Boer History1726 at the Cape of Good Hope: Drought, Guillaumet Silk, Zonder End Outpost, and De Koning at Delagoa
Jan de la Fontaine Still Acting Head of the Government — 1726
Calendar 1726 opened with Jan de la Fontaine still acting as head of the government at the Cape of Good Hope. The council of policy had placed him in charge on the morning after Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes died on the 8th of September 1724, and the acting headship would run until Pieter Gysbert Noodt was formally installed. Through the whole of 1726, therefore, the Cape file remained an acting governor’s year rather than a sealed new commission already in force on the ground. 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, he had been detained from a return ship in 1710 by commissioner Johan van Hoorn and set to work as storekeeper; two years after arrival he sat on the council of policy; in May 1711 he had married Maria Elizabeth, daughter of secunde Andries de Man. Everyone in the Caabse Vlek called him Jan. [3] [9]
Beside him, fiscal independent Adriaan van Kervel held the independent fiscal’s chair. After Cornelis van Beaumont died on the 14th of June 1724, the council had selected Van Kervel, already sixteen years in Cape service and secretary of the council since 1719, to act until the directors appointed; in 1725 he became fiscal. The post was difficult and, with the burghers, unpopular; he served it to the satisfaction of the parties concerned. When the secretary became fiscal, Rijk Tulbagh was appointed to the vacant secretary’s office and held it without a vote. In 1726 the local authorities named Tulbagh a junior merchant on approbation—a dignity the directors would later confirm. The year’s Castle table was thus an acting governor’s table, a confirmed fiscal’s table, and a secretary’s table on which Tulbagh’s rank was already being raised, not a sealed governor’s commission from the Netherlands. [3] [9]
Shore works finished a long Chavonnes file in the same calendar year. The fortifications then existing consisted of the castle and a battery on the shore where a later breakwater would run into the bay. That battery had been commenced in February 1715 and was completed in April 1726. It was at first termed Mauritius, and only afterwards came to be popularly called the Chavonnes battery. Noodt, the officer the Assembly of Seventeen had already chosen as governor, was director of fortifications and seven years earlier had inspected the shore of Table Bay and prepared plans of defensive works. April’s completed Mauritius battery therefore closed, under De la Fontaine’s acting signature, a work begun in Chavonnes’s first year, while the man who had surveyed that same shore waited in the east to take the Castle. [3]
Foreign flags remained scarce in Table Bay. 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 in. The burghers felt the loss severely, for foreigners had brought ready money into the country; the hope that with better times they would return was not realised. 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. 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 Cape terms everything possible had to be done to boost the economy, and as acting head De la Fontaine already made attempts to foster industry. [3] [9]
At Delagoa Bay the provisional command that had rested with Jan van de Capelle (also written Jan de la Capelle in the Delagoa narrative) would give way, at the end of May, to Commander Jan de Koning and a reinforced station force. The year’s Cape business was drought in the grain magazines, a silk superintendent from Europe, a small military outpost beyond the Hottentots Holland mountains, news that Noodt had been chosen governor, the April completion of the Mauritius battery, and a costly push to make Fort Lagoa a river-and-earthen-fort station rather than a thin fever post. Concord at the Castle still 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; De la Fontaine inherited that quiet account-book, now under dividend pressure, with Van Kervel fiscal, Tulbagh newly a junior merchant on approbation, and the roadstead a Company roadstead first. [3] [9]
Drought — No Wheat Spared for Export — 1726
Harvests during the broader De la Fontaine–Noodt period fluctuated considerably. The directors, having gained experience of the uncertainty of the seasons in South Africa, had ordered 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 had been exported. In 1726 none could be spared, owing to drought. The drought year therefore broke the two-year run of large India shipments under the new reserve discipline: after securing the reserve, the magazines had nothing left that De la Fontaine’s council could honestly ship east. [3]
Meat prices still told a 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. The 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. Calendar 1726 therefore sat in a roadstead that still bought meat dearer than the old memory, while the wheat surplus of the two previous harvests disappeared into drought. [3]
