Boer History1710 at the Cape of Good Hope: Mauritius Garrison Withdrawal, Van Hoorn, Helot, and the Stellenbosch Fire
Beverwaart Withdraws the Mauritius Garrison — 25 January 1710
The civilian transfer from Mauritius had already put free families ashore from the Mercurius on the 26th of January 1709. Among those named in the later summary were Daniel Zaaiman, Gerrit Romond, and Hendrik de Vries, with their families; the remaining Cape-bound heads of households were not listed. The military close of the dependency fell in the next calendar year. The directors had judged the island barely useful as a refreshment station and insecure if held only lightly: beyond a little ebony and ambergris it contributed nothing of consequence to commerce, and hurricane, pirate landing, and fire had already reduced its value as a settled post. [3]
The losses that underlay the withdrawal order were not abstract. During the night of the 9th of February 1695 the residency and magazines had been destroyed by a violent hurricane. In 1701 a pirate ship wrecked on the coast close to the settlement; some two hundred armed men got safely ashore, together with twelve English and thirty Indian prisoners from captured vessels, and commander Roelof Diodati was obliged to sell them the Company’s packet at half price—paid as £167 from money saved from the wreck—to be rid of the unwelcome visitors. On the 15th of November 1707 the Company’s premises on the island were totally destroyed by fire, books, records, and magazine goods included. Instructions to withdraw the garrison had reached the Cape in February 1707; the Carthago and Mercurius had begun the civilian lift in September 1708. [3]
The Beverwaart was then sent to remove the remaining troops. On the 25th of January 1710 Abraham Momber, the last Dutch commander, with the subordinate officers and the soldiers, embarked in her and set sail for Batavia. Before going on board, the departing force destroyed everything within reach that could not be taken away. Even the forests were damaged as much as possible. All the hounds were left behind, that they might become wild and exterminate the game. The object of this waste, as the record presents it, was to prevent the abandoned station being of service to any one else. The directors’ conclusion that a large military hold was too costly and a small one insecure was thereby carried to a deliberate end on the ground. [3]
At the Cape the Mauritius episode therefore closed as two separate movements: free households already absorbed into the colony in 1709, and the last Company troops and officers gone in January 1710. No new outpost replaced the island under Cape authority. Table Bay remained the refreshment harbour; the abandoned Mauritius station stood as a deliberate blank on the Company’s western Indian Ocean map. The year that opened with Momber’s embarkation thus finished a thread that had run from the February 1707 order through the civilian Mercurius landing and into the final military destruction of what could not be carried. [3]
Commissioner Joan van Hoorn in Table Bay — January–February 1710
On the 10th of January 1710 the retired governor-general Joan van Hoorn (also styled Johan), accompanied by his wife Johanna Maria van Hoorn and their daughter, arrived in Table Bay on his passage back to the Netherlands. Johanna Maria was a granddaughter of the Cape’s first commander, Jan van Riebeeck, and daughter of the sitting governor-general at Batavia, Abraham van Riebeeck, and of Elizabeth van Oosten. Van Hoorn remained several weeks in the colony, where he acted as commissioner of the Company, presiding in the council and on all occasions taking precedence of the governor Louis van Assenburgh. A homeward high officer of that rank made the Cape, for a short season, a seat of superior Company authority rather than only a refreshment stop. Van Assenburgh, who seldom left the castle and governed by written order rather than by personal circuit among the farms, yielded ceremonial and deliberative precedence while the commissioner sat above the ordinary council of policy. [3] [9]
The commissioner’s household did not merely lodge at the castle; it left a contemporary private judgment on Van Assenburgh’s style of rule. In a letter of the 13th of January 1710—three days after arrival—Johanna Maria wrote to her parents at Batavia that the governor was a man of great frivolity and seemed very fond of ladies whom he always had in his company. In further letters she described the castle as miserably untidy despite some pretty buildings inside, complained that he amused himself daily with young women of poor reputation, named the daughter of mistress Munckerus as one such companion, and contrasted them with a few women of modest character—including juffrouw d’Ableing—who were not in the governor’s good books because they would not join that company. For people of that disposition, she sighed, the Cape was a very sad place. Van Hoorn himself, writing to his father-in-law, quoted Van Assenburgh’s own remark that it was as if the Cape were held together by gorging and boozing, corn and must making the inhabitants frisky because so many gardens were vineyards. From Batavia, Abraham van Riebeeck answered in still harsher terms, speaking of a godless governor and a dissolute government at the Cape and of his intention to redress matters if he ever came himself—an intention cut short by his early death. [9]
