Everard Tunstall Author:Thomas Forester Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. Christmas of the year 1834 was a season of alarm and suffering, which will long live in the memories of the inhabitants of the Eastern province of... more » the Cape colony. On the same nights that Rosendal was the scene of the events detailed in preceding chapters, similar occurrences were spreading desolation along the whole frontier. And, disastrous as were those which it has been our business to relate, others were attended with circumstances still more treacherous and sanguinary. The evil was much aggravated by the sudden and simultaneous nature of the Kaffir irruption. The farmers, attacked at the same moment, had no time to unite their strength or to assist each other. They were not unfrequently overpowered and murdered, before they were aware of the danger. The frontier garrisons were too weak to afford any protection. It was as much as they could do to hold Vol. m. B the posts against the thousands of armed Kaffirs who surrounded them. In fact, within a few days, they were all, except two or three, withdrawn ; and the forts, abandoned by their defenders, were burnt by the enemy. Colonel Somerset, the Commandant in Kaffraria, was patrolling the passes with a handful of the mounted-rifles, but their horses were knocked up, and, notwithstanding all his efforts, in the course of a week, 20,000 Kaffirs poured into the colony from various points, and overspread the whole province as far as Uitenhague, a hundred miles in the rear of the line on which the Colonel was operating. Here the invasion was the more terrific, as it was less expected; for the frontier colonists, like men who reside on the declivities of a smouldering volcano, though not insensible of the gathering storm, were so habituated to its proximity, that, notwithstanding they had long slept with a...« less