The crossing of the Nardouw Mountains brought Coetzee within sight of the Onder Bokkeveld escarpment, which he skirted. The ground was now rough and stony. Rains came late in 1760, and the party took what shelter it could find against sudden thunderstorms with hailstones as large as pigeons’ eggs (diameter 14mm). The frightened oxen huddled together and the men crouched in the lee of the wagon smoking and swearing. Tobacco was grown in the Piquetberg district though not on Coetzee’s farm. It is well known that tobacco and brandy were instrumental in corrupting Hottentot culture. For these luxuries the Hottentots traded away their wealth in cattle and sheep, reducing themselves to a race of thieves, vagrants, and beggars. From the stupor induced by tobacco they could be roused not even by hunger. All day they lay beside their huts, rotating to keep in the sun when the weather was cool and in the shade when it was hot, their indolence such that their refuge from hunger was not the exertion of hunting but anodyne sleep or the dreary music of the gowra, an instrument of some interest which I shall describe later. The narcotic effect of tobacco was well known to the Hottentots, who amused themselves poisoning snakes with nicotine oil from their pipes.
Coetzee’s servants were perforce divorced from the indolence of a degenerate tribal culture. Having lost their stock, they or their fathers had migrated into Coetzee’s orbit. In return for their labour they were allowed to build their huts on his land and run their small flocks with his. They were paid in grain, sugar, and other essentials, and in judicious measures of tobacco and brandy. Thus Coetzee on his farm laid the foundations for another of those durable relations in which farmer and servant dance in slow parallel through time, the farmer’s son and the servant’s son playing dolosse together in the yard, graduating with adulthood into the more austere relation of master and servant, the servant revolving about the master for the duration of a working life, the two old men that they become stopping in the bright sunlight to exchange a cackled reminiscence, the tipped hat, the shuffle, the grandchildren playing dolosse. There was no word for “Yes” in Hottentot. To signify his assent a Hottentot would repeat the last phrase of his master’s command. The Hottentot language has perished, but one can still hear these antiphonal closes on the farms of the western Cape, in Afrikaans. “Drive them to the north camp”, “To the north camp, my master”. Their huts of curved wattle branches have given way to mud houses with corrugated iron roofs made in Benoni. Yet even these are capable of picturesqueness: smoke drifting up from the wood-stove, pumpkins on the roof, the naked bottoms of children, etc. There is a principle of stability in history which refines from all conflicts those conformations likeliest to endure. The quiet farmhouse on the slopes, the quiet huts in the hollow, the starlit sky.
The region through which Coetzee now passed was not virgin to the European eye. Hunters and traders had passed there before, often without the Company’s knowledge. But the region was so vast, its explorers so few, that the historian may legitimately think of its features as unknown, and of each ask the question, Who discovered this?, or, to be more precise, Which European discovered this?, for though the native population of the sub-continent has always been low we can never be sure with respect to an indigenous phenomenon that indigenous eyes were not the first eyes laid on it. Coetzee cut his double swathe (forward journey, return journey) through the partially unknown between the Piquetberg and the Orange River, his keen hunter’s eye distinguishing every bush within a hundred yards of his wagon (insects and the smaller reptiles retire before the discoverer’s gaze). The camelopard (giraffe) we all agree is his, in its austral variety. But against Thunberg, Sparrman, Paterson, et al., the gentleman botanists who flooded the Cape at the turn of the century, let me now advance Coetzee’s claim to the geeluygie (Malephora mollis), a succulent so astringent that enraged sheep dig it up with their horns. The criteria for a new discovery employed by the gentlemen from Europe were surely parochial. They required that every specimen fill a hole in their European taxonomies. But when Bushmen first saw the grass which we call Aristida brevifolia and spoke among themselves and found that it was unknown and called it Twaa, was there not perhaps an unspoken botanical order among them in which Twaa now found a place? And if we accept such concepts as a Bushman taxonomy and a Bushman discovery, must we not accept the concepts of a frontiersman taxonomy and a frontiersman discovery? “I do not know this, my people do not know it, but at the same time I know what it is like, it is like rooigras, it is a kind of rooigras, I will call it boesmansgras”—that is the type of the inward moment of discovery. In his way Coetzee rode like a god through a world only party named, differentiating and bringing into existence.
