BY JUNE 13 Blanche hadn’t heard from her husband for almost a month and was getting anxious. She didn’t yet know that he had nearly died. Burnham sent her several letters from the hospital in Pretoria, but they wouldn’t arrive until early July. For some reason, perhaps the expense, perhaps a reluctance to alarm her, he didn’t cable. A week later, still in the dark about her husband’s injury, Blanche read another newspaper account about his exploits in the war. “I am fearful that after living such an exciting life,” she wrote to him, “you will not be able to settle down to humdrum existence with your wife and boys but will want to go to China or to the West Coast [of Africa].” This proved prophetic.
Blanche finally heard about his injury on June 26, when Burnham cabled her. He told her it wasn’t serious and that he would soon board a ship for home, even if he had to sleep on a couch and borrow a room to change clothes. He left Cape Town on July 4 on the Dunottar Castle. A fellow passenger named Major A. W. A. Pollock later wrote, “Burnham, the American scout, was on board, as well as other celebrities.” These included generals, aristocrats, the mayor of recently-relieved Mafeking, and a young war correspondent named Winston Churchill.
The Gold Coast Colony, Ashanti, and the Northern Territories. (Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press from The End of Slavery in Africa, edited by Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts, © 1988 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System.)
Burnham and Churchill knew each other slightly from the war, but on the eighteen-day voyage to Southampton they deepened their acquaintance by discussing their mutual interests: explorers, military history and battle strategies, and the details about how each had escaped from the Boers (Churchill had broken out of Pretoria jail). Churchill questioned Burnham closely about his youth among Indians. They were also tablemates, and among their small group some topics were off-limits. Burnham wrote to his uncle that they had agreed on the following fines: “Anyone talking about the war, $1.25; about Pom Poms, $1.75; about armored trains, $5.75; about Boers, $7.25; about scouting, death; criticism of the war and explaining how it should have been conducted, penalty death by torture.”
But scouting never left Burnham’s mind. He had started making notes to write a technical manual about it (never published). The impetus was his experience in South Africa, where he had been appalled by the cost of the British army’s incompetence. He wrote a long letter to Baden-Powell on the subject during the voyage. “I saw things every day that would make an angel weep, the C in C [commander-in-chief, Lord Roberts] asking for information of this or that column and no man knew where it was or where the enemy were. I saw whole troops of men calling themselves scouts that did not know enough to pound sand in a rat hole—and yet it was the only stuff the C in C could get.” Because of poor scouting, many British soldiers had died needlessly in ambushes or night attacks or foolish charges.
Burnham asked Baden-Powell to use his new renown from Mafeking to convince the British military to form a capable scouting corps. War was becoming more lethal, with powerful long-range rifles and artillery that could lob devastating shells several miles. To save lives and fight effectively, it was more important than ever to scout troop movements and gun placements. And the next war, predicted Burnham, wouldn’t be a minor conflict like the one in South Africa, where an outnumbered enemy could be overwhelmed by throwing more and more troops into battle. (Like others, Burnham foresaw a brutal showdown between Britain and Germany.)
“It will all depend upon the man behind the gun,” wrote Burnham. “He will need brains.” To find the best men for scouting, continued Burnham, “They should be put through a severe test physically and tried mentally to see if they could stand all night in a drizzly storm watching a path to catch an enemy’s dispatch, and do this night after night on ½ rations. Some fellows start strong for the adventure, but shy of the drudgery in obscurity. Their enthusiasm dies as the sun goes down.” If Baden-Powell would take on this vital task, Burnham offered to help in any way he could.
The Dunottar Castle docked at Southampton on July 20. For the time being, Burnham basked in the love of his family. He was especially joyful to renew acquaintance with Bruce, now two.
