Four Fathers of Big Game Hunting - Biographical Sketches Of The Sporting Lives Of William Cotton Oswell, Henry Astbury Leveson, Samuel White Baker & Roualeyn George Gordon Cumming

Baker

Roualeyn George Gordon Cumming

THE honour of being the Pioneer or Father of South African Sport rests between two great British hunters—Sir William Cornwallis Harris and Roualeyn George Gordon Cumming. In point of time Sir William Cornwallis Harris has undoubtedly first claim to the title. But his book, which was published in 1837, though it appealed powerfully to sportsmen, took little hold of the general public, and his name is remembered now only by those who are versed in the lore of Big Game Shooting. Gordon Cumming, on the other hand, took the public by storm with his Five Years of Hunter’s Life in the Far Interior of South Africa. The book was read with as much avidity as a romance by all sorts and, conditions of men; the author became a lion in society; for years his name was as familiar in our mouths as household words, and still keeps its place in the memories of those of us who were boys when the great lion-hunter was a popular hero in the full flush of his fame. There was a mixture of sentiment and sport in his pages which gave them a romantic interest in the eyes of the great bulk of the reading public of that day. And the man himself corresponded with the popular notion of a daring hunter and adventurer. He was a splendid fellow physically—a veritable king of men—of towering height, of massive yet symmetrical frame suggestive of immense strength, with a bold, handsome face, the proud bearing of a Highland chief, and an eye bright and piercing as an eagle’s. Arrayed, as he always was in public, in full Highland costume, he made a picturesque and striking figure in whatever company he was. There were some, no doubt, who thought him a flashy and theatrical poseur; but I think they went as far wrong in one direction as those whose admiration elevated him into a hero of romance went in the other. What he really was I shall endeavour to show by a brief sketch of his career, illustrated by extracts from his own book.

Roualeyn George Gordon Cumming was a younger son of Sir William George Gordon Cumming, Bart., of Altyre and Gordonstown. His mother was Eliza Maria, daughter of Colonel John Campbell, of Islay, who married Lady Charlotte Campbell, daughter of the sixth Duke of Argyll. Born on March 15th, 1820, Roualeyn was sent at the age of nine to Eton. Even as a boy he distinguished himself in his Highland home by his passion for sport and his precocious skill both in deer-stalking and salmon-fishing. A commission was purchased for him in the Honourable East India Company’s service, and at the age of eighteen he was gazetted cornet in the Madras Cavalry. On his way out he stopped for some time at the Cape and had his first experience of South African sport. On arriving in India he found the climate utterly unsuited to him. For eighteen months he fought against it; but his health became so seriously affected that in 1840 he resigned his commission and returned to Scotland. For a while he devoted himself to deer-stalking, but he soon found that sport too tame for him. He felt the instincts of the wild hunter stirring in him, and longed for more exciting adventures than fall to the share of the mere sportsman. An ensigncy in the Royal Veteran Newfoundland Company promised some prospect of the sport he craved for in the Western Hemisphere. But his hopes in this direction were not fulfilled. Disappointed and disgusted, he exchanged in 1843 into the Cape Mounted Rifles. There he found himself on the threshold of the Hunter’s Paradise. Sport had more attractions for him than soldiering, and he resigned his commission after a few months’ service. His mind was now made up. He would explore that vast, unknown interior, teeming with game, of which as yet scarcely more than the fringes had been touched. He sought out traders well acquainted with Griqualand, Bechuana, and the country beyond the great Orange River, and got as much information from them as he could, though it was not much they could give him, beyond hints as to his outfit. For they traded only with the Dutch Boers, loading up their waggons from the large stores of the merchants at Grahamstown and Port Elizabeth with groceries, hardware, haberdashery, crockery, saddlery—in short, every conceivable article that the Boers, living as they then did in isolated farmsteads, could possibly want.

I was utterly in the dark, says Gordon Cumming, as to what sport I might expect to realise and what difficulties I should have to encounter, and there was no one to enlighten me. His sporting friends at the Cape assured him that game had all retreated into such remote and savage parts that no sportsman could reach them, and that his proposed expedition was sheer midsummer madness. You’ll only get sunstroke and dysentery, they said, and it’s twenty to one against your ever coming back alive.

But Roualeyn turned a deaf ear to these croakers, bought a couple of waggons, with teams of oxen, hired three natives and one Englishman (an ex-Cockney cabman!), and set out on his adventures.

