 This is Chapter 64 of Following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator by Mark Twain Chapter 64. The steamer Arundel Castle. Poor beds and ships. The beds in Noah's Ark. Getting arrest in Europe. Ship in sight. Mozambique Channel. The engineer and the band. Thackeries Madagascar. AfriKander's going home. Singing on the after-deck. An out-of-place story. Dynamite explosion in Johannesburg. Entering Delagoa Bay. A shore. A hot winter. Small town. No sights. No carriages. Working women. Barnum's purchase of Shakespeare's birthplace. Jumbo and the Nelson Monument. Arrival at Durban. When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do. Throw it in the fire or take it to the watchtinker. The former is the quickest. Puddinhead Wilson's New Calendar. The Arundel Castle is the finest boat I have seen in these seas. She is thoroughly modern and that statement covers a great deal of ground. She has the usual defect, the common defect, the universal defect, the defect that has never been missing from any ship that ever sailed. She has imperfect beds. Many ships have good beds, but no ship has very good ones. In the matter of beds all ships have been badly edited, ignorantly edited, from the beginning. The selection of the beds is given to some hearty, strong-backed, self-made man when it ought to be given to a frail woman accustomed from girlhood to back aches and insomnia. Nothing is so rare on either side of the ocean as a perfect bed. Nothing is so difficult to make. Some of the hotels on both sides provide it, but no ship ever does or ever did. In Noah's Ark the beds were simply scandalous. Noah set the fashion, and it will endure in one degree of modification or another till the next flood. 8 a.m. Passing Isle de Bourbon. Broken-up skyline of volcanic mountains in the middle. Surely it would not cost much to repair them, and it seems inexcusable neglect to leave them as they are. It seems stupid to send tired men to Europe to rest. It is no proper rest for the mind to clatter from town to town in the dust and cinders and examine galleries and architecture, and be always meeting people and lunching and teeming and dining, and receiving worrying cables and letters. And a sea voyage on the Atlantic is of no use, voyage too short, sea too rough. The peaceful Indian and Pacific Oceans and long stretches of time are the healing thing. 8 a.m. A fair great ship in sight, almost the first we have seen in these weeks of lonely voyaging. We are now in the Mozambique Channel between Madagascar and South Africa, sailing straight west for Delagoa Bay. Last night the burly chief engineer, middle-aged, was standing, telling a spirited seafaring tale, and had reached the most exciting place, where a man overboard was washing swiftly astern on the great seas, and uplifting despairing cries, everybody racing aft in a frenzy of excitement and fading hope, when the band, which had been silent a moment, began impressively its closing piece, the English national anthem. As simply as if he was unconscious of what he was doing, he stopped his story. Uncovered, hid his laced cap against his breast, and slightly bent his grizzled head. The few bars finished, he put on his cap and took up his tail again, as naturally as if that interjection of music had been a part of it. There was something touching and fine about it, and it was moving to reflect that he was one of a myriad scattered over every part of the globe, who by turn was doing as he was doing every hour of the twenty-four. As awake doing it while the others slept, those impressive bars forever floating up out of the various climbs, never silent, and never lacking reverent listeners. All that I remember about Madagascar is that Thackeray's little Billy went up to the top of the mast, and there knelt him upon his knee, saying, I see Jerusalem and Madagascar, and North and South America. May 3, Sunday. Fifteen or twenty Africanters, who will end their voyage to-day and strike for their several homes from Delagoa Bay to-morrow, sat up singing on the after-deck in the moonlight till three a.m.—good fun and wholesome, and the songs were clean songs, and some of them were hallowed by tender associations. Finally, in a pause, a man asked, Have you heard about the fellow that kept a diary crossing the Atlantic? It was a discord, a wet blanket. The men were not in the mood for humorous dirt. The songs had carried them to their homes, and in spirit they sat by those far hearthstones and saw faces and heard voices other than those that were about them. And so this disposition to drag in an old indecent anecdote got no welcome. Nobody answered. The poor man hadn't wit enough to see that he had blundered, but asked his question again. Again there was no response. It was embarrassing for him. In his confusion he chose the wrong course, did the wrong thing, began the anecdote. Began it in a deep and hostile stillness where had been such life and stir and warm comradeship before. He delivered himself of the brief details of the diary's first day and did it with some confidence and a fair degree of eagerness. It fell flat. There was an awkward pause. The two rows of men sat like statues. There was no movement, no sound. He had to go on. There was no other way, at least none that an animal of his calibre could think of. At the close of each day's diary the same dismal silence followed. When at last he finished his tale and sprung the indelicate surprise which is want to fetch a crash of laughter, not a ripple of sound resulted. It was as if the tale had been told to dead men. After what seemed a long, long time, somebody sighed, somebody else stirred in his seat. Presently the men dropped into a low murmur of confidential talk, each with his neighbor, and the incident was closed. There were indications that that man was fond of his anecdote, that it was his pet, his standby, his shot that never missed, his reputation-maker. But he will never tell it again. No doubt he will think of it sometimes, for that cannot well be helped, and then he will see a picture, and always the same picture, the double rank of dead men, the vacant deck stretching away in dimming perspective beyond them, the wide desert of smooth sea all abroad, the rim of the moon spying from behind a rag of black cloud, the remote top of the Misenmast shearing a zigzag path through the fields of stars in the deeps of space, and this soft picture will remind him of the time that he sat in the midst of it, and told his poor little tale, and felt so lonesome when he got through. Fifty Indians and Chinaman asleep in a big tent in the waist of the ship forward. They lie side by side, with no space between. The former wrapped up head and all, as in the Indian streets, the Chinaman uncovered, the lamp and things for opium smoking in the center. A passenger said it was ten two-ton truckloads of dynamite that lately exploded at Johannesburg. Hundreds killed. He doesn't know how many. Limbs picked up for miles around. Glass shattered, and roofs swept away or collapsed, two hundred yards off. Fragment of iron flung three-and-a-half miles. It occurred at three p.m., at six, sixty-five thousand pounds had been subscribed. When this passenger left, thirty-five thousand pounds had been voted by city and state governments, and one hundred thousand pounds by citizens and business corporations. When news of the disaster was telephoned to the exchange, thirty-five thousand pounds were subscribed in the first five minutes. Subscribing was still going on when he left. The papers had ceased the names, only the amounts. Too many names. Not enough room. One hundred thousand pounds subscribed by companies and citizens. If this is true, it must be what they call in Australia a record, the biggest instance of a spontaneous outpour for charity in history, considering the size of the population it was drawn from, eight dollars or ten dollars for each white resident, babies at the breast included. Monday, May 4, steaming slowly in the stupendous Delagoe Bay, its dim arms stretching far away and disappearing on both sides. It could furnish plenty of room for all the ships in the world, but it is shoal. The lead has given us three and a half fathoms several times, and we are drawing that, lacking six inches. A bold headland, precipitous wall, a hundred and fifty feet high, very strong, red color stretching a mile or so. A man said it was Portuguese blood, battle fought here with the natives last year. I think this doubtful. Pretty cluster of houses on the table-land above the red, and rolling stretches of grass and groups of trees, like England. The Portuguese have the railroad, one passenger train a day, to the border, seventy miles, then the Netherlands company have it. Thousands of tons of freight on the shore, no cover. This is Portuguese all over, indolence, piousness, poverty, impotence. Crews of small boats and tugs, all jet black woolly heads, and very muscular. Winter, a South African winter, is just beginning now, but nobody but an expert can tell it from summer. However, I am tired of summer. We have had it unbroken for eleven months. We spent the afternoon on shore, Delagoe Bay. A small town, no sights, no carriages. Three rickshaws, but we couldn't get them apparently private. These Portuguese are a rich brown, like some of the Indians. Some of the blacks have the long horse heads and very long chins of the negroes of the picture-books. But most of them are exactly like the negroes of our southern states, round faces, flat noses, good-natured, and easy laughers. Flocks of black women passed along, carrying outrageously heavy bags of freight on their heads. The quiver of their leg, as the foot was planted and the strain exhibited by their bodies, showed what a tax upon their strength the load was. They were stevedores and doing full stevedores work. They were very erect when unladen, from carrying weights on their heads, just like the Indian women. It gives them a proud, fine carriage. Sometimes one saw a woman carrying on her head a laden and top-heavy basket, the shape of an inverted pyramid. It's topped the size of a soup-plate. It's based the diameter of a teacup. It required nice balancing, and got it. No bright colors, yet there were a good many Hindus. The second-class passenger came over, as usual, at lights out—eleven. And we lounged along the spacious vague solitudes of the deck, and smoked the peaceful pipe and talked. He told me an incident in Mr. Barnum's life which was evidently characteristic of that great showman in several ways. This was Barnum's purchase of Shakespeare's birth-place a quarter of a century ago. The second-class passenger was in jam-racks employ at the time and knew Barnum well. He said the thing began in this way. One morning Barnum and jam-rack were in jam-rack's little private snuggery, back of the wilderness of caged monkeys and snakes and other common places of jam-rack's stock and trade, refreshing themselves after an arduous stroke of business, jam-rack with something orthodox, Barnum with something heterodox, for Barnum was a teetotaller. The stroke of business was in the elephant line. Jam-rack had contracted to deliver to Barnum in New York 18 elephants for $360,000 in time for the next season's opening. Then it occurred to Mr. Barnum that he needed a card. He suggested Jumbo. Jam-rack said he would have to think of something else. Jumbo