Groot Constantia Trail #6: The ‘Forgotten’ Years (Part 2)
This is the 6th cache of a 12-cache trail which will take you around this beautiful historic vineyard passing by most of its key features along the way.
The cache, a small, screw-topped dispensing pot, is hidden in a shady spot overlooking the dam close to Hoop op Constantia which provides irrigation water for the estate.
Continued from Part 1 . . .
At the start, Colijn effectively controlled both Constantia vineyards, and by 1736 his wine was so sought after that he asked the VOC for a price increase. Pointing out that he could sell his red wine privately for 130 rixdollars per leaguer, he requested 100 (up from 80) in return for which he was prepared to continue supplying the white for 50, despite being paid up to 80 privately.
After visiting the Cape in 1741, VOC official Otto Mentzel (later chief of police in Frankfurt, Germany) wrote that Constantia consisted of ‘two vineyards and two homesteads, the older one of which was erected by Governor Simon van der Stel, and the other in better architectural taste by a later owner, a burgher… Both produce similar red and white wine; only connoisseurs can distinguish some difference in flavour.’
So, who exactly was this ‘burgher’ Colijn who made such highly sought-after wine and maybe had better architectural taste than Van der Stel?
His father was the Netherlands-born (circa 1650) Bastiaan Colijn; his mother was dismissed by at least one genealogist during the Apartheid era as ‘onbekend’ (unknown). However, this was completely incorrect.
She was Maria Everts, generally known as Swarte (black) Maria Everts, and the Cape-born (c.1663) daughter of Evert and Anna, slaves brought to the Cape from Guinea, West Africa, in 1658. This of course was not the ethnic background to be publicised during the height of Afrikaner nationalism for a fairly prominent ‘white’ Afrikaner family!
Enslaved until 1671, when she was about 8, she was baptised on 29 March 1676 and on 5 November 1679 (aged 11!) married a fellow ‘free black’, Jackie Joy van Angola. The couple separated only 8 months later (after he accused her of trying to poison him) but this union at least partly explains why she never married Bastiaan Colijn. Named as his ‘concubine’ from 1685 onwards, she had 4 children with him: Johannes, Johanna, Maria and Evert.
While the Opgaafrolle reveal that Bastiaan Colijn’s possessions were not much more than the flintlock, sword and pistol carried by all vrijburghers, Everts became an exceptionally wealthy woman in her own right. When she died during the 1713 smallpox epidemic, her property included 60 morgen ‘aghter de Kloof in Tafel Valley na de seestrand toe’ (‘behind the Kloof in Table Valley to the sea shore’ - present-day Camps Bay), the De Mosselbanks Rivier farm in Durbanville, and Clavervalleij near Darling, as well as 10 slaves overseen by a white knecht (servant) in her employ.
In her will, dated 8 June 1713, she named her 6 children and Bastiaan Colijn as equal co-heirs (including two older children not fathered by him, namely Jacobus Willemsz Ten Damme, baptised in 1679, and Cornelia Everina Kraak, born in 1682). After Ten Damme also died of smallpox, his share of his mother’s estate was further sub-divided between his siblings and step-father, with 300 sheep, a wagon with 10 oxen, and a slave named Alexander van Madagascar specifically bequeathed to Johannes Colijn.
