Boer History1676 at the Cape of Good Hope: Bax Installed, Kyk-uit Rebuilt, Breede Murders, and the Raid on Kees
Bax Arrives in Simon’s Bay — 1 January 1676
The calendar year 1676 opened with a change of command already on the water. The new governor, Commander Johan Bax, second officer in rank at the island of Ceylon, had been named by the Assembly of Seventeen in November 1674 to succeed Isbrand Goske, but without the additional title of councillor extraordinary of India. He embarked at Galle in the Voorhout and reached Simon’s Bay on the 1st of January 1676. Two days later he took part in the deliberations of the council at the Cape. [3]
No ships were then leaving for Europe, so Goske retained the direction of affairs until the formal installation could be staged with the usual ceremony. Through January and February the settlement therefore worked under a dual presence: the outgoing wartime governor still in the chair, and the designated successor already sitting in council and learning the unfinished business of the castle, the free farms, Mauritius, and the open war with the Cochoqua chief Gonnema. The arrangement was practical rather than ornamental. Until a homeward fleet could carry Goske and his papers, the Cape needed a single responsible signature on orders and sentences. [3]
Bax Installed and Goske Departs — 14 March 1676
On the 14th of March 1676 Governor Johan Bax, entitled van Herentals, was installed with the usual ceremony. Goske’s particular wartime commission—to hold the Cape for the Netherlands at a moment of great peril—had ended with the English peace of 1674 and the special company treaty of 18 March 1674. The directors had already complimented him highly and directed that he was to supersede any officer of lower rank who might be returning to Europe as admiral of a fleet. With ships available at last, the transfer of the chair could be completed and the outgoing governor released for the homeward voyage. [3]
When Goske left South Africa the Netherlands were still at war with France, but no fear was entertained of an attack upon the Cape by a hostile fleet. Attention could therefore turn from pure fortress urgency to the security of the free farms and to the inland war that November 1675 had left unfinished at the Tigerberg. The council of policy that Bax inherited still centred on secunde Hendrik Crudop, captain Dirk Smient, lieutenant Hieronymus Cruse, treasurer Anthonie de Vogel, and chief salesman and secretary Marthinus van Banchem—the same departmental heads who had replaced an earlier generation under Goske. [3]
Farmer Protection: Kyk-uit and Keert-de-Koe Rebuilt
The farmers at Rondebosch and Wynberg were pressing their claims for protection. They feared that Gonnema might make such a raid upon them as he had recently made upon the people of Schacher and Kuiper at the Tigerberg. In the open field they felt confident that the whole Cochoqua following would not dare to attack them, but their cattle might easily be swept off and their houses burnt by a sudden foray on a dark night. That fear was not abstract: the November 1675 night assault on allied kraals had shown how quickly stock could be driven inland before horsemen from Table Valley could form. [3]
To prevent such a disaster the redoubts Kyk-uit and Keert-de-Koe, which had long since fallen into decay, were now rebuilt with stone, and parties of horsemen were stationed in them for the purpose of patrolling along the outermost farms. The rebuild restored a defensive geography that the free settlement had known since the first Liesbeek years: watch-works on the pasture edge, mounted patrols between the outermost freehold and the mountain approaches, and a line of warning short enough that a night raid need not end in emptied kraals before help arrived. Under Bax the unfinished inland war and the peacetime farm belt were thus tied together in the same stone and horse budget. [3]
Three Burghers Murdered at the Breede River
A few days after Governor Bax assumed office, intelligence reached the castle from Hottentots Holland that three burghers had been murdered by Bushmen at the Breede River, where they were shooting seacows. Upon the evidence of Captain Klaas and of a European who escaped from the massacre, these Bushmen were termed dependents of Gonnema, and the murder was set down as a charge to his account. The council treated the killings as part of the open Cochoqua war rather than as an isolated hunting accident far inland from Table Valley. [3]
