Boer History1681 at the Cape of Good Hope: Van Goens, Namaqua Copper, and Stellenbosch Wheat
Van der Stel’s Third Year and Stellenbosch Growth
The calendar year 1681 opened with Simon van der Stel in his third season as commander. He had landed from the Vrye Zee on 12 October 1679, taken the oaths in the castle council chamber, and within weeks ridden inland past Hottentots Holland into the valley he named Stellenbosch. Before 1679 closed, the first free farmer there had put a plough into the ground; in May 1680 eight families had removed together from the Cape district on freehold terms—self-selected plots as large as they could cultivate, reclaimable by the Company only if left untilled, burdened with a produce tithe, and barred from tobacco. What remained in 1681 was to thicken that foothold, fix disputed bounds, and test whether the new district could feed more than its own households. [3] [4] [8]
The colony he administered was still small. Occupation clustered about Table Mountain, with outposts and stations at Saldanha Bay, Hottentots Holland, and Tigerberg, while freehold farther inland than Wynberg remained a recent experiment. Up to the close of Hendrik Crudop’s acting command there had been no freehold farther from the castle than Wynberg; seven burghers had been residing beyond the isthmus by the late Crudop months, among them Henning Huising on the Eerste River pastures and Pieter Visagie and Jan Mostert on the Company’s old Tigerberg hay ground, all still on lease rather than full property. Van der Stel’s programme for 1681 therefore had a clear centre of gravity: densify free settlement where he had already chosen a name and seen the first plough turn, under terms stronger than the short pastoral and hay-ground leases of 1678–1679. [3] [4]
Neighbouring Khoikhoi lived on the best of terms with the Europeans. A large cattle trade continued, carried on principally with the Hessequas; and now and again a party of hunters was molested by San (Bushmen). That peaceful commercial frame, not open war, was the background against which Van der Stel pressed inland agriculture and northern curiosity in the same year. Cory noted more broadly that expansion of white occupation was anything but gratifying to pastoral communities who found themselves excluded from lands over which they had been accustomed to roam; the working sources for 1681, however, still describe the nearer relationship as one of peace and trade rather than open hostilities. [3] [4]
The commander remained anxious to know the Namaquas better, believing their country might hold commercial wealth beyond ordinary barter. Ordinary refreshment-station duties—fleets in Table Bay, the Company garden in Table Valley, resident preaching under the Rev. Johannes Overney, and castle administration—ran in parallel with that inland programme. The year’s distinctive marks would be a commissioner’s memorial in March, a Namaqua embassy in December bearing copper, a shipping census closing on the last day of December, and a Stellenbosch harvest rich enough to put fresh bread before soldiers as well as burghers. [3] [8]
Commissioner Ryklof van Goens the Younger — 20 March 1681
On the 20th of March 1681 commissioner Ryklof van Goens the younger issued standing instructions for commander Simon van der Stel and the council. The memorial belongs to the same series of visiting-commissioner documents that framed Cape government after each major inspection—Nicholas Verburg’s instructions of 15 March 1676 for Governor Bax, Sybrand Abbema’s of 27 March 1680 for the same commander, and later the retired governor-general Ryklof van Goens the elder’s memorial of 24 April 1682 and the high commissioner Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein’s of 16 July 1685. Van Goens the younger’s date fixes 1681 as a year in which higher authority again addressed the Cape under its restored commander rank. [3] [8]
The timing sat between Abbema’s first-season memorial and the fuller visit of the retired governor-general in the following year. Van der Stel had governed through one complete freehold planting at Stellenbosch; several more families would join the valley in 1681 itself; and the Namaqua invitation that produced the December deputation was still months ahead. A commissioner’s instructions at that hinge bound colonising work, trade discipline, and refreshment policy to the Company’s ordinary inspection cycle rather than leaving them as purely personal initiatives of the commander. The sequence of memorials—Abbema in March 1680, Van Goens the younger in March 1681, Van Goens the elder in April 1682, Van Rheede in July 1685—would refine courts, landdrost office, and slave rules; the March 1681 text was the second such formal address of the Van der Stel command. [3]
For free households and Company servants alike, such visits meant continuity of paperwork and expectation: titles, tithes, foreign-ship rules, and local courts would later grow from the same administrative soil. Botha later summarised the commander’s place at the head of Company affairs and the burgher population, with the Council of Policy exercising executive and legislative functions under the veto of Holland and Batavia—an architecture that visiting commissioners reinforced rather than replaced. In March 1681 the visible result was simpler—the commander who was about to send Captain Kees north and to ride among Stellenbosch freeholders held written instructions from Van Goens the younger as the season opened. [3] [8]
