Part 17

The perpetrators of these scandalous 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 they were in league with the colonists and were too numerous to be punished without ruining half the settlement. This statement was, however, 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. The burghers maintained that they ought to have been punished, and that the real reason why they were not prosecuted was that the governor’s agents had obtained cattle for him in the same manner, which would be brought to light at a trial. The names of the forty-five white men who formed the robber band are given. Forty of them are quite unknown in South Africa at the present day, and the remaining five are of that class that cannot be distinguished with certainty, so that the statements of the burghers are strongly borne out.

[Sidenote: Expedition to Natal.]

Owing chiefly to the scarcity of timber and fuel, in 1705 it was resolved to send an expedition to Natal and the adjoining coast, to make an inspection of the country and particularly of the forests there. The schooner _Centaurus_, which had been built at Natal in 1686-7, principally of timber growing on the shore of the inlet, was a proof that the wood was valuable, for she had been in use nearly fourteen years before needing repair. The galiot _Postlooper_ was made ready for the expedition. Her master, Theunis van der Schelling, had visited Natal when he was mate of the _Noord_ in 1689 and 1690, and therefore knew the harbour. He was instructed to make a thorough exploration of the forests, and to frame a chart of the coast. A sailor who was expert in drawing pictures was sent to take sketches of the scenery.

The _Postlooper_ sailed from Table Bay on the 20th of November 1705. She reached Natal on the 29th of December, and found the bar so silted up that she could only cross at high water. There were not so many cattle in the neighbourhood as there had been sixteen years before. Wood still remained on the shores of the inlet in considerable quantities.

[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]

In December 1689 a purchase of the inlet and surrounding land had been made from the chief then living at Port Natal, and had been recorded in a formal contract, two copies of which had been drawn up. The one kept by the Dutch officers was lost when the _Noord_ was wrecked in January 1690, and the master of the _Postlooper_ had therefore received instructions to endeavour to procure the other, that had been left with the chief, in order that a notarial copy might be made. The chief who sold the ground was dead, and his son was now the head of the tribe or clan, whichever it may have been. Upon Skipper Van der Schelling making inquiry of him concerning the document, the chief stated that he knew nothing about it, and supposed it had been buried with his father’s other effects. It was evident that he did not recognise the sale as binding upon him or his people.

At Natal an Englishman was found who gave his name as Vaughan Goodwin, and who stated that he was a native of London. He had two wives and several children. His story was that he arrived in February 1699 in a vessel named the _Fidele_, and with two others had been left behind by Captain Stadis, who intended to form a settlement there. They were to purchase ivory from the blacks, for which purpose goods had been left with them, and were to keep possession of the place until Captain Stadis should return, which he promised them would certainly be within three years; but he had not yet made his appearance. In 1700 the blacks some distance inland had killed the other white men on account of their having become robbers.

The life which Goodwin was leading seemed so attractive to two of the _Postlooper’s_ crew that they ran away from the vessel. When crossing the bar in leaving Natal the galiot lurched, and the tiller struck the skipper in the chest and hurt him so badly that he became unfit for duty. There was no one on board who could take his place, so the vessel returned to the Cape without any further attempt at exploration being made. She dropped anchor again in Table Bay on the 8th of March 1706.

[Sidenote: Failure to introduce Woolled Sheep.]

The directors were desirous of procuring sheep’s wool from South Africa, as some samples sent to Europe were pronounced of excellent quality. They were of opinion that if it could be produced at seventeen pence halfpenny a kilogramme, they would be able to make a good profit from it, and the colonists would have another reliable source of income. Instructions were sent to the government to have this industry taken in hand by the burghers. But it was not a pursuit that commended itself to South African farmers at that time. Although a good many European sheep had been imported in former years, there were very few of pure breed left, nearly all having been crossed with the large tailed animal. It was commonly believed that woolled sheep were more subject to scab than others, and the havoc created by that disease was so great that the farmers were in constant dread of it. Then there was the expense of separate herds. Further the carcase of the woolled sheep was not so valuable as that of the other, so that the graziers who bred for slaughter could not be induced even to make experiments.

In 1700 the government sent home one hundred and twenty-nine kilogrammes of wool shorn from sheep belonging to the Company. This was received with favour, but instead of increasing, the quantity fell off in succeeding years. In 1703 one small bale was all that could be obtained. It realised about thirty-two pence English money a kilogramme on the market in Amsterdam. In 1704 a very small quantity was procured, in 1705 none at all, and in 1706 fifty-two kilogrammes. In the meantime the governor took the matter in hand as a private speculation. He collected all the wool-bearing sheep in the settlement at a farm of his own, wrote to Europe for rams and ewes of good breed and to Java for some Persian sheep, and was about to give the industry a fair trial when he was recalled.

