Boer History1701 at the Cape of Good Hope: Bushmen Raids, Cloete Commandos, Vogel Vlei and Groen Kloof Posts, and Frontier Defence
Winter Oak Planting at Stellenbosch — 1701
Governor Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel, like his father Simon van der Stel, treated tree cultivation as a standing duty of the settlement. Notwithstanding the pains taken by the late governor to promote tree planting, there was still a scarcity of timber and fuel at the Cape, and it remained a difficult matter to supply the ships with firewood. Skippers had even pointed to rumoured forests on the islands Dina and Marseveen, in about latitude 41° or 42° south and some four hundred sea miles from the Cape; the master of the galiot Wesel had sailed from Table Bay on the 31st of March 1699 to inspect them and had returned on the 18th of May with a fruitless search. Local timber could not be replaced by distant discovery. During the first winter after Wilhem Adriaan’s arrival twenty thousand young oaks had been planted in the kloofs at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein where the native forests had been exhausted, and over ten thousand had been set out in the Cape peninsula. In the winter of 1701 a further supply was sent to Stellenbosch from the nursery in Table Valley, and the landdrost was instructed to have them planted along the streets. [3] [9]
The planting order belonged to the same administrative year that would be dominated by stock theft on the outer grazing line. Timber and fuel remained scarce for ships and the Castle; the street oaks at Stellenbosch were a long investment in shade and future wood rather than an answer to the firewood shortage that skippers still reported. For calendar 1701 the winter nursery draft is the only major peaceful public-works note before the March raids opened the year’s military record. [3]
The same winter oaks stood beside other early works of the governorship: expansion of the Company garden, a little museum and the rebuilding of the old tuynhuys into a guest-house, a botanical guide still consulted a century later, a new garden and lodge at Nieuwe Landen (Newlands), exploration and naming of the Land of Waveren, and the foundation stone of the Groote Kerk laid the previous December. Those measures do not cancel the pride and private farming that later cost him his office, but they show that calendar 1701 still mixed ordinary administration—trees, posts, captains—with the grazing expansion that drew San raiders onto burgher and Khoikhoi herds. [3] [9]
Street planting at Stellenbosch also fitted the colony’s demographic growth. Burgher families were generally large and married early; every year a few settlers still arrived from Europe; a custom had come into vogue of allowing soldiers and convalescent sailors to engage for short periods as servants to burghers, their wages and keep being saved to the Company while they remained at hand in case of need; and from a hundred to a hundred and fifty of the garrison and seamen were commonly out at service. A great many slaves were being introduced from Madagascar and Mozambique. The landdrost’s street oaks were civic furniture for a district that already held a resident clergyman—the Rev. Hercules van Loon, arrived 11 April 1700—and that would, through 1701, send burghers and soldiers north and east after San stock thieves. Shade along the village streets and young timber in the kloofs were the peaceful counterpart of posts at Vogel Vlei and Groen Kloof. [3]
The same seasons that demanded timber for ships were unfavourable for grain. From 1698 the harvests had been very poor, and no wheat could be exported; in 1700 rice had been imported from Java because there was not sufficient grain for the people and for fresh bread to ships’ crews. Winter oak planting in 1701 therefore proceeded under drought pressure rather than under surplus: the colony invested in future wood while still short of present bread, and while the open cattle trade of the previous February multiplied the herds that San raiders would find worth driving from Riebeek’s Kasteel, Waveren, and Groen Kloof. [3]
Cloete Raided at Riebeek’s Kasteel — March 1701
With the enlargement of the settlement after the open cattle trade of 1700 and the occupation of the Land of Waveren, fresh troubles arose with the San groups the Dutch records called Bushmen. Ever since cattle breeding had become a favourite pursuit with yearly increasing numbers of colonists, the government had given permission to applicants to use land for grazing at some defined locality, and if the pasture failed the occupiers did not hesitate to seek other and better places. That expansion pushed European and Khoikhoi stock into reach of mountain bases along the Obiqua range—the same range the governor’s 1699 tour had already reported as tenanted by San who descended to plunder burghers and Khoikhoi below. [3] [4] [9]