London society swept him up as a war hero and celebrity. Burnham’s background as a Westerner and scout was deeply appealing to the public, yet he was also expected to conduct himself like a Victorian gentleman who knew literary allusions and the correct fork. “Since his return, several months ago,” reported the London periodical Mainly About People, “he and Mrs. Burnham have been feted all over England, and have been guests at country houses without number, whilst endless dinners, receptions, and luncheon parties have been given in their honour in town.” Lords invited Burnham to join them for partridge shooting. Even Queen Victoria requested his presence, but took ill and had to cancel. Blanche saved the embossed menu from one honorary dinner at the Savoy Hotel on July 18. Among the nine Francophile courses were Truite-Salmonée au Champagne en Gelée, Chapon de Paris Albufera, Selle d’Agneau à la Broche, Corbeille de Friandises, and Savoury à la Bayeldi. It was a long way from raw corn gnawed in an aardvark hole.
The invitation he most appreciated came from the dons of Oxford University. He hesitated to accept, afraid he would be out of his intellectual depth. But the visit over several days delighted both sides as they shared knowledge about botany, mineralogy, animal behavior, and other subjects that Burnham and the dons, for very different reasons, had studied closely.
The Boer War was the first media-saturated conflict, with seventy correspondents sending dispatches and illustrations to feed the public’s appetite. Newspapers also had discovered the profits in creating and covering celebrities. Likewise, companies had started using famous soldiers, actresses, and athletes to sell their products. In its series on heroes of the Boer War, Ogden’s Cigarettes issued two “cigarette cards” featuring photographs of Burnham, an odd pairing since Burnham avoided tobacco to preserve his sense of smell. Newspapers reported Burnham’s activities and whereabouts, quoted his views on scouting and the Boer War, retold his adventures. To keep track, Burnham subscribed to a clipping service. Four months after his return, the scrapbook held 130 stories. Typical was one that covered his honorary appearance at the Anglo-African Writers Club, where the chairman read aloud Lord Roberts’s letter praising him and added, “any one of Major Burnham’s adventures would provide an ordinary man with conversation for the rest of his life.”
Rider Haggard gave Burnham’s name to Lady Jeune, wife of Sir Francis Jeune, a prominent judge and member of the Queen’s Privy Council. “Lady J is fond of the celebrities who chance to shine in the season’s sky,” wrote Haggard to Burnham. “She knows everyone and might be useful.” Soon the Burnhams were weekending at the Jeunes’ estate, Arlington Manor. “I wonder if you would know your Freddy and B.B.,” wrote Blanche to her mother on the Manor’s stationery, “if you could see us sweeping down to dinner in this grand old place with my lords and my ladies and a few Sirs thrown in.” Mid-letter, she switched from ink to pencil because her fingers were getting black, “and that will never do here.”
Blanche was surprised to find herself enjoying this swirl, at first, but the relentless stream of invitations and visitors—two to five callers every day—grew tiresome. And expensive. Sweeping down to dinner and receiving visitors required frequent new dresses, and Blanche wasn’t sure how long they could afford their new English life. Neither was Burnham. In October he wrote to his mother that he and Blanche were tearing around the countryside visiting lots of fancy people, which might bankrupt him in six months since the overhead of every visit was about $100. Too bad the tariffs are so high, he added, or he would send her Blanche’s old gowns, since Blanche could only wear them a few times.
Throughout Burnham’s war service in South Africa, his letters often contained paragraphs about money, stocks, and business affairs. “I will have to get out and hustle again after this war for $ again,” he wrote to his mother, “as I will be a long way behind.” He felt pleased that no matter what happened in the war and afterward, he had given several Blicks a financial head start and had saved enough to educate his children.
But the value of his African investments had plummeted after the war’s early debacles, and during the first months of 1900 the news from the Klondike was bad. John and Judd Blick were still there, working on Burnham’s syndicate mines, but the claims had proven disappointing. Burnham hated to fail the Blicks and his investors. Blanche soothed him. “What is not in the ground cannot come out and everyone knows that,” she wrote. With the gold rush over, Burnham also worried that the Skagway store he had bought for Madge Blick wouldn’t support her, and he would have to move her family back to Pasadena, where jobs were scarce. Blanche brushed aside these concerns while he was in South Africa and told him to focus on staying alive, not on money, because he had proven many times that he could always make more.
