Stand on the beach at Bloubergstrand and you get the most famous view in South Africa: Table Mountain, flat-topped and magnificent, across the blue sweep of Table Bay. What few of the people photographing it realise is that they are standing on a battlefield, and that the reason Cape Town drinks tea, drives on the left and plays cricket can be traced back to a mob storming a prison in Paris.
This is the story of how the Cape became British. It involves a revolution, an exiled prince writing letters from Kew, a battle fought mostly by ships, another fought mostly by Scotsmen, and a Royal Navy commodore who was so pleased with himself afterwards that he sailed off to invade Argentina without asking anyone. It is, in other words, a very British story.
It All Started in Paris
In 1789 the French stormed the Bastille, and a few years later removed their king’s head for good measure. By 1793 revolutionary France was at war with just about everybody, including its oldest and favourite enemy, Britain. The British and the French had been fighting each other, on and off, for roughly seven hundred years by this point. It was less a rivalry than a hobby.
In the winter of 1795 the French revolutionary army marched into the Netherlands across the frozen rivers. The Dutch Republic collapsed, a French-backed Batavian Republic took its place, and the Dutch head of state, Prince William V of Orange, fled across the North Sea to England. The Cape had been run by the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, since 1652, so suddenly the most strategic halfway house on the route to India belonged, on paper, to France’s new best friend.
The British and the French had been fighting each other for about seven hundred years. It was less a rivalry than a hobby.
Letters from Kew
Britain could not allow the French anywhere near the route to India. Fortunately it had a useful house guest. From his new lodgings at Kew, the exiled Prince of Orange was persuaded to sign the Kew Letters, instructing Dutch governors to welcome British troops as friends and hand over their colonies for safekeeping. It was a perfect British arrangement: we are not invading you, we are looking after your colony for you. Whether they planned to give it back was a question nobody asked out loud. In June 1795 a British fleet under Admiral George Elphinstone and General James Craig sailed into Simon’s Bay, waved the prince’s letter, and politely asked to be let in.
The Cape authorities were in a muddle. The VOC was almost bankrupt, the garrison was small, and the colony was catching revolutionary fever. Out in the interior, the frontier farmers of Graaff-Reinet and Swellendam had just thrown out the Company’s officials and declared their own little republics, borrowing the language of liberty and the rights of the citizen straight from Paris. In Cape Town, some were for the Prince, some for the French, and most just wanted to know who would be buying their wine. The British were told, more or less, to go away.
The Battle of Muizenberg
The road from Simon’s Town squeezes between the mountains and the sea at Muizenberg, and that is where the Dutch made their stand. Today Muizenberg is famous for brightly coloured beach huts and learner surfers falling off boards. On 7 August 1795 it was rather less relaxing. British warships moved close inshore and pounded the Dutch positions with their guns, while redcoats and sailors advanced along the beach. The defenders, a mix of Dutch regulars, burgher militia and the Pandour corps of Khoikhoi soldiers, did not stay long. Their commander ordered a retreat with what many thought was unseemly haste, and the British took the pass. It was less a battle than a very loud negotiation. Local tradition has it that the suburb the defenders fell back through has been called Retreat ever since, which makes it probably the only suburb in Cape Town named after a military manoeuvre. Property agents prefer to say it means a peaceful getaway.
The two sides spent several weeks glaring at each other across the Cape Flats until a second British fleet arrived with thousands more troops. After one more skirmish at Wynberg, the Cape surrendered on 16 September 1795 at a house called Rustenburg in Rondebosch, and the British, as usual, made themselves at home.
Thanks, We’ll Have It Back Now
And then, astonishingly, they gave it back. Under the Peace of Amiens in 1802 Britain and France agreed to stop fighting for a while, and the Cape was returned to the Dutch, now the Batavian Republic. For three short years the colony got a taste of revolutionary-era government. Governor Jan Willem Janssens and Commissioner-General Jacob de Mist brought Enlightenment ideas straight from Europe: religious tolerance, civil marriage and school reform. It did not last. War resumed in 1803, Napoleon was now in charge in Paris, and Britain decided it wanted the Cape back. Permanently, this time.
The Peace of Amiens lasted about as long as most Anglo-French treaties: barely long enough to dry the ink.
The Battle of Blaauwberg
In January 1806 a British fleet of more than sixty ships appeared off the West Coast, carrying around 6,000 soldiers under General David Baird, with the navy under Commodore Home Popham. The landing at Melkbosstrand began badly: heavy surf overturned a boat and dozens of Highlanders drowned before a shot was fired.
On 8 January 1806, on the slopes of the Blaauwberg hills, they met Janssens’ army. It was one of the most gloriously mixed forces ever assembled in Africa: Dutch regulars, burgher militia, Khoikhoi Pandours, German mercenaries from the principality of Waldeck, Javanese artillerymen, and French sailors and marines whose ship had been wrecked in Table Bay a few months earlier. Revolutionary France, in other words, was finally there in person, and it had arrived by shipwreck.
It did not go well for them. The German mercenaries fled almost immediately. The Highland Brigade, bagpipes playing, launched a bayonet charge, and the defending line broke. The French sailors and the Pandours fought on bravely while the rest retreated. The whole thing was over in a few hours. Janssens withdrew into the mountains, Cape Town surrendered on 10 January, and the agreement was signed under the old milkwood on Treaty Road in Woodstock, now known as the Treaty Tree, which I wrote about in If This Tree Could Talk.
Britain Colonises Everything
Having taken the Cape, the British did what came naturally to them. Commodore Popham, flushed with success and with a fleet sitting idle, decided entirely on his own initiative to sail across the South Atlantic and invade Buenos Aires. He captured it briefly, was thrown out by the locals, and went home to a court martial and a reprimand.
Britain was, after all, extremely enthusiastic about other people’s land. The historian Stuart Laycock once calculated that British forces have at some point invaded or fought in the territory of all but about 22 of the world’s countries. The Cape, with its harbour, its fresh water and its position halfway to India, never stood a chance. In 1814 the deal was made official, with Britain paying the Netherlands a large sum of money as part of a wider settlement. Nobody, of course, asked the people who actually lived here. For the Khoikhoi, the enslaved, and the frontier farmers alike, one set of colonial masters had simply been exchanged for another, and the consequences, from the abolition of slavery to the Great Trek and the Anglo-Boer War, would shape South Africa for the next two hundred years.
Visiting Today
At Muizenberg, look out for Het Posthuys on the Main Road, a little thatched VOC lookout post that watched the British fleet arrive, then reward yourself with a coffee and a look at the beach huts. At Blouberg, walk up into the Blaauwberg Conservation Area, look across the fynbos to the most famous view of Table Mountain, and imagine the Highlanders coming up the slope. On my Cape Peninsula and West Coast tours I like to tell the story where it happened. It is the only place I know where you can explain the French Revolution while standing in the sand.