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
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 1722 nearly three thousand five hundred muids of wheat left the colony. Calendar 1723 followed with over four thousand muids, 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 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 1723 figure did not restore those mid-decade totals, but it put Indian-bound wheat back on the books in commercial quantity for a second successive year. 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 remained a separate pressure. Horned cattle and sheep had been attacked from 1714 by a sickness unknown before; by 1718 it was so difficult to obtain animals for slaughter that when the meat contract was offered at auction there was not a single bidder, and the sheep in burgher hands had decreased by nearly fifty-six thousand. A private arrangement with Jacob van der Heiden had then been necessary, at three pence a pound for meat and twelve shillings and sixpence for live sheep. The placaat of 2 July 1720 still 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, had made loud complaints in Europe; the directors issued instructions that they should be treated as well as possible. Grain, however, was once more a Cape surplus article. [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 gave the inland year its character: magazines and free farmers shipping grain seaward while the Castle watched a recovering roadstead and a battered Delagoa dependency. Two successive commercial harvests—nearly thirty-five hundred muids, then over four thousand—did not refill the mid-decade magazines, but they ended the stretch in which fifty-one muids had been sent only to keep the name of exportation alive. India could again be spoken of as a wheat customer, and the return ships could again look to the Cape for beans, peas, and husked barley instead of rice. [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. Eighteen of the post had joined the raiders. The chart-maker De Bucquoi had been compelled to pilot them out, and the packet Kaap had been taken. Upon learning what had occurred, the council of policy had 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 at the bay, but he died before the news of his appointment reached the station. A subaltern, 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. The fort party was nevertheless 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 African 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. The iron-mountain rumour that would draw Jan Christoffel Stefler inland in August sat on that same thin knowledge: beads for dust, no map of the mines, and a fort still recovering from raid and isolation. [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. The post that sent them was still a fever station with a plundered store, a missing packet, and no settled map of copper or gold. An inland march of nineteen was a large cut from such a complement. [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. For a few days the march seemed to justify the risk taken from a fever post still recovering from raid and isolation. The iron mountain itself had not yet been reached; the country inland of the bay, a few miles of which had already been walked after relief, now opened into forested kloofs and well-watered grass. [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 copper mines remained unlocated. The gold dust still arrived in quantities too small to pay a station, and still without a road that the fort could follow. The failure closed the principal inland push of 1723 from Fort Lagoa. [3]
Jan Michel remained at the head of the occupation through the rest of the calendar. The Cape council continued to treat the bay as a dependency under ordinary appeal. A packet intended to tighten the sea link between Table Bay and Fort Lagoa was already on her passage out from Texel when Stefler’s survivors walked back: the little Meteren, whose loss in November would underline how thin that link remained after the buccaneer stroke and the iron-mountain failure. [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]
Slicher was of Middelburg. Before coming out he had served six years as chaplain of the troops at Lillo. Differences and animosity in that congregation led him to resign. He entered the Company’s service as a midshipman on the ’t Vaderland Getrouw and in that capacity arrived at the Cape in the same year as Petrus van Aken, 1714. He was well versed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was shortly appointed rector of the high school just established at Cape Town; he took pupils as boarders at his house. He held good testimonials from the ministers of the places where he had officiated. In 1721, while still rector, he obtained permission from the Seventeen, through the intercession of the Cape governor and council, to preach now and again in the town church. [8]
He still continued to perform the duty of rector of the school, though on the 16th of 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] [8]
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. He was born at Utrecht, where his father Arnoldus van Aken lived. His wife Anna Margaretha Bolwerk was related by marriage to the family of Governor Chavonnes, who with several members of that family had come to the Cape; Chavonnes himself belonged to an old Huguenot house, and several of the family stood sponsors to Van Aken’s children. The Drakenstein church had been funded by 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. [3] [8]
