Boer History1779 at the Cape of Good Hope: Buitendag, Burgher Delegates, the Orange Named, and Xhosa Across the Fish
Fifth Full Installed Year: Castle Continuity — 1779
Calendar 1779 opened as the fifth full year of the Prince’s commission dated the 18th of May 1774. Joachim van Plettenberg still sat the first chair, a Friesland baron already raised, in February 1776, to councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India. Pieter Hacker sat the second chair, the post Otto Luder Hemmy had left in January 1777, after Fiscal Willem Cornelis Boers had declined it on the 1st of February. Boers still sat the fiscal’s office. Hacker’s confirmation had already put Jacobus Johannes le Sueur into the wine stores. December 1778 had already put Olof Godlieb de Wet into Stellenbosch’s drostdy after Marthinus Adriaan Bergh retired at his own request. Calendar 1779 inherited that arrangement: two living Castle chairs, a grave, a Hague advocate in his fifth fiscal year, and a tour secretary in the country chair. [3] [9]
In the country the same inherited chairs still sat. Abraham Faure still sat the secretaryship under De Wet. Swellendam remained under Daniel van Ryneveld. Christoffel Brand still sat the winter port. Damien Hugo Staring still sat the naval establishment. Captain Robert Jacob Gordon remained second in command of the military force under Lieutenant-Colonel Van Prehn, the post he had taken on the 1st of June 1777. The outposts at Saldanha Bay, Groenkloof, Klapmuts, Zonder End, and Buffeljagts River were still maintained; the woodcutters’ post formed in July 1777 at Zwart River, in Outeniqualand, between the later villages of George and Knysna, still sat a few soldiers beside axes. [3]
The pulpits of the fifth full installed year were those December 1778 had left. The Cape church, which had continued to be ministered to by three clergymen until Kroonenburg’s pension, now sat two: the Rev. Johannes Frederik Bode and the Rev. Johannes Petrus Serrurier of Hanau. Stellenbosch sat the Rev. Philip Kuys. Waveren sat the Rev. Johannes Abraham Kuys. Zwartland sat the Rev. Daniel Goldbach. Drakenstein still sat the Rev. Van der Spuy inside the elder controversy that January 1772 had opened over Thomas Arnoldus Theron. Combined consistories had already ceased in 1759. No Lutheran clergyman was yet tolerated in the colony. [3] [8]
Outward, the land regime still opened on the 11 July 1775 names. The eastern boundary of Stellenbosch, according to the resolution of the council of policy, remained the Fish river; Swellendam’s eastern paper remained the Bushman’s river. The September 1778 conference at Willem Prinsloo’s Boschberg farm had already tried to make that Fish paper a line both Europeans and Xhosa would keep. The names of the men who stood on the Xhosa side of that talk were not kept. The agreement had not been officially recorded. Prinsloo still sat the Little Fish. Adriaan van Jaarsveld still sat Bruintjes Hoogte, the ground he had taken in 1776, resolved not to move again if he could hold his own. 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. San marauders still disturbed the Nieuwveld, the Sneeuwberg, and the Winterberg. [3] [4]
The nine produce years 1772–1780 still framed the roadstead. Calendar 1779 sat inside those averages as the eighth produce year. During those nine years the average exportation to Europe was 15 leggers Constantia wine, 98 leggers ordinary wines, 10,714 muids of wheat, 28,800 pounds of tallow, and 8,614 pounds of aloes. The average export to India was 14,419 muids of wheat, 180 muids of rye, 66 muids of barley, 87 muids of beans, 100 muids of peas, 296 leggers of wine, 18,618 pounds of butter, 11,555 pounds of tallow, and 1,183 pounds of ivory. The prices paid by the Company remained ruinously low: wheat to India 8s. 9¾d. a muid, wheat to Europe 5s. 11½d. after government dues; butter 6d. to 8d., tallow about 2d. a pound. Foreign shipping had not fallen off. During the same nine years there put into Table Bay 418 Dutch ships, 159 English, 192 French, 41 Danish, 7 Swedish, 16 Spanish, 9 Portuguese, and 3 Austrian; and into Simon’s Bay 47 Dutch, 85 English, 46 French, 17 Danish, 1 Austrian, and 6 Swedish; or, on an average, 52 Dutch ships and 65 under various other flags touched yearly at the two ports. The fiscal still took control of the grain trade and permitted nothing to be sold to strangers without his leave. The burghers still protested against that infringement of their rights, but to no purpose. [3] [9]
Buitendag Seized — 20 January 1779
Ever since the accession of Mr. Van Plettenberg to power there had been a feeling of discontent throughout the colony. There was no sympathy between the governor and the people. Governor Tulbagh had kept a watchful eye upon every official, and allowed no one to overstep the directions concerning farming and trading, or to take a fee that he was not entitled to. Governor Van Plettenberg permitted his subordinates to do almost as they chose. The result was a condition of affairs in which no transaction with government could be carried on without bribery, in which many of the officials farmed and traded openly, and the colonists generally became discontented. He could not keep his fiscal in check, nor other members of his government who traded for their own account. For that reason, mainly, the administration became almost as abhorrent to the colonists as that of Wilhem Adriaan van der Stel. The fiscal was detested as few men in South Africa have been, and instead of being a check upon the governor, he was held to be the worse of the two. His control of trade with foreigners opened a door to extensive bribery. [3] [9]
