Boer History1742 at the Cape of Good Hope: Simon’s Bay as Winter Port, Schmit’s Baptisms, Lutheran Petition Refused, and the Zebra Order
Swellengrebel, Tulbagh, and Fiscal Van Oudtshoorn — 1742
Calendar 1742 opened with Hendrik Swellengrebel still governor and Ryk Tulbagh still secunde under the arrangement the directors had imposed on the 14th of April 1739. The independent fiscal’s chair, however, was no longer held by Daniel van den Henghel. He had remained fiscal until the 18th of September 1741, when he was relieved by Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn, sent out by the supreme authorities; a few months later Van den Henghel returned to Europe as commodore of a squadron of four vessels. [3]
For the full agricultural and shipping year of 1742, therefore, the three senior civil names were Swellengrebel, Tulbagh, and Van Oudtshoorn. Ordinary council business, landdrost courts at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, and the three town and district pulpits still framed European parish life, while outposts such as Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, and Riet Vlei continued as before. The year’s distinctive record lay less in a change of governors than in winter shipping routes, confessional discipline, and game law. [3]
Swellengrebel remained a colonist by birth and long experience on the council of policy; Tulbagh, already linked by marriage to the Swellengrebel family, held the second civil place; Van Oudtshoorn began the fiscal tenure that would run for decades. That continuity left room for the directors’ winter-port experiment and for hard cases at Baviaans Kloof and among Lutheran petitioners to dominate the Cape’s written business for the year. [3]
Simon’s Bay First Used as a Port of Call — 1742
Owing to the heavy losses 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 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 period, but storms and unavoidable detentions still had to be taken into account. [3]
Simon’s Bay offered secure shelter during the winter season, but there was a drawback in difficulty of access by land, which made the supplying of a ship with fresh provisions expensive. In 1742 the bay was first used as a port of call, when it was found that in fine weather boats could ply from the head of Kalk Bay, thus shortening the land carriage considerably. The first winter season under the directors’ order therefore turned a paper resolution into a working roadstead before any permanent magazine or postholder’s quarters had yet been built on the southern shore. [3]
The permanent station that later became Simon’s Town still lay ahead: only in February 1743 would governor-general Gustaf Willem van Imhof select a site and begin a building for magazine, hospital, and quarters under Sergeant Justinus Blas as postholder. Calendar 1742 itself recorded the experimental use of the bay and the Kalk Bay boat link, not yet the village named from the harbour. Later summary counted that before the close of 1750 seventy-seven Company ships had put into Simon’s Bay after the 1742 opening. [3]
Zebra Protection Order — 1742
In 1742 an order was issued prohibiting the destruction of zebras under a penalty of £10 for each offence. The remarks of the members of the council of policy with regard to the extirpation of this animal showed that they could look at the question in a broader light than that of mere profit. Its presence on the hillsides, according to them, was an attractive feature. [3]
They thought also that the zebra could be tamed, and with a view of making an experiment they offered a premium of £20 each for three young ones to be delivered at the castle. The order thus paired a criminal fine for killing with a cash inducement to bring live foals into Company hands—an unusual mix of landscape preference and domestication trial in the game regulations of the Swellengrebel years. [3]
The zebra placaat sat beside earlier predator-bounty reductions of November 1739 and the long oscillation of elephant-hunting licences after the massacre of Hübner’s party. Where lion, leopard, and hyena skins still earned reduced premiums, the zebra was now protected as a visible part of the settled country rather than treated as quarry. Calendar 1742 therefore added a conservation and experiment clause to the Cape’s wild-animal law. [3]
Rev. Hendrik Kock Departs and Meyring Remains Assistant — February 1742
At the opening of the decade 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]
The Rev. Hendrik Kock returned to Europe in February 1742. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring, who had been detained from a calling ship as chaplain and who preached at the Cape for the first time on the 31st of March 1743 in the later Roodezand narrative, was therefore kept at the Cape as assistant clergyman until the parsonage at Waveren was fit for occupation. In calendar 1742 itself the decisive clerical fact was Kock’s departure and the retention of Meyring in Table Valley rather than the later first service at Roodezand. [3]
The three Reformed congregations thus carried the year’s parish load with one fewer established pastor at the Cape until Meyring’s assistant role filled the gap. Outlying leasehold farms still lay days from the nearest church, and the larger programme of new churches at what became Tulbagh and Malmesbury waited on governor-general Van Imhof’s instructions of January 1743. Within 1742 the clerical map remained the three old parishes plus an assistant held back for future mountain-basin duty. [3]
Lutheran Petition for a Resident Clergyman Refused — 1742
While the number of parishes connected with the state religion was later to be increased, dissenters were prohibited from establishing churches in which a different form of worship should be practised. There were many Lutherans at the Cape, and they were anxious to have a resident clergyman, but could not obtain permission from the government. [3]
