In 1834 a party of Boers, numbering twenty-seven families, under the command of Rensburg and Trichard, endeavoured to reach the Indian Ocean. Passing down the Olifanta river, they crossed the mountains, after many hardships; where they divided. Rensburg went north, Trichard and his party travelled south-east towards Delagoa Bay. Many of them died on the road; the remainder were sent on to Natal by the Portuguese Governor. Rensburg’s party was never heard of again, showing the restless nature of these discontented Boers. They were all killed, or died of fever.
Although they had secured the fertile plains of the Transvaal, where there was more land than they could hope to occupy, their thirst for more land was still unsated.
After the battle of Boomplaats the rebel Boers crossed the Vaal, treked to Marico in 1850, where some of them are now occupying the land they laid out for themselves; and they still foster hatred against the English, and since this last rebellion it has greatly increased in intensity, and nothing but a strong Government and an influx of British emigrants will allay, or partly extinguish, that feeling, which their present isolated position is conducive to foster, and teach them to understand, as General Warren is now doing, that there must be a limit to their lawless acts.
From 1850 many Free State Boers and others from the Cape Colony, as also many English, Germans, Swedes, and other nationalities, came in and settled down in different parts of the country, making small villages and occupying farms over the whole of the more southern portion of the republic, leaving the northern part, which is thickly populated by the native tribes already described.
On the diamond-fields being discovered, diggers came flocking on to the banks of the Vaal, to open up the mines at Hebron and Klip Drift. In 1869 there was great demand for all kinds of produce, consequently prices went up quickly to 200 per cent., which brought money into the Transvaal, as the greater portion of the food supply was obtained from thence.
Pretorius was president, and made an attempt to annex all the country on the north side of the Vaal, but was opposed by the Cape Government and by the diamond-diggers, which led to the dispute as to the western boundary of the republic. A commission was formed, which ended in the Keats award; the map I made in 1864 was used for the occasion by the Colonial Government.
Soon after, in 1871, President Pretorius resigned, and Erasmus acted until Mr Burgers was elected by the people. The State all this time was getting into such confusion that people would not pay their taxes, and there was no law to make them.
The Secocoene war was going on, “commandeering” was at its height, general discontent prevailed, and matters arrived at such an unsatisfactory state in 1876 that hundreds of Boers sold their farms with the intention of leaving the country, as they could not live under their own Government.
I was constantly passing through the Transvaal with my waggon to distant parts, and every Boer who had not tied from the colony for misdeeds, hoped the British Government would take over the Transvaal under British rule. Hundreds expressed this wish; the rebels from the colony and their sons did not say a word.
Those Boers who sold their farms agreed to trek together, and make for Damaraland on the west coast.