Note 71 — III. Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel. A History of the Successful Struggle of a few Hollanders and Huguenots against Tyranny and Corruption.

This charge can neither be proved nor disproved by any documents in the Cape archives. But there is one circumstance in connection with it that throws strong suspicion upon the governor, and under any circumstances shows that he paid no attention to the instructions of the authorities in Holland. Their orders of the 27th of June 1699, throwing open to the burghers the cattle trade with the Hottentots, reached Capetown on the 24th of November of the same year; having been brought by the flute De Boer, which sailed from Texel on the 17th of July. The governor did not return to the castle from his visit to the Tulbagh basin until the 14th of December,—all his movements when absent on duty are carefully recorded,—and a placaat announcing the will of the directors ought to have been issued on the following day. Instead of that, however, it was not published until the 28th of February 1700, and then only owing to the presence of the commissioner Wouter Valckenier. It was during these two months and a half, as the burghers asserted, that the governor’s agents were engaged in procuring horned cattle and sheep for him by fair means or by foul, and that the Hottentots to a considerable distance from the Cape were despoiled and exasperated. From his general character, as delineated in the archives, one cannot say that he would scruple even at acts of robbery.