Jungle Man: The Autobiography Of Major P. J. Pretorius C.M.G. D.S.O. and Bar

Major P. J. Pretorius

• Publisher: Normanby Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781786257895
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The true story of Major Jan Pretorius, a South African elephant hunter and adventurer, this is a true tale of continuous adventure for a lifetime and considered one of the most extraordinary ever written. Pretorius also gives the first full account of the search for the German cruiser Königsberg which had sunk the Pegasus at Zanzibar and then gone into hiding in the Rufiji delta."I have never seen a more thrilling story of a hunter's life. It is full of almost unbelievable incidents, of reckless daring, and of hair-breadth escapes. If one knew the writer the interest increases, for he was a quiet, gentle, unassuming person in appearance. What fire lay hidden under those quiet features and that gentle manner! His very person seemed to be a camouflage."—Foreword by J. C. Smuts

CHAPTER ONE—LIFTING HORIZONS

LIVING dangerously is twice blessed—it blesses the moment with elation; it blesses the after-day with warm memories. If a man has trodden unknown trails and landed on lost beaches, when age comes the domestic hearth is a campfire where old dramas are relived.

I must have been born with the divine unrest of adventure in my blood. I should have wilted in a town; even the open and active life of a South African farm, which was my home, seemed to “cabin, crib, and confine” me. My immature imagination pictured all Africa spread around that homestead, and I wanted to lift my horizons. When I was thirteen my father, trading horses and cattle with the natives, took me on my first long trek into King Khama’s country. From that moment nothing could have stayed me from a wandering life; it was at that time I planned to walk Africa from end to end! Since then for half a century I have hunted every type of big game; have known scores of native tribes, speaking their language, living their lives; have trodden jungle paths not used before by civilized men but made by the animals of the forest through countless years. I have stalked the rhinoceros, the lion, the bush-buck, shot hundreds of elephants (five on one occasion that were charging down on me in a bunch), and made friends with natives who had never seen a pale-face.

I have stalked men, too—men who were England’s enemies. And once it fell to my lot, at the request of the British Navy, to stalk a cruiser—the famous Königsberg, which, after its raiding exploits, had scurried for shelter. As on other hunting trips, on that memorable occasion too we made our kill.

All the facts of that historic chase are given here in print for the first time, and the exploit perhaps makes a fitting start to the tales I ask you to share now the camp-fire is lit and the day falls. Incidentally, the Königsberg adventure typifies a period of my life the recollection of which brings a special glow, since it was then I left for a time the shy paths of the forest, where hitherto I had spent the years, to serve under that gallant soldier-statesman who is now Field-Marshal J. C. Smuts, P.C., C.H., K.C., Prime Minister of South Africa.

Even then, though amid an army, my task was still a lone one. For the scout follows remote ways. It was like a diver coming up for a breather when I returned to headquarters with my cap full of news after expeditions into enemy territory.

But before my life as a scout with Smuts came the episode of the Königsberg. This enemy warship had left a spectacular trail of disaster behind her as she ploughed those southern waters. She had sunk merchant vessels and transports and had ended by smashing up H.M.S. Pegasus, as well as two guard ships. Then she scurried for shelter, for her commander knew the British Navy would be out to get her as surely as, much more recently, another German commander—the captain of the Bismarck—after the sinking of the Hood, was well aware that ships flying the White Ensign were gathering from every direction like hounds round a trapped quarry.

The Navy knew where to look for the Bismarck, but in 1915 the Admiralty had no definite information as to the whereabouts of the Königsberg. They thought she was hiding somewhere on the east coast of Africa and suspected the Rufiji delta, a desolate region of river swamp and jungle. It chanced that I had hunted there and was one of the very few white men who was familiar with the country and the natives.

Thus it was that—without knowing at the time the reason for it all—I was brought by urgent message, the mystery of which intensified as I was swept onward across the continent from Pretoria to Cape Town and Durban, and put aboard the battleship Goliath, on which Admiral King-Hall flew his flag.

