In the first two decades the farmers struggled to survive because the prices the Company fixed for their produce were far too low. Van Riebeeck conceded in a letter in 1661 that the free burghers could scarcely subsist on what they were paid for cultivating their wheat. Three years later, the government decided to distribute Sunday church collections and some petty fines to poor burghers burdened with ‘naked children, and [who] from simple poverty must sleep each night beside the livestock in the stable on a little straw and the naked earth’.
Although the government intermittently banned the cattle trade, its reach was not nearly far enough to stamp it out. It also could do little if burghers grazed their cattle beyond the limits of their plots. Van Riebeeck left the Cape in 1662 understanding that his original idea of an intensive settlement had failed. A large area he once thought could provide subsistence for thousands of families was considered fully occupied after a mere fifteen farms had been parcelled out.
The burghers in the town in Table Bay had better opportunities than the farmers working as carpenters, bricklayers, smiths and keepers of taverns. Most kept boarding houses, and they frequently circumvented the restrictions on selling Cape merchandise to passing sailors and on buying European goods. More than one Company official expressed the desire to rid the Cape of the ‘scum’ and called taverns the ‘mother of all scandalous practices’. The farming burgher became a special kind of burgher who, unlike his counterpart in the town, worked for something more than his immediate interests. These men had, in their own words, become ‘defenders of the land’ against internal enemies, along with being the indispensable producers of food.
