Boer History1722 at the Cape of Good Hope: Table Bay Gale, Delagoa Buccaneers, Schoonberg Wreck, and Wheat Export Recovery
Wheat Export Recovery — Nearly Three Thousand Five Hundred Muids — 1722
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. In the winter of 1721 the seasons changed for the better. In calendar 1722 the harvest answered. Nearly three thousand five hundred muids of wheat left the colony, restoring a real export figure after the token parcel of the rice year. [3]
Those three thousand five hundred muids stood against four lean seasons under Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes. 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, had measured the India account in two-digit parcels through the drought. The 1722 recovery did not yet match those mid-decade totals, but it closed the worst stretch of grain scarcity at the refreshment station and put Indian-bound wheat back on the books in commercial quantity. Peas at twenty-nine shillings and beans at twenty-five shillings a muid, prices remembered from years when India wheat was still being argued, no longer had to stand in for an empty wagon. [3]
Livestock disease and the live-animal placaat of 2 July 1720 still constrained meat supply. That order 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. English captains, who had been in the habit of purchasing cattle in considerable numbers, slaughtering them, salting the meat, and taking sheep away, made loud complaints in Europe after the prohibition; the directors issued instructions that they should be treated as well as possible. Grain, however, was again a Cape surplus article. The calendar year thus opened under Chavonnes with magazines and free farmers sending wheat seaward while foreigners remained under tight rules for fresh provisions. [3]
The ten years from 1 January 1715 to 31 December 1724, of which 1722 formed a middle year, 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. The winter fleet was much smaller, often only three or four ships. When an English vessel arrived without a royal commission or proper credentials from the English East India Company, she was warned to make sail at once; Flemish ships were treated in the same manner. During the fifteen years from 1 January 1700 to 31 December 1714 one thousand and seven ships had put into Table Bay, or on an average sixty-seven yearly. The post-Utrecht decade therefore brought some twenty more callers a year to the same roadstead that the June gale would empty. [3]
That busy roadstead was the same water in which the June gale would later leave not a single hull afloat. Calendar 1722 therefore combined restored wheat export with a meat placaat still in force, a licensed Company and East India traffic that remained large even while foreign live-stock buyers were fenced out, and a winter anchorage whose shelter would fail. Farmers who had complained in drought, and who had also complained when abundant rains brought mortality among cattle eating young grass, now had a harvest that could be counted in thousands of muids rather than in a token fifty-one. [3] [9]
Hendriks Becomes a Burgher; Tobacco Abandoned; Wine Samples Fail — 1722
The directors’ programme of staple experiments, pressed since the council reports of 1717 and the resolution of 17 April 1718, reached a practical close for tobacco in 1722. Cors Hendriks, an expert in the cultivation and manufacture of tobacco sent from Amsterdam in 1719, had 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 plot he had found was about two morgen adjoining Rustenburg at Rondebosch. There, and in the Company’s garden in Table Valley, a large number of tobacco plants were set out by slaves under his direction. At first they throve well; 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. [3]
The members of the council of policy were of the same opinion, and in 1722 the tobacco expert became a burgher. The change of status marked the end of his official superintendence rather than a new commercial industry: no marketable Cape tobacco leaf had been established, and the experiment stood abandoned. 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. Two staple hopes that the Seventeen had pressed upon the Cape thus closed, in this calendar year, as failed trials beside a wheat harvest that had at last recovered. [3]
Wine trials continued on a larger cask. 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 six pounds a legger for ordinary wine for the use of the fleets, and eight pounds for old wine for use in the hospital. On the 27th of June 1719 they wrote for selected samples, and with the next return fleet six half aams were sent. When the casks reached Amsterdam they were found unfit for use. It was the same with six half aams sent to Batavia. 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. In 1722 ten half leggers were sent to Amsterdam and Middelburg; the result was the same as before. An experiment was then made with bottles: a thousand were sent out to be filled with wine and returned. It succeeded no better than the others. [3]
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 the old six-pound and eight-pound figures. Grain, meat, and wine thus pulled in different directions through the year: wheat export restored in thousands of muids, live animals still fenced from foreign buyers, official wine samples still spoiling on the European and Batavia voyages, Constantia still selling premium leggers. [3]
Buccaneers Take Fort Lagoa — 19 April 1722
