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 inherited a residency whose wartime purpose had already faded. Peace with England, proclaimed at the Cape on the 13th of July 1674, and the special treaty of the two East India Companies dated 18 March 1674, had removed the sharpest fear of a hostile fleet. Goske had been sent to hold the Cape at a moment of great peril; that time was past, and he had reminded the directors of their engagement to relieve him at an early date. The Seventeen’s November 1674 appointment of Bax was therefore both a relief of a high-ranking wartime governor and a slight reduction of dignity attached to the Cape chair—Bax would govern without the additional Indian councillorship Goske had held. [3]
Commissioner Verburg and the Burgher Petition — Early 1676
The return fleet which put into Table Bay early in 1676 was under command of Nicholas Verburg, who occupied a position in the Company’s service next only to the governor-general of the Indies, and who upon arrival produced a commission from the Indian authorities empowering him to examine into and arrange the affairs of the Cape settlement. Goske had stipulated when he accepted the Cape governorship that no one should act as commissioner here during his stay, but he cordially assented to an inspection of the various departments of the public service and to the issue of instructions for the guidance of his successor. The visit had little lasting effect upon the settlement one way or the other, yet a petition presented to Verburg by the three burgher councillors, in the name of the whole body of freemen, fixed the freemen’s own view of the laws under which they lived. [3]
In that petition the burghers enumerated their grievances and asked for redress. Their first request was that some cattle taken from Gonnema and lent to them might be given to them in full possession. Next, that they might be allowed to sell wine, grain, and fruit to anyone at the best price obtainable, upon payment of such taxes as might be considered proper; that they might enjoy the same rights of trade in merchandise as freemen enjoyed in Batavia; that those among them who had no ground might have freehold farms assigned at Hottentots Holland and be supplied with cattle on lease; and lastly that, for the comfort of the poor, the price of rice sold out of the Company’s stores might be reduced. [3]
Verburg did not choose to incur the responsibility of deciding the requests. They were forwarded to the directors for consideration. In course of time the first request was fully acceded to; the second, third, and fourth were partly granted; and the fifth was refused. The Company, it was asserted, intended to discontinue the importation of rice as soon as possible, and to reduce its price would discourage the cultivation of wheat and thus frustrate one of the most important objects kept in view. The petition therefore stands as an early-1676 freemen’s programme—full title to lent Cochoqua cattle, freer local sale of produce, Batavian-style trade rights, freehold expansion toward Hottentots Holland, and cheaper rice—answered later from Amsterdam rather than from Verburg’s temporary commission at the bay. [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]
That board was itself the product of Goske’s last three years. 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, and Crudop, advanced to the rank of merchant, took the second chair. The fiscal De Neyn had gone to Batavia in October 1674. Cruse, the explorer who had led the 1673 and 1674 commandos, had climbed the military ladder to lieutenant. Six men around the table therefore carried ordinary government into Bax’s installation: 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. [3]
Crudop’s dual weight—secunde and, from 1674, first president of the Orphan Chamber—made him the central civilian figure Bax found already seated. 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. Cruse, the same officer who had been commandant-general of fifty soldiers, fifty burghers, and four hundred Khoikhoi in March 1674, sat on the council as lieutenant while the open Cochoqua war still required the kind of combined force he knew how to organise. The stone castle remained the seat of government; the old earthen fort’s walls had been broken down; Mauritius was again a thin Cape dependency after the English peace. [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]
The redoubts also belonged to a longer barrier system. Keert-de-Koe had once marked the cattle gate on the Liesbeek approaches; Kyk-uit had watched the same pasture edge. Their stone rebuilding under Bax was not a new frontier line beyond Wynberg but a restoration of posts freemen still recognised as the outer shell of Rondebosch and Wynberg security. With immigration closed by the recent war, farmer numbers had rather fallen off than increased under Goske; the men who remained wanted stone and horse, not abstract promises, against the kind of night foray that had just struck Schacher and Kuiper. [1] [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. When the Dutch came to South Africa they found a nomadic pastoral people living in separate small communities or clans, groups of which formed tribes under weak paramount bonds and frequent internal feuds. Wherever Europeans later penetrated they also found people whose homes were among almost inaccessible mountains and who maintained themselves by the chase and by plunder. That these mountain hunters were of a different race from the herdsmen was not even suspected by the Dutch of the seventeenth century, who believed them simply Khoikhoi robbers or brigands who had thrown off all restraint. [3]
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 European authorities frequently called upon captains to suppress brigandage by “their subjects”; the reply was always that the robbers were not their subjects, and that they would cheerfully exterminate them if they could. 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]
Operationally the empty march also showed the limits of postwar labour and intelligence. Castle urgency had eased after July 1674; no large staff was kept at the Cape purposely for the walls; immigration had ceased. Men enough could still be mustered for three weeks—fifty foot, twenty-three horse, fifty burghers, and the five captains’ following—but a guide who knew only deserted sites could not convert that column into a capture. The pattern repeated the November 1675 pursuit beyond Twenty-four Rivers: horsemen answered a cry, the quarry broke contact, and the residency returned with process rather than spoil. [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 and after Cruse’s March 1674 seizure of eight hundred cattle and four thousand sheep near the Tulbagh Kloof. [3]
The failed Sugarbergen surprise was therefore the third major field disappointment of the open war’s later phase: stock could be taken when an encampment was found, and allies could be marched under a European commandant-general, but Gonnema’s person and main herds repeatedly broke contact in time. Jacob’s report had promised a trap—Namaqua and Chariguriqua enemies blocking the inland exit—yet the Cochoqua still slipped the night approach. The column did not dissolve into the mountains empty-handed; it turned west toward an older score at Saldanha Bay. [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. On the 8th of June 1677 Kuiper and another petty captain would appear at the castle with messengers from Gonnema asking whether peace could be established; those feelers, and the treaty conditions of late June 1677, lay beyond the calendar 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. [3]
