The capital of Livonia is besieged and…

The Portuguese, following the fall of the Kingdom of Kotte in 1593, had been able to establish complete control over the entire coastal area, with Colombo as their capital.

The Dutch in 1638 had signed a treaty with King Rajasinha II of Kandy which had assured the king assistance in his war against the Portuguese in exchange for a monopoly of the island's major trade goods.

The Portuguese had resisted the Dutch and the Kandyans, but have been gradually defeated in their strongholds beginning in 1639.

The Dutch capture Colombo in 1656 after an epic siege, at the end of which a mere ninetey-three Portuguese survivors are given safe conduct out of the fort.

Although the Dutch initially restore the captured area back to the Sinhalese Kings, they later refuse to turn them over and gain control over the island's richest cinnamon lands, including Colombo, which now serves as the capital of the Dutch maritime provinces under the control of the Dutch East India Company.

The Dutch merchant ship Vergulde Draeck, sailing from Texel bound for Batavia (now Jakarta) is wrecked on April 28, 1656, off Ledge Point, one hundred and seven kilometers north of what is now Perth, Western Australia, after it departs the Cape of Good Hope.

Seventy-five survivors (of one hundred and ninety-three originally on board) make it to shore and dispatch a small boat to Batavia to call for help, but despite three search and rescue missions to locate them, the remaining survivors will never be found. (The wreck will be discovered in 1963.)

A search party, in one of three attempts to locate and rescue the remaining survivors of the Vergulde Draeck, is sent ashore in Goede Hoop's boat, which smashes against rocks and sinks: eight sailors drown; three more disappear ashore.

Nine European men are released from the VOC's service in 1657 , given the status of "free burghers," and granted blocks of land.

They were exempted from taxation for twelve years, but the VOC holds a mortgage on their lands.

They are free to trade with Khoikhoi for sheep and cattle, but they are prohibited from paying higher prices for the stock than does the VOC, and they are told not to enslave the local pastoralists.

They are encouraged to grow crops, especially grains, for sale to the VOC, but they are not allowed to produce anything already grown in the company's own gardens.

By such measures, the VOC hopes not only to increase local production and thereby to pay the costs of the settlement, but also to prevent any private producers from undercutting the VOC's control over prices.

The new settlement trades out of necessity with the neighboring Khoikhoi, but theirs is not a friendly relationship, and the company authorities have made deliberate attempts to restrict contact.

Partly as a consequence, VOC employees find themselves faced with a labor shortage.

To remedy this, they release a small number of Dutch from their contracts and permit them to establish farms, with which they are to supply the VOC settlement from their harvests.

This arrangement has proven highly successful, producing abundant supplies of fruit, vegetables, wheat, and wine; they also later raise livestock.

The small initial group of free burghers, as these farmers are known, has steadily increased in number and have begun to expand their farms further north and east into the territory of the Khoikhoi.

In addition to establishing the free burgher system, van Riebeeck and the VOC have also begun to import large numbers of enslaved people, primarily from Madagascar and Indonesia.

These slaves will often marry Dutch settlers, and their descendants will become known as the Cape Coloureds and the Cape Malays.

The VOC ship Waeckende Boey (Watch Buoy) had been sent out from Batavia with a crew of forty and, after searching the Western Australian coast looking for survivors of the Vergulde Draeck, which had disappeared two years earlier, sends fourteen men ashore in the ship’s jawl; a storm develops, and the jawl is driven northward and wrecked on an island on March 22, 1658; the Waeckende Boey gives the men up as lost, and returns to Batavia.

The ship’s upper steersman and navigator Abraham Leeman van Santwits, who had been in charge of the landing parties, will eventually manage to repair the jawl, sail north, and eventually reach Batavia in September.

The VOC ship Waeckende Boey (Watch Buoy) is repaired and sails north, where it is wrecked again on the coast of Java; the four survivors walk overland to Jepara.

Conflict between Dutch farmers and Khoikhoi breaks out once it becomes clear to the latter that the Dutch are here to stay and that they intend to encroach on the lands of the pastoralists.

Doman, a Khoikhoi who had worked as a translator for the Dutch and had even traveled to Java, leads an armed attempt to expel the Dutch from the Cape peninsula in 1659.

The attempt is a failure, although warfare will drag on until an inconclusive peace is established a year later.

Pressure on the Khoikhoi grows during the following decade as more of the Dutch become free burghers, expand their landholdings, and seek pastureland for their growing herds.

The Dutch officials and farmers of the Cape, in their need to communicate with enslaved Malays and Bantus and the indigenous Khoikhoi, began to incorporate many words of Malay, Bantu, and Khoi origin in their daily speech, creating a uniquely Cape Dutch patois.