Boer History1714 at the Cape of Good Hope: De Chavonnes Installed, Loan-Rent and Stamps, and Helot Suspended
Bennebroek Malabar Survivor at the Castle — 26 February 1714
On the 26th of February 1714 a single Malabar slave reached the castle with news that closed the first part of the Bennebroek stranding. He alone of those who had not turned back to the wreck had pushed westward for a whole year after the homeward Ceylon ship broke up on the Natal coast on 16 February 1713. A burgher found him near the mouth of the Breede river and sent him on to Table Valley. The seven surviving Europeans of the party still lived among a coastal community far to the east; their return would wait on foreign coasting trade later in the year. [3]
Within the Cape’s own calendar the arrival mattered less as a rescue than as confirmation that the wreck’s eastern survivors had not all perished and that no Company vessel had yet recovered them. Helot’s acting council received the report while still waiting for the permanent governor already named in the Netherlands. The Malabar’s year-long trek, the Breede discovery, and the castle date of 26 February fixed the Bennebroek story as unfinished business of 1714 rather than a closed file of the plague year. [3]
Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes Arrives and Is Installed — March 1714
Upon intelligence of Governor Louis 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. The new governor arrived at the Cape on the 24th of March 1714 and was formally installed on the 28th of the same month. [3]
From 28 December 1711, when the council of policy elected the secunde Willem Helot to act as head of government, through two full calendar years of plague, drought recovery, and Namaqua alarm, the Cape had been under provisional direction. Chavonnes’s installation on 28 March ended that acting period in form. He would govern until his death on 8 September 1724; the opening months of 1714 therefore mark both the close of Helot’s long interim and the first fiscal and land measures of a permanent military governor. [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 Chavonnes brought a programme aimed at revenue, land rent, and documentary stamps. [3]
Suspension of Secunde Willem Helot — May 1714
In May 1714 the secunde Willem Helot, who had recently been acting head of the government, was suspended for appropriating to his own use property belonging to the Company. Upon the circumstances being reported to the directors, the council was instructed to send him to the Netherlands without rank or salary. His named successor, Abraham Cranendonk, recently fiscal of the establishment on the Hoogly, did not arrive to take over the duty until the 4th of March 1715. Calendar 1714 therefore saw Helot’s fall from the second chair within weeks of Chavonnes’s installation, and a vacancy in the secunde’s office through the remainder of the year. [3]
The man who had buried Van Assenburgh with state in January 1712, steered the colony through the smallpox winter of 1713, and held the chair until 28 March 1714 thus left office under a charge of misappropriation rather than by ordinary relief. The directors’ later order to ship him home without rank or pay closed the acting era in disgrace at the personal level even as the new governor’s fiscal programme proceeded. Cranendonk’s delayed arrival left the council to work under Chavonnes without a settled secunde for most of the rest of 1714. [3]
Revenue, Expenditure, and the Governor’s First Object — 1714
The first object to which the new governor turned his attention was an attempt to make the revenue of the colony more nearly meet the expenditure than had previously been the case. Cape accounts were kept as of a branch business: every sum received from every source stood on one side, and every sum paid out, no matter for what purpose, on the other. Charges against the Cape included refreshment of ships’ crews, wages paid to sailors in such ships, hospital expenses, and other items that could not be struck wholly from a colonial balance, while sums paid in the Netherlands and in India for strictly colonial purposes did not always appear in the local books. [3]
The principal source of revenue was the money paid for the exclusive right to sell wines and spirituous liquors by retail, determined by public auction on the last day of August. During the first quarter of the eighteenth century that farm averaged about £3,167 a year. Tithes of grain, transfer dues on sales of ground, and profits on sales of goods together averaged about £4,789. Colonial revenue was thus about £8,000 a year. Expenditure, after deducting shipping charges as far as could be done, could not be estimated at less than about £14,500 a year. It was kept down by small salaries with privileges, by permitting from one hundred and fifty to two hundred men out of a garrison of about five hundred and fifty to take temporary service with farmers, and by slave labour in building and gardening. [3]
