Boer History1753 at the Cape of Good Hope: Elizabeth Tulbagh’s Death, Ivory Regulation, Appeldoorn at Stellenbosch, and Mid-Century Law
Elizabeth’s Death and Father Tulbagh’s Third Year — 1753
Calendar 1753 opened in the third year of Ryk Tulbagh in the first chair. He had not been quite fifty-two when, on the 27th of February 1751, he became governor; the public presentation to the burghers and the promise of fidelity from the official boards had followed on the 15th of April. The induction had been feasted by all sections of the population with more enthusiasm than the settlement spent on its first centenary a year later. Saturday, the 8th of April 1752, had been a day of thanksgiving for a hundred years of Company possession, looking back to the gardens of 1652. 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, with his wife Elizabeth Swellengrebel, on the fiftieth-penny list. 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 third year’s habit. [3] [7] [9]
As governor he was accessible without the least difficulty to all who wished to see him. The humblest individual could pour grievances into the ears of the father of the country and be sure of a patient hearing. If the complaints were well grounded, he obtained speedy redress; in any case he was sure of good counsel. That quality more than any other endeared him to the people. They knew that he studied their interests, that although he was their governor he was still their adviser and friend. His probity was beyond suspicion in an age when probity was hardly looked for in men holding such posts. Company salaries were small, and it was taken almost as a matter of course that officers would supplement their incomes in any way not punishable by law. Tulbagh set his face firmly against that habit. He neither traded on his own account nor would he allow any other officer of the government to do so. The fees they were permitted to receive in certain transactions were fixed, and they were restricted from taking more. He regulated his own expenses so that he lived well within his income and allowances, and used what he had to spare in relieving the wants of others. Under his administration every man was certain of getting his dues. The petty pilfering system under which farmers had been compelled to bribe Company officers before produce would be received, and then bribe them again before proper accounts could be had, was not tolerated. No man was put to unnecessary delay; no bribes were received; no false accounts were rendered. [3] [9]
The first challenge to that popularity had come in 1751, when the States General of the near-bankrupt Dutch Republic imposed a special tax on property—the fiftieth penny—and the governor-general of the Indies extended it to all Europeans in Company territories. Without hesitation Ryk Tulbagh and his wife Elizabeth had paid up first. Company officials followed. Burghers queued at the Castle with their coins and still called him Father Tulbagh. In 1753 a challenge of an entirely different nature followed, much more serious than the tax, because it was a challenge to his own personal happiness. Elizabeth died. She had been the companion who had shared his bed and table for seventeen happy years. She had caught a severe cold which she did not survive, and left him a childless widower. They had married in 1736, after a long delay that his sense of responsibility had imposed: he would not set up a household before he could maintain a wife properly himself, without drawing on her dowry. The not-so-young couple had gone to live in a modest house in Strand Street. After he became secunde they had moved to a larger house of two storeys and eight rooms at Keizersgracht, with a little garden. The third year of the chair thus opened, or soon turned, on a Castle without a governor’s wife at table. [3] [9]
His sorrow did not make him morose or self-commiserating, in spite of his loneliness. He overcame it by taking an even greater interest in the wellbeing of his people, who found him more accessible than ever. He had never sought popularity for popularity’s sake. He wanted to be right with the ego he held as given him by God, and its dictates clashed frequently with the desires of the people. Equanimity, calmness, and a lack of swashbuckling dash did not mean an uneventful chair. No direct attack by a hostile power fell on the settlement in his term, but the occasions were numerous on which only a firm, determined, and fearless leader could prevent lasting losses. Calendar 1753 was not a year of fleets in the bay or of smallpox in the streets. It was the year the governor buried the woman whose name had stood beside his on the first fiftieth-penny list, and then went on hearing the humblest grievance as before—more accessible, not less. [7] [9]
Continuity of persons was the point of the third year 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—£2 10s. until 1732 and £5 thereafter. The eastern hamlet of Swellendam remained a hamlet. The French astronomer Abbé Nicolas Louis de la Caille, who had arrived on the 19th of April 1751 with a letter from the Prince of Orange, was still measuring. From Tulbagh, who took a warm interest in his labour, he received all the assistance that it was possible to give. The tone of the government—open access, a fatherly chair, no private trading by officers—was still a third year’s ordinary Castle business. What the year would add was a grave without children, a tusk price at the barrier, a Drakenstein pulpit filled from the Cape, a Stellenbosch pulpit filled from Europe, and a Wynberg power of attorney sent to Leiden. [3] [4] [7] [9]
