Jan van Riebeeck

Properties2
tagsperson, dutch, colonial, voc, diplomat, cape-colony
aliasesJan Anthoniszoon van Riebeeck, Van Riebeeck, Secretaris Van Riebeeck, Stichter van Hollandsch-Zuid-Afrika, Founder of the Cape Colony

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Jan Anthoniszoon van Riebeeck (1619–1677) was a Dutch colonial administrator who served the VOC as onderchirurgijn (junior surgeon), secretaris of the High Government at Batavia, and — most famously — the “Stichter van Hollandsch-Zuid-Afrika” (founder of Dutch South Africa) at the Cape from 1652. His connection with Atjeh came in 1641–1642, when, as a twenty-three-year-old secretary, he accompanied Commissaris Pieter Soury on the embassy to Atjeh following the death of Sultan Iskander Tsani. The Atjeh mission was Van Riebeeck’s diplomatic apprenticeship and earned him promotion to Onderkoopman, the rank with which he would shortly be selected to command the Cape settlement.

Early life and Company service

A young orphan of good family, Van Riebeeck served a three-year apprenticeship with a surgeon, passed his examination — which consisted of grinding three irons into lancets, blood-letting, demonstrating sufficient knowledge of anatomy and performing a dissection on a corpse — and entered the service of the Oost-Indische Compagnie in 1639 at the age of twenty for the Kamer (chamber) of Delft. He sailed in April of that year aboard the Hof van Holland, with 250 souls on board, on a voyage that was nearly his death: the ship strayed to “Serra Leona of Afrika’s Westkust” — Sierra Leone on the West African coast, “het graf der blanken” (the grave of the whites) — where the shipwrecked crew waited almost eight months in the fever country before being relieved, arriving at Batavia only at the end of July 1640.

There Van Riebeeck exchanged the lancet for the quill, learning at the Generale Secretarie to write in “de tale Kanaäns” — the “language of Canaan,” the formal official style of Company despatches — without suspecting that he would one day die as Secretaris der Hooge Regeering.

The Atjeh embassy of 1641

By 1642 — the text has 1641 for the departure — the twenty-three-year-old was already judged experienced enough to accompany Commissaris Pieter Soury to Atjeh as Secretaris. Atjeh, the previous year, had cooperated with Djohor and the Company to drive the Portuguese from Malakka. Its Sultan had died; the Rijksgrooten had chosen his widow as successor; the same widow, now about forty years old, had wished to take a Dutchman as prince-consort — a wish over which both the Rijksgrooten and the High Government at Batavia had vetoed. The embassy’s charge was to congratulate the new Sultana on behalf of the Company and to deliver the late Sultan’s outstanding orders, including a parcel of diamonds.

The full account of the embassy is given under Pieter Soury’s mission to Atjeh (1641). For Van Riebeeck personally the most striking moments were the great audience of 1 July 1641 (for the formal hand-over of the Gouverneur-Generaal’s missive), the Sultana’s gift to the legation of Atjehsche feestjassen — Atjeh ceremonial robes — with three golden rings on the collar, “zooals nog nimmer tevoren aan een ambassade was gezonden,” and his own quiet satisfaction that his family coat of arms already bore three golden rings, which now reappeared on his Atjeh court robe. The Dutchmen sat shoeless in Atjeh dress chewing sirih (betel) “tot eer en voordeel van de Edele Compagnie” — to the honour and profit of the Honourable Company.

During the jewel-sale negotiations that followed, Van Riebeeck in his secretarial capacity “bracht… menig geschenk te hunnen huize” — brought many a gift to the houses of the Orangkaja’s — to soften the great officers toward permitting the purchase, since the Sultana was not liable for her late husband’s order and the treasury could not authorise the 15,000 tayl (= 5,000 guilders) required. Godee Molsbergen notes that this lesson — diplomatic flexibility in native dress — was one Riebeeck would carry to the Cape, where he later “al dansend en springend smerige Hottentotten aan zijn hart zou drukken en er zijn jas mee bederven” (dancing and leaping would press filthy Hottentots to his heart and ruin his coat with them).

Promotion and return to Batavia

On 26 November 1641 Soury and his secretary sailed from Atjeh via Malakka back to Batavia. Van Riebeeck took up his place again on the General Secretariat as Assistent, but only for a few months: the Atjeh journey brought him promotion to Onderkoopman. From there his career moved toward the project that would make his name — the founding of the Cape refreshment station in 1652.

Significance

For Atjeh the importance of Van Riebeeck lies in his role as eyewitness and recorder of the Soury embassy of 1641 — one of the most detailed surviving European accounts of the Atjeh court in the year of Iskander Tsani’s death and the accession of the Sultana. For the broader VOC story he is the connecting figure between the great sultanate of northern Sumatra and the founding of European South Africa, a single career arc that frames the global reach of the seventeenth-century Company.

See Also

Source

Tijdens de O.I. Compagnie, by Dr. E. C. Godee Molsbergen, Oud-Hoogleeraar, Landsarchivaris te Batavia (Amsterdam: N.V. Swets & Zeitlinger Boekhandel en Uitgevers Mij., 1932), chapters X–XII, pp. 33–47 of the numbered-letter sequence. On Van Riebeeck’s later South-African career and the connection with the Atjeh mission, cf. E. C. Godee Molsbergen, Jan van Riebeeck (1912).

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