Boer History1721 at the Cape of Good Hope: Delagoa Bay Landing and Fever, Rice Rations, Slicher’s First Service, and Cranendonk’s Death
Rice Rations and Fifty-One Muids of Wheat for Batavia — 1721
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. In 1721 it was not possible to supply the ships with beans, peas, and barley, and rice was served out to the Company’s own people instead of bread; but fifty-one muids of wheat were sent to Batavia to keep up the name of exportation. The fourth dry year therefore reduced the India grain account to a token parcel while rice stood on Company tables in place of the ordinary loaf. [3]
Those fifty-one muids stood well below even the token figure of the previous season. 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 India account in a two-digit parcel. Burghers and magazines had already lived through livestock disease since 1714, a private meat contract after a failed public auction in 1718, the first severe horse sickness of 1719, and the live-animal placaat of 2 July 1720, which forbade the sale of live animals to foreigners and stopped sheep being sent on board the Company’s ships. Meat had risen to three and three-quarter pence a pound. Calendar 1721 added grain rationing inside the settlement itself while still forcing a symbolic outward wheat parcel toward Batavia. Peas at twenty-nine shillings and beans at twenty-five shillings a muid, prices remembered from the years when India wheat was still being argued, could not fill a Table Bay hold when the lands themselves failed. [3]
In the winter of 1721 the seasons changed for the better. The improvement closed the worst stretch of the dry run under Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes without yet restoring a full export year. Rice on Company tables and fifty-one muids on the Batavia account thus mark the calendar year at both ends of the local food chain. Farmers who complained in drought, and who had also complained when abundant rains brought mortality among cattle eating young grass, found in this fourth dry harvest little to argue except the empty wagon and the rice ration. [3] [9]
Private Constantia still cleared a market that official sample casks had not. 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. Ordinary Cape wine remained a fleet and hospital staple at far lower figures. Grain, meat, and wine thus pulled in different directions through the year: wheat export almost extinguished, live animals still fenced from foreign buyers, Constantia still selling premium leggers. [3]
The ten years from 1 January 1715 to 31 December 1724, of which 1721 formed the middle, saw eight hundred and seventy-one ships call at Table Bay, 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. After the peace of Utrecht the Company had enlarged its commerce with first-class ships carrying from two hundred and eighty to three hundred and fifty men each. The summer fleet still assembled in Table Bay—the slowest sailers first from Batavia, then the Ceylon squadron, then the late Batavia ships—and endeavoured to leave about the end of March or beginning of April, often twenty to thirty large ships together, carrying merchandise that had cost from five to seven hundred thousand pounds sterling. In the same months that rice replaced bread ashore, that outward wheat shrank to fifty-one muids, and that the Delagoa party was already on the south-east coast, the ordinary return fleet still used the Cape as its mustering roadstead. The winter fleet was much smaller, often only three or four ships. English captains had been in the habit of purchasing cattle in considerable numbers, slaughtering them, and salting the meat, and of taking sheep away; after the 2 July 1720 prohibition they made loud complaints in Europe, and the directors issued instructions that they should be treated as well as possible. Calendar 1721 therefore combined rice on Company tables, a fifty-one-muid token export, a live-animal ban still in force, and a roadstead that remained busy with licensed Company and East India traffic even while foreign live-stock buyers were fenced out. [3]
Delagoa Bay Expedition Sails from Table Bay — 14 February 1721
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. Toward the close of 1720 the advance party sent from the Netherlands, consisting of forty-four soldiers and a few mechanics, arrived in Table Bay in two small vessels, the Kaap and the Gouda. The officer 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, as his successor. A council was chosen to assist him, and a petty court of justice was constituted. [3]
