Boer History1693 at the Cape of Good Hope: Padt’s Commando against Klaas, the Amy, and the Goude Buys
Padt’s Commando and the Capture of Klaas — April–August 1693
The inland realignment begun in 1692, when Captain Klaas lost Company favour and rival Koopman became the castle’s Chainouqua ally, broke into open force in 1693. On the 20th of April an urgent request for help reached the castle from Koopman, who represented that he was about to be attacked by Klaas and the Hessequas. The council resolved to send Captain Willem Padt with a hundred soldiers and a hundred burghers to Koopman’s assistance, with instructions to endeavour to capture Klaas. [3]
The commando, aided by Koopman’s adherents, surrounded Klaas’s kraal in the night, took possession of his cattle, and arrested him and two of his leading men. Some of his followers who attempted to escape were killed by Koopman’s people. The cattle were driven to the Kuilen, where they were counted and divided between Koopman and the Honourable Company. The stroke reversed, in a single night operation, the older pattern in which Klaas had been counted among the most faithful intermediaries between the settlement and the inland clans. [3]
On the 8th of August the three prisoners were brought before the council of policy. Klaas admitted some of the charges against him, but endeavoured to give a satisfactory explanation of his conduct. He denied having ever had hostile designs against the Company. The council admitted that he had not been guilty of any overt act of war, and on the 17th of August resolved that as no Christian blood had been shed, further proceedings against the prisoners should be dropped, but that to secure tranquillity Klaas should be detained on Robben Island. [3]
The fate of the Hottentot captain who had once been regarded as the most trustworthy of his race, and who had befriended many Europeans in distress, called forth a large amount of sympathy among free households. Intercession was made to the government on his behalf. He would not be released from confinement until January 1694, and only then under conditions that kept him first near Muizenburg rather than restored at once to his old kraal. The political board fixed by Padt’s ride thus outlasted the calendar year of the arrest. [3]
Attaqua Raid on Four Hessequa Kraals — March 1693
While the Chainouqua rivalry absorbed the castle’s attention, other Khoikhoi communities continued to destroy one another in the same fashion. In March 1693 four Hessequa kraals were pillaged by the Attaquas. All inland communities remained exposed as well to plunder by San groups. The March raid mattered because Klaas’s people and the Hessequas had been living in close friendship, and because Klaas had as wife a daughter of Goukou, paramount chief of the Hessequas, commonly called the oude heer by the colonists. Any blow against Hessequa herds therefore touched the same inland network that Padt’s commando was about to confront. [3]
The episode belonged to a wider pattern already visible around the free settlement. 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]
For the Company the March pillage and the April call from Koopman read as two faces of the same instability: clans weak enough to be stripped by neighbours, yet still strong enough, when aligned, to threaten a favoured captain and force a mixed soldier-burgher column into the field. The year’s inland history is therefore not only the story of one arrested chief, but of a pastoral landscape in which Company cattle, Koopman’s herds, Hessequa kraals, and Attaqua raiders all moved on the same contested ground. [3]
Oldenland Town Engineer and Peninsula Works — 1693
In the town several improvements were made in this phase of Governor Simon van der Stel’s rule. In January 1693 the botanist Oldenland, who was superintendent of the Company’s garden and land surveyor for the government, received the additional appointment of town engineer, with an annual salary of £6 13s. 10d., partly paid by the burgher council. He would die four years later, but the dual commission of 1693 already marked how thin the skilled European staff remained and how much of urban layout still rested on one man’s survey and garden office. [3]
In February 1693 a waggon road was completed over the neck beyond Wynberg to Hout Bay. The link tightened the peninsula’s internal road net between the Liesbeek–Wynberg farms and the western bay that had long been a timber and outpost shore. Together with Oldenland’s new engineering title, the Hout Bay road shows that 1693 was not only a year of inland commandos and shipping disasters, but also of ordinary settlement work under the free-burgher and Company dual economy. [3]
