Boer History1669 at the Cape of Good Hope: The Grundel, Miners, Saldanha Outpost, and Hackius Named
Officers under Invalid Borghorst — 1669
Commander Jacob Borghorst had landed from the Hof van Breda on the evening of 16 June 1668, produced his commission on Monday the 18th, and assumed control without further ceremony. He was already in ill health when he stepped ashore. Through 1669 he remained an invalid for nearly the whole of his stay, so that for about three-fourths of his command the practical direction of affairs rested with subordinates. Of those officers the ablest was the fiscal Cornelis de Cretzer, formerly secretary of the council under earlier commanders. Quiet times left little beyond the cattle trade and the gardens for daily oversight, yet the load of correspondence, trade parties, and discipline still fell on the men who sat nearest the commander’s chair. [3]
Of the leading men whom Commander Wagenaar had left in the settlement, few now remained. The secunde Hendrik Lacus had been suspended for a deficiency in the stores under his charge and was a prisoner on Robben Island at Borghorst’s arrival. He remained in the settlement under suspension through 1669; only in March 1670 would he finally be brought before the court, when most of the shortage was accounted for but he was still reduced to the rank of common soldier and ordered to Batavia in that capacity. During the long wait the secunde’s post was virtually vacant, except for a few months in 1669 when it was filled provisionally by Abraham Zeeuw, an officer detained from a passing ship. [3]
Other seats carried less weight. The ensign Smient had been on the point of leaving for a better situation elsewhere when Borghorst took charge. The Rev. Johannes de Voocht had left for Batavia in November 1666; the acting chaplain Petrus Wachtendorp had died on 15 February 1667 just before the permanent clergyman Adriaan de Voocht arrived. In council the lieutenant Abraham Schut was a man without weight of character and was even deprived of his seat soon after Borghorst’s arrival for having slandered the widow of the late acting chaplain. The secretary Jacob Granaat held an office that gave him little or no authority in the direction of affairs. Upon De Cretzer, therefore, rested the oversight of nearly everything that the invalid commander could not carry in person. [3]
The result was a calendar year in which the settlement’s paper hierarchy still named Borghorst as commander, while De Cretzer’s hand was felt on cattle barter, garden produce, and the ordinary discipline of free and Company people alike. To the burgher population had already been added names that would become familiar far beyond Table Valley—Gerrit van der Byl, Theunis van Schalkwyk, Arnoldus Basson, and Gysbert Verwey—yet the freemen still looked to a council whose daily pulse was the fiscal’s rather than the sick commander’s. The surgeon Nicolaus de Graaf, who called at Table Bay in 1669 among several visits between 1640 and 1687, left observations that Theal later judged entirely in accordance with the archival record; the year’s paper trail is thus not only official minutes but a harbour that still drew careful European eyes. [3]
The Grundel, Martin Vaz, and Wreede’s Return
In 1669 the supreme authorities sent out a small vessel named the Grundel to explore the coasts of Southern Africa. On the way she visited the rocks of Martin Vaz and searched in vain in their neighbourhood for a fertile island suitable for a residency. On board was George Frederick Wreede, the same officer who had visited Martin Vaz in the Pimpel in 1665 and who had later been named commander of the Mauritius occupation party. [3]
Wreede’s career had been broken under Van Quaelberg. Unable to carry out his Mauritius instructions because some of the people there were mutinous, he had been held responsible, recalled, and tried by the council of a fleet on a charge of neglect of duty. The sentence reduced him again to the rank of a soldier on pay of fifteen shillings a month. He found means of getting to Europe and of laying his case before the directors. They annulled the sentence, gave him the rank and pay of a junior merchant, and sent him out again to head the establishment at Mauritius. The Grundel carried that restored officer as far as Table Bay some months before the Mauritius packet was due to sail. [3]
The vessel’s arrival therefore tied three threads at once: a coastal survey ship under directors’ orders, a renewed search among the Martin Vaz rocks for a mid-ocean foothold, and the return of a linguist and island officer whose Cape vocabulary work in earlier years had already marked him as more than an ordinary soldier. For the settlement of 1669 the practical question was how long Wreede would remain available before the Mauritius packet took him east again. The directors who had reversed a fleet court’s humiliation were also the directors who still expected Mauritius to be held under a Cape-linked command—an ambition that Van Riebeeck’s own correspondence had once heard when the Seventeen spoke of placing Mauritius under the Cape commander and opening trade toward Angola and Madagascar. [2] [3]
