For some 300 years after the landing of Diaz, South-West Africa remained an Unknown Land, and no one seemed eager to venture into what appeared to be a most inhospitable region. Early in the nineteenth century a few whaling ships might have been seen off the coast taking heavy toll of the many whales that abounded. Walvis Bay, with its sheltered harbour, became a base for the seamen, and from the few Hottentots who lived in the vicinity the men purchased their supplies of fresh meat. The first European to cross the Orange River was one Jacobus Coetsee, who proceeded northward from his farm at Picketberg in 1760, with a number of Hottentots, to shoot elephants. He hunted in Great Namaqualand, and while there heard from the Namaquas of a tribe of strange, black people living ten days further north, called the Damrocquas, who had long hair, and wore clothes made of linen cloth. This was the day when queer tales lost nothing in the telling. On his return Coetsee related what he had heard to Hendrik Hop, a Captain of the Burgher Militia; Hop reported to Governor Ryh Tulbagh, and offered to conduct an exploring expedition in order to seek out these strange people. Tulbagh had a zeal for knowledge surpassed among the early Governors of the Cape only by the Van der Stels; he readily acquiesced in the proposal, and in 1761 Hop set out on his adventurous journey with a caravan of no less than fifteen wagons. The expedition was well-equipped, since it included a botanist, a surveyor, a surgeon, who also acted as a mineralogist, and a number of European volunteers, with quite a little army of Hottentots. The journey extended from July 16th, 1761, to April 27th, 1762. It deserves to be remembered as one of the most notable journeys connected with early African exploration. The result is the “New Accounts of the Cape of Good Hope, etc.”--one of our earliest books of travel in South-West Africa, an exceedingly rare octavo, published in Amsterdam, both in Dutch and French, in 1778. A German edition was published at Leipzig in 1779.[12] The book is the work of several hands: it contains, among other things, the journal of C. F. Brink, the surveyor, the reports of T. Roos and P. Marais, two volunteers, on the native tribes encountered, and some excellent plates depicting such rare animals, as they were then, as the zebra, the gemsbuck, the koodoo, and the gnu.