Boer History1705 at the Cape of Good Hope: Namaqua Staffs, Starrenburg Landdrost, Postlooper to Natal, Drought Breaks, and the Tas Memorial
Starrenburg Landdrost of Stellenbosch — July 1705
In July 1705 Johannes Starrenburg (also styled Jan Starrenburg in the succession lists) succeeded Pieter Robberts as landdrost of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein. Robberts had held the country magistracy since February 1703; before him Michiel Ditmar had served from July 1698 to February 1703, and before Ditmar the office had run from August 1696 under the preceding holder. The landdrost sat as president of the local court with the heemraden, collected revenue through the district apparatus, and was the governor’s ordinary channel for orders inland of the Cape peninsula. [3]
Starrenburg’s appointment fell in the sixth calendar year of Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel’s governorship. The governor, born at Haarlem on the 24th of August 1664 as first son of Simon van der Stel and Johanna Six, had at twenty married Maria de Hase, daughter of François de Hase, formerly director of Persia and Bengal; he had later sat as an alderman of Amsterdam and had faced the colonists on the 23rd of January 1699 as if a crown prince called to succeed a retiring king. Free grazing had already pushed burghers to Riebeek’s Kasteel and the Land of Waveren; military posts still stood at Waveren, Groen Kloof, and related stations; and the free cattle barter opened in 1700 had been withdrawn again in 1703. The July succession placed the country baton in Starrenburg’s hands for the remainder of the year. [3] [9]
Distrust between Castle and French-speaking country people still coloured the landdrost’s ordinary dealings. In 1705 Starrenburg told Refugees of Drakenstein that he would not doubt but that they would join arms with the French if French ships fell upon the Cape—an official suspicion recorded by Abraham Bogaert and later cited as evidence that assimilation remained incomplete in the eyes of Company officers even after twenty years of settlement. The same landdrost, speaking to some of the Refugees, was also reported as sure that if French ships did attack the Cape they would support them against the Company. The remark sits beside a language struggle still open at Drakenstein, where Middelburg’s letter of 24 July 1704 had deferred the French congregation’s request that the Rev. Hendrik Bek preach in French fortnightly. [8]
For the inland congregations the year also continued the thinned ministry left by the death of the Rev. Hercules van Loon in June 1704. Stellenbosch still had no resident clergyman except the quarterly visits of Bek from Drakenstein; the Rev. Engelbertus Franciscus le Boucq, named for Drakenstein, would not arrive until 30 March 1707, after which Bek would at last take charge of Stellenbosch—nearly three years without a settled minister except the quarterly sacraments. Civil authority at Stellenbosch thus rested more heavily on the landdrost and heemraden while the church vacancy dragged on through another full calendar year. In the country district the services of the people were still impressed for road-making and other public works; all males between sixteen and sixty had to enrol in the burgher militia and come up annually for a certain number of days of training, signal cannon from high points in the surrounding mountains calling the country burghers to arms. [3] [8]
Later narrative styled Starrenburg a base sycophant of the Castle clique. That judgment rests on work that belongs to the following year. What 1705 established was the office: a country magistrate installed in July, already voicing Castle suspicion of the Drakenstein French, and already the governor’s ordinary channel inland of the peninsula while Stellenbosch worshipped without a resident clergyman. [3] [7] [9]
Namaqua Captains Confirmed as Plato, Jason, and Vulcan — October 1705
In October 1705 three Namaqua captains came to the Castle for the purpose of requesting the governor to confirm their authority. They were kindly treated; their request was complied with; and they left carrying presents of beads and other trifles and copper-headed canes upon which the new names given to them— Plato, Jason, and Vulcan—were inscribed. Thenceforth they were termed allies of the Honourable Company. [3] [9]
The October visit followed the friendship agreement made when several Namaqua captains had visited the Cape in September 1704. That earlier agreement had already placed the tribe, like others in contact with the Europeans, in the position of vassals as a matter of course. The staffs of 1705 turned political friendship into named personal commissions: each captain carried a copper-headed cane as the visible mark of Castle recognition, and the classical nicknames entered the Company record beside their local authority. The practice belonged to a wider Cape diplomacy in which inland captains sought written or metal tokens of recognition, and the governor answered with presents and titles that bound the applicants as allies without reopening private cattle purchase. Later counted the handling of Khoikhoi captains among Wilhem Adriaan’s constructive marks—beside garden work, the Newlands lodge, tree-planting, and the Groote Kerk foundation—even while the same administration’s private farming drew freeburgher bitterness. [3] [9]