couldn't be had. The zoo wouldn't part with that elephant. Barnum said he was willing to pay a fortune for Jumbo if he could get him. Jam-rack said it was no use to think about it, that Jumbo was as popular as the Prince of Wales and the zoo wouldn't dare to sell him. All England would be outraged at the idea. Jumbo was an English institution. He was part of the national glory. One might as well think of buying the Nelson Monument. Barnum spoke up with vivacity and said, It's a first-rate idea. I'll buy the monument. Jam-rack was speechless for a second. Then he said, like one ashamed, You caught me. I was napping. For a moment I thought you were in earnest. Barnum said pleasantly, I was in earnest. I know they won't sell it, but no matter. I will not throw away a good idea for all that. All I want is a big advertisement. I will keep the thing in mind, and if nothing better turns up, I will offer to buy it. That will answer every purpose. It will furnish me a couple of columns of gratis advertising in every English and American paper for a couple of months, and give my show the biggest boom a show ever had in this world. Jam-rack started to deliver a burst of admiration, but was interrupted by Barnum, who said, Here is a state of things England ought to plush. His eye had fallen upon something in the newspaper. He read it through to himself, then read it aloud. It said that the house that Shakespeare was born in at Stratford on Avon was falling gradually to ruin through neglect. That the room where the poet first saw the light was now serving as a butcher's shop. That all appeals to England to contribute money, the requisite some stated, to buy and repair the house and place it in the care of salaried and trustworthy keepers, had fallen resultless. Then Barnum said, There's my chance. Let Jumbo and the Monument alone for the present they'll keep. I'll buy Shakespeare's house. I'll set it up in my museum in New York, and put a glass case around it, and make a sacred thing of it. And you'll see all America flock there to worship. Yes, and pilgrims from the whole earth, and I'll make them take their hats off, too. In America we know how to value anything that Shakespeare's touch has made holy. You'll see. In conclusion, the SCP said, That is the way the thing came about. Barnum did buy Shakespeare's house. He paid the price asked, and received the properly attested documents of sale. Then there was an explosion, I can tell you. England rose. What! The birthplace of the master genius of all the ages and all the climbs, that priceless possession of Britain to be carted out of the country like so much old lumber and set up for six-penny desecration in a Yankee show-shop? The idea was not to be tolerated for a moment. England rose in her indignation, and Barnum was glad to relinquish his prize and offer apologies. However, he stood out for a compromise. He claimed a concession. England must let him have jumbo. And England consented. But not cheerfully. It shows how, by help of time, a story can grow, even after Barnum has had the first innings in the telling of it. Mr. Barnum told me the story himself, years ago. He said that the permission to buy jumbo was not a concession. The purchase was made and the animal delivered before the public knew anything about it. Also that the securing of jumbo was all the advertisement he needed. It produced many columns of newspaper talk, free of cost, and he was satisfied. He said that if he had failed to get jumbo, he would have caused his notion of buying the Nelson Monument to be treacherously smuggled into print by some trusty friend, and after he had gotten a few hundred pages of gratuitous advertising out of it, he would have come out with a blundering obtuse but warm-hearted letter of apology, and in a postscript to it would have naively proposed to let the monument go and take Stonehenge in place of it at the same price. It was his opinion that such a letter, written with well-simulated asinine innocence and gush, would have gotten his ignorance and stupidity an amount of newspaper abuse worth six fortunes to him, and not purchasable for twice the money. I knew Mr. Barnum well, and I placed every confidence in the account which he gave me of the Shakespeare Birthplace episode. He said he found the house neglected and going to decay, and he inquired into the matter and was told that many times earnest efforts had been made to raise money for its proper repair and preservation but without success. He then proposed to buy it. The proposition was entertained, and a price named—fifty thousand dollars, I think—but whatever it was, Barnum paid the money down without remark and the papers were drawn up and executed. He said that it had been his purpose to set up the house in his museum, keep it in repair, protect it from name scribblers and other desecraters, and leave it by bequest to the safe and perpetual guardianship of the Smithsonian Institute at Washington. But as soon as it was found that Shakespeare's house had passed into foreign hands and was going to be carried across the ocean, England was stirred as no appeal from the custodians of the relic had ever stirred England before. And protests came flowing in, and money too, to stop the outrage. Offers of repurchase were made, offers of double the money that Mr. Barnum had paid for the house. He handed the house back, but took only the sum which it had cost him, but on the condition that an endowment sufficient for the future safeguarding and maintenance of the sacred relic should be raised, this condition was fulfilled. That was Barnum's account of the episode, and to the end of his days he claimed with pride and satisfaction that not England, but America, represented by him, saved the birthplace of Shakespeare from destruction. At three p.m., May 6, the ship slowed down off the land, and thoughtfully and cautiously picked her way into the snug harbor of Durban, South Africa. End of Chapter 64 This is Chapter 65 of Following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator by Mark Twain, Chapter 65. Royal Hotel Durban. Bells that did not ring. Early inquiries for comforts. Change of temperature after sunset. Rick Shaw's. The Hotel Chameleon. Natives not out after the bell. Proponderance of blacks in Natal. Hair fashions in Natal. Zulus for police. A drive round the barrier. The cactus and other trees. Religion of vital matter. Peculiar views about babies. Zulu kings. A trappist monastery. Transval politics. Reasons why the trouble came about. In statesmanship, get the formalities right. Never mind about the moralities. Puddin' had Wilson's new calendar. From Diary. Royal Hotel. Comfortable. Good table. Good service of natives and madrasis. Curious jumble of modern and ancient city and village. Primitiveness and the other thing. Electric bells, but they don't ring. Asked why they didn't. The watchman in the office said he thought they must be out of order. He thought so, because some of them rang, but most of them didn't. Wouldn't it be a good idea to put them in order? He hesitated, like one who isn't quite sure, then conceded the point. May 7. A bang on the door at six. Did I want my boots cleaned? Fifteen minutes later another bang. Did we want coffee? Fifteen later, bang again. My wife's bath ready. Fifteen later, my bath ready. Two other bangs, I forget what they were about. Then lots of shouting back and forth among the servants, just as in an Indian hotel. Evening. At four p.m. it was unpleasantly warm. Half hour after sunset one needed a spring overcoat. By eight a winter one. Durban is a neat and clean town. One notices that without having his attention called to it. Rick Shaw's drawn by splendidly built black Zulus, so overflowing with strength, seemingly, that it is a pleasure, not a pain, to see them snatch a Rick Shaw along. They smile and laugh and show their teeth, a good-natured lot. Not allowed to drink. Two shillings per hour for one person, three shillings for two. Three D for a course, one person. The chameleon in the hotel court. He is fat and indolent and contemplative. But is business-like and capable when a fly comes about, reaches out a tongue like a teaspoon and takes him in. He gums his tongue first, he is always pious in his looks, and pious and thankful both when Providence or one of us sends him a fly. He has a froggy head and a back like a new grave, for shape, and hands like a bird's toes that have been frostbitten. But his eyes are his exhibition feature. A couple of skinny cones project from the sides of his head with a wee shiny bead of an eye set in the apex of each, and these cones turn bodily like pivot guns and point every which way, and they are independent of each other. Each has its own exclusive machinery. When I am behind him and see in front of him, he whirls one eye rearwards and the other forwards, which gives him a most congressional expression, one eye on the constituency and one on the swag. And then, if something happens above and below him, he shoots out one eye upward like a telescope and the other downward, and this changes his expression, but does not improve it. Natives must not be out after the curfew bell without a pass. In Natal there are ten blacks to one white. Sturdy, plump creatures are the women. They comb their wool up to a peak and keep it in position by stiffening it with brown red clay. Half of this tower colored denotes engagement. The whole of it colored denotes marriage. None but heathen zulus on the police, Christian ones not allowed. May 9. A drive yesterday with friends over the Berea, very fine roads and lofty, overlooking the whole town, the harbour, and the sea-beautiful views. Residences all along, sat in the midst of green lawns with shrubs and generally one or two intensely red outbursts of poinsettia. The flaming splotch of blinding red, a stunning contrast with the world of surrounding green. The cactus tree, candelabrum-like, and one twisted like gray, writhing serpents. The flat crown should be flat roof. Half a dozen naked branches full of elbows, slant upward like artificial supports, and fling a roof of delicate foliage out in a horizontal platform as flat as a floor. And you look up through this thin floor as through a green cobweb or veil. The branches are Japanese-itch. All about you is a bewildering variety of unfamiliar and beautiful trees, one sort wonderfully dense foliage and very dark green, so dark that you notice it at once, notwithstanding there are so many orange trees. The flamboyant, not in flower now, but when in flower, lives up to its name, we are told. Another tree with a lovely upright tassel scattered among its rich greenery, red and glowing as a fire-coal. Here and there a gum-tree, half a dozen lofty Norfolk Island pines lifting their fronded arms skyward. Groups of tall bamboo. Saw one bird, not many birds here, and they have no music, and the flowers not much smell. They grow so fast. Everything neat and trim and clean like the town, the loveliest trees and the greatest variety I've ever seen anywhere except approaching Darjeeling. Have not heard anyone call Natal the Garden of South Africa, but that is what it probably is. It was when Bishop of Natal, that Kalenzo, raised such a storm in the religious world. The concerns of religion are a vital matter here yet. A vigilant eye is kept upon Sunday. Museums and other dangerous resorts are not allowed to