Boer History1723 at the Cape of Good Hope: Wheat Export over Four Thousand Muids, Stefler Expedition, Meteren Wreck, and Slicher Induction
Wheat Export over Four Thousand Muids — 1723
The harvest recovery that had restored nearly three thousand five hundred muids of wheat to the export books in 1722 strengthened again in calendar 1723. Over four thousand muids left the colony, carrying the Cape past the token shipments of the dry sequence and past the first restored figure of the previous year. [3]
Those four thousand-odd muids stood against the memory of four lean seasons under Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes: poor harvests in 1718 and 1719, less than a hundred muids outward in 1720, and the rice-and-token year of 1721, when fifty-one muids had gone to Batavia only to keep the name of exportation alive. The winter rains of 1721 had broken that drought stretch; by 1723 the magazines and free farmers were again shipping wheat in commercial quantity toward India. [3]
Meat supply remained a separate pressure. Disease among horned cattle and sheep, the private meat contract with Jacob van der Heiden, and the live-animal placaat of 2 July 1720 still framed the cost of fresh provisions for Company tables and foreign ships. Grain, however, was once more a Cape surplus article, and the calendar year opened with wheat seaward while the Castle watched a recovering roadstead and a battered Delagoa dependency. [3]
Delagoa Bay after the Buccaneers — Relief, Gold, Ivory, and Copper — 1723
At Delagoa Bay the occupation that had sailed from Table Bay on the 14th of February 1721 had already lost two-thirds of its first party to fever and had then suffered the buccaneer capture of Fort Lagoa on the 19th of April 1722. The fort party had been cut off from the outer world until relief came in due course. Exploration of the country a few miles inland was then completed. [3]
A little gold was brought by black traders from the interior to exchange for beads. The whole quantity was less than two ounces, yet it was enough to excite hope at the bay and at the Cape. The carriers asserted that they had travelled three moons and a half; that claim was not credited. The first who came had a small scale with pebbles of different sizes for weights, from which it was known that he had dealt before with white men, probably Portuguese. [3]
Over two tons of ivory and four hundred and ninety pounds of copper were also procured. The locality of the copper mines could not be fixed, because the local people either could not or would not give clear information. Trade, barter, and short-range exploration thus filled the months after relief while Jan Michel still headed the post and the Cape council treated the bay as a dependency under ordinary appeal and serious-case rules. [3]
Among the bay’s later personal links with the wider Atlantic world was a nephew of the powerful chief Maphumbo who had been to England, received in baptism the name John, spoke English fluently, and had been sent back to Delagoa Bay in 1723. His return belonged to the same thin corridor of contact that gold dust, ivory, and copper kept open between the fort and the interior. [3]
Stefler’s Iron-Mountain Expedition — 9 August 1723
A report of an iron mountain some distance inland drew a party of nineteen men under the secunde Jan Christoffel Stefler to go in search of it. They left Fort Lagoa on the 9th of August 1723 with three pack oxen to carry provisions. [3]
At the end of a week they were in a charming country. In mountain kloofs stood magnificent forests; the soil was rich and covered with long grass; streams of fresh water were numerous; and different kinds of game, particularly elephants, were seen in great abundance. The march seemed for a few days to justify the risk taken from a fever post still recovering from raid and isolation. [3]
When crossing a river, the leading division of the exploring party was attacked and destroyed by a band of local people. No one capable of giving directions was then left among the survivors, and those who remained returned to the bay. The iron mountain was not reached. The failure closed the principal inland push of 1723 from Fort Lagoa and left the copper and gold questions still unanswered when, in May 1724, Jan van de Capelle would be named provisional commandant after Michel asked to be relieved. [3]
Slicher Formally Inducted as Assistant Clergyman — February 1723
