Boer History1655 at the Cape of Good Hope: Exploration, Free Gardeners, and Gonnema
Pressure at the Fort and the Kaapmans
The settlement that Jan van Riebeeck commanded was still small, but it was already more than a barracks. Brick was replacing frail wood; about twelve morgen of garden lay under hoe and plough; children played outside the walls; women kept house and hearth. Against that permanence the Kaapmans (Goringhaiquas) pushed hard. They made huts on the very margin of the moat and, when asked to move, answered that the ground was theirs and they would build where they chose. Unguarded tools and stores vanished. Brass buttons were cut from the clothing of children at play. Work parties could move safely only in companies and with arms in hand. [1] [3]
Van Riebeeck doubled the sentries and took extraordinary precautions. He believed Harry stood behind much of the mischief and that the Kaapmans followed that counsel. Sailors and soldiers among the settlers burned to avenge daily insults; the commander held them back, bound by orders to keep peace where he could. Yet he also saw a deeper truth: while the Kaapmans filled the peninsula, inland clans rich in cattle would not bring stock to trade, because there were constant feuds between them. The young settlement needed new friends beyond the mountain — not as conquerors for glory’s sake, but as a community that meant to stay, feed the fleets, and raise families at the Cape. [3]
The year opened quietly enough in the bay. Small craft such as the Tulp and the Roode Vos worked the islands and the mainland. In January the Gecroonde Leeuw arrived from the Netherlands, and the Draeck, Ter Schelling, and Muyden from Batavia; high officers on every deck made the fort a place of entertainment as well as of work. Opperkoopman Pieter de Goijer allowed ship’s people to help haul firewood from the forests. In February the Malacca, Oliphant, and Wapen van Hollandt brought two ministers — Petrus Mus and Johannes Campius — and two marriages followed in March: Elisabeth Statlanders to under-merchant Jacobus van den Kerckhoven on the 6th, and Meijnsgen Campen to secunde Frederick Verburg on the 9th. Permanent occupation was written not only in brick and garden, but in wedding tables inside the fort. [1] [2]
Jan Wintervogel and the Inland Expedition
On 15 March 1655 the settlement sent its first substantial inland exploring party. Jan Wintervogel — a cadet only one step above a common soldier, yet a man who had led explorers for the West India Company in Brazil, helped discover silver at Chiera (Zheira), and once looked out upon the Great South Sea — stepped forward with seven volunteers. The Council described him as a keen explorer and bush-ranger and promised handsome reward if he found anything of worth. They took provisions for three weeks, six pounds of tobacco, six pounds of copper bars, and beads as samples of what the Cape community could offer for cattle. Their charge was plain: learn the land, invite inland clans to friendship and trade, watch for minerals better than the worthless “silver” of earlier years, and test whether free men of the fort could leave the ditch and come home again. [1] [3]
Their path cannot be drawn with a surveyor’s line, but it ran northward toward the country of today’s Malmesbury, west of the Drakenstein mountains. They met a party of San of very small stature — wild people without huts or cattle, clad in small skins and speaking nearly as the Khoikhoi did — who raised bows until Wintervogel walked forward with tobacco in his hands; the arrows dropped, and the strangers accepted the gift. They also met Soaquas called Fishermen, enemies of Watermen and Saldanhars, who advanced fully armed but did not attack after beads and tobacco were given. Later they found small Khoikhoi parties who received them kindly, and a large horde some fifteen or sixteen miles out — seventy to eighty men strong — rich in cattle and ready to part with stock for flat copper and tobacco, yet none would come to the fort while the Goringhaiquas (Harry’s allies, the Kaapmans) still held the neighbourhood pastures. [1] [3]
One of the seven, Jan de Vos, died after eating too many bitter almonds. The rest returned after nineteen days, on the evening of 3 April, having been inland about fifty miles. They brought useful knowledge — and something greater for a people who meant to belong here. They proved that free men of the Cape settlement could leave the ditch, walk the interior, and come home again. That courage is the same spirit that later carried trek and farm deeper into the hinterland: not the parade of a foreign army, but the grit of a community learning its country. [1] [3]
Sterthemius, Van Goens, and the Spring Fleets
