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] [4]
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 standing order that had closed the 1701 record—recover cattle stolen by Bushmen and deliver them to their proper owners whoever those might be—remained the measure of success for the outer line. 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. [3] [4] [9]
The ruthless character of the warfare the San 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. That report fixed the year’s frontier tone before any burgher farm loss was entered for 1702. The Castle journals as later synthesised record little else of Khoikhoi domestic life in these months beyond the recovered herds and the February massacre complaint; the year’s violence against kraals was measured at the outposts rather than in fresh burgher petitions. [3]
The parity of protection announced after the 1701 Twenty-four Rivers pursuit—no distinction between burgher and Khoikhoi stock when sergeants rode after thieves—thus became the working rule of 1702. Where the previous year had opened with forty head driven from Gerrit Cloete at Riebeek’s Kasteel and closed with a permanent sergeant’s post at Groen Kloof, the new calendar year reversed the complainant: the same posts now answered kraal captains, and the February murder of a captain’s household was the blood-price that justified hard pursuit under orders still forbidding unprovoked attack. [3] [9]
Governor Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel still sat at the head of that outer line. The same years beside expansion of the Company garden, a little museum and guest-house work on the old tuynhuys, 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, tree-planting, handling of Khoikhoi captains, and the foundation stone of the Groote Kerk. Those measures do not cancel the pride and private farming that later cost him his office, but they show that calendar 1702 still mixed ordinary administration—posts, captains, recovered herds—with the grazing expansion that had drawn San raiders onto burgher and Khoikhoi stock in 1701. [3] [9]
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]
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—perhaps the present Transkeian territories. [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. [3]
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. Summary of later authorised and unauthorised parties into the country east of the Fish—some for elephant hunting and ivory, others to trade in cattle or recover stock already “obtained” by Xhosa—places the 1702 clash as the opening type of a relation that would endure past the beginning of the nineteenth century: negotiations that seemed harmonious ending in quarrel, sudden changes of sentiment, and blood shed on both sides before the traders were out of the country. [3] [4]
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. While sergeants on the Obiqua posts restored cattle to Khoikhoi owners under standing order, the eastern trek robbed the same race under a plea of retaliation the government never tested in court. [3] [4]
That double standard sat under a governor already building private power inland. The same administration that could not or would not punish forty-five discharged men on the Fish was, in already shaping Vergelegen and the meat-supply arrangements that favoured Henning Huising when the Company stepped back from its own cattle farming. The eastern band was not the Tas petition of 1706, but it was an early proof that unsupervised free movement beyond the landdrost could blacken both the governor’s claim to order and the burghers’ claim to respectability. [3] [9]
Gwali’s Flight and the First Compact Xhosa West of the Kei — 1702
Traditional Xhosa history, places in the same year 1702 the first compact bodies of Bantu to cross the Kei. Palo, great son of Tshiwo, had not been born when his father died. Gwali, Tshiwo’s right-hand son, was then in the prime of life and, being ambitious, attempted to make away with his infant half-brother. A portion of the tribe rallied round the guardians of the child, and Gwali was compelled to flee. [3] [4]
With his own adherents and the Tinde clan he crossed the Kei and took refuge with a Khoikhoi chief named Hintsati, who resided near the site of the present village of Somerset East. Tradition points these out as the first compact bodies of Bantu to cross the Kei. The date was the year 1702. They were the people encountered by the European marauding party of the same year near the Fish. Gwali was received in a friendly manner by Hintsati, to whom he gave one of his sisters in marriage. Palo therefore became head of the nation; during his lifetime—from 1702 until about 1775—the gradual western movement of the Xhosa continued. [3] [4]
The Cape account of the March–October column and the Xhosa genealogical tradition thus mesh on one calendar fact: Europeans and Khoikhoi from Stellenbosch met Xhosa warriors west of the Kei who were themselves newcomers or fugitives living among Khoikhoi friends, not yet permanent holders of the Fish River country. At this date the Xhosa found near the Fish were probably, like the white men, on an exploratory or hunting expedition from regions farther east. Those warriors are identified with Gwali’s people and the Tinde who had taken shelter with Hintsati. Either reading fixes 1702 as the opening year of recorded European–Xhosa contact on the eastern line, years before authorised trading parties and colonial boundary proclamations would follow the same rivers. [3] [4]
After a long time an army was organised among Palo’s people to follow Gwali up. Hintsati’s kraal was surrounded in the night, the chief was killed with many of his people, and his cattle were taken. The army commenced its return march but was followed closely by the Khoikhoi. At the Koonap an indecisive battle was fought; further on, at the broad ford of the Keiskama, another engagement took place, and yet another on the Debe flats, where the Khoikhoi recovered many of their cattle. Those later blows lie beyond the seven months of the Stellenbosch column, but they close the traditional sequence that began with Gwali’s 1702 flight and explain why Xhosa and Khoikhoi already stood in mixed friendship and feud when the first Cape marauders reached the Fish. [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]
The Meresteyn belonged to the outward VOC traffic that still measured the settlement’s purpose: refresh Indiamen, take off sick, put on greens and meat, and hold the roadstead. A first-class hull destroyed before she could work into Saldanha was a pure loss of men and cargo on the Atlantic approach, not a failure of Table Bay pilotage. The same seasons that sent the Fish River band east for seven months thus also delivered ninety-nine wet survivors to the western shore—proof that 1702 pressed the Cape on the seaward face as well as on the grazing frontier. [3]