Martin Vaz itself yielded nothing the Company could occupy. The rocks remained rocks; no fertile island residency appeared in their neighbourhood. What the cruise delivered to Table Bay was not a new Atlantic station but a restored junior merchant and a surveying hull whose next African work would be ordered from the Cape itself. In a year of invalid command, that combination—European rehabilitation, island ambition, and coastal reconnaissance—gave De Cretzer’s government one of its few clearly directed tasks from Amsterdam. [3]
Permanent Station Ordered at Saldanha Bay
Shortly after the Grundel reached Table Bay, letters arrived from the directors with instructions to station a party of men permanently at Saldanha Bay, to prevent any other European power from taking possession of that port. It was believed that the French had at last resolved to abandon Madagascar, where they had met with nothing but loss, and it was suspected that they meant to establish themselves somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Cape of Good Hope. The frail French boards of De Montdevergue’s 1666 visit had already been removed in 1668, when Borghorst caused the remaining coats of arms to be obliterated and Company shields set where they had stood. The new order went further and required a standing Dutch presence, not merely the erasure of a rival’s painted claim. [3]
Wreede was accordingly sent with fourteen men to fix a site for the outpost and to put up the necessary buildings. The choice of an officer already destined for Mauritius was temporary: he was to be relieved when the Mauritius packet was ready to sail. Even so, the assignment placed a restored junior merchant at the head of the first deliberate permanent station on the bay that French admirals and cattle traders had both used as a western door to the Cape pastures. Fourteen men were few against a European squadron, yet they were enough to mark occupation in the language directors understood—buildings, a fixed party, and a continuous claim. [3]
The Saldanha order also fitted the freemen economy that the Company was trying to favour. Instructions had already been 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, so that freemen, whose largest gains came from the sale of produce to visitors, would not face official rivals. After Van Quaelberg’s dismissal, captains of foreign vessels were regularly referred to free producers 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. A watched western bay and a freer produce market were two sides of the same caution toward rivals and the same pressure to feed ships without emptying Company stores. [3]
That freemen policy had deep roots. From the first years of the post, Van Riebeeck and the Seventeen had argued whether free households should carry the grain and garden burden that a pure refreshment station could not sustain with servants alone. Böeseken’s account of those debates—free papers, fixed prices to the Company, surplus sales to ships, and the warning that officials must not compete with free producers—shows why Borghorst’s years could still speak of encouraging freemen without inventing the idea. What 1669 added was the strategic gloss: freemen as suppliers, Saldanha as a sealed western gate, and council members barred from farming for the market. [2] [3]
Convicts Seize the Lepelaar for Pernambuco
A day or two before the Mauritius packet was to have left, a small party of convicts managed to get possession of her. The leader was an old mate of a ship who had been sentenced to a long term of imprisonment for insubordination. Under his guidance the Lepelaar was captured, and the next that was heard of her was that she had safely reached Pernambuco. The escape stripped the settlement at a stroke of the vessel meant to carry Wreede and stores to the island command he had just recovered by directors’ decree. [3]
A few weeks later a yacht that called was laden with stores for Mauritius, and Wreede sailed in her to resume the position of commandant of the island. His Cape service in 1669 was therefore brief but concentrated: Martin Vaz in the Grundel, the Saldanha building party, the shock of the Lepelaar seizure, and a delayed eastward departure on a chance yacht. The later end of that Mauritius chapter—his drowning on 29 February 1672 while exploring islets in a boat overturned in a squall—lay outside the calendar year, but the 1669 record already fixed him again as the Company’s chosen head of the island station. [3]
For Table Valley the convict seizure was a reminder that Robben Island sentences and long imprisonments did not always end in quiet labour. An experienced mate among the convicts could turn a waiting packet into an Atlantic escape. The settlement answered with improvised shipping for Mauritius and with the Saldanha post still standing after Wreede’s relief, but the episode entered the year as one of the sharpest local shocks of Borghorst’s invalid administration. Lacus still waited under suspension on the island that had held other offenders; the Lepelaar showed that confinement and trust could fail in the opposite direction—not a prisoner left behind, but a hull stolen outward. [3]
