Boer History1759 at the Cape of Good Hope: French Provision Boom, Chinsurah Orders, and Consistories
Ninth Year: Castle Continuity — 1759
Calendar 1759 opened in the ninth 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 ninth 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. The ninth year tested that strength on a roadstead that filled with paying French hulls, on a church circuit the council cancelled, and on English colours that, after Bengal news, were to be treated more coolly than the treaties of peace might have suggested. [3] [7] [9]
Continuity of persons was the point of the ninth 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 had left on the 8th of March 1758. 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, now with the Rev. Johannes Frederik Bode, who had filled Voltelen’s place in November 1758. 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 was still under Remmerus Harders, sent inland in January 1758 by commissioner Johan Gideon Looten after Meyring’s death in May 1757. [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 1759. 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 ninth year therefore still lived inside that shadow: fewer free households, fewer bondsmen, and a colony that had exported 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]
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 1759 added no second Beutler-scale trek and no second Roggeveld commando. It added a paying fleet, a cancelled church meeting, and a cooler instruction about English flags. [3] [4] [7]
French Fleet and Provision Boom — January 1759
Matters had been at their worst when in December 1758 and January 1759 a fleet of seventeen French men-of-war and transports with troops arrived from Mauritius. They were sent here 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 empty foreign roadstead of 1756–1757 became a crowded market in a few weeks. 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. [3] [9]
The Cape had not planned the boom. It received it as a side-effect of European and Indian Ocean war. France and England were once more at war. That international fact had not crowded Table Bay with paying fleets in 1756 or 1757. In those two years 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. Magazines, butchers, and wine stores that had faced glut suddenly faced bidding. The settlement’s old role—refreshment station—paid in wartime cash. [3] [9]
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. The contest of endurance had gone on for twelve days; the French cooks must have been cutting their last piece of salted meat when one vessel fired her salute. “Not good enough,” the governor had said quietly, and not a single watermelon was picked in the garden for the French before their number two had also banged her respect for the Dutch flag. It took the visitors another four days to comply. Thereafter they got what they required, and in addition 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 years 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. January in Table Bay was not a north-west gale season. It was a paying fleet in the summer roadstead. [3] [9]
From this date the farmers were in a prosperous condition. French men-of-war, and later ships of both nations, came here to refresh and take in supplies. The officers of French packets from Mauritius and of English packets from St Helena bid against each other for cattle and meal and wine. The empty roadstead of the glut years had become a double auction. What the Castle could not do by placaat in 1756 and 1757—move the surplus—seventeen hulls and the packets that followed them did in cash. The ninth year is the first full calendar year of that market. [3] [9]
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 ninth year’s local face beside the boom: a watch-house and a levelled square in a capital that had buried more than two thousand people four years before, and a Castle that now watched strangers bid for the same wine it had failed to move. The gardens of 1652 were still a refreshment station. In January 1759 the station was paid for being one. [3] [9]
Farmers Prosper under Wartime Demand — 1759
On more than one occasion in this wartime stretch the government was unable to procure as much provision as was needed for the Company’s own ships, as the burghers were desirous of selling at high prices to strangers. That tension was the inverse of the insolvency years. The same farms that could not move wine in 1756 could not keep it from foreign pursers in 1759. The Castle still needed its own fleets fed. Burghers still preferred the higher foreign price. That contest, not insolvency, became the new administrative headache. [3]
The government, as well as individuals, profited by the strangers. The revenue was increased, a quantity of surplus wheat in the magazines was disposed of, and some shipments of Bourbon coffee were purchased at the low price of twenty-five shillings per hundred pounds for transmission to Europe. 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. A tax that had farmed for about thirty-eight pounds in its first year did not yet describe this market; the £1 export duty of 1756 sat on bulk wine and brandy sold to strangers, and strangers were now buying. [3]
