244 BOTANICAL EXCURSIONS 
country variegated with wood; in the other to the high 
mountains of Cafferland, among which the Winterberg (dis- 
tant about sixty leagues) makes a conspicuous figure. 
The hills on the north and east of Graham’s Town are 
considerably lower than those near the barracks, and expand 
at the top into smooth, grassy table plains of great breadth. 
A peculiar rocky knoll, in the shape of a truncated cone, 
overlooking the town from the east, is known by the name of 
Lynx's Kop, and noted as being the station from which the 
famous Caffer Chief Makanna, or Lynx as the Dutch called 
him, directed the desperate attack on Graham’s Town, in 
1819. This man, who pretended to a divine mission, had 
acquired by his arts a prodigious influence over the Caffers, 
and succeeded in engaging several of the tribes in a combined 
attack on the town, which was then in its infancy ; his object 
was nothing less than the total expulsion of the whites from 
Albany and the adjoining districts, and he had contrived to 
persuade his followers that by his magical arts he would be 
able to render harmless the bullets of the enemy. Abandon- 
ing, therefore, the insidious mode of fighting which is usually 
practised by the frontier Caffers, they advanced openly to the 
attack in dense masses and with great fury, but were at length 
routed by the severe fire of the English troops. Upwards of- 
five hundred of them, I was told, remained dead on the spot, 
and considering their extreme tenacity of life, the wounded 
must be estimated at three or four times that number. For 
some time afterwards, it is said, the bush between this town 
and the frontier swarmed with vultures, attracted by the 
corpses of those who had perished in their retreat. If there 
had been a force of cavalry at hand to follow up the victory, 
the Caffers would probably not have become again trouble- 
some to the colony in the present generation. Makanna 
himself did not fall in the battle, but was taken prisoner soon 
after, and sent to Robben Island, in Table Bay, the ordinary 
place of confinement for felons. By what right we could 
treat an independent chieftain as a criminal, is not easy 
to say. 
