Boer History1725 at the Cape of Good Hope: De la Fontaine Acting, Five-Thousand-Muid Wheat Export, Kirman Goats, and Mona’s Delagoa March
Jan de la Fontaine Acting Head of the Government — 1725
Calendar 1725 opened with Jan de la Fontaine already acting as head of the government at the Cape of Good Hope. Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes had fallen ill on the 7th of September 1724 and died early on the 8th; a few hours later the council of policy had voted that De la Fontaine should act until the Assembly of Seventeen made an appointment. His nomination as secunde had been confirmed by the Seventeen in 1724. Within a few months of Chavonnes’s death despatches promoted him to senior merchant and approved him as secunde in fuller form. He was only in rank a merchant when the council chose him, but there was no other officer at the Cape in a better position. [3]
The acting headship begun on the 8th of September 1724 therefore framed the whole of calendar 1725. De la Fontaine was the first Cape head whose previous career had been made at the settlement itself. Born in Amsterdam on the 23rd of April 1684 as Jan de la Fontaine dit Wicart, son of the silk merchant Jacques de la Fontaine and Barbara van den Burgh, he had been detained from the return ship Horstendal in 1710 by commissioner Johan van Hoorn and set to work as storekeeper. Two years after arrival, 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, daughter of secunde Andries de Man. Everyone in the Caabse Vlek called him Jan. The Seventeen in Amsterdam and Table Valley were, for once, in agreement that he was the proper man to hold the Castle after Chavonnes. [3] [9]
Beside him the fiscal’s chair changed hands in the same calendar year. After independent fiscal Cornelis van Beaumont died on the 14th of June 1724, the council had selected Adriaan van Kervel, already sixteen years in Cape service, to act until the directors appointed. In 1725 Van Kervel, who had been secretary of the council of policy since 1719, became fiscal. The post was difficult and, with the burghers, unpopular; he served it to the satisfaction of the parties concerned, even of trespassers he had to prosecute. When the secretary became fiscal, Rijk Tulbagh was appointed to the vacant secretary’s office. He held it without a vote. Tulbagh had arrived in 1716 at twelve guilders, assisting De la Fontaine; he had been raised to chief clerk to the secretary of the council, and upon the promotion of Hendrik Swellengrebel to master of the warehouses he had succeeded as clerk in that department. The year’s Castle file was thus an acting governor’s year, a new fiscal’s year, and a new secretary’s year, not a sealed governor’s commission from the Netherlands. [3] [9]
At Delagoa Bay Jan van de Capelle remained provisional commandant of Fort Lagoa after the May 1724 relief of Jan Michel. 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. In terms of Cape affairs that meant everything possible had to be done to boost the economy. As acting head between Chavonnes’s death and a governor’s later installation, De la Fontaine already made attempts to foster industry: the son of a silk merchant, he looked for a manufacturing staple the settlement might grow. Calendar 1725 gave him no new fortress programme and no sudden change of free-burgher land law. What it did give was a harvest strong enough for another large wheat export under a directors’ reserve order, the first landing of Persian kirman goats intended for a hair industry, continued labour on the Cape flats against feared silting of Table Bay, a thin but hopeful trade return from Delagoa Bay, and a failed thirty-one-man gold march inland from Fort Lagoa under Sergeant Jan Mona. [3] [9]
Concord at the Castle mattered as much as grain. Chavonnes had preserved the good will of directors and colonists by embarking in no costly undertakings and keeping expense down; the directors had raised him to ordinary councillor of India, a dignity enjoyed by none of his predecessors. De la Fontaine inherited that quiet account-book. He was a tall man, called Jan in the Vlek, and the first whose promotion to the headship had been a Cape career rather than an import from Batavia or the chambers. Calendar 1725 was the first full year in which that local career had to answer for wheat magazines, sand gangs, a Persian flock, a Delagoa cargo, and a vacant Drakenstein pulpit, with Van Kervel newly fiscal and Tulbagh newly secretary at his table. [3] [9]
Foreign Shipping Decline and the 1725–1737 Roadstead Average — 1725
Because foreign ships had been prevented from obtaining supplies at the Cape during the earlier period of scarcity, very few vessels not under the Dutch flag now put into Table Bay. The burghers felt the loss severely, for foreigners had brought ready money into the country; it was hoped that with better times they would return. That hope was not realised in the years that opened with 1725. 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. 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. Cheap fresh provisions were no longer the Cape’s name. [3]
