Two prisoners sentenced to death for sodomy

Claas Blanc and Rijkaert Jacobsz were two prisoners on Robben Island who had been accused of ‘mutually perpetrated sodomy’ according to trial records from the Cape Council of Justice in August 1735. Jacobsz was a sailor from Rotterdam who worked for the Dutch East India Company. He had been accused of sodomy in Batavia in 1713 at the age of eighteen. Due to insufficient evidence he was banished to Robben Island for twenty-five years. In 1715, Blanc, a Khoi-Khoi, from the south-west cape, was convicted of stock theft and sentenced to labour for fifty years on Robben Island. The trial was precipitated by the complaints laid against Jacobsz by a slave from Batavia, called Panaij van Boegies, in July 1735. Panaij reported that Jacobsz had made sexual advances towards him. After his complaint, Hermanus Munster of Steenwijk and Jacobus de Vogel of Rotterdam also submitted testimonies that they had seen Jacobsz and Blanc fornicating in April 1732. Following this, another prisoner, Augustijn Matthijsz, gave an eye witness account that corroborated the accusations against Jacobsz and Blanc. Faced with these eyewitness accounts; Blanc and Jacobsz confessed their guilt. They were sentenced to death on the 18th of August 1735. They were to be taken aboard a vessel and drowned in the sea. The death sentence was carried out the next day on Friday the 19th of August 1735.