Boer History1729 at the Cape of Good Hope: Saxenburg Wreck, Soldiers’ Desertion, Death of Noodt, and Le Sueur
Saxenburg Lost off Cape Agulhas — 9 January 1729
Calendar 1729 opened as Governor Pieter Gysbert Noodt’s third year in the Castle and, as it proved, his last. He had been at the head of the colony for a stretch that would close at two years and two months. His 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. Coarse, harsh, ill-tempered, full of pride and self-conceit, he was generally disliked; he took special pleasure in irritating secunde Jan de la Fontaine and had tried to injure that officer’s reputation. The secunde had tendered his resignation; the Assembly of Seventeen had answered by raising his pay from £6 13s. 4d. to £10 a month—from seventy-five guilders to one hundred and twenty—rather than accepting the resignation. Fiscal independent Adriaan van Kervel still held the independent fiscal’s chair. Ryk Tulbagh, secretary of the council of policy, had sat with a vote and a seat in the high court of justice since 16 September 1728. [3] [9]
On the morning of the 9th of January 1729 the provision ship Saxenburg, bound from Batavia to the Cape with rice and other Indian produce, went down in a gale off Cape Agulhas. Of eighty-eight souls on board, all perished but seven, who were picked up on pieces of the wreck by other vessels a few hours later. The southern tip, not the Table Bay beach, took the first hull of the new year. [3]
The Agulhas loss therefore opened the calendar year on the outward rice route rather than on the roadstead where the Stabroek, Haarlem, and Middenrak had already been wrecked or stranded in 1728. On Saturday the 3rd of July that prior year six ships had lain at anchor when a north-north-west gale drove the Stabroek ashore between the castle and the mouth of Salt River, the Haarlem nearer the castle two hours later, and the Middenrak just beyond Salt River a little after three, with seventy-five lost when she went to pieces overnight. The repaired Haarlem had then parted her cables again on the night of the 4th of December and broken up at once, sixteen of one hundred and seven getting to land on pieces of the wreck. A Batavia provisioner carrying Indian staples never even made that beach. Seven men on floating wreckage were the whole human salvage of a company of eighty-eight. [3]
For magazines and shipping clerks at the Cape, the January gale off the southern tip cut a rice and produce cargo out of the year’s expected Batavia arrivals. The disaster sat beside the prior winter’s Table Bay record as another reminder that the refreshment station’s approaches, not only its anchorage, could erase hulls and crews in a single blow. Noodt’s Castle had already sounded the cost of winter gales in the bay; January showed that the open Agulhas coast could do the same work on a homeward provisioner before the roadstead was even in sight. [3]
The governor who received that news was still the man who had brought an outsize tent—the German Geselte—as a proud possession, who had sworn at sailors on the Wapen Plein until sergeant Rudolf Siegfried Allemann pitched the ropes and poles, and who had ridden inspection tours of five or six weeks to Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, the Land of Waveren, the Great Berg River, and the Piketbergen, answering farmers with a steadfast “Veremus”—we shall see. January’s wreck was not a tour. It was a provision ship gone on the rice route, eighty-eight reduced to seven, and a Castle that would spend the rest of the summer answering directors who wanted the neighbouring harbours examined. [3] [9]
Harbour Commission: Table Bay, Saldanha, and Simon’s Bay — 1729
In consequence of the numerous disasters that had occurred in Table Bay in the winter season, the directors issued instructions that the several harbours in the neighbourhood of the Cape should be carefully examined, and a report be submitted to them. The July wrecks and the December loss of the repaired Haarlem had made the roadstead itself the metropolitan question; the January Agulhas gale then added the approaches. To perform the survey, a commission was appointed, consisting of two old skippers, one named Jacobus Möller, who was then acting as master of the naval establishment at the Cape, the other named Jan de Heere, who had been for some time living in the colony as a burgher. [3]
They sounded Table Bay and made a chart of it, reporting that it was not filling up, that it could be made a perfectly safe harbour by means of a mole, but that the mole would cost a great deal of money. The bay that had taken the Stabroek, Haarlem, and Middenrak was therefore still deep enough on the lead-line. Safety, in the skippers’ verdict, was an engineering price, not a silted channel. Calendar 1729 thus carried the first systematic local charting reply to the disasters that had closed the previous year. [3]
Saldanha Bay they described as secure, but as wanting in everything else that could make a refreshment station valuable. The same basin that had taken the Haarlem for repair between July and December was, on this survey, a shelter without the gardens, water-works, and shore establishment that made Table Bay worth its winter risk. A safe hole in the coast was not, by itself, a refreshment station. [3]
