The islands were discovered in 1506 by Tristão da Cunha. For three centuries they were visited only occasionally, but in 1811 one Joseph Lambert, an American citizen, claimed them as his personal empire (and sealing station); he published his claim and designed a flag. Offhand his claims seem as valid as any other in history and less presumptuous than most. This left-handed American occupation came to an end in 1816, when the British established a garrison there to keep the islands from being used as a base from which to rescue Napoleon. Only one of Lambert's colony was left at the time; Lambert himself had drowned in a sealing accident.
The British pulled out the garrison the next year, but Corporal William Glass got permission for himself, his wife and two children, and two sailors to stay on; this started the present colony. Over the years a few others joined them, including some women from St. Helena, but the colony grew mainly by natural increase; even today there are only seven family names on Tristan. Mrs. Glass did her part by having fourteen more children, a fact less surprising in view of the very limited recreational facilities.
The soil is poor and, while rainfall is adequate, the bad weather and high winds are no help; potatoes have always been the only crop they could rely on. Even that sometimes failed, or was devastated by rats or caterpillars; many times they have been close to starvation. The British government regarded the islands as unfit for occupancy and more than once tried to get them to accept relocation. But they won't go; they like it there despite the material hardships. Perhaps in view of the mess the rest of us are in and the prospects facing us their attitude is not really cracked.
Fish, potatoes, and birds' eggs collected on Nightingale are their only important foods; sheep and oxen are considered too valuable to slaughter. Of recent years attempts have been made to grow fruit trees but nothing much has come of it as yet. The biggest change has come since the War, through the establishment of the lobster-packing plant. The "lobsters" are our west coast lobster, or spiny crayfish; not the true lobster of Maine. You are probably now buying their lobsters, packed as "Union of South Africa" for the company is a Cape Town company. This company employs all of the men part time and for the first time in its history cash money is coming into Tristan, making it possible for them to buy things made in the outside world. Possibly this is the thin wedge that will eventually place Tristan on the map, join it by regular service to the outside world. Possibly-though it has not as yet; lobsters can be sure of a berth; a traveler cannot.
The Cape Town company has hired an agronomist and a doctor for the islanders. The agronomist has a real job cut out for him to find ways to grow something other than potatoes, but doctor would appear to have a sinecure. There is almost no disease, except colds picked up from passing ships, and it is customary to die of old age in the eighties or nineties. They don't need a dentist-perhaps there is fluorine in the water; I could not find out.
Although the company has been bringing some cash wages into the island for the past four years they are still painfully short on clothes and beg for cast-offs from passing ships. The Administrator is trying to break them of this habit; nevertheless many of us in the Ruys contributed. I had some shirts I did not like anyway and Ticky somewhat tearfully parted with her honeymoon suit-years out of style and useless on this trip, but which she had kept and fetched along for sentimental reasons (and partly to prove that she was still as slender as ever; Ticky is a fine piece of aerodynamic design). She dug out some shoes for them, too, having just stocked up in South America. I could not spare any, nor would mine fit anyone else; my feet aren't mates.
We stood out of there late in the afternoon and set course for Cape Town. Some of the Chinese had purchased two baby penguins from the islanders; in the course of the voyage it was needful to teach them how to walk. A baby penguin is not hatched knowing how, any more than a human baby knows how instinctively. The process is much alike for both types of babies-hold out your arms and say, "Come to Papa!"
Whereupon the baby penguin tries his earnest baby best to oblige, flapping his tiny stub wings and hopping manfully in a two-footed hop like a choir boy in a sack race. I laughed until I had pleurisy-and wanted to cry, too; the infant was so willing about it and so serious.
Penguins are very nice people and they don't mean to be funny. A baby penguin is funnier than an adult by inverse square ratio. They feel nice, too; their hairlike feathers feel like soft, warm fur. At that age they are not yet oily and have not acquired the full fishy fragrance that makes the adults something to stay upwind from.
Albatrosses, about six of them, joined us at Tristan and followed us for two thousand miles. So far as I could see not one of them ever flapped a wing the whole distance. They sail without effort, at twenty or thirty knots, rising much higher than the masthead, dipping down to the water for a fish or some tasty garbage, rising again to any height, all without apparent exertion of any sort-just willpower, personality, and clean living.
The albatross is deceptively large. I mistook the first one I saw for a gull, having nothing to judge it by-I suppose the best way to see how big one is would be to hang it around the neck of an ancient mariner. They have been measured up to twelve feet in wingspread, more span than the condor, largest of the flying birds. A little cross-eyed triangulation enabled me to estimate that those following us ranged eight to ten feet in spread, once I got it through my head that they were big and then waited for a chance to see one between me and part of the rigging. On another occasion one made a crash landing in the swimming pool of the Ruys and could not get out. He crowded the pool all by himself and almost beat the boatswain to a pulp before he could be evicted.
