Boer History1668 at the Cape of Good Hope: Borghorst’s Arrival, the Namaqua Foray, and Cruse’s Attaqua Trade
Peace with England and the English Fleet Watch — February 1668
In February 1668 news arrived from the Netherlands that a treaty of peace with England had been signed on the 24th of August of the preceding year. The settlement was not yet free of wartime caution. The treaty was not to take effect south of the equator until the 24th of April. A large English fleet had put to sea shortly before the directors’ letter was written, and because they could not learn its destination they ordered that all Company ships calling at Table Bay were to be detained and a good watch kept until the period of possible hostilities had ended. [3]
The instruction sat awkwardly beside the earlier May 1667 order that had suspended the unfinished Castle of Good Hope after De Ruyter’s Thames victories. One stone point of the five-bastioned design still stood incomplete; the other four had never been opened. Soldiers who could be spared had already been marked for Batavia. Yet for the first months of 1668 the settlement had again to treat Table Bay as a place where English sail might appear before the southern peace date, and where outward and homeward Indiamen were not to scatter until the danger window closed. The directors who had judged England’s naval power broken in 1667 now, for a few more months, treated the southern oceans as still contested water. [3]
Commander Cornelis van Quaelberg still held office while those letters were read. His administration had begun on 27 September 1666; it would end only when the successor named in Amsterdam landed and produced his commission. Until then the Cape remained under a commander already under sentence of dismissal for the aid he had given the French fleet of De Montdevergue in December 1666—though that dismissal letter of 20 November 1667 would not be executed in Table Valley until the following June. Contemporary notes identify him as Cornelis van Quaelberghen, the third commander after Van Riebeeck and Wagenaar; Böeseken later recorded that even Jan van Riebeeck, reading Cape news from Batavia and Malacca, followed the third commander’s difficulties and the endless free-burgher complaints that Wagenaar had begun and Van Quaelberg continued. [1] [2] [3]
Van Overbeke, who sailed outward as a councillor of justice in 1668 and later published a comic voyage description, sketched Van Quaelberg’s character in the same hard colours Theal found in the commander’s own writings, and added that even the Khoikhoi regarded him with aversion. The portrait matches the domestic record of early 1668: a man still in formal command, already condemned in Amsterdam, harsh toward freemen, and waiting on a successor still at sea in the Hof van Breda. [3]
Namaqua Foray at Saldanha Bay — May 1668
In May 1668 a strong band of Namaquas made a foray upon some small Cochoqua kraals at Saldanha Bay and seized their herds. A few oxen and sheep belonging to the Company, running near the outpost, fell among the plunder. Two or three Europeans who tried to rescue the stock were wounded with arrows. They opened fire with their muskets and shot three of the Namaquas dead. The rest escaped with the booty. [3]
Next morning the raiders sent messengers back to ask for peace with the white men, saying they had no desire to offend them. Peace was granted at once. In the course of the day the Europeans sent out a trading party and bartered as many of the plundered cattle as they had copper and beads to pay for. A messenger rode in haste to the commander, who entirely approved the proceeding and immediately sent a reinforcement of men to the outpost with a large stock of merchandise. By then the Namaquas had fallen back too far to be reached. [3]
In later years the plundered Cochoqua referred to the barter as an unfriendly act. They could never be made to understand that it was fair for their allies the white men to become possessed of their sheep in that manner. The episode left a double mark on the record: a rare armed clash with Namaqua raiders on the Saldanha pastures, and a cattle transaction that satisfied Company trading rules while straining the alliance language used toward the Cochoqua whose herds had first been taken. It was, in Theal’s judgment, the only other native event of Van Quaelberg’s administration worthy of special mention beside the mild criminal cases already on the books. [3]