Simon’s Bay they thought more highly of. Eight or ten ships could there find shelter in all weathers, and there was plenty of fresh water to be had. Its drawbacks they reported to be no ground in its neighbourhood fit for gardens and difficulty of access by land. The False Bay bight therefore entered the directors’ file as the preferred natural shelter for a small winter fleet, limited by wagon-road and the lack of garden soil nearby—not as a ready substitute for the Castle’s own beach. [3]
The Möller–De Heere survey thus answered directors’ anxiety after the winter wrecks with three distinct verdicts: Table Bay still deep enough for a costly mole solution; Saldanha safe but barren as a full refreshment base; Simon’s Bay the preferred natural shelter for eight to ten ships, limited by land approach and garden ground. Noodt’s own earlier rides had already taken him to Hout Bay and False Bay on inspection; seven years earlier, as director of fortifications, he had inspected the shore of Table Bay and prepared plans of defensive works. The 1729 commission put lead-line and chart under two old skippers rather than under the governor’s “Veremus,” and it asked a harbour question, not a battery question. The Agulhas wreck sat outside all three harbours: a rice ship that never reached the sounded water. [3] [9]
Soldiers Plan Desertion toward Delagoa — Night of 2 April 1729
Fourteen soldiers planned to desert from the garrison and march overland to the Portuguese possessions beyond Delagoa Bay, where they supposed they would find means to get to Europe. The east-coast factory the Company still held at Fort Lagoa had been a running file since 1721; for garrison men at the Cape it now figured as a Portuguese door toward home rather than as a Dutch outpost to be reinforced. In the night of the 2nd of April 1729 two of them were on guard. These deserted with their arms and assisted some of the others to rob the guardhouse of nine muskets with ammunition. One was unable to get away; the remaining thirteen marched towards Stellenbosch. [3]
During the next day they visited the farms of Andries Schutte and Izaak Nel, where they obtained food, and then continued on their journey. The desertion was thus not a single night’s bolt from the castle walls but a planned column toward the Portuguese east coast, armed from the guardhouse and feeding at free-burgher farms on the Stellenbosch road. Nine stolen muskets and the two guards’ own arms made the party a moving theft as well as a flight. [3]
Governor Noodt, meantime, instructed Pieter Lourens, landdrost of Stellenbosch, to assemble a party of burghers and arrest the fugitives. The inland magistracy had been on acting terms since Marthinus Bergh left the Stellenbosch and Drakenstein landdrost’s chair in January 1728, the senior heemraad sitting as president of the court and the secretary collecting the revenue and conducting the correspondence. Lourens, already the officer named to raise the burghers on the 2nd–4th of April, would be recorded as landdrost from May 1729. The Company’s answer was therefore local civil-military pursuit under the district landdrost rather than an immediate castle sortie alone—burgher neighbours called out against soldiers who had already left the posts with stolen muskets. [3]
The plot sat on a Cape garrison that had not seen a named San or Khoikhoi collision in the opening months of 1729. The last inland violence on the northern stock frontier had been the December 1728 raid on Jan Valk near Piketberg, when neighbours recovered all but two oxen after a slug volley. April’s deserters were Company soldiers on the Stellenbosch road, not a frontier stock party. Their imagined door was Portuguese Delagoa, not a San kraal. [3]
For the Castle the night of the 2nd was a guardhouse failure before it was a field action: two men on watch walking off with their arms, nine muskets and ammunition lifted, one of fourteen left behind, thirteen on the Stellenbosch path by morning. Noodt’s instruction to Lourens put burgher horses on that path. The farms of Schutte and Nel fed the column for one more day. [3]
Pursuit at Hottentots Holland Kloof — 4 April 1729
Early in the morning of the 4th they were overtaken at Hottentots Holland kloof, but only two gave themselves up when the landdrost summoned them to surrender. The others maintained a running fight for three hours, when their leader was shot and eight were captured. Another was made prisoner a few days later, and the remaining three returned of their own accord to the castle and surrendered. [3]
The kloof fight therefore broke the column without a complete field massacre: two at the first summons, a three-hour running action with the leader killed and eight taken, a later capture, and three voluntary returns to the castle. Of the thirteen who had left with arms after the guardhouse robbery, none reached the Portuguese frontier. The pass over the Hottentots Holland mountains—the same range that carried the wagon track toward the Zonder End country—closed a plot that had begun with two men on guard. [3]
