Boer History1715 at the Cape of Good Hope: Cranendonk Secunde, Wine Tax, Mauritius Battery, and Potgieter’s First Colonial Commando
Statutes of India as Law of the High Court — 12 February 1715
As the high court of justice was desirous of having the laws according to which they were to decide cases properly defined, the council of policy on the 12th of February 1715 directed that the statutes of India were to be strictly followed, except when they were modified by placaats issued by competent authority at the Cape. The order fixed a written hierarchy of rules for ordinary litigation: Batavia’s Indian statutes as the base, and local placaats as the Cape exception. It did not invent a new code; it named which imported corpus the court was to apply when Cape placaats were silent. [3]
That February resolution was listed among the heads of Chavonnes’s first full calendar year as the basis of colonial law. Company servants, free burghers, and litigants before the high court now had a stated answer to the question which law governed undecided points. Placaats already issued at the Cape remained the local override; everything else defaulted to the Indian statutes. The high court had asked for definition, not for a Cape digest of its own, and the council answered by binding the bench to Batavia’s corpus with a Cape exception clause. [3]
The following year the summary jurisdiction of the court of landdrost and heemraden would be extended in civil cases to £10 8s. 4d., but that enlargement belonged to 1716. Within calendar 1715 the February resolution was the year’s principal legal definition. It sat beside the wine tax of March, the Mauritius foundation of February, and the written leave that later authorised burgher commandos: a year in which the castle wrote down which law the court was to follow, which product was to be taxed at the press, and which neighbours might ride after stolen stock. [3]
Mauritius Battery Foundation Stone — 20 February 1715
The supreme authorities having decided to erect additional fortifications in Table Valley, on the 20th of February 1715 the governor laid the foundation stone of a battery which he named Mauritius, near the sea shore at the foot of the Lion’s Rump. The site was the shore where a later breakwater would run into the bay—a coastal point chosen to strengthen the approaches beyond the older castle lines. The stone and the name marked the formal opening of the work in Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes’s second calendar year at the Cape. [3]
The Assembly of Seventeen then thought that before proceeding further, plans and specifications should be drawn up by an engineer and submitted to them. That instruction slowed the build after the foundation stone: the visit of Pieter Gysbert Noodt, director of fortifications in Netherlands India, would not begin until 6 May 1718, and he remained only until 18 April 1719. Calendar 1715 therefore held the naming and the foundation, not the finished battery or the engineer’s Cape residence. Construction stretched far beyond the February ceremony; the battery was completed only in April 1726, more than eleven years after the stone was laid. [3]
At first the finished work kept the name Mauritius that Chavonnes had given it at the foundation. It afterwards came to be popularly called the Chavonnes battery, and that popular name was officially conferred in November 1744. For Table Valley in 1715 the February day recorded intent and a named shore work at the Lion’s Rump; the long build, the popular renaming after the governor who laid the stone, and the mid-century official title all lay ahead of the calendar year that opened the battery’s history. [3]
The fortifications then existing consisted of the castle and this new shore battery. The latter was commenced in February 1715 on the line where a later breakwater would run into the bay; no second castle was begun. Chavonnes’s stone therefore added a named work to a settlement still defended, in the main, by the pentagon raised in the previous century. The Seventeen’s later demand for engineer plans did not un-name the battery or shift its site; it only postponed the masonry that would, more than a decade later, complete the Mauritius work as a finished battery on that shore. [3]
Relative Rank and Church Seating — 1715
A subject that occupied a good deal of attention throughout the eighteenth century was the relative rank of the different individuals in the community, and, as the church was the place where all met, the position which each should occupy in that building. The directors desired that the burghers should be as nearly as possible of the same station, but when civil and military offices of various kinds were created, some distinctions were inevitable. There was, however, a general feeling of respect for legitimate authority properly exercised, so that with the burgher population each one’s place was recognised without much difficulty. [3]
In the country the landdrost ranked first, as the representative of the Honourable Company. He had the front seat in the church, which was slightly elevated and distinguished by a canopy. Next to him in rank came the clergyman. The heemraden followed, and had a special seat in church just behind the landdrost. The elders and deacons had seats on each side of the pulpit, and the military officers had recognised places in the body of the building, according to their grade. The wives of all these notables sat on chairs placed in the order mentioned above, it being one of the duties of a church officer called the koster to see that the seats were in their proper positions. [3]
