The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  The Crimean War had been in part responsible for agitating the mind of Mhlakaza and creating the fatuous idea that Russia would shortly invade the Cape Colony; one year later it was directly responsible for Richard Saltwood’s new name, Cupid.

  When the Russians in Sebastopol stubbornly held out against the British, causing thereby the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade at nearby Balaklava, a serious crisis developed in the British army. Enlistments at home failed to provide enough new troops to replace those dying from Russian bullets and English malfeasance. Various devices were suggested for replenishing the ranks, but in the end the only thing that made sense was a return to the system used so effectively in 1776 against American rebels and in 1809 against Napoleon: the English army sent recruiting agents to Germany, where for substantial bonuses a first-class mercenary legion was employed.

  The Germans had to be under twenty-five years old, over sixty-two inches tall, and unmarried. They proved a superb lot, and would surely have conducted themselves bravely in the Crimea except that peace came before they could be shipped out of England. This created a serious problem; the English had an army, trained and paid for, with no war in which to engage it.

  Queen Victoria, herself of German extraction, and her husband Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha were naturally concerned about what might happen to their young compatriots and were delighted when plans were announced whereby the entire contingent was offered passage to the Cape as military settlers, to establish homes and secure posts along the recently disrupted Xhosa frontier. A strategy somewhat like this had been advocated in 1820 with English colonists, and there was no reason why it could not be duplicated in 1857 with Germans.

  A vast scheme was initiated whereby nine thousand of the mercenaries, plus such new wives as they could acquire, would be shipped to the same port used by the English when they landed. But now a snag developed. The Germans had such an excellent reputation for soldiering that numerous other nations were eager to employ them; they received offers from the King of Naples, the Dutch in Java, the Argentinian government and seven revolutionary juntas across Europe, who felt that if only they could enroll these crack troops, they could overthrow reactionary governments. About a quarter of the recruits, 2,350 officers and men, were left over to emigrate to the Cape.

  Since Queen Victoria and her husband were most eager that this settlement prove successful, they wrote to South Africa, asking that Major Richard Saltwood, who had distinguished himself during the cattle killing, come to London to supervise the emigration. He was delighted with this opportunity to visit with his brother Sir Peter, and within two days of receiving the invitation, was on his way.

  To his astonishment, when he disembarked at Tilbury, he was whisked immediately to Buckingham Palace, where the queen herself discussed the emigration. She was a shortish, round woman with no chin, and when meeting strangers, liked to defer to her husband’s judgment; they both displayed a keen interest in her South African colonies—Cape and Natal—and were enchanted by the various stories told of Saltwood’s life on the frontier. They said that he must hurry to Southampton to make certain that the German embarkation moved smoothly, and Victoria added that she would hold Richard personally responsible.

  She was in the process of adding that she preferred only married emigrants, for this ensured family stability, when a charming boy of thirteen burst into the room, stopped in embarrassment, and started to withdraw. ‘Alfred, come here,’ the queen said, ‘this gentleman is from the land of lions and elephants.’ The lad stopped, and bowed low like a Prussian officer.

  ‘I am most pleased to meet you, sir,’ he said, whereupon Major Saltwood extended his hand, took the boy’s, and drew him back into the room.

  ‘You must come to my farm one day, and see the animals.’

  ‘That I should like to do,’ Alfred said, and the brief meeting ended.

  In Southampton the authorities were mustering the mercenaries for the voyage to the Cape, and they found themselves with a sterling group of husky young men, but they were not having much success with getting wives. This omission worried Saltwood, since the queen had specifically stated that she preferred complete families in her colonies, so he made a special effort to visit all the nearby towns, seeking women for the young Germans. He was not successful, and when the last of the ships was ready to sail, the rickety old Alice Grace, he informed the captain that it must not depart until a final effort had been made to find more brides.

  ‘Who am I?’ the captain demanded. ‘Cupid?’

  ‘No,’ Saltwood replied evenly, ‘but you do have a commission to perform.’