For Stellenbosch district and the Cape posts, the 4 April pursuit fixed the deserters’ route on the Hottentots Holland pass rather than on a successful overland trek to Delagoa. Landdrost Lourens’s burgher party closed in two days what the guardhouse had lost in one night. The three who later walked back to the castle saved the district a longer hunt and still placed themselves under the high court that would sit on the 21st. [3]
The running fight of three hours was burgher pursuit, not a Castle sortie in line. Two surrendered at the summons; the leader’s death and eight captures did the rest of the morning’s work; one more taken in the days after; three back through the castle gate on their own. Fourteen had planned the march; one had never left; thirteen had eaten at Schutte’s and Nel’s; thirteen were back in Company hands before the month was a week old, one of them dead on the kloof. [3]
Noodt’s government had not been a burgher quarrel. He did not interfere with the free farmers as the younger Van der Stel had done; they did not complain of him as they had of that governor. April’s call-out was the opposite of a burgher rising: country neighbours summoned by the landdrost to arrest Company soldiers who had stolen muskets and eaten at two farms. The kloof, not the Castle gate, was where that summons was answered with powder. [3]
High Court Sentence of the Deserters — 21 April 1729
They were brought to trial, and on the 21st of April sentence was passed. Four were condemned to be hanged, and their bodies afterwards to be exposed to perish by the air and the birds. Five were to be flogged, branded, and made to labour fifteen years in chains. Three were to be flogged and made to labour ten years. And the last was to be flogged and made to labour three years. The graded paper thus ran from capital exposure down to a three-year labour term, with branding reserved for the five longest chain sentences. [3]
At the foot of this sentence the original signatures may still be seen of the members of the high court of justice: Pieter Gysbert Noodt, Jan de la Fontaine, Johannes Theophilus Rhenius, Nicholas Heyning, Hendrik Swellengrebel, Christoffel Brand, J. P. van Coller, and Ryk Tulbagh. The bench that had sat without Tulbagh’s vote until September 1728 now carried his name under a capital sentence. Swellengrebel, once pushed back to secretary when Noodt forced De la Fontaine down from acting head, signed as a justice beside the secunde he had served. [3] [9]
The 21 April judgment thus graded capital exposure for four, long chain labour with flogging and branding for five, and lesser flogging-and-labour terms for the rest, under a bench that seated the governor, the secunde, and councillors including Tulbagh, who had entered the council of policy and the high court only the previous September. The paper record of the court, not later gossip about the day, is the surviving official account of how the desertion was punished. A German tutor’s tale, written after 1732 and afterwards staged as a drama, would blacken the governor’s part; the signatures at the foot of the sentence show a full court, not a single man’s caprice. [3]
Fourteen had planned; one had never left the posts; thirteen had been recovered, one of them shot on the kloof. The sentences that survive are those of the recovered living: four to the gallows and exposure, five to fifteen years in chains after flogging and branding, three to ten years after flogging, one to three years after flogging. That arithmetic, signed by eight names including Noodt and De la Fontaine on the same sheet, is what the high court left for the morning of the 23rd. [3]
Noodt sat at the head of that court as he sat at the head of the council: generally disliked, not a burgher target. De la Fontaine signed under him two days before the secunde would be asked to take the government again. Tulbagh, the quiet secretary who had stayed out of the governor’s sight through 1728, now had his name on a hanging sentence. The high court of 21 April 1729 was the last justice paper Noodt would sign as governor in health. [3] [9]
Execution and Sudden Death of Governor Noodt — 23 April 1729
The sentence was carried into effect on the morning of the 23rd, and the only interference of the governor that is recorded is that he used his power of mitigation to permit the burial of the four who were hanged, instead of allowing them to be exposed. The punishment was in accordance with the spirit of those times, and was not more severe than was inflicted for similar offences in other countries. Four bodies that the sentence had consigned to air and birds were, by that mitigation, allowed a grave. [3]
That same morning one of the deserters sentenced to death, dangling from the gallows behind the castle, was afterwards said in every street, alley, and square of the little town to have cried out with the last words he could utter that Pieter Gysbert Noodt would soon follow him to God’s throne to hear the Lord’s judgment. The rumour grew into a legend and was later staged as a thriller. The Company journal, under the heading of the 23rd of April 1729, put down something soberer: that it pleased the Almighty to take away from this earthly sphere the Honourable Governor Pieter Gysbert Noodt, that afternoon between three and four. In the case of the executed deserters, the governor was not more to blame than any of his contemporary rulers; the men had been found guilty, thus they were hanged. [3] [9]
