Boer History1673 at the Cape of Good Hope: St Helena Lost, Gonnema’s War, and Captain Klaas
St Helena Retaken — Munden, 15 May 1673
The Dutch occupation of St Helena that began with the December 1672 expedition from Table Bay did not last into a second summer. The English residents who escaped the island when skipper Jacob de Geus took possession sailed toward the coast of Brazil, where they fell in with a squadron under command of Commodore Richard Munden, who had been directed to meet and convoy the homeward-bound East India fleet. Munden resolved to retake the island, made his way there, and early in the morning of the 15th of May 1673 landed without notice two hundred men under Captain Kedgwin on the eastern coast. Proceeding with his ships round to the northern side, he appeared before the fort at the entrance of Church Valley, where Jamestown was afterwards built, just as Kedgwin reached it from behind. The Dutch garrison, taken by surprise, immediately surrendered. [3]
Lieutenant Coenraad van Breitenbach, appointed from the Cape to succeed the late Lieutenant Johannes Coon as commander of the Dutch post, had not yet reached the island when Munden struck. A few weeks after the December occupation, intelligence of Coon’s death had reached Table Bay, and Governor Isbrand Goske with the council named Van Breitenbach his successor. The lieutenant sailed from the Cape in the ship Europa. The traveller J. J. Struys, who was aboard that homeward Indiaman and later published his account at Amsterdam in 1676, recorded that the Europa lay at the Cape until the 1st of May 1673, when by order of Governor Goske she was directed to St Helena—the island having been taken from the English on the preceding 13th of January with about three hundred men—while other ships were to follow in seven or eight days and proceed homeward in company. On board went Captain Breitenbach to lie as governor on the island. They set a north-west course and came before St Helena on Whitsunday, the 21st of May. [3]
Hardly round the point that concealed the anchorage, those on the Europa saw that the chart was spoiled: seven large English men-of-war lay ready, with a fireship and three merchantmen. The English, having the Dutch ship within shot, welcomed her at once with lower and upper tiers. Struys wrote that the Europa had not more than sixty eaters on board and could work no more than five or six pieces. In that extremity the company resolved to board the English frigate Assistance, which carried fifty guns and followed with the fireship; the skipper had nearly all the hatches spiked so that no one might hide, intending the whole company to spring over together—yet they could not get half the arms they needed. Forced to yield ship, people, and goods, they suffered twelve- and eighteen-pounders with balls, bar-shot, and scrap until they could hold no longer, without being able to do the Englishman any noteworthy damage with their weak crew and few guns. After a futile attempt to escape and afterwards to resist, the Europa became a prize to the Assistance. [3]
Van Breitenbach and the garrison were taken to England as prisoners of war and were there exchanged for some Englishmen detained in the Netherlands. The lieutenant subsequently committed a military offence for which he was cashiered; he then went out to India as a free colonist, calling at the Cape on the way, and—when the Company was at war with some of the native powers—was requested to return into the service, carrying excellent recommendations from Governor Goske, where he soon regained his former rank. Struys also recorded the subsequent capture of two further Dutch East Indiamen by Munden’s fleet. Thus within half a year the Cape’s Atlantic side-venture had been reversed: English St Helena was English again, a Dutch reinforcement ship was a prize, and the settlement’s senior land officer of the December fleet was a prisoner rather than a colonial governor overseas. [3]
At the bay itself the year opened under the pressure of the European war that had already shaped Goske’s first months. When the residency was raised to a government the European population still did not exceed some six hundred souls—about sixty-four burghers, thirty-nine of them married, sixty-five children, fifty-three Dutch men servants, and roughly three hundred and seventy Company servants and soldiers. Urgent as was the need to complete the stone castle, it was not possible at any time to employ more than two hundred and fifty to three hundred men upon it, for the troubles in Europe caused a falling-off in ships and made soldiers and seamen hard to obtain. The old earthen fort, which Goske had described as like a ruined molehill, had been hastily repaired as a temporary measure; every man that could be spared was then set upon the castle walls or upon the transport of building material. Munden’s stroke and the loss of the Europa came as one more consequence of that same war, received at the fort while look-outs on the Lion’s Head watched for every sail and the inland outpost at Hottentots Holland still held only a thin wartime guard. [3]
