Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/161

 HISTORIC BETROSI'ECT. 119 was gradually tninsforniod to a colonial Bfttloinoiit, and bo early a» 1654 somo orphans were sent out from Amsterdam in order to form the nucleus of a peasant population. Soldiers and sailors left the service in order to till the land as free " burghers," on the condition of selling their prolf in due course encircled by numerous hamlets and farmsteads. In some places the land was purchased, because the squatters felt themselves still too weak to take it without allowing comiwnsation. liut once strong enough, they simply dispossessed the Hottentots, or even seized both land and people, com- pelling the latter to work as slaves. The natives, however, hitherto accustomed only to tend their herds, and unacquainted with husbandry, could afford little help to the Dutch farmers in cultivating their cornfields, vineyards, and orange-groves. Hence they began to be replaced so early as lOoH, when a first shipment of Negro slaves was consigned to the Cape, and the number of these imported slaves soon exceeded that of the freemen on the plantations. The consequence of this state of things was the same in Austral Africa as in the tropical regions. Large domains were constituted at the expense of the small freeholders, the whites learnt to look upon labour as dishonourable, the immigration of free Europeans took place very slowly, and the progress of the Colony was frequently arrested through the lack of private enterprise and industry. The importation of the blacks, however, gradually fell off during the course of the eightf enth contui v, and at the alwlition of slavery in 1831 there were not more than 30,000 altogether to be emancipated. These Negro freedmen have since then become entirely absorbed in the nia.'^s of the half-caste population. In 1680, that is to say twenty-eight years after the arrival of the first perma- nent settlers, the European colony comprised six hundred souls, with the officials and the soldiers recruited in F.anders, Denmark, and other parts of North Europe. But these pioneers were soon joined by a fresh ethnical element. Some of the French Protestants, in seeking new homes after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, together with a few Waldenses from the Piedmontese Alpine valleys, applied to the Dutch East India Company, which s; nt them to its new possessions at the Cape. Including women and children they numbered al)out three hundred, and in 1087 and 1C88 reached the colony, where lands were assigned to them in the upland valleys round about the rising city. Others followed, and being for the most part brave, energetic persons, who harl faced exile and all manner of hard- ships for conscience' sake, these French Huguenots took a large share in the development of the Colony, and to them especially is due the successful introduc- tion of vine-growing in South Africa. The local annuls record the names of ninety-five French families, some of which have di8ap|)eared, whilst others have assume.l Dutch forms. Thousands jind thousands of Boers are still proud to claim Pluguenot descent, and the map of South Africa, from the seaboard to the Limpopo vullev, is covend with topo- graphical names perpetuating their migrations northwards. The Boers of French