He died suddenly when sitting in the pleasure house in the Company’s garden between three and four o’clock in the afternoon of the 23rd of April 1729. A few hours before, when apparently in perfect health, he had signed documents which are still in existence. Sitting in an armchair in the Tuynhuys in the Company garden, he closed his eyes and breathed his last. He had not bothered his family and suite with any kind of sick-bed, and had not given the slightest hint of a possible passing away. The same calendar day therefore held the morning execution of the four condemned deserters—with Noodt’s mitigation for burial rather than exposure—and the governor’s own sudden death in the garden pleasure house that afternoon. [3] [9]
Mr. Noodt was at the head of this colony for a period of two years and two months. He was generally disliked, but as he did not interfere with the burghers, they did not complain of him as they had of the younger Van der Stel. On the last day of the month his body was buried with state under the pavement of the church, but in the records there is no trace of regret shown by any one for his death. Rhyme-loving Dutchmen in the Caabse Vlek were said to have answered the news with a little song: “Noodt is dood; nu is er geen nood”—Noodt is dead, and there is now no trouble. Very few burghers attended the funeral. [3] [9]
He had been born at Nijmegen on the 4th of April 1681, had visited the Cape in 1718 as director of fortifications, had quarrelled then with secunde Cranendonk over church seats and carriage precedence, and had been chosen governor in January 1726 in preference to promoting De la Fontaine, reaching Table Bay from Batavia in February 1727 and taking the oath on the 25th. The plaster he had once ordered stuck first on the right eye and then on the left, walking the Castle in unusual friendliness for six days before announcing that he could see well, belonged to that earlier installation, not to this April afternoon. What 1729 added was the morning gallows, the afternoon armchair in the Tuynhuys, the journal note between three and four, and a church pavement burial on the 30th with no recorded regret. [3] [9]
De la Fontaine Again Acting Head — 24 April 1729
At eight in the morning after Mr. Noodt’s death the council of policy met, and decided that the secunde Jan de la Fontaine should again act as head of the government until the pleasure of the supreme authorities could be known. With the next homeward bound fleet they sent a request to the directors that he should be permanently appointed governor. The Castle did not wait for a metropolitan nomination before filling the chair for the interim. [3]
De la Fontaine had already headed the government as secunde from 8 September 1724 to 25 February 1727, between the death of Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes and Noodt’s installation. He was the first man in that chair whose previous career had been made at the Cape: detained from the homeward Horstendal in 1710 by commissioner Johan van Hoorn and appointed storekeeper, two decades in the colony without a break, called Jan by everyone in the little town. Born in Amsterdam on the 23rd of April 1684—the same calendar day on which Noodt now died, forty-five years later—he was Jan de la Fontaine dit Wicart, son of merchant Jacques de la Fontaine and Barbara van den Burgh, baptized in the Oude Kerk rather than in the Walloon church. In May 1711 he had married Maria Elizabeth, the nineteen-year-old daughter of secunde Andries de Man. [3] [9]
Sharper contrasts than Jan de la Fontaine and Pieter Gysbert Noodt were hardly imaginable. The secunde was a tall man; the dead governor had been below average height, with legs too short for a portly frame, pale bulging eyes, and mouth corners curved downward in a perpetual sneer. Noodt had done his utmost to discredit De la Fontaine, falsely accusing him of malversations, mobilizing malcontents, and enclosing their statements in a letter full of false accusations to Amsterdam. The Seventeen had ignored the charges, refused the resignation, and raised the salary from seventy-five guilders a month to one hundred and twenty. The 24 April 1729 decision restored the acting arrangement inside twenty-four hours of Noodt’s death, with a formal petition for permanent appointment travelling on the next homeward fleet. [3] [9]
For the rest of calendar 1729 the Cape therefore ran again under De la Fontaine as acting head, with the high-court and council personnel who had signed the 21 April sentence still in place and the directors’ answer on the governorship still months away. Continuity of routine administration, not a contested local succession, marked the day after Noodt’s burial preparations began. Van Kervel remained fiscal independent. Tulbagh remained the secretary with a vote. In May the Stellenbosch landdrost’s chair, acting since Bergh’s departure in January 1728, was recorded in Lourens’s name—the same Pieter Lourens who had assembled the burghers at Hottentots Holland kloof in April. [3]
