Boer History1713 at the Cape of Good Hope: Smallpox, the Bennebroek Wreck, and the Namaqua Alarm at Piketberg
Helot’s Second Acting Year — 1713
Through the whole of 1713 the Cape remained under the acting headship of the secunde Willem Helot. He had been elected by the council of policy on the morning of 28 December 1711, the day after Governor Louis van Assenburgh died, to govern until the directors’ pleasure could be known. That provisional arrangement, already a full calendar year old by January, still framed every decision of the castle while no permanent successor sat in Table Bay. Commissioner Joan van Hoorn had earlier called Helot an able and competent man in a letter to his father-in-law Abraham van Riebeeck, yet among the free colonists he was extremely unpopular—an awkward contrast that left the intermediate government without the easy freeburgher goodwill Van Assenburgh had enjoyed, even as the second full year of the acting headship opened under the same secunde’s name. [3] [9]
Upon intelligence of Van Assenburgh’s death the directors named as successor Lieutenant-Colonel Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, a native of the Hague, born there on the 23rd of July 1654, son of Pierre, Marquis de Chavonnes, whose own father Joachim had left France after the massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572. Family tradition linked a great-aunt to Louise de Coligny. From youth destined for arms, he joined the army of the States General; in 1689 he married Balthazarina Kien, daughter of Rochus Kien, a lawyer of Utrecht, and Marie de Beaumont. In the mid-1690s he was military governor of the fortified town of Bergen-op-Zoom, already a lieutenant-colonel and later colonel and 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 reach the Cape 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. Calendar 1713 therefore belonged entirely to Helot’s acting administration: the year of the European peace that freed Chavonnes for Company service was still, at the Cape, a year without its permanent governor. [3] [9]
Immigration from Europe had practically ceased some years earlier. Increase of the free colonists rested chiefly on the excess of births over deaths, while cattle farmers continued to push from the Land of Waveren down the Breede and from Hottentots Holland along the Zonder End. The town in Table Valley still held about two hundred and fifty private houses besides Company buildings, and was not yet customarily called Cape Town; official letters still ran from and to the Castle of Good Hope. Between the opening of the century and the later installation of Chavonnes the colonial records first show surnames afterwards well known throughout South Africa: van Aardt, Badenhorst, Bek, Beukes, Blankenberg, Bosman, Bronkhorst, Cilliers, Eksteen, Faure, Fick, Grobbelaar, van Heerden, Kotzé, Maré, Moolman, Munnik, Oberholster, van Reenen, Uys, de Wet, and others printed in the same table. That was the settlement into which disease, shipwreck news, a new independent fiscal, and a northern Namaqua scare entered in the same twelve months—under an unpopular acting head whose permanent replacement, freed by Utrecht and backed by Heinsius, would not step ashore until the following March. [3] [9]
Wreck of the Bennebroek on the Natal Coast — 16 February 1713
On the 16th of February 1713 the ship Bennebroek, homeward bound from Ceylon, after being disabled in a storm ran ashore in broad daylight on the coast of Natal, at some point which was never exactly ascertained. She commenced to break up immediately. Fifty-seven Europeans and twenty Malabar slaves intended for the Cape got to land on pieces of the wreck; the remainder of the crew perished. Those who were saved collected some food which washed up, and then set out to travel to the Cape. No Company vessel was on that coast to take them off. The wreck itself, not a local rescue, opened the year’s shipping record. [3]
They could not cross a deep river which was in their way, and after a few days some of them turned back to the neighbourhood of the wreck. There they remained until June, subsisting upon milk, meat, and millet which they obtained from the natives for pieces of iron and copper. When the metal in the wreckage was exhausted, they made another attempt to reach the Cape by going far inland to avoid the lower courses of the rivers. They did not succeed. After wandering about for some weeks, hunger and fatigue compelled the Europeans who still survived—seven in number—to take refuge with a tribe of natives who treated them with great kindness. There they found a Frenchman who had been wrecked thirty years before. The iron-and-copper barter thus lasted from mid-February into the Cape winter; when it failed, the overland attempt failed with it, and the last seven Europeans sat down among a coastal people rather than force another river line. [3]