Van der Spuy to Drakenstein — January 1753
When Tulbagh became governor, Petrus van der Spuy had been alone at the Cape. Stellenbosch was vacant. Salomon van Echten was at Drakenstein. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring was at Waveren. Christiaan Benjamin Voltelen was at Zwartland. 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. The five pulpits of the centenary year were still Company pulpits in the third year. [3] [4]
In October 1752 the Rev. Hendrik Kroonenburg had arrived from Europe and been stationed at the Cape. That second town pulpit changed the arithmetic. In January 1753 Mr. Van der Spuy was transferred to Drakenstein, at his own request, when Mr. Van Echten returned to Holland. The Cape church was then again under the care of a single clergyman—Kroonenburg—while Drakenstein received the man who had held Table Valley since September 1746. Stellenbosch remained vacant. Waveren still had Meyring. Zwartland still had Voltelen. The January move was not a new parish. It was a swap inside five existing ones: a Cape veteran asking for the French-founded valley, a Drakenstein incumbent going home, and a town pulpit left to the man of the previous October. [3]
The index of that succession is plain. Van der Spuy had assumed duty as clergyman of the Cape congregation in September 1746. He was transferred to Drakenstein in January 1753. Van Echten had held Drakenstein from June 1736. The French language in that valley was already dying. The astronomer still at work in Table Valley had written in 1752 that the old French wards had preserved French and taught it to their children, but that the children were obliged to speak Dutch to transact business with Dutch and Germans, and because they had intermarried and did not teach French to their own children. Only the children of the original refugees, all aged, and no one under forty unless he had come from France, still spoke it. He was informed that within twenty years there would be no one in Drakenstein who would be able to speak it. 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. January’s transfer therefore seated a Dutch Cape clergyman in a valley whose French parish clerk had long since been refused, and whose French services had ceased after the first quarter of the century. [3] [8]
So January 1753 rearranged pulpits without adding a sixth church. The combined ecclesiastical council established in 1743 still met; it would not be stopped until later in the decade. Political commissioners still sat in consistory. Pay still came from the Company chest. The vacant Stellenbosch, empty since before Tulbagh took the chair, was not filled in January. That vacancy waited for a ship from Europe in September. The year’s church story therefore has two dated strokes: Van der Spuy’s request granted in January, and a new man for Stellenbosch in the spring of the southern calendar. Between those dates the five parishes stood as they had stood at the centenary, with one incumbent moved inland and one gone home. [3] [4]
Ivory Sale Regulation — 1753
In 1753 a regulation was made concerning the sale of ivory. It fixed the price of prime tusks at one shilling and four pence per pound, and of inferior tusks in proportion. Anyone detected disposing of ivory except to the Company was made liable to a heavy fine and banishment from South Africa. The purchaser was to be punished in the same manner. Any petty officer or soldier of the patrol who through want of proper diligence allowed a tusk to pass the barrier by day or by night, except to the Company’s stores, was made liable to be severely flogged, to be branded, and to serve ten years in chains. The rule treated every tusk as Company property once it entered the colonial circuit of hunters, waggons, and gates. Private sale was not a grey market. It was a crime whose paper maximum was exile for buyer and seller, and chains for the watch that blinked. [3]
Ivory already sat among the colony’s lesser exports, with skins of wild animals, ostrich plumes, and dried fruit, beside the great staples of wheat and wine. Ordinary wine went to Batavia by the hundreds of leggers; all the Constantia that could be obtained was exported, and ten times the quantity would have found a ready sale. A small quantity of ivory was also among the goods sent to India across Tulbagh’s twenty-one years. The 1753 placaat did not invent that export. It tried to make sure the tusks that left the barrier left through the Company’s stores, at the Company’s price, and not through a burgher’s private bargain on the far side of a sleepy post. [3]
Elephant hunting had long pulled men east and north. Beutler’s 1752 train had moved through country already named by elephant hunters—Cannaland, Galgenbosch, and the tracks beyond Mossel Bay. From the eastern side the peak which those hunters treated as the beginning of Xhosa country could be seen at as great a distance as when approaching in the opposite direction—the Intaba-ka-Ndoda of later maps. The 1753 ivory law tried to pull the product of those hunts back into the magazine ledger before private sale could drain it. Hunters could still go out. They could not lawfully sell a tusk to anyone but the Company. The barrier, not the hunting ground, was the point of the placaat. [3]
