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82 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
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tional and common names were supplanted by a new christening in 1779, when Colonel Robert Jacob Gordon, commanding the
garrison at Cape Castle, led
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another expedition up the river, and named it Orange in honor of the stadtholder.
Hop's
exploring party met a troup of giraffes soon after crossing the Groote
River, and won the distinction of furnishing the first skin of a
giraffe from South Africa to the Museum of the University of Leyden.
But excepting this novel chase there was little to attract the
explorers. The sun scorched them relentlessly in the open desert, and
they could nowhere find water except in the deep sand-pits dug by the
roving natives. Sometimes there was a shallow puddle
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at
the bottom of one of these pits, and even when the sand was barely
moist, further digging to the underlying stone would sometimes yield
a trickle of water. Still they pushed on stubbornly to the farthest
point yet reached from
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the Cape, in latitude 260 18' S., before turning back to bring home their discouraging story.
It was thirty years before this advance was outstripped by
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