The Covenant (64 page)

It was not that the Dutch were commercially minded and the English not; had the English merchants been allowed to dominate North America they might have duplicated the folly of the Dutch, but English commercialism was never free to dictate to their colonies the way the Compagnie did.

Wherein lay the difference? The Dutch system of government not only permitted but encouraged its businessmen to rule without supervision, whereas the English government, which started in the
same direction, quickly turned matters over to Parliament, a free press, and the innate longing for freedom of its citizens overseas. English businessmen might have wanted to ape the Dutch precedent, but the institutions of freedom forestalled them.

In no respect did the Dutch deficiency show itself more clearly than in the field of education and the dissemination of culture. Because the population was meager and dispersed over thousands of square miles, the development of large schools was impractical, and those that were attempted in the towns were atrocious. On the veld, where countless children like the Van Doorns grew up, education was left to a group of vagabond itinerants with only a meager knowledge of reading and writing. Usually discharged servants of the Compagnie, these inept clerks roamed from farm to farm dispensing their rudimentary wisdom while they supplemented their income with anything from composing love letters to making coffins. The trekboer Van Doorns were not alone in producing children who were illiterate; one traveler estimated that seventy-five percent of the colony’s children were unable to read.

This was not surprising, because the Compagnie ran the colony for nearly a century and a half before it allowed the colonists to import a printing press, or publish any kind of book, or print a newspaper. In Canada these things happened almost automatically, and America could not have been the same without its itinerant printers, inflammatory broadsides and contentious newspapers; but it was precisely such potential troublemakers that the Compagnie sought to inhibit, and did.

In such a climate there could, of course, be no institution of higher learning, and here the comparison with other colonial settlements was shocking. The Spaniards, who conquered Mexico in 1521, had by 1553 opened a major university. They took Peru in 1533 and sponsored a university in 1551. The English, who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1619, had a functioning college at Harvard in 1636, and before the revolution started in 1776 they had sixteen great colleges in operation. During the entire Dutch rule the Compagnie never even came close to starting a college.

Of course, bright boys at the Cape sometimes found their way back to Leiden or Amsterdam, where splendid universities were available, but an emerging nation needs speculative intelligence bred in local institutions; they provide the fine yeastiness that produces strong new ideas applicable to local situations. The entire history of
South Africa might have been modified if there had been a strong school system topped by a university staffed with local luminaries dedicated to the creation of a new society. Instead, fresh ideas either did not germinate or were stamped out.

Much of the blame must be shared by the church; its leaders were convinced that they could trust only predikants trained in the conservative centers of Holland, and they were terrified of the possibility that a Cape seminary might arise to sponsor alien ideas. Missing in South Africa were those gaunt Pilgrim ministers of New England who cut themselves off from European dictation and initiated a local approach to religious problems.

“The Night of Darkness in which the South African nation had its birth,” some historians would describe this period of the trekboers, when the merchant mind stifled the scientific, creative and political urges of the citizens.

But there was another side to this coin, and it shone brightly. A few Dutch children, through assiduous teaching within the family, did gain an education almost comparable to that available in the average European country, and although the Boers lacked an Oxford or a Harvard, they did have their own unique university, and its curriculum was one of the most effective in the history of education. They had a massive Bible, which accompanied them wherever they went; their curriculum was the Old Testament, whose narratives predicted each event that might arise. There were, of course, many trekboer families like the Rooi van Valcks and the Adriaan van Doorns who ignored the Bible, through either illiteracy or indifference, but the majority studied and obeyed.

Few nations were ever as solidly indoctrinated in one group of principles as the Dutch in South Africa, and this begat a Volk—a people—with tremendous driving force, self-assurance and will to persist. With constant support from this theological university, which each man could carry with him as he moved, the Dutch colony became a conservative, God-fearing state, and so it would remain despite English occupation, English persecution, English wars and the constant threat of imposed English values. In South Africa the Old Testament triumphed over the university because it was the university.

On one major point Lodevicus was wrong. When he thundered “South Africa is Dutch and will always remain so” he misrepresented the composition of his white community: Dutch ancestry,
forty percent; German ancestry, thirty-five percent; Huguenot component, twenty percent; and although this would later be denied by Van Doorn’s descendants, a Malay-Hottentot-black component of at least five percent. This creative mix had produced a handsome, tough, resilient Volk infused with the trekboer spirit, and no English governor would have an easy time trying to discipline them into the ways he wanted them to go.

T
HE
E
NGLISHMEN WHO CAME SO LATE TO
S
OUTH
A
FRICA
,
AND
with such pervasive power, were men of courage, as the Saltwoods of Salisbury, that cathedral town southwest of London, proved. On Midsummer Day 1640, after three years of daring enterprise among the Spice Islands, Captain Nicholas Saltwood of the little ship
Acorn
came sailing into Plymouth harbor with a bulging cargo of nutmeg, clove and cinnamon. It was so valuable that it made all his partners—who had counted him dead, and their investments lost—men of substantial wealth.

His own fortune was increased when he sold the
Acorn
within two hours of anchoring. When his partners, eager to send him forth again, asked why he had acted so precipitately and against his own best interests, he snapped, “You invested money. I invested my life against pirates, storms and Portuguese forts. No more.”

