A COLONY IN THE MAKING 
CHAP. 
232 
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 
