Boer History1719 at the Cape of Good Hope: Zonder End San Raid, Staples Experts, Wine Samples, Horse Sickness, and Van Kervel
San Raid on Van der Heiden’s Zonder End Stock — January 1719
Until January 1719 no fresh charge of depredations by San (Bushmen) had been made after the peace presents of arrack, tobacco, and beads and the temporary agreement of friendship arranged in 1716. That quiet interval broke when seven hundred head of cattle were driven away from Jacob van der Heiden’s farm on the river Zonder End. The San asserted that the raid was in retaliation for injuries inflicted upon them by people who gave out that they were sent to barter cattle for the Company. The records do not supply sufficient evidence in this instance to settle whether they had, or had not, received such provocation as they complained of. [3]
At Van der Heiden’s request, permission was given for a commando to assemble; but the cattle could not be recovered. The failure repeated the pattern of earlier Berg River and Waveren pursuits: in August 1715 thirty mounted burghers under Hermanus Potgieter had taken the field after a Drakenstein farmer’s wife reported more than seven hundred sheep driven off and a shepherd murdered, and several later parties had gone out on written leave with Company ammunition under orders to avoid bloodshed if possible and not to molest women and children. Stock once driven into broken country seldom returned. The keen-sighted San concealed themselves when an enemy approached and resumed depredations when the pursuers retired worn out. [3]
Van der Heiden already stood in the settlement’s economic centre as the private meat contractor of 1718. When the Company meat contract had been offered at auction that year there was not a single bidder; burgher sheep had decreased by nearly fifty-six thousand since the unknown horned-cattle and sheep disease of 1714; and a private arrangement had been made by which he undertook to supply meat at three pence a pound and live sheep at twelve shillings and sixpence each. The Zonder End loss of seven hundred head therefore struck both a frontier stock farm and the man who supplied the Honourable Company when the public meat auction had found no bidder. [3]
The January complaint came from another direction than the Berg River and Waveren farms hit in 1715–1716. Stock-keeping had spread toward the Zonder End, and San pressure followed that edge. In August 1716 the newly formed military posts had been withdrawn at burgher request, the colonists having a lively dread of tyranny being established by means of troops. The old outposts at Waveren, Saldanha Bay, Groenekloof, and Klapmuts were still maintained, but there were never more than seven men at each. Those thin guards could not police every cattle run on the expanding pastoral fringe when a raid of seven hundred head was organised in a single stroke, and a commando assembled under written leave could not bring the herd home. [3]
Pieter Gysbert Noodt Completes His Visit and Departs — 18 April 1719
Pieter Gysbert Noodt (also styled Pieter Gijsbert Noodt), an officer of the engineers and director of fortifications in Netherlands India, had arrived to draw plans and specifications for additional Table Valley works after Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes had laid the foundation stone of the Mauritius battery on the 20th of February 1715 near the sea shore at the foot of the Lion’s Rump. The Assembly of Seventeen then thought that before proceeding further, plans 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. [3] [9]
He was born at Nijmegen on the 4th of April 1681 and was married to Johanna Drabbe, whose family was very influential. One account places his landing in April 1718 aboard the Generale Vrede; the fuller administrative chronology fixes arrival on the 6th of May 1718. He remained until the 18th of April 1719. Through the whole of that residence he was described as a surly, quarrelsome man who would not so much as show the governor the plans he was making, though repeatedly requested to do so. 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. [3] [9]
Early in the visit a precedence quarrel with secunde Abraham Cranendonk (also styled Abraham van Cranendonck) had gone to the council of policy over military salutes, church seating for their wives—including a place closer to the pulpit—and carriage right to the crown of the street, including priority in Bergstraat. Both men appeared with long written statements. The council decided in Noodt’s favour; Mrs van Cranendonck was required to sit further back in the Groote Kerk. One framing of the same clash places it before the Court of Justice, which likewise put the secunde in the wrong. [3] [9]
By the time he sailed on 18 April 1719, therefore, the fortifications director left behind sealed designs for Amsterdam, a ranking victory over the secunde, and an unfinished open collaboration with the governor who still headed the settlement. The April departure closed the local phase of a metropolitan fortification programme without putting new masonry into the ground during calendar 1719. Further coastal works waited on the directors’ reading of the engineer’s papers. The composed marquis had not confined the visitor, though the garrison commander, Captain Dominique Martius Pasques de Chavonnes, held the force that might have done so. Within this year the concrete administrative fact was the end of a nearly twelve-month presence that had paired secretive plan-making with rank conflict at the castle while drought, stock disease, and San pressure occupied the same board. [3] [9]
