Boer History1696 at the Cape of Good Hope: Tremor, Burgher Watch, Vosmaar, Grigriqua Hostages, and Van der Stel’s Resignation Request
Second Recorded Tremor — 11 January 1696
In the afternoon of the 11th of January 1696 another slight trembling was felt in the town, but unaccompanied by noise. The shock followed the calm-morning earthquake of 4 September 1695, when a thunder-like report and a brief roll under the foundations had been felt without damage. The January event entered the record as a quieter sequel: felt in Table Valley houses and offices, short enough to need no second report, and without the acoustic startle of the previous September. [3]
For free and Company households the two shocks framed a new natural category in Cape memory. The settlement already measured gales, drought, and scurvy fleets; it now also dated earth movement. No rebuilding, no casualty list, and no aftershock series are attached to the January afternoon. The fact that mattered was the dating itself—the second entry in a local seismic sequence that still numbered only two shocks by the close of the century’s mid-1690s. [3]
Official narrative kept the January tremor brief. It stands beside street patrols, cattle-on-shares experiments, a scurvy Indiaman, French refugee arrivals and inland baptisms, and a slave-recovery ride to the Elephant river country as one of the year’s concrete marks on Table Valley life—felt, undamaging, and recorded without ceremony. Wild animals remained a more ordinary danger than earth movement: the premium for killing a lion in the Cape peninsula stood at £5 4s. 2d., and as late as 1702 an elephant would still be killed just beyond the Cape flats. [3]
Burgher Night Watch — April 1696
In April 1696 the streets began to be patrolled at night by a burgher watch. Constables were not yet employed in the town, though at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein two of those useful officials, there termed veldwachters, were already engaged in seeing that the placaats were observed. They were paid at the rate of £1 2s. 8d. a month. The April arrangement thus drew a line between the growing Table Valley street grid and the inland villages: night civic patrol by burghers in the town; paid field-wardens on the Stellenbosch and Drakenstein placaat beat. [3]
Botha’s account of the late-seventeenth-century town fills in the organisation. In 1696 the Burgher Watch or Guard was raised to patrol the town at night “to prevent arson, robbery and other acts of violence,” or such irregularities as might be caused by fugitive slaves and wandering rogues. The Cape burghers had to form themselves into six companies of thirty men each; when their time for duty came round they had to parade at four o’clock in the afternoon and remain on guard until the next morning, without monetary recompense, as one of the several duties which they as citizens had to perform. Sleeping households were thus protected by the Burgher Watch and the older Rattlewatch together, with military patrols still out as a further layer. [8]
The Rattlewatch itself was not new. First appointed in 1686 from the burgher community and paid from a tax levied on each household, the rattle watchmen patrolled the streets, called the hours after ten at night, and in case of fire, murder, or any other unusual occurrence sprang their rattles and raised the alarm. A Board of Firemasters had been appointed from among the burghers in 1691, each firemaster carrying a staff of office engraved with the Company’s arms. The April 1696 Burgher Watch therefore thickened an existing civic apparatus rather than inventing night order from nothing: unpaid rotating companies beside the paid rattle men and the firemasters’ staffs. [3] [8]
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 Keizersgracht—the present Darling Street—had been laid out in October 1695 between the Heerengracht, now Adderley Street, and the back of the castle. Down the two principal streets ran a canal; each dwelling had a garden attached, and around the whole stood a low wall. Night patrol in April 1696 sat inside that same civic frame: streets thick enough to need watching after dark, and burgher labour already accepted as part of how Table Valley ordered itself between garden, castle, and bay. [3] [8]
The contrast with the country posts remained sharp. Stellenbosch and Drakenstein already paid two veldwachters to enforce placaats on a monthly wage; the Cape town still relied on rotating unpaid burgher night duty rather than a standing constabulary. For free households the change meant organised after-dark presence on the principal streets—an ordinary urban measure, recorded without flourish, that fixed 1696 as the year night watch became a stated fact of Table Valley street life in six companies of thirty. [3] [8]
Cattle on Shares for the Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua — 1696
The clans of the Goringhaiquas and Gorachouquas were completely impoverished. In 1696 the governor supplied them with some cattle to tend on shares, but the effort to restore them to their former condition was fruitless. Of their own accord they referred their most weighty disputes to the European authorities for settlement, and upon the death of a captain they always applied to the governor to confirm his successor. A staff with a copper head, upon which was engraved on one side the Company’s arms and on the other the name given by the governor to the new captain, was considered indispensable to the exercise of authority. [3]