In March 1701 a band of these raiders drove off forty head of cattle from Gerrit Cloete’s farm at Riebeek’s Kasteel. A commando of ten soldiers and thirty burghers was sent after the depredators, but was unable to find them. A temporary military post was then established at Vogel Vlei, at the foot of the Obiqua mountains. Riebeek’s Kasteel had already been opened to Drakenstein graziers after the governor’s 1699 tour; the March lift showed that the new stock farms sat within reach of mountain bases the same range the Waveren settlers watched from the other side of the Roodezand. [3]
The failed pursuit of forty head, and the choice of Vogel Vlei as a standing watch rather than a one-day chase, fixed the pattern for the rest of the year: short commandos that lost the trail, then posts meant to shorten the next response. Early San warfare matches the March arithmetic—farmers living at distances that made combination slow, stolen herds driven into mountain fastnesses, and recoveries that more often failed than succeeded until larger mixed parties and standing posts were tried. Calendar 1701 opened not with a declared frontier war but with a single farm’s loss that the council answered by placing soldiers under the Obiqua. [3] [4]
The geography of the blow mattered as much as the count of forty. Riebeek’s Kasteel lay on the western flank of the Obiqua mountains, opposite the Land of Waveren which the governor had named in 1699 after an Amsterdam family and had opened to immigrants in July and October 1700. The interior range parallel to the Obiqua he had called the Witsenberg, after burgomaster Nicholas Witsen of Amsterdam. San groups using the Obiqua as a base could descend on either side: on Cloete’s Riebeek’s Kasteel stock toward the Berg River farms, or on the Waveren outstation and the new grazing households beyond the Roodezand pass. Vogel Vlei, at the foot of the mountains, was chosen to watch that hinge rather than to garrison every kraal. The March post was therefore a doctrinal statement—Company presence on the raid corridor—before April proved how thin a temporary guard still was. [3] [9]
San tactics—sudden descent, herds driven off in bulk, poisoned arrows from cover, and stands in mountain country that punished pursuit—explains why ten soldiers and thirty burghers could lose the trail so quickly. The first expeditions against such raiders were commonly on a small scale, the male members of a robbed household; combination of neighbours was a matter of difficulty and great inconvenience. The raiders’ advantage was not open battle but speed into ground they knew and the settlers did not. The March failure thus taught the council what later decades would repeat on a larger scale: without standing posts and enough horse, a single farm’s alarm came too late for recovery. [4]
Waveren Lift and Vogel Vlei — April 1701
The Vogel Vlei post soon proved insufficient. In April Gerrit Cloete was again robbed, and eleven head of cattle were lifted from the Waveren post itself. That post was still new: on the 31st of July 1700 recent immigrants from Europe had been sent to occupy the Land of Waveren; as it was the rainy season their families remained at the Cape until rough cottages could be put up; a corporal and six soldiers had formed the outstation; and on the 16th of October 1700 additional grazing families had followed. Within less than a year of those arrivals, stock was taken from the military post planted to protect them. [3]
A commando of twelve soldiers and fifty burghers was then organised to clear the country of Bushmen, but did not succeed in effecting its object. It was hardly disbanded when one hundred and thirty-seven head of cattle were lifted within sight of the Vogel Vlei post. Upon that third blow a reinforcement of six mounted soldiers was sent to each of the two posts, and twelve men were stationed at Riebeek’s Kasteel. The April sequence—repeat theft from Cloete, theft from the Waveren outstation, a larger mixed commando that found nothing, then a mass lift under the eyes of Vogel Vlei—made plain that temporary posts without enough horse could not cover the Obiqua front. [3]
The government answered with numbers rather than a change of doctrine: more mounted men on the same line. The older French and Dutch farms along the Berg River still formed the settled core, while Waveren lay beyond the Obiqua as the newest cattle district rather than as a second grain colony. The April lifts therefore struck not a mature drostdy but a basin occupied the previous winter and spring, still dependent on a corporal’s guard and on commandos raised from Stellenbosch and the older farms. In the recesses of those mountains were forests of magnificent trees which, though they could not be removed to the Cape, would be of great use to residents—another reason the governor had resolved to plant households there when immigrants were arriving in every fleet from the Netherlands. [3] [8]
