Not inaptly they compared themselves to Israel forsaking Egypt and beginning the long wilderness journey to a land of promise, thinking it not unlikely that the British governor, like Pharaoh, would pursue after them and try to turn them back. But their Pharaoh, after consulting his legal adviser, decided to let them go. It was serious, indeed, to lose so many stalwart and useful citizens, but there was no legal way of stopping them; and it would not do to use the strong hand, for Great Britain had just abolished slavery. Slowly and in small parties the exodus began, for there must not be cattle enough in one train to exhaust the pasture along the route they were to follow. Places of rendezvous were appointed beforehand, where, at necessary intervals of time, all might come together for mutual encouragement and counsel. The men carried arms for defense and for the killing of game for food. Long experience in shooting, not for sport but for life itself, had made them almost infallible marksmen—an accomplishment that proved their only salvation in the fierce and long continued struggle that was before them. Between 1836 and 1838 nearly 10,000 Africanders set forth, traveling in large covered wagons drawn by strings of oxen numbering in some cases ten and even twelve yoke. It is interesting to know that among the few survivors of that historic pilgrimage is Paul Kruger, who, as a boy of ten years, helped to drive his father’s cattle across velt and mountain range. The story of the wanderings of these emigrant Africanders, and of their conflicts with the warlike aborigines, is romantic to the highest degree, recalling in some of its features the adventures of the eleventh century crusaders and of the Spaniards in Mexico in the sixteenth century. The first division that trekked, consisting of ninety-eight persons traveling in thirty wagons, suffered defeat and almost ruinous disaster. They had penetrated into the far northeast beyond the Vaal river—the territory of the present South African Republic—where many of their number fell in battle with the natives. The remainder was rapidly thinned out by deaths from fever and from privation caused by the wholesale destruction of their cattle by the tsetse-fly. After incredible sufferings a mere handful escaped eastward to Delagoa Bay.