Boer History1679 at the Cape of Good Hope: Peace News, Castle Bastions, Van der Stel, and Stellenbosch
Franco–Dutch Peace, Garrison Cut, and Castle Labour — February 1679
The calendar year 1679 opened under acting commander Hendrik Crudop, who had held the chair since the death of Governor Johan Bax on 29 June 1678. The Cochoqua peace of 1677 still governed relations with the principal inland captains; free pastoral leases beyond the isthmus remained few; and the stone castle, though long under construction, still lacked a finished moat. Resident preaching continued under the Rev. Johannes Overney, seated the previous October after ten months without a settled clergyman. During Crudop’s administration very little of a dramatic kind occurred: it was a time of peace, there was no important work in hand beyond the unfinished fortress ditch, and nothing new could well be undertaken until the directors named a permanent successor. [3]
On the 10th of February 1679 intelligence was received of the conclusion of peace between France and the Netherlands. The news had immediate local effects. Another reduction of the Cape soldier establishment followed, and all the European labourers employed on the castle were released. The completion of the moat was judged the only work of importance that then remained, and that could be performed by slaves at a trifling expense to the Company. Peace in Europe thus translated, at the Cape, into fewer paid soldiers and freemen on fortress pay and a deliberate shift of residual earthwork onto enslaved labour. [3]
The decision marked how closely Cape military and building strength still tracked the Company’s wider war footing. While France and the United Provinces were at odds, Table Bay kept a thicker soldier establishment and European hands on the ramparts; once peace was known, Crudop’s council could thin both without abandoning the unfinished ditch. Ordinary provisioning, cattle trade with allied captains, and the thin free fringe beyond Wynberg continued under the same acting commander who had closed 1678. The February cut therefore did not announce a new inland programme: it announced that fortress labour no longer justified a wartime payroll once the European quarrel had ended. [3]
That quiet opening also fixed the institutional inheritance Bax had left. Overney’s appointment as acting clergyman, later confirmed, restored weekly preaching after the long gap that followed the death of the Rev. Petrus Hulsenaar. Services that had depended on ship chaplains and the sick-comforter’s reading of a sermon now again had a resident pastor. The same continuity of office that kept Crudop in the commander’s chair kept Overney in the pulpit while Amsterdam debated rank and person for the vacant Cape post. Peace news, garrison reduction, and slave labour on the moat were thus layered onto an already settled interim regime rather than onto a fresh constitutional start. [3]
Census of the Settlement — 9 April 1679
On the 9th of April 1679, when a census was taken, the free and bound population of the settlement was counted with unusual clarity. There were eighty-seven freemen, with fifty-five women, one hundred and seventeen children, thirty European men servants, one hundred and thirty-three men slaves, thirty-eight women slaves, and twenty slave children. The totals fixed a small free community still measured in tens of households, a modest free-servant layer, and a slave population already larger in adult males than the free men themselves. [3]
Read against the geography of the year, the figures describe a settlement still concentrated about Table Valley and the peninsula farms to Wynberg, with only a handful of freemen yet living beyond the isthmus. They also show how deeply enslaved labour had entered ordinary Cape work—castle ditch, Company garden, corn posts, and burgher households—before any large inland freehold expansion. The April count thus stands as a baseline for the commander who would arrive in October and for the first plough soon to turn soil in the valley later named Stellenbosch. [3]
The arithmetic of the return is worth dwelling on. Free adult men numbered eighty-seven; free women fifty-five; free children one hundred and seventeen—together a free community of two hundred and fifty-nine souls. Against them stood one hundred and ninety-one slaves of both sexes and ages, plus thirty European men servants. Adult male slaves alone already exceeded freemen. No later myth of an empty pastoral Cape in 1679 can stand beside those numbers: the refreshment station had become a small slave society before it became an inland freehold colony. When Van der Stel later redesigned the Company’s garden with more than a hundred slaves under European gardeners, he was organising labour already counted in April, not inventing a new labour system from nothing. [3]
The census also measured political scale. A commander chosen in Amsterdam would govern fewer than ninety free adult men, a thin militia and garrison after the February cut, and a slave majority in the bound workforce. Cattle trade with Hessequa and other allied captains still mattered more to the Company’s meat supply than any single freehold farm. The April return therefore framed every later decision of 1679—lease extensions beyond the isthmus, the rank of the new head, and the slow planting of freeholders at Stellenbosch—as the management of a compact peninsula station, not yet of a sprawling agrarian province. [3]
