T HE birth-year of the Boer or Afrikaner nation was in 1657. In this year the Dutch East India Company, in-terested, as always, in penny-pinching, decided that a more economical method must be found of provisioning its Indies-bound ships at the Cape entrep6t, which had been set up five years earlier. The local Hottentots were not an agricultural people, and had proved demanding and capricious when pressed for a regular supply of cattle.