The Settler and the Savage by R. M. Ballantyne (great books to read txt) 📕

With peace came prosperity. This was not indeed very obvious at first, for it took a long time to reconcile the unfortunates of the eastern provinces to their heavy losses, and a still longer time to teach them to forget. Nevertheless, from this time forward the march of the settlers of 1820, commercially, intellectually, and religiously, became steady, regular, and rapid.

No doubt they suffered one or two grievous checks as years rolled on. Again and again they had to fight the Kafir savage and drive him back into his native jungles, and each time they had more trouble in doing so than before, because the Kafir was an apt pupil, and learned to substitute the gun for the assagai; but he did not learn to substitute enlightened vigour for blind passion, therefore the white man beat him as before.

He did more than that. He sought to disarm the savage, and, to a large extent, succeeded. He disarmed him of ignorance by such means as the Lovedale Missionary Institution near Alice; the Institution near Healdtown, and other seminaries,—as well as by mission stations of French, Dutch Reformed, Wesleyan, English, and Scotch churches scattered all over Kafirland; he taught the savage that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and that industry is the high-road to prosperity. Some of the black men accepted these truths, others rejected them. Precisely the same may be said of white men all over the world. Those who accepted became profitable to themselves and the community. Those who rejected, continued slaves to themselves, and a nuisance to everybody. Again we remark that the same may be said of white men everywhere. White unbelievers continued to pronounce the “red” Kafir an “irreclaimable savage,” fit for nothing but coercion and the lash. Black unbelievers continued to curse the white man as being unworthy of any better fate than being “driven into the sea,” and, between the two, missionaries and Christians, both black and white, had a hard time of it; but they did not give in, for, though greatly disheartened at times, they remembered that they were “soldiers” of the cross, and as such were bound to “endure hardness.”

Moreover, missionaries and Christians of all colours and kinds, doubtless remembered their own sins and errors. Being imperfect men, they had in some cases—through prejudice and ignorance, but never through design—helped the enemy a little; or, if they did not remember these errors and aims, they were pretty vigorously reminded of them by white opponents, and no doubt the thought of this humbled them to some extent, and enabled them to bow more readily to chastisement. Then they braced themselves anew for the gospel-fight—the only warfare on earth that is certain to result in blessing to both the victors and the vanquished.

If any of the missionaries held with Lord Glenelg in his unwise reversal of the good Sir Benjamin D’Urban’s Kafir policy, they must have had the veil removed from their eyes when that nobleman himself confessed his error with a candour that said much for his heart; reversed his own decrees, and fell back upon that very plan which at first he had condemned in such ungenerous terms. His recantation could not, however, recall the thousands of Dutch-African farmers whom he helped to expatriate. Perhaps it was well that it should be so, for good came out of this evil,—namely, the reclamation of vast tracts of the most beautiful and fertile regions of the earth from the dominion of darkness and cruelty.

But what of those whose fortunes we have been following, during this period of peace and prosperity?

Some of them remained in the colony, helped on these blessings, and enjoyed them. Others, casting in their lot with the wanderers, fought the battles and helped to lay the foundations of the new colonies.

First, Charlie Considine. That fortunate man—having come into the possession of a considerable sum of money, through the uncle who had turned out so much “better than he should be,” and having become possessed of a huge family of sons and daughters through that Gertie whom he styled the “sugar of his existence,”—settled in Natal along with his friends Hans and Conrad Marais. When that fertile and warm region was taken possession of by the British, he refused to hive off with the Marais, and continued to labour there in the interests of truth, mercy, and justice to the end of his days.

Junkie Brook, with that vigour of character which had asserted itself on the squally day of his nativity, joined Frank Dobson and John Skyd in a hunting expedition beyond the Great Orange River; and when the Orange Free State was set up by the emigrant Dutchmen, he and his friends established there a branch of the flourishing house of Dobson, Skyd, and Company. Being on the spot when South Africa was electrified by the discovery (in 1866-67) of the Diamond Fields of that region, they sent their sons, whose name was legion, to dig, and soon became diamond merchants of the first water, so that when Junkie visited his aged parents on the Zuurveld—which he often did—he usually appeared with his pockets full of precious stones!

“I’ve found a diamond this time, nurse,” he said, on the occasion of one of these visits, “which is as big—oh!—as—as an ostrich-egg! See, here it is,” and he laid on the table a diamond which, if not quite as big as the egg of the giant bird, was large enough to enable him, with what he had previously earned, to retire comfortably from the business in favour of his eldest son.

The sudden acquisition of riches in this way was by no means uncommon at that time, for the “Fields” were amazingly prolific, and having been discovered at a crisis of commercial depression, were the means, not only of retrieving the fortunes of South Africa, but of advancing her to a condition of hitherto unparalleled prosperity.

Mrs Scholtz—by that time grown unreasonably fat—eyed the diamond with a look of amused contempt; she evidently did not believe in it. Patting the hand of her former charge, she looked up in his laughing face, and said, with a shake of her head—

“Ah! Junkie, I always said you was a wonderful child.”

Sitting on a bench in front of the house—no longer domestics, but smoking their pipes there as “friends” of the family, who had raised themselves to a state of comparative affluence—George Dally and Scholtz, now aged men, commented on the same diamond.

“It’ll make his fortune,” said George.

“Zee boy vas always lucky,” remarked Scholtz; “zince I began to varm for myself I have not zeen so big a stone.”

“Ah! Scholtz,” returned his friend, “the hotel business has done very well for me, an I don’t complain, but if I was young again I’d sell off and have a slap at the ‘Fields.’”

“Zat vould only prove you vas von fool,” said Scholtz quietly.

“I believe it would,” returned George.

In regard to the Scotch party at Glen Lynden, we have to record that they continued to persevere and prosper. Wool became one of the staple articles of colonial commerce, and the hills of the Baviaans River sent a large contingent of that article to the flourishing seaport of the eastern provinces.

Of course the people multiplied, and the sturdy sons of the South African highlands did credit to their sires, both in the matter of warring with the Kafir and farming on the hills.

Sandy Black stuck to his farm with the perseverance of a true Scot, and held his own through thick and thin. He married a wife also, and when, in later years, the native blacks made a sudden descent on his homestead, they were repulsed by a swarm of white Blacks, assisted by an army of McTavishes, and chased over the hills with a degree of energy that caused them almost