CHAPTER II
HEALTH
The physical conditions just described determine the healthfulness of the country, and this is a matter of so much moment, especially to those who think of settling in South Africa, that I take the earliest opportunity of referring to it.
The sun-heat would make the climate very trying to Europeans, and of course more trying the farther north toward the Equator they live, were it not for the two redeeming points I have dwelt on—the elevation and the dryness of the interior. To be 3000, 4000, or 5000 feet above the sea is for most purposes the same thing as being in a more temperate latitude, and more than five-sixths in area of the districts which are now inhabited by Europeans have an elevation of fully 3000 feet. Not merely the tablelands of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, but also by far the larger part of Cape Colony and nearly the whole of Natal (excluding a small strip along the coast), attain this elevation. Thus even in summer, when the heat is great during the day, the coolness of the night refreshes the system. The practical test of night temperature is whether one wishes for a blanket to sleep under. In Madras and Bombay all the year round, in New York through several months of summer, in Paris or sometimes even in London for a few days in July or August, a light blanket is oppressive, and the continuance of the high day temperature through the hours of darkness exhausts and enfeebles all but vigorous constitutions. But in South Africa it is only along the coast, in places like Durban, Delagoa Bay, or Beira, that one feels inclined to dispense with a woollen covering at night, while in Johannesburg or Bloemfontein a good thick blanket is none too much even in November, before the cooling rains begin, or in December, when the days are longest. In fact, the fall of temperature at sunset is often a source of risk to those who, coming straight from Europe, have not yet learned to guard against sudden changes, for it causes chills which, if they find a weak organ to pounce upon, may produce serious illness. These rapid variations of temperature are not confined to the passage from day to night. Sometimes in the midst of a run of the usual warm, brilliant weather of the dry season there will come a cold, bitter south east wind, covering the sky with gray clouds and driving the traveller to put on every wrap he possesses. I remember, toward the end of October, such a sudden "cold snap" in Matabililand, only twenty degrees from the equator. One shivered all day long under a thick greatcoat, and the natives lit fires in front of their huts and huddled round them for warmth. Chills dangerous to delicate people are apt to be produced by these changes, and they often turn into feverish attacks, not malarial, though liable to be confounded with malarial fevers. This risk of encountering cold weather is a concomitant of that power of the south-east wind to keep down the great heats, which, on the whole, makes greatly for the salubrity of the country; so the gain exceeds the loss. But new comers have to be on their guard, and travellers will do well, even between the tropic and the equator, to provide themselves with warm clothing.
Strong as the sun is, its direct rays seem to be much less dangerous than in India or the eastern United States. Sunstroke is unusual, and one sees few people wearing, even in the tropical north, those hats of thick double felt or those sun-helmets which are deemed indispensable in India. In fact, Europeans go about with the same head-gear which they use in an English summer. But the relation of sun-stroke to climate is obscure. Why should it be extremely rare in California, when it is very common in New York in the same latitude? Why should it be almost unknown in the Hawaiian Islands, within seventeen degrees of the equator? Its rarity in South Africa is a great point in favour of the healthfulness of the country, and also of the ease and pleasantness of life. In India one has to be always mounting guard against the sun. He is a formidable and ever-present enemy, and he is the more dangerous the longer you live in the country. In South Africa it is only because he dries up the soil so terribly that the traveller wishes to have less of him. The born Africander seems to love him.
The dryness of the climate makes very strongly for its salubrity. It is the absence of moisture no less than the elevation above sea-level that gives to the air its fresh, keen, bracing quality, the quality which enables one to support the sun-heat, which keeps the physical frame in vigour, which helps children to grow up active and healthy, which confines to comparatively few districts that deadliest foe of Europeans, swamp-fever. Malarial fever in one of its many forms, some of them intermittent, others remittent, is the scourge of the east coast as well as of the west coast. To find some means of avoiding it would be to double the value of Africa to the European powers which have been establishing themselves on the coasts. No one who lives within thirty miles of the sea nearly all the way south from Cape Guardafui to Zululand can hope to escape it. It is frequent all round the great Nyanza lakes, and particularly severe in the valley of the Nile from the lakes downward to Khartoum. It prevails through the comparatively low country which lies along the Congo and the chief tributaries of that great stream. It hangs like a death-cloud over the valley of the Zambesi, and is found up to a height of 3000 or 4000 feet, sometimes even higher, in Nyassaland and the lower parts of the British territories that stretch to Lake Tanganyika. The Administrator of German East Africa has lately declared that there is not a square mile of that vast region that can be deemed free from it. Even along the generally arid shores of Damaraland there are spots where it is to be feared. But Cape Colony and Natal and the Orange Free State are almost exempt from it. So, too, are all the higher parts of the Transvaal, of Bechuanaland, of Matabililand, and of Mashonaland. Roughly speaking, one may say that the upper boundary line of malarial fevers in these countries is about 4500 feet above the sea, and where fevers occur at a height above 3000 feet they are seldom of a virulent type. Thus, while the lower parts of the Transvaal between the Quathlamba Mountains and the sea are terribly unhealthy, while the Portuguese country behind Delagoa Bay and Beira as far as the foot of the hills is equally dangerous,—Beira itself has the benefit of a strong sea-breeze,—by far the larger part of the recently occupied British territories north and west of the Transvaal is practically safe. It is, of course, proper to take certain precautions, to avoid chills and the copious use of alcohol and it is specially important to observe such precautions during and immediately after the wet season, when the sun is raising vapours from the moist soil, when new vegetation has sprung up, and when the long grass which has grown during the first rains is rotting under the later rains. Places which are quite healthful in the dry weather, such as Gaberones and the rest of the upper valley of the rivers Notwani and Limpopo in eastern Bechuanaland, then become dangerous, because they lie on the banks of streams which inundate the lower grounds. Much depends on the local circumstances of each spot. To illustrate the differences between one place and another, I may take the case of the three chief posts in the territories of the British South Africa Company. Buluwayo, nearly 4000 feet above the sea, is always practically free from malaria, for it stands in a dry, breezy upland with few trees and short grass. Fort Victoria, 3670 feet above the sea, is salubrious enough during the dry season, but often feverish after the rains, because there is some wet ground near it. Fort Salisbury, 4900 feet above the sea, is now healthful at all times, but parts of it used to be feverish at the end of the rainy season, until they were drained in the beginning of 1895. So Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal Republic, is apt to be malarious during the months of rain, because (although 4470 feet above the sea) it lies in a well-watered hollow; while at Johannesburg, thirty miles off, on the top of a high, bare, stony ridge, one has no occasion to fear fever, though the want of water and proper drainage, as well as the quantity of fine dust from the highly comminuted ore and "tailings" with which the air is filled, had until 1896 given rise to other maladies, and especially to septic pneumonia. These will diminish with a better municipal administration, and similarly malaria will doubtless vanish from the many spots where it is now rife when the swampy grounds have been drained and the long grass eaten down by larger herds of cattle.
