Boer History1716 at the Cape of Good Hope: San Peace Party, Directors’ Questions, Tulbagh’s Arrival, and the Stellenbosch Flood
Landdrost and Heemraden Jurisdiction Extended — 1716
In the year after the council of policy had bound the high court of justice to the statutes of India (except where Cape placaats modified them), the summary jurisdiction of the court of landdrost and heemraden was extended in civil cases to £10 8s. 4d. The enlargement sat beside the wine tax of four shillings and two pence per legger opened on 12 March 1715, the cattle-run rental charged from 3 July 1714, and the stamp duties required from 20 July 1714 on transfers, wills, marriage contracts, and notarial acts. Country litigants could now finish a wider band of ordinary civil disputes at the drostdy without carrying every middling claim into the castle court. [3]
The order did not rewrite the hierarchy of law fixed in February 1715. Indian statutes remained the default corpus; local placaats remained the Cape override; the 1716 change only raised the money ceiling of summary civil work before landdrost and heemraden. For free burghers along the Berg, in the Land of Waveren, and on the expanding stock runs toward the Breede and Zonder End, the practical effect was a higher local threshold before a case had to travel to Table Valley. [3]
Commando Casualties from Poisoned Arrows — Early 1716
The San war that had opened in 1715 with the Drakenstein loss of more than seven hundred sheep and the first purely colonial commando under Hermanus Potgieter did not close with the calendar. Early in 1716 one of the commandos lost a man killed with a poisoned arrow and had another wounded. The casualties marked a harder phase than the null recoveries of the previous season: burgher pursuit still failed to clear the Berg and Waveren front, and now the field parties paid in blood as well as in fruitless tracking. [3] [4]
Instructions issued with the successive commandos of 1715 had been emphatic that bloodshed was to be avoided if possible and that women and children were not to be molested. In practice this was a kind of warfare in which men’s hearts were apt to become hardened. The keen-sighted San, when they observed an enemy’s approach, concealed themselves and their families; as soon as the pursuers retired worn out, depredations resumed. None of the commandos of the previous year had effected a lasting expulsion, and the early-1716 death and wounding showed that the same difficulty still governed the field. [3] [4]
Sergeant’s Guard and the Peace Party with Arrack, Tobacco, and Beads — 1716
After the poisoned-arrow casualties a sergeant and twenty soldiers were directed to guard the most exposed positions, and a strong party of the Company’s servants and burghers was sent with some arrack, tobacco, and beads to try and make peace. The dual measure paired a thin military screen on the threatened farms with a gift-bearing embassy intended to open talks rather than another pure pursuit. [3]
The peace party succeeded in obtaining a meeting with a company of Bushmen and returned to the castle with a report that an agreement of friendship had been entered into. And it certainly was the case that robberies ceased for a time. The lull was real enough to be recorded as more than a hopeful claim: for months after the meeting the immediate pressure of stock raids on the exposed front eased, even though later years would show that the settlement was not permanent beyond the next major complaint in January 1719. [3]
The episode sat inside the broader pattern of early colonial commandos: government powder and written permission, burgher horses and tracking, occasional soldier detachments, and—when force failed—presents and talk. Official sanction of farmer combinations against San stock raiders was already the working answer where the Company could not station a full police line across the inland runs. [3] [4]
New Military Posts Withdrawn — August 1716
In August 1716 the newly-formed military posts were withdrawn at the request of the burghers, who had a lively dread of tyranny being established by means of troops. The temporary screens raised after the early-year casualties and peace talks thus lasted only into the southern winter before free farmers asked that the extra soldier presence be pulled back. [3]
The old outposts at Waveren, Saldanha Bay, Groenekloof, and Klapmuts were still maintained; but there were never more than seven men at each. Those four stations remained the ordinary Company footprint beyond the castle and the town posts: small, fixed, and not the mobile field force the San war had briefly seemed to require. Burgher fear of a standing inland soldiery therefore shaped the year’s security settlement as much as the peace beads and the sergeant’s guard had shaped its opening months. [3]
Wheat to Batavia, Price Cut, and Limits on New Ground — 1716