Through the turn of the year those men and stores remained under castle authority while the sailing season opened. On the 14th of February 1721 the expedition, accompanied by a small vessel named the Zeelandia, sailed from Table Bay. Three vessels thus left the Cape roadstead for the south-east coast: the two small craft that had brought the advance party and the accompanying Zeelandia. The February departure turned a paper dependency into an outward voyage under Van Taak’s temporary commission, with soldiers, mechanics, and a Cape-made civil frame bound for a shore the Company had not held for nearly three decades. [3]
Chavonnes’s government kept the ordinary summer-fleet and interloper rules at Table Bay while this detached enterprise went out. 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 whatever in their ports. When an English vessel arrived without 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 putting in for supplies were treated in the same manner. The Delagoa sailing therefore left a roadstead still closed to unlicensed private traders even as the Cape itself despatched a licensed occupation to the south-east. [3]
Van Taak went out as a Cape clerk raised to a command, not as the Netherlands-appointed head who had died in Table Bay. The petty court and assisting council that sat with him were Cape constructions, designed so that the bay would answer to the Castle in the same way Mauritius once had. Nothing in the February orders yet spoke of fever. The three small vessels carried the first occupation, the first civil frame, and the first hope that ivory, wax, and a harbour on the south-east coast would repay the directors’ resolution of the previous year. [3]
Landing, Fever, and the First Fort — March–April 1721
On the 29th of March 1721 the expedition reached its destination, six weeks after leaving Table Bay. A site on the left bank of English river near its mouth was selected for the fort. The date fell in the same weeks when the Cape’s summer fleet commonly tried to clear Table Bay for Europe. Before much building was done, fever attacked the party. Within six weeks—by about the middle of May—two-thirds of them died, including the commander and the engineer. The first weeks of occupation therefore destroyed most of the force that had left Table Bay in February, and removed both the Cape-chosen head and the man charged with the works. The original draft of forty-four soldiers and a few mechanics was not a large occupation even before that mortality; after it, the post was a remnant. [3]
At length, with the assistance of some of the local people, a small fort was constructed. The Zeelandia was then sent back to the Cape with letters and a little ivory and wax obtained in barter. The first return cargo from the new station was thus thin trade goods and official reports rather than a settled factory’s surplus, and it carried news of a mortality that had already emptied two-thirds of the original party. What the directors had imagined as a paying dependency opened as a fever camp behind a small work on the left bank. [3]
Willem van Taak’s death closed the brief command that the Cape council had created after the Netherlands-appointed head died in Table Bay. The engineer’s death left the works without their specialist at the same moment. What remained on the left bank of English river was a reduced occupation behind a small fort, still dependent on the Cape for men, food, and a new civil head. The forty-four soldiers and few mechanics of the original draft had been cut to a remnant before a proper factory could be said to stand. [3]
From the Cape’s side the first letters from the bay were therefore a mortality roll and a request, not a trade balance. Ivory and wax in small quantity proved that barter was possible. They did not prove that the station could live. Chavonnes’s board, which embarked in no costly undertakings at Table Bay itself, now found itself responsible for an outpost whose first six weeks had already consumed two-thirds of the men sent to hold it. [3]
Zeelandia Returns with the Yacht Uno and Eighty Soldiers — August 1721
The Zeelandia returned in August, together with the yacht Uno, taking provisions and eighty soldiers to strengthen the occupation party at the bay. The reinforcement more than replaced the original military draft of forty-four soldiers in raw numbers, though it could not restore the dead commander, the engineer, or the two-thirds lost to fever in the first six weeks. Two ships and eighty men were the Cape’s answer to the first letters from English river. [3]
Upon learning what had occurred, the council of policy appointed Casparus Swertner successor to Van Taak, with the rank of junior merchant and a salary of £2 15s. 6d. a month. He was then already at Delagoa Bay, but he died before the news of his appointment reached the station. A subaltern named Jan Michel was then chosen to be head of the party of occupation. The council hoped that by this time the survivors from the fever were seasoned to the climate, and that henceforth all would go well. [3]