It is apparently the dryness and the purity of the air which have given South Africa its comparative immunity from most forms of chest disease. Many sufferers from consumption, for whom a speedy death, if they remained in Europe, had been predicted, recover health, and retain it till old age. The spots chiefly recommended are on the high grounds of the interior plateau, where the atmosphere is least humid. Ceres, ninety-four miles by rail from Cape Town, and Beaufort West, in the Karroo, have been resorted to as sanatoria; and Kimberley, the city of diamonds, has an equally high reputation for the quality of its air. However, some of the coast districts are scarcely less eligible, though Cape Town has too many rapid changes of weather, and Durban too sultry a summer, to make either of them a desirable place of residence for invalids.
Apart from all questions of specific complaints, there can be no doubt as to the general effect of the climate upon health. The aspect of the people soon convinces a visitor that, in spite of its heat, the country is well fitted to maintain in vigour a race drawn from the cooler parts of Europe. Comparatively few adult Englishmen sprung from fathers themselves born in Africa are as yet to be found. But the descendants of the Dutch and Huguenot settlers are Africanders up to the sixth or seventh generation, and the stock shows no sign of losing either its stature or its physical strength. Athletic sports are pursued as eagerly as in England.
CHAPTER III
WILD ANIMALS AND THEIR FATE
When first explored, South Africa was unusually rich in the kinds both of plants and of animals which it contained; and until forty or fifty years ago the number, size, and beauty of its wild creatures were the things by which it was chiefly known to Europeans, who had little suspicion of its mineral wealth, and little foreboding of the trouble that wealth would cause. Why it was so rich in species is a question on which geology will one day be able to throw light, for much may depend on the relations of land and sea in earlier epochs of the earth's history. Probably the great diversities of elevation and of climate which exist in the southern part of the continent have contributed to this profuse variety; and the fact that the country was occupied only by savages, who did little or nothing to extinguish any species nature had planted, may have caused many weak species to survive when equally weak ones were perishing in Asia and Europe at the hands of more advanced races of mankind. The country was therefore the paradise of hunters. Besides the lion and the leopard, there were many other great cats, some of remarkable beauty. Besides the elephant, which was in some districts very abundant, there existed two kinds of rhinoceros, as well as the hippopotamus and the giraffe. There was a wonderful profusion of antelopes,—thirty-one species have been enumerated,—including such noble animals as the eland and koodoo, such beautiful ones as the springbok and klipspringer, such fierce ones as the blue wildebeest or gnu. There were two kinds of zebra, a quagga, and a buffalo, both huge and dangerous. Probably nowhere in the world could so great a variety of beautiful animals be seen or a larger variety of formidable ones be pursued.
All this has changed, and changed of late years with fatal speed, under the increasing range and accuracy of firearms, the increasing accessibility of the country to the European sportsman, and the increasing number of natives who possess guns. The Dutch Boer of eighty years ago was a good marksman and loved the chase, but he did not shoot for fame and in order to write about his exploits, while the professional hunter who shot to sell ivory or rare specimens had hardly begun to exist. The work of destruction has latterly gone on so fast that the effect of stating what is still left can hardly be to tempt others to join in that work, but may help to show how urgent is the duty of arresting the process of extermination.
When the first Dutchmen settled at the Cape the lion was so common as to be one of the every-day perils of life. Tradition points out a spot in the pleasure-ground attached to the Houses of Parliament at Cape Town where a lion was found prowling in what was then the commandant's garden. In 1653 it was feared that lions would storm the fort to get at the sheep within it, and so late as 1694 they killed nine cows within sight of the present castle. To-day, however, if the lion is to be found at all within the limits of Cape Colony, it is only in the wilderness along the banks of the Orange River. He was abundant in the Orange Free State when it became independent in 1854, but has been long extinct there. He survives in a few spots in the north of the Transvaal and in the wilder parts of Zululand and Bechuanaland, and is not unfrequent in Matabililand and Mashonaland. One may, however, pass through those countries, as I did in October, 1895, without having a chance of seeing the beast or even hearing its nocturnal voice, and those who go hunting this grandest of all quarries are often disappointed. In the strip of flat land between the mountains and the Indian Ocean behind Sofala and Beira, and in the Zambesi valley, there remain lions enough; but the number diminishes so fast that even in that malarious and thinly peopled land none may be left thirty years hence.
The leopard is still to be found all over the country, except where the population is thickest; and as the leopard haunts rocky places, it is, though much hunted for the sake of its beautiful skin, less likely to be exterminated. Some of the smaller carnivora, especially the pretty lynxes, have now become very rare. There is a good supply of hyenas, but they are ugly.
Elephants used to roam in great herds over all the more woody districts, but have now been quite driven out of Cape Colony, Natal, and the two Dutch republics, save that in a narrow strip of forest country near the south coast, between Mossel Bay and Algoa Bay, some herds are preserved by the Cape government. So, too, in the north of the Transvaal there are still a few left, also specially preserved. It is only on the east coast south of the Zambesi, and here and there along that river, that the wild elephant can now be found. From these regions it will soon vanish, and unless something is done to stop the hunting of elephants the total extinction of the animal in Africa may be expected within another half-century; for the foolish passion for slaughter which sends so-called sportsmen on his track, and the high price of ivory, are lessening its numbers day by day. A similar fate awaits the rhinoceros, once common even near the Cape, where he overturned one day the coach of a Dutch governor. The white kind, which is the larger, is now all but extinct, while the black rhinoceros has become scarce even in the northern regions between the Limpopo and the Zambesi. The hippopotamus, protected by his aquatic habits, has fared better, and may still be seen plunging and splashing in the waters of the Pungwe, the Limpopo, and other rivers in Portuguese East Africa. But Natal will soon know this great amphibian no more; and within Cape Colony, where the creature was once abundant even in the swamps that bordered Table Bay, he is now to be found only in the pools along the lower course of the Orange River. The crocodile holds his ground better, and is still a serious danger to oxen who go down to drink at the streams. In Zululand and all along the east coast, as well as in the streams of Mashonaland and Matabililand, there is hardly a pool which does not contain some of these formidable saurians. Even when the water shrinks in the dry season till little but mud seems to be left, the crocodile, getting deep into the mud, maintains a torpid life till the rains bring him back into activity. Lo Bengula sometimes cast those who had displeased him, bound hand and foot, into a river to be devoured by these monsters, which he did not permit to be destroyed, probably because they were sacred to some tribes.
