Boer History1712 at the Cape of Good Hope: Helot, Van Assenburgh’s Burial, Tithe Auction, and Drought
Van Assenburgh’s State Burial — 2 January 1712
On the 2nd of January 1712 the body of the late governor Louis van Assenburgh was buried beneath the pavement of the church, with a great deal of state. He had died on the afternoon of Sunday the 27th of December 1711, five days after completing his fifty-first year, after about eight months’ confinement to his room in the castle—a sick-bed that other contemporary notices round to some nine months from the serious illness of early 1711. When that illness struck, most burghers were genuinely concerned; when he died they mourned him sincerely. The January funeral therefore opened the new calendar year as a public act of mourning and transfer rather than as the start of a new permanent governorship. Some burghers had 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 that visit and of the illness overthrow the tale. The body committed on the 2nd of January closed a sick-bed, not a murder. [3] [9]
The burial place was the church floor under which governors and principal officers were commonly laid. The ceremony was conducted with the formal display expected for a resident head of the settlement: the castle, the church, and the principal freemen marked the end of an administration that had not been eventful in conquest or constitutional change, and whose name was soon little remembered in popular tradition. Yet the same freemen who forgot the name had valued the practical climate of his years. After the recall crisis of Willem Adriaan van der Stel, Van Assenburgh’s easy-going, laissez-faire manner—smiling reception of the welcoming committee, “sweetest, kindest and most agreeable” thanks, and fatherly speeches from the castle balcony at installation—had restored ordinary friendliness between freeburghers and government. The body that had lain since the last days of December was thus committed under the pavement while the council already sat under another name, and while that quieter political legacy still mattered more at the magazines and farms than any monument. [3] [9]
In life he had seldom left the castle. He carried out the directors’ instructions in letter and spirit and so won the regard of the burghers, yet he developed a fondness for the pleasures of the table that contemporaries already associated with his name. He presented dog-and-bull fights on the Wapen Pleyn, promoted puppet shows and fireworks, and on his fiftieth birthday, the 22nd of December 1710, treated the settlement to a full day of eating, drinking, and “all imaginable kinds of enjoyment,” ending with the letters of his name rocketing through the sky. New Year’s Day and birthday calls by the principal freemen and their wives—compliments between ten and eleven in the morning, dinner, and departure only toward nine in the evening—were the ordinary social face of a governor who mixed little in the farmers’ personal affairs and still stood fairly well in their regard. On the yearly muster of the Cape-district militia, when the company of cavalry and two companies of infantry had gone through their exercises and been inspected, the officers were likewise entertained at the castle: friendly, easy of access, yet not a man who courted society. That public ease, not frontier conquest, was the tone the state burial closed. [3] [9]
Van Assenburgh’s death closed a governorship that had begun after the Kattendyk recall crisis and the interregnum of Johan Cornelis d’Ableing. Under him Mauritius had been evacuated, commissioners Joan van Hoorn and Pieter de Vos had sat at the Cape, full grain tithes had been reimposed by directors’ order in February 1711, and Stellenbosch’s public core had burned in December 1710. He could still act firmly when the flag or a council appointment required it, yet the lasting political fact of his years was the cooling of freeburgher anger after Willem Adriaan’s fall. The state burial of early January fixed that record in ritual while the living work of government passed without interruption to the secunde already chosen the morning after the death. [3] [9]
Willem Helot’s Acting Government — 1712
On the morning of 28 December 1711 the council of policy met and elected the secunde Willem Helot 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 was ordered on to India. Through the whole calendar of 1712 that acting headship was the ordinary government of the Cape: no permanent governor sat in the castle, and the council’s minutes ran under the secunde’s name. [3]
Helot’s year was not a new programme of reform. It was the continuation of council business under a resident officer who already knew the magazines, the freemen’s complaints, and the district machinery of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein. Tithe law, grain export, and the eastward cattle drift all moved through the same board that had, in mid-December 1711, confined the Stellenbosch landdrost’s jurisdiction beyond the Mosselbank and Kuils rivers. Commissioner Johan van Hoorn had earlier called him an able and competent man in a letter to his father-in-law Abraham van Riebeeck, yet among the colonists he was widely unpopular—an awkward contrast that left the intermediate government without the easy freeburgher goodwill Van Assenburgh had enjoyed, even while the directors still had no permanent replacement on the spot. [3] [9]