Later scrutiny of the geography and of Khoikhoi–San relations makes it nearly certain that Gonnema could have had nothing to do with the matter. The Dutch of the seventeenth century did not yet distinguish San mountain hunters as a people apart from Khoikhoi herdsmen; they commonly classed them as robbers or brigands who had thrown off restraint. Khoikhoi captains called such people ||obiqua—robbers and murderers—and denied any right of control over Bushmen in their neighbourhood, while sometimes using parties of them as scouts under a precarious protection. The Breede River district was Hessequa country, not Cochoqua pasture, so a night killing of hippopotamus hunters there need not have been Gonnema’s order. In 1676, however, the castle record still ran the charge to his account and prepared a punitive expedition on that footing. [3]
Cruse’s Commando Returns Empty-Handed
The council decided to send an expedition against the killers. A commando was assembled consisting of fifty foot-soldiers and twenty-three horsemen, fifty burghers under Wouter Mostert, and a large band of Khoikhoi under the captains Klaas, Koopman, Schacher, Kuiper, and Sousoa. The force was provisioned for three weeks and placed under the general orders of Lieutenant Cruse—the same officer who had led the 1673 and 1674 commandos and who still sat on the council of policy. The composition repeated the mixed pattern that had taken stock near Tulbagh Kloof in March 1674: Company soldiers, free burgher horse and foot, and Peninsula captains bound to Cape policy. [3]
Soon after setting out, a stranger held to be a spy was seized and compelled to act as guide. He led the expedition only to abandoned kraals, and was handed over to Captain Klaas, who put him to death. The Bushmen themselves could not be found. After a wearisome march the commando returned to the castle without having effected anything. The empty return left the Breede murders unavenged in the field, the allied captains blooded only by the killing of the forced guide, and the council still without a captive or a kraal on which to close the account opened a few days after Bax’s installation. [3]
Captain Jacob as Spy and the Sugarbergen March
Six months after the empty Breede expedition, a petty captain called Jacob by the Dutch came round from Saldanha Bay in a small vessel belonging to a freeman and tendered his services to look for Gonnema. Under pretence of purchasing cattle this man was sent out as a spy, and returned with information that the enemy was encamped in the Sugarbergen only a day’s march beyond the Berg River. Behind lay the Namaquas and the Chariguriquas, hereditary enemies of the Cochoquas, so that escape in that direction would—on Jacob’s showing—be impossible. [3]
A large commando was assembled and, under Jacob’s guidance, left the Cape in expectation of surprising Gonnema and punishing him severely. The expedition marched only at night and took every precaution to avoid detection, but by some means the enemy became aware of its approach and escaped in good time. Foiled in its principal object, the force still held powder, allies, and a guide who knew the west-coast pastures. The war with Gonnema, which for four years had kept the country disturbed, was not ended by the night march; the Cochoqua chief remained at large, as he had after the Tigerberg pursuit of November 1675. [3]
Raid on Captain Kees at Saldanha Bay
Foiled against Gonnema, the commando made a detour to Saldanha Bay and fell upon Captain Kees, who had destroyed the Company’s post there three years before. Several of his followers were killed, and the whole of his stock—one hundred and sixty-five head of horned cattle and thirty sheep—was seized. The booty was so small that the Khoikhoi allies were rewarded for their fidelity by presents of such articles as they most desired out of the Company’s stores rather than by a rich division of herds. The blow settled an old west-coast score even as it failed to close the Cochoqua war. [3]
This was the last expedition sent out during the war with Gonnema before the peace feelers of the following year. Through the remainder of 1676 the pattern stood as it had since 1673: mixed commandos could seize stock when they found an encampment or a lesser captain, Peninsula allies could be paid from the stores when the herds were thin, and Gonnema himself could still break contact in time. The redoubts at Kyk-uit and Keert-de-Koe, the empty Breede march, the failed Sugarbergen surprise, and the Saldanha seizure of Kees’s 165 cattle and 30 sheep together mark the military year under Bax—active, expensive in organisation, and still short of a Cochoqua submission. [3]
Matrimonial Court Established — 1676
