Boer History1737 at the Cape of Good Hope: Table Bay Gale, Van Kervel’s Death, Schmit Mission, De la Fontaine Hands Over
The Great Gale in Table Bay — 21 May 1737
Calendar 1737 was one of the most disastrous years ever known to shipping at the Cape. On the 21st of May a fleet of nine ships, mostly of the third class, lay at anchor in Table Bay ready to sail for the Fatherland. During the preceding night a heavy gale had set in from the northwest. At daylight the wind veered a little more to the westward and increased the swell. Huge waves rolled in between Robben Island and Green Point, and the bay was like a sheet of foam. As the gale increased, ships’ cables began to part, and between ten and eleven o’clock in the morning minute guns were heard. The Castle and the shore then knew that a homeward fleet, not a single coastal packet, was in the breakers. [3]
In a short time the Ypenroode was seen to be drifting. She struck close to the mouth of Salt River, and with the shock her masts fell and she broke into fragments in the surf. Some of her crew managed to get to land. The Goudriaan parted next. She struck broadside on, with her stern in the mouth of Salt River, and went to pieces at once. The larger number of those on board perished. At noon the Flora struck at the same place as the Goudriaan. She too went to pieces immediately, and of her crew only six men got to land. [3]
The Paddenburg followed, but her crew were more fortunate. She was carried in on the crest of a mountain wave, passed directly over the other wrecks, and struck high up on the beach. She went to pieces with the shock, but most of those on board escaped with their lives. The same Salt River stretch had taken the Cape brigantine Feyenoord during the night between the 1st and 2nd of July 1736 with only one life lost. Calendar 1737 turned that known lee shore from a one-packet casualty into a daylight destruction of a homeward fleet. [3]
Those morning hulls sat inside a roadstead that, across the thirteen years 1725–1737 embraced in the same government span, received one thousand and seven ships, or on an average seventy-seven yearly. Of these, eight hundred and sixty-eight belonged to the Company, ninety-one were English, twenty-seven Danish, nineteen French, one Portuguese, and one Flemish. Foreign flags had not returned in the old numbers after the years when outsiders were prevented from obtaining supplies during scarcity. The burghers felt the loss, for foreigners had brought ready money; the hope that better times would restore them was not realised. Beef and mutton were again to be had at a penny halfpenny to two pence a pound once the cattle plague decreased, but the Cape had lost its reputation for cheap fresh provisions, and it was a long time in regaining it. A May homeward fleet of nine third-class ships was therefore a large share of one year’s seventy-seven arrivals concentrated on a single open anchorage, with no mole and with cables as the only hold against a northwest swell that had already taken the Feyenoord on the same Salt River sand the July before. [3]
Afternoon and Evening Wrecks — Westerwyk, Buys, Duynbeek, Roodenrys, Victoria
At half past two in the afternoon the Westerwyk was driven ashore at the same Salt River place. She ran high on the beach without breaking up, and only a few of her men were lost. At four o’clock the Buys struck close to the Westerwyk, but she went to pieces at once, and only five of her crew were saved. The afternoon therefore split the remaining third-class hulls between a ship that held together on the sand and a ship that vanished in the surf a few yards away. [3]
Early in the evening the Duynbeek was driven ashore beyond Salt River mouth and broke up immediately; very few of her men were saved. Later the Roodenrys struck at the same place, but she held together until all of her crew but six got to land by means of a rope attached to a yard which was washed up. At the same time the brigantine Victoria, one of the Cape packets, was carried by a great wave high on the beach, where she lay dry when the gale was spent. Nearly all of her crew were saved. [3]
There were now left in the bay only the Papenburg, a homeward-bound Indiaman, and the Goede Hoop, a small vessel built at the Cape in 1733 and used as a packet. Those two managed to ride out the gale. In all, two hundred and eight men were lost out of seven hundred and thirty-nine that formed the crews of the wrecked Indiamen. The purchase price of the cargo with which the beach was strewn was £160,128. Nine Company hulls and one Cape packet therefore accounted for the day’s wreck roll; two hulls, one of them locally built four years earlier, were all that still rode to anchors when the foam subsided. [3]