  ‘My commission is sailing this ship,’ the captain replied. ‘Not finding wives,’ and the adventure would have ended poorly had not Saltwood been a man of ingenuity and humanity.

  ‘You have over two hundred fine young men aboard this ship,’ he told the captain. ‘I want them all on deck. Now!’

  When they assembled on the afterdeck he told them bluntly, ‘Men, it would be most improvident to travel to the Cape without women, so the captain has agreed to hold his ship here for two days. You must circulate through the town and find wives. You’ll be married before we sail.’

  Saltwood added his own imaginative touch to the quest. Finding himself only a short distance from Salisbury, he hurried there by train, burst into Sentinels and cried, “I can use all the spare women in town.’ His brother was absent, attending Parliament, but his wife was there, and she organized a hunt which produced five young women who had only bleak prospects at home. One ill-favored lass named Maggie began to whimper, ‘I don’t want no South Aferkee.’

  ‘That’s where you’re going,’ Saltwood said sternly, herding his charges onto the train, which frightened them just as much as the prospective sea voyage.

  At the ship two chaotic days were spent in a grand sorting-out, but since many of the Germans and some of the women were drunk, when dawn came on the third day and the passengers awoke to see the horrible choices they had made in the dark, there was rebellion.

  This man did not intend to spend his life with that woman, and this woman who could speak no German knew that a substitute husband had been fobbed off on her in the confusion. A wild scene ensued, which the two German ministers aboard could not resolve, and it seemed as if the whole plan might go smash when Saltwood grabbed a whistle, blew it shrilly, and ordered the men to line up on one side of the ship, the women on the other. Then he addressed them: ‘Gentlemen, do you wish to spend your lives alone?’ When the interpreter repeated this question, many men said ‘No.’ And Saltwood continued: ‘Well, if you don’t find your wives this day, you won’t find any out there for three or four or a dozen years. Is that what you want?’ The interpreter handled this message with brutal frankness, and the German men looked at the deck, saying nothing.

  Saltwood then directed his words at the English women: ‘You haven’t had good lives here. I can see that. Now you have a chance to go to a bright new land, with hope and a good husband. Are you daft, that you would surrender this?’

  Before his chastened listeners could dredge up excuses, he ordered the men and women to remain in lines, facing each other, upon which he blew his whistle three times, then said, his finger pointing, ‘You, at the head of the line. This is your woman!’ And that couple moved forward.

  ‘You!’ the interpreter repeated in German. ‘This is your woman.’

  He went down the entire roster, arbitrarily deciding who was to be married to whom, and at his signal, Reverend Johannes Oppermann stepped forward and in one grand ceremony married the lot. The two hundred and forty couples spent three months together aboard the old Alice Grace, and when they reached their destination they established some of the strongest families in South Africa.

  The London press delighted in the spectacle of a brother to the sober-sides member of Parliament, Sir Peter Saltwood, engaged in so amorous a royal commission, and a Punch caricaturist fleshed Richard considerably, plumped up his cheeks, strip
ped off his clothing but added a discreet diaper, gave him a little bow and arrow, and christened him Cupid.

  When officials at Cape Town implored Queen Victoria to send some member of the royal family out to the colony to show the flag and instill patriotism in the hearts of the English segment of the population, she found herself in something of a quandary. She herself would not think of leaving England, and Prince Albert was in failing health. Five of their nine children were girls, and deemed unsuitable for foreign travel among lions and elephants. That left four sons, but the youngest two were ten and seven, hardly appropriate for diplomatic service, while the oldest boy, the Prince of Wales, was visiting the United States and Canada that year. That left only the second son, Alfred, but he was only sixteen. Still, South Africa was a country of farmers and shopkeepers, not a real country like Canada, so little Alfred might do.