From the earliest days of the settlement the government had claimed and exercised the right of sending out of the country persons of bad character, especially those of idle and dissolute habits. During the forty years from 1738 to 1778 thirty-three individuals were thus deported, without a trial before a court of justice. Governor Tulbagh, during the twenty years that he was head of the colony, had sent away ten. Governor Van Plettenberg in less than eight years sent away eighteen. The American revolution had commenced, and tidings came over the sea of other colonists resisting rulers who oppressed them. In distant farmhouses and in dwellings in Cape Town the question of rights and liberties was discussed as it had never been before. Party feeling began to run very high. The junior officials were mostly either colonists by birth or married into colonial families, so that the existing system had its defenders. There was a large party loyal to the Netherlands, but desirous of a change from a bad to a good government, and there was a small party ready to plunge into anarchy, without understanding what they were advocating. Matters were in this state when the fiercest passions of the burghers were roused by an act of the government as imprudent as it was tyrannical. [3] [7] [9]
A man named Carel Hendrik Buitendag — Karel in one account, Buytendag in another — who had been living in the Land of Waveren, had recently come to reside in the town. This man was addicted to intemperance, and when partly intoxicated was very violent in his conduct. He was married into a respectable colonial family, but his treatment of his wife and of his Khoikhoi servants was at times so brutal that when he was residing at Waveren the landdrost and heemraden of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein petitioned the council of policy for his forcible removal. No action was taken upon this petition, nor was any immediate notice taken of an application to the fiscal by his wife to be separated from him, made during one of his outbursts of intemperance. In Cape Town his conduct improved. His wife seemed happier; he had obviously mended his ways. One account has him arrested on an unproved accusation made three years previously, and condemned without a trial to leave the country for military service in India. Another has the seizure twenty days after a forgotten domestic quarrel, when he was conducting himself properly. The two reports agree on the date, the house, the fiscal’s order, and the ship. [3] [7] [9]
On the 20th of January 1779 he was seized in his own house by order of the fiscal, dragged hurriedly through the streets by the lowest menials of the law, and sent on board the Honkoop, a vessel lying in the bay and bound to Batavia. His wife and children followed to the beach, crying and imploring help, but there was not time to effect a rescue. The persons employed by the fiscal to arrest Buitendag and convey him to the ship’s boat were the black scavengers of the town, who were used to take drunken slaves to prison. Hardly any act of oppression could have wounded the burghers so deeply as this, for pride of race was part of their nature. Advocate Boers could not have found a sharper knife to put in the flesh of the burghers. The spark that sets fire to rebellions is often a tiny one. In the case of the Cape settlement it was, moreover, belated and seemingly extinguished at the very moment it did its fiery work. It carried the name Carel Hendrik Buitendag. This farmer from the Land of Waveren had not a single qualification for the rôle of hero in a revolution which fate made him play. [3] [9]
On his arrival at Batavia, Buitendag complained of his treatment to the council of India, by whom permission was given him to return to the Cape. He therefore embarked in the first ship that left, but died during the passage. Permission later given at Batavia to return did not save him. The deportation in the manner here related brought on a crisis. The most respectable burghers consulted together, and came to a determination to send delegates to the Netherlands to endeavour to obtain from the stadtholder and the directors redress of their grievances and guarantees against future misgovernment. Then for the first time in the history of the colony was discussed the right of the people to have representatives in the legislature, and the theory rapidly gained ground that such representation would prove the best safeguard of liberty. The reaction came promptly. Many prominent citizens discarded the secrecy of their protest meetings and now came into the open. [3] [9]
