APPENDIX. + }91 
-beyond the present Cape district, and the interval populated 
by aggravated, hostile, and unknown tribes, 
The Caffers were accidentally discovered by a ‘party of 
Boors on a hunting expedition in 1684, and four years later, 
the inhabitants of Natal were visited by the celebrated Cap- 
tain Woodes Rogers, whose name is immortally blended 
with that delightful and dangerously seductive, half-fact, 
and. half-romantie tale which “ hath made many sailors,” 
fe The History of Robinson Crusoe,” whose prototype, 
Alexander Selkirk, Rogers had rescued at the Island of 
Juan Fernandez from an unknown grave, and a solitude, 
of which the genius of Defoe has,almost made an envied 
-Paradise. Who amongst us, calling back the recollections 
of our boyish days, cannot remember wishing to be the hero, 
or eyen the humble Friday of that exquisite story ? 
In 1719, Captain Gerbrantz Van der Shelling is said, 
upon the authority of the generally accurate Kolben, to 
have reached the Cape from Delagoa Bay, where he had 
lost his ship; and in 1727 a Lieutenant Monas is recorded 
to have visited Natal from the last-named settlement. | 
Lieutenant Patterson, the friend of the discoverer of the 
Orange River, Colonel Gordon, in 1779, made the Colonists 
acquainted with the country occupied by the advanced posts 
of the Caffers, then rapidly encroaching on the Hottentot 
nations, who, pressed upon from the east by those invaders, 
and on the west by the Whites, was destined soon after to 
relinquish their existence as an independent community. 
In 1783, a few sailors from the memorable wreck of the 
East India vessel, the “‘ Grosvenor,” effected their escape 
from the Omsemceeaba rivers, above one thousand miles by 
land from Cape Town, and in consequence of their.repre- 
sentations, the sources of the Kei River were explored 