I wish I had hunting adventures to relate: a bull elephant wheeling suddenly, for example, and disemboweling a horse, the hapless rider being saved from its wrathful tusks only by a timely shot; or a lioness, wounded, springing upon a Hottentot bearer, and dispatched too late (green eyes, red gums) to prevent the malodorous contents of his abdomen from being divulged to the skies. Hunting adventures lend excitement, however spurious, to history. Their structure is dramatically satisfying: complacency (I have a gun), discomfiture (my gun is not loaded, you have teeth/tusks/horns), relief (you jump the wrong one and/or I shoot you despite all). Coetzee was not alas the kind of hunter whom such adventures frequented. He shot but two elephants on this expedition, both (I race ahead of my story) north of the Orange. A scout came back with word of a troop. Undetected, Coetzee and a bearer approached them on foot (elephants, as we know, have poor vision, and the hunters were downwind). Coetzee took off his trousers, as is the wont of elephant hunters, and shot a bull stone dead with a ball behind the shoulder. The troop wheeled and began to lumber off. Coetzee raced to his horse and gave chase. From close quarters he fired into the belly of a straggling cow, forcing it to an agonized walk. Then followed a manoeuver which, though dangerous in appearance, was quite orthodox. He reloaded and circled in front of the cow. Baffled, it stooped to recruit its strength, whereupon the Hottentot bearer crept up and with a swing of his axe severed its Achilles tendon. Coetzee now leisurely approached the beast and dispatched it with a shot behind the ear. The tusks were chopped out and carried back to the wagon. That night (August 29) the hunters ate elephant heart, a notable delicacy. The foot is also much prized, but Coetzee found its taste insipid. I trust you have enjoyed this adventure.
With the crossing of latitude 31°S the party entered the country of the Namaquas. Would that I might expand on this thoroughly interesting people. The Namaquas must never be confused with the Cape Hottentots, a debased people whose tribal organization collapsed forever under the onslaught of smallpox in 1713 and whom Barrow justly calls “the most helpless, the most wretched of the human race, whose faces are continually overspread with gloom and melancholy, whose name will be forgotten or remembered solely as that of a deceased person of little note”.9 The Namaqua gave way before the pressure of White settlement, but they did not break until 1907. Emissaries sent to them in 1661 were fêted by a hundred musicians; the next envoy failed to find them, for they had trekked to their inland fastnesses.
The Namaqua were a people of medium stature. The men were slender, the women plump. Their skins were yellowish-brown, their eyes black and piercing like those of the Bushmen (Bleek claims that with his naked eye the Bushman discerned the satellites of Jupiter centuries before Galileo). Having mastered the trick of forcing the testicles back into the body, their men were noted for fleetness of foot. Their women, like those of ancient Egypt, were affected with a noticeable protrusion of the labia minora, but, knowing no better, regarded it as no blemish. A people of great interest, of great piquancy even, to the anthropologist. It was they who invented the Capuchin heelband. As protection against disease they twined the guts of leopards about their necks. Their craving for fat was insatiable. Loud was their jubilation when they came upon a stranded whale. Their kinship system. Romantic love (the story of the thwarted girl who threw herself over a precipice10). Burial customs.
Finger-amputation as a testament of mourning. The healing virtue of male urine. Laws and punishments: for stock theft a bath of hot resin, for incest loss of limb, for homicide the clubbing out of the brains. Their reluctance to venerate a Supreme Being (“Why should we pray to one who at one time gives excessive drought and at another excessive rain, when we would rather see it fall moderately and conveniently?”11). Material enough for a book.
So Coetzee’s caravan entered Namaqualand. His wagon contained: black, white and blue porcelain beads, tobacco, knives, looking-glasses, brass wire, there muskets, balls, a barrel of gunpowder, a bag of shot, flints, bars of lead and a bullet-mould, blankets, a saw, a spade, a hatchet, spikes, nails, ropes, canvas, a sail-needle, oxhide, yokes, halters, tar, pitch, grease, resin, linchpins, hooks, rings, a lantern, rice, biscuit, flour, brandy, three water-casks, a medicine chest, and many other things—civilization, in fact, in ovo. Within sight of the Khamiesberg his wagon sank to the axletrees in soft sand. Dugout, it sank again. Under the strain of a double span of oxen the pole (disselboom) broke. This first misfortune of the expedition cast his servants into hopeless apathy. Lacking all initiative, they stood about with glazed eyes and sucked their pipes. A people without a future. Only when thundered at did they stir to unload the wagon, bind the broken pole, lay a bed of branches, and drag it out. The rest of the day was spent in replacing the pole. The old one had been of assegaai-wood. The new one was of ironwood, not so tough but harder and heavier. How lucky that the socket (tang) was not damaged.
