Boer History1728 at the Cape of Good Hope: Table Bay Gales, Meat Placaats, Tulbagh Councillor, and the Valk Raid
Van der Heiden’s Interior Cattle Leave Withdrawn — February 1728
Calendar 1728 opened as Governor Pieter Gysbert Noodt’s second year in the Castle, with secunde Jan de la Fontaine still at the table the directors had refused to let him leave. The governor’s family remained small: his wife Johanna Drabbe, whose Netherlands connections had weighed in his appointment, and one son. He was a hard worker, constantly on the move among gardens and batteries, but the Castle already knew the cost of his temper. He took special pleasure in irritating De la Fontaine and had tried to injure that officer’s reputation; the secunde had tendered his resignation, and the Assembly of Seventeen had answered by raising his pay from £6 13s. 4d. to £10 a month rather than accepting the resignation. Fiscal independent Adriaan van Kervel held the independent fiscal’s chair. Rijk Tulbagh, secretary of the council of policy without a vote, plunged into routine work and did his utmost to stay out of sight of his grumpy superior. Noodt’s appearance had forced De la Fontaine back to the rank of secunde and Hendrik Swellengrebel to that of secretary, so Tulbagh’s own post ran for a stretch as acting secretary—a temporary demotion that at least kept him a step further from the governor’s eye. [3] [9]
In January 1728 another country office closed. Marthinus Bergh, landdrost of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein since October 1721, left that situation; the senior heemraad acted as president of the court and the secretary collected the revenue and conducted the correspondence. The inland magistracy thus entered Noodt’s second year on acting terms, while the Castle table itself remained an installed governor, a confirmed fiscal, a bruised secunde, and a secretary who preferred not to be seen. [3]
After a time the meat contractor Van der Heiden had informed the council that he could not continue to supply meat unless permission was given him to procure cattle from the Khoikhoi in the distant interior. Leave was therefore granted, but in February 1728 it was withdrawn upon the Drakenstein consistory complaining that the trading parties sent out by him had used violence towards the natives, and had even murdered some Khoikhoi. The February withdrawal closed a licensed interior meat path that had been opened under pressure of supply and shut again under consistory complaint. [3]
The matter was investigated by the fiscal and the landdrost, but sufficient evidence could not be procured to secure the conviction of the offenders, though there was no doubt that very atrocious crimes had been committed. Directors had already been so dissatisfied that the Europeans of Van der Heiden’s party had not been brought to justice that they had issued instructions to prohibit all dealing by private persons with natives under heavier penalties than before; the strict placaat of 9 April 1727 was that metropolitan answer. February’s local sequel inside 1728 was not a conviction. It was the cancellation of the interior leave itself. [3]
The same Castle that spent February on meat leave and consistory complaint was the Castle of a governor who had brought an outsize tent—the German Geselte—as a proud possession and had sworn at sailors who could not pitch it on the Wapen Plein until sergeant Rudolf Siegfried Allemann, demoted and confined for refusing to give evidence against De la Fontaine, was fetched from his cell and had the ropes and poles up in minutes. Thereafter Allemann became indispensable on the governor’s expeditions. Noodt’s second year thus opened with a working tent, a working fiscal, a working secunde the Seventeen would not release, and a meat contract cut off from the distant Khoikhoi barter Van der Heiden had said he needed. [9]
Tongue-and-Hoof Sickness and Stock Prices — 1728
The price of sheep sold at public auction at this time was from 11s. 1d. to 18s. 11d., taking one with another in a flock, and of draught oxen £4 8s. 4d. each. Scarcity was increased by the tongue and hoof sickness making its first appearance in 1728. Auction floors still cleared flocks and trek oxen at those quoted ranges, but a new epizootic had entered the same market that Van der Heiden’s cancelled interior leave had already strained. [3]
That first recorded tongue-and-hoof outbreak did not arrive in a country unused to stock disease. Horned cattle and sheep had been attacked from 1714 by a plague unknown before; by 1718 it was so difficult to obtain animals for slaughter that when the contract to supply the Company with meat was offered for sale by auction there was not a single bidder, and the sheep in possession of the burghers had decreased by nearly fifty-six thousand. A private arrangement with Jacob van der Heiden had then put meat at three pence a pound and live sheep at twelve shillings and sixpence each. On the 2nd of July 1720 the sale of live animals to foreigners had been prohibited by placaat, and henceforth no sheep were sent on board the Company’s ships; meat had risen to eightpence halfpenny a pound. [3]
The plague among cattle had later decreased in virulence, and beef and mutton had become 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. Calendar 1728 therefore stacked a new tongue-and-hoof fact on top of an older scarcity reputation. For free burghers and Company magazines alike, auction prices in shillings and pounds still moved flocks, while the biological file was no longer only the older cattle plague. [3]
