The original Dutch settlement at the Cape was made by a Company of Amsterdam merchants for the refreshment and refitting of their ships engaged in trade with the East.  The Company was a harsh and extortionate master, who paid little attention to the needs and the welfare of the settlement, which was regarded merely as a place of call.  The discontented colonists began to leave the seacoast and trekked inwards, where the heavy hands of the cordially detested representatives of the Company could not reach them.  Its rule came to an end in 1795, when, at the request of Holland, Great Britain took over the Colony in order to prevent it falling into the hands of France.  It was restored at the Peace of Amiens, but in a few years again came into the possession of Great Britain.

The Colonies of the Empire were at that time administered by a Branch of the War Office which regarded the Cape settlement much in the same light as it had been regarded by the Dutch Company, as a necessary but troublesome depôt on the way to the East; and had the Overland Route and the Suez Canal been available a generation earlier it would probably have been abandoned.

The Boers hoped that their new masters, who at least were not an association of Amsterdam merchants absorbed in their ledgers, would treat them with more sympathy and consideration.  But the only serious colonial problem with which British politicians had up to that time been called upon to deal was in North America, and they had disastrously failed in their attempt to solve it.  They were without experience in the management of white plantations, they shirked the future and looked only to the “ignorant present,” and their policy in South Africa was based upon two principles:  that on no account must the boundaries of the Empire be enlarged and new responsibilities incurred, and that in all quarrels between white man and black man the presumption was that the white man was in the wrong.

The Great Trek of 1836-7 was brought about by the emancipation of the slaves and by the refusal or inability of the Government to protect the farmers against the raids of the “Kaffir"[4] tribes on the border.  There is no doubt that enslaved Hottentots, Bushmen, and even Malays who had been with the knowledge of the authorities imported from Madagascar and Malacca, were often ill-treated by individual slave-owners; but the Boers resented the charge of wholesale cruelty which was made against them, and the favour and patronage bestowed upon native tribes.  Moreover, although the slave-owners were entitled to compensation for the loss of their helots, the fund was administered in London, with the result that a considerable proportion of the already inadequate sum was retained in the hands of agents.

The object of the Great Trek was deliverance from the harsh and hostile jurisdiction of the British Government, and the setting up of a new and independent Boer community in Natal, which was reported to be a promised land flowing with milk and honey.  The Boers proposed to shake themselves free from the Egyptian and to occupy Canaan.