South Africa, 1486-1913

Preface

The present volume brings to a close tbe first part of this history of the English People Overseas. It is my intention, or at least my hope, that at some future date I may be able to justify more completely the title of this work by adding, to these already issued, other volumes recording the growth of the English people in the United States — still the greatest of all English colonies — in Canada from 1867 to the present day, and in India since 1828, the period at which the second volume of this book concludes.

The fulfilment of so considerable an undertaking must inevitably occupy several years, but I cannot help thinking that it will be worth while to have a complete record in one easily accessible work of the activities of the English people in all parts of the world. (I may say in parenthesis, and in answer to certain critical inquiries from Scotland, that I have used the term English throughout, not from any desire to disparage our masters north of the Tweed, but as indicating English-speaking— a habit to which the best of Scots must plead guilty. The term English may in this sense be applied to the United States, whereas British would be entirely out of place ; nor am I conscious of having done any injustice to Scottish enterprise within the limits of the British Empire, or anywhere outside the title of this book. Indeed, it would be impossible for the most dishonest or prejudiced writer to ignore the part Scotland played, and still plays, in the found-

VI ing of the Empire, unless he undertook the wholesale suppression of names of pioneers, explorers, traders, missionaries, and governors from Dunedin to Nova Scotia. But one rather curious and significant fact emerges from these studies. Not one Scottish colonial enterprise succeeded before the Union with England in 1707 ; few indeed have failed since the Union.)

The six volumes now completed treat in the main of the founding of the English type of civilisation ; the remaining volumes will be engaged with the development of that type. They may on that account lose something of variety and picturesque incident, for they will be less concerned with pioneering and adventure than their predecessors ; but unless the fruits of the tree are held to be less important than the roots, the growth of the English people overseas will be not less worthy of study than their original establishment.

But in the meantime the completion of these chapters on South Africa provides the weary traveller, author and reader alike — if any readers have patiently toiled with me so far — with a convenient halting-place, a kind of half-way house, like the Cape itself in older days, where one may rest and refresh awhile before adventuring forth again. These first six volumes have given, however crudely, the history of the founding of every English-speaking colony or possession throughout the world, from Virginia and Newfoundland under Elizabeth to Rhodesia and Nyasa under Victoria. In a work of this length there must be errors of judgment, errors of fact, omissions, imperfections, and mistakes, authorities I have overlooked, documents I have not seen ; but in excuse for these shortcomings I would plead that where the activities of so many human beings had to be judged one human being is

PREFACE vii

certain to stumble from time to time, and that where so large a mass of material had to be sifted the book would never have been written at all had I waited until every document was available.

One may perhaps claim as a virtue, what at least one critic has imputed as a vice, that the book shows little party spirit and reflects neither Whig nor Tory doctrine ; and for another fault I remain obstinately unrepentant— the fact that while I have attempted to picture the social life of the people of every colony, and have given numerous and occasionally trivial details of their habits, houses, occupations and the cost of living, I have omitted mention of many unimportant governors and refused to cumber these pages with the quarrels of provincial Cabinets or the intrigues of provincial Premiers.

Against these omissions or mistakes I may perhaps claim that the wandering annals of the British Empire have been placed in proper perspective, that the brief and broken records of some forgotten failures in colonising have been rescued from the complete oblivion which was their natural fate, and that to the history of some successful colonies I have added new and not uninteresting details. It has been my reward for many weary hours wasted over incredibly stupid writers to have added some points to Nova Scotian history which Parkman overlooked, some items of Canadian settlement of which Kingsford was not aware, some materials to Australian annals which Rusden forgot, some relics of old New Zealand which were new to Pember Reeves, some settlements in the tropics which are not in Lucas, some incidents in South Africa which even the multitudinous Theal has failed to see ; and that I have discovered some overseas variants of the British constitution which might have interested May and

b

VOL. VI.

viii

Bagehot. The constitutional development of Pitcairn and other South Sea islands, the Anglo-Zulu senate of old Natal, the missionary parhament of Namaqualand may be trivial beside the greater institutions of Commonwealth and Dominions, but the smaller consequences of our political ideas nevertheless deserve a footnote in history. It is my hope, too, that the full comparative studies of the various constitutions of the Empire and the analyses I have given of the swing and play of opposing forces which have made them may also be of use.

I am far from suggesting that these points excuse the obvious imperfections of a work which has taken ten years to write, but I think they may be urged in mitigation of the heavy sentence which should be passed on any author who inflicts six substantial volumes on his fellow-men.

