OCR Rendition - approximate

336 SIR H. B. FRERE.-On the Laws afecting the by a visit to the Fingo settlements. The visitor would hear from the people themselves the state of utter barbarism to which they had been reduced when they were first met by the missionaries, Messrs Ayliff, Warner, and others, and taken under British protection. He would see in the villages of headmen, like Veldtman, farmhouses and orchards which would do no discredit to an English yeoman, and he would find in their tales of how Captain Blyth ruled and advised them, and in the schools they have erected in Captain Blyth's name, at Blytheswood and elsewhere, the evidence of how the improvement-material, intellectual, and moral-has been effected. 3. There was another emigration of Zulus into what is now known as Umsilar country. Less is known of it than of Moselekatze's, or of the Fingo emigration, but Umsila's people say they were Zulus driven from Zululand, early in Chaka's time, and after many wanderings settled on the coast some hundred miles north of Delagoa Bay. 4. There is yet a fourth emigration consequent on the formation of the Zulu kingdom, which is probably as numerous as either of the others, I mean the emigration from Zululand into Natal. When the territory which now forms the Colony of Natal was first visited by the Trek Boers, the country away from the coast was nearly void of inhabitants, a few broken tribes occupied, with the elephant and buffalo, the clearer portions of forests in the warmer and more fertile sea coast ; but there were vast tracts nearly uninhabited, and hideous stories are still told of men who, within living memory, were reduced to cannibalism from want of other food. The country had been laid waste by Zulu " impis "; some of the people who escaped massacre had been carried off to Zululand to swell the numbers of the Zulu tribes to which their conquerers belonged ; others had fled and joined the retreating hordes of Fingoes ; the country from the immediate low-lying sea coast to the Drakensberg, and often beyond, was practically without any settled inhabitants. No sooner was the boundary of the British territory fixed, and the English flag hoisted in Natal, than the Zulus, as well as the races they had subjected and incorporated, discovered that the rule of the white man was infinitely easier than that of the Zulu king, and a steady tide of migration across the border set in from Zululand into Natal, which has never since stopped. Sometimes after a contest for the succession or other cause for internal war, the influx into Natal would be by thousands at a time, but more frequently it was by single individuals or families at a time.