after having been put in irons, and fastened to a wheel with a riem (leathern thong) about his neck, he said, that if the commando went with him, before daylight he would bring them upon 200 Caffres, all asleep." Having thus treated a messenger from a free chief, and attempted to compel him to betray his master, away went this commando on the agreeable errand of surprising and murdering 200 innocent people in their sleep. But the messenger was made of much better stuff than the English. He led them about on a wild-goose chase for three days, when finding nothing they returned, and brought him back too.
Parties of troops were employed for several weeks in burning down the huts and hamlets of the natives, and destroying their fields of maize, by trampling them down with large herds of cattle, and at length the Caffres were forced over the Great Fish River, to the number of 30,000 souls, leaving behind them a large portion of their cattle, captured by the troops; many of their comrades and females, shot in the thickets, and not a few of the old and diseased, whom they were unable to carry along with them, to perish of hunger, or become a prey to the hyenas.
"The results of this war of 1811 were," says the Parliamentary Report of 1837, "first, a succession of new wars, not less expensive, and more sanguinary than the former; second, the loss of thousands of good labourers to the colonists (and this testimony as to the actual service done by Caffre labourers, comprises the strong opinion of Major Dundas, when landdrost in 1827, as to their good dispositions, and that of Colonel Wade to the same effect); and thirdly, the checking of civilization and trade with the interior for a period of twelve years.
