Boer History1666 at the Cape of Good Hope: Castle Foundation, Van Quaelberg, and the French Fleet
First Stones of the Castle — 2 January 1666
On Saturday the 2nd of January 1666 the ceremony of laying the first stones of the new fortress took place in Table Valley. The trenches of only one of the five points were complete, for the foundations were to be twelve feet thick and the excavation itself was a work of magnitude. It was a gala day at the Cape. At an early hour farmers with their wives and children came in from Rondebosch and Wynberg, sailors came ashore from the cutters, and the Company’s servants and other residents in Table Valley appeared in their best attire. Four large hewn stones stood ready to be lowered to the bottom of the trench. [3]
The first stone was laid by Commander Zacharias Wagenaar, the second by the clergyman Johan van Arckel, the third by the secunde Abraham Gabbema, and the last by the fiscal Hendrik Lacus. When they were all laid, a sum equal to six pounds sterling was presented by the commander on behalf of the Company to the master mechanics. That closed the formal proceedings; the remainder of the day was devoted to pleasure. Two oxen and six sheep, the choicest in the Company’s herds, were slaughtered; a hundred huge loaves of bread had been specially baked; eight casks of Cape ale stood ready for tapping. Tables were spread on the levelled ground inside the trenches. [3]
A holiday was not properly kept, in the opinion of people of the Netherlands, without a recitation of poetry specially composed for the event. Lines prepared by an amateur poet—Wagenaar recorded the fact without naming the author—were judged so appropriate that after recitation a copy was placed with the colonial records. The verses opened by naming the first stone of the new Castle of Good Hope laid by Wagenaar “with hope of good hope,” and went on to speak of stone walls raised where earthen banks had stood, and of a fortress meant to impress European and African alike. The day thus fixed in ceremony, feast, and verse the transfer from earthen fort to stone castle that the open-war orders of the previous year had commanded. [3]
Death and Burial of Johan van Arckel
The resident clergyman who had laid the second stone had hardly time to take his work well in hand. On the 12th of January 1666, less than six months after his arrival in the Nieuw Middelburg, the Rev. Johan van Arckel died after a very brief illness. Just a fortnight after the foundation ceremony the Cape community gathered again on the same ground. In the centre of the area inside the trenches the framework of a wooden building was being put together, part of which was intended for use as a place of worship. To that framework the coffin of the man who laid the second stone was borne, and in the ground beneath the spot where the pulpit was to stand was placed what was mortal of Johan van Arckel. [3]
It was a custom of those days to bury persons of note within the walls of churches, so that the minister’s was not long the only grave there. Within a few months the wife of Commander Wagenaar found a last resting-place in that ground, and soon the walls were studded thickly with the memorial escutcheons of those who lay beneath. At the head of a funeral procession a small framed board bearing the coat of arms of the deceased was carried and afterwards hung on the church walls—boards often prepared years in advance by notaries and merchants who had chosen arms for themselves. [3]
To supply Van Arckel’s place temporarily the council detained the chaplain of the next ship that called, pending appointment of a permanent successor by the supreme authorities. The chaplain so detained, Johannes de Voocht (also written Vooght and Voogt), remained at the Cape for several months and followed the same course as Van Arckel on the disputed question of baptizing children of unbelieving slaves. The Company’s own slave children continued to be sent to school, where they were taught to say their prayers and to repeat the Heidelberg catechism. [3]
The Baldeus Baptism Dispute — 21 March 1666
On the afternoon of Sunday the 21st of March 1666 the congregation assembled for worship in the great hall of the commander’s house in the old fort. The room did not much resemble the interior of a church in its fittings, but the building specially set apart for religious services was not yet completed, and this apartment had always been used for the purpose. Round the walls hung trophies of the chase—chiefly skins of lions and leopards—and over the end windows and the doors polished horns of larger antelopes. At the end opposite the entrance usually stood the stuffed figure of a zebra, removed before service. When Wagenaar came to the colony the windows, like those of the private rooms, had been unglazed, Van Riebeeck having been satisfied with calico screens; that defect had been remedied, and the congregation now had light enough to read their bibles and psalm books. [3]
The preacher was the Rev. Johannes de Voocht. Occupying an elevated seat just in front of the little platform which served for a pulpit was the commander; behind him sat the secunde and the fiscal. The elders and deacons had stools on one side of the platform; on the other sat the Rev. Philippus Baldeus, chaplain of the ship Venenburg. The body of the hall was filled with people of less note. After the sermon a child of European parentage was brought forward and baptized. Then a slave woman went up to the platform with her infant in her arms, but before De Voocht could dip his fingers in the water Baldeus rose and protested against the performance of the rite. [3]
