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. The government that had refused a finding of open war in August, yet held him offshore “to secure tranquillity,” now answered burgher sympathy without restoring him at once to the inland pasture ground where Koopman’s herds and Company cattle moved under the alliance fixed by Padt’s ride. [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 rival Chainouqua power now ran through Koopman. Muizenburg lay on the False Bay side of the peninsula, close enough for castle oversight and far enough from the Kuilen division of spoils that had sealed the previous year’s night 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 after she changed her mind and tried to return to Klaas, and the sergeant’s demand for restored Company oxen would intensify in later years of the same feud—notably the summons of both captains in February 1697 and Klaas’s death in a skirmish in June 1701. 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. Access to the castle remained a weapon in local politics; the year’s release showed that weapon could also be used to temper, without reversing, the board fixed by Padt’s ride. [3]
That inland politics still ran through named captains and copper-headed staffs of office was not accidental. Even impoverished Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua communities referred weighty disputes to the European authorities and, upon a captain’s death, applied to the governor to confirm a successor. A staff with a copper head—Company arms on one side, the name given by the governor to the new captain on the other—remained indispensable to the exercise of authority. Klaas’s January return under a peace promise sat inside that same system of confirmation and favour: the castle could imprison, release, and bind a Chainouqua captain without extinguishing the clan machinery that still sought European sanction. [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. The same January that released Klaas from the island’s prison thus made the island a scene of wreck and drowning within sight of Table Bay’s ordinary shipping lane. [3]
The Goude Buys had sailed from Enkhuizen on the 4th of May 1693 with one hundred and ninety souls and had dropped anchor about fifteen miles north of St Helena Bay on the 19th of October with fewer than a dozen men capable of working. Seven men left her on the 11th of November to seek help inland; five perished of hunger; one reached the Company’s Saldanha post by Khoikhoi aid along the Berg River; another was rescued after seven weeks. When intelligence reached the Cape, a yacht found only one living person aboard, and he died soon afterwards. The hull 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. That cargo, once concentrated for transport, now lay partly on the seabed and beach of Robben Island after a single night’s grounding of the Dageraad. [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. The island that held Company prisoners and signal posts had become, in the same calendar fortnight as Klaas’s release, a wreck site. 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]
The wreck also sat inside a longer sequence of roadstead and coastal losses that framed Van der Stel’s last decade. In the night of the 4th–5th of June 1692 the Company’s ships Goede Hoop and Hoogergeest and the English Orange had been driven ashore near Salt River mouth; later years would add the Waddingsveen and Oosterland at the same mouth in May 1697 and the Huis te Crayenstein behind the Lion’s Head in May 1698. The Dageraad was smaller than those Indiamen, yet her cargo linked her directly to the Goude Buys disaster and her ground was the prison island itself. Salvage, specie recovery, and the accounting of sixteen dead joined inland cattle politics as January business of the same council of policy. [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 March 1693 four Hessequa kraals had already been pillaged by the Attaquas; the same exposure continued into the new year. In April 1694 a large party of San 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—Company stock as well as his own having passed through the Kuilen division after Padt’s night ride. [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. 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. The April column used garrison soldiers rather than that full dual machinery, yet it confirmed that Koopman could summon European force because he stood as ally of the Honourable Company. [3] [8]
The April action confirmed the political map drawn after Padt’s night ride. Koopman could summon European soldiers to chase San stock-thieves; 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. Burghers were forbidden to trade with the Khoikhoi under severe penalties, but in defiance of the placaats some of the least respectable among them carried on an extensive barter. The 1694 raid and recovery made that insecurity concrete on the herds of the government’s chosen partner. [3]
Kraals remained thinly scattered and were still moved from place to place as in older times, except that they could not be erected on ground occupied by white men. Khoikhoi were subject to Dutch laws only in cases where Europeans also were concerned. That dual jurisdiction left clan feuds and San raids as ordinary inland risks unless a captain with castle favour could convert loss into a sergeant’s column. The April recovery of most of Koopman’s cattle, and the shooting of sixteen or seventeen raiders, was therefore both a pastoral and a political act: it protected an ally’s wealth and advertised what alliance with the Company was worth on the veld. [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. As late as 1702 an elephant would still be killed just beyond the Cape flats—proof that large game had not yet been pushed far from the growing freehold fringe. [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. Botha’s end-of-century sketch of the refugee valleys still imagined lions and leopards making their lair in wooded country where Khoikhoi parties might also plunder a homestead—conditions under which only simple dwellings had first been raised. 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] [8]
