Before the receipt of that message, Cetshwayo had every reason to believe that the negotiations concerning the disputed territory were broken off. Sir T. Shepstone’s tone on the subject had altered; he had parted with the king’s indunas at the Blood River in anger, and the messenger whom he had promised to send to the king himself had never appeared. Meanwhile, the Boers had gone into laager, by direction, they say, of Sir T. Shepstone himself, and with the full expectation that he was about to make war upon the Zulus. No offer of arbitration had yet been made. Cetshwayo had been played with and baffled by the English Government for sixteen years, and to all appearance nothing whatever was done, or would be done, to settle in a friendly manner this troubled question, unless he took steps himself to _assert_ his rights, and he seems to have taken the mildest possible way of so doing under the circumstances. According to the official reports at the time, he sent a large force of armed men to build a military kraal near Luneburg, north of the Pongolo, in land which was also disputed with the Transvaal Government, but formed no part of the (so called) disputed territory to the south of that river, or as Lord Carnarvon said to a deputation of South African merchants (_Guardian_, January 9th, 1878): “He (the Zulu king) had proceeded to construct, in opposition to Sir T. Shepstone’s warnings, a fortified kraal in a disputed territory abutting upon English soil.” But this was a very exaggerated way of describing a comparative trifling circumstance. The erection of a kraal—not, as so frequently asserted, a military one, but merely an ordinary Zulu kraal for the residence of a headman, to keep order among the 15,000 Zulus who lived in that district—had long been contemplated, and had once, during Umpanda’s lifetime, been attempted, though the Boers had driven away the Zulu officer sent for the purpose, and destroyed the work he had commenced. Cetshwayo himself explains his reason for sending so large a force for the purpose, on the grounds that he wished the kraal to be built in one day, and his men not to be obliged to remain over a night, while, as Colonel Durnford, R.E., says (2144, p. 237), “the fact that the men at work are armed is of no significance, because every Zulu is an armed man, and never moves without his weapon.”