When he was alone with his wife, Henrietta, who had spent these three years in near-poverty, he kissed her vigorously and led her in a small dance about their meager rooms: “Years ago, sweets, I saw the cathedral at Salisbury, and I swore that if I ever reached the Spice Islands and made my fortune, you’d have a home in the meadow, beside the River Avon. And you shall!”

With his bags of silver and his drafts upon the spice merchants of
London, he packed Henrietta in a diligence and his household goods in two drays. Taking his position at the head of his armed guards, he led the way through the lovely lanes of southern England until he reached that broad and noble plain in the middle of which stood Salisbury Cathedral. There, on the right bank of the Avon, he purchased nine good acres and the seven swans that guarded those gentle waters.

Like many a prudent Englishman, Captain Saltwood planted a garden before starting on a house, but since he was a man of vigor he preferred trees, and he located his so that they framed the handsome cathedral on the far side of the river. To the left he placed nine cedars, well rooted, whose dark limbs swept the ground. In the center, but not exactly so, he planted eleven strong chestnuts; in spring they would be white with flowers; in autumn, heavy with fruit for children to play with. Well to the right and safely back from the river, he started a group of slender oaks; in time they would be massive of trunk and stout of limb, and under them swans would nestle when they came ashore.

Sentinels he called his trees, and that name was given the house that later rose among them. It was notable as reflecting an older style of construction known as hang-tile. It was two-storied, with the lower walls built of conventional brick; nothing unusual about that. But the top story was faced in a most peculiar manner: instead of using brick, ordinary roof tiles had been hung vertically! The effect was resoundingly fourteenth century, as if the roof had slipped, abandoning its accustomed place to come down and cover the walls. The true roof was of thatch, sixteen inches thick and carefully trimmed like the hair of a boy about to leave for choir.

Generations of Saltwoods had gathered under the sentinel trees to discuss family problems while contemplating the spire of the cathedral; under strictures laid down by Captain Nicholas, they continued to be cautious in protecting their investments but daring in investing their profits. About 1710 a Timothy Saltwood had had the good fortune of making the acquaintance of the Proprietor, that gentleman of august lineage who owned much of the region, and before long Timothy was serving as the Proprietor’s agent, an occupation of dignity which passed from one Saltwood to the next.

One afternoon during the first years of the 1800s, Josiah Saltwood, the present master of Sentinels, sat with his wife on a bench beneath the oaks and said, “I deem it time we meet with the boys.”
He paused, as if matters of gravity impended, then added promptly, “Nothing serious, of course. Merely their entire future.”

His wife laughed. “They’re all about somewhere. I could summon them.”

“Not just yet. I must ride to Old Sarum with the Proprietor. The election, you know.” And with his wife at his side, and the swans following, he walked across the lawn to where his horse was being saddled.

The beautiful cathedral had not always stood in its present location. In the early days of Christianity in England a much different cathedral-castle-fort, keystone to security in this part of the country, had rested on a low hill some two miles to the north, and here devout bishops exercised as much leadership as the masters of the castle would permit. It was called by a bewildering variety of Roman and Saxon names, but in time it came to be known as Sarum, and from it came that set of orders and regulations for worship known as the Use of Sarum, which would be adopted by much of the English church.

The first cathedral, begun in 1075, was a large, rugged building in the French manner, set down within the walls of the castle-fort; between the two groups of occupants, clergy and soldiers, so much friction arose that rupture was inescapable. Rarely had a formal complaint been more comprehensive than that issued by Pope Honorius III in 1219 when he summarized the difficulties of his priests at Sarum:

The bishop solved these difficulties by offering to move his cathedral from Sarum to a vacant field well to the south, where the town of Salisbury would belatedly arise. The exchange worked and the cathedral at Sarum was abandoned, to the pleasure of the bishop; he owned the vacant field and sold it to the church for a nice profit.

With the loss of its cathedral, Sarum declined. Once it boasted more than two thousand residents, then one thousand, then five hundred,
then only a handful, and the day came in the early 1700s when it had almost none. Cathedral and castle alike were in ruins.

But tradition dies hard in England, and in rural England, hardest of all. When Parliament convened in the late 1200s, Sarum, as a major settlement and support of the king, was awarded two seats; in its heyday it sent some mighty men to London. With the disappearance of its cathedral and its population, those seats, in any other country, would have been lost. But not in England, where precedent was prized. If Sarum had once been entitled to two seats, Old Sarum, as it was now called, was still entitled to them, and these empty fields with barely a single human being residing on or near them retained the right to send two members to Parliament and arrogantly exercised that right.

It became famous as “the rottenest of the English rotten boroughs,” referring to those former towns, now abandoned or much reduced in population, which clung to ancient privileges on the principle that “Parliament represents land, not people.” So that even in these early years of the nineteenth century one-fourth of the members of Parliament came from boroughs which in common sense should have returned nobody, and a shocking percentage of these were from boroughs like Old Sarum, which contained almost no one.

When a sitting Parliament was dissolved and a new one authorized, who selected the men to represent a rotten borough, especially when it had no voters? Custom said that whoever owned the land reserved the right to nominate whom he wished to represent it. What made this system repugnant to people of sensible intelligence was that an empty spot like Old Sarum could have two members of Parliament while great towns like Birmingham and Manchester had none.