Boer History1702 at the Cape of Good Hope: San Patrols for Khoikhoi, Meresteyn Wreck, Bek at Drakenstein, Free-Barter Suspension, and the Fish River Marauders
San Patrols for the Khoikhoi and the February Massacre Report — 1702
In 1702 the military patrols that had multiplied along the Obiqua and Groen Kloof line in the previous year were kept busy chiefly on behalf of the Khoikhoi. No complaints of stock depredations were made by burghers in this calendar year. A large number of cattle were recovered and restored to various kraals, and so many of the San groups the Dutch records called Bushmen were shot that the raiders seem to have been terrified. At any rate they gave less trouble during the next few years, though occasionally it was still necessary to chastise them. [3]
Sergeants and corporals in command of the outposts were directed to endeavour to induce the San to keep the peace. When those people committed depredations they were to be followed up and punished, but under no circumstances were they to be attacked without provocation. The ruthless character of the warfare they pursued was evidenced in February 1702, when a Khoikhoi captain came to the Castle and reported that they had killed five of his wives and every one of his children. [3]
That report fixed the year’s frontier tone before any burgher farm loss was entered for 1702. The posts planted in 1701 at Vogel Vlei, Riebeek’s Kasteel, and Groen Kloof now spent their strength recovering kraal stock and escorting Khoikhoi claims rather than chasing lifts from Cloete or Huising. The standing order—restore stolen cattle to their proper owners whoever those might be—remained the measure of success for sergeants on the outer line. [3]
Marauding Party to the Fish River — March–October 1702
In March 1702 a marauding party consisting of forty-five white men and the same number of Khoikhoi left Stellenbosch and remained away seven months. They travelled eastward until they reached the neighbourhood of the Fish River, where at daylight one morning they were attacked unexpectedly and without provocation—according to the later Cape account—by a band of Xhosa (Kosa) warriors who were fugitives from their own country and were living in friendship with the Khoikhoi. The assailants were beaten off, followed up, and when they turned and made another stand were defeated again, losing many men. One European was killed. [3] [4]
The party then commenced a career of robbery, excusing their acts to themselves under the plea that they were undertaken in retaliation. They fell upon the Gonaquas and other Khoikhoi hordes, shot many of them, and drove off their cattle. The perpetrators of these acts were not brought to justice. In after years, when the governor and the colonists were at variance and each party was endeavouring to blacken the reputation of the other, the governor stated that the marauders were in league with the colonists and were too numerous to be punished without ruining half the settlement. That statement was indignantly contradicted by the most respectable burghers, who asserted that the marauding Europeans were miscreants without families or homes, being chiefly fugitives from justice and men of loose character who had been imprudently discharged from the Company’s service, and that they ought to have been punished. The names of the forty-five white men who formed the robber band were later recorded; forty of them are quite unknown in later South African family lists, and the remaining five cannot be distinguished with certainty, so that the burghers’ assertions are strongly borne out by the onomastic evidence. [3]
Independent narrative of the same eastward thrust places the first European contact with the Xhosa in the beginning of the eighteenth century in the course of expeditions from Stellenbosch in search of cattle, ivory, or other barter goods. That contact is dated to 1702, when a large party of Dutch and Khoikhoi penetrated as far as the Great Fish River, met Xhosa, quarrelled, and saw barter take the form of exchange of bullets for assegais. At that date the Xhosa were not yet settled as permanent holders of the Fish River country in which the party found them, but were probably, like the white men, on an exploratory or hunting expedition from regions farther east. [4] [3]
The seven-month absence from Stellenbosch therefore bound three facts into one calendar year: an unauthorised mixed column on the eastern grazing and hunting line; a fight with Xhosa near the Fish; and a subsequent war of robbery on Gonaqua and other Khoikhoi kraals that the Castle never successfully prosecuted. The open cattle trade of 1700 had licensed private barter under restriction; the 1702 band showed how far unsupervised parties could carry violence once they were months beyond the landdrost’s reach. [3] [4]
Wreck of the Meresteyn on Jutten Island — 3 April 1702
In the evening of the 3rd of April 1702 the outward-bound ship Meresteyn, an Indiaman of the first class, ran ashore on Jutten Island and in less than an hour broke into little pieces. Her skipper was endeavouring to reach Saldanha Bay, and the ship was in a heavy surf before any one on board suspected danger. The majority of her crew were lost, as also were two women and five children passengers for the Cape. Ninety-nine persons managed to reach the shore. [3]
The wreck sat on the same western roadstead approaches that pirate visits and English men-of-war had already made familiar in 1699. Jutten Island, at the mouth of Saldanha Bay, offered no harbour once the Meresteyn was in the breakers; the hour between grounding and disintegration left survival to swimming and wreckage rather than to organised boats. For the Cape the April loss was a shipping disaster rather than a political crisis: ninety-nine people came ashore to be absorbed by the settlement’s hospital and private charity, while the drowned majority never entered the muster rolls of the Castle. [3]