Captain Klaas (Dorha) and the Cattle Trade
For a considerable time no trading expeditions had been sent inland, because the directors thought the Khoikhoi would bring cattle to the Cape for sale if they could not obtain tobacco, copper, and beads at their own kraals. In this expectation they were disappointed. The rich clans living at a distance were unable to come, owing to the constant feuds in which they were engaged with others nearer at hand. Those in the neighbourhood of the Cape occasionally brought a lean cow or a few sheep for sale, but they had become impoverished through being plundered, and could not supply as many as were needed. It was therefore determined to send a trading party of twelve men to the kraal of the Chainouqua captain Dorha, who had intimated a wish to obtain some tobacco and copper in exchange for cattle. [3]
This captain Dorha, or Klaas as he was called by the Europeans, who now appears for the first time as a standing ally in the continuous narrative of the colony, was for many years to come intimately connected with the settlement and regarded as its most faithful Khoikhoi partner. The tribal government of the Khoikhoi was so weak that the slightest cause seems to have been sufficient to break them up into little clans virtually independent of each other—at least among those who came into contact with the white people. There was still in name a chief of the Chainouquas, but in fact that tribe was now divided into two clans under the captains Klaas and Koopman. Each of these was recognised as a ruler by the Cape government, in proof of which staffs with brass heads, upon which the Company’s coat of arms was engraved, had been presented to them, just as such symbols had previously been given to six or eight captains nearer the settlement. These staffs soon came to be regarded by the Khoikhoi not only as recognising, but as conferring authority, and thenceforth it became an object of ambition with every head of a few families to obtain one. [3]
Klaas attached himself to the Europeans, though not from any inclination to acquire civilised habits, for he remained, in the judgment of contemporary officers, a man of his own world until his death. Successive governors maintained that he was a model of virtue and fidelity; the proofs they give are not always conclusive—as when he once brought a little Khoikhoi boy whom he had captured in war and offered him as a present to the governor to be a slave, and was praised for sparing an enemy’s life and as having the merciful heart of a Christian. Whatever his object may have been, he proved a firm supporter of the European government, always ready to take part with it against his own countrymen. On this occasion he bartered away two hundred and fifty-six head of horned cattle and three hundred and seventy sheep, a very seasonable supply for the governor, whose slaughter stock was nearly exhausted. Klaas was then requested to furnish fifty young oxen to draw stone to the castle, and in less than a fortnight he collected them among his people and sent a message that they were ready. [3]
Such conduct naturally called for a return of favours. The Chainouquas and the Cochoquas were at this time at war, and whenever Klaas wished to visit the Cape an escort was sent to Hottentots Holland to protect him on the journey. Presents were frequently sent to him with complimentary messages, and he was provided with a showy suit of European clothing, that he might appear at the fort with such dignity as became a faithful ally of the Honourable Company. The October 1672 outpost under Sergeant Cruythof had already given the Company a foothold on that eastern road; Klaas’s cattle and castle oxen now tied the same road to the wartime building programme at the bay. The attention paid to him may partly explain the hostile conduct of Gonnema, chief of the largest division of the Cochoquas—whose people watched a rival captain clothed, escorted, and preferred while their own access to tobacco and copper still ran through feuds and distance. [3]
Gonnema and Cochoqua Pressure
