Boer History1754 at the Cape of Good Hope: Slave Code, French Salutes, Compulsory Schooling, and Croeser
Father Tulbagh’s Fourth Year — 1754
Calendar 1754 opened in the fourth 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, a year later, on its first centenary. 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. In 1753 she had died of a severe cold after seventeen years of marriage and had left him a childless widower. His sorrow had not made him morose. He had taken a still greater interest in the wellbeing of his people, who found him more accessible than ever. Independent fiscal Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn still held his office. The secunde Swellengrebel still sat the second chair. 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 fourth 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]
Equanimity, calmness, and a lack of swashbuckling dash did not mean an uneventful chair. 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. 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 1754 was not a year of fleets crowding the bay or of smallpox emptying the streets. It was a year in which Father Tulbagh, a childless widower in the fourth year of the chair, would refuse meat to French captains who would not salute, collect the slave laws into one ordinance, compel a widow to send her children to school, and tell Batavia that a further squeeze on produce prices would ruin the farmers. Gentle and tolerant he remained; strong when the governor’s authority was defied. [3] [7] [9]
Continuity of persons was the point of the fourth year as much as novelty of placaat. 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. In the Indies there had been of late years a growing tendency among Europeans toward luxurious habits, and the authorities feared that the descendants of sturdy pioneers would sink into effeminacy. Stringent sumptuary laws were issued there, and a copy was sent to the Cape with orders to enforce them. There was no dependency in which such regulations could have less effect, because there was very little accumulated wealth here except in the form of farming stock. Yet Tulbagh favoured them, not only because he was instructed to put them in force, but because he believed them well adapted to form a simple, honest, manly race of colonists and to preserve the hardy virtues which had made the people of the Netherlands a powerful nation. The tone of the government—open access, a fatherly chair, no private trading by officers—was still a fourth year’s ordinary Castle business. [3] [4] [7] [9]
What the year would add was a nine-gun argument in Table Bay, a slave code on the notice board with the Company’s great seal, a widow ordered to consign her children to the church or be flogged, a Batavia proposal to cut produce prices by a third, failed indigo and cotton in the Company’s gardens, the first butter sent to India, a six-week commando in the Roggeveld, an assistant pastor from Europe, a Huguenot from Berlin in the Company’s service, and a census that counted more slaves than colonists. The gardens of 1652 had become a refreshment station that still lived by the roadstead’s custom and the Castle’s honour. Calendar 1754 would test both. [3] [8] [9]
French Salute Dispute in Table Bay — March–April 1754
Every foreign vessel that put into Table Bay was required to fire a salute of nine guns, upon which the castle replied with seven. The custom was not a courtesy invented for the occasion. It was the roadstead’s ordinary mark of respect for the Dutch flag at a refreshment station that had flown that flag since 1652. A French ship came to anchor in March 1754, and her captain declined to salute unless the fortress would return an equal number of shots. The governor was at his country seat at Newlands. The secunde Swellengrebel informed the French captain, who had come on shore, that no provisions would be supplied until he conformed to the usual custom. He could get water and firewood, but nothing more. Meat, meal, wine, and the garden’s fruit stayed on shore. [3]
The Frenchman returned to his vessel, but disdained to fire a shot. Early in April another French ship came in, and met with the same reception. Governor Tulbagh would not allow even a boat to go off to either of them. At length one of the French captains offered to fire the required number of guns for both vessels. The governor replied that each must fire. They held out a little longer. The Castle did not blink. Two foreign hulls in the bay, in a gloomy season when farmers borrowed mariners’ glasses to scan the horizon for buyers, did not move Father Tulbagh to sell the honour of the flag for a load of meat. [3] [9]
