Boer History1658 at the Cape of Good Hope: Slaves, Hostages, and Wynberg Vines
The Harwarden Trek — Little Berg River and Tulbagh View
The opening months of 1658 still turned on meat for fleets. Two large Indiamen in deep distress, the Arnhem and the Slot van Honingen, had put into Table Bay and in a short stay consumed forty head of horned cattle and fifty sheep. Garden produce and the last magazine meat went aboard as well; by late February the fort’s storehouse was stripped of meat casks, and the council fretted that return ships might pass without relief if the roadstead stayed empty. Cattle stocks were too thin for the fleets still expected. [1] [3]
On 25 February 1658 the council resolved another inland trading party — larger and better equipped than any yet sent from Fort Good Hope. Sergeant Jan van Harwarden was to lead, with pack oxen carrying copper, tobacco, and provisions. Surveyor Pieter Potter was ordered to keep the journal, note valleys, mountains, and rivers, and chart a road so that later parties might travel the same line. Instructions covered tribes by name, ivory, ostrich feathers, musk, civet, gold, and precious stones, and a site for a small redoubt or trading post if the Saldanhars preferred to barter inland rather than at the fort. Doman, lately returned from Batavia with commissioner Joan Cunaeus and asking to be called Anthony, offered himself for such work. [1] [3]
The party left on 26 February: Harwarden, about fourteen Hollanders and three Khoikhoi, with five pack oxen (Theal later summarised fifteen Europeans, two Khoikhoi, and six pack oxen). They passed the Leopard Mountain, left the Diamond and Paarl mountains on the right and the Saddle on the left, and reached the Great Berg River. Pushing north along the mountain wall of the coastal belt, they searched for a pass. A stream foamed down an enormous cleft — the Little Berg River — but the sides rose in near-perpendicular precipices; no path opened through the gorge that later ages would know as a road inland. Dysentery struck. Near the Little Berg they formed a temporary camp while Potter, three Netherlanders, and two Khoikhoi climbed the range — near the later Roodezand Pass — and became the first Christians recorded to look down into the dell now called the Tulbagh basin. Along the Breede valley they saw a wide bare scene under the sun, with no sign of human life. The road to the interior failed in that direction. [1] [3]
On the homeward march they fell in with small Chariguriqua (Charingurina) camps and bartered what stock they could — the journal closed the trek at eleven head of cattle and forty-five sheep for copper, pipes, and tobacco. One man, Gerrit Beuckeren, died of the illness on the road; another followed within days. The night before they reached the fort, as they ate their last bread ration, a lion sprang on one of them. Van Harwarden shot it through the forehead; the man lived but lost his right arm. The survivors came in on 20–21 March, weak but welcomed — geographical knowledge gained, Monomotapa no nearer, and the fort still short of draught oxen for the next fleet. [1] [3]
Amersfoort and Hasselt — Bulk Slavery Arrives
Before 1658 the settlement held only some ten or twelve enslaved people from Batavia and Madagascar. Labour was now urgently wanted for grain-fields, forests, and free farms. The previous year the Company had already fitted the yachts Hasselt and Maria for the west coast. They cruised off St Paul de Loanda for a Portuguese prize; when that scheme failed, the Maria returned to the Cape without captives (23 January), and the Hasselt sailed on for the Gulf of Guinea. All hope for a slave cargo rested on her — until another Indiaman altered the count first. [2] [3]
On 28 March the Indiaman Amersfoort entered Table Bay. On the passage from Holland she had fallen in with a Portuguese ship bound from Angola toward Brazil with more than five hundred people aboard. The prize was too old to bring in; the officers selected and removed two hundred and fifty of the most valued captives, including older boys and girls, and let the Portuguese hull go on. Eighty died before Table Bay; one hundred and seventy landed in miserable condition (Böeseken notes about one hundred and seventy-four Angolan captives in the landing count). Within days the Wapen van Amsterdam and other callers shared the roadstead; Angola prize people were already being sorted for local work or for onward shipment. [1] [2] [3]
