who has visited both.
The Dutch Company always maintains there twelve hundred regular soldiers [sic: Instructions 16/7/85 ‘garrison’ of 332, but including civilians].
[Praise of the Dutch system as compared with the French, especially in that the Company has powers in the Indies to discipline even soldiers and sailors.]
If it takes care to punish offenders, it also seeks to reward merit, in whomsoever of its subjects this be found, regardless of nationality or of religion. The Governor of the Cape is a Frenchman from Paris, by name Monsieur Martin [sic], a name similar to that of the French General at Ponticheri, our goal, and both are Roman Catholics....
[Continued praise of the Dutch system, with an example of the failure of the French system in America, where owing to the lack of discipline he was captured by the English in 1687, and the French fort fell without resistance and was razed.]
I return to the subject of the Cape. Monsieur de Choisi correctly says in his Journal [item 58], that the Governor went out exploring. This indeed he did, and set up eight colonies [sic] to the North-North-East of the fort, at a distance of more than a hundred leagues, not far apart so that they can assist one another. They are suitably sited along the banks of a river which flows into the African Sea, at the mouth of which they always have a vessel, both to bring them what they need and take back the goods they barter, as also to evacuate everyone should the natives of the country force them to do this: which is however not likely, since the Dutch, besides being peaceable by nature, are daily fortifying themselves there. Our Armourer was in Le Coche, where d'Armagnan was killed: he told me, that a Frenchman with whom he had served in Flanders and who was now a Serjeant at the Cape, had told him that the States-General were going to send there all the vagabonds and libertines who infect Holland - that may well be called making use of everything.
[This Armourer is also responsible for the ‘natural history’ below.]
The first wheat sown in this Dutch colony did very well: the inhabitants harvest it, but in small quantity. The soil is more suitable for barley. They have there all the fruits which we have in France, but less tasty: they have also the indigenous ones, which are not very good either green or ripe, but make pretty good preserves. Their grapes are good: it remains to be seen whether they will make good wine, since none have as yet been pressed [sic], there being too few of them. Their domestic animals are like ours. The game is the same, but in small quantity [sic] because of the monkeys, which destroy everything except those larger animals which are too strong for them.
[Story of intercourse between the ‘large monkeys’ and the colonists as a regular custom, although punished when detected, and of the way in which the resulting progeny is dealt with, by the colonists if from women, by the monkeys if from a she-ape.]
I do not state this as absolutely true, not having seen or studied it: I was merely assured of it as a fact, and I repeat again that he who did this was certainly not clever to have invented such a yarn, and insisted that he had learnt it from the Serjeant whom I have already mentioned....