Presented to the
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
LIBRARY
by the
ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE
LIBRARY
1980
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
VOLUME VI
SOUTH AFRICA
1486-1913
OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES
THE AMERICAN COLONIES, 1583-1763. 4s. Qd. net.
INDIA, 1600-1828. 4s. Qd. net.
BRITISH NORTH AMERICA, 1763-1867. 6s. net.
BRITAIN IN THE TROPICS, 1527-1910. 6s. net.
AUSTRALASIA, 1688-1911. 6s. net.
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
\
VOLUME VI
Jff*
SOUTH AFRICA
1486-1913
BY
A. WYATT TILBY
^J\
LONDON
CONSTABLE AND COMPANY
LIMITED
1914
is
M ,
PREFACE
THE present volume brings to a close the first part of this
history of the English People Overseas. It is my intention,
or at least my hope, that at some future date I may be able
to justify more completely the title of this work by adding,
to these already issued, other volumes recording the growth
of the English people in the United States still the greatest
of all English colonies in Canada from 1867 to the present
day, and in India since 1828, the period at which the second
volume of this book concludes.
The fulfilment of so considerable an undertaking must
inevitably occupy several years, but I cannot help thinking
that it will be worth while to have a complete record in one
easily accessible work of the activities of the English people
in all parts of the world. (I may say in parenthesis, and in
answer to certain critical inquiries from Scotland, that I have
used the term English throughout, not from any desire to
disparage our masters north of the Tweed, but as indicating
English-speaking a habit to which the best of Scots must
plead guilty. The term English may in this sense be applied
to the United States, whereas British would be entirely out
of place ; nor am I conscious of having done any injustice to
Scottish enterprise within the limits of the British Empire,
or anywhere outside the title of this book. Indeed, it would
be impossible for the most dishonest or prejudiced writer to
ignore the part Scotland played, and still plays, in the found-
vi THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
ing of the Empire, unless he undertook the wholesale sup-
pression of names of pioneers, explorers, traders, missionaries,
and governors from Dunedin to Nova Scotia. But one rather
curious and significant fact emerges from these studies. Not
one Scottish colonial enterprise succeeded before the Union
with England in 1707 ; few indeed have failed since the
Union.)
The six volumes now completed treat in the main of the
founding of the English type of civilisation ; the remaining
volumes will be engaged with the development of that type.
They may on that account lose something of variety and
picturesque incident, for they will be less concerned with
pioneering and adventure than their predecessors ; but unless
the fruits of the tree are held to be less important than the
roots, the growth of the English people overseas will be not
less worthy of study than their original establishment.
But in the meantime the completion of these chapters on
South Africa provides the weary traveller, author and reader
alike if any readers have patiently toiled with me so far
with a convenient halting-place, a kind of half-way house,
like the Cape itself in older days, where one may rest and
refresh awhile before adventuring forth again. These first
six volumes have given, however crudely, the history of the
founding of every English-speaking colony or possession
throughout the world, from Virginia and Newfoundland under
Elizabeth to Rhodesia and Nyasa under Victoria. In a work
of this length there must be errors of judgment, errors of fact,
omissions, imperfections, and mistakes, authorities I have
overlooked, documents I have not seen ; but in excuse for
these shortcomings I would plead that where the activities of
so many human beings had to be judged one human being is
PREFACE vii
certain to stumble from time to time, and that where so large
a mass of material had to be sifted the book would never have
been written at all had I waited until every document was
available.
One may perhaps claim as a virtue, what at least one critic
has imputed as a vice, that the book shows little party spirit
and reflects neither Whig nor Tory doctrine ; and for another
fault I remain obstinately unrepentant the fact that while
I have attempted to picture the social life of the people of
every colony, and have given numerous and occasionally
trivial details of their habits, houses, occupations and the
cost of living, I have omitted mention of many unimportant
governors and refused to cumber these pages with the quarrels
of provincial Cabinets or the intrigues of provincial Premiers.
Against these omissions or mistakes I may perhaps claim
that the wandering annals of the British Empire have been
placed in proper perspective, that the brief and broken records
of some forgotten failures in colonising have been rescued from
the complete oblivion which was their natural fate, and that
to the history of some successful colonies I have added new
and not uninteresting details. It has been my reward for
many weary hours wasted over incredibly stupid writers to
have added some points to Nova Scotian history which
Parkman overlooked, some items of Canadian settlement of
which Kingsford was not aware, some materials to Australian
annals which Rusden forgot, some relics of old New Zealand
which were new to Pember Reeves, some settlements in the
tropics which are not in Lucas, some incidents in South
Africa which even the multitudinous Theal has failed to see ;
and that I have discovered some overseas variants of the
British constitution which might have interested May and
VOL. vi. b
viii THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Bagehot. The constitutional development of Pitcairn and
other South Sea islands, the Anglo-Zulu senate of old
Natal, the missionary parliament of Namaqualand may be
trivial beside the greater institutions of Commonwealth and
Dominions, but the smaller consequences of our political ideas
nevertheless deserve a footnote in history. It is my hope, too,
that the full comparative studies of the various constitutions
of the Empire and the analyses I have given of the swing
and play of opposing forces which have made them may also
be of use.
I am far from suggesting that these points excuse the
obvious imperfections of a work which has taken ten years
to write, but I think they may be urged in mitigation of the
heavy sentence which should be passed on any author who
inflicts six substantial volumes on his fellow-men.
It is a graceful custom of the day to thank in a preface
those who have rendered assistance to the author. I have
preferred to discharge my gratitude in occasional footnotes ;
but I may here properly acknowledge the chief debt of all,
to one whose constant encouragement during a period of not
always easy work has largely helped me to draw this labour
to its present conclusion. I mean my wife.
A. WYATT TILBY.
December 13, 1913.
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE v
BOOK XXIII
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND : 1486-1856
CHAP.
i. A LAND OF No SOJOURNING : 1486-1608 .... 1
ii. ABANDONED CLAIM AND RIVAL SETTLEMENT : 1608-1758 . 8
in. DUTCH EXPANSION AND ENGLISH CONQUEST : 1700-1815 . 33
iv. THE CAPE UNDER BRITAIN : 1806-34 .... 56
v. THE ENGLISH IMMIGRATION : 1820-42 .... 99
vi. THE FOUNDING OF NATAL : 1823-56 115
BOOK XXIV
TOWARDS THE NORTH : 1833-1900
I. THE GREAT TREK : 1833-52 129
ii. THE MESSENGERS OF GOD : 1799-1876 .... 161
in. Tna LUST OF MAMMON : 1867-95 208
iv. CECIL RHODES : 1871-90 232
v. THE FOUNDING OF RHODESIA : 1888-1900 .... 269
vi. NYASA AND THE NORTH : 1876-1900 310
BOOK XXV
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 347
x THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
BOOK XXVI
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA : 1852-1910
CHAP. PAOB
i. THE Two EUROPEAN PEOPLES : 1852-99 .... 387
ii. THE WAR OF WHITE SUPREMACY : 1899-1902 . . .478
in. RECONSTRUCTION AND RECONCILIATION : 1902-6 . . 552
iv. THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA : 1906-10 592
THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
BOOK XXIII
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND: 1486-1856
CHAPTER I
A LAND OF NO SOJOUKNING : 1486-1608
THE fate or the fortune of nineteenth-century Britain led her
to lay the foundations of three new nations in the southern
hemisphere, as in an earlier age she had likewise Difference
laid the foundations of two new English nations in between
the west. But marked as was the contrast be- Africa and
tween the two English nations in North America Australia.
the one a republic that repudiated its allegiance to the
mother country after a war which split the Empire, the
other a loyal dominion that resisted every attempt to wean
it from the old allegiance the contrasts that distinguished
Australia and New Zealand from South Africa, and coloured
all their annals with the encompassment of divergent circum-
stance, were still more marked.
Against the superficial likenesses between South Africa
and Australia seasons the reverse of Europe, a dry sunny
climate, a shortage of water and deserts that needed irrigation
before cultivation these' essential differences stand out
through all their history.
Australia and New Zealand were isolated and therefore
exclusive, the path to nowhere, the very end of the world.
Discovered and lost and discovered again before they were
VOL. VI. A
2 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
colonised by white men, those who went there stayed there ;
they seldom came back and they could not go forward, since
to go forward was but to come back on the full circle of the
globe. But the position of South Africa, on the other hand,
made it for centuries a half-way house between east and west,
north and south, between Europe and India, Britain and
Australasia, a place to which men often went and seldom
stayed, a place of coming and going but not of long sojourning.
An Australian port was the world's terminus ; a South African
port was a hostel where men put in and rested awhile from
the toils of an ocean voyage. The very essentials of the first
European settlements in Australia were that they should be
colonies from which exiled men could not return ; the very
essentials of the first European settlements in South Africa
were that they were not in fact settlements at all, but con-
venient stations on the long road to the Orient.
Even in its name the corner of South Africa that was first
known to Europeans betrays the thought that upheld its
The cape of discoverers. The Good Hope which attached to
Good Hope, the cn j e f ca p e o f t ne country was not the hope
of permanent settlement in a pleasant land, but of speedy
passage beyond ; it was named for a purpose, and the name
has clung long after the purpose has passed.
It was the great Portuguese mariner Bartholomew Diaz,
when doggedly pursuing that search for an ocean route to
its Dis- India which had engaged two previous genera-
covery, tions of his countrymen, who first of all Europeans
reached at length in the year 1486 the extreme
south-westerly point of the African continent. Thus far he
had outdistanced all his predecessors in the long quest of
West for East ; but the further progress of his frail vessel
was now barred by the fierce winds which sweep across the
lonely southern ocean. Diaz named the spot at which his
hopes were foiled the Cape of Storms Cabo dos Tormentos
and turned his vessel's head again towards Europe ; but his
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 3
master the King of Portugal, with instant realisation of the
vast importance of the discovery, renamed it the Cape of
Good Hope Cabo de boa Esperanza. And by that title it has
since been known.
A few years later the Cape was rounded by Vasco da Gama,
India was discovered, and the new ocean road to the East was
free. The good hope had been fulfilled ; but the And
Cape of Good Hope was henceforth neglected by Neglect,
its discoverers, and none but its discoverers had ventured yet
so far. The Portuguese engaged in strife and trade with the
Indies ; great viceroys of that nation conquered and ruled in
Asia, great apostles of the Christian faith spread their creed
among its alien peoples : but to South Africa, and particu-
larly to the south-western extremity of Africa, they gave but
little heed. The southern half of the dark continent was to
them no more than an immovable obstacle on the route
which all must pass, and on immovable obstacles men do not
waste their energies when there are other worlds to conquer
and convert.
For the first century that it was known to Europe the Cape
of Good Hope had therefore no real history. Nominally it
belonged to Portugal ; and since the Portuguese had as yet
no rivals in Africa and Asia, they were undisturbed in their
claim to its possession. But such attention as they could
spare from India to their other oversea dominions was
given, not to the Cape but to the moist warm regions of
Mozambique and the fertile if unhealthy eastern shores of
Africa.
Here in Sofala the lowlands of the eastern coasts in the
Arab tongue and all along the shores of eastern Africa the
Portuguese were active in' the hundred years after T&e
their discovery of the new route to the Indies. ^ salT 6
Often they did battle with the Arabs of Mombasa Africa,
and Zanzibar, in a religious and commercial war against
the old monopoly of Islam ; and while the Cape of Good Hope
4 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
was neglected and indeed avoided by these crusading traders
of the new Latin invasion of the East, outposts of the Portu-
guese Empire were established here and there along the
Indian Ocean, fortresses were planned and built, fights were
won and lost, governors and soldiers came and went, and
some at least among these warriors and rulers left their mark
on Mozambique and other tropic lands beyond.
A brave if credulous folk, old legends and tradition en-
couraged or misled them all. One traveller heard and perhaps
believed that Prester John, that mythical monarch of mediaeval
wonder-story, held sway near by in Central Africa, his resi-
dence being reported ' far in the interior and to be reached
only on the backs of camels ' ; 1 others made expedition up
the great Zambesi for the fabled mines of Ophir and the
wondrous wealth of Sheba. 2 These explorers failed in the
first European hunt for African treasure ; but another
traveller of the time, if he found no gold, brought back new
legends for old, telling of the murder of a Jesuit father in the
back lands of the continent, and how his body, clad in black
and bound across a log of wood, came floating down the river,
till the very beasts and birds, seeing it, had proved more land
than cruel men ; for they had stopped and brought the corpse
ashore, loosing it from the beam on which it lay, and ever after
reverencing and watching over the sainted remains of the holy
martyr of God.
These and other like adventures, and a century of traffic
and discovery in eastern Africa gave the Portuguese a hold on
Mozambique and Zambesia from which no rivals of a later day
could oust them ; 3 but the Cape of Good Hope itself was no
1 If this tradition had any basis of truth at all which is very doubt-
ful it probably referred to the Kingdom of Abyssinia.
Many of the earlier legends of mediieval Europe placed Prester John
in China, but the traditions varied from age to age.
- For some notice of the Ophir tradition, see vol. iv. bk. xiii. ch. i.
Milton lends some countenance to the theory that Ophir was in South-
East Africa, Paradise Lost, xi. 399 : ' Sofala, thought Ophir. '
3 See chapter vi. of this book.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 5
advantage to, and derived no advantage from, its discoverers.
And only a few Portuguese names along the southern coasts
Cape Agulhas, Saldanha Bay, Cape Infanta, and Natal
have survived to show that the whole of southern Africa was
once claimed by the Portuguese.
Even those few names were not of pleasant omen ; for
Portuguese remembrance of the Cape, and the terrific storms
which sweep around that austral headland, was Their
full of evil. Shipwreck and disaster were all its
story for the Latin traders to the East ; many a Africa,
fair ship richly laden was cast ashore, its silk and spices lost,
its sailors haply saved, but driven to grub for fish and roots
along the untilled shores, often ' in want of arms, clothes, and
money, and having no longer the semblance of human beings/
as one old writer tells ; always fearful of attack from natives
or wild beasts, and in great dread of death from hunger. In
one such catastrophe the chronicler states simply that the
captain who had lost his vessel was ' suffering in his brain
from constant watching/ in another a viceroy and more than
fifty of his people were slain in a terrible fight at Table
Bay ' by bestial negroes, the most brutal of all that coast/
And a third and more moving tragedy even than this whole-
sale massacre tells how a Portuguese lady who was cast
ashore by shipwreck with her husband and two children
was forced to strip herself before the natives. Half-dead
with shame, the unhappy woman ' cast herself upon the
ground, and covered herself with her hair, which was very
long, while she made a pit in the sand in which she buried
herself to the waist, and never rose from that spot ' before she
died. One of the children also died beside her, the other lived ;
and the father now returning from a search for food, sat down
by his dead lady ' with his face supported on one hand, not
weeping or saying a single word, but sitting thus with his
eyes fixed upon her, and taking no account of the child/
After a space he dug a grave in the sand for her and the little
6 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
one ; and then the poor broken man disappeared into the
thickets, and was never heard of more. 1
Truly the Portuguese had good reason for their hatred of
the Cape and Table Bay when such memories of evil haunted
The First them. But later visitors of other nations were at
VMtOTs ^ rs * no w ^ sel - To Thomas Stevens, indeed, the
1579-91. first Englishman who rounded South Africa on
his way to India in the year 1579, the Cape of Good Hope was
nothing more than a place that was ' famous and feared of all
men/ Cape Agulhas, further east, was even more terrible
and dangerous, being ' a land full of tigers, and people that
are savage and killers of all strangers/ Such was the earliest
brief comment on South Africa by an Englishman, and it did
but echo the opinion of the Portuguese in whose company he
sailed ; the report of Francis Drake, who passed the Cape in
the opposite direction a few months after Stevens in June
1580 on his homeward voyage round the world, was more
favourable and more accurate. He declared the great head-
land to be ' a most stately thing, and the fairest cape we saw
in the whole circumference of the earth ' ; the belief, too, that
it was always encompassed with intolerable storms was
stated to be false.
Neither Drake nor Stevens set foot on South African soil ;
and a dozen years more had passed before an English vessel
put in at the Cape for water and provisions. But on 1st
August 1591 the eastward-bound expedition under the two
captains Raymond and Lancaster cast anchor in Saldanha
Bay, and a party from the vessels went ashore. They re-
ported the bay to be commodious, and although the natives
were ' black savages very brutish/ they were not unfriendly ;
but after a stay of about a month, during which many ante-
lopes ' and other great beasts unknowen ' were observed in
the interior, the travellers departed for the Indies.
1 For these early days of the Portuguese in South Africa, see Theal's
Records of South-Eastern Africa ; and the delightful book by my friend
Ian D. Colvin, The Cape of Adventure.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 7
Others came and went in following years. From time to
time, and more often every season, a vessel would put in at
Table Bay to water or repair ; but those who ^^ otnerB
now began to use the place were mostly new com- frequent
petitors of Portugal, not the Portuguese them- the Cape<
selves. And the fact that upstart rivals whom the proud
monopolists of Lisbon would have branded as heretics and
pirates frequented Table Bay hardly made the place more
welcome to the descendants of Diaz and Da Gama.
The traders of England and Holland, ambitious of a share
in the profitable traffic with the Indies, embarked on mer-
cantile adventures to the Orient as the sixteenth century
neared its close ; and in course of time it was these men who
occupied the country which the Portuguese had discovered and
neglected, and it was these men who founded there a European
settlement that was destined to spread far into the remote
interior of the continent, and outdistance the decaying Empire
of the Latins on the fever-haunted coasts of Mozambique.
But for many years neither Dutch nor English had any
more idea of colonising South Africa than the Portuguese
themselves. It was the fate of the whole continent They hold
to be misjudged alike by its discoverers and by Africa of
those later travellers who sailed around its long little value,
low shores. They judged, as men will judge of men and
things, merely by the outward view ; and Africa shares with
Australia the concealment of its beauties and resources from
the superficial eye of the casual wayfarer. 1 It had no such
attraction of profit and adventure as was promised by the
Indies and the isles of the Eastern Seas. Its climate was
maligned, judged only by the fevers of Sofala and Mozambique.
Its people were condemned, and not without good cause, as
cruel and barbarous. Its riches were unknown and un-
suspected ; and after the failure of the Latins to locate the
1 For the low esteem in which Australia was held, see vol. v. bk. xvii.
chs. i. and ii.
8 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
wealth of Ophir, the gold and gems which lay hidden beneath
the soil of Africa were overlooked for nearly four centuries by
the eager seekers after wealth elsewhere.
And in those beautiful isles of the Indian Ocean, which
Nature has blessed with a soil of superlative fertility, the
nations of Europe found for long a greater attraction than
was offered by the more sombre shores of South Africa. The
conquest of Madagascar was the subject of many an ambitious
project before there was any thought of founding a colony at
Cape Town. 1 Mauritius was occupied by the Dutch fifty years
before they established themselves at Table Bay. And the
wealth of Java and Sumatra 2 was sought for and fought for
a century and more before it was realised that the vast terri-
tories south of the Zambesi could support anything more than
a few debased and ignorant savages.
The splendour of the tropics outshone the less gorgeous
lands of the temperate south, as a woman of seductive beauty
will divert the errant attentions of man from more estimable
but plainer sisters ; but only for awhile. The one attracted
many rivals from many nations, the other found but one
faithful claimant in two centuries ; yet while the one inspired
the passion for possession, and took due toll of life and health
from those who yielded to the warm embrace, the other gave
a permanent home, that was not abandoned by the children
of its founders.
CHAPTER II
ABANDONED CLAIM AND RIVAL SETTLEMENT : 1608-1758
As a port of call on the road to India, Table Bay had per-
manent advantages and occasional dangers ; but while the
Eastern Seas remained a monopoly of Portugal, it was unlikely
1 For Madagascar and Mauritius, see vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. iv.
2 Vol. iv. bk. xv. ch. ii. for the Malay Archipelago.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 9
to be much used. For the Portuguese maintained their
stations further east, at Mozambique and Sofala ; and it was
not until other European nations began to compete with and
surpass the Latins in the outer world that the Cape of Good
Hope became a place of regular resort.
But when Dutch and English merchantmen began to fight
the Portuguese and each other for the profitable trade in
oriental fabrics and spices, they soon found the APortof
advantage of a permanent port of call ; and what- call at
ever the risk of storm and sudden shipwreck at Table Bay '
certain seasons of the year in Table Bay, 1 it had advantages
that easily offset those dangers. It lay almost exactly half-
way on the long ocean road to and from the Indies. Its
noble headland stood out boldly, so that none could miss it,
and it had a continual supply of fresh running water that
incoming vessels could store against the remainder of the
voyage. 2 For these excellent reasons Table Bay became
the port of call for English and Dutch traders in the early
sixteenth century a place where skippers outward bound for
Java and Japan could leave letters reporting their progress
thus far on the voyage for returning vessels to carry back to
Amsterdam or London ; a place where men might rest awhile
after long tedious weeks in tropic waters, and exchange the
views and gossip of the high seas with other comers from
afar. In this wise Table Bay became a centre of recourse,
and in due time since skippers and sailors are convivial
souls achieved a reputation as a tavern of the Eastern Seas,
where high carousal was often held by mariners of mark
from broad Thames and broader Maas.
And there now grew up a traffic between these travellers and
1 It was from May to September, when the north-west gales blow in
full strength, that the ill-protected Table Bay was the terror of seamen,
and the Cape deserved its name of the Cape of Storms. For the other
half of the year it was safe.
2 It was the good fresh water of Table Bay that made it a place of
more resort for seamen than Saldanha, which was less well provided.
10 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
the barbarous natives of the Cape, who supplied the merchant-
men with cattle and such green stuffs as the country could
produce, in exchange for ' iron hoopes, which is the best
money which they doe esteeme,' * and such odd trifles of
the ships. Fresh meat and vegetables were the best restora-
tives to health for the scurvy-stricken crews of the old East
Indiamen ; 2 but care was needed in the conduct of this early
commerce. Neither Dutch nor English had forgotten the
massacre of the Portuguese by the natives a century before ;
and the treacherous character of the ' Kafirs or Atheists, the
accursed progeny of Cham/ as an English traveller of the
early sixteenth century called them in disgust, 3 made caution
and the presence if not actually the use of force a necessary
prudence in such barterings.
For some years these two European nations used the Cape
and Table Bay in common, with no thought of founding
colonies or advancing any claim to their exclusive possession.
But rivalry between the two grew keen. Englishman and
Hollander pressed hard on each other's heels in the East,
intrigued and denounced the other's intrigues in the Courts
of Asia, and waged a merchants' war of prices in the West.
On the high seas hard words were answered with harder blows ;
bloody fights were waged in the East Indies, and presently
the peaceful meeting-ground half-way between Europe and
India became an object of desire.
What, if any, views of settlement and conquest in South
Africa passed through the brains of Dutch skippers to the
Indies are unrecorded or lost in old Dutch archives ; but their
1 John Jourdain. His Journal has been printed by the Hakluyt
Society.
2 Many of the vessels of these days arrived in port after a long voyage
with half their crews dead or hopelessly diseased with scurvy, unable to
unfurl the sails, or even to bring the ship into harbour. I have given
some instances of the ravages of scurvy in the footnote on vol. ii. p. 25.
8 Sir Thomas Herbert, Some Yeares Travels into Divers Parts of Asia
and Afriqut (1638). His remark that most of the Kafir men were said to
be semi-eunuchs shows him a poor observer.
11
rivals were less reticent. In the year 1608 the English captain,
John Jourdain, chancing to be detained awhile at Saldanha
Bay, and ' having little business there/ he wrote, An English
' for recreation myself with other of the mer-
chants would take our walk to the top of the hill
called the Table/ From that broad eminence, which com-
mands a wide view of the neighbouring country, ambition
spoke to Jourdain ; his constructive faculties as a European
revolted at the waste uncultivated land, and he meditated
the founding of a plantation that ' would bear anything that
should be sown or planted, as for all kind of grain, wheat,
barley, besides all kind of fruit, as oranges, lemons, limes, and
grapes. If this country were inhabited by a civil nation,
having a castle or fort for defence against the outrage of
heathenish people and to withstand any foreign force, in short
time,' predicted the sailor, 'it might be brought to some
civility, and within few years able of itself to furnish all ships
refreshing/ while he did not despair that in due course even
the barbarous natives might ' be brought to know God, and
understand our language/
Such was Jourdain's vision of the future ; but like most
prophets, he was not to see his hopes fulfilled. A few years
later the gallant captain met his end in a sea-fight with the
Dutch in East Indian waters; and by that time the one
unworthy attempt to carry out his views had failed as it
deserved.
In the year 1614, perhaps with Jourdain's scheme in mind,
and with some idea of advantaging their growing trade, the
directors of the English East India Company The First
determined to plant a station at the Cape. They settlement
had already some experience of such matters in the lei*.
East ; but the materials they chose for this South African
enterprise were as evil as their methods were unhappy.
It happened that ten men had been condemned to death
at the Old Bailey sessions in London for certain serious crimes ;
12 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
and the East India Company entreated that these men should
be respited of their sentence, and banished to the Cape, to
A convict found an English colony at Table Bay. The
Colony. application was received with favour, being
looked upon as ' a very charitable deed, and a means to bring
the criminals to God by giving them time for repentance,
to crave pardon for their sins ' ; the request was granted, the
wretched men were released from the hangman's rope, and
presently sent forth upon their travels.
The scheme was foredoomed to failure. Two of the in-
voluntary colonists were not landed at the Cape at all, but by
its dismal accident or favour were taken on to India. The
Failure. f a t e of one of these is unknown ; the other, being
in time brought back to England, made a shabby return for
the kindness of his patron, the great Sir Thomas Roe, 1 by
stealing his plate. Probably the gallows now claimed their
prey ; but the other eight convicts were left on Robben
Island, a barren place with neither tree nor shade, fresh water
nor corn. 2 Their leader, one Cross, who had been a Yeoman
of the Guard at the Court of James i., was killed almost at
once in a brawl with the aborigines ; the remainder were
soon in desperate plight. They had been provided with a
boat, some ammunition, and provisions ; but they had not
the means, nor probably the capacity, to raise anything for
themselves on their bare island. Soon they had nothing but
dry biscuit left, and not too much of that, says the chronicler
of the affair, 3 living indeed as best they might ' with hungry
bellies for six months ' ; and when next an English ship put
in along that coast they made shift to reach her in what
remained of their boat, whose timbers were now split and
1 For Sir Thomas Roe and his embassy to the Court of the Mughal
Emperor in 1614, in which this condemned rogue accompanied him, see
vol. ii. bk. vi. ch. iii.
* In those days it was called Penguin Island.
3 The whole story has been given by Edward Terry in his Voyage to
Eaat India, published in 1665. Terry was chaplain to Roe on his
embassy to the Mughal.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYONl) 13
rotten. Four were drowned in the attempt, the three that
remained alive were rescued ; but these soon showed that
hardships had not reformed their character. They were a
source of serious trouble on the homeward voyage, and im-
mediately the ship arrived in England they escaped ashore
and stole a purse. For this they were condemned as incor-
rigible rogues, as in truth it seems they were ; and ' their very
foul story being related to the Lord Chief Justice/ he ordered
their immediate execution.
So ended the first English attempt at sovereignty in
South Africa ; the second, if more honourable, was hardly
more successful.
In the month of June 1620, some officers of the English
East India fleet, who chanced to meet and, as their custom
was, to discuss affairs in friendly fashion with British
their fellows of the Dutch East India vessels while
in Table Bay, learned with some surprise that the 1620.
Dutch proposed to found a settlement in Table Valley in the
following year. Probably the secret leaked out of an in-
discreet bottle ; but a few days later the Hollanders sailed
for the East, leaving this unpleasant news behind them ; the
English remained awhile in harbour and debated the thing
among themselves. Debate was but the preliminary to
action ; the two English commodores, Andrew Shillinge and
Humphrey Fitzherbert, determined to forestall their rivals
by taking immediate possession of the Cape in the name of
the King of England.
Their reasons for this step, which they were careful to place
on record, were not without force. They stated that only a
few men would be necessary to hold Table Valley, that a
plantation there would be of great use for the refreshment of
the fleet, that the soil was fruitful and the climate pleasant,
that the natives would become willing subjects of the king
and perhaps also servants of God, that the whale fishery would
be profitable ; and that above all, it was more fitting that the
U ;{| THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Dutch should be subjects of England than that the English
should be subjects of the Dutch or of anybody else.
The last excellent reason may perhaps be regarded as the
one which determined the two gallant commodores ; and a
fact which may also have been not without weight in their
minds was that the six English vessels at that moment in
Table Bay were more than a match for the one Dutchman
who happened to be anchored there.
On 3rd July the proclamation of sovereignty was read, and
the English flag hoisted on Table Mountain. No objection
was made by the aborigines to a ceremony which they did not
understand ; and the solitary Dutch captain who viewed the
scene was either too phlegmatic or too prudent to protest. Or
he may have had a vision of the future which restrained him.
The occasion was in one sense more noteworthy than
either Shillinge or Fitzherbert realised, for it marked the
And first formal claim by Britain to the soil of a
forgotten. continent which she has since so largely dominated.
But in its practical result the proclamation was of no signifi-
cance whatever. The English vessels sailed for the Orient,
where Shillinge died fighting and Fitzherbert died drinking ;
and neither the king nor the East India Company of England
recognised the existence of a possession which they did not
desire.
The Dutch project of founding a colony at the Cape was
likewise abandoned. For some years more the two nations
concentrated all their efforts on the oriental trade, in whose
pursuit both found a common enemy in the monopoly claimed
by Portugal ; and the sailors of England and Holland met
and gossiped freely and on equal terms in Table Bay, which
continued to serve as a half-way house and port of call for both.
The Hollanders, whose first appearance in India dates from
1595, a few years later than the English, were spending their
energies in continual but unsuccessful attacks on the Portu-
guese colony of Mozambique ; and although the directors
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 15
of the East India Company of Holland resolved in 1616 that
henceforth their ships should always put in at Table Bay,
they claimed no rights there above the East India Company
of England, nor did they seem likely to claim any.
It was in fact an accident which had nearly added another
disaster to the dreary annals of the Cape of Storms that led
to the founding of a Dutch colony at Table Bay ; Aninvoiun-
and the unforeseen consequences of that accident settlement
decided the political destinies of the Cape for a 1648.
hundred and fifty years, and influenced the destinies of
South Africa for all time.
During the year 1648 the Haarlem, a vessel of the Dutch
East India Company's fleet, was driven ashore and wrecked
on the South African coast. The sailors succeeded in saving
their lives and the cargo ; and they made their way to the
Table Valley, where they determined to await, since they
could do nothing else, the arrival of the next Dutch vessel.
Unlike some previous refugees, they found the natives
friendly and hospitable ; the soil was fertile, and the seeds
they planted throve ; game and fish were likewise plentiful.
The involuntary settlers therefore formed a highly favourable
opinion of their unexpected home ; and when they were
rescued six months later they advised the directors of the
Dutch East India Company that the acquisition of the Cape
would be highly advantageous to that great corporation.
They also expressed . their surprise that the foreign rivals of
the Company had not already seized so excellent a country.
The directors were impressed by the memorial, and after
debating the project for eighteen months, they determined
to establish an outpost at Table Bay. Three A per-
vessels from the Company's fleet the Dromedaris, manent
Dutch
the Reiger, and the Goede Hoop were told off to outpost,
carry the seventy men who were to form the new 1661 -
settlement : on the Christmas Eve of the year 1651 the
anchors were weighed, and the expedition stood out to sea.
16 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The voyage was prosperous, and rapid for a period in which
a year was often consumed by the journey from Europe to
India. On 7th April 1652 the emigrants landed at the Cape,
and Jan Van Riebeeck, who had been appointed Commander of
the colony, proceeded to look for a convenient and healthy
spot on which to build a fort.
It is highly improbable that any of the dutiful servants
of the Honourable Company realised the full importance of
their mission as they stepped ashore. It certainly never
entered the heads of the first settlers at the Cape that gold
and diamonds equal to all the riches of the Orient were to be
found in a region that report peopled only with wild beasts
and savages ; 1 while the idea that they were laying the
foundation of a new nation would have been regarded both by
the servants of the Company and by the Company itself as an
opinion dangerously near rebellion. Yet from this small seed,
that was planted in the southern autumn of 1652, sprang part
of the United South Africa of the twentieth century.
On 8th April, the day after the vessels cast anchor in Table
Bay, a meeting of the Council the commander and the three
The Found- ca P tams of the expedition was held aboard the
ing of cape Dromedaris ; the same week the site of the
wn, 1652. se ttlement was determined. The building of a
fortress was at once begun, a square castle being decided on,
with a flat roof, from which it would be easy to fire down on
any enemy who attacked the place. The fort was to be sur-
rounded by a moat to strengthen the defence ; a wooden
house and store-shed were included in the plan, and a work-
shop, hospital, and barracks were added. 2
1 Half a century later Swift wrote :
' So geographers in Afric maps
With savage pictures fill their gap?,
And o'er unhabitable downs
Place elephants instead of towns.'
A glance at some of the old maps shows that Swift by no means
exceeded the bounds of poetic licence in these lines ; see the examples
cited in the footnote on pages 149-50.
2 It stood behind the modern post-office of Cape Town
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 17
It was the close of the dry season when the Dutchmen
landed, and the soil was bare with drought ; but in a few
weeks, and before the first buildings were com- Early Diffl-
pleted, the winter rains set in. The settlement ^ tiesof
was now in some danger, for dysentery came with settlement,
the rains ; half the colony was down with sickness, medical
appliances were lacking, and scurvy was soon added to the
other misfortunes. Neither fresh meat nor vegetables, the
sovereign cure for the scurvy, were to be had ; the vessels
that put in at Table Bay were in the same plight as the
garrison ; and the first winter at the Cape was in truth but
a miserable time for its new occupants.
But presently a marvellous change was seen. The heavy
rains which had brought sickness to man brought new life to
the parched earth ; grasses and plants began to Its prOB
show, and shot up quickly as the settlers from the pects
north watched the unaccustomed spectacle of im P rove -
antipodean spring in September ; the seeds that had been
brought from Europe were planted, and it was found that
radishes, lettuces, and other green stuffs from Holland
flourished on the virgin soil.
Heavy storms and floods uprooted and destroyed some of
the plants, but in this, as in other matters, experience taught
the settlers wisdom ; and the second winter there was no
such scarcity of food as had marred the first.
From that time the colony at the Cape began to take
firm root, and there was never a thought of abandoning a place
which its owners described, picturesquely but not inaccur-
ately, as the frontier fortress of India.
The frontier fortress of the Dutch East Indies indeed, and
a port of call and ever-open tavern of the Eastern Seas,
Cape Town remained during the century and a The Frontier
half it was under the rule of the Dutch East Fortress of
India Company. And it was the steady aim of
that great Company that it should be neither more nor less
VOL. VI. B
18 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
than a frontier fortress and a port of call where their ships
could provision and water. If it was anything less it was
useless for their purpose ; if anything more it would outgrow
its founders' intentions and policy.
The latter objection lay far in the future ; the former
defect was quickly rectified. The first temporary defences
of the place were hardly very formidable, but in the second
year of the settlement, when England was at war with
Holland, 1 the castle was strengthened and rebuilt ; the fear
of a French attack twenty years later caused another addi-
tion to the fortifications of Table Bay.
But in neither case was the fear of attack justified by
the event. The East India Company of England, which
had established its own port of call at St. Helena in the
same year that the Dutch had determined on the colony
at Table Bay, 2 had no wish for territory at the Cape ; the
great French dream of empire in the East embraced the isles
of the Indian Ocean in its gorgeous vision of dominion,
but stopped short of annexation in South Africa. 3
The Dutch were therefore left undisturbed in their new
possession.
It is true that French and English trading vessels put in
at Table Bay from time to time. They came for shelter and
refreshment, not for conquest ; and they were sometimes
supplied at a price with the goods they required when their
nations were at peace with Holland although the local
Dutch commander once excused this profitable hospitality
to his jealous superiors at Amsterdam by remarking that the
meat he sold the English was unsound and they were
occasionally seized as lawful prizes when first news of the
outbreak of war had reached Cape Town.
1 See vol. i. bk. ii. ch. iii. for Cromwell's war with Holland.
2 See vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. v. for St. Helena. This island was captured
by the Dutch twice about this time, but in each case they were driven
out after a few months.
3 For the French in the Indies, vol. ii. bk. vi. ch. iv.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 19
In general the Dutch East India Company looked
rather jealously on such alien intruders at Cape Town. 1
Officially it refused to supply them with anything Policy of
but fresh water; and though the free Dutch
burghers who settled on the shores of Table Bay pany.
in later years were permitted to do business with the
foreigners, they were often restrained by a hint from their
commandant against selling the produce of their farms to
the rivals of their masters.
The Dutch East India Company, in fact, pursued the same
monopolistic policy at Cape Town as in the Eastern Seas ; 2
the same policy characterised the Dutch West India Company
in North America. 3 The directors argued forcibly as business
men that the station at the Cape was founded for their benefit,
and that to help their competitors in the trade with Asia was
to hurt themselves. They did not see that in the end it hurt
the colony they had founded by diminishing the demand for
its products, and that here were all the elements of a direct
conflict of interests between the colonists and themselves.
Like the English East India Company, they fought for trade
and not dominion ; and when circumstances compelled them
to become territorial sovereigns as well as commercial men
they attempted to limit their responsibilities. By doing
so they created the same dissatisfaction among their own
colonists in South Africa that had gone far to ruin the settle-
ments of the Dutch West India Company at New Amsterdam ;
but like their great rivals in London, the merchants of Holland
seem to have recognised that it was an anomaly for a com-
mercial corporation in Europe to be a sovereign power in
other continents, and to have had an uneasy consciousness
1 It is worth notice that Van Riebeeck's original instructions forbade
him to oppose or interfere with any other European settlement in South
Africa. The Dutch may reasonably have held that those Europeans who
wished to make regular use of Cape Town should build their own colony
elsewhere along the coast.
2 Pee vol. iv. bk. xv. ch. ii. for the Dutch in Java and the East.
3 Vol. i. bk. Hi. ch. Hi. for the Dutch colonies jn North America.
20 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
that the anomaly which they could not prevent would in the
end prove their undoing. They were not far wrong in their
belief ; for British dominion in India survives the English East
India Company, and the Dutch colonies in the Eastern Seas
and the Dutch population in South Africa have long survived
the Dutch East India Company which gave birth to both.
The population of Cape Town in these early years, however,
grew but slowly, too slowly even for the Dutch East India
The Free Company. The directors had certainly no wish
Burghers. ^ o f oun( ][ a powerful state in South Africa, since
commerce, not dominion, was their aim ; but they intended
the Cape to furnish all their ships with food, and the popula-
tion which was only 134 all told in 1657 was not large
enough to cultivate the soil.
Efforts were therefore made to obtain, recruits from Holland,
and good terms were offered to intending settlers approved
by the Company free possession of their holdings for three
years, and long credit for food, guns, powder, lead, and farming
implements but not many took advantage of the offer. 1
One of the conditions of acceptance was a pledge that the
emigrant would sell all his produce to the Company, and
remain twenty years in the colony ; the terms were not un-
reasonable, but although the Dutchman of the time was used
to wander all over the wide world, employment was too good
in Holland, and opportunities too many elsewhere, for him
to be prepared to tie himself to so long an exile with such
uncertain prospects.
A few were neverthless tempted to try their fortunes in the
new land ; from time to time, and at varying intervals, a
single family, or sometimes two or three together, would be
brought over to the Cape by the trading ships bound for the
eastern tropics, and take up their grant of land at some spot
near Cape Town or beyond.
1 The offer was limited to married men of good character and of Dutch
or German birth.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 21
Among these early settlers were many of good Dutch name
and lineage, whose children were to play their part, and that
a leading one, in the shaping of the white South Africa of the
future. Such families as Brinkman, Cloete, Bietvelt, and
Pretorius are found among the immigration records of these
years, and they formed a new class of population in the colony.
They were not merely the paid employees of the Dutch East
India Company, contracted to serve and obey that mighty
master for a term of years ; they were free men, who were
come out to make their own way in the world by their own
exertions.
They recognised, somewhat grudgingly at times it is true,
but still they recognised, the Dutch East India Company as
the ruler of the country ; they obeyed, at least for a time,
its rules ; but beyond admitting the authority of the Company
in its own territories and the extent of its dominions they
were later to dispute they owed it little thanks. Like
their contemporaries and fellow-countrymen on the other
side of the world, the Dutch burghers of New Amsterdam,
they wished to enlarge their rights and privileges ; the
Company which had brought them out was determined to
prevent them. The Company condemned the turbulence
of the colonists who resisted and sometimes ignored its regula-
tions, the colonists condemned the restrictions of the Company
which refused their demands ; and each chafed against and
irritated the other in turn.
Nevertheless they prospered, despite the disagreements, the
friction, and the restrictions. Some of these folk took up
their abode on the outskirts of Cape Town, others Their
settled in the part that became known as Hotten- pr B P ent y-
tots Holland ; some families crossed the Cape Peninsula,
and set up house upon the mainland of the continent whence
they soon began to send out exploring parties towards the
interior, and to speculate on the possibility of leaving the rule
of the Dutch East India Company behind them altogether.
22 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
. A canal was projected in the very early days of the colony
tnat would have separated the Cape Peninsula on which Cape
Town stood from the mainland where these more distant
parties had begun to settle. Its construction might have
prevented them from going so far afield ; the idea, however,
was abandoned after matured consideration for good reasons.
But there was more significance in the abandonment than
the Governor and Council responsible for the decision realised.
The cutting of a canal between Cape Town and the main-
land would have strengthened the colony at Table Bay
against the attacks of African aborigines ; but it would
also have tended to stereotype its original function as the
frontier fortress of India, it would have prevented Cape
Town from being the mother of Cape Colony, and it might
have delayed the advance of European settlement in the
interior.
But these Dutch families were not the only new arrivals at
Cape Town. A revival of religious bigotry in France had
The expelled the industrious Huguenots from their
immigra- homes in fair Provence and fruitful Burgundy and
tion, 1687. rich Languedoc ; and some of those among the
exiles who found refuge for their faith in Holland accepted
the proposal of the Dutch East India Company that they
should settle at the Cape. They were offered land and liberty,
neither of which were theirs in France ; and in return for
land and liberty, they were expected to introduce the cultiva-
tion of the vine and olive and other useful industries and arts
in South Africa.
The first parties of Huguenots arrived at Cape Town in 1687.
They numbered about one hundred and seventy-six men,
women, and children in all ; and among them were the names,
which afterwards shed lustre on the annals of South Africa,
of de Villiers and Joubert and Malan. They had neither
money nor other property on their arrival, but a fund was
raised to help them over the first difficulties of their new
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 23
position in a strange land, and it was not long before they took
firm root in the alien soil.
The Huguenots did not belie their well-won reputation
for capacity and industry in their new homes, and within
a few years they prospered like the Dutch ; but, TheiT
notwithstanding the many virtues of this admir- Exclusive-
able people, they were not altogether popular in ]
South Africa. Not unnaturally the exiles wished to form a
little separate community of French Protestants, distin-
guished by social customs, by the minor details of religious
worship, and above all by the difference of national speech,
from their neighbours a little Gallic island in a sea of strange
humanity ; but the Dutch Governor at the Cape had no more
intention of allowing the existence of a state within a state
than Richelieu, who had checked the same tendency to
exclusiveness among the Protestants of France some forty
years before. 1
They want, said the elder Van der Stel, the Governor at the
time of their arrival, ' not only their own church but their
own magistrate and their own prince/ Neither Huguenot
magistrate nor Huguenot prince would the Dutch Governor
permit ; the exiles were scattered here and there among the
Dutch settlers as a means of reducing their influence and
ultimately absorbing them among their neighbours ; and,
despite their protests and complaints, there was no remedy
for their grievance. The religion for which they had suffered
exile they might retain, since the Dutch were also of that
faith ; the nation which had cast them out they must in turn
cast out, lest perchance a Protestant New France should ever
rise to menace a Protestant New Holland in South Africa.
Truly the lot of the exile' is hard and bitter, and he who for-
sakes his country cuts out his heart.
1 See vol. i. bk. iii. ch. ii. for Richelieu's description of his policy.
Like the Dutch Governor, he allowed the Huguenots religious freedom,
but checked their attempt to form a separate political party.
24 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The policy of absorption was in the end successful. The older
Huguenots might chafe at the division of their community ;
They are the younger immigrants were less concerned.
Sy 8 the ed The y intermarried with the Dutch; and the
Dutch. Dutch being far more numerous than themselves, 1
and not having had their sense of nationality blunted by
religious differences at home and exile abroad, 2 the stronger
type prevailed. The children of these mixed unions some-
times spoke French, but they always spoke Dutch ; and
their children again spoke Dutch, and Dutch only.
Within a few years the two people were united in blood, and
one in sympathy and speech. The Frenchman Le Vaillant,
who visited South Africa in the eighteenth century, found
no signs of French nationality among the descendants of the
Huguenots save their dark hair and complexion, and the fact
that they still baked their bread after the French fashion. 3
Another traveller of the nineteenth century found indeed, or
thought he found, proof that the families of French ancestry in
South Africa were more courteous in manner than the Dutch.
But that may have been no more than the accidental chances
of personal encounter, an opinion founded on the varying
hospitality accorded to a stranger, or even a prejudice due to
personal or political causes. At least no other visitors remarked
a distinction which was not remarked by the colonists them-
selves ; and the only other sign of Huguenot descent in the
1 The Huguenots formed but a sixth part of the community.
2 I have a theory, which admittedly I cannot prove, but which
Richelieu's action in France rather supports, that the Huguenots were
lacking in the ideas of French nationality which it was the business of
French statesmen to encourage in the seventeenth century. It must
have been rather difficult, in the religious passions of the time, for the
same man to be a good Huguenot and a good Frenchman.
'Women are said to be more conservative than men, and such small
customs as the method of baking bread, being in the control of the women
of the household, might remain unchanged for generations. Similarly in
Pitcairn Island it was discovered that the descendants of Tahitian women
who had married Englishmen still suckled their children after the
Tahitian fashion (vol. v. bk. xx. ch. i). No doubt they do so to this
day.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 25
third generation was the family name, or so small and insignifi-
cant a survival as the use of some term or phrase or Gallic
idiom of speech which had outlasted the French language in
South Africa and been translated into the provincial dialect
of the Cape Dutch. 1
But not all the troubles of the early settlers were over when
the Huguenots arrived. Occasional sicknesses broke out,
and these were considered, after the fashion of the Further
day, to be the penalty of sin, and cured if they o^e" 166
were cured by prayer and fasting. 2 Generally, Colonists,
however, the place was healthy, and sufficient food was grown,
or imported, or purchased by barter from the natives ; but
the settlers often found their cattle, and sometimes their own
lives endangered by the wild animals of the country ; lions
came down at night, and leopards even ventured down by day,
to the very walls of the colony ; stock was seized, and several
men were mauled and bitten, until the great beasts learned
that man was too strong for them, and made off into the
interior.
Hitherto there had been no trouble with the aborigines.
They were not numerous on the Cape Peninsula ; they had
been treated kindly by the earliest of the settlers, and food
1 J. C. Voigt remarks the common use of the double negative at the
Cape, which he considers a survival of the French ne-pas. It is not
unusual for such verbalisms to be transmitted from one language to
another by those who have abandoned their mother tongue. I think I
have noticed instances of this in the books of Joseph Conrad, a Pole who
has won fame as an English author; and the Germans in America, who
have forgotten their own tongue, have occasionally given a Teutonic twist
to English.
Indeed, I might quote myself as a collateral proof. The earlier
chapters of the first volume of this work were written when I was living
in Germany, and speaking little but German ; and when I came to revise
them a couple of years later in -London I noticed, besides the cramped
style of immaturity, a number of sentences built, as it were, on a German
frame. The words were English, the construction German.
2 The apparition of a comet in South Africa at this time caused a
stricter observance of the Sabbath. It would take a good deal more than
that to ensure repentance in the twentieth century ; but at the bottom
of our hearts we still have a great deal of respect for the hell-fire
philosophy of a revengeful diety.
26
and presents given in exchange for native help in the building
of the fort. But when they saw the Europeans replacing
the first rough wooden houses of the settlement by brick
buildings, and planning out great gardens and plantations
on the Cape Peninsula and beyond, they knew the Dutch had
come to stay, and the prospect of the invaders' domination
vexed them. They were not indeed strong enough to expel
the intruders ; but they stole their cattle, murdered a lad in
charge of the herds, and began a system of continual pilfering
that no precautions or severity could check.
Neither the murder nor the outrages were revenged, the
prudent Van Riebeeck being anxious not to embroil his little
colony, which was still dependent for its meat on the Hottentot
supplies, in a native war ; and to avoid complications or the
chance of further disagreements, the settlers were forbidden
to have any intercourse with the natives, and all transactions
and bartering for cattle were carried on by the commandant
himself.
The regulation was a wise one, for the colony was still a
weakly infant, and time was on the side of the Europeans ;
but not all intercourse between the two races could be stopped
by the official order. Some Hottentot cattle found their
way into private hands for fair consideration, despite Van
Riebeeck's proclamation ; some were stolen by the less
scrupulous whites ; and some of the less unattractive Hotten-
tot women were enticed they were not always unwilling into
Dutch households, where they served the lonely exiles at
once as slaves and mistresses, while their offspring became in
time a minor half-breed population that was sometimes
bond and sometimes free, and was acknowledged or disowned
by its European father as he chose.
Neither the lust for their women nor the purchase or theft
of their cattle removed the fear of a Hottentot attack upon
the European settlements ; but the Dutch were steadily
advancing towards the interior as their numbers grew, and
27
with each advance of the white man the natives fell back
another stage inland. That advance and retreat of the two
races was to be the basic factor underlying all South ^ Settle .
African politics for two centuries and more ahead : ment
the existence of an ever-shifting frontier between ^ e e s ^ ert e "
European and native African ; an advance, slow, advances
irregular, but nevertheless certain, on the part
of the European, a retreat, reluctant, rebellious, but con-
tinuous, on the part of the native African. The existence of
that ever-shifting frontier is the real key to the history of
European colonisation in South Africa.
From the very early years of the settlement at Cape Town
the beginnings of this advance were seen. In 1656, four
years after the colony was planted, the first wheat and barley
were grown at Rondebosch t he round wood after the sowings
nearer to the sea had failed. The following 'year the Groote
Schuur the great barn was built to store the corn ; maize
was introduced in 1658, and the culture of the vine ; and a
number of experiments in crops and produce were now tried,
both by the government in the great garden of the East India
Company and by the private settlers themselves. 1
Each new farm and every successful experiment meant an
enlargement of the colony ; each new plant and domestic
animal that was imported and thrived in the hitherto barren
lands of the Cape strengthened the position of those who
brought them in. And during the next few years seeds,
slips, and cuttings of fruits and flowers were sent over to the
Cape from Holland, strawberries and blackberries from the
gardens of the Rhine 2 ; young oaks and fir-trees in pots and
tubs were shipped from Europe, and acorns planted by the
1 Stringent laws were adopted for the protection of the farms and
orchards. A proclamation of the Government announced that the
penalty for meddling with a fruit-tree was forfeiture of liberty and
goods.
2 Hops were also tried, but these failed to strike root time after time,
and were eventually given up.
28 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
thousand in South Africa. Horses, too, were imported from
Java, and pigs, sheep, dogs, and rabbits from the Nether-
lands ; and season after season the acreage in crop and under
pasture grew.
It was this steady industry of the white man, this sowing,
planting, reaping year by year that won the land from the
black.
Nor was Nature unresponsive to those who wooed her with
such stubborn perseverance. Ten years after the colony was
founded Van Eiebeeck's farm contained over a thousand
orange, lemon, and citron trees, besides a few bananas, olives,
walnuts, and other fruit-trees and some thousands of vines ;
and his success was eclipsed by a later and greater Governor,
the elder Van der Stel. His name lives in the village, which
he founded in 1679, of Stellenbosch ; the local records of the
time reveal him as a tireless planter of seeds and saplings.
Twelve thousand oaks were planted by him on the slopes of
Table Mountain ; the apes devoured four thousand of the tender
and slow-growing trees, but the rest survived. And the long
avenues of oaks and the great orchards and vineyards which
he planted in his own villa,ge of Stellenbosch gave the place
its beauty and secured its fame beyond South Africa ; the
great farm and vineyard of his own estate at Constantia, which
gave a name to a brand of wine that attained to some repute
in Europe, was planted six years after Stellenbosch.
Other settlements further inland showed the continued
progress of the colony. The village district of the Paarl, said
to be founded by the less successful farmers of Stellenbosch ;
Drakenstein, at the foot of the mountains which formed a
barrier between these early colonists and the wild unknown
interior ; Fransche Hoek, the French Hook, where some
Huguenots were congregated all bore witness to the advance
of colonisation.
It was under the two Governors Van der Stel, father and
son, who ruled the colony at the Cape from 1679 to 1707, that
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 29
this advance took place. They were indeed the real builders
of the colony, as Van Biebeeck was its founder ; but they were
more than that. They not only enlarged the settlement, they
put it on a new basis altogether. Men of big visage and long
views, shrewd farmers who profited themselves and others
by their schemes, 1 they turned their faces to the interior,
and from their day Cape Town was no longer a mere port of
call on the way to the Indies, it was the gateway to the in-
terior of Africa. When the elder Van der Stel was appointed
Governor, the Cape Colony had as yet hardly burst its first
bounds on the Cape Peninsula ; when the younger Van der
Stel ended his official career, the road to the uplands of the
interior a road which ought surely to have been called in
gratitude the Weg Van der Stel was discovered, marked out
across the mountains, and well trodden.
And meanwhile Cape Town was growing steadily. Its
trade increased with every season, and with its trade its
wealth and reputation as a port and place of Growth of
business. Simon's Bay on the other side the Ca P e Town -
Cape Peninsula, which takes its name from Governor Simon
Van der Stel, had, it is true, been used as a winter anchorage
for ships since 1722, owing to its freedom from the storms that
sweep down on Table Bay : Simon's Town in consequence
became a pleasant, busy little place, but it could never rival
the older city on Table Bay while the seat of government was
at Cape Town ; and there was no intention of removing the
administration and the fortress of the Dutch East India
Company from the old quarters under the shadow of Table
Mountain.
1 The Van der Stels became wealthy, as indeed they deserved ; but
their too great success caused 'envious tongues to wag, jealous minds to
plot, bitter tongues to slander ; the younger Van der Stel was accused
by his enemies at the Cape before the directors of the Dutch East India
Company, and reduced from his position. He was too big a man for the
place, and he paid the penalty of greatness.
But that dismal story lies outside the compass of this short summary
of old Dutch rule.
30
The public buildings of the capital were modest, but they
were not unworthy of their situation and their purpose. The
Governor's house was described in 1685 as a large pile of two
stories, surrounded by a terrace, paved with stone and flanked
by a railed verandah ; 1 not far off was the great garden of
the Company, whose fame had reached and even attracted
botanists from Europe, and whose pleasant walks and groves
of oranges and apricots, pomegranates and other fruit were
at once the admiration of the people of Cape Town and the
wonder of every visitor to the colony.
The private buildings of the place were not less pleasant.
The old one-storied houses thatched with reeds, which had
been put up in Van Riebeeck's day, were not yet superseded ;
but they had been enlarged and more solidly built, decked
with the beautiful tiles that were the pride of Holland, some-
times enriched with curious treasures from the Indies, and
bearing other clear evidence of prosperity among their owners.
By 1738 Cape Town had two hundred houses, many of which
were very stately in appearance and surrounded by large
gardens 2 ; some of these houses regularly accommodated
visitors from Europe and the Indies, serving in the purpose
of hotels ; but the majority were owned by private residents,
the merchants or officials of the capital. And their number
was increasing year by year.
The streets of the town, which had grown on the site and
after the plan laid down by its founder, Van Riebeeck, ran in
straight symmetrical lines. Some of the thoroughfares were
watered by canals, after the inevitable fashion of the Dutch ; 3
and most were planted with chestnut- trees, whose broad leaves
1 Father Guy Tachard, Voyage de Siam.
2 Kolbe's Good Hope. Kolbe was not a very trustworthy person,
although he lived some time in South Africa ; but in this matter he
should be reasonably accurate.
3 Even at Colombo in Ceylon the Dutch merchants cut a canal. I
believe that Dutch theologians have been inclined to locate paradise in
the pliinet Mars, on account of its canals. But this is not an aiti:le of
faith.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 31
and thick foliage sheltered both passers-by and the house-
wives within from the too ardent southern sun. 1 In these
respects the Dutch capital in South Africa reminded the
traveller of old Dutch towns at home, whose leafy avenues
and placid waterways never fail to charm the tired eye of the
wayfarer ; and in other things besides their language and
appearance the citizens at Table Bay recalled their country-
men in Europe. Life in Cape Town was always comfortable
and easy ; food and drink were plentiful and good ; and
according to the French author Saint-Pierre, who stayed some
time at the Cape, the excellent Dutch colonists, like the well-
fed Hollanders on the North Sea, were occupied in eating
from morning till night. 2
The Dutch colony at Table Bay was a century old when
Saint-Pierre enjoyed its hospitality, and praised its simple
happy people ; and this little outpost of Europe in the anti-
podes had by then become firmly rooted on South African
soil. Its early difficulties had vanished ; the days of hard-
ships and short rations were long since over. Its burghers
no longer feared the attacks of the aborigines, the wild beasts
that had sometimes menaced the first settlers at Cape Town
were now driven far into the interior ; trade was flourishing,
nor had the merchants of the place any fear of diminishing
prosperity, since their stores and live-stock were in regular
demand from the vessels engaged in the steadily growing
commerce with the East Indies.
Nevertheless a great change was slowly coming over the
position which Cape Town had made for itself, both in its
own little local world and in its relation to the c Town
larger world beyond South Africa. It had been outgrows
founded by a powerful corporation of traders lts Origin>
who aspired to the monopoly of the traffic with the Indies.
1 Saint Pierre, Voyage a I' lie de France, 1773.
2 Saint Pierre again. He stayed there on his way to Mauritius, which
he immortalised as the scene of Paul et Viryinie.
32 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
That monopoly the Dutch East India Company had failed
to engross into its own hands ; other nations, and above all
the old British rivals of Holland in the Eastern Seas, had
competed successfully for commerce and dominion in Asia.
The fortunes of the Dutch East India Company began to
decline about the middle of the eighteenth century ; but the
interests of Cape Town, which had been subordinated by its
founders to their oriental trade, had outgrown its early
destiny as the supply station of the great Dutch Company,
and the decay of the Company had only profited the city.
The old barriers of exclusiveness which the Company had set
up could no longer be maintained by a declining corporation,
and Cape Town now supplied the ships of every nation in-
differently. Established as the depot of a single Company,
it was becoming in effect a free port.
And while this change marked the relation of Cape Town
to the outer world, another and not less notable change had
begun to mark an alteration of its position in South Africa.
The city which Van Riebeeck had founded a century before
had grown and prospered ; but not the city only. For the
settlement of Europeans had begun to spread inland two
generations since, and that settlement, once begun, had con-
tinued to spread itself steadily further and farther through
the interior.
The colony at Table Bay was no longer merely a port of
call for passing ships, an isolated outpost and convenience
of civilisation in a savage land ; it was becoming the capital
of a province, and that^province, which a century before had
been a barren waste, was now dotted with peaceful industrious
farms, with church and homestead, with heavy vines and
fruit and flowers, and rich fields and grazing cattle.
No longer was the Cape of Good Hope a land of no sojourn-
ing ; the vision which had come to old John Jourdain as he
looked inland from the top of Table Mountain, the prophecy
of a country ' inhabited by a civil nation, and bearing any-
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 33
thing that should be sown or planted/ was no longer a mirage
of the mind, the idle dream of a busy man, but an accom-
plished fact.
CHAPTER III
DUTCH EXPANSION AND ENGLISH CONQUEST : 1700-1815
IN the very early days of Van Riebeeck's rule at Cape Town
a rumour reached that infant settlement of a race of men
dwelling far to the north, whose skins were white Nama-
as the white man's, who wore clothing like them quaiand.
and grew their hair long as was the fashion among some
civilised people at that period. 1 And it was said that this
strange people lived in stone houses, that the manual work
of their country was performed by slaves, and that their form
of religious worship resembled the church-going of Christians.
Another rumour reached the curious Dutch colonists of a
people in the north, perhaps identical with this white-skinned
tribe, whose country contained a vast amount of gold and
precious stones.
The traditions of savages are untrustworthy in every age
and every country ; 2 but every age and every country gives
1 Besides these rumours of white men, many strange stories reached
Cape Town, and were passed on to Europe, from time to time, of the
existence of cannibals and human beings with tails in the interior of
South Africa. The existence of cannibals, and cannibals from choice,
not from scarcity of food, was proved by Livingstone on his last journey
in 1868 north of Lake Tanganyika ; but as to the tailed men, when he
asked a question out of curiosity, he received the unexpected but baffling
answer : ' We have always understood that monstrosities are met with
only among you sea-going people.' Each had placed the marvel in the
unknown.
2 Aborigines had misled the French and English explorers in Canada
in much the same fashion as they misled the Dutch, with stories of white
men and great wealth far away ; see vol. iii. bk. x. ch. iii. And some-
thing of the same kind occurred in Australia, when one traveller after
another was misled by reports of a great inland sea; vol. v. bk. xix.
ch. i.
Apart from the untrustworthincss of the reports of savages, it is of
VOL. VI, C
34 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
them credence when they tell of wealth and an unknown
land. Van Riebeeck and his people inclined to believe the
Hottentot reports ; Namaqualand, the land of which they
heard, became an object of desire ; and there were some who
even wondered whether this country would not prove the
fabulous Empire of Monomotapa of which old legends told, or
that great realm of Ophir which Portuguese explorers sought
in vain. 1
One expedition after another started from Cape Town to
verify the native tales, but desert and disappointment was
A Land of ^ e ^ ^ a ^' ^e explorers discovered indeed
Disappoint- wild beasts and savages, great mountains and
the report of a large river away to the north ; but
they discovered little more. The river was the Orange, and
here report spoke true ; 2 but none yet reached so far ; and
Namaqualand, the supposed home of the white man, was
found nothing but a dreary barren waste, and its nomad
people knew no vestige of civilisation.
Twenty years later, in 1681, some of these barbarians
showed Simon Van der Stel specimens of copper from
their country, and interest again revived ; exploring parties
once more set out for the north-west. Once more they
were disillusioned ; there was indeed much copper in the
land, but it could not be located, and henceforth the
country of the Namaquas was left alone. Here was
neither profit nor home, nor even bare subsistence for the
European.
course possible that the white men misinterpreted their statements, and
that the wish was in these cases sometimes father to the thought. And
the savage would generally pitch his story to the white man's taste if
there was the prospect of a present at the end of it.
1 The Portuguese had reached some distance inland in their search for
the gold of Ophir. When the British occupied Rhodesia (bk. xxiv., ch. v.)
a Portuguese cannon was found in the Matopo hills, in the very region
of the fabled Monomotapa.
2 The river Orange was named, after the ruling house of Holland, in
1777. Previously it had been called the Groote Rivier, the great ivater
of the Hottentot idiom.
35
Had Namaqualand been as fertile as rumour held and its
first explorers hoped, the tide of settlement from Table Bay
might have spread along the coast towards the The inland
north when the little Dutch settlement at the Boad -
Cape began to grow beyond its early bounds. But sailors
and overland pioneers alike retreated from those inhospitable
shores, where was neither anchorage without nor pasturage
within ; and each step forward of the burghers at the Cape
broke fresh ground further inland.
The lie of the land and the look of the soil were their main
guides, and both led ever inland : the road to leafy Stellen-
bosch and onwards to the Paarl and Drakenstein, was the
beginning of a path that was to lead in time across the great
plains of the Karoo, over the Orange Eiver, and right onwards
to the tropics. That path took two centuries in the making,
and its making was the making of a nation.
Northwards and eastwards lay the way ; but for a time
the barriers of the Drakenstein Mountains stopped the move-
ment onwards. 1 Yet not for long. The colony Tnrough
needed more cattle and more pasturage, and all tneDraken-
the available land around the Cape itself was a em ' 1? '
already occupied. Insistent efforts were made to pass the
Drakenstein ; and in the year 1700 the younger Van der Stel
at last passed through a cleft in the mountains on to the great
inner ridge of the sub-continent.
He found himself in a strange new land, cut off from the
outer world a land which one who loved it 2 in later years
described as a country of mountains without summits, of
rivers without water, of trees without shade, of pasture
without verdure. It was a hard land, a bare and even at
first sight a forbidding land ; nevertheless it was a land
where men could live and build their houses and drive their
1 A similar but more troublesome barrier obstructed the English
pastoralists in Australia a century later. See vol. v. bk. xix. ch. i.
8 J, C. Voigt, of Cape Colony.
36 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
cattle ; and many men now passed through the Drakenstein
Mountains to the upland plains beyond.
They sought for pastures and wide acres, and they found
them ; but here also they found a fuller freedom than before.
For the rule of the Dutch East India Company
Settlement . r J
in the hardly reached across the mountains ; and these
^ te " or of new settlers in a new land were in effect indepen-
Coiony, dent of the world they left behind. They had
passed beyond the frontier of civilisation and
civilised government ; they were frontiersmen, and they
made their own frontiers and defended them, extending their
bounds at will, northwards and eastwards over the broad
tablelands of the interior, each new generation pushing
further afield into fresh country, and building new homes in
the waste as it needed them.
They had to provide their own defence against the savages
whom they were dispossessing for the Company could not
its in- have defended them, even if it would but they
dependent were strong, broad-shouldered men who pioneered
Character. ^^ j an( j j men W ^ Q ne ither shirked nor feared the
work they took upon themselves to do. And they were
strong enough to hold the land they took, to subdue and rule
and often to enslave its people ; and here, too, they could set
at naught the Company's regulations against intercourse with
the natives. For the Dutch East India Company, watchful
of its interests in Java and the outlying isles of the East, knew
little and cared little of the doings of the farmers who owed
it nominal allegiance in the wild uplands of South Africa.
These frontiersmen therefore took upon themselves the
business of their own defence ; but with the responsibilities
of freedom they obtained likewise, as their due, its privileges.
Seldom indeed in the history of the world have men had fuller
freedom than in this virgin land ; its settlers were uncon-
trolled, save by those eternal elemental forces of environment
and circumstance which hem men in with the invisible but
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 37
impassable mesh of earthly bondage ; but here environment
and circumstance were not unkind.
This windswept, sunburnt land was healthy ; and its new
masters gained a sense of sheer physical spaciousness of out-
look in their new homes that was far to seek in old Holland
or even in the farms around Cape Town. 1 They were un-
lettered, but life taught them much that lettered men can
seldom know ; and their children had endurance and a
strength of limb, a keenness of vision and, not least, a reliance
on their own resources that had come from the taming of the
wilderness qualities which left their mark deep on the
shaping of the new European people of South Africa.
Some isolated tragedies, of slow failure on bad land or
sudden disaster from black savage or wild beast, splashed
this forward movement here and there with blood, or smirched
it with a touch of squalor. One traveller tells of an upland
farm whose sorrowful name of Alles Verloren all is lost
confesses something of the grimmer side of colonisation in
the Cape interior ; others saw poverty and dirt in many
places, the unkempt witnesses of the less efficient frontier
settlers, who had lost in their new abodes the cleanliness
and neatness that custom made traditional in Holland.
But in general they prospered ; great farms grew heavy
with their stocks and crops, large rambling houses and out-
buildings housed the family and slaves ; and patriarchal
rule, the primitive governance of man by man, of serf or
slave by sovereign employer, held its own in this primitive
country.
Of the written history of this spreading settlement but
1 More than one South African writer has commented on this change
of outlook. I quote John Runcie, a Cape poet :
' By narrow laws we judge the farmer people
Whose large outlook we would fain gainsay.
Even as we fain would coop beneath a steeple
The God to whom we pray.'
A somewhat too exalted comparison.
38 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
little now survives. The Cape Dutch pioneer the Boer or
farmer as he was distinctively called was no narrator of the
events in which he played a part ; and his lonely life among
his flocks knew no other chronicler. The annals of this people
are little more than undated records of the building of new
homes, or the wearing of new tracks there were no roads
across the veldt, of fresh names upon the map betokening
a new advance, or the formation of a loose organisation of
society in a far-stretching district or sub-province.
Such was Swellendam, towards the east of the colony,
which dates its origin from 1740 ; further afield from the base
at Cape Town was GraafE Reynet, the mark of the next
generation's advance. Founded in 1786, the double name
of this district commemorates the Governor Van der Graaff
and his wife Reynet ; still further south was Uitenhage.
By 1778 the pastoralist pioneers had pushed their way east
to the Great Fish River and come to a land no longer dry and
bare, but a spreading fertile country of fine streams and
gorgeous flowers and great forests ; and here, on the boun-
daries of the Kafir territories, for a while they stayed. The
Great Fish River was to be a notable dividing-line in the
future years of European expansion in South Africa, and
many wars were fought with this Kafir people a stronger
type than the miserable Hottentots around Cape Town
before their power was broken by the Europeans.
The Dutch East India Company did nothing to advance
this forward movement ; indeed it misliked it, and forbade it,
not once but many times. But the prohibition of the directors
of the Company in Europe was as futile to stay the free
burghers who pressed onward to the open veldt as the pro-
clamation of the Governors at Cape Town ; neither could
check the advance of the pastoralists in the interior. And
the loose allegiance which the latter owed to Holland was
little more than nominal when they had passed beyond the
Drakenstein. They had formed the habit of independence
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 39
in their wanderings, and the nomadic life in quest of pasture
for their flocks and herds confirmed them in their love of liberty.
As time went on and settlement became closer with the
natural growth of population and the Cape Dutch were a
prolific race a more highly organised form of government
would have been evolved. The advance guard were little
more than nomads in the wilderness, living in tents or their
great travelling wagons for months on end, squatters where
they pleased or the soil proved suitable. But the children
of these first comers built themselves more permanent abodes,
sometimes mere rough huts that were hardly better than
comfortless ill-ventilated barns, but still an advance on tent
or wagon ; the third generation had begun to achieve some-
thing of the solid prosperous air and generous accommodation
that marked the older breed of Stellenbosch, the stately
sleepy homes and mellow ease of old Constantia.
The pioneers suffered, it is true, from thievish Bushmen,
who stole their cattle and their goods by night ; the Kafirs,
too, were not more scrupulous in their dealings with the white
invaders ; and wild animals, droughts and floods in turn, the
pest and other chances of disaster faced them then and now ;
but these could be fought against, and in the end controlled.
This slow but steady process, the taming of aboriginal
man and of Nature in the interior of Cape Colony, was con-
tinuous throughout the eighteenth century. It was the
beginning of a settled order of life in a vast unsettled J dis-
trict ; and with the establishment of a settled order on these
frontier regions a settled government would have developed
of itself or been imported from without : but for the moment
all the farmer folk beyond the Drakenstein required was to
live their own lives and. to be free of taxes and control.
Largely they achieved their aim, for the now decaying and
reluctant Dutch East India Company could not follow them.
1 It is sometimes forgotten that the word settlement, in its sense of
colonisation, connotes civilisation.
40 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
But before this settled order was evolved from within a
new order was imposed from without, and the upland farmers
The First whose passion had been independence of Cape
conquest Town found they were not really independent of
1796-1803. Cape Town, and that the distant revolutions of
Europe still had power to change the allegiance of the South
African veldt. They had escaped the rule of the Dutch East
India Company, to fall in the end under the rule of Britain.
About the time that Swellendam was founded the power of
the great Dutch trading corporation had begun to decline ;
by the time that GraafE Reynet was founded its star had sunk
far below that of the English East India Company. The
Cape Dutch farmers had few regrets at the decay of a Com-
pany which they had no great reason to love, but its decay
was in fact the doom of the independence they had so long
enjoyed. Had Holland remained the mighty power of the
middle seventeenth century the Dutch control of South
Africa would never have been jeopardised ; but Holland,
no longer able to hold its own in India since the victories of
Clive, 1 was no longer able to hold the frontier fortress of India
at the Cape.
Or even to hold its own in Europe. The Netherlands were
overrun by French troops in 1793 ; the Prince of Orange
fled to England, and the cherished liberty and national inde-
pendence which Holland had successfully maintained a cen-
tury before against the greatest of French kings vanished,
in a dream of equality and fraternity enforced by the sword,
before the generals of the French Revolution.
Grave fears at once arose for the safety of the Dutch pos-
sessions overseas when the motherland was in the hands of
enemies. France still had visions of conquest in India,
and the capture of Cape Town, the frontier fortress of India,
might yet appeal to her ambition.
But if its conquest by the French would be a fatal blow
1 Vol. ii. bk. vii. ch. i.
41
to the colonial empire of Holland, it would also be a serious
danger to the English, whose ships now used Table Bay as
a regular port of call, and whose East India Company had
no longer any fear of the Dutch outvying them in the Orient.
Britain was the ally of Holland in the war with France, and
for these reasons it was determined that a British squadron
should be sent to Table Bay to protect Cape Town against
the French ; and the commander of this squadron was pro-
vided with an order from the refugee Prince of Orange to the
Dutch Governor of the Cape, enjoining him to ' admit into
the Fort such troops as might be sent on the part of His
Britannic Majesty, to receive in Table and False Bays and
other harbours and place where ships could remain with
safety all ships of war, frigates or armed vessels that might
be sent from his said Majesty, and to look upon them as troops
and ships of a power in friendship and alliance, and come to
prevent the colony from being invaded by the French/ 1
The seven British ships of war ordered on this service under
Admiral Elphinstone, 2 and carrying troops under the com-
mand of General Craig, sailed into False Bay 3 on llth June
1795. Their arrival was totally unexpected ; the news they
brought was still more novel and unwelcome. For some
months past nothing had been heard from Europe, and the
sudden order to place the Cape in the hands of the British
put the Governor and his Council in a position of great em-
barrassment. They could not be certain that the command
from the Prince of Orange was genuine. If it was genuine
they had to determine whether they should continue to recog-
1 Order given at Kew, 7th February 1795 ; published in Theal's in-
valuable Records of the Cape Colony.
Another account of the British capture of the Cape in 1795 appears in
the Cape Monthly Magazine, 1858, with a long private letter from a
member of the Court of Policy at Cape Town. In addition to TheaPs
Records, the short British occupation may be studied in The Letters of
Lady Anne Barnard.
2 Afterwards Lord Keith.
3 Table Bay was not safe for shipping at this time of year ; hence the
choice of False Bay.
42 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
nise the authority of an exiled ruler ; if a forgery they had
to prepare their resistance.
The British on their side were not in too easy a position.
They were not sure of their ability to take the Cape by force,
and were fully prepared to negotiate at some length while
the chance remained that the negotiations would succeed.
For some weeks the matter hung uncertain ; but during this
period of suspense an American trading-ship was seized, and
found to carry a proclamation addressed by the French Re-
public to all the colonies of Holland, assuring them of the
friendship of France, and the triumph of the new revolu-
tionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity ; and
enjoining them on no account to enter into friendly relations
with those common enemies of mankind, the British.
That illuminating document somewhat hastened things
to a decision. It showed the Cape Dutch that both French
and British were ready to take their country, the latter on
the honest ground of common advantage against a common
enemy, the former on the more specious pretext of universal
humanity ; and it showed the British that they must act,
and act quickly.
In September 1795 the troops were landed at False Bay ;
the passage of Muizenberg, on the road to Cape Town, was
forced by General Craig ; and after some slight skirmishes,
in which a few men were killed and wounded, the Dutch
Governor and Council agreed on articles of surrender. 1 For
1 They were greatly blamed in some quarters for making so feeble a
resistance. Undoubtedly they could have done more ; but, faced as they
were by the Prince of Orange's orders, and the possibility of an attack
from France, they were in a very awkward position. The weak always
are.
Elphinstone complained that he found the Dutch Governor ' a cold and
undecided person,' and was met with ' nothing but chicane and duplicity '
the typical resource of those who cannot make up their minds to definite
action.
But one excellent reason for the speedy surrender of the Dutch was the
unexpected arrival of British reinforcements, to the extent of fifteen
English ships, at the very moment of the attack.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 43
the second time since its discovery by Europeans, the Cape
of Good Hope was a British possession.
A proclamation by Elphinstone before the surrender of
Cape Town had bound the British not to change the laws
and to respect the customs of the country, to impose no new
taxes and to permit trade with the English East Indies ;
and during the eight years of their occupation they fulfilled
their pledge. On both sides it was felt that the situation
was a temporary one, and when Holland recovered her inde-
pendence after the Treaty of Amiens, Cape Colony was re-
stored in 1803 to its old owners. The British abandoned
South Africa without reluctance, the Cape Dutch saw them
go without regret.
But no treaty could restore the fallen majesty of the Dutch
Empire ; and when the European war broke out again, and
Holland was involved once more, the British The second
decided almost instinctively to secure the route
to India by the recapture of the Cape. On
4th January 1806, two months after Trafalgar was fought
and won, a great British fleet sailed into Table Bay. In
command was Sir David Baird, a fine Scots soldier who had
fought his way under Wellington in the Mysore War ; 1 with
him was one of the reckless Irish breed of Beresford, and Sir
Home Popham a gallant adventurer who had travelled the
world round, and was indeed already dreaming of that sudden
descent on Buenos Ayres which had a brief success and quick
failure a few months later 2 and many others of like mettle,
a splendid force for the capture of the Cape.
1 See vol. ii. bk. vii. ch. iv. At one of the battles in Mysore, when
Baird was taken prisoner and confined in the gaol of Seringapatam, he
received two sabre wounds in the head, a bullet in the thigh, and a cut
from a pike on the arm, but recovered.
An immortal anecdote hangs to his imprisonment in Mysore. His
mother, a good Scots lady who knew her son's high spirit, was told that
he was chained to a brother officer. Her unexpected comment was, ' God
help the man who 's chained to our Da vie.'
A Life of Baird has been written by Captain W. H. Wilkin (1912.)
2 Vol. iv. bk. xii. ch. i.
44 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The Dutch Governor was worthy of his opponents. A
man of sterner stuff than his predecessor who had capitulated
to Elphinstone and Baird eleven years before, General
Janssens was well aware that victory against so large a force
as that which now faced him was impossible ; but like the
fine soldier that he was, he was prepared to fight for ' the
honour of the Fatherland, whatever the result might be/
His task was indeed a hopeless one. The troops at his com-
mand were largely mercenaries, ' all languages and nationalities/
as Janssens himself admitted, ' from the other hemisphere, with
the most respectable children of the colony, and even Eastern
and Mozambique slaves/ Among this motley force were
soldiers from Waldeck, that petty German state which
lived by hiring out its manhood to other states at war, 1 some
French refugees who had run into Table Bay to escape cap-
ture by the English, a Hottentot brigade, and a stiffening of
hard Dutch burghers from the backlands, who, if they had
but little love for their own Government, had still less for the
British invaders.
Brave Janssens did his best to encourage his troops as the
enemy came on. He ' threw himself among them, conjuring
them by their former renown, the honour of Germany and of
Waldeck, their beloved Prince, and whatever more he was
able to adduce, to remain firm, and to show that they were
soldiers worthy of the name. But neither this nor the request
of their officers availed the least. They did not retreat but
shamefully fled, and had Janssens remained longer among
them they might have dragged him along in their flight.
Therefore he left the cowards and joined the braver French,
who still maintained their ground ; but seeing, to his soul's
distress, the left wing of the 22nd battalion giving way, he
called on them also to stand firm, and they both heard and
obeyed. But the disorder had become too general to restore
1 Waldeck mercenaries had also fought for the British in the Imperial
Civil War thirty years before (vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. iii.).
TO THE CAPE AND BEYONt) 45
the line, and the French, deserted right and left, were finally
also compelled to retreat with heavy loss. But riding further
straight along the line, Janssens found the Grenadiers and
Chasseurs also retreating, but not flying. The dragoons had
formed together, and upon his order marched off. He sent
the Adjutant-General Rancke, and later Colonel Henry, in
advance to the Reit Vlei, in order to rally the retreating
troops, and to form a new position there, whilst, with the
officers who were round him, he kept in the rear of the re-
treating columns/ 1
The day was lost. Baird marched forward to Cape Town,
which had no stomach for more fighting ; and Janssens,
honourably defeated, retired to Hottentots Holland. There
terms were arranged, 2 the courtesies of war exchanged between
brave victor and not less brave vanquished ; and with that
the Dutch dominion in South Africa was ended. The pos-
session of Cape Colony was confirmed to England in 1814, a
payment of three million pounds sterling being accepted by
Holland in full settlement of all claim on Cape Colony and
those provinces of Guiana in South America which had been
taken by the British at the same time as the Cape. 3
The colony of the Cape of Good Hope, or, as it was more
often called for short, Cape Colony, was now permanently a
British possession ; but for long this new ad- The
dition to the British Empire was held in low Beginning
, . - < mi .of British
esteem by its new owners. The importance of south
the Cape with regard to ourselves/ said one of the Africa -
directors of the English East India Company before the first
conquest in 1795, ' consists more from the detriment which
1 This spirited description of the fight is Janssen's own account,
slightly shortened.
2 There is a story which should be true that while Baird and
Jansseus were arranging terms at the village of Papendorp a British
regimental band struck up 'God save the King.' Baird, with the con-
siderate thoughtfulness of a true gentleman, stopped the tune at once, to
spare his opponent's feelings.
3 For Guiana, see vol. iv. bk. xii. cb. i.
46 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
would result to us if it was in the hands of France than from
any advantage we can possibly derive from it as a colony. . . .
As such it would be rather dangerous, as there is too much
encouragement for settlers, and we have already too many
drains upon our population/ x From that negative stand-
point the Cape was regarded for many years, until it became
a proverbial complaint that the colony was a despised Cinder-
ella among the colonial children of Britain.
Cape Town was still the frontier fortress of India, and as
such its importance was recognised. But it was now also
the open gateway of South Africa, and its conquerors knew
it not.
Yet if the British cared little for Cape Colony, the people
of Cape Colony cared equally little for them, and from
The Cape very early days this fact was borne in upon
desire inde- ^ e new rulers. They were certainly as
pendence. popular as the Dutch East India Company
which they had superseded ; that great corporation, which
even in its dotage had been grasping, and attempted tyranny
when it no longer had the power to tyrannise, had few de-
fenders save its own officials ; the British at least had some
friends among the merchants of Cape Town, who hoped to
profit by their coming. But there were many, even in the
capital, who would have preferred French rule to British ;
and even before the first conquest of 1795 the leaders of the
Elphinstone-Craig expedition discovered to their amazement
that by far the greater number of the inhabitants desired
absolute independence of European control. Almost all the
people of the back-country, indeed, the Boers beyond the
Drakenstein, had adopted this ' chimerical idea/ 2
1 Letters in Records of the Cape Colony. There was some excuse for
this attitude, however. A Cape Dutchman, in an official memorandum
in the same records, wrote in 1795 that Cape Colony 'had for several
years been on the decline, and rapidly approaching annihilation.' He
justly ascribed its evils to the ' intolerable shackles laid on trade ' by the
Dutch East India Company.
a Craig to Dundas, 16th June 1795, in Theal's Records.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYONt) 47
But embarrassing as it was to the invader, this desire for
independence was but a natural outcome of the frontier
settlers' circumstance and past. The up-country colonists
had been, in fact, independent for many years already when
the British came. They had refused to pay taxes to the
Dutch East India Company ; and the Company, which had
done nothing for their defence on the frontier, had been im-
potent to compel them to pay. 1 The colonists had known
no ruler save necessity, and they wished for none.
These first crude stirrings of Dutch South African separa-
tism had already found vent in the proclamation of the short-
lived republics of GraafE Reynet and Swellendam Republic
a few weeks before the first British conquest, proclaimed
at Graafl
The burghers of GraafE Reynet on the eastern Reynet,
frontiers of Cape Colony, with some dim notion 1796<
of founding themselves on the example of the French
Revolution and the rebel English colonies in America, had
proclaimed their own sovereign Assembly which they called,
after the fashion of the times, a National Convention and
announced their views to a mildly interested world. It was
the first of many Dutch republics in South Africa.
They would have no more concern, they stated, with the
Dutch East India Company, but would ally themselves with
Holland ; they would receive no more com- its con-
missioners from the Company or the colony, or stitution.
recognise their authority ; and to emphasise their decision
they expelled their own Governor, and drew up a constitution
for themselves on strictly democratic principles as demo-
cracy was understood in GraafE Reynet. They claimed full
freedom of trade, and liberty to sell their products where
they would ; they refused to pay taxes ; they announced
that henceforth they would treat the natives as they chose,
1 Sometimes, however, the Company got even with the recalcitrants.
The up-country farmers occasionally found it necessary to come down to
Cape Town to barter their produce for European goods ; and on these
visits they were made to pay up some of the arrears of taxes.
48 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
no longer allowing the Hottentots the use of firearms, regard-
ing all prisoners of war as their own slaves and property,
and forbidding the Moravian missionaries who had visited
them from preaching Christianity to the natives. 1
This preposterous hybrid of modern rebellious democracy
and ancient paternal despotism, was the natural consequence
of the colonists' position, a people with the traditions of
freedom in their very marrow living among savages whom
they were forced to rule. The honest citizens of Graaff
Reynet were too ignorant to disguise their intentions in a
cloud of words ; they were transparently sincere in their
desire to do what they liked themselves and what they chose
with others. Liberty is not always altruistic : freedom for
oneself and slavery for others is a very human cry.
Preposterous as it was, the constitution of Graaff Reynet
had at least this compliment paid it, that it found imitators,
it is Its neighbour Swellendam quickly followed suit ;
imitated. an( j ^Q older settlement at Stellenbosch was on
the point of doing the same when the British troops arrived
in Cape Colony.
This unexpected intervention necessarily made some
difference, even in a country with so low a political organi-
sation as South Africa. If the English on their side were
surprised to find a travesty of the French Revolution in so
remote a corner of the earth as Graaff Reynet, the burghers
who had so recently proclaimed their independence of Euro-
pean control were not less disconcerted to discover that their
country could be easily invaded and controlled by a foreign
power.
On the whole, both sides acted with discretion at this
awkward moment. The citizens of Graaff Reynet sent a
statement of their grievances to Cape Town, in which they
did not insist too strongly on their independent and demo-
cratic principles ; the British Governor, by a miracle of tact,
1 for the Moravian missions in South Africa, see bk. xxiv, ch. ii.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 49
answered them in semi-republican fashion as ' good friends/ *
and made no more than casual reference to the questions of
allegiance. At that moment, he could hardly have enforced
allegiance even if he would.
But the trouble was postponed, and not averted, and
twenty years later the new British Government in South
Africa had an indication of the wild independence of the
interior in the baneful episode of Slachter's Nek, which left
a memory of discord as evil as its name. 2
On the lawless eastern frontier of the colony dwelt a farmer,
as wild and lawless as the land itself, one Frederick Bezuideu-
hout. Like every other farmer of the district he siacnter'a
employed several Hottentot dependents, whom Nek > 1815 -
he kept, as did his neighbours, in the condition of slaves.
One of these dependents complained to the magistrate, the
Landrost Andries Stockenstrom, of ill-treatment by his
master ; the magistrate, a Cape Dutchman of upright char-
acter, summoned, as was his duty, Bezuidenhout to answer
the charge before him. He refused ; his arrest was ordered ;
the Dutch field-cornet was required to bring him to the court.
A small body of Hottentot soldiers was sent, according to
custom, 3 to assist in the arrest should resistance be attempted.
They arrived at Bezuidenhout 's farm. Again he refused
to come when called on to surrender, and fired several shots
at the police before retreating to a cave ; here the accused
and two companions, armed with guns, loudly cursed the
attackers and put themselves in a posture of resistance.
1 Craig to the Burgher Officers of Graaff Reynet, 23rd November 1795 ;
in Theal's Records.
- The name Slachter's Nek the pass of slaughter derives from a
massacre of the Dutch settlers by the natives before the British
occupation.
3 The Hottentots had been trained to serve as soldiers under the
Dutch East India Company many years before, and a Hottentot brigade
had assisted in the defence of the Cape against the British attack in
1806. The British merely continued the practice. Under European
leaders they made excellent, brave and faithful military servants.
(Account of the Cape of Good Hope, 1819.)
VOL. VI. D
50
It was impossible to ignore their attitude, or to return
without the accused man, lest all respect for law should vanish
from the colony. A rush was made for the cave, a shot was
fired, and Bezuidenhout fell dead.
Here was surely no matter for martyrdom, since the head-
strong man had brought his death upon himself, by resisting
a summons on a not very serious charge, and firing at the
representatives of law. But he had rebelled, and met his
end in rebellion ; and that was enough, in that country and
among that people, to make a hero.
Crowds attended the funeral, and some desperate spirits
at the graveside swore to revenge the dead man on the Govern-
A Rebellion ment that had dared to assert its authority. An
planned. oath was taken, by frontier farmers as impatient
of control as Frederick Bezuidenhout, ' to remove these God-
forgotten tyrants from the land ' \ open rebellion was planned,
and an armed rising against the magistrate and the Govern-
ment was preached at every farm throughout the district.
The upholders of revolt found ready sympathy and encourage-
ment from those who had never yet obeyed a Government ;
and among the originators and leaders of the plot was Johannes
Bezuidenhout, a brother of the dead man, and as desperate
a character as he.
The movement rapidly progressed, until it became a public
danger. A letter that was intercepted by the Deputy-
The Rebels Landrost at Cradock, Van der Graaff, revealed
propose the seriousness of the position to the authorities,
Alliance , L .
with the who were already becoming suspicious : but this
Kafirs. wag by no means a]}. j n their hatred of the
Government the rebels were prepared to seek the aid of
savages ; communications were opened with Gaika, a great
Kafir chief across the frontier, asking his alliance and help
in a combined attack on all the military posts in a single
night. As their reward for the work the Kafirs were to
retain the cattle belonging to the troops and the loyal Dutch
TO THE CAPE AND BEYONt) 51
burghers who refused to join the movement, and to receive
back the Zuurveld, a large district of which they had been
deprived a few years since by the whites ; the rebels on their
part were to obtain a strip of Kafir territory across the colonial
boundary as a place of refuge for themselves.
Many of the lawless burghers joined the movement ; and
to persuade those who hesitated to rebel, threats were used
that any who refused would be murdered, with their wives
and children, by the Kafirs a terrifying argument to men
who knew something of the realities of frontier warfare
and savage usage in that country.
No more dangerous situation had ever arisen in the colony.
The leaders of the rebels were clearly blinded by their passion,
for otherwise no Boer would have called in the savage whom
he hated against his own colour and his own people ; * and
their action threatened the whole country, not only with a
colonial rebellion but with the horrors of a barbarian in-
vasion. The rebels in their violence had not hesitated to
commit the worst crime which a civilised man can commit
against civilisation.
But news of this conspiracy had reached the Government,
and prompt measures were determined on. They were indeed
urgently necessary.
Hendrik Prinsloo, one of the ringleaders, was arrested and
thrown into prison ; preparations were made to secure the
others who were implicated in the plot. But meantime a
number of the rebels, desperate and in arms, hurried to the
prison where Prinsloo was confined, and demanded his
release with menaces. They were told by Captain Andrews,
the commandant at the post, that their request could not be
heard, and that they were but bringing trouble on themselves
by their action ; a Cape Dutch officer, one Nel, also warned
1 It must be remembered that practically all the settlers in the
district were Dutch. Apart from a few soldiers and officials the British
were a negligible factor until after the establishment of Port Elizabeth
a few years later.
52 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
them of the consequences, and assured them that if Prinsloo
were innocent he would be released.
Warning and persuasion were alike useless. The Dutch
officer was called upon to join the rebels ; he refused, and a
threat was made to shoot him. The leaders then formed into
a ring and took solemn oath to stand by each other to the end.
During the next few days more messages were sent among
the frontier settlers threatening murder by the Kafirs, until
a feeling of terror and despair ran through many a startled
household. It was time for the authorities to take stern action ;
but first they again tried persuasion. Colonel Cuyler sent to
the rebels, reasoned with them, and urged them to abandon
their conspiracy and return peaceably to their homes.
It was useless. The insurgents refused ; and Cuyler, who
had already called the loyal burghers of the countryside to
arms, marched with the dragoons to arrest the rebels.
The two forces met at Slachter's Nek.
The rebels were clearly prepared to resist. They signalled
to the loyal burghers to stand aside that they might engage
with the dragoons at that last moment some feeling of
compunction for their neighbours may have seized them
but an unexpected blow now came. The Boer envoys from
the Kafir chief returned, and they brought with them the
staggering message that the barbarian would not join the
white men in their fight against their own people.
Followed a panic in the rebel ranks ; many of the farmers,
who had been persuaded by the ringleaders against their will
or frightened into joining, came down and sought forgive-
ness : the remainder fled.
Most of the fugitives were caught in the wild Winterbergs
country, and surrendered to superior force ; but Johannes
The Rebels Bezuidenhout, the last of the rebels, refused, and
crushed. ma( j e a s tand.
By the side of the desperate man were his wife and child.
Both were wounded in the unequal fight ; but his wife handed
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 53
him the loaded muskets one by one, which he fired in quick
succession, till he fell.
The first and the last shots in the revolt were fired by the
Bezuidenhout brothers ; the death of the one began the
rebellion, the death of the other ended it.
Thirty-nine prisoners in all were taken in the bloodless
fight at Slachter's Nek ; and on 16th December, before a
Special Commission of Justice appointed by the
Governor of Cape Colony, their trial began at
Uitenhage. The judges were Pieter Diemel and W. Hid-
dingh ; the prosecutor was Lieutenant-Colonel Cuyler, the
secretary at the trial Beelaerts van Blokland. All these men
were Cape Dutchmen.
The prisoners were examined separately one by one at
considerable length, 1 and the trial of so many men necessarily
engaged several weeks. The court sat over Christmas and
well into the new year before all the evidence was taken and
sentence could be pronounced ; but on 22nd January 1816 the
result of the trial was proclaimed. Six men, among whom
was Hendrik Prinsloo, the prime leader, were condemned to
death ; they were to be hanged at Slachter's Nek. Martha
Bezuidenhout, who had helped her husband in the last stand,
was banished from the eastern district of the colony for life ;
the remaining thirty-two prisoners, who had taken a more
or less active part in the revolt, were condemned to banish-
ment, or to varying terms of imprisonment, or to pay fines,
according to their complicity.
One of those condemned to death was afterwards reprieved ;
the remainder were hanged on 9th March 1816 at Slachter's
Nek. When the day came three hundred British The Rebels
soldiers guarded that place of evil fame ; a great are
crowd gathered round the gallows, and among
the spectators were the thirty-two remaining prisoners, who
1 The whole evidence has been printed by Leibbrandt in The Cape oj
Good Hope Archives; Slachter's Nek Rebellion, 1815. It occupies 979
large pages.
54 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
were ordered by the sentence of the court to watch the
execution of their comrades. Some may have expected a
reprieve, but none was forthcoming ; the scaffold was already
built, the condemned men pinioned and awaiting their doom.
They craved permission to sing a hymn before they died ;
and leave was given. The end was even yet delayed a little ;
for the gallows, clumsily and loosely built, collapsed with its
miserable burden. A painful scene now followed, as the
superstitious crowd of onlookers cried that heaven had inter-
vened to save the rebels ; they pleaded for mercy, but they
pleaded in vain. The gallows were again erected, and the
horrid work was done.
The bodies were buried on the spot by the soldiers ; but
the next morning one who passed by the place of execution
shudderingly observed the outstretched hand of one of the
dead men protruding from the earth which covered it, and
stretching out towards the sky. The limb had stiffened as
it set in death, displacing the loose soil that had been thrown
upon it ; but to the superstitious of the time that outstretched
hand was taken as a proof that the dead was reaching out to
heaven for vengeance on his executioners.
So ended the rebellion of Slachter's Nek. On the evidence
the court could have come to no other conclusion ; the facts
Unhappy of the case were not in doubt. The crime was
Conse- one no government could overlook ; nor was the
quences of
siachter's punishment excessive. Had the rebels succeeded
Nek - they would have ruined their country ; the
punishment for such a crime was rightly death.
Yet by a strange and melancholy perversion of sentiment,
the crime for which these rebels suffered was forgotten by
their people, who could never have condoned it ; and the
conspirators against the safety of the frontier were exalted
to the rank of heroes and martyrs for the part they played.
The minor fact that they had rebelled against the British
Government when it dared to assert its authority, was re-
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 55
membered and extolled ; the major fact that they would
have let loose savage war upon their neighbours was con-
veniently obscured.
The reason was a simple one. To the rebels, and those
who held with them, the minor fact was the major one ;
the resistance to a government which had dared assert its
authority was the cardinal point of Slachter's Nek, the calling
in of savage aid a minor mistake in a struggle to maintain
the old freedom to which they were accustomed. The view
was a wrong one, but it was the natural view to men who
had never yet obeyed a government.
Under the old government of the Dutch East India Com-
pany, which was no government at all, the conflict could
never have arisen ; under the new government
of the British, which was a real government that c nfli ct
exercised authority and maintained the law, Boers and
the conflict was bound to occur. Unhappily it Britisl1 -
occurred in a manner which made for bad blood on both sides.
The Cape Dutch settlers on the wild eastern frontier did
little more than they would have done had the Dutch East
India Company interfered in like manner ; the British
Government did no more than would have been considered
necessary by any government with any power at all. Un-
fortunately the people with whom it dealt were a stubborn
race, whom circumstances had accustomed to a government
without authority ; and the British had to pay in unpopu-
larity for the sins of omission which their predecessors had
committed. Slachter's Nek became a popular legend of
racial discord, the traditional grievance of the Boer against
the Briton, recalled with sadness and misgiving even by Cape
Dutchmen who were loyal to the new government. ' We
can never forget Slachter's Nek,' the old Boer colonists would
often say among themselves ; 1 the name had come to stand
for the slaughter of their people by the new rulers.
1 Cloete, Five, Lectures, an unimpeachable witness.
56 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
In such simple, tragic, and inevitable fashion was begun
the century of conflict between the two white peoples of
South Africa.
CHAPTER IV
THE CAPE UNDER BRITAIN : 1 806-34 '
ABOUT the time of the second and final cession of the Cape
to Britain, the total white population of the colony, after
Population ra ^her more than a century and a half of occu-
ofCape pation by the Dutch, was some forty thousand
all told. Four years after the cession of 1814,
at the period when the development of South Africa was first
taken seriously in hand by its new masters, the census returns
showed 21,513 males and 19,436 females of European descent. 2
Of these rather more than a thousand were servants ; there
was no white labouring class.
The slaves and apprentices or coloured bond-servants who
were employed by these forty thousand Europeans at the
Cape numbered about fifty thousand, of whom thirty thou-
sand odd were actual slaves of Malay or Madagascar descent,
and the remainder Hottentots.
1 The chief authorities for this chapter, apart from the Official Records
and Documents on Cape Government and Finance, are An Account of the
Gape of Good Hope (1819), a useful compilation ; The State of the Cape of
Good Hope in 1822, by a Civil Servant, fuller and more valuable ; the
files of the Cape of Good Hope Literary Gazette, 1830-35, a wilderness of
scissors and paste concealing an occasional gem ; articles in the Cape
Monthly, a store of useful information ; Gleanings in Africa (1806), a poor
gleaning indeed ; Chase, Cape of Good Hope and Algoa Bay (1843), and
Pringle, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (1835), admirable
records both ; The Cape and its People, by various writers (1869). The
Letters of Lady Anne Barnard during the first occupation by Britain give
a lively picture of the Cape at the time : Latrobe's Visit to South Africa
(1818) may be consulted; also Holman's Account of the Cape (1834),
Fawcett's Eighteen Months' Residence, and Hoodie's Record (1838).
2 The census returns for 1818, from which these figures are taken, are
said I know not with what truth to have been more accurate than
those of preceding or following years.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 57
The total permanent population under British rule in Cape
Colony at this time was therefore about ninety thousand,
divided in the proportion of four Europeans to five of other
races ; and of the Europeans, the great majority were men
born in the colony of Dutch descent, who spoke the Dutch
tongue and no other. There were not as yet many English-
men resident at the Cape apart from the new official class,
and fewer Englishwomen ; but already the British and Dutch
had begun to intermarry. Only one Englishwoman was
known to have given her hand to a Cape Dutchman ; but
several Cape Dutch girls had preferred the strangers from the
British Isles above men of their own blood.
Apart, however, from the actual centre of government, the
British had not yet made any great impression on South
Africa ; and if the capital had begun to assume p repon( j er .
a superficially English appearance in 1818, the anceoftbe
interior of the country was emphatically Dutch u c '
in method and custom. Through the eighteenth century
the Dutch had driven the roots of their civilisation deep into
the soil ; like trees that plant themselves in the slowly-
filling moat of some old forgotten castle, the silent growth
of a hundred years had passed unnoticed by the outer world,
which only saw it when the work was largely done. Most of
the trade and practically all the agriculture of the colony
was in the hands of Hollanders who had settled at the Cape
long before the British conquest ; and for some years there
seemed little likelihood that they would ever be disturbed, far
less outnumbered by the new rulers, who had shown no signs of
planting English settlers on the ample spaces of the country
which was still rarely called the colony of British South Africa.
The greater part of this not very large population lived
inland by agriculture and farming ; but the capital and the
oldest settlement of the colony, Cape Town, was
. . Cape Town,
a small but gay city, whose inhabitants always
had the advantage of their situation as a half-way house of
58
the world's trade. They were kept alert and informed of
current events by a constant flow of visitors and traffic from
foreign lands ; they heard the news of Europe months before
it reached Asia, the news of Asia months before it reached
Europe. And if any happenings of interest took place in the
still more remote British colonies in Australia, if a governor
was deposed, a notorious criminal executed, or if the dis-
covery of a gold mine was rumoured in the far antipodes,
the good people of Cape Town had the news long before it
could reach Britain. Their own lives might be placid and
unimportant, but with the shadows of the world's events
before their doors they could not easily stagnate.
Like all seaports, Cape Town had a double population,
its settled inhabitants and its migrants. Sailors came and
went from the ends of the earth with rich cargoes, strange
wares, and fickle hearts, some or all of which they occasion-
ally left behind them in South Africa ; dignitaries, grave
governors and deputy-governors, soldiers and conquerors of
provinces and territories in the East, passed through and
rested there awhile on their way to Europe ; but besides these
passing travellers Cape Town was a city of some substantial
merchants, who dealt in such produce as might come down
from the interior or was imported from overseas ; it had, too,
its official class, who with the naval and military men stationed
in or calling at the place, gave local society a distinction that
commerce cannot always confer.
The prosperity of the merchants was reflected by the ample
proportions of their houses and the gardens which surrounded
them. The essentials of life were cheap, although prices were
said to have risen since the English conquest, 1 but imported
goods were dear. The people as a rule lived comfortably
and entertained generously ; they had a theatre in which
amateurs performed dramatic pieces with as much success as
1 Yet in 1819 butcher meat is stated to have cost only Id. per lb.,
bread Id. per lb. , and a pint of Cape wine 3d.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 59
amateurs usually have ; they loved dancing and good cheer,
and after the manner of Dutchmen the world over, they
excelled in the concoction of strange seductive drinks.
On the whole there were many worse places for an exile
from Europe than Cape Town. Its beautiful situation and
plentiful supply of fresh water made the place popular with
residents and visitors alike ; but although the city was
generally neat and clean, after the invariable fashion of the
Hollanders' towns, its drainage was as primitive as that of
most human habitations in the early nineteenth century. 1
Its streets were cleansed of refuse mainly by the eagle and the
vulture ; but notwithstanding this drawback, Table Bay
was already noted as a health resort. 2 Many invalids, some
of whom were almost at death's door, settled there in the
hope of regaining their strength ; and although numbers of
these visitors came too late and died too soon after their
arrival, the death-rate of the city was lower than that of most
European capitals.
