Boer History1665 at the Cape of Good Hope: Open War, Castle Works, and the Royal Charles
Open War — Tidings of 9 June 1665
For many months after the war warnings of late 1664, the Cape remained in suspense. In September of that year the directors had written 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. On the 24th of October 1664 they had added that New Netherland had capitulated to an English fleet and that the Dutch factories on the Guinea coast had been attacked, though war was not yet formally declared. Commercial rivalry lay behind the ill-feeling, and colonial archives preserved proof that outrages in distant seas were not confined to one flag: Dutch and English crews alike committed piratical acts without punishment. [3]
One detailed Cape case recorded an Indiaman’s people overhauling two English vessels on the outward passage and torturing officers with burning rope-yarn to force confession of treasure. That episode belonged to the climate of suspicion in which Commander Zacharias Wagenaar and his council now waited. At length, on the 9th of June 1665, tidings reached 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 long uncertainty that had shaped fortress orders and the detention of troops now became a standing condition of every ship that entered Table Bay. [3]
Open war did not at once bring English shot into the roadstead, but it changed the meaning of every red flag and every slow flute lying under the Lion’s Rump. The residency commanded the highway to India; its earthen fort could not be held against a European enemy of any strength; and the directors’ earlier resolution to replace mud walls with stone now had the force of a wartime necessity rather than a peacetime improvement. Wagenaar’s council prepared to treat English visitors as enemies when opportunity offered, while the three hundred soldiers already ordered for quarry work became, in effect, the first garrison of a fortress not yet begun. [3]
Three Hundred Soldiers and the Castle Works
During the period of uncertainty that preceded formal hostilities, the directors had taken into consideration the importance of their residency at the Cape 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. Its walls were frequently falling, especially after heavy rains, and the guns mounted upon it were harmless to a ship at the usual anchorage. After much consideration they resolved to erect in Table Valley a strong stone fortress capable of sustaining heavy guns and sufficiently commodious for a large garrison. Plans were prepared; the design that seemed most suitable was approved; and the necessary orders for execution followed. [3]
Instructions went to Commander 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 first importance, remained entrusted to commissioner Isbrand Goske (also written Godsken, Gotsken, Godske — the last his own spelling), one of the ablest officers in the Company’s service. A scene of unwonted activity followed at the Cape. The three hundred soldiers were landed and set at once to quarrying stone. A party of convicts and slaves went to Robben Island to gather shells. Three or four large decked boats kept busy transporting those shells, and fuel from Hout Bay, for the limekilns. [3]
All waggons in the settlement not required for agriculture were engaged in the carriage of building material. Farmers received six shillings and three pence a day for each waggon with oxen and one man, whether a hired servant or a slave. The old fort still housed the council and the magazines, but the valley’s labour map had already shifted toward the trenches that would hold the new walls. The five-pointed design, with foundations planned twelve feet thick, meant that the excavation of even a single point was a work of magnitude. Through the remainder of 1665 spare oxen, boats, and detained soldiers kept feeding stone, shell-lime, and fuel into those openings. [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 chose — that the soil was hard and barren, that water might fail for the moat and for the garrison in the dry season — and Maetsuijker’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 1665 fixed on the ground was the organised haulage, the island shell parties, and the engineer’s first openings in the valley. [2] [3]
Goske Chooses the Castle Site — August 1665
On the 18th of August 1665 commissioner Goske arrived in the ship Nieuw Middelburg. After eight days’ inspection of Table Valley, with the approval of a large board consisting of the ordinary council of policy and a number of naval and military officers, he selected the site of the castle. The spot chosen lay sixty Rhynland roods (two hundred and forty-eight imperial yards) to the eastward of the old fort. It had been supposed that solid rock would be found near the surface. Opening the trenches proved that hope false: at no point could foundation walls be commenced nearer the surface than eleven feet, and in some parts excavations more than double that depth were needed. [3]
