The Autobiography of Eugen Mansfeld

by Eugen Mansfeld

  Shortly afterwards, a steamship arrived with three hundred geldings from Argentina for the German troops in South West, which we had to land in the same way. For the most part these were beautiful animals; but also unbroken, perfectly wild, malicious devils. However, by dint of hard work and much struggling—and a few blows—we brought them all ashore safely.

  Sichel was known across the region for his hospitable, open house, and as a result we enjoyed many visits from officers of the garrison and other company owners from Swakopmund, going on late into the night. In the evenings I was often in the family home of the magistrate, Cleverly, who was always happy to find someone to join him in a whisky and soda; I sometimes used to ride on Sundays with his three eldest daughters, young women of thirteen to fifteen years but, unsurprisingly, life in Walvis Bay was, generally speaking, tedious and dull.

  The missionary, Eich, a former shoemaker, was extremely pious, and regarded each native as a ‘brother’, living with us in perfect harmony. His two daughters were prim spinsters, and it was impossible to have a convivial conversation with them.

  Ludwig Koch, the tubby little harbourmaster, was a reliable and very sociable man, who had a strong interest in native folklore, and was even to be found every Sunday in church for the native service. A young English official, who was stationed in Walvis Bay for a short time, joined me in playing a practical joke on Koch. On the evening of Christmas Day 1897, when Koch was in church, we brought one of the little cart-donkeys into his house; up the steep stairs to the first floor and into his bedroom, and quickly tied it to the door-handle (the door opened outwards). Now, after midnight, Koch, with the sinister preaching of the missionary about the devil’s evil works preying on his mind, came back to his house half-asleep and tried to open his bedroom door. The donkey began to bray loudly and Koch nearly died from fright. Believing that Satan had arrived to claim his soul, he flew down the stairs in search of the help and protection of the missionary.

  Carrying lanterns, and armed with sticks, Koch, the missionary and his daughters crept into the open house and discovered the joke that had been played on him. It never came out who had done it, as the Englishman and I swore that we had been tucked up in our beds since ten o’clock that evening; therefore the devil was assumed to have had some part in the prank. Already it had not been easy to push the donkey up the stairs; it was equally hard to persuade him back down, and this took up several hours of Boxing Day morning.

  In July 1897 I cut my right hand on the lining while unpacking a tin-lined crate, and developed such serious blood-poisoning that I had to visit the doctor in Swakopmund, because there was none in Walvis Bay. There was no railway; the steamer service was two months away; the only way to travel the forty kilometres to Swakopmund was on foot or horseback. Sichel had at his place an old mare called Liese to fetch the fresh water from Sandfontein every day in a water-cart. I knew that good old Liese was not exactly a racehorse, but needs must in an emergency! I therefore rode her gently, and even though I was not able to persuade her to great speed, she brought me to Swakopmund by evening, nevertheless.

  I immediately went off to be patched up, and stayed there overnight; and the following day the gentle little medical officer again thoroughly cleaned up the hand, dressed it and put it in a sling which I tied again myself on the journey back. Though it was a long time ago, I have never forgotten this journey. Liese was all but finished, and could barely walk, stumbling continuously. When we were about ten kilometres from Swakopmund she simply lay down. I took off her saddle, slung it on my back, laid her bridle over my arm and trudged through the heavy sand, pulling Liese behind me, for the thirty kilometres to Walvis Bay. It took eight hours.

  At the beginning of 1898 Sichel returned to Germany. I managed the entire business on my own for eight months. When Sichel returned, Georg Schluckwerder came with him as partner; Schluckwerder wanted the company run his way, and I noticed that I was being pushed aside, as he was keen to bring his brother into the business. I left the firm on 20 December 1898 and took the steamer Leutwein to Cape Town in order to acquire with my savings a net-curtain business which I had seen offered there. The journey began to get lively right after our departure from Walvis Bay, in a strong south-westerly storm and heavy seas which left the small steamer (which was without cargo) rolling, bouncing and dancing, so that the lower deck was constantly underwater.

