United States or Saint Lucia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I considered that Scotland would be best, for my people were Scotch and I could pass anywhere as an ordinary Scotsman. I had half an idea at first to be a German tourist, for my father had had German partners, and I had been brought up to speak the tongue pretty fluently, not to mention having put in three years prospecting for copper in German Damaraland.
An attempt of the Boers to recruit in Damaraland was promptly stopped by the German officers in control, who were ordered to allow neither men nor horses to cross the border for the purposes of the war. All German steamship lines which held subventions from the Government were warned that if they were found carrying contraband they would thereby forfeit their privileges.
The northern column moved along the Lualaba and Congo rivers to the Cameroons; the second column became the industrial and state-building Luba and Lunda peoples in the southern Congo valley and Angola; while the third column moved into Damaraland and mingled with Bushman and Hottentot.
Sir Donald Currie had introduced a deputation to Lord Derby, Colonial Minister in the Gladstone Cabinet, which warned him seriously as to German aims on the coast of Damaraland; in reply to which that phlegmatic Minister stated that Germany was not a colonising Power, and that the annexation of those districts would be resented by Great Britain as an "unfriendly act ." In November 1883 the German ambassador inquired whether British protection would be accorded to a few German settlers on the coast of Damaraland.
'I am speaking truth, I said. 'Before the war I was an engineer in Damaraland. Mining was my branch, but I had a good general training, and I know enough to run a river-boat. Have no fear. I promise you I will earn my passage. His face cleared, and he looked what he was, an honest, good-humoured North German seaman. 'Come then in God's name, he cried, 'and we will make a bargain.
Army Headquarters were fixed at the Damaraland Building close to the shore a splendidly equipped edifice, with a tower commanding a fifteen-mile-radius view of the desert and the sea. General Botha made the private quarters of the General Officer Commanding-in-Chief at the Woermann Line House close by.
'Where have you come from? I asked. 'They shut me up in tronk, said Peter, 'and I ran away. I am tired, Cornelis, and want to continue the journey by boat. 'Remember you have worked for me in Africa, I said. 'You are just home from Damaraland. You are a German who has lived thirty years away from home. You can tend a furnace and have worked in mines. Then I spoke to the captain.
Then he made a speciality of the Ngami region, where I once hunted with him, and he was with me when I went prospecting in Damaraland. When the Boer War started, Peter, like many of the very great hunters, took the British side and did most of our intelligence work in the North Transvaal.
The doctors at the hospital had been clever, he said, and had done their best for him, but nerves and sinews and small bones had been so wrecked that they could not mend his leg, and Peter had all the Boer's dislike of amputation. One doctor had been in Damaraland and talked to him of those baked sunny places and made him homesick. But he returned always to his dislike of Germans.
DE BEER attacking the railways said they were already beginning to eat the bitter fruits of them. He was thinking of trekking to Damaraland, and his children would trek still further into the wilderness out of the reach of the iron horse. August 16. Mr. DE BEER said he saw where all the opposition to duties came from. It was English blood boiling to protect English manufacture. June 21.
Word Of The Day