Boer History1739 at the Cape of Good Hope: Swellengrebel Installed, Barbier’s Rising, San Commando, and Earthquake
Swellengrebel Installed Governor — 14 April 1739
Calendar 1739 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, had 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, had claimed it because he had been a senior merchant longer. He had been in the colony since March 1731. 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, and the first months of 1739 still ran under the same unusual chair. 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 took effect on the 14th of April 1739. The lottery winner had then ruled the settlement for nineteen months. The news that Swellengrebel would govern, that Tulbagh would sit as second, and that Van den Henghel would return to the fiscal’s chair was acclaimed by the whole colony. [3] [9]
Swellengrebel was the first born Caabse Vlekker called to the highest post. He was 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. To him the world was Table Valley. His grandfather, after whom he was named, had been a Dutch merchant who lived long in Moscow and died there in 1649; that grandfather’s father, George Swellengrebel, had come from Stettin in northern Prussia and settled in Amsterdam as a clothier. Three sons of the Moscow merchant came to the Cape in the Company’s service: Johannes the governor’s father; Sergius, born at Amsterdam in 1694, who arrived in 1712, rose to adjunct fiscal, repatriated in 1722; and Benjamin, who stayed a short while as a midshipman in 1710 and died at Batavia the same year. The April installation therefore put a man whose whole youth had been formed under Table Mountain into the chair that visiting merchants from Colombo and Amsterdam had held before him. [3] [9]
He was not remembered as a man of unusual gifts or of particular schooling. Kindness, a warmhearted nature, common sense, and long experience made him a popular and able governor. As a Company official he had been brought up in the practical school of Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes and Jan de la Fontaine. In 1727, while still a harassed council secretary under Noodt, he married Helena Wilhelmina ten Damme, also a born Vlekker and an orphan adopted by Jan Cloete of Wijnberg who lived under the Swellengrebel roof. Tulbagh had been best man at that wedding and had then first looked with meaning at the bridegroom’s sister Elizabeth. The couple lived in the spacious Swellengrebel residence in Berg Street. After the April appointment the new governor stayed on for a while in the parental home before settling in the Castle, and he remained a regular visitor there. Johannes was rumoured in the settlement to have spent a hundred thousand guilders in Amsterdam to convince the Seventeen that his son, and not Van den Henghel, was the right man to rule the Cape; whether that story was true or not, the father laid out another huge sum at the installation, because the whole town was entertained lavishly. [9]
On the same April day Tulbagh, already secretary and already married to Elizabeth, was created a senior merchant and secunde. He had landed in 1716 as a lad not yet seventeen, son of Dirk Tulbagh, an officer of the States-General, and Catharina Cattepoel, born at Utrecht on the 21st of May 1699. He had risen through the warehouse under De la Fontaine, the adjunct-secretaryship, and the senior clerkship under Swellengrebel, and had been secretary of the council since the mid 1720s. The April promotion therefore placed two brothers-in-law in the first and second civil chairs: a Cape-born governor whose world was Table Valley, and a Utrecht-born secretary whose whole Cape career had been spent beside that same family. Van den Henghel remained in the colony as independent fiscal. The directors’ hierarchy—governor, secunde, fiscal—now matched the living officers at the Castle. [3] [9]
The man who left the first chair and the man who entered it had already been judged against each other in the settlement. Van den Henghel and his wife—she of mixed Asian and European descent— were remembered as covetous and unreasonable people who seldom paid for work done for them. Swellengrebel’s installation therefore did more than correct a lottery. It restored the customary succession that the Seventeen had insisted upon, put a son of the Vlek in the governor’s place for the first time, and seated Tulbagh, whose vote in September 1737 had been shouted down as prejudiced, in the second chair that custom assigned to the Company’s next man. Calendar 1739 thus split at mid-April: three months still under the fiscal chosen by lot, then nine months under the first Cape-born governor. [3] [9]
Elephant River Complaint and the Fiscal’s Inquiry — 1739
