“CAPE” SKETCHES.

There is a peculiarity evinced by such of the advocates of colonisation as have acquainted themselves personally with colonial life, which puts in a strong light the adaptability of most of our territories beyond sea for bettering the condition of enterprising emigrants. It is this:—each man vaunts loudly the superiority of the colony he has visited over all the others. “How is it possible,” writes a settler in New Zealand to us, “that people will be so blind as to risk their capital in Australia while there is New Zealand, the finest country, with the finest climate in the world!” The friend, who occasionally amuses and instructs us with his vivid sketches of Australian life, exclaims—“New Zealand!—Where are its markets?—What is a farmer to do with his produce when he has got it?—No, no; my advice is Sydney.” “By no means,” ejaculates a third, just home from Port Philip, “South Australia is the country for an energetic man to gain independence and wealth.” A successful emigrant, hot from Hobart Town, vaunts the advantages of Van Dieman’s Land. Our friend from Canada over-rides all these opinions. “Why,” he argues, “go to uncivilised, uncultivated, and far-off countries, when you can, at once, join established communities, and enjoy regular British institutions, only a three weeks’ sail distant; where markets are regular, food cheap, and where (on account of the intense cold) there is nothing to do for one-third of the year?” Lastly, we are favoured with the opinion of a five years’ resident in South 589Africa:—“Truly,” he says, “people who brave the regions of a northern climate, who expose their lives in dangerous proximity to savages, who heed not agues in swamps, nor thirst in deserts, forget there is such a place as the Cape of Good Hope.”

Although all this one-sided enthusiasm does not prove either of the respective cases argued by the different advocates; yet it shows in a broad light the certain advantages of emigration in general. To whatever quarter of the globe the observer turns, he sees, amidst occasional instances of disappointment and loss, that emigration has, in general, answered the expectations of the emigrants. But this general success he does not attribute to the soundness of the principle in the abstract, but to the advantages of the particular country in which he has witnessed the most prosperity.

In, therefore, sifting and comparing with other evidence the numerous papers which we receive from, and relative to, the various colonies, it is our aim to give such true pictures of colonial life as enable the reader to judge fairly of the pains, pleasures, losses and gains of all the new homes which have been established by and for Englishmen in various parts of the globe.

We have been led into these remarks by a communication now before us from the gentleman already mentioned who has passed five active years in the colony of the Cape of Good Hope. His characteristic preface to the amusing and instructive sketches of Cape Life is as follows:—

“I cannot but think, that, in the present rage for promoting emigration, too much attention is paid to new and untried countries whose resources are as yet doubtful and undeveloped, to the detriment of the old established colonies, whose constant cry is for ‘labour, labour, labour.’ Amongst the least popular of our old colonies is the Cape of Good Hope. Yet I think, that most, if not all, the objections usually raised against it are erroneous; while many of its undoubted advantages are overlooked. It is my desire, if possible, to remove some of the prejudices entertained against a land where I spent five happy years of my life. My intention is simply to give a few travelling sketches, and to portray some of the characteristic features of the country and its inhabitants.”

Cape Wine enjoys a very unenviable notoriety in England. Order a glass of sherry at a fourth-rate tavern: taste it—it is very bad—you turn up your nose and cry “Cape!” Mr. Lazarus, a Hebrew dealer in wine and money, “does a little bill” for you, and sends you home as part payment a few dozen of “excellent Madeira.” Are you rash enough to taste it? If so, as soon as you have recovered from the sputtering caused by its fearful acidity, you mutter a phrase never mentioned to ears polite, and say again—“Cape!” In fact, whenever you drink any vile compound, under the name of wine, to which you are at a loss to ascribe a native land, you cry—“Cape!”

The old adage of “give a dog a bad name and hang him,” is fully exemplified here. Still it must be admitted that the dog must first have earned his bad name. So it is with Cape Wine. It was very bad, and a great part of it is so still; while decidedly the worst of it is sent to England. I have often endeavoured to persuade the wine farmers that this is bad policy on their part; but they will not be convinced. They say that Cape Wine has a bad name in the market; that it is bought only as “Cape Wine,” without any distinction of vintage or class; and that the worst of it brings them as good a price as the best. And yet there is a vast difference in the various qualities; and even the best of them are still susceptible of wonderful improvement.