The number of captains who applied for staffs was itself a sign 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. Plato, Jason, and Vulcan fitted this wider practice of Castle staffs and ally titles rather than standing apart from it. [3]
Northern diplomacy still sat beside a closed cattle trade. After Khoikhoi complaints of rapacity and violence by burgher trading parties, the council of policy had provisionally suspended free barter, and in 1703 the Assembly of Seventeen had withdrawn the privilege opened in 1700. Commercial intercourse between the two races was again illegal; European graziers were depended on for ordinary beef and mutton, with military bartering parties inland only when draught oxen were urgently needed. Confirming Namaqua captains did not reopen private purchase; it fixed political recognition while meat supply stayed bound to colonial herds and licensed contracts. [3]
The same administration still treated recovery of stock stolen by San (Bushmen) as a duty owed alike to burgher and Khoikhoi owners—an equality of protection that did not extend to free commercial barter. After the busy patrols of 1702, when a large number of cattle were recovered and restored to various kraals and so many San were shot that the robbers seemed terrified, they gave less trouble during the next few years, though occasionally it was still necessary to chastise them. Sergeants and corporals at the outposts were directed to endeavour to induce the San to keep the peace; when those people committed depredations they were to be followed up and punished, but under no circumstances were they to be attacked without provocation. The October staffs thus sat in a year of quieter inland robbery than the opening of the decade, with Namaqua captains named as allies while the cattle trade with their people remained closed to private burghers. [3]
Drought Breaks, Rain-Damaged Harvest, and No Wool — 1705
From 1698 to 1705 the seasons had been very unfavourable for farming, and no wheat could be exported. In 1700 rice had been imported from Java because there was not enough grain for the people and for fresh bread to ships’ crews. In 1705 the long drought broke up, and the crops were very good; but as the wheat was being reaped heavy rain set in and greatly damaged it. There was nevertheless a surplus above the requirements of the country, and in 1706 exportation would resume with fourteen hundred muids sent to Batavia. Calendar year 1705 was thus the hinge: the dry stretch ended, a surplus appeared despite harvest rain, and the first export shipment waited for the following year. [3]
The directors remained desirous of sheep’s wool from South Africa. Samples had been pronounced excellent; they held that wool at about eight pence a pound might profit the Company and give colonists another income. Burghers did not take to the industry. Although a good many European sheep had been imported in former years, few of pure breed remained; nearly all had been crossed with the large-tailed native animal. Woolled stock were thought more subject to scab; separate herds meant expense; and the carcase was less valued by graziers who bred for slaughter. In 1700 the government had sent home two hundred and eighty-five pounds of Company wool; in 1703 one small bale realised about fifteen pence a pound at Amsterdam; in 1704 only a very small quantity was procured; in 1705 none at all; in 1706 one hundred and fourteen pounds. The governor later collected wool-bearing sheep on a farm of his own as a private speculation, wrote 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—so the empty wool ledger of 1705 stood between the thin Company shipments of earlier years and a private trial that never matured under his administration. [3] [9]
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 allowed 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. Labour and household growth thus continued through the last drought year and into the first surplus harvest. [3]
Parallel experiments of the same administration—white-mulberry planting and imported silkworms that all 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 grain and cattle still dominated. Like his father he did a great deal for the improvement of the Company garden, adding a little museum, rebuilding the little tuynhuys into a worthy guest house, and devoting considerable botanical knowledge to its expansion; he wrote a botanical guide that a century later was still consulted by experts, laid out a new garden near Rondebosch called Newlands (Nieuwe Landen) with a lodge there as well, explored and named Waveren, and pushed tree-planting. Those public marks sat in the same years as Vergelegen. [3] [9]