In 1739 a petty insurrection took shape from a frontier stock dispute. Some Khoikhoi captains complained that a party of Europeans living along the Elephant river had robbed them of cattle under pretence of barter. Those persons were summoned to appear before the landdrost’s court at Stellenbosch, and their stock was summarily impounded to prevent concealment. The complaint therefore reached the district court as a charge of forbidden traffic, not yet as a political rising: captains asking the Company to recover cattle taken under colour of trade. [3]
They declined to obey the summons, and raised an outcry that the landdrost’s assistant had acted in excess of the law in taking possession of their cattle before it was proved that they had been engaged in the forbidden traffic. The matter was referred to the fiscal, who investigated the case and found that the Khoikhoi had sufficient cause of complaint. Their property was therefore restored, and they were taken under the Company’s protection. At the same time the landdrost’s assistant was found to have acted with unnecessary violence, and he was replaced by a more prudent officer. The fiscal’s finding thus cut two ways: it upheld the captains against the Elephant-river Europeans, and it disciplined the district officer whose seizure had been too rough even for a court that believed the complaint. [3]
A summons was then issued for the Europeans to appear before the court of justice and answer for their conduct in ignoring the constituted authority. As on the former occasion, they did not comply. The Elephant river dispute thus passed from a local stock seizure into open defiance of Stellenbosch process and of the high court at the Cape. The men who had refused the landdrost now refused the Castle. That second refusal, more than the original barter quarrel, was what turned a frontier complaint into the material of a rising. [3]
The inquiry sat inside the last months of Van den Henghel’s acting government and the first months of Swellengrebel’s confirmed one. The fiscal who investigated the captains’ complaint was the same officer who had held the governor’s chair by lot; the landdrost’s court that first summoned the Europeans was the Stellenbosch board that also had to answer San raids on Piketberg and the Bokkeveld in the same year. A stock quarrel on the Elephant river, a refused summons, a restored Khoikhoi herd, and a replaced assistant were therefore not a side story. They were the legal beginning of the year’s only recorded insurrection. [3]
Barbier at Drakenstein — 1 March 1739
A turbulent individual named Etienne Barbier, by birth a Frenchman, who had been in the Company’s military service and had risen to the rank of sergeant but had deserted about a year before, represented to these persons that he possessed great influence in Europe, and induced them to join him. His object was to attain such a position that he could make terms with the government. He had been living on a farm at Drakenstein by March 1738: a deserter from the garrison, an adventurer by choice, already on the valley farms a full year before he rode to the church door. [3] [9]
The malcontents were joined by some other disaffected Europeans, chiefly deserters and Company’s servants with passes to seek employment, and on Sunday the 1st of March 1739 the whole rabble, mounted and armed, appeared at Drakenstein. After reading a seditious document to the people, Barbier affixed it to the door of the church. The paper was read after service to a congregation gathered to take leave of the dominie, and it accused the acting governor and the landdrost of a list of crimes of which corruption and despotism were the most serious. He then pasted the writing to the wall. His tongue was smooth enough to cover errors in Dutch, and Van den Henghel’s unpopularity was such that neither the proclamation nor the rebels were damaged that Sunday. [3] [9]
The seditious paper was afterwards delivered at the Castle. Only after Barbier had written and circulated other similar documents was he declared an outlaw, and instructions were issued to arrest him. Upon first intelligence of the March Sunday reaching the Castle, orders had already gone to the landdrost to have him seized and brought before the high court of justice, and, if resistance was made, to shoot him. The church-door demonstration thus turned a stock quarrel and a second refusal of process into a public seditious act within sight of one of the colony’s three parish pulpits, and it did so while Van den Henghel still sat in the acting chair, more than six weeks before Swellengrebel’s installation. [3] [9]
The March Sunday therefore sat in the last weeks of the lottery government. The man accused on the church wall was still the fiscal who had drawn the winning paper in September 1737. The landdrost named beside him was the same Stellenbosch officer whose assistant had just been judged too violent on the Elephant river. Barbier’s claim of European influence, his deserters and pass-men, and his mounted appearance at Drakenstein were a bid to make terms from a position of force. The Castle’s first answer was a shoot-on-resistance order, not a negotiation. [3] [9]