One hundred and thirty-seven head taken in sight of a garrisoned post was the year’s sharpest humiliation of Company presence. It proved that a corporal’s watch and a temporary station could not hold a raid corridor when San parties chose their moment. After such trouble, fatigue, and bloodshed, a few head of stolen cattle might be recovered, but more often none at all: the depredators usually killed what they captured. The six mounted men added to each post and the twelve stationed at Riebeek’s Kasteel were the council’s immediate arithmetic: more horse on the same ground, still short of a permanent northern line that only November’s Groen Kloof sergeant would begin to fix. [3] [4]
Klaas Killed in the Feud with Koopman — June 1701
While San parties struck the Obiqua grazing line, an older Khoikhoi feud reached its end farther east. Captain Klaas (Dorha), once among the most trusted of the Company’s Khoikhoi allies and later a prisoner on Robben Island after the 1693 Padt expedition, had resumed his quarrel with his rival Koopman. The government had completely changed sides with the rival branches of the Chainouqua tribe: Koopman had become an ally of the Honourable Company, and Klaas was regarded as an ill-affected mischief-maker. Klaas had as wife a daughter of Goukou, paramount chief of the Hessequas, commonly called the oude heer by the colonists; his people and the Hessequas were living in close friendship. [3]
On the 20th of April 1693 an urgent request for help had been received from Koopman; Captain Willem Padt with a hundred soldiers and a hundred burghers had surrounded Klaas’s kraal by night, divided the cattle between Koopman and the Company, and sent Klaas to Robben Island. Intercession had secured his release in January 1694 to live near Muizenburg with some of his retainers. Goukou’s daughter, who had lived with Klaas about ten years, had preferred Koopman when the governor asked her choice after Klaas’s release; she later changed her mind and tried to return, upon which Koopman put her to death. Klaas and the Hessequas then attacked Koopman and took his cattle together with some belonging to the Company in his charge. A sergeant and twelve men sent from the Castle could not recover the oxen, already killed and eaten. The feud continued until, in a skirmish between them in June 1701, Klaas was killed. [3]
The death closed a decade of Company-side shifting between the two captains. In the early 1690s Klaas had fallen from favour for obstructing European bartering parties; Koopman had become the Castle’s preferred ally; release, Muizenburg residence, return to his old kraal, and repeated failed reconciliations under Simon van der Stel had never ended the quarrel. Occasionally Klaas had visited the Cape in company with Goukou and promised to live in peace with Koopman, but the promise was soon disregarded. Wilhem Adriaan, early in his governorship, still handled Khoikhoi captains with something of his father’s dexterity; calendar 1701 nonetheless recorded the violent end of a captain whose name had filled the journals since the 1680s, not by San raid but by inter-clan war the Company had long failed to quiet. [3] [9]
For the colony the June skirmish mattered less as a change of policy than as a reminder that Khoikhoi politics inland still ran on their own blood feuds even while San stock thieves pressed the new Waveren and Groen Kloof lines. Klaas’s death left Koopman without his long rival; it did not stop the autumn lifts from Cloete, Huising, Terreblanche, and the Riebeek’s Kasteel kraals. The same government that had once armed a hundred soldiers and a hundred burghers to seize Klaas now spent 1701 mounting smaller soldier parties against San raiders and instructing outpost officers to restore stolen cattle to burgher and Khoikhoi owners alike. [3]
Reinforcements, Captain Kees, and Cloete’s Private Commando
The Goringhaiqua and Cochoqua Khoikhoi now tendered their services to assist the Europeans against the Bushmen, and requested that the captain Kees, who was then living at Groen Kloof, might be recognised as their leader in the expedition. But it was discovered that Kees, who had suffered severely from the Bushmen, had already joined a commando of Gerrit Cloete’s friends, and that the joint force was scouring the Obiqua mountains. On receipt of this information, the governor sent instructions to the landdrost of Stellenbosch to have Cloete arrested and brought to trial for waging war without leave, and to ascertain and send in the names of those who had joined him in the expedition. [3]
