Boer History1736 at the Cape of Good Hope: Feyenoord Wreck, Hartzogenrath’s Death, Hubner Hunters, De la Fontaine Retires
Brigantine Feyenoord Wrecked near Salt River Mouth — 1–2 July 1736
During the night between the 1st and 2nd of July 1736 the brigantine Feyenoord was driven ashore in a gale near Salt River mouth and became a wreck. Only one life was lost. The vessel was a Cape packet of the same name that had earlier served Company coastal and Delagoa work; her loss on the open Table Bay shore put another small local hull on the stretch that winter north-westers treated as a lee shore whenever cables parted. Calendar 1736 therefore opened its dated Table Bay disaster record with a one-night packet wreck rather than with a homeward fleet broken up in daylight surf. [3]
The wreck sat in ordinary winter north-wester weather. Salt River mouth and the beach beyond it remained the place where a single packet driven in at night could break up as completely as a third-class Indiaman, even when almost all hands reached land. The administrative fact for the year itself was simple and local: the Feyenoord gone, one man dead, and the Salt River beach again the scene of Company salvage and burial rather than of routine boat traffic alone. No placaat against beach theft, no gallows at the water’s edge, and no nine-ship roll-call followed that July night; the packet’s loss was entered as a Cape-hull casualty on a known lee shore. [3]
That single hull sat inside a roadstead that, across the thirteen years 1725–1737 embraced in the same government span, received one thousand and seven ships, or on an average seventy-seven yearly. Of these, eight hundred and sixty-eight belonged to the Company, ninety-one were English, twenty-seven Danish, nineteen French, one Portuguese, and one Flemish. Foreign flags had not returned in the old numbers after the years when outsiders were prevented from obtaining supplies during scarcity. The burghers felt the loss, for foreigners had brought ready money; the hope that better times would restore them was not realised. Beef and mutton were again to be had at a penny halfpenny to two pence a pound once the cattle plague decreased, but the Cape had lost its reputation for cheap fresh provisions, and it was a long time in regaining it. [3]
A Cape packet driven ashore in July therefore mattered less as a dent in those seventy-seven yearly arrivals than as a reminder that the settlement’s own small hulls used the same winter beach as the Indiamen. The Feyenoord had been a working coastal tool, not a homeward third-rater waiting to sail for the Fatherland. Her wreck left the Castle with one fewer local packet on a coast that still depended on such craft for bay and outpost work, while the larger statistical traffic of Company and foreign flags continued under the same refreshment rules that had already thinned the non-Dutch share of the roadstead. Table Bay in midwinter was still an open roadstead whose cables, not a mole, held the shipping; a north-wester that could put one brigantine on the Salt River sand was the ordinary price of that anchorage, paid this year in a local hull and a single grave rather than in a homeward cargo. [3]
Death of Hartzogenrath; Van Echten to Drakenstein — June 1736
In June 1736 the Rev. Johan Wilhelm Hartzogenrath died. He had arrived from Europe in April 1731 as the directors’ clergyman for Drakenstein, and the council had at the same time made him consulent of Stellenbosch while permitting the aged Rev. Bek to retire on a pension. His five-year tenure had closed the long stretch of rural vacancies that had followed Van Aken’s death in December 1724 and Slicher’s in June 1730. The June death put Drakenstein vacant again and forced the council to rearrange the rural pair from the men already in the colony. [3]
The vacancies behind that June transfer ran back through the later 1720s. After Van Aken’s death the Drakenstein pulpit stood empty for some months until the council sent the Rev. Lambertus Slicher there on the 15th of July 1725 and left the Cape to the Rev. Arnoldus Maurice d’Ailly alone. Early the next year D’Ailly was taken seriously ill; he died in June 1726, when Bek was removed to the Cape and Slicher was directed to hold services occasionally at Stellenbosch. So matters remained for more than three years. The directors then sent the Rev. François le Sueur as second or assistant clergyman at the Cape; he conducted service for the first time on the 16th of October 1729. In June 1730 Slicher died, and the council instructed Le Sueur to act provisionally at Drakenstein and Stellenbosch. He returned to the Cape in April 1731 upon Hartzogenrath’s arrival. [3]
In April 1732 the Rev. Hendrik Kock arrived from Europe as second clergyman of the Cape, and he was followed in November of the same year by the Rev. Salomon van Echten, sent out as clergyman of Stellenbosch. Thus the whole of the churches were again supplied with ministers after a series of vacancies during eight years. Hartzogenrath’s death in June undid that restored rural pair at a stroke. The council removed Van Echten from Stellenbosch to Drakenstein, with instructions to act as consulent for Stellenbosch. Drakenstein received a sitting Stellenbosch minister; Stellenbosch fell back on consulent care from the same man until a later independent appointment could be made. [3]
