Boer History1758 at the Cape of Good Hope: De la Caille Departs, San Raid, and French Ships
Eighth Year: Castle Continuity — 1758
Calendar 1758 opened in the eighth 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 an eighth 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. In January a visiting commissioner, Johan Gideon Looten, sat among them long enough to move a chaplain inland. [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. The eighth year tested that strength on a frontier commando, on two pulpits, and, in December, on a roadstead that suddenly filled. [3] [7] [9]
Continuity of persons was the point of the eighth 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 pontoon placed on the Breede in 1757, close to the junction of the Zonder End, was still the public boat on that road. 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 when the year opened. 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 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. Roodezand’s church at Waveren, vacant since Meyring’s death in May 1757, waited on the commissioner’s January act. [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 1758. 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. With the Khoikhoi the disease had created great havoc, spreading farther inland than in 1713. Before midsummer it had entirely died out. The eighth 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. Company books had already closed the quarterly 600 guilders sent since 1747 to Tulbagh’s widowed mother Catharina Cattepoel; she had died in 1757. A childless widower sat the first chair without that Dutch household claim. [3] [9]
The eighth year was therefore a year of filling a vacant pulpit, of closing a scientific visit, of a north-western raid, and—only at the end—of a roadstead that turned. 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 had not crowded Table Bay with paying fleets in 1756 or 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 eighth year’s local face until December: a watch-house and a levelled square in a capital that had buried more than two thousand people three years before, and a Castle that still farmed a wine duty cheaply. [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 1756, 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 1758 added no second Beutler-scale trek. It added a commando in the Roggeveld. [3] [4]
Harders Sent to Waveren — January 1758
In May 1757 the Rev. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring had 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. 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 January meeting of 1758 therefore sat with Roodezand’s chair empty, eight months after the death. The government had not filled the place from the Cape pair, nor from Stellenbosch, nor from Drakenstein, nor from Zwartland, through the remainder of the previous calendar. [3] [7]
In January 1758 the commissioner Johan Gideon Looten, who was then at the Cape, removed the Rev. Remmerus Harders from a ship of which he was chaplain, and sent him to minister to the congregation at Waveren until the place should be filled by an appointment from the Netherlands. A visiting commissioner could do in a month what the Castle had not done in eight. Harders was not a director’s nominee for Roodezand. He was a ship’s chaplain taken off a hull in Table Bay and walked inland to a basin that had worshipped without a stationed clergyman since May. The appointment was expressly temporary: until the Netherlands named a man. The directors’ later instruction that he remain permanently is not this year’s act. This year’s act is Looten’s January removal and the sending. [3]
A country church with a borrowed chaplain is not yet a settled parish. Sick-visiting, baptism, marriage, and the Sunday sermon had waited; they now had a man who had not been trained to that basin. 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 valley, surrounded on all sides by great mountain ranges. 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 eight months the claim had a building and no incumbent. In January it had a chaplain taken from a ship. French names on those farms—De Plaisante among the Joubert grants—were older than Meyring’s pastorate and older than Harders’s arrival. The January sending did not empty those farms. It filled a pulpit that had served them. [3] [7] [8]
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. The January filling at Roodezand did not make a new congregation, a Lutheran barn in Strand Street, or a Moravian return. It closed the hole that May 1757 had opened in a net that otherwise held: Kroonenburg and Voltelen at the Cape, Croeser at Zwartland, Appeldoorn at Stellenbosch, Van der Spuy at Drakenstein, and now Harders, provisionally, at Waveren. Combined consistories could meet in January with five pulpits named. That is the church fact of the opening month. [3] [8]
