from the murder of a Hottentot, to
whom an old Kaffir thief was manacled, while being conveyed to Graham's
Town for trial for stealing an axe. The escort was attacked by a party
of Kaffirs and the Hottentot killed. The surrender of the murderer was
refused, and war was declared in March 1846. The Gaikas were the chief
tribe engaged in the war, assisted during the course of it by the
Tambukies. After some reverses the Kaffirs were signally defeated on the
7th of June by General Somerset on the Gwangu, a few miles from Fort
Peddie. Still the war went on, till at length Sandili, the chief of the
Gaikas, surrendered, followed gradually by the other chiefs; and by the
beginning of 1848 the Kaffirs were again subdued, after twenty-one
months' fighting.

_Extension of British Sovereignty_.--In the last month of the war
(December 1847) Sir Harry Smith reached Cape Town as governor of the
colony, and with his arrival the Glenelg policy was reversed. By
proclamation, on the 17th of December, he extended the frontier of the
colony northward to the Orange river and eastward to the Keiskamma
river, and on the 23rd, at a meeting of the Kaffir chiefs, announced the
annexation of the country between the Keiskamma and the Kei rivers to
the British crown, thus reabsorbing the territory abandoned by order of
Lord Glenelg. It was not, however, incorporated with the Cape, but made
a crown dependency under the name of British Kaffraria. For a time the
Kaffirs accepted quietly the new order of things. The governor had other
serious matters to contend with, including the assertion of British
authority over the Boers beyond the Orange river, and the establishment
of amicable relations with the Transvaal Boers. In the colony itself a
crisis arose out of the proposal to make it a convict station.

_The Convict Agitation and Granting of a Constitution_.--In 1848 a
circular was sent by the 3rd Earl Grey, then colonial secretary, to the
governor of the Cape (and to other colonial governors), asking him to
ascertain the feelings of the colonists regarding the reception of a
certain class of convicts, the intention being to send to South Africa
Irish peasants who had been driven into crime by the famine of 1845.
Owing to some misunderstanding, a vessel, the "Neptune," was despatched
to the Cape before the opinion of the colonists had been received,
having on board 289 convicts, among whom were John Mitchell, the Irish
rebel, and his colleagues. When