South Africa

At the Cape under the Dutch East India Company no coin was ever struck locally, so the settlement ran on whatever silver the passing fleets left behind — Dutch ducatons, three-guilder pieces and guilders alongside Spanish pieces of eight, Indian rupees, German reichsthalers, French and English crowns and Russian roubles — with the Dutch gold ducat almost the only gold in commerce. Accounts were kept not in coin but in a money of account, the Cape rixdollar of 48 stuivers, fixed as the standard unit by Council resolution in 1705 and again in 1738; because metal was chronically scarce, coins circulated at the Cape 9.5 to 20 per cent above their Holland ratings, and from 1782 the Company issued paper rixdollars, which held close to par until the 1790s and then slid badly. What survives is unusually good for a small colony: the Company’s Council of Policy resolutions and the memorials of its servants sit alongside the account books and minute books of the Dutch Reformed and Lutheran congregations, so a carver’s fee, a craftsman’s monthly wage in guilders and a church’s building costs can often be read in the same currency in the same year.

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Anton Anreith’s Contract for the Groote Kerk Pulpit, Cape Town 1788–1789

In August 1788 the churchwardens of the Dutch Reformed congregation at the Cape resolved that their old pulpit was past repair, and on 1 September they reported contracting with the Company’s sculptor Anton Anreith for 900 rixdollars and with the master carpenter Jan Jacob Graaff for 1,100 rixdollars, “for their labour, etc.” Anreith designed the whole thing, the great pulpit carried on two crouching lions with Faith and Hope above, yet as the lower-ranking man he was paid 200 rixdollars less than the carpenter who executed it. The paymaster-deacon was authorised to settle with both men on 7 December 1789, a week after the first sermon was preached from it. The conversion is estimated: the rixdollar of 48 stuivers was a money of account, and coin circulated at the Cape between 9.5 and 20 per cent above Holland ratings, so the Dutch gold ducat of 3.435 g fine is taken here at about 120 Cape stuivers, which matches a 1790 quotation of the rixdollar at three shillings and ninepence sterling.

~1,236g

Dutch Reformed Church (Groote Kerk), Cape Town, minutes of the Churchwardens, 1 September 1788 and 7 December 1789, transcribed by J. Overbeek, 1884; Cowen, Charles. “Memoir of the Life of William Howard Schröder.” In The Schröder Art Memento. (Press Printing and Publishing Works, 1894); Fransen, Hans. Three Centuries of South African Art. (Ad. Donker, 1982); de Kock, M. H. Selected Subjects in the Economic History of South Africa. (Juta & Co., 1924).