Boer History1684 at the Cape of Good Hope: Klaas’s Cattle Trade, New Outposts, and the First Grain Export
Opening 1684 after Klapmuts and Bergh
The calendar year 1684 opened with Simon van der Stel still commander, Stellenbosch under its unpaid heemraad of four leading inhabitants, and the peninsula petty court of commissioners hearing small civil claims week by week. The previous year had turned a tract of ground at Klapmuts into a Company stock-farm so that cattle kept at Hottentots Holland might change pasturage, and it had closed Ensign Olof Bergh’s second copper march with a drought report at the castle on 24 October. Ordinary refreshment-station work—fleets in Table Bay, the Company garden, castle administration—continued without pause while pastoral logistics and grain recovery pressed harder than northern ore. [3] [4]
Cattle supply for the garrison, the free burghers, and outward fleets still depended on inland barter. Company trading columns had for years gone out to purchase oxen and sheep; the cost, risk, and uneven return of those expeditions now invited a different arrangement with a Khoikhoi intermediary who already knew the inland markets. At the same time the insect-damaged wheat of 1682 left the settlement eager for a cleaner harvest cycle and for proof that the Cape could feed itself without constant foreign grain. Cory’s wider sketch of the free farming population—reinforced from soldiers and sailors permitted to leave the ships, and from the few who came from Holland as emigrants with promise of free passage, land, stock, seed, and implements at low rates—still described growth before the large Huguenot addition of 1688 as selective release from Company service rather than organised family immigration. [3] [4] [8]
Staff continuity was incomplete. The office of secunde had stood vacant for some time after Hendrik Crudop’s advancement to a higher post in India, so fiscal business and second-rank administration still needed a permanent holder. Before the year closed, a returning ordinary councillor of India would also sit above the commander for a season and rearrange parts of the official staff—but the year’s first structural changes were pastoral, commercial, and northern rather than ceremonial. Voigt’s later summary of colonial extent in this decade still placed white occupation from Groenberg on the west to Hottentots Holland on the east, inland as far as the Berg-river valley, with no houses of white colonists much farther than about fifty miles from the castle—geography against which the new cattle outposts and the continued Namaqua copper probes have to be read. [3] [7]
Sergeant Schryver’s Namaqua Copper Probe — February 1684
In February 1684 a party of Namaquas visited the Cape, and when they returned Sergeant Izaak Schryver with fifteen soldiers and three miners was sent with them. The march was a deliberate sequel to Bergh’s drought failures of late 1682 and of August–October 1683: instead of another large European column forcing the northern road alone, a smaller armed and mining detachment rode the same road under Namaqua escort after the visitors themselves had come south. [3] [4]
The sergeant succeeded very little better than Ensign Bergh, though he managed to proceed somewhat farther and to collect from the people he visited a number of pieces of copper ore which he brought back on a pack-ox. This ore was melted in crucibles, and the pure metal was sent as a specimen to the directors. Distance gained was therefore modest; the administrative product was concrete—crucible metal on a homeward report rather than another empty return with only a drought narrative. [3]
For the copper question the February probe kept the directors’ curiosity alive without resolving it. Specimens from Namaqua visitors in 1681 had first excited Amsterdam; Bergh’s two marches had proved the road and the drought belt; Schryver’s smaller column showed that ore could still be lifted and refined at the Cape even when a full mining establishment could not yet be planted on the Copper Mountain. Cory’s later description of the still larger 1685 march under the commander himself—fifty-six Europeans, drivers and leaders, waggons, carts, a coach, cannon, spare oxen, horses, and mules—makes Schryver’s fifteen soldiers and three miners legible as the thin middle term between Bergh’s second failure and the full gubernatorial expedition of the next year. [3] [4]
Captain Klaas and the Cattle Trade
In 1684 the Company discontinued sending trading expeditions into the interior to purchase cattle, and handed that business entirely over to Captain Klaas (Dorha), the Chainouqua chief long treated as the settlement’s most useful inland ally. Klaas bought up large herds at very low rates upon receiving one head for himself out of every five. The arrangement converted a repeated Company march into a licensed Khoikhoi agency: the settlement still obtained oxen and sheep, but the purchasing risk and the inland bargaining sat with Klaas rather than with successive European trading parties. [3] [4]
The one-in-five commission was the price of scale. At that rate Klaas had a direct interest in volume, and the Company accepted a predictable share of animals as the cost of withdrawing its own trading columns. The herds that came in were large enough that the older fixed posts could no longer absorb them on existing grass alone. Administrative success in the cattle market therefore created an immediate pastoral problem: where to station and rotate the new stock without exhausting Hottentots Holland, Tigerberg, and Klapmuts. [3]