The cattle plague later decreased in virulence, and beef and mutton became obtainable at a penny halfpenny to two pence a pound; but the Cape had lost its reputation for cheap fresh provisions, and it was a long time in regaining it. During the thirteen years 1725–1737 embraced in the same administrative chapter, one thousand and seven ships put into Table Bay, or on an average seventy-seven yearly. Of these, 868 belonged to the Company, 91 were English, 27 Danish, 19 French, 1 Portuguese, and 1 Flemish. Company hulls remained the backbone of the roadstead; foreign flags were a thin remainder of the money that had once crossed the beach. [3]
Against the denser 1715–1724 decade—eight hundred and seventy-one calls at eighty-seven a year—the new stretch therefore opened thinner in foreign ready money even while Company traffic remained the backbone of the roadstead. After 1715, following the peace of Utrecht and the building of first-class ships carrying from two hundred and eighty to three hundred and fifty men each, the number of persons visiting the Cape every year had been much greater than before. Calendar 1725 inherited that Company volume without inheriting the foreign cash that drought, cattle disease, and restrictive supply rules had driven off. For De la Fontaine’s council the concrete political fact was the continuance of exclusion-era habit: foreign visitors were few, burgher cash from strangers was scarce, and the refreshment station’s cheap-provision name had been damaged. [3]
Meat prices still told the livestock story that grain would not. Horned cattle and sheep had been attacked from 1714 by a sickness unknown before; by 1718 there had not been a single bidder when the meat contract was offered at auction, and the sheep in burgher hands had decreased by nearly fifty-six thousand. A private arrangement with Jacob van der Heiden at three pence a pound had then been necessary. Meat had later risen to three and three-quarter pence a pound. The penny-halfpenny-to-two-pence range that followed the plague’s decline still sat above the old cheap-provision memory. Grain, not cattle or foreign silver, was the surplus De la Fontaine could report. The roadstead of 1725 was a Company roadstead first. [3]
Wheat Export over Five Thousand Muids and the Directors’ Reserve Order — 1725
Harvests during the broader acting period fluctuated considerably. The directors, having gained experience of the uncertainty of the seasons in South Africa, issued instructions that a year’s supply of wheat should always be put by as a reserve before any was sent to India. In 1724 and again in 1725 over five thousand muids were exported. The 1725 figure therefore matched the previous year’s large surplus under the new reserve discipline rather than under careless emptying of the magazines. Two consecutive years above five thousand muids, after the reserve had been secured, were the inland year’s working fact. [3]
Those five thousand-odd muids stood against four lean seasons and two recovering harvests under Chavonnes, now carried into De la Fontaine’s first full year. 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. In 1718 and 1719 the harvest was poor but a small quantity was still exported. In 1720 less than a hundred muids left the country. In 1721 rice was served to the Company’s own people instead of bread, and fifty-one muids of wheat were sent to Batavia only to keep up the name of exportation. The winter of 1721 changed the seasons for the better. In 1722 nearly three thousand five hundred muids left the colony; 1723 followed with over four thousand; 1724 passed five thousand. Calendar 1725 held that restored surplus for a second year, still under the Seventeen’s reserve rule. [3]
For free farmers and Company granaries alike, that export year sat between the dear-meat tender pressures that had followed the failed Namaqua cattle party of late 1724 and a roadstead still short of foreign silver. Ensign Rhenius had returned empty-handed from the Namaqua in November 1724; live animals remained under the July 1720 placaat. Grain, not cattle, was the clearest Cape surplus De la Fontaine could report. 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. The reserve order meant the five thousand muids were what remained after a year’s home supply had been put by—not the whole harvest poured seaward. [3]
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. Arrangements for the supply of wheat to India, and of beans, peas, and husked barley to the return ships, had once been made just as dry seasons set in; the restored surplus of 1724–1725 put those India-bound wagons back on a commercial footing. De la Fontaine’s council could tell the Seventeen that the reserve was in the magazines and that more than five thousand muids had nevertheless gone east. That was the grain character of 1725: a second consecutive commercial harvest under an acting head, a new fiscal, and a secretary without a vote. [3] [9]
Cape Flats Sand-Planting against Feared Silting of Table Bay — 1725