That inspection culture also reminded the settlement how thin its permanent European population still was. Between January 1672 and the close of 1681 three hundred and sixty-eight ships would put into Table Bay—three hundred and forty-four of them Company vessels, with eleven English, ten Danish, and three French among the foreigners—yet the free inland households of 1681 could still be counted in small multiples of the eight families of May 1680. Van Goens the younger’s instructions therefore addressed a commander whose daily work mixed fleet refreshment at the castle with the slow densification of a freehold valley one stage beyond Hottentots Holland. [3] [4]
Captain Kees and the Namaqua Invitation — August 1681
In August 1681 Van der Stel sent Captain Kees to endeavour to induce some of the leading men of the Namaqua tribe to visit the Cape. The mission rested on a clear commercial hypothesis: that in the country where the Namaquas resided there must be sources of wealth worth knowing, beyond the cattle trade already carried on with nearer clans such as the Hessequas. Kees’s errand was diplomatic rather than military—an invitation carried inland to bring Namaqua leaders under the castle’s hospitality and questioning. [3]
A few months later the commander was gratified to hear that a party of Namaquas had reached the Grigriqua kraals on their way to see him. He immediately sent a sergeant and some soldiers with presents and complimentary messages. Under that escort the deputation completed the last stage of the journey to Table Valley. The sequence—Kees’s August invitation, news from the Grigriqua road, and a formal military escort with gifts—shows how carefully the Cape staged first contact with a distant pastoral people whose copper and geography it wished to understand. [3]
The choice of Captain Kees mattered in local political memory. He was already known in Company dealings with Khoikhoi captains of the nearer districts; using him as the opener to the Namaquas tied the northern invitation to existing alliance and message channels rather than to an anonymous patrol. By late spring and early summer the path from Namaqua country through Grigriqua kraals to the castle was open enough for whole households, not only for solitary messengers. Cory’s broader sketch of northern exploration—from Wintervogel and Gabbema through the later copper marches—places Kees’s invitation as the diplomatic prelude that made the 1681 embassy possible before any European column marched toward the copper mountains. [3] [4]
The commander’s anxiety about Namaqua wealth was not a sudden impulse of 1681 alone. It belonged to the same colonising temper that had named Stellenbosch and densified freehold there: Dutch language, laws, and institutions planted uncorrupted, and a commercial curiosity about the interior that refused to leave Monomotapa fables and unnamed rivers untested. Ordinary life at the peninsula—Hessequa cattle, San trouble on the hunt, garden work, and fleets—continued while Kees rode north with the invitation that would answer part of that curiosity before the year closed. [3]
Namaqua Deputation at the Castle — 21 December 1681
On the 21st of December 1681 the Namaqua deputation arrived at the castle. The men were accompanied by their wives, all riding on pack-oxen. They brought their huts with them—frameworks of long twigs fastened in the form of a beehive and covered with rush mats, which could be taken from the backs of the oxen and put up almost as quickly as tents could be pitched. They were habitations such as none but nomads would use. To furnish food, the travellers brought a herd of cows, for they depended almost entirely upon milk for subsistence. [3]
The scene at the castle therefore mixed diplomacy with a portable kraal. Mat houses rose beside the stone works of the refreshment station; pack-oxen and milking stock stood within reach of the Company’s headquarters; and the visitors presented themselves not as solitary envoys but as a travelling community able to live on its own dairy while talks proceeded. That self-sufficiency shaped the five-day stay that followed: the Cape could host and gift without having to feed the whole party from magazine stores alone. [3]
After those five days the visitors left the castle to return to their own country, taking with them a variety of presents, including a staff of office for their chief. They promised to return in the following year with cattle to trade and more specimens of copper ore. The December embassy thus closed as a formal exchange—information and ore in one direction, gifts and a recognised staff of office in the other—rather than as a one-sided interrogation. The staff of office placed the Namaqua chief within the same vocabulary of recognised captains that the Cape already used with nearer Khoikhoi leaders. [3]
For the settlement the visit was also a public spectacle of northern geography brought to Table Valley. Freeholders and Company servants who had never ridden beyond the Elephant river could see pack-ox transport, mat architecture, and a dairy-dependent diet at the castle gate. The deputation’s promise to return with cattle and more ore bound the embassy to the ordinary commercial calendar of the Cape rather than leaving it as a single curiosity. When 1682 opened, the copper specimens already in hand would excite the directors; the human channel that brought them south was this December party under Kees’s earlier invitation and the sergeant’s escort from the Grigriqua kraals. [3] [4]
Copper Ore, the Great River, and the Briquas