For free farmers and Company granaries alike, 1726 sat between the surplus years of 1724–1725 and the later stretch in which constant export would resume, sometimes of as much as seven thousand muids. Grain, which had been the clearest Cape surplus of the previous calendar year, became the clearest local shortage of this one. The directors’ reserve order, meant to protect India shipments against South African seasons, here did its other work: it forbade a thin harvest from being treated as an export year. De la Fontaine, son of a silk merchant and already looking for a manufacturing staple the settlement might grow, could not in this calendar year report a wheat cargo east. [3] [9]
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. Inside 1726 that exclusion-era habit framed a drought year: foreign visitors few, burgher cash from strangers scarce, meat no longer a penny market, and wheat locked in the reserve with nothing left to spare. [3]
Cape Flats Sand-Planting Continues — 1726
The isthmus connecting the Cape peninsula with the continent remained 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 still feared 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 had issued instructions that attempts should be made to fix the sand by planting it with grass and trees. [3]
Work begun in the winter of 1724—seventy slaves and a gang of convicts planting knot-grass and wild-olive seed, then belts of sods when those failed—continued through the rainy seasons that followed. The valuable properties of the mesembryanthemum for binding surface sand were still unknown. For eleven years, with one short interval, the effort would run on every winter until it was abandoned in despair after a nautical commission reported that the bay had grown deeper rather than shallower. Inside calendar 1726 that later abandonment was not yet in view: another winter season of labour-heavy planting still answered the directors’ silt fear. [3]
Calendar 1726 therefore carried another winter season of that 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 or a finished mole. Laden waggons still picked their way by poles. Skippers’ reports still weighed more, in Amsterdam, than any local claim that the flats were merely inconvenient. The acting council could plant; it could not yet prove the bay safe. [3]
The same labour that bound no sand yet also framed the year’s other experiments. Silk wanted mulberry trees in selected places; the flats wanted grass and sods; both asked for slave hours under an acting head who was trying to show the Seventeen that the Cape could still produce something besides a thin wheat return. Drought emptied the export magazines; the winter gangs on the isthmus did not fill them. They only kept a directors’ order in motion across a waste that waggons still crossed with difficulty. [3]
François Guillaumet Arrives — Silk Culture under Company Direction — October 1726
To superintend the experiments in silk culture which the directors resolved should be made, the services of a competent man named François Guillaumet were secured. In October 1726 he and his family arrived at the Cape. Attempts had previously been made to bring silkworm eggs from India, but in no instance had they been successful. Some had been received in good condition from Europe, however, and the worms when hatched had been carefully attended to in the houses of Messrs. Jan de la Fontaine and Nicholas Heyning. They were now handed over to Guillaumet. There were plenty of healthy mulberry trees, and the expert was furnished with whatever slave labour he asked for. Everything was thus in favour of the experiment. [3]
In the first year eight pounds weight of good silk was obtained, which was sent to the Netherlands, and was an object of considerable interest at Amsterdam and Middelburg. Anticipations arose of another manufacturing industry in the mother country, with an article produced in a Dutch colony. The members of the council of policy at the Cape were equally enthusiastic. A large building was immediately erected close to the Company’s garden, and was placed at Guillaumet’s disposal for keeping the worms in. The children in the slave lodge close by were all to be employed out of school hours in winding silk. Some thousands of young mulberry trees were planted in selected places. Any burghers who had a fancy to join in the industry, which was now believed to have passed the experimental stage, were supplied with a few eggs and the necessary instructions. [3]