At the Cape the pulpits of Le Sueur and Kock still framed town church life. The June transfer therefore rearranged the rural pair without stripping the Castle congregation. The Drakenstein succession that now read Simond, Bek, Van Aken, Slicher, Le Sueur acting, Hartzogenrath, and Van Echten was an official list of names and dates, not a guarantee that Stellenbosch would keep a resident minister of its own. Consulent care meant that baptisms, sick-visits, and the Sunday service at the older drostdy church would again depend on a man whose first charge was the French-founded valley. Calendar 1736 left Stellenbosch on those terms and Drakenstein with the minister who had occupied Stellenbosch since November 1732. The eight-year vacancy that Van Echten’s arrival had closed was not repeated in full; it was shifted onto the congregation that had just given up its only resident clergyman. [3]
Elephant Hunters Far Inland — 1736
The country at this time must have been explored far inland, for parties of elephant hunters were sometimes absent from the settlement eight or nine months together before returning with their waggons laden with ivory. Those people were very reticent upon routes and hunting grounds, and information obtained from them was known to be so unreliable that the government did not take the trouble to place it on record. Loan farms and recognised outposts still clustered west of the far eastern hunting belt; yet ivory loads kept arriving from journeys the council could not map. The hunters’ silence left official knowledge thinner than the practical reach of free-burgher waggons and Khoikhoi servants already travelling for months at a stretch. [3]
First contact between Europeans and the Xhosa had already taken that same eastern form at the beginning of the century. In 1702 a large party of Dutch and Khoikhoi had set out from Stellenbosch and penetrated as far as the Great Fish River. Xhosa were met with, a quarrel followed, and barter took the form of exchange of bullets for assegais. At that date the Xhosa were not in possession of the Fish River country in which the party found them, but were themselves on some exploratory or hunting expedition from regions farther east. Generally that remained the nature of the relations: authorised and unauthorised parties made expeditions into the country east of the Fish—some for elephant hunting and for ivory already obtained by the inhabitants, others to trade in cattle. More often than not, negotiations that appeared to progress harmoniously ended in a quarrel, and a sudden change of sentiment could produce an attack before the traders were out of the country. [4]
The people whom the hunters called Xhosa did not use that colonial label among themselves. They derived a national designation, Amaxosa, from a traditional chief Xosa. About 1680 Togu was said to have been paramount; he was succeeded by his son Gconde, located about the beginning of the eighteenth century on the banks of the Umtata. On Gconde’s death the chieftainship fell to Tshiwo. Palo, the great son of Tshiwo, was not born when his father died. The right-hand son Gwali, then a man in the prime of life, tried to make away with the infant half-brother; the tribe’s resentment forced Gwali and his adherents to flee, and in 1702 they crossed the Kei and travelled as far west as the later site of Somerset East, taking refuge among Khoikhoi clans. Palo therefore became head of the nation. During his lifetime the gradual western movement of the Xhosa continued, Palo himself later placing a location in the Izeli district, while the white inhabitants of the colony were simultaneously moving eastward. [4]
Against that background of unrecorded routes and of a paramount already named in Xhosa succession, one party in 1736 left a narrative detailed enough for the government later to take depositions. The exception did not invent inland hunting; it merely broke the usual silence after violence at a paramount chief’s kraals turned a commercial ivory trek into a matter of attestations. The Gauritz was still spoken of as the eastern frontier from which such a party might start. What the reticent hunters had refused to map, the Hubner disaster would force onto paper as names of chiefs, rivers, and dead companions. [3] [4]
Hubner’s Elephant Hunters East to Palo and the Pondos — 1736
In May 1736 a party of elephant hunters headed by Hermanus Hubner left the settlement and travelled eastward. There were eleven white men in the party, with thirteen waggons and a strong band of Khoikhoi. Passing through the district occupied by the Gonaquas, at whose head was a chief whom they called Captain Babbelaan, they came to the kraal of a petty Xhosa chief and then to the residence of Palo, paramount ruler of the Xhosa. The party was treated in a friendly manner as it moved from Gonaqua country into the paramount’s neighbourhood. Ivory, not conquest, was the load they hoped to bring back. [3]
