Boer History1800 at the Cape of Good Hope: Yonge, the September Sentences, Duckitt, and the Gazette
Yonge Takes Civil Power — January 1800
Calendar 1800 opened from the gardens of 1652 with the colony already a British possession and a new baronet in the governor’s chair. Sir George Yonge had arrived in Table Bay on the 9th of December 1799 in the ship-of-war Lancaster and had taken the oaths at eleven o’clock the following morning before the officials and people of note in the town. Major-General Francis Dundas had still been on the frontier that December. In January 1800 the acting governor came in from the east and surrendered his authority in civil matters to Yonge. The Castle that had watched Table Bay since 1652 thus opened the year under a civil governor who had never displayed ability of a high order, and under a general who kept the troops. [3] [4]
The grounds of the appointment remained uncertain. From 1754 to 1794 Yonge had represented Honiton in the house of commons. He had been vice-treasurer of Ireland, a lord commissioner of the admiralty, from 1784 to 1794 one of the secretaries at war, and more recently master of the mint. He may therefore have had a claim to a lucrative appointment. No man at the head of the Cape government was more generally disliked. In one despatch he reported that the colonists termed him their father; those who used such language were only a few suppliants for mercy. With the exception of favourites of his own appointment he was not on friendly terms with the officers of his government, and he reported that the only efficient public servant he found on arrival was Hercules Ross. From the gardens of 1652 the civil sword thus passed to a man whose despatches already read with something like alarm in London, while the Boschberg prisoners still sat untried in the Castle cells. [3]
The high posts remained English and salaried. Yonge had filled important situations without displaying ability of a high order; the king’s ministers had nevertheless selected him on Macartney’s retirement. Dundas, who had acted from the 21st of November 1798, kept the military command when he gave up the civil. The eastern truce that Maynier had named peace in October 1799 still held only as a word. Fort Frederick still stood new stone at Algoa Bay. Twenty men had been sent from Boschberg; one had died in the Castle; nineteen waited. Calendar 1800 thus opened not with a new war but with a new signature on old paper — a civil governor in the chair, a general on the troops, and a prison that had not yet seen a trial. [3] [4]
In March, far from Table Bay, Jan Willem Janssens was appointed Secretary-General of the War Department at The Hague, a post equivalent in military terms to major-general. Born at Nijmegen on the 12th of October 1762, son of Johannes Jacobus Janssens of the Van Aylva regiment and Adriana van Rees, he had joined as a cadet at twelve, been major at twenty-six, and been wounded in the campaign against the French in 1793. Between 1797 and 1800 he had served as commissioner for the French troops in Batavian employ. The Cape of 1800 did not yet see him; the Castle of 1652 still flew the British flag. The appointment nevertheless placed, in the Batavian war office, the soldier-administrator who would later be named to the colony when restoration came. [9]
Yonge’s civil year thus opened with Dundas off the frontier and Maynier still resident commissioner in the east. The burgher senate sat; Stellenbosch was quiet under Van der Riet; Swellendam had Faure. What the new governor inherited was not a settled occupation but a truce that the farmers would not call peace, a model of civil authority untried on the eastern drostdies, and a prison diet already fifteen months old. The Castle of 1652 had watched fleets water and be gone; it now watched a baronet take the civil pen while the general kept the sword. [3] [4]
Maynier on the Frontier — 1800
Maynier stayed in the east as resident commissioner when Dundas rode west. The recent negotiations with the Xhosa were more a withdrawal from hostilities than a restoration of peace. He had to control a class of people who hated him personally and were little better disposed to the government he represented; he had two Xhosa factions on bad terms with each other; he had to appease Khoikhoi who had taken up arms in 1799. Many Khoikhoi were induced to re-enter farmers’ service. Registration and his arbitration in disputes were reported as working. Relief to the poorest came from a fund placed at his disposal. He wrote privately — and in French for greater safety — suggesting that the Graaff Reinet prisoners in the Castle be set free on condition of answering for their friends’ behaviour: a gracious act, he argued, that would still have taken notice of the rising. Lands for captains and a leave for Xhosa to remain on the Sundays and Bushman’s rivers if they kept the peace belonged to the same truce-paper of late 1799 that he was now to administer without Dundas at his back. [4]
