Town The copyright of this thesis rests with the University of Cape Town. No quotation from it or information derivedCape from it is to be published without full acknowledgement of theof source. The thesis is to be used for private study or non-commercial research purposes only. University Council of (in)Justice: Crime, Status, Punishment and the Decision-Makers in the 1730s Cape Justice System Karl J. Bergemann (BRGKAR011) A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Master of Arts in Historical StudiesTown Faculty of the Humanities University of Cape Town 2011 Cape of Plagiarism Declaration: This work has not been submitted in whole, or in part, for the award of any degree. It is my own work. Each significant contribution to, and quotation in, this dissertation from the work, or works, of others has been attributed and has been cited and referenced. University Signature: Date: ABSTRACT Considerable attention has been paid to the social history at the Cape during the reign of the VOC and although many historians have made use of the criminal records of the Council of Justice, there are very few works that concentrate on these documents in any form of entirety. This dissertation provides a quantitative analysis of various fields drawn directly from the Cape’s criminal records of the 1730s, from which a database was created. This investigation highlights hypotheses of unequal treatment, separates out various groups according to their social status and investigates the differences in crimes and punishment methods over this period. It outlines correlational trends between status and crime as well as status and punishment and based on these findings sets out to investigate possibilities for why these trendsTown arise. The dissertation examines the role players in the criminal procedure, most notably the Independent Fiscals, charged with overseeing all criminalCape investigations at the Cape, by observing extrinsic and intrinsic motivations that played roles in the decisions these men made. It then goes on to investigate punishment methods,of the role of punishment and the implementation of different punishments based on certain crimes. This section of the dissertation entertains foreign ideals, notably European influences and the comparison of other VOC outposts, especially Batavia. The dissertation also provides case studies of two slave uprisings towards the end of the decade to solidify some of the arguments made throughout its investigation. It then concludes with suggestionsUniversity for future research endeavours. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the National Research Foundation (NRF) as well as the University of Cape Town for bursary allocations that helped with the funding of this Masters dissertation, without which it could not have been accomplished. My sincere gratitude goes towards my supervisor, Prof. Nigel Worden, for his continual mentoring support and immeasurable patience. Thank you for the considerable time and effort you have put into making this work a reality. Lastly, I wish to thank my parents, family and friends for any support and encouragement any of them has given me over the years, it is and always will be appreciated.Town Cape of University LIST OF TABLES Item Page Crime Frequency Table 12 Status Frequency Table 17 Punishment Frequency Table Town21 Status/Crime Correlation 25 Status/Punishment Correlation Cape 29 Murder Punishments: Europeans/Burghers of 68 Murder Punishments: Slaves/Khoi 69 University CONTENTS Abstract Acknowledgements List of Tables Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Analysing the Council of Justice Criminal Records: 1730-9Town 9 Chapter 3: The Independent Fiscals: Juridical power in the hands of the few 33 Chapter 4: Punishing the Rabble: Peculiarities in criminalCape punishment at the Cape 53 Chapter 5: Quelling Slave Revolt: Van den Henghelof and Needer in the late 1730s 89 Chapter 6: Conclusion and Suggestions 110 Bibliography 113 University Please Note: The 1730s Criminal Database is contained on a Disk on the inside cover of the dissertation. Town Cape of University 1 Chapter 1 Introduction On Thursday 5 January, 1730, Jan De La Fontaine, accompanied by the members of council, including Adriaan van Kervel, Johannes Thobias Rhenius, Nicolaas Heyning, Hendrik Swellengrebel, Christoffel Brand, Jacobus Moller and Ryk Tulbagh as well as the three burgerraaden (burgher councilors), Johannes Blankenburgh, Jan de With and Johannes Cruywagen, sat down to the first meeting of the Council of Justice for the decade. This would be the first of many cases presented to the council in the period 1730-9 and it seems fitting that the case they were hearing on that day was of the slave Moses van Batavia. He was accused of assaulting and murdering a fellow slave, Alexander, and was beingTown recommended for the death penalty by the official that presented his case. This introductory sitting of the council was indicative of what would be a decade dotted with both periods of calm and turmoil in the realm of crime and