Part 4

Who knows what might have been the case had a colony from the plains of Champagne or Bordeaux first settled there? Apropos of this, I may mention that a fellow passenger of mine was a Frenchman from Champagne. At the Cape he entered into partnership with a young Englishman (also a fellow passenger), and agreed to take a wine farm. The Englishman was to supply capital—the Frenchman knowledge. Monsieur had determined to make “Cape Champagne;” and remarkably well he succeeded. Often at public and even at private dinners, when swallowing something dignified with the name of that right-royal wine, have I sighed to think how far more palatable would be a bottle of Monsieur L——’s vintage.

It perhaps requires a greater outlay of capital to be a successful wine-grower than almost anything else in the colony. There are, in addition to the purchase of land and vines, the expenses of storehouses, casks, and, above all, that most difficult commodity to attain—labour. So great is the want of the latter, and so uncertain the supply of even that which is attainable, that he is a bold man who ventures on wine-farming at the Cape.

The wine-growers are generally wealthy men, for, in spite of all obstacles, their profits are very large. Few people who even touch at the Cape fail to visit the Constantia wine farms, producing the delicious sweet wine of that name. It is grown on a mountain named after the wife of one of the former Governors of the Cape—whether in compliment to the lady’s sweetness of disposition, or her love for the wine then produced, I know not. Three farms monopolise this mountain. Even half a mile from them, the wine produced is of a very inferior flavour. They live in excellent style, these Constantia wine-growers. When first I visited one of them, a carriage-and-four and two buggies, conveying a party of Indian visitors, had just drawn up at the door. A _déjeûner_ was spread in a long, handsome, and elegantly-furnished apartment, for the entertainment of any one who might chance to come and visit the farm. Two or three superintendents were ready to show the “lions” of the place to visitors, and to give them samples of the wine to taste. There are many varieties of it. And, oh, how seductive that same Constantia is! Who can resist it in all its delicious varieties?

I recollect that as I rode towards the farm I passed a toll-gate, and looking, I suppose, extremely like a “griffin” (for I had only been a week in the colony), the “pikeman” observed, as he took my twopence, and handed me the ticket, “Hopes you’ll be able to read it as you comes back, Sir!”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“No offence, Sir,” said the man with a grin; “only I’ve seed a many as _couldn’t_—that’s all.”

The three Constantia wine-growers are Dutchmen; and so, in fact, are nearly all the wine farmers throughout the colony. Englishmen who go out there generally take to trade or sheep-farming; and they are right,—for it requires far less experience, less capital, and less labour, to follow almost any calling at the Cape than that of a wine-grower. I think, however, that a Company might be profitably established here or in the colony, for cultivating the vine there and importing its produce to Europe. For this purpose, they should send out labourers and superintendents, carefully selected from the wine districts of France and Germany; and take care that the Madeira plan of gathering the grapes be adopted. They should agitate, too, for a reduction of the duty on the wine: at present it is far too high. Perhaps the profits would not at first be great, for there is a serious obstacle to be overcome,—a bad name in the market; but eventually I believe that the speculation would be a lucrative one, and that it would in time remove the unfortunate stigma now affixed to Cape wine.

In these days of railroad travelling, when twenty miles an hour would be considered slow enough to justify a letter of complaint from “Viator” to the editor of the Times, it may rather astonish my readers to learn that twenty miles is considered a fair day’s journey at the Cape. Yet so it is.

Unless you amble on horseback, which only men and _young_ men can undertake, the sole and universal method of travelling is by an ox-wagon. Just go and see the wagon exhibited by Cumming in his South-African Exhibition, at Hyde Park corner! Imagine such a machine, with twelve or fourteen oxen attached to it by a long rope of plaited hide (called a treck-tow) attached to the pole, and to which are fastened the yokes of the oxen. Then fancy a little Hottentot lad, very much like one of the Bushmen lately exhibited in London (but, perhaps, hardly so handsome,) leading the two front oxen by a strip of hide fastened to their horns (called a reim), and a full-grown Hottentot seated on the driving-seat, in the front of the wagon, with an enormous whip in his hands formed of a long bamboo handle and a lash of plaited thongs, with which he can, from his seat, reach the leaders of his team; and you have the “travelling carriage” of South Africa complete before your eyes.

