EARLY TRAVELLERS IN THE DRAKENSBERG

Quathlamba

“A mass of Spears. Named thus by the Zulu warriors before the white man came. Today called the Drakensberg, Mountains of the Dragon. Evocative names, both equally applicable to South Africa’s mightiest mountain range with its spear-like peaks – reminiscent of the saw-toothed spine of a gigantic dragon.”

Listen to the streams as they gurgle from their cradles and you will hear the story of the mountains. You will hear fascinating tales if only you listen! Lie next to a stream and listen to the song of the mountains. The smiling faces of the flowers, dancing in the wind. Venture into the remote valleys or stand on a peak at sunrise or sunset, after snow has fallen, and you will hear a song that you will never forget - the Song of the High Mountain".

DRAKENSBERG WILDERNESS PHOTOS © WILLEM PELSER

“I AM AS OLD AS

MY DISAPPOINTMENTS IN LIFE,

AND AS YOUNG

AS MY NAUGHTIEST THOUGHT”

XAMEB the BUSHMAN

EARLY TRAVELLERS IN THE DRAKENSBERG

It was a lonely, empty land into which those first travellers came. The peaks stood remote, far, enigmatic, unknown. Only the Bushmen and the wild game lived in grim solitudes. The foothills, once the peaceful Amazisi, had been ravaged and depopulated by the ravening hordes of Shaka and Matiwane. Only the eagle, soaring a thousand meters up into thin air, watched, and waited.

It is not surprising that the early colonists were slow in penetrating this mountain world. To a young community, struggling to subdue nature to its needs, mountains are little more than a barrier, a hindrance to travel and to trade. With all their love of beauty and physical fitness the Greeks never awoke to the splendor of their own mountains. They never climbed them for pleasure. It is only later, when increasing prosperity brings leisure, and the pressure of civilization begin to stifle the spirit of man, that mountains come into their own. The golden age of the Alps had to await the climbing of the Matterhorn by Edward Whymper in 1865 before it got under way.

There were other reasons, too, for the Drakensberg not being penetrated earlier, not the least being the fact that up to about 1875 the intruder was, as likely as not, liable to get a poisoned arrow in his back if he ventured too far into the shadow of the great peaks.

Then, of course, access to the Drakensberg was extremely difficult in those early days. The country was wild and broken, and wagons or horseback were the only means of transport. From Durban up to the road passes of the Drakensberg ran the slender thread of the “main road”, for many years merely a series of winding tracks through the long grass of the veld. Even this was 30 km to the east of the Drakensberg. It was not until the 1850s that a start was made on improving the track between Pietermaritzburg and Durban. Beyond, and for many years, only wagon tracks remained. Hardening only came in the 1860s. The Government erected a chain of straw huts along the route for the use of travellers, but there were no bridges. Major rivers were crossed at drifts, with small boats and ferrymen in attendance. Often wagons would have to be taken to pieces and reassembled on the other side. When the rivers came down in flood they could not be crossed for weeks at a time. In 1852 John Bird, Acting Surveyor-General, was asked by the Government to plan a road from Pietermaritzburg to Ladysmith, which had been founded three years previously.

As late as 1876 the journey from Pietermaritzburg to the Free State border still took six to seven days, even though all the rivers had by then be bridged, except for the uThukela. If the traveller wished to branch out on either side of this winding ribbon, for some outlying farm, or for the mountains, he simply followed his nose, and depended on local farmers for hospitality.

Transport, of course, was all by Cape Wagon, a sturdy, strongly built vehicle that served as coach and home for the traveller, often for many months at a time. The secret of a well-made wagon was its looseness. It had to be made in such a way that its various parts would respond and give to the multitude of bumps and strains it would be subjected to. The length was from 3.5 to 5.5 meters, and the breadth about 1.25 meters. It was usually made of stinkwood, and a top quality wagon could cost anything up to 100 pounds. In addition, a team of 12 to 14 oxen would be required, costing about 8 pounds a head, bringing the total cost to about 200 pounds, no mean sum in those days. The traveller John Shedden Dobie described wagon travel as “the jolliest and most independent style of travelling ever I have tried, a prolonged picnic”.

But it was a lonely and empty land.

Robert Ralfe, farming at Bergvliet, just beyond the Military Post at Bushmen’s River Drift – in the Escourt District – went for 14 years without seeing a single white woman!

William Allerston, who had been offered a position as a constable at the newly established village of Ladysmith, at 4 pounds a month, arrived there at the end of 1849 with his wife and family to find only four houses of wattle and daub. There had been a fifth, but it had fallen down the day before he arrived. In order to obtain food supplies for the family he had periodically to walk 64 kilometers to Bushmen’s River Drift, bringing the provisions home on his back.

When the Emmaus Mission Station was established in the Drakensberg in 1847, postal communications with Pietermaritzburg and Durban took place every 6 months.

In May 1850 Reverend James Green rode up from Pietermaritzburg to beyond Harrismith to meet Bishop Gray, who was coming to Natal overland from the Cape. From the time he left the present town of Escourt to his return there, he did not see bread, vegetables, sugar, coffee or any meat but game.

When Charles Barter, a prominent figure in early Natal days, made a similar trip the same year, he missed Ladysmith altogether, and went on into the Free State without ever finding it!

