248 TRAVELS IN 
and departure, and it ended with " Look for letters (in such 
" or such direction) from this stone/' Two or three stones of 
this kind are built into the castle wall, and are still legible. 
The Dutch used to bury, on a certain spot on Robben Island, 
a register of the state of tlieir vessels and caro;oes, out- 
ward bound, which the next ship, in coming home, took 
up and carried to Holland for the information of the Direc- 
tors. 
In this manner the English, the Dutch, and the Portugueze 
continued, for more than a century, to refresh at the Cape, 
without any design, on the part of the two former, of appro- 
priating the soil ; until the year 1620, when Andrew Shillinge 
and Humphrey Fitzherbert, two commanders of two fleets of 
English ships bound for Surat and Bantam, took a formal pos- 
session of the soil for, and in the name of, King James of 
Great Britain, because they discovered that the Dutch in- 
tended to establish a colony there the following year ; and 
" because they thought it better that the Dutch, or any other 
nation whatsoever, should be his Majesty's subjects in this 
" place, than that his subjects should be subject to them 
or anv other." It was not, however, until a period of more 
than thirty years had expired after this event, that the repre- 
sentations of Van Riebek, stating the richness of the soil, 
the mildness of the climate, the advantage it would give to 
the Dutch, as a colony, over other nations, whose ships would 
all be obliged to touch there, and, above all, the barrier it 
Av'ould afford to their Indian dominions, prevailed on the Di- 
rectors of the Dutch East India Company to form a regular 
establishment at the Cape. 