punishment at the Cape. Cape For the most part criminal records from the periodof of VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or Dutch East India Company) rule at the Cape have been used to gain understanding of the social and cultural values that marked both individuals and groups in the colony. Cape VOC historiography in general has paid much attention to the notion of slave identity and the role of contact between settlers and the indigenous people of the Cape, the Khoi and San. Key examples of such writingUniversity come from Ross1, Armstrong 2, Worden3 and Shell4 who generated authoritative works on slavery at the Cape, especially in and around the 1980s and 1990s concentrating primarily on the master-slave relationship and the plight of the slave. Well known works on contact between settlers and the Cape’s indigenous population, notably a ‘newer’ 1 See Ross, R. Cape Of Torments: Slavery and Resistance in South Africa (London, 1983). 2 See Armstrong, J. ‘The slaves, 1652-1795’ in Elphick, R. and Giliomee, H. (eds.), The shaping of South African Society (Cape Town, 1979), pp. 75-115. 3 See, for example, Worden, N. Slavery in Dutch South Africa (Cambridge, 1985) or, a much later contribution with a different style and translations of original criminal records, Worden, N. & Groeneweld, G. Trials of Slavery (Van Riebeeck Society, Cape Town, 2005). 4 See Shell, R. Children of Bondage: A Social History of the Slave Society at the Cape of Good Hope,1652-1838 (Johannesburg, 1994). 2 (though, of course, not exclusively newer, it had been raised before) theme in Cape VOC historiography include those by Newton-King5, Penn6 and Elphick7, who uncovered vast areas of information in this field. More recently progress has been made in uncovering issues such as gender roles, identity formation and its maintenance as well as a greater appreciation of the Cape’s underclasses. A result of this was bringing groups who had previously received little attention in Cape VOC historiography into the greater understanding of the historian, groups such as soldiers and sailors, artisans, convicts and exiles – people who, as Worden puts it, ‘fell between the cracks of the categories that historians had previously focused on’.8 The Council of Justice criminal records invariably aided these works in a number of ways. Many works have tended to follow the micronarrative form, relying on specificTown events and providing rich detail of both individuals and groups. However, most works have tended to focus primarily on these specifics, creating what Worden terms ‘a kind of “single category” kind of history’.9 They center on the actions of individuals, or of certainCape groups, and therefore have the tendency of creating a narrow or contained vision of that individual or group’s role in society or the ‘story’ that one can draw from the records, emphasizingof specific events. At times this works very well. Nigel Penn’s work on the ‘characters’ of the eighteenth century, for example, is a perfect testament to the efficacy of these narratives, since they suited what he was trying to do, namely highlight these individuals as unique.10 Some works focus onUniversity specific groups in society, such as Alexander’s investigation into the effect of crime within the Chinese community at the Cape.11 Worden and Penn have recently highlighted the plight of soldiers and sailors at the Cape, notably around the middle of the 5 See Newton-King, S. Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760-1803 (Cambridge, 1999). 6 See Penn, N. The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century (Cape Town, 2005). 7 See Elphick, R. Kraal and Castle Khoikhoi and the Founding of White South Africa (New Haven, 1977). 8 Worden, N. ‘Introduction’ in Worden, N (ed.), Contingent Lives: Social Identity and Material Culture in the VOC World (University of Cape Town, 2007), p. x. 9 Ibid, p. x. 10 Penn, N. Rogues, Rebels and Runaways: Eighteenth Century Cape Characters (Cape Town, 1999). 11 Alexander, A. ‘Crime and the Chinese Community in VOC Cape Town’ in Historical Approaches 2 (2003), pp. 1- 15. 3 eighteenth century.12 Some works have been particularly successful at extrapolating vital information about people and their roles in society through close investigations of certain crimes. Newton-King has been enterprising in this way through her investigation of sodomy trials at the Cape and her piecing together of social interactions from these.13 On the opposite end of this historiographical technique, one finds works such as Heese’s, which veer away from the specific and offer a broad and primarily quantitative perspective.14 His work is a compilation of court cases in the period, with a large time-frame spanning most of the VOC’s occupation of the Cape. This technique does well to highlight broader and long-range trends but, unlike works in the micronarrative or explanatory techniques, does little to explain why it is one sees such trends or how they impacted society and, importantly, focuses only on specific records from the period.