Boer History1743 at the Cape of Good Hope: Van Imhof’s Visit, Roodezand Church, Simon’s Town, and the Table Bay Mole
Governor-General Van Imhof at the Cape — January 1743
In January 1743 Gustaf Willem van Imhof, governor-general of Netherlands India, called at the Cape on his way to Batavia and was installed with much ceremony. He made a short tour of inspection in the country and instituted an inquiry into the condition of the farmers, the result of which was very unsatisfactory to him. For the weeks of his stay he exercised supreme control and issued orders that reshaped churches, ports, produce markets, and official perquisites under Governor Hendrik Swellengrebel and secunde Ryk Tulbagh. Calendar 1743 therefore opened not with a change of Cape governors but with an Indian visitor whose rank outranked the Castle. [3] [9]
The visitor was no ordinary commissioner. In the line of Indian overseers who had once criticised Cape commanders—from Rijklof van Goens in Van Riebeeck’s time to Adriaan van Rheede tot Drakenstein in Simon van der Stel’s—Van Imhof stood as Swellengrebel’s supervisor: recently appointed governor-general, a baron, and one of the councillors of India whom Adriaan Valckenier had deported. He surpassed those earlier commissioners in sense of detail, sharpness of diagnosis, and quickness of decision. He stayed only a few months at the Cape, but to the Cape-born governor those months must have felt like years. It was not that he acted in any high-handed manner. As a true nobleman he was always suave and polite. It was not pleasant, even so, for a governor when a commissioner launched an inquiry into farming conditions over his head and found little to his liking. [9]
The European population of South Africa at this date consisted of about four thousand colonists and fifteen hundred servants of the Company with their families. The only churches in the colony were still at the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein, all then provided with clergymen, the Rev. Willem van Gendt having been stationed at Stellenbosch in December 1738. Schools existed at each of those places, but everywhere else the education of children was often entrusted to no more competent a teacher than a soldier engaged for a short term. There were over four hundred leasehold farms or cattle runs, some three or four days’ journey from the nearest church, so that attendance on public worship was frequently neglected for long periods. [3]
Van Imhof consulted the clergymen François le Sueur and Willem van Gendt, who recommended the establishment of more churches and schools. Le Sueur was Swellengrebel’s brother-in-law; several meetings on outlying pulpits had already been held, and the governor had had to listen to religious arguments after office hours. The January inquiry therefore fell on ground the Castle already knew. Swellengrebel remained governor and Tulbagh secunde under the arrangement of 14 April 1739; Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn held the independent fiscal’s chair. The year’s distinctive business was Indian oversight, not a change of those three names. [3] [9]
Two New Churches Ordered for the Outlying Districts — 1743
The governor-general called the members of the council of policy together and issued certain instructions. Two new churches were to be erected in the outlying districts with as little delay as possible, and at each were to be stationed a clergyman and a comforter of the sick, the latter of whom should also act as schoolmaster. The clergymen were to be detained from the first Indiamen calling at the Cape with chaplains on board. A comforter of the sick was also to be sent without delay to labour among the scattered inhabitants beyond the Breede river. [3]
The places selected for the new churches were the sites of the present villages of Tulbagh and Malmesbury. Farmers in the Zwartland and Roodezand districts had long asked for churches within easy reach; many of them had to ride fifty to a hundred kilometres to hear the Sunday sermons in Stellenbosch. Van Imhof ruled that the churches must arise—one for Zwartland and one for Roodezand. The first was the most convenient place of meeting for the farmers occupying the country on that side of Riebeek’s Kasteel, the Land of Waveren or present Tulbagh Basin, the Warm Bokkeveld, and the valleys of the Upper Breede and Hex rivers. It lay beyond the first range of mountains, but was accessible by a road over the Roodezand pass, not far from the ravine through which the Little Berg river flows. [3] [9]
