They had almost been annihilated. Dingaan, the then chief of the Zulus, had resolved to annihilate them, and had gone nearer to success than the Indians of Mexico or Peru had ever done with Cortez or Pizarro. But they had stood their ground,--and were not inclined to be gentle in their dealings with the Zulus,--as the congregation of tribes was called with which they had come in contact. Natal received its name four centuries ago. In 1497 it was visited,--or at any rate seen,--by Vasco da Gama on Christmas day and was then called Terra Natalis from that cause. It is now called Na-tal, with the emphasis sharp on the last syllable. I remember when we simply translated the Latin word into plain English and called the place Port Natal in the ordinary way,--as may be remembered by the following stanza from Tom Hood’s “Miss Kelmansegg”:-- Into this world we come like ships, Launched from the docks and stocks and slips, For future fair or fatal. And one little craft is cast away On its very first trip to Babbicombe Bay, While another rides safe at Port Natal. After that no more was known of the coast for more than a hundred and fifty years. In the latter part of the eighteenth century the Dutch seem to have had a settlement there,--not the Dutch coming overland as they did afterwards, but the Dutch trading along the coast. It did not, however, come to much, and we hear no more of the country till 1823,--only fifty-five years ago,--when an English officer of the name of Farewell, with a few of his countrymen, settled himself on the land where the town of D’Urban now stands. At that time King Chaka of the Zulus, of whom I shall speak in a following chapter, had well-nigh exterminated the natives of the coast, so that there was no one to oppose Mr. Farewell and his companions. There they remained, with more or less of trouble from Chaka’s successor and from invading Zulus, till 1835, when the British of the Cape Colony took so much notice of the place as to call the settlement Durban, after Sir Benjamin D’Urban, its then Governor.