Boer History1756 at the Cape of Good Hope: Happy Deliverance, Leprosy, Wine Duty, and Drought
After Smallpox: Census and the Sixth Year — 1756
Calendar 1756 opened in the sixth 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. 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. In 1753 his wife Elizabeth Swellengrebel had died of a severe cold after seventeen years of marriage and had left him a childless widower. March 1755 had raised him councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India, a rank higher than governor without adding to his duties. He was the second Cape governor raised to that third top seat in the Company’s commercial empire. 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. The Castle’s ordinary business—open access, fixed fees, no private trading by officers—was a sixth year’s habit. The sumptuary laws adapted on the 25th of March 1755 still stood: no gilded coach but the governor’s, no livery but a councillor’s coachman, no large umbrella but a senior merchant’s or a board lady’s. After the empty streets of the smallpox months those rules had less work to do. [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. 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. No man was put to unnecessary delay; no bribes were received; no false accounts were rendered. Equanimity and a lack of swashbuckling dash did not mean an uneventful chair. He had never sought popularity for popularity’s sake. Gentle and tolerant he remained; strong when the governor’s authority was defied. [3] [7] [9]
Continuity of persons was the point of the sixth 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. Philippe Jacob Naudé of Berlin, who had arrived in the Company’s service in 1754, was still a Company servant. The Rev. Hendrik Kroonenburg still sat the Cape pulpit. The Rev. Gerhardus Croeser, who in November 1755 had gone to Zwartland under an arrangement the government approved, still sat that country church. The Rev. Voltelen, who had come to the Cape in the same swap, still shared the town charge. The Rev. Johannes Appeldoorn still sat Stellenbosch. The Rev. Van der Spuy still sat Drakenstein. The Rev. Meyring still sat Waveren. [3] [4] [8]
In the census returns of 1754 the number of colonists of both sexes and all ages had been given as 5,510, and the number of slaves owned by them as 6,279. In those of 1756 the number of colonists is given as 5,128, and of their slaves as 5,787. In ordinary years the number of deaths stood to baptisms roughly as 100 to 261, and there was a constant accession to the colonial population by servants of the Company taking their discharge. The figures, though they cannot be depended upon as absolutely accurate, give an idea of the heavy loss of life by the smallpox. Table Valley had buried 963 Europeans and 1,109 blacks between the 1st of May and the 31st of October 1755. In July of that year, colder than usual, 489 Europeans, 33 free blacks, and 580 slaves had perished in the capital. With the Khoikhoi the disease had created great havoc, spreading farther inland than in 1713: its ravages were felt in Great Namaqualand at least to the twenty-sixth parallel of latitude, and in the east to the Great Fish river. Before midsummer it had entirely died out. The 1756 count is the first full demographic shadow of that winter: fewer free households, fewer bondsmen, and a colony still exporting grain from reserves while the capital’s labour force stayed thin. [3] [9]
The sixth year was therefore a year of counting and of quiet repair. Wagons that had not come in during the seclusion months could move again. Militia muster, excused while the disease ran, could be called. Distant pews, empty while people stayed on their farms, could fill. The recently introduced sumptuary laws had become, in the worst weeks, almost futile: no one used coaches, silks, or umbrellas, and public auctions had been stopped. Now the town had to live with vacant houses, wiped-out families, and property that had lost its value, and still sit a refreshment station under a Dutch flag. France and England were once more at war. That international fact did not yet crowd Table Bay with paying fleets. It framed a year in which the Castle toiled on rehabilitation while the roadstead stayed thin. [3] [9]
Already in 1755–56 a new building for the rattle watch had been erected on the present Greenmarket Square, where it still stands, though later restored. The Wapen Pleyn was levelled again in these years and provided with a hedge of oak trees; new streets were laid out. The whole aspect of the Caabse Vlek changed as the little town tried to look like a town again after the empty squares of the smallpox winter. The name Kaapstad did not sound euphemistic any longer. That civic work is the sixth year’s local face: not a new drostdy, not a new parish, but a watch-house and a levelled square in a capital that had buried more than two thousand people the year before. [9]
Happy Deliverance Launched — February 1756
