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, 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. [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]
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; the Keizersgracht had been laid out in October 1695 between the Heerengracht and the back of the castle. 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]
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 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. [3]
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. Simon van der Stel’s 1696 issue of stock on shares was a restoration attempt rather than a conquest settlement—Company animals placed with Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua 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. [3]
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]
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 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. Against the eight-year average of about fifty-four ships a year into Table Bay in 1692–1699, a single Flushing Indiaman with four sound men was an extreme but familiar expression of the Cape’s role as hospital shore on the India route. [3]
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. For 1696 the settled facts are the composition of Schryver’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]
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. 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 wide esteem among Europeans at the Cape apart from many French immigrants; about that date a different feeling began slowly to develop. Love of wealth and attention to Constantia—already beautified with vineyards and young oaks—grew; the strong personal interest of the first dozen years seemed to colonists to be dying out. Open complaints had not yet broken the surface, and strangers who could not see beneath it still found the government 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. 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. The Rev. Petrus Kalden, inducted on 4 December 1695, held the Cape pulpit through 1696. [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. The directors’ 1695 order that farming and cattle dealing by the Cape government should cease as soon as possible still waited local execution. 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. For 1696 the settlement’s face was thus tremor and night watch, share-cattle and Grigriqua ride, scurvy ward and a resignation letter more than a new inland war. [3]
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—finished with Company slaves and burgher labour in 1699. 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]
Close of 1696 at the Cape
By the end of 1696 the Cape had felt a slight afternoon tremor on the 11th of January, begun night patrol of the streets by a burgher watch in April, issued cattle on shares to the impoverished Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua without restoring their former condition, and received the Vosmaar from Flushing on the 17th of October with only four sound men, one hundred and thirty-nine ill, ninety-three dead on the passage, and five of ten Huguenot passengers lost. In December Ensign Schryver rode with thirty soldiers and twenty burghers toward the Elephant-river Grigriqua country for runaway slaves, failed to find the tribe, and saw two Grigriqua men secured by other Khoikhoi detained briefly at the castle before one messenger vanished and the other was released. In the same year Governor Simon van der Stel requested permission to resign; the directors named his eldest son as successor while leaving the father in office until the son could reach the Cape in 1699. Those were the calendar facts of a year that marked Table Valley’s streets after dark, measured the peninsula clans’ poverty and the Cape’s hospital shore again, tested slave recovery on the northern Khoikhoi border, and opened the long succession from Simon to Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel without yet changing who sat in the castle. [3]