After several months of honors, celebrity, and recuperation—he was once again able to tear a deck of cards in half—Burnham was restless with drawing-room life. He needed action and income. In December Blanche wrote to Burnham’s mother that he had been asked to lead several expeditions in the spring but hadn’t yet picked one. “He was offered something very good to go to the gold fields of Ashanti [now in Ghana],” she added, “but I said No, I will never consent for him to go to that fever hole for any amount of money. The word Ashanti has a perfect horror for me. What would I care for money if Fred died of fever? Not much. No Ashanti.” For her, the only worse possibility was a return to combat in South Africa, where the Boers were refusing to surrender.
Two months later Blanche wrote to Burnham’s mother that he was leaving in ten days for Ashanti. “It all came up and was arranged in one day,” she wrote. “I was astonished. I have never wanted him to go to the West Coast, but he thinks that is the only and the best thing to do.” Burnham had signed a partnership agreement with a group of investors calling themselves the Wa Syndicate. Wa was the most remote outpost in the Northern Territories, also known as the Hinterlands, in Britain’s Gold Coast Colony. Wa was also Burnham’s destination. Once again he was going to look for gold.
Burnham and John Blick left from Liverpool on February 13, 1901. The trip out was spiced by tales from a prospector who had been to Patagonia, which rekindled Burnham’s desire to try his hand there. He wrote to Blanche complaining that he couldn’t find a challenging chess match on board. He drew a picture of the ship for Bruce, who loved boats and water.
After rounding the bulge of Africa into the Gulf of Guinea, they stopped at several places. European ships had been calling along this coast for hundreds of years, and these ports had been centers of the massive transatlantic slave trade. Burnham was struck by the difference between the natives here and in Rhodesia. The Guinea Coast natives spoke English with Cockney or Yankee accents, dressed “to the nines,” wore glasses, “and if you call him a nigger he has you arrested and found for insulting him.”
The voyage’s most memorable event occurred on this leg, a concert of the natives’ plaintive songs and chants. Some people didn’t like it, wrote Burnham, but “it just held me spellbound and put me in that strange mood it always does and that I can’t understand or express. . . . There is not in London anything that can move me in the same way as this.”
The syndicate had deposited £5,000 for his use in a British bank in Cape Coast, a former slaving depot on the Gold Coast. The money was for expenses, including the purchase of concessions from inland kings and chiefs. Burnham hoped he hadn’t come too late. Gold had been discovered in the Gold Coast Colony—or rather, discovered by Europeans, since Ghana had been the primary source of gold in northern Africa for centuries. Mining companies and speculators had started crowding into the country.
To foil the worst of them, the British government had passed the Gold Coast Concessions Ordinance of 1900. It reflected the government’s usual high-mindedness about protecting the natives, de jure if not de facto. It stipulated that no individual could own a concession larger than five square miles or total concessions of more than twenty square miles. Further, no concession would be recognized unless the commissioner and commandant of the Northern Territories both reported that the affected natives understood the agreement, and that it was reasonable. Syndicates were a legal way around the size limitations. Burnham had power of attorney for twenty-nine investors, allowing him to buy up to 580 square miles of claims.
He wasn’t working for a salary. Always a prospector at heart, he preferred to gamble on the possibility of a big strike. For his services, the syndicate agreed to cover all his expenses, including first-class travel accommodations to and from West Africa, and to give him 20 percent of the net profit from the sale of any concessions he bought for the syndicate. If he found rich deposits of gold, that 20 percent could be worth a fortune—that is, if the chiefs would sell the concessions, and if the government approved the terms, and if the gold could be extracted by native labor at reasonable expense, and if the government would build a railroad or allow one to be built so that transport to and from the Hinterlands became feasible, and if fever or the region’s sometimes belligerent tribes didn’t kill everyone and shut down the whole thing. As usual, Burnham didn’t allow these foreboding ifs to cloud his optimism.
