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 under Commander Wagenaar’s instructions of the 19th of that month, still hoping to push beyond the Namaqua country toward the long-sought inland towns of the maps. They followed the old northern path until they reached a Namaqua encampment deep in the wilderness beyond the Elephant River. That camp should have been their real starting point into unknown ground, for the country behind them was already well known; 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, and the expedition as discovery was a failure. [3]
One night incident marked the trek. 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 — the mountain people of poisoned arrows whom the Khoikhoi already dreaded as cattle-takers and killers of isolated herders — though who they were could not be positively ascertained, for they fled before the party recovered from surprise. Cory, following the same episode, places Cruythof’s northern journey among the earliest recorded European contacts with those hunters living like banditti among the Namaqua and other pastoral clans. [3] [4]
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. 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]
The failure did not close the northern road in principle. Wagenaar’s government still treated Vigiti Magna and the great river of the maps as reachable goals; van Meerhof’s standing rose by the volunteers’ refusal; and within the year another sergeant would be ordered north with sharper instructions if the Namaquas again barred the path. What February settled was narrower and more moral: the fort would not punish men who refused to massacre women and children for a night attack by unseen archers.
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 put into Table Bay, taken on board the soldiers detained for months, and sailed to try to wrest Mozambique from the Portuguese. De Lairesse, while at the Cape, had also seen van Riebeeck’s old show-farm Bosheuvel. He wrote that the vineyard there stood very fine and promised marked fruit, set on a most suitable place, and that if the good hand were kept to it the Honourable Company would be well served — yet he carried no special order to fix a purchase price, and the decision whether the Company should buy the farm rested with the Seventeen. [2] [3]
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 violently for nearly two months. Crews became 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 to learn whether any refreshment could be had. [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]
The Mozambique failure belonged to the wider Indian Ocean war the Company still fought against Portuguese strongholds, yet its Cape meaning was local and immediate. Soldiers who had crowded the fort and drawn on its cattle and greens were no longer a charge on Table Valley. The bay returned to the ordinary traffic of Indiamen, galiots, and the small craft of a refreshment station. Wagenaar’s temperament — elderly, grave, averse to dramatic exertion — fitted a year in which imperial ambition wrecked itself far up the coast while the Cape kept water, greens, and a thin garrison for the next fleet.
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 and deserving 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. The Assembly of Seventeen’s instructions for the Madagascar party, with addenda by Wagenaar, were dated the 26th of May 1663. [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. Wagenaar’s later instruction for Blank as head of a Madagascar party (19 May 1664) shows that the Company did not drop the island after one thin cargo, but 1663 itself ended without a permanent post. [3]
Spring brought a commissioner as well as a funeral. Herman Klencke van Odessen, at the Cape in March and April 1663, issued instructions for Wagenaar on the 16th of April. On Bosheuvel he crushed van Riebeeck’s remaining hope that the Company would buy the farm. The two Company gardens, he reported, already yielded enough fresh fruit for the ships; he could not see that it was advisable for the Honourable Company to purchase the land at the Bosheuvel from the Honourable Riebeeck, even if it could be had for little money, the Company having already enough land, gardens, and trees to maintain. The ships, he added, already carried so much produce that he would soon not know what to do with the abundance. So Klencke advised the Seventeen against the purchase. [2] [3]
Wagenaar still had to keep the place in order while title remained unsettled. On the 6th of April 1663 he wrote to the Seventeen that by the resolution of 28 July 1661 Bosheuvel had in effect already been transferred to the Company, together with eight slaves, twenty-two draught oxen, and farm gear; but because van Riebeeck had afterward removed and sold the slaves, Wagenaar had ordered two officials, with the help of six slaves and slave women, to keep the farm going. Eighteen oxen did the plough work, and the harvests served the Company. Only after van Riebeeck was told that the Seventeen would not buy did he order a public sale; that sale itself fell later, on 28 November 1665, when Jacob Cornelisz van Rosendael bought the farm. In the meantime Commissioner P. A. Overtwater’s instructions of the 7th of September 1663 framed further guidance for Wagenaar, and on the 24th of October Wagenaar wrote to Batavia that a bill of exchange for f 150, signed by Overtwater, should be paid there to van Riebeeck — a small, dutiful settlement of private Cape accounts beside the year’s larger failures. [2] [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. Wagenaar’s instructions for the party were dated the 10th of October 1663. They 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. The trek’s human result was clearer than its geography: Cruse gained field experience he would use on later Mossel Bay and eastern journeys; van Meerhof again survived a northern failure; and the fort learned once more that thirst, not Namaqua diplomacy alone, could close the road to Vigiti Magna. [3]
Between Cruythof’s February return and De la Guerre’s October departure the northern policy had hardened only in tone, not in route. The same Elephant River depot, the same pack-ox stage beyond the known path, the same hope of a mapped town that no European at the Cape had seen — and the same dependence on water holes that failed. Wagenaar would not yet send a major party east toward the Hessequa mountains that had already sent cattle to the fort; the cartography of hope still pointed north.
