Read Ebook: The Cape Peninsula: Pen and Colour Sketches by Hansard R N Westhofen W Wilhelm Illustrator

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Ebook has 3495 lines and 121101 words, and 70 pages

'Van der Merwe, Jacques Theron, The Captain of the garrison, Petrus de Witt, or Van Breda, Or Cloete of Constantia. And then the Fiscal--fat and old-- What matters? he had power and gold, Coffers of dollars, and doubloons, Gold mohurs, pagodas, ducatoons, And in his cupboards stored away The priceless treasures of Cathay.'

Then it tells of how she loved this English sailor, how he left to sail to many strange lands, and asked her what she wished to have.

'And she, although her cheeks were wet, Was in a moment all coquette: "Your English fashions would, I fear, But ill become my homely sphere; Besides, you know not how to choose-- Bring me instead a pair of shoes."'

So the English lover sailed away, and the Fiscal became a menace to the poor little cream and blue 'Jonge Vrouw,' and the wedding-day arrived:

'From Signal Hill to Witteboom, From Kirstenbosch to Roodebloem, With cannon, bugle, bell and horn, They ushered in the wedding morn.'

But the English lover and the shoes arrived just in time; the bride was missing; the wedding-party and the storming Fiscal rushed down to the sea-shore--'a ship in a cloud of sail was riding out of the Bay in a favouring gale.'

'They heard above the ocean's swell Ring faint and clear a wedding bell; And where the boat put off, they found A tiny shoe upon the ground.'

'Marions ci, Marions ?a, Et jamais, jamais marions l?.'

A charming idyll to amuse us as we climbed up the hill to Riebeek Square, where the flat-roofed houses and the old Slave-Market with a few wind-twisted pines have so much of the 'old order' in their keeping.

Behind the square were the old brickfields, where poor Lieutenant Schut's duties lay. The Slave-House stands in the middle of the square.

'Lieutenant Schut is expelled from the Council, because he has passed a deed of reclamation to the widow of the late Reverend Wachtendorp for libellous words uttered by him behind her back, and to her injury.

'The Council should keep itself free from obloquy, and unpolluted.'

Praiseworthy sentiments, but they must have suffered for them. I find no mention of another paragon who was able to accept the responsibilities imposed upon Schut.

Indiscriminate gossip or libel was most severely punished at the Cape, the desire to be free from obloquy not being confined to the Council.

In 1663 Teuntje Bartholomeus, wife of the burgher, Bartholomeus Born, is banished for six weeks to Dassen Island for having libelled a certain honest woman. A perfect rest-cure! Six weeks on Dassen Island! alone with Nature, wind, sea, rock-rabbits, and seals!

There is no official mention of her return from exile.

SLAVES.

'"Maria of Bengal," a Hindoo woman, set the fashion, and the famous interpretress, Eva, during her extraordinary career of diplomatic and immoral episodes within the walls of the Fort, where she wore garments made by kind Maria van Riebeek, or outside the walls, where she wore the filthy skins of her own people, the Hottentots, beguiled the senior surgeon to such lengths that he was granted permission to marry her. He fortunately was killed during an expedition to Madagascar, but not before he had had sufficient time to regret the beguilings of Eva.'

Many of the slaves were children of convicts sent from Batavia and the Malay Settlements. Here is the case of a half-breed girl, which was sent to Batavia for judgment:

In every family a slave was kept whose sole duty was the gathering of wood. It was strictly forbidden to gather any fuel, scrub, or bush on the Downs or Flats, so the slave would go out every morning up the mountains, and would return at night with two or three small bundles of faggots--the produce of six or eight hours' hard labour--swinging at the two ends of a bamboo carried across his shoulder. In some families more than one slave was kept for this purpose, and this gives a very good idea of the scarcity of wood at the Cape as late as 1798. From the diaries of that time one gathers that, though wood was only used for cooking purposes--as only the kitchen possessed a fireplace--yet the cost of fuel for a small household amounted to forty or fifty pounds a year.

FOOTNOTE:

Barouche.

IN THE BLUE SHADOW OF TABLE MOUNTAIN

The blue shadow of Table Mountain falls straight across the 'Flats,' or the sandy isthmus of the Cape Peninsula--a long, intensely blue line stretching from one ocean to the other.

In 1653 this shadow meant something more than a beautiful shade; it was a boundary-line; it meant safety and shade within its depth, war and barbarians beyond.

Along its borders were dotted small forts and watch-houses; there were even the beginnings of a canal running parallel with the definite shade, to intensify its significance.

The Dutch East India Company's long-suffering and harassed Commander, Van Riebeek, with infinite undertaking of dangers and difficulties, wild beasts, Hottentots, and quicksands, rode across it, and fixed its boundaries as proper limits to the Settlements, which its most honourable directors were pleased to call 'Goode Hoop.'

The blue shadow begins on the other side of the Wind Mountain or Devil's Peak, and we will go where it leads.

