Boer History1741 at the Cape of Good Hope: Van Oudtshoorn Fiscal, Simon’s Bay Winter Order, and De Savoye
Swellengrebel and Tulbagh Still at the Head of Government — 1741
Calendar 1741 opened with Hendrik Swellengrebel still governor and Ryk Tulbagh still secunde under the arrangement the directors had imposed on the 14th of April 1739. That order had restored the secunde to the first chair after the disputed succession that followed Governor Adriaan van Kervel’s death in September 1737, returned Daniel van den Henghel to the independent fiscal’s office, and raised the secretary Tulbagh to the second civil place. [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 seat. The ordinary machinery of council, landdrost courts at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, and the three town and district pulpits therefore ran under settled names through a third full agricultural and shipping year of the Swellengrebel governorship. [3]
Beyond the Castle the settlement still carried the military outposts at Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis, and Riet Vlei, while the frontier memory of the 1739 San raids and the September 1740 castle visit of the leaders named Waterboer, Anthonie, Dragonder, and Klein Jantje remained recent. The distinctive Cape business of 1741 was not a change of governors but a change of independent fiscal and a directors’ winter-port order that would reshape Company shipping in the seasons ahead. [3]
Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn Independent Fiscal — 18 September 1741
Daniel van den Henghel had held the independent fiscal’s chair since March 1731. After Van Kervel’s death he had briefly acted as head of government by lot against Swellengrebel’s claim as secunde; the Assembly of Seventeen had refused that arrangement and, from 14 April 1739, confined him again to the fiscal’s duty while Swellengrebel governed and Tulbagh sat as secunde. [3] [3]
On the 18th of September 1741 he was relieved by Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn, who was sent out by the supreme authorities and assumed duty as fiscal independent. The September succession closed a ten-year fiscal tenure that had begun under Governor Jan de la Fontaine and had survived the acting interlude of 1737–1739. [3] [3]
Van Oudtshoorn’s arrival placed a director-appointed senior merchant in the third great civil office beside the colonist governor and the secretary-turned-secunde. For the closing quarter of 1741 the three senior civil names were therefore Swellengrebel, Tulbagh, and Van Oudtshoorn—the same triangle that would frame the full agricultural year of 1742 and the long fiscal tenure that index lists carried to September 1762. [3]
Van den Henghel Returns to Europe as Commodore — 1741
A few months after the September relief, Van den Henghel returned to Europe as commodore of a squadron of four vessels. The departure completed the directors’ earlier decision that he should confine himself to the fiscal’s duty only until a proper successor could be sent, and it removed from the Cape the officer who had contested the acting governorship by seniority of merchant rank after Van Kervel’s death. [3] [3]
He had been in the colony since March 1731. His Cape career had thus spanned De la Fontaine’s permanent governorship, Van Kervel’s few weeks at the head of the table, the lot-drawn acting interval, and two full years under Swellengrebel before the hand-over to Van Oudtshoorn. The commodore’s homeward squadron marked the end of that local service rather than a new Cape appointment. [3]
With Van den Henghel gone, the Castle no longer held a former acting head of government in a subordinate fiscal seat. The directors’ hierarchy of 1739—governor, secunde, fiscal—now matched the living officers without the personal residue of the lot election that had once seated Van den Henghel above Swellengrebel. [3]
Directors Order Winter Refreshment at Simon’s Bay — 1741
Owing to the heavy losses which the Company had sustained by shipwrecks in Table Bay, in 1741 the directors resolved that their fleets should thereafter refresh at Simon’s Bay from the 15th of May to the 15th of August, the season when gales from the north-west were common. The order answered a long run of winter disasters on the open roadstead under Table Mountain, of which the wreck of the outward Indiaman Visch on the night of 5–6 May 1740 above the castle had been only the most recent Cape reminder. [3]
The time of sailing from the Netherlands and the Indies was so arranged that under ordinary circumstances there would not be many ships in South African seas during that mid-year window, but storms and unavoidable detentions still had to be taken into account. The directors therefore treated Simon’s Bay not as a casual alternative harbour but as the prescribed winter refreshment station whenever Company fleets could not avoid the dangerous months in Table Bay. [3]
The resolution belonged to metropolitan shipping policy rather than to a Cape building programme of 1741 itself. No permanent magazine, hospital, or postholder’s quarters yet rose on the southern shore; those works would wait for governor-general Gustaf Willem van Imhof’s site selection in February 1743. Calendar 1741 recorded the directors’ decision and the seasonal dates, not the later village of Simon’s Town. [3]
Secure Winter Shelter and Costly Land Access — 1741
