Boer History1688 at the Cape of Good Hope: Huguenot Refugees, Simond, and Drakenstein
Directors’ Terms and the Five Ships
The calendar year 1688 opened with the first large body of French Protestant colonists already at sea or embarking for the Cape. The ordinances that annulled the Edict of Nantes—issued by Louis XIV in October 1685—had forbidden Protestant emigration even as they drove thousands into flight. Fugitives who crossed the frontier in disguise abandoned almost every form of property except money and jewels; among the groups that reached the Free Netherlands, young and strong men heavily outnumbered women and children. A few refugees had entered Company service before the revocation, and on the 3rd of October 1685 the Assembly of Seventeen had already resolved to send French refugees with other emigrants, yet in two years only three or four suitable persons were obtained. [3]
When the directors met in the autumn of 1687 it seemed possible to obtain Piedmontese and French families as settlers. Besides advantages already held out to emigrants, they promised a clergyman speaking French and liberty to return to Europe after five years if desired. On the 28th of October 1687 they engaged the Rev. Pierre Simond, minister of the refugee congregation at Zierickzee (of Embrun in Dauphiné), at a salary of £7 10s. a month. On the 5th of November they added outfit gratuities of from £5 to £8 6s. 8d. for heads of families and from £2 10s. to £4 3s. 4d. for unmarried young men or women. On the 16th of that month they wrote to the commander and council that the parties would be sent at once. [3] [8]
Conditions were otherwise the same as those offered to natural subjects of the Netherlands: free passages, farms in full property without payment, farming stock at cost price on credit, the same oaths of allegiance, and the same privileges. The directors did not intend a French colony. Dutch families were being sent out at the same time, and at no period did the French exceed about one-sixth of the colonists or one-eighth of the whole European population including Company servants. They hoped the newcomers would strengthen wine, brandy, and olive work without neglecting wheat and cattle. Arrangements kept families and friends together as far as possible across the Company’s chambers and ports of embarkation. [3] [8]
The emigrants were sent in five principal ships—Voorschoten (also written Voorschooten), Borssenburg, Oosterland (Oosterlandt), China (Berg China), and Zuid Beveland—with a further French party in the Schelde. Voorschoten, a flute of about one hundred and thirty Dutch feet, sailed from Delftshaven on the 31st of December 1687 with twenty-two French emigrants among others: Charles Marais of Plessis and Catherine Taboureux with four children (Claude, Charles, Isaac, and Marie); Philippe Fouché and Anne Fouché with three children; Jacques Pinard, carpenter, and Esther Fouché (married before sailing); Marguerite Baché; Etienne Bruère, waggon-maker; Pierre Sabatier; Jean and Gabriel le Roux of Blois; Gideon Malherbe; Jean Pasté; Paul Godefroy; and Gaspar Fouché. [3] [8]
Borssenburg, the smallest of the group at about one hundred and fifteen feet, sailed from Texel on the 6th of January 1688; her full passenger list was later missing from both Cape and Hague archives, though Cape correspondence described a party of “French Piedmontese fugitives” among those she landed. Oosterland, about one hundred and sixty feet, left Middelburg on the 29th of January 1688 with twenty-four refugees including Jacques de Savoye of Ath (Aeth), Marie Madeleine le Clerc, Antoinette Carnoy, and three De Savoye children; the surgeon Jean Prieur du Plessis of Poitiers and Madeleine Menanteau; Sarah Avicé; Jean, Jacob, and Daniel Nortier with Marie Vytou; Isaac Taillefer (Taillefert), vinedresser of Château-Thierry, Susanne Briet, and six Taillefer children; Jean Cloudon, shoemaker of Condé; Jean du Buis of Calais; and Jean Parisel of Paris. [3] [8]
China sailed from Rotterdam on the 20th of March 1688 with Jean Mesnard, Louise Corbonne, and six Mesnard children; Louis Corbonne; Jean Jourdan and Pierre Jourdan of Cabrière; the orphan nieces Marie and Marguerite Roux; a second Pierre Jourdan; Pierre Joubert and Isabeau Richard; Susanne Réné; Jacques and Hercule Verdeau; Pierre la Grange; Matthieu Fracassé; André Pelanchon; and twelve others who died before the ship reached her destination—Botha’s Cape letters putting thirty-four French fugitives embarked and the greater portion of about thirty deaths on the passage among the refugees. From the Orphan Chamber of Rotterdam eight young women of unblemished reputation, industrious and skilled in farm work, also emigrated in China; all were married in the colony within a few months of arrival. Their names included Adriana van Son, Wilhelmina de Witt, Adriana van den Berg, Judith Verbeek, Petronella van Capelle, Judith van der Bout, Catharina van der Zee, and Anna van Kleef. [3] [8]
