Umnini, petty Bantu chief: particulars concerning, [263]
Uys, Pieter Lavras: particulars concerning the family of, [278]; personal character of, [279]; in 1834 visits and inspects Natal, [265]; is leader of the sixth party of emigrants from the Cape Colony, [277]; travels northward over the Orange river, with the intention of crossing the Drakensberg into Natal, [280]; on the 7th of August 1837 writes to Sir Benjamin D’Urban, stating the causes of the emigration, ib.; he assumes an attitude of independence as regards Mr. Retief, [283]; in October 1837 joins Commandant Potgieter in the campaign in which the Matabele are driven far to the north, [286]; in December 1837 visits Natal again, [289]; in February 1838 is in the present Orange Free State when tidings of the fearful massacres by the Zulus reach him, ib.; he immediately collects his men and goes down into Natal to the assistance of the distressed people there, ib.; with Commandant Potgieter marches into Zululand to attack Dingan, [292]; on the 11th of April 1838 is drawn into an ambuscade and is almost surrounded by a great Zulu army, ib.; when attempting to retreat is killed with nine others, [293]
Uys, Dirk Cornelis: heroic death of, [293]
Voigt’s Fifty Years of the History of the Republic in South Africa: reference to, [286]
Xosa invasion of the Cape Colony in December 1834: particulars concerning, [260]
THE END
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FOOTNOTES:
[1] Among the sources of information for the next few pages I must mention particularly Arnold’s History of Rome, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Busk’s History of Spain and Portugal, and Stephens’ History of Portugal.
[2] The old library of the Ptolemies was consumed in Cæsar’s Alexandrian war. Marc Antony gave the whole collection of Pergamus (200,000 volumes) to Cleopatra, as the foundation of the new library of Alexandria. It was kept in apartments of the great temple of Serapis, which was broken down in A.D. 389 by Theophilus, archbishop of Alexandria, “the perpetual enemy of peace and virtue, a bold, bad man, whose hands were alternately polluted with gold and with blood.” The valuable library was pillaged or destroyed. See Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XXVIII.
[3] The Arabs, Persians, and Indians were found at the beginning of the sixteenth century of our era to be well acquainted with the eastern coast as far south as Cape Correntes, and the Arabs and Persians had settlements along the whole of that seaboard. But of this Europeans knew absolutely nothing. Beyond Cape Correntes, in latitude 24° 4´ south, the Asiatics did not venture in their coir-sewn vessels. Here the Mozambique current, from which the cape has its present name, ran southward with great velocity, usually from two to five kilometres an hour, according to the force and direction of the wind, but often much faster. The cape had the reputation also of being a place of storms, where the regular monsoons of the north could no longer be depended upon, and where violent gusts from every quarter would almost surely destroy the mariners who should be so foolhardy as to brave them. The vivid Arab imagination further pictured danger of another kind, for this was the chosen home of those mermaids—believed in also by the Greeks of old—who lured unfortunate men to their doom. There were legends of ships having been driven far beyond it in gales, and having been carried by the current onward to a great ocean in the west, from which they had only with the greatest difficulty returned. The perils the crews had gone through and the hardships they had suffered were magnified as a matter of course, and the dreadful sights that had met their eyes were such as to make the boldest shudder. Of the shore of that awful sea nothing was known, for no one had ever set foot upon it. So Cape Correntes, with its real and fictitious perils, was the terminus of Mohamedan enterprise to the south, though there were men in Kilwa who sometimes wondered what was beyond it and half made up their minds to go overland and ascertain. Had there been a Bantu settlement beyond Inhambane there can be no doubt that their eagerness to procure ivory would have led them on, but black men had replaced the wild aborigines there so shortly before the arrival of the Portuguese that there was not time to make the venture.