Boer History1744 at the Cape of Good Hope: Rhenius at the Breede, Zwartland Church Site, Fortifications, and Anson’s Centurion
Rhenius Assistant Landdrost beyond the Lower Breede — 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. 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. [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. That double hat soon produced the rank quarrel that filled the first months of his tenure and forced the governor and council of policy to define when the new man sat above, and when below, the local board. [3]
Rank Dispute between Rhenius and the Heemraden — 1744
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. [3]
The arrangement did not answer at all. Through the rest of calendar 1744 the dual presidency remained an awkward stopgap. Only on the 31st of August 1745 would the dispute end by separating the country beyond the Lower Breede from Stellenbosch and elevating Rhenius to full landdrost rank with six heemraden—but that settlement belonged to the following year. Within 1744 the recorded facts were the January appointment, the immediate rank quarrel, and the council’s split-chair ruling that failed to quiet either side. [3]
Zwartland Church Farm Accepted — 16 June 1744
Governor-general Gustaf Willem van Imhof’s 1743 instructions had ordered two new churches in the outlying districts. 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. [3]
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. [3]
The site lay in wheat country rather than on a permanent stream that could be led out for gardens. Wells would have to serve in summer, and the brackish soil was widely believed unfit for trees—an unattractive prospect for a Dutch village—even though a hot mineral spring nearby already drew people troubled with rheumatism. Those drawbacks did not cancel the central situation for grain farmers west of the mountains and without a mountain barrier between them and the Cape. [3]
Wietse Botes Opens a School at the Church Place — 1744
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. [3]
The first pastor would only be agreed on the 9th of May 1745, when the Rev. Rutger Andries Weerman, chaplain of a passing ship, took the charge, and a consistory would form on the 8th of July 1745. 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 until 1829, when it received the name Malmesbury. [3]
Together with Roodezand’s earlier fabric, the Zwartland purchase of 16 June completed the land base of Van Imhof’s two-church programme inside eighteen months of his January visit. 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]
Indian Authorities Cut the Wheat Magazine Price — 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. [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. A European mason or carpenter cost from 2s. 6d. to 4s. a day besides food, though an inferior workman might sometimes be had at £2 a month. [3]
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. 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. The request would only be granted in June 1745; within 1744 the binding facts were the Batavia-side reduction, the Stellenbosch conference, and the formal petition channel through Swellengrebel’s board. [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. [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]
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. [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. Under those circumstances he 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. [3]
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. [3]
War Despatches and a Shore Line of Fortifications — September 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. [3]
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. [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. 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. Country burghers would later have to furnish rotating contingents of fifty mounted men for Cape guard duty while the fear of attack lasted—a burden felt until peace intelligence in 1748—but the 1744 administrative fact was the despatch order itself. [3]
Fort Knokke Completed — October 1744
The fort opposite the castle, begun with a foundation stone on the 24th of October 1743, was completed in October 1744 and received the name Fort Knokke, which it still bears. One year from cornerstone to completion placed a finished work on the eastern side of the castle just as the September despatches demanded a stronger Table Bay front. [3]
Knokke’s finish closed the 1743 building season’s main new fort and gave the settlement a named pair of major shore defences with the older Mauritius/Chavonnes work. The October completion date also framed the autumn naming and foundation acts that followed on the same defensive programme. [3]
Together with the castle, the completed fort and the older battery formed the solid core around which lighter batteries would now be thrown up along the beach. Calendar 1744 thus converted Van Imhof–era foundation work into an occupied fort under a permanent name in the same year that European war news reached the council table. [3]
Chavonnes Battery Officially Named — November 1744
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. [3]
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—Swellengrebel, Tulbagh, and others. The November renaming was administrative rather than structural: the masonry already stood; what changed was the Company’s written designation. [3]
With Fort Knokke finished in October and Chavonnes named in November, the castle’s two flanks entered the war winter under settled labels. The Imhof battery’s foundation later the same month would add a third heavy point covering the castle face from the margin of the sea. [3]
Imhof Battery Foundation Stone — 23 November 1744
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, and cannon would be mounted on it in July of the following year. [3]
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. The November Imhof stone thus anchored the heavy end of a named shore string that filled the open beach intervals the castle and older battery had left uncovered. [3]
Naming the principal new 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. [3]
Swellengrebel Councillor Extraordinary of Netherlands India — March 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. [3]
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]
Secunde Ryk Tulbagh remained the second civil officer under the arrangement fixed on the 14th of April 1739. The March promotion thus rewarded the head of a settled hierarchy rather than reshuffling the Castle chairs. Swellengrebel had been in continuous Company service since 1713; the 1744 title marked metropolitan approval mid-way through a governorship that would run a full decade before his 1749 request to retire. [3]
Anson’s Centurion in Table Bay — March–April 1744
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. [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 Centurion was thus one English hull among many, distinguished by the fame of her Pacific cruise rather than by any recorded Cape battle or wreck. [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 Swellengrebel. [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. [3]
From his death the church at Stellenbosch was without a resident clergyman until September 1747, when the post was filled by the Rev. Edward Arendsen, sent out by the directors. The October vacancy therefore opened a nearly three-year 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. [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. [3]