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]
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 nearly five-sixths of them were adult males. 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. [3]
Of the men who sat in the council in February 1717 there was but one who looked beyond the gains of the present hour on the labour question. Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, the secunde Abraham Cranendonk, the fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont, and the junior members J. Cruse, J. de la Fontaine, K. Slotsboo, and H. van der Meer were all in favour of slave labour. They stated that a slave cost 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. The slave was tractable, whereas the European was prone to be rebellious. [3]
The majority added that white men often became addicted to drunkenness, and that none could be obtained who would be willing to perform the severer kinds of labour in this climate. Cost, discipline, and climate thus formed the three 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. [3]
Captain Dominique Pasques de Chavonnes Advocates European Workmen — 1717
The commander of the garrison, Captain Dominique Pasques de Chavonnes, was alone in advocating the introduction of European workmen only. Slaves in this country, he observed, were like a malignant sore in the human frame. They kept the colonists in a state of unrest, and notwithstanding the terrible punishments inflicted upon them, they were not deterred from running away and committing atrocious crimes. [3]
If the cost of purchasing them—about £41 each—bringing them to this country, providing for them, and guarding them were taken into consideration, their labour would not be found much cheaper than that of white men, especially as they required supervision and did neither so much nor such good work. On the other hand, Europeans would give security to the country and would help to increase the revenue. The captain’s dissent therefore met the majority on their own ground of cost and order, and inverted the conclusion: full accounting of purchase, transport, keep, and guard erased the cheapness of the slave, while free European settlement promised both defence and a larger fiscal base. [3]
There is little doubt that if these views had been held by the other members of the council, and had been pressed upon the directors, the many evils which slavery later produced in South Africa would have been prevented on this early fork of policy. Nothing was said of the bearing of the question upon the African: it was almost a century too early in the world’s history for those interests to be taken into consideration in the form the later abolition debates would take. Within calendar 1717 the historical fact is the one-to-seven split itself and the written majority for continued slave labour. [3]
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. [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. [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; and the labour door that the directors had opened in 1716 was shut by seven councillors against one captain. The directors would not answer these reports until 17 April 1718, when they ordered renewed experiments in tobacco, silk, indigo, and olives with specialists sent out to superintend the work—but that resolution belongs to the following calendar year. [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. In 1717 a commencement was made with building a church at Drakenstein. The inland French-descended congregation, which had long worshipped without a finished church fabric of its own scale, now entered a three-year building programme that would be completed in 1720. [3]
The funds were derived from a legacy of £208 6s. 8d. bequeathed for the purpose by Henning Huising; £314 8s. 6d. left with the government here for charitable purposes by individuals in the fleet under the governor-general Van Hoorn; £698 12s. 2d. lent by the consistory of the Cape; and £715 12s. 6d. raised partly by special collections and partly by making use of 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—together underwrote the fabric without a single Company building grant named in the account. [3]
Huising’s name on the legacy tied the church start to a burgher already long present in Cape commercial and political memory. Van Aken’s three-year incumbency before the first stone-work of 1717 meant that pastoral care had run ahead of the building; the congregation now matched fabric to office. Completion would wait until 1720, but the decision and the funding package that opened the works belong squarely to calendar 1717. [3]
Stellenbosch Church Rebuilding Commenced — 1717
At Stellenbosch, where the Rev. Mr. Bek 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. [3]
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. [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 list that ran from Cornelis Linnes in the 1690s through Starrenburg, Mulder, Blesius, and Van den Heuvel into Voet and later Marthinus Bergh. [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]
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. The directors had already cut the Cape price to ten shillings and eight pence a muid, forbidden new wheat and wine ground without their approval in each instance, and ordered that ships from India be supplied at the Cape with peas, beans, and husked barley for the homeward passage. Calendar 1717 still sat inside that post-boom policy frame: India had been told Cape wheat was good but dear and irregular, and the burghers had refused a free trade to Indian ports on the ground that they could not wait long after harvest without return. [3]
A series of dry seasons had not yet fully set in—the poor harvests of 1718 and 1719 and the near collapse of export in 1720–1721 lay ahead—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. By 1718 it would be so difficult to obtain animals for slaughter that when the contract to supply the Company with meat was offered for sale by auction there would not be a single bidder, and the sheep in possession of the burghers would have decreased by nearly fifty-six thousand. Within 1717 the disease was already thinning flocks between the strong grain run and the meat crisis that forced a private arrangement with Jacob van der Heiden the following year. [3]
Wool had already failed as a staple experiment. The three thousand pounds 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. Meat, not wool, was the urgent pastoral problem by the time the council wrote its labour reports. The 1717 year thus combined a labour decision that entrenched slave import, church building that restored inland fabric, and a livestock disease that was already preparing the meat shortages of 1718. [3]
San Lull Continues; Fugitive Slave Bands — 1717
Until January 1719 no fresh charge of depredations by Bushmen 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. 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. [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. [3]
Close of 1717 at the Cape
By the end of 1717 the Cape council of policy had answered the directors’ questionnaire of 24 June 1716. Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, secunde Abraham Cranendonk, fiscal Cornelis van Beaumont, and juniors Cruse, De la Fontaine, Slotsboo, and Van der Meer had written for slave labour on grounds of cost, tractability, and climate; Captain Dominique Pasques de Chavonnes alone had urged European workmen only, counting full slave costs and the security of free settlement. All had doubted exotic staples without experts, rejected a tax on foreign-ship provisions, and dismissed coal and manufactures. Church building had begun at Drakenstein on Huising’s legacy, Van Hoorn fleet charity, a Cape consistory loan, and local collections, and at Stellenbosch to replace the fire-destroyed church with poor-fund money, collections, a large Cape loan, and a directors’ lottery. In June Jacob Voet succeeded Nicholas van den Heuvel as landdrost of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein. The San peace of 1716 still held; fugitive slave bands did not. Strong wheat years and a cut Company price framed the grain trade while livestock disease already prepared the meat shortages of 1718. Chavonnes’s fourth calendar year thus fixed the Cape’s labour path toward continued slavery, raised two inland church fabrics, and changed the drostdy’s head under a governor who still held both directors’ and colonists’ goodwill. [3]