« : NATAL Zhc Xanb anb Jt$ Stor\> i A Geography and History for the Use of Schools (WITH MAP) BY ROBERT RUSSELL Superintendent Inspector of Schools, Natal. PlETERMARITZBURG : P. DAVIS AND SONS, 1891. PREFACE. This outline of the geography and history of Natal, prepared by desire of the Council of Education, is intended to help the young people of the Colony to acquire a knowledge of their homeland and to encourage them to take an intelligent interest in all that makes for its welfare and progress. Much of the information in the geography is based on personal observation: much, on the authority of those most competent to know, chief among ivhom is our veteran physicist, Dr. Sutherland. The map is presented by the Council of Education. Being only a school-map, details have been omitted in order that the main feahires of the Colony may be clearly shown. The Story, drawn in its earlier chapters mainly from Mr. John Bird's exhaustive " Annals of Natal," has had the good fortune to be revised by the Nestor of South African history, Sir Theophilus Shepstone. To him and to all others who have given me valuable aid I return my hearty thanks. ROBERT RUSSELL. January, 1891. THE LAND. CONTENTS. PAGE' I. Position . 1 II. Size 2 III. Boundaries. .... 3 IV. General Appearance . 4 V. The Coast Line • 1. 5- VI. Geology 7 VII. Mountains .... 12 VIII. Rivers ...... 18. IX. Climate . 25. X. Soil and Productions . 28 XI. Plants 30 XII. Animals XIII. People . 38 XIV. Counties and Towns . 43 XV. Roads 50. XVI. Commerce ..... 57 XVII. Names of Places 58. XVIII. Neighbouring States . 61 THE LAND. I.—POSITION. Natal, the land we live in, is one of England's colonies. It forms a part of " Greater Britain," and of that widely- scattered and powerfnl empire on which the sun never sets. Look at a map of the world and you will see that Natal occupies only a small corner of the south-eastern part of Africa, the most compact and, even now, the least known of all the continents. It lies outside the Tropics, and about 30 deg., or rather more than 2,000 English miles, south of the Equator. This distance from the Equator, or its latitude south, is about the same as that of South Australia, Norfolk Island, and the town of Coquimbo in Chili. Notice now that the line of 30 deg. north latitude runs through Cairo, through the northern part of India, through the middle of China, and through New Orleans. The people in these places live therefore as far north of the Equator as we live south of it. Another line, also marked 30 deg., runs north and south through Natal and crosses the 30 deg. line of latitude in a southern part of the colony. This line is Natal's central meridian or line of longitude, and it is 30 deg. east of the similar line that runs from pole to pole through the English observatory at Greenwich. The general geographical 2 SIZE. position of Natal is thus easily remembered : —30 deg. south of the Equator and 30 deg. east from London. If we had, however, to indicate its position on the globe more exactly and also to give some idea of its size, we should have to say that Natal lies between 27| deg. and 31 deg. south latitude and between 29 deg. and 31^ deg. east longitude. The Earth, as you know, moves from west to east, and places to the east of us receive the sun's light some time before we do. Every 15 deg. of longitude makes a differ- ence of one hour. If a place is 15 deg. to the east of us its time is one hour before ours, if ] 5 deg. to the west its time is one hour behind. As we live 30 deg. east of Lon- don, it is 2 o'clock in the afternoon with us when it is only mid-day in London. Look again at Natal's 30 deg. line of longitude and you will see that it runs through the middle of the Transvaal, through Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, through Alexandria, through St, Petersburg, and through the centre of Lapland. The clocks in all these places point therefore to the same time as ours in Natal, and they are all two hours in advance of London time. Natal is about 6,800 nautical or geographical miles from London by sea and about 800 from Capetown. As every 60 of these miles is about the same length as 69| ordinary or English miles, it is easy to change the one kind of mile into the other. II—SIZE. Natal is only a small country when compared with the British Islands, with its neighbour Cape Colony, with the whole of the British Empire, and with the vast continent of Africa. The British Islands are about six times larger, — BOUNDARIES. 