The course of the old road could still be clearly traced, and a formidable rock that nearly blocked the passage remained an object of interest to the neighbourhood. The landdrost and heemraden of Stellenbosch used frequently to spend an hour or two trying to devise some means of getting rid of this rock, but they never succeeded. A site was selected along a gentle slope where water could easily be led on, and here the foundations of a church and parsonage were laid without delay. The original buildings are standing yet; the parsonage, partly constructed of materials imported from Holland, still served that purpose in later generations. [3]
The second church, in the wheat country of the Zwartland, still lacked a free site in 1743; the land bargain with the widow of Pieter van der Westhuizen and the later pastorate of Rutger Andries Weerman belonged to the following years. Within this calendar year the decisive ecclesiastical act was the Waveren foundation and the detention of a chaplain for mountain-basin duty. Huguenot farms already stood in that basin: De Plaisante at Waveren was among the properties later inventoried in a refugee widow’s estate, so the new pulpit would serve French as well as Dutch names on the far side of the Roodezand pass. [3] [8]
Meyring, First Roodezand Service, and Consistory — March–October 1743
A few weeks after the governor-general’s instructions were given, a ship put into Table Bay having on board as chaplain the Rev. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring, who was detained for duty at the Cape. He preached at the Cape for the first time on the 31st of March 1743. The Rev. Hendrik Kock had returned to Europe in February 1742, and Meyring was therefore kept at the Cape as assistant clergyman until the parsonage at Waveren was fit for occupation. The Cape congregation thus gained a temporary extra pulpit in the same months that the mountain-basin church was rising. [3]
He held the first service at Roodezand in September 1743, but the regular duty was not begun until some months later. On the 8th of October 1743 a consistory was established, when Jacobus Theron and Pieter Theron were approved by the council of policy as elders, and Jacobus du Pré and Gerrit van der Merwe were selected as deacons from a double nomination. Between the church and the parsonage gradually rose the houses of a little village which until 1804 had no other name than Roodezands Kerk. [3]
Those elder names were Huguenot as well as Cape. Jacques Therond of Nîmes in Languedoc had arrived in the Oosterlandt in 1688 as a soldier, become a free burgher on the 31st of May of that year, married Marie Jeanne des Pres, sat on the court of landdrost and heemraden, and owned the farm Languedoc. Jacobus and Pieter Theron of the 1743 consistory stood in that line. Du Pré likewise belonged to the refugee houses that had taken root at Drakenstein; in the same year Abraham, eldest son of Pierre de Villiers—one of the three vine-cultivating brothers sent from near La Rochelle—died unmarried about 1743, while Isaac also died without marrying and Jacob left issue. The new Roodezand board therefore sat among French names already two generations in the soil. [8]
Calendar 1743 thus added a fourth Reformed centre in the Land of Waveren while the three older pulpits at the Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein continued. The index of ministerial succession later recorded Meyring as acting at the Cape from March to September and then as clergyman of Roodezand’s church from September 1743 until May 1757. The year’s church map was therefore enlarged before the Zwartland site was purchased. The aftermath of the baron’s orders would keep Swellengrebel busier than ever, riding to new stations; within this calendar the concrete facts were the March detention, the September first service, and the October consistory. [3] [9]
Simon’s Bay Station and Postholder Justinus Blas — February–March 1743
Owing to heavy losses by shipwrecks in Table Bay, the directors had resolved in 1741 that their fleets should 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 these seas during that period, but storms and unavoidable detentions had to be taken into account. Simon’s Bay offered secure shelter in winter, but there was a drawback in difficulty of access by land, which made the supplying of a ship with fresh provisions very expensive. [3]
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 and so shorten the land carriage considerably. The permanent station still waited on a site and buildings. In February 1743 a site for a station was selected by governor-general Van Imhof on the southern shore of the bay, and in the following month a commencement was made with the erection of a building to serve as a magazine, a hospital, and quarters for the party in charge. A few soldiers were stationed there under command of Sergeant Justinus Blas, who had the title of postholder. [3]