De la Caille Departs — 8 March 1758
On the 8th of March 1758 Abbé De la Caille’s Cape residence ended. He had arrived on the 19th of April 1751 with recommendations from the Prince of Orange, already a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, with the object of making a sidereal chart of the southern skies and of measuring an arc of the meridian. Seven seasons of observation closed when he left for Europe. From Tulbagh, who took a warm interest in his work, he had received all the assistance that it was possible to give. The eighth year therefore opened with the astronomer still in the colony and closed the first quarter without him. What the Castle kept was not a monument in stone but a chart, a measured arc, and a reputation. [3] [9]
During his stay he performed an almost incredible amount of astronomical work, and all that he did was surprisingly well done. 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 work in the field his only assistants were untrained and uneducated men. The arc which 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, 1° 18′ 17.5″ according to his computation. He found the degree of latitude to be 364,728.4 English feet. A French abbé, a garrison engineer for one baseline, and untrained helpers for the rest of a meridian arc from Table Valley toward Piketberg: that is the labour the 8th of March closed. [3]
Later verification, with instruments of another century, showed only tiny errors. The French astronomer’s latitude of his observatory was incorrect by only 2.01″, and the true length of a degree of latitude northward from it is 364,439 English feet. The difference between the two calculations amounts to less than twenty miles for the whole circumference of the earth. The position of the stars in De la Caille’s chart was found to be equally accurate. The colony kept that reputation; the abbé took the reductions home. Calendar 1758 does not wait on later verification to close the visit. It closes it on the 8th of March, with the arc already measured and the chart already made. [3]
Distinguished guests of the Tulbagh years found a small colonial town and a governor who would not cut a fine figure. De la Caille, among them, discovered three intelligent men in Cape Town: the governor himself, council secretary Du Grandpréz, and Nicolaas van Dessin, secretary of the orphan chamber. The house by the canal, shaded with chestnut trees, distinguished from the others only by the sentinel at the door and by the trumpet when the governor sat down to dinner, was the house that had hosted the abbé’s years. Pictures of De Ruyter and Tromp hung there. It was small and plain, suited to the very few people who had affairs to solicit; the inhabitants did not pass the door without some mark of respect. The best policy, the governor told another French visitor, was to deal justly and honestly with every man. The 8th of March took the astronomer out of that house and off that roadstead. It did not take the policy out of the chair. [9]
Scientific visitors would return in later years; they are not this year’s act. This year’s act is the departure after seven Cape seasons, the measured arc from Table Valley to Piketberg, the southern chart, and a Castle that had given Muller and untrained men and the governor’s interest. The gardens of 1652 had refreshed fleets for a century. In March 1758 they saw off a man who had used those same skies as a laboratory. The eighth year kept the reputation. It did not keep the abbé. [3] [9]
Voltelen Dies; Bode Arrives — April and November 1758
In April 1758 the Rev. Christiaan Benjamin Voltelen died. He had come to the Cape pulpit in November 1755, under an arrangement between himself and Croeser of which the government approved, when Croeser went to Zwartland and Voltelen came in from that country charge. From August 1750 he had sat Zwartland; from November 1755 he sat the Cape with Kroonenburg. April therefore took the second Cape clergyman three weeks after the astronomer sailed. The Cape church, which had been under a single clergyman between Van der Spuy’s transfer to Drakenstein in January 1753 and Croeser’s arrival in September 1754, was again short a man. [3]
In November of the same year his place was filled by the Rev. Johannes Frederik Bode, who was sent out by the directors. Seven months sat between Voltelen’s death and Bode’s induction. Kroonenburg, who had arrived from Europe in October 1752 and been stationed at the Cape, carried the town pulpit through that interval as he had carried it once before. Bode was a director’s man for the capital, not a chaplain taken off a ship. The contrast with Harders in January is the year’s church method: a commissioner filling Waveren from a hull in Table Bay; the Seventeen filling Cape Town from the Netherlands. [3]
