Sir William Cornwallis Harris

Born in 1807, he trained at the East India Company's Addiscombe Military Seminary and later served in the Bombay Engineers. He is best remembered for an 1830s expedition in southern Africa, where he traveled widely, hunted, and sketched animals and scenery in detail.

Those journeys led to the books Wild Sports of Southern Africa and The Highlands of Aethiopia, which brought together adventure narrative, natural history, and illustration. His writing was popular with British readers of the time, and his images of African wildlife were especially admired.

He was later knighted and served as a diplomat in Ethiopia before his death in 1848. Today he is remembered as a soldier-author whose travel books captured both the curiosity and the attitudes of the colonial world in which he wrote.