I remember the Goliath put to sea with me aboard amid luxuries to which I was not accustomed and which contrasted violently with the previous quarter of a century I had spent almost entirely alone in the wilds.

I had been brought aboard by the Captain himself, had been sumptuously fed, and to the thrum of distant engines lay and wondered at the strangeness of events. Here was I, descendant of the famous Voartrekker general who gave his name to that Pretoria I had quitted eight days ago, and son of a Commandant who on two separate occasions had waged war against the English, now a guest of the King’s Navy.

I had always been a loyalist. Back in my youth I had seen service with the forces of Rhodes’s Chartered Company and, only just prior to the present adventure, in my home country of the Transvaal, had dispersed a smouldering rebellion. I had fought against the Germans and been wounded in the first month of the war. But as the great ship throbbed through the darkness that night it was natural I should be consumed with a tantalizing curiosity, for I had, as yet, no knowledge why I had been picked up from among my small private affairs and whisked on to a man-of-war. It seemed a long jump from my usual life of hunting, where, if I had a war, it was one of my own against such foes as the fierce Mashukulumbwe and the Congo cannibals, or against the animals of the jungle deeps.

However, I was to see the Admiral in the morning.

King-Hall was a charming man, slightly under six feet in height, red-complexioned, and possessing the bushiest eye-brows I had ever seen on a man. From the very first I instinctively liked him. He shook hands with me and signalled me to sit down.

“Pretorius,” he commenced engagingly, “do you know that I am the ugliest man in the British Navy?” He seated himself in a chair alongside me, and said: “Now I will tell you what we want you for.”

Then he explained he was after the Königsberg.

He told me they thought the ship was up the Rufiji river, and their chief evidence seemed to be the loss of searchers that had already been sent out there. Two seaplanes had flown over the delta, and neither had returned. Two armed whalers had been dispatched to patrol the coast. One of these, armed with machine-guns and light cannon, had entered the river and had not come back. Finally the Navy had sent an ordinary boat filled with local natives, but this too had disappeared.

The Admiral had a scheme to construct a raft substantial enough to carry guns as well as men, and on this he proposed to penetrate the delta; but that looked like suicide to me—if the Germans were there. So far as anyone knew the cruiser’s powerful guns and her torpedoes were undamaged. And she might be lying sixteen miles from the coast-line, since the main channel of the Rufiji—called the Salali—is deep. Sixteen miles of approach through swamps and streams dotted with small islands offering innumerable opportunities for ambush!

I suggested that, with a few natives, I should go scouting, first of all to discover whether the Königsberg were indeed there, and then how circumstances could best be used to attack her.

Twenty-two miles off the mainland in those parts lies an island called Mafia, and there the Admiral landed me with a staff of one—a wireless operator. It’s not a big spot, roughly twenty miles by eight miles, but fertile, producing coconuts, the plantations run by Arab and Swahili labor. It had been a German outpost, but on January 11, 1915, had been shelled and blue-jackets had captured it. It would make a good base for me, and I knew of another “two-by-four” island, named Koma, only a couple of miles from the river mouth, which would serve as an F.O.P.

Just as I left a wireless message was received from Whitehall asking how long I estimated it would take to ascertain whether the enemy ship was in the delta or not. I guessed about eight days. And eight days it was.

A Colonel Mackay, of the King’s African Rifles, was Resident Commissioner of Mafia, and he helped me pick my assistants, assuring me cheerfully that the six I eventually chose were the biggest rogues on the entire east coast, but adding that they made up in courage what they lacked in morals. I preferred fearlessness to any fastidious taste in native honor, and I assured myself of their silence by the threat that wagging tongues would be cured by removal. I spoke their language well enough to carry conviction.

I had been promised that if I buzzed an SOS help would arrive immediately, all ships having been warned, and I must say that throughout the rather lengthy and tricky operation that followed the Navy’s arrangements were so perfect that I could call up a ship almost with the ease one whistles a taxi.

