Boer History1738 at the Cape of Good Hope: Van den Henghel Acting, De la Fontaine Sails, Schmit Mission, Drought, Van Gendt
Van den Henghel Acting Head through 1738
Calendar 1738 opened with the Cape still under the acting head chosen by lot after Governor Adriaan van Kervel’s death on the 19th of September 1737. The independent fiscal, Daniel van den Henghel, had taken the vacant chair on the morning of the 20th, when the council split evenly between him and the secunde Hendrik Swellengrebel and the master of the warehouses, Christoffel Brand, proposed that the lot decide. [3]
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 therefore sent instructions that he should return to his office of independent fiscal, that Swellengrebel should take the place of governor, and that the secretary Ryk Tulbagh should become secunde. Those changes took effect only on the 14th of April 1739. Through the whole of 1738, therefore, the fiscal chosen by lot remained acting head of the Cape government. [3]
Van den Henghel had been in the colony since March 1731 and based his claim on longer seniority as a senior merchant than Swellengrebel, who had been secunde only nineteen days when Van Kervel died though he had sat on the council of policy for thirteen years. The year thus continued an unusual acting arrangement: a fiscal, not the second in command, held the chair while the directors’ corrective despatches still lay in the slow circuit between Europe and Table Bay. [3]
De la Fontaine Sails for Europe — March 1738
The retired governor Jan de la Fontaine had transferred the administration to Van Kervel on the 31st of August 1737 after despatches of the 17th of June authorised his retirement. He did not leave the colony at once. He remained at the Cape until the month of March 1738, when he sailed for Europe as admiral of a fleet of five ships, carrying with him the rank and salary the directors had allowed a retiring governor to keep on the homeward passage. [3]
De la Fontaine had served the Company for twenty-eight years, had governed since his installation on the 8th of March 1730, and had applied in 1736 to spend the evening of his life in the Fatherland with children for whom he wanted a European residence. His March departure closed the last personal presence of that long administration on Cape soil and left the settlement under Van den Henghel’s acting government without the former governor still living quietly in the colony. [3]
For the roadstead the sailing was ordinary Company business—an admiral’s flag over five homeward hulls—but for Cape politics it marked the final physical exit of the man who had handed over in August and whose successor had died within three weeks. Calendar 1738 therefore began with De la Fontaine still present and ended with him gone, while the lot-chosen fiscal continued to preside. [3]
George Schmit Continues at Baviaans Kloof — 1738
The Moravian missionary George Schmit had been noted in the proceedings of the council of policy on the 11th of July 1737 as having come in the ship Huis te Rensburg to convert the Khoikhoi to Christianity if that should be possible. The council hoped such a result would be attained by the blessing of the Lord and ordered that all possible assistance be given him. He established himself at Baviaans Kloof, later Genadendal, in the district of Stellenbosch. [3]
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. He collected a party of Khoikhoi and laboured for five years, doing his utmost to teach the doctrines of Christianity and the advantages of a settled industrious life. All this time he met with nothing but kindness from the government. [3]
Inside 1738 that work was still in its early phase: the later clash over baptism in 1742, the dispersal of his hearers, and his free passage home in January 1744 still lay ahead. The year’s Cape record therefore shows a Moravian presence continuing under Reformed parish assumptions, with Company goodwill and without yet the sacramental dispute that would end the first mission. [3]
San Raid on Lourens’s Stock and Conciliation — 1738
In 1738 a San raiding party drove off the stock of a farmer named August Lourens. The stock was pursued and recovered without any bloodshed. By direction of the council, the landdrost and board of militia of Stellenbosch then requested a discreet farmer to endeavour to enter into a friendly agreement with the San, and presents were made in hope of inducing them to abstain from robbery. [3]
That conciliatory line was remembered on the frontier when, early in 1739, another horde struck Piketberg and the Bokkeveld, murdered two Europeans and several slaves, fired houses, and swept off large herds. Farmers then feared the government would again try to conciliate rather than punish, and many abandoned their farms toward the Cape. The 1738 Lourens episode thus stood in the record as the preceding year’s soft answer—recovery without bloodshed and gifts—before the harder commando policy of the following March. [3]
Under Van den Henghel’s acting government the Stellenbosch board therefore handled inland stock theft as a matter for recovery, negotiation, and presents rather than as an automatic capital pursuit. The choice did not end San pressure on the scattered cattle runs, but it fixed the official tone of 1738 on that border as conciliation first. [3]
