Boer History1687 at the Cape of Good Hope: Centaurus, Drakenstein, and Simon's Bay
Centaurus Arrives — 1 March 1687
The calendar year 1687 opened with the long Natal wreck story still unknown at the castle. Early in the year another shipwrecked party reached the Bay of Natal. On the 25th of December 1686 the London ketch Bona Ventura, of twenty tons burden, had been lost at St Lucia Bay. One of her crew drowned; the remaining eight men and a boy set out intending to walk overland to the Cape of Good Hope and found, to their joy, Europeans and a vessel nearly ready for sea. They were welcomed to a share of whatever the others had and joined the labour on hand. [3] [8]
That vessel was the product of nearly eight months’ work by the Dutch survivors of the Stavenisse—wrecked about seventy English miles south of Natal on 16 February 1686—and five Englishmen of the ketch Good Hope, lost at Natal the previous May. Timber was at hand; the wreck of the Good Hope supplied materials; native carriers fetched iron from the Stavenisse wreck for a single copper arm-ring each, burdens of fifty to a hundred pounds over some seventy miles. John Kingston of Bristol, fertile in expedients, turned a stout iron ring into a tool that answered for a saw, using only the shank of an anchor as anvil. They laid the keel of a craft fifty feet long and fourteen feet beam and employed local people to carry timber and hew rough planks. [3]
Provisions purchased from the local people included about six or seven thousand pounds of millet, a thousand pounds of salted and smoked meat, millet meal, twenty goats, between two and three hundred fowls, and a hundred and fifty pumpkins, with seventeen small casks of water and the English ivory already bartered inland. On the 17th of February 1687, a year and a day after the wreck of the Stavenisse, the little craft was ready and launched as the Centaurus. At the last moment three Englishmen of the Good Hope chose to remain at Natal, having formed connections with the people there and preferring ease of life ashore to hardship at sea; an Englishman and a Frenchman of the Bona Ventura also stayed. There sailed eleven men of the Stavenisse, seven of the Bona Ventura, and John Kingston and William Christian of the Good Hope. Without chart or compass they kept the coast in sight all the way and reached Table Bay safely on the 1st of March 1687. [3]
When skipper Willem Knyf and his party reported themselves, they expressed great surprise that nothing had been heard of the forty-seven men who had left the Stavenisse wreck on 19 February 1686. The council took a number of depositions and judged that a search ought to be made. That decision turned the home-built boat from a private escape craft into a Company vessel for Cape service and coastal work later in the year. Botha later compressed the same chain—Natal silence, council anxiety, purchase of the boat, and the long coastal hunt—as the administrative aftermath of the 1686 wreck that only fully closed when survivors were lifted off the coast in the following season. [3] [8]
Purchase and Refit of the Centaurus
The council purchased the Centaurus from her builders. Her hull needed only a little finishing; after she was rigged afresh she proved a staunch sea-boat and an excellent sailer. Kingston and Christian were paid £33 6s. 8d. in cash for their share and were then engaged as quartermasters in the Company’s service, on the understanding that they would be employed in any expedition sent to Natal. The crew of the Bona Ventura worked their passages to Batavia in the next eastward-bound ship that called. The purchase thus secured both a coastal craft and two English quartermasters already familiar with the Natal shore and the inland peoples among whom the missing forty-seven might still be living. [3]
After refit the Centaurus was used at the Cape for several months—local coastal work under the castle before the longer eastern cruise. Only on the 10th of November 1687 was she sent east to look for the still missing men of the Stavenisse. Eastward of St Blaize she met a succession of head winds. By early February 1688 she had still only reached the mouth of the Kei, and calms and the south-westward current carried her back; the rescue of survivors off Cove Rock belongs to that following season. What 1687 secured was the purchase, the engagement of the Natal English quartermasters, months of coastal service under the castle, and the November departure itself—the institutional conversion of a wreck-built escape boat into a Company search vessel. [3] [8]