The ceremonial laying of the first stones would wait until Saturday the 2nd of January 1666, when only one point’s trenches were complete. Four large hewn stones would then be lowered — the first by Wagenaar, the second by the clergyman Johan van Arckel, the third by the secunde Abraham Gabbema, and the last by the fiscal Hendrik Lacus — with six pounds presented to the master mechanics and a feast of two oxen, six sheep, a hundred loaves, and eight casks of Cape ale spread inside the trenches. The year’s work of 1665 was the site decision, the depth of the dig, and the organised haulage that made a stone castle more than a directors’ sketch. It had been intended that Goske should remain at the Cape until van Quaelberg’s arrival, but when he reached the colony the commander’s health was so improved that it was unnecessary for him to stay after the site was fixed. [3]
Goske’s own judgment of Cape service was severe. Böeseken records Wagenaar’s complaint of 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 commissioner who chose the ground for the Company’s greatest stone work in the valley did not romanticise the post; he measured it, approved a board’s choice sixty roods east of the crumbling earthen fort, and left the trenches and the three hundred soldiers to Wagenaar’s continued government. [2] [3]
The Comet, Ernestus Back, and Jan Joris Graa
For thirteen years after its foundation the settlement had been considered too small to demand a resident clergyman. A sermon and prayers were read regularly every Sunday and on special occasions by the sick-comforter; other rites were performed occasionally by ships’ chaplains; marriages were usually celebrated before the secretary of the council. The first sick-comforter, Willem Barents Wylant, and his successor, Pieter van der Stael, had already filled that humble office. After van der Stael left for Batavia in September 1663, Ernestus Back, who had held the same office on board a ship, filled the vacant place. [3]
Back was so addicted to intemperance that at times he was unfit for duty. He was repeatedly suspended, on which occasions the fiscal conducted the services, but punishment and disgrace seemed only to harden him. Toward the close of 1663 he had also been appointed schoolmaster when a school was again opened at the Cape — fees first fixed at two shillings a month for each burgher’s child, soon reduced by half, with slave and Khoikhoi children taught without charge pro Deo. The school began with seventeen pupils: four slave children, one youthful Khoikhoi, and twelve Europeans. Back’s misconduct soon necessitated his suspension as a teacher of youth, when a steady soldier named Daniel Engelgraeff was appointed schoolmaster and the pupils increased under his care. [3]
Wagenaar feared that Back’s conduct would bring divine vengeance upon the whole community, all of whose members by some method of reasoning were held subject to the consequences of the comforter’s guilt. His alarm increased with the appearance of a comet visible nightly for two months. He and his council did not doubt that the terrible star with a tail was put there by God as a threat of righteous punishment, and therefore judged it high time to remove the chief offender. A yacht lay ready for Batavia. Back and his family were unceremoniously hurried on board. The Cape council’s despatch of the 7th of February 1665 to Governor-General Joan Maetsuijker set out the reasoning in plain Dutch: God had already for some two months every night threatened them with righteous punishment for foul and sinful conduct through an awful tailed star in the heavens, and it was therefore urgently necessary to be rid of the unworthy teacher and send him with his family to Batavia. Stringent regulations against sabbath-breaking followed the comet’s appearance and were attributable to it — a proclamation of the 15th of January 1665. [3]
A fortnight later the office was filled by transfer of a sick-comforter named Jan Joris Graa from a calling ship. Graa gave every promise of a useful and honourable career when he was removed by death in June 1665. Thus the church still had a humble representative at the fort, but the vacancy and the wartime decision to raise a stone castle together pushed the directors toward a permanent clergyman rather than another stop-gap comforter. Engelgraeff’s school continued; the loft in which it was kept was needed for visitors whenever a fleet lay in the bay, so there was no fixed holiday calendar — a practical arrangement that released the children whenever the anchorage filled. [3]