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. Klaas, Koopman, Schacher, Kuiper, and Sousoa had marched again with Cruse and Mostert; the Company’s stores had paid fidelity when spoil could not. When freemen looked out from the rebuilt stone posts along the outermost farms, they still faced an inland war whose chief remained free beyond the Berg River and the Sugarbergen. [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. With later colonial extension the same obligation to appear would come to be felt as oppressive; in 1676 it was still a Peninsula institution. [3]
The court’s constitution deliberately mirrored other mixed boards of the mid-1670s. Like the Orphan Chamber established under Crudop in 1674—two Company servants and three burghers, with annual rotation from a double list—the matrimonial commissioners split evenly between service and free status and renewed themselves under political-council election rather than under pure consistory control. Marriage law at the Cape thus sat beside orphan credit and church nomination as business the council of policy would not leave entirely to pulpit or private contract. [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]
The baptismal delay and the school-and-prayer regime fitted the same Reformed discipline the council and consistory had restated in December 1674 and through the Rev. Rudolphus Meerland’s pastorate after Adrianus de Voocht left for Batavia on the 12th of February 1674. Slave children were not to be rushed to the font apart from instructed parents; adults were to hear and repeat morning and evening prayers; selected youths were to learn trades under free masters. The Madagascar and Ceylon importations of Bax’s first year therefore thickened the labour force while tying new arrivals into the settlement’s existing religious and craft channels rather than leaving them outside both church and workshop. [3]
Abraham van Riebeeck’s Visit — Mid-November 1676
According to his own diary, Abraham van Riebeeck—third son of Jan and Maria, born at the Cape on 18 October 1653—had been accepted as a merchant by the Chamber of Enkhuizen and had sailed from the Netherlands on 18 July 1676. He had left the Cape as a child with his brother Lambertus on the Parel on 20 March 1660, been schooled in Rotterdam under the plan his parents had set down, taken doctorates in law with Lambertus at The Hague on 25 March 1673, and now sought Company service in the East in order to be near his father. In mid-November the outward ship De Vrijheyt raised the mountains of the Cape. [2]
When those on board sighted the many mountains of the Cape on 17 November, Abraham regarded his birthplace with keen interest. 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 noted 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. Berries would not thrive well, but the citrus trees looked splendid and the olive tree bore heavily. Down the middle ran a broad path; the coconut palms planted on either side would not take, and the bananas showed only leaves without fruit. Laurel trees three times a man’s height sheltered the garden against falling winds. With the same gardener’s attention his father had shown, Abraham described what he saw. [2]
The next day, 19 November, they ate again at the governor’s table and walked after the meal through the gardens and up into the kloof. Curiosity took them toward the summit of Table Mountain; cloud and dense mist spoiled the view, and the wind threatened to loosen rock that might crush them. Back between the castle and the old fort, Abraham recorded stonework in careful detail: blocks as large as a church broken with powder on the slopes of Lion’s Head into smaller pieces, three or four of which ox-waggons drawn by six oxen hauled to the castle. The stones seldom fitted; gaps were filled with smaller rock and the whole mortared. Freemen used the same building material, and between the old and new forts stood so many houses that it already looked like a village. [2]
The walls of the old fort had disappeared, but the governor’s house still stood. There Bax lived, and behind the hall of the old church a long cool dining room had been built with a fine view of Table Mountain. Toward the end of the first week Abraham noted that the “play days” were over and that the people must work; senior merchant Jacob de Werelt was to inquire into minerals, and Abraham went with him to know his birthplace better. After a sermon by the fleet chaplain, De Werelt, the skipper, 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. [2]
Abraham also looked behind the Lion’s Head, where he met Khoikhoi who spoke Dutch in broken fashion and talked with them of their religion. He rode with the burgher councillors to the mine lying toward Hout Bay and described the farmstead of burgher councillor Mostert. Of the Cape wine Mostert let him taste he wrote that the colour agreed with French wines, yet the flavour was a little of fennel—with which they cleaned the casks—and was not very strong but soft, though much used it could cause a turn in the head the next day. On Saturday evening, 28 November, he enjoyed a performance by Bax’s black steward on the harp and another young slave on the lute; the steward excelled especially in runs and preludes. At the farewell meal the two slaves played again, accompanied by a soldier on the violin; after dinner tea and confits were served and there was dancing. Later Bax, his wife, and his little son went with the travellers to the jetty for a parting glass. The next day the anchors were weighed, and on 9 December the Cape mountains disappeared from sight. [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; freemen’s houses already thickened the ground between the vanished earthen fort and the new masonry; 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. [2] [3]
Civic machinery thickened beside the military year. The matrimonial court of four commissioners joined the Orphan Chamber and the supervised consistory as standing boards under political-council election. Madagascar and Ceylon slaves enlarged the labour pool at a fixed Company price payable in wheat. Verburg’s early-year inspection had forwarded freemen’s demands on lent cattle, produce sale, Batavian trade rights, Hottentots Holland freeholds, and rice; the directors would answer in time, granting the cattle request fully, the middle requests partly, and refusing cheaper rice lest wheat cultivation suffer. Meerland remained in the pulpit through the pastoral continuity begun when De Voocht left in February 1674. [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; store presents had paid fidelity when Kees’s 165 cattle and 30 sheep would not stretch. Peace messengers from Gonnema would not reach the castle until June 1677. When 1676 ended, Bax held the chair van Herentals had conferred in March, Crudop remained secunde, Abraham van Riebeeck’s mid-November visit had already carried a founding son’s eyes over an enlarged garden and a castle still building, and the Cochoqua chief was still beyond a firm peace. [2] [3]