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. When these failed, in ensuing rainy seasons the experiment was repeated with belts of sods. The valuable properties of the mesembryanthemum for binding surface sand were then unknown. Calendar 1725 therefore carried the second winter season of that labour-heavy sand war under De la Fontaine’s acting government—still without mesembryanthemum knowledge, still under directors’ fear of a silted roadstead, and still measured in slave and convict planting gangs rather than in finished pasture. [3]
The planting belonged to Chavonnes’s last winter and to De la Fontaine’s first full year as acting head. It did not change the character of the flats overnight. Laden waggons still followed poles across a waste between Table Valley and the continent; 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 Company ships now dominated. Every winter much labour was expended upon the isthmus. Knot-grass and wild olive having failed in the opening season, the 1725 rainy months were the first in which belts of sods could be tried as the next method the Cape possessed. [3]
For eleven years, with one short interval, the effort to plant the flats would be continued; but inside calendar 1725 the working fact was simpler. The Seventeen still believed skippers who feared a filling bay. The acting head still owed them a winter’s work on the isthmus. Seventy slaves and a convict gang, sods where seed had failed, and a line of poles for waggons that still had no road: that was the Cape flats file De la Fontaine could send home. No new fort, no new church, no Delagoa reinforcement—only an attempt to pin drifting sand before the next south-easter. [3]
Persian Kirman Goats Land at the Cape — February 1725
Another industry which the Company at this time attempted to establish in South Africa was the production of kirman hair. Shawls made of this hair were then considered second only in value to those of Cashmere. The goat which produces it is reared in Persia, and in that country twenty-four young animals were obtained, which were sent to Ceylon to be forwarded to the Cape. The experiment sat beside De la Fontaine’s other attempts to foster industry in an acting year when metropolitan dividends were already falling and Cape affairs required whatever staple the settlement might grow. [3] [9]
In February 1725 eight of these reached South Africa, the others having died on the way. Of the eight, only one was a she-goat, and that died shortly after being landed. From ordinary she-goats cross-breeds were obtained, and from these and the pure animals, now reduced by death to two, goats with tolerably long and fine hair were bred. Some burghers were then induced to make experiments with the animals. The February landing was therefore already a wreck of the intended flock: sixteen dead on the Ceylon passage, the single ewe dead after landing, six surviving males, and a cross-breed programme begun from Cape she-goats because a pure Persian dam no longer existed in the pens. [3]
After a few years’ trial the owners informed the council that unless the Company would pay forty pence a pound for the hair, it would not be worth their while to keep separate flocks. That price could not be given even for a superior article. Instead of improving the quality, the owners allowed the hair to deteriorate by mixture with native animals. Inside 1725 the concrete event was the February landing of eight survivors, the early death of the single she-goat, and the opening of a cross-breed programme that never became a Cape staple. The imported goats which had to supply the raw material did not survive long; when some hair was produced, the Company could not afford the high price. [3] [9]
Kirman hair was thus the dated industrial fact of De la Fontaine’s first full acting year, as sand-planting was its dated labour fact and wheat its dated surplus. Twenty-four young animals from Persia, eight alive in February, one ewe dead after landing, two pure survivors, cross-breeds from ordinary Cape she-goats, burghers invited to keep separate flocks at a price the Company would not pay: the hair industry opened and was already failing in the same calendar in which it arrived. No shawl staple followed the wheat wagons east. The acting head who was a silk merchant’s son had launched a Persian flock and watched it collapse into a handful of males and a cross-breed pen. [3] [9]
Delagoa Bay Trade Returns — Ambergris, Copper, Ivory, Slaves, and Gold Dust — 1725
The early disasters at Delagoa Bay had not discouraged the Company, and for a long time hopes were entertained of a profitable trade being carried on there. Fever had emptied Fort Lagoa in 1721; buccaneers had taken the post on the 19th of April 1722; Stefler’s iron-mountain losses had followed in 1723; Van de Capelle had taken provisional command in May 1724 after the relief of Jan Michel. Calendar 1725 was the first year in which that battered station sent home a mixed cargo that looked, on paper, like thin proof of the bay’s commercial promise. [3]
