ho, being provided with firearms, might
hope to cope successfully with a foe considerably stronger in point of
numbers than themselves. And there were plenty of such men to be had--
farmers who had fled from their farms to the towns and villages upon the
first news of the outbreak, transport riders whose occupation had ceased
upon the outbreak of hostilities, hunters who were in like case with the
transport riders, and a few who, like myself, had lost everything but
life itself at the hands of the savages; and we speedily banded
ourselves into troops, in some cases numbering not more than twenty or
thirty, in others amounting to a hundred or more, each band under its
own elected leader and subordinate officers. The corps to which I
attached myself--and which dubbed itself the Somerset East Mounted
Rifles--consisted of one hundred and seven men under the command of
Major Henderson, divided into two troops of fifty men each--the right
troop under the command of "Captain" Henry Jackson, and the left troop
under the command of "Captain" Pieter Van Rhyn, with a sergeant in
command of each of the two squadrons which composed a troop.

Each man provided his own horse, weapons, and ammunition; we were not in
uniform, and were volunteers in the strictest sense of the word, for we
drew no pay, and acknowledged allegiance to no man save our own
officers, although it was of course fully understood by everybody that
we were always to be ready to co-operate with and support the regular
troops in the event of our encountering any. This, however, was
exceedingly unlikely, at least in the earlier stages of the campaign,
for so lightly equipped were we that we could perform forty-mile marches
day after day with ease, and were confident that we could not only get
into touch with, but could also reduce the enemy to subjection, long
before the regulars could arrive at the scene of hostilities. And
although we did not substantiate our boast or achieve our ambition in
its entirety, I think I am justified in claiming that the honours of the
campaign fell chiefly to the various bodies of irregulars who so
self-sacrificingly took the field on that occasion; for it was we, and
not the regulars, who followed up and hunted down so relentlessly the
marauding bands of savages who swept the colony like a storm wave,
causing such a loss of life and property as it took the colonists the
best part of a generation to recover from.

It is not my purpo