The same team (or “span” in South-African phraseology) of oxen take you the whole journey, whether it be twenty or two hundred miles; and as they have no other food on the way, nor indeed at any other time, than the grass and water on the roadside, you may imagine that twenty or twenty-five miles a day is quite work enough for them. The journey is, however, by no means so tedious or uninteresting an affair as might be supposed. It is like so many days of pic-nic-ing, with new scenery each day, and in a glorious climate. The wagon is of course well furnished with tea, sugar, coffee, wine, flour, eggs, fresh and preserved meat, vegetables, and in fact all that refreshes and cheers the inward man: for, be it recollected, that there are no inns, or at least the very few there are are scattered at such great distances apart over the country that no wagon traveller thinks of visiting them. The wagon in fact becomes your home and your store-house as well as your travelling carriage. A long stretcher is slung in it, on which is placed your bed, which serves for a lounging couch by day. Some people travel with a tent, but this is unnecessary when the party does not exceed two or three, besides the Hottentots, who sleep under the wagon, or under a bush or anywhere else on the ground, as soundly as their masters in their beds.

Travellers generally take their guns with them, as they may chance to get a little sport on the road. At six in the morning we will suppose the carriage to start; at about ten you will “outspan”—that is, take out the oxen and let them feed, and prepare for breakfast. Your Hottentots soon collect fuel, the wagon is drawn up close by a mimosa or some other bush, a fire is lighted, the kettle set to boil, the coffee prepared, the steaks cooked in a frying-pan, and perhaps some hot cakes made of meal baked for you; and with a beautiful country round you, and a magnificent sky above you, if you cannot make a good breakfast, and feel a light heart, I fear that you must be terribly “used up.”

Then comes a stroll through the bush with your double-barrel on your shoulder, in search of a partridge or a Guinea fowl, or a stray antelope; and back to the wagon, now ready for another start.

Forward, again, till dinner-time, when the same process is gone through. After dinner, perhaps you will go forward another four or five miles, and then “outspan” for the night.

The nights of the Cape climate are glorious! I can scarcely imagine anything more beautiful. The sky of that deep, dark blue, which we never see in northern climates; the moon shining as she only can in such a sky, the stars so bright and distinct, with the beautiful southern cross in all its brilliancy, among them; the perfect stillness of everything around; the lofty and rugged mountains where the foot of man has never trodden; the thick dark bush, penetrable only by the wild beast or the savage; the broad plain covered with Aloes, Cape Heaths, Wild Stocks, and the ten thousand variegated shrubs which make a carpet beneath your feet as beautiful as the canopy of heaven above your head; and that little spot worthy the pencil of Salvator Rosa—the dark foliage of the bush lighted up by your fire, and around it the dusky forms of your Hottentots stretched at their ease, and enjoying, as none but a half savage knows how thoroughly to enjoy, the requisite delight of the “Dolce far niente.”

No doubt railroads are glorious inventions. All honour, too, to Macadam, and to stagecoaches and post-chaises; all praise to the comforts and convenience of a good English Inn. But if you have a spark of native poetry in your composition, in spite of bad roads, slow travelling, rough fare, and a bed “al fresco,” you will enjoy one of these South African journeys more than any trip you ever took in Europe. You have no other travelling companions than the beauties of Nature’s works around you, fresh as from the hands of their Creator, and the thoughts and reflections high and holy, as such scenes and such companionship will not fail to call forth.

CHEMICAL CONTRADICTIONS.

Science, whose aim and end is to prove the harmony and “eternal fitness of things,” also proves that we live in a world of paradoxes; and that existence itself, is a whirl of contradictions. Light and darkness, truth and falsehood, virtue and vice, the negative and positive poles of galvanic or magnetic mysteries, are evidences of all-pervading antitheses, which acting like the good and evil genii of Persian Mythology, neutralise each other’s powers when they come into collision. It is the office of science to solve these mysteries. The appropriate symbol of the lecture-room is a Sphinx; for a scientific lecturer is but a better sort of unraveller of riddles.

Who would suppose, for instance, that water—which everybody knows, extinguishes fire—may, under certain circumstances, add fuel to flame, so that the “coming man” who is to “set the Thames on fire,” may not be far off. If we take some mystical grey-looking globules of potassium (which is the metallic basis of common pearl-ash) and lay them upon water, the water will instantly appear to ignite. The globules will swim about in flames, reminding us of the “death-fires” described by the Ancient Mariner, burning “like witches’ oil” on the surface of the stagnant sea. Sometimes even, without any chemical ingredient being added, Fire will appear to spring spontaneously from water; which is not a simple element, as Thales imagined, when he speculated upon the origin of the Creation, but two invisible gases—oxygen and hydrogen, chemically combined. During the electrical changes of the atmosphere in a thunder-storm, these gases frequently combine with explosive violence, and it is this combination which takes place when “the big rain comes dancing to the earth.” These fire-and-water phenomena are thus accounted for; certain substances have peculiar affinities or attractions for one another; the potassium has so inordinate a desire for oxygen, that the moment it touches, it decomposes the water, abstracts all the oxygen, and sets free the hydrogen or inflammable gas. The potassium, when combined with the oxygen, forms that corrosive substance known as caustic potash, and the heat disengaged during this process, ignites the hydrogen. Here the mystery ends; and the contradictions are solved;—Oxygen and hydrogen when combined, become water; when separated the hydrogen gas burns with a pale lambent flame. Many of Nature’s most delicate deceptions are accounted for by a knowledge of these laws.

