Boer History1735 at the Cape of Good Hope: Silk and Cape Flats Abandoned, Kirman Hair Ends, Guillaumet Burgher
Cape Flats Sand-Planting Abandoned — 1735
The isthmus connecting the Cape peninsula with the continent was at this time 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. [3]
To prevent that feared silting 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 had been commenced. Seventy slaves and a gang of convicts were employed in planting knot-grass and seeds of the wild olive, and, when these failed, in ensuing rainy seasons the experiment was repeated with belts of sods. The valuable properties of the mesembryanthemum for binding surface sand were then unknown. [3]
For eleven years, with one short interval, the effort to plant the flats was continued, every winter much labour being expended upon it; but in 1735 it was abandoned in despair. The long seasonal outlay of slave and convict labour had not produced a fixed vegetation belt that satisfied either local officers or the directors’ original fear for the anchorage. [3]
Nautical Commission: Table Bay Deeper, Not Silting Up — 1735
The directors, however, were by this time satisfied that Table Bay was in no danger of silting up. A commission of nautical men that was appointed to examine it carefully sent in a report that within the preceding half century, so far from its filling up with sand, the water had become deeper. [3]
That survey judgment closed the policy argument that had driven the flats plantings since 1724. Skippers’ alarms about summer south-easters carrying sand into the bay had justified eleven winters of knot-grass, wild olive, and sod belts; the nautical commission’s half-century comparison now told the directors the opposite physical story—more depth, not a closing roadstead. [3]
Abandonment of the flats work in 1735 was therefore not only a confession that surface planting had failed on the isthmus, but also an administrative acceptance that Table Bay’s anchorage did not require that particular landward defence. The line of poles across the sand waste remained the practical guide for laden waggons; the experimental green barrier did not become a permanent public work. [3]
Company Silk Culture Given Up by Directors’ Order — 1735
To superintend the experiments in silk culture which the directors had resolved should be made, the services of a competent man named François Guillaumet had been secured. In October 1726 he and his family had arrived at the Cape. Attempts had previously been made to bring silkworm eggs from India, but in no instance had they been successful. Some had been received in good condition from Europe, however, and the worms when hatched had been carefully attended to in the houses of Messrs. Jan de la Fontaine and Nicholas Heyning. They were then handed over to Guillaumet. [3] [5]
There were plenty of healthy mulberry trees, and the expert was furnished with whatever slave labour he asked for. In the first year eight pounds weight of good silk was obtained, which was sent to the Netherlands and was an object of considerable interest at Amsterdam and Middelburg. A large building was immediately erected close to the Company’s garden and placed at Guillaumet’s disposal for keeping the worms in. The children in the slave lodge close by were all to be employed out of school hours in winding silk. Some thousands of young mulberry trees were planted in selected places, and burghers who had a fancy to join the industry were supplied with a few eggs and the necessary instructions. [3]
Yet in no subsequent year did the production of silk exceed ten pounds in weight. The great majority of the worms always died before making cocoons, and in one particular season they would have become extinct altogether if it had not been that a few were preserved by some burghers. It was soon ascertained that the returns were so trifling as to forbid the industry being attractive to people who could make a living in any other way. For eight years, however, the experiment was continued by the government. [3]
In 1735 every one admitted that it could not be made to succeed, and by order of the directors it was then given up. The garden-side silk house, the slave-lodge winders, the mulberry plantings, and the small burgher egg distributions all ceased to be a standing Company industry once that order took effect. [3]
François Guillaumet Remains at the Cape as a Burgher — 1735
François Guillaumet had been sent out to the Cape in 1726 to superintend the silk culture, which post he held for some years. He came with his wife Claudine Cloy (or Cloi) and family. On the 25th of November 1726 both were inscribed as members of the Dutch Church at Cape Town upon presentation of their certificate from the French church at Amsterdam. [5] [3]
In 1735 he informed the government that he intended to remain at the Cape as a burgher. The notice sits in the same calendar year as the directors’ abandonment of the silk experiment he had been hired to run: the superintendent did not simply disappear from the record with the failed industry, but recorded a choice to stay in the settlement under free-burgher status rather than as a Company silk officer alone. [5]
His household already linked Cape church membership to a wider Huguenot and refugee network. A son, Matthieu (or Matthys), born at Berlin in 1711, later married at Drakenstein; daughters of Languedoc connection appear in the same family notices. Inside 1735 the administrative fact that matters for the year page is Guillaumet’s own declaration that he would remain as a burgher once the silk post no longer defined his Cape career. [5]
Kirman Hair Sample Unsaleable; Goat Experiment Abandoned — 1735
Another industry which the Company at this time had attempted to establish in South Africa was the production of kirman hair. Shawls made of this hair were then considered second only in value to those of Cashmere. The goat which produces it is reared in Persia, and in that country twenty-four young animals were obtained, which were sent to Ceylon to be forwarded to the Cape. [3]
In February 1725 eight of these had 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. From ordinary she-goats cross-breeds were obtained, and from these and the pure animals, now reduced by death to two, goats with tolerably long and fine hair were bred. 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. [3]
But instead of improving the quality, the owners of the goats allowed the hair to deteriorate by mixture with native animals until a quantity sent to Europe in 1735 was quite unsaleable. The experiment was then abandoned. The Persian import of 1725, the cross-breeding that followed the loss of the only she-goat, the burghers’ price demand of forty pence a pound, and the final unsaleable shipment thus close in the same year that also ended silk and the flats plantings. [3]
Government Continuity, Wheat Export, and Shipping — 1735
Through 1735 Jan de la Fontaine remained governor of the Cape. He had been formally installed on the 8th of March 1730 after the directors’ despatches of 20 February 1730, and on the 21st of March 1732 he had been further promoted to the rank of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India. Secunde Adriaan van Kervel and independent fiscal Daniel van den Henghel still occupied the senior civil seats filled earlier in the decade. [3]
The pulpits filled in 1731–1732 still framed church life in the year of the abandoned experiments: 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 installation dominates the 1735 narrative the way the closing of silk, kirman hair, and flats planting does. [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. [3]
Calendar 1735 thus kept ordinary refreshment and grain business under De la Fontaine while three long Company experiments ended together: the flats sand-plantings against a silting fear the nautical commission rejected, the silk works Guillaumet had superintended since 1726, and the kirman-hair flocks whose 1735 European sample could not be sold. Guillaumet’s own notice that he would remain as a burgher tied the failed silk office to a personal decision to stay in the colony. [3] [5]