Boer History1656 at the Cape of Good Hope: Hospital, Jetty, and Rondebosch Grain
The Hospital in the Hornwork
In the early part of 1656 a large hospital was completed in which sick sailors and soldiers could be properly lodged and cared for. It stood in the enclosure — the hornwork — in front of the fort. For years the settlement had refreshed fleets with greens and meat; now it could hold the broken bodies of the sea under a roof of its own. English scurvy cases had already been tended as carefully as Company men. The hospital made that mercy permanent — a Christian duty at the hinge of East and West, and a practical necessity if Table Bay was to remain the VOC’s chosen resting place. [3]
A settlement that builds a hospital is a settlement that expects the next fleet, and the one after that. The sick comforter, the gardens, the dairy, and now a proper ward: the pieces of a lasting community were locking into place beside the moat.
The Wooden Jetty into Table Bay
With the hospital standing, the commander turned to a wooden jetty — to ease communication with the shipping and to let seamen get water to their boats without the old scramble through the surf. Large and heavy beams were cut in the forest at Newlands and hauled to the beach. There they were formed into square trunks, ends fitted across one another as log huts are built in Canada. The trunks were set fifteen feet apart in a straight line out into the bay; as each was put together it was filled with stones until it stood as a solid pier. Upon those piers a heavy staging was laid. [3]
Two years of labour — and help from the crews of calling ships — made an exceedingly solid structure: like the wooden bridges that stand ice and freshet on a Canadian river. Cape timber, Cape stone, Cape hands. The jetty was not an ornament of empire; it was the settlement’s handshake with every Indiaman that needed water and life. [3]
The Nachtglas and Tristan da Cunha
After the Roode Vos went to India, the galiot Nachtglas was kept at the Cape for general service. Among other tasks she was sent to examine the islands of Tristan da Cunha, to learn whether they could serve in time of war. The report was unfavourable: no harbour was found. The settlement’s horizon stretched far into the South Atlantic — and then folded back to the work that mattered most: gardens, stock, and the bay at its feet. [3]
The Canal Dream and Ryklof van Goens
There was at this time much talk of cutting a wide, deep canal across the isthmus between Table Bay and False Bay — of turning the Cape promontory into an island. The idea came from Ryklof van Goens, admiral of a return fleet, who spent a short time at the Cape. After close inspection the commander reported that the plan would cost millions and would be of little use as a means of confining the Khoikhoi to the mainland and leaving the Europeans undisturbed on an artificial island. [3]
The settlement would not be secured by a fantasy ditch. It would be secured by grain that stood the wind, by free families on garden ground, and by the slow courage of people who meant to stay.
Plants, Animals, and the Islands
Nearly every garden plant of Europe and India was already cultivated at the Cape, though potatoes and maize had not yet arrived. Seeds attained great perfection here; large quantities went yearly to Batavia. Fruit trees of many kinds had been brought in. Young oaks and firs came growing in boxes from Europe; vines from the Rhine provinces and from France; even strawberries and blackberries from the Fatherland. Foreign animals already at the settlement included horses from Java and pigs, sheep, dogs, and rabbits from Europe. Rams and ewes were selected from the best flocks in Holland and sent out to try the Cape. Rabbits were ordered loose on the islands — but not on the mainland, where they could wreck the crops. [3]
This was the quiet material base of the settlement: seed that thrived, stock that bred, timber that grew. Gardens and kraals were already being stocked from two oceans and the soil of the Cape itself.
Rondebosch Grain behind Devil’s Peak
Every season wheat and barley had been sown near the fort, and every season the crop had failed. Just as the grain ripened, the south-east winds swept the valley and destroyed it. Yet even when a perfect storm blew at the fort, there was often little more than a pleasant breeze behind Devil’s Peak. The woodcutters said the wind never rose to a gale there; the commander verified it himself. He determined to try grain in that lee. [3]
At a place where a round grove of thorn trees stood — first called Ronde Doorn Bossien, afterwards Rondebosch — a plot was laid under the plough. Wheat, oats, and barley were sown as an experiment. A small guard house of sods held a couple of men to watch the ground. The experiment succeeded: the grain thrived and yielded a very large return. [3]
Rondebosch entered the map of settler memory not only as Gonnema’s cattle ground of the year before, but as the first sure cornland of the Cape community. From thorn-bush to wheatfield marked where grain could stand near the Cape.
Harry, the Plough Chain, and the Pasture
The pilfering habits of some Khoikhoi had long annoyed the settlers; until now the commander had not gone so far as to punish offenders. The beachrangers in Table Valley were held to be under Harry, by then a rich captain with a large herd purchased — so van Riebeeck stated — with the Company’s goods. One day a plough was left in the garden with a chain attached; the chain soon vanished. It could be of no use to the thieves except as a deliberate annoyance. Van Riebeeck caused three head of Harry’s cattle to be seized and announced he would keep them until the chain was restored. Harry protested innocence; the commander held firm. Before long the stolen article came back, and the cattle were released. [3]
The next quarrel was pasture. There was not grass enough near the fort for Harry’s cattle and the Company’s. Van Riebeeck told him he must move. Harry answered that the ground was his. The commander replied that the Company had taken possession and would not permit him to remain unless he sold some of his oxen. Then van Riebeeck proposed a plan meant to profit both sides: Harry should become a great cattle dealer, supplying ten head for each large ship and five for each small ship entering the bay, and one ox and one sheep every fourth day for the settlement — buying inland and taking copper and tobacco at a fair profit. Harry consented, then broke the contract after the very first delivery by moving away. [3]
Many of the poorest of Gogosoa’s people, and the beachrangers, still lived in Table Valley, cutting and carrying fuel and doing light labour for food. The edge between settler kraal and Khoikhoi camp remained uneasy — a tension that free farms on the Liesbeek would soon inherit.
