Boer History1703 at the Cape of Good Hope: Seventeen Repeal Free Barter, Cape Church Finished, Loan-Place Rent, and One Wool Bale
Seventeen Withdraw Free Cattle Barter — 1703
In 1703 the provisional halt that the council of policy had already placed on free cattle barter hardened into a directors’ repeal. Some Khoikhoi had complained of the rapacity and violence of burgher trading parties; the Cape council had suspended the liberty of free barter for the time being; and, owing to the governor’s representations, in this calendar year the Assembly of Seventeen withdrew the privilege outright. Commercial intercourse between the two races was again made illegal, and the European graziers were chiefly depended upon to provide as many cattle as were needed for the garrison, hospital, and fleets. [3] [4]
The repeal closed a short experiment. Ever since 1658 trade between burghers and Khoikhoi had been strictly forbidden, the chief object being to prevent collisions with the natives. In opposition to the law, parties of deserters and other persons of loose character had still carried on a cattle trade, often with conduct that could not be distinguished from robbery. Governor Simon van der Stel had tried to check the abuse by a more severe placaat of the 19th of October 1697, threatening whipping, branding, banishment, and confiscation of property. The directors disapproved. Disposed to let colonists purchase cattle from the Khoikhoi and fatten them for sale to meat contractors, they annulled that placaat and on the 27th of July 1699 ordered the trade thrown open on condition that burghers supply draught oxen to the government at fourteen shillings each when required. [3]
The council of policy had then no option. Tenders were called for, and in February 1700 the burgher Henning Huising (also Huizing) contracted to supply the garrison, hospital, and Company’s fleets with beef and mutton at twopence halfpenny a pound, receiving the Company’s slaughter-houses and, as a cattle run, the whole of the district of Groen Kloof not occupied by Khoikhoi. The contract was signed provisionally for ten years; the directors cut it to five. With that transaction the Company designed to relinquish routine inland purchase expeditions, using military bartering parties only when draught oxen were urgently needed. By a placaat of the council of policy under commissioner Wouter Valckenier on the 28th of February 1700, the trade was thrown open to the burghers with such restrictions as were thought necessary to prevent abuse. From that date cattle breeding became a favourite pursuit with yearly increasing numbers of colonists, attended with less expense and less anxiety than tillage, and with as much to be made by it. [3] [9]
Three seasons later the Seventeen judged that private barter had produced more violence than supply, and restored the older ban. The institutional effect was to bind meat and draught stock more tightly to colonial herds rather than to kraal purchase. Company military bartering parties were again the exception, while the ordinary flow of beef and mutton was expected from burgher graziers who had already pushed cattle runs toward Riebeek’s Kasteel, Groen Kloof, and the Land of Waveren. The 1702 eastern marauding column—forty-five Europeans and forty-five Khoikhoi who left Stellenbosch in March, fought Xhosa near the Fish River, then robbed Gonaqua and other Khoikhoi after seven months away—stood as the extreme illustration of unsupervised private force on the same frontier the directors now closed to legal barter. The names of those forty-five white men were later recorded; forty of them remained unknown in later South African families, and the remaining five could not be distinguished with certainty, which bore out the respectable burghers’ claim that the band had been miscreants without homes rather than a league of settled farmers. [3] [4]
The repeal did not erase the grazing expansion that free barter had accelerated. Permission to use land for grazing at some defined locality had already been given freely; if pasture failed, occupiers sought better places. Military posts planted in 1701 at Vogel Vlei, Riebeek’s Kasteel, and Groen Kloof, and the Waveren outstation of 1700, remained the Company’s outer line. In 1702 the military patrols had been kept busy on behalf of the Khoikhoi rather than the burghers: a large number of cattle were recovered and restored to various kraals, and so many San were shot that the robbers seemed terrified and gave less trouble for the next few years, though occasionally it was still necessary to chastise them. Sergeants and corporals at the outposts were directed to induce the San to keep the peace, to follow and punish them when they committed depredations, and under no circumstances to attack them without provocation. What 1703 changed was the legal channel of acquisition: kraal cattle could no longer be bought under licence, and the meat supply was thrown back upon colonial flocks and the contractor’s residual term. Huising’s meat monopoly had grown precisely when the Company stopped its own cattle farming—so the Seventeen’s ban closed the private kraal door while leaving the contractor’s slaughter-house still standing on Company ground. [3] [9]
Cape Church Finished Except the Tower — 1703
