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. Fifty-seven Europeans and twenty Malabar slaves intended for the Cape had got to land on pieces of the wreck; the remainder of the crew had perished as the hull went to pieces in daylight. Those who were saved had collected food that washed up and had set out for the Cape, only to be stopped by a deep river they could not cross. Some had then turned back to the neighbourhood of the wreck and lived until June on milk, meat, and millet obtained from coastal people for iron and copper from the wreckage. When the metal was exhausted they had tried inland to avoid the river mouths; hunger and fatigue had at last driven the seven surviving Europeans to take refuge with a tribe that treated them with kindness, among whom they found a Frenchman wrecked some thirty years earlier. The Malabar who would reach Table Valley in February had not been of that returning party. He had kept west for twelve months, overcoming every difficulty in his way. [3]
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, on the bank of a river with a navigable mouth, at war with San groups, and living chiefly on milk, pumpkin, and millet bread rubbed between stones and baked in ashes. Their return would wait on foreign coasting trade later in the year. The Malabar’s year-long trek had carried him through a countryside still marked, in 1713 and 1714, by empty huts and unburied dead where the great southern Khoikhoi tribes had stood before the smallpox. [3] [7]
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. Cannon, anchors, and the seven Europeans remained on the Natal shore; only one slave’s feet had closed the overland gap to the castle. [3]
Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes Arrives and Is Installed — March 1714
Maurits (Maurice) Pasques de Chavonnes was born at The Hague on the 23rd of July 1654, son of Pierre, Marquis de Chavonnes. Pierre and his father Joachim had left France for the Netherlands after the massacre of St Bartholomew in 1572; family tradition linked the line to Louise de Coligny, daughter of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, assassinated on that night, and later fourth wife of William the Silent. Destined early for arms, Maurits entered the army of the States General. In 1689 he married Balthazarina Kien, daughter of Rochus Kien, a lawyer of Utrecht, and Marie de Beaumont, of another French family in the Republic. By the mid-1690s he held the military governorship of fortified Bergen-op-Zoom. He rose from lieutenant-colonel through colonel to brigadier. A son, Pieter Rochus, was born in the 1690s and later began his Company career while his father governed the Cape, climbing in time to director-general of the Dutch East Indies. Company rolls listed the governor among Cape Huguenot-connected servants alongside his kinsman Dominique (garrison captain in 1687–1689, thereafter in the East Indies) and that son. [8] [9]
After the peace of Utrecht in 1713 the Republic reduced its field forces and could dispense with brigadier Chavonnes’s active command. On the strong recommendation of Pensionary Anthonie Heinsius the Lords Seventeen appointed him governor of the Cape settlement with the rank, title, and salary of a councillor extraordinary of the Indies. Roughly two years and three months had passed since Governor Louis van Assenburgh’s death—longer than slow ocean posts alone explain. From 28 December 1711 the council of policy had left the secunde Willem Helot to act as head of government through plague, drought recovery, and Namaqua alarm. Commissioner Johan van Hoorn had called Helot “able and competent” in a letter to his father-in-law Abraham van Riebeeck, yet Helot remained widely unpopular among the free colonists, and the directors’ long delay did not signal contentment with the interim. [3] [9]
The outward ship was the Kockinge. Off the Spanish coast and in the Gulf of Biscay she rode a storm of twenty-three days. Packed in one cabin with the governor were his wife, three daughters, two sons, a sister-in-law, and three maids. Despite that ordeal the family reached Table Bay in health. Archival narrative places arrival on the 24th of March 1714 and formal installation on the 28th of the same month—the dates followed here; a later castle chronicle sometimes compresses the landing into the installation day. The clergyman François Valentyn, who called at the Cape in 1685, 1695, 1705, and again in this year, was in Table Valley to witness the welcome. [3] [3] [9]
The welcome answered the voyage. Cape gentlemen and their ladies processed along the jetty while guns and muskets rolled through the town. Witness account of the salutes records the castle firing twenty-one rounds, the admiral of the fleet nineteen, the vice-admiral seventeen, the rear-admiral fifteen, and the other ships thirteen each, with burgher infantry and cavalry giving three musket volleys between the great guns. It was a deafening noise for a household just off a Biscay storm, and the new governor, simple in taste and no lover of fireworks, received it as the settlement’s due rather than as a taste he shared. From the Kat of the castle he delivered a brief installation address to the burghers. Chavonnes’s installation on 28 March ended Helot’s long 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 the interim and the first fiscal and land measures of a permanent military 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. Into that settlement Chavonnes brought a frugal military household and a programme aimed at revenue, land rent, and documentary stamps. Later writers ranked him with Bax van Herentals and Ryk van Tulbagh among the Company’s more popular Cape rulers, and credited him with doing a great deal for education—an estimate that would be tested in the High School opened in his time, and in the quiet religious demeanour that colonists contrasted with Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel and even with Van Assenburgh. [3] [7] [9]
Suspension of Secunde Willem Helot — May 1714
