The Cape Peninsula: Pen and Colour Sketches

by Réné Hansard

Slaves.

'For there is no country in the world where slaves are treated with so much humanity as at the Cape,' writes Le Vaillant in 1780, but in reading through the old day-books of Van Riebeek, Hackius, Borghorst, Isbrand Goski, and the Van der Stels, the punishments inflicted on slaves might have been inspired by those old, over-praised painters, who gloried in an anatomical dissection of a poor wretch whose miserable body possessed no anatomy at all. The Mozambique, Madagascar, and Malay slaves were keel-hauled; they were tied in sacks and thrown into the Bay; they were tortured. Here is the sentence of one: 'Bound on a cross, when his right hand shall be cut off, his body pinched in six places with red-hot irons, his arms and legs broken to pieces, and after that to be impaled alive before the Town House on the Square, his dead body afterwards to be thrown on a wheel outside the town at the usual place, and to be left a prey to the birds of the air.' Could any torture of the Inquisition be worse? But these tortures were in 1696, years before the enlightened days of Le Vaillant. The half-breed slaves of the early days were a source of worry to the ruling council; several times in the Journals one may come across a case of a freeman or burgher marrying his emancipated slave:

'"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:

'Regarding the half-breed girl, you order that she is to serve the Company until her twenty-second year, when she is to be emancipated on condition that she makes profession of the Christian faith, and, moreover, pays R. 150 for her education. We are well aware that this rule is observed in the case of slave children having Dutch fathers, but whether it applies to children of convict women by Dutch fathers, as in the case of this girl, would like to hear from you.'

When Le Vaillant wrote, all these rules had changed, though even he talks with some mystery of a runaway slave having received a slight correction. When slaves landed at the Cape, they cost from a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty dollars (i.e., rix-dollars) each, that being about £22 10s. to £27 10s. The negroes from Mozambique and those of Madagascar were the best labourers; the Indians were much sought after for service in the house and in the town. Malays were the most intelligent and the most dangerous. Barrow, in whose days (1798) the price of slaves had gone up considerably, tells a story showing the revengeful spirit of the Malay. A slave, thinking that he had served his master sufficiently long and with great fidelity, and having also paid him several sums of money, was tempted to demand his liberty. He was met with a refusal. He straightway went and murdered his fellow-slave. He was taken up and brought before the Court, acknowledged that the slave he had murdered was his friend, but said that the best form of revenge he could think of was not to murder his master, but to deprive him of a slave worth the value of a thousand rix-dollars (i.e., £187 10s.) and of another thousand by bringing himself to the gallows!

The Creole slaves were sold for a higher price than the others, and were often 'acquainted with a trade,' when their price became exorbitant. They were clothed properly, but went barefooted. Twenty to thirty slaves were generally found in one house. 'That insolent set of domestics called footmen,' writes the French explorer, 'are not to be seen at the Cape; for pride and luxury have not yet introduced these idle and contemptible attendants who in Europe line the ante-chambers of the rich, and who in their deportment exhibit every mark of impertinence!' The abolition of the Rack and Torture was responsible for an extraordinary occurrence: the public executioner made an application for a pension in lieu of the emoluments he used to receive for the breaking of legs and arms; the second hangman upon inquiry learnt that not only did the English of this new régime abolish the Rack and Torture, but that they were not thinking of establishing breaking on the wheel; this was more than he could bear, and, fearing starvation, he went and hanged himself! Strange irony of fate.

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.

CHAPTER III
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.

BLAAUWBERG AND HEAD OF TABLE BAY

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.

A scurvy gang of bastard natives called 'Watermen' or 'Beach Rangers,' crawling like mammoth cockroaches among the seaweed and wreckage, had eked out their monstrous living long before the Harlem dragged her anchor and stranded at the mouth of the Salt River.

A grand string of names in the records of these old wrecks; no cheap sloops, galleots, or second-rate pirating-hulks, but big, stately merchantmen: one, from France, La Maréchale, with a Bishop on board who is uncommonly like the man who became a Cardinal during the reign of 'Le Roi Soleil.' He was on his way to Madagascar with something political behind his mad-sounding schemes for church-building (on such a sparsely inhabited island) and for personally endowing the buildings to the tune of hundreds of thousands; it may be heresy, but there was something politically consequent in the extraordinary story of this wreck of La Maréchale and the energy of the French seal-fisheries at Saldanha Bay.