The contest of endurance went on for twelve days. The French cooks must have been cutting their very last piece of salted meat when at last one of the vessels fired her salute. “Not good enough,” said Father Tulbagh quietly, and not a single watermelon was picked in the garden for the French before their number two had also banged her respect for the Dutch flag. It took the visitors another four days to make up their minds and comply. Thereafter they got what they required, and in addition a courteous word and a glass of wine from their host. This was also Ryk Tulbagh the Just: gentle and tolerant, but strong when his authority as governor was defied. The roadstead’s custom was not a bargaining chip. Nine guns from each ship, seven from the castle, then meat, meal, and friendship. [3] [9]
The incident belonged to the same chair that had paid the fiftieth penny first in 1751 and had gone on hearing the humblest grievance after Elizabeth’s death. Popularity was not the point. The Castle’s honour was. Foreigners already paid twice as much as inhabitants for meat; that privilege enabled contractors to supply the Company at cheap rates, and from foreign ships the burghers made their largest profits. None of that commerce, in March and April 1754, moved until the guns had spoken in the proper number. The fourth year thus opened on the bay with a lesson that the refreshment station was not so hungry as to forget who flew the flag over the castle. [3] [9]
Slave Code Published — 3–5 September 1754
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. Officers of ships and private individuals regarded them 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. 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. 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. 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. And this during the government of a thoroughly good man, according to the views of his time, as Ryk Tulbagh. [3]
The nature of the industries carried on in the colony prevented slavery from becoming here what it was on an American cotton or sugar plantation, and few instances of extreme cruelty fill the record compared with the letter of the law. Under that letter, however, bondsmen stood in a very abject position. It was a common occurrence for people who had slaves bequeathed to them, or who had become possessed of more than they could employ, to hire them out to others in order to provide for their maintenance. In some cases the master took all the slave’s earnings and provided food and lodging; in others the slave paid a certain sum to his master and maintained himself on the remainder. A good workman could earn three rixdollars a day. Taken as a whole, Cape slavery was of a milder character than the plantation regimes across the Atlantic, yet in cases of misconduct the punishments were often barbarous in the extreme, and there were, in spite of the law, instances of gross and wanton cruelty. Because slaves were held to possess neither money nor goods, corporal punishment was the ordinary means of visiting their transgressions. [3] [4]
In the preamble of a slave code drawn up by Governor Tulbagh and the council it was stated that, notwithstanding the stringent proclamations that had from time to time been issued, the misconduct of the slaves was such that for the preservation of peace and good order it was necessary to collect all the laws into one ordinance, and to amplify them to meet existing circumstances. After mature deliberation, the code was drawn up in the castle of Good Hope on the 3rd of September 1754, and two days later was published by being affixed to the notice board, with the great seal of the Company attached to it. The collection was not a softening. It was a gathering of the old severity into one placaat that every officer of justice could read at a glance. [3]
The second paragraph condemned to death without mercy any male or female slave who should raise hand, though without weapons, against master or mistress. The twenty-third condemned every slave found loitering about the entrance of a church, when the congregation was leaving, to be severely flogged by the ministers of justice. The twenty-fourth subjected to the same punishment any slave, adult or child, found within a churchyard at the time of a funeral. The twenty-eighth prohibited more than twenty slaves from following the corpse of a companion to its burial. The number was to be regulated according to the rank of the owner of the deceased, by whom a fine of five pounds was to be paid if the rule was transgressed. For many offences slaves could be flogged at once by the officers of justice, without any trial. When convicted of ordinary crimes, they were punished much more severely than freemen. Some of the death sentences recorded against them horrify by their barbarity: impalement, breaking the limbs on a wheel, and slow strangulation were among the methods of execution. [3] [4]
