Boer History1675 at the Cape of Good Hope: Gonnema at the Tigerberg, Goske’s Council, Mauritius, and Company Leases
Goske’s Year after Peace and the Castle Move
The calendar year 1675 opened with Governor Isbrand Goske still in command at the Cape, the stone castle in Table Valley already occupied as the principal defensive work, and the old earthen fort broken down. By the beginning of the winter of 1674 that castle had been judged more capable of defence than the earthen square that had stood since the first years of the settlement; the garrison had been moved into the new works, and the walls of the old fort demolished so that the ground could open into the wider defensive plan pressed since the European war made permanent masonry urgent at the bay. Peace with England, proclaimed when a despatch vessel gaily decorated with flags sailed into Table Bay on the 13th of July 1674, had removed the sharpest fear of a hostile fleet, so that castle labour continued on a regular footing without the wartime staff once kept expressly for the walls. [3]
The French naval power hardly gave the Company a thought at the Cape after that July news. Extraordinary exertions to complete the castle were no longer required; from the peace date the work was carried on regularly, but was not considered of such urgent importance as to need a large staff of men kept at the residency purposely for it. The outpost and farm at Hottentots Holland, the look-out on the Lion’s Head, and the free farms along the Liesbeek and at Rondebosch and Wynberg remained the settled geography of a community that no longer expected an English squadron in Table Bay, yet still faced an unfinished inland war with the Cochoqua chief Gonnema. The residency contracted, as it had through the early 1670s, around stone fort, island watches, and the single inland farming post—only now the fort was masonry, and the old earthen trace had been deliberately erased. [3]
The March 1674 combined commando under Ensign—now Lieutenant—Hieronymus Cruse, with burghers under Wouter Mostert and Khoikhoi allies under Klaas, Koopman, Schacher, and Kuiper, had seized eight hundred head of horned cattle and four thousand sheep near the Tulbagh Kloof without capturing Gonnema himself. The spoil had been divided at the fort—burghers taking three hundred cows and ninety young cattle, each of the four captains a fair share of horned cattle plus three hundred sheep in full possession and three hundred on loan, the Company the remainder—and Goske had taken summary proceedings when the best animals whistled away as the allies drove off their portion. Through 1675 that unfinished business hung over the Peninsula captains who had taken the Company’s side. The European settlement, for its part, spent the year under a governor who had been sent to hold the Cape in wartime peril and who already knew that the Seventeen had named a successor—Commander Johan Bax of Ceylon—in November 1674, even though Bax would not reach Simon’s Bay until January 1676. [3]
Around the same wartime years the Company had also introduced a system of raising revenue by farming out certain privileges—the exclusive right to sell spirituous liquors first, with maximum prices fixed by law both at the Company’s stores and at retail, and in course of time the sole right to sell wine, beer, tobacco, salt, bread, meat, and other staples farmed out in the same manner. The system was the simplest plan to raise a colonial revenue the directors could adopt; colonists did not object while prices remained capped. Against that fiscal background, Goske’s quieter leases of Rustenburg and the corn mill in his later years belonged to the same logic of putting productive work into free or monopoly hands so that scarce Company servants could be concentrated on castle masonry, shipping duties, and the thin garrisons of outposts. [3]
Gonnema’s Raid on the Tigerberg — November 1675
In November 1675 Gonnema struck back at the Company’s allies. By night he surprised the kraals of Schacher and Kuiper at the Tigerberg (Tygerberg), killed several of the inmates, and carried off a large portion of their cattle. The attack was a raid of the kind the Cochoqua chief had repeatedly shown he could still deliver even after losing stock to Cape commandos: sudden, aimed at Peninsula partners rather than at the castle itself, and timed to seize herds before a European force could form. It answered, in kind if not in equal bulk, the March 1674 seizure of eight hundred cattle and four thousand sheep from his own followers at the Little Berg River mouth of the Tulbagh Kloof. [3]
Schacher and Kuiper had stood with Klaas and Koopman on that March 1674 expedition and had received shares of cattle and sheep from the spoil—each captain a fair share of horned cattle, three hundred sheep in full possession, and three hundred sheep on loan returnable when the Company required them. Their kraals at the Tigerberg lay on the inland approaches that linked Table Valley to the Twenty-four Rivers country and the mountains beyond, the same neighbourhood where Gonnema, known to the first settlers as the Black Captain, had usually kept his kraals about Riebeek’s Kasteel and Twenty-four Rivers when he was not wandering to Saldanha Bay or eastward toward Hottentots Holland. A night assault there was therefore both a recovery of stock and a blow at the alliance system Goske had used against Gonnema since the murders of 1673 at Moord Kuil and the Saldanha post. [3]
