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 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. [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. 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]
Jan Wintervogel and the Inland Expedition
On 15 March 1655 the settlement sent its first substantial inland exploring party. Jan Wintervogel — a man who had led explorers for the West India Company in Brazil, seen silver discovered there, and once looked out upon the Great South Sea — stepped forward with seven volunteers. 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, and watch for minerals that might strengthen a lasting home. [3]
Their path cannot be drawn with a surveyor’s line, but it ran toward the country of today’s Malmesbury. They met a party of San who raised bows until Wintervogel walked forward with tobacco in his hands; the arrows dropped, and the strangers accepted the gift. Later they found small Khoikhoi parties who received them kindly, and a large horde rich in cattle, ready to part with stock for flat copper and tobacco — yet none would come to the fort while the Goringhaiquas still held the neighbourhood. One of the seven, Jan de Vos, died after eating too many bitter almonds. The rest returned after nineteen days. [3]
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. [3]
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. [3]
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. The commander called a council to weigh the risk against the promise of a people who would not always live from Company rations alone. [3]
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. 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 four oxen. This was settlement logistics: men of the Cape community, pack animals, and a hope of cattle for the kraals. [3]
They left on 7 September 1655, accompanied by Khoikhoi men, women, and children. They crossed toward False Bay and kept for a time along the sea. When provisions ran low the Europeans turned back, leaving Harry to go on with the merchandise. Four weeks brought the soldiers little discovery — save one scene Muller set down: at a great flat rock in their path, Khoikhoi women took green branches, fell prostrate upon the stone, and spoke words the Christians could not understand, pointing upward as if in worship. The land was already full of meaning before the settlers named its farms. [3]
Harry did not return until 8 December, with thirteen head of cattle. It was soon clear he had won a far larger herd for the Company’s goods and kept the best for himself. 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. [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. [3]
From Gonnema’s people 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 not run out. The sheep went to Robben Island as a reserve where the grass was excellent. 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. [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. 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.
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. The other, a Kaapman of open face, the commander nicknamed Doman 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. [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.
The Launch of the Robbejacht and the Galiot Roode Vos
In September a cutter of eighteen or twenty tons was launched and named the Robbejacht. She was built almost entirely of Cape timber — forest and craft of the settlement itself — for work among the sealing stations. The galiot Roode Vos was sent on to Batavia. 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. [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. 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 a French ship 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. [3]
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. [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. 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. [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. The council leased her the Company’s cows at fifteen gulden a year per cow. She was to supply milk and butter to the commander at fixed rates without being stripped of all she made, and she might sell freely to ships’ people at the best price she could get. It was the first transaction of its kind in South Africa — and it wore the period nickname boerin (farmer-woman). [3]
That lease was no side note. It was the settlement recognising that a woman’s skill with cattle could enrich the whole community; that private enterprise belonged at the Cape; that the road from servant to free producer ran through butter, gardens, and honest sale. Her dairy lease was an early experiment in private production at the Cape.
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. Households, hospitality, and food production — the soft strength of a people putting down roots — grew beside the fort walls. [3]
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]
This was the founding purpose of the Cape made flesh: a Christian farming community at the hinge of East and West, saving lives with greens and fresh meat. The people who grew that food were not a temporary military detail. They were part of a European community learning to live permanently at the Cape.