Boer History1724 at the Cape of Good Hope: Chavonnes’s Death, De la Fontaine Acting, Five Thousand Muids, Rhenius Namaqua, and Van Aken
Wheat Export over Five Thousand Muids — 1724
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. Calendar 1724 carried the restored surplus past that figure: over five thousand muids were exported, the largest India-bound wheat shipment of the Chavonnes years. [3]
Those five thousand-odd muids stood against four lean seasons and two recovering harvests 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 1724 figure did not restore those mid-decade totals, but it put Indian-bound wheat back on the books in commercial quantity for a third successive year, and for the first time above five thousand muids. 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. Grain, however, was once more a Cape surplus article, and in 1724 the surplus passed five thousand muids. [3]
The directors, having gained experience of the uncertainty of the seasons in South Africa, already treated a full harvest as something to be used with caution. 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 1724 gave the inland year its grain character: magazines and free farmers shipping seaward while the Castle watched a recovering roadstead, a battered Delagoa dependency, and a governor in his seventieth year. Three successive commercial harvests—nearly thirty-five hundred muids, then over four thousand, then over five 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. From the year 1723 the Company’s annual dividends had begun to drop, decreasing in one decade from thirty-seven per cent to twenty-one. Cape affairs required whatever boost the harvest could give. Five thousand muids of wheat did not restore Batavia’s old magazines, but they were the inland year’s answer to a metropolitan dividend already past its peak. [3] [9]
Winter Sand-Planting of the Cape Flats — 1724
The isthmus connecting the Cape peninsula with the continent was at this time a barren waste of sand. With difficulty laden waggons traversed it, for there was no road, and nothing but a line of poles indicated the best course across. From reports of skippers, the directors were led to believe that Table Bay would at no very distant date be filled with the sand which violent south-east gales swept into it during the summer months. To prevent this, they issued instructions that attempts should be made to fix the sand by planting it with grass and trees. [3]
In the winter of 1724 the work was commenced. Seventy slaves and a gang of convicts were employed in planting knot-grass and seeds of the wild olive. The labour sat on the same sand that burgher waggons already crossed with difficulty between Table Valley and the continent: a treeless isthmus whose summer gales the Seventeen now feared as a threat to the roadstead itself. Calendar 1724 thus opened a new kind of Company work at the Cape—not a fort, not a church, not a Delagoa reinforcement, but an attempt to pin drifting sand with grass and seed before the next south-easter filled the bay. [3]
The planting belonged to Chavonnes’s last winter and to De la Fontaine’s first months as acting head. It did not change the character of the flats overnight. Laden waggons still followed poles across a waste; the Castle still drew its inland grain and meat over that same sand; and the directors’ fear of a silted Table Bay still hung over a roadstead that, in the decade just closing, had never been busier. What 1724 fixed was the start: seventy slaves, a convict gang, knot-grass, and wild-olive seed on the isthmus, under orders from the Netherlands that the Cape should try to hold the sand. [3]
Shipping of the Decade 1715–1724
On the 11th of April 1713 the peace of Utrecht had concluded a war with France of twelve years’ duration. The Company then resolved to enlarge its commerce, and a number of 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, 683 were Dutch, 280 English, 36 Danish, 6 French, and 2 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, 645 were Dutch, 192 English, 17 French, 10 Danish, 4 Portuguese, and 3 Flemish. Calendar 1724 thus closed a denser decade than the fifteen years that had preceded it: twenty more ships a year on average, a heavier Dutch majority, fewer English callers than in the earlier stretch, and a small Flemish presence that the Castle treated with the same closed door it showed to unlicensed English traders. [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 here 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, and it was something worth seeing when twenty to thirty large ships set their sails and stood away together. This was called the summer fleet, and it usually carried to Europe merchandise which had cost from five to seven hundred thousand pounds sterling. Sometimes a number of English vessels sailed in its company. The winter fleet was much smaller, often consisting of only three or four ships. [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 1724 thus ran beside a closed door for unlicensed traders, in the last full year of a decade that had averaged eighty-seven callers where the years before 1715 had averaged sixty-seven. [3]
Jan van de Capelle Provisional Commandant at Fort Lagoa — May 1724
