The Hottentots were exterminated, or reduced to thraldom, and the European colonists then came in contact with the Caffres, who were numerous and warlike, resisted aggression with greater effect, but still found themselves unable with their light assagais to contend with fire-arms, and were perpetually driven backwards with shocking carnage, and with circumstances of violent oppression which it is impossible to read of without the strongest indignation. Up to 1778 the Camtoos River had been considered the limit of the colony on that side; but at that period the Dutch governor, Van Plattenburgh, says Pringle, “in the course of an extensive tour into the interior, finding great numbers of colonists occupying tracts beyond the frontier, instead of recalling them within the legal limits, he extended the boundary (according to the ordinary practice of Cape governors before and since), adding, by a stroke of his pen, about 30,000 square miles to the colonial territory.” The Great Fish River now became the boundary; which Lord Macartney in 1798, claiming all that Van Plattenburgh had so summarily claimed, confirmed.
It is singular how uniform are the policy and the modes of seizing upon native possessions by Europeans. In America we have seen how continually, when the bulk of the people, or the legitimate chiefs, would not cede territory, the whites made a mock purchase from somebody who had no right whatever to sell, and on that title proceeded to drive out the real owners. In this case, Plattenburgh, to give a colour of justice to his claim, sent out Colonel Gordon in search of Caffres as far as the Keiskamma, who conducted a _few_ to the governor, who consented that the Great Fish River _should_ be the boundary. The real chief, Jalumba, it appears, however, had not been consulted; but the colonists the next year _reminded_ him of the recent treaty with his tribe, and requested him to evacuate that territory. Jalumba refused—a commando was assembled—the _intruders_, in colonial phrase, but the real and actual owners, were expelled: Jalumba’s own son Dlodlo was killed, and 5,200 head of cattle driven off. This was certainly a wholesale beginning of plunder and bloodshed; but, says the same author, “this was not the worst—Jalumba and his clan were destroyed by a most infamous act of treachery and murder; the details of which may be found in Thompson and Kay.”