IV.—Visit to the Cape Colony
Port Louis, January 20, 1771. I have landed among the Dutch at the extremity of Africa without money, without linen, and without friends. Learning of my position, M. De Tolback, the governor of Cape Colony, has invited me to dinner; and, happily, the secretary of the council has provided me with money, having allowed me to use his credit in buying whatever I need. The streets of the Cape are well set out; some are watered by canals, and most of them are planted with oak trees. The fronts of the houses are shadowed by their foliage; every door has seats on both sides in brick or turf, on which sit fresh and rosy-faced women. There is no gambling at the Cape, no play-acting or novel reading. The people are content with the domestic happiness that virtue brings in its train. Every day brings the same duties and pleasures. There are no spectacles at the Cape and no one wants any; every man there has in his own home all that he desires. Happy servants, well-bred children, good wives: these are pleasures that fiction does not give.
A quiet life of this sort furnishes little matter for conversation, so the Dutchmen of the Cape do not talk very much. They are a rather melancholic people, and they prefer to feel rather than to argue. So little happens, perhaps, that they have nothing to talk about; but what does it matter if the mind is empty when the heart is full, and when the tender emotions of nature can move it without being excited by artifice or constrained by a false decorum? When the girls of the Cape fall in love, they artlessly avow their feelings, but they insist on choosing their own husbands. The lads show the same frankness. The good faith which the young persons of each sex keep towards each other generally results in a happy marriage. Love with them is combined with esteem, and this nourishes all during life in their constant souls that desire to please which married persons in some other countries only show outside their own home.
It was with much regret that I left these worthy people, but I am not sorry to return to France. I prefer my own country to all others, not because it is more beautiful, but because I was born and bred there. Happy is the man who sees again the field in which he learnt to walk and the orchard which he used to play in! Happier still is he who has never quitted the paternal roof! How many voyagers return and yet find no place of retreat. Of their friends, some are dead, others are gone away; but life is only a brief voyage, and the age of man a rapid day. I wish to forget the storms of it, and remember only in these letters the goodness, the virtue, and the constancy that I have met with. Perhaps this humble work may make your names, O virtuous settlers at the Cape, survive when I am in the grave! For thee, O ill-fated negro! that weepest on the rocks of the Isle of France, if my hand, which cannot wipe away thy tears, can but bring the tyrants to weep in sorrow and repentance, I shall want nothing more from the Indies; I shall have gained there the only fortune I require.
JOHN HANNING SPEKE
Discovery of the Source of the Nile
I.—Beginnings in the Black Man's Land
John Hanning Speke was born on May 14, 1827, near Ilchester, Suffolk, England. He entered the army in 1844, serving in India, but his love of exploration and sport led him to visit the Himalayas and Thibet; leaving India in 1854, he joined Sir Richard Burton on his Somali expedition, where he was wounded and invalided home. After the Crimean War he rejoined Burton in African exploration, pushing forward alone to discover the Victoria N'yanza, which he believed to be the source of the Nile. Speke's work was so much appreciated by the Royal Geographical Society that they sent him out again to verify this, his friend, Captain Grant, accompanying him, and the exciting incidents of this journey are set forth in his "Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile," which he published on his return in 1863. Honours were bestowed on him for having "solved the problem of the ages," though Burton sharply contested his conclusions. An accident while partridge shooting on September 18, 1864, suddenly ended the career of one who had proved himself to be a brave explorer, a good sportsman, and an able botanist and geologist. His "Journal" is an entrancing record of one of the greatest expeditions of modern times, and is told with no small amount of literary skill. The work was followed a year later by "What Led to the Discovery of the Source of the Nile," these two forming, with the exception of a number of magazine articles, Speke's entire literary output.