Boer History1700 at the Cape of Good Hope: Valckenier’s Commission, Huising’s Meat Contract, Open Cattle Trade, Waveren Occupation, and Vergelegen
Valckenier, Huising’s Meat Contract, and the Open Cattle Trade — February 1700
The directors’ instruction of 27 July 1699 had already annulled Simon van der Stel’s severe cattle-barter placaat and ordered the trade thrown open on condition that burghers supply draught oxen at fourteen shillings when required. In February 1700 the council of policy, under that standing order, called for tenders to put meat supply on a contract footing. The burgher Henning Huising entered into a contract to supply the garrison, hospital, and Company’s fleets with beef and mutton at twopence halfpenny a pound, he to have the use of the Company’s slaughter-houses and, as a cattle run, the whole of the district of Groen Kloof that was not occupied by Khoikhoi. The contract was signed provisionally for ten years, but the directors reduced it to five. [3]
With that transaction the Company designed to relinquish sending expeditions into the interior to purchase cattle, as had been the custom for nearly half a century; henceforth it was only when draught oxen were needed that military bartering parties went inland. By a placaat of the council of policy presided over by the commissioner Wouter Valckenier, on the 28th of February 1700, the trade was thrown open to the burghers, with such restrictions as were considered necessary to prevent its abuse. From this date cattle breeding became a favourite pursuit with yearly increasing numbers of colonists. There was as much to be made by it as by agriculture, and it was attended with less expense and less anxiety. The government gave permission to applicants to use land for grazing purposes at some defined locality, but if the pasture failed or did not prove as good as was anticipated, the occupiers did not hesitate to seek other and better places. [3]
Valckenier’s February presence thus fixed in local form what the Seventeen had already decided from the Netherlands: open barter under regulation, a private contractor for fleet and hospital meat, and Company withdrawal from routine inland purchase. Huising’s Groen Kloof run and slaughter-house privilege made him, for the five-year term the directors would allow, the principal intermediary between grazing stock and the roadstead’s demand. Calendar 1700 therefore opened not with a new war or a new fort, but with a commercial reordering of how cattle reached the Castle tables and the ships. [3]
Vergelegen Granted to the Governor — February 1700
In the same February visit, commissioner Wouter Valckenier, holding authority from the governor-general and council of India, granted Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel in freehold four hundred morgen of land at Hottentots-Holland. The estate he named Vergelegen. The governor could not take ground for himself without such higher authority; Valckenier’s grant supplied it. To this freehold the governor afterwards added by granting a tract of the adjoining ground to a subordinate official and then purchasing it from that individual at a nominal rate—an enlargement that later critics would treat as part of the same landed concentration. [3] [4]
Upon Vergelegen he built a commodious dwelling house, with a flour mill, a leather tannery, a workshop for making wooden water pipes, wine and grain stores, an overseer’s cottage, a slave lodge, and very extensive outbuildings. He was in the habit of frequently residing there for ten days or a fortnight at a time, when public business was partly suspended. This was concealed from the directors: there is no mention of Vergelegen or of the governor’s absence from the castle in the official journal of occurrences or the correspondence of the period, copies of which were sent to Holland. On the estate were planted nearly half a million vines, or fully one fourth of the whole number in the colony by 1706. Groves, orchards, and cornlands were laid out to a corresponding extent. Beyond the mountains at various places the governor had six or eight hundred large cattle and eight or ten thousand sheep. [3] [4]
The February grant thus opened a private agricultural complex that would dominate later complaint against the administration. Secunde Samuel Elsevier obtained the farm Elsenburg near Klapmuts; the Rev. Petrus Kalden, clergyman of the Cape, obtained Zandvliet between Stellenbosch and the head of False Bay; the governor’s brother Frans van der Stel farmed at Hottentots-Holland; and the father held Constantia. The market for produce was small, and all of these persons had an entry to it before ordinary burghers could dispose of anything. Calendar 1700 did not yet bring open conflict over those facts, but it did place Vergelegen’s freehold title on the record under Valckenier’s commission. [3] [4]
Simon van der Stel and the Steenbergen — 1 February 1700
On the 1st of February 1700 the same commissioner, Wouter Valckenier, granted the retired governor Simon van der Stel life-use of the Steenbergen. Together with the freehold of Zeekoe Vlei and surrounding ground an hour’s walk in diameter that commissioner Daniel Heins had already given him on the 11th of March 1699, he had practically the whole peninsula beyond his Constantia property as a cattle run. The February life-use thus completed the landed settlement of the father’s retirement while the son’s Vergelegen freehold was being fixed at Hottentots-Holland. [3]
