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. Padt was no improvised field officer: he already sat on the council of policy as the garrison captain under Governor Simon van der Stel, beside the secunde Andries de Man, the independent fiscal Cornelis Joan Simons, and the other senior servants who had formed the board since the governor’s promotion of 1691. [3] [3] [8]
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—the same captain who, before 1692, had purchased stock for the magazines on a large scale and who had befriended Europeans in distress. Koopman also took Klaas’s wife, a daughter of Goukou, paramount chief of the Hessequas, commonly called the oude heer by the colonists, with the 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. [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. The finding was therefore political rather than judicial in the ordinary criminal sense: the government did not convict him of open war, yet removed him from the inland pasture ground where his rivalry with Koopman had forced a mixed soldier-burgher column into the field. [3]
The fate of the Khoikhoi captain who had once been regarded as the most trustworthy of his race 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. He had previously been ill and had been brought to the mainland for medical treatment, but upon recovery had been sent back to the island. When residence at Muizenburg was at last allowed, Goukou’s daughter was sent for; she had lived with Klaas about ten years, yet when asked by the governor whether she desired to return to her husband she replied that she preferred to remain with Koopman. The political board fixed by Padt’s ride thus outlasted the calendar year of the arrest and shaped inland cattle politics for the rest of the decade. [3]
Country males between sixteen and sixty still owed militia service and annual training days; signal cannon on the surrounding heights called district burghers to arms when needed. Padt’s column of a hundred soldiers and a hundred free men was therefore not an improvised raid but the ordinary dual machinery of garrison and burgher force applied to an inland captain whom the castle no longer trusted. Botha’s institutional sketch of the same end-of-century years confirms how tightly that dual order still bound town and district: burghers formed companies for night and field duty without pay, while the Company’s military officers retained the command of mixed expeditions ordered by the council of policy. [3] [8]
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. Any blow against Hessequa herds therefore touched the same inland network that Padt’s commando was about to confront a month later, when Koopman named Klaas and the Hessequas together as the force threatening him. [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 and of the punishment that followed conviction. Botha’s parallel note of Company monopoly confirms the same structure: 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. [3] [8]
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. 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. [3]
The older peninsula clans of the Goringhaiquas and Gorachouquas were already described as completely impoverished in the mid-1690s narrative that takes its departure from these years. Later notices would record San descents on Koopman’s herds in April 1694, fruitless attempts to restore peninsula stock by placing cattle with the Goringhaiquas and Gorachouquas on shares in 1696, and the long Chainouqua feud that ended only when Klaas was killed in a skirmish in June 1701. In 1693 itself the immediate inland calendar was simpler and sharper: Hessequa kraals stripped in March, Koopman’s appeal and Padt’s night seizure in April, and Klaas under guard on Robben Island from August. [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. Burgher councillors, who advised on municipal cleanliness, streets, roads, bridges, and local taxes without holding a formal charter, thus shared the cost of the engineering title that linked Company garden, cadastral survey, and town works. [3] [8]
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. The little town in Table Valley 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. [3] [8]
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. A substantial premium was paid for killing a lion in the Cape peninsula; as late as 1702 an elephant was killed just beyond the Cape flats. 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. [3] [8]
Country policing kept pace with the peninsula works. A veldwachter had been appointed as early as 1680 to report non-observance of the laws away from town and to enjoy half the fine on each conviction. Later, by resolution of 13 January 1693, two men were appointed to prevent smuggling, the killing of game in the country, and all acts contrary to the laws. Complaints and disputes between farmers continued to go first to the landdrost at Stellenbosch, with two heemraden commissioned to seek an amicable settlement before a full court hearing. Boundary and water-right quarrels were often closed in that way, and the judgment remained binding. The Court of Landdrost and Heemraden acted as a district council in the country much as the Burgher Councillors did in the town; persons removing from one district to another still required permission exhibited to the authorities of the new district. [3] [8]
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. 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 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 west-coast posts and the small craft of the bay thus did the work the settlement had been founded to do: receive the alarm, put men aboard a helpless Indiaman, and bring her into the roadstead before the remaining crew died at the anchors. [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 foundation would be commenced only in December 1694, and the building taken properly in hand in July 1697, but the design already looked to five hundred patients without crowding, or seven hundred and fifty on an emergency. The scurvy landings of 1693 already showed why a house of that size 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]
Town livelihood still depended heavily on public houses, lodging, and sales to passing foreigners. A sick fleet concentrated that traffic into sudden billeting of survivors, demand for greens and fresh meat, and the grim accounting of men who could not walk ashore. Rattle watchmen, first appointed in 1686, still patrolled and called the hours after ten at night; a Board of Firemasters had been appointed from among the burghers in 1691; and from April 1696 the streets would begin to be patrolled at night by a burgher watch raised to prevent arson, robbery, and other violence. Against that thin civic apparatus the Bantam landing was ordinary Cape work raised to crisis pitch: the same bay that sold lodging to healthy crews had to absorb hundreds of scurvy cases whenever an outward passage went wrong. [3] [8]
