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. The Assembly of Seventeen had judged the secunde the proper person to assume the chief authority upon a governor’s death. Calendar 1741 was therefore the third agricultural and shipping year of a hierarchy that Table Valley had already learned to treat as settled. [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, held several lesser offices including dispenser and a seat on the high court of justice, and settled as a free burgher in 1716, and of Johanna, daughter of the explorer-soldier Hieronimus Cruse. After Johanna’s death when Hendrik was thirteen, his stepmother Christina Stants, widow of Jan van Meerland, was also a Cape colonial, so that no other impressions shaped his youth than those of the Cape of Good Hope. 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 a harassed 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 third calendar year. [3] [9]
Tulbagh, already secretary and married into the Swellengrebel family, held the second civil seat through the whole of 1741. He had been born at Utrecht on the 21st of May 1699, son of Dirk Tulbagh, an officer of the States-General, and Catharina Cattepoel, and had landed at the Cape in 1716 as a lad not yet seventeen. He had risen through the warehouse under De la Fontaine, the adjunct-secretaryship, and the senior clerkship, and had sat on the council of policy for nine years by the time of the lot election that followed Van Kervel’s death. The April 1739 promotion had created him a senior merchant and secunde. Two brothers-in-law therefore 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. Van den Henghel remained independent fiscal through the first eight and a half months of the year, so that the ordinary machinery of council, landdrost courts at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, and the three town and district pulpits ran under settled names until the September fiscal hand-over. [3] [9]
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. 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 1741 still had only those three congregations; the year would test a fiscal succession and a metropolitan winter-port order under the old pulpits rather than under new country churches. [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 on Piketberg and the Bokkeveld and the September 1740 castle visit of the leaders named Waterboer, Anthonie, Dragonder, and Klein Jantje remained recent. Swellengrebel’s early years were already marked by difficulties with San bands on isolated farms and cattle stations; white settlement had gradually swarmed out over the hinterland, encroaching upon land that the San had regarded as hunting ground. After a severe commando punishment those named leaders had come to the Castle, promised to behave better, and been fittingly entertained. Predator bounties reduced in November 1739 still framed the cash rewards for lion, leopard, and hyena skins. 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] [9]
Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn Independent Fiscal — 18 September 1741
Daniel van den Henghel had held the independent fiscal’s chair since March 1731. He had been a senior merchant longer than Swellengrebel when Van Kervel died, and on that ground he had claimed the acting governorship against the secunde’s appeal to custom. The council of policy, six members present, had divided evenly: Nicholas Heyning and the master of the warehouses Christoffel Brand favoured the fiscal; Captain Johannes Tobias Rhenius and the secretary Tulbagh supported the secunde. The fiscal had objected to Tulbagh’s vote because he was married to Swellengrebel’s sister; Tulbagh answered that he had sat nine years and always voted according to his conscience, and that no regulation denied a member his vote on such a ground. The others upheld him. Brand then proposed that as the members were equally divided the lot should be cast. The result favoured the fiscal, and he took the vacant chair. He was not appointed governor, only acting until Amsterdam answered. [3] [9]
The Assembly of Seventeen did not approve, because they considered the secunde the proper person to assume the chief authority upon the death of a governor. They therefore sent out instructions that Van den Henghel should return to his office of independent fiscal, that Swellengrebel should take the place of governor, and that Tulbagh should take that of secunde. Those changes took effect on the 14th of April 1739. The news of Swellengrebel’s appointment, Tulbagh’s promotion, and Van den Henghel’s return to the fiscal’s office was acclaimed by the whole colony. From that April until the middle of September 1741 the fiscal who had once sat above the secunde by lot confined himself again to the independent office that the directors had assigned him. [3] [9]
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. 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. [3] [3]
The office itself was older than any of the three men. Independent fiscals had sat at the Cape since Cornelis Joan Simons in October 1690, then Johan Blesius from November 1694 to April 1711, a vacancy during which Willem van Putten acted provisionally, Cornelius van Beaumont from March 1713 to June 1724, Adriaan van Kervel from June 1724 to March 1731, and Van den Henghel from March 1731 to September 1741. Van Oudtshoorn’s September assumption therefore continued a line that the Company treated as a separate, director-controlled magistracy rather than as a local promotion from the council table. The fiscal independent was not the governor’s creature: he prosecuted, he sat as a senior merchant, and in 1737 he had even claimed the first chair by length of that rank. Calendar 1741 put a new name into that chair without rewriting the office. [3]
