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
Calendar 1727 opened with the Cape still under acting rule. The council of policy had placed Jan de la Fontaine in charge on the morning after Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes died on the 8th of September 1724, and that acting headship ran until a commissioned successor could be installed. The officer whom the Assembly of Seventeen had selected was the director of fortifications, Pieter Gysbert Noodt, born at Nijmegen on the 4th of April 1681. He had inspected the shore of Table Bay and prepared plans of defensive works after arriving in April 1718 on the ironically named Generale Vrede. Intelligence of his appointment had reached South Africa in January 1726; on the 6th of December of that year he left Batavia as admiral of a homeward bound fleet of nine ships. [3] [9]
On the 18th of February 1727 he reached the Cape, and on the 25th of the same month was formally installed as governor in the Castle. His family was small, consisting of his wife Johanna Drabbe—whose family was influential in the Netherlands—and one son. The acting headship of De la Fontaine, which had run from the morning after Chavonnes died, ended on that installation day. The Seventeen had chosen the fortification director rather than promoting the secunde who had held the reins in able hands since September 1724. De la Fontaine was still young and only recently elevated to senior merchant; Noodt came with an engineer’s commission and a sealed governor’s rank. [3] [9]
The 1718 visit already marked the man who now took the Castle. Sent out to draw plans and specifications for new fortifications when war clouds gathered over the Fatherland, he had arrived in April on the Generale Vrede and gone about the Caabse Vlek with notebook and pens. Repeatedly asked by Governor Chavonnes to show his drawings, he refused. He then quarrelled with secunde Abraham van Cranendonk on a matter of protocol: Van Cranendonk’s wife was entitled, as the second-in-command’s lady, to a seat in church closer to the pulpit than Noodt’s, and her carriage should enjoy priority in Bergstraat when Noodt’s wife turned up in her coach. Both men appeared in court with a long list of mutual accusations; the verdict held Noodt right, and Mrs van Cranendonk had to sit back in the Groote Kerk. That engineer, not the acting secunde, was the Seventeen’s choice for 1727. [9]
Almost immediately after the 25th of February he plunged into the routine of the post. He was constantly on the move, now visiting the Company’s gardens, now inspecting the batteries. The shore works finished in the previous calendar year already stood as a completed file: the battery begun in February 1715 and finished in April 1726, first termed Mauritius and later called the Chavonnes battery, faced the roadstead the new governor had surveyed as an engineer. Calendar 1727 was therefore the first full year of a commissioned governor since Chavonnes’s death—not another stretch of pure acting rule, and not a Castle table still waiting for a sealed commission from the Netherlands. [3] [9]
Beside him the Castle table was already set. Fiscal independent Adriaan van Kervel held the independent fiscal’s chair, confirmed after Cornelis van Beaumont died on the 14th of June 1724. Rijk Tulbagh held the secretary’s office without a vote, having been named a junior merchant on approbation in 1726. Hendrik Swellengrebel, still a council secretary pushed about by the new governor, married Helena Wilhelmina ten Damme, a born Caabse Vlekker, in 1727; Tulbagh stood best man. Noodt did not join the wedding. The year’s government was thus an installed governor’s table, a confirmed fiscal’s table, and a secretary’s table on which younger Cape-born officers already worked under a harsh new hand. [3] [9]
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. The earlier Cape visit had already shown the temper: as an engineer in 1718 he had refused to show Governor Chavonnes his drawings, and he had quarrelled with secunde Abraham van Cranendonk over church seating and carriage precedence in Bergstraat until both men appeared in court. In 1727 that same temper sat in the governor’s chair. He took special pleasure in irritating the secunde Jan de la Fontaine, and attempted even to injure that officer’s reputation. [3] [9]
He did his utmost to discredit the secunde, falsely accusing him of malversations, and ultimately making his life so unbearable that De la Fontaine submitted his resignation. Noodt did not refrain from mobilising malcontents with personal grievances against the secunde; nursed and feasted, those men produced statements enclosed in a letter of accusations sent to Amsterdam. The campaign was institutional as well as personal: a new governor against a trusted secunde whose previous career had been made at the Cape itself. [3] [9]
