The diary of a soldier of fortune : his experiences as engineer, sheep station hand, labour agent, explorer, American soldier, blockade runner, tramp

Chapter XXXII. PAGE 220

269 277 286 298 306

333 341

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The Author in 1899

Outside Palapye Stadt 1

Pool on Lotsani River J

Geelong Mine, November 1897

River Camp, Geelong "|

River Camp, Geelong J

The Author's Hut, River Camp (exterior)

The Author's Hut, River Camp (interior)

First Workings, Geelong Mine "j

Geelong, after a year's work j

Pack-donkeys for Shooting Trip — Malcolm Portal Hyatt on right

Lion Cubs

Bulawayo in the early days ]

A Mine Compound

A Mashona Kraal 1

Some of our followers J

Amyas Portal Hyatt .

A Drift in Rhodesia "j

On the Road j

Baobab Tree "j

In the Bush Veld J

Mrs Stanley Portal Hyatt

Wreck of s.s. Afasdafe^

Katubig, Samar J

Officers, Fort San Ramon ^

Outside Fort San Ramon j

Malcolm and Stanley Portal Hyatt

Frontispiece facing page 16

33 38

SO

148 178 221

272 304

324 342

THE DIARY OF A SOLDIER OF FORTUNE

Chapter I

The vessel on which I left England the first time was — and I believe is still — one of the finest and fastest sailing ships ever launched. She had been built in the days when the cargo-tank was still a horror of the future, and she held the record from the Cape to Melbourne, having made the run in seventeen days. True, she had done the feat by accident, involuntarily, having been unable to heave to ; but the fact of her achievement remains. However, when, as a youngster of seventeen, I was a passenger on her, she was not trying to startle the world of sailormen. Her skipper was careful — the ship's company used to put it more crudely and emphatically ; he liked to put his vessel to bed before he, himself, turned in ; and the mates knew better than to set a single stitch more canvas until he reappeared. On the other hand, he used to hold a service every night before he shortened sail, and, possibly, that may have compensated for the extra work he caused. At anyrate, it is to be hoped that his prayings in the cabin neutralised the effect of what was being said about him on deck.

I did not like that skipper. Even now, I look back on him with a definite amount of resentment.

which the ordinary traveller would not understand. On the average mail boat, with its hundreds of passengers and its fixed time-table, the skipper is the " captain," a gold-laced personage, possessing a bland smile and showing infinite patience in answering futile questions. He appears at regular intervals, suave and shaven, in the saloon, on deck, in the smoking-room, and, before one out of a score of those on board has learnt to know him at all, the voyage is over. On a sailing ship, however, the " captain" becomes the "old man" omnipotent and always present. If his liver is out of order, everyone scurries to cover ; if he has a fit of religion, everyone shares in his gloomy depression and hums alleged hymns ; if he looks on the whisky when it is yellow, the entire ship's company becomes afflicted with what is usually an unquenchable thirst.

There is no gold lace about the old man of a sailing ship. This particular specimen used to wear a frock-coat of semi-clerical cut, and one of those wholly detestable hats, hybrids between the silk hat and the bowler, dear to the heart of the retired Anglo-Indian. Even in the Tropics, when the pitch in the seams was bright and sticky, and the livestock in the coops abaft the forecastle was gasping and dying for want of the breeze which would not come, the old man would stalk up and down the poop in that same garb, a female relative on either arm. I did not like him, as I have said, but he had a certain strencrth which one could not help admiring. Most people, meeting him on land, would have taken him for an uneaten missionary, who had awed his local heathen into a state of trembling submission, either by his grimness or by his possible toughness. One could imagine him converting a whole tribe, and then marching back, at the head of the inevitable punitive expedition, to avenge the roasting of his successor. But he was certainly out of place in command of an Australian clipper. The second mate, who had been in the United States, used to declare that the old man was a Hard-shell Baptist, although he admitted he was not quite certain of the tenets of that particular sect. Personally, I do know that the skipper abhorred tobacco and alcohol, and regarded me as a malign influence, possibly because I had objected to sharing a cabin with a man in an advanced state of tuberculosis. ,

It was an uneventful trip, despite its length. There were some twenty passengers in all, mostly men with various complaints, ranging from alcoholism to consumption, and we went through the usual round of quarrels and reconciliations. We played nap for matches in the midshipmen's berth during the dog watches, and dozed and read and smoked for the rest of the day. We fished for albatross when we got down south, and tried in vain to preserve the skins of those we caught. It was too long a voyage, of course, and yet as a whole it was very pleasant, even despite the dreary influence of the skipper ; but, none the less, the best moment of it seemed to be when the tug took our tow-line a few miles south of Sydney Heads.

