Word: pretorius
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Dingaan's treachery was soon punished. Later that year, on Dec. 16, 1838, on the banks of Natal's Blood River, another Voortrekker column, headed by Boer Leader Andries Pretorius, bloodily defeated Dingaan's plume-decked, assagai-hurling horde. Of 12,000 Zulus, more than 3,000 perished. The Boers resolved ever after to celebrate Dec. 16 as a day of thanksgiving...
...Gift at the Gate. Jungle Man, Pretorius' autobiography (he,died in 1945), could have done with a dash of the Hemingway talent. It is competently written, but with a calm matter-of-factness that makes a commonplace of every act of fantastic nerve and daring. Pretorius spent years in unexplored territory and established precarious friendships with cannibals and tribes openly committed to the exclusion of whites. He had a good ear for their dialects, which he learned, and a nice inquiring eye for aboriginal customs. In one tribe he found what must have been the simplest form of courtship...
...raider that had sunk British warships, transports and merchant vessels and gotten cleanly away after each kill. On the bridge of the British admiral's flagship that day stood the man who had found the Königsberg, a slender, malaria-sallowed big-game hunter named P. J. Pretorius. A Briton raised in the Transvaal, he had spent his life in the jungle. When he had completed his war chores (he became chief scout to Field Marshal J. C. Smuts, who has written a foreword for this book), he slipped back into the jungle for more of the kind...
From a tribe of cannibals whom he saw eating human flesh, Pretorius courteously asked and got the recipe: soak the body in hot water, scrape off the skin, stuff with plantains, cover with leaves and roast over night in a bed of coals. The lucky hunter who had made the kill "was entitled to the fingers and toes, which he cut off and ate raw." Pretorius once gave a tribe of pygmies a goat; they set to it by slicing tidbits from the live animal...
Elephants for a Fee. It was by hunting that Pretorius made his living and his legendary reputation. His lifetime bag for elephants alone was 557; and after one six-month safari his take for ivory was worth ?3,600. Once when hundreds of rogue elephants ran wild in Cape Province, killing people and destroying property, the administrator of the province asked Pretorius to take on the job of extermination. Naturalist Sir Harry Johnson and two famous hunters had already given their opinions: the terrain and the danger made it impossible. "For a satisfactory fee" Pretorius went into the bush...