Boer History1699 at the Cape of Good Hope: Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel Installed, Land of Waveren Named, New Hospital Opened, and Pirates in the Bays
Arrival of Wilhem Adriaan and Installation as Governor — January–February 1699
When in 1696 Governor Simon van der Stel had requested permission to resign so as to spend the evening of his life in comparative freedom from care, the directors of the Dutch East India Company named his eldest son as his 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 interval had left the father still in office through 1697 and 1698; the son’s arrival at last opened the transfer year. [3]
Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel had for ten years been filling various offices in the city of Amsterdam, among others that of judge, when the Assembly of Seventeen, in recognition of his father’s services, offered him the appointment of councillor extraordinary of India and governor of the Cape Colony and its dependency the island of Mauritius. He had once resided at the Cape for a short time, and was well acquainted with the circumstances of the country. The records and contemporary publications leave no clear portrait of his personal appearance, though the details of his administration are given very minutely. [3]
After handing over the administration on the 11th of February 1699, Simon van der Stel retired, and Wilhem Adriaan was installed as governor. The chapter of the settlement that had opened when the father was promoted from commander to governor on the 1st of June 1691 thus closed on a winter day in Table Valley; the son took the chair under the same Company title, with Mauritius still attached as a dependency, and with secunde Samuel Elsevier and independent fiscal Johan Blesius already in the ranking civil posts from the later years of the previous administration. [3]
Simon van der Stel Retires to Constantia — February–March 1699
After the handover Simon van der Stel retired to his farm Constantia, where he had built a large and handsome residence. There during the next thirteen years strangers of note were always sure of a hearty reception, and the hospitality of the late governor was so great that his house was seldom or never without visitors. He devoted his remaining years chiefly to agriculture and cattle rearing. The wine which he made was the best in the colony; burghers believed that he possessed some secret for manufacturing it, and strangers attributed its quality to the care which he took in pressing and fermenting, though the flavour is now known to have owed much to the soil. [3]
On the 11th of March 1699 he obtained from the commissioner Daniel Heins a grant in freehold of Zeekoe Vlei with the ground surrounding it an hour’s walk in diameter. Practically, together with later life-use of the Steenbergen granted on the 1st of February 1700 by commissioner Wouter Valckenier, he had the whole peninsula beyond his property as a cattle run. The March freehold of Zeekoe Vlei was thus the first large landed settlement of his retirement year, fixing Constantia’s hinterland in legal form while the new governor already held the Castle. [3]
The directors had continued to hold a very high opinion of the father. In 1692 they had conferred upon him the rank and title of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India, and when he asked leave to resign they named the son rather than an outsider. Comparison of the records of the first twelve years of Simon’s administration with those of the last seven already suggested to later readers a cooling of official language, yet through 1698 there had been no open complaints, and to strangers everything had appeared to be working smoothly. Calendar 1699 made the succession a public fact: handover on the 11th of February, Constantia residence, and the March Zeekoe Vlei freehold under commissioner Heins. [3]
Search for Forest Islands and Oak Planting — March–May 1699
Notwithstanding the pains taken by the late governor to promote tree planting, there was still a scarcity of timber and fuel at the Cape. It was a difficult matter to supply the ships with firewood. Some skippers reported that in passing by two islands, named Dina and Marseveen, in latitude 41° or 42° south and about four hundred sea miles from the Cape, they had observed fine forests, which they suggested should be examined. The master of the galiot Wesel was therefore instructed to proceed to the locality indicated, to inspect the forests closely, and ascertain what quantity of timber was to be had. [3]
The Wesel sailed from Table Bay on the 31st of March 1699, but returned on the 18th of May with a report that the search for the islands had been fruitless. No timber station offshore answered the skippers’ report; the Cape remained dependent on peninsula kloofs, inland mountain timber that could not easily be brought to the roadstead, and whatever fuel could be scraped together for outbound fleets. The failed cruise closed one hoped-for remedy within six weeks of the new governor’s first full quarter in office. [3]
The governor, like his father, regarded the cultivation of trees as a matter of great importance. During the first winter after his arrival twenty thousand young oaks were planted in the kloofs at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein where the native forests had been exhausted, and over ten thousand were set out in the Cape peninsula. The bulk planting of 1699 thus answered the fuel and timber shortage on land after the sea search failed: nursery stock into exhausted kloofs and into the peninsula itself, continuing the long oak programme already familiar under Simon. [3]
