Boer History1709 at the Cape of Good Hope: Mauritius Settlers, Vergelegen Sale, Stellenbosch Oaks, and Abraham van Riebeeck
Mercurius Lands Mauritius Settlers — 26 January 1709
The evacuation of Mauritius, ordered from Europe in February 1707 and begun with the Carthago and Mercurius in September 1708, produced its first Cape landing in the new year. The island had been a dependency of the Cape Colony. The directors had judged it barely useful as a refreshment station and insecure if held only lightly after hurricane, pirate, and fire losses. Beyond a little ebony and ambergris it contributed nothing of consequence to commerce. When the withdrawal intelligence first reached the island, the burghers were averse to breaking up their homes, yet necessity forced the choice between Java and the Cape: nine heads of families elected for the Cape, the remainder preferring Batavia. [3]
The two ships sent in September had divided their work. The Carthago went on to Batavia with those who preferred Java; the Mercurius returned to Table Bay and put her passengers ashore on the 26th of January 1709. Among them were Daniel Zaaiman, Gerrit Romond, and Hendrik de Vries, with their families. The names of the other heads of households who chose the Cape rather than Batavia were not entered in the later summary. Those who landed brought household effects and experience of island farming into a colony still absorbing the departure of the recalled Van der Stel circle and the first full calendar year of governor Louis van Assenburgh’s administration. [3]
The January arrival closed the civilian half of a withdrawal that had been years in preparation. During the night of the 9th of February 1695 the residency and magazines on the island had been destroyed by a violent hurricane. In 1701 a pirate ship wrecked close to the settlement put two hundred armed men ashore, together with twelve English and thirty Indian prisoners out of captured vessels. The master of the buccaneers was an old acquaintance of the Dutch Company, having been in the Amy when she was seized in 1698 in Saldanha Bay. The island colonists took refuge in the fort. Commander Roelof Diodati, to be rid of the unwelcome visitors, sold them at half price the Company’s packet, for which they paid him £16 out of money saved from the wreck. On the 15th of November 1707 the Company’s premises were totally destroyed by fire, the books, records, and goods in the magazine burned with everything else. [3]
Company troops still remained on the island under the last Dutch commander, Abraham Momber. The year 1709 held the free families’ transfer; the garrison’s embarkation and the deliberate wrecking of what could not be carried still lay ahead. In Table Valley the new arrivals entered a community already accustomed to absorbing free families from Europe and from other Company stations. Wheat exports to Batavia were running, on the average of 1706–1711, rather over four thousand muids a year at a little under twelve shillings a muid at the magazines. Against that background the Mauritius households were one more increment of free population rather than a separate plantation project of their own—freemen folding into the same grain, stock, and village order that Van Assenburgh was charged to administer without the private agricultural empire of the previous decade. [3]
The choice the island freemen had been forced to make also defined what the Cape received. Those who preferred Batavia followed the Carthago toward Java and the denser Company world of the East; those who chose Table Bay accepted a refreshment colony still recovering from the recall of Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel, the shipping of Johannes Starrenburg, and the church quarrel that had ended only with Engelbertus François le Boucq’s deportation in September 1708. Zaaiman, Romond, and De Vries are named because the later summary preserved them; the unnamed heads of the remaining Cape-bound households entered the free population under the same terms—land, stock, and magazine prices rather than a reserved Mauritius settlement of their own. [3]
Vergelegen Divided and Sold — October 1709
The great Hottentots Holland estate of the recalled governor Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel reached its legal end in the Cape market in October 1709. After the council had refused, early in 1708, to leave him in possession beyond the pressing of that year’s grapes—he had obtained only leave to press the fruit then ripening and to dispose of half the wine on his own account, the other half for the Company, the quantity pressed being fifty-six leggers—Vergelegen was measured and found to contain six hundred and thirteen morgen. It was divided into four farms, which were sold by public auction. [3]
