A CAPE CART JOURNEY. 19 



yellowish brown, and very ugly little creature, whose 

 bare scalp showed plainly between the curious kinks 

 of wool — each kink separate — that grew sparsely 

 upon it. Undoubtedly I think these Bushmen were 

 the aboriginal possessors of South Africa ; but the 

 Hottentots, Kaffirs, and Boers have driven them, as 

 a tribe, almost completely from the Colony, and the 

 Kalahari Desert may now be considered their true 

 abiding place. A few broken septs, or remnants, 

 still wander about the little known banks of the 

 Orange River and in Griqualand West. 



It has been the Boer custom to treat the Bush- 

 men as creatures utterly undeserving of human 

 sympathy, as wild beasts of the field, to be shot 

 down and butchered without compunction. The 

 Bushmen, in their turn, have undoubtedly retaliated 

 mercilessly upon their oppressors whenever they 

 obtained the opportunity. But I am inclined to 

 think that these poor barbarians never had a fair 

 chance of redemption in the old days. In more 

 modern times, under British rule, they have proved 

 themselves excellent servants after their kind — active, 

 faithful, excessively sharp witted, and possessed of 

 infinitely more fire and spirit than the Hottentots. 

 The Bushmen in the Old Colony are now harmless 

 enough. As hunters and trackers they are simply 

 invaluable, and as herds excellent, and they make 

 good and very light-weight "after-riders," or second 

 horsemen. Between 1750 and 1760 the " Bosjes- 

 mans " — as the Boers call them — so far from raising 

 their hands against every man, appear to have 

 frequented the Colony openly and boldly, and to 

 have begged and pilfered, much as did the Kaffirs 

 subsequently. But they never appear at that time 