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, suffered the buccaneer capture of Fort Lagoa on the 19th of April 1722, and in August 1723 lost the leading division of Jan Christoffel Stefler’s nineteen-man iron-mountain party on a river crossing inland. A little gold had been brought by African traders from the interior to exchange for beads—less than two ounces, yet enough to excite hope. Over two tons of ivory and four hundred and ninety pounds of copper had also been procured. The locality of the copper mines could not be fixed. [3]
In May 1724 an active junior officer, named Jan van de Capelle, was appointed provisional commandant of Fort Lagoa, as Jan Michel had requested to be relieved. It was not a place to which people went willingly, for the climate had the reputation of being, in the summer season, one of the most deadly in the world. Van de Capelle’s provisional charge therefore closed Michel’s headship without promising a healthier bay or a richer interior: the fort still sat on English river’s left bank, trade in ivory, copper, and scant gold dust still depended on carriers from inland, and the Cape council still treated serious cases and appeals as business of the castle of Good Hope. [3]
Calendar 1724 thus opened the Delagoa file under a new name while the Cape itself remained under Chavonnes and acting secunde Jan de la Fontaine. The bay’s fever reputation, thin gold hope, and costly reinforcement history all rode with the provisional commandant’s appointment. Nothing in the May change reversed the pattern that had already cost Van Taak, Swertner, and so many soldiers their lives at the outpost. The Castle still hoped that seasoned survivors and a junior officer’s energy might hold a factory the Portuguese had abandoned in 1692 and the Company had occupied as a Cape dependency in 1721. [3]
For the men still at the bay, the year meant another summer of deadly reputation under a new provisional head, and another thin corridor of beads, ivory, copper, and rumour toward the interior. For the council at the Cape it meant one more name on a costly file that had already taken two commanders, a chart-maker, a packet, and an exploring division. Van de Capelle’s May appointment did not reopen the iron mountain or locate the copper mines; it kept the post alive under Cape appeal while Chavonnes’s last months ran out in Table Valley. [3]
De la Fontaine Confirmed Secunde; Van Beaumont Dies; Van Kervel and Tulbagh — 1724
On the 8th of October 1721 secunde Abraham Cranendonk had died. The council of policy had then chosen Jan de la Fontaine, who had been working his way upward during eleven years of residence in South Africa, to act as secunde until the pleasure of the directors could be known. Through 1722 and 1723 he had held that acting place under Chavonnes while fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont still filled the independent fiscal’s chair. In 1724 the Assembly of Seventeen confirmed the appointment. The confirmation closed more than two years of provisional rank for a merchant who had risen inside the Cape establishment rather than arriving with a sealed commission from the Netherlands. [3]
De la Fontaine, in full Jan de la Fontaine dit Wicart, had been born in Amsterdam on the 23rd of April 1684, son of the silk merchant Jacques de la Fontaine, whose parents had left Valenciennes in French Flanders, and of Barbara van den Burgh of Dutch Calvinist stock. He had been baptised in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, not in the Walloon church. In his early twenties he joined the Company and served in junior ranks in the Indies until Governor-General van Hoorn, afterwards commissioner at the Cape, detained him from the returning Horstendal in 1710 and appointed him storekeeper. Two years after arrival, though still a junior merchant, he sat on the council of policy. In 1717 he was made a fully-fledged merchant. In May 1711 he had married Maria Elizabeth, nineteen-year-old daughter of secunde Andries de Man. He was a tall man; everyone in the little town called him Jan. He was also the first man named to head the Cape government whose previous career had been made at the Cape itself: fourteen years of uninterrupted colonial service from the Horstendal detention onward, honesty and intelligence already noticed in the Indies, and a storekeeper’s training that had taught him goods before the council taught him men. The Seventeen in Amsterdam and the subjects in Table Valley were, for once, in agreement that Jan was the proper choice when the governor’s chair stood empty. [9]
On the 14th of June 1724 the fiscal independent, Cornelis van Beaumont, died. The council of policy selected Adriaan van Kervel, who had been sixteen years in service at the Cape, to act until a new appointment could be made by the directors. He also was later confirmed in his office. The June vacancy and local acting choice repeated the pattern already used for the secunde after Cranendonk’s death: the Cape council filled the independent fiscal’s seat from men already seasoned on the establishment, then waited on Amsterdam. Van Kervel’s sixteen years of Cape service made him the natural interim holder while the settlement still laboured under cattle scarcity, Delagoa expense, and ordinary church and fleet business under Chavonnes. [3]
