1677 to 1731 – Cape Cadastral Calendar

Introduction

The Opgaaf Project Document Series of the Early Cape. ©

Many of the documents of the old Cape for foreign-based researchers are unobtainable, illegible, or inaccessible because of their original format or location.

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The series we hope to present is a selection of those documents which we have found most useful in our own work on the Cape. We thought it would be wise to put these out in a privately published edition first, before trying to find a publisher. Taking advantage of the advent of electronic spreadsheets and “desk top publishing,” we hope to have our readers report on these documents’ utility, accuracy and layout before they are typeset. We intend to send copies only to a few major South African research libraries and a handful of specialized readers and researchers. A further innovation of the series — thanks to the recent breakthrough in the size of volatile memory of the current generation of computers — is the ability to have documents intensively indexed, so that one might approach the primary material from almost any known entry point. In this interim interaction period between ourselves and our readers, we would also like to encourage an exchange of ideas and criticisms and also to invite written amendments to the provisional manuscripts themselves. If we do not receive amendments, this interaction period will be regarded simply as a creative failure. However, we have had such good feedback on our first document – – the Map — that we have high expectations. We hope for a dynamic, albeit necessarily slow, synergistic interaction, between ourselves and other researchers and readers. The series then, is an entirely experimental idea in the preservation, restitution and presentation of historical documentation.

CONTEXTUAL INTRODUCTION

This publication is a calendar of the freehold property records of the Deeds Office of the Cape of Good Hope, now moved to the Cape Archives Depot in Roeland Street. It may be used in conjunction with the Opgaaf Project© map “The Southwestern Cape Colony, 1657-1750” which has already been circulated and which is now going into a second edition, thanks to revisions from among others, Margaret Cairns. However, this volume will probably be used alone. The calendar includes all transfers of properties, farms and town properties between 1677 and 1731. If this data arrangement proves useful, we will extend the dates of the calendar from 1657 to 1795 for which we have the data. The calendar does not include the land grants themselves, or loan farms, which are from a different series and are intended for later publication in this series. The transfers relating to slaves interfiled with these transfers up to 1706 are also not included, but form a separate publication (No. 3 in the Opgaaf Project Series). Some property transactions can no longer be traced since the records have been lost. We suspect that these records have simply been torn out of the volumes while the Transporten were carelessly housed in the Public Deeds Office. Perhaps, parvenu owners of old Cape houses tore these out. We do not know. Perhaps, they may be recovered at some stage.

These records have not been lost in the remote past, but in the last twenty years. Although many historians and scholars worked in the Deeds Office, the first historian to collect transcriptions of these documents in a systematic way was Leonard Guelke in 1970-1971. His work was followed by Anna Böeseken and Margaret Cairns (1970-1975) whose work was reproduced in the appendix of Slaves and Free Blacks. Their work was followed by Robert Shell in 1981-2, who worked principally on the slave transfers, but who also took several months to fill in many of the gaps on town properties in Leonard Guelke’s (then handwritten) “Deeds Book.”

His research was followed by Leon Hattingh and other staff members of the Historical. Institute of the Western Cape and again, Leonard Guelke who returned to Cape Town to complete the whole series (1652 through 1795) in 1985.

It was Leon Hattingh, who first pointed out the massive loss of Deeds Office documents in his latest article on the transfers in Kronos 15. We have managed to establish that between each set of professional researchers there has been a loss of documents and, in some cases, whole volumes. No better evidence for this loss can there be than the work of Leon Hattingh, probably one of the most careful archival historians in South Africa. He began his Cape career with a critique of Anna Böeseken’s work in 1979, but by the time he came to publish his own transcriptions, was ironically forced, through the loss of certain documents, to simply repeat many of Anna Böeseken’s transcriptions. The poignant word verlore [“lost”] added to each transaction transcription was a spur to making available our own notes. This calendar, having been started so long ago, might well be the most complete record of the sources.

Our rough notes of these records were never intended for publication and we present them here solely to make a beginning in reconstituting the entire archive so historians and others may make use of these records in a systematic way. We are not ashamed to admit that there are bound to be mistakes in this edition, for instance, we know several unidentified computer gremlins crept in [and out] at printout time.

There is many a slip twixt the document, computer and the printout.

There are also many lacunae. Because of constant subdivision, the town properties are without question the most difficult research area and the weakest area of this edition and still require much research. Nevertheless we believe that it is still possible to trace town properties quite easily. We are particularly keen to identify all the names of the various market gardens, taverns, coffee shops^[i]* and boarding houses, since their names and descriptions do not appear in the original transfers, but are a key to understanding the social and commercial history of Cape Town. We hope to obtain some new data along the following lines.

The taverns (a very fashionable research topic in colonial American history), or Cape “taps,” were also boarding houses and were organized on two bases: the first group catered to up country people (Buitenlui = “outer people”), while the second group catered to the maritime personnel (Scheepenlui = ships’ people).^[ii]* These were often run by Company officials’ widows, who would have known many of the upper echelon of the maritime personnel passing the Cape, viz.:

These maritime taverns catered to a broad range of national groups and often specifically appealed to groups on an ethnic or ethnic/regimental basis, viz.:

Some were named in more haphazard way, their clientele still needs study:

The Cape taps then, could be a topic in themselves, but we know little of them.^[iii]*

We also believe that the way the transfers have been transcribed and published —- unindexed and scattered in many arcane journals — is virtually useless to historians and has probably retarded research work on the early Cape considerably. It is in this tentative, but entirely collaborative, spirit that we present these documents, one of the key sets of sources in understanding the early settlement of South Africa

^[i] The first one was established in 1717 in Cape Town by Ernst Frederik de Swart, LR 1 (1st February, 1717): 350. It could be any of the many properties sold by this individual, see Index.

^[ii] See Guelke, Shell and Whyte, the De la Fontaine Report, page 1.

^[iii] A full list may be found in the H.C.V. Leibbrandt’ Requesten, Volume 5.

Example of Cape Cadastral Calendar Database entry.