The Namaquas presented some specimens of very rich copper ore, which they asserted they had taken out of a mountain with their own hands. The information was exceedingly interesting to the commander, who concluded with reason that the ore must exist there in great abundance when such specimens could be collected without any appliances for mining. He questioned them eagerly about their country, and the copper samples became the material hook on which later directors’ curiosity and exploring expeditions would hang. [3]
He asked whether they were acquainted with the great river Camissa and the town of Vigiti Magna. They had never heard of any town near their country, but they knew of a great river, very wide and deep. It was far from their kraals, on the side of the sun at noon, and it flowed in the opposite direction from that in which they had come to the castle. They were quite sure of this. So the first authentic information of the Gariep or Orange river was obtained, though it was long yet before European eyes were to see it. When Van der Stel had arrived in 1679 the Orange had never been heard of at the Cape; the December 1681 conversation replaced fable with a directional report from people who knew the country. [3]
The Namaquas, of course, knew nothing of the fabulous empire of Monomotapa. They informed the commander that they were acquainted with a race of people whom they called Briquas, the same who are known as Betshuanas. They also told some stories of tribes still more distant, but those accounts were merely visionary tales. Of their own tribe they gave such information as satisfied the commander that the only trade to be carried on with them would be in cattle, unless something could be done with the copper ore. [3]
That December conversation therefore redrew the northern mental map of the Cape without yet moving a European column into Namaqua country. Copper mountains, a great noon-side river flowing contrary to the path from the castle, Briqua neighbours inland, and a frank limit on trade to cattle unless ore could be worked—these were the concrete gains of the five-day visit. The specimens carried south in 1681 would, in later seasons, excite the directors and send Ensign Olof Bergh’s parties outward in October 1682 and August 1683; the geographical core of the report belonged to this year’s embassy. Cory’s summary of the later 1685 copper march under the governor himself is the distant sequel; the first authentic Orange-river intelligence and the first copper specimens in Company hands date to December 1681. [3] [4]
Foreign Ships and Refreshment Policy
At the beginning of his government Simon van der Stel interpreted the instructions received from the directors concerning the treatment of foreigners to mean that he was not to permit them to obtain other refreshments than water. Some Danes and Englishmen who visited Table Bay were unable to purchase anything whatever. The commander treated the officers with politeness and invited them to his own table, but declined to supply their ships with meat or vegetables. [3]
He informed some of them that they were at liberty to purchase what they could from the burghers, but privately he sent messengers round to the farmers forbidding them in some instances to sell anything under very heavy penalties, and in other cases requiring them to charge four or five times the usual rates. Complaints of such treatment speedily reached Europe, and representations were made to the Assembly of Seventeen which caused that body to issue instructions that foreigners were to be treated as of old. [3]
Under those restored rules foreigners were not to be supplied, except in very urgent cases, with sea stores out of the magazines, as such stores were sent solely for the Company’s own ships. They were to be at liberty to purchase refreshments from the burghers. No wheat or fuel was to be sold to them, as the Company needed all and more than all that was procurable of both. They were to be at liberty to refresh themselves in the lodging-houses kept by the town burghers. They were not to be permitted to sell any merchandise. Botha later noted that townspeople were to a great extent dependent for their livelihood upon public and lodging houses and the sale of goods to passing foreign ships—a municipal economy that Van der Stel’s hard early reading of the directors’ orders had squeezed. [3] [8]
The strictest phase of Van der Stel’s own restrictions lasted only until November 1683; after that date foreigners, though not encouraged to visit the Cape, were treated quite as fairly as subjects of the Netherlands were in the colonies of other European nations. A system was gradually introduced by which they were indirectly taxed for the benefit of the Company through the farming out of privileges to sell bread, meat, wine, and similar articles—fixed prices for burghers, higher rates for foreigners. Botha described that farming-out of sales rights as one of the principal sources of Company revenue from 1673 onward. Through 1681 the foreign-ship question was already a live point of friction between local practice, burgher sales, lodging-house trade, and the Seventeen’s reply. [3] [8]
Table Bay Shipping, 1672–1681
The number of ships that put into Table Bay from the 1st of January 1672 to the 31st of December 1681 was three hundred and sixty-eight. Of these, three hundred and forty-four belonged to the East India Company, eleven were English, ten were Danish, and the remaining three were French. The decade total closed on the last day of 1681 and measured how completely the bay remained a VOC refreshment roadstead even while foreign flags appeared in small numbers. [3]
