Boer History1718 at the Cape of Good Hope: Noodt’s Fortification Plans, Directors’ Staples Order, Meat Crisis, and Tulbagh’s Clerkship
Directors Order Renewed Staples Experiments — 17 April 1718
The council of policy’s written answers of February 1717 to the directors’ questionnaire of 24 June 1716 reached the Assembly of Seventeen in the ordinary course of India correspondence. On the labour head the Cape majority had preferred slaves to European workmen; on exotic staples every member had doubted coffee, sugar, cotton, indigo, olive oil, tobacco, flax, silk, and hops without men of special knowledge; a tax on provisions sold to foreign ships had been rejected; and neither coal at French Hoek nor manufactures had found a champion. [3]
Upon receipt of those reports the directors resolved, on the 17th of April 1718, that experiments should be repeated with all diligence in the cultivation of tobacco, silk, indigo, and olives, and that a person having special knowledge in the production of each should be sent out to superintend the work. The resolution did not reopen the labour decision of the Cape majority; it answered the staples doubt by committing Amsterdam to experts and seed rather than to free European settlement as the path to a larger colonial population. [3]
Sheep’s wool was not referred to in the April 1718 order. All attempts to encourage a marketable Cape fleece had failed: six hundred and fifty pounds sent in 1714 had not covered cost at public sale, and three thousand pounds purchased in 1716 at seven pence a pound had proved unsaleable for spinning at Amsterdam. The industry was left in abeyance until another breed of animals could be introduced. By the same months the greatest difficulty was being experienced in getting as much meat as was needed, so that wool, of less urgency, dropped out of the directors’ immediate programme even as tobacco, silk, indigo, and olives were put back on the agenda. [3]
The experts and seed that would follow the resolution belonged mainly to later calendar years—a large quantity of indigo seed with an expert from Batavia and silkworm eggs from Persia and Bengal in 1719, the tobacco expert Cors Hendriks from Amsterdam in the same season—but the binding Company decision that reopened those experiments was taken in April 1718. Within this year the Cape therefore sat under a dual inheritance from the 1716–1717 inquiry: slave labour confirmed in practice by silence on the majority report, and a fresh metropolitan push for non-grain staples that the local council had called doubtful without specialists. [3]
Pieter Gysbert Noodt Arrives to Plan Fortifications — 6 May 1718
The supreme authorities had already decided to erect additional fortifications in Table Valley. On the 20th of February 1715 Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes had laid the foundation stone of a battery named Mauritius near the sea shore at the foot of the Lion’s Rump. The Assembly of Seventeen then thought that before proceeding further, plans and specifications should be drawn up by an engineer and submitted to them, and Pieter Gysbert Noodt, director of fortifications in Netherlands India, was instructed to visit the Cape for that purpose. [3]
Noodt arrived on the 6th of May 1718 and remained until the 18th of April in the following year. He was a surly, quarrelsome man who would not so much as show the governor the plans he was making, though repeatedly requested to do so. The engineer’s presence thus put Table Valley defence back into formal design after the Mauritius stone of 1715, but it did not produce open collaboration between the fortifications director and the head of the settlement during calendar 1718. [3]
The visit belonged to a longer arc of coastal security under Chavonnes: the incomplete Mauritius battery, the directors’ insistence on professional plans before further outlay, and Noodt’s later return as governor in February 1727. Within 1718 the concrete facts were arrival on 6 May, residence through the rest of the year, refusal to exhibit drawings to the governor, and the beginning of a ranking dispute that would occupy the council of policy while meat, grain, and staples orders pressed the same board. [3]
Noodt and Cranendonk Dispute Precedence — 1718
Among the servants of the Company the struggle for place was constant. In the army and navy grades were easier to define; outside those branches complicated questions continually arose. Senior merchant, merchant, and junior merchant did not settle every claim. Noodt had not been long at the Cape when a quarrel arose between him and the secunde Abraham Cranendonk upon the question of precedence. [3]
They disputed as to which should receive the highest military salute, whose wife should occupy the foremost seat in church, whose carriage was to keep the crown of the street when they met, and other similar matters. They came before the council of policy, each with a long written statement of his claims. The council took the matter into serious consideration, and after some discussion decided in favour of Mr Noodt. [3]