March and early April also brought the outward fleet under Councillor of India Pieter Sterthemius — Provintie, Phenix, Koukercken, Blommendael, Coningh Davidt, and Maeght van Enckhuijsen among them — a great body of hulls for the commander to refresh. Vegetables and fruit were plentiful; meat was not, for the Khoikhoi still refused serious trade. On 6 April, the third anniversary of the landing from the Fatherland, the appointed day of thanksgiving and prayer was kept, and the Word was preached by Hermanus Bushoff, minister of the Phenix. Next day van Riebeeck and Sterthemius walked inland with fifty or sixty soldiers, found four Kaapman camps with together about a thousand to twelve hundred sheep and three to four hundred cattle, and were offered only a small, apparently sickly lamb — which they declined. [1] [2]
The Tulp returned on 10 April from St Helena with two horses and a box of saddles — still far short of the six or eight the fort needed — and with the dry lesson that ships which had hurried past Cape abundance to chase pigs on the island had left plenty for scarcity. On 21 April the return fleet under Councillor Extraordinary Rijckloff van Goens anchored: Parel, Tertolen, Princess Roijael, Dordrecht, Gidion, Louijse, Dolphijn, and others expected. Van Goens took the settlement’s seal-skins for the homeward voyage, rode with the commander to the forest and the mineral diggings, and left little official paper of admiration. On the road home he conceived the famous scheme of cutting a canal across the isthmus between Table Bay and False Bay to make the peninsula an island — a plan the Seventeen later judged impracticable, and which van Riebeeck himself, after sleeping in the field in February 1656, would report would cost millions and still not stop Khoikhoi from swimming the ditch. [1] [2] [3]
Through those same spring weeks brickwork pressed hard. A kiln of about 250,000 bricks was fired; the commander hoped that by the next year all dwellings, storehouses, and guard-houses inside the fort — light wood from the Fatherland already dilapidated — would stand in permanent brick. Garden labour was increased so that ships compelled to call might always find greens. Higher toward the mountain the soil grew richer, though roots of underwood made every morgen hard won. The fort was becoming a brick town in miniature even while cattle trade still hung on Harry’s shadow. [1]
The Return of Harry and the Revival of Trade
On 23 June 1655 Harry reappeared at the fort with fifty strangers and forty head of cattle for sale. He offered weak excuses for his long absence and denied any share in the cattle raid or the murder of David Janssen. Van Riebeeck, glad for peace and stock, received him with open hands and pretended to believe him. Almost at once a brisk cattle trade returned and ran through the winter — meat and breeding stock for a settlement that lived by garden and kraal as much as by magazine. Within days Harry was delivering fat beasts and sheep almost daily; by the end of June he had caused some sixty-seven beasts and thirteen or fourteen sheep to be brought and sold, earning copper wire and tobacco as brokerage while the Company’s herd climbed past sixty head even as animals were slaughtered for the homeward yacht Prins te Paert. [1] [3]
Harry’s counsel was as sharp as his trade. He urged the destruction or transport of the Kaapmans so that inland Saldanhars might come freely; he pointed to Company cattle still among Kaapman herds; he ate again from the commander’s table and slept under Company protection. Van Riebeeck pardoned him outwardly, kept him in doubt as to any seizure plan, and used the winter boom while watching every word. Toward spring the trading people moved off the peninsula, and Harry proposed that he himself go inland with a trading party. For a community building a future in stock and tillage, the offer was hard to refuse. Copper and tobacco could become herds; herds could become the independence of free households. [1] [3]
Island logistics kept pace with the bay trade. In late June assistant Jan Wouterssen took seven more sheep to Robben Island, raising the flock toward a hundred and five; by early July, after a stormy cruise to Saldanha, the island held about one hundred and fourteen sheep, and pigs there had increased from four to nineteen since 5 June. Whales were seen daily in thousands in Table Bay and Saldanha. On Saldanha’s islet the men found a French letter dated 20 March 1655 from officers of the ship Beer to the commander of the St. Joris — another reminder that foreign flags still knew the west-coast bays. [1]
The Council’s Decision and the Expedition to the Interior
Frederick Verburg was away in the Tulp, so no junior merchant sat at the table. Beside the commander stood the pilot, the sergeant, and two corporals; clerk Roelof de Man kept the record. On 6 September they resolved to send inland the interpreter Harry and nine soldiers under Corporal Willem Muller, with provisions and trade goods — flat copper, brass wire, beads, pipes, and tobacco — packed on oxen. Harry left three of his own beasts at the fort and Claas Das as interpreter in his place, with other Khoikhoi to fetch firewood for food, tobacco, and arrack. Almost every man at the fort offered to go; there was no lack of volunteers. [1] [3]
