te and Cape Colony, the
attacks of the Boers on the Kafirs who lived to the west of them toward
the Colony, could not be permitted to pass unchecked. The British
government, though still unwilling to assume fresh responsibilities, for
in those days it was generally believed that the colonial possessions of
Britain were already too extensive, nevertheless ultimately concluded,
for the reasons given above, to assert its authority over Port Natal and
the country behind as far as the crest of the mountains. A small force
was accordingly sent to Port Natal in 1842. It was there besieged by the
Boer levies, and would have been forced to surrender but for the daring
ten days' ride through the whole breadth of Kaffraria of a young
Englishman, Richard King, who brought the news to Graham's Town, six
hundred miles distant. A force sent by sea relieved the starving
garrison after a siege of twenty-six days. The Boer forces dispersed,
but it was not till a year later that the territory of Natal was
formally declared a British colony. Lord Stanley, then colonial
secretary, was reluctant to take over the responsibilities of a new
dominion with a disaffected white population and a mass of savage
inhabitants, and only yielded to the urgent arguments of Sir George
Napier, then governor of the Cape. In 1843, after long and angry debates
(sometimes interrupted by the women, who passionately denounced the
British government), the Volksraad, or popular assembly of the tiny
republic, submitted to the British crown, having delivered a warm but
ineffectual protest against the principle of equal civil rights for
whites and blacks laid down by the British government. The colony of
Natal was then constituted, first (1845) as a dependency of Cape Colony,
afterward (1856) as a separate colony. A part of the Boers, estimated at
five hundred families, remained in it; but the majority, including all
the fiercer spirits, recrossed the mountains (some forthwith, some five
years later), with their cattle, and joined the mass of their
fellow-emigrants who had remained on the plateaus of the interior.
Meanwhile an immense influx of Kafirs, mostly from Zululand, although
many belonged to other tribes whom the Zulus had conquered, repopulated
the country, and in it the blacks have since been about ten times as
numerous as the whites. Thus ended the Dutch republic of Natalia, after
six years of troubled life. While it was fighting with the Zulus on the
east, a