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 on the 12th of 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]
Those same revenue measures that framed the jurisdiction change had been Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes’s first answer to a chronic gap between Cape income and outgo. After the 3rd of July 1714 a rental of twenty-five shillings for six months, or fifty shillings a year, was charged on cattle runs in addition to the tithe of grain produced. Old residents in the Land of Waveren and elsewhere were permitted 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. After the 20th of July 1714 stamps ranging from six pence to twelve shillings and six pence had to be affixed to transfers of land and slaves, wills, marriage contracts, certificates of inheritance, licences to trade, powers of attorney, and papers passing through courts of law. [3]
Colonial revenue at this date was put at about eight thousand pounds a year against expenditure, after shipping charges, of not less than fourteen thousand five hundred. The directors had instructed the governor to devise means of meeting the deficit in part if not wholly. The wine tax of 12 March 1715 was the first levy on an article that had not been subject to tithe or any tax whatever before that date. The 1716 rise in landdrost and heemraden civil power therefore belonged to the same fiscal settlement as the loan-farm rent, the stamps, and the legger duty: more of ordinary country business was to be finished at Stellenbosch, while the castle kept the high court, the Indian statutes, and the larger money claims. [3]
The garrison itself was kept cheap by the same economy. Pay was small and privileges of different kinds were allowed to officers; from one hundred and fifty to two hundred men out of a garrison of about five hundred and fifty were permitted to take temporary service with farmers; and slave labour was employed in building and gardening. That thin military establishment was the background against which the San war of 1715–1716 had to be met: the drostdy could now hear a larger class of civil suits, but it could not put a standing police line across the Berg and Waveren front. [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]
In August 1715 the wife of a Drakenstein farmer had appeared at the castle and informed the governor that the San had driven off over seven hundred sheep belonging to her husband, after murdering the shepherd. 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, and a notification was sent to the landdrost. With that permission the first purely colonial commando took the field: thirty mounted burghers, who chose Potgieter as commandant. They did their utmost to trace the robbers, but without success. The San 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. [3]
Several commandos in succession were raised and sent to expel the marauders, the government supplying ammunition. Instructions issued with those parties were 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 1715 effected a lasting expulsion, though some of them believed they had done so until they learned that as soon as they were disbanded the marauders were busy again. The early-1716 death and wounding showed that the same difficulty still governed the field. [3]
Combination among farmers living far apart was a matter of difficulty and great inconvenience. The first expeditions against San stock raiders had been on a small scale, consisting probably of the male members of the robbed family; increasing familiarity with the difficulties and dangers fostered combinations for mutual assistance. Parties journeyed for days and sometimes weeks, suffering from weather, want of water, and scarcity of food, and then faced the further danger of following such people into fastnesses from which the flight of poisoned arrows marked the risk of proceeding farther. After trouble, fatigue, and bloodshed, a few head of stolen cattle might be recovered, but more often none at all. The government, while counselling the maintenance of order and the avoidance of hostilities, provided gunpowder, flints, and lead, because it was not in a position to station soldiers or a police force across the inland runs. Official sanction of farmer combinations against San stock raiders was already the working answer where the Company could not. [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. The sergeant’s twenty were not a new inland regiment: they were a temporary guard on the most exposed posts, raised after blood had been drawn where the 1715 commandos had drawn none. [3]
