Wilhelm Bleek, a philologist working in Cape Town, obtained permission in 1870 to take /Xam speakers serving sentences at the Breakwater convict station into his household so that he could learn and record their language. His sister in law Lucy Lloyd worked alongside him and, after his death in 1875, carried the project alone for a further nine years.
The result is roughly twelve thousand pages of /Xam narrative written in phonetic script with facing English translation, covering cosmology, the trickster figure Kaggen, rain making, the people of the early race, and the substance of daily life. It remains the only substantial record of the religion of any San community of the Cape.
The method has a feature that was unusual for its period and matters a great deal now. The notebooks record the narrators by name, //Kabbo, Dia!kwain, /Han=kass'o, /A!kunta and others, and treat them as collaborators whose words are being taken down rather than as anonymous informants supplying data. Their names are on the material. A selection was published as Specimens of Bushman Folklore in 1911, and the archive is held at the University of Cape Town and inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.