Boer History1752 at the Cape of Good Hope: Centenary Thanksgiving and Beutler’s Eastern Expedition
Lisle’s Burial and Centenary Thanksgiving — February–April 1752
Calendar 1752 opened in the second year of Ryk Tulbagh in the first chair. The induction of the year before had been feasted by all sections of the population with more enthusiasm than the settlement would spend on its first centenary a year later. The man in the chair remained the same: a kind, homely, fatherly officer who never sought popularity for popularity’s sake, and who was still called Father Tulbagh after putting his own name first on the fiftieth-penny list of 1751. Independent fiscal Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn still held his office. Landdrost Jan Andries Horak still sat Swellendam. Adriaan van Schoor still sat Stellenbosch and Drakenstein. Five Reformed parishes still stood after the boundary council of 30 August 1745. The Castle’s ordinary business—open access, fixed fees, no private trading by officers—was a second year’s habit, not a first year’s promise. [3] [7] [9]
On the 5th of February 1752 an English officer of rank, Commander Lisle, was buried under the pavement of the Dutch church in Table Valley. The surgeon of the Vigilant read the funeral service. It was the third such English rite in the same building in four years. On the 20th of April 1749 a commodore’s chaplain had preached according to the rites of the church of England. On the 9th of February 1751 William Wake, recently governor of Bombay, had been laid in a vault below the floor, the surgeon of the Boscawen reading the English burial service, Dutch officers in the procession, the castle flag lowered, the bell tolled, and minute guns fired from the batteries. Lisle’s pavement burial did not repeat that full state. It did repeat the leave: the Dutch church opened again to English words over an English grave. [3]
Saturday, the 8th of April 1752, was observed by the Europeans in South Africa as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God for the undisturbed possession of the colony by the Company for a hundred years. Special services were held in the churches at Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, Roodezand, and Zwartland. The date looked back to the 1652 foundation rather than to any single battle. Under Tulbagh’s second calendar year the colony paused to mark continuity: five pulpits, one theme, and a century of VOC rule on the same shore where Van Riebeeck’s people had first dug gardens. The feast of the induction had been louder. The centenary was a Saturday of ordered thanks. [3] [9]
The five pulpits were still Company pulpits. Clergymen sent out from Holland were paid entirely by the government, that is, by the Company. They became civil servants: responsible in a limited measure to the Classis of Amsterdam, but really controlled by the dictates of the commander of the Cape for the time being. A Political Commissioner appointed by the governor attended consistory meetings to see that nothing was done prejudicial to the government or public. The doctrine and discipline remained that of the Dutch Reformed Church in Holland, still the established form of worship. When Tulbagh became governor, Mr. Van der Spuy was alone at the Cape, Stellenbosch was vacant, Mr. Van Echten was at Drakenstein, Mr. Meyring was at Waveren, and Mr. Voltelen was at Zwartland. April’s thanksgiving therefore sounded from a Cape church still under one stationed clergyman, a vacant Stellenbosch, and three country pulpits whose incumbents had not changed with the chair. [3] [4]
Continuity of persons was the point of the centenary as much as novelty of title. The same castle, the same boards, and many of the same officers remained. Europeans and Khoikhoi were living together on friendly terms in the old districts, but occasionally the peace was disturbed by San marauders. Land continued to be allotted to colonists without consulting Khoikhoi clans. Plenty of land still seemed left. Cattle runs in the outward districts were probably never less than five or six thousand acres, for which, when it could be recovered, a yearly rental was paid. The eastern hamlet of Swellendam remained a hamlet. The year would add an English grave under the church floor, a Saturday of thanks for a hundred years, a train of waggons forced to the Kei, a Danish wreck in Mossel Bay, a second clergyman at the Cape, and a French astronomer’s notes on a dying language. The tone of the government—open access, a fatherly chair, no private trading by officers—was still a second year’s ordinary Castle business. [3] [4] [7] [9]
Beutler’s Expedition Departs — 29 February 1752
On the 29th of February 1752 an expedition left the Cape to explore the country east of the settlement and report on any changes that had taken place since 1688. It was under command of Ensign August Frederik Beutler, and was of sufficient strength to defend itself in case of sudden attack. There were thirty-seven petty officers and soldiers, twenty-five waggon drivers and leaders, a superintendent of the train, a botanist, a blacksmith, and a waggonmaker. The clerk Carel Albrecht Haupt went as journalist; the marine officer Pieter Clement to determine latitudes and distances; the surveyor Carel David Wentzel to make a map; and the surgeon Jan van Ellevee to attend the sick. [3]
