SOUTHERN AFRICA. 29 
sandy isthmus that connects it with the continent. Tlie arti- 
cle of fuel is so scarce that a small cart load of these plants 
brought to the town costs from five to seven dollars, or twenty 
to eight-and-twenty shillings. In most families a slave is kept 
expressly for collecting fire wood. He goes out in the morning, 
ascends the steep mountains of the peninsula, where waggons 
cannot approach, and returns at night with two small bundles 
of faggots, the produce of six or eight hours hard labor, 
swinging at the two ends of a bamboo carried across the 
shoulder. Some families have two and even three slaves, 
whose sole employment consists in climbing the mountains 
in search of fuel. The expence of a few faggots, whether 
thus collected or purchased by the load, for preparing victuals 
onl}'^, as the kitchen alone has any fire place, amounts, in a 
moderate family, to forty or fifty pounds a-year. 
The addition to the inhabitants of five thousand troops, and 
a large fleet stationed at the Cape, has increased the demand 
for fuel to such a degree, that serious apprehensions have been 
entertained of some deficiency shortly happening in the sup- 
ply of this necessary article. Under this idea the atten- 
tion of the English was particularly directed towards find- 
ing out a substitute for wood. The appearance of all the 
mountains in Southern Africa, being particularly favorable to 
the supposition that fossil coal might be found in the bowels 
of most of those inferior hills connected with, and interposed 
between, them and the sea. His Excellency the Earl of Ma-^ 
cartney, well knowing how valuable an acquisition such a dis- 
cover}'^ would prove to the colony, directed a search to be 
made. Boring rods were prepared, and men from the regi^ 