The giraffe has become very scarce, though a herd or two are left in the south of Matabililand, and a larger number in the Kalahari Desert. So, also, the zebra and many of the species of antelopes, especially the larger kinds, like the eland and the sable, are disappearing, while the buffalo is now only to be seen (except in a part of the Colony where a herd is preserved) in the Portuguese territories along the Zambesi and the east coast. The recent cattle-plague has fallen heavily upon him. So the ostrich would probably now remain only in the wilds of the Kalahari had not large farms been created in Cape Colony, where young broods are reared for the sake of the feathers. On these farms, especially near Graham's Town and in the Oudtshorn district, one may see great numbers; nor is there a prettier sight than that of two parent birds running along, with a numerous progeny of little ones around them. Though in a sense domesticated, they are often dangerous, for they kick forward and claw downward with great violence, and the person whom they knock down and begin to trample on has little chance of escape with his life. Fortunately, it is easy to drive them off with a stick or even an umbrella; and we were warned not to cross an ostrich-farm without some such defence.
Snakes, though there are many venomous species, seem to be less feared than in India or the wilder parts of Australia. The python grows to twenty feet or more, but is, of course, not poisonous, and never assails man unless first molested. The black momba, which is nearly as large as a rattlesnake, is, however, a dangerous creature, being ready to attack man without provocation, and the bite may prove fatal in less than an hour. One sees many skins of this snake in the tropical parts of South Africa, and hears many thrilling tales of combats with them. They are no longer common in the more settled and temperate regions.
Although even in Cape Colony and the Dutch republics there is still more four-footed game to be had than anywhere in Europe, there remain only two regions where large animals can be killed in any considerable numbers. One of these is the Portuguese territory between Delagoa Bay and the Zambesi, together with the adjoining parts of the Transvaal, where the lower spurs of the Quathlamba Range descend to the plain. This district is very malarious during and after the rains, and most of it unhealthy at all seasons. The other region is the Kalahari Desert and the country north of it between Lake Ngami and the Upper Zambesi. The Kalahari is so waterless as to offer considerable difficulties to European hunters, and the country round Lake Ngami is swampy and feverish. So far the wild creatures have nature in their favour; yet the passion for killing is in many persons so strong that neither thirst nor fever deters them, and if the large game are to be saved, it will clearly be necessary to place them under legal protection. This has been attempted so far as regards the elephant, rhinoceros, giraffe, and eland. In German East Africa Dr. von Wissmann, the Administrator of that territory, has recently (1896) gone further, and ordained restrictions on the slaughter of all the larger animals, except predatory ones. The governments of the two British colonies and the two Boer republics, which have already done well in trying to preserve some of the rarest and finest beasts, ought to go thoroughly into the question and enact a complete protective code. Still more necessary is it that a similar course should be taken by the British South Africa Company and by the Imperial Government, in whose territories there still survive more of the great beasts. It is to be hoped that even the lion and some of the rare lynxes will ultimately receive consideration. Noxious as they are, it would be a pity to see them wholly exterminated. When I was in India, in the year 1888, I was told that there were only seven lions then left in that vast area, all of them well cared for. The work of slaughter ought to be checked in South Africa before the number gets quite so low as this, and though there may be difficulties in restraining the natives from killing the big game, it must be remembered that as regards many animals it is the European rather than the native, who is the chief agent of destruction.
The predatory creatures which are now most harmful to the farmer are the baboons, which infest rocky districts and kill the lambs in such great numbers that the Cape government offers bounties for their slaughter. But no large animal does mischief for a moment comparable to that of the two insect plagues which vex the eastern half of the country, the white ants and the locusts. Of these I shall have something to say later.
CHAPTER IV
VEGETATION
The flora of South Africa is extremely rich, showing a number of genera, and of species which, in proportion to its area, exceeds the number found in most other parts of the world. But whether this wealth is due to the diversity of physical conditions which the country presents, or rather to geological causes, that is, to the fact that there may at some remote period have been land connections with other regions which have facilitated the immigration of plants from various sides, is a matter on which science cannot yet pronounce, for both the geology and the flora of the whole African continent have been very imperfectly examined. It is, however, worth remarking that there are marked affinities between the general character of the flora of the south-western corner of South Africa and that of the flora of south-western Australia, and similar affinities between the flora of south-eastern and tropical Africa and the flora of India, while the relations to South America are fewer and much less marked. This fact would seem to point to the great antiquity of the South Atlantic Ocean.
To give in such a book as this even the scantiest account of the plants of South Africa would obviously be impossible. All I propose is to convey some slight impression of the part which its vegetation, and particularly its trees, play in the landscape and in the economic conditions of the country. Even this I can do but imperfectly, because, like most travellers, I passed through large districts in the dry season, when three-fourths of the herbaceous plants are out of flower.
No part of the country is richer in beautiful flowers than the immediate neighbourhood of Cape Town. This extreme south-western corner of Africa has a climate of the south temperate zone; that is to say, it has a real summer and a real winter, and gets most of its rain in winter, whereas the rest of South Africa has only a wet season and a dry season, the latter coming in winter. So, too, this corner round Cape Town has a vegetation characteristically its own, and differing markedly from that of the arid Karroo regions to the north, and that of the warm subtropical regions in the east of the Colony and in Natal. It is here that the plants flourish which Europeans and Americans first came to know and which are still to them the most familiar examples of the South African flora. Heaths, for instance, of which there are said to be no less than three hundred and fifty species in this small district, some of extraordinary beauty and brilliance, are scarcely found outside of it. I saw two or three species on the high peaks of Basutoland, and believe some occur as far north as the tropic on the tops of the Quathlamba Range; but in the lower grounds, and even on the plateau of the Karroo they are absent. The general aspect of the vegetation on the Karroo, and eastward over the plateau into Bechuanaland and the Transvaal, is to the traveller's eye monotonous—a fact due to the general uniformity of the geological formations and the general dryness of the surface. In Natal and in Mashonaland types different from those of either the Cape or the Karroo appear, and I have never seen a more beautiful and varied alpine flora than on a lofty summit of Basutoland which I ascended in early summer. But even in Mashonaland, and in Matabililand still more, the herbaceous plants make, at least in the dry season, comparatively little show. I found the number of conspicuous species less than I had expected, and the diversity of types from the types that prevail in the southern part of the plateau (in Bechuanaland and the Orange Free State) less marked. This is doubtless due to the general similarity of the conditions that prevail over the plateau. Everywhere the same hot days and cold nights, everywhere the same dryness.
