2 
ON SAFARI 
A book that fascinated in only less degree was 
Hawkeb, and for five-and-twenty years I followed “ the 
Colonel” in what certainly represents the hardest and 
most strenuous form of wild sport that is attainable 
within our British Isles—that of wildfowling afloat. 
Then, after a quarter of a century, when there came 
at length opportunity to visit the far-away veld of 
South Africa, already its long-dreamt charm had faded. 
During the second half of the nineteenth century the 
erewhiles wondrous fauna of the sub-continent had 
steadily, incredibly melted away before Boer breech¬ 
loaders. 1 
It was in May 1899 that the author first landed in 
South Africa—in those days of deep anxiety and unrest 
that soon afterwards culminated in war. There still 
roamed then on the broad bush-veld that lies towards 
the Limpopo the superb sable and roan antelopes, the 
koodoo, tsesseby and brindled gnu, waterbuck and 
many more. The elephant, it is true, had finally disap¬ 
peared ; so had the rhino, buffalo, giraffe and eland—all 
of these abundant but a generation before. 
The first-named, however, all survived in some 
numbers, together with smaller antelopes which, if less 
imposing, are no less graceful. To have seen these 
magnificent wild beasts in their haunts, and to have 
secured specimens of most—that, at least, was something 
effected. It was, nevertheless, with a certain undefined 
sense of disappointment—or, at any rate, of aspirations 
not fully realised—that, after four months on the veld, 
I turned homewards. The circumstance and condition 
of wild-life had perceptibly changed. These were no 
longer purely pristine. They had lost that ineffable 
original charm of which I had read, and which it had been 
1 Though the Boers, being the most numerous, were the chief 
instruments of slaughter, yet other settlers were only less to blame 
in the proportion of their numbers. The Boers, moreover, never 
permitted the aboriginal natives to possess firearms; and this, in 
other territories (especially Portuguese), has been a deadly source of 
destruction. 