Five Points of the Castle Named — 26 April 1679
On the 26th of April the council resolved to name the five points of the castle in honour of the Stadtholder. The south point was called Orange, the south-east Nassau, the east Catzenellenbogen, the north Buren, and the west Leerdam. The nomenclature bound the unfinished stone fortress to the House of Orange–Nassau at the moment when European peace had already thinned the workforce that built it. [3]
Naming did not complete the works. The moat remained the principal outstanding task, now assigned chiefly to slaves. Yet the five titles gave every bastion a permanent political label in council minutes and daily speech, converting a construction site into a monument of Orange loyalty even while Crudop still governed only as acting commander pending a successor from Europe. South, south-east, east, north, and west each carried a princely name; the stone polygon ceased to be an anonymous engineering project and became, in language if not yet in finished masonry, the Castle of the Cape under Orange patronage. [3]
The timing was deliberate in more than one sense. Peace had just reduced the European labour force; the moat was left to slaves; and the council still waited on Amsterdam for a permanent head. To name the points for the Stadtholder in that interval was to assert continuity of Dutch and Orange identity at the Cape without waiting for a new commission to arrive in Table Bay. The ceremony of language cost little powder and no extra wages, yet it fixed the fortress vocabulary that later commanders, including Simon van der Stel, would inherit when they sat in the council chamber within those same walls. [3]
Eerste River and Tigerberg Leases — August 1679
In August 1679 permission was given to Henning Huising and his partner to graze their sheep along the Eerste River, provided they could satisfy the Khoikhoi who generally used the pasturage there and so prevent ill-feeling. At the same time the burghers Pieter Visagie and Jan Mostert obtained leave to cultivate a tract of ground lying on the east side of the Tigerberg, at the place where the Company usually gathered its hay. The two grants extended free pastoral and arable use deeper into the country already edged by the 1678 Hottentots Holland leases. [3] [4]
By then seven burghers were residing beyond the isthmus. To none of them had ground been granted in any other manner than on lease for certain specified terms. Up to the close of Crudop’s administration there was not an inch of land held as freehold, or in full property as it was termed in those days, farther away than Wynberg. The August permissions therefore thickened a leasehold fringe—Huising’s sheep on the Eerste, Visagie and Mostert on the Company’s old hay ground—without yet converting the interior into freehold farms. [3] [4]
The condition attached to Huising’s Eerste River leave—that the partners must satisfy the Khoikhoi customary users—recorded the council’s preferred method of avoiding open quarrel: private composition with local herders rather than an automatic extinguishing of older grazing claims. Tigerberg cultivation, by contrast, occupied a spot already familiar as a Company hay station, so that free tillage there grew out of an existing European extractive use. Together the grants show how far free occupation had crept by late winter 1679, and how strictly it remained leasehold beyond the Wynberg freehold limit. [3]
The geography of those seven names mattered for the autumn that followed. Hottentots Holland had already drawn free farmers to the base of the mountains in 1678; the Eerste River and Tigerberg permissions pushed grazing and plough farther along the same inland arc. When Van der Stel rode out in November he would not enter an utterly empty hinterland, but a country already marked by Company posts, leasehold kraals, and negotiated pasturage. What he would change was title: full property in the Stellenbosch valley, offered in the following seasons, broke the lease-only rule that still bound every freeman beyond Wynberg at the close of Crudop’s acting command. [3] [4]
Directors Choose a Commander — Simon van der Stel
Upon intelligence of the death of Governor Bax reaching the Netherlands, the directors of the East India Company considered that it would be unnecessary to appoint a successor of higher rank than a commander. The colony was therefore reduced again to its position before the arrival of Isbrand Goske. The officer whom they selected to fill the vacant post was then living in Amsterdam and was in the service of the chamber there, but he readily consented to remove to the Cape in the way of promotion. His name was Simon van der Stel. [3]
The rank decision mattered as much as the person. Bax and Goske had governed as full governors; Crudop had only acted; Van der Stel would land with the older, lower style of Cape headship restored. In Amsterdam terms the Cape remained an important refreshment station rather than a colony requiring continuous gubernatorial dignity. In local terms the choice ended more than a year of interim rule and promised a permanent hand on the council once the outward fleet delivered him. [3]