Johan van Arckel and the First Consistory
When it was decided to replace the old earthen fort with a substantial stone castle, it was also decided to provide a resident clergyman for the growing congregation. The Rev. Johan van Arckel, who received the appointment, arrived in the same Nieuw Middelburg that brought Goske, casting anchor in Table Bay on the 18th of August 1665. A few days later an ecclesiastical court was established. Its constitution showed the intimate relationship then existing between church and state: a member of the council of policy sat as political commissioner (commissaris politicq); the clergyman was a servant of the Company; deacons were selected by the council of policy from a double list furnished yearly by the court itself; elders were elected by the court as representatives of the congregation but could perform no duties until the elections were confirmed by the temporal authorities. [3]
That consistory, or ecclesiastical court, held primary control of purely religious observances and the first direction of educational institutions throughout the Company’s government of the colony. It was in one sense an engine of the state, always subordinate to the council of policy. In practice it was guided by the decrees of the synod of Dort and by fatherland precedents that were never disputed, and its decisions appear generally to have been in accord with public opinion at the Cape. The school of the period remained subsidiary to the church: children were taught to read and write, to cast up accounts in gulden and stivers, and to repeat the catechism and sundry prayers — under Engelgraeff’s care after Back’s disgrace, and under the new consistory’s first direction after August. [3]
Not long before, a fierce dispute had arisen among the clergy of the Reformed church in India over whether children of unbelieving parents should be baptized. At the Cape, ships’ chaplains had baptized all slave children brought to them, admonishing owners to educate such children in Christian principles. Many of those children were of mixed parentage and on that account entitled by law to freedom; even for pure blacks, baptism and a profession of Christianity were then considered substantial grounds for claiming emancipation. Opinion at the Cape was divided; reference had been made to Batavia; and a reply dated the 25th of January 1664 had directed that children of unbelieving slaves ought to be baptized provided those with whom they lived bound themselves to Christian education, grounding the opinion on the precedent of Abraham’s household. [3]
Van Arckel embraced the views held by the Amsterdam classis and the Batavia court, baptizing all children brought to him whether of believing or unbelieving parents. The Company’s own slave children were sent to school, where they were taught to say their prayers and to repeat the Heidelberg catechism. For a time strife in ecclesiastical matters ceased, for the clergyman won affection by gentleness and piety. His lasting work at the Cape was short: he would die on the 12th of January 1666 after a brief illness, less than six months from arrival, and be buried in the ground beneath the spot where the pulpit was to stand in the wooden framework rising inside the castle trenches — the second stone of which he himself would help to lay on the 2nd of January. The foundation he laid in late 1665 was the resident ministry and the standing consistory itself. [3]
The Royal Charles Chase — 20–21 September 1665
In the afternoon of the 20th of September 1665 an Indiaman with the red flag of England floating at her mizen peak stood into Table Bay and dropped an anchor without furling her sails. The Loosduynen, a clumsily rigged, slow-sailing flute just in port after a long passage from Texel, was the only vessel then in the roadstead. The stranger sent ashore a small boat with a petty officer who informed the commander that the ship was the Royal Charles, of thirty-six guns, bound homewards from Surat with a cargo of pepper and calico. The captain, James Barker, requested permission to take in water and to purchase fresh provisions. [3]
The English had not the faintest suspicion that their country was at war with the Netherlands. As soon as Wagenaar became aware of that ignorance he determined to take advantage of it and get possession of the ship by strategy. The four men who had come ashore were hospitably entertained; their request was apparently acceded to; when they returned to their ship a present of fruit and wine went to Captain Barker. The object was to induce the captain to visit the fort so that he could be detained without trouble. The scheme was nearly thwarted by a drunken mate of the Loosduynen who, coming ashore with a strong crew as the English went off, pulled alongside, took their boat in tow, and forced them back to the fort. He was instantly committed to prison for his trouble, and many apologies were offered to the Englishmen for the rudeness and violence they had suffered. [3]
