Boer History1742 at the Cape of Good Hope: Valckenier Arrested, 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 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. 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. [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 this fourth calendar year of his governorship. [3] [9]
Tulbagh, already secretary and married into the Swellengrebel family, held the second civil seat through the whole of 1742. 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. 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 Oudtshoorn, in his first full agricultural year as independent fiscal, completed the three-name hierarchy that Table Valley now treated as settled. That continuity left room for a winter-port experiment, a game placaat, and hard confessional cases to dominate the Cape’s written business for the year. [3] [9]
Beyond the Castle the settlement still carried the military outposts at Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis, and Riet Vlei. 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. The only churches in the colony remained those at the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein. Schools existed at each of those three seats; elsewhere the education of children was often entrusted to no more competent a teacher than a soldier engaged for a short term. The parish, outpost, and magistracy map of 1742 was therefore the map inherited from the previous year, under names Table Valley already knew. [3]
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 had already been 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 1742 was not a change of governors. It was the first working winter at Simon’s Bay, a zebra placaat, a Lutheran refusal, five Moravian baptisms, and—at the opening of the year—an order to imprison a sick guest who had lately been governor-general of Netherlands India. [3] [9]
Valckenier Arrested from the Swift — 10 February 1742
At the beginning of that same year 1742, Swellengrebel was confronted with a unique and extremely tricky problem. To apprehend an ex-governor-general and admiral of the return fleet must have been a most painful and embarrassing task for a governor of the Cape. He had no option: the Lords Seventeen had ordered it. When Adriaan Valckenier arrived—very ill and not able to stand on his feet—no one at the Cape knew that His Excellency was a mere fugitive, and the officials headed by the governor bent their sashed frames to pay their respect. [9]
Valckenier’s high-and-mightiness lasted only a fortnight. On the 10th of February the captain of the English ship Swift delivered a letter at the Castle in which the governor was instructed to arrest Valckenier. The letter explained why: the ex-governor-general had been responsible for the death of several thousands of Chinese during disturbances in Batavia, and had deported three Councillors of India who had opposed his policy. Hendrik had to roll up the red carpet and imprison his sick guest. [9]
The physical part of that unpleasant duty fell to Rudolf Siegfried Allemann, garrison commander at the time. Being a born Prussian and unconcerned about fallen Dutch greatness, he had no qualms about it. The arrest thus paired a Cape-born governor who had to obey Amsterdam against a guest who still carried the titles of governor-general and admiral, with a garrison officer who would execute the letter without ceremony. For a colonist whose world was Table Valley, the red carpet and the cell were the same fortnight: first the sashes, then the warrant. Calendar 1742 therefore opened not with a change of local chairs but with a return-fleet prisoner in Castle custody. [9]
The episode sat awkwardly beside the ordinary machinery of a refreshment station. Swellengrebel’s reputation in Table Valley was that of a kind and warm-hearted executive, not of a gaoler of viceroys. Yet the Seventeen’s letter left no local discretion. For a fortnight the Castle had received a man who could not stand, with the honours due to a governor-general of Netherlands India; after the Swift’s captain came ashore, those honours became a warrant. The same year that tested Simon’s Bay as a winter roadstead and Schmit’s authority to baptize therefore also tested whether a colonist governor would imprison a sick guest when Amsterdam so ordered. He did. [9]
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. Calendar 1741 had written that resolution on paper. Calendar 1742 had to make it work. [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. The inner bight of False Bay, under the eastern side of the Cape Peninsula, had long been left as a safer anchorage for ships that could not hold the open roadstead. 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]
That Kalk Bay boat link was the practical discovery of the year. Land carriage from Table Valley around the mountain to the southern shore remained costly; a boat working the inner water in fine weather cut the last stretch. In foul weather the advantage shrank again, and the Cape still had to provision a ship that could not be reached cheaply from the Castle magazines. Fresh meat, greens, and water still had to come from the peninsula’s farms and fountains; the new roadstead saved wrecks, not labour. No village yet took its name from the harbour. Calendar 1742 itself recorded the experimental use of the bay and the Kalk Bay boat link, not a built station. The experiment sat inside a busy shipping chapter: in the thirteen years 1738–1750 there put into Table Bay 640 ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company, 198 English, 23 French, and 20 Danish. [3]
