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.]
If there were no other charges against him than this one alone, an
honest historian, whose duty it is to expose to scorn the evil deeds of
ignoble men as well as to hold up to admiration the good deeds of the
upright, would be compelled to pronounce Willem Adriaan van der Stel
one of the most faithless and contemptible men of whom the records of
any nation, ancient or modern, furnish an example. Many a governor has
lost his head for crimes less glaring than his reckless neglect of duty
for the sake of private interest.
[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]
The governor was not the only official of the Company in South Africa
who was farming on his own account, though he was the most prominent of
them all, and his operations were far more extensive than those of any
of the others. The secunde, Samuel Elsevier, an old and somewhat
weak-minded man, had obtained a grant of the farm Elsenburg, near
Klapmuts, from Governor Simon van der Stel,[67] which brought him in
about £250 yearly after all expenses were paid. He might have cultivated
it without reproach from the burghers if he had not always submitted his
will to that of the governor. In the council he was regarded as a
nonentity, simply giving his vote in accordance with the wishes of the
head of the government. Two other members of the council of policy, the
fiscal Johan Blesius and the military captain Olof Bergh, had also
obtained grants of land, but were so moderate in their use that the
burghers did not complain of them.
The reverend Petrus Kalden, clergyman of Capetown, had also obtained a
grant of a farm, Zandvliet, between Stellenbosch and the head of False
Bay. He spent a good deal of time there, but he afterwards proved to the
satisfaction of the authorities in Holland that his object in doing so
was not purely mercenary, but was mainly a wish to acquire a perfect
knowledge of the Hottentot language, in order that he might attempt to
teach those people the doctrines of Christianity, and so improve their
condition.[68] The yearly income he derived from it cannot be
ascertained, but the ground with the buildings which he erected upon it
realised £1424 by public auction after his recall.
[Sidenote: Spirit of the Country Districts.]
The governor’s brother, Frans van der Stel, who was not in the Company’s
service, had a farm at Hottentots-Holland. He was intensely disliked by
the other burghers, on account of his assuming an air of superiority
over them, and, depending upon his relative’s support, doing pretty much
as he liked. He was in the habit of requiring them to plough his land,
to convey his produce to town, and perform other work for him, under
threats that if they did not he would see that they should regret it.
There have never been people less inclined to submit quietly to
grievances, real or imaginary, than the early colonists of Stellenbosch
and Drakenstein. Even at this infant stage of the settlement’s existence
they showed that great difference from the inhabitants of Capetown which
is observable to the present day. They did not know it then, but it was
they who were destined to impart that spirit of hostility to oppression
and wrong which has ever since marked the country people of South
Africa. It is not without reason that the farmers of the distant north
and east to-day regard Stellenbosch and Drakenstein as the mother
settlements of the country, and look upon Capetown almost as a foreign
city. The spirit of the town is widely different from that of the
country. And in 1705, when the first great struggle against tyranny and
corruption commenced, the very best men of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein,
those who had filled the posts of elders and deacons in the church, of
heemraden in the district court, and of officers in the militia, were
those who threw themselves into it. Among them was Jan Willem
Grevenbroek, the most learned man in South Africa at the time, who had
retired from the Company’s service, and had recently been an elder at
Stellenbosch. His name should command the respect of students of
ethnology, though his work has been to some extent distorted by a later
writer. He took as active a part in the movement against the governor as
was consistent with his character as a modest and godfearing student,
though his name does not appear on the principal memorial that will
presently be referred to.
[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]
The farmers did not know that instructions in their favour had been sent
out by the directors, which the governor had disregarded, but they saw
plainly that nothing but ruin was before them if matters went on longer
as they were then going. The governor was turning every possible source
of profit to his own account and that of his relatives and friends. He
had eighteen different cattle stations or enormous grazing farms beyond
the mountains, and would allow no one but himself and his brother to use
the pasture there. His horned cattle numbered, as afterwards
ascertained, fully a thousand head, and his sheep were eighteen thousand
eight hundred all told. He had a vineyard sixty-one morgen and a half in
extent at Vergelegen, and besides his plantations and cornlands there,
he had taken possession of another tract of land nearly a hundred and
nineteen morgen in extent, upon which he was growing wheat. His
expenditure was very small, for he made use of the Company’s servants
largely to do his work, and he paid no tithes of his grain to the
Company, as the burghers were obliged to do.[69]
The governor had the first entry into the market, and high prices from
foreign ships went into his pocket. Then his brother Frans at
Hottentots-Holland, his father at Contantia, and the secunde at
Elsenburg followed, and by the time all their produce was disposed of
little indeed was left that the burghers of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein
could sell to good account. In another way too the governor’s conduct
was believed to be such as to forfeit the respect of the burghers, who
were godfearing men. In his domestic life he was said to follow closely
the example of our Charles II, and it was asserted that he had given
strict orders that the ten commandments were not to be read in the
church when he was present.[70] There is no way of either proving or
disproving these charges against him, but the fact that they were made
shows in how little esteem he was held.
