Boer History1657 at the Cape of Good Hope: The First Free Burghers
The First Burghers — 21 February 1657
Preliminary arrangements to release some of the Company’s servants from their engagements and help them become farmers were at length complete. On the 21st of February 1657 ground was allotted to the first burghers in South Africa. Before that date individuals had been allowed private gardens while still in Company service — mostly petty officers with families who drew money instead of rations and sold a little produce. The free burghers formed a different class: subjects, not servants, of the Company. [3] [4]
For more than a year workmen and officers had weighed whether free life would better them. At length nine men decided to try. They formed two parties, chose ground, and concluded arrangements before the council in the commander’s hall: van Riebeeck, Sergeant Jan van Harwarden, and bookkeeper Roelof de Man. Secretary Caspar van Weede recorded the proceedings at length. The Seventeen’s letter of 12 October 1656 had already pressed free settlement, agriculture, stock-breeding, and related measures, and had renewed van Riebeeck’s contract at one hundred and thirty guilders a month without yet granting the eastern transfer he sought. [1] [3]
The days just before the grants were thick with survey. On the 7th the commander rode to the Ronde Doorn Bosjen, ordered bushes cleared inside a hedge eight or ten feet wide for a cattle kraal and future redoubt, then pressed one or two miles farther over rich flat soil he meant to show commissioner van Goens. There he came suddenly on more than ninety Khoikhoi huts and many cattle in five kraals of the Kaapman people, and on Harry himself, startled among the thickets and reassured only with kind words. On the 19th and 20th more men asked discharge; van Riebeeck walked the flats with them to fix plots and draft a contract. Harry and the fat chief, hearing talk of houses and ploughland on ground where they then camped, asked where they were to go. The answer — room enough to graze under Dutch protection, bread and tobacco to share as friends — satisfied them only in form. The land question between European freehold and pastoral right had opened in plain speech. [1]
Herman’s Colony and Stephen’s Colony
The first party of five — Herman Remajenne (Harmen Remajenne of Cologne, arquebusier), Jan Maartenssen de Wacht of Vreeland, Jan van Passel of Geel in Brabant (soldier, brewer, and brandy distiller), Warnar Cornelissen of Nunspeet, and Roelof Janssen of Dalen — took land just beyond the Fresh River, which the Dutch already called the Amstel, below and opposite the forest where the woodcutters worked, near the crooked tree, about three miles from the fort. They named it Groeneveld (the Green Country) and meant to grow wheat above all. Because Remajenne was the principal man among them, they called themselves Herman’s Colony. Their line was to remain on the far side of the river, with leave to occupy the flats toward the interior mountains. [1] [3]
The second party of four — Stephen Botma (recorded then as Steven Janssen of Wageningen, sailor, skilled in tobacco), Hendrik Elbrechts of Ossenbrugge (Osnabrück), Otto Janssen of Vreede, and Jacob Cornelissen of Rosendael — took ground about a mile nearer the fort at the Ronde Doorn Bosjen, on this side of the Amstel, from the small bridge leading to the forest to the site chosen for a redoubt near the proposed bird trap. They named it Hollandsche Thuin (the Dutch garden) and intended tobacco as well as grain. Henceforth they were Stephen’s Colony. Both companies also wanted vegetables and stock — cattle, pigs, geese, ducks, and poultry — though the Company’s first purpose was agriculture. [1] [3] [4]
They took possession at once and began houses. Little more than two months remained before the rains; that was enough for sod walls and thatch. Timber lay not far off. They were under shelter and ready to turn the soil when the first rains fell. Implements were scarce at first, then supplied. Stephen’s people, lacking a plough until one could be made, received a wagon and six young oxen on account to haul manure, and were promised six stivers a pound for dried, bundled tobacco until the masters ordered otherwise. Both colonies stood on fertile ground in the middle of the isthmus between Table Bay and False Bay — the first European freehold farms of the Cape. [1] [3]
The First Conditions of Freedom
The conditions of release, taken down on 21 February subject to the principals’ approval, were strict. Herman’s people were to hold in freehold all ground they could plough, dig, or otherwise prepare within three years from 1 March next, alone or with slaves or other freemen who might join them, free of taxes for that time; afterward a reasonable land tax in the Company’s interest and for the freemen’s protection. They might sell, lease, or alienate only after notice to the commander — that notice standing in place of a mortgage deed — and not before the three years had run. Magazine provisions were to cost the same as for married Company servants. They might fish the rivers for their own use and sell garden produce to ships’ crews when the Company did not need it — but not go aboard until three days after a ship’s arrival, and not bring strong drink ashore against the placcaaten. [1] [3]