However, I must avoid details, especially details which would be interesting only to a botanist, and be content with a few words on those more conspicuous features of the vegetation which the traveller notes, and which go to make up his general impression of the country.
Speaking broadly, South Africa is a bare country, and this is the more remarkable because it is a new country, where man has not had time to work much destruction. There are ancient forests along the south coast of Cape Colony and Natal, the best of which are (in the former colony) now carefully preserved and administered by a Forest Department of Government. Such is the great Knysna forest, where elephants still roam wild. But even in these forests few trees exceed fifty or sixty feet in height, the tallest being the so-called yellow-wood, and the most useful the sneeze-wood. On the slopes of the hills above Graham's Town and King William's Town one finds (besides real forests here and there) immense masses of dense scrub, or "bush," usually from four to eight feet in height, sometimes with patches of the prickly-pear, an invader from America, and a formidable one; for its spines hurt the cattle and make passage by men a troublesome business. It was this dense, low scrub which constituted the great difficulty of British troops in the fierce and protracted Kafir wars of fifty years ago; for the ground which the scrub covers was impassable except by narrow and tortuous paths known only to the natives, and it afforded them admirable places for ambush and for retreat. Nowadays a large part of the bush-covered land is used for ostrich-farms, and it is, indeed, fit for little else. The scrub is mostly dry, while the larger forests are comparatively damp, and often beautiful with flowering trees, small tree-ferns, and flexile climbers. But the trees are not lofty enough to give any of that dignity which a European forest, say in England or Germany or Norway, often possesses, and as the native kinds are mostly evergreens, their leaves have comparatively little variety of tint. One of the most graceful is the curious silver-tree, so called from the whitish sheen of one side of its leaves, which grows abundantly on the slopes of Table Mountain, but is found hardly anywhere else in the Colony.
If this is the character of the woods within reach of the coast rains, much more conspicuous is the want of trees and the poorness of those scattered here and there on the great interior plateau. In the desert region, that is to say, the Karroo, the northern part of Cape Colony to the Orange River, western Bechuanaland, and the German territories of Namaqualand and Damaraland, there are hardly any trees, except small, thorny mimosas (they are really acacias, the commonest being Acacia horrida), whose scanty, light-green foliage casts little shade. On the higher mountains, where there is a little more moisture, a few other shrubs or small trees may be found, and sometimes beside a watercourse, where a stream runs during the rains, the eye is refreshed by a few slender willows; but speaking generally, this huge desert, one-third of South Africa, contains nothing but low bushes, few of which are fit even for fuel. Farther east, where the rainfall is heavier, the trees, though still small, are more frequent and less thorny. Parts of the great plain round Kimberley were tolerably well wooded thirty years ago, but the trees have all been cut down to make mine props or for fire-wood. North of Mafeking the rolling flats and low hills of Bechuanaland are pretty fairly wooded, and so to a less degree are the adjoining parts of the Transvaal and Matabililand. The road going north from Mafeking passes through some three hundred miles of such woodlands, but a less beautiful or interesting woodland I have never seen. The trees are mostly the thorny mimosas I have mentioned. None exceed thirty, few reach twenty-five, feet. Though they grow loosely scattered, the space between them is either bare or occupied by low and very prickly bushes. The ground is parched, and one can get no shade, except by standing close under a trunk somewhat thicker than its neighbours. Still farther north the timber is hardly larger, though the general aspect of the woods is improved by the more frequent occurrence of flowering trees, some sweet-scented, with glossy leaves and small white flowers, some with gorgeous clusters of blossoms. Three are particularly handsome. One, usually called the Kafir-boom, has large flowers of a brilliant crimson. Another (Lonchocarpus speciosus[4]), for which no English name seems to exist, shows lovely pendulous flowers of a bluish lilac, resembling in colour those of the wistaria. The third is an arboraceous St. John's wort (Hypericum Schimperi[4]), which I found growing in a valley of Manicaland, at a height of nearly 4000 feet above the sea. All three would be great ornaments to a south European shrubbery could they be induced to bear the climate, which, in the case of the two latter (for I hardly think the Kafir-boom would suit a colder air), seems not impossible. In Manicaland, among the mountains which form the eastern edge of the plateau, the trees are taller, handsomer, and more tropical in their character, and palms, though of no great height, are sometimes seen. But not even in the most humid of the valleys and on the lower spurs of the range, where it sinks into the coast plain, nor along the swampy banks of the Pungwe River, did I see any tree more than sixty feet high, and few more than thirty. Neither was there any of that luxuriant undergrowth which makes some tropical forests, like those at the foot of the Nilghiri Hills in India or in some of the isles of the Pacific, so impressive as evidences of the power and ceaseless activity of nature.
The poverty of the woods in Bechuanaland and Matabililand seems to be due not merely to the dryness of the soil and to the thin and sandy character which so often marks it, but also to the constant grass-fires. The grass is generally short, so that these fires do not kill the trees; nor does one hear of such great forest conflagrations as are frequent and ruinous in Western America and by no means unknown in the south of Cape Colony. But these fires doubtless injure the younger trees sufficiently to stunt their growth, and this mischief is, of course, all the greater when an exceptionally dry year occurs. In such years the grass-fires, then most frequent, may destroy the promise of the wood over a vast area.