In course of time a small village was built, occupied by fishermen and people who depended for a living upon the shipping. It took its name from the bay, being called Simon’s Town. The establishment was at first conducted in the least expensive manner possible, for the directors had also resolved to experiment with a mole or breakwater in Table Bay, and should that succeed the other port would not be needed. Swellengrebel had to ride repeatedly to Simon’s Bay where the commissioner had selected the site, and to supervise building operations. In this way the little village came into being under the same Indian visitor’s hand that ordered the Table Bay pier. [3] [9]
Calendar 1743 therefore opened both a False Bay winter post and a Table Bay harbour work. Blas remained the first in the later succession of residents at Simon’s Town, holding the postholder title from March 1743. The index later listed him from March 1743 to March 1761. Within this year the decisive facts were Van Imhof’s February site, the March start of the magazine-hospital-quarters, and the posting of a sergeant with a new title on the southern shore. [3]
Table Bay Mole Begun — 4 February 1743
The mole was commenced on the 4th of February 1743. As it was considered a work of importance to the colony as well as to the Company, a special tax was levied upon all the Europeans in South Africa, Company’s servants and burghers. Those in the Cape district were assessed at the labour of 158 stout slaves for two months in the year, and those in the country at £293 6s. 8d. in money or provisions. All the Company’s slaves and all the waggons and cattle that could be spared from other work were employed upon the mole. A strong gang of convicts was sent from Batavia to assist in its construction. [3]
The general direction of the undertaking was entrusted to Messrs. Johannes Carolus de Wet and Jacobus Moller, the first a retired burgher councillor and the other the head of the Company’s naval establishment at the Cape. They gave the mole a base of one hundred feet in breadth, sloping upwards to twenty-four feet at the top. Much money and labour was put into the undertaking—even Batavia assisted by sending out convicts. Another scheme for the improvement of shipping facilities thus took a great deal of Swellengrebel’s attention and time in the same months that he was riding to the False Bay station. [3] [9]
By the close of 1746 the work would stand three hundred and fifty-one feet from the shore, then be suspended after locust damage, the death of most of the Java convicts, and burgher refusal to continue the quota. Within 1743 the decisive facts were the February start, the dual tax in slave labour and cash, and the appointment of De Wet and Moller. As far as could later be judged, the work promised, if carried out to a sufficient length, to protect the bay without causing it to silt up. The water remained at its original depth on the inner side, while on the outside a bank of sand formed which strengthened the work. [3]
The abandoned mole, after storms and use as a quarry, remained visible like a reef running out from under the later lighthouse, its site ever since called Mouille Point. Calendar 1743 recorded the beginning, not the abandonment, of that pier. The winter-port experiment at Simon’s Bay and the Table Bay mole were one Indian programme: if the breakwater succeeded, the False Bay post would not be needed; until that proof, both works ran together under Swellengrebel’s supervision. [3] [9]
Wine and Produce Market Recast under Van Imhof — 1743
For a long time past the wine farmers had complained of there being no sale for the produce of their vineyards, then from two to four thousand leggers a year. The directors had resolved, if no other remedy could be devised, to substitute wine for spirits to a large extent in their ships and Indian establishments, provided a moderately good article could be obtained. The burgher councillors, on behalf of the farmers, addressed governor-general Van Imhof on this question. The principal colonial revenue had long been the money paid for the exclusive right to sell wines and spirituous liquors by retail, determined by public auction on the last day of August—so the wine question was fiscal as well as agrarian. [3]
He first offered them free trade in India upon payment of 16s. 8d. freight and £2 10s. 0d. duty a legger. The burghers replied that such a privilege would be of no use to them. He then proposed that the tax on wine should be increased from 4s. 2d. to 12s. 6d. a legger; that upon payment of this, a fee of 4s. 2d. to the fiscal, and a fee of £1 0s. 10d. to the licensed dealer, the burghers should be at liberty to sell without let or hindrance to all visitors, Dutch or foreign, at the best price they could obtain; and that the Company should purchase at £5 5s. 10d. a legger sufficient for its own needs— on average about four leggers for each ship leaving the port, besides quantities for the Netherlands and Batavia for ships coming to the Cape and for the work-people in India. With this proposal the burgher councillors expressed themselves satisfied. [3]