Pirate at Saldanha Bay — May 1699
On the 10th of May 1699 intelligence was received at the castle that a pirate vessel with an English crew had put into Saldanha Bay and taken possession of some galiots and decked boats belonging to the Company and to private individuals, there being nothing else to plunder within reach. Two ships were at once sent to try and capture her, but before they could reach the bay she had sailed. She had taken the little vessels outside, but had then abandoned them, after her master had generously presented four negroes to the owner of one, in return for his stores. [3]
A few weeks after this a squadron of English men-of-war touched at the Cape on their way to the Mozambique Channel, where they were about to cruise in search of pirates. The May incident at Saldanha thus sat inside a wider late-century pattern: the Indian Ocean had begun to be frequented by pirates ready to pillage coasts as well as to seize defenceless ships, and names such as Captain Kidd were already current in the records. Calendar 1699 added a concrete English pirate visit to the outer bay, a failed intercept by Company ships, and an English naval squadron outward bound on the same pirate problem. [3]
The Saldanha brush differed from the earlier seizure of the brigantine Amy in May 1693, when Dutch officers had taken an armed stranger into custody, condemned her for Cape use, and sent Captain George Dew and his men prisoners to Europe—only to face later legal trouble when piracy could not be proved to the directors’ satisfaction. In 1699 the pirate was gone before the intercepting ships arrived; the galiots and boats were recovered after abandonment; and the Company’s answer was pursuit attempted, not a prize condemned in Table Bay. [3]
Directors Open the Cattle Trade — 27 July 1699
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 had thought to check this by threatening more severe punishment, and on the 19th of October 1697 he had issued a placaat in which the barter of cattle from Hottentots was prohibited under penalty of whipping, branding, banishment, and confiscation of property. [3]
The directors disapproved of this. They were disposed to allow the colonists to purchase cattle from the Hottentots 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. The council of policy then had no option but to obey; the open-trade regime would be worked out in form under commissioner Valckenier early in the next year, but the directors’ July instruction was the decisive act of calendar 1699. [3]
The policy shift matched instructions already sketched in 1695, when the directors had said that as soon as possible farming and cattle dealing should be given up by the Cape government, and that tenders might supply beef and mutton while colonists bought and fattened stock. No steps toward carrying those instructions into effect had been taken until the July 1699 annulment of Simon’s severe placaat. From the Company’s side the aim was to relinquish the long custom of sending military bartering parties inland except when draught oxen were needed; from the burghers’ side the opened trade would make cattle breeding a favourite pursuit with yearly increasing numbers once contracts and grazing permissions followed. [3]
New Hospital Opened — 24 October 1699
In this year, 1699, the new hospital was completed. On the 24th of October it was opened for use, when the sick were moved into it from the old building on the beach. The hospital built by Commander van Riebeeck close to the beach in front of the earthen fort Good Hope had long been in a dilapidated condition, and its site was exposed to the full force of gales. Upon the late governor’s representations the directors had authorised a larger hospital in a more suitable place. [3]
Simon van der Stel had selected the ground between the Heerengracht and Bergstraat—later Adderley and St George’s streets. In December 1694 the foundation was commenced, but it was not until July 1697 that the building was taken properly in hand. It was designed to accommodate five hundred patients without crowding, or seven hundred and fifty on an emergency. A building of that size was none too large for the requirements of the Company’s fleets at the close of the seventeenth century: passages between Europe and the Cape were now often made in ninety days, but scurvy still caused terrible havoc among seamen. [3]
The October opening closed a five-year building arc that had run through foundation, delay, serious construction from mid-1697, and final completion under the son’s first year. Sick men left the beach hospital for the inland wards as fleets still arrived with hundreds unable to walk, as in the great scurvy arrivals of the mid-1690s. For the settlement the visible change of 24 October 1699 was a working hospital on the town streets rather than a worn building on the exposed shore. [3]
Governor’s Tour: Land of Waveren and the Witsenberg — November 1699
On the 23rd of November the governor with a party of attendants set out on a tour of inspection of the settlement. He visited Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, and the farms about the Tigerberg, where he found some persons to whom no ground had yet been allotted. The country was inhabited by Europeans, though thinly, nearly as far as the present village of Hermon. Small Khoikhoi kraals were scattered about, but their occupants were found to be very poor and very lazy by the visitors’ report. [3]