Proceeding still further, they reached the country of the Tembus, where they found four colonists with six waggons already hunting elephants and trading with the inhabitants for ivory. The two parties united and went on to a district which they believed to be part of Natal, among a people they termed Nomotis—almost certainly the Pondos. There they met three Englishmen, Thomas Willer, Henry Clark, and William Bilyert, who had been shipwrecked many years before and were living in all respects like the surrounding communities, with numerous wives and children. The Englishmen were not a Cape outpost. They were wreck survivors who had taken local wives and stayed. [3]
From those Englishmen the hunters purchased on credit about five tons of ivory, undertaking to deliver later a quantity of iron, copper, and beads. They now had enough ivory to load ten waggons, each with eighteen or nineteen hundred pounds weight. They therefore began the return journey, intending to hunt by the way, the three Englishmen proposing to accompany them as far as Palo’s kraals. From the Nomotis country they passed again through the Tembus and kept on until they reached Palo’s residence, where they meant to rest their cattle for a week or two. So far they had been treated in a friendly manner and had no cause to suspect different conduct there. The credit bargain—ivory now, metal and beads later—tied a Pondoland wreck-camp to a Cape hunting account as tightly as any Company invoice. [3]
The trek thus already ran farther east than the official map. Gonaqua, petty Xhosa, Palo, Tembu, and Pondo country had been crossed with thirteen waggons and a Khoikhoi band, and a second colonial hunting party had been absorbed on the way. The significance of what followed would not be the mileage. It would be that a commercial ivory journey, received kindly at a paramount kraal, became the first clash between settlers and Xhosa detailed enough to enter Cape record as a named massacre rather than as another reticent hunter’s rumour. [3] [9]
Massacre of Hubner’s Rear Party at Palo’s Kraals — 1736
After resting a while, nine of the Europeans, with seven waggons, went on ahead and after a day’s journey came to a river so swollen that they had to encamp on its bank and wait for the fall. The name of the river was not given. The three Englishmen were with that advance group but did not intend to proceed further. The river was falling, though slowly. On the eighth day after leaving Palo’s kraal they were still waiting when two of the Khoikhoi left with the companions behind appeared and reported that all the others had been massacred. [3]
The servants stated that Hermanus Hubner was sitting in front of the tent, in which the other Europeans were lying down, when one of them reported signs of a hostile design among Palo’s people. Hubner took no notice, replying that the people were friendly and there was no cause for alarm. Shortly afterwards some Xhosa drove up eight oxen and, on behalf of the chief, presented them to Hubner. While they were talking, one suddenly stabbed Hubner with an assegai. He drew the weapon from his body and tried to reach his gun, but was killed by another stab in the back before he could do so. The warning had been given in the ordinary language of a hunting camp; the gift of oxen had looked like the same friendliness the party had met all the way from Babbelaan’s country. [3]
The attackers then rushed the tent from all sides and murdered Frederik Hubner, Andries Esterhuis, and Gerrit van Vuuren before they could protect themselves. Philip Constant and Anthonie Pottier got out of the tent but were killed close by. The bodies were afterwards mutilated. The murderers unloaded the twelve waggons and burnt them, probably for the iron. Among the stores were three kegs of gunpowder, each of fifty pounds. When the kegs were broken open and the powder thrown on a heap, a tremendous explosion killed and wounded a great number of those close by. Ivory, iron, and powder—the same three commodities that had structured the credit bargain in Pondoland—were what the kraal seized and what the powder then scattered. [3]
Hubner was only one of the victims. The members of the company who had been less confident of the friendly intentions of the Xhosa had taken another route and were the men waiting at the unnamed river. For the Castle the incident would read as a passing disaster on the far side of the hunting frontier—compassion for next of kin, regret for the lost ivory—rather than as a new kind of colonial war. For the record it was the first fully narrated clash between settlers and Xhosa: a gift of oxen, an assegai in the back, a tent rushed from all sides, and a powder heap that repaid the attackers in the same hour. [3] [9]
Survivors’ Flight to the Gonaqua and the Fish River — 1736
Upon learning the fate of their comrades, eight of the Europeans at the river hastened across with the waggons. The three Englishmen, who had no fear of the Xhosa, remained behind, and one of the hunters, Louis Cloete, thought it advisable to place himself under their protection. The wreck-survivors who had sold five tons of ivory on credit were now a local shield for a single Cape hunter. The rest chose the swollen river and the waggons rather than Palo’s neighbourhood. [3]
