THE AFRICAN WITNESSES.

WHEN the Dutch, in the middle of the seventeenth century, established themselves at the Cape of Good Hope, they found the aborigines a people of simple habits and comparatively mild and inert disposition. They were not, like the inhabitants in many parts of the interior, united under one sovereign, but consisted of a number of separate tribes, living under independent chiefs, and occupying distinct portions of the country. The original occupants of the south-eastern extremity of Africa, whom the Europeans called Hottentots,* were unacquainted with agriculture, and supported themselves and their families by hunting, and the produce of their herds, that grazed unmolested, except by the wild beasts of the desert, in the rich and extensive pastures of the country. The number of cattle possessed by the natives may be inferred from a notice contained in the journal of Van Riebeck, the first governor of the colony, who, while looking out from the mud walls of his fortress at Cape Town upon their herds, could not but express his "astonishment at the ways of Providence, which could bestow such very fine gifts upon the heathen." The dwellings of the Hottentots were huts of the simplest structure, consisting of a few boughs or poles fixed in the earth, and covered with a matting of rushes: the whole was slightly put together, for the sake of greater con

* According to Barrow, the name Hottentot is a fabrication, and has neither place nor meaning in the native language, and is only used by the people under the idea of its being a Dutch word.

venience in removing from one part of the country to another, as pasturage for their cattle might be more or less abundant. Their dress was in keeping with their habitations, rude and simple a sort of cloak, or kaross, formed of sheep-skins, sewed together with threads made from the sinews of animals, served its wearer for clothing by day and bedding by night. Their weapons were a bow and arrows, and a light spear or dart called an assagai. They were fearless huntsmen, maintaining a constant and successful warfare with the ferocious beasts of the forest, and manifesting no ordinary degree of daring intrepidity in opposing the early intruders to their country; they defeated Almeida, the first viceroy of the Portuguese in India, killing the viceroy and seventy-four of his men near the spot where Cape Town now stands; afterwards they courageously, though unsuccessfully, opposed the Dutch colonists in the first attempts of the latter to take possession of the country.

The arrival of the foreigners was to the natives, as the same event has too often been to the aborigines of other countries, the omen of extinction to many of their tribes, and of wretchedness and suffering to all. The Dutch at first entered the country as friends, and, we are told, easily obtained from the natives, for a few trinkets, and flasks of brandy, as much land as they then required; and when a portion of the country was ceded, and peace established, intercourse was amicably maintained for a number of years; the natives having kept with exact fidelity the engagements they had entered into. At length the Dutch settlers began to spread themselves over the country, while armed expeditions against the natives, for the sake of obtaining their cattle, were undertaken to such an extent, that the government refrained from punishing the delinquents, because, as the governor stated in a despatch transmitted in 1702, "half of the colony would be ruined, so great is the number of the inhabitants implicated."