Boer History1731 at the Cape of Good Hope: Delagoa Return, Hartzogenrath, and the Southeast Coast Survey
Delagoa Evacuation Party Reaches Table Bay — 18 January 1731
On the 27th of December 1730 acting commander Jan de la Capelle and one hundred and thirty-three men embarked from Fort Lydzaamheid at Delagoa Bay in the Cape packets sent to withdraw the station. Their voyage closed the Company’s occupation of the bay. On the 18th of January 1731 the same party arrived in Table Bay, bringing the evacuated establishment back under the eye of Governor Jan de la Fontaine and the council of policy. [3]
The January landing converted the December embarkation from a distant bay report into a Cape fact. Men, effects, and the acting commander who had held the post through its last fever seasons and the killing of Ensign Mona were again on the peninsula rather than on the south-eastern coast. Before the packets had even reached the bay, Mona and twenty-nine Europeans had been surprised and killed by a party of natives. The garrison, once one hundred and eighty-six strong after the desertion of sixteen soldiers toward Inhambane and the discovery of a sixty-two-man conspiracy, had been reduced to the one hundred and thirty-three who stepped ashore in mid-January. [3]
Calendar 1731 therefore opened on the practical end of the Delagoa experiment that the council had resolved to quit on the 11th of June 1730 and that the packets Snuffelaar, Zeepost, and Feyenoord had begun to execute on the 12th of August. The directors had left abandonment or retention of Fort Lydzaamheid to Cape discretion; the council had answered that the sooner it could be abandoned the better. The men who came up the beach in mid-January were the living remainder of a post that had cost gold-dust assays, failed river explorations, summer fever, desertion, conspiracy, and a final native surprise. [3]
What they brought home was not a paying factory. In 1725 the station had forwarded 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. The gold the natives offered was so mixed with other substances that the assayers in Batavia asserted that every stiver’s worth cost the Company a florin. Sergeant Mona’s march of twenty days from Fort Lagoa on the 27th of June 1725, with thirty-one men and the clerk Frans de Kuyper as journalist, had ended when hostile blacks killed the pack oxen and seized the baggage. The mineralogist Jan Hendrik Hoorn had likewise failed to find the copper mines. Boats pushed up the rivers under Commander Jan de Koning after May 1726 had not located gold fields or the still-believed empire of Monomotapa. [3]
Fever had done the rest. In December 1726 it attacked the garrison as it had done every previous summer, and in a few months thirty-eight men died, among them De Koning himself. De la Capelle, already secunde and once acting head while De Koning experimented with sugar cane and indigo beside the kraals of Maphumbo and Manisa, took the station again. Manisa’s people lived 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. Fort Lagoa had been too small for the reinforced garrison, so a larger area was enclosed with earthen walls and named Lydzaamheid. Reinforcements from the Cape renewed the interior searches without better success. By the time the three packets stood into Table Bay in January, Delagoa Bay stood abandoned as a Company station—even while the directors and the Cape still hoped for some other foothold farther along that seaboard. [3]
Even the slave traffic that was supposed to help pay the post had never answered. 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, that they might see for what purpose slaves were needed. One of those who visited was a nephew of Maphumbo who had been to England, had there received in baptism the name of John, had 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; but the traffic did not increase after their return. The January evacuees therefore brought home neither gold, nor copper, nor a living slave trade—only the remainder of a garrison and the knowledge that the bay had failed on every count the directors had named. [3]
Daniel van den Henghel Takes the Fiscalate — March 1731
The directors’ despatches of 20 February 1730 had named Daniel van den Henghel, then in service at Colombo, as independent fiscal when Adriaan van Kervel moved up to the secunde’s chair under De la Fontaine. The Colombo nomination left a gap between appointment and arrival. In March 1731 Van den Henghel took up the fiscalate at the Cape, completing the senior triangle the directors had sketched a year earlier. [3]
Van Kervel’s own tenure of the independent fiscalate had run from June 1724 to March 1731. Appointed secretary of the council of policy in 1719 and fiscal in 1725, he had served four years in that unpopular chair to the fullest satisfaction of all parties—even of the trespassers he had to prosecute—before Noodt’s death lifted him to secunde. His promotion and Van den Henghel’s arrival from Ceylon therefore closed one long fiscal career drawn from the local list and opened another drawn from the eastern stations. The independent fiscal remained a directors’ office on the wider Company circuit, not a Cape election. [3] [9]