Index lists recorded the same September date from the other end of the sentence: Van Oudtshoorn arrived in South Africa and assumed duty as fiscal independent in September 1741. Van den Henghel’s own index line closed with the same year: appointed fiscal independent, assumed duty in March 1731, chosen by lot to act provisionally after Van Kervel’s death, required by the directors to confine himself to the fiscal’s duty, and returned to Europe in 1741. The two index entries, read together, are the year’s civil fact in shortest form—one man arriving to the third chair, the other leaving it. [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. The commodore’s homeward squadron marked the end of local service rather than a new Cape appointment. Index and narrative agree that the return belonged to 1741. [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 of nineteen months, and two full years plus a summer under Swellengrebel before the hand-over to Van Oudtshoorn. The fiscal’s claim in September 1737 had rested on days as senior merchant; Swellengrebel’s counter-claim had rested on the custom that the second in command acted until the supreme authorities could be heard, even though he had been secunde only nineteen days, because he had sat thirteen years on the council of policy and had ample experience. The Seventeen had sided with custom. The commodore’s four ships were the last visible consequence of that metropolitan judgment. [3] [9]
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. The first governmental lottery ever held at the Cape had ruled the settlement for nineteen months; calendar 1741 closed that personal chapter by sending the winner home as commodore rather than by rewriting the chairs again. [3] [9]
The colony that watched him leave was the same colony that had acclaimed Swellengrebel’s installation. Johannes Swellengrebel was rumoured to have spent a hundred thousand guilders in Amsterdam to convince the Lords Seventeen that his son, and not Van den Henghel, was the right man to rule the Cape; whether or not that sum was laid out, the whole town had been entertained lavishly at Hendrik’s installation, and the fiscal’s later departure as commodore confirmed in shipping form what the April 1739 despatches had already decided in rank. Diligence and efficiency in the first two chairs, and a director-sent successor in the third, were the civil face of 1741 after the four vessels cleared the roadstead. [3] [9]
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. That ship, attempting to come to anchor in a stiff gale, had run ashore and become a complete wreck; her sick men between decks had drowned, and the others, with one exception, had reached the shore by a hawser. [3]
Table Bay’s winter character was not a new discovery. North-west gales made the roadstead a lee shore; the castle and the battery on the shore begun in February 1715, completed in April 1726, first termed Mauritius and later the Chavonnes battery, could not hold a fleet against those winds. The great gale of May 1737 had already wrecked nine ships with the loss of over two hundred lives and a large amount of property. Several wrecks took place on the South African coast during the long Swellengrebel chapter; the Visch was the disaster that still stood in living memory when the Seventeen wrote the winter-port order of 1741. [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. The dates themselves—the fifteenth of May to the fifteenth of August—were a metropolitan calendar imposed on a Cape anchorage: three months in which north-west weather was to be assumed, and in which the smaller bay under the peninsula’s eastern face was to stand in for the open roadstead. [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 rose on the southern shore in this calendar year. What Table Valley received was an instruction about where fleets should refresh, not a village, not a mole, and not a new garrison. The Castle’s naval work in 1741 was still the old Table Bay establishment: water, meat, and garden produce from the peninsula farms, and the memory of hawser and wreck above the castle walls. [3]
For skippers the order meant a change of winter destination, not a change of refreshment purpose. Fleets still needed water, vegetables, and meat after the long run from the Channel or from India; the Seventeen had simply named a different bay for the months when Table Bay killed ships. Calendar 1741 recorded the decision and the seasonal dates. Table Valley received an instruction about where fleets should refresh, not a built harbour on the southern shore. [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. False Bay’s inner bight, closed against the north-west by the mountains of the peninsula, was the geographical answer to a wreck ledger written in Table Bay. [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. The wagon road across the isthmus and over the peninsula’s spine was not a harbour street. Without a worked boat link or a permanent shore establishment, every winter call promised higher carriage costs than an ordinary Table Bay refreshment, where the castle, the jetty, and the garden stood a short pull from the anchorage. [3]
That cost was not a small accounting curiosity. Fresh meat, garden stuff, and water were the Cape’s reason for existing as a refreshment station; if those stores became expensive to deliver, the winter-port order would tax the Company’s Cape establishment even as it saved ships. The Seventeen had chosen safety of hulls over cheapness of carriage. Calendar 1741 therefore held two facts in one resolution: Simon’s Bay was the prescribed winter station, and land access would make provisioning dear. [3]