be open. You may sail on the bay, but it is wicked to play cricket. For a while a Sunday concert was tolerated upon condition that it must be admission-free and the money taken by collection. But the collection was alarmingly large, and that stopped the matter. They are particular about babies. A clergyman would not bury a child according to the sacred rites because it had not been baptized. The Hindu is more liberal. He burns no child under three, holding that it does not need purifying. The King of the Zulus, a fine fellow of 30, was banished six years ago for a term of seven years. He is occupying Napoleon's old stand, St. Helena. The people are a little nervous about having him come back, and they may well be, for Zulu kings have been terrible people sometimes, like Chaka, Dingan, and Setawayo. There is a large, trappist monastery two hours from Durban over the country roads, and in company with Mr. Milligan and Mr. Hunter, General Manager of the Natal Government Railways, who knew the heads of it, we went out to see it. There it all was, just as one reads about it in books and cannot believe that it is so. I mean the rough, hard work, the impossible hours, the scanty food, the coarse raiment, the merry-burrow beds, the taboo of human speech, of social intercourse, of relaxation, of amusement, of entertainment, of the presence of woman in the men's establishment. There it all was. It was not a dream, it was not a lie, and yet with the fact before one's face it was still incredible. It is such a sweeping suppression of human instincts, such an extinction of the man as an individual. La Trapp must have known the human race well. The scheme which he invented hunts out everything that a man wants and values, and withholds it from him. Apparently there is no detail that can help make life worth living that has not been carefully ascertained and placed out of the trappist's reach. La Trapp must have known that there were men who would enjoy this kind of misery. But how did he find it out? If he had consulted you or me he would have been told that his scheme lacked too many attractions, that it was impossible, that it could never be floated. But there in the monastery was proof that he knew the human race better than it knew itself. He set his foot upon every desire that a man has, yet he floated his project and it has prospered for two hundred years and will go on prospering forever no doubt. Man likes personal distinction. There in the monastery it is obliterated. He likes delicious food. There he gets beans and bread and tea, and not enough of it. He likes to lie softly. There he lies on a sand mattress and has a pillow and a blanket, but no sheet. When he is dining in the great company of friends he likes to laugh and chat. There a monk reads a holy book aloud during meals and nobody speaks or laughs. When a man has a hundred friends about him, evenings, he likes to have a good time and run late. There he and the rest go silently to bed at eight, and in the dark too. There is but a loose brown robe to discard. There are no night-clothes to put on. A light is not needed. Man likes to lie a bed late. There he gets up once or twice in a night to perform some religious office and gets up finally for the day at two in the morning. Man likes light work or none at all. There he labors all day in the field or in the blacksmith's shop or the other shops devoted to the mechanical trades such as shoemaking, saddlery, carpentry and so on. Man likes the society of girls and women. There he never has it. He likes to have his children about him and pet them and play with them. There he has none. He likes billiards. There is no table there. He likes outdoor sports and indoor dramatic and musical and social entertainments. There are none there. He likes to bet on things. I was told that betting is forbidden there. When a man's temper is up he likes to pour it out upon somebody. There this is not allowed. A man likes animals, pets. There are none there. He likes to smoke. There he cannot do it. He likes to read the news. No papers or magazines come there. A man likes to know how his parents and brothers and sisters are getting along when he is away and if they miss him. There he cannot know. A man likes a pretty house and pretty furniture and pretty things and pretty colors. There he has nothing but naked aridity and somber colors. A man likes—name it yourself—whatever it is, it is absent from that place. From what I could learn all that a man gets for this is merely the saving of his soul. It all seems strange, incredible, impossible, but La Trope knew the race. He knew the powerful attraction of unattractiveness. He knew that no life could be imagined, howsoever comfortless and forbidding, but somebody would want to try it. This parent establishment of Germans began its work fifteen years ago. Strangers, poor, and unencouraged. It owns fifteen thousand acres of land now and raises grain and fruit and makes wines and manufactures all manner of things, and has native apprentices in its shops and sends them forth able to read and write and also well equipped to earn their living by their trade. And this young establishment has set up eleven branches in South Africa, and in them they are Christianizing and educating and teaching wage-yielding mechanical trades to one thousand two hundred boys and girls. Protestant missionary work is coldly regarded by the commercial white colonist all over the heathen world as a rule, and its product is nicknamed Rice-Christians, occupationless, incapable, who join the church for revenue only. But I think it would be difficult to pick a flaw in the work of these Catholic monks, and I believe that the disposition to attempt it has not shown itself. Tuesday May 12. Transvaal politics in a confused condition. First the sentencing of the Johannesburg Reformers startled England by its severity. On the top of this came Kruger's exposure of the Cypher correspondence which showed that the invasion of the Transvaal, with the design of seizing that country and adding it to the British Empire, was planned by Cecil Rhodes and Bate, which made a revulsion in English feeling, and brought out a storm against Rhodes and the chartered company for degrading British honour. For a good while I couldn't seem to get at a clear comprehension of it, and was so tangled, but at last by patient study I have managed it, I believe. As I understand it, the Utlanders and other Dutch men were dissatisfied because the English would not allow them to take any part in the government except to pay taxes. Next, as I understand it, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Jamison, not having been able to make the medical business pay, made a raid into Mount Abelaland with the intention of capturing the capital, Johannesburg, and holding the women and children to ransom until the Utlanders and the other Boers should grant to them and the chartered company the political rights which had been withheld from them. They would have succeeded in this great scheme, as I understand it, but for the interference of Cecil Rhodes and Mr. Bate, and other chiefs of the Montabélé, who persuaded their countrymen to revolt and throw off their allegiance to Germany. This, in turn, as I understand it, provoked the King of Abyssinia to destroy the Italian army and fall back upon Johannesburg, this at the instigation of Rhodes, to bull the stock market. End of Chapter 65 This is Chapter 66 of Following the Equator. This Liebervox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator by Mark Twain, Chapter 66, Jamison over the border, his defeat and capture, sent to England for trial, arrest of citizens by the Boers, commuted sentences, final release of all but two, interesting days for a stranger, hard to understand either side, what the Reformers expected to accomplish, how they proposed to do it, testimonies a year later, a woman's part, the truth of the South African situation, Jamison's ride, a poem. Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody, put in Head Wilson's new calendar. When I scribbled in my notebook a year ago the paragraph which ends the preceding chapter, it was meant to indicate, in an extravagant form, two things, the conflicting nature of the information conveyed by the citizen to the stranger concerning South African politics, and the resulting confusion created in the stranger's mind thereby. But it does not seem so very extravagant now. Nothing could in that disturbed and excited time make South African politics clear or quite rational to the citizen of the country, because his personal interest and his political prejudices were in his way, and nothing could make those politics clear or rational to the stranger, the sources of his information being such as they were. I was in South Africa some little time. When I arrived there the political pot was boiling fiercely. Four months previously Jamison had plunged over the transphile border with about six hundred armed horsemen at his back to go to the Relief of the Women and Children of Johannesburg. On the fourth day of his march the Boers had defeated him in battle and carried him and his men to Pretoria, the capital, as prisoners. The Boer government had turned Jamison and his officers over to the British government for trial and shipped them to England. Next it had arrested sixty-four important citizens of Johannesburg as raid conspirators, condemned their four leaders to death, then commuted the sentences, and now the sixty-four were waiting in jail for further results. Before mid-summer they were all out accepting two, who refused to sign the petitions for release. Fifty-eight had been fined ten thousand dollars each and enlarged, and the four leaders had gotten off with fines of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars each with permanent exile added in one case. Those were wonderfully interesting days for a stranger and I was glad to be in the thick of the excitement. Everybody was talking and I expected to understand the whole of one side of it in a very little while. I was disappointed. There were singularities, perplexities, unaccountabilities about it which I was not able to master. I had no personal access to Boers. Their side was a secret to me, aside from what I was able to gather of it from published statements. My sympathies were soon with the reformers in the Pretoria jail, with their friends, and with their cause. By diligent inquiry in Johannesburg I found out, apparently, all the details of their side of the quarrel except one, what they expected to accomplish by an armed rising. Nobody seemed to know. The reason why the reformers were discontented and wanted some changes made seemed quite clear. In Johannesburg it was claimed that the Oytlanders, strangers, foreigners, paid thirteen-fifteenths of the Transfal taxes yet got little or nothing for it. Their city had no charter. It had no municipal government. It could levy no taxes for drainage, water supply, paving, cleaning, sanitation, policing. There was a police force, but it was composed of Boers. It was furnished by the state government, and the city had no control over it. Mining was very costly. The government enormously increased the cost by putting burdensome taxes upon the mines, the output, the machinery, the buildings, by burdensome imposts upon incoming materials, by burdensome railway freight charges. Hardest