‘You keep the weak ones’
In 1658, six years after Jan van Riebeeck landed at the Cape, there were only 11 slaves in his settlement.
He wrote in his diary: “I don’t want to use our soldiers and sailors for agricultural work and sealcatching. It’s too expensive. The locals don’t want to work for us. It would be much better for slaves to be brought here.”
After numerous requests to the owners of the Dutch East India Company for slaves, they wrote to Van Riebeeck in March 1657 informing him they were sending him two slave ships.
He was told he could keep 80 or 100 slaves but the rest had to be sent to Batavia. “The best and strongest are to be sent, the weak ones, should there be any, you are to keep back for yourself.”
But it was the Amersfoort, a merchant ship never intended to carry slaves, that brought the first shipment of slaves to the Cape.
On January 23 1658, the Amersfoort, which had left the Netherlands in October the previous year, came across a Portuguese slaving vessel off the coast of West Africa. The Portuguese ship was old and rickety and the Dutch managed to board and capture it.
Stuck in the hold of this creaky slaving vessel were 500 male and female Angolans, being taken to be sold in the slave markets of Brazil.
The Amersfoort was a smaller vessel than the Portuguese slaver, and so only took 250 of the best slaves as booty.
The fate of the 250 slaves that were left on the Portuguese ship is unknown.
With its ‘prize’ of 250 slaves the Amersfoort arrived in Table Bay on March 28 1658, the day on which the Cape became a slave-trading colony.
As Van Riebeeck wrote, of the 250 slaves captured the number had “been reduced by death to 170, of whom many were very ill. The majority of the slaves are young boys and girls, who will be of little use to the next four or five years.”
An estimated 63,000 slaves were shipped to the Cape between 1652 and 1808, when the slave trade was abolished.