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. The Hessequa alliance under Goukou—paramount chief of that people, commonly called the oude heer by the colonists—still stood with Klaas, so that the threat Koopman described was not a private cattle quarrel alone but a joint Chainouqua–Hessequa pressure on a captain who had become the Company’s chosen ally. [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. Two hundred men under a named captain marked a deliberate escalation from the thin recovery patrol of the previous year to a field force meant to surround a kraal and end the feud by seizure rather than by another promise of peace. [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. The pattern was the familiar one of Cape inland policing in the 1690s: European arms and burgher numbers supplied the ring; the allied Khoikhoi captain’s people settled scores at the edges; Company and ally shared the herd. [3]
The April stroke 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. Padt’s night arrest was therefore not a first meeting of strangers but the field conclusion of a feud the Castle itself had helped to polarise—and which the failed February 1697 reconciliation had only briefly papered over. [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. The two leading men taken with him shared the docket; the council’s minutes fixed the case as one of political tranquillity rather than of simple theft. [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. Between the night arrest of April and the island order of the 17th lay nearly four months of custody before judgment—time enough for the Castle to treat the capture as a settled fact while still framing the final resolution in the language of mercy. [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. After a previous capture by Captain Padt, intercession had been made on his behalf, and in January 1694 he had been released and permitted to live near Muizenburg with some of his retainers; he had earlier been brought to the mainland for medical treatment when ill, then sent back to the island upon recovery. When allowed to reside at Muizenburg, his wife—daughter of Goukou—had been sent for; she had lived with him about ten years, but when he was arrested by Padt, Koopman had taken her with other spoil, and when asked by the governor whether she desired to live with her husband she had replied that she preferred to remain with Koopman. Calendar 1698 reopened the Robben Island 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. [3]
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. Occasional later visits of Klaas to the Cape in company with Goukou, and further promises to live in peace with Koopman, had not ended the rivalry before the 1698 arrest, and 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. Other Khoikhoi communities were destroying each other in the same years—Hessequa kraals pillaged by Attaquas in March 1693, Bushmen descents on Koopman’s herds in April 1694—while the Goringhaiquas and Gorachouquas stood completely impoverished and still applied to the governor for confirmation of captains by copper-headed staffs. Against that background Klaas’s second island detention was one more instrument of Castle management of inland disorder, not a unique personal tragedy alone. [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. The sequence was therefore calm anchorage, night mist, parted cable, drift into the breakers, and total loss of hull on the Atlantic rocks—not a north-wester driving homeward ships onto Salt River mouth in daylight gale. [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, with sixteen lives lost and only part of her specie recovered; 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. Calendar memory thus placed two successive Mays in wreck: 1697 at Salt River mouth with heavy loss of life, 1698 at Camp’s Bay and the Lion’s Head with none. [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. The Bantam in February 1693, the Goude Buys in late 1693, the Schoondyk, the Pampus, the eleven-ship fleet of November 1695, and the Vosmaar in October 1696 had already shown how passages still measured in scorbutic dead even when hulls arrived. Calendar 1698 added the Lion’s Head rocks to the shore list beside Salt River mouth and Robben Island. [3]
Pirate danger on the Indian Ocean was rising toward the century’s close, with Captain Kidd already among the names current in the records. On the 2nd of May 1693 the armed brigantine Amy under English colours had put into Saldanha Bay, been seized as a pirate, condemned for Cape use, and her master George Dew sent prisoner to Europe—only for legal proof to fail and Dew’s claim for damages to trouble the directors for years. The Huis te Crayenstein was not a pirate loss, but she wrecked in the same late-century climate of sea risk in which scurvy fleets, Salt River gales, and armed strangers at Saldanha already framed every outward and homeward call. For Table Bay the May calm off Camp’s Bay proved as fatal to one Middelburg hull as the north-wester had been to two homeward Indiamen the year before. [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. The fabric change was local and practical—an extension of walls already identified with the district church—rather than the laying of