Boer History1735 at the Cape of Good Hope: Silk and Cape Flats Abandoned, Kirman Hair Ends, Groote Kerk Organ
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. That fear, not a local taste for ornamental planting, had driven the long winter labour on the flats. [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. Calendar 1735 therefore closed an eleven-year trial that had never possessed the plant later generations would treat as the obvious binder. [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. The poles across the sand waste remained the practical guide for laden waggons; the experimental green barrier did not become a permanent public work. Every rainy season had been a fresh attempt to do by grass, olive seed, and sod what the unknown mesembryanthemum would later do by habit; every summer south-easter had then tested the work against the same gales the skippers feared. Eleven such cycles, minus one short interval, were what 1735 wrote off. [3]
That despair sat inside a Company already past the zenith of its prosperity. Dividends which for the ten years ending 31 December 1722 had stood at 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. Many trading establishments were not returning the expense of maintenance. The Cape flats planting had been an instruction from Amsterdam, not a local luxury; once the physical argument for it collapsed, a settlement living under a cheaper dividend could not justify another winter of seventy slaves and a convict gang on a sand waste that still had no road. [3] [9]
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. 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]
An earlier sounding after the winter wrecks of the late 1720s had already pointed the same way. Two old skippers, Jacobus Möller, then acting as master of the naval establishment at the Cape, and Jan de Heere, living in the colony as a burgher, had sounded Table Bay and made a chart of it, reporting that it was not filling up, that it could be made a perfectly safe harbour by means of a mole, but that the mole would cost a great deal of money. Saldanha Bay they described as secure, but as wanting in everything else that could make a refreshment station valuable. Simon’s Bay they thought more highly of: eight or ten ships could there find shelter in all weathers, and there was plenty of fresh water, though there was no ground in its neighbourhood fit for gardens and access by land was difficult. Calendar 1735 did not reopen that harbour debate; it accepted the depth finding and stopped spending winters on the isthmus. [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. No mole was built. The roadstead that had already cost the Company hulls in July and December gales was judged, on a half-century comparison, to be deeper than before, not a bay in the act of becoming a sand-flat. [3]
That judgment mattered for more than gardeners and convicts. Table Bay was still the ordinary refreshment station of the Netherlands East India Company’s fleets. In the thirteen years 1725–1737 one thousand and seven ships put into it, or on an average seventy-seven yearly. A bay believed to be filling would have forced a different winter policy, a different spend on the isthmus, perhaps a different weight on Simon’s Bay. The nautical report of 1735 left the old roadstead in place and released the slave and convict gangs from a labour that had never bound the sand. [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. There were plenty of healthy mulberry trees, and the expert was furnished with whatever slave labour he asked for. Everything was thus in favour of the experiment. [3] [8]
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. Anticipations arose of another manufacturing industry in the mother country, with an article produced in a Dutch colony. The members of the council of policy at the Cape were equally enthusiastic. 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, which was now believed to have passed the experimental stage, were supplied with a few eggs and the necessary instructions. [3]
A factory was even erected near the Slave Lodge, to which the present Cape Town still owes its Spin Street. It is only natural that the son of a silk-merchant was particularly interested in the possibilities of silk manufacture, and he made a well-planned attempt to do so at the Cape. Jan de la Fontaine, born in Amsterdam on the 23rd of April 1684, was the son of merchant Jacques de la Fontaine; some members of the family were Walloon ministers, others, like Jan’s father, silk merchants. As acting head between the death of Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes and the appearance of Pieter Gysbert Noodt, he had already made several attempts to foster new industry. Two years after his detention at the Cape he had, though still a junior merchant, become a member of the council of policy; in 1717 he was made a fully-fledged merchant; after Chavonnes’s death in 1724 the council nominated him provisional secunde, and the Lords Seventeen confirmed the rank and promoted him to senior merchant. Thanks to an abundance of newly planted mulberry trees and, initially, a decent behaviour of the worms, the first year of operation showed promising results. [9]
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. These and other undertakings were in their most critical stage in the years 1730–1735. [3] [9]
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. A settlement that had watched eight pounds become a metropolitan curiosity, and then watched every later season fail to pass ten pounds, closed the books on an experiment the directors themselves had resolved should be made. [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. The silk officer thus entered the settlement not only as a Company expert with boxes of worms, but as a church member whose papers ran from a French congregation in the Netherlands to the Cape’s Dutch pulpit. [3] [8]
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. The post he had held for some years ended with the directors’ order; the household did not ship home with the last cocoons. [8]