Four Delegates and a Memorial — 1779
Although tempers had run high at the Buitendag incident, the burghers acted with restraint. They approached the three burgher councillors — representing the civic community in the council of policy — and four of the heemraden of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein. They requested these gentlemen to apply on their behalf to the governor and council for permission to elect a delegation to the Netherlands for presenting their grievances to the Lords Seventeen. At the sitting of the council of policy on the 30th of March 1779 a letter was read from the three burgher councillors, Cornelis van der Poel, Christiaan George Maasdorp, and Gerrit Hendrik Meyer, and four of the heemraden of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, Philip Albert Myburgh, Jan de Villiers, Joost Rynhard van As, and Hendrik Louw, stating that they had been requested by between three and four hundred burghers to apply for permission to elect some persons to be sent to Holland to lay before the directors the condition of affairs in this colony, and asking leave to do so. The council refused its consent, but asserted its willingness to consider any complaints made to it and to redress any grievances that could be shown to exist. The governor declared he was quite capable of looking into their complaints himself, and to be willing to correct the situation if such were necessary. At that stage he was, indeed, still genuinely prepared to meet their demands insofar as he possibly could. [3] [9]
The opponents of the government were not satisfied with this decision, because they had no confidence in the men who were at the head of affairs, and no confidence in a government with Fiscal Boers as one of its mainstays. They made no farther applications to the council therefore, but elected the burghers Jacobus van Reenen, Barend Jacob Artois, Tieleman Roos, and Nicholas Godfried Heyns as their representatives to proceed to Europe. Although the majority were residents of Cape Town, several inhabitants of the outlying districts joined. In the eyes of the governor they now became real rebels, for they went around with a memorial in which all their grievances were clearly set out. These persons drew up a memorial of grievances and proposed remedies, which received the approval of their constituents. It was dated the 7th of May 1779. The four delegates then proceeded to Holland, carrying with them a document authorising them to act for the persons who signed it, four hundred and four in number. The memorial was not shown to the governor and the council, but securely stored — one surmises — in the breast pocket of the leader of the delegation travelling to Amsterdam. [3] [7] [9]
The memorial contained thirty-seven clauses. The first part was devoted to accusing the officers of government, and particularly the independent fiscal Willem Cornelis Boers, of fraudulent conduct and oppression. Many of the junior officials were accused of trading so openly that shops were kept and accounts made out in their names. The burghers of the town who lived by commerce, it was asserted, could not compete with these traders, and were consequently being ruined. The whole system of exacting fees by the various officials on almost every business transaction was explained, and the individuals receiving them were charged with corruption. But in this the complainants laboured under the same difficulties that those must always do who are ignorant of the confidential instructions of the heads of a government to subordinates. They supposed that the receipt of fees except in certain well-known cases was unauthorised, whereas in reality the various officials were empowered to charge certain amounts, and could in justice only be accused of corruption when these amounts were exceeded. The general trend of the document was discontent with the whole method of administration of the Colony by the Company, and concrete suggestions were presented for remedying the wrongs. [3] [9]
The complainants asked that the orders issued in 1706 prohibiting officials from farming or dealing in farm produce should be strictly enforced; that the burghers should be allowed to dispose of the produce of the country to strangers, without first obtaining the consent of the fiscal; that persons banished from the colony should be sent to the Fatherland, not to India; that the burghers should be at liberty to punish their slaves without the necessity of first applying to the fiscal; that the laws of the country should be clearly defined and made known; that seven burgher members should have seats in the council of policy, and that these members should send a report upon the colony yearly to the Assembly of Seventeen; that the high court of justice should consist of equal numbers of officials and burghers; that there should be a right of appeal to the courts of the Fatherland, instead of to the court at Batavia; that the burghers should be allowed to trade with the Netherlands to the extent of one or two ships’ cargoes yearly; that they should also be allowed free trade with India and in slaves with Madagascar and the east coast of Africa; that the Company should purchase ordinary wine at £8 a legger, from which nothing should be deducted but 12s. government dues; that foreigners should not be allowed to travel about the country; that a smaller rental than £4 16s. should be charged on farms of inferior quality; and that more churches should be provided. [3]