Drakenstein in that March was also a parish of older French names. The valley that heard Barbier’s paper was the same district in which, later in the year, a Roux will would be drawn at Morgenster, a Therond of Languedoc would die, and a Guilliaumé daughter would marry. The seditious Sunday did not empty those farms; it used them as a stage. A French deserter speaking imperfect Dutch to a congregation that still counted Huguenot households made the year’s insurrection a Drakenstein event before it became a commando story. [3] [8] [9]
San Raid on Piketberg and the Bokkeveld — 1739
Just at this time a horde of San made a raid upon the scattered farmers of Piketberg and the Bokkeveld, murdered two Europeans and several slaves, set fire to some houses, and swept off large herds of cattle. In the preceding year the same marauders had driven off the stock of a farmer named August Lourens, but had been pursued, and the cattle had been recovered without any bloodshed. The 1739 descent was of another kind: dead Europeans, dead slaves, houses in ashes, and herds gone. [3]
By direction of the council, the landdrost and board of militia of Stellenbosch had 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 farmers of the frontier, however, had no confidence in the success of such treatment, and they were now seized with a general panic, fearing that the government would again try to conciliate rather than punish. Most of them in consequence abandoned their farms and fell back towards the Cape. The gift diplomacy that had followed the Lourens recovery therefore produced, in the next year, not quiet but a flight from the outer runs. [3]
Van den Henghel had reacted meekly to earlier San raids, preferring not to provoke the marauders. By the time the Piketberg and Bokkeveld homesteads burned, the government was passing into abler and firmer hands. Swellengrebel’s April installation did not create the raid, but it changed the answer. The double pressure of Barbier’s mounted band at Drakenstein and the burning of frontier houses thus fell on the same months of 1739: a church-door rising in March, a confirmed Cape-born governor in April, and a panic that emptied Piketberg and Bokkeveld farms toward the Castle. [3] [9]
White settlement had for years been spreading onto ground the San regarded as hunting country. Isolated cattle stations on the Piketberg and in the Bokkeveld were the farthest convenient marks. When those marks were hit hard enough to kill Europeans and slaves, the frontier’s judgement was that presents would not answer fire. The abandoned farms of 1739 were therefore not only a panic. They were a verdict on the previous year’s conciliation, delivered by households that would not wait to see whether the new governor shared the acting fiscal’s mildness. [3] [9]
Kruywagen’s Commando and Barbier’s Execution — 1739
The government, however, acted in a different manner. The old burgher councillor Jan Kruywagen was instructed to raise a commando and follow up the marauders, and all who had joined Barbier were offered pardon if they would take part in the expedition. Fifteen of them accepted the offer at once, and the remainder shortly afterwards. With the exception of Barbier himself they gradually signed on. The rowdies of the March Sunday were thereby turned into the first punitive column of the year. [3] [9]
Barbier managed to keep in concealment for a few months, but was eventually apprehended. Toward the end of the year he was caught. In November he was tried, condemned to death, and executed. After the barbarous manner of that time in Europe as well as in South Africa, his body was divided into portions, which were affixed to posts in different parts of the country. The French sergeant who had promised European influence and terms with the government thus ended as a public warning, quartered on the roads, in the same month that predator bounties were cut and that the San campaign was winding down. [3] [9]
Some of the farmers who were called out by Kruywagen refused to act under him, and his commando was too weak to accomplish the purpose for which it was raised. In attempting to expel the San from a mountain, a number of men, including the commandant, were wounded, and one was killed. The first punitive column of 1739 thus absorbed most of Barbier’s former followers by pardon, destroyed the French deserter’s leadership only in November, and still failed to clear the disturbed districts with the force first fielded. Pardon had thickened the roll; it had not made Kruywagen strong enough. [3]
The November execution closed the political half of the year’s double emergency. Barbier’s object had been to make terms. The Castle’s terms were a commando pardon for those who rode against the San, and death for the man who would not. His body on posts in different parts of the country was meant to be read as the church-door paper had been read: a public text. The difference was that this text was posted by the government that had taken office in April, not by a deserter speaking after a Drakenstein service. [3] [9]
