Boer History1671 at the Cape of Good Hope: Goske, De Cretzer, and the Death of Hackius
Commissioner Goske and Slave Regulations — February 1671
At this period less distinction was made between black men and white than between professing Christians and heathens. A baptized black enjoyed, in Company practice, the rights and privileges of a European; a heathen could hardly be said to have any rights at all. At the Cape there were a few Mohammedan slaves, natives of the Indian islands, banished here as punishment for crime. Some of these were sentenced to slavery for a limited number of years, after which they became free. The great majority of the slaves were negroes from Madagascar or the mainland of Africa, mostly males, who had been made prisoners in war and sold by the chiefs of victorious tribes. Of the children born at the Cape of slave mothers, only about one-fourth were black, the remainder being half-breeds. [3]
The commissioner Isbrand Goske, who visited the settlement in February 1671 on his homeward passage after earlier service that had already linked his name to the site of the stone castle, considered that circumstance so scandalous and demoralising to the whites that he attempted to legislate against it. He had no idea that heathen Africans understood the obligations of marriage or respected fidelity between man and wife. In his opinion, therefore, the slaves could not be married as long as they remained heathens, but he issued instructions that the females should be matched with males of their own class. [2] [3]
They were all to be sent to church twice on Sundays, and every evening they were to be assembled for instruction. The sick comforter was then to recite prayers slowly, which they were required to repeat after him. As soon as they should be sufficiently advanced in knowledge and should profess belief in Christianity, they were to be baptized and married. All the children were as heretofore to be sent to school, so that none might grow up heathens. And, lastly, especial care was to be taken that no half-breeds were retained in slavery. Goske’s February visit thus tied religious instruction, forced pairing within the slave community, and a formal bar on keeping mixed-descent children in bondage into one set of standing orders for the Cape magazines and households. [3]
The ordinances did not invent a new slave population; they tried to police one already shaped by war captives from Madagascar and the African coast, a thin layer of banished Indian-island Muslims on time-limited sentences, and a Cape-born generation in which three-quarters of the children of slave mothers were of mixed descent. Under an invalid commander and a government soon to lose its ablest working officer, those rules became part of the year’s paper law even while daily enforcement still depended on the sick-comforter’s evening drill, the school bench, and whatever supervision the fort could spare from ships, herds, and outposts. [3]
De Cretzer’s Misfortune — 10 April 1671
For a long time the secunde Cornelis de Cretzer had been the most active member of the Cape government. He was a favourite with the burghers and stood high in the estimation of the superior officers with whom he had come in contact, for he was able, honest, and attentive to his duties. From being a copying clerk he had successively held the offices of secretary to the council, fiscal, and secunde, and had now the title of merchant and a good prospect of being commander of the settlement at no very distant date. Under both Jacob Borghorst and Pieter Hackius—confirmed invalids who could not carry the full social and administrative load of the bay—De Cretzer had already become the officer who received, entertained, and decided. [3]
It was customary for the principal officers of ships in the bay to be invited frequently to dine on shore, and as both Borghorst and Hackius were confirmed invalids, the duty of receiving and entertaining guests was sometimes undertaken by De Cretzer. On the 10th of April 1671 the skipper of an Indiaman and a passenger by the same ship dined at the secunde’s house, where they revived an old quarrel between them. De Cretzer endeavoured to pacify them, but the skipper at length became so violent that he assaulted the passenger, and it was necessary to employ force to remove him. He went out of the house, but presently returned using threatening language, when the secunde, giving way to passion, drew his rapier and ran the brawler through the body. It was the act of an instant, but its penalty was lifelong. [3]
De Cretzer at once fled from his home and concealed himself somewhere in the settlement. As a matter of form the government cited him to appear before the council of justice and offered rewards for his apprehension, but no one wished to see him brought to trial and he was never arrested. After a time he left the colony quietly in a homeward-bound ship and returned to Amsterdam. There the case was investigated, and he was pronounced free of blame. The directors then restored him to the position of secunde at the Cape, but the ship in which he took passage was captured at sea by a Moorish corsair, and the last that is known of De Cretzer is that he was sold as a slave in Algiers. [3]