Among the servants of the Company the struggle for place was constant. In the army and navy it was easy to define the grades, but outside of those branches of the service complicated questions were constantly arising. There were the grades senior merchant, merchant, and junior merchant, yet these did not meet every difficulty of precedence. The same chapter that records the Mauritius foundation of 20 February 1715 sets that seating order down as the standing public map of rank in the year the battery was named: church, not castle courtyard, was where the settlement’s hierarchy was displayed each Sunday. [3]
Abraham Cranendonk Takes Over as Secunde — 4 March 1715
Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes had been installed only about two months when one of the first victims of his anti-corruption campaign was his second-in-command. In May 1714 the secunde Willem Helot, who had recently been acting head of the government after Louis van Assenburgh’s death and through the smallpox year, was suspended for appropriating to his own use property belonging to the Company. The new governor, simple in personal taste and under strict directors’ instructions to economise where expenditure already greatly exceeded revenue, had soon found more than a little corruption in government circles to the detriment of Company income; Helot’s fall sat inside that early clean-up rather than as an isolated scandal. [3] [9]
Upon the circumstances being reported to the directors, the council was instructed to send Helot to the Netherlands without rank or salary. A derobed former secunde thus left the Cape with his family stripped of pay; the passage was probably borne by his wife, Maria Engelbrecht, who, as widow of Dominie Hercules van Loon, was comfortably off. In any case the Helots vanished from the Cape scene. The vacancy in the second chair then stretched nearly ten months while Chavonnes governed without a settled secunde. [3] [9]
Abraham Cranendonk, recently fiscal of the establishment on the Hoogly, who was named as Helot’s successor, arrived at the Cape and took over the duty on the 4th of March 1715. His installation restored the second chair in the council of policy and closed the personal vacancy left by Helot’s disgrace. The new secunde came from Bengal service rather than from a long Cape apprenticeship; his first Cape year would run beside the wine tax, the Mauritius foundation, and the San commandos of the same calendar—under a governor whose economising knife was already cutting rental on cattle runs, stamp duties, a tax on wine pressed by farmers, and reduced public works, yet still retained burgher esteem by gradual and tactful application. The second chair thus filled would last, in the official list, from March 1715 until October 1721. [3] [9]
Wine Tax of Four Shillings and Two Pence per Legger — 12 March 1715
On the 12th of March 1715 a tax of four shillings and two pence was laid upon every legger of wine pressed in the colony. This article had not been subject to tithe or any tax whatever before this date. The impost sat beside the liquor retail farm auctioned each 31 August, the grain tithe, the cattle-run rental opened from 3 July 1714, and the stamp duties required from 20 July 1714 on transfers, wills, marriage contracts, and notarial acts—the revenue cluster already begun in Chavonnes’s first months. [3]
The March levy was not an isolated local whim. The directors had instructed the governor to devise means of meeting, in part if not wholly, the large excess of expenditure over colonial revenue; exact equality of the books could not be stated in single figures, but the shortfall was plain enough to drive policy. Retail liquor rights still averaged about £3,167 a year in the first quarter of the century; tithes, transfer dues, and goods profits about £4,789; total colonial revenue about £8,000 against expenditure not less than about £14,500 after shipping charges were reduced as far as the books allowed. The wine tax was the first new charge of 1715 aimed at that gap, and the first direct levy on the pressed product of the vine rather than on retail sale alone. [3]
Expenditure was kept at the lowest possible sum by the payment of very small salaries and the allowance of privileges of different kinds to the officers, by permitting from one hundred and fifty to two hundred out of a garrison of about five hundred and fifty men to take temporary service with farmers, and by employing slave labour in building and gardening. In converting the money of that day into British coinage, 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. Those were the books against which four shillings and two pence a legger was meant to tell. [3]