Cape Town was built on the plan laid down by Van Rie-
beeck, and many of the old houses, of one story and thatched
with reeds, were standing at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. At that time the capital was still regarded as more
important than the colony itself ; but there were already
signs that the future might change the relative positions of
the two. The growing stream of commercial and passenger
1 In 1877, however, Sir Bartle Frere, while admitting the beauty of the
environs of Cape Town, described the place itself as sleepy and slipshod,
dirty and unwholesome. A somewhat too sweeping judgment.
2 The older writers seem hardly to have noticed the absence of
sanitation and its evil effects a fact which speaks volumes for the
standpoint of the early nineteenth century. But two epidemics, in 1840
and 1858, taught the inhabitants wisdom ; see a paper on The Sanitary
State of Cape Town (1877), by W. S. Black.
But Cape Town was no worse than any European city of the time ; and
indeed, ignorance of sanitation'prevailed in the rural districts of England,
the pioneer of sanitary reform, until the end of the nineteenth century,
while in many parts of Europe (particularly in Spain, Russia, and the
near East, as I can vouch from personal and often nauseating experience)
its importance is still unrecognised.
60 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
traffic between Europe and the East showed a tendency to
swing back to the old channel of the Red Sea many years
before the Suez Canal was opened in 1869 ; x and every
traveller and every bale of goods that went by way of Egypt
was so much lost to the other end of Africa.
But meanwhile the agriculture of the colony itself was ad-
vancing. Corn was no longer difficult to grow ; and where the
Agriculture ^ rs ^ skiers had complained that the soil was
in cape so light that the wind blew the seed away, their
descendants, who had overcome that difficulty,
congratulated themselves that the same lightness of soil often
made the use of the plough unnecessary. The yield, indeed,
was good and the corn heavy in the grain ; but irrigation
was often necessary in the drier districts. Wheat, however,
is a crop that needs little water if the farmer is content to
forgo the straw ; and much even of such straw as the South
African farmers had was wasted.
Horse, sheep, and cattle breeding had made considerable
progress ; in 1819 the colony counted some forty-seven
thousand horses, a quarter of a million horned cattle, and
close on a million and a half sheep and goats. The sires of
the horses had mostly been imported from Spain, and the
stock had not deteriorated in South Africa ; 2 the cattle,
which were largely used for transport, were indigenous, and
were remarkable for their high shoulders, long legs, and
large horns ; 3 and although most of the sheep were of a poor
breed that produced much meat but little wool, some
had been found of sufficiently good quality to be exported
1 See vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. iv., for the Suez Canal.
The tonnage entered at Table Bay in 1821, exclusive of transports and
men of war, was 56,447 ; and at Simon's Bay, 15,272 tons.
2 Indeed, it had been improved since the coming of the English, who
had started horse-races almost immediately after their arrival. The
Englishman is the same everywhere ; a race-course is one of the first
distinctive marks of a British colony.
3 An attempt was made to improve the breed of cattle a few years
later in the Eastern Province, by importing Devon and Dutch bulls.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 61
to New South Wales for the first of the great Australian
squatters. 1
The agriculturists were more prosperous and therefore
more esteemed than the stock-farmers ; but the most pros-
perous class in the colony were the wine-growers of the
Stellenbosch district. It was reckoned that there were now
thirteen million vines of muscatel grapes in Cape Colony,
and the sweet wines of Constantia were becoming known
and increasingly popular in England, 2 where their vogue
continued until the middle of the century.
Brandies and liqueurs were also manufactured at the Cape,
but these could by no means rival the products of the vine-
yards and monasteries of France. Often made of unripe
grapes and distilled too quickly, the local substitute for the
drink of heroes was sometimes condemned by superior travel-
lers as poison ; but by the less fastidious palate of the colonist
the cognac of the Cape was appreciated readily enough. 3
At Cape Town intercourse with the outer world kept men
abreast with European ideas ; but the condition of society
in the interior was primitive and even patriarchal. Isolation
With an enormous territory awaiting occupation of the
there was no need to limit the size of a farm, ony '
which would extend to six thousand or more acres, and each
successive generation broke fresh ground and pushed further
inland. Every man, or at least the head of every family
1 See vol. v. bk. xvii. ch. iv.
2 Jane Austen made one of her heroines drink Cape wine as a remedy
for a broken heart, and the potion was declared to have a beneficial
effect for that most distressing of the maladies of youth.
But I notice that in the more prosaic prospectus of a commercial cor-
poration the South Africa Company of 1840 Cape wines were condemned
as poor, fiery and flavourless ; , and another writer declares their only
recommendation to be that they did not turn sour in the stomach.
3 Tobacco, much of which was grown in the country, was in constant
request ; the Dutchman, perhaps the most faithful devotee of nicotine in
Europe, had not laid aside his pipe in South Africa. The soil was not
unsuitable, but the crop, which always needs careful and skilled attention,
was often rough and harsh to the tongue ; but in this matter a notable
improvement took place in the course of the nineteenth century.
62
and the proprietor of every estate and the great majority
of the farmers were their own proprietors was a law to him-
self in the wilderness, and the Dutch pioneer did not dislike
the full freedom which he bought at the price of solitude.
There were no complaints here, as among some of the British
settlers in Canada and Australia, 1 that the loneliness was
greater than man could bear ; nor was there any sign of that
love of town life among the Dutch which was so conspicuous
in the English colonies. Many of these people, indeed, had
come to love their isolation and the slow even round of life, 2
untouched by outside influences or new fashions or ideas ;
they lived unchanging in a changing world, and they resented
any interference. Had they lived in Australia instead of
South Africa they might have preserved their isolation for
many centuries ; as it was, it became the peculiar tragedy
of their lot that this folk, which had in effect severed itself
from Europe, was settled in a land which could not be free
of Europe, since it lay on the road to India. The Cape Dutch
endeavoured for a century and more to shut themselves from
the main currents of the world's traffic. From time to time
it seemed they had succeeded ; but ever the hum of the busy
world was following them in their search for isolation, and
even in their remotest haunts in the interior their pathetic
desire for solitude was frustrated. Such is the fate of those
who build their home unwittingly upon a highway, and hope
for peace.
Save in the actual frontier settlements, where the sporadic
irruptions of the natives necessitated constant vigilance
against cattle-lifting or attacks on human life, the normal
1 See vol. v. bk. xix. ch. ii.
2 A South African poet has attempted to catch this attitude in verse :
' What do we know of the city's scorn, the hum of a world amaze,
Hot-foot haste, and the fevered dawn, and forgotten yesterdays?
For men may strain, and women may strive, in busier lands to-day,
But the pace of the ox is the pace to thrive in the laud of the veldt
and vlei. CULLEN GOULDSBURY.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 63
existence of the Dutch farmer was serene and placid. From
time to time he met his fellow-farmers at the little church
which was the centre of social intercourse ; here he took
the sacrament, saw his children married, heard his neigh-
bours' news, and bought or sold or laid in such stores as
he needed. For the rest, his slaves and dependents did
the manual work of the estate and the establishment ; he
supervised and directed their toil. He treated his underlings
kindly or not as he chose ; his own family was sometimes
subjected to almost the same severity or indulgence.
Early marriages and large families were the rule in this
primitive community, whose buxom daughters ripened
young ; the mature bachelor, the withered spinster, and the
childless couple were alike objects of contempt and suspicion.
A dozen children was a not unusual brood ; and it was re-
marked that the women bore their offspring easily, making
a quick recovery after their confinement of everything but
their figures, which became stout and shapeless before they
were thirty under the strain of bearing and suckling. Nurses
and doctors for these recurrent but continual occasions were
lacking on the veldt, but their absence was not often serious
in a healthy and fertile people ; one ingenuous writer, indeed,
suggested that the pains and danger of child-labour had been
removed by a bountiful providence as a signal mark of favour
to South Africa, so seldom did nature demand the sacrifice of
the mother for the child. 1
Even the ample family with which his lawful spouse en-
dowed him did not always satisfy the lusty farmer, who was
known to compel the perhaps not always unwilling embraces
of his more comely female slaves. Thus there grew up a
1 If the women did not die in childbirth, however, they very often
died young a sign that their constitutions were exhausted by too
frequent labour. A most unusual proportion of the Cape men of middle
age had married a second wife. The normal life of a woman is longer
than that of a man, since she is protected from many dangers which he
must face ; but in South Africa at this time it seems to have been
shorter.
64 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
small mulatto population, known as bastaards by the plain-
spoken Dutch ; and these were not exempt from the usual
lot of the Ishmaelite in every age, the contempt of the whites
and the jealous hatred of the blacks. 1
Living remote from, and often ignorant of the world, the
Dutch farmer had not nevertheless lost all his interest in
human affairs. He showed an abundant and sometimes
embarrassing curiosity in outside doings whenever a traveller
entered his gates ; in return for the hospitality which was
never withheld, the host plied his guest with endless questions
regarding events beyond his ken.
The hospitality was sometimes rude, and the fare rough,
but it was nearly always the best the house could command ;
and those fastidious mortals who disliked a diet of mutton
cooked in its own fat, and a bed or a room shared in company
with others, should have remembered that the comforts of
the old world were not always available in the new. In
general the diet of South Africa was notable for quantity
rather than quality. It is the general testimony of visitors
to the veldt that their hosts had enormous appetites, that
they indulged themselves freely, and that many of them
in consequence became obese in appearance and heavy of
head. 2
The isolation of the settler in the interior of Cape Colony
from the moving tide of the world's events and contem-
porary thought was perhaps as much to blame for his heavy
1 The male bastaards were said to make excellent slaves ; the females
were well proportioned, smart, and excessively fond of dress (Gleanings
from the Cape, 1806; and State of the Cape in 1822). They were not
distinguished for chastity, and often importuned European men, who
appear to have seldom denied them the expected boons. One writer,
who remarks that they made excellent companions, could probably have
told more had not discretion dried his pen.
These bastaards were the origin of the Griqua tribe across the Orange
River (bk. xxiv. ch. ii.).
' 2 One contemporary writer, whose medical competence I do not
altogether trust, remarks that dropsy was excessively common among
people of middle age throughout the colony, in consequence of their diet.
But obesity is often confounded with dropsy.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 65
lethargy as the coarse and too plentiful cooking for his table.
And in this respect the South African farmer was indeed
lonely ; but he was contented to be lonely, to lie at peace in
a backwater of life while others more active or at least more
restless sought the main stream of human endeavour. For
if society was lacking in the remoter districts of the colony,
the Cape Dutchman showed little inclination to substitute
the silent company of literature for the social intercourse
which his solitary situation forbade. He had few books
they were dear, scarce, and difficult to obtain in South Africa
and no newspapers ; he read the Bible regularly as a re-
ligious exercise, but he read hardly anything else. It is true
that even in the most lonely part of the veldt the children of
the more respectable farmers were taught by their parents
to read 1 schools could not exist in so scattered a com-
munity in order that they should not grow up without a
personal knowledge of the Christian scriptures ; but writing
was a much rarer accomplishment, and beyond that point
literary education ceased altogether.
In general these men were prosperous. Great wealth was
not indeed their portion. But most gained more than a bare
subsistence, and many were able to spend their Beautyof
surplus in improving their estates or beautifying the Home-
and enlarging their great rambling houses. Labour,
in the days of slaves and paternal rule, was cheap the price
of the labourer's food was his cost ; and the Dutchman, one
of the most domestic of human animals, often put his slaves
to build, and spent an admirable care on the decoration of his
home. The beauty of these old Dutch houses in Cape Colony,
and their slumberous air of. quiet ease, spoke of a homely,
happy breed of men, who found their pleasures with their
family and serving-folk at home.
1 See the Memoirs of Paul Kruyer. But when the British instituted
the system of judicial circuits in 1811, it was discovered that a large
number of the children in some of the remoter settlements could not read
or write.
YOL, VJ, E
66
In Cape Town many of the residents, accustomed to as-
sociate with travellers of every nation, had a passable know-
The c ledge of two or three languages besides their own,
Dutch and most people of any social standing in the
capital of the colony could carry on a conver-
sation in French or English without discredit ; but in the
interior, where the French tongue of the old Huguenot
settlers had long been dead, and other European languages
were entirely unknown, even Dutch had become a clipped,
debased, enfeebled dialect that would have been disowned
in Holland.
A century of isolation and intellectual stagnation had left
its mark upon the speech of Cape Colony. Many words of
classical Dutch had disappeared altogether from lack of use
in the South African dialect ; grammatical inflexions proper
to the tongue were first disregarded and then dropped, and
the language of Vondel was debased into a soft and easy
but intellectually poor patois that was incapable of express-
ing the higher abstractions or of denning thoughts with
accurate shades and distinctions of meaning. 1
Every class and every nation has the machinery of language
that its intellectual equipment requires ; a peasant's voca-
bulary is less ample than that of a philosopher, the child of
the philosopher in turn has a more restricted range of words
than an adult peasant. And the atrophy that had come over
the Dutch tongue in South Africa is a sufficient proof that the
mental calibre of the colonists had fallen below that of the
mother country. The Boers were happily unconscious of the
deficiencies of the Taal, as their dialect was commonly called,
until the British immigrants, with that preference for truth
over tact which makes the English respected, if not loved,
by other nations, began to laugh at the colloquial phrase-
ology of South Africa as an antediluvian survival. The truth
1 See the article by De Villiers, Chief Justice of Cape Colony, and an
authority on this subject, in the Cape Monthly.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 67
of the taunt was more readily admitted than its courtesy,
and an attempt was made to restore the true speech of Holland
by the foundation of a newspaper, the Tydschrift, and the
teaching of the correct idiom. But unhappily for the re-
formers the process of degeneration had gone too far ; the
newspaper and the propaganda both failed, and English
rather than correct Dutch became more and more the written
literary and commercial language of South Africa.
Many of the English laughed at the unlettered Cape Dutch-
man or Boer, as he was commonly called, 1 whose ignorance
was great, whose movements were slow, and whose farming
was not always of the best. But the Boer had many con-
siderable virtues to set against his very evident deficiencies,
and both played a prominent part in the making of South
Africa.
Whatever might be urged against the mental equipment
of the Cape Dutch, their physical condition was sound.
Despite defects of sanitation and a complete ignorance of
the laws of hygiene the health of this people was generally
good. They came of a sturdy stock ; they were endowed
with tough constitutions, and their pastoral life in a kindlier
climate than that of Holland helped to keep them in good
condition. Living in the vast distances and clear atmosphere
of the veldt their eyesight acquired a keenness that was the
envy of British soldiers, 2 and their accuracy at long range
with the gun became proverbial.
And if the words of the Cape Dutchman were few they
were generally weighty ; if his movements were slow they were
usually sure. If he was heavy and stolid he was also stubborn
and strong ; he knew what he wanted, and clung to his pur-
pose with the same dogged tenacity and, when the need
arose, with something of the dumb heroism that his ancestors
in Holland had shown in the fight against Spain.
1 Boer = farmer in the Dutch language, without the shade of contempt
that its old English equivalent, bom-, has now come to possess.
- Particularly was this remarked during the war of 1899-1902.
Chief among the forces that had animated the stubborn
Hollander in that long fight against Spain was his religion.
And chief among the forces that animated his descendant,
the stubborn Boer of South Africa, was the same religion.
The Cape Dutch, like the French Canadians, were colonists
who had lost their mother country ; but like the French
Religion Canadians again, 1 they had not lost their creed
of the cape with their country, and their creed was perhaps
the dearer to them that they had lost their country.
The ties of religion had proved more durable than those of
politics ; and the stern Calvinism of Holland, which the first
Dutch emigrants had carried with them into the wilderness,
was still the professed faith of the solitary Boer settler on the
veldt. Those harsh, unlovely doctrines of predestination and
fatalism brought comfort to his soul ; the cold and rigid
belief of Northern Europe which taught that the Christian
deity was no longer the God of Love, but a judge denouncing
doom upon his own creations, was not unsuited to the Dutch-
man who lived alone among his slaves and savages and the
elemental facts of nature in South Africa, and to whom the
irruptions of the one or the other may well have seemed the
arbitrary judgments of an unseen power.
The Dutch Reformed Church had been solidly founded
in Cape Colony, and its growth was as steady as that of the
Dutch people themselves. It was severely strait and orthodox
in its theology ; no suspicion of heresy attached to any of
its pastors, no hint of original thought or doubtful doctrine
disturbed the solemn propriety of their sermons and the
occasional devout slumbers of their congregations. They
mapped out the path to heaven as Dutch engineers cut a
canal through the soil clean, direct, and narrow, with no
great depth but a certain clearness of aim, a rigidity of touch,
and an absence of beauty as distinctive marks of their work.
Some observers, misled by the lack of originality in the
Calvinist pastors of South Africa, declared that the Dutch
1 Vol. iii. bk. xi, eh, iii,
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 69
Reformed Church was stagnant. They had misjudged ; for
as the Dutchman is bound by conventions at home yet is
daring on the high seas, so were the Dutch pastors in Cape
Colony timid in their own proper sphere of religion and more
courageous and powerful when they interfered, as they did
in later days, with politics.
The religion of the Boer found no place within its com-
munion for the aborigines of South Africa. Like most of the
Protestant creeds of Europe, it aimed primarily at securing
the personal salvation of its own adherents, and propaganda
engaged a very low place among its activities. Unlike the
Catholics, whose very name professed the universality of their
aim, and whose missionaries proceeded from Rome to the ends
of the earth, the Reformed Churches made little effort to ex-
tend their sphere of operations among non-European races. 1
And if the Boer did not formally deny the possibility of con-
verting the coloured races of mankind indeed he could not
deny it so long as he relied upon the Bible for his rule of life
he made in practice hardly any attempt to convert them,
and looked askance at any efforts to enlarge what he con-
sidered the natural sphere of Christianity.
The South African aborigines and the South African slaves
were beyond the pale of South African Christianity as inter-
preted by the Dutch ; and that narrow and illiberal attitude
was a fruitful source of friction in the years to come, when it
found itself confronted by the active propagandist spirit of
British missionaries.
The aborigines were the frequent menace, the slaves the
solid basis, of the Cape Dutch farmers' industry ; and it was
in connection with these two fundamental aspects THe Native
of South African life that trouble first arose with ProWem.
the new British rulers. The native problem, as in time it
was commonly called, raised issues that were still open and
uncertain when the nineteenth century closed ; the slave-
1 Bk. xxiv. ch. ii. ; and bk. xxv. The Moravians are a conspicuous
exception.
70
trade and slave emancipation brought a short, sharp crisis
that led directly to one of the decisive actions in South African
history.
The first open rupture between the British and the Boers
had been at Slachter's Nek. That was a white man's quarrel,
which fired angry passions that sank in time to sullen
memories ; but the recollection of Slachter's Nek might
shortly have grown dim, even in stubborn and resentful Cape
Dutch minds, had not the real cleavage between the new
rulers of the land and the old already begun to show. That
cleavage was in the treatment of the natives of the country
and their labour ; and it revealed a fundamental difference
that left its mark on the whole of South Africa.
In South Africa, as in other countries of the outer world,
there existed an aboriginal population before the coming of
the European. But in many other countries which the
European had invaded and in time possessed, in North
America, in Australia, and New Zealand, 1 the aborigines had
diminished, and in the end almost disappeared before the
European invasion ; in South Africa they had not. Here,
therefore, was a new colonial problem ; South Africa became
a semi-white man's country, a land in which white men could
establish themselves and propagate their race, as they could
not in those tropical colonies where coloured native or im-
ported labour was required ; 2 but the persistence of the
native population in South Africa limited the opportunities
and sensibly modified the position of the white. -
The old Dutch colonists had solved the problem in the way
it had been solved many times before by conquering invaders
they took the natives' land, they enslaved the natives and
made them labour. The Dutch East India Company, it is
true, protested and forbade the enslavement of the Hottentot,
1 For the diminution of the aborigines in North America, vol. i. bk. iv.
ch. v. ; in Australia, vol. v. bks. xviii. and xx. ; and in New Zealand,
vol. v. bk. xxi. ch. iii.
2 Vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. iv.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 71
not on ethical grounds, but because it had no wish to enlarge
its responsibilities at the Cape ; but its protests and pro-
hibitions were of little effect. In the Cape Town district,
where the Company could make its will obeyed, slaves were
imported from Portuguese East Africa and the East Indies ;
in the interior, where the Company had little or no power, the
aborigines were themselves enslaved, when the Dutch burst
through the Drakenstein and occupied their land. Broadly
therefore it was true that the aborigines became the workers,
and the Dutch became the rulers, in a semi-white man's
country. Such was the fundamental character of South
African civilisation before the British conquest.
A century earlier this solution of the question would have
seemed simple and natural to the British themselves ; for
they were the leaders in the slave-trade, and the owners of
many colonies based upon this principle of European ascend-
ency and coloured slavery or subjection. Had the British
annexed Cape Colony in 1715 instead of 1815, there would
probably have been no difference in this matter of the abori-
gines between the British and the Dutch.
But in the later eighteenth century a change of thought
passed over England. The New Humanity had made its way
among all classes ; 1 a belief in the responsibility ^Q^^^
of the British rulers for the welfare of the subject between
races of the Empire had been accepted as an
axiom of statecraft in Burke's gorgeous phrase, the Native
the Imperial Parliament had now assumed ' an
imperial character in which, as from the throne of heaven,
she superintended all the several inferior legislatures, and
guided and controlled them all/ The doctrine of the rights
of man was largely held in England ; 2 and that doctrine was
1 For the New Humanity, vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. i.
2 That doctrine was implied in the Puritan theory of seven teenth-
century England ; it appeared also in contemporary English philosophy,
vide Locke. Pushed much further by the French philosophers of the
eighteenth century, it crossed the Atlantic and was embodied in the
72 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
the philosophic basis, not only of the long and in the end
successful agitation against slavery, 1 but of the whole move-
ment for protecting the subject peoples under European
government throughout the world.
But no echo of the New Humanity or the rights of man had
ever reached the placid homesteads of Cape Colony before
the British came ; the practical Dutch farmer, like the prac-
tical English planter in the tropics, was neither idealist nor
sentimentalist, and he took things as he found them. It
was enough that he, as the stronger man, should conquer the
land and possess it ; in the struggle to secure himself against
thievish Bushman and cattle-lifting Kafir the Cape Dutch-
man had no room for the rights of man. The only right he
knew or cared for was the right of the invader to the soil he
occupied, the right of the strong to rule the weak. A re-
ligious man, he compared himself with the Israelites of old
who had driven out the heathen from the land of promise ;
he, too, drove out the heathen or enslaved them, and made
their land a goodly land, and a land of plenty. 2
But now came the British Government to protect the
heathen by law and statute ; and soon after came the British
missionary to convert them to a religion of which, in the
Cape Dutchman's view, they were unworthy, and even
incapable of understanding : and from that time was
windy phrases of the Declaration of Independence ; and it returned to
England again, appearing as the New Humanity. The English colonists
in America added equality to the rights of mau and forgot to liberate
their slaves ; the English at home had no such belief in equality, but
they did abolish slavery in the British Empire.
1 For the struggle against slavery, see vol. iv. bk. xiii. ch. iii.
2 The comparison with the Israelites was a natural one ; it occurred
independently to a British chaplain in the Matabili War (bk. xxiv. ch. v. ),
who would surely not have sympathised with the Dutch attitude towards
the aborigines when he left England to become a missionary in South
Africa. It was the environment that made the opinion; the British
colonists at the Cape hardly differed from the Boer view of the native
problem, changing the ideas they had accepted without question at
home; and the British planter in the West Indies would have had a
perfect understanding of the Cape Dutch attitude.
73
strife between the British and the Dutch. The visible
and inevitable result of the New Humanity, the belief
in the rights of man, and the preaching of British
the Gospel, was the cleavage between the two MiB8ion -
, . . aries em-
white peoples of South Africa over the treatment bitter the
of the natives. Situation.
The Cape Dutch had founded themselves on the practical
principle of the ascendency of one race over another ; the
British missionary took his stand on the theoretical principle
of race-equality. 1 Each pressed his view too far, for the Cape
Dutchman would hardly allow that the aborigines were
human beings, while the British missionary claimed that they
should be treated as the equal of the European. 2 Both views
1 In practice, however, he did not always carry out his principle, for
which some folk in Britain had good reason to be grateful. It is stated
in the Cape Monthly (1859) that the drunken heir of a Scots peerage
would have married an abandoned Hottentot woman, but the missionary
refused to solemnise the union. And there were other scandals of the
kind.
Yet logically the missionary who stood for racial equality of white and
black would have seen no objection in such a match. Indeed, there are
cases on record of missionaries who married their black converts.
2 Dr. Philip, for many years the chief of the British Mission staff in
South Africa, took his stand directly on the rights of man. ' Indepen-
dent of printed statutes," he wrote, 'there are certain rights which
human beings possess, and of which they cannot be deprived but by
manifest injustice the inalienable rights conferred upon them by their
Creator.' This is the doctrine of the American Declaration of Independ-
ence in a more pious form.
In many ways Philip was the typical missionary of the time, as honest
and bigoted as Paton in the Pacific Islands (vol. v. bk. xx. ch. i.).
Sincere and fervent in his faith he hurried one day to tell a dying
woman the news of the fall of idolatry in Tahiti he was extremely
narrow and dogmatic, a violent Protestant who would hardly admit that
a Catholic was a fellow-Christian ; it is amusing to notice that in his
Researches he ascribes the extension of printing to the Protestant
Reformation, but conveniently forgets to credit the invention to a
Catholic age. Such views would have pleased the Calvinistic Dutch had
not his advocacy of the native cause offended them still more.
There is a Memorial of the late Dr. Philip (1851), written in the most
nauseating style of religious literature ; and Philip's Researches in South
Africa are indispensable for the mission standpoint of the time. After
reading his book, one understands why the colonists hated him. But
after the Kafir War of 1846 Philip was convinced of the error of his
views, and took no further part in politics. Unfortunately it was near
the end of bis life, and the harm was done.
74 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
were absurd and untenable ; both were on that account
maintained the more firmly, as is usual in a stubborn contro-
versy. And each disputant took pains to oppose, annoy,
and often to insult his opponent. ' You might as well preach
to the baboons/ said a Boer to a British missionary who
wished to evangelise the Hottentots ; 1 the missionaries in
turn accused the Boers of corrupting and degrading the
savages, 2 and suggested that the Kafir and the Hottentot were
but imitating the example of the white man when they
thieved and went to war, a theory which had not the least
basis of fact. 3
The British missionaries were strongly prejudiced against
the Boers and the few British settlers in South Africa, whose
every action they traduced, and whose motives they frequently
maligned. But they were not opposed to the Boers as Boers,
any more than they were opposed to the English planter in
Jamaica as an Englishman : the missionary opposed both
on the same ground that they had done nothing to elevate
the coloured people whom they ruled. Of those coloured
people the missionary now constituted himself the champion,
and of their rights he considered himself the trustee. 4
1 Lives of Robert and Mary Moffat. Livingstone records much the
same experience ; the phrase was perhaps proverbial.
2 Dr. Philip, the head of the English missionaries in Cape Colony,
refers to a golden age of the Hottentots before the Dutch came and
directly accuses the Dutch of corrupting them. He concludes that ' the
vices of the Hottentots are the vices of their condition,' and ascribes their
condition to the Dutch. (Philip's Researches in Smith Africa, 1828.)
Neither the golden age nor the degeneration were true. But Philip
had not much regard for truth.
3 Livingstone, a more level-headed judge, allowed that all over Africa
there had been 'periodical outbreaks of war, which seem to have occurred
from time immemorial, for the possession of cattle.' One sentence by
Livingstone is worth all that Philip ever wrote, and most of what he
stole from other writers.
4 The missionaries of the West Indies were often criticised in England
by the West Indian planter interest at home. But there was no similar
South African commercial interest in England ; West Indian criticisms
seldom reached Cape Colony ; and the missionaries were there all the
time.
The Cape Dutch feeling against the missionaries existed, however,
before the arrival of the British ; one of the articles of the Graaff Reynet
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 75
In the abstract the missionary's attitude was sound, and
his ideal was a high one ; in practice neither was so sound.
For the missionaries had their shortcomings as well as the
Boers and the natives : all men are imperfect in an imperfect
world. Most, but by no means all, the missionaries were good
and honest men after their lights. But their views, if sincere,
were narrow ; they were prejudiced, bitter, and intolerant,
quarrelsome and vindictive among themselves, and even
more ready to spread scandal and false reports about their
neighbours. 1 Undoubtedly they meant well : but too often
they succeeded in doing evil instead of good. The very zeal
of the propagandist to prove his case against his opponent
led him to overstate it, sometimes even to invent the evidence
that was to shock the English audience at home with horrid
stories of colonial cruelty ; and sometimes the desire to prove
the white man a brutal tyrant was more prominent than the
desire to serve the interests of the coloured. Charges were
made that could not be sustained ; 2 and it is unfortunately
republican constitution of 1795 was that the Moravian missionaries should
be expelled. It was a conflict of first principles that happened to take a
racial twist.
1 There were some scandals and many innuendoes among the early
evangelists in South Africa, jealousies and quarrels among the elect ;
and intellectual honesty in mission circles, like female virtue in other
and less estimable quarters, was sometimes valued because it was so
scarce.
On this point the testimony of David Livingstone, the greatest of
missionaries, is emphatic. In 1840 he wrote, ' the missionaries are in a
sad state. Every man's hand is against his neighbour ; the present state
of feeling is disgraceful : they hate their brethren in the colony, and there
exists a considerable amount of floating scandal.'
Livingstone's remarks applied only to the missionaries located south of
the Orange River. Those further north, the pioneers in Bechuanaland
and Nyasa (bk. xxiv. ch. ii. ), were better men.
2 Philip, for instance, recounts the well-known story of eight charges
of cruelty brought by the missionaries against the inhabitants of
Uitenhage. The charges were declared to be false by the resident magis-
trate who inquired into them. Philip says he afterwards found evidence
that the charges were true. But he did not produce the evidence in his
book.
Many other missionary charges against the whites also broke down on
examination, such as those brought by Van der Kemp, a Hollander, and
Read, in 1811, to the number of nearly a hundred against the colonists.
Nearly all failed of proof, but the session was remembered for years as
the Black Circuit.
76 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
true that the historian must always hesitate to accept the
evidence of a missionary against a colonist unless independent
corroboration can be obtained. 1
But it happened that the British Government at Cape
Town and the Imperial Government in London were both
ready to accept the statements, and to adopt the
imperial standpoint of the missionaries, and often with-
Govern- ou ^ independent corroboration. The Government
ment
accepts the acted, indeed, from the high and laudable motive
of protecting the natives against the undoubted
aggressions of the white man, whether Boer or
British ; and it occupied an extremely delicate and difficult
position in the attempt to assume that high responsibility
of a Christian Empire. But in doing so it committed many
grave mistakes ; it continued to alienate the old Cape Dutch,
and many also of the new British pioneers who in time began
to push the frontiers of Cape Colony further to the east and
north.
The British Government's acceptance of the missionary
standpoint shows indeed in many of the official despatches
of the time. In any racial trouble, there was always a tend-
ency to condemn the European colonist as the aggressor, to
pity the native as the innocent victim of the white man's
tyranny ; 2 in any frontier dispute, there was always a tend-
1 ' The murders by Kafirs,' said the South African Commercial Advertiser,
an organ which reflected missionary opinion, 'are to be found only on
the lips of lying men ; the alarms have no foundation clamour raised
for the purpose of concealing frauds practised by the whites.' This was
before the Kafir rising of 1834 ; in that rising 456 farmhouses were burnt
and many white settlers murdered, a sufficient refutation.
Pringle, in one of his poems, has a couplet on frontier settlement which
comes nearer to the truth.
' It is a strife
Between the black-skinned bandit and the white.'
There were undoubtedly murders and raids on both sides ; see the
account of the Kafir War in the next chapter.
2 See, for example, Lord John Russell to the Governor of the Cape,
17th April 1841: 'It will be your policj" to draw closer the connection
between the colony and the Kafir tribes, to influence the latter by means
of the missionaries and resident agents, and to punish any colonist who
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 77
ency to accept the missionary's view that European settle-
ment was in itself an evil, and that the best end to pursue
was to discourage secular colonisation altogether, leaving the
natives to the care of the missionaries, who would watch over
them, convert them, educate them, and rule them for their
good. The frontiers of Christianity, in short, were to be en-
larged ; the frontiers of the Empire were to be restrained. 1
The worst enemy of the missionaries will admit that there
was something noble in their aim ; the best friend of the
missionaries must concede that it was impossible of realisation,
and that their methods hardly tended to make it more easy
of achievement. Apart from their mistakes and prejudices
and these were many the missionaries were few, and the
work of converting the savage to civilisation and Christianity
a long and difficult task which must take several generations ;
while the colonists were many, and their aims far more simple
and easy. Even with the support of the Imperial Govern-
ment, the missionaries could make but little impression on
the savage Kafirs, and none at all upon the Zulus ; 2 even
with the active opposition of the Imperial Government, the
may do them injury, so that they may look up to the British power as
their friend and protector.'
Again, Lord Stanley to the Governor of the Cape, 10th April 1842 :
H. M. Govt. ' cannot regard without lively indignation the slaughter and
oppressions to which (the Boer emigrants in Natal), in the prosecution
of their enterprise, have subjected the native tribes.' The Boers
had emigrated to Natal, which was not then a British colony ; they were
attacked by the natives, whereupon they naturally retaliated (bk. xxiv.
ch. i. ) Whatever their record in the Transvaal, in Natal it was clean ;
it is no wonder that the Boer Council of the People, assembled at
Pieter Maritzburg on 7th April 1841, had issued a protest 'against hasty
judgments on inadequate information of their dealings with the natives.'
The most emphatic example of the Imperial Government's attitude,
Lord Glenelg's despatch on the Kafir War, is quoted and discussed in the text.
1 It must not be forgotten that the missionary desire to limit the
spread of colonisation was heartily supported by the anti-imperial
school of Cobden in England itself (vol. iv. bk. xvi. ch. ii.). But most
of the missionaries also disliked the advent of the British trader among
the natives, although they did lip-service to the benefits of expanding
commerce in their books and sermons. As a fact, the trader was often
a more disreputable person than the colonist.
2 For the missions to the Kafirs and Zulus, see bk. xxiv. ch. ii.
78 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
European settlers in South Africa, both British and Dutch,
were able to enlarge the frontier of their possessions over the
whole vast territory south of the Zambesi within the lifetime
of a single man. The whole weight of the British Government,
the British philanthropy, and the British sentiment of the
day, was thrown upon the side of the Kafirs and against the
advancing tide of European colonisation ; and the European
colonists prevailed.
The real weakness of the Imperial Government's policy,
indeed, was not that it was wrong for many wrong policies
A Con- are su 00688 ^ but that it was impossible of
tradictory achievement because it was a contradictory
policy. Its whole intent was to protect the
natives against the Europeans ; but it endeavoured to carry
out that intention by two different means which directly
contradicted each other. At one time it would repudiate
a legitimate conquest of the native territories, and restore to
the Kafirs the land which they had forfeited and the pro-
perty which they had stolen ; at another it would proclaim
a protectorate over a native territory which it had neither
conquered nor obtained by treaty, in order to protect the
natives against the aggression of the whites. In each case
the intention was admirable, and the consequence absurd.
In 1837, for instance, after the Kafir War of 1835, in which
the Kafirs had invaded the eastern province of Cape Colony, 1
Alternate Lord Glenelg, that weakest of all Colonial secre-
A ^ ance taries who have ever served the British Govern-
Retreat. ment, 2 wrote a despatch to the Governor of the
Cape which became notorious. ' Through a long series of
1 For the Kafir War of 1835, see the next chapter.
2 Lord Glenelg's record at the Colonial Office was an unhappy one.
He blundered in Canada (voi. iii. bk. xi. ch. iv.), in Australia (vol. v.
bk. xviii. ch. iii.), and New Zealand (vol. v. bk. xxi. ch. ii.), as well as
in South Africa. If Paradise had been, what some imperialists think it
ought to be, a British possession, Glenelg would have driven even the
angels to the verge of rebellion.
Glenelg was a prominent member of the Clapham sect which included
Wilberforce and the Macaulays.
79
years/ he announced, ' the Kafirs had an ample justification
of war. They had to resent, and endeavoured justly, though
impotently, to avenge a series of encroachments. They had
a perfect right to hazard the experiment, however hopeless, of
extorting by force that legal redress which they could not
otherwise obtain ; and the original justice is on the side of
the conquered, and not the victorious party/ 1 The treaty
of peace which had been concluded with the Kafirs by the
British Government in South Africa was therefore cancelled,
and all cessions since the year 1817 were revoked, to the dis-
gust of the colonists, British and Boer alike, who realised
that in this action a civilised government had unwittingly
allied itself with barbarism.
Such might be the views of the Imperial Government in
1837 ; but in 1845 the Imperial Government proclaimed
Natal a British colony, not because of the interests of its
own people in those parts, but in order to protect the natives
who were not entirely unable to protect themselves against
the Boers ; and in subsequent years it pursued a similar
policy towards the north, again in order to protect the tribes
against the Boers. A government which repudiates its own
conquests and a few years later claims lands it has not con-
quered is doomed to impotence ; nor need it be surprised if
its intentions are derided as absurd, or accused as insincere.
It was truly from a sense of duty to the native that the
British Government and the British missionary followed the
native along the coast and into the interior of South Africa ;
but it was a sense of duty that was likely to be misinterpreted,
since it brought territorial aggrandisement in its train ; and
when the aggrandisement was permanent and profitable, few
believed the purity of the original motive. Yet the sincerity
of the Imperial Government in these matters cannot be denied.
1 Despatch dated 26th December 1835. The Governor of Cape
Colony, Sir Benjamin D'Urban, one of the best loved of British officials
in South Africa, was subsequently dismissed.
80 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The contrary policy of retreat which Glenelg had in-
augurated was an unmitigated failure, admitted by the wiser
missionaries themselves in the next generation
Its Failure.
as well as by the colonists. ' It was no real kind-
ness to the Kafirs,' said a Wesleyan evangelist who laboured
many years in their country, nor did he admit that the native
attacks on the whites were the result of any generally oppressive
conduct by the European settlers. 1 And another missionary
remarked, with still more force and directness, that ' the
Glenelg system had a very fine appearance on paper ; but
unfortunately there was more paper than anything else about
it. It was a benevolent dream ; its reality was its sad results.
It was founded on the groundless belief that the Kafir chiefs
were either willing or able to restrain their people from
plunder/ 2
The natives, as a fact, were tempted by the colonists'
great flocks and herds of sheep and cattle, vastly superior
in quality and breed to their own ; these were temptations
neither chief nor man could resist. ' The Kafirs are slaves
of cattle, the Hottentots of brandy, the English of money,'
remarked an old Kafir with a turn for epigram at this time ;
nor was any truer word spoken in this controversy.
But the British Government, like the Dutch Government
before it, was no more able to restrain the expansion of its
people in South Africa than the Kafirs to refrain from raiding
their white neighbours' stock. Ethically Glenelg may have
been right in attempting to restore to the Kafirs the territory
they had lost ; but the statesman is not concerned only with
ethics, but with the actual facts of the present and the cer-
tainties of the future. And the present fact in South Africa
demonstrated that the European as the stronger man would
in time control the weaker aborigines and rule their country ;
all history even the past history of the Kafirs themselves,
1 The Story of my Mission, by the Rev. W. Shaw (of Wesley ville, 1860).
8 Calderwood, Ca-jfres and CaJTre Missions (1857).
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 81
who had dispossessed other tribes as the Europeans were
now dispossessing them would have shown that in these
matters might is apt to be the only right.
The external policy of the British Government therefore
failed, and the changing map of South Africa was a witness to
its failure. Its internal policy in Cape Colony was based on
the same principle of protecting the weaker race against the
stronger ; but here the British Government succeeded. Yet
it bought success at an even higher price than failure when it
abolished slavery ; the price, however, which it paid was
largely owing to its own mistakes.
Slavery was still recognised in the British Empire, if not
in Britain, at the time when Cape Colony passed from Holland
to England ; 1 and although the slave-trade was slavery ^
prohibited after 1807 a prohibition in which the South
Cape Dutch acquiesced with good grace the ca "
economic basis of South African labour was not disturbed by
its new masters for a quarter of a century.
There were three classes of slaves in the colony : Malays,
Malagasies, and the bastaards, descendants of white men and
coloured women. Of these the half-breeds were considered
the most intelligent and valuable, and were often treated
more like privileged servants than slaves ; the Malagasies
were the least esteemed and the most numerous. In addition
the Hottentot ' apprentices ' occupied a position which could
hardly be distinguished from that of the slave.
In general each class of slave appears to have been reason-
ably well treated by most masters. Undoubted cases of
brutality have certainly been recorded on good Treatment
evidence ; examples of the frequent use of the of the
sjambok, of regular torture, of occasional outrage
are not unknown or even very unusual : and sometimes the
exasperated slaves rebelled against a bad owner. An instance
1 For the general history of slavery and the emancipation of the
slaves, see vol. iv. bk. xiii. ch. iii.
VOL. VI. F
82 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
is mentioned in which a traveller sat up all night with a
farmer and his sons in a locked and barricaded room with
guns loaded, fearing an attack by the slaves who had threat-
ened to kill their master, in revenge for some ill-treatment or
cruelty.
But it is not suggested that these were typical of the system,
and it seems likely that if the Cape Dutchman was often
rough he was seldom brutal to his dependents. Barrow, an
English witness by no means prejudiced in favour of the
colonists, and one who knew the Cape better than most men,
admitted that in spite of several instances of cruelty which
he recorded, the slaves of South Africa were better clothed,
better fed, and infinitely more comfortable than any of the
peasantry of Europe ; and neither the statistics nor the laws
of the Cape reveal such ugly secrets as those of the West
Indies and America. The slaves were sometimes given their
freedom by generous masters ; the natural increase in their
numbers was not disproportionate to the community as a
whole ; and the death-rate was no greater than among white
men at that age. 1
Nevertheless slavery was doomed in South Africa. The
Imperial Government was determined to abolish the system
Their throughout the British Empire ; and Cape Colony
Emancipa- could not be excepted from the law that was to
on, 1834. a ff ec ^ 1^ more important interests of all the
tropical plantations in the West Indies and British Guiana.
Unfortunately the most magnificent ideals are often
marred by mistakes in their practical application. The West
Indian planters were exasperated by the suggestion, which
was put forward by the advocates of emancipation, that every
slave-owner was a brutal and tyrannical master ; the pro-
1 See State of the Cape in 1822. The total slave population in that
year was 33,841, of whom 20,098 were males a disproportion of the
sexes that must be taken into account in comparing the statistics. In
that year there were 1085 births ; and 597 deaths and manumissions.
Dr. Philip (Researches in South Africa, 1S28) is less favourable to the
slave owners than Barrow. He is also less trustworthy as a witness.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 83
prietors at the Cape were equally offended by the libel, dili-
gently propagated by the British missionaries who had recently
come among them and readily believed in England, that the
cruelties which could undoubtedly be charged against in-
dividuals were typical of every owner. The statement was
a lie, and those who made it knew it was a he ; perhaps those
excellent persons comforted their tender consciences by the
reflection that the dangerous principle which they repudiated
in others, of doing evil that good should result, was justified
in their own peculiar case.
In any event, the cause they fought for triumphed, and it
was well for humanity as a whole that it did triumph. But
smaller evils are often allied with the greater good, the tares
are not always separated from the wheat ; and the evil
consequences incidental to the manner in which the Abolition-
ists did their work are writ large over the subsequent history
of South Africa.
The Cape Dutch, as human beings with an eye to their own
interests, did not welcome the prospect of emancipation for
their slaves. But neither did they rebel, nor even deliver
themselves of such violent language against the Abolitionists
as some of the Jamaica planters had done when threatened
with the loss of their human property. They took the more
sensible course of suggesting a plan of gradual emancipation
when they saw that emancipation was inevitable.
Their scheme had many merits, apart from the great ad-
vantage that it would have secured by consent what must
otherwise be secured by compulsion. It would have achieved
the freeing of the slaves ; it would also have ensured that
the industries of the Cape, which had been built up on slave
labour, should not be unduly disturbed by the transition from
force to freedom.
But that scheme by no means suited the Abolitionists,
whose admirable enthusiasm for the slave never allowed
them to see any good in the slave-owner. They believed him
84 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
to be their unalterable enemy, and the course of action which
they pursued went far to make him one.
The local scheme was therefore rejected, and other steps
were taken to secure the end in view. In 1826 an official
Guardian of the Slaves was introduced. His services may
sometimes have been useful and often necessary, but his
duty, which always and inevitably took the form of inter-
ference between master and man, and on the side of the slave
and against his owner, quickly made him the most unpopular
man in the colony. Four years later a punishment order-
book was directed to be kept, but this was soon after aban-
doned as useless. In 1828, however, an Ordinance was pro-
mulgated granting to the Hottentots and other free persons
of colour every right to which other British subjects were
entitled a measure of equality before the law, which, if
excellent in itself, was a revolutionary innovation to the
conservative Cape Dutch.
Finally, on 1st December 1834, slavery was abolished by
Act of the Imperial Parliament ; but the slaves were bound
as apprentices for four years more ; and on 1st December
1838 the slave or apprentice was to be declared a freeman.
He took prompt advantage of his freedom ; for on the earlier
date he laid down his tools and refused to re-engage with his
Unfor master. And it was now found that the Imperial
tunate Government, with an entire disregard of seasons
cjuences of anc ^ conditions at the Cape, had fixed the day of
Emancipa- emancipation in the very middle of the wheat
harvest, with the result that on a large number
of farms the freed slaves deserted their work, and the farmers
saw themselves left, at the busiest time of the agricultural
year, to cut and stack and thresh their corn themselves.
The slaves need not be blamed for hastening to enjoy their
new-found freedom. But if the Imperial Parliament had
delayed the boon a few weeks it would not have made the gift
less valuable, and it would have done something to reconcile
TO THE CAPE AND BEYONt) 85
the owners to a change which, as it was, caused them much
loss and inconvenience.
No other labour was to be had within the colony. The
Cape Dutch agriculturist had long since complained that the
free Hottentots preferred the easy life of the English mission
schools to hard work on the farms. And there were no free
white labourers within the colony, for the white labourer
cannot exist in a slave-owning community. 1
And no attempt had been made to supply other labour to
replace the slaves from without the colony. 2 There were
many unemployed men in England at the time, but few of
these had sufficient private resources to go to South Africa,
and none were assisted to emigrate by the State or by private
associations. The farmers of Cape Colony were indeed offered
convict labour from the English prisons for their farms. But
they had seen too many of the convict ships destined for New
South Wales put in at Cape Town, and they knew too much
of the human refuse which those vessels carried, to accept the
dubious gift.
The immediate consequence of emancipation was therefore
that the essential work of the colony which should have been
done was not done, and that those who should have done the
work were idle. Some of the emancipated and now un-
employed slaves interpreted their freedom to mean freedom
to break the laws and steal the property of their late masters :
a great increase of vagrancy was noticed in almost every part
of the colony, and it was a matter of general complaint that
the Government did nothing to suppress the wandering and
occasionally criminal population that roamed at large from
one district to another.
1 White labour had been originally tried in the British colonies in the
West Indies, Virginia and Georgia ; in each case it was driven out by
slave labour. See vol. i. bk. iv. ch. iii., and'.vol. iv. bk. xiii. ch. iii.
2 The Abolitionists seem to have assumed that the freed slaves would
re-engage for work with their old masters. They forgot that the slave
who had worked so long for others preferred idleness, if only by way of a
change ; and his wants being few, he could easily supply them, without
the need of regular labour.
86 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
But these were in fact only the minor difficulties conse-
quent on emancipation. The real trouble arose out of the
question of compensation.
It is easy to be virtuous at the expense of others ; and it
would not have been impossible for the British Government
to declare that slavery must be abolished throughout the
British Empire, without compensating the colonial slave-
owners for the loss of their slaves. 1 To have taken that
course would probably not have roused much more enmity
among many of the proprietors in the West Indies than the
actual course which the Government took, of compensating
the planters affected ; for no sum would have satisfied some
proprietors, and no compensation could really make good
the destruction of the economic basis on which their industry
rested. But the British Government was not hypocritical.
It proposed to pay the slave-owners for the loss of their
slaves ; it set aside the enormous sum of twenty millions
sterling for the purpose of compensation ; and it did in fact
pay the West Indian slave-owners an amount which was
probably largely in excess of the sum which they had origin-
ally paid for their slaves. It could not, of course, pay con-
tingent damages, and it ^ could not altogether accept the
planters' valuation of their property. But on the whole it
struck a fair bargain with the owners "in" 1 the' West Indies, in
British Guiana, and British Honduras.
But in South Africa its policy was far less happy. It pro-
posed to pay^the slave-owners^compensation for the loss of
scurvy their slaves in CapeTColony as elsewhere ; and it
Treatment appointed^official commissioners to appraise the
slave- value^ of ^those v?r slaves. These officials appearfto
owners. have ? done' 1 their ' work 1 fairly^enough/i andf they
named a sum as compensation which all save the extremists
among the proprietors would probably have admitted to be
1 The slave-trade, which had been abolished in 1807, was not com-
pensated for its prohibition by law.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 87
adequate if not generous. The British Government there-
upon repudiated the award of its own commissioners, cut
down the award by half, reduced it again by a quarter of a
million sterling, deducted a further sum of two and a half
per cent, commission on the amount, deducted a still further
sum for stamps and postage, and then directed that the
compensation money due to the farmers in South Africa was
to be paid in England.
The actual figures may be given. There were 35,745 slaves
in Cape Colony whose owners were to be compensated for
the loss of their human property. These included head-
men, slaves engaged in trade for their masters' benefit, field
labourers, domestic slaves, children, and aged retainers too
old to work. The British Commissioners declared the total
value of these slaves to be 3,041,290, an average per head of
85, Is. 7fd. The British Government at once reduced the
total value to 1,247,401, Is. 2d., and the average value to
34, 17s. lljd. From this amount it deducted a sum of
31,185 as commission ; and another sum of 10,722 for
postage, which reduced the total amount of compensation to
1,205,494.
The Cape Dutch farmers had naturally anticipated, as any-
body else would have anticipated, that they were to receive
the sum fixed by the commissioners ; and they complained
loudly that the British Government had cheated them by its
successive reductions and deductions. But even the lesser
sum awarded did not reach them in full, for the British
Government did not trouble to remit the amount to South
Africa, but made it payable in London. The result was that
the payees had to accept a settlement of their claims through
Cape Town merchants, who charged a commission of from
five to twenty and even thirty per cent, on the transaction.
And these hungry traders, not satisfied even with that exor-
bitant profit on a piece of business over which they risked
no possibility of loss whatever, insisted that part of the com-
88 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
pensation money should be taken out in goods supplied at
an equally exorbitant profit by themselves.
There is no reason to wonder that some of the disgusted
farmers declared that the now so shrunken compensation
money was not worth the trouble and expense of a journey
into Cape Town, and abandoned their claims altogether
a proceeding which the hard-headed intermediaries possibly
anticipated, and against which they certainly made no pro-
test. A very considerable proportion of the compensation
money for the South African slave-owners certainly stuck
to the capacious pockets of the agents ; but not a few of those
once prosperous agriculturists who had been so foolish as to
put their faith in the fair dealing of an Imperial Government
were brought near to ruin.
Such was the insensate folly of the British Government in
this transaction that it lost the goodwill of the whole Dutch
population at the Cape for an unjust economy of a million
pounds ; such was the almost incredible meanness of this
administration that it stooped to charge a forced commission
on its own sharp practice, and to deduct the very postage
stamps which it had not used 1 before it would consent to
pay the compensation it had promised. And even then it
had not exhausted the range of its stupidity, for it allowed the
middleman, the broker, and the rascally commission agent
to step in between itself and those whom it had already
mulcted of a large commission, and to snatch a large part
of what remained.
The price of that folly, that meanness, and that stupidity
was very many times the million odd pounds which was saved
to the British Treasury. From that time the Boers believed
that the British Government was not to be trusted to deal fairly
with them ; and there was some foundation for their belief.
But other signs of British rule had appeared in South Africa
before the emancipation of the slaves. It was ordered that
1 Government correspcmdence was free.
89
the English language should be used in all judicial proceedings
after 1823 ; and judicial circuits after the English fashion had
been instituted throughout Cape Colony in 1811. English
The introduction of an organised and regular gy^^
administration of the law J did much to stop the introduced,
old patriarchal and individual methods which had hitherto
existed, under which the farmer in the remote interior had
meted out such rough justice as he chose to his dependents ;
the innovation was not popular with the less reputable
elements of society, and even the respectable Boer may have
grumbled at the limitation on his liberty of action ; but the
more responsible colonists seem to have admitted, perhaps
rather grudgingly, that regular justice had long been overdue.
Many other changes had been introduced by the new
rulers. The Cape had stagnated during the last feeble years
of the Dutch East India Company, thanks largely Prosperity
to the restrictions on trade, the maintenance of ^tfgij 6116
monopolies, and the existence of a depreciated isoe-s*.
paper currency. 2 All these things were swept away by
British rule, and a sensible improvement and advance was
seen in the first thirty years of the new control, which was
checked, but not entirely stopped, by the fundamental
economic change caused by the emancipation of the slaves.
As in Java during the brief period of English rule, 3 a strong
new wine was poured into the somewhat musty bottle of the
old Dutch colonial system.
But the new rule had limits to its innovations. By a curious
reversal of their ordinary practice, the British, who are usually
so ready to confer their institutions on their neigh- The cape
bours, and to advocate the British constitution as t^*" 11 "
a sovereign cure for every political disease, were 1835-72.
slow in setting up a parliament at the Cape. This departure
1 The law itself remained as before, the old Roman-Dutch law of the
Dutch East India Company period.
2 Memorandum by F. Kersteins, 1795, Theal's Records.
3 Vol. iv. bk. xv. ch. ii.
90 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
from the old tradition of the Empire may probably be as-
cribed to the conservatism which held full sway in England
itself for the forty years after the French Revolution ; * but
it remains the fact that the Cape had no constitution until
a nominated Legislative Council was set up in 1835. Both
Dutch and British colonists in South Africa complained with
some reason of arbitrary rule ; the British immigrants pro-
tested strongly against this reluctance to create a parliament
such as they had known at home ; the Cape Dutch, who had
known no parliament in the old days of the Dutch East India
Company, began to feel the need of one now that the execu-
tive government was no longer ineffective. Not until 1854,
however, were representative institutions granted ; another
eighteen years and a long agitation followed before full self-
government after the Canadian and Australian model was
attained in 1872.
The language of this parliament was English ; but long
before the existence of a constitution at the Cape, the English
The language had begun to spread independently of
Language ^ s ^ e a ^ anc ^ omc i a ^ u 86 - I* 8 rival, the Cape
spreads. Dutch dialect, still held its ground as the speech
of the bulk of the people ; but English became more and
more the language of administration, of commerce, and of
such literature as South Africa could boast.
The Cape Dutch settler of the eighteenth century had been
content to live with little news of the outer world, and his
descendants had not outgrown the mental habits of their
ancestors. Few books were known in the Boer's household
save the Bible it is true that he knew that best of all books
1 I have studied with some care and, as at least one critic has reminded
me, with occasional irreverence, every constitution of the English people
overseas ; and I have noticed that the least fertile period of such con-
stitutions were the years 1800-40. The fact is, I believe, to be ascribed
largely to the conservative reaction after the French Eevolution, just as
the quick growth of constitutional government in the British colonies
after 1850 may be set down, in much smaller degree, partly to the
revolutionary year 1S48 in Europe.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 91
thoroughly and of the existence of newspapers and magazines
he was entirely ignorant. The English settler of the nine-
teenth century was less incurious ; a fair number of books were
written about the resources, the sport, and the natural features
of the colony by its new rulers ; and several of these showed con-
siderable faculty for observation and some gift of description.
The first English newspaper the South African Commercial
Advertiser made its appearance in 1824, under the part
direction of Thomas Pringle, a Scottish immigrant Th e
who played a prominent part in the colonisation English
of Algoa Bay. 1 Pringle was not without literary south
ability to qualify him for his task ; he wrote a Africa-
pleasant prose style, and produced a good book of travels,
besides some second-rate verses whose easy flowing couplets
were mistaken by kindly friends and partial critics for true
poetry. 2 But his journalistic enterprise was frowned on from
the first by the Governor, Lord Charles Somerset, whose con-
ception of the functions of the press was limited to approval
of the dreary but innocuous records of a Government Gazette ;
and when the editor ventured to criticise not only the method
of administration in Cape Colony, but the head of the adminis-
tration himself, the august representative of authority
promptly intervened. The infant freedom of the press and
the pocket of its sole representative in South Africa suffered
a cruel blow when Somerset suppressed the Commercial
Advertiser after eighteen numbers had been issued ; 3 but
neither the slaughter of the babe nor the angry protests of the
outraged parent moved the stony heart of the relentless
Governor. For some time longer the colonists were denied
the priceless advantage of seeing their rulers attacked in
print ; but a few years later a less irascible Governor and a
more reasonable editor reached agreement on the point, and
1 See chapter v.
2 Pringle's poems have been collected and published, and some of them
still survive in anthologies.
a A detailed account of the affair is given in Meurant's ttixty Years Ago.
92 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
before the middle of the nineteenth century the liberty of the
press was assured.
Several respectable newspapers were founded at Cape Town
and in any centre where British settlers became numerous ;
an occasional magazine was started, flourished or at least
survived some years, and then died. But the number of
South African readers was too small to provide a living for
author, printer, and publisher ; and although the literary
product of local brains was by no means always contemptible,
it was not strong enough to compete against the great masters
of Victorian literature in England, whose works were reviewed
and read with considerable interest in the colonies.
During the whole of the nineteenth century, indeed, South
Africa was to produce a vast amount of gold, but nothing
South ^^ a ^ was golden in literature. One or two his-
African torical writers of the second rank may be men-
era ure. tioned, of more conspicuous diligence than ability ;
Leibbrandt and Theal, sound scholars both, were the leading
annalists of the Cape ; Olive Schreiner was a novelist whose
name was known and respected, and one at least of whose
books The Story of an African Farm won some reputation
in every civilised country ; and of another character were
several volumes of travels, memoirs, and reminiscences. In
this department the works of MofEat, Livingstone, and Barrow
became classics ; but most of the remaining publications in
South Africa were of interest only to special students of a par-
ticular subject, and usually sank into the oblivion of the
library cellar when the contemporary political or social contro-
versy which had brought them into existence was at an end.
A few second or third-rate dramas were written in South
Africa, but none of sufficient merit to be staged outside the
colony. Many authors tried thek hands at
poetry, and a few succeeded in producing tolerable
verse ; but no native writer of any real talent appeared in
the highest form of literature. The Dutch language, which
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOtfD 93
has been the vehicle of one considerable and several minor
poets in Europe, produced nothing of this kind in South
Africa ; among the numerous English writers, much was
imitated from classic or contemporary British models ; but
though the versification was often facile the thought was
nearly always commonplace. There were the inevitable
love-songs, so bad that they were addressed, it may be hoped,
to imaginary lovers ; 1 a few patriotic poems, no better if no
worse than the average of such performances elsewhere ; an
occasional platitude of morality perpetrated in pedestrian verse,
thoughts on immortality obviously destined to speedy death,
cries to the infinite too feeble to raise even a finite echo ; at-
tempts at self-revelation that revealed nothing but poverty
of poetic equipment ; sonnets that the world has willingly
and even hastily let die ; longer poems in which nothing is
lacking save inspiration : these are the bulk of South African
poetry. An occasional happy line of natural description 2
or a felicitous phrase 3 was the utmost achievement of the
poets of the Cape.
1 ' Sweet is my love as new-mown hay,' cried one distracted Cape poet.
Hay-fever.
' J Such as the following, by H. H. Dugmore :
' Wilderness lands of brake and glen
The wolf's and the panther's gloomy clen ;
Wilderness plains where the springbok bounds,
And the lion's voice from the hills resounds.'
Not very great stuff, to be sure : but readable.
But if South Africa could not boast of the quality of her verse, she
might be proud of the quantity. As early as 1830 I notice the editor of
the Cape of Good Hope Literary Gazette remarking that he had poetry
enough to build a wall round Parnassus ; and in one of the early missionary
magazines of Nyasaland is a sonnet to the Lake.
3 As, for instance, these lines by W. E. Hunter, on the nightingale
(the inevitable victim of every poet) :
' Singing, for the world's delight,
The cantata, she by right
Should have sung in heaven to-night.'
By far the best South African verse I have read are the fugitive pieces
by my old friend Ian D. Colvin. But he was not a native of South
Africa, and his genius was happily destined to be exhibited on a larger
and more prominent stage.
94 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
If the literature of South Africa was imitative and common-
place, its people had, according to Paderewski, the famous
Art and pianist, ' no idea of art, no sentiment for it, and
Music. no desire for it/ 1 The artist who pronounced this
sweeping judgment was suffering from an unprovoked insult
in the country he condemned ; but the justice of his criticism
was not seriously challenged by South Africans themselves.
During the early years of the nineteenth century, when the
discontent of the Dutch against their new rulers was growing,
British the actual British population in South Africa
fiTcape eilt remam ed a small and numerically insignificant
Colony. minority. Many Anglo-Indians from the three
presidencies of British India, it is true, used the Cape from
time to time as a health resort ; some of them liked the
climate, which was warmer than that of their native country
and less warm than that of their adopted country, and took
up their abode there altogether. There are old Anglo-Indian
names to this day in Cape Colony, and the tombs in the church-
yards of Cape Town bear witness to the Anglo-India strain
of settlement in South Africa.
Besides these chance western immigrants from the East,
a few British colonists made their way to the Cape directly
from the British Isles in the early years of the British occu-
pation. But the main tide of emigration from England and
Scotland in the first half of the nineteenth century was to
Canada and Australia ; and apart from the one considerable
enterprise at Algoa Bay, 2 which gave the eastern part of Cape
Colony a distinctly English character, no scheme of organised
settlement on a large scale was undertaken by the British
Government in South Africa.
Nevertheless, some signs of the British conquest, if hardly
yet of British settlement, were beginning to appear in the
English words that gradually mingled with the old Dutch
names on the maps of the colony. The little city of George,
1 Cape Times, April 1912. '- See the next chapter.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 95
founded in 1811 in the south of the colony, is one of the earliest
settlements of distinctly British origin in South Africa. It
took its commonplace name from the commonplace monarch
who reigned at that time in England ; for here as elsewhere
the names of the third George and his children have been
scattered in various strange quarters up and down the British
Empire 1 by settlers whose loyalty to the throne was more
marked than their originality. 2 The fourth George of Eng-
land left no mark upon the map of South Africa ; but King
William's Town, named from his successor, dates its existence
from 1834 ; his consort gave her name to Adelaide, founded
at the same time, but long since eclipsed by its Australian
rival. 3 The districts of Victoria East and West, which were
established in 1847, Queenstown, founded in 1853, and
Prince Albert, derive their names from the Queen and her
consort ; Port Alfred and Alice, the capital of Victoria East,
from a son and daughter.
The village of Caledon, which dates from 1807, the second
year of the British occupation, can claim a slightly longer
ancestry and a more active, if less majestic, patron than
Georgetown. The oldest of all the English settlements in
South Africa, its name is that of the English Governor of the
colony at the time of its foundation ; and many another
Governor in after years strove to perpetuate his memory
among a more or less grateful people by the same easy means
of founding a town of his own name. Cradock, called after
Sir John Cradock, an early Governor of Cape Colony, may
perhaps remind some of its inhabitants of the traditional
descent of its founder from the ancient British chief, Carac-
1 A round dozen or more cities in Ontario were named after George in.
and his children by the United Empire Loyalists.
- In 1819 Georgetown contained one hundred houses, a church, a
parsonage, and a school (Account of the Ca.pt in 1819). Its subsequent
growth has not been rapid.
3 King William's Town was hardly worthy its exalted title ; for some
years it consisted only of a church, a mission-house, and a garden in the
wilderness.
96 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
tacus ; x Somerset East and West and Beaufort owe their
names to the great Somerset family of England, one of whose
members was an irascible Governor at the Cape for several
years ; Colesberg, founded in 1830, likewise acknowledges a
Governor for its parent ; Wodehouse, Malmesbury, and Rich-
mond took their names from the nobility of England, who
were officially connected with the colony at the time of their
foundation ; and one or two places were named by the British
missionaries who had come to convert the natives of South
Africa to Christianity soon after the conquest. The village
of Maclean near East London commemorates one of the early
Scottish evangelists ; Wesleyville and Theopolis tell their
own tale of propagandist zeal. But the maps of the still
unknown interior north of the Orange River were in time
to show more signs of the messengers of God, at Moffat's
station of Kuruman, at Livingstonia and Blantyre ; in these
early days there was nothing but the little pioneer station of
Griqua Town north of the colonial boundary. 2
Not many independent British settlers made their homes
in South Africa before the discovery of diamonds and gold in
the second half of the nineteenth century ; but the few there
were carried the name at least of the old home to the new. 3
The existence of a Cambridge and a Bedford at the Cape tell
of emigrants from the peaceful pastures of the laggard Ouse ;
a Waterford speaks of an exodus from southern Ireland ; and
the mention of a South African Aberdeen 4 proves, what indeed
1 The authenticity of the Cradock descent is, I believe, a question of
justification by faith rather than of actual proof.
2 See bk. xxiv. ch. ii.
' J As did also a few German settlers, who founded the townships of
Berlin, Potsdam, and Braunschweig in Cape Colony. These men came from
the Anglo-German legion which was disbanded after the Crimean War.
4 I had a conversation some years ago with Miss Jean Graham, the
courteous secretary of the Scottish branch of the South African
Colonisation Society. This lady told me that most of her clients came
from the district between Aberdeen, Inverness, and the Lowlands, and
that the people of Aberdeen had usually more grit, and therefore more
success in colonisation, than others. They were mostly of t\vo classes
rural labourers, forced out of employment by the creation of deer
enclosures ; and town millworkers in search of better wages.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 97
scarcely needed proving, that the hardy sons of the toughest
breed in Scotland had not neglected the chance of finding
fortune in this or in any other part of the British Empire. 1
One place of greater importance than the rest was founded
by the British in these early days of their rule at the Cape.
There had been trouble along the shifting in- The
definite eastern frontier of the colony between Founding
of Graliains-
the advance guard of the Dutch settlers and the town,
native Kafir tribes for many years before the 1812<
British conquest ; and these frontier troubles had quickly
forced themselves upon the new rulers of South Africa.
During the first brief occupation of Cape Colony by the British
a Kafir war had engaged the English forces, and both the
wild bush country in which they operated and the aptness of
the native tribes in cattle raids and their bravery in open
combat had sometimes disconcerted commanders accustomed
to the more regular methods of European warfare. Early
in the second and permanent British occupation of the colony
the same question presented itself ; and after some natural
hesitation and delay the Government at Cape Town deter-
mined to maintain the eastern frontier of the European
settlements along the Great Fish Kiver, the same line of
frontier that had been fixed by the old Cape Dutch Govern-
ment in 1778 ; and, in order to safeguard the isolated Dutch
settlements of the Zuurberg and Zuurveld in the interior
from Algoa Bay, it was decided to found a frontier fortress
as a garrison centre and city of refuge.
1 In almost any part of the outer world, wherever one finds a European
there is a two to one chance he is a Britisher. If he is a successful and
prosperous citizen, there is a two to one chance he comes from the north
of England or Scotland ; if he is a Scot there is more than a two to one
chance he is from Aberdeen. If'he is wealthy one can write him down a
Yorkshireruan or an Aberdonian -without further question.
The only exception to this rule, so far as England is concerned, is
Devonshire, which has given far more than the average of pioneers to the
Empire, from the days of Drake downwards. But Devon, apart from its
other excellences among which good cider and junket shall not be
counted the least has indeed received this unfair advantage from the
Almighty over other English counties, that it has two sea-coasts.
VOL. VI. G
,**' '"" *',
JV* % /'
&t f AjfOMifl'Mf^ ' ^,
* m %
98 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Colonel John Graham, of the 59th regiment, an officer who
had taken part in the attack on Cape Town in 1806, and who
A Frontier had since gained much experience of Kafir war-
andhcuty of ^ are > was P^ ace( i m charge of the work ; and on
Refuge. 3rd May 1812 he fixed the site of a city on the
spot where stood the remains of the abandoned Dutch farm
called Noutoe. 1 Three days later the Cape Regiment was
moved thither, and building operations were begun ; but
after a few weeks' work, on the recommendation of the Dutch
ensign Stockenstrom, who knew the country better than
Colonel Graham, the settlement was moved to a high spot then
known as Rand Kop, which commanded a wider view of the
surrounding country than Noutoe ; and here, in the early
days of June, the city of Grahamstown was founded. The
original foundation at Noutoe was discontinued ; the deserted
farmhouse of one Lukas Meyer, which stood on the Rand Kop,
was roofed in, repaired, and used as an officers' mess ; eighteen
temporary huts, in three rows of six each, were fitted up as
quarters for the troops ; and a small garrison was installed
to keep the frontier.
Such was the beginning of Grahamstown as a frontier
fortress and, in case of need, a city of refuge. The place grew
very slowly, for it had at first no citizens but soldiers, no
industry but drill ; but within a few years, when British
settlers and Boer farmers began to cultivate the country
around the little town, it became a city of refuge indeed for
terror-stricken women and children fleeing from a frontier
raid and a cruel native war. 2
Grahamstown was never taken by the enemy, and thus it
justified its founder and the choice of site ; 3 but the frontier
itself was less defensible. The line of the Great Fish River
1 Since called Table Farm.
4 See the following chapter.
3 It justifies its founder in another way. The health statistics of the
British regiments at Grahamstown showed a lower percentage of sick-
ness and death than any other troop station in the vi orld.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 99
was condemned by another soldier as ' all in favour of the
Kafirs ; a dense jungle, the medium breadth of which was
about five miles, torn and intersected by deep ravines, a great
part of it impenetrable, except to Kafirs and wild beasts,
occupying about a hundred miles of frontier along the Great
Fish River. The whole British army would be insufficient to
guard it/ 1
The justice of these words was to be proved by the Kafir
War of 1835.
CHAPTER V
THE ENGLISH IMMIGRATION : 1820-42
THE thirty years after the close of the Napoleonic wars in
1815 saw Britain faced with a prolonged industrial and social
crisis. Many an honest man in those years found Distress in
no work to his hand ; many was without a roof to England-
his head or a bed for his wife or bread for his child. Distrust
of the present and despair of the future drove hundreds to
outrage and crime. Side by side with the wealth that made
the presence of poverty more grim by contrast, utter desti-
tution stalked the land ; and so threatening was the outlook
at times, that there were some who even feared that nine-
teenth-century England might suffer the fate of eighteenth-
century France, and see the very foundations of society
dissolve under the stress of those for whom society seemed
to have no recognised place within its ranks.
From that untoward fate the conservative and constructive
forces of England saved the country after some years of
misery and disorder. But it is at such times of stress that
1 Major Charters, quoted in Chase's Natal.
Even the excellent Pringle, who, it is true, was no soldier, saw that
the frontier could not be effectually defended.
100 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
quiet unprogressive men, who see no prospect for themselves
at home, are forced to imitate the wanderers and adven-
Emieration ^ urous f every age, and to look abroad for the
as a Solu- career that is denied them in their own country.
Thousands of labourers, artisans, mechanics, and
shopmen left England to seek employment in her colonies
during the years after the battle of Waterloo ; and few of
those who settled overseas ever saw England again.
Some took advantage of their new opportunity, flourished
in the new lands, and rose to high position in the state ; many
prospered quietly after an early struggle in an unfamiliar
environment ; a certain number failed in the colonies as they
had failed in England, as they would have failed anywhere.
But nearly all except these last took firm root in the new soil,
for they were mostly of the solid, steady type that takes firm
root where it can, and deviates from the parent stock as little
as it may under other skies and a different climate ; and,
unconscious of the work they were doing, they and their
children were laying the foundations of new English nations
in virgin lands.
Very many, perhaps the greater number of these people,
went to Canada, the nearest of the British colonies, where
they settled in Ontario and the Maritime Provinces, and
often drifted over the border like human pollen driven by
the wind of circumstance to the United States. 1 A consider-
able number went to Australia 2 and New Zealand 3 under
the Wakefield scheme of colonisation. 4 And a few went to
South Africa.
1 Vol. iii. bk. xi. chs. ii. iii. iv.
2 Vol. v. bk. xviii. ch. ii.
3 Vol. v. bk. xxi. ch. ii.
4 Wakefield's theories had no influence on the colonisation of South
Africa; but a curious rival project was adumbrated some years later by
one Edward King, in a pamphlet entitled The, Advantages of a Triform
Scheme, System of Colonisation in South Africa, affording a gloriously
splendid prospect for the next generation of Mankind (1844). Unfortu-
nately for King, his own generation would have nothing to do with it.
His idea was to take the 'poor of the United Kingdom, the aborigines,
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 101
For many years Cape Colony was neglected or overlooked
as a field for emigration. The extent of its resources had
certainly been pointed out by those who knew TheAlg . oa
the country, 1 and the British Cabinet itself was Bay colony,
not without its own private information ; 2 but 182 *
it was not until 1819 that the Imperial Government decided
to take any effective steps to ensure that the new British
possession should have a considerable British population.
In that year, however, the Imperial Government deter-
mined to expend a sum of 50,000 in planting a colony of
four thousand British settlers in South Africa. The idea was
favourably received by parliament and the public ; and it
may give some idea of the distress of the times when it is
and the exceedingly wretched of every part,' and to settle them in
districts of equal size in South Africa. Labour and all duties were to be
shared equitably that pious hope of every idealist who ignores the
imperfections of poor human nature precedence and authority were to
be regulated by seniority, and profits to be distributed according to age
only, so ' as to leave no chance whatever for the influence of self-interest.'
One-third of the produce was to be paid as rent to the Crown, one-third
as profit to the settlers, and one-third as interest to the capitalists who
were to advance the money for the project. They displayed no excessive
anxiety to advance even a penny.
King advanced in his favour the suggestion that his scheme combined
Christianity with colonisation ; but this early socialist project, which
was unconsciously imitated in some respects in Australia two genera-
tions later (vol. v. bk. xxii. ), made no appeal to his own individualist age.
Profit-sharing according to age is not a very hopeful basis for a young
community's industry ; but in practice it might lead to the painless
extinction of the aged dotard if there were any profits to divide when
the motive of self-interest was eliminated.
Another extraordinary scheme was put forward by one Martin Boon,
in How to Colonise, South Africa (1883). The whole colonisation project
he outlined was to be financed by paper money. The project remained,
like the money on paper. He produced two other equally mad books,
The Immortal History of South Africa, and a History of the Orange Free
State. I am of necessity a hardened reader of rubbish, but I admit that
I failed to stomach this literary 'boon.
1 See Fisher's Importance of the Cape of Good Hope, independently of
the Advantage it possesses as a Naval and Military Station (1816).
Incidentally he suggested that convicts should be substituted for slaves,
an idea that appealed more to England than South Africa.
2 There are one or two confidential manuscript reports on South
Africa in the Colonial Office in London. Even after the lapse of a
century their contents are still kept secret.
102 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
stated that although the number assisted to emigrate was
limited to four thousand, over ninety thousand applications
were received from those who desired to be of the party.
As it was, even four thousand were too many for South
Africa to absorb at once. But it must be confessed that
Character those who were finally chosen for the enterprise
of the were of very mixed character, too often men
settlers. Wn0 se previous occupations had not in the least
suited them for the rough life of a frontier colony ; and many
of the subsequent difficulties of the new settlement sprang
directly from this fact. The emigrants, who were banded
in parties of ten under a head for each unit, appear in fact
to have been chosen in the most haphazard fashion. Some
of them were certainly excellent people, men whom no trials
or misfortunes could discourage ; but others were of very
different calibre. An unkindly critic stated that numbers
among them were ' tavern waiters, broken-down actors,
attorneys' clerks, pianoforte makers, men and women milliners
from Bond Street, and ladies' maids ' ; while one of the actual
emigrants, and the most able member of the party, allowed
that only about a third of the whole were people of real
respectability or substance ; the remainder being mostly
persons who had long hung loose upon society, low in morals
and desperate in circumstances, often idle, insolent, and
drunken, if not mutinously disposed and inclined to dis-
content wherever they were placed. 1
The destination of this motley army was not Cape Town
Boundless or the older and more settled part of the colony,
Disappoint- ^ut ^ ne a ^ unoccupied district around Algoa Bay,
ment. some days' sail to the east, in the country from
which the Kafirs had lately been driven by Colonel Graham.
There were those among the emigrants so ignorant that they
1 The less favourable estimate appeared in the Quarterly Review ; the
more favourable in Pringle's Narrative, of a Residence in South Africa,
the best account of the subject. Other contemporary authorities are
Chase, Cope of Good Hope and Algoa Bay, 1822; and The State of the
Cape in 1822, an admirable work by a civil servant.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 103
expected to find a veritable land of plenty awaiting them, 1
with apricots and oranges growing wild on the sites of their
new homes, and a life of ease and luxury ahead. They were
speedily disillusioned. On landing at their destination early
in 1820, they discovered a flat coastline, a monotonous belt
of undulating lowlands by the shore, and a range of moun-
tains in the interior. Of wild apricots there were no more
sign than of civilisation. Only a few rough huts, a rude
fort of British construction, and one or two miserable shelters
hastily erected for the accommodation of the immigrants, 2
were to be seen. The whole country seemed virgin land ; the
nearest European settlements being the newly founded
frontier post of Grahamstown far to the east which had as
yet but twenty-two houses 3 Bathurst, a mere skeleton of an
official plan, 4 the village of Somerset a considerable distance
inland, which a disgusted traveller of the time described as a
paltry collection of a couple of dozen huts set down in a
swamp, 5 and the neat and picturesque township of Uiten-
hage, with its seven hundred Dutch families a few miles
away. 6 There were no roads in this place, but a few rough
tracks led to the interior ; and along these tracks the settlers
1 Many had been unintentionally misled by the British Government,
which promised them that the ' Cape was suited to most of the produc-
tions of both temperate and warm climates, and the persons emigrating
would soon find themselves comfortable.' Chancellor of the Exchequer
Vansittart's Speech in British House of Commons, 12th July 1819.
2 The fort, which was called Fort Frederick, had been built by the
British during the first occupation of Cape Colony in 1799 (Records of
Cape Colony) after Admiral Pringle had examined the site two years before.
A garrison of three hundred men was maintained there for a time.
A picture in Alberti's Description Physique et Hintorique des Cafres
(Amsterdam, 1811) shows seven buildings at Algoa Bay besides the fort ;
but in a work published in the colony in 1835 it is stated that there were
only four houses at the time of the 1820 settlement. Perhaps the other
three blew down in the interval.
3 The size of Grahamstown at this time is mentioned in Introductory
Remarks to a Narrative of the Irruption of the Kafir Hordes, published at
that place in 1835.
4 Bathurst, like its namesake in New South Wales, was uamed from a
member of the British Government of the time.
5 Harris, Wild Sports of Southern Africa (1839).
6 Harris again.
104 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
made their way by wagon to the lands allotted them, and
those who were located far inland found that even the track
would vanish before they reached their journey's end.
Some of the founders of the settlement had discussed the
project of building a capital city of New Edinburgh for the
Port new colony on the shores of the southern ocean.
founded* 1 "^ke scheme fell through, and the less ambitious
1820. Scots names of Cheviot Fells, Craig Rennie, Lyn-
doch, Glen Lynden, and Ettrick Forest in the interior are all
that now mark the pronouncedly Scottish element among the
colonists ; the first town that was founded by the emigrants
at Algoa Bay was named Port Elizabeth, in memory of the
deceased wife of Sir Rufane Donkin, the Acting Governor.
A later and perhaps too severe critic declared that it was
planted on the least eligible site that could have been
found ; 1 but at least no time was lost in its establishment.
The first house of the new town began to rise from the
ground on 6th June 1820, only a week or two after the pioneer
The company of immigrants had pitched its first tent
build their on ^ e shores of the bay ; and the next few months
Homes. were employed in the inevitable work of settling
the locations of the various parties a task that was not
accomplished without several disputes, an ominous sign for
the future and the building of houses and huts along the
coast and in the interior.
These first dwellings, which superseded the tents that had
been in use since landing in South Africa, were merely slight
frames of wood, hastily felled and thatched with reeds down
to the ground. The floors were trodden earth, prepared after
the manner which had been in vogue among the Dutch ; the
windows were nothing but a hole, covered at night and in bad
weather with a cloth or sack or whatever offered to resist
the passage of the air ; and they had no chimney. A small
circular shed of clay was erected outside the hut, where the
1 The ubiquitous Harris once more.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 105
cooking required by the family was done on wood fires ; on
cold days a pan of the embers from these fires would be brought
into the dwelling-house for warmth. If plain and unattrac-
tive, the huts were said to be fairly comfortable ; but any
settler who had the good fortune to prosper soon made himself
more commodious quarters, and degraded his original home
to the service of a granary or cattle-shed.
Few of the immigrants had brought out furniture with
them, and in most cases it had to be fashioned by men who
were not carpenters by trade, and whose tools were as primi-
tive as their fingers were unpractised at joinery. The making
of a rough table, a shaky chair, and a plank bed that only the
tired and healthy man could sleep on was the extreme limit
of the ordinary settler's powers.
Seed was sown by the colonists, some of it brought from
home, some purchased on the spot, or given, together with
slips, cuttings, and graftings of fruit-trees, by And sow
kindly folk within the colony. After much their cropg.
anxious watching it was discovered that most of the English
seeds had failed in the alien soil ; only the potatoes imported
from Europe did well. The local products were more success-
ful ; a good crop of vegetables was soon raised, and in many
places the orchards that had been planted flourished. And
here, beside the rosy apple and the sun-kissed peach which
the settler knew at home, were other fruits that cheered his
heart : the sight of the pale lemon, the rosy pomegranate,
and even the drooping vine growing on his land comforted
the farmer with the thought that his first high expectations
of the country might not in the end prove extravagant.
But a succession of unlooked-for disasters soon changed
the reviving hopes of the people to misery and despair. Not
all of them understood that the land on which Tne i rMiB .
they had settled was one in which irrigation was fortunes,
necessary ; and the combined effects of a drought
and a lack of sufficient capital exhausted the resources of the
106 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
young and inexperienced community within two years of its
arrival.
Want and hunger quickly reigned where plenty had been
predicted. A pathetic letter from a disillusioned colonist
tells something of the horrors of that dreary time. ' My
wheat, two months ago the most promising I ever saw in any
country/ he wrote, 1 ' is now utterly destroyed by rust. My
barley, from the drought and a grub which attacks the blade
just under the surface, produced little more than I sowed.
My Indian corn, very much injured by the caterpillar ; cab-
bages destroyed by lice ; beans scorched with hot winds,
carrots run to seed ; potatoes good, but a small quantity.
Our cows are dry for want of grass ; not the least appearance
of verdure, nothing but one great wilderness of faded grass/
Many of the people, indeed, were in pitiful condition ; they
had had no time to accommodate themselves to the severe
conditions, or to accumulate provision against a season of
adversity. A relief committee, appointed to administer a
charitable fund subscribed in the other districts of Cape
Colony, reported that not one person in twenty had money
enough to buy shoes. All were short of clothes ; some of the
children ran about almost naked ; and one poor woman was
seen, whose dress consisted only of an old tent of rotten
canvas. 2
Their worst necessities were soon relieved ; a number of
1 Report of the Committee of the Society for the Relief of Dis/rt.-^d
Settlers (1823).
2 Some rather acrimonious disputes arose out of these troubles. One
party of the settlers was accused of being radicals, which to be sure was
not a very serious matter, and means little more than that thej 7 Mere
discontented, and actually dared to say so. But there was a government
squabble as well. Somerset and Donkin quarrelled ; a Commission was
appointed and reported, and correspondence was issued regarding the
charges (House of Commons Papers, 21st May 1827) ; a Bishop published a
Reply to the Report in 1826 ; Donkin defended himself in A Letter on the
Government of the Cape in the following year, attacking Somerset ; and a
religious fanatic named Parker published The Jesuits Unmasked, attack-
ing another official. When Jesuits are brought on the controversial field
the wise man beats a hasty retreat.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 107
the settlers, however, losing heart at their misfortunes, sold
their small effects for what they would fetch it must have
been little enough at a time of general distress and And
departed to pursue the compulsory gamble with Recovery,
fortune elsewhere. But those more courageous 82!
ones who stayed gradually recovered the ground they had
lost. The seasons were henceforth more kindly, the soil more
fruitful, the conditions of successful agriculture better under-
stood ; the farmers prospered on the land, trade flourished
in the capital ; a monthly fair was held at Grahamstown, at
which the Kafirs bartered their ivory and elephants' teeth for
European cloths and beads ; and Bathurst grew into a pretty
village, with houses built in the English style, surrounded by
gardens stretching over its twin undulating hills. 1
For ten years and more good fortune continued unabated.
Then the storm broke. But none had foreseen its coming ;
and when it came none foresaw its end.
On the first day of December 1834, the abolition of slavery
in the British Empire was celebrated throughout South
Africa. It was an occasion of general rejoicing TheKafir
and thanksgiving ; hymns of praise were sung in War,
the churches, and sermons preached on the
glorious prospects of a free and enlightened community, in
which white man and black should live and work together,
both worshipping the same God, serving the same sovereign,
and striving for the same ends.
Such was the universal dream of the idealist, the philan-
thropist, and the friend of liberty in that memorable year, 2
the hope alike of Christian England and her far dominions.
And the eastern province of Cape Colony took its due share
in these thanksgivings ; there were idealists even in the little
frontier settlement of Grahamstown, where the vanishment
1 Scenes and Occurrences in Albany, 1828.
2 For the abolition of slavery in the British dominions other than
South Africa, see vol. iv. bk. xiii. ch. iii.
108 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
of slavery was celebrated with enthusiasm, and the coming
of a new age foretold with joy. In the parish church of
St. George in that town the sermon was founded on the
magnificent prophecy of the Hebrew seer, ' Violence shall no
more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within
thy borders/ 1 Within a month that church had seen a grim
commentary on text and sermon.
As if to show the vanity of all human aspirations that
church was used before the waning year was out as a fortress
and a magazine of arms, and as a place of refuge for English
women and children of the colony in a war of black against
white.
A few days after the sermon of peace and goodwill had been
delivered, strange rumours of strife and coming war began to
circulate rumours in direct opposition to the prevailing
sentiment, as a storm comes up against the breeze. It was
said that the Kafirs were in a state of dangerous excitement,
that they spoke of outrages having been committed by the
colonists along the frontier, and that they threatened to
retaliate by sweeping the colony of its white men.
Few believed the rumour. In South Africa, as in New
Zealand, 2 the early British settlers, who knew little of the
country, disregarded the evidence of old travellers and ex-
perienced traders as to the character of the aborigines. The
settlers had been assured by the missionaries who preceded
them into the wilderness that the Kafir was not the san-
guinary, vindictive, and ferocious savage of the books, but
an interesting and manly innocent who was only too ready
to appreciate the benefits of civilisation and the blessings of
Christianity 3 ; and they believed the missionaries' assurances.
1 Isaiah Ix. 18.
2 Vol. v. bk. xxi. ch. iii.
3 I hiive quoted this excellent and edifying sentence almost verbatim
from Scenes and Occurrences in Albany, 1828 six years before the war.
There are many similar remarks in the profuse missionary literature of
the time.
But the missionaries were not the only Britons who believed in the
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 109
The colonists knew little of the past ; many did not realise
that they were living in territory from which the Kafirs had
been driven out by force only a year or two before the settlers
of 1820 had emigrated from England. Some of them had
indeed seen from time to time the burnt and blackened ruins
of old houses in the interior, a few perhaps realised that those
gaunt walls must once have been human habitations, off-
shoots from old Dutch homes at Uitenhage ; but none seem
to have realised that these were evidences of past irruptions
by the Kafirs, or that they might themselves be in danger
of the same fate, should any cause impassionate the unstable
and warlike native on their borders.
Few therefore believed the rumours. But as the days
passed and Christmastide drew near more definite news came
in to Grahamstown from the out-country. The accounts of
a rising on the frontier were confirmed by men who had been
among the Kafirs. It was stated that the cattle of one of the
chiefs had been carried off by a young officer at Fort Beaufort,
and that the chief and his fighting men had sworn vengeance.
And it was said further that a Kafir had exclaimed to a
colonist, ' The white men pretend to believe in peace with us,
and you tell us they are friendly ; but look ! they murder our
chiefs and our people. We can reckon forty-four of our men
murdered in time of peace.'
There was some truth in these rumours. There had cer-
tainly been collisions between the white man and the native,
and in those collisions the native was not always to blame.
If the Kafir was the first to attack, the white man took his
vengeance when and where he could, often careless of the
identity of the offender and the sufferer. And the cattle
innocence of the Kafirs ; Major Charters, in Chase's Natal, states that
' the frontier Kafirs were not always thieves ; they were taught by their
rather more civilized neighbours.' A very doubtful proposition ; cattle-
raiding was known in Africa centuries before the Europeans set foot
there. Perhaps Charters was misled by Rousseau's absurd doctrine of
savage innocence.
110 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
which the Kafir claimed were said to be cattle he had himself
stolen from the whites. It was certain that he had stolen
cattle ; it was not certain that the cattle which the Europeans
claimed were those which had been stolen, or even that they
had been stolen at all.
Still few of the whites believed that there was any danger.
But now men began to come into Grahamstown, whose scat-
tered solitary homes had been attacked and fired ; and worse,
there were white women from the countryside whose menfolk
had been waylaid and killed, widows bereft at once of husband
and home.
Faced with the accounts of these refugees, Grahamstown
at length believed in the reality of danger. The news came
through that the whole frontier had been attacked, and the
alarm spread that the Kafirs had sworn to destroy the city
in the night. And it was now discovered that the place was
almost defenceless, and a momentary panic ensued.
Two days before Christmas, and three weeks after it had
been foretold that violence should cease from the earth, the
parish church in which those words had been uttered was being
used for a very different purpose than the celebration of an
undying peace. The women and children of the town, and
the widows and orphans from the countryside, had flocked
within its walls ; but not to worship the God of love, whose
sanctuary it was, but to take refuge from a cruel, barbarous
enemy that recognised no sanctuary and worshipped no
Christian God. Some remembered with a shudder that the
bloody, mutilated corpses of their men lay out upon the veldt,
with the staring eyes of violent death upturned for vengeance
towards the sky ; some trembled lest their turn too should
come, if the poor defences of an improvised civilian force
should be overborne. . . .
And elsewhere in that church were strange doings. A
council of war was being held by the pulpit which should have
echoed with the Christmas message of peace and goodwill ;
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 111
the chancel was piled high with old muskets and rusty
bayonets, the hasty collection of an unprepared defence ;
arms and ammunition were being distributed before the holy
altar where men had prayed. 1
An urgent message had been sent along the coast for rein-
forcements from the Cape ; but it was certain that many
anxious days must pass before troops could arrive and the
defence be organised. And meanwhile Bathurst had been
almost deserted by its inhabitants, and six hundred refugees
from that district had entered Grahamstown.
Fortunately the Governor of Cape Colony at that time,
Sir Benjamin D'Urban, was a man of action, a soldier of the
Peninsular War, and one whom experience had therefore
taught to waste no time in an emergency. Fortunately,
too, he had by his side a man of the same breed as himself,
Colonel Harry Smith, who had led the storm of Badajoz
and earned promotion in a dozen such desperate fights.
Twenty years and more had passed since those days ; but
Harry Smith had lost none of the vigour of youth since he
had come to South Africa. 2 Ordered to sail for Algoa in a
warship, he preferred to ride the whole distance across veldt
and desert six hundred miles in high summer to save
time ; and save time he did on that tremendous ride. Hardly
for a minute was he out of the saddle, and going all the time
at a gallop of fourteen miles to the hour. The first day he
covered ninety miles, the second over seventy, a hundred the
third, in a country without roads or at best with bad roads ;
the fifth day he rode into Uitenhage, the sixth he was in
Grahamstown as fresh as when he left Cape Town.
1 Abstract of Proceedings of the Board of Relief for the. Destitute . . .
with a view to Mitigate the Sufferings of the Frontier Inhabitants occasioned
by the Irruption of the Cafir Tribes, 1834-5; a valuable piece of contem-
porary evidence. Theal's Kafir War of 1835 is a reprint of many
documents of the period. Like every other writer, Theal overlooks the
forementioned pamphlet, and misses the dramatic contrast of the war.
- Smith has written his Autobiography an admirable piece of work,
a* full of spirit as the man himself.
112 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
He found there some hundreds of soldiers assembled from
the outskirts of the district and awaiting his lead, together
with civilians bearing arms, but not all knowing how to use
them, 1 and there was news of further reinforcements to
come. The little town was barricaded against attack, but
no idea of an advance against the Kafirs had entered the heads
of the amateur garrison.
Mere defence was useless, and would never recover the
country the Kafirs had overrun, or deliver the colonists from
further depredations ; but Smith organised an offensive
move, and under D'Urban who had arrived at the seat of war
soon after his lieutenant he carried it out. Quick marches
were made into the heart of the Kafir country ; the great chief
Hintza, who was responsible for the war, saw his kraal
burnt by the whites before his eyes ; thousands of the cattle
that had been raided from the colonists were recovered, and
Hintza himself was taken. The savage tried to escape by a
feint, but Smith pursued him alone almost to the enemy's
encampment ; and after a chase that recalled the personal
conflicts of mediaeval warfare in Europe, Hintza was shot
dead. 2
The war died down with the death of Hintza, and apparent
security along the frontier was restored ; but much damage
Bad of the had been done. It was calculated that 456 farm-
war, 1835. houses had been burnt by the Kafirs, 350 more
had been pillaged or gutted, 5715 horses and over a quarter of
a million head of sheep and cattle had been stolen. Some of
these could be restored, but there were losses which could not
1 The civilians, however, Boer and Briton alike, proved themselves
good material 'patient, industrious, and orderly people.' D'Urban.
Despatch to Colonial Secretary, 29th July 1837.
2 A Court of Enquiry was held in August-September 1836 to determine
the circumstances of Hintza's death. It was found that Hintza met his
death in trying to escape, that Smith fired without effect, an<l then
threw his pistol at the chief ; he was fired at three times by George
Southey (afterwards Sir George) and the last shot was fatal.
A copy of the evidence, printed at Cape Town in 1837, is in the British
Museum, with a MS. appendix.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 113
be restored. The land, wrote Harry Smith to the Governor
at the Cape, ' was filled with the lamentations of the widow
and the fatherless ' ; and for these poor stricken souls was
neither redress nor relief.
But the full consequences of the Kafir irruption into the
eastern province and the punitive campaign were yet to
reveal themselves in unexpected and unwelcome Landa
fashion. For some time, however, those evil restored
consequences remained unknown to the settlers, toKafirs -
who could not conceive that a British Government would
undo the work done by its own colonists in their own
defence, support the Kafirs against its own people and give
back to the natives the conquered territories. Yet such
was the decision of the British Colonial Secretary two years
later. 1
Once more the settlement took up its work when the peril
of war was past ; the farmer rebuilt his ruined home, planted
and stocked his fields afresh ; and this time he Peaceful
took care that he was not unarmed against the ^^Jed
chances of future attack. Like the Dutchmen 1836-42.
before them, the British colonists had learnt their lesson, the
inevitable stern lesson that the governing minority must
always learn in a savage land or perish ; the lesson that rule
in the last resort rests upon force, and that although bene-
volent justice may be the best method, there are moments in
frontier life when the gun is the only argument. 2 After this
1 For Glenelg's decision and official despatch on this matter, see the
previous chapter.
2 The English colonists had learnt this lesson very quickly in America
(vol. i. bk. i. ch. vi. ). But Englishmen are quick to unlearn.
The remainder of Kafir frontier politics may be briefly summarised.
In 1846 another war, similar in 'origin and character to that of 1835,
broke out ; the territories which Glenelg had restored to the Kafirs in
1837 were re-annexed to the Cape in 1847. In that war the Kafirs were
so clearly the aggressors that even missionary Philip had to support the
European cause.
Another frontier war disturbed the years 1850-3 ; but before the last
war of 1S77 an extraordinary incident occurred. In 1856 a Kafir
prophetess persuaded the Amexosa tribe to destroy their grain and cattle,
VOL. VI. H
114 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Kafir War every British settler was armed in self-defence,
knowing full well that the day might come without warning
when his weapons would be the only thing between himself
and death, his wife and outrage, his children and torture.
The menacing black cloud was not forgotten, but for the
time at least the horizon had cleared ; within a few years the
scene of war had recovered all, and more than all it had lost.
The land was everywhere rising in value ; its advance led
naturally to the growth of the towns. By 1842 Grahamstown
was a place of seven hundred houses and a population of five
thousand : at once the emporium and the fortress of the
district, it could claim that its trade justified the local joint-
stock bank and assurance society that had been recently
founded. And it could boast its library, and its two weekly
newspapers as evidences of the mental alertness of its people,
its gaol as a sign of their other activities, its inns in proof of
their good fellowship ; and if it so chose, it could claim that
the local chapels which had already been built in opposition
to the episcopal church testified to the fact that its citizens
were as prone to religious differences as other Christians
elsewhere. 1
Bathurst likewise had an inn, a church and a chapel for
spirituous and spiritual refreshment ; Port Elizabeth had
become the recognised centre of the sea-borne trade, and a
place of some importance and ambition.
And meanwhile a new generation was growing up, the first
generation of British South Africans the children of the first
settlers, the fathers of the South African nation of the future.
promising them that if they did so they would be granted great victories
and loot in the invasion of Cape Colony in the following year. The
deluded people obeyed, but instead of a great victory thousands died of
starvation, and it was twenty years before the Kafirs recovered the loss.
It was suggested that the delusion of the prophetess was incited by the
Europeans, but no proof of this was forthcoming. Had the prophecy
fulfilled itself, and the famished natives thrown themselves across the
European frontier, the consequences might have been extremely serious
for Cape Colony.
1 See The Eastern Province in 1842. a contemporary pamphlet.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 115
THE FOUNDING OF NATAL: 1823-56 l
THREE years after the large British settlement had been
founded at Algoa Bay in 1820, a young Englishman left Cape
Town to visit a spot some four hundred miles Some
further along the South African coast to the east- ^*^
ward than Port Elizabeth. His name was Lieu- turers.
tenant Farewell, and he was of that adventurous type which
prefers the unknown chances of the wilds to the more regular
career of civilisation. Others of like mettle were attracted
to his side, and on his second journey to the same place a
twelvemonth later, he was accompanied or followed by a few
associates Lieutenant King, Nathaniel Isaacs, Henry Fynn,
and one or two more who were destined to play a consider-
able part in this enterprise. Their purpose was not coloni-
sation, but trade ; and Farewell had taken care to provide
himself with certain credentials from the Governor of Cape
Colony to assist him in his object. But those credentials
amounted to little more than a permission for Farewell to
go about his business in a country with which Britain had
no connection, and an implied warning that his success or
failure was entirely his own concern. 2
The place to which Farewell was bound had long been
written on the maps as Port Natal ; the country from which
the port took its name was already known by repute to
1 Bird's Annals of Natal is a complete record of all notices dealing
with the colony, and a monument of diligent research. Holden's Hix'ory
is only less valuable. Gibson's Story of the Zulus is authoritative ;
Gardiner's Zoolu Country (1836) is a valuable contemporary record ;
Isaacs, Travels in Eastern Africa (1836) is a detailed account by one of
the early traders in Natal of the remarkable adventures of the Farewell-
Fynn party ; it deserves to be regarded as a classic of pioneering, but is
too little known outside South Africa.
2 The Governor stated (Papers relative to Condition and Treatment of
Native Inhabitants, 1835) that Farewell was satisfied with this evasive
answer. The Governor certainly was,
116 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
captains and travellers engaged in the East India trade. It
had first been seen by Europeans over three centuries before ;
At Port for when the great Portuguese mariner, Vasco
Natal, 1824. ^a G. ama) sailed beyond the Cape on his pioneer
voyage to the Indies, he had chanced to notice this land that
lay on the upward bend of Africa towards the east, over
against the tropics and the vast ocean which was now spread
out before him. The voyage was not delayed, and the dis-
coverer set not foot upon its shores ; but in memory of the
place and the day it was the morning of Christmas, 1497
he gave it the auspicious name of Terra de Natal. From
that time until the visit of Lieutenant Farewell in 1823, tte
country was neglected by Europeans ; but the name bestowed
in passing had never been forgotten. Natal it was to Vasco
da Gama ; Natal it has remained to this day.
None came thither from foreign lands save by some cala-
mitous mischance of the seas, some fearful tempest of the
Earlier Indian Ocean, which would drive the trader
European homeward-bound for Lisbon or London with a
cargo of spices and drugs and rich oriental fabrics,
sheer upon those unfrequented shores. Among such in-
voluntary visitors are remembered the crew of the English
vessel Johanna, wrecked about the year 1683 off Natal ; part
of the cargo was salved by the natives, and the refugees were
kindly treated by their rescuers. 1 Another was a Dutch
East Indiaman driven on the coast some four years later.
Some of her people set out to tramp the long perilous journey
to Cape Town across an unknown country ; others who
made their escape by boat found two Englishmen from the
Johanna still in the land ; and to their surprise they dis-
covered later an old Portuguese sailor who had been ship-
wrecked in Natal full forty years before, and who, abandon-
ing at last all hope of rescue or escape, had made his home
among the natives. He was married to a woman of
1 Hamilton's East Indies,
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 117
the country, who had borne him many children ; ' he had
been circumcised/ reported the disapproving Dutch, ' and
spoke only the African language, having forgotten every-
thing, his God included/ 1 Yet perhaps at times the lonely
exile thought on boyhood scenes and old loves far away. . . .
These unhappy mariners reported well of the fertility of
the country ; and the great Dutch Governor at the Cape,
the elder Van der Stel, intent as usual on the expansion of his
territories, informed his superiors in Holland that he had
effected the purchase of Port Natal. 2 A payment of beads
to the value of some 50 was made to a native chief in token
of exchange ; but the chief was never called on to fulfil his
bargain. Van der Stel had looked too far ahead, and for
another century again the only strangers on that coast were
travellers in distress.
These first Europeans in Natal reported the aborigines to
be a wild but kindly people grouped together in a number of
communities under various chiefs. They were The
obedient to the authority of their rulers, whose Natives of
barbaric sway appears to have been usually mild a a '
and easy ; they had no arts, and there were indications that
they had not long abandoned a nomadic life. They lived in
rude huts made of branches, roofed with a thatch like that
which covers the haystacks in Holland ; they possessed pots
and pans for cooking, and they understood the cultivation
of the soil which was the occupation of the women and
the herding and milking of cows, the peculiar engagement of
the men. They baked their bread and brewed a kind of bitter
beer ; their manners, if primitive, were inoffensive, and they
were compassionate and hospitable towards strangers in dis-
tress. And while they were friendly and open in their bearing,
they were strongly built and not ignorant of the use of weapons.
Such was the first description given of the tribes that were
subsequently welded into the great Zulu nation of warriors.
1 Despatch of Van der Stel, 1689. 2 Ibid., 1690.
118 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Their real weakness was one common to many barbarians, the
lack of a united political organisation ; but since they had
little fear of outside enemies or invasion, they needed no more
efficient method of control.
But some years before the arrival of the English traders in
1824 a revolution had occurred among the Zulu tribes. There
Dingiswayo had been born among them a child whose later
founds the name of Dmgiswayo The Troubled One My
Nation. described his restless active mind. He was sus-
pected, probably not without cause, of a wish to usurp the
authority of one of the chiefs. The punishment for so grave
a treason against authority in almost every community is
death ; the natives of Natal were no exception. But Dingis-
wayo fled from justice, and in his wanderings among strange
people he saw strange things, the memory of which fermented
long in the thoughts of the exiled but still ambitious barbarian.
