We complain of the severe losses which we have been forced to sustain by the emancipation of our slaves, and the vexatious laws which have been enacted respecting them.
We complain of the continual system of plunder which we have for years endured from the Kaffirs and other coloured classes, and particularly by the last invasion of the Colony, which has desolated the frontier district and ruined most of the inhabitants.
We complain of the unjustifiable odium which has been cast upon us by interested and dishonest persons, under the name of religion, whose testimony is believed in England to the exclusion of all evidence in our favour; and we can foresee, as the result of this prejudice, nothing but the total ruin of the country.
We quit this Colony under the full assurance that the English Government has nothing more to require of us, and will allow us to govern ourselves without its interference in future.
We are now leaving the fruitful land of our birth, in which we have suffered enormous losses and continual vexation, and are about to enter a strange and dangerous territory; but we go with a firm reliance on an all-seeing, just, and merciful God, whom we shall always fear and humbly endeavour to obey.
In the name of all who leave this Colony with me.
P. RETIEF.
The English in pursuit.
We journeyed then with our fathers beyond the Orange River into the unknown north, as free men and subjects of no sovereign upon earth. Then began what the English Member of Parliament, Sir William Molesworth, termed a strange sort of pursuit. The trekking Boer followed by the British Colonial Office was indeed the strangest pursuit ever witnessed on earth. [8] The British Parliament even passed a law in 1836 to impose punishments beyond their jurisdiction up to the 25th degree south, and when we trekked further north, Lord Grey threatened to extend this unrighteous law to the Equator. It may be remarked that in this law it was specially enacted that no sovereignty or overlordship was to be considered as established thereby over the territory in question.
The Trichardt Trek.