Page 68 - Bulletin 14 2010

64

So, by the 1780s / 90s, towards the close of DEIC rule at the Cape, the route of the Main Road
from Cape Town to Simon’s Town was well-established. Elsewhere in the southern part of the

Peninsula the mountains were crossed by a number of farm roads and tracks.

The myth and its refutation

Historian Jose Burman was puzzled by stories of an Ou Kaapse Weg when he heard about them

in the early 1950s. His attempt to find the road at that time failed. Eventually he traced the origins
of all the stories to Wallace’s article and with this in hand, some five years later, circa 1958, (and

perhaps encouraged by The Wanderer’s 1957 article), was able to find the remains of his Ou Pad.
But he was not convinced by Wallace’s assertion that this had been the sole route for ox-teams

dragging heavy wagons to Simon’s Bay from the 1740s to the 1780s. So he examined Wallace’s

sources as well as his interpretations of them. His main findings follow, amplified by quotations
(in boxes) and maps that we have drawn from some of the original sources.

 Daniel Heyns, 1699: Burman studied his original account in Dutch and compared it with
the English translation in Wallace’s article and found a significant error: the statement

that the van der Stel party, in travelling southwards, came to the “end of the said valley”
should have read “end of the sand vallei.” “Sand Vallei” was the name given at that time

to the vlei at Muizenberg (today’s Sandvlei). The account also said that they travelled
along the “foot of the very steep mountains.” This showed clearly that van der Stel and

his party had not gone over the mountains but had instead journeyed along the coast

towards Fish Hoek and Glencairn.

 Anders Sparrman, 1772: he lived with a family in Simon’s Town for the three winter

months, from May to August, and travelled several times to Cape Town. He described the
hazards of the road along shores of Simon’s Bay in some detail but not along the rest of

his route. However, he drew a map of his travels at the Cape and, on an inset of the Cape
Peninsula, showed only one road: it runs along the coast from Simon’s Baay to

Muysenberg, and then heads north for Taffel Baay, with a branch leading westward to