Boer History1740 at the Cape of Good Hope: Visch Wreck, Rust and Grain Famine, San Leaders at the Castle, and Muller’s Silver Claim
Swellengrebel’s Government in Its Second Calendar Year — 1740
Calendar 1740 opened with Hendrik Swellengrebel still governor after his installation on the 14th of April 1739, when the directors’ order had restored the secunde to the first chair, returned Daniel van den Henghel to the independent fiscal’s office, and raised the secretary Ryk Tulbagh to secunde. The arrangement that had been unsettled by lot after Governor Adriaan van Kervel’s death in September 1737 was thus already a settled hierarchy for a full agricultural and shipping year. The Assembly of Seventeen had judged the secunde the proper person to assume the chief authority upon a governor’s death; calendar 1740 was the first complete year in which that judgment sat undisturbed in Table Valley. [3] [9]
Swellengrebel was the first born Caabse Vlekker called to the highest post. He had been born on the 29th of September 1700, son of Johannes Swellengrebel, who had arrived in 1691 and settled as a free burgher in 1716, and of Johanna, daughter of the explorer-soldier Hieronimus Cruse. Kindness, common sense, and long experience, rather than unusual gifts or particular schooling, 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 council secretary under Noodt, he had married Helena Wilhelmina ten Damme, also a born Vlekker. Tulbagh had been best man. The couple had lived in the spacious Swellengrebel residence in Berg Street; after the April appointment the new governor had stayed on for a while in the parental home before settling in the Castle, and he remained a regular visitor there through the second calendar year. [3] [9]
Tulbagh, already secretary and married into the Swellengrebel family, held the second civil place through the whole of 1740. Van den Henghel remained independent fiscal through the same twelve months. The ordinary machinery of council of policy, landdrost courts, and parish pulpits therefore ran under the same three senior names that had closed 1739. Two brothers-in-law occupied the first and second 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. The fiscal who had once taken the vacant chair by lot now sat again in the independent office that the Seventeen had assigned him. [3] [9]
The only churches in the colony were still at the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein. Those three pulpits were all provided. Willem van Gendt, sent out by the directors and stationed at Stellenbosch in December 1738, was in his second calendar 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 three or four days from the nearest church, so that attendance on public worship was frequently neglected for long periods. There were over four hundred such leasehold farms or cattle runs. The parish map of 1740 had not yet added Roodezand or Zwartland; the year tested grain, shipping, and a frontier peace under the old three congregations. [3]
Tulbagh’s second chair in 1740 was the fruit of a Cape career that had begun when he 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 1739 promotion had created him a senior merchant and secunde. Calendar 1740 was therefore the first full year in which two brothers-in-law occupied the first and second civil chairs without a lottery still hanging over the succession, and in which the fiscal sat again in the independent office rather than in the governor’s. [3] [9]
Beyond the Castle the frontier still bore the mark of the previous year’s San raids and commandos on Piketberg and the Bokkeveld, while predator bounties reduced in November 1739 framed the cash rewards offered for lion, leopard, and hyena skins. Those regulations continued into the new year without a fresh rewrite of the bounty schedule. The political year of 1740 was less a change of men than a test of harvest, shipping, and the first formal peace contact with San leaders after the autumn fighting of 1739. Swellengrebel’s early years were already marked by difficulties with San bands on isolated farms and cattle stations; calendar 1740 would convert the field peace of the previous October into a ceremonial appearance under the Castle walls. [3] [9]
Rust, Bread Regulation, and Fear of Famine — 1740
The seasons of the long Swellengrebel chapter fluctuated sharply. During the thirteen years 1738–1750 there were several bad seasons and one exceptionally good one. The exports therefore fluctuated greatly. The year 1738 had been a year of drought, and 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 empty bins: magazines and ships could clear only a few hundred muids after the dry season. The new governor had inherited those empty bins along with a frontier war; calendar 1740 opened on the crops that had to feed the colony through the next twelve months. [3]
