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. On the morning of the 20th six members of the council of policy had met to fill the vacant chair. The secunde Hendrik Swellengrebel, a colonist by birth and son of Johannes Swellengrebel, dispenser and member of the high court of justice at the beginning of the century, claimed the place by the invariable custom that the second in command acted until the pleasure of the supreme authorities could be known. He had been secunde only nineteen days, but he had sat on the council for thirteen years. The independent fiscal, Daniel van den Henghel, claimed it because he had been a senior merchant longer. He had been in the colony since March 1731, sent from Colombo when Van Kervel left the fiscal’s office for the secunde’s chair. The acting year was therefore governed by a man whose Cape seniority was counted in merchant days, not in a lifetime among the Vlek. Nicholas Heyning and Christoffel Brand favoured the fiscal; Captain Johannes Tobias Rhenius and the secretary Ryk Tulbagh supported the secunde. The fiscal shouted that Tulbagh, married to Swellengrebel’s sister, was prejudiced; Tulbagh answered that he had voted by conscience for nine years and that no regulation denied him the vote. The others upheld him. Brand, master of the warehouses, then proposed that the lot be cast. Folded papers went into a hat; someone drew; the fiscal’s name came out. Van den Henghel took the chair, and he still held it when January opened. [3] [9]
The winner of that first governmental lottery at the Cape was not appointed governor. He could indulge the coveted authority only for as long as a letter took to receive an answer from Amsterdam. Through the whole of 1738 that answer had not yet taken local effect. 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 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. Inside it the fiscal chosen by lot remained acting head: a senior merchant from Colombo’s service rather than the Cape-born second in command, presiding while the directors’ corrective despatches still travelled the slow circuit between Europe and Table Bay. [3] [9]
The man in the chair and his wife were remembered in the settlement as covetous and unreasonable people who seldom paid for work done for them. The wife was of mixed Asian and European descent. Swellengrebel, waiting in the secunde’s place, was as indigenous a product of the Caabse Vlek as the Groote Kerk or the garden house: born on the 29th of September 1700, son of Johannes, who had arrived in 1691 and settled as a free burgher in 1716, and of Johanna, daughter of the explorer-soldier Hieronimus Cruse. When Hendrik was thirteen Johanna died; his stepmother, Christina Stants, widow of Jan van Meerland, was also a Cape colonial. The year’s unusual acting arrangement therefore set a Colombo fiscal and a Cape-born secunde in daily contrast at the same table, with Tulbagh still secretary and still Swellengrebel’s brother-in-law, while the lot that had broken the September deadlock continued to govern the Castle’s ordinary business. [3] [9]
One French presence sat just outside that Castle quarrel. A certain Etienne Barbier, Frenchman by birth and adventurer by choice, deserter from the Company garrison, was living on a farm at Drakenstein in March 1738. He had risen to sergeant before he left the colours. The acting year therefore held not only a lottery fiscal in the governor’s chair but a deserter on a Drakenstein farm who had not yet made the Castle’s authority his public business. Van den Henghel’s unpopularity was already a fact that later writers would use to explain how a velvety tongue in imperfect Dutch could gather hearers; inside this calendar the fact itself is simpler: the garrison had lost a sergeant, Drakenstein had gained a French lodger, and the acting government had not yet been forced to treat him as more than a deserter at large. [3] [9]
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. For the first two months of the year the former governor was therefore still a physical presence in Table Valley—no longer in the sash, still waiting on a return fleet—while the fiscal chosen by lot already sat in the chair he had vacated. [3] [9]
He had served the Company for twenty-eight years and had governed since his installation on the 8th of March 1730. He 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. 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 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. He was a widower, his wife having died in June 1730. He had children for whom he desired a European residence, and from whom he did not wish to be separated. In 1736 he applied to spend the evening of his life in repose in the Fatherland. The directors heard of the resolution with regret, for he had performed his duties to their satisfaction; the request was so reasonable that it could not be refused. [3] [9]
The settlement remembered the departing man as truly philanthropic and kind-hearted. His departure was deplored by the whole colony. Whether they were white, brown or black, rich or poor, officials, free burghers, town citizens or lonely farmers in far distant districts, settlers agreed that Governor—and lately also Councillor Extraordinary—Jan de la Fontaine had been a worthy ruler. The March sailing was ordinary Company business on the roadstead, an admiral’s flag over five homeward hulls; on shore it closed a generation of hard, honest work for the Honourable Company and took from Table Valley the one former governor who had still been sitting, after the August transfer, within sight of the bay. [3] [9]