The want of forests in South Africa is one of the greatest misfortunes of the country, for it makes timber costly; it helps to reduce the rainfall, and it aggravates the tendency of the rain, when it comes, to run off rapidly in a sudden freshet. Forests have a powerful influence upon climate in holding moisture,[5] and not only moisture, but soil also. In South Africa the violent rain-storms sweep away the surface of the ground, and prevent the deposition of vegetable mould. Nothing retains that mould or the soil formed by decomposed rock as well as a covering of wood and the herbage which the neighbourhood of comparatively moist woodlands helps to support. It is much to be desired that in all parts of the country where trees will grow trees should be planted, and that those which remain should be protected. Unfortunately, most of the South African trees grow slowly, so where planting has been attempted it is chiefly foreign sorts that are tried. Among these the first place belongs to the Australian gums, because they shoot up faster than any others. One finds them now everywhere, mostly in rows or groups round a house or a hamlet, but sometimes also in regular plantations. They have become a conspicuous feature in the landscape of the veldt plateau, especially in those places where there was no wood, or the little that existed has been destroyed. Kimberley, for instance, and Pretoria are beginning to be embowered in groves of eucalyptus; Buluwayo is following suit; and all over Matabililand and Mashonaland one discovers in the distance the site of a farm-steading or a store by the waving tops of the gum-trees. If this goes on these Australian immigrants will sensibly affect the aspect of the country, just as already they have affected that of the Riviera in south-eastern France, of the Campagna of Rome, of the rolling tops of the Nilghiri Hills in Southern India, from which, unhappily, the far more beautiful ancient groves ("sholas") have now almost disappeared. Besides those gums, another Australasian tree, the thin-foliaged and unlovely, but quick-growing "beefwood," has been largely planted at Kimberley and some other places. The stone-pine of Southern Europe, the cluster-pine (Pinus Pinaster), and the Aleppo or Jerusalem pine (Pinus Halepensis), have all been introduced and seem to do well. The Australian wattles have been found very useful in helping to fix the soil on sandy flats, such as those near Cape Town, and the bark of one species is an important article of commerce in Natal, where (near Maritzburg, for instance) it grows profusely. But of all the immigrant trees none is so beautiful as the oak. The Dutch began to plant it round Cape Town early in the eighteenth century, and it is now one of the elements which most contribute to the charm of the scenery in this eminently picturesque south-west corner of the country. Nothing can be more charming than the long oak avenues which line the streets of Stellenbosch, for instance; and they help, with the old-fashioned Dutch houses of that quaint little town, to give a sort of Hobbema flavour to the foregrounds.
The changes which man has produced in the aspect of countries, by the trees he plants and the crops he sows, are a curious subject for inquiry to the geographer and the historian. These changes sometimes take place very rapidly. In the Hawaiian Islands, for instance, discovered by Captain Cook little more than a century ago, many of the shrubs which most abound and give its tone to the landscape have come (and that mostly not by planting, but spontaneously) from the shores of Asia and America within the last eighty years. In Egypt most of the trees which fill the eye in the drive from Cairo to the pyramids were introduced by Mehemet Ali, so that the banks of the Nile, as we see them, are different not only from those which Herodotus saw, but even from those which Napoleon saw. In North Africa the Central American prickly-pear and the Australian gum make the landscape quite different from that of Carthaginian or even of Roman times. So South Africa is changing—changing all the more because many of the immigrant trees thrive better than the indigenous ones, and are fit for spots where the latter make but little progress; and in another century the country may wear an aspect quite unlike that which it now presents.
CHAPTER V
PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF THE VARIOUS POLITICAL DIVISIONS
Hitherto I have spoken of South Africa as a natural whole, ignoring its artificial division into Colonies and States. It may be well to complete the account of the physical characteristics of the country by giving the reader some notion of the aspects of each of the political divisions, and thereby a notion also of their relative importance and resources as wealth-producing regions.
CAPE COLONY
Cape Colony is a huge territory more than twice as large as the United Kingdom. But very little of it is available for tillage, and much of it is too arid even for stock-keeping. The population, including natives, is only seven to the square mile. Nearly the whole of it is high country. All along its westerly coast and its southerly coast there is a strip of low ground bordering the ocean, which in some places is but a mile or two wide, and in others, where a broad valley opens spreads backward, giving thirty or forty square miles of tolerably level or undulating ground. The rich wine and corn district round Stellenbosch and Paarl and northward towards Malmesbury is such a tract. Behind this low strip the country rises, sometimes in steep acclivities, up which a road or railway has to be carried in curves and zigzags, sometimes in successive terraces, the steps, so to speak, by which the lofty interior breaks down towards the sea.
Behind these terraces and slopes lies the great tableland described in a preceding chapter. Though I call it a tableland, it is by no means flat, for several long, though not lofty, ranges of hills, mostly running east and west, intersect it. Some tracts are only 2000 feet, others as much as 5000 feet, above the sea, while the highest hilltops approach 8000 feet. The part of this high country which lies between longitude 20° and 25° E., with the Nieuweld and Sneeuwberg mountains to the north of it, and the Zwarte Berg to the south, is called the Great Karroo. (The word is Hottentot, and means a dry or bare place.) It is tolerably level, excessively dry, with no such thing as a running stream over its huge expanse of three hundred miles long and half as much wide, nor, indeed, any moisture, save in a few places shallow pools which almost disappear in the dry season. The rainfall ranges from five to fifteen inches in the year. It is therefore virtually a desert, bearing no herbage (except for a week or two after a rainstorm), and no trees, though there are plenty of prickly shrubs and small bushes, some of these succulent enough, when they sprout after the few showers that fall in the summer, to give good browsing to sheep and goats. The brilliancy of the air, the warmth of the days, and the coldness of the nights remind one who traverses the Karroo of the deserts of Western America between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, though the soil is much less alkaline, and the so-called "sage-brush" plants characteristic of an alkaline district are mostly absent. To the north of the Karroo and of the mountains which bound it, a similar district, equally arid, dreary, and barren, stretches away to the banks of the Orange River, which here in its lower course has less water than in its upper course, because, like the Nile, it receives no affluents and is wasted by the terrible sun. In fact, one may say that from the mountains dividing the southern part of the Karroo from the coast lands all the way north to the Orange River, a distance of nearly four hundred miles, nature has made the country a desert of clay and stone (seldom of sand), though man has here and there tried to redeem it for habitation.
The north-eastern part of the interior of Cape Colony is more generally elevated than the south-western. From Graaf-Reinet northward to Kimberley and Mafeking, and north-eastward to the borders of Basutoland, the country is 4000 feet or more above sea-level; much of it is nearly level, and almost all of it bare of wood. It is better watered than the western districts, enjoying a rainfall of from ten to twenty-five inches in the year, and is therefore mostly covered with grass after the rains, and not merely with dry thorny bushes. Nevertheless, its general aspect in the dry season is so parched and bare that the stranger is surprised to be told that it supports great quantities of cattle, sheep, and goats. The south-eastern part, including the Quathlamba Range, and the hilly country descending from that range to the sea, has a still heavier rainfall and is in some places covered with forest. Here the grass is richer, and in the valleys there is plenty of land fit for tillage without irrigation.
