The constitutional and
parliamentary history of the two British colonies and the two Boer
republics has been short and not specially interesting. The military
history has been on a small scale. The economic and industrial history
has been simple and remarkable only so far as the mines are concerned.
But the history of the dealings of the white races with one another and
with the blacks is both peculiar and instructive, and well deserves a
fuller narrative and more elaborate treatment than I have space to give.

Four European races have occupied the country. Of those, however, who
came with Vasco da Gama from Lisbon in 1497 we shall have little to say,
and of the handful who followed Herr Luederitz from Bremen in 1883 still
less. The interest of the tale lies in the struggles of two branches of
the same Low-German stock, the Dutch and the English.

The first to appear on the scene were the men of Portugal, then in the
fresh springtime of its power and with what seemed a splendid career of
discovery and conquest opening before it.[16] Bartholomew Diaz, whose
renown has been unjustly obscured by that of Vasco da Gama, discovered
the Cape of Storms, as he called it,--the name of Good Hope was given by
King John II.,--in 1486, and explored the coast as far as the mouth of
the Great Fish River. In 1497-98 Da Gama, on his famous voyage to India,
followed the southern and eastern coast to Melinda; and in 1502, on his
second voyage, after touching at Delagoa Bay, he visited Sofala, which
was then the port to which most of the gold and ivory came from the
interior. Here he found Arabs established in the town, as they were in
other maritime trading places all the way north to Mombasa. At what date
they first settled there is unknown; probably they had traded along the
coast from times long before Mohammed. They were superior to the native
blacks, though mixed in blood, but of course far inferior to the
Portuguese, who overthrew their power. In 1505 the Portuguese built a
fort at Sofala, and from there and several other points along the coast
prosecuted their trade with the inland regions, using the conquered
Arabs as their agents. For a century they remained the sole masters not
only of the South-east African seaboard, but of the Indian Ocean, no
vessel of any other European country appearing to dispute their
pre-eminence. They might, had they cared, have occupied and appropriated
the whole southern half of the continent; but in