  I was the only passenger, and the only place on deck where I could stay was on the bridge, next to the captain’s cabin. The ship had a steering wheel on the bridge, and at eleven o’clock at night the pitching and rolling of the sea caused four teeth to snap off the steering mechanism. As a consequence, the only possible emergency remedy was to control the chain which attached the steering wheel to the rudder, pulled by hand by sailors on each side.

  Naturally, the ship rolled in every direction, but without letting the seas crash against the length of the vessel, which would have simply capsized the ship. As sleep was obviously impossible, Captain Parow and I spent the night on the bridge, and kept ourselves awake by drinking one hot toddy after another. Better to go under drunk than sober—for none of us believed that we would see land again—until at four o’clock the next morning we reached the uninhabited Hottentot Bay, as though delivered to a place of refuge. There emergency repairs were carried out to the steering rudder and, after the weather had settled down, we set out on our journey twenty-four hours later, and reached Cape Town on 24 December at eight o’clock at night.

  We could not dock: the Anglo-Boer War had broken out, and all the wharves were piled high with all sorts of supplies for the troops, and guards stood everywhere. It was Christmas Eve and I wanted to land. However, Parow of course refused permission. After he had gone to bed, I bribed a sailor with £1 to carry me in a small boat to the quay wall. Carefully, avoiding all the alert guards, I climbed over the various iron railings, and was in the city by ten o’clock. When the Leutwein tied up right next to the quay, I managed to smuggle myself back on board with the Customs and immigration inspectors and return to the vessel unobserved, so that my informal landing was unnoticed.

  If I had been superstitious, I would have had to regard this arduous journey as a bad omen for my new plans, and would have had second thoughts.

  It was a short but painful fiasco. I fell into the hands of two sophisticated con-artists. A credit account which I needed for the business was opened to me by a wholesale supplier, but then closed under the pettiest possible circumstances. While investigating the obligations of the business, which I was to inherit, I uncovered further liabilities of the previous owner which would quickly have bankrupted me. I therefore withdrew myself from the whole mess in the quickest possible time. However, I had incurred brokers’ and transfer fees, and was bled for a share of the agreed goodwill payment, which used up the savings from Walvis Bay which I had painfully acquired.

  I applied for various jobs in Johannesburg, Rhodesia and Bechuanaland, but one effect of the Anglo-Boer War was to block chances for my employment at English companies. I sent a letter to the General Representative of the Deutsche Kolonial Gesellschaft für Süd West Afrika,[11] Dr Rhode,[12] who knew me from Walvis Bay, and received a reply at the beginning of April 1899: “You are engaged, come by next available steamer, fare paid.”

  And so I was once again saved from poverty; at the time I never suspected that I would remain in the service of the company for 22½ years.

  Working for the DKG

  The Deutsche Kolonial Gesellschaft für Süd West Afrika (DKG) had succeeded to the rights of F.A.E. Lüderitz of Bremen, owners of the whole area from the Orange River up to Kunene, twenty German miles inland, and holder of the mineral rights in these regions and in Hereroland, which made it the largest German colonial company. The rights were established in contracts that the Lüderitz company had signed with different native chiefs, and had been challenged several times and confirmed by the German government. Land and farms had to be acquired through the Company agent in Swako
pmund, and prospecting licences for all sorts of minerals and ores, as well as the exploitation rights, had to be obtained and delivered in Swakopmund.

  On my arrival in Swakopmund Dr Rhode told me that he did not have a suitable position for me at that time, but had been keen to secure my services. I spent three weeks in Swakopmund employed in learning stocktaking, and was then placed at the farm Spitzkopje, 135 kilometres north-east of Swakopmund. The manager there, Schlettwein,[13] had to travel as a representative to an agricultural show in Windhoek, and I remained behind so that Frau Schlettwein and their two children were not left alone at the farm.