THE COLONY OF NATAL
Much smaller, but more favoured by nature, is the British colony of Natal, which adjoins the easternmost part of Cape Colony, and now includes the territories of Zululand and Tonga land. Natal proper and Zululand resemble in their physical conditions the south-eastern corner of Cape Colony. Both lie entirely on the sea slope of the Quathlamba Range, and are covered by mountains and hills descending from that range. Both are hilly or undulating, with a charming variety of surface; and they are also comparatively well watered, with a perennial stream in every valley. Hence there is plenty of grass, and towards the coast plenty of wood also, while the loftier interior is bare. The climate is much warmer than that of Cape Colony, and in the narrow strip which borders the sea becomes almost tropical. Nor is this heat attributable entirely to the latitude. It is largely due to the great Mozambique current, which brings down from the tropical parts of the Indian Ocean a vast body of warm water which heats the adjoining coast just as the Gulf Stream heats the shores of Georgia and the Carolinas; and the effect of this mass of hot water upon the air over it would doubtless be felt much more in Natal were it not for the rapid rise of the ground from the sea in that colony. Pietermaritzburg, the capital, is only some fifty miles from the coast as the crow flies. But though it lies in a valley, it is 2225 feet above sea-level, and from it the country steadily rises inland, till at Laing's Nek (the watershed between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic), the height of 5300 feet is reached, and the winter cold is severe. Nearly the whole of Natal and four-fifths of Zululand may thus be deemed a temperate country, where Europeans can thrive and multiply. So far as soil goes it is one of the richest as well as one of the fairest parts of South Africa. Tongaland, a smaller district, lies lower and is less healthy.
GERMAN SOUTH-WEST AFRICA
Very different is the vast German territory (322,000 square miles) which stretches northward from Cape Colony, bounded on the south by the Orange River, on the north by the West African territories of Portugal, on the east by Bechuanaland. Great Namaqualand and Damaraland constitute an enormous wilderness, very thinly peopled, because the means of life are very scanty. This wilderness is, except the narrow and sandy coast strip, a high country (3000 to 4500 feet above sea-level) and a dry country, drier even than the Karroo, and far too dry for any kind of cultivation. Some parts, especially those in the south-west, are hopelessly parched and barren; others have small bushes or grass; while on the higher grounds and generally in the far northern parts, where the Ovampo tribe dwell, grass is abundant, and as cattle can thrive there is also population. Copper has been discovered in considerable quantities, and other minerals (including coal) are believed to exist. But the country, taken all in all, and excepting the little explored districts of the north-east, toward the Upper Zambesi,—districts whose resources are still very imperfectly known,—is a dreary and desolate region, which seems likely to prove of little value. Germany now owns the whole of it, save the port of Walfish Bay, which has been retained for and is administered by Cape Colony.
PORTUGUESE SOUTH-EAST AFRICA
On the opposite side of the continent Portugal holds the country which lies along the Indian Ocean from British Tongaland northward to the Zambesi. Close to the sea it is level, rising gently westward in hills, and in some places extending to the crest of the Quathlamba Mountains. Thus it has considerable variety of aspect and climate, and as the rain falls chiefly on the slopes of the mountains, the interior is generally better watered than the flat seaboard, which is often sandy and worthless. Much of this region is of great fertility, capable of producing all the fruits of the tropics. But much of it, including some of the most fertile parts, is also very malarious, while the heat is far too great for European labour. When plantations are established throughout it, as they have been in a few—but only a few—spots by the Portuguese, it will be by natives that they will be cultivated. The Kafir population is now comparatively small, but this may be due rather to the desolating native wars than to the conditions of the soil.
So much for the four maritime countries. There remain the two Dutch republics and the British territories which have not yet been formed into colonies.
THE ORANGE FREE STATE
The Orange Free State (48,000 square miles) lies entirely on the great plateau, between 4000 and 5000 feet above sea-level. It is in the main a level country, though hills are scattered over it, sometimes reaching a height of nearly 6000 feet. A remarkable feature of most of these hills, as of many all over the plateau, is that they are flat-topped, and have often steep, even craggy escarpments. This seems due to the fact that the strata (chiefly sandstone) are horizontal; and very often a bed of hard igneous rock, some, kind of trap or greenstone, or porphyry, protects the summit of the hill from the disintegrating influences of the weather. It is a bare land, with very little wood, and that small and scrubby, but is well covered with herbage, affording excellent pasture during two-thirds of the year. After the first rains, when these wide stretches of gently undulating land are dressed in their new vesture of brilliant green, nothing can be imagined more exhilarating than a ride across the wide expanse; for the air is pure, keen, and bracing, much like that of the high prairies of Colorado or Wyoming. There are fortunately no blizzards, but violent thunderstorms are not uncommon, and the hailstones—I have seen them as big as bantams' eggs—which fall during such storms sometimes kill the smaller animals, and even men. Dry as the land appears to the eye during the winter, the larger streams do not wholly fail, and water can generally be got. The south-eastern part of the Free State, especially along the Caledon River, is extremely fertile, one of the best corn-growing parts of Africa. The rest is fitter for pasture than for tillage, except, of course, on the alluvial banks of the rivers, and nearly the whole region is in fact occupied by huge grazing farms. As such a farm needs and supports only a few men, the population grows but slowly. The Free State is nearly as big as England and just as big as the State of New York; but it has only 77,000 white inhabitants and about 130,000 natives.
THE SOUTH AFRICAN REPUBLIC
Somewhat larger,—about as large as Great Britain and nearly two-thirds the size of France—is the South African Republic, which we commonly talk of as the Transvaal. Of its white population, which numbers some 170,000, two-thirds are in the small mining district of the Witwatersrand. All the Transvaal, except a strip on the eastern and another strip on the northern border along the river Limpopo, also belongs to the great plateau and exhibits the characteristic features of the plateau. The hills are, however, higher than in the Free State, and along the east, where the Quathlamba Range forms the outer edge of the plateau, they deserve to be called mountains, for some of them reach 7000 feet. These high regions are healthy, for the summer heats are tempered by easterly breezes and copious summer rains. The lower parts lying toward the Indian Ocean and the Limpopo River are feverish, though drainage and cultivation may be expected to reduce the malaria and improve the conditions of health. Like the Free State, the Transvaal is primarily a pasture land, but in many parts the herbage is less juicy and wholesome than in the smaller republic, and belongs to what the Dutch Boers call "sour veldt." There are trees in the more sheltered parts, but except in the lower valleys, they are small, and of no economic value. The winter cold is severe, and the fierce sun dries up the soil, and makes the grass sear and brown for the greater part of the year. Strong winds sweep over the vast stretches of open upland, checked by no belts of forest. It is a country whose aspect has little to attract the settler. No one would think it worth fighting for so far as the surface goes; and until sixteen years ago nobody knew that there was enormous wealth lying below the surface.
