The first Dutch settlement was really a station for supplying the passing ships of the Dutch East India Company. No idea of territorial extension was present in the minds of those who proceeded to erect a fort and to barter with wandering natives. They knew nothing of the vast interior of the Dark Continent and its two or three hundred millions of black or brown population, its merciless wars and campaigns, its savage customs and cruelties, its vast lakes and rivers and mountains and rolling plains. They were equally unaware that about the time of their own establishment in the south, under the protecting shelter of the vast square mass of Table Mountain, a tribe of dark-skinned natives, called the Bantu, had swarmed down upon the far eastern coast and were preparing to overrun from their home in Central Africa all the great region of barren upland and rolling veldt and level Karoo plain known now by the common name of South Africa. The tiny settlements of the Dutch were thus unconsciously preparing for a future in which the persistent pressure of millions of Bantu, or Kaffirs, from the north and east upon the white colonies of the south was to make history of a most prolonged and painful character. [Sidenote: The Old-Time Natives] At first little was seen of the natives excepting members of a degraded coast tribe whom the Colonists called Bushmen and who lived more like animals than human beings. A little higher in the scale were the Hottentots, who, in large numbers, formed a fringe of wandering tribes along the whole of the southern part of the continent. Fighting continually amongst themselves, trading occasionally with the white men and stealing cattle wherever possible from the gradually extending settlement, these natives proved a source of much trouble to the pioneers. [Sidenote: The Dutch East India Company]