The 1754 code is the year’s darkest institutional monument. It was drawn in the same castle that heard the humblest freeman’s grievance without a bribe, by the same governor who would not trade and would not let his officers trade. The contrast is the point of the fourth year as much as the seal on the notice board. Local industry and the smallness of the Cape market kept the slave regime from matching a plantation’s scale; the letter of the ordinance did not match that mildness. Bondsmen remained, under the law collected on the 3rd of September and posted on the 5th, in a very abject position. Peace and good order, in the council’s preamble, meant that the old proclamations were not enough, and that the Castle would amplify them. [3] [4]
Widow Compelled to School Her Children — 1754
In the same year there was a widow living in the town who refused to allow her two children to attend school. The elders of the church reminded her of her duty, and the clergyman reprimanded her, but to no purpose. The consistory next reported the circumstance to the council of policy, and by that body she was admonished not to bring up her children as heathens. Still she remained obdurate, maintaining her right to have the children educated or not, as she pleased. The Reformed parish was not a private taste. Five congregations stood in the colony. At the Cape Hendrik Kroonenburg, arrived from Europe in October 1752, held the pulpit after Petrus van der Spuy had gone to Drakenstein in January 1753. Stellenbosch had received Johannes Appeldoorn in October 1753. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring was at Waveren. Christiaan Benjamin Voltelen was at Zwartland. A widow in the town who kept two children from school was keeping them from the duties of Christians in a settlement that still measured its years from the gardens of 1652 and from the church that had grown with those gardens. [3]
The matter came again before the council, but now the governor settled it. The widow was ordered at once to consign her children to the church authorities that they might be instructed in the duties of Christians. If she did not comply, it was added, she should be flogged. Upon this she wisely submitted. Compulsory schooling here meant church discipline backed by the castle’s threat, not a modern education department. The same chair that would not let a French captain take meat without nine guns would not let a town widow raise two children outside the parish’s instruction. [3]
The episode sits beside the slave code’s church-door and churchyard clauses in the same year’s record. Slaves loitering at the entrance when the congregation left, or found in a churchyard at a funeral, were to be flogged; a free widow who kept her children from school was to consign them or be flogged herself. The Reformed establishment did not treat Christian instruction as optional, whether the person before the council was a bondsman at the church door or a burgher widow in the town. Father Tulbagh’s accessibility to the humblest grievance did not mean that every private claim of right would stand. The consistory had failed; the council had admonished; the governor closed the file with a sentence the widow understood. [3] [9]
That the threat was enough, and that the lash did not have to fall, was the Castle’s ordinary hope in such a case. The children went to the church authorities. The widow remained a widow in the town, no longer a scandal to the elders. Calendar 1754 thus added, to the nine-gun salute and the sealed slave code, a third proof that Father Tulbagh’s fourth year was not a year in which the government trimmed its sails to every private wind. [3] [9]
India Tax Proposals, Indigo, Cotton, and Butter — 1754
In 1754 the council of India, in order to derive greater benefit than previously from this colony, proposed to reduce by one-third the prices paid by the Company for produce; to charge a duty of a penny a pound upon meat, two shillings and eight pence a muid upon meal, and thirty-two shillings a legger upon wine supplied to foreign ships; and also to permit the importation of clothing materials in foreign ships upon payment of a duty of twenty per cent upon the value. Batavia’s wish was to squeeze the outpost harder. The Cape’s wish, guided from the first chair, was to keep the old refreshment bargain that had fed fleets since the gardens of 1652. [3]
The council of policy, guided by Governor Tulbagh, objected to these proposals for the following reasons. The prices of colonial produce were already so low that a reduction of one-third would ruin the farmers. A duty of a penny a pound upon meat supplied to foreign ships would not benefit the Company in the least. Already foreigners were complaining because they had to pay twice as much as the inhabitants for meat, and it was this privilege of charging double prices to them which enabled the contractors to supply the Company at very cheap rates. The proposed duties on meat, meal, and wine would drive foreigners from the port, and from them the burghers made their largest profits. As for the importation of clothing materials in foreign bottoms, it would hardly be worth while to make one class of merchandise an exception to the general rules. The argument was the argument of a refreshment station that lived by the roadstead: cheap meat for the Company because foreigners paid double; burgher profit because foreigners called; ruin if Batavia cut the Company’s own prices another third. [3]
