hat is now the territory of the Transvaal Republic. Some were cut
off by the natives; some, reduced to a mere handful by fever and by the
loss of their cattle,--for they had ventured into the unhealthy lower
country to the south-east of the mountains, where the tsetse-fly
abounds,--made their way to the coast at Delagoa Bay. Another party,
formed by the union of a number of smaller bodies at Thaba 'Ntshu, a
rocky peak in the Orange Free State, visible on the eastern horizon from
the present town of Bloemfontein, advanced thence to the north, and
presently came in contact with a redoubtable branch of the Zulu race,
famous in later history under the name of Matabili. This tribe was then
ruled by the chief Umzilikazi, or Mosilikatze, a warrior of great energy
and talent. He had been one of Tshaka's favourite generals, but, having
incurred that king's displeasure, had fled, about A.D. 1817, with his
regiment to the north-west, and established his headquarters near a
place called Mosega (between Pretoria and Mafeking), in what is now the
Transvaal Republic. Thence he raided and massacred the Bechuanas and
other tribes of this region, though himself unable to withstand the main
Zulu nation, which, under Dingaan, was living farther to the south. The
Matabili provoked war by falling upon and destroying a detachment of the
emigrants. Intruders the latter doubtless were, but, as the Matabili
themselves had slaughtered without mercy the weaker Kafir tribes, the
Boers might think they need not feel any compunction in dealing out the
like measure to their antagonists. And, in point of fact, the emigrants
seem all through to have treated the natives much as Israel treated the
natives of Canaan, and to have conceived themselves to have Old
Testament authority for occupying the territories of the heathen, and
reducing them by the sternest methods to serfdom or submission. Here
they had an unprovoked massacre to avenge, and they showed equal
promptitude and courage. Pouncing upon Mosilikatze, they defeated his
vastly superior force with so great a slaughter that he fled
north-westward far away beyond the Limpopo River, and fell like a
thunderbolt upon the tribes who dwelt between that stream and the
Zambesi, killing many and making slaves of the rest. Here, with the
king's kraal of Buluwayo for its capital, was established the kingdom of
the Matabili, which remained as a terror to its neighbours till, in its
turn, destroyed by Dr. Jameson