Boer History1711 at the Cape of Good Hope: Full Grain Tithes, De Vos, Van Assenburgh’s Death, and Helot
Full Grain Tithes Ordered — February 1711
Despatches that arrived at the Cape in February 1711 closed the temporary relief that commissioner Joan van Hoorn had granted the freemen the previous year. Instructions had already required tithes of the whole quantity of corn gathered, and not only of the portion brought for sale. On the 26th of February 1710 the three burgher councillors had appeared before Van Hoorn and, on behalf of the whole body of freemen, asked that farmers might be relieved from payment of tithes on grain needed for their own consumption and for seed. The commissioner had judged the request reasonable and had suspended the levy upon the whole until further instructions could be received. The directors took another view. In the February letters the farmers were required to pay tithes upon all grain harvested, as those in Europe had to pay. [3]
The freemen answered through the council of policy. They represented that in the Fatherland the tithe was collected upon the ground, whereas at the Cape it was delivered at the Company’s magazines. The difference of place and of delivery, they argued, made a full harvest tithe harder to bear than the European pattern suggested. The council replied that it had no power to make concessions in opposition to commands of the supreme authorities. The February despatches therefore stood: the local board could record the complaint, but it could not restore Van Hoorn’s suspension. [3]
The order sat against a grain economy that had, from 1706 to 1711 inclusive, sent rather over four thousand muids of wheat a year on average to Batavia at a little less than twelve shillings a muid at the magazines. Rye, barley, beans, and peas still supplied shipping and the Indian government when demand allowed, though as early as 1708 rye and beans had so far exceeded the limited Indian market that a notice had discouraged their cultivation and stated that the Company would purchase no more of either. Full tithes on every muid grown threatened the surplus that freemen reserved for seed and household use; the February letters made that pressure a standing rule even while collection on the ground remained, in practice, incomplete. [3] [8]
An effort would be made in 1712 to farm out the tithes by public auction so that a purchaser might collect upon the ground, but no one would make an offer of any kind. The Company maintained its claim; the condition of the country settled the question in the farmers’ favour only in so far as full collection proved impracticable, and after a time a fixed amount was deducted from the price of grain brought for sale. The 1711 despatches were the legal peak of the full-tithe demand; the years immediately after showed how hard that demand was to enforce at magazine doors and farm gates alike. Tithes or tenths of land produce, together with transfer duty on immovable property and the farming-out of retail rights in wine, spirits, bread, and meat, remained among the ordinary fiscal instruments of Company rule at the Cape. [3] [8]
The same February in which those letters were opened still had an English visitor in Table Bay. Captain Woodes Rogers had lain there since the 28th of December 1710, finishing a cruising voyage round the world begun in 1708. He did not sail until the 5th of April 1711. His later printed account of the country and its people ran to four pages. While he was still at the roadstead, Amsterdam was putting through the press Abraham Bogaert’s Historische Reizen door d’ Oostersche Deelen van Asia, a volume of six hundred and four pages of which no fewer than one hundred and fifty-six were devoted to Cape affairs. Bogaert, a physician who had called at the Cape for the fifth time outward in July 1702 and for the sixth time homeward in February 1706, gave one chapter to the country, another to the Khoikhoi, and two long chapters to the tyranny practised by Willem Adriaan van der Stel and its consequences. He had been more than a spectator of that struggle. The 1711 tithe letters thus arrived in a season when the roadstead still held an English circumnavigator and when a Dutch physician’s Cape chapters were appearing in Amsterdam print: memory of the 1706 burgher fight in one harbour, a new fiscal demand in the other. [3]
Commissioner Pieter de Vos and Tree Planting — 18 April 1711
On the 18th of April 1711 the council, presided over by the commissioner Pieter de Vos, admiral of a return fleet, decided to press upon the landdrost and heemraden of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein the necessity of planting trees along the roads and of selecting suitable places for laying out groves. The resolution continued a long Company concern with public timber after the mountain kloofs near the Cape had been exhausted and after the winter of 1709, when a number of young oaks had been sent to Stellenbosch to be planted along the streets, and after the 8th of August 1709 placaat that prohibited damage to trees on public property under penalty of a sound flogging at the foot of the gallows, with a reward of about two pounds one shilling and eightpence to any one bringing offenders to justice. [3]