The next crops—those that had to feed the settlement through calendar 1740—were almost destroyed by rust. The result was that in 1740 not only could no grain be exported, but famine at home was feared. The government was obliged to regulate the issue of bread very carefully. Holders who still had a supply of grain in store naturally demanded a high price for it. The rust therefore struck twice: once in the standing crop, and again in the price asked for whatever wheat remained in private lofts. A colony that lived by bread for garrison, hospital, and visiting fleets could not treat that second blow as a private bargain. [3]
The council of policy answered with a placaat that declared such demands extortionate and prohibited the sale of wheat at a higher rate than 11s. 1d. a muid. The ceiling was not a market suggestion. It labelled a higher demand a crime against the settlement’s bread, and it fixed the muid at a rate the council would enforce. Bread regulation and a fixed ceiling price thus became the inland face of a shipping year that could offer no surplus wheat to Batavia or to visiting fleets. The same page of the records that later counted a bumper harvest first recorded this interval of scarcity: rust on the standing crop, fear of famine in the settlement, careful bread issue, and a criminal label on any attempt to sell wheat above the placaat rate. [3]
For ordinary households the placaat meant that a muid still in store could not be held for a famine premium. For the Company magazines it meant that what grain could be collected would be issued as bread rather than sold outward. Ships that called still needed biscuit; a colony that feared famine could not sell wheat freely until the magazines were secure. Calendar 1740 therefore opened its agricultural narrative not with a tithe routine but with a criminal price cap, a rationed loaf, and an export stop. The rust year and the recovery year would prove to be the same twelve months, but the first half of that cycle was scarcity. [3]
The drought of 1738 had already taught the settlement what empty bins looked like: in 1739 only hundreds of muids had gone abroad. Rust in the next standing crop was a different failure. Drought withholds rain; rust takes the ear after the plant has grown. The council’s answer—careful bread issue plus a posted ceiling of eleven shillings and a penny—treated the remaining wheat as a public store even while it still sat in private lofts. Extortion was the word the placaat used for a higher demand. That language, more than the figure itself, shows how close the Castle judged the settlement to be to famine before the later harvest of the same year filled the magazines. [3]
Bumper Wheat Crop and Seventeen Thousand Muids Exported — 1740
Following the famine scare, the wheat crop of 1740 was the best ever known in the country. After the magazines had been filled, 17,000 muids were exported—a larger quantity than in any previous year. The same calendar year that had opened under rust and a bread placaat therefore closed with full Company stores and an outward grain movement larger than the thin 340 and 85 muids of the drought aftermath in 1739. The swing from near famine to record surplus within one agricultural cycle was the exceptional good season of the thirteen-year chapter. [3]
For the thirteen years 1738–1750 taken together the printed summary later gave average exports to India of 7,539 muids of wheat and 116 muids of rye, with 289 muids of peas and 271 muids of beans. Of ordinary wine, every year on an average 384 leggers were sent to Batavia, exclusive of that supplied to the ships. All the Constantia wine that could be obtained was exported, and ten times the quantity would have found a ready sale. Ivory, skins of wild animals, ostrich plumes, and dried fruit were also among the exports of the colony. Against that mid-period mean, the single year 1740 stood out both for the temporary stop on export during the rust crisis and for the exceptional recovery harvest that followed it. [3]
Grain policy in this year was not a steady tithe routine but a swing from near famine to record surplus within one agricultural cycle. The recovery also mattered for the ordinary refreshment business of Table Bay. Ships that called still needed bread and biscuit; a colony that had feared famine could not sell wheat freely until the magazines were secure. Once those stores were full, the surplus of 17,000 muids restored the Cape’s role as a grain supplier rather than a rationed consumer. The placaat ceiling of 11s. 1d. had held the private loft through the scare; the bumper crop then filled the Company’s own bins and sent a larger outward muid-count than any earlier harvest had done. [3]
Other seasons in the same long chapter would later bring locusts and renewed pressure on meat and garden crops, but those plagues lay outside calendar 1740. This year’s recorded business in grain was the rust, the bread placaat, the fear of famine, and then the best wheat crop yet known. The settlement that had regulated the loaf in the first half of the year could, after the magazines were full, send seventeen thousand muids abroad. That figure, set against the 340 and 85 of 1739 and against the thirteen-year wheat mean of 7,539, is the harvest arithmetic of Swellengrebel’s second calendar year. [3]