That fiscal pressure matched the character of the new administration. Pasques de Chavonnes was the opposite of extravagant and simple in personal tastes; he was also frugal in government, though the frugality was dictated by duty rather than mere meanness. He had received strict instructions to economise and tried hard to comply, while finding more than a little corruption in official circles to the detriment of Company income. Among the unpopular measures he introduced to improve the Cape’s trade balance were a rental on land leased for cattle runs, stamp duties on legal documents, a tax on wine pressed by farmers, and other “nuisances”; he also decreased public works, refusing even to have the canal bridges in the Heerengracht repaired or renovated. [3] [9]
Winegrowers who had escaped grain-style tithe now faced a fixed money duty per legger at the press. The measure did not replace the August monopoly farm; it added a production charge upstream of retail, extending the 1714 cluster—land rent of twenty-five shillings for six months or fifty shillings a year, freehold options for old Waveren residents, town-site reversion if houses were not built within twelve months, and stamps from six pence to twelve shillings and six pence—into the vineyard economy itself. Yet the same sources that record the cuts also record how little open resistance they provoked: the economising knife was applied gradually and with tact, and by a governor whose personal demeanour was so exemplary that not much grumbling was heard, even while revenue still lagged expenditure and the settlement’s books remained worrying. [3] [9]
Return of the Postlooper from the Natal Coast — 1715
In November 1714 the galiot Postlooper had been 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 not brought in by the English coasting boat of 4 September 1714. After an absence of nearly six months she returned with a report that neither men nor wreck could be found. The empty return therefore fell in 1715, closing the Company’s own eastern search for the Natal stranding of 16 February 1713. [3]
Four of the seven Bennebroek Europeans had already reached Table Bay with the English boat; the February 1714 Malabar survivor had confirmed that a westward trek from the wreck was possible. The Postlooper’s null cruise left cannon, anchors, and three men unaccounted for in the official file. For Chavonnes’s council the galiot’s report ended the active Company hunt without salvage or further rescue. No factory stood on that shore; the search had been a cruise along a coast already touched by English private traders, not a visit to a Dutch post. [3]
Calendar 1715 thus received the wreck story as a closed Company effort rather than as a new expedition. The November sailing had been the Cape’s official eastern search; its null result was known only after the galiot’s long cruise. What remained of the Bennebroek file after that return was the four sailors already landed in September 1714, the Malabar who had reached the castle in February of that year, and whatever later private reports might arrive. Cannon and anchors stayed in the surf; three Europeans stayed unfound. [3]
Blasphemy Sentence of Michiel van der Have — June 1715
Colonists respected Pasques de Chavonnes more than they had Willem Adriaan van der Stel or even Louis van Assenburgh, in part because, in contrast to those predecessors, he was a religious man. That character is frequently illustrated by entries in the Company journal. One such entry, dated the 6th of June 1715, records the case of boatsman Michiel van der Have, sentenced for blasphemy of the Lord. The conviction belonged to the same mid-year window as the fiscal and frontier business of the calendar: a public moral sentence under a governor whose piety was part of the authority he exercised at the Castle. [9]
The punishment mixed shame with banishment. On three consecutive Sundays van der Have had to stand at the church door, exposed to public view and carrying a board that read “I am a blasphemer”. Thereafter the sinner was banished to Robben Island for four years. Church-door penance first fixed the offence in the eyes of the congregation; the island term then removed him from the settlement’s ordinary labour and company for a fixed span. The sequence was judicial theatre followed by isolation—both under Company order, and both recorded as ordinary business of a pious administration rather than as an exceptional show trial. [9]
Chavonnes added a remark that the journal preserves a little apologetically: “Under a Roman Catholic Government he would not have escaped so easily.” The governor thus framed four years on Robben Island and public branding at the church door as comparatively mild by the standards of confessional justice he knew from Europe. The sentence still advertised that blasphemy of the Lord was a crime the Cape government would answer with body and place; the apologetic comparison only underlined how far a Reformed Company ruler thought he had already restrained the penalty. In a year of wine tax, statutes of India, and the first colonial San commandos, the van der Have case fixed another face of Chavonnes’s rule: religious discipline enforced in the open, and measured against Catholic severity by the man who ordered it. [9]
French and Dutch Sunday Services at Drakenstein — 1715
