Boer History1744 at the Cape of Good Hope: Rhenius at the Breede, Zwartland Church Site, Fortifications, and Anson’s Centurion
Rhenius Assistant Landdrost and the Rank Dispute — January 1744
On the 12th of November 1743 four heemraden—Cornelis van Rooyen, Jan Loots, Andries Holtshuizen, and Jacobus Botha—had been named to form a court of justice for residents beyond the Lower Breede river, chosen from a double list nominated by the board of landdrost and heemraden of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein. That November step still left the new country without a resident Company officer of its own. Before 1743 there had been, outside of Cape Town, but one seat of magistracy in South Africa; over all the wanderers pushing inland the Stellenbosch board legally held jurisdiction, though practically many of them were soon beyond the reach of law. In January 1744 the missing civil post was filled when Johannes Theophilus Rhenius, previously a bookkeeper in the Company’s service, was appointed assistant landdrost and secretary in subordination to the landdrost of Stellenbosch. [3]
The appointment carried the Breede frontier into ordinary district administration. Graziers and freeholders east of the older Stellenbosch–Drakenstein core no longer depended solely on distant sittings of the parent board; they now had a Company bookkeeper elevated to field judicial and secretarial work under Stellenbosch supervision. The January commission therefore made permanent the November heemraad experiment rather than leaving the Lower Breede as a temporary rural circuit alone. There was as yet no place selected for the seat of the new magistracy, and for a time the court met at the residence of one of the heemraden. The government wisely left the choice of a drostdy site to the court itself: some excellent sites were already occupied as farms, and it was not deemed advisable to eject government tenants. Half of the heemraden were already meant, in the parent Stellenbosch–Drakenstein board, to retire each year after sending a list of names from which the council of policy chose successors; the new Breede court inherited that burgher-nomination habit even while it still lacked a village, a lock-up, or a drostdy chamber of its own. [3]
Rhenius’s title mixed two offices that the older villages kept distinct: he was both the landdrost’s subordinate officer and the heemraden’s secretary. Almost immediately a dispute arose concerning the rank of the officials. The heemraden maintained that Rhenius, being their secretary, was beneath them in dignity, while he contended that as assistant landdrost he was their superior officer. The question was referred for settlement to Governor Hendrik Swellengrebel and the council of policy. [3]
They decided that when the court sat to hear judicial cases Mr. Rhenius was to preside, but when it sat to arrange district affairs the oldest heemraad present was to occupy the chair. The compromise split the new board’s two faces—criminal and civil justice on one side, roads, outspans, and local regulation on the other—and tried to honour both the Company’s commissioned officer and the senior free-burgher councillors who had been named in November. The arrangement did not answer at all. Through the rest of calendar 1744 the dual presidency remained an awkward stopgap: the January appointment, the immediate rank quarrel, and the council’s split-chair ruling that failed to quiet either side. [3]
The aftermath of governor-general Gustaf Willem van Imhof’s few months at the Cape in 1743 kept Swellengrebel busier than ever. Churches ordered for the outlying wheat and mountain-basin districts, a Simon’s Bay station, and a Table Bay breakwater all still demanded the Castle’s attention while this new Breede magistracy had to be fitted under Stellenbosch without a village of its own. Secunde Ryk Tulbagh remained the second civil officer under the arrangement of the 14th of April 1739. Calendar 1744 therefore opened not with a change of Cape governors but with a bookkeeper posted east of the river and a rank quarrel that the council could only split in two. [3] [9]
Zwartland Church Farm and Wietse Botes’s School — 16 June 1744
Van Imhof’s 1743 instructions had ordered two new churches in the outlying districts, each with a clergyman and a comforter of the sick who should also act as schoolmaster. One site rose quickly at the present Tulbagh basin as Roodezands Kerk. The second was recognised as most useful in the centre of the Zwartland, then as later the best wheat-producing tract in the country; but inspection found no suitable place that was not already occupied as a farm. 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. [3] [9]
At length the widow of Pieter van der Westhuizen made an offer, which the council of policy accepted on the 16th of June 1744. She received in exchange for her farm another which she had previously selected, and the congregation paid her a sum equal to one hundred and seventy-four pounds sterling for the buildings. The June acceptance therefore turned a Van Imhof parish order into a concrete Zwartland church place without ejecting a sitting cultivator by force—the same caution that, east of the Breede, left drostdy ground in tenants’ hands until the court itself should choose. [3]
