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. The directors still hoped that a free colony of useful size would cheapen food and furnish militia; in practice the magazines and the fleets continued to draw on inland herds that only clan captains could assemble in quantity. [3] [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 must have seemed to him insatiable, and jealous when European bartering parties reappeared on the roads and pastures he had once dominated. Theal’s summary is blunt: a man of his circumstances could not long continue in any pursuit that demanded so much travelling and so little rest, and the return of official parties under European officers excited him to put obstacles in their way. That conduct led rapidly to something more unfriendly. [3]
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. 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. [3]
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 and of the punishment that followed conviction. Botha’s institutional sketch of the same end-of-century years confirms how tightly the Company still guarded that monopoly: whatever the burghers had to sell or required to buy was, in principle, to pass through Company channels at prices fixed by authority, and cattle barter with the Khoikhoi remained strictly prohibited until the policy shift of 1699. In 1692, therefore, Schryver’s official party and Klaas’s obstructive anger were two faces of one contested meat economy—Company demand pressing inland, illicit free-burgher paths undercutting the monopoly, and clan captains forced to choose whether to serve, obstruct, or profit from the traffic. [3] [8]
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, Theal observed an exact counterpart of later manoeuvres by African chiefs seeking European backing against a rival: the accusation, the protestation of loyalty, and the bid to capture the castle’s favour as a weapon in local politics. [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—when Captain Willem Padt would march with a hundred soldiers and a hundred burghers after Koopman’s urgent request of 20 April 1693—but it set the political board on which that later expedition would move, including the eventual seizure of Klaas’s cattle, his detention on Robben Island, and the long feud that ended only with Klaas’s death in a skirmish in June 1701. [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—colonists still remembered that he had befriended Europeans in distress—but in official eyes 1692 marked the year when that credit was withdrawn. Goukou’s friendship remained valued because he was considered the most wealthy and powerful of the Khoikhoi chiefs in the neighbourhood of the colony; his daughter’s marriage to Klaas, and later her seizure by Koopman after Klaas’s arrest, would keep Hessequa politics entangled with the Chainouqua quarrel for the rest of the decade. [3]
Other inland communities were already destroying one another in the same fashion. Theal’s narrative of the mid-1690s records Hessequa kraals pillaged by Attaquas, San descents on Koopman’s herds, and the complete impoverishment of the older peninsula clans of the Goringhaiquas and Gorachouquas. Staffs of office with copper heads—Company arms on one side, the name given by the governor to 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]
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, and it opened a run of shipping losses that would continue through the later 1690s with the Dageraad on Robben Island, the Waddingsveen and Oosterland again at Salt River mouth, and the Huis te Crayenstein behind the Lion’s Head. [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. Theal’s account preserves the episode as one of the clearest acts of individual seamanship in the bay’s wreck calendar of the decade. [3] [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. Town livelihood still depended heavily on public houses, lodging, and sales to passing foreigners; a wreck concentrated that traffic into sudden salvage, billeting of survivors, and the grim accounting of damaged cargoes. 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] [8]
The physical setting of the disaster was the same low shore that the colony was only beginning to regularise as urban ground. Table Valley’s built area still extended roughly to the lines later known as Burg Street and Plein Street; canals ran down the Heerengracht and Keizersgracht; most houses were single-storey stone and brick under thatch, with gardens attached and walls required by statute to stand not less than twenty feet high. The road to the country still ran between the castle and the shore of the bay. When a north-west gale drove ships onto the Salt River flats, castle, town, and wreck beach therefore stood within a few thousand yards of one another—close enough for shore parties such as Willems’s to act, and close enough for the whole free community to see what winter anchorage still cost. [3] [8]
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—when the ship Java brought despatches raising him from commander to governor on 1 June—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. Botha’s plain institutional note of the same transition records that the commander’s rank was changed in 1691 to governor; the councillor’s dignity of 1692 was the next step in the same directors’ favour. [3] [3] [8]