Official business matched the household’s scrutiny. Van Hoorn’s stay overlapped the final Mauritius embarkation and the freemen’s grain complaint that followed. He heard burgher representations, ordered the examination of Adam Tas’s long-held writing desk, and made at least one personal appointment that shaped later Cape careers. The young ship’s bookkeeper Jan de la Fontaine, sailing home from Ceylon as bookkeeper of the Horstendaal (also Horstendal), was a man Van Hoorn already knew from junior service in the Indies. Seeing in him someone who might exercise a favourable influence on Van Assenburgh, the commissioner detained him in Table Valley and placed him as master of the warehouses—storekeeper under Company style—rather than let him continue to the Netherlands. The commissioner’s weeks thus knotted shipping hierarchy, fiscal dispute, paper evidence from the burgher crisis of 1706–1707, private Batavia correspondence, and deliberate patronage into the opening months of the year under a governor who still held the day-to-day castle but did not outrank a retired governor-general acting under Company commission. [3] [9]
The pattern was familiar from earlier homeward commissioners—among them Cornelis Joan Simons in 1708—who had used a Cape call to issue standing instructions and to sit above the local board. Van Hoorn’s sojourn did not install a new governor; it interposed a temporary superior whose rulings on tithes and papers would either stand until the directors answered or be reversed when despatches arrived, and whose household letters carried a second, unofficial report of castle manners back to Batavia. For freemen who had lived through the Tas memorial, the Kattendyk recall, and the first full years of Van Assenburgh’s quieter administration, the commissioner’s presence reopened a channel of appeal that the ordinary council alone could not supply—even while the same visit fixed a future governor of the colony in a warehouse post and left on record how Van Riebeeck’s granddaughter judged the castle’s social tone in January and February 1710. [3] [9]
Burgher Councillors and the Grain Tithes — 26 February 1710
On the 26th of February 1710 the three burgher councillors appeared before Van Hoorn and, on behalf of the whole body of freemen, preferred a complaint. Instructions had recently been received from the supreme authorities to demand tithes of the whole quantity of corn gathered, and not of that portion only which was brought for sale, as had previously been the custom. The councillors requested that the farmers might be relieved from payment of tithes of such grain as they required for their own consumption and for seed. The commissioner considered their request reasonable and suspended the levy upon the whole until further instructions could be received. [3]
The pause was temporary. The directors took another view, and in despatches received at the Cape in February 1711 the farmers were required to pay tithes upon all grain harvested, as those in Europe had to pay. In vain they represented to the council of policy that in the Fatherland the tithe was collected upon the ground, whereas at the Cape it was delivered at the Company’s magazines. They were informed that the council had no power to make concessions in opposition to commands of the supreme authorities. An effort was made in 1712 to farm out the tithes by public auction, the purchaser to collect upon the ground; but no one would make an offer of any kind. The Company still maintained its claim, yet the condition of the country settled the question in the farmers’ favour for a time, for it was soon found impracticable to collect a tithe upon all that was grown, and after a time a fixed amount was deducted from the price of grain brought for sale. [3]
The dispute sat against a still-favourable grain export background. From 1705 a series of good seasons had set in, and each year a considerable quantity of wheat was sent to Batavia. From 1706 to 1711, both years included, the average wheat export was rather over four thousand muids, at a little less than twelve shillings a muid at the magazines. Rye, barley, beans, and peas continued to supply shipping and the Indian government when demand allowed, though the 1708 notice against surplus rye and beans had already shown how narrow the market for secondary grains could be. Tithes on household and seed grain threatened that surplus system at the farm gate; the February suspension kept the older practice in force for the harvest cycle that still fell under Van Hoorn’s interim ruling. [3]