He reached in time the European settlements of South Africa,
and there was revealed to his astonished gaze the sight of
soldiers drilling with automatic discipline at the word of
command. He saw the secret of their strength, and quickly
realised its import for himself. And when at length he re-
turned to his own people, he was accompanied by a white
man, a horse, and a gun ; the compatriots of Dingiswayo,
awed by these portents of power, submitted to his rule, and
henceforth he devoted himself to drilling the tribes into
regiments. Few resisted, and none successfully resisted, the
conqueror who had found the secret of discipline and organi-
sation ; and the late exile was soon acknowledged the para-
mount chief of the natives of Natal.
After many years of triumphal war, Dingiswayo was cap-
tured by a rival chief. There are but two moves in the
game of barbaric battle, life and death ; and death was
Dingiswayo's portion. 1
1 It is believed to have taken place in 1818 ; but certainty is im-
possible.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 119
But the lessons he had taught were not forgotten. Another
chieftain's star was rising ; and the ambition and authority of
his son Tshaka 1 soon excelled that of Dingiswayo as much as
Dingiswayo had excelled his forgotten predecessors.
Tshaka's discipline was stern and harsh. He saw that the
forward rush of his warriors was slowed by the weight of their
numerous assegais, 2 and orders were given that each man was
in future to carry no more than one weapon into battle.
When the fight was over, each survivor was commanded
to produce his assegai ; if he failed to do so he was put to
death for cowardice. The system was always cruel, and often
unjust ; but it was effective. Few men in Tshaka's armies
failed to show bravery when death was the instant penalty.
Shortly after the English adventurers arrived in Natal, an
attempt was made by a native malcontent to assassinate the
Zulu king. It failed, and his wound was cured by Farewell
and Fynn, who in return received a free permission to trade
in the Zulu country. Their traffic, which was mainly in ivory,
was mutually profitable ; for ivory was a royal monopoly
under Tshaka, and the English dealers found a never-failing
demand at good prices in Europe.
But a second attempt was made by his subjects to murder
Tshaka in 1828. It succeeded ; and one of the conspirators
obtained the reward of blood. The reign of .^ ZulU8
Tshaka had been a reign of war ; Dingana, his under
assassin and his heir, declared himself a man of Dingana -
peace. The first professions of new monarchs, however, are
1 Very often spelt Chako in the old accounts, as Dingana is spelt
Dingaan, and indeed, in many other ways by various writers.
It may be added that the paternity of Tshaka, like that of many another
great man, is uncertain. Isaacs does not allow him to be the son of
Dingiswayo. I have given legitimacy the benefit of the doubt.
1 have read somewhere that' a shipwrecked European sailor on the
coast of Natal told Tshaka of the victories of Napoleon, and that his
recital fired the savage king with the love of war. It may be so.
2 The assegai was a short stabbing spear, which could either be thrown
in a concerted attack, or used with deadly effect at close quarters.
The word is said by Pettmann (Afrikanderisms) to derive from a
Portuguese form of an Arab word which the natives had adopted.
120 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
not always scrupulously observed ; and the twelve years of
Dingana's reign were among the most sanguinary that Natal
had ever known. His cruelty was condemned as excessive
even by those who remembered the savage outbursts of
Dingiswayo and Tshaka ; a casual visitor to his court observed
with horror the mutilated bodies of eleven of Dingana's wives,
and learnt that they had been put to death because they
chanced to annoy their brutal master ; and throughout Natal
which had been nearly depopulated by the wars of Din-
gana's predecessors the terrified remainder of the abori-
ginal tribes took refuge in the forests from the dreadful Zulu
warriors and their king. 1
But the fall of the Zulu empire was at hand. For centuries
Natal had been neglected by the outer world ; within the
The space of a few years it was now invaded from
invaTioifof three different directions by three different types
zuiuiand. of Europeans on three different errands.
A Christian missionary from England, one of those heroic
souls who are ready to brave danger and insult and death in
the service of their Divine Master, took up his abode at the
court of Dingana, and endeavoured without success to convert
that savage monarch to the religion of love and peace. The
teaching and the example of the evangelist were both in
vain ; he and his companions were accused of witchcraft, and
they were often in instant peril from the brutalities which
they deplored.
But these were the least effective of the European in-
vaders of Natal. In the north a large body of the Cape Dutch,
The Boers * ne forerunners of the Great Trek which is one
break the of the main dividing lines in South African his-
rer ' tory, 2 crossed the Drakensberg into Dingana's
country in 1837. Their arrival aroused the enmity of the
1 Both the wives and the refugees are vouched for in Papers Relative
to the Condition and Treatment of the Natives (House of Commons Papers,
1835).
2 For the detailed history of the Great Trek and the Boer settlement
of Natal, see the next chapter.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 121
Zulu king, a racial war followed, and much blood was shed
on either side ; but the Boer immigrants in time broke the
power of Dingana and his warriors. The city of Pieter
Maritzburg which they founded in the interior of Natal com-
memorates in its name the two chief pioneers of their success-
ful immigration, Piet Retief and Gerrit Maritz ; and if the
independence which they sought was not to be, the site of the
city was so well chosen that it remains to this day the capital
of Natal.
In 1838 the Dutch settlement at Pieter Maritzburg con-
tained no more than six huts and a number of wagons and
tents ; its British competitor on the coast, the city T]ie 3^8^
of Durban which had been founded on 23rd July Traders on
1835, and named from the Governor of Cape * e Coast<
Colony could boast of little more. Each settlement was the
centre of a petty independent community, owning allegiance
to no European state, and holding its land by a precarious
title from the native chiefs ; each wished for protection from
its motherland in Europe, the one from Holland, the other
from England.
The little British colony at Durban, which was not recog-
nised by the British Government, was the direct consequence
of the trading venture of Lieutenant King twelve years before.
He and his companions had prospered in their wild venture
among the Zulus ; they had driven a profitable trade with
Tshaka and Dingana and other native chiefs in the interior ;
they had quarrelled at times among themselves, had often
been in peril from the savages, 1 and some had lost their lives
1 Once they were in serious danger because their Hottentot servants
ravished the wife of a chief. The lady protested, her husband cursed,
the servants fled ; but the intrepid and diplomatic Briton settled the
matter with a few tactful words. '
At another time a great difficulty presented itself. Tshaka had been
assured that the white man had invented a hair oil which would cure
baldness ; and he insisted on a bottle being procured. According to
Isaacs, who is responsible for the story, none was obtainable, and the
infuriated monarch was with difficulty prevailed upon to control his
emotions and to bide his time.
122 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
from sickness or by massacre. One had tramped to Delagoa
Bay and back in search of trade ; others had been wrecked
and built themselves a boat ; and all were convinced that
the country which they had adopted was destined for British
rule.
So far as they could, they had attempted to forestall des-
tiny by ruling it themselves. A dozen men at most, they
The Anglo- had secured a cession of land from the Zulu king
Zulu at Port Natal ; there they had built themselves
huts mere windowless wattle barns, with reed
doors and thatched roofs x and a fort which was called, from
one of the members of the party, Fort Farewell. Those of
the natives who dwelt within their little territory they
governed as best they might, passing laws of their own de-
vising, and even in time establishing a formal constitution,
with a senate of twelve native members and political debates
on the local questions of the day. That Anglo-Zulu Senate
is perhaps the most amazing example that history records
of British faith in British institutions.
They were a cheery party, these English pioneers in Natal ;
and they never relaxed their hold. For years the British
Natal Government ignored them and the Cape Govern-
bj^Britain men t despised them ; and when in 1845 the whole
1845. country they had occupied and the interior were
at length annexed by the imperial authorities as a district
of the Cape of Good Hope, it was clearly understood that
that step had been taken more because the Boers in the in-
terior had proclaimed their independence than because the
British on the coast had professed their loyalty. 2
Whatever the reasons for annexation, however, the fact of
1 These huts, according to one traveller, often stank abominably.
According to another, a missionary, they were the scenes of profligacy
and drunkenness (Kay, Travels and Researches in Caffraria). But
both the stinks and the orgies were denied by the traders in Natal, and
in any case the missionary only spoke from hearsay. Nevertheless, I do
not wholly disbelieve him.
2 For details of the annexation, see bk. xxiv. ch. i.
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 123
annexation remained : and Natal henceforth advanced slowly
but fairly steadily as a British colony. Vines and wheat
were both grown in the Maritzburg district, Advance
where the only drawback to existence was the of the
occasional visit of a swarm of destructive locusts ; *
along the moist, warm coast plantations for semi-tropical
produce were soon laid out, as Englishmen with capital were
attracted by the prospects of success.
Between Cape Colony and Natal, however, was little com-
munication and less sympathy, and eleven years after the
latter had been attached to the Government at separated
Cape Town it was again separated, becoming a c r <>iony ape
Crown Colony under direct imperial control. 1856.
Small as its population was, Natal had its own commercial
and agricultural interests, which often conflicted with those
of the Cape, and it was beginning to attain an individuality
of its own ; in every such community is always seen a move
towards independence, and for the next fifty years Natal
maintained its position as a separate colony, rejecting any
proposals for reunion that were brought before it with an
emphasis that bespoke the popular spirit of the place. 2
At the time when the separation of Natal from its greater
neighbour was accomplished, the infant city of Durban, with
its harbour Port Natal, was still a small and in- Durban
significant place which hardly merited the name i* 11856 -
of town. It contained a few houses, a couple of passable
inns which were more like canteens than hotels and a
public library ; and one colonist declared that when he first
visited the town in the year 1850 he had crossed the market-
place without realising its existence or its purpose. 3 The
1 Christopher's Natal.
2 For such proposals, see bk. xxvi. ch. i. ; for the reasons that ulti-
mately overcame the objections of Natal to reunion, ch. iv. of that book.
3 See Barter, Six Months in Natal (1853) ; an article in the Cape
Monthly (1876) ; Henderson's Durban: Fifty Years' Municipal History ;
and Ingrain's Story of a South African Seaport, and Story of a South
African City.
124 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS
trade and population nevertheless grew steadily with the
advance of Natal, since the whole sea-borne trade of the
colony was necessarily in the hands of the merchants of
Durban, its one port ; by 1876 the place was quietly prosper-
ous, with many comfortable houses, and every house sur-
rounded by a garden full of fruit and glorious flowers. Life
was pleasant, and the city was not unhealthy ; its condition
in this respect, indeed, was steadily improving with better
sanitation and a purer water supply. The only troubles of
the seaport, in fact, were the ticks and mosquitoes which
swarmed everywhere ; but even these were a source of more
annoyance to the casual stranger than to the regular inhabi-
tant, accustomed and perhaps almost reconciled to the pests.
Durban was the centre for the British in Natal, Pieter
Maritzburg, or Maritzburg, as it was often called for short,
Pieter was ^ ne centre for the Dutch ; and in the inevit-
Maritz- able rivalry between the two the latter city had
the advantage of being the capital to set off against
the disadvantage of being inland. Its founders, who realised
by bitter experience the necessity of a defensible position
against native attack, had placed their town on a hillock
which was almost surrounded by the Little Bush River ; and
with a foresight not always shown by the builders of cities,
they had placed it on a slope to facilitate drainage. The
streets were laid out regularly and at right angles ; the houses
were simple whitewashed buildings, plain, unpretending, and
pleasing in appearance. Each house was surrounded, after
the usual Dutch fashion, with a verandah and a garden, in
which roses and the graceful weeping willow-tree were con-
spicuous ; and the air of tranquil repose, which seems insepar-
able from Dutch centres in South Africa, enveloped the little
town, whose pleasant hours were seldom troubled save by the
occasional alarm of a native rising. 1
1 One writer remarks that Marit/burg was full of social cliques. But
what little town is not?
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 125
Harrismith, named after the general whose Spanish wife
also is commemorated in Ladysmith was the only other
place considered worth mention in the colony or along its
borders in 1850 ; but Harrismith owed such celebrity as it had
to its name rather than its size. In those early days, in fact,
its whole inventory was no more than one stone building, one
wall, and one watercourse. 1
Northwards from Natal along the Indian Ocean lay the
old possessions of the Portuguese, in Mozambique and Sofala,
now stagnant and decaying from their former The British
power. Both southern and northern limits of this Deiaeoa*
Latin territory were doubtful and obscure ; the Bay, 1823.
old arrogant claim to the whole of Africa had perforce been
long abandoned, but at Mozambique were still Portuguese
soldiers and officials ; inland along the great Zambesi River
were Portuguese settlements or their remains, decaying
churches and forgotten trading stations, 2 and a few, a very
few, effective occupants on Portugal's behalf. The coast
was little known, the interior of this country was hardly
known at all ; and in 1822 the British Government, anxious
for some knowledge of the place, despatched an expedition
to chart the shores of eastern Africa.
Captain Owen was chosen for the work, and he performed
his task with the usual accurate efficiency of a British naval
officer. The whole of the following year was given to the
charting of the eastern coasts of Africa, and his instructions
were afterwards extended to Madagascar and the lesser islands
of the Indian Ocean. Many strange adventures were en-
countered, 8 but the geographical mission had an unexpected
1 By 1900, however, Harrismith could boast a race-course and a golf-
links, and it struck a traveller at that time as a little Scots community
(Nevinson's Ladysmith).
2 See bk. xxiv. chs. ii. and vi.
* It is ' strange,' remarks the innocent compiler of Owen's Voyage*
(1833) ' how soon travellers became reconciled to the lack of (female)
virtue.' Perhaps not so very strange, seeing that they were sailors.
This anxious moralist remarked, however, that many of the ladies
126 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
sequel. A native chief of the Delagoa Bay country, one
Mazeta, declared himself desirous of British rule, and on
8th March 1823 a formal treaty was drawn up by which
his possessions were declared a protectorate of England ;
a little later a second chief, Makasuni, professed the same
desire. He had in fact already sent a message to the British
at Bombay to that effect, and when no answer was returned,
he opened out his mind to Owen, who granted his request with
some demur. A second treaty was now drawn up, dated
23rd August 1823, between the British and Makasane,
called king of Maputa, and the Portuguese authorities
at Mozambique were at once acquainted of the facts by
Captain Owen.
He had little reason to anticipate a protest, for although
he knew from Makasane that the Portuguese had represented
the English as ' a miserable people, who only lived in ships
by robbing countries too weak to oppose them/ he had been
told by the Mozambique officials that they had no authority
over Delagoa Bay or its inhabitants, and that seemed in fact
the case. The miserable and unhealthy settlement of Lourengo
Marques, 1 named from an old Portuguese explorer, was
practically abandoned and deserted ; there were no signs of
Portuguese control or suzerainty, and of effective occupation
none.
Nevertheless the Portuguese protested strongly against
these treaties as an invasion of their rights, and now declared
that the native chiefs were under their control. The British
on this coast ' were remarkable for their constancy, except those of high
rank, who, as in other countries, claimed a greater licence.' The italics
are mine ; but not the innuendo.
In Madagascar the British sailors were so popular that hundreds of
the women would have come on board when the vessel sailed. But duty
triumphed over love.
1 Lourenco Marques had been founded in the seventeenth century,
and abandoned shortly afterwards on account of its unhealthiness. The
Dutch settled therein 1721, and abandoned the place for the same
reason as the Portuguese. In 1776 an Austrian expedition under
command of an Englishman erected a fort in the bay, but this also failed,
TO THE CAPE AND BEYOND 127
Government did nothing to enforce its claim, and the whole
question lapsed indefinitely.
Some forty years went by ; and in 1861 the British claim
to the Elephant and Inyack Islands was suddenly revived.
A British cruiser, the Narcissus, hoisted the Union Jack,
but Portugal again protested, and the matter lapsed once
more for several years. In 1870 the British Government
might have purchased the whole of Delagoa Bay for
a small consideration, the Portuguese Government at
Lisbon being then hard pressed for money ; but the
Colonial Secretary, Lord Kimberley, missed his opportunity.
He preferred to rely on arbitration as to the old British
claim ; the matter was referred to the French President,
MacMahon, and in 1875 he gave his decision wholly in favour
of Portugal.
A grave mistake had been committed. The British claim
was obviously a poor one, since it had never been enforced,
and the Portuguese consistently opposed it ; a fair bargain
would have settled the matter once for all. But the oppor-
tunity had passed ; and although the Portuguese now gave
the British the first option of purchasing the whole of Delagoa
Bay should they wish to sell at any time, 1 the occasion did
not again arise.
At the close of the nineteenth century, indeed, the greatest
English imperialist in South Africa offered to buy the terri-
tory himself from the Portuguese, in view of the expansion
of British sovereignty over the interior ; but while the Portu-
guese Government was willing and even anxious to part with
its old possessions in exchange for cash, foreign pressure and
1 Treaty of 17th June 1875; extended in 1891 to the whole Portu-
guese coast.
Details of these treaties and the whole controversy will be found in the
official Blue Book (C. 1361) Delagoa Bay : Correspondence Respecting the
Claim* of Her Majesty 1 s Government, 1875 ; Hertslet, The Map of Africa
by Treaty ; Jessett, The Key to South Africa. Owen's Voyages are
essential, and Maugham, Portuguese East Africa, gives a general account
of the country, but his history is rather shaky.
128 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
the fear of popular resentment in Lisbon forbade the bargain. 1
Even Cecil Rhodes could not repair the opportunity which
Kimberley had missed, and south-eastern Africa, like Panama
and Java, the Congo and Hawaii, took its place as one of
the lost opportunities of the British Empire.
1 See Michell's Life of Cecil Rhodes. The price offered by Rhodes
in 1893 is said by Le Sueur, his private secretary, to have been
1,300,000.
BOOK XXIV
TOWARDS THE NORTH: 1833-1900
CHAPTEK I
THE GREAT TREK : 1833-52 l
ABOUND and along the shores of southern Africa the tide of
British colonisation had swept steadily eastwards through
Port Elizabeth and Durban during the thirty years after the
conquest at Table Bay. But active as they were beside the
seaboard, few settlers of English blood had yet appeared in
the interior of Cape Colony. There solitary old Dutch
homesteads still slumbered undisturbed in the summer sun-
shine on the veldt ; the Dutch-colonial manners inherited
from the past were still the fashion of the present, un-
touched by intrusive strangers of another tongue. An occa-
sional hunter or trader of English speech came and went,
was kindly entertained, and told his news of politics and the
outside world ; but these were rare and transient visitors,
not unwelcome indeed, but men whose stay left the slow
stream of local life still running in the same even channel
through the same placid country to the same peace! ill end.
1 The materials for this chapter are in many scattered sources. A
fair statement of the Boer grievances is in Cloete, Five Lectures on the
Emigration of the, Dutch Farmers. (1856), an excellent study; F. Lion
Cachet, De Worstelxtrijd der Transvalers (1882, Amsterdam), is fuller but
not more valuable. A Journal of a Voortrckker appears in the Cape
Monthly of 1876. Bird's Annals of Natal and Gibson's Story of the
Zulus are again useful ; also the Memoirs of Paul Krw/er. Voigt, Fifty
Years of the History of the Republic in South Africa (1899), is extremely
anti-British, but contains much information, although, like most partisan
studies, it also suppresses a great deal. But it was written at a time
when feeling was high. Hofstede, Geschiedenis van den Oranje Vrijttaat.
VOL. VI. I
130 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Nor was there any evident reason why a change should
come. Emigration from Britain was regular and unceasing ;
but with the wide spaces of Canada and Australia waiting to
be filled there was no popular movement in favour of colon-
ising South Africa. 1 And the Imperial Government, after its
one settlement at Algoa Bay, seemed to have exhausted its
energies in that episode, and to be more desirous of limiting
its possessions than enlarging them. 2 The Dutch-colonial
farmer, too, was conservative in mind, lethargic in body, and
prosperous in estate ; his very house, solid and beautiful,
built to outlast the passing of many generations, proclaimed
his character, and the stability and tenacity of his tenure of
the soil. He had no wish to move from his own acres or his
own home ; the British had clearly no wish to take either
from him.
Yet there came a day when the Dutch farmer renounced his
home and his possessions, and marched out silently into the
wilderness ahead ; and his renunciation is one of the great
decisive facts in South African history as decisive as the re-
jection of the Olive Branch in the Imperial Civil War 3 or
the rejection of convict labour by the antipodean colonists 4
in the history of Australia.
From time to time since the first rude settlement at Cape
Town in 1651 the Dutch colonists in South Africa had moved
up from Table Bay through the valleys and drifts and passes
into the interior. Sometimes it was an exploring expedition
with no thought save of discovery and return that made its
way inland, and came back in due course with good or ill
report or did not come back. Sometimes it was a farmer
1 A large number of pamphlets was published between 1815 and 1850
advocating emigration to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. There
were very few advocating British settlement in South Africa, but I have
noticed several references in the ephemeral literature of the times describ-
ing the country as the Cinderella of the Empire.
2 Apart from the instances given in this volume, see vol. iv. bk. xvi.
ch. ii.
3 Vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. iv. 4 Vol. v. bk. xviii. ch. i.
TOWAKDS THE NORTH 131
intent on establishing himself on new land ; he succeeded or
failed, according to his ability or his location, and if he suc-
ceeded in building his house and raising his produce, in due
time his sons perhaps went further afield and followed his
example. Such are the plain and simple annals of an infant
colony, a turning of the wilderness into field and farm ; it
was the natural movement of a growing population that
needed room across an invisible frontier.
But in all this there was no renunciation of the fruits of
industry akeady won. The Great Trek which began in the
year 1835 was a sheer renunciation for a definite end.
The position of the older white race in South Africa had
been in some respects unfortunate since the conquest of
Cape Colony by the British. The Dutch as a Di8content
people are peculiarly tenacious of their own way of the cape
of life ; they are peculiarly jealous of the intrusion Dutch -
of foreigners in their affairs. The many campaigns in which
they had defended Holland against the aggression of great
European monarchs had shown how ready they were to fight
for their liberties ; * and the characteristics which distinguished
the Hollander at home had not changed during two centuries
of isolation in South Africa.
Yet Cape Colony was no longer a Dutch possession, nor
did it seem probable that it would ever revert to Holland.
For Britain had now become the leading maritime, commercial,
and colonising power of the world ; while the Netherlands
had fallen to the third rank among European states. And
Britain showed no sign of decadence, but was becoming
stronger every year at home and abroad. Holland, on the
other hand, only retained her. independence by a treaty whose
maintenance was guaranteed by her more powerful neighbours. 2
1 Vol. i. bk. iii. ch. iii.
3 Many of the Boers, however, whose knowledge of European politics
was more ancestral than actual, still thought that Holland was the most
powerful nation in Europe. The mistake caused them to indulge hopes
of Dutch intervention in South Africa that were quite unfounded.
132 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The Dutch in South Africa were therefore permanently
divorced from their mother country, but they did not take
kindly to their new rulers. They could not indeed dislodge
the British, who for their part showed no sign whatever of
withdrawing from Cape Colony ; but equally little could
they bear to live with them. It is true that the two
people were in many things alike ; but yet they could
never agree. In those small social matters where sneers
and criticism sting more than differences on graver issues
the Boers had often been sneered at and criticised for
dull ignorant peasants by the British. 1 Those sneers may
have been justified, and that criticism may have been
deserved ; but neither was very wise. And both left
irritation and heart-burnings between old Boer and new
Briton which did not diminish as the years went on ;
on the contrary, both were complicated by graver issues
in politics and religion, until the tension increased to
breaking-point, and a large number of the Boers decided to
quit a country that was too evidently no longer their own
peculiar possession.
Some of the reasons which led to this decision were clearly
set out in a manifesto issued on 22nd January 1837 by Piet
Causes of Retief , one of the more prominent leaders of the
the Great Great Trek movement. 2
The first cause cited was the prevalence of
vagrancy in the colony- -a direct consequence of the emanci-
pation of the slaves.
The second complaint referred to the severe losses which the
Boers had been forced to suffer by the emancipation of the
1 The Letters of Lady Anne Barnard, as \voll as other contemporary
chronicles mentioned in bk. xxiii. ch. iv., furnish sufficient instances of
this. The arrogant Briton habitually treats the foreigner as an inferior ;
but when in addition he proceeds to preach the equality of white and
black as he did in South Africa he can hardly be surprised if he
becomes unpopular.
2 The manifesto was published n the Grahamxtown Journal, 2nd Feb-
ruary 1837.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 133
slaves, and the vexatious laws which had been enacted
concerning them. 1
The third paragraph instances the continual system of
plunder which the colonists had endured from the Kafirs
and other coloured people.
The fourth clause mentions the unjustifiable odium cast
upon the Boers by ' interested and dishonest persons under
the cloak of religion/ a reference to the English missionaries
in South Africa and their supporters in England.
The manifesto then declares the intentions of the Boers.
' We are resolved/ it proceeds, ' wherever we go, to uphold
the first principles of liberty ; but while we shall take care
that no one shall he held in a state of slavery, it is our deter-
mination to maintain such regulations as may suppress crime,
and preserve proper relations between master and servant.
We solemnly declare that we leave this colony with a desire
to enjoy a quieter life than we have hitherto had. We shall
not molest any people, nor deprive them of the smallest
property ; but, if attacked, we shall consider ourselves fully
justified in defending our persons and effects, to the utmost of
our ability, against every enemy. We purpose, in the course
of our journey, and on arriving in the country in which we
shall permanently reside, to make known to the native tribes
our intentions, and our desire to live at peace and in friendly
intercourse with them.
' And we quit this colony under the full assurance that the
English Government has nothing more to require of us, and
will allow us to govern ourselves without interference in
future/
Each of the causes alleged in this manifesto, which was
1 Voigt denies that emancipation was a cause of the Great Trek. Un-
fortunately for his contention, Piet Retief was one of the Trek leaders.
It may be mentioned that Piet Retief came from the eastern province
of Cape Colony, and that when the Algoa Bay settlement was formed he
was noted for his kindness to the distressed English colonists. He was
at one time considered the most opulent farmer in or around Grahams-
town.
134 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
not without dignity or force, could have been justified by
facts. It was true that vagrancy had increased since emanci-
pation ; it was equally true that the farmers had lost heavily
by the freeing of their slaves. It was likewise true that the
British Government had neglected the defence of the frontier
against the Kafirs, 1 and that it had accepted what may be
called the missionary standpoint in preference to that of
colonial opinion as a whole.
There was, in fact, a fundamental conflict of ideals between
Boer and Briton in this matter. The Boer, arguing from
past experience and present obvious fact, wished to treat the
native as an inferior, to compel his labour and enjoy the fruit
of it. Many of the British, particularly among those who
were similarly circumstanced, agreed with the Boer ; 2 but
the British Government, and the missionaries who had now
so great an influence with the British Government, wished
to treat the black man as an equal, and to leave him free to
sell his labour when and where he would. Between two
such opposed attitudes towards life could be nothing save
opposition.
The Boers had in fact to adopt the British Government's
view or to go. And they went.
But there were other reasons besides those advanced in
the manifesto, which decided some of those who took part
in the Great Trek. A number joined the movement because
of private quarrels at home ; 3 some who had not actually
suffered in pocket or person joined because they wanted more
land or better land, some because they desired adventure in the
wild. Some left for the simple but sufficient reason that they
1 This was admitted in the private official correspondence. See
Further Papers relating to the Administration of the Cape (House of
Commons, 21st May 1827) in which Somerset warns the Imperial Govern-
ment of the danger. And there are other examples.
2 In the West Indies, for example, where the British planters hated
the missionaries and the Imperial Government which enforced emancipa-
tion at least as much as the Cape Dutch (see vol. iv. bk. xii. ch. ii.).
3 Cloete's Five Lectures.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 135
objected to pay taxes ; they would have objected as strongly
had the government been Dutch instead of British. Others
thought and they were not much mistaken in their con-
clusion that despite the repudiation of slavery in the mani-
festo, they would be able to introduce slavery in the interior,
and every man would be his own master where organised
government did not exist.
And with all alike the evil memory of Slachter's Nek, that
miserable episode which had come to stand as the typical
quarrel between Boer and Briton, was cherished as a silent
justification of their action. 1
For these various reasons a large number of the Boers
determined to quit Cape Colony. A few families, who were
afterwards known as the Voortrekkers, the ad- The Trek
vance guard of the movement, left their homes begins,
in 1833. Others followed ; and early in the year 1833 ' 5 -
1835 the British Government, which was not as yet aware of
the intentions of its Dutch subjects, observed with some
anxiety that an unusual number of farms throughout the
colony was in the market. There was no obvious cause, such
as drought, a bad harvest, a sheep disease, or cattle-sickness,
to account for these forced sales. And it was noticed, too,
that the owners were selling at a far lower price than the
actual values warranted. Yet the Boer was not usually
ignorant of the value, nor superior to the love of money.
Clearly then some strong motive-power was forcing these
men, whose usual round of life was sluggish and almost stag-
nant, to take this action. A Boer whose farm had passed from
father to son through three or four generations would not
lightly abandon his property and the ties of a lifetime at a
heavy loss to himself.
1 A Bezuidenhout, a cousin of the central figure in the Slachter's Nek
affair, was one of the trekkers into Natal. Probably the family left that
country when the British Government annexed it ; at least, a Bezuiden-
hout, a grandson of the rebel, was one of the chief opponents of British
rule in the Transvaal in 1877. A sturdy breed.
136 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS
The Government naturally attempted to stop a movement
which must seriously weaken the colony if long persisted in.
The clergy and the magistrates were used as official mouth-
pieces, and it was hinted broadcast that the sale of farms and
the desertion of the colony by its inhabitants was against the
law.
But that question was speedily forced to the issue. Lieu-
tenant-Governor Stockenstrom was asked by some of those
who contemplated leaving the province of Uitenhage whether
their action was illegal ; and when thus put to the test he
answered, ' It is but candid to state at once that I am not
aware of any law which prevents any of His Majesty's sub-
jects from leaving his dominions and settling in another
country ; and such a law, if it did exist, would be tyrannical
and oppressive.' From that time the movement progressed
without a break, and the Government was powerless to stop it.
The remedy of wholesale emigration was simple and heroic,
and for many years it was successful. The Boers chose to
abandon their homes rather than abandon their methods of
life ; new homes may be built in new lands, but old methods
and cherished traditions cannot be dropped and resumed at
will.
And the Boer was well fitted to be a pioneer. The con-
ditions of his life had made him hardy of physique, primitive
in his wants and habits, and capable of enduring privation
and fatigue ; his religion also comforted him with the belief
that he belonged to the chosen people of God, and that,
like the Israelites of old in the desert of Sinai, the peculiar
protection of heaven would guide his footsteps towards the
promised land. It was well for him that his faith was so
steadfast, for it helped him to secure the blessings he desired,
while he thanked the unseen powers for bestowing the very
gifts which his own perseverance had won. . . .
But whither should they go to escape British rule ? South-
wards was the sea and no more land ; and the Boer was a
' TOWARDS THE NORTH 137
peasant-farmer who had lost the seafaring habits of his Dutch
ancestors. Yet north-westwards, so far as it was known, were
vast deserts where was neither feed for cattle
f. ,1 i Whither?
nor ram for crops : the sand and stunted vege-
tation of the Griqua district was useless ; and further west,
where the great Orange River flowed towards the Atlantic, was
Namaqualand, a land of deathful sleep and desolation. 1
Here was no home for the pastoralist ; but in the north-
east again the land was owned by savage tribes ; in the
south-east the barbarians were again strong. The TowardB
Boer could not tame the desert ; but his an- North and
cestors had tamed the savages of the Cape, and Eas '
he might tame the savages of the northern and eastern up-
lands.
And thither they set out, in small parties or in large single
families with old household treasures stored in a roomy
Cape wagon, the oxen of the farm drawing the vehicle in
long teams across the veldt, or being driven on ahead ; great
companies of twenty or thirty or more families banded to-
gether with their flocks and herds under a general leader
all alike seeking a new land for their inheritance, and deserting
old homes of many memories that had seen two or three
generations born and die within their quiet walls and pass out
silently at last to the little family grave without on the bare
hillside. . . .
There were hundreds of deserted houses and neglected
farms reverting to wilderness in Cape Colony, especially in
the Eastern Province of the colony, in these years. For this
1 Namaqualand is rather happily described by W. C. Scully, a South
African poet, as
' A land of deathful sleep, where fitful dreams
Of hurrying spring scarce wake swift fading flowers ' j
land on whose neglected shores
' The waves for ever roar a song of death,
The shore they roar to is for ever dead.'
138
became in time a wholesale exodus, as of the Puritans from
England two centuries before, to a new land.
Day after day the pilgrims travelled slowly onwards,
halting nightly to rest the oxen and their drivers, pausing
from time to time while on the march to inspect new country,
to water the cattle where water could be found, or to shoot
big game for sport or sustenance.
The removal of arms and ammunition from the colony had
been forbidden by the British Government ; but every party
of Boers on trek carried their arms and ammunition never-
theless. Secrecy was necessary for safety ; the guns and
powder were therefore buried every day, unearthed and sent
on ahead by night. 1
The march was slow, but it progressed with a certain inevit-
able purpose and dogged persistence beyond the border to the
north and east, day after day, week after week, month after
month.
A slow monotony at first encompassed the journey as the
emigrants passed through the settled districts of the Cape
Hardships Colony. But when they pressed forward beyond
and the zone that the white man had conquered, many
Dangers. an ^ terrible were the hardships and dangers they
encountered as they marched through the wilderness. A
few of the poorer parties had practically no clothes, and had
to bear the heat by day and the intense cold by night ; many
of these perished from privation, and their bodies were left in
roughly-dug graves where they died before the sorrow-
stricken relatives again pushed forward. Fever, accident,
and disease likewise claimed their victims ; and medical re-
sources, always primitive among the Boers, were few indeed
so far afield. At times, too, the wanderers were short of food
or water. Antelopes and the wild game of the country were
shot when occasion allowed, but many came near starvation
in barren lands. Sometimes also the country was on fire, set
1 Journal of a Voortrekker, Cape Monthly, 1876.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 139
alight by the natives or ignited by the rays of the sun ; and
to other anxieties were then added fears lest the children
and the cattle, the most precious assets of the trekkers,
should be burnt.
Often the women were far gone in pregnancy at the begin-
ning of the journey, and their children were born in the
wagons as they jolted over the veldt ; but at times the way
was too rough even for the solidly-built wagon to carry its
owners, and expectant mothers and little children had to
tramp for hours by its side over the rolling, uneven ridges of
the uplands.
But the worst danger of all came from hostile native tribes,
who resented the invasion of their territories by strangers. A
surprise attack might overwhelm a family or a caravan ; only
an upturned wagon and a mutilated pile of corpses would mark
the silent tragedy and warn those who followed on that path
of perils on the morrow.
Or the natives might dissemble, welcoming the visitors
with food and presents, a treaty of peace and deceptive pro-
fessions of amity, to lull the trekkers' fears. And the same
night or the next the drowsy travellers would be awakened by
the howl of savages and a storm of assegais, and know that the
hour for their last sleep had come upon them. Everyman now
sprang to the defence, and even women took a gun or served
out ammunition ; shots would cross the flight of spears, and
perhaps a stern fight till dawn might see the white man victor.
But not always. In one terrible case 33 men, 95 women,
and 200 children, members of a single Boer party, were killed
in an encounter with savages ; * nor was the loss without
parallel. And many a catastrophe on a smaller scale wiped
out a whole family or a group of families altogether ; and no
certain knowledge of their fate would ever reach their friends
or relatives elsewhere. Only a long silence would at length
turn sickening suspicion into the certainty of disaster. . .
1 Journal in Cape Monthly, 1876.
140 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
And even a victory was sometimes worth but little, for the
numbers of the enemy might be enormous by comparison
with the invaders ; they knew the country, too, and they
could choose their own time for attack ; while at each en-
counter the trekkers were almost certain to lose some of their
diminishing band.
One party of thirty-one families had left Cape Colony in
1833, before the main body of the trekkers, for Delagoa Bay.
Death at They had heard good reports of the place ; they
Delagoa journeyed long through the wilderness, and sur-
vived the peril of native war ; but when at last they
arrived at their destination, weak and exhausted, the promised
land proved anything but a land of promise. They were
given food, clothes, and medicines by the compassionate
Portuguese ; but the tse-tse fly destroyed their cattle, the
fever that always haunts that fatal coast now attacked the
enfeebled settlers themselves. The children, who had sur-
vived the hardships of a thousand miles' march through the
untamed wilds, dropped daily one by one ; the toil-spent
mothers followed their infants to the grave. The men died
last of all ; but by the time disease had spent its energies
only two members of all that company were left alive.
That experiment was not repeated. But the following year
a prospecting party reported the advantages of Natal, as a
The fertile land where several districts were altogether
in Natai ent destitute of native population ; and forthwith
1837. large companies of emigrants set out for the south-
east. The Boers did not know that Natal had been de-
populated by the ambitious wars of its Zulu masters, nor
did they suspect any possible danger for themselves ; all
unsuspiciously they crossed the Drakensberg, and journeyed
down the ridges that separate the uplands of the interior
from the land they sought.
In October 1837 Piet Retief, the author of the trekkers'
manifesto and one of the leaders of this band of emigrants,
TOWARDS THE NORTH 141
arrived at the Bay of Natal ; in the following month he
applied to the bloodthirsty native sovereign, Dingana, for
permission to settle in his country.
Now Dingana hesitated awhile before he gave permission ;
and to gain time he accused the Boers of stealing some of his
cattle. They had not done so ; but they knew the culprit,
a native chief with whom they had had dealings. From him
they recovered Dingana's cattle ; and Dingana thereupon
ceded a large district to the Boers.
The immigrants appear to have thought that the whole of
the negotiations were a mere formality ; for before the cession
was finally agreed upon in 1838, and while the treaty of peace
was still delayed, a thousand or more Boer wagons, each
containing a Boer family and its possessions, had crossed
the Drakensberg and jolted down the rough descent into
Natal.
The formidable character of this invasion startled and
displeased the savage king ; but as yet he gave no sign of
fear. On the contrary, he dissembled, and so well did he
conceal his aims that the Boers had no suspicion of the
treachery ahead.
Piet Retief and several others were now bidden to a feast by
Dingana, to celebrate the treaty between the two peoples.
They went, not knowing that their doom was m assacre (i
already decided ; but at the beginning all seemed by the
well. One warning, indeed, they received. There Zulus -
was an English missionary whose perilous and difficult errand
it was to convert the Zulu tribes to Christianity. Living at
the court of Dingana, he had heard something of the intended
massacre, and he warned -the unsuspecting Boers against
treachery. And they disregarded the warning.
It was not long before they discovered their mistake too
late. After a short time spent in compliments, the Zulu
warriors were ordered to dance ; and suddenly the fatal
surprise was sprung on the still unsuspecting guests. Din-
142 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
gana's face changed from a deceptive smile to severity ; aud
quickly he gave the order, ' Seize them.' There was no
escape for the wretched Boers ; they were caught in a trap
by the crafty enemy, and the penalty of the mistake was
death. Most were overpowered at once ; some attempted
flight, but the pursuit was hot, and the Zulus knew the ground
before them. One miserable fugitive ran fifteen miles with-
out a halt before his enemies came up with him ; but at the
last he too was overtaken and slain. Only one of all that
company survived to give warning to the distant trekkers of
their danger ; and one man could do little to warn the immi-
grants of the work ahead.
For the Boers had by now scattered themselves over the
country, each family isolating itself from its neighbour after
the manner of that space-loving people ; and they were
already busied with the building of their houses, the tilling
of the land, and the planting of their farms. They knew
nothing of the murder of their comrades ; like them, they
had no suspicion of any danger, and therefore no means of
defending themselves against the foe.
Suddenly and without warning the storm of savagery broke
upon them. One after another the scattered families were
attacked, their cattle stolen, their farms or wagons fired.
A dozen Zulus would surround the farmer as he worked,
and in a few moments his life bled out under a shower of
assegais. Then the dependents would be destroyed preg-
nant mothers, little children, the babe at the breast all would
perish, for the Zulu knew no mercy, and when he killed he
slaughtered wholesale.
A smoking heap of ruins and a battered mass of dead were
all that was left for friends to see when they rode over to
hear the petty news of crops and pasture, the incidental
details of pioneering settlement in a new land. Sometimes
the skulls were split, the remains mutilated and unrecog-
nisable ; often the scavengers of heaven had been at work
TOWARDS THE NORTH 143
upon the nameless horror left by man, and the bones were
already picked clean by the birds of the air. . . .
At times, but very rarely, one or two survived by chance.
Once upon a heap of corpses two children were found ; these
alone were living of those that had been attacked, and even
these were nearly dead. When their quivering, wounded
bodies were examined, it was found that one, Johanna ver
der Merwe, had been stabbed nineteen times by assegais ;
the other, Catharina Margaretha Prinslo, was wounded in
twenty-one places. By some miracle they had escaped vital
injury, but all their relatives were slain.
Pitiful memories of these disasters yet haunt the map of
Natal, like ghosts of the past whose horror none can banish.
Such are the names of Moord Spruit (the River of Murder),
and Weenen (the place of weeping), where men fought and
died in a fight that lasted three full days, and women spilt
their tears in vain. The sight at this latter place, said one
who took part in the struggle, was unbearable. Another told
in later years how he was wakened that night from his sleep
by the barking of dogs and the whistle of assegais through
the darkness ; as he ran to get his gun he heard an old man
groan ' God ' in sudden anguish. The voice came from
his father, and the choking tone in which the old man moaned
told the son that he was choked with blood. He had been
struck in the gullet, and so died ; the son himself had four
assegais in his body, and only escaped by hiding among the
cattle. In one wagon after that encounter fifty were found
dead, and the blood was flowing out of every joint of the
wagon into the soaking ground.
At first the Boers were . quite defenceless against such
attack. But as the news of the disasters spread they or-
ganised themselves to resist ; permanent ties of interest and
colour prevailed over temporary enmities, an alliance was
made with the English settlers at Port Natal, and the united
Europeans advanced against the natives. In the first en-
'
144 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
counter, at Italena, the assegai was equal to the gun ; the
advantage of the day rested with the Zulus, but their loss
was heavy. But that was Dingana's last triumph.
Some of the immigrants now left the fatal country, crossing
the Drakensberg again on the way to unknown perils in the
north for few returned to their old homes in Cape Colony
but others remained to fight the mastery of Natal with the
Zulus, and these were joined by newcomers who were not yet
daunted by the terrors of a savage war. If the settlers in
Natal lost Hendrik Potgieter, one of the great trek leaders,
they gained Andries Pretorius, who led them against the
Zulus, and whose name and fame were yet to live in another
country, in the capital city of Pretoria further to the north.
But the condition of the Boers in Natal was now desperate.
Unable to tend their crops through stress of war, there was
Retribu- a famine in the land ; aid was implored from the
tion - Cape, sympathy was evoked, and a general sub-
scription relieved the immediate necessities of the trekkers.
But security from the natives had yet to be won, revenge
had yet to be sated, blood had still to wipe out blood. And
all the efforts of the Europeans were now directed to a con-
centrated attack upon the Zulus.
After a period of preparation the foes came face to face.
And before the great battle that was to decide the mastery
The Blood of Natal was fought the Boers, like the Israelites
Battle ^ ^' *k s l emn oa th ' to the Lord their God
1838. that if He was with them and gave the enemy into
their hands they would consecrate to the Lord the day in
each year and keep it holy as a Sabbath Day/ It was the
16th December 1838 on which this oath was taken ; and the
vow was not forgotten.
Thirty-six regiments of Zulus, nine or ten thousand men in
battle array, and under the strict discipline which Dingis-
wayo and Tshaka had introduced into the native ranks
this was the formidable force that threw itself upon the B^ers
TOWARDS THE NORTH 145
that day. But the Boers had posted themselves strongly
in laager, their wagons fastened together, and with hides of
oxen stretched across the wheels. For two hours the Zulus
attacked and the Boers repelled a deadly fire ; and then
Andries Pretorius showed his ability as a leader. The solid
wall of wagons opened, the Boers sallied out on horseback,
and thj massed ranks of the Zulus were caught between two
fires, the guns of the camp and the mounted men. It was
a daring move, and it won the day ; for the Zulus dropped
thick and fast under the deadly aim of the enemy, and soon
hundreds of them ' lay on the ground/ in the words of one
who fought there, ' like a fine crop of pumpkins/
Some escaped for a time, but these, too, were doomed.
For they dived into the river near by, floating under water
' with their noses out like hippopotami/ And as they
floated the Boers stood beside the banks and shot them one
by one, so that the waters of the stream turned red, and it
and the battle were henceforth called the Blood River in
memory of that terrible but decisive day.
Two of the brothers of Dingana were slain in the fight ;
Dingana himself had fled. But in his camp the pursuing
Boers found the bleached bare bones of Piet Retief and
his comrades who had been massacred. Their skulls were
smashed, they were only recognised by some tattered shreds
of clothing which hung on the remains, and the ghastly frag-
ments were reverently collected together and given Christian
burial before the avenging host pushed forward on the track
of the Zulu king.
But now another disaster had nearly wiped out the fruits
of victory. For the Boers were led forward by a decoy, and
suddenly they found themselves in a trap similar to that which
had caught Piet Retief. Only by rushing forward, swim-
ming the river, and riding back to camp by a circuitous route
of nearly forty miles did they escape ; even then five of their
number were killed in the flight.
VOL. VI. K
146 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
But Dingana had been permanently weakened by the
battle of the Blood River ; his day of power was near an
end. A rival now aspired to hold the proud
Power position of great chief ; civil war broke out soon
afterwards. The Boers found it good policy to
assist the rebels, and on 29th January 1840 a great battle was
fought between the two native factions, in which Dingana
was defeated.
Captured by his opponent, he had now to submit to some
of the torments he had so long inflicted on others. On the
first day of his confinement he was pricked with assegais
from head to foot. On the second he was bitten by dogs.
On the third he was told to look his last upon the sun ; his
eyes were now bored out. The wretched man, who had
been deprived of food by his conquerors since his defeat, was
now nearly dead ; and on the evening of that day he died. 1
The civil war and the defeat of Dingana broke the power
of the Zulu nation for twenty years. Not until the dreadful
name of Cetewayo again rang through the land did the power
of that warrior people revive ; 2 but by that time the whites,
both Boers and British, had too firm a hold on Natal to be
dislodged.
But news of these troubles reached Cape Town ; and the
British Government, which had shown not the least anxiety
conflict to assume responsibility for Natal when its own
with the people had gone thither fourteen years before, 3
British in . J
Natal, at once decided that active intervention was
1838-43. necessary now that another body of men, whose
only anxiety was to be quit of Britain and British rule, had
1 The Boers reached the field too late to take part in this battle, and
they had no share in the torture of Dingana's last hours.
There were other stories current as to the conduct of the trekkers in
Natal, and an old settler told an English missionary that he had heard a
very different tale from that generally received (Digest of S. P. G.
Records). Possibly ; but either he forgot proofs and details, or it was too
much even for the missionary to swallow.
2 See bk. xxvi. oh. i. :i See the previous chapter.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 147
settled in the country. It is true that the Boers were
British subjects and that British subjects cannot repudiate
their allegiance at will ; but the action of the Government
was hardly calculated to inspire those recalcitrant subjects
with more goodwill towards England in Natal than in Cape
Colony.
In any event the Boers in the interior of Natal ignored the
British troops when they arrived upon the coast in December
1837. A little more than a year later the soldiers were with-
drawn, after a treaty had been concluded with the Zulus
which bound the latter to return the cattle they had stolen
and not to pass over the Tugela River. The treaty was not
worth the ink with which it was written, and its provisions
were broken as soon as the troops embarked ; but the next
intervention of the British Government in the affairs of Natal
was not to punish the Zulus for broken faith, but to remon-
strate with the Boers for their dealings with the natives.
It happened that the Boers had been troubled by thefts of
their cattle. The miserable Bushmen, of whom there was
still a wretched remnant left in Natal, were the culprits ;
and old experience in Cape Colony had taught the trekkers
a manner of dealing with that people. They shot the adults,
they recovered their stolen cattle, and the children of the
Bushmen they took as servants or slaves.
It was on behalf of the Bushmen that the British Govern-
ment intervened in 1842. The Boers declared that they were
now a free and independent republic, the British .^ Brltlsb
declared that they were still subjects of the prevail,
Empire ; a hasty word in the dispute precipitated 1843 '
a fight on 23rd May, in which the English captain who had
come to enforce his authority lost seventeen men killed and
thirty-one wounded, and in the end found himself unex-
pectedly besieged. More troops were sent in due course from
Cape Colony ; another skirmish followed. It became clear
that the authorities at Cape Town were in earnest, and by the
148 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
time that the British Commissioner arrived on 5th June 1843
the Boer trekkers into Natal had once more submitted under
protest to British rule. 1 Two years later the whole country
was annexed by the British Government, and proclaimed a
part of Cape Colony,
Such were the fortunes of those emigrants from Cape Colony
who crossed the Drakensberg into Natal. It was their pur-
pose to escape from British rule, and British rule pursued
them.
But not all the trekkers crossed the Drakensberg ; not all
of those who crossed it remained in Natal. Some parties
The made their way northwards into the unknown
Trek hWard interior, and here at least it seemed they might
1833-40. be safe from British rule ; for on the far side of
the Orange River no Europeans save an English missionary
here and there had built their homes, 2 and few Europeans
hardly even an occasional hunter or explorer had ever
reached so far. Along the Orange River itself and in the
islands that strewed its course were banditti and bastaards,
the scum of the Cape and its white and coloured races ; 3
further north were savages, barbaric states and empires, but
scarcely any white men for the English missionaries who
had preceded the trekkers were few and feeble to prevent
the Boer from dealing with the savages as he thought fitting.
1 In their protest a very lengthy, but well-written and well-reasoiiecl
document, the Boers made much of the point that they had thrown off
their allegiance as British subjects in 1837, and that the British Govern-
ment had taken no steps to compel them to resume that allegiance for
several years subsequently. A good legal point ; but I take it that in such
matters legal points are often excuses but seldom reasons for action, and
abstract right is generally suffered to remain in abstract regions. The
plain facts were that the Boers desired independence and the British
desired Natal, and the stronger party had its will.
. It is true that the British Government declared on several occasions
that it had neither the desire nor the intention to annex Natal, but it is
also true that it annexed Natal.
2 See the next chapter for the English missionaries who preceded the
Boers north of the Orange River.
3 See Papers Relating to the Condition and Treatment of the Natives
(House of Commons Papers, 1st June 1835).
TOWARDS THE NORTH 149
But here also were hardships by the way on the long
march. Fever troubled the emigrants at times ; cattle-
sickness reduced their stock. And sometimes their flocks
and herds would be stolen ; yet the very children had to learn
to drive the oxen forward, while their elders were engaged in
deciding the way across the open veldt, in guarding against
possible ambuscades by the natives, or the attacks of wild
beasts. And nature built here on a grand scale : this was
the land of the buffalo, the rhinoceros, and the giraffe which
man was now invading ; here was found the hippopotamus
wallowing in the swamps, and the lion was heard by night
and often seen by day. The Boers were good shots, and
many of the hunters enjoyed the chase after great game ; but
sometimes a misfire lost a man his life and a family its head,
and the widow was left to press on with her children alone. 1
Nevertheless one party after another pushed on across the
Orange River, across the Vaal, some as far north almost as the
distant Limpopo, before they found the land to suit them.
Months would pass on the journey, as the great ox-wagons
rolled slowly forward through unknown country, or some-
times the trekkers would halt awhile, building them huts of
grass and reeds, and then perhaps a more permanent home
if the prospects pleased them.
It was an almost unknown land to which they came. The
old maps of the sixteenth century marked the interior of the
continent vaguely with the sources of the Nile, a conjectured
lake, a hypothetical empire of the aborigines ; the modern
maps gave no such information, but frankly owned their
ignorance. 2 It was a virgin soil to the European, save where
Robert Mofiat and one or two fellow-missionaries from Britain
1 In these cases the widow soon married again. It was not good for a
woman to be alone in that savage land.
2 On a map by Diego Ribero dated 1529 in the British Museum the
three sources of the Nile are marked parallel with the Zambesi, and the
Mountains of the Moon south of the Nile. The rest of the map is
scattered with elephants, birds, trees, and houses at random : the
150 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
had found their way and visited the country which the
emigrant Cape Dutch proposed to occupy.
This great land which the trekkers took for their inheri-
tance was thinly peopled ; but as they went they saw the
reason of its paucity of population. From time to time along
their route they passed great heaps of human bones, thou-
sands after thousands of heaped-up skeletons, picked clean
by the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. As they
passed these gruesome relics, even the horses on which they
rode would shudder and shrink with the nameless horror of
the dead ; but the trekkers knew that these piles of human
fragments were a sign that the land and its riches were theirs.
Each pile marked a battle or a massacre ; and continuous
battle and massacre had almost depopulated the country of
its savage owners.
But not quite. There were still chiefs of the Mata-
bili, powerful rulers of a widespread numerous Zulu
Atlantic is Mare Ethiopicum, the Indian Ocean is Sinus Barbaricus.
The island of Madagascar is correctly outlined.
A later English map (1663) also has the elephants and the Ethiopian
Ocean and the Barbarian Gulfe ; the Nile is made to rise in two lakes,
10' south of the equator ; between them lies the fabled city of Agag.
Central South Africa is vaguely called Mouomotapa.
Another map, apparently about 1709, makes all central Africa Ethiopia,
adding candidly ' this country is wholly unknown to Europeans.' South
of this lies Mono-emugi, through which flows the Zambesi ; south of that
again is Monomotapa, with Zimbaoe (Zimbabye). The Zaire (Congo) is
marked, and great bogs or morasses conjectured in Ethiopia.
A French map of the same date marks the Royaume de Nimeamaie,
separated by a great line of mountains (Lupata) from Monomotape;
south are Les Cobonas Antropopages, Les Hancumquas, Henssaquas,
Chainouques, Griquas, Odiquas, Ubiques. That Frenchman was a witty
soul.
On a French map of 1722 a lake, unnamed, is on the site of Tanganyika ;
but no other lakes. Monomotapa now shifts to the coast near Sofala ;
northwards lies Mouoemugi.
An English map of 1782 marks Monomotapa smaller, near Sofala, and
adds that the kingdoms of Manica and Sofala and Sabia are ' dismem-
brings of the ancient empire of Monomotape.' Lake Tanganyika is
marked, unnamed, but ' full of fish ' : Manoemoogi to the north in
Griqua land is ' a town of robbers and Chinese Hottentots ' : otherwise the
southern interior is blank.
I said in my haste, after wasting an afternoon on this rubbish, all
geographers are liars.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 151
people 1 that was to play a great part in the future relations
with European invaders, both here and further north. For
the time at least they offered no opposition to the Treaties
immigrants, but rather welcomed them ; treaties of with the
friendship were drawn up, the land between the Matabili<
Vet and the Vaal Rivers was bartered in exchange for cattle,
and here many of the Boers settled ; some, however, had
already stopped short and made their homes not very far
from the border of Cape Colony, on the left banks of the great
Orange River.
But not all the Boers asked permission of the Matabili, or
bartered herds for land ; not every party of the trekkers even
knew that the natives claimed the country, so
And War
thinly was it populated. Occasional misunder-
standings arose from this cause ; other mistakes on either side
were perhaps wilful errors, thefts of territory on the part
of the invader, thefts of cattle or sheer joy of war on the part
of the Matabili. Many a hard-fought skirmish took place
between trekker and savage, here as in Natal ; but nowhere
did the immigrants find so formidable a foe as Dingana and
his terrible Zulu braves. Their advance was checked at times,
but they were seldom routed, and they were never beaten.
And in the end they drove the Matabili out of the Transvaal
country, far across the Limpopo to the north. 2
And here, in the vast territories between the Orange and
the Limpopo, bounded on the west by the waterless Kala-
hari desert and on the east by the ancient do- T fc eBoers
minions of the Portuguese, the trekkers stayed, take
They had found the promised land a land of of OrangUi
wilderness indeed, but one that would blossom and
and bear fruit with industry and care, one, more-
over, that was free from the British Government, the British
1 More correctly Amandabili ; but Lo Bengula, the next king of this
folk, said when questioned, ' The proper name for my people is Znlu. '
- See chap. v. of this book.
152 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS
tax-collector, and the British magistrate, the slave-emanci-
pator and the philanthropist, and almost free from the British
missionary. 1 Here the Boers could have the liberty which
they desired.
The immigrants scattered themselves loosely and widely
after their usual fashion, in farms of five thousand acres or
more each ; and they maintained, so far as the conditions of
the country allowed, the style of building, the customs, and
the form of society which had been in vogue in Cape Colony
before the British had come to disturb the placid habits of the
colonial Dutch. 2
There was room for all in this almost vacant land, and
each party was a law and a direction unto itself in this de-
serted country. One band travelled along a tributary of the
Vaal River, at first with disappointment at its paucity of
water ; but later, when long reaches of clear crystal fringed
by grey whispering willows burst upon the gaze of the ex-
plorers, their faces changed. The stream they had despised
was now called Mooi, the beautiful ; and here was founded
Potchefstroom, the earliest successful settlement of the Boers
in the Transvaal country.
A little colony next spread itself over the mountain ranges,
and watered its cattle in the streams of Lydenburg ; other
towns or districts followed as fresh parties arrived month
by month, and settlement expanded. Some were reminiscent
of old Holland, such as Amersfoort, some indicative of the
1 Not quite free, however, after the next few years from the inevitable
Scot. One district in the Transvaal, that between Ermelo and Swazi-
land, was for many years known as New Scotland, and its capital was
called Robburnia after the poet. But after the war of 1881 the Dutch
changed the name to New Amsterdam.
2 The son of Robert Moffat the missionary, who engaged in trade in
the Transvaal, declared that the Boers were degenerating in their new
abode ; but Livingstone, a sounder judge, hardly bears this out. He states
that the Boers were a shade darker than the Europeans at home, but
otherwise they showed little change after two centuries of life in South
Africa. I have met several Cape and Transvaal Boers in Holland, and
they always seemed to me good Europeans of true Dutch build and
character.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 153
peace and quiet of pastoral life, such as that which grew
up amid the wonderful fertility of Rustenberg the hill of
rest. But mostly the Boer settler named his homes, like the
English puritan of two centuries before, from the book which
was at once his religion and his only literature. New Eng-
land across the Atlantic had its Providence, its Salem, its
Canaan, its Babylon ; 1 this New Holland in central South
Africa had its Bethany and Bethlehem, its Bethesda and
Beersheba, its Carmel and its Hebron. 2
These and other Bible names marked the path and the
stopping-places of the Boers over the country ; and one
party went still further north, to the great mountains and
deep glades and thick tropical forests of Zoutpansberg by the
Limpopo. It was the aim of Potgieter, the sturdy and un-
lettered farmer who led this band thus far to the north, to
put as wide a space as possible between himself and British
rule and British influence ; and he saw in this distant district
not only the prospect of eternal freedom from the hated
English, but also the chance of a profitable trade with the
Indian Ocean. And to this rough peasant-leader, whose
boyhood had been passed at Cradock in Cape Colony, and
who had seen hard fighting in later years in the Kafir wars
on the frontier, the remembrance of a disaster that had already
occurred among his folk in the Zoutspanberg was no deterrent.
For it was here that the earliest of all the trekkers had
come, companions for the first months of their journey with
those unfortunates who had died of fever at Delagoa Bay.
The first party of voortrekkers had pushed on steadily north-
wards under Van Rensburg in 1833, across the Orange, across
1 See vol. i. bk. ii. ch. v.
2 One of the tributaries of the Limpopo -was called the Nile by the
trekkers who discovered it ; the name has clung to the insignificant
stream. From the fact that it flowed in a northerly direction, the Boers
imagined it to be the origin of the true Nile.
They have been derided for their ignorance ; but Livingstone made a
similar error, in mistaking the source of the Congo for the Nile. And
Christopher Colombus mistook America for the Indies.
154 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
the Vaal, and over the mountains of the Zoutpansberg.
There in 1836 these earlier pioneers, a band of forty-eight in
all, men, women, and children, had rested ; and somewhere
there, in the vast distances of that wonderful district, they
had disappeared for ever from human ken. Some thought
that they had been wiped out by the natives, and this may
in fact have been their fate ; but others held and it was a
pleasant belief that the weary pilgrims had divorced them-
selves from their fellows and all other human society, and in
some happy valley of the unknown wild concealed their
homes, their children, and their cattle. Whatever their fate,
they were lost in the wilderness, and no trace of them or their
belongings, not the wheel of a wagon, nor a shred of clothing,
nor yet a bone nor a tress of hair, not even a child's discarded
plaything was ever found. 1
Such are the inevitable accidents and unsolved mysteries
of pioneering life ; but the trekkers as a whole had better
fortune.
It has been estimated that between the years 1833 and
1840, during which the trek movement rose and fell, some
ten thousand of the Cape Dutch made their way across the
frontier of the older colony. The bulk of emigration came
from those eastern districts Uitenhage, GraafE Reynet, and
Swellendam which had always been most strongly opposed
to foreign rule, and which had suffered most heavily from the
Kafir depredations ; the bulk of it was directed across the
Orange and the Vaal. There the trekkers found a quiet
prosperity ; there also they found what their brethren in
Natal had not found the freedom they desired. And thus
were laid the foundations of the Orange Free State and the
Transvaal Republic.
1 It may be recalled that a great exploring expedition in central
Australia disappeared in similar fashion (vol. v. bk. xix. ch. i. ).
Probably the tse-tse settled the fate of this Boer expedition ; but it is
curious that no relics of their journey have been found. The tse-tse fly
could not eat the wagons.
TOWARDS THE NOETH 155
The Boers were a pastoral people, and their towns were only
villages, their villages often no more than the casual junction
of two or three great farms. For a highly or- The Boer
ganised form of government they had neither wish Republics,
nor need ; but some form of government is a necessity for
the most primitive community, and the Boers were in no
doubt as to the form of government they should adopt. They
had not forgotten the Batavian Republic in Europe, the ill-
fated republics at the Cape ; * and in their new territories the
loose and easy robes of a republic were sufficient to cover the
essentials of a patriarchal rule.
The short-lived independence of the trekkers of Natal had
seen the formation of a republic with a definite constitution
and a regularly elected council 2 in session at Pieter Maritzburg,
which was to exist until, or perhaps even after Holland had
proclaimed the country a Dutch colony. That hope was vain ;
and the trekkers who settled in the interior no longer looked
for the protection of the Netherlands.
The settlers to the north of the Orange River therefore
proclaimed themselves a Free State in 1837, and a form
of constitutional government was promulgated ; across the
Vaal a number of political organisations gradually evolved a
separate existence. Each district, or each new settlement
of invading Boers, formed its own independent republican
community : one was at Lydenburg, a second in the
Zoutpansberg, a third at Utrecht, the greatest was at
Potchefstroom, so powerful indeed that it in time absorbed
1 Bk. xxiii. ch. iii.
2 I have seen it stated that the trekkers' republic in Natal was little
better than a loosely organised anarchy. That was the partisan view of
its British opponents, but singularly wide of the truth. I have looked
through the articles of its constitution, which shows considerable political
acumen ; and the proceedings of its Volksraad were at least as sensible
as the debates in many a small colonial parliament where English is the
mother tongue. It is true that the members made some mistakes in
policy and said some foolish things. But if we are to start condemning
members of parliament on that ground, even the British House of
Commons would not survive.
156 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
its fellows, and became the Transvaal or South African
Republic. 1
Others split off, or were added in later years as settlement
spread, such as the republics if indeed they could be said
to deserve that honourable name of Stellaland and Goshen
on the Bechuana border ; 2 but some of these primitive
settlements were short-lived, too weak to maintain themselves
against frontier warfare unaided, and therefore forced to seek
alliance or absorption with more powerful neighbours. Their
natural bent was to division and full independence of each
other ; but the perils of their position, and the danger of
external attack from the hostile tribes around them and
among them, made for cohesion. 8
But each of these settlements was free in time and for a
time of the British Government, as it desired.
At first, indeed, the British Government had followed its
rebellious subjects across the Orange River, as it had followed
them into Natal, reminding them that they could
(British) not thus throw off their allegiance to the sove-
orange reign power in South Africa. The land between
sover- the Orange and the Vaal was in consequence
annexed to the Empire in 1848 as the Orange
River Sovereignty ; Bloemfontein, the little village
capital of the Free State, was placed under a British Resident,
and the emigrant Boers found themselves once more the
1 The South African or Transvaal Republic was an amalgamation of
four republics in all: hence the national flag, the ' Vierkleur,' or four-
coloured flag,
: For Stellaland and Goshen, see ch. iv. of this book.
3 The Boers in this respect resembled the English settlers overseas,
each of whose new colonies in America, Australia and New Zealand,
broke off from its neighbours and sternly maintained its independence of
its brothers. Its self-sought isolation, even from its fellows, was a
symptom of the desire to evolve its own individuality ; in later years,
when the individuality was fixed, or thought to be fixed, the desire for
reunion became apparent, often because of an external danger. In this
case Australia offers some parallel to the Dutch Republics of South
Africa (vol. v. bk. xviii. ch. iii. ; bk. xix. ch. ii. iii. ).
TOWARDS THE NORTH 157
subjects of a foreign power, not free self-governing citizens
as they desired.
Another trek to the north, away from the hated Union
Jack, might have followed for independence was the leading
passion of the Boer, and there was land to the north and
to spare had not an insurrection of the indignant trekkers
proved successful. The British Resident was expelled by a
burgher commando under Andries Pretorius, the old leader of
the trekkers in Natal, and the Orange countries were once
more the possession of the emigrant Boers.
Their victory, however, was too much for the authorities
at Cape Town, and Sir Harry Smith, the hero of the Kafir
War of 1835, marched against the rebels. The old soldier
defeated the insurgent trekkers at Boomplaats, and the
country was again annexed, under the title of the Orange
River Sovereignty.
But England found that her servants in South Africa had
pressed ahead too far and too fast for her convenience in this
matter. Only with reluctance did the Imperial Government
consent to this expansion of territory in the interior, and
recognise an advance which committed her to new responsi-
bilities, at the very time when the anti-imperial movement
was at its height, and she was endeavouring rather to reduce
than enlarge her colonial possessions. 1
An unsuccessful native war with the Basutos, in the eastern
part of the Sovereignty, a few years later helped to convince
London that Cape Town had made a mistake in
this advance across the Orange River ; reasons e nce of the
were found for abandoning a country that was no ran |! t
longer wanted when it was found difficult to recognised
keep, and six years after the proclamation of the
Sovereignty it was withdrawn. In 1854 a Con-
vention was signed between a Special Commissioner of the
1 See vol. iv. bk. xvi. ch. ii. for the anti- imperial movement in
England.
158 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
British Government and the leading Boers of the territory,
the unwelcome protection or restraint of the imperial power
was proclaimed at an end, and the Orange Free State, a Boer
Republic under a Boer President, was again set up in its
stead. 1
It might have been well for England in the future had she
retained her hold over the Orange River countries ; but over
The sand the Transvaal she made no decided attempt to
vention n a ^ n a ^old at all. Those more distant Boers of
1852. Potchefstroom and Lydenburg had already at-
tained their ends. They had reckoned rightly that the lands
beyond the Vaal were a safe asylum from Britain, too far
afield for pursuit to touch them. Grudgingly and reluctantly
they were given their desire. Another convention, drawn
up at the Sand River and signed on 16th January 1852 by
representatives of Britain and the Dutch trekkers beyond
the Vaal, defined their status. It declared that :
1. The Assistant Commissioners guarantee in the fullest
manner, on the part of the British Government, to the emigrant
farmers beyond the Vaal River, the right to manage their own
affairs, and to govern themselves according to their own laws,
without any interference on the part of the British Government ;
and that no encroachment shall be made by the said Government
on the territory beyond, to the north of the Vaal River, with the
further assurance that the warmest wish of the British Govern-
ment is to promote peace, free trade, and friendly intercourse with
the emigrant farmers now inhabiting, or who may inhabit that
country ; it being understood that this system of non-interference
is binding upon both parties.
2. Should any misunderstanding hereafter arise as to the true
meaning of the words, ' The Vaal River,' this question, in so far
1 There was a considerable number of British residents in the Orange
Free State. Their interests were entirely overlooked by the Imperial
Government, which anticipated in this matter the principle laid down
by that accomplished trifler, Augustine Birrell, in the Liberal Govern-
ment of 1906, that 'minorities must suffer.' But some time afterwards
-15,000 was awarded them as compensation for their losses.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 159
as it regards the line from the source of that river, over the
Drakensberg, shall be settled and adjusted by Commissioners
chosen by both parties.
3. Her Majesty's Assistant Commissioners hereby disclaim all
alliances whatever and with whomsoever of the coloured nations
to the north of the Vaal River.
4. It is agreed that no slavery is, or shall be permitted or
practised in the country to the north of the Vaal River by the
emigrant farmers.
5. Mutual facilities and liberty shall be afforded to traders and
travellers on both sides of the Vaal River; it being understood
that every wagon containing firearms, coming from the south
side of the Vaal River, shall produce a certificate signed by a
British magistrate, or other functionary, duly authorized to grant
such, and which shall state the quantities of such articles con-
tained in said wagon to the nearest magistrate north of the
Vaal River, who shall act in the case as the regulations of the
emigrant farmers direct. It is agreed that no objections shall be
made by any British authority against the emigrant Boers
purchasing their supplies of ammunition in any of the British
colonies and possessions of South Africa; it being mutually
understood that all trade in ammunition with the native tribes is
prohibited, both by the British Government and the emigrant
farmers on both sides of the Vaal River.
6. It is agreed that, so far as possible, all criminals and other
guilty parties who may fly from justice either way across the Vaal
River shall be mutually delivered up, if such should be required ;
and that the British courts, as well as those of the emigrant
farmers, shall be mutually open to each other for all legitimate
processes, and that summonses for witnesses sent either way
across the Vaal River shall be backed by the magistrates on each
side of the same respectively, to compel the attendance of such
witnesses when required.
7. It is agreed that certificates of marriage issued by the proper
authorities of the emigrant farmers shall be held valid and sufficient
to entitle children of such marriages to receive portions accruing
to them in any British colony or possession in South Africa.
8. It is agreed that any and every person now in possession of
land, and residing in British territory, shall have free right and
power to sell his said property, and remove unmolested across the
Vaal River, and vice versd ; it being distinctly understood that this
arrangement does not comprehend criminals or debtors without
providing for the payment of their just and lawful debts.
160 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Such was the Sand River Convention of 1852, which was
rightly recognised as the final triumph and justification of the
it recog- Great Trek movement, and which on that account
nises became one pi the milestones of South African
tadejKmd- history. The Convention withdrew, on the part
ence of of Britain, all claim to jurisdiction or authority
Transvaal. i i, -i -i ' i
over her revolted subjects save only in regard
to the institution of slavery and it therefore recognised
the qualified independence of the Transvaal Boers, acknow-
ledging their full and perpetual right to the territories they
had occupied, and their further right to govern themselves
within those territories, save only for the limitation of the
fourth clause.
The Convention was an honest attempt to make a per-
manent and final settlement in South African politics. But
the time for a permanent and final settlement of the politics
of a developing but still undeveloped country had not yet
come, and the Sand River Convention was not a final settle-
ment of the quarrel between Boer and Britain for three
reasons : firstly, because both parties had in the end to live
together in a country which neither would abandon ; secondly,
because it bound the Transvaal Boers as regards slavery in a
manner which was frankly against their wishes, and which
many of them made no attempt to observe ; and thirdly,
because it bound the British as regards territorial expansion
to the north in a manner which they found excessively incon-
venient, and which in the end would have forced them to
break the Convention, had they not already broken it openly
and directly by the annexation of the Transvaal in 1877. 1
Both sides therefore broke the Convention, the Boers by the
revival of a disguised and modified but still unmistakable
form of slavery in the Transvaal, 2 the British by the expansion
of their Empire.
1 See bk. xxvi. ch. i.
2 The revival of slavery among the trekkers was often alleged by the
TOWARDS THE NORTH 161
The Sand River Convention, in short, bound both parties,
but it could not bind the future.
CHAPTER II
THE MESSENGERS OF GOD : 1799-1876
THE stubborn stolid Boer who nightly bent his knee to the
God of Israel in the wilderness, and thanked the Providence
of his belief for past mercies and future blessings, was at
heart more Jew than Christian. He looked upon his race as
a chosen people, the heathen among whom he dwelt as out-
casts to be enslaved or slaughtered. 1 His religion was self-
centred and exclusive, and the thought that the light of his
life, the light that should light himself to heaven, should
spread among those others with whom he came in contact,
troubled him not at all.
Many Englishmen of a previous century or even of his own
age would have agreed with the attitude of the emigrant
Boer towards the powers above and the heathen below. But
there were exceptions, men to whom the last message of Christ
to preach the gospel to all mankind was a command that
British, and as often indignantly denied by the Boers. Most of the
allegations rested on the testimony of the British missionaries, whose
word could not be implicitly trusted in this matter ; but the fact was
admitted by President Burgers of the Transvaal, whose statement is
sufficient.
1 The Boers defended their attitude by quoting Deuteronomy xx.
10-14 : ' When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then
proclaim peace unto it. And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace,
and open unto thee, then all the people that is found therein shall be
tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee. And if it will make no
peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege
it. And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thy hands, thou
shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword. But the
women and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city,
even all the spoil thereof, thou shalt take unto thyself.'
The Matabili, whom the Boers drove out of the Transvaal, might have
used the same argument had they been Christians, instead of heathen
to justify their treatment of the Makalakas and Mashonas ; see ch. v.
VOL. VI. L
162 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
could not be denied ; and these men had already been seen,
and their influence widely felt, in South Africa. It was
dislike of them and their methods that was largely responsible
for the Great Trek from Cape Colony to the interior ; yet even
when the Boers went up to seek out a new land to the north,
they found that here also the evangelist had gone ahead of
them into the wilderness.
They were far, indeed, from being the earliest evangelists
in South Africa. Long before either British adventurer or
Early Dutch trader to the Indies had ever set foot on
Missions South African soil, the Catholic Church which
to Africa. to its honour has seldom ignored the universality
of its work or neglected the final duty laid upon it by its
Master had sent its missionaries to the dark continent.
Some accompanied the Portuguese on their earliest expeditions
round the coast or through the interior the Cross was indeed
the very symbol of Latin advance ; crosses were set up
wherever the Portuguese explorers landed, 1 and the countries
they claimed as their own were also claimed in the name of
Christianity. And some of these earliest pioneers of religion
at times outran the pioneers of European trade and conquest
in their enthusiasm ; some laid down their lives for their
work, and the work survived both them and their Empire.
A great Scots traveller, 2 making his way through the wilds
of Central Africa, more than a century after the colonial power
of the Portuguese had begun to decay, found in several places
that the only sign of European civilisation having reached
so far in the interior was a congregation of native Africans
worshipping God after the rites of the Eoman Catholic Church.
They had neither priest nor missionary among them, nor had
any white man visited their country for very many years ;
1 One of these crosses was discovered at Augra Pequefia, on the south-
west coast of Africa, in 1824, by Captain Owen ( Voyage.*}. Tt was of
marble, and had apparently been set up by Bartholomew Diaz. But the
cross was broken, and the inscription almost effaced by time.
2 Livingstone, Journeys in South Africa.
TOWAEDS THE NORTH 163
but they had not forgotten the creed which white men had
taught their parents, 1 and they in turn were teaching their
children and their neighbours the faith which old Portuguese
evangelists had brought them across the seas. 2
But the missions of the Catholic Church, faced with so vast
a territory awaiting spiritual as well as temporal conquest,
seldom reached beyond the limits of the Latin civil power.
In that part of South Africa which was colonised by the Dutch,
the older form of Christianity had never any hold ; and the
narrower faith of the sturdy Protestant pioneers at the Cape
had no belief in the efficacy or need of Christian missions to
the natives.
Here was, indeed, a root distinction of theory and practice
and outlook between the two. To the Catholic, all mankind
was equally entitled to the Gospel which was addressed to
all mankind ; all men were equal before God. The Dutch
To the Dutch Protestant, whose divergence from fission
the older creed of Christendom had been sharpened work,
by the long fight against Catholic Spain in Holland itself, not
all mankind was equal or worthy of the creed which the Dutch
themselves had only won after a terrible fight ; certainly the
1 Forty years later, one of the priests of the Universities Mission of
the Church of England heard some native boatmen on Lake Nyasa sing-
ing as a refrain :
' I have no mother,
I have no mother ;
Thou art my Mother, Mary. '
The familiar words showed that a Catholic mission had been at work.
But there was no mission nearer than Quilimane. The incident is related
in the Nyasa Neios, the short-lived organ of the Likoma station.
2 H. W. Nevinson, an able writer, notes in Harper's Magazine (June
1906) that the Catholic missions were often planted in admirably chosen
spots : an establishment at Caconda in Angola, for instance, which had
a tin-roofed church, gatehouse, cells for four fathers and five brothers,
dormitories for a boarding-school, workshops, and a forge, stood in the
middle of a large and well- cultivated garden. The visitor, who saw
eighty male and female converts kneeling on the bare earthen floor of
the chapel for the early service held at dawn, could not but remark that
a feeling of beauty and calm seemed to brood over the whole mission.
Livingstone also comments on the well-chosen sites of the old Jesuit
missions.
debased and savage Hottentots and Kafirs whom he drove
before him in South Africa as the Israelites drove the Canaan-
ites from Palestine had no part in a faith whose mysteries
they could not understand.
' You might as well preach to the baboons/ said a Cape
Dutchman, contemptuously, to a British missionary in later
days, ' if you want a congregation of that sort ; or let me call
the apes from the mountains, or the dogs that lie before the
door/ The missionary replied in scriptural phrase that
' even the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from the
Master's table ' ; and the Boer, grudgingly convinced by his
reasoning, answered, ' My friend, you took a hard hammer
and you have broken a hard head ; you shall have the
Hottentots to preach to/ 1
That attitude of contempt for the natives, which was largely
based on experience, was typical of the older colonists of South
Africa, and indeed it was shared at a later day by the English,
who came with no such prepossessions. 2 No steps were taken
by the DutchfEast India Company in Holland, or its agents
and "rebellious subjects at the Cape, to evangelise the Hotten-
tots or Kafirs. A trading company has no concern with the
way to Heaven. 3 ."&*<
Nevertheless, a few Protestant missions were founded F at
the'Cape r under the old Dutch rule. The Moravians, those
1 The Live* of Robert and Mary Mo/fat, by J. S. Moffat.
2 Philip (Researches in South Africa, 1828) remarks that the English
colonists at Algoa Bay, who had no feeling against the natives on their
arrival in 1820, soon adopted the prejudices of the Dutch. Philip is
himself too prejudiced a witness to be of much value without indepen-
dent evidence, but the fact that the English settlers had their cattle
raided by the Kafirs as often as their Dutch neighbours was sufficient
to account for their changed opinion. Abstract benevolence seldom
survives a heavy personal loss.
3 The Dutch East India Company pursued the same policy in Java :
only in Ceylon did it make any attempt to convert the natives to Chris-
tianity. But that unusual zeal was largely because the Protestant
corporation discovered that its Portuguese predecessors in the island
had left a large number of Catholic converts behind them, a fact which
annoyed the excellent Dutch Governor at Colombo not a little. See vol,
iv. bk. xv, ch. v.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 165
devoted people whose zeal for their faith was such that they
were even ready to be sold into slavery if they might preach
to the negroes ori the West Indian plantations, The
opened a few stations in South Africa in the Moravian
eighteenth century. They laboured chiefly among ]
the Hottentots, and, derided and opposed by the other
Europeans of Cape Colony, 1 their measure of success
was small ; but some of their foundations became
permanent outposts of Christianity in the wilderness that
were destined in time, and often under other hands, to
serve as the starting-point of that long march of pioneer
evangelisation which ultimately reached to far Nyasa and
the unknown north.
But South Africa was still almost virgin soil to the Christian
missionary when Cape Colony passed to Britain in 1795. It
happened, however, that that event coincided Bri ti 8 h
with a great wave of propagandist zeal in England ; Missionary
new societies were being founded to preach the e
Gospel to the heathen in every part of the world, devoted
and enthusiastic men were forsaking home and country to
convert those who had never before heard of Christianity
or its promise of salvation, and many who perhaps cared little
for the greatness of the British Empire cared much for the
greatness of their creed. The first Protestant missions were
founded in these years in India, where their jealous insults
of a far older creed caused some trouble to the Protestant
Governor-General at Calcutta ; 2 some spent their lives to
save the souls of others on the deadly West African
coast ; 3 others again set out for the isles of the Pacific
1 One of the conditions put forward by the short-lived Kepublic of
Graaff Reynet was that the Moravian missionaries should be expelled a
clear proof that the Boers objected to missionaries on general principles,
and not because the majority of missionaries were British. At that time
there was not a single British missionary in South Africa.
2 Vol. ii. bk. vi. ch. ii.
3 Vol. iv. bk. xiv, ch. i.
166 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
and preached to cannibals and savages. 1 And in these
multitudinous activities the natives of South Africa were not
forgotten. -
The first evangelist sent by a British missionary society
to South Africa was an extraordinary person, whose character
van der &nd labours were both misjudged in his own life-
Kemp, 1799. time, and the results of whose zeal were sometimes
overlooked by his successors. Van der Kemp, a man of good
family and education, had been both a soldier and a doctor
of medicine in his native country of Holland, and seemingly
had paid but little more attention to religious matters in his
early manhood than the conventions of the time demanded.
He had already reached the age of forty-three a period of life
at which men seldom alter the settled order of their careers
save for great material advantage, or change their viewai
except to harden them when a sudden catastrophe revo-
lutionised the whole manner of his being. His wife and child
were drowned before his eyes ; and that accident, depriving
him at once of every v human tie, turned his thoughts to such
divine consolations as religion may bring to the afflicted.
In the pious phrase, which long use has made familiar, he
was converted ; he determined to convert others. The
London Missionary Society accepted his offer, and, in 1799,
being then fifty-one years of age, he set put for South Africa.
The Cape Dutch laughed at the mission of the old Hollander,
as they had laughed at the Moravians ; but Kemp was a man
The not easily turned from his purpose. He preached
of ^Bethels' 1 * ^ e natives, he learned their language, and in
dor^, 180*. 1804 he founded a permanent mission station, at
a place which he called Bethelsdorp, in memory of the covenant
he had made with God in the day of his distress. 2 Here
a native congregation gathered round him, and the work,
1 Vol. v. bk. xx. ch. i.
- Genesis xxxv. 3. ' And let us arise, and go up to Bethel, and I will
make there an altar unto God, who answered me in the day of my dis-
tress. . . .'
TOWARDS THE NORTH * 167
though slow and hard and often, as it seemed, of little use,
went on.
The outstanding figure of the man, his earnestness, and
not less his peculiarities and prejudices which led him to
bring charges against the Dutch settlers of the neighbourhood
that he was unable to prove became known by rumour and
report throughout the land during the seven remaining years
of his life. He died rather suddenly at Bethelsdorp in the
midst of his work, in the year 181 1. 1
The eccentricities of Kemp's life were remembered by the
whites ; the excellence of his ministrations was not forgotten
by the blacks. Many years later, when other missionaries
followed in his steps, they found a lively recollection among
the natives of the man, if not of the message he had brought. 2
The establishment at Bethelsdorp continued when Kemp
died. But with its founder gone its inspiration had departed,
and it sank presently into a deplorable condition it decays
a collection of some fifty miserable huts, in- l^p's
habited by lean and ragged or almost naked Death,
natives, whose indolent and sleepy faces hardly convinced
the passing traveller of the improvement said to be wrought
by Christianity. 3 Here was indeed no encouragement for the
evangelists ; the seed of the new religion had fallen on evil
ground. A few services were held from time to time at
Bethelsdorp, a few trades or occupations nominally taught
1 A Memoir of the Rev. J. T. Van der Kemp was published in 1812, a
rare but poor book. Most of it is incorporated, word for word and
without acknowledgment, in Philip's Researches. The admirable Philip
apparently regarded literary theft in the same light that the Kafir
looked on cattle-raiding or a Lovelace on seduction as a venial offence
of which no honest fellow need be ashamed.
2 Kemp's peculiarities crop up in every book of travel ; the blacks' re-
membrance of him is mentioned in Oalderwood, Caffres and Caffre
Missions (1857), an excellent and broad-minded work.
3 Lichtenstein's Travels. Dr. Philip in his Researches accuses Lichten-
stein of being prejudiced and inaccurate an accusation to which
Lichtenstein could have returned an effective tu quoqve but Philip him-
self admits that the condition of Bethelsdorp was deplorable when he
visited it.
168 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
the blacksmith's craft, thatching, carpentry, and masonry 1
and some of the people were dressed in European style ;
but these things apart, the place was no credit either to
Christianity or civilisation. 2
Other mission stations, which had been founded among the
Hottentots and elsewhere since Bethelsdorp was planted,
stagnation were m hardly better condition. Pacaltsdorp,
and Dis- founded in 1813 by the saintly evangelist Pacalt,
courage- . i T i
ment was stagnant ; a mission to the Bushmen at
Elsewhere. Toverberg, which had been opened in 1814, like-
wise showed little advance after ten years' work ; at another
station, which bore the Biblical name of Hepzibah, the soil was
certainly cultivated, but as the place showed no other sign
of progress it was presently abolished by the Government.
Even Theopolis, whose name commemorated the noble as-
piration that it should become a city of God, had done little
for the elevation of man, for when visited by a missionary
charged with its inspection, he admitted that education was
neglected, and neither religion nor civilisation, in the ordinary
meaning of the words, existed at all. 3
The natives generally remained indifferent, the white settlers
remained hostile ; but indifference and hostility did not
discourage the missionaries. It was at this very time of
failure within and enmity without, indeed, that fresh efforts
1 In 1822, however, the natives of Bethelsdorp secured, against all
comers, the government contract for transport-riding a fact which
proves they had some energy.
1 owe this point, and several other items in the present and later
chapters of this book, to information kindly furnished me by Mr. W. A.
Elliott, of the London Missionary Society, from his own mamtscripts.
It has been suggested that one reason for the failure at Bethelsdorp
was the fact that it was founded on a barren stony hill, badly provided
with water. Report in Records of Cape. Colony, 1812.
2 Captain Owen in his Voyages, when visiting this part of South Africa,
noticed the jealousy between the Dutch at Uitenhage and the mission
station at Bethelsdorp. He remarked that the native converts were not
well managed, and were denied both the rights of free men and the
advantages of the slave a sensible criticism.
That was in 1824, ten years before slavery was abolished.
3 Philip, Researches.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 169
were made and new stations were opened ; and during the
next few years the messengers of God, hitherto mainly occu-
pied with the Hottentots, had pressed forward into the very
heart of Kafraria. In this new campaign it was the fervent
emotional Wesleyans and the harder, yet not more dogged,
Scots Presbyterians who were in the forefront of what to
many must have seemed a hopeless battle.
' Although I have made a reserve for the Church of Eng-
land/ said Governor Cathcart to the Wesleyan missionary,
William Shaw, ' I know you Methodists will be Tne
there first/ The Governor was right. Shaw Advance
himself, an earnest and broad-minded man, who Kafraria,
was not the worse evangelist because he saw some 1824 - 46 -
faults in the natives and some virtues in the white colonists,
founded the mission station of Wesleyville by the Keiskamma
River in 1824 ; and there, he wrote, ' we lived in great peace
and security/ 1 preaching and teaching among a small but
earnest and sincere Kafir congregation.
Nor was encouragement lacking in the work for a time.
' The truths of the Christian religion made a deep impression
on many/ said Shaw some time later. ' The chiefs regularly
attended divine worship ; some of their children learned to
read and write/ 2 For some years, indeed, all went well.
Unhappily the peace and security were as delusive as the
drowsy calm before a thunderstorm. Wesleyville was at-
tacked and destroyed in the Kafir War of 1834, and again
twelve years later ; and each time the missionaries had to
flee for their lives through a burning and terror-stricken
country to the British frontier fortress and city of refuge at
Grahamstown. But each tune Wesleyville was rebuilt by
its undaunted founders, and its work was somewhat extended.
1 Shaw, Story of My Mission (1860), an excellent book. See also
his Memorials of South Africa.
- Shaw's evidence in Papers Relative, to the Condition and Treatment of
the Natice Inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope (House of Commons
Papers, June 1, 1835).
170 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The same fate had overwhelmed the Presbyterian mission at
Old Lovedale, originally founded at the same time as Wesley -
ville, but here again the evangelists returned when the war
was over, and carried on the work as before. 1
The indomitable persistence of the missionaries in face of
such disasters was not lost upon the natives, to whose savage
inconstant natures the steadfast policy of the white man was
a strange and novel apparition ; and in time the work began
to tell, as new mission stations were planted ever further
afield in the untamed wilderness.
King William's Town, which eventually became the capital
of British Kafraria, and a trading centre of some importance,
was at its foundation in 1834 nothing more than a solitary
mission station ; 2 but other outposts of the faith soon
followed and surrounded it, until in a few years something
like a chain of Christian settlements stretched across the whole
of the Kafir territories. 3
Further yet the Christian pioneers soon ventured in their
search for souls. When Boer and Briton were struggling
Among the with each other for the possession of Natal, they
Zulus. found a missionary from England had already
preceded the traders and trekkers of South Africa at the court
of the terrible Zulu king. But here was no success for the
brave evangelist ; the stubborn fury of the Zulu braves would
have none of the mild and gentle doctrines that won their
way more easily elsewhere.
Against that solid wall of savagery the labour of the most
active missionary recoiled in vain ; the messengers of peace
were accused of witchcraft by a people devoted to war, 4 and
1 For an account of Lovedale, see Young, African. Wastes Reclaimed
(1902) and the official Lovedale Past and Present: A Register (1887).
2 The first missionaries here were Brownlec and Jan TV.atzoe, of the
London Missionary Society, in 1826 ; the town was named eight years
later.
3 For some details of the progress made in these settlements sec
bk. xxv.
4 Gibson, Story of the Zulus.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 171
for another generation Christianity found no footing among
the Zulus.
Such was the first line of missionary advance in South Africa,
around and along the coast from Cape Town to beyond Durban.
There the evangelists stayed their progress for a time ; for in
the deadly fever-stricken air of Delagoa Bay they could do
but little, and the long, low shores of Mozambique, where the
shadow of Portuguese authority still slumbered in the tropic
swamps, were hardly more propitious to their work.
It was thirty years and more before British Christianity
won a firm foothold higher up the east African coast at
Zanzibar ; but the Christian church that was The second
built on that island in 1873, after ten years' work Missionary
among its trading Moslem people, was historically Advance,
the child of the second line of missionary advance in South
Africa. 1 That line ran through the interior of the country,
across the Orange River, the Griqua desert, and Bechuana-
land, and ever onwards in one long path to the blue waters of
Nyasa, the great tropic lakes, and the sea. This was a more
friendly if a longer path ; and it was this ever-lengthening
road that the greater missionaries trod. They were the fore-
runners of European civilisation as well as of Christianity,
the very pioneers of light in darkness, unwitting and often
unwilling pioneers of the British Empire as well as the self-
sent messengers of God.
It was the great London Missionary Society which led the
way across the Orange River in the earliest days of British
rule in South Africa, founding a station in 1803 oriqua
in that wild and desolate country which borders Town ' 1803 -
on the desert and sometimes even takes on the character of
the desert itself a country of savage beasts and hardly less
savage men. There, amid swamps and sandy strays and
desert drifts, where lions and elephants roamed in packs,
1 For the establishment of Christianity at Zanzibar, see vol. iv. bk.
xiv. oh. ii.
172 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
where the rhinoceros charged his prey and the hippopotamus
wallowed in silent muddy pools, the two evangelists Anderson
and Kramer pitched their camp, and founded a Christian
centre in the wilderness.
Griquas peopled the country a mixed tribe of half-castes,
the progeny of Boer fathers and Hottentot or Bushmen
mothers ; and besides this bastard race were found other in-
habitants of the desert, fugitive slaves from Cape Dutch
farms, wandering vagabonds and outcasts, the very dregs and
ullage of the thin civilisation of South Africa. To these men
Anderson and his successors preached of Christianity and
civilisation, teaching simple arts the sowing of the soil and
the reaping of the grain, the drainage of the swamps and
the watering of the desert ; and in the end, after many years
of labour, they were not unrewarded. A community of some
eight hundred people gathered round them ; four square
miles of land were covered with corn and barley, sufficient
to feed the population of Griqua Town ; and in the town
itself were presently built a few brick and stone houses. 1
Passing travellers noticed this little oasis of civilisation in
the desert, and admitted its success ; and in time the mission
station at Griqua Town became a landmark for the occasional
hunter or trader in the still unmapped interior, an inspira-
tion for the evangelists to follow and extend their work through
all that country.
And others followed in due course.
A mission station was opened at Warmbath on the Orange
River in 1806. For the time it failed and was abandoned ;
Lilyfontein but more fruitful soil was presently found in those
quaiand " ^ are anc ^ dreadful deserts of Namaqualand from
isos. which Cape Dutchmen seeking treasure had turned
back in despair. 2 To Lilyfontein one of those rare oases
1 Thomson, in his Travels, remarks the progress of Griqua Town ;
another notice of the place is in Warren's On the Veldt in the Seventies.
2 Bk. xxiii. ch. iii.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 173
which relieve that dreary wilderness as the chance smile of
a little child will light up a sunless solitary life with sudden
joy a missionary came in 1809 ; the wandering people of
that savage inhospitable country gathered round and heard
him ; and within a few years more the work had been
extended far afield, and the sacred names of Bethany and
Bethesda, each the site of a new Christian settlement in the
wilderness, marked the blank maps of the bleak Namaqua
territories. 1
Here Christianity flourished in the wild, and its success
was of that emphatic kind which could not be denied even by
the enemies of missions.
A great robber chief, Afrikaner by name, who had terror-
ised the country round, and robbed rich flocks of wandering
Boers as well as the poorer cattle of the native tribes, suddenly
professed his faith in Christianity, converted by the preachers
of Namaqualand in 1816. His depredations ceased, and
henceforth the land had rest ; Afrikaner's Kraal, as the old
stronghold of the tyrant had been called, was renamed the
Mountain of Peace, in token of the change ; and his willing
aid was given in rebuilding the very mission station at Lily-
fontein, which he had once destroyed on a wild raid in some
fit of sudden passion.
The conversion of this notorious brigand caused amazement
in Cape Colony, and was rightly claimed as a triumph for
Christianity ; but not less triumphal was the quiet progress
of civilisation in these solitary stations of the wilderness.
For the messengers of God did not forget that they were
also the standard-bearers of that high humanity which had
sent them forth into the untamed places of the earth. At
Lilyfontein and elsewhere the converts were taught to dig
and sow, to reap and store, to build and roof there houses ;
famine was no more in the land which they had taken, and
] Bethesda was founded in 1808, Bethany in 1814, by the London
Missionary Society ; the Wesleyans were also active in these parts.
174 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
even the desert began to lose its terrors when irrigation
enlarged the bounds of the little settlement.
In time this admirable work attracted the attention of the
Cape Government, which professed a general authority that
was not enforced over those bare regions. The methods of
the missionaries could not but be warmly approved when such
results of their labours were seen ; and the chief evangelist
at Lilyfontein, who had established his influence over the
people he had converted, was entrusted with certain adminis-
trative powers. He was required by the Government to
apportion the land for corn and gardens ; to plan the houses
and to see them built ; and he had the right to expel the
disobedient and unruly from the mission settlement a
weapon of no small weight where the settlement was no more
than an oasis in the desert.
But the power so well obtained was not abused, nor did
the missionaries refrain from inaugurating among their con-
its Native verts some of the political as well as the religious
senate. institutions of England. The pale shadow of the
British Constitution fluttered over the wilds of Namaqualand,
the elements of representative government were introduced,
and a senate or council of twelve native members with a
missionary president sat every month to discuss the affairs
and decide the policy of the colony. Had the debates of that
quaint experiment in hybrid Parliaments survived, one might
have added a page of no mean interest to the varied annals
of the constitutional history of the British Empire.
In due course other mission stations were again founded in
Namaqualand on similar lines. But the pioneer work of
Christianity in this country was not to close without a tragedy
and a martyrdom.
William Threlfall was a young and enthusiastic Christian,
who had embraced with ardour the chance of becoming a
missionary among the heathen. He had longed to visit
Madagascar, whither many evangelists had already gone from
TOWARDS THE NORTH 175
England to convert the Malagasies ; 1 but when no oppor-
tunity came for work in that great island he accepted with
thankfulness the occasion of settling at a mission Martyrdom
station in South Africa. For some time he ofThrei-
stayed at Delagoa Bay, a place which appealed f ' 1825>
to him ' because it was near Madagascar/ but that fever-
haunted coast had nearly made an end of him, as of many
another man. Stricken down with malignant disease and a
delirium that almost closed in death, Threlfall did not forget
or abandon his errand ; ' I had such views of Christ as I
seldom had before/ he cried in an ecstasy of fervour at the
crisis of his fever, and when he was recovered he settled at
Kamiesberg in Namaqualand, at a mission station founded
there in 1817. Here he worked awhile with the resident
evangelist, but it was still his wish to enlarge the sphere
of Christian effort from one oasis in the desert to another,
and in 1825 he set forth with two native converts to search
the country for fresh opportunities.
The time was unhappily chosen. A famine gripped the
thinly peopled land, and in the stress of hunger every stranger
was an enemy. One wild night, as they rested at some rude
shelter in the desert, Threlfall and his companions were set
upon by Bushmen. They were defenceless for the mes-
sengers of peace were seldom armed and the three were
slain. Wolves and vultures devoured their bodies, but the
memory of the martyrs was a sacred heritage for the infant
church in South Africa. 2
This work in Namaqualand was but a branch from the
main line of advance into the interior, and xneMisgion
Griqua Town the last station across the Orange Road to the
River where the rudiments of Christianity and
civilisation could be found was still the starting-point
1 Vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. iv.
2 For the missions hi Namaqualand, see Broadbent's Missionary
Martyr of Namaqualand ; and Cheeseman's Story of William Threlfall.
176 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
for those who turned their faces towards the unknown
north.
It was not long suffered to remain the last outpost in the
wilderness. The steady advance of evangelistic effort made
Griqua Town, within the bare lifetime of a single generation,
the beginning, not the end, of the new road towards the north.
This was indeed the heroic age of mission work, a time when
great men engaged in the business of saving souls, when
Christianity marched hand in hand with pioneering through
the wilderness, and outran trader and colonist alike, prepar-
ing not only the way to heaven, but the road of earthly
progress and material prosperity.
Other stations sprang up around and beyond Griqua Town
almost year by year. Some evangelistic centres were founded,
flourished for a time, and perished ; yet many proved per-
manently successful. The controversial name of Dr. Philip
lives in the mission and town of Philippopolis, which was
founded in his honour in 1825, across the Orange River ; and
mostly those missionaries who pitched their tent in well-
chosen spots, those who like the monks of old and the Jesuits
of a later day found fertile and well-watered places for their
settlements, saw their little gospel centre take on in time a
larger character as a trading mart between new white traveller
and native, or perhaps become a town with European popu-
lation and the capital of some new province. 1
1 Once at least there was a scandal in this frontier work, which
deserves to be remembered. One Stefanos, a Pole of Greek descent who
had come out to the Cape in the days of the Dutch East India Company,
took to forging banknotes, and was condemned to death ; but he escaped
from prison, and made his home with a missionary on the Sack River.
The excellent evangelist gave him succour, but one night discovered that
his guest was about to murder him. He forgave him, and sent him away,
whereupon Stefanos settled among the Koras, and straightway proclaimed
himself a prophet. ' He built a temple under the edge of a thick grove
of mimosas ; erected an altar, on which he encouraged these silly people
to make their offerings selected from the best of their flocks and herds ;
with solemn mummery he burned part of the victim and appropriated the
rest to himself ; sometimes taking advantage of a thunderstorm, or the
overflowing of a river, he \vas more exorbitant in his demands, and even
TOWARDS THE NORTH 17?
Many of the missionaries instinctively disliked and opposed
these new developments distrusting the trader who brought
temptation with him in the wilderness, the colonist who took
the land and mastered it and its people and perhaps paid but
scant heed to its Christian pioneers ; but the forces they had
set in motion were too strong for them. For the evangelists
sowed a double seed of Christianity and civilisation ; and
while they reaped their due harvest of souls, others more
masterful than they stepped in and took the material reward
of mundane wealth and territory.
Immediately to the north and east of Griqua Town, the
pleasant pastoral country that is now the Orange Free State
was held in the early nineteenth century by Among the
various Bechuana tribes. 1 This was a widespread Bechuanas,
numerous people, less warlike than the Zulus, and
less indifferent to persuasion than the Kafirs. Although filthy
in their habits, and as destitute of godliness as cleanliness,
they were a kindly, curious folk, not inhospitable to the
stranger nor unwilling to hear new things. 2
found it expedient to require the young damsels to be brought to the
temple.' Truly a pretty rogue. He had a debate with the shocked and
scandalised missionary, when he 'insisted,' we are told, 'chiefly on the
prophecy of Joel, and introduced many passages from the Revelations. His
eyes rolled and flashed, his tongue moved with incessant volubility' ; in
short, he conveyed to the pious mind ' a striking idea of the Chief of Hell.'
But the false prophet hardly seems to have had the worst of the argument.
1 The name Bechuana was unknown to the people themselves. It is
believed to have come from the expression Ba-chuana, 'they are alike,'
used by the natives to describe their neighbours, to indicate that all these
tribes were of a common stock.
The first European travellers among these people were Truter and
Somerville in 1801, closely followed by the more famous Lichtenstein
two years later.
2 Such was the general testimony of the missionaries. The hunter
Selous gave them a much less favourable character fifty years later. He
admits that all the Bechuanas wore European clothes, even to the top-hat,
which he thought no improvement ; but he described them generally as
' the stingiest, most begging, grasping and altogether disagreeable people
it is possible to imagine. They expect a stranger to give them every-
thing, but will not give him a drop of milk until he pays for it' (A
Hunter's Wanderings). But in the meantime Bechuanaland had become
a highroad for European traders, and the tribes had learnt the value of
supplies ; hence, probably, their changed character.
VOL. VI. M
178
Among these people came two pioneer evangelists
Hamilton and Evans in 1816, to preach the Christian faith
and scriptures. Permission was at first withheld ; but soon
after, when consent was given by the native chief, Hamilton
was left to do the work alone. His presence there was not
without its influence ; but more fruitful was the errand
of the Wesleyan missionary, Broadbent, who carried Chris-
tianity across the Orange River to another tribe of Bechuanas
the Barolongs in 1822. The natives heard him preach-
ing, and some at least believed his words. ' In twelve months
from the time of our settling at Maquassi/ wrote Broadbent,
' there was a quietness and stillness (on the Sunday) which
served to remind us of the Lord's Day in our native
land/
Here it seemed that the work quickly prospered, and
Broadbent, too, was more happily placed than many of his
comrades in new countries. He built himself an ample
wooden house, whose single story was divided into bedroom,
general living-room, and store-room for food and books ; the
floor was made of powdered anthills, crushed and trodden flat,
an art which his native pupils had taught their master ; the
doors and window-frames were built of packing-cases, the
roof was covered with ox-hide and thatch, the wood walls
filled with clay and white-washed altogether a solid, service-
able dwelling in the wilderness. 1
A greater man than Broadbent, one indeed who ranks
among the great evangelists of the world, was already working
Eobert by his side among the Bechuanas. The honest,
Kufuman homely parents of Robert Moffat had been re-
mi, luctant to let their son take up the work of a mis-
sionary among savage people, but after much searching of
heart the old Scots couple decided with reluctance not to
oppose the young man's wish, ' lest haply they should be
1 See Broadbent, Introduction of Christianity among the Barolovgs
(1865).