The patrol clause was the teeth. A petty officer or soldier who let a tusk pass the barrier by day or by night, except to the Company’s stores, faced a severe flogging, a brand, and ten years in chains. That was not an ordinary fine for a sleepy sentry. It was the heaviest punishment the paper could name, laid down so that administrators and judges would have it to hand. Want of proper diligence was enough. The tusk did not have to be proved sold. It had only to pass. Day and night were written in so that darkness would not be a defence. The Company’s stores were the only lawful mouth of the barrier. Everything else was a crime against the magazine. [3]
So the year’s clearest dated economic stroke was a price and a terror. One shilling and four pence a pound for prime ivory; inferior in proportion; Company as sole lawful buyer; banishment for the private bargain; chains for the watch. The regulation belonged to the same family as the older price placaats. It did not open a new frontier. It closed a leak on an old one. After Beutler’s map of 1752, the Castle did not send another train on that scale in 1753. It sent a rule after the tusks. [3]
Character of Mid-Century Legislation — 1753
The laws of the colony at this time were much harsher on paper than later codes. They were, however, seldom enforced in all their severity. The object of legislation was to lay down the heaviest punishment which could be inflicted for offences, rather than the ordinary penalties. Far greater power was thus placed in the hands of administrators and judges than in later practice. A tusk at the barrier, a smith’s bill in the village, and a slave’s offence in town could all meet a paper maximum far above ordinary practice—or, on a hard day, meet it in full. The 1753 ivory rule is the year’s specimen of that style: exemplary maxima, Company monopoly, and a patrol clause written to frighten. [3]
It was held to be one of the duties of government to regulate many matters later ages left to demand upon supply. Thus in 1744 a proclamation of Governor Swellengrebel and the council was issued in which the price to be charged by waggonmakers and blacksmiths for every part of their work was minutely fixed. The ivory rule of 1753 belonged to the same family: staple control by placaat, patrol, and exemplary maximums. Tulbagh’s early years did not invent that style. They continued it with a governor known for strict personal honesty, who would not trade himself and would not let his officers trade. Honesty at the Castle and harsh paper in the placaat were not opposites. They were two faces of the same order: the Company would name the price, name the buyer, and name the worst that could be done to anyone who cheated the magazine. [3]
Far greater power thus sat with those who decided when to apply the letter and when to mitigate it. The humblest individual could still reach the governor’s ear. That accessibility did not repeal the maxima. It placed them in a chair that heard grievances and also issued placaats. A farmer who had been forced to bribe warehouse officers in earlier administrations now found fees fixed and delays forbidden. A hunter who sold a tusk privately now found banishment on the paper. A sentry who blinked at the barrier now found ten years in chains on the same paper. The third year of Father Tulbagh was not a softening of Company law. It was Company law administered by a man the people still called father, after he had paid the fiftieth penny first and after he had buried his wife. [3] [9]
Game and hide had already been a governor’s problem in the previous chair. Premiums on killing wild animals had been cut; random slaughter of zebras, lions, and elephants had abated a little but still went on. Swellengrebel had seen farther than hides and skins; a journal entry of 1742 called the zebra’s presence on the hillside an attractive feature, and a reward was offered for three zebra foals to be delivered at the Castle. The 1753 ivory placaat was not that preservation instinct. It was a magazine instinct. Elephants remained a source of tusks. Tusks remained a Company staple. The barrier remained the place where the staple was either captured for the stores or lost to a private purse. Mid-century law named the heaviest consequence and left the chair to decide how often to use it. [3] [9]
Slave Majority and Madagascar Trade — 1753
There were then more slaves than Europeans in South Africa, notwithstanding the manumission of such as were considered deserving of freedom and of those who could lay claim to it under the law. Some were sent from Batavia, sentenced to periods of servitude varying in length. Officers of ships and private individuals regarded slaves as the most profitable article in which they could carry on a small trade, and brought so many from India that the government became apprehensive that this class of the population might too greatly preponderate, for when excited they were prone to commit appalling crimes. The council of India was therefore earnestly requested to prohibit the exportation of Asiatic slaves to this colony, but they continued to arrive in considerable numbers. The request had not yet been complied with. A few were brought from the east coast of Africa. With Madagascar there was a regular trade in slaves, small vessels being sent frequently from the Cape to procure them. [3]