Ticky worried greatly over how the albatrosses would get back home, since no ship would be going that way. (We had concluded that their miraculous powers of levitation were based on the thermals raised by the ship itself.) I pointed out that albatrosses had managed all right for thousands of years before men got around to sailing the oceans. But she refused to be reassured: those poor birds were lost, and somebody ought to do something about it.
The meteorologist's baby daughter enjoyed the trip back; she was a cute little carrottop and a favorite with everyone. But her mother had a very bad time of it. After nearly four years' unworldly peace and quiet of Tristan she found the Ruys (which is really a very quiet place itself) almost unbearably noisy and exciting. The change was too sudden and the poor woman had to spend most of her time in her room.
The rest of us were driving her to distraction.
VIII
The Country With a Problem
Lived a Woman Wonderful. . .
. . . Neither Simple, Kind, nor True-
South Africa: Kipling
Of all the countries we were in the Union of South Africa was the most difficult to evaluate.
It is a wonderful country, a glorious country. We liked everything about it-except the race problem. Which is like liking the Pacific Ocean except for the water in it.
South Africa is a paradise where you expect to wake up some morning with your throat cut. By comparison, our own racial problems are trivial and ninety per cent solved. Before some colored compatriot of mine, smarting under the wrongs of generations, jumps down my throat, let me add that I know that the ten per cent remains to be done, should be done, must be done, but let me point out that the ambition of every literate black man in South Africa is to emigrate to Birmingham, Alabama, or some place else in our Deep South, where he can be among his own kind and still enjoy freedom.
He stands no chance at all of realizing this modest ambition. Carefully contrived laws and rigid customs make it next to impossible for a black man to save enough money to escape. His gross earnings as a farmhand are about twenty-five cents a day; as a contract laborer in industry, in the mines or factories, wages run from twenty-five cents to around sixty cents a day-about what a Pullman porter gets as a single tip.
Apartheid, translated literally as (racial) apartness, is the most pervasive single fact about South Africa. But
it is much more than Jim-Crowism, or simple segregation; as legislated by Dr. Malan's Nationalist Party it means that a native must either live in a reservation or indenture himself to a white man; if he shows up in town without a work card he is liable to prosecution.
It means no voice in government, almost no chance for education, no hope for the future. If the native reserves, which are vast in area, were decent land, the system might be defended, but they are not. Only about seven per cent of South Africa is good arable land; the white man has it and the native has been assigned rocky, hilly, dry and almost unusable acreage that the Afrikander does not want. Almost the only way a black farmer can get decent land is by hiring out to a white farmer; then the white man lets him till a little piece of it for himself.
If a native youth refuses to go along with the cheap-labor racket, his position is hopeless; he can never buy oxen, he can never pay for a wife. So he signs up.
It is a legal system to enslave an entire race, without placing on the bosses the personal responsibility for the slaves entailed by chattel slavery. The South African native is neither a free man nor a chattel and he has the privileges of neither.
The Nationalist Party is not a majority party, but it stays in power through an entirely legal rotten-borough system similar to that which obtains in the California State Senate whereby a farmer's vote counts for more than that of a city dweller. In general the Nationalist Party is Afrikander while the Unionist Party is English just as most of the farmers are of Dutch descent and most of the city folks are of English descent. But it is most unlikely that more than a handful of the opposition party could be found which did not favor some form of racial discrimination. Looked at coldly, their reasons for this stand can be understood, for, no matter what might be or what should be, the vast majority of the natives are still illiterate savages. The South African white man who does not believe in Dr. Malan's brand of apartheid nevertheless believes that if the native were given his full rights as a human being overnight, the white men would be swallowed up.
There are other approaches, of course. Up in the Belgian Congo a black man can work hard and become an evolvé, a man with a certificate which makes him a statutory white, entitled to the same wages, entitled to live in white neighborhoods, entitled to place his children in white schools, even entitled to marry a white woman if he can manage it. All of these things are utterly prohibited in South Africa.
I am not arguing in favor of the evolvé system, as I never saw it in action. I give it as an illustration of the fact that there are middle ways between the extreme of apartheid and the other extreme-an extreme which the Nationalist always cites to prove that apartheid is necessary and unavoidable . . . when in fact it is neither one; it is an inhuman racket for the exclusive benefit of the white man.
On the other hand, do not be misled by the crocodile tears of Mr. Nehru; the very worst exploiters of the black man are the Hindus. The only real public disorder modern South Africa has known was when the natives turned on the Hindus and tried to chuck them back into the Indian Ocean. If South Africa were opened wide to the hordes of India the black man would not stand a prayer. As it is, world opinion and the more liberal elements among the South African whites may eventually force an improvement in his lot-though it looks hopeless today.
"Americans don't know how to deal with natives"-(or "coolies," "niggers," "Chinese," "boys"). So the British have blandly told us and so also have the other breeds who have held colonial empires. But the fact is that we are the only dominant people on earth who do know how to deal with the human beings designated by the above disparaging terms. Proof: when we inherited the Filipino from Spain, we promised him forty years of education and help, then full and unconditional freedom; we made good our promise. Whereupon, when we needed him, he fought for us and with us, and is now our staunch ally and friend.