Table Bay in late May was still an open roadstead whose cables, not a mole, held the homeward fleet. Company ships still assembled there to return to Europe together: the slowest sailers first from Batavia, then the Ceylon squadron, then the late Batavia ships, aiming to leave about the end of March or the beginning of April as a summer fleet. A May concentration of nine third-class hulls still waiting for the Fatherland was therefore a late remnant of that ordinary gathering, caught by the season in which north-westers rolled between Robben Island and Green Point. Calendar 1737 wrote that risk in a single day’s sequence of named hulls, a body count of two hundred and eight, and a cargo figure large enough to force Castle authority onto the Salt River sand while wreckage still washed in. The settlement’s own packet Victoria shared the beach with the Indiamen; the local Goede Hoop, four years off the Cape slips, shared the surviving anchorage with the Papenburg. Of seven hundred and thirty-nine Indiamen crew, more than one man in four did not leave the bay alive. [3]
Placaat against Pilfering and Four Hangings on the Beach — May 1737
While the ships were drifting ashore a placaat was issued threatening summary execution to anyone found pilfering the wrecked cargo. A military guard was stationed on the beach, and four men who were caught stealing were actually hanged on a gallows erected near the water’s edge, where their bodies were left exposed as a warning to others. The Castle therefore treated the Salt River shore as both salvage ground and scaffold on the same day the cables parted. [3]
Those executions took place on the same principle as that which permitted the shooting of San cattle-lifters caught red-handed: the council treated theft from stranded Company cargo as an immediate capital offence rather than as a matter for delayed process alone. The beach therefore became a place where the Company’s claim to wrecked goods was enforced in sight of the surf, with four corpses left on the gallows while the purchase price of the strewn cargo was still being counted. [3]
For the settlement the May disaster was not only a shipping loss. It forced Castle authority onto the Salt River shore in force, tied ordinary winter northwest weather to nine Indiamen and a Cape packet wrecked or stranded in a single day, and left a cash figure—more than one hundred and sixty thousand pounds purchase price of cargo—on the public record of Table Bay risk. The placaat and the four hangings made that record visible to every burgher and sailor who walked the beach after the gale. The guard stood among broken masts and cargo bales while the gallows went up near the water; the four men were hanged where the wrecks had come in, not after a delayed sitting of the high court, so that the warning would be read against the same foam that had broken the Ypenroode and the Goudriaan. [3]
No mole yet stood off Green Point to break the northwest swell. The day’s lesson was administrative as well as nautical: a homeward fleet in an open bay could be reduced to two riding hulls between morning minute guns and evening dark, and the cargo on the sand would be guarded by soldiers and a gallows. Calendar 1737 therefore joined the worst single shipping disaster yet recorded at the Cape with a public demonstration that wrecked Company goods were to be treated as the Company’s own under pain of immediate death. The Westerwyk high and whole on the beach, the Victoria dry above the tide, and the Papenburg and Goede Hoop still riding were the only exceptions to a day that had turned Table Bay into a wreckers’ shore. [3]
Hubner Survivors’ Attestation and the Eastern Elephant Ban — July–October 1737
Three of the Europeans who had escaped the massacre of Hermanus Hubner’s rear party at Palo’s kraals—Hendrik de Vries, Hendrik Scheffer, and Jan de Vries—came on to the Cape. On the 10th of July 1737 the two first-named gave an account of their journey in the form of an attestation, fixing the eastern ivory trek and the Xhosa attack in formal Company paper. The party that had left the settlement had numbered eleven white men, with thirteen waggons and a strong band of Khoikhoi, starting from the Gauritz, then considered the eastern frontier, and travelling through Gonaqua country under Captain Babbelaan as far as Palo’s residence and on toward Pondo country. [3] [4]
In July 1737 three elephant hunters arrived at the Castle in a state of near collapse with that grim story. Nothing certain had been heard of Hubner’s party since it had gone east for ivory. They had been kindly received at Palo’s kraal, had gone on into country later identified as Natal and among people later identified as Pondos, and had bought ivory from three white wreck survivors living locally before the rear party was stabbed at Palo’s on the return. The dead named in the later account included Hermanus Hubner himself, Frederik Hubner, Andries Esterhuis, Gerrit van Vuuren, Philip Constant, and Anthonie Pottier. Those who had been less confident of the friendly intentions of the Xhosa had taken another route and escaped. The incident was the first recorded clash between settlers and Xhosa, and at the Castle it roused compassion for the next of kin and regret for the lost ivory. [3] [9]
