have come on board their ships in a harmless and confiding manner: these
they have in great numbers carried away, and sold in the plantations,
with other slaves which they had purchased." And although some of the
Negroes may be justly charged with indolence and supineness, yet many
others are frequently mentioned by authors _as a careful, industrious,
and even laborious_ people. But nothing shews more clearly how unsafe it
is to form a judgment of distant people from the accounts given of them
by travellers, who have taken but a transient view of things, than the
case of the Hottentots, viz. those several nations of Negroes who
inhabit the most southern part of Africa: _these people_ are represented
by several authors, who appear to have very much copied their relations
one from the other, as so savage and barbarous as to have little of
human, but the shape: but these accounts are strongly contradicted by
others, particularly Peter Kolben, who has given a circumstantial
relation of the disposition and manners of those people.[A] He was a man
of learning, sent from the court of Prussia solely to make astronomical
and natural observations there; and having no interest in the slavery of
the Negroes, had not the same inducement as most other relators had, to
misrepresent the natives of Africa. He resided eight years at and about
the Cape of Good Hope, during which time he examined with great care
into the customs, manners, and opinions of the Hottentots; whence he
sets these people in a quite different light from what they appeared in
former authors, whom he corrects, and blames for the falsehoods they
have wantonly told of them. At p. 61, he says, "The details we have in
several authors, are for the most part made up of inventions and
hearsays, which generally prove false." Nevertheless, he allows they are
justly to be blamed for their sloth.--_The love of liberty and indolence
is their all; compulsion is death to them. While necessity obliges them
to work, they are very tractable, obedient, and faithful; but when they
have got enough to satisfy the present want, they are deaf to all