In 1725 a little ambergris, some aloes, three hundred pounds weight of copper, more than two tons of ivory, thirty-four slaves, and a few ounces of gold dust were received from that station. It was impossible to obtain any reliable information concerning the interior of the country from the natives at the bay; but it was observed on one occasion that two of the chief Maphumbo’s men went inland and returned with some gold dust within fourteen days. That observation raised a hope that the gold fields might be easily reached. Provisional commandant Van de Capelle’s Fort Lagoa, still deadly in summer fever and still expensive to reinforce from Table Bay, thus sent home a cargo of ambergris, aloes, copper, ivory, enslaved people, and gold dust in the same year that Maphumbo’s two men seemed to prove a short path to the fields. [3]
Copper at three hundred pounds, ivory above two tons, thirty-four enslaved people, scant gold dust, ambergris, and aloes did not yet repay the fever dead of 1721, the buccaneer capture of 19 April 1722, or Stefler’s iron-mountain losses of 1723. They did, however, keep Amsterdam’s gold-field and Monomotapa hopes alive long enough for a formal inland march to be ordered from the fort before mid-year. The empire of Monomotapa was still believed to be a reality. Maphumbo was the most powerful of the chiefs around the bay; another, named Manisa, was almost as strong, with kraals on the banks of the river Dos Reys of the Portuguese, where Vasco da Gama had landed—the Dutch called the stream after him. Gold dust in a fourteen-day circuit from Maphumbo’s men was enough, in a year of falling dividends, to turn a trade return into an expedition. [3]
For De la Fontaine’s Cape council, reading Delagoa letters in 1725, the station still promised more than it delivered, and still cost lives and reinforcements out of proportion to ambergris, aloes, ivory tons, and a few ounces of gold. Van de Capelle remained provisional commandant. The bay’s clans were not yet the council’s daily business; the cargo and the fourteen-day sample were. Calendar 1725 thus joined a thin commercial return to a gold hope born from Maphumbo’s men, and sent both facts to Table Bay as the year’s Delagoa file. [3]
Sergeant Jan Mona’s Gold Expedition from Fort Lagoa — 27 June 1725
On the 27th of June 1725 an expedition left Fort Lagoa in search of the gold fields. It consisted of thirty-one men under Sergeant Jan Mona, with a clerk named Frans de Kuyper as journalist. After a toilsome march of twenty days, a party of hostile blacks was encountered, who opposed further advance. The fourteen-day gold-dust trip of Maphumbo’s two men had suggested a short path to the fields; Mona’s armed column found a twenty-day road and an enemy at the end of it. [3]
In a skirmish several of the natives were shot, but as the pack oxen were killed by the enemy and all the baggage and goods were seized, the expedition was obliged to return. Mona came back without a working route, a mine location, or a trade agreement that could replace pack-ox carriage. The gold hope born from Maphumbo’s sample collapsed on logistics and resistance rather than on fever alone. Fort Lagoa still stood; the inland gold path did not. [3]
An attempt to search for the copper mines, made by a party under the mineralogist Jan Hendrik Hoorn, was also a failure. The same Delagoa year that returned three hundred pounds of copper through bay trade could not convert that purchase into a located mine under Company mineralogists. Hoorn’s failure sat beside Mona’s: gold dust and traded copper proved that valuable minerals moved through the bay’s networks, but neither sergeant’s column nor mineralogist’s party could fix the interior sources or hold a road to them. [3]
The directors’ later answer would be boats pushing their way up the rivers toward the gold fields and the empire of Monomotapa, still believed to be a reality—business of another calendar. Inside 1725 the paired failures of Mona and Hoorn closed the land-search file for gold and copper without abandoning the bay itself. De la Fontaine’s council, reading the journalist’s account and the mineralogist’s blank, still had a station that had sent ambergris, aloes, copper, ivory, thirty-four slaves, and a few ounces of gold dust, and still had no map of the mines. [3]
Twenty days out, pack oxen dead, baggage gone, several natives shot, no gold field reached: that was the inland test of 27 June 1725. Hoorn’s copper search added a second blank. Van de Capelle’s provisional command had given the Company its first mixed cargo from the bay and its first formal gold march; both remained on the 1725 file as promise unmatched by a road. [3]
Rev. Lambertus Slicher Takes Drakenstein — 15 July 1725
In December 1724 the Rev. Petrus van Aken, clergyman of Drakenstein since August 1714, had died at Cape Town and been buried in the Dutch Reformed church. For some months the inland pulpit was vacant. At length the council of policy resolved to send the Rev. Lambertus Slicher to Drakenstein, and leave the Cape to the care of the Rev. Johannes Godefridus d’Ailly alone until another clergyman should be provided by the directors. Slicher accordingly took over the duty on the 15th of July 1725. Stellenbosch still had the Rev. Mr. Bek. [3] [8]
