Boer History1664 at the Cape of Good Hope: Mauritius, the War Cloud, and Fortress Plans
Mauritius Reoccupied — May and June 1664
Shortly after the first residency at the Cape, the East India Company had withdrawn its people from Mauritius. The island was a poor victualling station by the standards of the India route, and little of commercial value beyond ebony and a small quantity of ambergris had been procured there. Before embarking, the Dutch had turned loose cows, goats, and pigs, which in a few years multiplied into large herds. Mauritius then remained unpeopled until 1664, when the directors resolved to take possession of it again — more to keep other nations away than for any direct profit they expected to draw from it. [3]
The French were making strenuous efforts in that part of the Indian Ocean. Their king had taken into his own hands the direction of the factories at Madagascar, and that great island seemed likely under his guidance to become an important colony. Bishop Estienne had reached the field on which his hopes had long been set and, with a large staff of ecclesiastics, was erecting a monastery near Port Dauphin from which missionaries were to be sent among the islanders. The French had also taken possession of Mascarenhas, placed a small post there, and named the island Bourbon. It was evident that Mauritius must be reoccupied or the Company would be excluded from a large portion of those seas. The plan was not an expensive colony but a few men on an outpost of the Cape residency. [3]
In May 1664 a small party left Table Bay under Jacobus van Nieuwland, an officer selected in Holland and sent out for the purpose. Commander Wagenaar’s instructions for van Nieuwland as head of the Mauritius party are dated among the Cape papers of that month, together with those of the 19th of May for Assistant Joachim Blank as head of a further Madagascar venture — proof that the Company still treated the western Indian Ocean as one field of Cape responsibility even after Blank’s thin cargo of the previous December. On the 26th of June the Mauritius party landed and resumed possession on behalf of the Honourable Company. They brought a wooden house, a quantity of seeds and tools, and a twelve-months’ supply of provisions. These were put on shore; the vessel that had carried them then set sail and left the little post in loneliness. [3]
For a whole year afterward the island remained unvisited. When a cutter later brought supplies and a relief commandant, the first establishment was found completely disorganised: van Nieuwland was dead, the soldiers had thrown off restraint after the last keg of spirits was drawn, and most of them were leading a half-savage life on wild goats while the garden went untended. The new commandant could not restore order until three chief mutineers were seized and put in irons on board the cutter; they were brought to the Cape, tried, and punished, one of them very severely. That relief and the trials belong to the following season; the act of 1664 was the reoccupation itself and the binding of Mauritius as a Cape dependency. [3]
From that footing the island’s growth was slow. Every year a vessel was to sail from Table Bay with supplies and bring back ebony logs. A soldier who requested discharge there became a burgher as at the Cape. Once, three families were forcibly deported from Rondebosch to the island because their heads were held worthless characters and the council thought a change of residence might bring them to their senses. In time councils similar to those at the Cape were formed, all subordinate to the Cape authorities, so that a man who lost a case in the court of justice at Mauritius could appeal to the court at the Cape. Mauritius stood to the Cape much as the Cape stood to Batavia. [3]
The commandant later sent to the island in 1665 was George Frederick Wreede, the German student-soldier whose Dutch–Khoikhoi vocabulary of November 1663 the directors had rewarded with twenty pounds and preferment. Before Mauritius he was briefly intended for a residency on the rocks of Martin Vaz; finding them bare and almost inaccessible, he returned disappointed, his journal and report still among the colonial papers. His Mauritius appointment closed the loop between linguistic work at the fort and the new oceanic outpost. For 1664 itself the Cape’s seaward map had already widened: Madagascar still under Blank’s thin trade, Mauritius under van Nieuwland’s wooden house and twelve-months’ stores, both answerable to Table Bay. [3]
The Anglo-Dutch War Cloud — September and October 1664
In September 1664 intelligence reached the Cape of the likelihood of war between England and the Netherlands. The directors wrote that the government of Charles II seemed bent upon a rupture, though the States were anxiously striving to maintain peace if that were possible without loss of honour. Commercial rivalry lay at the bottom of the ill-feeling, and the English government could not suppress the war spirit of the people. Historians of many nations later threw the blame of the humiliating war which followed entirely upon the English; the colonial archives, however, preserve proof that outrages were by no means confined to one side. Piratical acts were committed in distant seas by Dutch and English alike without the perpetrators being punished. [3]