Handing the trade to Klaas also fitted a longer pattern of reliance on particular captains as intermediaries. Klaas had already appeared in earlier years as a useful ally and cattle agent—hospitable to the shipwrecked crew of the English Indiaman Joanna in 1682, and repeatedly escort-protected when Chainouqua and Cochoqua feud made the road dangerous. Free burghers remained barred from competing freely in native stock markets under the older commercial rules, so the official channel and Klaas’s commission together defined how large numbers of animals entered Company hands in this year. Botha’s commercial sketch of the same settlement explains the structural logic: the Company had found its own farming expensive and unsatisfactory, yet still meant to control the magazine trade in grain, meat, and vegetables rather than open a free inland market. [3] [4] [8]
New Company Outposts — Kuilen, Diep River, Visser’s Hok, and Riet Vlei
By Klaas’s agency so many oxen and sheep were obtained that it was necessary to select fresh stock-farms. The Company therefore formed outposts at the Kuilen, Diep River, Visser’s Hok, and Riet Vlei. At each of these places four or five soldiers and a few slaves were stationed, the same pattern already used at Hottentots Holland, Tigerberg, and Klapmuts. [3] [4]
The four new posts extended the Company’s own pastoral grid rather than freehold title for burgher families. Small military-slave detachments watched government herds on defined ground so that animals bought cheaply inland could be held, rested, and moved without crowding a single station. Klapmuts, created the year before for change of pasturage from Hottentots Holland, now sat inside a wider ring of out-stations instead of standing as an isolated addition. Cory noted more broadly that gradual usurpation of pasture by 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 narrative of 1684 still frames the nearer relationship as one of licensed trade through Klaas rather than open hostilities. [3] [4]
Geography of the names points to the nearer peninsula and flats approaches—water, reed, and river margins useful for stock—rather than a leap to the far interior copper road. The Kuilen had already served as a named camp on the commander’s earlier rides toward Hottentots Holland; Diep River, Visser’s Hok, and Riet Vlei filled out a coastal and intermediate belt where four or five soldiers and a few slaves could hold government beasts on the same modest template used at the older posts. The 1684 outposts answered herd numbers, not mineral curiosity. Together with Hottentots Holland, Tigerberg, and Klapmuts they made the Company’s cattle system a multi-station network staffed on official account. [3] [4]
Discharged Servants and Freehold Growth
The commander had been informed by the directors that they would gladly send out families of agricultural labourers if such people could be found willing to emigrate, but that it was rarely any were to be had, because there was no lack of employment at home for all who could work. There was, therefore, no way of obtaining colonists except by discharging servants of the Company. In the past that system had entailed heavy expense without compensating result: fully nine out of every ten discharged soldiers and sailors who had been assisted by the Company to commence farming failed in that occupation, and either returned into the service in debt or found their way to some other country. [3] [4]
Commander Van der Stel tried to improve upon the older plan. Instead of waiting until men’s terms of service had expired and then giving ground indiscriminately to all who offered to take it, he was willing at any time to release individuals of good character and industrious habits, especially if they had families. Still the proportion of those who became permanent colonists remained very small compared with the whole number discharged. Botha’s later account of the same commercial order underlines why failure was common: the Company controlled trade, fixed prices, and expected farmers to sell first to its magazines; only after Company needs were met could colonists dispose of surplus, and then only under restriction. [3] [8]
Freehold growth in 1684 therefore remained a thin stream beside the thicker pastoral and grain work of the year. Stellenbosch already held its school under Sybrand Mankadan and its rotating heemraad; peninsula and valley farms still had to recover from the insect seasons; the Company’s own cattle grid expanded faster than the roll of permanent discharged farmers. The structural point for the year is not a sudden wave of new freeholds, but the administrative decision to keep selecting colonists carefully while cattle and wheat carried the settlement’s visible success. [3] [4]
Andries de Man Appointed Secunde — June 1684
The office of secunde had now for some time been vacant, owing to Hendrik Crudop having been advanced to a higher post in India. In June 1684 the Assembly of Seventeen appointed the fiscal Andries de Man to it. The promotion filled the second seat in local government from the existing fiscal line rather than by importing a new senior merchant from Europe or Batavia for that grade alone. [3]
