Boer History1692 at the Cape of Good Hope: Klaas and Schryver, the Salt River Wrecks, and Van der Stel Councillor Extraordinary
Klaas, Schryver, and the Cattle-Barter Crisis — 1692
The calendar year 1692 opened under Governor Simon van der Stel, whose promotion from commander had taken effect with the arrival of the Java on 1 June 1691. Free-burgher settlement already stretched from the Cape peninsula toward the mountains of Drakenstein and Hottentots Holland, yet the colony’s meat supply still depended on cattle obtained from Khoikhoi clans. Company trading parties of Europeans had again to be sent inland because the once-trusted Chainouqua captain Klaas no longer kept up the labour of purchasing stock for the Honourable Company on the scale demanded at the castle. [3]
Klaas had long been counted among the most faithful intermediaries between the settlement and the inland clans. By 1692 that relationship had soured. Contemporary records show him weary of continuous exertion on behalf of a demand that seemed endless, and jealous when European bartering parties reappeared on the roads and pastures he had once dominated. The head of one such party was Ensign Schryver. In 1692 Klaas used most threatening language toward Schryver, turning commercial rivalry into open unfriendliness and forcing the government to reassess which Chainouqua leader could still be treated as a reliable ally. [3]
The episode belonged to a wider pattern already visible around the free settlement. Khoikhoi kraals remained thinly scattered and still moved from place to place, except that they could no longer be pitched on ground occupied by Europeans. Clans were subject to Dutch law only where Europeans were also concerned. Cattle wealth had declined through inter-clan feuds, San depredations, and the readiness of some communities to exchange oxen for brandy and tobacco. Burghers were forbidden to trade with the Khoikhoi under severe penalties, yet some of the least reputable free men continued an extensive illicit barter in defiance of the placaats. [3]
Koopman Becomes the Company’s Ally — 1692
Koopman, Klaas’s rival within the same Chainouqua connection, moved quickly once Klaas stood in disfavour. He came to the castle with an accusation that Klaas was in league with those burghers who carried on the illicit cattle trade, and he professed so great a regard for the Company’s interests as to place his services entirely at the governor’s disposal. In the minute details entered in the contemporary records, the manoeuvre reads as a classic bid by one clan leader to capture European backing against another. [3]
The result in 1692 was a full reversal of earlier Cape policy toward the rival branches of the Chainouqua. Koopman became an ally of the Honourable Company; Klaas was regarded as an ill-affected mischief-maker. Klaas had as wife a daughter of Goukou, paramount chief of the Hessequas, commonly called the oude heer by the colonists. His people and the Hessequas were living in close friendship, so that any blow against Klaas risked drawing in a wider inland network. The alignment fixed in this year did not yet produce the armed commando of 1693, but it set the political board on which that later expedition would move. [3]
For the free districts the change mattered in daily terms. Company bartering parties could again operate with a recognised inland partner; illicit burgher traders lost, at least on paper, the cover of Klaas’s earlier goodwill; and the castle’s correspondence treated Koopman as the Chainouqua captain whose complaints and requests would receive a hearing. The older story of Klaas as the most trustworthy of his race was not erased overnight, but in official eyes 1692 marked the year when that credit was withdrawn. [3]
Table Bay Gale and Three Wrecks — 4–5 June 1692
During the night of the 4th of June 1692 a heavy gale set in from the north-west. Before daylight of the 5th three ships were driven ashore near the mouth of the Salt River: the Company’s Goede Hoop and Hoogergeest, and the English ship Orange. A large fleet lay in Table Bay at the time; the other vessels held to their anchors. The disaster struck the exposed Salt River roadstead that had already claimed wrecks in earlier decades whenever winter north-westers piled sea onto the flats east of the castle. [3]
The Goede Hoop was the same ship taken from the French in April 1689, when she had been named the Normande. She was now homeward bound from Ceylon. She held together, and most of her cargo, though damaged, was recovered. The Hoogergeest, from Batavia, and the Orange, from Madras, broke up quickly, but only a few of their people were lost. The men of the Hoogergeest were rescued by a quartermaster of an Indiaman who happened to be on shore at the time. That seaman, Jochem Willems by name, fastened a line to his body and made his way through the surf to the wreck. A hawser was then pulled ashore, and by its means most of the crew escaped before the ship broke up. [3]