The directors’ calculation was economical. A commander’s salary and dignity sufficed for a post whose free population still numbered in the low hundreds and whose principal tasks remained the refreshment of fleets, the cattle trade, and the completion of the castle moat. Yet the man they chose would, in the judgment of later historians, exercise a greater influence upon the future of South Africa than any of his predecessors had done. The gap between the modest rank of 1679 and the long shadow of Van der Stel’s colonising programme began the moment the chamber in Amsterdam filled Bax’s vacancy downward rather than upward. [3]
Van der Stel’s acceptance was framed as promotion within Company service, not as a private colonial venture. He was already on the Amsterdam chamber’s books, poor in private fortune, and ready to improve his position by taking the Cape chair. That readiness matched the Seventeen’s wish for a competent, Dutch-minded officer who would not demand gubernatorial rank. Crudop, who had buried Bax and held the fort through scarcity and quiet months, would hand over in form once the outward ship reached Table Bay. [3]
Arrival and Installation — 12 October 1679
Van der Stel embarked in the ship Vrye Zee, which arrived in Table Bay on the 12th of October 1679. The secunde Crudop, with the members of the council, went off to welcome him, and amid discharges of cannon and musketry he landed and was received by the soldiers and militia under arms. In the council chamber in the castle the commission was read by the secretary, the officials all promised lawful obedience, and the new commander assumed the direction of affairs. [3]
The ceremony closed Crudop’s acting command without disgrace: the secunde who had buried Bax, seated Overney, named the bastions, and issued the August interior leases now stood down in form before a commissioned successor. For the free community the salutes and armed reception advertised that the Cape again had a permanent head chosen in the fatherland, not merely a local stop-gap waiting on Batavia or the Seventeen. [3]
The landing sequence itself followed Company etiquette for a new chief. Council members went out to the ship; cannon and musketry answered from shore; garrison and militia stood under arms at the landing; the secretary read the commission inside the castle; and every official pledged obedience before business resumed under the new name. From that hour the direction of affairs—leases, cattle trade, fortress labour, church, and garden—ran in Van der Stel’s name, even though the physical settlement he took over was still the compact station Crudop had administered through the first nine months of the year. [3]
Crudop did not vanish from the record as a failed placeholder. He had kept the peace of 1677, managed the quiet months after Bax’s death, reduced the garrison when Franco–Dutch peace was known, named the five points, and extended leasehold grazing without granting freehold past Wynberg. The October installation transferred authority; it did not repudiate the interim. Van der Stel’s first inspections of offices and neighbourhood would rest on books, stores, and outposts already ordered under that acting hand. [3]
Character and Family of Simon van der Stel
The officer now at the head of the Cape government was a son of Adriaan van der Stel, commander for the Honourable East India Company of the island of Mauritius. Born there on the 14th of November 1639, Simon van der Stel when very young was sent to the fatherland and had received a liberal education in the best schools of Holland. Connected by marriage with an ancient and influential family of Amsterdam, he had hitherto maintained the character of a highly respectable burgher, though the situation which he held in the service of the East India Company brought him in but a very limited income, and he had inherited little or nothing. He was poor, and so when an opportunity of improving his fortune was offered to him he gladly accepted it. [3]
In person Simon van der Stel was small, with a dark complexion, but open cheerful countenance. His habits were refined, and as far as his means would permit he surrounded himself with objects of taste. His courtesy and exceeding hospitality to strangers were later dwelt upon by more than one visitor to the Cape, as was also his fondness for telling marvellous tales of his adventures and creating merriment at his own expense. Witty, good-natured, and polite, he was also shrewd and possessed of a large amount of plain common sense. Against these qualities stood an inordinate desire for wealth, hardly noticeable in the early period of his government, which increased as he advanced in years and toward the close of his life drew upon him a suspicion of not being over-particular as to the methods of making money. [3]
A prominent trait of his character, as it affected South Africa, was intense patriotism of a narrowly Dutch kind. In his eyes everything that was Dutch was good, and whatever was not Dutch was not worthy of regard. From the day that he landed he studied how he could best make the district round the Cape resemble as closely as possible a province of the Netherlands—Dutch language, Dutch laws, Dutch institutions, and Dutch customs planted uncorrupted and unchanged. That programme would later colour land grants, schooling, and his reluctance to fill the country with foreigners; in October 1679 it was already the mind he brought ashore from the Vrye Zee. [3]
