On His Return He Adopted A Mode Of Punishment Which He Had Seen In The Colony,
Namely, Making Criminals Work On The Public Roads.
And he has since,
I am informed, made himself the missionary to his own people.
He is tall, rather corpulent, and has more of the negro feature than common,
but has large eyes.
He is very dark, and his people swear by "Black Sechele".
He has great intelligence, reads well, and is a fluent speaker.
Great numbers of the tribes formerly living under the Boers
have taken refuge under his sway, and he is now greater in power
than he was before the attack on Kolobeng.
Having parted with Sechele, we skirted along the Kalahari Desert,
and sometimes within its borders, giving the Boers a wide berth.
A larger fall of rain than usual had occurred in 1852,
and that was the completion of a cycle of eleven or twelve years,
at which the same phenomenon is reported to have happened on three occasions.
An unusually large crop of melons had appeared in consequence.
We had the pleasure of meeting with Mr. J. Macabe returning from Lake Ngami,
which he had succeeded in reaching by going right across the Desert
from a point a little to the south of Kolobeng. The accounts of
the abundance of watermelons were amply confirmed by this energetic traveler;
for, having these in vast quantities, his cattle subsisted
on the fluid contained in them for a period of no less than twenty-one days;
and when at last they reached a supply of water, they did not seem to care
much about it. Coming to the lake from the southeast, he crossed the Teoughe,
and went round the northern part of it, and is the only European traveler
who had actually seen it all. His estimate of the extent of the lake
is higher than that given by Mr. Oswell and myself, or from about ninety
to one hundred miles in circumference. Before the lake was discovered,
Macabe wrote a letter in one of the Cape papers recommending a certain route
as likely to lead to it. The Transvaal Boers fined him 500 dollars
for writing about "ouze felt", OUR country, and imprisoned him, too,
till the fine was paid. I now learned from his own lips
that the public report of this is true. Mr. Macabe's companion, Mahar,
was mistaken by a tribe of Barolongs for a Boer, and shot as he approached
their village. When Macabe came up and explained that he was an Englishman,
they expressed the utmost regret, and helped to bury him.
This was the first case in recent times of an Englishman being slain
by the Bechuanas. We afterward heard that there had been some fighting
between these Barolongs and the Boers, and that there had been
capturing of cattle on both sides. If this was true, I can only say that
it was the first time that I ever heard of cattle being taken by Bechuanas.
This was a Caffre war in stage the second; the third stage in the development
is when both sides are equally well armed and afraid of each other;
the fourth, when the English take up a quarrel not their own,
and the Boers slip out of the fray.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 106 of 572
Words from 56668 to 57217
of 306638