The peace party succeeded in obtaining a meeting with a company of San 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 presents themselves were the Company’s ordinary language of inland diplomacy: arrack as drink, tobacco as a trade staple, and beads as the small manufactured goods that had long passed in barter. The party that carried them mixed Company servants with burghers, so that the castle and the robbed neighbourhoods were both represented at the meeting. Friendship, in the report that came back, meant a pause in driving stock rather than a surveyed boundary or a written treaty kept in the secretary’s office. Calendar 1716 nevertheless recorded a meeting, a reported agreement, and a real if temporary stop to the robberies that had ruined families along the Berg and in Waveren the year before. [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. The poisoned-arrow death had shown that pursuit into concealment could cost a life; the beads and arrack showed that the council was willing to buy a pause when expulsion had failed. Until January 1719 no fresh charge of San depredations was made, and then the complaint came from another direction. Within calendar 1716 the historical fact is the sergeant’s guard, the gift-bearing party, the meeting, and the lull that followed. [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. The request was granted. Fear of a standing inland soldiery therefore closed the year’s security experiment as firmly as the peace beads had opened it. [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. Seven men could watch a bay, a kloof, a pass, or a basin settlement; they could not ride the Berg and Waveren front as the sergeant’s twenty had been directed to do in the months after the poisoned arrow. [3]
Burgher dread of troops was not a new sentiment in a colony whose garrison already sent a third of its strength out to temporary farm service. The newly-formed posts of 1716 had looked, to men who had just ridden their own commandos, like the beginning of a different order: soldiers on the runs, not neighbours with government powder. The August withdrawal restored the older pattern. Inland security after the peace meeting rested on the reported friendship, on the four old posts of seven men, and on the burghers’ own horses if the lull broke. [3]
Waveren, the basin later called Tulbagh, was the inland post closest to the farms that had taken the 1715 blows. Saldanha Bay watched the west-coast harbour. Groenekloof covered the grazing district north of Table Bay toward the dunes. Klapmuts sat on the road toward Stellenbosch and the Berg. Together they were the Company’s ordinary map of the countryside in the year the extra posts came down. The peace presents and the August withdrawal thus left 1716 with a lighter, not a heavier, military line than the early months had seemed to promise. [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 contrast with the seasons immediately before Chavonnes’s arrival was sharp. The crop of 1710–11 had been a poor one, though grain in store had still enabled the government to keep up the supply to Batavia. In the two following seasons insufficient rain fell, and the yield was so small that only one thousand and twenty muids in 1712 and nineteen hundred and fifty-six muids in 1713 could be exported. In 1713 the fall of rain was ample, but the smallpox prevented extensive cultivation; the returns for seed sown were nevertheless exceptionally large, and in 1714 the quantity of wheat exported amounted to four thousand three hundred and seventy-five muids. The 1714–1716 average of more than five thousand muids a year therefore stood on top of a recovery already visible in Chavonnes’s first harvest, not on a sudden freak of one season. [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. The limit on new grain and wine ground was the counterpart of the price cut: Amsterdam would still buy, but it would not underwrite an indefinite expansion of the two staples that already glutted a limited Indian demand in good years. [3]
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. Those prices measured the scarcity of the lesser grains even while wheat was abundant enough to fill Batavia’s ships. Calendar 1716 thus closed the strong wheat-export run with a cheaper muid, a ban on unsupervised new wheat and wine ground, and an official preference for peas, beans, and barley on the homeward passage. [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. 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. Governor Chavonnes, secunde Abraham Cranendonk, fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont, and the junior members sitting with them had the remainder of the year to weigh the Seventeen’s queries. [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. The Seventeen asked, in so many words, whether European workmen would not serve the settlement better than slaves, and whether coffee, sugar, cotton, indigo, olive oil, tobacco, flax, silk, and hops might not support a larger free population than wheat and wine alone. [3]
The list of staples was itself a confession that wheat, already abundant enough to send more than five thousand muids a year to Batavia, could not be the sole answer to a larger European population. A tax on provisions supplied to foreign ships was the fourth query: whether strangers who bought Cape food should help close the gap between the eight thousand pounds of colonial revenue and the fourteen thousand five hundred of expenditure. No Cape vote on that tax, or on slave labour, was recorded in 1716. The year’s work was to receive the questions and to prepare the reports that February would hear. [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]
The 1716 parcel was nearly five times the weight of the 1714 sample, bought at a stated Cape price of seven pence a pound. Quantity did not cure quality. Amsterdam could not spin the Cape clip, and the experiment was not repeated with a larger shipment of the same fleece. Until a different breed could be brought in, wool was to wait. Meat, already short for garrison and fleets, took precedence over a fibre that had twice failed to sell. [3]