Zuid Beveland, of about the same size as Voorschoten, sailed from Middelburg on the 22nd of April 1688 with some twenty-five refugees—eleven men, four women, and ten children on the embarkation count Botha recovered from odd Cape sources. The only names securely known from the missing full list at first were the Rev. Pierre Simond and Anne de Beront (de Berault), his wife; later Cape papers also place Jean le Long with wife and two children, Estienne Viret, Salomon de Gournay, and David Senecal among those who reached the bay in her, together with Sergeant Louis de Berault, brother of the minister’s wife, then still in Company service. The Schelde, about one hundred and forty feet, carried twenty-three French refugees including members of the des Pres (des Prés) family, Charles Prévot with wife and children, and Abraham Bleuset; she put into St Jago after a severe storm and met another before Table Bay. [3] [8]
More men came out than women—the disproportion the Company wished to prevent and that Commander Simon van der Stel continually complained of—yet among groups escaping France the number of males was regularly far greater. By the embarkation reckoning of the Seventeen to the 1st of April 1688, sixty-seven men, thirty-three women, and fifty-one children had already left in the various boats, before deaths on passage reduced the landed total. Several passengers had held good positions before the persecution: the surgeon Du Plessis was of an ancient family of Poitiers, though now penniless; De Savoye had been a wealthy merchant at Ghent and Ath and had saved nothing but life and family after Catholic suits and attempts on his life drove him north in 1687. [3] [8]
Voorschoten, Oosterland, and Borssenburg Arrive
On the 13th of April 1688 Voorschoten put into Saldanha Bay under a strong south-east wind against which she could not beat up to Table Bay. Rocky islands covered with seabirds and desolate country around met eyes that had left cultivated France; yet the landing promised freedom of worship in the manner conscience approved. From the Company’s outpost a message went overland to the castle. Captain Fs. Villerius reported that the ship needed repairs and that her officers thought it advisable to remain in the bay to effect them. The cutter Jupiter was sent with fresh provisions, and when she returned she brought the immigrants to the Cape. [3] [8]
On the 26th of April Oosterland cast anchor in Table Bay after a passage of eighty-seven days from Middelburg—two months and ten days in Botha’s reckoning, then one of the quickest runs on record. She was followed on the 12th of May by Borssenburg, which had suffered no deaths among passengers or crew and landed her people in a healthy condition. Within a month of the first Saldanha landing, three of the five principal refugee ships had delivered their people into Cape hands, and the work of temporary housing and inland allotment could begin in earnest. Cape letters of late April and May already reported the arrivals to Batavia and the chambers at Delft and Middelburg. [3] [8]
The Schelde’s French passengers—among them Hercules des Pres with wife and four children, Charles Prévot with wife and three children, and Abraham Bleuset—added another twenty-three souls to the year’s intake after storms that forced a call at Porto Praya and a second blow five days from the Cape. Together with the April and May landings they formed the first solid block of refugee labour available for the Berg River farms marked out the previous October, before the long sick passage of China and the pastoral arrival of Zuid Beveland in August. [3] [8]
China and Zuid Beveland — August 1688
On the 4th of August 1688 China reached Table Bay after a disastrous run of seven months from Rotterdam. Nearly all her crew and passengers were sick. Twenty individuals had died on the passage in Theal’s summary, twelve of them French refugees; Cape letters cited by Botha speak of about thirty deaths, the greater portion among the thirty-four French who had embarked. The orphan girls and the surviving French families came ashore into a settlement already absorbing the April and May arrivals. [3] [8]
After a run of nearly four months, on the 19th of August, Zuid Beveland cast anchor in Table Bay too late that day for anyone to come ashore. Huguenots already landed had looked forward anxiously to their pastor’s arrival, and a little crowd waited on the wooden jetty—then the only pier in the bay—to welcome him. Between eight and nine the next morning the first boat shoved off for land; just after she left the ship she was capsized by a sudden squall. Those on the jetty watched several men drown without being able to help. Hours passed before communication could be restored. The drowned included three officers and five seamen of the ship in Theal’s account; Botha names among the dead Mr Cornelis Moerkerke, on his way to Malacca to take up appointment as fiscal. The Rev. Mr Simond and his wife landed safely into a community that regarded a French Protestant pastor as guide in secular as well as religious matters. [3] [8]
