Boer History1677 at the Cape of Good Hope: Gonnema’s Peace, the Bode Survey, Moat Labour, and Hulsenaar’s Death
Peace Feelers from Gonnema — 8 June 1677
The calendar year 1677 opened under Governor Johan Bax, entitled van Herentals, with the Cochoqua war still unfinished. The last field expedition of 1676 had failed to surprise Gonnema in the Sugarbergen and had struck instead at Captain Kees near Saldanha Bay. Through the early months of the new year no further mixed commando marched inland; the redoubts Kyk-uit and Keert-de-Koe still covered the outermost Rondebosch and Wynberg farms, and the Peninsula captains remained bound to Cape policy. The four-year disturbance that had run since 1673 waited on a political opening rather than on another empty night march. [3]
That opening came on the 8th of June 1677. Captain Kuiper and another petty captain appeared at the castle accompanied by messengers from Gonnema. Their mission was only to ask whether peace could be established. They were persons of no rank and brought no peace offerings. They asserted that if the prospects were favourable it was Gonnema’s intention to visit the governor and thereafter to trade in friendship with the Europeans. The council treated the feeler as serious enough to answer, but not as a finished treaty. [3]
The reply was carefully staged. The messengers were told that the overture was agreeable, and that if the Cochoquas would send a more respectable deputation to make due submission to the Honourable Company, the government was prepared to enter into a firm peace—provided the European allies were also included. A safe conduct good for three months was issued, and a small present was sent to Gonnema as coming from Lieutenant Hieronymus Cruse, the officer who had led the wartime commandos. The feeler thus converted a military stalemate into a short diplomatic corridor without yet binding either side. [3]
Peace Concluded — 24 June 1677
On the 24th of June the same messengers returned to the castle. They brought a present of nine head of cattle and were accompanied by three men of position named Nengue, Harru, and Nuguma, empowered to ask for peace. The ambassadors and their followers were admitted to the council chamber. The burgher councillors and the chief officer of the militia were present as well, so that the free community’s civic heads sat with the Company council for the act that was to close the open war. [3]
The conditions, purposely embodied in a few short clauses, were interpreted and explained. The Cochoqua envoys signified their assent by a general exclamation of Sam! sam!—“Peace! peace!” The clauses were then placed on record with the signatures of the officials and the marks of the envoys. Presents were made to each of the Khoikhoi present, and a good quantity of tobacco, pipes, beads, and similar goods was sent to Gonnema in return for the nine cattle. With that exchange the country was restored to a state of tranquillity again after four disturbed years. [3]
Conditions of the Cochoqua Peace
The recorded terms were brief and practical. In the first place the ambassadors requested forgiveness for the acts which had occasioned the war and asked that a friendly intercourse might be established as before. They offered and promised to deliver as tribute thirty head of cattle upon the arrival of the first return fleet in every year. They promised to punish their people in the same manner as the Honourable Company did—subsequent practice showing that stock theft and similar offences were to be treated as crimes of magnitude, not lightly passed over. They promised not to wage war against any of the Company’s allies without the knowledge of the government. [3]
The peace expressly included the captains Kuiper and Schacher, the petty captain Kees, and all who were subject to Gonnema, Schacher, and Kuiper. The clause folded wartime allies and wartime enemies into one tranquillity: Kees, stripped at Saldanha Bay the previous year, stood inside the settlement rather than outside it; Schacher and Kuiper, who had marched with Cruse against Cochoqua kraals, were named as parties the Cochoquas might no longer strike without Cape leave. Tribute, allied protection, and criminal discipline thus replaced the mixed commando as the ordinary instrument of inland order under Bax. [3]
Stringent Regulations on Burgher–Khoikhoi Intercourse
Peace did not open free private trade. Notwithstanding the strict regulations that had from time to time prohibited traffic between burghers and Khoikhoi, the forbidden commerce was discovered to be carrying on to a large extent. Laws even more severe than the old ones were therefore issued and enforced. It was made a capital offence to furnish a Khoikhoi person with firearms or any kind of munitions of war. Two guns that farmers had already bartered for cattle were recovered only with great difficulty and at considerable expense. [3]
It was made a penal offence to pay natives for labour in money—because, the council held, they did not know its value and rated their services too dear—or in half-breed sheep, because robberies could not be traced if such animals were in Khoikhoi possession. One assigned reason for preventing traffic was fear that farmers might imprudently commit some act that would lead to serious difficulties. Another was to keep down the price of cattle: in that traffic the Company would not permit its subjects to become its rivals. The government was anxious that farmers should hold large herds and flocks; it supplied stock at rates little above cost and hired breeding cows and ewes on equal shares of the increase. It even promised that if burghers brought to the stores any Khoikhoi who came to them with goods for sale, they might repurchase those goods at exact cost price. [3]
