Early History of Cape Colony.
1709-1833.] Early History of Cape Colony.
Capetown was first occupied by the Dutch East India Company in 1652 as a naval station on the road to India. At first it was only a military post; five years later a dozen men were allowed to settle outside the limits of the Dutch fortress, buying and selling under most stringent regulations laid down by the Company. The Dutch forcibly took the land from the Hottentots where they could not obtain its cession for a consideration. Gradually they increased in numbers and spread inland; at the close of the seventeenth century they were reinforced by a number of Huguenots, exiled from France on account of their religion, and for the most part men of high birth and noble character. The new comers attempted to keep their tongue and identity, but in 1709 the Dutch Company forbade all use of French in official communications, and the language rapidly became obsolete.
A homogeneous Dutch community grew up in this remote region—for the Cape was, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one of the least-explored and most out-of-the-way parts of the earth—which knew no literature but the Bible, which preserved the manners and traditions of the seventeenth century, and which from its frequent disputes with the Dutch East India Company's tyrannical government imbibed a rooted aversion to all laws and restraints.
It was a strong, old-world community, which retrograded rather than advanced as time went on, which in its utter isolation escaped the soothing influence of civilisation, and in which every man, as far as he could, did that which was right in his own eyes.
THE PAARDEKRAAL COMMEMORATION.
The Paardekraal (Horse-pound) Monument erected near Krugersdorp by the Boers to commemorate their independence. Periodically great meetings are held here, when prayers are offered and patriotic speeches made. Beneath the monument is a sort of cellar, into which every Boer in passing throws a stone as a token of his visit.
Unpopularity of the Dutch East India Company. British capture Capetown.