Boer History1674 at the Cape of Good Hope: Castle Occupied, Cruse’s Commando, Eva, and the Orphan Chamber
Castle Occupied — Winter 1674
By the beginning of the winter of 1674 the stone castle in Table Valley was far enough advanced to be judged more capable of defence than the old earthen fort that had stood since the first years of the settlement. Governor Isbrand Goske therefore moved the garrison into the new works. The walls of the old fort were broken down, and the ground they had occupied was opened into the wider defensive plan that had been pressed since the European war made a permanent masonry fortress urgent at the Cape. The move closed a chapter that had begun with Van Riebeeck’s earthen square and had run through every wartime scare of the early 1670s: the principal armed force of the residency would no longer sleep behind a work Goske himself had likened, in earlier reports, to a ruined molehill. [3]
The occupation did not mean that the castle was finished. Bastions, curtains, and interior buildings still needed labour, stone, and timber. It did mean that the settlement’s principal armed force no longer depended on decaying earthworks, and that the symbolic centre of Company authority shifted from the old fort into the unfinished pentagon that would dominate Table Bay for the rest of the Dutch period. Every free hand that could be spared from other duties continued to work on the walls or to haul building material to them, while the outpost at Hottentots Holland and the look-out on the Lion’s Head remained part of the same defensive system. The residency contracted, as it had in 1673, around fort, island, and the single inland farming post—only now the fort was stone, and the old earthen trace was deliberately erased. [3]
That winter decision was the physical fruit of Goske’s wartime mandate. He had been sent to hold the Cape for the Netherlands at a moment of great peril; castle masonry was the local expression of that charge. Until the garrison actually slept inside the new works, every despatch about English fleets and every look-out report from the Lion’s Head still measured defence by the old fort’s crumbling banks. Once the move was made, the unfinished pentagon became the ordinary seat of government, council, church, and garrison—even while masons and hauliers still crowded its unfinished curtains. The calendar year thus opened under stone already judged stronger than earth, and under a governor who intended the old fort’s demolition to be permanent. [3]
Peace with England — 13 July 1674
On the 13th of July a despatch vessel, gaily decorated with flags, sailed into Table Bay bringing intelligence that peace had been concluded with England. The French naval power hardly gave the Company a thought at the Cape, so that there was no longer any necessity for extraordinary exertions to complete the castle. From this date the work was carried on regularly, but it was not considered of such urgent importance as to require a large staff of men to be kept at the Cape purposely for it. The flags in the bay announced not only a European settlement but a local change in the labour budget: wartime pressure had emptied islands of stock, driven castle construction, and limited immigration; the July news relaxed the most acute fear of an English attack on Table Bay. [3]
A special treaty between the two East India Companies, dated 18 March 1674, further bound each to promote the honour and profit of the other—language that, at the Cape, confirmed that the island fortress race of the early 1670s had lost its sharpest edge even while Gonnema’s war inland remained unfinished business. England remained the only naval power capable of injuring the States in these waters in Company eyes; once peace and the Companies’ mutual engagement stood together, Goske’s special wartime rank looked less necessary in Amsterdam as well as at the fort. The July arrival simply made public at Table Bay what the March treaty and the European settlement had already begun to rearrange. [3]
The same peace also reordered the Company’s Atlantic and Indian side-posts that had been inflated for war. In 1671, when the Company was making preparations for the defence of its Indian possessions, the island of Mauritius had been raised from a dependency of the Cape to a separate seat of government under Commander Hubert Hugo. After the conclusion of peace with England the island was reduced again to its old position. It was at this time of very little advantage to the Company: except a little ebony brought back to the Cape every year in the despatch packet, it exported nothing; very few ships called there for supplies; a few burghers and a garrison of thirty or forty men were its only inhabitants. So dependent were its authorities that they could not even carry their sentences into execution, unless in cases of extreme urgency, until they were reviewed by the Council of Justice at the Cape. [3]