a new foundation stone of the kind Cape Town would see for its own stone church at the century’s turn. [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. The contrast with Table Valley remained sharp—unpaid rotating night patrol in town, paid veldwachters inland, and a country congregation large enough to force the carpenters and masons back to the church walls. [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. Once in three months the clergyman of the Cape visited the vacant church and administered the sacraments, and occasionally Simond attended for the same purpose; on the remaining Sundays the sick-comforter conducted the services. Only on the 11th of April 1700 would the Assembly of Seventeen’s appointee, the Rev. Hercules van Loon—once acting clergyman of the Cape—arrive from the Netherlands as resident clergyman of Stellenbosch. 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]
Cape Town’s own church fabric lagged on a different timetable. The foundation of a church in Table Valley had been laid in April 1678, but services continued for another quarter-century in a large hall within the castle until the poor funds and consistory could apply a sum equal to about £2,200 to the erection; a new foundation stone would be laid by the governor on the 28th of December 1700, and the first service held on the 6th of January 1704 under the Rev. Petrus Kalden. Stellenbosch’s 1698 enlargement thus stands as the inland parish’s answer to growth while the mother congregation at the Castle still waited for stone walls of its own. For the Eerste River district the year meant more pew room under visiting and sick-comforter ministry, not yet a resident pastor of its own. [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. After the Salt River mouth wrecks of 1692 and 1697, any plan that might give boats quieter water near the town shore carried obvious urgency. [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. The failure left ship’s boats and small craft as exposed as before whenever a gale set into the bay—precisely the condition that had cost the Waddingsveen and Oosterland their hulls the previous May. [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. The Keizersgracht itself—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 still ran between the castle and the shore of the bay. Hospital building on the inland site between Heerengracht and Bergstraat, taken properly in hand in July 1697 after a foundation start in December 1694, likewise continued toward its October 1699 opening, designed for five hundred patients without crowding or seven hundred and fifty on an emergency. Against those multi-year works the Salt River boat cut was a shorter, failed experiment of 1698 alone. [3]
Other peninsula works of the mid-decade framed the same civic programme. In February 1693 a waggon road had been completed over the neck beyond Wynberg to Hout Bay. The botanist Oldenland, superintendent of the Company’s garden, land surveyor, and town engineer from January 1693 at £6 18s. 10d. a year partly paid by the burgher council, had died four years after that appointment—placing his death in 1697—so that parade levelling and the harbour cut proceeded without the surveyor-engineer who had framed much of the recent street work. 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. The failed Salt River cut was one more mark in that programme of streets, gardens, open ground, and attempted shelter—not an isolated engineering flourish. [3]
French Refugees, the Driebergen, and Drakenstein Baptisms — 1698
Free French households at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein entered 1698 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 after his induction on the 4th of December 1695; inland, French liturgy and Roux’s careful entries kept the Refugee community’s vital record in its own tongue. [3] [8]
On the 25th of May 1698 the Driebergen, in command of Captain Martin de Jeugd and destined for Batavia, left Holland with five French refugees on board. A despatch dated the 7th of May 1698 from the Chamber at Delft named them: Louwys de Ryck alias Louis le Riche; Pieter Cronier alias Pierre Crosnier; Stephen Cronier alias Estienne Cronier; Jean van het tichelje alias Jean du Tuillet; and Philip van Renan alias Philippe Drouin. When north of the Canary Islands the Driebergen encountered a pirate vessel flying an English flag, taken to be Turkish; after Captain de Jeugd had warned her to keep off he fired a broadside and shattered her sails, and left the pirate without damage to his own ship. The five refugees arrived at the Cape on the 3rd of September 1698 and settled at Drakenstein as agriculturists. [8]
The Cronier brothers of Normandy—Estienne and Pierre—came out in the Driebergen in that year. Estienne, an agriculturist, later owned the farms Champagne and Olyvenhout in Wagonmakers Valley and died unmarried on the 2nd of September 1724. Pierre, born in 1671, married Susanna Taillefert, widow of Jean Gardé and daughter of the Refugee Isaac Taillefert; he died on the 2nd of September 1718 and left issue who were the heirs of his brother—his son Pierre, from whom the South African Cronjé descends, marrying Susanna Roi. Philippe Drouin, two years after landing, was living as an agriculturist in the Stellenbosch district; his will, proved the 29th of September 1702, instituted as heir the Refugee Gideon Malherbe “for his true friendship shown to me.” The 1698 five thus entered the same freehold and kinship web that Paul Roux’s register already recorded week by week at the Drakenstein font. [8]
