Company Of Spears

At Graham’s Town, a settlement of few stone buildings but to Hervey’s mind a busy, optimistic sort of place nevertheless, they found the detachment commander was laid low by an attack of dysentery. His lieutenant was new, so it was the landdrost who received them and told them of the ‘Clay Pits Trouble’, as already it was becoming known on the frontier. Hervey listened to the landdrost carefully, glancing periodically at Fairbrother for any sign of dispute, but seeing none. The landdrost was an old Cape hand, who had seen service with both the Cape Regiment and then the Albany Levy. He took the view that General Donkin – and Lord Charles Somerset – had made admirable plans, but that in reality the life of the frontier was not to be regulated as if it were a place subject to the usual laws of property and the border itself a mere party wall. The affair of the clay pits, he observed, was but one example of the ‘untidiness’ of the frontier and the difficulties in applying the ‘Donkin doctrine’ to the letter.

The clay pits, explained the landdrost, were about five leagues due east, an easy enough three-hour ride – two with fresh horses at a gallop. And the Fish River was two and a half leagues beyond. The pits were firmly within the colony itself therefore, not the unsettled, patrolled tract. The clay had been used for generations by the Xhosa for dyeing blankets and to paint themselves. The trouble was, he told them, the clay pits were on the farm of one John Brown, who had come east with the first 1820 settler parties. Brown complained that of late he had lost a hundred and sixty cattle and a dozen horses, and that the occasional patrols from Graham’s Town, or Fort Willshire in the unsettled tract, were no protection. The soldiers, he claimed – Hottentot troops – merely hid in ambush, shot at the Xhosa as they approached the pits and then cut off the ears of those they had killed as proof of their zeal and prowess. This, suggested the landdrost, accounted for growing Xhosa enmity. The trouble was, other settlers in the area were trading with the clay-seekers: cattle, ivory, hides and gum in exchange for beads, buttons, wire and trinkets. And since the settlers’ cattle was for the most part unbranded, it was not difficult to imagine the temptation for the Xhosa. One of the settlers had been killed not many months ago when a patrol had appeared unexpectedly and the Xhosa thought they had been betrayed. It was therefore no longer merely a matter of petty lawbreaking but of murder, and – though he was guarded in his expression of it – the landdrost evidently felt that the military were not cooperating as fully as they might in his investigations.

‘What’s to be done?’ asked Hervey.

The landdrost’s jaw jutted. ‘I would wish to have one of Brown’s neighbours by the name of Mahoney arrested for illegal trading, and his land confiscated. That ought to still the activity. I have asked the military to station two men on Brown’s property until such time that I can determine on a conciliatory course with the Xhosa. Brown’s claims of losses I find loose and exaggerated. They’d be wholly impossible to verify without actually tracing the cattle to the Xhosa kraals. Might I accompany you? At least as far as to Brown’s farm and the clay pits.’

Hervey had no objection. He trusted his own powers of observation and discernment in strictly military affairs (if there could be such a thing as strictly military), but in judging the civil conditions at the frontier he knew he would be wise to have counsel of the civil authority.

The following morning, Hervey and his party, accompanied by the landdrost and three pandours who would act as scouts – Hottentots from the Cape Corps detachment – left Graham’s Town for Brown’s farm and the clay pits. It was another fine day, with a few high, barred clouds to remind them that the sea was not so very distant, but otherwise in the vast carpet of green and yellow – rich grass that sorely tempted the horses, and a flower he did not quite recognize – Hervey could have believed himself in the middle of a continent rather than at its furthest edge. Johnson, however, was soon voicing his disappointment by the lack of game, big or otherwise. They saw the odd bush-buck, and plenty of birds, but nothing, he reckoned, they would not have seen in India. The landdrost, drawn in by Johnson’s simple curiosity, as Fairbrother had been the day before, explained that when they reached the Fish River they would see more; and if then they were to ride south towards its estuary, they would see hippopotamus, buffalo, antelope in many guises, and perhaps even the black rhinoceros.