Sir Harry George Wakelyn Smith

(Supplementary.)

THE QUESTION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A REPRESENTATIVE ASSEMBLY IN THE CAPE COLONY—THE CONVICT QUESTION—KAFIR WAR—RECALL OF SIR HARRY SMITH—HIS DEPARTURE FROM THE CAPE.

As early as 1841 the inhabitants of Cape Town had petitioned that their present system of government by a Governor and a Legislative Council consisting of officials and persons nominated by the Governor should give place to a constitution resembling that of the mother-country, to consist, that is to say, of a Governor and an Executive Council, both appointed by the Crown, and a Legislative Assembly composed of representatives freely elected by the people. Lord Stanley, in reply, expressed a general concurrence with the prayer of the petitioners, but desired further information. To this request no answer had been received, when on the appointment of Sir Henry Pottinger to the government of the Cape, Lord Grey instructed him (2nd Nov. 1846) that Her Majesty’s Government entertained the strongest prepossessions in favour of a representative system, and desired the Governor’s assistance and advice. “Some difficulties,” he added, “may be wisely encountered, and some apparent risks well incurred, in reliance on the resources which every civilized society, and especially every society of British birth and origin, will always discover within themselves for obviating the dangers incident to measures resting on any broad and solid principle of truth and justice.”

Sir Henry Pottinger, during his year of office, was too much occupied with the Kafir War to carry out the instructions given him in regard to the establishment of representative government, but the instructions he had received were repeated on the appointment of Sir Harry Smith. He lost no time in acting on them, and on the 29th July, 1848, the very day on which he started to put down the rising beyond the Orange, he transmitted to Lord Grey the opinions of a number of colonial authorities on the questions at issue, and stated that they all, and he with them, agreed on the main point that a representative form of government was desirable. Lord Grey then put the matter in the hands of a Committee of the Board of Trade and Plantations, who drew up the main lines of a constitution, which received Her Majesty’s approval. On 31st January, 1850, Lord Grey transmitted this Report to Sir Harry. It laid down that all subordinate arrangements should be made by Ordinance in the Colony, and Sir Harry was instructed to collect information and make all other arrangements for this purpose.

Meanwhile the Colony had been thrown into a state of hysterical agitation by an unfortunate arrangement made by Lord Grey to send thither some convicts from Bermuda in H.M.S. Neptune. These convicts were Irish peasants who had been driven into crime during the time of the famine, and Lord Grey seems to have thought that on this account less objection would be taken to receiving them. But the name “convict” was enough. The colonists of the Cape believed that this was only a beginning and that their country was to be made a convict settlement and flooded with criminals. An Anti-convict Association was formed, and the Governor was petitioned to dismiss the Neptune as soon as she arrived to some other station.

Sir Harry Smith, who from the beginning shared the colonists’ objection to Lord Grey’s proposal, wrote to that minister on 24th May, 1849, begging him to revoke his decision, in accordance with the petitions which he had been forwarding to him since 1st January. On the 29th May he reported a combination of the people headed by the Anti-convict Association “to hold in abhorrence any person who may aid the exiles in landing, and may have any communication with them whatever,” and to stop the supply of stores to Government. Government officials all over the country were resigning, but he was still making preparations to land the exiles and provide for their support on shore.[197] On July 24th he reported that all but one of the unofficial members of the Legislative Council had resigned, and that on the 17th he had promised by proclamation that the convicts should not be landed but detained on shipboard till Her Majesty’s pleasure were known, while declaring he had no legal power to send them to any other destination.[198]

No reply had been received from Lord Grey to the many appeals which had been made to him, when on 19th September the Neptune arrived. A fresh storm of public passion arose, and for the first time since his accession to office the Governor assembled the Executive Council. They approved of all his measures, and agreed that it would not be legal for him to dismiss the vessel. He offered a pledge, however, that he would resign his office rather than assist in carrying out any measure for landing the convicts. This declaration allayed the feelings of more moderate men, but the extremists extended their operations, and included the navy and the whole body of executive and judicial agents of the Government under an interdict so long as the Neptune should remain in Simon’s Bay.

Sir Harry, while curbing the military from any act of retaliation against the insults heaped on them,[199] was not to be daunted from the line he had taken up, and with his usual energy devised arrangements for supplying Government servants with meat and bread. He was thus able to maintain his position until 13th February, 1850, when, in answer to a dispatch of 30th September, he received one from Lord Grey dated 5th December, which authorized him to send the unfortunate convicts to Van Diemen’s Land.