The bad seasons had also tended to produce 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 recorded in the official papers of his years in office; there is not a single expression like his father’s “our own Netherlanders.” He requested the directors indeed to send out industrious Zealand farmers and no more French cadets, but the sentence displays as little affection for the one class as for the other. In 1705 the position became acute: Company officials, from the governor downwards, entered into competition with the farmers although orders had prohibited officials from engaging in farming operations; the supply of produce was in excess of the demand. Later refused the simple antithesis of scoundrel or martyr: the same man who improved the Company garden and handled inland captains also took private scale for granted in a community that would not endure it. [3] [8] [9]
Postlooper Expedition to Natal — November–December 1705
Owing chiefly to the scarcity of timber and fuel, in 1705 it was resolved to send an expedition to Natal and the adjoining coast to inspect the country and particularly the forests known to be there. It remained a difficult matter to supply the ships with firewood. Some skippers had reported fine forests on two islands named Dina and Marseveen, in latitude 41° or 42° south and about four hundred sea miles from the Cape; the master of the galiot Wesel had been instructed to inspect them, had sailed from Table Bay on the 31st of March 1699, and had returned on the 18th of May with a report that the search had been fruitless. The schooner Centaurus, built at Natal in 1686–7 mainly from timber growing on the shore of the lagoon, had been in use nearly fourteen years before needing repair and stood as proof that the wood was valuable. The galiot Postlooper was made ready. Her master, Theunis van der Schelling, had visited Natal when mate of the Noord in 1689 and 1690, and therefore knew the harbour. He was instructed to make a thorough exploration of the forests and to frame a chart of the coast. A sailor expert in drawing pictures was sent to take sketches of the scenery. [3]
The Postlooper sailed on the 20th of November 1705. She reached Natal on the 29th of December, and found the bar so silted up that she could only cross at high water. There were not so many cattle in the neighbourhood as there had been sixteen years before. Wood still remained in considerable quantities. The outward voyage and the December landing thus closed the calendar year on the Natal coast; the return to Table Bay would fall only on the 8th of March 1706, after the skipper was hurt when the tiller struck him in the chest as the galiot lurched on the bar, and after two of the crew had run away, attracted by the life of an Englishman found living there. With no one on board who could take Van der Schelling’s place, further exploration was abandoned and the vessel came home without completing the forest survey or coastal chart the instructions had required. [3]
In December 1689 a purchase of the lagoon and surrounding land had been made from the chief then living at Port Natal and recorded in a formal contract in two copies. The Dutch officers’ copy had been lost when the Noord was wrecked in January 1690; Van der Schelling was therefore instructed to procure the copy left with the chief so that a notarial transcript might be made. The chief who had sold the ground was dead, and his son now headed the tribe or clan. On inquiry the son stated that he knew nothing of the document and supposed it had been buried with his father’s other personal effects. It was evident that he did not recognise the sale as binding upon him or his people. [3]
At Natal an Englishman was found who gave his name as Vaughan Goodwin and stated that he was a native of London. He had two wives and several children. His story was that he had arrived in February 1699 in a vessel named the Fidele, and with two others had been left behind by Captain Stadis, who purposed to form a settlement and promised to return within three years. They were to keep possession of the place until Stadis should return; he had not yet appeared. In 1700 the natives had killed the other white men. Goodwin’s household was what the Postlooper’s people encountered at the year’s end on a coast still valued for timber more than for any immediate Dutch occupation—and attractive enough that two of the galiot’s crew deserted rather than sail home. [3]