In the Cape church, matters had assumed a satisfactory aspect under the ordinary town establishment. The Rev. Mr. D’Ailly remained first or chief clergyman of the Cape. The rector of the school, the Rev. Lambertus Slicher, was an ordained clergyman who had at first served as sick-comforter only. In that capacity he had come to the settlement; then, at the request of the local authorities and with the consent of the directors, he began to assist in the church. His first service had been held on the 15th of June 1721. [3]
He still continued to perform the duty of rector of the school, though in February 1723 he was formally inducted as second or assistant clergyman of the Cape congregation. The double load—school rectorship and assisting pulpit—thus received metropolitan and local recognition in the same winter that the wheat export crossed four thousand muids. The organ subscribed for the Cape church in 1720 already belonged to the completed fabric of town worship beside D’Ailly and Slicher. [3]
At Drakenstein the Rev. Petrus van Aken, appointed by the directors and arrived in August 1714, held the pulpit in the church completed in 1720. At Stellenbosch the Rev. Mr. Bek remained while the replacement church, begun in 1717 after the fire, continued to draw on the poor fund, special collections, a Cape consistory loan, and a lottery permitted by the directors. The three congregations thus entered 1723 with settled ministers and with the Cape town church now formally two-handed in the pulpit. [3]
French Sick-Comforter for Drakenstein Declined — 23 February 1723
When Paul Roux died, the Drakenstein consistory requested the council of policy to appoint another French sick-comforter in his stead, as there were still some twenty-five or twenty-six old people living who did not understand Dutch. The request preserved a linguistic memory of the Huguenot settlement inside a congregation that had otherwise moved toward Dutch public worship. [3]
The council, on the 23rd of February 1723, declined to make the appointment until the pleasure of the directors could be made known. Their decision, when it came, was unfavourable. No new French sick-comforter replaced Roux under that application. The handful of elderly French-speakers remained without a dedicated comforter of their own tongue while Van Aken continued the ordinary Dutch ministry of the completed Drakenstein church. [3]
The February refusal sat in the same month as Slicher’s formal induction at the Cape. Together the two decisions marked how the Company and the Cape council ordered language and staff: an ordained assistant was confirmed for the town church, while a special French comforter for a shrinking elderly minority at Drakenstein was not. [3]
Wreck of the Meteren north of the Elephant River — 7 November 1723
The next wreck on the coast after the Schoonberg stranding near Cape Agulhas on the 20th of November 1722 fell on the 7th of November 1723, when a little vessel named the Meteren, on her passage out to be employed as a packet between the Cape and Delagoa Bay, was lost a little to the north of the mouth of the Elephant river. [3]
She had left Texel with a crew of twenty-nine souls. Scurvy made its appearance, and six died on the passage; of the others, only ten were at length able to work. In a calm her anchor was dropped close to the coast, but a swell set in; she dragged and was cast ashore a complete wreck. Five men were drowned. [3]
The remaining eighteen got to land. Nine of them, who could walk, wandered about for twenty-five days before they were found. The others were believed to have died of want. The Meteren loss thus joined a small outward packet intended for the Cape–Delagoa run to the earlier disasters of 1722—the ocean foundering of the Sampson and Amstelveen, the June gale that cleared Table Bay, and the daylight Agulhas stranding of the Schoonberg—while underlining how thin the packet link to Fort Lagoa remained after the buccaneer stroke and the Stefler failure. [3]
Shipping, Fleets, and the 1715–1724 Roadstead — around 1723
After the peace of Utrecht on the 11th of April 1718 closed a twelve-year war with France, the Company enlarged its commerce and built first-class ships carrying from two hundred and eighty to three hundred and fifty men each. After 1715 the number of persons visiting the Cape every year was much greater than before. [3]
During the fifteen years from 1 January 1700 to 31 December 1714, one thousand and seven ships put into Table Bay, or on average sixty-seven yearly—of which 683 were Dutch, 280 English, 36 Danish, 6 French, and 2 Portuguese. During the ten years from 1 January 1715 to 31 December 1724, the number that called was eight hundred and seventy-one, or on average eighty-seven yearly—of which 645 were Dutch, 192 English, 17 French, 10 Danish, 4 Portuguese, and 3 Flemish. Calendar 1723 sat inside that denser second decade. [3]
