Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/232





NATAL AND ZULULAND.

HE "Cape" owes its name to Bartholomew Diaz; Natal to the still more illustrious navigator, Vasco de Gama, who first sighted a verdant headland breaking the monotony of this seaboard on Christmas Day ("Natal"), 1497. But more than three centuries elapsed before this station on the ocean highway between Europe and India was permanently occupied. Portuguese skippers visited the coast from time to time to revictual their ships; then the Dutch, who succeeded the Portuguese as masters in the southern waters, attempted on several occasions to secure a footing at Port Natal. But all such essays proved abortive, nor was it till 1824 — that is, nearly three-hundred and thirty years after its discovery — that some twenty English settlers from the Cape established the first centre of European colonisation on the spot where now stands the city of Durban. At that time the surrounding district had been almost depopulated by the ravages of Chaka, the terrible king of the Zulus. The native tribes had either been exterminated or compelled to migrate southwards, and all the land between the sea and the mountains had been transformed to a "howling wilderness." At present the colonial territory, with a superficial area of over 20,000 square miles, has a steadily increasing population, which in 1888 was estimated at nearly half a million.

Although the country was first settled by colonists of British descent, there was a time when the Dutch Boers threatened to acquire the numerical superiority in Natal as well as on the opposite slope of the Drakenberg range. They might even have permanently secured the political supremacy in this region but for their military reverses, followed by the active intervention of the British authorities. The great exodus of the Boers from Cape Colony towards the unknown lands of the interior was partly deflected in this direction, and in the year 1834 the first pioneers already began to make their appearance on the passes leading over the coast range. By dint of patience and energy they at last succeeded in reaching the opposite slope, and by the end of 1837 nearly a thousand waggons, with their long teams of cattle, had crossed the Drakenberg divide and occupied the river valleys draining to the Indian Ocean.