BRITISH TERRITORIES—BECHUANALAND
Of one British territory outside the two colonies, viz., Basutoland, I shall have to speak fully hereafter. A second, Bechuanaland, including the Kalahari Desert, is of vast extent, but slender value. It is a level land lying entirely on the plateau between 3,000 and 4000 feet above the sea, and while some of its streamlets drain into the Limpopo, and so to the Indian Ocean, others flow westward and northward into marshes and shallow lakes, in which they disappear. One or two, however, succeed, in wet seasons, in getting as far as the Orange River, and find through it an outlet to the sea. It is only in the wet season that the streamlets flow, for Bechuanaland is intensely dry. I travelled four hundred miles through it without once crossing running water, though here and there in traversing the dry bed of a brook one was told that there was water underneath, deep in the sand. Notwithstanding this superficial aridity, eastern Bechuanaland is deemed one of the best ranching tracts in South Africa, for the grass is sweet, and the water can usually be obtained by digging, though it is often brackish. There is also plenty of wood—thin and thorny, but sufficiently abundant to diversify the aspect of what would otherwise be a most dreary and monotonous region.
THE TERRITORIES OF THE BRITISH SOUTH AFRICA COMPANY
North of Bechuanaland and the Transvaal, and stretching all the way to the Zambesi, are those immense territories which have been assigned to the British South Africa Company as the sphere of its operations, and to which the name of Rhodesia has been given. Matabililand and Mashonaland, the only parts that have been at all settled, are higher, more undulating, and altogether more attractive than Bechuanaland, with great swelling downs somewhat resembling the Steppes of Southern Russia or the prairies of Kansas. Except in the east and south-east, the land is undulating rather than hilly, but in the south-west, towards the Upper Limpopo, there lies a high region, full of small rocky heights often clothed with thick bush—a country difficult to traverse, as has been found during the recent native outbreak; for it was there that most of the Kafirs took shelter and were found difficult to dislodge. Towards the south-east, along the middle course of the Limpopo, the country is lower and less healthy. On the northern side of the central highlands, the ground sinks towards the Zambesi, and the soil, which among the hills is thin or sandy, becomes deeper. In that part and along the river banks there are great possibilities of agricultural development, while the uplands, where the subjacent rock is granite or gneiss, with occasional beds of slate or schist, are generally barer and more dry, fit rather for pasture than for tillage. More rain falls than in Bechuanaland, so it is only at the end of the dry season, in October, that the grass begins to fail on the pastures. The climate, though very warm,—for here we are well within the tropics,—is pleasant and invigorating, for nowhere do brighter and fresher breezes blow, and the heat of the afternoons is forgotten in the cool evenings. It is healthy, too, except along the swampy river banks and where one descends to the levels of the Zambesi, or into the Limpopo Valley.
The reader will have gathered from this general sketch that there are no natural boundaries severing from one another the various political divisions of South Africa. The north-eastern part of Cape Colony is substantially the same kind of country as the Orange Free State and Eastern Bechuanaland; the Transvaal, or at least three-fourths of its area, is physically similar to the Free State; the boundary between Cape Colony and Natal is an artificial one; while Matabililand and Mashonaland present features resembling those of the Northern Transvaal, differing only in being rather hotter and rather better watered. So far as nature is concerned, the conditions she prescribes for the life of man, the resources she opens to his energies, are very similar over these wide areas, save, of course, that some parts are much richer than others in mineral deposits. It is only along the frontier line which divides Natal and the Portuguese dominions from the Transvaal and the territories of the British South Africa Company that a political coincides with a physical line of demarcation. Even German South-west Africa differs scarcely at all from the Kalahari Desert, which adjoins it and which forms the western part of Bechuanaland, and differs little also from the north-western regions of Cape Colony. If the reader will compare the two physical maps contained in this volume with the map which shows the political divisions of the country he will notice that these political divisions do not correspond with the areas where more or less rain falls, or where the ground is more or less raised above the sea or traversed by mountain chains. The only exception is to be found in the fact that the boundary of Natal towards Basutoland and the Orange Free State has been drawn along the watershed between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, and that the boundary line between the Portuguese territories and those of the Transvaal Republic and of the British South Africa Company, is in many places the line of division between the mountains and the low country. The Orange River and the Limpopo have, in parts of their courses, been taken as convenient political frontiers. But rivers, though convenient for this purpose to the statesman and the geographer, are not natural boundaries in the true sense of the term. And thus we may say that the causes which have cut up South Africa into its present Colonies and States have been (except as aforesaid) historical causes, rather than differences due to the hand of nature.
CHAPTER VI
NATURE AND HISTORY
Now that some general idea of how nature has shaped and moulded South Africa has been conveyed to the reader, a few pages may be devoted to considering what influence on the fortunes of the country and its inhabitants has been exerted by its physical character. The history of every country may be regarded as the joint result of three factors—the natural conditions of the country itself, the qualities of the races that have occupied it, and the circumstances under which their occupation took place. And among savage or barbarous people natural conditions have an even greater importance than they have in more advanced periods of civilisation, because they are more powerful as against man. Man in his savage state is not yet able to resist such conditions or to turn them to serve his purposes, but is condemned to submit to the kind of life which they prescribe.
This was the case with the first inhabitants of South Africa. They seem to have entered it as savages, and savages they remained. Nature was strong and stern; she spread before them no such rich alluvial plains as tempted cultivation in the valleys of the Nile and the Euphrates. Intellectually feeble, and without the patience or the foresight to attempt to till the soil in a land where droughts are frequent and disastrous, the Bushmen were content with killing game, and the Hottentots with living on the milk of their cattle. Such a life, which was one of uncertainty and often of hardship, permitted no accumulation of wealth, gave no leisure, suggested no higher want than that of food, and was in all respects unfavourable to material progress. Even the Bantu people, who probably came later and were certainly more advanced, for they carried on some little cultivation of the soil, remained at a low level. Nature gave them, except in dry years, as much corn as they needed in return for very little labour. Clothing they did not need, and their isolation from the rest of the world left them ignorant of luxuries. When the European voyagers found them at the end of the fifteenth century, they were making little or no advance in the arts of life.