The 1710 hearing was therefore the freemen’s first successful check on the new full-tithe order, even though it did not settle the principle. It placed the three burgher councillors, speaking for the whole free body, before a commissioner who outranked the governor and who was willing to treat household and seed corn as a reasonable exception until Batavia or the Seventeen answered. The later reversal in 1711, the failed auction of 1712, and the eventual compromise of a fixed deduction from magazine prices all flowed from the same February complaint; what the calendar year itself recorded was the temporary victory and the argument that Cape delivery at the magazines differed from European collection on the ground. [3]
Adam Tas’s Writing Desk Examined under Van Hoorn
The writing desk of Adam Tas had remained in government possession since the crisis of the burgher memorial years. A council presided over by Van Hoorn appointed a committee to examine its contents. A report was brought up that some of the papers were seditious, when it was resolved that they should be destroyed and the others be returned to Tas. The decision closed a material remnant of the 1706–1707 confrontation without a new public trial: the commissioner-era council sorted the papers, burned what it judged dangerous, and restored the rest to their owner. [3]
For freemen who had lived through the arrests, the certificate campaign, and the Kattendyk recall, the desk episode was administrative rather than spectacular. It confirmed that the post-recall order could still treat certain private papers as political evidence, yet it also returned a portion of Tas’s property under the same high authority that had just suspended the full grain tithe. Van Hoorn’s short Cape sojourn thus touched both the fiscal complaint of the living freemen and the paper trail of their earlier opposition. The destroyed papers were not published; the surviving residue went back to Tas as ordinary property once the committee’s report had drawn the line between sedition and the rest. [3]
The desk had been held through the entire interval from the height of the anti–Van der Stel campaign to the commissioner’s visit—years in which Tas and Jacob van der Heiden had been empowered by fellow freemen to press charges in the Fatherland, and in which both agents had sailed with the return fleet of 23 April 1708 that also carried the recalled governor and his circle. By 1710 Vergelegen had already been measured, broken into four farms, and sold; the desk examination was a late administrative tidying of the same crisis rather than a fresh prosecution. Burning the seditious portion and returning the rest signalled that the government would not keep the whole chest as perpetual evidence once a commissioner had reviewed it. [3]
Jan de la Fontaine Master of the Warehouses — 15 March 1710
On the 15th of March 1710 the homeward ship Horstendaal (also Horstendal) lay in Table Bay with her bookkeeper Jan de la Fontaine aboard, sailing back from Ceylon toward the Netherlands. He was still a young Company servant—born in Amsterdam on the 23rd of April 1684 under the fuller style Jan de la Fontaine dit Wicart—and he expected the ordinary end of an Indies posting: a well-earned passage home. Commissioner Joan van Hoorn, who already knew him from junior service in the Indies, ordered otherwise. Rather than let the bookkeeper continue to Europe, the retired governor-general detained him in Table Valley and gave him the appointment of master of the warehouses (storekeeper under Company style), thus opening a Cape official career that would, two decades later, end in the governorship itself. [3] [9]
The lineage behind that name was French-Flemish on one side and solid Dutch Calvinist on the other. His father, Jacques de la Fontaine, was a silk merchant whose own parents, Jean de la Fontaine and Marguerite le Thor, had left Valenciennes in French Flanders for Holland in the first half of the seventeenth century; some of the kin were Huguenot (Walloon) ministers, others silk traders. His mother, Barbara van den Burgh, daughter of Jan Gideonsen van den Burgh, came of Dutch Calvinist stock—enough to fix the baptism not in the Walloon church of family tradition but in Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk, and to turn grandfather’s Jean into the Dutch Jan of Cape usage. Jan was the first of the line to choose a colonial career. In his early twenties he entered the VOC, served a few years in junior ranks in the Indies, and there drew the notice of Van Hoorn for honesty and intelligence—the personal knowledge that later made the Cape detention more than a chance liking on a homeward call. [9]
