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. The May 1680 freehold migration of eight families into the valley he had named Stellenbosch had already turned a place-name and a solitary plough into a small neighbourhood of freeholders holding full property conditional on cultivation, paying the ordinary produce tithe, and barred from tobacco. What remained was to thicken that foothold, fix disputed bounds, and test whether the new district could feed more than its own households. [3] [4]
Beyond the peninsula core the colony still grew slowly. 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. 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. [3]
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, 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, and a Stellenbosch harvest rich enough to put fresh bread before soldiers as well as burghers. [3]
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—Sybrand Abbema’s instructions of 27 March 1680 for the same commander, and later the elder Ryklof van Goens’s memorial of 24 April 1682. 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]
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. [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. 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]
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. [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. [3]
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. [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; the geographical core of the report belonged to this year’s embassy. [3]
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. The strictest phase of Van der Stel’s own restrictions lasted only until November 1683; through 1681 the foreign-ship question was already a live point of friction between local practice, burgher sales, and the Seventeen’s reply. [3]
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. [3] [4]
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. [3] [4]
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. [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. [3]
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. [3]
Settlement by the Close of 1681
By the close of 1681 Simon van der Stel’s third calendar season had added several freehold families to Stellenbosch, converted an abundant wheat harvest into months of fresh bread for soldiers and burghers, and replaced open self-selection with fixed farm limits, surveys, and title deeds. The legal and agricultural skeleton of the inland district was firmer than it had been when the eight families of May 1680 first chose their ground. [3] [4]
At the castle the same year held the March instructions of commissioner Ryklof van Goens the younger, the foreign-ship refreshment dispute and the Seventeen’s reply, and the shipping total of three hundred and sixty-eight arrivals in Table Bay across the decade ending 31 December 1681. Khoikhoi peace and Hessequa cattle trade kept the outer pastoral economy open while San contacts remained a hazard for hunters. Northern diplomacy closed the year: Captain Kees’s August invitation brought a Namaqua deputation to the castle on 21 December with pack-oxen, mat huts, milking stock, copper ore, and the first authentic report of the great inland river. [3]
When the year ended, the Cape’s expansion was still measured in households and harvest stalks rather than in sudden multitudes, yet the record of 1681 was concrete: commissioner instructions on file, Stellenbosch wheat feeding the settlement’s own people, title deeds ordered for inland freehold, and Namaqua copper and river knowledge lodged in the commander’s questions and gifts. Further parties of farmers, insect plagues on the crops, heemraad courts, and exploring columns toward the copper mountains still lay ahead; 1681’s own history is the third-season densifying of Stellenbosch and the December embassy that tied the Cape to Namaqua ore and the Gariep. [3]