One such act is recorded in detail among the Cape papers. The crew of an Indiaman that put into Table Bay had, on the outward passage, overhauled two English vessels and searched them for treasure. The officers of one they tortured with burning rope-yarn to make them confess whether they had anything of value on board. For many months after the September warning, matters remained in suspense. On the 24th of October the directors wrote that news had been received at the Hague of the capitulation of the West India Company’s possessions in North America to an English fleet. The Dutch factories on the coast of Guinea had also been attacked, though war was not yet formally declared. [3]
Only on the 9th of June 1665 would tidings reach South Africa that the English had seized a great number of ships in the Channel, that the Dutch were retaliating, and that the two nations were openly at war. The Cape’s 1664 experience was therefore the long uncertainty, not the open fighting — months in which every Indiaman in the bay might be friend or prize, and in which the earthen fort’s weakness against a European squadron became a directorate obsession rather than a local complaint. The war cloud did not yet bring English shot into Table Bay; it brought orders that would reshape the valley in stone. [3]
A Stone Fortress Ordered for Table Valley
During the period of uncertainty that preceded the formal declaration of hostilities, the directors took into consideration the importance of their residency at the Cape as commanding the highway to India, and its defenceless condition in the event of a sudden attack. The old earthen fort was protection enough against the largest force the neighbouring clans could bring against it, but it could not be held against a European enemy of any strength. Its walls were frequently falling, especially after heavy rains, and the guns mounted upon it were harmless to a ship at the usual anchorage. [3]
After much consideration the directors resolved to erect in Table Valley a strong stone fortress capable of sustaining heavy guns and sufficiently commodious for a large body of troops. They caused plans to be prepared and, having approved the design that seemed most suitable, gave the necessary orders for execution. Instructions went to Commander Zacharias Wagenaar to detain three hundred soldiers from passing ships and to employ them in getting materials ready. Pieter Dombaer, an engineer, was appointed to superintend the work. Selection of the site, a matter of the first importance, was entrusted to commissioner Isbrand Goske (also written Godsken, Gotsken, Godske), one of the ablest officers in the Company’s service. [3]
The landing of the three hundred men, the shell-gathering on Robben Island, the limekilns fed with fuel from Hout Bay, and Goske’s choice of ground sixty Rhynland roods east of the old fort belong to the active season that followed — he would arrive in the Nieuw Middelburg on the 18th of August 1665 and fix the site after eight days’ inspection with a large board of councillors and naval and military officers. The strategic decision and the first orders that set those works in motion were products of the 1664 war scare. Foundations would later prove deeper than hoped — nowhere nearer the surface than eleven feet, in places more than double that — but the year itself closed with the order given, the engineer named, and the commissioner designated, not yet with trenches open in the valley. [3]
Years afterward, when van Riebeeck sat as secretary of the Council of India in Batavia, he would still raise difficulties about the ground Goske and Wagenaar had chosen — that the soil was hard and barren, that water might fail for the moat and for the garrison in the dry season — and Maetsuyker’s council would order those objections examined with circumspection and ask whether enough labourers could be found for so great a work over many years. That later Batavian debate belongs to the castle’s long building; what 1664 fixed was the political will in Amsterdam to replace mud walls with stone on the highway to India. [2] [3]
Batavia’s Ruling on Slave Baptism — 25 January 1664
Not long before this year a fierce dispute had arisen among the clergy of the Reformed church in India, and the strife was hotly carried on in every congregation and often in the households of the laity. The question was whether the children of unbelieving parents should be baptized. At the Cape the custom had been for ships’ chaplains to baptize all slave children brought to them for that purpose, at the same time admonishing the owners that it was their duty to have such children educated in Christian principles. Many of those children were of mixed parentage and on that account entitled by law to freedom; even in the case of pure blacks, baptism and a profession of Christianity were at this time considered substantial grounds for claiming emancipation. Yet the objection of many persons at the Cape seems to have rested less on a mercenary spirit than on a genuine conviction that the act was not in accordance with the teaching of the Bible. Members of the council of policy as well as the burghers were divided, and as no agreement could be reached locally, reference was made to Batavia. [3]