That same commissioner family closed another chapter in the Fatherland while Helot signed at the Cape. Johanna Maria, widow of Joan van Hoorn, did not long remain unmarried: on the 27th of November 1712 she wed Mr Cornelis Bors van Waveren, lord of Leusden, Hamersveld, Snorrenhoef, ’t Heetveld and Donkelaar, schepen and councillor of Amsterdam and a director of the West India Company. In the same year Johan van Riebeeck, the founder’s only surviving grandson, already a merchant at twenty-one after entering Company service at sixteen in 1707, stood on the open path of an Eastern career. The Van Hoorn–Van Riebeeck connection that had sat above Van Assenburgh in 1710 and had recommended Helot as able thus moved on in Amsterdam and Batavia while the acting head they had praised still governed a Cape that did not return the compliment. [2] [9]
District office under that acting head changed hands before the year closed. Johannes Mulder held the landdrostship of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein from March 1711 through December 1712; Dominicus Blesius then took the post from December 1712 to May 1713. The succession was ordinary Company rotation rather than a constitutional crisis, but it mattered on the ground: the landdrost and heemraden were the officers who collected local revenue, heard country civil causes, and policed the freemen already drifting stock posts down the Breede and along the Zonder End. Helot’s council at the castle thus governed 1712 through a district bench that itself turned over in the last weeks of the year. [3]
Upon intelligence of Van Assenburgh’s death reaching the Netherlands, the directors eventually named as his successor Lieutenant-Colonel Maurits (Maurice) Pasques de Chavonnes, a native of the Hague, born there on the 23rd of July 1654, son of Pierre, Marquis de Chavonnes, whose father Joachim had left France after the massacre of Saint Bartholomew in 1572. From early youth he was destined for a military career in the army of the States; in 1689 he married Balthazarina Kien; in the mid-1690s he was military governor of Bergen-op-Zoom, rising from lieutenant-colonel to colonel and then brigadier. After the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 restored peace with France, the Republic could dispense with his military services; on the strong recommendation of Pensionary Heinsius he was appointed governor of the Cape settlement and, simultaneously, councillor extraordinary of the Indies, with the rank, title, and salary of that Indies dignity. He did not, however, reach Table Bay until the 24th of March 1714, and was formally installed only on the 28th of that month—some two years and three months after Van Assenburgh’s death. The whole of 1712 therefore belonged to Helot’s acting administration, with the permanent successor still only a name in the Fatherland. [3] [9]
While Helot signed at the castle, Amsterdam printers issued in 1712 a foolscap volume of three hundred and twenty pages, the Contra Deductie, in the names of the two authorised Cape burghers Jacobus van der Heiden and Adam Tas. It gathered every particular of the 1706 charges against Willem Adriaan van der Stel, fortified with depositions and authentic copies meant to verify the memorial sent in 1706 to the Seventeen, and stood as a printed answer to the late governor’s own Deductie. The acting Cape government of 1712 was thus contemporary with the controversy’s appearance in type in the Fatherland, even as the late governor’s father, Simon, still lived at Constantia until June. [3]
At the date of the late governor’s 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. Into that same urban frame in 1712 came Sergius Swellengrebel, born at Amsterdam in 1694, beginning a Company career that would later carry him to adjunct fiscal and, after repatriation and return, to secunde under Rijk Tulbagh. Helot’s council governed from those two hundred and fifty houses a settlement whose freemen already pushed stock farms far beyond the peninsula while immigration from Europe had practically ceased, and while the next permanent governor still waited on European peace and a long outward voyage. [3] [9]
Tithe Farming Put Up to Auction — 1712
The full-tithe quarrel had already run for two years when Helot’s acting headship opened. On 26 February 1710, while the retired governor-general Joan van Hoorn still sat as commissioner above Governor Van Assenburgh, the three burgher councillors appeared before him on behalf of the freemen. Fresh instructions from the supreme authorities had demanded tithes on the whole quantity of corn gathered, not only on the portion brought for sale as had been the older Cape custom. The councillors asked that grain kept for household use and for seed be spared. Van Hoorn judged the request reasonable and suspended the levy on the whole crop until further orders could arrive. The directors took the opposite view. Despatches received in February 1711 required the farmers to pay tithes upon all grain harvested, as those in Europe had to pay. The freemen represented in vain that in the Fatherland the tithe was collected upon the ground, whereas at the Cape it was delivered at the Company’s magazines. The council of policy answered that it had no power to make concessions against commands of the supreme authorities. The full-tithe claim thus stood as law through 1712. [3]
An effort was made in 1712 to farm out the tithes by public auction, the purchaser to collect upon the ground. No one would make an offer of any kind. The auction was meant to close the gap between European field collection and Cape magazine delivery by placing a private farmer of the revenue on the farms themselves—the same farming-out principle already used for the lucrative retail wine and spirit monopoly, which the Company put up each year and which ranked among the principal colonial receipts. The complete absence of bids showed that neither freemen nor speculative buyers judged the full harvest tithe worth the cost and risk of collection in a thin-grain year under Helot’s intermediate government. [3] [8]
