Breath from the Veldt (1895)

Henry Sotheran, 1895, First Edition, , frontispiece by John Everett Millais, R.A., thirteen electro etchings, 12 full-page plates, 65 illustrations in the text, 236 pages, folio, foxing to some plates, book has been re-cased using cloth with original backstrip laid down, some browning from handling on buckram cloth ,  condition: good. 

The author came to South Africa, ' having just finished Mr. Selous's latest and most admirable book', and has produced a record of his tour. Millais avoids trespassing on the domain of the standard authorities on the pursuit of big game, and presents to the best of his ability  a true picture of life in South Africa, whether of man, beast, or bird; and to give to the sportsman of the period what help he can as a guide to the hunting grounds, and how to work them to advantage (from the preface). Millais was the author of 'Life of Frederick Courtenay Selous, D.S.O.' 

The following passage from Chapter V (page 91), combined with the two images, South Africa (as many have found it) and South Africa-The ideal (see below), give an indication of a hardening attitude that contributed to the Second Anglo-Boer four years later. 

"With few exceptions Dutchmen are what we English should call "impossible'' people to get along with. Though possessing many good qualities, they are lacking not only in humour but in that ready grasp of things in general that we are accustomed to look upon as amongst the essentials of an agreeable companionship. With few exceptions, an Englishman has nothing in common with them. Their fun is either forced, to further their own ends in trying to give you an impression that they are smarter than they really are, or is of such a low and feeble character that coarseness takes the place of humour. The associations, too, which any travelling Englishman has with moving Dutchmen are necessarily of short duration, and he has little or no opportunity for dispelling those mists of suspicion and inherent dislike with which every Dutchman is brought up to regard the Britisher. Conversations of a superficial nature and ordinary civilities are exchanged, but with all this the Dutchman keeps his shield arm up, and it is only after months of close association, by living with him, that you get to that stage where he is perfectly natural and you can see his character in its true light. As the Dutchman gets older he becomes far less aggressively anti-English in his ideas than in the days of his youth, for the younger he is the more insulting and objectionable to foreigners. At twenty every young Dutchman wants to have another Boer war, and talks bombastastically of how half a dozen Boers could sweep an English regiment of "roibatjes" off the face of the earth in half an hour, and constantly refers in grandiose terms to majuba. His constant boast is that if the English continue to encroach upon his territories as they have lately been doing, he will have to start and shoot a few thousands down as bucks. But age brings with it reasoning power and a wider range of thought, as he gets older the Boer, though liking the Englishman none the better, sees that it is to his advantage to keep on good terms with him, and that a second war might not end in precisely the same way as the first."

The author was the son of Sir John Everett Millais, a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. John Everett Millais contributed the poignant frontispiece, The Last Trek, to the book

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