Horse sickness, described as a new plague when it appeared in a very severe form in 1719, had never left South Africa since. It was not the 1728 tongue-and-hoof file, but it sat in the same stock memory: a settlement that had watched horses die, sheep fall by tens of thousands, and a meat contract find no bidder, now watched tongue and hoof named for the first time in the same year the interior cattle leave was withdrawn. [3]
Meat and Stranger-Supply Placaats — 24 February and 6 April 1728
By order of the directors, a placaat was issued on the 24th of February 1728 prohibiting the sale of fresh meat or vegetables to strangers, under penalty of deportation to Europe and a fine of nearly £70. This was construed to mean that permission must first be obtained from the council, for upon English captains requesting to be allowed to purchase supplies of fresh provisions for their sick, leave was invariably granted. The paper ban therefore policed private sales to foreign flags without starving English sick lists that came through the council door. [3]
On the 6th of April of the same year another placaat required the farmers to provide the Company with meat at two pence a pound and sheep at ten shillings each, under penalty of a tithe of all animals reared being required. Legislation such as this was fruitless. The February ban policed private sales to foreign flags; the April schedule tried to pin Company meat prices and flock delivery under threat of a rearing tithe. English sick lists still got council leave; the forced farm price did not restore a working meat market. [3]
In consequence of foreign ships being prevented from obtaining supplies at the Cape during the 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; but it was hoped that with better times they would return again. That hope was not realised. During the thirteen years 1725–1737 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. Calendar 1728 sat inside that thinner foreign count: a February placaat that made stranger meat and vegetables a council favour, and a roadstead whose foreign flags had already fallen off. [3]
Earlier still, English captains had been in the habit of purchasing cattle in considerable numbers, slaughtering them, and salting the meat. They had also generally taken away a number of sheep. Upon the prohibition being applied to them, they had made loud complaints in Europe, and the directors had issued instructions that they should be treated as well as possible. The 24 February 1728 placaat was the directors’ later, sharper instrument: not a quiet understanding that foreigners should be treated well, but a posted ban with deportation and a fine of nearly seventy pounds—then immediately read as a permission system for English sick. Inside Noodt’s second calendar year the paper answers to scarcity ran faster than the herds. [3]
An attempt had previously been made to procure cattle from the Khoikhoi of the interior, and even from the Xhosa, by licensing a certain burgher to carry on the trade under surveillance; but the great distance caused the scheme to fail. Ensign Rhenius had then been sent with a trading party to the Namaqua, and in November 1724 had returned unsuccessful. The Company had been compelled to submit to circumstances and to pay the high prices determined by public tender. February and April 1728 did not reopen that licensed interior path. They closed Van der Heiden’s leave and posted two placaats instead. [3]
Wheat Export Resumes after the Rust Year — 1728
The harvests during this 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 had been exported. In 1726 none could be spared, owing to drought. In 1727 there had not been sufficient for home consumption, owing to rust, which had attacked rye before, but not wheat. From 1728 there was again a constant export, sometimes of as much as seven thousand muids, though the crops were not uniformly good. Calendar 1728 was thus the first year of the resumed export sequence after the rust shortfall that had left the settlement short of its own bread grain. [3]
Magazines that had faced home shortage in 1727 could again load India-bound wheat once the reserve rule was met. The recovery did not imply uniformly fine seasons through the years that followed; it did mean that 1728 reopened the grain pipe that drought and rust had closed. Arrangements had hardly been made in earlier years for the supply of wheat to India, and beans, peas, and husked barley to the return ships, when dry seasons had shown how thin that pipe could run. Noodt’s second harvest year was the year the pipe opened again. [3]
Silk work under François Guillaumet continued in the same calendar. He and his family had arrived in October 1726 to superintend experiments the directors had resolved should be made. Worms received in good condition from Europe, carefully attended in the houses of Jan de la Fontaine and Nicholas Heyning, had been handed over to him. There were plenty of healthy mulberry trees, and the expert was furnished with whatever slave labour he asked for. In the first year eight pounds weight of good silk had been obtained and sent to the Netherlands, an object of considerable interest at Amsterdam and Middelburg. A large building had been erected close to the Company’s garden for keeping the worms; children in the slave lodge close by were to be employed out of school hours in winding silk; some thousands of young mulberry trees were planted; burghers with a fancy to join were supplied with eggs and instructions. 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. Calendar 1728 was one of those subsequent years: the building stood, Guillaumet still superintended, and the ceiling of ten pounds was not broken. [3] [8]
