A watercolour showing Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, shooting at an elephant, with a group of farmers and other figures alongside him; a young Khoikhoi man is galloping away on a horse off to the left. Signed and dated at bottom right: G.E. Hicks 1868; inscribed at bottom left: designed by O.W. Brierly.

In 1867 the twenty-three-year-old Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, the second son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, visited South Africa as part of a longer world tour which also encompassed stops in Europe, South America and Australia. The Prince was the Captain of HMS Galatea.

The scene captured in this drawing took place on 13 September and is recounted in an official account of the tour published by John Milner, the ship's chaplain, and Oswald Walter Brierly, an artist accompanying the Prince, titled The Cruise of H.M.S. Galatea, Captain H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh, in 1867-8 (1869). The young man on the horse, seen in this drawing fleeing from the elephant, had been sent into the forest to find and drive out the elephants; 'He had no sooner got up to the trees than he came face to face with a large bull elephant, which, the instant it caught sight of Totty, charged straight out after him' (Milner and O'Brierly, p. 95). The term 'Totty', used to refer to the young man, derives from the derogatory 'Hottentot', a word applied by white Europeans from the late 17th century onwards to the Khoikhoi peoples of South Africa and Namibia.

A drawing by Brierly (see RCIN 923430) was reproduced with variations as an illustration in the above-mentioned publication alongside an extract from a letter written by Alfred to his brother the Prince of Wales, describing the elephant hunt in his own words. The Illustrated London News (November 2nd 1867, p. 476) also published a slightly different illustration of the same scene. The ILN described their illustrations of Alfred's tour up to this point as deriving from 'sketches furnished by a gentleman of the party', probably Brierly.