184 Blach Population of Natal. 



THE BLACK POPULATION OP THE BEITISH COLONY 

 OF NATAL, SOUTH AFRICA. 



A PRELIMINARY SKETCH. 



BY ROBERT JAMES MANN, M.D., F.R.A.S., 

 Superintendent of Education in Natal. 



(With a Tinted Plate). 



The British. Colony of Natal lies on the south-eastern coast of 

 Africa, about eight hundred miles beyond the Cape of Good 

 Hope, and reaches upwards to within a little more than two 

 hundred miles of the southern tropic. It is a strip of land 

 included between the high Brakenberg step of mountains, 

 which forms the threshold of the great continent, and the 

 Indian ocean. Its sea-board is one hundred and fifty miles long, 

 and its depth from the sea to the mountains, an extent varying 

 from one hundred to one hundred and forty miles. 



Natal, thus placed, is the very middle of what Dr. Livingstone 

 and the geographers have termed the " Kaffir zone" of climate, 

 as distinguished from the Beclmana and Namaqua zones beyond 

 the mountains. This zone was inhabited, before the land was 

 visited by Dutch, Portuguese, or Englishmen, by a distinct race 

 of people, whose direct descendants now form the black popu- 

 lation of the Colony. The land was first seen by European 

 eyes on the 25th of December, 1497, when the renowned 

 Portuguese navigator, Vasco de Gama, touched at it on his 

 first voyage to India round the cape, and named it the " Terra 

 Natalis,"' - ' in honour of the day. The soil was first trodden by 

 British feet in the year 1683, when a crew of men who had 

 been shipwrecked further north, near the spot now known as 

 Delagoa Bay, made their way through it to the Cape of Good 

 Hope. Three years subsequently a Dutch ship was wrecked 

 where the Port of Natal is now established, and the stranded 

 crew spent twelve months on the shore, and at last built 

 a small vessel from the fragments of the wreck, and sailed 

 away for the Cape of Good Hope, leaving, however, three 

 Englishmen and a Frenchman behind. These were finally 

 taken away, after a longer residence, by a Dutch vessel visiting 

 the coast; but they carried with them reports of the place which 

 led to the Dutch forming a settlement there in the year 1721. 

 The settlement, however, was maintained for only a brief period, 

 and then abandoned. In the year 1823, Lieutenant Farewell 

 of the Marines in the progress of a surveying voyage, visited 

 the site of the old settlement. On the following year he led 



