Captaincy of Rio s de Senna. 51 



or at least much less prevalent, when agriculture shall have 

 made a moderate advance. 



Article II. 

 On Population. 



The population of the Rios de Senna, is composed of three 

 classes of people: — 1st. The whites and free mulattoes who 

 pay taxes: 2d. Slaves of both sexes and all ages: 3d. F 

 negroes, and the cultivators of the land, called colonists. 

 Even amongst civilized nations, it is very difficult I" obtain a 

 correct enumeration of the population, even with the ass - 

 tance rendered by arts and taxation, — much more so then 

 must it be in a colony inhabited by different nations of 

 Caffres, who pay no regular contribution, nor keep any 

 register or memorandum of births or deaths: no table, 

 therefore, of the different classes of inhabitants can be made 

 up, except of those who are capitated, — such as the Portu- 

 guese, the Creoles and Asiatics, and some Mulattoes of the 

 country. The number of Slaves, male and female, can also 

 be estimated, because their proprietors keep accurate lists of 

 them ; but there is no possible way of ascertaining the 

 numbers of the fixed colonists who inhabit the country, and 

 constitute by far the greater part of the population. Th< 

 people are not capitated, and even do not pay their rents to 

 their landlords regularly ; both these means therefore fail us. 

 The principal -reasons why the holders of crown lands cannot 

 calculate the number of colonists by their rents, is because 

 they neither pay by the head, nor by the family. Each 

 village has a chief called Fume, or Tuacoava, who pays for 

 it an arbitrary number of measures of millet, or baskets of 

 cotton wool : and as the villages do not contain any certain 

 number of families, nor are always existing on the same 

 places, there is no certain method of obtaining a correct 

 statement of the number of their inhabitants, particularly as 

 the Caffres are used to a wandering life, and remove from one 

 part of the country to another, or even to the independent 

 states, with great facility. It is only known, that the divisions 

 of the greatest magnitude, contain from ten to fifteen thousand 

 colonists, or more, by arbitrary estimation , but this popula- 

 tion is generally very much diminished by the violence they 

 suffer from the holders of crown lands, by occasional years of 

 famine, and by the invasion of neighbouring independent 

 Caffres, who live by plunder, and have reduced the neighbour- 

 hood of Tette to a desert: having made these reflections, I 

 shall merely give tables of the population of the different 

 classes of whites, of capitated mulattoes, and of the slaves 

 in 1 806. 