The Pernambuco landfall also placed the Cape, for a moment, on the same Atlantic map as Brazil and the Portuguese routes. Directors who feared French settlement near the Cape now had to absorb a Dutch convict success story written in a foreign American port. No Cape force recovered the Lepelaar; the news arrived as fait accompli. What remained local was the hole in the Mauritius schedule and the proof that a small settlement’s shipping pool was as fragile as its commander’s health. [3]
The Grundel’s Northern Coasting
After her Table Bay call the Grundel was sent first to examine the coast to the northward beyond St Helena Bay. She brought back no information except that the greater part of the country as far as she sailed along it appeared to be an uninhabited desert. South of the tropic there were no other people than Khoikhoi. The skipper wished to change the name of the inlet in latitude 26° 36′ from Angra Pequena to Grundel Bay, but his desire was not granted. [3]
The northern cruise added little to the map that cattle traders and earlier coastal parties had already sketched as far as the Elephant River mouth and beyond. By Borghorst’s time the coast had been thoroughly explored northward some distance beyond that mouth and eastward as far as Mossel Bay; the Berg River had been traced from source to sea, and Europeans had entered the Tulbagh Basin and the Breede River valley. Cory’s longer view of the same decade places Hieronymus Cruse’s 1668 crossing of the Hottentots Holland Mountains to Mossel Bay among the exploring steps that slowly pulled occupation after discovery. Against that inland and eastern advance, the Grundel’s 1669 northern report was deliberately thin: arid shore, no rival European mark, no new trading nation north of the known Khoikhoi range. [3] [4]
The refused rename of Angra Pequena kept the older Portuguese label on an inlet the Dutch had only glanced at from a surveying deck. Naming was a claim; withholding the name was a judgment that one coastal pass did not yet deserve a Dutch toponym on the Company’s charts. Negative knowledge still had administrative value: directors who feared French settlement could at least read that the long desert shore north of St Helena Bay did not advertise a ready rival harbour stocked with people and water. [3]
An eastward voyage of the same vessel belonged to the following year and ended in disaster when an officer and sixteen men landed at the bay Os Medãos do Ouro—reported in the papers as latitude 27° 17′ S., though modern maps place it near 26° 40′—and never returned. That loss is not part of the 1669 narrative; what the calendar year held was the northern desert report and the confirmation that the Grundel’s first African work after Martin Vaz was a blank commercial coast rather than a new harbour of supply. [3]
Miners and Assayers — Table Valley to Riebeek’s Kasteel
In 1669 a strong party of experienced miners and assayers was sent from Europe to search for metals in the neighbourhood of the Cape. They examined Table Valley carefully, and then proceeded to the Paarl Mountain and Riebeek’s Kasteel. For several years they were busy making excavations all over the country, sometimes believing they were in a fair way of finding valuable ores, though always disappointed in the end. [3]
The search did not open a mining economy, but it left a toponymic mark. In one of their reports the Windberg is called the Duyvelsberg, the first instance in the records of that name being used. Theal later noted that Nicolaus de Graaf, measuring heights with unusual care on his Cape calls, also spoke of the Duivelsberg by that name; the miners’ report and the traveller’s speech thus converge on a label that would stick in local geography long after the trenches filled. The party’s excavations tied European technical labour to places already familiar from grain and cattle routes—the valley under Table Mountain, the Paarl heights inland of the Berg River road, and the landmark of Riebeek’s Kasteel—without delivering the ores the directors hoped to hear of. [3]
For a settlement still importing rice because local grain did not yet cover consumption, the miners were a long-shot investment beside gardens, free farms, and inland barter. Their presence in 1669 nonetheless shows how Amsterdam still weighed the Cape as a possible mineral as well as a refreshment station. The repeated disappointments that followed over several seasons belong to the longer arc; the year’s fact is the arrival and the first systematic diggings in Table Valley and on the Paarl and Riebeek heights. Cory’s summary of the decade’s inland probes—north toward Namaqua copper country in later expeditions, east with Cruse in 1668—makes the miners one more specialised party on a landscape still being tested for what it would yield beyond cattle and greens. [3] [4]
