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. In November 1666 the Rev. Johannes de Voocht had left for Batavia and been succeeded as acting chaplain by the Rev. Petrus Wachtendorp. Wachtendorp died on the 15th of February 1667, just before the arrival of the clergyman whom the directors had at last appointed on a permanent footing for the Cape congregation. The temporary ministry that had run from Van Arckel’s brief residence through Johannes de Voocht’s detention and Wachtendorp’s few months thus ended within weeks of the calendar turn. [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. Until the special building was finished, the congregation had also continued to use the great hall of the commander’s house in the old fort, with its lion and leopard skins and polished antelope horns, for weekly service. [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. The baptism dispute of March 1666, when Philippus Baldeus had protested against Johannes de Voocht’s baptizing of a slave infant, had already shown how closely ecclesiastical practice and social order were watched in that hall; Adriaan de Voocht inherited a congregation that had learned to expect a fixed ministry rather than a succession of temporary supply. [3]
Commander Cornelis van Quaelberg — installed on 27 September 1666 as third commander at the Cape after Van Riebeeck and Wagenaar — still held the fort when the new clergyman took office. Contemporary notes identify him as Cornelis van Quaelberghen; Böeseken later recorded that even Jan van Riebeeck, reading Cape news from Batavia and Malacca, followed the third commander’s difficulties and the endless complaints about free-burgher conduct that Wagenaar had begun and Van Quaelberg continued. The church settlement of February thus unfolded under a commander already harsh toward the freemen and already compromised, in the directors’ later judgment, by the French refreshment of December 1666. [1] [2] [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. Timber scarcity had already slowed the walls: the forests Van Riebeeck had used in the kloofs above Rondebosch were exhausted, and no suitable wood lay closer at hand than Wynberg, so that quarry frames and wall work competed for every slow-grown log hauled from the mountain side. [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]
The May order was a European strategic judgment projected onto an African building site. De Ruyter’s raid up the Medway and the Thames had convinced the Seventeen that English sea power no longer justified the cost of a five-point stone castle at the end of Africa. At the Cape the judgment meant idle trenches, released soldiers, and the end of the Robben Island building party — consequences that would free Pieter van Meerhof for the Mauritius and Madagascar voyage and leave Table Valley with one incomplete castle point as the only monument of two years of wartime construction. [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. His inland journeys of the early 1660s — among them the Namaqua contacts recorded in the journals — had already marked him as the settlement’s most active pathfinder before the island and Madagascar appointment of 1667. [1] [3]
Van Meerhof had married the interpreter Eva, the first Khoikhoi person recorded as professing Christianity and conforming to European habits of living. Böeseken notes that even Van Riebeeck, far from the Cape, read of that marriage among the Cape news that reached him with mixed feelings — together with the sale of Bosheuvel and the free-burgher complaints under Wagenaar and Van Quaelberg. By the time of their marriage Eva’s 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. [2] [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. The Mauritius supply voyage thus returned without its director of trade, and the south-east African reconnaissance planned as the voyage’s third leg died with the shore party on the Antongil beach. [3]
Antongil was not an unknown name in Cape papers. Earlier French and Dutch contacts at Madagascar and along the same coast had already entered the journals of the 1650s; the 1667 voyage was meant to turn that scattered knowledge into Company trade and a running survey of the south-east African shore. Instead it closed the career of the traveller who had done most, among the early free and Company men, to push inland from Table Valley toward the Namaqua and the interior clans. The murder left Eva a widow within the Cape orbit and left the directors without the coastal intelligence the voyage had been ordered to collect. [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. The baptism note and the fall are thin administrative threads, but they place her still inside the Cape community in the year her husband left for the eastern voyage. [3]
Her earlier career had been denser than those 1667 notices suggest. As interpreter she had stood between council and inland clans in the Van Riebeeck years; as a professing Christian in European dress she had been the first Khoikhoi person the settlement recorded in that character; as Meerhof’s wife she had shared the Robben Island superintendence while shell and stone parties served the castle works. Böeseken’s reading of Van Riebeeck’s later attention to her marriage underlines how far her story had already travelled in Company correspondence before the accidental fall of 1667 briefly restored her name to the Cape papers. [2] [3]
