The White Chief of the Caffres

by Alfred W. Drayson

Chapter Eighteen.

It was a bright fresh morning in April, that—I embarked at Gravesend in the full-rigged ship Condor, bound to the Cape and Calcutta. The most unpleasant and dangerous portion of the voyage in those days was from Gravesend through the Downs, and along the Channel. Sailing ships only then made these long voyages, and they were sometimes detained during many weeks in the Downs waiting for a fair wind. Then, when sailing in the Channel, they often had to beat against a contrary wind the whole way. In my case we were fortunate in having a fair wind nearly the whole way from the Downs, until we had entered the Bay of Biscay. Fine weather continued until we were within a few degrees of the Equator, when the usual calms stopped us, and we lay broiling on the calm sea during ten days.

I caught two rather large sharks, and had a narrow escape from one as I was bathing from a boat near the ship. We reached Table Bay in sixty-two days after leaving Gravesend, which period was considered by no means bad time for a sailing vessel. Having cleared my baggage from the ship and Custom House, I put up at an hotel at the corner of the parade in Cape Town, and sent word to my friend, Mr Rossmar, to say I had arrived.

Early on the following morning. Mr Rossmar came to see me, and was at once full of complaints on account of my not having immediately gone to his house, and made it my home. The few years that I had been in England had taught me much as regards the rules of so-called society. In England there was formality and etiquette which did not exist in the Colonies, particularly at the Cape. Friendship in England and at the Cape conveyed entirely different meanings. At the latter, a friend’s house was almost like your own: you did not think it necessary to wait for a special invitation to go to dinner and take a bed, but if you rode over in the afternoon it was considered unfriendly if you did not stop till the next morning. I had forgotten these conditions, and so had first stopped at an hotel. By noon, however, I had reached Mr Rossmar’s house, and was received as though I had been a long-lost brother.

I was surprised, when I saw the Miss Rossmars, to find that they were more pretty than any girls I had seen in London. They had, too, the great charm of being natural and unaffected, and to be less occupied in seeking admiration than English young ladies. In spite of what I had gone through in the Zulu country, I was in reality merely a boy when I formerly stayed at Wynberg. Now I was a man; and the experience I had gained in society in London had made me capable of judging of the relative merits of that great paradox,—a young lady.

A certain portion of the day was occupied in making arrangements for my voyage to Natal. I found that a small vessel would sail from Table Bay in a month’s time, and I had made arrangements with the owners to use this vessel almost as if she were my own. I had brought from England quantities of beads of various colours, looking glasses, blankets, and some hundreds of assagy blades that I had caused to be made at Birmingham. All these things were, I knew, highly esteemed by the Caffres, and would purchase nearly everything they possessed. I was not so busy with my preparations but that I had plenty of time to pass with the Miss Rossmars. We rode nearly every day, had climbing expeditions up the Table Mountain, musical afternoons at home when the weather was not suitable for going out, and in fact enjoyed ourselves as people in the Colonies alone seem to do.

The natural results followed. I became much attached to Nina Rossmar, but as this is not a love story, but merely an account of my adventures in the wild country of south-eastern Africa, I will not weary my readers with the old, old tale, but will merely state that I wrote to my father and uncle, asking their consent to my marriage with Nina. These letters I wrote before I started for Natal, as I hoped the answers would be awaiting me on my return.

The month passed very rapidly, and I embarked at Table Bay in the little brigantine which was to convey me to Natal. I have sailed since that time on many seas, but the roughest I ever experienced is off the Cape. Well was this Cape termed the Cape of Storms, for there seemed a storm always on hand, and no sooner had the wind been blowing hard in one direction and then stopped, than a gale sprung up from the opposite point of the compass. Many times, as the huge waves came rolling towards us and seemed to be about to break over us, I thought nothing could save us from being sent to the bottom, or turned over; but the little vessel, which drew only eight feet of water, was like a duck on the ocean, and though she bounded like a thing of life as the monstrous waves approached and moved under her, she was very dry, scarcely any seas washing over her. We were, however, thirty days on our voyage from Table Bay to the Bluff at Natal, and we had to anchor on our first arrival, as the wind was off shore. I scanned the well-known coast as we lay at our anchorage, and recalled the strange scenes through which I had passed. There were the high-wooded bluff on the west entrance to the harbour, the low sandy hillocks to the east, where I had run the gauntlet of the Zulus, the dense wood of the Berea bush, and the islands in the bay where I had outwitted the Zulus, when I was in the boat. Now that I was again in the vicinity of these scenes of my early days, I felt in doubt as to whether I was not more a Caffre than an Englishman. I found myself actually thinking in Caffre, and speaking sentences in that language to myself.

I noted that there were several houses near the entrance of the harbour and up the bay which did not exist when I left Natal. These, I afterwards found, were the houses of some Dutchmen who had settled there.