Boer History1719 at the Cape of Good Hope: Zonder End San Raid, Staples Experts, Wine Samples, and First Horse Sickness
San Raid on Van der Heiden’s Zonder End Stock — January 1719
Until January 1719 no fresh charge of depredations by Bushmen had been made after the peace presents and temporary agreement of friendship arranged in 1716. The 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 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: mounted neighbours could take the field under written leave and Company ammunition, yet stock once driven into broken country seldom returned. Van der Heiden already stood in the settlement’s economic centre as the private meat contractor of 1718; the Zonder End loss 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. Old outposts at Waveren, Saldanha Bay, Groenekloof, and Klapmuts still kept small parties—never more than seven men at each—after the newly formed military posts of 1716 had been withdrawn at burgher request. 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. [3]
Pieter Gysbert Noodt Completes His Visit and Departs — 18 April 1719
Pieter Gysbert Noodt, director of fortifications in Netherlands India, had arrived on the 6th of May 1718 to draw plans and specifications for additional Table Valley works after the Mauritius battery foundation of 20 February 1715. 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 Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes the plans he was making, though repeatedly requested to do so. [3]
Early in the visit a precedence quarrel with secunde Abraham Cranendonk had gone to the council of policy over military salutes, church seating for their wives, and carriage right to the crown of the street. The council had decided in Noodt’s favour. 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. [3]
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. Noodt’s later return as governor in February 1727 lay years ahead; 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]
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. The experts and seed belonging to that 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. The chief experiment in the production of silk was not, however, made until a few years later. 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. [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. [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 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, initial growth, climate damage, and a joint expert–council judgment against continuance. Hendriks’s later decision to become a burgher in 1722 lay ahead; within 1719 the recorded result was condemnation of Cape soils for marketable leaf and abandonment of the programme at the highest local board. [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. [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 later supposed that the reason might be the small size of the casks, and therefore directed another trial with half leggers instead of half aams—work that fell into later years, as did bottle experiments. 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, and the dual rejection at Amsterdam and Batavia. 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 and hospital rates, even as bulk sample casks failed the directors’ flavour test. [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. 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]
Later seasons would tighten further—less than a hundred muids out of the country in 1720, and in 1721 rice served to the Company’s men instead of bread while fifty-one muids kept up the name of exportation—but calendar 1719 still belonged to the middle of the sequence rather than its floor. Burghers who had objected to free trade in Indian ports because they could not wait long after harvest without return now faced thin crops under the reduced Company wheat price of ten shillings and eight pence a muid and a ban on new wheat and wine ground without directors’ approval in each instance. [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—averaging about eighty-seven ships a year across 1715–1724—from a countryside that yielded less bread corn and less slaughter stock than the early years of Chavonnes’s government. [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 and from the tongue and hoof sickness that would later worsen scarcity in the 1720s. [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 Bushmen yet still costly to suppress. [3]
No contemporary cure or quarantine system is recorded for the 1719 onset. The plague entered the written memory of the colony as a novelty that thereafter recurred. 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]
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 Bushmen. 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. [3]
Inland church fabric begun in 1717 was still rising. At Drakenstein the building funded from Henning Huising’s legacy, charity money from Van Hoorn’s fleet, a Cape consistory loan, collections, and poor-fund use would be completed in 1720. At Stellenbosch work continued to replace the fire-destroyed church from the poor fund, collections, a large Cape consistory loan, and a directors’ lottery. 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. The burgher order of landdrost, clergyman, heemraden, elders, deacons, and military officers—with wives’ chairs kept correct by the koster—continued as the visible hierarchy of country congregations while Drakenstein and Stellenbosch walls went up. Calendar 1719 therefore paired unfinished inland sanctuaries with renewed frontier violence and a second year of thin harvests. [3]
Close of 1719 at the Cape
By the end of 1719 the Cape had seen the San quiet since 1716 broken by the January loss of seven hundred cattle from Jacob van der Heiden’s Zonder End farm, a commando raised without recovery of the stock, and San claims of retaliation against pretended Company barterers that the records could not prove or disprove. Pieter Gysbert Noodt had sailed on 18 April after nearly a year of secretive fortification planning and a precedence win over secunde Abraham Cranendonk. Indigo seed and a Batavian expert, bad silkworm eggs beside thriving mulberries, Cors Hendriks’s failed tobacco trials at Rustenburg and the Company garden, and another sterile olive season answered the directors’ April 1718 staples order with mixed botanical results and a clear local judgment against tobacco. On 27 June the Seventeen called for selected wine samples; six half aams on the return fleet failed at Amsterdam and Batavia while Constantia under Johannes Colyn still sold red and white at premium rates. The harvest was again poor but still yielded a small wheat export in the middle of the dry sequence. Horse sickness appeared for the first time in severe form and remained thereafter. Fugitive slave bands continued to plunder more accessibly than San raiders; Drakenstein and Stellenbosch church works advanced under Chavonnes’s still quiet, expense-conscious government. The year thus joined a resumed frontier raid, the departure of the fortifications engineer, the first full season of metropolitan staples specialists, a failed wine-sample test, and a permanent new livestock plague. [3]