A German sergeant who had signed with the Company shortly before Noodt’s appearance, Rudolf Siegfried Allemann, had the ill luck to get into the governor’s bad books when he refused to give evidence against the secunde. Being a sergeant at the time, he was demoted to common soldier and confined to a cell in the Castle. Noodt had brought to the Cape an outsize tent—a Geselte—one of his dearest and proudest possessions. When he commanded a gang of sailors to put it up in the Wapen Pleyn, the contraption proved unmanageable. Lieutenant Johannes Theophilus Rhenius, looking on, named Allemann as a man who knew tents. The governor had the ex-sergeant fetched from his cell; in a few minutes the Geselte stood. Thereafter Allemann became so indispensable that he was dragged along on Noodt’s expeditions, putting up and pulling down the tent. The Castle in 1727 thus held both a confined witness against the secunde and, after the tent, a restored favourite on the governor’s road. [9]
The directors, instead of accepting the resignation, increased De la Fontaine’s salary from £6 13s. 4d. to £10 a month—from seventy-five guilders to one hundred and twenty. They ignored the governor’s charges. 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. The raise was a striking demonstration of the Seventeen’s opinion not only of De la Fontaine but of his accuser. [3] [9]
On arrival in the Castle in February 1727 Noodt ordered the Company’s surgeon to stick a plaster on his right eye. The doctor asked to look first; the governor told him to shut his mouth and do as he was told. For three days the governor moved about in that fashion; then the plaster was shifted to the left eye for another three days. During both periods he behaved with unusual friendliness and courtesy. After the six days the plaster was removed altogether. “By now I am able to see well,” he announced—and thereafter he saw and noticed more than many people liked, and was not pleasant any longer. The six-day courtesy was the opening performance of the installed year; the Castle then settled into the harsh ordinary. [9]
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. He did not interfere with the burghers as a body. The friction that filled the records was Castle friction: a coarse new governor against a trusted secunde, answered from the Netherlands not by removing De la Fontaine but by paying him more to remain. De la Fontaine, 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, remained the first Cape head-in-waiting whose previous career had been made at the settlement itself—still secunde, still called Jan in the Caabse Vlek, and now better paid under a man who wished him gone. [3] [9]
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 to visit them for trade but in reality robbed them of cattle. The outpost had been formed in order that acts of violence might be prevented. Calendar 1727 inherited that thin Company presence beyond the mountains as a standing frontier fact, not as a new post to be founded in this year. [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. Free barter under colour of trade, already a standing frontier problem, was met in this calendar year with a published ban carrying heavier penalties than the older cattle-barter prohibitions. [3]
Cattle barter by burghers from Khoikhoi had been forbidden from 1658 to 1697, prohibited under more severe penalties by the placaat of October 1697, opened in February 1700, and repeatedly tightened again whenever private parties used trade as a cover for robbery. The April placaat of 1727 closed a chain that ran from inland complaint and the November post to directors’ anger over unpunished private misconduct. The Zonder End outpost remained the thin Company presence beyond the mountains; the published ban was the legal answer from the Castle. [3]
Inland Drakenstein lost a heemraad in the same year. Jean Durand, born about 1669, dean of La Motte Chalangen in Dauphiné, surgeon and farmer at Drakenstein, member of the Court of Landdrost and Heemraden, and heir of Jean Parisel, died in March 1727. He had married at Cape Town on the 29th of February 1702 Anna Vermeulen of the Cape, born 1686, and later Wilhelmina van Zijl of Haarlem. On the 31st of July 1727 André Huibaux (also written Hucebos, Hucibos, Wiebeaux) died: he had come in 1706 in the Blois from Middelburg and become a free burgher in 1715. The placaat year was thus also a year in which French-refugee names dropped from the Drakenstein roll while the consistory’s earlier complaint against Van der Heiden’s party still echoed in the directors’ heavier penalties. [8]
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. The hire was a European technical answer to Dutch wreckage in a roadstead whose winter disasters were a standing fiscal and human cost. [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. Table Bay after the June 1722 disasters, when several ships had perished and no fewer than six hundred and sixty men had drowned, still held cargo under that sand. [3] [9]
Foreign flags remained scarce in the same roadstead. 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. Lethbridge’s five English divers were a directors’ party, not a return of the foreign merchant flags that had once crossed the beach with cash. [3]