The Portuguese having abandoned Delagoa Bay in 1692, the Dutch East India Company had resolved in 1720 to take possession of that port and establish a factory there as 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. The occupation that had sailed from Table Bay on the 14th of February 1721, accompanied by a small vessel named the Zeelandia, and had reached the bay on the 29th of March, had selected a site on the left bank of English river near its mouth. Before much building was done, fever attacked the party, and within six weeks two-thirds of them died, including commander Willem van Taak and the engineer. At length, with the assistance of some of the local inhabitants, a small fort was constructed, and the Zeelandia was sent back to the Cape with letters and a little ivory and wax obtained in barter. [3]
Casparus Swertner had been appointed successor with the rank of junior merchant and a salary of £2 15s. 6d. a month, but he died before the news of his appointment reached the station. A subaltern named Jan Michel was then chosen to head the party of occupation. The Zeelandia and the yacht Uno had returned in August 1721 with provisions and eighty soldiers to strengthen the post. The council hoped that the survivors from the fever were seasoned to the climate, and that henceforth all would go well. Time then passed in trading, exploring, and gathering information under Cape dependency rules. The outpost was destined to further trouble. [3]
On the 19th of April 1722 some of the local inhabitants reported that three ships had entered the bay. The vessels proved to be manned by buccaneers. They attacked Fort Lagoa, took possession of it after a short cannonade, and plundered the store. They did not otherwise ill-treat the Company’s men at the fort; eighteen of them joined the raiders. The stroke fell on a post already thinned by fever and still dependent on Cape packets for communication. [3]
When the raiders were ready for sea they compelled an official named De Bucquoi to pilot them out, for he had surveyed the bay and made a chart of its soundings. They also took the vessel employed as a packet—so that, they said, they could send the pilot back once outside. They failed to keep that word. De Bucquoi and the crew of the Kaap had to remain with the buccaneers until another port was reached, from which they made their way to India. The packet that had brought the first advance party from the Netherlands in 1720, together with the Gouda, was thus lost to the Cape–Delagoa run in the same month that the fort itself was taken and stripped. [3]
Those left at the station were cut off from communication with the outer world. Relief would come only in due course. The Gouda, lying in Table Bay in June ready to sail to Delagoa Bay with supplies, was among the hulls that the north-west gale would drive ashore before she could close that gap. Calendar 1722 thus left Fort Lagoa plundered, eighteen men gone over to the raiders, the surveyor and the packet crew carried off, and the Cape dependency without a working sea link until a later relief. [3]
North-West Gale in Table Bay — 14–16 June 1722
The year 1722 was the most disastrous one yet known for the Company’s fleets in these seas. On the 17th of January the richly laden return ships Sampson and Amstelveen, belonging to a large homeward fleet, met a great gale off the southern coast and went down in the open ocean. Two men from the first and one from the last were later found by other ships of the fleet, some hours afterward, floating on pieces of wreckage; the remainder of their crews perished. That January loss opened a calendar that would close far worse inside Table Bay itself. [3] [9]
On Sunday the 14th of June a gale from the north-west set into Table Bay. At anchor for the Company lay two second-class outward-bound ships, the Standvastigheid and Rotterdam, together carrying 453 men; two third-class outward-bound ships, the Zoetigheid and Lakeman, together carrying 283 men; a small outward-bound vessel, the Schotsche Lorrendraayer, with 52 men; the packet boat Gouda, ready to sail to Delagoa Bay with supplies; and the brigantine Amy, in Cape use ever since her seizure in Saldanha Bay in 1693. The roadstead that averaged eighty-seven callers a year thus held, on that Sunday, a mixed Company list of outward Indiamen, a Delagoa packet, and an old prize brigantine. [3]
Three English East Indiamen also lay in the bay: the Nightingale, bound to Madras, with a crew of 140; and the Addison and Chandos, homeward from Bengal, with crews of 80 and 70. The Chandos had put in a fortnight earlier in distress, dismasted in a gale at sea. Licensed English traffic, which the directors had ordered should be treated as well as possible after the 1720 meat placaat, thus shared the same anchors as the Dutch outward ships on the Sunday evening. [3]
All that Sunday the danger to shipping was great, but no accident worse than parting cables and swamping boats occurred. On Monday the gale lulled. During the night the wind shifted to north-north-west, and on Tuesday morning the bay seemed covered with breakers. Still up to dusk the ships held to their anchors. The Monday pause therefore did not end the danger: it only reset the wind onto a line that filled the roadstead with broken water. [3]
As darkness set in the gale increased. At seven o’clock minute guns were heard between the gusts, and the firing continued until midnight. The sea broke on the beach with such violence that it was dangerous to pass along the road between the castle and the shore. Through that night the roadstead fought at its anchors while the settlement could give no help beyond listening to the guns. The Castle stood within sound of the minute-guns and within sight of a beach that could not be walked in safety. [3]