To return to the question of the new constitution. On the receipt of Lord Grey’s dispatch of 31st January, 1850, the Governor found himself at a deadlock owing to the resignation of the five unofficial members of the Legislative Council in the preceding July. The convict agitation had spread such a spirit of dissatisfaction in the Colony that the Governor thought that a Legislative Council filled up by men who were merely his nominees, would not command public confidence. He therefore arranged that the Municipalities and District Road Boards should furnish him with the names of gentlemen whom they would desire to be appointed, and from these he would fill up the vacancies. He did not, however, commit himself to nominating the five highest on the list. As a matter of fact, he chose the four highest, although he believed their election had been largely procured by electoral devices emanating from Cape Town, and with them the gentleman who was eleventh, chosen as having the special confidence of the Eastern Province. No sooner was the Council thus constituted and assembled than the four gentlemen above mentioned resigned their seats (20th September), as a protest against the Governor’s departure from the electoral results and against the fact that the Legislative Council was called on to vote the estimates and transact ordinary business instead of merely preparing the way for a Representative Assembly. These gentlemen were treated in the Colony as popular heroes, and two of them, Sir A. Stockenstrom and Mr. Fairbairn, were deputed to proceed to England to carry on an agitation against the Governor. Their position was, however, an untenable one, and received no support from Her Majesty’s Government.[200]

The Governor in his difficulty had taken a step which was not well received. He had constituted the remaining seven members of the Council a Commission to draft the ordinances of the proposed constitution, and on 19th Feb. 1851 suggested to Lord Grey that, there being no chance of forming a Legislative Council which would have the confidence of the Colony, the draft ordinances should be ratified in England. This suggestion was accepted. However, in obedience to Lord Grey’s further instructions, he set himself in September to fill up the Council, and found four gentlemen willing to accept the vacant seats. On 10th October the Council met again. On 16th December the draft ordinances which had received Her Majesty’s approval in England were read for the first time, and the second reading was fixed for February, 1852. In spite of the great eagerness of the Colony to receive representative government, it was then proposed that the further consideration of the question should be deferred till the Kafir War was over, and this view had the support of all the four unofficial members and of two out of the five official members of the Legislative Council. When, however, it was represented to the Governor, he promptly replied from his camp at King William’s Town, in words full of political courage and sagacious confidence—

Thanks, then, to Sir Harry’s firmness the business proceeded, although it was not till the time of his successor that the long-desired boon of Representative Government was actually received by the colonists.

Till the end of 1850, in spite of the Anti-convict agitation and the political unrest caused by the desire for a Representative Assembly, Sir Harry’s administration had been apparently a highly successful one. He had felt himself able to send home the 1st Battalion Rifle Brigade in May, 1850, and so meet the demands for economy pressed on him by the Home Government. The Orange River Sovereignty had been at peace, and in British Kaffraria, under the rule of an able officer, Colonel Mackinnon, the Kafirs seemed, as in 1836, to be making rapid progress towards becoming orderly and civilized British subjects. But this happy prospect was now suddenly over-clouded.

However contented the Kafirs at large might be with the new system, the chiefs suffered a loss of wealth by being no longer able to “eat up” whomsoever they liked, and with the loss of wealth a loss of dignity. They felt that their followers were encouraged to appeal for justice to the British Commissioner and that the feudal power of the chief was being quietly undermined. Accordingly the Gaika chiefs of British Kaffraria, Sandilli and his half-brother Macomo, became intriguing agitators, and found in the terrible drought and distress of 1850 an opportunity ready to hand for disturbing the peace.

In September of that year, Colonel Mackinnon, instead of his usual satisfactory reports, wrote that the white colonists were alarmed, as a new prophet, Umlanjeni, thought to be a creature of Sandilli’s, was preaching war against the white, while the Kafirs had been on their side alarmed by a report that the Governor wished to seize all the chiefs. In consequence of this information, Sir Harry on the 15th October left Cape Town for the frontier.

