The daily morning journal and courier., 1900-01-03
BoERs AND THEIR COUNTRY.

| pCINlNtp AAND SoolN n !.
 It was in 1497 that Vasco de Cana
 saw for the first time the southeast
 coast of Africa, and since it was
 Christmas day named the country Ma
 tal-the land of the Nativity. De
 Cana, however, like other explorers o1
 his time, was thinking of India, and of nothing else, and it was a century and a half before the new discovery re-
 ceived any practical attention. Then the Dutch, who preceded Us in India,
 as in North America and the Cape saw the importance of such a station on
 their route to the east, and sent out a small expedition to found a colony. | The not very fiourishing community
 was reinforced after some twenty years
 by Huguenots escaping from the perse-
 cution of Louis XIV. and the Boers
 continued in the country of their adop- | tion for upwards of a century, slowly | subjugating the natives, who owed to 1 them the name of Hottentots, and | leaving their mark on the country in | the names of it's physical features. | Handed over to us, as every one | knows, during the French war, they
 were not very willing to become British subjects. It may not now be universal ly remembered that the climax of their dscontent was reached when the aboli- tion act, without the accompanying compensation which had been accorded
 to other shareholders, was extended to
 them, and resulted in the ruin of many.
 This was the cause of the Great Trek,
 or migration of 1886, in which the Boer
 ro1y yly1r r,tn m q1 fhnir
 way across the Orange river with their
 wives and families, into the territories
 now known as Natal and the Orange
 Free State, fighting as they went against the savage tribes. In somewhat
 the same manner their ancestors and
 ours, moving westwards in. the early centuries of this era, drove the Celtic race before them to the western cor ners of Europe. The Boers had no bet ter arms than fintlock guns, and their wanderings and their struggle with the natives were long and severe. They had to face the Zulu armies at their best, by which they were enormously outnumbered, and in this warfare used that system of lingering their wagons in square formation which was found invaluable in the Matabele war. Mere handfuls of men again and again beat off thousands of Zulu warriors, the wo- men, and even the children, loading the guns as fast as the men fired them President Kruger, who, as we know, trekked at a very early age, helped as a boy to perform this service on one occasion when forty Dutchmen were thus fighting in laager
 Every student of the map of South Africa must have noticed the peculiari- ty of such names as Bethlehem and and 1t is said whether right ly or wrongly, that the Boers of the Great Trek-simple peasant farmers who had probably never opened any book but the Bible, and were as fully | possessed as our own Puritan ancestors | with the notion of Joshua driving out | he Canaanites and inberiting the | land-really believed that they would reach Jerusalem in the course of heir wanderings; and not Jerusalem | )nly, for one river which they found, md which overf1owed it's banks, they concluded was the source of the Nile, Q which belief the name Nylstroom 'emains as a witness. It has been re- hCh lilhI otHCi "'iiSh tiiNy bestowed on the places through which hey passed--Weenen, the place of weeping: Lydenberg, the mount of sor- ow-testify to the hardship of their Much of their simplicity if life Is attributed to the habits which were forced upon them by their migra- ion; the practice of sleeping half ressed, a necessary precaution when n enemy might at any moment be pon them; their earnest greetings nd farewells, as of those accustomed ) remember that each meeting or part 1g might be the last; then retiring to est immediately upon sunset as be- anne people practically without the onvenience of artificial light.
 It was fifty years ago that they at lst drove out Moselikatse, the father of from the country across the aal and themselves settled in it. heir wanderings had perhaps, im- lanted in them something of the rov- lg instinct; at all events they spread first further northwards and east ards than they afterwards remained he southern portion of the Transvaal ,rritory, or Hooge Weld is a bare but 5dllHy llSS SIX lousand feet above sea level-covered
 the wet season October to March) ith rank grass, which disappears in le dry, biting winds and froats of win- r. The different varieties of the an- lopes constitute the fauna of this dis jet. To the north and east, on the the land slopes doWnwards to hat is known as the Bush Weld, or W-lying country, which was few