Boer History1695 at the Cape of Good Hope: Keizersgracht, the First Earthquake, Kalden, and the Scurvy Fleet
French Refugees and the Du Seine Affair — June 1695
Free French households at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein entered 1695 under the same dual pressure that had shaped their settlement since 1688: loyalty sworn to the Dutch East India Company, and the memory of France as the land they had fled. In that climate a deserter named du Seine—who had left the French vessel L’Hirondelle, belonging to Admiral the Marquis du Quesne, and had been left on the island of Diego Rodrigues in proof of having taken that place—lived among the burghers after the Cape government allowed him to settle. In 1695 he resided with Pierre Rochefort at Stellenbosch. [8]
One day in June 1695, while conversing with the Refugees Pierre Meyer, Jacques Theron, Pierre Vivier, and Jacques La Bat, du Seine spoke his mind rather freely and expressed the wish that the French were there. If they did come, he would say Vive plus fort. As this was a time of unrest at the Cape, and an attack from the French was anticipated, it was wrong to speak in that strain to men who, although they had taken the oath of allegiance to Holland, were nevertheless born Frenchmen. The following year further reference to du Seine is found: a price was put upon his head, £20 if alive and £10 if dead. He and another soldier, commonly known as the Polish Nobleman or Baron (in de wandelinge genaamd den Poolsen Edelman oft Baron), were described as notorious rascals for whose capture a reward was offered. [8]
The June conversation did not by itself overturn French freehold life along the Berg River, but it fixed 1695 as a year in which suspected French sympathy could still be treated as a security matter. The same government that had settled Huguenot vine-dressers and grain farmers now watched loose talk against the possibility of a French descent. Burgher oath and French birth sat uneasily together whenever European war rumours reached Table Bay; du Seine’s residence with Rochefort and his words to Meyer, Theron, Vivier, and La Bat made that tension concrete for the Stellenbosch district in midsummer. [8]
Inland French settlement continued its ordinary work beside that scare. The majority of stock places in the colony were still held on yearly loan licence, with no dominium in the soil but a right to dispose of the opstal; the land given out to the Refugees along the Berg River remained freehold, with power to sell or transmit to heirs. Pierre Joubert of de la Motte d’Aigues in Provence, who had arrived in the Berg China in 1688 with his wife Isabeau Richard, possessed among other farms Bellingham, granted in 1695, together with Lamorin, La Roche, La Motte, La Provence, and later De Plaisante at Waveren (Tulbagh). Freehold grants and loan runs thus advanced in the same calendar year that a French deserter’s words put a price later on his head. [8]
Drakenstein Baptisms and Congregation Life — 1695
At Drakenstein the French church register kept by the reader Paul Roux continued to record baptisms through the year. The book of children baptised in the French church of Drakenstein had opened on the 29th of August 1694; in 1695 the entries ran month by month under the same hand and the same French formulary. On the 22nd of April 1695 Anna Caterina, daughter of Hernes Frederik Waltré and Caterina, was baptised, the witnesses Hansel Verbat and Marie La Noy. On the 8th of May Laina, daughter of Francois du Toit and Susanne Seugnet, was presented, with Pierre Sabatie and Sara Leclair as witnesses. On the 25th of June Marie, daughter of Daniel Terrier and Sara Jacob, was baptised, Jean de Buze and Marie Janne de Pret standing as witnesses. [8]
Mid-year and spring entries thickened the same record. On the 22nd of July 1695 Christina, daughter of Christoffle Senaymant (Snyman) and Marguerite Savoye, was baptised, with Jacobus van As and Laina Basson as witnesses. On the 8th of September—four days after the earthquake felt in Table Valley—Anne, daughter of Pierre Lombart and Marie Couteau, was baptised, Daniel Ugot and Anne Fauche standing. On the 25th of September Paul, son of Jean Jourdan and Elizabeth Longue, was presented, with Paul Roux the reader and Elizabeth Taillefer as witnesses. On the same day Janne, daughter of Handris Gauch and Janne Le Clair, and Pierre, son of Gedeon Malherbe and Marie Grillion, were also baptised. [8]