[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]

The governor had previously endeavoured to encourage the production of silk. He made experiments with the white mulberry, which was found to grow and thrive well, but the silkworms which he obtained from imported eggs all died. He then gave up the trial, being of opinion that the mulberry was in leaf at the wrong season of the year for worms from the south of Europe.

A less important but more successful experiment made by this governor was placing partridges and pheasants on Robben Island to breed.

From 1698 to 1705 the seasons were very unfavourable for farming, and no wheat could be exported. In 1700 it became necessary to import rice from Java, as there was not sufficient grain in the country for the consumption of the people and the supply of fresh bread to the crews of ships. In 1705 the long drought broke up, and the crops were very good; but as the wheat was being reaped heavy rains set in and greatly damaged it. There was, however, a surplus above the requirements of the country, and in 1706 exportation was resumed, and fourteen hundred muids were sent to Batavia.

The population of the colony was at this time increasing rapidly. The families of the burghers were generally large, they married at an early age, and no young women remained single. From Europe every year a few settlers were received. A custom had come into vogue of allowing soldiers and convalescent sailors to engage for short periods as servants to burghers, their wages and cost of maintenance being thus saved to the Company, while they were at hand in case of need. 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.

[Sidenote: Condition of Affairs in India.]

The bad seasons tended to produce a spirit of restlessness among the farming population, which was increased by the conduct of the principal officers of the government. Between Willem Adriaan van der Stel and the colonists of South Africa there was not the slightest feeling of sympathy, nor could there be between men who had a difficulty in making more than a frugal livelihood and a governor who was unscrupulous in his manner of acquiring wealth, and who regarded their interests as entirely subordinate to his own. In all the official documents of the period during which he was at the head of affairs, and the quantity is great, there is not a single expression like “our own Netherlanders” of his father. He requested the directors, indeed, to send out industrious Zeeland farmers and no more French cadets, but the sentence displays as little affection for the one as for the other.

The condition of things in the country districts was one of discontent, mingled with indignation towards the governor and some others, the reasons for which will presently be explained. In Capetown it was different. The people there could more easily be kept in restraint, and were less affected by the causes which at this time tended to produce intense dissatisfaction among the farmers. Those causes were not trifling ones, as will be seen in the following pages.

The East India Company had now been a century in existence, and the honesty and rectitude of conduct which distinguished its officials in early times were no longer noticeable except in a very few instances. Its mode of paying its servants, largely by perquisites, had tended to create a spirit of greed, and most of them were actuated more by the desire of acquiring wealth with which to retire than of advancing the interests of the association that employed them. To such an extent was private trading carried on in the East that the Company feared its utter ruin would be the result. There were even instances of Indian produce being sent to Europe in its own ships, and transferred to smuggling vessels off the coast of Holland, when it was landed and sold stealthily at rates with which the legitimate trade could not compete.

[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]

In November 1699 the directors found it necessary to instruct the governor-general and council of India to appoint two of the ablest men they could find to proceed to the various stations and check the abuses. They were to be empowered to dismiss from the service all of the Company’s officials who should be found guilty of abusing their trust, and to confiscate summarily all goods found in their possession which they were not entitled to have according to the regulations. They did not then imagine that the man whom they had recently appointed governor of the Cape settlement would in coming years prove to be the foremost of all the offenders in this respect.

III.

FAITHLESS CONDUCT OF THE GOVERNOR.

[Sidenote: _Faithless Conduct of the Governor._]

Willem Adriaan van der Stel, as soon as he assumed the administration, looked around for some means of acquiring money. The Cape settlement did not offer such facilities for this purpose as an Indian island or province would have done, still there were means for making large profits on trade even here. One plan that he adopted was by obtaining--purchasing as he termed it, constraining them to sell, as the burghers called it--from the poorer viticulturists their wines at from £3 2_s._ 6_d._ to £4 3_s._ 4_d._ the legger, and selling it to English and Dutch ships at £28 15_s._ or more. When these transactions were brought to light in later years, his explanation was that he had naturally purchased at as low a rate as he could, and that the ships’ people were willing to pay more for wines which he had improved by his skill than for those which the burghers made quite carelessly.[56] The farmers asserted that until his own vineyards were productive he bought and sold in this manner about one hundred leggers yearly; in the _Korte Deductie_, a kind of excuse for his conduct which he published after his dismissal, he stated that he had not bought and sold twenty leggers altogether, and there are no means now of ascertaining which statement is correct. There may have been nothing actually criminal in dealings of this kind, but they certainly did not tend to create respect, much less affection, for a governor who could act in this manner.