Your analytical chemist sadly annihilates, with his scientific machinations, all poetry. He bottles up at pleasure the Nine Muses, and proves them—as the fisherman in the Arabian Nights did the Afrite—to be all smoke. Even the Will o’ the Wisp cannot flit across its own morass without being pursued, overtaken, and burnt out by this scientific detective policeman. He claps an extinguisher upon Jack o’ Lanthorn thus:—He says that a certain combination of phosphorus and hydrogen, which rises from watery marshes, produces a gas called phosphuretted hydrogen, which ignites spontaneously the moment it bubbles up to the surface of the water and meets with atmospheric air. Here again, the Ithuriel wand of science dispels all delusion, pointing out to us, that in such places animal and vegetable substances are undergoing constant decomposition; and as phosphorus exists under a variety of forms in these bodies, as phosphate of lime, phosphate of soda, phosphate of magnesia, &c., and as furthermore the decomposition of water itself is the initiatory process in these changes, so we find that phosphorus and hydrogen are supplied from these sources; and we may therefore easily conceive the consequent formation of phosphuretted hydrogen. This gas rises in a thin stream from its watery bed, and the moment it comes in contact with the oxygen of the atmosphere, it bursts into a flame so buoyant, that it flickers with every breath of air, and realises the description of Goëthe’s Mephistopheles, that the course of Jack-o’-lantern is generally “zig-zag.”

Who would suppose that absolute darkness may be derived from two rays of light! Yet such is the fact. If two rays proceed from two luminous points very close to each other, and are so directed as to cross at a given point on a sheet of white paper in a dark room, their united light will be twice as bright as either ray singly would produce. But if the difference in the distance of the two points be diminished only one half, the one light will extinguish the other, and produce absolute darkness. The same curious result may be produced by viewing the flame of a candle through two very fine slits near to each other in a card. So, likewise, strange as it may appear, if two musical strings be so made to vibrate, in a certain succession of degrees, as for the one to gain half a vibration on the other, the two resulting sounds will antagonise each other and produce an interval of perfect silence. How are these mysteries to be explained? The Delphic Oracle of science must again be consulted, and among the high priests who officiate at the shrine, no one possesses more recondite knowledge, or can recal it more instructively, than Sir David Brewster. “The explanation which philosophers have given,” he observes, “of these remarkable phenomena, is very satisfactory, and may easily be understood. When a wave is made on the surface of a still pool of water by plunging a stone into it, the wave advances along the surface, while the water itself is never carried forward, but merely rises into a height and falls into a hollow, each portion of the surface experiencing an elevation and a depression in its turn. If we suppose two waves equal and similar, to be produced by two separate stones, and if they reach the same spot at the same time, that is, if the two elevations should exactly coincide, they would unite their effects, and produce a wave twice the size of either; but if the one wave should be put so far before the other, that the hollow of the one coincided with the elevation of the other, and the elevation of the one with the hollow of the other, the two waves would obliterate or destroy one another; the elevation as it were of the one filling up half the hollow of the other, and the hollow of the one taking away half the elevation of the other, so as to reduce the surface to a level. These effects may be exhibited by throwing two equal stones into a pool of water; and also may be observed in the Port of Batsha, where the two waves arriving by channels of different lengths actually obliterate each other. Now, as light is supposed to be produced by waves or undulations of an ethereal medium filling all nature, and occupying the pores of the transparent bodies; and as sound is produced by undulations or waves in the air: so the successive production of light and darkness by two bright lights, and the production of sound and silence by two loud sounds, may be explained in the very same manner as we have explained the increase and obliteration of waves formed on the surface of water.”

