176 Great and Small Game of Africa 



The first Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope met with a richly 

 coloured species of antelope in the neighbourhood of Cape Agulhas which 

 they named the bontebok, — pied or variegated antelope, — and it was more 

 than 100 years later that the very nearly allied species now known as the 

 blesbok was first encountered on some high-lying open plains to the south 

 of the Orange River in the present Colesberg division of the Cape Colony. 

 These undoubted blesboks were, however, at first called bonteboks, and the 

 plains over which they once roamed are known as the " bontebok flats " to 

 this day. When the emigrant Boers crossed the Orange River in 1836 and 

 trekked into the plains of what is now known as the Orange Free State, they 

 met with immense herds of blesboks, but saw no bonteboks. They, how- 

 ever, confused the names of the two species, those who had some acquaint- 

 ance with or knew something about the latter animal calling the new but 

 nearly allied species by the old name, whilst the majority, who had never 

 seen or heard of bonteboks, called the new species blesboks — from the 

 broad white blaze down the face. Thus a confusion arose between the 

 bontebok and the blesbok which there can be little doubt caused Cornwallis 

 Harris to believe that both species were abundant to the north of the 

 Orange River. It will be as well, however, to quote what he himself says 

 on this subject. On page 88 of his magnificent work on the Game and 

 Wild Animals of Southern Africa he writes : " Until we had reached the 

 headquarters of the bontebok in the heart of those great unexplored plains 

 (of the interior of South Africa) whereon thousands upon thousands were 

 seen and numbers daily slain, one small troop near Kapain and half a dozen 

 stragglers at the foot of the Cashan range ' were all that occurred after the 

 first specimens which we met with on the Chooi desert " (in Bechuana- 

 land). 



This means that when Harris met with blesboks for the first time in 

 Bechuanaland he was told they were bonteboks, and he seems to have 



1 In the present Magaliesbcrg district of the Transvaal. 



