THE CAPE OF ADVENTURE.*
Mn. IAN COLVIN is doing an excellent work in expounding the romance of South Africa's past. The first sign that a new land is approaching maturity is when she begins to have leisure to turn her eyes backward. What a story it is Even if we exclude Phoenician and Sabisan speculations, what a varied tale is unfolded since that day when Bartholomew Dias first rounded the Cape ! Mr. Colvin learned South African history at the feet of a master. In his delightful Introduction he tells us that he used to escape often from the wrangles of the Cape Parliament to the cellar where the archivist, Leibbrandt, sat among his folios. It would be well if his suggestion were carried out and a Leibbrandt Society formed to publish the Cape Archives in a worthy form. Mr. Colvin has cast his net wide, taking his narratives not only from Burros and the Botch.° and the later classics of travel like Le Valliant and Barrow, but from the obscure popular publications of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Lisbon press. The selec- tion has been admirably made, and Mr. Colvin appends a useful little introduction to each extract. Our only complaint is that some would have been the better for geographical annotations.
The best stories are the Portuguese. The speedy decadence of her African empire has induced most people to underrate Portugal's extraordinary achievements in exploration and conquest. The little country bankrupted herself of men to colonize the waste places of the earth. Her grandees in velvets and cuirasses, lured on by dreams of Prester John and a mythical Monomotapa, perished miserably among swamps and
• The Care of Adventure : being Strange and Notable Discoveries, ac. Extracted from the Writings of the Early Travellers. B7 Ina D. Colvin. London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, [10e. Od. net.]
deserts and savage hordes. . Her -reach at all times exceeded. her grasp, and her empire shipwrecked on a dream of gold in a land where men could not live. • The essential romance: of the Portuguese conquests lay in the fact that she carried with her all the ritual of Europe, both its chivalry and its faith. In this volume we are given several extracts from. de Barros, including the curious tale of the death of the Viceroy, Francisco d'Almeida, among the sands of Table Bay an the hands of a parcel of Hottentots. It is de Barros at his. noblest. The natives were so nimble that "they appeared to• be birds, or rather the devil's executioners." When the tutor heard that the Viceroy had fallen be would not seek safety "he returned to the place where the Viceroy lay, and there he also remained for ever." We are given the tale of Barreto's Zambesi expedition—a spirited piece of fighting. " The Governor wore a strong coat of mail with sleeves, with a sword ornamented with silver slung crossways, and a page stood near- him with a shield of shining steel." Small wonder that the Kaffir envoys were speechless with awe. We are told, too, of that mysterious island in the Zambesi to which the body of the martyred priest, da Silveira, drifted. " We have heard," the natives told Father Barbudas, " that long ago there came floating down this river the body of a white man dressed in. black and tied to that beam. It was stopped by the island.. Instantly crowds of beasts came out of the wood, undid the ties, drew the beam on shore and the body into the wood.. From that day forward the birds came to perch upon the beam, and the beasts to perambulate the shcre, preventing so the sacred place from being intruded on."
The finest tales are of the shipwrecks. Many tall ships of Portugal went ashore on the Natal coast, and the crews had nothing for it but to grope their way north to Delagoa Bay. The wreck of the ' Saint John' and the death of Manuel da Sousa and his wife, Dona Leanor, among the swamps of the Lourenco Marques has been told in verse by Camoens. " They had no longer the semblance of human beings," says the anonymous chronicler. The talc of the sur- vivors of the ' Saint Benedict' is told by the geographer Perestrello, and a grim piece of realism it is. Racked by famine and surrounded by hostile natives they struggled on,. eating their shoes and shield-straps and any bleached bones. they could find and reduce to charcoal. Sometimes in the march they came on water-lilies and had a rich banquet. They were so eaten of vermin that some died, and when they were rescued they were slaves in a Kaffir kraal. Twenty-three survived out of three hundred and twenty souls who escaped from the wreck. More terrible still is the story of the ' Saint. John the Baptist,' the crew of which tramped all the way from the Cape to Sofala. It is a record of sufferings beyond human reason. Women and children died by the wayside,. and the others, blind and tottering, wandered through swamps. and deserts. The writer tells how one day he smelt a savoury smell and found the young men cooking a meat like, pork. To his horror it was human flesh. In Joseph de Cabreyra's tale we find a happier fate, for the leader was a man of his bands, and, instead of trekking. into the wilds, set to and built a couple of excel- lent new ships. But the best is Feya's story of the journey made by the survivors of the Senhora da Atalaya." Among them was a great noble, Dom Sebastian Lobo, who. was too fat and too proud to walk. He was carried in a litter made of fishing lines till his bearers grew too weak with hunger for the task. Dom Sebastian declared that he oared not for death, but for the bad treatment shown to his person.. There was nothing for it but to leave him behind.
"And he, giving up hope end resolved to remain behind,. firsts of all set about confessing himself, and gave a ruby ring to each of those who had hitherto carried him, disposing of everything else, and oven depriving himself of a metal cross with relics which he wore round his neck and a small copper kettle. He remained without any food whatever, for there was none, and all parted from him with just sorrow, leaving him under a little cloth tent,. fat and in good health, with his strength unimpaired, because. ho would not venture to proceed on foot. . . . Dom Duarte. Lobo, his brother, remained with him a long while, Dom Sebastian. displaying in this extremity so much patience and good courage that if he persevered therein his salvation may be piously held as certain."
The later narratives are of a different type. They are the: crorede of travellers who are in closer touch with civilization,.
and can afford to cultivate the art of description and a, scientific interest. They tell us much about the natives, who,
to Sir Thomas Herbert were an accursed progeny of Cham," and to Saint-Pierre and Le Valiant the relics of an innocent world. We own no better account of Dutch life at the Cape than Saint-Pierre's, written with all his posturing grace of style. The Swede, Andrew Sparrman, is a more vigorous chronicler, full of sound sense and a dry humour. Le Valliant is a preposterous being, who tells a wonderful story of his prowess in a leopard hunt, though we know from another authority that the leopard died in a trap. As Mr. Colvin says, Le Valiant must surely be the original of Tartarin. His idyll of the fair Marina, which once awoke the susceptibilities of Europe, is an admirable piece of Rousseanism. Then come the sober naturalists' tales of Lichtenstein and Burchell, and the Zululand recollections of Allen Gardiner and Fynn, and that adventurous Israelite, Nathaniel Isaacs. Of all these Inter tales the beat are those which tell of the wars of the Voor- trekkers. Daniel Bezuidenhout's little narrative has the grim realism of the man whose literary model, so far as he had any, was the Book of Chronicles, and Carl Cellier's picture of the fight at Blood River is magnificent in its stern simplicity. Mr. Colvin says truly that readers who will go to the original authorities of South African history will be amply rewarded. We hope that his admirable pioneering in the field will blaze a trail for many to follow.
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