The April killing thus removed the settlement’s ablest working officer and closed his Cape career in a foreign slave market rather than in a local trial. The three offices of secunde, fiscal, and dispenser of the magazines had all been stacked on one man; when he fled, no ready successor stood ready for any of them. Formal citations and rewards for arrest preserved the appearance of justice, while the silence of the settlement—burghers and officers alike unwilling to see him docked—allowed the fugitive to slip homeward, win exoneration in Amsterdam, and then vanish beyond Company recovery when a corsair took his returning ship. [3]
Leadership Vacuum: Crudop, Cruse, and the Officers
This unfortunate event left the Cape without any man of note to direct affairs. The commander was so feeble that he seldom appeared abroad. Jacob Granaat had gone to Batavia some time before. The three offices of secunde, fiscal, and dispenser of the magazines had all been filled by De Cretzer, and there was no one to succeed to any of them. The chief military officer was Lieutenant Coenraad van Breitenbach, who had only been a month in the settlement, and whose experience was confined to matters connected with his own profession. Next to him was Brevet-Lieutenant Johannes Coon, who was little more than a cipher. [3]
The two ablest men at the Cape were both in subordinate situations. One of these, by name Hendrik Crudop, was a young man of good birth and education who had taken service in the East India Company as a means of pushing his fortune. He had passed through the stages of copying clerk and bookkeeper, and was at this time secretary of the council, with the rank of junior merchant and the address of sieur, but had no voice or vote in the proceedings. The other was Sergeant Hieronymus Cruse, a man with little education, but intelligent, active, and capable of carrying through any business that he undertook. He was the explorer of the day, the man who knew most of the interior of the country and of the native tribes. But, though his opinion had weight outside the council, and men of lower rank were often admitted in an emergency, he had no voice given to him in the management of affairs. [3]
Such being the personnel of the government, it was fortunate that no larger foreign crisis than the residual French flag episode of the previous September was at that moment pressing on Table Valley. The settlement entered the middle months of 1671 with an invalid commander, empty senior civil posts stacked on one fugitive’s former titles, a lieutenant new to the Cape, and its two most capable residents—Crudop and Cruse—still without ordinary council votes. Day-to-day administration therefore leaned on habit, outpost reports, and the secretary’s pen more than on a full working board. [3]
Into that thin establishment a few immigrant families were still being threaded from Europe. For ten or a dozen years the East India Company had tried to induce gardeners and small farmers to emigrate to South Africa, with little success: of all the Dutch dependencies the Cape possessed least attraction for settlers chasing the glowing tales of the eastern isles. In October 1670 the Chamber of Amsterdam announced that it had secured a few families for the next fleet, and in December another party was spoken of as about to leave for the Cape and Mauritius. Among the new burgher names of this period appear those of Jacob and Dirk van Niekerk, Johannes van As, François Villion, Jacob Brouwer, Jan van Eden, Hermanus Potgieter, Albertus Gildenhuis, and Jacobus van den Berg. The families were dispersed among the ships so as best to secure comfortable accommodation—some vessels taking only one spare cabin and thus only one family, others two or three—but the Cape still received only a trickle beside the Company’s eastern draw. [3]
Theal’s reading of that scarcity rejected the later commonplace that tyranny alone kept freemen away. Before the French Revolution, he argued, Netherlanders judged good government by light taxation and laws that matched their prejudices more than by elective representation; commercial chambers were modelled on self-perpetuating municipal power; and a prosperous fatherland without sectarian persecution simply did not export large bands of colonists. The Cape took its fair share of the few Dutchmen who chose to settle abroad, and foreigners only so far as they could be absorbed without loss of language and predilections. In 1671 that argument mattered less as theory than as census: the settlement still had to govern, trade, and defend itself with a handful of named freemen, a garrison thickening toward three hundred, and civil chairs emptied by death, departure, and one fatal dinner. [3]
Cochoqua–Chainouqua War and Burgher Murders
There was little communication between the Europeans and the natives at this time, and that little was not altogether friendly. In December 1670 the branch of the Cochoquas under the chief Gonnema had paid a visit to the settlement. Their presence caused a panic among the frontier farmers at Wynberg, some of whom abandoned their houses, which the Khoikhoi afterwards broke into. Happily they did not remain long in the neighbourhood. In the following year a war broke out between the Cochoquas and the Chainouquas, and the first-named tribe was nearly ruined. [3]
