The hand of the Dutch East India Company rested heavily on the people. In some respects a fair government, and sometimes represented by able men, it yet, like all other kindred commercial despotisms, crushed the people where its own interests were concerned under an iron heel. They might not trade nor barter with the natives, lest they should interfere with the Company's profits; they might not plant or sow as they wished; coffee and spice were forbidden as interfering with the Company's monopoly in the East; the smallest details of daily life were regulated by an externally imposed law; and the people writhed.
It was not to be supposed that these folk, the sons of roving soldiers and sailors, or of men who had left their homes in search of religious freedom, or whose forbears in Holland in the sixteenth century resisted the Spaniard when his heel was on the flag of freedom in half the lands of Europe, and who, rather than allow him to fix his foot permanently on their soil, had turned the waters of the North Sea over lands and villages; it was not to be supposed that folk so descended, and who regarded South Africa as their peculiar inheritance, should submit to dictation and interference at the hand of any external government.
Again and again the most restless and independent of these men drew out the huge ox-wagon—South Africa's ship of the desert—and putting into it wife and children and such household goods as they possessed, they with their flocks and herds bade good-bye for ever to the beautiful valleys of the Boven-Land. Sometimes they took their course northward over the high mountain ranges that separate the Western coast land from the vast Karoo plains; sometimes they kept north-east and along the coast; but wherever they went their aim was still the same—to escape beyond the region and rule of the old Dutch Government; and wherever they went, they went alone, and unaided by any organized government, their flint-lock guns their only means of defence, their rhinoceros-hide whips their one sceptre of rule.
And so began, one hundred and fifty years ago, that long "trek" of the Boer peoples northward and eastward, which to-day still goes on with unabated ardour and quiet persistency; and which in its ultimate essence is a search, not for riches, not for a land where mere political equality may be found; but for a world of absolute and untrammelled individual liberty; for a land where each white man shall reign, by a divine right inherent in his own person, over a territory absolutely his own; uninterfered with by the action of any external ruler, untrammelled by any foreign obligation—the Promised Land of Boer!
As a hundred years ago he stood on the banks of the Vaal and the Orange looking to the lands beyond, so to-day he stands on the banks of the Limpopo and Zambesi; and still looks northward.[40]
Often the early fore-trekkers moved due north and climbed the vast mountain ranges. They saw when they reached their summits no descent on the other side, but the vast plains with their scant olive-coloured herbage and tumbled rocks.
As sweeping across these wide Colonial plains to-day, one looks out at them from the windows of the railway train, silent as they still lie, it is not easy to recall what they must have appeared in the eyes of those first-born white sons of South Africa whose wagons, moving slowly along, broke for the first time into these vast, silent plains. Across each one some white man's eye looked for the first time, taking in the expanse, which till then only the Bushman had seen as he tracked his game, or the Hottentot as he travelled with his tribe; across each one of them some solitary wagon first crept, leaving the marks of its wheels deep in the red sand, which in all the ages of the past had been printed only by the feet of the antelope and the claw of the ostrich and lion, or the light tread of the Bushman and Hottentot—and the mark of those wheels made the first track of that road on which, later but surely, civilization with its colossal evils, and its infinite beneficial possibilities, was to follow.
At night, when they had drawn up their wagons beside some iron-stone kopje, or near the bed of a sloot[41] where there might be water in the sand, they heard the jackals howl about them (as you may still hear them at almost any farm in the Karoo, if in the night you will walk a mile or two from the house and sit down alone on the rocks) and the lion's roar, which for the span of more than a life has not been heard there now. And in the morning, when they woke and peered out between the sails of the wagon, within a stone's throw they saw the springbok feeding with wildebeest[42] among them; and when the sun rose, and they stood up on the wagon-chest and scanned the plain, they rejoiced if they saw far off a vley[43] where their cattle might drink; and if they saw none, they looked about for any indication of those carefully concealed drinking-places of the little Bushman, so well covered with stones, lest the wild animals might tread them in, or strangers drink the water; if they found none, and digging in the sand of the river-beds yielded too little for their cattle, then they trekked on. If they found enough, then they often stayed for awhile till the veld was brown and barren and the game gone and then they trekked again.
Those were the days of hard living and hard fighting. The white man depended mainly on his gun for food. And when the little Bushman looked out from behind his rocks, he saw his game—all he had to live on—being killed, and the fountain which he or his fathers had found and made, and had used for ages, being appropriated by the white men. The plains were not wide enough for both, and the new-come children of the desert fought with the old. We have all sat listening in our childhood to the story of the fighting in those old days. How sometimes the Boer coming suddenly on a group of Bushmen round their fire at night, fired and killed all he could. If in the flight a baby were dropped and left behind, he said, "Shoot that too, if it lives it will be a Bushman or bear Bushmen." On the other hand, when the little Bushman had his chance and found the Boer's wagon unprotected, the Boer sometimes saw a light across the plain, which was his blazing property; and when he came back would find the wagon cinders, and only the charred remains of his murdered wife and children. It was a bitter, merciless fight, the little poisoned arrow shot from behind the rocks, as opposed to the great flint-lock gun. The victory was inevitably with the flint-lock, but there may have been times when it almost seemed to lie with the arrow; it was a merciless primitive fight, but it seems to have been on the whole, compared to many modern battles, fair and even, and in the end the little Bushman vanished.