Boer History1732 at the Cape of Good Hope: Fifteen-Year Quit Rent, Kock and Van Echten, and the End of the Southeast Coast Search
Fifteen-Year Quit Rent Introduced — 18 February 1732
Previous to 1732 ground was held by individuals in the colony either under freehold title or under annual leases. On the 18th of February of this year, by order of the directors, another system of land tenure was introduced. The measure answered the insecurity that annual renewal of loan permission had created for gardeners and small cultivators who improved ground that the Company could reclaim at pleasure. The older pattern had grown from the first small garden loans of the mid-1650s and from the freehold grants that followed, but the pastoral loan place had long outrun those early plots. [3] [4]
It was enacted that garden ground in the Cape peninsula and small plots of land adapted for agriculture and bordering on freehold farms could be leased for periods of fifteen years, during which they were to be irreclaimable. If at the expiration of any term of fifteen years the Company should resume possession, the tenant was to be compensated for all buildings at a fair valuation. The new tenure thus protected opstallen—dwellings and other buildings—while keeping the soil under Company sovereignty. Lands were resumable only at the end of the term, not at the pleasure of government in any intervening season. [3] [4]
The rental first named was eight shillings and fourpence a morgen yearly. On another archival reading the rent, unlike that on the large loan places, varied with the capability of the soil and other natural advantages and was usually from four to eight skillings per morgen (one skilling being twopence halfpenny), while the older recognitie of twenty-four rixdollars continued as acknowledgment that the sovereign remained lord of the soil so long as no part was granted in absolute freehold—de Heer behoudt zyn recht. The February paper therefore paired a longer, more secure lease with a rent that could follow the ground rather than a single pastoral lump sum. [3] [4]
The insecurity that the new tenure was meant to cure had a long local pedigree. In 1654, two years after the first landing in Table Bay, some of the Company’s servants had been allowed to use small garden plots for three years without rent, on the understanding that the grants were only loans; land cultivated to the full at the end of that term was to be given in eigendom, or freehold. The first alienation followed on the 10th of October 1657, when about twenty morgen in the great field on the pass between Table Bay and False Bay went to Jacob Cloeten of Cologne. Permission to occupy a later loan place had to be renewed annually; from 1703 that permission was obtained upon a stamp of six rixdollars and an annual rent of twenty-four, and from 1714 an annual tax or recognitie of the same twenty-four rixdollars was levied. Gardeners who had added cattle to their plots, and then larger pastoral appropriations held on loan without survey, had watched indefinite boundaries creep outward while the soil itself remained a nominal cession resumable at pleasure. The remission of rent in the earliest years had not been altruism: more than its equivalent was demanded in tithes of the harvests and other duties. Calendar 1732 did not invent quit rent from nothing; it gave the small agricultural border-plot a fifteen-year term and a written promise that buildings would be paid for if the Company took the ground back. [4]
Beside the new fifteen-year paper stood an older neighbour tenure already familiar on the peninsula: Leenings Eigendom, the renting or borrowing from government of irregular small plots adjoining a freehold grant, to be used with the freehold but still considered the property of the Company. That borrowing had become common in later years. The February enactment of 1732 did not abolish freehold, annual loan, or Leenings Eigendom; it added a middle term for garden and border agricultural ground that the directors judged worth protecting for a decade and a half at a time. [4]
Loan Cattle Runs Raised to £5; Encroachment Checked — 1732
At the same time the rental of the large farms or cattle runs held under annual leases was raised from £2 10s. to £5. The increase fell on the wide pastoral holdings that free burghers had spread beyond the older freehold patches of the peninsula and the first country villages, and it doubled the Company’s direct cash claim on those loan places. The February package therefore paired a longer, more secure lease for small garden and border agricultural ground with a heavier annual burden on the great pastoral loan places. [3] [4]
Those cattle runs were already reckoned at probably never less than five or six thousand acres, and afterwards certainly more, for which, when rent could be recovered, the yearly charge had stood at two pounds ten until 1732 and five pounds thereafter. The extent of the country seemed illimitable, and farmers helped themselves liberally to the land. Once the white population scattered farther from Table Valley, control by the authorities at the Cape grew harder, and the doubled rent was one of the few cash instruments still within easy reach of the castle. Endeavours had been made from time to time to prevent further dispersion by issuing placaats that forbade a further eastern move and prescribed boundaries over which wanderers were not to pass; beyond the older villages those orders were already hard to enforce. The men on the runs were learning to live for months in tent-waggons, to spare their flocks with the flesh of game, and to treat a visit to town—with its officials, law agents, and tradesmen—as something to be avoided when they could. [4]