of all to bear, the government reserved to itself a monopoly in that essential thing, dynamite, and burdened it with an extravagant price. The detested Hollander from over the water held all the public offices. The government was rank with corruption. The Oytlander had no vote, and must live in the state ten or twelve years before he could get one. He was not represented in the rod—legislature—that oppressed him and fleeced him. Religion was not free. There were no schools where the teaching was in English, yet the great majority of the white population of the state knew no tongue but that. The state would not pass a liquor law but allowed a great trade and cheap vile brandy among the blacks, with the result that twenty-five percent of the fifty thousand blacks employed in the mines were usually drunk and incapable of working. There it was plain enough that the reasons for wanting some changes made were abundant and reasonable if this statement of the existing grievances was correct. What the Oytlanders wanted was reform under the existing republic. What they proposed to do was to secure these reforms by prayer, petition, and persuasion. They did petition. Also they issued a manifesto, whose very first note is a bugle blast of loyalty. We want the establishment of this republic as a true republic. Could anything be clearer than the Oytlanders' statement of the grievances and oppressions under which they were suffering? Could anything be more legal than citizen-like and law-respecting than their attitude as expressed by their manifesto? No. Those things were perfectly clear, perfectly comprehensible. But at this point the puzzles and riddles and confusions begin to flock in. You have arrived at a place which you cannot quite understand. For you find that as a preparation for this loyal, lawful, and in every way unexceptionable attempt to persuade the government to write their grievances, the Oytlanders had smuggled a maximum gun or two and fifteen hundred muskets into the town, concealed in oil tanks and cold cars, and had begun to form and drill military companies composed of clerks, merchants, and citizens generally. What was their idea? Did they suppose that the Boers would attack them for petitioning for redress? That could not be. Did they suppose that the Boers would attack them even for issuing a manifesto demanding relief under the existing government? Yes, they apparently believed so, because the air was full of talk of forcing the government to grant redress if it were not granted peacefully. The Reformers were men of high intelligence. If they were in earnest, they were taking extraordinary risks. They had enormously valuable properties to defend. Their town was full of women and children. Their mines and compounds were packed with thousands upon thousands of sturdy blacks. If the Boers attacked, the mines would close, the blacks would swarm out and get drunk. Riot and conflagration and the Boers together might lose the Reformers more in a day, in money, blood, and suffering than the desired political relief could compensate in ten years if they won the fight and secured the reforms. It is May, 1897 now, a year has gone by, and the confusions of that day have been to a considerable degree cleared away. Mr. Cecil Rhodes, Dr. Jameson, and others responsible for the raid, have testified before the Parliamentary Committee of Inquiry in London, and so have Mr. Lionel Phillips and other Johannesburg Reformers, monthly nurses of the Revolution which was born dead. These testimonies have thrown light. Three books have added much to this light. South Africa, as it is, by Mr. Statham, an able writer partial to the Boers, the story of an African crisis by Mr. Garrett, a brilliant writer partial to Rhodes, and a Woman's Part in a Revolution by Mrs. John Hayes Hammond, a vigorous and vivid diarist partial to the Reformers. By liquefying the evidence of the prejudiced books and of the prejudiced Parliamentary Witnesses and stirring the whole together and pouring it into my own, prejudiced, molds, I have got at the truth of that puzzling South African situation which is this. One, the capitalists and other chief men of Johannesburg were fretting under various political and financial burdens imposed by the state, the South African Republic sometimes called the Transfile, and desired to procure by peaceful means a modification of the laws. Two, Mr. Cecil Rhodes, Premier of the British Cape Colony, millionaire, creator and managing director of the territorially immense and financially unproductive South Africa Company, projector of vast schemes for the unification and consolidation of all the South African states into one imposing Commonwealth or Empire under the shadow and general protection of the British flag, thought he saw an opportunity to make profitable use of the Oitlander discontent above mentioned, make the Johannesburg cat help pull out one of his consolidation chestnuts for him. With this view he set himself the task of warming the lawful and legitimate petitions and supplications of the Oitlanders into seditious talk and their frettings into threatenings, the final outcome to be revolt and armed rebellion. If he could bring about a bloody collision between those people and the Bohr government, Great Britain would have to interfere. Her interference would be resisted by the Bohrs, she would chastise them and add the Transfile to her South African possessions. It was not a foolish idea, but a rational and practical one. After a couple of years of judicious plotting, Mr. Rhodes had his reward. The revolutionary kettle was briskly boiling in Johannesburg, and the Oitlander leaders were backing their appeals to the government, now hardened into demands, by threats of force and bloodshed. By the middle of December 1895 the explosion seemed imminent. Mr. Rhodes was diligently helping from his distant post in Cape Town. He was helping to procure arms for Johannesburg. He was also arranging to have Jameson break over the border and come to Johannesburg with six hundred mounted men at his back. Jameson, as per instructions from Rhodes, perhaps, wanted a letter from the reformers requesting him to come to their aid. It was a good idea. It would throw a considerable share of the responsibility of his invasion upon the reformers. He got the letter, that famous one urging him to fly to the rescue of the women and children. He got it two months before he flew. The reformers seemed to have thought it over and concluded that they had not done wisely, for the next day after giving Jameson the implicating document they wanted to withdraw it and leave the women and children in danger. But they were told that it was too late. The original had gone to Mr. Rhodes at the Cape. Jameson had kept a copy, though. From that time until the 29th of December a good deal of the reformer's time was taken up with energetic efforts to keep Jameson from coming to their assistance. Jameson's invasion had been set for the 26th. The reformers were not ready. The town was not united. Some wanted a fight, some wanted peace, some wanted a new government, some wanted the existing one reformed. Apparently very few wanted the revolution to take place in the interest and under the ultimate shelter of the imperial flag, British. Yet a report began to spread that Mr. Rhodes' embarrassing assistance had for its end this latter object. Jameson was away up on the frontier, tugging at his leash, fretting to burst over the border. By hard work the reformers got his starting date postponed a little and wanted to get it postponed eleven days. Apparently Rhodes' agents were seconding their efforts, in fact wearing out the telegraph wires trying to hold him back. Rhodes was himself the only man who could have effectively postponed Jameson, but that would have been a disadvantage to his scheme. Indeed it could spoil his whole two years' work. Jameson endured postponement three days, then resolved to wait no longer. Without any orders, accepting Mr. Rhodes' significant silence, he cut the telegraph wires on the twenty-ninth and made his plunge that night to go to the rescue of the women and children by urgent request of a letter now nine days old, as per date—a couple of months old, in fact. He read the letter to his men and it affected them. It did not affect all of them alike. Some saw in it a piece of piracy of doubtful wisdom and were sorry to find that they had been assembled to violate friendly territory, instead of to raid native crawls as they had supposed. Jameson would have to ride a hundred and fifty miles. He knew that there were suspicions abroad in the transeval concerning him, but he expected to get through to Johannesburg before they should become general and obstructive. But a telegraph wire had been overlooked and not cut. It spread the news of his invasion far and wide, and a few hours after his start the boar farmers were riding hard from every direction to intercept him. As soon as it was known in Johannesburg that he was on his way to rescue the women and children, the grateful people put the women and children in a train and rushed them for Australia. In fact, the approach of Johannesburg's saviour created panic and consternation there, and a multitude of males of peaceable disposition swept to the trains like a sandstorm. The early ones fared best. They secured seats, by sitting in them, eight hours before the first train was time to leave. Mr. Rhodes lost no time. He cabled the renowned Johannesburg letter of invitation to the London Press, the grey, headadest piece of ancient history that ever went over a cable. The new poet laureate lost no time. He came out with a rousing poem, lauding Jameson's prompt and splendid heroism in flying to the rescue of the women and children, for the poet could not know that he did not fly until two months after the invitation. He was deceived by the false date of the letter, which was December 20th. Jameson was intercepted by the boars on New Year's Day, and on the next day he surrendered. He had carried his copy of the letter along, and if his instructions required him, in case of emergency, to see that it fell into the hands of the boars, he loyally carried them out. Mrs. Hammond gives him a sharp wrap for his supposed carelessness, and emphasizes her feeling about it with burning italics. It was picked up on the battlefield in a leathern pouch supposed to be Dr. Jameson's saddlebag. Why, in the name of all that is discreet and honourable, didn't he eat it? She requires too much. He was not in the service of the reformers, accepting ostensibly. He was in the service of Mr. Rhodes. It was the only plain English document, undarkened by ciphers and mysteries, and responsibly signed and authenticated, which squarely implicated the reformers in the raid, and it was not to Mr. Rhodes' interest that it should be eaten. Besides, that letter was not the original. It was only a copy. Mr. Rhodes had the original, and didn't eat it. He cabled it to the London press. It had already been read in England and America and all over Europe before Jameson dropped it on the battlefield. If the subordinates knuckles deserved a wrap, the principles deserved as many as a couple of them. That letter is a juicily dramatic incident and is entitled to all its celebrity because of the odd and variegated effects which it produced. All within the space of a single week it