The voyage thus closed 1705 with a galiot over the silted bar, a vanished 1689 deed, fewer cattle than in 1689, wood still in considerable quantities, and an English household on the lagoon shore. The forest inspection and coastal chart that had justified the fitting-out remained unfinished when the year ended; they would not be completed on the homeward run either, once the skipper was unfit for duty and no substitute could take his place. [3]
Official Farms, Vergelegen Scale, and Burgher Charges to Batavia — 1705
The governor was engaged in farming for his own benefit on a very large scale as things were then estimated. He could not take ground for himself, but in February 1700 commissioner Wouter Valckenier, holding authority from the governor-general and council of India, had granted him in freehold four hundred morgen at Hottentots Holland, near the later Somerset West. To this he afterwards added by granting adjoining ground to a subordinate official and purchasing it from that individual at a nominal rate. The estate he named Vergelegen (“Far-Situated”). The grant itself was a principal source of freeburgher bitterness, and the bitterness deepened when Vergelegen products appeared to crowd private farmers from Company markets while Company labourers worked the fields and gardens. [3] [7] [9]
Upon it 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 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. Later narrative put the same flocks in still larger terms: thousands of cattle and sheep owned by the governor, added to every year, and grazed on government lands without the consent, and even without the knowledge, of the directors. [3] [7] [9]
The secunde, Samuel Elsevier, obtained a grant of the farm Elsenburg, near Klapmuts. The Rev. Petrus Kalden, clergyman of the Cape, in like manner obtained the farm Zandvliet, between Stellenbosch and the head of False Bay. These officials farmed on a smaller scale than the governor, but, especially in the clergyman’s case, neglected public duties for private property. The governor’s brother, Frans van der Stel, was a farmer at Hottentots Holland. His father farmed at Constantia. The market for produce was small, and all of these persons had an entry to it before the burghers could dispose of anything. Later narrative put the same complaint in sharper commercial terms: the family monopolised nearly all trade with ships and with the garrison; prices at which small farmers could sell were fixed by Company officials who could also prevent settlers from dealing with foreign ships in Table Bay. [3] [7] [9]
There has never been a people less inclined to submit to grievances, real or imaginary, than the colonists of South Africa. Some of the farmers determined to complain to the supreme authorities, and in 1705 privately forwarded to the governor-general and council of India a list of charges. At Batavia no action was taken. While the complainants awaited a reply, the materials of a larger memorial to the directors in the Fatherland were already being assembled in the country districts. After Henning Huising’s first private approach to the directors in 1704 had drawn no response, the dissatisfied farmers resolved on representations both to Batavia and again to East-India House in Amsterdam. They did so by means of a memorial composed by their secretary Adam Tas, Huising’s nephew. The year thus opened two tracks of protest: a private list already on the Batavia route, and a fuller case still being written for Amsterdam—the first concerted attempt, in later judgment, by white inhabitants to defend common rights as free citizens against misgovernment. [3] [7] [9]
Later refused to treat the governor as either scoundrel without the smallest sense of duty or innocent martyr sacrificed to jealousy. The version that remains is of a proud, extravagant individual who, by birth, upbringing, and environment, took it for granted that only the best was good enough for him, and who in a community of self-seeking colonists distinguished from him mainly by a lower grade of class was led into an inexcusable despotism that the burghers rightly rejected. Vergelegen’s four hundred morgen, the half-million vines, the concealed absences, and the family entry to a small market were the scale against which the Batavia list of 1705 was drawn. [3] [9]
Adam Tas Memorial and Huising’s Lost Meat Contract — Late 1705
Adam Tas, a native of Amsterdam and a burgher of Stellenbosch, drew up a memorial to the directors. With him were associated Pieter van der Byl and other prominent colonists. Later narrative treated Tas as the farmers’ secretary and noted that he was Huising’s nephew. The document contained thirty-eight paragraphs, some of great length, in which the governor and the others were accused of acting as already sketched, and the governor was further charged with corruption, extortion, and oppression. It was affirmed that he employed the Company’s servants and slaves at his farm; that he used the Company’s materials for building; that his agents when sent to barter cattle from the Khoikhoi had taken them by violence; that he bought wine at very low rates from those who could find no market for it and disposed of it at very high rates to strangers; that instead of licensing by auction four dealers in wine, to each of whom the farmers could sell without restriction, he caused the privilege of dealing in that article by retail to be sold as a monopoly to a man who would buy his at a good price; and that he would make no grant of land without a bribe. Some other offences of an equally serious nature were complained of. The secunde and the Cape clergyman were also accused of misconduct and neglect of duty. [3] [7] [9]