In this same year an attempt was also made to control the abuse of encroachment upon lands contiguous to those which had been loaned, by issuing, on the 1st of July, a prohibition of such procedure. The measure met with no success, probably on account of the difficulty of enforcing the dictates of government in the distant districts. Loan places had seldom been surveyed; grantees had gradually extended indefinite boundaries into adjoining territory, and the Company’s main object—provisions for visiting ships—had long favoured a haphazard system that produced cattle and grain more readily than it produced maps. [4]
Tenure reform and boundary policing thus moved together in 1732, even while the pastoral frontier outran both. The July placaat tried to limit the rights of holders on loan at the same moment that the February leases tried to make small agricultural tenure more secure. The two faces of the year’s land paper—longer protection for the improved garden plot, a doubled cash claim and a paper fence around the great cattle run—were one directors’ package, not two unrelated local whims. [3] [4]
De la Fontaine Councillor Extraordinary of Netherlands India — 21 March 1732
On the 8th of March 1730 Jan de la Fontaine had taken the oath and been formally installed as governor after the directors’ despatches received on 20 February 1730. That installation had not yet carried higher Indian rank. On the 21st of March 1732 he was further promoted to the rank of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India. The March promotion placed the Cape governor on the wider Batavian list without removing him from Table Valley. [3]
He was the first governor who had made his previous career at the Cape. Detained from the homeward Horstendal in 1710 by commissioner Johan van Hoorn and set to work as storekeeper, he had served two uninterrupted decades in the settlement before the sash. The ex-governor-general had known the young bookkeeper from Ceylon and had seen in him a man to exercise a favourable influence on Governor Louis van Assenburgh. Two years after his arrival, still a junior merchant, he sat on the council of policy; in 1717 he was made a fully-fledged merchant; on Chavonnes’s death in 1724 the council nominated him provisional secunde, and the Seventeen had to promote him to senior merchant to comply with tradition. 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 and of Barbara van den Burgh, he had been baptized in the Oude Kerk rather than in the Walloon church of the family tradition. His grandparents Jean de la Fontaine and Marguerite le Thor had left Valenciennes in French Flanders for Holland in the first half of the seventeenth century. Everyone in the little town called him Jan; for once the Seventeen in Amsterdam and their subjects in Table Valley had been in complete agreement that he was the proper choice. [9]
During the first year of his administration fate had taken his wife, Maria Elizabeth, daughter of the former secunde Andries de Man, and left him a widower with a daughter of fourteen and an infant son of two. He kept at the work. Silk and kirman-hair experiments, already begun in earlier seasons, were in their most critical stage in the years 1730–1735; a French expert, François Guillaumet, had been imported with boxes of silkworms, and a factory had been erected near the Slave Lodge. In no year after the first eight-pound sample sent to Amsterdam and Middelburg did production exceed ten pounds; most of the worms died before making cocoons. Calendar 1732 sat inside that hard middle stretch, not at a triumphant opening and not at a formal close. [3] [9]
Beneath him the senior civil seats filled in the previous two years still stood: secunde Adriaan van Kervel and, since March 1731, independent fiscal Daniel van den Henghel. Van Kervel had been secretary from 1719 and fiscal from 1725, and his step into the secunde’s shoes had been treated as a natural development. Calendar 1732 therefore opened its second quarter with a fully ranked governor and a settled council triangle rather than with another acting interlude. At the Cape there was less opportunity for the shameless accumulation common in some Asiatic dependencies; the chief officials after Noodt’s death were men held in general esteem, whose probity was not then questioned. [3] [9]
The East India Company, upon whose fortunes the colony greatly depended, had now passed the zenith of its prosperity. Its dividends, which for the ten years ending 31 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 1728–1732, and from 1723 the drop was already reckoned at the castle as one decade from thirty-seven to twenty-one; they 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; some branches were completely lost to the Dutch, and 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; their influence was enough to keep the States General from inspecting the Company’s affairs. Corruption in the public service extended more deeply than before. The appointment of independent fiscals had done nothing to check it. At the Cape the colonists were not the people to submit tamely to wrong, and the healthier moral atmosphere of the settlement after Noodt’s death left less room for the ostentation and bribery common among officers in the Asiatic dependencies. [3] [9]
