" If in the course of time, with God's blessing, the stock multiph-, the bouweries can be fully stocked with necessary cattle, and new bouweries set off with the remainder, as is the practice in Rensselaer's Colonic and other places, and so on, dc novo, so as to lay out no money for stock." The houses used at first by those who settled the new lands were rude affairs, often consisting of nothing more than a pit, dug cellar fashion, encased, and floored with timber, and roofed with spars covered with bark and sod. Not only did the poorer settlers use such homes, we are informed, but even the "wealthy and principal men" commenced to live in that fashion, doing so for the twofold reason that they might lose no time from the planting and cultivation of necessary

98 The Hudson River

crops, and that the poorer colonists might be encouraged by their example. More substantial dwellings followed those first primitive makeshifts that at the most could not be expected to last above four or five years. Reference has already been made to the troubles -- or, as Van Tienhoven calls them, " misunderstandings" -- with Indian neighbours. Particular instances of such tmfortunate encounters have their place in the narratives of individual settlements, and will be touched upon more fully in other chapters of this book. It is suggestive of recent South African history that the tenant farmers were referred to in some of the old documents as boors or boers. To us of to-day the name is associated with sweltering velts and beleaguered kopps and laagers of waggons bristling with guns. Perhaps the best way for us to comprehend the Boer of the seventeenth century, with his energy, pluck, thrift, and courage, is by studying his kinsman of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to whose unconquerable obstinacy the attention of the world has for several years been directed.