Boer History1717 at the Cape of Good Hope: Council Slave-Labour Reports, Drakenstein and Stellenbosch Churches, and Landdrost Voet
Council Reports on the Directors’ Questions — February 1717
On the 24th of June 1716 the Assembly of Seventeen had submitted a series of written questions on which they required the opinions of the members of the council of policy at the Cape. The principal queries asked whether the country could maintain a larger number of colonists; whether it would not be more advantageous to employ European labourers than slaves; whether coffee, sugar, cotton, indigo, olive oil, tobacco, flax, silk, and hops could be produced so as to enable more people to gain a living; and whether a tax could be imposed on provisions supplied to foreign ships. Each member was required to take the questions into consideration and bring up a report. [3]
Those questions were not a clerk’s circular. In some seventy years the Cape had grown from a refreshment station into a community of permanently settled burghers and farmers, a country with a future that, if managed with care, might offer a living to thousands of Dutchmen and even accrue profits. The Company’s heyday was virtually over, and the power and prosperity of the Dutch Republic were beginning to wane. Emigration, once almost unthinkable for contented citizens and left to adventurers or gentlemen building a life outside the fatherland, was becoming more thinkable; a land of promise, apart from the East Indies, had loomed up on the Dutch horizon. The directors therefore asked, without delay, whether the settlement could carry a large number of white immigrants, and if so whether European labour should replace slaves. [9]
In February 1717 those reports came before the council. The moment mattered because slavery had not yet taken deep root and could still have been done away with: the number of slaves was small, and they were overwhelmingly adult males—nearly five-sixths in one account, nearly ninety per cent in another. Without further importations the system would have rapidly perished. Upon the answers of this sitting would depend, in practice, whether the Cape was to be occupied solely by Europeans or whether a mixture of races under continued slave import would be confirmed as Company policy. A colony of free white labourers and artisans would have demanded an administration different in kind from one geared to European masters and enslaved labour from Africa and Asia. [3] [9]
Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes himself presided. Beside him sat the secunde Abraham Cranendonk (also Cranendonck) and the fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont, a far kinsman of the governor. Lower down the table sat the junior members: Hieronimus Cruse, Jan de la Fontaine, K. Slotsboo (also Slotsbo), and H. van der Meer. Sitting a little apart was the governor’s brother, Captain Dominique Martius Pasques de Chavonnes. The deliberations lasted several hours. First the juniors gave their considered opinions; thereafter the seniors spoke. [3] [9]
Of those eight men there was but one who looked beyond the gains of the present hour on the labour question. The governor, Cranendonk, van Beaumont, Cruse, de la Fontaine, Slotsboo, and van der Meer were all in favour of slave labour. They argued that a slave cost next to nothing—less than £3 a year—for maintenance, whereas a white labourer would cost at least as much as a soldier, whose pay and rations amounted to more than £12 a year, or at least four times the slave’s keep. The slave was held tractable; the European was said to be prone to be rebellious. [3] [9]
The majority added that white men often became addicted to drunkenness—needing too many sopies for comfort—and that none could be obtained who would willingly perform the severer kinds of labour in this climate. Cost, discipline, drink, and climate thus formed the legs of the argument that closed the opening the directors had left on paper in June 1716. The reports did not treat the interests of African people as a separate head of inquiry; the debate turned on Company expense, control of labour, and the supposed reliability of European workmen under Cape heat and toil. Only Captain Dominique raised the contrary voice; his full dissent is taken up in the next section. [3] [9]
Captain Dominique Pasques de Chavonnes Advocates European Workmen — 1717
Against that majority stood a single dissenting voice. The commander of the garrison, Captain Dominique Martius Pasques de Chavonnes, alone advocated the introduction of European workmen only. He sat a little apart from the other members while the juniors and seniors delivered their opinions; when he spoke, the argument ran loud and contrary to the cheapness case already laid down. Slaves in this country, he observed, were like a malignant sore in the human frame. They kept the colonists in a state of perpetual unrest, and notwithstanding the most cruel punishments inflicted when runaways were caught, they were not deterred from flight or from committing atrocious crimes. The metaphor was not a moral lecture on slavery in the abstract: it was a garrison officer’s report on order inside the settlement he was charged to defend. [3] [9]
