Boer History1704 at the Cape of Good Hope: Kalden’s First Church Service, Van Loon’s Death, Namaqua Friendship, and Thin Wool
First Service in the Table Valley Church — 6 January 1704
On the 6th of January 1704 the first service was held in the church edifice in Table Valley. The preacher was the Rev. Petrus Kalden. By the close of the previous year the building had been finished except the tower. Of the fabric then constructed the tower and end walls later remained as part of the side walls of the present church. For the Cape congregation the January opening ended a long interval in which Sunday worship had been conducted in a large hall within the Castle. [3] [9]
The foundation of a church in Table Valley had first been laid in April 1678, after which work had ceased. For another quarter of a century services continued in 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 construction brought walls and roof to completion by the end of 1703; the first public use of that body of the church fell in the opening days of 1704. [3]
Later counted that foundation among the constructive marks of Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel’s term—alongside the Company garden with a little museum and a rebuilt tuynhuys as guest house, a botanical guide still consulted a century later, the new garden and lodge at Newlands (Nieuwe Landen), tree-planting, and the naming of the Land of Waveren—even while the same administration’s private farming would draw bitter freeburgher protest. The January service therefore opened a stone sanctuary that the governor could number among public works, in the same years that Vergelegen was rising at Hottentots-Holland. [3] [9]
The finished Cape church marked Table Valley’s institutional lead over the country congregations rather than a colony-wide building programme. 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—the Cape clergyman visiting once in three months, the Rev. Pierre Simond occasionally from Drakenstein, and the sick-comforter conducting the remaining Sundays. Van Loon himself had once been acting clergyman of the Cape before the Seventeen named him to the country parish. Drakenstein still worshipped sometimes in a farmer’s front room, sometimes in a barn; the Rev. Hendrik Bek (Beck), installed in April 1702 to succeed Simond, preached in Dutch by the Seventeen’s direction while the sick-comforter Paul Roux continued French ministrations. Kalden’s January service therefore opened a permanent Table Valley sanctuary while the inland parishes remained architecturally provisional. [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 had 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. In 1703 two-thirds of the Drakenstein congregation still could not follow a Dutch sermon. 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. Those petitions were still under the directors’ consideration when Kalden opened the Cape church in January. [3] [8]
Kalden’s own position already mixed pulpit and farm. He held Zandvliet between Stellenbosch and the head of False Bay, a grant later cited among the official estates that crowded burghers from the small produce market. In his case especially, later charges would say that public duty had been neglected for private property. On the 6th of January 1704 that charge had not yet been laid in an organised memorial: he stood in the new church as the Cape’s preacher, in a building paid from poor-box accumulation, while the country congregations still waited for stone walls of their own. [3]
Van Loon’s Death and the Country Church Vacancies — 27 June 1704
On the 27th of June 1704 the Rev. Hercules van Loon, resident clergyman of Stellenbosch, died by his own hand. The vacancy reopened the problem the Assembly of Seventeen had only lately closed when they appointed him after nearly nine years without a settled minister at Stellenbosch. He had held the country pulpit for a little more than four years, from his landing on the 11th of April 1700. Before action could be completed on the Drakenstein Huguenots’ memorial asking that Bek preach in French once a fortnight, Bek himself requested to be removed to Stellenbosch as Van Loon’s successor. [3] [8]
The directors then appointed the Rev. Engelbertus Franciscus le Boucq clergyman of Drakenstein, and gave instructions that upon his arrival from Batavia Mr. Bek should be transferred to Stellenbosch. They also gave the council of policy permission to allow the French language to be used alternately with the Dutch in the church services at Drakenstein, if it should seem advisable to do so. That concession answered, in principle, the memorial of the French immigrants and the council of policy’s earlier favourable recommendation of their request. [3] [8]
The personnel plan and the language petition did not move as one letter. Independently of the shuffle that named Le Boucq for Drakenstein and Bek for Stellenbosch, the Chamber of Middelburg treated the French community’s request that Bek, conversant with both Dutch and French, be allowed to preach in the latter tongue as a matter still governed by the letter of the 20th of September 1701. The Middelburg reply of the 24th of July 1704 withheld consent for the present and left the Cape to act as it thought most advantageous for the Company. The two tracks—an appointment that allowed alternate French if advisable, and a chamber letter that still would not consent until good reasons came from the Cape—stood together in the same summer. [3] [8]