On the 16th of October 1779 the four delegates appeared before the Assembly of Seventeen. They made a verbal statement of the wretched condition of the colony and the unjust acts of the officials, and delivered the memorial with a large number of documents supporting it. The gentlemen from Cape Town were ushered into the imposing meeting hall of East-India House. Jacobus van Reenen spoke well, and concluded his address by putting the memorial with its annexures on the table. The mighty lords were very polite. They assured their honoured guests that they desired nothing more ardently than the Colony’s prosperity and the happiness of its burghers. In the following week the whole of the papers were referred to a committee of the chambers of Amsterdam and Zeeland to examine, collect evidence, and report upon. A copy of the memorial and its annexures was sent to the Cape for the various officers concerned to reply to. The directors at the same time wrote expressing their great regret that there should be an ill feeling between the colonists and the officials, and hoping that tranquillity would be speedily restored. They expressed a desire for the prosperity of the colonists, and commanded that everything that was possible should be done to allay strife. They would be greatly displeased, they said, if any resentment were shown, directly or indirectly, towards those who had signed the memorial. Calendar 1779 therefore put four Cape names into East-India House, a thirty-seven-clause paper on the table, an Amsterdam–Zeeland committee, a copy on a ship toward Table Bay, and a directors’ letter that forbade resentment. It did not yet put a Cape reply on the record. [3] [9]
Gordon Names the Orange — 17 August 1779
Two years after the October 1777 road, the same gentlemen made another journey together. In October 1777 Captain Gordon had left Cape Town in company with Lieutenant William Paterson, an English traveller, on a journey of exploration. He had proceeded by way of the Sneeuwberg to the Great river, which he came upon quite unexpectedly somewhere near the twenty-sixth meridian from Greenwich. He travelled for a day along its southern bank in search of a ford, but did not find one, so was unable to cross. From the summit of a hill he observed that the river was formed by the junction of two streams, at no great distance to the eastward. Lieutenant Paterson had returned to the Cape, in ill health, some time before. That inland sight had been nearly six hundred miles distant from the mouth. [3]
This time they travelled northward through Little Namaqualand to the mouth of the great river. Captain Gordon had taken a boat with him, which he placed on the stream, so that he had now a much better opportunity for examining the immense flow of water than in 1777. On the 17th of August 1779 he hoisted the Dutch colours to a staff in his boat, and while floating in the centre of the stream he named it the Orange, in honour of the stadtholder. He and Lieutenant Paterson examined it from the mouth upwards some thirty or forty miles. Since that date geographers have usually called the river by the name which Captain Gordon gave it, but the colonists term it indiscriminately the Orange, Great, and Gariep. One account places the naming on a tributary of that mighty river while the governor’s 1778 northern camp sat hippopotami and a Company monogram. The dated hoist in midstream at the mouth is the 17th of August 1779. The 1778 stone marked a limit. The 1779 colours marked a name. [3] [9]
August therefore put a Dutch flag on a staff in a boat, a stadtholder’s name on a river the 1777 hill had only seen from the south bank, and two travellers thirty or forty miles up from a mouth that Little Namaqualand had opened. Gordon still sat second under Van Prehn. Paterson still sat an English traveller’s journal. The Castle still sat Hacker and Boers. The first chair was not on this northern water. He had already set a 1778 monogram on a Zeekoe tributary and a Company’s-arms stone on a Keurboom beach. Calendar 1779 added the Orange at the mouth, with a boat the inland year had not carried. [3]
Country Courts Enlarged — 1779
In 1779 the jurisdiction of the courts of landdrost and heemraden was enlarged, owing to the difficulty of bringing cases from distant parts for trial before the court of justice in Cape Town. Henceforth civil cases in which the amount in dispute was less than £10 were summarily decided in these courts. Distant cases were so hard to bring to Cape Town that the fifth full installed year put a money line on the country benches: under ten pounds, the drostdy; over ten pounds, still the Castle’s court. De Wet’s Stellenbosch board and Van Ryneveld’s Swellendam board therefore sat a civil power they had not sat in 1778. The March 1778 petitioners had asked for a landdrost’s court in the east because unbridged rivers made Stellenbosch a month away. Calendar 1779 did not create that eastern drostdy. It enlarged the two that already sat. [3]