His household already linked Cape church membership to a wider Huguenot and refugee network. A son, Matthieu (or Matthys), born at Berlin in 1711, to which place his father François had no doubt fled, was of an age in 1735 to be a young man in the settlement his father now chose as a burgher home. Daughters Anna, Johanna, and Marie, all of Languedoc, appear in the same family notices; Marie, at least, later gave her parents’ names as François Guilliaume and Claudine Cloy. Inside calendar 1735 the administrative fact that matters is Guillaumet’s own declaration that he would remain as a burgher once the silk post no longer defined his Cape career. [8]
The man who stayed had been imported together with a few boxes of silkworms and given a factory near the Slave Lodge. He had been furnished with whatever slave labour he asked for, and he had seen the first year’s eight pounds become a metropolitan curiosity and every later year fail to pass ten. When the directors ordered the culture given up, the expert’s remaining choice was whether to treat the Cape as a finished posting or as a place of free-burgher residence. He chose the latter. The year that closed the silk house also enrolled its superintendent on the burgher side of the settlement’s ledger. [3] [8] [9]
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. The route itself already announced the fragility of the design: a Persian flock was to be rebuilt at the Cape after a Ceylon staging, as if climate, sex-ratio, and burgher patience could be shipped with the kids. [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] [9]
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. What had been launched as a Cashmere rival left the Cape as a sample Europe would not buy. [3]
Silk and kirman hair had been spoken of together as undertakings in their most critical stage through 1730–1735. The governor who still headed the settlement in the year both were given up was the silk-merchant’s son who had kept the worms at work after his wife’s death and who had seen the imported goats fail to survive long. Calendar 1735 did not invent a new staple. It admitted that neither the garden-side cocoons nor the mixed kirman flocks would pay, and it stopped the outlay. [3] [9]
First Organ in the Groote Kerk; Barbara de la Fontaine Plays — 1735
When the first organ was installed in the Groote Kerk in 1735, Barbara Elizabeth de la Fontaine played it. The girl was known in the Vlek for her musical gifts. The new instrument therefore entered the Cape church not as an anonymous Company purchase but under the hands of the governor’s daughter, in the same year her father’s long industrial experiments were being written off. [9]
That household had already been marked by loss. During the first year of his administration fate had taken away the governor’s wife and left him as a widower with a daughter of fourteen and an infant son of two. Jan de la Fontaine kept at the work. His grief made him work yet harder. The daughter who in 1735 sat at the new organ was that girl of fourteen grown into the young woman whose music the town already knew. The infant son, Jan Gideon, was still a child in the Castle household while the silk house closed and the kirman sample went unsold. [9]
The governor himself was the first who had made his previous career at the Cape. Sailing as bookkeeper on the vessel Horstendal on her return voyage from Ceylon to the Netherlands in 1710, he had been detained in the settlement by Commissioner Johan van Hoorn and appointed storekeeper. In May 1711 he had married pretty Maria Elizabeth, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Secunde Andries de Man. When he reached the highest rung on the ladder he had worked in the colony uninterruptedly for two decades. Everyone called him Jan. The organ year was therefore not the arrival of a stranger’s child at a new pulpit instrument; it was a Cape-raised household sounding the first Groote Kerk organ under a governor the town already treated as one of its own. [9]
His own stock mixed a French Flanders line with a Dutch Calvinist one. In full he was Jan de la Fontaine dit Wicart, born in Amsterdam on the 23rd of April 1684. His father Jacques was the son of Jean de la Fontaine and Marguerite le Thor, who had left Valenciennes in French Flanders to settle in Holland during the first half of the seventeenth century. His mother, Barbara van den Burgh, daughter of Jan Gideonsen van den Burgh, came from solid Dutch Calvinist stock. That is why the grandfather’s Jean became Jan for the governor, and why he was baptised not in the Walloon church according to family tradition but in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. Some members of the family were Walloon ministers; others, like the father, were silk merchants. The daughter who played the 1735 organ inherited both that silk-house ear and that Cape upbringing. [9]
Church life around that new organ still ran on the pulpits filled in 1731–1732. At the Cape the Rev. François le Sueur, who had conducted service for the first time on the 16th of October 1729, and the Rev. Hendrik Kock, arrived from Europe in April 1732 as second clergyman of the Cape, still shared the Table Valley work. At Drakenstein the Rev. Johan Wilhelm Hartzogenrath, arrived in April 1731, still held the French-valley pulpit. At Stellenbosch the Rev. Salomon van Echten, sent out in November 1732, still served. The whole of the churches had again been supplied with ministers after a series of vacancies during eight years. That recovered establishment simply held through the organ year. [3]
Refugee Households: Deaths and a Filed Will — 1735
Among the older French households the year was a season of burials and paper. Jacob de Villiers, stated in his will in 1719 to be of “Borgondien” and aged fifty-eight, married to Margaretha Gardiol of Provence, born 1674, died on the 17th of May 1735. He was one of the three brothers sent out on account of their knowledge of the cultivation of the vine; Abraham had died on the 31st of March 1720, Pierre on the 22nd of January 1720. The surviving brother’s death in May closed a vine-skilled generation that had been placed at Drakenstein from the late 1680s. [8]