The newly appointed minister did not reach the Cape until the 30th of March 1707. Bek then took charge of the Stellenbosch congregation, which had been for nearly three years without a clergyman, except once in three months when he had preached and administered the sacraments. Le Boucq should have taken up the duties in the parish to which he had been appointed, but instead got into difficulties at the Cape, and Drakenstein was for several years without a resident clergyman. When Le Boucq later held a consistory meeting there he found no parsonage, no Dutch parish clerk, and no proper graveyard; services continued in a shed or barn of very homely appearance. Calendar year 1704 therefore fixed the personnel plan—Bek for Stellenbosch, Le Boucq for Drakenstein, French alternately if advisable—while the practical effect for the rest of the year and the next two was a thinned country ministry dependent on quarterly sacraments and the continuing Dutch and French sick-comforter work of Paul Roux and his colleagues. [3] [8]
The institutional contrast with Table Valley was sharp. Kalden’s congregation now occupied a nearly complete stone church funded from poor-box accumulation; Stellenbosch lost its only resident preacher in mid-year; Drakenstein still had no church building and awaited a minister who would not arrive until 1707. The directors’ wish that French give way to Dutch as speedily as possible among Huguenot families remained policy, tempered only by the conditional leave for alternate-language services, by Middelburg’s July deferral to local discretion, and by Paul Roux’s ongoing French ministrations. The year of Kalden’s first service and Van Loon’s death still mixed ordinary institutional work with the tensions that freeburgher memorials would soon name. [3] [8] [9]
Middelburg Defers French Sermons at Drakenstein — 24 July 1704
On the 24th of July 1704 the Chamber of Middelburg wrote on the request sent by the French community at Drakenstein that the minister Bek, conversant with both the Dutch and French languages, be allowed to preach through the medium of the latter. For reasons alleged in the letter of the 20th of September 1701, and to which the chamber still adhered, the directors were unable as yet to consent—at any rate not until the Cape sent good reasons for granting the request. The matter was deferred to the Cape government to act as it thought most advantageous for the Company, while Holland awaited further enlightenment as to the necessity of the petition. [8]
The 1701 reasons were not vague. The Chamber of Amsterdam had then sent a minister in place of Pierre Simond who was to understand both Dutch and French, “not as we take it to preach in the latter language, but only to be of service to the aged colonists who do not know our language, so that he may visit, admonish and comfort them, in order that in the course of time the French language may die out, and be, as it were banished (from the Cape)”; schools were to give in future no other or further instruction than was necessary to let the youth learn to read and write Dutch. Middelburg’s July letter treated that programme as still in force. Consent to fortnightly French sermons would have reversed the 1701 object in the pulpit even if Dutch remained the school tongue. [8]
The Cape’s own earlier reply had already promised to see Dutch used in church and school so that French would fall into disuse, the more readily because there were no French schools. The Huguenot memorials had then restated the numbers: over a hundred adults at Drakenstein, not more than twenty-five able to follow a Dutch sermon, and a larger number of children of their nationality; in 1703 two-thirds of the congregation still could not follow Dutch. The council of policy had recommended that memorial to the favourable consideration of the Seventeen. Middelburg’s July deferral left the Cape a discretion it had already used in the settlers’ favour, without yet converting discretion into a standing order for French preaching. [3] [8]
Those two statements of policy have to be read together. The directors’ personnel letter, appointing Le Boucq and transferring Bek, gave the council of policy permission to allow French alternately with Dutch at Drakenstein if it should seem advisable. The Chamber of Middelburg’s letter of the same season, answering the same community’s petition that Bek preach in French, still withheld consent pending Cape reasons, while leaving the Cape to do as it thought most advantageous for the Company. The practical ministry on the ground did not wait on either formula: Bek preached in Dutch as directed; Paul Roux continued French ministrations to the Huguenots in their own language; and the country congregations, after Van Loon’s death, depended on quarterly sacraments from a minister who was himself the subject of the language quarrel. [3] [8]
