Boer History1709 at the Cape of Good Hope: Mauritius Settlers, Vergelegen Sale, and Stellenbosch Oaks
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 Carthago had gone 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 summary that later historians used; nine such heads of families had elected for the Cape when the withdrawal intelligence first reached the island. [3]
For the settlement under governor Louis van Assenburgh the January arrival was more than a shipping note. The Company had judged Mauritius barely useful as a refreshment station and insecure if held only lightly after hurricane, pirate, and fire losses; the colonists there had been averse to breaking up their homes, yet necessity forced the choice between Java and the Cape. Those who landed from the Mercurius 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 year of Van Assenburgh’s administration. The Company troops on the island remained until the Beverwaart completed the withdrawal in January 1710; the year 1709 therefore held the civilian transfer while the military close of the dependency still lay ahead. [3]
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. Rye, barley, beans, and peas still supplied shipping and the Indian government when demand allowed, though the 1708 notice against surplus rye and beans had already shown how narrow the market could be. Against that background the Mauritius households were one more increment of free population rather than a separate plantation project 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, Vergelegen was measured and found to contain six hundred and thirteen morgen. It was divided into four farms, which were sold by public auction. 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. [3]
The purchasers were Barend Gildenhuis, Jacob van der Heiden, Jacob Malan, and the widow of Gerrit Cloete. Van der Heiden’s name linked the auction to the burgher campaign that had helped bring the recalled officials down: he had sailed for Europe in April 1708 as one of the two agents empowered by nineteen freemen to press charges in the Fatherland, and he now stood among those who took up pieces of the broken estate. Gildenhuis, Malan, and the Cloete widow completed a transfer from 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. [3]
The October sale closed a thread that had run from the directors’ recall through the temporary grape-pressing leave of 1708 and the agents’ voyage with the return fleet. Van der Stel, Samuel Elsevier, and Petrus Kalden had already been dismissed absolutely from the Company’s service after the Amsterdam investigation; they had left agents in the colony to dispose of estates and transmit proceeds. Vergelegen’s demolition of the main house, the Company’s bargain on the remaining buildings, and the four-farm auction made that disposal concrete on the ground in Hottentots Holland. Frans van der Stel had returned to Europe with his brother; his wife, Johanna Wessels, daughter of a leading Cape burgher, remained with her parents to manage property and did not rejoin her husband in Amsterdam until April 1717 — a domestic aftermath of the same collapse, though outside the auction itself. [3]
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. 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. Public street oaks and private replacement planting therefore stood on different practical footing in the same districts. [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. 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 August text did not create new forests; it tried to keep what the winter planting put into the ground from being torn out again. [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]
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. 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. [3]
Close of 1709 at the Cape
By the end of 1709 three strands of Company policy had been made visible on the ground. On the 26th of January the Mercurius landed Mauritius free families — among them Zaaiman, Romond, and De Vries with their households — while the Carthago’s passengers went on to Batavia and the island’s remaining troops waited for the Beverwaart. In October Vergelegen’s six hundred and thirteen morgen were sold as four farms for £1,095 to Gildenhuis, Van der Heiden, Malan, and the widow Cloete, after the main house had been pulled down and the Company had taken the other buildings for £625. In winter young oaks went to Stellenbosch streets; on the 8th of August a placaat threatened flogging at the gallows and offered £2 1s. 8d. for the conviction of those who damaged public trees, against a background of exhausted kloofs near the Cape and remaining waggon timber in the Land of Waveren. Wheat still moved to Batavia above four thousand muids a year on the 1706–1711 average. The year closed under Van Assenburgh without a new recall crisis, but with the Mauritius transfer, the Vergelegen auction, and the oak placaat as the concrete marks of how the post-1707 order was being applied. [3]