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]
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: 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. [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 stone and the name marked the formal opening of a coastal work intended to strengthen the bay approaches beyond the older castle lines. The battery’s later design history would wait on engineers and directors; the February ceremony fixed the site and the dedication in Chavonnes’s second calendar year. [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. Calendar 1715 therefore held the naming and the foundation, not the finished battery or the engineer’s long Cape residence. For Table Valley the February day recorded intent and a named work at the Lion’s Rump shore. [3]
Abraham Cranendonk Takes Over as Secunde — 4 March 1715
In May 1714 the secunde Willem Helot, who had recently been acting head of the government, had been suspended for appropriating to his own use property belonging to the Company, and upon the circumstances being reported to the directors the council was instructed to send him to the Netherlands without rank or salary. Abraham Cranendonk, recently fiscal of the establishment on the Hoogly, who was named as his successor, arrived at the Cape and took over the duty on the 4th of March 1715. [3]
Nearly ten months had passed between Helot’s suspension and Cranendonk’s installation. Through that interval Chavonnes had governed without a settled secunde after the fall of the man who had buried Van Assenburgh and steered the smallpox year. Cranendonk’s arrival on 4 March 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. [3]
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. [3]
Chavonnes’s first object after installation had been to make colonial revenue more nearly meet expenditure. 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 March 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]
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. In a year of strong grain harvests and continuing fiscal shortfall, the twelve-pence-and-four-shillings rate on every legger extended Chavonnes’s 1714 revenue cluster—land rent, freehold options, town-site reversion, stamps—into the vineyard economy itself. [3]
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. [3]
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 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 the Bushmen had driven off over seven hundred sheep belonging to her husband, after murdering the shepherd. 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. [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—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]
Failure to recover the flock did not end the year’s violence. The August leave and Potgieter’s thirty horsemen established a pattern that later commandos of the same season would repeat: burgher pursuit authorised after a concrete complaint, 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]
Berg River and Waveren Raids; Successive Commandos — 1715
The Bushmen then 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. Several commandos in succession were raised and sent to expel the marauders, the government supplying ammunition. [3]
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. 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 keen-sighted Bushman, when he observed the approach of an enemy, concealed himself and his family; and as soon as his pursuers retired, worn out in looking for him, his depredations were resumed. [3]
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. [3]
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; those market arguments would sharpen in later correspondence, but the Cape’s own harvests through 1715 continued heavy enough to fill the three-year export total. [3]
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. [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. 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. [4] [3]
Close of 1715 at the Cape
By the end of 1715 the Cape had bound the high court to the statutes of India on 12 February, laid the foundation stone of the Mauritius battery at the foot of the Lion’s Rump on 20 February, installed Abraham Cranendonk as secunde on 4 March after Helot’s long vacancy, and from 12 March taxed every legger of wine pressed at four shillings and two pence. The Postlooper returned empty from the Natal Bennebroek search. San depredations resumed; after a Drakenstein loss of more than seven hundred sheep and a murdered shepherd in August, thirty mounted burghers under Hermanus Potgieter formed the first purely colonial commando and failed to recover the flock; successive commandos along the Berg and in Waveren likewise failed to expel the raiders before year-end, while some exposed families abandoned homes and a few were ruined. Wheat seasons remained strong within the three-year Batavia total of fifteen thousand four hundred muids, fugitive slave bands troubled inland farms, and cattle farmers continued the drift from Waveren down the Breede and from Hottentots Holland along the Zonder End. Chavonnes’s second full calendar year thus paired a settled secunde and a new wine levy with the opening of organised colonial pursuit of San stock raiders—and with the hard lesson that permission, powder, and thirty horsemen did not yet clear the Berg and Waveren front. [3] [4]