2 HUNTING TRIPS IN NORTHERN RHODESIA. 



I spent some years of my life as a tea-planter in Cachar, Sylhet, Assam, and the 

 Terai Dooars, but left India as the climate did not agree with me, for I suffered 

 constantly from fever, which I got into my system while opening out a new garden in 

 a particularly unhealthy spot. 



When I went to this place I got one hundred and five coolies, and when I left it. 

 a year afterwards there were very few left of the lot, the remainder having died 

 of various tropical complaints. Besides these, a great number of other coolies I got 

 later, also died, and I think the deaths altogether for the year came to over two 

 hundred. 



Besides the deaths on the garden itself, cholera broke out in the surrounding 

 villages, causing great loss of life amongst the inhabitants. 



The country swarmed with leeches and mosquitoes, the former causing very bad 

 ulcers, from which the coolies and myself suffered horribly. 



The shooting in Eastern India did not satisfy me, for the jungles were so dense 

 and impenetrable that it was impossible to get about them without the aid of 

 elephants, and an impecunious planter is hardly able to afford to keep these 

 animals. 



However, there were generally plenty of snipe, duck, and jungle-fowl to be 

 got, but the sport of shooting them was too tame. So I left India and came to 

 Mashonaland in 1899, where I spent a short time trekking about with a Boer 

 transport rider, as the men are called who run transport in waggons. For reasons I 

 can hardly explain myself I took it into my head to return again to India, but when 

 the Boer War broke out I was seized with the prevailing patriotism and came back 

 to the Cape, where I joined a mounted corps and was sent to the front. 



After serving for a few months I was knocked over with a bad attack of enteric 

 fever, which nearly finished me. I was taken ill near Modderfontein in the western 

 province, so I was carried into a store kept by an old Scotchman named Macgregor, 

 who had married a Dutch woman, by whom he had a large family of sons and 

 daughters, mostly the latter. 



Old Macgregor and his family looked after me so well that in three months I 

 was on my legs again, having only been seen by the Army doctor of the district 

 twice, as he had to drive a long distance and had plenty of other work on his hands. 

 After that I went to Ceres, a lovely hamlet in the hills about seventy miles from 

 Cape Town. The bracing climate and good food soon pulled me together again, 

 and shortly afterwards an opportunity occurred for my leaving South Africa, so I 

 booked a passage for Durban, where I transhipped into the s.s. Induna and came to 

 Chinde. I have heard the old Induna very badly maligned, but I found her fairly 