He then met the majority on their own merchants’ ground. If the cost of purchasing slaves—about £41 each—were added to the cost of bringing them to the Cape from Madagascar, Mauritius, or any other place of origin, and further added to the sums required for their maintenance and custody, their labour would not be found much cheaper than that of white men—and might well prove more expensive. Enslaved workers required supervision and did neither so much nor such good work. Europeans, by contrast, would work better, give security to the country, and help to increase the revenue. Purchase price alone had been the majority’s cheap figure; Dominique’s full ledger of transport, keep, and guard erased that cheapness and inverted the fiscal conclusion the governor’s side had drawn from the soldier’s £12 pay. [3] [9]
The dissent did not move the table. Even brother Maurice would not second the captain. The governor lacked neither honesty nor firmness of ordinary rule: he was a quiet, religious man who had already shown tact in the unpopular fiscal measures of his first years, and who might have taken for motto the verse that closed a Cape journal under his hand—“Fortunate is he who spends his days in quiet rest and kindly ways.” What he would not throw was the weight of his office and personal prestige behind a revision of the majority’s preference for continued slave labour. The sitting therefore recorded a lonely contrary report in a council that had already closed, in practice, the opening the Assembly of Seventeen had left on paper in June 1716. [3] [9]
Had the other members held Dominique’s views and pressed them on the directors, the later evils of slavery in South Africa might have been prevented on this early fork of policy: without further importations the existing slave population—still small, and overwhelmingly adult male (nearly five-sixths, or nearly ninety per cent, as the two counts stand)—would have dwindled rather than been replenished. Nothing in the written opinions treated the bearing of the question upon African people as a separate head of inquiry; it was almost a century too early for those interests to enter council minutes in the form later abolition debates would take. Within calendar 1717 the historical fact is the one-to-seven split itself, the Madagascar–Mauritius cost line in the captain’s dissent, and the written majority for continued slave labour. [3] [9]
Staples, Foreign-Ship Tax, Coal, and Manufactures — Council Opinions 1717
Whether coffee and the other plants named would thrive at the Cape was regarded as doubtful by all the members. Some of these plants, such as the olive and indigo, had already been fruitlessly experimented with. In any case, men having special knowledge would be needed to test them, for no one in the colony understood their culture. Whether a larger number of Europeans could exist here without being a burden upon the Company or the poor funds would depend upon the result of such experiments. The labour question and the staple question were therefore tied: without a proven cash crop beyond wheat and wine, the majority would not underwrite a free-white immigration that the poor funds might have to carry. [3]
All were agreed that it would not be advisable to levy a tax upon provisions supplied to foreigners, as it would not amount to much and might drive away strangers who brought ready money into the country. None of the members thought that any profit could be made from an alleged discovery of coal on Pierre Rousseau’s farm at French Hoek. Nor were any of them of opinion that manufactures could be introduced. Isaac Taillefer, it was stated, had made good hats from Cape wool; but when he died that industry ceased. Others had knitted socks and gloves of woollen yarn made by themselves, but that also had been discontinued. The February bundle therefore closed not only the labour door but the hope of a local factory or a coal pit as a second living for extra colonists. [3]
Sheep’s wool was not even referred to in the February answers. 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 in 1716 had purchased three thousand pounds at seven pence a pound for Amsterdam; that shipment too was unsaleable for spinning. The industry had been left in abeyance until another breed of animals could be introduced, and as the greatest difficulty was already being experienced in getting as much meat as was needed, wool, which was of less importance, was not spoken of. Calendar 1717 therefore answered the directors on coffee, silk, indigo, olives, hops, flax, tobacco, sugar, and cotton without reopening a wool file already judged closed. [3]