For the rest of 1731 the highest civil list stood as permanent governor De la Fontaine, secunde Van Kervel, and fiscal Van den Henghel. The March entry of the new fiscal filled the last open place in the February 1730 package and gave the Cape a fully seated headship after the acting years that had followed Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes’s death and Pieter Gysbert Noodt’s sudden end. On the 8th of March 1730 De la Fontaine had taken the oath; a year later the man named from Colombo at last sat in the fiscal’s chair beside him. [3] [9]
The office Van den Henghel now held had been created to check corruption in the public service. It had done nothing of the kind in the Asiatic dependencies, where officers lived in a style of ostentation resembling that of Asiatic rulers and where bribery and fraud were commonly practised. At the Cape there was less opportunity for such malpractices, as the colonists were not the people to submit tamely to wrong of any kind. For many years after Noodt’s death the chief officials in South Africa were men held in general esteem, whose probity was never questioned. The March seating of a Colombo fiscal did not alter that local climate; it only completed the directors’ written list. [3]
The Company upon whose fortunes the settlement depended had now passed the zenith of its prosperity. Its dividends, which for the ten years ending the 31st of 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 ten years 1723–1732, and never afterwards rose higher than twenty-five per cent. Many trading establishments were not returning the expense of maintenance. English and French commerce in the East was making enormous strides; the coasting trade of Southern Asia, once almost exclusively in the Company’s possession, had fallen into other hands. In Holland the directorate was secured by members of powerful families content to draw a revenue without correcting abuses. Van den Henghel’s March arrival therefore seated a new fiscal under a governor already working harder after private grief, in a Company whose Asiatic machine no longer paid as it had paid a decade earlier. [3] [9]
Hartzogenrath at Drakenstein; Le Sueur Returns to the Cape — April 1731
After the death of the Rev. Lambertus Slicher in June 1730, the council had instructed the Rev. François le Sueur, assistant clergyman at the Cape since the 16th of October 1729, to act provisionally at Drakenstein and Stellenbosch. That inland arrangement lasted into the new year. In April 1731 Le Sueur returned to the Cape upon the arrival from Europe of the Rev. Johan Wilhelm Hartzogenrath, appointed by the directors as clergyman of Drakenstein. [3]
Hartzogenrath’s landing restored a resident pastor to the Drakenstein congregation after the provisional months under Le Sueur and the longer sequence of vacancies that had marked the country churches since the mid-1720s. The pulpit’s own list ran Pierre Simond from June 1691 to May 1702, Hendrik Bek from May 1702 to April 1707, Petrus van Aken from August 1714 to December 1724, Slicher from July 1725 to June 1730, and Le Sueur acting from June 1730 to April 1731. The directors’ choice of a new man from Europe rather than a further temporary shift of Cape clergy signalled that Drakenstein was again to have a settled incumbent of its own. [3]
The vacancy Hartzogenrath closed had been years in the making. Van Aken had died in December 1724; for some months the pulpit stood empty until the council sent Slicher inland and he took over the duty on the 15th of July 1725, leaving the Cape to Johannes Godfried d’Ailly alone. Early the following year D’Ailly was taken seriously ill, and he died in June 1726, when Bek was removed to the Cape and Slicher was directed to hold services occasionally at Stellenbosch. So matters remained for more than three years, until the directors sent Le Sueur as second or assistant clergyman. April 1731 was therefore not a sudden repair but the first European appointment that answered that long country shortage. [3]
Le Sueur’s return to Table Valley put the Cape again under its assistant—and, with the Cape’s own establishment, under the pattern of town clergy who could cover the castle church without holding the inland pulpits by permanent transfer. He was already bound into the settlement’s senior households as brother-in-law of Hendrik Swellengrebel. The April exchange therefore redrew the clerical map: Hartzogenrath inland at Drakenstein, Le Sueur back on the peninsula, and the Stellenbosch question still to be settled by council resolution the same month. On the Cape Town list Le Sueur’s own dates now read October 1729 to June 1730, and again from April 1731. [3] [9]
Bek Retires; Hartzogenrath Consulent of Stellenbosch — April 1731
At the same time the council resolved that Hartzogenrath should act as consulent of Stellenbosch, and permitted the Rev. Hendrik Bek, who was advanced in years and very feeble, to retire on a pension. Bek’s long country and town service—from May 1702 through to April 1731 on the clerical lists—thus ended in formal superannuation rather than in another forced transfer. [3]
His own stations had already been a map of the colony’s pulpits. He arrived as clergyman of Drakenstein in May 1702, was transferred to Stellenbosch in April 1707, acted for a time at Cape Town from August 1707 to January 1708, and was transferred to Cape Town in June 1726 when D’Ailly died. From that June until April 1731 he stood on the Cape Town succession between D’Ailly and the restored Le Sueur. Stellenbosch, after his removal, had been left to Slicher’s occasional services and then to Le Sueur’s provisional care. The April pension closed a career that had begun when Simon van der Stel still governed and that had outlasted two acting intervals and three governors. [3]
