Boer History1802 at the Cape of Good Hope: Amiens, Tjaart van der Walt, and De Mist in the Castle
Paper Money — 1 January 1802
Major-General Francis Dundas had sat as acting governor since the 20th of April 1801, when Sir George Yonge was recalled. The Cape still paid in paper: coin left with the army and the navy, and the magazines in town still did not hold enough wheat. On the 1st of January 1802 Dundas increased the paper in circulation by 56000 pounds. 20000 went onto the capital of the loan bank, the interest to keep the streets of Capetown in order. 20000 was advanced to a committee to lay in wheat against famine in the town. 16000 went to the same committee for rice. The split mattered because it was famine paper, not farm paper: two of the three sums were food, and the third was the streets of a town that still had to feed a garrison and a roadstead. [3]
The wheat and rice notes sat against a harvest that still did not feed the town. William Duckitt had landed on the 20th of September 1800 to show that English skill, not only rain, could make the colony a grain country. His model farm at Klapmuts still produced nothing beyond ordinary Cape tillage, and cost more. By this year over 8000 pounds had gone on that farm with no return. In neither 1801 nor 1802 was enough food raised for the people employed there. Two or three of the Van Reenens tried the English manner; the rest held back. They told Duckitt that if God sent rain the land only needed to be scratched, and if little rain fell the highest culture would be useless. Their wooden ploughs cost almost nothing beyond labour; his were expensive. [3]
The experiment failed except that English ploughs came into limited use on ground long under cultivation. What hung on the January paper was not a new agricultural policy. It showed that, in a second poor season, the Cape still bought bread and rice with notes, while Klapmuts still could not feed its own hands. The occupation that Dundas held as acting governor was already, on paper in Europe, timed to end; the town still had to eat until whoever took the castle next. [3]
Roodewal — 13 February 1802
Tjaart van der Walt was the Swellendam commandant who had written against Maynier in 1801. Late that year 200 Swellendam burghers were summoned under him to recover stolen cattle and to punish marauders who would not retire to the Zwartkops location ordered on the 27th of November 1801. The location was meant to take refugee Khoikhoi out of Graaff Reinet under the missionary Vanderkemp. The summons was a test of whether the east would still answer a burgher call. Instead of two hundred, only eighty-eight appeared at the appointed time, and six of these deserted at once. Leaving sixteen men to guard a camp at Winterhoek, Van der Walt marched with the remaining sixty-six to Roodewal beyond the Sundays, where the Khoikhoi were kraaled between the Sundays and the Bushman’s. [3] [4]
On the 13th of February 1802 he attacked a kraal of the band. In the onset his only son received a mortal wound while helping to take the captured stock. The youth was twenty-one. The dying man’s thoughts turned to his home and to the woman who would soon be his widow. The commandant told him to take comfort that God would provide for her, then said a short prayer and went on with the fight. The attackers were beaten. 12 firelocks, 200 head of horned cattle, and 5 horses were taken. The numbers were small against what the border had lost. The cost to Van der Walt was not. [3] [4]
After the action Van der Walt tried to return to his camp, but found the Sundays too full to cross. On its bank he was attacked in turn by the same people, now led by Klaas Stuurman. For a day and a half he stood on the defensive. Three Khoikhoi were killed. Stuurman then sent to propose peace: the farmers restore the cattle and guns taken on the 13th, and the Khoikhoi cease roaming and plundering. Van der Walt agreed. Everything was given up. An hour later they attacked him again. By then the river was fordable. The burghers were too few to keep the field. They returned to Winterhoek, losing one man on the way. On the 23rd the small force was disbanded. The February effort had failed on numbers, on a flooded river, and on a truce that did not hold. [3] [4]
The whole colony was now in alarm. It was feared that the Khoikhoi soldiers in British pay — the pandours — would desert and join their countrymen. Any small event was enough to cause a panic. Combined Khoikhoi and Xhosa were again against the colony. What hung on the 13th of February was not the two hundred cattle. It was the proof that eighty-eight men could not close the east, and that Capetown now feared its own Khoikhoi corps as well as the Sundays thickets. [3] [4]
Bethelsdorp — March 1802
