III.

THE VOERTREKKERS.

The time was a summer night in January, 1851. The place was the stony brow of a long tabletopped hill or plateau, overlooking the broad sweep of the Natalian coastlands, a wilderness of grassy slope and bush-clad valley, stretching to where, ten miles away, and fifteen hundred feet below, the dazzling Indian Sea closed the outlook. At that hour, however, only the stars and the dim outlines of the adjacent hills were visible. No dwelling-place was in view, but a roughly-tented African wagon, scotched from rolling backward by blocks of stone under the hinder wheels, represented the resting-place of its inmates. They were three-a young English girl and her brother, a boy of twelve, travelling from Durban to Maritzburg in the care of a rough English-speaking colonist, who both owned and drove the wagon, and who had graciously consented, on payment of a few shillings, to carry them by what was then the only means of conveyance between the seaport and the capital. Horses they had none. Light though the load was, the "span" of

fourteen oxen had failed to drag the cumbrous vehicle over the stones which encumbered the steep and rutty track, and, as darkness fell, the easy-minded proprietor decided to remain perched up on the hill crest for the night. The situation was, or seemed, somewhat precarious, for had the stones under the wheels given way, the wagon must have rolled backward and downward to destruction; but South African life in those days was rich in such risks and possibilities, and the young travellers, rolled in their blankets inside the wagon, slept not the less soundly than did their hardy guardian underneath it. There were no sounds to disturb their rest except the occasional bark of a prowling hyena, or the drone of a native chant from a distant kraal.

That night's experience was the counterpart of several others during the week's journey that ensued. For, after the murmuring oxen, refreshed by their rest and goaded by the merciless lashes of the driver, had managed to drag the wagon on to a safer haltingplace, by the side of a friendly clump of brushwood, they, in their turn, disappeared amongst the neighboring gorges, only to be recovered after a two-days' search. Then came rain, which made the rough roads-falsely

more.

so-called-impassable for three days Time dragged very wearily during these compulsory delays. Books there were none. An old newspaper, found in the "wagon chest," had been read more than once from the first line to the last. The uncouth but goodhearted driver, however, sought to enliven his young companions by stories from the past-his own past-which, in its way, had been as fruitful in stirring incident as any novel of Scott or Fenimore Cooper. It was there, from his lips, that I first heard of the experiences of the Voertrekkers.

John Tosen was an Afrikander of mixed birth. His father had been English-an old soldier, I fancy-his mother Dutch. His accent was that of a Cockney; he had read one book in his life, and was ever quoting it: "The Wicar," as he pronounced it, "of Wakefield." Short, hirsute, and insignificant, he was not lacking either in pluck or independence. He deemed himself socially the equal of anybody, and spoke with bitter disdain of the lofty pretensions and affectations of "them emigrants," the poor folk who were then pouring into the country. He "couldn't abide those stuck-up snobs who turned up their noses at men who were their betters," albeit dressed in moleskins and veldschoens. "Reel ladies" put on no airs, and he cited with high commendation the wife and sister of an eminent government official who had lately travelled to Durban with him. It was from him that I learnt, while crouching out of the rain, the story of the Bushman's River massacres, which were then an episode of only twelve years old. It seemed ancient history to my boyish mind, though some of the survivors of the tragedy were still little more than children. The story, as yet, had not been told in England, and to this day its ghastly incidents are little known outside South Africa. There, however, they are household legends in many a

Boer family, and they shed a lurid light upon subsequent and now pending events. John Tosen's tale, as told me at that time, has been confirmed in all its main details by officially-authenticated documents, and a moving narrative it is.

Much has been written and printed concerning the expatriation of the Cape Boer farmers in the years 1835-37, but the genesis of that movement cannot, I think, be better described than it was by Mrs. Anna Elizabeth Steenekamp, in the record that was published in the "Cape Monthly Magazine" for September, 1876. The writer was a niece of the great and gallant Boer leader, Piet Retief.

"The reasons for which we abandoned our lands and homesteads, our country and kindred, were the following:

"1. The continual depredations and robberies of the Kaffirs, and their arrogance and overbearing conduct, and the fact that, in spite of the fine promises made to us by our government, we nevertheless received no compensation for the property of which we were despoiled.

"2. The shameful and unjust proceedings with reference to the freedom of our slaves; and yet it is not so much their freedom that drove us to such lengths, as their being placed on an equal footing with the Christians, contrary to the laws of God and the natural distinction of race and religion, so that it was intolerable for any decent Christian to bow down beneath such a yoke; wherefore we rather withdrew in order thus to preserve our doctrines in purity."

