Boer History1734 at the Cape of Good Hope: Mossel Bay Beacon, Riet Vlei Outpost, and St Helena Bay Post
Fifteen-Year Quit-Rent Rent Permanently Fixed — 1734
Previous to 1732 ground in the colony had been held either under freehold title or under annual leases. On the 18th of February of that year, by order of the directors, another system of land tenure was introduced. Garden ground in the Cape peninsula and small plots 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 the Company resumed possession, the tenant was to be compensated for all buildings at a fair valuation. The rental first named was eight shillings and fourpence a morgen yearly. [3] [4]
In the year after that February order the rent on the new holdings was permanently fixed at two shillings and a penny a morgen. Calendar 1734 therefore worked the fifteen-year paper on that cheaper permanent figure rather than on the opening tariff of eight shillings and fourpence. The cultivator’s cash burden dropped while the soil itself remained under Company sovereignty. The permanent rate did not convert the lease into freehold; it only settled what the new tenure would cost once the directors had seen the first named rental against ordinary Cape returns. [3]
On another archival reading of the same tenure the rent, unlike that on the large annual loan cattle runs, 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. Either way, 1734 carried the 1732 package as ordinary land administration: a middle term for garden and border agricultural ground, buildings protected as opstallen, and a working rent far below the first named eight-and-fourpence. [3] [4]
That insecurity 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. [4]
Beside the 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 had not abolished freehold, annual loan, or Leenings Eigendom; it had added a middle term. At the same time the rental of the large farms or cattle runs held under annual leases had been raised from £2 10s. to £5. Calendar 1734 therefore opened its land year with two faces of that package already in force: a cheaper, longer, more secure lease for the improved garden and border plot, and a doubled cash claim on the great pastoral loan place. [3] [4]
Huis te Marquette in Distress at Mossel Bay — June 1734
In June 1734 a homeward bound Indiaman named the Huis te Marquette—in another official telling ’t Huys de Marquette—put into Mossel Bay in distress. The hull had been badly damaged on her voyage to the coast of Africa and tried desperately to find shelter there. The bay lay well east of False Bay and the settled wheat and wine belt, on a stretch of coast that Company ships ordinarily passed rather than used as a regular refreshment harbour. [3] [9]
Distress at Mossel Bay forced a choice that Table Bay wrecks and ordinary India traffic did not: either leave a valuable homeward hull and cargo to local improvisation, or send senior Cape authority overland with naval and burgher support. The council and governor chose the second course. As soon as intelligence about the emergency reached the Castle, the journey was set in motion. What began as relief of an Indiaman became an official inspection of the bay and of the country immediately beyond it. [3] [9]
The choice of companions later showed how the Castle read the emergency. The master of the naval department, Jacobus Möller, had already sounded Table Bay after the winter disasters of the late 1720s and had reported, with the burgher skipper Jan de Heere, that the roadstead was not filling up, that a mole could make it perfectly safe at great cost, that Saldanha Bay was secure but wanting in everything else a refreshment station needed, and that Simon’s Bay could shelter eight or ten ships in all weathers, with fresh water but no garden ground and with difficult access by land. Mossel Bay had not been converted by that earlier commission into a recommended alternate port. The June call now forced the same naval office, and the governor himself, to judge a far more easterly bight under the pressure of a damaged homeward hull. [3]
The June intelligence thus opened the eastern field journey that dominates the Cape narrative of 1734. The settlement had long known Mossel Bay by name. Calendar 1734 was the year when a single ship’s emergency pulled the permanent governor, his secretary, the naval master, an ensign, and the neighbouring free-burgher waggons onto that shore together, and turned a refuge of last resort into a season of coastal judgment, forest reconnaissance, and formal marks of possession. [3] [9]
De la Fontaine Leaves the Cape for Mossel Bay — 7 July 1734
On the 7th of July 1734 Governor Jan de la Fontaine left the Cape for Mossel Bay. He was attended by the secretary Ryk Tulbagh, the master of the naval department Jacobus Möller, Ensign Rudolph Sigfried Alleman, and the burghers Jan Kruywagen, Jan Hop, Jan Christoffel Bek, Jacobus Botha, and Andries Grove, whose farms were in the neighbourhood of Mossel Bay and who offered the use of their waggons and cattle. [3]
In another telling the governor rode to the scene as soon as the Castle had the news, accompanied by secretary Rijk Tulbagh, Ensign Ruldof Allemann, and other officers—a journey that was still quite a journey in those days. The two lists mesh without trouble: central administration, a military officer, naval expertise in Möller’s person, and local free-burgher transport. Tulbagh’s presence as secretary kept the journey inside ordinary council record-keeping. The burghers’ waggons and oxen made the overland stage possible without stripping the Castle of its own teams alone. [3] [9]