They were not to keep taps in the country, but to cultivate and rear cattle. They were not to buy horned cattle, sheep, or other goods from the natives, on pain of losing all they owned. Cattle needed for ploughing and later for breeding were to be bought from the Company — twenty-five gulden for an ox or cow, three for a sheep — and sold only to the Company at those rates. For pasturage they owed one-tenth of cattle and sheep reared (not pigs or poultry). The Company would furnish implements, food, and arms on credit at Fatherland cost prices, taking produce in payment and a mortgage on wages, lands, cattle, and other goods. They remained subject to the laws of the Fatherland and India and to future laws for the Company’s service and the community’s welfare. Those regulations the supreme authorities could alter at will. [1] [3] [4]
Even as the ink dried, the return fleet crowded the bay. On the evening of the grants five ships appeared — Prins Willem, Wapen van Amsterdam, West Vrieslandt, Amersfoort, and Dordrecht — under Matthijs Crab, Pieter Hackius, and Pieter Kemp, cargo valued at more than one million four hundred thousand guilders at cost, with news of the Draeck wrecked on the Southland and of Colombo taken after seven months’ siege. The Amersfoort grounded opposite the bay and was warped off; sheep went out from Robben Island; seal-hunting was ordered suspended on the Seventeen’s word that skins stank the ships and no longer paid. Freedom and fleet service began in the same week. [1]
Van Goens Revises the Terms — March 1657
On the night of 16 March a large ship stood off the bay and would not enter until assured the Cape had not been sacked — rumours at home had run that far. A gun from the fort and a sloop with refreshments answered. On the 17th van Riebeeck went aboard early; the Orangie brought Ryklof van Goens, Councillor Extraordinary of India and admiral of the outward fleet, later Governor-General of Netherlands India. She had left the Vlie on 22 November with the Malacca, four hundred and three men aboard, three dead and two drowned, and had touched at St Vincent. Some thirty sick and the junior merchant Anthonij van Leeuwen were sent ashore at once. [1] [3]
He had been instructed to rectify what he found amiss. He thought the burghers’ conditions could be improved, altered several clauses, and added others. Freemen were to have plots along the Liesbeek of forty by two hundred roods — about thirteen morgen — free of taxes for twelve years instead of three. Farming tools were to be repaired free for three years. To build breeding stock they might buy from the natives until further orders, paying no more than the Company. The price of horned cattle between freemen and Company fell from twenty-five to twelve gulden. Selling cattle except to the Company cost twenty rixdollars. To push grain, freemen were not to plant tobacco or more vegetables than their own households needed. Van Goens’s surveyor was to use the Rhineland measure as in Holland, Zeeland, and the East; beacons at every corner; room, he calculated, for some two hundred and fifty farmers if the isthmus were fully taken up — paper plenty against the hard fact that in 1657 seed wheat barely covered twenty-eight morgen and plough oxen could turn little more than a hundred and fifty. [2] [3]
Burghers were to keep guard by turns in redoubts built for their protection. They might shoot only noxious animals; premiums rose — twenty-five gulden for a lion, twenty for a hyena, ten for a leopard. Only married men of good character and Dutch or German birth were to receive ground; wives and children might be sent from Europe on request; each was to agree to remain twenty years in South Africa. Unmarried men might be freed as mechanics or useful workers, or to serve ground-holders for a term. One respectable burgher was to sit and vote in the council of justice when freemen’s cases were tried, holding office a year, his seat not at the back but between the secunde and the sergeant. Stephen Botma was appointed for the first term. [1] [2] [3]
Van Goens’s wider instructions told the commander to encourage the burghers, who would cut the wage bill. There were then exactly one hundred persons on wages in South Africa; once farmers were numerous enough, that number was to fall to seventy. His population sketch counted about a hundred officials, ten freemen (some married, wives still in Europe), six women and twelve children, five male and eight female slaves, and six convicts — some hundred and forty-four or forty-five souls when the arithmetic was cleaned. The closing line of his instruction of 16 April became proverbial: they could become no noblemen here until they had first been good farmers — goede Boeren. He still pressed a canal under the name of a fishery; van Riebeeck again waited on the Seventeen, who stopped the work in 1658. [2] [3]
