Читать книгу The Cape Peninsula: Pen and Colour Sketches - Réné Hansard - Страница 4

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We walked across the parade-ground, and past the spot where, in my dream, I had seen the old Van Riebeek fort crumbling to pieces, with its canal and little bridges: now, there is a building called the Post Office, and instead of the canal, with its tree-bordered pathways, a street called Adderley Street, with shop-windows where the trees stood. Even the old Exchange is gone, with its stiff row of trees and its chained posts and kiosque, before which, in the turbulent days of Sir Harry Smith's régime, all Cape Town, English, Dutch, Malay, in stock, and crinoline, and turban, with one united voice roared against the Imperial Government's decree, which was to turn the Peninsula into a dumping-ground for convicts. Crinoline, stock, and turban kept the half-starved convict ships with their unwelcome freight for five months at anchor in Simon's Bay. Sir Harry, with an eye of sympathy on the mob, and the other eye of duty on the starving convict ships, ordered food to be sent, offered famine prices: no one moved. A few judicious civil servants, with both eyes on the main chance, smuggled a small supply on board. But the crowd in front of the old Exchange won the day, and Australia profited instead.

At the end of the eighteenth century a young lady described the Cape and its inhabitants in a few words: 'Di menschen zyn moei dik en vet, di huizen moei wit en groen' (The people are very fat and plump; the houses are pretty white and green).

Up Strand Street, which was the 'Beach Street,' lived all the high in the land, the Koopmans, or merchants—'a title,' says an old writer, 'that conferred rank at the Cape to which the military even aspired.' There they lived, in flat-roofed, high-stoeped houses with teak doors and small-paned glass windows, facing the sea; the men smoking, drinking and selling; the women eating, dressing and dancing. Not a decent school in the town, not a sign of a library, only a theatre whose productions bored them intolerably: 'Ach, foei toch, Mijnheer Cook,' says the lady with the smallest feet in all Kaapstad to the famous sailor Cook, who was the guest of her father, Mijnheer Le Roux, 'go to the theatre? to listen for three hours to a conversation?' Cook gave in, and, instead, was carried off in a big 'carosse,'[2] with a Malay coachman in large reed hat over his turban, pointed and with flowing ribbons at the side, to the Avenue in the Company's Gardens, a modest Vauxhall, and then on to one of the monthly dances given in the Castle by the Governor Van Plettenberg.

TABLE BAY FROM THE KLOOF NEK

Dancing was the great form of exercise. 'The ladies of the Cape are pretty and well dressed,' says the French traveller Le Vaillant, visiting the Cape about this time—1772. He expressed great surprise at the way they dressed: 'With as much attention to the minutiæ of dress as the ladies of France, with neither their manners nor their graces.' How could they have manners and graces? With the adaptability which amounts to genius, which the women of newly-arisen cosmopolitan nations possess as Fate's compensation for depriving them of the birthright of history, tradition, and ancient habitation, they imitated the manners and fashions of the passing passengers resting a few days at the Cape on their way to India. Those belonging to the better class all played on the harpsichord and sang; they had generally a good knowledge of French, and often of English; were experts with the needle, making all kinds of lace, 'knotting' and tambour work; and they usually made up their own dresses.

The men and youths, who never mixed with the English or foreign visitors, were entirely different: phlegmatic and dull, badly dressed and badly mannered. Anne Barnard, writing Cape gossip to London, has many stories to tell of pretty Cape ladies running off with Englishmen or Frenchmen. The thanksgiving sigh of one worthy 'Koopman' is conclusive: 'Grace à Dieu, ma femme est bien laide!'

However, we must return to the house of Le Roux in the Strand Street. It is the day after the fête in the Avenue and the Governor's ball. At an old French bureau, with metal inlays, praising Monsieur Buhl in every beautiful line, this gallant Captain Cook wrote in his Journal while the pretty little 'Foei toch,' with sighs of neglect, sat playing the spinet in a corner of vantage. They changed places presently—he would dictate and she should write. Two minutes passed, and Cook got up and looked over her shoulder. She had written, atrociously, a funny little French verse and signed it:

'Marion pleurt,

Marion rit,

Marion veut, qu'on la marie.

'Marion.'

Cook smiled and bowed. 'Me dear, you have the most adorable foot in the world, but I dare say little for your hand.' Very witty of him, but of course she wrote badly; there were no schools, only ill-paid writing masters. The parsons, all well paid by the Government, would not condescend to such a worthless occupation.

So Cook wrote his Journal himself, in large, scrawling writing, with old-fashioned s's, while his two ships, the Resolution and the Adventure, anchored by stout chains instead of cables in this Bay of Storms, lay waiting for a good wind to sail away round the world. And Marion sang from her corner at the spinet:

'Marions ci,

Marions ça,

Mais jamais, jamais marions là.'

Cook writes:

'The Cape of Good Hope,

'Monday, November 2, 1772.

'The Cape of Good Hope, in Caffraria, or the Country of the Hottentots, is the most southern promontory of Africa.