In 1741 the balance sheet of the new order was still theoretical. No winter fleet had been counted in the smaller bay under this instruction; no postholder had been named for a southern shore station; no magazine had been begun. What the Cape possessed was a directors’ calendar and a geography: three winter months, a sheltered bight, and an expensive overland supply. [3]
For burghers and Company’s gardeners the order did not yet change the daily geography of supply. Wheat, wine, meat, and vegetables still moved toward Table Bay as they had in 1740. What had changed was the metropolitan rule for fleets that could not avoid May, June, July, and the first half of August in South African seas. Skippers who kept that window would, by the Seventeen’s command, look for Simon’s Bay rather than for the castle roadstead. The Cape’s work in 1741 was to hear that command and to count the cost of land carriage against the memory of the Visch. [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. The burial in the church placed a second-generation refugee officer among the town congregation’s dead rather than on a distant loan place. [8]
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 cellar-master’s office tied a Huguenot-line household to the Company’s storekeeping rather than to a Drakenstein vineyard: wine, provisions, and the castle’s cellars, not a loan-farm grazing book. The will’s Meyer heirs closed that branch inside the town congregation’s formal record. [8]
The father had been Jacques de Savoye of Aeth, a wealthy merchant, born 1636, who arrived in the Oosterlandt from Middelburg on the 26th of April 1688 after a voyage of two months and ten days. The ship, one hundred and sixty feet, had brought twenty-four refugees; among them were also the surgeon Jean Prieur du Plessis of Poitiers and the hatmaker Isaac Taillefert of Château Thierry, all with wives and children. Jacques’s party included his wife Marie Madeleine le Clercq of Tournay and her mother Antonette Carnoy, widow of Philippe le Clercq, a merchant of Doornik, together with the children Marguerite, then aged seventeen, Barbere, fifteen, and Jacques, nine months. He had been a merchant at Ghent; Catholic hatred and lawsuits had driven him to the Northern Netherlands in 1687. [8]
Commander van der Stel had written that by their virtues and laborious zeal Jacques de Savoye and his family were examples to all the fugitives and exiles, and that on account of his abilities and knowledge of the Dutch and French languages he had been appointed a heemraad. He became a member of the court of landdrost and heemraden. On the 17th of July 1689 a daughter, Aletta, was baptised at Cape Town and married Pierre Meyer of Dauphiné—the line through which Philippe Rudolf’s 1741 will would run. In 1712 Jacques and his wife and her mother returned to Europe; on account of his poverty he could not pay the full passage money. He was buried in October 1717; his widow was buried in May 1721. Philippe Rudolf’s church burial in 1741 therefore closed another branch of that refugee household inside the settlement’s formal record, a generation after the father’s return and death in Europe. [8]
The death did not redraw the council of policy. 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. Marguerite de Savoye had married before 1690 to Christoffel Snyman and later to Henning Viljoen, son of the refugee Villion; Barbere had married Christiaan Eelers and then Elias Kina. Those married daughters had already carried the name into burgher households. The unmarried cellar-master’s will, pointing back to Aletta’s Meyer children, kept the Company’s junior-merchant branch inside the same refugee cousinage rather than founding a new de Savoye household in Table Valley. [8]
Churches, Schmit at Baviaans Kloof, and the Drakenstein Mining Association — 1741
The three pulpits at the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein remained the colony’s only churches. Van Gendt, sent out by the directors and stationed at Stellenbosch in December 1738, was in his third 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. Over four hundred leasehold farms or cattle runs already stretched three or four days from the nearest church. Calendar 1741 added no new congregation; it kept the old three under Swellengrebel and Tulbagh while the fiscal’s chair changed and the Seventeen named a winter bay. [3]
At Baviaans Kloof, later Genadendal, in the district of Stellenbosch, the Moravian missionary George Schmit was still labouring among Khoikhoi hearers after his arrival in the ship Huis te Rensburg and the council minute of the 11th of July 1737. That minute had stated that a certain person named George Schmit had come with the object of converting the Khoikhoi to Christianity if that should be possible; that it was to be hoped such a desirable result would be attained by the blessing of the Lord upon the means to be employed; and that all possible assistance was to be given to him in the prosecution of that meritorious work. It was 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. [3] [9]
He collected a party of Khoikhoi, with whom he laboured for five years, doing his utmost to teach them the doctrines of Christianity and the advantages of a settled industrious life. Through 1741 he was in the later stretch of that five-year labour and still met with nothing but kindness from the government. The understanding of 1737 still held: instruction at Baviaans Kloof, baptism at the parish font, no separate Moravian congregation. In 1741 Schmit was still the permitted instructor at Baviaans Kloof, working under the Dutch Reformed monopoly of the sacraments. [3]
