GOVERNOR of Mauritius from 1677 to 1692, He came to Mauritius as governor with his wife and a child in September 1677, on the Bode, and on 4 October succeeded Hugo (q. v.) as governor of the Cape : his salary was only 36 florins a month, compared with Hugo's 100, but at first he was surgeon, doctor and even Sunday preacher as well as governor. A student of national history, botany, medicine and theology, Lamotius during his first year as governor toured the island coasts on foot, later discovered a line plateau in the centre of the island, and compiled a relatively detailed map. In 1677 and 1678 his subjects numbered about 135 ; by 1679 they were 153, including 28 employees, 63 slaves, six exiled persons, 43 free colonists and 13 slaves belonging to them. They were indisciplined, and easily discouraged from productive labour and from planting by destructive storms, floods, rats and grass hoppers. Lamotius exiled a family of Timor people to Ile aux Mouettes (later Fouquets) in 1678, but with others of his worthless inferiors was over-friendly, dining and drinking with the free colonists daily and allowing them to be very familiar. Useful work done by Lamotius included plantations of rice, barley and corn at Flacq ; of citrons, pamplemousses, coconuts and vines else where ; building of stables at Flacq, housing 300 head of cattle ; of a large stone building for stores at the Fort ; of a saw mill on the River Nyon (as it was later called) ; the cutting of ebony at several places in the north, south, and east of the island ; the production (by the free colonists mainly) of a white syrup from sugar cane, and of arrack from sugar canes, sweet potatoes and palm trees. Lamotius was impeded by getting few supplies from the Cape. He supplied or allowed the colonists to supply maize, tobacco and butter to English visitors, most notable of whom were John Goldsborongh in 1682, and Benjamin Harris of the Berkeley CastIe in 1681. Later [according to Deodati's dispatches of 1694) Lamotius with his chief subordinates Steen and Ovaar took to treating employees and colonists as highway men and robbers, burning their houses and destroying their plantations if they were not submissive ; insubordination and drunkenness became rife, and in April 1689 Lamotius himself nearly killed Steen in a drunken brawl. So many persons complained against Lamotius that (despite a very line report and survey of Mauritius present and future sent in 1690 to Governor Van der Stel at the Cape) in 1692 Deodati was sent to be governor instead of Lamotius, whom he sent for trial to Batavia. There the public prosecutor in 1693 accused Lamotius and his chief subordinates of various crimes, including friendship with English visitors ; encouraging the rape of a colonist's wife (who had rejected Lamotius' attentions) ; of having treated colonists and employees harshly and unjustly ; and he asked that Lamotius suffer death for these crimes. In 1695 Lamotius was finally sentenced to spend six years in prison on the island of Banda. According to the Cape Archives, in September 1709 one Isaac Johannes Lamotius reported that he had a kabaai and four shirts stolen ; in 1718 a man of the same name, who had "resided several years in India and at the Cape" petitioned to be given a passage back from the Cape to Holland, and is presumably the same man who forty years earlier went as a young and inexperienced governor to Mauritius.
P. J. BARNWELL.---------
Bibl. :
- A. Pitot, T’Eylandt Mauritius, PP. 187-240 passim.
- Leibbrandt, Cape Letters Received 1695-1708, pp. 10, 11, 24.
- Leibbrandt, Cape Requesten 1715-1806, VOL F.-O.
- Leibbrandt, Cape Journal 1699-1732, under 21 SEPTEMBER 1709.
Dictionnaire de Biographie Mauricienne, 1944, N° 15, pp. 458 - 459.