There was thus a large excess of expenditure over revenue. The directors instructed the governor to try and devise means of meeting it, in part if not wholly. Chavonnes’s answer in 1714 was not a single new impost but a cluster of land and documentary charges that would run beside the older liquor farm and grain tithe: rental on cattle runs, freehold conversion for some older occupants, reversion of unused town sites, and stamp duties on the paper of civil life. [3]
Cattle-Run Rental, Freehold, and Town Sites — from 3 July 1714
No revenue had yet been derived from leases of land used for cattle runs. After the 3rd of July 1714 a rental of twenty-five shillings for six months, or fifty shillings a year, was charged, in addition to the tithe of grain produced. Old residents in the Land of Waveren and elsewhere were permitted, however, to take out freehold titles on application to the governor, in order to encourage them to improve the land. All building sites given out in the town were to revert to the Company if houses were not put up on them within twelve months. [3] [4]
The loan-place system had already carried an annual rent in earlier form. In 1703 permission to occupy a loan place, renewable yearly, had been obtained upon a stamp of six rixdollars with an annual rent of twenty-four rixdollars; further in 1714 an annual tax or recognitie of twenty-four rixdollars was levied in the land-tenure narrative that later writers used to mark the year’s fiscal tightening on pastoral holdings. One archival synthesis states the new cattle-run charge in sterling at fifty shillings a year plus grain tithe, with freehold relief for established Waveren and other older occupants who applied to the governor. [4] [3]
Together the measures bound inland stock posts more tightly to annual payment while offering title security to men already long on the ground. Town lots that stood empty for a year fell back to the Company, a rule aimed at speculation in Table Valley sites while the castle still needed occupied streets and taxable households. The July land package was thus both a revenue tool and a settlement discipline after the population losses of the smallpox year. [3]
Stamp Duties on Legal Documents — from 20 July 1714
After the 20th of July 1714 it was required that stamps should be affixed to different kinds of documents to make them legal. These documents included deeds of transfer of land and slaves, wills, contracts of marriage, certificates of inheritance, licenses to trade, powers of attorney, and generally all notarial acts and papers passing through courts of law. The stamps required ranged in value from six pence to twelve shillings and six pence. [3]
Stamp duty reached into ordinary free life more widely than a cattle-run lease. Every transfer of a slave or a morgen, every marriage contract and inheritance certificate, every trade license and power of attorney now carried a visible Company claim before it was good in law. The range from sixpence to twelve and sixpence graded the burden by the weight of the instrument rather than by a flat head tax. In a year of revenue repair after plague mortality, the July stamp placaat turned the paper of civil transactions into a steady small yield beside the August liquor auction and the grain tithe. [3]
English Coasting Boat and Four Bennebroek Sailors — 4 September 1714
On the 4th of September 1714 a decked boat twenty-eight feet long by nine feet beam arrived in Table Bay under English colours. Her master reported that she had been built in England purposely for trading on the south-eastern coast of Africa, and had been taken to Delagoa Bay in pieces in a vessel named the Clapham Galley. She had been put together there, had since been trading on the coast, and had now come to Table Bay according to arrangement to wait for the return of the Clapham Galley from India. [3]
She had entered a river, the name of which is not given, and had there found the seven surviving sailors of the Bennebroek, four of whom she brought to the Cape. The most interesting part of the master’s narrative was that at various places at which he had touched below Delagoa Bay he had obtained a large quantity of ivory in exchange for beads and copper rings expressly manufactured in England for trade with the coastal peoples. English private trade and the recovery of four of the seven Bennebroek Europeans thus entered Table Bay on the same small decked hull. [3]
