2 TRAVELS IN 
depeiided on, except one of Table Bay, made by arder of 
governor Van de Graaf ; not a single map that took in one 
tenth part of the colony. Neither the direction nor the distance 
of Graaf Reynet were known to any of the inhabitants. It 
w^as called a month's journey, or so many hundred hours, with 
an ox waggon ; but Avhether it was five hundred or a thousand 
miles was uncertain. That enlightened officer Sir James Craig 
roughly calculated it at eight hundred miles ; which is three 
hundred miles more than it actually is. lie observed that he 
once had received a dispatch from thence in sixteen days, but 
that the journey had been done in thirteen. Before we ceded 
the Cape,the English officers and English dragoons performed 
the journey in seven days, and sometimes in six; seldom 
using more than two horses upon the road. It was pretended 
that the three country districts could raise a militia of cavalry 
to the amount of from fifteen to twenty thousand men ; where- 
as the fact is, there are little more than twenty thousand white 
inhabitants, men, women, and children, in the whole settle- 
ment. The country was supposed to be so productive of 
grain, that a cargo of wheat was sent to England out of the 
quantity found in store at the capture ; the following year there 
was a famine ; and a very serious scarcity twice occurred du- 
ring the short period we held possession of it» 
To collect more accurate information, therefore, concerning 
the distant parts of the Colony, and the nations bordering 
upon it, was a principal object which his lordship had in view 
in s'^nding his own secretary into the interior almost imme- 
diately after his arrival at the Cape ; but this was not the 
only motive. The ignorant boors of Graaf Reynet, instigated 
bsf 
