Boer History1720 at the Cape of Good Hope: Delagoa Bay Outpost, Meat Placaat, Third Drought Harvest, and Drakenstein Church
Third Drought Harvest and Wheat Export under a Hundred Muids — 1720
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 still exported. It was the same in 1719. In 1720 less than a hundred muids were sent out of the country. The third dry year therefore reduced outward grain to a token figure while the settlement still tried to keep the name of exportation alive for Batavia and the India trade. [3]
The shortfall sat on top of livestock losses that had emptied kraals since the cattle and sheep disease of 1714 and the first severe horse sickness of 1719. Burghers who had already seen sheep numbers fall by nearly fifty-six thousand before the private meat contract of 1718 now faced a grain year thinner than either of the two preceding poor harvests. Company magazines and private barns alike measured the season in the smallest outward wheat total of the dry sequence. [3]
Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes still headed a quiet, expense-conscious administration that avoided costly new works while drought and stock scarcity pressed the board. The 1720 harvest did not yet force rice in place of bread for the Company’s own people—that sharper rationing belonged to the following year—but it closed the third season of the dry run with export almost extinguished and no relief yet from the winter rains that would only improve after 1721. [3]
Placaat against Live-Animal Sales to Foreigners — 2 July 1720
By 1718 slaughter stock had become so scarce that when the contract to supply the Company with meat was offered for sale by auction there was not a single bidder. A private arrangement with Jacob van der Heiden had then set meat at three pence a pound and live sheep at twelve shillings and sixpence each. On the 2nd of July 1720 the sale of live animals to foreigners was prohibited by placaat, and henceforth no sheep were sent on board the Company’s ships. Meat had now risen to three and three-quarter pence a pound. [3]
English captains had been in the habit of purchasing cattle in considerable numbers, slaughtering them, and salting the meat. They had also generally taken away a number of sheep. Upon the prohibition being applied to them, they made loud complaints in Europe, and the directors issued instructions that they should be treated as well as possible. The July placaat therefore protected local slaughter supply for the Honourable Company and the settlement at the cost of a standing friction with foreign Indiamen who had long counted Table Bay as a cheap provisioning stop. [3]
Van der Heiden remained the central private meat contractor whose Zonder End losses of January 1719 had already shown how frontier San raids could strike the same man who fed the castle when public auction failed. The 1720 ban on live sales to foreigners tightened the circle around remaining flocks without yet restoring abundance. Later leave for him to barter cattle from distant Khoikhoi, and the still later withdrawal of that leave after Drakenstein complaints of violence, lay beyond this calendar year; within 1720 the concrete legal fact was the July placaat and the end of sheep drafts to Company ships. [3]
Delagoa Bay Resolved as a Cape Dependency — 1720
The Portuguese having abandoned Delagoa Bay in 1692, in 1720 the Dutch East India Company resolved to take possession of that port and establish a factory there. It was intended that the station should be a dependency of the Cape government, just as Mauritius had been. Important cases were to be sent for trial to the Cape, and in all cases except the most trivial there was to be a right of appeal to the high court of justice at the castle of Good Hope. [3]
The resolution reopened eastern coastal ambition after the evacuation of Mauritius and the battery works that had closed that island chapter. Delagoa Bay offered a harbour on the south-east African shore, a hoped-for trade in ivory and other inland products, and a judicial tie that would keep serious criminal and civil business under Cape review. For Chavonnes’s council the project meant a new outpost to staff, provision, and supervise from Table Bay rather than a simple enlargement of the peninsula settlement. [3]
Factory status under Cape dependency also implied that the same council of policy which managed Waveren, Saldanha, and the meat crisis would answer for a distant bay still empty of Dutch masonry. The directors’ choice of 1720 for the occupation order placed the logistical burden on a colony already short of grain for export and slaughter stock for its own tables—an expansion decided in Europe and staged through a drought-pressed refreshment station. [3]
Kaap and Gouda Arrive; Willem van Taak Chosen Head — Late 1720
Towards the close of the year the advance party sent from the Netherlands to form the station, consisting of forty-four soldiers and a few mechanics, arrived in Table Bay in two small vessels, the Kaap and the Gouda. The officer who had been appointed head of the expedition died soon after reaching South Africa, when the council of policy selected a clerk on the Cape establishment, Willem van Taak by name, as his successor. A council was chosen to assist him, and a petty court of justice was constituted. [3]
The late-year arrival kept the whole Delagoa outfit in Cape waters through the remainder of 1720. Men, stores, and the two small vessels lay under castle authority while Van Taak’s appointment and the supporting council and court gave the expedition a local legal frame before any sail for the bay. The death of the Netherlands-appointed head so soon after arrival forced the Cape council to promote from its own clerkly ranks rather than wait for a replacement from Europe. [3]
Forty-four soldiers and a few mechanics were a modest occupation force for a harbour long empty of European garrison, yet they matched the scale of earlier small-station experiments. The petty court and assistant council signalled that the directors meant more than a transient trading camp: even before departure, Delagoa was organised as a judicial dependency whose serious cases would run back to the castle. The actual sailing from Table Bay on the 14th of February 1721, with the small vessel Zeelandia in company, fell in the next calendar year; within 1720 the recorded work was arrival, succession, and constitution of the party. [3]
Summer Fleets, Enlarged Commerce, and Interlopers — around 1720