The closing quarter of the register for the year carried the congregation into the fleet and induction months at the castle. On the 16th of October 1695 David, son of David Senecal and Madeleine du Puit, was baptised, with Daniel de Ruel and Anne du Puit as witnesses. On the 14th of November—three days after the eleven-ship scurvy fleet reached Table Bay—Marie Elizabeth, daughter of Jacob de Villiers and Marguerite Gardiol, was baptised, Jean Gardiol and Marie Elizabeth Taillefert standing. On the 7th of December Jean, son of Pierre Joubert and Elizabeth Richard, was presented, with Jean Durand and Francoise Martinet as witnesses. On the 14th of December two children were baptised without bills—one of Louis Peront and one of Cobus Vandray—and on the 26th of December Pierre, son of Pierre de Villiers and Marie Elizabeth Taillefert, was baptised, Jacob de Villiers and Susanna Gardiol standing. [8]
Those names were not ornament. They fixed French household continuity in the year the castle recorded earthquake, street layout, scurvy landings, and a new Cape minister. Susanna du Puis stood sponsor at Drakenstein in 1695 to a child of David Senecal; Jacques Labat, whose name appears on the burgher rolls from 1693, was described in 1695 as from Bordeaux; Marguerite Gardiol of Provence had married Jacob de Villiers before 1695. The reader’s book and the freehold farms along the Berg River thus document the same inland society that the November fleet and December induction would not interrupt. [8]
First Recorded Earthquake — 4 September 1695
In the morning of the 4th of September 1695 the first recorded shock of earthquake was felt at the Cape. The weather was perfectly calm and clear when suddenly a noise like a clap of thunder was heard, and a trembling of the earth was felt as if something was rolling beneath the foundations of the buildings. In a few seconds it ceased and was not repeated. No damage was occasioned by the shock. [3]
The event entered the settlement’s memory as a natural fact rather than a disaster. Houses and the castle stood; no later aftershock of the same day is noted in the contemporary account. The calm, clear weather made the thunder-like report and the brief roll under the foundations the more startling to free and Company households alike, yet the material result was simply that the Cape now had a dated first entry in its seismic record. Four days later the Drakenstein register would quietly record Anne Lombart’s baptism; the shock did not stop ordinary parish life inland. [3] [8]
A second slight trembling would be felt in the town on the afternoon of the 11th of January 1696, unaccompanied by noise. That later tremor belongs to the next calendar year; for 1695 the settled fact is the September morning shock—brief, undamaging, and the earliest quake written into the Cape’s official narrative. It stands beside street-laying, church induction, and fleet sickness as one of the year’s concrete marks on Table Valley life. [3]
Wild animals had already reminded the peninsula that natural danger was not only seismic. In May 1694 a burgher at Drakenstein had been killed by a leopard, and another at Stellenbosch nearly torn to pieces by a lion; on one day in the following month nine cows had been killed by lions in sight of the castle. The premium for killing a lion in the Cape peninsula stood at £5 4s. 2d. As late as 1702 an elephant would still be killed just beyond the Cape flats. Against that background the September earthquake was a new kind of alarm—brief, sky-clear, and under the foundations—rather than another stock-killing on the open pasture. [3]
Keizersgracht Laid Out — October 1695
In October 1695 the Keizersgracht, the present Darling Street, was laid out between the Heerengracht, now Adderley Street, and the back of the castle. The road to the country at that time still ran between the castle and the shore of the bay. The new street cut a formal line through the growing town block behind the fortress, tying the principal commercial thoroughfare to the castle’s rear face rather than leaving all heavy movement on the beach road alone. [3]
Town improvement in these years was incremental and shared. The botanist Oldenland, superintendent of the Company’s garden and land surveyor, had received the additional appointment of town engineer in January 1693 with an annual salary of £6 18s. 10d., partly paid by the burgher council; he would die four years after that appointment. The October 1695 layout of the Keizersgracht sat inside that engineering frame: survey and burgher contribution already shaped how streets were added as freehold and Company premises thickened between garden, castle, and bay. Down the two principal streets—Heerengracht and Keizersgracht—ran a canal; each dwelling had a garden attached, and around the whole stood a low wall. [3] [8]