-.. TOWARDS THE NORTH 179
found fighting against God's will ' ; the same stern, simple
piety upheld their son and the wife who joined him in the
wilderness. It was this sure conviction that he was doing
the will of God which filled Moflat when he settled at Kuru-
man among the Bechuanas, ' a solitary missionary with little
prospect of help. But how can we be faint or weary in well-
doing/ he added, ' when we see immortal souls dying for lack
of knowledge ? '
His first experience might have disheartened the bravest,
for five years of preaching and teaching brought no results
whatever. If at one moment Moffat was able HisDis .
to report hopefully that ' in this corner of hell the courage-
dry bones begin to shake/ at another he was men '
frankly discouraged. The little church which he had built
was nearly always empty ' the natives seem to think they
do us a favour by coming/ he wrote sadly and the school
which he had opened was equally neglected. And the
Bechuanas stole the mission corn, the Bushmen stole the
mission cattle ; some weak-kneed Hottentot converts had
become a shame to the infant church, and a native rain-maker
who failed to dispel a drought blamed the white men for
sorcery an accusation that was readily believed.
But Moffat learned his lesson from adversity. The failure
of the church and school was largely because he knew little
of the Bechuana language ; the failure of the unfriendly rain-
maker taught him the need of irrigation.
Gradually he acquired the native tongue, reduced it to
writing, and for years it was a labour of love in his leisure
hours to translate the Christian scriptures into the vernacular,
and to print, first the .Gospels and the Psalms, then
the whole Bible, in the Bechuana language. The task
needed enormous persistence and industry, but the im-
mediate cause of MofEat's success as a missionary was not
the message of eternal life, but the bringing to this people
of temporal salvation.
180 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
There came a year when famine gripped the land. All
around Kuruman men were starving in the droughty country,
And pitiful gaunt spectres of humanity searching the
Success. parched, cracked earth for food but at Kuruman
alone was plenty. For Moffat had utilised the water from
the great spring at Kuruman to irrigate the country, the crops
had still come up when no rain fell, and the people who had
listened to the native rain-maker when he told them of the
white man's sorcery now saw the sorcery was to their own
advantage. This work of Moffat's was indeed a miracle in
their eyes, and he had his reward. The gospel was believed
when the gospeller was so successful ; in 1829, the year of the
famine, Kuruman was suddenly converted to Christianity,
the religion which could save man from starvation in a drought.
From that day Christianity won its way steadily among
the Bechuanas, spreading from tribe to tribe until a few con-
verts were found in almost every village. Moffat was a stern
disciplinarian, but the people he had saved now loved him,
and invitations came from others who had heard of his great
work that he should visit them.
But mostly he remained at Kuruman, founding his place
deeper and deeper in the heart of the converts. A great
church was built, replacing the old barn of wattle and daub
where the first unattended services had been held ten years
before ; better schools were added, a handsome stone house
superseded the original wooden hut of the missionary ; and
other signs of his work were presently seen in the country
around. What had been alternately a morass and a desert
before the coming of Moffat roamed at one time by wild
beasts and at another abandoned by every living creature
save man was now transformed into fields and gardens,
bearing corn and flowers, whispering with grey willows and
soft syringas the eloquent tribute of Nature to the messenger
of God in the wilderness that was wilderness no more.
Henceforth Kuruinaii and not Griqua Town was the out-
TOWARDS THE NORTH 181
post of Christianity in South Africa. The line had been ad-
vanced a long stage into the interior by the work of Robert
Moffat. 1
Already, indeed, the way was preparing for a further ad-
vance to the north. In the year 1829 two white traders had
ventured into the far interior to shoot elephants ^ono-the
and barter with the natives, and these men, push- Matabm,
ing their way beyond the utmost range of the
Bechuana people, had found themselves in the Transvaal
country among the wild and warlike Matabili a Zulu tribe
whose joy was battle and whose life the death of others.
Grim proofs of their industry were everywhere apparent.
The country round their settlements had once been thickly
populated, as the scattered burnt remains of native villages
and townships showed ; but in some wild irruption of conquest
the Matabili had overcome their weaker neighbours, and the
place was now desolate. The few aborigines of the conquered
race who survived that fearful orgy of slaughter hid their
frightened faces from the casual stranger, fearing lest they
should meet the death they had so hardly escaped ; only the
dreadful heaps of human bones picked clean told the story
of this savage tragedy to the two white traders who passed
through the land that the Matabili had conquered.
Yet Mosilikatsi, the great chief of this fearful people,
received the white men kindly. He heard them out with
interest when they spoke of Europe, and the savage monarch
entertained them royally with honour in his court. The
mention of Christian missions led to an account of Moffat and
his work on the one side, the expression of a desire to see him
on the other and now the way seemed suddenly to open
before the messengers of God into the very heart of Africa.
Moflat visited the savage king ; new mission stations were
opened in the wild country which lay between the Bechuanas
1 See Moffat's Journals, Scenes and Labours in South Africa, and the
Lives of Robert and Mary Moffat.
182 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
and the Matabili, and often the lone evangelists confessed
that lions, jackals, and hyaenas formed their only congregation :
but almost before the opportunity seemed to open it had
passed, like the sudden unexpected vision and quick vanish-
ment of the sun among the racing clouds in a gale of spring.
Mosilikatsi indeed still welcomed Robert Moffat at his court,
but he would not adopt the white man's creed ; 1 nor would his
warrior people for a moment listen to the peaceful precepts
of Christianity.
But many things had happened between the day when the
first invitation came to Kuruman in 1829 and the last visit of
Robert MofTat to his friend the Matabili king nearly thirty
years later. The advance guard of the great Boer trek had
meantime pushed across the Vaal into the Matabili country,
and the first contact of armed Europeans with that fiery
people had ended in attack and sudden bloodshed when the
domains of Mosilikatsi were invaded. 2 The Matabili were
defeated in a terrible fight, compelled to abandon their
country to the invaders, and seek new homes north of the
Limpopo ; the enforced exodus did not dispose them to listen
more readily to the new doctrines. In this case Christianity
had brought not peace but a sword, not a friendly counsellor
but a dangerous enemy, who had come to claim the country
for his own, to enslave its people as he had enslaved the
Hottentots. When one body of white men could do this
thing, might not another do the same ?
Against the stern determination of the Matabili to preserve
then* independence the missionaries henceforth strove in
vain. A Christian station was indeed established at Inyati,
1 Moffat's third and last visit to Mosilikatsi in 1854 is described by
himself in vol. xxvi. of the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society.
' Your God has sent you to help me and heal me,' said the chief, who
was suffering from dropsy ; but the old savage would not change his
creed for Christianity.
2 Broadbent, Introduction of Christianity amony the Barolonys, admits
that the Matabili attacked the Boers first. The admission, coming from
a missionary, is conclusive.
TOWARDS THE NORTH* 183
in their new territory between the Limpopo and the Zambesi,
and some time later an evangelist settled at Hope Fountain
near their capital of Buluwayo ; but in neither case was the
work of much, if any, effect. Only force could touch that
savage people, and to force the messengers of peace could
not appeal. Another generation passed before the civil
power of Britain in South Africa reached as far as the evan-
gelists on the northward road, and the Matabili who had
refused the white man's creed were subdued by the white
man's guns. 1
But with the coming of the migrant Boers into the Trans-
vaal the future course of mission work and the way of the
mission road in the interior was entirely changed. The Boers
The old feud between Cape Dutch farmer and ^JfSL*
British evangelist 2 as to the treatment and rights interior,
of the aborigines at once revived. The missionaries wished
every native to be their friend, and only the slave-raider was
their enemy ; but ' the Boers/ in the terrible words which a
black used to a missionary, ' destroyed their enemies and
made slaves of their friends/ 3
They did more. They expelled the missionaries as well as
the Matabili from the Transvaal, 4 and the great station and
church which Robert Moffat had built at Kuruman was only
saved because it lay on the border of the desert, beyond the
main tide of the trekkers' advance. And they determined
to shut up the whole interior against the British missionary,
the British trader, the British colonist, and indeed against
British influence altogether.
One man alone, the greatest of all the missionaries, perhaps
the greatest of all Britons who wrote their names across
1 For the conquest of the Matabili, see ch. v.
2 See bk. xxiii. ch. iv., and bk. xxiv. ch. i.
3 Livingstone's Journeys in South Africa.
4 Lives of Robert and Mary Moffat.
The Boers allowed one or two German missionaries to preach in the
Transvaal, but they would tolerate neither British nor American,
184 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
South Africa, foiled that aim, and maintained the open road
to the interior of the continent.
That man was David Livingstone. 1
David Livingstone, the second child of a large Scots family,
was born on the second floor of a decent tenement-house at
David. Blantyre, near Glasgow, on 19th March 1813. His
sum^ mother was a capable household manager, and a
1813-73. woman withal of sweet and tolerant disposition ;
his father, who traced descent from the Highlanders of the
Isle of Ulva, and one of whose forbears was slain on Culloden
field fighting for the Stuart cause, was a small retail trader
in tea, and a man moreover whose religious convictions
coloured the whole tenor of his life. But neither the creed
nor the industry of the elder Livingstone sufficed to lift the
family from the poor circumstances into which it had fallen ;
and young David therefore, after surviving the usual domestic
accidents of childhood, was sent to work at the age of ten in
the cotton-spinning factory near his home, that his small
earnings might relieve in some degree his mother's anxiety
over the straining family budget. 2
The hours of labour were long and tedious, from six in the
morning till eight at night ; and the lad, who had already
shown a love of reading and an interest in science, seemed
destined to become no more than one of the minor human
cogs in the great wheel of Glasgow industry. Such a fate as
this had crushed or soured the spirit of many a rising youth ;
but Livingstone, who was considered by his mates ' just a
1 The life and work of Livingstone is almost a small literature in itself.
There are biographies by Dr. Blaikie, Hughes and Johnston, all of which
are valuable and based on original material ; but Livingstone's own
works are still the best record : the Journeys in South Africa, The Zambesi
and its Tributaries, and the Last Journals of Livingstone, edited with
care and knowledge by the Rev. Horace Waller, one of the original party
of the Universities' Mission in Nyasa. To these may be added Stanley's
How I found Livingstone in Central Africa.
- Several members of the Livingstone family emigrated to Canada,
like many another Scot of the time. Had David likewise gone, how
different might have been the destinies of Britain in Africa !
TOWARDS THE NORTH * 185
sulky, quiet, feckless boy/ was not to be denied of knowledge
by adverse circumstances. With part of his first week's wages
he bought a Latin grammar ; by improvising a reading-desk
on the spinning-jenny he attended he was able to read even
during working hours ; and when the day's dreary labour
was done he attended evening classes, like other lads of
similar energy and ambition, and often sat far into the night
over his studies, until, as he records, his mother, fearful for
his health, would discover him, and snatch the book from
her son's weary hand.
But after 1836 the Blantyre factory knew Livingstone no
more. Influenced, no doubt, by the monotony of the employ-
ment, he resolved to change his way of life ; impressed
probably by the religious atmosphere of his home, he decided
to adopt the calling of a missionary. But although there
could be no question of his sincerity he found the path of pre-
paration for his career less easy than many a lesser man.
He was burdened at the outset by too great abilities for the
task in hand ; he possessed many qualities not considered
necessary to the professional evangelist, but in the familiar
trappings of the conventional missionary of the day he was
something wanting. He had none of the rather boisterous
piety of the tune ; his delivery as a preacher was hesitating,
and he lacked the unctuous fervency of prayer then considered
fitting in those whose errand was the conversion of the heathen.
For these reasons Livingstone was only accepted as a candi-
date with some demur by the London Missionary Society after
he had taken a short course of general study at Glasgow
University, and spent a term of theological reading and two
years of medical training in London.
Yet this young man, who was destined to become the great-
est of Protestant evangelists, was in truth much more than
this ; for beneath the sober mantle of the missionary beat
the undaunted heart of the adventurer and explorer ; beside
the familiar phrases of the Christian advocate was the patient
186 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
seeking after knowledge of the man of science. He was to
save poor savage souls from darkness and damnation, and
minister to heathen bodies in sickness and distress ; but
beyond this he was to open up the road through Central
Africa, and to be the forerunner, not of Christianity only, but
of the British Empire and of European civilisation in those
dark lands of ignorance which he made known to the world.
A broader, bigger man than his contemporary mission
workers, an idealist who looked for the conversion of the
whole world to Christianity, he realised that the world must
be discovered before it could be converted, and that preaching
was but part of the work before him ; and he possessed not
only the passion for knowledge inherent in the Scot but also
a sturdy common sense and humour, in both which qualities
too many of his missionary colleagues were notably deficient.
Often in his travels was an awkward situation saved by a
timely jest ; and if Livingstone suffered many hard knocks
at the hands of fate, he kept to the last his love of fun, which
triumphed over the momentary irritation of an occasionally
hasty nature ; and with this went a kindly heart, and a broad
and catholic sympathy with all things human.
Even when accepted as a missionary, however, Living-
stone's future career still hung in an uncertain balance. At
first he was inclined to work in China, and only the outbreak
of war between that empire and Britain in 1839 * prevented
him from going to the Far East, and probably spending his
life there. The West Indies were also suggested as a field
for labour, and refused by the young probationer ; it was a
meeting in London with Robert Moffat of Kuruman that
finally decided Livingstone in 1840, and late in the autumn
of that year he sailed for the Cape. Almost at once he crossed
the Orange River, the recognised boundary between the
settled life of the colony and the wilder avocations of the
pioneer ; and it was not long before his thoughts turned to
1 See vol. iv. bk, xv. ch. vi.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 187
exploration. ' What do you say to my going up to Abys-
sinia ? ' he wrote to a friend at this time ; ' I think one may
be quite safe if alone and without anything to excite the
cupidity of the natives. It might be six or seven years before
I should return, but I could soon make known a little of the
blessed plan of mercy to the different tribes on the way ; and
if I should never return, perhaps my life will be as profitably
spent as a forerunner as in any other way. I thank Grod I
have no desire to accumulate money. Whatever way my
life can be best spent to promote the glory of our gracious
God, I feel desirous to do it.' In those few sentences the
whole future of Livingstone's life of missionary-exploration,
even to its lonely end among the tropic swamps of Central
i. Africa, seems to be revealed.
At this time he had no thought of marriage, and indeed he
scoffed openly at the scant attractions of the ladies of the
colony and particularly at the daughters of the missionaries,
who in his opinion had ' miserably contracted minds ' ; but
that kind of talk, in which every young man of marriageable
age is apt to indulge, soon had its customary sequel. In 1844
Livingstone married Mary, the daughter of Eobert Moffat,
a capable woman whom her husband describes as ' not ro-
mantic, a matter-of-fact, little, thick, black-haired girl, sturdy
! and all I want/
The union was one of quiet affection rather than deep
passion ; but in the end the wife had to pay the usual
price of marrying a great man. She took the second place
in his life, and saw herself supplanted by his work. It does
not appear that she complained, and complaint would have
led to his unhappiness for he loved her as well as hers ;
but in the long years of solitude that were to come
she may have realised that fame is not won without some
sacrifice.
At Mabotsa among the Bechuana people Livingstone built
I a house for his bride with his own hands ; and here for five
188
years he stayed, preaching and teaching not without success
among the natives of that country. 1
It was his first, and indeed, his only permanent home, for
soon his thoughts were turned again towards the north and
His First exploration. Marriage had but delayed a little
Journey the great work of discovery to which his life was
tn, 18*9. now to j^ Dedicated ; and in June 1849 Living-
stone began his first expedition into the unknown interior,
travelling northwards with two English sportsmen to test the
truth of the native tales of a great lake whose name of Ngami
was said to mark its curious resemblance to the shape of a
giraffe. 2 The route thither lay through the barren dreary
Kalahari country, a place that was almost desert, 3 a land
of dry and glistening salt-pans, of the kind that had so often
disappointed travellers in Australia with their evidence of
desiccation.
In these desolate and forbidding territories few people lived ;
but two months of this dismal travel brought the party to
the shores of Lake Ngami. Its waters were slightly brackish,
save when the lake was full after the rainy season ;
there was clear evidence that its expanse had shrunk,
and was indeed still shrinking ; but still it remained a
1 On one of Livingstone's journeys this house was raided and burnt by
the Boers, and his library destroyed. Paul Kruger, afterwards President
of the Transvaal Republic, was one of the raiding party. The excuse
or the reason for the act, as given by Kruger in his Memoirs, was that
Livingstone had supplied the native chief Sechele with arms.
2 Ngami is the nearest equivalent of a Bushman word meaning
giraffe ; Tletle, the Bechuana name of the lake, means the same. The
resemblance in shape is rather fanciful, but the lake has shrunk con-
siderably in size since the name was given.
3 Livingstone noticed, however, when crossing it that the desert once
had wells and water, and even yet had a good deal of insect life, while
it was still a refuge for beaten tribes that had been driven by stronger
races from more fertile countries.
Major Gibbons, who travelled through this country fifty years later,
says it was wilderness rather than desert, some parts being well wooded
and having good pasture fit for occupation.
The word Kalahari derives from the Sechuana tongue, meaning
Saltpans.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 189
insiderable sheet, and the human eye could nowhere see
across its surface. 1
After a short examination of its shores the explorers struck
back homewards ; but during the next five years Livingstone
and his companions made other journeys to Ngami ; and in
time the conviction forced itself upon them that the lake was
the head of a large river system, probably the southernmost
of a considerable chain of inland seas of which some rumour
had long since been heard. If that were so, it was clear that
a new and better country lay beyond the Bechuana desert
a land of plenty and perhaps profusion, a fertile and well-
watered territory reaching to the tropics.
Here was work for explorer and adventurer, and, since
these lands were certainly peopled by more than the scanty
population of Bechuana tribes, work too for the evangelist.
In that conviction Livingstone went forward to search out
the secrets of the interior ; with those ends in view, he
plunged into that new world.
On one of these early journeys Livingstone and his com-
panions greeted Sebituani, the great chief of the Makololo,
who had established his power and one of the He visits
unstable native empires of Africa within the last Barotsi-
few years over the Ngami countries and controlled
the Barotsi valley of the upper Zambesi. A great conqueror,
and a man of some administrative talent as well as military
genius, he had made himself feared and respected even by his
enemy and rival, Mosilikatsi of the terrible Matabili ; but,
unlike this mighty neighbour, Sebituani was famed for the
kindness of his disposition and the lenity of his rule. He
knew something of the white men by report, 2 and, since he
1 In 1896 the traveller Passarge found that all the water on Ngami had
disappeared, and only swamps and reeds remained. It may, of course,
have been an exceptionally dry season.
2 Livingstone found that white traders and hunters for ivory had
already made their way to the north of Lake Ngami. He notes that
they were able to purchase ten good large tusks at the price of u,
190 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
desired to have converse and trade with them, he sent messages
of friendship to these travellers in his country. Unhappily he
died soon after their first visit, but his son, a lad of eighteen,
who reigned in his father's stead, 1 was not less friendly.
Livingstone was now on the eve of his first great discovery.
On the return journey from the court of Sebituani, in June
He crosses 1851, he sighted the Zambesi River at Sesheke.
the The discovery was made at the end of the dry
season, when the waters were at their lowest ;
yet even then the stream was from three to six hundred yards
wide, and it was evident from this that the Zambesi, which
had been thought to rise much farther to the eastward, was
one of the great waterways of the world.
The discovery 'of the Zambesi led to the first of Living-
stone's great journeys. With his friends the Makololo and
a modest outfit of clothes and stores and goods for barter, he
struck westward up the river, and right across Angola. ' We
marched along with our father/ said his loyal native followers,
' believing what the ancients had always told us was true, that
the world has no end ; but all at once the world said to us,
" I am finished ; there is no more of me ! " It was the sea
that lay before them, the broad Atlantic Ocean and the Portu-
guese capital of St. Paulo de Loanda.
A brief rest in Loanda, and Livingstone turned back with
the Makololo to the Zambesi. An attack of rheumatic fever
the first serious illness he had had in Africa delayed them
awhile as they passed through the dense tropical forest ; but
after weeks of steady travel Livingstone at last led his party
safely back to the Barotsi Valley and the Zambesi early in
1855. They were received as those that return from tl
musket worth 13s., a rate which left ample profit, even when the heavj
transport charges and the risks of the trade were taken into cor
sideration.
1 This lad only reigned till 1864, and at his death his father's em pi
fell to pieces, after the manner of all the unstable states of savaj
See chap. vi. of this book.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 191
dead, with joy and astonishment ; but Livingstone would not
stay with his friends the Makololo. He had determined to
cross the continent from west to east a feat no white man
had yet performed. 1
The journey began on 3rd November 1855, and for some
time it lay through scenes so lovely that they must, said
Livingstone, have been gazed upon by angels in their flight ;
and then, almost suddenly, they came upon the great falls
of the Zambesi, where the black basalt bed in which the river
runs is cracked and riven, and the whole stream takes a flying
leap of three hundred feet downwards. Here, on one of the
islands almost on the verge of the cataract, where the waters
steady themselves for their fall through space, and their rising
spray overspreads the air in a cloud that forms an unending
rainbow, the native chiefs would come to worship ; this stupen-
dous chasm was the natural abode of their rude deities, and
the eternal rainbow which circled above was called the pestle
of the gods, the very emblem of supernatural power and
mystery which none might touch.
Livingstone gazed long at the magnificent spectacle, which
he named the Victoria Falls 2 in honour of his sovereign, before
he proceeded downstream.
The Lee-am-bye ! Nobody knows
Whither it comes and whither it goes,
n the native canoe-song ; 3 none had yet explored the full
1 The Portuguese claimed to have done so, and even to have estab-
lished a chain of communications between Angola and Mozambique.
Had they done so they would have stayed the northward expansion of
the British Empire in South Africa, and altered the whole course of
African history. But Livingstone had no difficulty in disproving their
claim.
' 2 The more poetic native name wa's Mosio-a-tunga ' The place where
smoke sounds.'
y The name Lee-am-bye was the Barotsi title for the Zambesi. The
word signifies the Great River.
It must be noted that Livingstone did not discover the actual source
of the Zambesi, which was unknown until Major Gibbons discovered it
in 1898, in a black spongy bog, six miles from where the Congo takes
its rise.
192 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
length of the Zambesi from source to mouth, and day by day
Livingstone came upon new country and unknown people.
His little expedition lived by hunting the big game which was
found in plenty in the magnificent Zambesi Valley ; per-
mission was asked to hunt from the chieftains along the
banks, and tribute was scrupulously paid by the offering of
part of the prey to these local rulers, in accordance with the
custom of the country. By these means Livingstone passed
in safety, and gained for the English a good name in a bar-
barous but not unfriendly land. 1
At length, after weeks of travel, they came upon the first
sign of the Portuguese colonies of East Africa at Zumbo. It
was no more than a few stone ruins, the remains of a church,
and on one side a broken bell with the sacred letters I.H.S.
stamped upon it with a cross a melancholy record of aban-
donment and failure, of a decaying empire and a lost outpost
of Christianity. 2 But even this abandoned outpost was a sign
that the travellers were coming near to European settlement
once more ; a day or so later Livingstone chanced upon some
native subjects of the Portuguese, and finally he fetched up
in the old Portuguese colonial town of Tete on 3rd March 1856.
The remaining course of the Zambesi to the sea was already
generally known to the Portuguese traders, and these lower
reaches of the river could have few surprises even for the
.
1 That good name stood the English in good stead forty years later,
when these Zambesi countries became part of the British Empire as
Northern Rhodesia. See ch. vi.
2 Livingstone was too great a man to cavil at a form of Christianity
other than that which he professed. Unlike many of his fellow-
missionaries of Protestantism, he recognised the value of the Jesuits'
work in South Africa; and in one remarkable passage, written at Rio
de Janeiro on his way out to South Africa, he said : ' The [Catholic]
Church [here] is beautiful. If ever I join an establishment, it will not
be the poor degenerate sisters at home, but the good mother herself ii
Brazil. '
He was not unrewarded for his tribute to the Jesuits. Many year
afterwards, an English traveller found that the grave of Mrs. Livingstone
at Shupanga was being carefully tended by that order. (Gibbons
Africa from South to North, 1904.)
TOWARDS THE NORTH 193
stranger ; and after resting for awhile at Tete, Livingstone
proceeded in leisurely fashion to Quilimane, where he arrived
two months later.
The great journey from west to east of the continent had
added largely to geographical knowledge, and Livingstone's
minute observations of natural conditions and of the human
and animal inhabitants of these regions increased enormously
the value of his discoveries ; but the real importance of his
work was far more even than this. By his journey from
Angola to Quilimane, down the whole length of the Zambesi,
if not actually along its whole course, 1 and through the heart
of what is now the British colony of Rhodesia, he had changed
the whole future of South Africa. For the great mission road
from the Orange River to the north, which had been deflected
from its course by the savage Matabili and menaced by the
Transvaal Boers, was now again extended inland. The emigrant
Cape Dutch reached no farther than the Limpopo on their
northward trek, and the Matabili had never spread across the
broad waters of the Zambesi, but Livingstone's journey from
the old outpost of Robert Moffat at Kuruman to his own first
home at Mabotsa, and onwards to Lake Ngami and the Zam-
besi, had outflanked both Boers and Matabili. From that
day the mission road and the British road to the north reached
as far as the great river that divides South Africa from the
full tropics. And presently it reached even farther. For the
fever of adventure and discovery still fired David Livingstone ;
and after a short visit to England where he was received
with the honour which was his due he returned to South
Africa to press into the very heart of the tropics, hoping
perhaps even to decide that ancient riddle as to the sources
of the Nile and to fulfil the boast of his young manhood,
1 Livingstone made several short cuts in his journey, often leaving
the stream to explore and joining it lower down. The first definite
chart of the river was drawn up by Major Gibbons in 1899 : see his book,
Africa from Sotith to North.
VOL. VI. N
194 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
that he should reach Abyssinia. It was this riddle that in
the end led him to his death.
Before starting on this journey Livingstone had severed his
connection with the London Missionary Society, and entered
The Dis- *he sery i ce f the British Government as Consul
covery of for Zambesia. For this change of employment he
yasa, 8 wag cr j^j c j se( j j^ some o f those miserable, petty-
minded people whose jaundiced pleasure it is to vent their
spleen upon great men ; but Livingstone remained at heart
a missionary as well as an explorer to the end of his days.
None that have read the private entries of his last diaries
can doubt the reality of his interest in religious propaganda ;
and his defence against detraction of this kind was both
adequate and admirable in temper. ' Nowhere have I ever
appeared/ he wrote, ' as anything else but a servant of God,
who has simply followed the leadings of His Hand. My views
of what is missionary duty are not so contracted as those
whose ideal is a dumpy sort of man with a Bible under his arm.
I have laboured in bricks and mortar, at the forge and car-
penter's bench, as well as in preaching and medical practice.
I am serving Christ when shooting a buffalo for my men, or
taking an astronomical observation, or/ as he added with
gentle sarcasm, ' writing to those who forget that charity
which is eulogised as " thinking no evil."
Accompanied on this journey by his wife and a few chosen
friends, Livingstone entered the Zambesi at its delta in May
1858. A steamer had been chartered it proved a wretched
failure for the work of river exploration and it was Living-
stone's intention to make his way up the Zambesi as far as
the great tributary which he had noticed on his previous visit,
and then to sail up that stream, which the Portuguese called
the Shire, until he should reach the great lake in which it rose,
and of which several vague rumours had reached him on his
previous travels. The work began, and soon Livingstone
was on the very threshold of the marvellous country of Nyasa,
TOWARDS THE NORTH 195
the country which was yet to bear his name ; but for awhile
it eluded search. The travellers had to return to the junction
of the Shire with the Zambesi, to quiet the suspicions of the
hostile tribes along its banks, and finally to go back to the
Portuguese town of Tete, where the previous transcontinental
expedition had ended. On their way they passed the great
cataracts of the Shire River, naming them after the President
of the English Royal Geographical Society, Sir Roderick
Murchison, who had shown Livingstone much kindness ; and
in the March of 1859 they tried again.
Landing at Chibusa near Katanga (afterwards known as
Port Blantyre) they left their wretched, leaking vessel here,
and began the overland tramp in the direction where they
supposed the lake to lie ; but the great waters of Nyasa again
escaped them. Instead they lighted on Lake Shirwa, a small
and brackish sheet, but this was clearly not the vast inland
sea they sought. Again they pressed onwards, through the
beautiful and fertile country of the Shire Highlands ; and at
length they halted for inquiries. But the natives whom
they asked the way misunderstood, and denied all knowledge
of the lake. They knew, they said, nothing more than the
river, which was two moons' journey long, and which sprang
from perpendicular rocks that reached almost to the skies.
Further conversation made the matter clear ; the native word
for lake and river was the same, and the lake itself was but a
few hours' distant. The march was at once resumed, and the
following day, at noon on 16th September 1859, David
Livingstone and his party stood on the shores of Lake Nyasa
the first Europeans to set eyes on that great sheet of water.
Little more was done on this first visit, for some members
of the expedition had been left at Chibusa, and Livingstone
was uncertain of their safety. He returned, and ^^ NyaBa
the remaining months of 1859 and the whole of Mission,
1860 were spent exploring the Shire and Zambesi
rivers, Livingstone pushing his way up the latter stream until
196 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS
lie reached the Victoria Falls and revisited his old friends the
Makololo of the Barotsi Valley. Not until 1861 was attention
given again to Lake Nyasa ; but by now new hopes had
formed. A party of pioneer evangelists under Bishop Mac-
kenzie of the Universities' Mission, an institution which had
sprung from the enthusiasm roused by Livingstone's last visit
home, had arrived on the Zambesi ; and these devoted men
prepared to spend their lives in planting Christianity among
the tribes that dwelt by the shores of Lake Nyasa. 1
Hopes now ran high, enthusiasm knew no bounds ; another
great extension of the mission road to the north seemed cer-
tainly assured. To these first pioneers of their
creed the splendid vision that all Central Africa
should worship Christ appeared a promise of the immediate
future : but disaster followed in the train of hope, as the
clouds of evening will obscure the late declining sun of a
summer day. The mission was planted in due course at
Chibusa, and Livingstone went forward to explore the lake.
He reached nearly to its northern limit, and then returned ;
but as he came back south fate struck two cruel blows.
Mackenzie and his companion Burrup were both dead of
fever at Chibusa ; and Mary Livingstone, who had parted
from her husband on his journey and had been joyfully await-
ing his return, was likewise dead of fever at Shupanga on 27th
April 1862. From that double loss, of wife and comrades,
the great traveller never recovered.
The last lonely journey of Livingstone was a long-drawn
tragedy, a seven years' solitary fight with danger and disease
en ded but with death. Almost from the
The Last
Journey, start from Zanzibar in 1866 misfortunes came ;
luck seemed now to have turned her back upon
the old explorer, as against one who sought too large a share
of the traveller's renown. The Sikhs who had been brought
1 For the Universities' Mission, see also vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. ii. ; anc
ch. vi. of this book.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 197
from India to accompany Livingstone into the interior proved
unsatisfactory and insubordinate. They disliked the country,
were lazy on the march, they would not work, and in the end
deserted, returning to the coast and spreading far a lying
story of their master's death so circumstantial that many
believed, and that indeed was only disproved after a relief
expedition had gained certain tidings of his movements. The
African native boys who served with Livingstone were better
servants ; but a more serious disaster than the desertion of
his followers soon touched him. The medicine-chest, the only
refuge of the traveller against the fevers that haunt the
swamps of the interior, was lost ; but Livingstone, instead
of turning back to renew his stock of drugs, plunged on with
Scottish doggedness into the unknown, facing the risk, which
amounted almost to a certainty, of illness with no remedies
at hand. It was not long before insulted Nature claimed
revenge for the old pioneer's neglect of proper precautions.
Soon indeed he fell ill of fever, aggravated by hgemorrhoids,
and from that illness his tough but now overtaxed consti-
tution never quite recovered. Travelling became a dreadful
toil : Livingstone grew so weak that he could hardly walk ;
at times he had to let his men carry him in a rough Utter, and
occasionally, when the least motion was too painful to be
borne, to lie up for days and weeks together. Fretting at the
enforced delay, the impatient traveller spent the time as best
he could in making scientific and natural observations, in
studying the Bible he read the whole of both Testaments
through from beginning to end four times in one of these
lonely years and in thinking of retirement to his native
Scotland when the work of this last journey was finished.
The work was to be left unfinished at the end ; but that
last tragedy of a great career was mercifully hidden from him
as he mused of quiet years and the evening of life's restless
day ahead. It was largely this thought of returning home
that upheld him in recurrent sickness, but a nobler motive
198 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
was not lacking. ' The sweat of one's brow is no longer a
curse when one works for God/ wrote the tired wanderer in
the wilderness, finely and with truth. With the fancy of a
dying man his thoughts turned to his birthplace ; but some-
times the over-weary traveller would hope for rest at once
and where he stood. ' I felt as if dying on my feet/ he said
after one dreary march ; another time he cried in utter ex-
haustion, ' I should like to he here in the still, still forest, and
no hand ever disturb my bones/ Yet there were days when
that indomitable spirit seemed as fresh and young as ever,
the only anxiety whether health and life would remain while
the great journey was completed. ' May God Almighty help
me to finish my work this year for Christ's sake/ was written
in his diary one New Year's Day ; it was but one of several
like prayers.
But the slowly lengthening shadow of approaching death
lay over all this journey. Again and again he was weak with
fever, and once even that brave spirit records that he was
frightened at his own emaciation ; at times the sensation of
singing in his ears was almost unbearable, so persistent that
he could not hear the loud tick of the chronometers. Nothing
but copious bleeding from the haemorrhoids gave relief, and
even this was only temporary. The unhappy man was slowly
bleeding to death but still he prayed for life and strength
to complete his task. ' May the Good Lord of all help me
to show myself one of His stout-hearted servants, an honour
to my children and perhaps to my country and race/ cried
Livingstone towards the end. That prayer at least was
answered before ever it was made.
From the start, too, this last journey was a sad one. Old
memories of sorrow and bereavement were awakened in
Nyasa : ' Many hopes have been disappointed here/ wrote
Livingstone as he passed through that country. ' Far down
on the right bank of the Zambesi lies the dust of her whose
death changed all my future prospects ' in such tender
TOWARDS THE NORTH 199
phrase did the old traveller refer to the wife he had lost years
before ; and later in the journey is one brief pathetic entry in
the homely Scots dialect of his youth : ' Poor Mary lies on
Shupanga Brae, and beeks foment the sun.' Very soon now
the husband was to follow.
Here too lay other hopes entombed. ' Good Bishop
Mackenzie sleeps far down the Shire River, and with him all
hope of the Gospel being introduced in Central Africa/ Had
Livingstone seen twenty years ahead, he would have found
that Christianity, after this first disaster in Nyasa, had begun
to spread and flourish in that country ; but the results of the
work were hidden from its author, and the untimely death of
poor Mackenzie in the first flush of enthusiasm made a wound
that was hard to heal.
In other ways the journey was a sad one. The appalling
miseries of the African people, and the horrors of the slave-
trade ' the open sore of the world/ as Living- Mlaery of
stone called it in a phrase that has become historic central
likewise touched him deeply ; his utter helpless-
ness to relieve those whom he saw suffering day by day preyed
hard on that compassionate spirit. The horrors which he
witnessed were indeed enough to move a heart of stone to
tears. Village after village was empty and deserted, and a
whole countryside would be devoid of population ; sometimes
nothing but the remains of broken pottery showed where men
had lived ; in other places hundreds of grinning skulls and
unburied bones lay scattered in confusion, where native war
or alien slave-raiders had turned a fertile land to ruin. Or
they would cross the route of an Arab caravan, and find the
bodies of slaves but lately dead ' a woman tied by the neck
to a tree and dead ; the people of the country explained that
she had been unable to keep up with the other slaves in a
gang. We saw others tied up in similar manner, and one
lying in the path shot or stabbed/
Day after day these ghastly sights were seen ; at other times
200 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
it might be a slave-market, where the captives stood around
in rows, their teeth examined by prospective purchasers, the
cloth around the loins lifted to prove the lower limbs, and a
stick thrown to a distance for the slave to fetch and thus
show his paces. 1
Slavery and the hand of the slave-raider were indeed every-
where in Nyasa ; the whole country was rotten with slavery.
And the memory of these sights, of a fair country given over
to human devils, burnt and scarred itself on Livingstone's
memory : in the last year of his life he would start up from
sleep at night, affrighted by the nightmare of some cruel deed
he had seen long since. ' I am heartsore, and sick of human
blood/ he cried wearily near the end.
But far beyond Nyasa was found the Arab slaver. Living-
stone pressed onwards to the north, and in time, on 31st March
Livingstone 1867, he stood upon the shores of Tanganyika, the
Tangan great lake lying still and peaceful in a scene of
yika, 1867. surpassing tropic beauty ; 2 but here, too, the
slave-hunt was in vogue the grip of the Arab hand was
everywhere. And when Livingstone turned westward, sore
in spirit, to explore those great forests in the heart of Africa
where the Congo takes its rise, he found another curse upon
the people. Here the horrid rites of cannibalism were in
vogue ; in a land of natural plenty men boasted openly that
they lived on human flesh and loved its flavour. 3 There
seemed indeed no end to the iniquities of Africa.
1 If the slave was a woman, Livingstone noticed that she was taken
into a hut to be examined closely.
2 The waters of Tanganyika are shrinking, as are those of other
African lakes, but it is still a great sheet of water. ' It is extremely
probable,' says J. E. S. Moore in The Tanganyika Problem, an admirable
book, 'that the shrinkage of the upper waters of the Nile, which is
recorded in history, is still going on, and is directly due to recent changes
in the modern volcanic dam between Kivu and the Albert Edward
Nyanza. '
Major Gibbons (Africa from South to North) suggests that Tanganyika
was sinking at the rapid rate of six inches every year.
3 Livingstone records the native opinion that ' human flesh was saltish,
and needed little condiment.' The cannibals of the Pacific Islands, on the
TOWARDS THE NORTH 201
Through all these scenes and disappointments Livingstone
was upheld by the iron spirit of his race and that unquench-
able love of knowledge which made his now shaking and un-
steady hand note the tiniest scrap of information on some
poor diary made of torn newspaper, storing it for safety in
the battered old tin trunk that accompanied him on every
march. Nor did he lose the sense of humour l and the great
sympathy with humanity which made him loved among all
these people. ' She is somebody's bairn/ was the excuse for
a kindness to some ebony daughter of Africa, with a parent's
thought of his children at home ; and once he recorded, with
a touch of the tenderness that lurked in that stout heart, a
dainty vision of happiness among these scenes of blood. One
day the expedition halted to inquire the way ; and as they
stayed the march they saw a newly-married couple looking
on, ' with arms around each other very lovingly, and no one
joked or poked fun at them ' a little gem of silent bliss in a
vast barbaric setting.
Month after month Livingstone pursued his way, hoping
still to light upon the sources of the Nile, and to float down
its broad waters towards the north, past Abyssinia the
waking dream of early days and on through the slave-ridden
Sudan to Egypt. The quest was vain. He did not know,
although the horrid fear at times beset him, that the great
River Lualaba, which he reached, would lead him to the Congo,
other hand, held that it was sweet, and refused to touch the European
because they found, by experience, that he was both tough and salt.
Tot homines. . . . But it is said that the unfortunate Pacific Islanders
were misled as to the succulence of the white man because they forgot
to remove the Wellington boots from one of their captives, and the
stout leather leggings were too much even for barbaric stomachs.
1 Livingstone comments in his diary on the fact that the Ptolemaic
map of Africa classified people according to their food Elephantophagi,
Anthropophagi, etc. ' If we followed the same classification,' he laughs,
' our definition would be the tribe of stout-guzzlers, the roaring potheen-
fuddlers, the whisky fishoid drinkers, the vin-ordinaire bibbers, the
lager-beer swillers, and an outlying tribe of the brandy-cocktail
persuasion,'
202 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
not the Nile ; that life's last hope was no great truth to be
discovered, but a mocking and delusive mirage that was
leading him to death. An attempt was made to turn him
from his course : Henry Morton Stanley headed an expedition
to search for and relieve the old traveller, who seemed to have
been lost for years in Central Africa, and for whose safety grave
concern was now felt in England. He both found and relieved
Livingstone ; but no persuasion availed to make him quit
his work ; and once more he pressed forward, spent and
weary, emaciated by persistent fever and continual bleeding,
in the belief that he should find the sources of the Nile in
the network of lakes and swamps where the Congo takes
its rise.
Perhaps it was well he stayed in Africa. Had he returned
to Europe, he would have chafed and fretted at thought
of the unfinished task ; in Africa he could but die at
his post like a gallant man who has shouldered too heavy
a burden. And death was now hastening her steps to-
wards him. ' By 1874 I shall complete my task and return/
he wrote hopefully in his diary ; but by 1874 he was already
dead.
Early in 1873 his strength began to fail very rapidly. The
poison of continuous fever was eating steadily into his vitality ;
His Death and the expedition had now come to a land which
Africa* 1 * 1 wou ld have tried the most vigorous health. Per-
1873. sistent rains had made the Lualaba and the great
Lake Bangweolo overflow their banks for miles ; the whole
country was one vast spreading swamp, an unending sponge
from which the travellers could not escape. In April Living-
stone reached the southern shores if shores they could be
called, when land and water joined in one enormous swamp
of Bangweolo. Here he camped at the village, called after
its chief, Chitambo, and here he rested. He was pitiably
weak ' knocked up quite/ as the last feeble entry in his diary,
on 27th April, reluctantly admits. His native servants were
TOWARDS THE NORTH 203
alarmed, and they did what they could to relieve him ; but
he was now past relief.
The great traveller had made his last earthly journey. On
the evening of 30th April he managed, with assistance, to
wind his watch. A little later, in the early hours of 1st May,
one of the servants entered his hut and found his master risen
from his bed. He was kneeling, the hands were clasped
beneath the head, the body bent forward in an attitude of
prayer. The servant paused a moment, unwilling to disturb
his master's communion with the unseen powers. Then he
came forward, and reverently touched his cheek. It was
cold : the end had come.
David Livingstone was dead. In the words of a great
Elizabethan dramatist, his wearied outworn body ' was but
giving over of a game that must be lost ' ; 1 but he had played
the game with zest, and lost at last with honour.
The faithful frightened servants, as loyal to their master in
his death as during life, now held a consultation. They deter-
mined to restore the body of the great white traveller to his
own people, to carry the remains overland to Zanzibar,
together with all the personal belongings, the instruments,
and notebooks of their late leader. First they embalmed the
corpse by drying it in the sun and anointing it with brandy
the remains were hardly more than skin and bone, the
mere shell of the man that had been then to avert suspicion
they concealed the body in the hollowed trunk of a tree, and
carried it down to the coast in this wise. Thence it was borne
to England, and, the native servants still attending, buried
with all honour in Westminster Abbey.
But the heart of the man who had so loved Africa that
he gave his whole life to Africa they rightly claimed
for Africa, burying it where he died, at Chitambo's village
on the southern shores of Bangweolo. And there it rests
for ever.
1 Philaster, by Ben Joiison.
204 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Livingstone died with his work broken and incomplete ;
the vision of a highway through the continent, from Cape
Results of Town to Cairo, which had been his waking dream
Ms work. as it was to be that of Cecil Rhodes, was not accom-
plished fact. But he had opened the unknown interior to the
evangelist and trader ; Tanganyika and Nyasa and the great
Zambesi were now clearly marked upon the maps ; a new world
was added to the old, a world of which its people were unworthy,
and which quickly passed to other rulers. And Livingstone
had not only discovered this new world ; he had fired his
countrymen with the desire to possess it. He had been the
pathfinder alike for Christianity and the British Empire, and
others now followed in his steps. Less than a generation
after he had died, the evangelisation and colonisation of
Central Africa by white men had begun.
' The end of the geographical feat/ said Livingstone in a
definitive sentence, ' is the beginning of the missionary enter-
prise ' ; and never was missionary enterprise more needed
than in these lands he had discovered, whose savage people
were terrorised by the bloody raids of Arab slavers. The
whole Nyasa country indeed was ' completely disorganised/
wrote its discoverer ; ' we counted thirty-two dead bodies
floating down the Shire River, and scarcely a soul was to be
seen in the lower Shire valley. Where last year we could
purchase any amount of provisions at the cheapest rates, we
could (now) see but a few starving wretches, fishing and
collecting the seeds of grass. I have never witnessed such a
change. It is a desert, and dead bodies lie everywhere/
' A new system must be introduced with a strong hand/
added Livingstone ; but while Khama's country of the
Bamangwato was evangelised, 1 the miserable people of
Nyasa had to wait another twenty years after those
words were written before the strong hand came to rescue
them.
1 See bk. xxv.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 205
Yet the death of Livingstone had brought this matter to
decision ; his death, indeed, was the source of new life to
Nyasa. The first mission of Mackenzie had failed, and many
still doubted of success ; but to the Free Church of Scotland,
the denomination to which Livingstone had belonged, it was
nothing short of a sacred duty to carry on his work.
Nor was the spirit lacking for the task. ' Let us plant, as the
truest memorial/ said one of the leaders of that Church in
council, ' an institution at once industrial and T Q6 Found-
educational, to teach the truths of the Gospel and ^8 of
the arts of civilised life ; let us place it on a care- stonia,
fully selected and commanding spot in Central 1875 -
Africa, where, from its position and capabilities, it might
grow into a town, and afterwards into a city, and become a
centre of commerce, civilisation, and Christianity. And this
place we shall call Livingstonia/
It was a noble and inspiring vision, the only adequate
memorial to David Livingstone. All Scotland rose with en-
thusiasm to the opportunity, funds were subscribed in plenty,
evangelists offered and were chosen ; and within two years
of the explorer's death these followers of Livingstone had
started on their long journey to raise their permanent
memorial on the shores of Lake Nyasa.
The way through Central Africa was still uncertain, the
navigation of the Zambesi and the swifter-flowing Shire
River was no easy work, and the reception which awaited
them unknown ; but the expedition pushed on steadily
towards its goal. A little steamer, the Ilala, had been pro-
vided for the work ; and at last, at sunrise on the 12th October
1875, the mission vessel pushed its way from the river out
into the broad, deep waters of the Lake Nyasa.
Here, on the white sandy beach of Cape Maclear, 1 a beautiful
spot at the southern end of the lake, the expedition stayed ;
1 The name had been given by Livingstone, after his friend the
astronomer- royal at Cape Town.
206
and here, under the direction of Dr. Kobert Laws, no un-
worthy follower of Livingstone, the work began. From that
memorable day Christianity never lost its hold on Nyasa.
A few months after this first European settlement was
founded at the foot of Lake Nyasa, another Christian mission
Biantyre in came ; and here again its origin was Scotland,
Highlands anc ^ ^ s inspiration David Livingstone. The
1875. Established Church of Scotland, stirred like the
Free Church by the example of the evangelist-explorer of
Central Africa, had decided to plant a mission station in those
wild majestic highlands through which the Shire Kiver flows
on its hurried course from great Nyasa to Zambesi ; and this
station was to be called Biantyre, in memory of the old Scots
home of Livingstone's boyhood. For once all rivalry between
two Christian bodies was laid aside ; the missionaries of the
Established Church accompanied their brethren bound for
Cape Maclear, and years after the settlement of this new
Biantyre in the tropics was begun, communion between the
two was close and cordial.
The site of Biantyre proved admirably chosen, and in time
this little mission station became the capital of a British
Tne colony ; * but before that day Christianity had
Advance to pushed its way still further forward through the
and interior. The Universities' Mission, whose first
Zanzibar. effort in Nyasa had so tragically failed, returned
to the scene of its early labours ; a Christian station was
opened by its people at Newala in 1883, another at Likoma
three years later ; and after a terrible fight with the Arab
slavers all along Lake Nyasa and beyond, the path which
Livingstone had made was opened as a road for civilisation
to Tanganyika and on to Zanzibar.
And through all these years of trial and struggle and
occasional discouragement Robert Laws of Livingstonia had
1 For the Nyasa mission and the founding of British Central Africa,
see ch. vi. of this book.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 207
stayed and striven for the mission he had founded, while
friends and comrades in the work were stricken down by
fever, returning home to die, or dying by his side at Lake
Nyasa for the infant church in Central Africa soon had its
toll of dead. Laws was indeed the last great missionary
pioneer of Central Africa ; but he was the last, not because
the breed of Moffat and Livingstone was extinct, but because
the work of the pioneer in those parts was done.
Such were the missionaries and the mission work during
three generations in South Africa. In that time they had
spread from the coast to the far interior, from The open
the southern ocean across river and desert and Road
nn r through
mountain to the great lakes m the middle of central
the continent and to the eastern ocean again ; Africa -
and they had left their mark upon the maps of Africa, on the
history of its exploration, on its native polity, and on its
European development.
These were the actual pioneers of the northern interior
for the Boers who trekked to the central uplands did but
follow the British missionary across the Orange and the Vaal
and it was the British, not the emigrant Cape Dutch, who
went first and furthest on the great road towards the north.
' The Boers resolved to shut up the interior ; and I/ wrote
Livingstone, ' determined to open the country. We shall see
who has been most successful/
Within ten years after Livingstone's death that question
had been settled for ever. The missionaries were still pushing
onwards towards the north, but a vast army of traders and
miners had entered the land they had disputed with the Boers,
and in the hunt for its new-found wealth the stability of the
little Dutch Republics had Begun to fail.
The Boers had attempted to undo the messengers of God,
but they were themselves undone by the seekers after
mammon.
208 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
CHAPTER III
THE LUST OF MAMMON : 1867-95 l
HARD upon the feet of the messengers of God came the seekers
after Mammon. They came in two divisions, the diamond
diggers and the gold-miners ; sixteen years separated the
two ; but when they came and stayed they changed the future
of South Africa. A field of carbon and a bed of quartz
precipitated a revolution.
The belief that mineral wealth existed in South Africa was
not indeed new. The fabled land of Monomotapa and the
. . supposititious Ophir, 2 whose vast store of precious
tae Exist- metals was rumoured to lie concealed somewhere
ence.of in the far northern interior, had attracted many
Precious . .
Metals in an expedition from Cape Town in the days of the
old Dutch dominion. But the promised riches
had ever eluded those who sought them ; and one
pioneer after another returned disillusioned from his excursion
into the unknown.
1 Original accounts of early Kiraberley are numerous. The best is
Boyle, To the Cape for Diamonds (1873) ; Algar's Diamond Fields (1872)
is less full; Warren, On the Veldt in the 'Seventies (1902), a useful book.
To these may be added Angove, In the Early Days : Pioneer Life in the
South African Diamond Fields (1910) ; Payton, The Diamond Diggings ;
Bryce, hnfrressions of South Africa ; and Streeter, History of Diamond*.
The literature of the gold fields is more ample. Among other works
may be mentioned, Baines, Gold Region* of South- East Africa ; Mather,
A Glimpse of the Gold Fields (1884), and Void Fields of South Africa
(1887); Ingram, The Land of Gold, Diamonds, and Ivory', Langland,
The Golden Transvaal, a valuable record ; Strecker, Auf den Diamante
und Gold f elden Siid Afrikas (1901); Goldman, The Witwatersrand Gold
Fields (1892), states the capital and output of each mine, and I have to
thank the author of that work, now M.P. for Falmouth, for some
information of old Johannesburg.
The political results of the discovery of gold and diamonds are dis-
cussed in bk. xxvi. ch. i.
2 I have read somewhere that on an old map of the middle eighteenth
century the words, ' Here be diamonds,' are written across the Griqua
country. A lucky guess, probably founded on a native report that, for
TOWARDS THE NORTH 209
Notwithstanding these failures, single gems were picked up
from time to time in the basin of the Vaal and Orange rivers,
either by the natives or by stray European travellers ; the
agate, the onyx, the amethyst, and the garnet are mentioned
as having been found ; and one Dutchman not only discovered
gold in Transvaal, but publicly proclaimed the fact, in the year
1854. But nothing came of the announcement ; and for some
time longer the gold and diamonds of South Africa remained
undisturbed.
A mere chance led to the discovery of diamonds. Some
children were seen playing with bright stones in the Hope
Town district in the year 1867 ; they were quite Accidental
ignorant of the fact that these brilliant pebbles Discovery
were diamonds, perhaps they did not even know Diamonds,
the excessive and indeed absurd value which men 1867<
place upon those stones. In any case, they gave one of their
playthings to a passer-by who, to his honour, offered to pay,
but payment for the bauble was refused and the stone was
found, when tested, to be a pure diamond, which was exhibited
and sold for 500.
The event aroused some curiosity, and a few expectant
parties of adventurers made their way up-country to try their
fortune in searching for diamonds along the rivers, Tne
whose waters were supposed to have washed Diamond
the gems downstream from their original beds. 1 ever> *
They had some success, and in May 1870 a parcel of diamonds
was brought into Maritzburg from the Vaal River, the value
of which, in the market conditions of the day, was estimated
once in a way, happened to be correct, and the fact that an occasional
diamond was brought down to Cape Town by the aborigines.
1 A native superstition declared that snakes with diamonds on their
heads sometimes went down to the Vaal River to bathe, and left the
diamonds on the banks of the stream, where they were found by the
aborigines and Europeans. The legend is mentioned in Warren's On the
Veldt in the 'Seventies ; it may be compared with the old English tradition,
to which Shakespeare refers, that another reptile, the toad, wears a
precious jewel in its head.
VOL. VI. O
210 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
at from twelve to twenty thousands pounds sterling. There
could no longer be any doubt that a rich field of diamonds
was located somewhere to the north ; and, despite the warn-
ings of professional geologists and diamond experts from
Europe, who had examined the ground and declared that no
diamond-fields existed, sensible men preferred the evidence of
their eyes above the reports of the professors. 1 A fever of
diamond-hunting now broke out and spread : forthwith a
rush of eager seekers after wealth began to flow northwards
towards the Modder and the Vaal.
They hardly differed in character from the usual crowd of
miners on similar adventures elsewhere. There were men
of all trades and classes and of none, 2 expectant, rough and
fearless, ready to face privation and danger in the hope of
sudden fortune ; and they knew that he whose luck was
favourable was certain of great wealth, for the world's supply
of diamonds had of late been unequal to the demand, and the
price had risen rapidly on the European market.
At first they sought their sparkling prey along the river
courses, and some secured considerable riches by this means.
The Found- But soon a discovery was made that changed and
Kimberi enormously enlarged the whole prospects of the
1871. venture. Diamonds were found in vast quantities
in the dry white earth some few miles away, and henceforth
the petty spoil brought down by the rivers was neglected.
The true goal of the miners was situated on a farm in the
sterile highlands of the Griqua country ; and here, on the
undulating flats and ridges of a desert of drought and dia-
monds, they pitched their tents if they had tents and
1 One of the experts roundly denied that diamonds existed in South
Africa at all ; another contented himself with proving, in the columns
of the London Times, that diamond-mining could never pay expenses.
Alas for prophecy !
2 The Dean of Grahamstown wrote that he had lost his organist and the
tenor voices of the choir, and the bricklayer who was working at the
cathedral. Durban lost several of its tradesmen, and ships that put in
there found part of their crews disappeared.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 211
searched the blue-white soil that hid the precious seed of
wealth. The site of the encampment was given the admir-
ably descriptive name of the New Rush ; later it was called
Kimberley, from the Colonial Secretary in the Imperial
Government of the day.
Many of the miners were rewarded with success beyond
their wildest dreams. There were authentic cases of men
who made hundreds of pounds in a day, thousands in a week
or two ; of others who struck a lucky spot, and sold out to an
eager newcomer for anything up to fifteen thousand pounds ;
of land being offered, and finding ready purchasers at 20 the
square foot. Some impecunious hangers-on of the regular
crowd, unable to buy a claim for themselves, devoted their
time to sifting the already roughly sifted earth for the small
diamonds that the more ambitious or more hasty workers had
overlooked ; and not a few found respectable fortunes in
these unconsidered trifles.
But the whole thing was a sheer gamble with luck, a gamble
in which industry counted for little although all worked
feverishly hard and chance for everything in this capricious
toil. An instance was recorded of three brothers who bought
claims side by side ; the most persevering of the trio, who
employed five natives to help him dig and sift the earth, only
found diamonds worth 12 in a twelvemonth's labour, while
the other two made 2000 each. Others who believed they
had secured the wealth of a lifetime in a moment's lucky dive,
were disillusioned when the huge diamond they found split
into fragments and halved its value ; 1 or an enormous stone
that was thought to be a ruby, and therefore worth a king's
ransom, turned out but a garnet after all. Such was the luck
of Kimberley in its first year.
1 The stories of diamonds that split, or ' exploded' to use the phrase
current at the diggings were discredited at first by the dealers and
jewellers of Europe. It seems to have been an unfortunate peculiarity
of the South African gem.
212 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The most extravagant expectations were entertained by
the diggers ; but periodical waves of depression swept across
the settlement and reduced the volatile crowd to temporary
despair. Sometimes a rumour that a new diamond-field had
been discovered a few miles away would stampede the place,
and another new rush would almost depopulate Kimberley
for a week ; but in a few days the disillusioned miners would
be back at their old claims. Or it would be announced
and such rumours arose without the least foundation of truth
that a marvellous new diamond-field had been found in
Brazil, and that henceforth the Kimberley product was value-
less ; or the dealers would fear that the market was becoming
overstocked, and refuse to buy save at a nominal price. On
such occasions a gem which would have fetched several
hundred pounds the day before could hardly find a purchaser
for the same number of shillings, and the digger in a fit of
passionate disgust might scatter his whole fortune to the
winds and the wilderness where others more hopeful found
and profited from his over-hasty action.
But confidence was restored as quickly as the original panic
spread, and with no more definite reason ; and digging and
sifting would begin again with renewed vigour. Yet there
were some who predicted that the diamondiferous earth
would be exhausted within a twelvemonth, and that Kimber-
ley would vanish from the maps on which it had so lately
found a place ; but those who held this view knew not that
the deposits extended deep down into the earth. Even in those
early days of extravagant individual expectations and occa-
sional realisation men had no idea of the vast wealth con-
cealed beneath their feet ; but by the year 1889, less than
twenty years after the discovery of diamonds in the Griqua
country, the total output of precious stones from this field
had reached the weight of six tons avoirdupois and the
enormous value of thirty-nine million pounds sterling.
Long before then, however, Kimberley had grown out of
TOWARDS THE NORTH ' 213
all recognition of its earlier self. Diamond-digging was no
more the work of individuals but of a great corporation, which
had swallowed all its smaller competitors, and which alone
could afford the powerful machinery required to excavate the
deeper soil, now that the surface deposits had been exhausted.
And the town itself had advanced from a primitive collection
of rough canvas tents, stationary wagons converted into huts,
and the wood or galvanised iron buildings of its infancy, to
a substantial city of fine streets and handsome buildings.
But the individuality of earlier days had vanished with
the passing of the canvas tent and its single occupant engaged
alone in his own venture. Those were the days Early Days
when men made the long journey up-country from Diamond
Cape Town to the diamond city by interminable Diggings.
stages in the tedious ox-wagon, when food was sometimes
less plentiful in Kimberley than precious stones and always
less plentiful than hope, and when all accommodation was
of the simplest kind.
The cost of food was indeed a serious consideration to the
poor miner in the earlier days at the diamond-fields. The
meat supplied by the Boer farmers of the neighbouring dis-
tricts was cheap enough, but, like much of the animal produce
of South Africa, often inferior in quality ; and vegetables
were scarce enough to be rare luxuries even for the prosperous
digger. A single cabbage might cost half-a-crown, and a cauli-
flower was so precious a prize that twenty-five shillings was
once paid for the possession of one.
If victuals were scarce, water was still scarcer. There was
no regular supply in Kimberley ; and those who carried it
from a distance extorted anything from threepence to five
shillings a bucket for their goods. At such prices a bath
became the rarest of pleasures or duties, a wash was a weekly
festival, and a clean shirt a monthly luxury. 1
1 There is a story of a man who had a bath of soda-water at Kimberlej-
during a drought. It would certainly have cleansed him.
214 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The lack of water and the superfluity of dust was an excuse
for the general indulgence in more potent liquors. The
number of inns, restaurants, and hotels which grew up at
Kimberley was enormous ; l but not less remarkable than
the amount of liquor consumed was its exceeding badness.
Cape brandy at the best was an inferior beverage, but by the
time it reached the diamond-fields and had been diluted on its
way by various agents intent on snatching an extra profit it
was an unfailing poison. Champagne, too, might be drunk
out of a bucket by the extravagantly successful digger but
its vintage was such that there was an even chance of the
bucket having its contents returned only slightly the worse
from the throats of its nauseated victims.
Better accommodation and more palatable refreshment
came with time ; the less pressing needs of the community
were also gradually supplied. The first place of worship, a
Wesleyan chapel, was built in the first year of the settlement ;
an Anglican church followed soon afterwards. The seekers
after earthly gems were not altogether forgetful of heavenly
treasures in their leisure moments ; nor were they un-
generous to the ministers of religion. One clergyman, in
fact, who remarked on the extraordinary liberality of his
congregation in almsgiving, felt impelled to utter the pious
hope that the collecting bag was not an inadvertent receiver
of stolen goods. For the theft of diamonds was a regular
industry, and some at least of those who engaged in that
particular trade may have salved such conscience as they
possessed by endowing the church with some fraction of the
tainted gold.
A hospital and the inevitable racecourse were founded in
1 Some of these inns had extraordinary names, such as The Hard
Times, The Perfect Cure, etc. But the wit, like the accommodation, was
primitive ; and I have seen more curious names in England : e.g. The
World Turned Upside Down an admirable name for a tippler's haunt
and The Silent Woman, with a picture of a headless woman. Probably
the publican within had suffered more than he admitted to a stranger.
TOWARDS THE NORTH ' 215
1872 ; the former institution at least was badly needed.
For if the situation of Kimberley on the dry bracing Griqua
uplands was healthy, its sanitation was altogether left to
chance, and many were the cases of fever and other infectious
diseases that derived from the decaying corpses of animals
and refuse of all kinds that strewed its unpaved streets. 1
The multiplicity and strength of its evil smells was commented
on by more than one traveller, but the older inhabitants are
believed to have become accustomed to the dust, dirt, flies
and fleas that were the notable by-products of Kimberley.
More interesting and not less varied in type than either
the fleas or the flies of the diamond-sprinkled desert was the
extraordinary congregation of humanity that the lust of
mammon had drawn to Kimberley. But the character of
those who had flocked to the Griqua fields was indeed so
mixed as almost to defy analysis. Some were old diggers
who had tempted fortune in vain, or had won and lost again,
on the Californian and Australian goldmines, and had come
to try their luck once more in Africa ; hard men these and
rough, ready with oath and fist if not with knife to defend
their claim. Others were farmers from Cape Colony and
Natal, whose estates had been none too prosperous in the
recent years of agricultural depression ; alert Englishmen,
phlegmatic Boers, shifty adventurers from Europe, civil ser-
vants who had left their posts for a quicker road to wealth
than the tedious routine of official advancement allows ;
traders who exchanged their stores for diamonds, reckless
men who dealt in guns and ammunition with the natives,
rogues who smelt an opportunity for plunder in the gem-
laden wilds from afar, savage Kafirs attracted by the offer
of high wages, and conspicuous among the rest a whole colony
of Jews from every ghetto of the old world, whose keen brains
1 ' The dust of the dry diggings,' said one old Kimberley man, ' is to
be classed with plague, pestilence, and famine, and if there is anything
worse with that also. '
216 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
and voluble bargainings often outwitted the slower Gentile
mind.
There were not many women in the infant city, but the
fame of its products soon attracted the attention of the fair.
It must be conceded, however, that the slightly battered
virtue of the Eves who flocked to Kimberley was seldom
proof against temptation in this galvanised garden of Eden,
and that the presence of diamonds led to the absence of the
still more precious jewel of chastity. Yet perhaps there were
few of these immigrant belles that sold themselves for
diamonds who would not have sold themselves for gold else-
where ; and in any case it appears that if the comforts of
home were somewhat to seek in Kimberley, the number of
ladies ready to supply a temporary substitute was soon fully
equal to the demand.
Honest and upright men there were in Kimberley, but
many a fortune was made by crooked means, and the
The illicit scandalous initials I.D.B. illicit diamond buyer
Diamond were attached by rumour to the name of more
than one millionaire. The small bulk and great
value of the diamond made it easy to conceal, and well worth
the risk of discovery, both to the native digger or sifter and
the European dealer who purchased the stolen goods ; and
a lucrative and regular traffic grew up in this way, which not
even the severe penalties of the local court, 1 or the regulating
Diamond Trade Act passed by the Cape Colony Legislature in
1882, or the exertions of a large police detective department, 2
1 In 1878, for instance, a Kafir convicted of stealing diamonds was
sentenced to fifty lashes and nine months' imprisonment by no means an
exceptionally heavy punishment.
The prison at Kimberley was built to hold four hundred persons, but
sometimes it was necessary to accommodate nearly double the number
a sufficient indication of the local conditions. (Report on Kimberley
Prison, in Cape Parliamentary Papers, 1882.)
2 The detective department itself, however, was corrupt. It was
admitted that the detectives often lived with other men's wives, and in
return the complaisant husband was no doubt immune from the atten-
tions of the police. (Cape Parliamentary Correspondence, 1885.)
TOWARDS THE NORTH 217
availed altogether to stamp out. The most ingenious
methods were discovered of outwitting the authorities,
diamonds being sewn up in the saddles and bridles of the
horses which conveyed the dealer over the frontier, or the
wretched animal was sometimes even made to swallow his
precious freight and deliver it again when a safe asylum from
discovery was reached ; and although the pursuit of a sus-
pected I.D.B. was often hot and punishment for the offence
was always swift and heavy, the profits of the trade were well
worth its dangers. 1 So well did the traffic pay, indeed, that
the dealer in illicit goods, that unclean vulture of the diamond
trade, could never be quite suppressed, even by the great De
Beers Corporation, 2 which absorbed the smaller honest dealers.
But Kimberley grew dull, and it was even reproached with
growing almost respectable, when its industry was put on a
steady basis by this powerful firm, which obtained a mono-
poly of the South African diamond trade, regulating output
and prices in the interest of the producer, and preventing
those wild fluctuations which had made the early days of in-
dividual search and sale a mixed game of chance and skill. 3
1 An amusing novel I.D.B., or the Adventures of Solomon Davis
was published in 1887 by one who evidently had considerable knowledge
of the illicit traffic.
More information, with much scandalous gossip of the diamond-fields
and accusations against prominent men in Kimberley, will be found in
Cohen's Reminiscences of Kimberley. The book was suppressed in 1911,
in consequence of a libel action, but copies of it are still to be found. I
am not persuaded that the author was altogether untrustworthy ; indeed,
he seems to me to have told too much of the truth.
2 For the De Beers Corporation, see the next chapter.
3 Native labour was largely employed, and the natives were well cared
for by the De Beers Corporation. They lived in a compound, were given
a school, a hospital, and goods were sold them at cost price. The shop-
keepers naturally attacked the truck system, which deprived them of
some profits ; the drink-sellers opposed the effort to restrict the sale of
alcohol, which caused most of the crimes in Kimberley and the need for
a large police force (speech by Cecil Rhodes, 10th September 1883).
Many also attacked the compound system on the ground that it was
slavery, which it was not ; the essence of slavery is that the slave is
bought for life, and not paid for his work, whereas the native labourer
contracted to serve for a period, he received wages for his labour, and a
bonus for honesty.
218 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The old claims were bought out, the old diggings superseded
by machinery, the New Rush of a few years back was no
more recognisable in the substantial town that grew up in its
place ; the pioneers and adventurers and gamblers looked
elsewhere for excitement and the chance of wealth : and
before Kimberley had quite degenerated into sober steadiness
they found their opening.
Sixteen years after the great rush to the Griqua diamond-
fields there was another and still greater race for wealth to
the interior of Africa. But this time the magnet was gold,
not diamonds ; and the ultimate but unforeseen consequences
of this second exodus were as much more important than the
first as gold is more common and more universally used than
diamonds.
Thirty years before, in the early days of the Transvaal Re-
public, one Jan Marais had discovered gold at the high reef
Transvaal of the white waters, the Witwatersrand. His
covered 1 ^ n( ^ rea ti se d some 500, and he made no attempt
1883. to conceal his good fortune. But the Australian
goldmines were then at the height of their reputation, and
the discovery in the interior of Africa excited little interest,
and was soon forgotten for a generation. 1 Not until 1883,
when one Fred Struben was passing over the same district,
was any importance attached to the earlier find ; but Struben
was so convinced that the Witwatersrand was auriferous that
he returned in January 1884 to explore the ground thoroughly.
He was trembling on the verge of a mighty discovery. On
the second day of his search his hopes were justified, and gold
was found ; and for seven months more he continued his work
at Sterkfontein, at the western end of the Witwatersrand
1 Gold head also been found at Lydenburg in the eastern Transvaal in
1879, and Lord Wolseley wrote at that time that ' larger and still more
valuable goldfields would sooner or later be discovered ' in that country.
It was also discovered in other parts of the Transvaal, and a few
diggers, mostly British, went up to try their fortune, but with little
success. The discoveries were too small, and the cost of transport too
high, to yield much profit.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 2l9
reef. Other men came and went on the same errand for
some rumour of the new goldfield had reached the outer
world with little success ; but Struben was rewarded for
his perseverance. On the 18th September he came across
a gneiss vein of very rich gold which extended an indefinite
distance.
On this spot a mill for crushing the gold from the rock was
erected in the following year ; a few houses or huts were built,
and the beginnings of a town, which was not as yet honoured
with a distinctive name, were presently seen.
While Struben had 'been searching for gold on the Wit-
watersrand, others also had sought and found elsewhere. In
the same year 1884 the mineral was found at Barberton in
quartz formation. 1 News of these discoveries was bruited
abroad, a few men at first came to see and try their luck, and
presently it became known that new goldfields, equal, if not
superior to those which had been found in California and
Australia, were awaiting development. The emigrant Boers
who had trekked northwards into the interior of Africa a
generation back to get clear of British rule had unwittingly
founded their republic in a country abounding in gold. And
before the passing of another generation the unsuspected
riches of their virgin territory proved their undoing.
In all the world there is no withstanding a ' gold rush/
Men will fight for their creed, their country, their honour
or good fame; but many men would forswear The Gold
their creed, forget their country, and pawn their Rusn > 1885 -
honour for the gold that will buy them all but honour and
health and peace. In every age some men have spent their
years in the vain hope of discovering a supposed transmutation
of metals ; the lust of gold was the magnet that drew them
1 The Barberton formation was of very old and highly metamorphosed
slates and sandstones, with eruptive diorite, serpentine, and other
greenstones. The gold seems to have been brought with the eruptive
rocks to the surface, and afterwards concentrated in quartz reefs.
(Proceediays, Roycd Geographical Society, 1888.)
220 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
on. The mere expectation of gold that had no more exist-
ence than the transmutation of metals led men to risk and
lose their lives in the search for a North- West Passage 1 and
many another fruitless quest ; the actual discovery of gold
brought men in hot haste from the ends of the earth across
the waterless deserts of western Australia, over the Rocky
Mountains to California, and through the ice-cold streams of
the Yukon Valley to fight for its possession. And human
nature had not changed when the wealth of the Witwatersrand
was exposed.
The Transvaal Government and its subjects were none too
pleased at the sudden and unexpected fame of their country.
Some may indeed have hoped great things from the new-
found wealth, for the Boer is no more superior to the love of
money than the rest of mankind. But many knew that the
solitude they loved would no longer be respected by an
avaricious world. The story of Kimberley was too recent
and too near to be forgotten ; and it was certain that a crowd
of seekers after wealth, not more scrupulous than those who
had invaded the Griqua desert, would soon invade the quiet
farms across the Vaal River. And these would again be
followed by their parasites, the owners of drinking-saloons and
gambling hells, the female prostitute and those who main-
tained her. . . .
And some also among the Boers had a foreboding as to
the dangers that await the weak whose dubious fortune it
is to come into possession of great riches. 2 The union of
wealth and weakness is as fatal to men as the union of poverty
and beauty to women.
But whatever the feelings or forebodings of the little Boer
community, no sign of coming trouble yet appeared. The
Transvaal Government showed itself equal to the immediate
occasion, and regulations were issued to ensure the maintenance
1 See vol. iii. bk. x. ch. i.
3 See bk. xxvi. ch. i. for Joubert's forebodings.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 1!T 221
of order on the goldfields. On 18th July 1886, certain farms
were thrown open to prospectors as proclaimed goldfields ;
on 20th September of the same year the site of Jo&annes-
a township was determined on, and its skeleton f^^ ded
streets were planned out at regular intervals isse.
in straight lines and right angles. The town was named
Johannesburg ; the first sale of sites, on 8th December, real-
ised 13,000. A second sale, a month later, fetched 19,921 ;
a third, in April 1887, realised 20,000.
A few buildings, roughly made of old boxes and tin, had
already been run up before the official regulations were issued ;
but these were found to cover a valuable gold-bearing pro-
perty, and were speedily removed elsewhere. And Johannes-
burg now began to grow rapidly. For the first three or four
years of its existence, indeed, it was nothing more than a rude
mining-camp, rough shanties of galvanised iron and mud
huts mingling promiscuously with tents and sheds and waste
spaces along its straight streets ; while some prospectors who
had hurried across the veldt in their own wagons were content
to make that substantial conveyance serve the purpose of
a dwelling-house when arrived at the promised land of wealth.
The first public building was a hotel ; the second a prison.
Both were soon full ; and both were said to be equally un-
comfortable.
But by 1890 something more substantial began to appear ;
the now prosperous Johannesburgers were sufficiently con-
fident of the future to spend part of their new-found
wealth on themselves and their city. It and its cosmopolitan
and very miscellaneous population had necessarily much
in common with other mining towns in the world ; but
the special character of the Witwatersrand goldfield gave
Johannesburg a character of its own.
There was never any doubt from the moment of the dis-
covery in 1883 that it would pay handsomely to extract the
gold from its surroundings ; but the formation of the mines
222 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
determined the character of the industry that grew up in
the Rand. This was no place for the miner whose only
capital was a pick and shovel, a strong arm and a stout heart.
Vast fortunes were to be made, but they were for the organiser,
the director, the heads of large companies, the speculator in
lands and claims ; they were not for the individual digger
who spent his energies on a single allotment, and staked all
upon the luck of his one claim. Capital was needed to
develop the industry ; and the fact that it was an industry
and not a gamble differentiated the Witwatersrand from the
goldfields of California and Australia. Whatever gambling
there was, was in the purchase of sites from the original
owners or those who had bought their concessions in the hope
of a rise in value ; and there was gambling in plenty in
Europe, where many worthless mining companies were floated
on the credit of the goldfields.
For some months after the first discoveries not much gold
was extracted from the Witwatersrand reef. The metal was
not scattered about in nuggets on or immediately under
the surface, as had been the case in Australia ; 1 it was dis-
tributed with other deposits in the earth, from which it had
first to be mined, then crushed and refined before it could
be put on the market. Fortunately large beds of coal near
the Witwatersrand reef provided the power that was needed
for the mills ; machinery was imported from Europe to mine
and crush the rock, and native labour under the direction
of skilled white engineers sufficed to operate the mines and
machinery cheaply and in most cases profitably.
The engineers who directed the work were lavishly paid ;
the few white workmen whom they employed earned wages
Profits of far in excess of what they could have obtained at
the Mines, home, but a great part of their money was ab-
sorbed in the high cost of living. The bulk of the manual
labour required for the mines was easily obtained from the
1 Cl 1 11 !_
1 See vol. v. bk. xvin. en. iv
TOWARDS THE NORTH 223
native population, the average payment offered being the
considerable sum of from fifty to sixty shillings per month
of four weeks, with board and lodging included a wage
which, if not spent, as it often was spent, as quickly as it was
earned on alcohol, sufficed to make the native a man of wealth
and importance when he returned to his own people after
three or four years in the mines. 1
Altogether some thirty-five thousand natives were em-
ployed in the goldmines in and around Johannesburg when
the industry was at the height of production ; the capital
employed and the value of metal extracted rose steadily from
year to year. In November 1887, the early days of the in-
dustry, 68 mining companies were registered, with a nominal
capital of 3,063,000; by January 1890 there were 450
companies, with a total nominal capital of 11,000,000. In
1890 the total output of the mines for the year was 494,810
oz. of gold ; in the following year this had risen to 729,233 oz. ;
by 1892 it was 1,210,865 oz., and year by year it increased
thereafter.
The profits of a rich and well-managed mine were enormous.
In 1892, for instance, the Ferreira mine paid its shareholders
a dividend of 125 per cent, on its capital ; other companies
were only less successful, and with such results the value
of the shares in London would mount to an extraordinary
premium, and the profits of those who were lucky enough to
sell their holding at the top of the speculative market might be
equal to the dividend and the original capital invested together.
Unfortunately the success of these reputable companies
encouraged less scrupulous men to prey on a gullible public ;
and in the wild mania of speculation which followed, and
which gave the pirates of Throgmorton Street their chance,
perhaps as much money was lost as gained.
1 The native labourers were better paid at Johannesburg than at
Kimberley. On the diamond-fields the average wage was Is. weekly
with food, or 15s. without food.
224 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The rash investor, learning caution by experience, grew
shy for awhile of South African mines, and blamed Johannes-
burg instead of London and his own imprudence ; but the
industry was founded on too solid a basis to be much aflected
by the disreputable parasites that clung to its golden skirts.
There was in fact sixty miles and more of gold-bearing country
in and around Johannesburg, and in places the deposits
extended to great depths, while there was always the chance
that more gold would yet be discovered further afield when
the Witwatersrand mines showed signs of exhaustion.
On these sound foundations Johannesburg was built, a
golden city in the wilderness, an industrial paradox in a
The Growth pastoral republic. Johannesburg, or as it was
neifburg 1 " more commonly called for short Joburg, was
1890-5. practically an English city after the hasty
American model, or some would have described it more
accurately as a city of Anglo-Israelites for the Hebrew
became as conspicuous here as in Kimberley. 1 Many tongues
were spoken in its streets, but the three newspapers published
in 1892 were all English. Most of the shops were English ;
its horse-races were essentially English ; there was a theatre,
at which only English dramas were played. The music-halls
and gambling-dens were English ; even the Vigilance Society
that was founded to watch the halls and dens for immorality
was imitated from an English model.
Social intercourse in Johannesburg ran on much the same
lines as in Kimberley : the general tone being fundamentally
plutocratic, rather flashy and ostentatious, self-conscious
of recent wealth and eagerly or blatantly materialist, thinking
in terms of dividends, weighing a man by the size of his
pockets, and reckoning even beauty as a commercial asset.
Some men laid the foundation of large fortunes on a slender
1 One of the old pioneers of Johannesburg told me that the Semitic
influx only became pronounced in the third year. In the first few
months there were not more than thirty to fifty Jews on the Rand.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 225
basis ; one who afterwards gained respect or envy as a titled
millionaire began by peddling watches and jewellery in the
streets until he could risk his profits on a share in a mine ; l
others showed the upstart insolence of sudden unaccustomed
riches, flaunted it gaily for a few brief months, then lost their
all in some financial hurricane, and quietly disappeared. 2
A few rose steadily by careful speculation or sound dealing,
and one firm Eckstein of the Corner House achieved the
same pre-eminence and power in Johannesburg as the De
Beers Corporation in Kimberley.
All spent their money when they had it, or their credit
when they had it not, on luxury and pleasure, giving the place
a certain crude magnificence and vulgar splen- its sharp
dour in sharp contrast to the staid farmer folk Contrast
of the Transvaal Republic who were their neigh- pastoral
bours. All around were Boer farms ; not many Boers - '
miles from noisy Johannesburg was the quiet town, which
indeed was then little more than village, of Pretoria, the
seat of government of a purely pastoral state, now faced with
entirely novel circumstances and an alien population. In
the first five years of its existence Johannesburg had out-
distanced the older cities of South Africa, and become the
most important inland urban centre south of the Zambesi ;
but every phase of its existence, and in truth the very fact
of its existence at all, was a paradox. It was a city of extra-
vagant wealth in a country of homely peasants, a city of
1 This gentleman is happily still alive and prosperous, but I forbear
to outrage his modesty by printing his name.
2 Many of those who lost all and went bankrupt in Johannesburg
disappeared, a number hiding their misfortunes in the new colonies
further north. Fiulason (A Nobody in Mashonaland) came across a man
in Rhodesia who had had a fortune of 200,000 in the Transvaal and lost
it all. At the height of his pride he had been heard to rate a waiter
soundly for serving champagne in a misty glass in a Rand hotel; the
next year he was in Mashonaland, dressed in a dirty flannel shirt,
drinking muddy water out of a lobster tin, and eating rice which he dug
out of a three-legged cooking-pot with a twig. Fortunately the unhappy
man took the change of fortune philosophically.
VOL. VI, P .
. i
*>" "t
*> nMMKattf
f ft
' ttf
226 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
mammon, of scrip and share and cash, in a country that
reckoned its riches in flocks and herds, a community of com-
pany promoters among the patriarchs, a city of flash and
glitter among a solid folk that hated show, a city of urgent
haste in a land of abundant leisure, a city of foreigners who
were mostly British in a country that hated every foreigner
and hated the British most of all foreigners. The soil and
the government belonged to the Boers ; but the great wealth
of the country was in the hands of the invaders, who soon
outnumbered the older population. It was this financial
and social paradox that precipitated a political revolution
thirteen years after Johannesburg had sprung from the
Witwatersrand gold reef.
The Boers for their part hated the immigration they could
not restrain ; and some were heard to speak of abandoning
The Boera the country and making another trek to the north
another across the Limpopo. A few of their number did
Trek. so ; 1 and in ordinary circumstances and under a
weak leadership of the Transvaal Republic a second Great
Trek might have occurred as soon as the large alien population
of the Rand outnumbered the native burghers.
But the circumstances were not ordinary, and the leader-
ship of the Republic was not weak as it had often been in
previous years. It happened that the President of the
Transvaal at that time was by far the ablest man of European
descent yet born in South Africa, a strong, stubborn man
who was not without the element of greatness. He hated
the influx of the aliens with all the intensity of a backveldt
burgher, but he would by no means abandon the country
to them ; instead he set himself to use the unwelcome visitors
to his own ends, to compel their reluctant aid in building a
greater structure on the trembling basis of the now so un-
stable Republic. Even before the discovery of gold, and
when his treasury was empty, he had conceived the idea of
1 See ch. iv. of this book, and bk, xxvi. ch. iii.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 227
enlarging the boundaries of the Transvaal, of making it the
dominant and independent state in South Africa, and cutting
off the British mission and trading route to the northern in-
terior beyond his own dominions ; now that his treasury
was filling with the new-found wealth of his country, he
calmly faced the danger of an alien population, and began
to use the British immigrants whom he hated to further his
ambitious dream of enlarging the independent Boer dominions.
Yet President Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger, 1 the
most able and bitter enemy of the British and of British rule
in South Africa, had been born a British subject, pj.^^^
His parents bore a name well known and not Kruger,
without esteem in Cape Colony ; the original 1825 ' 1904 -
Kruger was one of those German emigrants who had gone
out to South Africa in the very early days of the Dutch
East India Company, 2 and his descendants, having settled
in the colony and being blessed with many sons, in time
found kinsmen in every district of the Cape from Stellen-
bosch to Uitenhage.
Farming was the traditional occupation of the Krugers,
and Caspar Jan Hendrik Kruger, the father of Paul Kruger,
was a farmer in the northern district of the eastern province
of Cape Colony, at Vaalbank in the Colesberg region, a little
south of the Orange River. Here Paul was born, on 10th
October 1825, the third child of a large family ; here he
learned his first religious lessons from his mother, a farmer's
daughter of the Zuurberg, and gained from his human environ-
ment, of white master and black slaves or servants, that
1 The best biography of Kruger is the German work by Van Oordt.
There is a poor account by Statham ; Kruger's own Memoirs are not more
honest than most autobiographies.
There are several other lives of the President, remarkable mainly for
the fact that they were written before his death, at the climax of his
career ; interest evaporated in the last years of exile and seclusion.
The obituary notice in the London Times of 15th July 1904 is poor and
rhetorical ; the compiler clearly scamped his work.
2 See bk. xxiii. ch. ii.
228 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
theory of race-ascendency, of a European superior whose
plain duty was to command his African inferiors, which clung
to every Boer through life.
In due course Paul Kruger should have become a farmer
like his ancestors, moving a little when he grew up from his
His Early father's home, taking the share decreed by custom
Life in Cape for a younger son of the family flocks and herds,
claiming some unoccupied land for his own pos-
session, building a house according to his means and taste,
seeking out a wife among his people, and spending his days
henceforth as a pastoral patriarch of the veldt, unknown
beyond his own immediate circle but a little potentate within
it. In such manner the Cape Dutch had spread across Cape
Colony through the eighteenth century, and were still spread-
ing in the nineteenth ; but now came a break in the tradition.
Slavery was abolished in 1834 by the British Government ;
the old order of life was suddenly changed ; and the Great
Trek began. Young Kruger's parents were among the
emigrants across the Orange River ; and Paul, who had
already taken a hand in the day-work of the fields at home,
and learned his duties as a cowherd, trekked north with his
father and such of the family possessions as were not sold
before they left Cape Colony. He was then between nine
and ten years of age, and this uprooting of the family was a
lasting memory with the lad. It was the first impulse to that
hatred of the British which afterwards became the mastering
passion of his life.
After many wanderings, some perils, and a temporary
sojourn for a time in the Orange River countries, the Krugei
in the settled in the Transvaal. On the fertile pastures
Transvaal. o f Magaliesberg the lad was now again employed
in tending the paternal flocks ; but the dull monotony of the
cowherd's days was often varied by long hunting expeditioi
or guerilla warfare with the natives on the borders. The life
was rough and hard but very healthy, and in a few year
TOWARDS THE NORTH 229
Paul Kruger grew into a strong and powerful man, setting up
his farm at Waterkloof near by his father, and taking a wife
early, as was the custom of his people and indeed of the peasant
everywhere. At seventeen he was married, at twenty a
widower his first wife died in childbirth and in another
year or two he married again. By this second wife he had
sixteen children.
The large family was typical of the peasant ; the man
indeed was a peasant to the core. In all this was nothing
uncommon ; young Kruger 's life was the life of
hundreds of his fellows. His skill and bravery
as a hunter, his recklessness in attacking lion and elephant
single-handed in the bush, was marked ; but other young
Boers were not less brave. He showed the same resource and
daring in the warfare with the natives, in those continual
campaigns against the Kafir and the Matabili which filled the
early history of the Transvaal for several years ; he would
venture alone into a cave full of hostile natives, or ride fear-
lessly through a camp at open warfare with his people : *
but other young Boers would do little less. These were the
rude virtues of a peasantry whom necessity had taught to de-
fend itself. The great physical strength of Paul Kruger, an
iron constitution and an iron will, might be envied or admired
by a lesser breed of men ; but the Cape Dutch farmers were
a folk of great strength, good physique, and rugged steadfast-
ness, and Kruger was not more dogged than others of his race.
Those who live close to the soil are seldom highly strung,
for nerves are the prerogative of cities ; and Kruger after
a hunting accident which smashed his thumb hacked the
broken joint off with a pocket-knife, afterwards paring away
the mortifying flesh down to the raw wound by the same
rough surgery. It was the rude, unconscious heroism of
1 See his own Memoirs. In his youth Kruger had heard the shots
fired in Natal at the massacre of Retief, and been present at the great
fight with the Matabili in the Transvaal (bk. xxiv. ch. i.).
230 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
primitive man ; but others among that people would have
done the same.
Kruger's lack of learning, his rough plain-spokenness, 1 and
hatred of shams again typical of the peasant and his re-
causesof ligious creed he held the most narrow and
his influ- reactionary form of Cape Dutch Protestantism, 2
and he was devout enough to see the hand of God
in everything he did, the hand of Satan in every action
of his enemies was that of the typical Transvaal Boer.
The brute pluck and simple faith and crude wit of the
man both smelt of the earth, and both stamped the peasant.
He was a man of the people, a rough, masterful man of his
own people.
But it was through this very likeness to his fellows that
Kruger succeeded as President of the Republic, where his
predecessor Burgers failed. He knew his people through
and through, and they knew him his rudeness in speech,
his unctuous piety, his simple tastes, his doggedness, his
failings and limitations, as well as his virtues. He was seldom
far ahead of their ideas ; his aim was their aim. His restricted
outlook and anti-progressive views were after their own
hearts ; the only time his popularity was seriously affected,
and he seemed in some danger of losing his hold on his country-
men, was after one of his visits to Europe, when he arranged
to open up communication with the outer world by the con-
struction of a railway from Transvaal to Delagoa Bay a
scheme that had cost Burgers dear. Much of Paul Kruger's
1 In the hope of impressing Kruger with his importance, an English
peer once enumerated the great offices he had held, and enlarged upon
his noble ancestry. Thereupon Kruger said to the interpreter, ' Tell
the gentleman that I was a cowherd and my father a farmer.'
s The Christian Reformed Church, which adhered strictly to the
decrees of the Synod of Dordrecht, 1618. It differed little in doctrines,
so far as outsiders could judge, from the other Dutch Reformed
Churches ; but its nickname of Dopper, or Canting, church gives the
opinion of other Dutch Protestants. Kruger himself suggests that ' just
as a dop extinguishes a candle, so the Doppers extinguished all new
thoughts and opposed all progress. '
TOWARDS THE NORTH 231
influence among the citizens of the Transvaal Republic was
due to his steadfast opposition to the promotion of com-
munications between Pretoria and the south, because the
south was a British possession, and the independent Boers
wished to isolate themselves from the British.
This was the man who had become President of the Trans-
vaal in 1883 ; a man with an irreconcilable hatred of the British
that dated from the Great Trek of his boyhood, His
and deepened later into the abiding passion of his Ambition,
life. His aim was a single and an honourable one the inde-
pendence of his people ; and it carried with it, what he
thought a necessary corollary, the exclusion of the British
from South Africa. Before the discovery of gold in his do-
minions he had planned the expansion of the republic across
Bechuanaland and north of the Limpopo, the cutting off of
the British advance into the interior, the closing of the great
mission path which Livingstone and his fellows had made.
He had conceived this ambitious scheme, although his treasury
was empty for his burghers had not shaken off their heredi-
tary dislike of taxes but now that gold had been discovered
his plans were both more easy and more difficult of realisation.
Money was his in plenty, since the new alien population could
be taxed, and were rightly taxed, for the wealth they gained
from the Transvaal soil ; but that new alien population,
which in time outnumbered his own burghers, became his
greatest danger.
Nevertheless Paul Kruger might have succeeded in his aim,
of enlarging the republic and closing the interior to the British,
but for one thing. There were diamonds as well His chance
as gold in South Africa, and the diamonds of of success.
Kimberley were British as the gold of Johannesburg was
Boer. And it happened that an Englishman had the same
vision of expansion as the Boer, and while the Englishman
was ready to finance a British advance to the north with the
diamonds of Kimberley, as the Boer was ready to finance
232 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
his own advance with the gold of Johannesburg, the English-
man was on all accounts the greater man.
Between those two was the struggle waged whether the
interior of South Africa should be Boer and republican, or
British and imperial, for the next twenty years.
CHAPTER IV
CECIL RHODES : 1871-90
AMONG the motley crowd of adventurers who gambled and
drank, idled and stole, in the diamond-fields at Kimberley,
was a youth who neither gambled nor drank, idled nor stole.
He was of delicate, almost fragile appearance ; his mien was
grave and preoccupied, as of a dreamer who saw not as others
see ; but an officer of the British army who met him casually
was astounded to find that this youth knew more of such
practical affairs as boundary disputes and diamond digging
than either Government emissary or the average miner. He
was making, had indeed already made with rapidity and ease,
a fortune sufficient for most men ; but, in a place where most
successful names were tarnished with suspicion of illicit deals,
none spoke ill of him.
Yet few, perhaps none, in that congregation of adventurers
understood what manner of man this was. Although rich,
he was intent on becoming richer ; yet he was not a mercenary
man. A trader in diamonds, he was found studying theology
in his leisure moments ; a successful miner, he was intent
on taking a degree at Oxford University ; an authority on
finance, he was learning by rote the Thirty-Nine Articles of
the Church of England ; a promoter and director of a great
commercial corporation, he was ready for an animated argu-
ment with the learned on the obscure and difficult doctrine
of predestination. 1
1 Warren, On the Veldt in the 'Seventies.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 233
The name of this extraordinary youth was Cecil John
Rhodes. 1
His father was the vicar of Bishop's Stortf ord in the county
of Hertford in England ; and in that quiet country town of
millers and maltsters, which in those days was still Cecil
untouched by the growth of outer London, Cecil Rnodes -
Rhodes was born on 5th July 1853, to the uncertain prospects
of the fifth son and seventh child in the family of eleven that
was to be reared in that comfortable but by no means wealthy
parsonage. Like his brothers, the lad was sent to the local
grammar school for the rudiments of learning ; like them also,
he sat in the choir of his father's church, one of ' the seven
angels of the seven churches,' as the good vicar fancifully
called his seven sons ; and in due course Cecil would have
gone up to Oxford, probably to prepare for holy orders
in the Church of England, had he not outgrown his strength.
The doctors recommended a long sea voyage and the dry,
bracing air of South Africa as the best tonic for a weakly
constitution ; and in June 1870 the lad sailed for Natal,
where an elder brother had recently established a cotton
plantation.
The hour of his arrival was propitious. All Africa soon
began to talk of the new diamond deposits on the Orange
River and the new diamond-fields in Griqualand ; Rhodes at
a few months afterwards Cecil Rhodes joined the Kimberiey.
crowd that was making its way up-country in the hope of
wealth, carrying with him, we are told, ' a bucket and a spade,
several volumes of the classics and a Greek lexicon.' That
1 The Life of the Right Hon. Cecil J. Rhodes has been written by Sir
Lewis Michell, a dull but useful work. A more lifelike portrait is Cecil
Rhodes: His Private Life by His Private Secretary, Philip Jourdain.
Another private secretary, Le Sueur, has also written an account, from
a less worshipping angle, of Rhodes. Fuller's Rhodes : A Monograph and
a, Reminiscence, is good ; Hensman's Rhodes is superseded. But by far
the best view is in Cecil Rhodes : His Political Life and Speeches, by Vindex.
Colvin's Cecil Rhodes is a lifelike sketch in small compass. Cook's Life
of Qarrett contains a few memories of Rhodes's career ; Mortimer Menpes,
War Impressions (1901), is also useful.
234 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
curious equipment of scholarship and action typified the
next phase of this youth's life.
He read and dug, and two years afterwards, with health
seemingly restored, returned home to matriculate at Oriel
College, Oxford.
The academic calm of that ancient foundation contrasted
strangely with the rough excitement of Kimberley, but both
And at appealed in different ways to Cecil Ehodes. In
oxford. f ew men na ,ve the far-sighted visions of the
dreamer and the clear, practical brain of the financier and
statesman been more happily united for effective action ; it
would be difficult to say whether Oriel or the ruder school
at the diamond mines contributed more to the theory
of life and duty which Rhodes built up for his personal
guidance.
Had he followed the usual course of study at Oxford it is
probable that his whole career would have been changed, and
with it the trend of South African history. Rhodes might
have forsaken the rugged paths of empire for the placid
ruts of a conventional existence ; and the useful but obscure
avocations of a country parson, for which the excellent vicar
of Stortford had intended his delicate son, might have occu-
pied the man who made a huge personal fortune and helped
to shape and enlarge the destinies of a people, within the short
space of thirty years. Other men of equal abilities have been
cramped on too small a stage ; success and fame depend on
circumstance as well as character. 1 In the case of Rhodes
1 In the case of George Washington, for example (vol. iii. bk. ix.
ch. iii.).
Had Rhodes taken holy orders, and become in time Archbishop of
Canterbury, his extraordinary financial ability might have led him to
tackle the immensely difficult subject of Church of England finauce,
which was taken up by Archbishop Davidson some years later. His
views as to the advantages of political union might in that case have
become transformed into advocacy of the reunion of Christendom, and
his vision of the expansion of England have found expression in en-
couragement of missionary effort in savage lands.
But these are idle speculations.
tj
TOWARDS THE NORTH 235
the luck was with him till his work was almost done, and by
then his short life was nearly over.
The dual influence of university and mining camp divided
the next few years ; but the old weakness of the lung returned,
as the result of a chill caught when rowing on the Isis ;
phthisis set in, and the doctors who ordered Rhodes away
from England gave him only a year to live, even in the favour-
able climate of South Africa.
But the doctors were mistaken ; Rhodes did not die. The
dry southern air, more kindly than the fogs of Oxford,
restored the damaged lung, and in a few years the pallid,
weakly stripling grew into a burly man whom old associates
could hardly recognise.
Rhodes returned to Kimberley, and worked hard, first as
a digger, then as a dealer in claims. In time two partners
joined him, and the firm of Rhodes, Rudd, and He makes a
Alderson, after struggling through many dim- Fortune,
culties, due to lack of capital and short credit with the banks
which needed to keep a sharp eye on accommodations to
their customers in such a place as Kimberley gradually
attained a position of some importance and authority. Pres-
ently another partner was added, young Alfred Beit, a Jewish
diamond-buyer from Hamburg, who possessed the peculiar
financial instincts of his race in extraordinary degree ; and
with these men in combination, the first De Beers Mining
Corporation was registered in 1880, with a capital of 200,000.
They were among the strongest, and certainly among the
straightest, of the Kimberley diamond dealers. But they
had a rival, and a rival of whom Rhodes confessed His Rival,
he was afraid a cunning little Jew from White- Barnato.
chapel. As Alfred Beit came from the aristocracy of German
Jewry, Barney Barnato 1 sprang from the lowest slums of
1 An account of this extraordinary person has been written by Harry
Raymond, B. I. Barnato: A Memoir. And a livelier record in the
veracious Reminiscences of Kimberley , by Cohen.
236 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
the London ghetto ; a Whitechapel brat who had picked up
a gutter living as a child by buying the pass-out checks of
playgoers at the Garrick Theatre in London and selling them
for the precarious halfpence of chance late-comers, ' a little
weakly sorrowful child/ as another memory tells, ' sitting
crying on a doorstep ' in Petticoat Lane, that amazing street
of oriental life and colour and squalor and dirt, which the
lower ranks of London Jews have made their own.
In these struggles for pence to live Barney's wits were
sharpened, and then came his chance. He heard of Kimberley ;
he determined to go there. Somehow he reached the place,
along with others of his type, and there he started the risky
business of a diamond-dealer with a total capital of 30, and
forty boxes of dubious cigars.
It was a hazardous chance, and a single mistake would
have ruined him. But a Jew without capital is like a Scot
without a job or a Frenchman without a mistress the de-
ficiency is so unnatural that it is quickly repaired. Impudent,
assertive, shrewd ' he loved me better than any man/ said
his early partner Cohen, ' and would have done anything for
me in the world, bar lend me sixpence ' Barnato quickly
made his way in Kimberley. In a few years the Yiddish
guttersnipe was a man of wealth ; men began to speak of him
as one who might even outvie Rhodes and Beit ; and in 1880,
the year when the first De Beers Mining Company was formed,
the Barnato Mining Company, its admitted rival, was also
registered.
On the whole Barnato was reckoned the more powerful
man by the quidnuncs of Kimberley. He was merely a
financier whose whole mind was on his work ; Rhodes was
known as a visionary, a dreamer who had strange fits of ab-
straction and thoughtfulness ; and by this time he had also
entered Cape politics. This folly, said men who measured
the rivals, must divide his energies in the fight with Barnato ;
and in nine cases out of ten they would have been right.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 237
But this was the tenth case ; Rhodes was an exception to
every rule. If Barnato ' often gasped with mocking laughter
as he spoke of Rhodes's crackpot schemes/ 1 his Rnodes
rival was more shrewd than he in business. Bar- defeats
nato would have run his diamonds against arna '
Rhodes's diamonds, and the cut-throat competition in selling
a product for which as a luxury there could be no more than
a limited demand would have brought prices down with a
run, and gone far to ruin both. When this was pointed out
to Barnato, he laughed and refused to change his course ;
when the folly of competition and the advantages of amal-
gamation were again impressed upon him, he still persisted ;
and Rhodes saw that the only way to deal with such a man
was to beat him. He bought a large holding, 1,400,000, in
Barnato 's Company ; and when Barnato and other share-
holders objected, Rhodes bought still more. The price of
Barnato stock rose absurdly in consequence ; but Barnato's
shareholders still sold to Rhodes, and Rhodes warned Barnato
that he would soon find himself left alone in his own company.
These daring tactics won the day, and saved the diamond
industry. Barnato had to own himself beaten. Barnato's
Company was no longer his when his rival had so large a
holding ; and the two men met to discuss terms. The
negotiations lasted several days, the final settlement was de-
bated from early one morning until four the next morning ;
and finally Barnato agreed that the Barnato Company should
be absorbed by De Beers, which now became the practical
controller of the South African diamond trade. 2
1 The amiable Cohen, Reminiscences.
2 Barnato was made a life director of De Beers, but his power was
gone. He came to England for a time, a very wealthy man, and built
himself a house in Park Lane, the extraordinary bad taste of whose
architecture made passers-by stare and gasp. He committed suicide by
jumping off the steamer on his way from Oape Town to London in 1897.
It was said that his mind had become affected by the threats of illicit
diamond buyers to murder him.
The whole struggle between the two diamond interests is described by
238 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
That was in 1888 ; and from that day Cecil Rhodes had
no longer any rival in Kimberley. But by that time Kimber-
His great ley had no more the leading place in his thoughts.
Wealth. ft h ac i taken him seventeen years to make his
fortune he was now an extremely wealthy man and to get
the mastery of the diamond trade, and during these seven-
teen years the fragile English youth, who had come up to the
New Rush with a bucket and a Greek lexicon for his capital,
had grown into a sturdy man of thirty-five, and begun to
play his part upon a wider stage than the little isolated world
of Griqualand. He had, indeed, already changed the map
of southern Africa ; he was preparing to change it still
more.
In his first ten years at Kimberley this strange youth was
not only making money fast ; he was also hammering out a
gospel for himself, and planning a career. 1 His abstraction
drew attention in that lively, easy-going crowd of diggers and
drinkers and gamblers. ' I have many times seen him/ said
an old Kimberley acquaintance, ' dressed in white flannels,
leaning moodily with his hands in his pockets against a street
wall ' ; often too he was noticed sitting on a down-turned
Rhodes in his speech to the De Beers shareholders at Kimberley, 31st
March 1888.
It may be noted that there were still a few independent diamond mines
left outside the combination. But they were of little importance, being
described as ' too rich to abandon and too poor to pay.' Few ever paid a
dividend, and none paid dividends regularly.
The capital of De Beers was 3,400,000 after the amalgamation, and
the price of the shares rose from 10 to 64.
1 W. T. Stead, the extraordinary journalist who edited the Review of
Reviews and was for a time the friend of Rhodes, draws a picture of him
thinking out his career at this time, choosing deliberately between finance,
public life, 'a happy marriage,' etc. Rhodes must have known that no
man could make certain of the latter ; but I am not much impressed by
this picture of the young man passing various possibilities before him,
and choosing one of many. Every young man with any spark of original
ambition does the same, I imagine, whether he intends to become parson
or doctor or engineer or statesman. Few save the contemplative
philosopher and the wastrel float haphazard down the stream of human
circumstance and even the philosopher sometimes runs up against a snag
that shakes his contemplation into action.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 239
bucket, pondering strange thoughts which none could pene-
trate.
His thought was of nothing less than the future of South
Africa.