The depositions taken in March had already widened the council’s map of the south-eastern coast. Information from the Natal party, later joined to the log of the galiot Noord, enabled the commander to frame a rough chart far from perfect yet a great improvement on older maps: Monomotapa was pushed into the distant interior, and fabulous towns of the Cortado kind disappeared. Cory’s broader sketch of easterly exploration—Hieronymus Cruse over the Hottentots Holland Mountains toward Mossel Bay, cattle-recovery parties, temporary inland trade—placed the Centaurus voyage in a longer line of knowledge pushing ahead of permanent occupation. [3] [4]
Inqua Messenger — February 1687
At this date the most distant Khoikhoi people known to the eastward was the Outeniqua, occupying the country beyond the present village of George. Of them little more than the name was known; no European had penetrated further than the kraals of the Attaquas, who adjoined them westward. Between the Attaquas and Hottentots Holland lay the Gauriquas, Hessequas, and Chainouquas, all well-known peoples. Beyond the Outeniquas many hordes were reported, and commanders had written down some fifteen or twenty words then held to be tribal names—words that disappeared as soon as exploration threw real light on the country. [3]
In February 1687 there came to the castle a man who said he had been sent by a very powerful chief living far in the interior, to learn what kind of people the white men were and what articles they exchanged for cattle. He claimed to be a chief himself. From the way he boasted of his people’s exploits the commander concluded that his following was more likely a band of robbers than a settled court—a recital of the kind a praise-singer might offer strangers. Yet from the statements concerning the powerful ruler who had sent him, the Europeans at first believed this could be no other than the long-sought Emperor of Monomotapa. The messenger stayed only two days, was well entertained, and left promising soon to return with the brother of the great chief who had sent him. [3]
During the next two years presents were frequently forwarded through Captain Klaas to the individual who, from being imagined a mighty emperor, soon came to be termed chief of the Inqua Khoikhoi. A fuller deputation would arrive only in December 1688, and the expedition under Ensign Izaak Schryver would leave the castle on 4 January 1689 with twenty-two Europeans, Cape Khoikhoi, and two waggons of food and barter goods. The February 1687 visit opened the channel and fixed an inland name on the council’s map between the known Outeniqua country and reports of peoples still farther east—diplomacy and curiosity running ahead of the column that would later march through Caledon and Swellendam country toward the Inqua kraals. [3]
Stellenbosch Church — January to October 1687
Church organisation at Stellenbosch, resolved upon at the fair of 1686, took solid form in 1687. When the commander had visited the village for that first fair he had been accompanied by the Rev. Johannes Overney, who on Sunday the 13th of October 1686 conducted the first clerical service in the new settlement, preaching from Isaiah lii. 7 and baptizing three infants in the afternoon. An arrangement followed that the Cape clergyman should visit once every three months to conduct divine service and administer the sacraments, while the sick-visitor Mankadan continued to read a sermon and prayers on all other Sabbaths. [3] [4]
In January 1687, when Overney visited the village on that agreed quarterly plan, a deacon and an elder chosen by the congregation and approved by the council were installed. The deacon was Dirk Coetsee, a burgher already several years in the colony. A few weeks later, on the 14th of February, the first stone of a church forty feet by twenty-two was laid. The commander contributed liberally and sometimes visited the village expressly to superintend the work. The building opened for use during the commander’s next birthday tour, on the 19th of October 1687. On that occasion the Rev. Johannes van Andel—who had only recently consented to remain at the Cape after calling as ship’s chaplain—delivered a sermon from Numbers vi. 23–27. Between foundation stone and opening the inland congregation thus gained both officers and a dedicated place of worship, while on ordinary Sabbaths Mankadan still read as before. [3]
Civil building had already matched the spiritual programme. A residence for the landdrost and a courthouse had been erected in 1686, and a mill built at district expense; the price of grinding was fixed and the mill leased by auction to the highest bidder, the rental going to district funds. Cory later noted the landdrost stationed at Stellenbosch with jurisdiction over all the known country except the Cape division—a small indefinite strip from St Helena Bay to False Bay—so that the 1687 church stood inside an inland magistracy already claiming the farms and roads behind the peninsula. [3] [4]
