Boer History1691 at the Cape of Good Hope: Van der Stel Governor, the Java Despatches, and the Colonial Census
Java Arrival and Governor’s Rank — 1 June 1691
The calendar year 1691 opened with Simon van der Stel still styled commander, though the Assembly of Seventeen had already resolved, on the 14th of December 1690, to raise him to the dignity of governor and to grant him a salary above his maintenance expenses of £16 13s. 4d. a month. The directors judged that a settlement of such promise should no longer stand under a head of lower rank. The despatches embodying that promotion did not reach Table Bay until the ship Java arrived on the 1st of June 1691. From the date of that arrival the colony was always thereafter presided over by an officer with the rank of governor. [3] [3] [8]
The change was institutional rather than a sudden rupture of daily administration. Van der Stel had governed the refreshment station and its expanding free-burgher districts since 1679. What arrived in the Java was the Company’s formal acknowledgement that the Cape had outgrown the older commander’s title. The colony which at the close of 1679 had been limited to a portion of the Cape peninsula had, over the next twelve years, spread over the tract bounded by the mountains of Drakenstein and Hottentots Holland. Farmhouses stood along the Koebergen and as far down the Berg River valley as the Green mountain beyond Wellington, and a few families still arrived each year from the Netherlands. [3]
Behind the promotion lay a long directors’ argument about cost. Refreshments for the fleets could already be had in ample quantity, yet the Cape establishment had seemed to them the dearest victualling station in the world. A free colony of useful size ought, they thought, to cheapen food and furnish a body of militia so that a large garrison would no longer be necessary. They pointed out that while wheat sold in the Netherlands at about 6s. 8d. the muid, they were then paying 12s. 6d. and even 13s. 11d. the muid at the Cape, though Cape farmers paid no rent and almost no taxes. They hoped the price could gradually be reduced toward the Fatherland rate, and that export of wheat, wine, and olive oil might in time cover a considerable share of government cost from sale profits. Vine and olive experiments were therefore pressed; the commander replied that trials continued in the Company’s gardens, on several farms, and at Constantia, while a few Huguenots were even grafting on the wild olive of the country—though most burghers still declined a crop that paid only after long waiting. [3]
Table Valley itself already showed a compact town plan. Buildings covered part of the ground between the Company’s garden and the shore of the bay; extensive private gardens occupied much of the remaining space. There were still no private residences beyond the lines later known as Plein Street and Burg Street. On the north side of the Heeregracht the Company’s garden extended as far down as the present Longmarket Street; on the opposite side it terminated where it still does. A reservoir near the site of the old earthen fort on the parade ground received water from the Fresh River through a wooden pipe laid in 1686, from which it could be conveyed along the jetty to ships’ boats. Close by stood a mill for grinding corn. Where buildings extended, the streets were regularly laid out and crossed at right angles, though they did not yet bear the names later attached to them. Down the two principal streets—the Heerengracht and the Keizersgracht—ran a canal; most houses were single-storey stone and brick under thatch, with a garden attached and walls required by statute to stand not less than twenty feet high. [3] [8]
Agriculture by 1691 had advanced far enough that there was food for inhabitants, garrison, and fleets, and in good seasons a surplus of fifteen hundred or two thousand muids of wheat for Batavia. The government kept two years’ supply in the magazines against drought, locusts, or caterpillars. The Company had not yet abandoned farming altogether, but was withdrawing: besides the Table Valley garden and the Rondebosch vineyard it still held seven farms or cattle places, the most remote at Hottentots Holland—two growing a few hundred muids of wheat, the rest stations for breeding and for holding oxen and sheep purchased from the Khoikhoi until the fleets needed them. Horses of Javanese origin had increased but deteriorated in size; they still fetched £4 to £5 at auction, as much as four or five prime oxen. In 1689 the Company had imported Persian stud horses and asses, and Spanish rams in hope of kirman wool. Wheat remained the farmer’s first object; cattle next; wine third, bought by the Company at £5 a legger for the fleets and often converted to vinegar because of its inferior quality for the Indian market. [3]
Council of Policy under the New Governor — 1691