No separate Cape political consequence attached to the wreck beyond the absorption of survivors. Timber and fuel remained scarce for ships and the Castle—the same scarcity that had driven winter oak drafts to Stellenbosch streets in 1701 and that would, in 1705, send the galiot Postlooper to inspect Natal forests—but the Meresteyn’s timbers were not salvage enough to alter that calculation. The disaster stands in the year’s record as a hard date and a hard count: third of April, less than an hour to pieces, two women and five children among the dead passengers, ninety-nine ashore. [3] [9]
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 (also written Beck), whom they appointed to succeed him. Mr Bek reached the Cape in April 1702 and was installed at Drakenstein a few weeks later—the assumption of duty in May 1702, after Pierre Simond’s return to Europe the same month. [3] [8]
The Cape had already informed the Seventeen in March 1701 that Simond had asked for his discharge and was anxious to return to Europe; the congregation was not desirous that he should leave, and as his contract had not yet expired the governor had withheld authority. The Directors replied on 20 September 1701 that they were sending a successor who understood both Dutch and French—not to preach in French, but only to visit, admonish, and comfort aged colonists who did not know Dutch—so that in course of time the French language might die out and be, as it were, banished from the place; and with that object the schools were to give in future no other or further instruction than was necessary to let the youth learn to read and write Dutch. [3] [8]
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] [8]
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; before action could be taken upon it, later correspondence would carry Bek toward Stellenbosch after van Loon’s death in 1704, 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] [8]
On 20 March 1702 the Cape wrote the Chamber of Amsterdam that it would see to it that by the use of Dutch in the church and school at Drakenstein the French tongue would fall into disuse among the inhabitants of that community and afterwards, in course of time, die out—the more readily because there were no French schools. Simond had already sold his property, chattels, cattle, and slaves, and had preached his farewell sermon; the Drakenstein consistory was informed that Beck had been sent to replace him and that the governor ordered them to accept and respect him in his office. The letter of 17 May 1702 to the landdrost, heemraden, and kerkenraad carried that order into the district. By 1703 two-thirds of the Drakenstein congregation still could not follow a Dutch sermon; the settlers would declare that they lived one, two, three or more hours from each other and found it impossible to learn Dutch, praying for services in their own language at least once a fortnight. [8]
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—an able man of Haarlem, well versed in French, who had diligently discharged the duties of sick-comforter at Galle for three and a half years. 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 and arrived 11 April 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, with first service on 6 January 1704 under the Rev. Petrus Kalden. The same Groote Kerk foundation among Willem Adriaan’s constructive works; the unfinished walls of 1702 were still the governor’s public church project while Drakenstein worshipped in barns. [3] [8] [9]
Simond’s household departure and Beck’s arrival also mark ordinary Huguenot social life in the same months. Lists place refugee marriages and deaths around the year: Estienne Bruére remarried at Stellenbosch on 19 February 1702 to Anne du Puis; Phillipe Drouin’s will was proved 29 September 1702; and other refugee names—Cordier, Sollier, Rousseau—appear in 1702 wills and contracts. Those private acts sat under the public quarrel over the pulpit language: the same families who buried and remarried in Dutch legal forms still asked for French sermons once a fortnight. [8]
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 Wouter Valckenier had proclaimed on 28 February 1700. [3]
That open trade had been designed to relinquish Company purchase expeditions into the interior—the custom of nearly half a century—so that henceforth only when draught oxen were needed would military bartering parties go inland. In February 1700 Henning Huising had contracted to supply the garrison, hospital, and Company’s fleets with beef and mutton; the placaat of commissioner Wouter Valckenier had thrown the trade open to burghers with such restrictions as were considered necessary to prevent abuse. From that date cattle breeding became a favourite pursuit with yearly increasing numbers of colonists. Under Willem Adriaan, Huising acquired the meat-supply monopoly when the Company stopped cattle farming—the same German contractor whose Groen Kloof run had been stripped of more than two hundred head in the San raids of October 1701. The 1702 suspension answered Khoikhoi complaints that private parties had turned the liberty into rapacity. [3] [9]
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, a year before the Seventeen’s formal repeal. The Castle thus policed San theft for kraal captains with one hand and withdrew the legal channel of burgher–Khoikhoi cattle exchange with the other. [3] [4]
The broader farming background remained hard. From 1698 to 1705 the seasons were very unfavourable for farming, 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. Population nevertheless increased: burgher families were generally large, they married early, and no young women remained single; every year a few settlers still arrived from Europe; from a hundred to a hundred and fifty of the garrison and seamen were commonly out at service with burghers; and a great many slaves were being introduced from Madagascar and Mozambique. Under that pressure the provisional barter freeze of 1702 shifted cattle supply back toward European graziers even before the Seventeen’s 1703 repeal made the shift permanent. As late as 1702 an elephant was still killed just beyond the Cape flats—a reminder that wild country pressed close even while herds and posts multiplied inland. [3]
Taken together, calendar 1702 bound six strands: San patrols that recovered kraal stock and answered a February massacre of a captain’s wives and children; a seven-month mixed marauding column from Stellenbosch that fought Xhosa near the Fish and then robbed Gonaqua and other Khoikhoi; Gwali’s westward flight the same year, placing the first compact Xhosa bodies west of the Kei among Hintsati’s people near Somerset East; the Meresteyn broken on Jutten Island on 3 April with ninety-nine ashore; Hendrik Bek installed at Drakenstein under the Seventeen’s Dutch-only pulpit order, met by a Huguenot memorial for fortnightly French preaching; and the council’s provisional suspension of free cattle barter after Khoikhoi complaints of burgher violence—the first institutional retreat from Valckenier’s 28 February 1700 open trade, a year before the Directors withdrew the privilege outright. Under Willem Adriaan those strands still looked like ordinary frontier, church, and shipping business; within four years the same governor’s private farms and monopolies would turn burgher complaint into open opposition. [3] [4] [8] [9]