Van Quaelberg’s broader native policy in these months remained that of his predecessors. Khoikhoi were not to be molested, nor was there interference with their domestic affairs. Beachrangers living in Table Valley were left to themselves and were not made subject to Dutch tribunals except when they offended against Europeans. Only two punishments of Khoikhoi are recorded for the period: one man flogged and sent as a convict to Robben Island for theft, then released when friends paid two oxen and eight sheep; another found guilty of assault and allowed to compromise with eight fat sheep. Compared with penalties inflicted on Europeans for like offences, both were mild. The contrast with his free-burgher rules was sharp: mild composition for Khoikhoi offenders, rigid monopoly toward freemen who traded stock. [3]
Van Quaelberg’s Final Burgher Restrictions
Toward free burghers Van Quaelberg was far less forbearing. Regulations forbidding trade between freemen and the natives were enforced with unusual rigidity. Some farmers were suspected of buying sheep privately at prices well above what the Company paid. To stop the practice, burghers were required to surrender at a valuation all the African sheep in their possession and were prohibited from keeping any other than animals showing European blood, so that illegal barter would be easier to detect. [3]
Old rules that had nearly slept under Commander Wagenaar—prohibiting burghers from selling cattle to one another—were revived. Discontent rose further when a proclamation forbade freemen to carry firearms without special permission. The commander treated burgher complaints with open contempt and wrote of the free community in disparaging terms even as his own connection with the Cape was about to be cut short by the directors’ November dismissal. [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 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]
Those measures formed the last major domestic imprint of Van Quaelberg’s command. They fixed in the free farmers’ memory a season of sheep tallies, trade bans, and disarmed status, and they left his successor to govern a small settlement already restive under Company cattle monopolies. Böeseken notes that Van Riebeeck, still reading Cape despatches in the East, was not indifferent to 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. The French-fleet affair that had decided Amsterdam against him remained a separate charge; the burgher restrictions were the daily face of his authority in the months before Borghorst landed. [2] [3]
Borghorst Arrives and Assumes Command — June 1668
Jacob Borghorst sailed from Texel in the Hof van Breda and, after a wearisome passage, reached Table Bay on the evening of the 16th of June 1668. Next morning he landed, but because it was Sunday he did not produce his commission. On Monday the 18th the council of policy assembled, and the two burgher councillors were invited to be present. The directors’ authority was then read, and without further ceremony Borghorst assumed control of affairs. [3]
The letter of dismissal that had named him, dated 20 November 1667, had required Van Quaelberg to transfer everything without delay and either to return to the fatherland or to proceed to Batavia as a free man by the first opportunity. Future foreign vessels were not to be supplied from Company stores but left to their own resources—a direct reverse of the hospitality shown to De Montdevergue’s fleet. Sixteen of the seventeen directors had been present when that dismissal was resolved. Nearly seven months had passed between the vote in Amsterdam and the Monday ceremony in Table Valley; news and men still moved at the pace of Indiamen. [3]
Borghorst was already in ill health when he landed. He remained an invalid through the whole of his stay, so that for roughly three-fourths of his term practical government rested on subordinates. The ablest of them was the fiscal, Cornelis de Cretzer. Quiet years left little beyond the cattle trade and the gardens to oversee, yet the pattern of a sick commander and a working fiscal was set from the first week of the new administration. The unfinished castle, the suspended Robben Island stone works, and the standing order against aiding foreign fleets out of Company magazines were the physical and diplomatic inheritance he received; fortress building was not to resume while Amsterdam still judged the English naval danger closed. [3]
In the same year the former commander Zacharias Wagenaar reappeared briefly in the colonial archives as vice-admiral of the return fleet of 1668 and spent a few days in the settlement he had once governed. The visit was a passage, not a second administration; it underlined how thin the circle of senior Cape officers had become, and how completely Borghorst’s council would have to work with the men already on the ground rather than with a full bench of Wagenaar’s old colleagues. [3]
Van Quaelberg Departs for Batavia — 12 August 1668