The same year that put £10 on the country courts still sat the fiscal’s leave on every muid sold to a stranger. The nine-year produce frame had not opened the grain trade. The memorial of 7 May had already asked that burghers be allowed to dispose of the produce of the country to strangers without first obtaining the fiscal’s consent, and that the 1706 orders prohibiting officials from farming or dealing in farm produce be strictly enforced. The country-court enlargement was not an answer to that memorial. It was an answer to distance: Bruintjes Hoogte, the Boschberg, the Zuurveld, the Sneeuwberg, a month of unbridged rivers, and a high court that could not sit every small debt. The £10 line kept the Castle’s court for the larger sums, and gave De Wet and Van Ryneveld the smaller ones. [3]
The enlargement also sat inside the same inherited hardship that the 1778 tour had already heard. Frontier farmers had represented that owing to the unbridged rivers it was often a journey of a month to the village of Stellenbosch, so that practically they were cut off from a court of justice. They were willing to contribute liberally towards the expense of erecting the necessary buildings. The governor had admitted that their request was reasonable, and had promised to recommend it favourably to the directors, a promise fulfilled upon his return, though it was not immediately attended to in Holland. Calendar 1779 therefore sat a £10 civil power in the two old drostdies, and still no third drostdy on the Fish. The country courts were enlarged. The eastern court was not yet built. [3] [4]
Xhosa Clans Cross the Fish — 1779
Governor Van Plettenberg had arranged with some Xhosa chiefs that the Fish river should not be crossed by either Europeans or Bantu, but this agreement had not been officially recorded. After his return from the eastern province he had seen to it that his council ratified the verbal arrangements he had made with some petty captains, whereby the Fish marked a north-eastern line. It soon appeared that the Xhosa did not care one jot about resolutions issued at the Castle. They repeatedly crossed the Fish, either in retaliation of European encroachments on their territory, as they alleged, or to raid Khoikhoi kraals in evidence of their pretensions not to have any hostile feelings towards the white men of the settlement. That the Xhosa themselves did not regard the so-called treaty with any great concern is evident from the fact that in the ensuing year they poured into the Zuurveld in vastly increased numbers. This was most likely due, not to any defiance of the governor’s injunction, but to the consequences arising from an increasing population requiring more land, coupled with a general disposition to quarrel which induced the weaker tribes to remove from the vicinity of the stronger. [3] [4] [9]
In 1779 the Imidange under the chief Mahuta — Mahota, son of Umdange, in another account — the Amambala under the chief Langa, and some other clans of less note crossed the Fish river and spread themselves over the present districts of Somerset East and Albany, the southern portion of the later Graaff Reinet country, where some of the Dutch farmers, with their increasing flocks and herds, were thinly scattered. For some such reason the Imidange and the Amambala crossed into the Zuurveld, dispossessing the Gqunukhwebe under Tshaka. These latter fled for refuge to the western side of the Bushman’s river. One account names the clans that crossed as Gaika and Ndlambe. The dated 1779 names in the Castle’s reports and in the eastern chapter are Imidange and Amambala, with a Gqunukhwebe feud behind the first parties. [3] [4] [7]
Some persons asserted that the Europeans had provoked the Xhosa to invade the colony. There was a story in circulation that old Willem Prinsloo, of the Boschberg, had exasperated the Imidange by shooting one of them whom he caught in the act of stealing a sheep, and by seizing some of their cattle to make good his losses. There was another story that Marthinus Prinsloo, a son of the former, had gone across the Keiskama with a party trading for cattle in defiance of the prohibitions of the government, and had there in a quarrel killed one of Rarabe’s immediate retainers. It was stated also that a petty chief named Koba, who was one of those that agreed to the Fish river being the boundary, having crossed over to the colonial side, was driven back again by the colonists with unnecessary violence. It is impossible now to say whether these reports were true or not. They were put in circulation by men who were certainly biassed in favour of the Xhosa, and the explanations of the Prinsloos, if any were ever given, are not to be found. [3]
