Pioneers and Founders

      “Arise, vulture,Thou art the bird that eateth other birds.”

These were, however, not wives, only female slaves.  Either from jealousy of possible sons growing up, or from the desire not to be considered as in the ranks of the umpagati—elders or married men—neither Charka nor Dingarn would marry, and no man could take a wife without the king’s permission.  Dingarn wore his head closely shaven, whereas the married trained their woolly hair to fasten over a circle of reed, so as to look much as if they had an inverted saucepan on their heads.  Besides this they wore nothing but a sort of apron of skin before and behind, except when gaily arrayed in beads, or ornaments of leopard’s fur and teeth, for dancing or for battle.  Their wealth was their cattle, and their mealie or maize grounds; their food, beef, mealies, and curdled milk; their drink, beer, made of maize; their great luxury, snuff, made of dried dacca and burnt aloes, and taken from an ivory spoon.  Though sometimes acting with great cruelty, and wholly ignorant, they were by no means a dull or indolent people; they were full of courage and spirit, excellent walkers and runners, capable of learning and of thinking, and with much readiness to receive new ideas.

The presents arrived, and the red cloak, made of the long scarlet nap often used in linings, was presented, and gave infinite satisfaction; the king tried it on first himself, then judged of the effect upon the back of one of his servants, caused it to be carried flowing through the air, and finally hung it up outside his palace for the admiration of his subjects, then laid it by for the great national festival at the feast of first-fruits.

Captain Gardiner’s object was to obtain a house and piece of land and protection for a Christian missionary, and with this object he remained at the kraal, trying to make some impression on Dingarn, and the two indunas, who assured him that they were the king’s eyes and ears.  Thus he became witness to much horrible barbarity.  One of the least shocking of Dingarn’s acts was the exhibiting the powers of a burning-glass that had been given him, by burning a hole in the wrist of one of his servants; and his indifference to the pain and death of others was frightful.  His own brother, the next in succession, was, with his two servants, put to death through some jealousy; and, more horrible still, every living creature in thirty villages belonging to him was massacred as a matter of course.

Captain Gardiner, though often horrified and sickened by the sights he was obliged to witness, remained for a month, and then, after accompanying the king on his march, and seeing some astonishing reviews and dances of his wild warriors, made another effort; but the king referred him to the two indunas, and the indunas were positive that they did not wish to learn, either they or their people.  They would never hear nor understand his book, but if he would instruct them in the use of the musket he was welcome to stay.  Dingarn pronounced, “I will not overrule the decision of my indunas;” but, probably looking on the white man as a mine of presents, he politely invited Gardiner to return.

So ended his first attempt, and with no possessions remaining except his clothes, his saddle, a spoon, and a Testament, he proceeded to the Tugela, where he met his friend Berken, who had made up his mind to settle in Natal, and he set out to return to England for the purchase of stock and implements; but the vessel in which he sailed was never heard of more.

Captain Gardiner remained at Port Natal, which in 1835 consisted of a cluster of huts, all of them built Kaffir-fashion, like so many hollow haycocks, except Mr. Collis’s, which was regarded as English because it had upright sides, with a good garden surrounded by reeds.  About thirty English and a few Hottentots clustered around, and some three thousand Zulus, refugees from Dingarn’s cruelty, who showed themselves ready and willing to work for hire, but who exposed their masters to the danger of the king coming after them with fire and assagai.  Hitherto on such an alarm the whole settlement had been wont to take to the woods, but their numbers were so increasing that they were beginning to erect a stockade and think of defence.

To this little germ of a colony, Allen Gardiner brought the first recollection of Christian faith and duty.  On Sunday mornings he stood under a tree, as he had been wont to do on the deck of his ship, and read the Church Service in English to such as would come round him and be reminded of their homes; in the afternoon, by the help of his interpreter, he prayed with and for the Kaffirs, and expounded the truths of the Gospel; and in the week, he kept school for such Kaffir children as he could collect, dressing them decently in printed calico.  He began with very few, partly because many parents fancied he would steal and make slaves of them, and partly because he wished to train a few to be in advance and act as monitors to the rest.  The English were on very good terms with him, and allotted a piece of land for a missionary settlement, which he called Berea, and began to build upon it in the fashion of the country.

