delicate and most ably executed, both as to the goldsmith's work and as to the enamelling; that on the Minster Lovell jewel is only simple work throughout, enamel and gold.

Not all of these jewels are of the very highest class; but some of them are, and all are supremely valuable because of their great rarity and the undoubted historical interest which attaches to them, especially those bearing portraits, two of which are probably of King Alfred.

They are also most valuable evidences that, although the general art-workmanship of the Anglo-Saxons was simple and easy, there were goldsmiths capable on occasion, in spite of the inadequate means at their command, of producing most beautiful and original work. In the workmanship of these jewels is to be found soldering of a very difficult kind, as well as hammered work, cast work, and granulated work-to say nothing of the actual enamelling, much of which would sorely puzzle our best workmen to equal, even in these advanced days of gas muffles and technical schools.

THE STRANGE CHRISTENING OF THE ORANGE RIVER. BY J. M. BULLOCH

N the night of August 17, 1779, a little boat with three white men pushed off from the bank of the 'Great River.' They were the veriest specks in the dense blackness of the Hottentot' country; but they had the indomitable daring of the true pioneer. So, when the boat drifted into mid-stream, one of them, a tall handsome man, rose, and, unfurling the colours of Holland on the end of his staff, christened the water Orange River' in honour of William, the Hereditary Stadtholder of the Netherlands, whose mother had been an English princess; while his two companions, raising glasses, drank to the health of the States and the Prince of Orange. It was a weird and picturesque ceremony, of unusual significance as viewed to-day from the standpoint of nearly a century and a quarter later; for while the celebrant, Colonel Robert Jacob Gordon, who had really discovered the river two years before, was a Dutchman of Scots descent, one of his companions, Jacobus van Reenan, was a typical Afrikander, and the other, William Paterson, the historian of the occasion, was a British officer-probably of Scots birth. To-day, the possession of the river has been fought for by combatants of pretty much the same blood-the native-born Dutch Afrikander, the Hollander imported from the Netherlands, and the Britisher born and bred.

The career of Robert Jacob Gordon is full of interest. He and his father before him had fought the battles of the Dutch on European soil. He had explored the Cape and knew the country better than any man of his time. It was he who commanded the Dutch army which surrendered the Cape to us in 1795, and he blew out his brains when he found that we meant to keep the flag flying there. The fact of his mixed ancestry might have insured his remembrance by posterity; but you will search many records without finding a trace of him. Our own 'Dictionary of National Biography' just mentions his name in connection with Paterson. The Dutch Biographisch Woordenboek der Nederlanden' does not even do that. The only memoir of him I know of is a rhetorical panegyric in a forgotten volume of the Gentleman's Magazine. Thus his biographer to-day is left to piece his story together from many insignificant

sources.

Gordon was descended from one of the many Scots who settled in Holland during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and established themselves as the master merchants of the Baltic and the North Sea. That was the time when Holland was much easier of access to the Scot than England was, in point of transport and of temperament; for England was a closed door to all Outlanders from the north. To which branch of the great house of Gordon he actually belonged

I cannot say; but in all probability he represented one of the many families settled in Aberdeenshire, or in Banffshire (the Letterfourie Gordons, I think), which grew fat on fortune and fighting of the Low Countries.

Proud as he was of his Scots ancestry, his family had been settled so long in Holland that when his grandfather, who was Burgomaster of Schiedam, got a place for his father in the brilliant Scots Brigade -he joined Colonel W. P. Colyear's regiment on November 21, 1724 the other officers, who were mostly direct importations, resented his appearance in their midst. At every possible point, they remonstrated against his advancement, for they regarded him as a Dutchman pure and simple. His doggedness was certainly Dutch, for the young officer wore down all objections, and won his way to an important place in the Brigade; within twelve years he became brevet-colonel, and in 1748 he got a battalion of his own. He succeeded Charles Halkett as Colonel in 1758, and seven years later we find him a Major-General, at the head of a regiment, named after him, his son Robert Jacob being lieutenant of the fourth company. The General saw a great deal of fighting. He went through the war in Flanders, and in 1747 he was taken prisoner at Bergen-opZoom, where our own Gordon Highlanders so greatly distinguished themselves forty-eight years later.

The General's son, Robert Jacob, was born with his father's regiment in Guelderland in 1741, and thus became dedicated to the State in his cradle. He seems to have begun his public career at the age of twelve; for, writing in 1795, he speaks of having served Holland' these forty-two years.' He might have risen to a post as high as his father's, and lived to fight England on Dutch soil. As it was, he had to meet her in Africa. The life of a soldier in peacetime had no charms for him; and so, having risen to a captaincy in the Scots Brigade, he gladly took advantage of the chance of escaping to South Africa, the undiscovered country of his time, where he landed on June 1, 1777, as an officer in the service of the Dutch East Indies Company.

