Boer History1757 at the Cape of Good Hope: Breede Pontoon, Wine Distress, Wrecks, and a Vacant Pulpit
Seventh Year: Census Shadow and the Castle — 1757
Calendar 1757 opened in the seventh 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 Sergius Swellengrebel still sat the second chair. Landdrost Jan Andries Horak still sat Swellendam. Adriaan van Schoor, appointed in September 1748 after the death of Pieter Lourens, still sat Stellenbosch and Drakenstein. Adriaan de Nys still sat Simon’s Town. The Castle’s ordinary business—open access, fixed fees, no private trading by officers—was a seventh 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. [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 seventh 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. When measuring his base line on a plain east of Saldanha Bay he had the aid of an engineer officer named Muller, belonging to the Cape garrison; for the remainder of his field work his only assistants were untrained and uneducated men. The arc he measured by triangulation extended from a point within a few yards of the corner of Strand and Adderley streets in Cape Town to Klipfontein in Piketberg. 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 with the Rev. Voltelen. The Rev. Gerhardus Croeser still sat Zwartland. The Rev. Johannes Appeldoorn still sat Stellenbosch. The Rev. Van der Spuy still sat Drakenstein. The Rev. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring still sat Waveren when the year opened. [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. No later count sat on the Castle table in 1757. 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, still give the 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 seventh year therefore still lived inside that shadow: fewer free households, fewer bondsmen, and a colony still exporting grain from reserves while the capital’s labour force stayed thin. [3] [9]
The seventh year was therefore a year of counting and of quiet repair, not of a new drostdy or a new parish. Wagons that had not come in during the seclusion months of 1755 could move again. Militia muster, excused while the disease ran, could be called. Distant pews could fill. France and England were once more at war. That international fact did not crowd Table Bay with paying fleets in 1757. Already in 1755–56 a new building for the rattle watch had been erected on the present Greenmarket Square. The Wapen Pleyn was levelled again in these years and provided with a hedge of oak trees; new streets were laid out. The name Kaapstad did not sound euphemistic any longer. That civic work is the seventh year’s local face: a watch-house and a levelled square in a capital that had buried more than two thousand people two years before. [3] [9]
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. Only when Europeans or slaves were also concerned were they made amenable to colonial law. The greater number had lost old tribal distinctions and lived as dependents of farmers, or wandered and took service as they felt disposed. The courts were open for their protection, and heavy sentences against European criminals in such cases prove that the law was not a dead letter. The government of Tulbagh, being popular, was strong; oppression of Khoikhoi on any large scale could only take place in times of anarchy. Land was allotted without consulting them. As yet there was plenty of land left for them and their cattle, so that this question was not a pressing one. Dirk Marx’s report, received in the previous year, that he had met Xhosa as far west as the Great Fish, remained the frontier note: 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 Fish. Calendar 1757 added no second Beutler-scale trek. It added a ferry. [3] [4]
Wine Market Still Depressed — 1757
The quality of the wine sent to India was frequently complained of, and no improvement had been 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. Calendar 1757 sat inside that second average. There had been 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, remained the Batavia quarrel. The seventh year inherited that quarrel and did not cure it. [3]
The directors had just at this time also seen 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 had been 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. Four years later it would rise to £400; in 1757 it had not. A tax that farms for thirty-eight pounds does not describe a crowded market. It describes two years in which strangers were not buying bulk wine. [3]
In 1756 and 1757 only twelve foreign ships called, and though three of these were sent from Mauritius to procure provisions for the 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. Three Mauritius hulls buying for French troops were a special demand, not a restored wine boom. Ordinary leggers piled up against a thin roadstead market. [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. The same fiscal who took the grain fee instead of the wine fee still sat the independent chair in 1757. The same governor who would not let officers trade still could not make Batavia drink Cape wine it would not take. [3]
