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. The magazines that had once counted fifteen thousand four hundred muids in the three harvests of 1714–1716, before the directors cut the official wheat price to ten shillings and eight pence a muid, now measured the year in a two-digit export. [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. Peas at twenty-nine shillings and beans at twenty-five shillings a muid, prices fixed when the India wheat trade was still being argued, could not fill a Table Bay hold when the lands themselves failed. [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. Farmers who complained in drought, and who had also complained when abundant rains brought mortality among cattle eating young grass, found in this third dry harvest little to argue except the empty wagon. [3] [9]
The council that had once objected, with the burghers, to a free wheat trade to India now had almost nothing to ship even under the restricted system. A hundred muids was not a cargo; it was a figure kept on the books so that Batavia would still see the Cape listed as a grain station. Inland districts— Waveren, Drakenstein, Stellenbosch—shared the same dry sequence. The outposts at Waveren, Saldanha Bay, Groenekloof, and Klapmuts still held never more than seven men each, and those thin guards could not make rain. [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. Sheep sold at public auction at this time ran from eleven shillings and one penny to thirteen shillings and eleven pence taking one with another in a flock, and draught oxen from four pounds eight shillings and four pence each—prices that made live export to a foreign salting gang a drain the magazines could no longer bear. [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. Seven hundred head driven from that farm had not been recovered. 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]
The placaat sat beside the interloper rule already in force: authorised English captains might still refresh, but they might no longer walk live cattle and sheep up a gangway. Uncredentialed callers were warned off entirely. Between those two lines the castle tried to feed its own people, salt its own barrels, and keep enough breeding stock on the peninsula and the Zonder End runs to see another dry year through. Van der Heiden’s three-pence contract of 1718 had already been overtaken by the three-and-three-quarter-pence market of July 1720. [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. The same board that managed Waveren, Saldanha, and the meat crisis would answer for a distant bay still empty of Dutch masonry. [3]
Factory status under Cape dependency also implied that 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. Burgher councillors had only in 1719 asked leave to trade with the east coast, Madagascar, and the Mascarenhas, offering Cape produce against slaves, ivory, and gold dust; the directors had at first hesitated. The Company’s own factory at Delagoa was a different instrument: a garrisoned dependency, not a free-burgher voyage. [3]
Judicially the scheme copied the Mauritius pattern. Trivial disputes might be settled on the spot by a petty court; anything heavier would travel the coast to the castle. That arrangement put the high court, the council of policy, and the fiscal of the Cape in the path of whatever violence, debt, or trade quarrel a south-east African factory might breed. Within calendar 1720 the resolution and the advance party were the whole of the recorded work; the bay itself still waited for Dutch sails. [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. A clerk of the Cape establishment was cheaper and closer than a new commission from the Assembly of Seventeen. [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]
Provisioning that party from a settlement that had just forbidden live-animal sales to foreigners and had exported under a hundred muids of wheat was itself a political act. The same magazines that withheld sheep from Company ships still had to find salt meat, biscuit, and tools for forty-four soldiers bound for an empty bay. Chavonnes’s frugal board accepted the directors’ order without opening a costly new work at home. The two small vessels rode in Table Bay through the last weeks of the year under a clerk newly raised to command. [3] [9]
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. Of these, six hundred and eighty-three were 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 number that called was eight hundred and seventy-one, or on an average eighty-seven yearly. Of these, six hundred and forty-five were Dutch, one hundred and ninety-two English, seventeen French, ten Danish, four Portuguese, and three Flemish. Calendar 1720 sat in the middle of that busier decade: more hulls, more mouths, and a meat placaat that made every foreign captain’s provisioning letter a matter for the council. [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]
Chavonnes’s Quiet Government and Pieter Rocques as Dispenser — 1720
Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, born at The Hague on the 23rd of July 1654, son of Pierre, Marquis de Chavonnes, still held the castle in the seventh year of a governorship that had begun with his arrival on the 28th of March 1714. He had been Military Governor of Bergen-op-Zoom and a brigadier of the States General before the peace of Utrecht left the Republic able to spare him. Pensionary Heinsius’s recommendation had sent him to the Cape as governor and councillor extraordinary of India. He was the opposite of extravagant, simple in his personal tastes, and frugal in administration because the directors had instructed him to economise and because expenditure at the Cape already exceeded revenue. [8] [9]
He had introduced a rental on land leased for cattle runs, stamp duties on legal documents, a tax on wine pressed by farmers, and other fiscal nuisances, and he had decreased public works, refusing even to have the canal bridges in Heerengracht repaired. The measures were unpopular in themselves, yet he kept the esteem of the burghers by applying the knife gradually. In 1720 that same quiet style still defined the board: no costly new fabric at the castle, a meat placaat instead of a new contract auction, and a Delagoa expedition accepted as a directors’ order rather than as a local monument. [3] [9]
The council around him in this year still included Abraham Cranendonk as secunde and Adriaan van Kervel as secretary of the council of policy, the post Van Kervel had held since 1719. The fiscal independent remained Cornelis van Beaumont. Those names had already sat through Noodt’s visit, the staples answers, and the first two dry harvests. Calendar 1720 added no death and no new commission at the top of the table; it added work: a July placaat, a late-year occupation party, and a country church to see finished. [3] [9]
The governor’s son Pieter Rocques de Chavonnes (also styled Pieter Rochus), born in the later 1690s, had started his Company career while his father held the Cape. In 1717 he had sat on the Orphan Chamber; in 1720 he served as dispenser. The post put a Chavonnes name over the issue of stores in the same year that magazines were counting wheat in tens of muids and withholding sheep from the Company’s own ships. A religious, undemonstrative governor and a son in the dispensary together marked how far the family had settled into the castle’s ordinary machinery. [8] [9]