The burgher side of rank was more settled. The directors desired that free colonists should be as nearly as possible of the same station, yet civil and military offices made some distinctions inevitable. In the country the landdrost ranked first as the Company’s representative, with a slightly elevated front seat under a canopy in church; next came the clergyman; heemraden sat just behind the landdrost; elders and deacons had places beside the pulpit; and military officers sat in the body of the building by grade. Wives’ chairs followed the same order, which it was the koster’s duty to keep correct. Noodt’s victory over Cranendonk thus sat inside a community already minutely ranked at worship and on the road, and it fixed the visiting fortifications director above the secunde for salutes, carriage right-of-way, and church place while both men served under Chavonnes in 1718. [3]
Poor Harvest and the Opening of the Dry Seasons — 1718
Arrangements had hardly been made for the supply of wheat to India, and of beans, peas, and husked barley to the return ships, when a series of dry seasons set in. The crops of 1714 to 1716 had been so good that fifteen thousand four hundred muids of wheat had gone to Batavia—more than five thousand muids on an average yearly— before the directors cut the Cape price to ten shillings and eight pence a muid and forbade new wheat and wine ground without their approval in each instance. [3]
In 1718 the harvest was poor, but a small quantity of wheat was still exported. The same pattern held in 1719; by 1720 less than a hundred muids would leave the country, and in 1721 rice would be served to the garrison instead of bread while fifty-one muids kept up the name of exportation. Calendar 1718 was therefore the first full harvest year of the drought sequence that broke the post-1716 grain boom, yet it was not yet the near stoppage of later seasons: ships and Batavia still took some Cape wheat under the reduced Company price. [3]
The directors’ earlier order that India ships take peas, beans, and husked barley at the Cape for the homeward passage— peas then at twenty-nine shillings and beans at twenty-five shillings a muid—remained on the books as dry weather cut the grain surplus. Burghers who had refused a free trade to Indian ports because they could not wait long after harvest without return now faced the opposite problem: not a glut under a high Company price, but a thin crop under a cut price and a metropolitan ban on expanding wheat and wine land without leave. 1718 opened that squeeze without yet ending export altogether. [3]
Meat Crisis and Jacob van der Heiden’s Private Contract — 1718
In 1714 a calamity worse even than loss of crops had fallen upon the country. Horned cattle and sheep were attacked by a disease unknown before, and great numbers died. By 1718 it was so difficult to obtain animals for slaughter that when the contract to supply the Company with meat was offered for sale by auction there was not a single bidder. The sheep in possession of the burghers had decreased by nearly fifty-six thousand. [3]
It was necessary to make a private arrangement with Jacob van der Heiden, by which he undertook to supply meat at three pence a pound and live sheep at twelve shillings and sixpence each. The auction failure and the private contract together mark the pastoral low point of Chavonnes’s middle years: Company provisioning left the open market and passed to a single contractor at fixed rates while flocks stood tens of thousands below their recent strength. [3]
English captains had been in the habit of purchasing cattle in considerable numbers, slaughtering them, and salting the meat, and of taking away sheep as well. Later prohibition of live-animal sales to foreigners—issued by placaat on the 2nd of July 1720, when meat had risen to about three pence halfpenny a pound—lay ahead of this year; within 1718 the crisis was still the empty auction, the vanished sheep count, and Van der Heiden’s bargain. The same pressure that pushed wool off the directors’ April agenda made meat the urgent pastoral problem of the settlement. [3]
Van der Heiden’s later career—permission to procure cattle from Khoikhoi in the distant interior, withdrawal of that leave after Drakenstein consistory complaints of violence, and failed fiscal and landdrost prosecutions—belongs to the 1720s. In 1718 he enters the record as the man who took the meat supply when no bidder would touch the public contract, at three pence the pound and twelve shillings and sixpence the live sheep, under a governor still trying to keep Company expense down while disease emptied the kraals. [3]
Shipping, Fleets, and Enlarged Company Commerce — around 1718
After the long French war the Company resolved to enlarge its commerce and speedily built a number of ships of the first class, carrying from two hundred and eighty to three hundred and fifty men each. After 1715 the number of persons visiting the Cape every year was much greater than before. During the fifteen years from 1 January 1700 to 31 December 1714, one thousand and seven ships put into Table Bay, or on an average sixty-seven yearly—of these, six hundred and eighty-three Dutch, two hundred and eighty English, thirty-six Danish, six French, and two Portuguese. [3]
During the ten years from 1 January 1715 to 31 December 1724—the decade that framed calendar 1718—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. More hulls and larger first-class Indiamen meant heavier demand on Cape meat, grain, water, and hospital space in the same years when drought and stock disease cut what the countryside could spare. [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 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. Twenty to thirty large ships setting sail together formed the summer fleet, commonly carrying to Europe merchandise that had cost from five to seven hundred thousand pounds sterling; sometimes English vessels sailed in its company. The winter fleet was much smaller, often only three or four ships. 1718 sat inside that seasonal rhythm under rising average traffic. [3]
