The Cape of Good Hope was discovered by Ba.rtholomew Diaz, a Portuguese navigator, in 1487, but it did not occur to any European nation to make a settlement there until one hundred and sixty.years after that date. On the 6th April, 1652, Jan van Riebeeck founded the earliest settlement at the foot of Tab1e Mountain. Holland was at that time at the height of her political and commercial prosperity. The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, had acquired a practica~ monopoly of the sea-borne traffic with India and the East, and it was in order to provide a port of call for the outgoing and returning vessels of this Company that a tawnship was established and a castle built at the Cape of Good Hope in 1666, under the nsme and title of "the frontier fortress of India".