Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 4.djvu/162

120 SOUTH AND EAST AFRICA. origin have increased at a relatively more rapid rate than the others, because they arrived with their families, whereas most of the Dutch, being officials and soldiers, were unmarried, and formed alliances with the native women. From them are for the most part descended the half-castes still known as Bastaards. Nevertheless the French immigrants were not sufficiently numerous to preserve their mother-tongue in the family circle, when, after 1724, its public use in the churches and schools was forbidden by order of the Company. La Caille, who visited the colony in 1751, met only very few Frenchmen still speaking the language of their fathers, and in 1780 Levaillunt found one only who still remembered it. During the course of the eighteenth century the colony gradually spread east- wards beyond the mountains. This movement took place in spite of the Company itself, which desired the Cape settlement to remain nothing but a port of call and a provisioning station, and in opposition to the governors, who, jealous of their prerogatives, wished all the colonists to remain directly subject to their control, and enslaved to the irksoma rules of a severe administration and absurd routine. Edicts were frequently issued forbidding the squatters to quit the lands that had been assigned to them and penetrate farther inland, " under pain of capital punish- ment, and even death, with confiscation of their property." But such decrees could not be enforced in the absence of garrisons, forts, or clearly defined frontiers towards the Hottentot territory ; hence the Boers continued their trekken — that is iheir onward movement from station to station — with their families, slaves, and herds. This advance, which is even still continued away to the north beyond the Cunene river, had already become irresistible, and the Cape Government was soon compelled, in spite of itself, to proclaim the annexation of extensive territories. Ill 1745 the official frontier of the colony was the Gamtoos River, but in 1786 its limits were already extended to the Great Fish River. It had thus absorbed the Hottentot domain and rejched the Kafir country, where the Boers, themselves more numerous and better equipped for war, also came into collision with more compact and more formidable hostile bands. But the British Government was already planning the conquest of Cape Colony, that central station on the ocean highway which had become indispensable to secure for the East India Company the permanent possession of the Indian peninsula. In 1780 an English fleet sailed for the Cape of Good Hope, in order to surprise the fort and capture its garrison. But it was itself surprised by a French squadron commanded by Suifren, who, after defeating the English near the Cape Verd archipelago, landed two thousand French troops at Simon's Bay to reinforce their Dutch allies. But although foiled in this attempt, they took advantage of the next opportunity in 1795, when the French revolutionists having seized Holland the Boers settled in the interior of the colon}' proclaimed their independence. An English fleet thereupon again sailed for the Cape, in order to restore order in the name of the Prince of Orange and occupy the colony in the name of the King of England. This was the beginning of a new political adminis- tration in Austral Africa, which stiil persists. Apart from a brief interruption of three years, caused by the peace of Amiens, Cape Colony has since then never