The directors’ fear that Table Bay itself was silting had already put slaves and convicts on the flats every winter since 1724. Lethbridge’s men, working the same bay from below, reported sand over wreckage rather than a cleared floor. The two sand stories met in 1727: skippers’ reports of summer south-east gales filling the roadstead, and divers’ reports of older hulls buried too deep to lift. Coin and goods came up; most of the wreckage stayed down. [3]
For a settlement whose winter disasters in Table Bay were a standing cost, the Lethbridge party was measured work inside 1727: coin and goods brought up, and a sober report that sand still held most of what the Company hoped to reclaim. No full inventory of hulls recovered survives in the year’s narrative; the working result was partial salvage under a new governor who had once drawn plans of the same shore. [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. The same river valley that had received a corporal’s post in November 1726 thus drew the new governor’s own inspection in 1727. [3]
He travelled to those forests along the river-without-end to see what use could be made of them, which was not much, since transport problems appeared insoluble. He explored Hout Bay and False Bay, rode to Stellenbosch, Drakenstein and the Land of Waveren, and even penetrated as far as the Great Berg River and the Piketbergen. Wherever he arrived he was well received and entertained. To requests and complaints from the farmers he answered with a steadfast Veremus—we shall see. Those trips ran occasionally five or six weeks. Only a slight improvement of the roads and the erection of one bridge were the working result. [9]
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. 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] [9]
The inspection year therefore mapped a governor’s reach rather than a new timber staple. Gardens and batteries at the Castle, Hout Bay and False Bay on the peninsula, the old farming districts of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, the Land of Waveren beyond, and the Piketbergen to the north all saw the short, ill-tempered engineer on the road. Allemann, once restored, went with him, the Geselte going up and down on those five- or six-week circuits. The corporal’s post at the Ziekenhuis remained a corporal and six men. The woods along the Zonder End remained on the far side of a range that would not pay for a timber waggon. A slight improvement of the roads and one bridge were what the inland districts could show for the new governor’s summer; timber for the Company still had to come from woods the waggons could actually reach. [3] [9]
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. In 1727 there was not sufficient for home consumption, owing to rust, which had attacked rye before, but not wheat. [3]
Magazines that had faced a drought shortfall in 1726—nothing left for India after the reserve—now faced a sharper failure: not enough wheat for the settlement itself. 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. Constant export would later resume in following seasons, sometimes of as much as seven thousand muids, though the crops were not uniformly good—business outside this calendar year. Inside it, the Castle measured shortage, not surplus. [3]
Cattle plague, which had run from 1714, had after a few years decreased in virulence, and beef and mutton were obtainable at a penny halfpenny to two pence a pound; but the Cape had lost its reputation of affording cheap supplies of fresh provisions, and it was a long time in regaining it. Grain failure in 1727 therefore sat on top of a meat market that was no longer cheap enough to draw foreign skippers, and on top of a roadstead whose foreign flags had already thinned. Burghers who felt the loss of ready money from foreign ships now also faced rust in the wheat lands. [3]
Another Company staple trial still sat on the books from February 1725, when eight Persian Kirman goats had reached South Africa out of twenty-four obtained in Persia and sent via Ceylon, 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, reduced by death to two, goats with tolerably long and fine hair were bred. Some burghers were induced to make experiments with the animals. Calendar 1727 fell inside that early breeding, before the later demand of forty pence a pound and the later unsaleable sample—business outside this year. Wheat rust, not Kirman hair, was the magazine fact of Noodt’s first harvest. [3]
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 had been 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. In the winter of 1724 seventy slaves and a gang of convicts had begun planting knot-grass and seeds of the wild olive; when these failed, ensuing rainy seasons repeated the experiment with belts of sods. For eleven years, with one short interval, the effort continued every winter. Calendar 1727 fell inside that labour: another rainy season of planting on the flats, while rust, not sand, was the year’s blow to the magazines. [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. 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. Guillaumet, his wife Claudine Cloy or Cloi, and family had been inscribed as members of the Dutch Church at Cape Town on the 25th of November 1726 on a certificate from the French church at Amsterdam; Matthieu had been born at Berlin in 1711. [3] [8]