It is a graceful custom of the day to thank in a preface those who have rendered assistance to the author. I have preferred to discharge my gratitude in occasional footnotes ; but I may here properly acknowledge the chief debt of all, to one whose constant encouragement during a period of not always easy work has largely helped me to draw this labour to its present conclusion. I mean my wife.

A. Wyatt Tilby.

December 13, 1913.

Contents

Preface . v

BOOK XXIII

CHAP.

Chapter I A Land Of No Sojourning : 1486-1608

The fate or the fortune of nineteenth-century Britain led her to lay the foundations of three new nations in the southern hemisphere, as in an earlier age she had likewise Difference laid the foundations of two new English nations in between the west. But marked as was the contrast be- Africa and tween the two English nations in North America Austraiia. — the one a republic that repudiated its allegiance to the mother country after a war which spht the Empire, the other a loyal dominion that resisted every attempt to wean it from the old allegiance — the contrasts that distinguished Australia and New Zealand from South Africa, and coloured all their annals with the encompassment of divergent circumstance, were still more marked.

Against the superficial likenesses between South Africa and Australia— seasons the reverse of Europe, a dry sunny climate, a shortage of water and deserts that needed irrigation before cultivation — these essential differences stand out through all their history.

Australia and New Zealand were isolated and therefore exclusive, the path to nowhere, the very end of the world. Discovered and lost and discovered again before they were

VOL. VI. A colonised by white men, those who went there stayed there ; they seldom came back and they could not go forward, since to go forward was but to come back on the full circle of the globe. But the position of South Africa, on the other hand, made it for centuries a half-way house between east and west, north and south, between Europe and India, Britain and Australasia, a place to which men often went and seldom stayed, a place of coining and going but not of long sojourning. An Australian port was the world’s terminus ; a South African port was a hostel where men put in and rested awhile from the toils of an ocean voyage. The very essentials of the first European settlements in Australia were that they should be colonies from which exiled men could not return ; the very essentials of the first European settlements in South Africa were that they were not in fact settlements at all, but convenient stations on the long road to the Orient.

Even in its name the corner of South Africa that was first known to Europeans betrays the thought that upheld its The cape of discoverers. The Good Hope which attached to Good Hope, the chief cape of the country was not the hope of permanent settlement in a pleasant land, but of speedy passage beyond ; it was named for a purpose, and the name has clung long after the purpose has passed.

It was the great Portuguese mariner Bartholomew Diaz, when doggedly pursuing that search for an ocean route to its Dis- India which had engaged two previous generacovery, tions of his countrymen, who first of all Europeans reached at length in the year 1486 the extreme south-westerly point of the African continent. Thus far he had outdistanced all his predecessors in the long quest of West for East ; but the further progress of his frail vessel was now barred by the fierce winds which sweep across the lonely southern ocean. Diaz named the spot at which his hopes were foiled the Cape of Storms — Cabo dos Tormenios — and turned his vessel’s head again towards Europe ; but his master the King of Portugal, with instant realisation of the vast importance of the discovery, renamed it the Cape of Good Hope — Cabo de boa Esperanza. And by that title it has since been known.

A few years later the Cape was rounded by Vasco da Gama, India was discovered, and the new ocean road to the East was free. The good hope had been fulfilled ; but the And Cape of Good Hope was henceforth neglected by Ne?lectits discoverers, and none but its discoverers had ventured yet so far. The Portuguese engaged in strife and trade with the Indies ; great viceroys of that nation conquered and ruled in Asia, great apostles of the Christian faith spread their creed among its ahen peoples : but to South Africa, and particularly to the south-western extremity of Africa, they gave but little heed. The southern half of the dark continent was to them no more than an immovable obstacle on the route which all must pass, and on immovable obstacles men do not waste their energies when there are other worlds to conquer and convert.

For the first century that it was known to Europe the Cape of Good Hope had therefore no real history. Nominally it belonged to Portugal ; and since the Portuguese had as yet no rivals in Africa and Asia, they were undisturbed in their claim to its possession. But such attention as they could spare from India to their other oversea dominions was given, not to the Cape but to the moist warm regions of Mozambique and the fertile if unhealthy eastern shores of Africa.

Here in Sofala — the lowlands of the eastern coasts in the Arab tongue — and all along the shores of eastern Africa the Portuguese were active in the hundred years after Tiie their discovery of the new route to the Indies. fn^as^U6Se Often they did battle with the Arabs of Mombasa Africa, and Zanzibar, in a religious and commercial war against the old monopoly of Islam ; and while the Cape of Good Hope was neglected and indeed avoided by these crusading traders of the new Latin invasion of the East, outposts of the Portuguese Empire were established here and there along the Indian Ocean, fortresses were planned and built, fights were won and lost, governors' and soldiers came and went, and some at least among these warriors and rulers left their mark on Mozambique and other tropic lands beyond.

