72 RETALIATION ON BOERS. 



only inhabitants it seems ever to have had were baboons. 

 I left at the end of the upper branch one of Father Mathew'a 

 leaden teetotal tickets. 



I never saw the Bakwains looking so haggard and lean 

 as at this time. Most of their cattle had been swept away 

 by the Boers, together with about eighty fine draught-oxen ; 

 and much provision left with them by two officers, Cap- 

 tains Codrington and Webb, to serve for their return jour- 

 ney south, had been carried off also. On their return these 

 officers found the skeletons of the Bakwains where they 

 expected to find their own goods. All the corn,, clothing, 

 and furniture of the people, too, had been consumed in the 

 flames which the Boers had forced the subject tribes to 

 apply to the town during the fight, so that its inhabitants 

 were now literally starving. 



Sechelehad given orders to his people not to commit any 

 act of revenge pending his visit to the Queen of England; 

 but some of the young men ventured to go to meet a party 

 of Boers returning from hunting, and, as the Boers became 

 terrified and ran off, they brought their wagons to Lituba- 

 ruba. This seems to have given the main body of Boers 

 an idea that the Bakwains meant to begin a guerrilla war 

 upon them. This " Caffre war" was, however, only in 

 embryo, and not near that stage of development in which 

 the natives have found out that the hide-and-seek system is 

 the most successful. 



The Boers, in alarm, sent four of their number to ask for 

 peace ! I, being present, heard the condition : — "Sechele's 

 children must be restored to him." I never saw men so 

 completely and unconsciously in a trap as these four Boers 

 were. Strong parties of armed Bakwains occupied every 

 pass in the hills and gorges around; and had they not pro- 

 mised much more than thej^ intended, or did perform, that 

 day would have been their last. The commandant Scholz 

 had appropriated the children of Sechele to be his own 

 domestic slaves. I was present when one little boy, Khari, 

 son of Sechele, was returned to his mother; the child had 



