Episode 50 – Brigadier General Vandeleur fires grapeshot at the amaXhosa setting off 80 years of warfare
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Show notes
This is episode 50 and the British have mobilized the dragoons to end a trekboer uprising in Graaff-Reinet. That will spark what is known as the Third Frontier War.
But first we'll have a quick look at a powerful party that arrived in 1799 that was going to change everything on the frontier.
The Missionaries.
The idea started earlier, on November 4th 1794, when a small group gathered in Baker’s Coffee House, Change Alley, London. The outcome of this gathering was the London Missionary Society which was formed to “attend the funeral of bigotry and propagate the gospel among the heathen…”
It was to be of no particular religious denomination and launched as an umbrella organization which would be left to “the minds of the Persons whom God may call .. to assume for themselves such form of Church government as to them shall appear most agreeable to the word of God…”
These people would be hated by the colonists eventually as you’re going to hear.
Then the trekboers in the Zuurveld – the eastern Cape - rebelled once more in 1799 – with the elderly Adriaan van Jaarsveld freed from British captivity by the rebels as he was dragged back to Cape town to face a trial for fraud.
But the British did manage to cobble together a detachment of Dragoons as you know which was shipped to Algoa Bay and ordered to crush this uprising of around 200 trekboers. The grandly named Brigadier-General Thomas Packenham Vandeleur landed on the scenic shores of Algoa Bay along with his blue-jacketed dragoons and fifty "Hottentot" Corps soldiers dressed in the finest British military tunics.
