Boer History1678 at the Cape of Good Hope: Rice Scarcity, Hottentots Holland Pioneers, Bax’s Death, and Crudop
Rice Scarcity and Peninsula Disorder — Early 1678
The calendar year 1678 opened under Governor Johan Bax, entitled van Herentals, with the Cochoqua peace of June 1677 still new and the stone castle unfinished. Free farms still ended at Wynberg; the Company alone kept a large corn farm at Hottentots Holland and cattle posts farther out. Peninsula Khoikhoi who lived permanently about Table Valley had, over a quarter-century of European settlement, come to depend less on ancestral beach-ranging and more on rice and other food obtained for service about burgher houses. The men would tend cattle; the women sold fuel; many young girls were in domestic service. Sheepskins and cast-off European clothing, arrack, and tobacco marked their daily round more than independent herding on the shores of Table and Saldanha bays. [3]
Early in the year that fragile dependence broke. Rice grew so scarce in the settlement that burghers were compelled to discharge their dependents. No longer able to live as their ancestors had done, the discharged people were driven by hunger to seize sheep and even to plunder European houses in open day. At the same moment a party of San—called Bushmen in the records—took up their abode in the mountains at the back of Wynberg and descended at night upon the kraals of the farmers. In great alarm the free community appealed to the council for protection, and measures were promptly adopted to suppress the disorder. [3]
There was a large supply of ships’ biscuits in the magazines, and it was resolved to sell these at a very cheap rate to the burghers so that they might again employ and feed the Khoikhoi. Food was to be offered in payment to all who would work at the moat then being made round the castle. The country was to be patrolled night and day by horsemen. Rewards were offered for the apprehension of robbers. The twin crises of rice shortage and mountain raids thus forced the council to treat food distribution, fortress labour, and rural patrol as one problem rather than as separate police and commissariat questions. [3]
Schacher, Kuiper, Robbers, and Bushmen Executions
Captains Schacher and Kuiper were sent for. Upon their arrival at the castle they were informed that they would be detained as prisoners until their followers brought in such of the robbers as were known to be their people. Those persons were accordingly captured and delivered over without delay, and with some others they were transported to Robben Island. The hostage device converted Peninsula captains into the government’s recovery agents: only when known offenders were produced did the captains regain their liberty. [3]
The same captains subsequently captured five of the Bushmen, whom they brought to the castle and delivered to the governor, requesting that the prisoners might either be punished by the Europeans or be given back to them to be put to death. The council decided that as their crimes had been committed against the Honourable Company, they should be tried by the court of justice. A present of goods to the value of five pounds was made to the captains in return for their faithful services, and to encourage them to search for such of the brigands as were still at liberty. [3]
The five prisoners were tried by the court of justice, sentenced to death as highwaymen, and executed. The episode fixed, in a single season of scarcity, the pattern by which Cape authority claimed jurisdiction over violence against Company and burgher property even when the captors were Khoikhoi captains and the accused were San mountain raiders. Schacher and Kuiper received goods rather than the right to kill; the court of justice, not the kraal, closed the case. [3]
Through the same months the principles on which the government dealt with the natives remained those already practised under Bax: European power was treated as supreme in cases between whites and Khoikhoi and in differences between clans that threatened peace or Company interest, while interference in matters affecting natives only was rare. Captains Klaas, Koopman, Oedasoa, Gonnema, Schacher, Kuiper, and others stood on good terms with the governor and ready to do what he wished. A large cattle trade continued 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 council did what it could to prevent such disturbances and upon the whole succeeded. [3]
Church Foundation Stone — 9 April 1678
The little wooden church inside the fortress had already been judged full of graves by the close of 1677, when the Rev. Petrus Hulsenaar became the first burial in the new garden ground. Through 1678 the decision to level the old church site and to plant a new building at the lower end of the great garden was carried into stonework. A plot large enough for a cemetery had been enclosed with a strong wall; the garden could be extended with advantage toward the mountain. [3]