They had eleven waggons to transport baggage, stores, presents for native chiefs, and a boat to convey them across flooded rivers. No expedition fitted out on such a scale had ever left the Cape before, except when Commander Simon van der Stel visited the copper mountain in Namaqualand. The train was built to defend itself if attacked and to observe rather than to settle. It was a Company reconnaissance, not a trek of cattle-run occupiers. The last named European farm it would pass was still months and a mountain away. The purpose written on the order was older than Tulbagh’s chair: what had changed east of the settlement since the late seventeenth century. [3]
The east the train was sent to see was already a named geography in hunter talk and in older journals. Elephant hunters had used the Longkloof. Hunters had carved names in forest bark. A French brig would leave a broken boat on an eastern beach before Beutler’s waggons arrived. The great chief the party would try to find, Palo, had been head of his nation since 1702, when Tshiwo’s death and Gwali’s flight had left the infant in the direct line. During his lifetime the gradual western movement of the Xhosa had continued. His great son Galeka (Gealeka) had crossed the Kei some time before 1750 and settled in the later district of Komgha. Beutler’s order did not invent those names. It sent a journalist, a surveyor, a marine officer, and a boat to write them onto a Company map. [3] [4]
February’s departure therefore fixed two clocks on one calendar. At the Castle, Tulbagh’s second year had already buried Lisle under the church pavement and would, in April, thank God for a hundred years on the 1652 shore. On the road, an ensign’s train rolled east with presents, a boat, and orders to look as far as waggons could be forced. The centenary would be sung in five churches while those waggons were still on a mountain. The year named for thanksgiving was also the year the Company measured the corridor to the Kei. [3]
Castaways of the Nécessaire — March–April 1752
By the 31st of March the Gouritz was reached. While resting there the party was joined by a French sailor in a half-famished condition. He had come from Mauritius in a brig named the Nécessaire, one of three vessels sent to explore the south-eastern coast of Africa and look for a suitable place for a French settlement. At Algoa Bay a boat with an officer and eight men had been sent ashore; the boat was swamped, and the Nécessaire sailed away without an attempt to rescue the crew. [3]
For thirty-four days the man who gave this account of himself had been travelling westward, and he did not know what had become of his companions. Ensign Beutler sent him to Swellendam, with a letter to Jan Andries Horak, who in April 1749 had succeeded Johannes Theophilus Rhenius as landdrost, requesting that he should be forwarded to the Cape. The first European authority east of the mountains was therefore not a new post but the same Swellendam board that had sat since Horak’s appointment: a landdrost asked to pass a starving French sailor up the road to Table Valley. [3]
On the 2nd of April the farm of Esaias Meyer at Mossel Bay was reached. Here the officer of the French boat met them, and corroborated the account of the sailor in every particular. He could give no information as to the fate of the remainder of the crew, except that he knew one man had died from eating part of a poisonous fish. The ensign directed him to the farm of Ignatius Ferreira, who sent him on to the Cape. Two French mouths, one sailor and one officer, thus entered the colony’s paper on the same road: the sailor by Horak’s hand, the officer by Ferreira’s. The brig that had left them was already gone. The broken boat would be found later on the Algoa beach. [3]
The Nécessaire episode was not a Cape wreck in Table Bay. It was a French reconnaissance that had failed on the same coast Beutler was ordered to mark. Three vessels had been sent to look for a place for a French settlement. One boat had been swamped. The parent brig had not waited. The Company’s answer, in April, was not a protest to Paris. It was a letter to a landdrost, a farm kitchen at Mossel Bay, and, later, a beacon with the letters VOC at the Zwartkops mouth. Possession, in 1752, was a post and a mark, not a new drostdy. [3]
Longkloof, St Francis Bay, and Algoa Beacons — April–May 1752
On the 4th of April the Little Brak was passed, and on the following day the farm of the widow Hasewinkel—the last occupied by Europeans—was reached. Beyond that farm the cattle-run floor of the old districts gave way to hunter country. Runs behind the party were probably never less than five or six thousand acres when rent could be recovered; ahead there was no yearly rental, only a kloof named by elephant hunters. On the 7th of April the expedition came to the foot of a formidable mountain at the place later called Montagu Pass. It took three days of excessive toil to get the waggons across: in some places a tackle to assist the oxen, in others the waggons steadied by ropes held by the soldiers. Those three days were the same three days in which the five churches at the Cape prepared a Saturday of thanks for a hundred years. The centenary was sung on the 8th; the pass was still being climbed. [3] [4]