The captains immediately asked the castle for help. That appeal was the operational hinge of the November episode: the Company’s allies did not attempt a private recovery alone, and the residency did not treat a raid on Schacher and Kuiper as a quarrel outside its war. Assistance was a political as well as a military act. It confirmed that the four captains who had marched under Cruse in 1674 still stood inside Cape protection, and it committed horsemen from Table Valley to a pursuit that would test whether Gonnema could be caught once he had already lifted the herds and turned inland. [3]
The Tigerberg blow also carried a warning for the free farmers at Rondebosch and Wynberg. If Gonnema could kill inmates and sweep cattle from allied kraals within a night’s ride of the settled valley, the same sudden foray on a dark night might burn houses and lift stock among the outermost freemen even if, in open field, the whole Cochoqua following would not dare a pitched fight with armed burghers. That fear would drive the rebuilding of the redoubts Kyk-uit and Keert-de-Koe in stone after Bax took office in 1676; through the closing weeks of 1675 it remained an unrelieved apprehension under Goske’s last full calendar year. [3]
Pursuit beyond Twenty-four Rivers
Assistance was sent at once to the Company’s allies. Gonnema, however, retreated with his booty so hastily into the mountainous country beyond Twenty-four Rivers that the horsemen could not overtake him. The geography favoured the Cochoqua chief: once clear of the Tigerberg and into the broken country inland, a mounted pursuit from Table Valley lost the advantage of surprise and faced terrain that had already sheltered Gonnema after earlier commandos—the same mountain ground into which his people had withdrawn after the Moord Kuil murders of 1673 and from which they had escaped just in time when Cruse’s column tried to surround the Little Berg encampment in March 1674. [3]
The November raid thus repeated a pattern familiar since 1673. European and allied forces could seize stock when they found an encampment, and they could answer a call for help after a night attack, but they could not hold Gonnema in place long enough to end the war. Cruse’s 1674 column had taken eight hundred cattle and four thousand sheep only because the Cochoqua left herds and huts behind in flight; the 1675 horsemen took almost nothing of the stolen Tigerberg cattle because the flight began before they arrived. In both seasons the chief’s person remained free. Through the remainder of 1675 he remained at large beyond Twenty-four Rivers, while Schacher’s and Kuiper’s people counted their dead and their missing cattle under the protection—always a step behind the raid—of the castle’s horsemen. [3]
Operationally the pursuit also showed the limits of the postwar labour budget. Castle urgency had eased after July 1674; no large staff was kept at the Cape purposely for the walls; immigration had ceased; no one who could be kept in the service was readily permitted to leave it. Horsemen enough to answer an allied cry could still be mounted from the garrison and the freemen, but a prolonged mountain chase of the kind that would have required weeks of supply, guides, and a full combined column on the 1674 model was not what November produced. The residency answered quickly and fell short of the herds. That was enough to keep the alliance alive and not enough to close the war before Bax’s arrival. [3]
Fifteen Stragglers Killed by Schacher’s People
The pursuit was not wholly empty-handed. Fifteen stragglers from Gonnema’s party were captured and instantly killed by Schacher’s people. The record does not present these deaths as a formal Company trial before the fort; they were the allies’ immediate reckoning with men cut off from the main body as it fled with the stolen herds. In the alliance politics of 1675, Schacher’s people acted as both victims of the Tigerberg night attack and agents of the counter-blow that the horsemen themselves failed to land on Gonnema’s main party. [3]
The episode hardened the line between the Peninsula captains bound to Cape policy and the Cochoqua following still at war. Klaas, Koopman, Schacher, and Kuiper had marched with Cruse in 1674; in November 1675 two of those captains suffered the raid, one of them answered it with killings on the trail, and the Company’s mounted assistance arrived too late to recover the bulk of the cattle. Blood for blood on the stragglers did not restore the lifted herds, but it advertised that alliance still cut both ways: the captains who took Company sheep on loan and marched under a European commandant-general also killed Cochoqua men when opportunity offered without waiting for a castle sentence. [3]