The combined effect of the February 1717 bundle was therefore conservative on every head except the majority’s active preference for slave labour. Exotic staples were left to experts not yet present; a foreign-ship provision tax was rejected; coal and manufactures were dismissed; wool stayed silent; and the labour door that the directors had opened in 1716 was shut by seven councillors against one captain. Within this calendar year the directors had not yet answered. The Cape’s written opinion—slave labour, no provision tax, no local manufactures, and staples only under specialists still to be sent—stood as the settlement’s last word of 1717 on the questionnaire of the 24th of June 1716. [3]
Drakenstein Church Building Commenced — 1717
The Rev. Petrus van Aken, appointed by the directors clergyman of Drakenstein, had arrived in August 1714 and taken over the duty at once. The inland French-descended congregation he served was already large by Cape standards: a consistory letter of 26 March 1713 had numbered roughly seven hundred souls, children and adults, and had described the old church fabric as ruinous, with need of a pastor who could still serve in French. For six years before van Aken the congregation had been without a permanent clergyman. A visitor in the years before his arrival had found the church badly built inside and outside and more like a barn than a church; in 1708 the Cape had written to Amsterdam that services were conducted in a shed or barn of very homely appearance. Van Aken, born at Utrecht, where his father Arnoldus van Aken lived, married Anna Margaretha Bolwerk, whose kinship tied the Drakenstein manse to the Chavonnes circle at the Castle; members of that family later stood sponsors at the baptisms of van Aken’s children. Pastoral office thus ran three full years ahead of a finished building of the congregation’s own scale. [3] [8]
Nature forced the rebuild. In October 1716 heavy rains and winds so damaged the existing Drakenstein church that public worship had to be transferred to the old minister’s house, and the consistory resolved to demolish what remained of the ruined fabric rather than patch it. Plans drawn by van Aken with the churchwardens were laid before the Council of Policy and approved in March 1717 (resolution of 30 March 1717). In June 1717 the government engineer and surveyor Evert Walraven Cochius surveyed the chosen ground: five morgen and one hundred and fifty square feet, on the site of the later Upper Paarl church. The bounds ran north to the parsonage, east to the Berg River, south to the land of David Senechal (Senecal) of Dieppe, an agriculturist who had arrived in the Zuid Beveland in 1688 and married Marie Madeleine du Puis of Paris, and west to the wagon road that was already the main street. The churchyard was laid out as a square of thirty-five square roods on each side, with the church in the middle on a long axis running north–south. [3] [8]
The funds that underwrote the fabric were assembled without a single Company building grant named in the account. A legacy of £208 6s. 8d. had been bequeathed for the purpose by Henning Huising; £314 8s. 6d. had been left with the government at the Cape for charitable purposes by individuals in the fleet under the governor-general Van Hoorn; £698 12s. 2d. was lent by the consistory of the Cape; and £715 12s. 6d. was raised partly by special collections and partly by drawing on the poor fund. The four streams—private legacy, charitable deposits from a high fleet, a Cape consistory loan, and local collection plus poor-fund draw—matched the March approval and the June survey with a cash package large enough to carry a building programme whose completion is recorded in 1720. Huising’s name on the legacy tied the church start to a burgher long present in Cape commercial and political memory; van Aken’s three-year incumbency meant that pastoral care had already run ahead of stone and timber. Decision, survey, and funding package of 1717 together opened the works. [3] [8]
The Drakenstein start of 1717 was therefore a legal, surveyed, and funded commencement, not yet a consecrated nave. First stones and the later pew order for ladies’ chairs belong to the building years that followed; within this calendar the facts are the resolution of 30 March, Cochius’s June survey of five morgen and one hundred and fifty square feet, the four named money streams, and van Aken still serving a French-descended flock of some seven hundred from the old minister’s house while the barn-church came down. [3] [8]
Stellenbosch Church Rebuilding Commenced — 1717
