The cargo of children was bound, as I have said, for the Cape Colony. Some were to be landed at Cape Town, the others at Port Elizabeth, a few hundred miles distant, on the northeast coast. At the Cape it is almost impossible to get respectable industrious servants or artisans: people there are compelled to employ Hottentots and Caffres, who will only hire themselves out for a few days, or at most for a week or two; and they frequently run away, leaving their work half done. The Dutch settlers, therefore, bespeak children from their mother country, with the object of training them up as servants and artisans.
These children receive board, lodging, and clothing from the day of their embarkation. On reaching their destination they serve without wages for the first two years and a half, during which time they are considered as working off the expenses of their journey. For every following year they receive, besides board and clothing, sixty Dutch guilders (£5), one guilder per month being handed to them as pocket-money. The other forty-eight guilders are deposited with the authorities, and on completing their twenty-first year the balance is paid over to them. They have then the right of leaving their masters, should they wish to do so.
In several towns in Holland committees were formed for the selection of these children. From the orphan asylums none were taken. The children are asked, in the presence of the authorities, if they are content to travel beyond sea. Unfortunately, however, the committee seem to have taken matters very easily, and to have troubled themselves very little about the prescribed regulations. Thus the children were not children at all; almost without exception they numbered from sixteen to twenty years, instead of from ten to fourteen; and they must certainly have been picked up out of the streets, for in all my life I never saw such an amount of riff-raff collected together. The grown-up girls must have been lounging about for years in the sailor’s taverns; the younger ones followed the example of the elder, and the whole community swore like the sailors themselves, sang the most uproarious songs, and stole from one another. Their want of cleanliness was awful.
But I will not be too bitter against these poor wretches; and let him who would condemn them consider the curse that weighs from their birth-hour upon the children of poverty. It is not because they are wretchedly clothed and half fed that I pity them so heartily; their greatest misfortune consists in their having nobody to take charge of the education of their hearts and minds. The parents are seldom capable of fulfilling this trust, for did not the same curse rest upon their infancy? They work hard through the day, and give their children the indispensable bread, and think they have done their duty. If several other children come, the loaf becomes insufficient, and they are obliged to put the elder children to work at the earliest possible moment. If this work to which they are put were but regular, it might be rather an advantage to the child than otherwise; but what can a little boy or a little girl of seven or eight years old do? Those who get into the factories, or are bound apprentices, are the best off; but there is not employment of this kind for all, and for many there is no refuge left but to do all kinds of little offices in the streets, hawk newspapers, sweep crossings, and run on errands. Left to themselves, without guidance, without definite notions of right and wrong, and too often, alas! with the evil example of their parents before their eyes, is it to be wondered at if they at last succumb to the temptations that hover round them in such varied forms?
Far more worthy of condemnation do those men appear to me to whom the education of the people is intrusted, and who so often leave their duty unperformed. They can not, like the children of the poor, plead ignorance in their own defense; for if they fail, they do so with a full consciousness of their offense.
I speak of the priests and schoolmasters, who, to my thinking, are the most important men among the people; for in their hands lies the real education of the rest. They are the chief personages in every village; they can, if they earnestly desire it, effect an incalculable amount of good, and the government ought to keep the most vigilant watch upon them. Is this done? Alas! I fear not.
The clergymen are generally so little attended to by their consistories, that the whole village will sometimes be crying out about the misconduct of its minister, while his superiors know nothing about it. And if the affair becomes too bad at length, what is the punishment? Simply his translation to some other parish.
The schoolmasters, moreover, are so badly paid, that scarcely any one will take up with this profession who can earn his living in another way.
With a few notable exceptions, clergymen and schoolmasters think they have done their duty when the former have preached a dry sermon on Sundays, and the latter have managed to teach their pupils to read and write. But how few, how very few, trouble themselves about the moral training of the children intrusted to their charge, by teaching them the difference between right and wrong, by endeavoring to rouse their hearts and minds to healthy action, and, above all, by setting them a good example!
We had a schoolmaster on board, Herr Jongeneel, and his wife: he was to superintend the boys and she the girls. These good people ate their rations with great perseverance, said many prayers and sang psalms, but they cared very little about the behavior of those who had been intrusted to them. The last note of the psalm had scarcely died upon the lips of the girls before they would be hurrying away to the deck, where they spent the evening and half the night bandying jests with the mates and sailors. Even in the daytime their behavior was so unbecoming that I and a married female passenger, with her step-daughter, were obliged to pass nearly all our time in the cabin.