Coetzee glanced to neither right nor left as he passed through the defiles of the Khamies mountains. At night the thermometer fell below freezing point. There was snow on the peaks. In the morning the cattle, their joints frozen, had to be lifted to their feet with a pole passed lengthwise under chest and belly. At one of their halts (August 18) the expedition left behind: the ashes of the night fire, combustion complete, a feature of dry climates, faeces dotted in mounds over a broad area, herbivore in the open, carnivore behind rocks; urine stains with minute traces of copper salts; tea leaves; the leg-bones of a springbok; five inches of braided oxhide rope; tobacco ash; and a musket ball. The faeces dried in the course of the day. Rope and bones were eaten by a hyena on August 22. A storm on November 2 scattered all else. The musket ball was not there on August 18, 1933.
From scalp and beard, dead hair and scales. From the ears, crumbs of wax. From the nose, mucus and blood (Klawer, Dikkop, a fall and blows respectively). From the eyes, tears and a rheumy paste. From the mouth, blood, rotten teeth, calculus, phlegm, vomit. From the skin, pus, blood, scabs, weeping plasma (Plaatje, a gunpowder burn), sweat, sebum, scales, hair. Nail fragments, interdigital decay. Urine and the minuter kidneystones (Cape water is rich in alkalis). Smegma (circumcision is confined to the Bantu). Faecal matter, blood, pus (Dikkop, poison). Semen (al!). These relicts, deposited over Southern Africa in two swathes, soon disappeared under sun, wind, rain, and the attentions of the insect kingdom, though their atomic constituents are still of course among us. Scripta maent. Musket balls, those which found their mark more or less but were never recovered, their mark roaming the veld until it staggered and dropped from loss of blood or slowly over a period of weeks recuperated its force and survived mothering the lead, and those which found no mark, but struck the earth and embedded themselves or fell exhausted to its surface, memorialized their track on either side.
The defiles of the Khamies mountains abounded in game. The deserts of the Koa were barren and presented a variety of dangers. Rain never fell. Drinking-water came from underground springs whose mouths the Bushmen covered to lessen evaporation. The Bushmen of the desert are still known for their cruelty. They made poison by pounding the body of a certain black spider, genus Mygale, in the juice of Amaryllis toxicaria (giftbol); a scratch from an arrowhead coated in this poison resulted in lingering and painful death. Captured enemies were disembowelled and in a unique variant of the uroborus given their own entrails to ingest, or buried to the neck and left for the vultures, or robbed of the soles of their feet. The safety of Coetzee’s party depended on their speed and vigilance. Travelling by night they covered the hundred miles to the Great River in five days. Several cattle perished. The following also contributed to their survival.
A bed of truffles (kambros roots, genus Terfezia), 29°29’ S, 18°25’ E.
A bustard gompou, Otis kori, discovery alleged to Burchell) weighing 35 lb. which perished in a hail of smallshot and pebbles from Klawer’s piece. This bustard is alas nearly extinct.
A korhaan (Eupodotis vigorsii) weighing 20 lb., deprived of the power of flight by a pellet from the same gun (bravo Klawer!) and of its head after a dawn chase across the veld (zig korhaan, zig Klawer, zag Korhaan, zag Klawer), 29°20’ S, 18°27’ E.
Fried ants, a meal of which only the Hottentots partook, 29°16’ S, 18°26’ E.
And so on 24 August Coetzee arrived at the Great River (Gariep, Orange). The sight which greeted him was majestic, the waters flowing broad and strong, the cliffs resounding with their roar. Here he might have rested all day, here have fixed his abode, enjoying the shade of the willows (Salix gariepina, not the weeping willow) and inhaling the cool breezes. His Hottentots, glad of shelter from the scorchings sun, had thrown aside their garments and lay naked in the shade or swam fearlessly in the stream. The cooing of doves soothed his ear. The cattle, unyoked, drank at the water’s edge. He saw that the banks, clothed in trees (zwartebast, karreehout), might furnish timber for all the wants of colonization. He could not see that the course of the river was plagued with falls and rapids, or that it debouched on a particularly desolate strip of coast. He dreamed a father-dream of rafts laden with produce sailing down to the sea and the waiting schooners.