At Stellenbosch, where the Rev. Mr. Bek (Henricus Beck) was clergyman, a commencement was also made in 1717 with building a church in place of the one that had been destroyed by fire. The village that had lost its church in the great fire of December 1710 thus, seven years later, opened a replacement fabric on a different site. Part of one wall of that 1717 work would still remain in the building standing in later generations. Bek had already served Drakenstein before van Aken’s arrival; the Stellenbosch rebuild of 1717 therefore sat in the same inland ministry that was raising a new Drakenstein church from Huising’s legacy and the Van Hoorn deposits. [3] [8]
The cost was borne by applying the poor fund, by special collections, by a loan from the Cape consistory—which had then over £9,300 to the good—and by a lottery for which permission was obtained from the directors. Stellenbosch therefore mixed charity money, congregational giving, a large Cape consistory advance, and a licensed lottery, while Drakenstein had mixed legacy, fleet charity, Cape loan, and poor-fund collections. Both inland seats of worship entered active building in the same year that the castle council fixed labour policy against free European immigration. [3]
The pairing of Drakenstein and Stellenbosch church starts in 1717 marked a recovery of institutional fabric after the smallpox collapse and the Stellenbosch fire. Inland consistories could raise and borrow on a scale that the Cape mother church’s surplus made possible, and the directors’ consent to a lottery showed Amsterdam willing to license local church finance even while it still awaited the full fruit of the labour and staple correspondence. The drostdy town and the French valley thus both went into stone in the year of the one-to-seven labour vote. [3]
Bek’s Stellenbosch congregation and van Aken’s Drakenstein flock remained distinct in language and in funding, but they shared the inland court of landdrost and heemraden and the same Cape consistory creditor. The 1717 rebuilds therefore belong together as the year in which both country churches, after fire and storm, obtained the money and the authority to rise again, while the Castle still worshipped in the mother church whose organ subscription would not be gathered until a later year. [3]
Landdrost Jacob Voet Succeeds Van den Heuvel — June 1717
In the country magistracy of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, Nicholas van den Heuvel, who had held the landdrostship from May 1713, gave way in June 1717 to Jacob Voet. Voet would remain until October 1721. The change sat inside a long succession that ran Cornelis Linnes (June 1691–January 1695), Hendrik Munkerus (August 1696–July 1698), Michiel Ditmar (July 1698–February 1703), Pieter Robberts (February 1703–July 1705), Jan Starrenburg (July 1705–April 1707), Samuel Martini de Meurs (April 1707–March 1710), Johannes Mulder (March 1711–December 1712), Dominicus Blesius (December 1712–May 1713), and Van den Heuvel into Voet, after whom Marthinus Bergh would follow. Vacant intervals had been filled by the senior heemraad as president of the court, with the secretary collecting the revenue and conducting the correspondence. [3]
The landdrost ranked first in the country as the representative of the Honourable Company. He had the front seat in the church, slightly elevated and distinguished by a canopy; next came the clergyman; the heemraden followed with a special seat just behind the landdrost. Elders and deacons sat on each side of the pulpit, and military officers had recognised places in the body of the building according to grade. Wives of these notables sat on chairs ordered by the same hierarchy, which it was the koster’s duty to keep correct. Voet’s installation in June 1717 therefore placed a new man at the head of that visible order in both drostdy and church at the same moment the two inland churches began to rebuild. [3]
Among the servants of the Company the struggle for place was constant. In the army and navy grades were easy to define; outside those branches, senior merchant, merchant, and junior merchant did not always settle who took the foremost pew or the crown of the street. 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. Voet’s canopy seat in the Stellenbosch church was the country form of that same rank question that occupied a good deal of attention during the whole of the eighteenth century. [3]
Van den Heuvel’s four years had spanned the smallpox aftermath, Helot’s interim, Chavonnes’s installation, the first colonial commandos of 1715–1716, and the San peace presents. Voet inherited a district whose civil summary jurisdiction had only the previous year been raised to £10 8s. 4d., whose military posts beyond the old Waveren, Saldanha Bay, Groenekloof, and Klapmuts garrisons had been withdrawn at burgher request, and whose churches were now under construction. The June succession is the administrative hinge of inland government for the rest of the decade’s opening. [3]
Grain After the Strong Years and Rising Meat Pressure — 1717
