rights to the Hottentots resulted to a large extent in
vagabondism, with its concomitant robbery. The Kafirs, emboldened by
the weak, and exasperated by the incomprehensible, policy of the
Colonial Government at that time, not only crossed the border to aid the
Hottentot thieves in their work, and carry off sheep and cattle by the
hundred, but secretly prepared for war. Behind the scenes were the
paramount chief Hintza, the chief Macomo, and others. The first,
forgetting the deliverance wrought for him by the settlers and British
troops in 1828, secretly stirred up the Kafirs, whilst the second,
brooding over supposed wrongs, fanned the flame of discontent raised
among the Hottentots by the proposal of a Vagrancy Act.

When all is ready for war it takes but a spark to kindle the torch. The
Kafirs were ready; the British, however, were not. The settlers had
been peacefully following their vocations, many of the troops, which
ought to have been there to guard them, had been unwisely withdrawn, and
only a few hundred men remained in scattered groups along the frontier.
The armed Hottentots of the Kat River--sent there as a defence--became a
point of weakness, and required the presence of a small force to overawe
them and prevent their joining the Kafirs. At last the electric spark
went forth. A farmer (Nell) was robbed of seven horses, which were
traced to the kraal of a chief on the neutral territory. Restoration
was refused. A military patrol was sent to enforce restitution.
Opposition was offered, and the officer in command wounded with an
assagai. Hintza began to retreat and plunder British traders who were
residing in his territory under his pledged protection, and at length a
trader named Purcell was murdered near the chief's kraal and his store
robbed. Then Macomo began hostilities by robbing and murdering some
farmers on the lower part of the Kat River, and two days afterwards the
Kafir hordes, variously estimated at from eight to fifteen thousand men,
burst across the whole frontier, wrapped the eastern colony in the smoke
and flames of burning homesteads, scattered the unprepared settlers,
demolished the works of fourteen years' labour, penetrated to within
twenty miles of Algoa Bay, and drove thousands of sheep and cattle back
in triumph to Kafirland.

CHAPTER TWENTY THREE.

WAR.

It was at this juncture--the Christmas-tide of 1834, and the summer-time
in South Africa--that a merry party was