Offering those inducements to obedience, the council prohibited the purchase of cattle by a burgher from a Khoikhoi under penalty of severe corporal punishment, and the purchase of other merchandise—ivory, ostrich feathers, peltries, and the like—under penalty of a fine of four pounds and such further punishment as the court of justice might inflict. Khoikhoi captains under government influence were required not to purchase from those farther inland under pain of being considered unfriendly. Police regulations for searching waggons at the barrier beyond the castle and at the watch-house Keert-de-Koe, together with frequent inspection of farmers’ kraals, still could not entirely suppress the forbidden traffic. That the severe rules produced no burgher remonstrance marked how far Company monopoly on cattle still framed free opinion at the Cape. [3]
The Case of Willem Willems
The fear of lawless deeds on the frontier was not abstract. In 1672 a man named Willem Willems had deliberately shot a Khoikhoi person upon very slight provocation and afterwards escaped to Europe in a Danish ship. In Holland he presented himself before the Prince of Orange and, by false representations, procured a safe conduct to return to the Cape, where he had a family and some property. When he reappeared, the council felt bound to respect the safe conduct, but as Khoikhoi far and wide clamoured for justice the criminal was placed on Robben Island until instructions could be received from the directors. [3]
A close investigation into the homicide was made and the evidence sent to Europe. In course of time instructions came back to send Willems with his family to Mauritius, but his wife—who in the meantime had caused great trouble by her misconduct—objected, and delay followed. Eventually the family was deported to Batavia; when they returned again to the Cape they were banished to Mauritius and not permitted afterwards to leave that island. The long case sat beside the new peace as a warning that private violence against Khoikhoi could not be closed by a princely paper alone, and that the council would use island exile when local clamour and Company order both demanded removal. [3]
The Bode Surveys the West Coast — January to May 1677
In January 1677 a little yacht named the Bode was sent along the west coast to examine it carefully, to ascertain how far the Khoikhoi race extended, and to endeavour to discover the island of St Helena Nova. She was accompanied by a cutter drawing very little water and therefore adapted to run close in shore. The voyage was a survey of coasts the refreshment station had long named on charts but had not yet traced with a dedicated small craft under peacetime orders. [3]
The Bode went as far as latitude 12° 47′ S, where she found a small Portuguese fort named Sombreira. Some distance to the southward the last Khoikhoi had been seen, but the line of demarcation between them and the negro races could not be exactly ascertained. The Portuguese knew nothing whatever of such an island as St Helena Nova, and from this date its existence was held to be a fiction. Along the coast various bays or bights were discovered, but all were found wanting in fresh water and fuel. It is surprising that the mouth of the Orange River was not noticed in passing. The Bode returned to Table Bay at the end of May, having been rather more than four months engaged in the survey. [3]
Voorhout and Quartel on the South-East Coast
While the Bode worked the Atlantic shore, the seaboard of the district later called Zululand was carefully examined by the Voorhout and the Quartel, two small vessels sent to the Bay of St Augustine to trade for slaves. The double task—coast reconnaissance on the outward run and a slave cargo at the Madagascar destination—fitted the Cape’s standing need for labour and for knowledge of the long south-east littoral that return fleets and outward Indiamen both skirted. [3]
Together the west-coast survey and the St Augustine voyage marked 1677 as a year in which Bax’s administration looked outward once the inland war allowed. The castle still lacked labour for its moat; the free farms still sat inside a few miles of Peninsula pasture; yet small Company craft were tracing Khoikhoi limits toward Angola, discarding a phantom Atlantic island, and probing the south-east coast on the way to a known slave market. [3]
Cattle Trade and Captains under Bax
A quarter of a century had elapsed since the first European landing. Khoikhoi living permanently in the Cape peninsula had increased considerably in number and kept a kraal in Table Valley on the upper side of the later Hottentot Square, but in general they were found lounging about the houses of the burghers. The men could not be induced to do any other work than tend cattle; the women gathered fuel for sale; the young girls were mostly in service. They dressed in sheepskins and cast-off European clothing and depended for food principally upon rice obtained in return for such service as they performed. They had become passionately fond of arrack and tobacco. [3]