The moon was just rising as we dropped anchor in Watson's Bay. Somehow, the memory of that night seems absolutely fresh to me even after fifteen years. We had seen nothing of Sydney Harbour, save the lights along the shore, and the heads themselves loomingup black and threatening against the sky ; and yet, the moment the ship pulled up to her cable, a sense of the perfect security and peace of the place seemed to come on you, and you realised suddenly the beauties of the scene which the morning sun was going to reveal to you. I have seen many harbours since then, but I think the only ones which excel Sydney are Dar-es- Salaam, the Place of Peace, in East Africa, and Nagasaki. On this occasion it was the absolute stillness after the hundred days on the never-still ocean which told at first ; then, from over the water, very faint yet very distinct, came the barking of a dog, and the longing to be on land again, the natural instinct of man, swamped any regret one might have felt at quitting the old ship and the good fellows on her.

Looking back at it now, I realise that I must have been pretty green when I landed in Sydney. Since leaving Dulwich, two years previously, I had been working for a firm of engineers, whose head, Roger Dawson, was one of the pioneers of electric lighting in England, and I had picked up a certain amount of technical knowledge ; but beyond that my experience had been very limited. I was just a lanky, ungainly boy, who had outgrown his strength, and was suffering from that worst form of shyness, the one which makes you bluff clumsily to try and get through.

It is a wretched thing to be shy. I believe I am so still. Even dealing with publishers and editors and mining engineers has not hardened my shell completely ; and, more than once, when I have wanted a cheque particularly badly, I have gone into an office to ask for one, and then come out without having managed to reach the point. So I must be shy, for I am always convinced that publishers and newspapers owe me money morally, if not actually. On the other hand, I have never felt a moment's nervousness on the platform, perhaps because I have always been certain that my audience knew no more about my subject than I did myself, and so could not contradict me. Yet in Sydney, though I was put up for the New South Wales Club, and should have been only too glad to have taken advantage of the fact, I could never muster up courage to pass through its doors.

Those were the days when Sydney abounded, not only in larrikins, but in fan-tan shops as well. All down Lower George Street — probably the lowest George Street in the world — you would find those little gambling dens, which the police were, apparently, unable or unwilling to close. You usually went down a long, matchboarded passage into a large and grimy room at the back, where you would see a score of men, mostly larrikins and sailors, clustered round a big, matting-covered table. The game is simplicity itself — you merely bet on how many little brass coins will be left when a Chinaman has counted them off by fours at a time ; you put your money on nought, one, two or three, or combinations of these, and you win or lose accordingly. It is not very exciting, though you can generally find some squalidly picturesque details in the setting. I can still hear the long nails of the Chinese croupier, those horrible, gruesome claws, scratching over the matting as he raked in the lost money, still see the unconcealed spite on his face as he paid out to an unusually successful gambler.

Sydney may be pleasant enough in these days — it might have been pleasant enough then for a visitor who had plenty of money, although it was just after the bank failures and trade was still paralysed — but, personally, I was only too glad when, a fortnight after landing, I had the chance to go to a big sheep station over four hundred miles up country, in the driest, hottest part of New South Wales. It was a fine place, splendidly kept up, splendidly stocked, and in later years I often found myself comparing the miserable little flocks of a few hundred scabby sheep and goats, of which the Afrikander farmer is so proud, with the hundred and thirty thousand head of stock we had on that run. Yet, somehow, I cannot say that station life made any great impression on me ; certainly, it never appealed to me. Even so far up country as that, there was little suggestion of the back-blocks, and no hint at all of the Australia of the novelists. It was all quite prosaic and quite proper. I daresay I should have stayed there much longer, perhaps have settled down to it altogether, had it not been for the horse-racing. It was not the races we saw that wearied me, but those we talked about. They formed the one subject of conversation, until I grew absolutely to loathe the very mention of them ; and I believe it was this, rather than the fact that the prospects were extremely poor financially, which really sent me drifting back to the coast.

I got back to Sydney with two pounds in my pocket, and but a meagre chance of earning more. I tried to cut things down to the limit, for the first time learning what a really cheap eating house is like — you could get splendid sixpenny meals in Sydney — but I was soon absolutely broke. It was then I lost my first dress suit. I had been very proud of it, and I had, so far, regarded it as potential wealth ; but the little Hebrew down in the Argyll Cut, that detestable place where the larrikins drop lumps of blue-metal on the heads of passers-by, cross-examined me so sharply about it — where had I got it, why was I selling it — that I almost began to fear that I really had stolen it ; consequently, when he raised his original offer of seven and sixpence to ten shillings, I believe, for the moment, I looked on him as a generous benefactor, who was saving me from being turned out of my lodgings and becoming a " Domain Squatter," from sleeping out in that public park which was then the common camping ground of all the broken men, and all the cosmopolitan rascality, of Sydney.