The crops of 1714 to 1716 had been so good that fifteen thousand four hundred muids of wheat had been sent to Batavia, or more than five thousand muids on an average yearly. In the Company’s possessions in India the demand for wheat was limited, and it could be obtained elsewhere at a lower rate than twelve shillings a muid, which was the price paid at the Cape. The governor-general and council of India were satisfied with the quality of Cape wheat, but it was too dear, and the quantity 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. The burghers objected: they were not in a position to carry on a trade of that kind, and could not afford to wait long after harvest without any return. The colony would be ruined, they asserted, 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. Calendar 1717 still sat inside that post-boom policy frame: India had been told Cape wheat was good but dear and irregular, new grain and wine ground was frozen pending Amsterdam’s case-by-case leave, and the return ships were to take pulses and barley instead of loading yet more wheat. [3]
A series of dry seasons had not yet fully set in, but another pastoral calamity was already working. From 1714 horned cattle and sheep had been attacked by a disease unknown before, and great numbers died. Meat, not wool, was the urgent pastoral problem by the time the council wrote its labour reports. The three thousand pounds of Cape wool purchased in 1716 at seven pence a pound had proved unsaleable for spinning at Amsterdam, and the industry had been left in abeyance until another breed of animals could be introduced. Within 1717 the disease was already thinning flocks between the strong grain run of 1714–1716 and the meat shortages that would later force a private slaughter contract. [3]
Roadstead traffic in these years was already heavier than in the first decade and a half of the century. In the fifteen years from the 1st of January 1700 to the 31st of December 1714 one thousand and seven ships put into Table Bay, or on an average sixty-seven yearly—six hundred and eighty-three Dutch, two hundred and eighty English, thirty-six Danish, six French, and two Portuguese. In the ten years from the 1st of January 1715 to the 31st of December 1724 the number that called was eight hundred and seventy-one, or on an average eighty-seven yearly—six hundred and forty-five Dutch, one hundred and ninety-two English, seventeen French, ten Danish, four Portuguese, and three Flemish. Calendar 1717 therefore fed a busier bay than the years before Chavonnes, even as livestock disease thinned the meat that those extra hulls still expected to find. [3]
The Company’s ships assembled in Table Bay to return to Europe in a fleet. The slowest sailers were despatched first from Batavia and usually arrived here in January; then came the Ceylon squadron, and last the late ships from Batavia. They endeavoured to leave Table Bay about the end of March or beginning of April. That ordinary assembling, already the practice of Chavonnes’s years, made the February labour sitting and the March church approval coincide with the season when the return fleet lay in the bay and the Castle’s provisions, hospital, and slaughter demand stood at their annual height. [3]
San Lull Continues; Fugitive Slave Bands — 1717
Until the next named inland raid, no fresh charge of depredations by San (Bushmen in the records) was made after the peace presents of 1716. Calendar 1717 therefore fell inside the quiet interval that followed the sergeant’s guard, the party with arrack, tobacco, and beads, and the temporary agreement of friendship. Robberies had ceased for a time. The old outposts at Waveren, Saldanha Bay, Groenekloof, and Klapmuts still maintained small parties—never more than seven men at each—after the newly-formed military posts had been withdrawn in August 1716 at burgher request, the farmers having a lively dread of tyranny being established by means of troops. [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 majority reports of February 1717 that preferred slave labour therefore sat beside a security problem created by the same system: runaways formed predatory bands on the same farming country that the San raids had recently pressed. [3]
Captain Dominique de Chavonnes’s image of slaves as a malignant sore—unrest, flight, and crime despite harsh punishment—drew on this contemporary experience even as his colleagues voted for more of the same labour. The San lull of 1717 did not clear the inland security problem; it only changed which kind of fugitive and raider most occupied the farmers and the drostdy while Voet took up the landdrostship. The garrison that Dominique commanded still posted its seven-man parties at the four old outposts and still hunted runaway bands that were easier to find than San and harder to deter by the punishments already in use. [3]
