Tramp Royale (23 page)

So we spent the time trying to talk with the islanders and bought stamps from them (it was the first day of their first issue) and watched the loading of cases of lobster tails and gazed at the village through binoculars and fished. The lobsters were loaded from a little steamer whose masthead barely came up to the level of our forward welldeck. This vessel itself was used to ferry the catch to Cape Town when no larger ship was available, but it was easy to see why the meteorologist and his family had waited; she was larger than a soup tureen but not much-utterly unsuited for a woman and baby. I misdoubt the lobsters got seasick.

Eight-power glasses brought the village up to within a city block. The houses looked all much alike, one-story buildings of big, shaped lava blocks with thatched roofs. The thatch is New Zealand flax, which grows on the island. The dwellings were local-material equivalents of sod houses or of log cabins, one step ahead of a cave. But I did see the glint of glass in some windows.

The Administrator from the British Colonial Office, the Honorable Mr. J. P. L. Scott, was aboard; when he was through with his official duties I cornered him and quizzed him. He is the government, "The Law West of Pecos," "-the cook and the captain, bold, and the mate of the
Nancy
brig, and a bosuntight and a midshipmite and the crew of the captain's gig." He is the postmaster, the chairman of the council, the recorder, the tax collector, the port captain, the magistrate, and anything else which requires the attention of Her Majesty. His job as magistrate is not onerous; there is no crime.

The islands were discovered in 1506 by Tristão da Cunha. For three centuries they were visited only occasionally, but in 1811 one Joseph Lambert, an American citizen, claimed them as his personal empire (and sealing station); he published his claim and designed a flag. Offhand his claims seem as valid as any other in history and less presumptuous than most. This left-handed American occupation came to an end in 1816, when the British established a garrison there to keep the islands from being used as a base from which to rescue Napoleon. Only one of Lambert's colony was left at the time; Lambert himself had drowned in a sealing accident.

The British pulled out the garrison the next year, but Corporal William Glass got permission for himself, his wife and two children, and two sailors to stay on; this started the present colony. Over the years a few others joined them, including some women from St. Helena, but the colony grew mainly by natural increase; even today there are only seven family names on Tristan. Mrs. Glass did her part by having fourteen more children, a fact less surprising in view of the very limited recreational facilities.

The soil is poor and, while rainfall is adequate, the bad weather and high winds are no help; potatoes have always been the only crop they could rely on. Even that sometimes failed, or was devastated by rats or caterpillars; many times they have been close to starvation. The British government regarded the islands as unfit for occupancy and more than once tried to get them to accept relocation. But they won't go; they like it there despite the material hardships. Perhaps in view of the mess the rest of us are in and the prospects facing us their attitude is not really cracked.

Fish, potatoes, and birds' eggs collected on Nightingale are their only important foods; sheep and oxen are considered too valuable to slaughter. Of recent years attempts have been made to grow fruit trees but nothing much has come of it as yet. The biggest change has come since the War, through the establishment of the lobster-packing plant. The "lobsters" are our west coast lobster, or spiny crayfish; not the true lobster of Maine. You are probably now buying their lobsters, packed as "Union of South Africa" for the company is a Cape Town company. This company employs all of the men part time and for the first time in its history cash money is coming into Tristan, making it possible for them to buy things made in the outside world. Possibly this is the thin wedge that will eventually place Tristan on the map, join it by regular service to the outside world. Possibly-though it has not as yet; lobsters can be sure of a berth; a traveler cannot.

The Cape Town company has hired an agronomist and a doctor for the islanders. The agronomist has a real job cut out for him to find ways to grow something other than potatoes, but doctor would appear to have a sinecure. There is almost no disease, except colds picked up from passing ships, and it is customary to die of old age in the eighties or nineties. They don't need a dentist-perhaps there is fluorine in the water; I could not find out.