In 1676 a matrimonial court was established at the Cape. It consisted of four commissioners, two being servants of the Company and two burghers. Half the members retired yearly, and their places were supplied by election of the council of policy from a double list furnished by the court itself. Before these commissioners all persons intending to marry were obliged to appear, for the purpose of showing that no legal impediment existed. [3]
As long as the frontier was only a few miles distant this was no hardship to anyone. The court folded marriage discipline into the same council-supervised civic machinery that already handled orphan estates, poor funds, and consistory nominations. For a settlement whose free population still clustered on the Peninsula and whose Company servants rotated through ships and outposts, a standing check on impediments mattered more than distance: bigamy, incomplete service terms, and disputed prior bonds could all surface before the four commissioners in Table Valley. [3]
Slaves from Madagascar and Ceylon
The slave population was at this time considerably increased by importations from Madagascar and Ceylon. Most of these slaves were men, but there were a few women and children among them. The children were sent to school, but it was resolved not to baptize them until their parents should be instructed in Christianity, when all could be baptized at the same time. A person was employed to recite prayers morning and evening, which the adults were required to repeat. [3]
Some of the cleverest youths were selected and placed with master mechanics to be taught trades, so that they might become more useful. The price charged by the Company to the burghers for an adult slave was equal to six pounds sterling, barely the cost of introduction, and it could be paid in seven and a half muids of wheat each weighing 160 Amsterdam pounds. Labour demand on free farms, in the Company garden, and on castle works thus met a priced supply routed through Company stores rather than through open private import—an arrangement that kept the fiscal hand on both the bodies and the grain that paid for them. [3]
Abraham van Riebeeck’s Visit — Mid-November 1676
In mid-November the outward ship De Vrijheyt raised the mountains of the Cape. Among those on board was Abraham van Riebeeck, son of the first commander, bound ultimately for Batavia and already schooled in the Netherlands under the plan his parents had set down years before. On the day after arrival Governor Johan Bax van Herentals invited the party to dine in the castle. After the meal they walked in the garden his father had laid out—Abraham noting that the garden was now larger than the one Jan van Riebeeck had planted, with fruit trees from the Netherlands and medicinal plants in abundance. [2]
The visit continued in the ordinary hospitality of a refreshment station under a new governor. After a sermon by the fleet chaplain, senior officers and Abraham ate again at the governor’s table. The next day they inspected the barn and Rondebosch, the men on horseback, the women in an open coach and in the governor’s closed coach; tents were pitched for the midday meal, and the afternoon was freshened with tea. Abraham also looked behind the Lion’s Head, where he met Khoikhoi who spoke Dutch. The episode fixed, for one of the settlement’s founding family, a Cape already altered in garden scale and castle seat since 1662, yet still recognisable in its out-rides to Rondebosch and its mixed table of officials and passengers. [2]
Settlement under Bax through the Rest of 1676
Through the remainder of the year the European community lived under the new governor with the old departmental heads still in place. The stone castle remained the seat of government and the unfinished work of its walls and approaches; the free farms at Rondebosch and Wynberg sat behind rebuilt redoubts and mounted patrols; Hottentots Holland still reported inland alarms to Table Valley. France remained an enemy of the Netherlands at sea, but the Cape no longer organised its entire labour budget around the fear of an English or French fleet in the bay. [3]
The inland war, by contrast, was not closed. Gonnema had not been caught in the Sugarbergen; Kees had been stripped at Saldanha Bay; the Breede River killings had produced only abandoned kraals and a dead guide. Allied captains Klaas, Koopman, Schacher, Kuiper, and Sousoa had marched again with Cruse and Mostert; the matrimonial court and the Madagascar–Ceylon slave imports had thickened the civic and labour machinery of a settlement that still measured its frontier in a few miles of Peninsula pasture. When 1676 ended, Bax held the chair van Herentals had conferred in March, Crudop remained secunde, and the Cochoqua chief was still beyond a firm peace. [3]