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. The directors required the farmers to pay tithes upon all grain harvested, as those in Europe had to pay, and not only upon the portion brought for sale. The older custom, under which household and seed grain escaped the levy, was thus set aside by supreme order rather than by a fresh Cape placaat. [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. 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]
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. [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 oak plantings and the 8 August 1709 placaat against damage to public trees. [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. 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. [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. [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. [3] [4]
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]
Governor Van Assenburgh’s Illness — 1711
Governor Louis van Assenburgh was taken seriously ill early in the year 1711. He had never interfered with the pursuits of the farmers and had given the colonists the protection to which they were entitled, so that he stood fairly well in their regard. 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 affection for him that there had once been for the other. He seldom left the castle. [3]
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]
When he was taken ill, the burghers suspected that he had been poisoned, and one writer of the period did not hesitate to affirm that the poison had been administered to him 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. The rumour itself shows how quickly political memory at the Cape could turn a long sickbed into a story of intrigue; the calendar of the illness did not support the Constantia tale. [3]
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. 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. [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. [3] [4]
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. [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 eight-month confinement ended in the castle where he had spent most of his governorship. His administration had not been an eventful one in the sense of conquest or constitutional revolution; it had been a period of relative quiet for freemen after the recall crisis, closed by long illness and a December death rather than by dismissal or transfer. [3]
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 Van Hoorn and 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 notice. [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 in popular tradition. [3]
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; the December vote simply confirmed the ordinary succession when the governor’s chair fell vacant. [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, and the directors still to name a permanent successor. That successor would later be Lieutenant-Colonel Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, installed only in March 1714; the intervening government was Helot’s acting administration. [3]
For freemen and Company servants alike, the last days of 1711 therefore meant continuity of persons more than a new programme. The secunde who had already carried much of the sick governor’s load became the formal head; 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 and Van Assenburgh’s body still awaiting the January state burial. [3]
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. 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. [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 along the Zonderend, a tributary of the Breede. 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. [4] [3]
Close of 1711 at the Cape
By the end of 1711 the Cape had seen the full grain tithe restored by directors’ order, a return-fleet commissioner press tree planting and a Zonder End timber survey, a hard line drawn at the Mosselbank and Kuils against the Stellenbosch landdrost’s waggon impressment, and the death of the governor after eight months’ confinement. In February despatches required tithes on all grain harvested; freemen’s protests that Cape delivery at the magazines differed from European field collection could not move a council bound by supreme commands. On the 18th of April Pieter de Vos steered the council to press landdrost and heemraden of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein on road-side trees and groves, and sent Willem van Putten and Jan Hertog to the left bank of the Zonder End, where timber enough for existing needs was reported. Early in the year Van Assenburgh fell seriously ill; poison rumours tied to a Constantia visit did not fit the dates. On the 15th of December the council confined the landdrost’s authority beyond the Mosselbank and Kuils, as far as Europeans were settled. On the afternoon of Sunday the 27th of December, five days after his fifty-first birthday, the governor died; next morning Helot was elected acting head, there being no other eligible officer. The 1710–11 crop was poor, yet store grain still fed the Batavia export; cattle farmers continued from Waveren down the Breede and from Hottentots Holland along the Zonder End while the town in Table Valley held some two hundred and fifty private houses. The year closed with Helot in charge, Van Assenburgh’s state burial set for early January, and the freemen’s tithe burden written into standing law even where full collection still failed in practice. [3] [4]