Siberie

Siberie, also called Sint Jooris and for a long time "Malpais", is a plantation that was split off from the larger government plantation Malpais*. Brenneker described it as "a knoek (small holding), on the Weg naar Bandabou, south of San Pedro and with a stone enclosure".

It owes its name to a remarkable owner: Silberio Cafiero alias Serviero Cafiero, a businessman from Genoa who had settled on Curaçao from Venezuela. And although various immigrants from Venezuela settled on the island, they seldom bought a plantation. Silberio was thus clearly an exception when he bought the plantation in 1784, together with the adjoining Jan Kock. His name appears in all possible variants in deeds of sale, but he himself signs Saverio Cafiaro. He also called himself Basilie and once lived in Otrobanda, close to the basilica of Santa Anna. He was a devout Catholic and his name appears as godfather several times in the baptismal registers. He was married to Catharina and had at least 5 children: Pascual, Louis, Gertruida, Valentina and Celedonia.

Possibly Silberio Cafiero came to Curaçao as a businessman and, having made a fortune, was able to buy the two plantations: only after 1784 does his name appear as "slave owner" in the baptismal registers.

Jan Kock

The deed of sale of 24 February 1784 states that "sold to one and the same owner are the plantations 1: Malpais, now Sint Jooris, with house and privilege of cow, sheep and goat corrals;

and 2: a plantation called Zevenhuyzen and Poos Mange, besides a small canoe place called Bagadera or Cribus, with privilege of sheep and goat corrals, south of the plantation Sint Jooris." Zevenhuyzen (Seven Houses) is an alias for Jan Kock, as the seventh landhuis built in the valley of Rif Sint Marie.

Sint Jooris is the name Cafiero gave to his estate, but since he became owner popular speech decided that it would be called Siberie. Silberio was owner of the plantation Siberie when the freedom struggle of the enslaved broke out in 1795, and various of his servants had to appear before the court, a few even denounced by Silberio. Some were found innocent and returned to the plantation, but others, such as Tony, were broken on the wheel as punishment for their participation.

Inventory lists

When Silberio Cafiero died in September 1797 he still owned the plantations Siberie and Jan Kok. Christel Monsanto and Martin Visman delved into his will and inventory lists to get a picture of everyday life on these plantations, and conclude that both plantations were worked jointly: for Siberie the livestock was listed, for Jan Kok the enslaved. The furnishing of the dwelling house of Siberie was extensive. For Jan Kok no dwelling house or furnishing was mentioned, and in 1784 only a stone storehouse and some walled cattle corrals.

There were 170 head of cattle and the necessary Cologne milk pots, copper milk cans, tubs, buckets, churning equipment for making butter and butter barrels. Besides tools there were, as armament, 18 flintlocks and 12 bayonets. There was also a complete ship's outfit, from which it could be concluded that fishing was done from Jan Kock on the inner water of Rif Sint Marie and outside it in the Bullenbaai. The inventory lists furthermore showed small ferries with paddles for transporting harvested salt in the salt pans.

In addition the livestock consisted of more than 800 sheep and 76 goats. On Jan Kok lived 103 enslaved people, including 14 children. There worked 2 bomba's (overseers): Louw ("opperbomba", head overseer) and Juantu ("onderbomba", under-overseer), 2 to 4 masons, 1 shoemaker, 1 cooper, 2 painters, 1 leather-dresser, 1 fisherman, 2 grooms (baké), 5 shepherds, 3 goatherds, 2 cowherds and 2 gardeners for the vegetable garden. Among the women there were: 1 wet nurse, 1 washerwoman, 3 bakers, 2 net-knitters, cooks, turkey-keepers and saleswomen. The latter went to the city daily to sell the surplus of vegetables, fruit and milk. Not all enslaved people had their occupations named.

Siberie as country residence

Monsanto: "In the large storehouse of Siberie lay 1,500 makotten (baskets)* of maize; in the small storehouse were kept the fisherman's canoe, four ox carts, four saddles, including a woman's saddle, for the 13 horses, and seven saddles for the ten (jumping, pack and mule) donkeys, plus the tools.

The pine-wood furniture of the dwelling house Siberie was very simple, which might indicate that Cafiero stayed for long periods in his town house outside the Stenen Padspoort (Pietermaai). In his will Cafiero determined that his brother Pasqual Cafiero and his housekeeper, with whom he had an extramarital child, would inherit his property. Cafiero was himself a Catholic but bequeathed sums of money to the Catholic, the Reformed and the Jewish congregations," according to Monsanto.