By mid-year, therefore, the castle’s senior civil line ran Chavonnes as governor, De la Fontaine as confirmed secunde, and Van Kervel as acting fiscal independent. That triangle would not last the winter. When the governor died in September and De la Fontaine was named acting head of the government, Hendrik Swellengrebel moved into the secunde’s chair, and Rijk Tulbagh was appointed secretary of the council of policy at fifty guilders a month, with free quarters in the Castle. The Rotterdam youth who had arrived in 1716 at sixteen, at twelve guilders a month, to assist storekeeper De la Fontaine, now kept a cook and a valet and wrote the council’s paper in the first days of an acting government. His father, Captain Dirk Tulbagh, had served at Bergen-op-Zoom under Chavonnes; the boy had been sent by the Rotterdam Chamber straight to the Cape rather than to the Indies; Chavonnes had been pleased with the protégé and had seen him rise to adjunct-secretary at twenty-five guilders and then to senior clerk under Swellengrebel. The September shuffle thus seated three Cape-trained men—De la Fontaine, Swellengrebel, and Tulbagh—where a Hague marquis had sat for ten years. [3] [9]
Death and State Funeral of Governor Chavonnes — September 1724
Governor Chavonnes had preserved the good will of both the directors and 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. 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 with his administration that they raised him to the rank of ordinary councillor of India, a dignity enjoyed by none of his Cape predecessors. The letter announcing that elevation had reached the Cape on the 1st of June 1721. 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. He had taken the economising knife to land rents, stamp duties, and a wine tax, decreased public works, and still kept the burghers’ esteem by tact and a religious example. He had not the spark that would have reversed the council’s 1717 preference for slave labour over European workmen; he was an honest, tactful, and firm ruler without that vision. Calendar 1724 found him in his seventieth year, still the quiet master of the Castle. [3] [9]
Shortly after that seventieth birthday the governor was suddenly taken ill on the 7th of September 1724, and died early on the following morning, the 8th of September. A few hours later the council of policy met and decided that Jan de la Fontaine should act as head of the government until an appointment could be made by the Assembly of Seventeen. His nomination as secunde had not yet been confirmed by the directors in the fuller sense later despatches would supply, and he was only in rank a merchant; but there was no other officer at the Cape in a better position. Within a few months despatches were received in which he was promoted to be a senior merchant and was approved of as secunde—the Seventeen having to raise him to that rank to comply with tradition. [3] [9]
On the 14th of September the body of the late governor was buried under the pavement of the church, with all the state that was possible. Nearly the whole of the colonists of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, as well as those of the Cape district, attended the funeral. Six days after the death, not only the Caabse Vlek thronged in mass, but numerous residents from the outlying districts. The attendance marked how far free settlement had spread beyond Table Valley since the first free burghers of the 1650s: inland church districts turned out in force for a governor who had kept expense down and concord intact through drought, horse sickness, San pressure, and the Delagoa experiment. His widow and daughters returned to Europe with the next fleet from India. [3] [9]
During the period 1714 to 1724 the names of but few new colonists are found in the records. Among them were van Breda, Hermanus Combrinck, Jan Hop, Hendrik Klopper, Hermanus Kriel, Daniel Krynouw, Abraham Poltaer, Melt van der Spuy, Jan de Waal, and Pieter Wion. Some eighty-four new names in ten years was a thin stream beside the older Stellenbosch and Drakenstein turnout that filled the church for Chavonnes. De la Fontaine’s acting government therefore opened under the shadow of a full colonial funeral and an empty governor’s house. Church pavement, inland burgher attendance, and the widow’s homeward passage fixed the public memory of Chavonnes’s end while ordinary council business—meat tenders, Namaqua trade hopes, Delagoa command, sand-planting, and the Drakenstein pulpit—continued without a break in calendar days. [3]
Ensign Rhenius’s Unsuccessful Namaqua Trading Party — November 1724
Cattle supply had remained a standing pressure after disease among horned cattle and sheep, the private meat contract with Jacob van der Heiden, and the live-animal placaat of 2 July 1720. An attempt had previously been made to procure cattle from pastoral peoples of the interior by licensing a certain burgher to carry on the trade under surveillance; but the great distance caused the scheme to fail. Ensign Rhenius was then sent with a trading party to the Namaqua. In November 1724 he returned unsuccessful. [3]
He reported that the Namaqua tribe had been fearfully reduced in number by a disease resembling smallpox; that the San had taken advantage of their weakness to rob them of most of their cattle; and that in reckless despair they had slaughtered and consumed the remainder. The report closed a northern barter hope that Cape councils had repeatedly tried when local herds and free-butcher prices failed to fill Company and foreign tables. Smallpox-like sickness among the Namaqua, San cattle-taking on a weakened people, and self-slaughter of remaining stock made one empty return for the ensign’s party. [3]