Fresh threats from Dingarn led the settlers to try to come to a treaty with him, by which he was to leave them unmolested with all their Kaffirs, on their undertaking to harbour no more of his deserters.  There was something hard in this, considering the horrid barbarities from which the deserters fled, and the impossibility of carrying out the agreement, as no one could undertake to watch the Tugela; but Captain Gardiner, always eager and hasty, thinking that he should thus secure safety for the colony and opportunities for the mission, undertook the embassy, and set forth in a waggon with two Zulus and Cyrus, falling in on the way with one of the grotesque parties of European hunters, who were wont to go on expeditions after the elephant, hippopotamus, and buffalo, with a hunting train of Hottentots and Kaffirs in their company.  On whose aspect he remarks truly:—

“I’ve seen the savage in his wildest mood,And marked him reeked with human blood,   But never so repulsive made.Something incongruous strikes the mindWhene’er a barbarous race we find   With shreds of civil life displayed.There’s more of symmetry, however bare,In what a savage deigns to wear,   In keeping with the scene.These, each deformed by what he wears,Like apes that dance at country fairs,   Seemed but a link between.”

Dingarn proved to be at Congella, another circular town or kraal, on the top of a hill.  He gave a ready welcome to the Captain, and his presents—some looking-glasses, a pair of epaulettes, and some coloured prints, especially full-lengths of George IV. and William IV.  The collection in a place such as Natal then was must have been very hard to make, but it was very successful, and still more so was the Captain’s presenting himself in his uniform when he went to propose the treaty.  Dingarn said he must look at it before he could do anything else, and fully appreciated the compliment when the sailor said it was his war dress, in which he appeared before King William.  He agreed to the treaty, but declared that the English would be the first to break it.  The Captain answered that a true Englishman never broke a treaty, and that any white man who deceived was not the right sort of Englishman; and the king responded that “now a great chief was come, to whom he could speak his heart.”  Captain Gardiner tried to impress on him that it was the fear of God that made himself an honourable man, and to persuade him that the knowledge of the “Book” would make him and his people still greater; and the next time of meeting set forth an outline of the morality and promises of Revelation.  Dingarn was attentive, and said they were good words, and that he would hear more of them, but in the meantime Gardiner must go back to Natal and see that his people kept the treaty.  It was a good deal more than he could do.  A Kaffir inkosikase, or female chieftain, who, with two servants and three children, was fleeing into Natal at the time of his return, was sent back, with all her companions.  The poor creatures pleaded hard that the Captain would accompany them and save them, and he returned with them, and interceded for them with all his might, but soon found they were being starved to death.  “Their bonds must kill them,” said Dingarn.  A second great effort resulted in a little food being sent, and a kind of promise that their lives should be spared; but this was only made to get rid of him, and they all perished after his departure.

Deserters, as Gardiner called the fugitives to reconcile the surrender to his loyal English conscience, were hardly such as these: they were the only ones ever sent back, and the loose wild traders, who he ought to have known would never be bound by treaties, were at that very time enticing Kaffirs, who could be useful as herdsmen and labourers, across the frontier.  This led to great indignation from Dingarn, and he declared that no Englishman save his favourite great chief should come near him.

Meantime Gardiner was assisting an assembly of traders and hunters who had decided on building a town—all shaggy, unkempt, bearded men of the woods, who decided the spot, the name, the arrangements, the spot for church and magistrate’s house, by vote, on the 25th of June, 1835, the birthday of the town of Durban, so called after Sir Benjamin D’Urban, Governor of the Cape, while the Portuguese name of Natal passed to the entire territory.