By the close of 1703 the church edifice in Table Valley was finished, except the tower. The first service in it would be held only on the 6th of January 1704, with the Rev. Petrus Kalden as preacher; of the building then constructed the tower and end walls later remained as part of the side walls of the present church. For the calendar year 1703 the material fact was completion of the body of the church after a quarter-century pause—stone walls and a roof paid from poor funds, raised while services were still said in a Castle hall. [3] [9]
The foundation of a church in Table Valley had first been laid in April 1678, 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 consented to apply a sum equal to about £2,200 sterling to the erection of the building. As the original plan was then considered too small, it was enlarged, and a new foundation stone was laid by the governor on the 28th of December 1700. Three years of building brought the walls and roof to completion by the end of 1703, leaving only the tower unfinished when the year closed. The new nave thus closed a gap that had lasted from Bax van Herenthals’s generation to Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel’s. [3]
The same governor who laid that Groote Kerk stone was already known for other constructive works of the same years: expansion of the Company garden, a little museum, rebuilding of the old tuynhuys into a guest-house, a botanical guide still consulted a century later, a new garden and lodge at Nieuwe Landen (Newlands), exploration and naming of the Land of Waveren, tree-planting, and handling of Khoikhoi captains with almost as much dexterity as his father. Those measures do not cancel the pride and private farming at Vergelegen that later cost him his office. They do show that the finished nave of 1703 belonged to the same public programme as the garden and the Waveren naming, not to a separate pious success standing apart from the governorship. [3] [9]
Outside the Castle the parish geography of 1703 was still uneven. Stellenbosch had had a resident clergyman, the Rev. Hercules van Loon, since his arrival on the 11th of April 1700, after nearly nine years without a settled minister—services having been covered once in three months by the Cape clergyman, occasionally by the Rev. Pierre Simond from Drakenstein, and on remaining Sundays by the sick-comforter. Drakenstein still worshipped sometimes in a farmer’s front room, sometimes in a barn. There was as yet no church building in that valley. The finished Cape church therefore marked Table Valley’s institutional lead—stone walls and a roof paid from poor funds—over country congregations still meeting in barns, and over a Huguenot flock whose language of the pulpit was already a matter of petition to Holland. [3]
Kalden, who would open the new nave, already held private ground as well as a pulpit. The Cape clergyman obtained the farm Zandvliet between Stellenbosch and the head of False Bay and, like other officers, engaged in farming on a smaller scale than the governor, but in his case especially neglected public duties to attend to private property. The man who would preach the first sermon in the finished church of 1703 was thus already a grazier and wine farmer on the False Bay side, while the consistory’s £2,200 from the poor funds paid for the walls in which he would stand. [3]
Loan-Place Stamp and Annual Rent — 1703
On the grazing frontier the same year brought a clearer fiscal definition of the loan place (leeningsplaats). Permission to occupy a loan place—which had to be renewed annually—was obtained upon a stamp of Rds. 6, and an annual rent of Rds. 24 was charged. The measure was meant to draw more direct revenue from land as the colony’s expense grew, without yet converting the indefinite grazing cessions into surveyed freeholds. [4]
Loan tenure had grown haphazardly from the settlement’s first years. In 1654, two years after the landing in Table Bay, some Company servants had been allowed small garden plots for three years without rent, understood as loans, with the promise that ground cultivated to the full extent of its capability might pass into eigendom (freehold). The first alienation followed on the 10th of October 1657, when about twenty morgen (forty acres) “in the great field on the pass between Table Bay and False Bay” went to Jacob Cloeten of Cologne, free burgher of this place. Adjoining irregular plots along the Liesbeek, usable with the freehold but remaining Company property, illustrated the related tenure later called leenings eigendom. In that double grant is seen the beginning both of loan places and of freehold. [4]
Gardeners then added cattle-keeping and needed larger appropriations; those too were held on loan, and as far as is known without rent. Loan places were only nominal cessions, resumable at the pleasure of the government; the population was scarce; no surveys seem to have been made; and no concern was shown when grantees gradually extended their indefinite boundaries into the adjoining territories. The main object of the Company being to procure provisions for visiting ships, the haphazard system seemed best fitted to ensure produce from the soil and a better supply of cattle than could be depended upon from the natives. Remission of rent did not arise from altruism: probably more than its equivalent was demanded in tithes of the harvests and other duties. The ground was never free of burden merely because no rixdollar sat on the licence. [4]
