The climate of this part of the coast has always been considered unhealthy, nearly all the Europeans staying here for any length of time contracting malarial fever of a rather severe type. This is due to noxious exhalations from certain swamps which surround one part of the town, and to the imprisoned air which is wafted across the Tembi whenever a south wind blows from the Maputa territory. Indeed, most of the inhabitants suffer from this fever more or less, and have a ghastly, woe-begone expression, or as one rather humorous observer remarked to me, “they all look like corpses out for a holiday.”
In walking round the town I came suddenly upon some monuments of the past, partially buried in sand, which recalled to my memory those words of Juvenal, where he says, “Monuments themselves memorials need”—for there was no one there to tell me that the tons of railway material I saw piled and left to rust and decay, were all that was left by which the grand railway scheme of President Burgers, and his bright hopes of the future, could be remembered.
These relics convinced me more than ever that Burgers was a man ahead of his time, and the present justifies the opinions he formed years ago. When he went to Europe in 1875 to raise capital to construct the line from Delagoa Bay to the Drakensberg, all other schemes,[[116]] Moodie’s included, having failed, so sanguine was he of the future that although he obtained only £79,136 of the £300,000 he required, yet he spent £63,200 in railway material alone. The sequel is now a matter of history, how on his return he found all in disorder, the government credit gone, Sekukuni in rebellion, the burghers dissatisfied, and, to crown everything, he was not so shrewd without being able to see indications looming in the not far-off future, that the government of the State would soon be wrested from his grasp.
I also saw the railway embankments about seven miles in length which were in course of construction by the Portuguese to the Komati River, near which their territory ends and the Transvaal commences. This work I was informed was being executed by the Portuguese government with money which had been deposited by a Colonel McMurdo as security for commencing the line of which he had got a concession in 1883, but which he had not begun, and so probably has forfeited.
On my arrival in England early this year, 1887, I came to the conclusion that this work will now be prosecuted with vigor, as I learned that a company had been successfully floated to continue the formation of the line, and rumors were afloat in commercial circles that another company would at once complete it to Barberton. I have just at hand on going to the press the following letter from a friend in Barberton in which he says, “About forty miles of the earthwork of the railway is already completed. The contractors have found it quite easy to obtain labor.” The intervening country from Barberton to Pretoria, in the one direction, and from Kimberley to Pretoria on the other, would then only remain to complete a grand circular trunk line which would tap every important district and centre in South Africa. Geographically nothing could be grander, and as a work of utility few schemes present promise of greater good to the whole country; as it would be, to my mind, the salvation of South Africa from native wars and rapacious coast middlemen, it would prove a great factor in the future amelioration of the native races,[[117]] while further it would tend in time to a confederation of interests in South Africa, “a consummation devoutly to be wish’d.”
So far as Barberton and the Kaap gold fields are concerned, Delagoa Bay must be their port of the future, even in spite of the frantic efforts Natal is now making. It is only necessary to consider for a single moment the mileage from the different ports to see this. Whereas the distance from Delagoa Bay is, roughly speaking, only 130 miles, that from D’Urban, the Port of Natal, is 450, and that from Capetown about 1,300. The ad valorem duty at these ports also contrasts very unfavorably with the Portuguese port—Capetown collecting 15, Natal 7, while Delagoa Bay collects 3 per cent. only.
During the last session of the Natal legislative council, with a hopeless bid to catch the Barberton trade, this sapient body took off its export duty of 9/ per gallon on spirits, which formerly was a great article of export, hoping by this suicidal policy, together with sundry other minor concessions, to retain the trade, instead of, in my opinion, “making hay while the sun shines,” or in other words getting the most out of their rum traffic pending the inevitable, when the Delagoa Bay railway is completed.
There are no engineering difficulties whatever to be overcome on the Delagoa Bay route until near the approach to Barberton, and these, engineers tell me, could be easily surmounted. The much-talked-of ascent of the Lebombo range can also be made by the most insignificant gradients, and the Komati River can be bridged with facility; so that there is every probability of the shriek of the railway-whistle being heard, as once at a public dinner at Barberton I told my hearers, in less than eighteen months. This, as a matter of course, will materially promote the development and advancement of the gold fields, the difficulty and delay attendant upon the importation of machinery will be removed, and the thorough opening up of the Kaap gold fields will mark another era in the history of South Africa.