That inland quiet was local, not a general peace of the frontier. The next named San complaint would come from another direction, and from a farm on the Zonder End, not from the Berg and Waveren front that had been the 1715–1716 theatre. Within calendar 1717 the recorded fact is the lull itself, the four small garrisons, and the fugitive-slave bands that Dominique cited in council as the malignant sore of a labour system the other seven members chose to continue. [3]
Jan de la Fontaine Made Merchant; Pieter Rocques de Chavonnes on the Orphan Chamber — 1717
Among the juniors who had spoken first at the February sitting, Jan de la Fontaine (in full Jan de la Fontaine dit Wicart) received a rank that the year itself recorded. He had been born in Amsterdam on the 23rd of April 1684, son of the silk merchant Jacques de la Fontaine, whose parents Jean de la Fontaine and Marguerite le Thor had left Valenciennes in French Flanders for Holland, and of Barbara van den Burgh, daughter of Jan Gideonsen van den Burgh, of Dutch Calvinist stock. He had joined the Company in his early twenties, served in junior ranks in the Indies, and drawn the attention of Governor-General Van Hoorn, who afterwards, as commissioner at the Cape, ordered him to pack his belongings off the Horstendal and stay in Table Valley. Two years after that arrival, though still a junior merchant, he had become a member of the council of policy. In 1717 he was made a fully-fledged merchant. [9]
In May 1711 he had married Maria Elizabeth, the nineteen-year-old daughter of secunde Andries de Man. The merchant rank of 1717 therefore sat on a Huguenot-Dutch house already tied to the Castle by marriage and already voting, in February, with the slave-labour majority. The same Van Hoorn connection that had stranded him in Table Valley also named the charitable fleet deposits that underwrote the Drakenstein church. De la Fontaine’s promotion and Huising’s and Van Hoorn’s church money thus belong to one Cape year: a junior who had spoken for slave labour became merchant while the inland churches rose on deposits left by the commissioner who had put him ashore. [3] [9]
The governor’s own family also took a civil seat in the same year. Pieter Rocques de Chavonnes sat as a member of the Orphan Chamber in 1717. The Chavonnes circle at the Castle—Maurits in the governor’s chair, Dominique at the garrison, Pieter on the orphan board, and the Bolwerk–van Aken kinship at Drakenstein—was therefore visible in church, council, and estate business together. An earlier namesake, Dominiques de Chavonnes, had been captain and head of the Cape garrison in 1687–1689 before leaving for the East Indies; the 1717 Orphan Chamber seat belonged to the later family that had come out with the governor. [8]
Those promotions did not reopen the labour vote. De la Fontaine as merchant still belonged to the seven who had preferred slaves; Pieter Rocques’s orphan seat did not give Dominique a second voice at the council table. What 1717 added on this head was rank inside an already decided policy: a junior councillor made merchant, a Chavonnes on the Orphan Chamber, and the same family standing sponsors at van Aken’s baptisms while the Drakenstein church ground was surveyed. [8] [9]
Company Servants and Landed Property — Order of 1717
Throughout the rule of the Dutch Company there were two classes of Europeans at the Cape: the servants of the Company and the burgher population. The latter consisted of servants who had obtained their freedom and emigrants who had come out, and included the children of both. The broad distinction was that a burgher could practise the usual trades of an artisan—carpentry, bootmaking, smithing—carry on farming, and hold landed property which he could transmit to his heirs. The servant could neither trade nor hold property, and was liable to be removed to any of the possessions of the Company in the East Indies. The Letters of Freedom Vrijbrieven granted to a Company’s servant on his discharge gave him all the burgher privileges. [8]
An order of 1717 laid down that if a servant obtained landed property by inheritance or marriage he was bound to choose between keeping it and retiring from the service, or giving it up and retaining his position. The rule closed a leak between the two estates at the same moment the council was refusing a general increase of free European colonists. A man in pay could not quietly become a landholder and remain transferable to Batavia or Ceylon; he had to step out of the service into burgher status, or surrender the ground. [8]
That choice sat beside the February labour reports. The majority that preferred slaves to European workmen also preferred a sharp line between Company pay and freehold. Extra white families, if they came, were to come as colonists, not as servants who inherited farms and stayed on the books. The 1717 order therefore belongs with the one-to-seven vote as a second conservative act of the same year: slave labour confirmed in the council minutes, and servant landholding forced to a binary of discharge or surrender. [3] [8]
