Boer History1654 at the Cape of Good Hope: Famine, St Helena, Peace, and the First Vines
The Outward Fleet and Ryniers’s Departure
In December 1653 the ships Naarden, Breda, and Lam had arrived from Texel. They received vegetables in plenty, but only three oxen could be spared for them. Early in 1654 they were followed by the Vrede, Kalf, and Draak — these six ships forming the outward-bound fleet of the season. The Vrede belied her name: her officers quarrelled so violently that the council placed someone in authority over them all. Secunde Jacob Ryniers was chosen and given the provisional rank of merchant so that he could command the ship. After his departure the office of secunde at the Cape remained vacant for a time. [3]
The outward season thus stripped the fort of its only officer of merchant rank just as food anxiety peaked. Gardens could still cut greens for passing crews; meat was another matter. The cattle raid of October 1653 and the empty copper bins had left the kraals thin. Every ox sent aboard an Indiaman was an ox not drawing timber or breeding for the next call. The six ships of the season took what little the commander dared spare — and left him waiting for a return fleet that, unknown to him, had already been ordered not to come.
Scarcity, Robben Island, and the Beachrangers
The return fleet from Batavia was anxiously awaited. Vegetables were abundant; almost everything else was nearly exhausted. The few sheep reserved for the fleet were placed on Robben Island, where the pasturage was excellent. European rabbits and conies were turned loose there. A small party of men was stationed on the island to collect seal skins and oil and to look after the sheep — pasture, prison-to-be, and sealing station braided into one small outpost across the bay. [3]
Cattle trade with the Khoikhoi remained almost dead after the October 1653 raid. Flat copper — the only sort in demand — was exhausted. Harry was said to be inland; beachrangers were seen with Gogosoa’s people; stolen Company cattle were recognised among herds behind the mountains. Sailors and soldiers wanted revenge for David Janssen, but van Riebeeck would permit no hostility. Bound by orders to inspire confidence by kindness, he even allowed the robbers to shake hands with him and repurchased two or three of the stolen cows. By midsummer the Goringhaiquas came about the fort as freely as before — though still unwilling to barter cattle for anything in the magazine — and most of the beachrangers returned to live near the fort, mainly collecting firewood for the labourers. [3]
Kindness was policy under duress. The commander’s private calculation still ran toward seizure and servitude if ever the Heeren XVII loosened the rein; the magazine’s empty copper shelves made peaceful trade almost impossible in any case. Peace around the moat in early 1654 was therefore a suspended sentence — beachrangers at the woodpile, stolen cows somewhere inland, and the settlement eating greens while it watched the eastern horizon for sails that did not come.
Second Anniversary — 6 April 1654
The 6th of April 1654, second anniversary of the arrival of the party of occupation, was kept as a day of thanksgiving to God for the measure of success attained. Van Riebeeck wished the day observed as a holiday in perpetuity. In 1654 the distress — scarcity of bread and meat, anxiety for the return fleet — made them keep it as a sacred day; they had not so kept 6 April 1653. There could be no feast: they abstained from labour and listened to a long sermon, and thus made the most of the occasion. [3]
Two years from the Drommedaris landing, the settlement marked time with empty hands. No ox-roast, no free wine, no parade of plenty — only rest from labour and a long reading in the hall where, eighteen months earlier, war despatches and cattle tallies had filled the same hours. The anniversary was a confession as much as a celebration: the station still stood, and that alone was enough to thank for.
Two Meals a Day and the Galiot Tulp
By 15 April 1654 imported provisions were so nearly gone that the people were reduced to two meals a day. All eyes turned seaward; no sail appeared from the east. On the 18th the galiot Tulp arrived from home with crushing news: secret orders had been sent to Batavia in 1653 that this year’s return fleet was not to call at the Cape, but to push on to St Helena and wait there for instructions. There remained only enough bread for five or six weeks on the reduced scale, and no peas, beans, barley, or rice. [3]
The council immediately resolved to send the Tulp to St Helena to obtain food from the return ships. She sailed in haste, taking clerk Frederick Verburg to represent the settlement’s condition to the officers of the fleet, and assistant gardener Willem Gerrits to bring young apple and orange trees from the island. War strategy in Europe had diverted the Indiamen; survival at the Cape now depended on a single galiot racing west to intercept them. [3]
The Tulp returned from St Helena on 11 June 1654 after only forty-one days. She had found the return fleet at anchor and obtained rice and other provisions enough for immediate wants. Frederick Verburg, who had left as a clerk, returned a junior merchant — raised to that rank by the admiral and council of the fleet, who also appointed him secunde at the Cape. The gardener brought young fruit trees from those long planted on St Helena and by then growing nearly wild — living grafts of another island into Table Valley soil. [3]
Forty-one days saved the settlement. The empty secundship left by Ryniers was filled by a man promoted at sea; the empty bins took rice from ships that had never meant to feed the Cape this year. The secret order that nearly starved Table Bay also proved that the settlement could, under pressure, reach into the Atlantic logistics of the Company and pull survival back through the entrance.