To continue the rôle of backstairs glory: an English ship—a well-known name, The Mayflower—on her way from the east with John Howard, her captain, got a bad time in the terrible bay, tearing winds coming from the 'Wind Mountain' and across from Robben Island.

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.

TIGERBERG AND DIEP RIVER

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.

'2. The Company would sell them at ploughing time a plough and twelve oxen. The ground should be theirs for ever.

'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:

'February 21, 1657.

'Fine sunshine, fickle weather.'

'Many having been informed of the intention of the Masters to establish freemen all about and under favourable conditions, a party of five selected a locality on the other side of the Fresh River (Liesbeek), named by us the Amstel, below the forests and beyond it where our woodcutters are, near the crooked tree about three leagues from the Fort, and as long and broad as they wished it, on condition that they were to remain on the other side of the river. Another party of four selected a spot about a league nearer, at the Rondebosjen, on this side of the river or Amstel, from the small bridge leading to the forest as far as the spot chosen for the redoubt, near where the bird trap is to be built. The boundary of that land will be three-quarters of a league long, the river will divide them from the other party, and they will go back as far as they like to Table Mountain and the other mountains. The party of five may go forward towards the mountains of the continent proper, as far as they like; these two parties are therefore stationed right on the isthmus in fruitful soil. The further colony has therefore been named Amstel, or the Groeneveld, and the farthest redoubt will be about quarter of a league beyond it. The nearer colony at Rondebosjen (which is to be converted into a cattle kraal and to be provided with a gate) is to be called the "Dutch garden." A redoubt will also be built there.'

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 (stoffe)'—to quote from the old documents—

'These young men have accordingly prayed and begged us [the Council spared no words] to ask girls (meis-jen) 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.

It is a surprising thing, in looking over the old Roll-call, to find so few old Cape names. The varying forms of spelling may account for this.

In the old title-deeds one finds some lands in Table Valley granted to one Cornelius Mostaert, a well-known name; then there are mentioned Cloeten, Cloetas, Muller, Theunissen, Visagie, and a Van der Byl, who was a 'messenger of justice,' and rode from Cape Town to the Bosheuvel on his rounds; but the large majority are almost unknown names.

But we have arrived at Rustenburg, off the wagon road which leads to the forest on the slopes of the Bosheuvel, or 'Hen and Chickens Hill,' where Amman Erichiszen, the keeper of the forest lands, planted most energetically the great pine-trees which now, like an invincible army, have marched over all the lands.

It is said that the original buildings at Rustenburg have been destroyed. Marinus and I choose to think differently, as the position of the present building must be on the exact spot. Rustenburg has degenerated into a high school for girls, and bears itself like an aristocrat in the stocks. Its long teak windows and rows of Doric pillars look imposing enough to suggest the ancient glories which are so carefully recorded: 'This day the Commander takes out a party to inspect the Company's corn-lands at Rond die Bosje'—Van Riebeek on his famous horse, 'Groote Vos'; Maria de Quellerai, his wife, in a coach with the guests; Governors on their way to the East—the Great Drakenstein, Van Oudtshoorn, Governor Van Goens, the Java Commander who gave so much advice on his way to and fro, the Van der Stels still working in the East; the Admirals of Return and Outward Fleets—Vlemdingh, Van Tromp, De Reuyter—with their wives and families; the famous Commander of the French Fleet, M. le Marquis du Quesne, and so many others. Do their ghosts disturb the dreams of the little high-school 'backfish'?

At the back of the Rustenburg buildings, to the left, following a path which was probably a way to the Groote Schuur, are the remains of some old orchard lands, and some years ago I remember going with a troop of excited girls, in the terrifying hour of twilight, to see the old slave burial-place, which lay to the right of a path leading to the summer-house and 'Rustbank'—a small white seat still to be seen near the little red-roofed tea-house. To the right of this spot is the house called 'The Woolsack,' where Rudyard Kipling has lived every summer for years. Here were remains of graves, old bits of tombstone, old decaying skulls—oh! the horror and pleasure of these evening desecrations! An orgie for the emotions which makes one adore the past.

Above the Woolsack towers the Wind Mountain, on its slopes the white and grey granite temple of the Rhodes Monument.