The large dwelling house was broken down, and the material was sold for Van der Stel’s benefit. The other buildings were taken over by the Company for £625, though the materials of which they were constructed were appraised at a much higher sum. The four farms brought £1,095 at the sale. The purchasers were Barend Gildenhuis, Jacob van der Heiden, Jacob Malan, and the widow of Gerrit Cloete. The auction thus converted a single official domain into ordinary freehold holdings under the post-recall rule that Company servants were not to farm for private profit on the old scale. The disparity between the Company’s purchase price for the remaining buildings and the higher appraisal of their materials was itself a measure of how completely the estate was being stripped of its former official character: stone and timber counted for more as materials than as the standing works of a governor’s seat. [3]
Van der Heiden’s name linked the auction to the burgher campaign that had helped bring the recalled officials down. Nineteen freemen had empowered Adam Tas and Van der Heiden to continue pressing charges in the Fatherland; both agents had sailed with the return fleet of 23 April 1708 that also carried Van der Stel, the secunde Samuel Elsevier, and the clergyman Petrus Kalden with their families. Another investigation at Amsterdam had resulted in the absolute dismissal of Van der Stel, Elsevier, and Kalden from the Company’s service. They left agents in the colony to dispose of estates and transmit proceeds. Van der Heiden now stood among those who took up pieces of the broken estate on the ground in Hottentots Holland—a freeman who had carried the burghers’ case to Europe returning as a purchaser when the governor’s domain was finally put under the hammer. [3]
Jacob Malan (Jacques Malan), one of the four purchasers, was a French Refugee agriculturist settled in the Hottentots-Holland neighbourhood, husband of Elizabeth le Long, widow of Jean Jourdan, and later a member of the court of landdrost and heemraden of Stellenbosch. In 1713 he would receive in freehold the farm La Motte, which he had held since 1694; at his wife’s death in 1736 the estate still held farms including De Faisante Kraal on the Bot River and ground in Hottentots Holland. His presence among the buyers of 1709 thus tied the breakup of Vergelegen to a free Huguenot farming class already rooted in the same district rather than to a fresh circle of Company favourites. Gildenhuis and the Cloete widow completed a transfer into ordinary freehold names of the post-recall settlement. [3] [8]
A later castle portrait of the recalled governor put the same auction in personal terms: robbed of his magnificent estate Vergelegen, his dreams of a rewarding retirement in a beautiful country scattered, Simon van der Stel’s son had returned to the Netherlands in 1708. The October sale of 1709 made that deprivation concrete on the ground. Frans van der Stel had returned to Europe with his brother and taken up residence in Amsterdam; his wife, Johanna Wessels, daughter of a leading Cape burgher, remained with her parents to dispose of property to the best advantage. Vergelegen’s demolition of the main house, the Company’s bargain on the remaining buildings, and the four-farm sale at £1,095 for 613 morgen made the directors’ verdict visible in Hottentots Holland. [3] [9]
Young Oaks Sent to Stellenbosch — Winter 1709
Tree planting under the Van der Stel governors had slackened, but the authorities did not abandon it entirely. In the winter of 1709 a number of young oaks were sent to Stellenbosch to be planted along the streets. Some of those previously set in the same places had been wantonly or thoughtlessly destroyed. The village that had grown around the landdrost’s office and the church thus received a fresh public planting at a moment when timber near the Cape was already a matter of official concern. [3]
The forests in the mountain kloofs near the Cape were by this time exhausted. A commission sent to examine the Land of Waveren reported that there was still a considerable quantity of timber suitable for waggon making and house building to be found there. Public street oaks and the search for timber farther inland therefore stood together as answers to the same scarcity: shade and alignment in the village streets on the one hand, structural wood for waggons and dwellings on the other, once the nearer kloofs no longer supplied either need. [3]