Although the company has been bringing some cash wages into the island for the past four years they are still painfully short on clothes and beg for cast-offs from passing ships. The Administrator is trying to break them of this habit; nevertheless many of us in the
Ruys
contributed. I had some shirts I did not like anyway and Ticky somewhat tearfully parted with her honeymoon suit-years out of style and useless on this trip, but which she had kept and fetched along for sentimental reasons (and partly to prove that she was still as slender as ever; Ticky is a fine piece of aerodynamic design). She dug out some shoes for them, too, having just stocked up in South America. I could not spare any, nor would mine fit anyone else; my feet aren't mates.

We stood out of there late in the afternoon and set course for Cape Town. Some of the Chinese had purchased two baby penguins from the islanders; in the course of the voyage it was needful to teach them how to walk. A baby penguin is not hatched knowing how, any more than a human baby knows how instinctively. The process is much alike for both types of babies-hold out your arms and say, "Come to Papa!"

Whereupon the baby penguin tries his earnest baby best to oblige, flapping his tiny stub wings and hopping manfully in a two-footed hop like a choir boy in a sack race. I laughed until I had pleurisy-and wanted to cry, too; the infant was so willing about it and so serious.

Penguins are very nice people and they don't mean to be funny. A baby penguin is funnier than an adult by inverse square ratio. They feel nice, too; their hairlike feathers feel like soft, warm fur. At that age they are not yet oily and have not acquired the full fishy fragrance that makes the adults something to stay upwind from.

Albatrosses, about six of them, joined us at Tristan and followed us for two thousand miles. So far as I could see not one of them ever flapped a wing the whole distance. They sail without effort, at twenty or thirty knots, rising much higher than the masthead, dipping down to the water for a fish or some tasty garbage, rising again to any height, all without apparent exertion of any sort-just willpower, personality, and clean living.

The albatross is deceptively large. I mistook the first one I saw for a gull, having nothing to judge it by-I suppose the best way to see how big one is would be to hang it around the neck of an ancient mariner. They have been measured up to twelve feet in wingspread, more span than the condor, largest of the flying birds. A little cross-eyed triangulation enabled me to estimate that those following us ranged eight to ten feet in spread, once I got it through my head that they were big and then waited for a chance to see one between me and part of the rigging. On another occasion one made a crash landing in the swimming pool of the
Ruys
and could not get out. He crowded the pool all by himself and almost beat the boatswain to a pulp before he could be evicted.

Ticky worried greatly over how the albatrosses would get back home, since no ship would be going that way. (We had concluded that their miraculous powers of levitation were based on the thermals raised by the ship itself.) I pointed out that albatrosses had managed all right for thousands of years before men got around to sailing the oceans. But she refused to be reassured: those poor birds were
lost,
and somebody ought to do something about it.

The meteorologist's baby daughter enjoyed the trip back; she was a cute little carrottop and a favorite with everyone. But her mother had a very bad time of it. After nearly four years' unworldly peace and quiet of Tristan she found the
Ruys
(which is really a very quiet place itself) almost unbearably noisy and exciting. The change was too sudden and the poor woman had to spend most of her time in her room.

The rest of us were driving her to distraction.

VIII
The Country With a Problem

Lived a Woman Wonderful. . .
. . . Neither Simple, Kind, nor True-
South Africa:
Kipling

Of all the countries we were in the Union of South Africa was the most difficult to evaluate.

It is a wonderful country, a glorious country. We liked everything about it-except the race problem. Which is like liking the Pacific Ocean except for the water in it.

South Africa is a paradise where you expect to wake up some morning with your throat cut. By comparison, our own racial problems are trivial and ninety per cent solved. Before some colored compatriot of mine, smarting under the wrongs of generations, jumps down my throat, let me add that I
know
that the ten per cent remains to be done, should be done, must be done, but let me point out that the ambition of every literate black man in South Africa is to emigrate to Birmingham, Alabama, or some place else in our Deep South, where he can be among his own kind and still enjoy freedom.

He stands no chance at all of realizing this modest ambition. Carefully contrived laws and rigid customs make it next to impossible for a black man to save enough money to escape. His gross earnings as a farmhand are about twenty-five cents a day; as a contract laborer in industry, in the mines or factories, wages run from twenty-five cents to around sixty cents a day-about what a Pullman porter gets as a single tip.