Having arrived at King William’s Town on the 20th, he called a meeting of Kafir chiefs for the 26th. At this meeting great demonstrations of loyalty were made, and the Governor was greeted with a shout of “Inkosi Inkulu!” (“Great Chief!”); but Sandilli was absent. On the 29th Sir Harry threatened him that unless he came and renewed his allegiance, he would “throw him away” and confiscate his property—and when this threat produced no effect, formally deposed him and appointed Mr. Brownlee, the Civil Commissioner, chief of the Gaikas in his place.[201] The act showed perhaps an over-sanguine estimate of the readiness of the Kafir mind to recognize British authority as paramount to that of their feudal chiefs; but at the moment it was approved by Colonel Mackinnon and other men specially acquainted with the Kafir disposition, as it was later by the Home Government.

At another meeting held on 5th November, the chiefs of the Gaikas and other tribes acknowledged one and all that Sandilli by his contumacy had deserved his fate, and the Governor wrote to Lord Grey, “The crisis has passed, and, I believe, most happily.” He at once started on his return journey, and after receiving various congratulatory addresses on his way, reached Cape Town on the 24th November.

But news of fresh turbulent acts followed him, and (to quote the words of Mr. Chase[202]) “Sir Harry Smith was to be pitied by all who loved him—and who that knew him did not?—when he had to write in bitter disappointment to the Secretary of State on the 5th December, ‘The quiet I had reported in Kafirland, which I had so much and so just ground to anticipate, is not realized, and I start this evening.’” He left with the 73rd Regiment on the Hermes for the frontier, destined not to quit it again for sixteen months, and then as a man superseded in his office.

Having landed at the Buffalo mouth on 9th December, he reached King William’s Town the same night, and next day by proclamation called on all loyal citizens to enrol themselves as volunteers. The Kafirs were arming, and the farmers with their flocks and herds had fled in panic from the frontier. After a meeting with the chiefs (14th), which was again considered satisfactory, Sir Harry moved his troops to positions round the Amatola Mountains to prevent any combined movement between Kreili and the Gaikas. He proceeded himself to Fort Cox. Here on the 19th he held another meeting, at which, except Anta and Sandilli (who had now been outlawed), all the chiefs were present with their councillors and 3000 of their people. When Sir Harry vigorously denounced Sandilli’s conduct they apparently acquiesced, but asked the Governor why he had brought the troops?

From Fort Cox Sir Harry sent Colonel Mackinnon on 24th December with a patrol up the gorge of the Keiskamma in the direction in which Sandilli was supposed to be hiding, it being thought that when the troops approached he would either surrender or flee the country. Mackinnon was, however, attacked in a defile, and twelve of his men were killed. And so broke out a new Kafir War, a “fitting legacy,” says Chase, “of the retrocessive policy of 1836,” and, we may add, unfortunately not the last disastrous war to which those words could be applied.

Next day (Christmas Day) three of the four military villages which had been established in British Kaffraria not quite three years before, Woburn, Auckland, and Juanasburg, were treacherously attacked by Kafirs, many of whom had just shared the Christmas dinner of their victims, and the settlers murdered. The Gaikas sprang to arms; every chief but Pato joined in the rising; and of a body of 400 Kafir police 365 rushed to their tribes with their arms and ammunition.

Meanwhile the Commander-in-Chief was shut up in Fort Cox in the Amatola basin, with hordes of wild Kafirs filling the bush and heights on every side, and the prospect before him of speedy starvation if he remained, or death from a bullet or an assagai if he issued forth. Colonel Somerset from Fort Hare made two unsuccessful attempts at relief. In the second, on 29th December, after fighting for four hours, he was forced to retire. After this he wrote to Sir Harry, begging him not to move with infantry, or they would be cut to pieces, but to sally out with 250 men of the Cape Mounted Rifles.

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 vi 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.