At Constantia Simon continued the hospitality and wine-making for which strangers already knew the house. The Steenbergen grant did not create a new village; it legalised grazing depth behind the peninsula farm already famous under his name. In the politics of 1700 the father’s retirement lands and the son’s Vergelegen stood on opposite sides of False Bay and the Hottentots-Holland mountains, both secured under Company commissioners within twelve months of the February 1699 handover. [3]
Occupation of the Land of Waveren — July–October 1700
The governor’s November 1699 tour had named the Tulbagh basin the Land of Waveren and the inland range the Witsenberg, and had resolved to form a grazing settlement there. On the 31st of July 1700 some recent immigrants from Europe were sent to occupy the Land of Waveren. As it was the rainy season, the families of the immigrants remained at the Cape until rough cottages could be put up for their accommodation. At the same time a corporal and six soldiers were sent to form a military post in the valley for the protection of the colonists. This post was termed the Waveren outstation, and was maintained for many years. [3]
On the 16th of October several additional families were forwarded to the new district to obtain a living as graziers. Several burghers who had been living at Drakenstein had already been permitted, after the 1699 tour, to graze their cattle at Riebeek’s Kasteel; the July and October movements of 1700 carried occupation over the Roodezand into the basin itself. Agriculture, except to supply the wants of residents, could not be pursued with profit owing to the difficulty of transport; cattle breeding was the intended mainstay, matching the open-trade regime just fixed under Valckenier. [3]
The Waveren outstation of seven men was a thin line against San groups who used the Obiqua mountains as a base for descents on stock below. Troubles with those raiders would multiply in 1701, when cattle were lifted from Gerrit Cloete at Riebeek’s Kasteel and from the Waveren post itself, and temporary posts at Vogel Vlei and reinforcements followed. Calendar 1700 nevertheless established the civilian and military footing of the new district: immigrant households held back at the Cape until cottages stood, then moved in; a named outstation; and a second tranche of grazing families in October. [3]
Van Loon at Stellenbosch and De Groot at Drakenstein — April 1700
After the removal in 1691 of the Rev. Pierre Simond to Drakenstein, there had been no resident clergyman at Stellenbosch for nearly nine years. Once in three months the clergyman of the Cape visited the vacant church and administered the sacraments, and occasionally Simond attended for the same purpose. On the remaining Sundays the sick-comforter conducted the services. At length the Assembly of Seventeen appointed the Rev. Hercules van Loon, who had once been acting clergyman of the Cape, resident clergyman of Stellenbosch. He arrived from the Netherlands on the 11th of April 1700. [3]
At Drakenstein service was still conducted sometimes in the front room of a farmer’s house, sometimes in a large barn, there being as yet no church building. There was a French clergyman, assisted by a French sick-comforter. In April 1700 a sick-comforter and schoolmaster was first appointed for the Dutch portion of the congregation, that had previously been neglected. An able and zealous man named Jacobus de Groot, who was returning from India to Europe, was detained at the Cape for the purpose. The dual arrangement—French ministry for Huguenots, a newly assigned Dutch sick-comforter for the Dutch-speaking share of the same district—marked the year as one of pastoral consolidation rather than new church fabric at Drakenstein. [3]
Van Loon’s installation closed the long Stellenbosch vacancy that had lasted through most of the 1690s. De Groot’s detention closed the neglect of Dutch hearers in a congregation still organised around French preaching and French-language sick-comfort. Neither appointment required a new stone church in 1700; both placed named officers on the country circuits while Table Valley prepared its own building project. [3]
Cape Church Foundation Stone — 28 December 1700
In April 1678 the foundation of a church in Table Valley had been laid, but with that the work had ceased. For another quarter of a century services were conducted in a large hall within the castle. In course of time the poor funds accumulated to a considerable amount, and the consistory then consented to apply a sum equal to £2,200 of English money to the erection of the building. As the original plan was now considered too small, it was enlarged, and a new foundation stone was laid by the governor on the 28th of December 1700. [3]