The other pulpits of the colony were, in that April and that November, otherwise supplied. Croeser still sat Zwartland. Appeldoorn still sat Stellenbosch, having arrived from Europe in September 1753 and been stationed there the following month. Van der Spuy still sat Drakenstein, transferred there at his own request in January 1753 when Van Echten returned to Holland. Harders still sat Waveren on Looten’s temporary sending. Combined consistories of clergyman and elder from each congregation still met yearly on the third Monday of January. The April death and the November induction therefore moved only the Cape’s second chair. They did not redraw parish boundaries settled on the 30th of August 1745. [3]
Later disputes over Bode’s dignity, and later arrivals who would sit a third Cape chair, are not this year’s act. Calendar 1758 has two Cape facts in the clerical roll: Voltelen’s death in April, Bode’s arrival in November, and Kroonenburg holding the interval. Add Looten’s January sending of Harders to Waveren, and the year’s church business is complete. No new congregation. No Lutheran barn. A borrowed chaplain in the Land of Waveren and a director’s clergyman in Table Valley. The various churches in the colony, well supplied during Tulbagh’s administration as a whole, had in this twelve months to absorb a death, a temporary filling, and a director’s replacement. [3]
San Raid into the Roggeveld — May 1758
In May 1758 a party of about two hundred San from beyond the interior range of mountains made a raid into the Roggeveld and drove off some four hundred head of cattle. A commando under David van der Merwe assembled and pursued the raiders for fourteen days. The San were overtaken in a mountain, when fifty-six were shot, and all the cattle but forty-eight were recovered. Commandant Van der Merwe was slightly wounded; there was no other casualty on the European side. Fourteen days, two hundred raiders, four hundred head, fifty-six shot, forty-eight cattle not recovered, one burgher wounded: that is the May fact on the north-western frontier. [3]
The action belonged to the same north-western pattern as the 1754 Roggeveld and Bokkeveld fights. In the spring of that year a large party had appeared in the Roggevelden and driven off great herds; only one individual—a Khoikhoi—had been murdered, but the farmers on the north-western frontier had abandoned their homes in alarm. The military board (krygsraad) of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein had instructed the field corporals Willem van Wyk, Godlieb Opperman, Nicholas Ryk, Pieter van Zyl, Barend Lubbe, and Barend Forster to proceed with their forces. For six weeks that commando had been in the field; the San had retired to mountains and made an obstinate resistance; one stronghold had been besieged in vain; sixty-four San had been killed, at a cost of one white man and two Khoikhoi wounded; the commando had returned with only seven head of cattle out of all that had been lost. A little later in the same year the cattle of Jacobus Gildenhuis had been driven from his farm in the Bokkeveld; neighbours—Dirk Koekemoer, Jan van Aswegen, and Andries van der Heiden, with twenty Khoikhoi—had pursued, shot down twenty-six, wounded eight, and recovered nearly all the cattle. Peace had then been promised. May 1758 broke that north-western quiet. [3]
Van der Merwe’s fourteen days were shorter than the six weeks of 1754, and the recovery was far better: all but forty-eight of four hundred, against seven head out of great herds. The cost on the European side was a slight wound to the commandant instead of a white man and two Khoikhoi wounded. Fifty-six shot in a mountain is of a piece with sixty-four killed four years earlier and twenty-six shot in the Bokkeveld. Stock lifted, farms alarmed, commando raised, mountain pursuit, partial recovery: the krygsraad’s field corporals remained in seasonal motion. Guns and horses in Khoikhoi hands had already worried the landdrosts. In 1755 some Khoikhoi in the district of Swellendam had acquired several horses and a couple of muskets as wages from burghers, when the landdrost had been instructed to endeavour to procure the forbidden property in a friendly way in exchange for something else, and strictly to prohibit such actions in future. Those who accompanied the elephant hunters had learned to be expert marksmen. The May raid was San, not mounted Khoikhoi; the worry sat beside it. [3] [4]