They left on the afternoon of 7 September 1655, accompanied by Khoikhoi men, women, and children — nine Europeans with about 250 lb of bread, 80 lb of bacon, three cheeses, and kegs of arrack and brandy. Wet weather held them near the fort at first. Forest workers soon reported theft of food by Harry’s people and a disquieting request that the soldiers unload their firearms at night while Harry kept watch; the commander sent Corporal Sijmon Huijbrechtssen with reinforcements and fresh provisions, ordered loaded guns and a close watch, and told Muller that if Harry loitered he should return with part of the copper and let Harry go on alone. The party crossed toward False Bay and kept for a time along the sea. Muller’s journal recorded, near the sand dunes of False Bay, how Khoikhoi women took green twigs, fell prostrate upon a great flat rock, and spoke words the Christians could not understand, pointing upward and saying Hette Hie as if in worship. The land was already full of meaning before the settlers named its farms. [1] [3]
When provisions ran low the Europeans turned back, leaving Harry the merchandise and one Company ox. They returned on 5 October after about four weeks, having made no great geographical discovery but having risked copper and tobacco on credit as an experiment. Harry did not reappear until 8 December, with thirteen head of cattle. It was soon clear — from Kaapmans, Saldanhars, and the new interpreter Doman — that he had won a far larger herd for the Company’s goods and kept the best for himself, while claiming that bags of copper and all the tobacco had been stolen by night. The sting was real — yet the winter trade he had reopened, and the path inland he had walked, still served the settlement’s need for stock. A people learning to live from cattle and copper could not afford to close every doubtful door. [1] [3]
Gonnema and the Arrival of the Cattle
While Harry was inland, a clan rich in cattle came down from the country north and east of Saldanha Bay under the chief Gonnema — called the Black Captain by the Dutch for his dark features. In November no fewer than ten or twelve thousand head of horned cattle grazed within an hour’s walk of the fort. One of Gonnema’s camps at Rondebosch held fully two hundred huts in a great circle, the gaps closed with wattled fences so that the whole formed an enormous corral for the night herds. From that sight the Cape borrowed a word already known in India and America — kraal — for both a native village and a cattle enclosure. It would become a word of the land’s own tongue in later Cape speech. [1] [3]
From Gonnema’s people and other Saldanhars the settlers obtained three or four hundred head of horned cattle and as many sheep — and might have secured a thousand of each had copper plate not run out. Thick copper wire brought less success; thin Indian lojang still less. Day after day in early December the journal counted beasts and sheep into the Company’s kraals: fifty-two head on one excellent day; twenty-seven beasts and thirteen from Harry on another; totals climbing toward three hundred and thirty-two cattle young and old and more than five hundred sheep, many of them ferried by the new Robbejacht to Robben Island, where by late December the flock approached six hundred. This was not the triumph of a raiding army; it was barter that filled the settlement’s kraals and promised milk, meat, and draught power for a community that meant to farm. [1] [3]
Rondebosch itself — the round thorn-bush place behind Devil’s Peak — was already marked in settler eyes as ground where grain might stand when the south-easters wrecked the valley crops. On 4 October the commander rode behind the mountain while a fierce south-easter packed cloud over Table Mountain and tore the bay; in the forest valleys he found “the loveliest and most beautiful weather in the world,” rich soil, and rushing fresh rivers. Lack of men, he noted, alone kept those valleys uncultivated — and free families, not expensive Company houses, seemed the remedy. The great cattle camps of 1655 fixed that neighbourhood in memory as pasture and promise: a step from fort gardens toward the free farms of the Liesbeek that would follow within two years. [1] [3]
Interpreters and the Cultivation of Relationships
Trade ran through two Khoikhoi who had taken Dutch into their mouths. One beachranger, sent to Dassen Island to learn the language among the sealers, was called Klaas Das (Claas Das). The other, a Kaapman of open face, the commander nicknamed Doman (or Domine) because he looked as innocent as a dominie. He had lived among the settlers and was then trusted as faithful to their interest — a trust the years would later test, but in 1655 a sign that the Cape community already wove bonds beyond the wall. On 12 December Doman, questioned aside, confirmed that Harry alone with his gang had stolen the Company’s cattle two years before and that Harry’s sons had murdered the Dutch boy; he urged that Harry be seized on his next visit so that his own herds might be produced for his liberty. [1] [3]
