Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/106





PHYSICAL FEATURES OF THE ORANGE, LIMPOPO, AND OTHER BASINS.

HE modern era has been ushered in by three great geographical events — the discovery of the highway to the east by the Austral seas, the arrival of the caravels of Columbus in the New World, and the circumnavigation of the globe by Magellan. Of these epoch-making events in the history of our planet, the first in order of time was that which was accomplished when in 1486 Bartholomew Diaz successfully doubled the stormy headland which thenceforth took the name of the Cape of Good Hope. A few years later the "good hope" was fully realised when Vasco de Gama reached the East Indies by this route, when the western and eastern seas were merged in a common oceanic basin, and man learnt to compass the earth, which till then had seemed to him a boundless universe.

But the shores that the first Portuguese ships had skirted in order to pass from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean long remained neglected by geographical explorers. Attracted by the wealth of both Indias, the early navigators scorned to linger on a seaboard which held out no prospects of a rapid fortune by trade or plunder. Over a hundred and fifty years passed away before any Europeans landed on this part of the African continent with the intention of remaining and founding agricultural settlements. At the same time it is useless for certain Portuguese writers to express idle regrets that this region was neglected by their forefathers of the heroic age. These were far too few to embrace the whole world, to simultaneously undertake the conquest of the Indian, Malayan, and American Eldorados, and the slow development of the arable lands in South Africa between the Congo and Zambese.

Nevertheless the settlers in these Austral regions were destined to find much more than they could ever hope to obtain from the mines of Golconda and the spices of the Eastern Archipelago. The land which they occupied is a second