14 TRAVELS IN 
tills remark ; for although the Dutch themfelves have not fur- 
nillied much intelligence refpefting the fouthern promontory of 
Africa, foreigners were feldom refufed permiflion to vifit the 
interior parts of the fettlement. French, Swedes, and Englifh 
have publiftied accounts, and fome of them voluminous, of this 
colony ; yet, at the capture, fmgular as It may appear, we 
were entirely ignorant of all the points that were moft material 
to be known. There was not a furvey of one of the bays that 
could be depended on, except one of Table Bay, made by order 
of governor Van de Graafj not a fmgle map that took in one 
tenth part of the colony. Neither the direction nor the diftance 
of Graaf Reynet were known to any of the inhabitants. It was 
called a month's journey, or fo many hundred hours, with an 
ox waggon ; but whether it was five hundred or a thoufand 
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. He obferved that he 
once had received a difpatch from thence in fixteen days, but 
that the jeurney had been done in thirteen. Before we left 
the Cape, the Englifh officers and Engliffi dragoons, performed 
the journey in feven days, and fometimes in fix j feldom ufing 
more than two horfes upon the road. It was pretended that 
the three country diftridts could raife a militia of cavalry to 
the amount of from fifteen to twenty thoufand men ; whereas 
the fad is, there are little more than twenty thoufand white 
inhabitants, men, women, and children, in the whole fettle- 
ment. The country was fuppofed to be fo produdive of 
grain, that a Cargo of wheat was fent to England out of the 
quantity found in ftore at the capture j the following year there 
was 
