Letters from the Cape Part 1

Letters from the Cape.

by Lady Duff Gordon.

FOREWORD

IF Lady Duff Gordon's 'Letters from the Cape' are less familiar to the present generation of readers than those of the Lady Anne Barnard, the neglect is due in great part to the circ.u.mstances of their publication.

After appearing in a now-forgotten miscellany of Victorian travel, Galton's _Vacation Tourists_, third series (1864), where their simplicity and delicate unprofessional candour gave them a brief hour of public esteem, they were first issued separately as a supplement to Lady Duff Gordon's _Last Letters from Egypt_, occupying the latter portion of a volume to which the writer's daughter, Mrs. Ross, contributed a short but vivid memoir, which touched but lightly on her South African experiences; and they have never appeared, we believe, in any other form. Yet they are inferior in nothing but political interest to those of the auth.o.r.ess of 'Auld Robin Gray'. Indeed, in her intellectual equipment, her temperament, and her gift of style, Lady Duff Gordon was a far rarer creature than the jovial and managing Scotswoman who was the correspondent of Dundas. And in human sympathy-the quality that has kept Lady Anne Barnard's letters alive-Lady Duff Gordon shows a still wider range and a yet keener sensibility. Her letters are the fine flower of the English epistolary literature of the Cape. Few books of their cla.s.s have better deserved reprinting.

The daughter of John and Sarah Austin ran every risk of growing up a blue-stocking. Yet she escaped every danger of the kind-the proximity of Bentham, her childish friendships with Henry Reeve and the Mills, and the formidable presence of the learned friends of both her parents-by the force of a triumphant naturalness and humour which remained with her to the end of her life. Although her schooling was in Germany and her sympathy with German character was remarkable, her own personality was rather French in its grace and gaiety. It was characteristic of her, then, to defend as she did 'la vieille gaiete francaise' against Heine on his death-bed. But the truth is that her sympathies were nearly perfect.

She was one of those rare characters that see the best in every nationality without aping cosmopolitanism, simply because they are content everywhere to be human. Convention and prejudice vex them as little as pedantry can. Their clear eyes look out each morning on a fresh world, and their experiences are a perpetual school of sympathy and never the sad routine of disillusionment.

When Lady Duff Gordon came to the Cape in search of health in 1861, she brought with her, young though she was, a wealth of recollection and experience such as perhaps no other observer of South Africa has known.

She had been the friend of nearly every prominent man-of-letters from Rogers to Tennyson. She was intimate with half the intellectual world of England and Germany, and admired for her beauty and grace of character in the salons of Paris as much as in the drawing-rooms of London. And she had shown the quality of her womanly sympathy in the most famous of her literary friendships, that with Heinrich Heine, when she visited the poet and soothed him in his last sad days in Paris-an episode perhaps better known to present-day readers from Mr. Zangwill's story of _A Mattra.s.s Grave_ than in the moving narrative of Lady Duff Gordon herself, on which the story is based.

It was into the little world of Caledon and Simonstown and Worcester, drowsy, sun-steeped villages of the old colony-for Cape Town had little attraction for her and the climate proved unsuitable-that this rare and exquisite being descended. But the test of the true letter-writer, the letter-writer of genius, is the skill and ease with which he brings variety out of seeming monotony. The letters of Lady Duff Gordon answer this test. She had not been many days in the country before she had discovered (if she required to discover) the excellent principle: 'Avoid _engelsche hoogmoedigheid_ in dealing with the Dutch'; and by the time she reaches Caledon she is on the best of terms with her new friends.

'The postmaster, Heer Klein, and his old Pylades, Heer Ley, are great cronies of mine'-she writes-'stout old grey-beards, toddling down the hill together. I sometimes go and sit on the stoep with the two old bachelors and they take it as a great compliment; and Heer Klein gave me my letters all decked with flowers, and wished "vrolyke tydings, Mevrouw", most heartily.' She has a keen eye for the fine shades of national character, and the modifications that spring from differences of upbringing: the English farmer, 'educated in Belgium', the young Dutch doctor with English manners, the German basket-maker's wife in Cape Town.

