Cape Town, from the water, looks like a long, low, yellow fortification. Its population is about thirty thousand, made up of the representatives of nearly every nation. It was captured from the Dutch by the English in 1806. Being the great stopping-place for vessels bound round the Cape of Good Hope, or returning from Australia and the East Indies, the occupations of the inhabitants are mostly mercantile. The streets are wide and well laid out. They have a number of fine churches, a botanical garden, and quite an extensive library. High behind the town, flanked on either side by the conical hills of the “Lion’s Rump” and “Devil’s hill,” rises that remarkable formation, which is visible a great distance from the sea, called Table Mountain, four thousand feet high, and level on the top. The weather is nearly always unsettled, but a blow may be expected when the inhabitants remind you that the “cloth is spread” on Table mountain, which is suddenly covered with a thick white cloud, which curls over the steep face of the mountain, and extends itself down it, as a deep snow from the roof of a house when the melting begins. When this continues, the ships in the harbor, which is a very unsafe one, look to their moorings, and are frequently driven ashore. The day after our arrival we were compelled to change our berth: the old Mississippi reared and plunged at her anchors like an impatient steed endeavoring to slip his rein, and at night the royal mail steamer Bosphorus broke from her moorings and went ashore. We were unable to go to her assistance because the weather had prevented our getting any coal aboard.
CAPE OF GOOD HOPE.
As your boat approaches the mole, you pass through large flocks of the black gull and cormorant, and nearer the shore, groups of the pelican are feeding. Should a southeast wind prevail when you reach the wharf, you will scarcely be able to see the place. Dense clouds, not of dust, but of coarse red sand, fill the streets, and are borne in fitful eddies around the corners. It fills your eyes, if you are so rash as to open them but for a second, your ears, nostrils, and insinuates itself underneath every garment that you wear; you are doing the penance of walking with gravel under your sock, although sandal-shoon be on. The male residents who move about wear veils attached to their hats, but to a stranger the annoyance is horrible. During the prevalence of this wind, the houses are closed as well as they may be, but it is insufficient to keep out the plague. In the parlor-windows of an English hotel at which I dined, the dust had accumulated in a morning to the thickness of velvet, and from the front of the house I saw a Hottentot servant removing the sand piled on the pavement, as we would a small snow-drift in our own country.
But when you can open your eyes, strange-looking people and strange things meet them. At the hotel, you were waited upon by Bengalese servants, with their fantastically-wound turbans of cashmere nearly the size of a market-basket, their blue gowns reaching to the knee, tied with red riband in front, making their waist appear just under their arms, and moving so stealthily with their bare feet, as they came and went, that you were not conscious of their presence. In the streets you see the high-cheeked-bone Malay, the emaciated-looking cooley, and the red-capped, half-naked, simial-faced Hottentot, whom the mistaken philanthropy of English law has removed from the authority of the Dutch boor, that they may go lower in the scale of humanity. By you wheels some lately-arrived cockney in one of the patent safety cabs from London, the driver perched behind, and slowly following comes a lumbering wagon, its tents covering some large casks, it may be, drawn by sixteen or eighteen yoke of the enormous horned oxen of this colony, who are ever reminded of the proximity of their Hottentot driver, by his unceasing guttural calls and the continual application of his immense whip, whose lash, after being whirled in air an instant, he can cause to descend with unfailing accuracy on the back of any particular ox in his team, though he be a leader. In the windows of the stores you notice the graceful feathers of the ostrich, and its eggs; elephants’ tusks, and those too of the wild boar left in the skull; and the skins of the leopard and lion, remind you that you are where “Afric’s sunny,” &c. Innumerable jargons salute your ear as you move about.
On a bright Saturday morning, a Malay, with a good coach and four very good horses, drove a party of us out to Constantia, famous for the making of the celebrated wine of that name. The distance from town is about nine miles, and the road a very good one. You pass through long rows of the pine-tree, which I saw planted for ornamental effect for the first time, and here and there you see the native silver-tree, its bright leaves glistening prettily in the sun. The residences on the route are very cosy-looking, and much taste is displayed in laying off the approaches to them. A house not long before occupied by Sir Harry Smith, while governor of the colony, was a very attractive place.
The proprietors of the wine-producing establishments are very polite in their receptions and show you over their places with pleasure. We visited their brightly white-washed and steep-thatched roofed wine-houses, in whose extended walls were seen the huge wine butts like those of Madeira, but filled with the thicker-bodied and sweeter Pontac and Frontenac. The wine-house of Mr. Cloete has on its front quite a well-executed bacchanalian scene in basso-relievo, and was erected in 1793. The roofs of their houses are steep and smoothly thatched, which covering is said to last for forty years, without the accident of fire, of which they are very careful. The decorations of their grounds are tasty, and the sire, bending outward the limbs of the oak when young, leaves a canopied place for table and chairs in the centre of its branches, for the son.
The mode of cultivating the grape for the production of wine at Constantia is peculiar. They use no arbor for the support of the vines, but sustain them, a small distance from the ground, with sticks. When the fruit has reached maturity, the leaves are cut away to permit its being reached by the rays of the sun, and is only plucked for pressing when it has become nearly as sweet as a raisin; hence the taste of the wine, its high value, and its body.
During our stay at Cape Town, the Kaffir war still continued, and on our way back from Constantia, we drove to the little settlement of Wynberg to take a look at the captive Kaffir chief Seyolo, whom the English had confined in the prison at that place. We found the prisoner in a small cell, a stalwart woolly-headed negro, not of the darkest complexion, standing six feet one and three quarters inches high. His dress consisted of a lit cigar, and a single blanket thrown round his person. His wife, Niomese, with a good countenance and very small hands and feet, was with him. In an adjoining cell was his chief counsellor and his wife. They appeared quite cheerful and decidedly lazy. When the unintelligent face and elongated heel of Seyolo, was considered, it was a matter of surprise, how such a creature could have exercised with any force the power of command, or displayed any strategic skill to the annoyance of the English; but it was said that he had not been anything like as troublesome to the colonists as a withered-legged Kaffir chief named Sandilli, who having been once taken and turned out on his parole, would be shot in obedience to the sentence of a drum-head courtmartial, if again captured. The accounts from the seat of hostilities, during the time we lay at Cape Town were very unpropitious, owing to the severe fatigue and exhaustion which the hale hearty soldiers in their illy-adapted uniform, were compelled to undergo in bush-fighting or climbing steep places in pursuit of the alert and fleet-footed Kaffir, while with the best protection that could be extended to the kraals of the settlers, their cattle were continually being driven off by the thieving enemy.
A stroll through the botanical garden remunerates one very well. The exotics are rare and tastefully displayed, while the Fuchias and the Cape Jasmin laden the air with sweet perfume. The wheat of the colony is ground in steam-mills situated in the midst of the city.