In 1663 there was a narrow road running close up to the mountain rather higher up than the present dusty main road. It ran as far as Rondebosch, or 'Rond die Bostje,' whose round-wood traditions are untraceable, Van Riebeek having given orders that only the outer bushes should be preserved as a convenient kraal for cattle. Along this narrow road a small ox-cart rumbled every day from the fort in Cape Town, dragging home logs of wood from the almost unknown land beyond; its driver running momentary risk of meeting in the narrow way the lions, tigers, or rhino, that roamed the mountain slopes.

One end of the shadow falls into the sea at Maitland or Paarden Island, and covers some stretches of beach, small houses, and railway workshops. There the rivers meet--the Diep River from Milnerton, the Liesbeek and the Black Rivers from across the Flats. They join and form the Salt River, a wide, overflowing stream that is constantly flooding the green lands between the sea and the old Trek road to the north.

In the old days, this beach between Salt River and Milnerton was the setting of tragedies: backed in on the north and east by the Blaauwberg Mountains and the Stellenbosch Ranges, and on the south-east by the Hottentot's Holland.

From behind the Blaauwberg, or Blueberg, came that long thin stream of Saldanhas from the north, lighting their fires among the rushes of the Diep River and the Salt Pans near the Tigerberg or Leopard Mountains, which are the green, corn-sown hills of Durbanville and Klipheuvel.

They brought with them, past the outpost 'Doornhoop' on the Salt River, to the very gates of Van Riebeek's Fort, then standing where the railway station now is, cattle and sheep and wonderful stories of rich countries to the north and north-east, where kings lived in stationary stone houses and had much gold, their wives loaded with bracelets and having necklaces of sparkling white stones! The little dysentery-stricken settlement, growing thin and determined on a carrot and a snack of rhinoceros, opened the gates, bought the scurvy cattle, believed the stories, and had visions of reaching the fabulously renowned river 'Spirito Sancto.' They dragged their waggons and their precious oxen and horses over the scrub and sand-dunes; and now one may see the fruits of these brave but small expeditions in carefully compiled but imaginative maps and plans, telling of how one or another reached the banks of the Orange River and found 'a great desert,' but found no great kings, no gold, no cities.

Lying close to the shore are many wrecks, an old order which has changed but slowly.

This corner of the bay was a dangerous roadstead before the year 1653.

The clearing of the roadsteads became almost a yearly festival and a certain necessity.

So the blue shadow begins by the sea and ends by the sea; but to reach the other end will take us in a motor more than thirty minutes; an ox-waggon lumbering across sandy dunes and along stony mountain-paths took the early settlers something more than a day or two. We did it riding, and took something like a month; but one must compromise to really enjoy life.

We rode one day along the main road to Rondebosch, where the old Commanders would ride out two hundred years ago, to inspect the Company's granary, 'Groote Schuur,' and the Company's guesthouse, 'Rustenburg.'

The Cape Town length of the road has little of interest. 'Roodebloem' comes into the list of old homesteads; and down in the swampy green fields of Observatory Road, where the clerk life of Cape Town has its two acres and a cow, and near the Royal Observatory, lived the Company's free miller; and the Liesbeek waters worked his mill. There is still an old mill in existence, but probably of later date.

In 1658 the Company gave grants of land along the Liesbeek River, mostly all along the west side, beginning with the swampy land below the Wind Mountain or Devil's Peak, granted to the Commander's nephew-in-law, Jan Reyniez, and ending on the south side, somewhere in Wynberg, with the lands of Jacob Cloeten of Cologne. The burghers, having formed into three companies--one called Vredens Company--lying in lands on the wrong side of the river at Rosebank, sent in a petition, which was forwarded with all due delay to the Commander and Council, who, 'having found, according to the many deeds and diagrams, that the land is quite dangerously situated, the owners being exposed to the depredations of the Hottentots,' granted new lands near the Company's orchard, called 'Rustenburg.'

The conditions laid down by the Company to freemen varied slightly in each little colony: there were three along the Blue shadow:

'1. They might fish in the rivers, but not for sale.

'3. That they should grow tobacco.'

These are some of the rules. Everyone knows the story of how the rules later became unbearable--the fixing of selling-prices by the Company, the paying of taxes, the limitations set on selling produce to the ships.

The conditions, however, and the dangers from the Hottentots on the east side of the shadow, were thankfully accepted.

In the old records there is the entry which explains the position of these little colonies:

'Fine sunshine, fickle weather.'

And then began some amusing correspondence between the Honorable Commander and his honorable employers at Amsterdam.

Very few of these freemen had wives. Jan Reyniez had married the Commander's niece Lysbeth, Jacob Cloeten sent to Cologne for Frau Fychje Raderoffjes, and a few other wives were ordered out; but, grumbled the Council from this strenuous settlement, 'Here are good freemen, who would willingly marry if there were any material '--to quote from the old documents--

'These young men have accordingly prayed and begged us to ask girls for them, whom they may marry. We therefore request outward-bound families to bring with them strong, healthy farm girls, and the Company would make the condition that, when arriving at the Cape, the good ones might be retained and all others permitted to go on; as between Patria and this, it will be easily discovered what sort of persons they are.'

So in like manner, as bread fell from heaven to the Israelites in the desert, or as the British Government supplied wives to their Virginian Colonies, came wives to the freemen at the Cape. But rather hard for the families who were to have their good maids retained.

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