CHAPTER XXVIII - CORNELIS VAN QUAELBERG, COMMANDER, INSTALLED 27TH SEPTEMBER 1666, DISMISSED 18TH JUNE 1668: JACOB BORGHORST, COMMANDER, INSTALLED 18TH JUNE 1668, RETIRED 25TH MARCH 1670.

Summary

Of Commmander Van Quaelberg, previous to his arrival in South Africa, no information is given in the colonial archives, except that he was the head of the Company's factory at Masulipatam from 1652 to 1657, and that he had amassed considerable property. He was a younger and more active but in many respects a less estimable man than Mr. Wagenaar. It is impossible to read a dozen pages of the mass of documents bearing his signature without observing that he was intensely selfish, harsh towards his dependents, cringing towards his superiors, a man who studied no one's happiness but his own. He was a skilful naval commander, however, and must have possessed some special qualifications for the post he now filled, or the directors of the East India Company would not have selected him for it, though what these were cannot be ascertained from his writings. In his letters he was fond of calling attention to the mistakes of his predecessor, and of boasting of the different way in which he was managing affairs, but neither the supreme authorities nor the residents at the Cape looked upon that different way as a better way. To the burghers he was a tyrant, who acted on the principle that prosperous subjects are insolent subjects and therefore they should be kept poor. The freemen were not long in finding out that if Commander Wagenaar had personified King Log, Commander Van Quaelberg knew well the part of King Stork.