Stronger Force and San Peace Terms — August–October 1739
A stronger force was then raised, and took the field in two divisions, some soldiers having previously been sent to occupy temporary stations in the disturbed districts, where the families of the men on commando could be protected. The second column was therefore not only larger. It was organised so that burghers could stay in the field without leaving Piketberg and Bokkeveld households naked to a second raid. Company soldiers held those temporary posts while the two divisions moved. [3]
In August one of the marauding bands was defeated and some cattle were recovered, only one burgher being killed. Reinforcements were then sent to the front, and in October more than sixty San were killed and upwards of thirty others were wounded. A party of Europeans, who were searching along the coast for a ship that was supposed to have been wrecked, shot from thirty to forty more. The San then agreed to terms of peace. The fighting season of 1739 thus ran from Kruywagen’s weak first commando through an August success and an October slaughter to a negotiated close. [3]
On the European side during the latest operations three farmers had been wounded in action, and two—Jan Engelbrecht and Philip Meyer—had been surprised and murdered. The named dead of the later phase therefore stood beside the unnamed European and slave deaths of the first Piketberg and Bokkeveld raid, and beside the single burgher killed in August. Peace, when it came, was bought with that roll: more than sixty San killed in October, thirty or forty more on the coast, thirty-odd wounded, two burghers murdered in surprise, three wounded in action, and the earlier dead of the opening raid. [3]
The early years of Swellengrebel’s government were marked by these San difficulties. Isolated farms and cattle stations had been hit again and again; after the severe punishment of the commando, named San leaders would later come in to the Castle. Inside this calendar the fighting itself closed with terms of peace after the October killings. Temporary military posts had covered the farms of men still on commando; two divisions had done what Kruywagen’s first levy could not; and a coast party looking for a wreck that may never have lain there had added its own dead to the count. The year that installed the first Cape-born governor thus also recorded the hardest San campaign of his opening season. [3] [9]
Game Rewards Reduced — November 1739
From time to time regulations were issued for the preservation of harmless wild animals and for the destruction of beasts of prey. In November 1739 the reward for killing a lion was reduced from £4 3s. 4d. to £2 1s. 8d., for a leopard from £2 1s. 8d. to £1 5s. 0d., and for a hyena from 12s. 6d. to 8s. 4d. The November cut therefore halved, or nearly halved, the cash paid for each of the three chief predators at the same moment that frontier commandos were still winding down the San campaign and that Barbier’s body was displayed as a public warning. [3]
Half of these premiums were paid by the Company, the other half by the burgher council if the animal was destroyed in the Cape district, and by the court of landdrost and heemraden if it was destroyed in the district of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein. The bounty was therefore not a Castle charity alone. Town and country boards each paid their half when the kill fell inside their jurisdiction. A lion taken under Table Mountain was a Cape-district charge; a leopard taken above the Berg was a Stellenbosch-and-Drakenstein charge. The November schedule lowered both halves together. [3]
The elephant had nearly disappeared from the settled districts, owing to the demand that always existed for ivory. Hunting beyond the eastern border had been prohibited in July 1737 after the massacre of Hubner’s party, then restored in October of that year on a licence of two shillings and a penny, with a ban on molesting or trading with natives. That licence still framed what a hunter might legally do in 1739. The November predator cuts sat beside that older ivory rule: preserve what was harmless, pay less for what was dangerous, and keep eastern shooting on a ticket. Swellengrebel’s first November in the chair thus wrote a cheaper bounty table into a longer effort to police both predators and the gun. [3] [9]
Drought Export, Earthquake, and Settlement — 1739
During the thirteen years 1738–1750 there were several bad seasons and one exceptionally good one. The exports therefore 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. That thin shipment was the export ledger’s reading of the previous year’s failed fields: magazines and ships could clear only a few hundred muids after the dry season. Calendar 1739 thus carried the first deep trough of the uneven export record of Swellengrebel’s early years. The new governor inherited empty bins along with a rising, a frontier war, and a fiscal back in the independent chair. [3]