While the clans were fighting with each other, two burghers who went into the country to shoot game were surprised by some Bushmen and murdered. An account of this event was brought to the fort by a party of Chainouquas, who asserted that the Obiquas had been instigated by Gonnema to commit the crime. Their statement was believed, but the accusations of their enemies by Khoikhoi rivals can seldom be received as trustworthy evidence, and there is no other proof of Gonnema’s guilt in this matter. The year thus coupled an inter-clan war that wrecked Cochoqua strength with a double burgher murder on the hunting grounds, reported through Chainouqua mouths and fixed in the settlement’s mind against Gonnema without independent corroboration. [3]
Nearly every year the branch of the Cochoquas under Gonnema paid a visit to the Cape peninsula, where they seldom failed to create trouble by their pilfering propensities. The normal condition of this particular clan was that of a roving band, always at feud with its neighbours, either plundering the Namaquas, or the Chainouquas, or the Kaapmans of their cattle, or itself plundered and reduced to want. They had yet to learn that a European settlement was not to be dealt with in that manner. With a garrison of about three hundred men in Table Valley and a burgher militia about one hundred strong—a fair proportion of them mounted on Javanese ponies—the council of 1671 was in no mood to brook either affront or wrong from cattle thieves on the settled belt. [3]
The Europeans felt themselves more secure than ever before. The members of the council were plain men who looked at the native question as a very simple one. They had no thought or desire of harming a Khoikhoi person or of interfering in the slightest manner with the internal government of the clans. But they were determined to punish anyone who should molest a European, and to do it in such a manner as to inspire all others with a feeling of terror. That principle, already sharpened by the Wynberg panic and the unproven charge over the hunting murders, waited only for the first clear case of stock theft in Company or burgher flocks. [3]
Five of Gonnema’s People Tried for Sheepstealing
On the first opportunity that offered, the council put that principle into practice. Five of Gonnema’s people were taken red-handed in the act of sheepstealing, three of the number being guilty also of assaulting the herdsmen. They were bound and carried to the fort, where shortly a party of their friends appeared with cattle for their ransom. The council declined to release the prisoners on any terms. Day after day came messengers offering more and more cattle, but always without effect. [3]
The five prisoners were brought to trial, and were sentenced all to be soundly flogged, the three most guilty to be branded and to be banished to Robben Island for fifteen years to collect shells for the public benefit in return for their food, the other two to be banished for seven years. The first part of the sentence was strictly carried out, and the latter part would have been so likewise if the convicts had not made their escape from the island in a boat. The episode showed both the council’s refusal to treat cattle ransom as a substitute for criminal punishment and the practical limits of island confinement when boats and open water lay within reach of desperate men. [3]
Shell-collecting exile was not a random cruelty. The unfinished castle and the magazines needed lime and building material; convict labour on the island tied punishment to public works at a moment when the directors in the Netherlands were already preparing to resume the stone fortress in earnest. Flogging and branding marked the three assailants before the boat carried them off the island; the two lesser offenders shared the lash and a shorter term. Gonnema’s messengers, who had escalated their cattle offers day by day, learned that the fort would not sell justice back for stock—an early hard edge in a relationship that later years would turn into open war. [3]
Shipping to December 1671 and the Foundlings Wreck
During the ten years from the 1st of January 1662 to the 31st of December 1671, three hundred and seventy of the Company’s ships put into Table Bay, either on the outward or homeward passage, and all found ample refreshment. In the same period twenty-six French, nine English, and two Danish ships cast anchor here. The only other stranger was a small Portuguese vessel brought in as a prize. There were no wrecks or losses in Table Bay during this period, but on the coast nearly opposite Dassen Island a cutter was run ashore by a drunken skipper in June 1668, when two men were drowned, and in May 1671 another small vessel was wrecked on the Foundlings, when the crew got safely away in the boat. [3]
It was estimated that for the refreshment of the Company’s ships three hundred and fifty head of horned cattle and three thousand seven hundred sheep were required yearly. This was exclusive of the hospital and the people on shore. The average number of men on board each vessel that called in time of peace was about one hundred and eighty, but first-class Indiamen carried from three to four hundred. It needed seventy or eighty hands to set the enormous mainsail of such a ship, for shipbuilders were only beginning to learn that by reducing the size of the sails and increasing the number they could do with fewer men. Large crews were needed also for defence in case of attack by pirates, and allowance had to be made for at least one-third of the complement being laid up with scurvy in a passage exceeding four months. [3]