The attempt sat naturally with the acting head. Son of a silk merchant, De la Fontaine had a particular interest in silk manufacture and made a well-planned attempt to do so at the Cape. A French expert was imported together with boxes of silkworms; a factory was even erected near the slave lodge. Thanks to an abundance of newly planted mulberry trees and, at first, a decent behaviour of the worms, the first year of operation showed promising results. Dividend pressure from 1723 onward made a colonial staple more than a curiosity: if eight pounds could interest Amsterdam and Middelburg, a larger return might answer the drop from thirty-seven per cent to twenty-one. [3] [9]
Guillaumet came with his wife Claudine Cloy, or Cloi, and family. On the 25th of November 1726 both were inscribed as members of the Dutch church at Cape Town, upon presentation of their certificate from the French church at Amsterdam. A son, Matthieu or Matthys, had been born at Berlin in 1711, to which place the father had no doubt fled. The October landing was therefore not only a Company’s industrial posting: it planted a French Protestant household in the mother congregation six weeks after arrival, with a Berlin-born son in the family and an Amsterdam certificate in hand, while the garden-side silk house and the slave-lodge winders began their first season. [8]
Yet in no subsequent year did the production of silk exceed ten pounds in weight. The great majority of the worms always died before making cocoons, and in one particular season they would have become extinct altogether if it had not been that a few were preserved by some burghers. It was soon ascertained that the returns were so trifling as to forbid the industry being attractive to people who could make a living in any other way. For eight years, however, the experiment was continued by the government. Inside 1726 the concrete events were Guillaumet’s October landing, the transfer of the house-reared European stock, the first eight-pound export sample, the garden-side silk house with slave-lodge winders, the November church inscription, and a factory near the lodge under an acting head who was a silk merchant’s son. [3] [8] [9]
Outpost at the Ziekenhuis on the River Zonder End — November 1726
In November 1726 a corporal and six men were sent over the Hottentots Holland mountains to form an outpost at a place called the Ziekenhuis, on the river Zonder End. The few Khoikhoi left in that part of the country had complained to the government that they were not able to hold their own against the San, and that they were also exposed to depredations from vagrant Europeans, who professed to visit them for purposes of trade, but in reality robbed them of cattle. Owing to those complaints the outpost was formed, in order that acts of violence might be prevented. [3]
The directors were so dissatisfied that the Europeans of Van der Heiden’s party, of whom the Drakenstein consistory had complained, had not been brought to justice for their conduct towards the Khoikhoi, that they issued instructions to prohibit all dealing by private persons with natives under heavier penalties than before. Seven Company men beyond the mountains did not yet make a new district. They did plant a permanent Company presence on the Zonder End where Khoikhoi complaints had named both San pressure and European robbery under colour of trade. For De la Fontaine’s council the November post was a policing and protection measure, not a freehold settlement scheme, and it sat beside the directors’ anger over unpunished private misconduct inland of Drakenstein. [3]
The Zonder End had already entered Cape files as a hunting and timber country rather than as a farm belt. A corporal’s post of seven men could not close the mountains; it could watch a river crossing and a Khoikhoi remnant that had asked for protection against two kinds of pressure at once. Vagrant Europeans who came as traders and left as cattle-lifters were, in the directors’ view, the same class of misconduct that Van der Heiden’s party had shown and that Drakenstein’s consistory had already named. The November order answered that complaint with soldiers, not with a new landdrost. [3]
For the acting government the inland post was of a piece with the year’s other thin strengths: a drought magazine, a silk house not yet proven, a Mauritius battery newly finished on the Table Bay shore, and seven men over the mountains. It did not open the cattle trade. It did not punish Van der Heiden’s people after the fact. It placed a corporal where Khoikhoi had said they could no longer hold the river against San raids and against Europeans who came to trade and stayed to steal. [3]
Noodt Named Governor — News in January; Sails from Batavia 6 December 1726
The officer whom the Assembly of Seventeen selected as governor was the director of fortifications, Pieter Gysbert Noodt, who seven years earlier had inspected the shore of Table Bay and prepared plans of defensive works. Intelligence of his appointment reached South Africa in January 1726. The date of that appointment was January 1726; he did not yet stand in the Castle. The Cape therefore spent eleven months knowing the successor’s name while De la Fontaine still signed as acting head, with the Mauritius battery finished in April on the same shore Noodt had once surveyed. [3] [9]