On the 5th of February 1756 another English burial was held in the Dutch church in Table Valley. An English officer of rank— Commander Lisle— was buried under the pavement of the church, the surgeon of the Vigilant reading the funeral service. There had been a precedent. On the 20th of April 1749 divine service according to the rites of the church of England had been held in that building when Englishmen from returning ships of Boscawen’s fleet were on shore. On the 9th of February 1751 Mr. William Wake, recently governor of Bombay, who died here on his passage home, had been buried in the church with the state due to his rank: Dutch officers in the procession, the castle flag lowered, the bell tolled, minute guns from the batteries, the surgeon of the Boscawen reading the English burial service, the body in a vault below the floor. Lisle’s February funeral was another instance of the kind. The sixth year thus opened with an English service under a Dutch roof, in a town still counting its smallpox dead. [3]
Eleven days later, far to the east of Algoa Bay, the wrecked people of the English East India Company’s ship Doddington launched the sloop they had built on a barren islet and named her the Happy Deliverance. The Doddington had sailed from the Downs on the 23rd of April 1755. At a quarter to one in the morning of Thursday the 17th of July, while no one on board suspected danger, she had struck a rock on the eastern side of Algoa Bay and at once gone to pieces. Of two hundred and seventy persons on board, all had perished but twenty-three. Those saved found themselves upon a barren islet frequented only by sea-birds. A quantity of provisions, a small boat, a smith’s bellows, much timber, and numerous other useful articles had washed up from the wreck. They had at once set to work to build a sloop of twelve feet beam and thirty feet keel with which to make their escape. They had no nails; a Swedish sailor who had once been a blacksmith put up a forge and, with iron obtained from pieces of the wreck, managed to make as many as were needed. [3]
As smoke was often seen on the mainland, on the 3rd of September 1755 three men had left in the little boat to find out something of the country and its people. They steered for a point about nine or ten miles east of the islet, but when attempting to land the boat was overturned in the surf, and one man was drowned. The other two passed the night on the shore. Next day they found the boat and managed to pull it up on the beach. That night, weary and almost exhausted from want of food, they turned the boat over and lay down under it to sleep, but were disturbed by wild animals prowling about. Next morning a party of Khoikhoi appeared, who took from them a pistol and the greater part of their clothing, though otherwise the people were friendly and, seeing their distress from hunger, gave them some roots to eat. The wind was adverse that day, and they were obliged to pass another night under the boat, but on the following morning they returned to the islet. During the last months of 1755 the wrecked people had as many sea-birds’ eggs as they chose to gather, and at all times fish could be obtained, so that they did not suffer from hunger while the forge and keel took shape. [3]
Two burghers—Andries du Pré and Pieter Ferreira—who were hunting elephants along the Bushman’s and Sunday rivers, had heard from some Khoikhoi rumours of the landing of the boat, and sent a report to the landdrost of Swellendam. Horak thereupon directed the farmers Nicholas Haarhof and Pieter van Vuuren to make inquiries among the natives, and they obtained the pistol which had been taken from the English sailors, but could learn nothing of a wreck. For anything they could gather, the boat might have belonged to a passing ship. In December 1755, by order of the government, the landdrost sent Dirk Marx, a hunter who was well acquainted with the country, to look for any white people who might be in distress; but he could hear of none, nor could he find any trace of a wreck. He reported having met Xhosa as far west as the Great Fish river. The exploring expedition of 1752 had found the Keiskama the dividing line between the Xhosa and the Khoikhoi; Marx’s report in 1756 put Xhosa as far westward as the Fish. The Cape’s hunters and landdrost never found the twenty-three. Their industry on a barren rock became the famous sequel to the July wreck. [3]
On the 16th of February 1756 they launched their sloop and named her the Happy Deliverance. Two days later they sailed from the rock, to which they gave the name Bird Island, which it still bears. They reached Delagoa Bay safely, and there found a ship in which some of them obtained a passage home. The others proceeded to Bombay in their sloop. The story closed far from Table Valley’s smallpox hospitals and far from Lisle’s vault under the church floor. Twenty-three people had lived through winter on an islet, built a vessel without nails except those they forged, and left without colonial rescue. Bird Island entered the English and Cape record as a name made by survivors, not by a surveying ensign. Calendar 1756 thus holds both an English burial in the Castle’s church and an English escape the drostdy never reached. [3]
Cybells Wrecked above Blueberg — 19 March 1756
On the 19th of March 1756 the French ship Cybells, bound to Mauritius from the coast of Guinea with slaves, in trying to beat into Table Bay ran ashore a little above Blueberg, and shortly went to pieces. Her crew, with the slaves, got safely aboard another French ship lying at anchor in the bay. The wreck was not a winter north-wester on the castle beach. It was an autumn attempt to beat in, a French slaver from Guinea making for Mauritius, and a second French hull already in the roadstead able to take the people off. The Castle’s year of thin foreign trade still had French canvas in it. [3]