  Spitzkopje was a company farm of 120,000 hectares on the edge of the Namib desert. It had good rainfall, fine pasture and sufficient water for at least two years. Spitzkopje was a horse stud, with about 120 mares and good, imported stallions; it was stocked with about 1,500 cattle, dairy cows and oxen, about 4,000 sheep and goats, and additional pigs and fowl. On the farm there was a five-room farmhouse built of stone, with a kitchen, dairy and farm store. About thirty metres away were outbuildings including a stable, storeroom, harness-room and smithy. The farmworkers and cattlemen were natives, Hereros, Bergdamaras and Hottentots, who lived with their extended families about 150 metres beyond the outbuildings. The operations of the farm were naturally something new for me, but I enjoyed it and quickly mastered all my duties.

  Schlettwein had one white worker on the farm, a Pole; a hulking, ignorant brute who did not understand how to deal with the native workers, and whom they hated. One day in the smithy he beat one kaffir and gave him a bloody head wound, at which all the natives present stopped their work and explained to me that they did not want to continue working under the man. I managed to calm the people down by assuring them that they would subsequently receive instructions only from me. I sent the Pole back to Schlettwein, for assignment to different work in which he would come into contact with no natives.

  The latter was unnecessary. Just three days later he became seriously ill, with symptoms of intoxication; he died after a further three days—poisoned, without a doubt. The natives use deadly plants, which are undetectable in the corpse of a dead man; although I had my suspicions of the killer’s identity, the culprit was never discovered. It was the first time that I had played gravedigger, and I even made a coffin out of old packing-case planks, something the natives were conspicuously unwilling to give me any assistance with.

  When Schlettwein returned from Windhoek after about five weeks, he commissioned me to take a cart with twelve oxen and three natives to Franzfontein, about 220 kilometres north of Spitzkopje. An Afrikaner there had failed to pay off his massive credit balance at the farm store, and I was to collect cash or bring back cattle in payment. Schlettwein did not know the distance to Franzfontein, and believed that I would get there in three days. He measured out the provisions which he gave us accordingly, and if I had not shot buck on the way we would have gone hungry on our journey, because it took twelve days over appalling roads, in deep sand through dry river beds, uphill and downhill over mountains.

  One night we outspanned near a waterhole in a ravine in the Khorikas mountains because we had lost the precise course of the road in the darkness; we were awakened by the dreadful roar of lions, which we discovered the next morning were nearby at the waterhole. Our draught oxen panicked, and we had a tough job calming them down again.

  In Franzfontein I stayed for three days meeting with Sabatta,[14] and gradually persuaded him to pay 30 beautiful fat oxen as instalments to clear his debt so that I could go back to Spitzkopje.

  Soon after my return I was called back to Swakopmund to take over harbour management there for the Company. A harbour jetty or mole did not yet exist in Swakopmund at that time; the normal heavy surf usually caused the steamships to anchor two to three nautical miles from the beach, and all goods had to be brought ashore in open surf-boats, if the swell was not too heavy. The harbour management was shared between the DKG, the Damara and Namaqua Commercial Company, and the Walvis Bay harbour agent Koch, all under a white manager who was called the Beach-Pirate-General. The DKG had for its trade seven large surf-boats, staffed by sixty Kru men from West Africa, under their headman Meyer, and in addition employed about 120 Hereros, Ovambos and Kaffirs at the port.

  Often boats capsized in the waves, and then it meant me, and three or four natives roped behind me, plunging into the water in order to save the boat crew. Many brave Kru men were drowned in this way, and I was also once nearly drowned myself. A steamer had finished loading, and the sea had become very rough. Further communication with the ship hardly seemed possible but, since the ship wanted to leave, the ship’s papers still had to be taken on board. Following consultation with the Kru headman, I dared try it in the late afternoon with a boat directed by him through the increasingly tumultuous waves. Luckily we reached the steamer, but on the return journey with six men rowing and me steering, the boat stood on its head just three waves from shore. The six men flew away forward over the waves. However, I, sitting right at the very rear of the boat, was thrown behind the waves. Despite swimming with all my strength, I could not swim beyond the crest of the wave, and was thrown back again and again. It was futile to seek help from land, and after about fifteen minutes I dived between two waves and, even as I thought I would drown, with a fresh effort came to the crest of the wave, throwing me into the shallows, from where four hands caught and pulled me ashore.