Many restrictions would later look harsh. In 1657 men expected government interference in almost everything, and free trade in the Eastern seas was not a private option: only a powerful company could sustain war and fleets. The Cape settlement existed for the Company’s benefit; individual interest was subordinate even at home, and more so here. Yet the commissioner’s month on the flats — beacons across the isthmus, freemen’s dwellings visited, boundaries marked — turned a refreshment station toward a colony of grain. [1] [3]
More Free Papers and Occupations
Once a start was made, many applied for free papers. Most who received them later re-entered Company service or returned to the Fatherland; some names died out; others left long lines of descendants. Böeseken traces the first winter’s working groups with care. On 14 April Herman’s Colony received a title deed signed by van Goens; Jan van Passel and Roelof Jansz of Dalen no longer stood on it, and Hans Pietersz Faesbenger appeared instead. Stephen’s names held. A third pair — Jan Reiniersz of Amsterdam and Wouter Cornelis Mostert of Utrecht — received ground on 15 April. Through the winter months those were the only free-burgher farmers. By May the three companies together had ploughed about twenty morgen; three-quarters of the seed wheat went to freemen, one quarter to the Company. At month’s end van Riebeeck walked stiff two hours with admiral Volkert Westerwolt to the sowings — fourteen morgen under freemen’s wheat, six under the Company’s — and sighed that more seed would have meant more acres, for plough-time had only begun. [2] [3]
Within about a year of the first grants, free papers went among others to miller Wouter Mostert (who later built and ran a water mill on shares after the horse mill gave way to the Fresh River), gardener Hendrik Boom, and farmers including Caspar Brinkman, Pieter Visagie, Hans Faesbenger, Jacob Cloete, Jan Reyniers, Jacob Theunissen, Jan Rietvelt, Otto van Vrede, and Simon Janssen. On 15 December Jacob Theunisz, Pieter Visagie, and Symon Jansz each promised twenty years’ residence and received about thirteen and a half morgen of workable earth; Frans Gerritsz joined Visagie’s company before year’s end. In August, after bitter complaint that van Goens’s first allotments were sand and ironstone that broke ploughshares, van Riebeeck had already shifted them, pending the Seventeen’s order, onto ground their shares would cut. [2] [3]
Others were freed as farm servants; as hunters with a game monopoly and leave to keep a tap (Christian Janssen and Peter Cornelissen); as timber cutter (Leendert Cornelissen); as tailors; as surgeon Jan Vetteman with professional privileges; as waggon and plough maker Roelof Zieuwerts; as fishermen; as sawyers and carpenters. The free class was not only ploughmen — it was a small colonial labour and service economy under Company price lists. Van Goens also barred ordinary Company servants from large private gardens, but granted the commander the whole of Green Point as a private farm. Foreign crews were as a rule not to receive vegetables or meat, only water, though the commander kept some discretion; the tenor was not to encourage foreign calls at Table Bay. [3] [4]
The freemen’s new liberty was tested at once. In early June three men from Stephen’s and Herman’s companies went inland without leave and stayed three nights. In mid-June, when the English Welcome anchored and was allowed private greens, van Riebeeck learned with anger that freemen had also sold her two sheep at three rixdollars each and an ox at twenty — against the spirit of van Goens’s cattle rules. He told the Seventeen he still preferred a Company monopoly of the native trade, yet would leave van Goens’s permission standing until further order rather than break a commissioner’s word. By August freemen were already bidding against one another for stock; by November the Company paid thrice what cattle had cost five years before. When they asked leave for another inland trek he cut them short: reap the ripening grain, raise barns, build kraals against the beasts — Khoikhoi already brought cattle to their doors. [1] [2]
Roelof de Man Secunde and the April Count
Regarding the natives, van Goens ordered kind treatment to win goodwill; suspected assailants or robbers might be held on Robben Island until offenders were named, then the guilty banished there two or three years; murderers should die, if possible by native hands. No foreign language was to continue among slaves later brought in — only the mother tongue. Weights and measures were to be those of the Fatherland: twelve Rhynland inches to the foot, twelve feet to the rood, two thousand roods to the mile; six hundred square roods to the morgen — land measure that long remained in use at the Cape, one thousand Rhynland feet answering to about one thousand and thirty-three British Imperial feet. [2] [3]