Wine did not swing with the rust in the same way. Ordinary wine still moved toward Batavia at the period average of hundreds of leggers a year, exclusive of what was supplied to the ships, and every drop of Constantia that could be obtained went out, with ten times the quantity still wanted. Ivory, skins of wild animals, ostrich plumes, and dried fruit sat in the same export list. The year’s drama in the magazines was wheat: no muid abroad while rust and famine fear lasted, then 17,000 muids once the magazines were full. The other staples continued; grain was the item that stopped and then broke every previous outward count. [3]
Wreck of the Visch in Table Bay — 5–6 May 1740
In the night between the 5th and 6th of May 1740 the Company’s outward-bound ship Visch, when attempting to come to anchor in Table Bay in a stiff gale, ran ashore above the castle and became a complete wreck. The disaster belonged to the same exposed roadstead that had already cost the Company heavy losses in earlier winter gales. She had not yet secured her anchors. The night’s work was an Indiaman broken on the beach above the Castle before she had taken in water, bread, or meat for the rest of the outward run. [3]
Her sick men, who were between decks, were drowned. The others, with one exception, reached the shore safely by means of a hawser. The wreck thus split the ship’s company by location on board: those already too ill to leave the lower decks died with the hull, while the men who could work a rope to the beach survived the night of the gale. One man among the able-bodied failed to make that rope. The hawser was the difference between the between-decks dead and the shore party that walked up toward the Castle in the morning. [3]
Calendar 1740 therefore opened its shipping narrative not with a successful refreshment fleet but with an outward Indiaman broken above the castle before she had even secured her anchors. The Visch wreck sat in a short list of coast disasters for the Swellengrebel years, but its date and place fixed it as a Table Bay event of this specific year rather than a distant stranding on the outer coast. The Castle itself was the landmark of the wreck: the ship ran ashore above it, in the same roadstead whose winter north-westers had already taught the settlement what an open bay could do to a hull that failed to hook the ground. [3]
The same roadstead still had, as its existing fortifications, the castle and a battery on the shore begun in February 1715 and completed in April 1726, first termed Mauritius and later known as the Chavonnes battery. Those works watched the beach on which the Visch broke. They could not hold a ship in a stiff gale once her cables failed. The May wreck was therefore a reminder, in Swellengrebel’s second year, that Table Bay remained an open winter anchorage: useful in settled weather, fatal to an outward hull that tried to come to anchor in a north-west blow above the Castle. [3]
An outward-bound Indiaman carried her sick between decks as a matter of course on the long run from the Netherlands. When the Visch tried to hook Table Bay in a stiff gale, those men could not reach the hawser. The shore party that survived did so because they could work a rope; the drowned were already too ill to leave the lower decks. The wreck is therefore both a roadstead disaster and a hospital disaster: the Castle gained the able-bodied by a hawser, and lost the sick with the hull. One exception among those who should have been able to land kept the night from being a clean split between the dying below and the living on the beach. [3]
San Leaders Visit the Castle — September 1740
In September 1740 the leaders of the San bands with whom peace had been made after the commandos of 1739—men to whom the Dutch had given the names Waterboer, Anthonie, Dragonder, and Klein Jantje—visited the castle with a small following. The visit followed the autumn and spring fighting in which stronger columns had killed and wounded many San and recovered cattle, after which the raiders had agreed to terms of peace. The Dutch labels on the four leaders entered the year page as the names under which the Cape recorded that peace contact, not as a fresh outbreak of raiding. [3] [9]
At the castle they were well treated, and acceptable presents were made to them when they left. They promised to behave better, and they were fittingly entertained by a benevolent Swellengrebel. The September embassy thus translated the field peace of the previous year into a ceremonial appearance under the walls of the Company’s chief fort, with named leaders rather than anonymous frontier reports. The governor who had called out the farmers in 1739, and who had offered pardon to Barbier’s followers if they would join the commando, now received the San grandees as guests rather than as marauders. [3] [9]