Commander Van der Stel brought with him his four sons, of whom the eldest, Willem Adriaan by name, was in after years governor of the colony. The youngest, Frans, became a farmer; and the remaining two, after farming, speculating, and holding various appointments in South Africa, removed elsewhere in the service of the East India Company. The commander’s lady was unable or unwilling to accompany him from Amsterdam. She remained there with her friends and never again saw her husband, though he continued to regard her with much affection. The Cape household of 1679 was therefore a masculine official family—father and sons—without the commander’s wife at table or in the garden lodge he would soon build for visitors of rank. [3]
Condition of the Colony at Van der Stel’s Arrival
When Simon van der Stel arrived in South Africa the colony comprised only the settlements around the foot of Table Mountain, the outposts at Saldanha Bay and Hottentots Holland, a cattle station at Tigerberg, and the ground held on lease beyond the isthmus by the seven burghers already named. The interior had been explored eastward about as far as the present village of George, and northward forty or fifty miles beyond the mouth of the Elephant River. The boundary between the Khoikhoi and Nguni-speaking farming peoples farther east was still unknown. The existence of the fabulous stream Camissa was firmly believed in, and it was laid down in the charts as entering the sea by two mouths, one of which was named Rio Infante and was placed in the position of the present Great Fish River. The Orange had never been heard of. [3]
That map of knowledge and occupation defined the field the new commander could actually administer in October 1679: a peninsula core, two coastal and agricultural outposts, one hay-and-cattle hill, seven leaseholders beyond the isthmus, and wide rumour of rivers and empires still unvisited. Friendly intercourse with neighbouring Khoikhoi and a large cattle trade—principally with the Hessequas—continued; San (Bushmen) still molested hunting parties from time to time. The political inheritance from Crudop was peace without expansion of freehold title past Wynberg. [3] [4]
Exploration had already stretched farther than settlement. Eastward journeys had reached toward the later George country; northward parties had passed the Elephant River mouth by tens of miles; yet free European occupation still hugged Table Mountain, the peninsula farms, and a few leasehold points beyond the sands of the isthmus. Charts still carried the Camissa and Rio Infante as if they were known mouths of a great interior stream, while the true Orange remained unnamed in Cape speech. Van der Stel therefore inherited both a small administered colony and a large half-imagined geography—an imbalance that would shape his later interest in Namaqua copper and northern roads, but that in October 1679 still left daily government focused on castle, garden, outposts, and the cattle trade. [3] [4]
Relations with neighbouring Khoikhoi were, at this moment, described as living on the best of terms with the Europeans, even while San mountain people occasionally troubled hunters. Captains who had made peace in 1677 and served as recovery agents in the scarcity of 1678 still stood within the Company’s diplomatic circle. The large Hessequa cattle trade remained the principal inland commercial artery. Expansion of free farms, when it came, would press on pastures those same communities used; the August condition that Huising satisfy Eerste River herders was already a small admission of that pressure inside an otherwise peaceful season. [3] [4]
Hottentots Holland Visit and Naming of Stellenbosch — November 1679
The commander devoted a few days to a thorough inspection of the government offices and of the country in the neighbourhood of the castle; after which, on the 3rd of November, he left the Cape for the purpose of visiting the station at Hottentots Holland. He was attended by a few servants and a small escort of soldiers. The party encamped that night at a place called the Kuilen, close by a stream which still bears that name. The following morning the commander rode to Hottentots Holland, where he was greatly pleased with the condition in which he found the farming establishment. After making himself acquainted with all particulars there, he resolved to examine the country inland, toward the mountains which seemed to bar further progress in that direction. [3]
In the afternoon of the 6th or 7th of November—it is not certain which, but it was probably the 6th—the commander with his attendants rode into the most charming valley he had yet seen. The hills which enclosed it were diversified in form, but all were clothed with rich grass, and in their recesses were patches of dark evergreen forest trees. Through the valley flowed a clear stream of sweet water, which at one point divided into two channels and uniting again farther down enclosed an island of considerable size. There, under a wide-spreading tree, the commander’s pavilion was spread, and close by was pitched a tent which was to serve him as a bedchamber. [3]
At the beginning of November the heat, even at midday, has not become oppressive, and the mornings and evenings in the pure air and under the clear sky are almost invariably pleasant. The commander, fresh from a long sea voyage, and at all times capable of appreciating the beauties of nature, was enchanted with the scene before him. He observed that the valley was not only beautiful to the eye, but that its soil was rich and its water abundant. It might be made the home of many thriving families. At this time there were no signs of human life beyond the commander’s own encampment, though the spot must often have been visited by bands of nomad Khoikhoi bringing their herds to graze upon its pastures. The island was dotted over thickly with fine trees, which suggested to the commander a name that should perpetuate his own memory in connection with the grove. He called it Stellenbosch. [3] [4] [8]
