Boer History1698 at the Cape of Good Hope: Padt’s Commando against Klaas, Huis te Crayenstein Wreck, Stellenbosch Church, and Salt River Harbour Cut
Padt’s Commando and the Arrest of Klaas — April 1698
On the 20th of April 1698 an urgent request for help was received at the castle from Koopman, who represented that he was about to be attacked by Klaas and the Hessequas. The Chainouqua feud had already run through arrest, Robben Island detention, Muizenburg residence, a short return of Klaas to his old kraal, the failed February 1697 reconciliation under Governor Simon van der Stel, the killing of Goukou’s daughter by Koopman, and the seizure of Koopman’s and Company cattle by Klaas and the Hessequas. Koopman’s April appeal reopened the quarrel as a matter of immediate military aid rather than another castle summons. [3]
It was therefore resolved to send Captain Willem Padt with a hundred soldiers and a hundred burghers to Koopman’s assistance, with instructions to endeavour to capture Klaas. The double company—Company troops and free burgher horse and foot together—was larger than the sergeant’s party of twelve that had failed in 1697 to recover already-eaten Company oxen. The order mixed relief of an allied captain with a clear brief to take the rival leader who had again been judged the principal mischief-maker in the Chainouqua country. [3]
The commando, aided by Koopman’s adherents, surrounded Klaas’s kraal in the night, took possession of his cattle, and arrested him and two of his leading men. Some of his followers who attempted to escape were killed by Koopman’s people. The cattle were driven to the Kuilen, where they were counted and divided between Koopman and the Honourable Company. Night enclosure, seizure of stock, and a three-man arrest thus closed the April field action; the division at the Kuilen fixed the material spoils between the petitioning captain and the Castle before the prisoners were brought in for council judgment. [3]
Klaas before the Council and Detention on Robben Island — August 1698
On the 8th of August 1698 the three prisoners were brought before the council of policy. Klaas admitted some of the charges against him, but endeavoured to give a satisfactory explanation of his conduct. He denied having ever had hostile designs against the Company. The hearing therefore turned on whether the long feud with Koopman, the Hessequa alliance, and the earlier seizure of cattle held in Company charge amounted to open war against the settlement, or only to inter-captain violence that the Castle had chosen to punish by capturing one side. [3]
The council admitted that he had not been guilty of any overt act of war, and, on the 17th of August, resolved that as no Christian blood had been shed, further proceedings against the prisoners should be dropped, but to secure tranquillity Klaas should be detained on Robben Island. The formula was deliberate: no capital or corporal sentence for warfare against Europeans, yet indefinite island confinement as a peace measure against renewed Chainouqua disturbance. The two leading men taken with him shared the August process; Klaas’s own detention on the island became the recorded security for the countryside. [3]
The fate of the Khoikhoi captain who had once been regarded as among the most trustworthy of his people, and who had befriended many Europeans in distress, already had a longer paper trail of sympathy and release from an earlier Robben Island confinement in the mid-1690s. Calendar 1698 reopened that pattern under a different charge sheet: Padt’s night arrest after Koopman’s April plea, council examination in August, admission that no Christian blood had been shed, and a fresh island detention ordered on the 17th for tranquillity rather than for proven war against the Company. The feud with Koopman would continue until Klaas was killed in a skirmish in June 1701; for this year the settled end-state was island custody after the April–August sequence. [3]
Wreck of the Huis te Crayenstein — 27–28 May 1698
On the 27th of May 1698 the Huis te Crayenstein, from Middelburg bound to Batavia, anchored in a calm off Camp’s Bay. During the night a thick mist set in, and before daylight of the 28th the ship was found to have parted her cable and to be adrift. She was already in the breakers, and before anything could be done she struck on the rocks behind the Lion’s Head and became a complete wreck. No lives were lost. [3]
The May disaster differed in place and outcome from the Salt River mouth losses of the decade. 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 homeward Waddingsveen and Oosterland had been dashed to pieces at Salt River mouth on the afternoon of the 24th of May 1697, with only seventeen men saved from the two hulls. The Huis te Crayenstein wrecked instead on the Atlantic rocks behind the Lion’s Head after parting her cable in mist off Camp’s Bay—an outward Middelburg–Batavia Indiaman lost as a hull, yet without the mass drowning that had marked the previous May. [3]
For the settlement the commercial shock was real even where the human loss was not. A complete wreck on the Camp’s Bay lee meant cargo and hull written off on the outward run, while Table Bay’s ordinary refreshment traffic continued under the decade average of about fifty-four ships a year across 1692–1699. Scurvy and wreck remained linked perils of the sea; pirate danger on the Indian Ocean was rising toward the century’s close, with Captain Kidd already among the names current in the records. Calendar 1698 added the Lion’s Head rocks to the shore list beside Salt River mouth and Robben Island. [3]
Stellenbosch Church Enlarged — 1698
In 1698 the church at Stellenbosch was enlarged, as the original building was too small to contain the congregation. The inland church had stood since the district’s early freehold years as the spiritual centre of a farming community that had outgrown the first walls. Enlargement rather than a wholly new foundation marked the year’s answer: more room for an existing congregation whose numbers had risen with freehold expansion, wheat, and wine along the Eerste River country. [3]
