when committed by
such as they." Apologising to his employers in Holland for his show of
kindness to one group of natives, Van Riebeck wrote: "This we only did
to make them less shy, so as to find hereafter a better opportunity to
seize them--1,100 or 1,200 in number, and about 600 cattle, the best in
the whole country. We have every day the finest opportunities for
effecting this without bloodshed, and could derive good service from the
people, _in chains_, in killing seals or in labouring in the silver
mines which we trust will be found here."

The Netherlands Company frequently deprecated such acts of treachery and
cruelty, and counselled moderation. Their protests however were of no
avail. The mischief had been done. The unhappy natives, with whom
lasting friendship might have been established by fair treatment, had
been converted into enemies; and the ruthless punishment inflicted on
them for each futile effort to recover some of the property stolen from
them, had rendered inevitable the continuance and constant extension of
the strife all through the five generations of Dutch rule, and furnished
cogent precedent for like action afterwards,[7] After 1652, Colonists of
the baser sort kept arriving in cargoes, and gradually the Netherlands
Company allowed persons not of their own nation to land and settle under
severe fiscal and other restrictions. Among these were a number of
French Huguenots, good men, driven from their homes by the revocation of
the Edict of Nantes in 1690. Then Flemings, Germans, Poles, and others
constantly swelled the ranks. All these Europeans were forced to submit
to the arbitrary rules of the Netherlands Company's agents, scarcely at
all restrained from Amsterdam. Unofficial residents, known as Burghers,
came to be admitted to share in the management of affairs. It was for
their benefit chiefly, that as soon as the Hottentots were found to be
unworkable as slaves, Negroes from West Africa and Malays from the East
Indies began to be imported for the purpose. In 1772, when the
settlement was a hundred and twenty years old, and had been in what was
considered working order for a century, Cape Town and its suburbs had a
population of 1,963 officials and servants of the Company, 4,628 male
and 3,750 female colonists, and 8,335 slaves. In these figures no
account is taken of the Hottentots and others employed in menial
capacities, nor of the black prisoners, among whom, in 1772, a Swedish
travell