The vacant office of secunde was filled by promoting bookkeeper Roelof de Man. Caspar van Weede went to Batavia; clerk Abraham Gabbema became secretary of the council. In April 1657, when these instructions issued, the European population was one hundred and thirty-four souls — Company’s servants and burghers, men, women, and children. There were three male and eight female slaves at the Cape. The refreshment station had become, in Böeseken’s phrase, a colony: van Riebeeck was ordered to help freemen become good farmers, and the expected slave ships would only deepen that turn. [2] [3]
Through May the roadstead stayed busy. The flutes Vineq and Oijevaer, the Venenburch, and the great Gecroonde Leeuw landed scurvy cases and sent scores of men to drag jetty beams from the forest. Millwrights chose a site for a water mill. On the 23rd admiral Volquerius Westerwolt’s Henriette Louijse arrived short of provisions after a hard passage from Batavia; the council drew meat, oil, and bacon from the Gecroonde Leeuw to send her home. Return ships and freemen’s ploughs pulled on the same thin stock of cattle and grain. [1]
Hottentots Holland and Harry on Pasture
Van Goens had allowed burghers to buy cattle from the natives if they paid no more than the Company. A few weeks after he left, three farmers equipped a trading journey inland. Eastward they reached a district of five or six hundred Khoikhoi who received them friendly. The Europeans could not sleep in the huts for vermin and dirt, nor without shelter for lions; the residents built a high circular thorn hedge so the strangers could sleep safe. Already well supplied with copper, the people sold little — only two oxen and three sheep. The visitors understood them to call the district the choicest of the country — their Holland or fatherland for richness of pasture — and named it Hottentots Holland. [1] [2] [3]
For many months few pastoral Khoikhoi had come to the fort when, one day in July, Harry appeared. He asked where their cattle might graze, seeing Europeans till the Liesbeek. Van Riebeeck told them to remain where they were — eight or ten hours’ walk from the fort. Harry said it was not their custom to stay long in one place, and that without a retreat here enemies would ruin them. The commander offered ground behind the mountains toward Hout Bay or on the Lion’s Head slope if they would trade; Harry refused, saying they lived on their cattle’s produce. Later in the month he pressed again to live near the fort under protection against the Saldanhars; he was allowed the neck between Lion’s Head and the north end of Table Mountain in sight of the fort, grazing only along the coast behind the kloof toward Hout Bay and the Gevelbergen, not on Green Point pastures granted to the commander. His bid that the Hollanders join the Kaapmans to seize Saldanhar herds was refused: the Dutch, he was told, were not a nation to rob another of its property. [1] [3]
The commander’s favourite scheme at this time was a chain of redoubts across the isthmus linked by a wall, with a large Kaapman party enticed inside and held so that cattle sales could be compelled — an experiment the directors refused for cost. In July he still rode the Drooge Bos River and the freemen’s flooded lands, ordered trenches for Stephen’s Colony, young trees for windbreaks round the Table Valley gardens, and fixed a main redoubt halfway between Jan Reijnierssen’s house and Stephen’s people, so that two watch-houses rather than four might cover hundreds of morgen under the forest. Five years at the Cape had taught that local clans (Goringhaikonas, Gorachouquas, Goringhaiquas) were divisions of one tribe under Gogosoa; inland names such as Chariguriqua, Cochoqua, and Chainouqua were only beginning to be placed on the map. [1] [3]
Eva Interpreter and Inland Stories
After the beachrangers returned to Table Valley, Eva again lived in van Riebeeck’s house. At fifteen or sixteen she spoke Dutch fluently. Doman had gone to Batavia with van Goens; Eva interpreted in his place. She told of Namaquas inland with white skins and long hair, clothes, stone houses, and religion like Netherlanders, and of others rich in gold and jewels — tales a cattle-bringer partly backed with inventive detail, recognising gold chains and pearls shown him, though not a diamond, and speaking of a great lord named Chobona whose household raised a wife in gold ornaments. Offers of a waggon to fetch her were refused; she would be frightened to death by Europeans. [1] [3]
