Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 709 / July 28, 1877

In the island of Mauritius, in the Southern Ocean, stands Pieter Both (or Peter Botte), one of the strangest shaped and most inaccessible mountains in the world. From the sea it is most calculated to impress beholders. Its quaint shape towers above the rugged mountain mass which again dominates over Port-Louis; and its still quainter name dates from so far back as 1616, when Pieter Both d'Amersfort, a Dutch admiral, or General of the Sea, as he is described in the records, happening to be shipwrecked on the island, was perpetuated by name in the mountain which cast its shadow across his drowned body.
The travellers' tales which are heard beyond the seas of the ascents of a mountain, insignificant in size, but by reputation ranking with monarchs of Alpine celebrity, have contributed to lend a grandeur and a mystery to Pieter Both in the imaginations of those who approach him for the first time. Though various ascents have been made from time to time (one of which was described in this Journal as far back as 1834), that made in June 1876 by a party of eleven seems to have been of special interest, as the following narrative, from the pen of one of the party, will shew. His story runs as follows:
An Indian, Deebee by name, a carriole driver by calling, by repeated ascents has made himself so much at home on the mountain as to be able to arrange a system of ropes and rough rope-ladders by which any one with a good head and fairly strong muscles can reach the top with comparative ease. Deebee is a short square-built East Indian, with a pock-marked face, whose dress on the last time I saw him was a soldier's old tunic, and a lady's 'cloud,' also old, about his head and chin. This worthy, after the preliminaries are settled with the leader of the expedition, purchases a coil of two and a half inch Manilla rope, arms himself with a wonderfully battered horse-pistol and a broken cutlass, takes into his confidence sundry others of his countrymen, and starts up the mountain the day previous to that on which the ascent is to be attempted. Upon the 'Shoulder,' which I shall presently notice, he has built a small hut, where he and his band sleep; to me, who saw it empty, it seemed just capable of holding half one man, with the contingency that his other half would dangle over a precipice some hundreds of feet high. In the morning the ropes are fixed; the 'Ladder Rock' being ascended by means of a pole; the pistol is used to fire a line over the head, by which the rope is gradually hauled up; the cutlass is for cutting the rounds of the rope-ladders from the bushes; so that if all goes well, when the party gather on the 'Shoulder' they will see above them the whole apparatus, strangely suggestive of the Old Bailey on hanging mornings, with Deebee and his crew clinging thereto—a black Jack Ketch to perfection.