Thus, notwithstanding the number of ships appears small, over seven thousand strangers visited the Cape every year, who after consuming fresh provisions for ten or twelve days carried away with them as much as would keep good. The decade closed on 31 December 1671 therefore measured the refreshment station not only by the count of flags in the bay but by the steady drain of cattle and sheep required to send Indiamen on with sound crews—and by the rare coastal wrecks, of which the May Foundlings loss was the year’s local shipping disaster. [3]
Foreign callers remained a standing irritation as well as a source of water and greens. Instructions from the Assembly of Seventeen repeatedly wished that Danes and other European nations would excuse themselves from touching the Cape, yet conceded that hard refusal of water and light refreshment would be harsh when vessels sought only that. The settlement was to keep a sparing hand, excuse much on the plea of its own need, and seize and try foreigners who played the beast or committed manslaughter—provided the Cape remained master of the force required. Against that background the Foundlings wreck, with crew saved by boat, was a minor coastal loss; the heavier arithmetic of the year was three hundred and seventy Company hulls across ten years, seven thousand annual visitors, and the meat tally that kept them moving. [3]
War Scare, Castle Plans, and Officers Named
There was at this time throughout the United Netherlands a general feeling of impending danger. Hostilities with France were believed to be inevitable at no distant date, and it was beginning to be suspected that England would not much longer abide by the Triple Alliance. That the conquest and partition of the Free Netherlands had actually been arranged by Charles II and Louis XIV as long before as May 1670 was unknown to the Dutch people. But, though the Treaty of Dover was a secret to the intended victims, the unfriendly conduct of the English Court gave abundant cause for alarm. [3]
With so gloomy an outlook the directors of the East India Company considered it advisable to strengthen the defences of their possessions, and the Cape was one of the points which they resolved to secure more firmly. The castle, the building of which had been for some time suspended, was to be completed according to the original design, the garrison was to be increased, and the administration of affairs was to be confided to a class of men superior to those hitherto employed. The woodwork for the various buildings connected with the castle was being prepared in Amsterdam, and large quantities of bricks and tiles were also sent out, with skilled mechanics to do the work. Formal instructions to throw the settlement’s available force into shell-collecting, quarrying, and carting would follow in February 1672, but the 1671 decisions already named the men and materials. [2] [3]
The officers selected at this troublous time to conduct the government were Isbrand Goske, Albert van Breugel, and Pieter de Neyn. Goske was a man who had filled various responsible situations in the Indies and had always acquitted himself creditably. He had won distinction in Ceylon and on the coast of Malabar. Twice he had been commissioner at the Cape. It was he who selected the site of the castle, when on his way from Europe to Persia to assume the direction of the Company’s trade there, and again when returning home in 1671 he was charged with the duty of rectifying anything here that might be amiss. In rank he was already higher than a commander, and when he was requested to assume the direction of affairs at the Cape the residency was raised to be a government, and he was entitled governor. At the same time he was appointed councillor extraordinary of India. His salary was to be at the rate of £25 a month, or double that of a commander, with a very liberal table allowance, and besides quarters in the fort he was to have a pleasure house or country seat with an ornamental garden at Rondebosch, where he could entertain visitors at his ease. [3]
Albert van Breugel, who was appointed secunde, was a man of less experience than Goske, but was believed to be a staid, upright, and able officer. Advocate Pieter de Neyn, who was sent out as fiscal, was a good-natured, witty personage, well read in law, and thoroughly competent for his post as far as talent was concerned, though his moral character was not altogether above reproach. A book of poetry which he composed and published after his return to Europe bore the impress of a man of some genius to whom close thinking was familiar; many verses carried the peculiarities later readers associated with Sterne, though coarser in expression. He also prepared a work upon the marriage customs of various nations. The fiscal was the first of the three new officers appointed, and when he arrived at the Cape he experienced some difficulty in getting himself recognised by the grave God-fearing councillors who were then ruling the settlement. [3]
The 1671 war scare thus named a governor-designate, a new secunde, and a literary fiscal before any of them yet held the fort as a settled triumvirate under peacetime routine. Castle timber cut in Amsterdam, bricks and tiles stowed in following fleets, and mechanics under indenture were the physical counterparts of that paper elevation of the residency. Judged by a later century Goske’s views might be called narrow; in his own day he was held not only good but wise and liberal—an assessment that would matter when he finally took the chair in October 1672, long after Hackius was in the ground and a board of officers had kept the keys through the winter. [3]