Gonnema’s war therefore entered 1676 still open, with blood and stock losses on the allied side and no submission from the Cochoqua chief. The fifteen dead stragglers stood beside the unrecovered Tigerberg cattle as the measurable result of November—enough to prove that the coalition of 1673–1674 had not dissolved, not enough to claim a decisive campaign. When freemen later pressed Bax for protection against just such a night foray on Rondebosch and Wynberg, they were remembering Schacher’s and Kuiper’s kraals as much as any abstract fear of the mountains beyond Twenty-four Rivers. [3]
Council of Policy under Goske
During the last three years of Goske’s administration 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; though upon investigation the Batavian authorities acquitted him of carelessness, he was removed from the post. Hendrik Crudop, advanced to the rank of merchant, was appointed secunde in his stead. The fiscal De Neyn had gone to Batavia in October 1674. Hieronymus Cruse, the explorer who had led the 1673 and 1674 commandos, had climbed the ladder of military promotion and was now a lieutenant. [3]
By 1675 the council of policy therefore 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. Six men around the table carried the ordinary government of the residency: commerce and second command in Crudop, military seniority in Smient, field experience in Cruse, the treasury in De Vogel, and the sales desk plus the minute-book in Van Banchem. It was a postwar council built from the officers who had survived Goske’s reshuffle rather than from the mixed board that had greeted his arrival. [3]
Crudop’s dual weight—secunde and, from 1674, first president of the Orphan Chamber—made him the central civilian figure under Goske as the year ran toward the expected arrival of Bax. The chamber of five (two Company servants and three burghers, with burgher secretary Johannes Pretorius paid for his work) already required annual rotation of one servant and one burgher chosen by the council of policy from a double list the chamber itself presented; Crudop’s presidency tied that self-perpetuating credit institution to the same man who sat as second in the political council. Cruse, the same officer who had been commandant-general of the fifty soldiers, fifty burghers, and four hundred Khoikhoi in March 1674, sat on the council as lieutenant while the Tigerberg raid showed that the inland war still required the kind of combined force he knew how to organise. [3]
The council’s reach into church nominations, already restated in December 1674, continued to frame ordinary religious business through Meerland’s year: elder nominations balanced between Company servant and burgher, the political commissioner barred from the eldership, and baptismal practice tied to Batavian instructions from Commander Wagenaar’s time. Political control of the consistory and military memory of the Cochoqua war thus sat in the same room. When horsemen rode for the Tigerberg in November, the order ran from a board that already mixed Crudop’s civilian primacy with Cruse’s field rank and Smient’s captaincy. [3]
Rudolphus Meerland, Clergyman through 1675
Through 1675 the Rev. Rudolphus Meerland remained clergyman of the Cape. He had succeeded the Rev. Adrianus de Voocht on the 12th of February 1674, when De Voocht left for Batavia. The consistory still operated under the tight supervision the council of policy had restated in December 1674. When the church council had submitted two names for the election of an elder in place of the one retiring, objections were taken to both and fresh nominations called for; the council of policy informed the church that one elder 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. [3]
Roman Catholic settlers remained free to worship privately in their own houses but could not assemble for public worship or obtain the services of a priest from a foreign ship. When 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, the church council held 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 acting, the consistory submitted that opinion to the council of policy; the council referred them to the instructions concerning baptism received from Batavia in Commander Wagenaar’s time, which accorded with the view they had taken, and informed them that the customs of India were to be observed in every respect. [3]
Meerland’s year was therefore one of ordinary pastoral continuity inside a settlement whose political and military attention was fixed on Gonnema, castle labour, and the long wait for Goske’s relief. The deacons’ poor fund, whose capital in 1674 already exceeded a thousand pounds sterling invested on mortgage at six per cent, continued to relieve the congregation’s poor and to maintain destitute orphan children—including the lingering charges left by Eva’s death on 29 July 1674—while the Orphan Chamber under Crudop guarded legitimate portions when widowers and widows remarried. Church life in 1675 was thus institutionally thicker than the thin wartime garrison of the early 1670s had been, even while the pulpit itself changed little from De Voocht’s departure to Bax’s arrival. [3]
Mauritius Reduced Again to a Cape Dependency