The site lay in wheat country rather than on a permanent stream that could be led out for gardens. Close by is a hot mineral spring, like those found in many other parts of South Africa, used by persons troubled with rheumatism and some other diseases. Even with a central situation, a church, and a mineral bath, besides having no mountain barrier between it and the Cape, the site was not an attractive one. The ground is very uneven, and the colonists of those days were partial to tolerably level surfaces for building upon. There is no permanent stream of water which can be led out for household purposes and to irrigate gardens, the supply in summer being obtained from wells. Further, the belief was general that the brackish soil, though capable of producing the finest wheat in the world, was unfit for the growth of trees, a matter always of primary importance in a Dutch village. Those drawbacks did not cancel the central situation for grain farmers west of the mountains. [3]
A sick-comforter, Wietse Botes by name, who was serving on board a ship in the bay, was thereupon transferred to the church place and opened a school at once. The June farm exchange thus carried an immediate educational staff rather than waiting for a resident clergyman. School and sick-comfort work began while the buildings still wore the character of a purchased farmstead and before a regular pastor had been secured from a passing Indiaman. Calendar 1744 therefore closed the Zwartland story at the stage of site, purchase price, and Botes’s school—not yet at full parish government. The church place was known as Zwartlands Kerk. Together with Roodezand’s earlier fabric, the Zwartland purchase of 16 June completed the land base of Van Imhof’s two-church programme. New settlement began to gather as those churches opened their services. [3] [9]
Huguenot families already rooted in the older districts still married into Cape lines in the same year. Daniel Rousselet Brousson of Amsterdam, whose father Jan Rousselet had been a merchant, married at the Cape in 1744 Mariana, daughter of Andries Grové and Anna Niel, or Nel. The marriage belonged to the Cape congregation rather than to the new wheat-belt school, but it marked how French refugee descent continued to mix with Grové and Nel households while Botes taught at a purchased farm and Roodezand already heard regular preaching under Arnoldus Maurits Meyring. The Cape, Stellenbosch, and Drakenstein pulpits no longer stood alone as the only fixed Reformed centres; a wheat-belt school and church site now faced the older mountain-basin congregation across the peninsula and the first range. [3] [8]
Wheat Magazine Price Cut and Fixed Artisan Rates — 1744
In 1744 the Indian authorities reduced the price of wheat delivered at the Company’s magazines at the Cape to 9s. 4d. the muid. The cut struck the cash return that substantial grain farmers expected after tithe and harvest wages, and it immediately produced organised protest inland rather than quiet acceptance at the Castle scales. Zwartland was then as later the best wheat-producing tract in the country; a lower magazine price therefore fell on the same district whose church farm the council had just purchased, and on Stellenbosch and Drakenstein growers who still carted grain to the Company’s stores. Tithe already came off the grower’s load at the magazine; harvest hire came off it in cash; a Batavia figure of 9s. 4d. then named what remained. The inland board had no other remedy than to petition through the governor. A Castle order from India was not a suggestion, and the Stellenbosch conference was the only local answer the heemraden knew how to give. [3]
Some of the most substantial burghers in the country assembled at Stellenbosch to confer with the landdrost and heemraden and endeavour through their solicitation to obtain a higher price. They represented that ordinary farm work was performed by slaves, but that at harvest the cultivator needed more labourers, hired from townspeople at from 1s. 8d. to 2s. a day. If he needed a European mason or carpenter, he had to pay from 2s. 6d. to 4s. a day besides food, though an inferior workman might sometimes be had at £2 a month. After paying wages at those rates and deducting the Company’s dues, they argued, a farmer could not sell wheat at 9s. 4d. the muid. [3]
The landdrost and heemraden shared that opinion and requested the governor and council of policy to petition the Indian authorities to raise the price again to 10s. 8d. Within 1744 the binding facts were the Batavia-side reduction, the Stellenbosch conference, and the formal petition channel through Swellengrebel’s board. It was held to be one of the duties of government to regulate many matters which later ages would leave to demand and supply. The same year therefore saw not only a magazine price imposed from India but a Cape answer in the form of a burgher conference and a request to restore the old figure. [3]
In 1744 a proclamation of Governor Swellengrebel and the council was issued in which the price to be charged by waggon-makers and blacksmiths for every part of their work was minutely fixed. Harvest hire, magazine wheat, and artisan piece-rates thus sat in one regulated year: the Company named what it would pay for grain, the inland board asked for more, and the Castle named what a smith or waggon-maker might charge. Farmers who hired town slaves at harvest and paid masons by the day now also met a posted tariff for the iron and woodwork of waggons on which that grain rode to the magazines. Calendar 1744 therefore joined a Batavia price cut to a Cape price list—two faces of the same belief that the council should settle what the market might not be left to settle alone. [3]
La Bourdonnais Proposes Free Exchange with Mauritius — 1744