When the change of rank took effect in 1691, the council of policy consisted of the governor, Simon van der Stel; the secunde, Andries de Man; the fiscal, Cornelis Simons; the captain, Willem Padt; the treasurer, Ludowyk van der Stel; the garrison bookkeeper, Jan Hendrik Blum; and the secretary, Johannes Willem de Grevenbroek. That board combined military command, commercial accounting, and criminal prosecution under a single table of rank at the castle. Botha’s institutional sketch of the same years adds that the council, enlarged to this extent in 1685 by High Commissioner Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede, made laws, levied taxes, appointed Company servants to civil situations, and granted freehold and leasehold land, subject to the veto of Holland and Batavia. Burghers never sat as members—a grievance they would voice a century later—though they did hold representation in the administration of justice. [3] [8]
The fiscal’s place on the council was no longer that of a mere junior prosecutor. In March 1688 the directors had created the office of independent fiscal, differing sharply from the older guardians of the law. Before 1690 Cape fiscals had been only junior merchants in rank; their chief duty had been to conduct criminal prosecutions, and they had stood subject to the head of government like ordinary clerks. The independent fiscals answered to the supreme directory alone and were free of local control. By right of office they sat in the council of policy next to the secunde, had access to records and state papers of every kind, and controlled accounts connected with ships’ cargoes, soldiers’ food supplies, and other expenditure. The Cape system was made uniform with that already used in the Company’s Indian possessions. [3]
The first independent fiscal at the Cape, Cornelis Joan Simons, appointed in 1689, drew a Company salary of only £100 a year. He was permitted fees and retained for his own benefit one third of the fines he inflicted in petty criminal cases. The directors hoped that such officers would check corrupt governors and subordinates; they did not, however, place them beyond temptation themselves. The dual arrangement of local government and independent fiscal remained the Cape constitution, with little structural change, through the following century. [3]
Justice and municipal order sat beside the council. The Court of Justice, established in 1656 and sitting at the Cape, consisted by 1686 of the governor, the secunde, and eight members, two of them Burgher Councillors first appointed in 1657. It tried civil actions, alone judged criminal cases, and heard appeals from inferior courts, with further appeal open to Batavia. A Court of Petty Cases from 1682 relieved it of small civil disputes under about £20 16s. 8d., two burghers sitting with two Company servants. The Matrimonial Court of 1676 examined intending spouses for legal impediment before banns. In the country, Stellenbosch’s Board of Heemraden (1682) and the landdrost (1685) settled trivial disputes; four heemraden chosen from leading inhabitants sat with the landdrost, final under about £2 1s. 8d. and appealable to the Court of Justice up to about £10. Nomination lists for these boards went to the council of policy. In the town itself a Board of Firemasters was appointed from among the burghers in 1691—a Firemaster having already been named from a retiring Burgher Councillor in 1680—each firemaster carrying a staff engraved with the Company’s arms when directing engines or holding back the crowd. [8]
Drakenstein and Stellenbosch Parishes — After June 1691
In 1691 there were two clergymen in the colony, stationed at the Cape and at Drakenstein. In January 1689 the Rev. Johannes van Andel had been succeeded at the Cape by the Rev. Leonardus Terwold, and had gone to Batavia as chaplain of the Wapen van Alkmaar. The church of Stellenbosch was still without a resident clergyman, though organised as a consistory. The sick visitor continued to read the services, except when the minister Pierre Simond preached there in French or Mr. Terwold in Dutch. [3]
The Assembly of Seventeen’s resolutions of 6 December 1690—authorising a Drakenstein church under council approval of officers, a political commissioner in the consistory, Cape oversight of important matters, bilingual schoolteachers with Dutch instruction for French children, and an explicit refusal of separate French location—reached the Cape with the June shipping of 1691. Botha’s digest of the Chamber of Amsterdam letter of 17 December 1690 (C.514, pp. 841–843) confirms the same frame: a French consistory of elders and deacons where possible versed in both languages; yearly nomination lists to the council of policy; one or two political commissioners; local poor funds under Drakenstein control, outside subsidies under the combined Grote Kerkenraad with annual statements as at Batavia. After those despatches arrived, the parishes of Drakenstein and Stellenbosch were separated. Simond’s French congregation at Drakenstein thereby obtained the institutional church grant for which the November 1689 deputation had petitioned, while Stellenbosch remained a consistory without a resident minister of its own. [3] [8]
