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. The directors’ choice was an explicit recognition of the father’s long Cape service rather than an open competition among other Company servants, and the delayed departure from Europe meant that the succession, once decided in principle, still hung over two full calendar years of Simon’s continued administration. [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. The double commission—extraordinary councillor’s rank and the Cape–Mauritius governorship together—placed him on the same Company ladder his father had climbed when the directors raised Simon from commander to governor on the 1st of June 1691 and later conferred the councillor extraordinary title in 1692. [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 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—arrived from the Netherlands 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, already in the ranking civil posts from the later years of the previous administration. Calendar 1699 therefore did not rebuild the Castle’s official spine from nothing; it changed the governor’s chair while Elsevier and Blesius continued the second and fiscal ranks that Simon’s last years had already fixed. [3]
Within weeks of the installation the father put formal advice on paper for the son. The instructions of Simon van der Stel to Wilhem Adriaan are dated the 30th of March 1699, and in several places they bear on the settlers at Drakenstein. He advised care in discharging Company servants to live as burghers: they should be of the Reformed religion, subjects of the States General, or members of such Germanic nations as were not engaged in sea traffic, lest the government be exposed to a revolution. Should other nationalities populate the colony, he warned, each would adhere to his own nation and the defensive arrangements of the government would become useless. The March paper thus framed the new governor’s first quarter not only with garden and cattle counsel but with a clear preference for Dutch and German agricultural stock over further concentration of French-speaking refugees inland. [8]
That preference soon showed in the son’s own correspondence. When Wilhem Adriaan wrote to the Chamber of Middelburg after the safe arrival of French refugees in the Westhoven, he said that too many of that sort were already at the Cape, that some had conducted themselves badly and did not possess much knowledge of agriculture, and that he would rather see industrious Zeeland farmers well versed in agriculture sent out than further fugitives who might burden the Company and the poor fund. The letter is dated the 2nd of July 1699—only a few months after he had taken the chair—and it echoed both the father’s March instructions and the long-standing hope, already disappointed under Simon, of keeping the settlement a predominantly Dutch agricultural colony. Among the French who did arrive in the transfer year were Pierre Mouy of St Amant, freeman in the Donkervliet and later an agriculturist at Drakenstein, and Jacques Potier (later Potje) of Moukron in Flanders, who came as a soldier in the Westhoven and became a burgher in 1704. [8]
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. Retirement did not mean withdrawal from all commercial ambition: years later, in June 1711, when nearly seventy-two, he would still enter a five-year contract with the council of policy for dried and salted fish and a monopoly of fishing and seal hunting at Saldanha Bay against an annual payment of twenty-five leggers of train oil—but that lay far beyond the calendar of the transfer year. [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. The two grants—Heins in freehold in March 1699, Valckenier for life-use early in the next year—together explain how a retired official could keep hospitality and wine production on a scale that impressed every stranger who rode out from Table Valley. [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: the enthusiastic phrases of the earlier period give way to cold official expressions in the later one. 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. He was a disappointed man, for his dream of forming a purely Dutch settlement had been thwarted; the love of wealth had grown upon him; and Constantia, already beautified with vineyards and avenues of young oaks, year by year occupied more of his attention. Still, through 1698 there had been no open complaints, and to strangers everything had appeared to be working smoothly. [3]
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. The father’s retirement year was therefore not a quiet private withdrawal alone but a legal and social re-settlement of the peninsula’s most famous farm, while the son’s first months at the Castle still drew on the same secunde, fiscal, and inland district machinery Simon had left in place. What strangers saw at Constantia—hospitality, wine, cattle, oak avenues—was the visible counterpart of what the March freehold secured on paper. [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. The report, if true, would have offered an offshore timber station beyond the exhausted peninsula kloofs and the mountain forests that could not easily be brought down to the roadstead. [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, and it left the oak nurseries and the exhausted kloofs of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein as the practical answer rather than a southern-ocean forest island under Company flag. [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. The same winter programme would be renewed in later years—further nursery stock sent to Stellenbosch from Table Valley in the winter of 1701, with the landdrost instructed to plant along the streets—but the first-winter figures of twenty thousand inland and over ten thousand on the peninsula belong to the opening year of Wilhem Adriaan’s government. [3]