The August relief thus paired a double ship visit—Zeelandia and Uno—with a double failure of named succession at the outpost: Van Taak dead of fever, Swertner dead before his commission could be read to him, Michel left in charge as a stopgap head. The Cape still treated the bay as a dependency for trial and appeal, but the living chain of command had already turned over three times between the Netherlands appointment and Michel’s selection. Eighty fresh soldiers and a load of provisions could replace numbers; they could not put a junior merchant back on his feet. [3]
From the Cape’s side, Delagoa Bay remained an expensive and deadly dependency rather than a paying factory. Ivory and wax in small quantity had come back with the first Zeelandia letters; eighty fresh soldiers and provisions went north in August; no gold or copper yet answered the directors’ hopes. Chavonnes’s board continued to staff and supply the post while keeping Table Bay’s ordinary commerce under the enlarged post-Utrecht shipping pattern, and while rice still stood in for bread at the Castle itself. [3]
Swertner’s Dead Commission and Jan Michel’s Command — 1721
Swertner’s junior-merchant rank and fixed monthly salary of £2 15s. 6d. show how the Cape council tried to regularise the bay under ordinary Company grades once Van Taak was gone. The appointment was made at the Castle after the Zeelandia’s letters arrived; it never became an effective local installation because death outran the despatch. Michel, already on the spot as a subaltern, inherited the occupation without that merchant title. The Cape had now named four heads for one post in less than a year: the Netherlands officer who died in Table Bay, Van Taak who died of fever, Swertner who died uninformed, and Michel who remained. [3]
Under Michel the station passed the remainder of the calendar year in trading, exploring, and gathering information. The institutional fact within 1721 was a small fort on English river, a reinforced but fever-thinned party, and a subaltern head after two named successors had died. Time at the bay was spent on barter and on learning the shore, not yet on a paying return. The council’s hope that the survivors were seasoned was a hope, not a proof. [3]
The dependency’s legal frame still ran to the Castle. Important cases and appeals were to come to the Cape; a petty court had been constituted before the February sailing. Fever and successive deaths had stripped that frame of the men who were meant to sit in it. Michel held the occupation as a soldier’s command. The junior-merchant grade that had been written for Swertner remained a paper rank attached to a dead name. [3]
Chavonnes’s quiet, expense-conscious government thus carried, in this one year, both a rice ration at home and a fever outpost abroad. The directors had wanted a factory in a harbour the Portuguese had left in 1692. What they had by the last months of 1721 was a small fort, a subaltern, eighty newly arrived soldiers, and a first cargo of ivory and wax small enough to pack with the letters of the dead. [3]
Chavonnes Raised to Ordinary Councillor of India — 1 June 1721
Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes had managed to preserve the good will both of the directors and of the colonists. He embarked in no costly undertakings, did his utmost to keep down expense, and preserved concord in the settlement. He was a quiet, religious man, born at The Hague on the 23rd of July 1654, a soldier who had governed Bergen-op-Zoom and come to the Cape after Utrecht as both governor and councillor extraordinary of the Indies. No haughtiness sat in the face of that pedigree; the nobility claimed for him was of manner rather than of display. The directors were so well satisfied with his administration that they raised him to the rank of ordinary councillor of India, a dignity enjoyed by none of his predecessors at the Cape. The same honour is recorded as the additional title of Councillor Ordinary of the Indies, bestowed on a dutiful ruler already known as an honest, tactful, and firm head of the settlement, though without the spark of genius. [3] [9]
The letter containing the announcement of his elevation reached the Cape on the 1st of June 1721. The honour arrived in the same half-year that rice replaced bread for the Company’s people, that fifty-one muids of wheat went out as a token export, and that the Delagoa expedition was already dying of fever on English river. Metropolitan approval of a quiet, expense-conscious government thus coincided with the hardest grain year of the dry sequence and with the first mortality reports from the new bay factory. [3]