By the close of 1703 the edifice would be finished except the tower; the first service in it would be held on the 6th of January 1704, the Rev. Petrus Kalden being the preacher. Of the building then constructed the tower and end walls would remain as part of later fabric. For calendar 1700 the decisive public act was the December foundation under Wilhem Adriaan’s hand, funded from accumulated poor money and scaled larger than the abandoned 1678 plan—moving worship, in prospect, out of the castle hall into a town church. [3]
Wool Shipment, Rice Import, and Drought — 1700
The directors were desirous of procuring sheep’s wool from South Africa, as some samples sent to Europe were pronounced of excellent quality. They were of opinion that if it could be produced at eight pence a pound, they would be able to make a good profit from it, and the colonists would have another reliable source of income. Instructions were sent to the government to have this industry taken in hand by the burghers. But it was not a pursuit that commended itself to South African farmers at that time. Although a good many European sheep had been imported in former years, there were very few of pure breed left, nearly all having been crossed with the large-tailed native animal. It was commonly believed that woolled sheep were more subject to scab than others, and the havoc created by that disease was often so great that the farmers were in constant dread of it. Then there was the expense of separate herds. Further the carcase of the woolled sheep was not so valuable as that of the other, so that the graziers who bred for slaughter could not be induced even to make experiments. [3]
In 1700 the government sent home two hundred and eighty-five pounds of wool shorn from sheep belonging to the Company. This was received with favour, but instead of increasing, the quantity fell off in succeeding years. In 1703 one small bale was all that could be obtained; it realised about fifteen pence English money a pound on the market in Amsterdam. In 1704 a very small quantity was procured, in 1705 none at all, and in 1706 one hundred and fourteen pounds. The 1700 shipment thus marked the high point of an experiment that the burghers would not take up at scale while slaughter stock remained more profitable and less disease-anxious under local belief. [3]
From 1698 to 1705 the seasons were very unfavourable for farming, and no wheat could be exported. In 1700 it became necessary to import rice from Java, as there was not sufficient grain in the country for the consumption of the people and the supply of fresh bread to the crews of ships. The long drought would break only in 1705, when crops were very good though damaged by harvest rain, and exportation would resume in 1706 with fourteen hundred muids sent to Batavia. Calendar 1700 therefore combined a hopeful wool packet home with rice on the reverse voyage—evidence that the settlement still could not feed itself and the fleets from local grain alone. [3]
Population was at this time increasing rapidly. The families of the burghers were generally large, they married at an early age, and no young women remained single. From Europe every year a few settlers were received. A custom had come into vogue of allowing soldiers and convalescent sailors to engage for short periods as servants to burghers, their wages and cost of maintenance being thus saved to the Company, while they were at hand in case of need. From a hundred to a hundred and fifty of the garrison and seamen were commonly out at service. A great many slaves were being introduced from Madagascar and Mozambique. Against that growth stood the drought, the rice import, and the still thin Waveren line—expansion inland while the granary remained short. [3]
Close of 1700 at the Cape
By the end of 1700 commissioner Wouter Valckenier had, on the 1st of February, granted Simon van der Stel life-use of the Steenbergen and, in the same February visit, given Wilhem Adriaan four hundred morgen freehold at Hottentots-Holland as Vergelegen; on the 28th of February the council under his presidency threw the cattle trade open to the burghers by placaat, while Henning Huising took the meat contract for garrison, hospital, and fleets at twopence halfpenny a pound with Groen Kloof as run (ten years provisionally, cut to five by the directors). On the 11th of April the Rev. Hercules van Loon arrived as resident clergyman of Stellenbosch after nearly nine years without one, and in April Jacobus de Groot was detained as sick-comforter and schoolmaster for the Dutch portion of Drakenstein. On the 31st of July recent immigrants were sent to occupy the Land of Waveren, their families held at the Cape until cottages stood, and a corporal with six soldiers formed the Waveren outstation; on the 16th of October further grazing families followed. The government shipped two hundred and eighty-five pounds of Company wool to Europe and imported rice from Java under the long drought that blocked wheat export. On the 28th of December the governor laid the new foundation stone of the Table Valley church, financed from accumulated poor funds on an enlarged plan. Those were the calendar facts of a year that opened the cattle trade and meat contract, planted Vergelegen’s freehold and Waveren’s first households, filled two country pulpits and school posts, and began the town church in stone while grain still failed and wool briefly left the roadstead. [3]