On the 27th of November 1801 instructions had gone to Landdrost Bresler to select a temporary location near Algoa Bay, where Johannes Theodosius Vanderkemp might carry on mission work among as many Khoikhoi as would settle. Vanderkemp was a Dutch physician, born at Rotterdam in 1748, who had reached Capetown on 31 March 1799 and had sat at Graaff Reinet after his mission to Gaika’s country failed. The government undertook to send rice and other provisions until gardens yielded, and to furnish seed wheat and implements. The order was the 11 February 1801 letter put into land: take the refugee Khoikhoi out of the village, feed them for a season, and give the missionary a place of his own. Bresler selected the farm once occupied by Theunis Botha on the Zwartkops — between the loan places of Thomas Ignatius Ferreira and the Widow Scheepers, that is between later Cradock Place near Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage. Botha was still in prison from the Van Jaarsveld affair; the farm was empty. The whole stretch from the coast to later Uitenhage was then three farms. The location, shortly afterwards named Bethelsdorp, is about four miles from later Redhouse. [3] [4]
In March 1802 a mixed following of some hundreds of Khoikhoi left Graaff Reinet under Vanderkemp and Read, and after a journey of over 160 miles reached the Zwartkops grant. The greater number of men deserted on the march, so that the population on arrival was chiefly women and children. Vanderkemp had written to Dundas on the 11th of February 1801 the rules on which he proposed to govern the institution: the knowledge of Christ and real piety first, by instruction and example among Khoikhoi and other heathen admitted into a regular society; temporal happiness second; and Paul’s rule that if any would not work, neither should he eat, the people to be employed in useful work as circumstances allowed. The letter mattered in March because it was now a place, not a proposal: the empty Botha farm had a missionary and a remnant of a following. [3] [4]
He found those rules hard to enforce. Some of the people would at times seek temporary work with the farmers. Others chose to lie in the bushes and live on roots in the field rather than take the discipline of settled life. Idleness, in his own account, was the most common evil among them, and it exposed them to want. Unstable marriages brought further disorder. The wandering bands who still lifted cattle were content to wander and lift. The station that was meant to draw the east into gardens did not empty the Sundays thickets. [4]
In March and April the government tried again to induce the Khoikhoi still roaming to settle at the Zwartkops location. Dundas wanted the country to look orderly enough for a transfer with credit to the British authorities: on the 15th of December 1801 the Cape had learned that preliminary articles of peace, signed at London on the 1st of October, provided for restoration of the colony to the Netherlands — then the Batavian Republic. The March and April attempts failed. The location had women and children and a missionary. It did not have the captains who still sat on the Sundays. Efforts were then made to get a burgher force together. [3]
Von Manger, Hesse, and the Roodezand Panic — January–April 1802
Church posts shifted as the occupation waited on European news. Von Manger was removed from Swellendam to Capetown in January, filling a town pulpit left thin after earlier deaths; Ballot succeeded him at Swellendam in April. In February the reverend Hesse arrived from England with the permanent appointment to the Lutheran pulpit, after Johan Haas had sat as acting clergyman since February 1799, having called in a Danish ship. A clergyman of the church of England was stationed in Capetown as chaplain to the troops, but there was no congregation other than military, though some officers of government and several merchants attended the services. The Lutheran chair was now a settled appointment, not a stop-gap from a passing Dane. The English chapel remained a garrison service. [3]
On the 18th of April, as the reverend Vos was preaching his farewell sermon in the church at Roodezand to an audience in which were some 500 men — he was about to proceed to Europe — a cry that Khoikhoi were in sight emptied the building. Windows were broken open in the rush to get out. The Khoikhoi were a company of pandours sent to patrol the district. That was not calculated to calm anyone. Vos had been one of the warmest adherents of the English government; he had written from a pastoral tour in 1801 to have Maynier recalled. His farewell sat in a church that now treated a British Khoikhoi patrol as an enemy in sight. [3]
The panic mattered because it was not a frontier farm. Roodezand was a western congregation, and five hundred men ran from their own side’s patrol. After Roodewal, Capetown’s fear that Khoikhoi soldiers would desert had reached the church door. The occupation still needed those pandours for the east. The congregation no longer trusted the sight of them. [3]
Treaty of Amiens — 27 March 1802