On 6 May (Theal: a few weeks later) the Hasselt came in from Popo on the Guinea coast — Grand Popo on the Dahomey shore — with two hundred and twenty-eight survivors of two hundred and seventy-one purchased there; forty-three had died on the passage. The Cape now held more captives than the council thought necessary. One hundred and seventy-two were marked for Batavia; on 22 May the Hasselt herself sailed east with one hundred and two Guinea and Angola people after a short refreshment. Of those left, eighty-nine were sold on credit to burghers — Angola people earlier at about fifty to seventy-five guilders by age, Guinea people later around one hundred guilders — prices Theal rendered from about £4 3s. 4d. to £8 6s. 8d.; the Company retained the rest in its own service. Commissioner Van Goens’s standing rule had been blunt: no Portuguese speech with the captives, first choice of the best to the freemen, and the largest possible number pushed on to Batavia. [1] [2] [3]
A late-May reckoning made the new order plain. About eighty eaters stood in the garrison and fifteen sick in hospital; with freemen, women, and children the free mouths to feed were put near one hundred and sixty-six. The Company held some ninety-eight enslaved workers, the burghers eighty-nine, besides a handful of convicts — so that captives already outnumbered the immigrant free population. Böeseken later called 1658 the annus mirabilis of van Riebeeck’s Cape accounts: expenses higher than ever, yet a recorded profit of more than five thousand guilders — without the sources saying how the gain was made. Labour had arrived in bulk; so had every problem bulk labour would bring. [2] [3]
School, Seal Meat, and Coast Traders
One early regulation was Christian instruction. On 17 April a school opened under the commander’s brother-in-law Pieter van der Stael, sick-comforter since 1656 in succession to Willem Barents Wylant. Captives received pronounceable names and short daily lessons; the journal records it as the first school established in South Africa. The prize for diligence was a glass of brandy and a little tobacco. Van Riebeeck himself attended the first days to keep order and noted that the prize spurred application. Dutch reading was pressed because the sick-comforter read Dutch well; prayers and discipline were the daily frame. [1] [3]
Food for the new workforce was mainly seabirds and seal flesh. Van Riebeeck recorded that they liked seal meat; large quantities came from Saldanha Bay and the islands. Four burghers — Thomas Christoffel Muller, Jurien Janssen, Joachim Elberts, and Gerrit Harmanssen — took free papers as coast traders, bought a Company boat, and plied Saldanha, Dassen Island, and Table Bay with eggs, fish, oil, skins, salted birds, and dried seal meat, selling freely and delivering surplus to the Company at fixed rates — seal flesh at 4s. 2d. the hundred pounds. Their sloop Peguijn and later craft became a standing link between island protein and the fort’s slave rations. [1] [3]
May also tightened the freemen’s world. Letters of the Seventeen from October 1657, received that month, ordered an end to burgher cattle trade with the Khoikhoi. Van Riebeeck’s placaat of 4/5 May laid a general ban: within twenty-four hours freemen had to return copper bought for barter; private sale of cattle, sheep, and pigs to one another or to ships without leave was forbidden. In May the free community still numbered only about fifty-one burghers, of whom sixteen were farmers — small enough that every rumour reached the fort. Steven Jansz (Botma) and Hendrik Boom were named burgher councillors, Boom trusted as the commander’s ear among the freemen, even against Van Goens’s earlier preference for Herman Remajenne. [2] [4]
Desertions and the Hostage Crisis — June–July 1658
Captives stood under owners’ power, though regulations forbade gross ill-usage. People from Guinea and Angola, once recovered from the voyage, began to run north toward a homeland they knew lay somewhere in that direction. On the night of 2–3 June eight Angolan men and two women left forest, fort, and grain-fields together, led, the journal said, by the oldest forest slave who had feigned illness the day before. Soldiers and Khoikhoi were sent out with tobacco and bread and promises of reward; days passed without a recovery. Burghers who had bought on credit feared ruin. They — and the commander — blamed nearby Khoikhoi for enticing desertion; women were seen giving small gifts of food, and the council suspected the Kaapmans of passing runaways inland toward the Cochoquas and farther tribes. [1] [2] [3]
A few weeks earlier Hendrik Boom had lost seven cattle in open daylight. Friends arrested old Gogosoa, the fat captain of the Kaapmans, until the stock was found — within hours, after the whole clan searched. When slaves deserted, leading burghers urged the same method. On Saturday 22 June a council with senior merchant Willem Bastink of the Prins Willem, secunde Roelof de Man, and Van Harwarden — pressed by freemen who believed Remajenne had seen runaways heading toward the Kaapmans — resolved to seize Gogosoa’s heir Schacher (Osingkima), his brother Otegno (Pieter), and Osaoa, sitting unsuspecting in the fort courtyard. They were locked in the surgeon’s kitchen under guard and told they would be held until the runaways returned. [1] [3]