Attention to tree cultivation was not as close as it had been under the governors Van der Stel, yet it was not altogether neglected. Some of the oaks previously planted along Stellenbosch streets had been wantonly or thoughtlessly destroyed, which had helped prompt the August placaat. Farmers of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein had assigned, as a reason for neglecting the rule that anyone felling a tree on his own ground should plant an oak in its stead, that with only sixty morgen of land they lacked space, because trees near vineyards and cornfields attracted and harboured birds. De Vos’s April sitting answered that local reluctance with a formal push on road-side planting and grove sites under the district officers rather than with a new private-farm formula alone. [3]
A homeward admiral acting as commissioner gave the tree order the same kind of temporary superior weight that Van Hoorn had carried the year before. De Vos did not remain as a resident reformer; he used the council table while his return fleet lay in Table Bay to bind landdrost and heemraden to a planting programme that the ordinary Cape board could then be expected to follow up. The April minute thus linked shipping hierarchy, district government, and the long scarcity of waggon and building timber in one sitting. The Stellenbosch fire of 17 December 1710—which had consumed the church, the whole of the Company’s property in the village, and twelve dwelling houses—had already shown how brittle thatched public fabric remained when timber and building stock ran short. [3]
Thirteen days before that sitting Rogers had sailed. The English captain’s stay, from late December through the tithe letters into early April, therefore closed just as a Dutch return-fleet admiral took the chair. Table Bay in the first months of 1711 was not an empty roadstead waiting on a sick governor: it held, in succession, an English circumnavigator finishing a voyage begun in 1708 and a Company admiral with commissioner’s rank. De Vos used that rank on timber and trees; he did not reopen the tithe question that the February despatches had already closed against Van Hoorn’s suspension. The planting order and the Zonder End survey were the visible work of his presidency; the fiscal demand of February remained the directors’ word, not his to soften. [3] [3]
Timber Commission to the Zonder End — 1711
The same council session that pressed road-side planting appointed a commission consisting of the acting fiscal Willem van Putten and the master gardener Jan Hertog to examine the mountainous country along the left bank of the river Zonder End and report upon the forests there. The choice of men joined legal and horticultural authority: the fiscal’s office for an official survey, the master gardener’s for a practical reading of timber quality and quantity. The appointment sat in the same April sitting under De Vos’s presidency that had ordered the Stellenbosch and Drakenstein planting programme. [3]
The commission found a supply of timber sufficient for existing needs, which set the question at rest for a while. Earlier a commission sent to the Land of Waveren had already reported a considerable quantity of timber suitable for waggon making and house building still to be found in the mountain kloofs there after the forests nearer the Cape were exhausted. The Zonder End survey extended that search along the eastern stock route that cattle farmers were already using from Hottentots Holland. Sufficiency “for existing needs” was a limited comfort. It did not restore the depleted kloofs of the peninsula hinterland, nor did it create a permanent inland timber station. It did, however, tell the council that waggon and building wood could still be drawn from the Zonder End mountains without an immediate crisis, and it paired the freemen’s eastward cattle drift with an official map of remaining forest on the same corridor. [3] [4]
The timber question was not a separate curiosity from settlement. From about 1710 to 1715 many farmers from Waveren—as the district of Tulbagh was then called—were gradually drifting down the valley of the Breede river, while from Hottentots Holland some were gradually making their way along the course of the Zonderend, a tributary of the Breede. Van Putten and Hertog’s report therefore described remaining forest on a corridor that free stock farming was already opening. By mid-century that eastern migration would become extensive enough to warrant a third district; in 1711 it was still a gradual drift under Company pleasure rather than a proclaimed trek with fixed eastern bounds. The obvious solution that had presented itself after the Vergelegen years—to move away from the influence of Table Bay and to seek liberty in more remote regions—was already being taken in that quiet form. [3] [4]
Governor Van Assenburgh’s Illness — 1711