The little town in Table Valley was not very large at the close of the seventeenth century. It extended on one side to the present Burg Street and on the other to Plein Street. The Company’s gardens came down to where Longmarket Street is today. Houses, whose walls by statute had to be built not less than twenty feet high, were of stone and brick under thatch; most were single storeys with lofty rooms and a tiled voorhuis, paved with baked tiles or blue stone from Robben Island. 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 Keizersgracht was a permanent mark of street plan while the beach road still carried the country traffic past the fortress front. [3] [8]
Two years later, in October 1697, work would begin on levelling the ground between the new street and the shore—the space since termed the great parade—previously cut by deep gullies and knolls. Company slaves and burgher labour would finish that grading in 1699. In April 1696 the streets would begin to be patrolled at night by a burgher watch, the Cape burghers forming six companies of thirty men each to prevent arson, robbery, and other acts of violence. For 1695 the achieved fact was the street itself: Keizersgracht drawn from Heerengracht to the castle’s back, a canal line through the growing block, and the country road still running between castle and bay shore. [3] [8]
November Fleet and Scurvy — 11 November 1695
On the 11th of November 1695 a fleet of eleven ships arrived from the Netherlands with six hundred and seventy-eight men unable to walk, some of whom were so far gone that they died while being conveyed to the hospital. A great many others were ill but able to go about. Two hundred and twenty-eight had perished on the passage. The landing repeated, on a larger scale, the scurvy pattern already seen in the Bantam, Goude Buys, and Schoondyk disasters of 1693 and in the Pampus arrival of December 1694. [3]
The earlier landings make the November figures legible. 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 arrived from Texel with her whole remaining crew of one hundred and twenty men sick after one hundred and thirty-four deaths; on the 23rd of December 1694 the Pampus had arrived from Rotterdam with only sixteen healthy men, sixty dead, and eighty-three down with scurvy. The eleven-ship squadron of 11 November 1695—six hundred and seventy-eight men unable to walk, deaths on the stretchers, two hundred and twenty-eight already buried at sea—was therefore the decade’s pattern raised to fleet scale rather than a single-hull crisis. [3]
Improved ship construction had shortened many Europe–Cape passages toward about ninety days by the close of the century, yet scurvy still caused terrible havoc among seamen. Ships now 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. A hospital sized for five hundred patients without crowding, or seven hundred and fifty in emergency—its foundation begun in December 1694 though not taken properly in hand until July 1697—was judged none too large for such fleets. The November 1695 arrival showed why: hundreds who could not walk, deaths between ship and ward, and more than two hundred already lost before Table Bay opened. [3]
For free households and Company servants the November fleet was both a labour and a public-health shock. Sick seamen filled the old beach hospital—still dilapidated and exposed to the full force of gales on the site before the earthen fort Good Hope—and whatever other quarters could be pressed into use. Burial and nursing fell on a settlement whose ordinary strength was measured in hundreds, not thousands. 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 and demand for greens and fresh meat. Against the eight-year average of about fifty-four ships a year into Table Bay in 1692–1699, an eleven-ship squadron with six hundred and seventy-eight men unable to walk was an extreme but not isolated expression of the Cape’s role as hospital shore on the India route. [3] [8]
Later landings would keep the same pressure on the unfinished hospital. On the 17th of October 1696 the Vosmaar would arrive from Flushing with only four sound men on board, one hundred and thirty-nine ill, and ninety-three dead—among them five of ten Huguenot passengers for the Cape. Scurvy and wreck were not the only perils of the sea: toward 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 1693 had been George Dew’s brigantine Amy, seized in Saldanha Bay, condemned, and followed by a damages suit that troubled the directors in Europe into 1695. For the November fleet the recorded disaster was disease, not prize or reef—but the same bay still had to absorb every form of maritime failure. [3]
Petrus Kalden Inducted; Van Loon Returns to Europe — 4 December 1695