A Cape newspaper, politically opposed to him, wrote of Sir Harry’s conduct in these few days—

And it quotes from the Frontier Times—

Fresh signs of disaffection in the Cape Corps made it necessary to disarm still more men, and the Kafirs were so much emboldened that but for the loyalty of the one chief Pato, who held the country between King William’s Town and the sea, the Governor’s position would have been barely defensible. He continued to send out patrols, which were invariably successful. Mackinnon scoured the Poorts of the Buffalo in the middle of April and at the end of the month penetrated the Amatolas; and Captain Tylden, in command of the position of Whittlesea, which was twelve times assaulted, saved the Colony for the time from the enemy. But larger operations were out of the question. “Had the Kat River Rebellion and the defection of the Cape Corps not presented themselves, Sandilli’s reign would have been a transient one. I have been obliged to steer a most cautious course, one contrary to my natural desire in predatory warfare, but imperatively imposed on me by the dictates of prudence and discretion, my force being composed generally of a race excitable in the extreme.” So Sir Harry wrote on the 5th April. Ten days later he again complains of the little assistance given him by the farmers. “A few spirited farmers have performed good service, but where are the men who so gallantly fought with me in 1835—Van Wyks, Greylings, Nels, Rademeyers, Ryneveldts, etc.? Once more, my advice to the frontier inhabitants is to rush to the front.”

Early in May Sir Harry received reinforcements from home, consisting of drafts for the regiments already under his command (11 officers and 296 men) and the 74th Regiment. This he sent to Fort Hare to Major-General Somerset, ordering him at the same time to be prepared to concentrate for a move into the great Kafir stronghold, the Amatolas. Two more regiments were still to come, and Sir Harry believed that the force he would then have would be ample. In acknowledging the reinforcements, he wrote on 6th May, “I had most zealously clung to the desire of civilizing these savages. As regards the Gaikas generally, my attempt has been an awful failure, while I congratulate myself on having maintained at peace the T’Slambie tribes, comprising the half nearly of the population of British Kaffraria. I am deeply indebted to the chief Pato.”

On the 10th May he was gratified by receiving the following letter from the Duke of Wellington:—

It must have been satisfactory to Sir Harry to feel that in establishing his two lines of defence he had anticipated the advice of his great master.

While Somerset made a successful patrol against the combined Kafirs and Hottentots of the sources of the Kat River, and Mackinnon another in the Amatolas, there were still no signs of the submission of the enemy. Meanwhile news came of trouble with Moshesh in the Orange River Sovereignty, and the prospect of a new war there, and this was followed by a revolt of the Hottentots of the missionary station of Theopolis, 25 miles from Grahamstown. The period of six months for which the Hottentot levies in the army had been enlisted was now expiring, and there was no disposition among them to enlist again, and in this way the force would be reduced to 1800 men. Nothing could be done till further reinforcements arrived from England. “The almost general rebellion among the eastern Hottentots,” wrote Sir Harry on the 17th June, “paralyzes my movements in British Kaffraria and compels me to hold a force ready for the protection of Grahamstown.” Owing to the cutting off of the mails, his letters to his wife at Cape Town were now written almost entirely in Spanish.

The following letter to his sister Mrs. Sargant shows the feeling excited in him by Sir William Molesworth’s attack on him in the House of Commons on April 10th, in which he was accused of burdening the empire by the annexation of 105,000 square miles of new territory and provoking his local troubles by high-handed and despotic government.

One of Sir Harry’s nephews, writing home on the 21st, says—

On the last four days of June a combined movement to clear the Amatolas which had long been preparing was at last accomplished, the 1st Division under the command of Somerset co-operating with the 2nd under Michel (Colonel Mackinnon being ill), assisted by Tylden with 300 men from Whittlesea. The operations were conducted by four columns converging to a centre. They were completely successful, but Sir Harry saw no signs that they had hastened the end of the war, and warned the inhabitants of the colony that the beaten Kafirs were likely to go about in small marauding parties as “wolves”—an anticipation too sadly realized by the rush which was now made into the Colony, and the terrible depredations which accompanied it.

The trial of the Kat River rebels resulted in 47 of them being sentenced to death—a sentence which Sir Harry commuted to penal servitude for life; so bringing on himself in some quarters the charge of excessive leniency. Chase, who considers the commutation a “grave mistake,” excuses it on the ground that Sir Harry “pitied the poor creatures, knowing that they had been deluded into the belief that they are taught by the precept of the Bible to fight for independence with the sword of Gideon.”[210] It is better to accept the explanation given by Sir Harry himself in his dispatch of the 7th April, 1852.