Calendar 1738 therefore began with De la Fontaine still present and ended with him gone. The man who had handed over in August, whose appointed successor had died within three weeks, and who had not been called back to settle the September lottery, left the settlement under Van den Henghel’s acting government without the former governor still living quietly in the colony. What remained of his long administration was the official furniture of the years 1724–1737: new colonist names already in the records, 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, and a Table Bay whose thirteen-year average of seventy-seven arrivals a year had just been written into the previous chapter by the May gale. The March fleet took the person; it did not take the acting fiscal, the licensed ivory frontier, or the drought that would measure the year in grain. [3] [9]
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 upon the means to be employed, so that those people might be brought to the true knowledge of God, and ordered that all possible assistance be given him in that meritorious work. He established himself at Baviaans Kloof, later Genadendal, in the district of Stellenbosch. The July minute was the first official welcome of a Moravian at the Cape; calendar 1738 was the first full year in which that welcome had to be lived as daily work in a kloof rather than as a line in the council book. [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. Inside 1738 that labour was still in its early phase: a collected party, instruction in doctrine and settled life, and Company goodwill, without yet a sacramental dispute to test the July assumption that baptism would pass through the Reformed parish. [3]
Dissenters were not to establish churches in which a different form of worship should be practised. There were many Lutherans at the Cape, anxious for a resident clergyman, and they could not obtain permission. No objection was raised to Lutheran chaplains of Danish ships holding service in a private house, but that was the utmost liberty granted. The Moravian at Baviaans Kloof sat inside the same rule: admitted to teach, not to plant a church beside the three Reformed pulpits. Calendar 1738 therefore shows a mission continuing under Reformed parish assumptions, with the acting government still giving the assistance promised while De la Fontaine held the chair, and with Van den Henghel inheriting a kindness that cost the Castle nothing so long as baptism remained a parish act. [3]
The same Stellenbosch district that held Baviaans Kloof also held the vacant country pulpit that would be filled only in December. Schmit’s hearers were being taught a settled life in a kloof; the farmers of the leasehold runs three or four days from the nearest church were still without a resident Stellenbosch minister. The year’s religious map was therefore uneven in a precise way: three church seats in law, two of them already staffed, a Moravian instructor inland on Reformed terms, and a countryside whose children, away from those seats, were in most instances entrusted to no more competent a teacher than a soldier engaged for a short term. [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. The recovery, not a commando, was the year’s inland answer to a lift of cattle: the animals came back, no one was killed, and the Castle did not treat the raid as a capital pursuit. Under an acting fiscal already remembered as meek toward such descents, the episode fixed the official tone of the year on the scattered cattle runs. [3] [9]
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. The board therefore handled inland stock theft as a matter for recovery, negotiation, and gifts rather than as an automatic armed levy. The instruction came from the acting government; the execution sat with Stellenbosch, whose militia roll was the ordinary instrument for any inland pursuit and whose landdrost was the ordinary magistrate for Drakenstein and the farther runs as well. [3]
The farmers of the frontier had no confidence in the success of such treatment. They already feared that presents would be tried again if another horde came down, and that fear sat inside the same year as the Lourens recovery. The official record of 1738 is nevertheless the soft answer: cattle restored, no blood, a discreet neighbour sent out with gifts. Whether that answer would hold on Piketberg and in the Bokkeveld was not a question this calendar was required to close. What it did close was the Castle’s chosen method while Van den Henghel presided. [3]
The same Stellenbosch board that sent the discreet farmer also watched a district in which elephant licences, a Moravian kloof, a vacant pulpit, and a French deserter on a Drakenstein farm all sat at once. Inland government in 1738 was not a single frontier war. It was a fiscal in an acting chair, a landdrost’s court, a militia list, and a preference for presents over powder when stock could still be brought home. The Lourens raid tested that preference and left it standing. [3] [9]
Eastern Elephant Hunters and the Keiskamma Line — 1738
The elephant had nearly disappeared from the settled districts, owing to the demand that always existed for ivory. In July 1737, after the massacre of Hermanus Hubner’s rear party at Palo’s kraals, elephant hunting beyond the eastern border had been prohibited. The love of gain was 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. Licensed ivory treks therefore remained legal through 1738 even though the Castle could not easily enforce the written conditions far inland. [3]