The natives with whom they thenceforth lived were carrying on a perpetual war with San groups. Their residence was near the coast, on the bank of a river with a navigable mouth. The food of the tribe consisted chiefly of milk, varieties of pumpkin, and bread made by rubbing millet between stones, mixing the pulp with water, and baking it in ashes. Of those who did not turn back to the wreck, all perished except one Malabar slave. He pushed on westward for a whole year, overcoming every difficulty in his way. At length a burgher found him near the mouth of the Breede river, and sent him on to the castle, which he reached on the 26th of February 1714—news that closed the Bennebroek story only after Helot’s second full year had already ended. [3]
Within calendar 1713 the wreck itself and the first months of survival on the Natal coast belonged to the Cape’s wider shipping world rather than to any local rescue. No Company vessel recovered the main party that year. The survivors’ dependence on iron and copper from the wreckage, their failure to force the river barriers westward, the kindness of the coastal community that sheltered the last seven Europeans, and the chance presence of a French castaway from a wreck some thirty years earlier fixed the Bennebroek as a long-running eastern stranding whose full return of persons would stretch into the next governor’s installation season. Helot’s council could record the loss; it could not fetch the men. [3]
Smallpox Reaches South Africa — March 1713
In March 1713 a terrible calamity fell upon the country. In that month smallpox made what the Cape narrative treats as its first appearance in South Africa. It was introduced by means of some clothing belonging to ships’ people who had been ill on the passage from India, but who had recovered before they reached Table Bay. This clothing was sent to be washed at the Company’s slave lodge, and the women who handled it were the first to be smitten. A later frontier history, looking back from the nineteenth century, records earlier smallpox among the Khoikhoi in 1663, 1666, and 1674, and still places the 1713 outbreak as the catastrophe that emptied the great southern tribes. The two accounts stand together: whatever earlier epidemics had done among inland kraals, March 1713 is the documented entry of the disease into the Company’s lodge and town. [3] [4] [7]
The Company had at the time about five hundred and seventy slaves of both sexes and all ages. Nearly two hundred of them were carried off within the next six months. From the slaves the disease spread to the Europeans and the natives. The lodge wash-house thus became the documented point of entry for an epidemic that would mark the year more deeply than any single political act of Helot’s council. The women who took in the ships’ clothing were not recorded by name; their work at the lodge is the first human contact the printed sources give for the plague. [3]
So virulent was the attack, on both white and black, that some entire tribes of Khoikhoi were completely annihilated and others greatly reduced in numbers. The remnants of those broken tribes, with the feeling of clanship and nationality destroyed, submitted quietly thereafter to the rule of the white man—even to desiring and accepting the nomination of their chiefs by the commander or governor. From this time the printed frontier narrative treats organised Khoikhoi resistance near the older settlement as effectively ended by disease rather than by a single treaty campaign. The March clothing at the lodge, the two hundred slave deaths, and that later quiet of broken clans belong to one sequence. [3] [4]
Town Epidemic — May to July 1713
In May and June there was hardly a family in the town that had not some one sick or dead. Traffic in the streets was suspended, and even the children ceased to play their usual games in the squares and open places. At last it was impossible to obtain nurses, though slave women were being paid at the rate of four and five shillings a day. All the planks in the stores were used, and in July it became necessary to bury the dead without coffins. The town of some two hundred and fifty private houses thus lost, for those winter months, the ordinary sounds of street and square. [3]
For two months there was no meeting of the court of justice, for debts and quarrels were forgotten in presence of the scourge. The minds of the people were so depressed that anything unusual inspired them with terror. On the 10th of May two doves were observed to fall to the ground from the parapet of the governor’s house in the castle, and after fluttering about a little were found to be dead, without any injury being perceptible. This was regarded by many as an omen of disaster. The very clouds and the darkness of winter storms seemed to threaten death and woe. Helot still held the acting title in that house; the court below it did not sit. [3]