The February Malabar arrival and the September English boat together completed the main return of persons known at the Cape in 1714 from the Natal wreck. Three Europeans remained to be sought. Ivory barter south of Delagoa Bay, conducted with English beads and copper rings, also showed the council that foreign coasting craft were already working a trade the Company had not organised from Table Bay on the same stretch of shore. [3]
The Postlooper Sent to Search the Natal Coast — November 1714
In November the galiot Postlooper was sent to search along the coast of Natal for the wreck of the Bennebroek, and if possible to recover her cannon and anchors as well as the three surviving sailors. After an absence of nearly six months she returned with a report that neither men nor wreck could be found. The departure itself belonged to late 1714; the empty return fell in the following year, but the order and the sailing closed the Company’s own attempt in this calendar to finish what the English boat had only partly done. [3]
Cannon, anchors, and three missing Europeans defined the Postlooper’s brief. The galiot’s failure to locate either wreckage or men left the Bennebroek file dependent on the four sailors already landed in September and on whatever later private reports might arrive. For Chavonnes’s first year the November sailing was the Cape’s official eastern search; its null result would be known only after the galiot’s long cruise. [3]
Wheat Export, Good Seasons, and Settler Names — 1714
In 1713 the fall of rain had been ample, but smallpox had prevented extensive cultivation. Returns for seed sown were exceptionally large, and in 1714 the quantity of wheat exported amounted to four thousand three hundred and seventy-five muids. That figure restored the Cape’s Batavia grain service to the order of the better years before the drought trough of 1712 (1,020 muids) and the constrained plague export of 1713 (1,956 muids). [3]
The crops of 1714 to 1716 were so good that fifteen thousand four hundred muids of wheat were sent to Batavia over those three seasons, or more than five thousand muids on an average yearly. The rebound began in Chavonnes’s installation year. Full grain tithes ordered since February 1711 still framed collection law; the new cattle-run rental of July sat beside tithe on any grain those runs produced. [3]
Between the commencement of the eighteenth century and the arrival of Governor De Chavonnes a long list of family names later well known throughout South Africa entered the colonial records—among them van Aardt, Badenhorst, Bek, Beukes, Bosman, Bronkhorst, Cilliers, Eksteen, Faure, Fick, Grobbelaar, van Heerden, Kotzé, Maré, Oberholster, van Reenen, Roos, Scholtz, Terreblanche, Uys, de Wet, and others. The list is a roll of appearance in the books rather than a single immigrant fleet of 1714, but it marks the free population that Chavonnes’s land rent and stamp rules now taxed and titled. [3]
Cattle farmers still extended from Waveren down the Breede and from Hottentots Holland along the Zonder End. After the smallpox destruction of organised Khoikhoi communities near the older districts, the principal native difficulty recorded for the expanding stock frontier remained with the San (Bushmen), whose isolation had spared them the epidemic. Chavonnes’s first year did not yet open the major Bushmen commandos of 1715; it fixed revenue tools and finished the Bennebroek persons file as far as Table Bay could finish it. [3]
Close of 1714 at the Cape
By the end of 1714 the Cape had received the Bennebroek Malabar survivor at the castle on 26 February, installed Lieutenant-Colonel Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes as governor on 28 March after his arrival on the 24th, suspended former acting head Willem Helot in May for appropriating Company property, opened cattle-run rental of fifty shillings a year from 3 July with freehold options for older Waveren and other residents and reversion of unbuilt town sites, imposed stamp duties on transfers, wills, marriage contracts, and notarial acts from 20 July, welcomed an English Delagoa coasting boat on 4 September that landed four of seven Bennebroek sailors and reported ivory barter for English beads and copper rings, and in November sent the galiot Postlooper to search the Natal coast for wreck, guns, anchors, and the three men still missing. Wheat exports reached four thousand three hundred and seventy-five muids, the first strong rebound after drought and smallpox. Revenue still lagged expenditure by a wide margin, but the new land rent, recognitie tradition on loan places, and documentary stamps were the year’s concrete answer to the directors’ order to narrow the gap. Cranendonk had not yet arrived to fill the secunde’s chair. The year closed with a permanent governor in the castle, Helot under orders for home without rank, four Bennebroek sailors back in Table Bay, and the Postlooper still out on the eastern search. [3] [4]