Wagenaar was astonished at the audacity of a man who dared in such a manner to interfere with a service conducted with the approval of the Indian authorities in one of their own forts, but he chose to remain silent. Baldeus went on to say that he was better informed in such matters than anyone there, and that the practice in vogue was decidedly wrong. Upon that interruption the officiating clergyman desisted, and the service was abruptly terminated. Next morning the council met and went over in debate the whole history of the dispute. It was unanimously resolved that the orders received be implicitly obeyed, so as to preserve harmony and peace in religious as well as in political matters, and that therefore De Voocht be instructed to baptize the slave child on the following Sunday, together with any others brought to him for that purpose. The decision settled the question for a time at the Cape, though it would surface again in later years. [3]
School and Settlement Life
Subsidiary to the church was the school of the period, in which children were taught to read and write, to cast up accounts in gulden and stivers, and to repeat the catechism and sundry prayers. The first school at the Cape had been that opened by Pieter van der Stael for slave children from the west coast and closed after a few weeks. Toward the close of 1663 a school was again opened with Ernestus Back as teacher. Fees were first fixed at two shillings a month for each child of a burgher, then reduced by half; slave and Khoikhoi children were to be taught without charge pro Deo. 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, when a steady soldier named Daniel Engelgraeff was appointed schoolmaster. Under his care the pupils increased, and nothing interrupted his work until his death. [3]
The early settlers showed even in school regulations how practical a people they were. There was no fixed time for holidays, because the loft in which the school was kept was needed for the accommodation of visitors whenever a fleet was in the bay, during which period the children were of necessity released. That arrangement remained the pattern through Wagenaar’s closing months and into the year of the castle foundation, when war shipping and building labour still crowded Table Valley’s limited indoor space. [3]
During Wagenaar’s government Europeans and Khoikhoi lived generally on good terms. Once only a sharp incident caused unpleasantness: a party of Cochoquas with cattle for sale encamped near the watch-house Keert de Koe; a soldier on guard detected some of them breaking down the fence for firewood and was belaboured with sticks when he ordered them off. Next morning two were arrested at the fort; the clan later sent ten good oxen and as many sheep as recompense. Wagenaar accepted the cattle instead of hostages, with a promise to return them if the actual assailants were produced. They never were; after some months a pecuniary award went to the soldier and the cattle were slaughtered for the Company. Iron remained withheld from trade for fear of arming the clans; Cochoquas and Chainouquas seldom brought cattle except when short of tobacco, while Hessequas still supplied large herds. [3]
Sixteen Free Families in Table Valley
In 1666 there were sixteen free families living in Table Valley. Of these, four kept canteens, one had a retail grocery, one was a baker, and the remainder were mechanics. 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 by him; such as were not according to the Amsterdam standard were destroyed. The small free community in the valley thus lived under regulated retail trade beside the larger agricultural freehold at Rondebosch and Wynberg that supplied the foundation-day feast. [3]
Grain prices paid by the Company had already been raised because burghers complained that the old rates allowed 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 first public auction of sixteen Javanese-bred horses in 1665 had opened a new stock market; by 1666 free households in the valley and on the farms operated within that adjusted price frame while the Company still stamped every weight on the retail side. [3]
Van Quaelberg Arrives — 25 August 1666
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 but did not reach South Africa until the 25th of August 1666. 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. [3]
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. Van Quaelberg landed at once with his family, but he did not take over the government until the following month. Of his earlier career the Cape archives recorded that he had been head of the Company’s factory at Masulipatam from 1652 to 1657 and had amassed considerable property. Contemporaries would soon find him younger and more active than Wagenaar, yet harsh toward dependents and free burghers, a naval commander of skill whose manner the settlement compared unfavourably with the quieter rule he replaced. [3]
Installation of Van Quaelberg — 27 September 1666
On the 27th of September 1666 a ceremony took place similar to that with which Wagenaar had assumed office four and a half years earlier. Only one of the old members of the government was present on this occasion. Roelof de Man and Pieter Everaert had died in the interval. Abraham Gabbema, who had followed De Man as secunde, had left for Batavia high in favour with the directors only a few months before. Hendrik Lacus, secretary when Van Riebeeck left, was now secunde. Beneath him at the council board sat the lieutenant Abraham Schut, the fiscal Cornelis de Cretzer, the ensign Johannes Coon, and the chief surgeon Pieter van Clinkenberg. [3]
