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. [1] [3]
That roof was soon tested. Through the wet months the ward filled; by early July the commander recorded that the hospital was full and that every tenth man was affected, officials and the surgeon among them. When the junior surgeon was away with the seal-hunters and the remaining lad took to his bed, van Riebeeck himself fell back on his old calling as ship’s surgeon so that patients should not be left to die. In October the flute Breda landed so many sick that a tent had to be raised beside the hospital; two men died coming ashore, and the ship’s dead already numbered forty-six. A settlement that builds a hospital expects the next fleet — and the one after that. [1]
The sick comforter, the gardens, the dairy, mattresses of sail-cloth ordered for the ill, and now a proper ward: the pieces of a lasting community were locking into place beside the moat. Brick kilns still burned for houses, magazines, and the stone gate; but the hospital was the years proof that the Cape meant to keep men alive between oceans, not merely to count them as they passed. [2]
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. [2] [3]
The journal dates the labour. On 4 March most of the men were sent to drag beams from the forest for a jetty that was to run a good distance into the sea, so that boats might tie up for loading and unloading and men need no longer walk up to their necks in water. By late April beams still came down daily; by July the carpenters were busy on a structure that would have to stretch some seventy to eighty roods into the bay. On 3–6 October heavy box-sections, joined with hasps, anchors and dovetails, were warped into position with tackle and filled with bushes and stones. Hard-worked messes received English beer and tobacco for carrying stone. By mid-December more boxes were sunk, and beams were still being cut so the work might finish before the next winter. [1]
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 had been sent, on orders from the Seventeen, to examine the islands of Tristan da Cunha, to learn whether they could serve in time of war. She had left on 22 November 1655. On 27 January 1656 she re-entered Table Bay. The officers reported the island barren and difficult to land on: ceaseless hurricanes, heavy seas, great depths to within a stone’s throw of the shore, no sand but a stony strand only four or five fathoms broad, steep bleak mountains hanging over the water, no wood or grass save thin reeds. Fish and water could be had only with danger. There was no suitable anchorage; anchors parted quickly, and no shelter could be found. The island was of no use to the Company; no more vessels should be exposed there. Journals, mates’ notes, and small charts were copied for the Fatherland with the return fleet. [1] [2] [3]
The settlement’s horizon stretched far into the South Atlantic — and then folded back to the work that mattered most. Within days the Nachtglas was again on local service: provisions to Jan Wouterssen and the seal-hunters at Dassen Island and Saldanha Bay, shells from Robben Island for lime, sheep for refreshment. Distant reconnaissance had failed; the bay, the islands, and the forests behind Devil’s Peak remained the true theatre of 1656. [1]
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 had spent a short time at the Cape in 1655 and recommended the cut to the Seventeen. Their letter of 30 October 1655 asked van Riebeeck what further inspection would show. On 4 February 1656, in the dry season when the roads favoured travel, the commander rode with a military escort toward False Bay, following the tortuous Sweet Rivers (the Liesbeek system) through the lowest land to test whether a watercourse truly linked the bays. [1] [3]
He found a snake of water three or four miles across the isthmus, small lakes, soft sand, and, toward False Bay, high successive dune ranges and a large brackish lake full of hippopotami — today’s Zeekoe Vlei — fed through the sands with no open cut to the sea. A true canal would demand cutting lakelets and stony ground, then fighting wind-blown sand as fast as thousands of men could dig. Even if water stood, Khoikhoi could swim stock across; the artificial “island” would be so large that scattered garrisons would be needed to hold it. The cost would run to millions of guilders; the advantage would be small, and intercourse with inland cattle-owners would be cut off. Free families, he added, would be safer in strong stone houses near the fort than behind a fantasy ditch. [1]
The settlement would not be secured by a ditch across the flats. 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]
Van Riebeeck’s own letters and the Dagregister fill the catalogue. In a despatch of 15 July 1656 he listed grafted cherries, chestnuts, plums, peaches, quinces, medlars, apples and pears; vines looking well; some seventy young orange trees from St Helena; uncertainty still about gooseberries, currants, and strawberries, hope for the oaks. A month later he sent Batavia a carefully packed case of artichokes, rosemary, carnations, borage, and cucumber-herb — plants he had heard were missing in the eastern gardens. In October the Zeeridder brought horse beans; rooted sweet-potato runners from the old Brazilian stock of the Swarte Vos were transplanted and noted as growing very large; Turkish, Roman, and Rouen beans went into trial ground behind the mountain. First Dutch asparagus cut that season was as thick as a thumb; artichokes were so abundant the fort scarcely knew what to do with them. Currants, strawberries, cherries, pears, plums, oaks, ash, and orange and lemon trees from St Helena and India were all reported thriving. [1] [2]
On the islands the same material logic held. Robben Island carried hundreds of sheep; shells came ashore for lime; rabbits were turned among the dunes when a new lot arrived, though earlier stock seemed to have vanished. Dassen Island and Saldanha Bay still yielded seals, oil, reeds, and uneasy contact with Khoikhoi. This was the quiet base of the settlement: seed that thrived, stock that bred, timber that grew, and island pastures that fed the roadstead. [1]
