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. A quarter-century had elapsed since the first Europeans landed in Table Valley. In that time the habits of the Khoikhoi who lived permanently on the peninsula had changed more in diet and dress than in willingness to take European labour. They had increased considerably in number and still kept a kraal in Table Valley on the upper side of what later generations called 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; 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. Food they obtained principally as rice and other supplies paid for service about burgher houses. [3]
Early in the year that fragile dependence broke. Rice grew so scarce in the settlement that the burghers were compelled to discharge their dependents. No longer able to live as their ancestors had done by beach-ranging and independent stock, 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 same excavation that Bax, his lady, and the leading inhabitants had themselves carried baskets from on 25 November 1677, and that every passer-by had since been bound to feed with twelve baskets of earth. 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]
The scarcity was not an abstract famine of the whole settlement. Magazines still held biscuit enough to underwrite cheap sales; what failed was the rice on which Peninsula dependents had come to rely, and with it the domestic labour bargain that had kept those dependents fed about burgher hearths. Once discharged, they could not simply resume the old shore life of a generation earlier: numbers had risen, arrack and tobacco habits had taken hold, and independent herding no longer fed the same households. Night raids from the Wynberg mountains and daylight sheep seizures therefore arrived together, and the council’s answer—biscuit, moat wages in food, mounted patrols, and rewards—tried to restore employment and suppress theft in the same stroke. [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. Both men had already figured in the peacemaking of the previous June, when Cochoqua envoys accepted a short written peace that expressly included Schacher and Kuiper among the Company’s allies; the same channel of command was now turned from wartime diplomacy to police recovery under scarcity. [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. The five prisoners were tried by the court of justice, sentenced to death as highwaymen, and executed. [3]
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. Transport to Robben Island for known Peninsula robbers and capital sentence for the five highwaymen thus stood as parallel instruments—exile for one class of offender, the gallows for another—under the same council that had just underwritten biscuit sales and moat food-wages. [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]
That good order rested on restrictions already tightened after the 1677 peace. Burghers were still forbidden to purchase cattle from Khoikhoi under penalty of severe corporal punishment, and other merchandise such as ivory, ostrich feathers, and peltries under a fine of four pounds and such further punishment as the court of justice might inflict. Captains under government influence were required not to buy from those farther inland under pain of being considered unfriendly. Waggons passing the barrier beyond the castle and the watch-house Keert-de-Koe were searched; farmers’ kraals were inspected. The regulations produced no remonstrance from the free community, who did not treat the cattle monopoly as an invasion of privilege even while private barter continued to leak through the barriers. Scarcity, San raids, and hostage police thus unfolded inside a peacetime trade regime that still reserved the inland ox and sheep market to the Company. [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. The ground on which it stood was higher than the general surface, and the council considered it advisable to level the site and remove the old building. A new site was therefore required. It was resolved to take a portion of the lower end of the great garden for the purpose, as the garden could be extended with advantage toward the mountain. A plot large enough for a cemetery was enclosed with a strong wall. Through 1678 that decision was carried into stonework. [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 the first. The first interment in it had already been 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 fortress church were removed to the new yard and deposited in a common grave. A fee of five pounds was made payable to the church funds for a grave inside the future church, and eight shillings for one outside. [3]
The April ceremony thus fixed the long building site even while Sunday worship still depended on temporary arrangements after Hulsenaar’s death. For ten months after mid-December 1677 there was no resident clergyman at the Cape: ship chaplains held occasional services, and a sick-comforter read a sermon every Sunday and on special occasions, just as in the early days of the settlement. The foundation stone therefore marked a cemetery and a future nave more than a finished parish. Fees already attached to inside and outside graves, and the common grave of the transferred fortress dead, made the garden plot a working churchyard long before walls and roof closed over the April stone. [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. It needed no small amount of courage to hazard a life so far from the castle watch and the Rondebosch neighbourhood. [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. Later narrative would mark the same season as the moment when land at the base of the Hottentots Holland mountains became burghers’ farms, while the Company’s own later out-station at Klapmuts still lay five years ahead. [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. Up to the close of Crudop’s later administration there would not be an inch of land held as freehold, or in full property as it was then termed, farther away than Wynberg. 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]
The geography mattered as much as the names. Hottentots Holland already held the Company’s corn farm; freemen now took adjoining pastoral ground rather than empty wilderness beyond all European knowledge. Hieronymus Cruse had crossed those mountains eastward as early as 1668 on the way toward Mossel Bay, so the leases sat on a corridor already walked by soldiers and cattle traders. What changed in 1678 was tenure: private leasehold stock-farming beside the Company post, not another official outpost alone. On that small scale—five men across eight months—the occupation of the interior districts began. [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. The answer was not a simple ban but a cash tariff that measured private cargo against the magazines’ own retail. [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. That rice itself stood on the tariff in the same year as the peninsula rice scarcity underscored how closely shipboard grocery trade touched both Company profit and the food of dependents about burgher houses. [3]