The previous year’s campaign was the necessary background. After the Piketberg and Bokkeveld murders and stock seizures, most of the scattered farmers had abandoned their farms and fallen back toward the Cape, fearing that the government would again try to conciliate rather than punish. Jan Kruywagen’s first commando had been too weak; a stronger force in two divisions had taken the field, with soldiers on temporary stations to protect the families of men still out. In August 1739 one marauding band was defeated; in October more than sixty San were killed and upwards of thirty wounded. A coast party searching for a supposed wreck shot from thirty to forty more. On the European side Jan Engelbrecht and Philip Meyer had been surprised and murdered. The San then agreed to terms of peace. September 1740 was the Castle’s receipt of that field treaty. [3]
Not all the blame for the trouble sat on the raiders. White settlers had gradually swarmed out over the hinterland, slowly encroaching upon land that the San had always regarded as their exclusive hunting grounds. As usual the power of the strongest won the day. The September visit did not reverse that encroachment. It recorded that, after a severe commando punishment, named leaders came in, took presents, and promised better behaviour. For the settlement the visit closed a cycle that had run from the Piketberg and Bokkeveld murders, through Kruywagen’s first weak levy and the later two-division force, to a quiet reception in Table Valley. [3] [9]
The November 1739 bounty cuts still framed predator cash in 1740. The reward for killing a lion stood at £2 1s. 8d., for a leopard at £1 5s. 0d., and for a hyena at 8s. 4d. 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 elephant had nearly disappeared from the settled districts, owing to the demand that always existed for ivory. Harmless game was to be preserved, beasts of prey to be paid for at the reduced rate, and the San peace of September to be kept by presents rather than by a new commando. That was the frontier face of Swellengrebel’s second year. [3] [9]
Muller’s Silver Report at Groot Drakenstein — November 1740
In November 1740 a good deal of excitement was created at the Cape by a report from a man named Frans Diederik Muller, who professed to be an experienced mineralogist, that he had discovered a rich silver mine at Groot Drakenstein, close to Simonsberg. The claim sat in a wine and grain valley already thick with freehold and lease farms, not in a distant unexplored range. Drakenstein was a parish with a pulpit, a mill lease, and burgher households; a silver mine there would have been a mineral strike inside the settled district, almost in sight of the Paarl and the French Hoek mountains. [3]
The governor immediately left to inspect the locality, and was persuaded by Muller that ore was to be had in enormous quantities, only requiring capital to extract it. Swellengrebel’s personal inspection thus gave official weight to a private mineral claim before any directors’ charter had been written. The first Cape-born governor did not send a subordinate. He rode to Groot Drakenstein himself, stood on the ground Muller indicated, and came away convinced that the ore was there in bulk and that money, not further prospecting, was the missing piece. [3]
As the Cape government could not incur the estimated expense without authority from the directors, an association was formed by some burghers to work the mine. The November report, the governor’s visit, and the burgher association together made 1740 the opening year of the Drakenstein silver episode. The Castle would not charge the Cape chest for a speculative excavation; burgher capital would take the risk until the Seventeen could speak. That local decision—private association rather than Company outlay—was the mineral politics of November, not a charter already sealed in Amsterdam. [3]
The excitement itself is the year’s fact. A professed mineralogist had named a rich silver mine at Groot Drakenstein close to Simonsberg; the governor had inspected and been persuaded; burghers had organised to find the capital the Cape government could not spend. Wine farms and grain lands around the mountain suddenly sat next to a supposed silver lode. The Paarl, French Hoek, and Hottentots Holland mountains already bounded that wine-and-grain country; Muller’s claim put a silver name inside those same hills. Calendar 1740 therefore added a mineral hope to a year already swinging from rust to record wheat, and from a Table Bay wreck to a San embassy at the Castle. [3]
Burgher Mining Association and European News — 1740
The association formed after Muller’s report was the Cape’s answer to a purse it did not control. The estimated expense of extracting ore “in enormous quantities” could not be charged to the local chest without the directors’ authority. Burghers therefore organised to work the mine themselves. That organisation, and not a later exclusive charter, is the recorded mineral act of calendar 1740. The Seventeen would in time have to approve or refuse; until then the excitement of November and the governor’s inspection were what Table Valley knew. [3]