A whole chapter might be written on her friendship with the Malays, whose hearts she won as completely as she afterwards did those of their Mohammedan brothers in Egypt. Mr. Ian Colvin has since opened up afresh the field she was here almost the first to survey. In another direction, in her remarks on the Eastern Province Jew of 1860, Lady Duff Gordon has given us some notes which are of distinct value for social history. The following pa.s.sage, for example, deserves to be quoted as a 'point de repere' in the evolution of a type. 'These Colonial Jews'-says the writer-'are a new _Erscheinung_ to me. They have the features of their race, but many of their peculiarities are gone. Mr. L-, who is very handsome and gentlemanly, eats ham and patronises a good breed of pigs on the "model farm" on which he spends his money. He is (he says) a thorough Jew in faith, and evidently in charitable works; but he wants to say his prayers in English and not to "dress himself up" in a veil and phylacteries for the purpose; and he and his wife talk of England as "home", and care as much for Jerusalem as their neighbours. They have not forgotten the old persecutions, and are civil to the coloured people, and speak of them in quite a different tone from other English colonists.

Moreover, they are far better mannered and more 'human', in the German sense of the word, in all respects; in short, less "colonial".' It was a lady of this party who described Prince Albert's funeral to Lady Duff Gordon. 'The people mourned for him'-she said-'as much as for Hezekiah; and, indeed, he deserved it a great deal better.'

There is not much attempt to describe scenery in Lady Duff Gordon's Letters, but just enough to show that her eye was as sensitive to landscape as to the shades of racial character and feeling. She indicates delicately yet effectively the difference between the atmosphere at the coast and that inland. 'It is the difference between a pretty pompadour beauty and a Greek statue. Those pale opal mountains as distinct in every detail as the map on your table and so cheerful and serene; no melodramatic effects of clouds and gloom.' But, as a rule, it is the human pageant that engrosses her, and here her sense of values is extraordinarily keen. There is no better instance than the portrait of the German basket-maker's wife, who confided to the writer her timidity on landing in Africa. 'I had never-she said-been out of the city of Berlin and knew nothing.' She spoke of the natives as well-bred (_anstandig_), and Lady Duff Gordon's comment is: 'The use of the word was characteristic. She could recognize an _Anstandigkeit_ not of Berlin.' But one might quote from every second page of these letters.

Lady Duff Gordon was less than a year in South Africa; but in that time she brought more happiness to those around her than many have done in a lifetime. And her bounties live after her.

A last remark may not be out of place here, although it will doubtless occur to every reader who approaches these letters with sympathy and discretion. They must be read as true letters and the spontaneous delineation of a personality, and not as a considered contribution to South African history. Freer even than Stevenson himself from 'le romantisme des poitrinaires', and singularly clear-sighted in all that comes under her personal observation, Lady Duff Gordon does not wholly escape the nemesis which overtakes the traveller who accepts his history from hearsay. And in South Africa, as we know, such nemesis is well-nigh unfailing. Few, however, have been the travellers, as the following pages will show, who could meet such a charge with so great evidence of candour, disinterestedness, and love of human nature in its simplest and most innocent forms.

J. P.

INTRODUCTORY

THE following letters were written, as the reader will readily perceive, without the remotest view to publication. They convey in the most unreserved manner the fresh and vivid impressions of the moment, to the two persons with whom, of all others, the writer felt the least necessity for reserve in the expression of her thoughts, or care about the form in which those thoughts were conveyed.

Such letters cannot be expected to be free from mistakes. The writer is misinformed; or her imagination, powerfully acted upon by new and strange objects, colours and magnifies, to a certain extent, what she sees. If these are valid objections, they are equally so to every description of a country that has not been corrected by long experience.

It has been thought, however, that their obvious and absolute genuineness, and a certain frank and high-toned originality, hardly to be found in what is written for the public, would recommend them to the taste of many.

But this was not the strongest motive to their publication.

The tone of English travellers is too frequently arrogant and contemptuous, even towards peoples whose pretensions on the score of civilization are little inferior to their own. When they come in contact with communities or races inferior to them in natural organization or in acquired advantages, the feeling of a common humanity often seems entirely to disappear. No attempt is made to search out, under external differences, the proofs of a common nature; no attempt to trace the streams of human affections in their course through channels unlike those marked out among ourselves; no attempt to discover what there may be of good mingled with obvious evil, or concealed under appearances which excite our surprise and antipathy.

It is the entire absence of the exclusive and supercilious spirit which characterizes dominant races; the rare power of entering into new trains of thought, and sympathizing with unaccustomed feelings; the tender pity for the feeble and subject, and the courteous respect for their prejudices; the large and purely human sympathies;-these, far more than any literary or graphic merits, are the qualities which have induced the possessors of the few following letters to give them to the public.

They show, what a series of letters from Egypt, since received from the same writer, prove yet more conclusively; that even among so-called barbarians are to be found hearts that open to every touch of kindness, and respond to every expression of respect and sympathy.