A brave if credulous folk, old legends and tradition encouraged or misled them all. One traveller heard and perhaps believed that Prester John, that mythical monarch of mediaeval wonder-story, held sway near by in Central Africa, his residence being reported ‘ far in the interior and to be reached only on the backs of camels ’ ; 1 others made expedition up the great Zambesi for the fabled mines of Ophir and the wondrous wealth of Sheba.2 These explorers failed in the first European hunt for African treasure ; but another traveller of the time, if he found no gold, brought back new legends for old, telling of the murder of a Jesuit father in the back lands of the continent, and how his body, clad in black and bound across a log of wood, came floating down the river, till the very beasts and birds, seeing it, had proved more kind than cruel men ; for they had stopped and brought the corpse ashore, loosing it from the beam on which it lay, and ever after reverencing and watching over the sainted remains of the holy martyr of God.

These and other like adventures, and a century of traffic and discovery in eastern Africa gave the Portuguese a hold on Mozambique and Zambesia from which no rivals of a later day could oust them ; 3 but the Cape of Good Hope itself was no

1 If this tradition had any basis of truth at all — which is very doubtful— it probably referred to the Kingdom of Abyssinia.

Many of the earlier legends of mediaeval Europe placed Prester -John in China, but the traditions varied from age to age.

2 For some notice of the Ophir tradition, see vol. iv. bk. xiii. eh. i.

Milton lends some countenance to the theory that Ophir w;>s in South-

East Africa, Paradise. Lost , xi. 399 : ‘ Sofala, thought Ophir.'

3 See chapter vi. of this book.

advantage to, and derived no advantage from, its discoverers. And only a few Portuguese names along the southern coasts — Cape Agulhas, Saldanha Bay, Cape Infanta, and Natal — have survived to show that the whole of southern Africa was once claimed by the Portuguese.

Even those few names were not of pleasant omen ; for Portuguese remembrance of the Cape, and the terrific storms which sweep around that austral headland, was Their full of evil. Shipwreck and disaster were all its |^lSg®^s story for the Latin traders to the East ; many a Africa, fair ship richly laden was cast ashore, its silk and spices lost, its sailors haply saved, but driven to grub for fish and roots along the untilled shores, often ‘ in want of arms, clothes, and money, and having no longer the semblance of human beings/ as one old writer tells ; always fearful of attack from natives or wild beasts, and in great dread of death from hunger. In one such catastrophe the chronicler states simply that the captain who had lost his vessel was ‘ suffering in his brain from constant watching/ in another a viceroy and more than fifty of his people were slain in a terrible fight at Table Bay ‘ by bestial negroes, the most brutal of all that coast/ And a third and more moving tragedy even than this wholesale massacre tells how a Portuguese lady who was cast ashore by shipwreck with her husband and two children was forced to strip herself before the natives. Half-dead with shame, the unhappy woman ‘ cast herself upon the ground, and covered herself with her hair, which was very long, while she made a pit in the sand in which she buried herself to the waist, and never rose from that spot ’ before she died. One of the children also died beside her, the other liv ed ; and the father now returning from a search for food, sat down by his dead lady ‘ with his face supported on one hand, not weeping or saying a single word, but sitting thus with his eyes fixed upon her, and taking no account of the child/ After a space he dug a grave in the sand for her and the little one ; and then the poor broken man disappeared into the thickets, and was never heard of more.1

Truly the Portuguese had good reason for their hatred of the Cape and Table Bay when such memories of evil haunted The First them. But later visitors of other nations were at visitors first no wiser. To Thomas Stevens, indeed, the 1579-91. first Englishman who rounded South Africa on his way to India in the year 1579, the Cape of Good Hope was nothing more than a place that was £ famous and feared of all men.' Cape Agulhas, further east, was even more terrible and dangerous, being ‘ a land full of tigers, and people that are savage and killers of all strangers/ Such was the earliest brief comment on South Africa by an Englishman, and it did but echo the opinion of the Portuguese in whose company he sailed ; the report of Francis Drake, who passed the Cape in the opposite direction a few months after Stevens in June 1580 on his homeward voyage round the world, was more favourable and more accurate. He declared the great headland to be £ a most stately thing, and the fairest cape we saw in the whole circumference of the earth ' ; the belief, too, that it was always encompassed with intolerable storms was stated to be false.