Upon the growth of European settlements the influence of the physical structure of the country has been very marked. When the Portuguese had followed the long line of coast from the mouth of the Orange River to that of the Zambesi, and from the mouth of the Zambesi northward to Zanzibar, they settled only where they heard that gold and ivory could be obtained. Their forts and trading stations, the first of which dates from 1505, were therefore planted on the coast northward from the Limpopo River. Sofala, a little south of the modern port of Beira, was the principal one. Here they traded, and twice or thrice they made, always in search of the gold-producing regions, expeditions inland. These expeditions, however, had to traverse the flat and malarious strip of ground which lies along the Indian Ocean. A large part of the white troops died, and the rest arrived at the higher ground so much weakened that they could achieve no permanent conquests, for they were opposed by warlike tribes. In the course of years a small population speaking Portuguese, though mixed with native blood, grew up along the coast. The climate, however, destroyed what vigour the whites had brought from Europe, and by degrees they ceased to even attempt to conquer or occupy the interior. The heat and the rains, together with fever, the offspring of heat and rains, checked further progress. Three centuries passed, during which the knowledge of south-eastern Africa which the civilised world had obtained within the twenty years that followed the voyages of Vasco da Gama, was scarcely increased.
During those three centuries, America, which had not been discovered till six years after Bartholomew Diaz passed the Cape of Good Hope, had been, all except a part of the north-west, pretty thoroughly explored and partitioned out among five European powers. Large and prosperous colonies had sprung up and before the end of the eighteenth century one great independent state had established itself. The discovery of Australia and New Zealand came much later than that of America; but within one century from the first European settlement in Australia (A.D. 1787) the whole continent, though its interior is uninviting, had been traversed along many lines, and five prosperous European colonies had grown to importance. The slow progress of exploration and settlement in South Africa during so long a period is therefore a noteworthy phenomenon which deserves a few observations.
As regards the Portuguese part of the East African coast, the explanation just given is sufficient. As regards that part of the West coast which lies south of the Portuguese colony of Angola, the natural features of the country make no explanation needed. No more arid or barren coast is to be found anywhere, and in its whole long stretch there is but one tolerable port, that of Walfish Bay. The inland region is scarcely better. Much of it is waterless and without herbage. No gold nor ivory nor other article of value was obtainable. Accordingly, nobody cared to settle or explore, and the land would probably be still lying unclaimed had not the settlement of Herr Lüderitz and a vague desire for territorial expansion prompted Germany to occupy it in 1884.
The south coast, from the Cape to the Tugela River, was much more attractive. Here the climate was salubrious, the land in many places fertile, and everywhere fit for sheep or cattle. Here, accordingly, a small European community, first founded in 1652, grew up and spread slowly eastward and northward along the shore during the century and a half from its first establishment. The Dutch settlers did not care to penetrate the interior, because the interior seemed to offer little to a farmer. Behind the well-watered coast belt lay successive lines of steep mountains, and behind those mountains the desert waste of the Karroo, where it takes six acres to keep a sheep. Accordingly, it was only a few bold hunters, a few farmers on the outskirts of the little maritime colony, and a few missionaries, who cared to enter this wide wilderness.
When exploration began, it began from this south-west corner of Africa. It began late. In 1806, when the British took the Cape from the Dutch, few indeed were the white men who had penetrated more than one hundred miles from the coast, and the farther interior was known only by report. For thirty years more progress was slow; and it is within our own time that nearly all the exploration, and the settlement which has followed quickly on the heels of exploration, has taken place. Just sixty years ago the Dutch Boers passed in their heavy waggons from Cape Colony to the spots where Bloemfontein and Pretoria now stand. In 1854-56 David Livingstone made his way through Bechuanaland to the falls of the Zambesi and the west coast at St. Paul de Loanda. In 1889 the vast territories between the Transvaal Republic and the Zambesi began to be occupied by the Mashonaland pioneers. All these explorers, all the farmers, missionaries, hunters, and mining prospectors, came up into South Central Africa from the south-west extremity of the continent over the great plateau. They moved north-eastward, because there was more rain, and therefore more grass and game in that direction than toward the north. They were checked from time to time by the warlike native tribes; but they were drawn on by finding everywhere a country in which Europeans could live and thrive. It was the existence of this high and cool plateau that permitted their discoveries and encouraged their settlement. And thus the rich interior has come to belong, not to the Portuguese, who first laid hold of South Africa, but to the races who first entered the plateau at the point where it is nearest the sea, the Dutch and the English. Coming a thousand miles by land, they have seized and colonised the country that lies within sixty or eighty miles of the ocean behind the Portuguese settlements, because they had good healthy air to breathe during all those thousand miles of journey; while the Portuguese, sunk among tropical swamps, were doing no more than maintain their hold upon the coast, and were allowing even the few forts they had established along the lower course of the Zambesi to crumble away.
The same natural conditions, however, which have made the plateau healthy, have kept it sparsely peopled. Much of this high interior, whose settlement has occupied the last sixty years, is a desert unfit, and likely to be always unfit, for human habitation. Even in those parts which are comparatively well watered, the grazing for sheep and cattle is so scanty during some months of the year that farms are large, houses are scattered far from one another, and the population remains extremely thin. The Wilderness of the Karroo cuts off Cape Town and its comparatively populous neighbourhood from the inhabited, though thinly inhabited, pastoral districts of the Orange Free State. Between these two settled districts there are only a few villages, scattered at intervals of many miles along a line of railway four hundred miles in length. In the Free State and the Transvaal the white population is extremely sparse, save in the mining region of the Witwatersrand, because ranching requires few hands, and only a few hundred square miles out of many thousands have been brought under cultivation. Thus, while the coolness of the climate has permitted Europeans to thrive in these comparatively low latitudes, its dryness has kept down their numbers and has retarded not only their political development, but their progress in all those arts and pursuits which imply a tolerably large and varied society. The note of South African life, the thing that strikes the traveller with increasing force as he visits one part of the country after another, is the paucity of inhabitants, and the isolated life which these inhabitants, except in six or seven towns, are forced to lead. This is the doing of nature. She has not severed the country into distinct social or political communities by any lines of physical demarcation, but she has provided such scanty means of sustenance for human life and so few openings for human industry unaided by capital, that the settlers (save where capital has come to their aid) remain few indeed, and one may call the interior of South Africa a vast solitude, with a few oases of population dotted here and there over it.