The Huguenot valleys that had planted vines after 1688 now sold into a wartime bay. Drakenstein, the Paarl, Fransche Hoek, and Val du Charron—later Wellington—had been agricultural settlements whose fruit and grain had become plentiful while cattle remained scarce. Under the second van der Stel the settlement had been extended beyond the first mountain range to place colonists for cattle farming and stock grazing. The Tulbagh kloof remained the gateway to that inland basin. Wine from those old French names, and cattle from the outward runs of five or six thousand acres, were what French pursers paid for in January and through the year. The ninth year did not invent those farms. It paid them. [4] [7]
During the twenty-one years of Tulbagh’s government the average quantity of farm produce exported to India was 11,791 muids of wheat, 202 muids of rye, 68 muids of barley, 202 muids of peas, 174 muids of beans, and 346 leggers of common wine. Butter had first been exported to India in 1754; during the next eighteen years the quantity sent abroad annually averaged 22,322 pounds, usually purchased at the Company’s stores at sixpence to eightpence a pound. To Europe were sent yearly rather over 100 leggers of common wine and as much Constantia wine as could be obtained, which was usually not more than 14 or 15 leggers. From 1756 the price paid by the Company for red Constantia wine was £20 16s. 8d. and for white Constantia wine £10 8s. 4d. the legger, the proprietors of the farms into which the original estate was divided being obliged under an old contract to sell at that price. They could easily get double those sums from foreigners, and were loud in complaining. In 1759 that complaint had a new edge: the bay was paying foreigners’ prices while the Company still took Constantia at the old contract. [3]
Grain, unlike wine, still had a reserve logic. The poor wheat crop of 1756 had not stopped the usual export, because magazines held what the good harvest after June 1755 had left. Those magazines now found buyers among the strangers. The fiscal’s fee, shifted in the glut years from four shillings and twopence on every legger of wine sold to a foreigner to one shilling and fourpence on every hundred pounds of grain or meal, operated in a market where both wine and grain moved. Van Oudtshoorn still sat the independent chair. The same governor who would not let officers trade still could not make burghers sell cheaply to the Company when French pursers bid high. The ninth year’s prosperity was therefore not a placaat. It was a price. [3]
Wine from Glut toward a Paying Bay — 1759
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 1751–5 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 £14 11s. 8d. a legger. But the quality of the brandy sent as samples was so objectionable that the project fell through. The £1 export duty of 1756 and the quality quarrel with Batavia had not vanished. What changed in 1759 was demand at the anchorage. [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. A tax that farms for thirty-eight pounds describes years in which strangers were not buying bulk wine. In 1759 strangers were buying. The farm of that duty was no longer a glut-year token. [3]
Wartime callers cleared surplus that peacetime strangers had not. Batavia’s average take had already fallen; the bay’s foreign pursers now set the tone more than the India demand letter. Fiscal arrangements that had shifted fees from wine toward grain in the glut years suddenly operated in a market where both wine and grain moved. The Castle still needed its own fleets fed. Burghers still preferred the higher foreign price. The ninth year did not repeal the £1 duty. It filled the duty’s premise: strangers in bulk. [3]
The wine farmers who must specifically be mentioned, because their position had been desperate, were not a single district. Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, and the older peninsula vineyards all sat inside the same Batavia complaint and the same £1 duty. Huguenot households that had planted after the revocation still held those grants. On the 8th of November 1759 Marguerite Roux died. Born in 1682, she had married Estienne Viret of Dauphiné, who had arrived in the Zuid Beveland and had died on the 29th of October 1726, buried in the churchyard at Cape Town. He had had five sons, who do not appear to have left descendants in the male line. A Huguenot household that had sat the Cape since the turn of the century closed in the same twelve months that French packets paid cash for wine. French names on the old grants did not wait on the Mauritius fleet to remain French names. They were older than the ninth year. The year’s private death and the year’s public boom sit on different scales, as Marie Mouy’s death on the 21st of September 1758 had sat against the first French hulls, and as Catharina Cattepoel’s death had sat against the wine glut in 1757. [3] [8] [9]