With the unforeseen development of the colony and the increasing expense of government, some organisation and fixed principle in the granting of land at length became necessary. Hence in 1703, in order to derive more direct revenue from the land, the stamp and annual rent were imposed on the annual permission to occupy. A further annual tax or recognitie of Rds. 24 would be levied in 1714. Fifteen-year quit rent—lands resumable only at the end of fifteen years, with buildings (opstallen) to be paid for on valuation if resumed—would come only in 1732, the rent then varying with the capability of the soil, usually from four to eight skillings per morgen. For 1703 the immediate change was that a grazier’s yearly leave to sit on a loan place now cost a stamped licence and a fixed rixdollar rent. [4]
That fiscal turn sat beside the barter repeal. Burghers who could no longer legally buy kraal cattle were the same class holding loan runs beyond Stellenbosch and Drakenstein; the Company now asked them both to carry the meat supply and to pay an annual recognition for the ground on which the herds grazed. Occupation of the Land of Waveren and the posts at Vogel Vlei, Riebeek’s Kasteel, and Groen Kloof had already shown how far stock farming had moved from the Liesbeek freeholds of the 1650s. The rixdollar rent of 1703 was the administration’s attempt to put a price on that movement without surveying it. The annual renewal itself created a feeling of insecurity of tenure which discouraged industry and retarded improvement; the fifteen-year quit-rent of 1732 was expressly designed to lessen that insecurity. The dwelling and other buildings on a loan place were the occupier’s opstal, competent to be sold, the purchaser being allowed to continue the lease though he obtained no legal right to the soil. Loan places would still form the bulk of colonial holdings deep into the next century—by later count some five-sixths of all holdings—because the tenure suited graziers who valued indefinite boundaries more than a surveyor’s chain. [3] [4]
Robberts Landdrost of Stellenbosch — February 1703
In the country magistracy the calendar year also marked a change of office. In February 1703 Pieter Robberts succeeded Michiel Ditmar as landdrost of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein. Ditmar had held the post from July 1698; Robberts would keep it until July 1705, when Johannes Starrenburg took over. The landdrost sat as president of the local court with the heemraden, collected revenue through the district secretary, and conducted ordinary correspondence between the farms and the Castle. The office had already shown what a vacancy could mean: after Cornelis Linnes left in January 1695 the senior heemraad had acted as president and the secretary had collected the revenue until Hendrik Munkerus arrived in August 1696. [3]
The timing mattered. Robberts entered office in the same year the Seventeen closed free cattle barter and the fiscal stamp fell on loan places. Country graziers who had pushed stock toward Waveren, Riebeek’s Kasteel, and Groen Kloof now faced a landdrost whose ordinary duties included annual permissions, rent, and the policing of parties that had already shown what unsupervised travel east of Stellenbosch could become. The military posts of 1700–1701 remained the outer line; the landdrost’s court at Stellenbosch was the civil hinge between those posts and the Castle. For 1703 the public record is the succession itself rather than a single celebrated case, but the office Robberts took would, within two years, become the instrument through which Starrenburg later hunted signatures for the governor’s defence. [3] [4]
Ordinary country administration in 1703 thus ran through a named magistrate between the Castle and the loan runs while the finished church rose in Table Valley and the solitary wool bale left for Amsterdam. The landdrostship under Robberts was part of that spine: heemraden sitting with him, a secretary collecting the new stamp and rent, and correspondence that now had to carry both the barter ban and the rixdollar licence to farms that had grown used to indefinite grazing. The same winter oaks planted along Stellenbosch streets in 1701 still lined the approach to the drostdy; the office itself, not a raid or a wreck, is the year’s civil fact at that town. [3]
Wilhem Adriaan’s public works—Company garden, botanical guide, Newlands lodge, Waveren naming, tree-planting, Khoikhoi captains, Groote Kerk foundation—do not cancel the pride and private farming that later cost him his office. They do show that calendar 1703 still mixed ordinary administration with the grazing expansion that free barter had accelerated and that the barter repeal and loan-place rent now tried to discipline. A landdrost at Stellenbosch, a stamp on the loan licence, and a closed kraal door were the year’s instruments; Vergelegen itself still went unmentioned in the journals and correspondence copied for Holland. [3] [9]
One Small Wool Bale to Amsterdam — 1703
The directors remained desirous of procuring sheep’s wool from South Africa. Samples sent to Europe had been pronounced of excellent quality; they held that if wool could be produced at about eight pence a pound, the Company might profit and the colonists gain another reliable income. Instructions went to the Cape government to have the industry taken in hand by the burghers. The pursuit did not commend itself to farmers at that time. Although many European sheep had been imported in former years, few of pure breed remained, 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; the havoc of that disease was often so great that farmers lived in constant dread of it; separate herds meant expense; and the carcase of the woolled sheep was less valued by graziers who bred for slaughter, so that they could not be induced even to make experiments. [3]