Farmers of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, pressed under an older regulation to plant an oak wherever they felled a tree on their own ground, generally neglected the rule. They assigned as a reason that with only sixty morgen of land they had not sufficient space, because trees near vineyards and cornfields attracted and harboured birds. Private replacement planting and public street oaks thus stood on different practical footing in the same districts: the winter consignment to Stellenbosch was an act of government, not a spontaneous revival of the private duty the freemen continued to ignore. [3]
The winter planting did not restore the systematic avenues associated with Simon van der Stel’s earlier years. It was a limited remedial measure—young trees for streets already spoiled by earlier destruction—under a governor who seldom left the castle and who governed by written order rather than by personal circuit among the farms. Stellenbosch’s streets, the landdrost’s district, and the exhausted kloofs near the peninsula formed one continuous problem of wood, shade, and building material. The winter oaks of 1709 were a first small step in that effort, not its completion: they put trees back into the village lines, and left the larger question of mountain timber to the Waveren report and to later commissions. [3]
Placaat against Damage to Public Trees — 8 August 1709
Destruction of the earlier street plantings produced a formal response. On the 8th of August 1709 a placaat was issued in which damaging trees on public property was prohibited under penalty of a sound flogging at the foot of the gallows. A reward of £2 1s. 8d. was promised to any one bringing offenders to justice. The ordinance tied the winter oak consignment to a criminal sanction and a bounty, treating public trees as Company property to be protected by spectacle and payment rather than by exhortation alone. [3]
The placaat belonged to the same administrative style that Van Assenburgh was expected to maintain after the excesses of the previous decade: written rules, public penalties, and attention to village infrastructure without the private agricultural empire that had discredited Wilhem Adriaan. It did not create new forests; it tried to keep what the winter planting put into the ground from being torn out again. The gallows foot and the two-pound reward made the Company’s interest in street timber visible to every freeman and servant who passed the trees. [3]
Private neglect of the felling-and-replanting rule remained untouched by the August text. The placaat spoke to damage on public property, not to the sixty-morgen farmer who refused to plant oaks beside his vines for fear of birds. That distinction left the deeper timber problem—exhausted kloofs and distant Waveren stands—still to be managed by survey and report rather than by criminal ordinance. What 1709 fixed in writing was the defence of the public rows already assigned to Stellenbosch’s streets. [3]
In that sense the placaat and the winter oaks were one policy stated twice: first as supply of young trees, then as punishment for those who destroyed them. Together they mark a year in which the post-recall government spent its attention on ordinary municipal and rural order—trees, grain, church language, and the disposal of a fallen governor’s estate—rather than on a fresh political crisis of the Tas or Kattendyk scale. The penalty at the gallows foot was severe by design: public trees were scarce capital after the kloofs near the Cape had been worked out, and the Company preferred a visible flogging and a cash reward to another round of neglected exhortation. [3]
Wheat Export and Settlement Context — 1709
Through the middle years of the first decade of the century a series of good seasons had allowed a considerable quantity of wheat to be sent to Batavia each year. From 1706 to 1711, both years included, the average export was rather over four thousand muids. The Company paid a little less than twelve shillings of English money a muid at the magazines. Rye, barley, beans, and peas were grown in quantities sufficient for the shipping and for the Indian government when that market would take them. The 1708 discouragement of surplus rye and beans remained the recent reminder that excess of secondary grains could outrun demand even while wheat held its place. [3]
The notice of the previous year had not reversed the wheat trade that the good seasons had opened; it had narrowed the secondary crops the Company was willing to absorb. For free burghers who had expanded rye and bean plantings beyond ship and hospital need, 1708 had brought a clear signal that the Batavia market would not underwrite unlimited diversification of grain. Wheat remained the staple the magazines would take at a published price; rye and beans fell back to local and shipping consumption without a guaranteed Company buyer. Through 1709 that pattern held inside the longer 1706–1711 export average. [3]