Secunde and fiscal work had long overlapped in practice at a small settlement; naming De Man secunde restored a clear deputy beside the commander for council, correspondence, and day-to-day administration. Crudop’s Indian advancement explained the vacancy without crisis; the directors’ June choice closed it before the later arrival of a superior commissioner-traveller who would temporarily outrank the whole Cape staff. When High Commissioner Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein reconstituted the high court in the following year, Andries de Man would sit as secunde under Simon van der Stel as president—proof that the June appointment stuck through the staff rearrangements of late 1684 and early 1685. [3] [8]
For free burghers and Company servants the change mattered as continuity. Petitions, store issues, and council minutes again had a standing second officer whose title matched the older Cape hierarchy. De Man’s move from fiscal desk to secunde also left the fiscalate itself to be rearranged later in the year when Ryklof van Goens the younger began shifting clerks and bookkeepers, and when the supreme authorities sent out their own nominee for the prosecuting office. [3]
First Grain Export from the Cape — 1684
In the year 1684 the first exportation of grain from South Africa took place. The crops of that season were very good, and the insect scourge had been less destructive than usual. To encourage the growth of grain, the governor-general Van Goens had earlier relieved the burghers from payment of tithes for two years, and this had the desired effect. The relief belonged to the elder Van Goens’s visit of 1682; the harvest arithmetic of 1684 was the first clear Cape answer to that encouragement after the insect years. [3] [8]
In February and March, after the harvest was gathered, fifteen hundred muids of wheat were brought by the farmers for sale, so that there was more than sufficient for the supply of the garrison. A quantity of rye was also stored in the magazines, and of this grain twenty-five muids were sent to India. The export, small as it was, showed—as the commander exultingly wrote—that the settlement was no longer dependent upon foreign countries for its food. [3]
Fifteen hundred muids offered for sale after a clean harvest marked a turn from the insect year of 1682 and from long reliance on imported cereal for fortress and fleet. On the same ground where in November 1681 the commander had counted one hundred and five grains of wheat in ear on a single stalk, in November 1682 there had been hardly a sound ear to be seen; the plague continued for several successive seasons, though never again so destructive, and gradually disappeared. Tithe relief had pushed burghers to sow more; the magazines took wheat beyond local need and still had rye to spare for a token Indian shipment. Self-sufficiency in bread-stuffs remained a claim measured in muids and fortress rations, not yet in bulk cargoes, but 1684 fixed the first calendar year in which Cape grain left for India as surplus rather than arriving only as relief. Botha’s later commercial summary of the Company’s original purpose—to supply passing ships with grain, meat, and vegetables—reads the same milestone as proof that free farming could at last do what expensive official cultivation had failed to do cheaply. [3] [4] [8]
Stellenbosch Heemraad — Mostert and Smit at the End of 1684
The court of heemraad established at Stellenbosch on 30 August 1682 still consisted of four leading inhabitants who held office for two years without salary. Two members retired annually, when the court itself sent to the council of policy a list of four new names from which to select successors. The first heemraden had been Gerrit van der Byl, Henning Huising, Hans Jurgen Grimp, and Hendrik Elberts. At the end of 1683 the two first-named had retired, when Douwe Steyn and Matthys Greef were elected to take their places. [3]
Grimp and Elberts retired at the end of 1684, and were succeeded by Jan Mostert and Harmen Smit. The rotation kept the inland valley’s petty civil order in local hands while the commander and, later in the year, Van Goens the younger rearranged castle staff. Powers of the heemraad were still not very accurately defined, but its decisions appear in every instance to have been treated with respect—continuity that mattered as Stellenbosch’s freehold households, school, and grain surplus became more important to the settlement’s food arithmetic. [3] [8]
When High Commissioner van Rheede reconstituted Stellenbosch government in July 1685, he would name Johannes Mulder first landdrost and list Gerrit van der Byl, Henning Huising, Jan Mostert, and Herman Smit as heemraden—so the two men seated at the end of 1684 were already the inland names the commissioner found usable beside the older first-generation heemraden. For the calendar of 1684 the point is simpler: the valley’s four-man court completed another two-year cycle without crisis while cattle outposts multiplied and the first rye left for India. [3]
Ryklof van Goens the Younger — October 1684
In October 1684 Ryklof van Goens the younger, ordinary councillor of India and previously governor of Ceylon, arrived in South Africa on his way from Europe to the East and assumed authority above that of the commander. He remained in the colony until the following May, but as he was an invalid during the whole of that period he seldom left his room in the government country house at Rustenburg, where he resided. [3]