During the night arrangements were made to carry the Royal Charles by surprise as soon as the captain should land. About two hundred and fifty men were armed and distributed in the Loosduynen and the large decked boats that brought shells from Robben Island. It was intended that these should approach as if by chance and suddenly board the unsuspecting stranger. At daybreak next morning the Royal Charles sent her empty water-casks ashore in the longboat, with the captain’s brother and ten seamen, who brought a present of some value for the commander in return for the previous evening’s courtesy. The Englishmen were invited into the courtyard of the fort; the gate closed upon them; they were informed that they were prisoners of war. [3]
Meantime the non-combatants of the settlement, male and female, betook themselves to the side of the Lion’s Rump to witness the capture. About seven in the morning Captain Barker became suddenly aware that something was wrong: no sign of his longboat’s return, cutters creeping alongside, the Loosduynen shaking out canvas, shallops full of men at points along the shore. The sails of the Royal Charles still hung loose from her yards; a light breeze from the north-west rippled the bay. In a few seconds the topsails were sheeted home, the hempen cable severed by a couple of axe strokes, and the Indiaman, gathering way as canvas spread, stood over toward the Blueberg shore. [3]
All hope of surprise gone, the Loosduynen and the cutters hoisted colours and followed, keeping close together. The Royal Charles had the weather-gauge and was the faster sailer, but she could not beat out of the bay and tacked about for three or four hours while the pursuers tried in vain to get alongside. About eleven o’clock the breeze died away; she let go an anchor and fired several shots of defiance. There were not enough rowing boats in the bay to attack her, so she was safe as long as the calm lasted. At noon Barker waved a white flag. A boat went alongside; he demanded the cause of the commotion and why his men were detained. He was told he would learn all particulars if he went on board the Loosduynen, and was requested to strike his flag. His reply was more emphatic than polite. He did, however, throw to the boat a package of letters from Surat, adding a scornful message for the commander. [3]
Toward evening the breeze sprang up again and the chase resumed. After a couple of tacks the Royal Charles was fortunate enough to weather Green Point, passing close to the hostile squadron as she did so. Pursuers and pursued had not been within range of each other during the whole day, but at last there was a chance for a shot. It was getting dusk when the Loosduynen fired a broadside; the Royal Charles replied with her four stern guns. Nobody was hurt on either side, and before the culverins could be loaded again the Englishman had disappeared in the darkness. Wagenaar was disappointed, but he made the most of what had fallen to him: that evening he calculated to a gulden the value of the longboat and water-casks, the present the captives had brought ashore, and the two anchors and cables left in the bay, allowing a reasonable margin for the expense of searching for the last and fishing them up when found. [3]
Prisoners of War Sent to Batavia
The English prisoners offered to work without payment if the commander would promise to send them to Europe with the first return fleet. The offer was declined. They were sent to Batavia after being provided with a very scanty outfit. The episode left the Cape with a handful of captives, a longboat, casks, gifts, and anchors on the credit side of a failed seizure, and a clear demonstration that open war had reached the roadstead even when the quarry escaped. [3]
Strategy had almost worked: hospitality, fruit and wine, a closed gate on the longboat crew, two hundred and fifty armed men in flute and shell-boats. What failed was surprise once Barker read the empty horizon and cut his cable. For the settlement the lesson was double. The Loosduynen was too slow and the bay’s rowing strength too thin to take a thirty-six-gun Indiaman that kept the weather-gauge; yet the same shell-boats that fed Dombaer’s limekilns could be turned overnight into boarding craft. Open war at the Cape would be fought with the tools of the castle works as much as with the old fort’s light guns. [3]
First Horse Auction and Settlement Economy