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 (the journal’s Ronde Bosjen / Ronde Doorn Bosjen), afterwards Rondebosch — a plot was laid under the plough. In mid-May horses, ploughs, and harrows went out; by the 17th about half a morgen had been broken; more wheat followed on the 19th; on the 24th the rest of the wheat with oats and barley went in as a trial. A small guard house of sods held a couple of men to watch the ground. On 3 June van Riebeeck visited the new land and found wheat, oats, and barley growing splendidly — about one and a half morgen sown as an experiment. [1] [3]
Spring and early summer confirmed the choice. On 15 October, while a south-easter made it almost impossible to leave the fort, the commander forced his way to the grain-fields and found only a stiff summer breeze; barley heaped behind the fort was blown across the land, while at the Bosjen scarcely a straw stirred. He marked larger squares for horse beans, Turkish and Roman beans, and tobacco — toward two morgen enclosed against stock. On 24 October the clover stood knee-high for hay; on 2 November ripe barley showed not one ear beaten out. By late November wheat near the fort was so stripped that scarcely a twentieth part would be saved, while Rondebosch grain stood fine enough to promise seed for the next season. On 5 December he took all the Dutch women of the Cape by wagon to see corn, tobacco, and beans growing “as in the Fatherland.” [1] [2]
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 — and where, within months, free burgher plots would be measured along the Liesbeek.
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 (Autshumao), by then a rich captain with a large herd purchased — so van Riebeeck stated — with the Company’s goods. On 5–6 June a plough left before the blacksmith’s shop lost its chain and iron fittings. The theft could serve little purpose except annoyance. Van Riebeeck had the Company’s cattle driven among Harry’s and seized three head, announcing he would keep them until the iron returned and the thief was produced for thrashing by his own people at a post in the hornwork. Harry protested innocence, begged that the culprit be spared the thrashing, and within half an hour brought the iron back; the cattle were released. The same rule was agreed for future thefts. [1] [3]
The next quarrel was pasture. There was not grass enough near the fort for Harry’s cattle and the Company’s. As early as May the Kaapmans asking to camp behind the Lion’s Rump were told to stay farther off unless they would sell stock as the Saldanhars did. Harry answered that the ground was his. The commander replied that the Company had taken possession and needed the grass. On 6 June, in the same talks that settled the chain, van Riebeeck proposed a plan meant to profit both sides: Harry should remain under protection if he supplied ten head for each large ship and five for each yacht or small ship, receiving more copper and tobacco than other sellers so as to keep a profit; when his own herd ran low he was to barter inland, leaving wives, children, and milch cows in Company care. He also undertook an ox every fourth day for the garrison and a sheep for the commander’s table. Harry wanted recognition as paramount chief beside the Dutch commander; he was told that honour would follow proof of performance. [1] [3]
Performance was brief. A first delivery followed the English ship Goed Wil; the four-day ox and sheep were met a time or two. Then twelve stretched hides were stolen and returned cut up; Harry failed the next ox; on 25 June he broke camp instead of fulfilling promises, and the Kaapmans moved off. Van Riebeeck no longer trusted offers to barter inland with Company copper. 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 and tobacco — learning Dutch words even as the edge between settler kraal and Khoikhoi camp stayed uneasy. By December Harry reappeared near the salt-pans with some two hundred cattle and two hundred sheep, trembling “like a lady’s lap-dog,” promising cattle he did not deliver; he later sat exactly on ground marked for future free farms. The tension free households on the Liesbeek would soon inherit was already drawn. [1] [2]
Free Gardens and Families — May 1656
The settlement was expanding. On 1 May the council resolved to search out more land for cultivation, to pay married officials and assistants board money from that month, to find a site for a public tavern for men from passing ships, and to improve pay and conditions for some servants. In the same season Theal records the fuller family policy: men who had families with them were to be offered as much garden ground as they cared to cultivate, free of rent or tax for the first three years, while women and children were struck off rations and a money payment made to the heads of families after the custom in India — a sharp incentive to gardening, poultry, and household industry. [1] [3]
Annetje de boerin, wife of Hendrik Boom, the Company’s chief gardener, already stood at the centre of that experiment. On 18 May the council leased her all the Company’s cattle until the next January (and yearly thereafter) for one hundred guilders, whatever the number of cows. Burdened with eight children and unable to live on her husband’s board money alone, she claimed she was practically a free woman and was provisionally allowed to keep a tavern for lodging and refreshment of ships’ men — no one else yet daring to take discharge for that trade until it proved a living. A similar licence soon went to the wife of Sergeant Jan van Harwarden. Households, hospitality, dairy, and garden: private enterprise at the Cape stood beside the hospital and the rising jetty. [1] [3]