In 1744 M. La Bourdonnais, governor of the French island of Mauritius, proposed to the council of policy at the Cape a free exchange of the productions of the two countries, and stated that fifty or sixty leggers of wine would be needed yearly by the colony under his rule, exclusive of the shipping. The offer linked Cape viticulture to a French Indian Ocean market at a moment when wine farmers still complained of limited sale for two to four thousand leggers a year of ordinary produce, and when Indian authorities were already cutting what they would pay for wheat. [3]
The council replied that they could not establish a regular trade, nor receive the produce of Mauritius in barter; but that Frenchmen could purchase at the Cape as much wine as they chose, upon paying cash for it, and could then remove it at their pleasure. Cash sale without reciprocal barter thus remained the Cape answer: Mauritius might buy, but the Company would not open a bilateral free-exchange system that mixed French island staples into the Castle magazines. [3]
Complaints of the quality of the wine were frequently made by the Indian authorities. The directors sent out skilled persons from Europe to instruct the farmers in its proper manufacture, and the authorities at the Cape tested every legger that was purchased, but the complaints continued as before. A French demand for fifty or sixty leggers did not, in that climate of complaint, persuade the council to take Mauritian goods in return. Cash at the Cape scales kept the quality quarrel and the fiscal fees inside existing rules. [3]
The refusal kept wine export inside the post–Van Imhof rules already fixed for visitors and Company ships—dues, fiscal fees, and licensed-dealer charges when ships’ people bought—rather than creating a special Mauritius channel. Calendar 1744 therefore recorded a French demand figure of fifty or sixty leggers and a Dutch cash-only counter-offer, without a new commercial treaty on the Table Bay side. Wheat at 9s. 4d. the muid and wine sold only for cash were two measures of the same closed magazine: the Company would buy and sell on its own terms; it would not barter the Cape’s harvest against another island’s produce. [3]
George Schmit Takes Ship for Europe — 28 January 1744
After the council of policy on the 4th of September 1742 had forbidden further baptisms by the Moravian missionary George Schmit at Baviaans Kloof, his Khoikhoi hearers had dispersed and popular prejudice had branded the Moravians fanatics. He had been permitted in 1737 to settle at Baviaans Kloof in the Stellenbosch district and had taught both Christian doctrine and better living; baptism of five converts then brought him into collision with the Dutch Reformed monopoly. Under those circumstances he found himself incapable of effecting any good, and he therefore requested permission from his Society to return to Europe, hoping that representations might reverse the baptism order and allow him to come back with assistants. The people who had dispersed could not be collected together again. Instruction without baptism, which some at the Cape had been willing to tolerate as a compromise, had already failed in the kloof: without the rite, and with popular talk branding the Moravians fanatics, Schmit judged that he could effect no further good on the Stellenbosch frontier. [3] [9]
The Society acceded to his request, and on the 28th of January 1744 he appeared before the council of policy and asked for a free passage in one of the Company’s ships to Holland. This was granted, and he returned to Europe. The January hearing closed the Cape phase of the first Moravian mission: free outward passage after nearly seven years on the Stellenbosch frontier, beginning with the friendly minute of 11 July 1737 on the ship Huis te Rensburg. [3]
The directors refused to permit any other church than the Dutch Reformed to be established in the colony, and therefore the Moravians were compelled to abandon their enterprise. Schmit’s departure did not reopen baptism rights; it removed the missionary while locking the confessional monopoly that had already refused a strong Lutheran petition in 1742. The directors’ refusal was general, not a personal sentence on one Moravian: no other church than the Dutch Reformed was to be established in the colony, and a free passage home was as far as the council would go. Schmit left with the hope that his Society might yet obtain a reversal; the Cape minute of 28 January did not itself reopen the kloof. [3]
Swellengrebel had been drawn into that religious dispute against his inclination: the three clergymen who reported on Schmit had advised “the required caution” and that he be forbidden for the present to baptize more, while continuing with the same zeal to instruct. One of the compilers was the governor’s brother-in-law, the Rev. François le Sueur. The 28 January free passage was the practical end of that compromise. Calendar 1744 therefore closed the Baviaans Kloof mission at the council table, in the same January that posted Rhenius beyond the Breede and months before the Zwartland farm was bought for a Reformed school. [3] [9]
War Despatches and the Table Bay Fortification Line — September–November 1744