On the 6th of December of that year he left Batavia as admiral of a homeward bound fleet of nine ships. His family was small, consisting only of his wife and one son. Inside calendar 1726 the political facts were the January despatch news that ended pure uncertainty about Chavonnes’s successor, and the December sailing that put Noodt on the water toward Table Bay while De la Fontaine still signed at the Castle. The nine ships were a homeward fleet, not a Cape squadron; their admiral was a governor-elect, not yet a governor in possession. [3] [9]
The Cape already had a measure of the man from his earlier visit. He had then greatly upset Chavonnes; the later quarrel with secunde Abraham van Cranendonk had gone to the court of justice. For 1726 the working knowledge was that a fortification director, already known from the Table Bay survey, had been chosen, and that by year’s end he was at sea with nine ships—not yet in the castle, and not yet in a position to take special pleasure in irritating De la Fontaine. The acting head’s year therefore closed with a named successor on the water and with the Mauritius battery complete on the surveyed shore. [3] [9]
No sealed installation therefore took place in this calendar year. De la Fontaine remained the man the Vlek called Jan; Van Kervel remained fiscal; Tulbagh remained secretary, now a junior merchant on approbation. The Seventeen had filled the vacancy Chavonnes’s death had opened, but they had filled it at Batavia’s distance. January’s letter and December’s nine ships were the year’s political facts; the Castle’s daily signature stayed De la Fontaine’s until the fleet should arrive. [3] [9]
Commander Jan de Koning at Fort Lagoa — Fort Lydzaamheid, River Boats, and December Fever — 1726
After the failed land searches of 1725—Sergeant Jan Mona’s gold march of the 27th of June and mineralogist Jan Hendrik Hoorn’s copper probe—the directors issued instructions that attempts to reach the gold fields and the empire of Monomotapa, which was still believed to be a reality, should be made by means of boats pushing their way up the rivers. An old skipper, named Jan de Koning, was appointed commander, and the post was strengthened with a hundred soldiers and sailors. Early disasters at the bay had not discouraged the Company; a little ambergris, some aloes, three hundred pounds of copper, more than two tons of ivory, thirty-four slaves, and a few ounces of gold dust had been received from the station in 1725, and two of chief Maphumbo’s men had gone inland and returned with gold dust within fourteen days. [3]
At the end of May 1726 Commander De Koning arrived at Fort Lagoa. He found the secunde, Jan de la Capelle, who had been acting head of the station, engaged in making experiments in the cultivation of sugar cane and indigo. There were constant feuds between the various clans around the bay, but the Europeans were on good terms with all. The most powerful of the chiefs was named Maphumbo, but another, named Manisa, was almost as strong. The latter had his kraals on the banks of the river Dos Reys of the Portuguese, where Vasco da Gama had landed; and the Dutch called the stream after him, the Manisa. [3]
The people of the bay were credited with a belief that the Europeans purchased slaves to fatten and eat them, and it was supposed that this belief was the cause of their bringing so few for sale. To counteract it, Commander De Koning sent three men of rank with their attendants on a visit to the Cape, that they might see for what purpose slaves were needed. One of those who visited the Cape was a nephew of Maphumbo. He had been to England, and had there received in baptism the name of John; but had been sent back to Delagoa Bay in 1723. He spoke English fluently. The visitors professed to be pleased with the manner in which they saw the slaves were treated; but the traffic did not increase after their return. [3]
As Fort Lagoa was too small for the accommodation of the men now stationed there, a larger area was enclosed with earthen walls, to which the name of Lydzaamheid was given. The rivers were ascended as far as they were navigable with boats; but very little information was obtained concerning the country. The Dutch officers were never able to ascertain the exact position and distance of either the copper mines or the gold fields. The gold dust brought by the natives for sale was so mixed with other substances as to cause the assayers in Batavia to assert that every stiver’s worth cost the Company a florin. Boat travel and a bigger earthen fort thus answered Mona’s and Hoorn’s land failures without yet locating a mine or purifying a profitable dust trade. [3]
