'They heard above the ocean's swell
Ring faint and clear a wedding bell;
And where the boat put off, they found
A tiny shoe upon the ground.'
'Marions ci,
Marions ça,
Et jamais, jamais marions là.'
A charming idyll to amuse us as we climbed up the hill to Riebeek Square, where the flat-roofed houses and the old Slave-Market with a few wind-twisted pines have so much of the 'old order' in their keeping.
Behind the square were the old brickfields, where poor Lieutenant Schut's duties lay. The Slave-House stands in the middle of the square.
This energetic young man disappears from the pages of the Journals and presumably from society.
'August 1, 1668.
'Lieutenant Schut is expelled from the Council, because he has passed a deed of reclamation to the widow of the late Reverend Wachtendorp for libellous words uttered by him behind her back, and to her injury.
'The Council should keep itself free from obloquy, and unpolluted.'
Praiseworthy sentiments, but they must have suffered for them. I find no mention of another paragon who was able to accept the responsibilities imposed upon Schut.
Indiscriminate gossip or libel was most severely punished at the Cape, the desire to be free from obloquy not being confined to the Council.
In 1663 Teuntje Bartholomeus, wife of the burgher, Bartholomeus Born, is banished for six weeks to Dassen Island for having libelled a certain honest woman. A perfect rest-cure! Six weeks on Dassen Island! alone with Nature, wind, sea, rock-rabbits, and seals!
There is no official mention of her return from exile.
Slaves.
Table of Contents 'For there is no country in the world where slaves are treated with so much humanity as at the Cape,' writes Le Vaillant in 1780, but in reading through the old day-books of Van Riebeek, Hackius, Borghorst, Isbrand Goski, and the Van der Stels, the punishments inflicted on slaves might have been inspired by those old, over-praised painters, who gloried in an anatomical dissection of a poor wretch whose miserable body possessed no anatomy at all. The Mozambique, Madagascar, and Malay slaves were keel-hauled; they were tied in sacks and thrown into the Bay; they were tortured. Here is the sentence of one: 'Bound on a cross, when his right hand shall be cut off, his body pinched in six places with red-hot irons, his arms and legs broken to pieces, and after that to be impaled alive before the Town House on the Square, his dead body afterwards to be thrown on a wheel outside the town at the usual place, and to be left a prey to the birds of the air.' Could any torture of the Inquisition be worse? But these tortures were in 1696, years before the enlightened days of Le Vaillant. The half-breed slaves of the early days were a source of worry to the ruling council; several times in the Journals one may come across a case of a freeman or burgher marrying his emancipated slave:
'"Maria of Bengal," a Hindoo woman, set the fashion, and the famous interpretress, Eva, during her extraordinary career of diplomatic and immoral episodes within the walls of the Fort, where she wore garments made by kind Maria van Riebeek, or outside the walls, where she wore the filthy skins of her own people, the Hottentots, beguiled the senior surgeon to such lengths that he was granted permission to marry her. He fortunately was killed during an expedition to Madagascar, but not before he had had sufficient time to regret the beguilings of Eva.'
Many of the slaves were children of convicts sent from Batavia and the Malay Settlements. Here is the case of a half-breed girl, which was sent to Batavia for judgment:
'Regarding the half-breed girl, you order that she is to serve the Company until her twenty-second year, when she is to be emancipated on condition that she makes profession of the Christian faith, and, moreover, pays R. 150 for her education. We are well aware that this rule is observed in the case of slave children having Dutch fathers, but whether it applies to children of convict women by Dutch fathers, as in the case of this girl, would like to hear from you.'
When Le Vaillant wrote, all these rules had changed, though even he talks with some mystery of a runaway slave having received a slight correction. When slaves landed at the Cape, they cost from a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty dollars (i.e., rix-dollars) each, that being about £22 10s. to £27 10s. The negroes from Mozambique and those of Madagascar were the best labourers; the Indians were much sought after for service in the house and in the town. Malays were the most intelligent and the most dangerous. Barrow, in whose days (1798) the price of slaves had gone up considerably, tells a story showing the revengeful spirit of the Malay. A slave, thinking that he had served his master sufficiently long and with great fidelity, and having also paid him several sums of money, was tempted to demand his liberty. He was met with a refusal. He straightway went and murdered his fellow-slave. He was taken up and brought before the Court, acknowledged that the slave he had murdered was his friend, but said that the best form of revenge he could think of was not to murder his master, but to deprive him of a slave worth the value of a thousand rix-dollars (i.e., £187 10s.) and of another thousand by bringing himself to the gallows!
