Boer History1663 at the Cape of Good Hope: Cruythof’s Return, De la Guerre, Madagascar, and the School
Cruythof’s Return and Degradation — 1 February 1663
On the 1st of February 1663 Corporal Pieter Cruythof brought his volunteers back to the fort. Thirteen men, with under-surgeon Pieter van Meerhof as assistant, had left on the 21st of October 1662 to push beyond the Namaqua country toward the long-sought inland towns of the maps. They followed the old northern path to a Namaqua encampment deep beyond the Elephant River. That camp should have been their real starting point into unknown ground, but the Namaquas were at war with their neighbours and would let the Europeans go no farther. The choice offered was to fight beside the clan or to turn back. They turned back. [3]
The trek was a failure as discovery, yet one night incident marked it. As the travellers slept round their watch-fire a shower of darts fell from an unseen foe and four men were severely wounded. The assailants were believed to be San; they fled before the party recovered from surprise. Not long afterward the expedition came suddenly on a San encampment of women and children. Cruythof ordered that they be put to death and their effects destroyed in revenge for the wounds. The volunteers, standing by van Meerhof, refused unanimously and answered that they would not shed innocent blood. Cruythof had to abandon the design. [3]
At the fort the authorities expressed approval of what under other circumstances would have been treated as mutiny. Cruythof underwent no trial, but he at once lost favour. Shortly afterward he committed a trivial offence of which advantage was taken to degrade him in rank. The year’s inland work opened, therefore, not with a new northern triumph but with a public lesson that European revenge against non-combatants would not be shielded when the men in the field refused it. [3]
De Lairesse’s Fleet and the Mozambique Failure
Toward the close of 1662 a fleet of six large ships and a tender under Admiral Hubert de Lairesse had taken on board at Table Bay the soldiers detained for months and sailed to try to wrest Mozambique from the Portuguese. In 1663 the settlement learned the voyage’s cost. All went well until the latitude of Delagoa Bay. Then stormy weather and a head wind blew for nearly two months. Crews exhausted, scurvy broke out, and the admiral had to seek refreshment. The ships put about and by the following noon were as far south as they had been five weeks earlier, close to the coast some distance above Delagoa Bay. Good holding ground was found in a haven or bight; anchors went down and men went ashore. [3]
Cattle in plenty could be had from the people of the coast for iron and other merchandise. For a short time the fleet believed its troubles past and looked to the change of monsoon to renew the design against Mozambique. Joy was brief. The scurvy had not left them when the fever endemic on that coast prostrated whole companies at once. One hundred and fourteen men died within a few days; half the remainder were laid up when the admiral ordered the anchors raised and the course set for Batavia. At the Cape the temporary garrison of Mozambique soldiers was already gone; the news that followed only confirmed that the bay’s quiet under Commander Zacharias Wagenaar would not be broken by a victorious return from the Portuguese coast. [3]
Death of Roelof de Man and Blank’s Madagascar Venture
At the same season another effort was made to open trade between the Cape and the island of Madagascar. By order of the directors a small vessel was fitted out for the Bay of St Augustine, with a trading party and a wooden house ready to put up, for a permanent establishment if prospects looked good. The directors appointed the secunde Roelof de Man head of the expedition. That faithful officer died on the 5th of March 1663, before the vessel was ready to sail. De Man had been van Riebeeck’s right hand and Wagenaar’s first lieutenant in council; his death removed one of the few men who still linked the settlement of 1652 to the quieter command of the early 1660s. [3]
The council of policy then selected Joachim Blank, the ablest clerk on the Cape establishment, for the command. In December Blank returned with a report of failure. He stated that there was very little trade either at the Bay of St Augustine or at other places he visited, the inhabitants being impoverished by constant wars among themselves. He had obtained only eight or nine tons of rice and seven slaves. The directors’ hope of a Madagascan outstation feeding the Cape thus closed the year as thin cargo and a negative report, not as a new residency. [3]
De la Guerre’s Northern Expedition
Failures on the northern road had not yet turned the Cape authorities to another compass bearing. The exploring expedition of 1663 followed the path of those before it. The leader was Sergeant Jonas de la Guerre; Pieter van Meerhof was second in command; with them went fourteen European volunteers and three Khoikhoi. Among the volunteers was a soldier named Hieronymus Cruse, who would remain a prominent figure at the Cape for many years. Instructions ordered De la Guerre to take no part in native quarrels, but to induce interior clans to make peace with each other and come to the fort to trade. If the Namaquas acted as they had toward Cruythof’s party, he was first to threaten them with the commander’s enmity; if that failed he was to march his men forward, and if attacked to pour a volley of small shot among them. Sixteen men with firearms, it was believed, would be more than a match for the Namaqua horde. [3]