[Sidenote: Grievances of the Burghers.]
In 1705 some of the farmers determined to complain to the Indian
authorities, and they succeeded in forwarding to the governor-general
and council at Batavia a list of charges against him. It was a dangerous
thing to do, for if their names should become known, and no redress be
afforded, they knew, that they would be made to feel the governor’s
vengeance. The council was not regarded as any check upon him, and the
military power was entirely at his disposal, so that to brave his anger
was an act requiring more than ordinary moral courage. It was the
commencement of the struggle against corruption and tyranny by the
burghers of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein.
[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]
At Batavia no immediate action was taken in the matter, but a copy of
the complaints, without the signatures to the document, was forwarded to
the governor, who was required to answer to them. While the complainants
were awaiting a reply from the Indian authorities, one of them, Adam Tas
by name, a respectable burgher and a deacon of the Stellenbosch church,
drew up a memorial to the directors in Holland. Tas was a native of the
city of Amsterdam, who had received a good commercial education, and had
come to Capetown in the capacity of bookkeeper in the service of the
contractor Henning Huising, whose wife, Maria Lindenhof, was a sister of
Tas’s mother. After serving as a bookkeeper for some time, Tas married a
widow named Elizabeth van Brakel, whose former husband had left her a
well-cultivated farm in the Stellenbosch district, and he then went to
reside there. He had thus the qualifications and much of the knowledge
necessary for the task he had taken in hand, but as he was ignorant of
the instructions of the directors, the document which he drew up was in
some points very much weaker than it might have been made if the
official documents had been open for his inspection as they are now for
ours. On the other hand, for the same reason some of the charges were
perhaps slightly overdrawn, but the governor was subsequently unable to
prove that the most serious of them were without solid foundation.
[Sidenote: Articles of Complaint.]
In this document the directors were informed of the governor’s extensive
farming operations, and of his employment of the Company’s servants and
slaves and of the use of the Company’s materials for his private
service. He was accused of obtaining cattle by violent means from the
Hottentots, who were provoked to retaliate upon innocent people for the
wrongs done to them.[71] He was also accused of extorting cattle from
burghers by improper means. He was stated to have been frequently absent
at Vergelegen from two to six weeks at a time, when his public duties
were neglected. He was charged with selecting all the best timber and
staves for casks out of the Company’s stores, and paying less than the
burghers had to pay for what was left; of preventing free trade in wine,
and then extorting it from poor farmers at a very low price and selling
it to foreign ships at an enormous profit; of monopolising all trade
with foreigners; of requiring farmers to convey materials to Vergelegen
without payment; of compelling the bakers, by threats of his displeasure
if they did not, to buy his wheat at high prices; of defrauding the
Company by not paying tithes of his wheat; of commandeering--to use an
expressive colonial word--over four hundred woolled sheep from them
without payment; of requiring to be bribed before he would issue
title-deeds to farms; and of arranging the wine and slaughter licenses
in such a manner that the holders could obtain what they needed at very
low prices from the farmers by paying him very high prices for what he
had to sell.
[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]
There were some other charges against him, but they were of less
importance than these, and they need not be mentioned.
The secunde, Samuel Elsevier, and the clergyman, Petrus Kalden, were
charged with being occupied with agriculture to a very large extent, and
of neglecting their duties in consequence. Frans van der Stel, the
governor’s brother, was declared to be a perfect pest to the settlement.
