'The Council should keep itself free from obloquy, and unpolluted.'
Praiseworthy sentiments, but they must have suffered for them. I find no mention of another paragon who was able to accept the responsibilities imposed upon Schut.
Indiscriminate gossip or libel was most severely punished at the Cape, the desire to be free from obloquy not being confined to the Council.
In 1663 Teuntje Bartholomeus, wife of the burgher, Bartholomeus Born, is banished for six weeks to Dassen Island for having libelled a certain honest woman. A perfect rest-cure! Six weeks on Dassen Island! alone with Nature, wind, sea, rock-rabbits, and seals!
There is no official mention of her return from exile.
Slaves.
'For there is no country in the world where slaves are treated with so much humanity as at the Cape,' writes Le Vaillant in 1780, but in reading through the old day-books of Van Riebeek, Hackius, Borghorst, Isbrand Goski, and the Van der Stels, the punishments inflicted on slaves might have been inspired by those old, over-praised painters, who gloried in an anatomical dissection of a poor wretch whose miserable body possessed no anatomy at all. The Mozambique, Madagascar, and Malay slaves were keel-hauled; they were tied in sacks and thrown into the Bay; they were tortured. Here is the sentence of one: 'Bound on a cross, when his right hand shall be cut off, his body pinched in six places with red-hot irons, his arms and legs broken to pieces, and after that to be impaled alive before the Town House on the Square, his dead body afterwards to be thrown on a wheel outside the town at the usual place, and to be left a prey to the birds of the air.' Could any torture of the Inquisition be worse? But these tortures were in 1696, years before the enlightened days of Le Vaillant. The half-breed slaves of the early days were a source of worry to the ruling council; several times in the Journals one may come across a case of a freeman or burgher marrying his emancipated slave:
'"Maria of Bengal," a Hindoo woman, set the fashion, and the famous interpretress, Eva, during her extraordinary career of diplomatic and immoral episodes within the walls of the Fort, where she wore garments made by kind Maria van Riebeek, or outside the walls, where she wore the filthy skins of her own people, the Hottentots, beguiled the senior surgeon to such lengths that he was granted permission to marry her. He fortunately was killed during an expedition to Madagascar, but not before he had had sufficient time to regret the beguilings of Eva.'
Many of the slaves were children of convicts sent from Batavia and the Malay Settlements. Here is the case of a half-breed girl, which was sent to Batavia for judgment:
'Regarding the half-breed girl, you order that she is to serve the Company until her twenty-second year, when she is to be emancipated on condition that she makes profession of the Christian faith, and, moreover, pays R. 150 for her education. We are well aware that this rule is observed in the case of slave children having Dutch fathers, but whether it applies to children of convict women by Dutch fathers, as in the case of this girl, would like to hear from you.'