Stellenbosch therefore passed under Hartzogenrath’s consulent care while he held the Drakenstein charge. The arrangement was the council’s answer to a congregation that still lacked a full resident minister of its own and to a senior clergyman no longer able to carry the work. Country worship continued, but under a shared pastorate rather than under Bek’s declining strength. The Stellenbosch list itself shows the gap: after Bek’s June 1726 removal the next settled name on that succession is not a 1731 arrival. Inside this year the dated fact is the consulentcy, not a third full induction. [3]
The April decisions did not yet complete the full restoration of three settled pulpits. They did, however, end the provisional patchwork that Slicher’s death and Bek’s feebleness had forced on the country churches. A resident Drakenstein minister from Europe, a consulent for Stellenbosch, Le Sueur back in Table Valley, and a pensioned Bek were the clerical facts of the month. Free burghers at Drakenstein who still worshipped in the church that had been built for the French congregation now heard a pastor named by the Seventeen rather than an assistant borrowed from the castle. [3]
Refugee Households: A Death, a Will, a Heemraad, and a Return — 1731
Inland of the castle the older French households recorded their own dated facts. On the 17th of March 1731 Jeanne Mille died. She had been born in Provence in 1633 and had come out as the wife of Matthieu Arniel, an agriculturist at French Hoek who had received assistance for himself, wife, and two children from the Batavian fund of 1690. Arniel had died in November 1719. By their joint will of 1718 the couple left legacies to the Poor Fund of Drakenstein, to Susanna Fracassé, daughter of Matthieu Fracassé, living with her cousin François Ree in Amsterdam, and to Jan Roy, son of the agriculturist of that name at French Hoek, whom they appointed heir after his father’s death. Jeanne’s March death at about ninety-eight years closed one of the last lives that still reached back to the first refugee sailings. [8]
On the 22nd of August 1731 the will of Zacharie Vlantior was filed. Dated 1720, it described him as an old man having no relatives or friends, and left his property to the Drakenstein church on condition that they support him during his lifetime. The August filing turned a private bargain with the congregation Hartzogenrath had just taken into a completed record: the church that now had a resident minister also became heir to a refugee who had named no kin. Vlantior had been among those marked as receiving pecuniary assistance from the Batavian fund in 1690. [8]
In October 1731 François du Toit of Ryssel (Lille) died. He had arrived in 1686 in the Vryheit, become a member of the Court of Landdrost and Heemraden of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, and married Susanne Seugnet of Saintonge at Cape Town on the 12th of February 1690. He and his brother Guillaume had taken a prominent part in the later scenes connected with the van der Stel troubles. Descendants of François and Susanne were still living when the household was written down. His October death removed from the country bench a heemraad whose service had run from the first French generation into De la Fontaine’s governorship. [8]
Not every French name of the year was a closing. Gillis Sollier, brother of the Drakenstein shoemaker and later Cape elder Durand Sollier, had been a burgher at the Cape since 1697. In 1718 he had been permitted to return to Europe with his wife Anna Roulin and son David. In 1731 he came back to the Cape with Anna Roulin, his stepson Hendrik Melet, and his sister’s daughter. On the 15th of December 1731 Gillis and his wife were entered on the list of enrolled members of the Dutch church at Cape Town, with attestation from Montfort. Among the inhabitants of the Cape district in the same year stood Durand Sollier—probably his son—and wife Elizabeth de Villiers. [8]
Those four household dates—March, August, October, December—belonged to the same inland world Hartzogenrath had come to serve. A Provençal widow of the first embarkations, a childless testator who made the Drakenstein church his heir, a Lille heemraad of the van der Stel years, and a returned burgher with a Montfort attestation gave the new pastor a congregation still French in origin and already Dutch in its church roll. The April induction and the year’s refugee entries thus met in one district: the directors sent a minister; the older families recorded deaths, a will, and a homecoming. [3] [8]
Southeast Coast Still Sought after Delagoa — 1731
Delagoa Bay was abandoned, but the Company retained a strong desire to establish a station somewhere on the south-eastern coast of Africa. The gold-dust trade, copper hopes, and strategic interest that had justified Fort Lagoa and Fort Lydzaamheid had not vanished with the evacuation; they had only been detached from that particular bay. Batavia’s verdict that every stiver’s worth of mixed dust cost a florin had killed the profit of one factory, not the wish for another anchorage. [3]