Gonnema, known to the first settlers as the Black Captain, usually had his kraals in the neighbourhood of Riebeek’s Kasteel and Twenty-four Rivers, but occasionally he wandered to the shores of Saldanha Bay, or eastward to Hottentots Holland. All his neighbours were in dread of him, for whenever there was an opportunity he was in the habit of plundering them. It was from him that the whole of the Khoikhoi in the neighbourhood of the Cape were fifty years later called Gunjemans by the Dutch. The people of his own clan were even at this time called Gonnemas, and the word gradually became Gonnemans, Gonjemans, and Gunjemans. As the Goringhaiquas and others soon lost their distinguishing tribal titles in European speech, they all became blended together under this one name by which alone Europeans knew them. Among themselves the older names were probably preserved, but when speaking to white men they employed the word in common use—a pattern Theal later traced in other South African naming shifts down to his own day. [3]
The unpaid account of November 1672 still stood when 1673 opened. Three burghers had then obtained permission from the governor to shoot hippopotami, and for that purpose had travelled along the banks of the Berg river down to Riebeek’s Kasteel. There Gonnema with forty or fifty of his followers came upon them and seized their waggon, oxen, provisions, and whatever else they had with them, barely permitting them to escape with their lives. It does not seem to have occurred to the governor that Gonnema might object to the destruction of game in his district, and so the act was attributed solely to his enmity to the Company. But there was then no force that could be spared to chastise the offender, and the injury was left unpunished. Through the first half of the new year the same chief remained the unsettled power on the Berg-river approaches, while Klaas’s alliance and the Hottentots Holland outpost extended Company influence eastward along a different path. [3]
That geometry mattered. West and north of the fort lay the Cochoqua ranges from which Gonnema could touch Saldanha Bay, the Berg fords, and the game grounds beyond Twenty-four Rivers. Eastward lay the Chainouqua road through Hottentots Holland, now watched by a Company guard and favoured by Klaas’s barter. Fiscal Pieter de Neyn, who held office at the Cape from February 1672 to October 1674 and later wrote from memory in his Lusthof der Huwelyken (Amsterdam, 1697), preserved independent notices of the murders and executions that followed; the physician Wilhelm ten Rhyne, who visited the Cape in 1673 and published a Latin sketch of the promontory and its Khoikhoi at Schaffhausen in 1686, recorded careful observation of local customs in the same calendar year. The settlement thus entered the fighting months with European witnesses at hand, an unpaid November grievance still open, and two Khoikhoi power centres pulling in opposite directions. [3]
Moord Kuil — June 1673
In June 1673 eight burghers and a slave went out with the governor’s permission to shoot large game. They had two waggons with them, which it was their intention to load with skins and dried meat for the sustenance of their families and for sale. Finding no antelopes this side of the Berg river, they crossed at a ford near Riebeek’s Kasteel and went up into the mountains beyond Twenty-four Rivers. There, at a place which long afterwards bore the name of Moord Kuil, they were surrounded by Gonnema’s people, who detained them for several days and then murdered them all. De Neyn later told the story of that June murder in his printed recollections—not always with perfect accuracy of detail, Theal judged, but enough to show that the killings stood among the events a Cape fiscal of the day thought worth preserving when his papers had been stolen on the return to Europe. [3]
On the 11th of July a rumour reached the fort that the burghers were hemmed in, and the council immediately resolved to send out a relief expedition. The freemen were called upon to furnish a contingent of thirty-six men, who, with a like number of soldiers, were placed under the command of Ensign Hieronymus Cruse. Next morning the expedition left the fort, provisioned for eight days, and with orders that if they should find violence had been used towards the burghers they were to retaliate upon Gonnema and his people in such a manner that their descendants would be too terrified ever to offend Netherlanders again. The wording was the language of exemplary war: not a mere recovery of missing hunters, but a demonstration meant to outlast the generation that received it. [3]