The Cape would reply only on the 28th of March 1705, repeating that the settlers lived one, two, three or more hours from each other and found it impossible to learn Dutch, and praying that services might be held in French at least once a fortnight. That answer cited the earlier missive of the 24th of June 1703 and recorded that the community had repeatedly renewed the request. For calendar year 1704 the open Dutch record was Middelburg’s July deferral, not yet the Cape’s March restatement. French did not in fact vanish from the Drakenstein pulpit as quickly as the 1701 programme required; later church minutes would still show French and Dutch services on the same Sunday. The July letter, however, kept the directors’ object on paper while Van Loon’s death made the country ministry thinner than at any time since April 1700. [8]
Namaqua Captains and the Friendship Agreement — September 1704
In September 1704 several Namaqua captains visited the Cape, when an agreement of friendship was made with them. This tribe, like the others with which the Europeans had come in contact, at once accepted as a matter of course the position of vassals of the Honourable Company. The visit extended formal northern diplomacy beyond the closer Cochoqua and Goringhaiqua networks that had already dealt with the Castle and the military posts at Groen Kloof, Riebeek’s Kasteel, and the Land of Waveren. [3] [9]
That vassal pattern was already visible among Khoikhoi captains who applied for staffs and were termed allies of the Company. The number of such applications was itself an indication that the tribes were more broken up than formerly. Sometimes a clan requested the appointment of a regent because its hereditary captain was a minor; sometimes a brother of a deceased captain was sought in his stead, the applicants always giving as a reason that the dead chief had left no children. Feuds between clans of the same tribe caused frequent disturbances, though those same clans usually acted together against the adjoining tribe. The Namaqua friendship of 1704 fitted this wider practice of Castle recognition rather than standing apart from it. [3]
The sequel would come in October 1705, when three Namaqua captains came to the Castle to have their authority confirmed, left with beads and copper-headed canes, and received the inscribed names Plato, Jason, and Vulcan. Thenceforth they were termed allies of the Honourable Company. The September agreement of 1704 was the political opening of that northern recognition, not yet the naming of staff-captains. [3]
The northern agreement also sat beside the closed cattle trade. In 1703 the Assembly of Seventeen had withdrawn the free barter privilege opened in 1700, restoring the ban on commercial intercourse between burghers and Khoikhoi after complaints of trading violence. Company military bartering parties remained the exception when draught oxen were urgently needed; ordinary beef and mutton were expected from European graziers under residual contracts such as that held by Henning Huising (Huizing). Diplomatic friendship with Namaqua captains did not reopen private inland purchase; it confirmed political recognition while meat supply stayed bound to colonial herds and licensed contracts. 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]
San pressure on both burgher and Khoikhoi stock had eased after the hard patrols of 1702, when large numbers of cattle were recovered for various kraals and many San were shot, so that the robbers gave less trouble for the next few years, though occasional chastisement was still required. Sergeants and corporals at the outposts were directed to induce the San to keep the peace, to follow and punish depredations, and under no circumstances to attack without provocation. The ruthless character of San warfare had been evidenced in February 1702, when a Khoikhoi captain came to the Castle and reported that they had killed five of his wives and every one of his children. Against that quieter frontier the Namaqua visit of September was a political event more than a military one—an extension of the Company’s northern reach while the eastern memory of the 1702 marauding column toward the Fish River still coloured debates over unsupervised private force. [3] [4]
That 1702 column—forty-five white men and the same number of Khoikhoi, out seven months from Stellenbosch—had fought Xhosa near the Fish River and then fallen upon Gonaqua and other Khoikhoi hordes. The perpetrators were not brought to justice. Wilhem Adriaan handled Khoikhoi captains with almost as much dexterity as his father, which places the September friendship inside ordinary northern diplomacy rather than as an isolated flourish. The Castle that received Namaqua captains in 1704 was the same government that had, two years earlier, distinguished burgher from Hottentot only in the instruction to outpost officers to recover stolen cattle for their proper owners whoever those might be. [3] [4] [9]
Huising’s First Complaints to the Directors — 1704