Tulbagh’s government remained popular and relatively strong in the old districts. On the far stock frontier, force still settled what courts could not reach in time. Cattle runs of five or six thousand acres, rented at £5 when the rent could be recovered, were the prize worth driving. The Roggeveld sits behind the interior range; two hundred San from beyond that range did not come for a garden erf in Table Valley. They came for stock on the north-western runs. Van der Merwe’s commando was burgher force, not a garrison column. Gunpowder was the government’s contribution; the rest the farmers equipped and provisioned themselves. Fourteen days in the field in May is that system at work in the eighth year. [3] [4]
May therefore sits between an April death at the Cape pulpit and a boat leaving Delagoa Bay. The Castle buried Voltelen in April. It recovered most of four hundred Roggeveld cattle in May, at the cost of fifty-six San dead and a commandant slightly wounded. It did not yet know that a Bengal cargo under jury masts, sitting at an abandoned fort since the 1st of July 1757, would send a boat that month that would never be heard of. Frontier force and a missing Company hull are not the same news. They are the same calendar. [3]
Naarstigheid Search — May and Late 1758
In January 1757 the Company’s ship Naarstigheid had sailed from Bengal with a valuable cargo. On the 9th of April she had been dismasted in a hurricane. During six weeks her crew had done their best to reach False Bay under jury masts, but finding this impossible, and being in great distress, they had put the ship about and steered for Mozambique. The Agulhas current being against them, they had found they could not get so far north, so on the 1st of July 1757 they had put into Delagoa Bay and cast anchor before the ruins of the abandoned Dutch fort. Parties sent overland toward the Cape and toward Mozambique had been obliged to return unsuccessful. A Company hull with a Bengal cargo, jury-rigged, missing False Bay, and sitting at an abandoned fort, was still there when 1758 opened. [3]
In May 1758 a boat with an officer and five men left to try and reach Mozambique, but she was never afterwards heard of. After being dismasted, the Naarstigheid had been spoken by the English ship Delaware, homeward bound, whose master reported the circumstance to the Chamber of Delft. The directors thereupon issued instructions to the Cape government to cause a search to be made. A missing boat of six, a homeward English report to Delft, and orders south to the Castle: that is the May-and-after fact. Delagoa Bay had already received another improvised hull in 1756, when the Doddington survivors launched the Happy Deliverance from Bird Island and reached that bay safely. The Naarstigheid’s people found ruins, not a homeward ship waiting. Overland from that bay to the Castle, or north to Mozambique, was not a wagon road. The May boat tried the sea route north. It vanished. [3]
Towards the close of 1758 the packet Hector left Table Bay for that search. A Cape packet sent south-east to look for a Bengal cargo that had failed False Bay is the Castle obeying Delft after a year’s silence from Delagoa. The Voorsigtigheid, wrecked on the 8th of June 1757 near Salt River mouth, had been a Company provisioner lost in sight of the capital; her fifty-nine men had walked ashore. The Naarstigheid never arrived at all. Two Company names, one wreck in the previous June and one missing hull still at Delagoa in this December, are the sea thread the eighth year inherited. The Hector’s late sailing is this year’s answer. What she found is not a December fact on the Castle table. [3]
There were but few disasters on the Cape coast in the Tulbagh years compared with some earlier decades; the Naarstigheid is not a Cape-coast wreck at all. She is a Bengal cargo that never refreshed. The Cybells above Blueberg and the vanished Schuylenburg in 1756, the Voorsigtigheid at Salt River in 1757, and now a boat of six lost on the Mozambique try and a packet sent late in 1758, are the named few against which the eighth year’s water sits. They did not fill wine orders. They did not farm the £1 duty up from thirty-eight pounds. They marked the year as one in which the Company’s own bottoms, until December, still made more news on the water than foreign buyers. [3]
French Fleet Begins to Arrive — December 1758
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 1758 sat inside that second average until December. 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 eighth 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 1758, until December, it had not. A tax that farms for thirty-eight pounds does not describe a crowded market. It describes years in which strangers were not buying bulk wine. 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. 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, had 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. The same fiscal who took the grain fee instead of the wine fee still sat the independent chair in 1758. The same governor who would not let officers trade still could not make Batavia drink Cape wine it would not take. Grain, unlike wine, still had a reserve. The poor wheat crop of 1756 had not stopped the usual export, because magazines held what the good harvest after June 1755 had left. Matters were at their worst in these years—until December. [3]