First, he needed to find 100 carriers for the overland trek to the Hinterlands. They were scarce and everything was expensive because a minor gold rush had been on for six weeks, with hundreds of men in the country to buy concessions. He was also pestered by social invitations, “but it is all booze booze booze. Every five minutes the fools drink and yet each swears they don’t drink anything at all.”
Burnham entrusted the recruitment of carriers, and much else, to the Honorable J. H. Cheetham. Burnham described him as “a well-educated negro owning large property in Cape Coast and acting as shipping agent for several companies.” Cheetham also owned warehouses where the expedition’s goods could be stored, which might be useful in the future. For the investors, Burnham listed Cheetham’s other bona fides: he was a lawyer, a thirty-degree Mason, a member of the Royal Geographical Society, and a consul for Belgium. He had ten wives and drank a bottle and a half of whiskey a day, but never boasted or raised his voice, and he read heavy books such as Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. He could be reached at any time by cable. A good man to have in Africa.
Just three days after disembarking at Cape Coast, Burnham left for the interior—a new record, he was told. “I am like a whirlwind among these slumbering officials,” he wrote to Blanche. To buy supplies and concessions along the way, he was carrying British money weighing 150 pounds.
Heading north from the coast, Burnham was entranced by the landscape. Forests of mahogany and cotton trees towered nearly 200 feet, with orchids, ferns, and other botanical surprises filling the shade underneath. He sometimes walked for hours without seeing the sun. They rose at four o’clock for coffee, bread, bananas, pineapples, and coconut milk. Then they trekked for six or eight hours, with short breaks, before stopping to eat and overhaul the packs and write letters. By seven or eight o’clock they were under their mosquito nets. The bugs weren’t bad but there was “fever galore.”
He remained enraptured by African drums. Their power and his reaction mystified and discomfited him. “The land of the Ashanti is the home of the throbbing drum,” he wrote in Taking Chances.
We rose, we ate, we marched, we danced, we slept, we fought, and we died to its interminable tom-tom. Its low booming was as persistent as the beat of a man’s heart, and its crashing roar of war made the native hearers foam at the mouth and their eyes turn red with fury. Some white men find the reverberation of the drums unbearable. Others are indifferent to it, but there are many over whom it seems to weave strange spells or patterns of excited imagination. When the trees of the forest tower inky-black at night and the dance fires leap high; when hundreds of glossy, sinewy naked savages bound in rhythm to the pulsating sounds pouring rapidly from a dozen great drums, an uncanny feeling steals over the white man—a feeling that the experience is not new to him. But where? When? I know this madness, for I have been part of it. The blood ebbs and flows to the beat of the drums. The whole black earth and sky seem to move in rhythm with that reverberating pulse-beat. Time is not. Then the sudden light of dawn dims the fires. The drums cease, the dancers glide away, and with an agonized sigh of relief the white man comes out of the strange enchantment and tiptoes to his tent to lie down for an hour’s sleep before the heat of day comes on.
Within a few days Burnham convened a meeting of the carriers, about half of whom were women. He and Blick had noticed that the strongest men were putting the heaviest packs on the women, many of whom were also carrying children. Burnham ordered it stopped. This ignited four hours of yelling, stomping, and threats to leave, much of it from the women. Nevertheless, the packs were redistributed. Burnham required lighter loads than other white men, but the women still carried about 55 pounds on their heads and often an infant on their backs, plus a few pounds of their own food. The men carried 80 to 100 pounds. They did this for six to eight hours each day, for fifteen to twenty miles. For eleven weeks of work, most of the carriers were paid a bit more than £4.
Throughout the expedition there was often some minor complaint from the carriers or squabbling among them. Religion had spoiled them, wrote Burnham. “They are a truculent band of devils, half missionaried so they are not afraid of the white man.” He preferred Muslims—“more fierce but not such liars and thieves.” Neither he nor Blick ever responded to the carriers with anger, he wrote, since that was pointless and minor frictions were an expected part of travel in Africa. Several carriers told him there were lots of gold workings in the Hinterlands, and silver as well.
