Amersfoort brings enslaved Angolans to the Cape

On 28 March 1658 the VOC ship Amersfoort anchored in Table Bay after intercepting a Portuguese vessel carrying captives from the Angolan coast toward Brazil. The Amersfoort took 250 people as a prize. Van Riebeeck's journal recorded 174 survivors at the Cape, many of them young people and many in poor health after the voyage; later summaries give 170. The survivors were brought ashore for recovery, and Company officials decided that some should remain at the Cape while others were sent onward to Batavia. Their movement was controlled by the VOC, and their labour and sale were treated as Company property.

The arrival was followed within weeks by plans for a school for enslaved children and by the movement of Company-owned enslaved people into Corenhoop. The surviving record documents the Company's decisions, counts and descriptions of health and age far more fully than the captives' names, languages, prior communities or experiences during the seizure and voyage.

Significance

This was the first large documented arrival of enslaved people at the settlement and the first major addition to a population that had already included smaller numbers of enslaved people. It connected Cape labour demand to Atlantic slave raiding and to the VOC's redistribution of captives between its possessions.