In December 1726 fever attacked the men at the station, as it had done every previous summer, and in a few months thirty-eight men died, among them being Commander De Koning. The secunde Jan de la Capelle then became acting head of the station again. The summer pattern that had killed so many since the first occupation thus claimed the new commander within months of his May arrival and the building of Lydzaamheid. De Koning’s death returned provisional command to the same secunde who had held Fort Lagoa after Jan Michel and through Mona’s march. Inside this year the Delagoa file closed on fever and succession: a hundred-man reinforcement and a skipper-commander had raised earthen walls and pushed boats up navigable water; December cut the command down again, and thirty-eight dead in a few months—including De Koning—reasserted the bay’s summer cost over its mixed gold dust and river hopes. [3]
Death of the Rev. D’Ailly; Bek Removed to the Cape; French Services End at Drakenstein — 1726
In the church succession the Cape had been left to the care of the Rev. Johannes Godefridus D’Ailly alone after the Rev. Lambertus Slicher took Drakenstein on the 15th of July 1725, while Mr. Bek remained at Stellenbosch. D’Ailly had arrived at the Cape in 1708, after a voyage of more than eight months, to assume the office of minister to the Cape congregation. He married Alida de Lange, widow of the surgeon François Guto, but appears to have had no issue by her. Early in 1726 he was taken seriously ill, and he died in June. [3] [8]
When D’Ailly died, Bek was removed to the Cape, Slicher being directed to hold services occasionally at Stellenbosch. So matters remained for more than three years. Three pulpits thus ran thin for the remainder of the year: one resident minister at the Cape (Bek), one at Drakenstein who also rode to Stellenbosch (Slicher), and no separate Stellenbosch incumbent. The French-descended Drakenstein church completed in 1720 kept Slicher; the mother congregation at the Cape absorbed the ageing Stellenbosch clergyman after D’Ailly’s death. [3]
Drakenstein’s consistory used the same calendar year to write down a sexton’s work. By a resolution of 1726 the duties performed and the emoluments enjoyed by the sexton were laid down. Every Saturday he had to go to the house of the minister to receive instructions for Sunday, and was not to leave his home during the night without informing the clergyman or one of the elders where he was to be found. Directions were given regarding the cleaning of the church and preserving all that it contained. He was to see that the chairs of the ladies were placed according to their order of rank, and to show the respectable members, ladies and gentlemen, especially strangers, to the seats. He was prohibited from burying anyone on Sunday. He was given a house and garden free, and at New Year or at marriages or baptisms could accept any fees given. [8]
French church language reached a quieter close in the same year. After Paul Roux’s death the consistory had asked for another French sick-comforter; the Amsterdam chamber, in a letter among the incoming letters of 1725–1726 dated the 23rd of June 1724, had allowed a French parish clerk once more, not as a precedent, since only some twenty-six people did not understand Dutch. The Cape council had decided not to appoint another, Bosman the Dutch parish clerk already knowing French. In 1726 the ex-sexton Jeremias Roux was informed by the Drakenstein consistory that in future he was not to take the services in the French language as he had previously done. After this there appears to have been no further reference in the church minutes to the French services. Slicher’s Dutch pulpit at the 1720 church thus stood without a French service beside it for the rest of the year. [8]
Huguenot households filled the same calendar with quieter entries. Pierre Taillefert, who had married Marie Marais, widow of Estienne Niel, died in March 1726, leaving descendants in the female line. Estienne Viret of Dauphiné, born about 1662–64, arrived in the Zuid Beveland, married to Marguerite Roux of Provence, died on the 29th of October 1726 and was buried in the churchyard at Cape Town. Renault Berthault de St. Jean, born 1692 at Sancerre in Berry, who had become a Company surgeon in 1712 and arrived at the Cape in 1719, was in 1726 chief surgeon of the Company’s hospital at Cape Town; his mother Marie Doné was still living at Sancerre in that year. Guillaumet and Claudine Cloy, as already noted, took their seats in the Cape congregation on the 25th of November. For calendar 1726 the church fact was thus larger than one death: D’Ailly’s June burial emptied the Cape pulpit, Bek rode in from Stellenbosch, Slicher doubled Drakenstein with occasional Stellenbosch services, Drakenstein wrote a sexton’s rule, Jeremias Roux was stopped from French preaching, Taillefert died in March, Viret in October, and a silk superintendent from the Amsterdam French church was inscribed before the year closed. [3] [8]