Having got safely over this barrier, the expedition found itself in the long kloof, a narrow valley of great length between two ranges of mountains running nearly parallel to the coast. That section of it had already been named Cannaland by the elephant hunters, on account of the canna plant, which was used by the Khoikhoi as a purgative, being found there in great abundance. Very little grass was to be seen, but rhenoster bush was plentiful. The pastoral floor that Stellenbosch heemraden had already described as grass giving way to small bushy plants in the old districts was here a hunter’s valley of rhino bush and scarce feed. [3]
On the 17th of April they passed the head waters of the Keurbooms, their chief trouble now being the numerous lions that infested the valley. On the 20th they encamped at the Moordenaar’s river, which had received its name from a deserter who had been living with a Khoikhoi clan being murdered on its bank some years before. Names in this country were still hunter names and accident names: Cannaland for a plant, Moordenaar’s river for a killing, Galgenbosch still ahead for a gallows cut over signatures. [3]
On the 4th of May they came to the end of the Longkloof, and found that the mountain range on their right terminated on the shore of the sea. For some days they had been travelling along a stream which was a branch of the Gamtoos, but they left it before reaching the junction, and proceeded to the beach to examine the curve that now bears the name of St Francis Bay. They found it an open roadstead, protected only on the north and west. At the mouth of the Kabeljauw they set up a beacon with the Company’s mark upon it, as a token of possession, and then proceeded onward. The Gamtoos was crossed on the 6th of May, and three days later the expedition reached the Galgenbosch. Some elephant hunters had carved their names in the bark of a tree, and a later traveller had cut the figure of a gallows above the signatures, from which circumstance the forest was called the Galgenbosch. [3]
On the 13th of May the expedition encamped at the mouth of the Zwartkops. The broken boat of the Nécessaire was lying on the beach, but there was no other trace of European handiwork. The salt pans in the neighbourhood were visited, and the bearings of the shore around Algoa Bay were taken. The ensign regarded the roadstead as too exposed to be of any use for shipping. A beacon, however, was set up at the mouth of the Zwartkops, with the letters VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie) upon it, to denote that possession had been taken on behalf of the Company. Two beacons in nine days—Kabeljauw and Zwartkops—were the Company’s answer to a French boat on the sand. Beutler did not think the bay worth a harbour. He thought it worth a mark. [3]
Keiskama, Palo’s Country, and the Turn for Home — June–July 1752
On the 16th of May they passed the Sunday river; on the 17th a place called by the Khoikhoi Koernoe—meaning small forest—but which they named Hoender Kraal on account of the great number of Guinea fowls seen there; and on the 20th they crossed the Bushman’s river. Keeping near the sea, on the 2nd of June they passed the Fish, and on the 5th reached the Keiskama. So far they had met only Khoikhoi communities. The names of the tribes are given in the report of the expedition, but they have long since passed into oblivion. From Cannaland to the Keiskama the Khoikhoi were found in a condition of great poverty, arising partly from depredations by San groups, partly from wars with Nguni communities, and partly from feuds among themselves. They were very thinly scattered over the country. [3]
The Europeans noticed some of the heaps of stones which are still to be seen near the Fish river, and observed that the Khoikhoi who had joined their train threw green branches of trees upon the cairns as they passed, at the same time muttering some words or phrases. When questioned why they did so, the most intelligent among them replied that the devil had made the cairns, and that in this way they prayed for good luck and a long life. The Gonaquas, living between the Fish and the Keiskama, were on good terms with the Xhosa. As the Keiskama was considered the boundary between the Nguni and Khoikhoi tribes, the party was now divided into three watches, one of which was constantly armed and on guard. Two burghers— Andries Arendsdorp and Gerrit van Nimwegen— had joined them, and there was a large number of Khoikhoi in the train. [3]
