of the Cape of Good Hope. 3 1 1 



into fibres, are a substitute for thread. When I wanted 

 ink, equal quantities of brown sugar and soot, moistened 

 with a Httle water, were brought to me ; and soot was sub- 

 stituted tor a water. 



To add to the uncieanliness of their huts, the folds or 

 ■kraah in which their eattle remain at nights are immedi- 

 ately fronting the door, and, except in the Sneuwherg, 

 where the total want of wood obliges lliem to burn dung 

 ■cut out like peat, these kraals are never on any occasion 

 -cleaned out ; so that in old established places they form 

 mounds from ten to twenty feet high. The lambing season 

 commences Ijefore the rains finish; and it sometimes hap- 

 pens that half a dozen or m.ore of these little creatures, that 

 have be(;n lambed over night, are found smothered in the 

 wet dung. The same thing happens to the young calves ; 

 yet so indolent and helpless is the boor, that rather than 

 yoke his team to his waggon and go to a little distance for 

 wood to build a shed, he sees his stock destroyed from day 

 to day and from year to year, without applying the remedy 

 which common sense so clearly points out, and which re- 

 quires neither much expense nor great exertions to accom- 

 plish. 



If the Arcadian shepherds, who were certainly not so 

 rich, were as uncomfortable in their cottages as the Cape 

 boors, their poets nuist have been woefully led astray by 

 the muse. But Peo;a=us was always fond of playing his 

 gambols in the flowery regions of fancy. Without a fiction, 

 the people of the Cape consider Graaf Keynet as the Arcadia 

 oi the colony. 



Few of the distant boors have more than one slave, and 

 many none ; but the number of Hottentots amounts, on an 

 average, in Graaf Revnet, to thirteen to each family. The 

 inhunjanity with which they treat this nation I have already 

 had occasion to notice *. The boor has few^ good traits in 



his 



* In the second chapter of this work I have given an account of fifteen 

 innocent Hottentots that were intuimanlv butchered by the boors. A 

 pamphlet has just been put into my hands wJiich was pubhshcd in tlie 

 Cape by baron ck P., private secretary to The governor, and in which 

 the 5anic fact is noticed in the followinj^ v.'ords.: — " A Hottentot captain, 

 of the name of Kouwinnoub, beating the distinguishing mark of his rank 

 (a stick, on liie brass head of which were engraven the arms of h'S nia- 

 jtsty), and furni&hcd moreover with a passport signed by one of the 

 members of government, went, accompanied by fifteen Hotteniois, to pro- 

 cure a few leaves of tobacco in the pltins of S^neuu-bcrj^. The !)oois, re- 

 collecting, peihaps, that three years as£0 these faithful soldiers had served 

 ihe goverftmtnt by keeping them in order, thought it a favourable oj)por- 

 U 4 tunity 



