Some fifty years later, at the period of the journeys of Captain William Cornwallis Harris,[20] as I have already remarked, the same conditions prevailed, with regard to the abundance of wild animals, as in the days of Le Vaillant. It was almost a daily experience for the traveller to be molested by lions. The Vaal River then teemed with hippopotami. What is now the site of Pretoria was inhabited by a number of rhinoceroses, that were absolutely an annoyance to the explorer: “Out of every bush peeped the horrible head of one of these creatures.” Of the neighbourhood of Mafeking he tells us that the gatherings of zebras and white-tailed gnus literally covered the whole plain; that with his own eyes he had at one time seen at least fifteen thousand head of wild animals! In another place he tells us of an absolutely overwhelming spectacle. He saw at the same time more than three hundred elephants; to use his own expression, the plain looked like one undulating mass.
William Cotton Oswell, whom I have mentioned in my earlier work, and who died as lately as 1893, knew the countries of South Africa in the days of Livingstone, and gives the same account of them as his predecessor Harris. He once came upon more than four hundred elephants gathered together in one herd on the open velt. Unfortunately, like so many others, he published very few sketches.
Gordon Cumming, a traveller well known to the German public through Brehms’ _Tierleben_, has also left us sketches of those days that corroborate the descriptions given by his contemporaries. He tells how, in the year 1860, a great drive was organised in the Orange Free State in honour of the Duke of Edinburgh, afterwards Grand Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The number of wild animals driven together by the natives, which included zebras, quaggas, gnus, cow-antelopes, blessbock, springbocks, and ostriches, was estimated at five-and-twenty thousand. The number killed on this one day was reckoned at about six thousand animals, and a number of natives were trampled to death by the herds of wild beasts.
At this time there were still Europeans in South Africa who made elephant-hunting their ordinary business. Now there are neither elephants nor indeed any other kind of wild animal in numbers worth mentioning in these once rich hunting grounds. They have all been killed off in the course of a hundred years. Where once hundreds of thousands of gnus lived their life, there are now only a few hundred specimens carefully preserved and guarded. And the same is the case with all other wild animals. Many species are gone completely and for ever. _A similar process will go on slowly but surely throughout the whole of Africa, wherever civilisation penetrates. There is only one chance of the beautiful wild life of Africa being permanently preserved, and that lies in the hunters themselves consenting to protect and spare it._