De la Fontaine had held the governorship since his formal installation on 8 March 1730 and the further rank of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India since 21 March 1732. 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. 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. Everyone in the little town called him Jan. The July departure was not a change of headship but a rare personal movement of that permanent governor deep into the eastern cattle and forest fringe during a settled phase of his administration. [3] [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. Beneath him the senior civil seats filled earlier in the decade 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 1734 therefore sent its governor east from a settled council triangle, not from another acting interlude after Noodt’s death or Chavonnes’s end. [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. In that harder Company weather the June–July journey was not a ceremonial progress. It was an urgent attempt to save a large homeward hull and a precious cargo at a bay the settlement had seldom treated as a seat of government business. [3] [9]
Ship Relieved, Harbour Judged, Outeniqua Forests Attempted — 1734
At Mossel Bay the distressed ship was relieved. With the assistance of neighbouring farmers the vessel was brought ashore, and many lives and a precious cargo were saved. The emergency that had pulled the governor from the Castle was met in the concrete terms the Company understood: hull, men, and homeward goods recovered from a bay that was not on the ordinary refreshment roster. [3] [9]
The bay itself was examined. The governor left with a very poor opinion of its capabilities as a harbour. The inspection did not convert Mossel Bay into a recommended alternate port for ordinary Company fleets beside Table Bay and the winter use later developed at Simon’s Bay. Möller’s earlier sounding of the nearer bays had already ranked Simon’s Bay above Saldanha for shelter and water; the July visit now added a negative verdict on a still more distant bight. Relief of one Indiaman was not the same thing as a new roadstead policy. [3]
The party proceeded eastward to the forests in the district once occupied by the Outeniqua tribe, which the governor wished to explore. Timber had long been a Cape anxiety. In 1727 the forests along the river Zonder End had been examined by Governor Noodt in person, with a view of ascertaining whether they could not be made of greater use to the Company; the mountain range separating them from the Cape had been found too formidable a barrier to allow the transport of timber with profit. De la Fontaine’s eastward turn in 1734 was another official look at woods still farther along that same southern belt. [3]
Heavy rains, however, set in, which necessitated a return before the rivers should become flooded. The reconnaissance therefore stopped short of a full timber survey even while it confirmed official interest in those woods as a future resource of the colony. Waggons that had been offered by Kruywagen, Hop, Bek, Botha, and Grove could not outrun a winter rise on the south-coast rivers. The governor’s wish to explore and the weather’s refusal stood together in the same season. [3]
The party was absent not quite two months. Within that span it had combined Indiaman relief, a negative harbour verdict, an interrupted forest probe, and the formal act of possession that followed at the bay itself. Calendar 1734 thus recorded an eastern progress measured in weeks rather than in a new permanent seat of government on the south coast. The Castle had gone to the ship; it had not moved itself to Mossel Bay. [3]
Stone Possession Beacon at Mossel Bay — 1734
At Mossel Bay the governor caused a stone beacon, with the arms of the republic engraved on one side and those of the East India Company on the other, to be erected as a mark of possession. The double arms tied the bay both to the United Provinces and to the VOC that administered the Cape on the republic’s commercial charter. The stone was not a harbour work and not a battery. It was a claim cut into a shore the settlement had used in an emergency. [3]
The beacon did not reverse De la Fontaine’s poor opinion of the harbour. It asserted that Mossel Bay, whatever its limits as a roadstead, stood inside the Company’s claimed coastal order—an answer in stone to the same stretch of shore that foreign flags might otherwise treat as empty of European title. The same year would send a corporal’s picket to St Helena Bay against a rumoured French refreshment station. Possession on the south coast and a watch on the west coast belonged to one strategic weather. [3]
Together with the July journey and the Outeniqua attempt, the beacon made 1734 the year when Mossel Bay entered the Cape record not only as a chance refuge for a damaged Indiaman but as a place formally marked and personally inspected by the governor and his secretary. The neighbouring burghers who had lent waggons and cattle went home to farms that now stood a little nearer an official stone than they had in June. The bay remained a poor harbour in the governor’s judgment. It was no longer an unmarked bight. [3]
No new drostdy, no resident garrison, and no regular fleet call followed from the stone. The Company’s ordinary refreshment business stayed at Table Bay, with Simon’s Bay already ranked by Möller and De Heere as the better winter alternative among the nearer harbours. The Mossel Bay beacon of 1734 was a mark of title after an emergency, not the founding of a second Cape. [3]
Outpost at Riet Vlei on the Buffeljagts River — 1734
A few weeks later, a small military outpost, similar to those at Waveren and the river Zonder End, was established at Riet Vlei, on the Buffeljagts river, between the present villages of Swellendam and Heidelberg. The post extended the thin chain of country detachments that the Company had already used to watch loan-farm frontiers beyond the older freehold core. [3]
