JULY, 1876.

MEMOIR OF THE REV. WILLIAM SHEPSTONE;

WITH BRIEF REMINISCENCES OF THE EARLY DAYS OF THE KAFFIR

MISSION:

BY AN OLD COLLEAGUE.

(Concluded from page 490.)

Ir was while Mr. Shepstone was at Butterworth that it was deemed an act of justice to him to alter his relation to the Wesleyan Missionary Society. He had made progress in theological studies, as well as in a knowledge of the Kaffir language, and in efficiency as a preacher. He had acquired, likewise, much medical skill; all the while discharging his secular duties as "assistant." He was fully devoted in heart to the missionary work; and on the unanimous recommendation of the District Meeting, with the approval of the Missionary Committee, he was received by the Conference, on trial as a regular missionary.

His own feelings, on entering upon this new and responsible career, will appear from the commencement of his first letter to the Missionary Committee:

"REVERED FATHERS,

"PERHAPS it is but reasonable to expect that, in my first communication to you after my appointment as a Wesleyan-Methodist Missionary, I should say something on that subject. All I would say is, I hope I feel the obligations that are laid upon me to spend and be spent in the missionary cause, and that all my future life may manifest that the confidence which has been reposed in me has not been ill bestowed; but that by the grace of God I may approve myself to be a workman that needeth not to be ashamed,' having an eye to the recompense of reward; and, supported by your prayers, counsels, and advice, I hope you will ever find me an obedient son in the Gospel of Jesus Christ."

6

The new Station to which Mr. Shepstone was now appointed was one that had been planned in a situation nearly a hundred miles in advance of Butterworth, and beyond the Umtata River. These successive long steps towards the tropics introduced the

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missions into regions of increasing luxuriance, where lofty timber trees take the place of coast jungle, where the very grass grows to the height of eight or ten feet, and where the water springs are copious enough to excite the envy of any occupier of Colonial Kuroo. This tract of country, broken into deep valleys and gorges, intersected by steep or precipitous ridges, clothed with dense thicket and underwood, through which winding paths, suited only to footpassengers, form the sole means of intercommunication, was inhabited by a sort of "borderers,"-minor clans but loosely connected with the large tribes of Ama-Gcaleka, Abatembu, and Amampondo, that hemmed them in on three sides, as the sea did on the fourth. It was on the coast not far from this neighbourhood that the "Grosvenor" East Indiaman was wrecked, towards the close of the last century; and some who had escaped from that and still earlier wrecks had mingled with the natives, and formed families of mixed blood. Lighter colour, European features, and transformed European names, distinguished more especially the family of the chief under whose protection the missionary was considered to have placed himself.

It was a restless region. Feuds among the clans were of incessant occurrence. The "great places" of the "great chiefs" were too far away for them to exercise much control; and the petty chiefs would acknowledge no head among themselves. The missionary, however, received a pretty general welcome. Some new though undefinable good was expected to result from his settling among them, and all hoped to share in it.

His own faith, courage, and patience were soon put to a severe test. The commencement of the mission was unfortunate. Mr. Shepstone's "assistant," Mr. George Robinson, a zealous and devoted young man, was crushed to death by the falling of a tree, while he was cutting timber for building. Not long afterwards the Station was destroyed, and many of the surrounding population massacred, by a horde of banditti that spread terror in all directions. The mission-family narrowly escaped. The chief of the marauders had given instructions that the Station should be the first object of attack, and should be surprised by night. His men, however, could not resist the temptation presented by the cattle of the kraals they had to pass on their way; and the delay thus occasioned allowed time for warning to reach the missionary. The women and children were hurried into the wagons, with such goods as could be most easily carried away; the rest were left behind. As it was, the fugitives might have been overtaken and murdered, but that a thick mist providentially hid their course from their pursuers; who, once on the track of cattle, were lured onwards

into defiles and deep valleys that led them astray, and gave their higher prey time to escape.

The country was thrown into confusion; the marauding horde ravaged in all directions, till they were nearly all cut off by a stratagem of the powerful Amampondo chief Faku, who drew them into an ambuscade, where they had to choose between meeting death from the assagays of overwhelming numbers, or being dashed to pieces by leaping down a precipice. Many chose the latter alternative, and their bones marked the spot for years afterwards.