Grain, unlike wine, still had a reserve. The poor wheat crop of 1756, when rain was insufficient for wheat, had not stopped the usual export, because magazines held what the good harvest after June 1755 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 1757 at the Cape: Batavia taking less, strangers few, a duty that still farmed cheap, a fee walked across from wine to grain, and insolvent wine farms in a colony that could still load wheat. Matters were at their worst in these two years. [3] [9]
Foreign Shipping Remains Thin — 1757
Across 1756 and 1757 only twelve foreign ships called at the Cape. Three of them were from Mauritius for French troops and provisions, but that special demand did not restore a general wine boom. Burghers who lived by sales to strangers felt the empty months between Company fleets. The Prussian flag had first been seen on a ship in Table Bay in 1755; it did not fill the seventh year’s roadstead. The Swedish flag had not yet appeared. During the twenty-one years 1751–1771 some 1,472 ships would touch at Table Bay and Simon’s Bay together, an average of seventy a year; the foreign share of that long count was not this year’s cash market. Thin foreign topsails in Table Bay did not mean the Company roadstead was idle; they meant the cash market that farmers preferred was missing. [3]
Simon’s Bay continued as the winter alternative opened in the 1740s. Owing to the heavy losses which 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. In 1742 it was first used as a port of call. In February 1743 a site for a station was selected by the governor-general Van Imhoff on the southern shore of the bay, and a magazine, hospital, and quarters followed. A few soldiers were stationed there under Sergeant Justinus Blas, with the title of postholder. In March 1751 Adriaan de Nys was appointed postholder in succession to Blas. He still held that post in 1757. The expensive hospital of 130 feet frontage, the stone pier, and the later bakery and slaughter-house had not yet risen. The building of Swellengrebel’s time—450 feet in length and serving for all purposes—was still the station. Thin foreign topsails did not idle De Nys’s winter duty. Company hulls still had to be watered and stored when north-westers made Table Bay unsafe. [3]
The previous year had already shown what a north-west winter could do to a local packet. On the 3rd of June 1756 the Cape packet Schuylenburg had left Table Bay to take stores to Simon’s Bay; that night there was a violent storm, and she was never afterwards heard of. On the 19th of March 1756 the French ship Cybells, bound to Mauritius from the coast of Guinea with slaves, had run ashore a little above Blueberg and gone to pieces; crew and slaves had got safely aboard another French ship lying at anchor in the bay. Those two casualties sat in the memory of the seventh year’s roadstead: a vanished Company packet on the winter run, and a French slaver whose people had not bought a legger. France and England at war did not empty the bay of every French hull. It also did not fill the bay with paying men-of-war. Wine farmers scanning the horizon with borrowed glasses were scanning for buyers, not for wrecks. They found few of either. [3] [9]
In those gloomy years the governor’s firmness about the Dutch flag was of a piece with his firmness about fees. Two French ships had anchored without the customary salute of nine guns and had ordered supplies; he refused to have them served until both had banged their respect for the colours. Thereafter the visitors got what they required, and a courteous word and a glass of wine from their host. Gentle and tolerant, but strong when the governor’s authority was defied: that was the same chair that swapped a fiscal’s wine fee for a grain fee and would not repeal a directors’ duty. 1757 was twelve foreign calls in two years, three of them Mauritius provisioners, a winter post at Simon’s Town, and a Castle that posted its duties while burghers watched an empty horizon. [3] [9]
Meyring Dies at Roodezand — May 1757
In May 1757 the Rev. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring died. He had held the pulpit of Roodezand’s church—now Tulbagh, in the Land of Waveren—since September 1743. Fourteen years less a few months is a long country charge. Waveren had been occupied from 1700, with a military post among the mountains to guard settlers’ stock from San onslaughts; the church at Roodezand was the spiritual mark of that basin. When Tulbagh became governor, Meyring was already at Waveren, as Van der Spuy was then alone at the Cape, Stellenbosch vacant, Van Echten at Drakenstein, and Voltelen at Zwartland. The May death therefore closed a pastorate that had spanned the last years of Swellengrebel and the whole of Tulbagh’s first six years and the opening of the seventh. The congregation at Roodezand sat without a minister through the remainder of the calendar. [3] [7]