At Captain Kuiper’s kraal across the Cape Flats they found one of Gonnema’s people, whom they compelled under threat of death to act as guide. Passing by Paardeberg and Riebeek’s Kasteel they reached the Berg river, which they found too deep to be forded, so that they were detained until a raft could be made. They were resting on the other side when they were joined by a party of eighteen horsemen from the fort, under command of the burgher officer Elbert Diemer. Those horsemen did not ride out on the original rumour alone: they brought word of a second blow already struck on the west coast, and with it fresh instructions that turned Cruse’s column from a relief march into a combined punitive force. [3]
Saldanha Post Attack — 6 July 1673
The horsemen brought word that on the 6th of July some of Gonnema’s people under the petty captain Kees appeared at the Company’s post at Saldanha Bay, with the apparent object of selling sheep. The post was occupied at the time by only a corporal and two soldiers, but there was a fishing boat belonging to a freeman afloat close by, and two of her crew were on shore. Suddenly and without any warning the Khoikhoi rose upon the Europeans and murdered four of them, only one soldier managing to escape to the boat. The attackers then plundered the post. The boat sailed for Table Bay, but owing to contrary winds was detained at Jutten and Dassen islands, and did not reach her destination until the 14th. [3]
Upon receipt of this intelligence the council at once dispatched the horsemen to Ensign Cruse’s assistance, and they brought instructions to attack Gonnema’s people and endeavour to punish them severely, sparing none of the men. The thinness of the Saldanha post—three Company men and a freeman’s boat—showed how far wartime economy still stretched the residency’s outposts. Dassen Island had already been emptied of its sheep in the defensive measures of 1672; now the bay station itself was sacked while the main force was already inland on the Moord Kuil rumour. The double blow converted the November 1672 game seizure from an unpaid grievance into open war on two fronts at once. [3]
Cruse’s column was no longer a search party for missing hunters. It was a combined force of soldiers, burgher infantry, and Diemer’s eighteen horse, with orders that left little room for negotiation if contact with Gonnema’s following could be forced. The guide taken at Kuiper’s kraal, the raft on the Berg, and the smoke later seen among the mountains beyond Twenty-four Rivers were the first links in a July campaign that would end not with Gonnema’s person in hand, but with a great seizure of stock and the recovery of the murdered burghers’ goods from abandoned huts. [3]
Cruse’s Expedition — July 1673
The combined forces marched across the district of Twenty-four Rivers, and on the 18th saw smoke rising at a distance among the mountains. They then halted and sent out scouts, who returned in the evening with information that they had discovered the position of a kraal and had observed a number of women digging bulbs. Next morning before daylight Ensign Cruse marched upon the kraal in hope of surprising its inmates, but upon reaching it he found that they had fled with their cattle. The huts were standing and the fires were still alight, showing that the place had not been long abandoned. In the huts were found the cooking utensils, clothing, and other property of the murdered burghers—material proof that the Moord Kuil party had died in Gonnema’s country, and that the rumour of the 11th had understated the case. [3]
At daybreak the horsemen followed the fugitives and soon overtook them, when the Khoikhoi abandoned their cattle and fled into the mountains with their women and children. The cattle were then taken possession of, and without any further attempt to reach the enemy the expedition commenced its homeward march. But they had not proceeded far before they discovered that the Khoikhoi were following them. At their first resting place an attempt was made to recover the cattle, and though it failed the enemy kept hovering about for some time. The casualties during the march were one burgher wounded and two horses killed, while ten or twelve Khoikhoi were shot. The expedition reached the fort again on the 25th, and delivered to the governor eight hundred head of horned cattle and nine hundred sheep. [3]
Captains Klaas, Schacher, and Kuiper now tendered their services against Gonnema, Klaas especially being delighted at the prospect of his enemy’s ruin. The others commenced scouring the country in search of stragglers. The July expedition had not destroyed Gonnema’s following, nor taken the Black Captain himself; it had seized a large share of their stock, recovered tokens of the Moord Kuil murders, blooded Diemer’s horse and Cruse’s mixed column, and drawn the peninsula clans openly into the Company’s war. Schacher, whose people had sold the Cape district itself in the deeds of April 1672, and Kuiper, whose kraal had supplied the unwilling guide, now hunted Cochoqua stragglers as recognised allies rather than as uneasy neighbours. [3]
