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, had been lost at St Lucia Bay. One of her crew drowned; the remaining eight men and a boy set out to walk to the Cape and found, to their joy, Europeans and a vessel nearly ready for sea. They joined the labour. Provisions purchased from the local people included several thousand pounds of millet, a thousand pounds of salted and smoked meat, millet meal, goats, fowls, and pumpkins, with seventeen small casks of water and the English ivory already bartered inland. [3]
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; 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 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. [3]
Purchase and Refit of the Centaurus
The council purchased the Centaurus from her builders. Her hull needed only 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. [3]
After refit the Centaurus was used at the Cape for several months. Only on the 10th of November 1687 was she sent east to look for the still missing men of the Stavenisse. That search voyage ran into head winds beyond St Blaize and did not complete its work within the calendar year; what 1687 secured was the purchase, the engagement of the Natal English quartermasters, coastal service under the castle, and the November departure itself. [3]
Inqua Messenger — February 1687
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, yet the story of a mighty inland ruler at first suggested 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 Hottentots. The fuller expedition under Ensign Izaak Schryver would leave only in January 1689; 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. [3]
Stellenbosch Church — January to October 1687
Church organisation at Stellenbosch, resolved upon at the fair of 1686, took solid form in 1687. In January, when the Rev. Johannes Overney visited the village on the 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. [3] [4]
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 delivered a sermon from Numbers vi. 23–27. Between the foundation stone and the opening the inland congregation thus gained both officers and a dedicated place of worship, while on ordinary Sabbaths the sick-visitor Mankadan continued to read sermons and prayers as before. [3]
Tree-planting kept pace with building. In the spring of 1687 the commander 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. The oak thrived where other European and Indian timber raised from seed did not; fuel for the castle already depended on planted groves, and the inland farms were ordered toward the same habit. [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. [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, died on the 20th of June. He was succeeded in the command of the garrison by Lieutenant Dominique de Chavonnes. [3]
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 earlier embassies. Refreshment and hospital care were 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. [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. [3] [4]
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. [3]
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. 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. An experiment in farming the tithe out at public auction, with the purchaser entitled to every eleventh sheaf in the field, later raised complaints and was abandoned. The only other ordinary charge was the cost of measurement and title-deeds when survey was made. 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. [3]
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]
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. [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. [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. Oak planting, spring growth, and the inland harvest thus closed the agricultural year beside the new Drakenstein frontage and the False Bay survey. [3]
Census and Close of 1687
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: burghers 254; wives of burghers and widows 88; children of burghers 231; European men servants 39; men slaves 230; women slaves 44; slave children 36; horses in possession of burghers 155; horned cattle 2,951; sheep 30,142; muids of wheat from the last crop 1,857; rye 197; barley 205; vines bearing 402,900. The yearly lists were known to understate the number of burghers through omitted names, yet the figures still mark a free community thick enough to fill magazines and thin enough that marriageable women remained scarce. [3]
By the year’s end the Cape had absorbed the Natal boat-builders into Company service, opened Stellenbosch’s first church building, replaced Overney and Cruse, hosted a French war fleet under guarded hospitality, marked out Drakenstein along the Berg, named Simon’s Bay, and counted a harvest that outran store-room. Those were the calendar facts of 1687 under Simon van der Stel’s command. [3] [4]