As soon as the Khoikhoi clans in the neighbourhood heard that the Europeans had a new head, their chiefs sent complimentary messages and presents of oxen and sheep, as was customary among themselves. These friendly greetings were replied to in the same manner, for upon the cattle trade rested to a large extent the utility of the Cape residency, and the directors’ instructions were emphatic that the natives were to be conciliated in every possible way. The new commander thus opened his government with the forms of pastoral diplomacy that had framed Wagenaar’s years, even as the free burghers would soon learn a harder hand in internal regulation. [3]
Wagenaar Departs — 1 October 1666
On the 1st of October 1666 Wagenaar with his daughter-in-law sailed in the Dordrecht for Batavia. He knew, when he left, little more of the country and its people than what his predecessor had taught him. After the return of the party under Sergeant Jonas de la Guerre he had 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. [3]
The number of men to whom free papers were given during Wagenaar’s 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. His opinion was unfavourable to colonisation of the country by Europeans. In the last official document which bears his name he wrote that in his opinion twenty-five industrious Chinese families would be of as much service to the Company as fifty families of such Europeans as were established at the Cape, and regretted that they could not be obtained. There is no trace of regret shown by anyone on his departure. Two years later his name occurs again as vice-admiral of the return fleet of 1668; later still, news of his death arrived with word that he had bequeathed a sum for the guardians of the poor at the Cape. [3]
Castle Walls and Timber Scarcity
Van Quaelberg found the walls of the western point of the castle rising slowly out of the ground. One of the difficulties of which the workmen complained was scarcity of timber such as they needed for a variety of purposes at the quarries as well as at the walls. The forests which Van Riebeeck had found in the kloofs of the mountain side above Rondebosch were already exhausted, so that no timber was obtainable closer at hand than Wynberg. The government tried to prevent reckless waste of the few natural forests of the country. Indigenous useful timber was of exceedingly slow growth, and the best stood in situations difficult of access. [3]
A South African forest was composed of a variety of trees mingled together, in which it rarely happened that half a dozen of one kind grew side by side. Gigantic creepers twined among them, and the spaces between the trunks were filled with tangled underwood and enormous ferns, so that one could not proceed far without the axe. When a woodman felled a tree, its fall cleared a large open space where afterwards only useless scrub sprang up. To get the log out, a pathway broad enough for a team of oxen and straight enough to prevent jamming had to be opened, cutting down great numbers of smaller trees. The quantity of wood in a waggon or a roof thus represented but a small percentage of what was deducted from the forest, and none of it was replaced. The peninsula forests were disappearing under castle and settlement demand just as larger coastal forests would later under the same method of extraction. [3]
French Fleet of De Montdevergue — December 1666
About three months after Van Quaelberg took over the government, a fleet of twelve ships under command of the Marquis de Montdevergue, viceroy of the French possessions in the East, put into Table Bay. The equipment of that fleet had been watched with unusual anxiety in the Netherlands. During the preceding sixty years the French had made frequent but fruitless efforts to form a powerful East India Company; now the minister Colbert had organised an association which Louis XIV was determined should prove successful. It was modelled generally after that of the Netherlands, but shareholders enjoyed privileges those in the Low Countries did not: a government guarantee against loss during the first ten years, free convoy by national war ships, duty-free materials for shipbuilding, and honours for zeal in the new service. [3]
France had wealth and enthusiasm but few men with the training to conduct eastern trade. Alarm among the Dutch directors increased when they learned that Caron, an officer of French descent who had grown grey in their service and knew every branch of the Indian trade, had left the Dutch for Colbert’s company after some slight. A further blunder gave the title of viceroy to a man of high rank without qualifications for the post and forced Caron into second place—an error discovered only after almost incredible suffering in attempts to form settlements at Madagascar, though not too late for Caron later to form the first French factory on the coast of Hindostan. [3]
Notwithstanding the trouble taken in France, the fleet sailed ill-conditioned. Ships were crowded with landsmen and soldiers but short of seamen; order was wanting; waste of provisions was so great that when the fleet put into Pernambuco for refreshment symptoms of distress were already apparent. A Dutch sailor who visited the admiral’s ship there wrote to Amsterdam that she was so filthy it would be a wonder if pestilence did not break out, and so ill-provided that he did not believe she could ever reach Madagascar. From Pernambuco the fleet sailed for Table Bay. Though the French could not be regarded as allies of the Dutch, they were also at war with England, and De Montdevergue might reasonably look for a friendly reception in outward form at least. [3]