Without such bridges the settlement could not buy the stock that made free life possible. Copper and tobacco moved one way; cattle and sheep the other. Free household production needed both the plough and the herd — and people who could speak across the fire to keep that exchange alive. Late December also showed how fragile the peace among Khoikhoi bands remained: Kaapmans and the Black Captain’s people fell out with Saldanhars over brokerage profits, cooks’ wood-carriers left the fort hoping to share captured stock, and the commander noted that Kaapman obstruction still blocked deeper inland contact — even the distant dream of people from Monomotapa or Butua reaching the fort overland. [1]
The Launch of the Robbejacht and the Galiot Roode Vos
In September a cutter of about sixteen or seventeen lasts — roughly eighteen or twenty tons — was launched and named the Robbejacht. She was built almost entirely of Cape timber, with oak boards only where ships had supplied them: fifty-one and a half Amsterdam feet from stem to stern, fourteen feet ten inches broad, six feet deep, fitted for sail and oars, with a cabin for the crew. Her purpose was work among the sealing stations and bays of Saldanha, relieving a galiot. Local wood under a local keel was a quiet declaration: this community could make what it needed from the land it was learning to call home. The galiot Roode Vos was sent on to Batavia, where she was needed. [1] [3]
During the winter the other galiot of the place went again to St Helena for fruit trees, pigs, and horses, then on to Madagascar to reopen the rice trade begun at Antongil. Secunde Frederick Verburg sailed in her, leaving a wife of only five months — Meijnsgen Campen, married 9 March. The Tulp never returned. Later news told of fourteen slaves and rice taken aboard, then silence until March 1657, when four of her crew came back in the French ship Marichal and reported the galiot wrecked in a hurricane on 2 December 1655. Fever on St Mary’s Island took Verburg and eleven others. The settlement mourned its own — officers and seamen bound to Cape households — even as it kept building. [2] [3]
Sealing itself was already a seasonal science. Dassen Island had been nearly stripped by March, when Jan Wouterssen and the Roode Vos brought back some six thousand skins and withdrew the station for the season. By December the Robbejacht was ferrying sheep to Robben Island and skins and train-oil from Dassen — about nineteen hundred skins and two firkins of oil on one late-month return — while assistants were ordered not to frighten breeding seals too soon. Whales in thousands and seals on the rocks were the peninsula’s other harvest beside cabbages and calves. [1]
The Directors’ Resolve and the Introduction of Free Families
In this same year the directors resolved to locate free families on ground about the fort, to lessen Company cost and to plant households that would defend and feed themselves. The plan had answered in India; there was reason to hope it would answer at the Cape. Freemen would help hold the station so the paid force could shrink; they would grow food for sale as cheaply as hired hands could raise it. Van Riebeeck’s own letters through 1655 pressed the same logic: the best free burghers might be steady servants already at the Cape; a few households along the Liesbeek would do at first; without circulating coin no inn could open and few families would choose a “moneyless path”; without slaves the experiment would struggle. [2] [3]
While full arrangements matured, van Riebeeck gave the most steady Company servants leave to work little gardens of their own and to sell produce freely when ships lay in the bay. Gardens together approached twelve morgen, ditched and planted with wild thorn against beasts, with border strips of forest trees and St Helena saplings for windbreaks. Here, already, was the heartbeat of free Cape life: not a parade-ground identity, but families with soil under their nails, selling cabbage and milk to the fleets that made the settlement necessary — and prosperous. By late December the commander noted plainly that pigs, fowls, ducks, and geese needed freemen to thrive; Company “gentle folk” found such work beneath them, while freemen would serve excellently where all livestock and crops already proved the climate kind. [1] [3]
The Lease of Cows and the Rise of Annetje de Boerin