Eastern Elephant Hunters and the Keiskamma Line — 1738
Elephant hunting beyond the eastern border, briefly prohibited in July 1737 after the massacre of Hermanus Hubner’s rear party at Palo’s kraals, had been reopened in October of that year on payment of two shillings and a penny for a license that forbade molesting indigenous communities or trading with them. Licensed ivory treks therefore remained legal through 1738 even though the Castle could not easily enforce the written conditions far inland. [3]
Decades later, in 1809, Colonel Collins met a burgher ninety-five years of age who remembered an elephant-hunting expedition into Xhosa country which he had made in 1738. According to the old man, no Xhosa were at that date residing in the country west of the Keiskamma. The informant was probably connected with the earlier Hubner generation of eastern hunters, but the date he gave fixed a 1738 trek in later frontier memory. [4]
Calendar 1738 thus joined a licensed ivory frontier still open after the Hubner ban-and-reopen cycle with a later oral claim that Xhosa settlement had not yet reached west of the Keiskamma when hunters of that year moved east. The Company paper of the day spoke in licenses and prohibitions; the Collins interview preserved a single hunter’s recollection of where African polities then stood on the coastal plain. [3] [4]
Drought and the Poor Harvest of 1738
During the thirteen years 1738–1750 there were several bad seasons and one exceptionally good one, and exports fluctuated greatly. The year 1738 was one of drought, and consequently the harvest was so poor that in 1739 only 340 muids of wheat and 85 muids of rye could be sent abroad. [3]
The next crops were almost destroyed by rust, so that in 1740 not only could no grain be exported, but famine at home was feared and the government regulated the issue of bread carefully, while a placaat capped the sale price of wheat. Those later crises grew out of the dry season of 1738 and the thin stores it left behind; the drought year itself is measured in the export figures of the following season rather than in a separate famine placaat dated inside 1738. [3]
For farmers and Company magazines alike, the dry year cut the surplus that had supported a fairly constant wheat export through the later 1720s and mid-1730s. Under Van den Henghel the settlement still had to feed ships and keep a reserve, but the field returns of 1738 left little to spare once the next season’s books were opened. [3]
Rev. Willem van Gendt at Stellenbosch — December 1738
The only churches in the colony were at the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein. These were at the time all provided with clergymen, the Rev. Willem van Gendt having been sent out by the directors and stationed at Stellenbosch in December 1738. At each of these places there were schools, but everywhere else the education of the children was greatly neglected, being in most instances entrusted to no more competent a teacher than a soldier engaged for a short term. [3]
There were over four hundred leasehold farms or cattle runs, some of which were three or four days’ journey from the nearest church, so that attendance on public worship was frequently neglected for long periods. Van Gendt’s arrival closed a Stellenbosch vacancy in the pastoral roster at the end of the year and restored the three-parish pattern of Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein under resident ministers. [3]
When Governor-General Gustaf Willem van Imhof called in January 1743 and inquired into the condition of the farmers, the clergymen Francois le Sueur and Van Gendt recommended more churches and schools for the outlying runs. That later inspection used the December 1738 appointment as part of the baseline of a fully staffed three-church establishment before Waveren and Zwartland were added. [3]
Acting Government, Export Pressure, and Settlement — 1738
Across 1738 the European population of South Africa still clustered around the three church seats and the expanding leasehold cattle runs. The directors’ will that Swellengrebel should govern and Tulbagh serve as secunde was already written in Europe, but it did not take local effect until April 1739. Day-to-day Cape authority therefore remained with Van den Henghel through drought, frontier stock theft, licensed eastern hunting, and the December filling of the Stellenbosch pulpit. [3]
Grain administration felt the dry season immediately in the fields and, a year later, in the export ledgers that could ship only a few hundred muids. Wine and ordinary Company shipping continued, but the harvest failure of 1738 set the first deep trough in the uneven export record of the 1738–1750 block. [3]
Calendar 1738 thus held an acting fiscal at the head of government after De la Fontaine’s March departure, a Moravian mission still welcomed at Baviaans Kloof, a bloodless recovery and gift policy after the Lourens stock raid, licensed elephant hunting remembered as far as the Keiskamma line, a drought that starved the next year’s export, and Van Gendt’s December arrival at Stellenbosch—while Swellengrebel’s confirmed governorship still waited on the directors’ clock. [3] [4]