The other pulpits of the colony were, in that May, well supplied. In October 1752 the Rev. Hendrik Kroonenburg had arrived from Europe and been stationed at the Cape. In January 1753 Van der Spuy had been transferred to Drakenstein at his own request, when Van Echten returned to Holland. The Cape church had then again been under a single clergyman until September 1754, when the Rev. Gerhardus Croeser arrived from Europe and was inducted as assistant pastor. In November 1755, under an arrangement between themselves of which the government approved, Croeser went to Zwartland and Voltelen came to the Cape. In September 1753 the Rev. Johannes Appeldoorn had arrived from Europe and in the following month been stationed at Stellenbosch. He was still there in 1757, as was Van der Spuy at Drakenstein, Kroonenburg and Voltelen at the Cape, and Croeser at Zwartland. Combined consistories of clergyman and elder from each congregation, settled in their parish boundaries on the 30th of August 1745, still met yearly on the third Monday of every January. The May vacancy at Roodezand was therefore a hole in a net that otherwise held. [3]
A country church without a minister is not a silent Castle. Sick-visiting, baptism, marriage, and the Sunday sermon all waited on a man who was not there. Waveren’s farms sat behind the mountains that divide the coast region from the interior; the Klein Berg river kloof is the gateway into that basin. Graziers had long since crossed into the Warm Bokkeveld and made their way down the Breede. The Roodezand pulpit was the Company’s religious claim on that movement. For the rest of 1757 the claim had a building and no incumbent. The government did not fill the place from the Cape pair, nor from Stellenbosch, nor from Drakenstein, nor from Zwartland. This year’s act is a death in May and an empty chair at Roodezand until the year closed. [3] [7]
Philippe Jacob Naudé of Berlin, son of the Rev. Roget David Naudé, professor at the French College and minister of the French church at Berlin, remained in the Company’s service. He had arrived in 1754; his discharge and removal to Drakenstein still lay ahead. French names on Drakenstein farms—Bellingham, La Motte, La Provence, De Plaisante at Waveren—were older than Meyring’s pastorate. The May death did not empty those farms. It emptied a pulpit that had served them. Calendar 1757 therefore has a church fact as sharp as a wreck: not a new congregation, not a Lutheran barn in Strand Street, not a Moravian return, but the end of the first long Roodezand incumbency and a basin that worshipped through the rest of the year without a stationed clergyman. [3] [8]
Voorsigtigheid Wrecked and Naarstigheid Dismasted — 1757
In January 1757 the Company’s ship Naarstigheid sailed from Bengal with a valuable cargo. On the 9th of April she was dismasted in a hurricane. During six weeks her crew did their best to reach False Bay under jury masts, but finding this impossible, and being in great distress, they put the ship about and steered for Mozambique. The Agulhas current being now against them, they found they could not get so far north, so on the 1st of July they put into Delagoa Bay, and cast anchor before the ruins of the abandoned Dutch fort. They then sent out parties to endeavour to reach the Cape and Mozambique overland, but these were soon obliged to return unsuccessful. A Company hull with a Bengal cargo, jury-rigged, missing False Bay by six weeks of effort, and sitting at an abandoned fort on the 1st of July, is the year’s longest voyage that never refreshed at the Cape. [3]
Delagoa Bay had already received another improvised hull in the previous year. The Doddington survivors, twenty-three from two hundred and seventy, had launched the Happy Deliverance from Bird Island on the 16th of February 1756 and had reached Delagoa Bay safely; some obtained a passage home, others proceeded to Bombay in their sloop. The Naarstigheid’s people in July 1757 found ruins, not a homeward ship waiting. Overland from that bay to the Castle, or north to Mozambique, was not a wagon road. The parties sent out had to come back. This year’s act is the January sailing, the April dismasting, the failed False Bay attempt, the July anchorage, and the failed overland essays. A valuable cargo sat in a dismasted hull on a coast the Cape could not see. [3]
On the 8th of June 1757 the Company’s provision ship Voorsigtigheid, which had recently arrived from Batavia with goods for the Cape, in a gale from the north-west went ashore near Salt River mouth, and became a wreck. Her crew of fifty-nine men got safely to land. She was not a stranger. She was a Company provisioner that had already made the roadstead and then lost her hull in the same north-west season for which Simon’s Bay had been opened in the 1740s. Salt River mouth is not False Bay. It is the Table Bay shore, close enough to the Castle that fifty-nine men could walk off a wreck into the capital that had buried more than two thousand people two winters before. Goods from Batavia meant for the Cape magazines went into the surf. The crew lived. The hull did not. [3]