The landscape changed. The trees thinned and shortened, the fever waned. Bananas and pineapples gave way to rice and sweet potatoes. Burnham was eager to get farther north, away from the government stations where, he complained, “it is always a big chin chin and dinner, and I hate dinners,” especially since the table always disappeared beneath bottles.
On March 14 they reached Kumasi, 130 miles from the coast. This important town had been the capital of the Ashanti Empire until Britain conquered it in 1874. But the Ashantis were fierce warriors who had not been fully defeated. Britain’s most recent conflict with them had broken out almost exactly a year before Burnham’s arrival. The garrison at Kumasi—native troops, mostly Muslim Hausas, led by a few British officers—had been besieged for nearly four months before relief arrived.
This was the so-called War of the Golden Stool, sparked when the arrogant colonial governor, Sir Frederick Hodgson, traveled to Kumasi and assembled the Ashanti chiefs to demand that they turn over the Golden Stool, the solid-gold throne of their king. The British had captured the king several years earlier, along with much of the golden royal treasure, but the throne had been hidden away. Hodgson wanted it as a sign of the Ashantis’ subservience. He declared to the assembled chiefs that he represented the greatest power on earth, and commanded them to fetch the golden throne so he didn’t have to sit on an ordinary chair. Instead, the outraged Ashantis fetched their weapons.
Burnham described the Ashantis as the cleanest natives he had ever seen. They bathed every day, cleaned their clothes every other day, washed their dishes after each meal, and maintained a latrine for sanitation. He added, “but a more bloodthirsty lot does not live under the canopy of heaven,” an impressive ranking considering Burnham’s experience. The Ashantis had once controlled a vast region, enriching themselves through gold and brutal slave raids. Burnham visited their fetish grove in Kumasi, where great mounds of skulls and bones testified about the slaves tortured and sacrificed there for entertainment.
Burnham scouted for gold near Kumasi and found a promising reef that he traced for two miles. It had been easy to find because it was pitted with old workings dug by natives looking for “shed gold,” eroded from the reef by the little streams that ran down it and deposited golden bits not far from the surface. He bought some concessions on the reef after negotiating with the king of Bekwai, who could not be tempted with trinkets. The king bedecked himself with gold jewelry and luxurious robes, sprinkled himself with Florida Water cologne, and was fond of champagne. Burnham cabled the syndicate that the Ashanti country was rich and the company likely would have “a little gold empire.”
He couldn’t wait to leave for Wa in the far north. White prospectors hadn’t yet reached it, so it was still possible to buy big concessions there, though no one knew if there were concessions worth buying. He and Blick bought horses in Kumasi. Burnham’s had a fetish bag hidden in its foretop for protection.
They stopped in Kintampo, 110 miles above Kumasi. The landscape reminded him of Mashonaland. The people were no longer Ashanti. The region was ruled by the king of Banda. Burnham bought a concession of fifty square miles from him for a fee of £50 per year until the property was worked, whereupon the fee would rise to £300. He bought another concession of 200 square miles farther north, inside the big curve of the Black Volta River at a place called Wasipe, where he traced a gold reef for twelve miles. As before, the old workings showed him where to look. The Banda people were used to mining and “would furnish a good supply of labor if properly treated,” he wrote to the investors. To Blanche he wrote, “I feel that if we find nothing more our expedition is a howling success, and we are the pioneers in all the hinterland and ought to reap some reward for it.”
But rumors about even richer fields kept him moving north. The whole country was abandoned because of the depredations years earlier by Samori Ture, an Islamic warlord who once had a kingdom in what is now Guinea. When the French claimed his territory, Ture fought them for a dozen years. To elude them he adopted a scorched-earth strategy, devastating the landscapes he moved through and taking slaves to replenish his army. He was finally captured in 1898. Burnham’s party walked over the bones of hundreds of his victims. “When he finished a country,” wrote Burnham, “a locust would starve in it.”