had made Jameson an illustrious hero in England, a pirate in Pretoria, and an ass without discretion or honour in Johannesburg. Also it had produced a poet-loriatic explosion of coloured fireworks, which filled the world's sky with giddy splendours, and the knowledge that Jameson was coming with it to rescue the women and children, emptied Johannesburg of that detail of the population. For an old letter this was much. For a letter two months old, it did marvels. If it had been a year old it would have done miracles. End of Chapter 66. This is Chapter 67 of Following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator, by Mark Twain, Chapter 67. Jameson's raid. The Reform Committee's difficult task. Possible plans. Advice that Jameson ought to have. The War of 1881 and its lessons. Statistics of losses of the combatants. Jameson's battles. Losses on both sides. The military errors. How the warfare should have been carried on to be successful. First catch your bore. Then kick him. Put in head Wilson's new calendar. Those latter days were days of bitter worry and trouble for the harassed reformers. From Mrs. Hammond we learned that on the 31st, the day after Johannesburg heard of the invasion, the Reform Committee repudiates Dr. Jameson's inroad. It also publishes its intention to adhere to the manifesto. It also earnestly desires that the inhabitant shall refrain from overt acts against the bore government. It also distributes arms at the courthouse and furnishes horses to the newly enrolled volunteers. It also brings a transfer flag into the committee room and the entire body swear allegiance to it with uncovered heads and upraised arms. Also one thousand Lee-Metford rifles have been given out to rebels. Also in a speech Reformer Lionel Phillips informs the public that the Reform Committee delegation has been received with courtesy by the government commission, and been assured that their proposals shall be earnestly considered, that while the Reform Committee regretted Jameson's precipitate action they would stand by him. Also the populace are in a state of wild enthusiasm and can scarcely be restrained. They want to go out to meet Jameson and bring him in with triumphal outcry. Also the British High Commissioner has issued a damnifying proclamation against Jameson and all British abetters of his game. It arrives January 1st. It is a difficult position for the Reformers and full of hindrances and perplexities. Their duty is hard but plain. One, they have to repudiate the in-road and stand by the in-roader. Two, they have to swear allegiance to the bore government and distribute cavalry horses to the rebels. Three, they have to forbid overt acts against the bore government and distribute arms to its enemies. Four, they have to avoid collision with the British government, but still stand by Jameson and their new oath of allegiance to the bore government, taken uncovered in presence of its flag. They did such of these things as they could, they tried to do them all, in fact did do them all, but only in turn not simultaneously. In the nature of things they could not be made to simultaneously. In preparing for armed revolution and in talking revolution were the Reformers bluffing or were they in earnest? If they were in earnest they were taking great risks, as has been already pointed out. A gentleman of high position told me in Johannesburg that he had in his possession a printed document proclaiming a new government and naming its president one of the Reform leaders. He said that this proclamation had been ready for issue but was suppressed when the raid collapsed. Perhaps I misunderstood him. Indeed I must have misunderstood him, for I have not seen mention of this large incident in print anywhere. Besides, I hope I am mistaken. For, if I am, then there is argument that the Reformers were privately not serious, but were only trying to scare the bore government into granting the desired reforms. The bore government was scared and it had a right to be, for if Mr. Rhodes' plan was to provoke a collision that would compel the interference of England, that was a serious matter. If it could be shown that that was also the Reformers' plan and purpose, it would prove that they had marked out a feasible project at any rate, although it was one which could hardly fail to cost them ruinously before England should arrive. But it seems clear that they had no such plan nor desire. If, when the worst should come to the worst, they meant to overthrow the government, they also meant to inherit the assets themselves, no doubt. This scheme could hardly have succeeded. With an army of bores at their gates and fifty thousand riotous blacks in their midst, the odds against success would have been too heavy, even if the whole town had been armed. With only two thousand five hundred rifles in the place, they stood really no chance. To me the military problems of the situation are of more interest than the political ones, because by disposition I have always been especially fond of war. Now, I mean fond of discussing war and fond of giving military advice. If I had been with Jameson the morning after he started, I should have advised him to turn back. That was Monday. It was then that he received his first warning from a bore source not to violate the friendly soil of the Transfal. It showed that his invasion was known. If I had been with him on Tuesday morning and afternoon, when he received further warnings, I should have repeated my advice. If I had been with him the next morning, New Year's, when he received notice that a few hundred bores were waiting for him a few miles ahead, I should not have advised, but commanded him to go back. And if I had been with him two or three hours later, a thing not conceivable to me, I should have retired him by force, for at that time he learned that the few hundred had now grown to eight hundred, and that meant that the growing would go on growing. For by authority of Mr. Garrett one knows that Jameson's six hundred were only five hundred and thirty at most when you count out his native drivers, etc., and that the five hundred and thirty consisted largely of green youths, raw young fellows, not trained and war-worn British soldiers, and I would have told Jameson that those lads would not be able to shoot effectively from horseback in the scamper and racket of battle, and that there would not be anything for them to shoot at, anyway, but rocks, for the bores would be behind the rocks, not out in the open. I would have told him that three hundred bore sharpshooters behind rocks would be an overmatch for his five hundred raw young fellows on horseback. If pluck were the only thing essential to battle-winning, the English would lose no battles, but discretion, as well as pluck, is required when one fights boars and red Indians. In South Africa the Britain has always insisted upon standing bravely up, unsheltered, before the hidden bore, and taking the results. Jameson's men would follow the custom. Jameson would not have listened to me. He would have been intent upon repeating history, according to precedent. Americans are not acquainted with the British bore war of 1881, but its history is interesting, and could have been instructive to Jameson if he had been receptive. I will cull some details of it from trustworthy sources, mainly from Russell's Natal. Mr. Russell is not a bore, but a Britain. He is Inspector of Schools, and his history is a textbook whose purpose is the instruction of the Natal English youth. After the seizure of the Transfal and the suppression of the bore government by England in 1877, the boars fretted for three years and made several appeals to England for a restoration of their liberties, but without result. Then they gathered themselves together in a great mass meeting at Kruger's Dorp, talked their troubles over, and resolved to fight for their deliverance from the British yoke. Kruger's Dorp, the place where the boars interrupted the Jameson raid. The little handful of farmers rose against the strongest empire in the world. They proclaimed martial law and the re-establishment of their republic. They organized their forces and sent them forward to intercept the British battalions. This, although Sir Garnet Woosley had but lately made proclamation that, so long as the sun shone in the heavens, the Transfal would be and remain English territory. And also, in spite of the fact that the commander of the Ninety-fourth Regiment, already on the march to suppress this rebellion, had been heard to say that the boars would turn tail at the first beat of the big drum. From South Africa, as it is by F. Reginald Statham, page 82, London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1897. Four days after the flag-raising, the boar force, which had been sent forward to forbid the invasion of the English troops, met them at Brancourt Sprout, 246 men of the Ninety-fourth Regiment in command of a colonel, the big drum beating, the band playing, and the first battle was fought. It lasted ten minutes. Results? British loss, more than 150 officers and men out of the 246, surrender of the remnant. Boar loss, if any, not stated. They are fine marksmen, the boars. From the cradle up they live on horseback and hunt wild animals with the rifle. They have a passion for liberty and the Bible and care for nothing else. General Sir George Colley, Lieutenant Governor and Commander-in-Chief in Natal, felt it his duty to proceed at once to the relief of the loyalists and soldiers beleaguered in the different towns of the Transvaal. He moved out with one thousand men and some artillery. He found the boars encamped in a strong and sheltered position on high ground at Lang's neck, every boar behind a rock. Early in the morning of the 28th January, 1881, he moved to the attack, with the 58th Regiment commanded by Colonel Dean, a mounted squadron of 70 men, the 60th Rifles, the naval brigade with three rocket tubes, and the artillery with six guns. He shelled the boars for 20 minutes, then the assault was delivered, the 58th marching up the slope in solid column. The battle was soon finished, with this result according to Russell. British loss in killed and wounded—174. Boar loss—trifling. Colonel Dean was killed, and apparently every officer above the grade of Lieutenant was killed or wounded, for the 58th retreated to its camp in command of a Lieutenant—Africa as it is. That ended the second battle. On the 7th of February, General Colley discovered that the boars were flanking his position. The next morning he left his camp at Mount Pleasant and marched out and crossed the Ingego River with 270 men, started up the Ingego Heights, and there fought a battle which lasted from noon till nightfall. He then retreated, leaving his wounded with his military chaplain, and in recrossing the now swollen river lost some of his men by drowning. That was the third boar victory. Result according to Mr. Russell. British loss—150 out of 270 engaged. Boar loss—eight killed, nine wounded—17. There was a season of quiet now, but at the end of about three weeks Sir George Colley conceived the idea of climbing, with an infantry and artillery force, the steep and rugged mountain of Ammajuba in the night, a bitter, hard task, but he accomplished it. On the way he left about 200 men to guard a strategic point and took about 400 up the mountain with him. When the sun