The convulsions in Europe which followed the death of the emperor Charles VI on the 20th of October 1740, and which began by the king of Prussia invading Silesia, largely affected the Dutch East India Company. In September 1744 despatches were received at the Cape announcing that France and England were at war, and that there was a likelihood of the Netherlands being involved at no distant date. The governor was informed by the directors of that outbreak and of the bad chance of Dutch involvement, and was consequently instructed to strengthen the Cape’s defence. [3] [9]
The council was informed that the Company had resolved to construct a line of fortifications along the shore of Table Bay and to strengthen the garrison of the Cape. Existing works then consisted of the castle and a battery on the shore where the later breakwater would run into the bay—begun in February 1715, completed in April 1726, at first termed Mauritius, and already popularly called the Chavonnes battery. That older work had been raised in the years of Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes, whose name the beach already used even before the Company wrote it down. The September war news therefore fell on a settlement already mid-programme in harbour defence, and it authorised a fuller shore line rather than a single new work. Paper from the Seventeen, not a shot in Table Bay, was what moved the spades: France and England at war, and a Dutch Company that still hoped not to be drawn in, yet would not leave the roadstead covered only by the castle and one battery. [3]
On the opposite side of the castle a fort whose foundation stone had been laid on the 24th of October 1743 was still rising. It was completed in October 1744 and received the name Fort Knokke, which it still bears on the eastern shore toward Salt River. One year from cornerstone to completion placed a finished work on that flank just as the September despatches demanded a stronger Table Bay front. Knokke’s finish closed the 1743 building season’s main new fort and, together with the castle and the older Mauritius battery, formed the solid core around which lighter batteries would now be thrown up along the beach. [3] [4]
The shore battery begun in February 1715 and completed in April 1726 had first been termed Mauritius, but had come to be popularly called the Chavonnes battery. In November 1744 that popular name was officially conferred upon it. The November act therefore aligned formal nomenclature with common speech at the moment the Company was multiplying named works along the same beach. Official recognition of the Chavonnes title tied the older eighteenth-century battery to the memory of Governor Maurits Pasques de Chavonnes while new works took names from living officers and family circles. The November renaming was administrative rather than structural: the masonry already stood; what changed was the Company’s written designation. [3]
A line of batteries was now thrown up along the shore, only one of which—the Imhof—would still remain in later centuries. It was intended to cover the face of the castle and rose from the margin of the sea, where winter storms dashed against its walls. Its foundation stone was laid on the 23rd of November 1744. The other batteries of the new line were less solidly built. There were four between the castle and the mouth of Salt River, named Swellengrebel, Elizabeth, Helena, and Tulbagh. Between the castle and the Chavonnes battery there was one, called Heeren Hendriks Kinderen, on which ten guns were mounted. Four of those works took names from Swellengrebel and Tulbagh and their wives, Helena and Elizabeth; the fifth, with ten guns, honoured the eight Swellengrebel children as “Mr Henry’s children.” [3] [9]
Naming the principal new heavy work after the governor-general who had ordered so much of the 1743 reform programme kept metropolitan authority visible in masonry even after Van Imhof had sailed on to Batavia. For Cape burghers and Company servants, the 23 November ceremony marked the shift from paper war readiness in September to permanent stone on the waterline before the year closed. With Fort Knokke finished in October, Chavonnes named in November, and the Imhof stone laid the same month, the castle’s two flanks and its seaward face entered the war winter under settled labels. Calendar 1744 thus converted Van Imhof–era foundation work into an occupied fort and a named shore string in the same year that European war news reached the council table. [3] [9]
Swellengrebel Councillor Extraordinary and Anson’s Centurion — March–April 1744
Governor Swellengrebel gave contentment to the colonists by his administration, though his talents were not of a brilliant order. The directors were also satisfied with him, and, as a mark of their approbation, in March 1744 he received the rank and title of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India. The honour placed the Cape governor on the same higher Indian grade that earlier commanders had sought as recognition from the Seventeen. It did not remove him from Table Valley; it raised his Company rank while he continued to preside over council business that now included Breede magistracy disputes, Zwartland church purchase, wheat-price petitions, and shore fortification. [3]
As a Company official brought up in the practical school of Pasques de Chavonnes and Jan de la Fontaine, he carried out his duties with diligence and efficiency. In 1727, when still council secretary, he had married Helena Wilhelmina ten Damme, a born Caabse Vlekker; Ryk Tulbagh had been best man and had then cast a meaningful glance at the bridegroom’s sister Elizabeth. After settling in the Castle the governor still remained a regular visitor to the spacious parental residence in Berg Street, particularly after his father’s death in 1744. The March Indian title and the father’s death in the same year thus marked both metropolitan approval and a private loss in the street where the Cape-born governor had grown up. [3] [9]