The old Dutch East India Company had disappeared. On the 1st of March 1796 the assembly of seventeen had been replaced by a committee for the East Indian trade and possessions; this again in 1800 was superseded by a council for the Asiatic possessions and establishments. On the 8th of March 1802 the states-general resolved that the executive and legislative authority of the colony should be entrusted to a governor and a council of four members, at least one of whom should be by birth or long residence a colonist. The governor was to be also commander-in-chief of the troops. His salary was to be 4166 pounds 13 shillings 4 pence a year, and that of each of the councillors 833 pounds 6 shillings 8 pence. The high court of justice was to be independent of the executive and legislative authority: a president and six members, all versed in law and unconnected with parties in the colony, a secretary, and an attorney-general to conduct public prosecutions. The Hague was writing a colony, not a refreshment station under Java. [3] [9]
Trade between the colony and the possessions of the Batavian Republic everywhere was to be unrestricted, except that for revenue purposes customs duties of three per cent upon the value of articles of commerce were to be charged. The colony was not to be subject to any control from Java, but was to be a direct dependency of the Netherlands. With these general principles as a foundation, the task of drawing up a plan of government was entrusted to Jacob Abraham de Mist, an advocate of high standing and a member of that Asiatic council. Supervision from Batavia was abolished. From this moment the halfway station was to stand as a colony of its own under the Hague. The plan mattered because whoever took the castle would no longer answer to a governor-general on Java. [3] [9]
The final terms of peace were signed at Amiens on the 27th of March 1802, ending the war between Great Britain and France with Spain and the Batavian Republic. The sixth article left the Cape of Good Hope in full sovereignty to the Batavian Republic as it was before the war. Ships of every description belonging to the other contracting parties should have the right to put in there and purchase such supplies as they might stand in need of, without paying any other duties than those to which the ships of the Batavian Republic were subject. Ceylon, taken by a British naval expedition, was kept as a British colony on that condition. Restoration was to take place within three months of ratification. Dundas was directed to deliver the Settlement of the Cape of Good Hope with the fortifications thereof to such person as should be authorised to receive the same on the part of the Batavian Republic. What hung on article six was the chair itself: the occupation that had begun in September 1795 was now on a clock, and Ceylon was the British prize that made the Cape returnable. [3] [4] [7] [9]
The document drawn up by De Mist gave such satisfaction that on the 1st of April he was appointed commissioner-general to receive the colony from the English, install the Dutch officials, and make such regulations as he might find necessary. Lieutenant-General Jan Willem Janssens was appointed governor. He had been born at Nijmegen on the 12th of October 1762, son of Johannes Jacobus Janssens, captain of the Van Aylva regiment, and Adriana van Rees; had joined the army as a cadet at twelve; had been a major at twenty-six and a lieutenant-colonel in the campaign against the French in 1793, when he was seriously wounded and turned to military administration. Between 1797 and 1800 he served as commissioner for the French troops in the employ of the Batavian Republic; in March 1800 he was appointed secretary-general of the war department, a post equal in military terms to major-general. De Mist wrote to him, when the Cape appointment brought on a mood of doubt, to take heart: his talents and well-tried loyalty made him eminently suited for the office. Three commissioners — A. Muller, R. de Klerk Dibbetz, and J. F. Benay — were directed to proceed to the colony and make arrangements for the reception of the troops destined for a garrison. Amiens did not look stable. That is why a soldier-administrator was named to sit as governor when the commissioner-general’s work at the Cape was done. [3] [9]
Until the close of 1802 the average imports of goods of all kinds were in value 253927 pounds a year, and of slaves 44950. The average exports amounted only to 15047. There was thus a balance of trade against the colony of 283830 a year, met in coin that came into the country chiefly through the military and naval departments. The revenue in the period 1797 to 1802 was on an average 73518 pounds a year, the rixdollar computed at its nominal four English shillings. From 1796 to 1802 more slaves were imported than at any period of equal length before. With an empty treasury; a territory of which a very large portion seemed both less productive and less attractive than many other British colonial possessions; with a discontented white population, among whom republican sympathy was by no means extinct; and with the prospect of a costly war on the Fish, the South African settlement did not then seem to the rulers of Britain such a desirable acquisition as when Sluysken had signed. The Cape remained valuable as a marine outpost on the ocean highway to India. To obtain peace the negotiators on either side had to give and take, and Holland received back what had been her own territory. [3] [7]
June Commando — 1802