He named his discovery the Great River. One Robert Jacob Gordon, born Doesburg 1743, suicide Cape Town 1795, attained the Great River in 1777 and renamed it for the House of Orange. The second appellation has regrettably stuck.
Herewith we have come to the end of that part of Coetzee’s narrative which belongs to the annals of exploration. His journey and sojourn north of the Great River, his return, his second expedition with Hendrik Hop, full of incident though they are, are nevertheless somewhat of an historical irrelevance. Man’s thrust into the future is history; all the rest, the dallying by the wayside, the retraced path, belongs to anecdote, the evening by the hearth-fire.
After fording the Great River Coetzee turned north-east along the Leeuwen River (//Houm). For four days the terrain was mountainous. On the fifth he emerged upon a flat and grassy plain, the land of the Great Namaqua. He parleyed with their leaders, assuring them that his only intention was to hunt elephants and reminding them that he came under the protection of the Governor. Pacified by this intelligence they allowed him to pass. He camped at a warm spring which he named Warmbad. Today the spring is enclosed and supplies a hotel. Within sight of the Bunsenberg he turned back. On the way he was met by a party of Namaqua who told him that ten days’ march to the north there lived “a kind of people whom they called Damroquas, of a tawny or yellow appearance, with long hair and linen clothes”.
He shot two beasts which in his innocence he conceived to be a variety of camel (Kameelperd, giraffe), and brought their hides home.
He returned to his farm on 12 October 1760.
I hope I have succeeded in evoking something of the reality of this extraordinary man.
Notes
1. Prepared by the Political Secretariat at the Castle of Good Hope, this document has been published by E. C. Godée Molsbergen in his Reizen in Zuid Afrika in de Hollandse Tijd (The Hague, 1916), vol. I, pp. 18–22.
2. Hero—Herero. On the interesting speculation, acceded in by Von Trotha, that the Herero derive their name from the phrase ova erero “people of yesterday”, see Heinrich Vedder, The Native Tribes of South West Africa (Cape Town, 1928), p. 155.
3. John Barrow, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (
London, 1801), vol. I, pp. 182–184.
4. Researches in South Africa (London, 1828), p. ix.
5. William J. Burchell, Travels in the Interior of Southern Africa (London, 1822), vol. I, p. 301.
6. Anon., Remarks on the Demoralising Influence of Slavery (London 1828), p. 101.
7. H. Lichtenstein records this gruesome tale in his Travels in Southern Africa (1811) (Cape Town, 1928), vol. I, p. 125.
8. Diary of Leendert Janssen, Hague codex 1067 bis (OD 1648 II).
9. Barrow, Travels, vol. I, pp. 144, 148, 152.
10. Olfert Dapper, Naukeurige Beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche Gewesten (Amsterdam, 1668), p. 72.
11. Dapper, p. 85.
Appendix: Deposition of Jacobus Coetzee (1760)
Narrative given at the order of the Right Honourable Rijk Tulbagh, Councillor Extraordinary of Netherlands India and Governor of the Cape of Good Hope and all Dependencies thereof, etc., etc., by the burghet Jacobus Coetsé, Janszoon, concerning the journey undertaken by him in the Land of the Great Namaquas, as follows:
That the Narrator, having permission by written order of the Honourable Governor to travel inland for the purpose of shooting elephants, on the 16th of July this year left his dwelling place near the Piquetbergen with one wagon and six Hottentots, crossed the Oliphants, Groene, and Cous Rivers, and travelled as far as the Coperbergen visited by the Governor van der Stel in the year 1685.
That the Narrator pursued his journey further northward and after travelling for 40 days arrived at the Great River, to the Narrator’s knowledge never before crossed by the European Nation, which is everywhere at least three or four hundred feet wide and for the most part very deep, except at the place where the Narrator crossed it, where there is a broad sand-shoal, and is on both sides overgrown with the so-called Fatherlands Reed; that the Narrator found both banks covered with a kind of fine yellow glistening dust or sand of which, on account of its beauty, he gathered a little and brought [sic] back with him.
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