If they should awaken any sentiments like those which inspired them, on behalf of races of men who come in contact with civilization only to feel its resistless force and its haughty indifference or contempt, it will be some consolation to those who are enduring the bitterness of the separation to which they owe their existence.

SARAH AUSTIN.

WEYBRIDGE, _Feb._ 24, 1864.

LETTER I THE VOYAGE

Wednesday, 24th July.

Off the Scilly Isles, 6 P.M.

WHEN I wrote last Sunday, we put our pilot on sh.o.r.e, and went down Channel. It soon came on to blow, and all night was squally and rough.

Captain on deck all night. Monday, I went on deck at eight. Lovely weather, but the ship pitching as you never saw a ship pitch-bowsprit under water. By two o'clock a gale came on; all ordered below. Captain left dinner, and, about six, a sea struck us on the weather side, and washed a good many unconsidered trifles overboard, and stove in three windows on the p.o.o.p; nurse and four children in fits; Mrs. T- and babies afloat, but good-humoured as usual. Army-surgeon and I picked up children and bullied nurse, and helped to bale cabin. Cuddy window stove in, and we were wetted. Went to bed at nine; could not undress, it pitched so, and had to call doctor to help me into cot; slept sound. The gale continues. My cabin is water-tight as to big splashes, but damp and dribbling. I am almost ashamed to like such miseries so much. The forecastle is under water with every lurch, and the motion quite incredible to one only acquainted with steamers. If one can sit this ship, which bounds like a tiger, one should sit a leap over a haystack.

Evidently, I can never be sea-sick; but holding on is hard work, and writing harder.

Life is thus:-Avery-my cuddy boy-brings tea for S-, and milk for me, at six. S- turns out; when she is dressed, I turn out, and sing out for Avery, who takes down my cot, and brings a bucket of salt water, in which I wash with vast danger and difficulty; get dressed, and go on deck at eight. Ladies not allowed there earlier. Breakfast solidly at nine.

Deck again; gossip; pretend to read. Beer and biscuit at twelve. The faithful Avery brings mine on deck. Dinner at four. Do a little carpentering in cabin, all the outfitters' work having broken loose. I am now in the captain's cabin, writing. We have the wind as ever, dead against us; and as soon as we get unpleasantly near Scilly, we shall tack and stand back to the French coast, where we were last night. Three soldiers able to answer roll-call, all the rest utterly sick; three middies helpless. Several of crew, ditto. Pa.s.sengers very fairly plucky; but only I and one other woman, who never was at sea before, well. The food on board our ship is good as to meat, bread, and beer; everything else bad. Port and sherry of British manufacture, and the water with an incredible _borachio_, essence of tar; so that tea and coffee are but derisive names.

To-day, the air is quite saturated with wet, and I put on my clothes damp when I dressed, and have felt so ever since. I am so glad I was not persuaded out of my cot; it is the whole difference between rest, and holding on for life. No one in a bunk slept at all on Monday night; but then it blew as heavy a gale as it can blow, and we had the Cornish coast under our lee. So we tacked and tumbled all night. The ship being new, too, has the rigging all wrong; and the confusion and disorder are beyond description. The ship's officers are very good fellows. The mizen is entirely worked by the 'young gentlemen'; so we never see the sailors, and, at present, are not allowed to go forward. All lights are put out at half-past ten, and no food allowed in the cabin; but the latter article my friend Avery makes light of, and brings me anything when I am laid up. The young soldier-officers bawl for him with expletives; but he says, with a sn.i.g.g.e.r, to me, 'They'll just wait till their betters, the ladies, is looked to.' I will write again some day soon, and take the chance of meeting a ship; you may be amused by a little scrawl, though it will probably be very stupid and ill-written, for it is not easy to see or to guide a pen while I hold on to the table with both legs and one arm, and am first on my back and then on my nose. Adieu, till next time.

I have had a good taste of the humours of the Channel.

29_th_ _July_, 4 _Bells_, i.e. 2 _o'clock_, _p.m._-When I wrote last, I thought we had had our share of contrary winds and foul weather. Ever since, we have beaten about the bay with the variety of a favourable gale one night for a few hours, and a dead calm yesterday, in which we almost rolled our masts out of the ship. However, the sun was hot, and I sat and basked on deck, and we had morning service. It was a striking sight, with the sailors seated on oars and buckets, covered with signal flags, and with their clean frocks and faces. To-day is so cold that I dare not go on deck, and am writing in my black-hole of a cabin, in a green light, with the sun blinking through the waves as they rush over my port and scuttle. The captain is much vexed at the loss of time. I persist in thinking it a very pleasant, but utterly lazy life. I sleep a great deal, but don't eat much, and my cough has been bad; but, considering the real hardship of the life-damp, cold, queer food, and bad drink-I think I am better. When we can get past Finisterre, I shall do very well, I doubt not.