Mortgage debts

Cafiero's son Pascual was also connected with the church and in 1804 proved to be one of the initiators of the restoration of the basilica of Santa Anna after an English attack on the city. During the dry period that followed, planters on Curaçao went through difficult times, and Siberie was not spared either. Under English rule in 1807 the Cafieros had to repay a mortgage, and Pascual died in 1813 leaving a mortgage debt. The landhuis Jan Kock had by then been a ruin for years and merged with Siberie. And in 1815 his mother, Silberio's widow, lived in a rented house of the church in Otrobanda.

The inventory of Siberie as regards livestock was at that time: "129 head of cattle, 808 sheep, 473 goats, 36 horses, 4 jumping donkeys, 24 pack donkeys, 1 mule, 183 turkeys, 271 chickens, 173 ducks, 2 flights of pigeons* and 43 geese".

Production

The plantation Siberie had already been laid out in the 17th century, and in 1695 maize, cotton and indigo were grown. There was also a planting of divi-divi, for which a primitive method was used on Siberie: mixing the seed with goat manure and sowing it. Divi-divi was formerly an export product whose pods were used in the tanning industry.

As usual there was also a hofje on the plantation: the soil of Siberie was more fertile than at neighbouring plantations, but the application of modern farming techniques also made Siberie, unlike the nearby Grote Berg and Daniël, very profitable.

An important factor was that Siberie, although it does not border the sea, also had salt pans in the bay of St. Marie, near Jan Kock. In dry times salt was an important source of income for plantations, and in 1841, because of drought, salt could already be "harvested" from the Siberie pans in February. Thus in 1837 4,777 barrels of salt were produced. Around 1904 fibre agaves were imported from Trinidad and Suriname and planted, among other places, on Siberie. From fibre agave — pita — rope, among other things, was produced.

Curaçao Liqueur

In 1905 there were 300 orange trees on Siberie, and it was one of the largest orangeries on Curaçao. It was thus one of the most important suppliers of the citrus fruit laraha, whose peel provides the base ingredient for the Curaçao liqueur.

Livestock was also kept, but the import of infected cattle onto Siberie once spread disease among the Curaçao herd, as a result of which an import ban was imposed. Livestock farming, like the farming tradition on Siberie, was continued far into the twentieth century by a Portuguese entrepreneur.

Back became front

On a photo from around 1900 the landhuis can be seen with the original upper storey on it. Further data are lacking, but it does explain why the present landhuis has only one storey. The hipped roof is now lower than originally and has no dormers, which makes it look rather unique. The same happened at landhuis Santa Catharina.

Striking is that there is no gutter system to catch or drain the water.

Siberie still has extensive housing: the plantation house is situated on a raised terrace and has a gable stone in which the year 1753 is engraved. The present front of the house on the south side was formerly the back. An old road that ran over the hills from Daniël and Siberie came out at the old front of the house.

Furthermore, Siberie also has the stone house of the factor, or vitó, the overseer of the plantation, complete with a tiled roof. There are also cowherds' houses, dairy houses and so-called nursery houses (kweekhuizen), barns and cattle corrals, and no fewer than 4 storehouses.

Slave village

Directly next to the overseer's house, west of the plantation house, there lay in 1866 a village of 40 huts of enslaved people, with 90 people living there. In 1867 there were 47 huts and the number of inhabitants was 129, and in 1873 there were 37 huts and 138 inhabitants. Everyone who lived around a landhuis left for the Grote weg (the road to Westpunt). Of this village only some foundations of little houses and ovens remain, up to the foot of a small hill.

North of the road to the landhuis there is also a dam with a very large walk-in well, a natural water catchment that was called Pos Hanchu. Characteristic of Siberie was furthermore a stone enclosure, large parts of which were still fairly intact into the 20th century. Attempts to conserve these walls and preserve them as a historic monument came to nothing, however, and they have now almost entirely disappeared.

Gerard Ellis

In 1814, after the death of Pascual Cafiero, the plantation came via the "weeskamer" (orphans' chamber, a mortgage bank) into the hands of Gerard Martin Ellis. The Ellis family was known as a planter family and already owned various plantations such as Santa Cruz, Savonet, Zorgvliet, Brievengat, Groot Santa Martha, Ronde Klip and Knip. Gerard had himself been owner of Tera Seca (now Janwe), plantation Noordkant and the large plantation De Drie Gebroeders (alias Veeris), which he now sold in order to take over Siberie. He also owned a shipyard in the city.

The English raid in the vicinity of Rif Sint Marie was a disaster for plantation owners: various landhuizen in the area such as Sebastian and Porto Marie were burnt, and enslaved people fled to safer places. Thus there were once 120 enslaved people at work on Siberie and Jan Kock, but at the purchase of the plantations by Ellis only 6 on Siberie and 2 on Jan Kock. The herd had also been thinned to 4 oxen, 8 cows, 12 calves and 400 sheep. A consolation for Ellis was that the plantation house of Siberie was spared during the English raid.