Company ships still assembled in Table Bay to return to Europe in a fleet. The slowest sailers left Batavia first and usually arrived in January; then came the Ceylon squadron, and last the late ships from Batavia. They endeavoured to leave about the end of March or beginning of April. Twenty to thirty large ships setting sail together formed the summer fleet, often 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. English vessels sometimes sailed in company with the summer fleet. [3]
Interlopers remained under tight exclusion. After English government protest against assistance formerly given to private traders, an arrangement between the Assembly of Seventeen and the English Company directors barred each from permitting interlopers to obtain anything in their ports. An English vessel without a royal commission or proper East India Company credentials was warned to make sail at once, with no intercourse allowed with the shore. Flemish ships putting in for supplies were treated the same way. The crowded legitimate roadstead of the mid-1720s thus ran beside a closed door for unlicensed traders. [3]
Chavonnes, De la Fontaine, and Ordinary Administration — 1723
Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes preserved the good will of directors and colonists by embarking in no costly new undertakings, keeping down expense, and preserving concord. He was remembered as a quiet, religious man. The directors were so well satisfied that they had raised him to ordinary councillor of India—a dignity none of his Cape predecessors had enjoyed—news of which had reached the Cape on the 1st of June 1721 and still framed his rank through 1723. [3]
Secunde Jan de la Fontaine, chosen by the council of policy after Abraham Cranendonk’s death on the 8th of October 1721, continued to act through 1723 pending the directors’ pleasure. His confirmation by the Assembly of Seventeen would come only in 1724. Fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont still held office; he would die on the 14th of June 1724, when the council would select Adriaan van Kervel to act until a new appointment could be made. [3]
During the broader period 1714 to 1724 the names of but few new colonists appear in the surviving record. Among those noted are van Breda, Hermanus Combrinck, Jan Hop, Hendrik Klopper, Hermanus Kriel, Daniel Krynouw, Abraham Peltzer, Melt van der Spuy, Jan de Waal, and Pieter Wion. The list marks a slow intake of new free surnames rather than a mass immigration year inside 1723 itself. [3]
Horse sickness, first recorded as a severe new plague in 1719, had not left the settlement. Cattle and sheep disease from the mid-decade still shaped meat prices and foreign provisioning rules. Against that stock pressure the wheat surplus of 1723 and the ordinary church and council machinery under Chavonnes gave the year its inland character while Delagoa and the Meteren carried the year’s outward risk. [3]
Close of 1723 at the Cape
By the end of 1723 the Cape under Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes had exported over four thousand muids of wheat, extending the recovery begun with nearly three thousand five hundred muids in 1722. At Delagoa Bay, after relief from the 1722 buccaneer capture of Fort Lagoa, a little gold under two ounces, over two tons of ivory, and four hundred and ninety pounds of copper changed hands, while Jan Christoffel Stefler’s nineteen-man iron-mountain party left on the 9th of August, reached rich country in a week, and lost its leading division in a river crossing before the survivors returned. In February Lambertus Slicher was formally inducted as assistant clergyman of the Cape congregation while still rector of the school; on the 23rd of February the council declined a new French sick-comforter for Drakenstein’s remaining elderly non-Dutch speakers until the directors’ unfavourable pleasure was known. On the 7th of November the packet Meteren, outward from Texel with twenty-nine souls for the Cape–Delagoa run, wrecked north of the Elephant river mouth after scurvy and a dragging anchor: six dead on passage, five drowned, eighteen ashore, nine wandering twenty-five days. Table Bay remained a busy legitimate roadstead inside the denser 1715–1724 shipping decade, with summer and winter fleets and a closed door to interlopers. De la Fontaine acted as secunde, Van Beaumont as fiscal, D’Ailly and Slicher at the Cape church, Van Aken at Drakenstein, and Bek at Stellenbosch. The calendar thus joined a strong wheat year and settled town church staff to a failed Delagoa inland probe and another small coastal wreck on the packet line. [3]