Slicher, of Middelburg, had arrived at the Cape in the same year as Van Aken, but in a totally different capacity. He had served six years as chaplain of the garrison at Lillo; owing to differences and animosity among his congregation he had resigned and entered the Company’s service as a midshipman on the ship ’t Vaderland Getrouw. Well versed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, he was shortly appointed rector of the High School at Cape Town, then just established, and took pupils as boarders at his house. In 1721, while still rector, he obtained permission from the Seventeen, through the Cape governor and council, to preach now and again in the Cape Town church. His first service was held on the 15th of June 1721. In February 1723 he was formally inducted as second or assistant clergyman of the Cape congregation, still performing the duty of rector. In July 1725 that assistant was sent inland to the Drakenstein church completed in 1720. [3] [8]
Before that July transfer, the vacant pulpit had already produced a quarrel at the Castle. In 1725 Hermanus Bosman, Dutch parish clerk of the Drakenstein congregation, appeared before the council of policy and, in the name of the Drakenstein consistory, asked that, in view of Van Aken’s death, the Rev. Petrus Craan might be appointed in his place. The appointment, said he, would please the Drakenstein congregation very much. The council showed absolute displeasure at Bosman’s interference, informed him that his procedure was improper and disrespectful, there being no evidence that the church had authorised him, and upbraided him for communicating with Craan without their knowledge. They had no power to detain ministers destined for India. He was told that as a Company’s servant measures might be taken against him. The Drakenstein consistory asked the council’s pardon, and after correspondence the matter dropped. The resolutions of the 4th of January, the 23rd of January, and the 6th of February 1725 closed that file before Slicher was sent. [8]
French church language was a second Drakenstein file in the same year. After Paul Roux’s death the consistory had asked for another French sick-comforter, as some twenty-five or twenty-six old people still did not understand Dutch. The council had declined until the directors’ pleasure was known. The Amsterdam chamber, in a letter received among the incoming letters of 1725–1726 but dated the 23rd of June 1724, allowed once more that a French parish clerk be appointed at Drakenstein in place of the late one, not as a precedent, since the very small number who did not understand Dutch—twenty-six in all—barely merited the expense. The Cape council decided not to appoint another. Bosman, the Dutch parish clerk, knew French, being married to a daughter of the refugee Abraham de Villiers; two clerks would be an unnecessary expense. A letter of the 10th of April 1725 to the Seventeen recorded that decision. Slicher’s mid-July arrival thus brought a Dutch assistant, already known at the castle school and pulpit, to a congregation whose French clerkship the council had just refused to double. [3] [8]
Huguenot households filled the same calendar with quieter entries. On the 9th of November 1725 a certificate of membership was granted to Pierre Roux of Cabrière, stated in the Drakenstein church register to have come from Amsterdam, on his proceeding to Batavia. Jean Blignault of Amsterdam, who had arrived in the Company’s service in 1723, son of Pieter Blignault and Elisabeth Desbordes, married in 1725 Anne Rousseau, widow of the refugee Daniel Hugo, and by the union became possessed of much landed property; at the baptism of their first child Blignault’s mother Elisabeth Desbordes stood sponsor. He was a heemraad of Drakenstein and later possessed seven farms, most in that district, among them Bethel. The signature of Jean Gardiol, companion in earlier years with the three brothers de Villiers, appears among the church members of Drakenstein in 1725; he had witnessed an inventory in 1722 and was not to be confused with Jean Gardé, whose widow already stood on the Cape-district list. Dirk Snith of Nieuwburg, surgeon, second husband of the midwife Maria Buisset of Sedan—born 1678, married first at the Domkerk in Amsterdam in January 1700 to the surgeon Jean Prieur du Plessis of Poitiers—died about 1725. Slicher himself had married Sophia van der Byl, born at the Cape in 1690. For calendar 1725 the church fact was thus larger than one induction: Slicher at Drakenstein on the 15th of July, D’Ailly alone at the Cape, Bek at Stellenbosch, Bosman’s Craan petition rebuked in January and February, the French clerkship refused in the April letter to the Seventeen, and the Drakenstein roll still taking French names as Roux left for Batavia and Blignault married into Hugo land. [3] [8]