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. The February summons brought the rival captains back under castle eyes; the settlement recorded an outward peace; and Goukou, paramount chief of the Hessequas—commonly called the oude heer by the colonists—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, who had lived about ten years with Klaas and had later been taken by Koopman among other spoil after Captain Padt’s arrest of her husband, 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]
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. [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. [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. 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, held the Cape pulpit through 1697. Elsevier’s arrival thus completed the civil side of the castle staff without disturbing the church arrangement that had replaced the provisional service of Hercules van Loon. 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]
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. The night gale of 4–5 June 1692 had driven the Goede Hoop, Hoogergeest, and the English Orange ashore near Salt River mouth; the yacht Dageraad had broken up on Robben Island on 20 January 1694. 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. Salt River mouth again proved the fatal lee under a north-wester when cables and seamanship could not hold. [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. 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]
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, yet scurvy still caused terrible havoc among seamen. The Vosmaar of October 1696—four sound men, one hundred and thirty-nine ill, ninety-three 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 in October 1699; 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. [3]
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. [3]
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. [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. [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. 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. The year’s statute on the ground was Van der Stel’s severe ban of the 19th of October. [3]
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, 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. 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]
Politically the year still belonged to Simon van der Stel’s long governorship. His 1696 request for permission to resign had been answered by the directors with the naming of 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. 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. 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 October parade earthwork, and the October cattle placaat. [3]
Close of 1697 at the Cape
By the end of 1697 the Cape had summoned Klaas and Koopman in February to an apparent reconciliation under Governor Simon van der Stel, with Goukou of the Hessequas present as Klaas’s friend, only to see the peace collapse into renewed Chainouqua fighting, the killing of Goukou’s daughter by Koopman, and the seizure of Koopman’s and Company cattle by Klaas and the Hessequas—Company oxen already killed and eaten before a sergeant and twelve men could recover them. In April Samuel Elsevier arrived from the Netherlands as secunde after the death of Andries de Man. On the afternoon of the 24th of May the homeward-bound Waddingsveen and Oosterland were driven ashore at Salt River mouth in a great gale and dashed to pieces, only seventeen men in all being saved from the two wrecks. In July the new hospital between Heerengracht and Bergstraat, founded in December 1694 and planned for five hundred patients or seven hundred and fifty in emergency, was taken properly in hand. In October levelling of the great parade between the Keizersgracht and the shore began with Company slaves and burgher labour, and on the 19th of October a placaat prohibited burgher cattle barter from the Khoikhoi under penalty of whipping, branding, banishment, and confiscation of property. Those were the calendar facts of a year that reopened the Klaas–Koopman feud, restored the secunde’s chair, wrecked two rich Indiamen on the Salt River shore, and set hospital walls and parade earthworks moving under a governor still waiting for his son’s delayed succession. [3]