Hendrik Boom, chief gardener, kept a house in the great garden and a name for industry. His wife, used to dairy work in the Fatherland, the people called from her calling Annetje de boerin — Annetje the farmer-woman. On 1 October 1655 the council, after a long resolution on neglected Company herds, dying calves, and milk that never reached ordinary seamen, leased her the Company’s milch cows — ten in number — at fifteen gulden a year per cow. Calves remained Company property and must be reared; the commander’s table might take butter at ten stivers the pound, sweet milk at four, and buttermilk at two the tankard, but not so much as to strip the farmer of profit; she might sell freely to ships’ people at the best price she could get; Cape residents paid fixed rates and might not hawk to the fleets. It was the first transaction of its kind in South Africa — and it wore the period nickname boerin (farmer-woman). [1] [3]
That lease was no side note. The council’s own reasons read like a charter of private production: personal interest would save calves that wage-herds neglected; milk sold for small coin would refresh sailors who never trusted the sorted casks sent aboard; butter made at the Cape might in time replace Dutch imports; lease money might cover the copper spent on barter cattle; and married tenants might stay instead of yearning for India — “the free families could be offered the means to self-advancement.” Other married people preferred to watch how the gardener’s wife fared before taking cows themselves. Households, hospitality, and food production — the soft strength of a people putting down roots — grew beside the fort walls. She was later privileged to open a house of accommodation for visitors from the ships; a like licence went to the wife of Sergeant Jan van Harwarden. [1] [3]
Births, Brick, and the Year’s Households
On 8 December 1655 Maria de la Queillerie was delivered of her second son born at the Cape — actually her fourth son in all, after Anthonij and Lambertus born in Europe and Abraham born in the fort in 1653. The same afternoon Meijnsgen Campen, wife of Frederick Verburg, bore a daughter, the first girl born at the Cape; the couple had been married exactly nine months less one day. The Verburg child died on the night of the 16th. The van Riebeeck infant would not live many months either. Joy and burial followed each other inside the same brick walls that the kilns were raising against the next winter. [1] [2]
Brick-making closed the year as it had opened it. By the last day of December fire was lit in the first dry-season kiln of about 400,000 bricks, with another of at least 250,000 nearly ready. Horses for hauling firewood remained the bottleneck. Inside the fort, wood from the Fatherland continued to rot and collapse; Cape beams and planks came down daily from the forest wagon-road to raise houses meant to need no looking after for a lifetime. The fourth year ended not with a ceremony of departure, but with smoke from the kilns, sheep on Robben Island, and a commander still calculating how free households might hold the valleys the south-easter could not spoil. [1]
The Refreshment of Ships and the Arrival of the English
Before 1655 closed, eleven ships outward and twelve homeward called and found ample refreshment. Vegetables were more than enough. Two English ships also received liberal supply. One, eight months from London and half-ruined by scurvy, put her weakest men into care on shore, where they were tended as carefully as if they had worn the Company’s colours. Officers sat as guests at the fort. Garden produce stood at about two-pence a day for each man for as many vegetables as he would eat — a settler economy feeding the sea roads of the world. [3]
The English ship that lay in mid-December — named in the journal Jan Anthamis or Jan Baptist, under Captain Thomas Poth and merchant Nathaniel Davidts, five months out from London via Cape Verde — landed ten or twelve of her sickest in the Company’s hospital, took greens daily, and bargained hard for cattle beyond the two cows and four sheep first allowed. Van Riebeeck answered with garden abundance and careful refusal: some forty capital ships were expected before March, and six beasts each would demand two hundred and forty head the fort did not yet hold. In the end a third beast was granted. When they sailed on the 29th they insisted on paying despite a first offer of gift; the account closed at eighty-six reals — three cattle at six reals, ten sheep at one, sixteen days’ garden produce for forty-eight men at two reals a day, and 1,290 lb of rice at two reals the hundredweight. The commander noted that future English callers should pay more — at least ten reals a beast and three stivers a man daily for greens. [1] [3]
This was the founding purpose of the Cape made flesh: a farming community at the hinge of East and West, saving lives with greens and fresh meat, building boats of local timber, leasing cows to a gardener’s wife, and sending volunteers inland under a Brazilian bush-ranger’s lead. The people who grew that food and kept those herds were not a temporary military detail. They were part of a European community learning to live permanently at the Cape — and 1655 was the year that learning took the shape of exploration, kraal, free garden, and the first written steps toward free families on the land.