Boer History1697 at the Cape of Good Hope: Klaas and Koopman, Elsevier, Hospital Works, Waddingsveen and Oosterland, and the Great Parade
Klaas and Koopman — Reconciliation and Renewed Feud — February 1697
In February 1697 both Klaas and Koopman were summoned to the Cape, and an apparent reconciliation was effected by the governor. The Chainouqua feud had already run through arrest, Robben Island detention, Muizenburg residence, and a short return of Klaas to his old kraal on a promise of quiet. That promise had not held. After Captain Willem Padt’s earlier capture of Klaas, the prisoner’s wife—daughter of Goukou, paramount chief of the Hessequas, commonly called the oude heer by the colonists—had been taken by Koopman among other spoil; when she was later sent for to Muizenburg and asked by the governor whether she desired to live with her husband, she had replied that she preferred to remain with Koopman. The February summons brought the rival captains back under castle eyes; the settlement recorded an outward peace; and Goukou appeared again as the friend of Klaas. Goukou’s friendship was valued: he was considered the most wealthy and powerful of all the Khoikhoi chiefs in the neighbourhood of the colony. [3]
The captains had hardly returned to their kraals when fighting between them was renewed. Goukou’s daughter changed her mind and attempted to return to Klaas. Koopman put her to death. Klaas and the Hessequas then attacked Koopman and took his cattle together with some belonging to the Company which were in his charge. A sergeant and twelve men were sent from the castle to request Klaas to restore the Company’s property, but he could not comply, as the oxen had already been killed and eaten. The matter brought him into disfavour again, and thenceforth he was regarded as the principal mischief-maker in the country. [3]
The collapse sat inside a longer realignment of Company favour. Once the most trusted of inland cattle purchasers for the Honourable Company, Klaas had grown weary of travelling about the country to feed what must have seemed insatiable wants; European bartering parties had excited his jealousy; and by 1692 he had used most threatening language toward Ensign Schryver. Koopman had then come to the castle with accusations of illicit barter and offers of service, and the government had changed sides with the rival branches of the Chainouqua tribe. The February 1697 summons was thus not a first meeting of strangers but an attempt to quiet a feud the castle itself had helped to polarise. [3]
Occasional later visits of Klaas to the Cape in company with Goukou, and further promises to live in peace with Koopman, did not end the feud. The rivalry between the two captains was kept up until, in a skirmish between them in June 1701, Klaas was killed. For calendar 1697 the settled facts are the February summons and apparent reconciliation, Goukou’s presence as Klaas’s friend, the swift collapse into renewed fighting, the killing of Goukou’s daughter by Koopman, the joint Klaas–Hessequa seizure of Koopman’s and Company cattle, the failed recovery of already-eaten oxen by a sergeant’s party of twelve, and the renewed official judgment of Klaas as the chief disturber of the Chainouqua country. Theal noted that the story, written in minute detail nearly two hundred years before his own narrative, might be copied as a faithful description of a quarrel between native clans in his day. [3]
Samuel Elsevier Arrives as Secunde — April 1697
In April 1697 Mr. Samuel Elsevier arrived from the Netherlands with the appointment of secunde, Andries de Man having died some time before. The second seat in the Cape administration had stood vacant after De Man’s death; Elsevier’s arrival closed that gap and restored a full ranking pair under Governor Simon van der Stel. The independent fiscal’s chair remained with Johan Blesius, who had taken over from Cornelis Joan Simons in November 1694 when Simons proceeded to Batavia to fill a post of greater importance. On the 22nd of June 1694 J. W. Grevenbroek had already resigned as secretary to the council of policy and become a burgher at Stellenbosch. Elsevier thus entered a staff whose recent turnover had thinned the civil spine around the governor. [3]
Elsevier’s appointment belonged to the ordinary rotation of Netherlands-India staff rather than to any local crisis. The Cape’s books still ran on the late-century pattern of roughly £5,000 revenue against about £8,000 expenditure after stripping ship-supply items not fairly chargeable to the outpost alone. Wine and liquor privileges still yielded about £2,200 yearly; other sources about £800; average profits on goods about £2,000. The Company’s accounts set expenditure at about £12,000 yearly, of which some £4,000 covered supplies to ships and other items not fairly chargeable against the Cape. Filling the secunde’s post in April 1697 mattered because the colony’s day-to-day correspondence, trade supervision, and council work had lacked a permanent second since De Man’s death. [3]
