“No white man shall drink our milk,
No white man shall eat our children’s bread.
Ho-how! ho-how! ho-how!”
But this couplet often repeated seemed to work off their rage; they accepted the tobacco, and sullenly said the travellers might pass, but they were the last who should. This was in the Amakosa country, lying between the Grahamstown settlement and Port Natal, and to the present day unannexed, though even then there were traders’ stations at intervals, so filthy and wretched as to be little above the huts of the natives. These Amakosa tribes were such thieves that great vigilance was needed to prevent property being stolen; but the next tribes, the Amapondas, were scrupulously honest and friendly to the English. Their chief was found by Gardiner and Berken dressed in a leopard’s skin, sitting in state under a canopy of shields, trying a rain-maker, who had failed to bring showers in consequence of not having his dues of cattle delivered to him! The chief advised them not to proceed, as he said the Zulus were angry people who would kill them; but they pushed on,
though finding that the journey occupied much longer than they expected, so that provisions became a difficulty.
A full month had passed since leaving Grahamstown, and Gardiner decided on pressing on upon horseback, leaving Mr. Berken to bring up the waggons, and taking with him the interpreter and two natives. The distance was 180 miles, and a terrible journey it was. A few waggon tracks had made a sort of road, but this was not always to be distinguished from hippopotamus paths, which led into horrible morasses, where the horses almost entirely disappeared, and had to be scooped out as it were by the hands; moreover, scarcely any food was to be had. In crossing one river one of the horses was so irretrievably stuck in a quicksand that humanity required it to be shot, and at the next, the Umkamas, the stream was so swollen that the Captain had to devise a canoe by sewing two cowskins together with sinews and stretching it upon branches, in which, as no one save himself had any notion of boating, he shoved off alone. The stream was too strong for him, and he had to return and obtain the help of the only good swimmer among his party. With him he crossed, but with no food save a canister of sugar! However, the native swam back and fetched a loaf of bread, while Captain Gardiner waited among the reeds, hearing the snorting and grunting of hippopotami all round. The transit of the natives was secured by the holding a sort of float made of a bundle of reeds, and in the morning, as the river was too high for the rest of the party to cross, he brought over a few necessaries, and a horse, with which the Captain was able to proceed to Port Natal, where he found English traders, and sent back supplies to those in the rear.
The Zulus, on whom his attention was fixed, inhabit a fine country to the north of the Tugela, which is considered as the boundary of the British territory. The nation is full of intelligence and spirit, and by no means incapable of improvement, and their princes have been for generations past men of considerable natural ability, and of iron will, but often savagely cruel. The first known to Englishmen was named Charka, a great warrior, who kept his armies in a rude but thorough discipline, and had made considerable conquests. About the year 1829, Charka had been murdered by his brother Dingarn, who had reigned ever since, and was the terror of the English settlers, who were beginning to immigrate into the fertile terraced
country of Natal. His forays might at any time sweep away farms and homesteads; and his subjects were continually fleeing from his violence across the Tugela, and thus might bring him down as a pursuer.
Allen Gardiner’s plan was to go to the fountain head and endeavour to deal with the chief himself, so as to make him a Christian instead of an enemy. With this end he set out absolutely unaccompanied, except by Cyrus the interpreter, and a Zulu servant whom he had hired named Umpondombeni, and this with the knowledge that an English officer had shortly before been treacherously murdered, and that Dingarn was a blood-stained savage.
The king had been informed of his coming, and had pronounced that he was his white man, and should make haste to Umkingoglove, his present abode. The first view of this place, with a double circular fence around it, resembled a race-course, the huts being ranged along the ring of the enclosure so as to leave the centre free for the reviews and war dances of the Kaffirs. Gardiner was very near entering by the wrong gate, in which case all his escort would have been put to death. A hut was assigned to him, a sort of beehive of grass and mud, with a hole to enter by. His own lines, strung together in his many unoccupied moments for his children’s benefit, are so good a description of the Kaffir huts that form a kraal or village, as to be worth inserting:—
“I see them now, those four low props
That held the haystack o’er my head,
The dusky framework from their tops
Like a large mouse-trap round me spread.To stand erect I never tried,
For reasons you may guess:
Full fourteen feet my hut was wide,
Its height was nine feet less.My furniture, a scanty store,
On saddle-bags beside me laid,
A hurdle, used to close the door,
Raised upon stones, my table made.”
There he received a bundle of the native sugar-cane, a bowl of maize beer from Dingarn, and was invited to his palace.