294 NATURE AND SPORT IN SOUTH AFRICA 



The quaatities of game shot by the early successors 

 of Cornwallis Harris north of the Orange River were 

 prodigious. The rhinoceros bags of Oswell, Vardon, 

 and C. J. Andersson I have already referred to. Dutch 

 hunters often shot as many as fifty or sixty of these 

 animals per man during a season. The rhinoceros 

 was but one item of animal life thus destroyed. 

 Gordon Gumming probably could boast the greatest 

 bag of any of these Nimrods. He shot through 

 South Africa from 1843 to 1850, and his butcher's 

 bill must have been immense. 



But, it is to be remembered, besides the great 

 hunters, whose books have handed down to us this 

 plethora of sport, there were always silently at work 

 in the wilds those unknown gunners, who are con- 

 tent to slay without troubling the world with 

 statistics. Englishmen, Boers, Griqua half-breeds, 

 Hottentots, Bechuanas, and other native hunters; 

 all these were, and still are, busy. And to the 

 weapons of these obscurer sportsmen the great bulk 

 of the game of South Africa has, of course, fallen. 

 To-day, yesterday, and to-morrow, their work of 

 destruction still goes forward. Nothing, it seems, 

 can check it. How are you to patrol or preserve 

 those silent, illimitable deserts, hundreds of miles 

 even from a native town, where the game still 

 lingers, and the black hunter — often armed now-a- 

 days with a good Martini-Henry breech-loader — is at 



