. None saw then that there were other advantages and channels
of expansion, besides the Cape itself, to be gained in the “Hinterland”
to those unknown but reported “Mountains of the Moon.” It was only as
being a port on the road to India, in those days, that made the Cape
valuable, and for a very simple reason. Ships, like men, require stores
and food. Supplies run short, sails are destroyed, boats swept away.
These calling places are to the navy what “the Stores” are to the
individual; and if access to such places were denied, the ship and the
individual would suffer. A hostile Table Bay or Simon’s Bay would have
meant, in those days, no house of call between St. Helena and Bombay!

Therefore it is so interesting to watch this gradual expansion of the
national idea of empire based entirely, instinctively, and rightly
on the colonies we were founding. The whole “earth hunger” of Great
Britain, if viewed in its natural light, is the opening of new lands
for trade, the extension of colonial empire by true colonists, men who
mean to make the new realm their permanent home, and the preserving
intact, with a good series of supply stations along these unmarked
ways, the roads that unite Great Britain with her colonial children.

       *       *       *       *       *

Brave and gallant as had been the conduct of soldiers on board ship,
whether acting as marines afloat or as landed parties, there are other
instances of skill and courage equally well worth recording.

In 1852 the _Birkenhead_ transport was on its way to India, with drafts
of the 12th Lancers, and of the 2nd, 6th, 12th, 43rd, 45th, 60th,
73rd, 74th, and 91st Regiments, under the command of Colonel Seton,
and, entering Simon’s Bay, struck on a sunken rock, and began to fill.
She was ill provided with boats, for there was scarcely sufficient
accommodation for the women and children, let alone the crew or the
gallant representatives of the army, and the harbour swarmed with
sharks. But the noble spirit of duty, that fearlessness of deat