Rev. Hendrik Kock Second Clergyman of the Cape — April 1732
In April 1731 the Rev. Johan Wilhelm Hartzogenrath had arrived as clergyman of Drakenstein, the Rev. François le Sueur had returned to the Cape, the Rev. Hendrik Bek had retired on pension, and Hartzogenrath had been ordered to act as consulent of Stellenbosch. That arrangement still left the Cape without a full second resident minister and Stellenbosch without a pastor of its own. [3]
The vacancies had run since Van Aken’s death at Drakenstein in December 1724. Slicher had been sent there on the 15th of July 1725; D’Ailly had died in June 1726; Bek had been removed to the Cape and Slicher told to hold services occasionally at Stellenbosch; and so matters had remained for more than three years until Le Sueur, sent out as second or assistant clergyman, conducted service at the Cape for the first time on the 16th of October 1729. Slicher’s death in June 1730 had sent Le Sueur provisionally inland again. The April recovery of 1731 had only half closed that eight-year stretch. [3]
In April 1732 the Rev. Hendrik Kock arrived from Europe, having been appointed second clergyman of the Cape. His landing restored a double Cape establishment beside Le Sueur and ended the provisional stretch in which a single town clergyman, or a town man borrowed inland, had had to cover more pulpits than the directors intended as a settled pattern. Kock’s arrival did not yet close the Stellenbosch vacancy. Hartzogenrath remained consulent for that congregation while holding Drakenstein. [3]
The April fact on the clerical lists is therefore the filling of the Cape’s second chair from Europe, the next step in the recovery from the vacancies that had run since the mid-1720s. Town preaching no longer depended on one man and an inland consulent. The country congregation at Stellenbosch still waited for a resident minister of its own; that wait belonged to the November ship, not to Kock’s landing. [3]
Burgher East-Coast Trade Conference — 1732
As far back as 1719 the burgher councillors, acting on behalf of several colonists acquainted with the east coast and the islands of Madagascar and the Mascarenhas group, had requested liberty to trade with those countries upon payment of reasonable import and export duties. They had proposed to purchase manufactured goods from the Company and to exchange those goods and Cape produce for slaves, ivory, gold dust, and anything else of commercial value that should be obtainable. [3]
The directors had at first hesitated, but they were now disposed to take the request into favourable consideration if the colonists would submit their plans in detail. In 1732 a committee of officers of the Cape government, consisting of Messrs. Adriaan van Kervel, Nicholas Heyning, and Ryk Tulbagh, was appointed to meet the acting and retired burgher councillors and, after discussing the question with them, to draw up a report for transmission to the Netherlands. [3]
The conference took place; but the burgher councillors stated that circumstances had changed since 1719, those who were then prepared to embark in the trade having died or engaged in other pursuits, and they thought no advantage could now be derived from the project. The directors’ belated willingness therefore met a local judgment that the free-trade scheme no longer had undertakers at the Cape. Thirteen years had emptied the list of men who had known the east coast and the islands well enough to risk a ship. [3]
The report that went home thus closed a file the Seventeen had reopened too late. Cape produce and Company goods would not, in 1732, be exchanged on burgher account for Madagascar or Mascarene slaves, ivory, and gold dust. The same year that raised pastoral rent and wrote fifteen-year paper for garden ground also recorded that the older free-trade project had no living syndicate left to carry it. [3]
Zeepost and Feyenoord Second Coast Search — September 1732
Delagoa Bay had been abandoned in the embarkation of 27 December 1730 and the Table Bay return of 18 January 1731, yet the Company had still desired a station somewhere on the south-eastern coast of Africa. The early disasters at the bay had not at first discouraged the directors: in 1725 a little ambergris, some aloes, three hundred pounds of copper, more than two tons of ivory, thirty-four slaves, and a few ounces of gold dust had still been received from the station. Hopes of reaching gold fields and the supposed empire of Monomotapa by boats up the rivers had brought Commander Jan de Koning and a hundred soldiers and sailors to enlarge Fort Lagoa into the earthen walls named Lydzaamheid. Fever, desertion, conspiracy, and the killing of Ensign Mona had then emptied the post. In September 1731 the Snuffelaar and the Zeepost, with Jan de la Capelle as journalist, had examined the seaboard as far as Inhambane, lost many lives to fever at and near St. Lucia Bay, and returned after five months with a report that no suitable place for a station could be found. Nothing unknown before had been discovered; a Portuguese station had been visited; the survivors had come home empty of a site. [3]