It may interest sportsmen to know what battery he took with him, and I therefore quote the following:

"My ordnance was as follows: 3 double-barrelled rifles by Purdey, William Moore, and Dickson of Edinburgh—the latter a two-grooved, the most perfect and useful rifle I ever had the pleasure of using; one heavy single-barrelled German rifle, carrying 12 to the lb. This last was an old companion, which had been presented to me when a boy, by my dear and much-lamented friend and brother-sportsman, the late James Duff, of Innes House. With this rifle, about ten years before, I had brought down my first stag on the Paps of Jura, and subsequently bowled over many a master-stag, and graceful roebuck in his summer coat, throughout the glens and forests of my native land. The Purdey was also a tried friend, both it and the heavy German having been with me in several campaigns on the plains and in the jungles of Hindostan. I had also 3 stout double-barrelled guns, for rough work when hard riding and quick loading is required; several lead-ladles of various sizes, a whole host of bullet-moulds, loading-rods, shot-belts, powder-flasks, and shooting-belts; 3 cwt. of lead, 50 lbs. of pewter for hardening the balls to be used in destroying the larger game; 10,000 prepared leaden bullets, bags of shot of all sizes; 100 lbs. of fine sporting gunpowder, 300 lbs. of coarse gunpowder; about 50,000 percussion caps; 2,000 gun flints, greased patches, and cloth to be converted into the same. I carried also several spare yokes, yoke-skeys, whip-sticks, rheims, and straps, two sets of spare linch-pins, all of which last articles belong to the waggon. With the above and 200l. in cash which I carried with me, I considered myself prepared to undertake a journey of at least twelve months amongst Boers or Bechuanas, independent of either."

With the Boer settlers he came into frequent contact, and found them almost uniformly hospitable and friendly, a fact which he thus curiously explains: It is a strange thing that Boers are rather partial to Scotchmen, although they detest the sight of an Englishman. They have an idea that the Scotch, like themselves, were a nation conquered by the English, and that consequently we trek in the same yoke as themselves. So, fifty years ago the race-hatred was as strong and bitter as it is now. Many of the poorer Boers subsisted entirely by hunting; but Gordon Cumming thought very little of their skill as marksmen, and tells how four officers of the 91st Regiment, then quartered at Colesberg, challenged any four Dutchmen to shoot, and how the latter were jolly well licked. Still less did the Scottish hunter think of the personal attractions of the Boer women. Their beauty, he says, "like that of Skye terriers, I fear in many cases consists in their ugliness. They, however, sadly lack the dégagé appearance of the Skye terrier, as their general air and gait might be more aptly likened to a yard of pump water. But some of the wives and daughters of the Boers he found rather nice people," and they were always kind and civil, even when their surly, drunken men-folk were insolent and inhospitable.

When at last he got into the game-country his astonishment was greater even than his delight. The whole country, as far as my eye could reach, was white with springboks, with here and there a herd of black gnoos or wildebeeste prancing and capering. But the most remarkable sight which Gordon Cumming witnessed, a sight the like to which no European sportsman is ever likely to witness again, was that which he thus graphically describes:

"On the 28th I had the satisfaction of beholding, for the first time, what I had often heard the Boers allude to—viz., a ‘trek-bokken,’ or grand migration of springboks. This was, I think the most extraordinary and striking scene, as connected with beasts of the chase, that I have ever beheld. For about two hours before the day dawned, I had been lying awake in my waggon, listening to the grunting of the bucks within two hundred yards of me, imagining that some large herd of springbok was feeding beside my camp; but on my rising when it was clear, and looking about me, I beheld the ground to the northward of my camp, actually covered by a dense living mass of springboks, marching slowly and steadily along and extending from an opening in a long range of hills on the west, through which they continued pouring like the flood of some great river, to a ridge about a mile to the north-east, over which they disappeared. The breadth of the ground they covered might have been somewhere about half a mile. I stood upon the fore chest of my waggon for about two hours, lost in wonder at the novel and wonderful scene which was passing before me, and had some difficulty in convincing myself that it was reality which I beheld, and not the wild and exaggerated picture of a hunter’s dream. During this time their vast legions continued streaming through the neck in the hills in one unbroken compact phalanx. At length I saddled up, and