The commander pressed for inland roads toward Monomotapa and the Spirito Sancto; van Goens saw little difficulty and ordered reasonable exertion, even rewards rising to a hundred and fifty guilders a man if the great river or something of more note were found. Van Riebeeck’s private note on such orders was dry: the thing had been tried divers times with loss of people and health, and nothing notable gained. Still the charts pulled the gold centres farther back only as boots went forward — and the next serious party left not for Ophir but for cattle against an expected fleet. [2] [3]
Gabbema, the Berg River, and the Paarl — October 1657
On 19 October, in rainy weather toward evening, fifteen persons left the fort under Abraham Gabbema, fiscal and council secretary: seven Company servants, eight freemen, nine pack oxen, and three trusted Khoikhoi. They halted the first night at free burgher Jan Reijnierssen’s house. Next day they crossed the Salt and Fresh Rivers, held east past the tail of the Leopard Mountain, and on the 22nd reached a great stream running north along a mountain chain they judged impassable — the Great Berg River. They had passed through the kloof between the Diamond and Paarl mountains on one side and Klapmuts on the other. In the Berg they caught barbel, bony but pleasant, like Dutch pike. [1] [3]
They were in a broad fair valley. To the west a long isolated mountain showed green faces and streamlets; its granite domes caught the morning light so that the travellers named them the Paarl and the Diamant. Eastward the range glowed at evening. Trees dotted the floor; grass and flowers stood thick in October. Hippopotami thronged the river; zebras browsed the slopes; a rhinoceros once ran straight through the pack oxen without harm; grass Gabbema said was fit for hay. Horse dung and footprints raised hope that horses lived inland. Little kraals lined the Berg, but people were slow to sell. The party moved among Chorachouquas — the “Tobacco Thieves” who had stripped freemen’s plantings — and others; pack oxen’s backs festered under copper loads; scouts and promises brought a thin trade day by day. [1] [3]
More than a week’s moving brought only ten oxen and forty-one sheep in Theal’s round count — Gabbema’s own return on 5 November listed seven cows, three calves, and forty-one sheep, with copper and tobacco still on hand, total cost under eighty-five guilders. They could not cross the deep, north-running Berg to the principal Saldanhars before mid dry season; those on the near bank sang the Kaapman tune that they lived by their herds and could spare no more. On the way home they named a reed-choked stream the Dutch Rietbeeck. Geographical knowledge advanced a step; legendary gold centres slipped further back on the charts. Freemen who had gone out for themselves took fright when warned of ambush for copper, and for a time preferred the sickle to the inland path. [1] [2] [3]
Public Works in 1657
Several public works marked the year. On Robben Island’s highest point a platform was raised so a fire could burn at night when Company ships were seen off the port. At the Company’s Rondebosch farm a grain magazine was begun — one hundred and eight by forty feet — later known as the Groote Schuur, of solid build. In November the commander marked the granary site in the grain-fields and set reapers on the ripe barley; wheat, rye, and oats stood fine in the ear, though peas failed heavily. In Table Valley the Fresh River’s lower course was shifted: winter floods had damaged gardens, so a new broader channel was cut to enter the sea southeast of the fort; the old bed became a canal with sluices so the moat could still be filled. [1] [3]
The wooden jetty still ate timber. Outward crews in April and May were marched to the forest for beams; boxes and stone fill continued the work begun the year before. On Robben Island Jan Wouterssen was ordered to try garden seeds, sweet potatoes, and horse-radish in the sand, and to keep stone-cutting diligent. Sergeant Jan van Harwarden, by van Goens’s leave, opened a lodging house in part of the old sheep-fold north of the fort at fifty guilders’ rent from 1 November; his wife sought a scrap of ground behind the fort for pigs. In October the yachts Maria and Hasselt were fitted for the Angola and Guinea slave run that would mark the next year — barley and meal left aboard for captives, empty leaguers for water, orders to correct charts and plant the Company’s mark at Saldanha and Dassen Island. [1] [3]
By December the free-burgher experiment was no longer a paper scheme on the council table. Thirteen-morgen strips along the Liesbeek, a burgher seat between secunde and sergeant, Rhineland beacons on the flats, a Berg River and a Paarl on the map, and a granary rising at Rondebosch: the sixth year closed with subjects of the Company living beyond the moat, ploughing for a market the Company still meant to own. Grain, not gold, had become the settlement’s measure of success — and van Goens’s hard sentence stood over the fields: no noblemen here until there had first been good farmers. [1] [2] [3]