and
pulse, and even grapes grow readily, and rice also is cultivated. These
people have young ostriches, beef, and sea and fresh water fish in
abundance. When they wish to catch the young ostriches, as soon as the
birds are seven or eight days old they go to the nests, drive a stake
into the ground and tie the young birds by one of their feet in the
nest, so that they cannot escape, leaving them to be fed by their
parents till they are of good size, when they are taken to be"sold or
eaten.
When
the Dutch began to inhabit the Cape of Good Hope, they took, as I have
said, the daughter of one of these Cafres as soon as she was born. She
is white and beautiful, save that she has a slightly depressed nose,
and she serves as interpreter to the Dutch. She had a child by a
Frenchman, but the Company would not allow him to marry her. On the
contrary, they confiscated 800 livres of his wages ; this was somewhat
hard on him.
In
this country there are many lions and tigers, and the Dutch have
discovered a contrivance which answers well for killing them. They
fasten a gun to a stake driven into the ground, and fix some meat at
the end of the gun, which is bound to a cord attached to the trigger.
When the animal comes to take this meat the cord draws the trigger, and
the balls lodge in its mouth or body. The Cafres eat a root which
resembles our root of cheriiy,1 which they roast, and it
serves them as bread. Sometimes they make it into flour, and it tastes
like chestnuts. As for flesh, they eat it raw, and fish also in the
same condition ; and as for the entrails of animals,
beyond the fort built by Riebeck, marked the beginning of the colony (Ency. Brit., v. 237), see Ovington, 499, and Du Bois, p. 151.
1 Dr. E. Sidney Hartland has kindly searched many authorities on South Africa in order to identify this root. F. Leguat (Voyage, Hakluyt
Society ed., ii. 287) says of the Hottentots : ' They set great store
by a Root that resembles our skirrets [a perennial umbelliferous plant,
Sium sisarum, New English Diet. s.v!\. They roast it, and
oftentimes make it into Past, which is their Bread, and somewhat like
our Chestnut.' It is apparently a kind of ground-nut, which Junod (Life of a South African Tribe, ii.
12) says ' is extensively cultivated, being of everyday use in the
Thonga culinary art, which it provides with the fatty principles... .
Its taste is delicious, either prepared as a sauce to season mealie
flour, or roasted'. [In mod. Fr. chervi or -is = skirret.]
