Company Of Spears

But Hervey had read the colony’s historical record, Somervile had revealed to him the contents of the most confidential of papers, and Fairbrother had told him what so many outside the castle believed: the white man lived precariously at the Cape. He knew that what he observed inland of Algoa Bay was not a wilderness, and that out of the abundant green might come at any time native hordes to reclaim all that was settled. And even if those native hordes could be checked, there would surely be more. Could these Cape settlers, a few thousand adventurers, ever know what was to come out of that green heart of Africa – or when? Ex Africa aliquid novi semper: Atilius Regulus had killed the huge African snake, and the spoils of the creature were shipped to Rome for public display. The snake had been real enough, and yet the poets had seen it as boding evil for Rome, so that Africa to their minds became Rome-hating. The Carthaginians – black Hannibal – had almost destroyed the city: the Romans in their revenge had destroyed Carthage, poisoned the wells, ploughed salt into her fertile soil. Would that be what they would have to do here, at the very extremity of the continent, just as Rome had had to do?

Hervey knew that Somervile was right. There was no prospect of a diplomatic peace without the military resources to crush the Xhosa if they refused diplomacy: si vis pacem, preparate bellum. But if the Xhosa were only a fraction of the native hordes that might pour into the colony, how might there ever be a settled peace? As Somervile pointed out, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies was not of a philosophical mind. From the perspective of Downing Street, the shores of southern Africa could be colonized in the usual way: cleared, fortified, settled, regulated – and with trade, the benign influence, conducted beyond the pale. Moreover, to Hervey there was no ill in such a vision. Why could not the Xhosa stay east of the Fish River, where by ‘treaty’ they had settled after the terrible fighting seven years ago? What accounted for their recent depredations across the Fish into the Crown Colony? They must know that it brought nothing but retribution. These Cape-Dutch farmers, these burghers (and for that matter the newer British settlers), were not men who would be satisfied with merely recovering their stolen cattle: they would want a reckoning – compensation, reparation, condign punishment.

And so the trouble would inevitably increase. Did the colony possess enough troops to fight a full-scale war with the Xhosa? That indeed was the question to which this preliminary reconnaissance was directed. History was no good presage: the fighting seven years ago had been savage, unpredictable, unconfined, the Xhosa attacking not just isolated farms but forts and the bigger settlements. Even Graham’s Town had been all but overrun. The equal savagery with which the insurrection had been put down – necessary savagery, said everyone, for there had been no alternative – had then sown the seeds of the present state of frontier insolence. In the aftermath of the French war, and with Bonaparte on St Helena, there had been plenty of troops at the Cape, but since Bonaparte’s death and the Xhosa rebellion there had been severe retrenchment; how much more savage now would they need to be if the Xhosa made war again? Must they destroy every kraal, poison the wells and plough salt into the soil beyond the Fish River?