CAPETOWN 147 
where, on the first visit in March 1840, he tells his cousin, 
Mrs. Fleming : 
We went to Simon's Bay near to Cape Town, where the 
Naval dockyard and stores are ; as we lay there for upwards 
of a fortnight, many excursions were made to Cape Town, 
distant twenty-one miles, and as we always went on horse- 
back or in a gig, we had our full proportion of accidents ; 
little damage was however done, except to the horses and 
vehicles, for though some say that sailors are bad drivers, 
I am quite of the contrary opinion, for landsmen generally 
break their heads or limbs and the horse gets off, while you 
never almost hear of a sailor riding or driving without an 
accident ; that accident never affects him further than his 
pocket, an instance of sagacity in the members of the Naval 
profession too often overlooked, while their modesty is so 
great that they never own to meeting with an adventure 
of the sort, which would infer that they had the address to 
rescue themselves when their animals are killed and vehicles 
smashed. 
On the second visit he writes more fully to his mother 
(April 9, 1843) : 
The chffs of the Mountain are here the grandest for effect 
I ever saw, at least I always thought so ; perhaps from 
coming off the sea, — ^they quite frown down on the road 
though 3000 ft. overhead ; the worst of them is that they 
are essentially sterile, and there is a something in the look 
of the empty and silent water courses which the verdure 
and beauty of the slope below will not make up for. I 
quite felt that I should have heard the murmur of the many 
distant cataracts, which ought to have poured down each 
little gully. One of the first houses on the road is called 
Feldhausen and was of great interest to us, as there Sir John 
Herschel ^ lived and set up the telescope with which he 
catalogued the stars of the Southern Hemisphere. It is 
a very nice white house with a long avenue of dark Fir trees, 
which give it anything but an inviting appearance ; near 
^ Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) continued and expanded the astronomical 
work of his father, Sir William. From the beginning of 1834 he spent four 
years at the Cape mapping the southerji heavens as he had the northern. 