Two days after I landed at Mafia I “whistled” and got an immediate reply from H.M.S. Weymouth: “Will arrive 3 P.M.” When night fell I “taxied” across in her to the mainland with my company and a large dug-out, which had to be shipped aboard because the sea was too rough to permit of towing.

It was a hectic scramble getting from ship to shore at Koma. Not a soul was on the island; all the villagers had been cleared out. Why? This was the first support to our suspicions that the German ship was in the neighborhood. The islanders might give them away, so the Germans had removed them; that was the logic of it.

Next night—dark, wet, thundery, and therefore friendly to spies—we pushed off in the canoe for the mainland. I knew a village near the coast—Kisiji—and I planned to adopt the forthright stratagem of knocking on the first door and capturing anyone who emerged. But in this I was frustrated. For there was no inhabitant left in Kisiji. But if there was no tongue to speak, this little ghost village told its own story. The Germans had cleared the coastal region to prevent the natives from talking. Apparently their logic didn’t embrace the fact that the very act of removing these people implied there was something to move them for.

There was nothing for it but to penetrate farther inland, and we returned to our forward base until next night, when we crossed again, meaning to stay until we had results. So this time we hid our dug-out among the mangrove-trees where we landed. Not that “landed” seems quite the right description, for there is no ground visible at the edge of a mangrove swamp. These trees grow from the sea-bed up to the water’s surface, where they spread out so densely that one can scramble over the growth. We had a full mile of this unpleasant route to traverse from the edge of this sea forest to dry land. It was raining heavily; it was pitch dark, and I dared not light a torch.

We made a bee-line for the west, so that the next morning we should be among the native population, and there I decided I would stay until we had captured a man who could impart useful information. At about 3 A.M., after having travelled eight miles, we struck a big, wide road which had obviously been made since the outbreak of the war, for I knew these parts well and remembered there had originally been only a native footpath there. Taking up our position in very dense bush beside the road, we lay down for the rest of the night.

In the morning I noticed that the road was used almost hourly during the day by German troops marching backward and forward between Dares-Salaam and the Rufiji river. The enemy was here of a surety. At nine o’clock a very large safari of porters carrying supplies to the Germans on the Rufiji passed us, but there were too many of them for us to tackle. Eventually two local natives came along. I told my boys to stand ready, and as they came up I arrested them, took them into the bush about five hundred yards, and there questioned them.

I told them right from the start that in no circumstances could they be released for the duration of the war.

“You will be prisoners, but you will be kept and well fed,” I said; “but at the first sign of treachery you will both be shot.” Then I asked them for information concerning the German cruiser. They answered that it was in the Rufiji.

“We will go to the Königsberg tonight,” I said, “and you must guide me to a high point as near the cruiser as possible, where we will remain for the rest of the darkness, so that when it gets light I shall be in a position to see the ship and the German forces.”

They replied that there was a small hill close by from which the Königsberg would be visible; we could climb trees and sit in them until the day broke.

When daylight came the quest was finished. From a tree-top I had a bird’s-nest view of the cruiser, which lay moored not more than three hundred yards away. She was well camouflaged, smothered in trees on her deck, and her sides painted so that she seemed part of the surrounding jungle.

There were patrols about, and we had to be wary in returning. Not until dark did we reach the dug-out at the edge of the mangrove. Before daylight we were safe at Koma with our two prisoners.

Orders had been given to the Navy that during my absence from Mafia one ship was to patrol the coast-line every night to ascertain when I wanted to return, and it was arranged that I should light oil-soaked sacks on the beach away from the mainland as a signal that I wished to be picked up. Everything worked to plan, and we were taken to Mafia, where “Sparks” sent out a prearranged signal, “Pretorius wishes to see the Admiral,” which he knew meant that I had found the Königsberg. “Will arrive 10 A.M. to-morrow” came the pro...