Naudé of Berlin still served the Company. The French packets that bid for cattle, meal, and wine were not Huguenot families. They were wartime customers. The distinction mattered at a Castle that posted duties and at farms that sold what they had. Calendar 1759 paid both the old French names and the new French flags—without confusing them. [3] [8]
Chinsurah Crisis and Orders on English Ships — 1759
In 1759 an armament was sent by the government at Batavia to reinforce the garrison of the Dutch factory of Chinsurah on the Ganges. Colonel Clive was then the representative of the English East India Company at Fort William. He apprehended that if the Dutch forces were increased, the nabob Mir Jafar, who had been raised to power by his assistance, would form an alliance with them to the detriment of English interests in Bengal. [3]
England and the Netherlands were at peace, but Clive resisted the passage of the Dutch fleet up the Hooghly, captured the ships, and destroyed the army. Conditions were imposed upon the authorities at the Dutch factory, under which they were prohibited from building fortifications or raising troops. The Cape did not fight on the Hooghly. It received the echo. A Dutch factory on the Ganges, reinforced from Batavia, had been disarmed by an English Company commander while the two republics and kingdoms were still formally friends. That fact would travel from Bengal to Europe and from Europe to Table Bay as an instruction. [3]
When intelligence of this event reached Europe, the friendly feeling that had existed between Great Britain and the United Provinces was disturbed, and for a time it was doubtful whether peace would be maintained. Orders were issued by the directors that nothing which could be refused under existing treaties should be supplied to English ships touching at the Cape. The matter was adjusted without a rupture. The 1759 orders are the Cape echo of a Bengal crisis: French buyers welcome with cash, English callers under a cooler regulation until politics eased. [3] [9]
The contrast on the roadstead was therefore double. French packets from Mauritius bid for cattle, meal, and wine, and paid in money. English packets from St Helena bid too—until the directors’ cooler hand arrived. Treaties still bound what could not be refused. What could be refused was no longer to be given as a matter of course. Tulbagh, who had made two French ships wait sixteen days for a proper salute in the glut years, was not a man who confused courtesy with surrender of the flag. The ninth year’s English instruction asked him to be correct, not generous, toward a nation still at peace with the United Provinces and still at war with France. [3] [9]
Other foreigners obtained whatever they chose to pay for, excepting when the council thought it necessary to prohibit the sale of such articles as the Company needed and of which the supply was insufficient for all. That standing rule—sell to strangers unless the Company’s own need forbade it—now had a political overlay for English colours. Prussian ships had first been seen in Table Bay in 1755. The Swedish flag was first seen in 1759. The ninth year therefore added a new northern colour to the bay at the same moment that it cooled an old English one. Neutrality at a refreshment station was never only a price. It was also a treaty and a salute. [3]
Combined Consistories Cease; Swedish Flag — 1759
In 1759, by order of the council of policy, the yearly meetings of the combined consistories ceased to be held. The council considered that the meetings were serving no useful purpose, and that the travelling charges of the clergymen and elders were burthens too heavy to be borne by the congregations. The combined ecclesiastical council had been established in 1743. Parish boundaries had been settled on the 30th of August 1745. The yearly combined consistories had met on the third Monday of January. Sixteen years of that circuit—Cape, Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, Roodezand, Zwartland—ended by a Castle order in the same year that French pursers paid for wine the congregations could no longer tax themselves to discuss together. [3]
The various churches in the colony were well supplied with clergymen during the administration of Tulbagh. In 1759 the Cape sat two pastors: Hendrik Kroonenburg, arrived from Europe in October 1752, and Johannes Frederik Bode, sent out by the directors after Voltelen’s death in April 1758 and inducted in November of that year. Stellenbosch still sat Johannes Appeldoorn, arrived from Europe in September 1753 and stationed there the following month. Drakenstein still sat Petrus van der Spuy, transferred there at his own request in January 1753 when Van Echten returned to Holland. Zwartland still sat Gerhardus Croeser, who had gone there in November 1755 under an arrangement with Voltelen of which the government approved. Waveren still sat Remmerus Harders, removed from a ship by commissioner Looten in January 1758 and sent to minister until the place should be filled from the Netherlands. Five pulpits, five men, and no yearly combined meeting: that is the ninth year’s church map. [3]