Apartheid,
translated literally as (racial) apartness, is the most pervasive single fact about South Africa. But it is much more than Jim-Crowism, or simple segregation; as legislated by Dr. Malan's Nationalist Party it means that a native must either live in a reservation or indenture himself to a white man; if he shows up in town without a work card he is liable to prosecution.

It means no voice in government, almost no chance for education, no hope for the future. If the native reserves, which are vast in area, were decent land, the system might be defended, but they are not. Only about seven per cent of South Africa is good arable land; the white man has it and the native has been assigned rocky, hilly, dry and almost unusable acreage that the Afrikander does not want. Almost the only way a black farmer can get decent land is by hiring out to a white farmer; then the white man lets him till a little piece of it for himself.

If a native youth refuses to go along with the cheap-labor racket, his position is hopeless; he can never buy oxen, he can never pay for a wife. So he signs up.

It is a legal system to enslave an entire race, without placing on the bosses the personal responsibility for the slaves entailed by chattel slavery. The South African native is neither a free man nor a chattel and he has the privileges of neither.

The Nationalist Party is not a majority party, but it stays in power through an entirely legal rotten-borough system similar to that which obtains in the California State Senate whereby a farmer's vote counts for more than that of a city dweller. In general the Nationalist Party is Afrikander while the Unionist Party is English just as most of the farmers are of Dutch descent and most of the city folks are of English descent. But it is most unlikely that more than a handful of the opposition party could be found which did not favor some form of racial discrimination. Looked at coldly, their reasons for this stand can be understood, for, no matter what might be or what should be, the vast majority of the natives are still illiterate savages. The South African white man who does not believe in Dr. Malan's brand of
apartheid
nevertheless believes that if the native were given his full rights as a human being overnight, the white men would be swallowed up.

There are other approaches, of course. Up in the Belgian Congo a black man can work hard and become an
evolvé,
a man with a certificate which makes him a statutory white, entitled to the same wages, entitled to live in white neighborhoods, entitled to place his children in white schools, even entitled to marry a white woman if he can manage it. All of these things are utterly prohibited in South Africa.

I am not arguing in favor of the
evolvé
system, as I never saw it in action. I give it as an illustration of the fact that there are middle ways between the extreme of
apartheid
and the other extreme-an extreme which the Nationalist always cites to prove that
apartheid
is necessary and unavoidable . . . when in fact it is neither one; it is an inhuman racket for the exclusive benefit of the white man.

On the other hand, do not be misled by the crocodile tears of Mr. Nehru; the very worst exploiters of the black man are the Hindus. The only real public disorder modern South Africa has known was when the natives turned on the Hindus and tried to chuck them back into the Indian Ocean. If South Africa were opened wide to the hordes of India the black man would not stand a prayer. As it is, world opinion and the more liberal elements among the South African whites may eventually force an improvement in his lot-though it looks hopeless today.

"Americans don't know how to deal with natives"-(or "coolies," "niggers," "Chinese," "boys"). So the British have blandly told us and so also have the other breeds who have held colonial empires. But the fact is that we are the only dominant people on earth who
do
know how to deal with the human beings designated by the above disparaging terms.
Proof:
when we inherited the Filipino from Spain, we promised him forty years of education and help, then full and unconditional freedom; we made good our promise. Whereupon, when we needed him, he fought for us and with us, and is now our staunch ally and friend.

Compare this record with Indonesia, with Burma, with India, with Kenya, with Indo-China, with South Africa itself. The Hollander can hardly get a visa to the country he once proudly called "Holland in the East," the Englishman in Kenya sleeps with his rifle in his bed, South Africa is as yet free of "incidents" on any large scale but every South African knows that the natives are waking and listening and stirring, aware of Mau Mau to the north. It spoils the white man's sleep; it makes him careful to lock every door, every room, every cupboard; it makes him install flood lights around his beautiful Johannesburg home. It makes him very cautious on the streets of his own city at night.