The wool failure sat beside the wheat glut and the June questionnaire without answering any of the Seventeen’s staple queries. Coffee, silk, indigo, and hops remained paper possibilities; wool, actually shipped, had been tried and found wanting. Pastoral Cape 1716 was a meat country first, a wheat country in good seasons, and not yet a wool country at all. [3]
Stellenbosch Flood — 13 October 1716
In October 1716 severe rains and winds passed over the country districts beyond Table Valley. On the 13th of October the village of Stellenbosch on the Eerste River suffered a flood which later generations would still cite when a second inundation threatened the place on the 30th of 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 was damaged enough for the date to stand in the long memory of the district’s flood history. [3] [8]
The same autumn storms that filled the Eerste also struck the French congregation’s fabric at Drakenstein. The primitive church building there—already complained of as barn-like and ruinous in the 1713 letter of the Kerkenraad to the Classis of Amsterdam, when the congregation numbered about seven hundred souls—became unusable under the October rains and winds. A resolution of the 5th of October 1716 recorded the damage while the weather was still on the country. The congregation was obliged to hold its services in the old house of the minister, and it was decided to break down the old building that had done service as a church. [8]
That fabric had been a grievance for years before the flood finished it. In 1708 the Cape had written to the Seventeen at Amsterdam for authority to build, if not a church, at least a respectable place of worship and a decent house for the clergyman, describing the services as then conducted in a shed or barn of very homely appearance. A visitor who saw Drakenstein between 1685 and 1714 had already called the building badly built inside and outside and more like a barn than a church. The Kerkenraad’s 26 March 1713 letter had warned that the church had become ruinous and would not stand another year, and that a congregation of about seven hundred souls, children and adults, was daily becoming more unruly for want of church, parsonage, and minister. The October winds of 1716 made that warning good. [8]
The Consistory approached the government for a new building. Plans submitted by the Reverend Petrus van Aken and the churchwardens would receive the approval of the council of policy only in March 1717, with ground survey by the Company’s engineer Evert Walraven Cochius following in June—calendar work of the next year. For 1716 the paired facts are the Stellenbosch flood day, the Drakenstein resolution of the 5th of October, and the French church’s final ruin under the same October weather: two inland shocks in the autumn that closed the strong wheat-export run to Batavia. [8]
No full contemporary engineering remedy is recorded for Stellenbosch in 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, under whose supervision the work was carried out. The 13th of October 1716 remained the first dated inundation in that later comparison: the Eerste had already shown what it could do to the drostdy village in Chavonnes’s third calendar year. [3]
Ryk Tulbagh Lands from the Terhorst — 1716
Ryk Tulbagh was born in the city of Utrecht on the 21st of May 1699, the eldest son of Dirk Tulbagh, an officer in the army of the States General stationed at Utrecht, and Catharina Cattepoel. The family was plain but respectable, with a reputation for service in the wars of Dutch freedom; several near relatives later fell in the field, and among them in later years his father. While the boy was still small—accounts place the move in infancy or about his fifth year—his father was transferred to Bergen-op-Zoom, and there the child’s early life was spent. At that garrison town Captain Dirk served for a time under the garrison commander Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, a connection that would shape the son’s Cape posting more than any private capital the household could supply. [3] [9]
At Bergen-op-Zoom the boy entered the Latin school, where he showed intelligence and diligence rather than brilliance, and he remained at his books until he was sixteen, when he matriculated. His friends then judged him sufficiently educated to make his way; Captain Tulbagh’s pay did not stretch to further study, and other capital than the lad’s own good qualities and school knowledge he had none. He entered the service of the East India Company under an agreement for five years to act in whatever capacity he should be found most competent. A plausible path into that engagement was a letter from Captain Dirk to his former colonel, by then governor at the Cape—an explanation that also accounts for the Rotterdam Chamber sending the youth directly to the Cape Colony rather than, as usual with new employees, toward the Indies. Another account gives an old family friend as the influence that found the first Company place; the Rotterdam posting to the Cape, rather than to India, fits the Chavonnes connection more closely. [3] [9]