The crops of 1714 to 1716 were so good that fifteen thousand four hundred muids of wheat were sent to Batavia, or more than five thousand muids on an average yearly. Calendar 1716 closed that strong three-season 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. [3]
The governor-general and council of India were of opinion that the Company could be supplied from Bengal and Surat to greater advantage. They were satisfied with the quality of Cape wheat, but it was too dear, and the quantity produced fluctuated so greatly from season to season that a constant supply could not be depended upon. They proposed to allow the Cape farmers to send wheat to any part of India and sell it there at whatever price could be obtained. But to this the burghers objected, as they asserted that they were not in a position to carry on a trade of this kind and could not afford to wait long after harvest without any return. The colony would be ruined, they said, if the Company ceased to purchase their grain. [3]
The directors decided that it would be better to support the burghers than natives of Hindostan, but the price of wheat at the Cape was reduced to ten shillings and eight pence a muid. As it was asserted that they must purchase all that was grown, or ruin would follow, they wrote that no more ground was to be given out for the production of wheat and wine without their approval being obtained in each instance. To encourage the colonists to grow other produce, they gave directions 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. [3]
Directors’ Questions on Colonists, Labour, and Produce — 24 June 1716
On the 24th of June 1716 the directors submitted a series of questions upon which they required the opinions of the members of the council of policy. The principal queries were whether the country could maintain a larger number of colonists; whether it would not be more advantageous to employ European labourers than slaves; whether such articles as coffee, sugar, cotton, indigo, olive oil, tobacco, flax, silk, and hops could not be produced so as to enable a larger number of people to gain a living; and whether a tax could not be imposed on provisions supplied to foreign ships. [3]
Each member of the council was required to take these questions into consideration and to bring up a report. The answers would be delivered in council in February 1717, when Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, secunde Abraham Cranendonk, fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont, and the junior members J. Cruse, J. de la Fontaine, K. Slotsboo, and H. van der Meer would favour slave labour, while Captain Dominique Pasques de Chavonnes, commander of the garrison, alone would advocate European workmen only. Within calendar 1716 the historical fact is the despatch of the questionnaire itself: Amsterdam put free immigration, the slave system, exotic staples, and a foreign-ship provision tax on the Cape council’s table, and required written opinions before any large turn in labour policy. [3]
As yet slavery had not taken deep root and could easily have been done away with. The number of slaves was still small, and nearly five-sixths of them were adult males. Without further importations the system would have rapidly perished. The June questions therefore arrived at a moment when the Cape’s labour future was still open on paper, even though the majority reports of the following February would close that opening in favour of continued slave labour on cost and discipline grounds. [3]
Three Thousand Pounds of Cape Wool to Amsterdam — 1716
Sheep’s wool was not among the directors’ June staples in the same hopeful list, because all attempts to encourage the growth of a marketable article had hitherto failed. In 1714 six hundred and fifty pounds had been sent to Europe, but the quality was so bad that it did not produce at public sale as much as it had cost. Another experiment was made in 1716, when three thousand pounds were purchased at seven pence a pound and sent to Amsterdam. [3]
The quality of this shipment was likewise so inferior that it was unsaleable for spinning purposes. It was then resolved to let this industry remain in abeyance until another breed of animals could be introduced, and as the greatest difficulty was now being experienced in getting as much meat as was needed, wool, which was of less importance, was not spoken of. Calendar 1716 thus closed the second failed wool trial of Chavonnes’s early years and left meat supply the more urgent pastoral problem. [3]
Stellenbosch Flood — 13 October 1716
On the 13th of October 1716 the village of Stellenbosch suffered a flood which later generations would still cite when a second inundation threatened the place in May 1768. The October water marked a sharp local disaster in a year otherwise dominated by San negotiations, grain policy, and directors’ questionnaires: the drostdy village on the Eerste River was damaged enough for the date to stand in the long memory of the district’s flood history. [3]
