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needles, around which the sea boils and lashes itself into a white foam. Woe to the ship and
men who are carried into this archipelago of reefs. None live to tell the misadventure.

Standing on this platform one may by an effort of fancy draw a line from himself due
south, which forms the boundary between two of the largest oceans in the world, the
Atlantic on the right, and the Indian on the left. And one may dream that the two mighty
powers having chosen this spot as their battlefield, are here constantly engaged in struggle
for supremacy, sometimes with more sometimes with less fury, but never in the calmest
weather ceasing from the strife. The huge waves come rolling along the east and west sides,
meeting in front where we stood (and for miles away along our imaginary line) with a
concussion like a thunder clap, sending a body of water up into the air, which during a gale
is carried as far as the lantern of the lighthouse, coating the glass with an incrustation of
salt.

Looking immediately below, where the surge, owing to the protection of the reefs, was
comparatively quiet, I saw what seemed to me to be moving masses of discoloured water,
each patch several acres in extent. I could hardly believe that these coloured patches were
fish. But masses of fish they were, attracted hither by the million to feed within the reefs.
The Cape waters I well knew produce fish in incredible numbers and variety. ……….. but
till now, of the actual prodigality of marine life on these coasts I had formed no adequate
idea.

The keeper, who was an old man-of-war's man, asked, I remember, for two boons. Firstly,
he wanted a flag-staff and a code of ship's signals. When asked of what use they would be,
he answered, "Well, you see, sir, if so be a vessel hugs too close in, I'd up signals and tell
her to sheer furder off." But seeing that, if a ship were near enough to make out signals, she
would be already close into the reefs, and perhaps be tempted into further danger by her
desire to make out what the signals were, that boon was denied at once. Secondly, the old
tar wished to know whether he could annex a piece of ground and cultivate it. Being told
that he was "monarch of all he surveyed," and that no one would dispute his right to till the
whole promontory if it so pleased him, he replied that that being so, he should like to have
a few wagon loads of soil brought up from Simon's Bay, for he had "spotted" a nice piece
of level rock under the lee of a big boulder close to the house, where it only wanted a foot
or two of stuff to "grow 'taturs and greens stunnin'." Were an eccentric millionnaire, having
taken it into his head to have a cabbage garden in St. Paul's churchyard, to buy and pull
down a warehouse for its site, he would hardly compass a more costly plantation than
would have been the potato ground "under the lee of the big boulder" at Cape Point,
constructed according to the keeper's notions.

Dickens (ed), 1868: 311 - 312

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