Boer History1694 at the Cape of Good Hope: Klaas at Muizenburg, the Dageraad, Bushmen Raids, and the New Hospital
Klaas Released to Muizenburg — January 1694
The inland settlement that closed 1693 with Captain Klaas detained on Robben Island after Captain Willem Padt’s night seizure of his kraal opened 1694 with a carefully limited release. Intercession among free households on behalf of the Chainouqua captain who had once purchased cattle for the Company on a large scale, and who had befriended Europeans in distress, pressed the council of policy through the winter of his confinement. In January 1694 he was released from the island and permitted to live near Muizenburg with some of his retainers. [3]
The path back to the mainland had already begun under medical necessity. Klaas had previously been ill, brought ashore for treatment, and, upon recovery, sent back to the island. Only after that second confinement did the government allow him a supervised residence at Muizenburg rather than an immediate restoration of his old kraal authority. The arrangement kept him within easy reach of Table Valley while still removing him from the inland roads where Koopman’s herds and Company cattle now moved under the alliance fixed by Padt’s ride. [3]
When Klaas was allowed to reside at Muizenburg, his wife—the daughter of Goukou, paramount chief of the Hessequas, commonly called the oude heer by the colonists—was sent for. She had lived with him about ten years, but when he was arrested by Captain Padt, Koopman had taken her with other spoil. Her father had never visited the Cape, yet as a partisan of Klaas he came to the castle on this occasion. Asked by the governor whether she desired to live with her husband, she replied that she preferred to remain with Koopman. A little later Klaas was allowed to return to his old kraal upon giving a promise to live quietly and peaceably. The personal and political strands of the Chainouqua quarrel—wife, Hessequa father-in-law, Company ally, and released captain—were thus already tangled again before the year was many weeks old. [3]
The January release did not end the rivalry. Klaas and Koopman at once resumed their quarrel, though the open fighting, Goukou’s later appearances, the killing of Goukou’s daughter by Koopman, and the sergeant’s demand for restored Company oxen would intensify in later years of the same feud. For 1694 the settled fact was the shift of Klaas from Robben Island prisoner to supervised mainland resident and then to a kraal captain again bound by a peace promise, while Koopman still held the Company’s public favour and the spoils of 1693. [3]
Wreck of the Yacht Dageraad — 20 January 1694
Early in the morning of the 20th of January 1694 the yacht Dageraad, laden with cargo—including a quantity of specie—from the wrecked Goude Buys, ran ashore on the western side of Robben Island and broke up immediately. Sixteen lives were lost. Some of the specie was recovered, but not all. The disaster closed the salvage story of the previous November’s west-coast wreck by destroying, on the island’s own shore, a lighter that had been carrying rescued cargo toward safer custody. [3]
The Goude Buys had drifted ashore north of St Helena Bay in late 1693 after scurvy left almost no working hands aboard; small vessels from the Cape had spent weeks lifting what could be saved. That cargo, once concentrated for transport, now lay partly on the seabed and beach of Robben Island after a single night’s grounding. The island that held Company prisoners and signal posts thus became, in the same January that released Klaas, a scene of wreck and drowning within sight of Table Bay’s ordinary shipping lane. [3]
For the settlement the Dageraad loss was both a human and a fiscal blow. Specie intended to move under Company control was only partly recovered; sixteen seamen or passengers died in the break-up; and the small-craft strength already strained by Goude Buys salvage was reduced by one more hull. Together with the later December arrival of the Pampus under heavy scurvy, the January wreck fixed 1694 as another year in which the Cape’s value as a refreshment and salvage station was measured in broken ships and sick crews as much as in freehold grain. [3]
San Raid on Koopman’s Kraals — April 1694
Inland pressure in 1694 did not come only from the Klaas–Koopman feud. Other Khoikhoi communities continued to destroy one another, and all remained exposed to plunder by San groups. In April 1694 a large party of these raiders made a descent upon Koopman’s kraals and drove off fully half of his cattle. The captain who had become the Company’s Chainouqua ally the year before now applied for assistance to the governor as a client whose herds the castle had a stake in protecting. [3]
