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. [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. [3] [4]
The rental first named was eight shillings and fourpence a morgen yearly. In the following year it was permanently fixed at two shillings and a penny a morgen. 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, 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. [3] [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. [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 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. [4] [3]
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. Tenure reform and boundary policing thus moved together in 1732, even while the pastoral frontier outran both. [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 of 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. [3]
The March promotion placed the Cape governor on the wider Batavian list without removing him from Table Valley. De la Fontaine remained the permanent head who had already acted after Chavonnes’s death and after Noodt’s sudden end, and who now held both the Cape governorship and extraordinary councillor rank in the Company’s eastern hierarchy. [3]
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. Calendar 1732 therefore opened its second quarter with a fully ranked governor and a settled council triangle rather than with another acting interlude. [3]
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]
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. [3]
Kock’s arrival did not yet close the Stellenbosch vacancy. Hartzogenrath remained consulent for that congregation while holding Drakenstein. The April fact on the clerical lists is 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. [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. [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. 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. [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. [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. [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]
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. [3]
Calendar 1732 therefore carries both the second search and its institutional end. 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. [3]
Company Dividends, Wheat Export, and Settlement Context — 1732
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 1723–1732, and never afterwards rose higher than twenty-five per cent. Many of its trading establishments were not returning the expense of maintenance. [3]
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 1737 there was a constant export, sometimes of as much as seven thousand muids, though the crops were not uniformly good. Calendar 1732 sat inside that 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, the great majority Company vessels with smaller numbers of English, Danish, French, and occasional other flags. 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]