CAPE TOWN FAMILY HISTORY SOCIETY

An investigation into Angela van Bengale by Everard van Wulwen

Dr. A. J. Böeseken wrote on page 9 of her book “Slaves and Free Blacks at the Cape 1658 to 1700” that “In October 1655 van Riebeeck bought a small slave family from Commander Kemp. They were Domingo and Angela from Bengal and their three children.” Angela then became a household slave of van Riebeeck.
Records reveal that Angela and her three children had been granted their freedom on 13th April 1666 and that she later, on 15th December 1669, married Arnoldus Willemsz Basson. No record can be found of Angela’s first husband Domingo and it is presumed that he must have died at some time before this. My mother’s mother was born a Basson and I have traced back her ancestry, generation by generation, directly to Angela and her husband. They are therefore my very first ancestors at the Cape, or so I thought.
I have recently however had reason to doubt the accuracy of Dr. Böeseken’s given date of arrival at the Cape and my own research has indicated that she had actually arrived here, with absolute certainty, at the end of February 1657.
My research led me to two publications namely, the “Journal of Jan van Riebeeck” given out by The Van Riebeeck Society and published by A. A. Balkema which I came across at the Wynberg Library and the other being “Dutch-Asiatic Shipping in 17th and 18th Centuries”, consisting of the records of all shipping outward bound from Holland to and around the Cape in one volume and another volume with all homeward bound shipping which can be found at the Cape Archives.
In his Journal van Riebeeck records amongst other things the Occasions on which Commander Pieter Kemp had touched on at the Cape. On the first occasion Kemp had arrived at the Cape on 7th November 1655, having left Vlie in Holland on 10th June 1655. He left the Cape for Batavia on 21st November 1655. Coming from Holland at the time, where a law had been passed on 15th September 1636 by which, although slave trade was allowed, no slaves could be brought into Holland, Kemp would not have had any slaves on board.
In any case, in October 1655 he would still have been at sea on his way to the Cape.
Kemp’s next visit to the Cape was when he arrived on the Amersfoort from Batavia on 21st February 1657 with a fleet of ships, including amongst others the ship Prins Willem, having left Batavia on 4th December 1656. However, the fleet could only drop anchor on 24th February because of unfavourable weather conditions. Kemp had spent more than a year in Batavia in an official capacity, after spending time at the Cape, during which he traveled around the settlement a few times in the company of Jan van Riebeeck, he left the Cape for Holland with the fleet on 8th March 1657. It would have been during this time that he had sold his personal slaves to van Riebeeck, not being allowed to take them to Holland.
On 28th March 1658 the ship Amersfoort again arrived at the Cape, having left Vlie in Holland in the company of other ships on 14th October 1657. It was the Amersfoort that on this trip had captured a Portuguese slaver near the coast of Brazil with a large number of slaves from Angola and had taken off 250 of the slaves and taken them to the Cape. Van Riebeeck made no mention of Kemp having arrived with this fleet and it must be accepted that he had not been to the Cape at this time nor has van Riebeeck mentioned Kemp as having been to the Cape at any other time, before or after, except as mentioned above.
The source on the Dutch-Asiatic Shipping agrees exactly with the fleet and ship movements as given in van Riebeeck’s Journal. It does not however mention Kemp’s name anywhere because Kemp was not the captain of any of the ships. Kemp was the Commander and in one instance van Riebeeck referred to him as the Rear Admiral. Instead, the shipping records give the names of the captain of each particular ship. On the Amersfoort’s visit to the Cape in March 1658 the name given for the captain was Frederik Eldense.
There is therefore no doubt in my mind that Angela would have come ashore at the Cape at some time during Commander Kemp’s stay between 24th February and 7th March 1657, the day on which he took his leave before sailing off the next day.
It was mentioned above that the ship Prins Willem was one of those that accompanied the Amersfoort when the fleet arrived at the Cape in February 1657. This is confirmed by Dr. Solm, owner of the farm Delta at Drakenstein near Paarl, who established the museum van de Caab after finding numerous artifacts as well as the foundations of what appeared to be those of farm buildings used by the first owners of his farm as allocated to them by Simon van der Stel. Dr. Solm’s research revealed further that the second owner of his farm turned out to be Christoffel Snyman, the son of Catharina from Palicutta, better known as Groot Catriyn, the first female convict in the Cape. She had been a Company slave at Batavia where she had become involved with a male slave. During a lover’s quarrel it is stated that they had a fight in which Catrijn grabbed an angular hay ladder and hit her man with it across his lower stomach. He died four days later and she was charged with murder and sentenced to death by strangulation. The Governor of Batavia, when called upon to sign the death warrant, considered Catrijn’s action to have been in self defence and commuted the sentence to a lifetime of slavery at the Cape.
According to Dr. Solm’s research Catrijn arrived at the Cape on board the Prins Willem on 21st February 1657, in other words, with the same fleet and on the same day as Angela on the Amersfoort.
They would not necessarily known each other at Batavia but they certainly became great friends at the Cape, to the extent that they had themselves baptized together on 29th April 1668 and further, in March 1669, Angela became the godmother to the son of Catrijn.
Although Catrijn was at the Cape under sentence, the sentence was one of slavery and she was not incarcerated but looked upon by van Riebeeck as a slave and treated as such. One of her tasks could well have been the washing and ironing of the clothes of Company officials, including van Riebeeck himself and it is more than likely that such washing would have been done at the stream near the first fort where the company slaves were held before the first slave lodge had been built and where the remains of a dam and furrows are to be seen at the Golden Acre today. As with Angela, Catrijn was also at some time given her freedom.
Christoffel Snyman married Marguerite de Savoye, the daughter of Jacques de Savoye, a French Huguenot and nobleman. Their sixth child, a daughter named Johanna, later married Anthonie Lombard. They in turn had a grandson named Johannes Gerhardus (Lombard) who married Barbara Magdalena Rog. Their daughter married a Croeser and had a son and later a grandson, both named Johannes Gerhardus Lombard Croeser, the latter of the two marrying Maria Martina Basson, my mother’s mother and therefore my grandmother.
I suppose there are not too many people who can boast of their first two ancestors arriving at the Cape on the same day as far back as February 1657. Further, on my father’s side, I can claim to be related to Anna de Koning, a daughter of Angela before her marriage to Basson. Anna de Koning married Olof Bergh and their daughter Christina married Jacobus de Wet, a direct ancestor of Helena Geertruida de Wet, the mother of my father’s mother, Elizabeth Jacoba Combrink who married my grandfather van Wulven. The Combrinks in turn are descended from Herman Combrink who on 14th April 1720 married Magdalena Ley, the daughter of Armozyn van de Kaap who was born at the first slave lodge in 1661 from one of the West African slave women who were taken off a Portuguese slaver either from Angola by the ship Amersfoort and brought to the Cape in March 1658 or from Dahomey by the ship Hasselt in May 1658.

Everard van Wulven
September 2007