His journey across the mountains was very perilous and difficult, and took much longer than his sanguine nature had reckoned; but he reached Grahamstown at last, and explained matters to the Governor, who instantly sent off a British officer to assume authority over the settlement at Natal, and try to keep the peace with Dingarn, while Captain Gardiner embarked for England to lay the state of things before Government and the Church Missionary Society, at whose disposal he placed all his own personal grant from Dingarn. When the prospects of the mission were proclaimed, the Rev. Francis Owen volunteered for it, and Captain Gardiner collected all that he thought needful for the great work he hoped to carry out. He married Miss Marsh, of Hampstead, and, with her and his three children, Mr. Owen and his wife and sister, sailed on the 24th of December, 1836; but the arrival was a sorrowful one, for his eldest child, a girl, of twelve years old, was slowly declining. She died just as they
entered Durban Bay, and was buried at Berea immediately on their arrival. As soon as the Kaffirs heard of Captain Gardiner’s landing, they flocked in to express their willingness to live under his authority. He chose a pleasant spot for his home, and having settled his family there, went up to see Dingarn. The presents this time were indeed ecstatically received, and especially a watch and seals, and a huge pair of gay worsted slippers. “He took my measure before he went,” cried Dingarn, who had tried a pair of boots before, but could not get them on. The king was made to understand that his gift of land must be not to the Captain, but to the King of England, and with this he complied. He was also persuaded to modify his demands; as to the fugitives, Gardiner undertook not to encourage or employ them, but would not search them out or return them. Mr. Owen was also favourably received, as the umfundisi or teacher; a hut was allotted to him, and he was allowed to preach. He took up his abode at Umkingoglove, the first town where Captain Gardiner had seen the king, held services and opened a school, often holding conversations with the king. “Has God commanded kings and indunas to learn His word?” demanded Dingarn; and he actually did learn to read the words printed upon a card for the children.
Meantime Captain Gardiner was forming his settlement at a place which he had named in the Kaffir tongue, Hambanati, “Go with us,” in allusion to Moses’ invitation to Hobab: “Go with us, and we will do thee good.” It was half-way between Durban Bay and the Tugela, on a hill-side in the midst of the beautiful undulating ground and rich wood characteristic of the country, and with a river in front. There he had raised a thatched house for himself, and around it Zulu huts were continually multiplying. The English carpenter and labourers whom he had brought out instructed the Kaffirs in various kinds of labour, for which they were quite willing; and as they wore decent garments, they were called the clothed tribe. School was kept for the children in the week; for the grown-up people on Sunday; and on every alternate morning some Scripture fact was read and explained to them, the Captain still being obliged to act as chaplain, until the arrival of Mr. Hewetson, whom the Church Missionary Society were sending out.
Never had the generous toil of a devoted man seemed likely to meet with better success, when a storm came from a most
unexpected quarter. The original colonists of the Cape of Good Hope were Dutch, and the whole district was peopled with boers or farmers of that nation, stolid, prosperous, and entirely uncontrolled by public opinion. They had treated the unfortunate Hottentots as slaves, with all the cruelty of stupidity, and imported Malays and Negroes to work in the same manner; and they had shown, even when under their native state, a sort of grim turbulence that made them very hard to deal with. When in 1834 the British Government emancipated their slaves, and made cruelty penal and labour necessarily remunerative, their discontent was immense, and a great number sold their farms, and moved off into the interior to form an independent settlement on the Orange River. A large number of them, however, hearing of Dingarn’s liberality to Captain Gardiner, were determined to extort a similar grant to themselves by a display of power. First came a letter, which Mr. Owen had to read and interpret to the chief, and not long after a large deputation arrived, armed and mounted on strong horses. Dingarn showed them a war-dance, and they in return said they would show how the boers danced on horseback, and exhibited a sham-fight, which did indeed alarm the savage, but, so far from daunting him, only excited his treachery and fierceness. He gave a sort of general answer, and the messengers retired. But from that time his interest in Mr. Owen’s teaching flagged; he wanted fire-arms instead of religion, and preachings led to cavillings. Indications of evil intentions likewise reached Captain Gardiner, who sent to warn Mr. Owen, and to offer him a refuge at Hambanati in case of need. Still Mr. Owen could gather nothing; he was called from time to time to read the Dutchmen’s letters, but was never told how they were to be dealt with. In fact, Dingarn had replied by an offer of the very district he had given Captain Gardiner, on condition that the new-comers would recover some cattle which had been carried off by a hostile tribe. This was done, and the detachment which had been employed on the service arrived at Umkingoglove, where they were welcomed with war-dances, and exhibited their own sham-fights; but in the midst of the ensuing meal they were suddenly surrounded by a huge circle of the Zulus, as if for another war-dance. The black ring came nearer and nearer still, and finally rushed in upon the unhappy boers, and slaughtered every man of them.