In July 1737, owing to the massacre of Hubner’s party, elephant hunting beyond the eastern border was prohibited. The love of gain was, however, so strong that in the following October the prohibition was cancelled, and the only restriction placed upon elephant shooting was that each hunter should pay two shillings and a penny for a license. In the license it was forbidden to molest indigenous communities or to trade with them. The elephant had already nearly disappeared from the settled districts under the demand for ivory; the July ban and the October licence were the Castle’s attempt to keep that demand from writing another Palo on Company paper. [3]
Calendar 1737 thus closed the Hubner episode as administration rather than only as survivors’ story: three exhausted men at the Castle in July, an attestation on the 10th, a temporary eastern hunting ban in the same month, and a licensed return to the ivory frontier by October under written conditions that the Castle could not easily enforce far inland. The seven who had escaped the pursuit had already split on the Sunday river, four of them joining Gerrit Oosthuizen and Jacob van Deventer going east; only the three who came on to Table Valley made the massacre a dated item in the council’s year. [3] [9]
George Schmit and the Moravian Mission Noted — 11 July 1737
The first mention of the Moravian missionary George Schmit is found in the proceedings of the council of policy of the 11th of July 1737. The council recorded that a certain person named George Schmit had come in the ship Huis te Rensburg with the object of converting the Khoikhoi to Christianity if that should be possible; that it was to be hoped such a desirable result would be attained by the blessing of the Lord upon the means to be employed, so that those people might be brought to the true knowledge of God; and that therefore all possible assistance was to be given to him in the prosecution of that meritorious work. The minute is the first official welcome of a Moravian at the Cape, entered the day after the Hubner attestation and while De la Fontaine still held the chair. [3]
Schmit established himself for that purpose at Baviaans Kloof, later Genadendal, in the district of Stellenbosch. The council contemplated that if any Khoikhoi should be converted he would present them to the clergyman of the parish for baptism, and that he would not attempt to form a separate congregation with rules differing from those of the Dutch Reformed church. The July minute therefore opened a Moravian presence under Reformed parish assumptions rather than under an independent mission church. [3]
Inside 1737 the decisive official act was the July welcome and the promise of assistance. Schmit collected a party of Khoikhoi and began the work of teaching Christian doctrine and a settled industrious life. The government met that beginning with kindness. Dissenters were not to establish churches with a different form of worship: the Lutheran residents of the Cape, anxious for a resident clergyman, had no permission for a congregation of their own, and the Moravian was admitted only on the understanding that baptism would pass through the Reformed parish. The later friction over baptism, the dispersal of his hearers, and any free passage home still lay outside this calendar; the year’s Cape record is the council’s hope that the Khoikhoi might be brought to the knowledge of God and the instruction that every official help be given to the man from the Huis te Rensburg. [3]
The same mid-July week therefore carried two very different papers into the Castle: the Hubner attestation of the 10th, which named Palo and an eastern massacre, and the Schmit minute of the 11th, which named a Moravian and a Khoikhoi mission at Baviaans Kloof. One document looked east to ivory and a hunting ban; the other looked inland to a kloof in the Stellenbosch district and to baptism through the Reformed parish. Both were acts of the sitting council under De la Fontaine, still governor until the end of August. [3]
De la Fontaine Transfers to Van Kervel — 31 August 1737
Governor Jan de la Fontaine was advancing in years, and infirmities were creeping upon him. He was a widower, his wife having died in June 1730. He had children for whom he desired the advantages of a residence in Europe, and from whom he did not wish to be separated. During the twenty-eight years that he had served the Company he had amassed considerable wealth, and it had become a desire with him to spend the evening of his life in repose in the Fatherland. In 1736 he applied to the directors for permission to retire. They heard of his resolution with regret, for he had performed his duties to their satisfaction; but the request was so reasonable that it could not be refused. [3]
They therefore appointed the secunde Adriaan van Kervel as his successor and promoted Hendrik Swellengrebel to be secunde. The retiring governor was permitted to hand over the administration whenever it should please him to do so, and to return to Europe with his rank and salary. On the 17th of June 1737 despatches to that effect were received at the Cape. Two and a half months later, on the 31st of August, De la Fontaine transferred the duties and handed his governor’s sash to Van Kervel. He remained in the colony after the transfer, with leave to sail for Europe as admiral of a homeward fleet when he chose. [3] [9]