If these were the conditions in the Midlands, north of Pietermaritzburg, what of the Drakensberg itself? A map of Natal, prepared in 1853, gives a good idea of what was known of the area in the 1850s. North of Pietermaritzburg only three rivers are named, the Mooi, the Klip, and the Buffalo? (On the coast no less than 66 are named!), while Weenen is placed on the Klip River instead of the Bushmen’s. The Drakensberg is simply shown a straight line, though there does appear to be a slight bend, unnamed, at what would be Giant’s Castle. Not a single peak is named. Another map, published in Holden’s History of the Colony of Natal, in 1855, is a little better. The height of the Drakensberg is given as 1220 to 1 524 meters above sea level. The actual average height is 3 048 meters. Well could Dr W.H. Bleek, writing in that same year, 1855, say “The recesses of the Quathlamba are practically unexplored.”

It was far more than unknown. It was a place of superstitious dread. Many were quite convinced that it was the abode of magical dragons. Even so reputable a paper as the Bloemfontein Express reported in its issue of 26 April 1877 that an old farmer and his son had come back terrified from a trip into the Drakensberg, claiming to have actually seen the dragon, a fearsome monster with two wings and a forked tail, several hundred feet long, and flying very high. One cannot help wondering how many wayside taverns the two had visited on their way home!

Actually no one knew what lay behind those enigmatic spires. There was a well-established rumour that the mythical unicorn was to be found there, a rumour referred to by Sir John Robinson in his book A Life-time in South Africa, published in 1900. Round about 1855 a Zulu man told a Natal Settler that he and five other Zulus had once climbed to the summit behind Mont-aux-Sources. They had gone a little distance in-land, when they found a remote and fairly extensive swamp, “of the extend of one day’s travelling”. There they found six large animals, about the size of a blesbok, dark brown in color, and each with a long, straight horn on its forehead. The animals were extremely ferocious and attacked immediately, killing five of the Zulus. The sixth only escaped by climbing a large rock. In February 1866, during the Basotho war, a strong column patrolled this plateau, and discovered the swamp, but there were no unicorns!

A Mosotho in the service of Daniel Bezuidenhout, then living near Bethlehem, offered to show his employer a kind of animal which, from his description, must have been exactly the same animal as the ones described to Osborn. The Mosotho added that it was so fierce that it would attack its own shadow!

The colonists of Natal were so convinced that there was something there that in 1860 they seriously considered organizing an expedition to hunt out the mythical unicorn. It was proposed that a Natal Unicorn Company, Ltd, should be floated, but it never came to anything, largely owing to the hostile attitude of Moshoeshoe. The area was not approachable from the Natal side, owing to a lack of knowledge of the passes. The only way up the plateau was through Witzieshoek and up the Namahadi Pass, and Moshoeshoe was more than ordinarily suspicious of the whole idea. In any case, as one of the members pointed out, what about the Bushmen lurking in the recesses of the Maluti’s, with their poisoned arrows! That seemed to put a final damper on the whole scheme, and the unicorns were left in peace!

Who were the first white me actually to see the Drakensberg? Strangely enough, we can almost certainly answer that question. On 21 January 1593 the Santo Alberto, a large Portuguese vessel, richly loaded, set sail from Cochin for Portugal with 347 souls on board. Two months later, on 24 March 1593, she was wrecked between the Bashee River and the Great Kei River. Sixty-two people were drowned, but the survivors, 125 Portuguese and 160 slaves, set out for Delagoa Bay (the present Maputo). Shipwrecks were frequent on this wild and inhospitable coast in those days. The usual procedure was for the survivors to trek overland, following the coast, and to head either for Delagoa Bay or the Cape. The great difficulty was always the broad river mouths to be crossed, and on this occasion the survivors, men and women, decided to strike further inland to avoid these crossings.

It must have been one of the epic journeys of history – over more than 1 000 kilometer of wild, unmapped country. Many died by the way, but the survivors did eventually reach their destination, after a journey lasting three and a half months. They crossed the Upper uThukela, Upper emZimkulu, and the Upper emKhomazi. They must have passed through the Midlands of Natal and Zululand, more than 200 years before the Voortrekkers arrived there. On 2 May, when they must have been either near the Dargle or the Lotheni, they reported seeing, towering above them to the west, a great range of snow-covered mountains. This could have been no other than the Drakensberg.

How close to the Drakensberg did they come? Did they, perhaps, pause a while in this pleasant land, and did some of the more adventurous souls go exploring, and did they perhaps penetrate the valleys of the Little Berg? Did they even climb one of the passes to the top? We do not know, and it does not greatly matter. It is sufficient that this mighty mountain chain had at last unveiled her beauty to the eyes of the white man.

Then, as the mists close around the peaks on a summer’s day, so the mists of time close in about this lonely land. For more than two centuries all is darkness. But sometimes the mists part, and reveal for a brief moment some elusive peak or soaring pinnacle, only to close again and leave behind an unanswered question. And so, over the years, we catch an enigmatic, tantalizing glance at some lonely traveller, who appears for a moment and then is swallowed up again in darkness, the story of whose coming and going will remain forever untold.