biography
| name: |
Riebeeck, Jan Antonisz. van
|
pronunciation:
[van reebayk]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1619–77)
|
| biography:
| Dutch surgeon and colonial administrator, born in Culemborg, SC Netherlands. He worked for the VOC (United East India Company), travelling to Batavia in 1639. He was dismissed for private trading in 1648 and set himself up as a merchant in Amsterdam, travelling to the West Indies and Greenland. In 1651 he proposed to the board of the VOC (Heren XVII) that the Cape of Good Hope would be a better staging post on the way to the Indies than St Helena. They agreed, and sent him to the Cape, where in 1652 he built a fort and founded Cape Town and, within the space of ten years, the future Cape Colony. In 1662 he became governor of Malacca and a member of the Council of Justice, and in 1665 secretary of the Council of the Indies. |
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