Company's flag (11 September) at Fort Salisbury, where the capital of Southern Rhodesia now stands. The first great step in the occupation of Rhodes's ‘North’ had been taken. Rhodes himself had now become prime minister of the Cape Colony.
The next six months of Jameson's life were mainly occupied by two journeys of incredible arduousness. The first was undertaken to find the nearest means of access to the sea for the young community which could not for long be dependent on a land route from the Cape of nearly 2,000 miles, much of it passing through an uninhabited waste. In ill-health and with ribs broken by a fall from his horse, Jameson with his friend, Frank Johnson, made his way from Salisbury to the mouth of the Pungwe river in Portuguese East Africa, and thus marked out the route afterwards followed by the railway to Salisbury from Beira. On his second journey he obtained certain concessions for the Company from native chiefs to the eastward of Lobengula's sphere of authority. But here the Portuguese claimed sovereign rights. Jameson was arrested by the Portuguese authorities and taken as a prisoner to Delagoa Bay, whence, however, he was speedily released. The territorial dispute was settled by a treaty between Great Britain and Portugal (June 1891) which defined the spheres of the two nations in Central Africa.
From 1891 to 1893 Jameson, who had now been appointed administrator of Mashonaland in succession to Colquhoun, was engaged in establishing the nucleus of a civilized administration for the embryo colony of Rhodesia, and in cutting down the heavy expense of supplying a white settlement established in the remote wilds to such an amount as the overstrained finances of the Company could bear.
In 1893 came a new trial. The Matabele were not disposed to abandon their traditional practice of periodically raiding, slaying, and plundering their defenceless Mashona subjects. The practice was not one which a white authority, responsible for setting up an orderly administration of Mashonaland, could be expected to tolerate. Frontier incidents at Fort Victoria, and a claim by the Matabele to be allowed to slaughter some of the Mashona whom they accused of cattle-thefts, precipitated a conflict which in reality had been inevitable from the first. Jameson, hastily equipping a handful of volunteers and police, hurled them at the hitherto invincible ‘impis’ of Lobengula. The force numbered in all under 700 white men. It was commanded by Major Patrick William Forbes, and accompanied by Jameson himself as administrator but with no military authority. It was completely successful. Lobengula's best regiments were defeated in two pitched battles. Bulawayo was occupied (4 November 1893), and Lobengula himself died soon afterwards, a fugitive in the veld. The tragic fate of the Shangani patrol, under Major Allan Wilson, did not affect the completeness of the military success which had been achieved. The rule of the Matabele was at an end, and the Company's government under Jameson as administrator was, by the Matabeleland Order in Council of 1894, extended over the whole of what is now Southern Rhodesia.
Jameson, who had been Rhodes's chief instrument in the carrying out of his policy, was now at the zenith of his fame. On a visit to London at the end of 1894 he received the C.B. and could not wholly avoid, much as he disliked it, the notoriety of a popular hero. But the great catastrophe of his career was at hand.
The discontents of the ‘Uitlander’, mainly British, population of the Transvaal with the government of the South African Republic were coming to a head. By the autumn of 1895 the ‘reform committee’ in Johannesburg were making plans for the forcible overthrow of that government. Rhodes was supportig them, as he afterward said, ‘with his purse and influence’, hoping that the outcome of the movement might be the substitution for President Kruger's government of one more enlightened, which might render possible the federation, or at least the co-operation, of the South African states and colonies for common ends. Kruger had refused all proposals for reform; and an armed rising was prepared for the end of the year. To Jameson, who had returned to South Africa from England early in 1895, was allotted the task of raising a mounted force in Rhodesia and of holding it in readiness on the border of the Transvaal, to be used if events in Johannesburg should make it necessary. Accordingly, about 500 Mashonaland mounted police were by the end of October collected at Mafeking and at Pitsani Potlugo, in a portion of the Bechuanaland Protectorate which had been handed over by the imperial government to the administrative control of the British South Africa
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