  He was a popular lad, and within the royal family it had been agreed that he would be the Sailor Prince, with newspapers making a great fuss over the fact that while serving as a midshipman he went barefoot on deck. He was not very bright, which was never a handicap in the English system, but he did love guns; all in all he seemed a sensible solution to the South African problem, and the queen wrote to her friend Major Richard Saltwood of De Kraal, asking him to look after her boy and to ‘arrange for him a grand battue, if that be possible.’

  It would indeed be possible. Richard knew an English farmer near Bloemfontein who could enlist enough blacks to put on a real battue for the young prince, and all was arranged. Saltwood was at the dock at the Cape when the young fellow landed, and after a round of receptions he sailed with him along the coast to Port Elizabeth, where the royal party disembarked and mounted horses for an adventure inland which would cover twelve hundred miles of saddle-riding over the roughest terrain.

  When Saltwood first saw the entourage that proposed to make this journey, he was appalled by its magnitude: the prince, his toothy equerry Friddley, a company of fourteen from the ship, a company of twenty-six from the local government, several score of grooms to tend the spare horses, twenty-seven wagons with drivers to haul the gear, and a professional photographer, Mr. Yorke, to record events on a ponderous camera that required a wagon of its own. All this to enable a boy of sixteen to enjoy a battue.

  But it was a no-nonsense expedition, as the riders learned that first day when they rode twenty-two miles without a major stop. The next day they covered forty-six and were dusty-tired when they pulled into De Kraal, where they would rest for two days with the Saltwoods.

  It was a splendid respite, with the prince delighted by his first acquaintance with an African farm. De Kraal had been much improved in recent years when the Saltwood fortunes prospered. All the stone buildings dating back to the 1780s had been enlarged and beautified; the grounds had been spruced up with flower gardens; and the fences had been regularized; but the charm of the place, as young Alfred remarked, was still the handsome setting within the hills and the wandering stream that cut diagonally across the holding.

  In acreage the farm was somewhat diminished since the days when Tjaart van Doorn operated it: still the nine thousand acres within the hills, but only four thousand outside. ‘What I enjoy so much,’ the boy prince told Saltwood, ‘is the mix of closed-in and open.’ He also enjoyed the hunting and proved his reputation by bringing down several smaller antelope.

  At dinner on the first night the young man was embarrassed when one of the black maids brought in a bawling white infant to be presented to royalty. ‘It’s my grandson,’ Saltwood explained. ‘Seven months old and lord of the manor.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ the prince asked, holding the baby awkwardly.

  ‘Frank.’

  ‘Frank, I christen thee Sir Bawler,’ and that became the child’s nickname.

  From De Kraal the party headed east to Grahamstown, where Friddley cried, ‘What a delightful place! So English. Even the Dutchmen who live here look like our Surrey squires!’

  Friddley was a new experience for Saltwood; as the nephew of a duke, he felt entitled to say whatever came into his mind, and he did so in a flush of patriotic emotion which often raced ahead of his grammar. At the opening reception in Grahamstown he gave a far-ranging toast: ‘To the loyal citizens of this brave frontier city whose English pluck and heroic perseverance, which shall ever animate our noble race, and who love the queen with a devotion unparalleled and thank her for sharing with you her son, the gallant Sailor Prince …’ He dropped that sentence and launched fervently into another: ‘I say, it was your loyalty to our beloved queen and her beloved consort, the father of our beloved Sailor Prince who does us such honor by this timely visit to the most loyal of his mother’s colonies, and I have seen him barefooted on the deck of his ship, discharging his tasks like any other decent, red-blooded sailor on which the safety of our nation depends …’ He seemed to run out of breath, but then shouted, ‘I drink to the brave English hearts that protected this town against fierce savages.’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ the audience cried, but Saltwood asked his neighbor, Carleton the wagon builder, who served as mayor of the little town, ‘What about the Boers?’ and Carleton whispered, ‘Tonight Boers don’t count,’ and Saltwood chuckled. ‘Without them, he wouldn’t be standing here tonight.’

