CHAPTER IV

THE GREAT TREK AND ITS CAUSES

THE European colonisation of the Transvaal, like most other events of any moment, may be traced to what the doctors call a predisposing cause and an exciting cause. The predisposing cause was of twofold nature: on the one hand, there was the inherited and deep-rooted distaste of the Cape Boers for any kind of civil government which interfered with their entire liberty of action; on the other, closely intervolved with this, their longformed habit of remedying any grievance, whether due to mankind or nature, by "trekking," or moving away from its neighbourhood. The exciting cause was the emancipation of slaves in the Cape Colony by the action of the English Government, and the failure of the Boers to obtain anything like what they considered fit compensation for an arbitrary and, in their eyes, indefensible act.

The dislike of the South African Boers for any

of those restraints upon personal liberty which are, even in these democratic days, inseparable from the idea of a settled government, may be traced back to the earliest years of the Dutch rule at the Cape. The spirit of lawlessness, which is still so manifest in the Transvaal Boer, as the half-dozen filibustering expeditions of the last ten years bear witness, was indeed imported from Holland and Germany, Scotland and France, by the original settlers, nearly all of whom had been in serious conflict with the law, either for crimes of their own or wrongs of their rulers. It was hardly to be supposed that the Huguenot who had fled with his bare life before the dragoons of Louis, the Dutch farmer who had heard from his parents of the cruel days of Alva and Philip II., or the prisonbreaker who had fallen into the all-embracing net of the Company's kidnappers, should have any particular respect for law in itself.

And the early rule of the Dutch East India Company was of a kind to foster this spirit of opposition into tenfold vehemence. A severe

discipline was needed to keep the good-for-nothing soldiers in order, and the officers of the Company were restrained by neither public opinion nor

private scruples from enforcing it to the utmost. One of the earliest entries in the records of the settlement tells how the starving men were encouraged to be cheerful; the punishment of the grumbler was swift and heavy, and one man received a hundred blows with the butt end of a musket for uttering maledictions upon the purser because he served out penguins instead of pork. Flogging and keelhauling were the punishments for the lightest offences against the regulations of the Governor. Very possibly no lighter hand could have controlled the "Pilgrim Fathers" of the earliest Dutch settlement.

Unfortunately, it never occurred to the officials of the Company, who were rather traders than statesmen, that sauce for the adventurous goose was not equally good sauce for the agricultural gander. When French religious refugees and independent Dutch farmers came out to the Cape, they were placed under the same severe and often vexatious discipline as the original servants of the Company. Far from being admitted to any voice in the affairs of the colony, they were made to feel that they existed upon sufferance, to grow food for the sailors engaged in the profitable East Indian

trade. Amongst the arbitrary regulations which vexed and harassed the Huguenots in especial was the prohibition of the use of their native language, not only in addressing the Government, but even in the service of their Church and the privacy of their fire-side. Other rules weighed upon all burghers alike. "The only chance a burgher had of making money and of improving his position was by selling the produce of the Cape, in the shape of vegetables, fresh meat, milk, and wine, to passing vessels, yet he was debarred from doing this with success by the vexatious rules of the Governor. He was also forbidden to roam far afield in the desert and Veldt. On all sides he was crushed, cabined, and confined."

Less important, but even more hard to bear, were the sumptuary laws which the Governor and his Council thought it necessary to promulgate in the eighteenth century. No one except the Governor was permitted to use a gilded coach, or one bearing a coat of arms; no one under the rank of a member of Council might. put his coachman in livery; no one might carry a sunshade, save senior merchants and the wives or daughters of members of the public boards.

The way in which the officials carried out the rules of the Government-one can scarcely dignify them with the name of laws-was not less annoying to the colonists than the nature of the rules themselves. "Before the close of the seventeenth century," says Mr. Theal, "corruption in the administration of affairs had become widespread throughout the possessions of the East India Company. . . The majority of the higher officials were unscrupulous in their pursuit of wealth... Many officers used the power entrusted to them to make money in ways that were decidedly criminal." The evil arose, as in our own East India Company's service, from the system of paying very small salaries and winking at their being eked out by trade and presents. The consequence of it was that all through the eighteenth century the Cape settlers were continually sending home protests against the rapacious and unjust conduct of the officials. The evil must have been great, for even to protest was an offence punishable by imprisonment (which actually happened to a namesake of the famous President Pretorius), or by deportation to Batavia or Europe. The defence made by one Governor