Van Kervel had passed a great portion of his life in South Africa. From 1719 to 1725 he had been secretary to the council of policy; then he became fiscal, and afterwards secunde, so that his experience was varied and extensive. In the fiscal’s chair, an office unpopular with the burghers, he served some four years to the satisfaction of the parties who came before him. When De la Fontaine took the oath as governor on the 8th of March 1730, the fiscal independent Van Kervel was appointed to succeed him as secunde, and Daniel van den Henghel, then in service at Colombo, was appointed fiscal. Van Kervel’s stepping into De la Fontaine’s shoes was treated at the Castle as a natural development; the directors’ approval arrived with their reluctant fiat on the retirement request. His formal installation on the last day of August closed a governorship that had run since March 1730, and a Cape career that had run since the secretaryship of 1719. [3] [9]
De la Fontaine was the first governor who had made his previous career at the Cape. Detained in 1710 from the Horstendal by Commissioner Johan van Hoorn and appointed storekeeper, he had worked in the colony without a break for two decades before the highest office. Born in Amsterdam on the 23rd of April 1684, son of the silk merchant Jacques de la Fontaine and Barbara van den Burgh, he had been called Jan in the Vlek, sat on the council as a junior merchant, become a full merchant in 1717, and been named provisional secunde and senior merchant after Chavonnes’s death in 1724. From 1723 the Company’s annual dividends had dropped in a decade from thirty-seven per cent to twenty-one, and the Cape economy had been pressed to make up ground with silk and kirman experiments that were already past their most critical years. The August transfer ended that long Cape climb under the same man who had asked, the year before, to spend his last years in the Fatherland. [9]
Death of Governor Van Kervel — 19 September 1737
Van Kervel held the highest office in the land less than three weeks, and only presided in the council on one occasion. After a short illness he died on the 19th of September 1737. Installed on the 31st of August, he had barely taken the sash before falling ill. Three weeks are only a fleeting moment in the growth of a settlement, and the image of this governor flashed through the year like a star that did not stay. [3] [9]
As he had expressed a desire to his daughter that his funeral should be conducted without the usual state, the council respected his dying wish. His remains were buried in the church between seven and eight o’clock in the evening of the 24th, the officers of government and principal burghers attending without the parade of draped banners, muffled drums, and minute guns. He wanted to be buried as an ordinary citizen, without half-mast flags, drums, volleys, and speeches. So it was done. [3] [9]
He left a widow and a daughter, who remained in the colony, as most of their near relatives were resident at the Cape. The widow was Aletta Corssenaer, already ailing. There were also two sons. Commentators at the settlement called the daughter the belle of the Cape. The September death therefore cut short a governorship that had barely begun after a long Cape career in the secretaryship, the fiscal’s office, and the secunde’s chair—an officer almost as much respected as his predecessor, some said more. Within the same calendar year the settlement saw both the formal end of De la Fontaine’s long rule and the sudden vacancy of his appointed successor. [3] [9]
The day before the governor died, another Cape household closed. Charles du Plessis, son of the refugee surgeon of that name, born on the Oosterlandt and baptised on board in Table Bay on the 18th of April 1688, married in 1712 to Cecilia Marcevene, and himself practising as a surgeon, died on the 18th of September 1737. The Castle’s nineteen-day governorship and a Drakenstein surgeon’s death therefore shared the same September week: one vacancy at the head of government, one vacancy in a French refugee medical line that had begun on a Table Bay deck forty-nine years earlier. [8]
Van den Henghel Chosen Acting Head by Lot — 20 September 1737
On the morning after the governor’s death the council met to elect an acting head. Six members were present, and of these two put forward claims. The secunde, Hendrik Swellengrebel, was one. He was by birth a colonist, son of Johannes Swellengrebel, who had been dispenser and member of the high court of justice at the beginning of the century. He based his pretensions on precedent: that upon the death of a governor the second in command should act until the pleasure of the supreme authorities could be known. He had been secunde only nineteen days, but he had been a member of the council of policy for thirteen years. [3]
The independent fiscal, Daniel van den Henghel, claimed the appointment on the ground that he had been a senior merchant longer than Swellengrebel. He had been in the colony since March 1731. The question was put to the vote: Nicholas Heyning and Christoffel Brand favoured the fiscal; Captain Johannes Tobias Rhenius and the secretary Ryk Tulbagh supported the secunde. The result was a stalemate. The fiscal then shouted that Tulbagh, as Swellengrebel’s brother-in-law, was prejudiced and that his vote was not valid. [3] [9]