For the fort the eight hundred cattle and nine hundred sheep were wartime supply as well as reprisal. Slaughter stock had been nearly exhausted before Klaas’s earlier barter; castle work still needed draught oxen; freemen and soldiers both ate from the same narrow herds. The July seizure did not end the Cochoqua war—later years would see further commandos and a successful Cochoqua raid upon the Cape clans—but it fixed 1673 as the year when Gonnema’s pressure became a recorded military campaign with dates, casualty counts, and a counted delivery of stock at the governor’s gate. [3]
Captives Executed at the Fort — August 1673
On the 20th of August, Schacher and Kuiper with more than a hundred of their people appeared again at the fort, bringing with them four of Gonnema’s followers whom they had captured. They delivered these prisoners to the governor, who at once caused them to be tried by a committee of the council acting as a court martial. They were found guilty of participation in the murder of the burghers, and were thereupon delivered to their captors to be put to death after their own manner of execution. De Neyn’s later account of this August scene agrees with the official records and is even more complete in its details, confirming that the delivery, the trial form, and the handing-back for Khoikhoi execution were not a single clerk’s flourish but an episode remembered independently by the fiscal who had served through those months. [3]
The scene that followed, as described in the documents of the time, was stark. On the open ground in front of the fort the Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua warriors assembled, each with a clubbed stick in his hand. They then commenced a war dance, in which they leaped into the air and sprang about, chanting and stamping, until they had worked themselves into a state of frenzy. Then one would spring forward and deal a blow with his stick upon a captive lying bound and helpless, at which there would rise a general yell of exultation. Another would follow, and another, until at length the mangled corpses were dragged from the place of execution and, amid a deafening din of shouting and yelling and stamping, were cast into the sea. After this scene the governor caused a quantity of arrack and tobacco to be distributed among the warriors, as a reward for their fidelity. [3]
The form of the day mattered as much as its violence. A committee of the council sat as a court martial; guilt was pronounced under European procedure; the sentence was then remitted to Schacher’s and Kuiper’s people to be carried out in their own manner before the fort, with Company drink and tobacco as the price of alliance. Peninsula clans who had once been the Kaapmans and Gorachouquas of Van Riebeeck’s first decade now appeared as executioners of Cochoqua captives under a governor’s eye. The war against Gonnema was no longer only a Dutch punitive march; it was a coalition in which Khoikhoi captains hunted, delivered, and killed under the Honourable Company’s recognition. [3]
For several months after this event nothing was heard of Gonnema or of his people. The farm work at Hottentots Holland was pushed on, and a guard of twenty-two men was kept there to protect the establishment. There was no other outpost to care for, except the one on Robben Island, where a boat was always in readiness to bring the people away in case of an enemy appearing. On the Lion’s Head a good look-out was kept, so as to give due notice whenever a ship approached. Every man that could be spared from other occupations was at work upon the castle walls, or transporting building material to them. The residency contracted to fort, island, and the single inland farming post while the European war still made every strange sail a possible English or French threat. [3]
Wrecks of the Grundel and Zoetendal
In the year 1673 two wrecks occurred upon the southern coast. On the 20th of February the Grundel was lost a little to the eastward of Cape Hangklip. She had been sent from Batavia to Mauritius with supplies, but her skipper was unable to find that island, and so endeavoured to reach Table Bay. All of her hands got safely ashore and were taken on board a little vessel which happened to be at anchor in False Bay. The loss came early in the calendar year, before Munden’s May stroke and before the June–August fighting inland: a cargo ship of the eastern circuit that never found Mauritius and ended instead on the Hangklip shore within reach of False Bay relief. [3]
