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. The military close of the dependency fell in the next calendar year. The Beverwaart was sent to remove the remaining troops, and 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. The island that had been a Cape dependency since the previous century was thereby abandoned by the East India Company as a settled station. [3]
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. Hurricane, pirate landing, and fire had already reduced the island’s value as a refreshment post; the January embarkation completed the directors’ decision that a large military hold was too costly and a small one insecure. [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. [3]
Commissioner Joan van Hoorn in Table Bay — January–February 1710
On the 10th of January 1710 the retired governor-general Joan van Hoorn, accompanied by his wife and daughter, arrived in Table Bay on his passage back to the Netherlands. He remained several weeks in the colony, where he acted as commissioner, 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. [3]
Van Hoorn’s stay overlapped the final Mauritius embarkation and the freemen’s grain complaint that followed. He sat above the ordinary council of policy, heard burgher representations, and made at least one personal appointment that shaped later Cape careers. The commissioner’s weeks in Table Valley thus knotted shipping hierarchy, fiscal dispute, and patronage into the opening months of the year under a governor who still held the day-to-day castle but yielded ceremonial and deliberative precedence while Van Hoorn was present. [3]
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. [3]
The commissioner considered their request reasonable and suspended the levy upon the whole until further instructions could be received. The pause was temporary. Despatches that arrived in February 1711 required the farmers to pay tithes upon all grain harvested, as those in Europe had to pay. Later efforts to farm out the tithes by public auction failed when no one would make an offer; the Company maintained its claim, yet the condition of the country made full collection impracticable, and after a time a fixed amount was deducted from the price of grain brought for sale. The 1710 hearing before Van Hoorn was the freemen’s first successful check on the new full-tithe order. [3]
The dispute sat against a still-favourable grain export background. From 1706 to 1711, both years included, the average wheat export to Batavia 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. 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]
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. [3]
Jan de la Fontaine Master of the Warehouses — 15 March 1710
On the 15th of March 1710 a young man named Jan de la Fontaine arrived in Table Bay as bookkeeper of the ship Horstendaal. Commissioner Van Hoorn took a liking to him and gave him the appointment of master of the warehouses, thus introducing him to a career of official life in the colony which ended many years later in his occupying the post of governor. The March appointment was a classic Company patronage step: a ship’s bookkeeper noticed by a homeward governor-general and placed at once into the Cape magazine hierarchy. [3]
Control of the 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. De la Fontaine’s entry did not alter those structures overnight; it placed a new name in the chain that measured, stored, and issued Company goods. Later governors would rise from such posts; in 1710 the fact worth recording was the commissioner’s personal choice and the opening of that path. [3]
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. D’Ableing’s removal to India closed the 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. By mid-1710 the post-recall executive pair was Van Assenburgh and Helot. [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. [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 against damage to public trees now faced a larger loss of public fabric than any individual tree-breaking had caused. Fire, not bushmen or freemen’s politics, delivered the year’s sharpest blow to the inland village. [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, on the later synthesis, 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 moving eastward. 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. [4] [3]
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. [3]
Close of 1710 at the Cape
By the end of 1710 the Cape had closed the Mauritius dependency, hosted a retired governor-general as commissioner, reshuffled the secunde’s office, and watched Stellenbosch’s public core burn. On the 25th of January Momber and the last Dutch troops left Mauritius in the Beverwaart after wrecking what they could not carry. From the 10th of January Van Hoorn sat above Van Assenburgh in council; on the 26th of February the three burgher councillors obtained a suspension of full grain tithes pending further orders; Tas’s desk was examined, part of its papers destroyed as seditious, the rest returned. On the 15th of March De la Fontaine became master of the warehouses by Van Hoorn’s favour. On the 30th of April Helot rose to senior merchant and secunde; on the 10th of July d’Ableing sailed for India. On the 17th of December, at ten in the morning, wind-blown sparks from a carried fagot fired the thatch of the landdrost’s office and consumed the Stellenbosch church, the Company’s property there, and twelve houses, while church books and district records were saved. Beyond the older arable belt, cattle farmers were already moving from Waveren down the Breede and from Hottentots Holland along the Zonder End. The year closed under Van Assenburgh and Helot with the island gone, the tithe fight only deferred, a future governor seated in the magazines, and the inland drostdy village in ashes. [3] [4]