The official reports were to the effect that the first parties who crossed the Fish river said they did not want to quarrel with the Europeans, but they had a feud with the Gqunukhwebe clan, and these, having taken shelter behind the colonists on the Bushman’s river, sent out parties to lift their cattle. To prove the truth of their assertions, they murdered a number of Khoikhoi and took their cattle, without at first molesting the colonists. The invading clans, evidently perceiving the concern which their presence created, hastened to assure the farmers that there was no intention to molest them, in demonstration of which kindly feeling they considerately murdered a number of Khoikhoi and took their cattle. But shortly they began to drive off the herds of the white people also. Some Khoikhoi were killed in these raids, and some cattle and sheep belonging to white settlers were also carried off. All the country between the Great Fish and the Bushman’s rivers — the land constituting the present districts of Albany and Bathurst — was then overrun. [3] [4] [7]
On the 27th of September 1779 the field corporal Jan Hermanus Potgieter sent a report that the farmers of the Zuurveld, or the present districts of Albany and Bathurst, together with those along the right bank of the Bushman’s river, had been obliged to withdraw to a place of greater safety. Towards the end of 1779 matters had become so serious that the farmers had to abandon their holdings in the Zuurveld and Bushman’s river district and seek safety in other parts. Depredations, however, soon began, and with them all the fears and anxieties which, at an earlier date, had been the result of proximity to the San. The same tactics that have been practised by the Xhosa in every subsequent struggle with the colony were used in this, the first war on that line. Rarabe sent a message to the nearest European outpost, to the effect that the clans committing the depredations were rebels, and that he would be glad to receive assistance against them. The colonists, as yet without experience of that duplicity, believed Rarabe’s statement, though some of his immediate followers were among the plunderers. [3] [4]
Joubert and Ferreira Take the Field — Summer 1779–80
It became necessary to band together for mutual protection and recovery of property, and thus began the commando system against the Xhosa. Two burgher commandos were called out. One account has the first war commenced in September 1779, on the same month as Potgieter’s report. During the summer of 1779–80 two commandos took the field for the purpose of expelling the intruders. One, composed of the farmers from both sides of Bruintjes Hoogte, was under command of Josua Joubert. The refugees from the Zuurveld and their friends west of the Bushman’s river formed the other, which was commanded by Pieter Hendrik Ferreira. The operations were aimed at recovering the cattle which had been stolen and driving the depredators back over the Fish river. Van Jaarsveld still sat Bruintjes Hoogte as a farmer among Joubert’s neighbours, not yet as field commandant over the whole eastern border. The two summer commandos were district gatherings, not a Castle commission. [3] [4] [7]
September put Potgieter’s withdrawal on paper. The summer that followed put Joubert and Ferreira in the field. One account begins the war in that September. Another begins the two commandos in the summer of 1779–80. Both sit inside calendar 1779’s second half: a Zuurveld emptied, Bruintjes Hoogte armed, and the Fish still a spoken line. [3] [7]
The Imidange were attacked and defeated on several occasions, when a considerable number of their cattle were taken; but they were not entirely driven to their own side of the Fish river. Many cattle, indeed, were recaptured, but the Xhosa managed to elude their pursuers and only a portion were driven back to their own country. The fifth full installed year therefore closed on a first chair that still sat Hacker and Boers, a £10 civil line in two old drostdies, four Cape names already heard in East-India House, a Dutch flag named Orange at a river mouth, a 27 September withdrawal from the Zuurveld, and two summer commandos that had beaten the Imidange without clearing the colonial bank. Calendar 1779 did not yet put Van Jaarsveld over the whole eastern border. It put Joubert on both sides of Bruintjes Hoogte, Ferreira with the Zuurveld refugees, and a Fish line that the 1778 talk had spoken and that the Imidange and Amambala had already crossed. [3] [4]
The eight produce year still sat 52 Dutch ships and 65 foreign flags on the two bays’ average. The Cape pulpit still sat Bode and Serrurier. Stellenbosch still sat De Wet and Philip Kuys. Swellendam still sat Van Ryneveld. Gordon still sat second under Van Prehn, with an Orange name newly hoisted at a mouth he had not reached in 1777. The 404 signatures still sat in Holland with an Amsterdam–Zeeland committee, and a directors’ letter forbidding resentment was already on the water. The Zuurveld farmers were no longer on their runs. The fifth full installed year ended on those facts, without a third drostdy, without a cleared Fish, and without a Cape answer yet written to the thirty-seven clauses. [3]