After the June peace the principles on which the government dealt with the natives remained that European power was supreme, entitled to take cognisance of all cases between whites and Khoikhoi and to settle differences between the clans so as to preserve peace and secure Company interests, while rarely interfering in matters affecting natives only. The captains accepted without murmur the positions assigned to them. At this time Klaas, Koopman, Oedasoa, Gonnema, Schacher, Kuiper, and the others were on such good terms with Governor Bax that they were ready to do whatever he wished. A large cattle trade was carried on with them and with the Hessequas. Occasional violence still occurred—in one instance two Khoikhoi were shot in a quarrel with the Company’s hunters—but the government did what it could to prevent such disturbances and upon the whole succeeded. [3]
Basket Labour at the Castle Moat — 25 November 1677
Work at the castle proceeded very slowly for want of labourers. To expedite excavation of the moat a plan that seemed somewhat whimsical was adopted. On the 25th of November 1677 the governor himself, his lady, his little son, all the Company’s officers and their wives, the burgher councillors, and other leading inhabitants with their wives set to work for a considerable time carrying out earth. The governor carried out twelve baskets full and his lady six. [3]
After this example a regulation was made that everyone who passed the castle—male or female, irrespective of rank—should contribute labour to the same extent. The gesture tied fortress completion to the whole free and official community at a moment when slave importations and ship labour still could not fill the moat fast enough. Symbolic basket-work by Bax’s household did not replace gangs, but it fixed a public rule of passage labour on every person who used the castle approaches. [3]
Death of the Rev. Petrus Hulsenaar — 15 December 1677
The little wooden church inside the fortress was by now quite full of graves. The ground on which it stood was higher than the general surface, and it was considered advisable to level it and to remove the old building. A site for a new church had therefore to be selected. It was resolved to take a portion of the lower end of the great garden for this purpose, as the garden could be extended with advantage toward the mountain. A plot sufficiently large for a cemetery was enclosed with a strong wall. [3]
The first interment in the new ground was the body of the Rev. Petrus Hulsenaar, clergyman of the Cape, who died on the 15th of December 1677 and was buried in the middle of the site on which the church was afterwards to stand. Subsequently the remains of those who had been buried in the old church were removed to this ground and deposited in a common grave. A fee of five pounds was hereafter made payable to the church funds for a grave inside the church, and eight shillings for one outside. Through the last weeks of the year the settlement thus lost its resident minister and gained a walled burial ground at the garden’s lower end, even while the stone church itself remained a work for later seasons. [3]
Jan van Riebeeck’s Death in Batavia — 18 January 1677
Far from Table Bay, but still bound to the Cape’s founding household, Jan van Riebeeck died in Batavia in the morning hours of the 18th of January 1677, after months of illness. He was buried the next afternoon with near military honour in the great church of the city: the governor-general and the members of the Council of India followed the bier, preceded by a company of castle soldiers in full armour. The gravestone remembered him as first founder of the colony at Cabo de Boa Esperance, former president of Malacca, and latterly secretary of the High Government of India, dead at fifty-eight. [2]
His son Abraham van Riebeeck, who had dined with Governor Bax at the Cape in mid-November 1676 while outward bound, reached Batavia on the 16th of February 1677—twenty-eight days after his father’s death—and entered Company service there as a merchant. The Cape itself did not change governors on that Batavian news; Bax remained in the chair van Herentals had conferred in March 1676, with secunde Hendrik Crudop still beside him. Yet the death closed the life of the man who had opened the refreshment station in 1652, while his Cape-born son’s arrival in the eastern capital tied the founding family to a new generation of Company office far from Liesbeek and the castle garden Abraham had walked the previous November. [2]
Settlement under Bax through the Rest of 1677
Through the remainder of the year the European community lived under a governor no longer organising the whole labour budget around fear of an English fleet, and no longer sending mixed commandos after Gonnema. The stone castle remained unfinished; its moat now claimed basket labour from every passer-by. Free farms still ended at Wynberg; no freemen had yet settled beyond the Cape peninsula, though the Company kept a large corn farm at Hottentots Holland and cattle posts farther out. Slave numbers continued to be fed by Madagascar and Ceylon importations already under way in Bax’s first year, with adult sales to burghers priced near cost in wheat. [3]
When 1677 ended, the four-year Cochoqua war was closed on paper and in the cattle tribute of the first return fleet. Kees, Schacher, and Kuiper stood inside the same peace that bound Gonnema; private guns and private cattle barter were capital or corporal risks; the Bode had written St Helena Nova out of the charts; Hulsenaar lay in the new garden cemetery; and the founding commander’s death in Batavia had passed into the eastern record while Bax still held the Cape. The settlement measured its frontier in Peninsula miles and its inland order in annual oxen rather than in night marches beyond the Berg River. [3] [2]