Neither Drake nor Stevens set foot on South African soil ; and a dozen years more had passed before an English vessel put in at the Cape for water and provisions. But on 1st August 1591 the eastward-bound expedition under the two captains Raymond and Lancaster cast anchor in Saldanha Bay, and a party from the vessels went ashore. They reported the bay to be commodious, and although the natives were £ black savages very brutish,' they were not unfriendly ; but after a stay of about a month, during which many antelopes £ and other great beasts unknowen ’ were observed in the interior, the travellers departed for the Indies.

1 For these early days of the Portuguese in South Africa, see Theal's Record. x oj South-Eaxtern A frica ; and the delightful book by my friend Ian D. Colvin, The Cape of Adventure.

Others came and went in following years. From time to time, and more often every season, a vessel would put in at Table Bay to water or repair ; but those who And others now began to use the place were mostly new com- frequent petitors of Portugal, not the Portuguese them- the Cape' selves. And the fact that upstart rivals whom the proud monopolists of Lisbon would have branded as heretics and pirates frequented Table Bay hardly made the place more welcome to the descendants of Diaz and Da Gama.

The traders of England and Holland, ambitious of a share in the profitable traffic with the Indies, embarked on mercantile adventures to the Orient as the sixteenth century neared its close ; and in course of time it was these men who occupied the country which the Portuguese had discovered and neglected, and it was these men who founded there a European settlement that was destined to spread far into the remote interior of the continent, and outdistance the decaying Empire of the Latins on the fever-haunted coasts of Mozambique.

But for many years neither Dutch nor English had any more idea of colonising South Africa than the Portuguese themselves. It was the fate of the whole continent They hold to be misjudged alike by its discoverers and by Africa of those later travellers who sailed around its long little value, low shores. They judged, as men will judge of men and things, merely by the outward view ; and Africa shares with Australia the concealment of its beauties and resources from the superficial eye of the casual wayfarer.1 It had no such attraction of profit and adventure as was promised by the Indies and the isles of the Eastern Seas. Its climate was maligned, judged only by the fevers of Sofala and Mozambique. Its people were condemned, and not without good cause, as cruel and barbarous. Its riches were unknown and unsuspected ; and after the failure of the Latins to locate the

1 For the low esteem in which Australia was held, see vol. v. bk. xvii. chs. i. and ii.

wealth of Ophir, the gold and gems which lay hidden beneath the soil of Africa were overlooked for nearly four centuries by the eager seekers after wealth elsewhere.

And in those beautiful isles of the Indian Ocean, which Nature has blessed with a soil of superlative fertility, the nations of Europe found for long a greater attraction than was offered by the more sombre shores of South Africa. The conquest of Madagascar was the subject of many an ambitious project before there was any thought of founding a colony at Cape Town.1 Mauritius was occupied by the Dutch fifty years before they established themselves at Table Bay. And the wealth of Java and Sumatra 2 was sought for and fought for a century and more before it was realised that the vast territories south of the Zambesi could support anything more than a few debased and ignorant savages.

The splendour of the tropics outshone the less gorgeous lands of the temperate South, as a woman of seductive beauty will divert the errant attentions of man from more estimable but plainer sisters ; but only for awhile. The one attracted many rivals from many nations, the other found but one faithful claimant in two centuries ; yet while the one inspired the passion for possession, and took due toll of life and health from those who yielded to the warm embrace, the other gave a permanent home, that was not abandoned by the children of its founders.

Chapter II Abandoned Claim And Rival Settlement : 1608-1758

As a port of call on the road to India, Table Bay had permanent advantages and occasional dangers ; but while the Eastern Seas remained a monopoly of Portugal, it was unlikely

1 For Madagascar and Mauritius, see vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. iv.

2 Vol. iv. bk. xv. cb. ii. for the Malay Archipelago.

to be muck used. For the Portuguese maintained their stations further east, at Mozambique and Sofala ; and it was not until other European nations began to compete with and surpass the Latins in the outer world that the Cape of Good Hope became a place of regular resort.

But when Dutch and English merchantmen began to fight the Portuguese and each other for the profitable trade in oriental fabrics and spices, they soon found the A Port f advantage of a permanent port of call ; and what- call at ever the risk of storm and sudden shipwreck at Tal3le Bay' certain seasons of the year in Table Bay,1 it had advantages that easily offset those dangers. It lay almost exactly half-way on the long ocean road to and from the Indies. Its noble headland stood out boldly, so that none could miss it, and it had a continual supply of fresh running water that incoming vessels could store against the remainder of the voyage.2 For these excellent reasons Table Bay became the port of call for English and Dutch traders in the early sixteenth century — a place where skippers outward bound for Java and Japan could leave letters reporting their progress thus far on the voyage for returning vessels to carry back to Amsterdam or London ; a place where men might rest awhile after long tedious weeks in tropic waters, and exchange the views and gossip of the high seas with other comers from afar. In this wise Table Bay became a centre of recourse, and in due time — since skippers and sailors are convivial souls — achieved a reputation as a tavern of the Eastern Seas, where high carousal was often held by mariners of mark from broad Thames and broader Maas.

