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 purpose of acquiring a knowledge of the natural features of the country and of studying its fauna. Leaving Maritzburg on 16 May 1873, he spent some time in the Matabele country north of the Limpopo river. Three attempts to proceed were frustrated by the weather and the opposition of the natives. Finally, starting on 3 Nov. 1874, he arrived on the banks of the Zambesi on 31 Dec., and succeeded in amassing large collections of objects of natural history. He was one of the first white men who had seen the Victoria Falls in full flood; but no entries are found in his journal after his arrival there. The unhealthy season came on, and Oates contracted a fever. After an illness of twelve days, he died when near the Makalaka kraal, about eighty miles north of the Tati river, on 5 Feb. 1875, and was buried on the following morning. Dr. Bradshaw, who happened to be in the neighbourhood, attended him, and saw to the safety of his collections. Oates's journals were edited and published by his brother, Charles George Oates, in 1881, under the title of ‘Matabele Land and the Victoria Falls: a Naturalist's Wandering in the Interior of South Africa.’ A second and enlarged edition appeared in 1889, with appendices by experts on the natural history collections. 

OATES, TITUS (1649–1705), perjurer, the son of Samuel Oates (1610–1683), rector of Marsham in Norfolk, was born at Oakham in 1649. His father, the descendant of a family of Norwich ribbon-weavers, left the established church, and gained some notoriety as a ‘dipper’ or anabaptist in East Anglia in 1646. In 1649 he appears to have been chaplain to Colonel Pride's regiment, but he was expelled from that post by Monck in 1654 for stirring up sedition in the army. In 1666 he received a living in the church, that of All Saints, Hastings, but he was expelled for improper practices in 1674. He is stated by Wood to have died on 6 Feb. 1683 (Life and Times, iii. 36; cf. Addit. MS. 5860, f. 288). According to Oates's own testimony when appealing for the payment of the arrears of his pension in 1697, his aged mother, whose name is unknown, was living in that year. He also seems to have had a brother named Samuel (Trial of Thomas Knox and John Lane, 1679).

Titus was entered at Merchant Taylors' School in June 1665, but was expelled in the course of his first year, and it was from Sedlescombe school, near Hastings, that he passed, in 1667, as a poor scholar, to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Early in 1669 he had to migrate to St. John's College, where his father, now a zealous Anglican, having baptised him, sought an Arminian tutor for him. His choice fell upon Dr. Thomas Watson [q. v.], who left this note concerning his pupil (now preserved in the Baker MSS. at St. John's): ‘He was a great dunce, ran into debt; and, being sent away for want of money, never took a degree’ (, St. John's College Register; cf., Memorabilia Cantabrigiana, 1803, p. 69). Nevertheless, after some failures, Oates contrived to ‘slip into orders’ in the established church, being instituted to the vicarage of Bobbing in Kent on 7 March 1673, on the presentation of George Moore (Reg. Sheldon. Archiep. Cantuar. f. 534). In 1674 he left Bobbing, with a license for non-residence, and went as a curate to his father at All Saints, Hastings. There, within a few months of his arrival, he was a party to a very disgraceful charge, trumped up by himself and his father, against a certain William Parker, a local schoolmaster. The indictment was quashed, Oates was arrested in an action for 1,000l. damages, and thrown into prison, while his father was ejected from his living (, Life and Times, Oxf. Hist. Soc. ii. 417). Titus was removed to Dover prison, and it was probably in connection with this case that, in 1675, a crown-office writ was issued to the corporation of Dover to remove to the king's bench an indictment of perjury preferred by Francis Norwood against Oates (see Sussex Archæological Trans. xiv. 80). Before the case came on Oates managed to escape from Dover gaol, and he hid in London for a few weeks, at the end of which period he obtained a berth as chaplain on board a king's ship, and appears to have made the voyage to Tangier. Within a few months, however, he was expelled the navy. Criminal though he was, he next found means of obtaining the post of chaplain to the protestants in the Duke of Norfolk's household. At Arundel he came into contact with a number of papists, and it is probable that there he first conceived the plan of worming himself into secret counsels which he might betray for his personal profit to the government. Circumstances favoured such a design. In the winter of 1676, being once more in London and in a destitute condition, Oates encountered Israel Tonge [q. v.], rector of St. Mary Staining, and formerly vicar of Pluckley in Kent. Oates had probably made his acquaintance during his brief residence in the neighbouring parish of Bobbing.