rose in the morning there was an unpleasant surprise for the boars. Yonder were the English troops visible on top of the mountain two or three miles away, and now their own position was at the mercy of the English artillery. The boar chief resolved to retreat up that mountain. He asked for volunteers and got them. The storming party crossed the swale and began to creep up the steeps, and from behind rocks and bushes they shot at the soldiers on the skyline as if they were stalking deer, says Mr. Russell. There was continuous musketry fire, steady and fatal on the one side, wild and ineffectual on the other. The boars reached the top and began to put in their ruinous work. Presently the British broke and fled for their lives down the rugged steep. The boars had won the battle, result in killed and wounded, including among the killed, the British general. British loss 226 out of 400 engaged. Boar loss, one killed, five wounded. That ended the war. England listened to reason and recognized the Boar Republic, a government which has never been in any really awful danger since, until Jameson started after it with his 500 raw young fellows. To recapitulate, the Boar farmers and British soldiers fought four battles, and the Boars won them all. Result of the four in killed and wounded, British loss 700 men. Boar loss, so far as known, 23 men. It is interesting now to note how loyally Jameson and his several trained British military officers tried to make their battles conform to precedent. Mr. Garrett's account of the raid is much the best one I have met with, and my impressions of the raid are drawn from that. When Jameson learned that near Kruger's Dorp he would find 800 boars waiting to dispute his passage, he was not in the least disturbed. He was feeling as he had felt two or three days before, when he had opened his campaign with a historic remark to the same purport as the one with which the commander of the 94th had opened the Boar-British War of fourteen years before. That commander's remark was that the Boars would turn tail at the first beat of the big drum. Jameson's was that with his raw young fellows he could kick the persons of the Boars all round the Transfall. He was keeping close to historic precedent. Jameson arrived in the presence of the Boars. They, according to precedent, were not visible. It was a country of ridges, depressions, rocks, ditches, moraines of mining tailings—not even as favourable for cavalry work as Lang's neck had been in the former disastrous days. Jameson shot at the ridges and rocks with his artillery just as General Collie had done at the neck, and did them no damage and persuaded no boar to show himself. Then about a hundred of his men formed up to charge the ridge, according to the Fifty-Eights precedent at the neck. But as they dashed forward they opened out in a long line, which was a considerable improvement on the Fifty-Eights tactics. When they had gotten to within two hundred yards of the ridge the concealed Boars opened out on them and emptied twenty saddles. The unwounded dismounted and fired at the rocks over the backs of their horses, but the return fire was too hot, and they mounted again, and galloped back or crawled away into a clump of reeds for cover, where they were shortly afterward taken prisoners as they lay among the reeds. Some thirty prisoners were so taken, and during the night which followed the Boars carried away another thirty killed and wounded. The wounded to Krogerstorp Hospital. Sixty percent of the assaulted force disposed of, according to Mr. Garrett's estimate. It was according to Amadjuba precedent where the British loss was two hundred and twenty-six out of about four hundred engaged. Also in Jameson's camp that night there lay about thirty wounded or otherwise disabled men. Also during the night some thirty or forty young fellows got separated from the command and straggled through into Johannesburg. Altogether a possible hundred and fifty men gone out of his five hundred and thirty. His lads had fought valorously, but had not been able to get near enough to a bore to kick him around the Transfall. At dawn the next morning the column of something short of four hundred whites resumed its march. Jameson's grit was stubbornly good. Indeed it was always that. He still had hopes. There was a long and tedious zigzagging march through broken ground with constant harassment from the Boars, and at last the column walked into a sort of trap, and the Boars closed in upon it. Men and horses dropped on all sides. In the column the feeling grew that unless it could burst through the bore lines at this point it was done for. The Maxons were fired until they grew too hot and water failing for the cool jacket, five of them jammed and went out of action. The Seven Pounder was fired until only half an hour's ammunition was left to fire with. One last rush was made and failed, and then the Stott's artillery came up on the left flank, and the game was up. Jameson hoisted a white flag and surrendered. There is a story, which may not be true, about an ignorant bore farmer there who thought that this white flag was the national flag of England. He had been at Bronckhorst, and Langsneck, and Indigo, and Amadjuba, and supposed that the English did not run up their flag accepting at the end of a flight. The following is, as I understand it, Mr. Garrett's estimate of Jameson's total loss and killed and wounded for the two days. When they gave in they were minus some twenty percent of combatants. There were seventy-six casualties. There were thirty men hurt or sick in the wagons. There were twenty-seven killed on the spot or mortally wounded. Total, one hundred and thirty-three, out of the original five hundred and thirty. It is just twenty-five percent. However, I judge that the total was really one hundred and fifty, for the number of wounded carried to Krogerstorp Hospital was fifty-three. Not thirty, as Mr. Garrett reports it. The lady, whose guest I was in Krogerstorp, gave me the figures. She was head nurse from the beginning of hostilities, January one, until the professional nurses arrived, January eighth. Of the fifty-three, three or four were bores. I quote her words. This is a large improvement upon the precedents established at Bronckhorst, Langsneck, Ingogo and Amadjuba, and seems to indicate that Bohr marksmanship is not so good now as it was in those days. But there is one detail in which the raid episode exactly repeats history. By surrender at Bronckhorst the whole British force disappeared from the theater of war. This was the case with Jameson's force. In the Bohr loss, also, historical precedent is followed with sufficient fidelity. In the four battles named above, the Bohr loss, so far as known, was an average of six men per battle to the British average loss of one hundred and seventy-five. In Jameson's battles, as per Bohr official report, the Bohr loss in killed was four. Two of these were killed by the Bohr's themselves by accident, the other by Jameson's army, one of them intentionally, the other by a pathetic mischance. A young Bohr named Jacobs was moving forward to give a drink to one of the wounded troopers, Jameson's, after the first charge, when another wounded man, mistaking his intention, shot him. There were three or four wounded Bohr's in the Kruger's Dorp hospital, and apparently no others have been reported. Mr. Garrett, on a balance of probabilities, fully accepts the official version, and thanks heaven the killed was not larger. As a military man I wish to point out what seems to me to be military errors in the conduct of the campaign which we have just been considering. I have seen active service in the field, and it was in the actualities of war that I acquired my training and my right to speak. I served two weeks in the beginning of our civil war, and during all that time commanded a battery of infantry composed of twelve men. General Grant knew the history of my campaign, for I told it him. I also told him the principle upon which I had conducted it, which was to tire the enemy. I tired out and disqualified many battalions, yet never had a casualty myself nor lost a man. General Grant was not given to paying compliments, yet he said frankly that if I had conducted the whole war much bloodshed would have been spared, and that what the army might have lost through the inspiring results of collision in the field would have been amply made up by the liberalizing influences of travel. Further endorsement does not seem to me to be necessary. Let us now examine history and see what it teaches. In the four battles fought in 1881 and the two fought by Jameson the British loss in killed, wounded, and prisoners was substantially one thousand three hundred men. The bore loss, as far as is ascertainable, was about thirty men. These figures show that there was a defect somewhere. It was not in the absence of courage. I think it lay in the absence of discretion. The Britons should have done one thing or the other, discarded British methods and fought the bore with bore methods, or augmented his own force until, using British methods, it should be large enough to equalize results with the bore. To retain the British method requires certain things, determinable by arithmetic. If for argument's sake we allow that the aggregate of one thousand seven hundred and sixteen British soldiers engaged in the four early battles was opposed by the same aggregate of bores, we have this result. The British loss of seven hundred and the bore loss of twenty three argues that in order to equalize results in future battles you must make the British force thirty times as strong as the bore force. Mr. Garrett shows that the bore force immediately opposed to Jameson was two thousand, and that there were six thousand more on hand by the evening of the second day. Arithmetic shows that in order to make himself the equal of the eight thousand bores, Jameson should have had two hundred and forty thousand men, whereas he merely had five hundred and thirty boys. From a military point of view, backed by the facts of history, I conceived that Jameson's military judgment was at fault. Another thing, Jameson was encumbered by artillery, ammunition, and rifles. The facts of the battle show that he should have had none of those things along. They were heavy, they were in his way, they impeded his march. There was nothing to shoot at but rocks. He knew quite well that there would be nothing to shoot at but rocks, and he knew that artillery and rifles have no effect upon rocks. He was badly overloaded with unessentials. He had eight maxims. A maxim is a kind of gattling, I believe, and shoots about five hundred bullets per minute. He had one twelve-and-a-half pounder cannon and two seven-pounders, also one hundred and forty-five thousand rounds of ammunition. He worked the maxim so hard upon the rocks that five of them became disabled. Five of the maxims, not the rocks. It is believed that upwards of one hundred thousand rounds of ammunition of the various kinds were fired during the twenty-one hours that the battles lasted. One man killed. He must have been much mutilated. It was a pity to bring those futile maxims along. Jameson should have furnished himself with a battery of Putinhead Wilson maxims instead. They are much more deadly than those others, and they are easily carried because they have no weight. Mr. Garrett—not