Vine culture advanced with the buildings. Stellenbosch already had the reputation of producing better wine than Rondebosch or Wynberg, yet even the best remained so inferior to European wine that the commander believed either the grapes were pressed too soon or the right varieties had not yet been introduced. He issued a placaat prohibiting anyone, under a penalty of ten pounds, from pressing grapes before the vineyards had been visited by a committee and pronounced by himself of the requisite maturity. He obtained new cuttings from France, Germany, and Spain, managed to raise Persian vines from seed, and experimented at Constantia, in the Company’s gardens in Table Valley and at Rustenburg, while encouraging Stellenbosch burghers to do the same. Rice, cassava, and hops answered no better than before; millet obtained from Natal did well and was found to make good beer. The olive, tried again and again in every variety of soil and position, still dropped its fruit early, failed in some seasons entirely, and left only three or four trees alive. [3]
Tree-planting kept pace with building. The commander observed that indigenous forests were rapidly being destroyed and that nature unaided was not replacing them. Fuel for the garrison already came from a grove of alders beyond Rondebosch planted by Crudop in 1679. Of European and Indian timber raised from seed in the Company’s nurseries, none thrived like the oak. He offered young trees to burghers and later ordered every farmer to plant at least one hundred, setting the example at Constantia and on the Company’s farms. In the spring of 1687 he saw between four and five thousand oaks beginning to bear acorns in the Stellenbosch and Cape districts, with over fifty thousand more in the nurseries nearly ready to transplant. [3]
Winter Fever, Overney, and Cruse
Toward the beginning of the winter of 1687 the colony was visited by a destructive disease, a kind of fever that carried off many inhabitants. Indigenous people suffered severely; one kraal was reported in which half the people were dead while the others were all sick. Schacher, chief of the Goringhaiquas or Kaapmans, died at this time. The clan was so thoroughly subject to the Company that the appointment of his successor was made by the commander, who chose a nephew of the deceased chief, named him Massanissa, and gave him one of the ordinary staffs of office—a public mark that Kaapman succession now ran through the castle as well as through the kraal. [3]
Among the Europeans carried off were the Rev. Johannes Overney and Captain Hieronymus Cruse. The clergyman died on the 5th of May. The pulpit was not long vacant: on the 4th of June the Rev. Johannes van Andel called in a ship of which he was chaplain and consented to remain. The old explorer Captain Cruse, often named in earlier years of the settlement—and in Cory’s summary the man who had crossed the Hottentots Holland Mountains in 1668 and penetrated as far as Mossel Bay—died on the 20th of June. He was succeeded in the command of the garrison by Lieutenant Dominique de Chavonnes. Within six weeks the colony thus lost its settled Cape pastor and one of its longest-serving military explorers, and gained a new clergyman and a new garrison commander before midwinter had fully closed. [3] [4]
French Fleet — June 1687
In June 1687 a fleet of six ships of war, sent by the king of France with a second embassy to the king of Siam, put into Table Bay. The admiral’s request to purchase refreshments and lodge his sick in the hospital was at once granted, but on condition that all healthy men go on board before sunset and that none carry arms ashore. The castle’s permanent force was then very small. To make a brave show the commander called in men from the outposts, required the Cape militia to mount guard, and drew a contingent of forty armed burghers from Stellenbosch. A system of signals by guns and flags already linked the castle with the drostdy inland, so that militia could be summoned at short notice. [3]
The visit repeated, under tighter local control, the pattern of French naval calls already familiar from the 1685 embassy and Jesuit astronomers. Refreshment and hospital care remained Company duties at a port of call; display of militia strength was the commander’s answer to a foreign war fleet in the bay while the permanent force of soldiers remained thin. The forty Stellenbosch burghers and the signal link to the drostdy showed how far inland settlement had already become part of Table Bay defence: the fair-ground district of 1686 was, by June 1687, a reservoir of armed free men the castle could call when foreign topsails filled the anchorage. [3]
Founding of Drakenstein — 16 October 1687