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 the change of local rank had taken effect in 1691, that council had consisted of the governor; the secunde, Andries de Man; the fiscal, Cornelis Simons (more fully Cornelis Joan Simons); the captain, Willem Padt; the treasurer, Ludowyk van der Stel; the garrison bookkeeper, Jan Hendrik Blum; and the secretary, Johannes Willem de Grevenbroek. Botha’s parallel sketch of the board after High Commissioner Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede’s enlargement of 1685 names the same governing functions—laws, taxes, civil appointments, freehold and leasehold grants—subject to the veto of Holland and Batavia, and notes that burghers never sat as members. [3] [8]
The independent fiscal’s place on that board remained one of the constitutional novelties of the late 1680s. Created by the directors in March 1688, the office differed sharply from the older guardians of the law: the new fiscals answered to the supreme directory alone, sat next to the secunde, controlled accounts connected with ships’ cargoes and garrison supply, and retained for their own benefit one third of the fines they inflicted in petty criminal cases. Simons, appointed in 1689, drew a Company salary of only £100 a year. The dual arrangement of local government and independent fiscal remained the Cape constitution, with little structural change, through the following century. Against that machinery the councillor’s rank of 1692 was less a reform than a personal elevation—Amsterdam’s public mark of confidence in the governor who still headed both settlement expansion and the refreshment station. [3]
When in 1696 van der Stel later requested permission to resign, so as to spend the evening of his life in comparative freedom from care, 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. The newly appointed governor could not immediately leave the Netherlands; only on 23 January 1699 would Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel and his family reach South Africa, and only on 11 February 1699 would the father hand over the administration and retire to Constantia. For the free burghers watching from the Liesbeek, Stellenbosch, and Berg River farms, the honour of 1692 thus 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—and that Botha’s end-of-century sketch already foreshadows in the officials’ later competition with farmers and in the acute crisis of 1705—was still only a change of tone. [3] [8]
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, colonists would suspect a secret method of manufacture, and the true cause would prove to be the soil. 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]
The French dimension of the cooling was structural as well as personal. The refugees had received their own Drakenstein consistory at the close of 1691; bilingual schoolteachers and a political commissioner in the consistory were meant to keep them under Dutch oversight while allowing French worship. Van der Stel had written to Amsterdam in June 1691 that the refugees’ fickle nature still clung to them and that they were like the children of Israel longing for the onion pots of Egypt. By 1692 that assimilation policy and the governor’s private disappointment ran together: the settlement was no longer the purely Dutch colony of his early hope, Constantia claimed more of his attention, and free-burgher sympathy—Dutch as well as French—had begun the slow retreat that Theal dates from about this year. [3] [3] [8]
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—and from the later directors’ instruction of 1695 that farming and cattle dealing should as soon as possible be given up by the Cape government, with colonists left to purchase and fatten stock for contractors, a programme not carried into effect for some years. [3] [8]
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. Theal’s later notices of the same system—Khoikhoi applying of their own accord for confirmation of captains, and the copper-headed staff treated as essential to authority—belong to the working order already in force when Klaas fell and Koopman rose. [3]
Country and town alike still lived with wild animals as ordinary risk. A substantial premium was paid for killing a lion in the Cape peninsula, and stock losses near the castle remained possible; as late as 1702 an elephant was killed just beyond the Cape flats. Leopards and lions troubled Drakenstein and Stellenbosch farms in the same working years—Theal notes a burgher killed by a leopard at Drakenstein and another nearly torn by a lion at Stellenbosch in May 1694, and nine cows killed by lions in sight of the castle on one day the following month. Those hazards 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. San pressure from the mountains and illicit frontier barter completed the circle of insecurity around the free districts. [3] [8]