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. The geography of the disaster was the same west-coast pastoral fringe that Padt’s inland politics touched from the other side: Company posts, Khoikhoi guides, and a thin European presence stretched between Table Bay and the Berg River mouth. [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. Early in the morning of the 20th of January 1694 the yacht Dageraad, laden with cargo—including a quantity of specie—from the Goude Buys, would run ashore on the western side of Robben Island and break up immediately, with sixteen lives lost and only part of the specie recovered. The calendar year 1693 therefore closed with salvage still unfinished and with the next wreck already latent in the cargo moved northward from the stranded hull. [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—the Pampus in December 1694 with only sixteen healthy men, the eleven-ship fleet of November 1695 with six hundred and seventy-eight men unable to walk, the Vosmaar in October 1696 with only four sound men—but the calendar concentration of February and October–November disasters already defined this year’s sea face. [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. Those averages make the year’s death rolls plainer: the Goude Buys had sailed with one hundred and ninety souls and ended with a single living man found aboard; the Schoondyk landed one hundred and twenty sick after losing one hundred and thirty-four; the Bantam had already lost two hundred and twenty-one before her boats ever reached Saldanha Bay. Refreshment, salvage, and hospital care remained core Cape work beside free agriculture. [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. Among them was the famous Captain Kidd. On the 2nd of May 1693—two days before the Goude Buys even left Enkhuizen—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. Double papers, battle damage, a broken mainmast, and hidden men were enough, in local eyes, to fix her character without waiting for a European court. [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. Coastal security and prize jurisdiction joined scurvy relief as duties that no amount of inland freehold expansion could remove from the castle’s desk. [3]
The seizure also sat inside the English commercial presence that had thickened in Table Bay during the opening years of the 1692–1699 shipping decade. 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. Dew’s claimed Bermuda–Madagascar slave voyage was therefore not an exotic anomaly but one face of the mixed English crowd the Dutch authorities had to police in their own bays—sometimes as customers and allies, sometimes as suspected rovers. [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. The decade was busier in foreign flags 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. 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. [3] [3]
Revenue figures for the last years of the century show the same dual character of refreshment station and free colony. 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 at ten per cent within three years of a grant, five per cent within ten years, and two and a half per cent thereafter—as the general practice under Company rule. Shipping disasters and prize cases did not suspend that fiscal machine; they pressed it harder. [3] [8]
The pirate danger recorded alongside the Amy seizure would later include further English examinations and seizures in Cape waters, and men-of-war touching on their way to cruise the Mozambique Channel. 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 of the roadstead. 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 ordinary means by which a free population learned the local law that also governed foreign ships in the bay. [3] [8]
Official staff changes around these years underline how few named Europeans carried the whole machine. The secretary J. W. Grevenbroek would resign only in June 1694 and settle as a Stellenbosch burgher; the independent fiscal Simons would transfer his duties to Johan Blesius in November 1694 and proceed to Batavia; the Rev. Leonardus Terwold still held the Cape pulpit until his later transfer, with ship chaplains and the Rev. Pierre Simond supplying occasional services. In 1693 the same thin spine of governor, secunde, fiscal, captain, and clergymen had to manage Padt’s commando, Oldenland’s town works, three major scurvy disasters, and a pirate seizure without any enlargement of the constitutional board created in the late 1680s. [3] [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. The sympathy was personal as well as political: free households could distinguish between a captain no longer useful to the magazines and a man who had once stood between Europeans and inland danger. [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. 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. Goukou, who had never visited the Cape before, came to the castle as a partisan of Klaas when his daughter was sent for; the woman’s preference for Koopman closed that particular appeal without restoring the older balance. A little later, after Klaas’s supervised return toward his old kraal, the quarrel would resume, Goukou’s daughter would change her mind and be put to death by Koopman, and the feud would run on until Klaas’s death in June 1701. None of that later sequence erases the fact that 1693 was the year the castle chose sides with arms. [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. Access to the castle had become a weapon in local politics; Padt’s ride made that weapon physical. [3]
The same months continued the slow cooling of relations between Simon van der Stel and the free burghers that Theal dates from about 1692. Before that hinge the governor had enjoyed the esteem of nearly every European in South Africa except the French immigrants; afterward, colonists noticed that Constantia and private estate concerns claimed more of his attention, and the enthusiastic language of earlier records gave way to colder official expressions. There were still no open complaints in 1693, and to strangers everything appeared to work smoothly. Yet the year that saw burgher sympathy for an imprisoned Khoikhoi captain also saw the governor’s personal warmth toward free households under quiet strain—an irony visible only when inland politics and colonial feeling are read together. [3] [8]
Freehold and loan-tenure settlement work did not pause for the inland crisis. Many stock places were still held on yearly loan licence, with no dominium in the soil but a right to dispose of the opstal; Huguenot farms along the Berg River remained freehold, with power to sell or transmit to heirs. Botha’s refugee notices fix several French households in motion specifically in 1693: the surgeon du Plessis returned to Europe with his wife and two children after failing to earn a living by profession and farming; Jacques Labat of Fontenay-le-Comte appears on the burgher rolls; Jean Lecheret (Legeret) of Champagne came as a freeman in the Agatha and settled at Drakenstein; Guillaume Loret of Nantes, born 1671, arrived and later married Elisabeth Joubert; Estienne Niel of Dauphiné, born 1669, was a soldier in the Company’s service before living as an agriculturist at Drakenstein; and Salomon de Gournay had a child in this year on the Drakenstein farm later known as Salomon’s Valley. John Ovington, who was at the Cape in 1693, recorded that the French acknowledged the happiness of their transportation and the peaceful dwellings they had found. Those notices do not make the year a second great refugee fleet year; they show the first Huguenot wave already rooted while Dutch commandos, English prizes, and scurvy fleets defined the castle’s harder business. [3] [8]