Southern Africa. Occupied with their commerce on the coasts of Western Africa, the Portuguese scarcely give a thought to the southern extremity of the continent, the aspect of which was less promising; and accordingly, for a century and a half after the famous voyage of Vasco de Gama, the district round the cape of Good Hope remained a blank waste to Europeans. The prudent and enterprising Dutch, however, having embarked in the East India trade, soon discovered the importance of the cape as a commercial station, and in the year 1650 they founded Cape Town, the capital of Cape Colony, the most flourishing of all the European settlements in Africa. Encroaching, without the least scruple, on the territories of the natives, the Dutch extended their possessions so as to include an area of upwards of 120,000 square miles, some spots of which were cultivated and planted with vines, or laid out in corn-fields, but the greater part of which was converted into immense grazing farms. Under the Dutch the natives suffered dreadfully, numbers of them being reduced to bondage, and others driven into the interior to find subsistence as they best could. In 1795 the colony was taken by the English; it was again restored to the Dutch in 1800; a second time, however, it was taken by the English, to whom it was finally ceded in the year 1815, and is now, accordingly, an English possession. Both before and after the cession of Cape Colony to the British, various travelers have undertaken journeys among the tribes inhabiting this extremity of Africa; and no accounts are more full and interesting than those of the various missionaries, who, since the beginning of the present century, have employed themselves in the arduous task of carrying the doctrines of Christianity into the heart of the native tribes. The native tribes of Southern Africa are two in number—the Hottentots and the Caffres; the former, so far as not extirpated, inhabiting the tract of country adjacent to Cape Colony on the western coast, and the other the tract adjacent to the colony on the eastern coast.
Of the Hottentots of the colony and its vicinity, it is said that they have 'become noted and almost proverbial for presenting man in his lowest estate, and under the closest alliance with the inferior orders of creation. It must, indeed, be admitted that they take particular pains to render their external appearance the most hideous that the human body can possibly present. Grease is poured over their persons in copious streams, which, being exposed to the perpetual action of smoke, forms on their skin a black and shining cake, through which the native color, a yellowish-brown, is scarcely perceptible. Grease in Africa forms the chief distinction of rank—the rich besmearing themselves with fresh butter, while the poorer classes are obliged to tear the fat from the bowels of slaughtered animals. They assign as a reason for this singular practice, an effect which has been readily admitted by judicious travelers—namely, that such a coating has, in this climate, a most salutary influence in defending them from the rays of the sun, and in averting many cutaneous disorders. Nature seems to have aided the task of disfiguring them, by covering the head with irregular tufts of hard and coarse hair, and causing singular prominences, composed of fat, to jut out in parts where they are least ornamental. Nor do their habits of life present anything to redeem this outward deformity. Their kraals or villages, consist of a confused crowd of little conical
