CHAPTER VII

RIO JANEIRO AND CAPE COLONY

Rio Janeiro - Its magnificent scenery - Slave market - A "flogging ship" - Six strokes of the cat for every one on board - Ball at the Palace - Entertaining sea-slang and the pretty Brazilian - A curious history - Plague-stricken village - Prelude of a psychic experience - Story of an albatross - Cape of Good Hope - Bush-men - Dorsal disabilities of their women - De Wet's estimate of his Boer countrymen - Sail for Australia.

THE harbour of Rio Janeiro at last ! and few things can compare with its fantastic beauty, its exaggerated outline of peaks and hills ; the curious cone of rock - the Sugar Loaf Hill - at its entrance, the Corcovado, a sharp, towering acclivity which overhangs the town, or the lofty basaltic columns of the Organ Mountains lying inland at the head of the Bay. It is common to make comparisons between Rio and Sydney harbours, but two places less capable of comparison it would be difficult to find ; the first wildly romantic with mountains clothed with brilliant tropical verdure ; the second, a series of rounded hills, a few hundred feet high, bearing scattered patches of stunted, colourless gum-trees, whilst as to what man has done to enhance the beauty of either place, comparison is still less possible. For the city of Rio Janeiro has all the interest of nearly four centuries of slow growth, with its historic Cathedral, its quaint Spanish and Portuguese

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RIO JANEIRO: ITS SCENERY

broad-terraced, flat-roofed houses, with palms projecting out of every courtyard, and all the indefinable interest which gathers round the capital of a country very nearly as large as all Europe, ¹ which has witnessed revolutionary scenes as terrible as those of Paris, and where, even in my day, slaves were sold in open market, whilst Sydney is merely the agglomerated product of the modern jerry-architect, rows and rows of houses all alike, and with suburbs as ugly as Upper Tooting. Still, Sydney Harbour has a beauty of its own, of wide sweeping bays, lying sheltered behind the great Gates or headlands which open upon them from the ocean, whilst, in detail, pleasing scenes are to be discovered, silver stranded beaches, with the gum and the palmetto hanging over into the deep blue water, and with a few small wooded islands, but all unobtrusive. But the startling effect of Rio Janeiro, which compels the admiration of the least emotional, which rivets the attention of the man at the masthead as well as the officer leaning over the hammock-netting, is entirely wanting in Sydney.

The Iris was not many days in Rio ; for two reasons, both epidemic : namely, yellow fever and desertion from our ship, the first killing people daily by the hundred; the second, a disease we never shook off all the commission. For the Iris was a "flogging ship," and a bluejacket had to keep his eyes skinned to avoid the cat. But to convey an idea, to a landsman, as to how much flogging that meant, I have counted up my log records of flogging, and find that there were close on nine hundred lashes distributed amongst the bluejackets and marines, or about enough to have administered some five or six to every living soul on board, including the Skipper and Parson; good sound lashes, too, with

¹ Brazil is 3,300,000 square miles in extent, Europe is 3,800,000.

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a cruel whistle through the air, as the nine tails spread themselves out on the man's back, and not the feeble, trumpery floggings as received by garrotters and wife-beaters ashore; which are childish in comparison. The unrecorded floggings of the ship's boys, and the countless canings on their hands, are not included in the above nine hundred; and would certainly be treble the number of those of the men, so that, in round numbers, we reach the respectable figure of two thousand seven hundred cuts with cat and cane, "for the punishment of vice and the maintenance of true religion," as set forth in the Articles of War.

During our stay in Rio Janeiro, we came in for several entertainments. The town was en fête, for nothing in particular, for it was never difficult to find a pretext for public amusement in that idle, dissolute city, where one could buy or hire as many white, black, or whitey-brown men or women as you pleased, and dispose of them again as easily as oranges.