This was, however, a small matter compared with the governor’s conduct in carrying on farming operations on a very large scale on his own account, in disregard of the Company’s desire to favour the colonists by relinquishing the breeding of cattle and the cultivation of wheat and the vine in order that they might have better means of making a living, and in direct opposition to the express orders of the directors of the 26th of April 1668, the 14th of July 1695, and the 27th of June 1699. In the first of these instructions the directors had forbidden the members of the council to have larger gardens or a greater number of cattle than they required for the use of their own households, and this order had never been cancelled. The high commissioner Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede, lord of Mydrecht, had indeed made a grant of Constantia after that date to the governor’s father, Simon van der Stel, but he possessed very great and special powers, and the ground was given under circumstances which no longer existed. No one except the directors themselves or some official possessing equal authority to that of the lord of Mydrecht could legally grant land to a governor of the colony.

[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]

In February 1700, when Willem Adriaan van der Stel had been a year at the head of affairs, a commissioner, Wouter Valckenier by name, holding authority from the governor-general and council of India to inspect matters at the Cape and rectify anything that was wrong, on his way from Batavia to Europe called here, and during his stay took precedence of all the local officials.[57] What representations were made to him cannot be ascertained, for there is nothing concerning the matter in the Cape archives or those at the Hague, but at any rate he made a grant to the governor of four hundred morgen of ground at Hottentots-Holland, and signed a title-deed of it. He could not have foreseen the consequences, for he knew that the policy of the Company at the time was directly opposed to the head of the government being engaged in farming, and he could not have imagined that an official, whose duties required his presence at the castle almost constantly, would so far forget his obligations as to leave his post and devote his time and attention to private affairs. Probably he thought that the possession of a tract of land at such a distance could signify very little, but he realised afterwards that he had made a great mistake, for he was one of the directors of the Company when the grant was annulled on the ground of its having been improperly and fraudulently obtained.

[Sidenote: Farms held by Heads of the Government.]

Of the two precedents for heads of the government holding farms--not mere gardens--at the Cape,[58] both dated from a time when the settlement was very small, and the land assigned was so close to Table Valley that it could be cultivated without detriment to the public service. There was no precedent for a grant to a commander or a governor at such a distance from the fort or the castle that it could not be visited in a couple of hours. The policy of the directors recently made known was entirely opposed to such grants, and Willem Adriaan van der Stel was perfectly acquainted with that fact, as has already been shown. This policy remained unaltered ever afterwards. It was again impressed upon the governor in the strongest language in a despatch from the directors dated the 28th of October 1705, in which instructions were given that all the burghers should be permitted to tender for the supply of the beef and mutton required by the Company, that this should be regarded as a right belonging exclusively to them, and that no servant of the Company, the governor included, should be allowed to supply any meat to the ships, the hospital, etc., directly or indirectly.[59]

[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]

The farm at Hottentots-Holland the governor named Vergelegen. He lost no time in turning it to account, for he immediately began to build upon it, to break up and cultivate the ground, and to adorn it in every possible way. The choicest plants from the Company’s gardens were removed to it, and the Company’s master gardener, Jan Hertog by name, was sent there to lay out the grounds and superintend the work.[60] Great gangs of slaves and a large number of soldiers and convalescent sailors, who were skilful agriculturists or mechanics,[61] were constantly at work there, until the farm, which he expanded to six hundred and thirteen morgen, assumed the appearance of the most highly cultivated ground in South Africa.

[Sidenote: Extensive Farming Operations.]

On it were planted over four hundred thousand vines, or fully one-fourth of the whole number in the colony in 1706. Groves, orchards, and corn lands were laid out to a corresponding extent.[62] On the estate were built a very commodious dwelling-house, 82·4 by 74 English feet or 25·11 by 22·55 metres in size and with walls 19½ English feet or 5·94 metres in height, forming a storey and a half as it is termed at the Cape, a flour mill, a leather tannery, a workshop for making wooden water pipes, wine and grain stores, an overseer’s cottage, a slave lodge, and very extensive out-buildings.