The apparent contradictions in chemistry are, indeed, best exhibited in the lecture-room, where they may be rendered visible and tangible, and brought home to the general comprehension. The Professor of Analytical Chemistry, J. H. Pepper, who demonstrates these things in the Royal Polytechnic Institution, is an expert manipulator in such mysteries; and, taking a leaf out of his own magic-book, we shall conjure him up before us, standing behind his own laboratory, surrounded with all the implements of his art. At our recent visit to this exhibition we witnessed him perform, with much address, the following experiments:—He placed before us a pair of tall glass vessels, each filled, apparently, with water;—he then took two hen’s eggs, one of these he dropped into one of the glass vessels, and, as might have been expected, it immediately sank to the bottom. He then took the other egg, and dropped it into the other vessel of water, but, instead of sinking as the other had done, it descended only half way, and there remained suspended in the midst of the transparent fluid. This, indeed, looked like magic—one of Houdin’s sleight-of-hand performances—for what could interrupt its progress? The water surrounding it appeared as pure below as around and above the egg, yet there it still hung like Mahomet’s coffin, between heaven and earth, contrary to all the well established laws of gravity. The problem, however, was easily solved. Our modern Cagliostro had dissolved in one half of the water in this vessel as much common salt as it would take up, whereby the density of the fluid was so much augmented that it opposed a resistance to the descent of the egg after it had passed through the unadulterated water, which he had carefully poured upon the briny solution, the transparency of which, remaining unimpaired, did not for a moment suggest the suspicion of any such impregnation. The good housewife, upon the same principle, uses an egg to test the strength of her brine for pickling.

Every one has heard of the power which bleaching gas (chlorine) possesses in taking away colour, so that a red rose held over its fumes will become white. The lecturer, referring to this fact, exhibited two pieces of paper; upon one was inscribed, in large letters, the word “PROTEUS;” upon the other no writing was visible; although he assured us the same word was there inscribed. He now dipped both pieces of paper in a solution of bleaching-powder, when the word “Proteus” disappeared from the paper upon which it was before visible; whilst the same word instantly came out, sharp and distinct, upon the paper which was previously a blank. Here there appeared another contradiction: the chlorine in the one case obliterating, and in the other reviving the written word; and how was this mystery explained? Easily enough! Our ingenious philosopher, it seems, had used indigo in penning the one word which had disappeared; and had inscribed the other with a solution of a chemical substance, iodide of potassium and starch; and the action which took place was simply this: the chlorine of the bleaching solution set free the iodine from the potassium, which immediately combined with the starch, and gave colour to the letters which were before invisible. Again—a sheet of white paper was exhibited, which displayed a broad and brilliant stripe of scarlet—(produced by a compound called the bin-iodide of mercury)—when exposed to a slight heat the colour changed immediately to a bright yellow, and, when this yellow stripe was crushed by smartly rubbing the paper, the scarlet colour was restored, with all its former brilliancy. This change of colour was effected entirely by the alteration which the heat, in the one case, and the friction, in the other, produced in the particles which reflected these different colours;—and, upon the same principle, we may understand the change of the colour in the lobster-shell, which burns from black to red in boiling; because the action of the heat produces a new arrangement in the particles which compose the shell.

With the assistance of water and fire, which have befriended the magicians of every age, contradictions of a more marvellous character may be exhibited, and even the secret art revealed of handling red hot metals, and passing through the fiery ordeal. If we take a platinum ladle, and hold it over a furnace until it becomes of a bright red heat, and then project cold water into its bowl, we shall find that the water will remain quiescent and give no sign of ebullition—not so much as a single “fizz;” but, the moment the ladle begins to cool, it will boil up and quickly evaporate. So also, if a mass of metal, heated to whiteness, be plunged in a vessel of cold water, the surrounding fluid will remain tranquil so long as the glowing white heat continues; but, the moment the temperature falls, the water will boil briskly. Again—if water be poured upon an iron sieve, the wires of which are made red hot, it will not run through; but, on the sieve cooling, it will run through rapidly. These contradictory effects are easily accounted for. The repelling power of intense heat keeps the water from immediate contact with the heated metal, and the particles of the water, collectively, retain their globular form; but, when the vessel cools, the repulsive power diminishes, and the water coming into closer contact with the heated surface its particles can no longer retain their globular form, and eventually expand into a state of vapour. This globular condition of the particles of water will account for many very important phenomena; perhaps it is best exhibited in the dew-drop, and so long as these globules retain their form, water will retain its fluid properties. An agglomeration of these globules will carry with them, under certain circumstances, so much force that it is hardly a contradiction to call water itself a solid. The water-hammer, as it is termed, illustrates this apparent contradiction. If we introduce a certain quantity of water into a long glass tube, when it is shaken, we shall hear the ordinary splashing noise as in a bottle; but, if we exhaust the air, and again shake the tube, we shall hear a loud ringing sound, as if the bottom of the tube were struck by some hard substance—like metal or wood—which may fearfully remind us of the blows which a ship’s side will receive from the waves during a storm at sea, which will often carry away her bulwarks.