Many men, like Barnato, laughed at him until they knew
better ; some loved him for he had a large and charitable
heart to the unfortunate, 1 and his munificence His view
was a terror to his bankers 2 ; and some had begun of M ne y-
to fear him. But none understood him or his thoughts in
that paradise of money-grubbers. Every other man in
Kimberley, two perhaps excepted, Beit and Jameson and
these were influenced by Rhodes looked on wealth as an end
in itself ; Rhodes knew it as the means to other ends. With
their wealth the others could buy luxury and ease, a palace
in London if they wished, perhaps even rank and place and
titular honour for our England is accommodating to suc-
cessful sons and step-sons who bring wealth to her shrine.
But these things were not for Rhodes. For money he cared
nothing, save as means to an end ; it was no more than the
machinery of life, necessary for power, but otherwise useless. 8
1 Fuller and Jourdain record many of his charities to poor men in
distress. Women he would assist in the same manner, but he would not
often see them personally, lest the sight of their misery should unman
him. He could not bear to see a woman suffer.
2 The worthy biographer Michell, himself a banker, and a man who
looked on a bank ledger with the same reverence that a bishop looks on
a bible, was clearly horrified by the reckless expenditure of Rhodes,
which made large drafts on his balance.
For several years Rhodes had an income of a quarter of a million
sterling a year, yet for nine months in every year he was largely over-
drawn. But had he been more careful of his private affairs there would
have been no Rhodesia.
3 There is a story of Rhodes and General Gordon which gives his views
exactly. Gordon told Rhodes that he had been offered a whole roomful
of gold by the Chinese Government for his services in suppressing a
rebellion. He refused it. ' I would have taken it,' said Rhodes, ' and as
many more roomfuls as they would give me. It is no use to have big
ideas if you have not the cash to carry them out.'
On the other hand, after he defeated Barnato, a shareholder in De
Beers suggested a bonus of 10,000 to Rhodes for his services. He would
have none of it. ' Every man has his own pleasure,' he said ; ' my pleasure
has been in beating them all round, and I want no sums of money.'
240 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
For luxury he cared less ; while smaller men were spending
unaccustomed wealth with the lavishness and proverbial bad
taste of the parvenu, Rhodes lived simply and dressed shabbily.
For rank or title he had no use ; he rated the glint and baubles
of life at their proper worth.
Rhodes therefore looked on wealth as the means to ends.
But to what ends ? Hereditary instinct guided his decision.
His Desire He came, as he often pointed out, of farming
for Land. stock, of men who had owned land, cultivated
land, lived by the land and for the land ; and it was for land
that Rhodes went, all the land he could get.
The land indeed was there. North of Kimberley and the
Griqua desert was land in plenty, unoccupied by Europeans,
and in places even without native owners. The missionaries
had discovered it, were still discovering it even while
Rhodes was at Kimberley Livingstone was making his last
journey into the interior but they had not claimed it for
Britain, preferring indeed the native title and possession to
any European annexation ; but if they did not annex it there
were others ready for the spoil. The Boers were enlarging
their republics, for they, too, had the land-hunger of the
farmer ; the Germans were beginning to talk of African
colonies ; only the British Government, conscious already
of its vast possessions overseas, was reluctant to add to its
responsibilities. 1 The opportunity of expansion, of building
up a great empire in South Africa, was there for Britain ; if
1 Rhodes had a conversation with Gladstone on this subject, and the
two men amicably disagreed. ' Our burden is too great,' said Gladstone ;
' as it is, I cannot find the people to govern all our dependencies. We
have too much, Mr. Rhodes, to do. I don't blame you ; you never give
us any trouble. But we have too much of the world, and now these
wretched missionaries are dragging us into Uganda' (Rhodes, speech at
Cape Town, 25th October 1898). These were a rough version, ap-
parently, of Gladstone's words ; a slightly different account was given
in a later speech, when Rhodes added that Gladstone relied on the
principle of free trade, which made colonies useless (see vol. iv. bk. xvi.
ch. ii.). To which Rhodes answered, 'In logic you are all right, but
in practice you will be all wrong.' A cruel truth.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 241
she delayed or refused, the opportunity would pass, and pro-
bably for ever. At that time it seemed clear that she would
certainly delay and probably refuse.
On these matters Rhodes meditated long and earnestly
during those first ten years at Kimberley when he was strug-
gling upwards from a humble diamond-digger to Rhodes
a millionaire. And the outcome of his medi- ^anSSe-T 8
tations decided his work in lif e. That work was the North,
to take the north of South Africa for Britain, and to unify
the whole country south of the Zambesi under the control of
one white government and the flag of the unwilling British
Empire. That should have been task enough for one man's
life, but in later years his vision enlarged even upon this,
and saw an even greater work ahead ; his mind's eye looked
still further north, beyond the Zambesi to Tanganyika, Egypt,
and the Mediterranean ; and as David Livingstone forty
years before had hungered to explore those countries and
win them for Christ, 1 so Cecil Rhodes now dreamed of founding
a great civilisation stretching through the whole continent
from south to north, from Cape Town through to Cairo, and
winning Africa for the British Empire. 2
That stupendous vision took men's breath away when
Rhodes expounded it to petty ears ; its very hugeness made
men hate him, deride him, and traduce him. He was
opposed, of course, and misrepresented ; lying scandal touched
his name, and unnamed vices were ascribed by evil rumour
to a man whose sexual life was as pure as his schemes were
great. 3 Dogs will always be found to bark at men, and the
1 See chapter ii. of this book for Livingstone's vision of exploring and
converting the whole of Africa.
2 ' We shall not relax our efforts, until by our civilisation and the
efforts of our people we reach the shores of the Mediterranean.' Speech
by Rhodes at Cape Town, 2oth October 1898.
3 I need not refer in more detail to these unsavoury lies. There is a
type of man who starts them, and a type of man which loves to believe
anything against the great ; even the saintly Livingstone was not
exempt, and slander touched the very name of Christ Himself. But
VOL. VI. Q
242 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
bigger the man and the smaller the dog the louder it will
bark.
In admiration or derision Rhodes was nicknamed the
Colossus, the man who thought in continents and millions, by
men who thought in parishes and pence. Other men, it is
true, have had such visions, but yet have left no mark upon
their age. But Rhodes had both the money and the will to
carry out his schemes ; and he used both with a prodigality
that savoured of recklessness to more cautious minds. Had
he depended on the Imperial Government for funds he would
have been recalled in his first year ; but he believed in him-
self and his work, and provided much of the money out of
his own pocket, caring little what men said so long as he
had his way. ' I do not care a jot/ he once remarked, ' who
wears the peacock's feathers so long as the work is done/ 1
It is to the credit of the world that it gave him the credit for
his work. 2
In the twenty strenuous years that followed 1881 the
greater part of the work he had planned, more indeed than he
had actually planned in his musings on the down-turned bucket
at the Kimberley diamond mine, was done. For the moment,
however, expansion northward to the Zambesi seemed enough.
The first definite step towards the fulfilment of that vision
was to enter South African politics ; and on 7th April 1881
He enters Rhodes took his seat for the first time in the
p^rUament ^ape Parliament as member for the agricultural
1881. district of Barkly West, near Kimberley. He
was then twenty-eight years of age.
the testimony of Jameson and Jourdain to the purity of Rhodes is
sufficient refutation.
Rhodes was reputed a woman-hater and a drunkard. He only drank
in moderation ; and his secretary, Le Sueur, records that he proposed
marriage to a lady in Cape Colony several times, but she refused him,
and married another man.
1 Speech at Cape Town, 18th July 1899.
2 Several novels were written in England at this time, in which the
hero was a thinly disguised imitation of Rhodes. The least bad was
Anthony Hope's The God in the Car.
TOWAEDS THE NORTH 243
The political atmosphere at Cape Town was not very hope-
ful for his schemes. The Cape Parliament had no definite
division with two parties, such as prevailed at Westminster
and Washington ; its members voted mainly according to
the economic interests of their constituents, and were practi-
cally classified as urban and commercial representatives
from Cape Town and Port Elizabeth, or rural and agricultural
from the country districts. But the interests of the two ports
of the colony often clashed, and the representatives of Cape
Town and Port Elizabeth were at variance ; the rural members
again were split up into agricultural, pastoral, or wine-
growing representatives, and here once more was often a
division of interests. The urban members were mainly
British, the rural members mostly Dutch : but while no
serious racial divisions had hitherto divided one from the
other, the division between the various local interests was
sharp enough. And this division naturally made for parochial
and petty views of politics, short-sighted contradictory aims,
and a local rather than a national patriotism.
The Cape Parliament was therefore fundamentally opposed
at the start to Rhodes's ideas. But he had another difficulty
ahead. He entered as an Englishman, proud of opposition
his country and his Empire ; and it was then a to Ms Aims -
dark hour for England in South Africa. The imperialist
awakening in Britain had been succeeded by a sharp reaction
against increased responsibilities ; 1 a British Governor who
had favoured expansion in South Africa had been recalled
almost in disgrace ; and the whole policy of expansion was
suddenly reversed, to the grave detriment of British prestige
at the Cape. 2 The British, loyalists in South Africa were
sullen and angry, the Dutch loyalists were perplexed and
disheartened ; and many now openly advocated, what had
1 See vol. iv. bk. xvi. ch. ii. for the ebb and flow of imperial sentiment
in the Victorian age.
2 For the full details of these changes see bk. xxvi. ch. i.
244 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS
till then been a dying cause, the independence of South Africa
and the exclusion of the British from a country which the
British Government did not seem to want. The very year
after Rhodes entered the Cape Parliament the Afrikander
Bond was founded to unite the Dutch against the British, and
to advocate the foundation of a single Dutch Republic inde-
pendent of the British Government in British territory and
the countries which Rhodes proposed to annex to Britain.
Never did statesman start his political career at a more
inauspicious moment. The British Government had suffici-
ently declared its opposition to the policy which Rhodes had
determined on ; and it was supported by a large Dutch party
at the Cape, which had no wish to enlarge the boundaries of
the colony beyond the Orange River, and which desired that
the northern interior, if colonised at all by Europeans, should
be colonised from the Transvaal, and, by falling under the
control of the Transvaal Republic, come under Dutch inde-
pendent and republican, and not imperial British rule.
Against this attitude, which would have isolated Cape
Colony from the interior and minimised, if not actually cut its
connection with the British Empire, Cecil Rhodes protested
from the start. He was almost alone in his protest, but that
deterred him not ; he stated his broad view of things, that
both Briton and Boer were in South Africa for all time,
that both had an equal right to the country, and each must
take his share in its development. There could, he argued,
be no attempt at exclusion and the first principle of the
Transvaal Republic was its exclusiveness, as had been shown
by its expulsion from its soil of British missionaries and
traders, 1 and as was to be shown a year or two later in its
dealings with foreigners within its boundaries and its own
kinsmen without.
The idea of an independent South Africa, too, Rhodes
roughly ridiculed. To be independent one must be strong ;
1 See ch. ii. of this book.
245
and South Africa, with its European states at variance and its
black tribes still a constant danger, was anything but strong
as yet. ' Are we a great and independent South Africa ? '
asked Ehodes in one of his early speeches, and answered his
own question, ' No ; we are only the population of a third-
rate English city spread over a great country/ 1 South
Africa could not have maintained her independence against
a European power near the close of the nineteenth century
much more effectually than when Britain reduced the Cape
at the beginning of the century ; therefore, said Rhodes, the
British flag must remain. The alternative was not inde-
pendence, but control by another European power.
Such reasoning was resented by the Bond, and Rhodes was
burnt in effigy in towns where Bond views were paramount,
for trying, as he put it, to defend English interests in South
Africa. For a time, indeed, there was a danger that Rhodes
should be looked on purely as an English politician ; a cautious
Cape Dutchman refused him his vote partly because he was
too young, but mainly because ' he looked so damnably like
an Englishman/
This was a real danger, for Rhodes knew that he would be
unable to carry out his policy were the Cape Dutch solidly
against him. But that danger he avoided, partly by luck,
partly by considered policy. Most of his personal friends
happened to be Cape Dutchmen. His house, when he came
to live near Cape Town, was named after that rambling and
magnificent old Dutch mansion of East India days, Groote
Schuur ; 2 there open hospitality was dispensed to Dutch and
Englishman alike. His practical interest in agriculture, and
his boast that he came of. farming stock, appealed to the
bucolic mind of Cape Dutch farmers ; his frank sympathy
with many of their views, his not less frank opposition to them
when he deemed them wrong, passed him as an honest man
among them.
1 Speech in Cape Parliament, 25th April 1881. 2 See bk. xxiii. ch. ii.
246 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
One disadvantage, it is true, he had, and it is extraordinary
that he should not have remedied so obvious an obstacle.
He could not speak the Dutch language, or its Cape variant,
the Taal ; yet neither tongue is difficult to learn, and he
had acquired enough knowledge of the Kafir tongues in
Kimberley to converse easily with natives. Yet the Kafir
tongues are far less facile to a European than one variant
of a Germanic language to the man who speaks another
variant.
But this disability did not prevent him from winning the
confidence and good-will* of the Cape Dutch. With the
He wins Afrikander Bond, which thwarted him in his
Cape Dutch aims at northern expansion, he was still at issue
for some years, until the Bond itself saw fit to
modify its doctrines ; with the men whom the Bond claimed
to represent he had no quarrel. And not all the Cape Dutch
were members of the Afrikander Bond ; not all even of its
members approved all its principles. For the Cape Dutch-
man was essentially a conservative, and the principle of the
Bond, the ejection of the British from South Africa, implied
a revolution far more serious than Rhodes's plans of expansion,
plans which indeed were little more than a continuance and
enlargement on a vaster scale of the traditional expan-
sionist policy of the Dutch since they had settled in South
Africa.
But circumstances also helped him in his design to secure
Cape Dutch support. The old settler at the Cape naturally
preferred his emigrant kinsman in the Transvaal above the
Englishman, but his racial instincts were now thwarted by
the fact that the ruling spirit in the Transvaal was as hostile
to its kinsmen at the Cape as to the alien Englishman. A
Customs Union between the colony and the republic, such
as Rhodes advocated, would have been of great benefit to the
colony ; the republic would have none of it. A railway from
Cape Town to Pretoria and Johannesburg would have facili-
TOWARDS THE NORTH * 247
tated trade, and have given the farmers of the Cape a larger
market for their goods ; the Transvaal opposed it. The
employment of young Cape Dutchmen in the Transvaal civil
service would have given the educated youth of the colony
a new career, and helped to join colony and republic closer
together ; but the Transvaal authorities, unable or unwilling
to supply their wants among their own people or their kins-
men in South Africa, chose to import their officials from
Holland. Now the Hollanders were not popular in South
Africa, where some memory of the Dutch East India Com-
pany's rule still lingered ; a Dutch official is never popular
even in his own country : and the importation of these men
into the Transvaal was not welcomed at the Cape.
Against the exclusive spirit in the Transvaal, and its sup-
port by the Afrikander Bond, the Cape Dutch set the policy
of Cecil Rhodes, and deliberately preferred it. If Rhodes
advocated expansion, he also stood for equal rights and oppor-
tunities for all civilised men, whether Boer or Briton ; and
he did not commit that old error of the British, that fruitful
source of estrangement and ill-feeling with the Dutch ; he
did not attempt to put the native on a footing of equality
which he could not in fact maintain with the whites.
He would have them ruled justly, but as children, under the
control of the civilised whites of the country ; if they showed
themselves worthy they should have a vote and a share in the
government of the country, but until then the inferiors must
be ruled for their own good by the superior. 1 There could
be no question of equality in theory until there was equality
in fact.
This was a policy the Cape Dutch burgher could under-
stand and approve ' My head is with the British if my heart
1 Rhodes was an honest man. There are many in politics. He was
also a brave man. There are few in politics. He told the Cape wine-
growers that alcohol must be kept from the natives, although the sale of
liquor to the natives was one of the main points which decided, the wine-
growing vote. I doubt if his candour lost him anything in the end.
248 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
is with the Boers/ was the quietly effective way in which one
Cape Dutchman summed up the new position ; and Rhodes's
frank declaration that at bottom there was little difference
between Boer and Briton, 1 that the two peoples should unite
rather than quarrel, soon found an echo in their hearts. From
being a bugbear, Rhodes became in time a hero with the Cape
Dutch ; and that position he maintained even after persistent
misrepresentation of his aims and the one great catastrophe
of his later years. The Jameson Raid, which made them
distrust every other Englishman, diminished but destroyed
not entirely their affection for Cecil Rhodes.
The basis of his policy, in politics as in finance, was union
and amalgamation of interests, not division and perpetuation
of differences. 2 Where fighting was necessary, that is, when
the other side insisted on fighting, he would fight with the
best and win, as he fought Barnato at Kimberley. But
Rhodes knew that even the victor loses something ; at any
rate he must lose the energy expended on the fight, which
might have been given to constructive work ; and whenever
it was possible he preferred peace and agreement, a transitory
peace even and an agreement that might only be short and
temporary with an opponent. The love of peace, and the
belief in peace and an honest bargain, shows steadily through
his career ; sometimes indeed it led him into error. Thrice
at least his own love of peace convinced him that the other
man would never fight and he was mistaken. 3
Even with the Bond, the official enemy of his schemes,
Rhodes was willing to call a truce. ' I offer to the opposite
1 There are several such sayings in Rhodes's speeches. Perhaps the
most neatly phrased is in the speech at Kimberley, 19th February 1900.
' We have no feeling against them. We have lived with them, shot with
them, visited with them, and we find owing, I suppose it is, to the race
affinity that there is not much between us.'
2 His love of amalgamation led some one to say that if ever Rhodes
got to heaven he would want to amalgamate it with the other place
(Williams, How I became a Governor).
3 Twice he believed that the Matabili would not fight, and they did ;
and once that Kruger would not fight, and he did.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 249
benches the pomegranate/ he said in the Cape Parliament ;
' I ask you to clear away all grievances between me and you.
We have lived in the past under the mists of Table Mountain,
and the politics of this House have somehow resembled the
cloud that drifts around the mountain/ There were griev-
ances and wrongs on both sides, and therefore ' we must let
the grass grow over the past sometimes/
He had not yet learned, what a knowledge of French-
Canadian history would have told him, that a people which
has lost its motherland has a long memory that broods upon
the past while its rivals are looking to the future. 1 He found
that for himself in later days, but for the moment his appeal
was successful. The pact was made, under terms that dis-
honoured neither side ; Rhodes and the Bond worked together
for several years in South African politics. There were indeed
some things in common between them. Each was interested
in the progress of agriculture in Cape Colony. Each believed
that white men must rule all South Africa. Each be-
lieved in federal union but here was the one fundamental
divergence between them. The Bond believed in national
Dutch union without the British flag, while the retention
of the British flag was the one absolute condition made by
Rhodes. 2
In the end Rhodes had his way. The Afrikander Bond
modified, or professed to modify its policy ; the article hinting
that the British should be ousted from South Africa was
deleted from its constitution, perhaps forgotten by some of
its members ; and Cecil Rhodes, the head of the British im-
perialists in Cape Colony, and Jan Hofmeyr, the leader of the
1 See vol. iii. bk. xi. ch. iii. and iv.
2 He admitted, however, that there could be a federal union under
various flags, by a reference to Bryce's Impressions of South Africa.
Even in the case of a great racial upheaval as with the Balkan League
in 1912 such a union is a poor thing, as Rhodes well recognised ; but he
qualified his support of the project by the significant addition, ' One
knows in the end what Hag will fly.' Speech, 20th July 1899.
250 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Afrikander Bond, found themselves working together for
somewhat different ends. 1
Never was a more curious alliance. Rhodes was plain-
spoken to the verge of bluntness ; often he merely thought
aloud, uttering the frankness of what with others would have
been unspoken thoughts. Hofmeyr, on the other hand, was
no public speaker ; he was reserved, secretive, shy ; he loved
intrigue ; his nickname of ' the Mole ' explained his methods, 2
and Rhodes at a later day, when the alliance was at an end,
explained those methods in cruel detail. ' His duty was
clearly to be in the House leading his party ; but where was
he ? He was always to be found in the lavatories and the
passages of the House bullying some poor member of his
party, because he wanted to vote according to his feelings
and not according to Hofmeyr 's orders/ 3
' A mole as a leader/ continued Rhodes, ' could never win,
and no party would ever succeed if its leaders would not come
1 The terms of the pact as arranged between Rhodes and Hofmeyr,
the Bond leader, were simple. ' Hofmeyr was chiefly interested,' said
Rhodes several years later, ' in withstanding Free Trade and upholding
Protection on behalf of the Dutch, who were agriculturists and wine-
growers. I had a policy of my own, to keep open the road to the north,
to secure for British South Africa room for expansion, and to leave time
and circumstances to bring about an inevitable federation. I therefore
struck a bargain with him, by which I undertook to defend the Protective
system in Cape Colony, and he pledged himself in the name of the Bond
not to throw any obstacles in the way of northern expansion. He did
not like this condition, but 1 am bound to say he loyally fulfilled it,
thereby incurring the hatred of the Transvaal Boers, and to some extent
losing the confidence of extreme members of the Afrikander Bond. That
was the whole secret, which was no secret at all.' Rhodes forfeited
nothing, for he was personally in favour of protection for agriculture.
2 The name was given Hofmeyr by Merriman, himself somewhat of an
enigma in Cape politics, a brilliant erratic man whose evident abilities
lacked all constructive elements, and were entirely devoted to criticism.
' I call Hofmeyr the Mole,' Merriman explained, ' because you never see
him, but you know he is somewhere near. There is a little heap of
ground thrown up, which tells you he has been there, but you never see
him.'
The missionary Mackenzie of Bechuanaland had almost as good a
name for Hofmeyr. He called him 'the captain who never appeared on
deck. '
3 Speech by Rhodes, 26th August 1898.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 251
into the open and argue questions with its opponents/ But
for all that Hofmeyr 's extraordinary if peculiar abilities
underground were a match for Rhodes overground. Hof-
meyr thought he could win Rhodes over to the Dutch inde-
pendents if, as seemed probable, the Imperial Government
discountenanced his imperial views ; Rhodes thought he
could win Hofmeyr over to the British view when he saw the
futility of the Cape Colony under Transvaal domination.
Each thought he used the other for his own ends, and when the
alliance was finally broken Rhodes laughingly confessed that
he did not know which was right. Certainly neither had
succeeded. 1
Rhodes was essentially a man of action, not of words ; 2
his speeches were careless in form, rough-hewn, mostly un-
prepared. They have the same carelessness of construction,
the same unbreakable force of character, as those of Cromwell
to the Commonwealth ; 3 sometimes the very soul of the man
stood out in a single phrase. ' An honourable member told
us we should have to do it/ he said in his first year in the
Cape Parliament ; ' I say, No ; but we shall do it if we think
it right/ 4 He could hit hard at times, but he had never the
dexterous cut-and-thrust, the love of sham debating points,
that marks the good party politician ; his speeches were full
1 Rhodes was the more nearly right of the two. His imperialism
never changed or wavered ; Hofmeyr at the British Colonial Conference
in London in 1887 did some good imperial work, standing out for an
imperial preferential tariff as a measure of imperial union.
2 Even his physical attitude in the Cape Parliament seemed to show
this. He was ' as restless in his seat as a spring doll,' said one observer
of him. Michell's Rhodes.
3 A parallel quotation will best show the likeness. ' I have no feeling
as to where a man was born ; all I desire to know is whether he is a good
man, ajid then I want him,' said Rhodes in a speech on 23rd April 1891.
' Sir, the State, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their
opinions ; if they be willing faithfully to serve it, that suffices,' said
Cromwell. The same doctrine in substance, allowing for the difference
of two centuries.
4 Speech, 25th April 1881. The clean uprightness of the English
parsonage had clearly not been muddied by ten years' residence at
Kimberley.
252 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
of solid constructive thought, and that is the eloquence that
tells on Germanic audiences such as Rhodes had to face all
his life.
But Rhodes was a man of action, and in time the oppor-
tunity for action came in full measure. He aimed at the
The control of the north by Britain, and the securing
contro 113 ' of the road which British missionaries and traders
versy, 1883. had made through Bechuanaland ; but unless
the thing were done quickly it could not be done at all, for
the independent Boers of the Transvaal had the same ambition
for themselves as Rhodes they, too, were aiming for the
north, and had begun to take it.
The first chance came in Rhodes's third year of politics.
On the uncertain boundaries of Griqualand West were two
native chiefs, Mankaroane and Montsoia, whose lands the
Transvaal Boers desired. Those lands were the key to the
interior, and several settlers from the republic had emigrated
thither under one Gerrit van Niekerk, and there proclaimed,
on 6th August 1883, a new republic to be called Stellaland, 1
with its capital at Vryburg. Nothing tangible connected
this movement with President Kruger and his government at
Pretoria, but there was no doubt it was afterwards ad-
mitted by Van Niekerk that they were acting in concert
with that government, if not certainly by its express instruc-
tions. The plan was an ingenious one, for the Transvaal could
disavow its pioneers until they were successful, and then,
when opportunity arose, proclaim the country for its own. 2
Some little while afterwards a similar squatting enter-
prise was begun further north at Rooi-Grond, which was
presently proclaimed an independent republic under the title
of Goshenland. With these two places under its control
1 Stellaland = Stille, or peaceful, land. An official bluebook, which
declares the name to be from Stella, a star, derived from the comet of
1882, is wrong.
2 A similar plan ^as successfully employed in northern Zululand.
See bk. xxvi. ch. i.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 253
the Transvaal would hold the key to the interior, and Cape
Colony and the British Empire would find their chances of
expansion northwards at an end.
Rhodes saw the urgency of the occasion ; the British
Governor at the Cape, Sir Hercules Robinson, a man of long
experience and wide views, 1 saw it also : but the Cape Dutch
as a whole still believed that the northern interior was the
inheritance of the Dutch alone and not of British and Dutch
together, and therefore prepared to support the Transvaal
claims rather than their own ; the Imperial Government was
apathetic.
Yet it was clear that Stellaland and Goshenland could
not permanently stand alone ; they must in the end be
incorporated in the Transvaal or Cape Colony. BoerRe-
To ensure that it should be the latter which ob- Publics of
Stellaland
tained their allegiance, Rhodes went north in andGoshen-
1883, and talked with the chief Mankaroane, who land > 1883 -
willingly agreed to cede his lands to the Cape. Having thus,
as he thought, secured the expansion of Britain over a large
part of southern Bechuanaland, Rhodes went on to the
Stellaland republic. This he found a settlement of some four
hundred farms, under its own government, and equipped
with its own proper Raad, or assembly, at its own capital
of Vryburg, whose very name declared it a free town. Origin-
ally founded by Transvaal Boers, other settlers from Cape
Colony had come in from time to time ; but these squatters
were aware that they had no proper title to their lands.
That title they were anxious to secure, and their desire was
Rhodes 'a opportunity. It was his principle that he cared
not who had the land, so long as the Cape had the govern-
ment ; and on this basis a considerable number agreed to
petition for annexation by the Cape, Van Niekerk himself,
the head of the little republic, making no definite objection,
although clearly inclined towards the Transvaal.
1 Afterwards Lord Rosmead.
254 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
With this substantial result Rhodes returned to Cape
Town. But to his intense disgust, he found his labour thrown
away. The Imperial Government had done nothing, the
Cape Ministry would do nothing, the Governor therefore
could do nothing, and the whole matter was allowed to stand
over indefinitely.
But events were now occurring which aroused even the
slumberous Cape Colony. In that year a new European
power descended on South Africa : Germany
Germany
annexes raised her flag at Angra Pequena on the western
Nama- coast, and in 1884 annexed Namaqualand and
qualand - 1
and Damaraland, and attempted to occupy St. Lucia
in north NataL The latter ste P' which would
seriously affect the whole British position in
South Africa, was too much even for the dilatory Granville,
then Secretary of the British Foreign Office ; * he protested
that the Bay had been acquired by Britain in 1843 by virtue
of a treaty with the Zulus, and Germany resigned her claim.
But in Namaqualand and Damaraland she remained in per-
manence, proclaiming the whole territory a German protec-
torate under the style of German South- West Africa. She
had profited from the indecision of the British and the slowness
of the Dutch ; for both Cape Colony and Britain had been
urged by far-seeing men to annex those barren lands, but
nothing had been done, on the dangerous assumption that
nobody else would do anything. Only the land for a few
miles round Walfish Bay, the one practicable harbour of
Namaqualand, had been proclaimed British in 1878.
This sudden appearance of a new colonial power in southern
Africa awoke both Britain and Cape Colony, and the late
sluggards were kept awake by the fact that Germany was
contemplating the establishment of other colonies in that
continent and obtaining them elsewhere. Britain scented
1 For Granvillc's dilatory methods olsewhere in Africa, see vol. iv.
bk. xiv. clu i. and ch. iii.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 255
a fresh rival to her Empire, and the possessions which to
many had seemed so valueless suddenly became the objects
of desire when another sought them.
But this was not the only danger. The eastern boundaries
of the new German Protectorate in South- West Africa were
undefined ; the western boundaries of the Trans- Bechuana-
vaal were likewise undefined. If the two countries land
annexed
came together, as there was some reason to by Britain,
fear, the great road to the interior would be 188 *-
shut, and the long work of British missionaries and traders
would have been done in vain. The Imperial Government,
in a sudden access of activity, recognised the fact to be im-
portant ; by a Convention with the Transvaal in 1884, the
western boundaries of the republic were fixed, and those
boundaries left the British road to the north outside the
Transvaal territories. 1 And a British Protectorate was at
once proclaimed over Bechuanaland.
The work which Rhodes had done now seemed secure ; but
there remained the two petty republics of Stellaland and
Goshenland, whose affairs must be arranged. And there
remained also the Transvaal, whose true policy was now to
be revealed.
The deputy- commissioner of the new Bechuanaland Pro-
tectorate was John Mackenzie, one of those admirable Scots
evangelists who had spread Christianity and some elements
of civilisation through the interior. No man had laboured
more successfully, for to him was due the conversion of
Khama and an amazing revolution in that great chief's terri-
1 One of the Transvaal delegates at the 1884 Convention of London
wrote afterwards that the Imperial Government ' were willing to con-
cede everything and on every point, so they said from the outset, only
upon this point they could not give in. They would keep the trade
route to the north open.' (Du Toit, in Rhodesia, : Past and Present, 1897. )
Downing Street had been coached by the Governor at the Cape, but
the fact that Gladstone held out on this fundamental point should be
counted to him for righteousness by the imperialist. It is probably
true that he held out in the interests of free trade rather than the
British Empire.
256 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
tory ; no man knew Bechuanaland so well. 1 But Mackenzie,
like his fellows in the mission-field, had the defects of his
qualities. He approved the British Protectorate over
Bechuanaland, but he had no wish to see white men colonise
the country, which he regarded as sacred to its native in-
habitants ; he had the inevitable missionary prejudice against
the settler and the trader, and he disliked the Boer who seized
the native's lands even more than he disliked the Briton.
There was much reason for his views : neither the British
trader nor the Boer trekker cared much for the original owner
of the soil, and Mackenzie's vision of a native Christian king-
dom guided in the path of righteousness and civilisation under
disinterested white control must necessarily fade if any and
every white man were allowed in Bechuanaland.
His ideal was a high one, but in practice it was impossible
of achievement. The British trader could not be kept out
of the country, since it was the main road to the interior ;
the Boer farmer was already there. And, unfortunately,
Mackenzie had at once to deal with the two Boer communities
of Stellaland and Goshenland, which would not shift their
ground for any missionary or deputy-commissioner. A dead-
lock soon occurred : Mackenzie refused to recognise that the
Boers had any rights ; the Boers refused to recognise that
he had any authority. Each was unfortunately correct, for
the Boers had no title to the lands they had taken, and it
was clear that Mackenzie had no authority at the moment
save his own word. 2
1 Mackenzie's general views are explained in the pamphlet, Bechuana-
land, The Transvaal, and England ; and in an article on England and
South Africa in the Contemporary Review, 1884. See also his Ten Years
North of the Orange, River, an admirable book; and Austral Africa:
Losing It or Riding It ; and bk. xxv. There is a useful life of Mackenzie
by his son.
The controversy with Rhodes caused considerable ill-feeling between
the two men, and some years later Mackenzie opposed the schemes of
Rhodes in Mashonaland.
2 Some years afterwards Rhodes described Mackenzie's aim as ' a pro-
native, anti-Dutch policy, to cost nothing and to do everything.' A
cruel but not inaccurate view.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 257
Stellaland was coldly civil, at Goshenland he was openly
defied, and the squatters of that miniature republic calmly
pursued their main industry of raiding the native herds a
fact which rightly incensed still further the indignant mission-
ary-commissioner. In his zeal for native interests, Mackenzie
proclaimed that the whole land of the country was the pro-
perty of the British Crown ; but the Boers of Bechuanaland
paid no heed. They believed that their possession was
stronger than his proclamation ; they knew, too, that they
would be supported from the Transvaal, and they doubted if
Mackenzie would be supported from the Cape.
They were right, but hardly in the manner they expected.
Mackenzie was quietly recalled ; but a stronger man came in
his place. The Stellalanders had not forgotten Rhodes, and
when matters went awry in Bechuanaland Rhodes had talked
the question over with the Governor at the Cape. ' I am
afraid Bechuanaland is gone/ said Robinson ; ' those free-
booters will take the country, and Kruger, of course, is behind
it all.' Rhodes refused to believe that the whole interior was
to be lost to Britain ; and asked to quote his own account
of the conversation ' that I might be allowed to go up and
look into things. The Governor said : " Oh, you can go up,
but I can give you no force to back you up. You must use
your own judgment." I replied, " Will you allow me to do
what I like ? " " Yes," said the Governor, " but if you make
a mess of it, I shan't back you up." I said, " That is good
enough for me."
With this vague authority, and little to depend on save the
straight force of his own character, Rhodes went north to see
his old acquaintance of the Stellaland Republic. ' It seemed
to me that the best thing to do,' he said long afterwards,
' was to go into the camp of my opponents, and so I went on
a visit to Van Niekerk and De la Rey of the Transvaal. I
shall never forget our meeting. When I spoke to De la Rey,
his answer was, " Blood must flow," to which I remember
VOL. VI. R
258 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
making the retort, " No, give me my breakfast, and then we
can talk about blood." Well, I stayed with him a week, I
became godfather to his grandchild, and we made a settle-
ment. They got their farms, and I secured the government/
With this happy ease and friendliness of manner his
opponents were disarmed ; at the very threshold of his public
career Rhodes had learnt, or perhaps he knew by instinct,
what some who have called themselves statesmen never seem
to learn, the way to deal with men. But further north in
Goshenland he had a more difficult task. Here was a republic
of some 160 farms ; here, too, was Piet Joubert, commandant-
general of the Transvaal, and open war. In the very presence
of Rhodes, and on the very night of his arrival, a Boer force
set out from Rooi-Grond to attack the native chief Montsoia
at Mafeking ; Rhodes warned them that they were breaking
the Convention of London, and virtually rebelling against the
Queen ; and having done this, and recognised that he could
do no more, he left the country.
This was on 25th August 1884 ; three weeks later, on
16th September, the equivocal position of the Goshenlanders
contro- was made clear. The Official Gazette of the Trans-
the SyWitl1 Vaa ^ Republic contained a proclamation by
Transvaal. President Kruger annexing the whole of Mont-
soia 's lands, on which stood Rooi-Grond, ' in the interests of
humanity ' a convenient euphemism for theft.
This flat defiance of the London Convention and the British
Empire was too much even for the easy-going imperial
authorities. An immediate protest was lodged no less had
been expected at Pretoria. But the Transvaal had not anti-
cipated that the protest would be followed up by force ; and
it learned with some alarm that a large expedition of four
thousand men was to be sent up under Sir Charles Warren
to clear out the Boer marauders of Goshenland, reinstate
the evicted natives around Mafeking, and restore order in
Bechuanaland.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 259
Clearly the attempt had failed. The Transvaal was in the
wrong not that that weighed for much at Pretoria but it
was also certain that the small outpost at Rooi-Grond would
be helpless against so considerable an expedition ; and the
Transvaal, whose treasury was nearly empty, was alarmed
to receive notification that it would be charged with the
entire cost of the Warren force.
The Transvaal President had played a clever game of
bluff ; the Bond in Cape Colony had backed him up by hints
and whispers rather than actual threats of rebellion : but
for once the game had failed. President Kruger waited till
the British force was on its way to Mafeking, and then, realis-
ing that he had lost the chance, he announced himself ready
to meet Warren at Fourteen Streams on the border to discuss
boundary questions in a friendly spirit.
The offer was accepted, and at that conference, which
opened on 7th February 1885, Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger,
the British leader and the Boer in the fight for the northern
interior, met for the first time face to face. Each recognised
a man ; neither recognised his master.
Kruger protested that he had been powerless to check the
burghers of Goshenland by any other means than annexation.
The excuse deceived nobody, and Rhodes retorted with some
heat, ' I blame only one man for the events that followed
my arrival at Rooi-Grond, and that is Joubert. Why is he
not here to answer for himself ? } There was no answer, and
Bechuanaland passed peacefully to Britain.
But all was not yet settled in this Bechuana business.
Warren disallowed the titles of the Stellalanders to their
holdings, and proclaimed that none but British would be
allowed in that country ; the act was denounced by Rhodes
as a breach of faith, for as a representative of the Cape Govern-
ment he had already settled with the Vryburg squatters that
their holdings should be respected. ' I held to one cardinal
axiom/ he explained, ' that no matter who held the land,
260 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Cape Colony should have the government/ Warren's action
made him look a fool whose promise could be dishonoured ;
and Rhodes promptly resigned his position, remarking that
there were two cardinal axioms which explained the supre-
macy of England first, that the word of the nation, once
pledged, was never broken, and second, that when a man
accepted citizenship of the British Empire there was no dis-
tinction of races. ' It has been my misfortune,' said Rhodes
in stinging words, ' in one year to meet with the breach of
the one and the proposed breach of the other/ 1
In this matter Rhodes was right, both in his stand for high
principle and his view that it would be well to make the Boer
republicans contented ; and his view prevailed.
The first long step on the great road to the north was won ;
and many men who were not opposed to the expansion of the
British Empire thought that step was far enough. Not so
Rhodes, to whom Bechuanaland was nothing more than the
neck of the bottle the simile was his own. There remained
the bottle itself the great lands between the Bechuana
country and the Zambesi.
Rhodes has himself related the story of an interview
about this time with the Governor at the Cape, who had cor-
Bhodes dially approved and aided in the expansion over
forgather Bechuanaland. ' We are now/ said Rhodes, ' at
Expansion, latitude 22V Sir Hercules Robinson answered
him, ' And what a trouble it has been. Where do you mean :
to stop ? ' to which quick answer came, ' I will stop where
the country has not been claimed/ The two men looked
together at the map, and found that definition took them
to the southern end of Tanganyika. At this, reported Rhodes,
1 Unfortunately examples could have been found, and in South Africa
too, of recent years, that the pledged word of Britain was not invariably
sacred. Britain pledged herself to standby the Orange River Sovereignty
in 1848, and withdrew in 1854 ; and she pledged herself not to withdraw
from the Transvaal in 1878, and withdrew three years later in ignominy,
(Bk. xxiv. ch. i. and bk. xxvi. ch. i.)
TOWARDS THE NORTH 261
Robinson ' was a little upset, and I said, " The powers at
home marked the map and did nothing ; let us mark the map,
and we all know we shall do something." " Well/' said
Sir Hercules, " I think you should be satisfied with the Zam-
besi as a boundary." I replied, " Let us take a piece of note-
paper, and measure from the Block House at Cape Town to the
Vaal River ; that is the individual effort of the people. Now
let us measure what you have done in your temporary
existence, and then we will finish up by measuring my
imaginings." We took a piece of notepaper, and measured,
and His Excellency said, " I will leave you alone." '
Within twelve years the imaginings of Cecil Rhodes were
I fact ; the British Empire reached to Tanganyika.
This was indeed a Colossus that bestrode South Africa,
a great man moving to great ends. ' It is inevitable fate,'
said Rhodes, as he looked at the map of the continent, ' that
all this should be changed, and I should like to be the agent
of fate.' Such was his destiny ; or rather one would say,
since for a few brief splendid years he seemed above all human
bounds, such he made his destiny.
He knew all that had been written, and most that had
been said, concerning the interior north of the Limpopo ;
his faith in its prospects, as a country where white He turng to
men could live and rear their children, was un- Matabiii-
bounded. ' Give me the centre of the continent/ land '
said Rhodes privately, ' and let who will have the swamps
which skirt the coast ' ; already in his third year in Cape
politics he had referred in public to his project : ' I have been
favoured with reports from Tati, and I have learned how
great are the prospects of the territory beyond the Transvaal.' 1
That territory was the land of the Matabili, and the Nyasa
countries, where the followers of David Livingstone were now
at work. 2
Others also had been favoured in like manner ; Rhodes
1 Speech, 16th August 1883. 2 See chap. ii.
262 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
stood not alone in his belief in the lands north of the Lim-
popo. Boer hunters and British traders had been there, and
seen the richness of the country ; concessions had been asked
and granted from the Matabili, 1 Boer settlements had been
proposed, there was the immediate prospect of a Transvaal
trek to the north, and Ehodes knew that what he would do
he must do quickly.
Finally it was discovered in 1887 that the Transvaal
Government had sent an emissary to Lo Bengula, the Mata-
His Treaty bili king, with the view of establishing permanent
Matabili relations in that country ; and it was clear to
1888. Khodes that he must act at once, or be forestalled.
A hurried visit to Sir Hercules Kobinson showed that the High
Commissioner had no power to proclaim a British protectorate,
having indeed no instructions from the Imperial Government
to do anything at all in Matabililand ; but Rhodes found a way
out of the difficulty by suggesting that an arrangement should
be made with Lo Bengula, by which that ruler should bind
himself not to enter into correspondence or treaty with any
other state, or sell or countenance any sale of Matabili lands to
any other state without the previous knowledge and sanction
of , the British High Commissioner. To this pale shadow of
the coming annexation the High Commissioner readily agreed.
The luck as usual favoured Rhodes in carrying out his
project. The Transvaal agent had the mischance to get
killed ; the messenger whom Rhodes sent, J. S. Moffat, went
through in safety, the Matabili sovereign was not unwilling,
and a treaty in the terms which Rhodes suggested was drawn
up with Lo Bengula, and signed on llth February 1888.
The Transvaal Government, aware that it had been outdone,
1 The concession-hunters bought their privileges with presents of guns,
cartridges, and wines ; it was said that the Matabili court had enough
champagne to float a battleship. Some extraordinary things found their
way into the Matabili country. When Lord Randolph Churchill was
viaiting South Africa a few years later he sent the savage king of that
nation a bath-chair.
TOWARDS THE NOETH 263
at once alleged a prior treaty of similar character with itself ;
but a few months later, on 12th November of the same year,
Lo Bengula stated that his signature to the instrument had
been obtained by fraud. He made no attempt to deny the
validity or binding character of the British document.
Victorious over the Transvaal in this first move, it was
now the aim of Rhodes to secure a more definite footing in
the land. A second agent, a well-known hunter Further
of the day, named Fry, was sent up to Buluwayo, Negotia-
the Matabili capital, but died on the journey ; and Mineral
a stronger party was soon despatched, composed
of Rhodes 's partner Rudd, Rochfort Maguire, who afterwards
became a leading figure in Rhodesian affairs and a member of
the British Parliament, and Frank Thompson, one of the
big sportsmen of South Africa. These men reached the
capital of Lo Bengula in safety, and had an audience with
him, in which they proposed to purchase all the mineral rights
of his country in return for a substantial monthly pension.
Lo Bengula hesitated. He was attracted by the money,
he had no great value for the minerals of his country but he
steadily set his face against any diminution of authority as
a sovereign. Well aware that he was the last great native
chief of South Africa for his cousins the Zulus were broken
by the whites, Kafirs and Bechuanas were subject peoples,
and his neighbour Khama had accepted Christianity and
the white man's civilisation Lo Bengula had an uneasy
feeling, which later grew to certainty, that for him also this
was the beginning of the end. He could not take the white
man's money without being in some measure under the white
man's control ; and once the -white men got a footing in the
country there would be no stopping their advance.
Lo Bengula knew this, his people knew it, and he knew
that they knew it. But he did not break with the tempters
who offered him certain gold for the chance that gold would
be found in his countries.
264 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
From the standpoint of the visitors the negotiations were
difficult, and not without danger. The Matabili people, as
of old, hated the white men and mistrusted them ; there were
moments when a sudden outbreak that would have been fatal
to the little embassy seemed probable, and the visitors had
an uneasy memory of a similar party of Europeans who had
mysteriously died of poison several years before in Lo Ben-
gula's country. 1 Once, too, an awkward misadventure
showed the temper of the Matabili warriors. One of the white
men happened to clean his teeth on a certain morning with
some carbolic powder, and the running stream in which he
was washing turned red ; he was at once seized, brought
before Lo Bengula, and charged with bewitching the water.
A word from the king, and the whole party would have been
killed ; but the word was not given, and the serious triviality
was satisfactorily explained. Such episodes hardly helped
the negotiations forward.
At length, on 30th October 1888, the matter came to issue,
and the British ambassadors met the Matabili sovereign and
The Ungusa his chiefs in a great council or indaba on the Un-
T reaL gusa River, to decide the question of the purchase
1888. and the pension. It was a momentous scene.
The proposed treaty lay on the table, the king and his re-
tainers stood close by, the Matabili warriors were grouped
around, and the white men were at a little distance. For a
time none spoke for or against the treaty. The chiefs and
their followers were mainly hostile, but dared not go against
their autocratic master ; Lo Bengula himself, so masterful
at other times, sat silent, embarrassed, indecisive in this crisis
of his reign. He knew better than his people that a massacre
might succeed for the moment, but other white men would
quickly follow to revenge their fellows ; they were stronger
1 Three white men were reported 'poisoned' in 1879; it was after-
wards ascertained that they had been done to death, but no revenge was,
or could be, taken. The story is told by Rider Haggard.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 265
than he, and could no longer be refused. And money, too,
was sweet. . , 1 .: :
There was a long and awkward silence. Then suddenly,
his mind made up, Lo Bengula rose, pushed forward to the
table, and affixed his mark to the treaty. Unknowingly or
had he some prevision while he doubted what to do ? he had
signed his doom, and sold the independence of his people and
his country.
The treaty ran :
' Know all men by these presents, that whereas Charles Dunell
Rudd, of Kimberley ; Rochfort Maguire, of London ; and Francis
Robert Thompson, of Kimberley, hereinafter called the grantees, have
covenanted and agreed, and do hereby covenant and agree, to pay
to me, my heirs and successors, the sum of one hundred pounds
sterling, British currency, on the first day of every lunar month ;
and, further, to deliver at my royal kraal one thousand Martini-
Henry breech-loading rifles, together with one hundred thousand
rounds of suitable ball cartridge, five hundred of the said rifles
and fifty thousand of the said cartridges to be ordered from
England forthwith and delivered with reasonable despatch, and
the remainder of the said rifles and cartridges to be delivered as
soon as the said grantees shall have commenced to work mining
machinery within my territory; and further, to deliver on the
Zambesi River a steamboat with guns suitable for defensive
purposes upon the same river, or, in lieu of the said steamboat,
should I so select, to pay me the sum of five hundred pounds
sterling, British currency. On the execution of these presents,
I, Lo Bengula, King of Matabeleland, Mashonaland, and other
adjoining territories, in exercise of my sovereign powers, and in
the presence and with the consent of my council of indunas, do
hereby grant and assign unto the said grantees, their heirs,
representatives, and assigns, jointly and severally, the complete
and exclusive charge over all metals and minerals situated and
contained in my kingdoms, principalities, and dominions, together
with full power to do all things that they may deem necessary to
win and procure the same, and to hold, collect, and enjoy the
profits and revenues, if any, derivable from the said metals and
minerals, subject to the aforesaid payment ; and whereas I have
been much molested of late by divers persons seeking and desir-
ing to obtain grants and concessions of land and mining rights
in my territories, I do hereby authorise the said grantees, their
266 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
heirs, representatives, and assigns, to take all necessary and lawful
steps to exclude from my kingdom, principalities, and dominions
all persons seeking land, metals, minerals, or mining rights
therein, and I do hereby undertake to render them all such need-
ful assistance as they may from time to time require for the
exclusion of such persons, and to grant no concessions of land or
mining rights from and after this date without their consent and
concurrence ; provided that, if at any time the said monthly pay-
ment of one hundred pounds shall be in arrear for a period of
three months, then this grant shall cease and determine from the
date of the last made payment ; and, further, provided, that nothing
contained in these presents shall extend to or affect a grant made
by me of certain mining rights in a portion of my territory south
of the Kamaquaban River, which grant is commonly known as the
Tati Concession. This, given under my hand this thirtieth day
of October, in the year of our Lord, 1888, at my royal kraal.
Lo BENGULA X his mark.
C. D. RUDD.
ROCHFORT MAGUIRE.
F. R. THOMPSON.
Witnesses. CHAS. D. HELM.
J. F. DEEYER.
With this precious document the Rudd party returned
to the south, and on this treaty, whose conditions were faith-
fully observed by the British, Rhodes based his proposals to
the Imperial Government for a royal charter in the following
year.
He had already prepared the way to carry out his schemes
in South Africa. On 13th March 1888 the final deal with
Barnato at Kimberley was completed, the great corporation
of De Beers Consolidated Mines came into existence, and it
was a condition of the agreement that De Beers should finance
the new mining and colonising enterprise to the extent of
200,000 the total capital of the original De Beers Com-
pany. On that point Barnato had fought Rhodes to the last,
declaring that this was not business, but Rhodes prevailed. 1
1 Rhodes had, as already shown some pages previously, the advantage
over Barnato from his large holding in Barnato's company. The promise
of a seat in the Cape Parliament for Barnato was the final argument.
TOWARDS THE NO&TH 26?
' You have a fancy for building an empire in the north/
said the distressed Barnato sorrowfully as he thought of
good dividends thrown away on a dream of conquest, ' and
I suppose you must have your way/
Early in 1889 Rhodes came to England, leaving behind him
the clear message that ' whatever state possesses Bechuana-
land and Matabililand will possess South Africa ' ; 1 Rhodes
but the battle now had to be fought with those b *y B out
who already had, or asserted they had, claims concession-
upon the country. The concession-hunters, re- Holders '
marked Rhodes some time after, 2 were ' one of the greatest
difficulties we had. They came like locusts ; they followed
us everywhere, but did nothing whatever, and whenever they
found us in occupation of a district, they came with a piece
of paper from some wretched petty native chief, and claimed
the whole of our results/ Many of these irritating claims
were not made until later, but the bigger opponents were
dealt with summarily and at once. One concession for mining
rights which had been given to Thomas Baines ' the good
white man/ as Lo Bengula called that kindly companion of
Livingstone's early journeys so far back as 8th April 1870
had passed into other hands ; it had never been used, and
Rhodes bought the full rights from its owners for 10,000.
Other and more formidable rivals were bought out for cash,
and presently the road was fairly clear for Rhodes to discuss
the whole situation with the British Government, and to raise
the full capital required for the great enterprise that lay
ahead.
The Colonial Office agreed to the general principle of the
scheme, ' influenced by .the consideration that if such a
Company is incorporated by Royal Charter, its constitution,
objects, and operations will become more directly subject to
control by Her Majesty's Government than if it were left to
1 Speech, 28th September 1888.
2 Speech, 29th November 1892.
268 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
those gentlemen to incorporate themselves under the Joint
Stock Companies Acts, as they often do. The example of the
H Imperial East Africa Company shows that such
the Britisn a body may, to some considerable extent, relieve
Africa ^ er Majesty's Government from diplomatic dim-
company, culties and heavy expenditure/ But the Colonial
1889. Office, although friendly to the scheme, wished to
limit the soaring imagination of Rhodes and to confine
the boundary of the British South Africa Company to
the southern banks of the Zambesi. An official might as
well have commanded the lark to limit its flight. Rhodes
insisted, the Government in time gave way, and the northern
boundaries of the British South Africa Company's dominions
were left undefined. 1
On 29th October 1889 the Royal Charter was granted, to
Rhodes and his associates for a period of twenty-five years.
It was a year all but a day since the original treaty with Lo
Bengula had been signed. The way was clear for the founding
of the British colony that was to be called in time Rhodesia.
With the instinct born of his farming stock, Rhodes had
gone for land, as much land as he could get ; and he had got
it in full measure. ' I have got a great piece of Africa/ he
said to a Cape audience some time after, ' and whether you,
the fathers, are for me or against me, I know that your
children will be with me/ 2
1 In this respect the charter resembled the old charter for the colonisa-
tion of Carolina more than two centuries before, whose boundaries had
also been left undefined, and might have been claimed as reaching
through from the Atlantic to the Pacific. See vol. i. bk. iv. ch. iii.
2 Speech, 26th August 1898.
In the same year that he secured Rhodesia, Rhodes realised another
of his dreams. Like Warren Hastings, who had longed for years to
buy back his old family estates at Daylesford, Rhodes had tried to pur-
chase the lands which his people had once owned at Dalston, originally
open country, now a dreary north London suburb. In 1888 the purchase
was effected, and Rhodes became a landed proprietor on the bare veldt
and in crowded London. This little incident is an additional proof of his
craving for land.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 269
CHAPTER V
THE FOUNDING OF RHODESIA : 1888-1900
' WHEN I was elected to the Cape Parliament in 1881,' said
Cecil Rhodes to his constituents seventeen years later, ' I
went down, thinking, in my practical way, I will go and take
the north/ Four years after his election he had prepared
the way by securing the road to the north through Bechuana-
land ; three years later he had taken the north itself, by treaty
with its chiefs and native powers ; and in ' his practical way '
again, Rhodes at once began to secure and develop his new
possession by planting British settlements and townships,
and organising an administration in the wilderness.
It was a great country that he had secured for Britain, a
territory that reached far into the tropics and the heart of
Africa ; a very paradise for sportsmen, a land where lion
and elephant, buffalo and eland, giraffe and antelope were
found in thousands ; it was also a land of fertile pastures and
open grassy flats, millions of virgin acres awaiting the white
man's industry ; and there were, moreover, rumours some
held them more than rumours of gold and gems and precious
stones. 1
This great territory, which later ages were to call Rhodesia
from the pioneer of its European settlement, was then peopled
by the wild Matabili and their serfs, the gentler Mashonas.
Until fifty years before the Mashonas 2 and their cousins the
1 Apart from the great Zimbabwe ruins in Mashonaland (vol. iv. bk. xiii.
ch. i. ), several old gold workings were found in Matabililand by British
hunters before the annexation ; and a few quills of gold-dust that had
been washed out of river-sand were bought about 1875 by George Wood,
whom Selous (A Hunter's Wanderings) calls the last of the professional
elephant-hunters.
2 The origin of the word Mashona is unknown ; neither this nor any
other general term was recognised by the people themselves, among
whom each tribe or community had its individual name, as elsewhere in
Africa a proof in itself of their fatal lack of unity and common
organisation.
270 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Makalakas had had the country to themselves ; but then
the emigrant Cape Dutch, who drove the Matabili from the
Rhodesia Transvaal north of the Limpopo, had unwittingly
before driven destruction on that peaceful people.
Mosilikatsi, king of the Matabili, fled far from
the Boers, and proposed to found a settlement north of the
Zambesi ; but some of his warriors and their people, liking
the rich wooded country through which they passed on the
way to the great river, stayed behind in the districts around
the present capital of Buluwayo. Mosilikatsi himself soon
found his path barred by the tse-tse fly, and his cattle dying
by the hundred all along the banks of the Zambesi ; he there-
fore retraced his steps to the more excellent country where his
warriors had deserted him. These he slaughtered for their
faithlessness he might have spared them for their greater
foresight and the Matabili monarch established himself in
this land, spreading his authority over a wide territory with
little difficulty. Both the Mashonas and the Makalaka, the
older inhabitants, lived in small settlements under petty
chiefs, an industrious but stupid peasant folk, with little idea
of war and less of combination against a common enemy ;
they had as much chance of staying the Matabili as the corn
the wind. The Makalaka in these parts were utterly exter-
minated, only deserted hilltop villages and bleaching skulls
around showing where their homes had been ; the Mashonas
were reduced to servitude, allowed to live and work so long
as they paid tribute to their conquerors, and submitted to
a yearly foray on their cattle, fields, and children. 1
The reign of Mosilikatsi in the new Matabililand was long
and not inglorious ; and when he died in 1868, his people
1 When the country was annexed by the British, there were signs
that the Mashonas were becoming exhausted by these continual attacks.
Their old houses were three times the size of their miserable huts at
the time of the British invasion, and many parts of the country that
had once been cultivated were reverting to wilderness. The mark of
Zulu conquest was everywhere the same desolation and destruction.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 271
found that his successor, Lo Bengula, was likewise a man of
action. Rival factions and contending parties for the throne
were the inevitable accompaniments of a change of savage
kings ; but Lo Bengula's rival, Kuruman by name, was de-
feated in a tremendous battle in 1870 on the Bembees River
at the native town of Zwang Indaba ; 1 and from that time
there were none to challenge the authority of the last king
of the Matabili until the English came. 2
Not very many white men had yet visited this savage
country. From time to time a few Dutch hunters, brave
and daring shots, had travelled north from their European
Transvaal farms, and shot elephants for ivory ; f^ 11 * 18
and since this proved a profitable sport for the Traders,
price of ivory was rising on the European market they came
back year by year to the land of the Matabili and Mashonas,
returning southwards with their trophies when the rains made
further work impossible. Of such hardy breed were Viljoen,
an annual pilgrim to the north, who kept his sight and steadi-
ness of aim till nearly seventy, even recovering at that great
age from the mauling of a lion that crunched a limb, and
1 So fierce was the fight that a missionary who passed over the field
after the battle found in several cases two men lying dead together,
each with the other's assegai through his heart.
2 Some particulars of this considerable personage may be given. He
is described by Selous as a man of 5 ft. 10 or 11 inches, strong, and in
later years excessively stout, afflicted with gout or dropsy. At one time
he affected European attire, but towards the close of his reign reverted
to the national garb, partly perhaps to placate the anti-foreign views of
his people. He was an autocrat, cruel and capricious to his subjects,
who treated him with the most aggravated respect ; but nevertheless
there was always the chance that an ambitious rival might head a
rebellion and secure his throne, and this doubtless accounted for much
of what seemed wanton cruelty.
Lo Bengula did not, like his subjects, dislike white men on general prin-
ciples, but allowed them to trade and preach and hunt in his dominions ;
nor did he break his plighted word to them, save in the last crisis of his
reign.
His name is said by one writer to mean 'Driven by the Wind,' by
another to mean ' The Defender,' and he assumed the usual magniloquent
titles of royalty The Stabber of the Sun, The Eater of Men, the
Great Elephant, etc. But even civilisation is not exempt from these
absurdities.
272 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
going to the chase again ; Martin Swart, whose deeds and
escapades were told over many a camp-fire of an evening, but
who came to an untimely end, along with ten others of his
family, from fever on the Matabili plains ; John Lee, half
Dutch, half British, who hunted and traded at Mangwe ; and
Schinderhutte, another hunter-trader, who drank himself
mad on Cape brandy on his last trip, slew a Kafir boy in his
delirium, and was himself killed by his servants, and his body
thrown to the hyaenas in revenge.
British hunter-traders also found their way north in quest
of sport and profit in these years, and showed themselves the
equal of the Boers. A few left names that were remembered
for cool pluck or successful dealings : such were Jennings,
Gifford, and George Wood, a trio of professional elephant-
hunters who lived by their guns ; Hartley and Phillips, both
of whom shot over much of the country between 1864 and
1872 ; Fairbairn and Dawson, two young Scots traders,
who established a store in savage Buluwayo, exchanging
blankets, wagons and guns for ivory and ostrich feathers ; 1
and George Westbeech, who opened a trade and engaged
in sport along the Barotsi Valley to the left of the Matabili
in 1871.
These and other hunters, traders, and an occasional mis-
sionary, 2 were the unrecognised and mostly forgotten pioneers
of the country north of the Limpopo. Some left their bones
on the veldt, lost wanderers in its immeasurable dis-
1 Fairbairn built himself a house near Buluwayo, which he called the
New Valhalla, a place where many a weary traveller was refreshed and
entertained.
This was one of the earliest European houses in Matabililand, but I
think not actually the earliest. The first appears to have been built by
the English missionary at Inyati about 1859. But chronological precision
in such matters is impossible.
2 There were two mission stations among the Matabili before the
conquest by Britain, the oldest at Inyati, the second at Hope Fountain,
twelve miles from Buluwayo, founded about 1870. They were not very
successful ; and the main stream of missionary effort left the Matabili
on one side, and passed on under Livingstone's direction to Nyasa (see
ch. ii.).
TOWARDS THE NORTH 273
tances, 1 or were killed by the wild beasts they had come to
kill ; some came home with trophies of the chase, and told
admiring friends strange stories of sudden peril and quick
decision ; but only one made any permanent mark on the
country. 2 That one was Frederick Courteney Selous, the
mightiest hunter of them all.
In the year 1872 a young Englishman of nineteen had
presented himself at the court of Lo Bengula, and asked per-
mission to shoot the great game of the country. Freder i Ck
' Go where you will/ the king answered him con- Courteney
temptuously, ' you are only a boy.' The boy went !
out to shoot, and the steady nerve and eye of young Selous for
it was he soon made their mark. His first trip more than paid
expenses by the ivory he secured ; year by year thereafter he
returned north of the Limpopo, sometimes going as far as the
Zambesi and beyond in search of sport, sometimes touching the
Barotsi Valley, but mostly camping in the territories of the
Matabili and Mashonas. Each season had its share of wild ad-
ventures and hairbreadth escapes from lion or elephant that
turned on their pursuer ; each season had its hardships, lack of
food at times or water, and its little feasts of elephant's heart,
the greatest delicacy of the hunter's table in South Africa ; and
almost every season saw a heavy bag of ivory and trophies. 3
1 Such was French, a companion of Selous, who lost his way, wandered
round and round, and died of thirst and hunger. ' The sun killed him,'
said his native attendant simply when found and questioned by Selous
some days after the tragedy. Selous himself nearly lost his life on an
earlier expedition from the same cause.
2 Only four place-names of European origin survive from pre-annexa-
tion days. One was Beaconsfield Cataract on the Umniati River, named
by some straying Tory in the wilderness ; the second was the Hill of the
Stump-Tailed Bull, named by Hartley from an elephant he shot in 1864 ;
the third was Hartley Hill, seventy-seven miles from Salisbury, which
takes its name from Hartley himself ; the fourth was Mount Hampden.
3 Selous had all the ingenuity of the civilised man in primitive
surroundings. Once he needed a light, and the expedition had neither
lamp nor candle. The leader made it out of marrow fat spread on a
plate with a few shreds of blanket for a wick.
Selous has given an account of his experiences in A Hunter's Wander-
ings one <>f the classics of sport.
VOL. VI. S
274 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
It was to Selous that Rhodes came when the new province
was to be occupied. He was no longer the stripling whom
Leads the ^ Bengula had dismissed with a laugh and the
British contemptuous permission to go where he would ;
f^ edltl n a s ^ ron g man nearing forty, Selous had covered
Rhodesia, the whole of Mashonaland and Matabililand in
his ten years' experience ; no other white man
knew those countries or their people half so well. He had
no prevision of the great task which Rhodes invited him to
undertake ; but when the founder of the Chartered Company
was making his final arrangements in London in 1889, the
two men met, and Selous agreed to lead the pioneer British
force into the new territories in the following year.
It was his advice that the first effective occupation should
be in the country of the Mashonas, a people far less likely to
resist than the Matabili, whom no treaty would restrain from
an attack on the invader ; and that the pioneers should avoid
the Matabili territories and capital entirely, cutting a path for
themselves far to the south of Buluwayo. To the soundness
of that advice raay largely be ascribed the initial success of
the pioneering column. 1
But before the pioneers could start new difficulties arose.
It became known that Lo Bengula regretted the bargain he
LoBenguia ^ ia( ^ made on the Ungusa River. His pension
regrets his had been punctually paid, but as the time drew
Bargain. ^^ or y g Dominions ^ o k e invaded by European
miners the idea misliked him more and more. The few men
1 The original idea of Rhodes had been that the country should be
entered by way of Tati and the Matopo Hills, which would have led
into the heart of the Matabili country and inevitably have caused
instant collision. The advice of Selous, to go by way of Tuli into
Mashonaland, was so clearly wise that Rhodes deferred to it at once.
He was far too great a man to be ashamed to learn from another's wider
experience.
Once, indeed, some foolish person taunted him with changing his
views rather hurriedly. ' Yes, as hurriedly as I could,' replied Rhodes,
' for I found I was wrong. '
TOWARDS THE NORTH 275
among his people who had favoured the treaty were executed
in proof of his displeasure ; the agent of Rhodes at Buluwayo
had to flee the country to save his life. For the time Rhodes
could see no remedy, and his great project seemed like to go
awry at the last ; he could not himself visit Buluwayo to
placate Lo Bengula, owing to the pressure of affairs at Kim-
berley and the Cape, and he knew not whom to send.
In this perplexity he confided the matter to his closest
friend, Leander Starr Jameson, a young Scots doctor who
had come to South Africa some years since, and Dr Jame .
had obtained a large and lucrative medical son goes
practice in Kimberley. The two men had long Nortl1 -
been intimate, living like college chums in rooms together,
taking their meals together, and exchanging views on men
and things. 1 Jameson was familiar with the plans of Rhodes,
and when the difficulty was put before him he understood at
once. ' I will go/ he said ; and to the question, ' When will
you start ? ' he answered, ' To-morrow morning/ He was
a man of quick decision and self-sacrifice : a brilliant medical
career was straightway abandoned, and henceforth Jameson
was the right-hand man of Rhodes in the founding of the new
colony.
Once already he had encountered Lo Bengula, on a holiday
trip to the north the previous year ; but this time he meant
business. Risking his life among the now restless and un-
easy Matabili, he rode straight through to Buluwayo ; for-
tunately for his mission, the king was suffering from an attack
of gout doubtless caused by too great indulgence in the
wines that had been sent him by rival concession-hunters
and Jameson undertook to Cure his royal host. He succeeded,
and in reward was invested with the full insignia of a Matabili
1 From a speech by Cecil Rhodes.
A Life of Dr. Jameson has been written by Seymour Fort, after the
fashion of these days, which insists that a man shall have the chance of
reading his own biography some years before his career is finished.
276 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS
warrior, the ostrich plume, the shield, and assegai ; but in
the real purpose of his mission he seemed to make no progress,
and Lo Bengula put him off or gave evasive answers when he
talked of the fulfilment of the treaty and the opening of the
road through the Matabili country.
At length time came to say farewell, and Jameson now
warned the king in a last interview. ' As you will not con-
firm your promise and grant me the road/ said Jameson, ' I
shall bring my white impi, and if need be, we shall fight/
The unwieldy mass of dark copper-coloured flesh which was
the king moved restlessly to and fro in the dim light of the
royal hut. ' I have never refused the road to you and your
impi,' answered Lo Bengula. With that veiled permission
Jameson returned, and the pioneer expedition was prepared
for the march.
The route having been settled by Selous's advice, there
remained the size of the expedition to be sent, and its equip-
The Pioneer ment. And here were many diverse opinions,
invasion* ^ ne Boers knew much about such enterprises, and
1890. it was remembered that the trek which the Zout-
pansberg Boers had projected into Mashonaland two years
before would have numbered at least fifteen hundred men,
more probably two thousand. A British officer of some ex-
perience is said to have hazarded the opinion that a thousand
men and a quarter of a million pounds would be required
a sum that would have crippled the British South Africa
Company or, as it was more generally called for short, the
Chartered Company at the very start of its enterprise.
The actual work was done by a pioneer column of 179 men ;
a troop of Chartered Company's police ; and a body of 150
natives, carriers, and drivers, who were not very satisfactory,
and many of whom deserted ; and the total cost to the Char-
tered Company was 89,285, 10s. For that sum, and with
that number of men under the guidance of Selous, Major
Frank Johnson contracted with Cecil Rhodes to recruit, arm,
I
I
TOWAEDS THE NORTH 277
equip, and pay a force of about two hundred men, to construct
a good wagon road from the frontier to Mount Hampden in
Mashonaland, to organise an expedition thither in a manner
satisfactory both to the Imperial High Commissioner at Caj: e
Town and to the Chartered Company, and to build certain
forts in the new country for the protection of its settlers.
No similar enterprise had ever been more cheaply planned ;
the event proved that none was ever more efficiently
managed. 1
The pioneers were all picked men, dressed in a uniform of
brown corduroy, leather gaiters, stout army boots, a broad-
brimmed hat with the brim pinned up on one side, and a heavy
waterproof overcoat, and armed with the ordinary Service
Martini-Henry rifle. The rank and file were paid seven
shillings and sixpence a day ; and at the close of the ex-
pedition each man was to select three thousand acres of
land, and to have the right to fifteen gold claims in the new
country. 2
The invading force was first assembled at Kimberley, but
the real start was from Maf eking. On the morning of 18th
May 1890 the column left that dusty little village ThQ gtart
of the plain for the north, on an enterprise which from
those so minded might have compared with no afe ng '
great exaggeration to the great march of Cortes through
Mexico. But the expedition had a significance apart from
this. It was the last heroic undertaking of British colonisation,
the last of the long series of English settlements which had
spread from Virginia to Vancouver, from Sydney to the
1 The chief authority for the march is, of course, Selous, Travel and
Adventure in South- East Africa ; Hyatt's The Northward Trek, and
Harvey Brown's On the South African Frontier, should also be consulted.
2 Accompanying the expedition was also a small medical staff, organised
by the Jesuit Fathers, an Anglican and a Roman chaplain, and a veterinary
surgeon.
In all, the equipment took ninety wagons and four water-carts, and
included a searchlight, a plant for electric light, a steam saw- mill, arms
and ammunition, and four Maxim guns.
278 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Australian desert, from Table Bay to the Zambesi. 1 Rhodesia
was to be the last of the English commonwealths overseas ;
the pioneer work of the British Empire on a great scale was
finished. The men indeed were ready for the work, but the
work itself was nearly done ; the earth had grown too small.
Some little confusion occurred at the start in marshalling
the procession of wagons, cattle, horses, and troopers ; and
some murmuring was heard against the military discipline
that was necessary on such an enterprise. After the first
day, however, common sense prevailed, things were straight-
ened out, and for the remainder of the journey there was
unbroken good-comradeship between officers and men.
During the first three weeks the northward road was as un-
eventful as any journey by ox-wagon in the older settled
districts of Cape Colony. On the twentieth day the force
reached the Crocodile River at its junction with the Notwani ;
a day or two later, when passing the border of Khama's
country, that Christianised ruler sent two hundred of his
people to replace the Kafirs, who were now deserting daily. 2
The expedition, thus strengthened, then moved on to Mac-
loutsie near the British frontier. Here the pioneers were joined
by the Chartered Company's police, and the united party, after
being drilled and inspected, made ready for the main march.
On 27th June the frontier was crossed, and the dangerous
part of the work began. Almost as they started a letter was
The British recerve( l from Lo Bengula, warning them again
Frontier that the only road in his country lay through
Buluwayo, that he would permit no other road
to be made, and that if the white men dared to cross the Tuli
River they would meet with trouble.
1 Both in Virginia, the oldest of English colonial enterprises, and in
Rhodesia, the youngest, the situation v as essentially the same a settle-
ment of white men among savages. In Virginia (vol. i. bk. i. ch. vi.) as
in Rhodesia, a peaceful settlement was quickly followed by a racial w ar.
2 Doubtless the excellent and godly Khama lent his men with the
more willingness because he had often suffered from the raids of the
heathen Matabili.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 279
The whites then crossed the Tuli River.
Selous at once began to cut the road through this hazard-
ous district. Here on the wooded lowlands the natives would
have had every advantage in the attack. They seiouscuts
knew the country better than the whites, could tlle Tr&c ^-
choose their own place and time for battle, the artillery and
rifle fire of the invaders would have been hampered, and the
Matabili assegai have done its worst. 1
Such precautions as could be taken were taken. Scouts
were thrown out in all directions by day, flanking parties and
a rearguard were also told off to keep careful Precaution
watch ; and each night the camp was formed in against
a hollow square laager, a Maxim gun at every Attack -
corner, and sentinels on the look-out against attack. Yet
with all these precautions an attack in force by the Matabili
would probably have wiped out the whole body of the in-
vaders in ten minutes. But as yet no attack came.
On 1st July the main force reached the Tuli River, and
here a fort was built. 2 A small garrison was left at the place,
and the column then marched on, along the road that had been
cut a few days before by Selous and the advance guard. On
18th July they reached the Umshambetsi River without in-
cident ; from that time onwards, in order to quicken the
march, a double road of two parallel tracks was cut through
the bush. The work doubled the already arduous task of the
road-makers under Selous, but it also doubled the speed of
the expedition and time was important if they were to
get through safely.
About this stage of the journey, when Khama's party of
natives was dismissed and allowed to return, nervous rumours
1 To realise the disaster that might have occurred if the simple word
annihilation fails one need only cite a parallel. Some parties of the
Boers were utterly wiped out on the Great Trek (ch. i.), and the
catastrophe which overwhelmed General Braddock in the Virginian
backwoods when attacked by the redskins was another warning (vol. i.
bk. v. ch. iii.).
2 It was originally named Fort Selous, but afterwards called Fort Tuli.
280 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
ran through the camp of an approaching Matabili attack.
Most of these reports were started by the miserable natives
of the country, who lived in perpetual fear of Lo Bengula's
warriors, but none had any basis of truth. Nevertheless, as
an additional precaution for the safety of the camp, mines
were laid every night around the laager, and the searchlight
was kept playing steadily. But still no attack came.
A few days more, and the dangerous part of the journey
was over. The low country was nearly crossed, and the
pioneers were now at the foot of the high open veldt of
Mashonaland. Once that was gained they would be able to
see any hostile force several miles away, to prepare against its
coming, and fight at a strong advantage.
But between the lowlands and the uplands lay a border
country of rugged broken terraces, granite hills alternating
with boulder-strewn valleys and green swamps and marshes,
where the wagons might be stuck or overturned and the
whole expedition wrecked. In that difficult country it was
Selous's work to discover a pass through which the pioneers
could make their way into the promised land.
It was an anxious moment for the great hunter who was
finding the path. If the column was delayed, an attack by
the Matabili was almost certain ; and attack in such a place
meant death.
On 2nd August Selous rode on ahead of the main body,
accompanied by Lieutenant Nicholson, a Transvaal Boer
named Borius, and two natives. The next morning he
climbed one of the granite heights with which the country
was strewn to survey the land. Only one opening appeared
in the long range of hills ; and that opening, as he knew by
old experience, might end in a dead barrier and disappoint-
ment.
But all was well. The opening in the hills led directly to
the high veldt of Mashonaland ; the way was clear. ' A
weight of responsibility, that had at times become unbearable,
TOWARDS THE NORTH 281
fell from my shoulders/ wrote Selous afterwards of that
morning ; fitly he named the place the Providential Pass.
Still no attack came from the Matabili. By 13th August
the whole column had travelled safely through the pass, and
from that point the road was easy. The following The
day the first outpost was founded in Mashona- pi n eers
land, and named in loyalty to the sovereign, Fort Mashona-
Victoria ; * here Sir John Willoughby, who had lan<L
ridden after the pioneers with a troop of police, and whose
aid might have been invaluable in the event of a Matabili
attack, joined the party. The police were left as garrison
in Fort Victoria, and the remainder of the column moved on,
heading now straight for Mount Hampden and the journey's end.
A long but easy march still lay before them. The only
difficulty, indeed, that they encountered was the shortage of
cattle feed it was the end of the dry season, and the Mashona
grass was short and dry but when the cattle lost their
strength, the pioneers themselves lent a hand in pulling the
heavy wagons. In this wise the column marched and pulled,
and doubtless swore and sweated by the way, during the next
three weeks.
At length, on the evening of llth September 1890, this little
force of conquering pioneers that had come to take the
country for their own encamped on one of the Mas&ona-
many highlands in the territories of the Mashonas. ^mexed
They were still a dozen miles from Mount Hamp- isso.
den ; but they were very weary with the march. The spot
was healthy, thanks to a height of nearly five thousand feet
above the sea, the nights were cool, although the land was
in the tropics ; the soil was fertile ; and in this favoured
place the invaders determined to plant their settlement.
The march was at an end, and not a single life had been lost
by accident or war. The roll-call was complete when the ex-
pedition was paraded on the following morning.
1 Its site was afterwards moved a few miles away.
282 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The force was now drawn up to hear a proclamation ; and
in the name of Queen Victoria, all the land in South Central
Africa not claimed by any civilised power was declared
annexed to the British Empire. The Union Jack was hoisted,
prayer was offered, a salute of twenty-one guns fired into the
startled wilderness, and three loud cheers rang out from the
throats of the pioneers in possession.
On that eventful day, and with that simple but not un-
impressive ritual, the retreat of the Boers into the interior
was finally cut off, the vow which David Livingstone had
made to open the country was fulfilled, 1 and the seeds of a
new and alien civilisation were planted in a land which many
centuries before had seen another alien civilisation invade its
soil, and wax and wane and perish. That day, the twelfth of
September 1890, was one of the decisive days in the history
of South Africa.
Steady work at once began. In accordance with their
contract, the pioneers were disbanded, many scattering them-
Saiisb selves through the country to seek for gold, some
founded, remaining awhile at headquarters before taking
up the land they had been promised. 2 Here a
fort was built against a possible attack ; it was named Fort
Salisbury from the British Prime Minister of the day ; and
that fort soon afterwards became the city of Salisbury and
the capital of the colony of Rhodesia. There was no oppo-
sition to this first European settlement in Mashonaland, and
the new Salisbury in the South African wilderness looked for
a time as though its destiny was that of a city of peace, like
that far older Salisbury whose great cathedral spire rises nobly
out of the placid Wiltshire plain by clear-flowing Avon in old
England.
The town was conceived on a spacious plan, by men who
1 Bk. xxiv. ch. ii.
2 There was some dispute about these lands, the Chartered Company
being bitterly attacked for not fulfilling its bargain with the pioneers.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 283
had great visions of the future of Rhodesia, and over a mile
square was allotted for the site. Two great roads, Second
Street and Jameson Avenue, crossed each other at right
angles at the centre, and around this spot the public and
private buildings of the city presently began to spread. The
earliest rude huts were of straw and mud ; but before the
town was two years old the first brick house, that universal
sign of permanent possession, had been put up in Pioneer
Street ; by January 1893 the Anglican church of All Saints
was opened for divine service ; and in 1895 a school was
added a sure sign that some of the settlers who were now
following the pioneers into the country had brought their
children, and were prepared to make themselves new homes
in the new land.
Almost from the start Salisbury prospered and grew slowly,
with no great boom and no serious reverses. The first year,
indeed, were hardships enough and to spare, privation and
disease ; but these matters in time righted themselves. In
the middle of a gold-bearing district, the pioneer miners were
often successful, and their success attracted others ; and
although the place lost some of its citizens when Matabililand
was conquered, the new arrivals who came up week by week
by coach from Pretoria and the south were numerous enough to
prevent stagnation. In March 1899, two months before the
railway to Beira was opened, Salisbury was proclaimed the
capital of Rhodesia ; a year or two later it could boast three
banks, a stock exchange, a town hall, a post office, a hospital,
four churches, the same number of hotels, and that invariable
necessity of Engilish civilisation, a racecourse. 1
1 For the founding of Salisbury, see Warner's Salisbury (1903) ; the
first issue of the Biduwayo Directory and Hyatt, The Northward Trek
(1909). The latter, who was one of the pioneer force, and an eyewitness
of the events he described with nrach life and vigour, was a severe critic
of the site, the people, and the condition of Salisbury. He condemned
the capital as ' a miserable little town in a miserable situation, a mis-
cellaneous collection of buildings scattered over a dreary stretch of veldt ;
physically bad and geographically worse.' But most pioneer settle-
284 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS
But Salisbury was not the only or even the oldest British
settlement in Mashonaland. Further to the south, not many
The Failure m ^ es across the Rhodesian border from the Trans-
at Tuii, vaal, lay Fort Tuli, the first outpost founded by
the pioneering column on the road to Salisbury
itself. Here much hope of gold was entertained, and eager
miners hurried to the spot ; for a few brief months in 1892
the little place was full of life, the two hotels that had been
hastily run up were always crowded, and the talk was all of
wealth wealth that failed to come.
The town that had been born of the hope of gold died when
there was no longer any hope of gold ; Tuli was a rising city
in June, an expectant community in September, a dying city
in December. Before the year was out the local newspaper,
whose venturesome proprietor had been confident of success
six months earlier, was lamenting that ' the production of gold
was almost fatally slow/ and that the place had sunk to a
torpid condition ; a week or two later the offices of the am-
bitious but disillusioned Rhodesia Chronicle and Mashonaland
Advertiser were removed from Tuli to Victoria, whither most
of its customers and the bulk of the population had already
gone. The city of Tuli, after less than one short year of fame,
again became no more than a fort, and a place of call for the
traveller in the wilderness. 1
Victoria was the second post in the interior of Mashona-
ments have a half-baked appearance in infancy ; the now magnificent
city of Washington was condemned on the same grounds early in the
nineteenth century, and even Paris and Venice must have been muddy
unlovely places at the start.
In another book, Off the Main Track, Hyatt criticised the first in-
habitants of Salisbury as ' having no sense of comradeship, split into
tiny and mutually hostile cliques, as objectionable as vulgar, wholly
inefficient officials, semi-solvent store-keepers, auctioneers whose probity
was not even doubtful, second-rate mining men, and a noble army of
touts and loafers.' Officials are recognised targets for criticism every-
where, and auctioneers are not always above suspicion ; the insolvency
of the store-keepers may have been caused by the touts and loafers not
paying their bills. But with all these handicaps Salisbury advanced.
1 For the too brief annals of Tuli, see the Rhodesia Chronicle.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 285
land, the half-way house on the rough road up to Salisbury.
In the middle of the Rhodesian grain district, and near a pas-
toral country where the grass was always fresh and other
green, Victoria should have had a sturdy infancy Townships,
and prosperous subsequent career as an agricultural centre ;
while the fact that it was but a few miles distant from the
deserted ruins of the ancient goldmines of Zimbabwe, should
have attracted the hungry seekers after mammon to this new
fort or township. But for one reason or another Victoria
remained stagnant, even the overflow from Tuli soon deserting
it for other parts ; its total population was seldom over eighty,
and never more than a hundred in the first decade of its
existence ; and most of the many people whom it saw from
year to year stayed but a day or a night in the little place,
and travelled on to Salisbury and the north. 1
Even the through traffic was lost after a few years, when
the railway from Salisbury to the coast at Beira took goods
and passengers along a quicker road ; Umtali, high among the
hills on the majestic eastern border of Rhodesia, gained what
Victoria had lost. 2
But even sleepy Victoria, whose total population in the
town and the surrounding district was only 316 in 1904, was
in better case than Fort Charter, the last of the chain of out-
posts on the road to Salisbury. What should have been a
town remained little more than a fort, and the small roll of
its citizens actually shrank in the earlier years of the twentieth
century, when Rhodesia was passing through the same period
of depression that all South Africa had to face.
Such were the infant British outposts and the new British
capital in Mashonaland. Each had ambition to outvie the
1 There is a lively description of Victoria in Hyatt's two books.
2 Some idea of old Umtali may be gathered from the Umtali Adver-
tiser (No. 2, 20th December 1893), a copy of which is in the British
Museum. The other issues of the journal seem to have perished.
The original site of Umtali was moved some ten miles when the
railway came.
286 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
rival settlements, each already showed the beginnings of a
local patriotism in jealousy of its fellows ; each had its suc-
cesses and reverses in greater or less degree, but each became
in time the centre of an agricultural district, when other
settlers took up land and built them homesteads. None of
these first Ehodesian outposts had any extraordinary growth ;
but none and this is the surest testimony to their founders
was ever abandoned.
So far all had been peace in the young colony, and some
of its newer people had been heard to laugh at the old fears
The First ^ a Matabili irruption as a tale to frighten
Matabiii children. They were mistaken,
war, 1893. j^. ^ ^ Q ^^ j^ g en g u i a j^ j^^ honourably
to his word. He had not attacked the white men, although
they had tacitly invited attack when they entered and took
possession of a country which Lo Bengula's people claimed
for their own. Perhaps, indeed, Lo Bengula knew that the
oncoming tide of Europeans, who had already subdued the
miserable Hottentot and starving Bushmen, the thievish
Kafir, the weakly Bechuana, and even his cousin the mighty
Zulu, could not be stayed on its northward advance ; he
may even have foreseen for he was a man not without state-
craft, and statecraft should imply some foreknowledge of the
future 1 that he was himself the last great chief of the Mata-
bili, the last great native potentate in South Africa.
Lo Bengula may have foreseen these things ; his people
certainly did not. With difficulty they had been restrained
from attacking the British pioneers in Mashonaland ; but
there was a point beyond which Lo Bengula could not restrain
his braves. Even a savage autocrat finds limits to his power,
and those limits are certainly passed when he defies the
unanimous opinion of his subjects.
From time to time during these three years of peace a
Mashona had been outraged by a Matabili under pretence of
1 Alas ! that it does not more often contrive to do so.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 287
collecting arrears of tribute ; but no white man was touched.
A whole body of raiders descended on those luckless aborigines
in 1892, and Lo Bengula wrote to Jameson that ' he made
no excuses, claiming his right to raid when, where, and whom
he chose/ It was clear that the yearly foray of the Matabili
in Mashonaland was to be resumed. 1
The crisis came on Sunday, 9th July 1893. Three Matabili
warriors suddenly appeared at the little town of Victoria on
that day, and murdered several Mashonas who were in the
streets. To the white men they remarked contemptuously,
' We have been ordered not to kill you yet, but your day will
come/ From that threat it was evident that Lo Bengula
could no longer restrain his people ; and the British colonists
prepared to defend themselves. 2
Jameson at once hurried down from Salisbury to Victoria,
and met the Matabili raiders. ' Go back to your men/ he
said to the leaders, ' and tell them they must instantly leave
for the border. If you do not leave by sundown I shall send
out my men, and you will be driven out/ The warning was
effectual for the time. The main body left the country after
some dispute ; but the white colonists had no security that
a larger Matabili force would not return and revenge the
expulsion. The time in fact had come, as Jameson clearly
saw, when the question of authority must be settled once for
all between the native and the European, if the British were
to remain in Mashonaland and not to sacrifice their work of
the past three years. One or other must be acknowledged
as the master.
Ten days after these occurrences in Victoria, Jameson sent
for Major Forbes and instructed him to raise 750 men 250
1 There is a curious story, of which I have heard several versions,
that the change in Lo Bengula 'a attitude was owing to his monthly
pension of 100 from the Chartered Company going astray. It was said
that the two troopers charged with delivering the money stole it, and
levanted. J can neither confirm nor deny this.
" The best account of the war is in The Downfall of LobengtUa, by Wills
and Collingridge, with chapters by the leaders of the fighting columns.
288 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
each from the Salisbury, Victoria, and Tuli districts and to
march on Buluwayo. The force was to be entirely a volun-
teer army, and each man was to receive as his reward six
thousand acres of land in Matabililand, twenty gold claims
in that country, and a half-share of all the cattle taken from
the enemy, the other half going to the Chartered Company.
In addition each man was to retain all his existing rights in
Mashonaland until six months after the end of the campaign.
Under such conditions no difficulty was found in raising
the force required, even from the scanty white population of
Mashonaland ; but some delay occurred in getting sufficient
horses for the march, and in obtaining the consent of the
Imperial High Commissioner at Cape Town to the operations. 1
Finally the three columns left their respective bases early
in October, and pushed forward on the long march to the
Matabili capital. The way through the bush was rough,
and made slow going ; constant watch had to be maintained
against surprise attacks, and strong laagers formed at every
halt. As they approached and crossed the Matabili frontier
a few deserted villages were found and burnt, occasional
skirmishes now took place with the outlying forces of the
enemy, and a more serious affair on the Shangani River ; in
every case the advantage rested with the British, whose losses
were insignificant, while the Matabili warriors, attacking in
close formation, were mowed down by the machine guns of
the invader. 2 A second and decisive fight occurred on the
1 Rhodes paid & flying visit to Maahonaland in 1891, but he could not
remain there long, nor take part in this war, since he had accepted the
Premiership of Cape Colony on 16th July 1890.
Jameson, however, cabled from Victoria for his advice as to fighting
the Matabili. The answer was laconic: 'Read Luke xiv. 31.' ('What
king, going to make war against another king, sitteth not down first,
and consulteth whether he be able with ten thousand, to meet him that
cometh against him with twenty thousand ? ') Jameson sent for a Bible,
read the verse, and telegraphed in answer, 'All right.'
- In the fight at Shangani River a curious thing was noticed. When-
ever a shell exploded all the Matabili fired their rifles at it ; it was
explained afterwards that they thought the shell was full of little white
men, who ran out as soon as it burst and killed everybody near.
.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 289
Imbembesi River as the British neared Buluwayo. The
Matabili came on in force, but were completely discomfited,
their loss again being heavy, at least seven hundred men
killed ; their best regiments were engaged in this action, and
although they fought with great bravery, they were routed.
It was absurd, said a wounded Matabili prisoner who was
brought into the British camp after the fight, that the greatest
warriors of Lo Bengula should be beaten by an army of boys ;
but there was now no stopping the British advance.
It was now known that the king, discouraged by these
defeats, and despairing of success in a war which he had not
desired, had fled from Buluwayo, and that by his night of
orders the capital had been fired. 1 The con- Lo Bengula.
querors therefore pushed on quickly, Jameson and Sir John
Willoughby, who was acting as his confidential military ad-
viser, a short way in advance of the main body ; and when
they reached the city they found the royal kraals and the
stores of grain and ivory still in flames.
The war was nearly over, but one disaster, more brilliant
and more memorable than any success of the campaign,
checked the British triumph at the last. A small patrol of
thirty-four men under Major Wilson hurried after Lo Bengula,
on a daring attempt to capture the fugitive king. They
might have achieved their aim, but their line of communi-
cation was unexpectedly cut by the sudden rising of the
Shangani River, and they were surrounded and attacked by
overwhelming numbers. A few men were wounded early in
the fight, but all held their ground doggedly until beaten
down by the enemy, and every man of the patrol died
fighting. Even the Matabili, who could respect valour if
they could respect nothing else, were loud in admiration of
their end.
1 It should be mentioned, in justice to Lo Bengula, that he gave
strict orders to spare the houses of the white men in Buluwayo. The
order was obeyed.
VOL. VI, T
290 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
But Lo Bengula was never captured. The great savage
king, the last great native monarch of South Africa, was
HI D th 8 P are d that last indignity. Before the year was
out he had capitulated to a greater enemy ; he
died a fugitive, of fever on his flight towards the Zambesi.
He was a savage, lustful and cruel and bloodthirsty, but
not without honour, nor yet unworthy of the chance that
made him the last ruler of his people. He would have kept
out the white men if he could ; since he could not, he kept
his word to them, and dealt honestly with the strangers who
had come to take his country, until his hand was forced.
But he died among his own people, knowing that his kingdom
and his race was lost. The first Matabili War was ended. 1
On 4th November 1893, a day that was afterwards cele-
brated as Occupation Day, the British force marched into
The new Buluwayo and took possession of what remained
Buiuwayo, of the Matabili capital. The site, in the midst
of a rich and fertile country whose thick green
grass covered the chocolate-coloured soil, was an admirable
one ; and the conquering column of British volunteers deter-
mined that their own settlement should be made close by the
old native city. The Government House of the new Ad-
1 The war was criticised in England by the enemies of the Chartered
Company and the opponents of imperial expansion as an act of unpro-
voked and wanton aggression. These critics were able to make out a
specious case, but the facts were otherwise. It is true that no white
men had been attacked by the Matabili. But there was evidence to show
that they would have been attacked had they not forestalled it by
marching on Buluwayo ; and it is mere folly to await the other side's
convenience. The war could have been postponed, but not in the end
averted, save by a British evacuation of Mashonaland.
It may be added that the clergy of all denominations in Mashonaland
defended the war as enforced and inevitable. I am not sure that this
\vas very convincing. They certainly wished to see the Mashona pro-
tected ; but they could not forget or forgive the refusal of the Matabili
to adopt Christianity.
A more relevant argument was the fact that the Chartered Company
had every motive to practise economy. The first administration had
been costly and rather extravagant ; and when Jameson took it over in
1892 he had reduced the expenditure as far as possible. But the war
cost 100,000, a serious matter to the Company.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 291
ministration was placed exactly on the spot of Lo Bengula's
kraal. Three miles away the foundations of the new Euro-
pean capital were laid : even the unsavoury aboriginal name
was retained as a memento of the past by the masters of the
future. 1
Almost from the first the new Buluwayo began to nourish,
and within a year it had outgrown its envious and elder rival
Salisbury, and even earned the jealousy of Johannesburg.
The enthusiasm of the conquering pioneers attracted others.
Early in 1894 the tents of the first arrivals were up, stores
were coming in, more settlers were pushing forward across
the veldt by coach and wagon from the south ; and several
men, who had the will to come, but not the means to hire
their transport, had walked from Kimberley or begged a lift
from chance companions on the road, following the rough
track through the bush as best they might, taking good care to
avoid the lions and other wild beasts that roamed the land at
night, and making what footsore progress they could by day. 2
It was a weary march, but at the end was the hope of wealth ;
and for a short two years Buluwayo lived on that hope, which
indeed at that time seemed a certainty to its eager citizens. <
The growth of the place was astonishing. Hotels were
built in such numbers that it seemed, as the proud editor of
a local newspaper remarked, as though a magician's its sudden
wand had been stretched out across the wilderness. Prosperity.
Sites were given for half a dozen churches, and fresh shops
were opened almost every day. In May 1894, a few days
after the last of Lo Bengula's followers had made their peace
1 The generally accepted meaning of the word Buluwayo was 'the
place of slaughter." Its real meaning, as given by Selous, was ' the place
of him whom they wanted to kill.' Him was Mosilikatsi, its founder,
whom the Transvaal Boers wanted to kill.
2 One of the first settlers in Buluwayo told me that he started from
Johannesburg with a donkey. But one night a lion made a meal of the
donkey, and the pioneer had to walk most of the rest of the way. A
family going up to Umtali gave him a lift on his road, but he reached
Buluwayo on foot.
292 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
and sworn allegiance to their conquerors, a branch of the
Standard Bank was opened ; by July the overland telegraph
had reached the town. Already the tents of the first arrivals
were beginning to give way to wooden huts, and some brick
houses were seen ; a month or so later the energetic municipal
authorities prohibited straw roofs on account of the danger from
fire, and brick or stone began to displace the timber buildings.
The first year of Buluwayo was prosperous ; the second
eclipsed the record of the first. The fame of Buluwayo had
gone abroad, and was noised in the press of England ; 1
settlers with capital, both British and Boers, poured into the
country, and pronounced it good for cattle-ranching and
sheep-farming, prices went up, a mania for speculation in
land seized the town, auctioneers and dealers in real estate
made fortunes without effort and then came the crash.
In 1895 nothing could go wrong ; in 1896 nothing would
go right. The disagreements between British and Boers in
And quick the Transvaal Republic, which culminated in the
collapse. Jameson Raid, 2 bred distrust and lost Buluwayo
one of its main supports. A terrible cattle plague broke out,
sweeping the country south of the Zambesi bare of its main
source of wealth, paralysing the transport service, and render-
ing the cost of living prohibitive. Over a million animals
were lost to South Africa ; 3 the rinderpest shook the whole
commercial fabric of Rhodesia to the bottom.
And then, when the white troops had been withdrawn
from the country and it was in the thick of a financial crisis,
came a rising of the Matabili ; and the citizens of Buluwayo
1 One English journal Truth did its best to harm the progress of
Rhodesia at this time, declaring that the only settlers in the country
were disreputable company promoters, that a noxious vapour rising four
feet from the soil made the country uninhabitable, and that it had no gold.
The proprietor of the journal was Henry Labouchere, a well-known
political wit of the day, who had hopes of a seat in the 1892 Gladstone
Cabinet, which were not fulfilled. His most subtle jest was the title he
gave to his journal.
- See bk. xxvi. ch. i.
3 Khama alone is said to have lost 800,000 cattle.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 293
suddenly realised the shifting nature of the foundations on
which they had built.
On 22nd March 1896 a rumour reached the town of a dis-
turbance with native police on the countryside. So secure
did the settlers feel that this was disregarded as an The Second
isolated case. But two days later another rumour Matabili
reached the town that a British settler at an War ' 1896<
outlying farm had been murdered. That rumour was quickly
verified. And then came reports of more murders, and those
reports were also verified. Within a week it was stated
that the Matabili were in rebellion ; and that statement was
also verified. Rhodesia was suddenly faced with a grave and
unexpected peril.
All outside work was at once stopped, pioneers who had
hoped to take up land were either slain or fleeing for their
lives, the prosperous beginnings of new homesteads were in
ruins, and once more corpses lay out upon the veldt. Selous
and other settlers, who had left their womenfolk alone in their
homesteads, hastened back to their protection. In a few
instances they were too late. . . .
It was now remembered or discovered that for some time
past rumours of coming disaster to the whites had been spread
from the cave in the Matopo Hills where dwelt a Matabili
god ; a report that Lo Bengula was not dead had gained wide
credence among the natives, and it was believed that he was
coming back with a large army from the north to drive the
invaders from the country. ' Watch the coming moon and
be ready/ ran the word of command and rebellion. 1
1 It was also said that Lo Bengula's last words to the people before he
died were, ' Await your opportunity ; the day will come when you will
be able to revenge the death of your king, and the downfall of his
country. '
I suspect that somebody else said the words, and ascribed them to the
dead king as a means of working up the feeling of the Matabili.
The tradition is mentioned in Boggie's From Ox- Waggon to Railway,
1897 a^. little work which has an interest apart from its contents, m
that it was one of the first books printed at Buluwayo, and not badly
printed either.
294 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The report was welcomed by the natives who had lost their
king. They had certain grievances against the whites, but
their main grievance, a very real one, was that they were a
conquered people who had been dispossessed of their heritage.
Many had sickened and died in the fever-haunted swamps
near the Zambesi, to which they had retreated after the loss of
Buluwayo, and they had a fierce nostalgia for the healthy up-
lands of the south from which the whites had driven them.
And this people still had many thousand fighting men, 1
ready for war, and convinced that they could drive their
conquerors from the country. The guns also which should
have been given up after the first war, when a disarmament
order was issued by the British, had in most cases been hidden
or buried ; these were now hastily dug up for the coming
fight.
Now the defences of the British in Buluwayo were few and
poor. There were no white troops in the country. Half
the black police had gone over to the enemy ; the remainder
were at once disarmed. Apart from this, it was found that
not more than four hundred rifles were in the little capital.
Yet the English settlers in the open country came daily
to Buluwayo from their deserted farms ; and it was feared
that a sudden attack by the enemy might overwhelm the
whole European population of Matabililand at a single blow.
In this vital emergency all business was at once suspended.
Master and servant, employer and employed, banded them-
selves together in volunteer corps for defence, and a laager
was formed in Buluwayo for the protection of the people. 2
1 According to one account, between fifteen and twenty thousand
Matabili warriors were trained to the use of arms.
" Human nature was the same in Rhodesia as elsewhere. A contem-
porary writer in the Buluwayo Sketch remarks that ' the self-importance
of some men (of the volunteer corps) placed suddenly in authority is
painful to see, and the strict military curt kind of reply is ludicrous
when adopted by a common civilian. ' A little brief authority !
Many of the details of this rising are taken from the contemporary
Buluwayo newspapers, which were produced under difficulties when the
town was in laager ; indeed, one editor remarked ruefully that ' the
TOWAKDS THE NORTH * 295
On the first night of the alarm this entrenchment was a
mere pretence that would not have deceived the Matabili
had they determined to attack, or held them back for long ;
but soon the place was made impregnable, with sandbags
beneath the wagons, a network of barbed wire all round,
quick-firing guns at every corner, and a steady watch against
emergencies.
And meantime the country round was being searched by
a squad of volunteers to rescue those who were in jeopardy,
but who feared to take the dangerous road to safety. A priest
accompanied the soldiers, whose melancholy work it was to
give Christian burial to the mutilated bodies of the first
victims of the rising. Sometimes they found a whole family
destroyed in one terrible case eight persons were murdered
in one homestead sometimes a battered unrecognisable mass
of dead humanity, the body of a baby pounded to pulp in a
mealie-stamper, a woman's hair torn out by the roots ; or
an official who was killed as he was writing, and whose stiffened
upright body still sat stark at the table where he died. Once
nothing but a girl's hat was found to tell of what had
happened ; some articles of women's clothing discovered in
a deserted native hut spoke of another tragedy.
Confronted with such ghastly relics, the priest felt, he wrote
home, like the Israelites of old, insecure among the people
whom they conquered ; 1 but he had little time for writing,
for it was found that sixty-six men, women, and children
around Buluwayo had been murdered, whose remains craved
decent sepulture.
vagaries of our staff have been more fatal to a full issue than the advent
of the dreaded Matabili.' A more connected account by a participant
in the fight is Sunshine and Storm, in Rhodesia, by F. C. Selous, to
which may be added Baden-Powell, Tke Matabele Campaign, 1896 ;
Alderson's With the Mounted Infantry and the Mashonaland Field Force ;
Plumer's An Irregular Corps in Matabeleland ; and Sykes, With Plumer
in Matabeleland. All these works necessarily cover much the same
ground .
1 Mashonaland Paper, August 1896. (This was an Anglican missionary
paper printed in England.)
296 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The laager at the capital now held 915 men, and 627 women
and children ; and ten babies were born in camp during that
time of trouble. 1 Fever broke out, to add to the anxiety ;
the one bright spot on the horizon was the co-operation
between Boer and Briton in an emergency which threatened
the existence of both. Old quarrels between the two white
peoples of South Africa were forgotten for awhile ; and in
the presence of a common enemy the Dutch and English in
Rhodesia became ' the best of pals.' 2
But apart from this, ' the shadows/ as a local journalist
confessed, ' were dark and the light barely discernible. Blow
upon blow had fallen on Rhodesia, and its people were
now in a position to appreciate the ten plagues of Egypt/
Altogether some three hundred men, women, and children
of the European colony, one-tenth of the whole white popu-
lation, had been murdered ; but hardly a single Matabili had
been touched, and the forces that were to revenge the losses
of the British were still not fully organised. It was known,
too, that the Matabili were now confident of their power to
drive every white man from the country, and that even the
miserable broken-spirited Mashonas, believing the Europeans
doomed, had risen in feeble insurrection. And it was antici-
pated that the whole force of the native Matabili warriors,
a body now estimated at some 17,000 men, after clearing the
country of its European settlers, would concentrate their
whole strength in an attack on the capital. Things might
have gone hard with the British had they done so.
But the Matabili had lost their leader, and they had no
1 A few white women and children were sent down south by coach
from Buluwayo.
But one scandal occurred in this business which was not lightly
forgotten. A telegram from Buluwayo was received at Tuli warning that
fort of the start of a coach from the north with fifteen women and
children. The troops and settlers at Tuli turned out to welcome the
refugees ; but when the coach arrived it was found to contain only three
women, two or three children and eight males of the Hebrew race.
Brave fellows !
2 Buluwayo Sketch, 16th May 1896.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 297
other. Lo Bengula was dead, and he came not back again
from the mysterious Zambesi countries whither he had fled.
His people waited for his coming to sweep the white men
from the country, but their lying gods deceived them. The
new moon which should have brought him waned and died
and waxed again, and still Lo Bengula tarried on his journey.
With him the Matabili were a nation and an army ; without
him a mere horde of savages.