These simple but honest admissions on the part of the pious-minded old Dutch lady who made them, suffice to show how irreconcilable are the two standpoints: that of the British statesman and the British citizen, to whom the mere thought of slavery in any form is abhorrent, and that of the

South African trek-Boer, to whom a black skin was the badge of bondage, and the inferiority of the black man a canon of religious belief. The whole history of South Africa during sixty years has been moulded by this difference. The Boers not only regarded the blacks as an inferior race, but they treated them as such. Not with the atrocious cruelty falsely imputed to them by censorious philanthropists, but with a parental stringency which too often gave color to the slanders of their traducers. These calumnies, accepted by British governors and repeated in official documents, added bitterness to the more substantial wrongs of which Mrs. Steenekamp complained. Unable to obtain redress for the losses suffered through native depredations, debarred from exacting reparation in their own way, cheated, as they considered, out of adequate compensation for the liberated slaves, continually feeling the pressure of new restrictions and obligations, they lent a ready ear to the stories that reached them of vast pasturelands and rich wildernesses in the north, where they might find new homes and fuller freedom, and rule themselves-and the natives round them-under their own laws and in their own way.

Of the adventures which befell the emigrants in their quest of freedom, a properly pictorial account has yet to be written. Their experiences embody all the materials of an epic. No one who reads the published records of them can doubt the courage, the simple faith, or the natural resourcefulness of the pious and sturdy pioneers. That these qualities were tempered by an innate distrust of the black man was, under the circumstances, not unnatural. Though the perils of the wilderness they had to encounter were such as to test their endurance to the uttermost, their chief and constant cause of anxiety was the treacherous savage.

Though their wish in setting out was to remain at peace with the tribes around them, the hostility they met soon put an end to any hope of peaceful advance through the territories traversed. Their original purpose was to settle in the neighborhood of Delagoa Bay, but the accounts which reached them of the deadly climate in that country led them to turn their faces towards the nearer and more attractive region to the southward, now known as Natal. A small colony of Englishmen, some fifty in number, had for years been located at the port, but the country inland, devastated and depopulated by the Zulu tyrant, Chaka, was unoccupied, and the emigrants determined to pitch their tents and establish themselves permanently there.

This is not the time or the place to review the circumstances that attended the early settlement of Natal by both Boers and British. It must suffice to say that after all sorts of sufferings and adventures, the emigrants, in 1838, passed down the eastern slopes of the Drakenberg to the meadowy hills below, and encamped along the banks of the Tugela River and its affluents, between the present-and now historically famous-townships of Colenso and Estcourt. The country, as first seen by them, offered a refreshing contrast to the bare and arid plains of the interior. Its widespread basking hills were clothed with long or crisp grass, and the many watercourses winding between them were dotted about with the fragrant mimosa, which there grows to a greater height than elsewhere. Along the beds of the streams thicker vegetation nestles. The southern and western outlooks-free and open-were closed by the distant ramparts of the great mountain range that bisects East Africa from end to end. The view of this region as you approach it from the coast, whether suffused with the dreamy haze-glow of evening, or clari

fied by the sparkling atmosphere of morning, reminds you of a picture by Claude or Turner, and may well have captivated the fancy and appeased the longings of the weary wanderers in their search for a new home. To them this, indeed, seemed a Promised Land, an abode of peace and contentment, where, unvexed by tyrannic governments, they might live literally under their own vines and fig-trees, as the patriarchs did of yore.

Not long, however, was Arcadia to be enjoyed. One of the first steps taken by the emigrants was to secure, as far as they could do so, a possessory title to the country. They commissioned one of their leaders, Piet Retief, a man of singular capacity and character, to visit Dingaan, Chaka's successor in the sovereignty of the Zulus, rightly styled a "monster," with all the ferocity of his predecessor, but with none of his savage kingliness, and to establish with him relations of amity and concord. Taking with him an armed and mounted party, Retief approached the king, and after much parley he gave the wily savage the most effective guarantee of his good faith by rescuing from the clutches of a neighboring chieftain about 7,000 head of cattle of which he, the king, had been despoiled. A few weeks later, having during the interval visited and propitiated the English settlement at the seaport, Retief, with an escort of about sixty followers, returned to Dingaan's great kraal and obtained from him, in return for the service he had rendered, a document ceding to him and his countrymen "the place called Port Natal, together with all the land annexed, that is to say, from Tugela to the Umzimvubu River westward, and from the sea to the north, as far as the land may be useful and in my possession." This document, which is dated February 4, 1838, is now in the archives at Pretoria. Its