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 directors had long pressed olive oil as an export hope and had expressed disappointment that its culture had not been persevered in; Simon van der Stel replied that he had spared no pains, that occasional seasons alone succeeded, and that a few Huguenots were grafting on the wild olive while most burghers would not wait for so distant a profit. 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] [3]
Town and district improvements of the same mid-decade years underline how closely pastoral risk sat beside civic work. In January 1693 the botanist Oldenland, superintendent of the Company’s garden and land surveyor, had received the additional appointment of town engineer. A waggon road over the neck beyond Wynberg to Hout Bay had been completed in February 1693. The Keizersgracht (later Darling Street) would be laid out in October 1695; levelling of the great parade would begin in October 1697; and from April 1696 the streets would begin to be patrolled at night by a burgher watch. Constables were not yet employed in the town, though at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein two veldwachters already saw that the placaats were observed, paid at £1 2s. 8d. a month. Lions under the castle walls and a leopard death at Drakenstein thus struck a landscape already half measured by engineers, waggon roads, and district field guards. [3] [8]
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 (Johannes Willem de Grevenbroek) resigned his situation as secretary to the council of policy and became a burgher at Stellenbosch. He had held the secretaryship when the council, after Simon van der Stel’s promotion to governor on 1 June 1691, consisted of the governor, the secunde Andries de Man, the fiscal Cornelis Joan Simons, the captain Willem Padt, the treasurer Ludowyk van der Stel, the garrison bookkeeper Jan Hendrik Blum, and Grevenbroek himself. 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] [3]
Botha’s institutional sketch of the same end-of-century years confirms the board Grevenbroek left. After High Commissioner Hendrik Adriaan van Reede’s enlargement of 1685, the Council of Policy comprised the governor, the vice-governor (secunde), the two military officers highest in rank, the fiscal, the treasurer, the chief salesman, and the garrison bookkeeper. It made laws, levied taxes, appointed servants to civil situations, and granted lands in freehold or on lease, subject to the veto of Holland and Batavia. Burghers never sat as members of that council—a grievance they would press a century later—but they did sit in the Court of Justice and in inferior boards. Grevenbroek’s resignation removed one named European from the thin spine that still carried executive and legislative work for the whole colony. [3] [8]
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 by the directors in March 1688 and differing greatly from the older guardians of the law, remained responsible to the supreme directory alone and free of all local control. Before 1690 Cape fiscals had been only junior merchants, subject to the head of government like ordinary clerks, their chief duty the conduct of criminal prosecutions. The independent fiscals regulated justice, sat in the council of policy next to the secunde, had access to records and state papers of every kind, and controlled accounts connected with ships’ cargoes, garrison food, and other expenditure. Simons, appointed in 1689 as the first fiscal independent at the Cape, had drawn only £100 a year from the Company, with permission to charge fees and to retain one third of fines inflicted in petty criminal cases. Blesius now took that seat. [3]
These staff shifts sat inside a broader late-century administrative and fiscal frame. Revenue still came chiefly from privileges to sell wines and spirits, amounting to about £2,200 yearly, with lesser yields of about £800 from other sources and average profits on goods of about £2,000, while expenditure set down in the Company’s accounts at about £12,000 yearly included some £4,000 of ship supplies not fairly chargeable against the Cape alone—leaving a local revenue near £5,000 against expenditure near £8,000. Botha’s parallel sketch names the same pillars: auctioned retail privileges introduced in 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. 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] [8]
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 1694, and to strangers everything appeared to work smoothly. Yet the year that saw a council secretary choose Stellenbosch freehold, and an independent fiscal hand his seat to a successor bound for Batavia, also saw the governor’s personal warmth toward free households under quiet strain—an irony visible only when staff changes and colonial feeling are read together. [3] [8]
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. The Rev. Leonardus Terwold, who had succeeded Johannes van Andel in January 1689, would later be transferred to Batavia in August 1698; until a firm successor sat in Table Valley, services were held only occasionally by chaplains of ships and by the Rev. Pierre Simond of the French congregation at Drakenstein. 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 intermittent thus gained a resident, if still provisional, pastor for Table Valley. [3] [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. Stellenbosch still lacked a resident clergyman of its own, though organised as a consistory; the sick-visitor continued to read services there except when Simond preached in French or a Cape minister in Dutch. [3] [3]