On the 9th of April 1678 the foundation stone of a church was laid in the centre of that enclosed ground. The stone church itself was not completed until December 1703, but the ground was used as a cemetery from Hulsenaar’s interment onward. Remains from the old fortress church were later removed to the new yard and deposited in a common grave. Fees of five pounds for a grave inside the future church and eight shillings for one outside were made payable to the church funds. The April ceremony thus fixed the long building site even while Sunday worship still depended on temporary arrangements after Hulsenaar’s death. [3]
First Freemen beyond the Peninsula — Hottentots Holland
Before 1678 no freemen were settled beyond the Cape peninsula. The Company held its corn farm at Hottentots Holland and a couple of cattle farms elsewhere, but no burghers had yet ventured farther than Wynberg. Seclusion from companionship, risk of stock loss to neighbouring peoples, and the danger of wild animals made the step serious: at one Company outpost alone, in a single night, no fewer than a hundred and twenty sheep had been destroyed by lions and hyenas. Firelocks and flint muskets were poor comfort against such losses on an exposed lease. [3]
In January of this year two men named Jochum Marquaar and Hendrik Elberts arranged with the government for the lease of a tract of land at Hottentots Holland with stock of horned cattle and sheep, and became the pioneer colonists of the interior. They were followed in February by two others named Henning Huising and Nicholas Gerrits, who established themselves as sheep farmers on the adjoining land, and in August by another named Cornelis Botma, who also set up as a sheep farmer. These were the only freemen who settled beyond the isthmus at this period—on so small a scale was the commencement of occupation of the interior districts. [3] [4]
The five leases placed free pastoral and mixed farming at the base of the Hottentots Holland mountains for the first time. They did not yet create freehold titles beyond Wynberg; the grants were leases for specified terms, and the Company’s own posts remained the older inland presence. Yet the January–August sequence marked a clear frontier shift: from a peninsula settlement that ended at Wynberg to a thin free fringe on the eastern side of the isthmus, reinforced from time to time thereafter by discharged soldiers and sailors and by a few Netherlands immigrants, though most short-service men still proved ill-adapted to farming and left again. [3] [4]
First Customs Duties and Private Ship Trade
Servants of the Company, including officers of ships, had long been permitted to trade for themselves to a small extent. They brought various articles to the Cape and sold them either to privileged dealers or to burghers generally, but only after obtaining permission from the council. In 1678 that private trade was found to interfere with the Company’s own sales, and it was resolved to levy duties upon it equivalent to the loss sustained. [3]
The first tariff of customs duties levied at the Cape, and the list of articles it covered, ran as follows: for a keg of brandy 33s. 4d.; a keg of arrack 16s. 8d.; a half aum of Rhenish wine 33s. 4d.; a half aum of French wine 25s.; a cask of mum 25s.; a pound of tobacco 1s. 4d.; a gross of pipes 2s. 6d.; 1,000 lbs. of rice 20s. 8d.; a canister of sugar 4s. 2d. Spirits, wine, tobacco, pipes, rice, and sugar thus became the measurable private cargo against which the council set cash duties rather than a simple ban. [3]
Immigrants and New Burgher Names under Bax
During the government of Mr. Bax several families of immigrants arrived from the Netherlands. A good many servants of the Company whose terms had expired also became burghers, but of these last few remained long in the colony. As a rule they were ill-adapted to become farmers, and after a short trial they usually returned to their former occupations. Worthless characters were warned once or twice and, if that failed, forcibly placed on board ship and sent away. A constant selection thus went on, in which those only remained who were qualified to make good colonists. [3]
Among the new names of this period were those of Douwe Steyn, Frans Bastiaans, Gerrit Victor, Nicholas Loubser, Jan Loots, Diederik Potter, Roelof Pasman, Jan Wessels, and three brothers, Willem, Roelof, and Adriaan van Wyk. The list mixed men who would root families in the free community with others who might still leave; together they mark the onomastic turnover of Bax’s later months rather than a single immigrant fleet. [3]
Maatsuyker’s Death and Van Goens as Governor-General — January 1678
