- I drove out here
yesterday in Captain T-'s drag, which he kindly brought into
Capetown for me.
He and his wife and children came for a change of
air for whooping cough, and advised me to come too, as my cough
continues, though less troublesome. It is a lovely spot, six miles
from Constantia, ten from Capetown, and twelve from Simon's Bay. I
intend to stay here a little while, and then to go to Kalk Bay, six
miles from hence. This inn was excellent, I hear, 'in the old
Dutch times'. Now it is kept by a young Englishman, Cape-born, and
his wife, and is dirty and disorderly. I pay twelve shillings a
day for S- and self, without a sitting-room, and my bed is a straw
paillasse; but the food is plentiful, and not very bad. That is
the cheapest rate of living possible here, and every trifle costs
double what it would in England, except wine, which is very fair at
fivepence a bottle - a kind of hock. The landlord pays 1 pound a
day rent for this house, which is the great resort of the Capetown
people for Sundays, and for change of air, &c. - a rude kind of
Richmond. His cook gets 3 pounds 10s. a month, besides food for
himself and wife, and beer and sugar. The two (white) housemaids
get 1 pound 15s. and 1 pound 10s. respectively (everything by the
month). Fresh butter is 3s. 6d. a pound, mutton 7d.; washing very
dear; cabbages my host sells at 3d. a piece, and pumpkins 8d. He
has a fine garden, and pays a gardener 3s. 6d. a day, and black
labourers 2s. THEY work three days a week; then they buy rice and
a coarse fish, and lie in the sun till it is eaten; while their
darling little fat black babies play in the dust, and their black
wives make battues in the covers in their woolly heads. But the
little black girl who cleans my room is far the best servant, and
smiles and speaks like Lalage herself, ugly as the poor drudge is.
The voice and smile of the negroes here is bewitching, though they
are hideous; and neither S- nor I have yet heard a black child cry,
or seen one naughty or quarrelsome. You would want to lay out a
fortune in woolly babies. Yesterday I had a dreadful heartache
after my darling, on her little birthday, and even the lovely
ranges of distant mountains, coloured like opals in the sunset, did
not delight me. This is a dreary place for strangers. Abdul
Jemaalee's tisanne, and a banana which he gave me each time I went
to his shop, are the sole offer of 'Won't you take something?' or
even the sole attempt at a civility that I have received, except
from the J-s, who, are very civil and kind.
When I have done my visit to Simon's Bay, I will go 'up country',
to Stellenbosch, Paarl and Worcester, perhaps. If I can find
people going in a bullock-waggon, I will join them; it costs 1
pound a day, and goes twenty miles. If money were no object, I
would hire one with Caffres to hunt, as well as outspan and drive,
and take a saddle-horse. There is plenty of pleasure to be had in
travelling here, if you can afford it. The scenery is quite beyond
anything you can imagine in beauty. I went to a country house at
Rondebosch with the J-s, and I never saw so lovely a spot. The
possessor had done his best to spoil it, and to destroy the
handsome Dutch house and fountains and aqueducts; but Nature was
too much for him, and the place lovely in neglect and shabbiness.
Now I will tell you my impressions of the state of society here, as
far as I have been able to make out by playing the inquisitive
traveller. I dare say the statements are exaggerated, but I do not
think they are wholly devoid of truth. The Dutch round Capetown (I
don't know anything of 'up country') are sulky and dispirited; they
regret the slave days, and can't bear to pay wages; they have sold
all their fine houses in town to merchants, &c., and let their
handsome country places go to pieces, and their land lie fallow,
rather than hire the men they used to own. They hate the Malays,
who were their slaves, and whose 'insolent prosperity' annoys them,
and they don't like the vulgar, bustling English. The English
complain that the Dutch won't die, and that they are the curse of
the colony (a statement for which they can never give a reason).
But they, too, curse the emancipation, long to flog the niggers,
and hate the Malays, who work harder and don't drink, and who are
the only masons, tailors, &c., and earn from 4s. 6d. to 10s. a day.
The Malays also have almost a monopoly of cart-hiring and horse-
keeping; an Englishman charges 4 pounds 10s. or 5 pounds for a
carriage to do what a Malay will do quicker in a light cart for
30s. S- says, 'The English here think the coloured people ought to
do the work, and they to get the wages. Nothing less would satisfy
them.' Servants' wages are high, but other wages not much higher
than in England; yet industrious people invariably make fortunes,
or at least competencies, even when they begin with nothing. But
few of the English will do anything but lounge; while they abuse
the Dutch as lazy, and the Malays as thieves, and feel their
fingers itch to be at the blacks. The Africanders (Dutch and negro
mixed in various proportions) are more or less lazy, dirty, and
dressy, and the beautiful girls wear pork-pie hats, and look very
winning and rather fierce; but to them the philanthropists at home
have provided formidable rivals, by emptying a shipload of young
ladies from a 'Reformatory' into the streets of Capetown.
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