In June 1802 the commission of Lieutenant-Colonel Dickens and Messrs Acheson Maxwell and Clement Matthiessen acquitted Maynier of all the charges brought against him, and decided that he had conducted himself upon every occasion as an upright and honest man. Maynier had been resident commissioner for Swellendam and Graaff Reinet from 25 December 1799 until Dundas recalled him late in 1801 after the July rising and the petitions of Vos, Van der Walt, and the Sneeuwberg. While the investigation was pending he had been suspended from the high court of justice; upon his acquittal he was requested to resume that duty, and soon afterwards was awarded by Dundas a sum of 1000 pounds from the colonial treasury as compensation for his losses and expenses. The farmers had wanted him gone. The commission gave him back the bench, and a thousand pounds. That result sat on the same calendar as the next burgher call-out. [3] [4]
On the 7th of May Dundas issued a proclamation requiring the whole of the farmers of Swellendam and Graaff Reinet to take the field on the 1st of June against the Khoikhoi and Xhosa marauders. The latter had recently been unusually active. Van der Walt was to lead the burgher force, though operations were to be directed by Major Francis Sherlock, the officer in command of the garrison at Graaff Reinet — the same Sherlock who had ended the 1801 rising with a pardon on the 29th of November. The Graaff Reinet farmers were to assemble under Sherlock; the people of Swellendam under their landdrost and the veld commandant Van der Walt. At this time so great was the distress of the frontier farmers that many were in want of the barest necessaries of life, and the government, fearing that actual starvation was imminent, sent a quantity of rice to Algoa Bay to be distributed among them. All farming had to be laid aside. The bread-winners were compelled to go out on commando again. The May order mattered because February had shown that eighty-eight men were not enough, and because Sherlock’s paper of direction was to sit over Van der Walt’s bush work. [3] [4]
When the Khoikhoi came to know that a larger movement against them was in progress, Klaas Stuurman visited Vanderkemp to ask on what conditions the impending trouble might be averted. Dundas replied on the 28th of May, requesting Vanderkemp to inform Stuurman and the other captains that unless they would consent to the following conditions, their kraals on the Sundays would be attacked. They were to make complete restitution of all the stolen cattle still alive, sent to Fort Frederick to be restored to their owners by Major Lemoine. They were to surrender at Fort Frederick all arms and ammunition. The men were then either to enlist as soldiers, to engage themselves to the farmers, or to take up their residence at the mission station, as they might choose. All of either sex at the mission station would be fed and sustained by the government for one year, and none would be molested for past conduct except the actual murderers of two families named Naude and Van Rooyen. They would be supplied free of cost with ground, farming implements, and seed corn. The terms were a closed list: cattle, guns, then soldier, farm servant, or Bethelsdorp. The Naude murder of 6 November 1801 still sat outside the pardon. [3] [4]
The operations of the commando were suspended until Vanderkemp could communicate the result. The terms were not considered attractive enough. Stuurman and the other captains rejected the offer and preferred to take the risks of the intended attack. In June 1802 the burgher forces under Van der Walt attacked the combined Xhosa and Khoikhoi posted in thickets along the Sundays. During eight weeks there was almost constant skirmishing, in which the burghers suffered some losses, but about 230 of the marauders were killed, and 13100 head of horned cattle were recovered and sent to Bruintjes Hoogte for distribution. Large numbers of marauding Khoikhoi and Xhosa were actually in possession of much of the land to the west of the Great Fish. Nearly all the cattle had been swept away from the border districts. The country had seemed entirely at their mercy until this commando took the field. Sherlock sat at the drostdy with a paper of direction. Van der Walt sat in the Sundays bush with the recovered herds moving toward Bruintjes Hoogte. What hung on the eight weeks was the first real recovery of stock after years in which the Fish side had been swept. [3] [4] [7]
Tjaart van der Walt Killed — 8 August 1802
On the 8th of August that recovery broke. On that day, in an action at the Kouga hills between the Baviaans’ Kloof river and the Kouga, Commandant Tjaart van der Walt was shot dead by a Khoikhoi bullet. The loss of one man ended the enterprise. Every one, from Dundas to the poorest burgher, had felt confidence in the commandant’s tact and skill. There was one opinion as to his high moral character, his bravery, and his devotion to duty. In 1801 he had been one of those who wrote against Maynier from Swellendam. In February he had buried his only son at Roodewal. In June he had taken 13100 cattle out of the Sundays thickets. The 8th of August mattered because the east had one burgher officer whom both the castle and the farms trusted, and that officer was now dead. [3] [4] [7]