A reply was received from the governor-general and council of India, dated the 25th of January 1664, informing the Cape authorities that the ecclesiastical court at Batavia, in conjunction with the classis of Amsterdam, had decided that the children of unbelieving slaves ought to be baptized, provided that those with whom they lived bound themselves to have such children educated in the Christian religion. They grounded the opinion on the precedent of the patriarch Abraham, all the males of whose household had been circumcised on account of their master’s faith. In conformity with that decision the Company had established a school at Batavia for the education of the children of its own slaves, all of whom were baptized in infancy, and the Cape government was directed to act in the same manner. [3]
The ruling did not end controversy everywhere in the Company’s possessions. Many clergymen took a different view of the Abraham precedent; congregations were rent asunder; bitterness entered families. At the Cape the standing order became the measure against which later practice was tested when a resident clergyman arrived and when visiting chaplains protested from the pulpit. The Rev. Johan van Arckel, who would reach Table Bay only in August 1665 with the same Nieuw Middelburg that brought Goske, embraced the classis view and baptized all children brought to him. The Company’s own slave children were sent to school to learn prayers and the Heidelberg catechism. For a time strife ceased in matters ecclesiastical under a gentle and pious minister — until his death in January 1666 and a later Sunday interruption by a ship’s chaplain briefly revived the quarrel. The decision of 25 January 1664 was the legal and theological hinge on which those later Cape scenes turned. [3]
Cochoqua–Hessequa War and Oedasoa’s Offer
During Wagenaar’s government the Europeans and the Khoikhoi clans lived generally on good terms. Once only an incident near the watch-house Keert de Koe caused a short unpleasantness: a party of Cochoquas with cattle for sale encamped close to the gate through which they must pass into the Company’s territory; a soldier on guard detected some of them breaking down the fence to make a fire; when he ordered them off they belaboured him with sticks. Next morning they came on to the fort as if nothing had happened, but the soldier was there before them. Two were arrested. The others were told that the prisoners would be released only when the actual assailants were produced. After a short delay the clan sent ten good oxen and as many sheep as a recompense. Wagenaar accepted the cattle instead of the hostages, with a promise to return them if the disturbers of the peace were produced. They never were; after some months a pecuniary award was made to the soldier and the cattle were slaughtered for the Company. [3]
The Cochoquas and Chainouquas were by this time so well supplied with copper and trinkets that they seldom brought cattle for sale except when they wanted tobacco, but from the Hessequas large herds were frequently bartered. All were anxious to procure iron, and the commander could at any time have obtained from the nearest Cape clans as many oxen as he required in exchange for that metal had he chosen to supply it. Under no circumstances would he part with as much iron as would make an assagai, for fear of the ultimate consequences to the Europeans. Some of the natives understood how to smelt iron for themselves, but the quantity in general use was very small. [3]
In disputes between the clans Wagenaar’s policy was strict neutrality whenever he could not mediate so as to preserve peace. In 1664 the Cochoquas and the Hessequas were at war with each other. Oedasoa offered to pay six hundred head of good cattle in advance for military assistance, and as many more after the return of an expedition he was planning, if it should succeed in crushing his enemy. The offer was declined without hesitation. Oedasoa was informed that the Dutch were determined to quarrel with no one unless compelled in defence to do so. The refusal kept the settlement out of a cattle war that would have paid handsomely in stock and would have bound the Company to one side of an inland feud — a choice consistent with the thin garrison and the commander’s aversion to dramatic inland entanglement after De la Guerre’s thirst-broken northern return. [3]