Peace, then, arrived at the bay as flags and a despatch, but it worked outward as demobilisation of urgency: castle labour slowed from emergency staffing to regular progress; Mauritius sank back under Cape review; and the governor who had been posted for peril began to remind the directors of their promise to relieve him. Inland, none of that dissolved Gonnema’s war. The Cochoqua chief still lay beyond Twenty-four Rivers; Klaas and the Peninsula captains still owed the Company their alliance; and the March cattle seizure that had already marked the first half of the year stood as unfinished business rather than a final settlement. [3]
Disease among the Khoikhoi and a Pause in the War
The war with Gonnema had been suspended for some months owing to a strange and fatal disease which had broken out among the Khoikhoi, especially those under Captain Klaas (Dorha). What this disease was is not stated in the surviving narrative, but it is certain that it was not smallpox. Though its ravages were not very great, for a short time it kept the Khoikhoi from moving, as they considered it a bad omen. Governor Goske, recording the circumstance, added that before coming into contact with Europeans the Khoikhoi had not been subject to particular fatal maladies of the kind later observed after changes of food and habit; many attained a great age; war and occasional famine kept numbers down, the last killing outright but not producing the pestilences familiar in European experience. [3]
Goske’s comparative note reached beyond the Cape. He observed that in recent times the same peculiarity had been remarked among the Bantu peoples farther east: periods of famine in which great numbers perished, yet those who survived, though reduced to mere skeletons, suffered from nothing else than weakness—until contact with white men, and particularly changes of food and habit of living, brought diseases from which they had before been exempt. The governor’s ethnography belongs to his own record and to the limits of seventeenth-century observation; what mattered operationally at the fort was simpler. Disease among Klaas’s people delayed any fresh combined expedition until the captains themselves judged movement possible again. [3]
The pause mattered because the fighting of 1673—Moord Kuil, the Saldanha post murders, Cruse’s first punitive march, and the August executions before the fort—had left Gonnema at large in the mountains beyond Twenty-four Rivers and the Company’s Chainouqua and Peninsula allies still bound to Cape policy. For several months after the August scene nothing had been heard of Gonnema or of his people; farm work at Hottentots Holland had been pushed on under a guard of twenty-two; Robben Island and the Lion’s Head look-out had held their thin wartime watches; every spare man had hauled stone. Disease among the allies extended that quiet. When movement became possible again, the initiative came through Klaas’s own report to the governor rather than through a spontaneous Company raid. [3]
Klaas’s Report and the March Commando
On the 24th of March Klaas paid a visit to the governor and reported that the sickness had left his people. He had sent out spies who brought back information that a large party of Gonnema’s followers was encamped at the Little Berg River, where it issues from the gorge in the mountains later called the Tulbagh Kloof. It was immediately resolved to send an expedition against them. A combined force of soldiers, burghers, and Khoikhoi was made ready: fifty burghers under command of Wouter Mostert, four hundred Khoikhoi under the captains Klaas, Koopman, Schacher, and Kuiper, and fifty soldiers under Ensign Hieronymus Cruse, who was also commandant-general of the expedition. The numbers repeated the coalition pattern of 1673 on a larger allied scale: equal European arms of burgher and soldier, and an overwhelming Khoikhoi contingent under four recognised captains. [3]
The party marched along the line later traversed by the railway, passing round Klapmuts, down the Paarl Valley, and following the base of the mountains to Vogel Vlei. There they rested for a few hours and planned their next march so as to surround Gonnema’s encampment before daylight. The route was the inland corridor already becoming familiar to Cape commandos: not a thrust from Saldanha or the Berg River mouth as in some earlier operations, but a march up the settled valley floor toward the mountain gate where the Little Berg leaves the kloof. Rest at Vogel Vlei was the last pause before a dawn attempt at encirclement. [3]
But, as on a former occasion, the people who were to be attacked managed to make their escape just in time to avoid the onslaught. They left all they possessed behind them. The commando seized without resistance eight hundred head of horned cattle and four thousand sheep. The Khoikhoi contingent stripped the huts of everything that could be of use to them and then set fire to whatever remained. Gonnema himself was not taken. The military result was therefore stock and burning huts rather than a captive chief—the same frustrating pattern Cruse had met when Cochoqua scouts and mountain ground gave the enemy time to vanish with their persons while abandoning their herds. [3]