When he fell, Philip Rudolph Botha, the next burgher officer in rank, became commandant, and early on the following morning he ordered a retreat eastward through the country that had previously been cleared of the enemy. He did not exercise the same influence or inspire the same confidence. In great confusion the commando marched to the Bushman’s river, and on the 14th of August the burghers composing it dispersed and set out for their homes. The frontiersmen in the field, refusing to fight under an English leader, went home. The Khoikhoi were not made more peaceable. They again sought the alliance of the Xhosa, preparatory to more extended operations. Six days after the shot, the eight-week recovery had no force left in the field. [3] [4] [7]
Upon intelligence of Van der Walt’s death and the dispersion of the commando reaching Capetown, Dundas immediately went to the frontier, taking Maynier with him. General Vandeleur was left in command in Capetown. Maynier was sent to the Khoikhoi to try to induce them to lay down their arms, but he succeeded only with seven petty captains, who with their people were conducted overland to the seat of government, where they were maintained at the public expense until the transfer of the colony. Vanderkemp, seeing the danger which surrounded his mission station, moved all his people for protection to Fort Frederick. It was more than ever necessary that the colony should present an appearance of quietness and order, as negotiations were in progress in Europe for the Cape to pass to the Batavian Republic. Dundas took the acquitted commissioner east because he needed a man the captains would still speak to. Seven small captains came in. The Sundays captains did not. [3] [4]
Conference at Fort Frederick — 10 September 1802
On the 19th of August Dundas wrote to Commodore Mellissen, whose Dutch ships of war and transports bound to India had recently arrived in Simon’s Bay, requesting that Dutch troops might be sent to Algoa Bay to relieve the English soldiers there. The commodore replied that he was not empowered to act as desired. Dundas therefore resolved to leave Fort Frederick without a garrison, and to withdraw from the interior of the colony all the troops except a few dragoons stationed at Hagelkraal. The wooden blockhouse, prepared in Capetown and sent round by sea in August 1799, and the stone redoubt eighty feet square named Fort Frederick that year and then held by 350 soldiers under Lemoine, were to stand empty. Vanderkemp’s people, who had gone there for protection, would fail to receive it. Amiens required a handover. Mellissen’s ships were for India, not for Algoa Bay. The British interior posts were to come in before the Batavian flag went up. [3] [4]
On the 10th of September there was a conference of military officers, under the presidency of Dundas, at Fort Frederick. Landdrost Bresler was present and took part. The troops were being withdrawn from the village of Graaff Reinet, and those in Fort Frederick were on the point of leaving for Capetown, as the colony was shortly to be restored to its old masters. No one could suggest any other course than again to call out a large burgher commando. Orders were therefore issued to the farmers of Stellenbosch, Swellendam, and Graaff Reinet to meet in arms at Wolvefontein, about halfway between Fort Frederick and Graaff Reinet, on the 20th of December. Philip Rudolph Botha was appointed commandant-general, but the burghers of each district were to be under the immediate orders of their own commandants. The September conference was an admission: with the regulars coming in, only a three-district burgher muster could still cover the Fish. [3] [4]
The Xhosa and Khoikhoi had now the country along the coast from the Fish River to Plettenberg’s Bay entirely at their mercy. On the 15th of October a party of fugitives was overtaken in the poort between Plettenberg’s Bay and the Knysna by a band under David Stuurman — a brother of the captain — when three white men and one black were murdered. Their waggons were plundered, but three women and some children were spared, and after five days’ detention were set at liberty. All the farms as far west as Kaaiman’s River, near later George, were then laid waste. The more southern part of the colony, as far west as Plettenberg’s Bay and George, was again overrun. The empty fort and the empty coast were the same fact: without Lemoine’s 350, the line ran to the Knysna. [3] [4]
In December there was a report that the Xhosa were returning to their own country, so the commando did not assemble at the time appointed. The thieves had been divided against themselves: the Xhosa quarrelled with the Khoikhoi over the stolen property, and each seemed indisposed to sustain an attack and therefore promised to behave as the commandant of the force dictated to them. The commando then disbanded. Fresh orders would be issued by Dundas, but calendar 1802 did not see Stellenbosch, Swellendam and Graaff Reinet meet at Wolvefontein as appointed. Before fighting could begin, terms of peace were talked, and the enemy was left in possession west of the Great Fish. What hung on the missed muster was an open Zuurveld through the change of flag. [3] [4] [7]