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 loan from the Cape consistory—which then had over £9,300 to the good—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
Paul Roux of Orange, the first teacher and voorlezer of the French congregation, died at Drakenstein on the 7th of February 1723, having filled the post for thirty-five years. The Company had taken him into service on the 8th of November 1688 as parish clerk and schoolmaster to the French community, at twenty-five shillings a month and twelve shillings and sixpence ration allowance, chosen for good conduct and proofs of ability. He had married, first, Claudine Seugnet of Saintonge, and later Elizabeth Couvret, widow of the refugee Josue Cellier. [8]
When he died there were still some twenty-five or twenty-six old people of the original arrivals living who did not understand Dutch. The Drakenstein consistory requested the council of policy to appoint another French sick-comforter, or parish clerk, in his stead, so that those elderly members would not be deprived of public divine service in French. The request preserved a linguistic memory of the Huguenot settlement inside a congregation that had otherwise moved toward Dutch public worship. French services were still held in 1718; the directors had long wished the French tongue superseded as soon as possible, but mention of it in public had not yet disappeared from the records. [3] [8]
The council, on the 23rd of February 1723, decided that for the present the place of the late Mr. Roux was not to be filled, but that the directors would be communicated with. The members knew the Seventeen’s intention that services at Drakenstein should be conducted in Dutch only, so that the people might become accustomed to that tongue. They declined to make the appointment until the pleasure of the directors could be made known. [3] [8]
On the 28th of February the Drakenstein church council recorded the announcement. It was resolved that this be made known to the people, “which we can perceive will give our French congregation no satisfaction”; and further, that they be asked whether they would maintain a French parish clerk at their own expense. The February refusal therefore did not close the language question in silence: it put cost as well as metropolitan policy before a shrinking elderly minority. [8]
On the 20th of March 1723 the Cape wrote to the Chamber of Amsterdam. The minister and church council of Drakenstein had asked that, on account of the death of the French parish clerk, another person be chosen to fill the post, as some twenty-five or twenty-six old people in the district did not understand Dutch very well and would otherwise be deprived of public divine services in French. Taking into consideration the small number, and above all the orders and intentions of the Seventeen to have the religious services there conducted in Dutch so as to teach it to the settlers, the council had decided not to agree to the request, but to place the matter before their Excellencies and to ask for honoured commands. The February induction of Slicher at the Cape and the March letter on Roux’s vacant clerkship thus marked, in the same season, how the Company 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 referred to the Netherlands. [8]
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. The packet that Fort Lagoa needed after the loss of the Kaap thus never took up her station. [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. A west-coast stranding, a scurvy passage, and a three-and-a-half-week walk for the able-bodied half of the survivors thus closed the year’s principal shipping disaster on the same coast that had, the year before, seen six hundred and sixty men perish in Table Bay and the Schoonberg run ashore in daylight at Agulhas. [3]
The Meteren loss 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 Agulhas stranding of the Schoonberg—while underlining how thin the packet link to Fort Lagoa remained after the buccaneer stroke and the Stefler failure. No replacement packet of that name took up the bay service in the remainder of the calendar. [3]
Shipping, Fleets, and the 1715–1724 Roadstead — around 1723
After the peace of Utrecht on the 11th of April 1713 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. Calendar 1723 sat inside that denser second decade, a year of restored wheat and a lost packet, not of a gale that emptied the bay. [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. [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]
From the year 1723 the Company’s annual dividends began to drop from the thirty-seven per cent per annum upon paid-up capital that had been paid for the ten years ending 31 December 1722. The colony’s fortunes still depended on that Company. Wheat wagons moving again, a denser licensed traffic in Table Bay, and a quiet governor’s books sat against a metropolitan dividend that had passed its peak. At the Cape there was less opportunity for the ostentation and fraud then spreading in some Asiatic dependencies, because the colonists were not the people to submit tamely to wrong of any kind; but the refreshment station felt the Company’s tighter years in the pressure to keep expense down and to make Delagoa pay. [3] [9]
Chavonnes, De la Fontaine, and Ordinary Administration — 1723