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. From 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 boosting the economy, and the silk attempt was a well-planned industrial trial under a French expert, with a factory near the Slave Lodge. De la Fontaine, son of a silk merchant, had already as acting head made attempts to foster industry; 1727 continued that trial under Noodt. [3] [9]
Yet in no subsequent year did production exceed ten pounds in weight. The great majority of the worms always died before making cocoons. 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. 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. For eight years the experiment would continue by government; the later abandonment by directors’ order lies outside this year. Silk remained a Company-directed staple trial under Noodt, not yet a proven burgher industry. [3] [9]
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. Everything had been in favour of the experiment: healthy mulberries, slave labour as asked, European stock that had hatched and been attended in the houses of De la Fontaine and Heyning. The large building by the garden, the lodge children, and the thousands of young trees were the council’s answer to that first eight-pound sample. Calendar 1727 was the year in which those buildings and plantings were already in use under Noodt, and in which the worms still died before cocoons. [3]
The silk house stood in a settlement whose French names were already thinning. Guillaumet held the post for some years; the worms did not repay the building, the lodge children, or the thousands of mulberries. Burghers given eggs learned the same lesson as the Company: most worms died before cocoons. Inside 1727 the trial was still official policy, still housed by the garden, still counted in pounds rather than in a manufacturing staple for Amsterdam. [3] [8]
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. De Koning had reached Fort Lagoa at the end of May 1726, found De la Capelle engaged in sugar cane and indigo, enclosed a larger area with earthen walls named Lydzaamheid, and sent boats up the rivers without locating the copper mines or the gold fields. The gold dust brought by the natives for sale was so mixed with other substances that the assayers in Batavia asserted that every stiver’s worth cost the Company a florin. [3]
Around the bay the most powerful of the chiefs was named Maphumbo, but another, named Manisa, was almost as strong. Manisa had his 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, the Manisa. The natives 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. De Koning had sent three men of rank with their attendants on a visit to the Cape; one was a nephew of Maphumbo who had been to England, received in baptism the name of John, been sent back to Delagoa Bay in 1723, and spoke English fluently. The visitors professed to be pleased with the manner in which they saw the slaves were treated; the traffic did not increase after their return. That inherited diplomacy, not a new inland map, was what Noodt’s council still had on the Delagoa file in 1727. [3]
Reinforcements were sent from the Cape, and attempts to explore the interior were renewed, but with no greater success than before. The early disasters at the bay had not discouraged the Company, and for a long time hopes were entertained of a profitable trade there. 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 had been received from that station. Calendar 1727 inherited those thin returns and a garrison rebuilding after fever, not a new discovery of Monomotapa. [3]
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. Cape reinforcements had rebuilt numbers; sixteen men still walked toward Inhambane and mostly died; sixty-two more were caught before a mass desertion. [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; fever had cut the command; Cape reinforcements rebuilt the post to one hundred and eighty-six; desertion and conspiracy then ate at that strength. The directors would later leave abandonment or retention of Fort Lydzaamheid to Cape discretion—business outside this year. Inside it, Delagoa remained a reinforced, fever-scarred, restless station on the south-eastern coast, still hoped to pay, and still not paying. [3]
Calendar 1727 therefore closed as Noodt’s first installed year: a sealed governor in the Castle, a secunde kept and better paid against the governor’s will, a strict placaat on private native trade dated the 9th of April, English divers lifting coin and goods from sanded wrecks, a summer inspection that found no profitable timber road from the Zonder End, wheat rust that left the magazines short of home need, silk still tried in pounds, and Delagoa still held after De Koning at a hundred and eighty-six men. The next year’s winter gales and later inland files lie outside this page. [3]