Before the despatches arrived most of the Huguenots who had been located elsewhere had managed to purchase ground at Drakenstein, and when the next census was taken only three French families were found still residing in Stellenbosch. The first consistory of the French congregation at Drakenstein was constituted on the 30th of December 1691, with Claude Marais, Louis de Berault, and Louis Cordier as elders, and Abraham de Villiers, Pierre Meyer, Pierre Beneset, and Pierre Rousseau as deacons. Claude Marais had already held office as deacon of the Stellenbosch church the previous year; a journal note of 14 December 1690 marks that service, and de Berault retired as deacon from the Cape Town church at the same season. Country church life therefore ran on three tracks by the close of 1691: a Dutch congregation at the Cape under Terwold; a French (and mixed) congregation at Drakenstein under Simond with separate parish status and its own consistory; and a Stellenbosch consistory still dependent on visiting sermons and the sick visitor’s reading. [3] [3] [8]
Mid-year correspondence shows how firmly the governor still held the scattering policy even while the church grant took effect. On the 29th of June 1691 van der Stel wrote to the Chamber of Amsterdam that the refugees on arrival had mostly been settled at Drakenstein and a few at Stellenbosch among the Dutch, so that they might learn Dutch language and customs and be incorporated with the Dutch. “We find,” he added, that their fickle (wispeltuurige) nature still clung to them, and that they were like the children of Israel who, fed by God’s hand in the wilderness, longed for the onion pots of Egypt. In the same year that the French received their own congregation, directions required schoolmasters who knew both Dutch and French; yet Cape officials still feared that closer French settlement would keep the refugees French, whereas intermingling was meant to ensure assimilation. The bitterness of earlier years had not vanished overnight, but the December consistory fixed the institutional answer: a separate country church under Company oversight, bilingual schooling with Dutch for French children, and no French territorial bloc. [8]
Linnes Succeeds Mulder as Landdrost — 12 June 1691
Johannes Mulder, the first landdrost of Stellenbosch, retired from office at his own request. On the 12th of June 1691—eleven days after the Java had brought the governor’s commission—he was succeeded by Cornelis Linnes. The landdrost’s court, with the heemraad, remained the ordinary instrument of civil order in the country district: disputes among free burghers, enforcement of placaats, and the intermediate link between farm households and the council of policy at the castle. Jurisdiction remained modest by later standards—final under small sums, appealable to the Court of Justice within a fixed band—but the office was the spine of rural administration from Stellenbosch out toward Drakenstein and the Berg River farms. [3] [8]
In the heemraad and in the consistory men were already taking part whose family names would remain rooted in the district. The same held for many members of the various boards at the Cape. In the burgher council, the consistory, the orphan chamber, the matrimonial court, and the court of commissioners for petty cases sat men whose surnames became familiar across later South Africa. A roll call of the militia would likewise have shown a large proportion of names still recognisable generations afterward between Cape Point and the far interior. All males between sixteen and sixty were expected to enrol in the burgher militia and come up annually for training; signal cannon from high points could call the country burghers to arms. In the town, Rattlewatch men appointed from 1686 patrolled and called the hours after ten, while from 1696 a fuller Burgher Watch would be raised—six companies of thirty—but the unpaid civic duty of watch and fire already framed urban life in 1691. [3] [8]
Linnes himself appears on the Stellenbosch roll of notable inhabitants for 1691 with wife and one child. Mulder, after leaving office, likewise remains listed among the Stellenbosch free population. The June succession therefore transferred the drostdy without emptying either household from the district rolls that close the year. Country revenue work and placaat enforcement ran through the same officers: a veldwachter had been appointed as early as 1680 to report non-observance of the laws to the fiscal and take half the fine on conviction; later men were set to check smuggling, unlawful game-killing, and other breaches away from the castle’s eye. [3] [8]
Khoikhoi Clans and Illicit Cattle Trade — 1691
Quarrels between Khoikhoi clans within the limits of the European settlement were frequent. Their kraals lay thinly scattered over the country and were still moved from place to place as in earlier times, except that they could not be erected on ground occupied by Europeans. Khoikhoi communities were subject to Dutch law only in cases where Europeans also were concerned. They had become poor in cattle, owing partly to the waste of perpetual feuds, partly to San depredations, and partly to readiness to exchange oxen for brandy and tobacco. Tracts of land of considerable extent were being taken up for European immigrants, yet the natives were never more friendly in formal terms: there was room enough for all, and colonists would gladly have employed hundreds of Khoikhoi if the men could have been induced to take regular service. Light work for tobacco and spirits, especially in harvest, and the hire of female children as household servants, spread a knowledge of Dutch without converting the men from a free pastoral life. None had yet progressed so far as to make gardens for themselves. [3] [3]