The isthmus connecting the Cape peninsula with the continent was still 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. To prevent this, they had issued instructions that attempts should be made to fix the sand by planting it with grass and trees, and in the winter of 1724 the work had commenced: seventy slaves and a gang of convicts planting knot-grass and seeds of the wild olive, and, when these failed, in ensuing rainy seasons the experiment repeated with belts of sods. For eleven years, with one short interval, the effort to plant the flats was continued, every winter much labour being expended upon it. The winter of 1728 was one of those labouring winters. [3]
The East India Company, upon whose fortunes this colony greatly depended, had now passed the zenith of its prosperity. Its dividends, which for the ten years ending 31st December 1722 had been at the rate of thirty-seven per cent per annum upon the paid-up capital, averaged only twenty-one per cent for the following decade, and never afterwards rose higher than twenty-five per cent. Many of its trading establishments were not returning the expense of maintenance. The commerce of the English and French in the East was making enormous strides, and some branches were completely lost to the Dutch. Calendar 1728 at the Cape therefore combined a resumed wheat export with a Company whose dividend peak already lay behind it—grain going out again, metropolitan prosperity no longer at thirty-seven per cent. [3]
French Sick-Comforter Refused — 23 February 1728
The rector of the school, the Rev. Lambertus Slicher, was an ordained clergyman. He had begun to assist in the church; his first service had been held on the 15th of June 1721. He still continued to perform the duty of rector of the school, though in February 1728 he was formally inducted as second or assistant clergyman of the Cape congregation. In 1720 some persons had subscribed the necessary funds for the purchase of an organ for use in the church. The February induction therefore seated a school rector already known in the pulpit as the Cape’s assistant clergyman, without releasing him from the school. [3]
When Paul Roux died, the Drakenstein consistory requested the council of policy to appoint another French sick-comforter in his stead, as there were still some twenty-five or twenty-six old people living who did not understand Dutch. The council, on the 23rd of February 1728, declined to do so until the pleasure of the directors could be made known, and their decision was unfavourable. The refusal left the ageing French-speaking remnant at Drakenstein without a dedicated comforter of their language in the same month Slicher took the Cape assistant’s chair. [3]
The Rev. Petrus van Aken, appointed by the directors clergyman of Drakenstein, had arrived in August 1714 and taken over the duty at once. In 1717 a commencement had been made with building a church at Drakenstein. The funds were derived from a legacy of £208 6s. 8d. bequeathed for the purpose by Henning Huising, £314 8s. 6d. left with the government here for charitable purposes by individuals in the fleet under the governor-general Van Hoorn, £698 12s. 2d. lent by the consistory of the Cape, and £715 12s. 6d. raised partly by special collections and partly by making use of the poor fund. The building was completed in 1720. That completed church, under Van Aken, was the congregation whose consistory asked in February 1728 for a French comforter and was told to wait on directors who would not reopen the line. [3]
At Stellenbosch, where the Rev. Mr. Bek had been clergyman when a commencement was made in 1717 with building a church in place of the one destroyed by fire, the cost had been borne by applying the poor fund, by special collections, a loan from the Cape consistory which had then over £9,300 to the good, and by a lottery for which permission was obtained from the directors. So the clerical map of 1728 still ran a Cape congregation with Slicher newly inducted as assistant while remaining school rector, Drakenstein under Van Aken without a French comforter, and Stellenbosch’s rebuilt church on the older Bek file—not a new inland incumbent created this year. [3]
Among the French refugee families whose names still stood on Drakenstein rolls, Pieter Jansz van Marseveen (van Marcevene), husband of Elizabeth des Pres of Courtrai, died in 1728. She had been sponsor on the 24th of May 1688 to Charles Prévot, baptised on the Schelde, and by van Marseveen left Anna, married to Abraham Prévot; Cecilia, married to Charles du Plessis; and Pieter. The year’s French file at the Cape was therefore not only the consistory’s refused comforter for twenty-five or twenty-six old people who did not understand Dutch. It was also a Courtrai marriage line closed by a death in the same calendar as the council’s February minute. [8]
July Gale: Stabroek, Haarlem, and Middenrak — 3–4 July 1728
