for every day brought him nearer to his treasure chest. As the ship moved towards the equator, the climate changed. Miraculously, winter began to thaw into summer, and as they approached the African coast, the days and nights became hot and steamy.
The Walmer Castle arrived in Cape Town at early dawn, moving carefully through the narrow channel that divided the great leper settlement of Robben Island from the mainland, and dropped anchor in Table Bay.
Jamie was on deck before sunrise. He watched, mesmerized, as the early-morning fog lifted and revealed the grand spectacle of Table Mountain looming high over the city. He had arrived.
The moment the ship made fast to the wharf, the decks were overrun by a horde of the strangest-looking people Jamie had ever seen. There were touts for all the different hotels – black men, yellow men, brown men and red men frantically offering to bear away luggage – and small boys running back and forth with newspapers and sweets and fruits for sale. Hansom drivers who were half-castes, Parsis or blacks were yelling their eagerness to be hired. Vendors and men pushing drinking carts called attention to their wares. The air was thick with huge black flies. Sailors and porters hustled and halloaed their way through the crowd while passengers vainly tried to keep their luggage together and in sight. It was a babel of voices and noise. People spoke to one another in a language Jamie had never heard.
‘Yulle kom van de Kaap, neh?’
‘Het julle mine papa zyn wagen gezien?’
‘Wat bedui’ di?’
‘Huistoe!’
He did not understand a word.
Cape Town was utterly unlike anything Jamie had ever seen. No two houses were alike. Next to a large warehouse two or three storeys high, built of bricks or stone, was a small canteen of galvanized iron, then a jeweller’s shop with hand-blown plate-glass windows and abutting it a small greengrocer’s and next to that a tumble-down tobacconist’s.
Jamie was mesmerized by the men, women and children who thronged the streets. He saw a kaffir clad in an old pair of 78th Highland trews and wearing as a coat a sack with slits cut for the arms and head. The kaffir walked behind two Chinese men, hand in hand, who were wearing blue smock frocks, their pigtails carefully coiled up under their conical strat hats. There were stout, red-faced Boer farmers with sun-bleached hair, their wagons loaded with potatoes, corn and leafy vegetables. Men dressed in brown velveteen trousers and coats, with broad-brimmed, soft-felt hats on their heads and long clay pipes in their mouths, strode ahead of their vraws, attired in black, with thick black veils and large black-silk poke bonnets. Parsi washerwomen with large bundles of soiled clothes on their heads pushed past soldiers in red coats and helmets. It was a fascinating spectacle.
The first thing Jamie did was to seek out an inexpensive boarding-house recommended to him by a sailor aboard ship. The landlady was a dumpy, ample-bosomed, middle-aged widow.
She looked Jamie over and smiled. ‘Zoek yulle goud?’
He blushed. ‘I’m sorry – I don’t understand.’
‘English, yes? You are here to hunt gold? Diamonds?’
‘Diamonds. Yes, ma’am.’
She pulled him inside. ‘You will like it here. I have all the convenience for young men like you.’
Jamie wondered whether she was one of them. He hoped not.
‘I’m Mrs Venster,’ she said coyly, ‘but my friends call me “Dee-Dee”.’ She smiled, revealing a gold tooth in front. ‘I have a feeling we are going to be very good friends. Ask of me anything.’
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Jamie said. ‘Can you tell me where I can get a map of the city?’
With map in hand, Jamie went exploring. On one side of the city were the landward suburbs of Rondebosch, Claremont and Wynberg, stretching along nine miles of thinning plantations and vineyards. On the other side were the marine suburbs of Sea Point and Green Point. Jamie walked through the rich residential area, down Strand Street and Bree Street, admiring the large, two-storey buildings with their flat roofs and peaked stuccoed fronts – steep terraces rising from the street. He walked until he was finally driven indoors by the flies that seemed to have a personal vendetta against him. They were large and black and attacked in swarms. When Jamie returned to his boardinghouse, he found his room filled with them. They covered the walls and table and bed.
He went to see the landlady. ‘Mrs Venster, isn’t there anything you can do about the flies in my room? They’re –’
She gave a fat, jiggling laugh and pinched Jamie’s cheek, ‘Myn magtig. You’ll get used to them. You’ll see.’
The sanitary arrangements in Cape Town were both primitive and inadequate, and when the sun set, an odoriferous vapour covered the city like a noxious blanket. It was unbearable. But Jamie knew that he would bear it. He needed more money before he could leave. ‘You can’t survive in the diamond fields without money,’ he had been warned. ‘They’ll charge you just for breathin’.’
On his second day in Cape Town, Jamie found a job driving a team of horses for a delivery firm. On the third day he started working in a restaurant after dinner, washing dishes. He lived on the leftover food that he squirrelled away and took back to the boardinghouse, but it tasted strange to him and he longed for his mother’s cock-a-leekie and oatcakes and hot, fresh-made baps. He did not complain, even to himself, as he sacrificed both food and comfort to increase his grubstake. He had made his choice and nothing was going to stop him, not the exhausting labour, nor the foul air he breathed, nor the flies that kept him awake most of the night. He felt desperately lonely. He knew no one in this strange place, and he missed his friends and family. Jamie enjoyed solitude, but loneliness was a constant ache.
At last, the magic day arrived. His pouch held the magnificent sum of two hundred pounds. He was ready. He would leave Cape Town the following morning for the diamond fields.
Reservations for passenger wagons to the diamond fields at Klipdrift were booked by the Inland Transport Company at a small wooden depot near the docks. When Jamie arrived at seven a.m., the depot was already so crowded that he could not get near it. There were hundreds of fortune seekers fighting for seats on the wagons. They had come from as far away as Russia and America, Australia, Germany and England. They shouted in a dozen different tongues, pleading with the besieged ticket sellers to find spaces for them. Jamie watched as a burly Irishman angrily pushed his way out of the office onto the sidewalk, fighting to get through the mob.
‘Excuse me,’ Jamie said. ‘What’s going on in there?’
‘Nothin’,’ the Irishman grunted in disgust. ‘The bloody wagons are all booked up for the next six weeks.’ He saw the look of dismay on Jamie’s face. ‘That’s not the worst of it, lad. The heathen bastards are chargin’ fifty pounds a head.’
It was incredible! ‘There must be another way to get to the diamond fields.’
‘Two ways. You can go Dutch Express, or you can go by foot.’
‘What’s Dutch Express?’
‘Bullock wagon. They travel two miles an hour. By the time you get there, the damned diamonds will all be gone.’
Jamie McGregor had no intention of being delayed until the diamonds were gone. He spent the rest of the morning looking for another means of transportation. Just before noon, he found it. He was passing a livery stable with a sign in front that said MAIL DEPOT. On an impulse, he went inside, where the thinnest man he had ever seen was loading large mail sacks into a dogcart. Jamie watched him a moment.
‘Excuse me,’ Jamie said. ‘Do you carry mail to Klipdrift?’
‘That’s right. Loadin’ up now.’
Jamie