In 1671, when the Company was preparing 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, and Hubert Hugo, an officer of some note, had been appointed commander. After the conclusion of peace with England the island was reduced again to its old position. By the mid-1670s it was of very little advantage to the Company: except a little ebony brought back to the Cape each year in the despatch packet, it exported nothing, and very few ships called there for supplies. The peace that had slowed castle labour at Table Bay thus also demobilised an Indian Ocean side-post that wartime caution had briefly inflated into a separate government. [3]
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, except in cases of extreme urgency, until those sentences were reviewed by the Council of Justice at the Cape. The reduction of Mauritius after the English peace thus tightened, rather than loosened, the administrative thread running through Goske’s Table Valley council: the island was again a Cape outpost in law, thin in population, and bound to Cape justice for ordinary criminal process. Hugo’s former separate command left no thick local state behind—only ebony packets, a handful of freemen, and a garrison smaller than many Indiamen carried as soldiers. [3]
For freemen at the Cape the island remained a possible destination rather than a rival colony. Within a few years of Eva’s death a burgher who had been a personal friend of Van Meerhof, removing with his family to Mauritius, was allowed to take two of her children as apprentices under formal contracts approved by council and church, the children placed under the protection of the island’s commander. That later arrangement presupposed the dependency restored in Goske’s time: Mauritius took Cape orphans only as a place still answerable to Cape authority. Through 1675 the practical meaning of reduction was simpler—fewer separate pretensions, the same thin ebony trade, and criminal sentences that waited on Table Valley review. [3]
Rustenburg Leased and the Corn Mill to Jan de Beer
Goske’s government is associated above all with the building of the castle and the establishment of the out-station and farm at Hottentots Holland, but the quieter fiscal measures of his later years also reshaped daily work around Table Valley. He had little opportunity to originate major improvements while castle work, inland war, and wartime limits on immigration absorbed attention and men. He kept the large garden in Table Valley in order by means of slave labour, yet to free ten or twelve men for castle work 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. [3]
These leases belonged to the same postwar logic as the slower castle programme. With English naval danger reduced, the governor still needed masonry progress, but he preferred to buy labour by putting productive Company properties into free hands rather than by holding a large dedicated building staff at the Cape. Ten or twelve men shifted from Rustenburg’s vines and gardens to the unfinished pentagon were a concrete labour transfer; De Beer’s mill likewise moved a daily industrial task off the Company’s muster. Slave labour concentrated on the Table Valley garden and on whatever hands could still be spared for stone and timber at the walls. [3]
Rustenburg and the mill therefore mark 1675 as a year in which freemen took over concrete pieces of the Company’s local economy while the monopoly farms of liquor and other staples, introduced in the early 1670s, continued to raise revenue under fixed maximum prices. The settlement’s provisioning base remained the Company garden, free farms along the Liesbeek and at Rondebosch and Wynberg, livestock obtained by trade or by earlier commando spoil, and the Hottentots Holland outpost. Leasing did not enlarge the free population—immigration had ceased—but it did enlarge the share of local production running through free or farmed channels rather than through direct Company management of every vine, millstone, and retail counter. [3]
Oyster Experiment in Table Bay
One experiment Goske made which his predecessors do not appear to have thought of was to cause 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 attempt sits among the small improvement schemes of a governor who had little room to originate major reforms while castle work, inland war, and wartime limits on immigration absorbed attention and men. It is one of the few purely experimental marks Theal attaches to Goske’s name beside the castle and Hottentots Holland. [3]
Failure did not reverse the broader pattern of local provisioning. The bay already supplied the refreshment station’s core needs through the Company garden, free farms, and livestock obtained by trade or by commando spoil. The oyster beds were an attempt to add a coastal food resource closer to the anchorage, sparing long boat work down the south coast when ships called for refreshment. Their collapse left the settlement dependent on the same agricultural and pastoral base it had been building since the 1650s, now supplemented by monopolies farmed out since the early 1670s and by the Rustenburg and mill leases of Goske’s later years. [3]