Mr. Van Quaelberg left for Batavia on the 12th of August 1668. In later years he was taken back into Company service and rose to be governor of Malacca, but Cape records do not show whether influence or merit restored him. He was never again connected with South Africa. His Cape command had lasted less than two years; it closed under the shadow of the French-fleet decision and of a free-burgher policy that had strained the small farming community. [3]
From the East, Van Riebeeck still followed such Cape news with mixed feeling: the death of a favourite horse, Eva’s marriage to Pieter van Meerhof, the sale of his Wynberg farm Bosheuvel to Jacob van Roosendael, and the endless complaints about free burghers under Wagenaar and then under Van Quaelberg. Böeseken wonders whether he ever acted as advocate for the third commander when Van Quaelberg complained that the Cape and his own person were not viewed in a favourable light. If anyone understood the difficulties of Cape authority, she remarks, it was surely Van Riebeeck. By August 1668 that third commander was gone from Table Valley for good. [2] [3]
Borghorst’s first tasks were not to resume fortress building—Amsterdam had already stopped that cost—but to steady ordinary trade, clear French marks from Saldanha Bay, and keep the free farmers and the cattle barter under a quieter hand. The transfer ceremony of 18 June and the departure of 12 August thus bracketed less than two months in which the old commander wound up his private affairs while the new one, already an invalid, leaned on De Cretzer for the daily load. [3]
Officers and Free Names under Borghorst
Of the leading men whom Commander Wagenaar had left in the settlement, few still held their places. The secunde Hendrik Lacus had been suspended for a deficiency in the stores under his charge and was a prisoner on Robben Island. He would remain in the settlement under suspension until March 1670, when trial reduced him to the rank of common soldier for Batavia; during the long wait the secunde’s post was virtually vacant, except for a few months in 1669 when Abraham Zeeuw was detained from a passing ship to fill it provisionally. [3]
Cornelis de Cretzer, formerly secretary, was now fiscal and the working centre of daily business. The ensign Smient was on the point of leaving for a better situation elsewhere. Lieutenant Abraham Schut was a man without weight of character and was deprived of his seat in council soon after Borghorst’s arrival for having slandered the widow of the late acting chaplain. Secretary Jacob Granaat held an office that gave him little authority in the direction of affairs. Upon De Cretzer, therefore, rested the oversight of nearly everything while the times stayed quiet. [3]
The permanent clergyman remained the Rev. Adriaan de Voocht, appointed after the short acting tenure and February 1667 death of Petrus Wachtendorp. To the burgher population had been added names that later spread far beyond the colony: Gerrit van der Byl, Theunis van Schalkwyk, Arnoldus Basson, and Gysbert Verwey. The free community was still small, but its family list was no longer only the first Liesbeek grantees of 1657. 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]
French Beacons Removed at Saldanha Bay
Some of the landmarks set up around Saldanha Bay by order of the French viceroy De Montdevergue were still standing when Borghorst took charge. They consisted of the French coat of arms painted on boards attached to posts—so frail that one had been destroyed by a rhinoceros and another had been used by a party of Khoikhoi to make a fire. The commander lost no time in removing those that remained and causing all traces of the offensive beacons to be obliterated. Where they had stood, shields bearing the Company’s arms were placed. [3]
The gesture closed a visible remnant of the December 1666 visit that had cost Van Quaelberg his post. It also restated, in timber and paint on the Saldanha shore, the directors’ rule that the bay was not to carry another European power’s marks while the Dutch claimed the refreshment station and its outposts. French interest in the region had not vanished from Amsterdam’s calculations—within a year the directors would order a permanent party at Saldanha against any new French design—but in 1668 at Saldanha the Company’s arms again stood alone. [3]
Coastal Knowledge and Interior Limits
By 1668 the country along the coast had been thoroughly explored northward to some distance beyond the mouth of the Elephant River and eastward as far as Mossel Bay. The Berg River had been traced from its source to the sea. Europeans had been in the Tulbagh basin and the valley of the Breede River. No white man had yet climbed the formidable wall that skirts the Bokkeveld and the Karoo, nor sought entrance to the unknown interior through the gorge later known as Michell’s Pass, the Hex River recesses, or Cogman’s Kloof toward Montagu. [3]
