shop what's new gem journeys
wishlists my shopping bag
 

prehnite - South Africa's first mineral
Prehnite was the first mineral to ever be named after a person.
Prehnite was also the first new mineral species to be described from South Africa. Seventy years would elapse before South Africa produced another species -- teschemacherite, described in 1846 and named after a British chemist.
South Africa was inhabited by the Khoi, San (Bushmen), Xhosa, Zulu and various other native tribes, when Dutch settlers arrived in 1652.
Great Britain seized the Cape of Good Hope area in 1797 during the Anglo-Dutch War. The Dutch declared bankruptcy and the British annexed the Cape Colony in 1805.
The Anglo-Dutch Wars were actually four different wars, fought over who would control seas and trade routes. The first war started in 1652 and the last war concluded in 1784 -- at which time the English were declared 'winners.'
dutch treat

carved prehnite; the laughing buddha

Dutch baron, colonial army officer and mineralogist Colonel Hendrik van Prehn (1733-1785) discovered prehnite in the Cradock district of the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa (bordering the Indian Ocean), northeast of the Cape of Good Hope.
Prehn -- whom some accounts say was a Governor of Cape Province at the time -- brought the first specimen to Holland from South Africa in 1774, but the declaration of prehnite's discovery was not made until after Prehn's death in 1788.
the dutch in south africa
On April 6, 1652, a victualling station was established at the Cape of Good Hope by Jan van Riebeeck on behalf of the Dutch East India Company.

For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the slowly expanding settlement was a Dutch possession. The Cape Colony was settled by European Calvinists, primarily from the Netherlands, but also some from Germany, France, Scotland, and elsewhere.

The Dutch settlers largely exterminated the San, the original inhabitants of Southern Africa and imported slaves from Indonesia, Madagascar and India. These slaves became the Cape Coloureds and Cape Malays of the Western Cape Province.