Boer History1727 at the Cape of Good Hope: Noodt Installed, Native-Trade Placaat, Lethbridge Divers, and Wheat Rust
Arrival of Pieter Gysbert Noodt and Installation as Governor — February 1727
The officer whom the Assembly of Seventeen had 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 had reached South Africa in January 1726, and on the 6th of December of that year he had left Batavia as admiral of a homeward bound fleet of nine ships. [3]
On the 18th of February 1727 he reached the Cape, and on the 25th of the same month was formally installed as governor. His family was small, consisting only of his wife and one son. The acting headship of Jan de la Fontaine, which had run from the morning after Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes died on the 8th of September 1724, ended on that installation day. [3]
Calendar 1727 therefore opened as the first full year of a commissioned governor since Chavonnes’s death—not as another stretch of pure acting rule. Noodt brought a fortification director’s eye already known from the earlier Table Bay survey; the council of policy and the free community received a sealed commission rather than a provisional continuation of the secunde’s chair. [3]
Noodt’s Temper and De la Fontaine’s Raised Salary — 1727
Mr. Noodt was a coarse, harsh, ill-tempered man, full of pride and self-conceit, and therefore generally disliked. He took special pleasure in irritating the secunde Jan de la Fontaine, and attempted even to injure that officer’s reputation. [3]
In consequence, De la Fontaine tendered his resignation; but the directors, instead of accepting it, increased his salary from £6 13s. 4d. to £10 a month. The secunde who had carried the government through the Chavonnes succession and the drought year of 1726 thus stayed in office under a governor who made personal friction a working fact of the castle. [3]
Noodt did not, in the surviving administrative picture of this year, launch a broad assault on free burgher rights of the kind that had marked the younger Van der Stel crisis. The friction that filled the records was institutional and personal: a new governor against a trusted secunde, answered from the Netherlands not by removing De la Fontaine but by paying him more to remain. [3]
Strict Placaat against Private Native Trade — 9 April 1727
In November 1726 a corporal and six men had been sent over the Hottentots Holland mountains to form an outpost at the Ziekenhuis on the river Zonder End, after the few Khoikhoi left in that part of the country complained that they could not hold their own against the San and were also exposed to depredations from vagrant Europeans who professed trade but robbed cattle. [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. In consequence, on the 9th of April 1727 a very strict placaat to that effect was issued. [3]
The April placaat therefore closed a chain that ran from inland complaint and the November post to directors’ anger over unpunished private misconduct. Free barter under colour of trade, already a standing frontier problem, was met in calendar 1727 with a published ban carrying heavier penalties, while the Zonder End outpost remained the thin Company presence beyond the mountains. [3]
John Lethbridge and the English Divers in Table Bay — 1727
In 1727 a party of five English divers under a foreman named John Lethbridge, who had been engaged in Europe and sent out by the directors, endeavoured to recover the treasure buried in wrecks in Table Bay. The apparatus which they brought with them is not described, but whatever it was, it enabled them to remain a considerable time under water. [3]
They recovered some coin and a quantity of goods, but found that most of the wreckage was deeply covered with sand. The project was thus a partial salvage rather than a full clearing of the bay floor: enough metal and cargo to justify the directors’ hire, not enough to undo the sand that winter gales and the roadstead bottom had laid over older losses. [3]
For a settlement whose winter disasters in Table Bay were a standing fiscal and human cost, the Lethbridge party was a European technical answer to Dutch wreckage. Inside 1727 the working result was measured coin and goods brought up, and a sober report that sand still held most of what the Company hoped to reclaim. [3]
Noodt Inspects the Zonder End Forests — 1727
During the summer the forests along the river Zonder End were examined by the governor in person, with a view of ascertaining whether they could not be made of greater use to the Company. But the mountain range separating them from the Cape was found to be too formidable a barrier to allow the transport of timber with profit. [3]
The same river valley that had received a corporal’s post in November 1726 thus drew the new governor’s own inspection in 1727. Noodt’s fortification training and his interest in material supply met the Hottentots Holland barrier as a transport problem, not only as a policing line against San pressure and vagrant European robbery. [3]
No profitable timber road followed from the summer survey. The Zonder End woods remained geographically near enough to inspect and too costly, across the mountains, to feed the Cape’s building and shipping demand on Company account. [3]