Dawn of 17 June 1722 — Every Ship Ashore
At dawn on the morning of the 17th not a single vessel was afloat in the bay. The Amy lay nearest the castle and had broken up, but her crew had got ashore. That brigantine had been in Cape use ever since her seizure in Saldanha Bay in 1693 under supposition that she was a pirate vessel; nearly thirty years of local service ended in fragments against the castle beach. The Chandos was next, close to the castle; she had partly broken up, and only two of her people were drowned. Then came fragments of the Zoetigheid, half of whose crew had perished. The Sunday list of Dutch and English hulls had become, in one night, a line of wreckage read from the castle beach outward. [3]
The Lakeman stood high on the land a little further on, with only one man missing. Just beyond were the crushed fragments of the Standvastigheid, Rotterdam, and Schotsche Lorrendraayer, all together; of their crews only forty-five men were living. Those three ships had carried, with the two second-class and the small outward vessel counted in the Sunday anchorage, the greater part of the Dutch complements in the bay. Their wreckage lay in one heap. [3]
The Gouda and the Nightingale lay some distance off, both high on the land and not much broken: the Nightingale had lost one man, the Gouda none. The Addison had struck in the mouth of Salt River, overturned, and broken up; only ten of her crew had got to land. The Delagoa packet thus survived as a hull on the beach without loss of life, while the English homeward ship from Bengal was destroyed at the river mouth. [3]
The roadstead that had held Dutch outward ships, a Delagoa packet, the old prize brigantine, and three English Indiamen on the Sunday evening was, by Wednesday morning, a single line of wreckage from the castle beach toward Salt River. No hull remained at anchor; the bay’s shelter had failed completely under the shifted north-north-west storm after the Monday lull. Every ship that had lain there on the 14th was ashore on the 17th. [3]
Six Hundred and Sixty Dead and a Quarter-Million Loss — June 1722
In all, six hundred and sixty men perished in that gale, and property valued at nearly a quarter of a million sterling was lost. The figure joined Company sailors and soldiers on the outward ships with English Indiamen crews and the small craft tied to Cape and Delagoa service. It stood without parallel in the earlier wreck record of the settlement. The January foundering of the Sampson and Amstelveen in the open ocean had already marked the year; the June total inside Table Bay dwarfed that first loss. [3] [9]
Among the Dutch losses the crushed cluster of Standvastigheid, Rotterdam, and Schotsche Lorrendraayer accounted for most of the dead from the large outward complements: of the men those three had carried, only forty-five were living. The Zoetigheid lost half her people. The Lakeman, driven high ashore, almost saved her full company, with only one man missing. The packet Gouda, meant for Delagoa Bay supplies after the April buccaneer stroke at Fort Lagoa, survived as a hull on the beach without loss of life, while the old Amy broke up with her crew ashore. Second-class outward ships of four hundred and fifty-three men between them, and the small Lorrendraayer of fifty-two, thus furnished the heaviest Dutch death-roll; the third-class pair split between a half-lost crew and a ship high on the land. [3]
On the English side the Addison at Salt River mouth was the worst single case among the three Indiamen: ten men only reached land from a crew of eighty. The Chandos, already once dismasted at sea and lying close to the castle, lost two. The Nightingale, high and little broken, lost one from one hundred and forty. The June disaster thus struck both flags in the same roadstead and left Chavonnes’s government to bury, salvage, and report on a scale the Cape had not yet known. [3]
After the calamity the governor stood on the beach among the bodies and wreckage washed ashore. The year had already taken two fully loaded return ships in January; June now added the cleared roadstead and six hundred and sixty dead. Chavonnes, who kept expense down and embarked on no costly new undertakings, faced in a single dawn a loss of men and property that no quiet administration could have budgeted. The Castle’s road to the shore, dangerous even to walk while the minute-guns fired, became in daylight a salvage ground. [3] [9]
Schoonberg Run Ashore near Cape Agulhas — 20 November 1722
On the 20th of November of the same disastrous year the Schoonberg, homeward bound with a valuable cargo, was run ashore near Cape Agulhas in broad daylight and in fine weather through the culpable negligence of her officers. The ship broke up, but all on board got safely to shore. No storm justified the stranding; the entire company walked free while the cargo went with the hull. [3] [9]
That November loss differed in kind from the June gale. The Table Bay disaster had been a north-west and then north-north-west storm that no cable held; the Agulhas stranding was a daylight error on a fine-weather coast. Coming five months after six hundred and sixty deaths in Table Bay and ten months after the ocean foundering of the Sampson and Amstelveen, the Schoonberg wreck extended the year’s shipping toll from open-sea return fleet to roadstead catastrophe to a third loss on the Agulhas coast. [3] [9]
