Quatermain at eighteen, in love with a Boer girl whose father will not have an Englishman, caught in the siege of a mission station and then in the Great Trek - and at Retief's massacre by Dingaan, which he watched from a hill. Haggard went to South Africa at nineteen and helped raise the Union Jack over the Transvaal; here he wrote the Trek from Boer and Zulu testimony collected while the survivors were alive, and Marie is the first of the Quatermain books chronologically.