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.
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.
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 2s. 6d. to £4 3s. 4d. the legger, and selling it to English and Dutch ships at £28 15s. 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.
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.