Camp Fire Yarns of the Lost LegionHamilton-Browne, G.
History
Camp Fire Yarns of the Lost Legion
Hamilton-Browne, G.
Māori (New Zealand people) -- Warfare; New Zealand -- History -- Anecdotes; Zulu War, 1879
London, whose hidden mysteries far and away outnumber all the frontier
mysteries of the British Empire put together, but yet somehow the
picture of a man lost in the bush, dying, alone, of starvation, thirst
and exhaustion seems, if not so pathetic, at least more romantic than
the scores of hungry, ragged and homeless creatures who wander about
the Embankment, or the slums of the mighty city. Very many times
during my life on the frontiers of the various colonies in which I
have served I have been called on to assist in the search for a
missing man; sometimes we have been successful, and have found our
man alive, sometimes we have found him dead, and often we have
searched in vain, the poor chap having disappeared, as if taken from
earth in a chariot of fire. I could fill a book with yarns of cases of
people being lost and found, and of being lost and not found, but the
most wonderful case I know of is that of a young colonial, who was
lost for forty days, yet was found alive, and who I believe to be
still living.
In 1891 I had taken command of the De Beer's Company Expedition to
Mashonaland, consisting of sixty white men, forty colonial boys
(natives), and eighteen waggons. The above I was to conduct from
Kimberley to Salisbury, a trek of about 1300 miles. It was no joke.
Very many of my men were quite raw hands, and just after we had left
Kimberley the heaviest rains ever known in South Africa came on, so
that the rivers became flooded, the swamps impassable, and the roads,
such as they were, so rotten that the heavily laden waggons sank to
their bed plates every few minutes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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