The Cape packets that had brought De la Capelle home were the natural instruments for a fresh coastal examination. The council and the directors could use small vessels already on the Cape establishment, and a journalist who had commanded the last Delagoa months, to test whether some other anchorage between Natal waters and Inhambane might serve where Lydzaamheid had failed. The same three names— Snuffelaar, Zeepost, and Feyenoord— had been employed as packets at the Cape when they sailed on the 12th of August 1730 to bring away the garrison. Two of them would now reverse the errand. [3]
That policy decision framed the second half of 1731. While the fiscalate and the inland churches were being settled in the first months of the year, the maritime question left by Delagoa’s abandonment was prepared for a September sailing rather than for a quiet close of the file. De la Fontaine, first governor whose previous career had been made at the Cape, and everyone still called Jan, now had to spend Company money on a coast that had already cost him a station, an ensign, and a fevered garrison. The desire was the directors’; the ships and the journalist were the Cape’s. [3] [9]
Nothing in the January landing had taught the Seventeen to forget the south-eastern seaboard. The early disasters at the bay had not discouraged the Company even in the mid-1720s; for a long time hopes were entertained of a profitable trade being carried on there. Those hopes had survived Mona’s failed gold march, Hoorn’s failed copper search, De Koning’s river boats, the summer of thirty-eight deaths, the Inhambane desertion, and the conspiracy inside a garrison of one hundred and eighty-six. They survived the January evacuation as well, only now they were aimed at some other point on the same coast. [3]
Snuffelaar and Zeepost Sail for Inhambane — September 1731
In September 1731 the Snuffelaar and the Zeepost were sent to examine the seaboard carefully as far north as Inhambane. Jan de la Capelle accompanied the expedition as journalist. The two packets carried the Company’s search for a replacement station into waters beyond the abandoned Delagoa anchorage, with the same officer who had closed Lydzaamheid now writing the cruise. [3]
A Portuguese station was visited, but nothing unknown before was discovered. The cruise therefore confirmed existing coastal knowledge rather than opening a new bay or river mouth to Company occupation. De la Capelle’s journal role linked the voyage to the same officer who had been acting head at the bay when De Koning died, who had embarked the last one hundred and thirty-three men, and who now tested whether any other point on that coast would repay a fresh post. The Portuguese already sat where the Dutch were looking. [3]
The September departure used two of the three small craft that had withdrawn Delagoa the previous August. Packet work in 1731 thus shifted from evacuation to reconnaissance: the same class of vessel, and one of the same senior names, now sought a site instead of dismantling one. The third packet, Feyenoord, stayed off this cruise. The limit named in the orders was Inhambane—the same Portuguese roadstead toward which sixteen soldiers had deserted overland from Lydzaamheid, and where most of them had perished. [3]
For a refreshment station whose ordinary business was wheat, meat, and the roadstead, the cruise was an extraordinary errand. It asked two Cape packets to do what a fortified factory, a hundred extra soldiers and sailors, river boats, and a mineralogist had failed to do at Delagoa: find a paying foothold on the south-eastern coast. De la Capelle’s presence as journalist made the report a continuation of the Lydzaamheid file rather than a new officer’s first look at a strange shore. The council would read his pages against the January landing they already knew. [3]
Fever at St. Lucia Bay; No Suitable Station Found — 1731
At and near St. Lucia Bay many lives were lost by fever, and the survivors then returned to the Cape with a report that no suitable place for a station could be found. The human cost of the cruise fell hardest on that stretch of coast, where disease rather than native hostility or shipwreck emptied the packets’ complements. The same summer fever that had taken thirty-eight men at Fort Lydzaamheid, including Commander De Koning, now took its toll on the reconnaissance that was meant to replace that fort. [3]
The expedition was absent five months. Measured from the September sailing, the return fell after the calendar year had turned; the negative report and the St. Lucia losses belonged to the voyage ordered and begun in 1731. The council received not a new anchorage plan but a judgment that the seaboard as far as Inhambane offered no post worth the risk already paid in fever deaths. Nothing unknown had been found at the Portuguese station; nothing habitable had been found at St. Lucia. [3]
Inside calendar 1731 the dated maritime arc therefore runs from the January Delagoa return through the September Inhambane cruise to the fever toll at St. Lucia and the survivors’ report that no station site had been found. The Company still wished for a south-eastern foothold when the packets sailed; it had a written answer against that wish when they came back. Two small Cape vessels and a journalist who had already buried a factory had been asked to reopen the file. They closed it again, at the price of the men who died in the St. Lucia heats. [3]