Still Lo Bengula came not. But the white men were now
active. Supplies were coming up to Buluwayo for by a
fatal miscalculation of the Matabili, the road to T]le
the south had not been closed, in order, it was
said, that the invaders might take the hint and (
quit and forces were organised to revenge the dead. Every
man's heart was hot within him as he thought of the mutilated
corpses of his people out upon the veldt ; and in the battles
that followed no quarter was given when the Matabili were
routed. They were just ridden down by cavalry charges,
or mown down by the fires of the machine guns, and de-
stroyed.
A remnant, a large remnant that would have given trouble
in the future, took refuge in the Matopo Hills, whence they
could not be dislodged. Troops could hardly reach them
there ; if they did reach them the Matabili merely retired
for a time, and returned the following day when the whites
had gone ; but the country would not be secure while they
remained in arms.
But now the genius of Cecil Rhodes was seen. Although
he had no love for war, 1 he had served with his settlers through
1 The enemies of Rhodes spread a legend that he was a coward. It
was founded partly on his admitted preference for peace over war,
which surely is no proof of cowardice, and partly on the fact that he was
not in Rhodesia in the first Matabili War. He could not be; he was
Prime Minister of the Cape at the time.
In this second war he. stood fire well, remarking with quiet humour,
'One may get hit in the stomach very unpleasant, very unpleasant.'
But the true refutation of the slander was his way of making peace.
298 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
this campaign, sharing with them the burdens of the march
and the dangers of the fight ; but he knew that it might take
Rhodes years to conquer the enemy now they lay hidden
ends the in caves and fastnesses, and meanwhile the strength
of the whites would be exhausted, and the
Chartered Company bankrupted by the heavy expenses of the
campaign. The only thing was to end the war by persuasion ;
but none save Rhodes could attempt it with any chance of
success, and few save Rhodes would have attempted it at all.
He now left the regular camp of the whites, and pitched
his own camp, a tent-wagonette, near the hills. He was
quite defenceless, but he waited.
The Matabili, who knew of this great white chief, wondered
at his action. Day after day they wondered more, as Rhodes
remained, within their sight, within their grip had they
chosen, unarmed, undefended. For six weeks they watched
him ; then an old and withered and cunning chief, Babiaan,
came to spy more closely. He was suspicious at first ; but
he found no treachery here ; he entered the white chief's
camp, stayed a fortnight, had food and drink and blankets,
and returned to his own people to tell them of his fortune.
Others came and saw this wonder for themselves, and as they
came Rhodes reasoned with them.
' Tell your people they are all fools/ Rhodes would say,
and the listeners would suddenly look at him with startled
serious faces. ' Ask them do they want peace. Ask Babiaan
does he want peace, and also Dhliso, does he want peace, do
they all want peace ? ' Not a word would be heard. ' Tell
them they are fools, they are children. If they do not want
peace, why do they not come down here any night and murder
me and my party ? ' The three or four white men with
Rhodes would feel uneasy at this directness, but the con-
versation went on. ' The thing would be very simple ; they
need only send down a party of their young bloods twenty-
five would be enough one night and the business would be
(. TOWARDS THE NORTH 299
over. If they are not fools they would do this. Tell them,
if they want peace, then why do they not all come and shake
hands with me, and then they could go back to their wives
and children and lands and be happy ever after ? '
This talk, repeated day by day, convinced the Matabili
chiefs. A great indaba was arranged between Rhodes and
the rebel leaders, to discuss the whole situation ; when the
day came Rhodes and a few white men went out to meet them.
As they reached the spot, a large force, four or five hundred
armed Matabili, came forward ; treachery was seemingly in-
tended. Rhodes dismounted and walked forward alone until
he was among the enemy, then broke out : ' How can I trust
you ? You asked us to carry no guns and said you would
not, and what do I find ? Until you lay them down, every
one of you, I will not discuss a single point/ Sullenly they
obeyed, and Rhodes said he would now hear their grievances,
but ' before I listen to what you have to say I must tell you
that, while I do not blame you for fighting if your complaints
have not been listened to, I tell you most emphatically that
I look on all of you as wolves, for you have killed women
and children. Many such have been killed or murdered,
rather. Now, if any of you have had a hand in such work,
leave this conference, for I wish to talk to men, not murderers/
' It is well said/ they shouted in answer, ' but no such dogs
are here, so let us talk/
For three hours they now described their grievances, and
Rhodes promised them redress ; then suddenly he said,
almost as if it was a matter of no moment to him, ' Is it
peace or war ? ' For answer the chiefs came forward and
threw their spears at his feet. ' Now that we have no longer
Lo Bengula/ they cried, ' you are our father, our friend
and protector, and to you we shall look in the years that are
coming/ ' It is well/ answered Rhodes, as the Matabili
shouted and danced and embraced him : ' you are my children,
and I will see to your welfare/
300 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
' It is such scenes as this make life really worth living/
said Rhodes, as he rode back to camp. By his courage and
address he had saved his country.
Peace was secured, and it proved permanent ; the Matabili
held to their word. Not another shot was fired ; the back
of this people was broken. 1
Yet when it became clear that the peril had passed, the
prospect did not greatly lighten. Trade was no longer brisk,
Depression new se ^tlers avoided the country, capital was even
in Rhodesia, more shy of Rhodesia ; the once-busy Buluwayo
897-1900. seemec i now t o ij ve m the past, and its people,
like those of modern Athens, were bidden to think of the glories
that had gone a curious anomaly in a two-years-old town. 2
A darker shadow than a local rising, in fact, was enveloping
the whole country the shadow of the coming war between
Boer and Briton in South Africa.
But in these years of depression the founder of the country
was ever true to it. The unremitting care with which Cecil
Rhodes watched the fortunes of Rhodesia has been compared
to that of a bridegroom to his cherished bride ; rather should
it be styled the devotion of a father to his best-loved child.
Rhodes spent his money right and left on Rhodesian develop-
ment : railways, telegraphs, irrigation works were financed
from his own pocket ; he would refuse himself luxuries to
advance his country. A picture was offered him in Kimberley
for five hundred pounds. ' Ah/ he said, ' I should like to
have it, but I must not. I can build a court-house in Bulu-
wayo for that/ After the second Matabili War was over
1 Many of the white settlers suggested that the Matabili had de-
generated since they broke away irom the Zulus, largely owing to
intermarriage with the women of conquered races. It is possible, but I
doubt it. Disorganised and deceived by their prophets as they were,
the Matabili were a grave peril to the whites; had they been drilled,
organised, and led by Lo Bengula. and had he been a younger man in
1890, the European conquest might have been delayed some years.
2 Buluwayo Sketch. The same journal contains a notice of the open-
ing of a public library, and the bitter comment that the settlers had
now plenty of time for reading.
t
TOWARDS THE NORTH 301
many poor broken settlers came to him for help. If they
would stay he helped them to start afresh ; if not, a note
was given them on his bankers, worded, ' Help this man home,
and charge to me. C. J. Rhodes/ Not less than twelve
thousand pounds was spent by him in this succour of those
who had failed, probably through no fault of their own, in
the country which Rhodes had taken.
Many left the country ; but some came in, encouraged by
its founder's example. They found a ready welcome :
' Homes, more homes, that's what I work for/ said Rhodes ; 1
and these newcomers and the staunch older settlers faced
with goodwill the uphill task before them, of founding homes
and farms in the new country.
But in the end this period of depression did no harm.
It weeded out the weaklings, it proved the men with back-
bone, men with something of the iron will of Rhodes himself.
He, too, was passing through a period of adversity since the
Jameson Raid ; 2 he was no longer Prime Minister of the Cape,
he had been forced to resign the chairmanship of the Chartered
Company itself for his complicity in the Raid ; honours had
been stripped from him, and he held no official position even
in his own colony. But he learned a lesson from his trouble :
' If I can put to you a thought/ he said to one at this time,
' it is that the man who is continually prosperous does not know
himself exactly, his own mind and character. It is a good
thing if one has a period of adversity/ The same was true
of his country as of himself ; the period of adversity taught
the Rhodesians their real strength.
These scattered small communities of British pioneers,
some ten thousand men in all, thus settling themselves firmly
in the wide territories of the Mashona and Mata- Pioneer
bili, had already begun to stamp those countries ^^a
with the impress of their own strong individuality, 1890-1900.
as they had stamped them from the start with their own name
1 Garrett's Character-Sketch of Rhodes. 2 Bk. xxvi. ch. i.
302 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
of Rhodesia. 1 They were the masters of the land they con-
quered ; and as masters they had imported their own habits
and their own methods of work and play, of farming and
mining and traffic and sport. Nor had they yet been
long enough in the upland of Central Africa for it to stamp
its mark on them, as every country in the end will stamp
its mark upon its people ; the second generation, the Euro-
pean children born in Rhodesia and native to the soil, were
still no more than children. 2
The first settlers were mostly of English or Scottish breed,
of sound and hearty stock, with a few Germans, a Cape Dutch-
man or two from the south, a sprinkling of Transvaal Boers,
and some Jews who had deserted Kimberley or Johannesburg
in the hope of still better fortune further north. A few were
altogether disreputable, but these mostly fell out of the ranks
rather quickly the life was too hard for wastrels ; but many
were pure adventurers, full of the joyous sunshine of life,
restless sons of civilisation who fled its shackles for the breezy
freedom of a frontier land, open-handed primitive men who
spent their money as quickly as they made it, trusting to the
chance of circumstance for the morrow. A large number,
too and these were the very backbone of young Rhodesia
were able resourceful men who had roamed the world, and
feared not to take the hardest knocks of fortune and give
stout blows in answer. Looking on life as a game, it was a
1 The name Rhodesia appears to have been first officialty recognised in
an Order in Council, 1898. But it was in popular use at least as early as
1892.
2 This general survey of early conditions in Rhodesia is built up from
the annual Reports of the Chartered Company, the authorities dealing
with Cecil Rhodes, enumerated in the previous chapter, the old cyclo-
style newspapers mentioned in the text, and such books as Fitzpatrick's
Through Mashonaland imth Pick and Pen, The Adventures of Two
Hospital Nurses in Mashonaland, Knight- Bruce, Memories of Mashona-
land, Finlason's A Nobody in Mashonaland. I have also gained much
information from conversations M'ith old settlers in the country. If
there are difficulties in writing almost contemporary history, one cannot
complain that materials are lacking. The perspective of the picture may
give trouble, but the colours are plentiful,
TOWAKDS THE NORTH 303
great game they played to win ; believers in luck as well as
muscle, they were ready to help themselves, and not less
ready to hold out a helping hand to others less fortunate
who were hard hit in the early rounds ; a sense of comrade-
ship and good fellowship was inherent in them all.
They had the usual vices of a virile breed. They drank
much, gambled more, and swore most of all ; many of the
deaths that were credited to blackwater fever were really
due to whisky, 1 and often a budding fortune was lost in a
night by an unlucky bet on the billiard table, or low cards
and high play at whist. 2
But they could ride hard and shoot straight when the need
arose ; they were ready to fight the Matabili at tenfold odds,
and to rescue some widowed woman and her children from a
threatened lonely homestead when her good man lay murdered
stark and silent on the veldt. Possibly these rude but stead-
fast virtues were more useful to the young community which
had set itself to master a savage land than the higher arts
of Europe ; haply they may even be held as adequate excuse
for some of those minor vices which the stern untempted
moralist at home condemned.
The life of the invading people in Rhodesia centred natur-
ally round the little townships which grew up beside the
forts founded at the start by the pioneers. Here stores and
hostels were established ; and hither the settler came to
1 At the Geelong mine of Rhodesia, says Hyatt (The Diary oj a Soldier
of Fortune), ' sugar, meat, and flour were abnormally dear ; and after a
while these, and most other things as well, became unobtainable always
barring whisky.'
But sometimes whisky was so costly that it was almost unobtainable.
There is a touching story of a time of scarcity in early Salisbury when
the spirit was 76 a dozen bottles, and the people were compelled to
sobriety or to drink the vile Cape brandy, which cost 10s. a bottle in
Rhodesia, and was not worth tenpence anywhere.
2 An advertisement in one of the Buluwayo journals announces that a
license fee of 5 would be charged on all gambling tables at the local
festival in honour of the Queen's Birthday.
A simple form of whist, much in favour, was to play for a glass of
whisky a point, and sometimes a bottle on the rubber.
304 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
purchase goods and stock, to fetch his letters, to sell his pro-
duce, and to see his friends ; while new arrivals in the colony
Life made the township their headquarters when pro-
round the specting through the country for the land they
Township, wished to farm. Peaceful settlement spread in a
widening circle from the township which had been a fort ; but
there were times and seasons, when the dark shadow or the
baseless rumour of a native rising swept across the land, when
the township became a place of refuge and a city of distress
once more.
Besides its fort, its inns and stores, its church and drinking
bars, each of these small Rhodesian townships had its weekly
Old or even its daily newspaper, which circulated such
News CSian news an( i views as it could provide among such
papers. local subscribers as it could obtain, usually at the
price of sixpence for a small sheet of four pages. 1 Each
Rhodesian newspaper resembled its greater English contem-
poraries in the affection which it showed the advertiser who
paid for the use of its columns, and the readiness with which
it commented on the errors of a rival print ; but the resem-
blance went little further. The earliest journals of the colony
necessarily had a precarious life, and the rate of mortality
in the infant press was almost as high as its advertisement
rates were low ; 2 a large number of fugitive periodicals were
started year by year, few of which survived for long, and
apparently only one the Buluwayo Chronicle outgrew all
its early troubles.
The first newspapers of the colony were written and pub-
lished by hand, reproduced by a cyclostyle or some similar
duplicating apparatus. The scanty local sheet was obviously
of less value at the time of publication than the English
1 One paper, the Gubuluwayo Comet, published in 1901, was priced at
' two tiokeys.' A tickey was a threepenny piece.
2 A whole page advertisement in the Rhodesia Chronicle cost 10s. 6d.
Other proprietors estimated the value of their space at about the same
rate,
TOWARDS THE NORTH 305
journals which most settlers in Rhodesia received by post
from time to time, and which were passed from hand to hand
for general reading ; the local production, which told the
settler little more of local life than he already knew, but which
would have told the historian muchmore than he can ever hope
to ascertain, was often thrown away as soon as read. Most
of these ephemeral sheets, the earliest literature of the country,
have perished, but some stray copies of their issues have been
preserved by chance disregarded at the time, they are now
among the most treasured specimens of the collector's library,
and the most valuable sources of the pioneer history of
Rhodesia. Many, however, have not survived at all, and
some possibly abusive reference to their existence in the stray
copy of a rival sheet which itself owes its survival to chance
may be the only testimony to a brief and troubled existence. 1
The earliest newspaper in the colony was one of the first
to die. The Rhodesia Chronicle and Mashonaland Advertiser,
a roughly lithographed manuscript production, burst upon
the little town of Tuli in the May of 1892. It lived a short six
months, ceasing publication in December, when its proprietor
removed to Victoria, and started the Mashonaland Times.
Three months earlier, in September 1892, the Rhodesia Herald
had begun to enliven the little world of Salisbury, and a rival
soon appeared in the Rhodesian Times. These sufficed to
quench the thirst of the capital for news, but Umtali in the
further east soon had its Advertiser, which began to advertise
itself and others in December 1893 ; and Beira on the Portu-
guese coast presently possessed its Rocket, whose career
was not much longer but certainly less brilliant than the
spluttering toy of childhood.
1 For the opportunity of see.ing these fugitive journals I have to thank
Mr. Sidney Mendelssohn, the bibliographer of South Africa, whose un-
rivalled library has been freely placed at my disposal. I may add that
the kindness with which he gave up several busy hours to the elucida-
tion of difficult points that arose in connection with this volume haa
been as much appreciated by the author as the library itself,
VOL. VI. U
306 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The energetic folk of Buluwayo, as became so ambitious a
community, had a more considerable press. The Matabele
Times and Mining Journal, whose first issue appeared in
March 1894, was its oldest chronicle. It was closely followed
by the Matabele News and Mining Record, a month later ;
but this rival venture was quickly absorbed in the Rhodesia
Weekly Review, a journal which, unlike its lithographed
predecessors, was produced on a duplicating typewriting
machine. None of these early ventures, however, could
compete in quality with the Buluwayo Sketch, a larger, more
lively, and more critical paper, which began its existence on
21st July 1894, and ran with much success some years. The
Sketch, reverted to the lithographed manuscript method of
production, but its well-drawn illustrations and well-written
letterpress gave it considerable popularity. A later comer
was the Buluwayo Observer, which followed in May 1895, and
appears to have observed little and profited less during its
lamentably short career.
But the death-knell of all these manuscript journals was
sounded when the first number of the Buluwayo Chronicle was
issued on 12th October 1894 a printed paper of four large
pages with different founts for articles, news, and advertise-
ments, and at least as good a sheet as many a sound pro-
vincial newspaper in England. From that time the Rhodesian
press followed the normal course of English journalism in
other colonies. 1
One of the chief items in this infant journalism was the
reporting of sport ; for sport was indeed a vital interest to
sport in the young community. Most townships, even
Rhodesia. little Victoria, could put a respectable eleven into
the cricket field ; boxing competitions and billiard matches
were public events ; but the real enthusiasm was reserved for
1 Another manuscript journal, the Livingstone Mail, was issued so late
as 1906.
Curiously enough, the printing press was introduced in Nj r asa several
years before Rhodesia ; see the next chapter.
TOWAKDS THE NORTH 307
racing. Every little city in Bhodesia could boast its race-
course and its local handicap ; and one of the first and chief
uses of the direct telegraph cable from England was to let
the good sportsmen of Salisbury and Buluwayo know within
a few hours of the event what horse had won the Derby or
St. Leger in the classic fields at home.
Amateur musical and dramatic entertainments were also
sometimes given by such local talent as was available or
considered itself competent to sing or act ; and where these
failed, a smoking concert would beguile or increase the tedium
of the dullest evening. 1
Fortunes were lost as easily as won in these early days,
and bankruptcy was lightly looked on by the wise, who knew
that fate was fickle and a second start was no dis- L credit
grace. On the whole the life was happy to those and High
who lived it, whether its end was a bullet through ]
the brain in some wild skirmish on the veldt or a pro-
sperous return to the quiet comfort and mellowed peace of
the English countryside when the shadows of age began to
lengthen. 2
Money was easily made and not less easily spent, and credit
was supple when money was gone ; but prices were almost
uniformly high in the days before railways, and none too
cheap after railways came. At Salisbury in 1892 a cabbage
cost from one to four shillings according to size and demand,
1 One dissatisfied settler wrote to the local paper at Tuli to say that
smoking concerts were held ' to celebrate anything from the Queen's
birthday to the opening of a new public-house, and that one never heard
anything but the same men singing the same old songs. '
2 The outline of one such career, typical of many at this time and
place, may be sketched. One Ted Slater, a London cockney from
Clapham, had come out to Kimberley, and afterwards gone on to
Buluwayo. Here fortune favoured him, and he was accredited by
rumour with 80,000 ; but with gambling, racing and the collapse of the
land boom he lost every penny, finally enlisting as a volunteer in the
South African War. ' I don't think he wanted to come back,' said the
settler who told me of Slater's history ; in any case, a Boer shell blew
his head off. There were many Ted Slaters in old Rhodesia who died
penniless.
308 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS
butter fetched from, three to four shillings a pound, eggs
varied between three and five shillings a dozen, but fowls,
perhaps more venerable than edible, were only half-a-crown
apiece. Beer, one of the staple commodities of the country,
found a ready market at sixpence a glass, and other com-
modities were in proportion.
It was largely the uncertainty as well as the shortage of
supplies that made for high prices. If a large consignment
of corn or cattle were brought in, prices would fall with a run ;
but sometimes when sugar was plentiful milk was scarce,
and tea or coffee had run out altogether.
Travelling, in a country of great distances and few convey-
ances, was hardly less expensive than food. The coach
Travelling fare from Tuli to Salisbury was 10 ; from
and Hotels. Pretoria to Salisbury a journey which took nine-
teen days 27, 10s. was charged ; the express from Mafeking
to Buluwayo, timed to cover the distance of 480 miles in
7 days 18 hours, was 25. In every case except the last
luggage was an extra charge ; on the Mafeking coach thirty
pounds of baggage were carried free for every fare.
If a man came up with his wife and family to Rhodesia,
his first business would be to run up a rough hut for their
accommodation within a few days of his arrival at the chosen
spot ; but most single men in early days lived at a hotel and
paid an inclusive sum for board and lodging at the Avenue
Hotel of Buluwayo, for instance, the very reasonable price
of 9 a month was advertised for accommodation and food.
Drinks in every case were extras. No hotel-keeper could
afford to risk an under- estimate of what might be the main
part of his bill.
Since hotel life was the most convenient for the bulk of
the population, it followed that the hotel-keeper was an im-
portant figure in the community, and many a man found a
quick road to fortune by selling rest and refreshment to others
who sought gold or gems as their passport to speedy wealth.
TOWARDS THE NORTH
309
A hotel was one of the first buildings to rise in the infant
township, and one of the last to close its doors when things
went badly with its customers ; here business was transacted,
deals arranged, and much of the social converse of the colony
took place.
Before Buluwayo was three years old it boasted eight hotels,
one of which advertised twenty-five bedrooms, stabling for
fifty horses, and a billiard room ; Tuli had two hotels, and
others which were rather inns or stores that had a bed to
let were scattered up and down the country at convenient
resting-places for the horse or ox-wagon which brought the
traveller across the veldt. But the railway revolutionised
Rhodesian life, and many a small hotel and little posting-
station lost its custom when the locomotive came.
The railway, like the telegraph, was ever in the mind of the
founder of Rhodesia. The telegraph was at Salisbury and
Buluwayo within a year or so of their founding, Railway
but the building of a railway was a longer and
more costly matter. Its construction was, how-
ever, hastened by the rinderpest which swept the colony
clear of transport cattle, and from that time Rhodes worked
with feverish haste to get his line completed to the two capitals
of his colony. ' The rails are being forwarded/ he said in
June 1896, ' at the rate of one mile or two trainloads daily,
and we will lay the rails as fast as the Cape authorities give
us them/ The boast was true : Rhodes was as good as his
word.
Before the planting of the pioneer settlement in Mashona-
land, the railhead of South Africa had reached no further
inland than Kimberley. At 'the pressing request of Rhodes,
the Cape Government Railway was extended in 1890 to
Vryburg in Bechuanaland ; there for awhile it stopped.
But three years later construction was begun again, and the
line was pushed forward through the little frontier township
of Mafeking, on to Palapye, and on 19th October 1897 it
310
reached Buluwayo, the last 228 miles of track being laid in
the amazingly short time of four and a half months. 1
A little more than a year later railway communication was
completed between Salisbury and Beira on the east coast
by way of Umtali, along a route of greater difficulty ; but
here the line was at first only of two-foot gauge, with break
of gauge at Umtali, and its inconveniences were such that it
was relaid to the standard narrow gauge of three feet six
inches two years later.
By that time the extension to the north, towards the Victoria
Falls and Tanganyika the Cape-Cairo project with which
Rhodes astonished his contemporaries was started. Six
months later the outbreak of the war in the south delayed,
and for a time stopped the undertaking altogether ; but in
1902 the work was begun again, Buluwayo and Salisbury
were connected, and in two years more the line had pushed
forward to the Victoria Falls.
_A.nd with that extension the rough pioneering work in
southern Rhodesia was done ; the first stage of its develop-
ment was finished.
CHAPTER VI
NYASA AND THE NORTH : 1876-1900 2
' BEFORE the year 1885/ said a South African writer in 1876,
' there will be a larger population of European race north of
1 A word for the navvies who laid the rails all over South Africa.
' To see them shift muck was a treat and to see them shift beer a marvel,'
said Hamilton Browne (A Lost Legionary).
Muck, it may be explained, is the technical term for soil in the navvies'
vocabulary.
This hearty breed of men, hard workers as a rule, but quarrelsome in
drink, were often enlisted as auxiliaries in Kafir and other native wars ;
their discipline was bad, but they loved the fight, and they were appar-
ently the only white men who could punish a black with the fists.
2 For the early years of the British missions to Nyasa the chief
authorities are, Young, Mission to Nyasa ; Thomson, To the Central
TOWARDS THE NORTH 311
the thirtieth degree of south latitude than south of it. This
change will be chiefly owing to the presence of gold. It is
not probable that the Boers will long remain in A Soutfl
the ascendency. A mixed population, having African
a very strong English element, will outnumber op ecy '
the Afrikanders, and it is not likely that such will fall in
amicably under the Government of the Transvaal Republic.
Events of an exceedingly troublesome and disagreeable
character will in all likelihood take place unless the
sheltering wing of the British Empire is extended over this
region/ 1
The prophecy came nearer to the truth than many similar
attempts to forecast the future. Within little more than the
decade allowed for its fulfilment the gold rush had indeed
brought a very mixed population into the Transvaal, and
the threatening shadow of troublesome events had already
darkened the prospect ahead.
But further to the north, where Cecil Rhodes had followed
Livingstone, both dreaming of a greater Empire, this prophet
of South Africa forgot to look, or inspiration failed. Yet
here also, in Rhodesia and beyond, great matters were pre-
paring, and the future destinies of the vast countries between
the Limpopo and the lakes were likewise to be decided during
the same quarter of a century that saw the troubles of the
Transvaal come to a bloody head.
In the very year 1876 when the prophecy was made the
African Lakes and Back ; Drummond, Tropical Africa ; Duff Macdonald,
Africana ; Moir, Letters from Central Africa ; and Elton, Lakes and
Mountains of Africa. Johnston's Laws of Living stonia may be consulted ;
also Jack's Daybreak in Livingstonia, a useful book in rather too fervent
a style. The old mission journals Aurora, the Nyasa News, and
Blantyre Life and Work are valuable.
A general description of the country at the coming of the British
is in Johnston's British Central Africa ; see also Waller's Title Deeds to
Nyasa. For the Arab war, Fotheringham's Adventures in Nyasaland,
and Lugard's Rise of our East African Empire. The early British
administration is well described in Duff's Nyasaland under the Foreign
Office.
1 Cape Monthly Magazine, 1876.
312 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Scottish mission station was opened at Blantyre in the Shire
Highlands, a few months after the Livingstonia settlement at
Mission Cape Maclear had been founded and the first
Nyusa, 118 steamship floated on the deep waters of Nyasa. 1
1876. At both places small staffs of Europeans were
engaged in preaching to the natives, but for some time longer
no other white men were located at those settlements. Several
years later, indeed, only two Europeans were engaged in
trade at Blantyre, 2 and none at all in Livingstonia ; but in
these far outposts of Christian civilisation was already some
promise of development, some small shadow of success that
bade fair to grow. The great Nyasa countries were in fact a
sacred mission soil, whose very mention brought to mind
the sad and lonely figure of the greatest of modern mission-
aries, David Livingstone, and recalled his lamentations at the
slave-trade of those regions, his mourning at the miseries
he had seen ; and something of the zeal, the doggedness, and
the rare humanity of the great Scots evangelist, clung to
those who followed him to Central Africa and carried on his
work.
The first-fruits of death and disappointment in Nyasa were
gathered by the Universities' Mission of the Church of Eng-
land, whose earliest missionaries were dead within a year of
their arrival 3 in 1861 ; and others who came after them toiled
for long in vain, before their work began to tell. In the first
five years of the Scottish mission station at Cape Maclear
there were preachers, teachers, and a church, but no con-
verts ; and Blantyre fared even worse, for the settlement
itself was only saved from utter disaster by outside help,
sought and sent from Livingstonia.
But on 27th March 1881, the mission journal of the evan-
1 See ch. ii.
2 Swann, Fighting the Slave-Hunters in Central Africa.
3 See vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. ii. , and ch. ii. of this book. There is a good
account of Bishop Mackenzie of Nyasa in the Cape Monthly, 1862.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 313
gelists at Cape Maclear records with joy the first baptism
of a native of Nyasa ; from that time converts came
more readily, and the primitive building of mud success
and straw, which served this little station for its MacLear
church, soon had forty regular attendants, and issi.
the neighbouring school had seventeen pupils.
Yet hardly was this triumph won when all seemed
lost again. The site at Cape Maclear had proved un-
healthy, some of the missionaries died, and the Failure and
deadly tse-tse fly ravaged all that country : it Renwvai-
was seen that the missionaries must either remove or
perish.
Another site was sought and found ; and at Bandawe,
higher up the lake on its western shore, the new Livingstonia
was planted in 1881.
This in itself was a further step on that great northward
road which the Cross was driving through the heart of Africa,
but at the time the new advance seemed hardly better than
retreat. For the deserted station at Cape Maclear was a
grim reminder that the missionaries warred with untamed
nature as well as savage man : the cottages were empty but
the graves were full, and the silent melancholy of the aban-
doned settlement, where the tombs that lay beneath the
shadow of a great granite mountain were quickly covered
with the spreading vegetation of the tropics, warned the
traveller who looked for welcome that here the European
evangelists had fought and failed. 1
At Bandawe the remnant of the mission had better fortune,
but the work had to be begun again among strange people.
Gross superstitions and fair legends were encountered
for the tribes of Lake Nyasa had a gift for nature
1 When Professor Drummond visited the spot two years later, a
native, the only inhabitant of the place, showed him the graves of the
missionaries ; another traveller, Montagu Kerr, was told that the white
men were 'all dead, all gone, all gone Bandawe.'
314 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
stories, 1 and a love of dance 2 and song 3 and against their
rude philosophy of life the novel doctrines of the whites at
The settle- ^^ ma de little head. The white man spoke of
ment at peace, the native thought of war ; the white man
we ' preached of freedom and eternal life, the native
knew of slavery and cruel death ; the white man told of the
love of God, but his curious listeners knew little save the lust
of man. 4
1 Two of these stories, one moral, the other human, are worth preserving.
The natives told that when man was first born into the world, God
sent two messengers with different messages. The chameleon came
with a message of life, the salamander with a message of death. And
the salamander outran the chameleon ; wherefore death has ever since
outrun life.
The second story is of the origin of Lake Nyasa. Once, it was said,
the great lake was but a brook, when on a day came an unknown man
out of the west with a silver sceptre ; and he made his dwelling with
the tribe that lived beside this brook. Here he married ; but presently
besought his wife to return with him to his own country. She con-
sented ; but her brother said, ' Yes, I will go also with you.' Then the
husband said, ' I will not take you too with me.' And the brother wept
when he saw his sister cross the brook, and took his stick and struck
the water, till it rose and covered everything, and became a flood.
Then the woman and her brother died ; but the corpse of the woman
floated north, and the corpse of the brother south. And now, when a
cloud weeps in the south the sister sleeps quietly in the north ; when a
cloud weeps in the north the brother rests quietly in the south.
2 Many of these dances were of a ceremonial, religious, initiatory
order, and often of lewd character. Great care was taken that no
stranger should see them performed.
3 Not only could the Nyasans sing, but they had a music of their
own. The player had a piano of polished sounding wood of twelve
notes ; or metal tongues attached to a sounding-board ; hollow gourds
were sometimes attached to the piano to answer each note with an echo.
The native orchestra also included a whole range of drums, a rattle and
bells, and a horn. Travelling musicians went from village to village,
and festival dances were held when the moon was bright. (Nyasa News,
August 1893.)
Another writer, Duff, notes that he heard a stringed instrument of the
guitar kind, which was said to have been imported from the East,
possibly by the Arabs.
But many of the Central African tribes were musical. Even the
miserable Mashonas had a kind of piano, twenty pieces of flat iron of
varying lengths, fastened in a row along a flat board, the sound of
which, according to Selous, was not unpleasant.
4 No complete study of the aboriginal faiths of Nyasa survives ; but
it is known that there was some kind of ancestor-worship, and that the
natives revered primitive natural forces, recognising a seed-giver and a
god of lightning the essential forces of life and death which, by the
TOWARDS THE NORTH 315
But here, as at Cape Maclear, the wisdom of Europe helped
forward the gospel of Christ. If the African was unmoved
bj the teaching of the evangelists, he could not deny their
power of healing ; for the mission had its medical equipment,
and Robert Laws, its head, was a physician. He cured the
sick where the rude spells of the native medicine-man were
impotent ; and his magical ' sleep-medicine ' chloroform
which seemed first to kill a man and then to cure him, was
an unending source of wonder. When the white man could
do such things himself, what could not his gods do if they
chose ?
Gradually the work extended, and tribes and peoples
further from the lake were brought within the influence of
the Livingstonia Mission. As early as 1878 a visit Among the
had been made to the Ngoni, a wild and powerful N ni > 1878.
tribe of Zulu blood ; 1 and the reception had been friendly.
' Why do you not come up and live with us ? ' said the Ngoni
warriors ; ' can you milk fish, that you remain at the lake ?
Come up and live here, and we will give you cattle. We are
the rulers of the land, and all others are beneath us/
The missionaries urged their case, but here were no con-
versions ; the chiefs were indifferent, the people would not
change without a lead ; only a few poor slaves accepted a
creed which had openly proclaimed itself against slavery.
These were contemptuously permitted by their masters to
adopt the white man's faith.
.... i > ' ';-'!Offi "M-'" 1 'ii'j U Lni Ivi r a'Jl
development of religious consciousness, would in time have been regarded
as good and evil.
But with Islam advancing from the north and Christianity from the
south, the growth of these native beliefs, like that of the native social
organisation, was arrested and ultimately destroyed.
The Zulus had originally come from the northern interior, travelling
south as they conquered the weaker native tribes whom they encountered,
and finally settling in Natal. But some of them broke back to the north
again, where they became known as the Matabili and Ngoni ; in each
case the love of battle and the masterfulness of a ruling race, typical of
the Zulus, survived the migration. The proudly contemptuous salutation
of the Ngoni to the missionaries of Nyasa was characteristic of the Zulu
outlook on life.
316 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The missionaries despaired not at their failure, but soon
they were in serious danger of their lives. The son of a chief
died suddenly, and the strangers were accused of witchcraft.
A trial by ordeal after the manner of the Ngoni was arranged ;
two fowls were given poison if they died the missionaries
were proven guilty, if they vomited their innocence was pro-
claimed. The birds vomited, and they were saved.
On such slight chances did the missionaries' lives depend ;
a balance not less hazardous decided the conversion of the
Ngoni people.
There came a drought among their territories, and the
native rain-makers were called on to fulfil their craft. They
Their tried, and tried again with potent incantations,
Conversion. an( j nev failed. The missionaries were now im-
plored to save the country ; they came and held a service, in
which they prayed to the God of the Christians for the clouds
which native art had sought in vain. The next day came
the rain in floods, and the drought was broken.
So likewise was the indifference of the Ngoni ; clearly the
white man's god was the power to serve, and the white man's
word was mighty with his god. 1
All were now eager to learn of these powerful teachers,
schools and churches were opened among the Ngoni, and
many professed their belief in the religion that had worked
this miracle. Chiefs and headmen, slaves and women, came
to be baptized ; on one day 195 adults and 89 children were
received into the church, four thousand people assembled
at the service, and when the offertory was taken, the aston-
ished missionaries counted twenty-eight shillings in money,
3 Ibs. 6 oz. of small beads, 11 knives, 1 axe, 2 hoes, 5 finger
1 The rain-maker's craft was revered all over southern Africa, as was
indeed but natural in a land of ignorance and drought ; but once the
pious missionaries were themselves accused of worshipping the rain.
' You have a bottle in front of the house,' said a native to the European ;
' and when it rains you look at the bottle. What is that but worshipping
the rain?' The bottle was a rain-gauge, and the missionary promptly
smashed it to prove that this was not his god.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 317
rings, 3 bracelets, 1 spear, 14 cooking-pots, 10 baskets, 1 mat,
67 fowls, 2 goats, 2 sheep, 233 Ibs. of maize, 34 Ibs, of potatoes,
and 62 Ibs. of pumpkins a motley contribution whose
diverse character bore witness to the interest and sincerity
of the givers.
Others saw this sudden change, and marvelled as they saw.
One of the Tonga tribe, a peaceful people that had often
suffered under the Ngoni, said in amazement, ' Can these
be the Ngoni who used to murder us, who slew the Henga,
and the Bisa, and other tribes ? I see men with scars
of spears, and clubs, and bullets sitting at the Lord's Table
in the still quiet of God's presence, and my heart is full of
wonder/
This was the first great victory of Christianity in Nyasa,
but others quickly followed ; Blantyre as well as Liviiig-
stonia overcame its early difficulties, 1 and now The
the converts came in larger numbers year by year. Advance at
Many were fugitives, slaves who had fled from the Blantvre -
Arab traders, or broken men who feared some savage ven-
geance of their chiefs ; some came from curiosity, others
were persuaded to listen, and having listened once, they
stayed : in this wise the mission settlement of the Shire High-
lands took firm root, a little Christian colony in a heathen
land.
The station had been planted on a modest scale at its first
founding, a few simple houses placed on either side a laid-out
square a hundred yards long by fifty-five broad ; its Great
but as the settlement at Blantyre grew an amazing Cnurch -
sight was seen. Other mission stations had their plain and
homely churches, made of reeds and thatch or timber ; but
1 An issue of Life and, Work, the Blantyre mission newspaper, speaks
of ' the early days when raids threatened their existence, and they were
beleaguered for months at a time. '
But even in those days the mission had its critics : see the pamphlet,
The Blantyre Missionaries ; Discreditable Disclosures, by Andrew Chirn-
side, F.R.G.S. (1880), with a rather tall story of unprovoked flogging
and execution.
318
at Blantyre, on a spot that was but wilderness ten years
before, there began to rise a great church whose stately
proportions would not have disgraced a European capital.
Its foundation proved the ambition of the Scots evangelists
and the devotion of their people ; for if the conception and
design of this magnificent cathedral were European, the
bricks which formed its walls were of local manufacture, and
the whole edifice was built by native labour freely given.
Within the church were an oak pulpit, a brass lectern, an
organ, and other usual appurtenances of Christian worship ;
the exterior was in the solid Norman style of architecture
that seems built to last for ever.
And not at Blantyre only did Christianity advance. The
Universities' Mission, now firmly founded on the isle of Zanzi-
Tne bar, 1 returned to the scene of its first errand and
Mtelioif* 1 * original disaster ; stations of this branch of the
stations. Anglican Church were founded in 1883 at Newala,
in 1886 at Likoma, an islet near the south of Lake Nyasa,
and at Sumba and Pachia elsewhere.
At Newala a church was built, like the native houses, of
bamboos and poles and thatch, 2 and here also was established
a mission school for native lads, whose regular discipline and
hours and lessons seem like some faint echo of an English
public school that had reached the wild youth of Central
Africa.
1 See vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. ii. for the church at Zanzibar.
2 The measurements and structure of these churches may be worth
recording, for some students of ecclesiology. That at Sumba was
19 feet 4 inches broad, the nave 60 feet 4 inches long ; the full length of
the church with the apse was 70 feet ; the height of wall 10 feet. The
building at Pachia was slightly smaller.
Experience taught the missionaries that iron was too heavy for general
use, tiles too dear and scarce ; the roofs of their churches were mostly
of grass thatch with long ears. These were watertight, even in the
rainy season, if properly constructed ; but apart from the serious danger
of fire, a thatched roof would last several years. The roof was kept up
by bamboo poles ; no rafters were used, as these either rotted or were
eaten by white ants ; no windows were thought necessary. The M-alls
were usually made of reeds from the lake, bound with bark rope.
TOWAEDS THE NORTH 319
Details of the scheme of work have been preserved. 1 Soon
after 5.30 every morning, as the light was dawning, the lads
were called from sleep ; a short prayer at roll-call opened the
day's work, and they dispersed to make the fires, boil water,
set breakfast for their masters, and wash the pots and plates.
At 6.15 matins were said according to the order of the Church
of England a service at which attendance was voluntary ;
and in the interval between the close of morning prayer and
school at 8, the lads played football, a game they quickly
understood. School began with a half-hour's lesson from
Scripture in the Yao tongue ; the rest of the morning till 11
was given to reading, writing and arithmetic under a native
teacher. Then till noon came more football, and at noon,
dinner. The boys were fed on porridge made of native meal,
on beans, or boiled rice ; and, with the iron digestion of
youth, immediately after dinner they played football again
till 2, when school reopened. At 4.30 lessons closed for the
day ; an hour of play more football relieved the weight
of knowledge ; at 5.30 was evensong, then the evening meal
was prepared and eaten, a short benediction followed, and
bed for all at 8.
Saints' days and Saturdays were holidays on which un-
ending games could be enjoyed ; 2 but mostly the lads were
glad to learn, and quick at their books ; the more promising
scholars were sent on to Zanzibar to be trained as native
teachers.
At Likoma was a smaller school, which relied almost en-
tirely on such native teachers ; 3 and among the rough fisher-
folk on this little island of Nyasa were many converts to the
1 In the Jownals and Papers of Ghauncy Maples (posthumous). His
Life and Letters should also be consulted.
2 The wise fathers of the Anglican mission allowed and even encouraged
football in the intervals between religious exercises on Sundays a laxity
which must have horrified the stricter Scots.
:! In the Occasional Paper for Nyasaland, the organ of the Universities'
Mission, it is said that these teachers were too mechanical in their work,
and that little progress was made.
320 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Church. At the Christmas service held in 1892, only four of
the eighty-four persons who partook of the Eucharist were
Europeans, yet admission to full church membership was not
easy, every convert being required to pass three years' novi-
tiate before baptism, and careful examination being made
of their way of life before the supreme rite of Christianity
was administered.
Here as elsewhere there were failures, some who threw off
the strait mantle of the new religion for the easier pagan
robe ; it was simpler, said one of the missionaries, to teach
the converts a devotional habit than a strict moral life, to
repeat a formula, sing hymns, and pray, than to speak the
truth, be honest, and free from impurity. 1
Polygamy still remained the great stumbling-block in the
way of Christianity, and few men of wealth or standing in
their country were willing to give up all their wives save one ;
but among the common people, with whom polygamy was
not a personal question, the new faith spread. New mission
stations were opened, and more churches built ; but it was
on one of these forward marches that sudden disaster again
came on the Universities' Mission. On 26th August 1895,
George Atlay, one of its devoted priests at Likoma, was
killed, not by his own people, but by those to whom he would
have ministered ; and a week later Chauncy Maples, the
Bishop of Likoma, was drowned in Lake Nyasa.
The double loss crippled the Likoma Mission ; but Chris-
tianity was now too firmly planted in Central Africa for an
The individual disaster to one station to cause it per-
of ciuis? ' nianent harm. The nineteen years of steady
tianity. work since the foundation of Livingstonia and
Blantyre had left their mark in most parts of the country,
even far to the north of Lake Nyasa ; few places south of
Tanganyika were so remote, few tribes so distant or so isolated
but what some rumour of the Cross had reached them.
1 Nyasa News, No. 3.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 321
But in that time had come far more than a religious re-
volution. The change from paganism to Christianity meant,
in Nyasa as in every other country of the world, Meansa
a fundamental social change, 1 a departure from social
old customs and traditions which Christianity could ReT( lution>
not recognise, a sloughing of superstitions, a breaking with
polygamy, a weakening of the authority of the chiefs before
the new teaching of the white man. It was a destruction
of the native way of life by the invader, and a destruction
not less certain or complete that it came by persuasion
instead of battle.
Possibly the world lost something when these changes
came ; probably something worth preserving is lost in every
revolution. The advance of Christianity in Nyasaland may
have crushed some rough gem lying hidden amid the dross
and rubbish of a savage realm, it may have distorted or
destroyed some stray gleam of beauty or chance vision of de-
light in native lore. Such losses there must always be when
one order supersedes another ; but certainly the world gained
immeasurably more than it lost when Christianity began to
conquer paganism in Nyasa. If the new religion destroyed
ruthlessly with the one hand, it brought as recompense with
the other all the culture and the proud achievement of Europe,
the settled order and the strength of the white man's civili-
sation in place of anarchy and war, and the liberty which
Britain boasted in place of slavery. 2
1 Aa, for example, in the Pacific Islands vol. v. bk. xx. ch. i.
2 Incidentally it destroyed the native craft of weaving cloth. The
traders, as Livingstone remarked, were never far away from the
missionary ; and the traders introduced the Manchester cottons, whose
splendid texture and beautiful prints were naturally preferred by the
natives to their own rougher product. ' Truly ye are gods,' said a native
to Livingstone as he looked upon these fabrics ; from that time nothing
would satisfy the people but imported cloths and cottons, and the
aboriginal industry fell into decay.
It was noticed that the Nyasans, who had gone almost naked, were
anxious for clothes. The women even begged the empty coal- bags from
the steamers on the lake, and cutting slits in the top and sides for head
and arms, used the dirty bags for dresses.
VOL. VI. X
322 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
It was the firm conviction of the missionaries that civili-
sation must advance hand in hand with religion, and that
European conviction shaped all their polity and work,
civilisation Several of the evangelists who accompanied
iduced. j) r ^ aws were s kiii ec [ s co ts artisans, blacksmiths,
masons, or carpenters by trade, men who could teach the
people of Nyasa craftsmanship as well as Christianity. This
was indeed one of the great objects of the founders of the
Livingstonia Mission, as it had been of Livingstone himself :
' he who implants the ideas of a straight line and a right
angle/ said Dr. Laws, ' in the natives' minds has caused a
great stride to be made towards civilisation/
The axiom was sound and true ; and each mission station
in Nyasa became a little centre of steady work and increasing
knowledge freely given. Every native who engaged to labour
at Blantyre and Bandawe and other stations was paid in
wages for his time, first in cloth or beads and afterwards in
English money ; every man who brought his produce to the
mission house could sell his goods there if nowhere else. 1
It was indeed a settled principle of the Scots evangelists to
buy everything that was offered by these people, not because
they needed the goods, but as a proof that labour would
have its reward.
Printing and bookbinding were quickly introduced when
the Nyasan children learnt to read in the mission schools.
Printing-presses were imported and set up at Blantyre,
Livingstonia, and Likoma ; paper was brought from Europe,
and with some ingenuity, binding materials were made on the
1 Unfortunately few records have been kept of the prices paid, but one
may serve. When bricks were required at Bandawe, the natives of the
district contracted to make them at the rate of 10s. the 1000 ; and it is
stated (Nyasa News) that the African contractor made a good profit
from the business.
On the whole, however, life was cheap, and money \vent far. Ten
years later Duff remarks that with a shilling one could buy 40 eggs, or
(3 chickens, or 50 Ibs. of sweet potatoes or the same amount of native
flour. But prices rose rapidly as European settlement advanced.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 323
spot from the hides of hippopotamus, while the boards for the
backs of the books were fashioned out of old magazines and
strips of waste calico.
The pupils in the native schools were taught the tedious
mysteries of the printer's craft, and soon they were able to
set the type for the translation of the Gospels in the Yao
tongue, and even to print from English manuscript. A
monthly magazine of several pages, carefully and clearly pro-
duced, was begun at Blantyre in 1887 ; a less ambitious
Occasional Paper issued from the Likoma station in 1893
developed into the short-lived quarterly Nyasa News ; a
third periodical served the needs of Livingstonia. 1 Each of
these productions was set up and printed by local labour ;
even the official British Central Africa Gazette, which began
at Blantyre in 1891, was the work of native hands.
But this was only the beginning of the work of civilisation,
which soon extended far afield. When the missionaries first
arrived on Lake Nyasa all communication between one dis-
trict and another was slow and tedious and sometimes danger-
ous, unless the line of travel lay along the great national
waterway of the country. But this was remedied when
roads were driven through the wilderness, round the Mur-
chison Cataracts from Blantyre up to Cape Maclear and
beyond ; and already the idea of pushing the great thorough-
fare through to Tanganyika and onward to the sea was in
men's minds.
1 A manuscript periodical had been issued as early as 1877, for the
joint use of the Blantyre a,nd Cape Maclear stations. It was prematurely
born, and only survived two numbers.
Life and Work, the later Blantyre paper, and Aurora, the Livingstonia
journal, were more substantial productions ; but the Nyasa New* did
not survive the deaths of Atlay and Maples of Likoma. Indeed, the last
number bears evident signs of the crisis that had overtaken the island
mission, and it ends abruptly in the middle of an unfinished sentence.
Some of the papers in these journals are of a high order of merit,
showing the sound scholarship and knowledge that distinguished the
Nyasa missions ; the Nyasa press as a whole was distinctly above the
level of the Rhodesian journals, which followed a few years later, and
which are mentioned in the previous chapter.
324 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Native agriculture, too, was superseded near the European
stations. The old wasteful method, common to all primitive
improve- people, of burning down a portion of the forest
Agricui^ vear ky year, planting the seed on the roughly
ture. cleared soil, and moving on with every season to
repeat the simple process, was given up ; better results were
shown by the missionaries, who kept their fields and gardens
in constant cultivation ; and the natives of Nyasa now began to
realise that steady industry on a permanent estate gave better
yields than their nomadic and sporadic efforts to cultivate the
soil. They stood unwittingly upon the threshold of one of the
fundamental distinctions between civilisation and barbarism.
The soil of Nyasa was fertile, and in the capable hands of
European settlers it soon gave excellent results. A single
coffee plant had been brought from the Botanic Gardens at
Edinburgh to Nyasa in 1878, and placed in the mission garden
at Blantyre ; it grew and flourished in the kindly tropical
climate, and from that insignificant beginning sprang a con-
siderable industry. For several years, indeed, the coffee-
growing plantations were the chief basis of Nyasan commerce. 1
A secondary but still important product was tobacco.
The natives of Nyasa were not ignorant of the uses of that
admirable plant, whose soothing virtues had eased the un-
even path of life for many generations before the Europeans
same ; but they were now shown by British planters a more
excellent way of curing the crop, and the sweet Nyasa nicotine
soon found the favour it deserved in England.
Such dealings led to trade at the mission stations ; but
regular commerce the missionaries would not touch. They
Tlle were wise in their refusal, for they would have
Growth of lost their influence at the price of trading profits ;
commerce, recognised instinctively, what not every
evangelist before them had remembered, that they could
1 The excellent quality of the Nyasa coffee made Cecil Rhodes prefer it
above all others. He never travelled without it.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 325
not serve both God and mammon. 1 Yet by a strange
paradox, the commerce in this heathen land was Christian,
although the leaders of Christianity would take no part in it.
The paradox was due to the practical foresight of the Scots
missionary founders of Nyasa. It was clear that trade must
come, and with trade the European trader. And it was
notorious that the white trader in a savage land was often
a blackguardly ruffian who tempted the natives with poison-
ous drink and guns and ammunition, spreading an evil in-
fluence which might destroy in a week the work that the
missionaries had painfully accomplished in a year, and
leaving behind him when he went a hated name and a fatal
distrust of every European. Between trader and missionary
was therefore an old and undying feud ; but experience
showed that wherever the missionary went the trader quickly
followed. The missionaries could not have kept the traders
from Nyasa for very many years when its opportunities of
profit were once known ; but the promoters of the missions
determined to forestall the traders by founding an inde-
pendent trading company, whose operations were kept
separate from mission work. The mission stations were to
have no commercial dealings ; but the trading depots that
were opened by the company were to be run on Christian lines.
The experiment was a novel one, but it succeeded. The
African Lakes Corporation, 2 which was founded in the year
1877 to trade with Central Africa, had for its The African
chairman James Stevenson, a shrewd but godly
Glasgow merchant who had been one of the main 1877.
supporters of the Livingstonia enterprise ; its managers in
Africa were all professing Christians who could preach as well
1 See, for example, certain missionary transactions in New Zealand,
vol. v. bk. xxi. ch. i. Previous missionaries in South Africa had not
always been above suspicion of engaging in trade ; see bk. xxv.
2 It was originally known as the Livingstonia Central African Trading
Company. The cumbrous name was soon dropped for that of African
Lakes Corporation.
326 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
as barter ; even its clerks and junior officials were chosen
partly on religious grounds. It was determined that divine
service should be held daily at its chief stations in Nyasa ;
and no work was done on Sundays, no goods were bought or
sold. More important than these religious exercises which
some unregenerate onlookers were wont to sneer at as hypo-
crisy 1 was the fact that the Corporation steadily refused to
import any armaments or alcohol into Nyasaland, and reso-
lutely set its face against the demoralising traffic of which
other white men in savage lands elsewhere were not ashamed.
The record of this great company of British traders is un-
tarnished.
The first trading station was opened at Mandala, a mile
away from Blantyre in the Shire Hills. 2 It was profitable,
the work extended, trading steamers were placed on Lake
Nyasa, and within a year or two other stations had been
founded, and steamers seen on Tanganyika. The natives
brought their goods to the Corporation's depots, they ap-
preciated fair prices and straight dealing ; and soon they
began to seek direct employment from the British.
But trouble lay ahead of the European traders of Nyasa.
From the first they had set themselves against the slave-trade
The of the country, and by so doing had roused the
strugg e wra th of the older masters of the land, the Arab
slavery. dealers in slaves and ivory who were settled at
the north of Lake Nyasa.
1 Occasional slighting references to Nyasa occur in early Ehodesian
literature. This may be partly the proverbial jealousy of a neighbour ;
in this case it usually follows the line of attacking the sincerity and the
success of the policy inaugurated by the African Lakes Company.
The Rhodesia Chronicle is clearly referring to Nyasa a few years later
when it says that 'a protected state, where Catholics are at feud with
Protestants, while Mohammedans and heathens are watching for their
turn, and where a puppet king stipulates for ivory before consenting to
receive absolution, presents a spectacle edifying in a peculiar way.' An
exaggerated and distorted caricature ; but not unrecognisable.
2 The name Mandala was said to be derived from the native word for
the spectacles worn by the chief agent at this station.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 327
This trade in slaves and ivory was indeed the staple traffic
of the country ; the Asiatic slave-trade of eastern Africa
was far older than the European slave-trade of western Africa,
and from time immemorial Arab invaders had raided the
weak tribes of the interior for slaves and sent their captives
down to the great central market of Zanzibar, where men of
every eastern nation met and haggled for their human cattle. 1
Terrible evidences of the disastrous consequences of this
traffic met the Scots missionaries and traders in the interior
at every turn, and sickened them as they had sickened Living-
stone. The sight of villages in flames or blackened ruins,
skeletons and corpses lying where the over-driven natives
had dropped beneath their chains or load of ivory, trembling
fugitives found hidden in a swamp or forest such were the
normal incidents of travel in Nyasa ; and at times the labour-
ing slave-gang, men and women and their children yoked
together bearing ivory, hove in sight and passed along the
silent, miserable way towards the coast for Mozambique or
Zanzibar. In some parts the traffic had been prosecuted
with such fury that it had worked its own doom as well as
that of the land itself ; whole districts of Nyasa were de-
populated ; 2 the slave-trade had proved as deadly in these
northern countries as a Zulu or a Matabili war further to the
south. 3 ' In 1877,' wrote one European in the country, ' a
K.V-K. -.ickf wofed suwv :;:'.: .>!-; :-A wtni* vi^ii* warf-
1 For the slave market at Zanzibar, see vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. ii.
2 Sharpe, in Proceedings, Royal Geographical Society, 1890 ; and Last,
Proceedings, Royal Geographical Society, 18S7.
'Six years ago,' wrote a missionary at this time, 'on the road to
Tanganyika there was a village every six or eight miles ; now you can
travel for days and scarcely meet a creature. '
3 Yet the slave-trade, apart from the destruction of life it caused, did
not always yield much profit. An Arab trader told Livingstone that
after feeding the slave and reckoning up those who died or made their
escape on the way to the coast there was little gain from a raid. The
demand for slaves at Zanzibar was not always heavy, nor the price high.
It is true that the ivory which was brought down by the slaves, aud
which nearly doubled in price from 1840 to 1870, paid the traders well,
and the slaves carried the ivory. Had it not been for ivory, in fact,
there would have been far less slavery.
328 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
village five miles from us was fired on at dead of night, and
every creature bolted for his life. Many were killed, many
captured. It is the custom to shoot every man, capture and
take prisoner every young woman, boy and girl, and to chop
off the hands and ears of the old and infirm/ And at another
village, ' every house seemed entire, but not a creature was
within. Innumerable broken pots and gourds and bones
were strewn around. At the spot where the death-struggle
had taken place the wall of the black man's village had been
hewn down and the bloody ruffians had rushed in.' l
Against such a brutal traffic every instinct of the Briton rose
in quick rebellion ; nor was it possible on other grounds to
maintain neutrality. Between the Arab and the European
was indeed instinctive enmity ; 2 between the two ruling races
a conflict for the mastery was inevitable, for to the economic
war which was fought over the existence of slavery was added
a racial and religious zealotry which would have sought a
cause for combat had none been there. The impending
struggle was not only between the slaver and free trader ; it
also revived the ancient and interminable conflict between
Islam and Christianity which had broken out once more in
Uganda and Nigeria and on the Sudan reaches of the Upper
Nile. 3
But the first blow to the slave-trade in East Africa had
been already struck. In 1873, some years before the Scots
missionaries and merchants had appeared on Lake Nyasa,
the Sultan of Zanzibar had prohibited the slave-trade in his
dominions, and closed the great slave-mart of Zanzibar. He
acted under British influence, and the Arab traders of Nyasa
did not fail to note that a British consul had advised the step,
1 Dr. Kerr Cross of Livingston! a.
8 This enmity had broken out when first the Portuguese appeared in
the East four centuries before. ' Devil take you, what brought you
here?' cried an Arab trader to the Latin adventurers when they set
foot in India (vol. i. bk. i. ch. ii.).
3 Vol. iv. bk. xiv. chs. i. ii. iii.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 329
and that a Christian church rose on the site of the old slave
market of Zanzibar.
One outlet for their trade was stopped ; the trade itself
continued. Other avenues for the disposal of their slaves
and ivory were found ; but within ten years after the closing
of Zanzibar to slavery, British traders and missionaries ap-
peared on Lake Nyasa, and as they pushed their way from
south to north, opening from time to time fresh stations on
the lake and even stretching out to Tanganyika, it became
clear that the struggle between European and Asiatic, between
freedom and slavery, for the possession of Africa, was now to be
carried from the coast to the interior.
The Arabs prepared betimes for the conflict which they
saw ahead. They fortified their settlements ; they imported
arms and ammunition ; and they spread a rumour through
the land that the Christians were cannibals who would devour
the natives and then: children. Many a wretched aboriginal
who would have sought a refuge from his Asiatic master in
the European settlement was deterred by that gross fable.
The Christians on their part were not blind to the future.
Their numbers were few, and they could not count on the
protection of their government in so distant a land ; but they
determined to rely upon their own resources when no others
were available. Both at Cape Maclear and Blantyre small
forts were built in case of trouble, and at every station that
went up a native refugee encampment spread around, and
the natives who were saved from slavery almost worshipped
their deliverers. ' You may tell them it is God/ wrote one
engaged in this rescue work ; ' they will turn round and tell
you that you are God/ "wi'
For some time an actual outbreak was averted, but the
two sides were now consciously measuring their strength
against each other, while disorder swept the un- The slave
happy country from end to end. The British War, 1887.
trading stations grew in power and influence along the lake ;
330
and meantime ambitious Arabs proclaimed themselves sultans,
and lost their shadow-kingdoms as quickly as they gained
them ; chiefs were murdered, villages and tribes were
menaced and sometimes overwhelmed, and slavery in these
last days of its existence in Nyasa was more terrible than ever.
There were evil times for the people of Central Africa when
Asiatic and European strove for the mastery of the land.
The immediate aggressors in the war that finally broke
out in 1887 were the Arabs. The white fort at Karonga,
on the far north-western shore of Lake Nyasa, was attacked ;
negotiations were declined by the slavers, who were confident
of victory, and the agents of the African Lakes Corporation,
who saw themselves surrounded in the enemy's country
for Karonga was near the very centre of the Arab influence
prepared for a regular siege. Fortunately they were ready
for the sudden but not unexpected emergency ; they had arms
and food, and they soon discovered that their opponents were
only formidable against the helpless unarmed natives.
The Arabs numbered some five hundred, while the British
were but six in all ; the Corporation fort was by no means
impregnable it had been hurriedly built by its garrison of
half a dozen, its walls were only breast-high, and its chief
security was a ditch filled with acacia thorns but all the fire
of the Arabs only succeeded in scratching two of the defenders
and killing a wretched donkey within the entrenchments.
The garrison found that it could hold its own for a time,
but it could do little more ; and presently came welcome
reinforcements from another station of the Corporation, as
well as native aid. The aboriginal auxiliaries fought well
under European leadership, showing a courage that their
previous history had not revealed ; but they had little staying
power, they disliked the strain and tedium of a siege, and
in the end Karonga was abandoned by the whites. Had only
one of the Corporation steamers arrived, said the chief of the
little garrison, the place might have been retained ; as it was,
331
most of the stores were successfully removed, and the Euro-
peans retreated without loss.
The attack on Karonga was typical of the whole war. The
British could not hold the north of the lake, where Arab in-
fluence was strong ; they could not be dislodged from the south
of the lake, where Arab influence was weak. After two years'
conflict neither side could beat the other ; neither could con-
trol the country as a whole or drive the other from it.
But the nobler aspect of this petty struggle of rival traders
in Central Africa had now touched the heart of Britain. If
the war between the Arabs and the African Lakes Corporation
was in one sense a fight for trade between possessor and in-
vader, it was also a fight for native emancipation and British
supremacy ; if the British business man remembered the
commercial advantages that a victory of the British traders
would bring, the ardent philanthropist dwelt on the conquest
of slavery and the destruction of the slave-traders, while the
religious anxiously awaited the salvation of the heathen.
Thus the magnificent glamour of liberty for a downtrodden
people, and the inspiration of a holy crusade against Islam,
combined with the expectation of a new market to interest
Britain in Nyasa : from such mixed motives do human
actions spring.
But no British Government was yet ready to intervene in
these remote regions, on behalf of so great a cause as liberty,
or even in the hope of so gross a reward as territorial isolation of
aggrandisement. Khodesia was still unpopulated N y asa ~
and even unsubdued by Europeans ; 1 Nyasa was yet further
afield. For six months and more at a stretch its small
white population was cut off from communication with
Britain ; 2 the country itself was approached by a tedious
and difficult navigation of the Zambesi, a river whose course
1 See the previous chapter.
2 The two issues of the Occasional Paper for Nyasaland complain that
no mails had been received at Likoma from England for six months.
332 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
was little known outside South Africa ; the route thither
lay through Portuguese dominions, and, what was perhaps
more important as a deterrent, through a notoriously fever-
stricken land.
A British Consul was indeed accredited to Nyasa ' for
service in the suppression of the slave-trade and the develop-
ment of civilisation and commerce in Central Africa ' ; but
the resounding words of an official without force behind him
are at best a negative quantity. And Lord Granville, the
indolent Foreign Secretary 1 of the 1880-85 Gladstone Ad-
ministration, could only warn the exasperated British mis-
sionaries and traders who were righting the Arab slavers of
Nyasa that their action was illegal, and recommend ' great
caution, tact, and patience ' in their dealings qualities in
which crusaders and pioneers are usually lamentably deficient.
Lord Salisbury, the successor of Lord Granville at the
British Foreign Office, could for the moment do little more ;
but it was not the habit of that statesman to shirk responsi-
bility in the easy manner of Lord Granville. As the con-
flict between the Arabs and the African Lakes Corporation
dragged wearily along, he first intervened to end the struggle,
and in the end the British Premier faced without flinching
the prospect of enlarging the British Empire by the inclusion
of Nyasa.
His determination achieved its object. In the year 1888
an official agent from the British Government was despatched
Temporary to the north of Lake Nyasa to negotiate a peace
Peace, 1889. ^ifa the Arab slavers. For the time he failed ;
but at last, on 22nd October in the following year, the treaty
was concluded. And at the same time other agents of the
Government were pressing on the native chiefs of Tanganyika
and Nyasa the advantages of treaties of protection with so
great a power as Britain.
1 See vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. hi., and bk. xvi. ch. ii. for examples of his
indolence.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 333
The arguments they used, and the presents with which
they backed their arguments, were effectual. By the end of
1890 the work was done ; early in the following British
year a British Protectorate was formally pro- torate over
claimed over Nyasa and the Shire Highlands. Nyasa, isai.
The mere proclamation did not end the contest over slavery.
The Arab traders, like other men, had no wish to lose their
livelihood ; and for the next five years the history Slavery
of the protectorate was one of continual punitive suppressed,
expeditions against the slave-dealers. A small 1896>
force of Sikhs was brought over from India to aid the British
troops, and one by one the old slave-trading chiefs were over-
come. One Mlozi was the last to be attacked ; but in 1895
his town was shelled, he himself was captured hiding in a
cellar, charged with murder, tried and hanged. Thus igno-
miniously fell the old slave rule which had been the curse
of Nyasa.
But meanwhile the new rule had been established firmly.
The old native organisation, in separate villages or tribal
communities, had been destroyed by the advance The New
of the stronger Arabs from the north, the stronger A
British from the south ; the new government tion, issi-96.
was therefore faced with the need of creating a new adminis-
tration altogether.
Sir Harry Johnston, the energetic head of the Protectorate,
was not the man to shirk his work. By 1893 a new land
settlement had been introduced, judicial courts established,
a tariff and a hut-tax imposed for revenue, 1 an organised
civil service was at work, roads and bridges being made, and
postal communications enlarged. The country was safe for
European and aboriginal alike : and in the first five years of
British administration the trade of Nyasa had more than
1 The hut-tax was revised in 1902, when it was proclaimed that all
who refused to work one month iu twelve should pay 6s. per annum
instead of 3s. There was some criticism of this act as modified slavery ;
but those who made the criticism did not know what slavery was.
334 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
doubled, and the small European population of the country
had increased six-fold.
Those five years transformed Nyasa from a land of anarchy
and misery to a land of order, with the beginnings of a per-
manent civilisation ; and here, as in other parts of the African
tropics where a similar revolution was in progress, in British
East Africa, in Nigeria, and Sudan, 1 the European had ousted
the Asiatic, the Christian displaced the Mohammedan as
ruler. Each imposed a civilisation alien to the soil, a creed
and culture foreign to the people of the country ; but where
the Asiatic had brought ruin and desolation, the European
gave peace and ordered industry.
The new capital was proclaimed at Blantyre, whose ideal
situation, reminding travellers of a station in the Indian hills,
Blantyre became the home of a growing city. Here the
the capital Scots missionaries still held to their work of
yasa. conversion, but they were no longer supreme
when the new civil administration was introduced. They had
not indeed grasped at the temporal authority which in their
early years in Nyasa had been almost forced upon them by
their circumstances among a weak and broken people ; but
even to a spiritual ruler the gross attributes of earthly authority
may sometimes have their charm, and the missionaries of
Nyasa, like their brethren in Bechuanaland and elsewhere,
faced the passing of their full dominion, and the raising of
new problems as white officials, settlers and traders came,
with natural regret. Their influence with the people whom
they had saved, not only from the eternal wrath but from
very present misery, was no longer paramount ; they were
no more as gods among men.
The change was inevitable in a country which was now
definitely part of the British Empire, and fertile enough to
attract white planters to its soil. Blantyre became not only
the administrative capital but a trading centre, a mart for
1 See vol. iv. bk. xiv.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 335
the produce of the Shire Highlands as well as a centre of
evangelistic effort. The evening bell at the mission schools
still called the dusky children to their prayers, the great
altar of the Christian faith still drew its crowds of
worshippers ; but the whole atmosphere of the place
was transformed when the telegraph came up from the
south, 1 when a railway was projected and begun, and
new commercial buildings of galvanised iron were hastily
run up near the quiet mission station and the great cathedral
church.
The new British planter population spread itself about the
land, and prospered ; there was no difficulty whatever in
growing produce on that easy soil, but a grave The New
difficulty in getting it to market. Many of these g^grs
settlers, men with capital and energy, founded 1891-1900.
permanent homes in Nyasa ; and they liked to think their
country was like England, a tropic England of the austral
hemisphere. One noticed ' a bird on the hills whose name
I do not know, but whose voice is the voice of the
moorland lark ; a few stone walls and sheep, and one
might be in Scotland or Yorkshire' a fanciful com-
parison that betrays rather than conceals the sick heart of
the exile.
The tropic verdure and the burning sun belied the simile :
it could hardly be said that Nyasa was a white man's country,
and it had yet to be proved that it lay within Unhealth i.
range of the new white South African nation that ness of the
was forming further south. The one great blot
upon Nyasa was its unhealthiness : the first missionaries had
quickly died there, the first civilians were likewise stricken,
and old Fort Johnston, the earliest recognised outpost of the
British Government in the country, was deserted within a
few months of its foundation, left to the eerie silence of dank
graves and decaying walls, to become that most melancholy
1 Swann, Fighting the Slave- Hunters in Central Africa,
336 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
of all earthly sights, a human habitation abandoned by its
owners. 1
Happily new hope was here, in the new school of tropical
medicine which was to revolutionise hygiene in the torrid
belt of the earth. 2 But practically the whole length of the
Zambesi Valley at this time was, in fact, an unhealthy country
that had taken its toll of pioneering life ; and further north,
on the way to Tanganyika, were diseases, such as sleeping
sickness, which were as yet hardly known to Europeans at all.
Here the tse-tse fly, which exasperated hunters cursed as a
direct descendant of the flies that plagued the Egyptians,
paralysed communications, killing horses and transport oxen
by its deadly bite ; and all along the great river which divides
the temperate south from the tropic middle of Africa, fever
had claimed its human victims. If any white man wished to
die of fever, said one of the earlier explorers in these regions,
he had only to go along the Zambesi till he reached Barotsi-
land, and his desire would quickly be fulfilled.
Further experience somewhat modified this view, for the
high plateau of northern Barotsiland was bracing, dry, and
British n ot unhealthy, and a splendid cattle country ;
Pioneers fo^ no ^ even the diseases of the fertile deadly
North of the .. . ' ^ , . . , , n ^ .. /
Zambesi, valley of the Zambesi had prevented English-
1860-90. men f rom settling by the riverside. 3 Where
Livingstone had led the way other missionaries and explorers
1 Even Sir Harry Johnston, who compares Blantyre with its roses and
geraniums and English vegetables to a village of the Scots Lowlands,
admits that it was only on a plateau 5000 feet high in this part of tropic
Africa that Europeans could rear their children without much, if any, de-
terioration of constitution. (Report on British Central Africa, 1901-1903.)
2 See vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. iv.
3 The leading authorities are the annual Reports of the British South
Africa Company; Gouldsbury, The Great Plateau of Northern Rhodesia ;
Gibbons, Exploration and Hunting in Central Africa, and Africa from
South to North, both extremely valuable works ; Harding, In Remotest
Barotsiland ; Cameron, Across Africa ; and Bertrand, Au Pays des
Barotsi. There are some sporting books of no great importance, of which
Letch er's Big Game Hunting in North-Eastern Rhodesia is neither better
nor worse than most of its fellows. The works of Selous, cited in the
previous chapter, touch on this part of the subject.
TOWAKDS THE NORTH 337
had since followed, and begun, after the manner of our nation,
to play a part in the barbaric politics as well as the trade of
these remote regions. Since Livingstone had been welcomed
at the court of Sebituani, indeed, a revolution had been
made in this country ; the Makololo supremacy under Sebi-
tuani had fallen soon after that monarch died, the old empire
of the Barotsi people was restored, and that race, a handsome,
well-developed folk, was now prosperous under the rule of
Lewanika, a monarch whose earlier days were cruel and
harsh, but who was described by an enthusiastic English
traveller in later years as a fine man, over six feet high, with
' the manners of a gentleman and the unobtrusive dignity of
the well-bred.' He had not held this throne without a
struggle, and .the name of John Macdonald, a Scots trader at
Lialui, the new Barotsi capital, is remembered for the fact
that he aided Lewanika to assert his title on the death of
Sipopo, the first ruler of the restored Barotsi empire.
Well disposed as he was to the British on this account,
the new monarch had not forbidden the missionaries who
sought permission to settle in his country ; and soon after
came evangelists from Europe to preach the Christian gospels,
opening mission stations along the Zambesi, one at Lialui
the capital, another later at Luanza, a third at Kazombo,
others in due course at Kazungula, Ankala, and Seshiki,
where Livingstone had conversed with Sebituani. Many of
these pioneers, who had unknowingly pitched their camp
where the white man could not live, were stricken and died
of fever, sometimes a whole family at a time ; x but others
1 Two families of missionaries, the Prices and Helmores, settled at
Linyanti among the Makololo and Barotsi in 1860. Within a fortnight
all save three were down with fever ; even the Bechuana attendants
were prostrate, 'lying about like logs of wood.' A few days after, as
Price was tending the sick family, he ' touched a little face among the
four children, and found the cold hand of death had been there before
him.' it was one of the young Helmores. Presently the mother herself
became delirious, and fancied ' she heard her little ones calling for water,
and had denied herself of all for her loved ones. ' She also died ; Helmore
and the other children followed ; and Price made his way out of the
VOL. VI. Y
338 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
took their places, although they made few converts, and the
king himself remained true to the old barbaric creed. 1 But
if they had seemingly small measure of success, their work
was not without its influence. The strength of savage customs
was insensibly diminished, the belief in witchcraft was dis-
couraged, the . indifference to human suffering perhaps grew
less ; 2 and the good example of the evangelists helped to
prepare the way for the white man, if not for the white man's
creed.
Even this almost unknown land, so remote that it had
never suffered from the Arab slavers of Tanganyika and Nyasa,
was not secure from the spreading European influence of the
nineteenth century. Lewanika foresaw and bowed to the
inevitable destiny ; and liking the fair dealings of the British
fatal district. ' If suffering in mission work is doing anything,' he
wrote, ' then I have done something ; if not, then I have done but
little.'
This pitiful tragedy, which is described in Mackenzie's Ten Years
North of the Orange River, does not stand alone. Many years later the
Buckenham family settled as missionaries at Ankala ; little Elsie
Buckenham sickened, drooped for several months, and died ; within a
few months the father was laid beside his child ; the widow abandoned
the accursed country.
The fate of the parents was sad enough, but they knew what they
were risking when they went out. But why did they not leave their
helpless children in England? The separation would have been hard,
but not so hard as to see the children die before their eyes. Missionary
enterprise has been hungry of child life.
1 He gave the excellent reason that he could not abandon any of his
many wives.
2 The Barotsi were little less cruel than their neighbours. Those
guilty of witchcraft had their stomachs roasted over a slow fire until
their entrails burst out, or they were smeared all over with honey, and
tied on an anthill where thousands of ants would attack them. And it
was a favoured amusement of Sipopo, first king of the restored Barotsi
dynasty, to sit in a canoe on the Zambesi and order children to be
thrown into the water. He would watch the little ones struggling to
reach the shore with mild amusement ; but his real enjoyment began
when the sudden shriek and upthrown arms of a wretched child showed
it had been seized by a crocodile. At such A moment Sipopo felt that he
had not spent his time in vain.
Compared with the amusements of this human devil, the sport of
Mosilikatsi, king of the Matabili, was tame. He threw from time to
time old men and women of the tribes he had conquered to the vultures
a little food ' for my children,' as the barbarian termed his action.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 339
whom he knew and distrusting both Portuguese and the
Transvaal Dutch, he declared himself anxious for British
protection over his dominions. The day was not The Found-
long gone when no notice would have been given ingl of
. North- West
to his request ; even in 1890, when the request Rhodesia,
was made, the idea of extending the British 1891 - 190 -
Empire north of the Zambesi was still almost beyond the
political horizon both of London and Cape Town, and many
who were not averse from the enlargement of British territory
held that the Zambesi was the natural boundary of the British
dominions in South Africa.
Not so Cecil Rhodes, whose soaring vision reached from
the Zambesi onwards to the great lakes and far beyond to
Egypt. He had helped the African Lakes Corporation with
a large financial grant in its struggle in Nyasa, and thus
secured that district to the Empire ; and it was mainly
through his influence that the Barotsi country was marked
as British territory in the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1891,
which carried the sphere of British influence through to Tan-
ganyika and the undefined southern boundaries of the Congo
Free State. 1
The whole Barotsi empire was soon to be known as North-
West Rhodesia, the equally unknown country around Bang-
weolo, that land of swamps and sponges where Livingstone
had breathed his last, as North-East Rhodesia ; but for the
time at least no steps were taken to ensure effective occu-
pation, that sole title to possession, and Lewanika became
1 Rhodes had obtained a concession still further north, along the
western shores of Tanganyika. The precious document was being sent
to the coast by runners, but it- was intercepted and destroyed by a
member of Stanley's expedition, who was more concerned with Belgian
than British interests. The act ha,d important consequences. 'But for
the blackguardism of one man I should have been right through Africa, '
said Rhodes to his secretary, Le Sueur, who tells the story.
Stanley had himself urged that Britain should take over the Congo
district, but his appeal fell on deaf ears. And unlike Rhodes, he had
not the money to carry out a great annexation himself. The Congo is
one of the lost opportunities of the English people overseas.
340 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
restive under the delay. It was too much even for the
colossal ambition of Cecil Rhodes to develop two inaccessible
tropical provinces, whose full extent was not yet explored,
much less surveyed, at the same time that he was founding a
colony in Southern Rhodesia and fighting the Matabili. An
occasional white traveller reached the country, or even
settled there ; but not until 1898 was the authority of the
Chartered Company introduced. In that year British
officials, commissioners of the Company, were stationed at
Monze, Kalomo, Kazungula, and at Mongo near Lialui ; the
beginnings of a new administrative system were thought out ;
but unfortunately the Zambesi country did not belie its un-
healthy reputation blackwater fever killed some of the early
administrators, the station or fort at Monze was abandoned,
and little progress was made elsewhere. From one cause
and another, but mainly on account of the great war which
broke out in 1899 between British and Boers, little progress
was made in North- West Rhodesia, and when the war was
over it was realised that little could be done until the railway
reached the country.
The great district nominally known as North-East Rhodesia
had much the same fortune. A line of stations was founded
North-East De tween Nyasa and Tanganyika ; each contained
Rhodesia, a few thatched or tin-roofed buildings, an office,
1891-1900. surgery, an d prison, a post office and perhaps a
church ; each had an administrator responsible for the
government, most had an independent trader ready to traffic
with the tribes, some had a missionary, and a few had an in-
dividual settler. The smallest fort in the country had little
less ; the capital at Abercorn, in the far north near Tangan-
yika, had little more. 1
The total white population of the country in 1900 was less
than a hundred, and it was not increasing rapidly. Those
1 Abfircorn was called after the duke of that name, the first President
of the British South Africa Company. See note on page 567.
-.- . TOWARDS THE NORTH 341
who were there realised that in North-East as in North- West
Rhodesia, little more could be done until the railway was
driven through to Tanganyika ; but some who liked the
peaceful remoteness of station life in the tropics were happy
in this slumberous lotus-land. Small as was the British force
in the country, it was sufficient to stamp out much of the
old misrule which had saddened Livingstone ; the slave-trade
had gone, and there was no fear of a native rising among the
unwarlike tribes of the place ; the only danger to the whites
was the chance of fever, the only danger with the blacks the
spread of sleeping sickness.
These two vast provinces with their small white body-
guard were like trustees of the future, waiting for their day
to dawn. The administration was costly, the Union of
revenue was low, and both provinces showed a North-East
considerable annual deficit, which was, however, ^e^ 01 * 11 "
reduced when the two were united under the name Rhodesia,
of Northern Rhodesia in 1911.
The government was now centralised at Livingstone, the
one place that could be called a European town, and that only
a town by courtesy, as yet founded in this district. The
name was fittingly given by its founders, since it stood beside
the Victoria Falls which David Livingstone had discovered,
but for awhile its growth was not much quicker than that of
the province of which it was the head. In 1906 Livingstone
Town, although situated on the highroad to the interior,
had only one hotel with no more than ten rooms ; its white
population was less than fifty, and its newspaper, a thin
type-written sheet after the style of the early press of Salis-
bury and Buluwayo, found four foolscap pages ample to in-
form its few readers both of local doings and the scanty news
that came up by the great transcontinental telegraph
which Cecil Rhodes had planned and largely financed from
his own pocket. 1
1 The Livinyrtone Mail, 1906, in Mr. Mendelssohn's library.
342 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
A few years later the prospects had begun to improve.
The railway from the south had reached to Livingstone,
Advance of spanning the Victoria Falls ; l by 1912 it stretched
RhoS, through Broken Hill and the whole length of
1912. Rhodesia from south to north, and onwards into
the Congo Free State. With the building of the line the old
isolation of the country quickly vanished : casual tourists
now visited the place which David Livingstone had dis-
covered fifty years before, restaurant and sleeping-cars ran
as far as the Zambesi, and white prospectors and intending
settlers made their way about the country where Lewanika
had ruled his Barotsi. By 1912 the total European popu-
lation of North Rhodesia had risen to over a thousand, of
whom nearly three hundred were white women. 2
Such were the first foundations of a European civilisation
in Nyasa and Northern Rhodesia. Time was to show whether
those foundations were permanent ; the potential wealth
of the country could no longer be disputed, but its future as
a European colony depended chiefly on its health.
Fifty years had seen the British Empire in South Africa
advance from 'the Orange River to Tanganyika, from the
Comparison Griqua Town of the older missionaries to the
Livingstone Chartered Company's fort at Abercorn. This
and Rhodes, advance had been made despite the reluctance
of Imperial Governments in London, colonial Governments
in Cape Town, an anti-imperial bias in England, 3 and an anti-
British bias in Cape Colony. Many had played their part in
this great advance ; but two men were so largely responsible
for the expansion that one may say that without their aid it
1 When he was planning the railway to the north, Rhodes had taken
a great interest in its crossing the Zambesi at this point, closely examin-
ing the engineers to discover if the spray from the Victoria Falls would
touch the carriages of the trains as they crossed the river-bridge a
detail which appealed strongly to his imagination.
a Not all of these people, however, were permanent inhabitants.
Soutk Africa Company's Annual Report, 1912-13.)
3 See vol. iv. bk. xvi. ch. ii.
TOWARDS THE NORTH 343
would not only not have been made so far, but it would
hardly have been made at all. Those two men, David
Livingstone and Cecil Rhodes, were the giants among the
pigmies in this movement, and it is as natural to compare
their work and character and circumstances as those of Clive
and Warren Hastings in another portion of the Empire a
century before.
Between the two men were obvious points of resemblance
as well as obvious differences. Each had the broad mind
that could take wide grasp of men and things : Rhodes would
not trouble himself about petty details, and rose superior to
small provincial prejudices ; Livingstone had no love for the
bickerings of rival sects, and hated the ' competition to catch
souls/ the going about to make one proselyte, among his
fellow-missionaries. In the smaller details of life both had
the same carelessness in dress, allied, by a curious coincidence,
with the same scrupulous carefulness of person : Rhodes for
preference wore old loosely-fitting clothes, Livingstone had
never more than one change of attire in his travelling ward-
robe ; yet Livingstone warned fellow-European travellers of
the importance as well as comfort of a neat and cleanly
appearance when going among the natives, and Rhodes
was known as the only man who troubled to shave himself
daily in the rough pioneering days of early Mashonaland. 1
In disposition, both men had a sweet and sunny character
among their friends, with occasional sharp hastiness when
matters went awry ; both, too, were at all times openly
straightforward and clear-spoken. Each gave all his working
life for Africa, led onwards by the vision of the north and the
hope of reaching through at last to Egypt ; and each died
prematurely, before his work was done.
But there resemblance ends. Rhodes was the son of an
1 Finlason (A Nobody in Mashonaland) remarks that those who did
not know Cecil Rhodes by sight could always recognise him on the road
by the fact that he had shaved a certain sign of great rank in a laud
where razors and other commodities of civilisation were scarce.
344 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
English parson, and gave his thoughts to politics ; Living-
stone was the son of a Scottish layman, albeit an extremely
pious layman, and gave his thoughts to religion. And
Livingstone was no statesman, but the greatest of modern
explorers ; Rhodes was no explorer there was little left,
indeed, for him to explore but the greatest statesman of
modern times in South Africa. Livingstone was the path-
finder, Rhodes the man who used the path to the north ; but
without Livingstone the world might have waited many years
for so full a knowledge of Central South Africa, and Rhodes
have laid his mighty plans in vain. And without Rhodes
as an opponent Paul Kruger might have cut off the interior
which Livingstone had discovered from the imperial path of
Britain in South Africa, and have founded the great Boer
dominion in the interior which was the working dream of his
long life. Livingstone and Rhodes, in short, were the com-
plement of each other, and the making of British South
Africa on a larger scale than its older statesmen had thought
possible.
But the work of British expansion to the northward in
South Africa had not been completed without some friction
Friction outside South Africa. For one brief moment the
Portugal dying energies of Portugal flickered into sudden
1889-91. flame at this last enlargement of the British
Empire ; and both Nyasa and the Shire Highlands were
claimed as part of that great Portuguese domain in Africa
which had nominally stretched across the continent from
sea to sea, and recognised no rivals in past centuries.
The claim had once been valid ; yet one after another the
neglected provinces had passed to other hands since the
great days when Portuguese explorers led the way across
the unknown ocean and reached out towards the very heart
of Africa. The whole history of the Dutch and British for
three hundred years past had been one of continual expan-
sion from their first port of call at Table Bay, and every en-
TOWARDS THE NORTH 345
largement of their settlements had been made at the expense
of the older Latin Empire, an encroachment on the nominal
sovereignty of the Braganzas over Africa. The Dutch had
spread through Cape Colony and across the Orange River
on to those Transvaal heights which the Portuguese had seen
and claimed but never taken ; the British had spread along
the coast from west to east, settling in countries which bore
the Latin names of Algoa and Natal, but had no Latin owners.
And now the British had pushed forward far into the in-
terior. When their line of advance ran first through the
deserts of the Griqua country the Portuguese made no re-
monstrance ; when that line was carried onwards through
the country of the Matabili and Mashonas into the dim realm
of Monomotapa there was again no sign of protest. But now
at last they had reached the tropics ; and by the annexation
of Nyasa they drove a broad wedge between the disunited
eastern and western colonies of Portugal that finally separated
Mozambique from Angola, and for ever stayed a junction of
the two and a consolidation of the Portuguese colonial empire.
Then too late the Portuguese awoke and acted.
The commander of the small Portuguese forces on the
Lower Shire and Zambesi Rivers in the year 1889 was one
Lieutenant Coutinho. He was new to his post, and therefore
energetic ; the fatal lassitude of Mozambique had not yet
eaten into his career. And he became impatient of the long
negotiations which were now proceeding between his govern-
ment and the British Foreign Office as to the boundaries of
Nyasa negotiations in which he was convinced that the
weaker country would be worsted.
The thought was as gall, to the young Portuguese, who
preserved some of the ancient fire of his people ; and he
determined to obtain by arms what he knew could never be
obtained by argument. He put the small force under his
command in motion ; the Ruo River, which had been treated
as a temporary boundary between British and Portuguese
346 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
territory, was crossed ; a Makololo village near Chiromo
was burnt, and Coutinho set forth on his way to Blantyre.
What would have happened, or which side have gained
the victory when he reached the little Scots settlement in
The the Highlands of Central Africa, it is useless to
Portuguese speculate. When the too daring soldier of a
ay> decaying power outruns the caution of the states-
man he has to suffer for his zeal ; the scandal of an open
rupture was avoided by the recall of Coutinho ; and although
the Portuguese Government breathed defiance, Lord Salisbury
remained impervious to threats which he knew could not be
carried out. Soon afterwards, in 1891, the authorities at
Lisbon grudgingly recognised the British claims to the interior,
in Nyasa and Northern Rhodesia. Effective occupation,
backed by external power, had conquered a nominal suzer-
ainty that had never been enforced.
The Portuguese had claimed but never possessed the in-
terior ; the British possessed before they claimed ; and
cape Town possessing, held what they now claimed Soutb
ganytica Africa from Cape Town to Tanganyika, from Table
British. Bay to the heart of the tropics. The onward
march of explorers, hunters, missionaries, and traders had
carried them through half a continent in seventy years.
The road to Nyasa and the north, the route which Living-
stone projected and Cecil Rhodes secured, was made. The
grotesquely mingled aims of Christianity, commerce, and
civilisation, of the gospel, force, and mammon had conquered ;
the road through the interior was made, and it was British.
BOOK XXV
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 1
ALONGSIDE the pomp and the majesty of the expanding
empire of Britain marched ever through the centuries another
but a less tangible force. Sometimes it ran ahead ContraBt
of civilisation, sometimes it followed in its steps ; between
sometimes it was associated with the traders and J^ poral
traffickers in material things, more often it was Religious
opposed to them and their aims and their methods.
And sometimes its inspiration was the very source from which
the new settlements drew their being.
That force was Christianity.
The same creed, almost unchanging in a world of change,
had seen other empires rise and rule and perish. It had
conquered the proud unity of the older Roman Empire,
coerced and sometimes controlled the divisions of the Holy
Roman Empire of mediaeval Europe ; it had decided the
boundaries of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, and seen
those later Latin states tower into splendour and in time
decay.
If the Christian faith had outlived such mighty powers, it
1 This section is mainly a drawing together of loose strands and open
threads from previous chapters of this work, where religion and mission-
ary effort are referred to only casually or incidentally. I have not
attempted to write a general history of the relations between the
Christian churches within the Empire that would be a tedious and
unprofitable inquiry but rather to give a general view of the position of
Christianity among the English peoples and their subjects. From this
general survey I have excepted India, but that subject I hope to treat
in a subsequent volume.
347
348 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
might yet outlive others the Russian Empire which it had
followed through the snows and steppes of Siberia, the British
Empire whose emigrants it accompanied to the ends of the
earth. And the humble Christian missionary who built his
hut of reeds and clay in the wilderness might be doing a
work that should outlast the immutable decrees of a viceroy
or the fundamental constitution of a free people, even as the
work of Paul the apostle outlasted the work of the Roman
Caesars.
The strong hand of the civil power was clearly temporal,
perhaps temporary, the invisible authority of Christianity
claimed to be eternal. The one was immediate and local,
the other ultimate and universal.
The two were ever connected and ever opposed : like the
soul in the human body, each influenced the other, acting
and reacting ; each found it difficult to work with, and not
less difficult to work without the other. Often the two were
at variance, sometimes at open issue ; each claimed part of
the other's sphere, and each also claimed a sphere in which
its own authority was supreme.
The grounds of opposition were clear and outstanding.
The Church in all ages claimed its power direct from God,
the Empire claimed its authority from man. The aim of the
politician was temporal, of the priest eternal. The statesman
sought dominion and the mastery of his own people, the
missionary preached the equality of all men before God.
The minister of Empire spoke of straggle, the minister of
Christ spoke of peace. The soldier of Empire took by force,
the soldier of God conquered by persuasion. The trader
dealt by haggle, bribe and barter ; the evangelist worked
by love.
But overlying these fundamental divergencies between the
two forces of Christianity and Empire there were also super-
ficial likenesses which helped at times to conceal those diver-
gencies. Each worked for civilisation, as civilisation was
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 349
understood in Europe ; each carried the banner of European
supremacy before it the Empire in open acknowledgment,
the Church by implication, by propagating a faith whose claim
to universal belief had become localised by the circumstances
of nineteen centuries to Europe. Each sought power, but
each sought a different kind of power, and sought to en-
compass power by different methods. Each sought unity,
but a different kind of unity the Imperialist a unity of law
and government, the priest a unity of faith and doctrine.
And each failed of his ideal, since each worked with a human
material that changed with changing circumstance and
environment ; yet neither failed utterly. There was a
rough unity of law and allegiance in the British Empire,
a rough unity of faith in the same God among the Christian
Church.
The Church, as was its duty, ignored the barriers of race
and language, the boundaries of nations and empires ; and
here was the great divergence of church polity Divisions
from statecraft. But here was also a likeness c^stian
concealed beneath the divergence. The Church c&urches.
was itself divided by barriers, not of race or empire, but of
sects and schisms ; not by boundaries of language, but of
dogma and doctrine. The conflicting politics of rival empires
were paralleled by the conflicting propaganda of rival de-
nominations ; the lack of unity in human society was equalled
by the lack of unity in religious practice.
The notorious divisions among Christians had indeed been
fraught with disastrous consequences to the faith. The
great schism between Eastern and Western Their
Churches had weakened the uniform front of con* 8 ,** 0118
Christendom in Europe, and the Turk had driven quences.
the solid wedge of Islam through Byzantium, the meeting-
ground of conflict between Slav and Latin Christianity. Even
before the loss of Constantinople in 1453 had put its dark
lesson on the strife, that schism had made the conception of
350 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
all Europe as a single religious, social, or political unit an
unreal vision.
But Christendom had not learned the need of union even
from a disaster which threatened to overwhelm it. Hardly
was the Turk firmly seated in the city of Constantino when
another schism spread in Western Europe, and the old con-
trast between Teuton and Latin was permanently deepened
by the Reformation. The Teutons became Protestants, the
Latins remained faithful to the old Catholic Church ; and the
magnificent conception of an all-embracing Church in an all-
embracing Empire, already so sadly shrunk by the schism
between Eastern and Western Christendom, finally vanished
in the religious wars and rival persecutions of the Reformation.
Another, and in the end perhaps not less disastrous, line
of religious cleavage was seen among the English people,
Religious whose full consequences it needed centuries to
schisms in show. The reformed Church of England still
England. indeed claimed communion with the Catholic
Church after its secession at the Reformation, but the claim
of Canterbury was repudiated as an absurd impertinence at
Rome. And the Church of England, itself the creation of a
comprehensive compromise that was intended to provide
for the spiritual needs of all the English people, was to be
faced with the same schism it had itself committed. Eliza-
bethan Puritan and Georgian Nonconformist seceded from
the national church, and their permanent secession marked
the whole of modern English life with a division that has been
not merely religious, but largely coloured by social and political
bitterness as well.
It has been claimed, indeed, that the division between
Established Church and Nonconformity has given a variety
and individuality to English spiritual life which could not have
existed in a uniform organisation, that the competition
between sect and sect has made for general vitality, and that
the full religious freedom of the English people has been well
351
purchased at the heavy price of frequent jealous rivalry and
concealed or open enmity between one denomination and
another. On such vexed matters men will always differ
according to sympathy or upbringing, those who value unity
emphasising the obvious disadvantages of overlapping or-
ganisations and minimising their advantages, those who value
freedom disregarding the strength and discipline of a common
unit and exaggerating its undoubted defects. 1 But at least
the impartial judge if such a one exists in this eternal
controversy may admit that men will always worship as they
will, but that the price paid for freedom is a high one, and
that while the tendency of liberty is to broaden, it sometimes
also narrows by the very strifes which it creates.
The Church of England, in short, was a compromise, but
a compromise that neither failed absolutely nor completely
succeeded. The permanent schism of Nonconformity showed
where it failed ; the continued existence of the Church, the
admitted strength of its organisation and its undoubted hold
on the affections of half the nation which it served, was the
best proof of the partial but still considerable measure of its
success.
But these unhappy divisions, which had so marked an
effect for good or ill on England, were not confined to Eng-
land. The rise of the British Empire abroad and Brltlgh
of Nonconformity at home were absolutely con- Empire and
temporaneous, and the two movements soon f ^na*d isin
became inextricably connected. It is a curious together,
coincidence, but nothing more than a coincidence,
that the first colonies of the English people in America were
planned and founded in the very year that the activities of
the Puritans attracted the attention of the English Govern-
ment : in 1583, while Humphrey Gilbert was proclaiming the
1 At bottom the question of church establishment versus dissent is the
secular controversy of the great empire versus the little kingdom or
republic, in another form.
352 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
establishment of the Church of England in his abortive settle-
ment on the still uncolonised shores of Newfoundland, 1 and
Walter Ralegh was giving 100 for the propagation of the
Christian religion in the intended settlement of Virginia, the
Brownist sect of Puritans drew upon themselves the serious
displeasure of the ministers of Queen Elizabeth and the heads
of the Anglican Church.
What had been a coincidence, however, became a con-
nection : Puritanism and the Empire not only rose together,
they grew together. As the British Empire spread the strife
of sects spread with it, and the disputes which had perplexed
Lambeth and Westminster were revived on the banks of the
Potomac and Connecticut, on the Caribbean Sea, and even
far off in remote Pacific Islands, whose other native gods had
vanished before the coming of Christianity. Everywhere,
indeed, that British settlers went this strife of sects went with
them, often showing in some sharp cleavage of interests or
opinion that should have been as one an element of under-
lying but inevitable discord that could not be forgotten when
the need for common action rose.
The West Indian plantations and the southern colonies of
the English people in North America, founded by the royalists
Religious of the seventeenth century, followed generally
ta E e ngn C 8iT the Utur gy of the Church of England which they
America. loved ; the northern colonies were founded by
those who cherished an irreconcilable hatred for her teaching
and her government. The cavalier settler in Virginia re-
garded Canterbury with much the same reverence that the
Catholic emigrant to Maryland regarded Rome ; 2 the island
of Barbados, like Virginia, was divided into parishes after
the ecclesiastical pattern of England by its faithful Anglican
colonists, 3 Jamaica and Bermuda likewise had their parishes
and parsons, the latter not always creditable or competent
1 Vol. iii. bk. xi. ch. i. 2 Vol. i. bk. ii. ch. iv.
3 Vol. i. bk. ii. ch. vi.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 353
to perform their spiritual duties. 1 But Puritan influence
was not unknown in the West Indies, as the history of Provi-
dence and indeed the very name of that little city of the
Bahamas shows ; Puritans were found in Virginia ; members
of the Society of Friends, commonly called Quakers, found
their way to the southern colonies, and the Bermudas ; 2
and the new Nonconformity of the eighteenth century, which
indeed did not yet confess to its dissent from the Church of
England, made its appearance in the Carolinas, colonies
where the Church was late in coming to the people.
Here indeed Nonconformity was a weak and persecuted
force that made but little headway ; but in the northern
English colonies in America, settled by avowed and open
rebels from the Church of England, it was ever the pre-
dominant and ruling factor, giving the prevailing tone to
political and social life as well as the religion of the people, and
establishing itself and its authority with a rigour to which
the Church of England under the strong hands of Whitgift
and Laud had aspired but never attained. The Prayer Book
of the Anglican Church was hated in New England as the Mass
was hated in Geneva or the Kuran in Vienna ; the episcopal
order of government to which the Church had steadfastly
adhered was as much associated with tyranny and oppression
in Massachusetts as the Inquisition in England, and the
bishop's mitre was as foul a memory in Boston as the thumb-
screw and the rack in Holland. 3
1 Vol. iv. bk. xii. ch. ii.
In 1683, however, when Jamaica had nine churches, it was stated that
' all the ministers \vere sober, orthodox, and good men ; none but such as
conform, and are recommended by my Lord Bishop of London can be
admitted. '
The slackness of the Church was not always entirely the fault of the
clergy. One Governor of the Bahamas openly avowed that the laws
which forbade incestuous marriages in England did not apply in the
colonies, and ignored a protest from the Bishop of London. He may
have had a personal interest in the question. (Digest of S. P.O. Records.)
2 Vol. i. bk. iv. ch. ii.
3 'They left no means untried, both foul and fair, to prevent the
settling of the Church among them,' wrote an Anglican missionary from
VOL. VI, 2
354 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
That fact at once marked out New England as a distinct
religious entity from old England or episcopal Virginia,
stren th of P r testant Puritanism dominated the northern
Established colonies, as the Anglican Church dominated the
formity southern and West Indian colonies ; and the
in New former, which only gained a partial and tem-
porary victory in England under Cromwell,
proved permanently the stronger of the two in North
America.
There were adequate causes for this greater strength of
Nonconformity in North America than England. The Non-
conformist colonies had the advantage from the start, in that
they were founded for a definite religious purpose, whereas
the Anglican colonies were not. Had there been no national
Church of England, the complexion of Virginia and Carolina
would not have been essentially different from what it was ;
but had there been no Nonconformist revolt against the
Church of England, the whole character of New England
would have been different, if indeed New England had been
founded at all. The very basis of New England was its Non-
conformity, a spirit of revolt against the established order
which permeated its politics as well as its religion.
New England Puritanism therefore had this advantage over
Virginian episcopacy, that it went far deeper into the roots of
its local life. And while it had this advantage, it had no
corresponding disadvantage. Whatever strength may come
from state recognition and establishment it is a contro-
versial question the English Nonconformists in New England
had secured, since their creed was legally established in those
New England ; ' the people were likewise threatened with imprisonment,
and a forfeiture of 5 for coming to hear me. They spare not openly to
speak reproachfully and with great contempt of our Church, they say
the sign of the Cross is the Mark of the Beast and the sign of the Devil,
and that those who receive it are given to the Devil.' (Digest of S.P.O.
Records.) This was at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
But after all the Anglican propagandists were intruders in New
England.
CHEISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 355
colonies and the Anglican ritual was proscribed or at least
discouraged. They held communion with English Non-
conformists of their views, and their creed was therefore never
entirely isolated from the intellectual basis of its origin in the
mother country ; but they had at the same time all the
advantages of complete local self-government.
It is indeed true that even in New England the fissiparous
tendencies inherent in Nonconformity 1 became manifest ;
a local Nonconformist revolt against the now established
Nonconformity of New England was seen when Roger Williams
founded his little colony of Providence at Narragansett Bay
on a system of complete toleration, 2 which Nonconformity
in its day of power no longer recognised. Rhode Island was
the logical outcome of the paradox of Nonconformity, in itself
a revolt against the state establishment of religion, being
established by the state : but the paradox prevailed, and
the revolt perhaps for geographical reasons, for Rhode
Island necessarily remained a small community was never
serious or widespread. The internal discipline of New Eng-
land Nonconformity, the masculine vigour of that people,
and perhaps the lively sense of enmity to their neighbours,
the French Catholics of Quebec and the English Churchmen
of the south, maintained their zeal for the rather bleak repel-
lent creed of their fathers.
The Church of England in the American colonies, on the
other hand, was very badly served. It had all the disadvan-
tages of dependence, and none of the advantages weakness
of self-government. By a scandalous and amazing of the
oversight of the metropolitans of Canterbury, church of
the infant Anglican Church possessed no bishop En s land -
and few clergy of its own in the very colonies which were
1 In our own time a decided movement towards union is visible among
English Nonconformists. But it is coincident with a lay movement for
the formation of Brotherhoods, in itself hardly distinguishable from a
new division.
2 Vol. i. bk. ii. ch. ii.
\ t.
356
well affected to its usage ; nominally under the control of
the Bishop of London, it was neglected by successive diocesans
of Fulham Palace, who seldom even feigned an interest which
they did not feel in this portion of their charge. Anglican
episcopacy in consequence became a reproach in the very
colonies which had been willing and anxious to recognise it,
and while the Catholicism of Rome was laying its foundations
firm and deep in French Canada and the Spanish colonies
of South America, the Anglican Catholicism of Canterbury
became a plant of feeble growth in its own peculiar
territories. 1
Seldom indeed has a religious organisation so entirely
missed its opportunity as the Church of England in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries in the southern English
settlements of North America ; 2 so complete and absolute
was its failure that the field it had ineffectively occupied was
invaded and to some extent secured by the emotional Wes-
leyanism which made a more direct and striking appeal to the
heart of the people.
The process was repeated in Canada. There, too, the
Church of England was established by law, but it possessed
hardly any other hold. 3 Its impotence and arrogance were
a byword in Quebec, where it roused contempt rather than
1 ' The poor Church has nobody upon the spot to comfort or confirm her
children ; therefore they fall back again into the herd of the dissenters,'
wrote an Anglican visitor in 1703. And in the same year another wrote
that if ministers of the Church ' come not timely the whole country will
be overrun with Presbyterians, Anabaptists, and Quakers.' From South
Carolina it was reported that the English settlers 'were making near
approach to that heathenism which is to be found among negroes and
Indians' ; and much the same report was given of Georgia, which was,
however, established on a better foundation. Vol. i. bk. iv. ch. iii.
2 In 1675 Bishop Compton declared that there were 'scarce four
ministers of the Church of England in all the vast tract of America, and
not above one or two of them, at most, regularly sent over.' A sufficient
condemnation.