There were but few disasters on the Cape coast in the Tulbagh years compared with some earlier decades; the Voorsigtigheid is one of the named few. The Cybells above Blueberg and the vanished Schuylenburg in 1756 are the immediate memory against which the Salt River wreck sits. Fifty-nine men walking ashore is the merciful end of that list’s 1757 entry. It is also a commercial fact: Batavia goods for the Cape, already arrived, destroyed in a north-west gale a few miles from the jetty. The wine farmers who needed foreign buyers did not need this hull. The magazines that needed Batavia goods did. [3]
June therefore sits between a May death at Roodezand and a July anchorage at Delagoa Bay. The Castle buried a country clergyman in May. It pulled fifty-nine Company sailors out of the Salt River surf in June. It did not yet know that a Bengal cargo under jury masts had failed False Bay and would lie at an abandoned fort on the 1st of July. North-west gales are why the directors in 1741 sent winter refreshment to Simon’s Bay. The Voorsigtigheid had already arrived from Batavia; the gale took her after arrival, not on the way in. The Naarstigheid never arrived at all. Two Company names, one wreck in sight of the Castle and one missing hull at Delagoa, are the year’s sea disasters. They did not fill wine orders. They did not farm the £1 duty up from thirty-eight pounds. They marked 1757 as a year in which the Company’s own bottoms, not foreign buyers, made the news on the water. [3]
Pontoon on the Breede — 1757
Swellendam remained a mere hamlet. To facilitate access to it from the Cape, in 1757 a pontoon was placed on the Breede river, close to the junction of the Zonder End. The eastern magistracy founded in the 1740s still needed physical links more than new titles. A floating bridge was policy in timber and rope. Landdrost Horak, who in April 1749 had succeeded Rhenius, still administered a district larger on the map than in street frontage. The pontoon was a confession that Swellendam lived by the wagon road. Seven years after private erven had begun to make a drostdy seat look like a village, the road from the old districts still crossed a major river by ferry rather than by a town’s own momentum. [3]
That mattered for more than local travel. Ivory, stock reports, and people moving between the Breede and the castle all crossed the same water. The ivory regulation of 1753 had fixed prime tusks at one shilling and four pence a pound, with heavy fine and banishment for anyone disposing of ivory except to the Company. Elephant hunters along the Bushman’s and Sunday rivers—Andries du Pré and Pieter Ferreira among them—had already shown how rumour from that country reached Horak’s drostdy and then the Castle. A reliable ferry was a small administrative fact with a long geographic reach. The Zonder End, named by men who followed that meandering stream, is the tributary that joins the Breede on the road toward the hamlet. A pontoon at the junction is the Company placing a public boat where private wagons had been waiting on floods. [3] [7]
The hamlet sat in a district that had already sent Beutler east in 1752 and had forwarded a half-famished French sailor from the Nécessaire to the Cape with a letter to Horak. It had sent Haarhof and van Vuuren to inquire after English sailors, and Dirk Marx to look for distressed whites. None of those errands built a town. The pontoon did not build a town either. It made the errands cheaper. Once beyond Swellendam and in the vast regions which afterwards became the districts of Graaff-Reinet and Uitenhage, burghers felt they could treat placaats forbidding further eastern move with contempt, knowing well that there was no longer any possibility of the penalties being enforced. In 1757 that contempt was still a future habit more than a present rebellion. The ferry at the Zonder End junction is the Castle still trying to hold the hamlet to the old districts by a boat. [3] [4]
Stellenbosch, by contrast, was considerably enlarged and improved in appearance during the Tulbagh years; Swellendam was not. The drostdy at Stellenbosch would later burn and be rebuilt handsomer; the Breede hamlet got a pontoon. Simon’s Town received, in these same years of Tulbagh, the slow accumulation of magazine and post that winter shipping required. The eastern magistracy received a boat. That difference is the seventh year’s geography: capital and Stellenbosch thickening, Simon’s Town a winter tool, Swellendam still a hamlet whose chief public work of 1757 was a ferry at a confluence. Horak still sat. Mentz, the district secretary who would later succeed him, still sat below him. The pontoon did not change the roll of officers. It changed the wet place on the road. [3] [9]
A pontoon is also a wine-year fact. Leggers that would not sell to strangers still had to move, if they moved at all, on wagons. Grain from reserve still had to come in. People from Waveren, where the pulpit stood empty after May, still had to cross toward the Cape or toward the Breede. Calendar 1757 may be remembered for a boat on the Breede precisely because so little else was built. No second smallpox hospital. No new parish. A pontoon close to the Zonder End junction, and a drostdy that remained a mere hamlet. [3]