practical value, however, as an act of cession, was destroyed by the immediate sequel. Three days later the king invited his visitors to see him in his kraal, where he assured them of his desire that the farmers "should come and possess the land he had given them." He wished them a pleasant journey, and he asked them to sit down and drink native beer, as a parting cup. Unversed as yet in the arts of Zulu treachery, the farmers accepted the invitation. We are told that "after drinking some beer together, Dingaan ordered his troops to amuse the farmers by dancing and singing, which they immediately commenced doing. The farmers had not been sitting longer than a quarter of an hour, when Dingaan called out, 'Seize them!' upon which an overwhelming rush was made upon the party before they could get on their feet. They were then 'dragged with their feet trailing on the ground, each man being held by as many Zulus as could get at him, from the presence of Dingaan, who still continued sitting and calling out, 'Bulala amatakati! (Kill the witches.) He then said, "Take the liver and the heart of the king of the farmers and place them in the road of the farmers,' who were then all clubbed to death, Retief being held and forced to witness the death of his comrades before they despatched him."

It is for jurists to determine what validity could attach to a deed of cession signed under such circumstances. That it in no sense expressed the wish or will of the grantor was proved by the bloody act of cancellation. So far from being desirous to encourage the settlement of the farmers, or even to tolerate their existence, within two hours of the massacre Dingaan gave orders to his impi to set off and destroy the wives and children of the murdered farmers left behind on the Tugela. And shouting out, "We will go and kill the

white dogs!" the bloodthirsty warriors rushed off on their cowardly mission. And thoroughly they accomplished it. With the same noiseless celerity which marked, forty years later, so many swift attacks on British camps and garrisons, the Zulus swept across the broad uplands of the Buffalo, and through the broken defiles of the Tugela Valley, to the unsuspecting bivouacs of the Boers. Heedless of treachery and danger, they had broken up into detached parties, and were camped out in nooks and sylvan resting-places, confidently awaiting the return of their representatives. Let one of them tell the tale as it is recorded in Bird's "Annals of Natal":

We had remained behind with the women and children under the Drakensberg, along the Blaauwkrantz and Bushman's River-not in a camp (laager), but in little bivouacs of three or four wagons each, every family separately, all along the course of the Blaauwkrantz downwards. We were in tranquil security, for there was peace; and as Retief had recovered the cattle belonging to Dingaan's people, we could hardly imagine that matters would not all go right. This Dingaan knew; and, in order to come upon us unawares, immediately after the murder of Retief and his sixty men, he sent a Zulu commando to fall upon us by night. Blaauwkrantz is between Ladysmith and Weenen, towards the

sea.

The first assault of the Zulus was on Barend Johannes Liebenberg's bivouac, the second on that of Wynand Frederick Bezuidenhout (my father). Each stood with its cattle separately, no camp (laager).

Of the Liebenbergs, four sons came forward; who, together with young Biggar, went to meet the Kaffirs. All the other Liebenbergs were murdered. Young Biggar was an English bastard from Port Natal. He and the Zulus understood each other; and he must have acted treacherously, for he went among the Zulus without receiving any molestation from them. When Van

Vooren, who was Liebenberg's son-inlaw, and was in his bivouac, saw this, he shot at Biggar, breaking his arm. Upon this Biggar said, "Uncle, you have shot off my arm!" Van Vooren said, "What, then, are you seeking among the Kaffirs?" And then he shot Biggar, and killed him. Liebenberg's bivouac was the lowest down along the Blaauwkrantz Kloof, and was thus first attacked.

The second attack was on Adriaan Js. Rossouw, who was murdered with his wife and four children. We found two children, badly wounded, on the following day, but they were still alive. Elizabeth Johanna Rossouw had sixteen wounds, and died next day. Adriaan Johannes Rossouw, son of Adriaan, had thirty-two assegai wounds, and escaped with life. He lived on my farm till his eighteenth year (he was my sister's child), and then died of one of the wounds, which had never completely healed. It was a wound which he had received under the breast, and it had penetrated through the shoulderblade. The film of the stomach remained always exposed, and when he breathed one could see the film open. The third attack was on my father's bivouac, consisting of five wagons and three skin tents; and there were three men with it, namely, my father, Roelof Botha (my brother-in-law), and myself.

An even more piteous narrative is that given by Mrs. Steenekamp-Retief's niece-from whom I have already quoted: "On the 17th of February the Kaffirs attacked us also. Oh! dreadful, dreadful night! wherein so much martyred blood was shed, and two hundred innocent children, ninety-five women, and thirty-three men were slain and hurled into an awful eternity by the assegais of those bloodthirsty heathens. Excluding the servants, the number was over four hundred souls. Oh! it was unbearable for flesh and blood to behold the frightful spectacle the following morning. In one wagon were found fifty dead, and blood flowed from the seam of the tent sail down to the