During that dreadful winter nearly one fourth of the European inhabitants of the town perished, and only when the hot weather set in did the plague cease. The burgher rolls are not to be regarded in any year as more than approximately correct, but, in common with other contemporary documents, they bear witness to the great loss of life. According to them, in 1712 the number of colonists—men, women, and children—was one thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine, and in 1716, three years after the cessation of the plague, notwithstanding the natural increase, only one thousand six hundred and ninety-seven. The rolls count free colonists; they do not include the Company’s slaves already reduced by nearly two hundred, nor the Khoikhoi labour the farms would miss at harvest. [3]
The court silence, the coffin shortage, and the quarter-town death rate together describe a settlement whose ordinary civil machinery stopped while Helot’s council still held formal title as acting government. Street traffic, children’s games, nursing labour, and plank stocks all failed before the epidemic eased with the heat. Four and five shillings a day could not keep slave nurses at the bedsides once the disease had run through the lodge and the private houses. The later roll comparison with 1716 shows that free European recovery was slow even after the acute winter of 1713 had passed. [3]
Country Spread and Devastation of the Khoikhoi — 1713
The disease spread into the country, but there, though the death rate among the white people was very high, the proportion that perished was not so large as in the town. It was easier to keep from contact with sick persons. Some families living in secluded places were practically isolated, and the farmers in general avoided moving about. Isolation and distance thus moderated free mortality inland even as the same pathogen moved through kraals and harvest labour networks. Of the Europeans who were smitten, more recovered than died; among the Khoikhoi, to be ill and to die were treated as synonymous. [3]
Among the Khoikhoi the disease created the greatest havoc. The state of filth in which they lived caused the plague to spread among them with fearful rapidity. When the kraals were first infected, and the number of deaths became startling, the Khoikhoi of the Cape fled across the mountains, declaring that the Europeans had bewitched them. As soon as they got beyond the settlement they were attacked by tribes of their own race, and all who could not get back again were killed. The probable object of this slaughter was to prevent the spread of the disease, but if so, it failed. Then the wretched creatures sat down in despair, and made no attempt to help themselves. They did not even remove their dead from the huts. In Table Valley it became necessary to send a party of slaves to put the corpses under ground, as the air was becoming foul. Whole kraals absolutely disappeared, leaving not an individual alive. [3] [4]
The very names of the tribes for a great distance inland were blotted out by the disease. They no longer appear in the records as organised communities, with feuds and rivalries and internal wars, but as the broken-spirited remnant of a race whose feelings of nationality and clanship had been crushed out by the great calamity. A later account names the five most powerful tribes of the south—the Hessequa, the Goringhaiqua, the Cochoqua, the Chainouqua, and the Grigriqua—as having almost entirely disappeared, literally killed out by the disease. Thousands of dead bodies and empty huts were to be found in 1713 in the localities where previously flourishing kraals belonging to those tribes had stood. [3] [4] [7]
The farmers who had been accustomed to employ many hundreds of them in harvest time complained that none were now to be had. Strangers who had visited the colony before 1713, and who saw it afterwards, noticed that the Khoikhoi population had almost disappeared. From this date until other tribes were reached by the expansion of the settlement, the only difficulty with the natives was occasioned by the San. Owing to the isolation of those people, they escaped the disaster which overtook the pastoral clans. The smallpox year thus reordered both labour supply and the pattern of frontier conflict around the older districts: harvest hands gone from the kraals, organised Khoikhoi resistance near the settlement treated as ended, and San descents left as the remaining native trouble on the stock posts. [3] [4] [7]
Rain, Cultivation, and the Wheat Export — 1713
