However, we will pass over the good ould toimes, when a rale fighting-man had no need to insure himself with Lloyd George against unemployment, and comedown to the nineteenth century--in fact the years 1838-1839, when there were but few English in Natal, and the black fiend, Dingaan, who had murdered his brother Tshaka, ruled the roost in Zululand with his army of 50,000 bloodthirsty warriors. I am not writing a book on the history of Natal, but, as 999 out of every 1000 Englishmen have probably never heard of Tshaka or Dingaan, and are just as ignorant of the struggles of the early Settlers in the garden colony of South Africa, I may state that, although Natal was not officially occupied by British troops till 1842, when Captain Smith of the 27th Regiment marched there with a portion of his corps and a detachment of artillery and built a fort near Kongella, in which he was speedily surrounded and besieged by the trek Boers under Pretorius: yet small parties of Englishmen (good Lost Legionaries every one of them) had years previously taken root in the vicinity of where Durban now stands, where they carried on the usual pioneer pursuits, such as hunting and trading with the natives. Yes; they had taken root, and meant to hold their own and stick to their foothold in the country, notwithstanding the jealousy and secret enmity of large parties of trek Boers, who were crowding into Natal for the purpose of forming a Dutch republic there. Well, the year 1838 had been a hot one for the Boer trekkers, as in the early part of it Pieter Retief, a chief, one of their most influential commandants, together with seventy picked Boers and from thirty to forty picked Hottentots, having visited Dingaan's kraal for the purpose of making a treaty, were inveigled, unarmed, into the cattle enclosure, overpowered and brutally murdered.
This act of treachery the savage monster quickly followed up with a lightning raid into Natal, during which over 600 Boers, men, women and children, were butchered with fiendish barbarity. This raid he continued down to Port Natal, where the aforementioned few Englishmen were forced to take refuge on board two ships that, providentially, happened to be in the harbour. Later on in the year the Boer War punitive expedition, under the celebrated commandant Piet Uys, were ambushed and badly worsted, having to fall back, with the loss of their O.C. and many men, so that the year 1838 is still regarded by the Dutch inhabitants of South Africa as a very black year indeed.