Ten soldiers under a sergeant were sent to his aid. The San were followed up, most of the cattle were recovered, and sixteen or seventeen of the marauders were shot. The scale of the recovery column—a sergeant’s detachment rather than Padt’s mixed hundred soldiers and hundred burghers of 1693—shows how the government graded inland force: a full commando to seize a rival captain, a small military party to restore an ally’s stolen stock and punish raiders on the open veld. [3]
The April action confirmed the political map drawn after Padt’s night ride. Koopman could summon European soldiers to chase San stock-thieves because he stood as ally of the Honourable Company; Klaas, newly back from the island and still under a peace promise, did not hold that channel. Cattle wealth among the near clans had already declined through inter-clan feuds, San depredations, and illicit brandy-and-tobacco barter with the least reputable free men. The 1694 raid and recovery made that insecurity concrete on the herds of the government’s chosen partner. [3]
Leopard, Lions, and Stock Losses — May–June 1694
Wild animals still gave trouble around the free districts. In May 1694 a burgher at Drakenstein was killed by a leopard, and another at Stellenbosch was nearly torn to pieces by a lion. On one day in the following month nine cows were killed by lions in sight of the castle. The premium for killing a lion in the Cape peninsula stood at £5 4s. 2d. Predation remained a fact of daily settlement life even as roads, gardens, and freehold farms thickened on the peninsula and in the mountain valleys. [3]
The geography of the losses mattered. Drakenstein and Stellenbosch were the inland free-burgher cores of the 1680s expansion; a death by leopard and a near-fatal lion attack there showed that the wine and grain frontier still shared ground with large carnivores. Nine cows taken in a single day within view of the castle brought the same pressure into Table Valley’s immediate pastoral fringe. Company and burgher households alike measured risk not only in San raids and clan feuds but in lions that could still kill stock under the walls. [3]
Plantation work continued beside these losses. Efforts to produce olives still failed in every instance; hop culture remained under trial; and the planting out of young oaks in different parts of the Cape peninsula was assiduously attended to. The contrast of 1694—oak seedlings and failed olives on the one hand, leopard and lion kills on the other—marks a settlement still building a European agrarian landscape on ground where large predators and open stock routes had not yet been pushed far back. [3]
Grevenbroek Resigns; Blesius Independent Fiscal — June–November 1694
Several changes took place in the official staff during the year. On the 22nd of June 1694 Mr. J. W. Grevenbroek resigned his situation as secretary to the council of policy and became a burgher at Stellenbosch. The move of a senior council secretary into the free community at the inland dorp was itself a small index of how Stellenbosch had matured as a place where a Company officer might choose freehold life over the castle desk. [3]
In November 1694 the independent fiscal Cornelis Joan Simons transferred his duties to Johan Blesius and proceeded to Batavia to fill a post of greater importance. The office of independent fiscal, created in the late 1680s as a check upon corrupt governors and subordinate officers, remained responsible to the supreme directory alone and free of all local control. Simons had been the first holder of that strengthened Cape fiscalate; Blesius now took the seat next to the secunde in the council of policy with access to records and control of accounts connected with ships’ cargoes, garrison supplies, and other expenditure. [3]
These staff shifts sat inside a broader late-century administrative frame. Revenue still came chiefly from privileges to sell wines and spirits, with lesser yields from other sources and profits on goods, while expenditure—including ship supplies not fairly chargeable against the Cape alone—ran higher than local income in the Company’s books. For 1694 the concrete personnel facts were Grevenbroek’s June resignation to Stellenbosch burgher status and Blesius’s November succession to the independent fiscalate as Simons left for Batavia. [3]
Hercules van Loon Provisional Clergyman — 22 September 1694
Church staffing at the Cape remained thin and dependent on ships’ chaplains when no settled minister was in place. On the 22nd of September 1694 the Rev. Hercules van Loon, chaplain of the Nederland, was detained at the Cape and appointed provisionally clergyman of the settlement. Services that had been held only occasionally by visiting chaplains and by the Rev. Mr. Simond thus gained a resident, if still provisional, pastor for Table Valley. [3]