Mr. Owen had suspected nothing of what was passing, till
he received a message from Dingarn that he need not fear; the boers had been killed for plotting, but the umfundisi should not be hurt. A time of terrible anxiety followed, during which the Owen family saw large bodies of the Kaffir army marching towards the Tugela, and in effect they fell upon the Dutch camp, and upwards of a hundred and fifty white men, women, and children were massacred. This horrible act, showing that no reliance could be placed on Dingarn’s promise, made the Owens decide on leaving Umkingoglove, and they arrived at Hambanati, whence they proceeded to Durban. The Gardiner family waited for another week; but, finding the whole of the settlers infuriated, and bent on joining the Dutch in a war of extermination against Dingarn, they were obliged to retreat to the coast. First, however, Captain Gardiner assembled his Kaffirs, and promised to do his utmost to find another tract, where they might settle in peace, if they would abstain from all share in the coming war. They promised; but in his absence the promise was not easy to keep; they joined in the fight, many were killed, and the settlement entirely broken up. The cause seemed to Gardiner hopeless; and, after waiting for a short time in Algoa Bay, he decided on leaving the scene of action, where peaceful teaching could not prevail for some time to come. Whether it would not have been better to have tarried a little while, and then to have availed himself of the confidence and affection he had inspired, so as to gather the remnants of his mission again, we cannot say. At any rate, he consoled himself for the disastrous failure at Natal by setting forth on a fresh scheme of Christian knight-errantry on behalf of the Indians of South America.
Long ago, in Brazil, the Jesuits had done their best to Christianize and protect the Indians; but the Portuguese settlers had, as usual, savagely resented any interference with their cruel oppressions, broken up the Jesuit settlement, and sold their unfortunate converts as slaves. After this, the Jesuit Fathers had formed excellent establishments in the more independent country of Paraguay, lying to the south, where they had many churches, and peaceful, prosperous, happy communities of Christian Indians around them. South American Indians are essentially childish beings; and the Jesuits, when providing labour enough to occupy them wholesomely, found themselves obliged to undertake the disposal of the produce, thus not merely rendering
their mission self-supporting, but so increasing the wealth of the already powerful Order as to render it a still greater object of jealousy to the European potentates; and when, in the eighteenth century, the tide of opposition set strongly against it, the unecclesiastical traffic of the settlements in Paraguay was one of the accusations. The result was, that the Jesuit Fathers were banished from South America in 1767; and whether it was that they had neglected to train the Indians in self-reliance, or whether it was impossible to do so, their departure led to an immediate collapse into barbarism; nor had anything since been done on behalf of the neglected race. Indeed, the break-up of all Spanish authority had been doubly fatal to the natives, by removing all protection, and leaving them to the self-interested violence of the petty republics, unrestrained by any loftier consideration.
In the Republic of Buenos Ayres, under the dictatorship of General Rosas, the lot of these poor creatures was specially cruel. A war of extermination was carried on against them, and eighty had at one time been shot together in the market-place of the capital. Nothing could be done towards reclaiming them while so savage a warfare lasted; but Gardiner hoped to push on to the more northerly tribes, on the borders of Chili, and he took a journey to reconnoitre across the Pampas, with many strange hardships and adventures; but he found always the same story,—the Indians regarded as wild beasts, and, acting only too much as such, falling by night on solitary ranchos, or on lonely travellers, and murdering them, and, on the other hand, being shot down wherever they were found.