very carefully concealing a smile—excuses the presence of the maxims by saying that they were of very substantial use because their sputtering disordered the aim of the bores, and in that way saved lives. Three cannon, eight maxims, and five hundred rifles yielded a result which emphasized a fact which had already been established, that the British system of standing out in the open to fight bores who are behind rocks is not wise, not excusable, and ought to be abandoned for something more efficacious. For the purpose of war is to kill, not merely to waste ammunition. If I could get the management of one of those campaigns, I would know what to do, for I have studied the bore. He values the Bible above every other thing. The most delicious edible in South Africa is builtung. You will have seen it mentioned in Oliver Schreiner's books. It is what our plainsmen call jerked beef. It is the bore's main standby. He has a passion for it, and he is right. If I had the command of the campaign, I would go with rifles only, no cumbersome maxims and cannon to spoil good rocks with. I would move surreptitiously by night to a point about a quarter of a mile from the bore camp, and there I would build up a pyramid of builtung and Bibles fifty feet high, and then conceal my men all about. In the morning the bore's would send out spies, and then the rest would come with a rush. I would surround them, and they would have to fight my men on equal terms in the open. There wouldn't be any amajuba results. Just as I am finishing this book, an unfortunate dispute has sprung up between Dr. Jamison and his officers on the one hand, and Colonel Rhodes on the other, concerning the wording of a note which Colonel Rhodes sent from Johannesburg by a cyclist to Jamison just before hostilities began on the memorable New Year's Day. Some of the fragments of this note were found on the battlefield after the fight, and these have been pieced together. The dispute is as to what words the lacking fragments contained. Jamison says the note promised him a reinforcement of three hundred men from Johannesburg. Colonel Rhodes denies this, and says he merely promised to send out some men to meet you. It seems a pity that these friends should fall out over so little a thing. If the three hundred had been sent, what good would it have done? In twenty-one hours of industrious fighting, Jamison's five hundred and thirty men with eight maxims, three cannon, and one hundred and forty-five thousand rounds of ammunition killed an aggregate of one bore. These statistics show that a reinforcement of three hundred Johannesburgers armed merely with muskets would have killed, at the outside, only a little over a half of another bore. This would not have saved the day. It would not even have seriously affected the general result. The figures show clearly and with mathematical violence that the only way to save Jamison, or even give him a fair and equal chance with the enemy, was for Johannesburg to send him two hundred and forty maxims, ninety cannon, six hundred carloads of ammunition, and two hundred and forty thousand men. Johannesburg was not in a position to do this. Johannesburg has been called very hard names for not reinforcing Jamison, but in every instance this has been done by two classes of persons, people who do not read history, and people like Jamison, who do not understand what it means after they have read it. End of chapter sixty-seven. This is chapter sixty-eight of Following the Equator. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Following the Equator by Mark Twain, chapter sixty-eight. Judicious, Mr. Rhodes. What South Africa consists of? Johannesburg. The Gold Mines. The Heaven of American Engineers. What the author knows about mining? Description of the bore. What should be expected of him? What was? A dizzy jump for roads. Taxes. Rhodesian method of reducing native population. Journeying in Cape Colony. The cars. The country. The weather. Tamed blacks. Familiar figures in King Williamstown. Bore dress. Bore country life. Sleeping accommodations. The reformers in bore prison. Torturing a black prisoner. None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain pen, or half its cussetness. But we can try. Put in head Wilson's new calendar. The Duke of Pfeife has borne testimony that Mr. Rhodes deceived him. That is also what Mr. Rhodes did with the reformers. He got them into trouble, and then stayed out himself. A judicious man. He has always been that. As to this, there was a moment of doubt once. It was when he was out on his last pirating expedition in the Metabole country. The cable shouted out that he had gone unarmed to visit a party of hostile chiefs. It was true, too, and this daredevil thing came near fetching another indiscretion out of the poet laureate. It would have been too bad, for when the facts were all in, it turned out that there was a lady along, too, and she also was unarmed. In the opinion of many people, Mr. Rhodes is South Africa. Others think he is only a large part of it. These latter consider that South Africa consists of Table Mountain, the Diamond Mines, the Johannesburg Goldfields, and Cecil Roads. The Goldfields are wonderful in every way. In seven or eight years they built up, in a desert, a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants, counting white and black together, and not the ordinary mining city of wooden shanties, but a city made out of lasting material. Nowhere in the world is there such a concentration of rich mines as at Johannesburg. Mr. Bonamici, my manager there, gave me a small gold brick with some statistics engraved upon it, which record the output of gold from the early days to July, 1895, and exhibit the strides which have been made in the development of the industry. In 1888 the output was four million one hundred and sixty-two thousand four hundred and forty dollars. The output of the next five and a half years was total seventeen million five hundred and eighty five thousand eight hundred and ninety four dollars. For the single year ending with June, 1895, it was forty five million five hundred and fifty three thousand seven hundred dollars. The capital which has developed the mines came from England, the mining engineers from America. This is the case with the diamond mines also. South Africa seems to be the heaven of the American scientific mining engineer. He gets the choices places and keeps them. His salary is not based upon what he would get in America, but apparently upon what a whole family of him would get there. The successful mines pay great dividends, yet the rock is not rich, from a Californian point of view. Rock which yields ten or twelve dollars a ton is considered plenty rich enough. It has troubled with base metals to such a degree that twenty years ago it would have been only about half as valuable as it is now. For at that time there was no paying way of getting anything out of such rock but the coarser-grained free gold. But the new cyanide process has changed all that, and the gold fields of the world now deliver up fifty million dollars worth of gold per year, which would have gone into the tailing pile under the former conditions. The cyanide process was new to me, and full of interest, and among the costly and elaborate mining machinery there were fine things which were new to me, but I was already familiar with the rest of the details of the gold mining industry. I had been a gold miner myself in my day, and knew substantially everything that those people knew about it, except how to make money at it. But I learned a good deal about the boars there, and that was a fresh subject. What I heard there was afterwards repeated to me in other parts of South Africa. Summed up, according to the information thus gained, this is the boar. He is deeply religious, profoundly ignorant, dull, obstinate, bigoted, uncleanly in his habits, hospitable, honest in his dealings with whites, a hard master to his black servant, lazy, a good shot, good horseman, addicted to the chase, a lover of political independence, a good husband and father, not fond of herding together in towns, but liking the seclusion and remoteness and solitude, and empty vastness and silence of the belt, a man of a mighty appetite, and not delicate about what he appeases it with, well satisfied with pork and Indian corn and bil-tong, requiring only that the quantity shall not be stinted, willing to ride a long journey to take a hand in a rude all-night dance, interspersed with vigorous feeding and boisterous jollity, but ready to ride twice as far for a prayer meeting, proud of his Dutch and Huguenot origin, and its religious and military history, proud of his race's achievements in South Africa, its bold plunges into hostile and uncharted deserts in search of free solitudes unvext by the pestering and detested English, also its victories over the natives and the British, proudest of all of the direct and effusive personal interest which the deity has always taken in its affairs. He cannot read, he cannot write, he has one or two newspapers, but he is, apparently, not aware of it. Until laterally he had no schools and taught his children nothing, news is a term which has no meaning to him, and the thing itself he cares nothing about. He hates to be taxed and resents it. He has stood stock still in South Africa for two centuries and a half, and would like to stand still till the end of time, for he has no sympathy with Oytlander notions of progress. He is hungry to be rich, for he is human, but his preference has been for riches in cattle, not in fine clothes and fine houses, and gold and diamonds. The gold and the diamonds have brought the godless stranger within his gates, also contamination and broken repose, and he wishes that they had never been discovered. I think that the bulk of those details can be found in Olive Shriners' books, and she would not be accused of sketching the boar's portrait with an unfair hand. Now what would you expect from that unpromising material? What ought you to expect from it? Laws inimical to religious liberty? Yes. Laws denying representation and suffrage to the intruder? Yes. Laws unfriendly to educational institutions? Yes. Laws obstructive of gold production? Yes. Discouragement of railway expansion? Yes. Laws heavily taxing the intruder and overlooking the boar? Yes. The Oytlander seems to have expected something very different from all that. I do not know why. Nothing different from it was rationally to be expected. A round man cannot be expected to fit a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape. The modification had begun in the detailer too, before the raid, and was making some progress. It has made further progress since. There are wise men in the boar government, and that accounts for the modification. The modification of the boar mass has probably not begun yet. If the heads of the boar government had not been wise men, they would have hanged Jameson, and thus turned a very commonplace pirate into a holy martyr. But even their wisdom has its limits, and they will hang Mr. Rhodes if they ever catch him. That will round him and complete him and make him a saint. He has already been called by all other titles that symbolize human grandeur, and he ought to rise to this one, the grandest of all. It will be a dizzy jump from where he is now, but that is nothing. It will land