Van Hoorn’s motive was political as well as personal. He saw in the young bookkeeper a man who might exercise a favourable influence on governor Louis van Assenburgh, whose castle manners the commissioner’s own household had already judged severely in January letters to Batavia. The March warehouse post was therefore not a casual reward for a pleasant shipboard clerk; it was a deliberate placement of a trusted Indies junior into the magazine hierarchy beside a governor whom the commissioner did not fully trust to steady the settlement alone. Control of those warehouses mattered in a year when wheat still moved outward in volume and when tithes, magazine prices, and shipping demands defined the freemen’s economy. The four-thousand-muid average export of 1706–1711 was measured, stored, and issued through the same magazine chain into which De la Fontaine now stepped—receiving grain at a little under twelve shillings a muid and supplying shipping and the Indian government. His entry did not rewrite those structures overnight; it fixed a new name, chosen by a superior commissioner, in the commercial core of the castle. [3] [9]
The episode also showed how a short commissioner visit could bend the ordinary ladder of Cape service faster than any routine directors’ letter. Van Hoorn did not wait for a vacancy cycle in Batavia’s correspondence; he pulled the Horstendaal’s bookkeeper off a homeward holiday and seated him at once among the senior commercial posts. Under Van Assenburgh’s government, which preferred written order and limited social display, such patronage from a superior commissioner was one of the few ways a new man could enter those posts without long prior Cape service of the kind that would, only weeks later, elevate the secretary Willem Helot—sixteen years already at the Cape—to secunde by directors’ order. De la Fontaine’s path ran the other way: Indies junior ranks, a commissioner’s detention, the magazines in 1710, and only afterward the long uninterrupted Cape climb that made him, in time, the first governor whose whole prior career had been built in Table Valley. In May 1711 he would marry Maria Elizabeth, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the late secunde Andries de Man—a local tie that sealed how completely the interrupted homeward voyage had become a Cape life. For 1710 the fact that mattered was simpler: the commissioner who ranked above Van Assenburgh chose the man in the warehouses. [3] [9]
Willem Helot Secunde and d’Ableing’s Departure — 1710
On the 30th of April 1710 the secretary to the council of policy, Willem Helot by name, who had been sixteen years in service at the Cape, was by order of the directors raised to the rank of senior merchant and took over the duties of secunde, Johan Cornelis d’Ableing having been instructed to proceed to India to fill an office of greater importance. The late secunde left South Africa on the 10th of July following. The April promotion and the July departure completed a reshuffle at the second tier of the castle government under Van Assenburgh. [3]
Helot’s elevation rewarded long Cape service rather than a new arrival from Batavia or the Netherlands. As secretary he had already sat at the centre of council paperwork; as secunde he became the ordinary second in command and, in the event of the governor’s death, the formal candidate to act as head of government. That contingency would become real on the afternoon of Sunday the 27th of December 1711, when Van Assenburgh died after a long illness and the council next morning elected Helot to act until the directors’ pleasure could be known—an election treated in the later narrative as a matter of form, for there was no one else eligible. The 1710 promotion thus pre-positioned the man who would bury the governor with state under the church pavement on the 2nd of January 1712 and hold the interim. [3]
D’Ableing’s removal to India closed the Cape service of the nephew of the recalled Van der Stel who had arrived as secunde in May 1707 and had steered the colony through the interregnum before Van Assenburgh’s installation on the 1st of February 1708. He had held the second office through the first years of the post-recall settlement, the Mauritius civilian landing, and the Vergelegen sale. By mid-1710 the executive pair at the castle was Van Assenburgh and Helot—a governor who seldom mixed with the burghers beyond New Year and birthday receptions and militia musters, and a secunde drawn from sixteen years of local secretarial service rather than from the old governor’s family circle. [3]
The directors’ order that raised Helot also marked how thoroughly the post-recall personnel settlement had moved on from the men shipped home in 1708. Van der Stel, the secunde Samuel Elsevier, and the clergyman Petrus Kalden had already been absolutely dismissed at Amsterdam; d’Ableing’s transfer to a greater Indian office was promotion away from the Cape rather than disgrace, yet it still cleared the second chair for a Cape-trained secretary. Ordinary freemen dealing with magazine prices, tithes, and district business now faced Helot’s signature where d’Ableing’s had stood. [3]