[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]

Beyond the mountains he had eighteen cattle stations or runs, on which he kept fully a thousand head of horned cattle and over eighteen thousand sheep.[63]

With the instructions of the directors before him, it is difficult to imagine how a sane man could have embarked in such an enterprise. If it should become known, he must be ruined, for his friends and connections in Amsterdam, though influential, could not support him in opposing the highest authority. His only hope must therefore have been that his transactions would never be known in Holland. No ships’ officers were likely to see, or perhaps even to hear of, Vergelegen and the cattle stations, and no one in South Africa, he must have thought, would be likely to report upon it. The burghers knew nothing of the orders that had been issued--that is very evident,--and probably he thought that they supposed he was permitted to farm on such a scale. No information was ever sent by him to the directors concerning Vergelegen, and the utmost care was taken that in no official document of any kind, of which duplicates had to be sent to Europe or India, was mention made of the place or of any of the governor’s farming transactions. Actually for more than five years the whole thing was kept secret, and it might have been so for an indefinite time if the governor had not provoked the burghers to complain of him.

His inordinate desire to acquire wealth had stifled all feeling of fidelity to the trust reposed in him by the authorities in Holland. On the 15th of March 1701 the directors wrote to him and the council that Carlos II, king of Spain, had died childless, leaving by will his crown to Philippe duke of Anjou, grandson of the king of France, that Louis XIV had thereupon sent troops into the Spanish Netherlands and garrisoned the principal cities to the very border of the republic, which had caused the greatest apprehension of danger. The country was being placed in a condition of defence, and the emperor and the king of England were preparing for eventualities. The governor and the council were enjoined to be on their guard.[64]

[Sidenote: War of the Spanish Succession.]

In another despatch from the directors, dated the 18th of February 1702, the governor and council were informed that there was every probability of the outbreak of hostilities. Spain had accepted Philippe as her king, which was regarded as equivalent to her becoming subject to Louis XIV. And on the 15th of May 1702 England, Holland, and the Empire issued a declaration of war against France, Bavaria, and Spain, when the great contest known in history as the war of the Spanish Succession commenced, in which our English Marlborough won so much renown. As far as England and Holland were concerned, the war continued until the 11th of April 1711, when the treaty of Utrecht was signed, so that nearly the whole term of office of Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel was a period of hostilities.

He was entrusted with the care of what was rightly regarded in Holland as the frontier fortress of India. He was directed to reflect every night when he retired to rest that when he awoke in the morning he might find an enemy ready for attack before the gate of the castle, if due precautions were not taken. The officer in command of the garrison, Olof Bergh, was only a captain in rank, and was required to carry out his instructions. Every evening after prayers it was his duty to give the password and countersign for the night, to issue directions where sentries were to be placed, and to ascertain that everything connected with the military department was in proper order. He only could call out the burghers to aid in the defence of the colony. It was a post of extreme importance, which required the strictest attention to the obligations of duty. Tidings frequently came of English or Dutch ships being captured by French men-of-war and privateers in the Indian sea as well as in European waters, and although the captures of French ships by the allies were more numerous, there was nothing extravagant in the supposition that a few men-of-war with a strong body of troops on board might sail from some port of France or Spain and attempt to get possession of the castle of Good Hope. The temptation to do so was very great. The colony was not thought of, for that was of small importance in the great war. But if the castle of Good Hope was occupied by a French garrison, the ships of the Dutch East India Company could be all seized as they came with their rich cargoes from the East, and one of the sources of that wealth which enabled the Netherlands republic to supply the funds for carrying on the war would be cut off.

[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]

Avarice is the blindest of vices, and the eyes of Willem Adriaan van der Stel were closed to everything except the money that flowed into his coffers from an estate built upon and cultivated almost entirely at the Company’s expense,[65] and from flocks and herds practically pillaged from the Hottentots. The trust confided to him the governor disregarded to such an extent that he was frequently absent at his farm Vergelegen for two to six weeks at a time as the burghers asserted, six or seven days he himself admitted in his _Korte Deductie_,[66] surely the weakest attempt as an excuse for such conduct that ever was penned. It was a journey of twelve hours by a single span of horses from the castle to Vergelegen, but by keeping relays of fresh teams along the road, as he did, it could be done in six hours. What might not have happened in even six hours if a French fleet had sailed into the bay? Fortunately for the colony, none appeared. But the burghers were certainly justified in the fear which they expressed that the governor was imperilling the very existence of the settlement and exposing it to foreign conquest by absenting himself from his duty.

[Sidenote: Faithlessness of the Governor.]