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]
The manufactures head was not empty of local precedent. Isaac Taillefer (also Taillefert) had made good hats from Cape wool; when he died that industry ceased. Others had knitted socks and gloves of woollen yarn made by themselves, but that work too had been discontinued. None of the councillors thought profit could be made from an alleged discovery of coal on Pierre Rousseau’s farm at French Hoek. Those negative findings travelled with the labour majority to Amsterdam and framed the directors’ reply in 1718. [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. War clouds were again gathering over the Fatherland, and East-India House judged it imperative to strengthen the Cape’s defence. Pieter Gysbert Noodt (also styled Pieter Gijsbert Noodt), an officer of the engineers and director of fortifications in Netherlands India, was instructed to visit the Cape for that purpose. [3] [9]
He was born at Nijmegen on the 4th of April 1681, and was married to Johanna Drabbe, whose family was very influential—facts that later helped explain how a capable but quarrelsome engineer obtained high Company trust. He reached Table Bay in 1718 aboard the ship Generale Vrede (“General Peace”)—an ironic name for a mission framed by European war anxiety. One account places the landing in April 1718; the fuller administrative chronology fixes it on the 6th of May 1718. He remained until the 18th of April 1719. [3] [9]
Capable as a fortifications director in the Indies, he proved a surly, quarrelsome colleague at the Cape. Moving about the Caabse Vlek with notebook and pens, he behaved more like an inspector on a sealed commission than a subordinate of the local governor—one narrative likens the manner to that of a spy on a secret mission. When Chavonnes repeatedly asked to see the drawings, Noodt refused to exhibit them. The composed marquis did not confine the visitor, though the garrison commander, Captain Dominique Martius Pasques de Chavonnes, held the force that might have done so. [3] [9]
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. 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, European war anxiety as the metropolitan motive for the commission, and Noodt’s later return as governor in February 1727. Within 1718 the concrete facts were arrival on the Generale Vrede (April–early May, with 6 May the standard dated landing), residence through the rest of the year, secretive survey of the settlement and bay approaches, refusal to show drawings to the governor, and the beginning of a ranking dispute with the secunde that would occupy the council of policy while meat, grain, and staples orders pressed the same board. [3] [9]
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 (also styled Abraham van Cranendonck) upon the question of precedence. Having already strained relations with Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes by refusing to exhibit his fortification drawings, the engineer pressed a second contest—this time with the second-in-command—over protocol rather than plans. Cranendonk, who had assumed the secunde’s duty on the 4th of March 1715 after service as fiscal on the Hoogly, would not yield an inch of rank. [3] [9]
They disputed which should receive the highest military salute; whose wife should occupy the foremost seat in church— specifically a place closer to the pulpit than the rival household; whose carriage was to keep the crown of the street when they met, including priority in Bergstraat when the wives’ coaches passed; and other similar matters. As second-in-command Cranendonk held that his wife was entitled to the nearer pulpit seat and to carriage precedence over Noodt’s household. The controversy ran so high that both men appeared with long written statements—lists of mutual claims and accusations. One record frames the hearing before the council of policy; another places the same clash before the Court of Justice, which put the secunde in the wrong. In either framing the authorities took the matter into serious consideration, and after discussion decided in favour of Mr Noodt. Mrs van Cranendonck was required to sit further back in the Groote Kerk. [3] [9]
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. It fixed the visiting fortifications director above the secunde for salutes, Bergstraat carriage right-of-way, and church place—down to the rearward pew forced on Mrs van Cranendonck in the Groote Kerk—while both men served under Chavonnes in 1718. The engineer’s prior visit had already upset the governor; the precedence judgment confirmed that the same difficult temperament could prevail against the second-in-command when protocol was formalised in writing. [3] [9]
The same year that Noodt won that protocol contest, inland congregations were still arguing pews of their own. At Drakenstein, where a new church was rising, men and women sat apart, and the consistory would soon require each lady to bring her own chair, named on the back, with the first rows reserved for wives of churchwardens and heemraden. Castle precedence and country pew-order were therefore two faces of one ranked society: the engineer’s victory in the Groote Kerk was the Company’s version of a dispute that free farmers also knew how to keep in writing. [3] [8]