Those licences sat on the far side of a frontier that the Hubner survivors had already named. In July 1737 three exhausted hunters had reached the Castle; on the 10th Hendrik de Vries and Hendrik Scheffer had attested the journey, and Jan de Vries had come on with them. Four other escapees had turned east again from the Sunday river with Gerrit Oosthuizen and Jacob van Deventer. The October reopening put paper over that blood and sent new parties out under a fee. Calendar 1738 was the first full hunting season under that cheap licence, with Palo still a recent name and with no new ban to replace the one cancelled in October. [3] [4]
Decades later, in 1809, Colonel Collins, touring the eastern districts for the colonial government, 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—the party of eleven white men and a Khoikhoi band that had started from the Gauritz, then considered the eastern frontier, and travelled, probably, as far as Pondoland. The date he gave, whatever his exact place in that generation, fixed a 1738 trek in later frontier memory and placed the Xhosa line that year at the Keiskamma rather than west of it. [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 licences and prohibitions; the Collins interview preserved a single hunter’s recollection of where African polities then stood on the coastal plain. Between those two kinds of record the acting government at the Castle could levy two shillings and a penny and write a ban on barter into a printed form. It could not see the Keiskamma from Table Valley. [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 only 340 muids of wheat and 85 muids of rye could later be sent abroad from that crop. The dry year is measured in those figures rather than in a separate famine placaat dated inside the calendar. Fields failed first; the export ledgers recorded the failure when the magazines had taken what they could and almost nothing remained to ship. [3]
That trough broke a run the directors already knew how to fear. They had issued instructions that a year’s supply of wheat should always be put by as a reserve before any was sent to India. In 1724 and again in 1725 over five thousand muids had been exported. 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. From 1728 through 1737 there had been a constant export, sometimes of as much as seven thousand muids, though the crops were not uniformly good. Calendar 1738 ended that ten-year constancy. The reserve rule still stood; the surplus that had supported it did not. [3]
For farmers and Company magazines alike, the dry year cut the surplus that had fed both the India ships and the ordinary Cape household. Beef and mutton were again to be had at a penny halfpenny to two pence a pound once the cattle plague of the mid-decade had decreased, but cheap meat did not replace bread. A settlement that had to refresh fleets, keep a hospital, and hold a year’s wheat in store found itself counting muids in the low hundreds after a decade in which seven thousand had sometimes gone out. Wine and ordinary Company shipping continued; it was wheat and rye that failed. Under Van den Henghel the field returns of 1738 left little to spare once the magazines were served, and the first deep trough in the uneven export record of the 1738–1750 block was already visible in the stubble. [3]
The drought also sat beside the roadstead’s longer arithmetic. Across the thirteen years 1725–1737 one thousand and seven ships had put into Table Bay, or on an average seventy-seven yearly: eight hundred and sixty-eight Company, ninety-one English, twenty-seven Danish, nineteen French, one Portuguese, and one Flemish. Foreign flags had not returned in the old numbers after 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. A drought year at the start of a new thirteen-year block therefore threatened both the grain ledger and the cash that foreign hulls had once left on the beach. The acting government still had to feed whatever ships did come. [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. His arrival closed a vacancy that had stood since Salomon van Echten left the Stellenbosch pulpit in June 1736 for Drakenstein after the death of Johan Wilhelm Hartzogenrath, serving thereafter as consulent for Stellenbosch while he held the French valley. The Stellenbosch succession in the official list therefore reads: Hercules van Loon, April 1700 to June 1704; Hendrik Bek, April 1707 to June 1726; Van Echten, November 1732 to June 1736; then Van Gendt from December 1738. Two years and a half of consulent care ended when the directors’ man took the country pulpit. The Cape church, the oldest of the three, and Drakenstein, still the French valley’s parish even as Dutch had long been the language of most wills, had not stood empty; only Stellenbosch had waited on a new appointment from the Fatherland. [3]
At each of the three 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. 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 December installation restored the three-parish pattern of Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein under resident ministers; it did not shorten those journeys or put a schoolmaster on every run. The outlying cattle posts remained a landscape of neglected children and infrequent Sundays. [3]