Indigo Seed from Batavia and Silkworm Eggs from Asia — 1719
Upon the council’s February 1717 answers to the directors’ questionnaire of 24 June 1716, the Assembly of Seventeen had resolved on the 17th of April 1718 that experiments should be repeated with all diligence in tobacco, silk, indigo, and olives, and that a person having special knowledge in each should be sent out to superintend the work. Every member of the 1717 board had regarded coffee, sugar, cotton, indigo, olive oil, tobacco, flax, silk, and hops as doubtful without specialists; some of those plants, including the olive and indigo, had already been fruitlessly tried. The experts and seed belonging to the 1718 resolution reached the Cape in strength during 1719. [3]
A large quantity of indigo seed was sent with an expert from Batavia in 1719, and for many years experiments were made with it. There was no difficulty in getting the plant to grow well in sheltered positions and in rich soil; but it was found that it would not answer as a general crop. The first season’s work thus confirmed the local council’s earlier doubt that exotic staples could sustain a larger European population without specialists—and showed that even with a Batavian expert the plant remained a garden and shelter-belt curiosity rather than a field staple for the colony’s ordinary farms. [3]
Silkworm eggs from Persia and Bengal were sent at the same time, but were found to be bad on their arrival. The white mulberry trees which were planted throve as well as could be desired. Calendar 1719 therefore opened the silk programme with sound host trees and worthless eggs—an incomplete metropolitan package that left mulberry culture standing while the worms themselves failed before any spinning test could begin. The chief experiment in the production of silk was reserved for a later season; within this year the recorded result was a failed egg shipment beside thriving mulberries. [3]
Sheep’s wool had been left out of the April 1718 order. 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 remained in abeyance until another breed of animals could be introduced. Manufactures had found no champion on the 1717 board: Isaac Taillefer (also Taillefert) had made good hats from Cape wool, but when he died that industry ceased; knitted socks and gloves of home-spun yarn had likewise been discontinued; and none of the councillors thought profit could be made from alleged coal on Pierre Rousseau’s farm at French Hoek. The 1719 indigo and silk packets therefore arrived as the directors’ chosen substitutes for those discarded heads, not as a general reopening of Cape industry. [3]
Cors Hendriks and the Tobacco Trials at Rustenburg — 1719
An expert in the cultivation and manufacture of tobacco, Cors Hendriks by name, was sent from Amsterdam in 1719. He made a tour through the colony, and upon his return to the castle pronounced very unfavourably upon the appearance of the soil. The most suitable place for an experiment that he had found was a plot of land about two morgen in extent, adjoining Rustenburg at Rondebosch. That judgment after a colony-wide inspection already narrowed the directors’ tobacco hope from a general Cape staple to a single suburban garden strip. [3]
There and in the Company’s garden in Table Valley a large number of tobacco plants were set out by slaves under direction of the expert. At first they throve well, but after a time some were destroyed by violent winds, and others by the heat of the sun. The seed had been carefully selected, but the leaves which reached maturity were so bad in flavour that Hendriks, who attributed the quality to the soil, despaired of success, and advised that the experiment be given up. The members of the council of policy were of the same opinion. [3]
The labour that set those plants was the labour the same council had preferred in February 1717. A slave, the majority had then written, 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, the European prone to be rebellious. Captain Dominique Pasques de Chavonnes had been alone in preferring European workmen, calling slaves a malignant sore that kept the colonists in unrest. The tobacco beds of 1719 were therefore a metropolitan experiment executed by the slave system the Cape majority had confirmed, on Company ground, under an Amsterdam specialist. [3]
The tobacco trial thus ran the full arc of the directors’ 1718 staples method inside a single expert’s first Cape season: metropolitan specialist, selected seed, slave labour on Company ground at Rustenburg and in the Table Valley garden, initial growth, climate damage by wind and sun, bad flavour attributed to the soil, and a joint expert–council judgment against continuance. Within 1719 the recorded result was condemnation of Cape soils for marketable leaf and abandonment of the programme at the highest local board. Hendriks’s tour had found no better field than two morgen beside Rustenburg; the leaves that matured there closed the case. [3]
Olive Failures and Directors’ Wine Samples — 27 June 1719
The experiments with the olive had the same result as on every previous occasion. The trees grew most luxuriantly, but many of them suddenly died without any accountable cause. From others the fruit dropped when still young, and the few olives that ripened in exceptionally good seasons were of very inferior quality. Olive culture therefore joined indigo’s limited niche success and tobacco’s flavour failure as a third staples disappointment under the renewed 1718–1719 push. The 1717 councillors had already named the olive among plants fruitlessly tried; the expert season did not reverse that finding. [3]