For free and Company households alike, the provisional ministry mattered because public worship and baptismal discipline still structured settlement life. 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 the council would detain a ship’s 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] [8]
Inland French church life continued under Simond and the voorlezer Paul Roux while Table Valley waited on Van Loon and Kalden. The Drakenstein baptismal register kept in French by Roux opens entries that year: on the 29th of August 1694 Philippe Rodolf, son of Jacques de Savoye and Madame Leclair, was baptised with Rodolf Passemant and his wife as witnesses; on the 11th of December Jan, son of Jan Haance and Marguerite Bachet; on the 25th of December Anne Roux, daughter of Paul Roux and Claudine Seugnet, with François du Toit and Anna Retif as witnesses. Those entries do not make 1694 a second great refugee fleet year; they show the first Huguenot wave already rooted in parish discipline while the castle detained a Dutch ship’s chaplain for the Cape pulpit. [8]
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. The site lay inside the growing town grid rather than on the open beach before the old earthen works, on ground later occupied by the Cape of Good Hope Bank. [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. 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 hospital’s design plainer: even improved hulls still put scores of sick men ashore whenever a passage went wrong. [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. On the 8th of February 1693 a boat from the Bantam had reached Saldanha Bay after two hundred and twenty-one deaths from scurvy; on the 23rd of November 1693 the Schoondyk had landed one hundred and twenty sick after one hundred and thirty-four deaths. 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]
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. The little town in Table Valley still extended roughly to Burg Street on one side and Plein Street on the other; the Company’s gardens came down toward Longmarket Street; canals ran down the Heerengracht and Keizersgracht; houses of stone and brick under thatch stood mostly as single storeys with lofty rooms and a tiled voorhuis. 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. Against that thin civic apparatus the hospital foundation was long-term insurance: the same bay that sold lodging to healthy crews needed a house inland from the gales whenever an outward passage failed. [3] [8]
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. 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. [3]
Later landings in the mid-1690s would repeat and deepen the pattern. On the 11th of November 1695 a fleet of eleven ships would arrive from the Netherlands with six hundred and seventy-eight men unable to walk, some so far gone that they died while being conveyed to the hospital, after two hundred and twenty-eight deaths on the passage. On the 17th of October 1696 the Vosmaar would arrive from Flushing with only four sound men, one hundred and thirty-nine ill, and ninety-three dead—among them five of ten Huguenot passengers for the Cape. The Pampus figures of sixty dead and eighty-three ill were therefore not exceptional in kind for the decade, only stark in a single hull at the close of 1694. 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]
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. 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. Against that volume a single December arrival with sixty dead and eighty-three ill was ordinary Cape work raised to crisis pitch. Between the poles of January wreck and December scurvy the settlement continued ordinary work—staff changes, provisional ministry, hospital foundations, inland cattle protection—while still absorbing the dead and the sick of the Europe–Cape run. [3]
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. The concrete Cape case of the previous year had been the seizure of George Dew’s brigantine Amy in Saldanha Bay on the 2nd of May 1693—double papers, battle damage, concealed men, condemnation as a packet, and a damages suit that troubled the directors in Europe. In 1694 itself the recorded sea disasters were the Dageraad and the Pampus, but the pirate danger remained part of the same coastal security problem that kept armed vessels and prize jurisdiction on the castle’s desk beside hospital plans. [3]
Freehold and loan-tenure settlement work did not pause for wreck or scurvy. 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. The directors in 1695 would issue instructions that as soon as possible farming and cattle dealing should be given up by the Cape government, with tenders contemplated for beef and mutton and colonists allowed to purchase cattle from the Khoikhoi and fatten them for contractors—but no steps toward carrying those instructions into effect were taken until some years later. For 1694 the practical year-end picture was simpler: Klaas back under a peace promise, Koopman’s herds partly secured by a sergeant’s column, Grevenbroek a Stellenbosch burgher, Blesius independent fiscal, Van Loon in the provisional pulpit, hospital foundations in the Heerengracht–Berg Street block, and the Pampus landing sixteen healthy men after sixty deaths and eighty-three scurvy cases—the Cape still doing the work it had been founded to do, at a human cost the new hospital was meant, in time, to reduce. [3] [8]