Free Gardens and Families — May 1656
The settlement was expanding. In May the council resolved to offer all men who had families with them as much garden ground as they cared to cultivate, free of rent or tax for the first three years. At the same time the women and children were struck off rations and a money payment was made to the heads of families, after the custom in India. That change was a great incentive to gardening, poultry rearing, and other household industries — the everyday work that encouraged household production beyond Company rations. [3]
Annetje de boerin, wife of Hendrik Boom, who was already farming the Company’s cows, was privileged to open a house of accommodation, chiefly for visitors from the ships. A similar licence soon went to the wife of Sergeant Jan van Harwarden. Households, hospitality, dairy, and garden: household enterprise at the Cape stood beside the hospital and the rising jetty. [3]
Lions, Bounties, and Game Laws
Wild animals still did great damage. They destroyed oxen, sheep, and poultry, trampled garden beds, and ate the young sprouts of the vines. It was not safe to go out at night. Two guards at the cattle kraal were badly wounded by a leopard; once, as the commander walked in the garden, a lion was seen not far off. A fine large stud horse — the only one in the settlement — was torn to pieces and devoured close to the fort. [3]
The council offered premiums for the destruction of these beasts: twenty-five shillings for a lion, sixteen shillings and eightpence for a hyena, twelve shillings and sixpence for a leopard — the dead animal to be shown to the commander. Those sums bought more than the same numbers today; twenty-five shillings was more than a labourer earned in a month. The commander himself received only £7 10s. a month until 1656, when his salary rose to £10 16s. 8d. The first lion skin hung as a trophy in the great hall of the commander’s residence, where religious services were held. [3]
Next came laws to preserve the game the settlement needed for meat. The Company kept two hunters for venison; everyone else was forbidden to shoot animals other than those for which a reward was offered, under a fine of about forty shillings and forfeiture of a private gun. The settlement protected its herds and rationed wild meat. [3]
Winter Sickness and the Day of Prayer
During the winter of 1656 there was much sickness among the people. The council held it a punishment for sin and set apart Thursday 29 June as a day of fasting and prayer. The people were admonished not to sit down to meals without asking a blessing and giving thanks afterwards. Those who disobeyed were to be fined a shilling for the first offence, two for the second, and so on, besides further correction. A few weeks later a placaat forbade bathing or washing clothes in the river above the place from which cooking water was taken — a hint that the “sin” may have been as much against the laws of health as against heaven. [3]
Religious observance and clean water both concerned the council. The same hall that held lion skins and Sunday sermons now held a people on their knees for health — a community that framed illness and discipline in religious as well as Company terms.
Council, Marriages, and Catharina of Bengal
In October it was arranged that for ordinary business the council should consist of the commander Jan van Riebeeck, Sergeant Jan van Harwarden, and the bookkeeper Roelof de Man. When sitting as a court of justice or a military tribunal, the constable of the fortress and the two corporals were also to have seats. Records were to be kept by the clerk Caspar van Weede, who was also to act as fiscal. [3]
With no clergyman permanently at the Cape, marriages took place before the secretary of the council after banns had been published three times by the sick comforter. The ceremony was usually on Sunday morning after the reading of the sermon. One or two unions were solemnised by chaplains of calling ships — as when the late secunde Frederick Verburg married a clergyman’s sister. Up to the end of 1656 the marriages in the fort included Adolphus Bengevoort and Janneken Willems; Jacob Ryniers and Elizabeth van Opdorp; Pieter van Duyne and Sebastiana van Opdorp; Jacobus van der Kerkhoven and Elizabeth Stadtlanders; and Jan Wouters and Catharina, a freed slave, daughter of Anthonie of Bengal. [3]
Marriages such as the last were encouraged in that generation. A profession of Christianity placed black and white on the same civil footing in the language of the day; Catharina, freed and baptized, was styled an honourable young woman in the same words used of the commander’s own niece. A hundred years later other views would harden. In 1656 the settlement was still small enough that every marriage was a public act of belonging — household against wilderness. [3]
Forty-Four Ships in Table Bay
Van Riebeeck had asked the directors for clear orders on the treatment of strangers. They answered that foreigners might catch fish and take water freely, but were not to be supplied with refreshments, for the Company needed all it could raise for its own ships. Courtesy was required; needless offence was to be avoided; yet the Cape establishment existed for the Company’s benefit, not for the world’s convenience. [3]
In 1656 forty-four vessels put into Table Bay: thirty-five of the Company, five English, and four French. The English and French were treated as friendly as circumstances allowed. They might buy vegetables from private gardeners; presents were exchanged. The commander, writing home, excused his liberality by noting that beef sent aboard on two occasions came from unsound cattle. Even under tight orders, the settlement’s gardens already fed more flags than Batavia had planned for. [3]