the death of Captain Hunt

I was looking for something else and found this. I'm pretty sure many of my friends have seen the film Breaker Morant (I wager that gr_c17, at least, has seen it several times, as I have). This incident is a pretty crucial one in the hardening (as alleged in the story at any rate) of Harry Morant's character. How ironic it would be, in retrospect, if the allegations of atrocity were in fact true, but the perpetrators were (effectively) neutrals as regards the conflict, a possibility that, as the article notes, was not considered by *anyone* at the time.

The whole article on Harry Morant is (IMO) well written and interesting to read, an example of the good work that is done on Wikipedia, a resource that is too often simply poo-poohed out of hand as corrupted and useless.

A look at the final phase of the Second Boer War might give people today an insight into the eternal nature of counterinsurgency, as well as reminding us of the (sadly) ever-present danger of such varied powers as deadly force during wartime and military (and, of course, civil) courts to cover up inconvenient truths and to settle personal scores.

from the Wikipedia article on Harry Harbord "Breaker" Morant

The pivotal event of the Morant affair took place two days later, on the night of 5 August 1901. Captain Hunt led a seventeen-man patrol to a Boer farmhouse called Duivelskloof (Devil's Gorge), about 80 miles (130 km) south of the fort, hoping to capture its owner, the Boer commando leader Veldtcornet Barend Viljoen. Hunt also had some 200 armed native African irregulars with him, and Witton claimed that although "those in authority" denied the use of African auxiliaries, they were in fact widely used and were responsible for "the most hideous atrocities".

Hunt had been told that Viljoen had only twenty men with him. The Boers surprised the British as they approached. During the ensuing skirmish, both Barend Viljoen and his brother Jacob Viljoen were killed. Witnesses later testified that Captain Hunt was wounded in the chest while firing through the windows and Sergeant Frank Eland was killed while trying to recover his body. Witnesses later testified that Hunt was still alive when the British retreated.

Hunt's body was recovered the next day. It was found lying in a gutter, naked and mutilated; the sinews at the backs of both knees and ankles had been severed, his legs were slashed with long knife cuts, and his face had been crushed by hob-nailed boots. According to Kit Denton, he had also been castrated, but Witton makes no mention of this. Hunt's battered body was taken to the nearby Reuter's Mission Station, where it was washed and buried by Reverend J.F. Reuter and Hunt's native servant Aaron, who corroborated the troopers' statements about the condition of the body. The body of Jacob Viljoen was also found inside the farmhouse, also mutilated in the same way as that of Hunt. It was later proved that black witchdoctors came to the house after the skirmish, and removed parts of the bodies of both Hunt and Viljoen to use as "medicine" ("muti"). Witchdoctors believe that body parts (specifically the genitalia) from brave men make "strong muti", and both Hunt and Viljoen were regarded as such. The possibility that both men may have been killed, or at least mutilated, by the witchdoctors was not considered by Morant, or extensively explored during the court martial.

GoogleBooks

I know this project has gotten a lot of flak from different quarters, and to some extent I can understand why.

But I am astonished and grateful for the immense amount of (fairly obscure) material it contains. While I'm on this eastern Sudan 1884 kick, I've been delving, and I've come up with some gems.

One is Bennett Burleigh's "Desert Warfare" and his "Kharthoum Campaign, 1898". BB was one of the principal war correspondents of the period, and he was "embedded" (to use modern concepts) with both the Suakin and both the later Khartoum expeditions. Also available is "Days and Nights of Service" by E. A. De Cosson, one of Sir Gerald Graham's staff officers on the Suakin Expedition. Also "Under Crescent and Star", by Andrew Haggard, a British officer in Egpytian service who was stationed at Suakin. "The River Column" by Maj Gen Brackenbury, who commanded part of the relief force sent to rescue Gordon. "The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan" and "With the Camel Corps Up the Nile" by Lord Edward Gleichen. "With the Indian contingent in Egypt: 1882", a war correspondent's memoir of the Arabi Revolt. "The War in Egypt", the Times' account of the same. The US Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence report on the same. Steevens' "With Kitchener to Khartum", a war correspondent on the 1898 expedition. And the anonymous memoir of a British Army officer from the same campaign.

And, finally (so far) the edited letters and diaries of Sir Gerald Graham, whose expedition in 1884 I'm particularly interested in.

If I had credentials, I might be able to get to a university library and get access to copies of these books. If they had them. Or get them at the Library of Congress (especially if they were published in the US). And some are available through Project Gutenberg. But to be able to simply Google and have the book right here in front of me... that is priceless.

I confess when some visionaries early int he public discussion of the possibilities of the Internet suggested that a day like this might come, I was skeptical, perhaps even dismissive. How could people find the time to do all this, much less the data storage? But someone has. All hail Google!