The share-cattle experiment sat inside a longer impoverishment of the peninsula clans. Feuds, San raids, and barter for brandy and tobacco had already reduced herds; Company and freehold occupation had narrowed the old grazing range. Other Khoikhoi communities were likewise engaged in destroying each other: in March 1693 four Hessequa kraals had been pillaged by the Attaquas, and all were exposed to plunder by San raiders. In April 1694 a large party of those raiders had made a descent upon Koopman’s kraals and driven off fully half of his cattle, after which ten soldiers under a sergeant recovered most of the stock and shot sixteen or seventeen of the marauders. Simon van der Stel’s 1696 issue of stock on shares to the Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua was a restoration attempt rather than a conquest settlement—Company animals placed with keepers in the hope that herds would recover under shared interest. The record states plainly that the effort failed to restore former condition. [3]
Political dependence ran parallel to economic weakness. Captaincies now sought copper-headed staffs from the castle; heavy disputes went to European settlement; succession needed the governor’s confirmation and name. The 1696 cattle-on-shares episode thus belongs with staff symbolism and dispute referral as evidence of how far the peninsula clans had been drawn into Company arbitration even while their own herds remained too thin to recover under the year’s pastoral experiment. Inland, the Chainouqua feud of Klaas and Koopman—eased by Klaas’s 1694 release and Muizenburg residence—would not see its next major recorded reconciliation attempt until February 1697. [3]
French Refugees, Drakenstein Baptisms, and Justice — 1696
Free French households at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein entered 1696 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. The security scare of the previous year had a direct sequel. In June 1695 the deserter du Seine—who had left the French vessel L’Hirondelle and lived among the burghers after the Cape government allowed him to settle—had spoken freely to Pierre Meyer, Jacques Theron, Pierre Vivier, and Jacques La Bat, wishing that the French were there and saying that if they came he would cry Vive plus fort. 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. A Council resolution of 2 February 1696 anchors that price in the year’s judicial calendar. [8]
Criminal process in the same year reached a Swiss-born freeholder as well. In 1696 a burgher living at Drakenstein and born at Bortel in Switzerland was charged with illicit cattle-bartering with the natives—one of the gravest offences against which repeated placaats had been published—and was banished to Mauritius. It is possible that Simon van der Stel had some of these cases in mind when he later wrote his Instructions of 30 March 1699 and spoke of agriculturists who had wandered from farm to farm and become vagabonds used by the ill-disposed for cattle-trading with the natives. Against that thin criminal list Botha notes that before 1700 few Refugee names appear in the Court of Justice sentences: a knife case in 1694, du Seine’s seditious language and Mauritius banishment in 1695, and the Swiss cattle-barter banishment of 1696. [8]
At Drakenstein the French church register kept by the reader Paul Roux continued to record baptisms through the year. Early in 1696 Jonas, son of Daniel Nortie and Marie Vitout, was baptised, with Jean Nortie and Susanne Lanoy as witnesses—Susanne Lanoy standing sponsor in that year to a son of Daniel Nortier. On the 28th of May a child of Willem Schalk van der Merwe’s stepson was baptised. On the 18th of June Nicolas, son of Hary Lecrivent (generally known as Ary Lekkerwyn), was presented, with Nicolas Lanoy and Susanne de Vos as witnesses; Marie Lanoy’s first child by Hary Lecrivent had already been baptised on the 18th of January 1696. [8]
Spring and late-year entries thickened the same book. On the 4th of September 1696 Francoise, daughter of Louis Florit and Susanne Cordie, was baptised, with Louis Cordie and Francoise Martinet as witnesses. On the 14th of October—three days before the Vosmaar reached Table Bay—Elizabeth, daughter of Pierre Rousseau and Anna Retif, was baptised, Francois Retif and Marie Anna standing; on the same day Joseph, son of Paul Roux the reader and Claudine Seugnet, was presented, with Pierre Benezet and Marie Grillion as witnesses. On the 21st of October two children were baptised without bills—one of Jacobus van As and one of Matthys Greeff. On the 25th of November Hendrik, son of Conra Klout, was presented to baptism by Jacques de Savoye, the godmother not appearing and the party arriving without a billet. [8]
Ordinary freehold business ran beside the font. On the 18th of May 1696 Guillaume Loret of Nantes, who had come out in 1693 and married Elisabeth Joubert, daughter of the Refugee Pierre Joubert, signed a power of attorney in favour of the Rev. Petrus de Joucourt, minister of the French congregation at Middelburg. On the 7th of June 1696 Paul Roux himself passed a power of attorney in favour of the Rev. Salomon Bernard, minister of the French congregation, and Nathaniel Goutier, merchant of Amsterdam. Pierre Batté, who had received assistance from the Batavian Fund in 1690, was able to pay his passage and return to Europe in 1696. Louis de Perrone of Nazareth (Mazéres?), a burgher at Drakenstein who had married Maria le Fevre at Stellenbosch on the 19th of October 1692, died in 1696. Those names fix French household continuity in the year the castle recorded tremor, night watch, scurvy landing, and a governor’s resignation request. [8]
The Vosmaar and Scurvy — 17 October 1696