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. In the Company’s Indian possessions the demand for wheat was limited, and it could be obtained elsewhere at a lower rate than the old Cape price of twelve shillings a muid. The governor-general and council of India were satisfied with the quality of Cape wheat, but thought Bengal and Surat cheaper and more constant; they proposed to let Cape farmers sell in India at whatever price they could get. The burghers objected that they could not wait long after harvest without return, and that the colony would be ruined if the Company ceased to purchase their grain. The directors decided that it would be better to support the burghers than natives of Hindostan, but they reduced the price and closed new wheat and wine grants without leave. [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]
Ordinary Cape wine did not offer the farmers a compensating staple. The directors were of opinion that if the flavour were improved a large market could be found both in Europe and in India; they were then paying £6 a legger for ordinary wine for the fleets and £8 for old wine for the hospital. The wine made at Constantia, however, already had a good reputation in Europe. Johannes Colyn, the owner of the farm at that time, produced yearly from ten to twelve leggers of red wine, for which he received £16 13s. 4d. a legger, and about twenty leggers of white wine, which he sold readily at £10 8s. 4d. That luxury pocket sat beside a poor grain year: Constantia could still command more than double the Company fleet price, while the mass of wine farmers remained tied to the cheaper legger rate and to the directors’ hope of flavour that had not yet been realised in ordinary casks. [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. The April staples order, the May fortification visit, and this private meat bargain thus pressed the same council in one scarce year: exotic crops without experts yet in the country, defence plans the governor was not allowed to see, and slaughter stock that would not come to auction. [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: more authorised mouths to feed, and no relief from unlicensed buyers who might otherwise have paid ready money for meat and grain the Company itself could scarcely command. [3]
Ryk Tulbagh Placed Assistant Clerk to the Council Secretary — 1718
Ryk Tulbagh, the eldest son of Dirk Tulbagh and Catharina Cattepoel, had been born in the city of Utrecht on the 21st of May 1699. The family was plain, honest, and respectable; several near relatives, and among them in later years his father, laid down their lives on the battlefield in the cause of the Netherlands. His parents removed from Utrecht to Bergen-op-Zoom while he was still an infant. He remained at school there until he was sixteen, when his friends considered him sufficiently well educated to make his way in the world. Other capital than his own good qualities and the knowledge gained at school he had none. [3]
He 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. The directors had resolved to send him to South Africa; he bade his friends at Bergen-op-Zoom farewell and embarked. 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. The Company regarded ability in its officers as capital to be turned to account: men of energy and industry were sure of promotion, while the dullard and the idler remained in the lowest ranks. [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. A large proportion of his salary was transmitted every year to his widowed mother, Catharina Cattepoel, until her death in 1757; he disliked to have that charity spoken of. 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 San (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 San bands. 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 through 1718. 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. Plans submitted by the Reverend van Aken and the churchwardens had received the approval of the council of policy in March 1717. In June of that year the government engineer and surveyor Evert Walraven Cochius surveyed a piece of ground of five morgen one hundred and fifty square feet at the Upper Paarl—north to the Drakenstein parsonage, east to the Berg River, south to the place of David Senechal, and west to the wagon road (later the main street). A churchyard was marked off as a square of thirty-five square roods to the side, with the church to stand in the middle, lengthwise north and south. [3] [8]
On the 6th of September 1718 the first stones of that Drakenstein church were laid. Monsieur du Toit began the ceremony; he was followed by the churchwardens and two heemraden, Francois du Toit and Jacob Theron; then the ex-elders Pieter de Villiers, Claude Marais, and Pieter Rousseau; and the ex-deacons Paul Roux, Hercules des Pres, and Pieter Taillefert. The building would be consecrated only in June 1720, so calendar 1718 held the foundation act rather than the finished sanctuary. [3] [8]