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—the same precedence that had set Mrs van Cranendonk’s pew and carriage against Noodt’s in 1718–1719—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] [9]
Church finance at the Cape already underwrote country building through loans. The same consistory that could lend large sums toward Drakenstein and Stellenbosch fabric—more than nine thousand three hundred pounds then standing to the Cape consistory’s credit when the Stellenbosch replacement church was begun—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]
Chavonnes himself was a religious man whose journal entries turned on blasphemy sentences, drought complaints, and a closing verse of quiet rest and well-doing. An organ in the Cape church fitted that temper better than a new battery or a repaired Heerengracht bridge. The instrument was a burgher subscription, not a Company work, and it left the governor’s economising instructions untouched. [3] [9]
Drakenstein Church Building Completed and Consecrated — June 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. Plans submitted by Van Aken and the churchwardens received the approval of the council of policy in March 1717. In June a piece of ground on which the church at the Upper Paarl later stood, in extent five morgen and one hundred and fifty square feet, was surveyed by Evert Walraven Cochius, the government engineer and surveyor. It extended north to the Drakenstein parsonage, east to the Berg River, south to the place of David Senechal, and west to the wagon road. A churchyard was marked off in the form of a square, each side of which measured thirty-five square roods, and in the middle it was decided to build the church, lengthwise to the north and south. [3] [8]
On the 6th of September 1718 the first stones were laid by Monsieur du Toit, 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, as well as the ex-deacons Paul Roux, Hercules des Pres, and Pieter Taillefert. The funds were derived from a legacy of £208 6s. 8d. bequeathed for the purpose by Henning Huising, £314 8s. 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 and consecrated in June 1720. [3] [8]
The windows of the new church were put in by the Company’s glazier, Willem Dempers of Middelburg. There was no wooden floor; the ground was hardened and kept clean by sand being strewn on it before every service. Up to 1720 beer glasses and a slop basin had been used for a communion service and a christening font; after this a silver service was authorised to be made. Before the church was completed it was found that there were not enough pews for the ladies, as men and women sat apart. Each lady was to bring her own seat. The first row nearest the pulpit was set aside for the wives of churchwardens and heemraden in office; the next for wives of ex-churchwardens and heemraden; then old ladies and respectable persons. All others were placed in order by the sexton. Four shillings and twopence was paid for each chair placed in the sexton’s care, half toward repairs and half to the sexton, and each chair was to have the owner’s name distinctly marked on it. [8]
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 and consecrated church 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. 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. Within 1720 the institutional fact was the completed and consecrated building itself. [3] [8]
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. Hendriks had condemned the soils after a tour and after plants set out on two morgen at Rustenburg, Rondebosch, and in the Company garden took a bad flavour from wind and sun. 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]
Chavonnes’s wine tax on farmers’ pressings still ran as one of the quiet fiscal nuisances of the administration. It did not touch Colyn’s European reputation, nor did it make the rejected half-aam samples drinkable. Ordinary Cape wine remained a fleet and hospital staple at far lower figures—six pounds a legger for the fleet and eight for the hospital in the sample years—while Constantia cleared more than double those rates on the private market. [3] [9]
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. The third dry harvest and the July meat rule were the year’s scarcities; Colyn’s ten-to-twelve red and twenty white were its remaining luxury. [3]
Huguenot Deaths, a Cape Baker, and a Church Bequest — 1720
Two of the three de Villiers brothers who had arrived on the 6th of May 1689 in the Sion from near La Rochelle, sent out for their knowledge of the vine, died in this year. Pierre de Villiers, who lived with wife and children at the foot of the Paarl Mountain at Drakenstein and had married Elizabeth Taillefert, daughter of the refugee Isaac Taillefert, died on the 22nd of January 1720. Abraham de Villiers, who had married Susanne Gardiol of de la Costé, Provence, on the 5th of October 1689, died on the 31st of March 1720. Abraham had been one of the first deacons of the French congregation, a heemraad, and captain of the burgher cavalry corps at Drakenstein; he left only daughters. Susanne later contracted with Claude Marais, the antenuptial belonging to the following year. [8]
Other French households closed or were described in the same calendar. Cecilia D’Atis, widow of Hercules des Pres, Sr., who had married the Drakenstein agriculturist Pierre Robert Dumont in 1700, died on the 15th of November 1720 while living on the farm Soetendal in Drakenstein. Jean Roi of Provence, who had married Maria Catherina le Febre, widow of Gabriel le Roux, in 1712, died in 1720. Jean le Sage of Dieppe, married at Drakenstein on the 31st of October 1717 to Margaretha de Villiers, died about 1720. Jacques Bisseux of Picardy, who had come in the Vosmaar in 1696 as a freeman, was described in 1720 as a baker; he would be buried in the Cape Town churchyard only in 1723. [8]
Zacharie Vlantior, in a will dated 1720 and later filed on the 22nd of August 1731, described himself as an old man having no relatives or friends, and left his property to the Drakenstein church on condition that they support him during his lifetime. The bequest tied a solitary refugee’s last estate to the same congregation that in June consecrated its new building. Johannes Guillaume de Grevenbroek’s earlier will of the 3rd of February 1714, leaving Pierre de Villiers a gold ring set with garnets in acknowledgment of kindness received from his co-religionists in France, now sat on a dead man’s name. [8]
Those deaths and the June consecration together marked how far the French congregation had become a Cape institution speaking Dutch in church while a handful of elderly people still needed French comfort. Abraham’s cavalry captaincy and heemraad seat, Pierre’s Paarl-foot farm, Bisseux’s Cape Town bakery, and Vlantior’s church bequest were the year’s Huguenot facts: not a new refugee fleet, but the closing of the first generation inside a finished Drakenstein nave glazed by the Company’s Middelburg glazier. [3] [8]