The prosecution fell through, and the governor thought it best after this to send out only parties of soldiers against the raiders. The failed case left an awkward mark on the year’s policy: burgher and Khoikhoi self-help under Cloete and Kees had moved faster than the landdrost’s warrant, yet the council would not legitimise private war. Official defence was thereafter to be Company soldiers from the posts, even when Khoikhoi captains offered alliance under a named leader. Early unofficial commandos—undertaken without Cape authority because the drostdy was far and prompt action was necessary—supply the broader pattern into which Cloete’s private ride fitted, and which Wilhem Adriaan tried, after the failed prosecution, to close by restricting pursuit to soldier parties. [3] [4]
Kees’s residence at Groen Kloof tied the episode to the meat contractor’s run as well as to the mountain war. In February 1700 the burgher Henning Huising (also Huizing) had contracted to supply the garrison, hospital, and Company’s fleets with beef and mutton at twopence halfpenny a pound, he to have the use of the Company’s slaughter-houses and, as a cattle run, the whole of the district of Groen Kloof that was not occupied by Khoikhoi. The contract had been signed provisionally for ten years, but the directors reduced it to five. The same district that fed Huising’s slaughter-houses sheltered a Khoikhoi captain willing to fight San thieves—and willing, when the council delayed, to ride with Cloete’s friends without leave. Calendar 1701 thus recorded both an offered alliance and a refused private war on the same stretch of grazing ground that would, in October, cost Huising more than two hundred head. [3]
The contractor’s run mattered politically as well as militarily. The German immigrant had piled up riches in a short span; Simon van der Stel had earlier recognised his shrewdness as an organiser; under the son he held the meat-supply monopoly when the Company stopped routine cattle farming of its own, sending inland military bartering parties only when draught oxen were needed. A private burgher ride that mixed Cloete’s friends with Kees from Groen Kloof therefore touched not only the governor’s claim to control of war but also the commercial geography of the man who supplied the roadstead. In 1701 that collision still appeared as a failed prosecution and a turn to soldier-only patrols. [3] [9]
French Language Forbidden at Drakenstein — 20 September 1701
While soldier parties watched the Obiqua and Groen Kloof lines, the Assembly of Seventeen struck at another frontier of settlement—the language of the Huguenot congregation at Drakenstein. There was already a desire on the part of the directors that in the families of the Huguenot immigrants the French language should be superseded by the Dutch as speedily as possible. It was only a question of time, for the proportion of French-speaking people was too small compared with those of Dutch and German descent for their language to remain long in use in the mixed community. At no time did the Refugees exceed about one-sixth of the burgher population, or one-eighth of the whole European community including the Company’s servants. [3] [8]
On the 14th of March 1701 the Cape informed the Chamber of Amsterdam that the Rev. Pierre Simond of Embrun in Dauphiné, the first minister of the congregation, had asked for his discharge, being anxious to return to Europe. The congregation was not desirous that he should leave, and as the term of his contract had not yet expired the governor was obliged to withhold his authority. Simond had already sold his property, chattels, cattle, and slaves, and had preached a farewell sermon. He had prepared a new metrical version of the psalms of David which the French churches in Europe had awaited for three years, and wished to submit it to a synod there. Drakenstein still worshipped sometimes in the front room of a farmer’s house, sometimes in a large barn, there being as yet no church building; a French sick-comforter, Paul Roux, continued ministrations in their own tongue; and since April 1700 Jacobus de Groot, an able and zealous man returning from India to Europe and detained for the purpose, had served the Dutch portion of the same congregation, previously neglected. [3] [8]
On the 20th of September 1701 the Directors answered both the pastoral vacancy and the language question in one despatch. The ship Huis te Byweg would convey a minister in place of Pierre Simond, who was not in any case to leave before he was relieved. The successor was to understand both Dutch and French, “not as we take it to preach in the latter language, but only to be of service to the aged colonists who do not know our language, so that he may visit, admonish and comfort them, in order that in the course of time the French language may die out, and be, as it were, banished” from the place. With that object the schools were in future to give no other or further instruction than was necessary to let the youth learn to read and write Dutch. The September letter thus instructed the government to starve French out of pulpit and school while the Huguenot flock still lacked its designated successor and while Etienne Terreblanche and other French-named graziers held stock on the Waveren line under San raid. [3] [8]