There is a similarity between the Cape and the Madeira grape. Both are cultivated very much in the same manner, but the grand point of difference between the two is the time of gathering the grapes. In Madeira they are not gathered till so ripe that many begin to fall, and many are withered from over ripeness; these are of course rejected. By this means a smaller amount of wine is obtained from a vineyard than would have been produced had the grapes been gathered earlier: but the quality of the wine is improved beyond conception. Every grape is full, ripe, and luscious, and the wine partakes of its quality. Nothing can prove more clearly the necessity of the grape being fully, and rather over ripe, than the difference of the wine produced on the north side of the Island of Madeira, where this perfection of the grape can scarcely be attained, and that grown on the south side: the latter is Nectar; the former Cape; or little better.

Now at the Cape the object of the farmer is always to get the greatest quantity of wine from his vineyard; and consequently he gathers his grapes when they are barely ripe, and none have fallen or withered; whereby he fills his storehouses with wine full of acidity and of that vile twang which all who have tasted shudder to recal.

Some of the wine-growers in the colony have lately pursued a different plan, and with vast success. This has been chiefly among the English colonists; for a Dutch boor at the Cape is a very intractable animal, and not easily induced to swerve from old systems, be they ever so bad. Probably, the principal reason why the colony produced from the very first such bad wines, was its having been colonised by Dutchmen, who could have had no experience at home in wine-growing.

Who knows what might have been the case had a colony from the plains of Champagne or Bordeaux first settled there? Apropos of 590this, I may mention that a fellow passenger of mine was a Frenchman from Champagne. At the Cape he entered into partnership with a young Englishman (also a fellow passenger), and agreed to take a wine farm. The Englishman was to supply capital—the Frenchman knowledge. Monsieur had determined to make “Cape Champagne;” and remarkably well he succeeded. Often at public and even at private dinners, when swallowing something dignified with the name of that right-royal wine, have I sighed to think how far more palatable would be a bottle of Monsieur L——’s vintage.

It perhaps requires a greater outlay of capital to be a successful wine-grower than almost anything else in the colony. There are, in addition to the purchase of land and vines, the expenses of storehouses, casks, and, above all, that most difficult commodity to attain—labour. So great is the want of the latter, and so uncertain the supply of even that which is attainable, that he is a bold man who ventures on wine-farming at the Cape.

The wine-growers are generally wealthy men, for, in spite of all obstacles, their profits are very large. Few people who even touch at the Cape fail to visit the Constantia wine farms, producing the delicious sweet wine of that name. It is grown on a mountain named after the wife of one of the former Governors of the Cape—whether in compliment to the lady’s sweetness of disposition, or her love for the wine then produced, I know not. Three farms monopolise this mountain. Even half a mile from them, the wine produced is of a very inferior flavour. They live in excellent style, these Constantia wine-growers. When first I visited one of them, a carriage-and-four and two buggies, conveying a party of Indian visitors, had just drawn up at the door. A déjeûner was spread in a long, handsome, and elegantly-furnished apartment, for the entertainment of any one who might chance to come and visit the farm. Two or three superintendents were ready to show the “lions” of the place to visitors, and to give them samples of the wine to taste. There are many varieties of it. And, oh, how seductive that same Constantia is! Who can resist it in all its delicious varieties?

I recollect that as I rode towards the farm I passed a toll-gate, and looking, I suppose, extremely like a “griffin” (for I had only been a week in the colony), the “pikeman” observed, as he took my twopence, and handed me the ticket, “Hopes you’ll be able to read it as you comes back, Sir!”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“No offence, Sir,” said the man with a grin; “only I’ve seed a many as couldn’t—that’s all.”

The three Constantia wine-growers are Dutchmen; and so, in fact, are nearly all the wine farmers throughout the colony. Englishmen who go out there generally take to trade or sheep-farming; and they are right,—for it requires far less experience, less capital, and less labour, to follow almost any calling at the Cape than that of a wine-grower. I think, however, that a Company might be profitably established here or in the colony, for cultivating the vine there and importing its produce to Europe. For this purpose, they should send out labourers and superintendents, carefully selected from the wine districts of France and Germany; and take care that the Madeira plan of gathering the grapes be adopted. They should agitate, too, for a reduction of the duty on the wine: at present it is far too high. Perhaps the profits would not at first be great, for there is a serious obstacle to be overcome,—a bad name in the market; but eventually I believe that the speculation would be a lucrative one, and that it would in time remove the unfortunate stigma now affixed to Cape wine.