Church staffing at the Cape had been thin since the transfer of settled ministers and the reliance on ships’ chaplains. In August 1698 the Rev. Leonardus Terwold would be transferred to Batavia; in the mid-1690s services were held occasionally by chaplains of ships and by the Rev. Mr. Simond until the 22nd of September 1694, when the Rev. Hercules van Loon, chaplain of the Nederland, was detained and appointed provisionally clergyman of the Cape. The directors, however, sent out the Rev. Petrus Kalden, who was inducted on the 4th of December 1695. Van Loon was obliged to return to Europe. He left reluctantly and with the good wishes of the congregation. [3]
The December induction closed a short provisional interval rather than a contested local election of a pastor. The Assembly of Seventeen’s nominee took the Cape pulpit; the ship’s chaplain who had held it for some fifteen months went home with the congregation’s goodwill but without a permanent charge. Public worship, baptismal discipline, and the ordinary rhythm of a Reformed congregation in Table Valley thus passed from a detained chaplain to a director-sent minister in the last month of the year. At Drakenstein, three days after the induction, Paul Roux’s French register would still record Jean Joubert’s baptism—inland French ministry and the Cape Dutch pulpit running on parallel tracks under the same Company umbrella. [3] [8]
For free and Company households the change mattered because church provision ranked among the ordinary needs of the outpost alongside hospital capacity and street works. That Van Loon’s provisional service ended only when Kalden could be inducted shows how far the Cape still depended on the directors’ shipping of clergy. The congregation’s regret at Van Loon’s departure and its acceptance of Kalden’s induction fixed 1695 as the year the provisional pastorate gave way to the Seventeen’s appointed minister. [3]
Staff continuity around the pulpit had already shifted in the previous year. On the 22nd of June 1694 Mr. J. W. Grevenbroek had resigned as secretary to the council of policy and become a burgher at Stellenbosch; a copy of a letter of his to a clergyman in Amsterdam would be made in 1695, preserving one of the more accurate contemporary accounts of the South African natives then available. In November 1694 the independent fiscal Cornelis Joan Simons had transferred his duties to Johan Blesius and proceeded to Batavia. The secunde’s chair would not be filled by Samuel Elsevier until April 1697 after Andries de Man’s death. Kalden’s induction thus completed a run of official and clerical appointments that left the Cape with a settled minister, an independent fiscal, and still no new secunde at the close of 1695. [3] [3]
Directors Order the End of Company Farming and Cattle Dealing — 1695
In 1695 the directors issued instructions that as soon as possible farming and cattle dealing should be given up by the Cape government. They were disposed to call for tenders to supply the garrison and fleets with beef and mutton, and to allow the colonists to purchase cattle from the Khoikhoi and fatten them for sale to the contractors. No steps toward carrying these instructions into effect were taken until some years later. [3]
The order struck at a practice as old as the refreshment station itself. For decades the Company had run gardens, grain lands, and cattle barter in its own name to feed ships and the local establishment. The Seventeen’s 1695 line pointed instead toward contractor supply and open colonial purchase from Khoikhoi herds, with the government stepping back from direct farming and cattle dealing. The Company had long controlled all trade; whatever the burghers had to sell or required to buy had to be sold to or purchased from it at prices fixed by the authorities, and only after the Company’s requirements were satisfied could colonists dispose of produce to others with the governor’s permission. Implementation of the new farming order would wait; the policy direction, however, was already written in the year’s despatches. [3] [8]
Later measures—Simon van der Stel’s severe 1697 placaat against burgher–Khoikhoi cattle barter, the directors’ annulment of that placaat, and the opening of the trade with Henning Huising’s meat contract in 1699–1700—belong to subsequent years. In 1699 the farmers would be further encouraged by being allowed to carry on cattle barter with the natives and given the right of supplying fresh meat for the Company’s establishment. For 1695 the recorded fact is the directors’ instruction itself: farming and cattle dealing by the Cape government to cease as soon as possible, tenders and colonial fattening to replace Company herds in the intended system, and no immediate local execution of that programme. [3] [8]