The work belonged to the same late-century pattern that had given Stellenbosch and Drakenstein two veldwachters paid at £1 2s. 8d. a month to see that the placaats were observed, while the Cape town streets had been patrolled at night by a burgher watch since April 1696. Church fabric and local order moved together: an enlarged meeting-house for Sunday worship, and paid rural constables for the placaats on weekdays. For free households at Stellenbosch the visible change of 1698 was more space under a roof already identified with the district church. [3]
Clerical supply for the wider colony remained uneven. After the removal in 1691 of the Rev. Pierre Simond to Drakenstein there was no resident clergyman at Stellenbosch for nearly nine years; quarterly visits from the Cape pulpit and occasional attendance by Simond covered the sacraments, while a sick-comforter conducted ordinary Sundays. The 1698 enlargement therefore expanded a building still served in large part by visiting ministry—space for a congregation that had grown faster than the permanent clerical establishment of the district. [3]
Abortive Salt River Harbour Cut — 1698
In the same year an abortive attempt was 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. Small craft and ship’s boats had long suffered in open roadstead weather; a cut through the sand bar toward a quieter inland reach promised shelter without the cost of a full masonry mole. The scheme was practical in aim and limited in means—an earth-and-sand cut rather than a new artificial basin. [3]
The attempt failed. Sand and tide closed or defeated the passage before a lasting boat harbour could be secured. Table Bay remained the open anchorage it had been through the wreck years: useful for Indiamen in ordinary weather, deadly under north-westers at Salt River mouth, and still without a protected boat basin on the town side. Calendar 1698 thus records both the will to cut a safer channel and the fact that the cut did not answer. [3]
The harbour cut sat beside other civic earthworks already in hand. Levelling of the great parade between the Keizersgracht and the shore, begun in October 1697 with Company slaves and burgher labour, was still unfinished and would only be completed in 1699. Hospital building on the inland site between Heerengracht and Bergstraat, taken properly in hand in July 1697, likewise continued toward its October 1699 opening. Against those multi-year works the Salt River boat cut was a shorter, failed experiment of 1698 alone. [3]
Terwold’s Transfer, Settlement Works, and Government Continuity — 1698
In August 1698 the Rev. Leonardus Terwold was transferred to Batavia. At the Cape the pulpit continuity already rested on the Rev. Petrus Kalden, inducted on the 4th of December 1695 after the provisional service of Hercules van Loon. Secunde Samuel Elsevier, arrived in April 1697, and independent fiscal Johan Blesius held the ranking civil chairs under Governor Simon van der Stel. Terwold’s August departure to Batavia was a clerical transfer within the wider Netherlands-India staff movement rather than a vacancy of the Cape town church itself. [3]
Agrarian experiment and peninsula planting continued on familiar lines. Efforts to produce olives still resulted in failure; experiments in hop culture were still being made; the planting out of young oaks in different parts of the Cape peninsula was assiduously attended to. Those works did not yield a sudden staple in 1698, but they kept the long programme of tree cover, garden trial, and failed Mediterranean crops on the official record beside wheat and wine. [3]
Politically the year still belonged to Simon van der Stel’s long governorship. When in 1696 he had requested permission to resign, the directors named his eldest son, Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel, as successor; the newly appointed governor 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 1698 the father remained in office. From 1698 through 1705 the seasons would prove very unfavourable for farming, and no wheat could be exported—a drought span that began in this calendar year even though its full agricultural cost ran into the next decade. [3]
Shipping pressure on Table Bay held to the late-century average. During the eight years 1692–1699 four hundred and thirty-five ships put into the bay, or about fifty-four yearly—two hundred and ninety-three Company, one hundred and thirteen English, nineteen Danish, and ten French. Dutch Indiamen averaged about one hundred and seventy men; English visitors were as a rule smaller. Revenue still ran near £5,000 against about £8,000 expenditure after stripping ship-supply items not fairly chargeable to the outpost alone. Against that background the year’s distinctive facts remained Padt’s April commando, Klaas’s August island detention, the May wreck behind the Lion’s Head, the Stellenbosch church enlargement, and the failed Salt River boat cut. [3]
Close of 1698 at the Cape
By the end of 1698 the Cape had answered Koopman’s appeal of the 20th of April with Captain Willem Padt’s commando of a hundred soldiers and a hundred burghers, the night surrounding of Klaas’s kraal, the seizure and Kuilen division of cattle between Koopman and the Company, and the arrest of Klaas with two leading men. On the 8th of August the prisoners stood before the council of policy; on the 17th further proceedings were dropped because no Christian blood had been shed, while Klaas was detained on Robben Island to secure tranquillity. On the night of the 27th–28th of May the outward Huis te Crayenstein parted her cable in mist off Camp’s Bay, struck the rocks behind the Lion’s Head, and became a complete wreck without loss of life. In the same year Stellenbosch enlarged its church for a congregation too large for the original building, an attempt to cut a boat harbour through the sand from Table Bay to a reach of the Salt River failed, the Rev. Leonardus Terwold was transferred to Batavia in August, oak planting and olive and hop trials continued, and the first of the lean farming seasons of 1698–1705 set in under Governor Simon van der Stel, still in office while his son’s arrival waited on the new year. Those were the calendar facts of a year that re-arrested Klaas for the Chainouqua peace, wrecked an Indiaman on the Lion’s Head shore, and stretched Stellenbosch’s church walls while a sand cut toward the Salt River came to nothing. [3]