The English government had protested against assistance formerly given to private traders at the Cape, and an arrangement between the Assembly of Seventeen and the directors of the English Company provided that neither would permit interlopers to obtain anything in their ports. When an English vessel arrived without a royal commission or proper East India Company credentials, she was warned to make sail at once and denied intercourse with the shore. Flemish ships putting in for supplies were treated in the same manner. Licensed Company and national traffic thus thickened while interloper contact was shut out—another pressure on legal Cape markets in a scarce year. [3]
Ryk Tulbagh Placed Assistant Clerk to the Council Secretary — 1718
Ryk Tulbagh had landed from the ship Terhorst in 1716, not quite seventeen years of age, under a five-year Company agreement to serve in whatever capacity he proved most competent. He had left Bergen-op-Zoom with no capital beyond his schooling and character. He had not been long at the Cape when his superiors noticed earnest conduct, thorough work on trivial tasks, and an obliging disposition that made him a general favourite. [3]
Colonel De Chavonnes, then governor, observed that young Tulbagh spent leisure hours principally in reading useful books. On inquiry he found the youth a fair accountant, with a style of composition much better than that of many old clerks, and with neat papers and clear handwriting. The governor therefore, in 1718, placed him as an assistant clerk in the office of the secretary of the council of policy. [3]
The appointment gave a slight increase of pay, which he much needed, and greater opportunities for study. His memory remained exceedingly retentive; in this period he laid by much of the store of knowledge that later observers thought marvellous in one whose schooldays had been short. His first care in the new employment was to master the work and then to do it in a masterly manner. He remained a junior until 1722. The 1718 clerkship is thus the administrative beginning of the career that would eventually carry him to the governorship, fixed in the same year that Noodt drew fortification plans and Van der Heiden took the meat contract. [3]
San Lull, Fugitive Slaves, and Inland Churches — 1718
Until January 1719 no fresh charge of depredations by Bushmen was made after the peace presents of 1716. Calendar 1718 therefore still lay inside the quiet interval that followed the sergeant’s guard of twenty soldiers, 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. They formed themselves into bands and plundered the farmers whenever necessity impelled and opportunity offered. Though they usually selected a retreat difficult of discovery and access, they were much more easily found than Bushmen. The labour majority of February 1717 that preferred slave import therefore continued to sit beside a security problem created by the same system, through a year when San raids were quiet and runaway bands were not. [3]
Inland church fabric begun in 1717 was still under construction. At Drakenstein a commencement had been made with building funds from Henning Huising’s legacy of £208 6s. 8d., charity money left by individuals in Van Hoorn’s fleet, a loan from the Cape consistory, and special collections and poor-fund use; that church would be completed in 1720. At Stellenbosch work had also begun in 1717 to replace the fire-destroyed church, financed from the poor fund, collections, a large Cape consistory loan, and a directors’ lottery. Landdrost Jacob Voet, installed in June 1717 in succession to Nicholas van den Heuvel, held the drostdy through 1718 while those walls rose and while rank disputes and meat contracts occupied the castle. [3]
Close of 1718 at the Cape
By the end of 1718 the Cape lived under the directors’ 17 April order to renew tobacco, silk, indigo, and olive experiments with specialists, while wool stayed shelved and the February 1717 slave-labour majority went unanswered by any contrary metropolitan command. Pieter Gysbert Noodt had been in Table Valley since 6 May, drawing fortification plans he would not show Governor Chavonnes, and had won a council decision on precedence over secunde Abraham Cranendonk for salutes, church place, and the crown of the street. The harvest was poor but still yielded a small wheat export as the dry sequence opened. Livestock disease left the Company meat auction without a bidder after a loss of nearly fifty-six thousand sheep, and Jacob van der Heiden supplied meat at three pence a pound and live sheep at twelve shillings and sixpence under private arrangement. Average shipping in the 1715–1724 decade ran near eighty-seven vessels a year as larger first-class Indiamen thickened Table Bay traffic. Ryk Tulbagh entered the secretary’s office as assistant clerk. The San peace of 1716 still held; fugitive slave bands did not; Drakenstein and Stellenbosch church works continued under landdrost Voet. Chavonnes’s fifth calendar year thus paired metropolitan staples instructions and an engineer’s secretive plans with drought, a privatised meat supply, and the quiet promotion of a future governor. [3]