In September 1732 the Zeepost and the Feyenoord were sent to make another search. The second cruise used two of the Cape packets that had figured in the Delagoa withdrawal and in the first Inhambane examination, and it carried the residual coastal policy into a further four months at sea. The directors’ desire for a south-eastern factory had outlived Fort Lagoa and Fort Lydzaamheid; it had not yet outlived a second pair of packets. [3]
After spending four months examining the coast, the packets returned to the Cape, when their officers reported that north of Port Natal they could find no place where a station could be established to advantage. The negative judgment of 1731 was thus repeated and sharpened: not merely no unknown bay of promise, but no advantageous site on the stretch the Company still hoped to occupy. The second search did not reopen Delagoa; it tested the remaining seaboard and came back with the same emptiness in a narrower form. [3]
The four-month examination belonged to the year’s maritime business as surely as the February land paper belonged to its inland business. Packet strength that might have refreshed India ships or carried ordinary coast errands was again spent on a fever shore. The men who came back in the southern autumn of the next shipping season brought no new river, no new chief, and no new factory site—only a recommendation against building north of Port Natal. [3]
Directors Give Up the Southeast Station Design — 1732
Upon that report the design was given up by the directors. The long sequence that had run from Fort Lagoa and Fort Lydzaamheid through gold-dust assays, river boat explorations, summer fever, desertion, conspiracy, Ensign Mona’s death, the 1730 evacuation, the 1731 Inhambane cruise, and the 1732 Zeepost–Feyenoord search closed as a settled directors’ decision rather than as another provisional Cape hesitation. [3]
The gold dust brought by natives for sale at the old bay had been so mixed with other substances that assayers in Batavia had asserted that every stiver’s worth cost the Company a florin. Boats had been pushed up the rivers as far as they were navigable; the exact position of the copper mines and the gold fields had never been fixed. Fever had killed thirty-eight men in one summer, including Commander De Koning; sixteen soldiers had deserted toward Inhambane; sixty-two men had entered a conspiracy; Mona and twenty-nine Europeans had been surprised and killed before the last embarkation. The 1732 packets added a final negative to that ledger. [3]
For the Cape the abandonment meant that packet strength, council attention, and men who might otherwise have been posted to a fever coast were again available for Table Bay, the country districts, and ordinary India shipping. The southeast African station project that had outlived Delagoa itself did not receive a third trial after the Port Natal report. Calendar 1732 therefore carries both the second search and its institutional end. [3]
The same council that wrote fifteen-year leases in February and heard the burghers decline east-coast free trade thus also closed the factory file that had competed with both. Inland tenure and the roadstead’s ordinary refreshment work remained; a new Fort Lydzaamheid did not. The September sailing and the four-month examination belong to the year’s maritime business; the directors’ giving up of the design is the policy close that those officers’ report produced. [3]
Rev. Salomon van Echten at Stellenbosch — November 1732
In November of the same year the Rev. Salomon van Echten arrived, sent out as clergyman of Stellenbosch. He followed Kock’s April landing and completed the European supply of the three congregations that the council and the directors had been patching since Van Aken’s death in December 1724 and the later removals of Slicher, D’Ailly, and Bek. [3]
Thus the whole of the churches were again supplied with ministers, after a series of vacancies during eight years. At the Cape stood Le Sueur and Kock; at Drakenstein, Hartzogenrath; at Stellenbosch, Van Echten in place of the consulent arrangement that had covered Bek’s retirement. Country and town pulpits no longer depended on temporary transfers alone. [3]
The November arrival closed the clerical arc of 1731–1732 that had begun with Hartzogenrath’s Drakenstein appointment and Bek’s pension. Inside a single calendar year the Cape gained a second town clergyman and Stellenbosch a resident minister, while the southeast coast project that had competed for ships and attention was written off. The three congregations stood as the directors had meant them to stand: two men at the Cape, one at Drakenstein, one at Stellenbosch. [3]
Stellenbosch had been the congregation most often left to a consulent. After D’Ailly’s death Bek had gone to the Cape and Slicher had been told only to hold services there occasionally; after Slicher’s death Le Sueur had been sent inland provisionally; after Hartzogenrath’s arrival the Drakenstein man had been told to act as consulent. Van Echten’s landing ended that borrowed-pulpit pattern for the year. The village that had waited through eight winters had a pastor of its own again before the year closed. [3]
Company Dividends, Wheat Export, Households, and Settlement Context — 1732
