The colonists were perpetually in conflict with the hated Dutch East India Company; they were in open revolt when in 1795 a British force appeared off Table Bay and captured Capetown. There was at first no antagonism between the conquerors and the colonists. When the Cape was re-occupied in 1806, it having been restored to Holland in the peace of 1802, Sir Home Popham was able to trust very largely to the colonists for the defence of the place. He lays emphasis on their dislike for the Dutch Company and on their loyalty to the Union Jack.
A LAAGER, SHOWING THE LONG CAPE WAGGONS USED IN A "TREK."
When Boers are trekking, or travelling from one place to another, they outspan their waggons at night and put them end-on in the form of an oblong. The cattle are tethered in the centre, and the interstices of the wheels filled up with wacht-een-beitje or wait-a-bit thornbush.
[1837-1854
It was not until England began to interfere with the treatment of the natives by the Dutch colonists that Dutch discontent first showed itself. The prohibition of the use of the Dutch language in official documents and in the law courts, the abolition of slavery in 1834—for which most inadequate compensation was made by England—and the meddling in the government of the colony by doctrinaires in England who knew and cared little or nothing for the peculiar circumstances, familiar to the men on the spot, caused general irritation amongst a people always averse to law and order, and by nature inclined to nomadic habits.
"The Great Trek."
The abolition of slavery was the immediate cause which led to "the Great Trek" in 1837, when many hundreds of Dutch colonist-farmers or "Boers," as they now came to be called, went forth with their waggons and women and children and belongings into the vast, unknown, mysterious, remote lands which then bordered upon the colony. They settled down in what is now Natal, the Orange Free State, and the southern Transvaal.
Natal was annexed by England in 1843; the Orange Free State in 1848, after the Boers had been defeated at Boomplaats in the first real engagement fought in South Africa between the English and the Dutch colonists.
