Boer History1667 at the Cape of Good Hope: Castle Suspended, Meerhof’s Death, and Van Quaelberg’s Dismissal
Wachtendorp’s Death and Adriaan de Voocht — February 1667
The ecclesiastical stopgap that had begun after the death of Johan van Arckel in January 1666 closed early in the new year. The Rev. Petrus Wachtendorp, who had succeeded Johannes de Voocht as acting chaplain in November 1666, died on the 15th of February 1667. His death came just before the arrival of the clergyman whom the directors had at last appointed on a permanent footing for the Cape congregation. [3]
That permanent minister was the Rev. Adriaan de Voocht. He took up the work that Van Arckel had barely begun and that the successive ship’s chaplains De Voocht and Wachtendorp had held only provisionally. The wooden church frame inside the castle trenches—where Van Arckel already lay beneath the intended pulpit, and where Wagenaar’s wife had since been buried—remained the community’s principal place of worship while stone walls still rose only on a single point of the unfinished fortress. [3]
The arrival of a settled minister marked a quiet institutional step for a settlement still small in free families and still dependent on the Company’s magazines for grain and meat. Baptisms, school prayers, and the Heidelberg catechism for slave children continued under a pastor who was no longer a detained ship’s chaplain awaiting the next outward fleet, but a resident appointed from the Netherlands for the Cape alone. [3]
Castle Works Suspended — May 1667
In May 1667 letters from home brought news of the victorious career of the Dutch fleet and of the memorable exploits of De Ruyter in the Thames. The directors believed that there was no longer anything to be feared from the naval power of England, and therefore deemed it unnecessary to be at the cost of completing the castle in Table Valley. They gave orders that the work was to be suspended forthwith, and that all the soldiers who could be spared were to be sent to Batavia. [3]
When those instructions reached the Cape, four out of the five points of the castle had not been commenced. The one point which had absorbed the labour of nearly three hundred men for more than twenty-one months was not fully completed. The gala foundation of 2 January 1666, the feast of oxen and Cape ale, and the amateur verses laid among the colonial records thus stood over a fortress still little more than a single unfinished bastion and a trench system whose other four angles remained unopened. [3]
Suspension altered more than the skyline of Table Valley. The Robben Island establishment, maintained while stone and shell work for the castle demanded labour and oversight offshore, lost its principal justification once building ceased. Soldiers released from trench and wall duty were drafted for Batavia. The settlement that had lived for two years under open-war fortress orders returned, in the directors’ calculation, to a quieter defensive footing—though the earthen fort of earlier years still stood as the real place of arms while the stone castle waited unfinished. [3]
Van Meerhof’s Madagascar Voyage and Murder at Antongil
It was intended that the vessel which took the supplies for Mauritius in 1667 should call at Madagascar for trading purposes and then explore the south-east coast of Africa. The last design was frustrated by a tragic event. Pieter van Meerhof, the most energetic of the early South African travellers of the Van Riebeeck and Wagenaar years, was sent as director of trade and exploration. [3]
Van Meerhof had married the interpreter Eva, the first Khoikhoi person recorded as professing Christianity and conforming to European habits of living. By the time of their marriage her services as interpreter could be dispensed with, as nearly all the children of the beachrangers—and particularly the girls who were in service—could speak Dutch fluently. Soon afterwards he had been appointed superintendent of the party on Robben Island, and she had gone there with him. [3]
When the building of the castle was suspended and there was therefore no longer any need for the establishment at Robben Island, Van Meerhof was appointed head of the expedition to Mauritius and Madagascar. At the Bay of Antongil he went ashore with eight men to see what trade could be done, and while unsuspicious of danger the little party was attacked by natives and all were murdered. The coastal survey that was to have followed the Madagascar call never took place under his direction. [3]
Eva after Robben Island
For a couple of years after the Robben Island appointment Eva’s name almost disappears from the documents of the period, excepting in a brief paragraph concerning her coming from the island to the fort with a child to be baptized. In 1667 it occurs again to record the particulars of an injury which she sustained by an accidental fall, after which for another twelvemonth her name is not mentioned in the surviving notices. [3]
The fall and the baptism note are thin threads, but they fix her still within the Cape community in the year her husband left for the eastern voyage. The interpreter who had once stood between council and inland clans now lived as the widow of a murdered junior official once the Antongil news reached Table Bay—her later fortunes belonging to subsequent years, not to the calendar that closed with Van Quaelberg still in the fort. [3]
Native Policy and Punishments under Van Quaelberg
Commander Cornelis van Quaelberg maintained the same attitude as his predecessors towards the natives. They were not permitted to be molested, nor was there any interference with their domestic affairs. Even the beachrangers living in Table Valley were left to themselves, and were not made subject to the Dutch tribunals except when they committed offences against Europeans. [3]