In these days of railroad travelling, when twenty miles an hour would be considered slow enough to justify a letter of complaint from “Viator” to the editor of the Times, it may rather astonish my readers to learn that twenty miles is considered a fair day’s journey at the Cape. Yet so it is.

Unless you amble on horseback, which only men and young men can undertake, the sole and universal method of travelling is by an ox-wagon. Just go and see the wagon exhibited by Cumming in his South-African Exhibition, at Hyde Park corner! Imagine such a machine, with twelve or fourteen oxen attached to it by a long rope of plaited hide (called a treck-tow) attached to the pole, and to which are fastened the yokes of the oxen. Then fancy a little Hottentot lad, very much like one of the Bushmen lately exhibited in London (but, perhaps, hardly so handsome,) leading the two front oxen by a strip of hide fastened to their horns (called a reim), and a full-grown Hottentot seated on the driving-seat, in the front of the wagon, with an enormous whip in his hands formed of a long bamboo handle and a lash of plaited thongs, with which he can, from his seat, reach the leaders of his team; and you have the “travelling carriage” of South Africa complete before your eyes.

The same team (or “span” in South-African phraseology) of oxen take you the whole journey, whether it be twenty or two hundred miles; and as they have no other food on the way, nor indeed at any other time, than the grass and water on the roadside, you may imagine that twenty or twenty-five miles a day is quite work enough for them. The journey is, however, by no means so tedious or uninteresting an affair as might be supposed. It is like so many days of pic-nic-ing, with new scenery each day, and in a glorious climate. The wagon is of course well furnished with tea, sugar, coffee, wine, flour, eggs, fresh and preserved meat, vegetables, and in fact all that refreshes and cheers the inward man: 591for, be it recollected, that there are no inns, or at least the very few there are are scattered at such great distances apart over the country that no wagon traveller thinks of visiting them. The wagon in fact becomes your home and your store-house as well as your travelling carriage. A long stretcher is slung in it, on which is placed your bed, which serves for a lounging couch by day. Some people travel with a tent, but this is unnecessary when the party does not exceed two or three, besides the Hottentots, who sleep under the wagon, or under a bush or anywhere else on the ground, as soundly as their masters in their beds.

Travellers generally take their guns with them, as they may chance to get a little sport on the road. At six in the morning we will suppose the carriage to start; at about ten you will “outspan”—that is, take out the oxen and let them feed, and prepare for breakfast. Your Hottentots soon collect fuel, the wagon is drawn up close by a mimosa or some other bush, a fire is lighted, the kettle set to boil, the coffee prepared, the steaks cooked in a frying-pan, and perhaps some hot cakes made of meal baked for you; and with a beautiful country round you, and a magnificent sky above you, if you cannot make a good breakfast, and feel a light heart, I fear that you must be terribly “used up.”

Then comes a stroll through the bush with your double-barrel on your shoulder, in search of a partridge or a Guinea fowl, or a stray antelope; and back to the wagon, now ready for another start.

Forward, again, till dinner-time, when the same process is gone through. After dinner, perhaps you will go forward another four or five miles, and then “outspan” for the night.

The nights of the Cape climate are glorious! I can scarcely imagine anything more beautiful. The sky of that deep, dark blue, which we never see in northern climates; the moon shining as she only can in such a sky, the stars so bright and distinct, with the beautiful southern cross in all its brilliancy, among them; the perfect stillness of everything around; the lofty and rugged mountains where the foot of man has never trodden; the thick dark bush, penetrable only by the wild beast or the savage; the broad plain covered with Aloes, Cape Heaths, Wild Stocks, and the ten thousand variegated shrubs which make a carpet beneath your feet as beautiful as the canopy of heaven above your head; and that little spot worthy the pencil of Salvator Rosa—the dark foliage of the bush lighted up by your fire, and around it the dusky forms of your Hottentots stretched at their ease, and enjoying, as none but a half savage knows how thoroughly to enjoy, the requisite delight of the “Dolce far niente.”

No doubt railroads are glorious inventions. All honour, too, to Macadam, and to stagecoaches and post-chaises; all praise to the comforts and convenience of a good English Inn. But if you have a spark of native poetry in your composition, in spite of bad roads, slow travelling, rough fare, and a bed “al fresco,” you will enjoy one of these South African journeys more than any trip you ever took in Europe. You have no other travelling companions than the beauties of Nature’s works around you, fresh as from the hands of their Creator, and the thoughts and reflections high and holy, as such scenes and such companionship will not fail to call forth.