The memorial was signed by sixty-three individuals, thirty-one of whom were Frenchmen—the rest Dutch, both home-born and colonial. That number represented a very large proportion of the free inhabitants in those days. Their intention was to send the memorial to the directors with the return fleet in the early months of 1706. Official records of the early years of Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel’s administration, to which the burghers had no access, later showed that some of the most serious charges against him were without foundation. One principal opponent— Jacob van der Heiden—was at a later date strongly suspected of dishonest practices himself. Another—Henning Huising—had strong ground for resentment at the end of 1705, when he lost the lucrative meat contract he had held for five years. The German, once a penniless immigrant, had piled up riches with striking speed after favours under Simon van der Stel, and his hostility to the son was never fully explained—yet the same later reading refuses to treat the opposition as mere angelic virtue against pure wickedness. [3] [7] [8] [9]
Huising’s five-year meat monopoly had begun in February 1700, when he contracted to supply the garrison, hospital, and Company’s fleets with beef and mutton at twopence halfpenny a pound, with use of the Company’s slaughter-houses and, as a cattle run, the whole of Groen Kloof not occupied by Khoikhoi. The directors had reduced a provisional ten-year term to five. At the instance of the governor in 1705, tenders were called for, and four butchers were licensed, the price of meat being fixed at a penny three farthings a pound to the Company and two pence to burghers. Huising resented this, and as the contract had made him the richest man in the community, he could make his resentment felt. After those circumstances are weighed, the charges that were unquestionably true still made a formidable indictment, and the majority of the governor’s opponents were among the most godfearing and respectable men in the country. Among them was J. W. Grevenbroek, recently an elder at Stellenbosch, who took an active part in the movement though his name was not attached to the memorial. [3] [9]
The farmers of 1705 were no more disposed to submit to injustice than the original free burghers of 1658. Their settlement within Company territory did not, in their view, surrender rights as Netherlanders; if justice failed at the hands of the directors, they would appeal without hesitation to the States General. The French Refugees formed a very considerable element among the farming population; relations with the Dutch had originally been none too cordial, France remaining the arch-enemy of the Republic, yet by the beginning of the eighteenth century, after twenty years of the same life and hardships, mistrust had softened. Misgovernment under Van der Stel supplied a common cause: difference of race was forgotten, and French and Dutch faced the Castle as one body. Of the sixty-three signatories thirty-one were French; later observers noted striking coincidences of nationality among those banished and those who died in the persecution—symbols, to contemporaries, of the unanimity with which the colonists entered the struggle. [8] [9]
On the 29th of November 1705 the Indian authorities, with a view to save expense, instructed the council of policy not to contribute longer toward the prizes of the Stellenbosch fair or to furnish wine and ale at the Company’s cost. There was thus no kermis or fair in the following year—the first visible effect of a November 1705 economy order that country people would later blame on the Cape government when the annual gathering failed, even though Starrenburg would truthfully answer that the Indian authorities had prohibited it. By the close of the calendar year the Batavia list of charges was already away, Tas’s thirty-eight paragraphs stood signed for the next return fleet, Huising’s five-year meat monopoly had ended in a four-butcher licence system, and Starrenburg held the landdrostship of Stellenbosch. Later portrait does not cancel the pride and private farming that the sixty-three had named; it does show that the year mixed ordinary administration—Namaqua staffs, a Natal timber voyage, a broken drought—with the scale of official estates that later complaints would measure in nearly half a million vines, and with a freeburgher solidarity that Dutch and French farmers had not shown so openly before. [3] [8] [9]