Soon after crossing the river the party was overtaken by a great horde among whom they recognised some people of mixed descent. They fired on the pursuers and struck down eight or ten; but with very little powder left they abandoned the waggons at the first opportunity and continued on foot. For three days and two nights the pursuers followed until the fugitives reached Gonaqua country, where Captain Babbelaan gave them an escort as far as the Fish River. The same Gonaqua chief who had seen them pass east in May now saw a remnant come back without ivory, without waggons, and without Hubner. [3]
One of their number, Christoffel Hoogreefde, became faint on the way and was left under Gonaqua care. The seven who escaped continued on foot to the Sunday River, where they met another elephant-hunting party under Gerrit Oosthuizen and Jacob van Deventer travelling eastward. Four of them—Daniel de Vries, Jan de Bruin, Jan van Vuuren, and Coenraad Scheffer—joined that party. The other three—Hendrik de Vries, Hendrik Scheffer, and Jan de Vries—came on toward the Cape. Inland hunting had not paused for the massacre: an eastbound ivory trek was already on the Sunday River to receive four of the fugitives and keep going. [3]
The Hubner trek thus fixed, for Cape record-keepers, a line of names and places from Babbelaan’s Gonaquas through Palo’s Xhosa, the Tembus, and the Pondos to shipwrecked English residents and a massacre at a paramount kraal. Ivory loads of nearly a ton per waggon, credit trade in iron and beads, a powder explosion among the attackers, and a foot-flight to the Fish and Sunday rivers all entered the same narrative that free hunters had long kept off the official map. Palo’s name, already the great-house name in Xhosa succession from 1702, was now also the name attached to six dead Europeans and twelve burnt waggons. [3] [4] [9]
De la Fontaine Applies to Retire; Van Kervel Named Successor — 1736
Governor Jan de la Fontaine was now advancing in years, and infirmities were creeping upon him. He was a widower, his wife Maria Elizabeth, daughter of the former secunde Andries de Man, having died in June 1730 in the first year of his administration, leaving a daughter of fourteen and an infant son of two. He had children for whom he desired the advantages of a residence in Europe, and from whom he did not wish to be separated. During the twenty-eight years that he had served the Company he had amassed considerable wealth, and it had become a desire with him to spend the evening of his life in repose in the Fatherland. [3] [9]
He was the first governor who had made his previous career at the Cape. Born in Amsterdam on the 23rd of April 1684 as Jan de la Fontaine dit Wicart, son of the silk merchant Jacques and of Barbara van den Burgh, he had been detained from the Horstendal in 1710 by commissioner Johan van Hoorn and appointed storekeeper. Two years after arrival, still a junior merchant, he sat on the council of policy; in 1717 he was made a merchant; on De Chavonnes’s death in 1724 the council nominated him provisional secunde, and the directors had to promote him senior merchant to match the seat. Everyone in the little town called him Jan. In 1736 that same Jan applied to the directors for permission to retire. [3] [9]
The directors heard of his resolution with regret, for he had performed his duties to their satisfaction; but his request was so reasonable that it could not be refused. They therefore appointed the secunde Adriaan van Kervel as his successor and promoted Hendrik Swellengrebel to be secunde. Van Kervel had passed a great portion of his life in South Africa. From 1719 to 1725 he had been secretary to the council of policy; then he became fiscal, and afterwards secunde, so that his experience was varied and extensive. His stepping into De la Fontaine’s place was treated in the settlement as a natural development. Inside calendar 1736 the decisive local act was the governor’s own application and the directors’ choice of those two men for the seats that would follow. The formal transfer of the sash still lay ahead; De la Fontaine remained in office through the year the letter went. [3] [9]
In the same year the Castle’s younger civil generation took a household step of its own. Secretary Rijk Tulbagh had been a guest at Hendrik Swellengrebel’s wedding in May 1728, where his glances at the bridesmaid Elizabeth had already been noticed. It took him another eight years before he married her. The delay was read as a sense of responsibility that would not let him set up a household before he could maintain a wife himself, without drawing on her dowry. The wedding took place in 1736, and the couple went to live in a modest house in Strand Street. Tulbagh had already been a member of the council of policy for years; the Strand Street household sat under a governor who was asking Amsterdam for leave to go home, and under a secunde already named as that governor’s successor. In the governor’s own house the daughter Barbara Elizabeth, known in the Vlek for her musical gifts, had played the first Groote Kerk organ the year before; the infant of 1730, Jan Gideon, was the son for whom a Netherlands schooling still pulled the widower homeward. The retirement letter and the Strand Street wedding were two household facts of the same Castle year. [9]