Excavation without ore still moved people and tools into the hinterland on Company orders. Assayers who believed themselves near success kept hope alive in despatches even when final yields failed. That rhythm—optimistic report, empty result, new trench—would run for years after 1669. For Borghorst’s invalid year the miners were also a European reinforcement of skilled labour at a post whose ordinary strength was thin and whose commander could not tour every digging in person. [3]
Burgher Hunting Licenses and the Cattle Watch
During Commander Borghorst’s administration licenses were first granted to the burghers to hunt large game wherever they chose. Hippopotami abounded at that time in the Berg River, and parties were frequently fitted out to shoot them. The flesh was brought in large quantities to the settlement for food, and the hides were soon found useful for making whips. The new freedom of the chase extended free men’s range beyond garden plots and leased pastures into the river bush where game and Khoikhoi herds both moved. [3]
Those expeditions exposed the burghers to the temptation of bartering cattle from the natives. The government kept a watchful eye upon their flocks and herds and confiscated every hoof that could not be satisfactorily accounted for. The same administration that favoured freemen against official farm rivals thus still policed the cattle monopoly that fed Company ships and kraals. Hunting flesh and hide could be a burgher gain; unexplained horned stock could not. [3]
Together with the standing rule that members of the council of policy were not to keep cattle or cultivate gardens beyond household needs, the hunting licenses sketched the social bargain of the Borghorst years: widen free men’s legitimate earnings from produce and game, narrow the space in which officials or burghers could quietly build competing herds. In a year when De Cretzer rather than the sick commander watched daily detail, that bargain depended on inspection as much as on written placcaaten. Van Riebeeck’s earlier insistence that free producers should supply ships while the Company kept the Khoikhoi cattle trade in official hands had already drawn the same line in principle; Borghorst’s licenses and confiscations applied it to hippopotamus parties on the Berg. [2] [3]
Hippopotamus meat in bulk also eased pressure on slaughter stock at a post that still imported rice and still counted every breeding cow won in inland barter. Whips from hide were a small industry, but they marked how quickly a newly licensed chase found commercial uses beyond the pot. The Berg River parties thus belong with Saldanha’s permanent post and the freemen’s produce sales as parts of one year’s effort to feed, supply, and police a settlement that remained small even as its map of permitted activity widened. [3]
Hackius Named Successor — December 1669
Owing to the commander’s ill health he had no desire to remain long in South Africa. Only a few months after his arrival the directors had sent instructions that the merchant Jan van Aelmonden, expected with the next return fleet, should be detained at the Cape as his successor. That officer was not on board the fleet. Borghorst then sent a pressing request for the appointment of someone else to relieve him. [3]
The directors selected Pieter Hackius, another of their old servants whose health was completely shattered by long residence in India, and who was then on furlough in Europe. Thom’s edition of the Van Riebeeck journal notes that the Pieter Hackius who appears as vice-admiral of a return fleet touching the Cape in February 1657 is very probably the same man: he had served the Company many years in the East, his health had suffered, and he would die at the Cape in 1671 and be buried in the church then within the Castle. The 1669 appointment thus recalled an officer already known on the Indies route, not a stranger chosen at random from the Amsterdam chambers. [1] [3]
Hackius and his family sailed from home in the Sticht van Utrecht on the 7th of December 1669. They would reach Table Bay only on the 18th of March 1670; the new commander would land a more confirmed invalid even than the officer he came to relieve, and formal transfer would wait until 25 March 1670. A few weeks after that handover Borghorst would embark in the Beemster for Europe. Those arrivals and the transfer belong to the next calendar year. What 1669 closed on was the naming and the December sailing of a successor chosen because Borghorst could not carry the post in health. [3]
Thus the year that opened under an already ailing Borghorst ended with Europe’s answer already at sea: a second invalid officer bound for Table Bay, while at the Cape De Cretzer still bore the daily weight, Lacus still waited under suspension, miners still dug without profit, the Saldanha post stood against a feared French shift from Madagascar, and the Grundel’s northern cruise had reported desert shores beyond St Helena Bay. The settlement’s map, metal hopes, and command succession had all moved in 1669 without yet resolving the commander’s broken health. Cory’s decade-long frame of exploration pulling occupation behind it fits the smaller facts of the year—permanent Saldanha occupation, mining probes inland, burgher parties on the Berg—while the archival spine remains Theal’s reading of Borghorst’s quiet, invalid government. [1] [3] [4]