Burghers were forbidden to trade with the Khoikhoi under severe penalties. In defiance of the placaats, and of the punishment that followed conviction, some of the least reputable among them carried on an extensive barter. Captain Klaas, once a trusted intermediary who had purchased cattle for the Company and had sheltered Europeans in distress—including survivors of the Noord wreck the previous year—was already falling into disfavour. A man who had tired of constant travelling to satisfy Company demand no longer served as the castle’s preferred agent. Company need for stock had again forced the despatch of European trading parties; those parties excited his jealousy, and he put obstacles in their way. The coolness would harden into open threat against Ensign Schryver in 1692, but the friction and the rival captain Koopman’s readiness to denounce Klaas at the castle were already shaping the Chainouqua politics of the early 1690s. Koopman came to the castle accusing Klaas of league with illicit burgher traders and offering his own services; the government gradually shifted alliance toward Koopman and came to regard Klaas as an ill-affected mischief-maker. [3]
Other communities destroyed one another in the same years. Hessequa kraals suffered Attaqua pillage; all remained exposed to San plunder. The Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua clans near the Cape were described as completely impoverished. Captains still sought copper-headed staffs engraved with the Company’s arms and a governor-given name as marks of recognised authority, and weighty disputes were increasingly referred of their own accord to European settlement. In the recent past the two Chainouqua captains Klaas and Koopman had quarrelled so often that the commander had repeatedly interfered on Klaas’s behalf; Namaqua and Grigriqua raids across the Elephant River had struck Cochoqua kraals near Saldanha Bay, and at the end of 1690 soldiers had been sent to preserve order, capturing several thousand head of cattle that were restored with presents when the invaders sued for peace. Between those events the old Cochoqua chief Oedasoa had died, and a brother had received a staff of office under the name Hannibal. The pattern of 1691 was therefore not a single war but a grinding combination of clan feud, San pressure, illicit frontier barter, and Company cattle demand. [3] [3]
Burgher Rolls of Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein — 1691
Contemporary lists of the most notable free inhabitants in 1691 preserve a working map of the three European districts. In the Cape district the roll includes households such as Louris van As, Pierre Barrillé, Johannes de Beer with six children, Wynand Bezuidenhout, the Botma families (Cornelis with seven children, Johannes with wife), Adriaan van Brakel widower with six children, Johannes Coetsee, Bastiaan Colyn with four children, Henning Huising, Albertus and Johannes Myburgh, Johannes Pretorius with six children, Adriaan Prinsloo, Michiel Smuts, Joost Strydom, the Victor households, the Visagie and Visser lines (Gerrit Visser with nine children), Pieter van der Westhuizen with six children, and Frederick Russouw de Witt, among many others named with wives and children. French names already stand on the Cape list beside Dutch and German ones— Barrillé, du Plessis, Brasier—showing how incomplete any simple map of “French only at Drakenstein” would be. [3]
At Stellenbosch the notable roll names, among others, Ferdinand Appel, Frederik Botha, Gerrit Cloete with six children, Dirk Coetsee with six children, Pierre le Fèbre with three children, Matthys Greef with four children, Cornelis Linnes with wife and one child, Sybrand Mankadan, Philip Morkel, Johannes Mulder with wife and one child, Guillaume Nel with three children, Hermanus Potgieter, Douwe Steyn with eight children, Adam Tas, Guillaume du Toit with three children, Hendrik Venter, Gerrit van der Byl, and the Pasman households. The list is a cross-section of Dutch, German, and some French free households already fixed on Stellenbosch ground—the same district whose first landdrost had just handed the staff to Linnes. [3]
Drakenstein’s notable inhabitants show the Huguenot concentration still dense after the arrivals of 1688–1689. The roll includes Etienne Bruère, Louis Cordier with five children, Philippe Fouché with four children, André Gaucher, Pierre Jacob, the Joubert and Jourdan households, Pierre Lombard with three children, Jacques Malan, Gideon Malherbe, the Marais households including the widow of Charles the elder, Schalk and Willem van der Merwe (Willem with eight children), Daniel Nortier, Jacques Pinard, the Du Pré households, Paul Roux, Pierre Rousseau with two children, Jacques de Savoye with three children, the Rev. Pierre Simond with wife and two children, Isaac Taillefer with three children, François du Toit, and the three De Villiers brothers with their households, among many others. Dutch and German names—Cloete, Van der Byl, Kruger, Van Wyk, Van Zyl, Van Staden with eight children—stand on the same district list, matching the Seventeen’s instruction that nationalities should be mixed when ground was granted. The elders and deacons named on 30 December are almost all visible on this same roll. [3] [8]
