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Vosmaar
- Ship’s type: Spiegelretourschip
- Construction: Built in 1691 for the Chamber of Zeeland at the VOC ship yard in Middelburg.
- Term: In use by the VOC from 1691 until 9 March 1713 when it was dismantled in Batavia.
- Length: 145 feet
- Breadth: 35,5 feet
- Depth: 14,75 feet
- Loading capacity: 759 tons
- Crew: 200-275 men
- Flag: Chamber of Zeeland
- Voyage: Departed from Wielingen on 26 April 1696 and arrived at the Cape of Good Hope on 22 October 1696.
- Captain: Jakob Landsheer
Passengers:
- Jacques Bisseau from Picardie x ?Maria le Febvre
- Pierre Bisseau (1693-1735) baptised Middelburg, Zeeland
- Paul Bisseux (bef 26 Nov 1695- 7 Sept 1696) baptised Middelburg, Zeeland. Dies on board.
- Paul le Febvre (Sr) from Champagne - possibly on earlier ship in 1694?. Returned to Europe in 1705 x Marie Taillefert (- 17 Aug 1696) Dies on board.
- Paul le Febvre (Jr) fom Champagne x Isabeau Sézille from Zeeland with one child.
- Paul le Febvre (bap Middelburg 7 Aug 1694)
- Susanne le Febvre ( - 8 Oct 1696) Dies on board
- Marie le Febvre ( - Aug 11 1696) Dies on board. Possibly wife of Jacques Bisseux, above
- Marguerite le Febvre (bap Middelburg Jan 19 1687)
- Paul le Febvre (Jr) fom Champagne x Isabeau Sézille from Zeeland with one child.
- Pierre Huet (-Oct 1 1696). Dies on board
Passengers' Stories:
..from the transcription of the records of the Walloon church in the Zeeland capital we learn that the surgeon Paul Lefebvre and his wife Marie Taillefert had reached Middelburg at an earlier date and had been naturalized there on November 17, 1685. Paul Lefebvre played an important part among the Calvinists of the Chateau-Thierry election in his professional capacity. He attended the Nogentel pastor Jean Pages in his last illness and was a witness at his funeral in 1677.
The Lefebvre children who appeared at Middelburg with their parents were Paul, Pierre, Susanne and Marie. There are discrepancies here with the children whose baptisms are recorded in the surviving Nogentel registers. There we find the baptism of Jean Lefebvre on April 1, 1674, of Anne on January 12, 1676 and of Marie-Madeleine on May 16, 1677. The registers, however, do not cover a lengthy period and it is also possible that some of the children of Paul Lefebvre and Marie Taillefert died before 1685. Another daughter Marguerite was born to them in exile and christened at Middelburg on January 10, 1687.
It seems a distinct possibility that there were two surgeons named Paul Lefebvre, father and son, at the Cape, the former arriving in the service of the Dutch East India Company in 1694 and the latter two years afterwards. This hypothesis is suggested by entries in the log of the Vosmaar of Zeeland, a vessel which sailed for the Indies on April 26, 1696 under the command of Jacob Lantsheer. She left Flushing in the company of the Veenmol and a larger ship, the Huijs te Duijnen, on a voyage which was to last almost six months and cause the deaths of ninety-four of those aboard her. With only four fit men left among the crew she had to be helped to an anchorage in Table Bay. Her consorts made even longer voyages and there were many deaths aboard the Huijs te Duijnen, whose captain could bring her no further than Saldanha Bay without assistance. The Veenmol, which reached the Cape via Accra and Cape Lopez, was captured by the French merchantman the Pontchartrain in February 1697 and sold with her cargo in Brazil.’
The Vosmaar carried ten French refugees. On June 27, 1696, in cold, wet weather, it was reported in the log: “Kregen dagelix veel volck jnde kooij door sieckte”. The first death occurred two days later and by the time the Vosmaar had crossed the equator on August 1, several more had succumbed to sickness and a sailor Jacob Hartog had fallen overboard and drowned. In southern latitudes the toll mounted rapidly, each fatality being faithfully recorded in the log. On Saturday, August 11 during the first watch a French passenger, Marie Lefebvre, died. Six days later we read: “Smorgens ... is overleeden maria taaljefaar (Marie Taillefert) van Schattoetire (Chateau-Thierry) in vranckrijck zijnde de moeder van den overleede maria La fever franse refugees overvaarende na de Caap de bon Esperance”. Here we have the first link with the family of Paul Lefebvre the surgeon.