The order of 1701 had required Dutch in the Drakenstein congregation, and in 1709 the clergyman and church officers there were told that in future they were to address their letters to the government and their nomination lists for office bearers in Dutch and not, as had been the case hitherto, in French. Petitions that the Reverend Beck might still preach in the refugees’ own tongue had been referred to the directors, who would not permit the request unless contrary reasons warranted it, yet left the governor to act as circumstances required. The settlers had declared that they found it impossible to learn Dutch as they lived one, two, three or more hours from each other, and had asked that they might be allowed, if only once a fortnight, to have the services in their own language. [8]
That order was not rigidly enforced. There is evidence that French services were held at Drakenstein many years subsequent to 1701. The church minutes of 1715 show that the French service was to commence at half-past eight on Sunday mornings and the Dutch service at ten o’clock. Two hours on the same morning, in two languages, thus remained the congregation’s stated Sunday order in Chavonnes’s second calendar year—fourteen years after the directors’ Dutch instruction, and in the first full year after Petrus van Aken took over the Drakenstein pulpit in August 1714. [8]
The minutes therefore answer a question the 1701 placaat had seemed to close. French had not been extinguished at Drakenstein; it had been given an earlier hour, with Dutch following at ten. After the removal in 1707 of Reverend Beck from Drakenstein to Stellenbosch the Cape church council had written to the Classis at Amsterdam on the 26th of March 1710 that the former congregation was still badly in want of a clergyman, as the services were being conducted by a sick-comforter, and that none of the ministers then allowed for foreign service could satisfy Drakenstein’s special requirement of French. Calendar 1715 records, not that want’s end in a French-speaking minister, but that a French hour was still on the Sunday board beside the Dutch. [8]
The same congregation kept a register of members dated 1715, preserved with the extracts of baptisms from the French register kept at Drakenstein by Paul Roux. The roll sits among the papers of a church that still opened Sunday with a French service at half-past eight. Language, membership, and the Sunday clock were thus written down in the same year that the high court was bound to the statutes of India and a wine tax was laid on every legger pressed in the colony. [8]
Renewed San Depredations — 1715
For some time back the Bushmen (San) had not been giving much trouble, but in 1715 their depredations were renewed. These people would not change their mode of living, and, as the game was being destroyed, a conflict between them and the farmers was inevitable. Stock posts pushed into country where hunting bands still moved; the epidemic of 1713 had broken organised Khoikhoi communities near the older districts more severely than it had reached isolated San groups, leaving the stock frontier’s principal recorded native difficulty with the San. [3]
The renewal was not a single raid but a return to stock-taking after a quieter interval. Farmers along expanding cattle runs faced the same tactical problem that earlier decades had already shown: San parties who knew the ground could drive sheep and cattle and vanish into country where mounted pursuit was slow and uncertain. The council’s response in 1715 would move from written permission for neighbours to follow plunderers to successive burgher commandos supplied with Company ammunition. [3]
First expeditions against San raiders had tended to be on a small scale, consisting probably of the male members of the robbed family; increasing familiarity with the difficulties and dangers then fostered combinations of farmers for mutual assistance. In the early days of the trouble those combinations were unofficial—undertaken without the knowledge or authority of the government—because the Cape was far away and the promptest action was necessary. Calendar 1715 is the year in which that unofficial habit received written leave from the castle after a concrete Drakenstein complaint, and in which government powder, flints, and lead began to follow the horsemen onto successive fields. [3] [4]
First Colonial Commando under Hermanus Potgieter — August 1715
In August 1715 the wife of a Drakenstein farmer appeared at the castle and informed the governor that San raiders had driven off over seven hundred sheep belonging to her husband, after murdering the shepherd. The complaint was concrete and local: a named flock, a dead herdsman, and neighbours close enough to ride. Thereupon the governor gave a general permission in writing to the neighbours of the man who had been robbed to follow the plunderers and retake the spoil. A notification to this effect was also sent to the landdrost. Written leave from the castle, not a garrison column under a Company officer, thus opened the pursuit. [3]
With this permission the first purely colonial commando took the field. It consisted of thirty mounted burghers, who chose as their commandant a farmer named Hermanus Potgieter. They did their utmost to trace the robbers, but without success. The party was colonial in composition—free burghers under a burgher commandant—rather than a mixed column of Company soldiers and free men under an officer of the garrison. Ammunition and written leave came from the castle; the riding and the choice of leader came from the neighbourhood of the loss. [3]