Amongst other things we were invited to a ball at the Palace, where we had a good time, in spite of knowing nothing of Portuguese or Spanish. I was introduced to a pretty Brazilian girl, with hair like black silk, and eyes like a raven's ; fairly bewildering after months of sea. She was about my own age, a child in European estimation, but a complete woman in that land of the sun, and we danced together more or less all night. She was very naive and spoke English with a fascinating unconventionality, interlarded with much sea-slang which she had learnt from her English governess, daughter of an ex-sailor and storekeeper in the Naval Depôt at Rio. The night was, of course, exquisitely warm and the dancers strolled all over the garden, laden with the scent of thousands of flowers and of the immense magnolias which grew everywhere. Beyond the garden was a magnificent

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A STRANGE LIFE

avenue of palms where the moonlight shone in broad bands and myriads of fireflies darted about in every direction. At the end of the avenue lay a dark wood, with even more fireflies, for their numbers seemed incredible. I caught some and stuck them in my friend's hair, when she exclaimed-

" For heaven's sake keep your weather eye lifting for mama : she's always all over the place, like a shifting back-stay ! "

When we returned to the ball-room we found we had forgotten to remove the fireflies, and as chance decreed it the first person we met was mama, who, however, did not seem the dragon I expected, as she merely smiled and pointed to her daughter's head, for she herself was still young enough to have liked fireflies.

There was a lady at the Court of Don Pedro II. with an extraordinary history, and she figured at this ball. She was a native of Bogötà, Colombia, her father a ruined hidalgo of Spain, her mother an Indian. She had been actually sold by this said father to an American in New Orleans, when she was fifteen ; had lived with him two years, had killed him for his brutality, and escaped in an open boat alone. Disguised as a man she served two years as a steward's boy in a steamer without her sex being discovered, and then came by chance to Rio, where she went on to the stage, and became a great dancer, marrying a very rich man, about forty years older than herself, who died of apoplexy very soon after, leaving her with a large fortune. She had then hunted up her father - who, by this time, had sunk as low as he could - had bought back the old family property in Spain, and had settled him on it, with re-version to herself. Opinions in Rio differed greatly about her, some thinking she should never have forgiven her father, others that she had acted nobly. Thinking it over

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now I agree with the last. She was still extraordinarily beautiful when I saw her, dark, clear skin, with eyes no painter could reproduce, a short delicate nose, and a terribly earnest expression about her thin lips. She had the undulating, stealthy walk of a wild animal and a faultless figure. It was my firefly girl who told me this story, as we sat in a conservatory, heavy with the scent of orchids. And here I had another example of sea-going English from her, when she sighted our Skipper, bowsed into the tightest of full-dress coats, its gilded tails sticking out behind as though he wore a bustle, his neck bulging out over his collar, his face purple, his small yellow wig jauntily cocked over one ear.

"What a funny old Cocky oily-boy, is he not ? " she remarked ; and seeing me smile, "Or is it Loplollybird ? I never can remember which my governess called them."

My next Brazilian experience was very different. Wood - to whom I have before alluded as the son of the First Lord - and I were out riding, and having wandered out of our way in a forest, came on a collection of native huts, built of sticks and banana-leaves, and occupied by woebegone niggers and cross-breeds, whose squalor and misery were terrible. There appeared to be nothing to eat in the whole place, not even bananas, or any of the cheap food of the country, though a few repulsive-looking black pigs roamed about untouched, for a reason we soon gathered. Evidently some dreadful calamity had overtaken this unhappy community ; our arrival failing to arouse any interest amongst them, except to some starving, naked, little boys and girls, who clustered round our horses, and stared up into our faces.

Lying about on the ground were several people - covered up with straw or shreds of clothing - some quite still, others wriggling about, apparently in great pain. Then it dawned on us that we had come across a village

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YELLOW JACK

stricken with yellow fever ; the motionless, dead, and the others dying. A horrible stench pervaded the air, and in many places we saw that the ground had been dug afresh. Two or three niggers were digging a biggish hole, and two more passed close to us, unconcernedly carrying the almost nude body of a whitish woman, her shrivelled skin covered with brilliant yellow patches. Further off a group of boys and girls stood watching an old man rolling about on the ground in agony, but no one did anything to alleviate his sufferings, and he suddenly stiffened. I noticed that it was only the genuine negroes who were lively or working, but that none of the half-breeds were occupied in any way, all lying about in a state of abject dejection or collapse. I afterwards learnt that pure-blooded negroes have an almost absolute immunity from yellow fever, but that any admixture of white blood renders people liable to attack. Poor Wood - who had a very delicate stomach - turned and rode off, feeling terribly sick, but I got off my horse and gave it to a boy to hold, for I was curious to see what yellow fever was like. I saw quite enough to last a lifetime. A man was lying at the door of his hut, wailing piteously, his lips and nostrils blood red, and his tongue parched and protruding. I propped him up and he was at once deadly sick, and I got him some water but he could not swallow. Again he was sick - a hideous black vomit. I dipped a rag in water and tried to clear his mouth. His skin seemed on fire and his eyes screwed up like a ferret's. Then he seemed to choke and I could do no more. I laid him down and after some violent convulsions he lay still, dead. Just inside his hut was the body of a young woman. She had been dead for some hours, her skin was as yellow as saffron, whilst, almost touching her, two little girls were playing with a small kitten. Then some niggers came in, lifted her up and carried her away,