Clerical continuity was already settled. The Rev. Petrus Kalden, inducted on the 4th of December 1695 after the directors sent him out in place of the provisional service of Hercules van Loon, held the Cape pulpit through 1697. The independent fiscalate created in March 1688—responsible to the supreme directory alone, with a seat in the council of policy next to the secunde, access to records, and control of accounts connected with ships’ cargoes and garrison food—remained the dual check on local power that the directors had hoped would restrain corrupt officers throughout the Company’s possessions. Elsevier’s arrival completed the civil side of the castle staff without disturbing either Kalden’s church arrangement or Blesius’s fiscal chair. For free households and Company servants the practical change was a named secunde again at the council table—an administrative restoration dated to April of the year. [3]
Later career notes fix Elsevier in the longer administrative sequence. He would engage in farming, be recalled by the directors, cease to hold office in June 1707, return to Europe, and be dismissed from the Company’s service. The succession lists place him between the vacancy after Andries de Man and Johan Cornelis d’Ableing. For 1697 itself the settled fact is the April assumption of duty as secunde under Simon van der Stel, restoring the ranking pair while the father still governed and the son named as successor still waited in the Netherlands. [3]
Wreck of the Waddingsveen and Oosterland — 24 May 1697
In the afternoon of the 24th of May 1697 the Company’s homeward-bound ships Waddingsveen and Oosterland, with valuable cargoes on board, were driven ashore at Salt River mouth in a great gale and were dashed to pieces at once. Two other ships out of a large fleet that was lying in the bay narrowly escaped the same fate. Only seventeen men in all were saved from the two wrecks. [3]
The May disaster sat in a longer sequence of Table Bay losses. During the night of the 4th of June 1692 a heavy north-west gale had driven the Company’s ships Goede Hoop and Hoogergeest and the English ship Orange ashore near Salt River mouth; the Goede Hoop—the former French Normande, taken in April 1689—had held together so that most of her cargo, though damaged, was recovered, while the Hoogergeest and Orange broke up quickly with only a few lives lost, many of the Hoogergeest men being rescued by the quartermaster Jochem Willems, who fastened a line to his body and made his way through the surf. Early on the morning of the 20th of January 1694 the yacht Dageraad, laden with cargo including specie from the wrecked Goude Buys, had run ashore on the western side of Robben Island and broken up immediately, sixteen lives being lost and only part of the specie recovered. The 1697 wrecks differed in concentration: two rich homeward Indiamen destroyed in a single afternoon, almost the whole of their people lost, and only a narrow escape for two further ships in the same roadstead. [3]
For the settlement the human and commercial shock was immediate. Seventeen survivors from two hulls meant mass burial and the loss of cargoes already counted toward the homeward account. Table Bay’s role as refreshment station did not protect ships once a great gale set them driving on the Salt River shore. Salt River mouth again proved the fatal lee under a north-wester when cables and seamanship could not hold. Calendar 1697 thus added the Waddingsveen and Oosterland to the decade’s wreck list beside scurvy fleets and the ordinary average of about fifty-four ships a year into the bay across 1692–1699. [3]
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 opportunity offered, to pillage coasts as well as to seize defenceless ships; among them was the famous Captain Kidd. The Cape already knew the pattern from the seizure of the brigantine Amy in Saldanha Bay in May 1693—master George Dew, conflicting papers, concealed men raising the crew to thirty-five, condemnation for local use, and later legal trouble for the directors when piracy could not be proved in Europe. The May double wreck of 1697 therefore stood beside rising pirate danger as well as beside the Salt River lee: homeward wealth destroyed in one afternoon, while the ocean routes that fed Table Bay grew less safe even when cables held. [3]
Hospital Building Taken Properly in Hand — July 1697
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. Its site was not good, as it was exposed to the full force of gales. Upon the governor’s representations, the directors authorised him to build a larger hospital in a more suitable place. He selected the ground later occupied by the Cape of Good Hope Bank, between the present Adderley and St. George’s streets, then termed the Heerengracht and Bergstraat. In December 1694 the foundation was commenced, but it was not until July 1697 that the building was taken properly in hand. [3]
The new hospital was designed to accommodate five hundred patients without crowding, or seven hundred and fifty on an emergency. A building of that size was judged none too large for the requirements of the Company’s fleets at the close of the seventeenth century. Improved ship construction had shortened many Europe–Cape passages toward about ninety days—more sails, each smaller, so that fewer hands were needed than formerly—yet scurvy still caused terrible havoc among seamen. Dutch Indiamen at the close of the century still averaged about one hundred and seventy men; English visitors were as a rule smaller and carried on average not more than one hundred. [3]