The March expedition thus carried the war of 1673 into a second campaigning season without ending it. Fifty soldiers and fifty burghers could not have lifted four thousand sheep alone; the four hundred under Klaas, Koopman, Schacher, and Kuiper made the seizure possible and also claimed the right to strip and burn. Cruse’s command was general over the whole, Mostert’s over the burgher fifty, and the captains’ over their own people—an arrangement that treated the Peninsula and Chainouqua leaders as officers of a coalition rather than as mere trackers. When the column turned back toward Table Valley, it drove a herd large enough to strain the politics of division as much as it rewarded the march. [3]
Division of the Spoil
Upon arriving at the fort, the spoil was divided among the members of the commando. The burghers received three hundred cows and ninety young cattle. Each of the four Khoikhoi captains received a fair share of horned cattle and three hundred sheep in full possession, and a loan of three hundred sheep to be returned when required. The Honourable Company kept the remainder. The arithmetic advertised alliance as clearly as it advertised profit: freemen took breeding and young stock in freehold; captains took cattle and a double sheep grant half owned and half on loan; the Company retained the residual herd as capital of war. [3]
The same thing happened when the Khoikhoi were driving away their share that usually occurs with native allies on such occasions: the best of those dealt out to the burghers and reserved for the Company were whistled away, and if the governor had not taken summary proceedings to recover them, the Europeans’ share of the spoil would have been very trifling indeed. Goske’s recovery action was therefore part of the division itself—not a later footnote. Without it the auction of risk on the march would have ended with the allies holding both their formal share and the pick of everyone else’s. [3]
The March expedition therefore repeated the pattern of 1673 without ending the war. Gonnema again escaped personal capture; his followers lost a large stock of cattle and sheep; Klaas and the Peninsula captains were rewarded as allies and creditors of loaned sheep; and Goske had to police the division after the return to Table Valley. Inland, the Cochoqua chief remained a threat to the Company’s partners at the Tigerberg and beyond Twenty-four Rivers, even while castle labour and Atlantic peace news reshaped the settlement’s priorities at the bay. The loaned sheep, returnable on demand, also tied the captains to future reckoning with the fort: alliance was paid in animals that could be called back. [3]
For the freemen the three hundred cows and ninety young cattle were a rare wartime windfall in a year when immigration had ceased and no one who could be kept in the service was readily permitted to leave it. For the Company the residual herd offset some of the cost of soldiers, powder, and the continuing castle works. For Klaas, Koopman, Schacher, and Kuiper the open grant plus the loan confirmed their status as recognised captains in a war that had already seen Schacher’s and Kuiper’s people execute Cochoqua captives before the fort in August 1673. Spoil division was policy in portable form. [3]
Death of Eva — 29 July 1674
On the 29th of July of this year died Eva, the Khoikhoi woman who had been brought up in Commander Jan van Riebeeck’s household and who was afterwards married to the surgeon Pieter van Meerhof. In childhood she had been apt to learn, readily acquired the Dutch and Portuguese languages, adopted European customs, professed a belief in Christianity, and gave promise of a life of usefulness. After Van Meerhof’s death she remained some time upon Robben Island and then requested to be brought over to Table Valley. There her manner of living attracted the attention of the officers of government, and after repeated warnings she was brought to account. [3]
She had been guilty of drunkenness and other misconduct, had more than once gone to live at a Khoikhoi kraal and while there had fallen into practices the officers condemned, and had neglected her helpless children. For these offences she was sent back to the island, and her children were placed under the care of the deacons. There was no desire to be harsh with her, and upon a promise of reformation she was again permitted to reside in Table Valley. Then the same cycle repeated—removal to Robben Island alternating with short periods of scandalous conduct in Table Valley—during the remainder of her life. The records as read by later historians traced in her career the instability that Company officers already believed they saw in attempts at rapid assimilation. [3]