The Company still maintained its claim, but the condition of the country settled the question in the farmers’ favour so far as collection went. It soon proved impracticable to take a tithe upon all that was grown. After a time a fixed amount was deducted from the price of grain brought for sale. The 1712 auction failure was therefore not a formal repeal of the February 1711 despatches; it was the practical limit of enforcement. Helot’s government kept the legal demand while the market for farming the tithe refused to form, and freemen continued to meet the Company at magazine doors rather than on the threshing floor. [3]
Grain tithes remained, with transfer dues on sales of ground and profits on sales of goods, one of the ordinary secondary branches of colonial revenue beside the large farm of the retail wine and spirit monopoly. Transfer duty on immovable property had been introduced as early as 1686, after freemen were found to dispose of newly granted land at a profit without having paid for the soil: ten per cent of the purchase amount if the land was sold within three years of the grant, five per cent within ten years, and two and a half per cent thereafter. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century the wine and spirit monopoly alone averaged some eight thousand pounds a year in the later sterling reckoning of the printed histories, while tithes, transfer dues, and goods profits together averaged about four thousand seven hundred—still far short of the wider charges booked against the station. The failed tithe auction of 1712 left that structure unchanged: claim intact, collection incomplete, freemen still delivering at magazine doors when they sold, and no private bidder willing to stand between castle and farm. [3] [8]
Drought and the Grain Export — 1712
In the grain-producing districts the recorded periods of drought for the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries include the band 1710 to 1712, all three years named. That label sits beside earlier dry years 1698 to 1704 and later ones such as 1717 to 1720; for Helot’s Cape it fixes the agricultural climate of the whole acting headship. The crop of 1710–11 had already been a poor one, but a quantity of grain in store had 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 1712 figure was the thinnest of that short sequence and the clearest measure of how drought, not only tithe law, pressed the freemen’s surplus under the intermediate government. [3] [3]
From 1705 a series of good seasons had set in, and every year a considerable quantity of wheat went out to Batavia. From 1706 to 1711 inclusive the settlement sent rather over four thousand muids of wheat a year on average at a little less than twelve shillings a muid at the magazines; rye, barley, beans, and peas likewise met shipping and Indian wants when they could be spared. Against that earlier average the 1,020 muids of 1712 marked a collapse of exportable surplus rather than a change of Indian demand. Wheat for Batavia remained the headline of the Cape’s grain service; in Helot’s first full calendar year that service nearly failed, while freemen still faced the directors’ full-tithe claim of February 1711 on every muid grown. [3] [3]
Store grain had masked the poor 1710–11 harvest; it could not mask two further dry seasons inside the same 1710–1712 drought band. The council still had to provision ships in Table Bay and meet Indian requisitions as far as stocks allowed, while freemen reserved seed and household grain under a legal tithe that claimed the whole crop. The failed auction of field collection and the thousand-and-twenty-muid export belonged to the same agricultural year: a government that could not farm the tithe also could not fill the Batavia ships from a rain-starved harvest. Export totals, not narrative colour alone, fix how severe the shortfall was—the seasons record itself uses quantity of grain sent abroad as the ordinary test of a very good or only moderately fair year when other evidence is thin. [3] [3]
Recovery would come only after better rain and after the smallpox year of 1713, when ample fall of rain was offset by disease that prevented extensive cultivation, yet returns for seed sown proved exceptionally large and 1714 again exported four thousand three hundred and seventy-five muids—close to the old 1706–1711 average. That later rebound lies outside the calendar of 1712; within the year itself the record is the named drought band, the empty tithe-auction floor, and the 1,020-muid wheat shipment that nearly closed the Cape’s ordinary grain service to Batavia under Helot’s acting headship. [3] [3]
Burgher Rolls and Population — 1712
According to the burgher rolls, in 1712 the number of colonists—men, women, and children—was one thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine. The rolls are not to be regarded in any year as more than approximately correct, but, in common with other contemporary documents, they fix a population level against which the later smallpox losses would be measured. In 1716, three years after the cessation of the plague, notwithstanding natural increase, the same class of return showed only one thousand six hundred and ninety-seven. The gap between those two figures is not a story of 1712 itself, yet the year’s count is the last full free-colonist benchmark before the epidemic winter of 1713 cut the town and the country districts. [3]
