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 the permanent successor named in the Netherlands had not yet sailed for Table Bay. [3]
Upon intelligence of Van Assenburgh’s death the directors had appointed 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 reach the Cape until the 24th of March 1714, and was formally installed only on the 28th of that month. Calendar 1713 therefore belonged entirely to Helot’s acting administration. [3]
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. That was the settlement into which disease, shipwreck news, and a northern Namaqua scare entered in the same twelve months. [3]
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. [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. [3]
The natives with whom they thenceforth lived were carrying on a perpetual war with Bushmen. 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, and the kindness of the coastal community that sheltered the last seven Europeans fixed the Bennebroek as a long-running eastern stranding whose full return of persons would stretch into the next governor’s installation season. [3]
Smallpox Reaches South Africa — March 1713
In March 1713 a terrible calamity fell upon the country. In that month smallpox made 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. [3] [4]
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. [3]
So virulent was the attack, on both white and black, that some entire tribes of Hottentots 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. [4] [3]
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. [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. [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. [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. 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. [3]
Among the Hottentots the disease created the greatest havoc. Of the Europeans who were smitten, more recovered than died; but with the Hottentots, to be ill and to die were synonymous. 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 Hottentots 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. [3] [4]
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. 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. [3] [4]
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 Hottentot 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 Bushmen. Owing to the isolation of those people, they escaped the disaster which overtook the higher races. The smallpox year thus reordered both labour supply and the pattern of frontier conflict around the older districts. [3] [4]
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. [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. [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, who was again landdrost of Stellenbosch, to call out twenty-five burghers from Drakenstein and twenty-five from Stellenbosch. [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. [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. [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. [3]
Close of 1713 at the Cape
By the end of 1713 the Cape had lived a second full year under Helot as acting head, learned of the Bennebroek wreck on the Natal coast of 16 February, suffered the first recorded smallpox epidemic in South Africa from March through the winter, exported nineteen hundred and fifty-six muids of wheat under better rain but constrained cultivation, and answered an October Namaqua alarm at Piketberg with a November commando that found no invaders. Nearly two hundred of about five hundred and seventy Company slaves died within six months of the lodge infection; roughly a quarter of the European town population perished before the heat returned; whole Khoikhoi kraals disappeared and harvest labour collapsed; free burgher rolls that had stood at about one thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine in 1712 would still show only one thousand six hundred and ninety-seven in 1716. The Bennebroek’s main European remnant remained among coastal communities far to the east, with only the later arrival of a single Malabar survivor at the castle in February 1714 still ahead. De Chavonnes, already named abroad, had not yet reached Table Bay. The year closed with disease as the dominant fact of settlement life, Helot still in the chair, and the stock frontier north and east watched by a militia that could muster even when the court of justice could not sit. [3] [4]