It was not to be supposed that these folk, the sons of roving soldiers and sailors, or of men who had left their homes in search of religious freedom, or whose forbears in Holland in the sixteenth century resisted the Spaniard when his heel was on the flag of freedom in half the lands of Europe, and who, rather than allow him to fix his foot permanently on their soil, had turned the waters of the North Sea over lands and villages; it was not to be supposed that folk so descended, and who regarded South Africa as their peculiar inheritance, should submit to dictation and interference at the hand of any external government. Again and again the most restless and independent of these men drew out the huge ox-wagon--South Africa's ship of the desert--and putting into it wife and children and such household goods as they possessed, they with their flocks and herds bade good-bye for ever to the beautiful valleys of the Boven-Land. Sometimes they took their course northward over the high mountain ranges that separate the Western coast land from the vast Karoo plains; sometimes they kept north-east and along the coast; but wherever they went their aim was still the same--to escape beyond the region and rule of the old Dutch Government; and wherever they went, they went alone, and unaided by any organized government, their flint-lock guns their only means of defence, their rhinoceros-hide whips their one sceptre of rule. And so began, one hundred and fifty years ago, that long "trek" of the Boer peoples northward and eastward, which to-day still goes on with unabated ardour and quiet persistency; and which in its ultimate essence is a search, not for riches, not for a land where mere political equality may be found; but for a world of absolute and untrammelled individual liberty; for a land where each white man shall reign, by a divine right inherent in his own person, over a territory absolutely his own; uninterfered with by the action of any external ruler, untrammelled by any foreign obligation--the Promised Land of Boer! As a hundred years ago he stood on the banks of the Vaal and the Orange looking to the lands beyond, so to-day he stands on the banks of the Limpopo and Zambesi; and still looks northward.[40] [40] This was written in the April of 1891, when large treks were being organized in the Free State and Transvaal. * * * * * Often the early fore-trekkers moved due north and climbed the vast mountain ranges. They saw when they reached their summits no descent on the other side, but the vast plains with their scant olive-coloured herbage and tumbled rocks.