Dutch custom treated clergymen with respect; the refugees’ attachment ran deeper still. A French Protestant minister of that generation was expected to be a man of earnest faith, bravery, and self-devotion—qualities forced by persecution under Louis XIV, when nothing short of death could silence the pastors. Correspondence later preserved shows Simond sadly lacking in charity toward those who differed from him—fault of the age as much as of the man—yet for his own religion and flock there was no honest sacrifice he would not make. With his arrival the little band of refugees felt their circle more complete. His name would later be perpetuated in the Drakenstein valley at Simondium; in October 1688 his brother-in-law Sergeant de Berault accompanied an expedition toward Rio de la Goa in search of wrecked men of the Stavenisse, and afterward settled as a free burgher. [3] [8]
Landing, Relief, and First Allotments
The Huguenots landed without goods or money. Many had escaped with only their lives. The Company sent ship’s biscuit, peas, and salt meat for a few months’ provisions, and deal planks for the woodwork of temporary houses. Whatever else was needed came on credit from Company stores. No large relief could be expected from Europe, where demands on the benevolent were unceasing. In the colony a subscription list went round among the older settlers and Company’s servants; each person contributed cattle, grain, or money according to means. The amount is not stated in the surviving narrative, but Commander Van der Stel reported it very creditable to the old colonists and serviceable to the refugees. It was given to the Rev. Mr Simond and the deacons of Stellenbosch for distribution. [3] [8]
The burgher council furnished six waggons free of charge to convey the immigrants inland. The heemraad of Stellenbosch supplied six more until the refugees were settled. Everything had been arranged to receive them along the Berg River in the Drakenstein Valley—named in 1687 by Simon van der Stel after a family seat of the high commissioner Hendrik Adriaan van Rheede, Lord of Mydrecht. In that same year twenty-three farms along the Berg, each measuring sixty morgen, had been marked out for agriculturists. Some Huguenots were located in and about Stellenbosch; the larger number at Drakenstein and French Hoek (at first also known as Oliphant’s Hoek). Particular care was taken not to place them by themselves but to mix them as much as possible with Dutch colonists already present or arriving at the same time. [3] [4] [8]
From nearly the day of landing that mixture was a point of disagreement: the refugees expressed a strong desire not to be separated. Several refused the allotments offered and preferred to engage as servants to others of their own tongue. The Landdrost and Heemraden of Stellenbosch were requested to receive Simond with the respect his office demanded and to assist him in erecting a house; upon arrival he was conveyed inland in comfort. Cory later compressed the same expansion: pasture and farm ground for the increasing community already reached beyond the Cape peninsula; the Huguenots filled the new Berg-river frontage and the adjoining French Hoek valley, while Stellenbosch remained the inland administrative and church centre for the mixed district under a landdrost whose jurisdiction covered all known country outside the small Cape division from St Helena Bay to False Bay. [3] [4] [8]
That placement was the largest single addition of the period to the free population. The whole Berg River portion was known as the Drakenstein Colony as distinguished from the Stellenbosch Colony, yet still under Stellenbosch jurisdiction. Farm names that the refugees later gave their grants—Dauphine, La Cotte, Cabrière, La Motte, Champagne, Rhône, Languedoc, La Provence—would mark French Hoek, Groot Drakenstein, Dal Josaphat, the Paarl country, and the approaches to Wellington for generations; in 1688 those names were still promises on newly opened ground among Dutch neighbours deliberately interspersed by order from the castle. [4] [8]
Church Services under Simond
For church services an arrangement was made that the Rev. Mr Simond should preach in French on alternate Sundays at Stellenbosch and at the house of a burgher at Drakenstein. The sick-comforter Mankadan was to read a sermon and prayers in Dutch at Stellenbosch when the minister was at Drakenstein, and at Drakenstein when the minister was at Stellenbosch. Once in three months Simond was to preach at the Cape, and then the Rev. Johannes van Andel was to hold service in Dutch and administer the sacraments at Stellenbosch. [3]
The pattern followed Netherlands practice as closely as local numbers allowed. There, refugees formed branch congregations of established churches; here they formed a branch of the church of Stellenbosch. That church, though still without a resident Dutch clergyman, had a fully organised consistory presided over by the Cape minister as consulent. The arrangement was meant to serve both language groups; it did not satisfy the French, who desired a church entirely of their own—a demand that would harden into formal petition only after the first building season, when on the 28th of November 1689 Simond, Jacques de Savoye, Daniel de Ruelle, Abraham de Villiers, and Louis Cordier would appear at the castle on behalf of their countrymen. [3] [8]