And there now grew up a traffic between these travellers and

1 It waa from May to September, wlien the north-west gales blow in full strength, that the ill-protected Table Bay was the terror of seamen, and the Cape deserved its name of the Cape of Storms. For the other half of the year it was safe.

2 It was the good fresh water of Table Bay that made it a place of more resort for seamen than Saldanha, which was less well pi-ovided.

the barbarous natives of the Cape, who supplied the merchantmen with cattle and such green stuffs as the country could produce, in exchange for ‘ iron hoopes, which is the best money which they doe esteeme,’ 1 and such odd trifles of the ships. Fresh meat and vegetables were the best restoratives to health for the scurvy-stricken crews of the old East Indiamen ; 2 but care was needed in the conduct of this early commerce. Neither Dutch nor English had forgotten the massacre of the Portuguese by the natives a century before ; and the treacherous character of the ‘ Kafirs or Atheists, the accursed progeny of Cham/ as an English traveller of the early sixteenth century called them in disgust,3 made caution and the presence if not actually the use of force a necessary prudence in such barterings.

For some years these two European nations used the Cape and Table Bay in common, with no thought of founding colonies or advancing any claim to their exclusive possession. But rivalry between the two grew keen. Englishman and Hollander pressed hard on each other’s heels in the East, intrigued and denounced the other’s intrigues in the Courts of Asia, and waged a merchants’ war of prices in the West. On the high seas hard words were answered with harder blows ; bloody fights were waged in the East Indies, and presently the peaceful meeting-ground half-way between Europe and India became an object of desire.

What, if any, views of settlement and conquest in South Africa passed through the brains of Dutch skippers to the Indies are unrecorded or lost in old Dutch archives ; but their

1 John Jourdain. His Journal has been printed by the Hakluyt Society.

2 Many of the vessels of these days arrived in port after a long voyage with half their crews dead or hopelessly diseased with scurvy, unable to unfurl the sails, or even to bring the ship into harbour. I have given some instances of the ravages of scurvy in the footnote on vol. ii. p. 25.

0 Sir Thomas Herbert, Some Yeares Travels into Divers Parts of Asia and Afriqut (1638). His remark that most of the Kafir men were said to be semi-eunuchs shows him a poor observer.

rivals were less reticent. In the year 1608 the English captain, John Jourdain, chancing to be detained awhile at Saldanha Bay, and ‘ having little business there/ he wrote, An English ‘ for recreation myself with other of the mer- p^j^ed chants would take our walk to the top of the hill 1608. called the Table/ From that broad eminence, which commands a wide view of the neighbouring country, ambition spoke to Jourdain ; his constructive faculties as a European revolted at the waste uncultivated land, and he meditated the founding of a plantation that ‘ would bear anything that should be sown or planted, as for all kind of grain, wheat, barley, besides all kind of fruit, as oranges, lemons, limes, and grapes. If this country were inhabited by a civil nation, having a castle or fort for defence against the outrage of heathenish people and to withstand any foreign force, in short time/ predicted the sailor, £ it might be brought to some civility, and within few years able of itself to furnish all ships refreshing/ while he did not despair that in due course even the barbarous natives might ‘ be brought to know God, and understand our language.’

Such was Jourdain’s vision of the future ; but like most prophets, he was not to see his hopes fulfilled. A few years later the gallant captain met his end in a sea-fight with the Dutch in East Indian waters ; and by that time the one unworthy attempt to carry out his views had failed as it deserved.

In the year 1614, perhaps with Jourdain’s scheme in mind, and with some idea of advantaging their growing trade, the directors of the English East India Company The First determined to plant a station at the Cape. They settlement had already some experience of such matters in the 1614.

East ; but the materials they chose for this South African enterprise were as evil as their methods were unhappy.

It happened that ten men had been condemned to death at the Old Bailey sessions in London for certain serious crimes ;

and the East India Company entreated that these men should be respited of their sentence, and banished to the Cape, to a convict found an English colony at Table Bay. The

Colony. application was received with favour, being

looked upon as ‘ a very charitable deed, and a means to bring the criminals to God by giving them time for repentance, to crave pardon for their sins 5 ; the request was granted, the wretched men were released from the hangman’s rope, and presently sent forth upon their travels.

The scheme was foredoomed to failure. Two of the involuntary colonists were not landed at the Cape at all, but by its dismal accident or favour were taken on to India. The