Within calendar 1722 the Agulhas stranding closed the known major ship losses tied to the Cape sea-lanes under Chavonnes. The governor who had stood on the Table Bay beach in June now had a third wreck to report, this one without drowning and without weather as excuse. Cargo and hull were gone; the people were not. The year that had restored wheat export in thousands of muids thus ended, at sea, as the most disastrous yet known for the Company’s fleets on this coast. [3]
Church and Administration under Chavonnes — 1722
Inland and in Table Valley the ordinary machinery of the colony continued under the same heads who had closed 1721. The Rev. Mr. D’Ailly remained first clergyman of the Cape. Lambertus Slicher, of Middelburg, rector of the school and an ordained clergyman, who had held his first assisting service on the 15th of June 1721 after permission obtained from the Seventeen through the governor and council, still served in that assisting capacity and still performed the duty of rector. He was well versed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, had been appointed rector of the High School at Cape Town, and took pupils as boarders at his house. The organ subscribed for the Cape church in 1720 already belonged to the completed fabric of town worship. [3] [8]
At Drakenstein the Rev. Petrus van Aken held the pulpit in the church completed in 1720. Funds for that building had come 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 from the poor fund. At Stellenbosch the Rev. Mr. Bek remained while the replacement church, begun in 1717 after the fire, rose on poor-fund money, collections, a Cape consistory loan from a consistory that then had over £9,300 to the good, and a lottery permitted by the directors. [3]
Secunde Jan de la Fontaine, chosen after Abraham Cranendonk’s death on the 8th of October 1721, acted through 1722 pending the directors’ pleasure. Fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont still held his office. Chavonnes himself kept the good will of directors and colonists by avoiding costly new undertakings, holding down expense, and preserving concord. The metropolitan honour that had reached the Cape on the 1st of June 1721—ordinary councillor of India, a dignity enjoyed by none of his predecessors—still framed his rank while the June gale and the Delagoa raid tested the practical limits of a quiet administration at a refreshment port. [3]
In the castle secretariat a younger servant moved up. Rijk Tulbagh, born on the 21st of May 1699, had arrived in 1716 as a teenager of sixteen, the most junior of juniors at twelve guilders a month, to assist storekeeper Jan de la Fontaine. He remained as junior until 1722, when he was raised to the post of chief clerk to the secretary of the council of policy. Hendrik Swellengrebel was then secretary; Tulbagh became his senior clerk. The warehouse had taught him to handle goods; the council taught him to handle men. The promotion stayed inside the year: it did not yet carry a council vote or a merchant’s rank. [3] [9]
Since 1722 the officers of government at the Cape were permitted to have gardens for their own use, not exceeding two morgen in extent; they were prohibited from selling anything out of them or from trafficking in any manner whatever with farm produce. Their salaries were insufficient for their decent maintenance, but the garden privilege of this year was a household allowance, not a licence to trade. The East India Company, upon whose fortunes the colony greatly depended, closed on the 31st of December 1722 a ten-year run of dividends at thirty-seven per cent per annum upon the paid-up capital. That year-end figure was the peak decade of the Company’s prosperity as later counted from the Cape. Chavonnes’s quiet books and the restored wheat export sat, at the close of the calendar, against a Company still paying at that high rate while Table Bay’s wrecks and Fort Lagoa’s raid had already shown how suddenly men and cargo could be lost. [3]
Du Buisson’s Death and Gardiol’s Inventory — 1722
Inland Huguenot households recorded their own closures in the same calendar. David du Buisson of Rochelle, who had married in August 1707 Claudine Lombard, daughter of the refugee Pierre Lombard, had been living in Hottentots Holland in 1716. He was schoolmaster to the children of Pierre Joubert. In 1722 he died. The death removed a French schoolmaster from a ward that still counted old people who did not understand Dutch, even as Van Aken’s Drakenstein church, completed two years earlier, conducted ordinary worship for the valley. [3] [8]
Jean Gardiol signed as witness to an inventory in 1722. His name had appeared on the burgher roll of Drakenstein for 1690, when he was living at Drakenstein and was mentioned as compagnon with the three brothers de Villiers. In 1700 he was living in the Stellenbosch district, unmarried. The 1722 signature placed him still among the valley’s French names in the year of the Table Bay gale, a witness on paper while wheat wagons moved again and the Castle counted wrecks. [8]
Those two notices—a schoolmaster’s death at Hottentots Holland and a Drakenstein burgher’s hand on an inventory—did not alter the Castle’s wreck list or the Delagoa raid. They mark the same year among the French farms: Du Buisson gone, Gardiol still witnessing, Van Aken still in the Drakenstein pulpit, Bek still at Stellenbosch while the replacement church rose. Calendar 1722 thus closed with restored wheat, failed tobacco and wine samples, Fort Lagoa plundered, six hundred and sixty dead in Table Bay, the Schoonberg ashore at Agulhas, Tulbagh at the secretary’s table, officers limited to two-morgen gardens, and the Huguenot roll one name shorter. [3] [8]