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. Peace with England, proclaimed at the bay in 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. 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. [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 hundreds of cattle and thousands of sheep near the Tulbagh Kloof without capturing Gonnema himself. 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]
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. [3]
Schacher and Kuiper had stood with Klaas and Koopman on the March 1674 expedition and had received shares of cattle and sheep from the spoil. Their kraals at the Tigerberg lay on the inland approaches that linked Table Valley to the Twenty-four Rivers country and the mountains beyond. 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. The captains immediately asked the castle for help. [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. [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. Through the remainder of 1675 the Cochoqua chief 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]
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; 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. Gonnema’s war therefore entered 1676 still open, with blood and stock losses on the allied side and no submission from the Cochoqua chief. [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 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 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. 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. Cruse, the same officer who had led the 1673 and 1674 commandos, 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]
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: elder nominations balanced between Company servant and burgher, the political commissioner barred from the eldership, and baptismal practice tied to instructions received from Batavia in Commander Wagenaar’s time. [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. Children of such parents might be baptized in the Reformed church when sponsors of the reformed faith could not be procured, after the parents had first been admonished to seek such sponsors—the India custom the council had ordered the consistory to observe. 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. [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. [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. [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 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. Rustenburg’s vines and gardens and De Beer’s mill therefore mark 1675 as a year in which freemen took over concrete pieces of the Company’s local economy while slave labour concentrated on the Table Valley garden and whatever hands could still be spared for the unfinished pentagon. [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. [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; 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 1673 and by the Rustenburg and mill leases of Goske’s later years. [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. [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, a fear that would drive the rebuilding of the redoubts Kyk-uit and Keert-de-Koe after Bax took office in 1676. [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. They complimented the outgoing governor highly and directed that he was to supersede any officer of lower rank who might be returning to Europe as admiral of a fleet. 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 council two days later, and was not installed until 14 March 1676, Goske retaining the direction of affairs until ships left for Europe. [3]
The year 1675 therefore closed still under Goske, with Crudop as secunde, Cruse as lieutenant on the council, 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. The castle stood occupied but unfinished; the inland war stood open; the named successor stood somewhere on the long sea road from Ceylon. [3]