Van Assenburgh himself, installed on the 1st of February 1708, carried out the directors’ instructions in letter and in spirit and won the regard of the burghers, even as contemporaries described his growing fondness for the pleasures of the table. He seldom left the castle. On New Year’s Day and on his birthday the principal burghers with their wives called between ten and eleven in the morning to present compliments, stayed to dinner, and usually left only at nine in the evening. At the yearly muster of the Cape district militia—one company of cavalry and two of infantry—the officers were entertained at the castle. He was friendly at these receptions and easy of access, but he did not court society in the manner of Simon van der Stel’s earlier years. [3]
A later castle portrait of the same governor filled in the working manner behind those receptions. He was easy-going—in fact rarely going at all, for he mostly stayed in the Castle and seldom went on inspection tours—yet he was not a mere echo of his superiors. He severely reprimanded an English captain who, on arrival in Table Bay, did not honour the Dutch flag, telling the man “I shall shoot you from the roadstead for not saluting the castle,” after which the captain rushed back to fire his guns and was then welcomed with courtesy and a glass of wine. He overruled a decision of the council of policy about the appointment of a certain skipper and got his way. He put an ultimatum to the German Peter Kolbe, who had for some time done nothing, neither pursuing his astronomical observations nor performing burgher service: if he remained longer he must be looked upon as a burgher and pay duty and taxes, or be sent back to Holland. Puppet shows and fireworks displays belonged to the same public manner; the burghers took the laissez-faire that followed Wilhem Adriaan as, in the circumstances, no small relief. [3] [9]
The year 1709 did not reverse that pattern with a new political crisis on the scale of the Tas memorial or the Kattendyk recall. Instead it registered the working of decisions already taken: Mauritius families on the Mercurius, Vergelegen on the auction block, and street trees under a gallows penalty. The secunde Johan Cornelis d’Ableing still held his post; the Cape pulpit remained with Johannes Godfried d’Ailly; the meat contracts and free-barter arrangements of the post-recall settlement continued without a fresh directors’ upheaval recorded for this calendar year. The commissioner Cornelis Joan Simons’s manumission security rule of 19 April 1708—no slave to be freed without security that the freed person should not become a charge upon the poor funds within ten years—remained the standing law of the settlement. [3]
Stellenbosch Marriages of the Costeux Widow and Abraham de Clercq — 12 May 1709
Ordinary freehold and family business among the Refugees continued under the same post-recall order. Esaias Costeux, agriculturist in the Stellenbosch district, had died in 1708 leaving a widow, Anna van Marseveen (van Marcevene), but no issue; his brother and sister were his heirs in 1709. The widow married Abraham Prévot of Calais at Stellenbosch on the 12th of May 1709. They later left two daughters. Such settlements—heirship, remarriage, and the quiet transfer of a small agricultural estate—ran parallel to the spectacular four-farm auction of Vergelegen and to the landing of the Mauritius freemen. [8]
Prévot was a son of Charles Prévot of Calais and Marie le Fèvre, who had arrived from Amsterdam in 1688 in the Schelde with three children, Abraham, Anne, and Elizabeth; a fourth child, Charles, was baptised on board in Table Bay. The father was already deceased in July 1688. Abraham’s marriage to the Costeux widow therefore joined a Calais refugee line of the first 1688 ships to a Stellenbosch agricultural household whose male head had died the year before, the brother and sister taking the blood heirs’ portion while the widow remarried in the district church. [8]
The same Stellenbosch register, on the same 12th of May 1709, recorded another Refugee marriage. Abraham de Clercq (later de Klerk) of Straaskerke, alias Serooskerke, on Walcheren Island, son of Pieter de Clercq and Sara Cochet, had arrived in 1688 in the Oosterlandt in the service of the Dutch East India Company. He married at Stellenbosch Magdalena Mouton of Middelburg. His sister Jeanne had married André Gaucher. The double date—Prévot and De Clercq on one day in the Stellenbosch church—shows a district still knitting the 1688 arrivals into local households twenty-one years after the first ships. [8]