The font at Drakenstein told a different story from the pulpit order. Throughout 1701 Simond continued to baptize in the French church, the entries being registered by Paul Roux as he had done since 1694. On the 2nd of January Josué Sellie (Cellier) and Elizabet Couvret presented their son Josué, with Claude Marais and Caterine Tabourdeux as witnesses; on the 27th of March Louis Fourie and Susanne Cordier presented Marthe; on the 10th of April Philippe Depret and Elizabet Prevost presented Hercules, the grandmother Sysillia Depret standing as godmother; on the 15th of May Matthieu Fracassé of Provence and Jeanne Cordier presented Elizabet, with Jacob Cordier and Elizabet Villiers as witnesses. July and August added Ellaina, daughter of Barend Burger and Martha Eskal; Philippe, son of Christoffel Senaiman and Marguerite Savoye; Pierre de Villiers and Elizabet Taillefer’s daughter Marie; and Gabriel, son of Pierre Rousseau and Anne Retif. Roux’s note at the close of the 1701 entries records that all these children written above were baptized in the church of Drakenstein by Monsieur Pierre Simond, minister of the Holy Gospel, registered for Paul Roux, as far as had been possible from the year 1694 to the year 1701. [8]
Autumn baptisms continued under the same minister after the Directors’ letter was already on the water. On the 23rd of October Willems, son of Eskal Willems and Anne Prevot, was presented, with Barend Burger and Marthe Escalk as witnesses; on the 30th of October Joseph, son of Pierre Jourdan de Cabrière and Anne Fauche; on the 4th of November Marthe, daughter of François du Toit and Susanne Seugnet; on the 11th of November Sara, daughter of Jean de Buis and Sara Jacob; on the 27th of November Anne, daughter of Paul Couvret and Anne Walleté. The new clergyman understood French, but at the Seventeen’s direction was to conduct public worship in Dutch, while Roux continued ministrations to the Huguenots in their own tongue. The same year that multiplied military posts against San stock thieves thus also recorded a cultural instruction against the minority tongue of the Refugees who farmed Drakenstein and, in names such as Terreblanche, the new Waveren basin—while the French register itself still ran in Simond’s hand through November. [3] [8]
Huguenot–government tension under the van der Stels supplies background without changing the September text. At the arrival of the first group of twenty-two Huguenots in April 1688 the Caabse Vlek had counted round two hundred European citizens and a hundred and forty children, Stellenbosch a hundred and eighty-four adult whites and eighty-nine children; further shiploads had made the French a large fraction of the civilian population. Simon had scattered French farms among Dutch neighbours and later warned his son, in the memorandum handed over as a political testament, that French settlers were not to be trusted in the event of a French attack; Wilhem Adriaan inherited both the Refugees and the directors’ assimilation aim. The 20 September 1701 letter was not a Cape invention but a Netherlands order—while French baptisms and French surnames on the stock frontier continued in practice through the year. [8] [9]
September Recovery and Huising’s Loss at Piketberg
In September one of the soldier parties recovered one hundred and twenty head of cattle belonging partly to burghers and partly to Khoikhoi. That success was the first substantial recovery of the year and showed that mounted patrols could still retake stock when they struck the right trail. It did not end the raids. The parity of the recovered herd—European and Khoikhoi owners together—already anticipated the November instruction that outpost officers were to restore stolen cattle to their proper owners whoever these might be. [3]
In the following month—October—more than two hundred head belonging to the contractor Henning Huising were lifted at Groen Kloof, and a patrol of thirty-five soldiers was obliged to fall back from Piketberg, where the Bushmen made a resolute stand. The meat contractor who held the Company’s slaughter privilege and the Groen Kloof run thus became a principal victim of the same frontier pressure his open-trade world had helped to extend. A Company patrol large enough for ordinary pursuit could not force the Piketberg position. [3]