When the Antongil news reached Table Bay she lived as the widow of a murdered junior official. Her later fortunes — including the darker passages of subsequent years — belong to calendars after 1667. Within this year the documented facts are the fall, the prior baptism visit from the island, the end of the Robben Island household when castle work stopped, and the voyage that took her husband to his death on the Madagascar coast. [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. The cattle trade still framed the residency’s utility, and the directors’ instructions remained emphatic that the Khoikhoi were to be conciliated in every possible way — a line Van Quaelberg had answered, on taking office, with the customary exchange of complimentary messages and presents of oxen and sheep when neighbouring chiefs greeted the new head. [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. After the French fleet of December 1666 had eaten nearly everything needed for the expected return fleet, Van Quaelberg had organised barter through trusted intermediaries and Company parties — Schacher of the Kaapmans on commission inland, Mrs Van Quaelberg across the bay among the Cochoqua, and Corporal Hieronymus Cruse eastward to the Hessequas, the Gauriquas on the Gauritz, and as far as Mossel Bay. Those recovery expeditions belong to the turn from 1666 into the stock crisis that still shaped 1667 magazines; the two recorded criminal cases stand as the documented punitive edge of an administration that otherwise left clan life outside the fort’s jurisdiction. [3]
The contrast with Van Quaelberg’s treatment of free burghers was sharp. Toward Khoikhoi offenders the recorded hand was light and often compounded in stock; toward Europeans who traded sheep privately or carried fire-arms without leave the same commander reached for surrender of flocks, revived cattle-sale bans, and special licences. Native policy in 1667 was therefore not a single temper of mildness, but a double register — conciliation and mild criminal compounding on one side of the fort’s jurisdiction, and commercial monopoly enforced without patience on the other. [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]
The pattern was older than Van Quaelberg’s temper. From the first free-burgher grants the Company had undertaken to buy cattle and grain while imposing conditions Cory later called selfish and tyrannical, varying with the caprice of commander or visiting authority. Free families had been placed to cultivate so that the Cape might grow its own bread and not forever draw rice and grain from India; yet private barter with Khoikhoi flocks, private cattle sales between neighbours, and free carrying of fire-arms cut against the magazine monopoly the fort was bound to keep. Van Quaelberg’s 1667 measures — the sheep-blood test, the revived ban on burgher-to-burgher cattle sales, and the fire-arm licence — were a harsh tightening of that commercial logic, not a new invention of it. [3] [4]
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. Böeseken records that Van Riebeeck, reading from the East, still noticed the nimmereindigende klagtes over free-burgher behaviour under Wagenaar and then under Van Quaelberg; at the Cape those complaints now ran both ways, as freemen found the third commander a King Stork after Wagenaar’s quieter hand. [2] [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. Twelve French ships under a viceroy of Louis XIV’s new East India Company had been thoroughly refreshed; sea stores had been drawn from the Company’s magazines; a leaky vessel had been repaired with materials and carpenters kept for the Company’s own service — aid so complete that the viceroy could reach Madagascar with his forces undiminished. [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. The French episode of December 1666 thus produced, eleven months later, both a personal dismissal and a standing order against the liberality Van Quaelberg had shown to De Montdevergue. [3]
Borghorst would not reach Table Bay until the evening of 16 June 1668, landing in the Hof van Breda after a wearisome passage from Texel; he would land next morning but wait until Monday the 18th to produce his commission before the council of policy and the two burgher councillors. The calendar year 1667 therefore 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. Van Quaelberg’s later career, after he left for Batavia on 12 August 1668 and eventually rose again to be governor of Malacca, lay outside South African service; within 1667 the decisive fact was the unanimous vote of sixteen directors on 20 November. [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]
Lacus’s suspension left a hole that would not be properly filled for years. He remained in the settlement under suspension until March 1670, when he was at length brought to trial; though the greater part of the deficiency was satisfactorily accounted for, he was sentenced to reduction to the rank of common soldier and sent in that capacity to Batavia. During the long wait the secunde’s place was virtually vacant except for a few months in 1669 when Abraham Zeeuw was detained from a passing ship. In 1667 the practical fact was simpler: the second seat was empty, the fiscal De Cretzer was rising in weight, and the commander who despised freemen still signed for a magazine whose late keeper sat on Robben Island. [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. The same commercial instinct Cory traced from the first free papers — Company purchase of grain and cattle joined to tight restrictions on private trade — now bore the names of families whose descendants would carry Cape and interior history far beyond Table Valley. [3] [4]
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, a suspended secunde on the island, 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. Van Quaelberg still governed through the southern summer that followed 20 November, harsh to freemen and formally mild to Khoikhoi offenders, while the Hof van Breda and the letter of dismissal made their slow way toward Table Bay. [2] [3]