Anna van Marseveen herself belonged to that same mesh. She was a daughter of Pieter Jansz van Marseveen and Elizabeth des Pres of Courtrai; her sister Cecilia married Charles du Plessis. The Costeux family had come from Marcq near Calais: Esaias, Jean, and Susanne, children of Esaias Costeux and Susanne Albert, described in the 1690 list as orphans living with Nicolaas Kleef. Esaias had become an agriculturist in Stellenbosch district; Jean would later marry Anna Gildenhuys of the Cape. The 1709 heirship and the 12 May remarriage therefore closed one Calais-Stellenbosch household and opened another, without any new grant of a governor’s estate or any new Company contract—ordinary burgher business in the year Vergelegen went under the hammer. [8]
d’Ailly Baptises Eight Children at Drakenstein — 21–22 September 1709
The Cape minister d’Ailly’s hand appears in the Drakenstein church record for the year. On the 21st and 22nd of September 1709 he baptised a cluster of children in the district church. After the removal in 1707 of the Reverend Hendrik Bek from Drakenstein to Stellenbosch, the French congregation remained without a settled clergyman of its own; services were in the hands of a sick-comforter, and the Cape minister’s two days at Drakenstein filled a gap the district could not fill from its own pulpit. [3] [8]
On Sunday the 21st of September he baptised Marie, daughter of François du Toit and Susanne Seugnet, the witnesses Pierre Rousseau and Marie Jeanne Des Pres; and Abraham, son of Josué Cellier (Selliet) and Elizabeth Couvret, presented for baptism with Abraham de Villiers the son as witness and Ester Roux as godmother. Cellier and Couvret had arrived in the Reygersdaal in 1700 with Paul Couvret; the September child therefore belonged to a slightly later Refugee stream than the 1688 ships, still using the Drakenstein font under a Cape minister. [8]
On Sunday the 22nd of September the same minister baptised six more: Susanne, daughter of Louis le Riche and Susanne Fouché, witnesses François du Toit and Susanne Seugnet; Jacques, son of Charles Marais and Anne de Ruel, witnesses Charles Marais and Anne Roux; Jean, son of Jean de Bus and Sara Jacob, witnesses Daniel Jacob and Marthe le Fèvre; Pierre, son of Jacques Theron and Marie Jeanne Des Pres, witnesses François du Toit and Cornelia Villion; Willem, son of Pieter Willem van Heerden and Makel Eskal, witnesses Barend Burger and Johanna, wife of Geert Basson; and Jean, son of David du Buisson and Claudine Lombard, witnesses Jan Elberst and Sophia Hapel. The register notes that all eight children were baptised by monsieur d’Ailly, minister of the Cape, in the church of Drakenstein. [8]
The two days sit beside the later Dutch-paper order as evidence of a bilingual district under a Dutch-speaking government, not of a French church extinguished overnight. Du Toit, Marais, Theron, le Riche, de Bus, and du Buisson were names of the original Refugee settlement; Van Heerden’s child in the same list shows Dutch neighbours using the same font and the same visiting Cape minister. d’Ailly had preached at the Cape for the first time on the 5th of February 1708; his September journey to Drakenstein was pastoral supply from Table Valley, not the installation of a new French clergyman. French services did not cease; church minutes of later years still show French and Dutch hours on Sunday mornings. [3] [8]
Abraham van Riebeeck Takes Office as Governor-General — 30 October 1709
On the 30th of October 1709 Abraham van Riebeeck, third son of the Cape’s first commander Jan van Riebeeck and Maria de la Queillerie, took over the government of Netherlands India and moved into the castle at Batavia with his wife, his eighteen-year-old son Johan van Riebeeck, and his sixteen-year-old daughter Elisabeth. He was fifty-six years of age. He had been Director-General of the Dutch East Indies since the 18th of September 1702, and on the 2nd of March 1708 had been designated successor to his son-in-law, Joan van Hoorn. The highest Company office in the East thus passed, in this calendar year, to a man born inside the fort of Good Hope. [2] [3]
The birth itself had been entered in the Cape journal on the night of the 18th of October 1653, the second child of European parentage born in the fort Good Hope—the first having been the child of the sick-comforter Willem Wijlant on the 6th of June 1652. A later note on that journal leaf records that this son, named Abraham, was in later years (1709–1713) to attain the highest position in the Company’s service in the East Indies, namely that of Governor-General. The Cape of 1709, busy with Mauritius families, oak saplings, and a governor’s broken estate, thus stood at one remove from Batavia’s castle: the infant of the 1653 fort had become the Company’s senior servant in India. [1] [3]