Governor Louis van Assenburgh was taken seriously ill early in the year 1711. He had been installed on the 1st of February 1708 after a military career that contemporaries remembered as brave and skilful — service that had included employment under the German Emperor before the Cape appointment, and, in one contemporary clergyman’s account, command of the Austrian Danube fleet before he left that employ, went to his brothers in Amsterdam, and obtained the Cape post. At the settlement he developed a fondness for the pleasures of the table that caused some to describe him as a winebibber, yet he carried out the directors’ instructions in letter and in spirit and thereby won the regard of the burghers. He had never interfered with the pursuits of the farmers and had given the colonists the protection to which they were entitled. After the heavy hand of Willem Adriaan van der Stel, freemen valued a lighter touch: a laissez-faire style that left their farms and markets freer of official competition and personal interference. He had not mixed with them and interested himself in their personal affairs as Simon van der Stel in his earlier years had done, so there was not that affectionate intimacy once felt for the elder Van der Stel. He seldom left the castle. [3] [9]
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 and present their compliments. They were then invited to remain to dinner and did not usually leave until nine in the evening. On the yearly muster of the militia of the Cape district, when the company of cavalry and two companies of infantry had gone through their exercises and been inspected, the officers were entertained at the castle. At these receptions the governor was very friendly, and he was at all times easy of access, but he did not court society beyond that formal hospitality. [3]
Ease of manner did not mean that he was a mere echo of advisers. He had severely reprimanded an English captain who, on arrival in Table Bay, failed to honour the Dutch flag, telling the man that he would shoot him from the roadstead for not saluting the castle; only after the guns were fired was the visitor welcomed with courtesy and a glass of wine. He had overruled the council of policy on the appointment of a skipper and had got his way. He had also put an ultimatum to Peter Kolbe, who for some time had done nothing, neither pursuing astronomical observations nor 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. The same man who smiled through installation speeches and free-drinking bouts could still bind a roadstead salute and a idle sojourner to Company form. [9]
He also made himself known as a public entertainer. Dog-and-bull fights were staged on the Wapen Pleyn; puppet shows and fireworks displays filled festival hours that the dry Company journal still recorded as days of eating, drinking, and “all imaginable kinds of enjoyment.” His fiftieth birthday, the 22nd of December 1710, closed with rockets that spelled VAN ASSENBURGH in fire above the settlement — a spectacle no ordinary Cape townsman had expected of a VOC governor. One earlier departure from steady burgher habits had already startled the town: when the afternoon service was concluded on Sunday the 11th of November 1708, he invited the principal townspeople to the castle and made an effort to entertain them with a fight between bulls and dogs. [3] [9]
The same host had been quoted, through commissioner Van Hoorn writing to his father-in-law Abraham van Riebeeck at Batavia, as saying that it was as if the Cape were held together by gorging and boozing, and that the abundance of corn and must made adults and children pretty frisky, for all gardens were vineyards and in them the majority of burghers pressed wine from their grapes. Abraham van Riebeeck, for his part, had written of “that godless governor and the dissolute government at the Cape,” and had spoken of going there himself to redress matters; his early death prevented the visit. Freemen who could agree with much of the criticism still valued the light hand after Willem Adriaan more than they minded the table and the Wapen Pleyn. [9]
When he fell ill early in 1711, most burghers were genuinely concerned for him. Some suspected poison, and one writer of the period did not hesitate to affirm that it had been administered in a glass of wine when on a visit at Constantia. The dates of the visit and of his illness, however, overthrow that statement. He was confined to his room for about eight months by one careful narrative; another reckoning of the same sickbed runs to nine months before the December death. Either way, the long confinement turned political memory toward intrigue even while the calendar refused the Constantia tale. The concern itself measured how far freemen had come to accept a castle-bound host whose light hand after Willem Adriaan mattered more than his reputation as a winebibber and showman. [3] [9]
Through those months the day-to-day work of government rested more heavily on the secunde Willem Helot and the ordinary council while the governor remained upstairs in the castle. Helot had been raised to senior merchant and secunde on the 30th of April 1710 after sixteen years’ Cape service, when Johan Cornelis d’Ableing had been ordered on to India. The colony that had hosted Van Hoorn and De Vos as passing commissioners now lived with a resident head who could not take the field or the ordinary public circuit. Tithe law, tree orders, and district jurisdiction still moved through the council table; the sick governor’s name continued to head the government even as his body no longer filled the public rooms that had once hosted birthday banquets and crowds from the Wapen Pleyn. [3]
Landdrost Jurisdiction at the Mosselbank and Kuils — 15 December 1711