September’s hundred and twenty recovered and October’s two hundred-plus lost at Groen Kloof framed the soldier-only policy in hard numbers: recovery was possible; so was a fighting retreat when San groups chose ground and stood. Huising’s loss also linked the Castle’s beef contract directly to the northern grazing war, not only to Cloete’s Riebeek’s Kasteel line and the Waveren basin. San tactics—sudden descents, herds driven off in bulk, poisoned arrows from cover, and stands in mountain country that punished pursuit—match the October reverse at Piketberg. Following such people into their native fastnesses, where they could never be seen if they wished to remain hidden, but from which the flight of poisoned arrows indicated the risk of proceeding farther, was the danger the thirty-five soldiers met when they fell back. For 1701 the documentary core remains the sequence of soldier recovery, contractor loss, and forced retreat. [3] [4]
The contractor’s disaster also showed how private monopoly and public defence already shared the same ground. Huising was the German immigrant who, under both van der Stels, had become the most prominent and wealthy free burgher of the meat run; in October 1701 what the journals show is more than two hundred head gone from that run and thirty-five soldiers falling back from a San stand at Piketberg—the military price of open cattle country on the contractor’s own veld. [3] [9]
Groen Kloof Post, Terreblanche, and Twenty-four Rivers — November 1701
In November a sergeant and ten men were sent to form a permanent military post at Groen Kloof. The temporary answer of Vogel Vlei and the mounted reinforcements of April were thus supplemented by a standing northern guard on the meat contractor’s run and on the road toward Piketberg. In the Land of Waveren forty head of cattle, mostly belonging to Etienne Terreblanche, were seized by Bushmen, and one of the soldiers who tried to recover them was killed. Two hundred and seventy-four head belonging to Khoikhoi kraals at Riebeek’s Kasteel were driven off, but a party of soldiers followed the robbers to Twenty-four Rivers and retook most of the spoil. [3]
Terreblanche’s name ties the Waveren blood price to the Huguenot immigration. The surname’s later Cape forms Terblanche and Terblans appear among the French refugee families whose orthography Dutch clerks and descendants simplified. Whether the November victim farmed under the French spelling or a Dutch clerk’s variant, the loss of forty head—mostly his—and the death of a soldier in recovery show that the basin occupied in 1700 still paid in stock and blood in 1701. The permanent Groen Kloof post answered Huising’s October disaster and Kees’s earlier residence there with a sergeant’s guard rather than with another private burgher ride. [3] [8]
In trying to afford protection, no distinction was made by the government between burghers and Khoikhoi: the officers at the outposts were instructed to do their utmost to recover cattle stolen by Bushmen and deliver them to their proper owners whoever these might be. That parity of recovery—explicit after the November kraal lift and the Twenty-four Rivers pursuit—matched the year’s earlier pattern in which Khoikhoi stock and burgher stock had both appeared in the September recovery of one hundred and twenty head. The retaking of most of the two hundred and seventy-four kraal cattle closed the year’s recorded pursuits on a partial success for Khoikhoi owners under Company escort. [3]
Calendar 1701 itself ends with the permanent Groen Kloof post, Terreblanche’s loss, a soldier dead at Waveren, and most of a Khoikhoi herd retaken at Twenty-four Rivers. Sergeants and corporals at the outposts already had their standing orders in that year’s terms: recover stolen cattle for burgher and Khoikhoi alike, and hold the new posts at Vogel Vlei and Groen Kloof against a raid corridor the March and April lifts had mapped. The harder pressure of later patrols belongs to later calendars; the infrastructure and the blood-price on which they would rest were laid in November 1701. [3]
Taken together, the year’s military arithmetic runs from forty head at Riebeek’s Kasteel in March, through eleven from the Waveren post and one hundred and thirty-seven in sight of Vogel Vlei in April, past the June death of captain Klaas in the Koopman feud, the failed private war of Cloete and Kees, the September recovery of one hundred and twenty, Huising’s October loss of more than two hundred and the Piketberg retreat of thirty-five soldiers, to November’s permanent sergeant’s post at Groen Kloof, forty head mostly Terreblanche’s, one soldier killed, and most of two hundred and seventy-four Khoikhoi cattle retaken at Twenty-four Rivers. Beside that sequence stands the winter oak draft to Stellenbosch streets, the Cape’s 14 March letter on Simond’s discharge, Roux’s French baptismal register running under Simond through November, and the Directors’ 20 September order against French preaching at Drakenstein. Expansion of pasture, posts, and language policy thus mark 1701 as the first full calendar year in which the open-trade and Waveren decisions of 1700 were tested by San raid, by inter-clan Khoikhoi war, and by cultural instruction from the Seventeen. [3] [4] [8] [9]