A few years later, the English colonists living in the coastal settlement of Port Natal (Durban) requested to be officially recognised by the Cape Government as a dependency of Britain.

However, the Afrikaner Boers, who had recently left the Cape Colony in the mass exodus called the Great Trek, had ventured over the Drakensberg mountains, settled in the area they named the Natalia Republic and resumed their farming lifestyles.

This fire the Inniskillings returned, but with nothing to aim at except the flashes from the scrub, while, as they stood up in the bright moonlight to reload, they offered the Boers a target such as every marksman dreams of but very seldom sees.

When the guns lumbered into action their projectiles checked the Boer musketry but only for a moment and, when the enemy's bullets began to find their billets among the oxen, the beasts broke loose, upset the limbers, dashed among the soldiers and threw them into confusion...

The moment the Boers had silenced the light guns they turned their musketry again upon the infantry who fell so fast that Charlton Smith realised that the attack had failed and retired, pursued by the burghers who for two or three hours fired hotly into his camp .

Three more men were drowned in crossing a river: this disastrous night attack caused fifty casualties, or nearly thirty-six per cent of the one hundred and thirty-nine combatants who took part in it.

In the confusion his fall was unnoticed and he was reported missing until next day, when he was brought up to the camp by some Good Samaritans who had found his apparently lifeless body stranded on the bank.The Boers had won a major battle, and Captain Smith had lost many of his men.

Two of these guns had been landed but luckily one had been dragged safely into camp before dawn on 26 May when a hundred burghers stalked the party and from cover poured so heavy a fire upon them that the sergeant was forced to surrender, but not before five of his men were killed or wounded.

To make good his deficiencies in food, Charlton Smith made forced requisitions among the non-combatant inhabitants of the settlement who, though they professed loyalty to the British flag, protested loudly at this procedure.

Captain Smith now saw that it was time to call in [his] outposts and concentrated the remnant of his command in the camp which he had fortified as well as his limited resources would allow...The history continues, saying that the Boers extended a flag of truce proposing that the women and children should be removed from the rustic fort to safety aboard the schooner Mazeppa which was then in port.

We were doing all we could to fortify the camp... Just before sunrise we were saluted by a six-pound shot which passed through the officer's mess tent, knocking their kettles and cooking apparatus in all directions.

Thirty one days after Captain Smith recruited King, the reinforcements arrived at Port Natal by ship, aboard the Conch and the South Hampton.