The same broad European year that closed with Muller’s silver story also included the death of the emperor Charles VI on the 20th of October 1740, an event whose convulsions began by the king of Prussia invading Silesia and largely affected the Dutch East India Company. In 1740 itself those consequences had not yet arrived as local orders to fortify Table Bay or to strengthen the garrison. The Cape’s recorded business remained rust and bread, the Visch wreck, the San leaders’ visit, and the Drakenstein mineral claim. The emperor’s death was news of the year; the wars that followed it were not yet a Cape placaat. [3]
The other military outposts— Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis on the river Zonder End, and Riet Vlei—remained as before. The Waveren post, maintained since 1700, still stood. No new magistracy was erected in 1740. The map of posts that had framed the later 1730s still framed Swellengrebel’s second year: a cattle and sealing bay to the north, a grain and wine belt inland, a river station toward the Breede, and Riet Vlei on the Buffeljagts. The Castle’s year of rust, wreck, San embassy, and silver report did not redraw that line of outposts. [3]
Europeans and Khoikhoi were living together on friendly terms, but occasionally the peace was disturbed by San marauders. The September castle visit was this year’s answer to that disturbance on the Piketberg and Bokkeveld side. The three town and district churches at the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein still framed parish life for a European population that a later governor-general’s inquiry would count at about four thousand colonists and fifteen hundred servants of the Company with their families. Calendar 1740 thus tested grain security and mineral hope under a settled Swellengrebel administration without yet redrawing the map of magistracies, pulpits, or ports. [3]
Langa West of the Kei and Pruvost’s Death — 1740
Far to the east of the settled districts, beyond any Cape magistracy of 1740, the Xhosa (Kosa) tribe had for a considerable time thrown offshoots over the Kei. The left-hand son of Tshiwo was named Tiso. He died without issue, when Palo placed his son Langa at the head of the clan. This petty chief and his people crossed the Kei some time before the year 1740, and never returned. They appear to have avoided a conflict with the Khoikhoi, who still occupied the greater portion of country on the right bank of that river, and even had outposts as far eastward as the Tsomo. [3]
There had thus been, by this year, a westward movement of Xhosa clans that the Cape did not yet police. Gwali, Tshiwo’s right-hand son, had crossed the Kei as early as 1702 with the Tinde clan and taken refuge with a Khoikhoi chief named Hintsati near the later site of Somerset East; the Imidange and Kosini had crossed and remained west of the river. Langa’s crossing some time before 1740 added another petty chief to that western scatter. The Castle’s year of rust, the Visch, San presents, and Muller’s silver did not include a Xhosa war. It did include, as eastern background, the fact that Langa’s people were already west of the Kei and did not go back. [3]
Closer to the pulpits, a refugee household closed its Cape roll about this year. Anne Pruvost (also Prévot, Provo, Provost), who had married Schalk Willem van der Merwe and lived on their farm Wittenberg at the Paarl, died about 1740. They left a very large family, from which a great number of the van der Merwe family is descended. Her sisters of the same refugee house included Elizabeth, who married Philippe des Pres of Courtrai and by him had a large family, and the earlier Anne line that had married into the same valley. Wittenberg at Paarl thus lost its Pruvost mistress in the same calendar year that rust and a bumper wheat crop, a Table Bay wreck, a San embassy, and a silver report filled the Castle’s journal. [8]
Calendar 1740 thus held a settled Swellengrebel government in its second year, with Tulbagh as secunde and Van den Henghel still fiscal; rust that almost destroyed the grain crops, a bread placaat at 11s. 1d. a muid, fear of famine, and then the best wheat harvest yet known, with 17,000 muids exported after the magazines were filled; the wreck of the outward Indiaman Visch above the castle in the night of 5–6 May, her sick drowned between decks, the rest—save one—ashore by hawser; the September visit of Waterboer, Anthonie, Dragonder, and Klein Jantje to the Castle, well treated, presented, and entertained after the 1739 peace; Muller’s November silver report at Groot Drakenstein near Simonsberg, the governor’s inspection, and a burgher mining association; the death of emperor Charles VI on the 20th of October; Langa’s clan already west of the Kei; and Anne Pruvost’s death about this year at Wittenberg. The year opened under rust and a wreck and closed with full magazines, a San embassy remembered, and a mineral hope in a wine valley. [3] [8] [9]