In consequence of an attempt of the landdrost of Stellenbosch to press for the public service some waggons belonging to residents of the Cape peninsula, the burgher councillors appealed to the council of policy to define the bounds of that officer’s jurisdiction. On the 15th of December 1711 it was decided that he had no authority on the Cape side of the Mosselbank and Kuils rivers. Beyond those streams his jurisdiction extended as far as Europeans were settled. [3]
The ruling split the peninsula free population from the inland district machine. Burghers near Table Bay and the Liesbeek who kept waggons for their own and Company use were not to be commandeered by the Stellenbosch landdrost as if they lived under his drostdy. East and north-east of the Mosselbank–Kuils line, by contrast, the landdrost’s reach followed settlement itself: wherever Europeans had taken root, the district officer’s authority ran, even as cattle posts slid down the Breede and along the Zonder End. The Court of Landdrost and Heemraden already acted as a district council whose country functions paralleled those of the burgher councillors in the town; the December line fixed where that country machine stopped short of the peninsula. [3] [4] [8]
The December boundary was administrative rather than a new purchase or war. It answered a concrete quarrel over waggons, yet it also fixed a map line that matched the colony’s double structure: a town and peninsula under the castle and burgher councillors, and a growing country district under landdrost and heemraden. Coming two weeks before the governor’s death, it was one of the last major council decisions of Van Assenburgh’s nominal administration—taken while the governor still lived but after months in which Helot and the board had already carried the ordinary load of government. [3]
Death of Governor Van Assenburgh — 27 December 1711
Van Assenburgh died on the afternoon of Sunday the 27th of December 1711, five days after he had completed his fifty-first year. The long confinement — about eight months by one careful count, nine by another — ended in the castle where he had spent most of his governorship. Most burghers who had been genuinely concerned during the sickbed now mourned him sincerely. The death closed a period of relative quiet for freemen after the recall crisis of the later Van der Stel years: not conquest or constitutional revolution, but a December end to a castle-bound administration rather than dismissal or transfer. [3] [9]
What freemen most valued in the dead governor was not spectacle or intimacy. After Willem Adriaan van der Stel, they had appreciated a laissez-faire hand that left farms and markets freer of official competition and personal interference. Even colonists who could agree with criticism of his table habits and showmanship still credited him with restoring friendly relations between freeburghers and government — a quieter distinction than war or charter reform, yet the one most often attached to his memory when the Sunday death notice went out. If he achieved no other distinction than that restoration, the memory still deserved a warm thought. Popular tradition soon forgot his name; the freemen’s political memory kept the lighter hand. [3] [9]
He had taken office after the Kattendyk recall and the interregnum of Johan Cornelis d’Ableing, and he had governed while Mauritius was evacuated, while Joan van Hoorn and Pieter de Vos sat as commissioners, while full tithes were reimposed, and while Stellenbosch’s public core burned in December 1710. The personal style recorded of him was castle hospitality on set days, ease of access, and little private intimacy with the freemen. That style ended with the Sunday afternoon death. Upon intelligence of the death reaching the Netherlands, the directors would later appoint as his successor Lieutenant-Colonel Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, a native of the Hague who had commanded an infantry regiment in the army of the States and had been thrown out of employment by the reduction of troops at the peace of Utrecht; Chavonnes would arrive only on the 24th of March 1714 and be installed on the 28th. [3]
At the date of his death the town in Table Valley contained about two hundred and fifty private houses besides the buildings belonging to the Company. 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. The urban count sat beside the still-expanding cattle frontier as a measure of how large the settlement had already grown under a governor whose name would soon be little remembered outside the record books — even while freemen still measured his years by the friendlier terms between burgher and castle that those years had restored. [3] [9]
Willem Helot Elected Acting Head — 28 December 1711
Next morning the council of policy met, when the secunde Willem Helot was elected to act as head of the government until the pleasure of the directors could be signified. The election was a matter of form, for there was no one else eligible. Helot had been raised to senior merchant and secunde on the 30th of April 1710 after sixteen years’ Cape service, when Johan Cornelis d’Ableing left for India on the 10th of July 1710; the December vote simply confirmed the ordinary succession when the governor’s chair fell vacant. The sickbed months had already made him the working centre of the castle administration, so that the formal choice followed a practice freemen and servants had already learned under the long confinement. [3]
