The original envelope of a letter sent to Jan van Riebeeck in October 1658 has been saved from auction.
|||Cape Town - In October 1658 Jan van Riebeeck, the founder of the Cape colony, received a letter from someone in Saldanha thanking him for supplies which included a barrel of buttermilk and 680 eggs.
Following intervention by the VOC Foundation and the Cape Archives, the original envelope of the letter written by Jakob Sijms was saved from being auctioned in London on Wednesday. The envelope was valued at R52 000 to R65 000.
It was among several Dutch East India (VOC) documents withdrawn from going under the hammer at Spink and Son’s auction after it was established the items had been stolen from the Cape Archives, foundation spokesman Piet Westra said on Thursday.
“The Dutch East India archives is a Unesco-declared heritage and nothing from it can be sold. The sale was stopped a day before the auction and they (Spink and Son) just had to,” he said when asked if the auctioneers had surrendered the envelope.
Westra said arrangements were being made to have it and other historical documents belonging to the Cape Archives returned to Cape Town.
VOC Foundation secretary Dan Sleigh said the envelope had been seized by police in London.
“The words on the envelope were written by Jakob Sijms who was the secretary of the captain of the ship West Friesland. He wrote it on 24 October 1658 to thank Jan Van Riebeeck for provisions they had received. The provisions were vegetables, live sheep, a barrel of buttercream and 680 eggs,” Sleigh said.
It was ironic because, had it not been saved from being auctioned, the envelope would have been sold on Wednesday, March 20 - the same day on which the Dutch East India Company had been founded, he said.
“There were also other historical items in the auction catalogue including stamps and about 15 envelopes addressed to commanders or governors of the Dutch East India Company. There were about 30 stamps from the British period. The items are very rare and worth thousands,” said Sleigh.
He said Cape Archives head Yolanda Hogg had approached Sports and Cultural Affairs MEC Ivan Meyer for assistance and Meyer had arranged for lawyers who in turn had Spink and Son remove the items from its auction catalogue.
“They (the lawyers) also ensured that we reserve the right to examine other items on the catalogue - items also possibly stolen years ago from the archives by someone named Hutchinson,” said Sleigh.
He said Hutchinson was a Franschhoek man in whose flat items stolen from the archives were found and who had received a seven-year jail sentence in 1988.
aziz.hartley@inl.co.za
Cape Times