The same settlement allowed the fiscal a fee of four shillings and twopence upon every legger of wine sold to a foreigner—a perquisite later remembered when the foreign demand itself collapsed. The question of a market for other produce than corn and wine then came on. Van Imhof proposed to reduce the price of peas to £1 and of beans to 16s. a muid, and offered on behalf of the Company to take as much as the farmers chose to grow at those prices. Whatever was not needed for the ships could be sent to Batavia. To this arrangement also the burgher councillors agreed. [3]
The year’s produce settlement therefore paired a higher wine tax and freer visitor sales with fixed Company purchase prices for wine, peas, and beans. Huguenot vine knowledge, sent out with the de Villiers brothers from near La Rochelle in 1689, still stood behind much of the legger count Van Imhof was trying to move. The January inquiry into farming conditions and the wine address of the burgher councillors were one conversation: unsold harvests, distant churches, and a Castle that lived on retail-licence auctions. [3] [8]
Official Trade Banned and Wine Perquisites Fixed — 1743
Since 1722 the officers of government at the Cape had been permitted to have gardens for their own use, not exceeding two morgen in extent, but they were prohibited from selling anything out of them or trafficking in farm produce. Their salaries were insufficient for decent maintenance, yet they had been allowed to trade in various kinds of foreign wares on their own account. Van Imhof prohibited further trading, and as compensation allowed the officials certain fixed sums on different transactions. [3]
Thus, for every legger of wine purchased by the Company from the farmers, ten rixdollars were to be divided between the governor and the secunde in the proportion of two-thirds to the former and one-third to the latter. In practice a farmer who delivered a legger of wine for exportation or for the Company’s ships signed a receipt for £8, but actually received only £5 5s. 10d., 12s. 6d. being deducted for the Company, £1 7s. 9d. for the governor, and 13s. 11d. for the secunde. The fiscal had corresponding privileges in issuing licences to trade, and the minor officers were provided for in a similar manner. No official document could be drawn up for a burgher without a heavy fee. This was an ever-increasing evil, for the fees were constantly being augmented. [3]
The practice of using different money from that of the Netherlands opened a door to what would later be termed fraud, but what was in those days regarded as a legitimate perquisite. In the accounts, two and a half Dutch gulden of twenty stivers each equalled one rixdollar, but at the Cape a fictitious gulden was in use: three counted as one rixdollar when receiving money, while in paying out—for instance to a farmer for grain—the fictitious gulden was reckoned at sixteen stivers, giving the officer in charge of the granaries a perquisite of four per cent. Another perquisite, considered legitimate, was receiving grain at a heavier weight the muid than it was debited to the Company. The last or load, in which the accounts were kept, at this time consisted of seventeen muids. The muid, as charged to the Company, weighed 175 Amsterdam pounds; as delivered by the farmer, from 180 to 190 pounds. [3]
In 1743 an order was given that the heavy gulden should be exclusively used in accounts prepared for the directors, so that the double standard would no longer cloud returns sent to the Netherlands. Before that year it is often doubtful which gulden was meant. The heavy gulden generally used in accounts transmitted to the Netherlands was valued at one shilling and eight pence, and the light gulden used in transactions in the colony and in India at sixteen pence and two-thirds of a penny. The year’s paper reform did not abolish the fictitious gulden in local paying and receiving; it required the heavy standard in the books that sailed home. [3]
Sixty-Morgen Freehold about the Homestead — 1743
The colonists were constantly taking possession of new tracts and laying them out in cattle runs never less than five or six thousand acres in extent, for each of which they paid a yearly rental of £2 10s. before 1732 and £5 after that date. Upon the slightest fault being discovered in a cattle run, the occupier did not hesitate to abandon it and move farther inland. A vast region, almost untenanted since its desolation by smallpox in 1713, lay open before them. Van Imhof regarded this condition as boding no good to the future of the European population in South Africa. In his opinion it would tend to unsettle the colonists and turn them into a body of half-barbarous nomads. [3]