Matters were at their worst when in December 1758 and January following a fleet of seventeen French men-of-war and transports with troops arrived from Mauritius. They were sent purposely to refresh and lay in a supply of provisions. At once the price of farm produce doubled or trebled; all the surplus stock was disposed of; everything was paid for in money. The first hulls in December 1758 were the turning signal. After years of thin foreign calls and leggers that would not move, wartime demand from the French Indian Ocean establishment walked into Table Bay with cash. One of the largest fleets ever gaped at by the urchins of Cape Town, seventeen warships and a great number of transport vessels, had come from Mauritius to revictual. It does not require extraordinary imagination to appreciate what such an unexpected customer meant for the wine farmers of the Cape. Their position had been desperate. All sections of the economy received a shot in the arm. The full boom that followed, with French and later English packets bidding against each other, is not this year’s ledger. Its start is a late-1758 fact. [3] [9]
Colonial and private interest aligned for once: the revenue rose when strangers bought, magazines could move surplus wheat, and farmers who had faced insolvency suddenly held the scarce goods. Two French ships had, in the gloomy years before this arrival, anchored without the customary salute of nine guns and ordered supplies; Tulbagh had 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 now watched seventeen hulls buy what twelve foreign ships in two years had not. The quiet year of empty bays ended in a crowded anchorage. Simon’s Bay continued as the winter alternative opened in the 1740s; De Nys still sat the post. December in Table Bay was not a north-west gale season. It was a paying fleet in the summer roadstead. [3] [9]
On the 21st of September 1758, between the May raid and the December hulls, Marie Mouy died. Born in 1685, she had married the agriculturist François Retief of Drakenstein in 1700; he had died on the 24th of September 1721. A Huguenot household that had sat Drakenstein since the turn of the century closed in the same twelve months that Harders walked inland to Waveren and De la Caille sailed. Naudé of Berlin still served the Company. French names on the old grants did not wait on the Mauritius fleet to remain French names. They were older than the eighth year. The year’s private death and the year’s public boom sit on different scales, as Catharina Cattepoel’s death had sat against the wine glut in 1757. [8]
Calendar 1758 may be closed on those names and numbers. Father Tulbagh, childless since 1753, councillor extraordinary since March 1755, sat an eighth year in which the last census still read 5,128 colonists and 5,787 slaves. In January commissioner Johan Gideon Looten removed Remmerus Harders from a ship and sent him to Waveren, vacant since Meyring’s death in May 1757. On the 8th of March Abbé De la Caille left, after measuring an arc from near Strand and Adderley streets to Klipfontein in Piketberg. In April the Rev. Voltelen died; in November Johannes Frederik Bode, sent out by the directors, filled the Cape’s second chair. In May about two hundred San raided the Roggeveld and drove off some four hundred head of cattle; David van der Merwe pursued fourteen days, fifty-six were shot, all the cattle but forty-eight were recovered, and the commandant was slightly wounded. In May a boat with an officer and five men left the Naarstigheid at Delagoa Bay for Mozambique and was never heard of; towards the close of the year the packet Hector left Table Bay to search. On the 21st of September Marie Mouy died. In December the first of seventeen French men-of-war and transports from Mauritius began to arrive to refresh and lay in provisions; farm produce doubled or trebled and was paid for in money. Horak still sat Swellendam. De Nys still sat Simon’s Town. Kroonenburg still sat the Cape pulpit; Croeser Zwartland; Appeldoorn Stellenbosch; Van der Spuy Drakenstein; Harders, provisionally, Waveren. The gardens of 1652 were still a refreshment station under a Dutch flag, a Castle that posted its duties, and a fatherly chair that had seen an astronomer off in March and a paying fleet in in December. [3] [4] [7] [8] [9]