Immigration from Europe had practically ceased some years before. Occasionally a family from abroad was still added to the burgher population, or a servant of the Company was discharged in South Africa and took free papers, but the increase of the colonists was now due chiefly to the excess of births over deaths. The 1,939 of the 1712 rolls therefore represented a community growing mainly from within, under Willem Helot’s acting government, on the eve of the disease that would cut Table Valley and the Khoikhoi kraals in the following year. Reverse movement outward still thinned the French and Flemish edge of that free society even while natural increase thickened it: the rolls counted a stationary order of magnitude, not a closed door on every individual passage. [3]
One such reverse passage was that of Jacques de Savoye. Once a merchant at Ghent and later a public man among the Drakenstein freemen—he had sat on the Court of Landdrost and Heemraden, appointed for his knowledge of Dutch and French and held up by Commander van der Stel as an example of virtue and laborious zeal to the other fugitives—he returned to Europe in 1712 with his wife Marie Madeleine de Clercq and her mother Antoinette Carnoy. Poverty, not preference alone, forced the voyage: he could not pay the full passage money. The same printed refugee lists that record his office and departure also note his burial in Europe in October 1717 and his widow’s in May 1721. A son, Philippe Rudolf de Savoye, remained in Company service at the Cape and was later buried in the church; a daughter, Aletta, had already married into the Meyer connection. De Savoye’s exit therefore removed an early refugee notable without extinguishing the household line on colonial ground—and it sits in the same calendar year as the 1,939-soul free count. [8]
Not every French household that moved in 1712 left under the same pressure. Paul Gouvret of Orleans, settled at Paarl as agriculturist, vinegrower, and shoemaker after arriving in the Reygersdaal in 1700, also returned to Europe in 1712 with his wife Anne Valleté and four children—another freeman family booked out of the colony in Helot’s year, whether or not the rolls registered the departure in the same ink as a birth. Against those exits, the ordinary thickening of free society still ran through church marriage registers rather than through new immigrant fleets. In Cape Town on the 22nd of May 1712 Jean Costeux married Anna Gildenhuys of the Cape, born 1699; he was buried in the Cape Town churchyard in June 1713, on the threshold of the smallpox year that would rewrite the next burgher totals. Charles du Plessis, himself born on the Oosterlandt and later practising as a surgeon, married Cecilia Marcevene (van Marseveen) in 1712. Philippe Mesnard of Provence married Jeanne Mouy in the same year—the only Mesnard son in the printed lists to marry and leave issue. Jean Roi married Maria Catherina le Febre, widow of Gabriel le Roux, likewise in 1712. Those unions—Cape-born and refugee partners, second marriages, and the first lasting Mesnard line—are the concrete markers of internal growth that the bald 1,939 figure compresses into a single total. [8]
Ordinary French-descended names still thickened the district lists even without a new immigrant fleet. Jacob Bourbounais of Mons, once a sailor in Company service who had entered the household of Pierre le Febre at Stellenbosch in 1692 and later that of Pierre Rochefort, appeared in 1712 on the list of burghers of Drakenstein. Gerard Hanseres (Hanseret), a mason at Stellenbosch born at St Omer in Artois in 1652, made a will in 1712 in which only his daughter Maria Gabrilla, still at the birthplace, appeared to be living, with legacies to townsmen of St Omer. Those entries are the small change of the 1,939: a Drakenstein admission and a Stellenbosch will in the same year as the de Savoye and Gouvret reverse passages. [8]
Between the commencement of the eighteenth century and the arrival of Governor de Chavonnes in 1714, names later well known throughout South Africa entered the colonial records—among them families such as van Aardt, van Heerden, Badenhorst, Bosman, Grobbelaar, Kotzé, Maré, Oberholster, van Reenen, de Wet, du Buisson, Uys, Faure, Zaaiman, and many others listed in the printed synthesis for that interval. Their appearance in the rolls and notarial papers of Helot’s years marked the ordinary thickening of free society rather than a single immigrant fleet. The 1712 count sat in the middle of that naming of new colonial surnames, while older French refugee houses such as de Savoye, Costeux, du Plessis, Mesnard, and Roi either contracted by return passage or extended by local marriage inside the same free total. [3] [8]
The Company still held several hundred slaves at the lodge and on its works; freemen held others on farms and in town houses. The burgher-roll figure of free colonists did not include those bonded people, nor the Khoikhoi labour still hired at harvest—labour that the smallpox year would soon make scarce. It measured the European free community that paid tithes when it sold grain, mustered militia, and pushed cattle posts eastward while Helot signed as acting head at the castle. Against that free total, the de Savoye and Gouvret departures of 1712 were individual subtractions; the Costeux, du Plessis, Mesnard, and Roi marriages were individual additions of household capacity; the Bourbounais admission and the Hanseres will were the small notarial marks of the same free list. The roll number 1,939 held both kinds of movement inside one approximate census of free men, women, and children on the last full year before plague. [3] [8]