For the present year the French remained inside Stellenbosch order. Divine service inland would long be held in borrowed rooms and, later, in a primitive building more barn than church that the congregation themselves timbered (daar wij selfs een hokie timmerde). The full constitution of a Drakenstein consistory—elders Claude Marais, Louis de Berault, and Louis Cordier; deacons Abraham de Villiers, Pierre Meyer, Pierre Beneset, and Pierre Rousseau—belonged to December 1691, after the Seventeen’s conditional permission of December 1690. In 1688 the pastoral fact that mattered was simpler: a French-speaking ordained minister was on the ground, alternating between Stellenbosch and the Berg River houses, while Mankadan kept the Dutch reading services alive on the opposite Sundays. [3] [8]
Building, Planting, and the First Season
The refugees began building and planting with alacrity. Those used to manual labour soon raised rough dwellings of clay walls and thatched roofs and laid out vegetable gardens. Men bred in ease found the toil severe and fared badly at first; with some help from countrymen they too made a start in farming. The ground had never been tilled; it was overgrown with bush and roots, and several years would pass before full return. Tools and implements came from the Company, to whom the settlers became debtors. The Company had promised slaves as soon as possible but could procure none at this time. Wheat and garden crops remained the immediate necessity; vine and olive skill, which the directors had hoped to import with the refugees, could only show later. [3] [8]
Those located at Drakenstein had hardly got roofs above their heads when they addressed the commander on a school for their children. He approved. On the 8th of November 1688, Paul Roux of Orange in France, who understood both languages, was taken into Company service as parish clerk (voorleser) and schoolmaster of the French community at Drakenstein. He was chosen for good conduct and proofs of ability, to receive a salary of 25s. and a ration allowance of 12s. 6d. a month; besides teaching he was to act as church clerk. The dual-language school was the first permanent French–Dutch educational post inland of the Cape. Roux would hold the post for thirty-five years until his death on 7 February 1723; the baptismal register later kept in his hand (1694–1713) remains the only surviving Drakenstein church record in French. [3] [8]
With most of the Huguenots the first difficulties of settling were speedily overcome: houses—very small and rough, yet shelter from sun and storm—went up, gardens came under cultivation, and the crops of the first season were particularly good, so that there was no want of the necessaries of life. A few who declined farms at Stellenbosch remained in poorer circumstances. The manner of mixed location was felt by all as a grievance, though as each improved his property the grievance would naturally lessen. The deeper discontent—that the government treated them as part of the Stellenbosch congregation while they read the directors’ promise of a clergyman of their own as leave to form a congregation by themselves—remained for the commander to refuse when put formally, and for the Seventeen to settle only in later years under conditions that still mixed the nationalities and pressed Dutch instruction in the schools. [3] [8]
Two years later the deacons of Batavia would send a bill of exchange for six thousand rixdollars—equal to about twelve hundred and fifty English pounds—drawn from an old Formosa poor fund, for distribution among the refugees according to need on the 18th and 19th of April 1690. That gift, and a present of oxen from the commander the next day, lay outside the calendar of 1688; yet the poverty Van der Stel described when he appealed to Batavia—that the French would not enjoy the fruits of their work for three or four years and were supported by the Company and the local poor fund—was already the condition of the first inland season. [3] [8]
Further Parties, the Vaudois Plan, and the Garrison
A few months after the first party left the Netherlands, others were engaged. They embarked in Wapen van Alkmaar and Zion. The first of these left Texel on the 27th of July 1688 under Captain Carel Goske with about forty immigrants young and old; she would reach Table Bay only on 27 January 1689 after six months, having lost thirty-seven persons by death and landing a hundred and four sick for the Company’s hospital. The French among them were sent to their country homes on 1 February 1689 once supplies for agriculture had been issued; of the Alkmaar French names Botha could later trace with certainty only Antonie Martin. Zion, carrying among others the vinedresser brothers Abraham, Pierre, and Jacob de Villiers from the neighbourhood of La Rochelle, would arrive on 6 May 1689—the Delft chamber having written on 16 December 1688 that the three brothers had good knowledge of laying out and managing vineyards and should be given a helping hand. Within 1688 those ships belonged to the outbound reinforcement, not yet to the landed census. [3] [8]
