Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  In the meantime, Dutch settlers got to work transforming the ‘Cape Settlement’ into Kaapstaad, or Cape Town. In its opening decades, the ‘Brothel and Tavern of the Two Oceans’ (as it was known) enjoyed a ragged reputation as little more than a stopping-off point for sailors, whalers and traders – with a service economy built around their various carnal needs. Unlike Boston or Bridgetown, Cape Town did not develop as an export dock for colonial produce. Instead, it was a refreshment stop with an urban economy of innkeepers and drink salesman, butchers and brewers, as well as masons, carpenters, smiths, wagonmakers, potters, shoemakers and tailors. The rich let out their houses to the officer class, and the less wealthy put up the sailors. Smuggling, private trading, prostitution and slaving kept the city afloat. ‘Nothing can be more agreeable to the people of this place, than the arrival of an English ship,’ commented a passing visitor in the 1760s, ‘as it causes a circulation of money, and indeed it is chiefly by the English that most people in town are supported; not only by taking the captains, passengers, etc., to board at their houses, but by furnishing the ships with provisions.’18

  The earthy realities of this port economy were masked by the city’s stunning whitewashed fabric and natural magnificence. ‘Nothing can be neater, or more pleasant, than the appearance which this town presents, spreading over the valley, from the sea-shore towards the mountains on each side,’ thought Burchell.19 ‘The situation of Cape Town is singularly well chosen; and the Dutch certainly deserve great credit for the regularity and convenience with which it is laid out,’ agreed Robert Percival of the Royal Irish.

  It is divided by five streets, running in a parallel direction from the shores or edge of the bay towards the Table Mountain, with five other streets, intersected by lanes at regular intervals, which cross the larger streets at right angles … Most of the streets are wide, airy and spacious, planted with oak trees entwined in each other, which shade the houses and take off the great glare occasioned by the reflection of the sun from the white houses, and from the Table Mountain.20

  Mrs Jemima Kindersley, in transit to Pondicherry in 1777, wrote how:

  every one must be pleased with the town, which has all the regularity and neatness usual among the Dutch: the streets are all parallel to each other; and there is one large square with trees planted round, and a canal of water from springs running down: the houses are very good and have a neat appearance on the outside; which altogether make it a very pretty town and, some few circumstances excepted, equal in neatness to any of our sea-ports in England.21

  A French author, Jacques Arago, was similarly effusive in his praise. ‘From the brilliant whiteness of the houses of the Cape you would take it at a distance for the foundations of a city which is but just finished. The fronts of the houses, the windows, the steps, are all astonishingly clean. The streets are broad, as straight as a line, and in general bordered with trees which keep the apartments agreeably cool.’22 The Dutch domestic architecture of flat roofs, bared joist ceilings, large windows and lofty rooms was widely admired, with the paved platform stoep (step) in front of each house a source of particular fascination – ‘here the inhabitants frequently walk or sit, in the cool of the evening, and often at other times, to enjoy the air, or to converse with passing friends’.23

  Others christened Cape Town ‘Little Amsterdam’ on account of its array of ditches, bridges, sluices and low-walled channels which diverted the mountain streams into watering the growing city. In succeeding decades, as the city’s population expanded, these channels would become filled with filth and refuse, but in the late eighteenth century they still formed part of a broader cityscape dedicated to providing for the culinary passage of passing ships – since ninety days at sea on a diet of cheese, biscuits, salt meat and rum could be deadly for any crew’s constitution. Johan Stavorinus liked to put three quarts of lemon-juice into his sailors’ drinking water, and mix orange-peel into the rum rations. Previously, to keep the scorbutics at bay, the Dutch had planted fruit-trees and vegetables at regular inlets in Saint Helena and Mauritius. However, the miraculously fecund soil and sea air of Cape Town fertilized an exceptional array of fresh produce – oranges, lemons, grapes, melons, apples, pears, peaches, almonds, apricots, figs, walnuts, mulberries, quinces, chestnuts, bananas and guavas. And if it was too cold for mangoes and too warm for gooseberries, subtler gardeners could harvest strawberries, plums, raspberries and cherries to be sold to passing boats. For sailors, there was also the added attraction of the colony’s celebrated ‘pickled fish curry’ prepared by Malay cooks. The moment Calcutta diarist William Hickey’s ship, the Sea-horse, dropped anchor in False Bay en route to the Bay of Bengal in 1777, ‘we instantly were regaled with the most delicious fruits’. The local ‘Dutch Chief’ also tried to sell them poultry, ham, tongues, sausages and, to the horror of the gluttonous Hickey, a truly execrable Constantia vintage – ‘more like treacle and water than a rich and generous wine’.24