Wheat Rust — Not Enough for Home Consumption — 1727
The 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. [3]
In 1727 there was not sufficient for home consumption, owing to rust, which had attacked rye before, but not wheat. From 1728 to 1737 constant export would resume, sometimes of as much as seven thousand muids, though the crops were not uniformly good. Inside this calendar year the magazines faced a sharper failure than the drought shortfall of 1726: not merely nothing left for India after the reserve, but not enough wheat for the settlement itself. [3]
Rust on wheat was recorded as a new blow in the grain sequence. Rye had known the disease; wheat had not, until 1727 made home supply the immediate problem under Noodt’s first harvest year as installed governor. [3]
Silk Culture Continues under Guillaumet — 1727
François Guillaumet and his family had arrived in October 1726 to superintend silk experiments. Worms received in good condition from Europe and reared in the houses of Jan de la Fontaine and Nicholas Heyning had been handed over to him; healthy mulberry trees and requested slave labour were supplied; and in the first year eight pounds weight of good silk was obtained and sent to the Netherlands, where it drew interest at Amsterdam and Middelburg. [3]
The council of policy had been enthusiastic: a large building rose close to the Company’s garden for the worms; children in the slave lodge close by were to wind silk out of school hours; thousands of young mulberry trees were planted; and burghers who wished to join received eggs and instructions. Yet in no subsequent year did production exceed ten pounds in weight. The great majority of the worms always died before making cocoons. [3]
Calendar 1727 fell inside that early run of hope and thin return—after the first eight-pound sample, with the garden-side silk house and mulberry plantings in place, and before the eight-year experiment would be abandoned by directors’ order in 1735. Silk remained a Company-directed staple trial under Noodt, not yet a proven burgher industry. [3]
Delagoa Bay after De Koning — Reinforcements, Desertion, Conspiracy — 1727
In December 1726 fever had attacked the station at Delagoa Bay, as it had done every previous summer, and in a few months thirty-eight men died, among them Commander Jan de Koning. The secunde Jan de la Capelle then became acting head of the station again. [3]
Reinforcements were sent from the Cape, and attempts to explore the interior were renewed, but with no greater success than before. At the beginning of the following summer a party of sixteen soldiers deserted and made their way overland to Inhambane, where most of them perished. A little later sixty-two men at the station entered into a conspiracy to rebel and desert, but the plot was discovered in time to prevent its being put into execution. The garrison was then one hundred and eighty-six strong. [3]
For Noodt’s Cape council reading Delagoa letters in 1727, the bay after De Koning was cost without map: earthen Lydzaamheid and river boats had not located the gold fields or copper mines; fever had cut the command; Cape reinforcements rebuilt numbers to one hundred and eighty-six; sixteen men still walked toward Inhambane and mostly died; and sixty-two more were caught before a mass desertion. Directors would later leave abandonment or retention to Cape discretion, with the station only wound up in 1730—business outside this year. [3]
Close of 1727 at the Cape
By the end of 1727 Pieter Gysbert Noodt held the governorship to which he had been installed on the 25th of February, after reaching Table Bay on the 18th with his wife and one son. Secunde Jan de la Fontaine remained in office despite tendering resignation, his monthly pay raised by the directors from £6 13s. 4d. to £10 after Noodt’s harsh treatment. On the 9th of April a strict placaat banned private dealing with natives under heavier penalties, following directors’ anger over unpunished misconduct by Europeans of Van der Heiden’s party and the November 1726 Zonder End outpost. Five English divers under John Lethbridge recovered some coin and goods from Table Bay wrecks while most wreckage stayed under sand. Noodt himself inspected the Zonder End forests and found the mountain barrier too costly for profitable timber haul. Rust left wheat short of home consumption after the drought year that had spared nothing for export. Silk under François Guillaumet continued inside the early experimental run that never topped ten pounds a year. At Delagoa Bay, after De Koning’s December death, Cape reinforcements, failure of fresh interior searches, desertion of sixteen toward Inhambane, a foiled conspiracy of sixty-two, and a station one hundred and eighty-six strong filled the file under acting head Jan de la Capelle. The first installed year of Noodt’s government thus closed on personal friction at the castle, a harder native-trade ban, partial wreck salvage, a barren timber survey, grain failure by rust, thin silk, and a fevered eastern post held by force of numbers rather than by profit. [3]