In 1700 the government had sent home two hundred and eighty-five pounds of wool shorn from sheep belonging to the Company. That consignment 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—well above the eight pence the directors had named as a profitable farm price, yet proof that supply, not price, was failing. In 1704 a very small quantity would still be procured; in 1705 none at all; in 1706 one hundred and fourteen pounds. The single bale of 1703 therefore marks the trough of the early wool experiment under Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel’s government, before he later collected wool-bearing sheep on a farm of his own as a private speculation, writing to Europe for rams and ewes of good breed and to Java for Persian sheep, and was about to give the industry a fair trial when he was recalled. [3] [9]
Parallel experiments of the same administration showed a governor willing to trial secondary products while the staple grain and cattle economy still dominated. He had endeavoured to introduce the culture of silk, planting white mulberry that grew and thrived well, but the silkworms obtained from imported eggs all died; he then gave up the trial, judging the mulberry in leaf at the wrong season for worms from the south of Europe. A less important but more successful experiment was placing partridges and pheasants on Robben Island to breed. For 1703 the measurable export fact remained the solitary wool bale and the absence of any recovering grain surplus. Silk and game-birds were governor’s trials; wool was the directors’ commercial hope, and the burghers would not carry it. [3]
Burgher indifference to wool was structural rather than momentary. Graziers who had just lost legal access to kraal barter needed slaughter stock for Huising’s residual contract and for fleet demand; a second flock kept for fleece alone competed for herdsmen and pasture on loan runs now subject to stamp and rent. The directors’ eight-pence farm price assumed a volume the colony would not deliver. Amsterdam’s fifteen pence on the one bale of 1703 proved the fibre saleable and the producers unwilling—an early instance of the gap between Company commercial ambition and the pastoral logic of the expanding interior. The same private energy that later gathered wool-bearing stock on a governor’s farm was already building vines and herds at Vergelegen on a scale the open record still largely omitted. [3] [4] [9]
Drought Years and the Settlement Economy — 1703
From 1698 to 1705 the seasons were very unfavourable for farming, and no wheat could be exported. In 1700 it had become necessary to import rice from Java, there being insufficient grain in the country for the people and for fresh bread to ships’ crews. The long drought would break only in 1705, when crops were very good though damaged by heavy rain at harvest, and exportation would resume in 1706 with fourteen hundred muids sent to Batavia. Calendar year 1703 therefore sat in the middle of that dry stretch: a finished church and a fiscal stamp on loan places, but still no grain ships outward from Table Bay. [3]
Population nevertheless increased. Burgher families were generally large; they married early; few young women remained single. Every year a few settlers arrived from Europe. A custom had come into vogue of allowing soldiers and convalescent sailors to engage for short periods as servants to burghers, their wages and maintenance being saved to the Company while they remained at hand in case of need—commonly from a hundred to a hundred and fifty of the garrison and seamen out at service. A great many slaves were being introduced from Madagascar and Mozambique. The settlement’s labour and household growth thus continued through the drought even as export agriculture stalled. Timber and fuel remained scarce for ships and the Castle; the winter oaks of 1701 were a long investment, not an answer to skippers still wanting firewood. [3]
The bad seasons tended to produce a spirit of restlessness among the farming population, increased by the conduct of the principal officers of government. Between Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel and the colonists there was not the slightest feeling of sympathy. In all the official documents of his administration—and the quantity is great—there is not a single expression like “our own Netherlanders” of his father. He requested the directors to send industrious Zealand farmers and no more French cadets, but the sentence displays as little affection for the one class as for the other. Behind the public ledger his private farming at Vergelegen—granted in freehold by commissioner Valckenier in February 1700 as four hundred morgen at Hottentots-Holland and enlarged by purchase of adjoining ground from a subordinate official at a nominal rate—was already building toward the scale that later complaints would measure in hundreds of thousands of vines and large cattle and sheep flocks beyond the mountains. [3] [9]