Drakenstein itself already had Van Echten. The Cape had Francois le Sueur. Stellenbosch, last of the three to be refilled, received the newcomer at the dark end of a drought year. The directors had sent him; the acting fiscal received him. The pulpit he took stood in a village that was also the seat of the landdrost and militia board which, earlier in the same year, had sent a discreet farmer out with presents after the Lourens raid. Church, court, and commando roll therefore shared one drostdy, and the December arrival put a resident clergyman back into that cluster of country offices. [3]
The December appointment also completed, for this calendar, the religious staffing against which Schmit’s kloof had to be read. A Moravian instructor might collect Khoikhoi at Baviaans Kloof and teach doctrine and settled life; baptism, if any convert came, was still to be a parish act. With Van Gendt in the Stellenbosch pulpit the parish that geographically contained Baviaans Kloof once again had a resident minister to whom such a convert would, on the council’s 1737 understanding, be presented. The acting year therefore ended with the three Reformed seats full and the Moravian still at work under that rule. [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 inside this calendar. Day-to-day Cape authority remained with Van den Henghel through drought, frontier stock theft, licensed eastern hunting, a deserter on a Drakenstein farm, and the December filling of the Stellenbosch pulpit. De la Fontaine’s March departure removed the last personal remnant of the long government that had begun in 1730; it did not change the acting chair. [3] [9]
Refugee and later-arrival households wrote their own dates into the same year. Joost Bevernagie, brother of Francina of Meerbrakel near Oudenaarde, arrived as a freeman in 1700 in the Helmeet and died on the 30th of September 1738. An agriculturist at Drakenstein, he was married to Anna van der Wey of the Cape, born about 1687. Jean Gardiol, whose name appears on the Drakenstein burgher roll for 1690 as compagnon with the three brothers de Villiers, later a Stellenbosch resident, a witness in 1722 and a church member in 1725, died in 1738. Estienne Niel, born in Dauphiné in 1669, a soldier in 1693 and later an agriculturist at Drakenstein, married to Marie Marais of Hierpoix, died in 1738; when he made his will in 1736 he was living at Rondebosch on the farm Rodenberg belonging to his son-in-law Andries Grové, and the will was read over to him in Dutch, which he understood and spoke well. He signed his name as Niel. [8]
The same lists recorded a will filed and a marriage made. Jean Roux, born at la Morin (or Lormarin), Provence, in 1665, an agriculturist at Drakenstein and in 1694 living at Dal Josaphat, had on the 17th of February 1705 instituted his father, Philip Roux, then living at la Morin and aged sixty-eight, as heir to half his estate and the Drakenstein Poor Fund as heir to the other half. He does not appear to have married. His will was filed in 1738. Matthieu Guilliaumé, or Matthys, born at Berlin in 1711, son of François Guilliaumé who had been sent out in 1726 to superintend the silk culture and who in 1735 informed the government that he intended to remain as a burgher, married on the 1st of June 1738 at Drakenstein Susanna Radyn and left male issue. The silk superintendent’s household thus took a Drakenstein wife in the same year that older refugee names left the roll. [8]
That June marriage closed a Company experiment as a family story. François Guilliaumé had arrived with his family in October 1726 to superintend silk culture. Worms hatched from European eggs had first been kept in the houses of Jan de la Fontaine and Nicholas Heyning, then handed to the expert; a large building rose by the Company’s garden, slave-lodge children were to wind silk out of school hours, and thousands of young mulberry trees were planted. In the first year eight pounds of good silk went to the Netherlands; in no later year did production exceed ten pounds. Most worms died before spinning. For eight years the government persisted; in 1735 everyone admitted the work could not succeed, and by order of the directors it was given up. François then said he would remain as a burgher. Three years later his Berlin-born son married at Drakenstein. The acting year therefore recorded not a revival of silk but the settlement of the silk household among the older French names of the valley. [3] [8]
Those household dates sat beside names that had entered the official record during De la Fontaine’s long government, or so shortly afterwards as to be practically within it: 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. The fifteen-year quit-rent tenure of 1732 still framed how new ground was held while a fiscal sat in the governor’s chair and a drought cut the wheat that paid the magazines. [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, a deserter named Barbier living on a Drakenstein farm, licensed elephant hunting remembered as far as the Keiskamma line, a drought that starved the export from that harvest, Van Gendt’s December arrival at Stellenbosch, and a cluster of refugee deaths, a filed will, and a June marriage—while Swellengrebel’s confirmed governorship still waited on the directors’ clock. The year opened with the former governor still in the colony and closed with a resident clergyman back in the Stellenbosch pulpit, the lot-chosen fiscal still in the chair, and the grain bins counting hundreds instead of thousands. [3] [4] [8] [9]