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threw her into a pit, and shovelled earth over her. I began to feel squeamish, too, by this time, for the sight of the pigs rootling up the new graves gave me a horror, whilst the stench would have sickened a vulture. And yet I could not bear to ride away ; it seemed so heartless. However, I rejoined Wood, who had waited a few hundred yards off, and, riding on, we struck the broad high road leading to the capital, where we met strings of carriages full of gay Brazilians coming back from a sea-side place to which the fashion of Rio flocks in the evening. The contrast struck me painfully: the giggling, flirting crowd; and, scarce two miles away, the graves, the niggers filling in the earth, the dead woman, the little girls - playing with their cat, and the pigs intent on their loathsome feast.

* * * * *

During our stay in Rio an incident happened to which I will now allude, though the curious psychological sequel to it was far off. I had been sent ashore in charge of the night cutter to bring off officers, the quay, even at that time, being crowded with loafers of all sorts. As the boat sheered alongside the two bowmen - whose oars had been tossed in - sprang on to the quay, and vanished up a dark alley. My coxswain dashed after them tiller in hand, but they were gone before he could overhaul them, so he returned to the quay, where, the officers having assembled, we shoved off and went back to the ship. Of course there was trouble about the deserters and I was had up before the Skipper and disrated from midshipman to naval cadet - a very great disgrace, and attended with most serious consequences in one's after career - whilst the coxswain, who was a petty officer, was also disrated to able seaman. He was the man I have before alluded to, omitting his name.

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GET INTO TROUBLE

There was not a particle of justice for this severe punishment beyond the fact that the two men who had deserted were not of my regular boat's crew, and it might be held to be his fault and mine that we had not noticed it before leaving the ship, although it had been dark. I felt so bitter about it that I thought the coxswain only did what I should have been glad to do myself, namely, desert the first chance he got. The fact was, the Skipper was feeling alarmed at these wholesale desertions, fully expecting to be hauled over the coals by the Admiralty, and was only too glad to make a scapegoat of any one.

And now for the sequel. Seven years after this I was one night stranded on the bank of an Australian river which had suddenly risen in flood, and seeing a man on horseback some distance off hailed him, and asked him if he could find the ford. As bushrangers were numerous at that particular time it was never safe to accost any one at night, so I was not surprised that he delayed answering for some time. But finally, with what light there was, he seemed to decide I was not a dangerous person, and drew near. In an instant, though I certainly could not see his face except that he had a rough beard and wore his hat pulled over his eyes, the Rio scene came before me and I knew it was my old coxswain. But he did not know me, and it required tact on my part to divulge my identity, as, having deserted, he was always in a delicate position. But we soon came to understand each other, and rode on for many miles together after crossing the river. He was getting on well, and already owned a small station of his own.

An amusing incident of our voyage to the Cape of Good Hope was Wood tumbling overboard while we midshipmen were being drilled aloft. The weather was fine, hardly any wind, the vessel scarcely going

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two knots, so that Wood, swimming comfortably after us, was not in the least danger. But to save the son of the First Lord was too great a chance to be lost, so in two seconds after the alarm of "Man overboard ! " at least three officers and six bluejackets were furiously hauling off their clothes to go after him. But Bell, our Irish Lieutenant, determined not to be forestalled in the rescue, flinging off nothing, went overboard all standing, when he joined Wood in a few strokes, and swam about comfortably with him, with no greater risk of being drowned than had they been bathing on Southsea beach. Still this did not deter others from joining them, for in less than half a minute there were some five or six in the water, all perfect swimmers, so that the whole thing became ludicrous. Then Deane lost his temper, and, roaring out, wanted to know how many more d___d fools were going overboard, and would they please stop their tomfoolery ! Meanwhile, the main-yard had been squared, the cutter lowered, and, in a few minutes, rescued and rescuers - the latter looking extremely foolish - were alongside again. Needless to say no one got even a leather medal out of the affair.