They cost there less than three pounds sterling each, though the rivalry of the English, French, and Portuguese was complained of as increasing the price and making it difficult to obtain cargoes. It was nothing unusual when one fourth to one third of the number taken on board died during the passage. And frequently from one third to half of those landed died within three months, from despondency and change of climate and food. After the arrival of a slave-ship, it was not uncommon to find in the journal whole pages of names of those who died during the preceding month, with an occasional comment as to the loss to the Company, but never a word of compassion for the people named. And this during the government of a man remembered as thoroughly good according to the views of his time. More pity would be expressed in a later age for a shipment of horses. Calendar 1753 did not close that trade. It sat inside it. [3]
Occasionally captives on board ship made attempts to regain their liberty, but in general such precautions were taken that they were utterly helpless. In the Cape archives of the early years of the eighteenth century a statement exhibits in a very clear light the views of those times regarding negro slaves. It was made by the master of an English slave-ship bound to the West Indies, who put into Table Bay for provisions, and who asked to be treated with exceptional favour on the ground of his voyage having been disastrous. On the passage from Madagascar he had observed symptoms of discontent among the negroes, he said, and to prevent them from rising and murdering his crew he had considered it necessary to throw the sturdiest of them overboard. The event is recorded with no more feeling for the blacks than if they had been bales of calico. That was the moral weather in which the Madagascar runs of Tulbagh’s early years still sailed. [3]
That trade context surrounded every mid-century regulation, including ivory. The year 1753 stands between Beutler’s map and the slave code the council would later collect into one ordinance. Exploration had closed for the season. Monopoly sharpened at the barrier. The human cargo system still ran on Madagascar voyages and Asian decks. Local industries kept Cape slavery from matching an American plantation regime in scale, but the numbers already told: more slaves than Europeans, even after manumissions and legal claims to freedom. Asiatic import still worried the Castle enough to write to India. Madagascar still supplied people at less than three pounds a head before English, French, and Portuguese bidders drove the price. The journal still listed the dead as a loss to the Company. [3]
The governor who would not trade in produce, who fixed officers’ fees, and who heard the humblest grievance, presided over that cargo system without a word of compassion entering the monthly lists. The contradiction is the period’s, not a later sermon. Strict personal honesty at the warehouse and silence over names in the slave journal belonged to the same chair. Father Tulbagh in the third year was more accessible after Elizabeth’s death. Accessibility did not alter the Madagascar arithmetic. Small vessels still left the Cape to procure people. One fourth to one third still died on the water. One third to half of those landed still died within three months. The ivory placaat named a price per pound. The slave trade named a price per person, and then named no one when the person died. [3] [9]
Appeldoorn at Stellenbosch — September–October 1753
In September 1753 the Rev. Johannes Appeldoorn arrived from Europe, and in the following month was stationed at Stellenbosch. The village pulpit that had been vacant when Tulbagh became governor, and vacant through the centenary thanksgiving of 8 April 1752, received a man from the Netherlands in October. He was still there in 1771, as was Van der Spuy at Drakenstein. The five parishes of the mid-century map thus had, by October, a named incumbent at Stellenbosch again. The vacancy that had stood beside Van der Spuy’s Cape years and Kroonenburg’s arrival was closed in the same calendar year as the ivory placaat. [3]
Stellenbosch was not a new foundation. The church there had been enlarged in 1698; in December 1710 the church, the public offices, and several dwelling-houses had been destroyed by fire; in 1717 another church had been commenced on a different site. The village had been enlarged and improved in appearance in the mid-century years. Its succession of ministers ran from Hercules van Loon in April 1700 through Hendrik Bek, Salomon van Echten, Willem van Gendt, and Eduard Arendsen, whose death in July 1749 had left the pulpit empty into Tulbagh’s chair. Appeldoorn’s October induction therefore filled a gap of some four years, not a new district. The Political Commissioner still sat in consistory. Pay still came from the Company. Doctrine and discipline remained those of the Dutch Reformed Church in Holland. [3] [4]
The Cape church, after Van der Spuy’s January transfer, remained under Kroonenburg alone for the rest of 1753. Waveren still had Meyring, who had held Roodezand since September 1743. Zwartland still had Voltelen, there since August 1750. Drakenstein now had Van der Spuy. Stellenbosch now had Appeldoorn. The year’s two clerical dates thus book-ended the ivory year: a Cape veteran asking for Drakenstein in January, a European arrival asking for the vacant Stellenbosch in October. No third town clergyman was added. No new country church was founded. The combined consistories still met. The Classis of Amsterdam still had its limited claim. The commander of the Cape still had the real control. [3] [4]