No full contemporary engineering remedy is recorded for 1716 itself. Half a century later, after the 1768 flood again endangered the village, the course of the river would be altered according to plans furnished by the heemraad Martin Melk. For calendar 1716 the fact that enters the narrative is the flood day and the scale of the threat it posed to Stellenbosch’s built core—an inland settlement shock in the same autumn that closed the strong wheat-export run to Batavia. [3]
Ryk Tulbagh Lands from the Terhorst — 1716
In the year 1716 a lad from Bergen-op-Zoom bade his friends farewell and embarked in the ship Terhorst under an agreement for five years to act in whatever capacity the East India Company should find him most competent. He was not quite seventeen years of age when he landed at the Cape. The youth was Ryk Tulbagh, later to rise through the civil service to the governorship; his arrival is the quiet personnel fact of Chavonnes’s third calendar year. [3]
He had been at school until he was sixteen, when his friends considered him sufficiently well educated to make his way in the world. Other capital than his own good qualities and the knowledge gained at school he had none. He had not been long at the Cape when he attracted the attention of his superiors by his excellent conduct: earnest demeanour, thorough work even on trivial tasks, and an obliging disposition. Governor De Chavonnes would later observe that young Tulbagh spent leisure hours principally in reading useful books, was a fair accountant, and wrote a clearer hand and better composition than many old clerks—observations that in 1718 would move the governor to place him more carefully. Within 1716 the record is the landing, the age, the ship, and the opening of a career that began in the same year as the San peace presents and the directors’ labour questions. [3]
Burgher Rolls, Population after Smallpox, and Fugitive Slaves — 1716
The burgher rolls are not to be regarded in any year as more than approximately correct, but in common with other contemporary documents they bear witness to the great loss of life in the smallpox year. According to them, in 1712 the number of colonists—men, women, and children—was one thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine, and in 1716, three years after the cessation of the plague, notwithstanding the natural increase, only one thousand six hundred and ninety-seven. Free European recovery remained incomplete three full years after the epidemic’s end. [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 temporary San lull after the peace presents therefore did not clear the inland security problem: slave bands and stock raiders pressed the same farming country from different habits of flight and concealment. [3]
From 1710 to 1715 many of the farmers from Waveren, as the district of Tulbagh was then called, had been gradually drifting down the valley of the Breede river, while from Hottentots Holland some had been gradually making their way along the course of the Zonder End. That outward stock movement framed the farms that had taken the San blows of 1715–1716 and the slave-band thefts of the same years: cattle country was still spreading under informal occupation during the Company’s pleasure even as burgher totals on the rolls stood lower than before the smallpox. [4] [3]
Close of 1716 at the Cape
By the end of 1716 the Cape had raised the civil summary jurisdiction of landdrost and heemraden to £10 8s. 4d.; buried a commando man killed by a poisoned San arrow and tended another wounded; posted a sergeant and twenty soldiers on the most exposed ground; and sent Company servants and burghers with arrack, tobacco, and beads to a meeting that produced a temporary friendship and a real pause in robberies. In August the newly-formed military posts came down at burgher request, while Waveren, Saldanha Bay, Groenekloof, and Klapmuts kept their old outposts of not more than seven men each. The three-season wheat run of 1714–1716 shipped fifteen thousand four hundred muids to Batavia even as directors cut the Cape price to ten shillings and eight pence, forbade new wheat and wine ground without approval, and ordered peas, beans, and husked barley for homeward India ships. On 24 June the Seventeen put free colonists, European versus slave labour, exotic staples, and a foreign-ship provision tax to the council in writing. Three thousand pounds of Cape wool bought at seven pence a pound failed at Amsterdam. Ryk Tulbagh landed from the Terhorst not yet seventeen. Stellenbosch flooded on 13 October. Burgher rolls stood at one thousand six hundred and ninety-seven free colonists against one thousand nine hundred and thirty-nine in 1712, while fugitive slave bands still plundered inland farms and cattle settlers continued the Breede and Zonder End drift. Chavonnes’s third calendar year thus paired a fragile San peace and a reduced inland soldiery with the directors’ great labour questionnaire, a failed wool trial, a village flood, and the quiet arrival of the youth who would one day govern the Cape. [3] [4]