That form mattered because earlier stock pursuits had often begun smaller still. First expeditions against San raiders tended to be on a small scale, consisting probably of the male members of the robbed family; increasing familiarity with the difficulties and dangers then fostered combinations of farmers for mutual assistance. Such self-imposed duties were by no means light: men journeyed for days and sometimes weeks over considerable tracts of country, suffering hardship from weather, want of water, and scarcity of food, while the danger of following raiders into native fastnesses—where they could remain hidden until a flight of poisoned arrows marked the risk of pressing farther—made recovery uncertain even after bloodshed. After all that trouble, fatigue, and risk, a few head of stolen stock might be recovered, but more often none at all. Potgieter’s thirty horsemen sat at the hinge of that evolution: no longer a single household’s chase, yet still a neighbourhood combination rather than a regular military detachment, and still ending, in August, with a null recovery. [3] [4]
Distance from the castle made the August procedure almost inevitable. To obtain official permission in every interior case was often out of the question when the promptest action was necessary, and the government was not in a position to plant soldiers or a standing police force on every outer run; the practical course was to sanction farmers’ efforts, later to appoint trustworthy field-commandants with authority to call men out, and to counsel order and the avoidance of hostilities while itself supplying gunpowder, flints, and lead. In 1715 that sanction took the form of Chavonnes’s written general leave and the landdrost’s notice; the thirty burghers still chose Potgieter themselves. Failure to recover the flock did not end the year’s violence. The August leave and Potgieter’s horsemen established a pattern that later commandos of the same season would repeat: burgher pursuit authorised after a concrete complaint, Company ammunition on successive fields, hard tracking, and no lasting clearance of the raiders. The first purely colonial field force of the Cape’s recorded San wars thus entered the books as a null recovery after a shepherd’s murder and a loss of more than seven hundred sheep. [3] [4]
Berg River and Waveren Raids; Successive Commandos — 1715
After Potgieter’s null recovery the San commenced plundering generally the farmers along the Berg river and in the Land of Waveren. They murdered some herdsmen, set fire to several houses, and drove off a large number of cattle. It was feared that they would burn the ripening corn. Some of the most exposed farmers abandoned their homes, and a few families were quite ruined. The pressure was no longer a single Drakenstein flock but a broad front from the Berg valley into the Tulbagh basin, where outer stock runs and grain lands sat within reach of the same raiders. [3]
Several commandos in succession were raised and sent to expel the marauders, the government supplying ammunition—gunpowder, flints, and lead on the same pattern already sanctioned for neighbourhood pursuit after the August leave. The instructions under which they took the field were emphatic that bloodshed was to be avoided if possible, and women and children were not to be molested. But this was a kind of warfare in which men’s hearts were apt to become hardened. What began as written leave after a concrete complaint became a season of repeated call-outs under Company powder, still short of a standing frontier garrison on every outer run. [3] [4]
It was easy to resolve to drive the marauders from a stated tract of country, but very difficult to carry the resolution into effect. The self-imposed duties of such farmer combinations were by no means light: men journeyed for days and sometimes weeks over considerable tracts, suffering hardship from weather, want of water, and scarcity of food. The keen-sighted San, when he observed the approach of an enemy, concealed himself and his family in native fastnesses where he could remain hidden if he wished; a flight of poisoned arrows marked the risk of pressing farther. As soon as pursuers retired, worn out in looking for him, depredations were resumed. After trouble, fatigue, and risk, a few head of stolen stock might be recovered, but more often none at all—and the robbers were not intimidated by the season’s raids. [3] [4]
None of the commandos sent out in this year effected their object, though some of them believed they had done so until they learned that as soon as they were disbanded the marauders were busy again. Early in 1716 one of the commandos would lose a man killed with a poisoned arrow and have another wounded, after which a sergeant and twenty soldiers and a peace party with arrack, tobacco, and beads would be tried; those measures belong to the next calendar. Within 1715 the record closes on repeated burgher expeditions, Company powder, abandoned farms, burned houses, and no lasting expulsion of the raiders from the Berg and Waveren front. Government-supplied commandos had not abated the career of spoliation that season; the outer districts still faced a frontier on which pursuit could clear a valley for a few days and lose it again the moment the horsemen rode home. [3] [4]
Wheat Harvests, Fugitive Slaves, and Frontier Spread — 1715