They stopped in Bole, 100 miles beyond Kintampo. At this remote outpost, they found one British officer commanding a small troop of native soldiers. The officer was delighted. He hadn’t seen a white man for four months or a white woman for sixteen. “Poor devil,” wrote Burnham. To cheer him, Burnham asked their cook to make a special dinner: soup, fish, roasted birds, fried yams, bread, jam, and tea. Wrote Burnham,
These young fellows will be found two or three in a station stuck away in a corner of the wilderness and ruling a half dozen tribes of wild savage people with a handful of house troops. Sometimes a solitary Lieutenant and 20 men live for months on a station cut off from supplies of all kinds, no mails, no luxuries. Native chop for food and [shea butter] oil for light. Some antiquated magazines and almanacs for literature. But they are holding down a stake on the Empire’s boundary so that some day the man of commerce can slowly develop the resources of the country, and then the Lieutenant will be shifted deeper into the wilds.
On April 20 they finally reached Wa, more than 400 miles from the coast. The trip had taken nearly seven weeks. Wa was the Gold Coast Colony’s outermost station. Three white officers and 100 native soldiers, mostly Hausas, held it for King and Empire. (King Edward VII had succeeded his mother, Queen Victoria, who died in January 1901.) After the usual official niceties, Burnham invaded France.
French West Africa began fifteen miles to the west, across the Black Volta River. A native had told Burnham about a vast gold field there, which no whites had prospected. He found it easily. There were thousands of pits, old and recent. He traced the reefs back across the river into British territory, his excitement growing with each mile. The French side was richer, but the British side was the richest he had seen in the Gold Coast Colony, with reefs running four to twenty feet thick. He pegged 200 square miles of it along twenty miles of the Volta. “Lord but I would like to see you right now,” he wrote to Blanche. “I am so full of schemes I shall burst.”
It was the wildest country he had ever trekked. Most of the native people, the Dagara (or Dagaaba), didn’t wear clothes, though the women donned a loincloth after marriage. They were farmers, he noted, strong workers who would make good miners. Until Burnham’s party arrived, most of them had never seen a white man, French or otherwise, nor a horse or a gun, though they had heard rumors of such marvels. They used bows and arrows with poisoned tips. They were friendly at the moment, but Burnham’s habit was to anticipate conflict, so he ran tests and made measurements like a military anthropologist.
The Dagara’s unfeathered arrows, he reported, had expertly-made iron points, but the bows were short and weak, with bamboo strings. At fifty yards, the bows couldn’t drive an arrow through a pigskin legging or three folds of tent canvas. But the Dagara could shoot their arrows “with wonderful rapidity,” relying on quantity rather than power or accuracy. Their poison, on the other hand, was deadly, even from a scratch. The Dagara knew an antidote, and Burnham recommended that the syndicate and the army discover it before any conflict arose.
When attacked, the Dagara retreated into their compounds made of “swish,” a blend of mud and mortar. It hardened like concrete and was impenetrable by bullets. The compounds had no doors and could be entered only from the roof. Attackers without artillery would have to get close enough to use dynamite or battering rams while Dagara bowman on the roofs showered them with poisoned arrows. Therefore, advised Burnham, soldiers fighting the Dagara should wear leather or three-ply canvas from their breasts to their knees. Officers should wear helmets and tunics fronted with “wire cloth.”
After a week or so in the environs of Wa, Burnham and Blick started for home. They suspected that the Volta was navigable for most of its length. If so, steamships could get to within twenty miles of the syndicate’s claims, and short railroad spurs to the river would cover the rest, allowing the company to do away with “all this head-carrying business.” John Blick was going down the river to test the theory, while Burnham went overland. (Blick traveled 500 miles down the Volta. The chief hazards were hippopotamuses. He saw at least 400 and had to kill six that attacked.)
