THEWHITEINVADERS
and placed them on twenty-acre landholdings at Rondebosch in the Cape
peninsulasix miles south of Table Bay.The directors' reasoning was strictly
businesslike. These free burghers were to produce grain and vegetables and
sell them to the company at fixed prices. The directors calculated that this
would be more economical than continuing to have food produced ex-
clusively by company slaves and men on the company payroll. 5
In the years that followed, the company discharged more men at the
Cape on similar conditions. It also transported a number of people from
the Netherlands to the Cape as settlers, including a few orphan girls and
156 men, women, and children of French origin-
Huguenots who had fled
to the Netherlands after 1685, when the French government reversed its
policy of tolerating Protestantism by revoking the Edict of Nantes. Until
1679, the settlement was confined to the Cape peninsula. In that year, the
company began to make grants of land in the fertile valleys beyond the
sandy Cape flats and below the mountains, starting at what became known
asStellenbosch, some thirty miles east ofTable Bay.The company ceased to
provide free transportation to settlers in 1707, by which time the colonial