To attempt to fix the people to the soil, he issued instructions that any one who so desired could convert sixty morgen of ground about his homestead into freehold property, upon application to the council of policy and payment of from £10 8s. 4d. to £41 13s. 4d. according to the value of the land. The remainder of the farm was to be held as before, its use allowed upon payment of a yearly rental of £5 so long as it was not required by the Company. The most significant change, in one reading, was this conversion of a system of loan farms into a scheme of freeholds, whose objective was to make the farmers more attached to their land and put a stop to the random desertion of farms and occupation of new tracts when the old ones ceased to please them. [3] [9]
In this context Van Imhof expressed strong feelings against the use of slave labour. He even added a psychological argument to those conveyed by Dominique de Chavonnes in 1724. The introduction of slaves, said the baron, had resulted in a master-servant mentality that affected the conduct of the humblest and least efficient farmer. Expecting to be served by the labour of others, he forgot to work himself. Although the governor-general did not put it in so many words, he implied clearly that the colonists grew lazy and became extravagant in their demands. The plea was not a reflection on Swellengrebel’s work, but a born settler could feel such criticism deeply. [9]
This measure, though well intended, had not much effect, as very few farmers availed themselves of it. On another archival reading the same year also saw a proposal to convert loan places into perpetual loans or leenings eigendom of the same nature as additional lands adjoining freehold properties: a sum depending on value paid at the outset, then annually the usual recognitie of twenty-four rixdollars; a careful survey, a diagram, and an erfgrondbrief or title-deed to establish a complete understanding between government and landholder. To check unlimited extent, the grants were to be limited to sixty morgen instead of the customary nominal three thousand—and nothing came of the proposal. Calendar 1743 therefore recorded both Van Imhof’s sixty-morgen freehold offer and the failure of a broader survey-and-title scheme to take hold. [3] [4]
Four Heemraden beyond the Lower Breede — 12 November 1743
Before 1743 there was outside of Cape Town but one seat of magistracy in South Africa. Over all the wanderers who were pushing their way inland the landdrost and heemraden of Stellenbosch legally held jurisdiction, but practically many of them were soon beyond the reach of law. On the 12th of November of this year four heemraden were appointed to form a court of justice for the residents beyond the Lower Breede river. [3]
Their names were Cornelis van Rooyen, Jan Loots, Andries Holtshuizen, and Jacobus Botha. They were selected out of a double number nominated by the board of landdrost and heemraden of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, as it was at first intended that for general purposes they should sit in that court. The appointment created a local judicial presence east of the Lower Breede without yet naming a separate drostdy village. The same eastward push that had left farms three or four days from a church now received a four-man court while still remaining, for general purposes, under Stellenbosch’s board. [3]
The later assistant landdrostship of Johannes Theophilus Rhenius and the full separation of the country beyond the Lower Breede as a district with its own landdrost belonged to 1744–1745, and the name Swellendam to 1747. Within calendar 1743 the concrete step was the November naming of the four heemraden—the first formal court for residents who had outrun Stellenbosch’s practical reach. Van Imhof’s January order that a comforter of the sick go beyond the Breede and this November court were two answers to the same map: people already living past the river the Castle still treated as Stellenbosch. [3]
Foundation Stone of Fort Knokke — 24 October 1743
The fortifications then existing consisted of the castle and a battery on the shore where a later breakwater would run into the bay. That battery had been commenced in February 1715 and completed in April 1726; it was at first termed Mauritius and afterwards came to be popularly called the Chavonnes battery. On the opposite side of the castle a fort was being built, the foundation stone of which was laid on the 24th of October 1743. [3]