After the arrangement called peace, Graaff Reinet remained wretched. The upper fieldcornetcies were again occupied, but the heavy cattle losses were not made good, and poverty was general. Toward the close of 1799 locusts in vast swarms ate off every green thing, so that even the game disappeared. In February 1800 heavy rains fell, and great flocks of locust-birds came from some unknown place in the north and speedily devoured the insects. The game did not return for a long time. Many families who had few or no domestic cattle were actually in want of food. Country near the Xhosa and Khoikhoi kraals was nearly uninhabited, as neither life nor property was safe there. [3]
To the farmers it seemed as if justice, as well as order, had fled. It was of no use to bring charges against coloured people before Maynier: no matter how good the case, he would not decide in their favour. He reported that the Xhosa and the Khoikhoi were behaving themselves very well. For the colonists in the district he had no good word. They considered his presence a greater evil even than the raiding horde, and blamed him for more misery than they should have done. One thing irritated them exceedingly. The original church in the village had been destroyed by fire early in 1799; in the midst of trouble they had put up another building for worship, and it was now a barrack for the pandours. Dundas said it was a necessity to have shelter for the Khoikhoi soldiers, that the building was cleaned and the men withdrawn some time before divine service, and that a proper barrack would be built as soon as possible. The colonists’ view was that the church was being polluted by the heathen, and this too was set down to Maynier’s account, though he had nothing to do with it. [3]
In March 1800 Maynier’s health broke down, and Dr. William Somerville was appointed assistant commissioner. A conspiracy in which Gaika was implicated aimed to attack and destroy the drostdy and carry the two commissioners into Xhosa country. A party of Gaika’s warriors entered the colony; at the Baviaan’s River they met Cungwa and his people, who — probably in their own interest — repelled the invaders. Maynier sent a message to Gaika; the answer left no doubt of its inspiration. Gaika replied that the only ground of peace was the release of the prisoners in Capetown: they were his allies, and until that demand was complied with no present of whatever value would be received. Coenraad du Buys was also to be considered in the terms. Christoffel Botha, one of the fugitive rebels, was afterwards taken and carried to the drostdy. He confessed that the intention was, with Gaika’s aid, to drive the English out, and that in the event of success Buys was to have been sovereign. [4]
On the 24th of April 1800 the reverend Aling died at Paarl and was buried in front of the pulpit in the old church. The congregation stood without a minister for about seven years after. While Graaff Reinet’s new church was a pandour barrack, the old Huguenot pulpit at Paarl thus lost the man who had held it through the first British years. Farther north, beyond the Orange, the missionary Anderson went to work in 1800 among a wandering people who still spoke Cape Dutch, lived by plunder and the chase, and had as yet few marks of settled life. From the gardens of 1652 the year thus counted a vacant Paarl pulpit, a polluted Graaff Reinet nave, and a new station beyond the river that Macartney had proclaimed the northern bound. [4] [8]
Capetown Gazette — 16 August 1800
During Yonge’s tenure an official Gazette began to be published. It was at first termed the Capetown Gazette and African Advertiser and was issued weekly by Messrs Walker and Robertson, merchants at the Cape. It was the organ by which all proclamations and official notices were made public, and for many years it contained also trade advertisements and such general reading as the government considered might be safely placed before the people. Very little information concerning South Africa is to be had from it, and even its foreign intelligence is generally limited to matters not political. [3]
Shortly after its first appearance — the 16th of August 1800 — John Barrow was appointed censor. From that date the publication has been continuous. In the same year Barrow married Anna Maria Truter, intending to make South Africa his home. He had been auditor-general since 1798; the Gazette now put the colony’s proclamations under the eye of Macartney’s former private secretary. Born in 1764 at Dragley Beck near Ulverstone, he had come out with Macartney and already written of the interior with a confidence the farmers did not share. [3] [4]
As late as July 1800 Yonge so far restricted the press as to prevent matter of any kind being printed by anyone except the Cape Town firm that issued the Gazette. Under Dutch rule restrictive placaats had applied not only to the colony but to Holland itself; the first British occupation did not open the type. The Castle of 1652 thus gained, in Yonge’s second half-year, a weekly organ and a monopoly of print. What the farmers of Graaff Reinet could read of their own trial would be what the censor passed. [3] [4]
The Gazette did not end the rumour that had run since the dragoon-stables fire of November 1798. It did give the government a single sheet in which to post wheat prices, agricultural notices, and the sentences that the high court would deliver in September. From the gardens of 1652 the colony had waited a century and a half for a printed weekly; when it came, it came as an official organ under a censor, not as a free press. Calendar 1800 is the year that sheet began, and the year the type was locked to one firm. [3] [4]
