Wages paid mechanics range from $3 to $4 a day of eight hours' work. Such employment as teamster, hod carrier, street laborer, 'longshoreman, and park worker is all done by Indians and natives. The native is paid from 25 to 50 cents a day, the latter figure being considered good wages, while the Indian works for 10 to 15 cents a day. Hotel work, waiting on tables, kitchen work, and even cooking, with a few exceptions, is done by blacks, chiefly Indians.
A white man "on his uppers" in Durban, or in any black center, for that part, is to be pitied. If he be a mechanic, his chances for work are none too good, and if he be an unskilled worker there is no chance for him at all, as blacks do all the work of that sort. The United States and Canada are the only countries—possibly Mexico, too—in which one can travel on railroad trains without paying fare or being put into a penitentiary. Walking on a railway track in Europe is a prison offense. So, taking that as one's cue, a man caught stealing a ride on a train might be tried for treason. As Durban is 7,000 miles from England, 4,500 miles from the Argentine, 6,000 miles from Australia and 5,000 from India, a fellow "broke" in the coast cities of South Africa is in a sorrowful plight. The cheapest steamship passage from South African ports to England is $80 to $100.
Labor unions exist in South Africa, and the members take an active part in politics. Not long since a spirited campaign was on for a seat in the Senate. One of the foremost business men of that country was a candidate for the office, and a union labor man, a locomotive engineer by trade, was the opposing candidate. The lines were tightly drawn between capital and labor in that senatorial contest. The "one-man-one-vote" clause has yet to be drafted into the constitution of the Union of South Africa. Only a citizen paying a certain amount of tax during the year is allowed to vote. On the other hand, a man holding much property, and this scattered about the country, can, as in England, vote in as many districts as his property is located. A wealthy man may cast half a dozen votes at an election, while the workingman taxpayer will not, as a rule, have more than one vote. The capitalist candidate for the Senate in this election had four votes to cast, while the railroad man had but one. A widely known man from the Transvaal was imported to Natal to do "heavy work" for the wealthy candidate, and prominent labor men from the Transvaal and the Cape of Good Hope Provinces were saying and doing all they could to make votes for their candidate.
"We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately," a labor campaigner was heard to say at one gathering, quoting Benjamin Franklin's cynical epigram. "Of the people, by the people, and for the people," Abraham Lincoln's immortal words, were also used during the campaign. But the speakers of both parties were tyros compared to the American brand of spellbinder. Election day came, and he who had plural votes cast them, and he who had one vote cast it. The result of an election is made known by a judge announcing the figures from the balcony of the Town Hall. "Hear, ye! Hear ye!" a voice was heard to command, the judge addressing the people assembled. The engineer had 36 more votes than his wealthy competitor, and was the third labor legislator elected to the South African Upper House.
Every mechanic has his "boy"—the bricklayer, carpenter, plumber, electrician, painter—to wait on him. One might be located in the black belt for years and not see a mechanic carry even a pair of overalls. A mechanic may be seen any time, when working, asking his "boy" to hand a tool that would not be two inches beyond his natural reach. A bricklayer becomes so painfully helpless that he will neither stoop nor reach for a brick; that is what his "boy" is for. The carpenter must saw boards, because the native cannot saw straight, but in every other respect he is just as helpless as the bricklayer. Clerks even have a "boy" to hand a pen or any other thing they might need in connection with their work. The only tradesman observed who did his work without the aid of a "boy" was the printer and linotype operator. And what applies to printers may be said of editors and others engaged in the printing trade. They really work in the old-fashioned way. Were one to take a spade in hand to prepare the garden for vegetables, merely that act of manual labor would be very apt to prove a bar to a further continuance of the respect of his European neighbors, and assuredly so by the natives and Indians.
The white man is always at his minimum energy where the black man is depended on to do the work. We need not go farther than our Southern States to learn that lesson.
Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, discovered the Province of Natal five years after Columbus set foot on the North American Continent. Da Gama's first visit to Natal was on Christmas Day in the year 1497. As Christmas Day is the natal day of the Savior, and as the word natal in the Spanish and Portuguese languages is used as is the word birth in the English language, this will explain the origin of the naming of Natal.
For more than three hundred years that section of South Africa remained as Da Gama found it before white men made a settlement among the Zulus. In 1824 a few Englishmen built temporary dwelling places on the shores of the Indian Ocean, more Englishmen joining them from time to time, until Durban has become one of the leading seaport cities of the African continent. The coast section of the Province of Natal is the only part of South Africa in which the Dutch were not the pioneers.
A great many humpback whales inhabit the Indian Ocean in the stretch of sea, nearly a thousand miles long, separating Durban from Capetown. Of late years whales have been hunted on a large scale, and each season finds a new whaling company in the field to share in the profits of this lucrative industry. Eight or ten factories, or stations, most of these located a few miles from Durban, are now engaged in utilizing the by-products of the whale.
Harpooning whales, or whaling—to use the general term—is engaged in at places separated by thousands of nautical miles, and, like other water industries, has its season. Whales, like wild fowl, migrate at certain seasons to some particular part of the great water expanse, and return again the succeeding year. By nature, this cetacean prefers a cold climate to a warm one. The season for their migration is at a different period to that of the wild fowl, for the "spouter" leaves the zone of the hot sun and swims great distances until he reaches cooler water. Sometimes it is from the North Atlantic to the South Atlantic or Indian Oceans, and at others from the Indian Ocean southeasterly to the South Pacific Ocean, the water of which is cooled by the icebergs of the South Pole section. Whales leaving the North Atlantic in early summer for the South Atlantic Ocean know it is cooler south of the equator than north of it.