The Seal of the Cape of Good Hope / The Saints

On one side of this sheet is a coastal profile of the Îles des Saintes in the archipelago of Guadeloupe, coloured in watercolour, by naval officer Aiskew Paffard Hollis (1764–1844). He may have made this profile when in the Leeward Islands in the ‘Andromeda’ in 1793. The other side of the sheet features a watercolour of a brown fur seal, inscribed ‘The Seal of the Cape of Good Hope’. The sheet has been trimmed, removing the tips of the seal’s tail. Hollis probably produced this drawing between 1796 and 1798, when he was serving at the Cape of Good Hope, initially in the ‘Chichester’ and later in the ‘Tremendous’. For other examples of Hollis’s work, see PAH4885 and ZBB0352–84.