r population through
parts of the interior, which therefore stood open to European
settlement. Thus it was that the Great Trek, as the Dutch call it,--the
great emigration, or secession, as we should say,--of the Dutch Boers
began in 1836, twenty-five years before another question of colour and
slavery brought about a still greater secession on the other side of the
Atlantic.

If the reader will here refer to the map, and measure from Cape Town a
distance of about four hundred and fifty miles to the east (to the mouth
of the Great Fish River), and about the same distance to the
north-north-east (to where the towns of Middelburg and Colesberg now
stand), he will obtain a pretty fair idea of the limits of European
settlement in 1836. The outer parts of this area toward the north and
east were very thinly peopled, and beyond them there was a vast
wilderness, into which only a few hunters had penetrated, though some
farmers had, during the last decade or two, been accustomed to drive
their flocks and herds into the fringe of it after the rains, in search
of fresh pastures. The regions still farther to the north and east were
almost entirely unexplored. They were full of wild beasts, and occupied
here and there by native tribes, some, like the various branches of the
Zulu race, eminently fierce and warlike. Large tracts, however, were
believed to be empty and desolate, owing to the devastations wrought
during his twenty years of reign by Tshaka, who had been murdered eight
years before. Of the existence of mineral wealth no one dreamed. But it
was believed that there was good grazing land to be found on the upland
that lay north of the great Quathlamba Range (where now the map shows
the Orange Free State and the Transvaal Republic). More to the south lay
the territory we now call Natal. It was described by those very few
persons who had explored it as fertile and well-watered, a country fit
both for tillage and for pasture; but wide plains and high mountains had
to be crossed to reach it by land from the north-west, and close to it
on the north-east was the main body of the Zulu nation, under King
Dingaan, the brother and sucessor of Tshaka.

Into this wilderness did the farmers set forth, and though some less
laudable motives may have been mingled with the love of independence and
the resentment at injustice which mainly prompted their emigration, it
is impossible not to admire their strenuous and valiant spirit. They
wer