The children swarm on board, and cry unceasingly. A pa.s.senger-ship is no place for children. Our poor ship will lose her character by the weather, as she cannot fetch up ten days' lost time. But she is evidently a race-horse. We overhaul everything we see, at a wonderful rate, and the speed is exciting and pleasant; but the next long voyage I make, I'll try for a good wholesome old 'monthly' tub, which will roll along on the top of the water, instead of cutting through it, with the waves curling in at the cuddy skylights. We tried to signal a barque yesterday, and send home word 'all well'; but the brutes understood nothing but Russian, and excited our indignation by talking 'gibberish '

to us; which we resented with true British spirit, as became us.

It is now blowing hard again, and we have just been taken right aback.

Luckily, I had lashed my desk to my washing-stand, or that would have flown off, as I did off my chair. I don't think I shall know what to make of solid ground under my feet. The rolling and pitching of a ship of this size, with such tall masts, is quite unlike the little niggling sort of work on a steamer-it is the difference between grinding along a bad road in a four-wheeler, and riding well to hounds in a close country on a good hunter. I was horribly tired for about five days, but now I rather like it, and never know whether it blows or not in the night, I sleep so soundly. The noise is beyond all belief; the creaking, trampling, shouting, clattering; it is an incessant storm. We have not yet got our masts quite safe; the new wire-rigging stretches more than was antic.i.p.ated (of course), and our main-topmast is shaky. The crew have very hard work, as incessant tacking is added to all the extra work incident to a new ship. On Sat.u.r.day morning, everybody was shouting for the carpenter. My cabin was flooded by a leak, and I superintended the baling and swabbing from my cot, and dressed sitting on my big box.

However, I got the leak stopped and cabin dried, and no harm done, as I had put everything up off the floor the night before, suspicious of a dribble which came in. Then my cot frame was broken by my cuddy boy and I lurching over against S-'s bunk, in taking it down. The carpenter has given me his own, and takes my broken one for himself. Board ship is a famous place for tempers. Being easily satisfied, I get all I want, and plenty of attention and kindness; but I cannot prevail on my cuddy boy to refrain from violent tambourine-playing with a tin tray just at the ear of a lady who worries him. The young soldier-officers, too, I hear mentioned as 'them lazy gunners', and they struggle for water and tea in the morning long after mine has come. We have now been ten days at sea, and only three on which we could eat without the 'fiddles' (transverse pieces of wood to prevent the dishes from falling off). Smooth water will seem quite strange to me. I fear the poor people in the forecastle must be very wet and miserable, as the sea is constantly over it, not in spray, but in tons of green water.

3_d_ _Aug._-We had two days of dead calm, then one or two of a very light, favourable breeze, and yesterday we ran 175 miles with the wind right aft. We saw several ships, which signalled us, but we would not answer, as we had our spars down for repairs and looked like a wreck, and fancied it would be a pity to frighten you all with a report to that effect.

Last night we got all right, and spread out immense studding-sails. We are now bowling along, wind right aft, dipping our studding-sail booms into the water at every roll. The weather is still surprisingly cold, though very fine, and I have to come below quite early, out of the evening air. The sun sets before seven o'clock. I still cough a good deal, and the bad food and drink are trying. But the life is very enjoyable; and as I have the run of the charts, and ask all sorts of questions, I get plenty of amus.e.m.e.nt. S- is an excellent traveller; no grumbling, and no gossiping, which, on board a ship like ours, is a great merit, for there is _ad nauseam_ of both.