The crop of 1710–11 had been a poor one, but store grain 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 1713 figure improved on the drought low of the previous year, yet still stood far below the rather over four thousand muids a year averaged from 1706 to 1711. [3]
In 1713 the fall of rain was ample, but the smallpox prevented extensive cultivation. The returns for seed sown were, however, exceptionally large, and in 1714 the quantity of wheat exported amounted to four thousand three hundred and seventy-five muids. Within the plague year itself the agricultural record is therefore mixed: better moisture than in the dry seasons immediately before, constrained planting under disease, high yield where seed was put in, and a Batavia shipment of just under two thousand muids. [3]
Full grain tithes claimed since the directors’ order of February 1711 still stood in law, though the failed auction of field collection in 1712 had already shown that private farming of the levy was impracticable. Helot’s second year added epidemic labour loss to that fiscal strain. Harvest hands drawn from Khoikhoi kraals were no longer available in the hundreds freemen had employed, while town and country European households buried their own dead through the winter months when field work should have expanded under the better rains. The magazines could not create labour that the disease had removed. [3]
The magazines and the Batavia ships still had first claim on whatever surplus could be threshed and delivered. Rye, barley, beans, and peas continued to support shipping when they could be spared, but wheat remained the headline of the Cape’s grain service. The 1,956 muids of 1713 mark the plague year’s export capacity under Helot before the rebound of 1714 under the newly installed permanent governor. Ample rain and a high return on the reduced sowing were not enough, in a year of coffins and empty kraals, to restore the four-thousand-muid average of the years before the drought. [3]
Namaqua Alarm at Piketberg and Slotsboo’s Commando — October–November 1713
In October 1713 a report reached the castle that four or five thousand Hottentots of the Great Namaqua tribe had made an inroad upon the natives living along the Elephant river, and had threatened to plunder some graziers at Piketberg, who had in consequence been obliged to retire from their farms. The government thereupon instructed Johannes Mulder, whom the printed narrative still styles landdrost of Stellenbosch, to call out twenty-five burghers from Drakenstein and twenty-five from Stellenbosch. The same author’s succession list, however, names Nicholas van den Heuvel as landdrost from May 1713 to June 1717, after Dominicus Blesius’s short tenure from December 1712, and after Mulder’s own recorded term from March 1711 to December 1712. The October call-up and the succession table are here left standing together. [3]
The same number were called out in the Cape district, and with twenty-five soldiers were sent on to meet the country contingents at the farm of François du Toit. Lieutenant Slotsboo was in command of the expedition. His instructions were to endeavour to come to an amicable understanding with the Namaquas, if possible to induce them to return to their own country, and not to attack them unless they had done some harm to the burghers. The force was thus a mixed burgher-and-soldier column of about one hundred men under explicit orders preferring negotiation to battle: twenty-five from Drakenstein, twenty-five from Stellenbosch, twenty-five from the Cape district, and twenty-five soldiers, rendezvousing at a Huguenot farm on the northern road. [3]
The commando returned to the castle on the 22nd of November, and reported that there were no Namaquas at Piketberg and that no burgher had been molested. The October alarm had emptied some Piketberg stock posts and filled the council minutes; the November return closed the scare without a fight. In a year already dominated by smallpox, the northern muster showed that Helot’s government could still assemble district militia and a military detachment for a distant cattle frontier even while the town buried its dead without coffins. Four or five thousand Great Namaqua on the Elephant River remained a report, not a battle. [3]
Landdrost Mulder’s call-up of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein freemen, the Cape district’s equal contingent, and the rendezvous at Du Toit’s farm fixed the ordinary geometry of early eighteenth-century defence: local officers, fixed muster numbers, and a lieutenant from the garrison in overall command. The amicable brief given to Slotsboo matched a council that had no confirmed proof of burgher injury and that still preferred to turn large Namaqua movements back north rather than open a new war on the Elephant River line during the plague months. Whether the sitting landdrost in May–November was van den Heuvel or Mulder styled again, the column that marched was the same mixed hundred under the lieutenant. [3]