Only about two months after Chavonnes’s brief installation address to the burghers from the Kat of the castle, the new governor turned on the man who had held the second chair through the long interim. In May 1714 the secunde Willem Helot, who had been acting head of the government from Van Assenburgh’s death until 28 March, was suspended for appropriating to his own use property belonging to the Company. The charge was not a remote book-keeping quarrel. Chavonnes, under strict directors’ orders to economise and already probing why expenditure so far outran revenue, found more than a little corruption in government circles to the detriment of Company income. Helot became one of the first victims of that anti-corruption drive—the highest-ranking local casualty of the new regime’s opening months. [3] [9]
The fall closed a career that had looked secure only months earlier. Helot had buried Van Assenburgh with state in January 1712, steered the colony through the smallpox winter of 1713, and sat as acting head until the permanent governor took the chair. Commissioner Johan van Hoorn had still called him “able and competent” in a letter to his father-in-law Abraham van Riebeeck, yet among free colonists Helot remained widely unpopular, and the Lords Seventeen’s long delay in naming a successor had not signalled contentment with the interim. Once Chavonnes reported the misappropriation, the directors instructed the council to send Helot to the Netherlands without rank or salary. A derobed secunde thus left the Cape stripped of pay and office; the household that accompanied him almost certainly depended on private means for the homeward fare. [3] [9]
That private cushion was his wife, Maria Engelbrecht, widow of the clergyman Hercules van Loon and therefore comfortably off by Cape standards. With her means the Helots could vanish from the settlement once the council executed the directors’ order. 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, a vacant secunde’s office through the remainder of the year, and the personal close of the acting era in disgrace even as the new governor’s fiscal programme of land rent and stamps proceeded without him. [3] [9]
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. Though the returns were made out yearly to fractions of a farthing, it is impossible to say exactly what the expenditure of the colony was. 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. The hospital, for instance, housed sick of the garrison as well as of the fleets, so a portion of its cost was a proper colonial charge. The books therefore understated both the true cost of the refreshment station and the share of that cost fairly chargeable to the colony alone. [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. In converting the money of that day, the heavy gulden generally used in accounts transmitted to the Netherlands is valued at one shilling and eight pence, and the light gulden used in transactions in the colony and in India at sixteen pence and two-thirds of a penny; before 1743 it is often doubtful which was meant. 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. Even so the gap between the two sides of the ledger remained large enough to worry both the castle and the directors. [3] [9]
The new master of the castle had little in common with recent predecessors on this point. He was the opposite of extravagant, simple in personal tastes, and frugal in administration—not from private parsimony alone but from a sense of duty under strict instructions from the Lords Seventeen to economise. The financial situation of the settlement was worrying: expenditure greatly exceeded revenue, and Chavonnes tried hard to comply. In probing the books he also found more than a little corruption in government circles, naturally to the detriment of Company income—the discovery that within about two months of his Kat installation address brought the suspension of Willem Helot as the highest-ranking local casualty of the opening anti-corruption drive. [3] [9]
There was thus a large excess of expenditure over revenue, though it is not possible to state the exact amount in figures. 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. A tax on wine pressed by farmers and further “nuisances” followed later in the same economising programme. On the expenditure side he decreased public works, refusing even to have the canal bridges in the Heerengracht repaired or renovated—a visible restraint in Table Valley itself rather than only a levy on distant stock posts. [3] [9]
The measures were obviously unpopular in the abstract, yet the governor never lost the esteem of the burghers. Castle chronicle attributes that survival of goodwill to tact and gradual application: the economising knife was used with understanding, and the personal demeanour of the man who wielded it remained exemplary enough that little lasting grumble attached to the 1714 package as a whole. Another reason colonists respected this governor more than they had done Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel, and even Louis van Assenburgh, was that, in contrast to them, he was a religious man—a character frequently illustrated in later journal entries, but already visible in the quietness of his first months. Calendar year 1714 thus opened the Chavonnes fiscal programme as both a directors’ economy order and a local settlement discipline—closing part of a structural deficit of roughly £6,500 a year while binding land, paper, and public works more tightly to Company income after the population losses of the smallpox year. [3] [9]