The directors, however, already intended a different appointment. They sent out the Rev. Petrus Kalden, who would be inducted on the 4th of December 1695, after which Van Loon was obliged to return to Europe. He left reluctantly and with the good wishes of the congregation. The September 1694 detention therefore opened a short pastoral interval rather than a permanent Cape charge: a ship’s chaplain held the pulpit until the Seventeen’s nominee could be installed the following year. [3]
For free and Company households alike, the provisional ministry mattered because public worship and baptismal discipline still structured settlement life. That the council would detain a homeward or outward chaplain rather than leave the congregation without a resident minister shows how far church provision ranked among ordinary needs of the outpost—alongside hospital plans, fiscal succession, and inland cattle protection—in the same calendar year. [3]
New Hospital Foundation Begun — December 1694
The 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. He selected ground between the Heerengracht and Berg Street—later Adderley and St George’s streets—for a building designed to accommodate five hundred patients without crowding, or seven hundred and fifty on an emergency. [3]
In December 1694 the foundation was commenced, though it was not until July 1697 that the building was taken properly in hand. The December start nevertheless fixed the year’s material programme in Table Valley: a hospital sized for the Company’s fleets at the close of the seventeenth century, when passages of about ninety days were common yet scurvy still wrecked crews. A house for five hundred—or seven hundred and fifty in crisis—was judged none too large for those landings. [3]
The foundation thus answered the same sea pressure already visible in the Bantam, Goude Buys, and Schoondyk disasters of 1693 and in the January Dageraad wreck and December Pampus arrival of 1694. Beach hospital walls open to gales could not serve fleets that still put hundreds of sick men ashore; the inland street block between Heerengracht and Berg Street was chosen to put care on firmer ground inside the growing town. [3]
The Pampus and Scurvy — 23 December 1694
On the 23rd of December 1694 the Pampus arrived from Rotterdam with only sixteen healthy men on board. Sixty had died on the passage out, and eighty-three were down with scurvy. The landing closed the year with another demonstration that improved ship construction and shorter average passages had not ended the Cape’s role as a hospital shore for Indiamen whose crews could barely work the ship into the bay. [3]
Set beside the January Dageraad wreck, the December Pampus arrival framed 1694’s sea face: specie and cargo lost on Robben Island at the year’s opening, and a Rotterdam Indiaman with sixteen sound men and eighty-three scurvy cases at its close. Between those poles the settlement continued ordinary work—staff changes, provisional ministry, hospital foundations—while still absorbing the dead and the sick of the Europe–Cape run. [3]
During the eight years 1692–1699 four hundred and thirty-five ships put into Table Bay, or on an average fifty-four yearly—two hundred and ninety-three Company, one hundred and thirteen English, nineteen Danish, and ten French. Against that volume a single December arrival with sixty dead and eighty-three ill was not exceptional in kind, only stark in numbers. The hospital foundation begun the same month was the government’s long answer to a traffic that still measured success partly by how many men could walk ashore. [3]
Close of 1694 at the Cape
By the end of 1694 the Cape had moved Klaas from Robben Island detention to Muizenburg residence and then, under a peace promise, back toward his old kraal, while Goukou visited the castle and Klaas’s wife chose to remain with Koopman. In April San raiders drove off half of Koopman’s cattle until a sergeant and ten soldiers recovered most of the stock and shot sixteen or seventeen of the marauders. In May and June a Drakenstein burgher died by leopard, a Stellenbosch man was nearly killed by a lion, and nine cows were taken by lions in sight of the castle. At sea the yacht Dageraad broke up on Robben Island on 20 January with Goude Buys cargo and specie and sixteen dead; on 23 December the Pampus landed from Rotterdam with sixteen healthy men, sixty dead on the passage, and eighty-three sick with scurvy. Ashore, Grevenbroek resigned the council secretaryship for Stellenbosch burgher life in June; Blesius succeeded Simons as independent fiscal in November; Hercules van Loon was detained on 22 September as provisional clergyman; and in December the foundation of the new hospital between Heerengracht and Berg Street was begun. Those were the calendar facts of a year that eased one captain’s confinement without ending the Chainouqua feud, defended the Company’s ally against San stock-theft, and kept building town and church capacity under the same scurvy and wreck pressure that had marked the early 1690s. [3]