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 the Dutch Company (an older but
weaker brother of John Company in India) had caused them to revolt.
The local rising, however, was hardly noticed in the universal
cataclysm which followed the French Revolution. After twenty years,
during which the world was shaken by the Titanic struggle between
England and France in the final counting up of the game and paying
of the stakes, the Cape Colony was added in 1814 to the British
Empire.
In all our vast collection of States there is probably not one the
title-deeds to which are more incontestable than to this one.
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