For the settlement the June wrecks were both a material loss and a demonstration of Table Bay’s winter danger. Cargo from Ceylon and Batavia, and an English Indiaman from Madras, piled onto the same stretch of shore within hours. Salvage parties worked the Goede Hoop while the broken hulls of the other two ships marked how little holding ground the Salt River mouth offered once a north-wester had the fleet on a lee shore. The episode stood among the principal shipping disasters of Van der Stel’s governorship and fixed 4–5 June 1692 in the bay’s wreck calendar. [3]
Van der Stel Councillor Extraordinary — 1692
In 1692 the Assembly of Seventeen conferred upon Simon van der Stel the rank and title of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India. The directors continued to hold a very high opinion of the governor. The honour sat above the local title he had received in 1691 and linked the Cape head of government more formally to the upper hierarchy of the Company’s Indian administration, even while he remained stationed at the castle in Table Valley. [3]
The promotion did not alter the daily composition of the council of policy overnight, but it confirmed that Amsterdam still trusted the man who had opened Stellenbosch, settled Drakenstein, and raised the free population above a thousand souls. When in 1696 he later requested permission to resign, the same directors would name his eldest son as successor—an outcome prepared by the confidence already visible in the councillor’s rank of 1692. For the free burghers watching from the Liesbeek, Stellenbosch, and Berg River farms, the honour marked official success at the very moment when personal warmth between governor and colonists was beginning to cool. [3]
Changing Relations with the Free Burghers — 1692
Before the year 1692 Simon van der Stel had enjoyed the esteem and affection of nearly every European in South Africa except the French immigrants. About this date a different feeling began slowly to develop. He was now a disappointed man: his earlier dream of forming a purely Dutch settlement had been thwarted by the Huguenot influx and by the Seventeen’s own instructions that nationalities should be mixed when ground was granted. The love of wealth had grown upon him, and his farm Constantia, already beautified with vineyards and avenues of young oaks, year by year occupied more of his attention. [3]
Free households noticed that the strong personal interest he had once taken in their welfare seemed to be dying out. A comparison of the records of the first twelve years of his administration with those of the last seven shows that a change in his feelings had really taken place: the enthusiastic language of the first period gives way to cold official expressions in the last. Still there were no open complaints in 1692, and to strangers and others who could not see beneath the surface everything appeared to be working smoothly. The breach that would later mark the end of the Van der Stel era was still only a change of tone. [3]
Constantia itself was becoming a centre of the governor’s private estate economy. Vineyards and oak avenues already distinguished the property; in later years strangers would praise the wine pressed there. In 1692 the farm’s growing hold on the governor’s time was read by colonists as a shift of energy away from district visitation and personal arbitration toward a more distant, official style of rule. That perception, more than any single placaat, explains why the year stands as a hinge between the popular commander of the 1680s and the cooler governor of the later 1690s. [3]
Khoikhoi Poverty and Illicit Cattle Trade — 1692
Around the European farms the older peninsula clans were under lasting pressure. The Goringhaiquas and Gorachouquas were already described as completely impoverished in the mid-1690s narrative that takes its departure from the conditions of this period. Inter-clan fighting continued beyond the Chainouqua rivalry: other communities destroyed one another in the same fashion, and all remained exposed to plunder by San groups. Burgher defiance of the trade ban meant that brandy and tobacco still moved outward along informal paths while cattle moved in, undermining both Company monopoly and clan herds. [3]
The government’s answer in 1692 was twofold: renew European trading parties under officers such as Schryver, and cultivate Koopman as a counterweight to Klaas. Neither measure restored the older abundance of Khoikhoi stock. They did, however, reassert the castle’s claim to regulate who might barter and who counted as a friend of the Company. Free burghers who ignored the placaats risked prosecution; captains who obstructed official parties risked the fate Klaas was already approaching. The year’s inland politics were therefore inseparable from the meat economy of the bay. [3]
Staffs of office with copper heads—Company arms on one side, the governor’s name for the new captain on the other—remained indispensable symbols when clans sought confirmation of successors. Even impoverished communities still turned to the European authorities for settlement of weighty disputes. That dependence, already visible before 1692, hardened as cattle grew scarcer and as rival captains learned that access to the castle could decide a local balance of power. [3]