The Creole slaves were sold for a higher price than the others, and were often 'acquainted with a trade,' when their price became exorbitant. They were clothed properly, but went barefooted. Twenty to thirty slaves were generally found in one house. 'That insolent set of domestics called footmen,' writes the French explorer, 'are not to be seen at the Cape; for pride and luxury have not yet introduced these idle and contemptible attendants who in Europe line the ante-chambers of the rich, and who in their deportment exhibit every mark of impertinence!' The abolition of the Rack and Torture was responsible for an extraordinary occurrence: the public executioner made an application for a pension in lieu of the emoluments he used to receive for the breaking of legs and arms; the second hangman upon inquiry learnt that not only did the English of this new régime abolish the Rack and Torture, but that they were not thinking of establishing breaking on the wheel; this was more than he could bear, and, fearing starvation, he went and hanged himself! Strange irony of fate.
In every family a slave was kept whose sole duty was the gathering of wood. It was strictly forbidden to gather any fuel, scrub, or bush on the Downs or Flats, so the slave would go out every morning up the mountains, and would return at night with two or three small bundles of faggots-the produce of six or eight hours' hard labour-swinging at the two ends of a bamboo carried across his shoulder. In some families more than one slave was kept for this purpose, and this gives a very good idea of the scarcity of wood at the Cape as late as 1798. From the diaries of that time one gathers that, though wood was only used for cooking purposes-as only the kitchen possessed a fireplace-yet the cost of fuel for a small household amounted to forty or fifty pounds a year.
CHAPTER III
IN THE BLUE SHADOW OF TABLE MOUNTAIN
Table of Contents The blue shadow of Table Mountain falls straight across the 'Flats,' or the sandy isthmus of the Cape Peninsula-a long, intensely blue line stretching from one ocean to the other.
In 1653 this shadow meant something more than a beautiful shade; it was a boundary-line; it meant safety and shade within its depth, war and barbarians beyond.
Along its borders were dotted small forts and watch-houses; there were even the beginnings of a canal running parallel with the definite shade, to intensify its significance.
The Dutch East India Company's long-suffering and harassed Commander, Van Riebeek, with infinite undertaking of dangers and difficulties, wild beasts, Hottentots, and quicksands, rode across it, and fixed its boundaries as proper limits to the Settlements, which its most honourable directors were pleased to call 'Goode Hoop.'
The blue shadow begins on the other side of the Wind Mountain or Devil's Peak, and we will go where it leads.
In 1663 there was a narrow road running close up to the mountain rather higher up than the present dusty main road. It ran as far as Rondebosch, or 'Rond die Bostje,' whose round-wood traditions are untraceable, Van Riebeek having given orders that only the outer bushes should be preserved as a convenient kraal for cattle. Along this narrow road a small ox-cart rumbled every day from the fort in Cape Town, dragging home logs of wood from the almost unknown land beyond; its driver running momentary risk of meeting in the narrow way the lions, tigers, or rhino, that roamed the mountain slopes.
One end of the shadow falls into the sea at Maitland or Paarden Island, and covers some stretches of beach, small houses, and railway workshops. There the rivers meet-the Diep River from Milnerton, the Liesbeek and the Black Rivers from across the Flats. They join and form the Salt River, a wide, overflowing stream that is constantly flooding the green lands between the sea and the old Trek road to the north.
In the old days, this beach between Salt River and Milnerton was the setting of tragedies: backed in on the north and east by the Blaauwberg Mountains and the Stellenbosch Ranges, and on the south-east by the Hottentot's Holland.
From behind the Blaauwberg, or Blueberg, came that long thin stream of...