Fire at Stellenbosch — 17 December 1710
On the 17th of December 1710, at ten o’clock in the morning, a fire broke out in the village of Stellenbosch. There was a high wind, and a slave who was carrying a lighted fagot allowed some sparks to be blown into the thatch with which the landdrost’s office was covered. In a minute the roof was in flames. The fire spread to the adjoining buildings, which were all covered with thatch, and in a short time the church, the whole of the Company’s property, and twelve dwelling houses were burned down. Fortunately the church books and district records were saved. [3]
The December fire struck the administrative and religious core of the country district that had been the inland counterweight to Table Valley since Simon van der Stel’s foundation. Landdrost’s office, church, and Company buildings gone in one morning meant temporary relocation of district business and worship even while the saved registers preserved continuity of baptisms, marriages, and local acts. Thatch roofs and a berg wind turned a single carried light into a village disaster; the survival of the books was the one clear administrative mercy in the report. Twelve private houses lost beside the public fabric made the fire a burgher as well as a Company calamity. [3]
Reconstruction would occupy the following years; the calendar year 1710 closed with Stellenbosch’s public core in ashes and its paper memory intact. The same district that had received young street oaks in the winter of 1709 and a placaat of the 8th of August 1709 against damage to public trees—flogging at the foot of the gallows and a reward of £2 1s. 8d. for bringing offenders to justice—now faced a larger loss of public fabric than any individual tree-breaking had caused. Fire, not Bushmen raids or freemen’s politics, delivered the year’s sharpest blow to the inland village. [3]
The timber scarcity that had already sent a commission into the Land of Waveren for waggon and building wood, and that would in April 1711 send the acting fiscal Willem van Putten and the master gardener Jan Hertog along the left bank of the river Zonder End, framed the rebuilding problem in advance. Forests in the mountain kloofs near the Cape were by this time exhausted; public oaks and distant timber stands were the answers the authorities had begun to seek. A village whose church, landdrost’s office, and Company buildings had burned in a morning would draw on those same scarce supplies when walls and roofs rose again. [3]
Cattle Farmers, Waveren, and the Breede Valley — around 1710
By this date immigration from Europe had practically ceased. Occasionally a family from abroad was added to the burgher population, or a Company servant was discharged in South Africa, but the increase of the colonists was due chiefly to the excess of births over deaths. Cattle farmers were pushing their way from the Land of Waveren down the valley of the Breede river and from Hottentots Holland eastward along the course of the Zonder End. The movement was gradual rather than a single proclaimed trek, yet it marked the opening of the pattern later writers would treat as characteristic of free stock farming beyond the older Stellenbosch–Drakenstein core. [3] [4]
From 1710 to 1715 many of the farmers from Waveren—as the district of Tulbagh was then called—were gradually drifting down the Breede valley, while from Hottentots Holland some were gradually making their way along the course of the Zonderend, a tributary of the Breede. By 1745 that eastern migration would become extensive enough to warrant a third district and the village of Swellendam; the years around 1710 were the early drift, not yet the magisterial consolidation. Timber reports from Waveren had already noted waggon and building wood still available in the mountain kloofs when forests near the Cape were exhausted. Stock posts and loan-farm practice carried households farther from the castle’s daily reach even while wheat exports and tithe law still bound the arable districts to the magazines. [3] [4]
The impulse to move away from Table Bay’s immediate influence lay in the long pressure of Company monopoly and official private trade that had marked the Van der Stel years—Vergelegen’s scale, the limited market, and the freemen’s repeated protests. After the recall, the obvious solution that presented itself to many stock farmers was still distance: liberty in more remote regions rather than competition at the magazines under the old official farming system. The gradual Breede and Zonder End drift of 1710–1715 was that solution in motion, even under a governor who had not interfered with the freemen’s pursuits and who stood fairly well in their regard. [3] [4]