The Hessequa cattle road remained the working supply for large herds even while Cochoqua copper satiety dried the nearer trade. Neutrality cost the fort six hundred oxen in hand and as many more in prospect; it preserved the settlement’s character as a refreshment station that traded with all pastoral neighbours and marched with none. In the following year a disease would thin the Goringhaiquas and Gorachouquas by about a fifth of their fighting strength — Wagenaar reckoned them left with only some eight hundred fighting men — and the Cochoquas would suffer even more; but that mortality belongs to 1665. In 1664 the political fact was the war between Cochoqua and Hessequa and the rejected bargain with Oedasoa. [3]
Sousoa’s Death and Changing Clan Names
About this time the Chainouquas began to be called Soeswas by the Europeans, though the old chief Sousoa, from whom the new name was derived, died in 1664. In the same manner one branch of the Cochoquas now had the name of Gonnemas given to it. The labels stuck in everyday speech at the fort even as the men who had first worn them passed out of the record. Trade and diplomacy continued under the new names; the Hessequa cattle road and the Cochoqua counsels of Oedasoa and Gonnema remained the working map of the western clans. [3]
The number of Khoikhoi residing permanently in Table Valley increased during Wagenaar’s administration to about eighty souls. The increase came from an influx of some of the most unsettled individuals from the pastoral clans. They had a kraal of their own on the slope under the Lion’s Head where, after Harry’s death in 1663, they were nominally under the government of Jan Cou. The commander never interfered in quarrels among themselves, but he gave notice that anyone caught stealing from Europeans would be soundly flogged. According to Wagenaar they lived by sending their women to collect firewood for sale, placing their little daughters in service, and further by fishing occasionally and begging constantly. The men could seldom be induced to do any other work than tend cattle, and that only in return for spirits and tobacco. They could all understand Dutch so well that an interpreter was no longer needed in ordinary dealing at the fort. [3]
Sousoa’s death and the rise of the Soeswa and Gonnema labels mark a quiet shift in European speech rather than a sudden redrawing of power inland. The fort still dealt with Oedasoa’s Cochoquas and with Hessequa herds; Harry was gone; Eva and Wreede carried much of the linguistic burden. What changed in 1664 was the vocabulary of the council minutes and the watch-house talk — new names for old neighbours, fixed by a chief’s death and by the habits of Dutch scribes who needed short handles for long clan histories. [3]
Eva’s Marriage to Pieter van Meerhof
Eva, who had been brought up in Mr van Riebeeck’s house, was baptized soon after the arrival of Commander Wagenaar and two years later was married to the explorer Pieter van Meerhof. The match therefore falls in 1664. The commander and council believed that the union would tend to promote goodwill between the two races, and they resolved to show their approbation in a substantial manner. Eva was considered a child of the Company, having served as an interpreter for many years without other payment than food and clothing. A bridal feast was prepared for her at the Company’s expense in the commander’s house, and a wedding present of ten pounds in money was made to her. The bridegroom was promoted to the full rank of surgeon, with pay at the rate of three pounds a month. [2] [3]
In the following year van Meerhof was further advanced to the office of overseer on Robben Island, where in addition to the old establishment a party of men was placed to collect shells and dress stones for particular work in the new castle. The marriage thus linked the interpreter household of the first commander’s years to the stone-building season that the war cloud of 1664 had set in motion. At the fort the feast and the cash gift were public marks that the council wished the alliance read as Company policy, not merely as a private match. [3]
Van Meerhof’s standing had already risen by the volunteers’ refusal, on Cruythof’s northern trek, to massacre San women and children. He had survived De la Guerre’s thirst-broken return. Promotion to full surgeon and, later, Robben Island overseer rewarded both field service and a marriage the council chose to advertise. For Eva the bridal table in the commander’s house was the most public recognition the settlement had yet given a Khoikhoi woman raised inside the fort’s walls — still framed, as the minutes framed it, as an instrument of goodwill and a debt owed to a long unpaid interpreter. [3]
Grain Prices and the Settlement Economy
The prices paid by the Company for grain were raised at this time, as the burghers complained that the old rates allowed them no profit. Wheat was raised to eleven shillings and eight pence, rye and barley to nine shillings and two pence, and oats to six shillings and eight pence the muid. The farmers were paying from sixteen shillings and eight pence to twenty-five shillings a month to European men-servants as wages. The Javanese horses had increased so greatly in number that the Company began to supply the farmers with them. In 1665 the first troop of sixteen would be sold by public auction at an average of four pounds five shillings each; the breeding stock and the decision to put horses into free hands were already part of the economic adjustment of Wagenaar’s middle years. [3]
