Page:George McCall Theal, History of South Africa from 1873 to 1884, Volume 1 (1919).djvu/140

 1 20 History of the Cape Colony. [1878 Sir Arthur Cunynghame, and on the 4th of March he assumed at King-WilHamstown the command of the imperial troops and the colonial forces. He found an expedition under Commandant-General Griffith about to march against Sandile in the Thomas Eiver valley. On the 8th of March this expedition entered the valley and began to scour it, but the men who had only a fortnight before attacked Captain Harvey with such determination seemed to have lost all heart, and made only a very feeble resistance. Seventy of them were killed, without any loss on the colonial side, and twelve hundred head of cattle, which they depended upon for food, were captured. Sandile himself, his sons, and some eight hundred of his men managed to elude the colonial forces and escape to the westward, the next thing that was known of them being that they were in the Perie bush. A reward of i-500 was now offered for the capture of Sandile, and an attempt was made to surround that por- tion of the forest occupied by the rebels and either make them prisoners or destroy them. From the 10th to the 17th of March the troops and colonial forces were engaged in this task, but the area of operations was so extensive and the ground was so difficult for Europeans to traverse that they met with much less success than they hoped for. The principal events of these days occurred on the 11th and 15th of March. On the 11th a portion of the division of volunteers under Comman- dant Frederick Schermbrucker fell in with a party of Gaikas, with whom they had two skirmishes, killing nine of them, but losing a very promising young man named Hillier, of Bowker's rovers, and having another wounded. They managed to secure three hundred head of horned cattle, two hundred and ninety sheep, and four horses. On the 15th Lieutenant Andrews, of the George volun- teers, with thirty of his own men and twenty-seven of the Stutterheim German police encountered about two