After the peace of Utrecht of 11 April 1713 closed a twelve-year French war, the Company resolved to enlarge its commerce, and 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 1 January 1700 to 31 December 1714 one thousand and seven ships put into Table Bay, or on an average sixty-seven yearly. During the ten years from 1 January 1715 to 31 December 1724 the number that called was eight hundred and seventy-one, or on an average eighty-seven yearly. [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. The summer fleet of twenty to thirty large ships, sometimes with English vessels in company, 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. [3]
The English government had protested against assistance formerly given to private traders at the Cape, and an arrangement had been made between the Assembly of Seventeen and the directors of the English Company that neither would permit interlopers to obtain anything whatever in their ports. In consequence, when an English vessel arrived, unless her master could produce a royal commission or proper credentials from the East India Company, she was warned to make sail at once, and no intercourse was allowed with the shore. Flemish ships which put in for supplies were treated in the same manner. Calendar 1720 therefore combined higher legitimate traffic with a hard line against uncredentialed callers, even as the July meat placaat strained relations with authorised English captains who wanted live stock. [3]
Organ Subscribed for the Cape Church — 1720
In the church, matters had assumed a satisfactory aspect under the Rev. Mr. D’Ailly as first or chief clergyman of the Cape. The rector of the school was an ordained clergyman who had long served in a limited capacity; he would hold his first assisting service in the church only on 15 June 1721, but the congregation’s fabric and music advanced a year earlier. In 1720 some persons subscribed the necessary funds for the purchase of an organ for use in the church. [3]
The organ subscription marked a voluntary burgher and Company-servant investment in Table Valley worship while drought and meat scarcity dominated secular placaaten. It did not alter the ranked seating and street-crown disputes that still structured official life, yet it added a permanent musical instrument to the chief congregation at a moment when inland churches were finishing walls and when the castle’s attention also ran to Delagoa packing and foreign provisioning rules. [3]
Church finance at the Cape already underwrote country building through loans. The same consistory that could lend large sums toward Drakenstein and Stellenbosch fabric now saw private subscribers complete an organ fund in the capital. The year thus paired a metropolitan musical improvement with the completion of a country church whose funding mix had been assembling since 1717. [3]
Drakenstein Church Building Completed — 1720
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 funds were derived from a legacy of £208 6s. 8d. bequeathed for the purpose by Henning Huising, £314 3s. 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 building was completed in 1720. [3]
Completion closed a three-year fabric campaign that had run through the council’s slave-labour debate of 1717, the meat crisis and Noodt visit of 1718, and the Zonder End raid and horse sickness of 1719. Drakenstein now possessed a finished church building while Stellenbosch was still raising a replacement for the structure destroyed by fire, financed from the poor fund, collections, a large Cape consistory loan, and a lottery permitted by the directors. [3]
The finished Drakenstein church served a congregation that still included a small number of elderly French speakers. When Paul Roux later died, the consistory would ask for another French sick-comforter for some twenty-five or twenty-six old people who did not understand Dutch—a request the council would decline in February 1723 pending directors’ pleasure, with an unfavourable decision thereafter. Within 1720 the institutional fact was the completed building itself, funded by Huising’s legacy, Van Hoorn fleet charity, Cape credit, collections, and the poor fund. [3]
Constantia Wine Reputation amid Failed Sample Exports — 1720
The wine made at Constantia retained 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. Those private prices stood in contrast to the directors’ sample programme of half aams filled at the Cape and returned for judgment, which had succeeded no better than earlier official wine experiments. [3]
Staples trials ordered after the council’s 1717 answers to the directors—tobacco under Cors Hendriks, indigo with a Batavian expert, silkworm eggs from Persia and Bengal, olives—had already shown in 1719 how poorly exotic crops matched ordinary Cape soils and winds. Calendar 1720 added no fresh metropolitan expert success to reverse those judgments; the durable commercial wine story remained Constantia’s private red and white under Colyn, not the failed sample casks sent for Amsterdam and Batavia tasting. [3]
Grain, meat, and wine thus pulled in different directions through the year. Wheat export nearly vanished; live animals were fenced from foreign buyers by placaat; Constantia still cleared premium leggers. Chavonnes’s government kept expense down and concord up while those uneven commodity lines defined what the settlement could and could not ship. [3]
Close of 1720 at the Cape
By the end of 1720 the Cape under Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes had lived through the third dry harvest of the sequence, with less than a hundred muids of wheat sent out of the country. On the 2nd of July a placaat forbade sale of live animals to foreigners, ended sheep drafts to Company ships, and left meat at three and three-quarter pence a pound after Jacob van der Heiden’s private contract had already replaced a failed public auction; English captains complained in Europe and were ordered treated as well as possible. The directors resolved to occupy Delagoa Bay as a factory dependent on the Cape; late in the year the Kaap and Gouda brought forty-four soldiers and a few mechanics; the appointed head died; clerk Willem van Taak was chosen successor with a council and petty court before any 1721 sailing. Summer-fleet traffic and interloper exclusions framed a busier legitimate harbour. Private subscribers funded an organ for the Cape church, and the Drakenstein church building begun in 1717 from Huising’s legacy, Van Hoorn charity, Cape consistory credit, collections, and the poor fund was completed, while Johannes Colyn’s Constantia red and white still sold at premium rates beside earlier failed official wine samples. The year thus joined a token grain export, a protective meat law, the staging of a new south-east outpost, and finished country church fabric under a still quiet governor. [3]