528 Chapter XXI
Nor were they pleased when another Dutch relief ship, sent from Java, was cap-
tured by a stratagem in which a British warship pretended to be an American
merchant vessel. It was not very edifying when, after a mutiny in the British South
African squadron, twenty- three of the sailors were brought ashore at Cape Town
(alleged to be “blind agents of French miscreants”) and three of them were exe-
cuted. Censorship at the Cape had never been so severe. The official salary scales
were a source of discontent. The Dutch head of the high court at Cape Town re-
ceived £400 a year, while the Earl of McCartney, the governor, drew £10,000 a year
plus a table allowance of £2,000, and ten British officials together drew £23,000,
which was equal to the total revenue of the colony in 1796. The British did not
much associate with the local Dutch, as may be seen from the letters of Lady Anne
Barnard. She had persuaded Pitt’s government to give her husband some kind of
position, which, to her dismay, proved to be the secretaryship of the Cape colony,
paying £3,100 a year, or the equivalent of 35,000 Dutch guilders. She complained
that the Cape burghers did not seek acquaintance with the English. “As for the
young Dutchmen, I hardly saw any,” she said after two months, “... perhaps they
are altogether Jacobin.”^44
On the frontier, some two hundred miles east of Cape Town, at Graaf Reinet,
where the Dutch and Bantu cattle- herders had recently begun to come into colli-
sion, there had long been dissatisfaction on the part of the settlers with the gov-
ernment at the Cape. Dutch officers of the Company, in the interests of a compact
and peaceable colony, designed primarily as a service station for the Eastern trade,
had long attempted to restrain this migration and the accompanying clashes be-
tween the Dutch and the Africans. The frontier Boers had always resisted, de-
manding the freedom to take up apparently unoccupied land, and to handle their
labor problem in their own way, which meant in effect, though not exactly in law,
the enslavement of African tribesmen. Rebelling first against the Dutch Company,
and then holding aloof from the British, they set up a somewhat shadowy Repub-
lic of Graaf Reinet, often called the First Boer Republic, since it antedated the
Transvaal by half a century. Another small republic was proclaimed at
Swellendam.
It is perhaps unseemly for an American, having in mind conditions in the
United States at this same time, to question the democratic principles of slave-
holders, or the ideas of liberty and equality to be found among frontiersmen bent
on acquiring land in conflict with an indigenous population. The language of the
French and Batavian republics was heard on the South African frontier, as on the
American. “Citizens” talked of “liberty and equality” and of the “sovereignty of the
people.” The republic of Graaf Reinet had a “convention.” It is hard to estimate the
depth of conviction which such language represented. The republics of Graaf
Reinet and Swellendam, mere associations of a few hundreds of Dutch families
out of touch with the world, were hardly viable as political entities in any case, and
soon disappeared. Their political doctrine, such as it was, seems to have served a
quite specific negative purpose—to keep outsiders, whether Orange Dutch, Bata-
44 Barnard, X XIV and 8.