Before Wapen van Alkmaar sailed, the directors had contemplated sending six or seven hundred Vaudois of the labouring class, most understanding some handiwork as well as agriculture. About a thousand souls in some two hundred families of Piedmontese and Vaudois refugees had taken refuge about Nuremberg; their number included agriculturists, tradesmen, and four ministers. Deputies offered to emigrate in a body to any Netherlands colony if they might settle close together and exercise their own religion. The Assembly of Seventeen offered to settle them at the Cape; the States of Holland and West Friesland agreed to contribute £4 3s. 4d. per emigrant toward outfits and the journey to Amsterdam; the Company would give free passages, building materials and provisions on credit for seven or eight months, and the same privileges as earlier emigrants. Arrangements were made for two or three hundred to go in the Schielandt and then in Alkmaar; while those arrangements were concluding, the Vaudois obtained employment in Germany, proved averse to so long a sea voyage, and declined to go so far. The Seventeen wrote that forty French refugees bred to agriculture were being sent in Alkmaar instead. The larger project fell through. [3] [8]
After June 1688 the subject of French emigration, once prominent in the directors’ discussions, disappears from their records as a large programme. Exciting events in Europe occupied them. The summer of 1688 passed in anxiety that war with France and England combined was imminent; the first thought was protection, not enlargement, of possessions. In the autumn the garrison of the Cape was increased by one hundred and fifty men. The landing of the Prince of Orange in England, French seizure of Dutch ships, and open war with France followed on the European calendar; while those storms gathered, no further mass colonisation scheme was pressed. Individuals of French origin would still arrive over the next twenty years, but seldom more than two or three families at a time. [3]
Van der Stel and the Newcomers
Commander Simon van der Stel would much rather have seen Netherlanders alone coming to South Africa, but as the supreme authorities chose to send French refugees he received them and dealt with them according to his instructions. He could not be as free with them as with his own countrymen, yet he did not at first treat them with undue reserve. In the settlement year he worked through Simond and the Stellenbosch deacons for relief, mixed the farm grants as ordered, and kept the French services inside the existing church order. Later marks of limited personal goodwill—appointing Jacques de Savoye a heemraad of Stellenbosch in 1689, standing sponsor at the baptism of one of De Savoye’s children and of a child of the Rev. Mr Simond—lay just beyond the year; 1688 itself was the year of arrival, allotment, and guarded hospitality under orders from home. [3] [8]
Among the immigrants already named, families that would mark later rolls of Drakenstein and Stellenbosch took ground in this first season: Marais, Fouché, Taillefer, Nortier, De Savoye, Du Plessis, Jourdan, Joubert, Mesnard, Malherbe, Le Roux, Pinard, Bruère, Cloudon, Du Buis, Parisel, des Pres, Prévot, and many unmarried young men who hired out until they could hold farms. The orphan girls from Rotterdam married into the free community within months. When the Batavia fund was later shared, Theal’s distribution list would total some one hundred and seventy-six souls, while Cape despatches of nearly the same date put Huguenots of all ages at about one hundred and fifty-five—Company servants and those married into Dutch families not always reckoned the same way. [3] [8]
Names familiar for generations in the Low Countries—Le Fèbre, De Lanoy, Nel, Du Toit, Cordier, Joubert, Malan, Malherbe, Mesnard—also appear among people who had long residence behind them before the 1685–88 flight, so that not every French surname on a Cape list was a brand-new refugee in the commander’s eyes. Branches of Le Fèbre had been at Middelburg since 1574, De Lanoys at Leiden since 1648, Nels at Utrecht since 1644, Du Toits at Leiden since 1605, Cordiers at Haarlem since 1627, Jouberts at Leiden since 1645, Malans at Leiden since 1625, Malherbes at Dordrecht since 1618, and Mesnards at Leiden since 1638. The directors’ hope remained amalgamation without a French colony; the refugees’ hope remained a congregation and neighbourhood of their own. Between those hopes the year 1688 fixed the human facts of the Cape’s largest single free-burgher reinforcement of the seventeenth century. [3] [4] [8]