Governor Chavonnes preserved the good will of directors and colonists by embarking in no costly new undertakings, keeping down expense, and preserving concord. He was a quiet, religious man. No haughtiness, pride, or coldness sat in the face of Maurice, Marquis Pasques de Chavonnes, though his name and descent could have given it such characteristics: his nobility was seated in his soul. He had been born in The Hague on the 23rd of July 1654, son of Pierre, Marquis de Chavonnes, whose house had left France after the massacre of St Bartholomew. He had served the States General as lieutenant-colonel, colonel, and brigadier, and as military governor of Bergen-op-Zoom, before Pensionary Heinsius’s recommendation sent him to the Cape. He arrived on the 28th of March 1714 as governor and councillor extraordinary of the Indies, with strict instructions to economise. [3] [9]
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. A verse that closed the journal for one of the years when he was at the head of affairs might have served him as motto: Geluckigh is hy die syn tyd in stille rust en weldoen slyt—happy is he who spends his time in quiet rest and well-doing. [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. He had been working his way upwards during the eleven years of his residence in South Africa. Sailing as bookkeeper on the Horstendal on her return from Ceylon in 1710, he had been detained at the Cape by commissioner Johan van Hoorn and appointed storekeeper. By 1723 he was the settlement’s second officer in all but confirmed rank. Fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont still held office. [3] [9]
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. One named arrival of the calendar was Jean Blignault of Amsterdam, son of Pieter Blignault and Elisabeth Desbordes, who entered the Company’s service in 1723. [3] [8]
Chavonnes’s quiet books, De la Fontaine at the secunde’s table, Van Beaumont as fiscal, D’Ailly and Slicher in the town pulpit, Van Aken at Drakenstein, and Bek at Stellenbosch thus framed ordinary administration through a year whose inland surplus was wheat and whose outward risks were Fort Lagoa and the Meteren. The governor who had taken the Cape with orders to economise still held both the colonists’ good will and the directors’ ordinary-councillor dignity while the Company’s dividend, from this year, began to fall. [3] [9]
Huguenot Deaths and the Drakenstein Teak Pulpit — 1723
Inland Huguenot households recorded their own closures in the same calendar. Roux’s death on the 7th of February was the first. On the 11th of June 1723 Jacques Bisseux of Picardy, who had come in the Vosmaar in 1696 as a freeman and who in 1720 was described as a baker, died and was buried in the churchyard at Cape Town. His son Pieter, by his first wife Marie le Febre, was later described as from Middelburg in Zeeland; Jacques had remarried Elizabeth Posseaux of Paris. [8]
On the 12th of September 1723 Amand Veron of Malines, or Mechelen, died. He had arrived in the Bosweyk in 1687 as a soldier in the Company’s service, become a burgher on the 28th of November 1690, and on the 1st of February 1699 been granted the farm St. Omer in Dal Josaphat, Drakenstein. He was stated to have been born at St. Thomas, and at his death was sixty-two years of age; he left no wife or child. Jean Imbert, born at Nîmes in Languedoc, agriculturist at Drakenstein and grantee of the farm Languedoc along the Palmiet River, also died in 1723. He instituted as his heir Pierre Joubert of Provence, agriculturist at Drakenstein, in recognition of faithful services rendered; he does not appear to have married. [8]
On the 28th of October 1723 Pierre Jourdaan died. He had lived on the farm Cabrière, which came to his son Joseph. He had married first Anna Fouché, who died about 1713 leaving children Anna, Joseph, and Susanna, and then Maria Verdeau, daughter of the refugee Hercule Verdeau. In their joint will of 1719 he described himself as between fifty-six and fifty-seven and she as nineteen. Gideon Malherbe, born 1663, who had arrived in 1688 in the Voorschoten as a bachelor and was later described with wife Marie Grillion, also died in 1723, leaving issue. Two farms mentioned in his deceased estate were De Groene Fonteyn and Hexenberg. [8]
The Drakenstein church itself took a carpenter’s repair in the same year. The windows of the new church had been 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 strewn before every service. Up to 1720 beer glasses and a slop basin had served for communion and font; after that a silver service was authorised. About a year after the consecration, severe storms caused a portion of the northern gable and a corner twenty feet in extent to fall in, carrying the roof with it, which ruined the pulpit and churchwardens’ pews. In 1723 a new teak pulpit, on the pattern of the old one, was built. Van Aken still preached from that repaired interior while Roux’s clerkship stayed vacant and the French elderly were told that a comforter of their own tongue would not be appointed unless they paid for him themselves. [8]
Those notices—a voorlezer’s death in February, a baker buried in the Cape churchyard in June, Veron at St. Omer in September, Jourdaan at Cabrière in October, Imbert of Languedoc and Malherbe of Groene Fonteyn in the same calendar, a teak pulpit raised where the storm had smashed the old, and Blignault taken into Company service—did not alter the Castle’s wheat tally or the Meteren’s wreck list. They mark the same year among the French farms: Roux gone, the clerkship referred to Amsterdam, Van Aken still in the Drakenstein pulpit, Bek still at Stellenbosch while the replacement church rose. Calendar 1723 thus closed with more than four thousand muids of wheat exported, Fort Lagoa’s iron-mountain party broken at a river, a packet lost north of the Elephant river, Slicher inducted beside D’Ailly, and the Huguenot roll several names shorter. [3] [8]