3 An exception must be admitted in Newfoundland, where the Church
provided effectual civil administration. In 1769 a clergyman who was
burying a corpse discovered by examining the body that a murder had
been committed, and trial and execution followed. Following this
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 357
enmity among French Catholics ; l in Ontario, where it should
have gained a hold among the United Empire Loyalists and
the later emigrants from England, 2 it had more official privi-
leges than adherents. Lands had been set aside for its
maintenance : but these were valueless until occupied, and
few ordained clergy sought a cure in the profitless wilderness.
The great Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign
Parts, which had been founded in 1701 to spread the prin-
ciples of the Church of England overseas, and which had done
whatever had been done for Anglicanism in the old American
colonies, 3 certainly accomplished much in Canada, sending
out its missionaries to the Maritime Provinces, Ontario, and
early Manitoba, to preach to the colonists and baptise them. 4
Many of these excellent men did their utmost in conditions
of great difficulty, were well received, and gathered large
congregations round them ; but it was too late. The clergy
lands which had been set aside for the maintenance of the
Church were alienated in 1855 to secular purposes by the
state a step which would hardly have been taken had the
Church not neglected its work during the first two vital
generations in the making of British North America.
Some years before that disaster threatened, a great revival
of Anglican activity was seen among the clergy of Ontario
and Nova Scotia. But the day had passed. The prevailing
detection, many civil magistrates were appointed ; but many of the early
clergy had previously been designated magistrates.
Even in Newfoundland, however, there were places where ' the word
of God was not heard for thirty years.' (Digest of S.P.G. Records.)
1 The English Protestants had to use French Catholic churches for
their services at one time, having no buildings of their own. After each
service, the church was thoroughly cleansed to remove the supposed
pollution. The very refinement of religious insult.
2 Vol. iii. bk. xi. ch, iii.
3 Wesley was himself at one time a S.P.G. missionary.
4 In one case recorded in Canada a man had to wait twelve years for
his children to be baptized, and another twenty-six years before they
could be confirmed. No wonder that one of the clergy declared that
baptizing the children was ' something like a shepherd setting his mark
upon his sheep and then letting them go in the wilderness.'
358 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
and predominant denomination among the English Canadians
was Wesleyanism, of Scottish Canadians Presbyterianism,
of French Canadians Catholicism.
The religious history of Canada illustrates in striking fashion
the relative advantages of voluntary and established creeds.
The discipline, the organisation, and the regular succession of
an Established Church give it a strong advantage over other
denominations of more fluid character, and that advantage
is added to by its relation with the state. The Church gives
something in loyalty to the state, and it gains something in
official recognition, if it loses a little in freedom, 1 from the
state. 2 But these things are at best accessories, the mere
trappings of a creed ; the essential is life. And it was life that
the Established Church lacked at this unhappy period of its
history, both in England and abroad ; it was life and en-
thusiasm, if nothing else, that the voluntary Nonconformist
bodies had. While the Nonconformist ministry of New
England had education and sound theological knowledge, the
roving and enthusiastic Dissenters of early Canada had
neither ; their ignorance was often as incredible as their zeal
was great. But their ignorance mattered little to their
audiences, who were themselves not too well informed ; if
the lamp of religion burnt smokily, at least it burnt vigorously,
while the wretched candle of the Established Church guttered
and drooped and hardly burnt at all.
1 Nonconformists, however, are also bound by the trust deeds of
their chapels in many cases, which sometimes hampers their doctrines.
But it does not hamper their politics, as too many of their sermons
attest.
3 In the Imperial Civil War, George Washington sent a message to a
clergyman in New York State, that he proposed to come to the church,
' and would be glad if the violent prayers for the King and royal family
were omitted.' The violent prayers were presumably the moderate
petitions ordered by the liturgy of the Church, and the clergyman
refused to shorten the service.
I cannot prove it, but I doubt if any prayers were put up for King
George in any save Anglican churches of North America. The Non-
conformist ministers of New England were among the leading spirits of
the secession movement.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 359
In later days the Church had learnt its lesson, and deter-
mined to be early in the field. Anglican missionaries were
among the first pioneers in British Columbia, its Late
which owes some at least of its English complexion R evival -
to then: efforts in the days when the city of New Westminster
was no more than a few huts in the forest ; 1 the primates of
England founded a special mission to establish the Church
among the rapidly growing prairie provinces at the close of
the nineteenth century. Their work was not without reward,
but as a whole the Church of England was unable to recover
the opportunity it had had and lost.
In Cape Colony for many years the Church of England was
even more remiss than in Canada. There was not indeed the
same obvious need for its services, since there were few
Englishmen in South Africa, and the Dutch Reformed Church,
which retained all its old privileges after the British conquest,
justly held the affection of the old Dutch colonists. The few
priests of the Anglican Church that visited and ministered in
Cape Colony were received with courtesy and kindness by
their colleagues of the Dutch persuasion, and usually by the
Nonconformist English bodies which had already started
operations in the colony, and which in consequence had gained
adherents from the Anglicans in South Africa : but it was
not until 1847 that an English bishop was appointed to Cape
Town, and the Church which received no special privileges
above other denominations really took up its work in earnest.
From that time, under the devoted influence of Bishop Gray,
with Archdeacon Merriman and others of his band of workers,
the Church of England went steadily forward and more than
redeemed the early reproach upon its name. 2 If it had been
1 Vol. iii. bk. x. ch. iii.
2 But not without a minor scandal. The cathedral at Cape Town was
a joint stock affair, some of the original proprietors of which were said
to be Jews or atheists they were probably merely irreligious men and
the offerings of the Holy Communion were sometimes hypothecated to
pay interest on the building shares.
There were other similar cases in Cape Colony.
360 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
last in Cape Colony, it was first in Nyasa, and well to the fore
in the other provinces of South Africa.
Australia proved a more fertile field for the Church of Eng-
land. A chaplain accompanied the first convicts to Botany
Bay, and the early ministers of the Anglican communion
were men of earnest active character, who sowed a seed that
spread and flourished through the continent. What could
be done by spiritual agencies to mitigate the evils of the
transportation period was done by the Church of England,
which in this respect led all other denominations, and the
lead obtained in those early days was never lost. An Anglican
bishop in New South Wales could report in 1842 that there
was not a single district of the colony in which his Church
had not taken the lead of every other persuasion, and in some
cases its adherents outnumbered the adherents of all other
religious denominations combined ; in Victoria the people were
said to have ' a much stronger sense of their responsibility
towards the Church than in England ' itself, and when the clergy
made their way into Queensland they found, instead of the
rough irreligion and insult which for some reason they expected,
an enthusiasm for their work and the warmest welcome. 1
In New Zealand the Church of England was likewise for-
tunate. Its first bishop, Selwyn, was a man of great strength
of character and conviction, whose long service at Auckland
obtained the respect of colonist and Maori alike ; 2 one great
settlement in the South Island was founded on avowedly
Church of England principles, its very name of Canterbury
recalling the sacred city of the Kentish vale from which
English Christendom has sprung ; but here, too, as in Aus-
1 Digest of S. P.O. Records.
~ Vol. v. bk. xxi. ch. iii.
Selwyn ascribed much of his success to the fact that he 'was not
fettered with strict rules or obliged to refer every question to England'
the same freedom which the New England Nonconformists had obtained.
Had such a man existed, and gone to Virginia or the Carolinas two
centuries before, the history of the Church of England in America might
have been very different.
361
tralia, the Nonconformist sects were vigorous and prosperous,
and the Catholics, although for long in a very small minority,
maintained, and perhaps even slightly increased, their hold.
Practically all of the hundred and more denominations
and varieties of the Christian faith that were recognised and
followed in the British Isles had a footing, if often Continued
a precarious footing, in the outer Empire ; the Religious
same religious divisions distracted Christendom Dmsl
in the new world as the old, and the ideal unity of the faith,
to which lip-service was often paid by priests and pastors in
their quieter hours, was as far to seek in the antipodes as in
Europe. In this matter at least the new English communities
were a pattern of the old.
But perhaps the most extraordinary and unexpected thing
about these various phases of Christianity that took root in
the English colonies was their entire lack of Tneir
originality in form, ceremony, and doctrine, their imitative
astonishing imitativeness of the parent churches, Chara(
their faithful reproduction of an older pattern of religion.
In vain the patient chronicler searches the records of the
faith for the scandalous but lively episodes of heresy or
schism ; with one partial and temporary exception in South
Africa, all is unmitigated orthodoxy. 1
Yet in other details of character and occupation the colonial
Briton was frankly and even assertively divergent from the
stock from which he had sprung ; he was often ready and even
anxious to innovate in politics, to express contempt for the
traditional conservatism of England, to lay out his life in a
new country on new lines. Only in his religious views had he
no such innovations of practice or belief. In a new world
one would have thought that some new form of faith would
have arisen, some new vision of eternal life have spoken in
1 Bishop Colenso of Natal was excommunicated by the Church of
England in 1865. He had a few followers, but although the secular arm
upheld him, the heresy was loc.il and temporary.
362 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
the silence of the wilderness : but the Australian Christian
celebrated his midsummer Christmas and autumnal Easter
without a thought of incongruity, he fought a wordy war
over the details of religious education like his co-religionists
in England, and his sects distinguished and paraded their
petty divergencies of practice with the same pride and pomp
that they showed in their divisions at home.
In the whole long range of their history, indeed, the English
people overseas have produced only one novel and notable
creed which has left a considerable mark on their history the
Mormon revelation ; and several peculiar or passing phases of
belief, in which the orthodox may fear the voice of the tempt-
ing serpent, but the philosopher will more truly recognise
the inchoate longings of human souls astray the charlatanism
of a Dowie, and the body of doctrines that have obtained a
widespread acceptance under the name of Christian Science.
The cause of this remarkable lack of originality, however,
lies not very deep. As a whole the European, who has taken
Cause of his creed from Asia, the conqueror of the world
by force who reveres the gentle memory of one to
menon. whom force was abhorrent, the anti-semite who
worships a Jew as God, is not so much an innovator as an
imitator in religion ; the quality of other-worldliness is the
exception rather than the rule. It is the contemplative
spirit which furnishes the mental atmosphere from which
new creeds evolve ; and the European stands for action
more than contemplation.
The further west one goes the more does action triumph
and the less is contemplation esteemed ; amor/* the most
westerly of Europeans, the English people in particular to
whose other faults can certainly not be added a disregard of
religion this tendency is seen in marked degree. The daring
originality which they have shown in politics is far to seek in
their religion ; if they have been fertile of new sects they have
been sterile of new creeds, and the real religious energies o
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 363
the English people have been given, not to evolving new
beliefs but to enlarging the knowledge of the old among those
with whom they have come in contact. An age of missionary
enterprise is not one in which heresies or new religions flourish,
nor a people who exalt the messengers of the God they know
above the seer of new gods.
The plain duty of Christians, which they have not always
too readily obeyed, is in the command of their founder to
preach the gospel to all mankind. From the Early
moment when the early Christian Church emanci- ^c^^ s
pated itself from its Jewish origin and its Jewish tendom.
tendency to exclusiveness, from the moment, that is, when
Paul rather than Peter directed the development of the
Church, the propagandist aspect of the faith was seldom
wholly neglected, and at times the missionary zeal of Christen-
dom surged up triumphant in some great movement to convert
the barbarians of the outer world to the true revelation. The
evangelists of the Church were found in Britain and Germany,
in Scandinavia, in Scythia and Sarmatia, and as far afield as
Abyssinia and even India under the Roman Empire : in
early as in later ages they ran ahead of civilisation, their
messengers outpaced the Roman legionary and the British
soldier ; the Greek trader of antiquity and the Scots com-
mercial traveller of modern times both found the messengers
of Christ had been before them in the wilderness.
They looked for no reward on earth : but their work was
not without result. If Christianity was practically over-
whelmed outside Europe by the rise and spread of It becomes
its potent enemy Islam, it became in the end the the creed
accepted and dominant creed of Europe itself.
If it lost some of its early purity in contact with the barbaric
superstitions of Goth and Vandal, it yet broke the shock of
their assault upon a declining Roman Empire, and preserved
the dying civilisation of the Latins from the rude hands of its
assailants. At the very time when it was driven out of Africa,
364 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
and its petty outposts in Asia were left isolated and forgotten
for a thousand years, Christianity was becoming the supreme
and indeed the only faith of Europe. Therein lay its destiny
for Europe was to be the supreme arbiter of the outer world,
and the creed of Europe became, in the eyes of many Euro-
peans, a test not only of salvation in the next world but even
of civilisation in this.
The heathen and the infidel were one in the sin of rejecting
the Christian God, but while both were certain to be damned
unless they discovered or repented their error, the brutish
heathen at least had no foreknowledge of the truth the
infidel of Islam had known the way of salvation and rejected
it. His sin was therefore the greater, as error is worse than
ignorance. The warlike Carib of the West Indies, the coal-
black negro of the African tropics, the horrid Hottentot of
the Cape these men had never heard of Christianity ; the
cultivated Musalman had heard, and preferred another
revelation. The former must be taught, the latter fought ;
the false gods and devils of the heathen and the infidel cast
out and trampled underfoot. Such was the conception of
his duty by the Christian of the Kenascence.
From the first invasion of the outer world by European ex-
plorers in the fifteenth century the distinction was made that
catholic the expanding civilisation and religion of Europe
Missions must fight the Asiatic civilisation and religion
Renas- which had also expanded and was still expanding
cence. over Africa and instruct rather than coerce the
heathen barbarians elsewhere. The good Christians of
Catholic Europe, recognising their duty to the people whom
their explorers had discovered and their pioneers exploited,
convinced that Christians alone held the secret of eternal
truth, prepared to impart that secret to others, sometimes by
persuasion, occasionally by force. The admirable Las Casas,
troubled by the brutalities of his countrymen in the Spanish
West Indies, introduced Christianity in those colonies, whence
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 365
it spread to Peru and Mexico and other provinces of that
great empire, and took firm hold on all South America.
Francis Xavier carried the knowledge of his faith through
the Eastern Seas, his followers preached in China and Japan,
French missionaries spread the gospel among the redskins of
Canadian forests, and others of like aims brought their creed
to the inattentive tribes of Africa.
The English people came later to the field as colonists and
conquerors, and for a time they did less than the Latins as
evangelists. In Asia they could do nothing, Earl
.since the English East India Company was no English
more than a commercial corporation, and its
agents often merited the reproach of godless traders, who
had forsaken their own religion and adopted no other ; 1 on
Africa they had as yet no hold ; in America the Church of
England achieved but little propagandist work in the southern
colonies, and the established Nonconformity of New England
did no more in the north. Both had first to strike full root
themselves before they could sow the seed for others.
Some negro and redskin converts in Virginia and Carolina, 2
and a translation of the Bible into the language of the American
aborigines by John Eliot, 3 a Puritan of the north, They
summarise the missionary work of a century of
English Churchmen and Nonconformists ; 4 the Century,
real missionary effort of Britain began with the Society for
The first English church in India was built in Madras in 1680 ; but
most of the traders of the East India Company abandoned their religion
altogether while in the Orient.
2 An Anglican missionary in North Carolina reports in 1752 that he
had baptized 243 black children and 112 black adults; as much or as
little seems to have been done in other colonies (Digest of S. P. G. Records).
Many slaves in Pennsylvania were, however, converted to Christianity.
3 It has been said that the translation was incomprehensible to the
redskins. But one of the historians of the Church Missionary Society
has been assured by an American scholar that such was not the case.
Nevertheless the converts were few.
4 A missionary society was established under the Commonwealth, and
both Cromwell and the Parliament took some interest in it. But I
canuot discover that it achieved much.
366 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
the Propagation of the Gospel in 1701, and it spread far and
fast with the eighteenth century. One missionary society
after another was established the London Missionary Society,
an undenominational organisation which sent such men as
Livingstone and Moffat to South Africa, and a whole army
of excellent teachers and preachers to the Pacific Islands ; *
Baptist and Wesleyan Societies, a Presbyterian organisation
from Scotland, and the great Church Missionary Society in
1799, which became in effect a centre of Anglican low church-
manship, in more or less friendly rivalry with the high Anglican-
ism of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
The spreading work of these evangelistic agencies reached
in time to the very ends of the earth ; but unhappily the old
Their Dis- divisions and jealousies of the Christian churches
agree- in Europe were again a subject of strife within
Len B ' and derision without the mission field ; various
sects and denominations, and rival upholders of different forms
of the same creed, each started their own particular propa-
ganda, and their frequent disagreements and occasional open
quarrels retarded the work which all were anxious to do.
Some evangelistic agencies were not above poaching another's
converts : 2 the Protestant distrusted the Catholic as an
historic foe, whose missions to the heathen too often had
successful and permanent results ; 3 the Catholic denounced
the Protestant as a vulture surrounded by moral carrion ; 4
and the French missionaries in Basutoland were accused of
meddling in the politics of the tribes, in a manner contrary
to the interests of the British Government. 5
1 Vol. v. bk. xx. ch. i.
2 Livingstone comments on, and reprobates, this tendency among rival
mission stations.
3 The bigoted Philip admits this as well as the fairer -minded
Livingstone.
4 I quote this gem of ecclesiastical jealousy from O'Haire's Twelve
Years in South Africa.
5 Gust, Africa Rediviva (1891). The charge is not referred to in
Lagden's Basutos, but it is not in itself improbable. The more enr nrctic
and successful the missionary, the more is he likely to interfere in tribaJ
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 367
Between one evangelistic agency and another was little
attempt at co-operation, and the inevitable duplication and
overlapping of propagandist zeal which resulted could not
but be productive of lost and wasted effort. Too much atten-
tion was concentrated on some sections of the vast mission
field, which indeed offered ample size and scope for all, while
other districts were left vacant and untilled. As an instance,
in 1890 there were no fewer than thirty-one differing de-
nominations at work in South Africa ; 1 in one part of Rhodesia
alone were three different agencies the Brethren of Christ,
the Seventh Day Adventists, and the American Episcopal
Methodists besides the original and well-organised Univer-
sities' Mission of the Church of England, the Roman Catholics
and the Salvation Army. 2
To no denomination alone can be given the palm for achieve-
ment. Each denomination depended for success partly on
the funds contributed at home, partly on the The Mis-
character of its missionaries, a continuance of their Binaries,
zeal and health in often unfavourable circumstances, and their
relations, political and social as well as religious, with the
people among whom they had cast in their lot. Some lived
and died unknown, obscure and unsuccessful, toiling a whole
lifetime perhaps for hardly a single convert in some neglected
corner of their divine Master's vineyard ; many saw wife or
child or comrade fall in some fatal climate, and worked on
alone till stricken down in turn ; a few, like Williams and
Patteson in the Pacific, 3 and Threlfall in Namaqualand, 4 were
given the supreme crown of martyrdom for their faith ; others
politics. And a Frenchman can hardly be blamed for not upholding the
interests of Britain in a land that'was not at the time British territory.
Similar accusations had been brought, no doubt with some truth,
against the French missionaries in Canada (vol. i. bk. v. ch. iii. ), and
the English in South America (vol. iv. bk. xii. ch. i. ).
1 Gust, Africa Rediviva.
2 London Guardian, 31st May 1912.
3 Vol. v. bk. xx. ch. i.
4 Bk. xxiv. ch. ii.
368 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
again won honour and renown in their lifetime, recognised,
like Marsden of New Zealand, 1 as the apostle of a country
or a people, or like Livingstone or Moffat or Mackenzie, as the
discoverer of new countries and the agent of civilisation as
well as Christianity.
Not all the missionaries could be of the commanding type
of Livingstone, heroes who adventured far into the wild like
some un- Threlf all, or builders of civilisation with their own
worthy hands like Moffat and Broadbent and Laws of
}r8 ' Livingstonia. A few were indeed utter failures,
totally unsuited for the work they had taken upon themselves
to do ; some fell away from their high calling, engaging in the
very traffic with the natives which they had denounced,
buying and selling at their own prices, dealing in guns and
ammunition and even slaves or holding lands. 2 Some scandals
occurred on this account, and more were hinted at. 3 But
these lapses were usually inquired into when discovered,
and the missionary who was proved guilty of unfitting con-
duct was recalled or dismissed by the Society which sent him
out.
In general, however, the most of the missionaries were
worthy and well-meaning men of good character, if somewhat
1 Vol. v. bk. xxi. ch. i.
2 See Moffat's Journals, and Scenes and Labours in South Africa The
scandal was stopped by Dr. Philip ; and years later we have Livingstone's
emphatic testimony that in all his journeys he never saw a missionary
trading for profit, although European traders were sometimes allowed at
the mission stations. Often, indeed, there was no other accommodation.
One of the early envoys of the Church Missionary Society in West
Africa abandoned his sacred calling, and became an agent of the slave-
trade ; and the missionaries in New Zealand were not always quite
disinterested (vol. v. bk. xxi. ch. ii. ).
3 In Twelve Years in South Africa, by O'Haire, a Catholic priest, who
alleged that ' enormous tracts of land were in the hands of the Protestant
missionaries, who let it out in small lots to the blacks. The missionaries
generally had warehouses, sold all sorts of goods, and in many instances
were said to have amassed considerable riches, while the poor blacks
were impoverished.' But O'Haire's testimony is far from trustworthy,
as other passages in his book show, and he hated the British Protestants
with all the fervour of an Irish Catholic.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 369
narrow views, devoted to their work, tolerant of its hard-
ships and occasional dangers, and not often complaining
of the poor pay and scant consideration which Butmoatly
were usually their lot. They were carefully of good
chosen and given some training by the evan-
gelistic agencies in London or elsewhere, and their enthusiasm
for the gospel mostly carried them through to the end.
Yet often it seemed a hopeless task to convert the world
to Christianity, and many of those engaged in the work were
at tunes discouraged as they thought of the slow Their
progress of the past and the difficulties ahead. Difficulties.
In his earlier days at Kuraman the stalwart Moffat mourned
that ' we have no prosperity in the work ; five years, and not
one soul converted all treat with ridicule and contempt the
truth ' ; while his devoted wife burst out, ' It is not conferring
with flesh and blood to live among these people. In the
natives of South Africa there is nothing naturally engaging ;
their extreme selfishness, filthiness, obstinate stupidity, and
want of sensibility have a tendency to disgust/ He who
would take up mission work in South Africa, said Moffat on
another occasion, needed a strong stomach as well as a warm
heart, for in preaching to the savages he would sometimes
have to live almost a savage life himself, among the ' im-
measurable heaps of dirt and filth ' in their villages and en-
campments, and after years of labour the worker might not
see the advance which he expected.
Some friendly native rulers understood the difficulties of
the white evangelists perhaps better than the evangelists
themselves. ' Do you imagine these people will ever believe
by your merely talking to th,em ? ' said a Bechuana chief to
Livingstone ; ' I can make them do nothing except by
thrashing them, and if you like I shall call my headman, and
with our whips we will soon make them all believe together/
The well-meant offer was declined.
The native languages, too, were a serious trouble to many
VOL. vi. 2 A
370 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
of the evangelists, who had to learn a strange and barbarous
tongue before they could preach to their savage hearers ;
and the blank ignorance of the people, the frequent absence of
any religious ideas whatever among them 1 was often a grave
stumbling-block. When Broadbent, for instance, was teach-
ing the Barolong tribe the Lord's Prayer in their own speech
he tested his pupils by the simple question, ' Who is our Father
in Heaven ? ' and was answered frankly, ' We do not know/
One aged man to whom Mofiat was speaking of the miracles of
Christianity assured the missionary of a warm welcome if he
could tell him how to become young again a miracle far
beyond Moffat's power. 2 And another who had listened for
awhile to the preaching of Campbell, a great Scots missionary,
confessed that ' he knew no more about anything than a
beast.' 3
But while they were always faced by ignorance, and often
by indifference, the evangelists were seldom openly opposed,
Their save on some savage island of the Pacific where
Encourage- all strangers were seen as enemies. At times,
indeed, they were welcomed and even entreated
to stay by their hearers. ' If after all you do now leave
me/ said the chief of a tribe to one of the messengers of God
who had rested with him awhile on his journey, ' I will lay
1 Dr. Philip remarks that the Hottentots had a tradition of a golden
age, when their ancestors had believed in the one true God. Perhaps ;
but I am more sceptical than the doctor, who with his usual prejudice
against the Boers remarks that this golden age was before the Dutch
came to South Africa.
2 Sometimes, on the other hand, the missionaries got undeserved credit
for working miracles. When one dug a well and found water in a
droughty country, the grateful but astonished natives who were watching
remarked, ' Now we are sure you know God, and He has told you of
this.' Whether the white man denied the acquaintance or not, he
probably improved the occasion by a sermon.
3 The Europeans were sometimes little better. A white navvy once
said to O'Haire ( Twelve Years in South Africa), ' We belong to the religion
of horses ; we eat our share and drink our fill and then sleep. '
A native on one occasion remarked to Livingstone, ' We love you as if
you had been born among us, but we wish you to give up that everlasting
preaching and praying we cannot become familiar with that at all.'
My sympathies incline to the native.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 371
me down aud sigh my life out/ * Sechele, a great ruler of
the Bechuana, saluted the first missionary in his territory
with tender aflection as the ' friend of my heart's love/ And
sometimes the bringer of heavenly tidings was entreated as a
deliverer from earthly ills : ' We are tired of flight/ said a
hunted tribe with whom Livingstone dwelt, ' give us rest and
sleep/ But that was beyond even Livingstone's power to give
to weak and weary fugitives from native war.
And if the seed of Christianity often fell on stony ground
among indifferent hearers, sometimes also it was carried far
afield by unexpected means, news of the new religion spread-
ing from one native to another, from one tribe to another,
even from one territory to another. One who had heard
something of mission teaching in Namaqualand told another on
a journey ' strange things, such as we had never heard before,
by which we were greatly alarmed. We became so terrified of
our sins that we fled to the rocks to hide. But there too we
could find no refuge from the frowning eye of God/ 2
Many times, indeed, the message went ahead of its own
proper messengers, and some distorted rumour of the creed
they brought ran before its bearers in the wilderness ; and
often, as with the poor fugitive from invisible wrath among
the desert rocks of Namaqua, the first effect of the mission
preaching was one of fear and wonder more than joy. ' You
startle me/ said the great Sechele when Livingstone expounded
to him the Christian doctrine of the Day of Judgment, ' these
words make all my bones to shake I have no more strength
left in me. But my forefathers were living at the same time
yours were, and how is it they did not send them word about
these terrible things sooner ? . They all passed away into dark-
ness without knowing whither they were going/
So indeed we all must pass at the last, vanishing like
shadows into darkness, missionary and convert, Christian
1 Mar rat, Missionary Veterans of South Africa.
2 Cheeseman, Story of William Threlfall.
372 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
and pagan alike. Of that ultimate test of the evangelists'
work none but the God whom they trusted can judge ; but
the temporal results of their labours were there for all men
to see.
There were many who cavilled, and some who openly
condemned the creed, the aim, the methods, and the results
Temporal achieved : the European colonist was an un-
Resuits of sparing critic of the European missionary. If it
was often said, and sometimes with justice, that
the religion of aboriginal converts was only skin-deep, that
the Christianised native was arrogant and overbearing as
well as lazy, 1 a hypocritical rogue who sang psalms and prayed
unctuously but did no work, a proselyte who professed the
European's creed for his own advantage, the missionaries
could retort with effect that they could not work miracles ;
that a savage race cannot alter all its habits and traditions in
a generation, and that the gap between the white man and
the black could not be bridged by a sermon or a baptism.
When the missionaries had full scope, as in Nyasa where
the Scots evangelists not only converted the community but
practically ruled it 2 the improvement was too clear to be
denied even by the malicious ; the example of a Khama,
who ruled his people like an enlightened European, out-
weighed a dozen failures ; 3 and the martyred native Christians
1 E. B. Baker in (London) Empire Review, 1913. These and similar
accusations were frequently brought.
2 A habit of the Scots. The same thing occurred in some of the Pacific
Islands (vol. v. bk. xx. ch. L), and in England.
* Khama refused to practise polygamy after his conversion, and
stopped the witch-doctors, the killing of children, and enforced abstin-
ence on his people, the Bamangwato ; he even refused to allow the
manufacture of the native beer. An excellent chief, he was the ideal
South African native statesman under Christian rule, and the best
example of missionary success in that country. Accounts of him will be
found in Knight-Bruce, Memories of Mashonaland ; and Mrs. Knight-
Bruce, Khama, : An African Chief.
There are similar testimonies to the advance of the American redskins
who adopted Christianity, and with it some of the habits of European
civilisation: see the Digest of S.P.G, Records.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIEE 373
of Uganda showed that the neophyte black converts could
equal in staunchness even the great heroes who had given
their blood for the early Church. 1
Nor stood these things alone. It was ever the aim of the
missionaries to raise up evangelists among the natives, fresh
bearers of their message from the converts themselves ; and
every Christian school that was founded among the heathen
sought to train a body of aboriginal preachers, sound in
doctrine and enthusiastic in their faith. If much of the
labour was lost, and many of the native pupils were back-
sliders the boys often giving way to drunkenness when they
left the school, and the girls engaging in lewd native dances
and such abhorrent practices 2 there was also a sufficient
number of successes. Much of the teaching in Central Africa
was done by natives of Cape Colony trained in the mission
schools of Lovedale and elsewhere, some more promising
pupils were sent to Zanzibar for further training or even to
England for ordination ; 3 and the trusted native school-
master and the native deacon became a noticeable feature
of the mission churches of South Africa, as also of New
Zealand. 4
This training of young natives to mission work in the
mission schools was often criticised by other Europeans as
a serious blunder, tending to create a large class of sancti-
1 Vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. ii.
2 Examples of this will be found in the Nyasa mission periodicals,
Blantyre Life and Work, and the Nyasa, News. It is also noticeable
in the missionary literature of the Pacific Ocean (vol. v. bk. xx. ch. i.).
3 Not always with complete success. I notice in the London Guardian
of 31st May 1912, in the report of the Universities' Mission, a complaint
that ' when the native Christians who went away to be trained for the
work of the ministry returned to their people they were not the same as
before. They had somehow lost touch ; they were not fellow-Christians,
but missionaries.' In other words, they had absorbed something of the
feeling of superiority inherent in the white man, as a result of their
living among white men.
4 Bishop Selwyn strongly insisted on the necessity of a native teaching
and pastoral element in New Zealand, and in South Africa it became the
usual practice among all denominations.
374 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
monious but otherwise useless natives, who despised manual
labour and did no other work, 1 but spent their days in singing
hymns and psalms, and had the insolence not only to despise
the unconverted natives but the godless whites. The criticism
had truth enough to make it sting, but it was not wholly
justified. The missionaries, conscious of their own poverty
of numbers, so inadequate to the task in hand, did wisely to
train up a staff of native assistants where they could ; but
there were many of their pupils who had no aptitude for
mission work, and these were set to learn a trade. Once the
habit of regular work was established in itself a difficult task
where failure was perhaps more frequent than success 2
good results would be achieved that justified the experiment.
At Theopolis in South Africa, for instance, between 1822 and
1825 the resident Hottentots of that religious settlement
built themselves houses which were valued at 35,000 rix-
dollars ; at Hankey, a similar institution, they built their
own houses and the school, besides contributing 580 out
of the total purchase money of 1500 ; at Pacaltsdorp,
Philippolis and other Christian stations their gardens were
neat and tidy, their houses respectable, and the land around
the settlement well cultivated. 3 At the great mission station
of Lovedale in Cape Colony, looking back over half a century
of steady work among the Kafirs, a studiously moderate
report stated that a reasonable number of native scholars
followed their trade ; and although the quality of their work
was not high, needing close European supervision and con-
stant direction, a small educated class was growing up that
was capable of better things. 4 More could not well be reason-
1 It is a fact that the mission schools in some parts occasioned a
shortage of native labour, which the white planters naturally
resented.
- Some of the failures are noted in bk. xxiv. ch. ii.
3 I owe these details to the courtesy of my correspondent, Mr. W. A.
Elliott, of the London Missionary Society.
4 See Lovedale Past and Present: A Register (1887); and African
Wastes Reclaimed, by Young (1902).
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 375
ably looked for : the gulf between native and European
could not be bridged in two generations.
But the adoption of Christianity meant much more than
a change of view and a habit of industry. The acceptance
of the new religion by a heathen tribe necessarily chris-
revolutionised its social organisation as well as tiani *y
. . - ,. . implies
changed its conception of religion ; the accept- a social
ance of the creed of Europe meant, in fact, the Revolution,
acceptance of a civilisation of the European type, usually
although not inevitably with the European as the master.
That fact as a rule prevented any gross corruption of the
creed by the introduction of native superstitions ; it was only
when European influence was withdrawn, as in the island of
Hayti, that the old heathen rites bred in the native blood,
and not exorcised by Christian baptism, resumed their place,
and mingled incongruously with the nobler worship of the
Messiah or the Virgin. As a whole native Christianity was
pure in doctrine if primitive in form ; it was the simple
doctrines of salvation, of hell-fire and heavenly bliss, not the
difficult questions of predestination and the Trinity, that were
preached and accepted.
It was sometimes made a reproach that the native peoples
lost their originality when they abandoned their creed and
their old habits and traditions for the white man's faith and
customs ; and there was truth in the reproach. Native arts
died out, native songs the literature of the illiterate were
tabu ; 1 and here was certainly some loss. But far more
was gained in the process. If a few legends of beauty or
fantasy grew dim, 2 massacres and slavery were likewise for-
1 The examples of the Pacific Islands (vol. v. bk. xx. ch. i.), aiid
Nyasa (bk. xxiv. ch. vi.) may be recalled.
2 As in New Zealand, vol. v. bk. xxi. ch. iii. Some ideas, however,
were common to both civilisation and barbarism. In Nyasa it was
believed that if a baby cut its upper front teeth before the lower, it was
unlucky, and it was destroyed. In many parts of England it is still said
that a baby which cuts its teeth in this order will never grow up. The
basis of this idle superstition is identical in both countries.
376 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
gotten. A lyric of the lake might perish in Nyasa, but a
whole tribe lived that would have died ; a lecherous dance
might vanish from Tahiti, but abortion and child-murder
were stamped out ; a fable might be forgotten in West Africa,
but unclean rites were suppressed. The missionaries destroyed
something, but they built much more ; and what they de-
stroyed was largely evil, what they built was mainly good.
They were, it is true, often ignorant and prejudiced, in-
clined to condemn a thing merely because it was pagan, and
to introduce an alien habit merely because it was European.
In all they did the European missionaries made their stand-
point that of Europe : their converts were taught to dress
after the European fashion, and the top-hat of Piccadilly
sometimes graced or more often obscured the likeness of a
native chief in Tahiti or Bechuanaland ; the women converts
of the tropic islands wore skirts and bonnets after the ap-
proved fashion of an English country town, and even the little
children, whose brown bodies the sun kissed into sturdiness,
were clad by their new masters. 1 These things, absurd in
themselves, were often irksome to the converts, and they did
the cause some harm : indeed, the relative failure of the
Christian missionaries in conflict with Islam in Central and
Western Africa 2 may be traced largely to the fact that the
Crescent made no such incongruous demands upon its forced
converts as the Cross on its willing adherents.
These superficial but nevertheless important changes may
be recorded with a smile or a sneer ; but in fundamentals as
in externals the European missionaries set up the lofty
standard of the white man the standard which the white
man himself so often disregarded. The gross habits and
1 There is a dreadful story of a missionary visiting a tribe in Central
Africa that was said to have adopted the religion and even the dress
of Europe. He found the queen of the tribe dressed in the cope of his
predecessor ; the more modest king was satisfied with an alms-bag for
his whole costume.
2 Vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. i.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 377
superstitions of the aborigines were tabu ; the unnatural and
inhuman customs of abortion and child-murder and other
revolting institutions were discouraged and where possible
forbidden ; but most of all the missionaries fought against
the practice of polygamy.
They opposed it as an institution that was contrary to
Christianity, as a system which degraded women and debased
the men, as both evil in itself and evil in its results. Their
task was a difficult and in some ways almost an impossible
one : the system had firm root the world over, it was sanctified
by centuries of tradition and immemorial usage, and its
abolition by consent meant a social revolution of funda-
mental character. The native chief who was asked to put
away all his wives save one felt himself shorn of his dignity
and reduced to the rank of common men ; the women who
were repudiated were bitterly opposed to the missionaries,
for they were left defenceless, in an uncertain middle state
between wife and widow ; and the system itself was
sometimes clandestinely revived, the single wife being
supplemented by concubines, whose position was no longer
recognised, as before, by tribal law or custom. 1 In these
last cases the change merely made for evil, and hypocrisy
was the only consequence of a social revolution that changed
nothing.
In standing firmly to their position as monogamists the
missionaries were certainly delaying the progress of their
creed, for many honest men would not repudiate their wives
at the price of a promised heaven ; but they struck at the
very heart of paganism, and if they failed in this, they failed
nobly in accordance with their principles. Their desire to
Europeanise their converts was often ludicrous, but that
desire in itself preserved Christianity from the untoward fate
of many a propagandist creed preached by advanced to
primitive man ; it saved their own religion from those
1 See vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. i.
378 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
insidious corruptions of the convert, which early Christianity
had not escaped.
Where the' missionaries failed, it was sometimes because
they insisted on too complete a revolution ; but it may be
The Mis- argued that such a failure was more noble than
aionary the facile success which conferred Christianity
as KU er. ^y thousands of unmeaning baptisms, and enlarged
the creed by converts who understood not what they pro-
fessed. But where they succeeded, they succeeded thoroughly ;
if they sometimes paid the penalty of their work and their
mistakes with their lives, they frequently gained an influence
which the most potent conqueror might have envied. When
the power of the old heathen chief vanished with the con-
version of his tribe to Christianity, it was often the mis-
sionary who took his place, a white chief among the blacks,
a Christian despot among his converts. 1
The missionaries of Christianity had indeed become a power
in the world since the eighteenth century neared its close ;
and they used their power, as other men use power, both for
good and evil.
They made many blunders ; they were unwittingly the
cause of some crimes, perhaps of some rebellions among those
whom they converted. 2 They were often grossly at fault
in their estimates of the people among whom they worked, as
to their mental capacity and desire for improvement ; and
they were nearly always prejudiced against their fellow-
Europeans, as their fellow-Europeans in turn were equally
prejudiced against them.
1 See the example of several of the Pacific Islands.
The desire to smash the existing native organisation was frankly con-
fessed by Buchanan, a missionary in South Africa, who hoped that ' the
whole system of chieftainship would be effectually rooted out, and with
it the very essence of heathenism.' The same desire animated nearly
all his colleagues in the mission-field. They were sincere in their belief
that the native system must be rooted out but incidentally it led to
an increase of their own power.
2 See the disputable cases in British Guiana and the West Indies : vol.
iv. bk. xii. ch. i. and ij.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 379
From the first dawn of missionary effort in the European
colonies indeed this sharp division between colonist and
missionary stood out conspicuous ; one oi the Enmity
great difficulties in the way was the almost in- between
M. ui -4.- * V* 1 u Missionary
evitable opposition of white colonists or conquerors and
of savage lands to the work of the evangelists. Colonist -
The worst enemies of Las Casas were not the redskins but his
own countrymen in the West Indies. The worst enemies of
the French missionaries in Canada were not the savages who
sometimes heard and sometimes slew them, but their own
secular countrymen who swindled and sold alcoholic poison
to the people of the Canadian forests, and ' lost in a month
the fruits of the toil and labour of thirty years/ 1 The worst
enemies of the English missionaries in West and South Africa
were the slavers and traders, men whose ravages made one
poor savage say, ' God made the black men first, and did not
love us, as He did the white men. He made you beautiful,
and gave you clothing, and guns, and gunpowder, and horses,
and wagons, and many other things about which we know
nothing. But towards us He had no heart/ 2 The worst
enemies of the English missionaries in the West Indies and the
old American colonies were the English planters, few of whom
would allow Christianity to be preached to their slaves.
The white colonists were Christians, or at least professed
Christianity as their creed ; many had their place of worship
and contributed to the upkeep of a church or the maintenance
of a minister of their religion ; but they had no wish for the
natives to adopt their faith, although that faith insisted in the
sacred writings which they bound themselves to obey on the
catholicity of its aim and their duty.
The reason for the opposition between colonist and mis-
sionary is nevertheless simple. Christianity taught the
equality of all men before God ; the colonist depended for
his existence on the inequality of the native to himself.
1 See vol. i. bk. iii. ch. ii. 2 Livingstone.
380 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Very often he had taken the natives' land, and although he
had improved that land by his greater knowledge, the essential
Reason condition of its improvement was that he should
for this be the master and the native be the servant,
the slave, or the exile. From that position,
which was inevitable in the nature of things, the white colonist
could not depart ; his whole existence in a new country de-
pended on his keeping the mastery. Yet from his own
opposite position also the missionary could not move. He
cared little or nothing for the temporal supremacy of the
white ; but he cared very greatly for the equal chance of
eternal salvation for all men, black and white alike. 1 It
was for this fundamental reason that Christianity and colonisa-
tion, the Church and the Empire, were frequently opposed.
Each party to the unending controversy could maintain
its point of view with vigour and often with undoubted facts.
The missionary regarded the white trader as a rogue, which
he often was, 2 and the white planter as a cruel tyrant, as
was occasionally the fact. 3 The white trader, on the other
hand, regarded the missionary as a fool, and a pernicious or
sometimes dishonest fool who spoilt his business ; the white
planter looked upon the Gospel which the missionary preached
1 It may be recalled that the New Humanity of eighteenth- century
England (vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. i.), unlike the contemporary new philo-
sophy of France, had a definitely Christian impulse, and while the New
Humanity allied itself with freedom in its stand for the emancipation
of the slaves, and its implied belief in the equality of man, the new
missionary effort of the time was firmly on the side of the New
Humanity, supporting its aim of emancipating and uplifting the extra-
European races which it believed could only be done through Chris-
tianity. That implicit alliance was nerer broken in a century of effort.
2 This will hardly be disputed after the instances given in this work,
particularly in vol. v. bk. xx. ch. i.
3 See vol. iv. bk. xiii. ch. iii. for proof. The tyranny was often caused
by the fact that the white man Avas obliged to assert his mastery over a
people whom he was convinced not always rightly understood nothing
but force.
When Bishop Knight-Bruce was working among the Mashonas, one
of those natives asked him, ' Why is not the Bishop vicious like other
white men?' (Memories of Mashonaland) a testimonial of character
which would have embarrassed anybody but a bishop in the recording.
CHKISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 381
and which the planter himself believed as the salvation
of his own soul as a teaching of sedition when applied to
his slave. 1
It is impossible to deny that there was some truth, but
not the whole truth in both these views. White traders
and planters were sometimes rogues and often tyrants, and
the missionary who exposed their doings was hardly likely
to earn their gratitude. Yet the missionaries on their part
were by no means always wise, and certainly not always
just, in their denunciations. They were not above blackening
the white planter to increase their own apparent goodness ;
and if they exaggerated the shortcomings of their country-
men in the colonies, they could expect but little mercy when
their own shortcomings were exposed by the planters.
It followed from this prejudice against the white trader
and planter that the missionaries opposed them when they
were already in possession, and protested against their coming
when they followed the evangelist to a land of material as well
as spiritual promise. In this attitude, again, the missionaries
were at once logical and right from their own point of view.
They knew the wreckage and havoc which followed the
advent of the white trader, with his guns and gin, and in the
interests of the natives whom they served, the missionaries
attempted to close any country in which they were estab-
lished against other white men. 2 And they also recognised
since missionaries, like other men, are human that if
white settlers were once permitted in any country their own
influence would diminish and in the end perhaps vanish
altogether.
Yet the missionaries were themselves the agents, sometimes
the unwitting and nearly always the unwilling agents, of
1 See vol. iv. bk. xii. chs. i. and ii.
2 As in New Zealand, vol. v. bk. xxi. ch. ii. ; and by Mackenzie in
Bechuanaland, bk. xxiv. ch. iv. The kindred example of the Jesuits
in South America will be at once recalled as a parallel showing that
this principle transcended denominational differences.
382 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
European advance ; the trader or the colonist often followed
them and always vanquished them. In New Zealand the
white teachers of the Maori opposed the coming of the colonists,
but were quickly worsted in the struggle ; x in South Africa
the missionary Mackenzie went down before Rhodes in
Bechuanaland, 2 the missionary pioneers in Nyasa could no
longer rule the land when white planters came, 3 the first
missions in Mashonaland were soon followed by white settlers, 4
and everywhere the white man settled and cultivated the
soil the missionary ideal of a Christian autocracy over con-
verted natives vanished.
But not Christianity itself. It was changed, but not
abolished, by the discord between white evangelist and white
settler.
The missionaries disregarded the ties of race and colour,
as indeed they were bound to do by their religion ; and they
Native denounced others who did not also disregard those
Chris- ties. In this they were logical but hardly wise ;
despised ^ or ^ ne trader and planter whom they opposed knew
by White by experience, what the missionary did not, that
racial superiority and distinctions of colour were
fundamental in human society. Mostly the white colonists
would not worship with the black converts, and their reluct-
ance or refusal, which caused much sorrow and misgiving to
the missionaries, was a warning to the newer native Christians
of unexpected difficulties ahead. In quite another sense from
that in which the words were spoken it was correct, as a
Canadian of the Huron tribe said to an old evangelist, that
the natives ' inhabited a different world, and there ought
therefore to be another paradise for them, and consequently
another way by which to arrive/ 5
It was in truth a different way the native Christian trod ;
1 Vol. v. bk. xxi. ch. ii. 2 Bk. xxiv. ch. iv.
3 Bk. xxiv. ch. vi. 4 Bk. xxiv. ch. v.
5 Vol. i. bk. Hi. ch. ii.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIRE 383
for if the messengers of God had preached the equality of all
men before Christ, the example of their fellow-Christians and
white masters fell sadly behind the precept. The fact that
the European colonist would not enter the same place of
worship with the coloured aboriginal convert showed that he
would never acknowledge the equality on earth which he
grudgingly allowed might be enforced in heaven : white and
black worshipped the same God in different churches, and
communion between the two was found impossible. ' Some
whites say they will not receive the Cup of Salvation with
us/ confessed an African convert sadly to his pastor ; 1 and
indeed everywhere, even in the remote interior of Rhodesia,
there was difficulty over the position of the black convert to
the white man's creed. 2
This practical difficulty, which was not without its justi-
fication from the white colonists' standpoint, 3 was one of the
causes, perhaps the chief cause, of the formation indepen-
and secession of a native African church. ' We cnris^* 1
cannot expect/ wrote one of the missionaries at tianity.
Blantyre, ' that native church life will move in the grooves cut
out elsewhere/ 4 and if some of the broader minds in Central
Africa could congratulate themselves on possessing ' the
force of a Christianity which knew nothing of Protestant or
Papist/ 5 they were soon to find that the creed they spread
could split on racial lines. A century after the gospel had been
introduced in South Africa, an independent native church
was born.
Its coming should not have surprised or distressed those
who had laboured to plant the Christian religion firmly in
1 The East and the West, a missionary magazine, 1910.
2 Report of Universities' Mission to Central Africa, London Guardian,
31st May 1912.
3 Although the native convert's creed might be the same as that of the
European, his social standard and manners were not ; and such things
count.
4 Life and Work (Blantyre), Sept. 1895.
s Ibid., Dec. 1893.
384 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
South Africa ; for there is no more certain sign of growth
than the putting forward of fresh branches and new roots,
The and every missionary throughout the world was
Ethiopian bound to pray that the divine seed which it was
ffovement. y g gj or j ous privilege to plant should bear im-
mortal fruit. They had encouraged native converts to
spread the gospel among the remoter and still heathen tribes,
and they had not refused to ordain some selected aboriginal
Christians to the holy ministry of the faith ; yet the new
Ethiopian Church, which was founded at Pretoria on 20th
November 1892, was regarded from the start with distrust by
European missionaries as well as European statesmen in
South Africa. 1
The source of that distrust is not immediately apparent.
The doctrines of the new church were strictly Protestant and
evangelical, and showed no divergence from the orthodox
teaching of the Protestant and evangelical school in Britain.
The Ethiopian leaders displayed none of those tendencies
towards heresy which had distinguished the older and long
since extinct churches of northern Africa, whose disputes
had split the brotherhood of primitive Christianity into
warring camps of religious enemies ; the Ethiopian Church
professed no dangerous originality of thought or practice to
disquiet its doubtful sponsors, the European missionaries.
Its articles further denied any intention to interfere with
politics ; it repudiated the preaching of sedition, and pro-
fessed loyalty to the properly constituted authority of the
State in other words, it was ready to submit to the existing
temporal power in temporal things, and to confine itself to the
spiritual matters which are the proper and, according to some,
the only concern of a religious organisation.
1 It took its name from Psalm Ixviii. 31 : ' Princes shall come out of
Egypt ; Ethiopia shall haste to stretch out her hands unto God.'
The old travellers, such as Sir Thomas Herbert, usually called the
Cape or all Africa indifferently Ethiopia.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE EMPIEE 385
Moreover, in seeking an independent form of worship, the
Ethiopian Church might have claimed that it was but follow-
ing the example of the negro Christians of the United States,
who had long since established themselves in separate con-
gregations from the whites. Their religion, if more emotional
and less intellectual than that of European worshippers,
was neither corrupt, 1 nor obscene ; 2 and although the white
American democrat who acknowledged the equality of man
refused to worship as an equal in the negro churches, he could
not refuse to acknowledge that the negro whom he despised
worshipped the same God with the same rites as himself.
Nor could he advance the objection that the American negro
churches added a political complexion to their energetic
religious exercises ; an impartial and exhaustive inquiry
proved that they made no attempt to engraft racial or colour-
hatred on the religion of universal love. 3
The Ethiopian Church in South Africa might have advanced
the example of North America in its favour, but it did not in
fact follow the same course. Some of its members, who
appear to have been originally of the Wesleyan persuasion,
became reconciled to the Church of England in 1899 as the
Order of Ethiopia, 4 and against these the strongest European
opponent of native Christianity could say nothing ; but the
remainder presently justified the dislike of the whites by their
actions. A trustworthy witness before the South African
Commission on Native Affairs declared that the Ethiopian
movement had loosened moral bonds and lowered the ethical
1 Some variations, such as dancing in church to a chant with curious
words, were remarked ; but these could hardly be called corruptions.
2 At least in the United States. In Hayti and San Domingo, from
which European influence had been expelled, both corruptions and
obscenities were alleged, and, I think, fairly proved.
3 The Negro Church, a Social Study, published by Atlanta University,
1903 a work of admirable temper and thoroughness.
4 See Missions Overseas: Fifth Annual Review of Central Board oj
Missions of the Church of England, 1912.
For Ethiopianism generally see The South African Natives and the
Commission on Native A/airs ; also Leenhardt, Le Mouvement Ethiopien.
VOL. VI. 2 B
386 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
tone of the community, and it had, moreover, discovered a
dangerous political aim, which was nothing less than that of
ousting the whites from the country. South Africa, declared
an Ethiopian publication, The Voice of Missions, was destined
to become a black republic : ' If the Anglo-Saxon cannot
mingle his blood by wedlock with the aborigines of the country
which he grabs/ said this production, ' why does he not keep
his heels in England ? '
When such doctrines were maintained, it was no answer
to the objections of the whites that the independent native
church was the natural outcome of the missionary work of
the previous hundred years, and that its political prejudices
were directly caused by the fact that the European colonists
had themselves been opposed from the start to native Chris-
tianity. The retort was true, but it did not dispose of the
objections of the ruling race, who were more than ever con-
firmed in their feeling against missionary effort. Whatever
might be the religious aims of Ethiopianism were now of
secondary importance in the eyes of Europeans ; perhaps
even to the natives who embraced the creed of Europe the
dangerous temporal ambition of uniting the whole of the
African aboriginal peoples against their European conquerors
displaced the eternal aspiration of Christianity.
However that may be for Ethiopianism had yet to prove
itself by deeds a racial and colour bar had shattered the
catholicity of the new Christendom which so much effort had
created : and in this wise vanished once again the splendid
hope and the elusive mirage of a universal Church.
BOOK XXVI
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFEICA : 1852-1910
CHAPTER I
THE TWO EUROPEAN PEOPLES : 1852-99
FOR the space of more than half a century the colonists ol
two white peoples, sprung from opposite shores of the North
Sea of Europe, had now lived side by side among
the aboriginal races of South Africa ; and that Advance of
half century had been of momentous import in Disc v ery
* and Settle-
the discovery and development of the vast and mentin
hitherto unknown territories from Cape Town
* Africa.
to the Zambesi. More had been done in each year
of that period than in each decade of the preceding period ;
more advance had been made in exploration, in settlement,
and in throwing the rough-cast of a new civilisation over the
wilderness than in the three earlier centuries in which Euro-
peans had inhabited South Africa.
Much, perhaps even the greater part of the pioneer work
had now been done. Both peoples had gained a firm footing
in the country, from whose broad distances it was Dutch and
improbable that either would ever be displaced p^^the
by the other or by some new rival. In the hands Country.
of these two peoples lay, therefore, the ultimate destinies of
South Africa. With them rested the decision whether it was
to be the seat of a colony or a nation, the home of a collection
of individual human units or groups of units or of a single
national entity ; and the decision of that question engaged
387
388
the troubled years of the last quarter of the nineteenth century
and even overstepped into the twentieth.
At first sight the answer should have been clear. These
two peoples, the British and the Dutch, were of no mean
Their political capacity, between them were no great
of Char 3 differences of character ; and therefore it seems that
acter. there should have been little difficulty in forming
a national union of both stocks in this new land which the
two had conquered for their inheritance. They were as two
branches of a large family whose members have often met,
sometimes quarrelled, and not infrequently agreed. Briton
and Hollander had long sailed together and fought together
in the four quarters of the earth and the five seas for land
and trade and money, for power and the good things that
power may buy ; yet from time to time they had also dwelt
together as brethren who acknowledged the same God and
worshipped in much the same fashion. If we remember the
bitter fight for empire between England and Holland in the
Eastern Seas J and India, 2 we must also remember that it was
in Holland that English religious refugees found a home
when they could find none in England, and that the first
resting-place of the Pilgrim Fathers was not in New England
but in the Netherlands. 3
And both England and Holland had produced the same
tough breed of daring sailors, shrewd traders, dauntless
pioneers, admirable colonists as their typical men ; stubborn,
indomitable, rough-hewn men with a faculty for suiting their
environment to themselves rather than themselves to their
environment. Each nation knew something of hard work and
hard drinking, of heavy fighting and strong swearing as a
means of getting through the rough tasks of a rough world ;
both loved freedom at home and abroad, and with both
freedom was no inaccessible abstract goddess of Latin birth,
1 Vol. iv. hk. xiv. ch. ii. - Vol. ii. l>k. vi. ch. iv.
3 Vol. i. bk. ii. ch. ii.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFKICA 389
but a plain man's purpose of getting his own way. Both
had given up much for liberty ; both had gained much from
liberty : and with both liberty for themselves was sometimes
hard-elbowed and intolerant of the rights of others.
Such were the small differences between the British and
the Dutch. But small differences do not avoid great dis-
putes ; the quarrels of brothers are proverbially Their
bitter. And between these two peoples in South
Africa a long series of detached and unrelated Africa,
events had quickened the dormant sense of opposition into a
feeling of very real enmity that led to war ; but if some of
those events were the chance outcome of accidental circum-
stance, others were due to sheer folly, to a wavering indecisive
policy, and to stupidity on the one side, obstinacy on the other.
A short analysis of the cumulative effect of these events is
an indispensable preliminary to the consideration of the wars
through whose bloody portals the distant vision of national
union was first dimly seen.
In the early days of British sovereignty in Cape Colony there
had been little ill-feeling between the two peoples, if little
actual sympathy. No impassable social barriers divided
them. The difference of language was no insuperable diffi-
culty. The intermarriage of Englishmen and Cape Dutch
women was not uncommon nor is there any suggestion that
such marriages were less happy than unions between people
of the same stock. Nevertheless the British and the Cape
Dutch began to drift apart.
The Boers, it is true, acquiesced in British rule after the
enforced change of allegiance in 1806 ; but they acquiesced
with reluctance. Most of them would have pre- Origina
f erred full independence for the Boer dislike of of this
the British Government was largely a dislike of all PP ositlon -
government, based on the practical absence of government
in the interior under the Dutch East India Company for a
whole century before and the outbreak at Slachter's Nek in
390 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS
1815 proved the existence of irreconcilables ; the appeal of
the rebel Boers to the Kafir for common action against the
British proved how far they were prepared to go in their
hatred of the new rulers.
That outbreak was the first definite breach between the
two white peoples ; its consequences were remembered with
bitterness long after that miserable affair should have been
forgotten. The fact that it was resented so long and so bitterly
shows how largely the irreconcilable feelings which animated
the actual rebels were shared by men who took no direct part
in the rebellion. Slachter's Nek became a permanent racial
memory, a cherished tradition, a distorted grievance to be
handed down from father to son ; and such memories gain
rather than lose with time, when their memory is sharpened
by other incidents. Nor were other incidents lacking.
The eastern frontier of Cape Colony was sometimes left
undefended against Kafir irruptions by the British Govern-
ment. It had always been neglected by the Dutch Govern-
ment ; but the faults of their own people were now forgotten,
the omissions of the British were ever visible.
Not only was the frontier neglected, but the British Govern-
ment sometimes took the side of the black man against the
white. Its policy was known to be largely influenced by the
missionaries, who always took the side of the black man
against the white. And both were considered unpardonable
by the Boer, who always, and not unnaturally, took the side
of the white man against the black. The Boer had no sym-
pathy with the work of the missionaries, no belief in the con-
version of the aborigines to Christianity ; and he made no
secret of his views. In consequence he was reviled by every
missionary in the land, and those revilements reached England
and were believed. The Boer side of the case was not pre-
sented to the British public.
These facts did not dispose the Cape Dutch to welcome
the emancipation of their slaves, which the British Govern-
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 391
ment insisted on in 1834. And the gross blundering which
attended emancipation, the disappointment as to the amount
of compensation, the malversation of part of the already
diminished compensation funds, and the inevitable disturb-
ance of the labour market, finally determined many of the
Boers to quit a country whose government had become in-
tolerable to them, and to set up their own form of society
elsewhere. 1
A triplex divergence, of political theories, social concep-
tions, and religious ideals had been revealed. The Boer
stood for mastery over the aborigines, the Briton itg
for equality between European colonists and Extent.
African natives. 2 The Boer stood for an exclusive creed that
looked upon the native as unworthy the high doctrines of
Christianity, the Briton believed in the equality of all men
before God. The Boer stood for independence from outside
rule, the Briton stood for the British Empire.
Each of these feelings played its part ; but the greatest
factor of the three was the Boer desire for isolation and inde-
pendence, which had been born of the old freedom of the
eighteenth-century settlers from the control of the Dutch
East India Company, nourished by the doctrines of the French
Revolution that found a place at the Cape a few years before
the first British conquest of 1795, and openly admitted in the
proclamation of the republics of Graaff Reynet and Swellen-
dam. Those short-lived republics were rather the expression
of a crude feeling of Cape Dutch nationality than of any
convinced adherence to, or understanding of, the new revo-
lutionary doctrines that were overturning the thrones of
Europe in the name of a triumphant democracy and a common
1 For emancipation, see bk. xxiii. ch. iv. ; for the Great Trek, bk. xxiv.
ch. i.
2 The British Government and missionary, at least ; the ordinary
British colonist was inclined to agree with the Boer as regards treat-
ment of the natives. Had there been more British colonists and fewer
British missionaries in South Africa the differences between Briton and
Boer would not have been so marked.
392 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
humanity ; and when forty years afterwards the Great Trek
took place the same ideas of independence, which had not
died with the death of the republics, were carried across the
Orange and the Vaal by the emigrant Cape Dutch. And there,
in the virgin pastures of the uplands, they came to their brief
fruition. 1
Such were the results of the first generation of British
rule in South Africa the abandonment of Cape Colony
And Conse- by a large number of its old inhabitants, and a
quences. definite and well-marked feeling of enmity be-
tween the old Dutch settlers and the new British rulers.
In the second generation the two people drifted still further
apart. The emigrant Boers founded their pastoral republics in
the interior, an unstable series of loosely-bound communities ;
the British after awhile recognised, albeit very grudgingly,
the independence of these recalcitrant subjects. But the
British remained in Cape Colony and along the coast, the
Boers remained north of the Orange and the Vaal in the in-
terior ; and the Conventions of 1852 and 1854 admitted the
independence of the Boers and put a limit, so far as paper
could put a limit, to the future expansion of the British.
For some years the position seemed to remain unchanged,
but in fact it was changing slowly and inevitably as the
Expansion interior was explored. The Cape Dutch emi-
of the Boer grants across the Orange and the Vaal spread
themselves continually further north, occupying
fresh districts where they could, subduing native tribes where
their strength was equal to the task, or concluding treaties
with the stronger native powers when conquest was im-
possible. By such means the Boers spread themselves north of
the Orange in the nineteenth century, as they had spread them-
selves south of the Orange in the eighteenth. The British
1 The previous volumes of this work have shown precisely the same
feelings of local nationalism and a desire for freedom of control from
the mother country, in practically every British colony.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 393
missionary settlement at Kuruman among the Bechuanas, and
indeed the whole of the Bechuana territories, were threatened
by their expansion in the west ; x to the east the Boers were
watching their opportunity in Zululand and Basutoland ; 2
in the north their hunters had already crossed the Limpopo
into Mashonaland and the new territory of the Matabili, 3 and
some of their younger men had begun to discuss another trek
and the founding of a permanent settlement in those countries.
The British also were spreading over the country, trading,
exploring, and preaching to the natives in these years. Dealers
in ivory and hunters of big game pushed their The Brltisn
way far into the interior. Travellers in quest of also
sport and science followed the now well-trodden
track from the Orange River through the Bechuana countries,
and passed on to the tropic lands beyond. Rumours of gold
and precious stones drew some ; love of adventure without
reward attracted others. But most of all this advance of the
British in the interior was due to the Christian missionaries.
They had, it is true, been expelled from the territories now
occupied by the Boer Republics, by their old enemies, the Cape
Dutch trekkers, and driven westwards towards the desert ;
but the great mission road which ran up from Kuruman to
the left of the Transvaal was continually lengthened towards
the north. The middle course of the road was a little changed,
but the building of the road went on unchecked, and in time
its extension took the missionaries, no longer able to labour
in the country of the Boer, into lands where the Boers them-
selves were yet unknown. The missionaries out-trekked the
trekkers when they reached forward to Nyasa.
No treaty was broken by. this first advance of evangelists
1 See Mackenzie, Ten Years North of the Orange River. The projected
attack was abandoned, owing to a remonstrance by Sir George Grey,
Governor at the Cape.
2 See the Life of Sir Bartle Frere, and the Zulu War later in this
chapter.
3 See bk. xxiv. ch. v.
394 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
and traders from Britain. They visited, explored, and even
settled in these lands to the north of the Boer, but they took
no territory, they made no treaties with the natives. The
Sand River and Bloemfontein Conventions of 1852 and 1854,
which forbade the British to annex the countries north of the
Vaal, were therefore still unbroken by the British but the
temptation to break them was beginning to be felt. It was
easy to resist a desire to annex the G-riqua desert ; it was far
less easy to resist the wealth and beauty of the Zambesi
Valley or Lake Nyasa.
But even the Griqua desert had its hidden wealth ; and
the discovery of the diamond-fields which led to the foun-
The British dation of Kimberley in 1871, not only revolu-
Diamond- tionised the economic position of South Africa,
Diggers. j^ ^ a j gQ ^ Q ^ g^ permanent step of British
territorial aggrandisement in the north. 1
The first diggers and diamond-hunters on the Orange River
good-humouredly repudiated the claim of the Orange Free
Repudiate State to the soil which they were searching in the
the Orange hope of wealth. The Free State, a weak pastoral
state. commun ity under the form of a republic, had no
means of enforcing the authority it declared ; the few burghers
who were sent to proclaim its rule found themselves welcome
to as much of the diggers' liquor as they pleased, but to none
of their obedience ; and for awhile the miners ruled them-
selves.
A Diggers' Committee was elected, one Parker was pro-
claimed its chairman, and he ruled the small community
The with mock majesty but real authority for some
Diggers' time as President Parker. His constitution
Republic. followed the revered model of the British, in that
it was unwritten ; his committee adopted the practical
example of the mother of Parliaments, in that they considered
difficulties as they arose, and not till then ; and this easy
1 See bk. xxiv. ch. iiu
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 395
solution of the matter seems to have worked admirably while
it lasted.
But when the diamond-diggings by the Orange River ex-
tended to the New Rush, and Kimberley was founded, some-
thing more than a government of diggers was The British
desired by the native states, if not by the diggers G&^uaiand
themselves. The land on which the diamonds lay west, i87i.
was claimed both by Waterboer, a native chief, and by the
Orange Free State ; the British Government now held that
Waterboer had the better title, although the lands in question
had been considered part of the old Orange River Sovereignty
under British rule, 1 and it had never before been suggested that
the Orange Free State occupied less territory than the Sove-
reignty. And when Waterboer, conscious that he could not
control the settlers on the land he claimed, and not unim-
pressed by the offer of a pension from the British Government, 2
offered his lands to the British, that Government accepted the
proposal which they had desired and perhaps suggested.
Griqualand West was proclaimed a Crown Colony of the
British Empire on 27th October 187 1. 3
The annexation naturally acted as a further breach between
the independent Boers and the British. Both claimed the
country, and this sudden desire to annex a land Consequent
so unexpectedly proved to be wealthy, and to w ^the
maintain the appearance of being disinterested, Boers.
was in itself suspicious. The Orange Free State held that
Britain would not have taken the country had it not been
valuable, and that was both relevant and true. It held also
that Britain had no title to the land ; that was also true,
but irrelevant, for Britain derived her title from Waterboer.
The question resolved itself therefore into the original owner-
1 See bk. xxiv. ch. i. for the Orange River Sovereignty.
2 The pension was not paid, and Waterboer s lawyer, in a letter of
18th March 1876, complained with some reason of this scurvy treatment.
The letter is in Wilmot's Life and Times of Sir Richard Southey
3 It was incorporated in Cape Colony in 1880.
396 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
ship of the land, and here Waterboer was not necessarily the
best judge of his own possessions, while the fact that the
country had been considered to belong to the Orange River
Sovereignty when a British colony was strong presumptive
proof that it still belonged to the Orange Free State as a
Boer Republic.
Boer farmers were already established on the diamondi-
ferous lands, but that fact was hardly sufficient of itself to
prove them burghers of the Free State. The authority of the
two Republics was proverbially as loose as their boundaries
were vague ; and the outlying Boer settlers, who more closely
resembled independent squatters than citizens or subjects
owning definite allegiance, might have repudiated the authority
of the Free State on a question of paying taxes as firmly as the
diamond-diggers themselves. If, in short, there was effective
occupation by the Boers in the disputed territory, there was
hardly effective control by the Orange Free State, as the inde-
pendent existence of the Diggers' Republic proved.
The case was at best a doubtful one in a land of uncertain
frontiers, but the balance of argument was as strongly in
favour of the Boers as the balance of power was on the side
of the British. The Orange Free State as the weaker party
acquiesced after an official remonstrance, grudgingly and with
remembrance ; but five years later the British Government
tacitly admitted that the attitude of the republic was justified,
and agreed to pay a sum of 90,000 ' in full satisfaction of all
claims which the Orange Free State considered that it might
possess in regard to Griqualand West/ 1
From the British point of view it was urged and there was
truth in this contention that since the Free State could not
control the diamond-fields, the imperial authorities had to
make their choice between the recognition of an independent
Diggers' Republic and the enlargement of the Empire by the
annexation of Griqualand West ; they chose the latter, as
1 C. 1631 (1876).
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 397
the lesser of two evils. 1 But the lesser evil did not raise the
credit of the British for fair dealing.
Once again the British territories in South Africa reached
beyond the Orange River, the great dividing line between the
old colonies and the new states. There British expansion
stayed for awhile ; but the future had already begun to declare
itself across the uncertain northern frontier. For British
missionaries and traders were still lengthening the road into
the yet unclaimed interior ; and four years before Kimberley
was founded or Griqualand annexed David Livingstone set
eyes on the beautiful shores of Lake Tanganyika.
The great evangelist-explorer thus pointed the road to the
far north in 1867 ; but before news of his dis- The British
covery reached Europe, another annexation in
South Africa had startled and annoyed the
Boers. In the year 1868 Basutoland was proclaimed a
British Protectorate.
The Basutos were a Bantu people, a collection of consan-
guineous tribes who had been welded into some rough national
union by the pressure of outside enemies and the ruling
genius of Moshesh, the great chief of the Basuto and allied
1 Theal admitted, in an early edition of his History, that ' there was
no alternative from British Sovereignty other than an independent
diamond-field republic. ' In later editions this statement was suppressed.
Here, as in other controversial portions of his works, the industrious
annalist was able to effect a politic change in his views when circum-
stances required.
For the whole subject see official Blue Books C. 459 (1871), and C. 508
(1872) ; also Wilmot's Southey, and the Life of Molteiio.
It was said in some quarters that the British action in crossing the
Orange River was an infraction of the Convention of 1854 with the
Orange Free State. The vague wording of that Convention, however,
did not confine them south of the Orange River as the Sand River Con-
vention of 1852 confined them south of the Vaal. But it did never-
theless in clause 2 state that the British Government ' had no wish or
intention to enter hereafter into any treaties (with native chiefs) which
might be injurious or prejudicial to the interests of the Orange River
Government.' It might reasonably be argued that the agreement with
Waterboer was both injurious and prejudicial ; but the point is
relatively unimportant compared with the question of ownership of the
soil and the competence of the Free State to assert its authority.
398
tribes. 1 Their country, beautiful, wild, and mountainous, had
been called the Switzerland of South Africa by the few travellers
who had visited it ; its climate was magnificent, its con-
figuration favoured the inhabitants ; but the boundaries of
this native empire were uncertain. Moshesh ruled as far as
his authority was acknowledged, and claimed to rule more
than his strength could control ; but he had raised his own
people, whom he had governed for more than thirty years,
from extreme misery and degradation to a barbaric power of
no mean rank. Foreign and European influence had not been
despised ; Christian missionaries had worked steadily among
the people with some success ; 2 and in 1848, when the inde-
pendence of the country seemed threatened by the Boer
emigrants beyond the Orange River, a treaty had been made
between the British and the Basutos by that energetic soldier,
Sir Harry Smith. The Dutch complained with some reason
that the British had invaded their rights for they had
already a few settlers in the Basuto country when the treaty,
which was practically an assumption of British protection over
Basutolaiid, was made known ; but the British themselves
found Moshesh and his people far from easy to control in the
next few years. An armed British force was sent into the
dangerous fastnesses of the country to reduce the natives
to submission : imperfectly acquainted with the mountains
and ravines of the Basuto territory, its leader committed that
old blunder of civilised man in dealing with the barbarian,
and miscalculated the strength of the enemy ; a skirmish
took place, in which the Basuto had the indecency to win the
day ; a second skirmish under Governor Cathcart produced no
better result, and the British somewhat hurriedly withdrew.
It was now the turn of the Boers to try their hand. The
Basutos raided the Orange Free State farmers, against the
1 The standard work on this people, which has superseded all others,
is Lagden's Basutos.
' J See bk. xxv.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 399
wish of Moshesh ; x the farmers retaliated, and the Basutos
retorted with success by defeating their commando. The
Boers attacked again, and this time, infuriated by the sight
of their dead and mutilated comrades, they began to drive
the Basutos before them. It was at this inopportune moment
that the British intervened ; the Basutos were now as anxious
for protection as they had before been anxious to avoid it ;
and the Boers proclaimed, perhaps with truth, but certainly
with anger, that they had been balked of the legitimate fruits
of victory by men who could not win the victory themselves. 2
But a few years after Basutoland had been annexed and
the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley had drawn hungry
adventurers into the African desert, and at the very time
when the British mission stations had again been founded
in Nyasa, 2 far to the north of the Boer Republics, the Boer
communities beyond the Orange and the Vaal once more came
into direct conflict with the British Empire.
Both the virtues and the vices, both the weakness and the
strength of those communities were indeed a source of fre-
quent embarrassment and occasional danger to Difficulties
themselves and others. Their admirable love of and weak-
freedom, which no Briton could condemn, meant Boer fthe
in fact an entire absence of internal discipline, Republics,
although faced by external dangers whose menace
should have made for union. Their pride of race, not un-
1 So at least he said ; probably with truth, as he would have realised
that retaliation might mean defeat in the long run. His own remark on
the subject is full of wisdom : ' I cannot bind myself to say there will be
no more stealing ; thieves do not tell me when they come in or out of
Basutoland. You must give me time. I have eaten the Governor's
meat, and it will be easy for me to vomit it up ; but it is not so easy to
make thieves disgorge what they have stolen.'
2 In 1871 Basutoland was incorporated in Cape Colony. It was an
endless source of embarrassment to the authorities at Cape Town, and
in 1884 was transferred to the Imperial Government. This arrangement
was so successful that the country was retained under imperial control
at the Union of 1909, and four years later, when the Union wished to
bring Basutoland under its control, the chiefs protested that they pre-
ferred direct British rule.
3 Bk. xxiv. ch. vi.
400 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
justified by the record of their ancestors both in Holland
and South Africa, made them feel a chosen people, arrogant,
exclusive, and self-centred ; and those feelings were naturally
increased by their evident superiority to the savages among
whom they lived, and many of whom they had dispossessed.
Their lofty ignorance made them contemptuous of all other
men, at the time when their more energetic and better-
equipped British rivals were pushing ahead of them in the
interior.
The Boers also were expanding their territories every year,
each of the many sons of a large family usually occupying
fresh land when he set up in life for himself : but as they
spread themselves over so large an area, in great farms of
five or six thousand or more acres, they weakened their hold
on the country they had taken ; their loose political organi-
sation, inadequate even for a pastoral community, weakened
them still further. The dislike of any effective government
remained as strong among the Cape Dutch emigrants when
living north of the Vaal as south of the Orange ; but whereas
in the latter case it led to rebellion against the British, and
could be represented as a legitimate rising against the tyran-
nical foreigner, in the former it led to the impotence of their
own executive. Many of the burghers refused to pay their
taxes an old trouble inherited from Cape Colony and
although the executive spent much of its energy in col-
lecting its dues, it was not very successful in enforcing its
demands. 1
It could not control the burghers ; it also could not control
itself. Faction divided these petty republics, rival parties
hated and intrigued against each other ; civil war often
threatened, and more than once broke out ; and on one
occasion the scandal was seen of an elected President desert-
ing his dominions, invading the dominions of the sister re-
public in force, there declaring himself president, and from
1 This is clearly shown in Kruger's Memoirs.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 401
its capital attempting to reduce his old comrades to the new
allegiance. 1
In primitive pastoral communities such as the Transvaal
and the Orange Free State these things are not indeed of
great importance by themselves. A revolution does not
convulse the country nor a civil war destroy it ; they merely
incommode a few stalwarts on either side. Trade is not
disorganised or credit shaken by a crisis in the capital, for
nearly the whole wealth of the country is in its farms, and
every farm is practically a self-sufficing unit in itself, every
farmer his own master, living on his crops and stocks. And
most of the independent Boers in the interior, who were but
living as they wished, were perfectly satisfied with their
condition, and happy in the lack of system and the freedom
from control ; this patriarchal manner was precisely the form
of life to which their ancestors had been accustomed, and
which they themselves enjoyed ; had it continued in Cape
Colony there would have been no Great Trek, no sudden
break of allegiance, but a gradual expansion over the interior.
There are clearly advantages in such primitive political
organisations, a certain rude strength and resisting power in
the people apart from the government, a tough national fibre
that is hardly conscious of national existence ; the trouble
is that things cannot remain as they are, that communities
must grow, organisations increase, and in growing and in-
creasing become more complex and interdependent ; and in
the process the primitive organisation, not without some
regrets and resistance on its part, must vanish.
1 There were three leading republics in the Transvaal country, at
Potchefstroom with Pretoria, Lydenburg, and the Zoutpansberg. In
1857 young Pretorius, the son of the old trekker (bk xxiv. ch. i.),
attempted to conquer the Orange Free State ; but both Lydenburg and
Zoutpansberg rose in the rear, and the attempt failed. In 1859
peaceful union was proposed, but again Lydenburg and Zoutpansberg
refused. A general civil war broke out in 1859, and lasted until 1864,
when peace was concluded ; from that time the forward policy against
neighbouring native tribes was resumed, and the boundaries of the
Transvaal enlarged.
VOL. VI. 2 C
402 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
To that stage South Africa was now slowly coming. All
would have been well with the Boer Republics for a time
had the British remained stagnant in Cape Colony. But
the relative position of the two peoples had changed consider-
ably in the twenty years since the signing of the Sand
River Convention. In that time the British had explored
much and annexed a little ; but they were no longer so ready
to resign all claim to the interior as when they bound them-
selves to the south side of the Vaal in 1852.
With much knowledge had come some understanding ; the
search for diamonds and the search for souls had taught
them the value of South Africa, and they had begun to realise
what the pastoral Boer Republics in the interior had not
that the various independent states, Cape Colony, Natal,
Griqualand West, the Transvaal, and the Orange Free State,
could not in fact remain independent of each other, but
must in time be interdependent on each other. And one
man was ready to go further, and advocate a general union
of the South African states.
Time proved the policy of union right. Unfortunately for
its success, it was advocated by the wrong man, from the
wrong quarter, in the wrong manner, and at the wrong time. 1
And consequently it failed.
Three years after the Kimberley diamond-fields were an-
nexed, a new Conservative Government was elected in Britain.
Britain ^ was a ^ me wnen tne rst stirrings of the new
advocates imperial impulse were felt ; in place of the wish
African to ^ e r ^ ^ ^he glorious burden of Empire, which
Federation, had dominated the previous thirty years, a sense
of imperial union and a desire for imperial ex-
pansion now began to animate Britain. 2 Of that sense
1 Butler in his Autobiography remarks that confederation was tried at
the end of twenty years of peace. True. But it was likewise the
beginning of twenty years of expansion, which led to war.
2 See vol. iv. bk .xvi. ch. ii. for the ebb and flow of the imperialist
tide in Britain.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 403
the new Conservative Government was fully conscious. It
enlarged the Empire by a forward policy in India and the
annexation of new territories elsewhere ; it looked not un-
favourably on the prospect of expansion in South Africa ;
and its Colonial Secretary, Lord Carnarvon, had turned his
back on the cold colonial policy of his predecessors, and was
ready not only to enlarge, but to engage in the far more
difficult and delicate task of attempting to consolidate the
Empire.
Carnarvon was an able man and an honourable statesman,
who saw clearly, what indeed was clear enough, that many of
the difficulties, and consequently much of the weakness of
South Africa sprang from the divisions among its ruling white
population. He saw also that until the last few years the
Canadian colonies had suffered from similar divisions produc-
ing similar results, and that those difficulties had been re-
moved by federation in 1867. The moral seemed clear, that
union or federation would do for South Africa what it had
done for British North America. 1
The parallel between the recent political condition of
Canada and the existing political condition of South Africa
in 1874 was in many respects a striking one. parallel
Canada had her disunited and iealous provinces b et ween
. Canada
Ontario, Quebec, the maritime provinces ; South and south
Africa had the same Cape Colony, Natal, the Arica -
Orange Free State and the Transvaal. In both countries
the various provinces had opposing commercial interests.
Canada had her racial question the large foreign population
of Quebec living under the British Crown ; South Africa like-
wise had her racial question the large foreign population of
1 See vol. iii. bk. xi. ch. v. for Canadian federation.
Sir George Grey, Governor of Cape Colony in 1858, had already
advocated South African federation, and he may therefore be considered
the pioneer in this matter. But his despatch on the subject, which was
a noteworthy one, fell on deaf ears at the Colonial Office, and his faith in
federation carried him further than the facts pf the situation warranted
in South Africa.
404 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS
Cape Colony Dutch living under the British Crown. In
both cases this foreign population was older than the British
occupation, and had lost its rule to the British Empire ; in
both cases, although generally loyal to its new sovereign, it
remembered the fact with natural regret, in some instances
with bitterness. In both cases there had been considerable,
and at times intense, friction ; in Canada the question was
complicated by a sharp difference of religious belief, in South
Africa by a sharp difference of religious practice ; 1 and,
finally, in Canada as in South Africa there was a difference of
social habits due to difference of occupation. In both countries
the British were the traders, the discoverers, the townsmen,
the inaugurators of a new political synthesis, while the French
Canadians and the Cape Dutch were peasants, agriculturists,
farmers. The former were necessarily progressive, the latter
necessarily conservative.
In both countries, too, a political deadlock was inevitable :
in Canada it had actually occurred, in South Africa it was
clearly coming, and Lord Carnarvon, like a true statesman,
did his best to anticipate and avoid it.
But there resemblance ended. Carnarvon forgot that in
Canada each jealous province was under the British Crown,
united by that tie if by no other ; in South Africa two of the
states had been founded by men who revolted from British
rule, and who would not hear of any return to the imperial
fold ; he forgot too and this was his capital mistake that
in Canada union had come from within, in South Africa he
attempted to impose it from without.
A self-governing British colony will no more brook the inter-
vention of the mother country in its internal affairs than a
married daughter who has set up house will allow her mother-
in-law to alter the arrangement of her rooms ; the older party
may possibly be right, will certainly be more experienced, but
if she is wise she will wait till advice is asked before it is given.
1 I refer to the antagonism regarding Christian missions to the natives.
405
Carnarvon forgot this ancient maxim in his policy. Never-
theless the attempt to federate South Africa was justified, or,
if one adopts the convenient opportunist attitude of English
political theory, it would have been justified had it succeeded. 1
It was at once made clear, however, that South Africa
was not yet ready for federation. Lord Carnarvon's despatch
recommending the subject, and suggesting the south
names of those persons who, in his opinion, would ^^8
be most suited to draw up the proposed scheme Federation,
of union, arrived at Cape Town on 2nd June 1875 ; within
a week the Ministry at the Cape had condemned his proposals,
and the Cape Legislature emphatically declared that any such
projects must originate in the colony, not in Britain.
The objection of the Cape might be considered unreason-
able, as implying absorption in local interests ; or natural, as
indicating a pride in its own recently obtained institutions
responsible self-government had only been obtained three years
before, and was still an attractive novelty but the objection
was fatal. The Cape was the leading colony in South Africa, and
its refusal killed the federation policy as much as the refusal
of New South Wales killed the same policy in Australia. 2
But Lord Carnarvon was unfortunate, not only in his
method but in his men. South Africa was not yet convinced
of the wisdom of political union, or she would j A
have united of herself ; she had therefore to be Froude's
convinced that it was wise, and indeed essential
to her interests. And the agent whom Carnarvon chose to
1 To its lasting credit, the Imperial Government has never adopted
the base and paltry method of perpetuating differences among its
children in order to enlarge its own power by weakening them. The
course has been suggested by political writers an example is given in
vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. i. but the Imperial Government has never followed
it. After the manner of parents, it has often been tyrannical, and
attempted to enforce a line of action with which the colonies would
have nothing to do, as in the endeavour to unite the old American
colonies from without (vol. i. bk. iv. ch. v. ). There, as here again
in South Africa, the end was right, the means hopelessly wrong.
2 Vol. v. bk. xix. ch. iii.
406 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
convince her failed completely in his errand. James Anthony
Froude, who was charged with the political conversion of
South Africa, was a brilliant literary man who wrote an ad-
mirable English prose style and a passably inaccurate English
history. He was an imperialist by instinct, but he knew
little of modern politics, and he was more at home in the
common-rooms of Oxford and the great country-houses of
England than in the life of a pastoral colony. He had a
literary man's ideas of statecraft ; he knew what he knew of
ruling men from the study of books, and that is little more
than a politician knows of literature from a study of official
documents. Like many men who write history but do not
make it, the quiet of a library had unfitted him for the noise
and dust of public life, the underground intrigues, the insincere
declarations, the mean arts of lobbying ; Froude could read
documents but not men, and even documents he could not
always read accurately. Faced with a task that would have
taxed the greatest of statesmen to the utmost, a man who
was not a statesman at all was bound to fail.
The choice of Froude was unfortunate ; the moment of his
advent even more unfortunate. He arrived at Cape Town
a bare week after the Cape Legislature had declined to consider
the very proposal he had come to discuss. Froude might well
have decided that their refusal was a sufficient reason for
abandoning his mission ; but instead he toured the country,
was entertained at banquets, made speeches as brilliant in
language as they were contradictory in policy, and in a short
six months wrecked whatever small chance Carnarvon's
ideal might have had of success. He found federation dead ;
he left it damned. 1
1 That was not, however, Fronde's own opinion. On his return to
England he wrote, ' If anybody had told me two years ago that I should
be leading an agitation within Cape Colony, I should have thought my
informant delirious. The Ministers have the appearance of victory, but
we have the substance.' (Shirley's Table Talk.) Fronde's substance
was not even an insubstantial shadow, as he found out before his
death.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 407
But Carnarvon was still hopeful, and failed to realise that
the beautiful body of union which he worshipped was already
a decaying corpse. No conference could assemble The
in South Africa, but a Federal Conference met Abortive
T T n i London
in London in 1876. Its composition, however, conference
made the discussions a farce. If the small colony of 1876 -
of Natal sent three representatives one of whom was Wolse-
ley, its late governor and a soldier who had no knowledge
of politics neither Cape Colony nor the Transvaal, the
most important states in South Africa, were represented at all.
President Brand of the Orange Free State was present, but
refused to discuss federation, and expressly limited himself
to native policy. Froude was understood to represent
Griqualand West, a district whose acquisition by the British
he had condemned in one of his more indiscreet moments
in South Africa.
The proceedings of such a conference were necessarily
unreal, its conclusions an abortion, the whole policy a failure. 1
Carnarvon, it is true, saw further than most men of the time,
and he saw that union must come if South Africa was to
prosper. But he forgot that other men could not see so far,
and he attempted to take them along a road they did not
know to a destination they did not wish to reach.
Confederation by consent had failed ; a new policy, union
by force, was next attempted.
The originator of the new policy was Sir Theophilus Shep-
stone, one of the delegates from Natal at the abortive London
1 Carnarvon, however, refused to recognise the demise of his pet
project. When Bar tie Frere went out to South Africa in 1878,
Carnarvon told him that the time required for the achievement of
federation was 'not more than two years.' Actually it took thirty-four
years.
For the whole federation policy, see C. 1732 (April 1877); and the
Life, and Times of Sir John Charles Molte.no. Carnarvon, Speeches on
South African Affairs, should also be consulted; and The Conference
(1875) and other pamphlets and articles of the period dealing with the
subject, in vol. xxv. of bound pamphlets in the Royal Colonial
Institute.
408 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Conference of 1876. This remarkable man, 1 who exercised so
considerable an influence on South African history, was of
sir English birth, but only the first three years of
sSstone* his Ufe had been s P ent in England. In 1820 his
1817-94. father settled as a Wesleyan missionary in Natal,
and the son had from an early age been concerned in the
native politics of that colony, acting as interpreter in the
negotiations at the close of the Kafir War of 1835, 2 subse-
quently becoming British diplomatic agent to the natives of
Natal, and, when the colony obtained its constitution in
1856, taking the office of Secretary for Native Affairs. Shep-
stone's native policy was his own : it included the establish-
ment of land reserves for the aborigines, and the legalisation
of many native customs, such as polygamy, which the mis-
sionaries had opposed. He was violently criticised, but he
had his way ; and he was generally regarded as a strong
and upright man, reserved and slow of speech but prompt in
action. 3
In these duties were passed the greater part of Shepstone's
life. But while employed among the natives of Natal he
Advocates naturally learnt much of the position of affairs in
of to* atlC the neighbouring Transvaal. He was no friend
Transvaal. o f the Boers or of Boer policy, and he appears to
have been ready to exaggerate the admittedly serious diffi-
1 Unfortunately there is no regular biography of Shepstone. An
account of him appears in the Gape. Illustrated Magazine, August 1894, the
year of his death ; the references to him in the Life of Sir Bartle Frere
sum up his character not unjustly ; and there is a thumb-nail sketch of
him from personal knowledge in Butler's Autobiography.
2 See bk. xxiii. ch. v.
3 Sir Bartle Frere, his superior at the Cape, characterised him as 'an
African Talleyrand,' and remarked that one of his greatest faults was
his reserve ; his superiors could never be sure whether he had told them
everything, or was holding back some important consideration that
would have led to a change in policy. Frere clearly disliked Shepstone,
and distrusted his policy ; but the characterisation was just.
This reserve was attributed by Butler, and no doubt justly, tc long
association with the natives. It was the native habit of long silences,
and he had also adopted the native habit of nsing illustrations and
parables in his talk.
409
culties of the republic, and to have honestly formed the
opinion that that Government, threatened as it was by bank-
ruptcy and lack of executive authority within its borders
and by the dangers of a Zulu attack without, could no longer
carry on without assistance.
His view may have been the right one, but he failed to
perceive that he could not altogether judge the strength of the
Boers by the weakness of their government. 1 The British
However that may be, Shepstone imparted his ment" 1
views to Carnarvon in 1876, adding that there was approves,
a party in the Transvaal anxious for union with Britain ; and
Carnarvon, impressed by the quiet and masterful air of the
man, agreed with the suggestion that the annexation of the
republic by Britain would become a necessity in the interests
of the burghers themselves. This was a greater mistake than
ever he had made in his confederation policy, and it was to
lead to graver consequences ; for when Shepstone returned
to South Africa he had in his possession a commission em-
powering him in certain circumstances to annex the Trans-
vaal to the British Empire ; and that commission had been
signed by the Privy Council at Balmoral on 5th October 1876. 2
1 Similar mistakes have often been made. After the Imperial Civil
War ended in 1783, many people thought that the independent British
colonies in North America were ruined, because Congress had no power.
(Vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. iv. ) But the people were not ruined, and once
an acceptable Constitution was established, made astonishing progress
for ruined men.
But Shepstone was not alone in his mistake. Theal the historio-
grapher, who was not unfriendly to the Boers, declared in 1876 that the
commando system of military organisation, which was the Boer burgher
form of military service, had broken down for ever. The historian is a
poor success when he takes to prophecy ; for the war with the British
in 1899 was fought with extraordinary success on the commando
system.
2 The Colonial Office Blue-Books (1877-82) and the Life of Sir Bartle
Frere give the British side of the case ; the First Annexation of the Trans-
vaal, by Dr. Leyds, the standpoint of the Transvaal. Other books, which
mostly reflect statements at second-hand, may be disregarded.
Many of the statements in the British Blue-Books must be received
with caution, as mistaken, prejudiced , or inaccurate ; several are effectively
traversed by Leyds, whose work on the annexation is without exception
410 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Three months later, on 4th January 1877, Shepstone
crossed the Transvaal frontier to carry out his plans. The
end was determined union with Britain ; the means was
yet uncertain. It appears that Shepstone hoped the Boers
would consent or be persuaded to voluntary union ; he little
knew the stomach of that people. If they refused or delayed,
he determined to proclaim the country British.
How far Shepstone was right or wrong in his estimate of
the external danger to the Transvaal is very doubtful. An
authority on native affairs, he knew that the Boers had been
unsuccessful in their war with the native chief Sikukuni, he
knew too that the power of the Zulu kingdom had revived since
Dingana was defeated forty years before, 1 and he was better
able to judge the ambitions and intentions of Cetewayo, the
then Zulu king, than perhaps any man in South Africa. He
believed that the Zulus would soon rise against the Europeans,
and he was so far right that war did in fact break out within
two years. But he was not so well qualified to estimate the
resisting power of the Transvaal burghers. He believed that
the republic would be defeated ; the burghers with some
reason held that they were strong enough, and that Shepstone
had grossly exaggerated their difficulties. 2 The question
the cleverest piece of special pleading I have ever seen, not only for the
evidence it brings forward, but for what it judiciously omits the
Diggers' Republic, for example, the sharp words spoken by Frert; to
Joubert regarding the message concerning the constitution for the
Transvaal, the application of Kruger for office under the British. I
have an enormous respect for the author, if only for several days of hard
labour to which he has put me, in the necessity of checking his state-
ments, and discovering what he has thought tit to leave out as telling
against his case.
1 See bk. xxiii. ch. vi.
2 The Transvaal delegates who subsequently came to London declared
that the reports of internal troubles in 1877 were grossly exaggerated.
(Correspondence between Sir M. Hicks-Beach and the Transvaal Delegates.)
But these also were not impartial witnesses, for they stated in the
same breath that the Transvaal nourished until Britain annexed
Kimberley.
The Boers contended that they could easily have defeated the Zulus
in 1879, as they had forty years before ; the Zulus were no more
powerful under Cetewayo than under Dingana, the Boers were far more
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 411
was never put to the test, for when the Zulu War did break
out, it was fought from Natal and not the Transvaal.
As to the internal condition of the Transvaal, Shepstone
was right on every point save one and that point was the
one that was vital. The republic was divided into factions,
dissatisfied with its president, and a bitter contest was waging
as to his successor ; the taxes were not paid, 1 the Government
was owing 300,000, the treasury was empty, 2 and the prisons
were thrown open because there was no money to buy food
for the prisoners. These things Shepstone saw ; he could not
see the one thing that mattered the determination of the
Transvaal not to have British rule. He saw he could not
help seeing the distressful body, but he did not see the soul ;
he ignored the national spirit of the people ; and who does
so in such circumstances ignores everything.
Yet there were not lacking signs to those who could see.
Carnarvon had hoped to obtain voluntary union ; but al-
though some of the Boers, particularly those who lived on the
Zulu frontier and would have had to bear the brunt of a
native invasion, advocated union with Britain, the great
majority of the people were strongly averse from losing their
independence. 3 President Burgers, the head of the republic,
numerous in the Transvaal than they had been in Natal, and they would
have had, moreover, the advantage of fighting on their own ground in
case of a Zulu invasion. Zulu tactics, like those of their cousins the
Matabili (bk. xxiv. ch. v.), were to fight in lowland forest country; on
the high veldt of the Transvaal or Mashonaland neither Boer nor Briton
feared them. These are very weighty considerations against Shepstone's
argument.
1 Those who refused them resisted on the ground that the taxes were
illegally levied the Hampden ship-money case again.
2 To be meticulously accurate, there was a sum of twelve shillings
and sixpence to represent the resources of the republic.
3 For the annexation 31 petitions with 587 signatures were obtained ;
against it 125 petitions with 6591 signatures. The usual doubts were
thrown on the authenticity of the signatures on both sides. Many of
those who signed the petitions in favour of annexation were British
store-keepers in the Transvaal. The total male white population of the
republic was about eight thousand.
A referendum on the subject was afterwards suggested by a member
of the Volksraad, but rejected by Shepstone for obvious reasons.
412 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
it is true, and some members of the Government, secretly
told Shepstone that the position was hopeless, urged him to
proclaim a British protectorate, and not only saw, but made
various amendments in the proposed proclamation of British
rule. 1 But they spoke with a double voice : in public they
repudiated the course they had urged in private, and that
fact alone should have given Shepstone pause, even had he
dismissed entirely the agitation of the large party that favoured
independence as factious and ignorant.
But Shepstone was in a hurry to complete his work, for
he believed there was instant danger of a Zulu attack on the
Transvaal ; Carnarvon, who was even then contemplating the
introduction of a Bill in the Imperial Parliament to carry
through South African union, was likewise in a hurry. The
Boers were not.
And suddenly, on 12th April 1877, Shepstone proclaimed
at Pretoria the annexation of the Transvaal Republic by
Britain Britain, a few days after he had told the leading
annexes Boer politicians that he was authorised by his
the r . J
Transvaal, instructions from London to do so.
Opinions as to the wisdom, if not as to the
ethics, of the revolution may vary. Shepstone may have
saved the republic from a disastrous native war, 2 and he
certainty intervened when the country was in a condition of
1 This statement rests on Shepstone's words, and is not, so far as I
know, confirmed directly by any documentary evidence from Burgers.
But Shepstone was an honourable man, who would not falsify or
manufacture evidence. (His letter is given in The Life of Sir Bartle
Frere.) And Paul Kruger, who headed the independents, accused
Burgers of treachery a presumptive proof of Shepstone's accuracy.
2 The day before the proclamation, Shepstone wrote to inform Cete-
wayo, to which the Zulu king answered, 'I thank my father for his
message. I am glad that he has sent it, because the Dutch have tired
me out, and I intended to fight them once, only once, and to drive them
over the Vaal. You see my impis are gathered. It was to fight
the Dutch I called them together. Now I will send them back to their
houses.' (C. 1883.)
Unfortunately Cetewayo's message was a verbal one, which gave
point to the Boer suggestion that its purpose had been strengthened by
the British to support their case. Such things will happen.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 413
administrative anarchy. But morally the act was indefen-
sible, almost as improper as the seizure of the Palatinate by
Louis xiv. in the seventeenth century, and not less open to
reprobation than many of the subsequent acts of the restored
Transvaal Republic itself during the next twenty years : it
was not to be excused even by the peril in which Shepstone
believed the republic stood. The Volksraad were the best
judges of the peril of the country, but the Volksraad had
not petitioned for Shepstone's proclamation. At the last
moment, too, Burgers changed his attitude and repented
of his weakness ; after the act which he had counselled was
accomplished, he protested publicly, and two Boer delegates
left the Transvaal for England to state their case.
Apart from its ethical side the annexation was precipitate
and ill-timed. It clearly broke the Sand River Convention
of 1852, and gave the Boers an opportunity of which they
were quick to take advantage, of accusing England of bad
faith. 1 Its suddenness took Carnarvon by surprise, 2 and
1 It must be remembered that the Boers had also broken the Sand
River Convention by disregarding the clause prohibiting slavery. There
is overwhelming evidence of this, and Burgers himself admitted that
slavery was in vogue in the Transvaal.
2 Shepstone's commission from Carnarvon was in the following words :
' If the emergency should seem to you to be such as to render it
necessary in order to secure the peace and safety of our said colonies (in
South Africa) and of our subjects elsewhere, that the said territories, or
any portion or portions of the same, should provisionally, and pending
the announcement of our pleasure, be administered in our name, and on
our behalf; then, and in such case only, we do further authorise you,
by proclamation under your hand, to declare that from and after a day
to be therein named, so much of any such territories as aforesaid, as to
you after due consideration shall seem fit, shall be annexed to and form
part of our dominions. And we do hereby constitute and appoint you
to be thereupon Administrator of the same provisionally and until our
pleasure is more fully known.
' Provided, first, that no such proclamation shall be issued by you with
respect to any district, territory, or state, unless you shall be satisfied
that the inhabitants thereof, or a sufficient number of them, or the
Legislature thereof, desire to become our subjects ; nor if any conditions
unduly limiting our power and authority therein are sought to be
imposed. And, secondly, that unless the circumstances of the case are
such as in your opinion make it necessary to issue a proclamation forth-
with, no such proclamation shall be issued by you until the same has
414 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Sir Bartle Frere, the new Governor at the Cape, was amazed
at this unexpected increase of the territories under his charge.
' Good heavens/ he remarked, when he heard the news, ' what
will they say to this in England ? '
In England, as it happened, they said very little at the
moment ; only one member of Parliament protested, 1 and the
Transvaal delegates who discussed the subject with the new
Colonial Secretary, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach 2 for Carnarvon
had resigned his office in the meantime were told that the
annexation was irrevocable. But a great deal more was to
be said and done about the question in the next year or two. 3
For the time being the matter was overshadowed by the
Zulu War. Here Shepstone proved too true a prophet ; and
The Zulu Sir Bartle Frere, the experienced and well-beloved
war, 1879. Indian administrator who had been prevailed
upon to crown his career by settling the difficulties of South
Africa, found his attention called away from the political
relations of the whites by the revival of the native problem.
All the fates indeed seemed against the union of South Africa
in that generation.
been submitted to and approved by our trusty and well- beloved Sir
Henry Barkly ' (Governor of Cape Colony).
Shepstone based his action both on the emergency contemplated in the
first paragraph, and the popular desire stipulated in the second. The
latter will not bear examination ; the former is more doubtful.
The words of this extraordinarily dangerous commission are sufficient
Eroof that Carnarvon entirely misunderstood the whole situation in
outh Africa.
1 Leonard Courtney, afterwards Lord Courtney, a notable opponent of
imperial expansion, and in later days equally remarkable for his
advocacy of proportional representation and his wearing of a mustard-
coloured waistcoat.
2 Afterwards Lord St. Aldwyn, popularly known in parliamentary
circles as Black Michael from the colour of his hair, and respected or
avoided by more timorous members on account of the vigour of his
language.
3 The general opinion may perhaps be gathered from an article in the
Nineteenth Century of the same year. Beginning with the remark that
' Imperial Government is a costly and onerous inheritance, and as
Liberal principles have ripened, the policy of imposing rule by force upon
a reluctant community has been repudiated,' it proceeds to justify the
annex vtion. A dexterous performance.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 415
The power of the Zulu people, crippled for the time by the
Boer and British settlers in Natal some forty years before, 1
had revived in a generation of peace, and Cete-
, , , . , , , , . , Cetewayo,
wayo, the new king of that warrior people since
1873, now dreamed of restoring the military glories of the
past. The long but irksome interval of quiet had not de-
stroyed or deteriorated the fighting instincts of this people,
and they gladly welcomed a return of the old days of valour
of which their fathers had boasted. ' Here is Tshaka come
back to us/ cried the braves when they knew their new
sovereign's character : the old discipline was restored to the
Zulu army, the old desire to wash their spears in the blood
of the enemy revived. Foreign influence, which had obtained
some superficial hold in his predecessor's reign, was despised
by Cetewayo ; and the missionaries of Christianity, who had
secured a precarious permission in the days of peace to settle
in the country, were now expelled, for Cetewayo held that
' A Zulu converted was a Zulu spoiled ' ; the sixteen mission
stations were perforce abandoned, and the religion of peace
had no longer any place in the land whose real creed was
war.
It seemed clear that Cetewayo, like his forbears Dingana and
Tshaka, was preparing for a reign of blood : massacres revived
in the country, 2 and Cetewayo coolly defended his action in
answer to a remonstrance from the British. ' Did I ever tell
Mr. Shepstone I would not kill ? ' he exclaimed. ' Did he
tell the white people I made such an arrangement ? Because
if he did he has deceived them. I do kill. But do not con-
1 Bk. xxiii. ch. vi.
2 A large number of young women had transgressed one of the funda-
mental laws of Zululand, and married the men they chose, instead of
those for whom they were destined. Many of these and their friends
were in consequence murdered, and the corpses exposed as a warning ;
and when the parents buried the bodies of their murdered children, they
too were put to death. (Sir H. Bulwer to Lori Lytton, 13th Oct. 187Ci,
inC. 1748.)
I commend this example to the advocates of Eugenics.
416 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
aider/ he added as a warning threat, ' that I have done any-
thing yet in the way of killing. Why do the white people
start at nothing ? I have not yet begun ; I have yet to kill ;
it is the custom of our nation and I shall not depart from it.'
Cetewayo likewise protested that the British had no more
right to interfere in the internal affairs of Zululand than he
had to interfere in those of Natal an unexceptionable doc-
trine in theory which was complicated in practice by the
existence of an uncertain frontier, a boundary dispute between
the Transvaal Boers and the Zulu chief Sekukuni, and a raid
on the borders of Natal.
The people of the colony were not ignorant of the Zulu
strength and their own numerical, perhaps actual, weakness ;
Frere's they believed that Cetewayo and his trained
Ultimatum. army of thirty thousand men could destroy the
European settlement, and from his words and character they
gathered that such was his intention; and Frere, who had
not long arrived in South Africa, and who had already seen
a minor rising of the Kafirs on the eastern borders of Cape
Colony, now found himself drawn to this more serious frontier
peril. For several months he watched the position from Natal,
examining the evidence for and against Cetewayo carefully ;
and finally he was convinced that Natal was in serious and
imminent danger from the new military power of South-
East Africa. He wrote home for reinforcements ; but so
threatening, in his view, had the black cloud of Zulu regiments
on the frontier become, that he decided not to await the attack.
