[Footnote 159:  The Natuna Islands, in long. 108 deg.  E. from Greenwich.—­E.]

Cowley and his remaining companions embarked at Batavia in a Dutch ship in March, 1686.  They arrived in Table bay at the Cape of Good Hope on the 1st June, where they landed next day, and of which settlement, as it then existed in 1686, Cowley gives the following account:—­

“Cape Town does not contain above an hundred houses, which are all built low, because exposed to violent gales of wind in the months of December, January, and February.  The castle is very strong, having about eighty large cannon for its defence.  There is also a very spacious garden, maintained by the Dutch East India Company, planted with all kinds of fruit-trees, and many excellent herbs, and laid out in numerous pleasant walks.  This garden is near a mile in length and a furlong wide, being the greatest rarity at the Cape, and far exceeding the public garden at Batavia.  This country had abundance of very good sheep, but cattle and fowls are rather scarce.  We walked out of town to a village inhabited by the Hodmandods, or Hottentots.  Their houses are round, having the fire-places in the middle, almost like the huts of the wild Irish, and the people lay upon the ashes, having nothing under them but sheep-skins.  The men seemed all to be Monorchides, and the whole of these people were so nasty that we could hardly endure the stench of their bodies and habitations.  Their women are singularly conformed, having a natural skin apron, and are all so ignorant and brutish that they do not hesitate to prostitute themselves publicly for the smallest imaginable recompense, of which I was an eye witness.  Their apparel is a sheep-skin flung over their shoulders, with a leather cap on their heads, as full of grease as it can hold.  Their legs are wound about, from the ankle to the knees, with the guts of beasts well greased.

“These people, called Hodmandods by the Dutch, are born white, but they make themselves black by smearing their bodies all over with soot and grease, so that by frequent repetition they become as black as negroes.  Their children, when young, are of a comely form, but their noses are like those of the negroes.  When they marry, the woman cuts off one joint of her finger; and, if her husband die and she remarry again, she cuts off another joint, and so on however often she may marry.

“They are a most filthy race, and will feed upon any thing, however foul.  When the Hollanders kill a beast, these people get the guts, and having squeezed out the excrements, without washing or scraping, they lay them upon the coals, and eat them before they are well heated through.  If even a slave of the Hollanders wish to have one of their women, he has only to give her husband a piece of tobacco.  Yet will they beat their wives if unfaithful with one of their own nation, though they care not how they act with the men of other nations.  They are