Table Bay had long been a grave of ships. In the night between the 5th and 6th of May 1740 the Company’s outward-bound Visch, attempting to come to anchor in a stiff gale, had run ashore above the castle. On the 25th of October 1747 the outward-bound Reygersdaal had gone to pieces between Dassen and Robben islands. At dawn of the 19th of January 1750 the French Centaur, homeward from Mauritius, had run ashore near Cape Agulhas in fine weather. Those wrecks belonged to earlier calendars. The Cybells is the sixth year’s French disaster in the bay itself: not Agulhas, not the castle beach, but Blueberg, and not a homeward Indiaman but a Guinea slaver bound for the islands. [3]
The slaves who reached the second French ship did not become a Cape census item. They were cargo for Mauritius, taken off a hull that went to pieces, and they left the roadstead as they had been meant to leave it—bound onward, not landed for the Company’s gardens. The Cape’s own slave majority, counted at 5,787 in burgher hands in this year’s returns, sat under the code posted in September 1754. The Cybells people passed through the bay as a wreck’s survivors, not as a new labour draft. That distinction is the March note: a French disaster without a Cape landing of the Guinea cargo. [3]
France and England were once more at war in 1756. A French slaver wrecking above Blueberg in March, with another French ship already at anchor to receive her people, shows that the bay had not yet been emptied of French calls. What it did not show was a wartime boom. Wine farmers were already desperate from too much supply and too little demand. The Cybells did not buy a legger. She bought a berth on a sister hull and left her bones above Blueberg. The year’s French story in the bay is a wreck and a rescue, not a fleet gaped at by urchins on the shore. [3] [9]
Leprosy Commission — May 1756
The coloured races of South Africa, though singularly free of many diseases, were subject to leprosy. There are no means of ascertaining the ravages made by it among Khoikhoi, but it is tolerably certain that though they were acquainted with the disease, the number of individuals affected was very small. It is not once named in the early records, and it is only from tradition that it is known to have existed among these people before their intercourse with strangers. Whether the San were liable to be attacked by it is uncertain. Among Nguni communities it was by no means rare, and slaves of all nationalities who were brought into the colony were subject to it. The smallpox winter had just shown what a contagious disease could do in Table Valley. Leprosy was another malady, slower, and until this year not proved among Europeans at the Cape. [3]
It was now proved that Europeans also were liable to its attacks. Some cases having been suspected, in May 1756 a commission of medical men was appointed, who examined the sufferers, and reported that one man, who had been eighteen years ill, was afflicted with leprosy, that his eldest daughter was showing symptoms, and that another man, who had been nine years ill, was suffering from the same disease. The government recommended isolation of the sufferers, but did nothing more—no hospital foundation, no removal statute, only advice. Two great hospitals had been run the year before for smallpox: one for poor Europeans, supported by the board of deacons; the other for blacks, at the owner’s 1s. 4d. a day. Those sheds had been for an epidemic that killed by the hundred in a month. Leprosy, proved in two men and a daughter, got a recommendation and no building. [3]
Eighteen years and nine years of illness meant the disease had sat in European households through most of Tulbagh’s public life and through the years before he took the first chair. The commission did not discover a new infection brought in a 1756 hull. It named what had already been there. Isolation, recommended and not enforced by a new placaat, left the sufferers where they were unless families chose to separate them. The Castle that had posted a slave code with the great seal in 1754 and sumptuary rules in 1755 did not post a leprosy law in 1756. Advice was the whole of the May resolution. [3]
In a year that counted 5,128 colonists against 5,510 two years earlier, a disease of years rather than weeks did not move the census. It moved the medical board. The fatherly chair that had been accessible in smallpox, that had raised emergency hospitals and recruited recovered slaves as nurses, now faced a malady that would not empty the Wapen Pleyn in a month. The contrast is the May note: prompt hospitals for smallpox; isolation advised and not built for leprosy. The sixth year proved Europeans liable, and then went back to wine, wheat, and wrecks. [3] [9]
Schuylenburg Lost on the Simon’s Bay Run — June 1756
On the 3rd of June 1756 the Cape packet Schuylenburg left Table Bay to take some stores to Simon’s Bay. That night there was a violent storm, and the Schuylenburg was never afterwards heard of. She was not an Indiaman from Ceylon or a Guinea slaver. She was a local packet on a short winter run between the two bays the Company used, carrying stores, and she vanished in a night. [3]