Some five years after Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel’s arrival as governor, in 1704, the most prominent and wealthy freeburgher—the former German shepherd Henning Huising—approached the directors of the Company with complaints about what he called the governor’s misrule. That first approach in this calendar year stood before the later, more organised memorials to Batavia and to East-India House in Amsterdam that Adam Tas, Huising’s nephew, would draft. Since no response came from the directors at once, the dissatisfied farmers decided to make representations both to the Governor-General in Batavia and again to Amsterdam—a chain that would surface openly only in 1705–1706. [3] [9]
The main charges already forming around Huising’s circle concerned the governor’s country estate Vergelegen (“Far-Situated”) near present-day Somerset West—its grant by commissioner Wouter Valckenier in February 1700 as four hundred morgen at Hottentots-Holland, its enlargement by purchase of adjoining ground from a subordinate official at a nominal rate, and the suspicion that Vergelegen products were crowding private farmers out of the Company’s markets while Company labourers worked the fields and gardens. Upon the estate the governor 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 frequently resided there for ten days or a fortnight at a time, when public business was partly suspended; Vergelegen and those absences were omitted from the official journals and correspondence sent to Holland. [3] [9]
Huising’s own position in 1704 was still that of residual meat contractor rather than of a man already stripped of his monopoly. His five-year contract, signed provisionally for ten years in February 1700 and cut by the directors to five, still ran through the calendar year; only at the end of 1705 would tenders be called and four butchers licensed, with meat fixed at a penny three farthings a pound to the Company and two pence to burghers. Official records of the early years of Wilhem Adriaan’s administration, to which the burghers had no access, would later be read as proving some of the most serious charges without foundation, and Huising’s opposition would be tied by those same records to the loss of the lucrative contract. The German immigrant had piled up riches in an astonishingly brief span after favours under Simon van der Stel, who had recognised his shrewdness and gifts as an organiser; why he rewarded those favours with bitter hostility to the son was never fully explained. For 1704 the open fact is the first private approach to the Seventeen, not yet the mass memorial of sixty-three signatures that Tas would organise, and not yet the contract’s end. [3] [9]
Beside Vergelegen the secunde Samuel Elsevier held Elsenburg near Klapmuts; Kalden held Zandvliet between Stellenbosch and the head of False Bay and, especially in his case, was later charged with neglecting public duties for private property; the governor’s brother Frans farmed at Hottentots-Holland; his father remained at Constantia. These officials engaged in farming on a much smaller scale than the governor, but the market for produce was small, and all of them had an entry to it before the burghers could dispose of anything. Between Wilhem Adriaan and the colonists there was not the slightest feeling of sympathy. In all the official documents of his administration 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. [3] [9]
Later portraits of this governor would swing between scoundrel and martyr. The constructive side of the same administration—Company garden, botanical guide, Newlands lodge, Waveren naming, tree-planting, Khoikhoi captains, and the Groote Kerk foundation—does not cancel the pride and private farming that Huising had already begun to name. It does show that calendar year 1704 still mixed ordinary administration with the scale of official estates that later complaints would measure in nearly half a million vines by 1706, with groves, orchards, cornlands, and beyond the mountains six or eight hundred large cattle and eight or ten thousand sheep. Private complaints would go more openly to Batavia in 1705; Tas’s memorial to the Fatherland would follow. For 1704 the first organised crack in that cold relationship was Huising’s approach to the directors. [3] [9]
Huguenot Households: Marriage, Burgher Status, and Deaths — 1704
While the directors and Middelburg argued the Drakenstein pulpit, Huguenot households continued to marry, baptise, and enter the burgher roll. On the 16th of November 1704 Pierre le Grange of Cabrière in Provence, born circa 1664, who had arrived in 1688 in the Berg China, married Margaretha Kool of Amsterdam, born circa 1690. The marriage joined a Provence immigrant of the 1688 fleet to a woman of Amsterdam a generation younger, a domestic instance of the fusion that Company language policy was trying to hasten from the pulpit. [8]
In the same year Jacques Potier (later Potje) of Moukron, or Moecroon, in Flanders, who had arrived in 1699 as a soldier in the Westhoven, became a burgher and lived at Drakenstein. He would marry in 1705 and die on the 23rd of February 1739, instituting Andries du Toit as his heir. The 1704 burgher entry turned a Zeeland-ship soldier of the late 1690s into a Drakenstein free man in the year the French congregation was still petitioning for sermons in its own tongue. [8]