After crossing the river, several Xhosa came to meet them, and with these and some Gonaquas presents were sent on in advance to the great chief Palo and to another of lower rank whom they called Banke. As the expedition advanced, the country was found to be more thickly peopled. It was the winter season, and the district had been subject to a long and severe drought, still there was ample proof that the inhabitants were agriculturists. Gardens were seen, in which millet stalks were still standing, and leaf tobacco was also noticed. Before they reached the Buffalo, which they crossed on the 17th of June, all the Khoikhoi with the train, except a few Gonaquas, deserted through fear. On the 24th of June the Gonubie was reached. On the 28th the expedition halted at the kraal of Galeka, great son of Palo, somewhere near the later village of Komgha—not far from where Hubner’s hunting party had been massacred years before. Upon being questioned as to the massacre, the Xhosa tried to throw the blame upon Hubner’s interpreters, who, they said, had caused a misunderstanding. [3] [4]
After resting a little, the party crossed the Kei on the 3rd of July, and on the following day encamped at the Toleni. Here messengers whom they had sent in advance to the Thembu chief Tzeba met them and delivered a friendly greeting. To the east of the Kei only Thembu were found, and in Ensign Beutler’s report that river is stated to be the boundary between them and the Xhosa. As these tribes were frequently at war, it is evident that the Xhosa had been defeated and driven for a time from the district between the Kei and the Bashee. Five days longer the party marched north-eastward, without making any discovery of note. The oxen were now beginning to die from fatigue and scarcity of food, and the members of the expedition were almost wearied out. Travelling over a broken country, where at every brook a road had to be made, was no easy task. The ensign took counsel with the leading men of the party, and all decided that it was advisable to go no further. On the 10th of July therefore they turned towards home. [3]
Palo, the head of the Xhosa tribe, was then living at the foot of the Amatola mountains. They were desirous of seeing him, but he probably feared meeting a strong party of Europeans, for no one would guide them to him. They noticed that from the eastern side the peak which the elephant hunters called the mountain where Xhosa country began could be seen at as great a distance as when approaching in the opposite direction. This is the Intaba-ka-Ndoda—the Mountain of the Man—of later maps. The great chief the presents had been sent to find remained a name and a direction, not a meeting. Galeka’s kraal had been the farthest household the train entered. Palo’s Amatola seat was refused to them. [3] [4]
Keeping close to the foot of the mountain chain, the expedition, after leaving Xhosa country, passed the Tyumie, Kat, Koonap, Baviaans, Tarka, and Fish rivers. The only inhabitants of this tract of country were San groups, with whom it was impossible to have much intercourse. In the report it is stated that one division of these people practised polyandry as well as polygamy, but that assertion stands on thin evidence. The San along the Fish river—called Little Chinese by the Europeans—were reported to be monogamists. Many rock paintings made by these people were noticed. The country was so parched by a long drought that the cattle were half famished, and large thorn trees were perishing through want of moisture. The ensign had not been able to purchase from the Xhosa as many oxen as he needed, so after keeping upward along the bank of the Fish until the 18th of August without discovering anything of importance, he turned again towards the sea. For many days nothing more noteworthy occurred than the recovery of a runaway slave of the burgher Willem Landman. [3]
Crown Princess at Mossel Bay and Kroonenburg — June–October 1752
While Beutler’s train was at the Keiskama, the coast behind him took a Danish wound. On the 9th of June 1752 the Danish ship Crown Princess of Denmark, homeward bound from Tranquebar, put into Mossel Bay disabled, having sustained great damage in a gale. The cargo was landed and stored in sheds until it could be forwarded to Copenhagen, and the wreck was then abandoned. All possible assistance was given to the crew by the Cape authorities. The bay where Esaias Meyer’s farm had fed Beutler in April now held a Danish hull. The same shore that had passed a French officer inland in early April received, in June, a Company of sheds and a wreck left on the sand. [3]
There were but few disasters on the coast in this stretch of Tulbagh’s years. The Crown Princess was the named casualty of calendar 1752. It was not a Table Bay gale with nine ships on the beach. It was a homeward Dane from the Coromandel, broken enough to be emptied into sheds at Mossel Bay and then given up. The authorities’ part was assistance, storage, and a forwarding of cargo toward Copenhagen. The hull stayed. The year of the centenary therefore added a foreign wreck on the same bay Beutler had used as a rest and a post for French castaways. [3]
In October 1752 the Rev. Hendrik Kroonenburg arrived from Europe and was stationed at the Cape. The town church that had sung the centenary in April under Van der Spuy alone now had a second stationed clergyman. Stellenbosch remained vacant. Drakenstein, Waveren, and Zwartland kept Van Echten, Meyring, and Voltelen. Kroonenburg’s arrival did not multiply parishes. It doubled the Cape pulpit. Clergymen remained civil servants paid by the Company, watched in consistory by a Political Commissioner, and bound to the doctrine and discipline of the Dutch Reformed Church in Holland. The English rites over Lisle in February and the five-church Saturday in April had used the same buildings; October added a Dutch voice from Europe to the town congregation. [3] [4]
