Boer History1724 at the Cape of Good Hope: Chavonnes’s Death, De la Fontaine Acting, Rhenius Namaqua Failure, and Van Aken
Jan van de Capelle Provisional Commandant at Fort Lagoa — May 1724
At Delagoa Bay the post 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. In May 1724 an active junior officer, Jan van de Capelle, was appointed provisional commandant of Fort Lagoa, because Jan Michel had requested to be relieved. [3]
It was not a station to which people went willingly. 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 black 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 Governor Maurits Pasques de 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. [3]
Assembly of Seventeen Confirms De la Fontaine as Secunde — 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. [3]
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. It also fixed the man who, within months, would have to head the whole government when the governor died suddenly in September. [3]
De la Fontaine’s confirmed secunde status still left him, on the morning of Chavonnes’s death, only a merchant in formal rank until later despatches promoted him to senior merchant and approved him as secunde in fuller form. The calendar year’s administrative spine was therefore a confirmed second-in-command whose highest local authority would expand by council vote on the day the governor died, not by a prior sealed succession order. [3]
Death of Fiscal Van Beaumont and Van Kervel Acting — 14 June 1724
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. [3]
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: September would remove the governor and force De la Fontaine from second place into full acting headship of the government. [3]
Death of Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes — 8 September 1724
Governor Maurits Pasques de 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 remembered as a quiet, religious man. The directors had been 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. [3]
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. [3]
Within a few months despatches were received in which he was promoted to be a senior merchant and was approved of as secunde. The September council vote thus opened an acting headship later dated from 8 September 1724 to 25 February 1727, when Pieter Gysbert Noodt would be installed as governor. Inside calendar 1724 the concrete fact was the overnight transfer of executive charge from a long-serving ordinary councillor of India to the local secunde already confirmed that year. [3]
State Funeral of Chavonnes under the Church Pavement — 14 September 1724
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. 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. [3]
His widow and daughters returned to Europe with the next fleet from India. The household departure closed the private side of a governorship that had begun with installation on the 28th of March 1714 and had run more than ten years of Cape headship, including the smallpox year of 1713’s aftermath, the loan-farm and stamp measures of his early term, the meat crisis and staples experiments of the late 1710s, and the shipping denser decade after 1715. [3]
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, 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. Ensign Rhenius was 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 Bushmen 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. [3]
The November failure therefore joined disease among the Namaqua, San cattle-taking on a weakened people, and self-slaughter of remaining stock into one empty return for the ensign’s party. No herd came south to ease the Cape’s meat books in the first months of De la Fontaine’s acting rule. [3]
Company Forced to High Tender Prices for Cattle — 1724
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. [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 four thousand muids of wheat exported in 1723—but meat remained a separate and dearer pressure into the acting government of late 1724. [3]
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. The Namaqua failure and the tender submission thus closed the year’s pastoral diplomacy without restoring cheap stock to the magazines. [3]
Death of the Rev. Petrus van Aken at Drakenstein — December 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. [3]
In December 1724 Mr. Van Aken died. For some months the Drakenstein pulpit would stand vacant until the council of policy later resolved to send Mr. Slicher to Drakenstein and leave the Cape to Mr. D’Ailly alone until another clergyman should be provided by the directors—a rearrangement carried out when Slicher took over that duty on the 15th of July 1725. 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. [3]
Close of the 1715–1724 Shipping Decade and Few New Colonists — 1724
After 1715 the number of persons visiting the Cape every year had been much greater than before. 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—among them 683 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 an average eighty-seven yearly—among them 645 Dutch, 192 English, 17 French, 10 Danish, 4 Portuguese, and 3 Flemish. [3]
Calendar 1724 closed that denser decade. Company ships still assembled in Table Bay for the summer fleet— slowest Batavia sailers in January, then the Ceylon squadron, then late Batavia ships, leaving about the end of March or beginning of April, sometimes twenty to thirty large ships together with merchandise that had cost from five to seven hundred thousand pounds sterling—while the winter fleet remained much smaller. Interlopers without royal or English Company credentials were still warned off; Flemish ships seeking supplies met the same exclusion. [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 slow free-surname intake across Chavonnes’s whole term rather than a mass immigration pulse inside the death year alone. [3]
Close of 1724 at the Cape
By the end of 1724 the Cape had buried Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes under the church pavement after his sudden illness on the 7th of September and death early on the 8th, with state funeral on the 14th attended by nearly the whole of Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, and the Cape district, while his widow and daughters took ship for Europe with the next India fleet. Jan de la Fontaine, confirmed as secunde by the Assembly of Seventeen during the year, was voted acting head of the government the morning Chavonnes died. Fiscal independent Cornelis van Beaumont had died on the 14th of June; Adriaan van Kervel acted in his place. At Delagoa Bay Jan van de Capelle became provisional commandant in May after Jan Michel asked relief. Ensign Rhenius returned from the Namaqua in November empty-handed after smallpox-like disease, Bushman cattle-taking, and despairing slaughter of remaining stock, and the Company submitted to high public-tender meat prices. In December the Rev. Petrus van Aken died at Drakenstein. The denser 1715–1724 shipping decade closed with eight hundred and seventy-one calls at eighty-seven a year, and the decade’s short list of new free surnames stood as the immigration mark of Chavonnes’s whole term. Acting rule under De la Fontaine thus opened on death, dear cattle, a deadly bay command, and a vacant inland pulpit. [3]