Pierre de Villiers’s widow’s will was filed in 1735. He had married, before 1699, Elizabeth Taillefert, daughter of the refugee Isaac Taillefert, and had lived with wife and children at the foot of the Paarl Mountain at Drakenstein. In a will dated the 3rd of February 1714, Johannes Guillaume de Grevenbroek, secretary to the government in the days of Governor Simon van der Stel, had bequeathed to that Pierre de Villiers his gold ring set with garnets, in acknowledgment of the kindness formerly received from his co-religionists in France. The 1735 filing therefore put a long Drakenstein widowhood into the same year’s paper as the surviving brother’s May death. [8]
On the 25th of July 1735 Abraham Bleuset of Calais, born 1665, an agriculturist who signed himself Bleuset and was described as compagnon in farming with Jean Manier, died and was buried near his wife. His will was filed in the same year. He had come in the Schelde in 1688, had been living in the Cape district unmarried in 1692 and at Stellenbosch in 1700, and had married Elizabeth Posseaux of Paris, widow of Jacob Bisseux. She had died in September 1726 and been buried in the churchyard at Cape Town. Six days after Bleuset’s burial, on the 31st of July 1735, Pierre Mouy of St Amant, who had arrived as a freeman in 1699 in the Donkervliet and farmed at Drakenstein, also died. [8]
On the 7th of August 1735 Charles Marais of Plessis, son of the refugee Charles Marais who had arrived in 1688 in the Voorschoten and been murdered at Drakenstein by a Khoikhoi in April 1689, died. He had married Anne de Ruelle of Guisnes, daughter of the refugee Daniel de Ruelle. In the same year Pieter Bisseux, son of the Picardy baker Jacques Bisseux who had come in the Vosmaar in 1696 as a freeman and died on the 11th of June 1723, also died; in 1729 that Pieter had been described as from Middelburg in Zeeland, and he appears to have left no issue. The year’s French paper was thus a closing of first-generation and second-generation names—de Villiers, Bleuset, Mouy, Marais, Bisseux—while the silk expert newly chose burgher status among the same refugee-descended settlement. [8]
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. The headship that had begun as an acting interlude after Noodt’s sudden death on the 23rd of April 1729 was, in the organ-and-abandonment year, the ordinary government of a settled governor. [3]
The East India Company, upon whose fortunes this 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. The commerce of the English and French in the East was making enormous strides, and some branches were completely lost to the Dutch. In Holland the directorate was secured by members of powerful families, who were content to draw a revenue without troubling themselves to correct abuses. Their influence was sufficient to prevent the States General from exercising the right of inspection into the Company’s affairs. Under those circumstances the corruption long prevalent in the public service extended more deeply than before; the appointment of independent fiscals had done nothing to check it. In the Asiatic dependencies officers of government lived in a style of ostentation resembling that of Asiatic rulers, and bribery and fraud were commonly practised. At the Cape there was less opportunity for such malpractices, as the colonists were not the people to submit tamely to wrong of any kind. It may have been accidental, or it may have been owing to their living in a healthier moral atmosphere, but the chief officials in South Africa for many years after the death of Governor Noodt were men held in general esteem, whose probity was never questioned. [3] [9]
Land administration in the same year still ran on the fifteen-year package introduced on the 18th of February 1732. 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 irreclaimable; if the Company resumed possession, the tenant was to be compensated for all buildings at a fair valuation. The rental first named had been eight shillings and fourpence a morgen yearly; in the following year it had been permanently fixed at two shillings and a penny a morgen. 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 1735 did not reopen that enactment; it worked the cheaper permanent rate and the doubled cattle-run rent as ordinary soil business. The insecurity the new tenure had been meant to cure still had its older pedigree on the peninsula: from 1654 garden loans without rent, the first alienation on the 10th of October 1657 to Jacob Cloeten of Cologne, annual renewal of later loan places, and from 1714 the recognitie of twenty-four rixdollars as acknowledgment that the sovereign remained lord of the soil—de Heer behoudt zyn recht. Beside the fifteen-year paper stood Leenings Eigendom, the borrowing of irregular small plots adjoining a freehold grant. None of that was new in 1735; it was the ground on which the abandoned silk house and the unsaleable kirman sample sat. [3] [4]
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. In 1724 and again in 1725 over five thousand muids had been exported. In 1726 none could be spared, owing to drought. In 1727 there was not sufficient for home consumption, owing to rust, which had attacked rye before, but not wheat. 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. In consequence of foreign ships being prevented from obtaining supplies at the Cape during the period of scarcity, very few vessels not under the Dutch flag now put into Table Bay. The burghers felt the loss severely, for foreigners had brought ready money into the country; but it was hoped that with better times they would return again. That hope was not realised. The plague among the cattle after a few years decreased in virulence, and beef and mutton were again to be had at ordinary prices, yet the cheap-supply reputation did not come back with the meat. [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. 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. The first Groote Kerk organ, played by Barbara Elizabeth de la Fontaine, and the May-to-August deaths among the older French farms, 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] [9]