Population, Slaves, Stock, and Harvest — 1691
In addition to those named on the district rolls, there were in the whole settlement in 1691 about 250 male colonists with 50 women and 60 or 70 children not separately listed among the “most notable.” Those who were married included Asiatics or freed slaves who enjoyed the same privileges as European burghers and were classed with them in official documents without distinction. The unmarried were chiefly discharged Company servants of nearly every European nationality, few of whom remained long or left lasting local lines. Colonists of all ages numbered rather over a thousand souls. That free population—small by later measure, large beside the fort community of the 1650s—was the body the Seventeen had in mind when they spoke of militia and cheaper grain. [3]
They owned 285 men slaves, 57 women slaves, and 44 slave children. The children were all baptised and were receiving Christian instruction. Disproportion of the sexes remained a source of disorder among slaves as among Europeans. Several parties of runaway slaves maintained themselves in the mountains and committed depredations on farmers; others took refuge with Khoikhoi clans, by whom they were generally surrendered sooner or later. The same mountains that sheltered runaways also sent leopards and lions onto the farms; San parties still came down from the Drakenstein heights to plunder the valley when they could. The labour system and the frontier security problem were thus two faces of one thin settlement. [3] [3]
Free stock and cultivation figures for the same snapshot give the material base of the settlement. The colonists possessed 261 horses, 4,198 head of horned cattle, 48,703 sheep, and 220 goats. They had 584,950 vines bearing, and had harvested in the last season 4,181 muids of wheat, 808 muids of rye, and 202 muids of barley. Those numbers describe a mixed grain-and-wine freehold economy already large enough to tithe and to supply fleets, yet still small enough that a single bad season could press hard on magazine stocks—hence the standing rule of two years’ wheat in store. Wine at five pounds the legger and wheat still dear by Netherlands standards explain both the directors’ hope of export profit and the farmers’ preference for grain and stock over slower experiments such as the olive. [3]
Revenue and a Decade of Table Bay Shipping — 1691
Colonial revenue at this time came almost entirely from three streams. Licenses to sell wines, spirits, bread, meat, and various other articles, put up at auction yearly, brought in altogether about £1,500. Tithes fluctuated greatly and, with deductions allowed to the sick, the very poor, and generally in bad seasons, were not worth more than about £700. Transfer dues on sales of fixed property brought the whole up to about £2,250 yearly. The transfer duty itself, introduced in 1686, had been meant to check quick resale of free grants: ten per cent if sold within three years, five per cent within ten, and two and a half per cent thereafter. Colonists thus appeared taxed at roughly 45s. for each individual over and above Company profits on goods, but in reality strangers contributed the largest portion of the license money through the tavern and supply trade of the bay. Botha’s parallel sketch of end-of-century revenue names the same three pillars— auctioned retail privileges from 1673, tenths of produce, and transfer duty—as the general practice under Company rule. [3] [8]
Shipping returns for the ten years ending on the 31st of December 1691 counted 424 vessels that put into Table Bay. Of these, 339 belonged to the Company, 46 were English, 23 French, 13 Danish, and 3 Portuguese. The bay remained first a VOC refreshment and return-fleet anchorage, and only secondarily a port of call for foreign flags. English numbers already reflected both East India traffic and the Madagascar slave trade that used the Cape as a watering place; French hulls had to be read against the war begun in 1689, when the Normande and the Coche had been seized in the bay and sent home as the Goede Hoop and the Afrika. Townspeople depended heavily on public houses, lodging, and sales to passing foreigners; country people sold grain, wine, and stock into a market the Company still sought to monopolise at fixed prices once its own requirements were met. [3] [8]
Taken together, the revenue and shipping figures show why the Seventeen had raised the local head to governor’s rank. The station was still a debit post in full Company accounts, yet it handled a continuous international traffic, drew a measurable local tax yield, and supported more than a thousand free inhabitants on grain, vines, and stock. Travellers of several nationalities would describe the little colony as a place where life could be passed as comfortably as anywhere in the world; official documents of the same season show no one accumulating great wealth and no one wanting food. The institutional promotion of June, the December French consistory, the Linnes succession at the drostdy, and the census rolls of free households, slaves, stock, and shipping, all belong to one year in which the refreshment station finally wore the outward rank of a small colonial government. [3]