The brief history of the Blaauwbok is a miserable record of speedy extermination. The actual date of its discovery will probably never be known. Kolben, who visited the Cape between 1700 and 1710, mentions the "Blue Goat"; but the species was first definitely described by Pallas, who examined, in 1766, a specimen preserved at Leyden—the first one known to have been brought to Europe. From the little that is recorded of the animal, it appears to have been nowhere abundant. Le Vaillant gives as a locality, "the valley of Soete Melk, the only canton which they inhabit," and subsequently Lichtenstein mentions the mountains near the Buffalo-jagt River, between Swellendam and Algoa Bay, as one of the last refuges of the Blaauwbok. Le Vaillant obtained his specimen (a bull) in 1781; already it had become "the most scarce and beautiful species of the African Gazells." Sir John Barrow, whose work on South Africa was published in 1801, remarks that in his day the Blaauwbok was almost exterminated; while Lichtenstein says that "some" were shot in 1800, but that since then no more had been seen. These Blaauwbok of 1800 were, in fact, the last of their race.
Nevertheless, the post-mortem existence upon which the species has entered has proved almost as lively as that which it enjoyed in the flesh; for as the years passed by, and no new examples were obtained, naturalists began to inquire for it with a zeal similar to that which animated the would-be discoverers of the living Moa in New Zealand, and, more recently, the searchers after the Ground-Sloth (Mylodon listai) in Patagonia. Sir Andrew Smith, in 1835, searched for it in vain; he also says that, after studying a carefully executed drawing of the Blaauwbok in the Paris Museum, he concluded that the sketch represented merely a young Roan Antelope. His friend Sir Cornwallis Harris, who, during 1836–7, enthusiastically shot specimens of every kind of South African game animal for his collection, inquired persistently for the Blaauwbok without success. "For the last forty years," writes Harris, "not an individual has been heard of in Southern Africa"; and he adds: "For a leucophæa I would willingly have given a finger of my right hand." Finally, many zoologists boldly declared the Blaauwbok to have been a zoological myth, asserting that the few specimens still existing were merely small or young Roan