On the 8th of November the party reached the castle again, but during that journey of five days extensive plans of colonisation had been forming in the commander’s mind. He would build up a thriving settlement here at the extremity of Africa. He would begin at the place which bore his own name, and plant there a body of freeholders who would become attached to the soil. The great difficulty was to find men and women to make colonists of, for the fatherland could not furnish people in large numbers, and the commander objected to foreigners. The process of filling up the country must therefore be slow. [3]
The five-day circuit—from castle to Kuilen, to Hottentots Holland, into the islanded valley, and home again—thus did more than inspect an outpost. It supplied the commander with a concrete site, a personal place-name, and a colonising intention that rejected both rapid foreign immigration and mere leasehold drift. Stellenbosch was not yet a village with landdrost and school; it was a named valley and a resolve. Later writers would date the founding of the district to 1679 precisely because that November ride fixed the name and the programme, even though the larger body of free families and formal freehold offers belonged to the seasons that followed. [3] [4] [8]
First Plough at Stellenbosch and Garden Plans — Late 1679
Before the close of the year the first farmer of Stellenbosch had put his plough into the ground there. The act converted the November naming from a travellers’ label into the start of permanent free occupation inland of Hottentots Holland. Larger parties and formal freehold offers on the valley floor belonged to the following seasons; what 1679 itself secured was the name, the commander’s colonising intention, and at least one working plough before December ended. In May 1680 a party of eight families would remove together under an offer of as much land as they could cultivate, selectable by themselves in the Stellenbosch valley, to be held in full property and reclaimable by the Company only if left uncultivated—but that freehold wave lay beyond the calendar of this year. [3] [4]
Before the arrival of Simon van der Stel the large garden in Table Valley had been used chiefly to produce vegetables for the Company’s people and the fleets. Very little had been done in it in the way of ornamentation. One of the earliest acts of the commander was to prepare a plan which he steadily carried out until the Company’s garden at the Cape became something wonderful in the eyes of visitors. By that plan the ground was divided into a great number of small parallelograms separated from each other by live hedges high enough to break the force of the wind—some plots for fruit, some for vegetables, some as nurseries of European timber trees, others for foreign experiments and for wild African plants whose properties might be ascertained. [3]
The redesign began in the same closing months that saw the Stellenbosch plough. Van der Stel enlarged the garden toward the mountain and cut off a narrow strip at the lower end on which he intended in course of time to erect a hospital and a building for the accommodation of the Company’s slaves. Just inside the new main entrance he had a pleasure house or lodge put up, and there he usually entertained visitors of rank. The whole garden could be irrigated by the stream then called the Sweet River, and its drainage was carefully attended to. Over a hundred slaves were usually employed in keeping it in order, working under skilful Europeans who received directions from a chief gardener or superintendent. The full fame of the garden and the later botanical labours associated with men such as Hendrik Bernard Oldenland unfolded over subsequent years; the decision and first layout, however, belonged to the commander’s opening season in 1679. [3]
Garden and valley together announced the style of the new government. At Stellenbosch the commander sought freeholders attached to the soil under Dutch norms; in Table Valley he sought a Company garden that would impress every fleet and foreign visitor with order, variety, and Dutch taste. Both projects used the labour and geography already counted in April—slaves in the plots, leasehold and outpost farmers on the road to Hottentots Holland—and both rejected mere subsistence refreshment as the ceiling of Cape ambition. The fatherland might send few emigrants, and foreigners were unwelcome in the commander’s scheme, but the ground itself could be renamed, ploughed, hedged, and irrigated into a likeness of a Netherlands province at the extremity of Africa. [3]
When 1679 ended, Franco–Dutch peace had thinned the Cape military establishment and released European castle labourers; the five bastions bore Orange names; the April census had numbered freemen, servants, and slaves; seven leaseholders held ground beyond the isthmus, including new Eerste River and Tigerberg permissions; Crudop had yielded the chair to Simon van der Stel on 12 October; Stellenbosch had been named in early November; and the first free plough and a new garden plan had begun to mark the commander’s programme on the ground. [3] [4] [8]