  There was a drive to build the first railway in Southwest in these years; a narrow-gauge railway of sixty centimetres from Swakopmund to Windhoek via Karibib. In addition, all the railway materials had to be landed in this fashion: each surf-boat was loaded with thirty to fifty rails or sixty to one hundred sleepers; the boats approached through the waves and presented themselves lengthways to the beach, then often tilted, and the rails were lost in the sea water and swirling sand. For us that was a quick and effortless unloading of the boat: hundreds of rails were lost in this way. Six locomotives also had to be landed. One of the biggest steam boilers ever was shipped on a surf-boat, and brought with the high tide so far up the beach that it sat on dry land once the tide ebbed away; and then I proceeded to land all the locomotives safely by means of an apparatus of tripods and pulleys and railway track, planned in the course of one sleepless night. This brought me a special commendation from the railway commander and a beautiful cash bonus from the Company.

  The Hereros and Ovambos contracted pneumonia from the cold and foggy air, and there were many injuries from unloading the boats, so we set up our own hospital. As I was of course responsible for the health and welfare of the natives employed in landing operations, I always accompanied the Company doctor on his daily rounds to learn as much as I could about sickness, diagnosis and medical operations, and often used the information later.

  At the beginning of February 1900 I was replaced at my landing post and sent to the Salem Company horticulture station in Swakopmund to make a full audit of the books, since the manager there was suspected of embezzlement. I was there for fourteen really unpleasant days. The manager, who had previously been for a long time in Argentina, was a drunken bully who, when he noticed that I had uncovered his theft, became even drunker and threatened to shoot me. The two of us were alone on the Salem station, but about three kilometres away was a police station occupied by a police non-commissioned officer who came one evening by chance—and luck—to the farmhouse and straightened out the situation directly.

  The manager was drunk again, and standing with a loaded rifle in front of the open window of the room in which I worked, making loud remarks about bringing eternal rest to people who looked too closely into his books. I went toward him and ordered him to put the rifle away immediately. He just grinned at me scornfully, I pulled a loaded revolver from my pocket and, before he could make a move with the rifle, pointed it at his chest and cried “Hands up!”

  At the same moment the police officer, whose presence I had been unaware of, but who had witnessed the m
anager’s threats, sprang forward out of the darkness, grabbed the manager from behind and put handcuffs on him. At my request he took the manager to the police station and locked him up overnight. When I came to the station the next morning, my colleague had sobered up, and was weeping and whimpering for mercy. With the agreement of the police officer, I told him that I would not lay charges against him if he immediately packed his things and cleared out of Swakopmund. He did; I do not know where he went, but I have never seen him again.

  On my return to Swakopmund I heard that the Company was planning an expedition to discover guano deposits along the coast up to the Orange River. The search was to be made by camel and mule, and would include the purchase of a yacht that would precede the expedition, depositing provisions, fodder and water at different places on the coast. I wanted to lead the land expedition. Dr Rhode asked me the following day whether I thought I was capable of it, and I simply replied, “Yes”. He ordered me to take the steamship Leutwein, leaving Swakopmund the next day for Cape Town, and entrusted me to look out there for a good, suitable yacht, and to purchase it. I was to return on the steamer Gertrud Wörmann eight days later, and to bring along three hundred Angora goats for Spitzkopje farm.

  I had naturally enough no idea what sort of yacht to look for, only that I had a budget of 10,000 marks, but I thought “Don’t be afraid”, and with the help and expert advice of my old friend Captain Parow and the captains of two large sailing boats at anchor in Cape Town, I bought a yacht and ordered its captain and crew to head for Swakopmund. The three hundred Angora goats were of course transported from the interior by train, and once these were loaded on board the Gertrud Wörmann, I went back to Swakopmund.