On the 23rd of September the homeward-bound ship Zoetendal was lost a short distance to the north-eastward of Cape Agulhas. Four of her crew were drowned; the remainder made their way to Hottentots Holland, and thence to the Cape. The name of the ship is still preserved in Zoetendal’s Vlei, close to the scene of the wreck. That the survivors could walk in to Cruythof’s district and from there to the fort showed how far the October 1672 outpost had already become a station on the coastal path as well as a farming and cattle refuge. The two losses bracketed the fighting summer: one early cargo ship that never found Mauritius, and one late return ship that ended her voyage on the Agulhas shore rather than in Table Bay. [3]
Neither wreck was a Table Bay disaster; both struck the southern coast while the residency’s attention was divided among castle stone, European war look-outs, and the Cochoqua campaign. Hands from the Grundel were saved by chance presence of a small vessel in False Bay; hands from the Zoetendal saved themselves by land through the new eastern outpost. In a year of thin shipping from the Fatherland, every lost hull mattered, yet both crews largely lived—four drowned on the Agulhas wreck, none recorded lost on the Hangklip stranding—and the place-name Zoetendal’s Vlei kept the September ship on the map long after her timber was gone. [3]
Farming Out Privileges — Revenue Monopolies
At this time was introduced a system of raising revenue by means of farming out certain privileges, a system which remained in force as long as the East India Company was the governing power in South Africa. In principle it was the lease by public auction to the highest bidder of an exclusive right—comparable to a toll or a guano concession in later practice. By the Company the system was carried to such an extreme length that every branch of business that could be conducted in the colony was conducted as a monopoly. It was the simplest plan to raise a revenue that could be adopted, which is all that can be said in its favour. That it was not intolerable to the colonists was owing solely to there being a maximum price fixed by law for everything sold. The purchaser of a monopoly for selling salt, for instance, could not oppress the people at will, because he was bound to sell at a fixed price and had no power to practise extortion. [3]
The colonists did not object to the system, which seemed to them fair and reasonable. It was introduced by the sale of the privilege of selling spirituous liquors, the price at which all such liquors were to be purchased for cash at the Company’s stores as well as the price at which they were to be retailed being fixed in the conditions under which the monopoly was put up at public auction. In course of time, the sole right to sell wine, beer, tobacco, salt, bread, meat, and other staples was farmed out in the same manner. The 1673 introduction thus tied local retail trade to auctioned exclusivity under fixed ceilings, while castle labour and wartime scarcity still governed daily life at the fort. [3]
The fiscal habit fitted a government that counted fewer than six hundred Europeans, farmed out what it could not staff, and needed cash and control without a deep customs establishment. Auction of a liquor pacht was simpler than a corps of retail inspectors; fixed maxima answered the freemen’s fear of extortion; the Company’s own stores remained the wholesale source for the spirits sold. What began with arrack and brandy retail would, over the following years, become the ordinary frame of colonial commerce—every staple a privilege, every privilege a price bid in public, every bid bounded by a placcaat. In the same months that Cruse delivered cattle at the gate and Schacher’s people danced before the fort, the residency also leased the right to sell drink. [3]
Under Goske, then, the calendar year ran from the February loss of the Grundel east of Hangklip through Munden’s mid-May recovery of St Helena and the Europa’s capture with Van Breitenbach aboard, past Klaas’s barter of two hundred and fifty-six cattle and three hundred and seventy sheep and his fifty castle oxen, into the June murders at Moord Kuil, the 6 July sack of the Saldanha post under Kees, Cruse’s and Diemer’s July march that returned on the 25th with eight hundred cattle and nine hundred sheep, the 20 August delivery and club execution of four Cochoqua captives before the fort, the September wreck of the Zoetendal near Agulhas, and the first farming-out of retail privileges—while a guard of twenty-two held Hottentots Holland, the Lion’s Head kept watch, and every spare man still hauled stone to the castle walls. [3]