Rank, not local election, placed him over Simon van der Stel. An ordinary councillor of India travelling outward carried power to reshape staff and favours even while confined by illness to a country-house room. Rustenburg—already known in earlier administrations as a government vineyard and garden at Rondebosch—became the temporary summit of Cape authority: decisions issued from a sick chamber rather than from constant appearance at the castle parade. [3]
His stay straddled the turn of the year, but the arrival, the assumption of superior authority, and the first staff and land measures belonged to the closing months of 1684. Burghers and servants now had to reckon with a second Van Goens—son of the governor-general who had visited in 1682, relieved tithes, prohibited tobacco planting, and ordered experiments in flax, hemp, and indigo—exercising Indian rank at the Cape while the commander continued the ordinary work of the settlement under that shadow. In the same October the Assembly of Seventeen, far from Table Bay, placed Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein at the head of a three-member commission with very extensive powers for Hindostan and Ceylon and with instructions to rectify anything amiss at the Cape on the outward passage; that high commissioner’s own arrival would fall in April 1685, after Van Goens the younger had already begun rearranging local offices from Rustenburg. [3]
Staff Changes and Land for Company Officers
Van Goens the younger made several changes in the official staff. He promoted the clerk Johannes Willem de Grevenbroek to be secretary of the council, and the bookkeeper Cornelis Linnes to be chief salesman. He also appointed the junior merchant Albert van Breugel to act as fiscal, but this officer was obliged soon afterwards to resign the situation to Johannes van Keulen, who was sent out by the supreme authorities. [3]
The sequence left a clear paper trail of ranks: council secretary, chief salesman, and fiscal passed through local promotion and then, in the fiscal’s case, through replacement by a director-sent officer. Van Breugel’s brief acting fiscalate and Van Keulen’s arrival showed the limit of a travelling councillor’s staffing power when the Seventeen had already named someone else for the same post. Grevenbroek’s rise from clerk to council secretary, and Linnes’s from bookkeeper to chief salesman, thickened the castle’s civilian spine just as De Man’s June appointment had restored the secunde’s chair. [3]
To all the officers in the Company’s service who desired it he allotted ground for cultivation, but titles were not to be issued until the directors should approve of the measure. Provisional farming rights for officials thus entered Cape practice under a superior visitor’s hand, with freehold still held back pending Amsterdam or the chamber’s consent. The same season that confirmed De Man as secunde therefore also blurred the line between servant and cultivator for other men on the pay list. When High Commissioner van Rheede examined private trade and official farming in 1685, he would approve the experiment of land grants to officers so that they might sell produce to the Company on the same terms as burghers—an enlargement of the door Van Goens the younger had already opened from Rustenburg. [3] [8]
Privileges of Adriaan van der Stel
To Adriaan van der Stel, a son of the commander, Van Goens the younger granted several exclusive privileges. This young man had been issuer of stores, but he now became a burgher and obtained a grant of land in full property. The right to put up a fowling-net, within five hundred roods of which no one was to be permitted to shoot, nor was any one else to put up another within a distance of five hours’ journey; the right to catch fish in False Bay without payment of any taxes; and the right to shoot all kinds of game and birds were privileges granted by Van Goens to his favourite and at his instance approved of by the council. [3]
These monopolies naturally caused dissatisfaction among the other burghers. The commander Van der Stel himself was beloved by all, and no one would have thought of offending him, but from this time it began to be freely said that the sons were not likely to follow in the father’s footsteps. Favour to Adriaan separated the family’s private advantage from the commander’s personal reputation—an early note of the complaint literature that would later swell against Willem Adriaan van der Stel’s far larger official farming, though that storm still lay years ahead. [3] [7]
The privilege of shooting game at any time and in any quantity was regarded as particularly unfair to other farmers, because they were all bound by stringent regulations to kill nothing without special permission, and no one of them was ever allowed to shoot more in a year than a single rhinoceros, a hippopotamus, an eland, and a hartebeest for his own family’s consumption. Against that yearly bag, Adriaan’s open licence and the fowling-net and False Bay fishing rights looked like a private hunting and fishing estate carved out of common rules. The year that proved the Cape could export twenty-five muids of rye thus also fixed, in burgher talk, the first sharp distinction between a trusted commander and a favoured commander’s son. [3]