De Mist in the Castle — 23–31 December 1802
On the 5th of August De Mist and Janssens with a staff of officers had sailed from Texel in the Bato, one of the ships of war belonging to a fleet under Commodore Dekker, destined for the Cape of Good Hope and India. Some transports with troops and some storeships sailed at the same time; others followed a little later. The troops selected to form the garrison consisted of the twenty-second and twenty-third battalions of infantry, each 764 men; the ninth battalion of jagers, 420; the fifth battalion of artillery, 412; a squadron of 206 light dragoons; and the fifth battalion of Waldeck, 584 — altogether, officers and men, 3150 souls. Three commissioners — Muller, Dibbetz, and Benay — arrived in Simon’s Bay on the 12th of August, and on the same day an English frigate brought official intelligence of the signing of the treaty of Amiens and the first despatches from the secretary of state received during ten months. The fleet left Texel the week Van der Walt was shot. The commissioners reached Simon’s Bay four days later. The Cape that was to be handed over was still fighting on the Kouga. [3]
Preceded by commissioners to pave their way, De Mist and Janssens arrived in Table Bay on the 23rd of December 1802. The Bato put them ashore; next morning the commissioner-general took up his quarters in the castle, where he was at once waited upon by the principal residents in Capetown. Two members of the council and six of the judges of the high court landed at the same time. Janssens stayed aboard the first day to supervise the disembarkation of his soldiers. De Mist’s quarters were soon crammed with visitors who, after a British occupation of well over seven years, wanted to greet the representative of their regained mother. His daughter and son were at his side. The troops were disembarked as the transports arrived and were quartered in the barracks, which in the meantime had been abandoned by the English. Toward the end of the year 1300 of the 3150 men despatched were in those barracks. Half the garrison was still at sea. That is why the next week’s ceremony could still be stopped from the water. [3] [4] [9]
On the 30th of December Dundas issued a proclamation absolving the inhabitants of the colony from the oath of allegiance to the king of England on and after the 1st of January 1803. It was arranged that at sunset in the evening of Friday the 31st of December the English guards should be relieved by Batavian soldiers, and at sunrise next morning the Dutch flag should be hoisted on the castle. Formal restitution was to take place on the 31st, the Batavian flag on the 1st. The English troops were nearly all embarked in transports. The 30th of December was the paper end of the occupation: the oath would lapse at the new year. The 31st was to be the physical end. [3] [4]
At half past two in the afternoon of the 31st Dundas and Vice-Admiral Sir Roger Curtis went to the castle and informed De Mist that the transfer must be delayed. At noon a packet had arrived with a despatch from the secretary of state, dated the 14th of October, instructing the acting governor not to give up the colony until further orders. The English and Dutch commanders had been dining together in good humour within a few hours of the intended change of government, when an English officer who had just arrived from England appeared bearing the despatch from Lord Hobart. The soldiers in the transports had then been hurried into boats on the offshore side of the ships, and a strong force had landed and was within the castle walls before the Dutch officers knew that anything was amiss. Only half the Batavian troops had arrived, and those on shore were not provided with weapons. There was no attempt therefore to insist upon the transfer. Amiens had looked unstable from the start. Hobart’s October letter made that instability a fact inside the castle on New Year’s Eve. [3] [4] [9]
An arrangement was made that the Batavian troops should camp out under canvas on a plain near Rondebosch, which from that circumstance has ever since been known as the campground. De Mist remained at the castle. Janssens and the Dutch officials took up their residence with the troops. This event caused great consternation in Capetown, for it was feared that war would break out again immediately. In a panic some of the residents were preparing to retire to the inland districts. Deaf to fiery entreaties of a section of the burghers to shoot the English out — a risky undertaking with the limited stock of soldiers, guns and ammunition then ashore — De Mist moved with caution and tact. What hung on the afternoon of the 31st was the flag: it did not rise on the 1st. Calendar 1802 closed with a Batavian commissioner in the castle, a Batavian general under canvas at Rondebosch, and a British acting governor still in the chair. [3] [9]