  At each step Friddley was eager to orate, dwelling upon the nobility of the queen in allowing her young son to come so far to receive the plaudits of the colony; he served the same purpose as the official flatterers at the court of King Dingane and his words were equally empty. But the prince was not diverted by this constant aggrandizement. ‘When do we get to the battue?’ he asked repeatedly, and once Grahamstown was passed, he stayed in the saddle for fifty miles a day.

  Behind him the entourage rode in clouds of dust; the wagons creaked; the grooms helped along the horses gone lame; and Mr. Yorke performed heroics in keeping his cumbersome photographic wagon within striking distance of the others. When they slept in cots in their tents, he lay curled up in his wagon.

  After a final ride of fifty-six miles in one day, they came at last to a large farm east of Bloemfontein, where an enormous plain a hundred miles in circumference lay hemmed in by low hills. Days before, at every pass through which game might escape, blacks had been stationed, one thousand in all, and on the late afternoon of 23 August 1860 these beaters began slowly moving toward the central area which the prince would occupy next morning. As they moved, they drove ahead of them from all compass directions a monstrous herd of zebras, blesbok, eland, hartebeest, wildebeest, kudu, ostriches and the soon-to-be-extinct quagga. How many animals did the herd contain? Perhaps two hundred thousand, perhaps less, for no one could count the beasts as they moved in toward the center, then out to the perimeter. Some escaped through unguarded valleys; most were kept penned in by the multitude of beaters.

  At dawn the prince, accompanied by twenty-four other guns, moved to the hunting ground, where Friddley laid down the rules: ‘I shall ride at the prince’s left, Major Saltwood to his right. We will not shoot. Our job will be to hand the prince freshly loaded guns as he fires at the beasts. Your Royal Highness, reach first to me on the left, then to Saltwood on the right. Now I want six good shots to ride behind us in a semicircle. You gentlemen may fire at the game occasionally, but your main task is to protect the prince, should any beast come at him. Is that understood?’

  Just as the sun came up, the twenty-five guns took their positions, plus Friddley and Saltwood as handlers, plus ninety black servants, with many guns, plus eighteen white factotums, plus one thousand beaters out on the plains to get everything in readiness for ‘the greatest hunt in history.’ Only then did Friddley flash a signal, and the grand battue was under way.

  The beaters close in raised a hullabaloo, whereupon the frightened animals in that quarter started to rush in the general direction of the waiting hunters. First a score of zebras rushed past, then a scattered flight of leaping springbok, then the main body of the herd. They came in turmoil
, hundreds of them, thousands. At first they veered away from the hunters, and many escaped, but when the crush became sheer chaos, they galloped by within ten paces of the gunners, great concentrations of large animals running in terror.

  The firing never ceased. ‘Here, your Highness!’ Friddley cried as he took the prince’s empty gun, thrusting a freshly loaded one into his hands. After firing from ten inches into the side of a zebra, the prince would thrust his gun in Saltwood’s general direction, and without even looking, reach for a fresh one, which he would again discharge at animals not ten paces away.

  Meantime, the twenty-four other sportsmen were also surrounded by fleeing beasts, often throwing up dust in their faces, and they, too, were firing as rapidly as they could, right into the chests of the rushing animals.

  After an hour of incessant slaughter the herd reeled in confusion, whereupon the factotums rode their horses out into various parts of the plain, encouraging the beaters to accelerate their movement, and this threw a really tremendous flight of animals right past the waiting prince. Indeed, the great beasts now came so close that firing guns at them was senseless, if not impossible, for the barrels could scarcely be raised against the pressure of the animals.

  This delighted Friddley, who shouted, ‘Your Highness, let’s use the blades!’ And he took away the prince’s gun, thrusting into his hand a short-handled hog-hunting spear, so sharp that Friddley had named it ‘the Paget blade,’ after the surgeon who attended Queen Victoria and her family. The young prince used it with some skill; he and Friddley spurred their horses and charged the stampeding beasts, stabbing at them as they roared past. Within minutes both Friddley and the prince were splattered with blood from the frequent stabbings and the fall of the animals.