Mr. - is writing a charade, in which I have agreed to take a part, to prevent squabbling. He wanted to start a daily paper, but the captain wisely forbade it, as it must have led to personalities and quarrels, and suggested a play instead. My little white Maltese goat is very well, and gives plenty of milk, which is a great resource, as the tea and coffee are abominable. Avery brings it me at six, in a tin pannikin, and again in the evening. The chief officer is well-bred and agreeable, and, indeed, all the young gentlemen are wonderfully good specimens of their cla.s.s. The captain is a burly foremast man in manner, with a heart of wax and every feeling of a gentleman. He was in California, '_hide droghing_' with Dana, and he says every line of _Two Years before the Mast_ is true. He went through it all himself. He says that I am a great help to him, as a pattern of discipline and punctuality. People are much inclined to miss meals, and then want things at odd hours, and make the work quite impossible to the cook and servants. Of course, I get all I want in double-quick time, as I try to save my man trouble; and the carpenter leaves my scuttle open when no one else gets it, quite willing to get up in his time of sleep to close it, if it comes on to blow. A maid is really a superfluity on board ship, as the men rather like being '_aux pet.i.ts soins_'. The boatswain came the other day to say that he had a nice carpet and a good pillow; did I want anything of the sort? He would be proud that I should use anything of his. You would delight in Avery, my cuddy man, who is as quick as 'greased lightning', and full of fun. His misery is my want of appet.i.te, and his efforts to cram me are very droll. The days seem to slip away, one can't tell how.

I sit on deck from breakfast at nine, till dinner at four, and then again till it gets cold, and then to bed. We are now about 100 miles from Madeira, and shall have to run inside it, as we were thrown so far out of our course by the foul weather.

9_th_ _Aug._-Becalmed, under a vertical sun. Lat. 17, or thereabouts.

We saw Madeira at a distance like a cloud; since then, we had about four days trade wind, and then failing or contrary breezes. We have sailed so near the African sh.o.r.e that we get little good out of the trades, and suffer much from the African climate. Fancy a sky like a pale February sky in London, no sun to be seen, and a heat coming, one can't tell from whence. To-day, the sun is vertical and invisible, the sea gla.s.sy and heaving. I have been ill again, and obliged to lie still yesterday and the day before in the captain's cabin; to-day in my own, as we have the ports open, and the maindeck is cooler than the upper. The men have just been holystoning here, singing away l.u.s.tily in chorus. Last night I got leave to sling my cot under the main hatchway, as my cabin must have killed me from suffocation when shut up. Most of the men stayed on deck, but that is dangerous after sunset on this African coast, on account of the heavy dew and fever. They tell me that the open sea is quite different; certainly, nothing can look duller and dimmer than this specimen of the tropics. The few days of trade wind were beautiful and cold, with sparkling sea, and fresh air and bright sun; and we galloped along merrily.

We are now close to the Cape de Verd Islands, and shall go inside them.

About lat. 4 N. we expect to catch the S.E. trade wind, when it will be cold again. In lat. 24, the day before we entered the tropics, I sat on deck in a coat and cloak; the heat is quite sudden, and only lasts a week or so. The sea to-day is littered all round the ship with our floating rubbish, so we have not moved at all.

I constantly long for you to be here, though I am not sure you would like the life as well as I do. All your ideas of it are wrong; the confinement to the p.o.o.p and the stringent regulations would bore you.

But then, sitting on deck in fine weather is pleasure enough, without anything else. In a Queen's ship, a yacht, or a merchantman with fewer pa.s.sengers, it must be a delightful existence.

17_th_ _Aug._-Since I wrote last, we got into the south-west monsoon for one day, and I sat up by the steersman in intense enjoyment-a bright sun and glittering blue sea; and we tore along, pitching and tossing the water up like mad. It was glorious. At night, I was calmly reposing in my cot, in the middle of the steerage, just behind the main hatchway, when I heard a crashing of rigging and a violent noise and confusion on deck. The captain screamed out orders which informed me that we were in the thick of a collision-of course I lay still, and waited till the row, or the ship, went down. I found myself next day looked upon as no better than a heathen by all the women, because I had been cool, and declined to get up and make a noise. Presently the officers came and told me that a big ship had borne down on us-we were on the starboard tack, and all right-carried off our flying jib-boom and whisker (the sort of yard to the bowsprit). The captain says he was never in such imminent danger in his life, as she threatened to swing round and to crush into our waist, which would have been certain destruction. The little dandy soldier-officer behaved capitally; he turned his men up in no time, and had them all ready. He said, 'Why, you know, I must see that my fellows go down decently.' S- was as cool as an icicle, offered me my pea-jacket, &c., which I declined, as it would be of no use for me to go off in boats, even supposing there were time, and I preferred going down comfortably in my cot. Finding she was of no use to me, she took a yelling maid in custody, and was thought a brute for begging her to hold her noise. The first lieutenant, who looks on pa.s.sengers as odious cargo, has utterly mollified to me since this adventure. I heard him report to the captain that I was 'among 'em all, and never sung out, nor asked a question the while'. This he called 'beautiful'.