Twice tried and twice failed, the oysters also illustrate the narrow margin on which Cape experiment ran. Men, boats, and attention enough to lift shellfish from the south coast and seed them in Table Bay could be spared twice; a sustained fishery science could not. Goske’s administration is remembered for stone and an inland farm post, not for a bay industry. The failed beds remain a footnote that proves the governor still looked for local improvement even while he reminded the directors that his wartime purpose was past and that he wished to be relieved. [3]
Farmers, Closed Immigration, and Service Discipline
The farmers rather fell off than increased in number during Goske’s administration. Immigration, owing to the war, had ceased, and no one who could be kept in the service was permitted to leave it. The European free population around the Liesbeek, Rondebosch, and Wynberg therefore faced 1675 without the stream of new free papers that had marked earlier peacetime years, while Company servants remained bound to their posts for castle labour, shipping duties, and the thin garrisons of outposts and of Mauritius. Free status was not a tap the council could open at will while the Atlantic war and its manpower rules still framed every discharge. [3]
That freeze on release from service and on new settlers was the domestic face of the same Atlantic peace that had slowed the castle. Extraordinary building urgency had eased after July 1674, but the directors and the Cape council still treated manpower as a scarce wartime residue rather than as a peacetime surplus. Free farmers pressed for security against Gonnema even as their numbers stalled; the November Tigerberg raid on allied kraals only underlined how exposed stock remained beyond the outermost free farms. In the open field burghers felt confident that the whole Cochoqua tribe would not dare to attack them, but cattle might easily be swept off and houses burnt by a sudden foray on a dark night—the precise fear that would drive the rebuilding of the redoubts Kyk-uit and Keert-de-Koe with stone and the stationing of mounted patrols after Bax assumed office in 1676. [3]
The stalled free population also shaped what leases and monopolies could achieve. Rustenburg and De Beer’s mill moved work into free hands without adding free households; liquor and staple farms raised revenue without importing new families. Spoil from the 1674 commando had put three hundred cows and ninety young cattle into burgher possession and loaned sheep to allied captains, but a single season’s herd could not replace a closed immigration stream. Through 1675 the settlement therefore lived on the freemen it already had, the servants it refused to release, the slaves in the Table Valley garden, and the allied captains whose kraals Gonnema had just proven he could still reach by night. [3]
Bax Still En Route — Succession Pending through 1675
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 past. Peace had been made with England, the only naval power capable of injuring the States, and a special treaty between the two East India Companies, dated 18 March 1674, bound each to promote the honour and profit of the other. 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. [3]
In November 1674 the Assembly of Seventeen had appointed Commander Johan Bax, the second officer in rank at the island of Ceylon, to succeed 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 highly upon his administration and directed that he was to supersede any officer of lower rank who might be returning to Europe as admiral of a fleet. The appointment was therefore both a relief of Goske and a slight reduction of the dignity attached to the Cape chair: Bax would govern, but not as councillor extraordinary of India. [3]
Through the whole of 1675 that succession remained a paper fact in Amsterdam and Ceylon rather than a change of chairs in Table Valley. Bax embarked at Galle in the Voorhout only in time to reach Simon’s Bay on the 1st of January 1676, took part in the deliberations of the council at the Cape two days later, and was not installed until the 14th of March 1676, Goske retaining the direction of affairs until ships left for Europe. The calendar year 1675 thus closed still entirely under the wartime governor’s hand, with the named successor somewhere on the long sea road from Ceylon and no Verburg commission or burgher petition yet before the board—those belonged to the return fleet and the first weeks of 1676. [3]
The year therefore ended with Crudop as secunde, Cruse as lieutenant on the council, Smient as captain, De Vogel at the treasury, Van Banchem as chief salesman and secretary, Meerland in the pulpit, Mauritius again a thin Cape dependency, Rustenburg and the mill in free hands, the oyster experiment failed, free farmer numbers stalled, and Gonnema’s November blow at Schacher and Kuiper unanswered by any capture of the Cochoqua chief himself. Fifteen stragglers dead on the trail and a hasty retreat beyond Twenty-four Rivers were the inland ledger. The castle stood occupied but unfinished; the inland war stood open; the named successor stood at sea. When Bax stepped into Simon’s Bay on New Year’s Day 1676, he inherited that unfinished ledger rather than a closed peace. [3]