In Wildest Africa ^ 



race with guns and ammunition and sending them out 

 rhinoceros-hunting. Now it is difficult to get even a few 

 specimens of this animal for the museums, and they are 

 almost worth their weight in gold. Information lately 

 obtained seems to indicate that a very small number 

 of these mighty beasts, probably not more than thirty-five 

 in all, are still living their life in the midst of inaccessible 

 swamps in Zululand and Mashonaland, in a district that, on 

 account of its deadly climate, is almost closed to Europeans. 

 However, the Government of Natal has, I am pleased 

 to say, made the killing any animal of this species, without 

 legal permission, a crime to be punished by a fine of ;f 300. 

 An English officer, Captain (afterwards Sir) William 

 Cornwallis Harris, is an authoritative witness as to the 

 extermination of wild animals in South Africa in 1836, 

 though it must have been going on for a long time before 

 that without any written record. The Boers must have 

 slaughtered hecatombs of wild animals, though up to that 

 date we have no first-hand written evidence on the subject.^ 

 Their proceedings were precisely of the same character 

 as the events that have occurred in our own day in 



^ We are indebted to the English hunters of those days for all the 

 information we possess as to the wild life of South Africa at that time. If 

 there had not been amongst them men who knew also how to handle the 

 pen, we should have been almost entirely without trustworthy information 

 as to that period. I may take this opportunity of saying a word for the 

 English "record-making sportsman," who is not unfrequently the subject of 

 false and unfounded invectives, which I can only describe as mostly full 

 of fanciful fables. Other lands, other ways, and there are black sheep in 

 every nation. In any case we may take English ideals of sport as our 

 example, and also the regulations drawn up by English authorities for the 

 protection of the animal world. 



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