After the first three years’ hesitation, strenuous efforts were directed to the development of agriculture, especially the cultivation of grain. Wheat was sown in suitable localities, and vines and willows were planted by the banks of streams on the hillsides at the back of Cape Town. Nevertheless the colonists were terribly hampered by restrictions, which made them almost slaves to the Company. White labour proving expensive and somewhat rebellious, an attempt was made to introduce negro slaves from Angola and Moçambique, but they were not a success as field labourers. The Dutch therefore turned towards Madagascar, and above all, to the Malay Archipelago; and from the latter especially workers were introduced who have in time grown into a separate population of Muhammadan freemen of considerable prosperity[88]. As Dutch immigrants still held back from settling the Cape with an abundant population (owing to the greed and despotic meddlesomeness of the Company), it became more and more necessary to introduce black labour; and in the first half of the 18th century many negro slaves were imported from the Gold Coast and from Moçambique. The Cape became a slave-worked colony, but on the whole the slaves were treated with kindness; their children were sent to school, and some attempt was made to introduce Christianity amongst them. The people really to be pitied, however, were not the imported slaves, but the Hottentots, who had become a nation of serfs to the Dutch farmers, and whose numbers began greatly to diminish under the influence of drink and syphilis, and through their being driven away from the fertile, well-watered lands back into the inhospitable deserts. In 1682, after the colony had been established 30 years, a census showed a total of 663 Dutch settlers, of whom 162 were under age or children. For about the same period few if any attempts were made to explore the country 100 miles from Cape Town; but the coast from Little Namakwaland on the west to Zululand on the east had been examined by the end of the 17th century. Indeed the Bay of Natal was purchased by a representative of the Netherlands Company in 1689; but the ship bringing back the purchase deed was lost, and no further attempt was made to push the claim. In 1684 the first export of grain to the Indies took place, and in 1688 some Cape wine was sent to Ceylon. In 1685 and in subsequent years representations were made to the directors in Amsterdam that the colony consisted mainly of bachelors, and that good marriageable girls should be sent out. The result of this appeal was that in 1687 many of the free Burghers (namely, persons more or less independent of the Company) had been furnished with wives; and they and their families amounted to nearly