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. Gardeners who added cattle to their plots had taken larger appropriations on loan from the Company, and, as far as is known, at first without rent; those loan places were only nominal cessions, resumable at the pleasure of the government. Population was scarce, no surveys seem to have been made, and little concern was shown when grantees gradually extended indefinite boundaries into adjoining territory. The Company’s object was provisions for visiting ships; the haphazard system seemed fitted to draw produce from the soil and a better supply of cattle than could be depended upon from the Khoikhoi. Remission of rent did not arise from altruism: more than its equivalent was demanded in tithes of the harvests and other duties. With the unforeseen development of the colony and the rising cost of government, some organisation became necessary. In 1703, in order to derive more direct revenue from the land, 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. 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. [3] [4]
Renting or borrowing from government land adjoining private freehold—the tenure known as leenings eigendom—treated those adjoining acres as still the property of the Company even when used with the titled ground. Annual renewal of permission to occupy a loan place created a feeling of insecurity of tenure which discouraged industry and retarded improvement; the July freehold door for old Waveren residents was a limited answer to that insecurity, not a general conversion of the pastoral frontier. 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 after the smallpox deaths. [3] [4]
Together the measures bound inland stock posts more tightly to annual payment while offering title security to men already long on the ground. Cattle farmers still extended from Waveren down the Breede and from Hottentots Holland along the Zonder End; the July charge followed them as recognitie rather than as a surveyed cadastral tax. The July land package was thus both a revenue tool and a settlement discipline after the population losses of the smallpox year—the first new land money the Company had drawn from cattle runs as such. [3] [4]
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]
A stamp of six rixdollars had already attached to the yearly permission to occupy a loan place since 1703. The July placaat generalised that paper claim from pastoral licences to the ordinary instruments of free life. 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. [3] [4]
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. Wills already drawn earlier in the year—among them the testament of Johannes Guillaume de Grevenbroek, dated the 3rd of February 1714, which bequeathed a gold ring set with garnets to the French refugee Pierre de Villiers, living with wife and children at the foot of Paarl Mountain at Drakenstein, “in acknowledgment of the kindness formerly received from his co-religionists in France”—show how thick that notarial traffic already was before the stamp rule took effect. From 20 July such instruments needed the Company’s mark to stand in court. [3] [8]
Petrus van Aken at Drakenstein; Slicher Arrives — August 1714
The Rev. Petrus van Aken, who had been appointed by the directors clergyman of Drakenstein, arrived in August 1714 and took over the duty at once. He was born at Utrecht, where his father Arnoldus van Aken lived. His wife Anna Margaretha Bolwerk was related by marriage to the family of Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, several of whom came to the Cape. For a considerable time before that appointment the congregation had been without a pastor. Hendrik Bek had held the charge from May 1702 to April 1707; thereafter the flock had gone years with no permanent minister. [3] [8]
In 1713 the Drakenstein Kerkenraad had written to the Classis of Amsterdam that they had been without a permanent clergyman for six years, and that the congregation, then about seven hundred souls, children and adults, was becoming unruly and degenerate in a church so ruinous it would not stand another year. They had asked for a minister who could speak French, that older members who did not understand Dutch might at least be admonished and comforted in that tongue, the children being already instructed in Dutch. Valentyn, on his visits, had found the Drakenstein church badly built inside and outside and more like a barn than a church; Cape letters of 1708 had already called the place of worship a shed or barn of very homely appearance. Van Aken’s August arrival therefore closed a vacancy that had run from Bek’s departure through the whole Helot interim and into Chavonnes’s first winter. [3] [8]
In the same year as van Aken, though in a wholly different capacity, Lambertus Slicher of Middelburg reached the Cape. He had served six years as chaplain of the garrison at Lillo; owing to differences and animosity in that congregation he had voluntarily resigned and entered the Company’s service as a midshipman on the ship Vaderland Getrouw. He was well versed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and held good testimonials from the ministers of the places where he had officiated. Shortly afterwards he was appointed rector of the High School at the Cape, then newly established, and took pupils as boarders in his house—an educational opening later writers ranked among Chavonnes’s services to the settlement. [7] [8]
Drakenstein thus received a settled clergyman in the same months that Table Valley received a permanent governor. The French-speaking older members still needed pastoral comfort in their own tongue; the children were already being raised in Dutch. Building a proper church would wait on later collections, a Huising legacy, and Van Hoorn’s charitable residue; what 1714 itself supplied was the man in the pulpit after six vacant years, and a learned midshipman who would shortly keep school in the town. [3] [8]
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. Those seven had been living with a coastal tribe at war with the San, on the bank of a river with a navigable mouth, and had among them a Frenchman wrecked some thirty years before. 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]