Trial in August — Sentences 3 September 1800
Owing to various causes, the prisoners sent from Boschberg on the 6th of April 1799 were not brought to trial before August 1800. They had arrived at the Castle on the 12th of June 1799 in the sloop Rattlesnake. For nearly fifteen months they sat in confinement. These men, whose early lives had been passed in active exercise in the open air, suffered severely from scanty prison diet — chiefly rice-water — and the closeness of their quarters. With them were detained persons charged with political offences, and in one apartment eighty-six prisoners were locked up at night. It was rarely that any of their friends could obtain permission to visit them. Relatives, people in Capetown, and even the burgher senate sent petitions begging less rigorous treatment; the authorities thought an example necessary, and held that, considering the charge, they were being dealt with leniently. [3] [4] [7]
One of the prisoners having died, nineteen were put upon their trial. The high court that sat was Olof Godlieb de Wet as president, with A. Fleck, C. Matthiessen, H. A. Truter and J. P. Baumgardt; fiscal W. S. van Ryneveld conducted the prosecution. The continued imprisonment without trial of all the accused — including the two afterwards acquitted — from June 1799 to August 1800 was against both the spirit and the letter of the British constitution as the frontier men understood it. From the Castle of 1652 the court now sat on men who had laid down arms at Willem Prinsloo’s farm under the impression, they said, that surrender carried pardon. [3] [7]
At Boschberg on the 6th of April 1799 one hundred and twelve or one hundred and thirteen of the insurgents, including Prinsloo, had surrendered. Eighteen of the most guilty had been sent to Algoa Bay and put on board the Rattlesnake; the rest of those seized had been fined and released. Buys, Jan Botha and five others equally named had not surrendered, but fled into Xhosa country; a reward of £200 for each, dead or alive, had been offered without result. Native disturbances immediately following had delayed the trial. The nineteen who now stood before De Wet were therefore not the whole rising, but the men the Castle had been able to hold through a year of war and truce. [4] [7]
On the 3rd of September judgment was delivered. Marthinus Prinsloo and Adriaan van Jaarsveld were sentenced to death — to be hanged and buried beneath the gallows. Cornelis Edeman was sentenced to be flogged on the scaffold and then banished from the colony for life. Theunis Botha, Gerrit Hendrik Rautenbach, Barend Jacobus Bester, Jan Izaak Bonte, Pieter Frederik Rautenbach, Godlieb Koch, Gerrit Scheepers and Pieter Ignatius van Kamer were sentenced to be struck over the head with a sword and then banished for life. Lucas Meyer and Zacharias Albertus van Jaarsveld were to witness the foregoing punishments and then be banished for life; Willem Grobbelaar and Jacob Kruger, the same witnessing, then banishment for ten years. Willem Venter was sentenced to imprisonment for two years, Paul Venter for one. Gerrit Botha and Jan Kruger were acquitted, on consideration of having already undergone a long imprisonment. [3] [4] [7]
Edeman was a schoolmaster and had written letters exciting the farmers to take up arms. He was not a fighting man; his offence was ink. The eight named for the sword were not the chief leaders but prominent and active participants. Meyer, Zacharias van Jaarsveld, Kruger and Grobbelaar were to watch and then go. The two Venters had already sat nearly fifteen months; Paul’s one-year sentence was already exceeded by the lock-up. The Castle that had held them since June 1799 thus heard, on a September Wednesday, death for the old commandant and for Prinsloo, the scaffold for a schoolmaster, and banishment for a dozen names that the Fish and the Boschberg knew. [3] [7]
Yonge Refers the Sentences
Yonge mitigated the sentences of Willem and Paul Venter by releasing them upon their giving security to appear whenever called upon. Willem had been condemned to two years and had already been in gaol nearly fifteen months; Paul, sentenced to one year, had suffered the same length of time. Gerrit Botha and Jan Kruger, though acquitted, were required before leaving the prison to take an oath of allegiance to the king of England and to give security for their future good behaviour. Had they refused, they would have had soldiers quartered on them in their border homesteads, or been kept locked in the Castle. The step was one to which inhabitants had become accustomed since the occupation began. [3] [7]