Church and Castle were one payroll. Appeldoorn did not arrive as an independent pastor called by a free congregation. He arrived as a civil servant of the VOC, to be stationed where the council of policy placed him. Stellenbosch in October was that place. The same council that named a tusk price and a patrol penalty named a pulpit. The same governor who heard grievances without a fee heard, in consistory through his Political Commissioner, that nothing prejudicial to government was moved. Mid-century law and mid-century church were not separate spheres. They were two boards under one chair, in the year that chair became a widower’s. [3] [4] [9]
Settlement after Beutler, Serrurier of Alphen, and the Year’s Frame — 1753
Beutler’s return on the 6th of November 1752 left the Cape with fresh eastern geography and VOC beacons beyond the old farms. The year 1753 did not launch another train on that scale. European occupation along the coast still stood only a few miles farther east than Mossel Bay. Some graziers had taken possession of land on the banks of the Gamtoos, but in January 1745 the landdrost of Stellenbosch, acting under orders from the governor, had required them to return to the westward of the Great Brak river. The circumstances under which the graziers lived were so favourable to expansion that they could not long be kept within the assigned limits. In 1753 those limits had not yet been redrawn on Beutler’s furthest tracks. The government had a map to the Kei. It did not yet have farms there. [3] [4]
Cattle runs in the outward districts remained enormous. They were probably never less than five or six thousand acres, and afterwards certainly more, for which, when it could be recovered, a yearly rental of £2 10s. was paid until 1732 and £5 thereafter. In consequence of the increasing extent of country over which the white population were becoming scattered, and the increasing difficulty of control by the authorities at the Cape, endeavours were made from time to time to prevent further dispersion by the issue of placaats forbidding any further eastern move and prescribing boundaries. Once beyond Swellendam and in the vast regions farther out, burghers felt they could treat such orders with contempt, knowing that penalties could no longer be enforced. The 1753 ivory barrier was enforceable where a patrol still stood. The eastern grazing line was a paper line where the patrol did not. [3] [4]
In the old districts the French names were already burgher names. In 1753 Jan Serrurier of Hanau, son of Louis Serrurier and Ester de Vis of Hanau, passed a power of attorney in favour of his brother, the Rev. Daniel Serrurier, minister at Leiden, and Hendrik van Alphen. Jan had married at the Cape, on the 5th of November 1747, Catharina Krygsman. He became a burgher councillor of Cape Town and was the owner of Alphen at Wynberg. The instrument of 1753 was not a new refugee fleet. It was a Cape burgher of Huguenot stock sending legal power back to Leiden and tying his Wynberg farm’s name to a kinsman. Another Serrurier of Hanau, Johannes Petrus, would later come as a Cape clergyman; that arrival belongs to a later year. In 1753 the name on the notarial paper was the councillor of Alphen. [8]
De la Caille was still at work. He had arrived on the 19th of April 1751 as a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, with the object of making a sidereal chart of the southern skies and of measuring an arc of the meridian. Tulbagh took a warm interest and gave all possible assistance. The astronomer’s notes on dying French in Drakenstein belonged to the year before. In 1753 the same man was still in the colony, still measuring, still using untrained assistants in the field once the engineer Muller had helped on the base line east of Saldanha Bay. The third year of the chair thus kept a French observer in Table Valley while it seated a Dutch clergyman in Drakenstein and a new man in Stellenbosch. Language, pulpit, and star chart ran on the same shore. [3] [8]
So 1753 closed without a new district name and without another eastern train. It left Elizabeth Tulbagh dead after a severe cold, seventeen years of marriage, and no children, and a governor more accessible than ever in his loneliness. It left an ivory placaat: one shilling and four pence a pound for prime tusks, Company as sole buyer, banishment for private sale, flogging, brand, and ten years in chains for a negligent patrol. It left Van der Spuy at Drakenstein from January, Van Echten gone home, Kroonenburg alone in town, and Johannes Appeldoorn in the Stellenbosch pulpit from October. It left Jan Serrurier of Alphen with a power of attorney sent to Leiden. It left slaves still more numerous than Europeans, Madagascar still cheaper than three pounds a head, and journal pages still listing the dead as a loss to the Company. It left De la Caille still measuring, Horak still at Swellendam, Van Schoor still at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, Van Oudtshoorn still fiscal, and five Company pulpits still paid from the same chest. The chair was the same fatherly chair. The year gave that chair a grave, a tusk price, two pulpits moved or filled, and a Wynberg paper—and then stopped short of the slave code the council would collect in the next calendar year. [3] [4] [4] [7] [8] [9]