Death of Commander Hackius — 30 November 1671
The illness of Commander Hackius at length assumed a form which forbade all hope of recovery. For some months after his arrival he had buoyed himself up with the prospect of a speedy return to the fatherland, but as time wore on this comfort failed him. The spring of 1671 found him bedridden and hardly conscious of what was transpiring about him, and in this condition he lingered until his death on the night of the 30th of November. [3]
The funeral took place three days later. It was attended by all the inhabitants of the settlement, but could not be conducted with much pomp owing to the circumstances of the time. The body was laid in the interior of the building used as a church, in the ground now enclosed by the castle walls. Another escutcheon was added to those already hanging there, but in the course of a few years grave and escutcheon were alike undistinguishable, and nothing was left to perpetuate the memory of Commander Hackius. The second invalid commander of the late 1660s thus ended his term not by relief to Europe but by burial inside the temporary church that still stood within the works of the unfinished stone castle. [3]
Hackius had been installed on 25 March 1670; he had held his first council meeting only in June of that year; and through 1671 the bay had seen Goske’s slave ordinances, De Cretzer’s flight, Cochoqua war news, sheepstealer sentences, and the Foundlings wreck while the commander lay scarcely aware of the sequence. His death removed even the nominal head under whom Crudop wrote and Van Breitenbach wore the senior military title. The escutcheon in the church was a last official mark; the settlement’s working memory of him would be the long invalidism and the board that followed, not a monument that survived the later castle fabric. [3]
Board Government after Hackius — December 1671
On the morning after the death of Hackius, the council assembled for the purpose of making arrangements to carry on the government. There were present the two military officers, Coenraad van Breitenbach and Johannes Coon, a junior merchant named Daniel Froymanteau, who had been detained from a ship some time before to act as issuer of stores, and the secretary, Hendrik Crudop, to whom a vote in the proceedings was now for the first time given. There was no one in the settlement whose rank would warrant the council in placing the administration of affairs temporarily in his hands. [3]
It was therefore arranged that each member of the government should retain the exact position which he held before the late commander’s death, and that there should be no other distinction between the councillors than that reports of unusual occurrences were to be made by the officers at the outposts to Lieutenant Van Breitenbach, who was immediately to lay them before his colleagues. The settlement was thus for a few months governed by a board of officers without any local head or chief. Crudop’s new vote, Van Breitenbach’s role as collector of outpost news, and the equal standing of Coon and Froymanteau defined the December machinery that closed the calendar year. [3]
That board would hold until the secunde Albert van Breugel arrived in the Macassar from Texel on 23 March 1672 and, after a south-easter delayed landing until the 25th, assumed direction under a commission empowering him to act as commander when no one higher in the service was present. Through December 1671 and the following summer, however, Table Valley ran on collegiate equality: no single local chief, military routing of outpost alarms through Van Breitenbach, and Crudop at last voting as secretary after years of silent pen-work. Sergeant Cruse, still the explorer who knew the interior best, remained outside ordinary council voice even as the board leaned on men of his kind for field knowledge. [3]
Far to the east, the first commander of the Cape still watched Indian preferment with a private pen. On 17 December 1671 Jan van Riebeeck wrote again to the Seventeen, recalling service since 1639 and since 1651, pointing back to his request of 30 January 1671 for appointment to the Council of India, and complaining that others were again being preferred while he remained secretary without a vote. Böeseken’s household study places that December letter in the long sequence of unanswered solicitations that framed his Batavia years. The Cape he had founded was, in the same month, burying Hackius and inventing board rule; the man who had opened Table Valley was still petitioning for a seat he would not obtain on the timetable he desired. [2]
Thus 1671 ran from Goske’s February slave ordinances and the April rapier stroke that ruined De Cretzer, through Cochoqua war, burgher murders, sheepstealer trials, the May Foundlings wreck, immigrant surnames on the freemen roll, and the naming of Goske, Van Breugel, and De Neyn for a stronger wartime administration, to Hackius’s death on the last night of November and a headless council board in December. The settlement ended the year with empty senior civil chairs, a reinforced military establishment still living under board rule, Robben Island shell-labour sentences already broken by escape, castle materials marked for completion under officers of higher grade than the invalid commanders of the previous decade, and—half a world away—the first commander still asking Batavia and the Seventeen for rank the Cape no longer waited on him to supply. [2] [3]