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 was sold by public auction and brought on an average four pounds five shillings each. The notice posted at the fort on the 21st of February 1665 advertised young horses bred in the country, stallions and mares, to be sold to the highest bidder or out of hand at the Company’s stable on the coming Wednesday afternoon at three o’clock, the 25th of the month — ending with the customary cry Segget voorth. It was the custom to post copies of proclamations and notices in a public place where everyone could see them; this first horse sale notice became one of the colony’s earliest surviving pieces of commercial advertising. [3]
Grain prices paid by the Company had already been raised because the burghers complained that the old rates allowed them no profit: wheat to eleven shillings and eight pence, rye and barley to nine shillings and two pence, oats to six shillings and eight pence the muid. Farmers were paying from sixteen shillings and eight pence to twenty-five shillings a month to European men-servants. The horse auction thus fitted a wider adjustment in which free producers drew more stock and better cereal returns from the Company’s stores and stables while wages and fixed prices still framed every bargain in Table Valley. [3]
On the 28th of November 1665 another public sale closed a chapter of the first commander’s private estate. After the directors had refused to purchase Bosheuvel, Wagenaar carried out van Riebeeck’s order that the farm be sold by auction. Jacob Cornelis van Rosendael bought it for one thousand guilders, payable in three instalments. Wagenaar stipulated that the buyer might not pick the grapes that year, the Company still being entitled to the vintage to recover its labour costs in the vineyards. A year later van Rosendael would press seven half-aums of very good tasty wine from the vines van Riebeeck had planted there. Wagenaar also continued to settle the former commander’s outstanding Cape accounts by bills on Batavia — small sums against a much larger career, but proof that the open-war year still administered the private ledgers of the founding decade. [2]
Wagenaar’s own opinion remained unfavourable to colonisation 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. Böeseken records the same strain: free burghers so poor that many wished to re-enter Company service; some farmers scarcely knowing how to handle a plough or span an ox; servants complaining they were treated worse than slaves. In his last official paper he would write that twenty-five industrious Chinese families would serve the Company as well as fifty of such European families as were established at the Cape. The raised grain tariffs, the horse sales, and the Bosheuvel auction show a government still obliged to keep ploughland and vineyard alive while it planned stone walls. [2] [3]
Van Meerhof Overseer on Robben Island
Eva, brought up in Mr van Riebeeck’s house, had been baptized soon after Wagenaar’s arrival and two years later married to the explorer Pieter van Meerhof. The commander and council had believed that union would promote goodwill between the races; Eva was considered a child of the Company after years of unpaid interpreting; a bridal feast had been prepared at Company expense in the commander’s house with a wedding present of ten pounds, and the bridegroom promoted to full surgeon at three pounds a month. In the year following that marriage — 1665 — 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 castle. [3]
Shell-boats already plied between the island and the limekilns for the three hundred soldiers’ masonry. Placing a trusted surgeon-explorer over both the old island post and the new quarry party kept discipline and supply under one hand while Table Valley’s trenches deepened. The appointment was promotion for van Meerhof and a practical measure for Dombaer’s works rather than a ceremonial honour alone. The interpreter household of the first commander’s years thus became tied directly to the lime and dressed stone of the war fortress. [3]
Seaward of the bay another appointment of 1665 bound linguistic skill to an oceanic outpost. George Frederick Wreede, the runaway German student-soldier whose Dutch–Khoikhoi vocabulary of November 1663 the directors had rewarded with twenty pounds and preferment, had briefly been intended for a residency on the rocks of Martin Vaz; finding them bare and almost inaccessible, he had returned disappointed, his journal and report still among the colonial papers. In 1665 he was sent to Mauritius and assumed command of the post reoccupied the previous year under Jacobus van Nieuwland. The Cape’s wartime map thus ran from Robben Island’s shell heaps under van Meerhof to the ebony island under Wreede, both answerable to Wagenaar’s fort. [3]
Disease among the Cape Clans
