Chapter 1 - Page 2

strove to
obtain some further footing, but save along the courses of the rivers
they made little progress. Fierce natives and an enervating climate
barred their way.

But it was different with the Dutch. That very rudeness of climate
which had so impressed the Portuguese adventurer was the source of
their success. Cold and poverty and storm are the nurses of the
qualities which make for empire. It is the men from the bleak and
barren lands who master the children of the light and the heat. And so
the Dutchmen at the Cape prospered and grew stronger in that robust
climate. They did not penetrate far inland, for they were few in
number and all they wanted was to be found close at hand. But they
built themselves houses, and they supplied the Dutch East India
Company with food and water, gradually budding off little townlets,
Wynberg, Stellenbosch, and pushing their settlements up the long
slopes which lead to that great central plateau which extends for
fifteen hundred miles from the edge of the Karoo to the Valley of the
Zambesi. Then came the additional Huguenot emigrants -- the best
blood of France three hundred of them, a handful of the choicest seed
thrown in to give a touch of grace and soul to the solid Teutonic
strain. Again and again in the course of history, with the Normans,
the Huguenots, the Emigrés, one can see the great hand dipping into
that storehouse and sprinkling the nations with the same splendid
seed. France has not founded other countries, like her great rival,
but she has made every other country the richer by the mixture with
her choicest and best. The Rouxs, Du Toits, Jouberts, Du Plessis,
Villiers, and a score of other French names are among the most
familiar in South Africa.

For a hundred more years the history of the colony was a record of the
gradual spreading ,of the Afrikaners over the huge expanse of veld
which lay to the north of them. Cattle raising became an industry, but
in a country where six acres can hardly support a sheep, large farms
are necessary for even small herds. Six thousand acres was the usual
size, and five pounds a year the rent payable to Government. The
diseases which follow the white man had in Africa, as in America and
Australia, been fatal to the natives, and an epidemic of smallpox
cleared the country for the newcomers. Further and further north they
pushed, founding little towns here and there, such as Graaf-Reinet and
Swellendam, where a Dutch Reformed Church and a store for the sale of
the bare necessaries of life formed a nucleus for a few scattered
dwellings. Already the settlers were showing that independence of
control and that detachment from Europe which has been their most
prominent characteristic. Even the sway of