The travelling charges that the council called too heavy were not a new complaint. Roodezand’s church at Waveren sat inland through the Tulbagh kloof; Zwartland sat north toward Malmesbury country; Stellenbosch and Drakenstein sat the old wine belt; the Cape sat the bay. Elders as well as clergymen had been expected to make that January circuit. In a year when wagons moved again after the seclusion months of the smallpox, and when militia muster could be called, the Castle nevertheless judged that the combined consistory no longer paid its cost. The congregations bore the burthen. The council stopped the meeting. [3] [7]
During the twenty-one years 1751–1771 there put into Table Bay 988 ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company, 168 English, 147 French, 81 Danish, 18 Swedish, 4 Prussian, 1 Portuguese, and 1 Spanish. During the same period 129 ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company, 14 English, 11 French, 18 Danish, and 2 Swedish put into Simon’s Bay. The whole number that touched at the two ports was 1,472, and the average yearly number 70. Those figures are the Tulbagh-period frame, not a single year’s count. Inside that frame the Prussian flag was first seen on a ship in Table Bay in 1755, and the Swedish in 1759. The ninth year is therefore a shipping year as well as a church year: a new northern colour in the bay, and an old combined meeting struck off the calendar. [3]
Other foreigners obtained whatever they chose to pay for, excepting when the council thought it necessary to prohibit the sale of such articles as the Company needed and of which the supply was insufficient for all. Swedish callers in 1759 sat inside that rule, as Danish callers had sat before them. They were not the French fleet. They were not the English packets under a cooler instruction. They were a new flag in a bay that had learned, in January, what a paying customer looked like. The average of seventy ships a year across Tulbagh’s twenty-one years includes glut years of twelve foreign calls and boom years of seventeen men-of-war at once. Calendar 1759 belongs to the second kind. [3]
Ninth Year Closed — 1759
The decade that opened with Tulbagh’s installation, De la Caille’s instruments, and the fiftieth penny closed a calendar year of French transports, rising food prices, a cancelled consistory circuit, a Swedish flag, and careful orders about English colours. Between those poles of the 1750s lay Beutler’s eastern march, the slave code, sumptuary rules, smallpox, the Doddington’s rock, leprosy confirmed among Europeans, wine collapse, a pontoon on the Breede, and a Roggeveld pursuit. The 1750s did not give the Cape a new province. They gave it a new governor’s style, a measured sky, a harsher slave ordinance, a demographic scar, and a wartime market that finally paid the farms in cash. [3]
Calendar 1759 may be closed on those names and numbers. Father Tulbagh, childless since 1753, councillor extraordinary since March 1755, sat a ninth year in which the last census still read 5,128 colonists and 5,787 slaves. In January a fleet of seventeen French men-of-war and transports from Mauritius finished arriving to refresh and lay in provisions; farm produce doubled or trebled and was paid for in money. French packets from Mauritius and English packets from St Helena bid against each other for cattle, meal, and wine. The government as well as individuals profited: revenue rose, surplus wheat moved, Bourbon coffee was bought at twenty-five shillings the hundred pounds. Burghers preferred strangers’ prices to the Company’s own need. After Clive’s action against the Dutch armament at Chinsurah, directors ordered that nothing which could be refused under existing treaties should be supplied to English ships touching at the Cape; the matter was adjusted without a rupture. By order of the council of policy the yearly meetings of the combined consistories ceased. The Swedish flag was first seen in Table Bay. On the 8th of November Marguerite Roux died. Horak still sat Swellendam. De Nys still sat Simon’s Town. Kroonenburg and Bode sat the Cape pulpit; Croeser Zwartland; Appeldoorn Stellenbosch; Van der Spuy Drakenstein; Harders, still provisionally, Waveren. [3] [4] [7] [8] [9]
Year 1759 is the hinge of the late 1750s into a paying early wartime stretch—still under Tulbagh, still under Company law, and now under the noise of European war in the roadstead. 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 the year before and a paying fleet in in January. What the ninth year did not do is as clear as what it did. It did not extend the eastern border. It did not fill a vacant landdrost. It did not restore Batavia’s old wine take. It paid the farms, cancelled a church circuit, cooled an English courtesy, and logged a Swedish colour. That is enough for one calendar. [3] [9]
The ninth year closed with cash in the bay and a thinner church calendar. French hulls had done what twelve foreign ships in two glut years had not. Combined consistories, useful or not, would no longer meet at the congregations’ travelling cost. English ships would find a cooler hand until the directors’ temper eased. Swedish colours were new in Table Bay. The Castle, the boards, and the fatherly chair remained. Calendar 1760 would have its own names. They are not this year’s ledger.