The secretary replied that the right to vote had never before been disputed on such grounds. He had been a member of the council for nine years and would continue to vote according to his conscience. There was no regulation denying a council member his vote on that ground. The others maintained Tulbagh’s right. The master of the warehouses, Brand, then proposed that as the members were equally divided the lot should be cast. This was agreed to. The honourable gentlemen folded snippets of paper and a hat went round; someone drew, and the fiscal’s name came out. Van den Henghel took the vacant chair. [3] [9]
So it became possible that the winner of the first governmental lottery ever held at the Cape ruled the settlement from the 20th of September. Swellengrebel had insisted that he was the legitimate choice and that he had the longer experience of Cape affairs; Van den Henghel had counted days as senior merchant and would not step back. The council had tried to nominate the secunde and failed. The hat settled what the votes could not. The Assembly of Seventeen did not approve of Van den Henghel’s appointment, because they considered the secunde the proper person to assume the chief authority upon the death of a governor. They later sent instructions that he should return to his office of independent fiscal, that Swellengrebel should take the place of governor, and that Tulbagh should become secunde. Those changes lay outside this calendar. Through the remainder of 1737 the Cape was headed by the fiscal chosen by lot. [3] [9]
Government Continuity, Wheat Export, and Shipping — 1737
Across the thirteen years 1725–1737, one thousand and seven ships put into Table Bay, or on an average seventy-seven yearly. Of these, eight hundred and sixty-eight belonged to the Company, ninety-one were English, twenty-seven Danish, nineteen French, one Portuguese, and one Flemish. The May gale struck that roadstead traffic at its most concentrated moment—nine homeward hulls ready for the Fatherland—and left the bay’s winter danger written in wreckage, two hundred and eight dead, cargo at £160,128, and four hangings on the beach. [3]
From 1728 through 1737 there was a constant export of wheat, sometimes of as much as seven thousand muids, though the crops were not uniformly good, and the directors still required a year’s supply to be reserved before any was sent to India. In 1724 and again in 1725 over five thousand muids had gone out; in 1726 none could be spared, owing to drought; in 1727 there was not sufficient for home consumption, owing to rust, which had attacked rye before but not wheat. Ordinary grain administration therefore continued under three successive heads of government in a single year: De la Fontaine until 31 August, Van Kervel for nineteen days, and Van den Henghel from 20 September. The 1728–1737 export run still framed the Company’s ordinary Cape business in this last of those years, even while the Castle changed hands twice after May’s wrecks. [3]
During De la Fontaine’s long government, or so shortly afterwards as to be practically within it, new names entered the official record: Jeremiah Auret, Jan Bam, Jan Blignaut, Carel Buitendag, Dirk Craffort, Jan Ditlof, Jan Fleck, Andries Holtshuizen, Hermanus Keeve, Frans Marx, Jacob Naude, Hendrik Nefdt, Adriaan de Nys, Godlieb Opperman, Christiaan Rabe, Pieter Radermacher, Andries Schutte, Frederik Seele, Jan Serrurier, Jan Hendrik Swemmer, Jan Andries Truter, Willem van de Vyver, and Ernest Wepener. Between 1724 and 1737 one hundred and five such new colonists appear in the official lists, after sixty-one between 1700 and 1714 and eighty-four between 1714 and 1724. Those names sat beside the older French households still visible in the same year: Charles du Plessis dead on the 18th of September, and the rural pulpits still arranged as they had been since Hartzogenrath’s death the year before, with Salomon van Echten at Drakenstein and consulent for Stellenbosch. The fifteen-year quit-rent tenure introduced on the 18th of February 1732 for peninsula garden ground and small plots bordering freehold farms, at two shillings and a penny a morgen after the first year, still framed how new ground was held while three men in succession sat in the governor’s chair. [3] [8]
Calendar 1737 thus joined the worst single shipping disaster yet recorded at the Cape with the Hubner attestations and a brief eastern hunting ban, the council’s welcome to George Schmit, De la Fontaine’s formal handover, Van Kervel’s death within three weeks, a refugee surgeon’s death the day before the governor’s, and an acting succession decided by lot—while wheat export and the long average of Table Bay arrivals still framed the Company’s ordinary Cape business. The year opened under De la Fontaine, passed the sash on the last day of August, buried Van Kervel on the evening of the 24th of September without banners or drums, and closed with Daniel van den Henghel in the vacant chair. [3] [4] [8] [9]