Cape Colony, Dutch East India Company's
Substate | Defunct
1652 CE to 1798 CE
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Science, military, and art (especially painting) are among the most acclaimed in the world.
By 1650, the Dutch own sixteen thousand merchant ships.
The Dutch East India Company and the Dutch West India Company establish colonies and trading posts all over the world, including rule over the northern parts of Taiwan between 1624–1662 and 1664–1667.
The Dutch settlement in North America begins with the founding of New Amsterdam on the southern part of Manhattan in 1614.
In South Africa, the Dutch settle the Cape Colony in 1652.
Dutch colonies in South America are established along the many rivers in the fertile Guyana plains, among them the Colony of Surinam (now Suriname).
In Asia, the Dutch establish the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), and the only western trading post in Japan, Dejima.
The Portuguese have basked in the nautical achievement of successfully navigating the Cape of Good Hope but have showed little interest in colonization.
The area's fierce weather and rocky shoreline pose a threat to their ships, and many of their attempts to trade with the local Khoikhoi had ended in conflict.
The Portuguese find the Mozambican coast more attractive, with appealing bays to use as way stations, prawns, and links to gold ore in the interior.
The Portuguese have little competition in the region until the mid-sixteenth century, when the English and Dutch begin to challenge the Portuguese along their trade routes.
Stops at the continent's southern tip increase, and the cape becomes a regular stopover for scurvy-ridden crews.
A Dutch vessel had in 1647 been wrecked in the present-day Table Bay at Cape Town.
The marooned crew, the first Europeans to attempt settlement in the area, have built a fort; they stay for a year until they are rescued by a fleet of twelve ships under the command of W.G. de Jong.
The nomadic pastoral Khoikhoi (Hottentot) and nomadic hunter-gatherer San (Bushmen) peoples inhabit the region of the western Cape; the Khoikhoi number between thirty-five thousand and fifty thousand.
The Xhosa populate the Eastern Cape; the Zulu hold Natal and other Nguni speakers reside farther inland.
The Dutch East India Company’s Jan Van Riebeeck lands with sixty of his countrymen at Table Bay in 1652 and establishes Cape Town as a resupplying station for the worldwide Dutch trading empire.
The South African wine industry has its origins in this era.
Some of the shipwrecked crew members returned to Holland had tried to persuade the Dutch East India Company (in the Dutch of the day: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) to open a trading center at the Cape; they decide to establish a permanent settlement.
The VOC, one of the major European trading houses sailing the spice route to the East, has no intention of colonizing the area, instead wanting only to establish a secure base camp where passing ships could shelter, and where hungry sailors could stock up on fresh supplies of meat, fruit, and vegetables.
To this end, the VOC requests Jan van Riebeeck, who had been on one of the rescue ships, to undertake the command of the initial Dutch settlement in the future South Africa.
Van Riebeeck, who had joined the Company in 1639, had served in a number of posts, including that of an assistant surgeon in the Batavia in the East Indies.
He had subsequently visited Japan.
His most important position had been that of head of the VOC trading post in Tonkin, Vietnam, but after his superiors discovered that he was conducting trade for his own account, he had been recalled from this post .
Van Riebeeck reaches Table Bay on April 6, 1652, landing three ships -- Drommedaris, Reijger and Goede Hoop -- at the site of the future Cape Town, meant to be a way-station for the VOC trade route between the Netherlands and the East Indies.
The Walvisch and the Oliphant arrive later, having performed 130 burials at sea.
Charged with building a fort, with improving the natural anchorage at Table Bay, and planting fruit and vegetables and obtaining livestock from the indigenous Khoi people, van Riebeeck plants a wild almond hedge as a barrier.
(It still survives in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town.)
The initial fort is made of mud, clay and timber, and has four corners or bastions.
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.
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.
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.
Hereafter, Khoikhoi society in the western Cape disintegrates.
Some people find jobs as shepherds on European farms; others reject foreign rule and
move away from the Cape.