There are only two instances on record of Khoikhoi being punished at this time. The first offender was convicted of theft, and was soundly flogged and sent as a convict to Robben Island, but was released soon afterwards upon payment by his friends of two oxen and eight sheep. The second was found guilty of assault, but compromised by the payment of eight fat sheep. Compared with punishments inflicted upon Europeans for similar offences, these penalties were mild. [3]
That restraint in criminal cases did not mean indifference to stock and trade. The commander still organised barter through trusted intermediaries and Company parties when magazines ran low, and he still treated European–Khoikhoi boundary questions as matters of council policy rather than private force. The two recorded punishments stand as the documented criminal edge of an administration that otherwise left clan life outside the fort’s jurisdiction. [3]
Burgher Restrictions — Sheep, Trade, and Firearms
The regulations forbidding trade between the free men and the natives were very rigidly enforced by Van Quaelberg. Some of the farmers were suspected of purchasing sheep privately at prices greatly in advance of those which the Company was giving. To prevent this, the burghers were required to surrender at a valuation all the African sheep in their possession, and were prohibited from keeping any other than those showing European blood, so that if they persisted in setting the law at defiance they would be easily detected. [3]
The old regulations prohibiting the burghers from selling cattle to each other, which had been nearly dormant during Wagenaar’s government, were likewise revived. These oppressive laws caused much discontent in the settlement, which was increased when a proclamation was issued forbidding the free men to carry fire-arms without special permission. The commander was treating the burghers and their complaints with utter contempt, and writing of them in most disparaging terms, when his connection with them—and with South Africa—was abruptly brought toward its end by news that had taken nearly a year to reach Amsterdam. [3]
Grain and horned cattle remained reserved for the Company’s own use under the free-paper conditions of earlier years; vegetables, poultry, eggs, milk, butter, and similar articles could still reach ships’ crews after the usual delay from arrival. What cut deepest in 1667 was not the old reservation of grain and slaughter stock, but the sheep-blood test, the ban on burgher-to-burgher cattle sales, and the special licence required for fire-arms—rules that made private stock and private defence visible to the fort at every turn. [3]
Directors Dismiss Van Quaelberg — 20 November 1667
In those days news travelled slowly. The French fleet under the viceroy De Montdevergue had been in Table Bay in December 1666, and it was not until the following November that what had occurred at the Cape became known in Amsterdam. The directors were not a little incensed to find that the fleet whose outfit had caused them such uneasiness had been assisted so greatly by one of their own servants. [3]
They considered that there could be no excuse for his conduct either in leaving the fort and placing his person in the power of the foreigners, or in furnishing strangers and rivals with stores kept at the Cape for their own service. There were sixteen out of the seventeen directors present when this subject was discussed, and they resolved unanimously to dismiss Mr Van Quaelberg from their employment. A successor was immediately appointed and instructed to proceed to South Africa and take over the government as soon as possible. [3]
In the letter of dismissal dated the 20th of November 1667, Van Quaelberg was required to transfer everything without delay to the new commander, Jacob Borghorst, and either to return to the fatherland or to proceed to Batavia as a free man by the first opportunity. Instructions were laid down in the most positive terms that in future foreign vessels were not to be supplied with the Company’s stores, but were to be left to their own resources. Borghorst would not reach Table Bay until June 1668; the calendar year 1667 closed with the dismissal written in Amsterdam and the commander still at the Cape, unaware—or not yet formally superseded—while the letter and his successor were still at sea. [3]
Officers, Stores, and Free Names in 1667
Of the leading men whom Wagenaar had left in the settlement, few still held their old places by the end of Van Quaelberg’s tenure. The secunde Hendrik Lacus was suspended from office on account of a deficiency in the stores under his charge and became a prisoner on Robben Island. Cornelis de Cretzer, formerly secretary, was now fiscal. The ensign Smient was on the point of leaving South Africa for a better situation elsewhere. Those shifts framed the council board that still answered to Van Quaelberg through the winter and spring after the castle order and the Meerhof disaster. [3]
To the burgher population had been added four names that would become well known in and far beyond the colony: Gerrit van der Byl, Theunis van Schalkwyk, Arnoldus Basson, and Gysbert Verwey. They joined a free community that had numbered sixteen families in Table Valley in 1666 and that now laboured under the sheep, cattle-sale, and fire-arm rules of Van Quaelberg’s later months. [3]
The year that opened with a permanent clergyman in prospect and closed with a dismissal letter on the water thus left the Cape with an unfinished single castle point, no Robben Island building party, a murdered explorer’s widow in the settlement’s orbit, two mild recorded native criminal cases, discontented free farmers stripped of African sheep and special fire-arm rights, and a commander whose liberality to De Montdevergue had cost him the confidence of sixteen directors. Jacob Borghorst was already named in Amsterdam; his assumption of control would belong to the following June. [3]