The year’s Drakenstein baptisms open early and run through December. On the 12th of February 1698 Elizabeth, daughter of Abraham Vivret and Jacqueminne des Pres, was baptised, the father standing with Elizabeth des Pres. On the 8th of June Daniel, son of Charles Marais and Anne de Ruel, was presented, with Daniel de Ruel and Catherine Taboureux as witnesses. On the 27th of July two children entered the book: Marthe, daughter of Pierre Rousseau and Anne Retif, with the Rev. Pierre Simond, minister of the holy Gospel at Drakenstein, and Mademoiselle Hanna de Berault as witnesses; and Jean, son of Matthieu Fracassé and Jeanne Cordier, with Gideon le Grand and Susanne Taillefert standing. On the 10th of August Johannes, son of Claas Redas and Marie van Staden, was baptised; on the 17th Hendrik Willems, son of Schalk Willems van der Merwe and Anne Prevot, was presented. [8]
Late-year entries thickened the same register. On the 24th of August 1698 Pierre, son of Pierre Marcevene and Elizabeth des Pres, was baptised, with Pierre Dumont and Cecilia des Pres as witnesses; the same day Marie, daughter of Jacques Theron and Marie Jeanne, was presented, Hercules des Pres and Jacqueminne des Pres standing. On the 21st of September Erasmus, son of Pieter Erasmus and Marie Elizabeth, entered with Barend Pieter Blom and Catharina Blom. On the 26th of October two further children were presented: Marie, daughter of Louis Floris and Susanne Cordier, with Jacob Cordier and his sister as godmother; and Philippe, son of Louis Cordier and Francoise Martinet, with the Rev. Pierre Simond and Mademoiselle Anne de Berault as witnesses. On the 30th of December Charles, son of Schalk Willems and Anna Prevost, and Anne, daughter of Pierre Jourdan of Cabrière and Anne Fouché, closed the calendar year—the father of the latter serving as witness and the grandmother as godmother. Ordinary freehold names—Marais, Rousseau, Cordier, des Pres, van der Merwe, Jourdan—thus filled Roux’s book through the same months that Padt rode inland and the Huis te Crayenstein broke behind the Lion’s Head. [8]
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, who had been detained from the Nederland on the 22nd of September 1694 and later obliged to return to Europe when the directors sent Kalden out. Secunde Samuel Elsevier, arrived in April 1697 after the death of Andries de Man, and independent fiscal Johan Blesius, who had taken over from Cornelis Joan Simons in November 1694, held the ranking civil chairs under Governor Simon van der Stel. 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. 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. The directors had already, in 1695, issued instructions that as soon as possible farming and cattle dealing should be given up by the Cape government, with tenders contemplated to supply the garrison and fleets with beef and mutton and colonists allowed 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. Calendar 1698 therefore still belonged to the older mixed system of Company and freehold agriculture. [3]
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 began slowly to develop as Constantia occupied more of his attention and the enthusiastic language of his first twelve years gave way to colder official expressions in the last seven. Still there were no open complaints. The directors continued to hold a very high opinion of him: in 1692 they 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 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; the formal handover would follow on the 11th of February 1699. Through 1698 the father remained in office. [3]
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. 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, many engaged in the slave trade between the West Indies and Madagascar, others private traders or interlopers, others of the new English East India Company, and a few men-of-war sent to convoy fleets. 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 still ran near £5,000 against about £8,000 expenditure after stripping ship-supply items not fairly chargeable to the outpost alone. Wine and liquor privileges 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 including some £4,000 of ship-supply and related items. Between 1691 and 1700 new burgher names entered the records in a steady stream—among them Bakhuizen, Bisseaux, Brink, Coenradie, Couvret, Cronjé, Delport, van Deventer, Gardiol, Haak, Heems, van Jaarsveld, Maritz, Mouton, Niel, Odendaal, van Rensburg, le Riche, Swanepoel, de Vos, and others—proof that freehold recruitment continued even as the governor’s personal popularity cooled. Against that background the year’s distinctive facts remained Padt’s April commando and Klaas’s August island detention, the May wreck behind the Lion’s Head, the Stellenbosch church enlargement, the failed Salt River boat cut, the Driebergen Refugee arrival of the 3rd of September, and Terwold’s August transfer to Batavia while Simon van der Stel still held the chair he would surrender only in February 1699. [3]