redit for opening up Rhodesia belongs not only to the missionaries but also to the early hunters and prospectors. One of the most famous of the hunters was Henry Hartley who as a child came out to South Africa with the 1820 Settlers. In 1841 Hartley moved to the Transvaal and went hunting in Matabeleland in 1859. Thereafter he paid visits nearly every season to present-day Rhodesia. In 1865 he came across traces of early gold workings near the Umfuli River. The next year Hartley brought the geologist Karl Mauch to Mashonaland to confirm the presence there of payable gold. The publication of their discoveries gave rise to intensive prospecting. Besides recognizing the gold potential of Mashonaland, Hartley was one of the greatest professional hunters known in Southern Africa. During his lifetime he is credited with killing 1 200 elephants.

n 1869 Hartley was engaged by Thomas Baines, acting on behalf of the newly formed South African Goldfields Exploration Company, to guide him to the Mashonaland goldfields. Baines was born in 1820 at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and pursued an adventurous career. He was attached to the British forces as an artist during the Kaffir War of 1850-53. For two years he served on Gregory’s Australian Expedition. Baines then joined Dr. Livingstone’s Zambezi Expedition and was dismissed by him on charges of dishonesty which were never proven.

aines next became concerned with an attempt to open up the middle and lower Zambezi and during 1862 he paid a visit to the Victoria Falls, being the first artist to depict them. In 1868 Baines became employed by the South African Gold Fields Company and from Lobengula obtained permission to mine gold between the Gwelo and Hunyani rivers. Unfortunately his company became insolvent and Baines spent the remainder of his life trying to clear up the financial tangle. He died of dysentery at Durban in 1875.

homas Baines painted hundreds of pictures during his extensive travels and is best known now as an artist. But he was also a most resourceful explorer and his journals are an exact and interesting record of events in Rhodesia before the Occupation. Because he obtained the first mineral concession in Mashonaland, Baines must also be considered one of the founders of modern Rhodesia.