Simon’s Bay offered secure shelter during the winter season. That advantage was the whole point of the directors’ order: north-west gales that made Table Bay a lee shore left the smaller bay under the Cape Peninsula’s eastern face a safer anchorage for ships that could not keep the open roadstead. [3]
There was, however, a serious drawback to its use in difficulty of access by land, which made the supplying of a ship with fresh provisions very expensive. Cattle, vegetables, and water had still to reach the anchorage from the settled peninsula farms and from Table Valley stores; without a worked boat link or a permanent shore establishment, every winter call promised higher carriage costs than an ordinary Table Bay refreshment. [3]
The practical answer to that cost would appear only in 1742, when the bay was first used as a port of call and boats were found able, in fine weather, to ply from the head of Kalk Bay, shortening the land carriage considerably. In 1741 the balance sheet of the new order was still theoretical: secure water against expensive overland supply, with the first experimental season still a year away and the later count of seventy-seven Company ships in Simon’s Bay before the close of 1750 not yet begun. [3]
Death of Philippe Rudolf de Savoye — 1741
Among the Cape’s Huguenot-descended Company servants, Philippe Rudolf de Savoye died in 1741 and was buried in the church. He was a son of the refugee Jacques de Savoye, baptised at Drakenstein on the 29th of August 1694, and he does not appear to have married. [5]
He had joined the service of the Dutch East India Company and held the ranks of junior merchant and keldermeester—cellar-master—at the Cape. In his will, filed in 1741, he instituted his nephews and nieces Meyer as his heirs. The burial in the church placed a second-generation refugee officer among the town congregation’s dead rather than on a distant loan place. [5]
The death did not redraw the council of policy, but it removed a named Huguenot-line Company servant from the commercial and storekeeping staff in the same year that the fiscal’s chair changed hands. Jacques de Savoye himself had been buried in October 1717 and his widow in May 1721; Philippe Rudolf’s 1741 will and church burial closed another branch of that refugee household inside the settlement’s formal record. [5]
Churches, Schmit at Baviaans Kloof, and the Drakenstein Mining Association — 1741
The only churches in the colony were still at the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein. Those three pulpits were provided with clergymen, the Rev. Willem van Gendt having been sent out by the directors and stationed at Stellenbosch in December 1738. Schools existed at each place, but elsewhere the education of children was often entrusted to no more competent a teacher than a soldier engaged for a short term. [3]
At Baviaans Kloof, later Genadendal, the Moravian missionary George Schmit was still labouring among Khoikhoi converts after his arrival in the ship Huis te Rensburg and the council minute of the 11th of July 1737 that had promised him assistance. Through 1741 he remained inside the understanding that converted people would be presented to the parish clergyman for baptism and that he would not form a separate congregation with rules differing from those of the Dutch Reformed church. The crisis of his own baptisms of five converts, and the council’s prohibition of further baptism on the 4th of September 1742, still lay a year ahead. [3]
Inland, the burgher mining association formed after Frans Diederik Muller’s November 1740 silver report at Groot Drakenstein near Simonsberg continued to organise capital while awaiting directors’ approval. The exclusive charter to Olof de Wet and his associates would be granted only early in 1743; calendar 1741 therefore carried the interval between the governor’s inspection and the formal grant, with Muller still the master miner of a claim not yet condemned as imposture. [3]
Settlement, Staples, and the European Horizon — 1741
The agricultural memory of the previous year still shaped ordinary supply. Rust had almost destroyed the crops that fed the colony through early 1740, forcing bread regulation and a placaat that capped wheat at 11s. 1d. a muid; the later harvest of that same year had then filled the magazines and allowed 17,000 muids of wheat to be exported. Calendar 1741 opened on that recovered staple base rather than on a fresh famine narrative. [3]
Predator bounties reduced in November 1739 still framed the cash rewards for lion, leopard, and hyena skins, half paid by the Company and half by the burgher council or the court of landdrost and heemraden according to district. Elephant hunting beyond the eastern border, prohibited after the massacre of Hübner’s party and then reopened under licence, continued under the restriction that each hunter pay two shillings and a penny for a license and neither molest natives nor trade with them. No new zebra protection order yet stood; that placaat belonged to 1742. [3]
Overseas, the death of the emperor Charles VI on the 20th of October 1740 and the wars that followed would later press the Dutch East India Company and, by September 1744, bring despatches to the Cape about fortification and garrison strength. In 1741 itself those consequences had not yet arrived as local military orders. The Cape’s recorded business remained the fiscal succession, the directors’ Simon’s Bay winter resolution, the death of a Huguenot-line cellar-master, and the quiet continuation of parish, mission, and mining work under Swellengrebel and Tulbagh. [3] [5]