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 heemraad, and the peninsula petty court of commissioners hearing small civil claims week by week. The previous year had added a Company stock-farm at Klapmuts so that cattle 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 and grain questions 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. [3]
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 and commercial rather than ceremonial. [3]
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. 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]
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; 1684 made that role exclusive for Company interior purchase. 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. [3]
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. [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 1684 outposts answered herd numbers, not mineral curiosity. Together with the older posts they made the Company’s cattle system a multi-station network staffed on a common modest template: a handful of soldiers, a few slaves, and official beasts on government account. [3]
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. [3]
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. [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. [3]
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. 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. [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 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—exercising Indian rank at the Cape while the commander continued the ordinary work of the settlement under that shadow. [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. [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. [3]
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. [3]
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. [3]
Settlement by the Close of 1684
By the close of 1684 the Cape under Simon van der Stel had handed interior cattle purchase to Captain Klaas on a one-in-five commission, opened Company stock outposts at the Kuilen, Diep River, Visser’s Hok, and Riet Vlei beside the older stations at Hottentots Holland, Tigerberg, and Klapmuts, and filled the vacant secunde’s office with Andries de Man in June. [3] [4]
The same year brought the settlement’s first grain export: a strong harvest, lighter insect damage, tithe relief still working from Van Goens’s earlier visit, fifteen hundred muids of wheat offered by farmers in February and March, and twenty-five muids of rye shipped to India as proof that the Cape magazines held more than fortress bread alone. [3]
From October, Ryklof van Goens the younger lay ill at Rustenburg with authority above the commander, promoted De Grevenbroek and Linnes, tried Van Breugel then accepted Van Keulen as fiscal, allotted provisional cultivation ground to willing officers, and loaded Adriaan van der Stel with land and hunting, netting, and False Bay fishing monopolies that other burghers already resented before the year ended. Those were 1684’s own facts—pastoral expansion, a restored secunde, first surplus grain at sea, and a superior invalid reshaping favours—complete within the calendar. [3]