Beyond the outer line of their own discoveries, maps of the period were still trusted almost as if compiled from survey. No one doubted the great river drawn as the western boundary of Monomotapa; by chance the line was a tolerably correct boundary between Bantu and Khoikhoi spheres. Inland bartering parties no longer kept careful journals as at first, because novelty had worn off. Dutch nicknames for chiefs—Captain Thickhead and the like—often make the routes impossible to follow unless the naming incident was earlier recorded. Fresh discoveries, however, were still carefully reported when they occurred. [3]
Cory later summarised the easterly thrust of the same year more briefly: Hieronymus Cruse had crossed the Hottentots Holland Mountains in 1668 and penetrated as far as Mossel Bay, while minor expeditions still followed stolen cattle or temporary leave to trade with distant natives. Exploring knowledge was thus running ahead of occupied ground; the land actually farmed remained a thin belt about the peninsula, even as barter parties and coastal yachts pushed the known line toward the Gourits and the Outeniqua country. [3] [4]
The Voerman, Cruse, and the Attaqua — August 1668
In August 1668 the yacht Voerman was sent to examine the east coast carefully as far as Terra de Natal. Corporal Cruse and fifteen men went in her, with instructions to land at Mossel Bay and explore the country in that neighbourhood. The Voerman got no farther eastward than the bend in the coast now called St Francis Bay, then termed Baya Contant, where she put about after springing a leak in a storm. Her officers discovered nothing of note—later judged a failure of attention, for the Knysna cleft, Plettenberg Bay, and the forested hills of the Tsitsikamma lay along that same seaboard. [3]
The party put ashore at Mossel Bay did much better. Corporal Cruse visited for the first time a tribe called the Attaqua, of whom he had heard on a previous journey. He found them very wealthy in cattle and exchanged his merchandise to such advantage that he returned to the fort with some hundreds of oxen and sheep. The Attaqua occupied the country between Mossel Bay and the present neighbourhood of George, and had as their eastern neighbours a tribe called the Outeniqua. [3]
Cruse’s success induced Borghorst to send him back without delay at the head of another trading party. The eastward cattle road that had been only a rumour of wealthy clans beyond the Hessequa country now yielded a concrete return to the Company’s kraals, and it raised the corporal’s standing as the most useful inland trader of the Borghorst months. Cory’s shorter notice of the same season—friendly barter obtained on the Mossel Bay road, followed by trouble with wild interior bands on the return—agrees with Theal’s fuller sequence while fixing Cruse’s name among the first explorers who carried the settlement’s knowledge across the Hottentots Holland range. [3] [4]
Cruse, the Obiqua, and Captured Cattle
On the way of the second journey Cruse encountered a company of Bushmen with a great herd of cattle stolen from the Khoikhoi of those parts. The band appears to have been a standing pest to the pastoral clans between the Breede and the Gourits. The Khoikhoi called them the ||Obiqua; the journals speak of that name as if it were a clan title, though in one place the commander states expressly that they were Sonqua. The Khoikhoi word means simply “the murderers,” which accounts for what would otherwise be obscure in the records. [3]
Upon the appearance of the Europeans, the Bushmen—having no conception of firearms and believing the little party of strangers to be at their mercy—tried to seize the merchandise. Cruse offered presents to conciliate them, without success. Resistance followed. In a few seconds those of the plunderers who were not stretched on the ground were flying in dismay, leaving families and cattle in the hands of the Europeans. No harm was done to the women and children, but the corporal took the whole herd as lawful spoil of war and returned with it to the fort. [3]
Cory’s parallel account places the clash on the return from Mossel Bay after friendly barter with the coastal Khoikhoi: a party of these wild people approached, refused peaceful overtures, attacked, and could not be driven off until a volley had been fired and some of them killed. Shortly afterward three burghers crossing the Hottentots Holland Mountains were murdered by a similar band without, so far as was known, any offence given. The two narratives together fix 1668 as a year in which the settlement’s eastward traders met not only wealthy Attaqua herds but the standing Bushman threat that already terrified pastoral Khoikhoi clans. [3] [4]