  Wisely, the VOC prioritized the planting of market gardens, and the most impressive of these were the Company Gardens, fed by the waters of the Heerengracht (Gentlemen’s Canal). Now a well-tended civic park dotted with First World War cannons and statues of Jan Smuts and Cecil Rhodes, it provides an elegant and shaded setting for the South African Parliament and National Gallery. In the 1700s, it was an altogether more industrious landscape. As well as an exhausting hike up Table Mountain (‘we beheld beneath us both the Cape Town and that of False Bay, an immense tract of rich and fertile country, bounded by the ocean’), Hickey and his party ‘walked in the Company’s Gardens, which are well stored with curious plants, the choicest fruits and vegetables’.25 Peter Kolben, a Prussian diplomat sent to investigate the Cape, thought the 40-acre Company Gardens simply ‘the noblest and most beautiful Curiosities in all Afric. And I question whether there is a Garden in Europe, so rich and beautiful in its Productions as any one of ’em.’ Not only did the Gardens provide the Cape with ‘almost every Thing the Vegetable World produces by Way of Fruit and Flower’, they were also gloriously free of artifice. ‘The Gardens are not laid out and divided, perhaps, so curiously as are many in Europe … Nature has Little or Nothing to set her off there besides her own Charmes and the Hand of the Gardener: And she is more charming than I have seen her in any other Part of the World.’ Through the middle of the Gardens ran a public walkway overshadowed by oak trees 30 feet tall, while around the fruit trees were planted elm and myrtle to protect their delicate produce from the brutal south-east winds. Then there were the domestic gardens, encircling the whitewashed houses. ‘’Tis very delightful to visit ’em; and they make a lovely Appearance in several Views of the Town. The Millions of Flowers in the Cape-Gardens replenish the Air with the most delicious Perfumes.’26

  Close to where the Heerengracht would have once gushed into the sea still stands the most totemic edifice of the Dutch Cape: the Castle of Good Hope. ‘The Castle is a large pentagonal fortress on the south-eastern or inland side of the town, close to the water’s edge,’ reported Burchell. ‘It commands the jutty, or landing-place, and part of Table Bay, and completely controls the only road between the town and country.’27 Built in the 1670s to replace van Riebeeck’s initial mud, clay and timber fort, it was from the castle’s stone bastions that the VOC imposed their will upon ocean and inland alike. Here was where the governor and his senior officials enacted the orders of the Council of Seventeen from Amsterdam and answered to the governor-general in Batavia. Today, on reclaimed land between the castle walls and the Atlantic shoreline, is the six-lane Strand freeway, the rail terminus, the central business district and then the Duncan Dock. But until the 1800s the spring tide used to come crashing in through the entrance gates. From the battlements and captain’s tower (for a long time Cape Town’s tallest building), the comings and goings of the Table Bay anchorage could be carefully scrutinized, with few ships escaping investigation by the Dutch authorities. Whilst the castle would be remodelled under British rule, its stonework still retains
its VOC imprimatur. Above the main gates, the pediment bears the coat of arms of the United Netherlands, a clawed, crowned lion holding the seven arrows of unity in its paw. Carved on the architrave below are the arms of Van Hoorn, Delft, Amsterdam, Middelburg, Rotterdam and Enkhuizen – the six Dutch cities in which the United East India Company had chambers. The yellow brickwork, the VOC initials, the Dutch colonial styling, the sun dials, the shutters and statues of Neptune all give the castle an air of cloistered, colonial assertion even as twenty-first-century Cape Town’s skyscrapers crowd over its courtyard. The courtyard itself is sliced in two by a 12-metre-high wall (with balcony for public pronouncements) which allowed for protection from attack from both Table Mountain to the north and the coast to the south.

  Plan of Dutch Cape Town. Plan van Het Cassteel en de Stad, de Goede Hoop, by Van de Graaff, Thiebault & Barbier (1786).

