The Dutch Africa. Portugal as the leading maritime and commercial power of the world, and the Dutch became the great carriers of Europe in the trade with the East Indies, and their navy ruled the seas, Dutch colonies being established in the East and West Indies and in Guiana in South America, New Netherlands in North America and the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa. The capital of their possessions in the East Indies was Batavia, in the island of Java, which was founded in 1619. The Dutch still retain Guiana in South America and their possessions in the East Indies, though they have lost many of their other possessions by British conquest. The Dutch East India Company had immense fleets of war and merchant ships. The Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope was founded in 1652 in South by one hundred and fifty settlers from Holland, under Jan Van Riebeek. In 1658 negro slavery was introduced into this colony, and the introduction of this great wrong was the first and main cause of all the trouble which has since occurred between the Dutch and English in South Africa, just as the introduction of the same great wrong into the English colonies in North America by this same Dutch race in 1620in which year a Dutch trading vessel sold the first slaves in what is now the United States to the English planters at Jamestown, Virginia -was the great cause of sectional animosity and bloody civil war in the United States. Dutch and French A few years later many prominent colonists from Holland joined the Dutch colony already planted at the Cape of Good Hope, and Colonists. Dutch East India Company sent many young women to the colony from the orphan asylums at Amsterdam and Rotterdam to become wives of the Dutch planters already there. The Revocation of the Edict of Nates by France's great king, Louis XIV., in 1685, and the great persecutions of the Huguenots, or French Protestants, which immediately followed and which caused half a million Huguenots to flee from their native land and to seek homes in England, Holland and Germany, introduced a new foreign element into the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope, several hundred of the Huguenot refugees from France settling among the Dutch colonists there. Among the descendants of these French Protestant settlers in South Africa was General Joubert, the late Vice President of the Transvaal Republic and the commanderin-chief of its military forces. The Dutch colonists of South Africa were not a free community, and they frequently rebelled against the arbitrary rule of Holland. British The great French Revolution, which broke out in 1789 and which Conquest of the in 1793 had caused Great Britain, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Austría, Prussia, the German Empire and the Italian states to form a coalition against the new French Republic, was the cause of the loss of of many Dutch Republic. Holland's colonies. In 1795 the French armies conquered Holland and erected that country into the Batavian Republic, in alliance with France, the result of which was war between Great Britain and Holland and the conquest of many of the Dutch colonies in various parts of the world by the British. In 1795 a British fleet and army under Admiral Elphinstone and General Craig conquered the Dutch colony at the Cape of Good Hope. By the Peace of Amiens between Great Britain and France in 1802, Great Britain agreed to restore the Cape Colony to the Batavian Republic, as Holland was then called; but Great Britain refused to evacuate the Cape of Good Hope, on the ground that Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul of the French Republic, did not comply with the terms of his part of the treaty. Although the Cape Colony was afterward recovered by Holland, the British finally conquered it in 1806, being confirmed in its possession by a treaty between Great Britain and Holland in 1814, Great Britain paying Holland six million pounds sterling (about thirty million dollars) for Cape Colony and all the Dutch claims in South Africa, which extended as far north as twenty-five degrees of south latitude, and also the Dutch colonies of Demerara, Berbice and Essequibo, which now constitute the colony of British Guiana. The African domain thus acquired by Great Britain from Holland by purchase and conquest embraced the territory of the two Boer republics which recently made war on the British Empire. Since that time Great Britain has been the paramount power in South Africa. As we have before remarked, the Dutch population of Cape Colony had not enjoyed political rights under Holland's government, and after they came under British rule the civil and political institutions under which they lived were far more liberal than those under which they had lived before, and the Dutch colonists of South Africa always have had the same civil, political and religious rights as the British colonists. In accordance with the democratic spirit of the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the British colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other parts of the world where the British population rule have become democratic and self-governing, the suffrage being universal, and all classes and nationalities of white men and civilized men having equal civil, political and religious rights, while the natives have equal civil and religious rights. In fact, the British colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and other parts of the world are practically republics, or self-governing democracies, having their own Parliaments and Ministries for their own legislation and government, the Imperial Parliament at Westminister only legislating to establish the colonial British Conquest of the Dutch in South Colony Africa. Political |