Drakenstein Church and the Classis Letter — 1713
While smallpox was entering the settlement through the Company’s slave lodge, the French district’s church officers pressed a long-standing material and pastoral crisis on paper. On the 26th of March 1713 the Kerkenraad of Drakenstein wrote to the Classis of Amsterdam that the congregation had been six years without a permanent clergyman and still lacked a proper church, parsonage, and minister. The letter fixed calendar 1713 as the year in which the inland French-Dutch parish, already known for barn worship and intermittent supply from Stellenbosch, formally begged the metropolitan classis to end a vacancy that had opened when the Reverend Beck left Drakenstein for Stellenbosch in 1707 and the appointed successor Le Boucq refused the charge for want of fabric and staff. [8]
The officers numbered the flock at about seven hundred souls, children and adults, and described a “flourishing community” that was, they warned, daily becoming more unruly and degenerate for want of settled ministry. If the vacancy continued, they wrote in the harsh idiom of the age, the people would deteriorate into Hottentots—a rhetorical measure of how far the consistory thought pastoral discipline had already slipped under sick-comforter and occasional-preacher arrangements. They asked that a minister be appointed who could speak French: even if he might not preach regularly in both tongues, he should at least be allowed to admonish and comfort the older members, many of whom still did not understand Dutch. The children, by contrast, were already instructed in Dutch and would in course of time learn the word of God in that language—an explicit split between elder Huguenot comfort and the rising Dutch-schooled generation. [8]
The same letter reported that the church building itself had become ruinous and would not stand another year. Divine service at Drakenstein had long been held in a deserted cottage, then in rooms lent by farmers, and later in a primitive structure the congregation itself timbered—more barn than church (daar wij selfs een hokie timmerde). Services were still held in that fabric in 1713. Visitors had already fixed the image: the Reverend François Valentyn, who saw the Cape at intervals between 1685 and 1714, found the Drakenstein church badly built inside and out and more like a barn than a place of worship. In 1708 the Cape had written to the Seventeen at Amsterdam for authority to raise, if not a full church, at least a respectable place of worship and a decent house for the clergyman, describing services “in a shed or barn of very homely appearance” (en werd thans de godsdienst daar in een hok of schuur van zeer sober aansien nog verrigt). The March 1713 appeal therefore did not invent the barn problem; it told Amsterdam that the old hokie had reached the end of its structural life in the same season that epidemic and shipping news filled the castle minutes. [8]
Under Helot’s acting government the Classis letter stood beside plague, grain shortfall, and the later Namaqua muster as one more unfinished piece of ordinary colonial administration. No permanent Drakenstein minister arrived in calendar 1713; the six-year vacancy lengthened, and the ruinous barn continued to house the seven-hundred-soul congregation while older French speakers waited for comfort in their own tongue. The petition’s date—ten days after the March clothing that carried smallpox into the slave lodge—places Huguenot church politics inside the same hard year rather than outside it. Only in later seasons would rains and winds finish the old structure, services move into the former minister’s house, and plans for a new church gain the council’s approval; within 1713 the record that matters is the Kerkenraad’s March appeal to Amsterdam for clergyman, fabric, and French pastoral care. [8]
Fiscal van Beaumont and the Stellenbosch Landdrosts — 1713
In March 1713, in the same month that smallpox entered the slave lodge and the Drakenstein consistory wrote to Amsterdam, the long vacancy in the independent fiscal’s office ended. Johan Blesius had held the situation from November 1694 to April 1711; thereafter Willem van Putten acted provisionally. Cornelius van Beaumont took office in March 1713 and would sit until June 1724. The plague year thus opened with a new law officer in the castle as well as an acting governor still waiting for Chavonnes. [3]