Ellis sells pieces of land from Siberie, such as Cribus to Jan Römer, who calls the knoekje "Korporaal", the name under which it is still known. Korporaal was never added to Siberie again and became ever smaller in area.

Ellis remained owner of the plantations Siberie and Jan Kock for less than 20 years. In 1832 he died in Venezuela at the age of 52. It then turned out that he had fathered no fewer than 15 children.

August Muller

In 1830 August Leberecht Statius Muller (22.1.1798–9.9.1884) officially became owner of Siberie. Unofficially he had acted as owner since 1828 of both Siberie and the nearby knoekjes Duzu and Baai Klaas. Muller was a businessman, landowner, member of the court and owner of the nearby plantation San Sebastian, and member of the Board of Directors in the colony. Furthermore, from 1823 to 1876 Muller was editor at the Curaçaosche Courant. In 1833 he became co-owner of the printing house/publishing house and was appointed state printer. He was also district master and as such wrote many harvest reports which he invariably signed "August Muller". He proudly reported that he only had to visit his two plantations once a fortnight because the daily management was in the hands of a black factor, i.e. the vitó.

Salt, the white gold

Muller also came up with the initiative to promote the export of Curaçao salt to the Netherlands, had great interest in the agricultural sector, owned much literature on agriculture and took part wholeheartedly in the agricultural and livestock techniques that the government had developed. Muller was, like Van der Dijs (Savonet) and Sprock (Brievengat and Cas Cora), one of the few who used manure, a modern farming experiment for that time. Sprock and Muller were also among the few planters who ventured into the rather costly cultivation of cochineal. Muller could afford this thanks to income from commerce and the printing house. Thus in early 1841 nopaleries were laid out on Siberie for the cochineal, a species of scale insect that likes to grow on the nopal cactus. It yields a red pigment, called cochineal or carmine red, a natural dye that was formerly very popular in the clothing industry.

Trials with cochineal were not successful on Curaçao, but from harvest reports of the west division it appears that Siberie was good for 92.5 pounds in 1844, 450 pounds in 1850, 100 in 1854 and 300 in 1856.

August Muller dies in 1887 in Venezuela, where he was living at the time. In 1876 he had sold Siberie, Sebastian and the rest of his possessions on Bándabou for 28,000 guilders to his three unmarried daughters Cornelia Helena, Petronella Wilhelmina and Jannetje Magdalena Muller.

Striking locations at Siberie

• Porto di pilá lies in the extreme south-west of Siberie; there stood a gate with pillars as a passage to Jan Kock, close to the areas Gomasi and Wan Boneiru.
• In the east of Siberie lies Shon Manuela, nowadays part of Tera Kora, and Mondi di Siberie is the plain east of Siberie.
• Pos Shimaron (well of the runaway enslaved person) is a natural water storage place in the north of Siberie, opposite Krakeel. Some water drips from the rocks, but formerly it was so much that the entire population of Krakeel went there to fetch drinking water.
• Fontein Chikí, or Klein Fontein, is a place south of Fontein and north-west of Siberie. Kunuku di Katoen is the north-western corner of Siberie, adjoining Klein Fontein, and Seru di kunuku di katoen (150 m) is the mountain peak of the mountain plateau there.
• Kurá di kabai, Horse Corral, is a place in the middle of Siberie, west of the landhuis. Also in the middle of Siberie lies Seru di Anita (127 m), named after a woman who probably lived nearby. It lies close to Seru di Dake (148 m), also called Dákwe.
• Seru di Nika, a protruding point of the flat mountain, and Seru di Dundun both lie in the north-east of Siberie.
• South-west of the landhuis lie the Pos di Ema and the Pos di Atras. And south of the landhuis: the Seru di Santana (the cemetery hill), 116 m. At its foot babies were buried, but without any memorial. The Dam di lechi is also here.
• Rooi di Santu is a rooi and Cunucu di Santu (Sand knoek) is a place in the south of Siberie. Klein Jan Kock is also found in the south of Siberie.

* Makotten are probably baskets, in Papiamentu "makutu". * A flight of pigeons was 20 pairs, so 40 in total. Some houses had 2 flights of pigeons. Pigeons were formerly also eaten.

Note: the Dutch source's footnote marker "" after "Malpais" at the top has no matching footnote on the page.*

Sources

• M. Visman: De geschiedenis van Jan Kock
• C. Monsanto: Kleine kroniek van San Sebastiaan
• W. Renkema: Het Curaçaos plantagebedrijf in de 19e eeuw
• P. Brenneker: Sambumbu, various editions
• J. van Soest: Olie als water
• Werkgroep Archeologie: reports on Siberie

With thanks to: Christel Monsanto, Helma Maduro Molhuijsen, Francois van der Hoeven, Fred Chumaceiro and Michele van Veldhoven.