Other Authoresses

THAT WHICH HATH BEEN : A Tale of Old Cape Town (1913)

THERE is little to be said in favour of historical notes and explanations in connection with a romance. But perhaps that little may be urged when the hero of the romance is comparatively unknown to English readers, though his name is familiar to every South African child—whether as the ambitious schemer that Adam Tas, Peter Kolbe and Dr. Theal have depicted for us, or as the strong man working under adverse circumstances for the good of his country, if we see him with the eyes of that wise and learned old Dutch scholar Hendrik Leibbrandt, for more than thirty years Keeper of the Archives of the Cape of Good Hope. 

Willem Adriaan van der Stel came of a family which had served the Dutch East India Company in its distant possessions for several generations. His father was born in Mauritius in 1639, and was the son of Captain Adriaan van der Stel who took up his appointment as Commander of the island in that year. Simon van der Stel in his turn saw many years of service in the East Indies before his appoint-ment in 1679 as Commander of the Cape of Good Hope—a post which during his term of office was raised to a Governorship in recognition of his services to the Company. Simon's wife, Johanna Jacoba Six, was a daughter of Willem Six and his wife Catarina Hinlopen—the Sixes came of an old and well-known Amsterdam family, distinguished by their friendship for Rembrandt. Apparently she never lived at the Cape, though she had accompanied her husband to Batavia, where their five sons, Adriaan, Willem Adriaan, Hendrik (who died young), Cornelis and Frans, and their daughter Catarina were born. 

In 1699 Simon van der Stel was succeeded as Councillor-Extra-ordinary of India and Governor of the Cape of Good Hope by his son, Willem Adriaan, who was accompanied to the Cape by his wife Marie de Haase and their children. For the first few years of his administration he carried out his policy of the expansion of the country without hindrance—if without much sympathy from the Company, which was less interested in the development of the Cape than in its success as a provision-station for ships, especially for the great fleets of the Company which touched at Table Bay twice a year, on their way to and from the East.