The conclusion which Governor Goske arrived at from a review of her career was that the hereditary disposition of the Khoikhoi was too unstable to admit of their adoption of European civilisation otherwise than very slowly and gradually—a judgment that belongs to the governor’s own record rather than to later ethnography. As Eva was the first baptized Khoikhoi at the Cape, he decided that she should have an honourable funeral, and the day following her death she was buried within the church in the castle. The honour was institutional as well as personal: the first convert was not to lie in an unmarked strand grave even after years of discipline and scandal. [3]
Three years later a burgher who had been a personal friend of Van Meerhof, when removing with his family to Mauritius, was allowed to take two of the children as apprentices under formal contracts approved by the council and the church authorities, at whose expense the children were being maintained. The burgher bound himself to educate them and bring them up in a proper manner, and they were placed under the protection of the commander of Mauritius. The boy when grown up returned to the Cape but fell into wild habits; one of the girls subsequently became the wife of a well-to-do Cape farmer. Eva’s death on 29 July thus closed the life of the first baptized Khoikhoi woman in the colony and left her children as charges of the deacons—charges that the orphan and poor institutions of this same year were being built to handle in ordinary course. [3]
The Deacons’ Poor Fund
The duty of supporting destitute orphan children devolved, as had already been seen, upon the deacons. There was a fund at their disposal for relieving the poor of the congregation, out of which all such charges were paid. This fund was raised partly by church collections, partly by certain fines and fees, and was often augmented by donations and bequests. The first person who bequeathed money for this purpose to the Cape congregation had been Commander Zacharias Wagenaar; since his death other contributions had been received in the same manner. Charity at the Cape was therefore already older than Goske’s government; what 1674 recorded was the scale the capital had reached. [3]
In the year 1674 the capital of this fund amounted to rather more than a thousand pounds sterling, invested as loans on mortgage of landed property and bearing interest at the rate of six per cent per annum. The collections were more than sufficient to meet current expenses, so that the fund was constantly increasing. By 1679 it was equal to about £1,535, and by 1684 to about £1,821—figures recorded later, but already the 1674 capital shows a working poor-relief institution able to maintain Eva’s children and other dependents without drawing the full cost from the Company’s cash chest. [3]
Mortgage investment at six per cent made the deacons’ chest a small credit institution as well as an alms box. Landed freemen borrowed; the congregation’s poor and orphans lived on the interest and on weekly collections; bequests from commanders and others thickened the principal. In a settlement whose European population still counted only in the low hundreds, a four-figure sterling capital was substantial local finance. It also explained why the council could place neglected children with the deacons without inventing a new treasury line for every case: the church already held the purse and the duty. [3]
The Orphan Chamber Established
For the protection of the rights of children of another class an Orphan Chamber was at this time established. The necessity for such an institution was apparent from the fact that recently several widows had remarried without previously securing to the children their legitimate portion of the property of the deceased parent. It was enacted that in future no marriage of a widower or widow, whether a servant of the Company or a burgher, could take place in the colony without a certificate first obtained from the Orphan Chamber that the rights of the children by the previous marriage were secured. The chamber answered property guardianship; the deacons answered destitution—two problems that Eva’s household and freemen’s remarriages had both made visible. [3]
The chamber was provided with power to invest money belonging to orphans and to collect interest therefor at the rate of six per cent per annum. It was constituted guardian of orphans in all cases where none were named by the will of the deceased parent, and was authorised to provide for the maintenance of minors under its care by a reasonable allowance from the property belonging to them. The Orphan Chamber thus created consisted of five individuals, two of whom were to be servants of the Company and three burghers. Of the last, one was to be secretary and was to receive payment for his services. The first president was Hendrik Crudop; the first secretary was Johannes Pretorius, formerly secunde at Mauritius and now a burgher at the Cape. [3]