The Tulp on the South-East Coast and Madagascar
After this the Tulp was sent to explore the coast of Africa from the Great Fish River to Delagoa Bay, then to proceed to Madagascar for a cargo of rice. In 1653 a Jesuit missionary, Martinus Martini (a German returning from China to Europe), had told van Riebeeck that gold, ambergris, ivory, ebony, and slaves were to be had along the south-eastern coast; that the Portuguese sent two or three small vessels yearly from Mozambique to Rio dos Reys and Os Medãos do Ouro; and that few Portuguese were to be found south of Cape Corrientes. Van Riebeeck’s instructions to Verburg quoted Linschoten as well as Martini. [3]
The galiot ran along the coast in the winter season, often in stormy weather, with a heavy surf on the shore. After leaving Mossel Bay there was no further communication with the land; upon reaching the latitude of Delagoa Bay she stood east for Madagascar. At the bay of Antongil the islanders were friendly, and a considerable quantity of rice was purchased, with which the galiot returned to the Cape. The voyage did nothing to correct errors on the chart — but it opened a food line beyond the uncertain barter of Table Valley and the diverted return fleets of wartime. [3]
Ambition and hunger ran together. Gold and slaves were the talk of passengers and old books; rice was the cargo that mattered when the magazines ran low. The Tulp’s winter coasting — surf, storms, no landing after Mossel Bay — was exploration on a short leash, always bending east toward grain rather than inland toward empires that existed mostly on paper at the fort.
July Relief: Prize Ship, Rice, and the First Asian Exile
In July 1654 two vessels brought supplies. First came the yacht Goudsbloem from home, bringing an English sloop of seventy tons captured on the passage. Her name was changed from Merchant to Kaap Vogel; too lightly timbered for this coast, she was sent on to Java. A few days later the yacht Haas arrived from Batavia with a large quantity of rice. [3]
With the Haas came the first of a class of persons afterwards numerous in South Africa, whose descendants form an important element in the population of Cape Town. Four Asiatics had been sentenced by the High Court of Justice of Batavia to banishment and hard labour for life; three were sent in the Haas to Mauritius (then a Company possession), and one was brought to the fort Good Hope — the first Asian exile landed at the Cape under Company sentence. [3]
July thus filled more than bins. A prize renamed for the Cape, rice from Batavia, and a sentenced man from the Asian courts arrived in the same breath. The settlement was no longer only a European garden camp with Khoikhoi neighbours; it was a node on a coercive circuit that already linked Batavia, Mauritius, and Table Bay.
Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving — 23 July 1654
Because of the war with England, the Governor-General and Council of India ordered a day of prayer that God would bless their cause and of thanksgiving for mercies received. In Asian waters they had taken five rich prizes and lost no ship. Van Riebeeck held that the dwellers in the fort Good Hope had special cause for thanks: they had been in sore distress for food, and God had sent abundance; He had favoured the Tulp’s forty-one-day voyage to St Helena and back; He had given the Goudsbloem a safe passage and an English prize; and He had filled the sails of the Haas so that the stores were full. For all these reasons 23 July 1654 was set apart and observed as a holy day. [3]
April’s thin thanksgiving under two meals a day and July’s full holy day under full stores framed the same year. Between them lay the St Helena dash, Madagascar rice, a prize sloop, and the knowledge that wartime orders from Batavia could starve a station the directors still expected to refresh the fleets. Gratitude at the Cape was concrete: bread again, rice again, a second officer again.
Peace with England — August 1654
On 15 August 1654 the yacht Vlieland arrived from Texel after a very rapid passage, with news to 19 May. She was sent by the directors to announce the peace concluded between the States and the Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate). Henceforth the English were to be treated as friends: one article of the peace allowed ships of either nation, in the harbours of the other, freely to purchase stores, provisions, and other necessaries. [3]
A few months later the English ship East India Merchant, bound to Bantam, put into Table Bay and was liberally supplied with vegetables. Her officers were entertained by the commander; the fort’s officers were invited on board in return. Presents were exchanged and a little trade carried on. The same flag that 1653’s war despatches had taught the fort to fear now dined at the Cape as a customer and guest. [3]
Peace unlocked tonnage. Without the same wartime risk the Company could push a large fleet east, and Table Bay would see the proof before the year was out — not as abstract strategy, but as hull after hull needing greens, water, and men who could still stand.