Simon’s Bay had begun to be used in 1742. Owing to the heavy losses the Company had sustained by shipwrecks in Table Bay, in 1741 the directors had resolved that their fleets should thereafter refresh at Simon’s Bay from the 15th of May to the 15th of August, the season when gales from the north-west were common. Before the close of 1750 seventy-seven ships, all belonging to the Company, had put into that harbour. The average number touching at South African ports in those mid-century years had been about seventy-three yearly. The Schuylenburg’s June run sat inside that winter window: stores for the southern bay in the months when Table Bay was not to be trusted. [3]
A packet that leaves at the opening of June and is gone by morning does not leave a survivor’s sloop or a Blueberg beach of timber. There was no Happy Deliverance from the Schuylenburg, no second hull to take her people off, no landdrost’s hunter sent to look for distressed whites. The night storm closed the file. For a refreshment station that lived by moving stores between bays, the loss of a packet on that short hop was a Company loss, not a stranger’s wreck to be buried in the church or counted in a foreign list. [3]
June thus sits between the May leprosy report and the year’s wine and wheat arithmetic. The Castle recommended isolation and posted no hospital. The packet left with stores and posted no return. Foreign topsails were already scarce. A vanished Company hull in the winter gale season did not fill the roadstead. It emptied one more bottom from the local service that kept Simon’s Bay supplied while north-westers made Table Bay unsafe. Calendar 1756 therefore holds three very different sea stories: an English sloop built on Bird Island, a French slaver in pieces above Blueberg, and a Cape packet that simply disappeared. [3]
Wine Export Duty and a Glutted Market — 1756
The quality of the wine sent to India was frequently complained of, but no improvement was made in it. The master of the Company’s wine stores at the Cape professed that the greatest care was taken to reject the worst that was brought for sale, and that he could not obtain a better article than was forwarded. The result was that the council of India declined to take as large a quantity as previously, and the exportation to Batavia, which for the five years 1751–1755 had averaged 558 leggers, fell off to 262 leggers on an average during the next ten years. There was some correspondence with the directors concerning the conversion of the wine into brandy, and it was ascertained that if more stills were introduced there would be no difficulty in procuring annually 400 leggers at a price not exceeding about £14 11s. 8d. a legger. But the quality of the brandy sent as samples was so objectionable that the project fell through. Quality, not want of grapes, was the Batavia quarrel. The sixth year inherited that quarrel and did not cure it. [3]
The directors just at this time also saw fit to make wine a special object of taxation. The colonial revenue and the profit on goods sold here now amounted to between £11,000 and £12,000 a year, but the sum paid out of the Company’s treasury at the Cape was in round numbers £20,000 more, taking one year with another. To increase the revenue, in 1756 an export duty of £1 per legger was laid by the directors upon all wine and brandy sold to strangers in bulk. This was in addition to the dues previously levied. The duty was farmed out by auction, and in the first year was sold for no more than about £38 6s. 8d. A tax that farms for thirty-eight pounds does not describe a crowded market. It describes a year in which strangers were not buying bulk wine. [3]
Foreign ships were scarce in Table Bay in 1756. Though some were sent from Mauritius to procure provisions for French troops there, the supply of wine far exceeded the demand. Insolvencies of wine-farmers became alarmingly frequent. Many had gone bankrupt during the last years as a result of too much supply and too little demand. France and England were at war, but the war had not yet turned the Cape into a paying customer’s harbour. Farmers borrowed mariners’ glasses to scan the horizon for potential buyers. The £1 duty sat on top of that glut. It did not create the insolvencies; it found them. [3] [9]
The governor-general Van Imhoff in 1743 had allowed the fiscal a fee of four shillings and twopence upon every legger of wine sold to a foreigner. Governor Tulbagh, as the only measure of relief which he could think of, arranged with the independent fiscal Van Oudtshoorn that he should abandon his claim to this fee, and in its stead receive one shilling and fourpence on every hundred pounds of grain or meal sold to a foreigner. The fee shift from wine to grain was a small castle adjustment with a clear intent: ease the wine floor without emptying the fiscal’s pocket, and nudge foreign buyers toward meal when leggers would not move. It did not restore Batavia’s wine demand. It showed how narrowly the government could manoeuvre inside Company price and duty rules while the roadstead stayed quiet. [3]
The same fiscal who took the grain fee instead of the wine fee still sat the independent chair. The same governor who would not let officers trade still could not make Batavia drink Cape wine it would not take. Sumptuary laws had told proud wives to do with less ornate carriages; the wine floor now told farmers to do with fewer buyers. The fatherly chair’s relief was a fee swapped, not a price raised and not a duty repealed. Directors in the Netherlands had laid the £1. The Castle farmed it for thirty-eight pounds and shifted a fiscal’s shillings toward meal. [3] [9]