His eldest daughter, Johanna Maria van Riebeeck, had been married at sixteen to Gerrit de Heere and, after his death in 1703, had in 1706 become the wife of Joan van Hoorn, Governor-General of India—the very office her father now assumed. The designation of 2 March 1708 had therefore been a succession within one Batavia household as well as a Company appointment: the Cape-born Director-General stepping into his son-in-law’s place. On 30 October 1709 that paper succession became residence in the castle, with the eighteen-year-old Johan and the sixteen-year-old Elisabeth under the same roof. [2]
For the Cape the fact was genealogical rather than administrative. Van Assenburgh remained governor in Table Valley; d’Ableing remained secunde; no order from Batavia in this year recast the post-recall settlement. Yet the coincidence is part of the year’s record: while Vergelegen, the estate of a disgraced Cape governor, was being measured at 613 morgen and sold in four farms, a son of the first Cape commander took the highest civil office the Company possessed. The infant baptised into the tiny garrison of 1653 now signed as Governor-General; the colony that had borne him was planting street oaks under a flogging placaat and absorbing nine Mauritius families into its free rolls. [2] [3]
Drakenstein Church Paper Ordered into Dutch — 10 December 1709
In the French district the pressure toward Dutch official forms tightened further. One account records that 1708 had been the last year in which nominations from the Drakenstein consistory were sent in the French language, and that upon receipt of the usual documents written in French the council of policy had directed that in future the nominations of church officers and letters to the government must be in Dutch. The council resolution of 10 December 1709 (Res. 10.12.1709, p. 495) made that instruction explicit to the Drakenstein clergyman and church officers: letters to the government and nomination lists for office bearers were thereafter to be in Dutch and not, as hitherto, in French. The two datings belong to one change of paper, not two: the last French nominations of 1708, and the recorded resolution of 10 December 1709. [3] [8]
The December order sat on top of an older language policy. On the 20th of September 1701 the directors had forbidden the Drakenstein minister to preach in French and had written that the French language should in course of time die out and be banished from the place, the schools to give no other instruction than was necessary to help the youth to read and write Dutch. In 1703 two-thirds of the Drakenstein congregation still could not follow a Dutch sermon. Petitions to permit the Reverend Bek to preach in their own tongue were referred to the directors, who left the matter in the governor’s hands; the settlers declared that they found it impossible to learn Dutch as they lived one, two, three or more hours from each other, and asked for services in their own language if only once a fortnight. The 1709 resolution did not reopen that pulpit question; it closed the language of the paper the district was required to lay before the Castle. [8]
French services did not cease. Church minutes of later years still show a French service at half-past eight on Sunday mornings and a Dutch service at ten, and still later a Dutch hour at nine followed by French even if only for one or two people. What 1709 changed was the language of nominations and of letters to government. The Refugees had never exceeded about one-sixth of the burgher population, or one-eighth of the whole European community including the Company’s servants; many had lived in Holland before they sailed. Official Dutch on consistory paper was the directors’ long design made local, not a sudden extinction of French in the Berg River farms. [8]
The resolution of the 10th of December therefore belongs with the winter oaks and the August placaat as an instrument of ordinary order under Van Assenburgh: Dutch paper from Drakenstein, public trees in Stellenbosch streets, wheat at a published magazine price, and Vergelegen in four freehold names. d’Ailly’s eight baptisms of 21–22 September had still been entered in French in the Drakenstein register; three months later the same congregation was told that its letters and nomination lists must go to the Castle in Dutch. The font and the file were no longer required to speak the same language. [3] [8]