A messmate of mine called Dobbin, our second master, a very truthful man, told me of a curious coincidence. He was mate of a merchant ship, and somewhere between the Cape and Australia he caught an albatross, fastened a brass label under one of its wings, with a fine wire, on which he had roughly stamped the date of this capture. Two years after - in another ship at the same time of year and about the same latitude and longitude - he caught the same bird again, with his label still attached. He re-dated it and let it go once more. It is curious to think that sea birds have some instinct by which they return to particular localities, on the open sea, after the breeding season.

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GERMAN RIFF-RAFF AND BOERS

My impressions of Simon's Bay, Cape of Good Hope, are very vivid, and I remember well the disgust there was in Capetown by hordes of German ruffians - the disbanded remnants of the Mercenary German Legion got together in England for the Crimean War - being sent out to South Africa to get rid of them. These off-scourings of German cities had become a terror in the neighbourhood of Gosport, where they robbed and murdered at their own sweet will, as might be expected of them from their origin. The result was that the Government of Cape Colony was doing its utmost to move them away from the more settled portions of the country near Capetown, and get them planted on the outer fringes of civilisation, in the more congenial society of the lower-class Boers. It is unquestionable that up to that time the Dutch of the Cape were a peaceful and law-abiding people, and might have been in South Africa, what their ancestors were in the United States of America, a thrifty, industrious community, had it not been for the moral and physical contamination of these Germans.

At the Ca.pe of Good Hope hospitality is proverbial, and I spent some nights at Stellenbosch, with people my family had known in England. I saw there a Kaffir girl who had run away from that tribe (name forgotten) which had been seized with the extraordinary suicidal mania then rampant among the natives. The direct cause of this terrible epidemic was the brutality of the Boer farmers, whose excesses it is impossible to describe in English literature.

For a great medicine man had arisen amongst these Kaffirs, and had persuaded them that if they would all simultaneously commit suicide they would return to life - in a few hours mighty and invincible warriors, able to rid their country, once for all, of the hated Boer. Though it seems incredible, it is a well-ascertained fact that fifty

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thousand men of this one tribe actually carried out this terrible advice in the hope of escaping from tyranny, but, alas ! only to leave great tracts of their land uninhabited, which were immediately occupied by their oppressors, whilst thousands of women, if old, were left to starve ; or, if young, were taken on as " helps " in the Boer farms.

* * * * *

Riding out from Simon's Bay one day, somewhere at the back of Table Mountain, I came down into a broad valley, lying between rocky hills, with a shallow lake in the centre of it and forests on three sides ; in fact, an ideal place for a native camp. Coming round a corner of the wood I found myself unexpectedly amongst huts, made of sticks and grass, some of them covered with strips of tarpaulin and canvas. The place seemed deserted, so I tied my horse to a tree and went to explore. But at the entrance to one of the huts I was confronted by a human being, as the occupation of cooking something in a pot denoted it to be, but so abnormal in a particular development as to make one wonder if it were, or what Evolution, and especially Selection, had been at to produce it. It was though evidently a woman, from the petticoat which hung over this astounding back, whilst below this garment appeared a pair of attenuated brown legs, uniform in size from ankle to knee. Hearing my step, she straightened herself and, turning round, produced a curious "cluck" in her throat, which I have no doubt meant, "How do you do! " Then with a friendly gesture, she pointed to the pot in which I could see that food of some kind was boiling.

She was about three feet six inches tall, her head certainly not less than a fifth of the whole, her face copperish yellow, eyes somewhat oblique, mouth large, and jawbone going back under the ear like a crank, teeth

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BUSHMEN

long, prominent, and the colour of a tobacco quid, hair scant and black, straggling over her face and forehead. The aforesaid petticoat and a linen bodice, tied jauntily round her middle by a bit of red rag, formed her entire costume. For ornaments there were patches of red paint on her cheeks and a belt of beads round what I assumed was her waist. She constantly repeated a word sounding like "Saan," which I learnt afterwards is the name given to Bushmen. She was not pure Hottentot ; that I knew at once, from her straight hair. But the Boers have many things to answer for, amongst others a custom of catching and enslaving these diminutive women, who - when they can - escape and return to their own tribe, mothers of a half-breed.

