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. 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. [3]
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. 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. [3]
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. 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]
Willem Helot’s Acting Government — 1712
On the morning of 28 December 1711 the council of policy had 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 D’Ableing was ordered on to India. Through 1712 that acting headship was the ordinary government of the Cape. [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. The acting head inherited those minutes as standing order rather than as unfinished business to be rewritten. [3]
Upon intelligence of Van Assenburgh’s death reaching the Netherlands, the directors appointed 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 the troops at the peace of Utrecht. He received the rank, title, and salary of a councillor extraordinary of the Indies. He did not, however, reach Table Bay until the 24th of March 1714, and was formally installed only on the 28th of that month. The whole of 1712 therefore belonged to Helot’s acting administration, with the permanent successor named abroad but not yet present at the castle. [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. That urban frame was the seat from which Helot’s council governed a settlement whose freemen were already pushing stock farms far beyond the peninsula while immigration from Europe had practically ceased. [3]
Tithe Farming Put Up to Auction — 1712
Despatches received in February 1711 had 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 freemen had 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 had answered that it had no power to make concessions in opposition to commands of the supreme authorities. The full-tithe claim thus stood as law when Helot’s acting year opened. [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 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. [3]
The Company still maintained its claim, but the condition of the country settled the question in the farmers’ favour in so far as it soon proved impracticable to collect 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. [3]
Grain tithes remained, with transfer dues and profits on sales of goods, one of the ordinary branches of colonial revenue beside the large farm of the retail wine and spirit monopoly. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century those secondary heads together averaged some thousands of pounds a year in the later sterling reckoning of the printed histories, yet they never closed the gap between Cape receipts and 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. [3]
Drought and the Grain Export — 1712
The crop of 1710–11 had 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. [3]
From 1706 to 1711 inclusive the settlement had 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. Against that earlier average the 1,020 muids of 1712 marked a collapse of exportable surplus rather than a change of Indian demand. Rye, barley, beans, and peas still supplied shipping when they could be spared, but wheat for Batavia was the headline of the Cape’s grain service, and in Helot’s first full calendar year that service nearly failed. [3]
Store grain had masked the poor 1710–11 harvest; it could not mask two further dry seasons. The council still had to provision ships and meet Indian requisitions as far as stocks allowed, while freemen reserved seed and household grain under a legal tithe that claimed every muid grown. 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. [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. That later rebound lies outside the calendar of 1712; within the year itself the record is the drought export figure and the empty tithe auction floor. [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. [3]
Immigration from Europe had practically ceased some years before. Occasionally a family from abroad was added to the burgher population, or a servant of the Company was discharged in South Africa, 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 Helot’s acting government, on the eve of the disease that would cut the town and the Khoikhoi kraals in the following year. [3]
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 Heerden, van Reenen, de Wet, du Buisson, Uys, Faure, 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. [3]
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. 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. [3]
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. [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. [4] [3]
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. [4] [3]
Close of 1712 at the Cape
By the end of 1712 the Cape had buried Van Assenburgh under the church pavement, lived a full year under Helot as acting head, failed to farm out the full grain tithe at public auction, exported only one thousand and twenty muids of wheat after insufficient rain, counted about one thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine free colonists on the burgher rolls, and seen cattle farmers continue from Waveren down the Breede and from Hottentots Holland along the Zonder End. On the 2nd of January the late governor’s state funeral opened the year; the council that had elected Helot on 28 December 1711 governed without a resident permanent successor, though the directors in the Netherlands named Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes after news of the death—he would arrive only in March 1714. The 1712 tithe auction found no bidder, so the Company kept its legal claim while collection on the ground remained impracticable and a fixed deduction from sale price later took the place of a full field levy. Drought cut the Batavia wheat shipment to a fraction of the four-thousand-muid averages of 1706–11. The free population figure of the rolls stood as a high mark before the smallpox of 1713. Inland, the stock frontier kept moving on the Breede–Zonder End corridor that Van Putten and Hertog had already surveyed for timber. The year closed with Helot still in the chair, the magazines short of export grain, and the freemen’s eastward cattle drift unbroken by the empty auction of the tithe farm. [3] [4]