Experiments in plantation continued beside these works. Efforts to produce olives still failed in every instance; hop culture was under trial; and the planting out of young oaks in different parts of the Cape peninsula was assiduously attended to. Wild animals still gave trouble in the surrounding years—burgher deaths by leopard and lion, stock killed in sight of the castle—but the material programme of roads, oaks, and town engineering fixed 1693 as a working year in Table Valley and on the peninsula necks as well as a crisis year inland. [3]
The Bantam and Scurvy off the West Coast — February 1693
Scurvy still caused terrible havoc among seamen even when passages between Europe and the Cape were often made in about ninety days. On the 8th of February 1693 a boat reached Saldanha Bay with a feeble crew and a sick officer, who reported that they had left their ship, the Bantam, anchored off Paternoster Point. On the passage out, two hundred and twenty-one men had died of scurvy, and those left alive were too weak to work. They had therefore dropped anchor, and some of them left in a boat to look for assistance. [3]
The first boat was swamped, and of her crew only two men got to land. It was believed that one of these died of hunger, and that the other was killed by wild animals. A second boat then left for Saldanha Bay and fortunately found a large Indiaman at anchor there. A party of men was sent to the Bantam, and she was brought safely to Table Bay. The episode fixed early 1693 as a demonstration that the Cape’s value as a refreshment station was still measured in lives saved after Atlantic and South Atlantic passages, not only in grain and wine tallied on freehold farms. [3]
The old hospital built by Commander Van Riebeeck close to the beach in front of the earthen fort Good Hope was by this time in a dilapidated condition and exposed to the full force of gales. Upon the governor’s representations the directors authorised a larger hospital in a more suitable place, on ground between the Heerengracht and Berg Street. The scurvy landings of 1693 already showed why a house designed for five hundred patients without crowding, or seven hundred and fifty on an emergency, would be none too large for the Company’s fleets at the close of the seventeenth century—pressure that the later building programme of the decade was meant to relieve. [3]
The Goude Buys and the Schoondyk — May–November 1693
On the 4th of May 1693 the Goude Buys sailed from Enkhuizen with one hundred and ninety souls on board. On the 19th of October she dropped anchor off the coast about fifteen miles north of St Helena Bay, when there were not a dozen of her crew capable of working. On the 11th of November seven men left the ship to seek assistance inland. Of these, five perished of hunger; one wandered along the banks of the Berg River until he was found by some Khoikhoi and taken to the Company’s post at Saldanha Bay; and the other, after roaming about for seven weeks, was rescued. [3]
When intelligence of the state of the ship reached the Cape, a yacht was sent to her assistance. Only one living person was found on board, and he died soon afterwards. The Goude Buys had drifted ashore and could not be got off. Most of her cargo was saved, and all the small vessels at the Cape were for some time employed in transporting it to Table Bay. The wreck thus became both a human catastrophe and a prolonged coastal salvage operation stretching from the St Helena Bay shore into the bay’s lighter fleet. [3]
On the 23rd of November 1693 the Schoondyk arrived from Texel with her whole remaining crew of one hundred and twenty men sick. One hundred and thirty-four had died on the passage out. Together with the Bantam and the Goude Buys, the Schoondyk made 1693 one of the starkest scurvy years of Van der Stel’s governorship: hundreds dead at sea, survivors too weak to work, and the settlement’s boats and hospital pressed into continuous relief. Later landings in the mid-1690s would repeat the pattern, but the calendar concentration of February, October–November disasters already defined this year’s sea face. [3]
Seizure of the Brigantine Amy — 2 May 1693
Scurvy and wreck were not the only perils of the sea. Towards the close of the seventeenth century the Indian Ocean began to be frequented by pirates, ready when opportunities offered to pillage the coasts as well as to seize defenceless ships. On the 2nd of May 1693 a small armed brigantine under English colours, with her main mast gone, put into Saldanha Bay. There was a ship belonging to the English East India Company lying in Table Bay, and her officers assured the governor that the stranger was a pirate, urging him at the same time to take her in custody. [3]
An armed vessel was thereupon sent to Saldanha Bay to ascertain particulars. The brigantine was found to have two conflicting sets of papers, and to bear traces of having been in an engagement. Her master, George Dew by name, stated that he was from the Bermudas, bound to Madagascar for a cargo of slaves, and that his crew consisted of twenty-four men. The vessel was called the Amy. The Dutch officers considered that they were justified in seizing her, and they brought her to Table Bay. Twenty-four hours after she was in their possession some men were found concealed on board, when her crew reached a total of thirty-five. [3]
