Soon other parties of emigrants came in from beyond the Drakensberg, and in 1838 an expedition under Potgieter failed to punish Dingaan for his treachery.  Nor did an attempt to help the emigrants made by the British settlers at Durban meet with success.  A small force of Natal natives under an Englishman named Biggar was greatly out-numbered at the mouth of the Tugela and perished almost to a man.  Dingaan retaliated by sending an impi to Durban, which he held for a few days; the settlers taking refuge on board a ship in the Bay.

The Boers were disheartened and many of them trekked back to the veld beyond the Drakensberg passes, which is now the Orange River Colony.  Their position in face of Dingaan seemed hopeless; but in November, 1838, there came out of the Cape Colony one Pretorius.  He had heard of their distress, and he organized a force of 500 men, with whom, on December 16, he successfully encountered Dingaan’s army and slew 3,000 of his warriors at the Blood River, an affluent of the Buffalo.  Dingaan fled and the column marched on to Umgungundhlovu, where Retief’s mouldering body was found on the hill of mimosas, and on it the deed of grant of land at Durban.  Pretorius was ambushed by Zulus disguised as cattle, crawling on all fours and wearing ox hides; but he escaped with slight loss, and returned to the Tugela.  “Dingaan’s Day,” December 16, is kept by the Boers as a festival of thanksgiving and rejoicing.

Soon a new complication beset the harassed emigrants.  In December, 1838, the British Government, anxious to stop the wars between the Boers and the natives and to exclude the former from the sea, sent one hundred soldiers to Durban and issued a proclamation in which the Boers were declared to be British subjects who had unlawfully occupied Natal, and who were morally responsible for all the blood that had been shed.  They protested against the imputation and against the military occupation of Durban, but took no active steps to resent the affront.

When twelve months had passed without hostilities between Boer and native, the British Government withdrew its hundred warriors from Durban and tacitly handed over Natal to the emigrant Boers.  Hardly had the little transport Vectis catted her anchor when the Republic of Natalia was proclaimed and its flag run up on the staff of the forsaken British Camp on Durban Bay.

But the dog-in-the-manger policy of neither incorporating Natal in the British Empire nor frankly allowing the Boers to occupy it could not be indefinitely maintained.  Each present difficulty wriggled out of made the future more embarrassing.  Soon, as might have been anticipated, the Boers were again in trouble with the natives.  Panda, the father of Cetchwayo, whose impis forty years after washed their spears in the blood of 800 British soldiers at Isandhlwana, broke away from his brother Dingaan, taking with him into Natal many thousand Zulus who were awaiting an opportunity of shaking themselves free from the tyranny and cruelty of Dingaan.  Panda made overtures to the Boers and was gladly received as an ally, and with his help Dingaan was finally crushed and driven into Swaziland, where, in the hands of a hostile tribe, he perished miserably by torture.