On the 2nd of January 1712 the body of the late governor was buried beneath the pavement of the church, with a great deal of state. The funeral fell just outside the calendar year of the death, yet it belonged to the same transfer of authority: Helot already acting, the castle in mourning form after a death freemen had mourned sincerely, and the Lords Seventeen still to name a permanent successor. That successor would be Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, installed only on the 28th of March 1714; the intervening government was Helot’s acting administration, running two years and three months from Van Assenburgh’s death to Chavonnes’s arrival. Even allowing for the slow pace of communication in those days, the length of the vacancy is hard to explain as mere transit delay. It cannot well be read as directors’ satisfaction with the intermediate government of the secunde. [3] [9]
Official opinion of the man who now sat in the chair was already split before the December vote hardened it. Commissioner Joan van Hoorn had given Helot a favourable testimonial, calling him an able and competent man in a letter to his father-in-law Abraham van Riebeeck. Among the colonists, by contrast, Helot was extremely unpopular — a reputation the Lords Seventeen can scarcely have ignored when they weighed how long to leave an acting head in place. The December election therefore fixed continuity of office more than popularity of person: the secunde who had carried the sick governor’s load became formal head, while freemen who had just lost a laissez-faire governor faced an interim whose later performance would not please the directors and whose dismissal under Chavonnes lay beyond the close of 1711. [3] [9]
Castle society under the long sickbed had not stood still. In May 1711 Jan de la Fontaine, whom Van Hoorn had taken from the ship Horstendaal as bookkeeper and made master of the warehouses on the 15th of March 1710, married Maria Elizabeth, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the former secunde Andries de Man. The wedding belonged to the same year as the tithe letters and the De Vos sitting: a young warehouse master, pulled from his outward voyage to please a commissioner, was already rooted in Table Valley households while the governor lay upstairs and Helot carried the board. For freemen and Company servants alike, the last days of 1711 therefore meant continuity of persons more than a new programme. The council that had fixed the Mosselbank–Kuils line a fortnight earlier now fixed the temporary chief. No second candidate stood in the way. The year closed with Helot in the chair, Van Assenburgh’s body still awaiting the January state burial, and the settlement entering a long wait in which drought, thin harvests, and — after 1713 — smallpox would fall on an administration that had not been chosen for its colonial favour but simply because the ordinary succession left no one else eligible when the governor died. [3] [9]
Poor Harvest, Stores, and the Cattle Frontier — 1711
The crop of 1710–11 was a poor one, but there was a quantity of grain in store which enabled the government to keep up the supply to Batavia. In the two following seasons also insufficient rain fell, and the yield of the harvest was so small that only one thousand and twenty muids in 1712 and nineteen hundred and fifty-six muids in 1713 could be exported. In 1713 the fall of rain was ample, but smallpox prevented extensive cultivation; the returns for seed sown were, however, exceptionally large, and in 1714 wheat exports rose again to four thousand three hundred and seventy-five muids. The 1711 season therefore stood at the start of a thin-harvest sequence even while magazine stocks still masked the shortfall for the Indian demand. [3]
Immigration from Europe had practically ceased some years before. 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 same corridor whose forests Van Putten and Hertog had just inspected. From 1710 to 1715, on the later synthesis, many of the farmers from Waveren were gradually drifting down the Breede valley, while from Hottentots Holland some were gradually moving eastward along the Zonderend. The movement was gradual rather than a single proclaimed trek, yet it marked the opening of the pattern of free stock farming beyond the older Stellenbosch–Drakenstein core while the castle still argued tithes, trees, and landdrost bounds. Names later well known throughout South Africa—among them Van Heerden, Van Reenen, Du Buisson, Le Grand, Zaaiman, De Wet, and others—already appear in the colonial records of the years between the opening of the century and the arrival of Chavonnes. [3] [4]
The year thus closed on a double map. In Table Valley about two hundred and fifty private houses stood beside the Company’s buildings under a town still called simply the Cape. Along the coast the June Saldanha monopoly bound fish and seals to a private five-year farm under the late governor Simon van der Stel and Johannes Phyffer. Inland, landdrost authority stopped at the Mosselbank and Kuils on the Cape side and ran with European settlement beyond; freemen and their cattle moved down the Breede and along the Zonder End; full grain tithes stood as law even where collection failed; and the acting head of government was the secunde who had already governed through the sick governor’s last eight months. The deeper crises of smallpox and of Helot’s later fall under Chavonnes still lay ahead, but the administrative transfer of late December 1711 was complete. [3] [4]
