CHAPTER XLV. BRITISH AND DUTCH IN SOUTH AFRICA. SECTION I.-CAPE COLONY UNDER HOLLAND AND GREAT BRITAIN (SINCE A. D. 1652). Portu guese Discovery of South Africa. IN 1486-six years before Columbus discovered America-Bartholomew Dias, a Portuguese navigator, while on a voyage in search of a new sea-passage to India, discovered the southern point of Africa and named it the Cape of Storms, but the name of this headland was soon changed to that of Good Hope, because there was now good hope that a new ocean route to India would soon be found. In 1497-eleven years after this discovery and five years after the discovery of America -Vasco da Gama, another Portuguese navigator, doubled the Cape of Good Hope and sailed along the south-eastern coast of Africa and passed the beautiful land which he named Natal, because he first saw it on Christmas day, the natal day of the Founder of Christianity. Vasco da Gama and his crews landed at Delagoa Bay and traded with the natives, after which they sailed on and touched the coast at Quilimane, and then continued their voyage to India. After landing in India, Vasco da Gama founded Calicut, the first European settlement in the East Indies, and from which the word calico was derived. The Portuguese were then the greatest maritime and commercial people in the world, and they established colonies and trading posts along the western and eastern coasts of Africa and the southern coasts of Asia, their most prominent colonies being Goa, in India, and Ormuz, in Persia. For sixty years from 1580 to 1640-Portugal was a province of Spain; and during that period the Dutch in the Netherlands were en- Republic gaged in their Eighty Years' War of Independence against Spain, caused by the tyranny and cruelty of Philip II., whose reign of fortytwo years (1556-1598) was the grave of Spain's greatness. The Dutch finally achieved their independence and in the meantime conquered from Spain many of the Portuguese colonies which had come under the Spanish dominion when Portugal was annexed to Spain in 1580. The Dutch Republic, as Holland was then called, succeeded The Dutch and Its Colonies. The Dutch Africa. Portugal as the leading maritime and commercial power of the world, and the Dutch became the great carriers of Europe in the trade with the East Indies, and their navy ruled the seas, Dutch colonies being established in the East and West Indies and in Guiana in South America, New Netherlands in North America and the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. The capital of their possessions in the East Indies was Batavia, in the island of Java, which was founded in 1619. The Dutch still retain Guiana in South America and their possessions in the East Indies, though they have lost many of their other possessions by British conquest. The Dutch East India Company had immense fleets of war and merchant ships. The Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope was founded in 1652 in South by one hundred and fifty settlers from Holland, under Jan Van Riebeek. In 1658 negro slavery was introduced into this colony, and the introduction of this great wrong was the first and main cause of all the trouble which has since occurred between the Dutch and English in South Africa, just as the introduction of the same great wrong into the English colonies in North America by this same Dutch race in 1620— in which year a Dutch trading vessel sold the first slaves in what is now the United States to the English planters at Jamestown, Virginia -was the great cause of sectional animosity and bloody civil war in the United States. Dutch and A few years later many prominent colonists from Holland joined French the Dutch colony already planted at the Cape of Good Hope, and Colonists. Dutch East India Company sent many young women to the colony from British of the the orphan asylums at Amsterdam and Rotterdam to become wives of the Dutch planters already there. The Revocation of the Edict of Nates by France's great king, Louis XIV., in 1685, and the great persecutions of the Huguenots, or French Protestants, which immediately followed and which caused half a million Huguenots to flee from their native land and to seek homes in England, Holland and Germany, introduced a new foreign element into the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope, several hundred of the Huguenot refugees from France settling among the Dutch colonists there. Among the descendants of these French Protestant settlers in South Africa was General Joubert, the late Vice President of the Transvaal Republic and the commanderin-chief of its military forces. The Dutch colonists of South Africa were not a free community, and they frequently rebelled against the arbitrary rule of Holland. The great French Revolution, which broke out in 1789 and which Conquest in 1793 had caused Great Britain, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Prussia, the German Empire and the Italian states to form a coalition against the new French Republic, was the cause of the loss of many Dutch Republic. of |