During July and August bands of the enemy filled the country between Fort Beaufort and the Fish River, penetrating later into Lower Albany itself, and burning and marauding wherever they appeared. It was natural that the colonists should appeal to the Commander-in-Chief to assist them. Feeling, however, that if he fell back from King William’s Town, his retreat would be the signal for tribes on the east, hitherto passive, to join the Gaikas, he expressed his wish to continue operations in the Amatolas, and ordered Somerset to establish posts of burghers, if they would turn out, at every eligible point. Somerset replied that the burghers could not now withstand the attacks, and he had established a camp at Haddon on the Koonap; and a month later Sir Harry sent Colonel Eyre with the 73rd Regiment from King William’s Town to Bathurst to protect Grahamstown and Lower Albany.

And so the war went on, the Commander ever sending out fresh patrols to harass the foe in his fastnesses,—on the 8th August he says that the 73rd regiment has now marched 2838 miles since the outbreak of hostilities,—maintaining every single post, yet still, for want of an adequate force, unable to effect any decisive action. Meanwhile there were fresh defections among the Hottentots in the Cape Corps, and news came from Warden in the Orange River Sovereignty that many of the Boers there would not assist him against Moshesh, and their fellow-countrymen over the Vaal were disposed to back them in their hostility to the British Government. He was bidden to act only on the defensive till troops could be sent to him.

In August the 2nd (Queen’s) Regiment arrived from England, and soon after part of the 12th Regt. from the Mauritius. But there were a mass of hostile Kafirs and Hottentots in the Colony estimated at more than 6000, one body being in the Fish River Bush 30 miles to the north-east of Grahamstown, the other under Macomo in the Waterkloof 50 miles to the north-west, and in a patrol made by Colonel Mackinnon in the Fish River Bush on the 8th September, Captain Oldham and 25 men were killed and 41 wounded, and the bush was re-occupied by the Kafirs immediately. Meanwhile Somerset had failed in expelling Macomo, and Kreili and Fakoo seemed on the brink of openly throwing in their lot with Sandilli.

Under these circumstances, although now reinforced by the 60th Rifles and the 12th Lancers, Sir Harry asks on the 15th October for 400 English recruits for the Cape Corps and two additional regiments of infantry. Meanwhile there were fresh operations of the most arduous kind in the Waterkloof, and Somerset at the end of October succeeded in dislodging Macomo from his fastness. In consequence of that success, Sir Harry was able to write on the 1st November that he was now able to undertake tasks of a more extensive character, and proposed, after sweeping the Amatolas and driving the enemy from the Fish River Bush, if he concentrated there, to march across the Kei with three columns to invade Kreili, whose country was the great refuge of the beaten Gaikas, after which it might be necessary to send a force over the Orange River against Moshesh.

On November 12th, having received a despatch from Lord Grey suggesting that, failing the support of the Boers in the Orange River Sovereignty, the territory should be relinquished, Sir Harry forwarded it to his Assistant-Commissioners, Major Hogg and Mr. Owen, with a strong expression of his own views of such a proposal.

In this Sir Harry saw more clearly than most of his contemporaries. When, contrary to the strong opinion of the Colony,[212] the Sovereignty was abandoned in 1854, and a Republic hostile to England was allowed to take its place, only one man, the present Lord Norton, opposed the change in the House of Commons, and he on very narrow grounds, and Sir Harry Smith’s successor in the Governorship of the Cape wrote in blind satisfaction, “The foolish Sovereignty farce is at length over, and we have done with it.”[213]

In November, in the course of Somerset’s continued operations to clear the Waterkloof, Lieut.-Col. Fordyce of the 74th and four other officers fell by an ambuscade, an incident the more unfortunate as the English public, unable to realize the enormous difficulties of the situation, was already much excited by the slow progress made in the war. Those difficulties were enumerated by Sir Harry Smith on 18th Dec. in reply to a querulous dispatch of Lord Grey. He reminded him that he had had to carry on a desultory war over an extent of country twice the size of Great Britain and Ireland, overrun by a most enterprising horde of savages, and to maintain twelve forts. Had one retrograde step been made, the whole population of British Kaffraria would have been in a blaze. What soldiers could do, his had done.

“So long as the insurgents held together and acted in large bodies, they were defeated on forty-five different occasions between the 24th Dec. and 21st Oct.... I have maintained throughout my positions and forts—no convoy has been cut off, and no rencontre, however sanguinary, has been unattended with success.” Now that the reinforcements have arrived, they “will rescue the Colony from its misery ... and relieve the Governor of the Cape from difficulties, obstacles, opposition, and rebellion, such as it has been the fortune of few men to encounter.”