Simon’s Bay began to be used in 1742, and before the close of 1750 seventy-seven ships, all belonging to the Company, put into that harbour. The average number touching at South African ports across those thirteen years was thus 73 yearly. Those later tallies measure the opening that belonged to this calendar year: a Company winter port on the False Bay side, first worked with boats from Kalk Bay, still without a magazine, hospital, or named postholder on the southern shore. The directors had resolved the season; Swellengrebel’s government had to feed the ships that actually came. [3]
The agricultural memory of the previous years still shaped ordinary supply. The wheat crop of 1740 had been the best ever known in the country; after the magazines had been filled, 17,000 muids had been exported. Calendar 1742 opened on that recovered staple base rather than on a famine narrative. 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. In 1742 the magazines filled from the great wheat harvest of 1740 were still the immediate fact: bread was no longer rationed, and the first Simon’s Bay winter could be worked as a shipping problem rather than as a famine problem. [3]
Zebra Protection Order — 1742
From time to time regulations were issued for the preservation of harmless wild animals and for the destruction of beasts of prey. In November 1739 the reward for killing a lion had been reduced from £16 9s. 5d. to £2 1s. 8d., for a leopard from £2 1s. 8d. to £1 5s. 0d., and for a hyena from 12s. 6d. to 8s. 4d. Half of those 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. A few years before Swellengrebel’s induction the premiums on killing wild animals had been substantially cut; enthusiasm for random slaughter of zebras, lions, and elephants had abated a little, but a great deal of unnecessary shooting still went on. [3] [9]
The elephant had nearly disappeared from the settled districts, owing to the demand that always existed 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. In 1742 an order was issued prohibiting the destruction of zebras under a penalty of £10 for each offence. 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. [3]
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. A journal entry of 1742 put the same thought in those words. It is to Swellengrebel’s lasting honour that he saw farther than the profits made from hides and skins. 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. [3] [9]
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. Calendar 1742 therefore added a conservation and experiment clause to the Cape’s wild-animal law in the same year that the Castle imprisoned a returning viceroy and first watered Company ships from Kalk Bay boats. Unnecessary shooting had not ceased; the placaat named the animal whose presence on the hillside the council wished to keep. [3] [9]
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. The Rev. François le Sueur still held the Cape congregation, a tenure that had begun in April 1731. 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. Outlying leasehold farms still lay days from the nearest church, so that attendance on public worship was frequently neglected for long periods. [3]
The Rev. Hendrik Kock returned to Europe in February 1742. He had arrived in South Africa and assumed duty as clergyman of the Cape congregation in April 1732, so that his Cape pulpit had run almost ten years beside Le Sueur’s. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring, detained from a calling ship as chaplain, was 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 any later first service at a mountain-basin church. [3]
The succession of ministers who held the situation of clergyman of Cape Town therefore recorded Kock from April 1732 to February 1742, with Le Sueur continuing from April 1731. Meyring’s acting spell at the Cape pulpit would be written later; within this calendar year he was an assistant held back, not yet a country pastor. The three Reformed congregations thus carried the year’s parish load with one fewer established pastor at the Cape until that assistant role filled the gap. [3]
The larger programme of new churches at what became Tulbagh and Malmesbury still lay ahead of this year. Within 1742 the clerical map remained the three old parishes plus an assistant held in Table Valley. That same map framed the year’s two confessional disputes: Lutherans in town who wanted a resident clergyman of their own, and a Moravian missionary at Baviaans Kloof who had begun to baptize. Both cases would be decided against a separate font. [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. The Dutch Reformed establishment held the public pulpits; a second resident confession was not on offer. [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. Visiting ministry might touch a crew ashore; a resident Lutheran pastor and a separate congregation might not. The refusal fixed the confessional monopoly of the Dutch Reformed establishment for the Swellengrebel years in the same calendar in which Simon’s Bay first took Company ships and the council examined a Moravian baptismal document. [3]
Danish ships were not rare on the Cape books of this chapter: 20 Danish vessels put into Table Bay across the thirteen years 1738–1750. A chaplain from one of those ships might preach in a private house without raising a council case. A resident clergyman, with a congregation and rules of his own, was another matter. The Lutheran petitioners of 1742 asked for the second and received the first. [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. In both, the Cape’s public font remained Dutch Reformed. [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; 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, so that those people might be brought to the true knowledge of God; and that all possible assistance was to be given to him in the prosecution of that meritorious work. [3] [9]