During the summer the forests along the river Zonder End had been 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. That inspection sat on the same file as the outpost of a corporal and six men sent in November 1726 over the Hottentots Holland mountains to the Ziekenhuis on that river, after Khoikhoi there had complained they could not hold their own against San and against vagrant Europeans who professed to visit for trade but in reality robbed them of cattle. Summer timber hopes closed; winter water then opened. [3] [9]
On Saturday the 3rd of July 1728 there were six ships at anchor in Table Bay, when a gale set in from the north-north-west. At one o’clock in the afternoon the Stabroek parted her cables and was driven ashore between the castle and the mouth of Salt River. She was followed two hours later by the Haarlem, which grounded nearer the castle. Neither of these vessels was broken, and only two men of each were drowned in endeavouring to get to land. [3]
A little after three o’clock the Middenrak went ashore just beyond the mouth of Salt River. There were seventy-five men on board, and the ship was in a raging surf, but it was not possible to render any assistance. Night set in, and the hull of the Middenrak still held together. But when morning dawned on Sunday the 4th, all that remained of the ship was strewed along the beach, and not one of the seventy-five was saved to tell when she had gone to pieces. The other three vessels rode out the gale. [3]
The July disaster therefore split three ways on the same north-north-west blow: two Indiamen beached with light loss of life, one total loss of ship and company beyond Salt River mouth, and three ships still holding their anchors when the surf quieted. Table Bay’s winter reputation, already costly in earlier gales—the June 1722 blow that had taken six hundred and sixty men and property valued at nearly a quarter of a million sterling—took another full wreck and two strandings in a single afternoon and night. From one o’clock to a little after three the roadstead had given up three hulls; by Sunday morning only the Middenrak was gone to pieces. [3]
English divers under John Lethbridge had in the previous year recovered some coin and a quantity of goods from wrecks in Table Bay, but had found that most of the wreckage was deeply covered with sand. July 1728 added new timber and new bodies to that sanded file: two ships that might still be got off, and one that would not be got off at all. The Castle watching Salt River mouth that Saturday afternoon could not send a boat through the surf to seventy-five men. Monday’s beach held what Sunday’s dawn had already named as total loss. [3]
Haarlem Repaired at Saldanha and Lost Again — 4 December 1728
The Haarlem was got afloat again, and was sent to Saldanha Bay to be repaired. This was effected, and she returned to Table Bay on the 4th of December. At that season of the year danger was not suspected, though the day was rainy and the wind was variable from north-west to south-west. The same hull that had grounded nearer the castle in July with two drowned came home from Saldanha on a summer calendar, not a winter one. [3]
At ten o’clock that night the Haarlem parted her cables and went ashore close to the mouth of Salt River, where she broke up at once. Of one hundred and seven men on board, only sixteen got to land on pieces of the wreck. Ninety-one men were lost on a rainy night when the roadstead was not thought dangerous. Summer expectation did not protect a ship already once cast on the Table Bay beach. [3]
The same hull that had grounded near the castle in July with two drowned thus completed a second career in five months: Saldanha repair, December return on a day not classed as winter crisis, and total break-up at Salt River mouth with ninety-one men lost. July’s partial salvage of two ships and total loss of the Middenrak was answered in December by the failure of the repaired Haarlem. For the settlement watching Salt River mouth twice in one year, 1728 was a shipping year as much as a meat-and-grain year. [3]
Saldanha itself had long been known as a bay that could hold a hull for repair. What it could not do was rewrite Table Bay’s cables. The Haarlem left Saldanha whole and died at Salt River mouth the night she came back. The three ships that had ridden out the July gale were not on that December beach; the one that had been saved in July was. Noodt’s second December in the Castle therefore opened with wreckage close to the river mouth where the Stabroek had first come ashore in July—and with sixteen men of a hundred and seven walking off the pieces. [3]
Rijk Tulbagh Enters the Council of Policy — 16 September 1728
Rijk Tulbagh had been born on the 21st of May 1699, eldest son of Dirk Tulbagh, an officer in the army of the States General in Utrecht, and Catharina Cattepoel. As a five-year-old he had gone to Bergen-op-Zoom when his father was transferred; Captain Dirk had served there under garrison commander Maurice Pasques de Chavonnes—a link that later pointed the boy toward the Cape rather than the Indies. He arrived in 1716, a teenager of sixteen, as the most junior of juniors at twelve guilders a month, assisting storekeeper Jan de la Fontaine. Two years later he was adjunct-secretary of the council of policy on twenty-five guilders. In 1722, when Hendrik Swellengrebel was secretary, he became Swellengrebel’s senior clerk. When De la Fontaine became acting head in 1724 and Swellengrebel secunde, Tulbagh was appointed secretary of the council of policy at fifty guilders a month, with free quarters in the Castle, a cook, and a valet. [9]
