Willem Adriaan Van Der Stel, and Other Historical Sketches

by George McCall Theal

Ever since 1658 trade between the burghers and the Hottentots was strictly forbidden. The chief object was to prevent any act that might bring on a collision with the nomadic people or irritate them in any way. In opposition to the law, however, parties of deserters and other persons of loose character carried on a cattle trade, and were often guilty of conduct that cannot be distinguished from robbery. Governor Simon van der Stel thought to check this by threatening more severe punishment, and on the 19th of October 1697 he issued a placaat in which the barter of cattle from Hottentots was prohibited, under penalty of whipping, branding, banishment, and confiscation of property.

The directors disapproved of this. They wished to encourage the colonists, and for that purpose they had already, on the 14th of July 1695, issued instructions that their own farming operations should be gradually discontinued, and that the cultivation of the vine and wheat together with the rearing of cattle should be left entirely to the burghers. They were now disposed to allow the colonists to purchase cattle from the Hottentots and fatten them for sale to such persons as would contract to supply the hospital, the garrison, and the ships with beef and mutton. They therefore annulled the placaat, and on the 27th of June 1699 issued instructions that the cattle trade should be thrown open, care being taken that the Hottentots suffered no ill-treatment in connection with it. Servants of the Company having seats in the council of policy or in the court of justice were excluded from this trade, and forbidden to supply meat for the public service.[54]

Historical Sketches.

This order reached Capetown by the flute De Boer on the 24th of November, but the governor, who paid little regard to the instructions of the directors when they clashed with his own interests, did not make it known at the time. After long delay tenders were called for, and in February 1700 the burgher Henning Huising entered into a contract to supply the garrison, hospital, and Company’s fleets with beef and mutton at 5½d. a kilogramme, he to have the use of the Company’s slaughter houses, and as a cattle run the whole of the district of Groenekloof that was not occupied by Hottentots. The contract was signed provisionally for ten years, but the directors reduced it to five. With this transaction the Company designed to relinquish sending out expeditions to purchase cattle, as had been the custom for nearly half a century; and henceforth it was only when working oxen were needed in greater numbers than the burghers could supply that military bartering parties went out. By a placaat of the council of policy presided over by the commissioner Wouter Valckenier, on the 28th of February 1700 the trade was thrown open to the burghers, with such restrictions as were considered necessary to prevent its abuse.

Training of the Colonists.

From this date cattle-breeding became a favourite pursuit with yearly increasing numbers or colonists. There was as much to be made by it as by agriculture, and it was attended with less expense and less anxiety. The government gave permission to applicants to use land for grazing purposes at some defined locality north or north-east of Stellenbosch, but if the pasture failed or did not prove as good as was anticipated, the occupiers did not hesitate to seek other and better places. East of the Hottentots-Holland mountains permission was not given to the burghers in general to graze oxen and sheep until after the governor’s recall in 1707, as he kept the pastures there as far as the Ziekenhuis in one direction and Zoetendal’s Vlei in another for his own use and that of one of his brothers. In defiance of the instructions or the 27th of June 1699 and of the avowed policy of the Company at the time, he himself was rapidly becoming a cattle farmer on a very extensive scale.

Many men and women were thus undergoing a special training for pushing their way deeper into the continent. They were learning to relish a diet of little else than animal food, and to use the flesh of game largely in order to spare their flocks and herds. They were becoming accustomed also to live in tent waggons for months together, so that the want of houses soon ceased to be regarded as a matter of much hardship by these dwellers in the wilds. They were acquiring a fondness for the healthy life of the open country, with its freedom from care and restraint, and its simple pleasures. For the town, with its government officials and law agents and tradesmen and speculators of many kinds always seeking to take advantage of their simplicity, they acquired such a dislike that they never visited it when they could avoid doing so. They took with them no other books than the bible and the psalms in metre, so their children came to regard education in secular subjects as entirely unnecessary. In self-reliance, however, they were receiving the most complete training possible. The tastes and habits which were thus formed were transmitted to their offspring, and in a few generations there was a body of frontiersmen adapted, as no other Europeans ever were, for acting as the pioneers of civilisation in such a country as South Africa.

Historical Sketches.

To encourage the cattle breeders, no rent for ground was charged until 1714, and no other tax than the one for district purposes was laid upon their stock. A little experience proved that occasional change of pasture was advantageous in the rearing of oxen and sheep, and the authorities made no objection to the graziers going yearly for three or four months to a tract of land far from that on which they lived at other times. This grew into a custom for each one to select as winter grazing ground a particular part of the karoo on the third terrace upward from the sea, his right to which was respected by all the others, though it was not directly recognised by the government.

With the enlargement of the settlement, fresh troubles arose with the Bushmen. In March 1701 a band of those people 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 Vogelvlei, at the foot of the Obiqua mountains.