The ordinary-councillor rank did not alter the local board’s daily work. Secunde Abraham Cranendonk, fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont, and the junior members still sat under him. It placed the Cape governor on a higher India grade than any predecessor had held while still resident at the Castle. He had arrived in 1714 already as councillor extraordinary of the Indies; the 1721 letter raised that India dignity from extraordinary to ordinary. [3] [9]
Concord at the Cape in this year was the concord of a settlement eating rice, shipping fifty-one muids, and staffing a fever post, not the concord of an easy harvest. Chavonnes did not embark on new works to match the honour. The Castle still ran the ordinary summer fleet, still warned interlopers off, and still treated Delagoa Bay as a Cape dependency for trial and appeal. The June letter was metropolitan praise for a government that kept expense down while those several scarcities ran together. [3]
Rev. Lambertus Slicher’s First Cape Church Service — 15 June 1721
In the church, matters had assumed a satisfactory aspect. The Rev. Mr. D’Ailly remained as first or chief clergyman of the Cape. The rector of the school, the Rev. Lambertus Slicher, was an ordained clergyman, but had been employed as rector only. In that capacity he had served at the Cape when, at the request of the congregation and with the consent of the directors, he began to assist in the church. His first service was held on the 15th of June 1721, two weeks after the ordinary-councillor letter for Chavonnes had been read at the Castle. He still continued to perform the duty of rector of the school. [3]
Slicher was of Middelburg. He had served six years as chaplain of the garrison at Lillo. Owing to differences and animosity among his congregation he had voluntarily resigned and entered the Company’s service as a midshipman on the ship ’t Vaderland Getrouw, and in that capacity he had arrived at the Cape in the same year as the Rev. Petrus van Aken. Well versed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, he was shortly afterward appointed rector of the High School at Cape Town, which had just been established; he took in pupils as boarders at his house. He held good testimonials from the ministers of the different places where he had officiated. In 1721, while still rector, he obtained permission from the Seventeen, through the intercession of the Cape governor and his council, to preach now and again in the church at Cape Town. A council resolution of 25 November 1721 recorded that permission. The June pulpit Sunday and the November resolution thus stand together: the first service on the 15th of June, and the directors’ leave, obtained through Chavonnes’s board, entered on the books in November. [3] [8]
The previous year private persons had subscribed funds for an organ for use in the Cape church. Inland, Petrus van Aken already held Drakenstein, where the church building begun in 1717 had been completed and consecrated in 1720, and Bek remained at Stellenbosch while a replacement church rose on poor-fund, collection, Cape consistory loan, and lottery money. The Cape consistory had then over £9,300 to the good. Within 1721 the new Cape fact was Slicher’s first pulpit Sunday beside D’Ailly, not a change of inland pastors. [3]
The June service therefore opened a dual role—school rector and assisting preacher—under D’Ailly’s chief pastorate. Slicher did not lay down the High School. He added the Cape pulpit, now and again, with the congregation’s request behind him and the Seventeen’s leave on the November resolution. Chavonnes’s board, which had just received the ordinary-councillor letter, was the same board that interceded for that leave. [3] [8]
Cranendonk Dies; Jan de la Fontaine Acting Secunde — 8 October 1721
On the 8th of October 1721 Abraham Cranendonk died. He had been secunde since 4 March 1715, after the Helot crisis and Chavonnes’s installation, and had sat through the labour debate of 1717, the Noodt precedence quarrel of 1718, and the dry years that followed. In February 1717 he had sat with the governor, the fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont, and the junior members J. Cruse, J. de la Fontaine, K. Slotsboo, and H. van der Meer, when the council answered the directors on slave labour. His death opened the second chair of the government in the same year that Delagoa Bay consumed its first two named commanders. [3] [9]