In the year 1716 the lad bade his friends at Bergen-op-Zoom farewell and embarked in the ship Terhorst. He was not quite seventeen—a teenager of sixteen by the landing reckoning— when he stepped ashore at the Cape as the most junior of juniors on a salary of twelve guilders a month. His first post was to assist the storekeeper Jan de la Fontaine, a mentor who would himself rise through the castle hierarchy in the decades ahead. The arrival is the quiet personnel fact of Chavonnes’s third calendar year: the same season as the San peace presents, the directors’ labour questions of 24 June, and the October flood on the Eerste. [3] [9]
He had not been long at the Cape when he attracted the attention of his superiors by his excellent conduct: an earnest demeanour, thorough work even on trivial warehouse tasks, and an obliging disposition that made him a general favourite. Governor De Chavonnes observed 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 as assistant clerk in the secretary’s office of the council of policy on a slight increase of pay, from twelve guilders to twenty-five as adjunct-secretary. Within calendar 1716 the record closes on the landing, the ship, the twelve-guilder storekeeper’s assistantship under de la Fontaine, and the opening of a career that began beside the San peace beads and the Seventeen’s questionnaire. [3] [9]
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]
Among the Khoikhoi the disease had created the greatest havoc. Of the Europeans who were smitten, more recovered than died; but with the Khoikhoi, to be ill and to die were synonymous. Whole kraals absolutely disappeared, leaving not an individual alive. The very names of tribes for a great distance inland were blotted out. Farmers who had been accustomed to employ many hundreds of them in harvest time complained that none were now to be had. Strangers who had visited the colony before 1713, and who saw it afterwards, noticed that the Khoikhoi population had almost disappeared. From that date until other tribes were reached by the expansion of the settlement, the only difficulty with the natives was occasioned by the San. Owing to the isolation of those people, they escaped the disaster which overtook the pastoral clans. The 1716 burgher total of one thousand six hundred and ninety-seven therefore stood in a countryside whose Khoikhoi labour had collapsed and whose San war had just been paused with beads. [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 San. 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. The June questionnaire’s still-open labour question sat on that same countryside: a small slave population, nearly five-sixths adult males, already producing runaways enough to plunder farms. [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, a tributary of the Breede. In the early periods of that outward move the burghers obtained an informal sanction to occupy new lands and pastures under a somewhat indefinite understanding that they were held during the pleasure of the Company. Cattle runs were probably never less than five or six thousand acres, for which, when it could be recovered, a yearly rental of £2 10s.—the fifty shillings charged from July 1714—was paid. [3] [4]
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. The 1716 free-colonist figure of one thousand six hundred and ninety-seven was therefore not a compact town population. It was a thin European total stretched from Table Valley through Stellenbosch and Drakenstein into Waveren and down the Breede and Zonder End, still short of the 1712 count by two hundred and forty-two souls. [3] [4]
Johannes Swellengrebel Settles as a Free Burgher — 1716
In the same year that young Tulbagh came ashore to the warehouse, Johannes Swellengrebel settled down as a free burgher. He had arrived at the Cape in 1691 and had occupied various Company offices before taking his discharge in 1716. The change of status belongs to Chavonnes’s third calendar year as a personnel fact of the town, not of the inland commandos: a senior servant of long Cape residence joined the burgher roll in the same season the roll itself still showed the smallpox deficit. [9]
His son Hendrik Swellengrebel had been born on the 29th of September 1700. The mother was Johanna, daughter of the explorer-soldier Hieronymus Cruse. When Hendrik was thirteen Johanna died; his stepmother, Christina Stants, widow of Jan van Meerland, was also Cape-born, so that the boy’s youth was spent wholly under Table Valley impressions. In 1716 Hendrik was himself sixteen—the same age as the Utrecht lad who that year began at twelve guilders under de la Fontaine. [9]
The Swellengrebel grandfather after whom Hendrik was named had lived for the greater part of his life in Moscow, where he died in 1649, but he was a Dutch merchant, not Russian-born; his father, George Swellengrebel, hailed from Stettin in northern Prussia and had settled in Amsterdam as a clothier. Grandfather Hendrik had three sons who all went to the Cape in the Company’s employ. One was Sergius, born in Amsterdam in 1694, who arrived in the settlement in 1712. The youngest uncle, Benjamin, stayed a short while at the Cape as a midshipman in 1710 and died in Batavia the same year. Johannes’s 1716 free-burgher settlement therefore closed a Company-service chapter for a family already thick on the Cape books. [9]
