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]
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]
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. 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. [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 military 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. [3]
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]
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. 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]
Country church life therefore ran on three tracks in 1691: a Dutch congregation at the Cape under Terwold; a French (and mixed) congregation at Drakenstein under Simond with the new separate parish status; and a Stellenbosch consistory still dependent on visiting sermons and the sick visitor’s reading. That arrangement fixed the religious geography of the free-burgher districts for the rest of the decade until a resident clergyman was later appointed to Stellenbosch. [3] [3]
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. [3]
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. [3]
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. [3]
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. [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, was already falling into disfavour. Company demand 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. [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. 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]
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, the Botma families, Adriaan van Brakel widower with six children, Johannes Coetsee, Bastiaan Colyn, Henning Huising, Albertus and Johannes Myburgh, Johannes Pretorius, Adriaan Prinsloo, Michiel Smuts, Joost Strydom, the Victor households, and the Visagie and Visser lines, among many others named with wives and children. [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, Matthys Greef, Cornelis Linnes with wife and one child, Sybrand Mankadan, Philip Morkel, Johannes Mulder, Guillaume Nel, Hermanus Potgieter, Douwe Steyn with eight children, Adam Tas, Guillaume du Toit, and Hendrik Venter. The list is a cross-section of Dutch, German, and some French free households already fixed on Stellenbosch ground. [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, Daniel Nortier, Jacques Pinard, the Du Pré households, Paul Roux, Pierre Rousseau, 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—stand on the same district list, matching the Seventeen’s instruction that nationalities should be mixed when ground was granted. [3]
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. [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. [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. [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. 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. [3]
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. [3]
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. The institutional promotion of June matched the scale already visible in the rolls and returns of the same year. [3]
Close of 1691 at the Cape
By the end of 1691 the Cape stood under a governor rather than a commander. The Java had delivered the Seventeen’s December 1690 promotion on 1 June; Simon van der Stel’s council sat with Andries de Man as secunde, Cornelis Simons as independent fiscal, Willem Padt as captain, Ludowyk van der Stel as treasurer, Jan Hendrik Blum as military bookkeeper, and Johannes Willem de Grevenbroek as secretary. On 12 June Cornelis Linnes succeeded Johannes Mulder as landdrost of Stellenbosch. After the June despatches, Drakenstein and Stellenbosch became separate parishes under the church grant framed in Amsterdam the previous December, with Terwold at the Cape and Simond at Drakenstein while Stellenbosch still lacked a resident clergyman. District rolls named the leading free households of Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein; the wider free population exceeded a thousand souls, with 285 men slaves, 57 women slaves, and 44 slave children, 261 horses, 4,198 cattle, 48,703 sheep, 220 goats, 584,950 bearing vines, and a last-season harvest of 4,181 muids of wheat. Revenue ran near £2,250 a year, and 424 ships had entered Table Bay across the decade ending 31 December 1691. Those were the calendar facts of the year in which the Cape’s headship changed title and the free settlement first appears in full statistical outline. [3] [3]