Compare this record with Indonesia, with Burma, with India, with Kenya, with Indo-China, with South Africa itself. The Hollander can hardly get a visa to the country he once proudly called "Holland in the East," the Englishman in Kenya sleeps with his rifle in his bed, South Africa is as yet free of "incidents" on any large scale but every South African knows that the natives are waking and listening and stirring, aware of Mau Mau to the north. It spoils the white man's sleep; it makes him careful to lock every door, every room, every cupboard; it makes him install flood lights around his beautiful Johannesburg home. It makes him very cautious on the streets of his own city at night.
He knows he is sitting on a powder keg, but he does not like to talk about it. He prefers to talk about how you must "handle the natives," how you "mustn't spoil them."
These "pukka sahib" laddies who know so much about "how to treat natives" fail to see the native as an individual. In the Ruys the South African passengers thought it was funny, ridiculous, a bit bad for our face really, for Ticky and I to bother to know the names of the Chinese crew members with whom we came in daily contact. Many of them (I inquired) did not even know the names of their own room stewards-said names being posted on little cards outside each stateroom door. As for the barmen or deck boys, they would whistle and shout, "Hey! Charlie!"
This attitude applied even more strongly to the Dutch officers. The Dutch once had the worldwide reputation of being the perfect colonials . . . until the Indonesians chucked them out. An engineering officer in the Ruys told me that he did not know the name of a single Chinese among his own engineroom watchstanders; he simply knew which one was "Number One" through whom he bossed the others, nor did he know "Number One" by name. I inquired further and found that most of the Dutch officers did not know the names of their own room servants, although in some cases they had been waited on by the same Chinese for several voyages.
We sat successively with three Dutch officers in the course of the trip. As is usual aboard ship the same waiters would serve a table meal after meal, day after day. Yet the Dutch officers who sat with us seemed to find it amusingly odd, somehow undignified, and a rather startling exhibition of memory that Ticky and I always knew the names of the waiters.
They failed to notice that we got better and quicker service than they did, even better than the Captain got.
Of course, we weren't doing anything odd for Americans; I am not pinning a rose on myself. The usual run of American, if he eats twice in the same restaurant and draws the same waitress, will find out her name and call her by it thereafter. He may find out her name the first time, even if he expects never to eat there again, simply because he dislikes shouting, "Hey, you!" If he is served regularly by the same waitress or waiter he is certain to know the name.
This common American habit is not in itself democratic; it is just horse sense. I have emphasized it because, while it is a minor matter to us, simply good manners and convenience, it is a major, important, even crucial difference between us and most other Western white nations. Hell's bells, even a dog is easier to handle if you call him by name! Why can't these lunkheads see that?
The most important possession of any man is his own name. Without a name he has no face. The white man in the East has always emphasized the importance of keeping face himself, but he seems to have given little thought to the deadly danger of not giving face to natives.
In most other ways the South African white (or "European" as he always calls himself) is a remarkably pleasant fellow-jovial, sociable, warm, not at all distant with strangers, being much more like us than they are like the English in this respect. They tend to be somewhat anti-American in general, but not toward individual Americans. This anti-American attitude seems to derive first from a belief that we are stirring up a third world war (they have swallowed the Moscow line on that point), on a dislike for us as business competitors, and a generalized nationalism-South Africans are among the most nationalistic people in the world. They seem to dislike the English even more than they dislike us and speak of the day when they will divorce themselves from England completely-not "if," but "when."
This xenophob
ia takes the curious form with the Afrikander South African of tending to be a little surly with those who speak English instead of Afrikaans. The country is officially bilingual but a civil servant will be a lot more civil if addressed in Afrikaans-but he will be just as difficult about it with an English-speaking fellow citizen as with a foreigner.
This clinging to a national language spoken by no one else anywhere (Afrikaans is not Dutch, just as Pennsylvania Dutch is not German; it is a highly bastardized dialect derived from Dutch), this insistence on Afrikaans, is perhaps the most cross-grained symptom of their neurotic nationalism. Afrikaans is a language unnecessary and useless. It is spoken by less than two million people practically all of whom speak English as well-and English is spoken by more than a half billion people on this planet. It has no tradition worthy of the name, it has little literature; to use it for science or technology requires borrowing all the technical words from some other language. It requires almost everything in South Africa to be printed twice; it requires wasted years of study to acquire a second daily language, when the time could be spent learning Spanish or German. It has no use at all save to shut out the rest of the world.
Which is exactly what many South Africans, most particularly the Afrikanders, want to do.
Many of them want to make South Africa self-sufficient in all respects; the policies of the present government are aimed at making the country independent both in food and in manufactured goods. They still would like to sell, but they don't want to buy anything if they can possibly help it, and aside from the regrettable necessities of trade they wish the rest of the world would go away and forget to come back. Clinging to a language which no one else can talk makes it easier for them to maintain this attitude. Psychiatrists have a name for this symptom when exhibited by individuals.
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