him in good company and be a pleasant change for him. Some of the things demanded by the Johannesburgers manifesto have been conceded since the days of the raid, and the others will follow in time, no doubt. It was most fortunate for the miners of Johannesburg that the taxes, which distressed them so much, were levied by the boar government, instead of by their friend Rhodes and his chartered company of highwaymen, for these latter take half of whatever their mining victims find, they do not stop at a mere percentage. If the Johannesburg miners were under their jurisdiction they would be in the poor house in twelve months. I have been under the impression all along that I had an unpleasant paragraph about the boars somewhere in my notebook, and also a pleasant one. I have found them now. The unpleasant one is dated at an interior village, and says, Mr. Z., called, he is an English-African der, is an old resident, and has a boar wife. He speaks the language, and his professional business is with the boars exclusively. He told me that the ancient boar families in the great region of which this village is the commercial centre are falling victims to their inherited indolence and dullness in the materialistic latter-day race and struggle, and are dropping one by one into the grip of the user, getting hopelessly in debt, and are losing their high place and retiring to second and lower. The boar's farm does not go to another boar when he loses it, but to a foreigner. Some have fallen so low that they sell their daughters to the blacks. Under date of another South African town, I found a note which is creditable to the boars. Dr. X. told me that in the Kaffir War 1,500 Kaffirs took refuge in a great cave in the mountains about ninety miles north of Johannesburg, and the boars blocked up the entrance and smoked them to death. Dr. X. has been in there, and seen the great array of bleached skeletons, one a woman with the skeleton of a child hugged to her breast. The great bulk of the savages must go. The white man wants their lands, and all must go accepting such percentage of them as he will need to do his work for him upon terms to be determined by himself. Since history has removed the element of guesswork from this matter and made it certainty, the humanist way of diminishing the black population should be adopted, not the old cruel ways of the past. Mr. Rhodes and his gang have been following the old ways. They are chartered to rob and slay, and they lawfully do it, but not in a compassionate and Christian spirit. They rob the machonas and the metabolis of a portion of their territories in the hallowed old style of purchase, for a song, and then they force a quarrel and take the rest by the strong hand. They rob the natives of their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country belong to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated. They issue regulations requiring the incensed and harassed natives to work for the white settlers and neglect their own affairs to do it. This is slavery, and is several times worse than was the American slavery which used to pain England so much, for when this Rhodesian slave is sick, superannuated, or otherwise disabled, he must support himself or starve. His master is under no obligation to support him. The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to the desired limit is a return to the old time slow misery and lingering death system of a discredited time and a crude civilization. We humanely reduce an over-plus of dogs by swift chloroform. The bore humanely reduced an over-plus of blacks by swift suffocation. The nameless but right-hearted Australian pioneer humanely reduced his over-plus of aboriginal neighbors by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding. All these are admirable and worthy of praise. You and I would rather suffer either of these deaths thirty times over in thirty successive days than linger out one of the Rhodesian twenty-year deaths with its daily burden of insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the victim hates. Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and pillage and puts the right stain upon it. Several long journeys gave us experience of the Cape Colony Railways, easy riding fine cars, all the conveniences, thorough cleanliness, comfortable beds furnished for the night trains. It was in the first days of June and winter, the daytime was pleasant, the night time nice and cold. Spinning along all day in the cars, it was ecstasy to breathe the bracing air and gaze out over the vast brown solitudes of the velvet plains, soft and lovely nearby, still softer and lovelier further away, softest and loveliest of all in the remote distances, where dim island hills seemed to float as in a sea, a sea made of dream-stuff and flushed with colors faint and rich, and dear me the depth of the sky and the beauty of the strange new cloud-forms, and the glory of the sunshine, the lavishness, the wastefulness of it, the vigor and freshness and inspiration of the air and the sun, while it was all just as Oller Shreiner had made it in her books. To me the welt, in its sober winter garb, was surpassingly beautiful. There were unlevel stretches where it was rolling and swelling and rising and subsiding, and sweeping superbly on and on, and still on and on like an ocean, toward the faraway horizon, its pale brown deepening by delicately graduated shades, to rich orange, and finally to purple and crimson, where it washed against the wooded hills and naked red crags at the base of the sky. Everywhere from Cape Town to Kimberley and from Kimberley to Port Elizabeth and East London, the towns were well populated with tamed blacks, tamed and Christianized too, I suppose, for they wore the dowdy clothes of our Christian civilization. But for that many of them would have been remarkably handsome. These fiendish clothes, together with the proper lounging gate, good-natured face, happy air, and easy laugh, made them precise counterparts of our American blacks. Often where all the other aspects were strikingly and harmoniously and thrillingly African, a flock of these natives would intrude, looking wholly out of place and spoil it all, making the thing a grating discord, half African and half American. One Sunday in King Williamstown a score of colored women came mincing across the Great Barron Square dressed, oh, in the last perfection of fashion and newness and expansiveness and showy mixture of unrelated colors, all just as I had seen it so often at home, and in their faces and their gate was that languishing aristocratic, divine delight in their finery which was so familiar to me, and had always been such a satisfaction to my eye and my heart. I seemed among old, old friends, friends of fifty years, and I stopped and cordially greeted them. They broke into a good fellowship laugh, flashing their white teeth upon me, and all answered at once. I did not understand a word, they said. I was astonished. I was not dreaming that they would answer in anything but American. The voices, too, of the African women, were familiar to me, sweet and musical, just like those of the slave women of my early days. I followed a couple of them all over the Orange Free State—no, over its capital, Bloomfontaine—to hear their liquid voices and the happy ripple of their laughter. Their language was a large improvement upon American, also upon the Zulu. It had no Zulu clicks in it, and it seemed to have no angles or corners, no roughness, no vile S's or other hissing sounds, but was very, very mellow and rounded and flowing. In moving about the country in the trains, I had opportunity to see a good many bores of the Velt. One day, at a village station, a hundred of them got out of the third-class cars to feed. Their clothes were very interesting. For ugliness of shapes and for miracles of ugly colours, inharmoniously associated, they were a record. The effect was nearly as exciting and interesting as that produced by the brilliant and beautiful clothes and perfect taste always on view at the Indian railway stations. One man had corduroy trousers of a faded chewing-gum tint, and they were new, showing that this tint did not come by calamity, but was intentional—the very ugliest colour I have ever seen. A gaunt, shackly, country-lout, six feet high, embattered grey slouched hat with wide brim, and old resin-coloured britches, had on a hideous brand-new woolen coat which was imitation tiger-skin, wavy broad stripes of dazzling yellow and deep brown. I thought he ought to be hanged, and asked the station-master if it could be arranged. He said, no, and not only that, but said it rudely, said it with a quite unnecessary show of feeling. Then he muttered something about my being a jackass, and walked away and pointed me out to people, and did everything he could to turn public sentiment against me. It is what one gets for trying to do good. In the train that day, a passenger told me some more about Bohr life out in the lonely belt. He said the Bohr gets up early and sets his niggers at their tasks, pasturing the cattle and watching them. Eats, smokes, drowses, sleeps. Toward evening super-intends the milking, etc. Eats, smokes, drowses, goes to bed at early candle-light in the fragrant clothes he and she have worn all day and every weekday for years. I remember that last detail in Olive Shriners' story of an African farm. And the passenger told me that the Bohrs were justly noted for their hospitality. He told me a story about it. He said that his grace, the bishop of a certain sea, was once making a business progress through the tavernless belt, and one night he stopped with a Bohr. After supper was shown to bed. He undressed, weary, and worn out, and was soon sound asleep. In the night he woke up feeling crowded and suffocated, and found the old Bohr and his fat wife in bed with him, one on each side, with all their clothes on, and snoring. He had to stay there and stand it, awake and suffering, until toward dawn, when sleep again fell upon him for an hour. Then he woke again. The Bohr was gone, but the wife was still at his side. Those reformers detested that Bohr prison. They were not used to cramped quarters and tedious hours and weary idleness and early to bed and limited movement and arbitrary and irritating rules, and the absence of the luxuries which wealth comforts the day and the night with. The confinement told upon their bodies and their spirits. Still they were superior men, and they made the best that was to be made of the circumstances. Their wives smuggled delicacies to them, which helped to smooth the way down for the prison fare. In the train Mr. B. told me that the Bohr jail guards treated the Black prisoners, even political ones, mercilessly. An African chief and his following had been kept there nine months without trial, and during all that time they had been without shelter from rain and sun. He said that one day the guards put a big black in the stalks for dashing his soup on the ground. They stretched his legs painfully wide apart and set him with his back down hill. He could not endure it and put back his hands upon the slope for support. The guard ordered him to withdraw the support and kicked him in the back. Then, said Mr. B., the powerful Black wrenched the stalks asunder and went for the guard. A reform prisoner pulled him off and thrashed the guard himself.