Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/253

 are fond of it. Although the English say one Kaffir is worth ten Indians, they admit that Indians are employed almost exclusively on the big sugar and tea plantations, where the workmen must be painstaking and reliable. My impression is that the whites are a little jealous of the Indians, and find the negroes more easily controlled Early this morning the skies brightened, and we expected a return of pleasant weather, but while we were at breakfast, the down-*pour of rain began for the fifth successive day. Since Sunday night the rainfall has amounted to nearly seventeen inches Natal, of which Durban is the largest town, is one of the states of the South-African federation. It is not so large as Kansas, being 350 miles one way, and 150 the other. Natal has 1,200 miles of railway, and corn, which is the easiest grown of all the cereals, is the staple crop. Sugar-cane, tea, alfalfa, ostriches, sheep, turkeys, nearly all the tropical fruits, and hogs, cattle and horses, are also produced. The planting season for corn lasts three months, instead of about eighteen days, as with us. The rainfall is 42 inches per year. The bulk of the farms are of 200 to 1,000 acres, and many stock farms are much larger. Land in Natal is worth from four dollars an acre up. Natal farm laborers receive $4 a month, and Indians about the same. It is expected that hail will destroy everything in the way of crops every fourth or fifth year. It is asserted that the European death-rate in Durban in 1910 was less than seven per thousand, as compared with a death-rate of fourteen per thousand in England and Wales in 1908 The Dutch settled in the vicinity of Capetown