Before the church was completed it was found that there were not enough pews for the ladies, as men and women sat apart during divine service. It was therefore decided that each lady was to bring her own seat. To prevent disputes, the first row nearest the pulpit was set aside for the wives of churchwardens and heemraden in office; the next row for the wives of ex-churchwardens and heemraden; then, if there was not enough room, they were to be placed in the third row with the old ladies and the respectable persons. All others were to be placed in order by the sexton as they were brought in, and each chair was to have the name of the owner distinctly marked on it. Four shillings and twopence was paid for each chair placed in the care of the sexton, half toward repairs and the other half to the sexton. Rank in the unfinished Drakenstein nave thus echoed, in a country key, the Groote Kerk quarrel that Noodt had just won at the castle. [8]
At Stellenbosch work had likewise 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]
The same year fixed the bilingual service order at Drakenstein while the new fabric rose. It was decided that the Dutch service should start at nine o’clock in the morning and be followed immediately by one for the French, “al waar het ook voor een of twee menschen”—even if only for one or two people. At the quarterly communion the French service was to commence at half-past eight, before the Dutch. That arrangement sat downstream of earlier minutes (French at half-past eight and Dutch at ten in 1715) and of the long pressure from Holland to prefer Dutch in public church business; within 1718 it kept a residual French hour alive beside the dominant Dutch liturgy while foundation stones went down at the Upper Paarl and San depredations remained in abeyance until the complaints of early 1719. French services were still held in 1718; the language of the minority had not yet disappeared from public worship even as the directors wished Dutch to supersede it as soon as possible. [3] [8]
Huguenot Deaths, Wills, and Returns to Europe — 1718
While the Upper Paarl foundations went down, several of the older French households closed a generation in the same calendar year. Guillaume Loret of Nantes, born 1671, who had come out in 1693 and married Elisabeth Joubert, daughter of the refugee Pierre Joubert, died at Drakenstein on the 5th of January 1718. He left only daughters. On the 1st of April 1718 Marie Couteau of Soudiere in Dauphiné, born 1659, wife of the agriculturist Pierre Lombard of Pontaix, died. On the 2nd of September 1718—four days before the Drakenstein foundation stones— Pierre Cronier (also Crosnier), born 1671, died, leaving issue who were later the heirs of his unmarried brother Estienne. Pierre had married Susanna Taillefert, widow of Jean Gardé and daughter of Isaac Taillefert; his death left her a widow for the second time in 1718. [8]
Wills drawn in the same months show how the refugee poor fund and kin still tied Drakenstein to Amsterdam. Marie Catarina Durier, widow of Guillaume de Haas, lived at French Hoek; her will, dated the 11th of August 1718, was witnessed by Jean Gardiol and André Huibaux. Matthieu Arniel and his wife Jeanne Mille, born in Provence in 1633, made a joint will in 1718 leaving legacies to the Poor Fund of Drakenstein, to Susanna Fracassé, daughter of Matthieu Fracassé, then living with her cousin Francois Ree in Amsterdam, and to Jan Roy, son of the French Hoek agriculturist of that name. After the death of the survivor they appointed Jan Roy, junior, heir after his father’s death. Susanna Fracassé was still living in Amsterdam in 1718 under that bequest. On the 22nd of September 1718 Margareta Roux (also Rousse) stood sponsor with her husband Estienne Viret, her name now spelt Roux in the Cape Town church register. [8]
Other Huguenot names left the colony rather than the grave. Salomon de Gournay (also Gournai), who had come in the Zuid Beveland in 1688, held the farm Salomon’s Valley at Drakenstein and the office of elder in that congregation; in 1718 he returned to London, where his eldest brother Jean de Gournay had been living in 1712. Gerard Hanseres (also Hanseret), a mason at Stellenbosch born at St. Omer in Artois in 1652, left for Europe in 1718. Gillis Sollier, a burgher at the Cape since 1697 and brother of the shoemaker Durand Sollier, was permitted in 1718 to return to Europe with his wife Anna Roulin and son David. [8]
In the town congregation, Johanna de Potter, daughter of David de Potter and Susanna d’Ailly, who had lived at Haarlem in 1696 and later joined her husband Jean d’Ailly at the Cape, died about 1718, leaving David, born 1705, and Jan Benjamin, born about 1717. The French deaths, wills, and returns of 1718 thus ran beside the new church’s first stones and the bilingual Sunday order: a congregation still French enough to keep an hour “even for one or two people,” yet already sending elders back to London and widows’ papers to Amsterdam while the castle argued pews, meat, and fortification plans. [8]