  The Dutch designed the castle, but they were not the ones who built it. That task fell to the thousands of slaves sold into Cape Town. Wary of establishing a fully fledged colony rather than staging post, the VOC had refused van Riebeeck permission to enslave the local Khoekhoe. So in 1658 he started importing slaves, and over the ensuing 150 years some 63,000 men, women and children entered the Cape Colony in bondage. Most came from the VOC’s eastern empire, with Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Goa – as well as Madagascar, Zanzibar and Mozambique – providing the progenitors of the modern Cape coloureds and multicultural Cape Town. By the 1790s, compared to around 13,000 free burghers, there were already some 15,000 slaves (generally replenished through imports rather than births in the colony), and these were the men, women and children who built the infrastructure of the Cape economy. They laboured in the vineyards, the docks, the salt-works and the hospitals; they built canals, drains and public buildings; they worked as butchers, carpenters and barrel-makers. There was no plantation economy in the Cape, and so the diffusion of slaves through society was not concentrated on great estates but spread across different businesses and classes. In the 1750s, seven burghers had more than fifty slaves each, whilst it was common for a Dutch citizen of decent rank to keep ten to fifteen slaves (including women and children) to work as farm labourers and drivers, cooks and wetnurses. William Burchell reported that Malay slaves were the most prized possessions in Cape Town, the men working as carpenters, cabinet-makers, masons and tailors. Those from Mozambique and Madagascar were put to ‘the most laborious’ employments. In contrast to the Caribbean, manumission levels were very low, and the ‘freed slave’ community small, but the Cape did share with the West Indies a high degree of racial miscegenation, and it was quite common for a slave-owner to allow one of his female slaves to cohabit with a European as man and wife. None of this amused the VOC, which issued successive circulars deploring the fact that ‘irresponsible people, both among the Company’s servants in the garrison of this fortress, as also free settlers or inhabitants of this place’, were living in open concubinage with coloured and slave women, siring illegitimate coloured children.28 British commentators usually turned a blind eye to such practices and instead chose to criticize the practice of Cape slavery as another example of the slothful indulgence of the Dutch. ‘There is, perhaps, no part of the world, out of Europe, where the introduction of slavery was less necessary than at the Cape of Good Hope,’ thought John Barrow, private secretary to Earl Macartney. ‘Nor would it ever have found its way into this angle of Africa, had the same spirit of Batavian industry, which raised a wealthy and populous republic out of the sea, impressed the minds of those who first formed the settlement.’29

  Lady Anne Barnard, View of The Gallows, Cape Town, detail from a panorama of Cape Town. A slave in shackles repairs the castle walls while others rest in the sun. In the distance is the building known as the Great Barracks. Lady Anne’s panorama was intended as a gift for Governor Macartney (1797).

  If brutality on the scale of the West Indian plantations was a rarity in the Cape, the Dutch legal system nonetheless sanctioned an array of appallingly murderous and sadistic tortures – breaking on the wheel, boiling to death, burning alive, branding and whipping – to crush any dissenting slave spirit. The gallows and the rack formed an important part of Dutch public architecture (slaves who murdered their masters were sentenced to the most innovatively barbaric of deaths), whilst the conditions in which the VOC housed its chattels were equally inhuman. ‘You have entered the oldest surviving slave building in South Africa,’ explains the guide as you walk into the Slave Lodge in Adderley Street, at the bottom of the old Company Gardens. Now a fine museum dedicated to the history of slavery in South Africa, it was once the fetid home to some 1,200 slaves belonging to the VOC. ‘The lodge for the government-slaves is a large, plain, oblong building, about eighty paces long, and twenty broad, with an area in the center,’ as the American visitor Robert Semple described it. ‘It stands between the church and the Company’s garden, and has nothing in its structure worthy of notice.’30 Indeed it didn’t: originally, a single-storey rectangular structure of plastered brick, built around an open inner courtyard, much like a prison, its base conditions and overcrowded cells ensured a wretched mortality rate from smallpox, malnutrition and ill-treatment.