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. Through 1741 he had still been the permitted instructor under that 1737 understanding. In 1742 he baptized five of his converts and 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]
The three clergymen who signed that report suggested “the required caution” in handling “a matter of this nature.” They advised the governor that the said George Schmit by provision should be forbidden till further order to baptize any more, with the recommendation, however, that he continue with the same zeal to instruct them, which he had accepted to do. And so it was decided: Schmit doing the hard work of teaching, the dominies sprinkling the holy water. Baptism remained their exclusive business; encroachment on that monopoly would not be tolerated. Swellengrebel, drawn into a religious dispute he had not sought, took the caution the pulpits asked. [3] [9]
One of those compilers was Swellengrebel’s brother-in-law, Le Sueur, still clergyman of the Cape congregation after Kock’s February departure. The governor who had imprisoned Valckenier in February now, in September, forbade a missionary’s font while praising his teaching. Both decisions were local executions of a metropolitan monopoly: the Seventeen’s warrant in one case, the Reformed sacrament in the other. Calendar 1742 held them in the same council chamber. [3] [9]
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. The 1737 understanding had always pointed that way: instruction at Baviaans Kloof, baptism at the parish font. After five years of labour, the five baptisms of 1742 had tested whether the missionary might himself administer the sacrament. The council had answered no. [3]
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. 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. A permitted instructor of 1737 had become, after the five baptisms, a suspected teacher in the Stellenbosch district. [3]
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. The Castle thus still described the teaching as good work even while it forbade the font. The sergeant’s inquiry could not reassemble a party that had already scattered. [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. Those later steps closed a story whose crisis—the five baptisms, the 4 September ruling, the dominies’ caution, and the dispersal of the Baviaans Kloof party—belonged to calendar 1742. The directors would not permit any other church than the Dutch Reformed to be established in the colony. In that, the Lutheran petitioners and the Moravian missionary had already received the same answer in the same year. [3] [9]
Pieter Wion’s Butcher Shop at Stellenbosch — December 1742
Local district regulation continued under the board of landdrost and heemraden at Stellenbosch. The board acted as a court of justice and performed also the duties later undertaken by municipal and divisional councils. A contract was made with a farmer to place a pontoon upon the Berg river and to keep in repair the road over the Roodezand pass, for which he was to receive yearly from every family residing beyond the Berg river either a muid of wheat or eleven shillings in money. In December 1742 permission was given to the burgher Pieter Wion to open a butcher’s shop in the village on fixed conditions. [3]
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. 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]
Some of the burghers were in the habit of grinding their corn with hand mills or little water mills of their own construction. From that custom the board anticipated a serious decrease in the price paid for the leases of the public mills at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, which carried with them the exclusive privilege of grinding all the corn consumed within fixed limits at certain stated charges. The district was then receiving £126 13s. 4d. a year for the lease of each of these mills. Yet the members of the board were very willing to assist their fellow burghers if it could be done without affecting the revenue, and generally an arrangement was made that the owner of the hand mill should satisfy the lessee and be allowed to grind his own corn. [3]
The village of Stellenbosch was by this time quite embowered among its oaks. It had been quickly rebuilt after the fire of 1710, and travellers who visited it described its beauty in glowing terms. The board that licensed Wion also managed pontoons, mill leases, and ordinary police of the village. Inland, the burgher mining association formed after Frans Diederik Muller’s November 1740 silver report at Groot Drakenstein close to Simonsberg still organised capital while awaiting a directors’ charter. Muller had professed to be an experienced mineralogist; the governor had inspected the locality and been persuaded that ore was to be had in enormous quantities, only requiring capital. Calendar 1742 therefore still carried that unchartered interval, with Muller the master miner of a claim that had not yet received the Seventeen’s grant. [3]
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. Swellengrebel still governed; Tulbagh still sat second; Van Oudtshoorn still held the fiscal’s chair. Valckenier had arrived ill and been arrested from the Swift’s letter of the tenth of February. Simon’s Bay had taken its first Company ships, with boats from Kalk Bay in fine weather. Zebras stood under a £10 penalty and a £20 foal premium. Kock had sailed for Europe in February; Meyring remained assistant in Table Valley. Lutherans had been refused a resident clergyman. Schmit had baptized five converts on the fourth of September and been forbidden to baptize again. Wion sold mutton on Wednesdays and Saturdays at two pence a pound. That was the Cape year: a colonist governor’s fourth calendar, a winter port begun, a viceroy gaoled, and two confessions told that the public font was Dutch Reformed. [3] [9]