“I shall be very very glad to see BB’s face again,” wrote Burnham to his mother while aboard the ship to England, “and each time I go off for so long, I think what a fool I am, but the spirit of unrest I must have suckled with the milk of your breast, so I wander and rove and do things that no other living man can do.”
During her husband’s absence, Blanche had wearied of socializing and the demands of fashion. She wrote to his mother that she hoped Burnham would take her to the desert. “I am getting tired of civilization.” (A couple of months later, she was pushing for Patagonia.) She also hoped the expedition would generate enough income to keep Fred home awhile and out of unhealthy places.
Burnham reached London in early July, after five months away. Many papers covered his return, running stories about his latest adventure and his thoughts on the gold prospects in West Africa. “It will become one of the very greatest goldfields in the world,” was a representative quote. A story in the Daily Mail, later picked up by the New York Times, was headlined “New Eldorado—Major Burnham’s Discoveries in West Africa—Famous Scout’s Story.” The syndicate’s investors must have rubbed their hands at such coverage, which could only increase the value of their concessions.
On December 17, King Edward VII made Burnham a member of the Distinguished Service Order (DSO), Britain’s second highest military honor after the Victoria Cross. The king also granted an exception that allowed him to retain his rank of major in the British Army without giving up his U.S. citizenship. The ceremony took place in the hallowed setting of St. James’s Palace. Burnham had to kneel, and he worried that his sword would hit the floor because he was so short. In Scouting on Two Continents, he wrote, “I realized at that moment why it is men so cheerfully die for the Empire . . . There was no desire now in my heart to boast or strut. I felt of no more importance than a grain of sand on the shore of the mighty sea.”
The honor made Blanche proud, but she was probably even more pleased that her husband remained in London. “Thank fortune that I am not going to be a widow this winter,” she wrote to her mother. She worried that he would get the urge to return to South Africa, which remained an ugly bog. More than two years after the war began, 200,000 British troops sent to South Africa had been unable to defeat the surviving 20,000 bittereinders (bitter enders), who persisted in small guerrilla groups that struck and disappeared. The British public was war-weary.
Lord Roberts had been succeeded in December 1900 by Lord Kitchener, who once called Boers “uncivilized Afrikander savages with a thin white veneer.” Kitchener resolved to end the war by any means. He instituted a scorched earth policy, burning every Boer farm and killing or seizing all livestock. He also herded all Boer women and children—eventually 160,000 of them—into about eighty internment centers that became known as “concentration camps,” another of the Boer War’s gifts to the twentieth century. An additional 130,000 natives also were interned. Malnutrition and disease in these camps killed 28,000 Boer civilians, 22,000 of them children, and at least 14,000 black Africans.
Even Burnham no longer seemed keen on this war. In late 1901 and early 1902 he stayed busy exercising his mind at his chess club, seeing old friends such as the Rider Haggards, and monitoring the many dormant investments that formed a map of his wanderings in the United States, Rhodesia, the Klondike, Alaska, and Africa’s Gold Coast.
But he was soon agitated by the old restlessness. “Can’t stand London high life another minute,” he wrote to his mother in February 1902. “Things are too comfortable and easy. Everything I can think of, everything I used to want—friends, fame, health, leisure, and some money, a good family—I have them all. Yet I cannot stand it and must be off into some wilderness. And strange to say B[lanche] is just wild to go with me.” He began looking for something adventurous and potentially profitable.
In March came news that Cecil Rhodes had died in Rhodesia at age forty-eight. Burnham later said that from that moment on, his devotion to Africa began to wane. But he and Africa had one more episode together.
The Boer War finally ended in late May 1902. The cost to Britain had been severe: £200 million, more than 22,000 dead, more than 75,000 sent home wounded or ill. To keep the peace, the British government urged the Boers to join in the reconstruction and governance of the expanded colony. The “white man’s war” changed little for the colony’s black Africans. They went back to work in white men’s mines and on white men’s farms, with no new rights and no promise of a vote.
Just as the war was ending, Burnham was stepping back onto the continent, this time in British East Africa.
British East Africa. (Courtesy of the Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.)
