Ch. 3: The Pioneer Advance

Page of 449

Text size:



	90 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA their lives. These staggering rebuffs in the face of the new emigrants were greatly demoralizing. Some fled from the Cape in despair, and many more wrote home to their friends that the Colony was hung between flood and famine, and that the greater part of South Africa was a dismal Karrooland. Still there was a notably plucky rally and an immediate turning to other resources when wheat cultivation was shown to be an uncertain reliance. Cattle and sheep breeding was largely extended at once, and in 1828 hides and skins ranked only second to wine in the list of exports.¹ The failures in wheat growing and the resort to pasture land were strongly moving influences urging on the advance of pioneer settlers from the southern river valleys north and east over the veld into unclaimed territory. This natural flow of migration was greatly swelled and impelled by the clashing of the old settlers with the newcomers from Great Britain, and by their resentment of British control and administration measures. By the census of 1819 the white population of the colony was 42,217, and outside of Cape Town this people was almost wholly of Dutch descent or of the fused Dutch and Huguenot strains. It was inevitable that a stock of such breeding and tradition should be impatient of any ordinances or ways except its own. It was peculiarly irksome to bow to a nation which had captured the Cape by the strong arm, and was only represented by a small minority of the settlers. The inevitable heart-burning was aggravated by the contact and rivalries of the new and old settlers. Neither faction had the knowledge or temper to recognize the best traits in the other and show tolerance for dissimilar habits and prejudices. The Dutch boer has an old Anglo-Saxon root and is simply correspondent to the German bauer, a farmer or countryman ; but in the English mouth all the Dutch colonists were lumped as Boers, and in the English eye Boer was too often confounded with the clownish boor. The Boers faced this contempt with a glowing resentment that burned like a slow-match. ¹ "South Africa," Theal.

Page of 449