I have often wondered what became of that ugly little Semite ; whether he went to Johannesburg and became rich through buying gold shares or stolen gold, whether he stayed in Australia and reached wealth through Parliament, or whether the larrikins treated him as they should have done down in that same Argyll Cut. At anyrate, he got my dress suit cheaply enough ; and yet, perhaps, the beggar brought me luck, for, within a couple of hours, I had got a job to overhaul the electric lighting of a big coffee palace in the centre of the city.

Chapter II

Australia to-day seems entirely devoid of the element of Romance. Possibly, the same can be said of any prosperous country, for excitement means insecurity and dislocation of trade. On the other hand, it does seem rather remarkable that practically all the successful Australian stories of adventure should have dealt with violent crime of the bushranger type. Nowadays, those who would have been bushrangers a few decades ago, who are still bushrangers in spirit, find a safer and more remunerative field for their energies in politics. Life has become drab, for you cannot well admire the man who is piling up the National Debt for you, greatly though you might have been interested in his father when that gentleman was merely robbing your richer neighbours.

In the end my job petered out, and I had to do as I might have done all along — cable for money, an unpleasant confession of failure. I left the country without regret. It had never made the least appeal to me, perhaps because of its very order and security, and the only incident I can remember which even verged on the picturesque was the arrest, as a rogue and vagabond, or its Australian equivalent, of a man who had been one of our Parliamentary candidates only the week before.

I came home round the Horn, again in a windjammer, and once more the trip, a hundred and twenty days in duration, was perfectly uneventful, except for the fact that, owing, I believe, to the steward's desire to save rnoney, we ran short of provisions, and, after eating the cow, which was disgustingly tough, had to borrow off a German oil-tank we were lucky enough to meet. I often think that sea novelists and sea poets must have wonderful luck in getting their experiences — or is it that those experiences make them break out into fiction and verse ? Altogether, I have spent about a couple of years as a passenger on various craft, which have ranged from a tiny Philippine coastguard to a Cunarder, and have been on pretty well every sea, yet I have never had a maritime adventure, never even been seasick. Luck does go that way. I might have got copy for two or three more novels out of one shipwreck. The thing has been done before.

I suppose most budding engineers want to be inventors. Certainly, during the eighteen months I was at Home I had the craze badly ; and the nation was the richer to the extent of protection fees on five epoch-making inventions ; though it showed an utterly callous indifference to the value of them all. The first was a camera. I claimed that it was the lightest and neatest ever invented. Possibly I was right, and undoubtedly it would have been the most expensive to manufacture ; so the makers passed it by. The next patent was for a bicycle brake, which would have been so powerful and sudden in its action that it would have upset the machine, and probably killed the rider. Then came a steam-engine valve, which, besides not being entirely novel, would have leaked badly as soon as it became worn. An arranorement for glazing the windows of railway carriages I still hold to have been good, if only because the big German firm, which had the model, made innumerable excuses for not returning it, and finally managed to keep it in the end.

The pick of the inventions was, however, a paraffin lamp for using the incandescent mantle. One of my brothers and I worked on that together, and we had a company promoter ready to float it — when it was ready, I grew quite used to fires during the experiments. We kept a box of sand at the end of the bench, and every time the lamp burst we used to empty this over the blaze. The thing did work, there was no denying that. When the atmospheric conditions were right, or the vaporiser was in a good humour, the light was far brighter than that obtainable from coal gas ; but at other times it either poured out volumes of thick black smoke, or blew the mantle to pieces. We never succeeded in getting an automatic adjustment ; and, in the end, we lost about a hundred pounds over it.

It was during these lamp days that my brother Malcolm and myself signed contracts to go out to Matabeleland for two years. That country was just being opened up in earnest ; the second Matabele War was practically over, and the dawn of prosperity was come — at least the financial papers said so, and they must have known. Our mine, the Geelong, was to be the first actually to produce gold, and, with that end in view, a special staff was recruited in England. My position was that of electrical engineer, and, though I was a little doubtful of my own capability to see the thing through, it was good enough to risk, good enough for me, at anyrate.