The decade’s sick lists explained the scale. On the 8th of February 1693 a boat had reached Saldanha Bay from the Bantam, anchored off Paternoster Point with two hundred and twenty-one dead of scurvy and the living too weak to work. On the 4th of May 1693 the Goude Buys had sailed from Enkhuizen with one hundred and ninety souls and by mid-November had dropped anchor about fifteen miles north of St Helena Bay with not a dozen men capable of working; when a yacht reached her, only one living person was found on board, and he died soon afterwards. The Schoondyk had arrived from Texel on the 23rd of November 1693 with her whole remaining crew of one hundred and twenty men sick and one hundred and thirty-four dead on the passage. The Pampus had reached Table Bay from Rotterdam on the 23rd of December 1694 with only sixteen healthy men, sixty dead, and eighty-three down with scurvy. On the 11th of November 1695 a fleet of eleven ships had brought six hundred and seventy-eight men unable to walk, some dying while being conveyed to hospital, with two hundred and twenty-eight dead on the passage. The Vosmaar of the 17th of October 1696 —four sound men, one hundred and thirty-nine ill, ninety-three dead, five of ten Huguenot passengers dead—had only recently shown why a beach hospital of Van Riebeeck’s scale could no longer serve. [3]
July 1697 therefore marks the shift from foundation trench to serious construction on the inland town site. The old beach wards remained in use until the new building opened on the 24th of October 1699, when the sick were moved from the old building on the beach; for this year the recorded fact is that proper building at last began on the authorised larger hospital between Heerengracht and Bergstraat—capacity planned for five hundred ordinary beds and seven hundred and fifty in emergency, sized against the scurvy fleets that still defined the Cape’s hospital shore. Theal’s index dates the hospital as commenced in 1697 and completed in 1699, confirming the July start as the year’s decisive building mark. [3]
French Refugees and Drakenstein Baptisms — 1697
Free French households at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein entered 1697 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 reader Paul Roux continued the French baptismal register of the Drakenstein church—the book begun on the 29th of August 1694—while the Rev. Pierre Simond still served as minister of the French congregation. Cape Town’s Dutch pulpit remained with Petrus Kalden; inland, French liturgy and Roux’s careful entries kept the Refugee community’s vital record in its own tongue. [3] [8]
The year’s register opens early. On the 10th of January 1697 Susanne, daughter of Daniel Terrier and Sara Jacob, was baptised, with Salomon Gournay and Susanne Lanoy as witnesses. On the 9th of March Elsy, daughter of Geert Janse, was presented, Hendrik Beaumons and Elsie Jacob standing, though Roux noted that he had received no billet from the parties. On the 24th of March Pierre, son of Francois du Toit and Susanne Seugnet, was baptised, with Guillaume du Toit and Sara le Clair as witnesses. On the 13th of April Justina, daughter of Nicolas Klef and Barbara le Fevre, was presented, Hercules des Pres and Marie le Fevre standing. [8]
Mid-year entries thickened the same book. On the 15th of July 1697 Louis, son of Jean Jourdan and Elizabeth le Long, was baptised, with Louis Barret and Marie Grillion as witnesses. On the 1st of August Elsie, daughter of Christoffel Sniman (Snyman) and Marguerite Savoye, was presented, Hercules des Pres and Elsie Jacob standing. On the 1st of September Jeremie Roux, son of Paul Roux the reader and Claudine Seugnet, was baptised, with Pierre Jourdan of Cabrière and Marie Avis as witnesses—the reader’s own household entering the font beside the families he served. On the 25th of August three further children were presented: Elizabeth, daughter of Etienne Viret and Marguerite Roux, with Etienne Niel and Marie Elizabeth; Lidie, daughter of the Rev. Pierre Simond, minister at Drakenstein, and Mademoiselle Hanna de Berault, with Isaac Taillefer and Marie Elizabeth; and Helsijs, daughter of Schalk Willems van der Merwe and Hanna Prevot. [8]
Spring and late-year baptisms closed the calendar. On the 15th of September 1697 Jean, son of Daniel Nortie and Marie Vitout, was baptised, with Hercules des Pres and Marie le Fevre as witnesses. On the 6th of October two children were presented: Janne, daughter of Jacob de Villiers and Marguerite Gardiol, Abraham de Villiers and Mademoiselle le Fevre standing; and Salomon, son of David Senecal and Madelaine Dupuit, with Salomon Gournay and Susanne Seugnet. On the 11th of November Francoise, daughter of Pierre Joubert and Elizabeth Richard, was baptised, the surgeon Paul le Fevre and Elizabeth Taillefer standing; the same day Geertru, daughter of Cornelis Corpenant, was presented. On the 24th of November Susanne, daughter of Abraham de Villiers and Susanne Gardiol, entered the register with Jean Gardiol and Susanne Taillefer as witnesses. On the 1st of December Elizabeth, daughter of Gideon Malherbe and Marie Grillion, was baptised; on the 8th Anna Elizabeth, daughter of Abraham Dimmes, without billet for mother or witnesses, and Geertru, child of a stepson of Hendrik Kelbeers, with Pieter van der Byl and the grandmother as godmother; on the 15th Harijs, son of Marie Lanoy, wife of Hary Lekervain (Ary Lekkerwyn), with Christoffel Sniman and Marguerite Savoye as witnesses. [8]