The dispute with Dingarn continuing, the Captain was again sent to negotiate.  This time he was received in the royal mansion, a magnified beehive, where the king was lying on a mat with his head on one of the little stools made to act as pillows, with about fifty women ranged round.  As to the matter in question, Gardiner was able to declare that, in the white settlement itself, no deserters had found a home since the treaty, and that none should do so; Dingarn said he considered him the chief of the whites there, and should look to him to keep them in order.  Gardiner explained that he had no authority.  “You must have power,” said Dingarn.  “I give you all the country of the white people’s ford.”  This was a piece of land extending from the Tugela to the Nouzincoolu, from the Snowy Mountains to the sea—in fact, the present whole colony of Natal.  A smaller portion, including the district about Natal, was to be his own immediate property.  Dingarn was perfectly in earnest, and thus intended to make him responsible for the conduct of every individual of the motley population of Natal, declaring that he should receive no trader who did not bring credentials from him.  It was as curious a situation as ever commander in the navy was placed in.  All he could do was to return to Durban, explain matters to Mr. Collis and the other traders, and then set out for the Cape to consult Sir Benjamin Durban.

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.

With great difficulty and perseverance he made his way to the Biobio river, leaving his family at Concepçion, the nearest comparatively civilized place.  Here he meant to make his way to a village of independent Indians, with whose chief, Corbalan, he had hopes of entering into relations.

To cross the rapid stream of the Biobio, he had to use a primitive raft, formed of four trunks of trees, about eighteen feet long, lashed together by hide-thongs to two poles, one at each end.  A horse was fastened to it, by knotting his tail to the tow-rope, and on his back was a boy, holding on by the single lock of the mane that is allowed to remain on Chilian horses, who guided him across with much entreating, urging, and coaxing.  On the other side appeared Corbalan, the Indian chief on horseback, and in a dark poncho, a sort of round cloak, with a hole to admit the head, much worn all over South America.  He took Captain Gardiner to his house, an oval, with wattled side-walls, about five feet high and thirty-five long, neatly thatched with grass, with a fireplace in the centre, where a sheep was cooked for supper.  Corbalan could speak Spanish, and seemed to be pleased with the visit, making an agreement that he should teach Gardiner his Indian tongue, and, in return, be instructed in the way of God and heaven.  He had convened forty-five of his people, among whom were five chiefs, each of whom made the visitor the offering of a boiled chicken, while he gave them some coloured cotton handkerchiefs and some brass buttons.  It was a beautiful country, and reminded the guest so much of some parts of England, that it needed a glance at the brown skin, flowing hair, and long poncho of Corbalan to dispel the illusion that he was near home.  Things looked so favourable, that he had even selected a site for the mission-house, when some change of sentiment came over Corbalan, probably from the remonstrances of his fellow-chiefs: he declared that a warlike tribe near at hand would not suffer him to harbour a stranger, and that he must therefore withdraw his invitation.

So ended this attempt; and the indefatigable Captain turned his attention to the Indians to the southward, but he found that these were on good terms with the Chilian Government, and that no one could come among them without a pass from thence; and, as there was a cautious attempt at Christianizing then going on, by persuading the cacique to be baptized and to admit priests to their villages, there was both the less need and the less opening for him.

So, picking up his wife and children again at Concepçion, he sailed with them for Valdivia, where, as wandering Europeans were always supposed to be in search of objects for museums, and perhaps from some confusion about his name, he was called “El Botanico.”  Again he plunged among the Indians; but, wherever he came to a peaceable tribe, they were under the influence of Spanish clergy, who were, of course, determined to exclude him, while the warlike and independent Indians could not understand the difference between him and their Spanish enemies; and thus, after two years of effort, he found that no opening existed for reaching these wild people.  A proposal was made to him to remain and act as an agent for the Bible and Tract Societies among the South American Roman Catholics, but this he rejected.  “No,” he said; “I have devoted myself to God, to seek for openings among the heathen, and I cannot go back or modify my vow.”

The Malay Archipelago was his next goal.  He sailed with his wife and children from Valparaiso for Sydney on the 29th of May, 1839, but the vessel got out of her course, and was forced to put in at Tahiti, where he found things sadly changed by the aggression of Louis Philippe’s Government, which had claimed the protectorate.  The troubles of Queen Pomare’s reign were at their height, and the conflict between French and English, Roman Catholic and Protestant, prevented any efficient struggle against the corruption introduced by the crews of all nations.