Permission from the council remained the gate; the novelty was the price of passage through it. Officers and servants could still land private parcels for sale to privileged dealers or to the free community, but each keg and canister now carried a published duty calibrated to what the Company reckoned it lost when those sales undercut the official stores. The tariff is the first of its kind in the Cape record, and it freezes in one list the groceries and comforts that ship traffic actually moved beside official cargo in Bax’s last year. [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. The free community grew less by a single immigrant fleet than by this slow filter of families from the Fatherland and of time-expired servants who could stand a farmer’s year. [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 passenger roll. Later expansion beyond the peninsula would draw on such names as well as on discharged soldiers and sailors permitted to leave the ships, though the largest single addition to colonial population still lay a decade ahead with the Huguenots of 1688. [3] [4]
Selection cut both ways. Immigrants who took land and stayed thickened the burgher rolls; short-service men who failed at the plough went back to deck and barrack; characters the council judged worthless were shipped out after warning. The Hottentots Holland leases of Marquaar, Elberts, Huising, Gerrits, and Botma belonged to the same filter in another form—five men willing to risk lions, hyenas, and isolation on term leases while others still preferred the peninsula’s shorter walk to the castle. [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]
Maatsuyker’s long tenure had covered the whole rise of the Cape from van Riebeeck’s refreshment station through the English wars, the first free-burgher grants, and the Cochoqua conflict closed only the previous June. Van Goens, who had more than once shaped Cape policy in person and on paper, now sat at the head of the eastern hierarchy that confirmed commanders, judged expensive works, and routed the return fleets on which the settlement still depended for news, specie, and relief. The January death and succession did not alter Bax’s local commission, but they reset the signature at the top of the correspondence that would later receive news of Bax’s own death and of Crudop’s acting command. [3]
Far from both Batavia and Table Bay, the founding family still registered the year’s ordinary joys and griefs. In the Netherlands, Lambertus van Riebeeck—advocate at the Court of Holland and son of the Cape’s first commander—had married Sara van Tiel in May 1677; their first child, a daughter named Maria, was baptised in The Hague on 12 April 1678, three days after the church foundation stone was laid in the Cape garden. Less than six months later, on 26 September 1678, Lambertus died. Word of that death reached his brother Abraham in the course of 1679 at Batavia, where Abraham had already begun the merchant’s career that would carry him into the Council of Justice and, much later, to high office in India. [2]
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. The dying governor thus provided for continuity without presuming to name a full successor of his own rank. [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; later waves of disturbance about the church seem to have swept the stone from sight. 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]
Later colonial memory ranked Bax van Herentals among the more popular of the Dutch Company’s rulers at the Cape, naming him with figures such as the Marquis de Chavonnes and Ryk van Tulbagh as men whose service still seemed, to a later generation, to have done the country lasting good. That reputation rested on a short administration: the Gonnema peace of June 1677, the moat labour that bound every passer-by to the castle works, the first free leases beyond the isthmus, and a personal standing with Khoikhoi captains sufficient that they walked in his funeral train on a wet July day. Fifteen days of lung illness ended the robust health that had carried him through wartime commandos’ aftermath and peacetime building; Crudop took the acting chair the same morning the instructions were given. [3] [7]
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. Crudop’s title was deliberately lower than governor: he held the settlement until Batavia or the Seventeen should name a permanent head, and he did not pretend to open a new programme of exploration or fortification on his own warrant. [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—now holding both Hulsenaar’s first interment and Bax’s state burial inside the April lines. [3]
When news of Bax’s death later reached the Netherlands, the directors would judge it unnecessary to appoint a successor of higher rank than a commander, reducing the colony again to the status it had held before Isbrand Goske’s governorship. The officer they chose, Simon van der Stel, was then living in Amsterdam in the service of that chamber; he would not reach Table Bay until October 1679. Through the intervening months Crudop’s quiet administration was exactly what the interim required: peace kept, moat and magazines tended, no expensive new design begun without a confirmed head. [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. Most of those slaves were men, with a few women and children among them; children were sent to school, but baptism was withheld until parents could be instructed in Christianity so that families might be baptised together. A person was employed to recite prayers morning and evening, which the adults were required to repeat. Some of the cleverest youths were placed with master mechanics to learn trades. The price charged by the Company to burghers for an adult slave was equal to about 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. [3]
The matrimonial court established in 1676 still consisted of four commissioners, two Company servants and two burghers. Half the members retired yearly, their places 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, to show that no legal impediment existed. As long as the frontier was only a few miles distant the rule was no hardship; with the first free leases beyond the isthmus it began a long slow journey toward later complaint. Private ship trade now paid the new spirit and grocery duties; forbidden burgher–Khoikhoi cattle barter remained under the severe penalties issued and renewed after the 1677 peace. [3]
Civic boards thus thickened beside the military year even while the governorship fell vacant. The Orphan Chamber already managed estates of the dead; the supervised consistory and the matrimonial commissioners handled moral and marriage discipline; the council of policy under Crudop after 29 June still drew on the same officer class that had served Bax—men such as lieutenant Hieronymus Cruse, who had led the wartime commandos and whose name had carried the small present to Gonnema during the June 1677 feelers. Redoubts and watch-houses on the peninsula approaches, including Keert-de-Koe on the waggon barrier, continued to frame searches and patrols that scarcity had made urgent in the year’s first months. [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, with fees already fixed for graves inside and outside the future church. Five freemen—Marquaar, Elberts, Huising, Gerrits, and Botma—held the first free leases beyond the peninsula at Hottentots Holland. The first Cape customs tariff taxed private brandy, arrack, wine, mum, tobacco, pipes, rice, and sugar. New burgher names from Steyn to the van Wyk brothers marked the slow filter of immigrants and time-expired servants. Crudop administered as acting commander; Overney filled the pulpit from October; in Batavia Van Goens the elder had replaced Maatsuyker at the head of Netherlands India; and in The Hague the Cape founder’s son Lambertus had buried the year between a daughter’s April baptism and his own death in September. The Cape measured its year in food crisis, first interior free farms, the first published customs list, and the death of the governor who had closed Gonnema’s war. [2] [3] [4] [7]