Huguenot Households, the Middelburg Letter, and French–Dutch Solidarity — 1705
On the 28th of March 1705 the Cape government wrote to the Chamber of Middelburg on the French congregation’s request that the Rev. Hendrik Bek preach at Drakenstein in both Dutch and French. Middelburg’s letter of 24 July 1704 had declined, for reasons already alleged on the 20th of September 1701, to consent that Bek preach through the French medium, yet had deferred the request to the Cape to act as most advantageous for the Company. The March reply could give no fuller opinion on the necessity than the respectful letter of 24 June 1703 already sent; it added that the community had repeatedly renewed the petition, declaring it impossible for them to learn the Dutch language because they lived one, two, three, or more hours from one another, and praying that divine service might be conducted in their own tongue at least once a fortnight. Bek understood French but, at the Seventeen’s direction, conducted public worship in Dutch; the sick-comforter Paul Roux continued ministrations to the Huguenots in their own language. Drakenstein still worshipped sometimes in a farmer’s front room, sometimes in a barn. [3] [8]
The March letter did not close Castle suspicion of French loyalty. Starrenburg’s remark to the Drakenstein Refugees in 1705—that he would not doubt they would hold to the Frenchman against the Company if French ships fell upon the Cape—belongs to the same year as the congregation’s renewed plea for fortnightly French sermons. At first the feeling between Dutch and French had not been one of trustfulness: the two nations had been at war for many years, and at the Cape there was a feeling that Huguenot sympathies would be for France should she attack. Simon van der Stel had distrusted the petition for a separate congregation. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, after twenty years of the same life and hardships, that mistrust had softened; misgovernment under Wilhem Adriaan supplied a common cause, and French and Dutch faced the Castle as one body. [8]
Household papers of the same year show the French congregation still settling estates and marriages even while some families left. On the 17th of February 1705 Jean Roux, born at la Morin (or Lormarin) in Provence in 1665, an agriculturist at Drakenstein living at Dal Josaphat, made his will and instituted his father, Philip Roux, then living at la Morin and aged sixty-eight, as heir to half his estate, and the Drakenstein Poor Fund as heir to the other half. He does not appear to have married. Jacques Potier (Potje), of Moukron in Flanders, who had arrived in 1699 as a soldier in the Westhoven, become a burgher in 1704, and lived at Drakenstein, married in 1705. [8]
Other Huguenot names left the Cape in the same calendar year. Louis Barré, who had received assistance from the 1690 Fund and in whose favour the Rev. Pierre Simond had on the 26th of February 1700 granted a power of attorney to recover certain money, returned to Europe in 1705. Paul le Febure (le Febre), a surgeon of Chaurry who had practised at Stellenbosch, married secondly Elizabeth Sezille (Sisillia); two children of that marriage had been baptised at the Cape in 1699 and 1701; in 1705 with his wife and two children he returned to Europe. A Le Febure household—husband, wife, and two children—is likewise recorded as returning to Europe in 1705. Those who paid their full ship money and went home had, in later judgment, been industrious enough to put money by; poverty and old age came to the very best, and not every departure argued indolence. [8]
Land tenure under which such households farmed remained mixed. The majority of farms held during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were on loan tenure: a grazier selected a pasturage, applied for permission to settle for a year, renewed the licence annually if the place suited, or abandoned it and sought fresh pastures further afield. He had no dominium in the ground and could not sell it, but might dispose of the buildings (opstal) erected thereon; the government, if it resumed occupation or refused renewal, would pay him out for the value of the opstal. The land given out to the Refugees along the Berg River had been granted in freehold, which allowed them to sell or transmit it to their heirs. That mix of annual cattle-runs and Huguenot freehold lots was the rural ground on which thirty-one French names could stand among the sixty-three signatories of Tas’s memorial—home-born Dutch, colonial Dutch, and Refugees together, difference of race forgotten for a common cause in the same year that Drakenstein still asked, in writing to Middelburg, for sermons in French once a fortnight. [8]