This memorial was dated the 5th of January 1706, and was signed by Jan
Rotterdam, Henning Huising, Abraham Diemer, Nicolaas Diepenauw, Jan van
Meerland, Jacob de Savoye, Willem Mensink, Stephanus Vermey, Guillaume
du Toit, Pieter van der Byl, Adam Tas, Jacob van Brakel, Jacob Plunes,
Hercules du Pré, Jacobus van der Heiden, Wessel Pretorius, Jan Elberts,
Hans Jacob Conterman, Nicolaas Elberts, Jean le Roux, Ary van Wyk,
Pieter de Mont, Pierre Meyer, Reinier van de Zande, Jacobus Louw, Daniel
Sevenhofen, Ferdinandus Appel, Matthys Greef, Willem van Zyl, Daniel
Hugo, Jacques Theron, Etienne Niel, Jean du Buis, Jacques Malan, Douwe
Frederiks, Christiaan Wynoch, François du Toit, Claude Marais, Arend
Gildenhuis, Cornelis van Niekerk, Nicolaas van der Westhuizen, Pierre de
Villiers, Paul Couvret, Abraham Vivier, Abraham Bleusel, Jacques
Pienard, Pierre Vivier, Esaias Costeux, Pierre Mouy, Etienne Bruere,
David Senekal, J. le Roux, Jacob Vivier, Pierre Rousseau, Salomon de
Gourney, Pierre Cronje, Coenraad Cyffer, Charles Marais, Louis le Riche,
Nicolaas Meyboom, Jacob Cloete, and Jan Hendrik Styger.
In a volume published by the governor some time afterwards, as well as
in his statements to the directors and the Indian authorities,[72] he
attempted to explain away some of these charges, and he succeeded so far
that several must be pronounced not proven, while in some others he
established his innocence, but in all that related to his extensive
farming operations and to his making use of the Company’s servants,
slaves, and materials, he failed completely in overthrowing the charges
made against him. He does not refer to his not having paid tithes of his
grain, for he certainly could not refute that charge.
[Sidenote: Action of the Indian Authorities.]
During the night of the 3rd of February 1706 the first five ships of the
return fleet of that year, which sailed from the roads of Batavia on the
2nd of December 1705, cast anchor in Table Bay, and they were followed
in the morning of the 4th by five others, all under the flag of
Commander Jan de Wit. They had orders to remain here until the arrival
of three ships from Ceylon and two others to be despatched later from
Batavia, that all might sail together for Europe. It had been arranged
with the English authorities in India that their return ships should
also call at Table Bay, in order to proceed farther with the Dutch
fleet, so that there might be a very strong force to oppose any French
cruisers in the Atlantic.
With these ships the governor received a despatch from the Indian
authorities enclosing a copy of the document in which he was accused of
malpractices, that had been sent to Batavia in the previous year. He
immediately concluded that similar charges would be forwarded to the
Netherlands, and that a memorial embodying them must be in existence;
but he was unable to learn where it was, or who were parties to it. The
danger of his position, which he at once realised, now drove him to
acts of extreme folly as well as of the grossest tyranny. To prevent the
knowledge of his farming operations reaching the directors became the
object of highest importance to him. If that could be done, he might
still be safe, but if it could not, it would matter little what
additional charges were brought against him, for in any case all would
be lost. There is no other way of accounting for the absurd and violent
measures that he now resorted to, for he cannot be regarded as insane,
though the remark of one of his opponents that avarice had intoxicated
him was doubtlessly true.
[Sidenote: Historical Sketches.]
He now caused a certificate to be drawn up, in which he was credited
with the highest virtues, and the utmost satisfaction was expressed with
his administration. The male residents of Capetown were then invited to
the castle, and were there requested to sign the certificate. His
servants were sent out to collect in turn all the mechanics and
labourers of every description in the town and all the fishermen, white
and black, and to bring them to the castle to drink wine and beer and to
smoke a pipe of tobacco at his expense. They mustered there party after
party, and after making merry, allowed their names to be attached to the
document, probably without knowing or caring what its contents were.
The landdrost of Stellenbosch, Jan Starrenburg by name, a mere tool of
the governor, who had held office since July 1705, was directed to
proceed with an armed band from house to house in the country, and
require the residents there to sign it also. This was a much more
difficult matter to effect than to get the signatures of the town’s
people. Many of the farmers refused, even under the landdrost’s threats
that they would be marked men if they did not. Not a few of the
respectable names found on that extraordinary document are certainly not
genuine, for they appear with a cross, though the men that they
professed to represent could write letters and sign other papers as well
as the governor himself could do. Of the two hundred and forty names
found on it, less than one hundred are known in South Africa to-day, and
of these, as already stated, many must have been placed there
fraudulently. Surely no such means of obtaining a certificate of good
conduct was ever resorted to by any other officer of rank in a
colony.[73]
[Sidenote: Violent Conduct of the Governor.]