They took a waggon in which stores rode as far as the Elephant River. There they took it to pieces and buried it with some provisions, then started fresh with pack oxen and a food reserve against the return. Hardly a doubt remained among them that they would reach the great river of the map. Want of water in that arid country destroyed the hope. They pushed on bravely through intense suffering, but at length had either to turn back or lie down and die. Fainting with thirst they regained the Elephant River and found that during their absence the stores had been discovered and removed. The waggon had been burnt, probably for the ironwork. The oxen remained, so starvation was not immediate, but they reached the fort after more than three months in a very different condition from that in which they had left it. [3]
The Cape tent waggon of later colonial travel was already, in model, the Low Countries farm waggon the first settlers knew: axle and schamel, draaiboard and tongue, disselboom and longwaggon. Sand and rivers forced higher wheels; long journeys enlarged the body; iron axles and patent brakes lay far ahead. De la Guerre’s buried vehicle was still close to that European pattern — and it ended as ash and scavenged iron beside a dry northern river. [3]
The Water Tank at Table Bay
In this year a public work of real use to the shipping was completed. A water tank sixteen roods long, four roods wide, and from four to five feet deep was built about a stone’s throw west of the fort near the margin of the bay. It was intended for the convenience of ships watering in Table Bay — a concrete improvement to the refreshment station’s oldest duty, independent of the failed inland treks and the thin Madagascan cargo. [3]
The tank did not enlarge the settlement’s boundary. Watch-houses and ploughlands remained where van Riebeeck had left them. What changed was the harbour equipment: water stored in a measured basin instead of only the Fresh River’s flow and the improvised casks of earlier years. For a commander averse to dramatic exertion, a finished tank was the sort of solid, uncontroversial work that fitted both Company interest and Wagenaar’s temperament. [3]
George Frederick Wreede’s Vocabulary — November 1663
Among Company servants at the Cape in these years was George Frederick Wreede, a runaway German student who had enlisted as a soldier and reached South Africa in 1659. The East India Company of the Netherlands Republic still offered advancement to ability wherever it could be found; many commanders and governors had risen from the ranks. Whatever fault had driven Wreede from Germany, it was not want of brain or distaste of study. Once among a people whose inner life Europeans still barely understood, he set himself to learn their speech. Within a few years he had a thorough knowledge of the language, so that after the deaths of the old interpreters Harry and Doman the commander used him on important occasions as messenger to chiefs at a distance. [3]
In November 1663 Wreede was arranging a vocabulary of Dutch and Khoikhoi words. He dedicated the work to the directors and sent them two copies. Commander Wagenaar, forwarding it, asked that it be printed and that some copies be returned to the Cape for use. What became of the manuscripts cannot be fixed from documents later found in South Africa or in the Dutch archives; there is strong reason to believe they were lent to the historian Ludolf and were among his papers at his death. The directors, though they thought it more advisable that the natives learn Dutch than that Europeans learn the Khoikhoi tongue, promised to have the work printed. Whether that promise was kept remains doubtful. [3]
The first Cape author had no reason to complain that his labour went unpaid. The directors instructed the commander to present him in their name with a sum equal to twenty pounds sterling, and ordered him promoted to a good situation in any branch of the service he should choose. That preferment would carry Wreede, in later seasons, toward Martin Vaz and then Mauritius; in 1663 the visible fruit at the Cape was the vocabulary itself and official recognition that linguistic work belonged inside the Company’s business of trade and mediation. [3]
Van der Stael, Ernestus Back, and the Sick-Comforter’s Office
For thirteen years after the founding the settlement was held too small to need a resident clergyman. A sermon and prayers were read every Sunday and on special occasions by the sick comforter; other rites were performed occasionally by ships’ chaplains; marriages usually passed before the secretary of the council. The first sick comforter, Willem Barents Wylant, and his successor, Pieter van der Stael, had already shaped that humble ministry. Van der Stael left the Cape for Batavia in September 1663. Ernestus Back, who had held the same office on board a ship, was appointed to the vacant place. [3]