Among the English ships that called in these years was the Centurion, Commodore George Anson, bound homeward after her famous cruise in the Pacific. She was at the Cape in March and April 1744. The visit placed one of the best-known British circumnavigation commands in Table Bay under wartime European conditions, while Dutch and English interests were not yet openly locked as enemies at the Cape roadstead. The March rank and the March–April English hull therefore occupied the same autumn of the Cape year: a Dutch governor raised by the Seventeen, and a British commodore watering after the Pacific, before September’s despatches made France and England declared belligerents in the Castle’s hearing. [3]
Anson’s stop belonged to the broader shipping pattern of the Swellengrebel years: in the thirteen years 1738–1750 some 640 Dutch East India Company ships, 198 English, 23 French, and 20 Danish put into Table Bay, while Simon’s Bay, first used as a winter port of call in 1742, took seventy-seven Company ships before the close of 1750. The average number touching at South African ports was thus seventy-three yearly. The Centurion was one English hull among many, distinguished by the fame of her Pacific cruise rather than by any recorded Cape battle or wreck. She came in before the September despatches, while English and Dutch still used the same roadstead as customers rather than as declared enemies. Fresh meat, water, and wine at cash rates were what a heavy English hull needed after the Pacific; the Castle sold them under the same dues that applied to other foreign visitors. [3]
Refreshment of a heavy English man-of-war in autumn 1744 also tested the same provision markets that wine and grain farmers were pressing through council—cash sales to foreigners under dues and fees, without the free bilateral barter La Bourdonnais had sought for Mauritius. The Centurion’s March–April presence therefore sits beside the French wine proposal and the Indian wheat-price cut as part of one commercial year under a governor newly styled councillor extraordinary. Swellengrebel had been in continuous Company service since 1713; the 1744 title marked metropolitan approval in the middle of that long Cape career, in the same months that Anson’s people bought what the Castle would sell for cash. [3]
Death of Rev. Willem van Gendt — October 1744
In October 1744 the Rev. Willem van Gendt died. He had been sent out by the directors and stationed at Stellenbosch in December 1738, restoring a resident pulpit after earlier vacancies, and he had been one of the two clergymen—together with François le Sueur—whom Van Imhof consulted in 1743 about new churches and schools. From his death the church at Stellenbosch was without a resident clergyman. The October vacancy therefore opened a gap at the oldest country village just as Zwartland was only beginning under a sick-comforter and Roodezand was settling into regular duty under Arnoldus Maurits Meyring, who remained at Roodezands kerk. [3]
Parish geography at the close of 1744 was thus uneven: Cape and Drakenstein still served; Roodezand and the new Zwartland site expanded the map; Stellenbosch lost its resident minister. Consistory finance, schoolmasters, and consulent arrangements would have to stretch across that imbalance while fortification labour and grain-price dispute occupied the same council that approved church lands. Van Gendt’s death also removed one of the two voices that had recommended more churches only the year before; Le Sueur remained at the Cape, and Botes taught at Zwartland without a pastor of his own. The oldest country village, founded under Simon van der Stel, now depended on neighbouring pulpits and on whatever consulent help the Cape clergy could spare, at the very moment when its landdrost still had to supervise an assistant beyond the Breede and to host the wheat conference that asked Batavia for 10s. 8d. again. [3]
The staff of clergymen was already a thin line for a colony of about four thousand colonists and fifteen hundred Company servants with their families, and over four hundred leasehold farms or cattle runs, some three or four days’ journey from the nearest church. Van Imhof had ordered two new pulpits and a comforter beyond the Breede precisely because attendance on public worship was frequently neglected for long periods. Calendar 1744 gave Zwartland a school and a purchased farmstead, and it took Stellenbosch’s minister by death in the same October that finished Fort Knokke. The map of worship and the map of guns were drawn in one season. [3]
Swellengrebel, newly councillor extraordinary, thus closed the year as head of a settlement that had posted an assistant landdrost beyond the Breede, bought a wheat-belt church farm, refused Mauritian barter, sent Schmit home, named a shore line of batteries, watered Anson’s Centurion, and buried the Stellenbosch clergyman. The directors’ March honour and the September war despatches framed that list: metropolitan approval of a Cape-born governor, and metropolitan alarm that France and England at war might yet involve the Netherlands. What the Castle could finish in stone and paper in 1744, it finished; what it could not—quiet the Breede rank quarrel, restore the wheat price, or fill the Stellenbosch pulpit—it left standing when the year turned. [3] [9]