Panda's men as native auxiliaries eager to avenge themselves on the common enemy Dingaan were all very well in their way. Most of them, however, belonged to Natal and joined him in the hope of recovering the tribal lands from which they had been evicted by Chaka and to which they had a better right than the trekkers.
The Boers now began to reap the harvest of the Panda alliance. They regarded the new arrivals as intruders, refused to acknowledge their claims, and finally in August, 1841, decreed their expulsion from Natal. The location chosen for their settlement was a district in Pondoland in the possession of a chief under British protection, who already had had occasion to lodge at Capetown a complaint against the Boers.
The British Government now found it necessary to intervene again in Natal. A military occupation was announced by proclamation in December, 1841, and 240 men, under the command of an infantry captain named Smith, were sent up to Durban to give effect to it.
When Smith, after a difficult march along the coast, reached his destination on May 4, 1842, he pitched his camp on the flat which forms the base of one of the promontories enclosing the Bay. He at once lowered the Republican flag flying over the block-house at the Point, and soon found that 1,500 Boers were occupying Congella on the shore of the Bay. An attempt to surprise them by night failed disastrously; Smith's force was reduced to half its strength, and the block-house was captured by Pretorius.
Smith was now besieged in his camp, and the nearest help that could come to him was at Grahamstown, five hundred miles away. Thither a gallant civilian named King, who was one of the pioneers, rode in ten days; and on June 25, when the little garrison was in extremity, it was relieved by sea. Pretorius withdrew into the interior, and the Volksraad at Pietermaritzburg, the capital of the Republic of Natalia, voted the submission of the Boers. Pending a final settlement it was allowed to remain in authority over the settlers, but the district around Durban Bay was at once taken over as British territory. In May, 1843, a year after the landing of Smith, the Republic of Natalia passed away and Natal was proclaimed a British Colony.
The final settlement did not come for some time. The Volksraad was abolished, but the claims of the Boers to the lands upon which they had squatted were liberally considered. They were, however, dissatisfied because the rights of Panda's men were also regarded, and many trekked away across the Drakensberg. Those who remained protested that their lives and property were insecure in the presence of the natives, and Pretorius was deputed to go and lay their grievances before the British Governor at the Cape.
The ill success of his mission provoked him to reprisals, and he proceeded to stir up trouble in the Orange River Sovereignty, which had recently been formally proclaimed British Territory. If not actively loyal it was peaceably disposed until the arrival of Pretorius, who soon drove out the British Resident and the little garrison of Bloemfontein and set them on the run as far as Colesberg in the Cape Colony. He was defeated at Boomplatz in August, 1848, by Sir Harry Smith, a veteran of the Peninsular War, and British authority was for a time reestablished over the Sovereignty. The Colonial Office soon however tired of the new possession and gladly scuttled out in 1854 in order to avoid the task of reaping the harvest of a clumsy and grotesque policy, which it had formulated a few years before, of hemming in the voortrekkers, who had settled north of the Orange River, with a barrier of native states set up for the purpose on the east and west; and which now threatened to involve it in a quarrel which naturally arose between Moshesh, the Basuto chief, and the emigrants whom he had been appointed to restrain.
Pretorius retired across the Vaal where he joined Potgieter, who, after the failure of his attack on Dingaan in 1838, had gone into Moselekatse's country and had driven him beyond the Limpopo. A Republic was set up beyond the Vaal which the British Government recognized as independent in the Zand River Convention of 1852.
Such is in brief the story of the Boers' claim to Natal. They considered it to be their lawful heritage out of which they had been jockeyed, and in October, 1899, they seemed to have a chance of recovering it. They boasted that they would not only win back Pietermaritzburg, which was named after two leaders of the Great Trek, Pieter Retief and Gert Maritz, but that they would establish themselves on the shores of the Indian Ocean. It was not the vainglorious gasconade of a swashbuckler. Four months after October 11, 1899, when the Boer ultimatum expired, the British Army was still engaged in endeavouring to drive out the Boers from British territory, and hardly a rifle had been discharged in the enemy's country.
Napoleon was in the habit of impressing upon his officers the necessity of studying past campaigns, both modern and ancient; but those who anticipated confidently that the Boer War would soon be brought to a successful close by the British Army were led into their error by the history of past campaigns. There was, however, one campaign, the War of Independence in North America, which the discerning might have recognized as an analogous struggle; but it was overlooked, and the history of the great European conflicts was established as the leading authority. The occupation of the populous places and the control of the means of access to them, which seemed to present few difficulties, meant the end of the war and the subsequent negotiations as to the amount of the indemnity or other penalty to be paid by the defeated.