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.

The emigrants were now favourably situated in Natal. They had
established an equitable if not a legal claim to it; Dingaan was out of
the way; and the British Government seemed indisposed to inter-meddle.
But the fatal and grotesque alliance with Panda, which culminated in his
installation as King of the Zulus by Pretorius in 1840, and which was
entirely inconsistent with the attitude hitherto assumed towards the
natives, was the undoing of the trekkers of 1836.