Edeman’s sentence was ordered to be carried out at once. He was flogged on the scaffold and sent to New South Wales as soon as an opportunity occurred. He had no influential friends; he was a poor Hollander schoolmaster. That a schoolmaster should be a republican and should incite to rebellion was intolerable to the Castle officials. He was not a British subject. The remaining fourteen prisoners — Prinsloo, Van Jaarsveld, the eight of the sword, Meyer, Zacharias van Jaarsveld, Grobbelaar and Jacob Kruger — had their sentences suspended until the pleasure of the king could be made known. Beyond keeping them in prison, Yonge was disinclined to do anything further without instructions from England. They went back to the cells under the lion and crown of the Castle of 1652 to wait. [3] [4] [7]
Maynier’s French letter proposing a conditional liberation had already failed to move the Castle. Gaika’s demand that the prisoners be released as the price of peace had failed likewise. The fourteen remained. Calendar 1800 therefore did not hang Prinsloo or Van Jaarsveld, and it did not send the eight over the water. It flogged a schoolmaster, extracted an oath from two acquitted men, and referred death and banishment to London. The outer portal of the Castle now stood, in the eyes of farm-houses from Table Mountain to the Bamboesberg, as the place where the Boschberg surrender of April 1799 had ended in a September sentence still unexecuted. [4] [7]
What the year left in those cells was not yet the king’s pleasure. Yonge had asked for full instructions before confirming the heavy sentences. Considerations that the occupation was temporary, that there had been no bloodshed in the rising, and that the men had surrendered when they might have placed themselves beyond the law, weighed with the governor enough to suspend, not enough to pardon. The fourteen would still be sitting when the year closed. [3] [7]
Agricultural Department — 20 September 1800
Before Yonge left England an arrangement was made between the secretary of state and himself that an agricultural department was to be added to the Cape government. It was supposed that only skill was needed to make South Africa a great corn and wine country from which England could draw large supplies. To encourage brandy and wine, on the 9th of June 1800 the house of commons reduced the duty on Cape brandy entering Great Britain to that on West Indian spirits, and the duty on Cape wines to that on wines from Portugal. To the taste of the English people the produce of South African vineyards was objectionable, so that the measure had little or no effect. Shortly after his arrival Yonge caused a society for the encouragement of agriculture, arts and sciences to be established, of which he was president and Barrow secretary; beyond talking, this society did nothing. [3]
The department was designed to introduce improved implements and, by a model farm, to show the best method of tilling. It was confidently anticipated that the whole expense would be covered by the crops raised. On the 20th of September 1800 the persons selected arrived in Table Bay after a very long passage from England. William Duckitt superintendent, with a salary of £500 a year; Mr Iles assistant, with £60; a carpenter and a blacksmith, each with £33 12s; six husbandmen, each with £31 10s; one farm boy, with £10; and one dairy woman, with £10 10s a year. They brought implements of various kinds. Upon arrival they were placed on the farm Klapmuts, where they were provided with horned cattle, horses, a party of slaves, and everything else necessary for work and maintenance. [3]
Before this date the ground was cultivated in a very rough manner. The plough was a heavy wooden implement with only one handle, needing a team of six or eight oxen. The harrow was formed of three blocks of wood in a triangle, with strong pegs driven in to scratch the ground; sometimes a large bush was used. Sheaves were threshed by laying them upon a hard floor enclosed with a circular fence and driving a troop of horses or young oxen round upon them. Grain was winnowed by throwing it up in the air when the wind was blowing. A fairly good horse for saddle or trace was now common, and there was rivalry — especially among young men — as to who should have the best. In horned cattle the aim had been size and strength of oxen rather than milk. It was the fashion for a young farmer who wished to be thought respectable to take his bride from church in a wagon drawn by a span of fourteen large oxen of the same colour. [3]
The attempt to introduce woolled sheep, begun some years before, had not succeeded so well. The tracts supposed best for sheep runs, where experiments had shown most signs of success, had been laid waste. No one had yet thought of keeping sheep on the karoo plains all the year round; those vast tracts were inhabited only a few months during and just after the rains, when flocks were driven down from the colder highlands and their owners lived in great tent-wagons. There were still some woolled sheep, though they were not increasing, and there were no longer any enthusiastic breeders. Some of the best stock had been purchased for exportation and taken to New South Wales. Goats, on the contrary, had been greatly improved in weight of carcase by imported animals, and were much thought of, as they were hardy and throve where sheep would not. [3]