De la Fontaine’s own merchant promotion in the same year did not itself confer freehold. He remained a Company servant of higher grade, still removable, still voting in council. The order of 1717 would have touched him only if land had come by inheritance or marriage while he stayed in pay. Maria Elizabeth de Man’s marriage had already taken place in 1711; the new rule governed later windfalls. For ordinary soldiers and clerks the practical effect was immediate: a farm in a wife’s estate now meant a career decision, not a quiet second income beside the Company’s wage. [8] [9]
Drakenstein Marriages, a Savoye Burial, and David d’Ailly’s Company Service — 1717
The French congregation whose church van Aken and Cochius were putting on a surveyed ground also recorded marriages, a burial, and a Company enlistment in 1717. Nicolas Labat, whose name already appeared in 1692, married at Drakenstein on the 13th of June 1717 to Elizabeth Vivier, when he is described as of Poinetri. He died on the 30th of December 1717. The marriage and the death therefore both belong to the church-start year: six months of a Poinetri household on the Drakenstein roll, closed before the year ended. [8]
Jacob Nortier (Nourtier, later Nortje) of Calais, an agriculturist who had arrived in 1688 in the Oosterlandt, married at Drakenstein on the 8th of August 1717 to Margaretha Mouton of the Cape. He and his brothers Jean and Daniel had come out as domestiques of Jacques de Savoye. De Savoye himself, who had sat on the court of landdrost and heemraden and who in 1712 had gone to Europe with his wife and her mother, was buried in October 1717. His widow was later buried in May 1721. The Nortier marriage of August and the Savoye burial of October thus closed, in the same valley and the same year, a servant-to-burgher line and the grave of the master on whose ship-list those Nortiers had once stood. [8]
On the 31st of October 1717 Jean le Sage of Dieppe married at Drakenstein Margaretha de Villiers. The autumn therefore held two Drakenstein weddings after Labat’s June match: a Calais agriculturist in August and a Dieppe bridegroom on the last day of October, while Savoye’s burial sat between them in the same month as le Sage’s marriage. Those register facts are the French congregation’s domestic record for the year in which its new church ground was measured to Senechal’s line and the Berg. [8]
In Table Valley a Huguenot-descended clerk took Company pay. David d’Ailly of Amsterdam, who had arrived at the Cape in 1713, joined the Dutch East India Company in 1717 and became junior merchant and bookkeeper. Jean d’Ailly of Amsterdam, who had arrived in 1708, was already at the Cape with his wife Johanna de Potter; their son Jan Benjamin was born about 1717. Johannes Godefridus d’Ailly, who had also arrived in 1708 after a voyage of more than eight months, still served as clergyman of the Cape congregation. The d’Ailly name thus stood in 1717 on the Company books, in a Cape birth, and in the mother-church pulpit, in the same year Drakenstein married Labat, Nortier, and le Sage and buried de Savoye. [8]
Gerrit van Oosten Certifies the van Riebeeck Family Papers — 30 April 1717
The Cape founder’s surviving line, whose Eastern chapter had closed in 1716 when Johan van Riebeeck reached the Netherlands and a new Abraham was born at Batavia on the 28th of November, left a paper trace in 1717. Jan van Riebeeck’s personal notes, copied and collated by his son 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, had passed into the possession of Gerrit van Oosten, who had married the founder’s granddaughter Elisabeth. [2]
In 1717 Gerrit van Oosten made a copy of the family papers that were in his possession, and that copy was certified on the 30th of April 1717. The date falls two months after the Cape council’s labour sitting and a month after the Drakenstein church plans received the council’s approval. It is not a Table Valley act: the certification belongs to the Netherlands papers of a granddaughter’s husband. It is the year’s fact in the founder’s family, as Johan’s July arrival and the Batavian Abraham’s birth had been the facts of 1716. [2]
Those writings later came into the hands of Mr. Gerard Cornelis van Riebeeck, great-grandson of Jan van Riebeeck, who in 1747 held the diaries and family notes, possibly inherited from the estate of his mother, who died on the 31st of December 1746 and was buried at Delft. Calendar 1717 does not turn on that later custody. The recorded act of the year is the certified copy of 30 April, which kept the founder’s notes from vanishing in the same season that the Cape council chose slave labour and the inland churches began to rise. [2]