The town in Table Valley was growing also. It had not yet become the custom to call it Cape Town; it was usually termed the Cape, or sometimes the town at the Cape. Official letters were addressed from and to the Castle of Good Hope. At the date of Van Assenburgh’s later death the town contained about two hundred and fifty private houses besides the buildings belonging to the Company—a measure of urban bulk already accumulating while the cattle frontier slid east and north-east from Waveren and Hottentots Holland. Urban concentration at the castle and dispersion along the Breede thus advanced together in the same decade. [3]
Among the French Refugee households ordinary family and professional business continued under the same order. The surgeon Gideon le Grand, who had practised at Drakenstein and Stellenbosch and had served as heemraad of Drakenstein, died in 1710, leaving no heirs at the Cape but a brother, Abraham le Grand, at Haarlem. What appears to have been a fragmentary day book of his for that year survives in the archives, with clinical notes, messenger names, and the careful record envoyé—medicine sent on order—beside entries for cinnamon, terebinth, crocus, ginger, and sweet oil. Jacob Naudé, born at Berlin about 1696, arrived at the Cape in 1710; he would later marry Suzanne Taillefert, widow of Pierre Cronier, and join the Drakenstein church with a certificate from Hanover. Anne Retief, first wife of the heemraad and early deacon Pierre Rousseau of the farm De Boog van Orleans, died in 1710. [8]
Church provision in the French district remained thin. After the removal of the Reverend Beck from Drakenstein to Stellenbosch in 1707, the Cape Church Council wrote to the Classis at Amsterdam on the 26th of March 1710 that the former congregation was still badly in want of a clergyman, services being conducted by a sick-comforter. The reply was that the Seventeen had been approached and five ministers allowed for foreign service, yet among them were none who could satisfy Drakenstein’s special need of French. The Dutch-paper order of late 1709—letters to government and nomination lists thereafter in Dutch—thus stood beside a still-unfilled French pulpit and beside Sunday arrangements that in later years would still show separate French and Dutch hours. Official forms had shifted; pastoral supply had not caught up. [3] [8]
Through the same months the wheat trade that framed the tithe dispute held inside its longer average. The good seasons from 1705 onward still sent rather more than four thousand muids a year to Batavia at a little under twelve shillings a muid; rye and beans remained under the shadow of the 1708 discouragement whenever they outran ship and hospital demand. The public face of the castle, meanwhile, remained the governor’s fixed calendar of hospitality rather than any circuit among the farms. On New Year’s Day and on his birthday it was the custom for the principal burghers with their wives to call at the castle between ten and eleven in the morning, present their compliments, and remain to dinner until about nine in the evening; after the yearly muster of the Cape district militia—one company of cavalry and two of infantry—the officers were likewise entertained at the castle. At those receptions Van Assenburgh was friendly and easy of access, yet he did not court society beyond the appointed hours, and he seldom left the fortress walls. [3]
Within that pattern the year closed with a spectacle that went well beyond the ordinary morning call. On the 22nd of December 1710—five days after the Stellenbosch fire—Van Assenburgh kept his fiftieth birthday. The Company journal recorded that the whole day was spent in drinking and eating and that the settlement was treated to “all imaginable kinds of enjoyment.” The display ended in fireworks whose climax spelled the letters VAN ASSENBURGH rocketing through the sky in flame—an impresario’s flourish unmatched in ordinary castle receptions. The same governor had already promoted dog-and-bull fights on the Wapen Pleyn and encouraged puppet shows and other public diversions, so that the birthday fireworks sat in a known line of castle entertainment rather than as a solitary freak. Burghers who valued his laissez-faire protection of their ordinary pursuits could still mark the distance between that open-handed spectacle and the quieter New Year dinners; both belonged to the same administration that left stock farmers free to push farther from Table Valley while the magazines and tithe law held the arable core. [3] [9]
Against that administrative background the year recorded the Mauritius garrison’s end, a commissioner’s tithe suspension and desk review, Helot’s rise and d’Ableing’s departure, De la Fontaine’s entry to the magazines, the December fire at Stellenbosch, the governor’s fiftieth birthday spectacle five days later, and the early cattle drift from Waveren and Hottentots Holland toward the Breede and the Zonder End. [3] [4] [8] [9]