Every year one servant of the Company and one burgher retired, and were succeeded by two new members chosen by the council of policy from a list of four names presented by the chamber itself. It was thus to some extent a self-perpetuating corporation. The large sums of money which the Orphan Chamber had charge of were commonly invested on mortgage of landed property, so that it served the purpose of a loan bank as well as a guardianship board. Together with the deacons’ poor fund, the chamber gave the Cape a dual institutional answer to dependency: charitable relief for the destitute, and formal property guardianship for minors with estates. [3]
Crudop’s presidency linked the new chamber to the rising official who would soon be secunde and, after Goske and Bax, a central figure of the later 1670s. Pretorius’s secretaryship linked it to the Mauritius service now again subordinate to the Cape. The marriage-certificate rule reached Company servants and burghers alike, so that no second wedding in the colony could quietly extinguish a first family’s legitimate portions. In a year of cattle spoil and castle occupation, the Orphan Chamber was quieter work—and more permanent. It outlasted Gonnema’s war and Goske’s governorship as a piece of ordinary colonial machinery. [3]
Church Control, Meerland, and Baptism
Some regulations regarding church matters which were made in December 1674 show how complete was the control exercised by the council of policy. The church council submitted two names for the election of an elder in place of the one retiring, but objections were taken to both, and fresh nominations were called for. The church council was informed that one of the elders should be a servant of the Company and the other a burgher, and that the officer who held the position of political commissioner should not be nominated as an elder. Consistory business thus ran through the castle’s political board before it could settle a single vacancy. [3]
Another question referred to the council of policy for decision had reference to baptism. Some Roman Catholics had settled in the colony, and though they were at liberty in their own houses to worship God in the manner approved by their consciences, they could not assemble together for public worship nor have the services of their church performed by any clergyman who might chance to call in a foreign ship. Under these circumstances, one of them requested permission of the consistory to have his children baptized in the Reformed church, and offered sponsors who were also Roman Catholics. Private conscience was tolerated; public Catholic worship and a visiting priest’s ministry were not. [3]
The church council expressed its opinion that the children should be baptized if other sponsors were not forthcoming, but that the parents ought first to be admonished to endeavour to procure sponsors of the true reformed faith. Before taking action, however, they submitted this opinion to the council of policy for approval. The council referred them to the instructions concerning baptism which had been received from Batavia in the time of Commander Wagenaar, which accorded with the view they had taken, and informed them that the customs of India were to be observed in every respect. Batavia’s earlier rule, not a new Cape invention, decided the case; the political council merely enforced the Indian precedent. [3]
At this time the Rev. Rudolphus Meerland was clergyman of the Cape, having succeeded the Rev. Adrianus de Voocht on the 12th of February 1674, when the last named left for Batavia. Meerland’s arrival early in the year placed a new minister over the congregation in which Eva would be buried in July, in which the deacons’ fund already exceeded a thousand pounds, and in which December’s elder dispute and baptism reference would demonstrate that the pulpit and the consistory still answered to the council of policy. Church and chamber, poor fund and political commissioner, were strands of one Company order. [3]
Goske’s Leases, Officers, and Domestic Experiments
During the last three years the officers at the head of the several departments had been almost entirely replaced. The secunde Albert van Breugel had been charged by the governor with inattention to his duties, and though upon investigation the Batavian authorities acquitted him of carelessness, he was removed from the post. Hendrik Crudop, now advanced to the rank of merchant, was appointed secunde in his stead. The fiscal De Neyn had gone to Batavia in October 1674. The explorer Hieronymus Cruse had climbed the ladder of promotion in the army and was now a lieutenant. The council of policy consisted of the governor, the secunde Hendrik Crudop, the captain Dirk Smient, the lieutenant Hieronymus Cruse, the treasurer Anthonie de Vogel, and the chief salesman Marthinus van Banchem, the last named being also the secretary. [3]