A third death among the emigrants took place on September 7, that of “een van onse franse passagiers kinders .. . genaamt paulus biosse (Paul Bisseux) gebooren tot middelbg”. We shall return to the Bisseux family in due course. Although more than three weeks were to elapse before another passenger died, the loss of life among the soldiers and sailors aboard was increasingly heavy throughout September. The deaths included that of a French-speaking soldier, Paul Grison of Lille, on September 9 and of the chief surgeon Daniel van Sluijs six days later. By September 18 fifty deaths had been reported and on the following day the log noted: “Het Rantsoen drinkwater gestelt op 7 mutsies daags”. On Monday, October 1 sickness claimed “een fransche passa- gier, pieter huet v: maineauel (Monneaux) bij Chateau tierie” and on the Monday following the death of a fifth refugee was recorded, the “fransche jonge dogter Susanna Lavever (Lefebvre)”. The tragic voyage was almost at an end and on October 16 land was sighted. The deaths, however, continued until the day before the vessel anchored and it is not surprising that the accuracy of the running total kept for so long in the log began to falter in the last weeks.
The link with the Chateau-Thierry and Monneaux families is an interesting one. It would seem that Marie Taillefert was coming out to join her surgeon husband, bringing with her the children Marie and Susanne. Was her son Pierre also aboard the Vosmaar? A Paul Lefebvre, presumably the son of the Chateau-Thierry surgeon, was married at Middelburg on June 27, 1694 to Elisabeth Sezille, who bore him a child Paul less than six weeks after the ceremony. The boy was baptized in the Zeeland capital on August 4 of that year. The father and his wife Elisabeth Sezille could have been aboard the Vosmaar; they were certainly at the Cape in the last years of the seventeenth century. The name Sezille suggests a Picardy background. Sezilles at Herly were related to the Mangards there and may thus have been connected with the family of Abraham le Grand’s wife. The surname is also to be found among refugees from the Noyon district, north-east of Com-piegne. ... While the Pierre Huet who died on the Vosmaar has not been positively identified, the Nogentel registers contain the baptism of a Pierre Huet on January 15, 1674 and the burial of a man of the same name, a Monneaux viticulturalist, on January 27, 1677. Huets are known to have been living in Amsterdam in 1691.
Two of the five survivors among the Vosmaar's passengers were the baker Jacob Bisseux and his son Pierre, elder brother of the boy Paul who died on the voyage. Pierre Bisseux was christened in Middelburg on February 17, 1694 and Paul on November 26, 1695. The latter was thus less than a year old at the time of his death. A third brother, Jacob, was baptized in the Zeeland capital on January 7, 1691. Their mother was Marie Lefebvre. Was this the daughter of Paul Lefebvre and Marie Taillefert? It is possible, although she is not described as a married woman in the log of the Vosmaar. Bisseux remarried Elisabeth Pochox (Pochot) in 1700 and in the same year an inventory of the goods formerly owned by Marie Lefebvre was drawn up. If Bisseux ’s first wife survived the voyage, then there were two Marie Lefebvres on the Vosmaar.
Jacob Bisseux apparently entered the United Provinces by way of Lille. He was enrolled as a member of the Walloon church in Middelburg on August 21, 1689, but may first have abjured at The Hague two years previously. He came from Picardy, perhaps from Chery-les-Pouilly, north of Laon. A Jacob Bisseux is known to have fled from this village by 1686. His possessions came into the hands of Nicolas Hochet and others after his departure and it is evident that this refugee harvested wheat, a circumstance in keeping with his known trade. A Marie Bisseux from the nearby Guise district abjured at Haarlem early in 1687 and an Abraham Bisseux in the following year. The Haarlem congregation contained many refugees from Picardy. It is an interesting coincidence that the nineteenth-century Protestant minister Isaac Bisseux, born at Leme, near Vervins in the Aisne department of France on September 4, 1807, should have devoted his life to missionary activity in the Cape region of early French settlement with which his namesake and fellow-Picard was associated.
- Boucher.M (1981). French speakers at the Cape: The European Background. Pretoria, UNISA (Search, using the individual Chapter Name below, to download each as a pdf):
- CHAPTER EIGHT Cape settlers IV: from Burgundy to Picardy pp226-228
Resources
- List of Huguenots embarking from France
- Olive Tree Site's Ship Lists
- Huguenot Heritage Ship Lists
- De VOC Site