Cattle Frontier on the Breede and Zonder End — 1712
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 already under way when Van Assenburgh died; under Helot in 1712 it continued as the ordinary expansion of stock farming beyond the older Stellenbosch–Drakenstein core, without a single proclaimed trek or a new district landdrost. Printed later synthesis put the same drift as the obvious solution to official monopolies and a limited Table Bay market: to move away from the influence of the Bay and seek liberty in more remote regions. [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 valley of the Breede, 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 at Swellendam; in 1712 it was still the early, informal stage of occupation under Company pleasure rather than surveyed freehold. [3] [4]
The same corridor had drawn official attention in 1711, when the acting fiscal Willem van Putten and the master gardener Jan Hertog examined the mountainous country along the left bank of the Zonder End and reported timber sufficient for existing needs. Cattle posts and remaining forest thus shared one eastern route from Hottentots Holland while Helot’s council managed tithes and drought at the magazines. Expansion of pasture did not wait on a permanent governor from Europe. [3] [4]
Early occupation of more distant parts often rested on informal sanction to hold lands and pastures during the pleasure of the Company. Rent and definite boundaries would tighten later; in Helot’s year the pattern was still gradual drift, large cattle runs, and freemen seeking room away from the crowded market and official monopolies of Table Bay. The 1712 drought on the grain farms of the older districts made that stock frontier no less attractive to households that lived by sheep and cattle as much as by wheat. [3] [4]
Death of Simon van der Stel — 24 June 1712
On the 24th of June 1712 the former governor Simon van der Stel died at the Cape. His remains were buried beneath the pavement of the church in Table Valley—the new church completed under his son Willem Adriaan van der Stel, and still known as the Groote Kerk. A monument to his memory was erected behind (or next to) the pulpit; when the building was enlarged in the 1830s–1840s that monument, with everything else of its kind, was removed and never restored. The June burial thus closed the life of the colony’s most formative late-seventeenth-century head under the same church floor that had already received Louis van Assenburgh in January, while the living government still sat under the acting headship of Willem Helot. [3] [9]
Van der Stel had left office long before. On the 11th of February 1699 he had inducted his eldest son as governor and retired to the farm Constantia, already beautified with vineyards and avenues of young oaks, where he had built a large and handsome residence. On the 11th of March 1699 the commissioner Daniel Heins granted him Zeekoe Vlei with the ground surrounding it an hour’s walk in diameter; on the 1st of February 1700 commissioner Wouter Valckenier granted him the use of the Steenbergen for the term of his life. Practically, therefore, he had the whole peninsula beyond his property as a cattle run. From that day his name faded from the official chronicle, yet as a private citizen-farmer he remained extremely active for roughly twelve years more—another neighbouring count of the same Constantia retirement runs to thirteen—supplying the Company with fresh produce and wine, and standing at the centre of local social life, entertaining Cape and foreign guests lavishly. Strangers long attributed the quality of Constantia wine to the care he took in pressing and fermenting; the flavour was later understood to owe as much to the soil. The wine he made was the best in the colony. The retired governor did not confine himself wholly to the estate. He was still ready to embark in any undertaking that promised large returns. [3] [9]
That commercial energy lasted almost to the end. In June 1711, when he was nearly seventy-two years of age, he entered into a contract with the council of policy, in company with the burgher Johannes Phyffer, to supply dried and salted fish for five years. 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 was struck only a year before his death, while Van Assenburgh still governed and the Cape was already sliding into the drought seasons of 1710–1712. It fixed the former governor’s last public footprint not as a castle politician but as a private monopolist still bargaining with the council that his son had once headed. [3]
By the mid-year of 1712 the political world he had shaped had already moved on. Willem Adriaan had been recalled in 1707; Van Assenburgh’s quiet administration and January state burial were past; Helot held only an interim chair while the directors named Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes in Europe. Simon’s death did not reopen those contests. It closed a longer arc that ran from the expansion of freehold farming and the founding of Stellenbosch through the Constantia retirement and the late Saldanha contract. The body laid under the Table Valley pavement in June belonged to the man who had, more than any single predecessor after Van Riebeeck, stamped the inland districts and the wine farms of the peninsula onto the Company’s map—and whose memorial stone the later rebuilding of the Groote Kerk would erase. [3] [9]