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. [3]
Swellengrebel was a colonist by birth, son of Johannes Swellengrebel, and had sat long on the council of policy before the brief secunde interval that preceded Van Kervel’s death. Tulbagh, already secretary and married into the Swellengrebel family, held the second civil place. Van den Henghel remained fiscal through 1740 and would keep that post until relieved by Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn on the 18th of September 1741. The ordinary machinery of council, landdrost courts, and parish pulpits therefore ran under the same three senior names that had closed 1739. [3]
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. [3]
Rust, Bread Regulation, and Fear of Famine — 1740
The seasons of the long Swellengrebel chapter fluctuated sharply. 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. The next crops—those that had to feed the colony through calendar 1740—were almost destroyed by rust. [3]
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, and the council answered with a placaat that declared such demands extortionate and prohibited the sale of wheat at a higher rate than 11s. 1d. a muid. [3]
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]
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. [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 other staples in smaller figures. 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. Grain policy in this year was not a steady tithe routine but a swing from near famine to record surplus within one agricultural cycle. [3]
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, even while other seasons in the same long chapter would later bring locusts and renewed pressure on meat and garden crops. [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. [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. [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, later joined by other named losses, 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. [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. [3]
At the castle they were well treated, and acceptable presents were made to them when they left. 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. [3]
For the settlement the visit closed a cycle that had run from the Piketberg and Bokkeveld murders and stock seizures, through Jan Kruywagen’s first weak commando and the later two-division force, to a quiet reception in Table Valley. The Dutch labels on the four leaders—Waterboer, Anthonie, Dragonder, Klein Jantje—entered the year page as the names under which the Cape recorded that peace contact, not as a fresh outbreak of raiding. [3]
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. [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. [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, even though the formal exclusive charter to Olof de Wet and his associates would only be granted early in 1743 and the long, fruitless excavations under Muller as master miner would run for more than five years thereafter. [3]
Burgher Mining Association and European News — 1740
The association formed after Muller’s report met later with the approval of the Assembly of Seventeen. Early in 1743 a charter granted De Wet and his associates the exclusive right of searching for and extracting metals within the area bounded by the Paarl, French Hoek, and Hottentots Holland mountains, on condition of paying the Company fifteen per cent of everything valuable obtained and delivering the surplus at specified prices. That charter lay outside calendar 1740, but the decision to organise burgher capital rather than charge the Cape chest was taken in the excitement of Muller’s November claim. [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 wars later pressed the Dutch East India Company and, by September 1744, brought despatches to the Cape about fortification and garrison strength. In 1740 itself those consequences had not yet arrived as local orders; the Cape’s recorded business remained rust and bread, the Visch wreck, the San leaders’ visit, and the Drakenstein mineral claim. [3]
Through it all the ordinary outposts—among them Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, the river Zonder End station, and Riet Vlei on the Buffeljagts—continued as before, while the three town and district churches at the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein still framed parish life for a European population that the next governor-general’s inquiry would count in thousands rather than tens of thousands. Calendar 1740 thus tested grain security and mineral hope under a settled Swellengrebel administration without yet redrawing the map of magistracies or ports. [3]