The question was submitted to the directors, by whom these views were endorsed, and matters were left as they always had been. The year thus preserved the old refreshment bargain against Batavia’s wish to squeeze the outpost harder. Father Tulbagh, who would not let a French captain take a watermelon without nine guns, would not let the council of India take a third of the farmers’ price without an answer. The Seventeen in the Netherlands, on this point, backed the Cape. [3] [9]
Instructions were at this time given by the directors to renew experiments in the cultivation of indigo, and also to try if cotton could not be successfully grown in South Africa. These orders were carried out in the Company’s gardens at the Cape, Rondebosch, and Newlands, with the result of showing that neither indigo nor cotton could be produced with profit. The gardens that had begun as a refreshment plot in 1652 were still, a hundred and two years later, the Company’s trial ground. Newlands, where the governor sat in March while the French captains sulked in the bay, was one of the three places where the dye-plant and the cotton shrub were put to the Cape’s soil and climate and found wanting. [3]
In 1754 butter was first exported to India. It was usually purchased at the Company’s stores at six pence to eight pence a pound. A small quantity of dried fruit and a little ivory were also among the India cargoes of the mid-century, the ivory already under the 1753 regulation that fixed prime tusks at one shilling and four pence a pound and banned private sale. Wheat, rye, barley, peas, beans, and common wine remained the ordinary farm produce sent east. The first butter cask to India was a small fact beside the slave code and the French salute, but it belonged to the same year’s ledger: the outpost still lived by what it could grow, slaughter, and ship, and by what it could refuse to ship on Batavia’s harder terms. [3]
San Raids in the Roggeveld and Bokkeveld — 1754
In the spring of 1754 a large party of San made their appearance in the Roggeveld and drove off great herds of cattle. Only one individual—a Khoikhoi person—was murdered by them; but the farmers on the north-western frontier abandoned their homes in alarm. The peace that held, on the whole, between Europeans and Khoikhoi in the old districts did not hold on that outer grazing edge. Cattle runs of five or six thousand acres, rented when the Castle could recover the rent, were exactly the stock that raiders found worth driving. The fourth year of Father Tulbagh’s chair thus had a frontier as well as a notice board and a roadstead. [3] [4]
The military board krygsraad of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein instructed the field corporals Willem van Wyk, Godlieb Opperman, Nicholas Ryk, Pieter van Zyl, Barend Lubbe, and Barend Forster to proceed with their forces against the robbers. For six weeks the commando was in the field, as the San retired to mountains, where they made an obstinate resistance. One stronghold was besieged in vain, the robbers from secure positions shouting defiance and declaring they would have the whole of the cattle in the country. In other places, however, sixty-four San were killed, at a cost on the farmers’ side of one white man and two Khoikhoi wounded. The commando then returned home, with only seven head of cattle out of all that had been lost. [3]
An expedition of burghers from Stellenbosch and from the Tulbagh country was thus away from their homes for six weeks, travelling in difficult country, suffering from want of water, climbing difficult and hazardous places, and recovering only those seven head. The government provided gunpowder, flints, and lead. In the early days of this trouble commandos had been unofficial—undertaken without the knowledge or authority of the government, because the Cape was far away and prompt action was necessary. The government itself was not in a position to provide soldiers or a police force for the outer districts. The most trustworthy of the Boer farmers were appointed field-commandants, authorised to call out men. The Castle counselled them to maintain order and avoid hostilities, and itself furnished the powder. In spite of those government commandos there was no abatement in the career of spoliation. Armed parties of farmers and Khoikhoi went forth; a fight usually ensued; a few head might be recovered, more often none. Calendar 1754 furnished a typical instance of that pattern, not its end. [3] [4]
