232 A COLONY IN THE MAKING chap. 



adventure, exploration, and research. Those who 

 ventured on them had to be the possessors of really 

 stout and determined hearts. They had hardships 

 to face for certain, shortage of water, unpleasant 

 food, and fever ; moreover, they had the indefinite and 

 exciting prospect of finding hostile natives and imper- 

 fectly known wild beasts whose mischievous pro- 

 pensities prove to have been considerably exaggerated. 

 Against such dangers and privations to be faced there 

 were balanced rewards of great worth : new territory to 

 be visited, new, or at all events more or less unknown, 

 tribes of doubtfully friendly natives to be encountered 

 and studied, and almost certainly new animals or birds 

 to be discovered. As to sport itself, the same com- 

 parison holds good, but here I would submit that, from 

 a purely sporting point of view, there is an adverse 

 balance against the older days. In many instances, 

 such sportsmen as I have named struck virgin shoot- 

 ing ground ; the game was very numerous and tame and 

 to slay a quantity of it was an uncommonly easy matter. 

 Nor, indeed, judging by some published lists of bags, 

 can excessive clemency be urged against the early 

 comers. They had, too, the delightful and unrestricted 

 feeling of really shooting Ferae Naturae, wild beasts 

 which belonged to no man. With the coming of 

 licences, schedules, fines, and undertakings to be good, 

 absolutely necessary as they all are, this feeling has 

 gone, never to return. The sportsman of to-day can, 

 however, weigh against this the fact that the game is 

 wilder and more difficult of approach, and the fact that 

 though the quantity of game is no doubt considerably 

 less than before the visitation of rinderpest in 1890 

 and subsequent years, the habitat of each species is so 

 well known that it is a matter of infinitely greater ease 