I think, in all, there were eighteen of us went out for the company. Of these, my brother is still in Rhodesia, whilst I know where a couple more are to be found in England ; but the others are scattered far and wide. I know that several are dead ; I feel fairly certain that several more have also made their last trek ; and I cannot say definitely that more than two of the remainder are alive. The men who were in Rhodesia in those days dropped out of the race rather quickly. The new-comers stand the country well enough. They scoff at the idea of its being unhealthy, never realising that the conditions of life have changed completely. They would have died off fastenough in the bully-beef-and-mealie meal days, perhaps faster than did our fellows, because, though the latter were not those detestable people, desirable citizens, they were of a much more hardy and self-reliant type. They were not settlers. I do not think anybody then wanted to settle in the country ; the main object was to make some money and go home before the fever or the natives finished your career ; but, incidentally, we broke down the way for the settlers.

I was twenty when I went out to Matabeleland, but I looked a good deal older. I remember I proposed to a girl two or three days before I sailed, and, after receiving a qualified acceptance, was quite sentimental for some time, really until I began to get some good shooting. Then I forgot that she, being wise, had ceased to write.

Perhaps it was being in love that made me hate Port Elizabeth so much. We landed there for our long journey up country, and I took a dislike to it, right away. It is one of those towns where there are always flies in your morning coffee, and blatant, loud-voiced men in the hall and bar of the hotel, men whose sole object in life seems to be to impress the newly arrived Britisher. They did impress me, certainly.

I remember once hearing a Yankee describe the town ; he said : " It's hotter than blazes. It's all Jew boys and flies and plague and niggers ; and I wouldn't stay there even if they made me Mayor. No, sir ; not even if they threw in the customs' job as well."

Up in Rhodesia the name of Port Elizabeth was anathema. It was there that the whisky came from — literally. True, it was in Scotch bottles ; but only the Teutonic gentlemen at the coast could tell you what the contents were. It was said that the essential part, that which actually gave you alcoholic poisoning, came from the Fatherland, in which case I admire that country for having the sense to send it away. Then, too, the customs people and forwarding agents, being patriots, in a colonial sense, did their best to delay the transit of stuff imported direct from Home, holding that it ought to be handled first by a local firm ; and so, in the end, the unfortunate Rhodesian had to be content with inferior or doctored brands. Consequently, it is not unnatural that, when a Port Elizabeth man did chance to come north himself, he often heard unpleasant things.

Railhead was at Palapye then, or rather at Palapye siding, eleven miles from Khama's town itself. We jolted northwards in leisurely style. Sometimes the train attained a terrific speed — twenty miles an hour or so — but as a rule it went at the far more dignified gait beloved of the English south coast lines. Once, near Taungs, from where I was sitting on the footboard of the carriage, I saw the engine driver shoot a hare, jump to the ground, pick it up, and regain his footplate without his mate having to slow down. We spent a night at Mafeking. The stationmaster insisted on that. The train had been only three days and four nights doing seven hundred miles, he said, and if it went on in that way it would be establishing a most dangerous precedent ; other passengers would be claiming to be carried at that fearful rate.

Next morning we jogged along again, until about midday, when we reached a siding where we stayed till nightfall. The line is, of course, a single one, and we were supposed to be waiting for another train to pass us. Unfortunately, the other engine driver was doing a similar thing a few miles higher up, and we might both have been where we were all night had not a travelling nigger carried the news of our situation to the down train. Nobody was sorry when we finally went on again. There was any amount of whisky on board, but no one had any water, except the engine driver, who declared he could not spare a drop. Consequently, it was a thirsty day, if not exactly a dry one. Evidently, the guard found it so, and I am afraid he was not exactly a teetotaller ; for when at nightfall it was suggested that he should light the carriage lamps, he first denied that there were any lamps, then denied that it was dark, then finally, after bumping his head in an attempt to stand up, murmured softly that he had no pain now, and went to sleep on the floor of his van. After that, we did the job for ourselves.

Amongst the passengers was Doel Zeederberg, the famous coach contractor, probably the bestknown and best - liked Dutchman north of the Crocodile. From that time onwards for seven years I often met him, but after I left the country I heard no more of him till 1908, when I saw in The Daily Telegraph a curt announcement of his death in a London nursing home. It was a curiously pathetic end for a man who had done so much, whose whole work had lain ahead of the railways, in the open air, to come to England and die amid the smoke and grime of the metropolis.

We were five days and nights in all from Port Elizabeth to Railhead, about nine hundred and seventy miles. Last time I passed through Palapye siding all that marked it was a big nameboard and a derelict iron tank, yet in 1897 there was quite a township there — three or four stores, a hotel, a restaurant, five police tents and a couple of score of hovels inhabited by Greeks, coolies and natives ; whilst, in addition to these, there was a huge accumulation of stuff of all sorts — mining machinery, whisky, and provisions — waiting for transport.