On Sunday 23 June excitement ran high among Khoikhoi near the fort. Interpreter Doman, back from Batavia with the meek face that earned him the nickname Dominee, advised seizing beachranger chief Jan Cou (Khamy) so both clans would search. Jan Cou was taken at once from the courtyard. In the council chamber Eva defended the beachrangers and accused the Kaapmans of roguery; she had already told the commander that Doman “thought double,” while Doman retorted that he was a Hottentot man, not a Dutchman, and that Eva sold herself to the commander. Doman repeated old charges — fourteen Company sheep stolen, and the murder of David Janssen five years before. Harry then said Schacher advised seizing a Gorachouqua leader too, so all three clans would share the hunt; that clan fled before it could be done. Kaapmans and beachrangers recovered only two captives; three more returned of hunger. The rest of the hunt failed. [1] [2] [3]
Harry Seized and the Kaapman Treaty
By 3 July the council — with two ships’ officers joining — was convinced the Khoikhoi had not driven the desertions. Fear remained that the fleeing Gorachouquas would make trouble and that Schacher’s seizure would stop cattle trade. Prisoners offered cattle for freedom and blamed Harry: his herd, they said, had been built with Company copper when he was sent inland, and only ten head had ever been delivered; five years earlier he had caused the herdsman to be slain and the Company’s cattle driven off, with Jan Cou and Boubo (Simon) among the actors. The council resolved to entice Harry in, seize him, and take the stock grazing near the old redoubt. Within an hour Harry was jailed; Van Harwarden rode for Salt River. [1] [3]
At Harry’s kraal assegais flew; one Khoikhoi was shot dead, another wounded, before one hundred and ten cattle and two hundred and sixty sheep were driven in. Panic followed: only ninety-seven European men were resident, twenty of them invalids left by the last fleet. Twenty soldiers, a thousand pounds of powder, and two hundred hand grenades came ashore from the Prins Willem; two guns went on redoubt Korenhoop at Rondebosch; burghers without guns were ordered to draw them under fine of eight shillings and fourpence. Pieter Otegno was released next morning with a peace message. Gogosoa and fourteen leading men came in. [1] [3]
On Friday 5 July a treaty followed. Past offences were forgotten; future offenders would be punished by their own people; the Kaapmans were to move east of the Salt and Liesbeek, leaving Cape-side pasture to the Dutch, with leave to shelter behind the Lion’s Head if attacked; no trespass on cultivated ground; utmost effort to recover fugitive slaves, paid as for an ox in copper and tobacco; no blocking other Khoikhoi from trade; fixed cattle sales per large ship (ten head and ten sheep), per small ship (five of each), and two of each every Sunday for the garrison; a Kaapman with Doman to board each arrival for two sacks of bread or rice, pork, and a small keg of brandy. Schacher and Osaoa were freed; the Kaapmans gave ten cows and nine sheep; gifts returned. [1] [2] [3]
Beachranger peace was refused. On Doman’s advice, on Monday 8 July Harry was sent to Robben Island with Jan Cou and Boubo (Simon) — the latter two until Janssen’s murderers were given up. After about two months the last two were freed on friends’ pleas; Harry stayed, only Eva pleading for him. He might have had wives and children with him; he preferred not. Desertions did not stop. By late August fourteen slaves of the sawyer Leendert Cornelisz and the woodcutters were gone, with others from Remajenne and the Company; the council counted some twenty-eight still missing and resolved to chain male captives, except infants and the very old, as the only way to keep them at work — freemen received the same leave. Deeper measures worked for a time: by 6–9 September nearly all were back. Many burghers nonetheless returned purchased slaves and asked the Company to take them, preferring European hands if released for hire. [1] [2] [3]
Cochoqua Trade through Eva — October 1658
For some months after the Kaapman settlement, contact was thin. Gogosoa kept distance and largely avoided the cattle clauses. Gorachouquas stayed away. Beachrangers, few in number, made a kraal at the Lion’s Head foot and sometimes fetched firewood for brandy and tobacco. Inland parties sold too few oxen for Company need. Doman, the journal now said, was thrice as harmful as Harry had ever been, thwarting the Company at every turn while Eva testified against him. [1] [3]
