On Sunday mornings he stood under a tree, as he had been wont to do on the deck of his ship, and read the Church Service in English to such as would come round him and be reminded of their homes; in the afternoon, by the help of his interpreter, he prayed with and for the Kaffirs, and expounded the truths of the Gospel; and in the week, he kept school for such Kaffir children as he could collect, dressing them decently in printed calico.

He began with very few, partly because many parents fancied he would steal and make slaves of them, and partly because he wished to train a few to be in advance and act as monitors to the rest.

The English were on very good terms with him, and allotted a piece of land for a missionary settlement, which he called Berea, and began to build upon it in the fashion of the country.
Fresh threats from Dingarn led the settlers to try to come to a treaty with him, by which he was to leave them unmolested with all their Kaffirs, on their undertaking to harbour no more of his deserters.

There was something hard in this, considering the horrid barbarities from which the deserters fled, and the impossibility of carrying out the agreement, as no one could undertake to watch the Tugela; but Captain Gardiner, always eager and hasty, thinking that he should thus secure safety for the colony and opportunities for the mission, undertook the embassy, and set forth in a waggon with two Zulus and Cyrus, falling in on the way with one of the grotesque parties of European hunters, who were wont to go on expeditions after the elephant, hippopotamus, and buffalo, with a hunting train of Hottentots and Kaffirs in their company.

On whose aspect he remarks truly:-- "I've seen the savage in his wildest mood, And marked him reeked with human blood, But never so repulsive made.
Something incongruous strikes the mind Whene'er a barbarous race we find With shreds of civil life displayed.
There's more of symmetry, however bare, In what a savage deigns to wear, In keeping with the scene.
These, each deformed by what he wears, Like apes that dance at country fairs, Seemed but a link between." Dingarn proved to be at Congella, another circular town or kraal, on the top of a hill.