Castle of Good Hope

The Castle of Good Hope has a ghost story, and it is not the one usually told about it. On the morning of Saturday 23 April 1729, four soldiers were hanged at the Cape for desertion. That same afternoon the governor who had signed their sentence, Pieter Gysbert van Noodt, was found dead. In 1784 a German writer named O. F. Mentzel published the version that still circulates: a condemned man turning on the ladder to summon van Noodt "before the judgment seat of the Omniscient God", and the governor dropping dead in his chair as the court came to report the execution. The Council of Justice records, which survive, tell it differently on almost every point, including where and when he died and how many men were hanged. This file follows the pentagonal Dutch East India Company fortress from the first stone of the Leerdam bastion in 1666, through the Donker Gat where Adam Tas and Etienne Barbier were chained, to the limpet mine that went off in the courtyard in 1988 — and keeps the archive and the gossip apart.

The Castle of Good Hope exists because the first one dissolved. Jan van Riebeeck's Fort de Goede Hoop, thrown up in 1652 out of clay and timber, was finished within a year and was unsatisfactory almost immediately: Cape rain washed the breastworks away faster than the garrison could rebuild them. The outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War in 1664 settled the argument, and the Dutch East India Company (VOC) approved a proper pentagonal fortress east of the settlement, on the model of Dutch bastioned design going back to Sebastiaan van Noijen in the 1550s. The site was cleared in 1665 and the first foundation stones of the Leerdam bastion were laid in early 1666. Progress was slow and uneven. By the end of 1671 Leerdam stood complete with a curtain wall on either side; Catzenellenbogen followed in 1672, Oranje and Nassau in 1673, and Buuren in 1674. The five bastions carry the titles of the Prince of Orange. The Castle was finished in 1679 — and Leerdam, the first one built, collapsed almost at once and had to be rebuilt. Simon van der Stel moved into the completed commander's quarters in 1680. The gate most visitors photograph is not the original one. Between 1682 and 1684 the entrance was shifted from the sea-facing curtain wall, between Buuren and Catzenellenbogen, to the landward wall between Leerdam and Buuren, where it stands today under the bell tower. The bell itself went up in 1697; one of the garrison's duties was simply to keep time, with two rondegangers watching an hour-glass and ringing the hours by hand. A cross wall was thrown across the old bailey after a VOC commissioner's recommendation in 1685, to reduce the area an enemy could fire into, and in 1703 the moat was deepened and carried right around the walls. Who built it is a question the Castle's own managers answer with unusual bluntness. The Castle Control Board's Integrated Conservation Management Plan states that "the Castle is not known for having been built by slaves and it is inaccurate to assign the Castle as a quintessential 'slave site'. However, slaves did play a role in its construction." Enslaved people were held at the old fort and contributed to some of the building work; once the Castle was finished they were mostly domestic servants inside it. The larger truth runs the other way round. The VOC's own slaves were housed in the Slave Lodge at the foot of the Company's Garden, and that labour pool was administered from the Castle; and the Council of Justice that judged enslaved people — often, the same plan concedes, unjustly — sat inside these walls. O. F. Mentzel, who lived at the Cape from 1733, recorded the daily timetable: labourers and enslaved workers began at six in the morning and stopped at six in the evening, while Company officials worked from nine to eleven and from two to four. The Castle's dungeon has a name, Donker Gat — dark hole — and Mentzel, who saw it in use, is the best guide to it. It was, he wrote, "a dungeon in which ordinarily none but prisoners condemned to death were confined". Prisoners were not merely locked in but put with their feet in the stocks or fastened to an iron chain, and stubborn ones were left there four to six weeks before the first hearing of their trial, on the reasoning that they would grow "weary of life under these conditions" and confess. Adam Tas, one of the burghers who secretly petitioned Holland against Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel, was held in it from March 1706 until May of the following year. So was Etienne Barbier, the deserter sergeant who on Sunday 1 March 1739 rode into Drakenstein with an armed rabble and nailed a seditious document to the church door; he hid for months, was taken, and in November 1739 was tried, condemned and executed, his body cut into portions and fixed to posts around the colony. The Donker Gat under the Nassau bastion is shown to visitors today as the torture chamber, and was archaeologically excavated in 1988. That is the setting for the one event the Castle is still famous for. In 1729 fourteen soldiers planned to desert the garrison and walk overland to the Portuguese possessions beyond Delagoa Bay. On the night of Saturday 2 April two of them were on guard; they left with their arms and helped the others rob the guardhouse of nine muskets and ammunition. One man could not get away. The remaining thirteen marched towards Stellenbosch and were fed at the farms of Andries Schutte and Izaak Nel. Governor Pieter Gysbert van Noodt instructed Pieter Lourens, landdrost of Stellenbosch, to raise a party of burghers; early on Monday 4 April they were overtaken at Hottentots Holland kloof. Only two surrendered. The rest kept up a running fight for three hours until their leader was shot and eight were captured; one more was taken days later and the last three walked back to the Castle and gave themselves up. Sentence was passed on Thursday 21 April 1729. Four were to hang, five to be flogged, branded and set to fifteen years' labour in chains, three to be flogged and set to ten years, and one to be flogged and set to three. The signatures at the foot of that sentence can still be read, and two of them belong to men who would later govern the Cape themselves: Hendrik Swellengrebel and Ryk Tulbagh. The four were hanged on the morning of Saturday 23 April. The only intervention by van Noodt that the records preserve is that he used his power of mitigation to let the bodies be buried instead of left exposed to the air and the birds. That same afternoon, between three and four o'clock, the governor was found dead in the pleasure house in the Company's Garden. A few hours earlier, apparently in perfect health, he had signed documents that still survive. His body was carried to the Castle late that evening, and on 30 April it was buried with state under the pavement of the church. The historian George McCall Theal, who worked from the court records, added the detail that gives the whole affair its temperature: "in the records there is no trace of regret shown by any one for his death." The Castle went on being a working military headquarters long after the VOC. It passed to the Union Defence Force after 1910 and served as a command headquarters during the Second World War. For much of the twentieth century, and through the apartheid years, it was — in the conservation plan's phrase — "one of the most accessible faces of the South African Defence Force", its five-pointed star reproduced in the SADF insignia, with protests, pickets and graffiti against conscription outside the walls and official celebrations inside them. On 19 August 1988, while an archaeological team was excavating the central well, a mini-limpet mine exploded in the courtyard. Nobody was hurt, and the action was later listed in the African National Congress's 1997 further submissions to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The conservation plan draws the conclusion: the Castle "has never fired, nor been fired upon in anger, except for the Limpet Mine incident." Its prisoners were not only Dutchmen. The Zulu king Cetshwayo was held here after his capture in the Ngome forest, as were Sekhukhune of the Pedi and Langalibalele of the Hlubi. In August 2016 a memorial to Krotoa, the Khoi interpreter buried at the Castle, was placed beside the chapel. The building was the first site in South Africa ever declared a National Monument, in 1936; under the National Heritage Resources Act it was reclassified as a former national monument and treated as a provincial heritage site from 2000; and on 14 October 2016 the South African Heritage Resources Agency declared it a National Heritage Site. The proclamation is worth quoting for its caution: it calls the Castle "arguably the oldest fortress and building in South Africa" and "currently the oldest functioning Dutch colonial building of the period".