Back proved so addicted to intemperance that at times he was unfit for duty. He was repeatedly suspended; on those occasions the fiscal conducted the services. Punishment and disgrace seemed only to harden him. Wagenaar feared that such conduct would bring divine vengeance on the whole community, whose members were held, by a grim logic of corporate guilt, subject to the consequences of the offender’s sin. That fear would later be sharpened by a comet seen for two months in the night sky and by the decision to ship Back and his family to Batavia — events that fall in the following season. In 1663 the practical fact was simpler: the sick-comforter’s post changed hands in September, and the man who filled it was already unfit for the trust the settlement placed in the office. [3]
The School of Late 1663
Subsidiary to the church stood the school of the period, in which children learned to read and write, to cast accounts in gulden and stivers, and to repeat the catechism and sundry prayers. The first school at the Cape had been Pieter van der Stael’s short-lived class for slave children from the west coast, closed after a few weeks by earlier events. Toward the close of 1663 a school was opened again, with Ernestus Back as teacher. [3]
Fees were first fixed at two shillings a month for each child of a burgher, then shortly reduced by half. Slave and Khoikhoi children were to be taught without charge pro Deo, as the regulations put it. The school began with seventeen pupils: four slave children, one youthful Khoikhoi, and twelve Europeans. Back’s misconduct soon forced his suspension as a teacher of youth. A steady, well-behaved soldier named Daniel Engelgraeff was then appointed schoolmaster. Under his care the number of pupils increased, and nothing interrupted the work until his death in a later year. [3]
Even the school regulations showed how practical the early settlers were. There was no fixed holiday calendar, because the loft in which the school met was needed for visitors whenever a fleet lay in the bay; during those weeks the children were of necessity released. Instruction, hospitality, and the rhythm of the shipping season shared one roof — a small emblem of how tightly the refreshment station still braided daily life with the Company’s fleets. [3]
Harry’s Death and the Table Valley Kraal
During Wagenaar’s government Europeans and Khoikhoi generally lived on good terms. The number of Khoikhoi residing permanently in Table Valley rose in these years to about eighty souls, swollen by an influx of some of the most unsettled individuals from the pastoral clans. They kept a kraal of their own on the slope under the Lion’s Head. After Harry’s death in 1663 they stood nominally under the government of Jan Cou. The commander did not interfere in quarrels among themselves, but gave notice that anyone caught stealing from Europeans would be soundly flogged. [3]
Harry — Autshumao to his own people, interpreter and beach ranger to the Dutch since before the fort was built — had been for more than a decade the settlement’s most familiar Khoikhoi intermediary, by turns ally, suspect, exile on Robben Island, and again the man through whom cattle and messages moved. His death closed that personal channel. Wreede’s rising skill with the language and Eva’s continued service partly filled the gap; no single figure replaced Harry’s long, ambiguous brokerage between fort and kraal. [3]
By Wagenaar’s account the Table Valley residents lived by sending their women to collect firewood for sale, placing little daughters in service, fishing occasionally, and begging constantly. The men could seldom be induced to any work but tending cattle, and that only for spirits and tobacco. They understood Dutch so well that an interpreter was no longer needed for ordinary dealings — another quiet mark of how far daily contact had gone by the eleventh year of the residency. [3]
Settlement Tempo under Wagenaar — Close of 1663
The calendar year thus mixed failure and modest construction. Cruythof came home disgraced; De la Guerre came home thirst-broken; Blank came home with rice by the ton and seven slaves instead of a Madagascan factory. De Man’s death removed a pillar of the early council. Against those losses stood a finished water tank for the bay, a vocabulary dedicated to the Seventeen, a school that outlasted its first drunken master, and the slow demographic fact of a permanent Khoikhoi kraal under the Lion’s Head after Harry’s death. [3]
Wagenaar still sent no expeditions on new bearings after De la Guerre’s return. No new clan except the Hessequas, already seen in the previous season’s trade, altered the map of known neighbours. Free papers remained few. The commander’s opinion ran against rapid European colonisation; the statistics he had to furnish would later show the free burghers less idle than he sometimes pronounced them, but in 1663 policy and temperament alike favoured repair, regulation, and the shipping’s water over another push into the dry north. The earthen fort still served; the stone castle and the resident clergyman lay in decisions not yet taken. For the Cape, 1663 was a year of returns, replacements, and small durable works rather than of enlarged borders. [3]