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. Fleets that still lost weeks to scurvy on other coasts could at least fill more quickly and more cleanly in Table Bay. [3]
Measured against the year’s other projects, the tank was the one clear success. Mozambique had cost more than a hundred lives without a Portuguese surrender; Madagascar returned rice by the ton rather than a residency; the northern waggon burned for its iron. Sixteen roods by four of stored water did not figure on any map of Monomotapa, yet it served every hull that anchored off the fort — the practical core of why the Cape existed in Company accounts.
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. When Harry’s personal brokerage ended in the same year, Wreede’s skill and Eva’s continued service became the practical substitutes for a single beach-ranger’s long, ambiguous channel between fort and kraal. [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 seasons, with the Cape council’s despatch of 7 February 1665 citing the tailed star as a threat of righteous punishment. 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 office itself remained indispensable. Until a resident clergyman arrived in 1665, the sick comforter was the only standing representative of the church on shore. Ships’ chaplains might baptize or marry when a fleet lay in the bay; Sunday by Sunday the reading of sermon and prayer still fell to the man in the post — or, when Back was suspended, to the fiscal. Spiritual care, school teaching, and moral example were expected of one thin appointment; Back failed all three almost as soon as he took them up.
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. Seventeen names on a first roll, a drunk teacher replaced by a steady soldier, fees cut in half for burghers and waived for slave and Khoikhoi children: the school of late 1663 was modest, mixed, and already shaped by the bay’s traffic rather than by any metropolitan plan of education. [3]
Harry’s Death and the Table Valley Kraal
During Wagenaar’s government Europeans and Khoikhoi generally lived on good terms. The commander’s policy among the clans was strict neutrality whenever he could not mediate so as to preserve peace — a line he would hold even when, in a later year, Oedasoa offered hundreds of cattle for military help against the Hessequas. 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. Doman was already gone; the old pair of interpreters who had framed the first ten years of contact left the stage within a short span of seasons. [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. The kraal under the Lion’s Head was not a sovereign clan camp in the old pastoral sense; it was a permanent fringe community inside the settlement’s shadow, governed lightly by Jan Cou and watched by a commander who flogged thieves but left internal quarrels alone. [3]
So 1663 closed at the Cape: Cruythof degraded and the volunteers praised; De Lairesse’s Mozambique design ruined by storm, scurvy, and fever; de Man dead and Blank back from St Augustine with rice and seven slaves; Klencke’s no to Bosheuvel; De la Guerre’s party thirst-broken on the northern road; a water tank finished by the bay; Wreede’s vocabulary on its way to the Seventeen; van der Stael gone and Back already a scandal in the sick-comforter’s office; a school of seventeen under a soldier schoolmaster; and Harry dead under the Lion’s Head. The maps still named Vigiti Magna. The fort’s real gains that year were a basin of water, a word-list, a loft school, and the hard knowledge that revenge against San non-combatants would not pass when the men in the field refused the order.