FROM ALGOA BAY TO THE GREAT KEI RIVER
[Opposite p. 620.
On the day of his arrival in King William’s Town, 31st December, Sir Harry issued a Government notice of the most vigorous kind. “He hopes colonists will rise en masse to destroy and exterminate these most barbarous and treacherous savages, who for the moment are formidable. Every post in British Kaffraria is necessarily maintained.”[204]
Meanwhile, on the news reaching Cape Town that the Governor was shut up in Fort Cox, the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Montagu, himself a Waterloo man, showed the greatest energy in raising troops and despatching them to the frontier. He sent in all 3000 men, chiefly Hottentots. On the arrival of the first levies (1600 men), Sir Harry wrote to him, “Your exertions are incredible, and they will enable me to take the field.”
Accordingly, at the end of January he ordered Mackinnon to throw supplies into Forts White and Cox. This was accomplished, but he could do little at the moment beyond maintaining the military posts, and meanwhile difficulties were accumulating upon him. The Dutch farmers did not come forward as they had done in 1835, to assist in repelling an invasion from the colony; Kreili, the Great Chief beyond the Kei, was wavering; and, worse than all, by the beginning of February Sir Harry learnt that the Hottentots of the Kat River Settlement, people nominally Christians, though of late suspected of disaffection, had one and all revolted and joined the Kafirs, their hereditary enemies.
On the 3rd February, in once more appealing to the inhabitants of the colony to rally in their own defence, he said, “I regard this almost general disaffection of the coloured classes within the Colony as of far greater moment than the outbreak of the Kafirs.”
At this time the British troops at Sir Harry’s disposal amounted only to 1700,[205] of whom 900 were employed in holding a dozen posts. Accordingly he had only 800 “available to control 4000 Hottentot auxiliaries of doubtful loyalty, and to meet the hordes of well-armed athletic and intrepid barbarians in the field.”[206] Both Colonel (now Major-General) Somerset and Colonel Mackinnon had obtained successes; the rebel chief Hermanus had been killed in attacking Fort Beaufort on 7th January; yet the enemy was still powerful and in the occupation of a mountainous country next to impenetrable.
Sir Harry was compelled to act on two bases, the one from King William’s Town to the mouth of the Buffalo, so communicating by the port of East London with the Western Province and with the sea; the other from Fort Hare viâ Fort Beaufort and Grahamstown to Port Elizabeth, Fort Hare being connected with King William’s Town by the garrisons of Fort White and Fort Cox. The troops operating on the first line in British Kaffraria were under the command of Colonel Mackinnon, and had their headquarters at King William’s Town under the eye of the Commander-in-Chief. In April, after the arrival of the new levies, they amounted to 4700 men, of whom 1000 were occupying a line of seven posts. The troops on the second line were under the command of Major-General Somerset, whose headquarters were at Fort Hare. They amounted to 2900, of whom 900 were garrisoning six posts. The general plan of the campaign was to confine the war to neutral territory, to detain the Kafirs in Kaffraria, and eventually to drive them out of their fastnesses in the Amatola Mountains. The Kafir revolt would in this way, Sir Harry writes, have been crushed at once, but for the hopes raised by the defection of the Hottentots. That defection had indeed gone far. Although Somerset on the 23rd February had crushed the Kat River rebellion by the capture of the rebels’ stronghold, Fort Armstrong, only a fortnight later 335 men of the Cape Mounted Rifles, including the very men who had so gallantly escorted the Governor from Fort Cox, deserted from King William’s Town in a body. This was another crushing blow. “My horror cannot be described,” Sir Harry wrote on the 17th March. “I assure your Lordship that no event of my military career ever caused me so much pain as the defection of so large a portion of a corps to which I am as much attached as I am to that wearing the green jacket of my own regiment.” This detachment of the Rifles had been drawn principally from the Hottentots of the Kat River Settlement and had been much excited by rumours of the punishment which was to be meted out to the Kat River rebels.
Having felt it necessary to disarm nearly all the Riflemen who had not deserted, Sir Harry now found himself practically without any mounted force at all, and wrote to ask for 400 young Englishmen to be sent out as recruits, with the promise of receiving ten acres of land after ten years’ service. This request, however, was not granted. In order to anticipate any attempt at rescuing the Kat River prisoners at Fort Hare, Sir Harry moved out himself on March 19th, and by a masterly movement defeated the enemy at the Keiskamma, spent the 20th at Fort Hare, obtained another success on the Tab’ Indoda Range on the 21st, and returning by Fort White with 1000 captured cattle, reached King William’s Town on the 25th.