With a vessel steaming perhaps nine knots it was therefore necessary to keep as much inshore as could be done with safety. To set a course was not possible; during the daylight hours the ship was steered by the coastline, and when darkness closed in a course was set which ran parallel to the land by the chart, yet caught the current on the port bow, with the result that when daylight came the ship would be thirty miles out, or more, fighting the full strength of an adverse current. The nett result was that passages between East London and Natal were a very uncertain quantity. I took to this sort of watch-keeping in the daylight very kindly. The coast was mostly like English parkland, and I set myself to learn it as thoroughly as possible; in this I was assisted in every possible manner by the captain, who spared no pains to point out the various places by name. It was interesting work, for it gave one a chance to exercise one’s initiative which was in no way checked by my seniors. Durban harbour in those days was not the ample port it is now. Under the best conditions there might be perhaps sixteen feet of water on the bar at high tide. It was more often twelve or even less. Outside the bar there were the remains of three attempts to improve the harbour, but each one had been a failure. There was an impression that any of them might have been a success if it had been persevered with, but money had been too scarce to push the experiment to a successful ending. There was, however, one man who even then had made up his mind that Durban should be a port, and he lived long enough to realise his ambition. His name was Harry Escombe, afterwards “Right Honourable.” If Harry Escombe and Cecil Rhodes were alive to-day there would be some backbone in the councils of the Empire. But this is a digression. There was a good deal of formality about getting the little _Natal_ into the Bluff Channel, a dignified port captain, an oracular pilot, lots of signalling and a final pointing for the bar. Whether we touched or not I cannot remember; most likely we did, for it was a very common occurrence--but anyhow we got in, moored in the Bluff Channel, and looked around us with satisfaction. There was every reason to do so. A beautiful harbour, a hearty welcome from all, and an utter absence of anything approximating to bustle. Further it was the land of the Zulu, who was relied upon to do all the hard work. I suppose that it would be difficult to find finer specimens of muscular humanity than were the Zulus who did the shipwork; their scanty raiment appeared perhaps inadequate to the white ladies who were then making their first acquaintance with the manners and customs of the country, but if modernity has now insisted upon trousers in the towns of Natal, it has destroyed a picturesque side of the national life.