The pulpits of 1752 therefore closed the year fuller at the Cape and still empty at Stellenbosch. A centenary sung by five congregations, an English burial under the town pavement, and a new clergyman from Europe were the church’s own map of the year—parallel to Beutler’s beacons, not caused by them. The Company paid both the ensign’s train and the new pastor. Both were civil work under the same chair. [3] [4]
Outeniqua Search, French Speech, and Return — November 1752
When resting at the farm of Hendrik Blankenberg at the Zoetmelks river, the ensign received a letter from the landdrost of Swellendam, written under instructions from the governor, directing him to search for a bay that was reported to have been found by some hunters on the coast of Outeniqualand. He accordingly sent part of the train on to the Cape, and with a few men on horseback he endeavoured to find a way to the shore. He reached the two lakelets nearest the later village of George, and supposing them to have been mistaken for a bay, he turned back without seeing the Knysna lagoon. Horak’s board, which had passed the French sailor inland in April, now passed a governor’s order to look for a hunters’ bay. The order found lakes. It missed the lagoon. [3]
On the 6th of November he reached the Cape, after an absence of a little over eight months. The expedition had planted VOC beacons, mapped a corridor from the last European farm to the Kei, contacted Xhosa and Thembu polities, recovered French castaways’ testimony, and shown how far waggons could be forced east—and how quickly drought and dying oxen ended the push. Palo had not been seen. Galeka had. The Keiskama had been treated as the Nguni–Khoikhoi line; the Kei as the Xhosa–Thembu line for that season. San groups held the drought-parched return along the mountain foot. A runaway slave of Willem Landman had been recovered. A hunters’ bay had been a pair of lakes. The centenary year thus closed with a map, two beacons, and a train that had turned on the 10th of July because the oxen were dying. [3]
At the Cape the French astronomer Abbé Nicolas Louis de la Caille, who had arrived on the 19th of April 1751, was still at work. From Governor Tulbagh, who took a warm interest in his labour, he received all the assistance that it was possible to give. In 1752 he wrote of the old French wards that they had preserved the French language and had taught it to their children. The children, however, were obliged to speak Dutch in order to transact business with the Dutch and Germans who spoke that language, and also because they had intermarried with the Dutch and Germans and did not teach French to their children. He found that only the children of the original refugees, of whom there were no longer any living, spoke French. They were all aged, and no one under forty years of age that he met spoke French unless he had come from France. He was informed by those who spoke the language that within twenty years there would be no one in Drakenstein who would be able to speak it. [3] [8]
After the first quarter of the eighteenth century the language had begun to die out; later the grandchildren of the original arrivals knew only Dutch. Calendar 1752 put a number on that dying. In the same year an inventory in the deceased estate of the widow Verdeau was filed. Maria Catharina Huibeaux, born 1675, widow of Hercule Verdeau of the Berg China of 1688, died about 1752; they had left only daughters. Jean Blignault of Amsterdam, arrived in the Company’s service in 1723, married in 1725 to Anne Rousseau, widow of the refugee Daniel Hugo, heemraad of Drakenstein, possessed of seven farms, most in Drakenstein, some of them Bethel where he evidently lived, died about 1752, leaving two sons and three daughters. A midwife’s death had closed 1751 in the French wards. A widow’s inventory and a heemraad’s seven farms closed 1752. The language De la Caille heard was the speech of the aged children of the 1688 ships, not of a living parish. [8]
So 1752 closed without a new district name and without a meeting with Palo. It left a Saturday of thanks on the 8th of April for a hundred years of Company possession, quieter than the induction feast of the year before. It left Commander Lisle under the Dutch church pavement on the 5th of February, a Danish wreck emptied into sheds at Mossel Bay from the 9th of June, and Hendrik Kroonenburg in the Cape pulpit from October. It left Beutler’s train back on the 6th of November after eight months, with VOC marks at the Kabeljauw and the Zwartkops, a Keiskama treated as a boundary, a Kei crossed and recrossed, and a hunters’ bay that was two lakes near George. It left a French astronomer still measuring, and French still spoken in Drakenstein only by the aged. The chair was the same fatherly chair. The year gave that chair a centenary, a map to the Kei, and a second clergyman in town. [3] [4] [7] [8] [9]