Those figures give scale to the year’s local arguments about meat, vegetables, wheat, and fuel. Hundreds of Company hulls had drawn on Cape produce across the ten years; a thin stream of English and Danish visitors, and a handful of French, was enough to generate complaints when the commander tried to hold them to water alone or to inflated burgher prices. The shipping census ending 31 December 1681 therefore belongs with the foreign-refreshment dispute as part of the same administrative year, not as a separate curiosity. [3]
For the free community the same fleets were the market and the reason for the station’s existence. Grain raised at Stellenbosch and stock obtained through Hessequa trade fed people whose labour and titles only made sense if ships continued to call. The 368 arrivals of 1672–1681 mark the end of a decade in which the colony had “fairly commenced to expand,” even though growth remained necessarily slow when measured in families rather than in tonnage. Cory’s account of expansion beyond the peninsula—Hottentots Holland farms from 1678, Klapmuts as a Company out-station from 1683, Stellenbosch as the inland freehold centre—sits beside Theal’s shipping total as the landward and seaward faces of the same slow growth. [3] [4] [8]
The commander who planted freeholders at Stellenbosch was the same officer who sat at table with foreign captains while withholding meat and vegetables from their ships—two faces of a single effort to keep the Cape a Dutch refreshment and colonising station under Company control. The decade shipping total closing on 31 December 1681 measured the seaward half of that effort; the exceptional wheat of the same calendar year measured the inland half. [3]
Stellenbosch Families, Wheat Harvest, and Title Deeds
In 1681 several families were added to those already living in the Stellenbosch valley. The colony had now fairly commenced to expand, though its growth was necessarily slow. The new households thickened the freehold neighbourhood begun by the eight families of May 1680 and by the first farmer who had ploughed before 1679 closed, turning a thin fringe into a district that needed bounds, surveys, and local peacekeeping among neighbours. Botha later described freehold as the form of tenure that allowed owners to sell or transmit ground to their heirs—stronger than the loan-tenure cattle runs that would dominate outer grazing—and the 1681 thickening of Stellenbosch families was an early exercise of that full-property principle inland. [3] [4] [8]
That season the wheat crops there were so exceptionally good that for the first time the soldiers as well as the burghers could be supplied for several months with as much fresh bread as they needed, instead of the biscuits and rice to which they had been accustomed. In November 1681 the commander counted one hundred and five grains of wheat in ear on a single stalk—an emblematic measure of the same abundant harvest that filled the bread ovens of both free and Company households. The contrast with the insect plague of November 1682, when the same ground would show hardly a sound ear, would later prove how exceptional 1681 had been; within this calendar year the stalk of 105 grains stood as proof that Stellenbosch soil could answer the Company’s bread need. [3]
The farmers had been permitted to select ground for themselves, but this liberty had given rise to various disputes and contentions, to settle which the commander paid them a visit. His presence and the friendly interest which he took in the welfare of all had the effect of restoring concord, and after fixing limits to each man’s estate he arranged for a proper survey of the ground and the issue of title deeds. Self-selection, which had drawn the first freeholders inland, now required a commander’s arbitration and paper title if the valley was to remain a neighbourhood rather than a field of quarrels. Botha’s later sketch of district secretaries passing legal documents and of boundary and water disputes referred to landdrost and heemraden belongs to the institutional sequel; in 1681 the commander himself still rode out to fix limits and order deeds. [3] [8]
The fruitfulness proved by those crops already turned the eyes of industrious people in Rondebosch and Wynberg toward Stellenbosch. The larger party of fifteen or sixteen farmers who would remove when the ploughing season commenced in May 1682 lay just beyond this calendar year; 1681’s own record is the intermediate thickening of families, the exceptional wheat, the 105-grain stalk in November, and the visit that fixed limits and ordered surveys and deeds. Cory’s note that the village of Stellenbosch was founded in this period, with a magistrate later stationed there over the known country outside a small Cape strip, looks forward from the freehold densification of 1680–1681 toward the heemraad of August 1682 and the landdrost of Van Rheede’s reforms. [3] [4]
When 1681 ended, Van Goens the younger’s March instructions stood on the record; Captain Kees’s August invitation had drawn a Namaqua deputation to the castle on 21 December with copper ore, a staff of office for their chief, and the first authentic Cape report of the great noon-side river later known as the Orange; three hundred and sixty-eight ships closed the decade count in Table Bay; foreign refreshment remained under a hard early reading of the directors’ orders tempered by the Seventeen’s reply; and Stellenbosch freeholders, thickened by several new families, had eaten fresh bread for months, settled bound disputes under the commander’s eye, and stood ready for surveys and title deeds on ground that had answered the plough with a stalk of one hundred and five grains. [3] [4] [8]