The Castle of Good Hope is a working museum complex on the corner of Castle and Darling Streets, Cape Town 8001, a few minutes' walk from the Grand Parade and Cape Town station. It is managed by the Castle Control Board, a public entity reporting to the Department of Defence and Military Veterans, on +27 (0) 21 461 4673/6. The Castle's own visitor pages give opening hours of 09:00 to 16:00 and admission of R50 for adults, R25 for South African pensioners, R25 for children and R8 per learner for booked school groups, with prices stated as valid until further notice. Two details on the site disagree with each other and are worth confirming by telephone before travelling: the homepage says the last ticket is sold at 15:45 and that the Castle closes on Christmas Day and Workers' Day, while the visitor information page says the last ticket is sold at 15:15 and that it closes on Christmas Day and New Year's Day. Guided tours run seven days a week at 11:00, 12:00, 14:00, 15:00 and 16:00. The Castle describes itself as wheelchair- and visually-impaired-friendly, and as family- and pet-friendly, and advises comfortable shoes and weather-appropriate clothing; the courtyards are open and the Cape wind is not a figure of speech. There is no ghost tour and no night opening. If that is what you came for, this is not the place that sells it. What there is instead is a great deal of building. The Castle Military Museum covers the military history of the Cape; the William Fehr Collection holds paintings and decorative art of the early colonial Cape and is one of the more important public collections of the period; the Cape Heritage Museum, the Camissa Museum, the Adam Kok I Kitchen, the 500 Years Circumnavigation Museum in the vaults under the former governors' offices and an exhibition on the developing world in the Second World War are all inside the walls. The Donker Gat, the dungeon under the Nassau bastion, is shown as the torture chamber. The Krotoa memorial stands beside the chapel. A gift shop and an in-house restaurant operate in the front courtyard. A previous version of the Castle's visitor information, archived in 2019, added that the Key Ceremony ran Monday to Friday and that the cannon firing did not take place on Sundays, both weather dependent. Neither ceremony is listed on the current pages, so treat their times as unconfirmed and ask at the gate. One number gives a sense of scale, and of how quiet the place can be. The Castle Control Board's annual report for 2022/23 records 73,765 visitors of all kinds against a target of 120,000, and describes a pre-pandemic benchmark of 200,000 a year that it is still working to recover.