Hidden lives revealed
by Maureen Rall, TEPC transcriber
What can one hope to discover among the bare bones of inventories? A surprising amount of information about life at the Cape in the 18th and 19th centuries lurks within the formulaic, and on the face of it boring, lists of belongings of the recently dead.
It is immediately obvious that there were a considerable number of extremely wealthy people who lived in great style. Many owned farms as well as town houses, lavishly equipped with furniture fashioned from exotic hardwoods from the East as well as the local yellow-wood and stinkwood. There were carpets from the far-flung regions on the trade route. On the walls were family portraits or other paintings and mirrors in elegant frames.
Among the elite, men and women dressed in fine silks and satins, linen and exotic prints from all parts of the East and they wore an inordinate amount of jewelry. Huge armoires were packed with gowns, bolts of material, hundreds of serviettes, dozens of sheets and tablecloths. Clearly, they entertained on a grand scale. The cellars contained vast quantities of wine and other liquor and cabinets displayed fine porcelain, glass and silverware. Many homes had musical instruments, and one can imagine candlelit dinners with music.
One of the wealthiest women of her time was Debora de Koning who died in July 1748. She was the widow of a Company official, Jacobus Moller, who left her very comfortably off. She owned a farm called Boshoff on the Liesbeeck River, as well as six houses in town. The house in which she lived boasted 308 porcelain plates and 41 porcelain dishes and 622 bottles of liquor but it was her jewelry that must have been the envy of her contemporaries: ropes of pearls with diamond clasps, gold and silver bracelets, rings and earrings set with diamonds (a total of 83 fine stones). The jewelry alone was valued at 2630 rixdollars – more than the entire value of many an estate.
Elizabeth de Waal, wife of Johannes van Sittert, a senior official, also owned an impressive collection of jewelry, including the obligatory diamond rings and three double ropes of fine pearls. Catharina Doman glittered in the candle light wearing a gold carcanet, a jeweled collar, with 36 diamonds, a gold bracelet with 11 diamonds and a pair of gold bracelets with 32 diamonds.
The inventories also reveal that some of the elite did a brisk trade to augment their incomes. Elizabeth de Waal – who lived in a house valued at 5333 rixdollars – is a case in point. Most of the rooms held merchandise: material, silk thread, bonnets, fans, gloves and stockings (including 746 pairs of Danish stockings). One room contained 1000 glasses, 1000 pounds of coffee beans and 800 pounds of sugar. The store room was crammed with 900 pounds of sugar, 522 pounds of soap, 920 porcelain cups and saucers and 330 porcelain basins.
The inventories of some shops – such as the inventory of a partner in the firm of George and Mather who died in 1828 – reveal veritable emporiums. The shop stocked everything for the handyman, from hinges and nails to paint and brushes, as well as oars and cleats and planking for boats. The sophisticated householder could buy the finest crockery, glassware and silver, but there were also vast stocks of ordinary crockery and cutlery for the ordinary townsfolk. There were plenty of hams, tongues, olives and cheeses, macaroni and vermicelli, and all the spices of the East, not to mention pink champagne, fine madeira and sherry, other wines, gin, rum and brandy, beer and ale.
The scribe who took down the inventory found himself in an Aladdin’s cave of irresistible temptation. He seems to have sampled many of the wares, noting that one of the hams was old but another better, a keg of ale was sour, some of the wine inferior, three cases of brandied fruits bad. It must be said that his spelling became ever more erratic, and there were quite a few ink blots towards the end of his inventory.
Wealth was not confined to officials and merchants. Rev. Johannes Petrus Serrurier left a substantial legacy which included a house at 26 Long Market Street. He may have been a sociable soul who entertained his parishioners to tea – he owned 100 cups and saucers, and numerous silver teaspoons, tea pots, milk jugs and sugar bowls. He also owned 32 slaves who were divided among his six children after his death according to his wishes. Despite his profession, Rev. Serrurier was a shrewd moneylender to whom many of the townsfolk were indebted. He charged a healthy 6% interest per annum and kept meticulous records.
In glaring contrast to the extravagant lifestyles of the elite, many people at the Cape lived and died in abject poverty, owning little more than the clothes on their backs. Some of the farmers had the bare minimum of equipment to develop their land. Large families lived on very little and suffered great deprivation. In later years as the interior opened up, it seems that many people lived in their ox wagons. Their inventories do not mention house or furniture – only livestock, the usual feather bed, a bucket or two, a few tin plates, forks and spoons, iron pots and perhaps a veld-stool.
The inventories, despite the stilted officialese, reveal that human nature has remained immutable. From the introductions to the inventories, notes scribbled in margins, last wills and testaments, and the occasional letter, a picture emerges of the frailties of those early settlers.
There was avarice and cruelty, love and kindness, brooding resentment and deep despair. Locked into the inventories are stories of the tragedies which befell these long-dead people.
A young farmer Jan Hendrik Coetzee, and his wife, Hester Brits, committed suicide, leaving a nine-year old son. Their inventory shows that they owned nothing but a basin, two tin plates, a spoon, a fork, a feather bed, three pillows, 101 sheep, 30 goats, two old horses and a rifle. No mention is made of the fate of the child. The estate would have been auctioned to raise money for the boy, but the auctioneer’s account came to 42:1 rixdollars, so it could not have been a great deal.
On the night of 5 July 1760 a Company bookkeeper in Cape Town, Michiel Smuts, his wife and little son were murdered by a gang of fugitive slaves who were hiding out around Table Mountain. Two younger children were hidden by some of the other slaves and escaped death. A year later, on 1 July 1761, a Stellenbosch farmer, Jan de Villiers, and his wife, Anna Hugo, were attacked by their slaves. They left 4 young children, the youngest only three months old. The inventory does not tell you where the children were, nor who murdered their parents.
Smallpox epidemics wiped out entire families, sometimes leaving a single child. In 1755 Paulus Artoijs, a Burgher Councillor, lost his second wife, Maria Marik, and four of his five children in less than three weeks. Artoijs did not remarry and when he died in 1762, his surviving son, Barendt, was placed in the care of the Orphan Chamber.
Many women died in childbirth or within days, probably of puerperal fever, leaving husbands to cope with young families. In a sad little letter a young Stellenbosch farmer begged the Orphan Chamber for permission to postpone his journey to Cape Town to settle his affairs, as his wife had died giving birth and the baby was only four days old. In 1817 two young unmarried women in outlying areas died in childbirth. The inventories reveal that they had good clothes and some jewelry. It seems possible that the men who listed their property may have been the fathers. It could well be that no minister was available to marry the parents or baptise the children. Poignantly, the inventory of the one young woman lists a trunk containing an entire layette lovingly prepared for the baby. The inventory for the other young woman notes that the baby died, unbaptised, five days after her mother.
And so they lived, our forebears, and, when their time came, so they died, for the most part leaving little to be remembered by. We owe a debt of gratitude to the officials of the Master of the Orphan Chamber for their meticulous attention to detail, and for the little asides that shed light on some tantalizing mysteries.
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