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THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS
VOLUME VI
SOUTH AFRICA
1486-1913
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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
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*> 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 c 