In 1742 a strong petition of theirs was refused. No objection was raised to Lutheran chaplains of Danish ships holding service in a private house, but this was the utmost liberty that was granted. The refusal fixed the confessional monopoly of the Dutch Reformed establishment for the Swellengrebel years: foreign Lutheran ministry might touch visiting crews ashore, but no resident Lutheran pastor or separate congregation was allowed. [3]
The same policy frame that blocked a Lutheran resident clergyman also shaped the harder case of the Moravian missionary at Baviaans Kloof. Both disputes belonged to a single year of confessional boundary-drawing: one closed by petition refused, the other opened when a foreign baptismal authority was tested against the council of policy and the classis of Amsterdam. [3]
Schmit Baptizes Five Converts and the Council Forbids Further Baptism — 4 September 1742
George Schmit, a Moravian missionary sent from Germany to attempt the conversion of Khoikhoi to Christianity, had established himself at Baviaans Kloof—later Genadendal—in the district of Stellenbosch. The first mention of this missionary in the proceedings of the council of policy was dated the 11th of July 1737, when it was recorded that a certain person named George Schmit had come in the ship Huis te Rensburg with the object of converting the Khoikhoi if that should be possible, and that all possible assistance was to be given to him in that work. [3]
It was contemplated that if any Khoikhoi should be converted the missionary 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. 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. All this time he met with nothing but kindness from the government, but when in 1742 he baptized five of his converts he was immediately called to account. [3]
On the 4th of September of that year the matter was discussed by the council of policy. Schmit’s authority to administer the sacraments was examined and found to be a document signed by the head of a foreign society, which the council ruled could not be held to have any force in South Africa. The missionary was therefore forbidden to baptize any more, but he was advised to continue instructing the Khoikhoi, in which work his great zeal was admitted. The clergymen of the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein were requested by the council to draw up a report of the circumstance and submit it to the classis of Amsterdam for instructions. [3]
Converts Disperse and Popular Prejudice against Schmit — 1742
This decision seemed to the missionary to make his position, if not quite untenable, at least very unpleasant. In his account he said that he thought it very absurd that he should teach the Khoikhoi and send them for baptism to ministers who did not concern themselves about their conversion. But now he had to contend against popular prejudice, for his conduct caused many of the colonists to regard him as a heretic, and it came to be generally believed that the Moravians were fanatics who held wild views of Christianity. [3]
The people whom he had collected together left him, probably out of love of change, though he believed it to be owing to representations by neighbouring farmers that the religion he was teaching was not that of the bible. He complained of this to the council, and instructions were sent to the sergeant in command of the military post close by to inquire carefully into the matter, in order that any one hindering him in his good work might be brought to account; but the people who had dispersed could not be collected together again. [3]
Under these circumstances Schmit found himself incapable of effecting any good, and he therefore requested permission from his Society to return to Europe. He hoped that upon his representations the Moravian body would obtain from the directors a reversal of the order concerning baptism, and that he might return to South Africa with assistants. The Society later acceded, and on the 28th of January 1744 he appeared before the council and asked for a free passage to Holland, which was granted; the directors, however, refused to permit any other church than the Dutch Reformed to be established in the colony. Those 1744 steps closed a story whose crisis—the five baptisms, the 4 September ruling, and the dispersal of the Baviaans Kloof party—belonged to calendar 1742. [3]
Pieter Wion’s Butcher Shop at Stellenbosch — December 1742
Local district regulation continued under the board of landdrost and heemraden at Stellenbosch. In December 1742 permission was given to the burgher Pieter Wion to open a butcher’s shop in the village on fixed conditions. Every Wednesday and Saturday he was to offer for sale good wholesome fresh mutton at the rate of two pence for a single pound, or six pence for four pounds, and to refuse no one at that price. [3]
Four times a year he was to offer beef for sale at the same rates. Failing these conditions he was to pay a fine of £5 to the deacons for the benefit of the poor. The licence thus tied a private butcher’s privilege to scheduled meat days, ceiling prices, and a poor-fund penalty—an inland market rule recorded in the same year that the Company tested a second winter port on the False Bay side. [3]
Stellenbosch by this period was already embowered among its oaks and rebuilt after the fire of 1710. The board that licensed Wion also managed pontoons, mill leases, and ordinary police of the village. Calendar 1742 therefore closed not only on confessional and shipping questions at the castle but on a concrete price schedule for mutton and beef in the oldest country magistracy beyond Table Valley. [3]