In the old days, this beach between Salt River and Milnerton was the setting of tragedies: backed in on the north and east by the Blaauwberg Mountains and the Stellenbosch Ranges, and on the south-east by the Hottentot's Holland. From behind the Blaauwberg, or Blueberg, came that long thin stream of Saldanhas from the north, lighting their fires among the rushes of the Diep River and the Salt Pans near the Tigerberg or Leopard Mountains, which are the green, corn-sown hills of Durbanville and Klipheuvel. They brought with them, past the outpost 'Doornhoop' on the Salt River, to the very gates of Van Riebeek's Fort, then standing where the railway station now is, cattle and sheep and wonderful stories of rich countries to the north and north-east, where kings lived in stationary stone houses and had much gold, their wives loaded with bracelets and having necklaces of sparkling white stones! The little dysentery-stricken settlement, growing thin and determined on a carrot and a snack of rhinoceros, opened the gates, bought the scurvy cattle, believed the stories, and had visions of reaching the fabulously renowned river 'Spirito Sancto.' They dragged their waggons and their precious oxen and horses over the scrub and sand-dunes; and now one may see the fruits of these brave but small expeditions in carefully compiled but imaginative maps and plans, telling of how one or another reached the banks of the Orange River and found 'a great desert,' but found no great kings, no gold, no cities. [Illustration: BLAAUWBERG AND HEAD OF TABLE BAY] Lying close to the shore are many wrecks, an old order which has changed but slowly. This corner of the bay was a dangerous roadstead before the year 1653. A scurvy gang of bastard natives called 'Watermen' or 'Beach Rangers,' crawling like mammoth cockroaches among the seaweed and wreckage, had eked out their monstrous living long before the _Harlem_ dragged her anchor and stranded at the mouth of the Salt River. A grand string of names in the records of these old wrecks; no cheap sloops, galleots, or second-rate pirating-hulks, but big, stately merchantmen: one, from France, _La Maréchale_, with a Bishop on board who is uncommonly like the man who became a Cardinal during the reign of 'Le Roi Soleil.' He was on his way to Madagascar with something political behind his mad-sounding schemes for church-building (on such a sparsely inhabited island) and for personally endowing the buildings to the tune of hundreds of thousands; it may be heresy, but there was something politically consequent in the extraordinary story of this wreck of _La Maréchale_ and the energy of the French seal-fisheries at Saldanha Bay. To continue the rôle of backstairs glory: an English ship--a well-known name, _The Mayflower_--on her way from the east with John Howard, her captain, got a bad time in the terrible bay, tearing winds coming from the 'Wind Mountain' and across from Robben Island.