96 
ON GIVING A GENERAL CHARACTER TO THE BOORS. 15, 16 March, 
inculcated and remembered ; it shows that savages, however low or 
debased may be their rank among the nations of the globe, are not 
insensible to an indignity. 
I could not learn for what crime this flogging had been inflicted ; 
nor do I pretend to interfere with the question, whether, from mere 
ignorance, or misled by the habits of a lawless life to which she had 
been born, she might not, though unwittingly, have committed some 
offence which, in a civilized or better instructed society, might justly 
be visited with punishment ; but I shall not hesitate to pronounce 
that man to be a cowardly unfeeling brute, who could treat with such 
merciless severity, one of that sex which it is a natural duty to 
protect from wrong, and shield from unkindness. 
Another of the Bushwomen complained that this baas had com- 
pelled her son to remain in his service against his wish ; nor could 
they by any means obtain leave for him to return with them to their 
kraal. Whatever might have been the stipulated wages for these 
people's services, they certainly carried away with them none of the 
rewards of their labor, unless a cap of scarlet cloth, and a pair of old 
cloth trowsers, are to be considered as such, or the sheep skins which 
the women wore over their shoulders and which were probably given 
to them by their kind-hearted baas. 
As the events of these travels are, without partiality or pre- 
judice, related as they occurred, and the observations recorded faith- 
fully in that light in which they appeared, I cannot allow the unfavor- 
able qualities of an individual, to be adopted as the general character 
of the Dutch colonists, any more than I would admit selected ex- 
amples of individual worthiness, to be taken as specimens of the 
whole colony. Of the latter, I know many : of the former, I wish 
that I knew none. 
From these natives I learned that the boors were apprized of my 
coming, and that the intelligence had reached them by means of 
some men of Kaabi's kraal, who had been to communicate with 
some of their friends residing on the borders. I was not surprised 
at these Bushmen having outstripped us in travelling, because 1 had 
witnessed sufficient proofs of their powers, to believe that they can 