The same decade that produced the farming order also produced the first appearance in the colonial records of many burgher surnames still familiar later: among those first found between 1691 and 1700 were Bakhuizen, de Haas, Odendaal, Bisseaux, Heems, Bloem, Helm, de Boer, Heyning, van Rensburg, Brink, Hoffman, le Riche, Coenradie, Hubner, Couvret, van Jaarsveld, Cronjé, Kerver, Delport, de Kock, Schryver, van Deventer, Diemer, Maritz, Swanepoel, Dumont, Mouton, Faber, Mouy, Gardiol, Niel, Haak, and others. French and Dutch freehold names thus thickened on the rolls in the same years the directors wrote that the government should leave farming and cattle dealing to colonists and contractors. [3]
Shipping, Town, and Settlement Context — 1695
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. Dutch Indiamen at the close of the century averaged about one hundred and seventy men; English visitors were as a rule smaller and carried on average not more than one hundred. Many English vessels were engaged in the slave trade between the West Indies and Madagascar; others were private traders or interlopers, or belonged to the new English East India Company; a few were men-of-war on convoy. The old English East India Company’s ships usually passed by Table Bay, having a refreshing station of their own at St Helena. [3]
Revenue in the last years of the seventeenth century still came chiefly from privileges to sell wines and spirituous liquors—about £2,200 yearly—with other sources about £800 more and average profits on goods about £2,000. Expenditure in the Company’s accounts ran about £12,000 yearly, including roughly £4,000 in ship supplies and items not fairly chargeable against the Cape alone, so that a rough balance of some £5,000 revenue against £8,000 expenditure framed the outpost’s books. Staff continuity after 1694 left Johan Blesius as independent fiscal; the secunde’s chair would not be filled by Samuel Elsevier until April 1697 after Andries de Man’s death. At Stellenbosch and Drakenstein two veldwachters, paid at the rate of £1 2s. 3d. a month, were already engaged in seeing that the placaats were observed, though constables were not yet employed in the town. [3]
Inland and agrarian work continued beside town and fleet pressure. Efforts to produce olives still failed; hop culture remained under experiment; young oaks were planted assiduously in different parts of the Cape peninsula. In February 1693 a waggon road had been completed over the neck beyond Wynberg to Hout Bay. Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua clans were described as completely impoverished, and would receive Company cattle to tend on shares only in 1696. Of their own accord they 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. The Chainouqua feud of Klaas and Koopman, eased by Klaas’s 1694 release, would not see its next major recorded reconciliation attempt until February 1697. For 1695 the settlement’s face was thus street and pulpit and scurvy ward more than a new inland war. [3]
The clergyman François Valentyn, whose later description of the Cape would draw on government charts and documents as well as personal observation, called at the Cape in 1685, 1695, 1705, and 1714. His visits place an outside clerical observer in Table Bay in the same year Kalden took the Cape pulpit and the eleven-ship fleet filled the hospital. Ordinary European traffic thus still included not only Indiamen and slave ships but men who would write the settlement into the wider Dutch Indian literature of the next generation. [3]
Governor Simon van der Stel still held office. Before 1692 he had enjoyed the esteem of nearly every European in South Africa except the French immigrants, but about that date a different feeling had begun slowly to develop. He was now a disappointed man: his earlier dream of a purely Dutch settlement had been thwarted; the love of wealth had grown upon him; and Constantia, already beautified with vineyards and avenues of young oaks, year by year occupied more of his attention. A comparison of the records of the first twelve years of his administration with those of the last seven shows enthusiastic language giving way to cold official expressions. Still there were no open complaints, and to strangers who could not see beneath the surface everything appeared to be working smoothly. The directors continued to hold a high opinion of him; they had conferred the rank of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India in 1692, and when in 1696 he would request permission to resign they would name his eldest son as successor. The calendar year 1695 still ran under his government: French scare and freehold grant, earthquake and street, fleet and induction, and a directors’ order on farming that local officers did not yet execute. [3]