The correct pronunciation of Boer words is very difficult to a speaker of the English tongue, hence the attempt to give it in above glossary is omitted. The language is as peculiar to South Africa as the jargon French of lower Louisiana is to that country and even more unlike Holland Dutch than the Creole dialect is unlike Parisian French. While the Boer speech was primarily Dutch, it has been so modified by isolation from the mother country for more than two centuries, and by contact with the native African tribes, and by the influx of French, Spanish and Maylay elements, that a native Hollander is scarcely able to understand it, even when written, and to speak it, as the Boers do, he finds impossible. PART I. OF VOL. I. EARLY HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF SOUTH AFRICA BY J. CASTELL HOPKINS [Illustration: GENERAL SIR WILLIAM GATACRE, GENERAL LORD KITCHENER, THE HON. FREDERICK W. BORDEN, Canadian Minister of Militia and Defence, GENERAL JOUBERT Commander-in-Chief of the Dutch Forces. Died at Pretoria, March 27th, 1900.] [Illustration: WILLIAM BRYANT, KINGSTON, CANADA, and Batt. Royal Fusiliers, Imperial Army, in South Africa. VICTORIA CONTINGENT FOR THE TRANSVAAL, Troops marching through Melbourne on Oct. 28th, 1899, _Photo by Bishop, Prahran_. MAJOR DUNCAN STUART, LONDON, ONT., With B Co., 1st Canadian Contingent in South Africa] CHAPTER I. Early Scenes of Settlement and Struggle. [Sidenote: The Dark Continent] From the date of its discovery by Bartholomew Diaz, in 1486, until the first Dutch settlement by Van Riebeeck, in 1650, the Cape of Good Hope was simply a finger post on the route to India--a convenient and temporary anchorage for Portuguese, Dutch, English, Spanish and French ships. And around its stormy and rock-bound headlands had passed the richly laden ships of the English and Dutch East India Companies for half a century before the latter founded its pioneer establishment. Henceforward, however, the shores of Table Bay, with its towering and mountainous mass of granite sheltering the Castle of the Dutch Governor and the tiny settlement of Cape Town, was to be the scene and centre of a gradual colonization, of continuous struggle with innumerable natives, of peculiar trade conditions and curious governing experiences, of capture by the English and of varied experiments in British government. [Sidenote: The First Settlement]