In October the strong Cochoqua clan migrated within a few hours of the fort. Trade opened through Eva, whose sister was a wife of chief Oedasoa (second to the paramount Ngonomoa in some reports). She moved from camp to camp in Khoikhoi dress, yet told the commander she still said her prayers night and morning and had taught thanksgiving when her sister recovered from illness. Doman warned daily that the Cochoquas meant to burn houses and kill men, and begged twenty soldiers to seize their cattle while sickness weakened them. Eva answered that Doman lied with a double tongue and tried to set Dutch and Cochoqua against each other. On 30 October the council, on her advice, sent Van Harwarden with fifteen men, Eva, and four of Oedasoa’s people, packing brass, beads, pipes, tobacco, Spanish wine and brandy, bread, and spices as gifts. [1] [2] [3]
Oedasoa received the party well, sent a present of cattle and sheep (paid for), but would not yet visit the fort — his chief wife, Eva’s sister, was big with child and ill. Harwarden reported camps of large round mat houses, some thirty or forty feet across, Oedasoa’s own still greater and stacked with weapons; cattle so numerous that half a day would strip every Cape pasture the Company and freemen held; oxen broader and taller than Fatherland beasts. A second expedition left before dawn on 2 November with a wagon, six oxen, hundreds of pounds of copper, beads, pipes, and tobacco. Large barter followed; the Cochoquas looked on the Dutch with favour while feuding with the Kaapmans. By mid-October the Company already counted more than three hundred and fifty cattle of its own and freemen about two hundred — near six hundred head — before the Cochoqua opening swelled the trade further. [1] [3]
Burgher Remonstrance — December 1658
Restriction had been building all year. Van Goens had allowed cattle purchase from natives; at van Riebeeck’s urging the Seventeen withdrew it, and the May placaat closed the door. Intercourse was so barred that a burgher could be punished for letting a Khoikhoi enter his house. Leave to board ships three days after arrival was withdrawn after freemen hid in a return fleet; special leave was now required. In June the fiscal and sergeant went out three hours before dawn to catch freemen slaughtering and selling meat to ships. In September, after much sniffing at daybreak, two fat wethers were found in a pit near Visagie’s house; the guilty faced the Council of Justice. July had already brought a threat to close the provision depot if seed went unsown. [2] [3] [4]
On the afternoon of 23 December burgher councillors Steven Jansz of Wageningen and Hendrik Boom handed in a petition signed the day before by fourteen free farmers. Van Riebeeck’s marginal notes — preserved with the piece — named Herman Remajenne and Jan Rietveldt as authors and called the pen far too sharp; the whole he labelled seditious. The freemen claimed they had become free in order to trade cattle with the Khoikhoi without hindrance; that Van Goens had promised the best oxen and even a thousand sheep; that they now received old cows “as big as bleary-eyed dogs”; that they would take no less than ten guilders the muid for wheat or sow no more land, refusing to be “Company slaves.” They complained of forced peas, barley, beans, and maize, of sureties for provisions, of boarding bans, and of the commander’s own milch cows cared for under another man’s name. [1] [2]
Van Riebeeck answered point by point. Title deeds bound them to local rules confirmed by the masters; the Seventeen’s letter of 16 April 1658 fixed grain at seventy to one hundred guilders the last of three thousand six hundred pounds — about five to six guilders the muid in the freemen’s reckoning, far under their ten. He read the extract aloud; hearts sank, then rose a little when he promised to press commissioners and directors for more. Not a letter of the cattle and boarding regulations would be altered. Batavia later instructed payment near 6s. 11d. the hundred pounds of wheat. The year closed with freemen still ploughing under protest — and with the commander warning that the idle would be taken back into Company service, and that they should not dare trample Company or his own land with the plough. [1] [2] [3]
Wynberg Vines, Maize, and Half-Bred Sheep
In 1658 vine culture spread beyond Table Valley. Early stocks in the Company gardens had thrived and already borne; cuttings were plentiful. Commissioner Cunaeus, at the Cape as admiral of the return fleet from 3 to 19 March, allowed the commander to take the Bosheuvel — about three hours from the fort, beyond Company grain-lands and free farms — in place of the Green Point (behind the Lion’s Head) ground Van Goens had once earmarked, which experience showed better as pasture. The Seventeen’s letter of 16 April later confirmed full ownership of a parcel behind Table Mountain toward the sea, provided Company slaves and servants were not used on it; van Riebeeck’s own note on Van Goens’s instructions recorded that he had already planted over twelve hundred vines at the Bosheuvel on Cunaeus’s consent. [2] [3]
