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110 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
place of the retiring Boers who recrossed the Drakensberg. In 1848, by proclamation of Sir Harry Smith, her Majesty's High Commissioner and Governor of Cape Colony, all the territory between the Vaal and Orange rivers and the Quathlamba divi­sion of the Drakensberg was formally declared to be part of the British dominions under the name of the Orange River Sover­eignty. The Boers had been spreading out towards the Vaal in many trekking parties north of the Drakensberg, and the Brit­ish supremacy was not recognized until it was forcibly asserted by arms in the battle of Boomplatz, July 22, 1848. Then part of the Boers sullenly submitted, but many, headed by Andries Pretorius, preferred to pass beyond the farthest assertion of English dominion by crossing the Vaal and entering the wilder­ness stretching to the Limpopo.
There was then not even a glimmer of anticipation that the great stretch of veld and karroo between the Orange and the Vaal contained by far the richest diamond fields in the world. The controlling ministry in Great Britain at the time did not even consider it worth the cost of keeping and defending, and on October 21, 1851, Earl Grey wrote to Sir Harry Smith that " its ultimate abandonment should be a settled point in imperial policy." The territory beyond the Vaal was rated still more cheaply, and on January 17, 1852, the local independence of the inhabitants of the Transvaal was formally recognized by the Sand River Convention, signed by two assistant commissioners for Sir Harry Smith, and by appointed delegates for the Trans­vaal pioneers. The state organization of these settlers was first christened Hollandsche Afrikaansche Republiek, but this name was changed to Zud Afrikaansche Republiek in September, 1853. In the preceding month of July, Andries Pretorius, the pioneer leader who broke the Zulu power, died, but his great service was honorably recognized in the choice of his eldest son, Marthinus Wessels Pretorius, as the first president of the new Republic, and in the establishment of its capital of Pretoria.
On March 31, 1852, Lieutenant General George Cathcart suc­ceeded Sir Harry Smith as High Commissioner and Governor