Hendrik Bek at Drakenstein and the French-Language Memorial — April 1702
At Drakenstein, service was still conducted sometimes in the front room of a farmer’s house, sometimes in a large barn, there being as yet no church building. There was a French clergyman, assisted by a French sick-comforter. The Rev. Pierre Simond had prepared a new version in metre of the psalms of David, which he was desirous of submitting to a synod of the French churches, as great interest had been taken in the work by the Huguenots in Europe. He therefore tendered his resignation, to the regret of the Drakenstein people, and requested permission to return to the Netherlands. The Assembly of Seventeen consented on condition of his remaining until the arrival of the Rev. Hendrik Bek, whom they appointed to succeed him. Mr Bek reached the Cape in April 1702 and was installed at Drakenstein a few weeks later. [3]
There was 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. The new clergyman understood French, but at the direction of the Assembly of Seventeen conducted public worship in Dutch. The sick-comforter Paul Roux continued ministrations to the Huguenots in their own language. [3]
This arrangement created much dissatisfaction. The French immigrants sent in a memorial requesting that the Rev. Mr Bek should be instructed to preach in their language once a fortnight. They stated that they comprised over a hundred adults, not more than twenty-five of whom understood sufficient Dutch to gather the meaning of a sermon. There was also even a larger number of children of their nationality. The council of policy recommended the memorial to the favourable consideration of the Assembly of Seventeen; action on it belonged to later correspondence, but the April installation and the memorial together fixed the language quarrel of 1702 as a Drakenstein fact rather than a Cape Town one. [3]
The Dutch portion of the Drakenstein congregation had already received a sick-comforter and schoolmaster in April 1700 in the person of Jacobus de Groot, detained on his return from India. Bek’s Dutch pulpit therefore completed a bilingual parish structure in which Roux still served the French hearers while the Seventeen’s preference for Dutch public worship was enforced from the new minister’s arrival. Stellenbosch, by contrast, still had its resident clergyman Hercules van Loon, appointed in 1700; the Cape church building begun with a new foundation stone on 28 December 1700 was not yet finished—the edifice would stand complete except the tower only by the close of 1703. [3]
Free Cattle Barter Provisionally Suspended — 1702
Beyond the February massacre report and the recovered kraal herds, there is little else on record concerning the Khoikhoi at this period in the Castle journals as later synthesised. Some of them made such complaints of the rapacity and violence of burgher trading parties that the council of policy provisionally suspended the liberty of free barter. Owing to the governor’s representations, in 1703 the Assembly of Seventeen would withdraw the privilege outright; commercial intercourse between the two races was again made illegal, and the European graziers were chiefly depended upon to provide as many cattle as were needed. The provisional local suspension, however, belongs to the complaints of the 1702 season and stands as the Cape’s first institutional retreat from the open trade Valckenier had proclaimed on 28 February 1700. [3]
The suspension sat in awkward parallel with the Fish River band. While sergeants on the Obiqua posts were ordered to restore cattle to Khoikhoi owners, unsupervised burgher and discharged-soldier parties on the eastern trek were accused of the very rapacity that led the council to freeze legal barter. The open trade of 1700 had been meant to replace Company purchase expeditions with regulated private dealing; by 1702 Khoikhoi complaints had already forced a provisional halt, two years before the Seventeen’s formal repeal. [3]
Close of 1702 at the Cape
By the end of 1702 the outer posts had spent a year recovering Khoikhoi stock and shooting San raiders under orders never to attack without provocation, after a February report that five wives and all a captain’s children had been killed. In March forty-five Europeans and forty-five Khoikhoi had left Stellenbosch for seven months, fought Xhosa near the Fish River with the loss of one European, and then robbed Gonaqua and other kraals without successful prosecution at the Cape. On the 3rd of April the Meresteyn had broken up on Jutten Island in under an hour, drowning most of her people and two women and five children bound for the Cape, while ninety-nine reached the shore. In April Hendrik Bek had been installed at Drakenstein in Simond’s place, preached in Dutch by the Seventeen’s direction, and faced a Huguenot memorial from over a hundred adults of whom not more than twenty-five could follow a Dutch sermon, while Paul Roux continued French sick-comforter work. The council of policy had provisionally suspended free cattle barter after Khoikhoi complaints of burgher trading violence, foreshadowing the Seventeen’s 1703 withdrawal of the privilege. Those were the calendar facts of a year in which the grazing frontier’s San war shifted onto Khoikhoi clients, an unauthorised eastern column made first recorded contact with Xhosa at the Fish, a first-class Indiaman died on Jutten, and Drakenstein’s pulpit language became a petition to the directors. [3] [4]