Refugee Households, Government Continuity, Wheat, and Shipping — 1736
Through 1736 De la Fontaine still headed the government he had held since his installation on the 8th of March 1730, after the directors’ despatches of 20 February 1730, and he still held the rank of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India conferred on the 21st of March 1732. Van Kervel remained secunde and Daniel van den Henghel independent fiscal. The retirement request did not remove the governor from the Castle in the year it was sent; it only set the succession the directors accepted while he remained in office. The chief officials at the Cape for many years after Noodt’s death continued to be men held in general esteem, whose probity was not in question, even as the Company itself had passed the zenith of its prosperity. [3]
The East India Company, upon whose fortunes this colony greatly depended, had seen dividends which for the ten years ending 31 December 1722 had stood at thirty-seven per cent per annum upon the paid-up capital average only twenty-one per cent for the ten years 1723–1732, and never afterwards rise higher than twenty-five. Many trading establishments were not returning the expense of maintenance. From 1723 that drop had meant, in Cape terms, that everything possible had to be done to boost the economy. The silk factory near the Slave Lodge and the kirman-hair flocks had been the industrial answers of a silk-merchant’s son; both had been written off in 1735. Calendar 1736 therefore opened under a cheaper dividend, with those experiments already closed, and with a governor who now asked to spend the evening of his life in the Fatherland. [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 1736 did not reopen that enactment. The older pedigree still sat beside it: 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. [3] [4]
Among the older French households the year’s paper was a will-file and a death-roll rather than a new arrival list. Antoine Faure, born at Orange in 1683, had arrived at the Cape in 1714 in the Company’s service, son of Pierre Faure and Justina Pointy. In 1719 he had been appointed voorlezer and schoolmaster at Stellenbosch; in 1714 he had married Rachel de Villiers, daughter of the refugee Abraham de Villiers, and left male issue. He must have died in 1736, in which year their joint will was filed. Theunis Bevernagie, brother of Francina Bevernage who had married Jacob Mouton in 1700 and of Joost who farmed at Drakenstein, had by a will dated 1724 left a legacy to Francina and instituted Joost as his heir; that will was filed in 1736. [8]
Elizabeth le Long, widow of Jean Jourdan and wife of Jacques Malan, who lived at Hottentots Holland and sat on the court of landdrost and heemraden of Stellenbosch, died in 1736; at her death the estate possessed the farm De Faisante Kraal on the Bot River and one in Hottentots Holland. Estienne Niel, born in Dauphiné in 1669, once a soldier in the Company’s service and later an agriculturist at Drakenstein, married to Marie Marais of Hierpoix, made his will in 1736 while living at Rondebosch on the farm Rodenberg belonging to his son-in-law Andries Grové. The will states that it was read over to him in the Dutch language, which he understood and spoke well. In the same year Philippe Jacob Naudé was born, grandson of the noted Philippe Naudé and a nephew of Jacob—a new French-descended name on a roll that the year’s filed paper was otherwise closing. [8]
During the later years of De la Fontaine’s government, or so shortly afterwards as to be practically within that span, names found in the records included Jeremiah Auret, Jan Bam, Jan Blignaut, Carel Buitendag, Dirk Craffort, Jan Ditlof, Jan Fleck, Andries Holtshuizen, Hermanus Keeve, Frans Marx, Jacob Naude, Hendrik Nefdt, Adriaan de Nys, Godlieb Opperman, Christiaan Rabe, Pieter Radermacher, Andries Schutte, Frederik Seele, Jan Serrurier, Jan Hendrik Swemmer, Jan Andries Truter, Willem van de Vyver, and Ernest Wepener—a burgher-roll sample of the mid-1730s settlement rather than a single day’s census. [3]
Across the wider harvest span that included this year, the directors still 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 the later 1730s 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. Calendar 1736 thus combined a Salt River packet wreck, a rural clerical death and transfer, the first fully narrated eastern ivory disaster under Hubner, the governor’s formal step toward retirement with Van Kervel and Swellengrebel already named, a Strand Street wedding in the secretary’s household, and a French paper of wills and one new birth—while ordinary wheat export and roadstead traffic continued under the same Castle hierarchy that still awaited the actual handover. [3] [4] [8] [9]