The mission was thus broken up for a time. The missionary had to retire towards the older stations, and lead, with his wife and children, an itinerant wagon-life for several months. Afterwards the mission was resumed, but on another site. The people had fallen back, and placed the Umtata River, with its almost unscaleable bordering heights, between them and their foes. The founding of Morley thus marked a retrogression instead of an advance. This, however, was only for a time; for soon afterwards the Rev. W. B. Boyce commenced the Buntingville Station with the great tribe of Faku, forty miles further in the onward missionary march towards Natal.

Mr. Shepstone laboured earnestly at Morley for some years, often at great personal risk, while trying to allay the tribal feuds which raged around him. His journal of this period affords evidence of his activity and zeal. His employments, however, like those of many other missionaries in those days, were of a very miscellaneous character woodcutter, builder, agriculturist, physician, schoolmaster, preacher, law-pleader, magistrate, ambassador, diplomatist, -all these, by turns, a missionary had to become. Nor even yet, after fifty years have elapsed, does versatility of talent cease to be needed.

In the earlier days the demands on that versatility were sometimes of a strange character: surgical skill was tested when a mangled girl was rescued, literally from the jaws of hyænas, fighting for their human prey; or a half-roasted victim of an accusation of witchcraft crawled to the mission-station for refuge. A hostile chief had sometimes to be remonstrated with by a missionary, at the risk of his own life; or two bodies of barbarian warriors drawn up for fight, and excited by their rival" bards," had to be kept asunder by his earnest pleadings as he rode between them. A conflict of diplomatic skill would sometimes involve a week's or a fortnight's running to and fro between the mission-station and the "great place" with interchanges of questions and answers, replies and rejoinders, when it was necessary to make a stand upon some principle the operation of which crossed the chief's inclinations.

The Wesleyan system of ministerial change brought Mr. Shepstone, in due time, back to Wesleyville; not now as "assistant," but as missionary in charge. Here he laboured again zealously for several years. During this period he carried a point on which his heart had been strongly set. He induced the chiefs, in connection with their tribal council, to pass a law forbidding week-day labour on the Sabbath. The law was first fully discussed; its scope and range were distinctly specified; and it was formally promulgated, and very generally observed, till the Kaffir War of 1834 upturned the foundations of society throughout Kaffirland.

During this second residence at Wesleyville, Mr. Shepstone's first great domestic sorrow came. The wife of his youth, who had shared his earlier trials and dangers, died on her way to Graham's Town, after giving birth to an infant daughter. She was a woman of strong character and devoted piety, admirably fitted to sustain and cheer. a missionary husband in the difficulties of his first labours. She died on the 18th of July, 1833, after ten years of missionary service, and lies buried on the banks of the Bikha. Her monument stands on a spot which was then in the midst of the people of her husband's charge.

Mr. Shepstone was left a widower with six young children. He continued to reside at Wesleyville till the outbreak of the Kaffir War of 1834. That war, which came with the suddenness of an African thunderstorm, spread devastation and ruin over a wide extent of country. It took the quiet British settlers completely by surprise in the midst of their peaceful agricultural pursuits, and blighted their growing prosperity as with the blast of a simoom. A state of growing exasperation had existed on both sides of the border, owing to the incessant thefts of cattle on the one hand, and the frequent visits of military patrols for recapture on the other. The British colonists, unused to barbarian frontier life, knew, however, but little of the danger to which they were constantly exposed; and the invasion, utterly unexpected and unprepared for, surprised many of them in the midst of their Christmas festivities. The apparition of bands of savages, who had rushed simultaneously over the whole of the eastern border-line, paralysed and distracted the inhabitants, who were destitute of military organization; and the Kaffirs, almost without resistance, laid waste the settlement as completely as the Danes used to do the coasts of England in the olden time.

Nearly all the frontier tribes joined in the war. But the tribe of Pato, in which missionary influence had been powerful in other respects, was induced by Mr. Shepstone to "sit still." Their previous ten years' abstinence from cattle-lifting, and the chief's