Johannes was accounted a very wealthy man by the time he left the service. The free-burgher step of 1716 did not remove the family from castle society: Hendrik would later be trained in the practical school of administration under Chavonnes and de la Fontaine, and Tulbagh’s first Cape friendship would run through that same household. For the calendar year the recorded fact is the father’s discharge and burgher status, taken in the season of the San peace presents and the Seventeen’s labour questions. [9]
Van Riebeeck’s Grandchildren: Johan in the Netherlands and Abraham Born in Batavia — 1716
After the deaths of Abraham van Riebeeck and, six months later, of his widow Elisabeth van Oosten, their two surviving children had to decide their own futures. For the daughter Elisabeth the choice was not difficult: less than two months after her mother’s death she married Gerrit van Oosten. The son born to them on the 28th of November 1716 at Batavia they named Abraham. [2]
For Johan, only surviving grandson of Jan van Riebeeck, the decision was not so easy. His choice lay between a career in the East and a new future in the birth country of his grandfather, a land he did not know. Up to that point he had had a prosperous Company career. He had entered the service in 1707, when he was sixteen. After two years as assistant he became under-merchant, and in 1712, now twenty-one, he was already merchant. The road to an honourable career in the East thus stood wide open. [2]
Yet this grandson of the Cape’s founder chose the unknown West. He bought the heerlijkheid, or noble estate, of Van Bunschoten and reached the Netherlands in July 1716. His sister also later came to live in the Netherlands. Johan’s three sons would in time close the male line of the Cape founder in Europe: Abraham dying at fourteen in Delft, Francois Diederik dying childless at twenty-eight, and Gerard Cornelis dying childless in 1759 as secretary of Delft. Those later deaths lie beyond the calendar; the 1716 facts are Johan’s arrival in the Netherlands in July and the birth of the Batavian Abraham on the 28th of November. [2]
To this grandson the later family papers owe their survival. Jan van Riebeeck’s personal notes, copied and collated by Abraham three years after the founder’s death, together with Abraham’s own notes on family life and on the funerals of his father and of his stepmother Maria Scipio, remained in Johan’s care and afterwards passed to Gerrit van Oosten. The 1716 double movement—Johan to the Netherlands, a new Abraham born at Batavia—thus carried the founder’s line and papers out of the Indies in one direction while it renewed the name in the other. Calendar work at the Cape that year did not turn on these Batavian and Dutch events; they belong to the year as the closing of the founder’s surviving grandchildren’s Eastern chapter. [2]
Huguenot Deaths, a Return to Europe, and a Confirmation — 1716
The French congregation whose church the October winds ruined also recorded deaths, a return, and a confirmation in 1716. Marguerite Gardiol of Provence, born 1674, who had married Jacob de Villiers before 1695, died at Drakenstein in 1716. Her sister Susanne Gardiol, born at de la Costé in Provence, had married Abraham de Villiers of La Rochelle in 1689; Marguerite’s death in the flood year removed one of the Provence sisters from the Drakenstein roll while the barn-church still stood, and then fell. [8]
Marie Marais, who in 1716 described herself in her will with her first husband, Estienne Niel, as aged thirty-four years and born at “Hierpoix,” probably Hurepois south of Paris, was the daughter of Charles Marais. Another entry gives her birth as 1673 and her death as the 7th of July 1716. The will and the death date therefore belong to the same calendar year, with the two ages—thirty-four in the will, forty-three if born in 1673—standing together as the books have them. Niel, born in Dauphiné in 1669, a soldier in the Company’s service in 1693 and later an agriculturist at Drakenstein, survived her. [8]
Jean Lecheret (also Legeret or Leseret) of Champagne, who had come as a freeman in the Agatha in 1693 and lived as a burgher at Drakenstein, returned to Europe in 1716. In the other direction, David du Buisson of Rochelle, married in August 1707 to Claudine Lombard, daughter of the refugee Pierre Lombard, was living in 1716 at Hottentots Holland. He was schoolmaster to the children of Pierre Joubert. The year’s French record thus holds a death at Drakenstein, a death in July, a return from Drakenstein to Europe, and a Rochelle schoolmaster still on the Hottentots Holland farms. [8]
On the 15th of September 1716 Philippe Rudolph de Savoye was confirmed, with Estienne Viret of Dauphiné and his wife Margareta Rousse (Roux) among the sponsors. The confirmation belongs to the Cape Town church register, not to the Drakenstein barn that the October winds would finish. It closed the French year of 1716 on a named church-register fact three weeks before the Stellenbosch flood and the Drakenstein resolution of early October: a Savoye confirmation, a Gardiol and a Marais dead, a Lecheret gone home, and du Buisson still teaching Joubert’s children at Hottentots Holland. [8]