From Pole to Pole: A Book for Young PeopleHedin, Sven Anders
General
From Pole to Pole: A Book for Young People
Hedin, Sven Anders
Geography -- Juvenile literature; Voyages and travels -- Juvenile literature
In 1843 Livingstone started off to found a new mission-station, named
Mabotsa. The chief of the place was quite willing to sell land, and he
received glass beads and other choice wares in payment. Mabotsa lay not
far from the present Mafeking, but seventy years ago the whole region
was a wild. On one occasion a lion broke into the village and worried
the sheep. The natives turned out with their weapons, and Livingstone
took the lead. The disturber of the peace was badly wounded and retired
to the bush. But suddenly he rushed out again, threw himself on
Livingstone, buried his teeth in his shoulder, and crushed his left arm.
The lion had his paw already on the missionary's head, when a Christian
native ran up and struck and slashed at the brute. The lion loosed his
hold in order to fly at his new assailant, who was badly hurt.
Fortunately the animal was so sorely wounded that its strength was now
exhausted, and it fell dead on the ground. Livingstone felt the effects
of the lion's bite for thirty years after, and could never lift his arm
higher than the shoulder; and when his course was run his body was
identified by the broken and reunited arm bone. He had to keep quiet for
a long time until his wound was healed. Then he built the new
station-house with his own hands, and when all was ready he brought to
it his young bride, the daughter of a missionary at Kuruman.
Another missionary lived at Mabotsa and did all he could to render
Livingstone's life miserable. The good doctor hated all quarrelling, and
did not wish that white men should set a bad example to the blacks, so
he gladly gave way and moved with his wife forty miles northwards. The
house in Mabotsa had been built with his own savings, and as the London
Missionary Society gave him a salary of only a hundred pounds a year,
there could not be much over to build a house. When he left, the
natives round Mabotsa were in despair. Even when the oxen were yoked to
the waggon, they begged him to remain and promised to build him another
house. It was in vain, however; they lost their friend and saw him drive
off to the village of Chonuane, which was subject to the chief Sechele.
From the new station Livingstone made a missionary journey eastwards to
the country whither the Dutch Boers had trekked from the Cape. They had
left the Cape because they were dissatisfied with the English
administration of the country, for the English would not allow slavery
and proclaimed the freedom of the Hottentots. The Boers, then, founded a
republic of their own, the Transvaal, so named because it lay on the
other side of the Vaal, a tributary of the Orange River. Here they
thought they could compel the blacks to work as bondmen in their service
without being interfered with. They took possession of all the springs,
and the natives lived on sufferance in their own country. The Boers
hated Livingstone because they knew that he was an enemy to the slave
trade and a friend to the natives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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