The only water at the siding was what came up on the water train, and the railway people were none too generous with regard to the number of trains they ran. So much water a day was issued to the hotel and the restaurant and the heads of businesses, but none to stray individuals. Washing of any sort was absolutely impossible. There were men in the siding who had not even rinsed their hands for weeks, and the flies and the dust between them did not tend to render that siding a clean place. At the restaurant, which consisted of a square mud hut with a roof of bush, they gave you one cup of tea, and no more. You could not buy a drink anywhere, at least openly, for Khama's country was strictly Prohibition ; although, after I had been there a day or two, I did manage to get some whisky from a storekeeper who had smuggled it in, but even that had to be consumed neat.

Altogether it was a perfectly detestable spot, blazing hot by day, bitterly cold at night. There was always grit between your teeth, always flies, which had previously visited some Kaffir, trying to crawl into your eyes. If you smoked to keep the flies off, you got thirsty ; if you stopped smoking, the little brutes drove you mad.

We were waiting for the wagons which were to take us to the Geelong mine — everybody seemed to be waiting for wagons in those months following the Rinderpest, when nine-tenths of the cattle were dead — our stuff was all ready, but day after day went by, and no transport riders appeared. Finally, we were told we must trudge the eleven miles into Palapye, and either wait there, or go on another trek to the Lotsani Drift, where there was supposed to be plenty of water.

It was a very dry tramp into Palapye, through heavy sand, the only landmarks being the Rinderpest wagons, which had been abandoned when their cattle died a few months before. Some had been looted, but the number of these was small, for Khama has always had his tribe well in hand ; and, whilst the civilised part of him looked upon theft as a deadly sin, his savage side — and every African native is a savao^e at heart — knew how to devise suitable punishments for thieves. Palapye Town — Palapye Stadt, they used to call it, though I believe the wretched spot has been abandoned now — was, if possible, more hateful than the siding. It was reputed to be the largest native settlement in Africa. I daresay it was. I am certain it was the most insanitary one.

Khama's people, the Bamangwatu, are Christians. At least the Blue Books and missionary reports say so ; and, consequently, it must be true. Certainly they sing hymns with great and inharmonious fervour, and steal whenever they think it safe so to do. As labourers they are useless, as warriors they are despicable ; in their homes they are the dirtiest of South African races. Possibly they have some redeeming virtues ; but they hide these so carefully that no white man — save some stray missionary, perhaps — has ever discovered them. Yet, none the less, Khama, their chief, will go down in history with his great foes, Umzilakazi and Lobengula, as a native statesman and a black gentleman. I admire him as much as I detest his people. I met him in Palapye the day after I arrived there. He was on horseback, and pulled up to greet, through an interpreter, the youngster who was

OUTSIDE PALAPYE.

LOTSANI RIVER.

with me and myself. There was nothing remarkable in his appearance ; and yet, as was the case with several chiefs I met subsequently, especially old Gabaza, the great M'Tchangana warrior, who was poisoned by the Mashona in my camp, you could see he was used to giving commands which had to be obeyed. I have no love for missionaries, and even less for native Christians, but the greatness of Khama, the missionaries' chief, goes far towards redeeming all the faults of the others. But then, of course, Khama was the convert of John Mackenzie, who, if not the greatest missionary, was certainly the greatest Imperial statesman who ever breathed in South Africa. There could be no better proof of our utter lack of a sense of proportion than the fact that, as a nation, we have forgotten that Mackenzie ever existed ; and yet, but for what Mackenzie did in the eighties, when he saved Bechuanaland, the Gate of the North, from the Boers and the Germans, there would never have been a Rhodesia or a British Central Africa. Griqualand West would have been the boundary of the British colonies. Cecil John Rhodes was a great man, but, even though I commit the unpardonable sin in saying so, I hold that John Mackenzie was greater. "^

But to go back to the subject of Palapye Stadt — I hope I never go back to the spot itself — it stank of natives. There was no denying that fact. Even the hymns could not sterilise the effluvia. It was a huge slum of round mud huts. The roads were merely wide stretches of offal-littered white sand ; whilst the centre of the town, the aristocratic portion, merely consisted of a few galvanised iron stores, where the white men, most of whom were of Hebrew extraction, bartered skins for shoddy trade goods. Under the eaves of every one of the thousands of huts hung Rinderpest biltong, strips of dried or putrescent meat which had been cut from defunct bullocks. These did not furnish the main smell — the Bamangwatu themselves did that — but they helped to swell the total in a noticeable degree.