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.'