Upon Vergelegen he built a commodious dwelling house, with a flour mill, a leather tannery, a workshop for wooden water pipes, wine and grain stores, an overseer’s cottage, a slave lodge, and 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. That absence, and Vergelegen itself, were concealed from the directors: official journals and correspondence sent to Holland still omitted both. On the estate nearly half a million vines would stand by 1706—fully one fourth of the whole number in the colony—with groves, orchards, and cornlands to a corresponding extent, and beyond the mountains six or eight hundred large cattle and eight or ten thousand sheep. The secunde Samuel Elsevier held Elsenburg near Klapmuts; Kalden held Zandvliet; the governor’s brother Frans farmed at Hottentots-Holland; his father remained at Constantia. These officials farmed on a much smaller scale than the governor, but, in the clergyman’s case especially, neglected public duties for private property. The market for produce was small, and all of these persons had an entry to it before the burghers could dispose of anything. [3] [9]
For 1703 those private facts remained largely off the open record. What entered the year’s public history was the Seventeen’s barter repeal, the finished body of the Table Valley church, the first regular stamp and rent on loan places, Robberts’s succession to the Stellenbosch landdrostship, the solitary wool bale at fifteen pence, another dry harvest without wheat export, continued growth of burgher households and slave labour, and at Drakenstein a French majority still petitioning to hear the gospel in a tongue two-thirds of them could understand. The restlessness of the dry years and the scale of official farming would surface in memorials only in 1705–1706; the calendar year closed with stone walls up, legal barter shut, and the interior still priced by the rixdollar rather than the surveyor’s chain. [3] [4] [8] [9]
Drakenstein French Petitions and the Dutch Pulpit — 1703
The Rev. Hendrik Bek (Beck), appointed to succeed Pierre Simond, had reached the Cape in April 1702 and been installed at Drakenstein a few weeks later. At the direction of the Assembly of Seventeen he conducted public worship in Dutch, while the sick-comforter Paul Roux continued French ministrations to the Huguenots. The new clergyman understood French, but the pulpit order left that knowledge for aged colonists who did not know Dutch, not for a regular French sermon. Since April 1700 an able and zealous man named Jacobus de Groot, returning from India to Europe and detained for the purpose, had served the Dutch portion of the same congregation, previously neglected. Drakenstein in 1703 thus had a Dutch preacher, a French sick-comforter, a Dutch schoolmaster, and still no church building. [3] [8]
That language order had been hardening since the directors’ letter of the 20th of September 1701, which forbade the Drakenstein minister to preach in French and directed that schools give no instruction beyond what was needed for youth to read and write Dutch, “in order that in course of time the French language may die out and be, as it were, banished from the place.” The Cape government replied that it would see Dutch used in church and school so that French would fall into disuse—the more readily because there were no French schools. The proportion of French-speaking people was too small compared with those of Dutch and German descent for their language to remain long in use in the mixed community; it was only a question of time. In 1703 that time had not yet come. [3] [8]
In 1703 two-thirds of the Drakenstein congregation still could not follow a Dutch sermon. Nothing daunted, the Refugees sent in several petitions that Bek be permitted to preach in their own tongue, as they felt the severity of the order from Holland. The French memorial stated that the congregation comprised over a hundred adults, not more than twenty-five of whom understood sufficient Dutch to gather the meaning of a sermon, together with an even larger number of children of their nationality. They asked that Bek be instructed to preach in French once a fortnight. On the 4th of April 1703 Drakenstein wrote in that sense to the classis of Amsterdam. The council of policy recommended the request to the favourable consideration of the Seventeen. [3] [8]
A Cape despatch of the 24th of June 1703, sent off with the later ships, already set out the community’s necessity as the government then saw it. The congregation repeatedly renewed the request after that date, and declared that it was impossible for them to learn Dutch on account of the fact that they lived one, two, three, or more hours from each other, praying that religious services might be conducted in their own language at least once a fortnight. Those memorials were referred to the directors and would still be under consideration when the Chamber of Middelburg wrote again on the 24th of July 1704, unable as yet to consent, for the reasons of September 1701, unless the Cape sent good reasons, and leaving the matter in the governor’s hands to act as most advantageous for the Company. Before directors could finally dispose of it, later events would remove Bek toward Stellenbosch after Van Loon’s death in June 1704. [3] [8]
Parish life at Drakenstein continued under that strain. The name of Estienne Terreblanche of Toulon appears in the church books of Drakenstein in 1703. On the 14th of October 1703 Pieter, son of Daniel Jacob and Louise Cordier, daughter of the Refugee Louis Cordier, was baptised at Drakenstein. The font thus still recorded French families while the pulpit spoke Dutch. For 1703 the Huguenot congregation’s public history is that petitioning: two-thirds unable to follow the sermon, a letter to the Amsterdam classis on the 4th of April, a Cape restatement on the 24th of June, and no grant of a fortnightly French service before the year closed. [8]