On 21–22 August the commander told freemen they might fetch vines for house walls or lands; most declined through poverty or ignorance, and only one or two would plant against their houses — none would put vines in open lands. On 26 August he therefore had one thousand two hundred rooted branches and unrooted cuttings set out on the Bosheuvel by his private agriculturists and slaves, in the waning moon he held the right season, and gave freemen as many as they wanted. The place was thereafter called Wynberg on that account. By year’s end his farm notes ran to some one hundred and one morgen, with draught oxen, milch cows, and mixed Dutch, Cape, and Bengal sheep — wealth enough to draw freemen’s envy in the December remonstrance. [1] [2] [3]
The first maize (Turkish wheat) came in the Hasselt from the Guinea coast. In late July, Dutch sowing time past, van Riebeeck urged every farm to plant at least a muid while the slaves still knew the crop; reluctant freemen were threatened with a closed depot if they refused. They preferred Fatherland grain and fruit to vine and maize they claimed not to understand — a complaint repeated in December when forced peas, barley, beans, and maize still lay unsold. Half-bred sheep thrived better than pure Cape stock; burghers might keep only imported rams. When the Company had enough, each farmer’s flock was made up to fifty Cape ewes and one European ram. About five hundred breeding ewes stood on Robben Island under two men who also kept the night fire for ships; a December inspection found four hundred and eighty-nine sheep in surprising condition on dry sand and green bush. [1] [3]
At burgher-councillor election freemen nominated Hendrik Boom, Jan Reyniers, Herman Remajenne, and Jacob Cornelissen. The council chose Hendrik Boom and kept Stephen Botma another year so that two councillors should sit, one retiring yearly — the same Boom and Steven who would carry the December paper to the commander’s table. [1] [3]
The West Friesland and the Hunger for Labour
Among callers was the West Friesland (West Vrieslandt). She had left Holland with three hundred and fifty-one healthy men. On 14 October she put into Saldanha Bay one hundred and forty-eight days out, unable to furl sails: seventy-two dead, some one hundred and fifty sick with scurvy ashore in tents on Schapen Island, more than half the living at first unable to walk. Free traders Jurien Janssen and his partners had already given twelve sheep and daily geese, fish, purslane, and greens from the islands by the Peguijn and Zeeleeuw. On the 21st three of her men reached the fort overland; the council packed the Schapenjacht with carrots, turnips, radishes, artichokes, leeks, milk, hundreds of eggs, and six live sheep. She reached Table Bay on 27 October; of one hundred and fifty-one sick only sixty were still down, and fresh meat and garden stuff went aboard at once. [1] [3]
Free farms at Rondebosch already meant a constant demand for cheap labour. The Company had imagined peasant proprietors on grants of at most twenty morgen, working with their own hands or a couple of servants or slaves. Farmers already wanted to direct others. West Coast slavery had disappointed — desertion, chaining, returned purchases — and they asked again for Europeans. Garrison men willing to hire out might take free papers — about twenty-five names, few staying long. Mechanics took free papers; ground went to Johannes Louw, Philip van Roon, and Jan Coenraad Visser. Cunaeus had warned not to free too many farmers before they could feed themselves; Van Goens had wanted numbers so the garrison might shrink. Between those poles van Riebeeck steered a restless free community. [2] [3] [4]
The council asked the Seventeen for poor industrious farming families; the reply was that such people were hard to move to an almost unknown land, though friends might be sent and women carefully carried. Maria de la Quellerie, meanwhile, lent capital to freemen at the usual monthly interest — on one October day alone hundreds of guilders to carpenters, Saldanha traders, and farmers — a private credit network beside the Company’s ledgers. October also exposed slave plots on the commander’s own Bosheuvel and at the grain-fields: chains filed off, draught oxen nearly driven away, talk of seizing a ship’s boat and coasting home. Labour had come to the Cape in 1658 in a new shape and a new scale. It fed vines at Wynberg, maize in freemen’s fields, and seal meat in the schoolyard — and it bound the settlement’s politics to hostages, treaties, and a remonstrance that already sounded like a colony arguing with its masters. [1] [2] [3]