A little later in the same year the cattle of Jacobus Gildenhuis were driven away from his farm in the Bokkeveld. Gildenhuis’s neighbours— Dirk Koekemoer, Jan van Aswegen, and Andries van der Heiden, with twenty Khoikhoi—pursued, shot down twenty-six of the robbers, wounded eight others, and recovered nearly all the cattle. The San in that part of the country then promised to abstain from robbery, and peace was made with them. The Bokkeveld pursuit was shorter and more successful than the six-week Roggeveld commando. It was still the same frontier logic: stock lifted, neighbours called, Khoikhoi in the party, a mountain chase, a count of dead, a partial or nearly complete recovery, and a promise of peace that the next season would have to test. [3] [4]
The north-western frontier thus closed the year’s grazing account with sixty-four dead in the mountains, twenty-six more in the Bokkeveld, one white man and two Khoikhoi wounded on the long commando, seven head recovered from the great Roggeveld herds, and nearly all of Gildenhuis’s stock brought home. Farmers who had abandoned their homes in alarm could return. The krygsraad of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein had done what a distant Castle could not do with regular soldiers. Powder, flints, and lead had gone out; the field corporals had come back. Peace was promised in one quarter. The outer cattle runs remained what they had been: five or six thousand acres, a yearly five pounds when it could be recovered, and a San presence in the mountains that did not vanish because a placaat had been posted in Table Valley. [3] [4]
Croeser, Naudé, and the Census of 1754
In the census returns of 1754 the number of colonists of both sexes and all ages is given as 5,510, and the number of slaves owned by them as 6,279. Those figures, though they cannot be depended upon as absolutely accurate, are the year’s count of a settlement that still grew, in ordinary seasons, by baptism and by the discharge of Company servants. In ordinary years the number of deaths was in proportion to the number of baptisms as 100 to 261, and there was a constant accession to the colonial population by servants of the Company taking their discharge. The slave majority on the return matches the darker monument on the notice board: more bondsmen than colonists, under a code that condemned a raised hand to death without mercy. The gardens of 1652 had become, a hundred and two years later, a colony of five and a half thousand Europeans and more than six thousand slaves. [3]
The various churches in the colony were well supplied with clergymen during Tulbagh’s administration, but the Cape pulpit had been thin since Van der Spuy’s transfer. When Tulbagh became governor, Van der Spuy had been alone at the Cape, Stellenbosch had been vacant, Van Echten had been at Drakenstein, Meyring at Waveren, and Voltelen at Zwartland. In October 1752 the Rev. Hendrik Kroonenburg arrived from Europe and was stationed at the Cape. In January 1753 Van der Spuy went to Drakenstein at his own request, when Van Echten returned to Holland. The Cape church was then again under the care of a single clergyman until September 1754, when the Rev. Gerhardus Croeser arrived from Europe and was inducted as assistant pastor. The fourth year’s church news was thus a second man at the Cape, not a vacancy. Kroonenburg and Croeser together filled the town pulpit that had been one man’s charge since the January of 1753. [3]
In the same year Philippe Jacob Naudé of Berlin arrived in the Company’s service. He was the son of the Rev. Roget David Naudé, professor at the French College and minister of the French church at Berlin, and of Elizabeth Borrel. The Huguenot thread that had run through Drakenstein since the late seventeenth century thus received, in 1754, another name from the French church of Berlin, not as a refugee of 1688 but as a Company servant of the mid-century. He would later take his discharge and reside at Drakenstein; the year’s fact is the arrival. Beside Croeser’s induction and the widow’s children consigned to the church, Naudé’s coming is a small personnel note in a year whose larger monuments were a sealed code, a nine-gun salute, and a six-week commando. [8]
Calendar 1754 may be closed on those names and numbers. Father Tulbagh, childless since 1753, sat a fourth year in which he was more accessible than ever and no less firm. Two French captains learned that nine guns were not optional. A slave code drawn on the 3rd of September and posted on the 5th collected the old severity into one ordinance. A widow consigned her children to the church rather than be flogged. Batavia’s one-third price cut was refused, and the directors agreed. Indigo and cotton failed in the Company’s gardens; butter went to India for the first time. The Roggeveld lost great herds and recovered seven head after six weeks; the Bokkeveld recovered nearly all of Gildenhuis’s cattle. Croeser took the Cape assistant’s pulpit. Naudé arrived from Berlin. The census counted 5,510 colonists and 6,279 slaves. The gardens of 1652 were still a refreshment station under a Dutch flag that required its salute, a Castle that posted its laws, and a fatherly chair that would not trim every sail. [3] [4] [7] [8] [9]