The Company was then compelled to submit to circumstances, and to pay the high prices determined by public tender. The Rhenius report left no northern alternative that could undercut the free market’s meat rates. Public tender, already the fallback when private contract and inland barter failed, became the forced path for stock the Honourable Company still needed for its own tables and for legitimate foreign shipping allowed to refresh in Table Bay. No herd came south to ease the Cape’s meat books in the first months of De la Fontaine’s acting rule. [3]
That compulsion sat beside the longer stock troubles of the Chavonnes years: horse sickness first recorded as a severe new plague in 1719 and never since absent; disease among cattle and sheep through the dry sequence; and the private contractor system that had put Van der Heiden at the centre of meat supply when public auction found no bidder in 1718. Grain had recovered—over five thousand muids of wheat exported in 1724—but meat remained a separate and dearer pressure into the acting government of late 1724. For burghers who sold on tender, high Company prices could mean cash; for the council and the ships, they meant dearer provisioning just as foreign shipping, already restricted in scarcity years, continued to shape who could buy refreshment at the Cape. [3]
Van Aken’s Death, French Funeral, and Huguenot Households — 1724
In the church, the staff that had served under Chavonnes still framed the year’s close. The Rev. Mr. D’Ailly remained first or chief clergyman of the Cape. Lambertus Slicher, formally inducted as assistant clergyman in February 1723 while still rector of the school, continued in that double work. At Stellenbosch the Rev. Mr. Bek held the pulpit of the rebuilt church. At Drakenstein the Rev. Petrus van Aken, appointed by the directors and arrived in August 1714, had held the congregation since the church building completed in 1720. In December 1724 Mr. Van Aken died. For some months the Drakenstein pulpit would stand vacant. Inside calendar 1724 the event itself was the December death that opened the vacancy. [3]
Van Aken’s ten years at Drakenstein had covered the building of the church from Huising’s legacy, fleet charity funds, Cape consistory loans, special collections, and the poor fund, and the council’s 23 February 1723 refusal of a new French sick-comforter for the remaining elderly non-Dutch speakers. His death in the same year as Chavonnes’s removed a second long-serving figure from the inland French-descended congregation while De la Fontaine’s acting government was only three months old. The directors were not inclined to encourage the French language in India; yet on the 23rd of June 1724 the Chamber of Amsterdam wrote that, although it would be better that the French colonists accustom themselves to Dutch, a French parish clerk might this time be appointed at Drakenstein in place of the late one, not as a precedent, since only about twenty-six people who did not understand Dutch barely merited the expense. [3] [8]
French did not vanish from public hearing in the year Van Aken died. Even in 1724, when Mrs. Jacob Naudé died—Susanna Taillefert, daughter of the refugee Isaac Taillefert, widow first of Jean Gardé and then of Pierre Cronier—a service in the French language was held in the church at her funeral. The inventory of her estate in 1724 had a document of monies due written in French, and among the funeral expenses stood the line “for the service in the church in the French language, 3 rixdollars.” Her son Jean bought in the same year the farm Versailles from that estate. The June letter from Amsterdam and the three-rixdollar French funeral thus sat in one calendar: directors willing, once, to pay for a clerk they thought barely worth the cost, and a Drakenstein household still burying its dead in French. [8]
Other Huguenot houses closed or shifted in the same twelve months. Susanna Taillefert herself had died on the 13th of February 1724. Estienne Cronier of Normandy, agriculturist of Champagne and Olyvenhout in Wagonmakers Valley, died unmarried on the 2nd of September 1724, six days before the governor. Jan Rosier of Morsselen, who had arrived as a soldier in the Zion in 1699 and become a free burgher on the 13th of October 1711, died on the 22nd of May 1724. Sara Vitu, wife of Jacques de la Porte of Lille, agriculturist at Drakenstein, predeceased her husband in 1724. Theunis Bevernagie, by a will dated 1724, left a legacy to his sister Francina and instituted his brother Joost as heir. [8]
Those household dates did not change the Castle’s language policy, but they marked how the inland French-descended congregation stood in the year its clergyman died: a few dozen old people still without Dutch, a funeral still sung in French at three rixdollars, an Amsterdam letter willing to pay for one more clerk without making a rule of it, and a pulpit at Drakenstein empty from December. De la Fontaine’s acting months thus closed with grain in surplus, sand newly planted on the flats, Delagoa under a provisional commandant, cattle on high tender after the Namaqua failure, and two graves—the governor’s under the church pavement in September, the Drakenstein clergyman’s in December—framing the calendar. [3] [8]