asStellenbosch, some thirty miles east ofTable Bay.The company ceased to
provide free transportation to settlers in 1707, by which time the colonial
population included about 700 company servants and a settler community
of about 2,000 men, women, and children, besides the slavesand the local
pastoralists. After that, the burgher population grew partly by natural
increase, partly through company servants taking their discharge in the
colony, and to a small extent, as we shall see, by the manumission of slaves.
In 1793, according to company records, there were 13,830 burghers
(4,°32 men, 2,730 women, and 7,068 children). These were miniscule
numbers compared with the scale of European settlement in the Americas
by that time.
Most of the settlers came from the lower and least successful classes in
hierarchical Dutch or German society, since service in the company was
dangerous and poorly paid. Such differencesas were rooted in their Euro-
pean backgrounds diminished in the colonial situation, where individual
initiative and practical abilities were more significant than social origins.
This was also the experience of the Huguenots. The company dispersed
them among the other settlers, and within a generation they were speaking
Dutch rather than French.