In Table Valley the free population remained small and closely regulated. By 1666 there would be sixteen free families living there — four keeping canteens, one a retail grocery, one a baker, the remainder mechanics — and the government fixed the price of everything that was sold. An officer went round periodically to test all weights and measures; such as were correct were stamped, and such as were not according to the Amsterdam standard were destroyed. The number of men to whom free papers were given during Wagenaar’s whole period was very small. A few women, either wives of or betrothed to men already in the colony, and a couple of families from the Netherlands, constituted the additions to the settled population. [3]
Wagenaar’s own opinion was unfavourable to colonisation of the country by Europeans. He seems to have been prejudiced against the free burghers; the statistics he was obliged to furnish, however, show that they were far from being as idle as on more than one occasion he pronounced them to be. In his last official paper he wrote that twenty-five industrious Chinese families would, in his view, serve the Company as well as fifty of such European families as were established at the Cape, and regretted that they could not be obtained. Böeseken records the same strain in his correspondence: free burghers so poor that many wished to re-enter Company service; daily trouble with raw and refractory ships’ and labour people for a hundred and fifty guilders a month; and Goske’s remark that he would not willingly serve out his time at the Cape even for six hundred guilders a month. The poor opinion was probably a reflection of their feelings regarding him — there is no trace of regret at his later departure — yet the raised grain tariffs and the horse sales show a government still obliged to keep ploughland alive while it planned stone walls. [2] [3]
Wagenaar’s Successor Named — December 1664
Commander Wagenaar had not been two years in South Africa when he requested the directors to relieve him of the cares of government, owing to his ill health. In December 1664 his request was so far complied with that he was informed of the appointment of a successor in the person of Cornelis van Quaelberg, who, however, was unable to leave Europe just then. It was intended that commissioner Isbrand Goske should remain at the Cape until van Quaelberg’s arrival, but when Goske reached the colony the commander’s health was so improved that it was unnecessary for him to stay after the site of the castle was fixed. [3]
Van Quaelberg himself would leave Holland only on the 19th of December 1665 in the ship Dordrecht and would not take over the government until the 27th of September 1666. During the war, ships from the Netherlands stood away north-west and rounded the British islands; the Dordrecht was so battered in the North Sea that she lay nine weeks in the Faröe Isles, lost a hundred and ten men by death after leaving those isles, and entered Table Bay with not a single person in sound health on board. The year’s close in 1664, therefore, gave the Cape a named successor and a prolonged lame-duck command rather than an immediate change of hands. [3]
After the return of the party under Sergeant Jonas de la Guerre, Wagenaar sent out no more exploring expeditions, and no new clans except the Hessequas had visited the fort during his government. The boundary of the settlement remained exactly where van Riebeeck had left it. Two of the old watch-houses, Houdt den Bul and Koren Hoop, had been broken down; the other three — Duynhoop, Keert de Koe, and Kyck uyt — were kept in good repair. When at last Wagenaar handed over and sailed for Batavia on the 1st of October 1666, only one of the old members of government from his own installation remained: Roelof de Man and Pieter Everaert had died; Abraham Gabbema had left for Batavia; Hendrik Lacus sat as secunde beneath a new board. [3]
So 1664 closed at the Cape: Mauritius reoccupied under van Nieuwland and bound as a dependency; Blank’s Madagascar instructions renewed in May; September and October despatches warning of Anglo-Dutch rupture and of New Netherland’s fall; three hundred soldiers ordered detained and a stone fortress designed for Table Valley under Dombaer and Goske; Batavia’s baptism ruling of 25 January on the slave children of unbelievers; Oedasoa’s six hundred cattle refused; Sousoa dead and the Soeswa and Gonnema names in daily use; Eva married to van Meerhof with a Company feast and ten pounds; grain tariffs raised and horses breeding toward free hands; and Cornelis van Quaelberg named successor while Wagenaar’s health and the war kept him still in the fort. The earthen walls still stood. The order that would replace them had already left Amsterdam.