  The church which Semple referred to, across Spin Street from the Lodge, is Die Groote Kerk. Home to the Calvinist Dutch Reformed congregation (which remained the Cape state church until 1780), the church has been described as the oldest place of Christian worship in southern Africa. It was rebuilt in the so-called ‘Cape Gothic’ style in the mid-nineteenth century on the foundations of an earlier edifice renowned for its Puritan simplicity. ‘Nothing entertaining to the Eye is seen within the Church,’ reported Peter Kolben. ‘The Pulpit is plain wood, quite naked of Ornament. And the People sit on long Forms, planted in several Parallels, running this Way and that, before the Pulpit. But distinctions are observed in sitting nearer to or farther from the Pulpit, according to every one’s Birth, Employment or Condition in Life.’31 Christian worship was as important a part of Dutch Cape culture at the end of the eighteenth century as slave-trading and the city was noteworthy for its public displays of piety. ‘The principal church near the grand parade, is a very handsome building,’ reported Robert Percival. ‘The church is well attended, and a great deal of solemnity and decorum observed in the worship.’32 For those of a more ecumenical nature, the sumptuous Dutch Lutheran church – which was allowed to compete with Calvinists for souls from the 1780s – offered an alternative place of worship.

  With its churches, whitewashed double-storey houses, canals, gardens, castle, hospital and barracks, the rough and ready ‘Cape Settlement’ had by the mid-1700s made the transition into the more civilized Kaapstad with a population and prosperity beginning to challenge the VOC’s more developed East Asian ports. No building captures that sense of urban pride and cultural confidence more than the Old Town House on Greenmarket Square. Rising above the tourist tat for sale in the square’s stalls, this resplendent display of whitewashed Cape Dutch architecture is a vainglorious celebration of ‘European civilization’ as it existed on the edge of the known world. Inside, the Dutch still-life watercolours, the dark mahogany furniture and the closed shutters transport you back to seventeenth-century Rotterdam or Amsterdam.

  The Dutch had turned Cape Town into an eminently liveable, colonial backwater. Yet if it was recognized as a useful logistical asset, the Cape Colony rarely featured prominently in European colonial thinking in the eighteenth century. In the 1790s this low-key status was to be dramatically revised. And the man who proved so determined to transform the Cape from a second-tier refreshment station to axis of Empire was Lady Anne Barnard’s mentor and husband manqué, Henry Dundas.

  FEATHERS AND SWORDS

  Today, Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville, is a rather forgotten servant of Empire who rarely features in the higher imperial Pantheon of Clive, Pitt, Wellesley or Wolfe. Yet he was a pivotal architect of Britain’s colonial strategy as it made the transition from the First Empire of th
e Americas to the Second Empire of India. Raised within the same Edinburgh circles as Lady Anne, he worked his way up Auld Reekie’s political and legal ladder to become lord advocate, Scotland’s chief officer of government. But he was determined to get to Westminster and, in 1774, Dundas was duly sent by the voters of Edinburgshire (Midlothian) to represent them in the House of Commons. Wisely, he allied himself early on to Pitt the Younger and assumed ‘a powerful informal position as friend, advisor, and factotum’ as Pitt plotted his way into Downing Street. Dundas did not entertain many high-minded notions about public service: he was happy to cut the deals, do the dirty work and give Pitt the glory. It was an approach to Westminster life which would generate plentiful evidence for his impeachment in 1806 on charges of siphoning off public funds. But that was all in the future: in the 1780s and ’90s Dundas was beginning a brilliant government career which would culminate in his appointment as first lord of the Admiralty in 1804.

  The American War of Independence had been the subject of Dundas’s maiden speech in parliament in February 1775, and he had followed the consensus in supporting the Coercive Acts on Boston and urging the harshest possible reprisals against the rebels. The loss of America convinced him, however, of the pitfalls of any future involvement with territorial Empire. ‘The peopling of colonies would, he believed, create demand for autonomy, then independence, with disruption or loss of British commerce.’ The next phase of British imperialism, he argued, should be a trading rather than colonizing one, built on commercial outposts for the exploitation of resources.33 It would be an Empire focused as much around the navy as the army and intimately connected with Britain’s mercantile interests. ‘We must be merchants while we are soldiers … our trade depends upon a proper exertion of our maritime strength,’ as one diplomatic memo put it, ‘trade and maritime force depend on each other, and … the riches which are the true resources of this country depend on its commerce’.34