The January evacuees had already shown what that coast cost in fever, desertion, and surprise. The September cruise showed that changing the bay did not change the climate. St. Lucia added its own dead to Mona’s twenty-nine, to De Koning’s thirty-eight, and to the unnamed soldiers who had perished on the overland flight to Inhambane. For De la Fontaine’s first full year as sworn governor, the south-eastern design ended not in a new fort’s name but in a journalist’s report that no suitable place had been found. [3]
Harvest Export, Shipping, and the Governor’s Year — 1731
Across the wider span that included this year, the directors required a year’s supply of wheat to be reserved before any was sent to India. In 1724 and again in 1725 over five thousand muids were 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. From 1728 through 1737 there was a constant export, sometimes of as much as seven thousand muids, though the crops were not uniformly good. Calendar 1731 sat inside that exporting sequence rather than inside the drought and rust years of the mid-1720s. [3]
Shipping through Table Bay remained the settlement’s other measure of ordinary business. In the thirteen years 1725–1737 one thousand and seven ships put into the bay, or on an average seventy-seven yearly. Of these, eight hundred and sixty-eight belonged to the Company, ninety-one were English, twenty-seven Danish, nineteen French, one Portuguese, and one Flemish. Foreign ships had been prevented from obtaining supplies during the period of scarcity; very few vessels not under the Dutch flag then put in, and the burghers felt the loss, for foreigners had brought ready money into the country. The cattle plague later decreased, 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. The Cape of 1731 continued to function as a refreshment and export station while its council closed Delagoa, reseated the fiscalate, and probed the southeast coast. [3]
The peninsula’s own ground still argued with the directors’ fears. The isthmus connecting it with the continent was 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. 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 was commenced: seventy slaves and a gang of convicts planting knot-grass and seeds of the wild olive, and, when these failed, belts of sods in later rainy seasons. That slow planting still belonged to the same years as the wheat reserve and the seventy-seven ships a year. [3]
The governor under whom that ordinary business ran was still the tall Amsterdammer everyone called Jan. Born 23 April 1684 as Jan de la Fontaine dit Wicart, son of the silk merchant Jacques de la Fontaine and Barbara van den Burgh, he had been taken off the homeward Horstendal by Commissioner Johan van Hoorn in 1710 and made storekeeper. In June 1730, in the first year of his administration, fate had taken his wife Maria Elizabeth, daughter of the old secunde Andries de Man, and left him a widower with a daughter of fourteen and an infant son of two. He kept smiling; his grief made him work yet harder. Silk manufacture under the French expert François Guillaume, with a factory near the Slave Lodge, and a kirman-hair trial with imported goats stood in their most critical stage in the years 1730–1735. Most of the worms died before making cocoons; the goats did not survive long; and when some hair was produced the Company could not afford to pay the high price. [9]
Inland, the clerical repairs of April and the refugee dates of March, August, October, and December mattered as much as the coastal survey of September for the daily life of free burghers at Drakenstein and Stellenbosch. A resident Drakenstein minister, a consulent for Stellenbosch, and a pensioned Bek replaced the provisional patchwork that Slicher’s death and Bek’s feebleness had forced on the country churches. Jeanne Mille’s burial, Vlantior’s filed will, Du Toit’s vacant heemraad seat, and the Solliers’ Montfort attestation were the congregation’s own calendar under that new pastor. [3] [8]
Far from Table Bay, a smaller European print of the Cape also belonged to the year. A London compendium of Kolbe’s description of the Cape of Good Hope appeared in two small octavo volumes in 1731—a selection of paragraphs, badly translated and condensed by a man ignorant of the subject. The handsomer Dutch Naauwkeurige Beschryving van de Kaap de Goede Hoop had already been issued at Amsterdam in two great illustrated volumes in 1727. The Cape that exported wheat under a reserve rule, seated a Colombo fiscal, inducted a Drakenstein minister, and lost men to St. Lucia fever was already a book in Europe, even when the book was a poor abridgement. [3]
Calendar 1731 therefore closed as the year the Delagoa garrison came home on the 18th of January; the year Van den Henghel assumed the independent fiscalate in March; the year Hartzogenrath took Drakenstein, Le Sueur returned to the Cape, Bek went on pension, and Stellenbosch passed under a consulent; the year Jeanne Mille died, Vlantior’s will was filed, François du Toit died, and Gillis Sollier was enrolled from Montfort; and the year two Cape packets, with De la Capelle as journalist, examined the coast to Inhambane and came back from St. Lucia with fever dead and no station site. The Company’s wish for a south-eastern foothold remained on the table after the five-month cruise. The dated work of this year had already been done. [3] [8]