The government of Mr. Goske is associated with the building of the castle and the establishment of an out-station and farm at Hottentots Holland, but with little else of lasting institutional fame beyond the orphan and poor-relief apparatus of this year. He had no wide opportunity to originate improvements. He kept the large garden in Table Valley in order by means of slave labour, but to obtain ten or twelve men to work on the castle he leased the vineyard and garden Rustenburg, at Rondebosch, to freemen, retaining only the lodge there for his own use. With a like view he leased the corn mill to the burgher Jan de Beer. Labour for masonry outranked direct Company cultivation and milling when the wartime castle still needed hands. [3]
One experiment, indeed, he made which his predecessors do not appear to have thought of. He caused oysters to be brought from the south coast and deposited in Table Bay with a view to their propagation in a convenient situation. The experiment was twice made, and on each occasion it failed. The farmers rather fell off than increased in number during his administration. Immigration, owing to the war, had ceased, and no one who could be kept in the service was permitted to leave it. Domestic Cape life under Goske was therefore a holding action: castle and Hottentots Holland first, freemen’s leases where they freed soldiers and servants for the walls, failed oysters in the bay, and a freeman population that shrank or stagnated while Europe’s war cut the flow of new settlers. [3]
Cruse’s lieutenant’s rank after the March commando, Crudop’s rise to secunde and Orphan Chamber president, De Neyn’s October departure, and Van Banchem’s double role as salesman and secretary together show a service ladder turning over while the governor who had arrived for a war prepared to leave in a peace. The same council that divided Gonnema’s cattle and buried Eva in the castle church also leased Rustenburg and the mill, failed twice with oysters, and governed a Mauritius again reduced to dependency. Ordinary administration filled the months between the Tulbagh Kloof seizure and the November succession decision in Amsterdam. [3]
Bax Appointed to Succeed Goske — November 1674
Governor Goske had been sent to the Cape for a particular purpose—to hold it for the Netherlands at a time of great peril. That time was now past. Peace had been made with England, the only naval power capable of injuring the States, and the special Company treaty of March 1674 reinforced the new calm. There was no necessity to retain at the Cape any longer an officer of Goske’s rank and ability, more especially as he reminded the directors of their engagement to relieve him at an early date and requested permission to return to Europe. The wartime governor asked to be allowed to go home once the wartime reason had lapsed. [3]
In November 1674 the Assembly of Seventeen appointed Commander Johan Bax, the second officer in rank at the island of Ceylon, to succeed Mr. Goske as governor of the Cape, but without the additional title of councillor extraordinary of India. At the same time they complimented the outgoing governor very highly upon his administration and issued directions that he was to supersede any officer of lower rank who might be returning to Europe as admiral of a fleet. The compliment and the fleet precedence were the directors’ public thanks; the omission of the extraordinary councillor’s title marked Bax’s appointment as important but not identical in dignity with Goske’s wartime commission. [3]
The new governor embarked at Galle in the Voorhout and would arrive in Simon’s Bay only on the 1st of January 1676. Two days later he took part in the deliberations of the council at the Cape, but as no ships were then leaving for Europe Mr. Goske retained the direction of affairs until the 14th of March 1676, on which day Governor Johan Bax was installed with the usual ceremony. The November 1674 decision therefore named a successor more than a year before installation; the calendar year closed under Goske with the succession already fixed in Amsterdam and still invisible in Table Bay. [3]
Under Goske, then, 1674 ran from the winter occupation of the unfinished stone castle and the demolition of the old earthen fort, through Klaas’s 24 March report and Cruse’s commando of fifty soldiers, fifty burghers under Wouter Mostert, and four hundred Khoikhoi under Klaas, Koopman, Schacher, and Kuiper that seized eight hundred cattle and four thousand sheep at the Tulbagh Kloof mouth, past the 13 July peace flags and the Companies’ 18 March treaty, the 29 July death and castle-church burial of Eva, a deacons’ poor fund above a thousand pounds sterling at six per cent, the Orphan Chamber under Crudop and Pretorius, Meerland’s 12 February succession to De Voocht and December’s consistory controls, Mauritius reduced again to a Cape dependency, Rustenburg and Jan de Beer’s mill leased to free castle hands, failed oyster beds in Table Bay, De Neyn’s October sailing, Cruse’s promotion to lieutenant, and the Seventeen’s November choice of Johan Bax—while Gonnema still roamed beyond Twenty-four Rivers and the garrison slept at last inside walls of stone. [3]