South-West Africa

by William Eveleigh

In 1486 Bartholomew Diaz, the famous Portuguese navigator, who was in search of the way to India, stepped ashore from the little fifty-ton ship that had brought him from the Tagus, and gave the bay the name Angra Pequena, the Little Bay. On Serra Parda, or the Grey Mountain, now Pedestal Point, he set up the first of the three stone crosses erected on the South African coast. It stood there above the dreary waste, a striking landmark, well into the nineteenth century, when vandals from the whaling ships broke it in pieces. Fortunately, considerable fragments of the monument were recovered and conveyed to the South African Museum at Cape Town in 1856.

For some 300 years after the landing of Diaz, South-West Africa remained an Unknown Land, and no one seemed eager to venture into what appeared to be a most inhospitable region. Early in the nineteenth century a few whaling ships might have been seen off the coast taking heavy toll of the many whales that abounded. Walvis Bay, with its sheltered harbour, became a base for the seamen, and from the few Hottentots who lived in the vicinity the men purchased their supplies of fresh meat.

The first European to cross the Orange River was one Jacobus Coetsee, who proceeded northward from his farm at Picketberg in 1760, with a number of Hottentots, to shoot elephants. He hunted in Great Namaqualand, and while there heard from the Namaquas of a tribe of strange, black people living ten days further north, called the Damrocquas, who had long hair, and wore clothes made of linen cloth. This was the day when queer tales lost nothing in the telling. On his return Coetsee related what he had heard to Hendrik Hop, a Captain of the Burgher Militia; Hop reported to Governor Ryh Tulbagh, and offered to conduct an exploring expedition in order to seek out these strange people. Tulbagh had a zeal for knowledge surpassed among the early Governors of the Cape only by the Van der Stels; he readily acquiesced in the proposal, and in 1761 Hop set out on his adventurous journey with a caravan of no less than fifteen wagons. The expedition was well-equipped, since it included a botanist, a surveyor, a surgeon, who also acted as a mineralogist, and a number of European volunteers, with quite a little army of Hottentots. The journey extended from July 16th, 1761, to April 27th, 1762. It deserves to be remembered as one of the most notable journeys connected with early African exploration. The result is the “New Accounts of the Cape of Good Hope, etc.”—one of our earliest books of travel in South-West Africa, an exceedingly rare octavo, published in Amsterdam, both in Dutch and French, in 1778. A German edition was published at Leipzig in 1779.[12] The book is the work of several hands: it contains, among other things, the journal of C. F. Brink, the surveyor, the reports of T. Roos and P. Marais, two volunteers, on the native tribes encountered, and some excellent plates depicting such rare animals, as they were then, as the zebra, the gemsbuck, the koodoo, and the gnu.

The party crossed the Orange, passed the hot springs now known as Warmbad, pushed along the western base of the Karas Mountains; and penetrated to the borders of Damaraland. Some valuable prizes were secured in the shape of several giraffes, animals that were among the rarities at the time. Governor Tulbagh sent the skin of one of these animals to Leiden, the first of its kind to be sent to Europe from South Africa. Hop did not succeed in reaching the country of the Damrocquas, as he was compelled to turn back owing to the loss of cattle and the failure of water. The Orange River, placed on the map from hearsay by the elder Van der Stel, was now definitely located, and a fair knowledge obtained of the sterile wastes of Great Namaqualand, and the mountainous region that lay to the north.

Lieutenant William Paterson, a gifted botanist and explorer, next reached the Orange River; in company with Colonel Gordon, the Scotch Commanding Officer of the troops of the Dutch East India Company, and Jacobus van Reenen. “On the 17th of August, 1779,” says Paterson, “we launched Colonel Gordon’s boat, and hoisted Dutch colours. Colonel Gordon proposed first to drink the States’ health and then that of the Prince of Orange and the Company, after which he gave the river the name of the Orange River, in honour of that Prince.”[13]

Up to this time the river had been known as the Braragul, the name given to it by the elder Van der Stel. We owe a debt to the gallant Gordon, who could hardly have found a more appropriate name for these yellow muddy waters; and as Pettman points out in his “South African Place Names,” this is the only royal name in the place names of the period.

Le Vaillant next appears upon the scene. This romantic and picturesque traveller assures us that he journeyed “into the interior parts of Africa in the years 1783, 1784, and 1785,” leaving the house of his friend Mr. Slabert, near Saldanha Bay, in the middle of 1783; but, unfortunately, Le Vaillant was much given to romancing, and doubts have been thrown on the authenticity of his journeys. That he travelled somewhere in the regions north of the Orange River, “in search of rare birds and new hordes,” “suffering much from the reverberations of the sun,” seems clear from his descriptions of the country and people. His many adventures make delightful reading, and he was a wonderfully keen observer of objects of natural history.

The quest for gold next led a party into the northern wilds. In 1791 Willem van Reenen set out from his farm on the Elephant River, accompanied by a number of burghers, in the expectation of discovering gold, about the existence of which rumours had reached him. The party passed the farthest point reached by Hop thirty years before, and pushed northward until they probably penetrated into what is now Damaraland. One Peter Brand travelled fifteen days further than the main party, and was the first European to come into contact with the mysterious Damrocquas, the Berg Damaras. These natives had the appearance of Kaffirs, they spoke the Hottentot language, and they lived like Bushmen.

For some months the party remained among the Damaras gleaning information about the various clans. Game was abundant; they accounted for no less than sixty-five rhinoceroses, six giraffes, and small game without number. What was more important to them, they dug up large quantities of “gold ore,” and transported it with much joy to Cape Town. Their chagrin can be imagined when they were assured that the “gold” ore was really copper ore.

But belief in the existence of gold north of the Orange seemed to persist, as in 1793 another party left Cape Town, with Chevalier Duminy as a guide, in the packet Meermin, for a bay somewhere up the coast, where a train of wagons, sent overland, was to meet them on landing. The wagons, however, were not at the rendezvous, so the Meermin sailed north until Walvis Bay was reached. Here, in February of 1793, the prospectors set up a stone beacon, engraved on one side with the arms of the States, and on the other with the monogram of the Dutch East India Company. Hottentots were found living along the shore, and Peter Brand sought their guidance for a trek into the interior. He was away about a month; during which time he traversed a portion of the Damara country, and was somewhat surprised to find an abundance of trees and many rich grazing tracts. Elephants, buffaloes, rhinoceroses, lions, and giraffes were numerous, but there were no traces of the desired gold. Pienaar was probably the first European to penetrate into the country from the west coast.