In October 1687 a fresh tract of land was given out to settlers. About fifty individuals from the homeward-bound fleet that put into Table Bay in September, charmed with the appearance of the country, petitioned to try farming. The commander would cheerfully have accepted them all had they been married men; as only a few had wives he thought it best to reject about two-thirds. At the close of the Stellenbosch fair twenty-three individuals in all were ready to take farms. He resolved to found a new settlement with them in the beautiful valley first visited by Abraham Gabbema thirty years before—the same Berg River country Cory and Botha later identified as the natural inland extension once Stellenbosch and the peninsula farms could no longer absorb every new agriculturist. [3] [4] [8]
At daylight on the morning of the 16th of October the new burghers left Stellenbosch and were followed a little later by the commander with attendants on horseback. At Simonsberg they halted to rest; there his Honour overtook them. Looking down into the valley where they were to make their homes, he found the country still without a name and called it Drakenstein in honour of the lord of Mydrecht—Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein, whose visit as commissioner had reshaped Cape administration two years earlier. Botha later recorded the same dedication: the fertile valley named after one of the family seats in Holland of the High Commissioner who had come out in 1685 to inspect the Company’s affairs. [3] [8]
That afternoon the frontage of the twenty-three farms was marked out along the Berg river. Each farm was to extend backwards six hundred roods and was sixty roods in width, thus containing nearly one hundred and twenty-seven English acres—Botha’s parallel figure of sixty morgen apiece matches the same survey. Like other landed property in the colony, the grants were legally burdened with payment to government of tithes of produce—often wholly or partly remitted in bad seasons or when occupants met heavy losses. An experiment in farming the tithe out at public auction, with the purchaser entitled to every eleventh sheaf in the field (for though called the tithe a full tenth was seldom demanded), later raised complaints and was abandoned. The only other ordinary charge was the cost of measurement and title-deeds when survey was made. [3] [8]
Farms were given in full property subject to these conditions, but could be forfeited if the grantees failed to begin cultivation within a year or afterwards abandoned the ground—a safeguard against the many Company servants who soon tired of farming. Title-deeds still waited on proper survey, sometimes delayed many years after allotment, so that the July 1686 registration book and the Drakenstein frontage of October 1687 belonged to the same paper order: occupation first, authenticated freehold when the chain and the secretary caught up. Within a year the same valley would receive French refugees scattered among Dutch neighbours; the 1687 grants were the Dutch skeleton onto which that larger settlement would be fixed. [3] [8]
False Bay Survey and Simon's Bay
In November of this year False Bay was examined by the commander in person. In March 1682 it had been surveyed, but not carefully enough to satisfy the directors. The galiot Noord conveyed the commander with surveyors and a draughtsman round from Table Bay; while she took soundings, a party along the shore measured distances and angles. The bight previously known as Yselstein Bay was found capable of affording good shelter for a small fleet. Fresh water was to be had there, and fish in great abundance and of excellent quality. Its advantages as a place of call and refreshment for Company ships in time of war—when an enemy fleet might be watching Table Bay—were noted. The commander gave it his own Christian name, and as Simon’s Bay it has ever since been known. [3]
The November survey thus closed a naval argument that had run since the incomplete work of 1682. Table Bay remained the ordinary anchorage; Simon’s Bay entered the Company’s geography as the wartime alternative, a named pocket on the False Bay shore with water, fish, and room for a small fleet when hostile topsails might close the northern roadstead. Cory’s Cape division—from St Helena Bay to False Bay—already treated that southern bight as the edge of the home magistracy; van der Stel’s soundings and shore angles gave the edge a charted harbour name. [3] [4]
Oaks, Locusts, and the Condition of the Colonists