Scurvy Fleets and the Cape as a Refreshment Port
Peace with England allowed the Company to send a large fleet to India without the same wartime risk. In a short time no fewer than twenty-one vessels called at Table Bay on their way east. All were supplied with vegetables in abundance. Some ships had lost as many as fifty men on the passage and dropped anchor with over a hundred helpless from scurvy. Fresh provisions here saved hundreds of lives yearly. Detention was limited because the feeblest men were often put ashore and healthy ones taken in their place. Officers chasing a premium of six hundred gulden for a six-month passage to Batavia had sometimes run past without calling; when this became known, the temptation was removed by adding to the six months the time spent at the Cape. [3]
Here the founding argument of 1652 became flesh at the hinge of East and West. A little republic could not keep great fleets afloat if scurvy emptied the lower decks year after year — ranks filled heavily from foreign countries, voyages measured in dead and crippled. Table Bay’s gardens and kraals were not an ornament of empire; they were the work of a settled community — and a medical and naval necessity. Twenty-one ships in one season made the case stronger than any memorial to the Heeren XVII: the Cape worked when it had food to give.
The contrast with April’s two meals a day could not have been sharper. The same fort that had begged rice from St Helena now stripped its beds for outward fleets. Men too weak to work were landed; men still sound were taken off. The outpost became a filter in the bloodstream of the VOC route — a place where the dying were sorted from the living before the long run to Batavia continued.
Officers who once raced past for a six-hundred-gulden premium learned that time spent refreshing at the Cape would no longer count against them. That single rule change mattered as much as cabbage rows. It turned a call at Table Bay from a career risk into a duty, and it aligned the private interest of skippers with the public interest of keeping crews alive. The gardens of 1652 were planted for this press of hulls; 1654 was the first year the press arrived in force after peace reopened the sea.
Sealing, Horses, and the First Vine Stocks
During this summer from twenty to thirty men were kept employed at Dassen Island and Saldanha Bay in connection with the sealing establishments, and the galiot Roode Vos was engaged pretty constantly going back and forth. The commander believed that the profits on the seal skins alone would more than defray the Company’s expenses at the Cape; the directors did not endorse his opinion. Still the boats went out, the try-works and drying grounds worked, and the west-coast islands remained a second economy beside the gardens of Table Valley. [3]
The Tulp was sent to St Helena for horses taken past in a ship from Batavia, and to try to recover those set ashore there from Van Teylingen’s fleet, but she returned with only two. Mounted strength at the Cape stayed thin — a reminder of how few horses had stood ready even in the October 1653 pursuit. [3]
It was in this season that the first vine stocks were introduced at the Cape. They came from the borders of the Rhine and were received by one of the outward-bound ships. What began as cuttings in a ship’s care would, in later years, root the Cape’s wine culture; in 1654 they were only another experiment in a garden that had already learned which winds destroyed peas and which slopes held cabbages for the fleets. [3]
Seal skins, two horses, Rhine vines: the year’s secondary cargoes looked small beside rice and scurvy relief, yet they pointed forward — island industry, mounted range, and a crop that would outlast the first wooden houses.
Native Policy after the 1653 Raid
Since the beachrangers’ robbery of October 1653, very little cattle trade had been done. The Khoikhoi were still treated kindly — only because the commander had no choice. Already the policy toward the natives looked different in the mother country and in South Africa. The directors wrote that the actual murderer of David Janssen should be put to death if discovered, and that Harry might if necessary be sent as a prisoner to Batavia, but that none of the other beachrangers were to be molested; only the same number of cattle as stolen should be seized, and only from the robbers. [3]
Van Riebeeck replied that the real murderer could not be detected and that the robbers had nothing left to seize. Retaliation on their allies would mean war unless the whole were made prisoners at once. The way to rid the settlement of idle robbers, in his view, would be to reduce them to servitude — provocation enough, he held, to justify it — while the gain would be ten or twelve hundred breeding cattle and many slaves for the islands and Batavia. Board-room restraint in the Netherlands and the commander’s harder local calculation stood in open tension. [3]
The Kaapmans had of late visited Table Valley in large parties, and their conduct had every appearance of hostility. The Europeans were replacing frail wooden houses with substantial brick buildings; they had turned about twelve morgen of ground into gardens. Dull as outsiders might think the Khoikhoi, they could see that this industry meant permanent occupation — not a seasonal camp like the Haarlem castaways. They were willing for Europeans to trade, even to remain for months, but not to be excluded forever from pastures. They made huts on the very margin of the moat; when asked to move, they answered that the ground was theirs and they would build where they chose. Unguarded goods were stolen; brass buttons were cut from children’s clothing outside the fort. Workmen moved only in armed companies. The commander doubled sentries and took extraordinary precautions, convinced that Harry was at the bottom of the mischief and that the Kaapmans followed his advice. [3]
So 1654’s peace with England abroad sat beside a rawer peace at home: gardens that looked like permanence, a moat edged with Khoikhoi huts, and a commander forbidden to strike as hard as he wished. The year that proved the Cape could save scurvy fleets also proved that permanent occupation would not be accepted without friction.