The directors were of opinion that if the flavour of Cape wine were improved, a large market could be found both in Europe and in India, to the advantage of the colonists as well as of the Company. They were then paying £6 a legger for ordinary wine for the use of the fleets, and £8 for old wine for use in the hospital. On the 27th of June 1719 they wrote for some selected samples, and with the next return fleet six half aams were sent. When the shipment reached Amsterdam it was found unfit for use. It was the same with six half aams sent to Batavia. [3]
The directors supposed that the reason might be the small size of the casks, and therefore directed another trial with half leggers instead of half aams. Within the correspondence and shipping rhythm of 1719, the binding facts were the 27 June sample order, the dispatch of six half aams on the return fleet, the matching six half aams to Batavia, and the dual rejection at both ends of the India route. Ordinary fleet and hospital wine continued under the old prices while the search for an improved export flavour failed its first controlled test. [3]
Against that failure stood the established reputation of Constantia. 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. Specialty Constantia thus already commanded prices far above the Company’s ordinary fleet rate of £6 and hospital rate of £8, even as bulk sample casks failed the directors’ flavour test. The contrast was not lost at East-India House: a named peninsula farm could sell red at more than double the hospital price, while selected half aams were condemned at Amsterdam and Batavia alike. [3]
Second Poor Harvest of the Dry Sequence — 1719
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 were sent to Batavia, or more than five thousand muids on an average yearly. In the Company’s possessions in India the demand was limited, and wheat 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 found it too dear and too fluctuating. The directors decided that it would be better to support the burghers than natives of Hindostan, but the price at the Cape was reduced to ten shillings and eight pence a muid, and no more ground was to be given out for wheat and wine without their approval in each instance. [3]
To encourage other produce they had directed 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. In 1718 the harvest was poor, but a small quantity of wheat was exported. It was the same in 1719. The second dry year therefore repeated the first pattern: enough grain moved to keep the name of export alive, yet far below the boom that had sent fifteen thousand four hundred muids to Batavia across the good seasons of 1714–1716. [3]
Burghers who had objected to free trade in Indian ports—because they were not in a position to carry on such a trade and could not afford to wait long after harvest without any return—now faced thin crops under the reduced Company wheat price and a ban on new wheat and wine ground without directors’ approval. The colony, they had asserted, would be ruined if the Company ceased to purchase their grain. Calendar 1719 still belonged to the middle of the dry sequence rather than its floor: a small export continued, the India wheat arrangement still stood on paper, and the high pea and bean prices remained the directors’ alternative encouragement. [3]
The same dry years pressed the meat supply that Van der Heiden had taken privately in 1718. Stock disease since 1714 had already cut burgher sheep by nearly fifty-six thousand and emptied the public meat auction. A poor grain harvest on top of that pastoral loss left the settlement feeding larger postwar Indiaman traffic from a countryside that yielded less bread corn and less slaughter stock than the early years of Chavonnes’s government. Auction prices current in the same scarcity ran from 11s. 1d. to 13s. 11d. for sheep taken one with another in a flock, and £4 8s. 4d. for a draught ox, while the contractor’s private rates of three pence a pound and twelve shillings and sixpence a live sheep still governed Company supply. [3]
First Recorded Horse Sickness — 1719
The troubles of the community were increased by the horse sickness making its appearance in a very severe form in 1719. There is no mention of it in the records before that date, and it is described as a new plague. It has never left South Africa since. The outbreak therefore marks a permanent addition to the settlement’s livestock burdens, distinct from the horned-cattle and sheep disease that had emptied kraals since 1714. No contemporary cure or quarantine system is recorded for the onset. The plague entered the written memory of the colony as a novelty that thereafter recurred. [3]
Horses were essential to commandos, message traffic, plough teams on larger farms, and the ranked carriage life of Company officers who disputed the crown of the street. A severe first visitation in the same year as the Zonder End cattle raid and a second poor harvest compounded mobility and defence problems just when San pressure resumed on the pastoral fringe and when fugitive slave bands already troubled farmers more easily tracked than San yet still costly to suppress. Together with drought grain shortfalls and the continuing after-effects of the 1714 stock disease, it fixed 1719 as a year in which three separate biological pressures—on corn, on slaughter animals, and now on horses—operated at once under Chavonnes’s government. [3]