3 Cape Colony is eleven times, the British Empire is nearly 430 times, and Africa is no less than 600 times. Its area, or the amount of its land surface, is 20,000 square miles, or 12,800,000 acres—the same as that of Greece with its islands. If Natal were in the shape of a square, instead of an irregular diamond, each side would be nearly 14'2 miles long. It would take nearly 10,000 such squares placed closely together to cover the surface of the globe, and 2,750 of them to cover all the land. Its extreme distance in a straight line, or air-line, from north to south from the top of the diamond to the mouth of the Umtam- vuna—is 255 miles, and from west to east—from Mont aux Sources to the mouth of the Tugela—160 miles. III.- BOUNDARIES Except on the southward the boundaries of Natal are easily defined. On the west and north-west the Drakens- berg separates it from Basutoland, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal or South African Republic ; on the north- east the Tugela and its tributary the Buffalo separate it from the Transvaal and Zululand ; and on the east it is bounded by the Indian Ocean. Until the year 1866 the southern boundary was as well marked as the other boun- daries. It ran up the Umzimkulu, the Ingwangwani, and the Little Ingwangwani rivers, and thence along a water- shed of ten miles to Bushman's Neck, a natural bridle-pass in the Berg. In 1866 an irregularly-shaped piece of territory, then part of Noman's Land, was annexed to Natal and named Alfred County in honour of a visit which Prince Alfred, now the Duke of Edinburgh, had lately paid to the South 4 GENERAL APPEARANCE. African colonies. This county lies between the Lower Um- zimknlu and the river TJmtamvnna, and contains an area of 1,550 square miles. The southern boundary now runs along the Umtamvuna from the ocean to the Ingeli Mountains. It follows the ridge and then strikes off with many bends and angles in an easterly and north-easterly direction to the former boundary at the point where the Ibisi falls into the Umzimkulu. This boundary separates Natal from Pondo- land on the south and from Griqualand East or Adam Kok's Country on the west and south-west. Look at the map and you will see that a wedge-shaped piece of land, belonging to Cape Colony and lying between the north end of the Ingeli Mountains and the Middle Um- zimkulu, makes our southern border run in a line as zia--za°* * O O as that just described. At a point near the extreme north of the Colony, the apex of the diamond, the territories of the Free State, of the Transvaal, and of Natal all meet together. From the point of contact the boundary runs south-east along a water-course to the Buffalo River, four miles distant. IV.—GENERAL APPEARANCE. A good idea of the general appearance of the surface of Natal would be obtained from a bird's-eye view of it, that is, the view we should get if we could look down on the country as a bird does when flying over it high in the air. Let us fancy ourselves viewing the landscape on a clear day from a balloon poised several thousand feet above the highest ground. We see lying below us what seems a huge slice of meadow-land, sloping south-eastwards from a grand natural rocky rampart to a seemingly boundless sea. The rampart is the Drakensberg, and the sea is the Indian Ocean. THE COAST LINE. 5 Three well-defined silver streaks are seen winding from the mountain to the sea in a general direction at right angles to both. These are the Tugela, the Umkomaas, and the Umzimkulu rivers. Descending nearer to the surface we find that the mea- dow is not flat, and that the silver streaks have considerably increased in number, and form a glistening network over the whole face of the country. We notice that the Drakens- berg, besides being a continuous mountain-range, contains in places two or more short lines of elevation, divided by deep grassy valleys and wooded gorges, and abounding in roman- tic cascades, dizzy precipices, and towering peaks of fantastic form \ " That like giants stand, To sentinel enchanted land." Mountain buttresses, some of them partly covered with natural forest, are seen to radiate in decreasing elevation from the parent ridge to the tangled bush and tropical vegetation of the coast. The surface seems to consist almost entirely of large and small tongues of meadow-land flanked by water-courses and rain-channels, of deep river-valleys surmounted by grassy heights and majestic kranzen, of wooded kloofs and wild rocky ravines, and of isolated mountains and lofty hills, whose " sunless pillars " are sunk " deep in earth." V.— THE COAST LINE.