Across the wider harvest span that included this year, the directors required a year’s supply of wheat to be reserved before any was sent to India. From 1728 through the later 1730s there was a constant export, sometimes of as much as seven thousand muids, though the crops were not uniformly good. Earlier seasons in the same chapter had shown the opposite extreme: over five thousand muids exported in 1724 and again in 1725, none spared in the drought of 1726, and not enough for home consumption in the rust year 1727. Calendar 1732 sat inside the exporting sequence while the council rewrote local land tenure and closed the coastal-station file. [3]
Shipping through Table Bay remained the settlement’s other ordinary measure. In the thirteen years 1725–1737 one thousand and seven ships put into the bay, or on an average seventy-seven yearly: 868 Company vessels, 91 English, 27 Danish, 19 French, one Portuguese, and one Flemish. Foreign flags had never fully returned after the years of scarcity when they were prevented from obtaining supplies; beef and mutton were again obtainable at a penny halfpenny to twopence a pound, but the Cape had lost its reputation for cheap fresh provisions and was a long time in regaining it. The Cape of 1732 continued as refreshment and export station while quit-rent paper, pastoral rents, restored pulpits, and a final negative coast survey defined the year’s special business. [3]
Silk and kirman hair, the two industrial experiments most closely tied to De la Fontaine’s own household and taste, remained in that same middle crisis. The son of a silk merchant had already, as acting head between Chavonnes and Noodt, tried to foster manufactures. Worms hatched from European eggs had first been tended in the houses of De la Fontaine and Nicholas Heyning before being handed to Guillaumet; a large building close to the Company’s garden held the worms; children in the slave lodge were to wind silk out of school hours; thousands of young mulberry trees had been planted; burghers who fancied the industry received eggs and instructions. The first year had yielded eight pounds of good silk, an object of interest at Amsterdam and Middelburg and the seed of hopes for a colonial raw material feeding a Dutch manufacture. In no later year did the return exceed ten pounds; the great majority of the worms always died before making cocoons, and in one season they would have become extinct altogether if a few had not been preserved by burghers. The experiment was continued by government for eight years, but by 1732 it was already plain that the returns forbade the industry to anyone who could make a living another way. For kirman hair, shawls then ranked second only to those of Cashmere, twenty-four young Persian goats had been sent via Ceylon; eight reached the Cape in February 1725, only one a she-goat, and she died shortly after landing. From ordinary she-goats cross-breeds were obtained, and from these and the two remaining pure animals goats with tolerably long and fine hair were bred. Burghers later told the council that unless the Company would pay forty pence a pound the separate flocks were not worth keeping. That price could not be given even for a superior article. In 1732 those undertakings had not yet been formally given up; they were simply failing in plain sight. [3] [9]
Among the older French households the year took three men whose names had stood on the refugee lists since the late seventeenth century. Pierre Joubert of La Motte d’Aigues in Provence, born about 1663–1665, who had arrived in the Berg China in 1688 with his wife Isabeau Richard and become an agriculturist possessing many farms at Drakenstein, died in 1732—the printed list gives 31 June. His widow lived on; the farms later named at her death included Bellingham, granted in 1695, Lamorin, La Roche, La Motte, La Provence, and De Plaisante at Waveren. [8]
Jacob Nortier of Calais, an agriculturist who had arrived in the Oosterlandt in 1688 among the three Nortiers described as domestics of Jacques de Savoye, died on the 20th of September 1732. He had married at Drakenstein on the 8th of August 1717 Margaretha Mouton of the Cape. Louis le Riche, who had arrived in 1698 in the Driebergen and married Susanna Fouché, died on the 8th of October 1732. The February land paper and the November pulpit at Stellenbosch thus closed a year that also subtracted three established refugee names from the country lists. [8]
Calendar 1732 therefore stands as a year of paper and of endings rather than of new bays. Fifteen-year quit rent and a doubled loan-farm rent rewrote how garden ground and cattle runs were held; a July prohibition failed to stop encroachment in the distant districts; De la Fontaine received extraordinary councillor rank while silk and kirman hair toiled in their worst stretch; Kock and Van Echten filled the last open pulpits after eight years of vacancies; the burghers declined the east-coast trade they had asked for in 1719; and the Zeepost and Feyenoord came home from north of Port Natal with a report that ended the southeast station design. Wheat still went to India after the reserve was laid by, and the roadstead still counted its seventy-seven ships a year. The settlement that had begun as a refreshment post in 1652 spent this twelvemonth securing small fields, taxing large runs, restoring churches, and giving up a coast. [3] [4] [8] [9]