On the 4th of January 1678 died Joan Maatsuyker, governor-general of Netherlands India during the preceding quarter of a century. He was succeeded by Ryklof van Goens the elder, already familiar in Cape affairs from earlier inspection visits and instructions. The succession belonged to Batavia’s high government rather than to Table Bay’s local council, yet it mattered for every outpost that drew orders and return fleets from the eastern capital—including a Cape still finishing its castle and opening free leases beyond the isthmus. [3]
Death of Governor Bax — 29 June 1678
Governor Bax had been in robust health previous to the winter of 1678, when he caught a severe cold which settled upon his lungs and completely prostrated him. He was confined to his bed for fifteen days before his death, which took place on the morning of the 29th of June. Just before his decease he gave instructions for carrying on the government and appointed the secunde Hendrik Crudop to succeed him, with the title of acting commander, until the pleasure of the authorities at Batavia or in the Netherlands should become known. [3]
On the 4th of July his remains were laid with as much state as possible inside the foundations of the new church. It was a dark and rainy day, but all the Europeans in the settlement attended, as did also several Khoikhoi captains and their chief men, for the late governor had been esteemed by whites and natives alike. A neat slab was afterwards brought from Robben Island and laid over the grave. Bax’s two years and three months in the chair van Herentals—from 14 March 1676 to 29 June 1678—thus closed with a funeral that joined Company officers, free burghers, and allied captains at the unfinished church site whose foundation stone had been set only in April. [3]
Crudop as Acting Commander and Overney as Clergyman
During the administration of Mr. Crudop very little occurred that calls for extended notice in the remainder of the calendar year. It was a time of peace; there was no important new work in hand that the acting commander could well launch without higher authority. The castle moat and ordinary provisioning continued; the five Hottentots Holland lessees held their ground; captains who had worked with Bax remained the ordinary channel for cattle trade and for the recovery of robbers. [3]
For ten months after the death of the Rev. Petrus Hulsenaar there was no resident clergyman at the Cape. Services were occasionally held by the chaplains of ships, and a sermon was read every Sunday and on special occasions by the sick-comforter, just as in the early days of the settlement. On the 18th of October 1678 the ship Wapen van Alkmaar arrived with a chaplain named Johannes Overney on board. As he consented to remain, the council appointed him acting clergyman until the pleasure of the supreme authorities should be known. He was afterwards confirmed in the appointment and remained at the Cape for several years. [3]
Overney’s arrival closed the long ministerial vacancy that had run from mid-December 1677. Baptisms, marriages before the matrimonial court established in 1676, and ordinary Sunday preaching again had a resident ordained voice, while Crudop held the political chair without the rank of full governor. The settlement entered the last weeks of 1678 under an acting commander and a newly seated clergyman, with free pastoral leases beyond the isthmus still measured in five names and the stone church still only a foundation and a graveyard. [3]
Settlement through the Rest of 1678
Through the rest of the year the European community lived without open Cochoqua war and without a full governor after June. Slave numbers continued to reflect earlier Madagascar and Ceylon importations; adult sales to burghers had been priced near cost in wheat under Bax. The matrimonial court of four commissioners—two Company servants and two burghers—still required every intending couple to show that no legal impediment existed before marriage. Private ship trade now paid the new spirit and grocery duties; forbidden burgher–Khoikhoi cattle barter remained under the severe penalties issued after the 1677 peace. [3]
When 1678 ended, rice scarcity and Wynberg night raids had been answered with cheap biscuit, moat food-wages, mounted patrols, Robben Island transport, and five capital sentences. The garden cemetery held both Hulsenaar’s first grave and Bax’s state burial inside the April foundations. Five freemen—Marquaar, Elberts, Huising, Gerrits, and Botma—held the first free leases beyond the peninsula at Hottentots Holland. Crudop administered as acting commander; Overney filled the pulpit from October; and in Batavia Van Goens the elder had replaced Maatsuyker at the head of Netherlands India. The Cape measured its year in food crisis, first interior free farms, and the death of the governor who had closed Gonnema’s war. [3] [4]