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
On the 18th of February 1732 the directors’ order had introduced fifteen-year leases for garden ground in the Cape peninsula and for small agricultural plots bordering freehold farms. Those leases were to be irreclaimable during each term, with fair valuation of buildings if the Company resumed possession at the end of fifteen years. The rental first named for that tenure was eight shillings and fourpence a morgen yearly. [3] [4]
In the following year—calendar 1734 on the settled printed reading of that order’s aftermath—the rent on the new fifteen-year holdings was permanently fixed at two shillings and a penny a morgen. The permanent figure replaced the higher opening rate and gave cultivators a stable cash burden while the soil remained under Company sovereignty. [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, 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. Either way, 1734 carried the practical settlement of the 1732 quit-rent package into ordinary Cape land administration rather than leaving the new leases on their temporary opening tariff alone. [4] [3]
Huis te Marquette in Distress at Mossel Bay — June 1734
In June 1734 a homeward bound Indiaman named the Huis te Marquette put into Mossel Bay in distress. 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]
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, turning a single ship’s emergency into an official inspection of the bay and of the country immediately beyond it. [3]
The June call thus opened the eastern field journey that dominates the Cape narrative of 1734. What began as relief of an Indiaman became a short season of coastal judgment, forest reconnaissance, and formal marks of possession on a shore the settlement had long known by name but had seldom treated as a seat of government business. [3]
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]
The party therefore mixed central administration, naval expertise, a military officer, and local free-burgher transport. Tulbagh’s presence as secretary kept the journey inside ordinary council record-keeping; Möller’s naval office spoke to the distressed hull and to any judgment on Mossel Bay as a harbour; the burghers’ waggons and oxen made the overland stage possible without stripping the Castle of its own teams alone. [3]
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. The July departure was not a change of headship but a rare personal movement of the permanent governor deep into the eastern cattle and forest fringe during a settled phase of his administration. [3]
Ship Relieved, Harbour Judged, Outeniqua Forests Attempted — 1734
At Mossel Bay the distressed ship was relieved, and the bay was examined. The governor left with a very poor opinion of its capabilities as a harbour. The emergency had been met, yet 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. [3]
The party proceeded eastward to the forests in the district once occupied by the Outeniqua tribe, which the governor wished to explore. 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. [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. [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. [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. [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. [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. [3]
Riet Vlei on the Buffeljagts therefore seated a corporal’s watch on the route toward the later Swellendam country at the same season when the governor’s own party was proving how far waggons could still push toward the Outeniqua woods before winter rain closed the rivers. Frontier police and coastal reconnaissance moved together in 1734 without yet creating a new drostdy. [3]
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 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. [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. [3]
Government Continuity, 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 after Noodt’s death or Chavonnes’s end. [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. [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. 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 smaller numbers of English, Danish, French, and occasional other flags. The Cape of 1734 thus kept its ordinary refreshment and grain business while the governor’s Mossel Bay beacon, the Buffeljagts outpost, and the brief St Helena Bay picket marked the year’s special geography. [3]