Page:George McCall Theal, History of South Africa from 1795 to 1872, Volume 1 (4th ed, 1915).djvu/34

10 of fidelity to the king of England. On the 25th he and Mr. Bresler left the drostdy to return to Capetown.

On hearing of these proceedings, General Craig sent Major King with three hundred men of the eighty-fourth regiment to Stellenboseh, to be in readiness to move forward at short notice. Supplies of ammunition and goods of all kinds were cut off from the district of Graaff-Reinet, and a corps of Hottentots was raised for service in the interior. They were enlisted for a year, were provided with arms, clothing, and rations, and each man received sixpence a week in money.

Meantime dissension appeared among the people of Graaff-Reinet. The farmers of the fieldcornetcies of Zwartkops River, the Zuurveld, and Bruintjes Hoogte remained faithful to the government they had established, but the others began to argue that it would be better to submit to the English than to be deprived of ammunition and of a market to buy and sell in. Woyer, for whose apprehension the government was striving, suddenly disappeared, and another who had been active in promoting resistance—Hubert Dirk Campagne—was arrested when on a visit to Capetown, and was sent to England.

Just at this time an event took place which disheartened the great majority of the patriot party in the colony. This was the surrender to the British forces in South Africa of a Dutch fleet of war, and the consequent destruction of their hope of assistance from the Batavian Republic.

One of the first acts of the new government of the Netherlands was to fit out a number of ships to convey reinforcements to the Indian islands, for the purpose of protecting them against the British and of bringing the administrations there into harmony with the order of things established by the revolution in the mother country. The ships selected with this object were the Dordrecht, of sixty-four guns, to carry the admiral's flag, the Revolutie, of sixty-four guns, Captain Jan Rynbende, the Maarten