The nomadic pastoral Khoikhoi (Hottentot) and nomadic hunter-gatherer San (Bushmen) peoples inhabit the region of the western Cape; the Khoikhoi number between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand.

The Xhosa populate the Eastern Cape; the Zulu hold Natal and other Nguni speakers reside farther inland.

The Dutch East India Company’s Jan Van Riebeeck lands with sixty of his countrymen at Table Bay in 1652 and establishes Cape Town as a resupplying station for the worldwide Dutch trading empire.

The South African wine industry has its origins in this era.

A conflict had started in 1648 between Styuvesant and Brant Aertzsz van Slechtenhorst, the commissary of the patroonship Rensselaerwijck.

Stuyvesant had claimed he has power over Rensselaerwijck despite special privileges granted to Kiliaen van Rensselaer in the patroonship regulations of 1629.

Stuyvesant had marched to Fort Orange with a military escort in 1649 and ordered houses to be razed to permit a better defense of the fort in case of an attack from the Native Americans.

When Van Slechtenhorst refused, Stuyvesant had sent a group of soldiers to enforce his orders.

The controversy that followed results in the founding, in 1652, of Beverwijck, a fur-trading community north of Fort Orange on the Hudson River, that is to become Albany, New York.

Peter Stuyvesant, selected in May 1645 by the Dutch West India Company to replace Willem Kieft as Director-General of the colony of New Netherland, Stuyvesant had arrived in New Amsterdam on May 11, 1647, and in September of that year had appointed an advisory council of Nine Men as representatives of the colonists.

Stuyvesant was probably born in Peperga, Friesland, in the Netherlands, to Balthazar Johannes Stuyvesant, a minister, and Margaretha Hardenstein in 1612.

He had grown up in Scherpenzeel, studied in Franeker, and joined the Dutch West India Company about 1635; he had been director of the Company's colony of Curaçao from 1642 to 1644.

He had attacked the Spanish-held island of Saint Martin in April 1644 and been wounded, the lower part of his right leg struck by a cannon ball.

He had returned to the Netherlands, where his right leg was amputated and replaced with a wooden peg.

Stuyvesant has become involved in a dispute with Theophilus Eaton, the governor of New Haven Colony, over the border of the two colonies.

The Iroquois have attacked the Susquehannocks without success from 1651 to 1652.

The Susquehannocks have been in an inactive state of war with Maryland; as a result, they trade almost exclusively with New Sweden.

They conclude a peace treaty in 1652 with Maryland.

In return for arms and safety on their southern flank, they cede to Maryland large territories on both shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

European diseases had taken their toll on the Iroquois and neighbors in the years preceding the war, and their populations have drastically declined.

To replace lost warriors, the Iroquois work to integrate many of their captured enemy by adoption into their own tribes.

They work to keep their captured enemies happy.

They invite Jesuits into their territory to teach those who had converted to Christianity.

One priest records, "As far as I can divine, It is the design of the Iroquois to capture all the Huron...put the Chiefs to death...and with the rest to form one nation and country."

The Jesuits also reach out to the Iroquois, many of whom convert to or add Catholicism to indigenous belief.

They are to play an important part in the years to come.

Most Virginia colonists had been loyal to the Crown during the English Civil War, but in 1652, Oliver Cromwell sends a force to remove and replace Governor Berkeley with Governor Richard Bennett, who is loyal to the Commonwealth of England.

The new governor is a moderate Puritan who allows the local legislature to exercise most controlling authority, and will spend much of his time directing affairs in neighboring Maryland Colony.

A Dutch factorij (trading post) had been established at Ponckhockie, at the junction of the Rondout Creek and the Hudson River, where Kingston, New York stands today, in 1614.

The Dutch traded European goods with the Lenape and Mahican for the furs their trappers collected.

Only five years earlier, Henry Hudson, exploring the river that bears his name in 1609, had encountered many natives who had never seen white men before; some, in fact, were unaware that there were any other people in the world, so they find the Dutch settlement disturbing.

This land had been occupied by the Esopus tribe of Lenapes, who had used it for farming.

They soon destroyed the post and drove the settlers back to the south.

A new settlement had been established there in 1652, but the feelings of the Esopus tribe had not changed and the new colonists had again been driven out.

...and another soon afterwards in Sado.

These are not directly related, as none of the persons involved are the same, nor do they follow a single leader or organized ideology.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, it is significant to note how widespread the distaste for the shogunate is at this time, and the degree of the "problem" of the ronin throughout the country.

The civil war in France had ceased after the campaign of December 1651, but in the several other campaigns of the Franco-Spanish War that follows, the two great soldiers are opposed to one another, Turenne as the defender of France, Condé as a Spanish invader.

The début of the new Frondeurs takes place in Guyenne (February–March 1652), while their Spanish ally, the archduke Leopold Wilhelm, captures various northern fortresses.

Some of the shipwrecked crew members returned to Holland had tried to persuade the Dutch East India Company (in the Dutch of the day: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) to open a trading center at the Cape; they decide to establish a permanent settlement.

The VOC, one of the major European trading houses sailing the spice route to the East, has no intention of colonizing the area, instead wanting only to establish a secure base camp where passing ships could shelter, and where hungry sailors could stock up on fresh supplies of meat, fruit, and vegetables.

To this end, the VOC requests Jan van Riebeeck, who had been on one of the rescue ships, to undertake the command of the initial Dutch settlement in the future South Africa.

Van Riebeeck, who had joined the Company in 1639, had served in a number of posts, including that of an assistant surgeon in the Batavia in the East Indies.

He had subsequently visited Japan.

His most important position had been that of head of the VOC trading post in Tonkin, Vietnam, but after his superiors discovered that he was conducting trade for his own account, he had been recalled from this post .

Van Riebeeck reaches Table Bay on April 6, 1652, landing three ships -- Drommedaris, Reijger and Goede Hoop -- at the site of the future Cape Town, meant to be a way-station for the VOC trade route between the Netherlands and the East Indies.

The Walvisch and the Oliphant arrive later, having performed 130 burials at sea.

Charged with building a fort, with improving the natural anchorage at Table Bay, and planting fruit and vegetables and obtaining livestock from the indigenous Khoi people, van Riebeeck plants a wild almond hedge as a barrier.

(It still survives in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town.)

The initial fort is made of mud, clay and timber, and has four corners or bastions.