There was no doubt in local eyes as to her true character, so she was condemned and kept for use by the Cape government as a packet. Captain Dew and his men were sent prisoners to Europe. It proved impossible, however, to prove legally that Dew was a pirate, and he then put in a claim for damages against the Company and caused the directors much trouble and expense. The Amy affair thus left a double mark on 1693: a prize added to the Cape’s small-craft strength, and a legal quarrel that outran the year and reached the Seventeen in Europe. [3]
Shipping, Pirates, and the Cape Roadstead — 1693
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. English traffic 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. The old English East India Company’s ships often still preferred St Helena. [3]
Against that volume the disasters of 1693 showed how thin the margin remained. A bay that could host mixed Dutch and foreign fleets could still receive Indiamen whose crews were almost entirely sick, lose a cargo ship on the west-coast sand, and seize a suspected pirate in the next inlet north. Ship construction had changed since the mid-century—more sails, each smaller, fewer hands—but the average Dutch Indiaman at the close of the century still mustered about one hundred and seventy men, and English visitors were as a rule smaller. Refreshment, salvage, and prize law remained core Cape work beside free agriculture. [3]
The pirate danger recorded alongside the Amy seizure would later include the famous Captain Kidd among those who frequented the Indian Ocean. In 1693 itself the concrete Cape case was Dew’s brigantine: broken mainmast, double papers, concealed men, condemnation as a packet, and a damages suit that the directors could not ignore. Coastal security and prize jurisdiction thus joined scurvy relief as duties that no amount of inland freehold expansion could remove from the castle’s desk. [3]
Sympathy for Klaas and Koopman’s Ascendancy — 1693
After the August detention on Robben Island, public feeling in the free districts did not simply follow the council minute. The captain who had once purchased cattle for the Company on a large scale, and who had aided Europeans in distress, still had friends among burghers who remembered those services. Intercession on his behalf began before the year closed and would help secure his removal from the island early in the following January, first for medical treatment and then for supervised residence near Muizenburg with some of his retainers. [3]
Koopman, meanwhile, held the spoils of the April night and the status of Company ally. When Klaas was arrested, Koopman had taken Klaas’s wife—daughter of Goukou—with other spoil. That personal seizure bound the Hessequa connection into the same quarrel and ensured that Goukou’s later appearances at the castle would be read as partisan acts. For 1693 the practical result was clear: official cattle barter and inland complaints would run through Koopman’s channel, while Klaas sat under guard offshore. [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 when clans sought confirmation of successors. Even impoverished communities still turned to the European authorities for settlement of weighty disputes. The year’s arrest of Klaas showed how far that dependence could run: a Chainouqua captain could be taken by a mixed commando, tried in the council chamber, and held on Robben Island without a finding of open war, solely to secure tranquillity as the government defined it. [3]
Close of 1693 at the Cape
By the end of 1693 the Cape had lived through a year of inland force and seaward distress. Captain Willem Padt’s column of a hundred soldiers and a hundred burghers had answered Koopman’s April call, seized Klaas and two leading men at a night-surrounded kraal, divided the cattle at the Kuilen, and seen the council detain Klaas on Robben Island after hearings in August. In March the Attaquas had pillaged four Hessequa kraals. In Table Valley Oldenland added town engineer to his garden and survey offices, and a waggon road over the Wynberg neck reached Hout Bay. At sea the Bantam’s scurvy survivors staggered into Saldanha in February; the Goude Buys left almost her entire company dead or dying on the west coast by November; the Schoondyk landed one hundred and twenty sick in the same month; and the brigantine Amy, taken at Saldanha on 2 May, was condemned as a Cape packet while George Dew’s damages claim went forward to Europe. Those were the calendar facts of a year that enforced the Koopman alliance, removed Klaas from the mainland roads, and reminded every household that the settlement’s life still turned on cattle inland and on broken crews in the bays. [3]