Historical Sketches.
After his dismissal from the Company’s service, Willem Adriaan van der Stel was in the most unenviable position that can be imagined, though he was now possessed of considerable wealth. In the city of Amsterdam, where he had once been a magistrate and where he had numerous respectable relatives and connections, he was a disgraced man. In order to try to make his conduct appear less reprehensible in the eyes of the public, he prepared and published the volume called the Korte Deductie, in which the most serious of his offences were entirely ignored, and the certificate in his favour and the forced declarations from several burghers that have been described were set forth as proofs of his innocence with regard to others. As may well be believed, such a volume completely failed in its object. The burghers in South Africa were under no necessity to reply to it, for its weakness was evident to every one, but two of them did so, and in their Contra Deductie published such a number of depositions made under oath as utterly to destroy it.
There is one circumstance in connection with this matter that has been commented upon by several historians, notably by the late Judge Watermeyer in his Lectures, that is the lightness of the punishment inflicted on Van der Stel. Mr. Watermeyer attributed it to the assembly of seventeen not feeling aversion towards his tyranny. But that view is not borne out by the documents of the time when minutely examined, for the directors certainly did express the strongest disapprobation of his conduct in trampling on law and justice. Nor was the leniency of their treatment of him altogether due to their wish to avoid irritating his influential relatives, though that may have had something to do with it. The main cause was simply that Mr. Wouter Valckenier, who was one of the directors at the time, could not absolve himself from all blame in the matter, for he had granted part of Vergelegen to Van der Stel, without reflecting upon what the consequences might be. The governor had abused his confidence, still he was not free of blame. And so nothing but the ground was resumed, and the delinquent was not even compelled to make good to the Company the amount which he had defrauded it of.
One Effect of the Governor’s Tyranny.
The punishment of Willem Adriaan van der Stel, though mild, had the effect of securing to the Cape colonists good government, as it was then held to be, for more than half a century after his recall. The spirit of the burghers was not broken, as it would have been if he had remained in power, and a liberty loving people had time, in God’s good providence, to secure a firm foothold in South Africa.
There was an effect upon the South African colonists that these troubles produced which makes them memorable in our history. They blended the different nationalities together so firmly that thereafter they were absolutely inseparable. There is nothing that tends more to make men and women sympathise with each other than suffering in a common cause, and in this instance Hollander and Huguenot alike had resisted and felt the vengeance of the tyrant. When Du Toit and Du Pré, liberated from the vessel that was to have taken them into exile at Mauritius, met Tas and Louw, staggering from the dungeons in which they had been so long confined, can anyone doubt that they greeted each other as brothers? Our archives tell us nothing of that scene on the parade ground before the castle, but they do tell us very plainly that from that day onward there was no jealousy, no ill-feeling of any kind, between Dutchmen and Frenchmen in the colony. Thereafter all were Afrikanders.
How could it be otherwise? It is not too much for even a historian seeking only for truth to assume that the sisterhood of the women also had been cemented by their common misery, that Mevrouw Van der Byl, for instance, would feel an affection stronger far than mere sympathy for Madame Du Toit, who, like herself, had seen her husband torn from her and sent into banishment, probably for ever unless God and the directors should curb the merciless oppressor’s will. The names on the memorial show an equal number of French and Dutch, and among them are those of the heads of many of the best families in South Africa at the present day. They can look back with pride to the action of their ancestors in resisting corruption so gross and tyranny so outrageous as that of Willem Adriaan van der Stel, and in thinking of the suffering those brave men and women endured, they can thank God that it was not in vain, since it was productive of so much good.
Historical Sketches.
The Van der Stel family attained its highest point of celebrity in the time of the sons of Simon, the grandsons of Adriaan who went to India in 1623. According to Van der Aa, Willem Adriaan, after his dismissal, purchased the estates of Old and New Vossemeer, and died on the 1st of July 1723, leaving five children. Adriaan became governor of Amboina and councillor extraordinary of India, and left three children. Hendrik was warehouse keeper at Malacca in 1705, but nothing more is known of him. It is a saying in the United States that the stage from shirt sleeve to shirt sleeve is usually covered in only three generations, and the observation would seem to be correct in this case. Van der Aa could find no one of the name of Van der Stel worthy of notice after the third generation had passed away, except A. van der Stel, who drew plates for a work on natural history published in 1754, and a woman of the name who was an actress and stage dancer in the middle of the eighteenth century.[88]