On the 17th of October 1696 the Vosmaar arrived from Flushing with only four sound men on board. One hundred and thirty-nine were ill, and ninety-three had died. Of ten Huguenot passengers for the Cape, five had died. The landing repeated, on a single-ship scale, the scurvy pattern already seen in the Bantam, Goude Buys, and Schoondyk disasters of 1693, in the Pampus arrival of December 1694, and in the eleven-ship Netherlands fleet of 11 November 1695 that had put six hundred and seventy-eight men unable to walk ashore. [3] [8]
Botha preserves the outbound and Company frame of the same voyage. A sad fate overtook the ten men and women Refugees who sailed from Holland in April 1696 in the Vosmaar. When she arrived in October she had lost ninety-three persons by death, five of whom were of the French emigrants. Of the remainder of two hundred and thirty-six persons who were mostly sick and in a weak condition, only four were left in a good state of health. The Middelburg Chamber wrote to van der Stel that at the request of these French Refugees they had been given permission to proceed to the Cape, and that the Company in granting this did so with the object of populating the Colony. The directors expressed the hope that they would not be a trouble to the Colony, but that each one would be able to maintain himself honestly by his trade or handicraft; to enable them to do so they were to be given as much help as the orders of the Seventeen required. A letter of 25 April 1696 from the Chamber of Middelburg anchors that despatch. [8] [8]
Of the five survivors who arrived in the Vosmaar the only name Botha recovers is that of Jacques Bisseux of Picardy, who came as a freeman, became a baker, and was buried in the churchyard at Cape Town after his death on the 11th of June 1723. In 1720 he is described as a baker; his son Pieter by his first wife Marie le Febre (died 1700) is described in 1729 as from Middelburg in Zeeland. Jacques remarried Elizabeth Posseaux of Paris, and their daughter Elisabeth married Albertus Bergh, son of Captain Olof Bergh. The surname Bisseaux also appears among burgher names first found in the colonial records between 1691 and 1700. For 1696 the settled fact is the landing itself: half the ten Huguenot passengers dead at sea, four sound men on a hull that had buried ninety-three, and at least one named Picard baker entering freehold life from that wreck of a passage. [3] [8]
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. 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 old beach hospital built by Commander van Riebeeck close to the beach in front of the earthen fort Good Hope was still dilapidated and exposed to the full force of gales; the new site chosen between the Heerengracht and Berg Street still awaited serious building. The October 1696 Vosmaar showed why on a concentrated hull: four men fit for duty, one hundred and thirty-nine sick, ninety-three dead at sea, and half the ten Huguenot passengers bound for the Cape lost before Table Bay opened. [3]
For free households and Company servants the Vosmaar was both a labour and a public-health shock. Sick seamen and the surviving Huguenot passengers pressed the old beach hospital and whatever other quarters could be used; burial and nursing again fell on a settlement whose ordinary strength was measured in hundreds. Town livelihood still depended heavily on public houses, lodging, and sales to passing foreigners; a single sick Indiaman concentrated that traffic into 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, a Flushing hull with four sound men was an extreme but familiar expression of the Cape’s role as hospital shore on the India route. [3] [8]
Schryver’s Grigriqua Expedition — December 1696
The Grigriqua tribe, then usually living on the borders of the Elephant river, was giving offence by harbouring runaway slaves. In December 1696 Ensign Schryver was sent with thirty soldiers and twenty burghers to endeavour to obtain the fugitives in friendly barter. If the Grigriquas would not restore them, the ensign was instructed to seize some individuals, male or female, and bring them to the castle as hostages. The expedition was not successful in finding the tribe. [3]
Some friendly Khoikhoi, however, secured two Grigriquas, who were detained at the castle for a couple of months. One of them was then sent to his people with a friendly message asking for the slaves. He did not return, and the other was shortly afterwards released. The December ride thus ended without a recovered slave cohort and without a lasting hostage leverage: the main body of Grigriqua had not been found; the two men taken through intermediaries produced only a one-way messenger and a later discharge. [3]
The episode sits among other inland pressures of the mid-1690s—Klaas and Koopman’s Chainouqua feud, San raids on Khoikhoi herds, and Company concern over runaway labour. Burgher night patrol in Table Valley that same year was expressly charged to prevent irregularities caused by fugitive slaves and wandering rogues; Schryver’s ride carried the same concern inland to the Elephant river border. The surname Schryver itself appears among burgher names first found in the colonial records between 1691 and 1700. For 1696 the settled facts are the composition of the ensign’s party, the Elephant-river destination, the dual instruction of barter first and hostages second, the failure to locate the tribe, and the short detention of two Grigriqua men secured by other Khoikhoi. No large recovery of slaves is recorded from the year’s attempt. [3] [8]
Simon van der Stel Requests Permission to Resign — 1696
