THE BOER SIDE OF THE WHITE FLAG, CRUELTY, ETC. (Unpublished manuscript)

by Peter Macqueen, Boston, Mass., U.S.A., Sept.1900

25 pages, written in ink, on one side of the page only, in lined note book (210 x 170 mm) with grey light card covers, the title written on a white label on the upper cover. The covers are detached and chipped along all the edges, stapled binding but several pages are loose.

Peter MacQueen (1865-1924) was born in Scotland and went to the United States when he was 17 years old. He graduated from Princeton University in 1887 and from Union Theological Seminary in 1890. His first church was in New York. He moved to Boston in 1892. In 1898, he became a war correspondent and went to Cuba with Theodore Roosevelt. He travelled to the Transvaal in 1900 to cover the guerrilla war. After that, MacQueen travelled extensively throughout Russia, Japan, the Philippines, and Africa, and he wrote about and gave lectures on his experiences.

In this manuscript he gives wide ranging accounts, many of them first hand, of Boer grievances and British atrocities and numerous ‘white flag’ events. He reports on claims by the Boers that ‘attempts have been made by the English authorities to bribe their generals, de la Rey, de Wet and Louis Botha. De la Rey told me he had been offered ten thousand pounds a year if he would surrender.’
He includes an interview with General Louis Botha in which he describes attempts by Kitchener and Roberts dissuade him from his cause. MacQueen concludes, ‘I saw much in my travels through South Africa to substantiate the opinion that the English leaders there, as Mr Cecil J. Rhodes has perhaps unwisely said, are taking every little coign of vantage they can get to cover their inherent weakness and military ineptitude. The large number of dead men they report as “missing” shows that they are afraid to look the facts in the face. The men are also getting beyond control of the officers.’