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. Calendar 1715 sat in the middle of that strong run. In the Company’s possessions in India the demand for wheat remained limited, and grain could be obtained elsewhere at a lower rate than the twelve shillings a muid then paid at the Cape. The governor-general and council of India were satisfied with the quality of Cape wheat, yet held that Bengal and Surat could supply the Asian factories to greater advantage; quantity at the Cape also fluctuated so sharply from season to season that a constant export could not be depended upon. They proposed to let Cape farmers ship wheat to any part of India and sell it there at whatever price they could get, but the burghers objected that they were not placed to carry such a trade and could not wait long after harvest without return. The directors later preferred supporting the colonists over buying from Hindostan, yet reduced the Cape purchase price to ten shillings and eight pence a muid and forbade new wheat and wine ground without their approval in each case. Through 1715 itself the harvests still filled the three-year export total even while those market arguments hardened in correspondence. [3]
To encourage the colonists to grow other produce, directions were given that ships from India were to be supplied at the Cape with peas, beans, and husked barley sufficient for the passage home, though peas were then bringing the high price of twenty-nine shillings, and beans twenty-five shillings a muid. Good grain years and dear pulse thus stood together in the same market argument: Batavia took more than five thousand muids of wheat a year on average across 1714–1716, while the Company still looked for other Cape produce that might fill outward ships without glutting the Indian wheat price. [3]
Abundance did not silence complaint at the Castle. Not long after mid-year, Pasques de Chavonnes sighed in the Company journal over the fickle mentality of farmers: they never had things as they liked them; if there was drought they complained, and if rains were abundant they complained of great mortality among cattle that had eaten young grass. It would be better, the governor admonished, if they kept silent because of Heaven’s blessing, for God loved man more than they had any idea of. The entry sits beside the heavy wheat seasons rather than against them: good grain years and pastoral losses could travel together, and a religious administrator read both as matter for providence rather than open grievance. [9]
At this date fugitive slaves were giving a great deal of trouble to the colonists. These people formed themselves into bands and plundered the farmers whenever necessity impelled and opportunity offered. Though they usually selected a retreat in some place difficult of discovery and access, they were much more easily found than Bushmen. The San war of 1715 and the slave-band problem thus pressed the same inland farms from different directions: one by stock raid and fire along Berg and Waveren, the other by theft from hidden camps closer to settled ground. The grain surplus that filled Batavia’s ships did not secure every outer kraal against either threat. [3]
From 1710 to 1715 many of the farmers from Waveren, as the district of Tulbagh was then called, were gradually drifting down the valley of the Breede river, while from Hottentots Holland some were gradually making their way along the course of the Zonder End, a tributary of the Breede. The same years that produced Chavonnes’s land rent and the first colonial San commando also carried cattle farmers deeper into those valleys. As more remote districts were reached, considerations of permission, boundaries, and rent were often ignored; the country seemed illimitable, and stock runs of several thousand acres became the ordinary claim. Informal occupation under Company pleasure still framed much of the outer stock country; the pressure of San raids in 1715 fell on a frontier already moving east and northeast of the older wine and grain core. [3] [4]
Named households marked the same year on the refugee rolls. Andries Wiebaux (also Huibaux or Wiebeaux), who had come from Middelburg in the Blois in 1706, became a free burgher in 1715. Durand Sollier, a shoemaker at Drakenstein who with his wife had joined the Dutch church at Cape Town on the 4th of October 1697, was by 1702 married to Martha Petel, who died in 1715. Louis Fourie, agriculturist in the Wagonmakers Valley on the grant of 1699 called Slange Rivier, lost his first wife, Susanna Cordier, daughter of the refugee Louis Cordier, about 1715. The member register of the Drakenstein congregation for the same year, the French Sunday hour at half-past eight, and these household dates sit together as the refugee community’s written trace of calendar 1715. [8]
On the last day of 1715 the same governor closed the year in the journal with a line of Company piety: “But if God is with us, that is with the Honourable Company, who shall prevail against it?” The sentence gathered a season of heavy wheat exports, fiscal pressure, San commandos, fugitive-slave bands, and cattle-farm drift into one official confidence. Whatever the farmers’ complaints about drought or young grass, the Castle’s final entry for the calendar year set the Honourable Company under divine protection and treated the settlement’s fortunes as inseparable from that claim. [9]