e, suddenly bade his men fall upon and "kill the wizards."
The excellent Retief perished with his whole party, and a body of
emigrants not far distant was similarly surprised and massacred by a
Zulu army of overwhelming strength. These cruelties roused the rest of
the emigrants to reprisals, and in a fierce battle, fought on December
16, 1838, the anniversary of which is still celebrated by the people of
the Transvaal, a handful of Boers overthrew Dingaan's host. Like the
soldiers of Cortes in Mexico, they owed this, as other victories, not
merely to their steady valour, but to their horses. Riding up to the
line of savage warriors, they delivered a volley, and rode back before
an assagai could reach them, repeating this manoeuvre over and over
again till the hostile ranks broke and fled. Ultimately their forces,
united with those of a brother of Dingaan, who had rebelled against him
and had detached a large part of the Zulu warriors, drove Dingaan out of
Zululand in 1840. Panda, the rebel brother, was installed king in his
stead, as a sort of vassal to the Boer government, which was now
entitled the republic of Natalia, and the Boers founded a city,
Pietermaritzburg, and began to portion out the land. They deemed the
British authorities to have abandoned any claim to the country by the
withdrawal of a detachment of troops which had been landed at Port Natal
in 1838. But their action, and in particular their ejection from the
country of a mass of Kafirs whom they proposed to place in a district
already occupied by another tribe, had meanwhile excited the
displeasure of the government of Cape Colony. That government, though it
had not followed them into the deserts of the interior, had never
renounced, and indeed had now and then reasserted its right to consider
them British subjects. They, however, repudiated all idea of subjection,
holding British sovereignty to be purely territorial, so that when they
had passed out of the region which the British crown claimed they had
become a free and independent people, standing alone in the world. Their
attempt to establish a new white state on the coast was a matter of
serious concern, because it might affect trade with the interior, and
plant in a region which Britain deemed her own the germ of what might
become a new maritime power. And as the colonial government considered
itself the general protector of the natives, and interested in
maintaining the Kafirs between the Boer sta