Tree work sat beside other unfinished improvements that the transfer year brought to a close or left in plain view. The great parade between the Keizersgracht and the shore, begun as a levelling of knolls and gullies in October 1697 with Company slaves and burgher labour, was completed in 1699, so that the open ground before the Castle took its lasting form in the same calendar as the hospital opening and the Waveren tour. Olive experiments still failed; hop culture was still under trial; and the planting out of young oaks in different parts of the Cape peninsula continued to be assiduously attended to. The Wesel’s empty return in May therefore did not end a forestry policy—it forced that policy back onto the soil the settlement already held. [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. The incident was brief, almost farcical in its mixture of seizure and gift, yet it placed an armed English rover inside the outer bay that served the settlement as a secondary anchorage and sealing station. [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: toward the close of the seventeenth century 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—proof that the Cape roadstead now lay on a pirate as well as an Indiaman route. [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 at Saldanha Bay, 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 and Dew put in a claim for damages. 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. The contrast mattered for port practice: six years earlier the Castle had risked a condemnation that the Seventeen later regretted; in May 1699 it could only report a rover already at sea again. [3]
Saldanha’s vulnerability was structural. The bay held Company and private small craft employed in sealing, fishing, and local transport; it was far enough from the Castle for a fast stranger to work and leave before two ships could beat up from Table Bay; and it offered little plunder beyond boats, stores, and whatever labour or slaves could be lifted from decks. The four negroes presented to one owner after the stores were taken underline how casually human cargo moved in the same waters as the galiots. When English men-of-war called a few weeks later bound for the Mozambique Channel cruise, they underlined the other half of the same problem: European states were beginning to treat pirate hunting as a naval duty on the route the Cape refreshed.
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 the Khoikhoi was prohibited under penalty of whipping, branding, banishment, and confiscation of property. The October ban was the hard face of a policy that had already failed to stop illicit inland dealing for four decades. [3]
The directors disapproved of this. 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. 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, when tenders were called and the burgher Henning Huising contracted in February 1700 to supply the garrison, hospital, and fleets at twopence halfpenny a pound, 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. Contemporary summary put the same change in local terms: in 1699 the farmers were further encouraged by being allowed to carry on cattle barter with the natives, a trade most strictly prohibited since the early days of the colony, and in the same year they were also given the right of supplying fresh meat for the Company’s establishment. [3] [8]
The July order did not instantly create a free interior. Restrictions meant to prevent abuse would still be written into the council placaat of the 28th of February 1700 under Valckenier; the Huising contract would carry Groen Kloof grazing rights and slaughter-house use; and within a few years complaints of rapacity by burgher trading parties would push the council to suspend free barter again and the Seventeen to withdraw the privilege in 1703. What 1699 fixed was the directors’ will: Simon’s whipping-and-branding ban annulled, draught oxen priced at fourteen shillings, and the principle that colonists rather than military expeditions should feed the meat contracts. Cattle breeding as a colonial pursuit, with permission to graze at defined localities and a readiness to move when pasture failed, takes its legal opening from that July despatch. [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. The October opening was therefore the end of a building argument that had begun under Simon and finished under the son: beach ruin replaced by inland wards on the town streets. [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. The mid-1690s had already shown what the beach hospital could not hold—fleets with hundreds unable to walk, ships such as the Vosmaar with only four sound men, and Indiamen that left dead and dying on the passage out. [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 crews broken by scurvy, as in the great 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. Capacity figures of five hundred ordinary and seven hundred and fifty emergency beds measured the Company’s judgment of what the Cape refreshment station now owed every outward and homeward fleet that still lost men to the long sea. [3]