That the Cape is subject to occasional shocks of earthquake was experienced in the early morning of the 5th of September 1739. There was a single shock, and a rolling noise, as of passing thunder. Beyond causing alarm, no damage was done. The September morning therefore added a felt earth tremor to a year already marked by a new governor in April, a church-door rising in March, frontier war through the later months, and a starved grain export. The shock came between the August commando success and the October killings, in the same season that soldiers held temporary posts on the disturbed farms. [3]
The three Reformed pulpits—at the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein—were all provided. Willem van Gendt, sent out by the directors and stationed at Stellenbosch in December 1738, was in his first full year in that parish. Schools stood at each of those three seats. Everywhere else the education of children was commonly left to a soldier engaged for a short term. Leasehold farms and cattle runs already lay days from the nearest church. The year of Swellengrebel’s installation therefore opened with the parish map still confined to the old three congregations, even as Piketberg and Bokkeveld households fell back toward the Cape and as Drakenstein heard a seditious paper after service. [3]
Refugee and later-arrival households wrote their own dates into the same year. Jacques Potier, now Potje, of Moukron in Flanders, who had arrived in 1699 as a soldier in the Westhoven, become a burgher in 1704, lived at Drakenstein, and married in 1705, died on the 23rd of February 1739 and instituted Andries du Toit as his heir. Pierre Roux of Cabrière, to whom the Drakenstein register gave Amsterdam as origin and who on the 9th of November 1725 had received a certificate of membership on proceeding to Batavia, made a will dated the 17th of September 1739 at Morgenster in Hottentots-Holland, the farm of the heemraad Daniel Malan. He stated that he had no parents or friends to whom he was indebted, and appointed Malan his heir on condition that he maintain him for the remainder of his life. [8]
Durand Sollier, a shoemaker at Drakenstein who with his wife had become a member of the Dutch church at Cape Town on the 4th of October 1697, died in September 1739 and was buried in the Dutch church there. In 1702 his name is found as married to Martha Petel, who died in 1715; in 1719 he was an elder of the Cape Town church. Their only daughter Martha married the surgeon Renault Berthault de St. Jean of Sancerre. Marie Guilliaumé, daughter of François Guilliaumé—sent out in 1726 to superintend the silk culture, remaining as a burgher from 1735—and of Claudine Cloy, married on the 18th of October 1739 Louis Jourdan. Her sister Johanna’s first husband was Jan Engelbrecht, ancestor of the Cape family of that name: the same surname as the burgher surprised and murdered in the later San operations of the year. [3] [8]
Two more Drakenstein names closed the roll in December. Jacques Therond, now Theron, of Nîmes in Languedoc, who had arrived in the Oosterlandt in 1688 as a soldier, become a free burgher on the 31st of May 1688, married Marie Jeanne des Pres of Béthune, daughter of the refugee Hercule des Pres, sat on the court of landdrost and heemraden, and owned the farm Languedoc, died on the 2nd of December 1739, aged seventy-one years and six months. Jacques de la Porte, or Delport, of Ryssel (Lille), who had arrived in 1699 in the Cattendyk with his wife Sara Vitu, an agriculturist at Drakenstein, died on the 9th of December 1739; his wife had predeceased him in 1724. The Drakenstein register still held their presentation of a child at baptism on the 4th of October 1699. A heemraad of Languedoc and a Lille agriculturist thus left the valley in the same December that closed Swellengrebel’s first calendar year. [8]
Calendar 1739 thus held the installation of the first Cape-born governor on the 14th of April, with Tulbagh as senior merchant and secunde and Van den Henghel back in the fiscal’s chair; a petty rising that began in an Elephant-river stock complaint and reached the Drakenstein church door on Sunday the 1st of March; a San war on Piketberg and the Bokkeveld that emptied farms, absorbed Barbier’s followers by pardon under Kruywagen, failed in a first mountain assault, then killed more than sixty in October and closed on peace terms after the murders of Engelbrecht and Meyer; Barbier’s November execution and quartering; cheaper lion, leopard, and hyena bounties in the same month; a drought export of only 340 muids of wheat and 85 of rye; a single earthquake shock on the morning of the 5th of September; and a cluster of refugee deaths, a Morgenster will, and an October marriage. The year opened with a fiscal still sitting by lot and closed with a son of the Vlek in the Castle, the San campaign ended by treaty, and the grain ships counting hundreds instead of thousands. [3] [8] [9]