Page 8 - Bulletin 14 2010

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Resolutions . . . the mine at the Witteboomen . . . without the least sign of any
lode . . . agreed to send the Mine-Overseer Frederik Math van Werlinghof
with the other miners to Batavia . . . for employment on the west coast of
Sumatra . . . 9

Thus ended in failure the Cape’s first true mining venture.

We now turn to the Steenberg and the area today known as Silvermine. The 1:50 000 survey

map of the area records a ‘Silvermyn 1687’ immediately to the west of the Ou Kaapse Weg,

an ‘Ou Mynskag’ close to the first but on the other side of the Ou Kaapse Weg, while a third
‘Old Mine Shaft’ is noted some 800 m to the east of the second shaft. These mark the site of

the Cape’s second true mining venture.

In 1687 the Governor of the Cape, Simon van der Stel, was travelling towards Yselstein (later

to be known Simon’s Town) when, somewhere in the vicinity of present-day Llandudno, he
was astonished to come across a group of men armed with muskets. It turned out that they

were workers at the ‘mines at the Steenbergen’ but, they informed him, they were not out
hunting, as it would appear, but were actually on Company business trying to recapture some

runaway slaves who had broken into their house at the “mine”!

As we have seen above there are actually three mining excavations in the area: the signed

vertical shaft some 4 m by 3 m and 16 m deep adjoining the road; across the Ou Kaapse Weg
and some 50 m from it an horizontal adit some 20 m in length, partially flooded during the

winter months and inhabited by a number of bats when visited by the author some time ago;

finally, some distance across the valley a second horizontal adit some 15 m in length. Both
these adits are high enough to be entered with little more than a stoop; like the vertical shaft

neither shows evidence of any occurrences of metallic veins or ore deposits. (Figs. 1.1 – 1.3.)

The most interesting description of this mine comes not from a contemporary visitor to the

Cape but from one Johann Wilhelm Vogel, an employee of the Dutch East India Company,
who visited the Cape in March 1688, not all that long after the mining operations had ceased:

nd
On the 22 [of March 1688] I went ashore, meeting there a miner, by the
name of Thomas Creutzig, who told me that he was working as Foreman at a
mine a few hours inland, and also asked me to be so good as to visit it. I had