Hospital work was only one face of a town that had been slowly regularised through the 1690s. The Keizersgracht had been laid out in October 1695; night burgher watch had begun in April 1696; firemasters and burgher councillors already managed engines, streets, and municipal order; and the parade levelling finished in the same year as the hospital doors opened. Revenue still came chiefly from liquor privileges—about £2,200 yearly—with other sources and sale profits bringing the Company’s Cape income toward £5,000 against expenditure near £8,000 when ship supplies were fairly charged. Against that thin fiscal frame the new hospital was a capital work justified by scurvy statistics rather than by local rates: the directors had authorised it because Indiamen still delivered their sick faster than the beach ruin could hold them. [3] [8]
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, in the visitors’ report, very lazy. The tour was the new governor’s first systematic look at the inland districts his father had planted and quarrelled over—Stellenbosch church and heemraden, Drakenstein’s French and Dutch farmers, and the cattle country pushing toward the Berg River. [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. If a cane with a large round head be laid upon soft ground, the mark gives an idea of its form: the hollow of the head for the basin, the long narrow groove for the valley between the Obiqua mountains and a parallel range six or seven miles further inland. [3]
The Breede river has its source on the third terrace and, rushing down a gorge in the interior range—later Michell’s pass—flows south-eastward through the valley. Close to that pass the mountain retires, then sweeps round and joins the Obiqua range, the keystone of the arch being the Great Winterhoek, six thousand eight hundred and forty feet in height, the loftiest peak visible from the Cape. The basin the governor entered is drained by the Little Berg river and its numerous tributary rills, whose waters escape through a gorge in the Obiqua mountains and flow north-westward. The watershed between the Breede and Little Berg is merely a gentle swell: at the foot of Michell’s pass a mill race can turn water from the one system into the other, and a few shovels of earth can divert flow from the Indian to the Atlantic ocean. Geography thus explained both the basin’s charm and its isolation from cheap wagon traffic to Table Bay. [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—the basin excels all other parts of South Africa in the variety and splendour of its wild flowers, which in early spring almost conceal the ground. 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 on the 31st of July 1700, the corporal’s post of six soldiers termed the Waveren outstation, and the additional families sent on the 16th of October 1700, followed in the next rainy seasons, but the inspection, naming, and resolve to settle belonged to the November tour of this year. [3]
The November journey therefore did more than attach two Dutch place-names to a Cape map. It marked the limit of thin European occupation toward Hermon, recorded San pressure on the Obiqua range, judged the Tulbagh basin fit for stock rather than for export grain, and opened Riebeek’s Kasteel as immediate grazing for Drakenstein men while Waveren itself waited on cottages and a six-man post. In the same year Drakenstein’s French congregation continued its own paper life: Paul Roux’s baptismal register for 1699 records children of the du Toit, de Villiers, Pinard, Viret, Theron, Jourdan, and related houses through June, August, September, October, and December—proof that while the governor named a new cattle district beyond the Obiqua, the older French farms still filled the church books under the sick-comforter’s hand. [8]
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. The charge turned a refreshment call into a prize case inside a Dutch roadstead, with a slave cargo of one hundred and twenty souls already on the books as the Margate’s declared freight. [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. Port sovereignty yielded to an English commission on the same water where the Castle claimed exclusive jurisdiction over strangers. [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. Dutch Indiamen at the close of the century averaged about one hundred and seventy men; English callers were as a rule smaller, often under a hundred, and many of them were engaged precisely in the Madagascar–West Indies slave trade that the Margate claimed to be serving. 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]
The year that had opened with Wilhem Adriaan’s arrival on the 23rd of January and his installation on the 11th of February thus closed with a foreign captain ignoring a Dutch governor in the principal bay. Between those dates lay Simon’s retirement to Constantia and the Zeekoe Vlei freehold, the fruitless Wesel cruise and the winter oak plantings, the May pirate at Saldanha and the English squadron bound for the Mozambique Channel, the directors’ 27 July opening of the cattle trade, the hospital doors of the 24th of October, and the November naming of the Land of Waveren and the Witsenberg. The transfer of government from father to son was complete; the problems the son inherited—timber, meat, sick fleets, inland expansion, and armed strangers in the bays—had already been written into the first year’s minutes. [3]