In the following year, upon the promotion of Hendrik Swellengrebel to be master of the warehouses, Tulbagh had been chosen to succeed him as clerk in that department. In 1725 the secretary, Adriaan van Kervel, became fiscal, when Tulbagh was appointed to the vacant office. He remained in it without a vote until the 16th of September 1728, when he became a member of the council of policy, and at the same time had a seat given to him in the high court of justice. In 1726 he had been named by the local authorities a junior merchant on approbation, and this dignity was now confirmed by the directors. The September promotion thus paired a council vote and a justice seat with metropolitan confirmation of the junior-merchant rank already granted on the spot. [3]
Thus gradually he was making his way upward, in every post giving entire satisfaction, and always esteemed and beloved by his colleagues. He had taken to wife a young lady who was by birth a colonist. Several of her relatives were then in the service of the East India Company, and among them her brother, Hendrik Swellengrebel, who was on several occasions Tulbagh’s immediate superior in office. The 1728 entry into the council therefore seated a secretary already tied by service—and by the Swellengrebel house at the corner of Berg and Wale Streets—to the colonial official families around Noodt’s government, not a stranger imported for the chair. [3] [9]
In May 1728 Tulbagh stood at the wedding of his friend Hendrik Swellengrebel, where his loving glances at the bridesmaid Elizabeth grew more bold. He did not set up a household that year. His sense of responsibility did not allow him to marry before he could maintain a wife properly himself, without drawing on her dowry. Noodt did not make the wedding a governor’s festival. Tulbagh’s year at the Castle was the year of staying out of the governor’s sight until September gave him a vote. [9]
He had acquired an uncanny insight into human nature, and this must have helped him in his relations with the unpredictable governor. A shy, quiet young man who, instead of joining in parties, stayed in his room to read, he was not the officer who pitched Noodt’s tent or swore on the Wapen Plein. On the 16th of September that quiet clerk became a councillor with a justice seat. The junior-merchant rank of 1726 was confirmed from the Netherlands in the same turn. Noodt’s council of policy in the last quarter of 1728 therefore included a man who had arrived at twelve guilders a month and now sat with a vote—still secretary, no longer voteless. [3] [9]
San Raid on Jan Valk near Piketberg — December 1728
There is at this period hardly any mention of the natives in the records, as they seldom gave the Europeans trouble. An exception occurred in December 1728, when a party of San drove off the cattle from the farm of Jan Valk near Piketberg. Valk’s neighbours assembled and pursued the robbers, who offered resistance when they were overtaken. The northern stock frontier, not the Zonder End corporal’s post, was the file that broke the quiet. [3]
Two Europeans were wounded, but a volley of slugs put to flight all the San who were not struck. The cattle were recovered, except two oxen. The government approved of the action of the colonists in following the robbers and firing upon them, but directed the landdrost to be careful that no provocation was given to San who did not first offend. Approval of the chase and a caution against unprovoked offence were the dual minute from a Castle that had spent the year on meat placaats and wrecks. [3]
The December pursuit near Piketberg was thus recorded as a rare frontier incident inside a quiet native file: neighbour assembly, resistance and wounded Europeans, a slug volley, recovery of all but two oxen, and that dual government answer. It closed the calendar year’s inland violence on the northern stock frontier rather than on the Zonder End line that had drawn a corporal’s post in November 1726. The landdrost who was to be careful was the inland magistracy already running on acting terms since Bergh’s departure in January—the senior heemraad as president of the court. [3]
Noodt’s inland rides had already reached the Piketbergen on inspection tours of five or six weeks, with little more to show than a slight improvement of the roads and the erection of one bridge, and with a steadfast “Veremus”—we shall see—to farmers’ requests and complaints. December’s volley near Valk’s farm was not a governor’s tour. It was neighbours overtaking San who had driven off cattle, two Europeans wounded, two oxen not recovered, and a landdrost cautioned not to provoke those who had not first offended. [3] [9]
Calendar 1728 therefore closed as Noodt’s second installed year: interior cattle leave withdrawn in February without a conviction to match the consistory’s complaint; tongue-and-hoof named for the first time; placaats of the 24th of February and the 6th of April on stranger supplies and Company meat; wheat export resumed after the rust year; Slicher inducted as Cape assistant in February and a French sick-comforter refused on the 23rd; the Stabroek, Haarlem, and Middenrak ashore on the 3rd of July, the Middenrak gone to pieces with seventy-five, the repaired Haarlem lost again on the 4th of December with sixteen saved of a hundred and seven; Tulbagh given a council vote on the 16th of September; and Valk’s neighbours firing slugs near Piketberg in December. The next year’s January wreck off Agulhas and the April files in the Company’s garden lie outside this page. [3]