The directors continued to hold a very high opinion of Governor Simon van der Stel. In 1692 they had conferred upon him the rank and title of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India, and when in 1696 he requested permission to resign, so as to spend the evening of his life in comparative freedom from care, they named his eldest son as his successor. The newly appointed governor could not immediately leave the Netherlands, however, and it was not until the 23rd of January 1699 that he and his family reached South Africa. [3]
The resignation request did not end Simon’s government in the calendar year it was made. He remained in office through 1697 and 1698 while Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel prepared to leave Europe; only on the 11th of February 1699 would administration pass and the elder van der Stel retire to Constantia, where he had built a large and handsome residence. There during the next thirteen years strangers of note were always sure of a hearty reception, and the hospitality of the late governor was so great that his house was seldom or never without visitors. He devoted his remaining years chiefly to agriculture and cattle rearing. For 1696 the recorded political fact is the request itself and the directors’ answer: permission framed through dynastic succession, the eldest son named, and the Cape left under the father’s continued rule until the son could arrive. [3]
Contemporaries already noted a change beneath the smooth surface. Before 1692 Simon van der Stel had enjoyed the esteem and affection of nearly every European in South Africa except the French immigrants; about that date a different feeling began slowly to develop. He was now a disappointed man: his earlier dream of forming here a purely Dutch settlement had been thwarted. Love of wealth had grown upon him, and his farm Constantia—already beautified with vineyards and avenues of young oaks—year by year occupied more of his attention. The strong personal interest which he had taken in the welfare of the colonists seemed to them to be dying out. A comparison of the records of the first twelve years of his administration with those of the last seven shows that a change in his feelings had really taken place, for the enthusiastic language of the first period gives way to cold official expressions in the last. Still there were no open complaints, and to strangers and others who could not see beneath the surface everything appeared to be working smoothly. The 1696 resignation request belongs to that later phase: a governor still trusted in Amsterdam, already turning toward private ease, and still years from the formal hand-over. [3]
Shipping, Town, and Settlement Context — 1696
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. Since the middle of the century many improvements had been made in the construction of ships: they carried more sails, but each one smaller, so that they needed fewer hands than formerly. 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 after Cornelis Joan Simons transferred his duties and proceeded to Batavia; the secunde’s chair would not be filled by Samuel Elsevier until April 1697 after Andries de Man’s death. The Rev. Petrus Kalden, inducted on 4 December 1695, held the Cape pulpit through 1696, while at Drakenstein Paul Roux’s French register and the Rev. Mr. Simond’s occasional services continued the inland French ministry. [3]
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. Burgher Councillors saw to matters of a municipal nature: cleanliness of the town, streets, roads and bridges, and the collection of taxes. Townspeople were to a great extent dependent for their livelihood upon the keeping of public and lodging houses and the sale of goods to passing foreign ships, and had little in common with the farming people inland. [8]
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. The directors’ 1695 order that farming and cattle dealing by the Cape government should cease as soon as possible still waited local execution; 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, but no steps toward carrying those instructions into effect were taken until some years later. 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 1696 the settlement’s face was thus tremor and night watch, share-cattle and Grigriqua ride, scurvy ward, French font and justice, and a resignation letter more than a new inland war. [3] [8]
Town engineering still looked forward as well as back. Oldenland’s dual role as garden superintendent, surveyor, and town engineer framed street work that had produced the Keizersgracht in 1695 and would, in October 1697, begin levelling the ground between that street and the shore—the space since termed the great parade, previously intersected by several deep gullies and knolls of considerable size—finished with Company slaves and burgher labour in 1699. In 1698 the church at Stellenbosch would be enlarged as the original building was too small, and an abortive attempt would be made to form a safe harbour for boats by cutting a passage through the sand from Table Bay to a reach of the Salt river. The hospital foundation of December 1694 still awaited serious building until July 1697. Calendar 1696 therefore held the night-watch innovation and the Vosmaar crisis inside a longer programme of streets, parade ground, and hospital that straddled the years on either side. [3]
Between the years 1691 and 1700 many burgher surnames still familiar later first appear in the colonial records: among them 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, the castle felt its second tremor, and Simon van der Stel asked leave to spend the evening of his life in comparative freedom from care. [3]