In the year following the Cochoqua–Hessequa war and Oedasoa’s refused cattle offer of 1664, the Khoikhoi nearest the Cape suffered very severely from a disease which broke out among them. What its nature was is not stated. As the Europeans were not attacked, it is not probable that it was introduced by them; it was certainly not small-pox. Wagenaar computed the loss of the Goringhaiquas and Gorachouquas at one-fifth of their original number, so that they were left with only about eight hundred fighting men. The Cochoquas suffered even more. In the commander’s words, they melted away. Whether other clans were affected is not mentioned, but the disease can hardly have been confined only to those nearest the Cape. [3]
During Wagenaar’s government Europeans and Khoikhoi lived generally on good terms. 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 the much-coveted article, 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. In disputes between the clans his policy was strict neutrality whenever he could not mediate for peace — the same refusal that had turned aside Oedasoa’s six hundred cattle the year before. [3]
The number of Khoikhoi residing permanently in Table Valley had increased during Wagenaar’s administration to about eighty souls, an influx of unsettled individuals from the pastoral clans with a kraal under the Lion’s Head nominally under Jan Cou after Harry’s death in 1663. They lived, according to Wagenaar, by sending their women to collect firewood for sale, placing their little daughters in service, fishing occasionally, and begging constantly. The men could seldom be induced to do any other work than tend cattle, and that only for spirits and tobacco. They understood Dutch so well that an interpreter was no longer needed in ordinary dealing. The commander never interfered in quarrels among themselves, but gave notice that any caught stealing from Europeans would be soundly flogged. The inland mortality of 1665 did not erase that small valley population, but it thinned the fighting strength of the western Cape clans with whom the settlement traded and negotiated. [3]
Van Quaelberg Leaves Holland — December 1665
Commander Wagenaar had requested relief from the cares of government on grounds of ill health, and in December 1664 had been informed of the appointment of Cornelis van Quaelberg as successor. Van Quaelberg left Holland in the ship Dordrecht on the 19th of December 1665, though he would not reach South Africa until the 25th of August 1666 and would not take over the government until the 27th of September. During the war, ships sailing from the Netherlands for the Indies did not attempt the English Channel but stood away to the north-west and rounded the British Islands. In midwinter the Dordrecht was so battered in the stormy North Sea that she was compelled to put into the Faröe Isles, where she lay for nine weeks; after leaving those isles she lost by death one hundred and ten sailors and soldiers; and when she at last entered Table Bay, hands had to be sent from shore to drop her anchors and furl her sails, for there was not a single person in sound health on board. [3]
It had been intended that commissioner 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 castle site was fixed. Wagenaar therefore continued in office through the open-war year, directing the stone works, the first resident clergyman’s establishment, the failed seizure of the Royal Charles, and the island shell parties, while his successor beat north-about out of a Europe at war. After the return of Jonas de la Guerre’s party, Wagenaar sent out no more exploring expeditions; no new clans except the Hessequas had visited the fort during his government; the boundary remained where van Riebeeck had left it. Two of the old watch-houses, Houdt den Bul and Koren Hoop, had been broken down; Duynhoop, Keert de Koe, and Kyck uyt were kept in good repair. [3]
So 1665 closed at the Cape: open war confirmed on the 9th of June; three hundred soldiers quarrying under Dombaer while convicts and slaves gathered shells on Robben Island; Goske’s site sixty Rhynland roods east of the old fort, trenches eleven feet and deeper; a comet, a sabbath proclamation, Back expelled, Graa dead in June; van Arckel and the first consistory from the 18th of August; the Royal Charles chased and lost on the 20th–21st of September with prisoners sent to Batavia; sixteen Javanese horses auctioned and Bosheuvel sold to van Rosendael; van Meerhof overseer of the island shell and stone party, Wreede commandant on Mauritius; disease taking a fifth of the Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua fighting strength and melting the Cochoquas; and Cornelis van Quaelberg at last at sea in the Dordrecht while Wagenaar still held the fort. The earthen walls still stood. The openings for their stone successors were already in the ground. [3]