82 VOYAGE OF THE POTOMAC. [December, 
dreadful reaction. Such was too often the case, even with the 
pious and enhghtened founders of our own nation ; and acts origi- 
nating in a similar mistaken policy have stained the annals of the 
Cape colony. The true character of the natives in both coun- 
tries has been but little understood, and much misrepresented. 
Captain Benjamin Stout, a relative of our elder Adams, the 
second president of the United States, was shipwrecked in the 
year 1796, on the southeastern coast of Africa, near the river 
Infanta, in the country of Caffraria ; and he was perhaps the first 
writer who described these people according to their real charac- 
ter. In a letter to his illustrious relative, the.n chief magistrate 
of the nation, he speaks of them in the following terms : — 
" Cast, with sixty of my people, on the shores of Caffraria, 
after combating the horrors of a tempest, which, I believe, has 
but few parallels in the history of naval misfortune, I found in 
the natives a hospitality, and received from them a protection, 
which, on many of the shores that belong to the polished nations 
of Europe, I might have sought for in vain. These unfortvmate 
inhabitants of Caffraria, who have been so ofen and so wickedly 
denominated savages that delight and revel in human slaughter, I 
found possessed of all those compassionate feelings that alone 
give a lustre to and adorn humanity ;. living in a state of per- 
petual alarm from the persecuting and avaricious disposition of 
the colonists, and instructed by their fathers to consider a white 
man as a being who never hesitates to murder when plunder is in 
view, still a justifiable revenge yielded to the virtuous impulse of 
compassion, and our necessities were generously relieved, without 
even the prospect of recompense. When thrown, by the raging 
of the elements, on the sandy shores of their country, we were all 
unarmed, not having saved from the wreck a single article, either 
for our defence, clothing, or subsistence. In this situation we 
were completely at the mercy of the natives ; but, instead of re- 
membering and revenging the wrongs they and their predecessors 
had endured from the savage white, they made a fire to dry and 
refresh us ; they slaughtered a bullock, which they gave us for our 
subsistence ; they conducted us to a spring of the most limpid 
and wholesome water ; and, when we were enabled to travel, fur- 
nished us with guides through the deserts of their country. 
Such was the conduct of a people who have been described as 