Keeping down the Berg river, the range of mountains on the right was reported to be tenanted by San groups who were in the habit of descending from their fastnesses and plundering the burghers and Khoikhoi below. The range was on this account known as the Obiqua mountains. The governor crossed over at a place since termed the Roodezand pass, just beyond the gorge through which the Little Berg river flows, and entered the valley now called the Tulbagh basin. Though not greatly elevated, the basin lies on the second of the steps by which the mainland rises from the ocean toward the interior ranges; it is drained by the Little Berg and its rills, with the Breede rising beyond and escaping south-eastward through what is now Michell’s pass. [3]
The visitors were charmed with the basin’s appearance, though it was too late in the season for the full spring flower display for which the valley is known. Very few Khoikhoi were found. In the recesses of the mountains were forests of magnificent trees; although the timber could not be removed to the Cape, it would be of great use to residents. Immigrants were arriving in every fleet from the Netherlands, so the governor resolved to form a settlement in the valley, where cattle breeding could be carried on to advantage. Agriculture, except to supply the wants of residents, could not be pursued with profit owing to the difficulty of transport. [3]
The governor named the basin the Land of Waveren, in honour of a family of position in Amsterdam. The range of mountains enclosing the valley on the inland side and stretching away as far as the eye could reach, as yet without a name, he called the Witsenberg, after the justly esteemed burgomaster Nicholas Witsen of Amsterdam. The Land of Waveren has long since become the Tulbagh basin, but the Witsenberg has borne that honoured name since 1699. Several burghers who had been living at Drakenstein were now permitted to graze their cattle at Riebeek’s Kasteel; the actual forwarding of recent immigrant families to occupy Waveren, and the corporal’s post of six soldiers termed the Waveren outstation, followed in the rainy season of 1700, but the inspection, naming, and resolve to settle belonged to the November tour of this year. [3]
Seizure of the Margate in Table Bay — December 1699
On the 28th of December an English vessel named the Margate put into Table Bay. Her master stated that he was from Madagascar, bound to the Bermudas with one hundred and twenty slaves. Another English vessel, named the Loyal Merchant, was lying at anchor in the bay. Captain Lowth, who commanded her, had a commission from King William authorising him to search for rovers and seize them. He examined the Margate, and then took possession of that vessel on the ground that she had been engaged in piracy. [3]
The governor protested against this violation of a Dutch port, but to no effect, for Captain Lowth kept his prize and took her away with him. He also examined another English vessel which put in before he left, but released her after two days’ detention. The December seizure thus differed from the May Saldanha episode: there the pirate had fled before Company ships arrived; here an English commander with a royal pirate-hunting commission made a prize inside Table Bay itself, over the protest of the Dutch governor, and carried the Margate out again. [3]
Port sovereignty and the pirate problem met on the same anchorage. Table Bay had already seen English East India ships, interlopers, slave traders between the West Indies and Madagascar, and men-of-war on convoy or cruise. 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. Against that traffic the last days of 1699 recorded an English prize taken under English colours in a Dutch roadstead, with the Castle’s protest unavailing. [3]
Close of 1699 at the Cape
By the end of 1699 the Cape had received Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel and his family on the 23rd of January and installed him governor on the 11th of February, while Simon van der Stel retired to Constantia and on the 11th of March secured freehold of Zeekoe Vlei with surrounding ground from commissioner Daniel Heins. The galiot Wesel searched from the 31st of March to the 18th of May for the reported forest islands Dina and Marseveen and found nothing; in the first winter some twenty thousand young oaks went into Stellenbosch and Drakenstein kloofs and over ten thousand into the Cape peninsula. On the 10th of May a pirate with an English crew took Company and private boats in Saldanha Bay and sailed before interceptors arrived; English men-of-war later touched outward for the Mozambique Channel pirate cruise. On the 27th of July the directors annulled the severe cattle-barter placaat of October 1697 and ordered the trade thrown open on condition of draught oxen at fourteen shillings. On the 24th of October the new hospital between Heerengracht and Bergstraat opened and the sick left the old beach building. On the 23rd of November the governor’s tour reached the Tulbagh basin, named the Land of Waveren and the Witsenberg, and resolved on a grazing settlement there, while Drakenstein burghers gained leave to graze at Riebeek’s Kasteel. On the 28th of December Captain Lowth of the Loyal Merchant seized the slave-laden Margate in Table Bay as a pirate prize over the governor’s protest. In the same year the levelling of the great parade between the Keizersgracht and the shore, begun in October 1697 with Company slaves and burgher labour, was completed. Those were the calendar facts of a year that changed the governor, opened a hospital, named an inland basin, loosened the cattle trade, and twice met the pirate problem in the colony’s bays. [3]