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—339 of the Company, only forty-six English, twenty-three French, thirteen Danish, and three Portuguese. 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. Passages between Europe and the Cape were now often made in about ninety days, yet scurvy still caused terrible havoc among seamen—a fact that would drive the later building of a larger hospital authorised in these years and begun in earnest only in July 1697. 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. Revenue figures for the last years of the century show the same dual character: licenses to sell wines and spirits yielded about £2,200 yearly, other sources about £800, and average profits on goods about £2,000, while expenditure chargeable against the Cape after stripping out ships’ supplies stood near £8,000 against a local revenue near £5,000. Botha’s parallel sketch of end-of-century finance names the same pillars—auctioned retail privileges from 1673, tenths of produce, and transfer duty introduced in 1686—as the general practice under Company rule. [3] [8]
Municipal order in the little town kept pace with the shipping traffic. A Board of Firemasters had been appointed from among the burghers in 1691; rattle watchmen, first appointed in 1686, still patrolled and called the hours after ten at night; and in April 1696 the streets would begin to be patrolled at night by a burgher watch raised to prevent arson, robbery, and other violence. Cape burghers were to form six companies of thirty men each and parade without pay when their turn came. Country districts already employed veldwachters to see that the placaats were observed, paid at about £1 2s. 3d. a month. The shipping decade that opens with 1692 thus frames both the colony’s international importance and the thin civic apparatus that had to manage fleets, wrecks, taverns, and night order on a single lee shore. [3] [8]
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—rather over a thousand free souls, nearly 585,000 vines, thousands of cattle and tens of thousands of sheep, and a harvest counted in thousands of muids of wheat. 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] [3]
Botha’s refugee lists fix several French households in the colony specifically in 1692. Pierre Barillé and his wife Dina van Soetermeer were living in the Cape district; Abraham Bleuset (Belusé) of Calais, still unmarried, was likewise in the Cape district; Marie Avice (Avis) appears at Drakenstein as wife of Claude Marais of Plessis; two Pierre Jourdans stand on a Drakenstein inhabitants’ list, one in partnership with Louis Barré and one of Cabrière; Nicolas Labat’s name appears; Jacques Pinard’s son Jacques was born of his first wife Esther Fouché; and on 19 October 1692 Louis de Perrone married at Stellenbosch Maria le Fevre, previously widow of Charles Prévot and of Hendrik Eekhof. A Stellenbosch baptism of 3 August 1692 records Lysbeth, daughter of Hans Pieter van Malcheer and Margarita Basse (Baché). Those notices do not make 1692 a second great refugee fleet year; they show the first Huguenot wave already rooted in Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein households while new Dutch and German names continued to enter the rolls. [8]
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. In February 1693 a waggon road would be completed over the neck beyond Wynberg to Hout Bay; in October 1695 the Keizersgracht (later Darling Street) would be laid out between the Heerengracht and the back of the castle; and from October 1697 the levelling of the great parade would begin with Company slaves and burgher labour. 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]
Land tenure under that programme remained of two principal kinds. Many stock places were held on loan tenure: a grazier selected pasturage, took a yearly licence, and might abandon an unsuitable spot for fresh ground further afield, holding no dominium in the soil but a right to dispose of the opstal he had built. Freehold, by contrast, was the form in which the Huguenot farms along the Berg River had been granted, with power to sell or transmit to heirs. Botha stresses that the Company’s primary object was still a refreshment station, yet by the gradual extension of grain, vine, and stock the land was being converted into an agricultural country—an imperceptible change against the founders’ first intentions, but already plain in the census and shipping figures that close the 1680s and open the 1690s. Country males between sixteen and sixty still owed militia service and annual training days; signal cannon on the surrounding heights called the district burghers to arms when needed. [8]
Church life in the free districts in 1692 still ran on the three tracks fixed at the close of the previous year: a Dutch congregation at the Cape under the Rev. Leonardus Terwold; a French (and mixed) congregation at Drakenstein under the Rev. Pierre Simond with its own consistory, constituted on 30 December 1691 with elders Claude Marais, Louis de Berault, and Louis Cordier and deacons Abraham de Villiers, Pierre Meyer, Pierre Beneset, and Pierre Rousseau; and a Stellenbosch consistory still without a resident clergyman, dependent on visiting sermons and the sick visitor’s reading. Placaats continued to be published from the castle balcony and, after 1688, in both Dutch and French, with copies posted where people congregated and sometimes read from the pulpit or church steps. The settlement work of 1692 was therefore not only new surnames and oak saplings, but the ordinary machinery of parish, militia, land licence, and published law under a governor newly styled councillor extraordinary while the inland cattle alliance shifted from Klaas to Koopman and the winter sea took three ships at Salt River mouth. [3] [3] [8]