Duckitt was an enthusiast in high culture. His father was a well-known writer on farm machinery, and he himself had improved a drill for sowing seed then in general use in England. As soon as he arrived he tried to persuade farmers near the Cape to cultivate in the English manner. He induced two or three of the Van Reenens to make the experiment; all the others held back. Some said they would follow his advice as soon as they saw the model farm giving better returns than their own; others argued. If God sent abundant rain the land only required to be scratched to yield heavy crops; if little rain fell, the highest cultivation would be useless. Their ploughs and harrows cost hardly anything beyond their own labour, whereas his were expensive. Theirs required more draught cattle than his did; but they were obliged to keep a large number of oxen to take produce to market, and in seedtime these might as well be working as doing nothing. The model farm was established at a bad time. Crops since 1798 had been very poor. [3]
The agricultural department was Yonge’s expensive hobby as much as a public office. It had been arranged before he sailed; he threw himself into it. English ploughs, a drill, a carpenter, a smith, six husbandmen, a farm boy and a dairy woman were to teach a country whose oxen already numbered fourteen to a wedding wagon. Klapmuts, on the old Company ground toward Stellenbosch, received them with slaves and stock. The gardens of 1652 had been planted so that fleets might water; the model farm of 1800 was planted so that England might draw corn. The first harvest had not yet come in when the year turned, and the rain argument still stood. [3]
Wheat into the Magazines — 4 December 1800
In November 1800 the Namaqua captain Afrikaner sent Kobus Booy again to Capetown, professedly to ask that Afrikaner might be pardoned, but more probably to act as a spy. Yonge was disposed to overlook the past in order to prevent greater evils, and forwarded a safe-conduct for Afrikaner and his followers, to hold good for six months, to enable them to visit Capetown and make arrangements by which they could live honestly. To Kobus Booy the farm Klipfontein in Little Namaqualand was given, as an earnest of the governor’s desire to provide for their maintenance. Afrikaner declined the offer and continued his career as a marauder. His name remained a terror to the farmers of a large portion of Stellenbosch district. [3]
With the San on the north-eastern frontier there was at this time a cessation of hostilities, but the scheme of 1798 — breeding cattle given through fieldcornets Visser and Louw, with beads, tinderboxes, rings, pocket mirrors and knives as presents — had already failed. Those who had not personally received cattle did not consider themselves bound; the stock collected by subscription was exhausted; there was great waste among the new cattle-breeders; and people farther inland plundered those who were not living according to the traditions of their race. The northern bound that Macartney had drawn on paper did not hold the interior quiet in 1800. [3]
Such was then the scarcity of grain that on the 4th of December 1800 a stringent proclamation was issued by Yonge to prevent its exportation or waste. To provide for the army, fleet, and townspeople, the farmers were called upon to bring all their wheat to the magazines at Capetown, except sufficient for their own consumption and for seed. The government undertook to pay for the grain so delivered at the rate of £8 12s in paper for ten muids, from which would be deducted 12s instead of the tithe. Farmers disobeying were to forfeit their grain and pay a fine of £100. The government would sell wheat to bakers and to families, according to their needs, at £9 2s for ten muids. The drought continued. Duckitt’s high culture had not yet had a harvest by which the Van Reenens’ neighbours might be convinced. Ten muids at £8 12s paper, less a shilling-a-muid in lieu of tithe, was the Castle’s price for filling the magazines that had fed fleets since 1652; bakers and families would buy back at £9 2s. Disobedience meant forfeiture and a hundred pounds. The wooden plough and the English drill were under the same sky. [3]
The Castle magazines of 1652 thus closed the year as a granary under proclamation, as they had opened it as a prison. Wheat that the wooden plough had scratched from dry ground was to come in under penalty; brandy and wine that the Commons had favoured in June still found no English palate; the model farm at Klapmuts had cattle, horses, slaves and English implements, and no crop that could answer the rain argument. Afrikaner kept the field. Maynier kept the drostdy. Fourteen sentences kept the cells. [3]
From the gardens of 1652 to Klapmuts and the Fish, calendar 1800 had given the colony a civil governor in January, a printed Gazette in August, death sentences in September that were not carried out, an agricultural department that had not yet grown a crop, and a December order that every muid of wheat but food and seed should lie in the Capetown magazines. Yonge sat in the chair; Dundas still commanded the troops; Barrow sat as censor; Duckitt sat at Klapmuts; Prinsloo and Van Jaarsveld sat under sentence of death. The year did not restore Graaff Reinet, and it did not break the drought. What it left on the ground was a weekly sheet, a model farm, a referred judgment, and a granary filling under fine. [3] [4]