Shipping and the Opening of the 1692–1699 Decade
During the eight years 1692–1699 four hundred and thirty-five ships put into Table Bay, or on an average fifty-four yearly. Of these, two hundred and ninety-three belonged to the Company, one hundred and thirteen were English, nineteen were Danish, and ten were French. The decade opened, therefore, with a busier foreign presence than the ten years ending 31 December 1691, when 424 vessels had been counted and English ships had numbered only forty-six. English traffic now included East India voyages, private traders or interlopers, ships of the new English East India Company, occasional men-of-war on convoy duty, and vessels in the Madagascar slave trade that used the Cape as a watering place. [3] [3]
Ship construction had changed since the mid-century. Indiamen carried more sails, each smaller, and needed fewer hands than formerly. The average Dutch Indiaman at the close of the century mustered about one hundred and seventy men; English ships that put into Table Bay were as a rule much smaller and did not carry on average more than one hundred. The old English East India Company’s ships often still preferred St Helena, so that the English flags seen in Table Bay in the 1692 opening years were a mixed commercial and interloping crowd rather than a single company fleet. [3]
Against that traffic the June wrecks were a sharp reminder that volume did not mean safety. A bay that could host a large winter fleet could still lose three ships in one night when the north-west gale made the Salt River mouth a lee shore. Refreshment, repair, and salvage remained core Cape work even as free agriculture expanded inland. The shipping figures that begin with 1692 thus frame both the colony’s international importance and the physical risk that governed every winter anchorage. [3]
Settlement Work and New Burgher Names — 1692
Inland of the bay the free districts continued the routine of grain, vines, and stock that the 1691 rolls had already measured in aggregate. Between 1691 and 1700 a further set of burgher surnames first appears in the colonial records—among them Bakhuizen, Bisseaux, Bloem, de Boer, Brink, Coenradie, Couvret, Cronjé, Delport, van Deventer, Diemer, Dumont, Faber, Fleuris, Gardiol, Haak, de Haas, Heems, Helm, Heyning, Hoffman, Hubner, van Jaarsveld, Kerver, de Kock, Kruisman, Lutters, Maritz, van Meerland, Menssinck, Mouton, Mouy, Niel, Odendaal, Oertman, Pleunis, van Rensburg, le Riche, Rotterdam, van de Sande, Scheffer, Schryver, Slabbart, Swanepoel, Syfer, de Vos, Wiederhold, Willemse, Wynoch, and Zevenhoven. Not every name can be pinned to a single twelve-month grant, but the cluster marks the continued arrival and local establishment of Dutch, German, and French households across the decade that 1692 opens. [3]
Experiments in plantation and town improvement grouped with this phase of Van der Stel’s rule—olive trials, hop culture, and the assiduous planting of young oaks in the Cape peninsula—belong to the same working years, even where the surviving notices are not dated to a single month of 1692. Failure with olives did not stop the effort; oak planting was pursued as a long investment in timber and landscape. The free settlement’s material programme thus ran in parallel with the political cooling between governor and burghers and with the inland realignment from Klaas to Koopman. [3]
Wild animals still troubled the peninsula and the country districts. Premiums for killing lions in the Cape peninsula stood at a substantial sum, and stock losses near the castle remained possible. Those hazards were part of ordinary farm risk in 1692, not exceptional news, but they help explain why cattle obtained by barter or bred on freehold ground were guarded so closely and why Company and burgher alike watched the inland captains who controlled access to wider herds. [3]
Close of 1692 at the Cape
By the end of 1692 three strands defined the year at the Cape. Inland, Captain Klaas’s threats against Ensign Schryver’s bartering party had cost him Company favour; Koopman stood as the Chainouqua ally of the castle, with Klaas cast as mischief-maker and still linked by marriage to Goukou of the Hessequas. In Table Bay, the north-west gale of 4–5 June had driven the Goede Hoop, Hoogergeest, and English Orange ashore near Salt River mouth—Jochem Willems’s surf rescue from the Hoogergeest the one clear act of heroism in a night of broken ships. At the level of rank and reputation, the Seventeen had made Simon van der Stel councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India, even as free-burgher esteem for the governor began to cool and Constantia claimed more of his attention. Shipping returns for the eight years beginning in 1692 would count 435 arrivals in Table Bay. Those were the calendar facts of a year that realigned inland alliances, scarred the winter anchorage, and marked both the height of official honour and the first quiet estrangement between governor and colonists. [3]