The free population was by this time in a fairly prosperous condition. No avenues to great wealth stood open, but no one was suffering from want of the necessaries of life, and there were no beggars in the colony. Thriftless and unstable burghers of earlier days had died out or returned into Company service; their places were occupied by a more industrious class. One circumstance still caused the commander uneasiness: only about one-third of the colonists were married, and none but these could be considered permanently settled. Everything possible had been done to procure female immigrants, yet the number that arrived remained very small. Despite laws against European men forming connections with slave and indigenous women, such connections could not be entirely checked, and many children of mixed blood were born in the settlement—growing up, in Theal’s phrasing of contemporary hierarchy, as a class ranked below Europeans yet above pure Khoikhoi or enslaved Africans. [3]
Burghers of the town, nearly all discharged Company servants, depended chiefly on the shipping for a living. They showed prosperity by display in dress, which the commander forbade. He wanted no spurious grandees, he said, but honest, industrious people of whom alone good colonists could be made. When he prohibited the wives of mechanics from carrying sunshades as too outrageous to be tolerated, he was following sumptuary examples already familiar in Europe and, since October 1686, among Company regulations in India. The inland farmer planting oaks and vines, not the town display of borrowed finery, remained his measure of a settler worth keeping. [3]
Toward the close of the year a plague of locusts did much damage to the gardens, yet the crops were so good that there was not room in the magazines for all the grain, wine, and other produce brought in. On the 31st of December 1687, when the yearly census was taken, the Company had at Rustenburg in round numbers one hundred thousand vines bearing, and on the several farms 1,164 head of horned cattle, 140 horses, and 9,218 sheep. Returns for the colonists, their stock and produce, stood as follows: 254 burghers; 88 wives of burghers and widows; 231 children of burghers; 39 European men servants; 230 men slaves; 44 women slaves; 36 slave children; 155 horses in possession of burghers; 2,951 horned cattle; 30,142 sheep; 1,857 muids of wheat from the last crop; 197 muids of rye; 205 muids of barley; and 402,900 vines bearing. Theal cautioned that the number of burghers was always understated in the yearly lists through omission or carelessness; even so, the December schedule measured a colony no longer a thin fort garden but a freehold society with inland churches, a new Berg River frontage, and magazines too full for the harvest. [3]
While the Cape counted vines and sheep, the directors in the Netherlands were already preparing a larger immigration. On the 1st of October 1687 they appointed a general committee—three members from the Amsterdam Chamber, two from Zeeland, and one from each of the other chambers—to decide whether French Piedmontese and other Reformed fugitives should be sent to the Cape and on what footing. On 6 October the committee reported; the decision of 3 October 1685 was left in force with amendments. Fugitives were to present themselves at Amsterdam and Zeeland, receive free passage with limited luggage, take land in ownership as agriculturists, refund implements and cattle in corn or otherwise, and remain five years unless specially released. A French minister was promised. The oath of allegiance was registered at the meeting of the Seventeen on 20 October 1687—four days after Drakenstein was named. On 16 November 1687 the Amsterdam Chamber wrote to Simon van der Stel that fugitives would come with a clergyman, among them wine farmers and brandy distillers to supply wants he had long complained of; they were destitute but industrious and easily satisfied, and were to be treated on the same footing as Dutch emigrants and supplied until able to earn for themselves. The Voorschooten would sail on the last day of the year with the first large batch; their landing belonged to 1688, but the legal and logistical frame was a product of October and November 1687. [8]
Taken together, the March arrival of the Centaurus, the February Inqua opening, the Stellenbosch church from January officers to the October sermon of van Andel, the winter fever that removed Overney and Cruse and raised Massanissa and de Chavonnes, the June French war fleet faced by Stellenbosch militia, the sixteen-of-October founding of Drakenstein, the November naming of Simon’s Bay, the full magazines beside the locust damage, the December census, and the directors’ October–November machinery for French refugees, made 1687 a year of inland foundation and naval foresight. The home-built boat became Company property; the Berg River valley received a name and twenty-three frontages; False Bay gained a wartime harbour title; and before the year closed the Seventeen had already committed the Cape to receive the largest Reformed French migration the settlement would see. [3] [4] [8]