Dick King had succeeded. After a ride of many hundreds of miles over trackless, unknown, and savage regions, he had safely reached the Cape Colony. It was on the ninth day after he left the Bluff at Natal that he arrived, almost exhausted, in Graham's Town. Colonel Hare, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Eastern Province, immediately sent the grenadier company of the 27th Regiment, in the schooner _Conch_, from Port Elizabeth, and when Sir George Napier heard the news in Cape Town, he lost no time in persuading Admiral Percy to despatch the flagship _Southampton_, with the 25th Regiment on board, under the command of Colonel Cloete. The ship of war arrived at Natal only one day after the _Conch_. A landing was immediately effected with very trifling loss; the Boer force was driven back to the Congella. A gale of wind drove the Southampton to sea, and supplies became so scarce that Colonel Cloete was obliged to obtain the services of Zulus to secure cattle. Some of these killed two Dutch farmers, and this gave occasion to a panic among the Boers, who precipitately fled to Pietermaritzburg. [Sidenote: _Dismay of the Boers._] Amidst great consternation and great confusion, a meeting of the Volksraad was held in the church at Pietermaritzburg, when recriminations, quarrelling, and loud talking occupied the entire Sunday. At last it was resolved to propose terms of peace to Colonel Cloete; but the ignorance and simplicity of the Boers were displayed by their holding out as a threat the succour they might receive from the King of Holland, to whom letters had some time previously been sent by the hands of a trader named Smellekamp. After negotiations, Colonel Cloete granted an amnesty to all except four ringleaders, and Natal was peaceably once more under the rule of the British Crown. These transactions took place in 1842; and in the following year the Honourable Henry Cloete, afterwards a Judge of the Supreme Court of the Cape Colony, was sent to Natal as her Majesty's Commissioner, with ample authority to inaugurate a settled system of government, and to put an end to the anarchy and confusion which prevailed. By the exercise of great tact and judgment he was successful. A powerful radical faction in the Volksraad opposed submission in the most outrageous and foolish manner. They even adopted a plan to assassinate the leading members of the peace party; but Andries Pretorius, one of the latter, and a wise, true friend of his adopted country, having discovered the plot, exposed it publicly, and brought its authors to shame. Judge Cloete tells us that this patriot addressed the meeting in a strain of impassioned extemporaneous eloquence not unworthy of Cicero when denouncing Cataline, and turned the tide so powerfully against the would-be assassins as to entirely defeat their plot. Entire submission to the British Government followed. Major Smith was succeeded by Colonel Boys, of the 45th Regiment, as military commandant, and his Honour Martin West,