It was a valuable herd: many breeding cows such as barter hardly ever yielded. The exploit raised the Europeans high in the estimation of the Hessequa and their neighbours, who sent complimentary messages and expressed thanks for the chastisement of the Bushmen. Company cattle strength and local Khoikhoi goodwill thus advanced together from a single violent encounter on the eastern trading road. [3]
Burial Custom and an Infant Rescued
The journal of this date also records a cruel custom among the Khoikhoi of the neighbourhood. Unlike some other African peoples, they did not expose their dead but buried them in any cavity they could find. When the mother of a helpless infant died, the living child was buried with its parent, because no one would take the trouble of nourishing it, and that was the customary way of ending its life. [3]
Some Dutch women one afternoon saw a party of Khoikhoi working in the ground and were drawn by curiosity to the spot. They found that a corpse had been thrust into an excavation made by a wild animal and that an infant was about to be placed with it. Shocked, they could not prevail on any of the natives to rescue the child. No one, however, objected to their taking it themselves. With a view of saving its life they carried it home with them. The incident entered the Cape journal as a rare domestic glimpse beside the year’s cattle and command changes. [3]
A fuller version survived outside the fort journal. Pieter de Neyn, fiscal at the Cape from 1672 to 1674, later retold the rescue from memory in his Lusthof der Huwelyken: he gave the women’s names, noted that one afterward married Johannes Pretorius (a fellow-student of De Neyn’s at Leiden), and added that the child was baptised but died shortly afterward. Theal judged that several items in those few pages stand more fully than elsewhere; the infant episode of Borghorst’s time is among them, a private act of mercy that the official diary recorded only in outline. [3]
Encouraging Freemen — Limits on Official Farms
Among the means by which the Company attached officers to the service was liberty to trade to a limited extent on private account. Skippers, mates, and even sailors often carried small ventures; shore officers had corresponding privileges when they could be granted without harm to public business. The first commander at the Cape had held a farm of his own, 101 morgen at Wynberg; his immediate successors likewise cultivated landed property for their exclusive benefit. [3]
Van Riebeeck’s Wynberg farm had been ordered sold by public auction for his benefit after the council’s earlier plan to take it over at a valuation was set aside by the supreme authorities. Jacob Rosendael (also written Roosendael) purchased it for 1,600 gulden, payable in yearly instalments over a long period. At this time Van Riebeeck was still receiving yearly payments from the Cape. Rosendael extended the vineyard the first commander had planted, and the quantity of wine was so considerable that the owner was licensed to sell it to visitors from the ships as well as to residents. Böeseken records the same sale among the Cape news Van Riebeeck still followed from Batavia—Bosheuvel passing to Jacob van Roosendael while the former commander served as secretary of the Council of India. [2] [3]
The Company was now anxious to encourage the freemen, whose largest gains came from the sale of produce to visitors. To prevent rivalry, instructions were issued that none of the members of the council of policy were to keep cattle or to cultivate gardens beyond the requirements of their households. After Van Quaelberg’s dismissal, captains of foreign vessels were invariably referred to the freemen under the plea that the Company had nothing to spare. Farmers remained free to sell vegetables, poultry, eggs, milk, butter, and similar articles to Dutch or foreign crews; grain and cattle stayed reserved for Company use except by special permission. [3]
Thus 1668 closed under a new commander who was seldom well enough to direct every detail, a fiscal who carried the daily load, an eastward cattle trade opened through Cruse and the Attaqua, French boards gone from Saldanha Bay, and a free community still small but deliberately favoured against official farming rivals. The calendar year that had begun with Van Quaelberg and an English-fleet watch ended with Borghorst’s invalid government and a settlement looking to freemen and inland barter rather than to unfinished stone walls. Cory’s long view of the same decade places Cruse’s Mossel Bay thrust among the exploring steps that slowly pulled occupation after discovery; within the single year 1668 those steps already showed both the profit of Attaqua herds and the cost of meeting Obiqua bands on the return road. [3] [4]