The view was not sufficient to tempt Lady Anne Barnard who was not as desperate for a roof over her head as was poor Penny. She went out to inspect the area when the homestead was suggested as a possible home for her and Andrew. She reported to Henry Dundas:

“I rode round to Camps Bay, the road to which is finer than any scene I ever saw in my life....that is to say fine from mountains and sea.”

Dassies and wild honey would not have suited her aristocratic palate and she decided that Paradise, in Newlands ( A suburb of Cape Town) would be “more snug”. Robertson was not well and wanted to transfer the property to someone else but the Governor did not want the property to pass into another’s hands. Andrew Barnard wrote to the Lord Macartney on 10 March 1800 .  Camps Bay apartments

At the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, Camps Bay was regarded as a source of firewood, a stretch of dangerous coastline, and an isolated spot where a few lonely soldiers kept watch. It was uninhabited mountainous terrain with trees, fynbos, baboons, buck and birds, fringed by a bay. The dangers of its coast had been reinforced by the wrecking of the Portuguese slave ship, the San José on the rocks at Oudekraal beyond Camps Bay on 27 December 1794. There were five hundred unfortunate slaves tethered under hatches, over two hundred of whom drowned helplessly inside the doomed ship.

William Duckitt, a trained agriculturalist, was sent out to the Cape by the Governor, Sir George Yonge, to improve farming practices. Yonge took him out to see Camps Bay soon after his arrival in 1800 but Duckitt was not impressed with its agricultural potential. He thought that Camps Bay was too exposed and had too little timber although at a pinch it could possibly produce rye or barley36. (Years later he was to buy ‘Groote Post’, Lord Charles Somerset’s shooting lodge near Mamr, a suburb of Cape Town, and farm there himself.) In 1802 with the Treaty of Amiens, Britain and France made peace. The Cape was returned to Holland,37 the defence works in excellent condition, and the British returned home. Commissioner-General De Mist in a memorandum to the VOC in 1802 reported pragmatically that:

“As long as the maritime power of our neighbours, England and France continues to be so much greater than our own, a state of affairs which we may feel fairly certain is bound to exist for a good many years... All the lines and earthworks further inland seem to us superfluous, useless and far too expensive to maintain, while for a systematic defence there are not half the lines necessary... The money has unfortunately been expended on them, but it may be possible to conserve them by spending a small annual sum in keeping them in repair.”

The treaty of Amiens did not last long. The following year war between France and England broke out once more. The earthworks no longer seemed so superfluous. General Janssens was informed that the batteries at Camps Bay could be put in a state of readiness for very little expense. Muir40 says that another battery was erected in Camps Bay overlooking the beach and that this may be the foundations of the Round House, but Seeman in her research has found no record of another battery being erected here. Napoleon seemed unstoppable and European kingdoms were falling to him one by one. Rumours reached England that the French were eyeing the Cape, that Napoleon had dispatched troops there and that a British ship had chased a French ship ashore at Cape Town. The Cape was of vital importance to Britain’s control of the seas, so a squadron of sixty -three ships was despatched to prevent a French takeover. The British ships anchored between Blaauwberg( A suburb of Cape Town) and Robben Island on 4 January 1805 and some troops were landed next day in Losperg’s Bay (Melkbosstrand) to very little resistance. The Dutch troops fired valiantly, but their aim could not have been good because no one was killed. The only fatalities were the unfortunate occupants of a boat that capsized.

Subsequently there was a battle on Blaauwberg beach( A suburb of Cape Town) but the German Waldeck mercenaries in the service of the Dutch were unwilling to risk their lives for the pay, and despite appeals by General Janssens, they took to their heels in a panic that spread like wildfire to the 22nd Dutch Infantry Battalion. The sight of the Highlanders, kilts flying and bayonets drawn, was just too much for a brave man to endure.41 The French marines fought nobly but were cut off from their forces by the advancing British troops. The French had to take a detour, and marched rapidly to Cape Town through fields of fynbos over Constantia Nek( A suburb of Cape Town), from Hout Bay to Kloof Nek ( in Camps Bay) passing Camps Bay with its surprised militia watching from the battery. Unfortunately the exhausted troops arrived in Cape Town only to find that the German mercenaries had surrendered the town without a shot, so they had to lay down their arms as well.

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