The printed succession of landdrosts of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein places Johannes Mulder in that office from March 1711 to December 1712, Dominicus Blesius from December 1712 to May 1713, and Nicholas van den Heuvel from May 1713 to June 1717. Dominicus Blesius’s five months therefore closed in the smallpox spring; van den Heuvel’s name then heads the country court through the winter burials and the October Namaqua alarm. The narrative of that alarm, written in the same history, still has the government instructing Mulder, “who was again landdrost of Stellenbosch,” to call out the Drakenstein and Stellenbosch burghers. The two statements are not here forced into a single office-holder: the March fiscal appointment is firm; the landdrost style in October remains double in the printed record. [3]
Those country officers sat over a district already stretched from the Mosselbank and Kuils line, fixed in December 1711, as far as Europeans were settled toward the Breede and the Zonder End. Helot’s second year did not redraw that bound. It filled two of the posts that made the bound work: an independent fiscal after a two-year acting gap, and a Stellenbosch landdrost whose very name in the plague autumn is given two ways. Van Beaumont’s March commission is the cleaner of the two facts; it belongs with the clothing at the lodge and the Classis letter as a dated act of 1713 inside the castle, not on the Natal beach or the Piketberg farms. [3]
The court of justice that did not meet for two months in the winter still had, on paper, its independent fiscal. Debts and quarrels were forgotten while the scourge lasted; when the heat returned, van Beaumont remained the officer named since March. The landdrost’s court at Stellenbosch, whether under Blesius in the early months, van den Heuvel after May, or Mulder as the October narrative has him, was the machine that called the fifty country burghers to Du Toit’s farm. Office-holding in 1713 is thus part of the plague year’s administration, not a separate peace. [3]
Huguenot Arrivals, Freehold Grants, and the Last French Baptisms — 1713
Ordinary Huguenot paper still moved while the lodge sickened and the barn church begged for a minister. David d’Ailly of Amsterdam arrived at the Cape in 1713. François Louis Migault of Embden arrived in the same year. They joined a French-descended countryside whose increase no longer came by refugee fleets but by births, marriages, and the slow conversion of old loan places into freehold. Immigration from Europe had practically ceased; these named arrivals are the exception the lists still catch. [3] [8]
Older grants were confirmed in the same twelve months. In the title deed of Bossendal at Drakenstein, granted in 1713 to Jean le Long, it is stated that the land had been given to him in 1685 and 1686, among those few refugees who had accepted the Company’s first offer to settle under the resolution of 1685. In 1713 Jacques Malan was given in freehold the farm La Motte, which he had held since 1694; he lived at Hottentots Holland and sat on the court of landdrost and heemraden of Stellenbosch. Estienne Terreblanche (Terblans), whose name was already in the Drakenstein church books in 1703, married in 1713 Martha la Febre, widow of Jacques Pinard. Martin Pouisseon, on the Stellenbosch burgher roll of 1685 and described in 1692 as with wife and three children, was buried at Cape Town in January 1713. Title, marriage, and burial thus run through the plague year beside the Classis letter. [8]
The only existing Drakenstein church record kept in French—the baptismal register in the handwriting of Paul Roux, covering 1694 to 1713—closes in that same spring. On the 5th of March 1713, in the house of Abraham de Villiers, Monsieur Camper, minister of the holy gospel, being back from a voyage to the East Indies, baptized Hanna, daughter of L’aupretorijs and Marie Rousseau, the witnesses Pierre Rousseau and Geertru du Toit as godmother; and Marie, daughter of Koenraad Scheper and Marie Hota, the witnesses Jacobus Botha and Catharina Botha as godmother. Those two household baptisms, twenty-one days before the Kerkenraad’s letter to Amsterdam, are the last dated French entries the Roux register yields. [8]
The March baptisms in a farmer’s house, the ruinous hokie that would not stand another year, and the six-year vacancy named on the 26th belong to one parish. Camper could christen two infants on his return from the Indies; he was not the permanent clergyman the consistory asked of the Classis. Roux’s French pen stopped. Dutch instruction of the children, already pleaded in the letter, would be the language of the next register. In Helot’s second acting year the French district thus left, on paper, both a cry for a bilingual minister and the last page of its French baptism book—while d’Ailly and Migault stepped ashore, le Long and Malan took freehold titles, Terreblanche married, and Pouisseon was buried in the Cape Town churchyard in January, before the lodge wash-house had yet handled the fatal clothing. [8]