Inland, the burgher mining association formed after Frans Diederik Muller’s November 1740 silver report at Groot Drakenstein close to Simonsberg continued to organise capital while awaiting directors’ approval. Muller had professed to be an experienced mineralogist and had reported a rich silver mine. The governor had immediately left to inspect the locality and had been persuaded that ore was to be had in enormous quantities, only requiring capital to extract it. As the Cape government could not incur the estimated expense without authority from the directors, an association had been formed by some burghers to work the mine. Calendar 1741 therefore carried the interval between the governor’s inspection and any formal grant, with Muller still the master miner of a claim awaiting the directors. [3]
The other military outposts—Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis, and Riet Vlei—remained as before. The Waveren post, maintained since 1700, still stood. No new district had been cut from Stellenbosch; no new church place had been founded in the Zwartland or at Roodezand. Europeans and Khoikhoi were living together on friendly terms, occasionally disturbed by San marauders. The parish, mission, and mining work of 1741 therefore ran under the same three congregations, the same five named outposts, and the same unchartered Drakenstein claim that had closed 1740. [3]
Settlement, Staples, and the European Horizon — 1741
The agricultural memory of the previous year still shaped ordinary supply. During the long Swellengrebel chapter the seasons fluctuated sharply. The year 1738 had been one of drought, so that in 1739 only 340 muids of wheat and 85 muids of rye could be sent abroad. The next crops were almost destroyed by rust, so that in 1740 no grain could be exported and famine at home was feared. The government had been obliged to regulate the issue of bread very carefully. Holders who had grain in store demanded a high price; a placaat declared such demands extortionate and prohibited the sale of wheat at a higher rate than 11s. 1d. a muid. Following that famine, the wheat crop of 1740 was the best ever known in the country, and after the magazines had been filled, 17,000 muids were exported, a larger quantity than in any previous year. Calendar 1741 opened on that recovered staple base rather than on a fresh famine narrative. [3]
Ordinary Cape exports in this chapter, besides the fluctuating wheat staple, included rye, peas, and beans to India, ordinary wine to Batavia exclusive of ships’ supplies, all the Constantia wine that could be obtained, and ivory, skins of wild animals, ostrich plumes, and dried fruit. Wine-farmers had for a long time been complaining of there being no sale for the produce of their vineyards, then from two to four thousand leggers a year. Those complaints belonged to the running argument between burgher councillors and the Company about a market. In 1741 the magazines filled from the great wheat harvest of 1740 were the immediate fact: bread was no longer rationed, and the winter-port order could be discussed as a shipping problem rather than as a famine problem. [3]
Predator bounties reduced in November 1739 still framed the cash rewards for lion, leopard, and hyena skins: a lion at £2 1s. 8d. instead of £16 9s. 5d., a leopard at £1 5s. 0d. instead of £2 1s. 8d., a hyena at 8s. 4d. instead of 12s. 6d. Half was 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 Stellenbosch and Drakenstein. The elephant had nearly disappeared from the settled districts owing to the demand for ivory. Elephant hunting beyond the eastern border, prohibited in July 1737 after the massacre of Hübner’s party and then reopened the following October, continued under the restriction that each hunter pay two shillings and a penny for a license and neither molest natives nor trade with them. Game-preservation talk in Swellengrebel’s early years had already cut the premiums; enthusiasm for random slaughter of zebras, lions, and elephants had abated a little, though a great deal of unnecessary shooting still went on. [3] [9]
Overseas, the death of the emperor Charles VI on the 20th of October 1740, and the convulsions in Europe which followed and which began by the king of Prussia invading Silesia, largely affected the Dutch East India Company. In 1741 itself those European consequences had not arrived as local military orders at the Cape. No new line of batteries had been thrown up along the shore; no monthly contingent of fifty mounted country burghers had been called in to keep guard. 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] [8]
The settlement that closed 1741 was still a refreshment station with three churches, five named military outposts beyond the Castle, a Cape-born governor in the first chair, his brother-in-law in the second, and a director-sent fiscal in the third. Magazines filled from the great wheat harvest of 1740 fed the town and the fleets. Simon’s Bay had been named as the winter refreshment station from the fifteenth of May to the fifteenth of August, at the cost of expensive land carriage. Philippe Rudolf de Savoye’s will and church burial had closed a second-generation refugee branch inside the town congregation. Schmit still taught at Baviaans Kloof under the 1737 understanding. Muller’s silver claim still waited on the Seventeen. That was the Cape year: not a change of governors, but a change of fiscal, a winter-port order, and a Huguenot cellar-master’s death, under Swellengrebel and Tulbagh. [3] [8] [9]