JDiscovery In the African Continent. 201 



of foliage quite flat, and impervious both to light and to rain ; 

 the top of a single tree in the dense mass of other kinds ap- 

 pearing from the neighbouring heights like a fine grass plot, 

 and when several are together like fine lawns. One spec'i ■ 

 men has been particularly noticed by Messrs. Cowie and 

 Green as shading a circumference 20 yards in diameter, the 

 leaves were 11 inches long and \l broad, and deeply ser- 

 rated. 



The inner range of country is much more free of wood, 

 and consists of large plains, but so swampy as to be travelled 

 over in a direct line with much trouble. Game is abundant, 

 and, since the spoil of the flocks of the inhabitants by their 

 conquerors, has mainly supplied them with food, and enabled 

 them to collect fresh herds from their westerly neighbours by 

 the sale of antelope skins, especially those of the Blue Buck, 

 the Antelope Pygmea, a favorite and costly ornament used for 

 the head-dress of the Caffre Belles. Laws of great severity 

 have, therefore, been enacted and scrupulously administered to 

 protect this now important branch of trade and the various chiefs 

 have respectively assumed a landed proprietorship over several 

 forest districts, which they either hunt themselves, or let out 

 at higli prices for determinate periods to parties of native 

 adventurers, and thus creating a novel and lucrative source of 

 wealth, to repair their previous and ruinous losses. 



The coast from the Omzimvooboo or St. John's River, to the 

 Omtavoomo, is one continued bed of elevated rocks, without 

 one patch of sand. Oysters are most abundant along this 

 whole line, and of the most delicious kind. Most of the 

 rivers and rivulets with which the country is almost incessant ly 

 intersected, precipitate themselves over these rocky ledges into 

 the sea in numerous and beautiful cataracts, more than one of 

 which are said to have a fall of full three hundred feet. 



It was on this iron-bound and inhospitable shore that the 

 Grosvenor East Indiaman's wreck occurred in the year 1782. 

 This catastrophe took place about seven miles westward of the 

 Omzimcaaba river, orinlat. 31. 10. and Ion. 29. 50., where 

 eighty-six pigs of iron wedged in the rocks, five large guns, 

 a quantity of iron ballast piled up, which the tradition of the 

 natives represents as having been the forge of the blacksmith 

 of the vessel, who chose to remain among them rather than 

 brave the dangers of an exploratory journey into the interior 

 in search of a rescue, and who died at a very late period, — 

 attest this place as the awful scene of one of the most destruc- 

 tive and melancholy shipwrecks with which we are acquainted. 

 It has also been supposed, from the immense quantity of drift 

 wreck in which cocoa-nuts are frequently found, and which 

 accumulate on the rocky shore in an extraordinary manner, that 



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