The objects were to prevent illicit cattle dealing with the natives, and to provide protection to the farmers and the Khoikhoi from the San. Illicit barter had long cut across the Company’s claim to regulate livestock exchange; San stock raids and counter-violence on the pastoral fringe were the other pressure that small posts at Waveren and the Zonder End had been meant to dampen. Riet Vlei seated that same double watch farther east, on the route toward the later Swellendam country. [3]
The Zonder End precedent was already eight years old. In November 1726 a corporal and six men had been sent over the Hottentots Holland mountains to form an outpost at a place called the Ziekenhuis, on that river. The few Khoikhoi left in that part of the country had complained that they were not able to hold their own against the San, and that they were also exposed to depredations from vagrant Europeans who professed to visit them for purposes of trade but in reality robbed them of cattle. Owing to those complaints the outpost had been formed in order that acts of violence might be prevented. The directors, dissatisfied that Europeans of Van der Heiden’s party had not been brought to justice for their conduct toward the Khoikhoi, had issued instructions to prohibit all dealing by private persons with natives under heavier penalties than before; on the 9th of April 1727 a very strict placaat to that effect had followed. [3]
Riet Vlei on the Buffeljagts therefore did not invent a new kind of post. It copied the corporal’s watch already tried at Waveren and at the Ziekenhuis and planted it on a river still farther along the cattle frontier. The July journey had shown how far waggons could still push toward the Outeniqua woods before winter rain closed the rivers. The new post showed where the Company was prepared to leave a handful of soldiers after the governor had gone home. Frontier police and coastal reconnaissance moved together in 1734 without yet creating a new drostdy. [3]
The loan-farm country that the post was meant to police was the same country whose annual rent had been doubled in 1732 and whose unsurveyed boundaries still invited encroachment. A corporal’s hut on the Buffeljagts could not survey those places. It could watch the cattle path, discourage private barter, and give farmers and remaining Khoikhoi a nearer appeal than Stellenbosch when San raids came in. That was the scale of country government in 1734: a stone at Mossel Bay, a small post at Riet Vlei, and the older posts still holding Waveren and the Zonder End. [3] [4]
Temporary Outpost at St Helena Bay — 1734
In the same year a corporal and six men were sent to form a temporary outpost at St Helena Bay, where it was feared that the French had an intention of establishing a refreshment station. The numbers matched the Zonder End detachment of November 1726: one corporal, six men, a thin official presence rather than a village. The fear was strategic rather than local. A foreign watering place on the west coast north of Table Bay would have undercut the Company’s monopoly of intermediate supply on the Europe–India route. [3]
After an occupation of a few months, upon receipt of intelligence from Europe, this outpost was broken up. The corporal’s post had done its work as a holding presence while the directors’ and allies’ information matured; it was not converted into a permanent west-coast village or battery. The same season that set a stone at Mossel Bay and a watch on the Buffeljagts also proved willing to pull a west-coast picket back once the rumour cooled. [3]
Calendar 1734 therefore carried two different small-post logics at once: Riet Vlei as an inland watch against illicit trade and San pressure on the Buffeljagts, and St Helena Bay as a short-lived coastal picket against a rumoured French station. One looked east and inland; the other looked north-west to the Atlantic approaches. Both were cheap instruments of a Company whose dividends had already fallen from thirty-seven to twenty-one per cent and which could not afford to plant towns wherever a flag might theoretically appear. [3]
The French commerce that made the rumour plausible was the same commerce already cutting into Dutch trades in the East. English and French gains, and the loss of the Southern Asian coasting trade that had once been almost exclusively the Company’s, formed the wider weather in which a corporal’s tent at St Helena Bay made sense for a few months and then did not. The Cape of 1734 still lived by the refreshment monopoly. It would not leave an Atlantic bight unwatched while that monopoly seemed at risk, and it would not keep the watch once Europe said the risk had passed. [3]
Refugee Households: a Third Marriage and a Cape-District Will — 1734
Among the older French households the year was not marked by a death-wave of the kind that had taken Pierre Joubert, Jacob Nortier, and Louis le Riche in 1732. It was marked by a third marriage and by a will filed in the Cape district. Those two paper acts kept Huguenot names on the ordinary civil list while the governor was on the south coast. [8]
Marie Marais, who in 1716 had described herself in her will with her first husband, Estienne Niel, as aged thirty-four and born at Hierpoix—probably Hurepois, south of Paris—was the daughter of Charles Marais. She had married secondly Pierre Taillefert, and thirdly, in 1734, Pieter Booysen. The third marriage joined a refugee daughter of the 1688 Voorschoten household to a burgher name already at home in the colony’s Dutch lists. It was a Cape fact of the year, not a new arrival from Europe. [8]
