Diamond Mines: Pioneer Advance Page 128



	THE PIONEER ADVANCE	91

	In the new measures of government there was a succession of vexations also to colonists attached to the old customs and ordinances. The expense of the new colonial establishment was a grievance. The adjustment of the currency aroused bitter complaint. The substitution of English for Dutch in official papers, and the abolition of the old Dutch courts, were heavy humiliations. But the keenest resentment was excited by the measures designed for the protection of Hottentot bond servants and free natives, and the emancipation act of 1833. There had been a rapid increase in the importation of slaves from Guinea after the first conquest of the Colony by the British, but in 1807 the last cargo of slaves was landed at Cape Town, and the slave trade was formally brought to an end by law in the following year. Still the colonists continued to hold and breed slaves as their fathers had done, and there were 35,745 slaves in the Colony when the emancipation act went into effect on the first of December, 1834. These slaves were valued at £3,000,000, but only £1,200,000 were appropriated as compensation to their owners. The loss fell heavily on many owners already sinking under the weight of mortgages, and there were rumblings and outpourings of bitter indignation. The deficiency in compensation was called Imperial confiscation, and the Boers resented it sorely, not merely on the score of the loss measured in money, but as a crowning instance of their political subjection.¹ Alien Imperial rule was the deep-seated grievance which was the underlying and impelling cause of the extraordinary exodus from Cape Colony called the Great Trek.² In 1835 Louis Triechard led out the first pioneer company of this migration, and his advance into the wilderness bevond the bounds of the Colony was followed by a succession of slow-moving caravans pushing northeast to the head waters of the Orange River and the terraces of Natal, and moving on, in course of years, across the Vaal to the Limpopo water-shed. This out-push of pioneers in large parties, overcoming all barriers of ¹ " Annals of Natal." "South Africa," Theal. " The Great Trek," Henry Cloete, her Majesty's High Commissioner for the Colony of Natal. ² Ibid.