This book was published in 1869 by Alfred W. Drayson as a compiling of all the information found about Hans Sterk, a young Dutchman living the wild areas of South Africa in 1835.

He and the other Dutch in South Africa (known as Boers) were primarily elephant hunters in the tribe-inhabited wilderness. There were many battles with the local tribes and a lot of violence; the book reads like a fiction story.

The details are not very well filled in by the author. There seems to be some stretching to the limit of what would be considered possible for a non-fiction book, and there were some important points that were not explained satisfactorily. For the most part though, I enjoyed reading it, and I think it gives an accurate presentation of what things were really like in South Africa around that time.

What happened to the Boers? The British invaded their nation (the Orange Free State) in 1889 because they wanted to expand their reign (like all empires do) and because there was a huge diamond deposit on Boer territory. The Boers were either sent overseas as prisoners or put in concentration camps.