Simon van der Stel governed Cape Colony for eighteen years, built Stellenbosch, welcomed the Huguenot refugees, explored Namaqualand, and made the Cape one of the most beautiful and productive corners of the Dutch Empire. His son Willem Adriaan tried to continue his work and was destroyed by a conspiracy of lying petitions. The story of the House of van der Stel is one of the great moral dramas of South African history.
If Jan van Riebeck founded Cape Colony, Simon van der Stel built it. And if Simon built it, his son Willem Adriaan tried to keep building — and was destroyed by the men he was trying to help. The story of the House of van der Stel is the story of two great administrators who did more for the Cape than anyone before or after them in the Dutch period, and who were repaid with conspiracy, slander, and disgrace. It is also, as one historian said, a story that displays in its different phases most of the great problems that South Africans have been fighting about ever since.
Simon van der Stel — A Father to the Colony
Simon van der Stel arrived as Commander of the Cape in 1679, having grown up in Amsterdam and married into the Sixes — one of the great merchant families who bought Rembrandt's paintings. He was sophisticated, energetic, genuinely interested in science and agriculture, and possessed of a graciousness that struck every visitor to the Cape. Père Tachard, a Jesuit mathematician who came through the Cape four times on his way to Siam and China, has left us the best portrait of the man. He describes finding Simon at his beautiful walled Company garden — fourteen hundred yards long and two hundred and thirty-five wide — full of alleys of citrons and pomegranates and oranges, other plots growing ananas and bananas and European fruits, the whole watered by a stream from the mountain. Van der Stel showed the Jesuits his observatory pavilion, lent them equipment, invited them to dinner. When they left he embraced them and prayed that their work in China would end happily. This was the Cape's golden period. Van der Stel planted Stellenbosch — the oak-shaded valley he named after himself — and settled white families there, watching the new community grow as Rhodes later watched Rhodesia. He welcomed the Huguenots, the French Protestant refugees who fled France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 — over two hundred of them, whom he settled in the valleys of the Drakenstein with farming tools, livestock, and six thousand rixdollars from a fund he obtained from Batavia. Their descendants filled the Cape's vineyards with the knowledge of French viticulture. He also explored — himself, in person. He pushed north into Namaqualand with fifteen wagons and a hundred followers, discovered the Orange River, found copper mountains, survived a charge by a rhinoceros that wrecked his carriage, and marched back across a salt desert for eighteen days on bitter water before reaching fresh rivers again. It was a journey of five months, and by it he learned more of the interior than anyone before him.
Visitors called his Company garden 'the Paradise of the World.' Van der Stel called it his life's work — and was eventually robbed of it by the conspirators he had benefited.
The Conspiracy Against Willem Adriaan
Simon's son Willem Adriaan stepped into his father's shoes as Governor in 1699, inheriting both his father's ability and his enemies. He was, by every honest account of the records, as good a governor as his father — reforming agriculture, suppressing cattle-stealing, improving the hospital, starting the wool industry by importing wooled sheep, trying to protect the Khoikhoi from the worst abuses of the frontier settlers. But Willem Adriaan trod on toes. He trod on the toes of men who profited from the illicit cattle trade with the Khoikhoi. He trod on the toes of men who liked their monopolies. He trod on the toes of outlaws in the mountains who made their living by raiding native herds. These men drew up a memorial — a formal petition of complaint — and went around the countryside getting signatures for it. Some signed willingly. Others, according to their own later sworn testimony, signed because they were threatened with death, or didn't understand what they were signing, or had been knocked down and had a pen forced into their hands with a cutlass held over their heads. One man signed "from stupidity, and because having seen the number of signatures, thought there could be no harm in it." Another signed "in a fit of mad passion, for which he was sorry from the bottom of his heart." The memorial was full of lies. Willem Adriaan proved this in a calm and devastating official reply, taking the charges one by one and answering each with documented evidence. The ringleader, a meat contractor named Henning Huysing who had arrived at the Cape as a "most insignificant personage" and been elevated by Simon van der Stel's own patronage, had charges against him that were documented and serious. It didn't matter. Huysing took the petition to Holland, where he had money and connections. The Directors of the Company were bored by the whole affair — it had, they said, "wasted a large quantity of paper" and caused "no end of trouble." They didn't much care whether the charges were true. They wanted their servants to shut up and supply the ships with fresh meat. Willem Adriaan was recalled. His land was taken. His father's Constantia farm was threatened. The conspirators won.
Stellenbosch and the neighboring Drakenstein and Franschhoek valleys were all settled under the van der Stels — their legacy in the landscape outlasted all the slanders against them.
The history vindicated them. The names of the van der Stels' accusers are forgotten. The places the van der Stels built — Stellenbosch, the Drakenstein, Franschhoek, Constantia — are still there, among the most beautiful in South Africa, bearing the imprint of their work. They loved the land and the settlers, and wanted to see the cellars full of wine and the lofts full of corn and the people at peace. They planted honesty, justice, and humanity on the frontier of a wild continent. The best of South Africa's governors and administrators have followed their lead ever since, consciously or not. The van der Stels were the golden age of the Cape.
