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]
The repeal closed a short experiment. On 28 February 1700 commissioner Wouter Valckenier and the council of policy had thrown the cattle trade open to burghers, with restrictions meant to prevent abuse, after the directors had annulled Simon van der Stel’s severe placaat of 19 October 1697 and ordered the trade opened on condition that burghers supply draught oxen to the government at fourteen shillings each when required. Henning Huising’s meat contract of February 1700 had been the Company’s intended substitute for inland purchase expeditions. Three seasons later the Seventeen judged that private barter had produced more violence than supply, and restored the older ban. [3]
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—used when draught oxen were urgently needed—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, which had robbed Gonaqua and other Khoikhoi after a fight near the Fish River, stood as the extreme illustration of unsupervised private force on the same frontier the directors now closed to legal barter. [3] [4]
Cape Church Finished Except the Tower — Close of 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. [3]
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. [3]
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. Drakenstein still worshipped sometimes in a farmer’s front room, sometimes in a barn; the Rev. Hendrik Bek, installed in April 1702, preached in Dutch by the Seventeen’s direction while the sick-comforter Paul Roux continued French ministrations, and the Huguenot memorial asking for a fortnightly French sermon still awaited directors’ action. The finished Cape church therefore marked Table Valley’s institutional lead over the country congregations rather than a colony-wide building programme. [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. Gardeners and then cattle keepers had held larger appropriations on loan from the Company, often without rent and without survey, while tithes of harvests and other duties were still demanded. Boundaries extended as grantees pushed into adjoining pasture. The 1703 stamp and rent did not end that expansion, but they marked the first regular annual charge on the permission to occupy. A further annual tax or recognitie of Rds. 24 would be levied in 1714; fifteen-year quit rent would come only in 1732. 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. [4] [3]
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; separate herds meant expense; and the carcase of the woolled sheep was less valued by graziers who bred for slaughter. [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. [3]
Parallel experiments of the same administration—white-mulberry planting and imported silkworms that died, and the more successful placing of partridges and pheasants on Robben Island to breed—showed a governor willing to trial secondary products while the staple grain and cattle economy still dominated. For 1703 the measurable export fact remained the solitary wool bale and the absence of any recovering grain surplus. [3]
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. [3]
Behind the public ledger the governor’s private farming at Vergelegen—granted in freehold by commissioner Valckenier in February 1700 and enlarged by purchase of adjoining ground—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. Official journals sent to Holland still omitted Vergelegen and the governor’s absences from the Castle. For 1703 those facts remained largely off the public record; what entered the year’s open history was the Seventeen’s barter repeal, the church fabric, the loan-place rent, the wool bale, and another dry harvest. [3]
Close of 1703 at the Cape
By the end of 1703 the Assembly of Seventeen had withdrawn the free cattle-barter privilege opened in 1700, restoring the ban on commercial intercourse between burghers and Khoikhoi after Cape complaints of trading violence and the council’s provisional suspension. The Table Valley church, refounded on 28 December 1700 from accumulated poor funds, stood finished except the tower, awaiting Kalden’s first service in January 1704. Loan places now required a Rds. 6 stamp and Rds. 24 annual rent on yearly renewal. One small bale of Company wool was all that reached Amsterdam, at about fifteen pence a pound, while the drought that had run since 1698 still kept wheat from export and left the growing free population—large burgher families, soldiers and sailors out at service, and slaves from Madagascar and Mozambique—dependent on local herds and imported rice rather than on a grain surplus. Those were the calendar facts of a year in which directors closed the open cattle trade, the Cape congregation gained a nearly complete church, grazing tenure acquired a fixed rixdollar price, and the wool experiment shrank to a single bale. [3] [4]