Ordinary freehold and membership business ran beside the font. On the 4th of October 1697 Durand Sollier, a shoemaker at Drakenstein, and his wife became members of the Dutch church at Cape Town; he would later die in September 1739 and be buried in that church, having served as an elder in 1719. His brother Gillis Sollier had been a burgher at the Cape since 1697. Elsie Jacob stood sponsor at a baptism in the Drakenstein church on the 9th of March 1697 and on several occasions thereafter. Before 1697 Marguerite Roux had married Etienne Viret of Dauphiné; Marie de Lanoy appears in the 1697 inventory of Hary Lekervain’s estate as his widow. Pierre Joubert of la Motte d’Aigues still held Bellingham, granted in 1695, among other Drakenstein farms. The year’s Refugee record is thus not a thin name-list but a working congregation: Roux at the register, Simond at the pulpit, baptisms from January through December, and free burghers moving between Drakenstein farms and Cape Town membership. [8]
Great Parade Levelling Begun — October 1697
In October 1697 the work of levelling the ground between the new street and the shore, since termed the great parade, was commenced. 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. The road to the country at that time ran between the castle and the shore of the bay. The parade ground was previously intersected by several deep gullies, and some knolls of considerable size were standing on it. [3]
The Company furnished a party of slaves, and the burghers contributed the remainder of the labour. The work was completed in 1699. October 1697 thus opened a two-year civic earthwork that turned broken shore ground into the level parade later generations would know as a central open space of Table Valley. It belonged to the same town programme that had made Oldenland town engineer in January 1693, laid the Keizersgracht in 1695, and begun burgher night patrol of the streets in April 1696. Down the two principal streets ran a canal; each dwelling had a garden attached, and around the whole stood a low wall. Night patrol and parade levelling sat inside that same civic frame: streets thick enough to need watching after dark, and shared slave and burgher labour already accepted as part of how Table Valley ordered itself between garden, castle, and bay. [3] [8]
The botanist Oldenland, superintendent of the Company’s garden, land surveyor, and town engineer with an annual salary of £6 18s. 10d. partly paid by the burgher council, died four years after his January 1693 engineering appointment—placing his death in 1697. Parade levelling therefore began in the year the settlement lost the surveyor-engineer who had framed much of the recent street work. Slave gangs and burgher labour carried the earth-moving forward without him toward the 1699 finish. The contrast with the country posts remained sharp: Stellenbosch and Drakenstein already paid two veldwachters at £1 2s. 8d. a month to see that the placaats were observed, while the Cape town still relied on rotating unpaid burgher night duty and shared earthwork rather than a standing constabulary for its principal open spaces. [3]
Other peninsula works of the mid-decade framed the parade’s start. In February 1693 a waggon road had been completed over the neck beyond Wynberg to Hout Bay. 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 still gave trouble: 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. October 1697 parade levelling was thus one mark in a programme of streets, gardens, and open ground rather than an isolated civic flourish—the year the gullies and knolls between Keizersgracht and shore began to be cut down to a single level. [3]
Cattle-Barter Placaat — 19 October 1697
Ever since 1658 trade between the burghers and the Khoikhoi had been strictly forbidden. The chief object was to prevent any act that might bring on a collision with the natives. In opposition to the law, however, parties of deserters and other persons of loose character carried on a cattle trade, and were often guilty of conduct that cannot be distinguished from robbery. Governor Simon van der Stel thought to check this by threatening more severe punishment, and on the 19th of October 1697 he issued a placaat in which the barter of cattle from Khoikhoi was prohibited under penalty of whipping, branding, banishment, and confiscation of property. [3]
The directors disapproved of this severity. They were disposed to allow the colonists to purchase cattle from the Khoikhoi and fatten them for sale to such persons as would contract to supply the garrison and fleets with beef and mutton. They therefore annulled the placaat, and on the 27th of July 1699 issued instructions that the cattle trade should be thrown open, on condition that the burghers should supply draught oxen to the government whenever required, at fourteen shillings each. For calendar 1697 the local fact remains the October prohibition itself—the harshest formal bar on burgher–Khoikhoi cattle barter yet recorded under Simon van der Stel. Theal’s index summarises the longer arc: cattle barter by burghers forbidden from 1658 to 1697; prohibited under more severe penalties by the October 1697 placaat; later opened and again restricted in the early eighteenth century. [3]