The Cape district inhabitants’ list of 1704 named the widow of Jean Gardé, daughter of the refugee Isaac Taillefert. She would remarry before 1710 the refugee Pierre Cronier, and after his death in 1718 Jacob Naudé. Jean Gardé had two children, Jean, born 1701, and Susanna, born 1703. The same 1704 list distinguished that widow from Jean Gardiol, given as a resident of Drakenstein when the widow’s name appears at the Cape. Gardiol had stood on the Drakenstein burgher roll of 1690 as “compagnon” with the three brothers de Villiers; in 1700 he was living unmarried in the Stellenbosch district. [8]
Marie of Aulis (Laney, or de Lanoy) died in 1704. She had married at Stellenbosch in 1698 Hans Hendrik Hatting of Spyer. Another Marie Lanoy, probably the same, had married Hary Lecrévent, Lescervain, or Lekervain, whose name was corrupted into Ary Lekkerwyn; in the inventory of his estate in 1697 Marie de Lanoy is described as his widow. The 1704 death therefore closed a household already twice recorded in Stellenbosch and Drakenstein baptism and inventory papers. [8]
In the Cape church, Anna, child of the surgeon Jean Prieur du Plessis of Poitiers and Maria Buisset of Sedan, was born in 1704. The church entry of Anna’s birth names the sponsors as Christoffel Buisset and Maria Buisset. Maria Buisset, born at Sedan on the French frontier in 1678, had married du Plessis in January 1700 at the Domkerk, Amsterdam, and returned with him to the Cape; she later practised in Cape Town as a qualified midwife. Their other children were Marie, born 1702, and Pieter, born August 1708. [8]
At Dal Josaphat the agriculturist Jean Manier of Calais, in partnership with Abraham Bleuset, made a will jointly with Bleuset in 1704, witnessed by Pierre Rousseau and Jacques Therond. Manier gave his age as fifty-five years. In 1700 he had stood sponsor to a child of Theron. The joint will is a dated paper of the same community that was still writing to Middelburg about French sermons: not a petition to the Seventeen, but a partnership testament in a Drakenstein valley already mixed in surname and witness. [8]
These household facts do not resolve the pulpit quarrel. They do show that in 1704 French names continued to enter the burgher roll, the marriage register, and the baptismal books even while the directors wished the language banished. At no time did the refugees exceed about one-sixth of the burgher population, or one-eighth of the whole European community including the Company’s servants; many had lived in Dutch towns before they sailed. The departure of Simond had already hastened the dying out of French as a public tongue. Le Grange’s Amsterdam marriage, Potier’s burgher papers, the Gardé widow’s listing, Anna du Plessis’s baptism, and Manier’s will are the domestic counterpart of Kalden’s Dutch service in the new Table Valley church and of Roux’s continuing French ministrations in the country. [8]
Thin Wool, Continuing Drought, and Settlement Growth — 1704
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. [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 Amsterdam market—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 was procured; in 1705 none at all; in 1706 one hundred and fourteen pounds. The calendar year thus continued 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]
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 1704 therefore sat still inside that dry stretch: a first service in the new Cape church, a shattered Stellenbosch ministry, a Namaqua friendship at the Castle, Huising’s first private charges to the Seventeen, and only a trickle of wool outward. [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 and the wool experiment nearly failed. [3]
Parallel experiments of the same administration—white-mulberry planting and imported silkworms that died, the governor concluding that the mulberry was in leaf at the wrong season for worms from the south of Europe, 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. Burgher indifference to wool was structural rather than momentary. Graziers who had lost legal access to kraal barter in 1703 needed slaughter stock for residual meat contracts and for fleet demand; a second flock kept for fleece alone competed for herdsmen and pasture on loan runs now subject to the stamp of Rds. 6 and the annual rent of Rds. 24 imposed that same year. The directors’ eight-pence farm price assumed a volume the colony would not deliver. Amsterdam’s fifteen pence on the one bale of 1703 and the mere trickle of 1704 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. [3] [4] [9]
The bad seasons tended to produce a spirit of restlessness among the farming population, increased by the conduct of the principal officers of government. Company garden, museum, rebuilt tuynhuys, botanical guide, Newlands lodge, Waveren naming, tree-planting, Khoikhoi captains, and the Groote Kerk foundation do not cancel the pride and private farming that Huising had already begun to name in 1704. They do show that the calendar year still mixed ordinary administration with official estates, a first service in stone, a country pulpit empty from June, a Middelburg deferral of French sermons, a Namaqua friendship at the Castle, Huguenot marriages and burgher papers, thin wool, and another dry harvest without wheat export. [3] [4] [8] [9]