In the same year Guillaume Niel of Rouen, born about 1663, and his wife Jeanne la Batté of Saumur, born 1663, executed their will. It was filed in the same year. They were then living in the Cape district. Guillaume had received assistance in 1690 for himself, wife, and two children; it is probable that he was a brother of Estienne Niel. The 1734 will therefore closed, on paper, a refugee marriage that had already run more than four decades in the settlement, and it placed that closure in the Cape district rather than at Drakenstein. [8]
Those two households sat under pulpits that had only recently been filled again after the vacancies of the mid-1720s. They did not change the year’s public geography. They showed that the older French names were still marrying, still testating, and still living on the peninsula and in the country while De la Fontaine’s party was marking Mossel Bay and while a corporal’s watch went up on the Buffeljagts. Calendar 1734 had room for both the governor’s eastern progress and the quiet paper of refugee families who had been in the colony since the last years of the seventeenth century. [3] [8]
Government Continuity, Silk Still Critical, Wheat Export, and Shipping — 1734
Through 1734 De la Fontaine remained governor, with secunde Adriaan van Kervel and independent fiscal Daniel van den Henghel in the senior civil seats filled earlier in the decade. The July journey and the new posts were acts of a settled headship, not of 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]
The pulpits filled in 1731–1732 still framed church life in the year of the Mossel Bay march: at the Cape the Rev. François le Sueur and the Rev. Hendrik Kock; at Drakenstein the Rev. Johan Wilhelm Hartzogenrath; at Stellenbosch the Rev. Salomon van Echten. No fresh clerical vacancy dominates the 1734 record the way Kock’s and Van Echten’s arrivals had dominated 1732. The whole of the churches had again been supplied with ministers after a series of vacancies during eight years. That recovered establishment simply held. [3]
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 the first year eight pounds weight of good silk had been obtained; in no subsequent year did production exceed ten pounds. The great majority of the worms always died before making cocoons. For eight years the experiment was continued by the government. Calendar 1734 sat inside that hard middle stretch, not at a triumphant opening and not at a formal close. Guillaumet still held the silk post he had taken up after landing with his family in October 1726. On the 25th of November 1726 he and his wife Claudine Cloy had been inscribed as members of the Dutch church at Cape Town upon presentation of their certificate from the French church at Amsterdam. That inscription still described the household of the man who, eight years on, was still winding a trickle of silk beside the Slave Lodge. [3] [8] [9]
Beside the worms stood the kirman-hair flock. Twenty-four young Persian goats had been sent toward the Cape by way of Ceylon; in February 1725 eight reached South Africa, the others having died on the way. Of the eight, only one was a she-goat, and that died shortly after being landed. Cross-breeds from ordinary she-goats and the surviving pure animals, reduced by death to two, yielded goats with tolerably long and fine hair. Some burghers were then induced to make experiments with the animals. After a few years’ trial they informed the council that unless the Company would pay forty pence a pound for the hair, it would not be worth their while to keep separate flocks. That price could not be given even for a superior article. Calendar 1734 still sat inside the years when those flocks and the silk house were together described as being in their most critical stage. The governor who rode to Mossel Bay in July was the silk-merchant’s son who had kept both experiments at work after his wife’s death. [3] [9]
The same middle stretch still held the attempt to plant the Cape flats. 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. In the winter of 1724 seventy slaves and a gang of convicts had begun planting knot-grass and seeds of the wild olive, and when those failed the experiment had been repeated in ensuing rainy seasons with belts of sods. For eleven years, with one short interval, the effort continued, every winter much labour being expended upon it. Calendar 1734 was still inside that eleven-year labour. The directors were not yet formally satisfied that the bay was in no danger of silting up. [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. Beef and mutton were obtainable at a penny halfpenny to two pence a pound once the cattle plague had decreased in virulence, but the Cape had lost its reputation of affording cheap supplies of fresh provisions, and it was a long time in regaining it. Foreign ships had not returned in the old numbers. [3]
In the thirteen years 1725–1737, one thousand and seven ships put into Table Bay, or on an average seventy-seven yearly—eight hundred and sixty-eight of them Company vessels, with ninety-one English, twenty-seven Danish, nineteen French, one Portuguese, and one Flemish. The Cape of 1734 thus kept its ordinary refreshment and grain business while the governor’s Mossel Bay beacon, the Buffeljagts outpost, the brief St Helena Bay picket, Marie Marais’s third marriage, and Guillaume Niel’s Cape-district will marked the year’s special geography and household paper. The headship did not change. The pulpits did not fall vacant. The eastern stone and the two small posts were what the year added to a settlement already living under the cheaper fifteen-year quit-rent rate and under a Company past the zenith of its prosperity. [3] [8]