It was completed in October 1744 and received the name Fort Knokke, which it still bears. The larger line of shore batteries—Imhof, Swellengrebel, Elizabeth, Helena, Tulbagh, and Heeren Hendriks Kinderen—and the wartime mounted burgher guard of fifty men belonged to the war scare that followed despatches of September 1744. Calendar 1743 itself recorded the October foundation of Knokke as the year’s concrete addition to the Table Bay works beside the mole. The index later noted that Fort Knokke was commenced in October 1743 and completed in October 1744. [3]
Together with the Simon’s Bay post and the Mouille Point pier, Fort Knokke showed how the year answered shipwreck and strategic anxiety with new fixed points on both sides of the peninsula. The castle remained the administrative centre; the new fort and mole were the year’s building facts on the roadstead shore. Van Imhof’s few months of supreme control had thus left stone as well as paper: a False Bay magazine, a Table Bay pier, and a foundation on the castle’s opposite flank. [3]
Waveren Outpost Withdrawn and Sold — October 1743
The Waveren outpost, which had been maintained since 1700, was withdrawn in October 1743, when the building with sixty morgen of ground about it was sold by auction to Pieter de Vos for £266 13s. 4d. The other military outposts—Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis, and Riet Vlei—remained as before. The sixty-morgen parcel sold with the building matched the homestead measure Van Imhof was offering as freehold about other farms: the post itself was converted from Company picket to private ground in the same year the church took up the basin’s parish role. [3]
The sale coincided with the planting of a civilian church centre at Roodezand in the same basin. Where a military post had watched the Land of Waveren for more than four decades, the year’s October auction converted the site into private freehold while the new church and parsonage, whose foundations had been laid without delay after the January order, took up the parish role. Huguenot De Plaisante already lay in that same Tulbagh basin; the Theron consistory of the 8th of October and De Vos’s purchase later in the month turned a garrison landscape into a parish one. [3] [8]
The remaining posts continued the older pattern of coastal and inland pickets. Calendar 1743 therefore thinned the Waveren garrison presence at the same moment it thickened ecclesiastical and magisterial institutions farther east and on False Bay—an administrative redistribution rather than a general withdrawal from the frontier. The Castle kept Saldanha, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis, and Riet Vlei; it sold the mountain-basin watch that a church could now claim. [3]
Olof de Wet’s Silver-Mining Charter — Early 1743
In November 1740 excitement had been created by a report from Frans Diederik Muller, who professed to be an experienced mineralogist, that he had discovered a rich silver mine at Groot Drakenstein close to Simonsberg. Governor Swellengrebel had inspected the locality and 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, a burgher association was formed to work the mine. [3]
This met with the approval of the Assembly of Seventeen, and early in 1743 a charter was granted to Mr. Olof de Wet, for himself and his associates, in which they received the exclusive right of searching for and extracting metals within the area bounded by the Paarl, French Hoek, and Hottentots Holland mountains, upon condition of paying to the Company fifteen per cent of everything valuable obtained and delivering the surplus at prices specified for almost all known metals. The index later recorded De Wet as chief director of an association established in 1743 to search for minerals and work a supposed silver mine at Drakenstein. [3]
De Wet, chief director of the mining association, then engaged a large number of men to whom the government had granted passes, and prospecting in the mountains and excavating at the so-called silver mine commenced, with Muller as master miner. For more than five years he kept up hopes without producing anything valuable, successively calling the ore silver, copper, and gold, until samples sent to Holland proved almost worthless and he was banished as an impostor. Those later exposures closed a venture whose charter and first organised work belonged to calendar 1743. [3]
The silver charter sat in the same Indian season as the wine tax, the sixty-morgen offer, and the two new churches. Van Imhof’s few months at the Cape recast how the settlement worshipped, sold wine, held land, watched False Bay, and dug at Simonsberg. Swellengrebel was left to carry the aftermath: riding to Simon’s Bay, watching De Wet and Moller’s mole, and governing a colony whose paper now used the heavy gulden when it spoke to the Seventeen. Calendar 1743 stands as the year that Indian supervision, not a change of governors, redrew the Cape’s church map, its winter port, and its homestead title. [3] [9]