Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer

by W. C. Scully

Next morning, just before daybreak, we heard a lion killing close to the water. After day had fully broken, I went down and found some hyenas breakfasting on the remains of a waterbuck.

Sleep's worst enemy in the Low Country was the hyena. The voice of this beast is horrible; it begins with a guttural growl and ends with a high-pitched screech. Although cowardly to a degree, hyenas would often come to within less than a hundred yards of the fire. Occasionally they might be heard on several sides at once, uttering their unspeakable yells. We always noticed that the smell of roast meat attracted them; when meat was boiled, they were not nearly so troublesome. A shot would always send them scampering to a distance, but cartridges were not things to be wasted by the traveler in the Low Country.

On arriving at Lourenco Marques in 1874 I met a man named Good, whom I had known slightly up country. I have been told but I do not guarantee the statement that he was the original of Rider Haggard's "Allan Quatermain." From Good I heard sad news; poor Pat Foote, one of my best friends, had died in the fortress during the previous night. I went up at once to see his remains; they lay on a wretched truckle-bed in a dingy cell.

The funeral took place that afternoon. The grave was dug among some cocoanut palms out beyond the fetid swamp which lay in those days a crescent of foulness on three sides of the town. A wall separated the swamp from the houses, and over this wall the sewage used to be cast. Poles, bearing human heads, stuck out here and there. The swamp was crossed by a causeway.

The proceedings were marked by a melancholy lack of dignity. Several of those forming the cortege were drunk. Among them was a Portuguese officer. The military guard at the causeway gate failed to present arms, so the officer rushed at the men and belabored them with a stick. However, poor Foote was too sound asleep to be disturbed by such trifles. I wonder whether, besides myself, any who took part in those squalid obsequies are alive. I believe the palms which shaded that lonely grave have been long since cut down and that the town has extended over the site.

In the early part of 1875, after I left "The Reef," I worked for a short time near the head of the creek. One day a friend named McCallum came and showed me a piece of gold he had picked up on a headland which jutted over the Blyde River near Peach tree Creek. Next day was Sunday, so we went together to the spot and took a prospect. The result was most encouraging; not alone was there a good yield for the amount of wash we had panned, but the quality of the gold suggested that it belonged to a genuine lead. Next morning we struck our tents and moved down to the scene of the discovery. As the area was not far enough from the nearest proclaimed diggings to entitle us to an extended miner's right, we just marked out a claim apiece and made no report of the matter. We pitched our tents in a little grove of peach-trees below the bluff, close to the river bank.

The thing was a "surface" proposition; that is to say, the wash was only a few inches deep; it lay on a soft slate bottom. We fixed our sluice box in a rapid of the river which was some two hundred yards from the claim, and was reached by a footpath we scarped down the face of the bluff. We hired a couple of boys to carry down the wash. I did the pick and shovel work, which included the filling of the gunny-bags. McCallum washed out each installment as it arrived. This was the easiest contract I ever took on; it meant about one minute's work alternating with nearly ten minutes' rest, all day long. The first couple of days' work gave splendid results; from the gravel cleared off a space about eight feet square we got, so far as I can remember, about a pound weight of gold.

Naturally, we considered that at length our fortunes were made. Our claims measured together forty five thousand square feet, the area we had cleared was but sixty four. The latter number, when worked into the former, went nearly seven hundred times. And the surface appeared to be exactly the same over the whole area.

Assuming that any reliance could be placed on arithmetic, we were potential capitalists. We began to speculate as to what we would do with our money. 14,000 apiece was a large sum. I think McCallum decided to go to Scotland, there to recommence some lawsuit he had been obliged to drop for want of funds. My own firm intention was to organize an expedition to the Zambezi not to go "foot-slogging," as I had been doing in the Low Country, but with properly equipped wagons, the most modern armament, salted horses and all the rest of it. Well, for one night, at all events, we enjoyed ourselves. I do not think we slept at all.

But we never found so much as another half-ounce of gold in those claims; we had struck the one little "patch" they contained. We hired more boys, we ran prospecting trenches in every direction, we worked late and early often carrying the bags of wash down the scarped footpath ourselves, long after the boys had knocked off. But all was in vain. Our pound of gold melted like an icicle in the sun. We were, in local parlance, "bust."