"Test shipments of frozen meat have already been made from Rhodesia to England, and the results were favourably reported on by experts. It would seem, in short, that South Africa and Rhodesia may well become successful competitors in the meat supplies of the world, and this Company has already secured an early start in this development of an important industry. We have recently added sheep-breeding to our ranching operations, although at present on a small scale only."
The high rate of freight and expense of transport from an isolated region like Rhodesia will be the great difficulty in the future, even if they can raise the stock, and the country will have to compete with Canada, New Zealand, and South America, all countries which have now good, cheap, well-organized methods of transport and shipment. It must not be supposed that Rhodesia has suffered altogether from a lack of the right kind of settlers. On the contrary, the most cheerful, industrious type of gentleman-farmer has tried to "make good" there and when backed by capital has just managed, after years of toil, to make both ends meet. If the reader wishes to know the absolute truth about conditions of life there let him ask some of the old settlers who are independent in opinion and have no land to sell, and let him read the novels of Gertrude Page and Cynthia Stockley, and he will glean a far more accurate picture of life in Southern Rhodesia than from any company reports or blue books. Romance is often truth, whilst complete distortion may lie in official dreams.
The British South African Company is ever active in trying to get the right kind of settlers in Southern Rhodesia and we have no fault to find with them for that if they were to put them in healthy, fertile areas, but what are the actual prospects of success there compared with other British colonies. They too have a post-war land-scheme of offering ex-soldiers a free land-grant of 500,000 acres. It sounds generous, but if it is to grant free blocks of land (in Scotland) of the class offered to ex-soldiers without capital by the Duke of Sutherland, I feel very sorry for the poor soldiers. All the land of any value in South Rhodesia is already taken up by settlers, whilst a great part of the country is totally unfit for "white man" colonization.
The following is written by a lady now resident as a farmer's wife in South Rhodesia, and gives accurately the various pros and cons and the prospect of success to-day in that colony.
"Do not resign your position as any kind of brass hat to come out here, if making money is your aim and object. Even our wealthiest farmers are not on the way to being plutocrats. After all, we are 6000 miles from our best market. But should fate or fortune land you here, you who love the sky and the open road, and the starry solitudes of an African night, the clear-cut outline of granite hills against a sapphire sky and the fragrance of a flower-jewelled veld, the whirr of startled birds and the crash of game as it bounds through the bush, I think you would find it difficult to return to the troglodyte life of London.—Ethel Colquhoun Jollie." ("The Field," April 6th, 1918.)
When the boom in "Things Rhodesian" was at its height, some truth of the real state of affairs seemed to have reached British investors. Henry Labouchere doubtless got hold of a good deal of perfectly correct information and much that was decidedly otherwise. With his characteristic audacity in exposing all shams he, in a series of articles in "Truth," ruthlessly attacked the Chartered Company and all exploiters and "boomers" of the new territory. Much of what he wrote was the truth, but with it all, most of his criticisms were too scathing and hopelessly inaccurate. Amongst those classed as rascals who came under the lash of his pen was Fred Selous, a man who knew no more about business than a child, and who was not associated in the smallest degree with any financier, and who had never written one word about the country he was not prepared to substantiate. To those who knew Selous and his perfect immunity from all stock-dealing transactions the whole thing was simply ridiculous, but the Great Public, after all, is too often prone to believe any libel if it is constantly repeated. In consequence Selous was much depressed by these attacks and resented them bitterly, for he knew he was wholly innocent, yet being advised that he would not advance his position by replying in the newspapers he resolved to bide his time and reply to them in toto in a work he had under preparation ("Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia").
Mr. Burlace (of Rowland Ward, Ltd., who had bought the rights of his new book) met Selous at Plymouth on his arrival in 1896, and fortunately persuaded him not to mention controversial matters to the numerous pressmen who were there and wished to hear what he had to say concerning Mr. Labouchere's articles. Selous was, however, still anxious to thresh out the whole matter in his book, but Mr. Burlace, who has very considerable business knowledge and a firm conviction that the public do not care two straws about controversial matters after the subject is, so to speak, "dead," gave him good advice to avoid the discussion as far as possible and to let the public learn by a man's own character, past and future, who speaks the truth. That was sound logic, and Selous profited thereby, although he did answer many of Labouchere's gross libels on the Bulawayo Field Force.
In many ways Rowland Ward and the members of his staff were good friends to Selous for a considerable part of his life. They bought his specimens at a good price, looked after his affairs at home before he married, and helped him in a hundred ways. Rowland Ward purchased the rights of Selous' new book, "Travel and Adventure in South-East Africa," and gave the author a good sum of money for his work. If "A Hunter's Wanderings" made Selous known to the public, "Travel and Adventures in South-East Africa" assured his reputation, made money for him when he badly wanted it, and fixed a definite value to his future books and the numerous contributions he made to scientific and sporting literature. "Sunshine and Storm in Rhodesia," published by Rowland Ward and Co., was also a success and gave the public a clear and truthful account of the second Matabele war and did much to enhance the author's reputation. This book he dedicated to his wife "who, during the last few months, has at once been my greatest anxiety and my greatest comfort."
It had long been one of Selous' ambitions to add to his collection the heads of that rare and beautiful antelope, the Nyala, or Angas's bushbuck, Tragelaphus angasi, whose habitat was the dense bush stretching along the coast from St. Lucia Bay, Zululand, to the Sabi river in Portuguese territory, east of Mashunaland. It has also more recently been found in Nyassaland. Wherefore, as soon as he left Matabeleland and reached Kimberley, he left his wife and went to Delagoa Bay, intending to hunt this animal for a short time in the dense thickets which border the Pongolo and Usutu rivers in Amatongaland. Only three Englishmen previously had had personal acquaintance with this somewhat rare antelope, namely, Angas who discovered it, Baldwin in 1854, and Drummond, 1867-1872, all of whom wrote of its great beauty, cunning nature, and the pestilential climate in which it lived.
In Delagoa Bay Selous was fortunate enough to meet a certain colonist named Wissels, who owned a small trading station near the junction of the Pongolo and Usutu rivers, right in the heart of the habitat of the Nyala. Wissels was returning home next day in his sea-going boat and Selous made some swift preparations and accompanied him. In two days he reached the Maputa and proceeded overland, with three women carriers, to Wissels' station, where he found numerous freshly captured skins and horns of the animal he had come to hunt. For the next few days, in pouring rain, he crept through the bush with native hunters, and was fortunate enough to bag three fine male and two female Nyala, a pair of which are now in the Natural History Museum in London; the heads of the two other males are in the collection at Worplesdon. He was somewhat disappointed not to shoot the rare little Livingstone's Suni, one of which he saw, as it was one of the few rare antelopes he did not possess. After a long tramp of eighty miles through deep sand he reached Delagoa Bay on October 7th, and then returned to Kimberley, and so to England, not, however, completely escaping the inevitable attacks of fever which are the lot of all who hunt the Nyala in the feverish swamps and thickets of the East Coast.