His fleet was scattered on the passage; his own ship was the first to reach South Africa. As soon as he let go his anchors he saluted the fort with five guns, returned with three according to the custom of the day. Van Quaelberg immediately sent a messenger to welcome the French viceroy and invite him to land. The viceroy excused himself for that afternoon; upon learning which the commander himself visited the St. Jean and tendered his services to supply the fleet with anything to be had in the settlement. Of that offer De Montdevergue availed himself to its fullest extent. He not only thoroughly refreshed his people but drew a considerable quantity of sea stores from the Company’s magazines. One of his vessels was so leaky that it was considered dangerous for her to proceed; Van Quaelberg had her repaired with materials kept for the Company’s own use and by carpenters maintained for the Company’s own service. Upon the whole as much was done to assist this French fleet as if it had been the property of the owners of the settlement and not of their declared rivals, so that by the aid thus given the viceroy was enabled to reach Madagascar with his forces undiminished. [3]
Saldanha Bay Marks and Cattle Expeditions
The commanding position of the Cape of Good Hope had not escaped Louis XIV, who had instructed his deputy to take possession of Saldanha Bay and establish a residency there. Against that design the council of policy entered a protest, on the ground that the Honourable Company was already in occupation. A dozen men were sent overland with all haste to Saldanha Bay, where two were stationed on each of the islets—Jutten, Marcus, and Schapen—and five with a petty officer formed a camp at the watering place. The French surveyed the bay and set up landmarks with their arms upon them, but left without forming any establishment. [3]
As soon as his visitors had gone, Van Quaelberg took a careful view of the situation. They had eaten nearly everything, so that there was little left for the return fleet from Batavia, which might be expected in three or four months. The chief want was slaughter cattle, and without loss of time trading parties were organised and sent to the different clans. Schacher, who had succeeded his father the Fat Captain Gogosoa as head of the Kaapmans, appeared now in the character of a trader. He was entrusted with a good stock of merchandise, with which he went inland bartering cattle on commission for the Company. The commander’s wife headed another party, which took a Cochoqua encampment across the bay for its field of operations. Mrs Van Quaelberg was out three days and returned boasting of a fair measure of success. [3]
Hieronymus Cruse, now promoted to the rank of corporal, with a third party struck away to the eastward, crossed the Hottentots Holland mountains, and collected some hundreds of oxen and sheep among the kraals of the Hessequas. Pushing still farther on his next journey he encountered a tribe called the Gauriquas, from whom he bartered the finest herds yet seen in the settlement. Their kraals lay on the banks of the river later called from them the Gauritz. The corporal went as far as the bend in the coast to which Paulus van Caerden sixty-five years earlier had given the name of Mossel Bay. There the Gauriquas informed him that their next neighbours were the Attaquas, also rich in cattle, but there was now no necessity for him to go farther. Those winter expeditions after the French visit belong to the recovery of stock rather than to calendar 1666’s closing weeks; the year’s last political fact at the bay was the French refreshment, the Saldanha marks, and the empty magazines that forced the renewed inland trade. [3]
Clergy Change — De Voocht and Wachtendorp
In November 1666 the Rev. Johannes de Voocht left for Batavia and was succeeded as acting chaplain by the Rev. Petrus Wachtendorp. The temporary ministry that had begun with De Voocht’s detention after Van Arckel’s death thus passed to another ship’s chaplain while the directors still had in hand the appointment of a permanent clergyman. Wachtendorp would die on the 15th of February 1667, just before the arrival of the Rev. Adriaan de Voocht as permanent minister; the closing ecclesiastical fact of calendar 1666 was the November hand-over from Johannes de Voocht to Wachtendorp in a congregation that still worshipped between fort hall and unfinished wooden church frame. [3]
The year that opened with four foundation stones and a feast of oxen, bread, and Cape ale thus closed with a new commander in the fort, castle walls rising on one point amid timber hauled from Wynberg, French marks on the Saldanha islets, and a depleted store after De Montdevergue’s twelve ships. Wagenaar was at sea for Batavia; Van Quaelberg held the council board with Lacus, Schut, De Cretzer, Coon, and Van Clinkenberg; and the settlement’s free families in Table Valley still numbered sixteen under stamped weights and fixed prices. The directors in Amsterdam would not learn until the following November how far their servant had aided the French rivals—knowledge that would cost Van Quaelberg his post—but that reckoning lay beyond the calendar of 1666. [3]