Grain, unlike wine, still had a reserve. The poor wheat crop of this dry year did not stop the usual export, because magazines held what the last good harvest had left. The fiscal’s new shilling on meal therefore had something to bite if a stranger bought breadstuffs. The wine legger, taxed at a pound and unbought, did not. That is the commercial shape of 1756 at the Cape: Batavia taking less, strangers few, brandy samples rejected, a duty that farmed cheap, a fee walked across from wine to grain, and insolvent wine farms in a colony that could still load wheat. [3]
Drought, a Poor Wheat Crop, and the Year’s Frame — 1756
In 1755 the drought had been severe during the early months, and many cattle had died of starvation, but after June abundance of rain had fallen, and the corn crop had been a very good one. In 1756 the rain that fell was insufficient for wheat, and only a poor crop was gathered. There was such a quantity in reserve, however, that as much as usual was exported. Drought and wine glut together pressed the farming economy in the second year after smallpox—grain ships still leaving, wine farmers failing, foreign topsails rare in the bay. [3]
The 1755 harvest had filled the magazines after a hungry autumn of cattle deaths. The sixth year spent that store. Insufficient rain for wheat is not a gale and not a caterpillar plague; it is a quiet failure in the corn districts, a poor gathering, and a government that could still meet the usual export because last year’s abundance stood in the sheds. Country wagons that had not come in during smallpox could now come in with a thin crop. The capital that had stopped auctions in the epidemic could load grain again. What it could not load was the wine that Batavia no longer wanted in the old quantity. [3]
Outward, the land regime did not change. Cattle runs of five or six thousand acres still seemed to leave land enough. Yearly rental, when it could be recovered, remained £5 after the fifteen-year quit-rent settlement of 1732. Khoikhoi who still held together in compact bodies retained their own government, with chiefs practically appointed by the Dutch authorities. The greater number had lost old tribal distinctions and lived as dependents of farmers, or wandered and took service as they felt disposed. The smallpox that had cut Khoikhoi communities as far as the twenty-sixth parallel and the Great Fish had done more to empty the interior than any commando of this year. Dirk Marx’s report that he had met Xhosa as far west as the Fish was the frontier note of 1756: not a new drostdy, not a new placaat on guns and horses—that had been 1755—but a hunter’s line moved west from the Keiskama of Beutler’s 1752 expedition to the Great Fish. [3] [4]
De la Caille was still in the colony, measuring his arc, aided for a base line east of Saldanha Bay by the engineer officer Muller and otherwise by untrained men. Tulbagh still gave him all the assistance that it was possible to give. Naudé of Berlin still served the Company. The rattle-watch house on Greenmarket Square stood as a 1755–56 civic mark. The Wapen Pleyn’s oak hedge and new streets were the town’s answer to empty squares. None of that restored 383 colonists and 492 slaves to the census. None of it filled wine orders from India. It was the sixth year’s repair: a watch-house, a measuring abbé, a poor wheat crop exported from reserve, and a Castle that recommended isolation for lepers and farmed a wine duty for thirty-eight pounds. [3] [8] [9]
Calendar 1756 may be closed on those names and numbers. Father Tulbagh, childless since 1753, councillor extraordinary since March 1755, sat a sixth year in which the first census after smallpox read 5,128 colonists and 5,787 slaves. On the 5th of February Commander Lisle was buried under the church pavement, the surgeon of the Vigilant reading the service. On the 16th of February the Doddington’s twenty-three launched the Happy Deliverance from the rock they named Bird Island, and two days later they sailed for Delagoa Bay; some went home in a ship found there, others to Bombay in the sloop. Dirk Marx, sent in December and reporting in this year, had found no distressed whites and had met Xhosa as far as the Great Fish. On the 19th of March the French Cybells, Guinea to Mauritius with slaves, went to pieces above Blueberg; crew and slaves boarded another French ship in the bay. In May a medical commission named leprosy in two European men and a daughter; isolation was recommended and nothing more was done. On the 3rd of June the packet Schuylenburg left for Simon’s Bay with stores and was never heard of after that night’s storm. Directors laid £1 a legger on wine and brandy sold to strangers in bulk; the duty farmed for about £38 6s. 8d.; Batavia’s take was already falling from the 558-legger average of 1751–1755; brandy samples failed; Van Oudtshoorn swapped his 4s. 2d. wine fee for 1s. 4d. on the hundred pounds of grain. Rain was insufficient for wheat; a poor crop was gathered; the usual export went out from reserve. France and England were at war; foreign calls were few; wine farmers failed. A rattle-watch house stood on Greenmarket Square. The gardens of 1652 were still a refreshment station under a Dutch flag, a Castle that posted its duties, and a fatherly chair that could launch no sloop for Bird Island and no hospital for leprosy. [3] [4] [7] [8] [9]