On llth December 1878 an ultimatum was sent to Cetewayo,
imposing the terms that a suzerain power demands from an
inferior ; and the king was warned that if he refused, the
British troops would invade his country on the first day of
the following year.
' When shall wars cease on this poor earth ? ' said Frere
sadly as he rode out of Pieter Maritzburg on the afternoon
when he had determined on the ultimatum. He was too old
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 417
at his trade of government not to know that if things went
wrong the blame would fall on him, too sound a man to rely
on the consideration that if he waited for the Zulus to attack
Natal no censure could touch him personally. It was the
safety of the colonists alone that weighed with him.
Of the justice of his action there can be little doubt, for
no civilised community can remain indifferent to the excesses
of a more powerful savage neighbour ; but the con-
necessity of the war which followed for Cete-
wayo ignored the ultimatum is a more arguable Action,
matter. Whether the danger to Natal was real, and if real,
whether it was imminent, became matters of furious contro-
versy at the time, on which the more cautious and temperate
verdict of history must pause. Frere's past career in India
showed his judgment sound ; his faculties were not yet
dimmed by age ; although a soldier, he had no glory to gain,
no personal ambition to gratify, from a Zulu war, and he was
sincere in his love of peace. Shepstone too, who had known
the Zulus all his life, had no doubt of Cetewayo's warlike
intentions. The Transvaal Boers, who advised Frere in some
details of the situation, agreed with Shepstone in this if in
nothing else. The people of Natal, who had some reason to
know the truth, if also some cause for nervous panic to affect
their judgment, held, with one considerable exception, that
their existence was threatened by the revival of the Zulu
military spirit. That one exception was the bishop of the
colony, Colenso, an able and fearless Anglican, whose theology
provoked the charge of heresy, and whose open admiration of
the Zulus had brought upon him the resentment of his flock.
Neither the great army nor the military fervour of Cetewayo,
neither the banishment of the missionaries, nor yet the
massacres which showed the revival of the old Zulu spirit,
turned him against his friend the savage king ; and Colenso
urged his view, both in England and South Africa, with an
untiring persistence that made many converts outside Natal.
vol.. VI, 2 U
418 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
His words were not without effect on the Imperial Govern-
ment, which, although it had appointed Frere, hesitated to
accept his assurance as to the Zulu danger, and quite clearly
disliked the war and disputed its necessity from the start. 1
Between Colenso and Frere can be no conclusive judgment,
and for this reason, that Frere's action in invading Zululand
destroyed the very evidence that would have proved his case.
He may have saved Natal, but by forestalling the Zulu attack
he destroyed the proof that an attack was contemplated.
Frere held that the attack on Zululand was fundamentally
a defensive war, since in his view it merely anticipated a
Zulu invasion of Natal : the conclusion is sound provided
the premiss is well founded.
The final verdict must rest on a balance of probabilities, on
the fact that savage armies are not trained for nothing and
that Zulus are not disciplined to play, on the known ambition
of Cetewayo and his warriors, and on a comparison between
the judgment of Colenso and Frere. As to that, it can only
be said that the balance inclines towards Frere, and that his
action would hardly have been impugned had it not been
that a terrible disaster and an individual tragedy focused
the attention of the world upon the war.
On 10th January 1879, ten days after the ultimatum sent
by Frere had expired, the British troops under Lord Chelms-
ford marched into the wild Zulu country. 2 They numbered
1 The Imperial Government's reluctance was due to the threatening
character of international politics in Europe in 1878. It had no desire
to be involved in a native frontier war in South Africa at a time when
it might become involved in a first-class contest nearer home.
2 There is a considerable literature of this war. First in authority is
the official Narrative of the Field Operations (1881) ; Wilmot's Zulu War
is good, also Norris-Newman's In Zululand with the British in 1879, and
Ashe and Edgell's Story of the Zulu Campaign. Rider Haggard's
Cetywayo and his White Neighbours is the sound work of a literary man
who knew his South Africa well ; other books that may be consulted with
advantage are Elliott's Victoria Cross in Zululand, Viju's Cetshwayo's
Dutchman, and from the pro-Zulu point of viaw, Colenso's Ruin of
Zululand. For the Prince Imperial, Augustin Filon's Memoirs of the
Prince Imperial, a work which in its English translation has lost most
of the charm, but none of the inaccuracies of the French original,
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFKICA 419
some 5500 in all, and they had with them two thousand native
levies, 1 none too large, but perhaps a large enough force to
attack a Zulu army of thirty thousand trained men The Zulu
on their own proper ground. Ten days after the War > 1879 -
British force had crossed the Tugela Kiver into Zululand,
and one or two severe brushes with the enemy had occurred
at Isandula and Inyezane, part of the invading army en-
camped at Isandhlwana, the lion's hill in the native tongue.
The British troops were full of confidence, so assured indeed
of success and contemptuous of their opponents that they
disregarded the warnings of the Boers, who knew by past
experience the Zulu methods, as to the absolute necessity
of unceasing watchfulness against sudden attack, and the
need of securing the camp at night against surprise. 2 This
over-confidence was the direct cause of a terrible disaster.
The British force was divided ; the camp, in defiance of
direct orders, was not secured ; and the scouts, by a miracle
of blindness, had failed to discover the main Zulu The isandih-
army, to the number of twenty thousand men, wana
encamped near by. It was the morning of the 22nd
22nd January, and the Zulus, restrained by some Januaj r-
native superstition, had not meant to fight that day. But
the British, catching sight of some small outpost, provoked
an attack ; the martial instincts of the enemy overcame their
superstition. The Zulu army swung round upon its foe ;
before the invaders could join their ranks they were sur-
rounded, and the sudden impetuous onslaught, characteristic
1 These natives were an unmitigated nuisance. They had no training,
and understood not a word of English, while the officers knew nothing
of their tongue ; they were horribly afraid of the Zulus, but the officers
whose thankless task it was to lead them were more afraid of the Kafirs
killing them by accident than of the Zulus killing them by design.
Hamilton Brown's Lout Legionary in South Africa, an admirable book by
a participant in the war.
2 This confidence was shared in Natal. One leading member of the
Legislative Council, who should have known better, stated that he did
not believe the Znlns would fight, and that two hundred soldiers could
march from one end of Zululand to the other,
420 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
of Zulu warfare, swept away the poor defence in a few
moments. 1 On that fatal day of savage triumph perished
sixty officers and six hundred men of the British army.
The disorganised invaders swept back across their frontier.
A heroic defence at Rorke's Drift, by a handful of men who
kept the Zulu regiments at bay, somewhat restored the spirits
of the troops ; but it could not undo the past, nor could it
save Natal a panic. Even in Durban men feared lest the
conquering tide of Zulu braves should sweep them from the
colony ; and all along the frontier and through the land was
the fear of destruction and death at the hands of the trium-
phant Cetewayo. 2
But Cetewayo stayed his hand. The remainder of the
British force in Zululand, which had been divided from the
Defeat of main body under Chelmsford, kept the natives
the Zulus. f u iiy occupied ; reinforcements were hurried out
from Cape Town and from England ; Chelmsford was quietly
superseded by Wolseley, but before Wolseley arrived, his
unfortunate predecessor had redeemed his name in the great
victory of Ulundi on 5th July. A few weeks later Cetewayo
was captured and banished, and instead of one paramount
chief the country was divided among thirteen kinglets whose
petty authority could no longer be a danger to Natal. 3
1 The Zulus drove cattle before them into the British camp, and
threw the defence into hopeless confusion. Had the camp been laagered
this manoeuvre would have been ineffectual.
A small party of whites reoccupied the camp during the night, and the
Zulus seeing them thought the enemy had come to life again, and
refrained from attack.
2 So bad was the panic that Hamilton Browne found one prosperous
farmhouse which had been deserted the moment the news arrived.
A meal was on the table, the coffee in the oven, and the food on the plates
weeks after it had been abandoned. Even money and jewellery had
been left behind in the hurry.
3 One of these minor sovereigns, and perhaps the greatest of them, was
one John Dunn, a renegade Englishman who had adopted Zulu customs
and possessed several Zulu wives.
The system of Zulu kinglets, which was Wolseley's own idea, proved
unworkable in practice. Some years later Cetewayo was allowed to
return to his people ; he gave no trouble, but his successor precipitated
another outbreak, which caused much trouble in Natal, in 1906.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 421
But the war had not closed without another mournful
tragedy. Among those who had come out to Africa as a
volunteer in this campaign was the Prince Im- Death of
perial of France, son of the third Napoleon, and Imp eriai
claimant to the crown which had fallen from his of France,
father after the disaster of Sedan. It was unwise that a
foreign prince of so high rank, an exile from his proper throne
and the honoured guest of England, should be allowed to
share so dangerous a service ; but the lad was intelligent and
brave, and none could have foreseen the shameful story of
his death.
On the morning of the 1st June, the Prince accompanied
a small patrol of six mounted men and one friendly Zulu
under the command of Lieutenant Carey to Ityotyozi. The
patrol was too small for safety, the watch was careless, and
the whole party was suddenly attacked by the enemy. A
panic broke out ; the English troopers saddled and galloped
away, Carey with the rest, leaving the Prince Imperial, who
had some difficulty in mounting his horse, 1 to make his escape
as best he could.
He did not escape ; he alone of the party that should have
protected him was taken by the Zulus. When the news was
known to the main army a search was made, and his body
was found lying on a bed of wild flowers, the face looking
upward to the sky, the eyes open as if smiling ; but the
corpse had been stripped of all save an amulet which the
prince's mother had given him, and it was stabbed with
eighteen wounds from Zulu assegais. 2
1 The Prince was an excellent horseman, who could easily vault into
the saddle from the ground (Butler's Autobiography), but the horse was
a wild one, and the shameful fact that some dishonest tradesman had
made the saddle partly of brown paper added to his difficulty.
Brown (A Lost Legionary), who knew the country and the Zulus,
declared that the small patrol could probably have escaped had they
stood together. Not a doubt of it, for all save one did in fact escape.
2 The corpse was brought to England, and buried at Farnborough, in
the magnificent tomb where Napoleon HI. also lay.
422 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
So perished the Prince Imperial of France, to the shame of
England, in a tragedy of cowardice. The miserable Carey
was tried by court-martial, and his sentence, which was kept
secret, was forwarded to England for confirmation ; but
the Empress Eugenie, with a merciful compassion that not
every parent could have shown, intervened to save the
miscreant that had lost her only son and the chief hope of
the royalists of France.
With that unhappy memory an unfortunate campaign
drew to a close. The Zulu War had provoked far stronger
criticism than the annexation of the Transvaal in England,
where the Isandhlwana disaster and the death of the Prince
Imperial had startled and alarmed men into momentary
attention to the obscure and complex politics of South Africa.
Few understood the real position : some held, and not with-
out apparent justification for their attitude, that the war
had been provoked by Frere, 1 others maintained the low
and selfish theory inherited from Cobden, that the colonists
were in favour of such campaigns because they led to the
presence of a British army and consequently the spending of
much money in their country. 2 And some held the extra-
ordinary belief, which could hardly be excused even by com-
plete ignorance of South African conditions, that the Zulus
were an oppressed and hardly-treated people who would have
1 The mild Spectator, a supporter of Liberalism in those days, remarked
that ' Frere was perhaps the most conspicuous example of the class of
men who will deliberately conceive and carry out an iniquitous policy,
thinking all the while that they are doing God service and conferring
benefits on the victims of their policy. . . . We are thankful that
a man so fanatically and sincerely colour-blind as to the fundamental
laws of political morality no longer occupies a position of official
responsibility.' (London Spectator, 27th August 1881.) The true
accent of insular party passion.
2 The London Daily News (8th July 1879) stated that Frere ' had
allied himself with the worst passions and sinister motives of the
colonists, (who) sponge on the Empire, to prosecute their own gain
at the cost of the mother country. They make war with the British
taxpayers' money and the British soldiers' blood.' This was the very
voice of Cobden (vol. iv. bk. xvi. ch. ii.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 423
preferred peace, but had been forced to defend themselves
against their will. 1
From the Zulu War men turned naturally to the condition
of the Transvaal, whose annexation by Britain had passed
with little comment ; and here also was material Troubles
in plenty for comment and criticism. At first, ^raj^vaai
indeed, all had seemed to go well in the new ISTT-SO.
province. Confidence was renewed, the public credit was
restored although not without Shepstone drawing heavily
on the Imperial Government to pay the debts of the defunct
republic, in a lavish manner which frightened the cautious
officials of the Colonial Office ; 2 and many of the Boers con-
gratulated Shepstone on saving the country from disaster,
and a memorial protesting against the deputation that had
gone to London to complain of annexation was largely sup-
ported, its signatories including six members of the late
Volksraad.
All seemed well ; but Bartle Frere, a wiser man than
Shepstone, soon realised that several dangerous undercurrents
of public opinion ran beneath the superficial quiet. He was
well aware that the sudden revolution had come as a shock
to the conservative Dutch colonists throughout South Africa ;
it was clearly disliked by the Ministry at Cape Town ; Shep-
stone, too, was becoming personally unpopular in the Trans-
vaal, and the Boers had good reasons for their dislike. He
came from Natal, a British colony for which they had no love,
and he held views as to native policy which they detested.
He had annexed the Transvaal to defend it from the Zulus, and
the promise had not been carried out the Boers had had to
defend themselves. Moreover, Shepstone was a man of no
1 This attitude was taken by a pseudo-philanthropic agency, which
called itself the Aborigines Protection Society.
2 One of these officials declared himself ' aghast ' at Shepstone's
financial methods. Vouchers were produced for about one-third only of
the payments ; the unvouched revenue contained duplicate charges, and
such items as Shepstone's hat, and somebody else's hair brushes, cricket
bat, and fishing-rod.
424 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
constructive or administrative ability, 1 and constructive
genius was badly needed in the anarchic condition of the
country. The old republican constitution was no more ;
but no new constitution had been proclaimed. The Volks-
raad had not been summoned, lest it should protest against
the annexation, but no new Assembly, not even a nominated
Council, had been called, and public meetings had been
forbidden.
Shepstone's rule, in short, was an autocracy, and a foreign
autocracy, such as the freedom-loving Boers would not abide ;
and many of the burghers, sorrowfully abandoning hope of
better things, had determined, like their ancestors, to quit
their homes and trek further north into Mashonaland, where
freedom might be theirs once more.
But at that moment Shepstone was recalled, Colonel
Lanyon was appointed in his stead, and in April 1879 Bartle
Frere Frere paid an official visit to Pretoria. As he rode
Pretoria towards the capital, whose very name com-
1879. memorated one of the great Boer leaders who
had shaken off British rule in Cape Colony, he found large
numbers of the Boers, fifteen or sixteen hundred in all, en-
camped awaiting him a few miles from the city. He had
been warned that his hie would not be safe among them,
but he disregarded the base suggestion for the Boers
were men, and could respect a man even if an enemy and
entered their ranks. As he passed through ahead of his
escort, he raised his hand to the salute ; not a man
of all that gathering acknowledged it. They stood in
moody deathlike silence, watching the representative of
the power they hated, who had come to discuss the situation
with their leaders ; and in this dismal fashion the conference
opened.
1 This judgment was passed by Frere, who had ample opportunities
of deciding. But if Frere's statement were distrusted, the facts of the
case would proclaim its truth.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 425
Frere explained to the Boers that the annexation could
never be undone he had no foreknowledge that his grave
words as a ruler of the Empire would be turned A Con
to mockery within two years but that he was stitution
anxious to discuss the future constitution of the pro ie '
country with them. His hearers would have none of it.
Piet Joubert, a man of whom the British were to know much
more in the ensuing twenty years, 1 had failed to deliver Frere's
message to the assembled Boers concerning a constitution ;
an angry altercation followed, but Joubert declared plainly,
' I should mislead your Excellency if I said that the people
of the Transvaal would be content with anything short of
their independence. All the independence as denned in the
Cape Colony and England is understood by the people who
have chosen their sovereign or voluntarily stand under that
sovereignty, and unlike us, who have never consented to such
sovereignty. A slave, however kindly treated, desires his
liberty, and will exchange for such slavery freedom, even
though it might entail great misery/ To which Frere
answered, ' Mr. Joubert, I think we have had enough of this
tall talk. You must know that it is pure nonsense, this talk
of being a slave/
It was clear that nothing could be done to lessen this
stubborn love of independence, which an Englishman in other
circumstances might have admired. ' Unless I had Tne new
seen it/ Frere wrote home, ' I could not have be- Transvaal
lieved that in two years things could have drifted February
into such a mess/ He did his best and the best 188 -
that Frere could do was very good indeed to save the situa-
1 Piet Joubert, like Paul Kruger, had been born a British subject, at
Graaff Reynet, in 1831. He was the child of one of the Voortrekkers, and
as such had great influence in the counsels of the Transvaal ; but although
he stood for independence, his career showed him less firm of purpose
than his dour associate. He was no irreconcilable foe of the British, and
unlike Kruger, he was prepared to work with them rather than against
them whenever it was possible. But Kruger's masterful character
overbore Joubert's more pacific views.
426 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
tion ; he drew up the scheme of a new constitution, and
planned a better administration of justice ; x but over all
his work lay this fatal flaw, that it came too late. What
might have had a bare chance, but no more than a bare
chance, of success in 1877 was hopeless three years later ;
this new constitution was fruitless. 2 The Executive Council
met, indeed, on 23rd February 1880, and the Legislative
Assembly on 10th March ; but before the year was out the
crisis had arrived. In December 1880, the old Volksraad
of the republic was convened at Paardekraal a clear act
of rebellion.
That there should be no doubt regarding their attitude a
lengthy proclamation was published embodying the griev-
The Boers ances of the Boers and declaring war upon the
rebel, 1880. British, and a triumvirate Paul Kruger, Pre-
torius, and Piet Joubert was appointed to carry on a
provisional government. 3 The seat of government was de-
clared to be at Heidelberg, and the flag was hoisted on
16th December, the day which had been kept for many years
as ' Dingaan's Day/ 4
This sudden outbreak clearly took the British by surprise.
Until the last moment they had thought and it was nearly
Folly of the ^ e last and worst of their many mistakes in this
British dismal business that the situation was improving.
They had not realised the stubborn independence
of the Dutchman, although history might have taught them
1 Frere's plans were described by himself in the London Nineteenth
Century, February 1881.
2 ' Do you understand.' said Paul Kruger to a fellow- Boer, ' what this
self-government is that the British offer you? I will try to explain.
They say to you, first put your head quietly in the noose, so that I can
hang you up; then you may kick your legs about as much as you please.'
An apt illustration.
8 A curious point about this proclamation was that the republic
declared itself ' prepared to confederate with the colonies and states of '
South Africa.'
4 For Dingana and Dingaan's Day, see bk. xxiv. ch. i.
The actual rebellion arose out of the seizure by the British of a Boer
farmer's goods to enforce payment of his taxes. The farmer's name was
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 427
something of his character, and a knowledge of psychology
have taught them more. Their fundamental error and their
colossal folly was the conviction, ineradicable from English
minds, that British institutions are so superior to those of
other peoples that less fortunate men must always crave for
British government : behind all their actions was the unspoken
belief that they were doing a worthy act in repairing the strange
error of an otherwise kindly Providence, which had made
men in His image and forgot to make them British. That
absurd belief underlay the whole of this Transvaal question. 1
In their desire to give the Boers the blessings of a government
which they did not realise its people hated, Carnarvon and
Shepstone had been stupidly honest ; one is almost tempted
by the result to say that it would have been better had they
been cleverly dishonest.
One fundamental error should have been sufficient, but
others followed. The Conservative Cabinet in England
which had appointed Frere allowed his policy in the Zulu War
Bezuidenhout, and he was a descendant of the Bezuidenhout of Schlater's
Nek (bk. xxiii. cli. iii.). Had the British been a superstitious people,
they would not have worried that unquiet family again.
1 It was suggested by some Boer apologists that Britain annexed the
country for two reasons Because the Transvaal was known to contain
gold, and because the British were no longer confronted with the menace
of the French Empire in Europe after 1871, and therefore were able
to expand in the outer world.
Nobody can pry into the thoughts of dead men, and it is easy to im-
pute motives which cannot be proved wrong. As to the first reason, I
will only say that 1 have examined the records pretty carefully, and
can find no shadow of a hint before the annexation that the British
Government or Shepstone knew the great value of the Transvaal
goldfields ; it was eight years before the Witwatersrand was dis-
covered, and the older gold workings in the country were not very
successful.
As to the second reason, I doubt if the Franco-German War directly
had the effect on British opinion suggested above. It certainly made
Britain realise that her dream of peaceable commercial expansion was
an imperfect reflection of the facts ; but the removal of pressure in
Europe does not necessarily make for oversea expansion. The com-
petition of Germany a few years later led directly to colonial expansion.
For the whole subject of British expansion and the reasons underlying it,
, see vol. iv. bk. xvi. ch. ii.
428 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
to be censured in the House of Commons ; and that censure,
which arrived in South Africa when he was negotiating with
the Boers, distinctly weakened his authority. The same
Conservative Cabinet divided his office as High Commissioner,
and gave the Transvaal and Natal to Wolseley, whose ideas
of policy were those of a soldier in a conquered country. 1
On each occasion Frere's natural instinct and better course
was to have resigned, but the very Government which censured
him begged hjm to remain.
The Conservatives had done their best to ruin any slight
chances of a South African settlement ; it was now the turn
of the Liberals. The imperialist wave in England had spent
its force for the time ; the flowing tide of British expansion
had now retreated, and a strong reaction was visible towards
the Little England policy of the early Victorian period. The
annexation of Cyprus 2 and a military excursion into Afghan-
istan had taken place in the same years as the seizure of the
Transvaal and the Zulu War ; and the policy of conquest
which Disraeli had inaugurated furnished a weapon which his
Liberal opponents were not slow to use. As the general
election of 1880 approached, Gladstone emerged from his
retirement, and swept the country with a torrent of rhetorical
passion ; on one occasion he described the Transvaal as ' a
country where we have chosen, most unwisely, I am tempted
to say insanely, to place ourselves in the strange predicament
of the free subjects of a monarchy going to coerce the free
subjects of a republic, and to compel them to accept a citizen-
ship which they decline and refuse ' ; in another speech he
declared ' that if these acquisitions were as valuable as they
are valueless, I would repudiate them, because they were
1 There was some friction between Bartle Frere and Wolseley, not
unnatural in the circumstances. I need not rake up the details.
Wolseley made several blunders in the Transvaal as extraordinary as
his settlement after the Zulu War. He had Pretorius imprisoned on a
charge of high treason, then released him, and nominated him for a seat
on the Legislative Council. Qvem Deus vidt ptrdere ....
- See vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. iv.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 429
obtained by means dishonourable to the character of our
country/
Such was the burning fever of election ; but when it had
played its part, and Gladstone entered office in triumph, a
cold reaction of official responsibility quickly followed. The
Boers, who did not understand that it was a sacred custom
among their enemies for otherwise honourable men to promise
in opposition what they could not fulfil in office, awaited with
impatience the restoration of their country ; when the boon
was delayed, they made inquiry, and to their utter amazement
were officially assured that ' it was impossible now to consider
the question as if it were presented for the first time. . . .
Our judgment is that the Queen cannot be advised to relinquish
her sovereignty over the Transvaal/
The contradiction between promise and performance,
which astounded the Boers, was too much even for Glad-
stone's own party followers ; and many of the Liberals,
balked of their desire to restore the Transvaal Republic its
independence, appealed to Gladstone that at least Sir Bartle
Frere, against whom a violent campaign of vituperation had
been waged, should be recalled. The Government consented,
and on 1st August 1880, Frere was dismissed from office.
He was the one man who emerged from the whole affair
with credit ; he was not responsible for the annexation of the
Transvaal, nor for the miserable mess that had been made
by Carnarvon and Hicks-Beach, Shepstone, Lanyon, and
Wolseley of the Transvaal question ; he was respected by
the Boers as an honest man, loved by the Cape Dutch, trusted
by the natives. 1 For that reason, perhaps, he was sacrificed ;
1 Molteno, Prime Minister of Cape' Colony, who had come into collision
with Frere over the Zulu War, denounced him as the dictator of South
Africa up to Zanzibar. Frere was certainly a strong man, but the
universal sorrow of South Africa at his recall showed that the people did
not share the angry politician's opinion.
On the other hand, the Liberal prejudice against Frere in England sur-
vived twenty years and more. I notice, in one of the books of G. W. E.
Russell, a politician turned paragraphist, he casually refers to South Africa
as ' the scene of Bartle Frere's misdeeds. ' It had other titles to fame.
the offerings to evil gods in some religions must be the finest
in the flock. 1
The Boers now perceived the weakness of the British
Government they had not yet probed it to the bottom
Tbe war and they struck for independence. For six months
of 1881. before the old flag of the Transvaal was hoisted
secret preparations had been making : the British had been
warned of the danger of rebellion ; they had not believed it. 2
But within a week after the rebel flag was hoisted and Joubert,
the Commandant-General of the Boer forces, had marched
towards Natal, the small British garrisons stationed at
Pretoria and other centres in the Transvaal were isolated ; 3
the authority of the Imperial Government had collapsed with
a crash ; and the first British defeat in that short and disas-
trous campaign had occurred. Four days after the outbreak
of the war, a company of British troops was surrounded and
taken prisoner at Bronkerspruit. 4
1 Frere never recovered from the shock. He died on 26th May 1884,
his last words being, ' If they would only read the Further Correspond-
ence, they would surely understand -they must be satisfied. ' The hope
was vain ; Englishmen do not read blue books. I doubt if a dozen men
beside myself have even glanced at the documents since Frere died.
2 General Pomeroy-Colley, High Commissioner of South-East Africa,
Governor of Natal, and the tragic hero of the ensuing war, had been
warned by a loyal Boer. He thought the talk of rebellion mere bluff.
So also did Shepstone. When men on the spot were so deceived, the
Imperial Government need not be blamed if it misjudged the situation
in this respect.
3 For the benefit of the British garrison at Pretoria, a newspaper was
issued by an enterprising journalist three times a week at the price of
sixpence, called News of the Gamp, a, journal of fancies, notifications,
gossip, and general chit-chat. Advertisements were accepted at two
shillings the line, and later in the campaign, when they were somewhat
scarce, the price was reduced to a shilling. With a grim humour, not
unworthy of the camp, the first leading article was headed, ' Peace on
earth, goodwill towards men.'
4 There were allegations of treachery against the Boers on this and
many other occasions of this war. Some of the allegations were
perhaps justified ; but there will always be accidents in mortal combat,
and men fighting for their independence will not stick at the niceties of
military etiquette.
As regards Bronkerspruit, I have examined the evidence on both
sides, and I think the Boer defence against their accusers hold
good.
' THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 431
The commander of the British troops in the neighbour
colony of Natal at that time was likewise High Commissioner
of South-East Africa, a gallant soldier who had sir George
served with success and distinction in Ashanti Colle y-
under Wolseley and in the great Afghan campaign of 1879.
Sir George Pomeroy-Colley 1 had been accounted lucky by
his friends, had always held himself till now a favourite of
fortune ; but now the time had come when the fates that
guard our little destinies did more than equalise the scales.
From the first day he took command events went wrong.
He left Maritzburg on 10th January 1881 ; the rivers were
in flood, the roads were quagmires. Had he waited a few
weeks, reinforcements would have come from India ; but
Colley would not wait. With a small force of twelve hundred
men he hurried forward towards the Transvaal frontier to
relieve the imprisoned British garrisons ; but at the steep
pass of Laing's Nek on the mountains that divide the two
countries he was repulsed by the rebels under Joubert. The
British artillery was ineffectual, the Boer guns were deadly in
their aim ; and Colley found himself defeated. ' I am too
tired and sad to write much/ he said as he sent the news
home ; but instead of retreating he pushed forward and
crossed the double drift of the Ingogo River. He was again
attacked, and again repulsed, and forced to recross the
stream. The Boers did not pursue them, for this time the
fight had been more equal, and the Boer leader admitted
that he ' had got all there was to be got out of the men ' ;
and now negotiations opened.
The Imperial Government had now to pay the price of
Gladstone's contradiction. It had not anticipated the re-
bellion ; it detested the war ; it hated the idea both of carry-
1 Colley's Life has been admirably written by Sir William Butler,
whose work is valuable both from a military point of view and the fact
that it contains many official documents.
The general history of the campaign may be studied in Carter, Narra-
tive of the Boer War.
432 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
ing the war further and of owning itself beaten. It therefore
suggested that a settlement of ' the present difficulties ' could
be arranged if the rebels would consent to a ' cessation of
armed opposition/ The negotiations miscarried ; Colley still
believed that ' in a few weeks (he could) break the back of
the military resistance ' ; and in that forlorn hope, and with
only the remnant of his little army, he again pressed forward.
He had not waited for reinforcements ; and when he came
in sight of the Boer army, which far outnumbered his, he seized
Majuba the hill which lay as a great natural bastion before
February their lines. Amajuba or Majuba Hill the hill
1881. of doves, in the native tongue seemed an im-
pregnable position, so inaccessible indeed that the Boers had
not thought of occupying it. As the British troops climbed
and scrambled up the heights in the dead of night on 26th
February, they had to support themselves by seizing tufts
of grass or projecting fragments of the rock ; and when day
dawned on Sunday, 27th February, they looked down upon
the enemy beneath with the full assurance of success. Only
Colley, already shaken by his past defeats, was doubtful of
the issue : ' It is a strange world of chances/ he wrote in a
tender letter of farewell to his wife at home and the chances
of war had gone against him.
The British force was 554 rifles in all, and they carried with
them three days' food and seventy rounds of ammunition
per man. It seemed that that would be sufficient to hold
Majuba Hill ; so strong, in fact, was the position that some
of the Boers advised their leader Joubert to retire. A council
of war was hurriedly summoned to discuss the new position ;
and for perhaps the first time in the history of councils of war,
the bolder course was determined on. It was decided to
storm Majuba Hill.
The decision seemed a foolhardy one, entirely out of keeping
with the Boer character, which if brave was cautious. But
the keen-eyed men beneath had discovered that the British
ft
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 433
force on the summit was not a large one ; picked shots had
volunteered to scale the height and take such cover as they
could : the chance of success, though small, was worth the risk.
The ascent began. As the volunteers started on their
difficult and perilous task, their comrades below maintained
a steady fire at the British. It was harmless, but it had the
effect of distracting their attention ; and slowly but yet
steadily the Boers crept up the hill.
Suddenly one party emerged unseen, close on an astonished
picket of the British. Taking careful aim, they fired, and
firing, killed their men. One of the rough tracks that led
from the Boer side of the hill to the summit, of whose existence
the British had been ignorant when they climbed Majuba
the night before, was now unguarded. Along this the Boers
advanced more quickly, and as they neared the summit they
discovered that the British had omitted to entrench their camp.
It was a fatal error. The Boers came on towards the
summit, pouring in a deadly fire ; a disgraceful panic, such
as will sometimes unnerve the best of troops, broke out
among the British. They saw that the position they had
thought impregnable was lost ; and like a flock of frightened
sheep, they broke and fled.
But Colley did not run. He stood steadily watching the
Boer advance ; and in those last dreadful moments of his
life he knew that his premonition of disaster had been true,
and all was lost. Standing straight up upon the summit he
awaited the end with outward calm ; a ball struck him full in
the forehead, and so he died.
Of Colley as a general there is little need to speak. His
precipitance and rashness, his mistakes and blunders, were
patent to the world. He had only to wait for reinforcements,
and Laing's Nek might have been avoided ; he had only to
have stayed in camp again, and Majuba need never have been
fought. He was doubtless a brave man, but he proved a poor
soldier in command.
VOL. vi. 2 E
434 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Yet when all is admitted against Colley that can be ad-
mitted, the Boer storming of Majuba Hill remains an amazing
feat of arms, an achievement of which any army might be
proud, a daring enterprise which should have ended once
for all the talk of cowardice which some British levelled at
the Boers, a piece of soldier-craft which should have made
the British understand this was no common enemy with whom
they fought. 1
Majuba was the last battle of the war. These petty
defeats they were little more and a plain warning that
The the Orange Free State might make common cause
Government w ^ n * ne Transvaal, were enough to dishearten
surrenders, the Imperial Government. It was decided that
the annexation which Gladstone had first condemned and
then confirmed should be annulled ; an armistice was ar-
ranged with the Boers, and an attempt was made to establish
a basis for a definite peace. A phrase was invented by Glad-
stone to deceive the people ; he declared that terms had been
arranged to save the nation from sheer blood-guiltiness ; but
the phrase did not deceive the British and the concession
did not delude the Boers. 2 The surrender seemed cowardly,
1 Yet the same charges of cowardice and incompetence were brought
seventeen years afterwards in the second Anglo- Boer war. Fitzpatrick,
in The Transvaal from Within, remarked that the Boer military reputa -
tion was the largest unpricked bubble in the world this before Colenso
and the Modder River. The British as a nation are far too ready to
impute cowardice to the enemy; it is perhaps a modest way of depre-
ciating the merits of their own victory.
2 In February 1881, the Transvaal issued a moving appeal to the
Orange Free State. ' Come and help us. Consider our cae. God
rules, and is with us. It is His will to unite us as a people, to make a
United South Africa, free from British authority. The future brightens
for us. His will be done.'
An honest or incautious member of the British Cabinet admitted
several years afterwards that it was the fear that the Free State might
join the Transvaal, and no fear of sheer blood-guiltiness, which deter-
mined the Imperial Government's action. The speaker was Lord
Kimberley, the place Sheffield, the date 1 899 ; and so perturbed did he
feel by his indiscretion that he asked the reporters present not to
publish that passage of his speech. The London reporters did not ;
but the local reporters, whom he forgot or who forgot his request,
published it in full.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 435
the excuse was hypocrisy ; the plain facts were that the Im-
perial Government had not anticipated war, that at the first
pinch of distress it had no stomach for more fighting, and
that the mere threat of one third-rate pastoral republic ally-
ing itself with another third-rate pastoral republic was enough
to bring a shaking Imperial Cabinet to its knees.
But it stooped ungracefully enough, and played the part
of the convicted thief who attempts to cheat his captors by
swallowing some of the spoils. It was at first proposed that
part of the Transvaal should be given back to the Boers, part
retained by the British. The Boers naturally objected ; and
the Royal Commission which was sent out from England to
determine the final terms of peace, knowing that the Im-
perial Government would not support its views by force, gave
way. Little but the pale shadow of a British suzerainty over
the foreign relations of the Transvaal survived the terms of
peace in 1881, and even that was modified three years later
by the London Convention of 1884. 1
1 Would the trouble have been avoided had it not been for Gladstone's
vacillation ? I doubt it. It is true that Kruger, the real leader of the
rebellion, became a member of the Transvaal Council under the British,
took British money for his services, and even asked for more which
was refused ; but he was an irreconcilable at heart, and he had not
that nice sense of honour which would have prevented some men from
accepting a living from the enemy while plotting a rebellion.
Gladstone's speeches out of office and his action in office had aggra-
vated and made impossible an already difficult situation ; bub the
original mistake was Carnarvon's misconception of the situation.
Shepstone's inaction made things worse ; Wolseley's blunders and
Lanyon's stupidity did not improve the situation ; but Gladstone's
speeches (and the encouragement given the Boers by his followers,
notably Courtney, who corresponded with Kruger) were the final cause.
It is nevertheless true that there were many signs of unrest before his
speeches, but no actual sign of rebellion.
But the bitterness on the Boer side was very great ; an example will
illustrate it clearly. During the war an English resident sent a letter
to his wife to relieve her anxiety, and prayed Joubert's aid to pass it
through. The letter was returned by Joubert with the following note
on a blank page : ' Why do you bear arms against us ? In this most
inequous (sic) war of Lanyon ? Don't ask us for favours as long as your
administrator is a fool.' It was not, of course, Lanyon's war at all, but
the folly of his administration cannot be denied.
The original of this letter is now in the library of the Royal Colonial
Institute.
436
The Transvaal had won ; and Paul Kruger, the man who
had played the leading part in the struggle for independence,
The Policy became the next President of the restored re-
ofPaui public. 1 He hated, and he had hated since his
Transvaal boyhood, the British Empire and the English
President, people : at a politic moment he could dissemble
his feelings, and disguise his contempt in terms of adulation ; 2
but it was his aim, and it remained his aim during the en-
suing sixteen eventful years during which he was President,
the first and last President of the restored republic, to block
the British road to the north which missionaries and traders
had opened, to build a solid Dutch Afrikander nation out of
the older settlers in Cape Colony and Natal, and so far to
reduce the strength of the British element in South Africa
as to compel the British Government in the end to withdraw
from the country altogether.
And at that time, after the fatal five years' blundering
which ended in the retrocession of the Transvaal, there
Tne seemed nothing impossible in Kruger's aim.
Afrikander Men who commit such mistakes and show such
nd, 1882. ^^11^^ p OUCV as the British Ministers had
done deserve to lose their Empire ; and Paul Kruger had
with him not only his own people of the Transvaal, but the
active sympathy of the Free State, and of large numbers of the
Cape Colony Dutch. In the year 1881, when the British
cause seemed hopeless in South Africa, a revival of Cape
Dutch nationalist feeling was clearly noticeable ; and in the
following year a remarkable organisation which had chosen
1 For Kruger's origin and early life, see bk. xxiv. ch. iii.
2 ' We do not wish to seek a quarrel,' wrote Kruger as head of the
provisional Boer Government on 12th February 1881, 'but cannot do
otherwise than shed our last drop of blood for our just rights, as every
Englishman would do. We know that the noble English nation, when
once truth and justice reach them, will stand on one side.' This in
public ; in private the Memoirs show a very different tone. But
the compliment nattered his correspondents of the anti-Imperial party
in England.
*
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 437
for its name the Afrikander Bond held its first congress at
Graaff Reynet, the historic centre of Cape Dutch independ-
ence since the proclamation of the short-lived republic of
1795. 1 Its programme was cautiously but clearly worded ;
and it declared that, ' While in itself acknowledging no single
form of government as the only suitable form, and while
acknowledging the form of government at present existing,
(the Bond) holds that the aim of our national development
must be a united South Africa under its own flag/ 2
This was evidently nothing more than passive obedience,
if indeed it was as much ; and passive obedience may easily
be transformed by circumstance to active dis- n a i ma
loyalty. Events less startling than Majuba, weak- at south
ness less criminal than that of Gladstone, would be independ-
sufficient to turn an organisation of this character ence -
openly on the side of rebellion ; and if the constitution and
the avowed object of the Bond were justly condemned as
veiled treason, the speeches of its leaders left no doubt what-
ever of its ultimate aim. The real founder of the Bond, du
Toit, a Cape Dutch clergyman who transferred to politics the
enthusiasm which was not permitted by the chilling creed of
his church, declared in a speech at Amsterdam that ' the South
African flag shall yet wave from Table Bay to the Zambesi,
be that end accomplished by blood or by ink. If blood it is
to be, we shall not lack the men to spill it ' ; and in the news-
paper which he conducted De Patriot where the nationalist
Afrikander policy was outlined, it was made clear that the
Dutch language, or rather the soft enfeebled dialect of Dutch
which was spoken at the Cape, was to displace the spreading
English tongue, that marriages and social intercourse between
the British and the Dutch were to be discountenanced, and the
1 See bk. xxiii. ch. iii,
2 Some good and several indifferent studies of the Afrikander ideal of
South Africa will be found in vol. cciii. of the pamphlets of the Royal
Colonial Institute, in Worsfold's Lord Milner's Work in South Africa,
and in more detail in Iwan-Miiller'a Lord Milner and South Africa,
438
independent republics of the Transvaal and the Orange to be
reverenced as the standard-bearers of the future. The real
barrier to South African federation was declared to be the British
flag, and from the Bond point of view the assertion was correct.
This sudden nationalist agitation, the unforeseen consequence
of the British surrender, was dangerous both from an imperial
and colonial aspect : from the latter, because it persuaded
the Dutch inhabitants of Cape Colony to put the interests
of the Transvaal before their own ; from the former, because
it worked ceaselessly to undermine the Empire from within.
In the first year of its existence the Bond showed its strength
by securing that Dutch as well as English should be spoken
in the Cape Parliament. There was nothing against the
change save that it was recommended by the Bond ; but
politicians soon discovered by other signs that a new force
had risen in Cape politics. While the Bond had not yet
power enough to obtain a majority or form a ministry of its
own, it had the power to keep the party that did its bidding
in office, or to turn a ministry out that refused its demands.
And there was the prospect that after a decade or so of steady
work by its enthusiastic supporters, it might yet hold the
power itself, not merely the balance of power. If that day
came, as seemed not unlikely, and if the principles of the
Bond were unchanged, as seemed even less unlikely, it would
be a bad day for British South Africa.
But that day did not come, and strong as the Bond was,
its power remained considerable but never overwhelming,
Its and its principles were quietly revised and moder-
Quaiified ated. The Cape Dutch are not by nature a
revolutionary people ; some of them had no great
grievance against the British, and refused to join the agitation ;
and many sympathised with Merriman, the brilliant Cape
English politician, who bluntly accused the Bond of stirring
up race-hatred an accusation whose truth could not be
denied. The attack told ; and by 1885 the professed, perhaps
439
the actual aim of the Bond had been changed at the instance
of Jan Hofmeyr, an able but enigmatic politician whose
growing influence was felt rather than seen throughout South
Africa. The anti-British character of the Bond was damped
down, its original profession of veiled independence expunged
from the articles of its constitution, and the enthusiastic
nationalist propaganda transformed into alliance with a
peaceful agricultural association, which worked for years
in close association and occasional harmony with Cecil
Rhodes. The nationalist Afrikander objective of the Bond
slumbered rather than died under the influence of Hofmeyr,
who had the acumen to see, what more hasty politicians had
not seen, that British policy in South Africa, however vacillat-
ing, would never vacillate to the extent of abandoning the
country altogether : but for several years it was the natural
tendency of the Bond as an essentially Cape Dutch league, to
thwart British expansion and to encourage Boer expansion
in South Africa ; and that, at a time when both Briton and
Boer were intent upon expansion, was an asset of no small
value to Paul Kruger. 1
To combat Kruger and the Afrikander Bond, and their
mutual ideal of South African national union founded on
racial exclusiveness and Boer isolation and D i SCOUrage .
independence, 2 the British had on their side mentofthe
nothing but the consciousness of defeat, of im-
perial blunders that seemed irreparable, of divided local
1 Some years later the excellent du Toit, the founder of this league,
whose vital principle was secession from the empire, became a convinced
Imperialist. A short personal experience of the Kruger Government in
Pretoria sufficed to change his views.
Strangely enough, although I have read any number of English
apologists for the Transvaal Government, I have never seen a reference
to this fact in their writings ; nor do they usually enlarge much on the
origin and aims of the Bond.
2 The Afrikander ideal worked in much the same fashion as the Czech
national ideal in Bohemia, and the Polish national ideal in Germany.
In each case the bitterness of the smaller nationality was carried into
social life ; in each case the dominance of the ruling people was to be
thrown off. But the Czechs had no Kruger, the Poles no Johannesburg.
440
interests between Cape Colony and Natal, divided commercial
interests between Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, and Durban
seemingly a hopeless prospect. Their soldiers had failed
in the war ; their Government had more than failed, it had
dishonourably failed, in its policy.
They did not know that in the young English diamond-
digger from Kimberley who took his seat in the Cape Parlia-
cecii ment in 1881, the year of Majuba, they had one
who would raise their prestige to a higher point
Politics, than it had ever reached before ; few recognised,
when Cecil Rhodes made his noteworthy declara-
tion in 1883 : ' I have my own views as to the future of South
Africa, and I believe in a United States of South Africa, but
as a portion of the British Empire ' that he had thrown
down a challenge to the man who had just become President
of the South African Republic, and whose steady aim it was
to drive British rule from the southern half of the continent
altogether.
But very quickly it was seen that these two men, Cecil
Rhodes and Paul Kruger, stood for the two contending
His Duel policies in South Africa : the policy of Kruger
with one of Dutch exclusiveness and Dutch Afrikander
rule ; the policy of Rhodes that expressed in his
own words, South African union under the British Empire,
and ' equal rights for every civilised man south of the Zam-
besi.' Between the two men and the two policies a long duel
now began which lasted twenty years, and ended only with
the death of the one and the defeat and exile of the other.
The two men were not unworthy of the fight or the in-
terests involved, and each had his own peculiar advantages
The two an( ^ disabilities in the coming struggle. Each
Men con- man was strong and dogged, each typical of his
masterful race ; each refused to accept defeat, and
returned to the fight with admirable pertinacity. In that
respect the struggle was an equal one ; in others it was not.
THE UNION OP SOUTH AFRICA 441
Paul Kruger had a solid people at his back, but no money ;
Rhodes had much money, but no popular support at the
start of his political career. Kruger was the head of his
government, with all the immense prestige of a Voortrekker
in the land the Voortrekkers had taken, and the added merit
of having saved his country from the British in 1881 ; Rhodes
was a mere private member at the Cape, hardly known among
the British, and likely to find himself opposed as soon as he
was known among the Dutch.
Kruger accused his English adversary of foul play ; 1 but he
himself fought doggedly, by fair means and foul for he was
too much in earnest to observe the bonds of treaties when
they conflicted with his aims to gain his ends ; no man ever
fought better. It was his misfortune that the cause he repre-
sented was a dying one, and it was the supreme tragedy of his
life that he lived to see it dead. It was not indeed the cause
of liberty that was dying that cause can never die while
men are men but the cause of isolation, and with it the in-
dependent Boer dominion in South Africa. Certainly it was
through no special virtue of the British that they won, or
fault of the Boers that they lost, in the long fight which lay
ahead ; it was simply that the British represented the future,
and the Boers clung to the past. A combination of economic
circumstances and the genius of one Englishman destroyed
Paul Kruger's dream ; but when he became President in
1883 those circumstances were unforeseen and the English-
man was unknown. 2
1 Kruger says in his Memoirs that the murder of Grobler, his emissary
to Lo Bengula (bk. xxiv. ch. iv. ), was instigated by Rhodes and his
clique. But he brings no evidence to support the charge ; nor has any-
body ever done so. The charge may be dismissed as unfounded ; it was
not by such means that Rhodes gained his ends.
2 A curious but not inexact parallel might be drawn between the
contest of Spaniards and English in North America, and that of Dutch
and English in South Africa. In both cases the former were the first
European inhabitants of an undeveloped land. In both cases they
came in contact with aboriginal savages, who lost the territories they
were incapable of using. In both cases the Spaniards and Dutch
442 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
The first round of the fight was fought out over the vital
question of expansion. The limits of the Transvaal Republic
The Fight ^ad cer t am ly been defined by the revised Con-
fer Land, vention of 1884, but that made no difference to
Paul Kruger, who had no respect for a treaty when
it conflicted with his desires, and no belief that the British
would be more exacting in the future than the past. At first
he was successful. The Transvaal incorporated part of
Zululand in its territories under the title of the New Republic
in 1884 ; it was already watching an opportunity of expan-
sion in Swaziland which might give it an outlet to the sea,
and the full independence which it sought ; and a movement
among the burghers to trek into the fertile pastures of Mashona-
land, already known as a great hunting-ground, had been
afoot in 1879. The scheme was abandoned or postponed
when the republic was restored by Britain, but the belief
that the ultimate destiny of the Transvaal lay in expansion
acquired great possessions ; and despite fundamental differences of
national character, both lived a life of arcadian simplicity and retire-
ment, caring little for refinements or culture of any kind. In both
cases, too, they formed an agricultural or pastoral community, as
opposed to the mercantile and trading interests which developed in
later times. And in both cases, again, the latter interests were con-
trolled by men of English stock, who gradually beat down all resistance.
These were at first a feeble folk, whose influence was confined to a
small area along the coast ; but they extended their power until they
possessed the whole. The Spaniards were driven even from their last
stronghold in California by the restless Yankee. The Boers lost piece
by piece their governing power in South Africa. And in both cases
the synthesis that unified the two lands was built on an English
basis.
The parallel must not be pressed too far, since the Boers, with the old
tenacity of the race that had been so splendidly shown in Holland,
retained much of their influence under British rule ; while the control
of the Spaniards faded utterly away, and is now remembered in the West
only by such names as San Francisco and Los Angeles, and a few chance
relics that have survived the English invasion.
But the reason was the same in both cases. The purely agricultural
and pastoral communities represented the older life that is giving v. ay
everywhere before the new and more complex order of civilisation ; Boers
and Spaniards alike belonged to an era that is past. And both the
Yankees in North America and the British in Soutli Africa were the
progenitors of the modern life ; of the modern life, it must be confessed,
sometimes in its rawest and least attractive aspect. . . ,
in
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 443
to the north remained firm ; for the moment, however, Kruger
only attempted to extend his authority over Bechuanaland,
which would have cut the British off entirely from the interior.
The British, who saw the Transvaal Boers doing what
they had so often done themselves, begrudged them thek
spreading territories ; and Rhodes now came into contact
with Kruger, and won his first victory. Bechuanaland was
annexed to the British Empire in 1885.
The Boer President was foiled in his primary aim of extend-
ing the republic eastwards as far as the new German territory
of South- West Africa ; 1 and the struggle shifted further
north. The idea of Boer expansion over Matabililand and
Mashonaland, which had never been forgotten at Pretoria, 2 was
now revived ; but here again Rhodes won the day, and the
great colony of Rhodesia had by 1890 cut the Boers off from
the countries which they had believed their rightful heritage.
In the seven years' struggle for the possession of the north
the Englishman had won. ' Rhodes/ said Kruger to his
opponent once, ' you are putting a ring fence success of
round me, and that is why I am fighting you/ 3 the Britisn -
And again he burst out in angry sorrow to a young English
1 Bk. xxiv. ch. iv.
2 When the British were negotiating with Lo Bengula for the mineral
rights of his country, they found a letter from Joubert to the Matabili
king, dated 9th March 1882, which contained clear evidence of the Boer
interest in that country, and their contempt for the British after the
surrender at Majuba. ' The English took away our country, or, as they
say, annexed it. We then talked nicely for four years, and begged for
our country. But no ; when an Englishman once has your property in
his hand, then is he like a monkey that has its hands full of pumpkin-
seeds if you don't beat him to death, he will never let go and then
all our nice talk for four years did not help us at all. Then the English
commenced to arrest us because we were dissatisfied, and that caused
the shooting and the fighting. Then the English first found it would be
better to give us back our country. Now they are gone, and our
country is free, and we will now once more live in friendship with
Lo Bengula, as we lived in friendship with Mosilikatsi. '
The Boers had certainly lived in friendship with Mosilikatsi after
they had fought him and expelled him from the Transvaal country.
Probably Lo Bengula knew how much faith to place in these pro-
fessions.
3 Speech by Cecil Rhodes, 25th October 1898.
444
journalist who interviewed him, ' What is the use of talking ?
I am shut in shut in for ever/ 1
It was true. Kruger had lost the first great round of the
fight ; the interior of South Africa was to be British, and the
direct road to the sea through Swaziland was also lost. But
Kruger's loss was more than this. Within a few years many
of his burghers had gone up into Mashonaland despite a
pathetic appeal by Joubert that they should not desert their
own sacred territories which their fathers had won from
savagery, and they themselves had defended from the British ;
by 1898 Rhodes found a thousand Transvaal Boers, or one in
eighteen of the male citizens of the republic, had renounced
their President and the republic and crossed the border into
British territory. ' Why do they not return ? ' asked Rhodes,
and he answered his own question. ' Because I have the
sweet veld, and (in the Transvaal) they had the sour veld.
I have got President Kruger's burghers, and I am going to
keep them. I have got one-eighteenth of his burghers, and
if he does not look out I shall have half of them before long/ 2
But if Kruger's aims had been foiled in the north, and the
Transvaal Republic could no longer reach to the Zambesi
The and beyond, a great economic revolution had in
Transvaal the meantime enormously strengthened Kruger's
1 es ' position in his own proper territories. The
Witwatersrand goldfield had been discovered in 1885, and
proved extraordinarily wealthy ; Johannesburg was founded,
and in a few months far outgrew Pretoria ; and the whole
world of mammon-hunters suddenly seemed to flock towards
the Transvaal. 3 The invasion was unwelcome to the Boers,
whose cherished isolation was invaded, and who saw their
primitive pastoral way of life inevitably yielding place to
commerce and finance and the complex machinery of indus-
1 Cook's Garrett.
2 Speech by Cecil Rhodes, 3rd August 1898.
3 Bk. xxiv. ch. iii.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 445
trialism ; 1 but it was not altogether unwelcome to Paul
Kruger. There was no longer any question of poverty at
Pretoria when such wealth was at Johannesburg ; and the
Transvaal Treasury, which had been forced to suspend its
payments temporarily in 1885, was soon full to overflowing.
The Boers were ever bad taxpayers, but the new population
of the Rand were a very milch-cow to the Government.
The revenue of the republic, which had been no more than
161,596 in 1884, rose suddenly three years later to 637,749.
In that year the Rand had just been proclaimed The New
a goldfield. The following year, 1888, it had ^* h
risen again to 884,440 ; by 1889 it was 1,577,445 ; Republic,
by 1894 it had reached 2,247,728 ; by 1896 it was 3,912,095 ;
and by 1899 it touched 4,087,852. 2 By far the greatest part
of this new taxation was raised from the industry of the new
alien population of the Rand.
But this invasion of the Transvaal by the Uitlanders, from
being a source of wealth, quickly became a source of danger
to the republic. It was like one of those powerful Influence
medicines which, taken in small doses, acts as a of the New
tonic, but all the time the medicine is a poison, p P ulation -
and if too much is taken the result is fatal. So it was now
with the Transvaal. The Boer population of the republic
was not very large, some eighteen thousand burghers and their
families in all ; it was soon equalled, and in time outnumbered
by the alien immigrants or Uitlanders outlanders, as they
were known in the republic. It is true that these latter were
1 Kruger relates in his Memoirs that a Transvaal burgher told
Joubert with joy of a new gold-reef being discovered. ' Instead of
rejoicing you would do better to weep,' said the wise old Boer in
rebuke, ' for this gold will cause our country to be soaked in blood.' A
true prophecy.
Joubert's remark was an unconscious paraphrase of the great
English poet's line, ' War seldom enters, save where wealth allures.'
2 There had been a temporary setback in 1891, the year after the Baring
Crisis in London. But ten years before a financial crisis in Europe
would not have touched the Transvaal. That fact is eloquent of its lost
isolation from the world.
446 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
men of every nationality, and that numbers of them had no
interest in politics or any interest at all beyond finance, while
the old Boer guard on which Kruger relied was a united people
of strong national instincts, which sank all internal differences
in the presence of the foreigner. But the Uitlanders increased ;
and in the very years when their numbers were growing most
rapidly, the Boers began to emigrate to the new British
dominions north of the Limpopo.
These two things weakened Kruger at both ends ; he saw
his own people going over to the foreigner, his own land
invaded by the foreigner. Not the most autocratic sovereign
could long maintain his power unchecked in such changing
circumstances ; for the time was clearly coming, and coming
quickly, when the foreigners who had obtained great financial
power would demand some measure of political power, 1 and
the diminished Boers would be unable to refuse them. True
though it was to a large extent that most Englishmen went
to Johannesburg to ' make their pile and clear/ 2 the fact
remained that many of them had established their homes in
the country, and were prepared to stay there. Some were
of course unworthy immigrants, the very scum of humanity,
which always floats towards a goldfield ; but the bulk were
law-abiding people. 3 And sooner or later these people would
demand a share in the government of the country which their
taxes had so large a share in maintaining.
Clearly a crisis lay ahead. But how to meet it ? Piet
Joubert, whose past record vouched his patriotism he had
stood up to Bartle Frere with a demand of full independence
for the Transvaal realised the difficulty of refusing all
1 Kruger might have read with profit Macaulay's Essay on the Civil
Disabilities of the Jews.
2 Garrett.
3 Kruger's own words in his Memoirs.
General Butler, the British Commander in Cape Colony, whose
sympathies with the Boers were extreme, described Johannesburg as
' Monte Carlo superimposed on Sodom and Gomorrah ' a description
which may fitly be compared with Kruger's more restrained account.
.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 447
political privileges to the Uitlanders at the time when the
Boers were leaving their country for British territory. He
appealed to the burghers to remain, but the appeal Dilemma
fell on deaf ears, for the emigrants hungered after of the
the sweet veldt of Rhodesia. And he favoured Re P ubllc -
some measure of reform ; many of the younger generation
of the Boers, some of whom had been educated in Europe,
and who had sloughed the prejudices of their fathers, were
with him in his views. But against him was a stronger man :
Paul Kruger, as immovable still to reform as fifteen years
before, when Burgers had advocated change, was more
than a match for the Boer reformers and the Uitlanders
together. The solid strength of the President, with its appeal
to the backveldt Boers, carried the day.
' Perhaps I should have been wiser had I shown more
consideration for the feelings of the foreigners/ said Kruger
years afterwards in exile, 1 taught by sorrow and defeat ; but
at the time he had no thought of yielding.
Yet the Transvaal was indeed in a serious difficulty, and
rapidly drifting towards a situation which was becoming
impossible. To have given some measure of political rights
to the new alien population would have led to an immediate
agitation for more ; to have given more would have shifted
the old basis of the State, and rendered the Boers of no
account in their own proper country. On the other hand, to
give nothing was clearly the direct road to a revolution by
force.
Faced with this dilemma, ' I never ceased thinking/ said
Kruger, ' how I could meet the wishes of the new population
for representation, without injuring the republic or pre-
judicing the older burghers/ 2 There is no reason to dis-
believe him. But the thing simply could not be done : the
interests of the new population and the older burghers could
1 Kruger' s Memoirs.
2 Ibid.
448 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
not be reconciled. 1 Within five years a state within a state
had sprung up in the Transvaal ; and the new population
was more numerous than the old.
The attempt was made, and Kruger put forward a scheme
for a second Volksraad, a purely consultative body, with local
powers for the Rand, which was intended to represent the
Uitlanders. It was not unkindly received by the British
Government in London, but the attempt proved the im-
possibility. The second Volksraad certainly came into
existence, but it had no real authority, and neither Kruger
nor the older burghers would give it any : and the great
population on the Rand would have no sham authority.
The root of the difficulty, said an English writer with
much force some years afterwards, was the ' growing need of
the economic rulers to become political rulers.' 2 It is no
shame to Kruger or his people that they would not resign
their power to the foreigner ; nor any to the British who
insisted on equal rights. ' All the trouble in the Transvaal/
said Rhodes bluntly in 1898, ' is due to the fact that English-
men are treated as slaves there, and they won't have it. The
essence of Englishmen is that they will be a self-governing
state, and they will go on agitating until they get their rights.
We are the most uncomfortable people in the world we will
insist on our rights, and will never stop until we get them.
That is the very essence and characteristic of our nation.' 3
1 This attitude of exclusiveness by the older settlers had several
parallels in British colonial annals. The Puritans of Massachusetts
would not accept as fellow-citizens the godless cavaliers of England
(vol. i. bk. iv. ch. i.), and something like Kruger's attitude, on a smaller
scale, was assumed by the Family Compact in Ontario towards the new
English immigrants (vol. iii. bk. xi. ch. iv.). In neither of these cases
was the issue complicated, as it was in South Africa, by a question of
race ; but in Ontario, as in the Transvaal, there was a rebellion.
2 Contemporary Review, 1900.
3 Speech by Cecil Rhodes, 21st April 1898. The words might have
been spoken by Cromwell, who declared that Spain offered ' no reason
why there should not be liberty given to your people. We thought,
being denied just things we thought it our duty to get that by the
sword which was not to be had otherwise. And this hath been the
spirit of Englishmen.' The whole passage is in vol. i. bk. ii. ch. iii.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 449
It was the simple truth, from the British point of view, but
a truth that Kruger could never admit. ' You see that flag/
said the President once as he pointed to the republican emblem
over the government buildings ; ' if I grant the franchise I
may as well pull it down/ That also was the simple truth,
from Kruger 's point of view.
Kruger's unyielding attitude solidified the Uitlanders. At
first these newcomers had had no political organisation, not
even a common political consciousness ; the hunt Tfce
for wealth absorbed all their energies. But as Agitation
Johannesburg became more of a town and less 1892-5.
of a camp, the disabilities of the Uitlanders showed more
clearly. Political impotence combined with heavy taxation
made a substantial and increasing grievance, and the grievance
made for cohesion.
At the start the agitation which afterwards became so
formidable was nothing more than a constitutional movement
for reform. The Transvaal National Union that was estab-
lished in 1892 by Charles Leonard, a solicitor from Cape Colony
who had settled in Johannesburg, to urge the representation
of the Uitlanders in the Volksraad at Pretoria, was not a very
powerful organisation : it was supported by the professional
men of the Rand, doctors, lawyers, and engineers, but the
large floating population held aloof, the disreputable element
was not wanted by the Union and did not want the Union ;
and the capitab'sts took no interest in the thing at all. It
was noticed that the non-British element took no share in
the activities of the Union, and Kruger grew more contemp-
tuous and unyielding to the British Uitlanders. They in-
sulted him in the press, even in person 1 on the rare occasions
1 One riotous individual waved a Union Jack over the old President's
head as he rode in his carriage through Johannesburg ; and there were
other similar incidents. These things were made the most of by those
who supported the Transvaal in England ; they forgot that Kruger in
his turn had taunted the Uiblanders with their impotence. ' What is
the use of protesting,' he said one day, ' I have the guns, and you have
not ' a cogent but dangerous argument.
VOL. VI, 2 F
450 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
when he visited Johannesburg ; but he had no belief that these
people would rebel, and others were of the same opinion. 1
His attitude towards them hardened ; all concessions were
refused, and when a deputation from the Union met him to
discuss reform on 1st September 1892, he answered harshly,
' Go back and tell your people I shall never give them any-
thing, and now let the storm burst/
But no storm burst. The Uitlanders were not yet strong
enough, and although a final barrier was now put upon their
Corruption representation in the Volksraad, 2 the Johannes-
of the burg capitalists, without whom the agitation could
Govern- have no driving force, would probably not have
ment. joined the Transvaal National Union had they
not also suffered. For the Transvaal Government was not
only autocratic ; it was corrupt. Contracts were given to
the President's friends, monopolies sold to his supporters ; the
members of the Volksraad, who enjoyed his financial favours,
1 The Uitlanders are ' not the stuff of which revolutionaries are made '
Garrett in 1890. It was true then, but five years more made some
difference, although the 1895 revolution did not come off.
2 The franchise had been modified backwards. Before 1877 one
year's residence in the Transvaal, the payment of 25, and the taking
of an oath of allegiance made an alien immigrant a burgher of the
republic. At the Convention of 1881 Kruger promised there should
be no difference of rights between Boer burghers and the British
immigrants who became naturalised ; but in 1882 the period of residence
required before papers of naturalisation could be taken out was increased
to five years, and this was gradually increased to twelve years in ] 889,
and subsequently made fourteen years. Even then it was conditional on
the majority of burghers in the constituency signifying their desire in
writing that the alien should be naturalised and obtain the vote
a provision which effectively made the enfranchisement of the Uitlander
impossible.
Not all the Boers agreed with Kruger in these changes. ' Now
our country is gone,' said Gert de Jager, as one of those reforms
backward was made, ' nothing can settle this but fighting, and there
is only one end to the fight. Kruger and his Hollanders have taken
away our independence more surely than ever Shepstone did.' A true
saying.
Another grievance which pressed hardly on the reputable Uitlanders,
was the fact that 63,000 was raised annually for education (I take the
figures for 1895), mostly from the Uitlanders, and of this only 650 was
spent on schools for the Uitlanders' children.
451
became his tools. 1 The civil service of the Transvaal was
recruited, not from the burghers of the Cape Dutch but from
the Netherlands, and the young Hollanders, hated by Boer
and Uitlander alike, made for themselves a comfortable and
not unprofitable home in the republic. These things dimin-
ished Kruger's popularity with his own people, and at the
presidential election of 1893 it was thought that his rival
Joubert had a majority of votes. But the obedient Volks-
raad did its master's bidding. One of Joubert's chief sup-
porters was unseated, several of the votes cast for him were
disallowed, and in the end Kruger was declared elected by the
small majority of 7911 to 7246.
Had Joubert been made President the coming crisis might
have been averted, for he made no secret of his sympathy
with the Uitlanders ; but with the return of Kruger it was
clear there was no hope for constitutional reform. The Uit-
landers might agitate and agitate, but nothing would move
the unyielding President ; he was determined to have every-
thing and to give nothing.
But early in 1895 a crisis arose in a different quarter.
Steadily pursuing his settled policy of isolation, Kruger had
refused to co-operate with Cape Colony in the The crisis
building of a through railway to the south until Ofl8 9 5 -
1892, when it became impossible to refuse any longer ; his
own Delagoa Bay Railway, opened in 1895 and at once heavily
advantaged by a high tariff on Cape-imported goods, diverted
1 One notorious scandal out of several may be instanced. In 1890 a
concession was given to Barend Vorster, a member of the First Volksraad,
to build the Selati Railway, the Government guaranteeing at 4 per cent,
the share capital and debentures.. But the concessionaries were allowed
to account the 100 debentures at 70, the substantial difference going
into their pockets. It was arranged also with a contractor to build 200
miles of railway at 9600 per mile ; the following day the same contract
was sub-let at 7002 per mile. It was discovered afterwards that the
company had bribed 21 out of 26 members of the First Volksraad,
including the Vice-President of the republic, to give it the contract.
Kruger defended the affair on the ground that there was no harm in
members of the Volksraad receiving presents.
452 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS
the bulk of the Transvaal traffic from the British colony ;
a tariff war broke out, and when the produce from the Cape
was sent up-country, Kruger closed the drifts through which
it was transported into the Transvaal. This was too much
for the British Government, which in this matter at least had
the support of the whole Dutch agricultural community in
Cape Colony : an ultimatum was sent threatening war in
twenty-four hours if the drifts were not reopened to Cape
produce ; and Kruger hastened to withdraw.
His deference to force taught the Uitlanders a dangerous
lesson. To force alone would the President give way, and
to force they determined to appeal, since peaceful agitation
failed. From that time the storm which he had invoked
three years before began to gather.
Some of the capitalists of the Rand had now come in, and
joined the agitation they had formerly discountenanced :
The but they had joined at first, not so much to gain
conspiracy * ne franchise, 1 as to work for a more honest
1895. government for the Transvaal as a whole. That
hope, however, had vanished since the defeat of Joubert as
candidate for the Presidency ; a few months convinced the
capitalists that the other Uitlanders were right, and that
reform could only come through the franchise ; a few months
more showed them that the franchise could never be obtained
by peaceful means ; still a few months more, and they saw
that Kruger had yielded to force over the crisis of the drifts.
The conclusion was obvious.
From that time the road was clear, and the path towards
rebellion quick. The leaders of the Transvaal National
Union were given funds by their new and wealthy supporters, 2
1 In 1894 Lionel Phillips, one of the great capitalists of the Rand, and
a partner in Ecksteins, the dominant financial house of Johannesburg,
remarked in a private letter that not many of the Uitlanders cared a fig
for the franchise, the real trouble being over the unconcealed enmity of
the Pretoria Government to the Johannesburg aliens.
2 Rhodes gave over 60,000, and others subscribed about a quarter of
a million sterling.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 453
some part of which was spent on arms ; and by the middle of
1895 they had secured an adherent from outside, whose assist-
ance far outweighed all others. Cecil Rhodes, the old oppon-
ent of President Kniger, now Chairman of the Chartered
Company and Prime Minister of Cape Colony, was supporting
the Uitlanders of the Rand and advising an armed rising
within the republic.
His support was enough to show the hopelessness of peace-
ful agitation, for Rhodes was not a man to appeal to force
unless he thought force the only means. But once he was
convinced that nothing else would serve, he was not the
man to delay the use of force ; and a conspiracy was now
set on foot between Rhodes at the Cape, Charles Leonard,
Chairman of the Transvaal National Union, and Lionel
Phillips, Chairman of the Witwatersrand Chamber of Mines.
It was arranged that the Uitlanders should rise in revolt,
seize the arsenal at Pretoria which was known to be weakly
defended and its ammunition, retire on Johannesburg, and
hold that city against the Boers until the British High
Commissioner should intervene. So much for the Uitlander
rising ; but it was also arranged that Dr. Jameson, who was
now Administrator of Rhodesia, should station himself with
a considerable force upon the Transvaal frontier, and that
he should come to the assistance of the rebels if they should
send him word they needed aid. To this end Jameson re-
ceived an undated letter from the leaders of the movement
in Johannesburg inviting him to invade the Transvaal, which
it was understood was only to be used when confirmed directly
at a later date ; and Colonel Frank Rhodes, an elder brother
of Cecil Rhodes, visited Johannesburg to hurry on the pre-
parations.
The date of the combined raid and rebellion was provision-
ally fixed for 28th December 1895, and if all went well it
might have happened that the Transvaal Government would
have been surprised and forced into granting the Uitlanders'
454 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
desires, if not actually overthrown. But all did not go well ;
never did conspirators muddle away then 1 chances in worse
fashion.
A week before the rising was planned a curious difficulty
arose. Rhodes and Jameson had understood that the rebels
The Con anc ^ tne raiders were to raise the British flag ;
spirators but for this many of the expectant rebels had no
disagree, particular desire. They wished for the franchise
Bebeiiion and good government in the Transvaal, but they
16 ' had hardly contemplated that it should be de-
clared a British colony and it was more than doubtful if
the Imperial Government, which knew nothing of the con-
spiracy, would have recognised the proceeding. On this
matter, therefore, Rhodes, who was all for quick decisive
movement, gave way ; but he met with another disappoint-
ment. The Uitlanders had miscalculated their strength and
the time required to complete the conspiracy, they had little
or no organisation, some hung back at the last moment,
many wished to postpone the rising or forgo it altogether ;
the whole thing seemed to be fizzling out, remarked Rhodes,
like a damp squib.
And at that moment Jameson on the frontier, who had re-
ceived no invitation to do his share in the business from those
who were unready at the last moment to do their own share,
started in to invade the Transvaal and succour Johannesburg
in the historic phrase used by Rhodes, he ' took the bit in
his teeth and bolted.'
The heads of the republic were now aware that rebellion
was afoot in Johannesburg ; they knew, too, that assistance
Kruger would be secured to the rebels by an armed in-
temporises vasion from without. But Kruger was too old
Apparent a nan ^ a * South African politics, and too ex-
Conciiia- perienced a rebel and raider himself, to discount
the possibility of a successful rebellion and raid in
combination ; he was likewise too shrewd a statesman to
THE UNION OP SOUTH AFRICA 455
leave the crisis to ripen, and he acted promptly when he heard
that Jameson had started for Johannesburg. Negotiations
were opened with the reformers who were so nearly rebels,
the Government professed unusual complaisance towards the
alien agitators, and the Johannesburg Reform Committee
were officially informed that the British High Commissioner
was coming to the Transvaal to discuss the situation, that
no hostile step would be taken against the Uitlanders pending
his arrival, providing they took no hostile step against the
Government, and that the President would earnestly consider
grievances.
By these clever tactics, and a promise which committed
him to nothing, Kruger averted, or at least postponed the
rebellion : the danger was diminished by half. The British
Uitlanders could not well refuse to accept the terms : clearly
a rebellion was impossible when the highest representative
of British authority in South Africa had himself taken the
troubles of the Uitlanders in hand. So ended, before it had
begun, the rising of the Rand.
The Johannesburgers were too good financiers to be good
revolutionaries, and in truth they muddled their chances.
They changed the date of the rising more than once ; they
changed their plans and methods of procedure ; they were in
two minds as to the flag they should raise for one party
merely wished to reform the republic, another clearly wished
for British rule and openly divided as to the wisdom of asking
Jameson's assistance on the frontier. Almost at the last
moment the suggestion was made, and largely supported,
that the entire project should be postponed and remodelled ;
but by that time Jameson had started across the frontier,
Johannesburg was in a panic, and Kruger had his chance.
After the event charges of cowardice were flung against the
Uitlanders, and not without effect. For they had secured
their safety not their political aims, as the future was to
show but not the safety of their ally, whom they had tacitly
456 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
disowned as he was on his way to aid in their rebellion. They
were acquitted indeed of poltroonery by Rhodes, who held
that the reformers ' were not cowards ; they were rushed/
The verdict was sound : Johannesburg was rushed, first by
Jameson's haste and then by Kruger's tactics. But it is not
of such stuff that revolutions are made ; it was not in this
way that the Boers had rebelled against the British in 1880.
Meanwhile Jameson had been waiting on the frontier, and
he had become tired of waiting. The conspiracy seemed to
The be hanging fire, and Jameson decided to push
S eS 29th tllin g s to an issue - On Sun< iay, 29th December
December 1895, at about three in the afternoon, the force
1895. o f some eight hundred men which he had collected
was paraded at Pitsani, the conditional letter of invitation
read, 1 and the announcement made that they were to start
at once for Johannesburg. A number of the troops asked if
they were fighting under the Queen's orders, and the am-
biguous answer was returned that they were fighting to
maintain the supremacy of the British flag in South Africa.
On this many refused to join the expedition, and the total
force that set out on the Jameson Raid into the Transvaal
was not more than 480 men, 350 of whom were from
the Chartered Company's forces, the remainder from the
Bechuanaland Border Police.
If this fell far below the original estimate of two thousand,
it was nevertheless a formidable force, and it might con-
ceivably have been successful had it been supported from
Johannesburg. The troops were well mounted and armed,
1 No actual letter was sent, as had been arranged was to be done
before the invasion was finally decided. When Jameson was sub-
sequently questioned on this point, he replied that he had received so
many contradictory messages from the Uitlanders that he thought
it better to make up their minds for them. (Wilson, South African
Memories. )
There is no doubt that the project strongly appealed to him, and he
was loath to abandon it. The idea is said to have been suggested to him
by reading a Life of Clive ; but his own success in the Matabili War also
had some influence (bk. xxiv. ch. v.).
t
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 457
taking with them 8 Maxims, 2 seven-pound and 1 twelve-
pound gun ; but, as a rapid march over the 170 miles to
Johannesburg was essential to the revolution, no other heavy
equipment was provided, and food was carried for one day
only.
The pace was extraordinarily quick, half-hour rests being
permitted every twenty miles to refresh the horses and the
men, and this was maintained without a stop from Sunday
afternoon through Sunday night, the whole of Monday and
Monday night, and Tuesday. It was necessary that the
force should reach Johannesburg before resistance could be
organised ; but it happened that the excessive fatigue which
the speed entailed told against the raiders in the end.
On Tuesday as they marched a warning was received from
the British High Commissioner, ordering their return to
British territory. It was ignored. On the following day
a severe action was fought with the Boers outside Krugers-
dorp. The defenders had been hastily summoned to resist
the raiders, but they were fresh, and although they were heavily
damaged by Jameson's artillery, the advantage rested with
the Boers.
The raiders took up another position on higher ground for
the night, and the following morning they attempted to reach
Johannesburg by a circuitous road. Had they pushed
straight ahead during the night they might have arrived in
safety, but it appears that the troopers and their horses were
too exhausted for the work ; they did not know the road,
and the guide whom they had expected from Johannesburg
had not arrived. On the following morning they were
guided, by an agent who is alleged to have been an accom-
plice of the Boers, eight miles south to Doornkop ; and here
a large commando of Boers had assembled in the night and
was now blocking the way to Johannesburg. They were
more than double the number of the raiders, they were heavily
armed and provided with artillery, and they had taken up a
458 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
strong position behind a ridge of rocks, whereas the invaders
had to advance along an open grassy slope where concealment
was impossible.
A desperate effort was made by Jameson to force the
position, but it was hopeless. Quick as the invasion had
its Failure been, the defence was even quicker ; and after a
let January short engagement in which some twenty men
were killed, the white flag was hoisted by the
British. A promise to surrender, provided a safe conduct
out of the country was guaranteed to every member of the
force, was sent by Sir John Willoughby ; and to this the
following reply was returned :
' I acknowledge your letter. The answer is that, if you will
undertake to pay the expense which you have caused the South
African .Republic, and if you will surrender with your arms, then
1 shall spare the lives of you and yours. P. A. CRONJE,
Commandant, Potchefstroom.'
The guarantee was absolute : but the raid as well as the
revolution had failed. Over-haste and recklessness on the
one side, procrastination and infirmity of purpose on the
other, had wrecked the conspiracy : the republic was saved.
How near it had been to disaster may be judged from the
hurried truce with the rebels and the extraordinarily generous
terms granted to the raiders : the Transvaal Government
was glad to be quit of the crisis at any cost. 1
1 The facts relating to the history of the raid, so far as they were
ascertained, and the abortive Johannesburg plot, are in the British
Blue-Books 165 (1897) and C. 1830 (1897). Fitzgerald's Transvaal from
Within is a good account, and there is some information in Fort's Life of
Jameson.
It has been constantly stated that many salient facts have been with-
held ; but Michell, an honest man in a position to know, in his Life of
Rhodes, denies this. There is some confusion and discrepancy in the
various accounts ; not more, however, than in most similar movements.
A number of pamphlets, both approving and condemning the raid, were
printed in South Africa. Few are worth notice. The title of one,
Jameson's Heroic Charge, a Complete Vindication, sufficiently indicates
its character ; another, called Puppets on Show ; Enylcmd's Dilemma
and the Boers' Mistakes, by an independent American, characterised the
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 459
Ethically the raid was entirely indefensible, no more to
be condoned or justified than the attempt by Kruger to
annex Bechuanaland in defiance of the Convention The Raid
with the British, 1 or the raid which the President indefens-
had led into the Orange Free State many years
before. But the abstract doctrines of political ethics were
somewhat scantily observed in South Africa in these years ;
the real condemnation passed upon the raid was not that it
was wrong and therefore unsuccessful, but that it was un-
successful and therefore wrong. The Jameson Raid, in short,
was a political blunder of the first magnitude. It transferred
the grievance to the other side without improving the position
of the Uitlanders ; it gave a handle to the Boers, and fur-
nished them with an argument before the world. More than
that, it broke for a time at least the power of the two
leading Britons in South Africa. Rhodes was bluntly told
that his career was ended ; Jameson was openly reviled for
his attempt by the Dutch, 2 and none too well received by the
British for his failure.
It was true that the over-haste of Jameson had ruined
whatever chance, and it was not a great one, the mild revolu-
tionaries might have had ; but there was no reproach from
affair as ' the dismal smash of a political and financial Punch and Judy
show,' and remarks that Rhodes was 'pushing, active, intriguing, pug-
nacious ; a great man, but Satan is great in his way.'
The English Liberal press strongly condemned the raid ; the Unionist
press with some exceptions upheld it. I remember an old journalist,
who in younger days had served his country as a soldier in India, told
me that he nearly quarrelled with his editor on this matter. The
editor was bent on supporting Jameson; the other journalist pointed
out that for any subject of the Queen to levy private war on a country
with whom Britain was at peace was an act of rebellion, and as a soldier
he could not argue on Jameson's behalf.
The English poet laureate published some verses applauding the
raiders ; a judicious public opinion generally held that this was their
final condemnation.
1 Bk. xxiv. ch. iv.
2 I well remember that a Dutch friend of mine, whose brother was a
farmer in the Transvaal at this time, told me some years afterwards
that the Boers had privately threatened to kill Jameson if the oppor-
tunity offered.
460 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
Rhodes, whose splendid loyalty to his friends was never better
seen than now. If he could no longer say, as he had said in
the pioneer days of the north, that ' Jameson never makes
a mistake/ 1 he could defend the best-loved of his comrades
against the critics of Cape Town with a valiant persistence.
' Jameson at any rate tried to do something/ he burst out
angrily ; ' all you down here do nothing at all, except jabber,
jabber, jabber/ 2
But it was nevertheless a time of cruel anxiety to Rhodes.
For five nights after the raid he slept not a wink, and his
servant told how ' the Baas walks up and down his bedroom,
which is locked, at all times of the night.' 3 The whole scheme
had miscarried, and for the first time in the long duel between
the two men Kruger had beaten Rhodes ; many old associates
and fair-weather colleagues quickly turned their backs upon
him, and the beaten statesman cried, ' Now that I am down
I shall see who are my real friends/ 4
Officially at least his friends and those of his associates
were few. If the British community at the Cape applauded
Britain Rhodes and Jameson, and the British at home
punishes generally did not condemn his action, more re-
Raiders. o ffi c i a i circles were bound to mark their
displeasure. Jameson and the chief participants in the raid
were handed over by the Transvaal to the British Govern-
ment, tried in London, and sentenced to imprisonment ; 5
Rhodes was stripped of almost all his honours. He
1 Fuller's Cecil Rhodes. An anecdote will best show how great was
the affection of Rhodes for Jameson. The beautiful house at Groote
Schuur was burnt down ; and a friend, wishing to break the loss to
Rhodes, told him he had bad news. When it was done, Rhodes said
simply, ' Thank God ! I thought Jameson was dead.'
2 Cook's Garrett. This was openly in his defence. Privately Rhodes
said to Schreiner, ' Poor old Jameson. Twenty years we have been
friends, and now he goes and ruins me. I cannot hinder him. I cannot
go and destroy him.'
3 Jourdan's Cecil Rhodes.
4 Ibid.
6 When Rhodes heard the sentence he exclaimed, 'A tribute to
461
resigned his office as Cape Premier ; the Imperial Govern-
ment insisted on his resignation of the chairmanship
of the Chartered Company which he had founded ; and
a prolonged inquiry was held by a committee of the House
of Commons into the circumstances of the conspiracy and
the raid.
The guilt of Ehodes was plain, and he made no attempt
to deny it, in the plain statement which he gave in evidence
before the committee, which declared in its report Rhodes
that ' whatever justification there might have been
for action on the part of the people of Johannes- Parliament,
burg, there was none for the conduct of a person in Mr.
Rhodes's position, in subsidising, organising, and stimulating
an armed insurrection against the Government of the South
African Republic. He seriously embarrassed both the
Imperial and Colonial Governments, (and) such a policy in-
evitably involved Mr. Rhodes in grave breaches of duty to
those to whom he owed allegiance. He deceived the High
Commissioner, he concealed his views from his colleagues in
the Colonial Ministry and from the board of the British South
Africa Company, and led his subordinates to believe that his
plans were approved by his superiors/
The judgment was a fair one, not unworthy the traditions
of the Imperial Parliament which had tried Clive and Warren
Hastings a century before ; 1 and Rhodes returned to South
Africa, his career shattered, as it seemed, by the raid and
its consequences. Publicly he declared, with the courage
that never deserted him, that his career was only beginning ;
the upright rectitude of my countrymen who have jumped the whole
world. '
Jameson was released some months afterwards on account of illness.
There were some who declared that the Imperial Government had
favoured him ; but the illness was genuine. It was a recurrence
of fever contracted in E,hodesia a year or two before, when he had
nearly died, and it was this old enemy that compelled his retirement
from South African politics in 1911.
1 For Parliament's judgment on Clive and Hastings, see vol. ii. bk. vii.
cb, Hi
462 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS
privately lie admitted that it would be ten years before lie
recovered his position with the public, 1 and quietly turned his
attention to the growth of his favourite child, Khodesia.
In the colony of his own founding he was at home ; even
the burning of his magnificent house at Groote Schuur
could not move him much. With quiet cynicism he summed
up his new position : ' Providence has not been kind to me
this year ; what with Jameson's Raid, rebellion, famine,
rinderpest, and now my house burnt, I feel like Job all but
the boils/
So ended the raid ; but not yet its consequences, either
in Britain or South Africa. There was a wide, indeed almost
The & universal suspicion that the Imperial Government
imperial ^ a( j Deen privy to the raid, had encouraged the
Govern- ... ... . t r , -,
ment and raiders, and then disowned them when they failed.
the Raid. rp ne f ac t s were otherwise : the Imperial Govern-
ment had known nothing of the raid, had therefore not en-
couraged the design, and had disowned it as soon as it had
known. Nevertheless the suspicion was diligently fostered
in South Africa by Kruger and the Bond as a means of in-
creasing the distrust and hatred of the British ; and not less
openly proclaimed in Britain as a piece of party tactics.
Many Liberals indeed would have been glad to fix the blame
on another man than Rhodes not because they loved
Rhodes, but because they hated the other man ; many
believed, or wished to believe, or convinced themselves that
they believed that the Imperial Government through the
Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, had cognisance of
the raid.
It was untrue. About twenty people in London were in
1 Wilson, South African Memories.
In a speech at this time he said, ' If I may put to you a thought, it is
that the man who is continuously prosperous does not know himself, his
own mind or character. It is a good thing to have a period of adversity.
You then find out who are your real friends. From those from whom I
expected most I got least ; but from many quarters, some the most
remote, I received a kindly support I never anticipated.'
.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 463
the secret, 1 but Chamberlain was not. The utmost that
could be alleged was that some telegrams were not produced
before the Parliamentary Committee, although Chamberlain
had no objection to their production ; that the secretary of
the Chartered Company, Dr. Rutherford Harris, had had an
interview with Chamberlain some months before, at which
he desired to impart some confidential information to Cham-
berlain, and Chamberlain had stopped him, and that the
accounts of that interview differed in some minor details. 2
Against that it is sufficient to say that Sir William Harcourt,
a good party man who cherished no unnatural love for his
political opponents, and in particular disliked the Colonial
Secretary and Cecil Rhodes, after hearing all the evidence
declared in the most emphatic terms in the House of Commons
his firm belief that Chamberlain had had no knowledge of
the Jameson Raid.
Had the Colonial Secretary been a man of the ordinary
stamp of colonial secretaries, a Kimberley or a Harcourt,
not the least doubt of his ignorance would have Joseph
been entertained by his political opponents or laj^^gg.
even by his friends ; that the Colonial Office 1902.
should have been ignorant of colonial movements would have
been assumed as natural. But the Colonial Secretary in the
new Unionist Government that entered office in 1895 was as
few colonial secretaries have been before. Joseph Chamber-
1 Butler, Autobiography, mentions that it was known at Aldershot; a
few knew in London, mainly close friends of the conspirators or
employees of the Chartered Company.
2 It was also a point that Rhodes was not put on his trial with
Jameson as a fellow-conspirator, and it was suggested that had he been
tried the complicity of the Colonial Office would have been discovered.
But there was a well-marked distinction between Rhodes and Jameson
in the fact of the actual invasion, and this the public well understood.
On this flimsy basis a large literature of controversy was built up. I
need refer only to The History of the Mystery, by W. T. Stead (1897),
which defends Rhodes and attacks Chamberlain ; and The Scandal oj the
South African Committee (1899), by the same author. I have read both
carefully, and remain unconvinced and happily unasphyxiated by the
gaseous political journalese which Stead affected.
464 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
lain was a successful business man who had entered politics
a Radical, had been hated by the Conservatives for his out-
spokenness and revolutionary speeches, and sometimes
dreaded for the same- reason by timid Liberals and the last
decaying remnants of the Whigs. An ally of Gladstone
whose caustic tongue was as valuable in parliament as on the
platform, he deserted Gladstone when Gladstone deserted the
union of the British Isles and proclaimed himself an Irish
Home Ruler, a conviction that coincided happily with his
dependence on the Irish vote. Chamberlain became one of
the leaders of the new Liberal Unionist party which worked
in alliance with the old Conservatives, and brought them
brains and votes at a time when they needed both, during
the next few years ; doubly hated by his old associates as
the chief of turncoats, and somewhat dreaded and at first dis-
trusted by his new allies, 1 Chamberlain had his chance when
Lord Salisbury offered him the post of Colonial Secretary in
1895.
His smaller opponents delighted to accuse him, as the
minor Tories also accused Gladstone, of that least deadly of
His south political sins, inconsistency, as though it were a
African crime to learn from experience. The charge
troubled Chamberlain far less than Gladstone,
partly perhaps because Gladstone's change of view had oppor-
tunely brought him office, and Chamberlain's had, for the
time at least, cut him off from political advancement ; but
while Gladstone, that magnificent paradox of Victorian
politics, had changed from the Conservatism of his youth to
the strong Liberalism of old age, his energetic lieutenant
had progressed in exactly the contrary direction, moving from
an almost republican attitude in politics towards the staunch
Imperialism of the later Victorian period ; and by a curious
1 The law of averages makes rough justice. A few years later
Winston Churchill deserted the Unionists for the Liberals, who also
distrusted the brilliant recruit.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA
465
trick of fate, South Africa was to illustrate the man in both
characters. He had been a member of the Government
that had given the Transvaal back its independence in 1881 ;
he was now a member of the Government that pressed the
Boers to a policy which, in effect, meant resigning their inde-
pendence. In both cases Chamberlain defended his position
with the forcible speech which his enemies, and occasionally
his friends, were known to dread. ' What is the use of being
great and powerful if we are afraid to admit an error when
we are conscious of it ? ' he said after Majuba ; ' shame is not
in the confession of a mistake ; shame lies only in persistency
in wilful wrong-doing.' x Fifteen years had passed since
then, and South African polities had changed : British in-
terests and possessions there had expanded, the Transvaal
was no longer a bankrupt pastoral community, but a wealthy
republic, whose wealth was produced by aliens, and the hard
case of the Uitlanders had attracted the sympathy of Cham-
berlain's predecessor, the Liberal Colonial Secretary in the
Rosebery Government. It could not attract less attention
from the energetic Joseph Chamberlain, the smouldering
embers of whose old Radicalism could still kindle at the
thought of a large community deprived of political privi-
leges, and whose new Imperialism could not accept a theory
of South African politics which placed thousands of British
subjects in an inferior position in the very state over which
the Imperial Government claimed to exercise a suzerainty.
Inevitably Chamberlain's work at the Colonial Office began
to centre more and more in South Africa, and particularly
on the Transvaal, which was not a British colony at all. If
his new Imperialism neither neglected nor snubbed, as some
of his predecessors had done, the other colonies of the Empire
for in this period West Indian interests were succoured, 2
the Australian Commonwealth was born, 3 the new school of
1 Speech, 7th June 1881.
8 Vol. v. bk. xix. ch. iii.
VOL. VI.
2 Vol. iv. bk. xii. ch. ii.
2G
466 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
tropical medicine was founded under Chamberlain's direct
encouragement, 1 and the Colonial Conference which Salisbury
had summoned in 1887 enlarged its scope in 1897 the position
of South African politics became continually more pressing. It
is probable that future ages will count Chamberlain's greatest
achievement the establishment of a system of tropical
medicine, even as the legal code of Napoleon now bulks larger
than his greatest victory ; but his own contemporaries judged
the man almost entirely by his South African policy.
In the perfectly constituted world of theoretic argument,
the interests or status of the subject of one country who
emigrates for his own advantage to another country would
cease to concern his own proper rulers ; and British statesmen
had before now taken the view that in certain circumstances
the disabilities or dangers to which their adventurous fellow-
countrymen exposed themselves were no affair of the British
Government. 2 But in a perfectly constituted world there
would be no grievances to remedy ; and in practice no power-
ful state has ever neglected the interests of any considerable
body of its subjects in another land. The interests of British
subjects in a republic that was, at least nominally, under
British suzerainty, were therefore a matter of legitimate
concern to the British Government ; and Chamberlain, with
the strong support of the Cabinet of which he was a member,
took up the case of the Uitlanders in the Transvaal with all
the force of his energetic nature.
The Jameson Raid occurred when Chamberlain was still
new to his work, and it needed no political acumen to see
Racial that it made the task he set himself, of obtain-
Bitterness m g political privileges for the Uitlanders in the
revives in m , f. ,. , m , .,
south Transvaal, enormously more difficult, ihe raid
Africa. a once inevitably revived all those unhappy
differences, that mutual distrust and seeking for offence
1 Vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. iv.
2 As, for example, the early missionaries in Nyasa, bk. xxiv. ch. vi.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA
467
between Boer and Briton, which had seemed to be dying
down. Three years earlier an English tourist had remarked
with some exaggeration that the old hostility had entirely
passed away ; x it now suddenly broke out again, in all and
even more than all its former intensity, and from that time
the Dutch in South Africa believed no more in Britain.
Racialism once more became the dominant factor in the
country, and the Cape Dutch, who had lost something of their
old sympathy with their Transvaal kindred of recent years,
again supported Kruger in his policy of isolation and ex-
clusion. Before the raid Kruger was practically a beaten
man : after the raid he seemed stronger than ever before.
He could pose as a wronged man, an honest patriot,
a magnanimous foe ; and many excellent people, both
in England and elsewhere, were deceived thereby. 2 Once
again the whole position of Britain in South Africa seemed
in danger.
But the strength which the raid gave to Kruger was not
real strength. Jameson's over-haste had obscured but not
changed the fundamental facts of the situation. Tne
Externally the Transvaal was still hedged in on Uitianders'
. , , . . Position
every side by foreign territory ; internally the remains
Uitlanders were still a discontented majority, Uncnan ed -
powerful but politically impotent. And Kruger was still a
strong man in a weak position, a stubborn man struggling
with circumstances not of his making, a man fighting for his
people, his country, and his own hand against an enemy within
whom he could not expel without ruining the republic, and
1 Lord Randolph Churchill, Men, Mines, and Animals in South Africa
(1892). Not a very accurate witness, it is true. But Bryce formed
somewhat the same impression, and Rhodes's speeches and co-operation
with the Bond bears this out.
2 A definite Kruger legend grew up on the Continent about this time,
and journalists in Paris, Berlin and Vienna exhausted their vocabulary
in praise of the simple President of an arcadian republic whose existence
was threatened by the rapacious British. The legend withered in 1902,
and perished shortly afterwards ; by 1905 the most ignorant editors of
provincial newspapers had forgotten it.
468 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
an enemy without over whom he had a temporary advantage,
but whom he knew had, through the possession of the north,
the ultimate advantage over him.
For such a man, in so difficult and even tragic a position,
the most unsparing enemy could hardly begrudge a
word of admiration : the amazing thing is not that Kruger
was defeated in the end, but that he was not defeated for
so long.
But once the raid was over, Kruger at once renewed his
work for the security of the Transvaal Republic security
that could never really be obtained while the Uitlanders
remained a majority of the population.
The President had sought assistance in his fight against
the British from two quarters from the great European
Kruger's powers who were ambitious of territory in Africa,
Policy 11 an< ^ fr m t ne small republican neighbour of the
i. in Europe. Transvaal whose peaceful citizens desired no
entanglements. 1 From France the President could hope for
little aid, from Portugal whose decaying greatness he could
judge by Delagoa Bay even less ; but a new and martial
star had risen over Europe, whose rising was coincident with
his own career. When Kruger was in England in 1884 he
had extended his journey to the Continent ; and while there
he had visited Germany. That colonial ambitions and, more
than that, colonial ambitions in South Africa were cherished
in high quarters at Berlin could not be hid even from
less shrewd eyes than those of Kruger; and he resorted to
that inevitable policy of the weak, the policy of playing ofi
two strong men against each other. He sought German I
support, he received German compliments ; but his aims [
in this direction cost him some criticism among his friends
in South Africa, where the spirit of Boer exclusiveness and!
1 The idea of an alliance with a European power, as a means of
counteracting British supremacy in South Africa, was not new. Sir I
Bartle Frere found that Kruger's predecessor, Burgers, had sought such!
alliances, but without effect.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA 469
independence made small distinction between one European
power and another, even between Germany and Britain. 1
Criticism or no criticism, Kruger held on his way ; and
could the secrets of diplomacy be revealed, some highly
interesting exchanges between Pretoria and Berlin would be
added to the history of imperial rivalries. The President
believed and it was not easy to deceive him that Germany
was behind him in his fight with Britain for South Africa.
' I know/ he had remarked publicly at Pretoria before the
raid in 1895, ' that I may count on the Germans in future.
I feel certain that when the time comes for the Transvaal to
wear larger clothes, Germany will have done much to bring
it about. The time is coming for our friendship to be more
firmly established than ever/
The speech showed that Kruger had not yet abandoned
the hope of enlarging his territories, and that he relied on
German support to do so. And a few months later, in the
confusion following the raid, it became known that Kruger
had received the following telegram from the German
Emperor :
' I tender you my sincere congratulations that without appeal-
ing to the help of friendly powers you and your people have been
successful in opposing with your own forces the armed bands that
have broken into your country to disturb the peace, in restoring
order, and in maintaining the independence of your country
against attacks from without. WILHELM, I. R.'
The telegram 'was followed by a request from Berlin to
Portugal to allow German marines to land at Delagoa Bay,
' to guard German Consulates in the Transvaal/ The request
was refused, and a storm of indignant patriotism was evoked
in Britain by the Emperor's telegram, which was only ap-
peased by the mobilisation of a naval squadron ; but the
1 Hofmeyr in particular, the head of the Afrikander Bond, and one
of the most powerful politicians in Cape Colony, had n passionate hatred
of Germany and German colonisation of South Africa.
470 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
incident showed that Kruger had not spoken altogether at
random when he had claimed the friendship of Germany. It
did not show him, what was the fact, that that support would
not be forthcoming when he most needed it four years
later.
European aid was yet to fail him at the crisis of his
fortunes, but Kruger still believed that assistance might be
obtained in some future trouble from the great
2 In Africa,
rivals of Britain. It was a chance not to be
neglected ; more effective work, however, in strengthening
the republic's hand was accomplished nearer home, at Bloem-
fontein and not Berlin. The Orange Free State had much in
common with the Transvaal ; its people had the same ideals,
its policy was much the same. In 1881 the burghers of
the one republic might have joined the other had not Britain
hurriedly concluded peace ; in 1886 the Transvaal was urging
political union with its neighbours, and was refused on the
significant ground that the Transvaal was itself under British
suzerainty ; but three years later, the pivotal year when the
prospect of northern expansion was finally cut off from the
Boer republics, this objection was no longer held a barrier,
and an alliance between the two independent states of South
Africa was concluded, which was renewed and strengthened
in the following years. The new President of the Free State,
Martin Steyn, entirely reversed the policy of his predecessor
Brand, whose good feeling towards the British was uncon-
cealed ; Steyn threw in his lot entirely with Paul Kruger,
and in the end he and his country played a stronger hand
for the cause of Dutch independence than the Transvaal
itself.
The alliance in South Africa was a source of strength to
the Transvaal, as the reliance on European support proved
in time a source of weakness ; but neither could touch the
real problem, which lay within the republic itself, in the
presence of the large alien population on the Rand.
471
There were some good-hearted, feeble-headed folk, in
England and elsewhere, who believed that after the raid had
shown the President the internal danger to the The
republic, Kruger would have seen the wisdom J^* 1
of reform, and introduced conciliatory measures oppressed,
and the franchise. Conciliation lay not in that unbending
nature ; but Kruger did see, what some of his more foolish
friends could not see, that reform was quite as dangerous
as reaction. There was no middle path between the two.
Sham reforms would not deceive the Uitlanders, and real
reform would give them the balance of power and wreck the
republic. Conciliation would not serve ; but there was at
least a chance that the harshness which was more easy to his
nature might yet avail.
It was tried. The leaders of the abortive reform move-
ment in Johannesburg were heavily fined. 1 A new press law
was passed to limit criticism ; the right of public meeting
was restricted, and any open assembly of eight people could
be declared a breach of the peace ; an Alien's Admission Act
and an Alien's Exclusion Act regulated the immigration
of the Uitlanders. No change was made in the franchise ;
but the old corruption continued, and even the administration
of justice was tampered with. Most of the judges were the
tools of Kruget ; but one, Chief Justice Kotze, was an upright
and independent man. To the scandal of all South Africa,
he was summarily dismissed because he would not demean his
high office to the will of the executive ; and it was by this
1 Kruger also presented a bill to the British Government for
677,938, 3s. 3d. for expenses in suppressing the raid, and a further
claim for a million sterling for 'moral and intellectual damages.' The
preposterous character of the demand excited universal laughter, and
the expression became proverbial. The bill was not paid.
As it was, the confiscated arms at Johannesburg, together with those
of the raiders, were of considerable value, and were used in the war
against the British four years later.
The cost of the raid to the Chartered Company is declared by Fort
(Life of Dr. Jameson) to have been 75,000, all of which was, of course,
dead loss to Rhodesia.
472 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
man that a memorable sentence indicting the Transvaal
republican system was pronounced. ' There will never be
the harmony and peace we all desire/ said Kotze, ' until the
present oligarchy is transformed into a genuine republic such
as the United States/ 1
For over a year after the raid the position remained much
the same, not righting itself, but rather drifting from bad
Lord to worse ; and in 1897 the British Government,
Miiner, finally realising the seriousness of the position in
commiB- South Africa, sent out a new High Commissioner
sioner,i897. to fo e Q a p e> ]y[ en o f both political parties in
England joined in praising the choice of Sir Alfred, afterwards
Viscount Miiner, whose rise to power and high office was a
portent of the times. He came not of the governing stock of
England, but no man of the classes that had inherited the
tradition of administration from former generations had
more natural ability as a ruler. A poor public speaker but
an excellent writer, a journalist who had been successful in
that calling yet had committed no indiscretions, an official
whose Oxford training had not prevented him from becoming
an able and accurate financier in Egypt, Milner's character
was even yet not fully understood by all his friends some
of whom so soon became his enemies, open or concealed.
They knew and respected him for an austere and upright
man ; they did not realise that his was one of those unbending
characters, somewhat scarce in English politics, but happily
not scarce in England, who put principle before compromise
in all their actions, and whose iron will is not well suited to
the tricks and mental reservations and ignoble concessions of
a democratic constitution. He was a man who knew his own
mind ; and almost for the first time in South Africa a High
1 Some English journalists of the day made the inevitable comparison
between Kruger and the Bourbons, that he had learned nothing and
forgotten nothing since the Jameson Raid. The comparison was unfair
to Kruger : the Bourbons had only to conciliate their own people if they
wished to keep their thrones, Kruger had to conciliate the foreigner,
and had he done so, his own position would have been undermined.
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRI1A 473
Commissioner at Cape Town who knew his own mind was sup-
ported by the full force of the Imperial Government in London.
Into the details of the prolonged negotiations that were
conducted during the next two years between Chamberlain
and Milner on the one side, and President Kruger His
on the other, there is little need to enter. The Negotia-
. . . . n tiona with
essentials of the situation remained unchanged the Trans-
throughout. Britain insisted on political privi- vaa1 ' 1897 " 9 -
leges for her subjects in the Transvaal ; Kruger refused those
privileges, lest his burghers should be swamped and his country
handed over to the strangers within his gates. To grant the
franchise to the Uitlanders, he declared, would be worse than
annexation.
From that standpoint neither side would shift. Kruger
and Milner met face to face in conference at Bloemfontein on
30th May 1899, in a final effort to adjust their The Bioem-
differences ; but the conference only emphasised Conference
the hopelessness of discussion. Milner proposed 1899.
that five years' residence in the Transvaal should enfranchise
the Uitlanders ; but Kruger utterly refused. ' It is our
country you want/ said the old man sadly, as tears coursed
down his cheeks ; his thoughts had indeed already turned to
war as the only means of saving his country.
The conference was abortive, but almost immediately after
came a gleam of hope. For the moment it seemed that Kruger
had reconsidered his position, and was on the point of giving
way : a draft law was proposed by which a seven years'
residence was to confer the franchise on the Uitlander, and
the bare detail of the proposal led Chamberlain to assume too
hastily that the crisis was over. 1
Between five years and seven years was apparently so slight
1 The London Times definitely announced in July that the tension was
relaxed. A mouth later, on 26th August 1899, when he realised what
Kruger's actual proposals were, Chamberlain made the celebrated speech
in which he remarked that Kruger ' dribbled out reforms like water
from a squeezed sponge,' a frank utterance that caused much shaking
of beads among the quidnuncs.
474 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
a difference that a compromise should have been assured ;
but it was not to be. The five year 