Those livestock losses fell on a harbour that was busier than before. On the 11th of April 1718 the peace of Utrecht had closed a war with France of twelve years’ duration. The Company then resolved to enlarge its commerce, and a number of ships of the first class, carrying from two hundred and eighty to three hundred and fifty men each, were speedily built. After 1715 the number of persons visiting the Cape every year was much greater than before. During 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. [3]
During 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. 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. When twenty to thirty large ships set their sails together, the summer fleet usually carried to Europe merchandise which had cost from five to seven hundred thousand pounds sterling. The winter fleet was much smaller, often only three or four ships. English vessels whose masters could not produce a royal commission or proper credentials from the English Company were warned to make sail at once, with no intercourse allowed with the shore; Flemish ships were treated in the same manner. Calendar 1719 therefore fed that heavier traffic from thinner kraals, a second poor harvest, and a new plague among the horses that moved commando and carriage alike. [3]
Fugitive Slave Bands and Inland Church Works — 1719
At this date fugitive slaves were giving a great deal of trouble to the colonists. These people formed themselves into bands and plundered the farmers whenever necessity impelled and opportunity offered. Though they usually selected a retreat in some place difficult of discovery and access, they were much more easily found than San. The labour majority of February 1717 that preferred slave import to European workmen therefore continued to sit beside a security problem created by the same system, through a year when San raids resumed at the Zonder End and runaway bands did not cease. Captain Dominique Pasques de Chavonnes had already called that unrest a malignant sore; the 1719 records show the sore still open. [3]
Inland church fabric begun in 1717 was still rising. The Reverend Petrus van Aken, appointed by the directors, had taken over the Drakenstein duty in August 1714. Funds for the new church there were derived from a legacy of £208 6s. 8d. bequeathed by Henning Huising, £314 8s. 6d. left with the government 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 first stones had been laid on the 6th of September 1718. Through calendar 1719 those walls were still unfinished. [3] [8]
At Stellenbosch, where the Reverend Bek was clergyman, work likewise continued to replace the fire-destroyed church. The cost was borne by applying the poor fund, by special collections, by a loan from the Cape consistory—which then had over £9,300 to the good—and by a lottery for which permission had been obtained from the directors. At the Cape the Reverend D’Ailly remained first or chief clergyman. Landdrost administration and consistory finance thus ran through 1719 while staples experts, horse sickness, and the Zonder End raid occupied the castle’s attention. [3]
Relative rank in church and street remained a standing preoccupation of Company servants even after Noodt’s departure. In the country the landdrost ranked first as the Company’s representative, with a slightly elevated front seat under a canopy; 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. The directors desired that burghers should be as nearly as possible of the same station, but civil and military offices made some distinctions inevitable. Calendar 1719 therefore paired unfinished inland sanctuaries with renewed frontier violence, runaway slave bands, and a second year of thin harvests, under a seating order that still ranked every notable household when the congregation met. [3]
Adriaan van Kervel Appointed Secretary of the Council of Policy — 1719
In 1719 Adriaan van Kervel was appointed secretary of the council of policy. He was already a man of marked ability and of a reputation for integrity that later commentators would call of the highest. The clerkship put him at the writing-table of every resolution that passed the board in a year of San raid, staples failure, wine-sample orders, drought harvest, and the first recorded horse sickness. From that year the secretaryship remained his until he left it for other high office. [3] [9]
The same board still sat under Chavonnes, with Cranendonk as secunde after taking over that duty on the 4th of March 1715, and with Cornelis van Beaumont as fiscal independent. Junior members who had signed the slave-labour majority of February 1717 included J. Cruse, J. de la Fontaine, K. Slotsboo, and H. van der Meer. Van Kervel’s new minutes therefore recorded the work of a council already committed to slave labour, to directors’ staples experiments, and to the private meat arrangement with Van der Heiden, while Noodt’s sealed fortification papers travelled home on the same correspondence. [3] [9]
In 1718 Governor Chavonnes had placed the young Ryk Tulbagh as assistant clerk to the secretary of the council of policy. The 1719 appointment of Van Kervel therefore put that junior clerk under a new chief at the same table. The pairing of a trusted secretary with an assistant already marked for advancement gave the castle a writing office equal to the heavier postwar traffic and to the directors’ staples correspondence that filled the year. [3] [9]