Great joy was later remembered in the Settlement when it was known that Jan had become Noodt’s successor; in 1729 that joy was still an acting chair and a letter on the homeward fleet. He had held the reins in able hands from Chavonnes’s death until Noodt’s appearance, and now held them again. Two years after his arrival he had, though still a junior merchant, become a member of the council of policy; in 1717 a fully-fledged merchant; on Chavonnes’s death the council had nominated him provisional secunde, and the Seventeen had confirmed him and promoted him to senior merchant to match the chair. Noodt’s appointment in January 1726 had passed him over; the morning of the 24th of April 1729 put him back. The Lords Seventeen in Amsterdam and their subjects in Table Valley were, for once, in agreement that Jan was the proper choice—agreement the council put on paper that morning, without waiting to hear it confirmed. The confirmation itself belongs to another year. [3] [9]
Rev. François le Sueur, Assistant Clergyman — 16 October 1729
The directors sent out as second or assistant clergyman at the Cape the Rev. François le Sueur, who conducted service here for the first time on the 16th of October 1729. At the Cape the clerical map had for some years run with the Rev. Mr. Bek at the mother congregation after the death of the Rev. Mr. D’Ailly in 1726, and with the Rev. Lambertus Slicher at Drakenstein and directed to hold services occasionally at Stellenbosch. So matters had remained for more than three years when Le Sueur’s first Cape service added a second ordained voice on the Cape side. [3]
The October arrival did not yet fill every inland vacancy; it did place an assistant clergyman at the Cape under directors’ appointment. The succession of ministers who held the Cape Town pulpit now ran Bek from June 1726 with Le Sueur from October 1729 beside him as second. Slicher remained the inland voice at Drakenstein with occasional Stellenbosch duty, as he had since the council sent him inland on the 15th of July 1725 after Van Aken’s death and then, after D’Ailly’s death, directed him to hold Stellenbosch services while Bek took the mother church. More than three years of that two-man map ended when Le Sueur preached. Inside 1729 the dated fact is that first service on the 16th of October. Later deaths and transfers that would again reshuffle Drakenstein and Stellenbosch lie outside this page. [3]
Among the French-descended free burghers who sat under those pulpits, 1729 also dated household files. Pieter Bisseux, son of Jacques Bisseux of Picardy—the baker who had come in the Vosmaar in 1696 as a freeman and died on the 11th of June 1723, buried in the churchyard at Cape Town—was described in 1729 as from Middelburg in Zeeland, and appears to have left no issue. Jacques’s second marriage to Elisabeth Posseaux of Paris had given the Cape a daughter Elisabeth, married to Albertus Bergh, son of Captain Olof Bergh, and a son Johannes Bisseux. The baker’s line thus still showed in town while Pieter’s own branch was already marked as childless. [8]
At Drakenstein, Claude Marais of Plessis Marle, near Paris—one of the first elders chosen for the French congregation in 1691—lost his second wife about 1729. Susanna Gardiol, born at de la Costé in Provence, widow of Abraham de Villiers, had executed an antenuptial contract with him on the 13th of October 1721. At the time of her death Claude Marais possessed a house in Cape Town and the farms Meerlust, Lekkerwyn, Plessis Marle, and Wel van Pas. The French elder’s town house and four farms therefore stood on the record in the same year that an assistant clergyman first preached at the Cape. [8]
Jacob Naudé, born at Berlin circa 1696, arrived at the Cape in 1710, and in 1722 married Suzanne Taillefert of Château-Thierry, daughter of the refugee Isaac Taillefert and widow of Pierre Cronier. His parents were Philippe Naudé and Anna Isnard, who lived at Berlin; when Jacob joined the Drakenstein church he brought a certificate of membership from Hanover. In March 1729 Philippe Naudé, the theologian and mathematician born at Metz on the 28th of December 1654, died at Berlin. Jacob’s own statement in the Cape archives named that Philippe as his father; the Berlin death of 1729 thus closed a European file for a Drakenstein householder already two decades at the Cape. [8]
Calendar 1729 therefore closed as the year the Saxenburg went down off Agulhas on the 9th of January with seven saved of eighty-eight; the year Möller and De Heere sounded Table Bay, Saldanha, and Simon’s Bay; the year fourteen soldiers left the guardhouse on the night of the 2nd of April and were broken at Hottentots Holland kloof on the 4th; the year the high court signed a graded sentence on the 21st and four were hanged on the morning of the 23rd before Noodt died in the Tuynhuys armchair between three and four that afternoon; the year the council at eight the next morning put De la Fontaine in the acting chair again and Lourens took the Stellenbosch landdrost’s name in May; and the year François le Sueur held his first Cape service on the 16th of October while Huguenot households at town and Drakenstein dated a childless Bisseux, a Gardiol death, and a Berlin Naudé burial. The directors’ answer on the governorship, and the first homeward fleet that would carry Noodt’s widow and son, lie outside this page. [3] [8] [9]