English traders were thus already engaged on the south-eastern coast of Africa in 1714, working a traffic in ivory that the Company had not organised from Table Bay on the same stretch of shore. Beads and copper rings made in England for that barter showed how deliberately the voyage had been fitted out. The unnamed river that held the Bennebroek men lay somewhere below Delagoa Bay on a coast the castle still knew chiefly from wreck and rumour. [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 waters the Postlooper would have to search for wreckage rather than for a Company factory. [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 English decked boat had already lifted four sailors from an unnamed river; the galiot was to find the rest and whatever metal still lay in the surf. No Company factory stood on that shore. The search was therefore a cruise along a coast known to English private traders and to the Malabar who had walked it, not a visit to a Dutch post. [3]
The galiot’s failure to locate either wreckage or men left the Bennebroek file dependent on the four sailors already landed in September, on the Malabar who had reached the castle in February, 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. Calendar 1714 thus opened the wreck story with one overland survivor and closed the Company’s effort with a galiot still at sea. [3]
Unknown Cattle Disease and the Wool Shipment — 1714
In 1714 a calamity worse even than loss of crops fell upon the country. Horned cattle and sheep were attacked by a disease unknown before, and great numbers died. The outbreak belongs to Chavonnes’s first year even though its full scarcity was felt only in the seasons that followed, when slaughter stock became hard to obtain and the burghers’ sheep were counted tens of thousands fewer. For the installation year itself the fact is the appearance of a new murrain on the same pastoral frontier that July’s cattle-run rental had just begun to tax. [3]
All attempts to encourage the growth of a marketable sheep’s wool had hitherto failed. In 1714 six hundred and fifty pounds were sent to Europe, but the quality was so bad that it did not produce at public sale as much as it had cost. The shipment therefore stands as another experiment of the installation year that did not pay—wool on the books beside wheat that did, and beside a cattle disease that would in time pinch the meat supply more sharply than any short harvest. [3]
The coincidence was bitter for graziers already paying the new recognitie. Stock posts from Waveren down the Breede now owed fifty shillings a year, or twenty-four rixdollars as the land-tenure narrative has it, plus grain tithe on whatever they sowed, while an unknown sickness cut the herds those rents presumed. Chavonnes’s first object remained the ledger; the murrain and the worthless wool bale showed how little of pastoral profit the castle could command by placaat alone. [3] [4]
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. In the Company’s possessions in India the demand for wheat was limited, and it could be obtained elsewhere at a lower rate than twelve shillings a muid, the price then paid at the Cape; quality was not in dispute, but price and the fluctuation of seasons were. For 1714 itself the fact that mattered at the castle was the restored export of four thousand three hundred and seventy-five muids after two poor years and a plague harvest. [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, Bernard, Best, Beukes, Blankenberg, Bok, Bosman, Bronkhorst, du Buisson, Buys, Cilliers, Ditmaar, Eksteen, van Emmenes, Faure, Fick, le Grand, Grobbelaar, Hasselaar, van Heerden, Herbst, Holland, Holm, Human, Kleinveld, Knoetsen, Kotzé, Langeberg, Lens, Ley, van der Linde, Lourens, Maasdorp, Maré, Meyboom, Moolman, Munnik, Niemand, Oberholster, Oelofse, Paassen, Pottier, van Reenen, Richter, Robberts, Roos, Scholtz, Steenekamp, Stols, Sweetman, Sweris, Terreblanche, Uys, Verron, Vledman, Voogt, de Vries, van der Walt, de Wet, and Zaaiman. 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. During the period of his government few new colonial surnames would be added. [3]
One name on that roll can be fixed to the installation year with independent detail. Antoine Faure, born at Orange in 1683, son of the merchant Pierre Faure and Justina Pointy, arrived at the Cape in 1714 in the Company’s service. Pierre and Justina had fled to Holland under religious persecution; Pierre later returned to Orange in 1689 and died there. In the same year as his arrival Antoine married Rachel de Villiers, daughter of the refugee Abraham de Villiers, and left male issue. In 1719 he was appointed voorlezer and schoolmaster at Stellenbosch. Faure’s Company entry and marriage into an established refugee family show how a single 1714 arrival joined the free community that the July rent and stamp measures now reached. [3] [8]
Other refugee paper of the same twelve months filled the notarial and parish books that July’s stamps would soon cover. On the 13th of January 1714 a posthumous daughter of Abraham and Jacquemina du Pree was baptised Anna at Drakenstein. In 1714 three separate inventories of the deceased estates of the brothers Abraham, Jacob, and Pierre Vivier were signed by Jacquemina du Pree, widow of Abraham, the only one of the three who had married. Sara Couchet, widow of Guillaume du Toit of Ryssel, died in 1714; Susanne Costeux, wife of Gerrit Meyer, died about the same year. According to the burgher rolls, in 1712 the number of colonists—men, women, and children—had been about one thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine; the plague winter then cut that free population, and 1714 opened on a thinned settlement still finding harvest labour hard to hire from Khoikhoi kraals that had almost disappeared. [3] [8]
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, thousands of dead bodies and empty huts were still to be found in 1713 and 1714 where the Hessequa, Goringhaiqua, Cochoqua, Chainouqua, and Grigriqua had had their kraals. 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 major Bushmen commandos; it fixed revenue tools, installed a Drakenstein clergyman after a six-year vacancy, and finished the Bennebroek persons file as far as Table Bay could finish it, while wheat returns and new family entries such as Faure’s marked the recovery of free settlement after the plague year. [3] [7]