The secretaryship was not a decorative post. Every commando leave, every sample-wine letter, every expert’s report from Rustenburg, and every note on horse sickness or runaway bands passed through that hand before it entered the bound resolutions. Van Kervel’s first year in the chair of the minutes thus coincided with the end of Noodt’s visit on 18 April, the directors’ wine-sample order of 27 June, and the January Zonder End complaint—the year’s dated administrative facts written up by a new secretary of recognised capacity. [3] [9]
Burgher Councillors Request East-Coast and Island Trade — 1719
As far back as 1719 the burgher councillors, acting on behalf of several colonists who were acquainted with the east coast and the islands of Madagascar and the Mascarenhas group, requested liberty to trade with those countries upon payment of reasonable import and export duties. They proposed to purchase manufactured goods from the Company, and to exchange those goods and Cape produce for slaves, ivory, gold dust, and anything else of commercial value that should be obtainable. [3]
The request sat against a Company that still claimed the coasting and island trades as its own, and against a Cape countryside already short of slaughter stock and bread corn. To open a burgher voyage to Madagascar and the Mascarenhas would have given private men a legal path to the same slave and ivory markets the Honourable Company reserved, while offering the castle a duty instead of a prohibition. The colonists who backed the memorial were men who knew those waters, not projectors working from hearsay. [3]
The directors hesitated. They did not grant the liberty in 1719, nor did they reject it out of hand. The memorial therefore remained an open Cape proposal: a burgher bid to carry Company manufactures and colonial produce eastward and to bring back slaves, ivory, and gold dust under stated duties. Within this year the binding facts were the request itself, the named destinations, the proposed cargoes, and Amsterdam’s delay. [3]
The same harbour that would have fitted out those voyages was already feeding a heavier Indiaman traffic and turning uncredentialled English and Flemish callers from the shore. A burgher east-coast trade would have added private keels to that roadstead under licence rather than as interlopers. Calendar 1719 left the project on the table while horse sickness, a second poor harvest, and the Zonder End raid occupied the council that Van Kervel had begun to minute. [3]
Huguenot Schools, Deaths, and Wills — 1719
Permission was given in 1719 to Francois Louis Migault of Embden, who had come out in 1713 and was of Huguenot stock, to open a school for teaching the youth Dutch and French. On the 5th of March 1719 he married Maria Magdalena Niel. The licence kept a bilingual classroom alive in a colony whose directors wished Dutch to supersede French in public church business as soon as possible, and it sat beside the residual French hour still known at Drakenstein. [8]
At Stellenbosch Antoine Faure, born at Orange in 1683, son of Pierre Faure and Justina Pointy, who had fled to Holland on account of religious persecution, was appointed voorlezer and schoolmaster in 1719. He had arrived at the Cape in the Company’s service in 1714 and had married Rachel de Villiers, daughter of the refugee Abraham de Villiers. In the same year Renault Berthault de St. Jean, born 1692 at Sanoere in Berry, son of Marie Doné, arrived as a Company surgeon; his wife Anna Fourdinier and their son, left behind in Holland, joined him later. In the town congregation Durand Sollier was an elder of the church at Cape Town in 1719. [8]
Deaths and wills closed a further Huguenot generation in the same calendar year. Matthieu Arniel, an agriculturist at French Hoek married to Jeanne Mille, born in Provence in 1633, died in November 1719; their joint will of 1718 had left legacies to the Poor Fund of Drakenstein, to Susanna Fracassé living with her cousin Francois Ree in Amsterdam, and to Jan Roy, son of the French Hoek agriculturist of that name. Pierre Rousseau of Mer or Menars-la-ville, born about 1666, one of the first deacons of the French congregation at Drakenstein and a heemraad for that district, died in 1719, having married first Anne Retief (died 1710) and then Geertruy du Toit; he lived on the farm De Boog van Orleans. [8]
Two joint wills of 1719 show how young second wives and old refugee men still bound Drakenstein farms to the notary. Pierre Jourdan of Cabriére, in a joint will executed in 1719 with Maria Verdeau, daughter of the refugee Hercule Verdeau, described himself as between fifty-six and fifty-seven and her as nineteen years of age. Jacob de Villiers stated in his will in 1719 to be of “Borgondien” and aged fifty-eight; he had married Margaretha Gardiol of Provence, born 1674. Steven Gaucher of Geneva, son of the blacksmith and agriculturist André Gaucher, married at the Cape in 1719 and left descendants. [8]
The Company itself took stock of older obligations. The amounts advanced to settlers at the Cape had been entered in a book specially kept for that purpose, and in 1719 a list of such as were still debtors, with the amount of their debt, was compiled. In proportion to the number of French refugees who had come out and received assistance, not many of their names appeared on that list; the greater number had managed by their industry to wipe out their obligations. The bilingual school, the Stellenbosch voorleser, the Cape Town eldership, the November death at French Hoek, and the remaining-debtor roll thus ran through the same year as the Zonder End raid and the first horse sickness: a refugee community still French enough to licence a Dutch-and-French classroom, yet already far enough from the 1690 advances that most of those names had left the Company’s book. [8]