Saldanha Fish and Seal Monopoly — June 1711
Beside the grain magazines, the coast still offered contracts that retired officials and freemen could take from the council of policy. In June 1711, when the late governor Simon van der Stel was nearly seventy-two years of age, he and the burgher Johannes Phyffer entered into a five-year agreement to supply dried and salted fish. The partners secured a monopoly of fishing and seal hunting at Saldanha Bay, on condition of an annual payment of twenty-five leggers of train oil. The bargain sat in the same thin-harvest year: while wheat for Batavia still drew on stored grain, the bay’s fish and seals were farmed out as a private monopoly under council terms rather than left open to free competition. [3]
The late governor had not confined his attention wholly to Constantia’s vineyards and cattle. After handing over the administration on the 11th of February 1699 he had retired to the large residence he had built there; strangers of note were always sure of a hearty reception, and his house was seldom without visitors. On the 11th of March 1699 commissioner Daniel Heins had given him Zeekoe Vlei with the ground surrounding it an hour’s walk in diameter; on the 1st of February 1700 commissioner Wouter Valckenier had granted him the use of the Steenbergen for the term of his life, so that practically he had the whole peninsula beyond his property as a cattle run. The wine he made was the best in the colony. The 1711 Saldanha grant shows how far a former governor, still living at the Cape and already in his seventy-second year, remained ready to embark in any undertaking that promised large returns. [3]
The five-year term bound dried and salted fish and the seal hunt at one bay to a private farm under an annual oil rent. Twenty-five leggers of train oil a year was the Company’s price for shutting other hands out of that water. The contract did not restore Company cattle expeditions of the kind abandoned after 1700; it farmed a coastal staple the way retail wine and meat were farmed in town. In a year when full grain tithes stood as law and the 1710–11 crop was poor, the bay’s oil and fish were still a bargain worth taking by a retired commander who had never confined himself to one pursuit. [3]
Drakenstein Baptisms and Burgher Admissions — 1711
The French refugee community at Drakenstein still marked ordinary colonial increase in the parish books, now under Dutch church paper. On the 17th of May 1711 the Rev. Hendrik Bek baptised in the Drakenstein church two children born that year. Elisabet, daughter of Abraham Prevost and Hanna Marcevene, had been born on the 6th of February; the witnesses were Pieter Hance van Marcevene and Elisabet Depre. On the same day Isac, son of the widow of the late Charle Marais, born the 15th of April, was presented, with Etienne Marais and Elizabet Villiers standing. Both entries were recorded in the French baptismal hand still used in the Drakenstein register even after nominations to government had been ordered into Dutch. [8]
On the 8th of November 1711 a posthumous son of Jean le Roux of Blois, named Daniel, was baptised in the same church, and on the same day a posthumous son of his brother Gabriel le Roux was christened Gabriel. Jean had arrived in 1688 in the Voorschooten and had been married to Jeanne Mouy; he left three sons and one daughter. Gabriel, born 1671, had married Maria Catherina le Febre and at his death left five minors. Such entries belonged to ordinary colonial life under a sick governor and a full-tithe order rather than to any fresh wave of European settlement. [3] [8]
Discharge from the Company’s ranks still added an occasional name to the free rolls. On the 13th of October 1711 Jan Rosier of Morsselen (Monsnay), born about 1673, who had arrived at the Cape in 1699 as a soldier in the Zion, became a free burgher. He later married, first, Willemina Willems and, second, Margaretha Harmse Harting. In the same year Maria Buisset of Sedan, widow of the surgeon Jean Prieur du Plessis of Poitiers, married Dirk Snith of Nieuwburg, also a surgeon. She practised in the town as a qualified midwife; midwives at the Cape were either sent out by the directors or admitted after examination by two of the chief government surgeons. A Stellenbosch joint will of 1711 also records Maria Rousseau (Rossar) of Blois. Maria Vitout, who had remarried Matthys Michiels, died in 1711 leaving Elizabeth Nortier aged twenty, Anthony eighteen, Jonas sixteen, and Jean fourteen. [8]
These parish and roll entries did not reopen immigration from Europe. They show how the colony grew in 1711 while the governor lay ill, while De Vos pressed trees, and while Helot prepared to take the chair: baptisms at Drakenstein under Bek in May and under the same church in November, a soldier of 1699 made burgher in October, a Sedan midwife remarried to a town surgeon, and a Nortier widow’s death leaving four minors. The increase of the colonists was already, as the castle itself recorded, due chiefly to the excess of births over deaths. [3] [8]