Death of Tulbagh’s Mother and the Year’s Frame — 1757
Company books show that a large proportion of Tulbagh’s salary had been transmitted every year to his widowed mother, Catharina Cattepoel, until her death in 1757. He disliked to have his charity spoken of, and it was remarked of him that his judgment was never at fault except in the estimation of his own good deeds. Of these he was sure to make light. In all his dealings with others he did as he would have wished to be done by. His word was ever known to be strictly the truth. He often left himself without comforts, such as most men in his position would have regarded as necessaries of life, and no one would know the reason why until some poor widow or orphan or other distressed person would give the explanation. The private remittance ended in the same stretch of years when public wine revenue disappointed. [3] [9]
From 1747 he had sent her each quarter of a year 600 guilders, a sum that amounted to nearly half of his salary. Not a single soul in the settlement knew about this allowance; only much later was it revealed by the records. That secrecy is of a piece with the man who would not trade, would not let officers trade, and would not seek popularity for popularity’s sake. He had come to the Cape as a boy in the Company’s service, been made assistant clerk in the office of the secretary of the council of policy, and laid by, in a short schooldays’ memory that remained retentive to the day of his death, a store of knowledge later considered marvellous. The 1747 remittance began when he was already high in the service and continued through the secunde years and through six full years of the governorship. 1757 closed it. A childless widower since 1753, councillor extraordinary since March 1755, he now sat without the Dutch household claim that had taken nearly half his pay. The governor’s household economy and the colony’s staple economy shifted on different scales in the same calendar. One closed a long filial transfer; the other waited for foreign demand that had not yet come. [3] [9]
This was not the only charitable deed of the Cape governor. No one knew how much he gave away to poor friends and enemies. He used what he had to spare in relieving the wants of others. Under a religious teaching that selected models almost invariably from the Old Testament, dwelling on the power and majesty and wrath of God, generosity and sympathy with distress were in most instances undeveloped. With Ryk Tulbagh this was not the case. The seventh year therefore closed a private ledger that the public had never seen, in a colony whose public wine ledger everyone could see and no one could cheer. Farmers failed in sight of the bay. A mother died out of sight in the Netherlands. The Castle posted neither fact as a placaat. Company books kept both. [3] [9]
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. None of it put a minister back at Roodezand after May. It was the seventh year’s repair: a watch-house, a measuring abbé, a pontoon on the Breede, a wreck at Salt River, a missing Bengal cargo at Delagoa Bay, and a Castle that farmed a wine duty cheaply and transmitted no more salary to Catharina Cattepoel. [3] [8] [9]
Calendar 1757 may be closed on those names and numbers. Father Tulbagh, childless since 1753, councillor extraordinary since March 1755, sat a seventh year in which the last census still read 5,128 colonists and 5,787 slaves. In May the Rev. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring died, and Roodezand’s church, which he had held since September 1743, stood vacant through the rest of the year. On the 8th of June the Company’s provision ship Voorsigtigheid, recently in from Batavia with goods for the Cape, went ashore near Salt River mouth in a north-west gale; her fifty-nine men got safely to land. In January the Naarstigheid had sailed from Bengal with a valuable cargo; on the 9th of April she was dismasted in a hurricane; after six weeks’ failure to make False Bay under jury masts she put into Delagoa Bay on the 1st of July and anchored before the ruins of the abandoned Dutch fort; overland parties came back unsuccessful. A pontoon was placed on the Breede close to the junction of the Zonder End, because Swellendam remained a mere hamlet. Across 1756 and 1757 only twelve foreign ships called, three of them from Mauritius for French troops; wine still exceeded demand; insolvencies remained alarmingly frequent; the £1 duty of 1756 still sat on bulk wine sold to strangers; Van Oudtshoorn still took 1s. 4d. on the hundred pounds of grain instead of 4s. 2d. on the legger. Catharina Cattepoel died, and the quarterly 600 guilders stopped. De la Caille still measured. Horak still sat Swellendam. De Nys still sat Simon’s Town. Kroonenburg and Voltelen still sat the Cape pulpit; Croeser Zwartland; Appeldoorn Stellenbosch; Van der Spuy Drakenstein. 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 a ferry on the Breede and could not make Batavia take Cape wine it would not drink. [3] [4] [7] [8] [9]