The placaat sat beside the directors’ earlier 1695 order that farming and cattle dealing by the Cape government should cease as soon as possible—an order still waiting full local execution. The directors had been disposed to call for tenders to supply the garrison and fleets with beef and mutton and to allow colonists to purchase cattle from the Khoikhoi and fatten them for sale to contractors, but no steps toward carrying those instructions into effect were taken until some years later. October 1697 thus tightened the private side of the cattle question while Company pastoral policy remained in transition. Unlicensed inland barter was to be crushed by corporal and capital-adjacent penalties; the longer Amsterdam line pointed toward open burgher purchase and contractor supply rather than permanent prohibition. [3]
Local justice had already shown how seriously illicit barter was treated. In 1696 a burgher living at Drakenstein and born at Bortel in Switzerland had been charged with illicit cattle-bartering with the natives—one of the gravest offences against which repeated placaats had been published—and banished to Mauritius. Simon van der Stel would later write, in his Instructions of the 30th of March 1699, of agriculturists who had wandered from farm to farm and become vagabonds used by the ill-disposed for cattle-trading with the natives. The October 1697 placaat raised the statutory ceiling on such cases: whipping, branding, banishment, and confiscation named in a single instrument. The year’s statute on the ground was Van der Stel’s severe ban of the 19th of October. [3] [8]
Shipping, Town, and Settlement Context — 1697
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]
Town and agrarian work continued beside 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. Burgher night patrol, begun in April 1696 in six companies of thirty men each, remained the town’s after-dark order while Stellenbosch and Drakenstein already paid two veldwachters at £1 2s. 8d. a month to see that the placaats were observed. The Rattlewatch, first appointed in 1686 from the burgher community and paid from a household tax, still called the hours after ten at night; a Board of Firemasters had been appointed from among the burghers in 1691. In the country, wild animals still gave trouble in the mid-decade pattern, and the peninsula clans of the Goringhaiqua and Gorachouqua remained impoverished after the fruitless cattle-on-shares experiment of 1696. [3] [8]
Politically the year still belonged to Simon van der Stel’s long governorship. Before 1692 he had enjoyed the esteem of nearly every European in South Africa except the French immigrants; 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 his farm 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 that enthusiastic language gives 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 very high opinion of him: in 1692 they had conferred 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, Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel, as successor. The son could not immediately leave the Netherlands, and it was not until the 23rd of January 1699 that he and his family reached South Africa. Through 1697 the father remained in office, the secunde’s chair was filled by Elsevier, Kalden held the pulpit, and the great material works of the year—hospital construction and parade levelling—went forward under the elder governor’s authority. [3]
Inland, the Chainouqua feud after February’s failed peace defined the year’s Khoikhoi politics more than any new northern expedition. Other Khoikhoi communities were likewise 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 driven off fully half of Koopman’s cattle, after which ten soldiers under a sergeant recovered most of the stock and shot sixteen or seventeen of the marauders. The Grigriqua slave-recovery ride of December 1696 had already closed without finding the tribe; 1697 shifted the recorded pressure back onto Klaas, Koopman, Goukou, and Company oxen eaten in the Hessequa country. Of their own accord the impoverished peninsula clans still referred their most weighty disputes to the European authorities, and upon the death of a captain they applied to the governor for a copper-headed staff engraved with the Company’s arms and the new captain’s name. [3]
Between 1691 and 1700 new burgher names continued to enter the records—Bakhuizen, Bisseaux, Brink, Coenradie, Cronjé, Delport, Gardiol, van Jaarsveld, Maritz, Mouton, van Rensburg, le Riche, Swanepoel, and many others among them—while French Refugee farms at Drakenstein and the older freeholds of Stellenbosch thickened the agrarian fringe. Pirate danger on the Indian Ocean was rising toward the century’s close—Captain Kidd among the names already current—but the Cape’s own calendar facts for the year remained the February summons, the April secunde, the May double wreck, the July hospital works, the year-long Drakenstein baptismal register under Paul Roux, the October parade earthwork, and the October cattle placaat. [3] [8]