392 TRAVELS IN 
taneous and free hand of nature. The knolls are covered with 
thick grass, which, for want of cattle to eat it off, is suffered to 
rot upon the ground, or is partially burnt off towards the end 
of summer to make room for the young blades to shoot up with 
the earliest rains of winter. It is greatly to be lamented that 
so fine a country should be suffered to remain in total ne- 
glect. A few indolent boors grasp the whole district, which, 
when in possession of the rightful owners, the Kaffers and the 
Hottentots, some thirty years ago, maintained many thousand 
families by the numbers of their cattle it was found capable 
of supporting. The small game, which here are plentiful, gra- 
mineous roots, the bulbs of the iris, of the wild garlick, and of 
the Cyanella, the filaments and anthers of whose stamens bear 
a remarkable resemblance to the fingers and nails of the hu- 
man hand, together with the seeds of the Strelitzia Reginae, 
and a variety of wild berries, were the chief articles of sub- 
sistence of the Hottentot tribes, and milk was the principal 
food of the Kaffers. 
A few days before our arrival at Algoa Bay, General Van- 
^eleur had subdued the rebellious boors in the manner I have 
already described in the beginning of this chapter, and had 
sent the ringleaders on board his Majesty's ship the Rattle- 
snake, to be conveyed to the Cape, to take their trial there by 
their own laws, before their own court of justice. Desirable 
as it might have been to punish the leaders upon the spot by 
martial law, as an example to a rebellious people, the General 
resolved to try once more what lenient measures might effect, 
concluding that, in the event of their own countrymen finding 
thetn guilty, the colonists must at least acknowledge the 