Inviting me to sit down the little woman fished up a bit of meat out of the pot on a piece of stick and offered it to me. As it smelt good and fresh - evidently a bit of deer of some kind - I had no hesitation in eating it. She seemed active enough, but as I contemplated her dorsal proportions I saw how impossible it would be for midshipmen to run over the futtock shrouds if Nature had designed them on this plan. I rose to go, but by signs she detained me, and I went round the little camp on a tour of inspection. Behind the huts was a small enclosure, in which were a few scraggy calves and a pig or two ; whilst in a hut, bigger than the others and barricaded in by bushes, was a number of small girls and boys, all devoid of clothing, some asleep, some playing with bits of broken pots, whilst one boy, bigger than the rest, was carving in relief a very well drawn horse on a piece of hard wood. I was surprised at his skill, but less so afterwards, when I was shown some still better executed specimens of his drawing - on thin slabs of hardened clay. In fact, many of these small people seemed born draftsmen.

As I was again preparing to depart, a sound, resembling

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screeching more than human speech, heralded the arrival of the rest of the tribe ; so I waited to see the new arrivals, when, headed by a herd of small, lean cows and a few skeleton sheep, a group of some ten or fifteen diminutive men and women emerged from the wood. I saw at once that the women were all built on the same inconvenient lines as my friend of the meat-pot, one or two of them even exceeding her in this exaggerated structure. But the men, though equally short and ugly, were not so greatly deformed in this respect. On the other hand, their faces were far more repellent than those of the women, with an expression of abiding cunning, whilst their movements, and even their voices, bore a marked resemblance to their half-brothers, the baboons, who might be seen hopping about the rocks on the mountains behind their village.

But though they looked so unattractive and fierce they were civil enough, whilst one, who looked more like a Malay than a Bushman, speaking English fairly well, begged me to stay and eat, and as I was curious to learn more about these people, I willingly remained. He was an intelligent person, and, though the jargon he spoke was a mixture of low Dutch and pidgin English, I understood him better than I do the School Board children in my own Surrey village. From his description of the breed to which he belonged, there can be nothing more mixed in the world ; strains - originally Portuguese - crossed and recrossed by Dutch, German, Hottentot, Bush, Malay, Kaffir, and Negro blood. He told me this little tribe was by no means pure Bushman, but an offshoot of a larger tribe who had vanished slowly, going north and dying out, and that probably there were not fifty other people like them in the whole Cape Colony. He said they still used small bows and poisoned arrows, the poison extracted from plants and out of

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OPINION OF VELDT BOERS

beetles, scorpions, and the venom of snakes. They believed in a future life ; to be spent in a kind of happy hunting-ground, but he thought that now this idea had given place to a Paradise where there were to be no Boers, and to a Hell where there was nothing else, over which would preside a Boer with claws and a sjambok. It did not seem to strike him how needless it was to go out of Cape Colony to find this particular form of devil.

His own pedigree was a good illustration of the aforesaid cross-breeding, for his father was the son of a Boer by a Malay slave woman ; his own mother a cross between a Hottentot and an American whaling captain ; his great-uncle at that moment a Dutch minister, and his great-aunt, the minister's sister, still a "help" in a married Boer's establishment beyond the Praal. I asked him who the lady might be who I had first met, and he replied that she was his own half-sister, his father having married a Bushman woman. I found a note of this pedigree in the flyleaf of an old French novel, or I should long ago have forgotten it.

I saw something of Boer peasant life at different times of my visits to South Africa, and I am honestly of conviction that nothing exists more hypocritical, ignorant, and superstitious than the average Boer farmer. His manners are churlish, his temper sullen, his cunning phenomenal, his personal habits filthy, his ideas of decorum lower than those of Esquimaux, Patagonians, or the Blacks of Australia. A household cat has more instincts of decency and more knowledge of hygiene. Of course the above does not apply to better-class Boers, who have lived in towns and have acquired civilised habits, but I believe it is a fair picture of the average Boer farmer and small settler.

I do not know what the means of communication may

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now be between Simon's Bay - the Naval Station - and Capetown, but in those days they were somewhat perilous. At a point between these two places it was necessary to cross a wide bay between two headlands, and the only safety was in keeping on the hard sand where the rollers swept back into the sea. To landward of this ridge lay deep and shifting quicksands, and I have heard that underneath them lie many and many bullock teams with their wagons - and, for all we know, their drivers too. At one end of this bay some steep rocks lead down from the road above, a short cut of a few hundred yards. Down these, in his young days, Sir Harry Keppel is reported to have driven a Cape curricle. To look at the place it seems impossible that mortal horses could have done it ; but I believe it is quite true. The spot is called "Keppel's Folly" to this day.

We left the Cape with very great regret, and putting to sea shaped our course for Australia.

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