Boer History1695 at the Cape of Good Hope: Keizersgracht, the First Earthquake, Kalden, and the Scurvy Fleet
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. [3]
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]
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 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. [3]
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. For 1695 the achieved fact was the street itself: Keizersgracht drawn from Heerengracht to the castle’s back, a permanent mark of Table Valley’s street plan while the beach road still carried the country traffic past the fortress front. [3]
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]
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. 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 on the stretchers between ship and ward, and more than two hundred already buried at sea 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 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. 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]
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. On the 22nd of September 1694 the Rev. Hercules van Loon, chaplain of the Nederland, had been 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. [3]
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]
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. Implementation would wait; the policy direction, however, was already written in the year’s despatches. [3]
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. 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]
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. [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. Wild animals had killed stock and men in 1694; the premium for killing a lion in the Cape peninsula stood at £5 4s. 2d. Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua clans were described as completely impoverished, and would receive Company cattle to tend on shares only in 1696. 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]
Governor Simon van der Stel still held office. 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. Contemporaries already noted that Constantia and private wealth occupied more of his attention than in the first dozen years of his administration, though open complaints had not yet broken the surface. The calendar year 1695 still ran under his government: earthquake and street, fleet and induction, and a directors’ order on farming that local officers did not yet execute. [3]
Close of 1695 at the Cape
By the end of 1695 the Cape had recorded its first earthquake on the calm morning of 4 September, laid out the Keizersgracht from the Heerengracht to the back of the castle in October, received an eleven-ship Netherlands fleet on 11 November with six hundred and seventy-eight men unable to walk and two hundred and twenty-eight dead on the passage, and inducted the Rev. Petrus Kalden on 4 December while Hercules van Loon returned to Europe with the congregation’s good wishes. In the same year the directors ordered that farming and cattle dealing by the Cape government should cease as soon as possible in favour of contractor supply and colonial purchase from Khoikhoi herds—an instruction not yet carried into local effect. Those were the calendar facts of a year that marked Table Valley’s street plan and pulpit, measured the settlement again as a hospital shore for Indiamen, and wrote a long-term change in Company agrarian policy without yet rewriting daily cattle practice on the ground. [3]