Jan de la Fontaine, who had been working his way upwards during the eleven years of his residence in South Africa, was chosen by the council of policy to act as secunde until the pleasure of the directors could be known. He had arrived on the 15th of March 1710 and had held warehouse and junior council work through the Mauritius evacuation, the Stellenbosch fire, and the early Chavonnes years. The October vote made him acting second in the colony while confirmation still lay with the Assembly of Seventeen. He was already known at the board as the junior member who had sat through the 1717 labour answers. [3]
Within calendar 1721 the legal fact was the council’s choice after Cranendonk’s death on the 8th of October: De la Fontaine acting secunde under Chavonnes, with fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont still in office. The board that had staffed Delagoa Bay and received Slicher’s first service now itself changed its second seat before year-end. Later memory would know De la Fontaine as Cranendonk’s successor in the second chair, and would remember how another officer later tried to discredit him; those later quarrels do not belong to this year. The year’s fact is the October acting appointment after eleven years of Cape service. [3] [9]
The second chair thus turned over in the same twelve months that Delagoa Bay turned over three living heads and that Slicher took the Cape pulpit beside D’Ailly. Chavonnes remained. Van Beaumont remained. The junior merchant who had sat in 1717 now sat as acting secunde. Rice, fifty-one muids, eighty soldiers for English river, and an ordinary-councillor letter had already measured the year before Cranendonk’s death closed the second seat. [3]
Huguenot Deaths, a Midwife’s Certificate, and the Anthony of Goa Case — 1721
Inland French households closed through the same calendar. Hercule des Pres of Courtrai, a member of the court of landdrost and heemraden of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein and captain of the burgher cavalry, died on the 9th of May 1721. He had married first Marie le Febre, by whom he had issue, and secondly Cornelia Villion (Viljoen). He signed himself as des Pres, and had taken an active part in the movement against Governor Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel. François Retief, an agriculturist at Drakenstein, born in 1663, died on the 24th of September 1721; he had married in 1700 Marie Mouy, born 1685. Jean le Long, who had lived at Drakenstein with his wife Maria Coche, died in August 1721. Josue Cellier of Orleans, agriculturist, vinedresser, and carpenter, who had arrived in 1700 in the Reygersdaal with his wife Elizabeth Couvret and held the farm De Orleans at Drakenstein, died in October 1721, leaving five sons and five daughters. [8]
Jacques de Savoye had been buried in October 1717; his widow was buried in May 1721. On the 13th of October 1721, five days after Cranendonk’s death, Claude Marais of Plessis Marle, near Paris, one of the first elders chosen for the French congregation in 1691, executed an antenuptial contract with Susanne Gardiol, born at de la Costé in Provence, widow of Abraham de Villiers of La Rochelle, who had died on the 31st of March 1720. The contract closed a year of French deaths with a remarriage that tied the Gardiol–de Villiers house to the Marais farms. [8]
At the Castle a different French household entered the criminal record. Maria Buisset, born at Sedan on the French frontier in 1678, had married Jean Prieur du Plessis of Poitiers, surgeon, and after his death had married Dirk Snith of Nieuwburg, also a surgeon, in 1711. She practised in Cape Town as a qualified midwife. Midwives during the Dutch occupation of the Cape were either appointed by the directors and sent out from Holland, or were admitted to practise after examination by two of the chief government surgeons. Mrs Snith must have had some knowledge of surgery, for in 1721 she produced before the Court of Justice at Cape Town a surgical certificate which she had signed. In it she set forth the result of her inspection of a slave girl who had been stabbed with a knife. The certificate was accepted as evidence, and the man who had committed the deed, Anthony of Goa, was found guilty and sentenced to be flogged and put in chains for two years. [8]
Those deaths, the October antenuptial, and the midwife’s certificate together mark how far the French congregation had become a Cape institution in the same year that Slicher, a Middelburg rector rather than a Huguenot pastor, took the Cape pulpit beside D’Ailly. Des Pres’s cavalry captaincy and heemraad seat, Retief’s Drakenstein farm, Cellier’s De Orleans, le Long’s August burial, the Savoye widow’s May burial, and Marais’s contract with Abraham de Villiers’s widow were the year’s Huguenot facts: not a new refugee fleet, but the closing and remarrying of the first generation while a Sedan-born midwife’s surgical paper was received as evidence in the high court of justice at the Castle. [3] [8]