Private gardeners already sold vegetables to English callers when the Company refused cattle. The December wagon outing of the Dutch women to Rondebosch was not mere recreation; it was recruitment of interest in corn land that free married servants might soon occupy. Preparations for free burghers at the round thorn-bush were forming in the commander’s mind through the year’s end, though he still judged slaves needful before the plunge of 1657. [2]
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. In early June a Company horse came home with twenty or thirty wounds about the head and neck from a lion or leopard above the Ronde Bosjen wagon-rest. On the night of the 15th–16th the best stallion — the only fine stud horse — was entirely devoured close to the fort. The next day, walking in the gardens, the commander saw spoor everywhere; a bold lion rose some forty paces off and made for Table Mountain. Sergeant, huntsman, and soldiers followed; some two hundred Khoikhoi drove sheep and cattle as a living breastwork and cornered the beast in a kloof. Assegais flew; the sergeant missed; the huntsman put three balls through the head. The skin was saved for the great hall used as church; the carcase weighed 426 Dutch pounds, measured five and a half feet without the tail, and stood three and a half feet at the shoulder — as sturdy, the journal said, as an average English or Java pony. Horse-flesh and porcupine quills lay in the stomach. [1] [3]
On 17 June the council offered premiums for the destruction of these beasts: six reals of eight for a lion, four for a leopard or hyena (“tiger” or “wolf” in the Dutch), the dead or living animal to be shown to the commander — Theal’s sterling equivalents being about twenty-five shillings, sixteen and eightpence, and twelve and six. 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. A lioness later nosed the carcase outside the hornwork gate; leopards wounded guards; on 23 July a forest-worker brought a leopard from the Rondebosch grain-field for three reals; on the 29th a famished lion scaled a rain-softened kraal wall, killed one beast, wounded another, and was shot — six reals to the guards. [1] [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. One horse alone, the commander noted after the stallion’s death, did more than ten men at plough, clay, stone, and timber. The settlement protected its herds, rationed wild meat, and paid blood money for the cats that unmade its transport. [1] [3]
Winter Sickness and the Day of Prayer
During the winter of 1656 there was much sickness among the people. At the turn of the season in late May many were taken ill for two or three weeks though few died; by late June the Lord was said to be visiting the fort so sorely that hardly anyone remained untouched. The council held the affliction a punishment for sin and set apart Thursday 29 June as a day of general humiliation and prayer. The people were enjoined to religious exercises and to refrain from shameful diversions. Those who sat down to meals without asking a blessing and giving thanks afterwards — living “like pigs,” the resolution said — were to be fined by the provost-marshal: half a real for the first offence, more for the second, fourfold for the third, besides arbitrary correction. The appointed day was observed in fine, calm weather. [1] [3]
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. One hundred sail-cloth mattresses were ordered for the sick who had none. Rain delayed building and garden work already behind because of illness. 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. [1] [3]
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. That thin official spine — commander, sergeant, bookkeeper, clerk-fiscal — was the civil order of a fort that married people, fined meal-time irreligion, and tried runaways in the same chambers where sermons were read. [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. On 21 May 1656 the assistant Jan Wouterssen was married in open council chamber, after three Sundays’ banns, to the honourable young maiden Catarina Anthonis from Salagon in Bengal — formerly a slave girl of the Hon. Boogaerd (Bogaert), liberated at her request and free to marry. Roelof de Man acted as marriage officer. 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 of Bengal. [1] [3]
Marriages such as the last were encouraged in that generation. Van Riebeeck noted the advantage Portugal had drawn from mixed populations that helped hold eastern fortresses, and thought the Netherlanders might need a similar link. 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. Private grief kept pace with public ceremony: on 20 February the commander’s infant son Anthony, born 8 December 1655 and still unbaptized for want of a minister, died between two and three in the morning, so that both children born that December day — his and the Verburghs’ — were with the Lord. [2] [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 journal’s year is thick with their names and needs: the paralysed captain of the English Arosia (Star) lodged in the surgeon’s dwelling in February; the Goed Wil from Masulipatam in June paid thirty reals for three oxen and eight for four sheep; October brought the Princes Roijael, Brampton’s Olijfftack (Olive Branch), and the Egel, with pipes of beer and tongues coming ashore and half-sheep and unsound bullocks going out in courteous return; the Breda, Ulisses, and Meulen landed scurvy cases and seed; the English flute Postilion of London took water and private greens but not cattle. 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. [1] [3]
Company hulls remained the main traffic: outward yachts and flutes for Batavia, return ships under flags such as Sarcerius’s squadron in April, Christmas and New Year fleets wanting cabbage and tobacco still green in the beds. Brick kilns fired again as the dry season returned; jetty boxes still sank in December seas; Rondebosch wheat waited on the sickle. The fifth year closed not with a ceremony of departure, but with a hospital that had proved its need, a jetty half-born in the surf, corn that finally stood the south-easter, and a commander still measuring how free households might hold the valleys the wind could not spoil. [1]