He had not been in Africa many months when he came across William Paterson, a lieutenant in our army, whose spirit for adventure was as keen as his own. Paterson was a strange and puzzling person, who ultimately became Governor of New South Wales, where a mountain and a river bear his name to this day. Gordon met him at the Cape in October 1777, and the two set out together to explore the untraversed north. Gordon had many qualifications for the task. He had gone to the Cape with a knowledge of Dutch, German, French, and English. He had mastered Hottentot.' He was an enthusiastic botanist and zoologist-his museum came to be one of the wonders of the Cape, which no traveller dreamed of missing and he had an iron constitution. When they had been a month

together, Paterson fell ill (November 3) and halted at Beer Valley; but Gordon pushed on, and was rewarded by striking the Orange River, quite unexpectedly, near the twenty-sixth meridian from Greenwich. In 1779 he picked up Paterson, then on a third journey; and, as I have noted, the two explorers, accompanied by Van Reenan, a travelling merchant, christened the river. Gordon made many another voyage of discovery into the wilds of South Africa, and accumulated a vast quantity of geographical and ethnological information; but never again did he figure amid such romantic circumstances as on that August night in his boat on the Orange River.

His purely official career as a servant of the Dutch East Indies Company affected the destinies of the Cape no less than his scientific services. In 1780 he was appointed to the command of the garrison at the Cape, where he had a charming villa; and in 1795 he became Commander-in-Chief, a battery in the Hout Bay being named after him. The great point to note about him in his capacity as administrator was his utter inability to deal with the 'slimness' of the Dutch settlers. Fearless as an explorer, on the best terms with the natives, profoundly skilled in physical science, open, candid, and sincere; of strict integrity, punctilious honour, and unshaken principles,' he found the Cape Dutchmen too much for him. If anything were needed to demonstrate the complexity of the Dutch Afrikander, it is Gordon's absolute failure. His panegyrist in the Gentleman's Magazine, writing at a time (May 1796) when there were no Mr. Rhodes and no Jameson Raiders to complicate the issue, declares that Gordon was possessed of 'too little subtlety and of too impatient a mind to treat with sufficient indifference the continual vexations he met with in a colony where despotism and peculation were uncontroulable, and where self-interest was universally prevalent.' A century and more has gone, and precisely the same qualities which vexed the scientific soul of this old soldier are taxing the energies of our best generals and the temper of our politicians at this moment.

Gordon's difficulties were increased tenfold when the English fleet, conveying Major-General Craig's army, bore down on the Cape to demand surrender in the name of the Dutch Stadtholder, who had taken refuge in England after the dominance of France had been demonstrated in Holland-to be unbroken by England until 1815. Gordon and the Dutch rulers at the Cape, including the Governor, Sluysken, favoured the Orange, or Conservative, party, represented by the Stadtholder. I abhor French principles,' wrote Gordon to Admiral Elphinstone, on June 14, 1795, and if our unhappy Republic, where I am born [his English, you see, was distinctly Teutonic] and served these forty-two years, surrender (which God forbid), then I am a Greatbritainer.' He felt interested in this

country, not only from the point of view of a Conservative or Orange Dutchman, but also on account of his Scots descent, although 'he never suffered the least bent of his inclination to warp him from his duty as a Dutchman.' In proof of his warm feeling towards this country, it is mentioned of him that he erected a handsome monument to the amiable Colonel Cathcart, who, in his passage to the Embassy to China, died in the Indian Seas, and was buried in one of these islands.'

When France declared war against the Stadtholder and England in 1793, the Cape Dutch had raised a ramshackle army, 1200 or 1300 strong, under the chief command of Gordon. It was composed of clerks and civil servants, of Hottentots and half-breeds (styled the Corps of Pandours), and of the riff-raff of Europe under the command of Colonel De Lille. By a strange irony, the English troops sent to the Cape included the Scots Brigade, which had been reconstituted in 1793; for in 1783 it had been broken up, owing to the attempt of Holland to turn it into a Dutch national corps and force its officers to forswear Britain. Still more strange is the fact that new colours were presented to it by Lord Adam Gordon, the uncle of the notorious Rioter, in June 1795. It was in this very month that the English fleet anchored in Simon's Town Bay, and handed the Prince of Orange's demand to the authorities, who found themselves between two fires-France and England. A long correspondence between Governor Sluysken, Colonels Gordon and De Lille, and the English commanders-occupying over 200 pages in Mr. G. M. Theal's elaborate Records of the Cape Colony-ensued. The Dutchmen shilly-shallied-in the way they have. From the first they seemed to have made up their minds to obey the exiled Stadtholder; but they pretended that they were in earnest in defending the colony. In the midst of their indecision, the English seized Simon's Town without opposition. On August 7, 1795, they advanced on Muizenberg, De Lille opportunely retreating, for which he afterwards got a commission in our army. On September 14, 5000 troops advanced on Cape Town, of which General Craig took possession two days later in the name of His Britannic Majesty, George III. When Gordon, the scientific dreamer, came to realise what had happened, that the English intended to retain the Cape without reference to the Prince of Orange,-he committed suicide on the night of October 5, 1795. His colleagues, Sluysken and De Lille, viewed the matter much more philosophically by taking posts under the British Government, as another Dutch patriot did in our own time.

Colonel Gordon (who is described as having been handsome in his person, elegant in his manners, upwards of six feet high thin, but muscular, strong, active, and capable of enduring great fatigue: and of a dark complexion') was only fifty-four when he died (his old