Full seven thousand, in pomp and parade,
The chivalry, flower of Mexico,
And a gaunt two hundred in the Alamo.”
One month before the final disappearance of the Comet, the Texas War came to an end with the bloody battle of San Jacinto, when Sam Houston, with 800 American frontiersmen, defeated 1,500 Mexicans, and made a prisoner of President Santa Ana of Mexico.
When the Comet had passed to the Southern Hemisphere, it was seen at its brightest in South Africa.
The pious Boers of Cape Colony understood it to be a sign from heaven and forthwith set out on their great trek across the Orange and Vaal rivers, where they founded the Orange Free State and Transvaal Republic.
Thus the Comet was the signal for the first blood drawn in the long fight between the British and Boers.
A little later, though, the Boers found another, more woeful significance for the blazing of the Comet.
Under the leadership of Piet Relief, a thousand Boer families had trekked across the Drakensberg Mountains into Natal. A solemn treaty of peace with the Zulu warriors was entered into with Dingaan, the chief of the Zulus at Dingaan’s Kraal. Suddenly the Zulus pounced upon the unsuspecting Piet Relief and his sixty-five Boer followers and massacred them to a man.
Then the Zulus, numbering some 10,000 warriors, swept out into the veldt and made for the Boer wagon trains. Near Colenso, at a spot called Weenen (weeping), in remembrance of the dreadful tragedy there perpetrated, the Zulus overwhelmed the Boer laager and slaughtered all its inmates—41 men, 56 women, 185 children and 250 Kaffir slaves.