'It is very mountainous.

'The Table Mountain is of a great height (sic), and the top of it is always covered with a cap of clouds before a storm. There are no harbours, though there is a sea-coast of a thousand miles. When Commodore Byron touched at the Cape he was obliged to work into Table Bay with his top sails close reefed. Indeed, the Cape is scarce ever free from storms a week together; the winds blow hard and on every side from the vast southern ocean, and the waves of the sea rise to a height never seen or experienced in any part of Europe. The Bay of Biscay, turbulent as it is, has no billows that mount like those on this extensive ocean; the stoutest vessels are tossed and almost lifted to the skies. A number of rich ships have perished on this coast; the Dutch have lost whole fleets even at anchor before the Town.

'The climate is very healthy, the country is fine, and it abounds with refreshments of every kind. The Company's garden is the most ravishing spot.'

(He read this to Mademoiselle Marion, who had found Mr. Pickersgill, his Third Lieutenant, a good second when the gallant Captain, with his tongue in his cheek and a wink at Marion, escorted the fat wife of Governor Van Plettenberg round the most ravishing Gardens.) The Captain went on with his diary:

'The garden produces all the most delicious fruits of Asia and Europe. It is guarded from the winds and storms by hedges of bay, very thick and high, affording a most refreshing shade in the hottest season. It abounds with peaches, pomegranates, pineapple, bananas, citrons, lemons, oranges, the pears and apples of Europe, all excellent in their kind, and the crimson apple of Japan, appearing through the green leaves, of all the most beautiful. The Dutch have large plantations of almond-trees, and many sorts of camphor-trees, and there is scarce a cottage without a vineyard to it. Their cabbages and cauliflowers weigh from thirty to forty pounds, their potatoes from six to ten, raised from seed brought from Cyprus and Savoy. Their corn is ripe in December, and our Christmas is the time of their harvest. In January they tread out their corn, and in February the farmers carry it to the Company's magazines.

'They sow every kind of grain but oats. Lions, tigers, leopards, elephants, and the rhinoceros are to be found here; the elephants are very large; their teeth (sic) weigh from sixty to one hundred and twenty pounds. The Dutch keep up a body of regular forces, and have a strong garrison at the Cape; they have also a militia, a corps of men in all nations formidable in themselves, most dreadful to an enemy, and, when called out for service, spreading destruction all around them in the heights of their ungovernable fury. They are of so robust a disposition, and so naturally inclined for war, that, like the Devonshire and Northamptonshire champions in England, they are ever ready to solicit employment, even against the principles of their own institution.'

Next day the Governor, the English Consul, the Fiscal, Marion and her father, together with a large party, boarded the Resolution, to see them make fresh water out of salt water; and when they left, and before the Resolution, firing fifteen guns, and the Adventure nine, sailed away round the world, Mr. Pickersgill and Marion had found time to fall in love. Marion at her spinet that evening shed very salt little Dutch tears when she came to the lines, 'Mais jamais, jamais marions là.'

There is a charming poem by Ian Colvin which Marinus thinks might be inspired by Marion and her Lieutenant.

In the Museum at the top of the old Company's gardens lies a little English shoe of surprising smallness—surprising, for not only Anne Barnard remarked on the size of the Cape ladies' feet: there is that nice story of the enterprising merchant who chartered a large shipload of out-sizes in ladies' shoes, and the ladies sent their slaves in the dark to buy them!

The poem goes:

'There's a tiny English shoe

Of morocco, cream and blue,

Made with all a cobbler's skill

By Sam Miller in Cornhill.

'Many a story, quaint and sweet,

Of the lady fair, whose feet

Twinkled with a charm divine

Beneath her ample crinoline,

Making her tortured lovers dream

That heaven itself was blue and cream.'

The story tells of how this dainty creature walked down the 'Heerengracht,' followed by the tortured lovers:

'Van der Merwe, Jacques Theron,

The Captain of the garrison,

Petrus de Witt, or Van Breda,

Or Cloete of Constantia.

And then the Fiscal—fat and old—

What matters? he had power and gold,

Coffers of dollars, and doubloons,

Gold mohurs, pagodas, ducatoons,

And in his cupboards stored away

The priceless treasures of Cathay.'

Then it tells of how she loved this English sailor, how he left to sail to many strange lands, and asked her what she wished to have.

'And she, although her cheeks were wet,

Was in a moment all coquette:

"Your English fashions would, I fear,

But ill become my homely sphere;

Besides, you know not how to choose—

Bring me instead a pair of shoes."'

So the English lover sailed away, and the Fiscal became a menace to the poor little cream and blue 'Jonge Vrouw,' and the wedding-day arrived:

'From Signal Hill to Witteboom,

From Kirstenbosch to Roodebloem,

With cannon, bugle, bell and horn,

They ushered in the wedding morn.'

But the English lover and the shoes arrived just in time; the bride was missing; the wedding-party and the storming Fiscal rushed down to the sea-shore—'a ship in a cloud of sail was riding out of the Bay in a favouring gale.'