Boer History1745 at the Cape of Good Hope: Rhenius Landdrost, Weerman at Zwartland, Wheat Price Restored
Rhenius Full Landdrost and Separation of the Lower Breede — 31 August 1745
Since January 1744 Johannes Theophilus Rhenius, formerly a Company bookkeeper, had served as assistant landdrost and secretary beyond the Lower Breede under the landdrost of Stellenbosch. The dual office had produced an immediate rank quarrel with the four heemraden named on the 12th of November 1743— Cornelis van Rooyen, Jan Loots, Andries Holtshuizen, and Jacobus Botha—and Governor Hendrik Swellengrebel’s council had tried to split the chair between judicial and district sittings. That compromise had not answered at all. [3]
On the 31st of August 1745 the dispute ended by separating the country beyond the Lower Breede from the district of Stellenbosch and elevating Mr. Rhenius to the full rank of landdrost. The August act created a second rural magistracy outside Cape Town—the first permanent break in the long monopoly by which Stellenbosch landdrost and heemraden had legally held jurisdiction over all inland wanderers, even when many graziers already lived beyond practical reach of law. [3]
The new landdrost still had no fixed seat of magistracy in calendar 1745. For a time the court met at the residence of one of the heemraden while the board itself searched for a site the government would not form by ejecting sitting tenants. Permission to occupy chosen ground and raise buildings would come only on the 25th of October 1746, and the district name Swellendam only on the 26th of October 1747. Within 1745 the binding facts were separation, full landdrost rank for Rhenius, and a working court without a named drostdy village. [3]
Six Heemraden and an Undefined Eastern Boundary — 1745
With full landdrost rank the number of heemraden was increased to six, owing to the great size of the new district. Half of the heemraden were to retire every year after sending a list of six names to the council of policy, from which list their successors were chosen by that body. The rotation rule copied the older Stellenbosch practice while enlarging the local board to match a territory far wider than the first four-man circuit of 1743–1744. [3]
The boundaries of the new district were not otherwise defined than “where the power of the Honourable Company ends.” That formula left the eastern and interior limits open wherever free burghers and Company authority still reached together, rather than fixing a surveyed river line on the map. It also left later arguments about how far a landdrost’s writ ran when graziers pushed past Mossel Bay and the Great Brak toward the Gamtoos. [3]
In institutional terms the August settlement converted a temporary Breede board into a standing district government under Swellengrebel and the council of policy. Rhenius no longer sat as Stellenbosch’s subordinate secretary in one face of the court and as rival of the senior heemraad in the other; he headed a six-man local college whose judicial and district work now belonged to a separate rural magistracy of its own. [3]
Weerman First Pastor of Zwartland — 9 May 1745
Governor-general Gustaf Willem van Imhof’s 1743 church programme had ordered two outlying pulpits. Roodezand had risen quickly under the Rev. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring. The second site, accepted from the widow of Pieter van der Westhuizen on the 16th of June 1744, had opened under sick-comforter Wietse Botes and a school, but still lacked a resident clergyman through the close of that year. [3]
On the 9th of May 1745 an agreement was made with the Rev. Rutger Andries Weerman, chaplain of a passing ship, and he became the first pastor of the Zwartland congregation. The May contract therefore completed Van Imhof’s second parish staff by the same Indiaman-detention method the governor-general had prescribed—pull a ship’s chaplain into local duty rather than wait years for a director-sent minister from the Netherlands alone. [3]
The church place remained known as Zwartlands Kerk until 1829, when it received the name Malmesbury. Weerman’s arrival did not erase the site’s physical drawbacks—uneven ground, summer wells, and a general belief that brackish soil was unfit for village trees—but it did place a Reformed pastor in the centre of the colony’s best wheat tract, with a hot mineral spring nearby and no mountain barrier between the congregation and the Cape. [3]
Zwartland Consistory Formed — 8 July 1745
A consistory was formed on the 8th of July 1745, when Pieter Venter and Gerrit Olivier were chosen as elders, and Jan Loubser and Floris Smit were appointed deacons. Two months after Weerman’s agreement the Zwartland church place therefore moved from school-and-sick-comfort provisional order into ordinary Dutch Reformed parish government with a double bench of lay officers. [3]
The July consistory matched the pattern already used at Roodezand in October 1743, when Jacobus and Pieter Theron had been approved as elders and Jacobus du Pré and Gerrit van der Merwe as deacons. Zwartland’s four names rooted the new wheat-belt parish in local free-burgher households rather than in Company clerks alone, while the pastor still owed his first call to a shipboard chaplaincy diverted by council agreement. [3]
With Botes’s school from 1744, Weerman’s pulpit from May, and elders and deacons from July, the second of Van Imhof’s ordered churches stood complete as a working congregation inside calendar 1745. The Cape, Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, Roodezand, and Zwartland pulpits now formed a five-congregation Reformed map that the August boundary council could treat as a single ecclesiastical system. [3]
Five Parishes Settle Boundaries — 30 August 1745
The boundaries of the several parishes were settled on the 30th of August 1745 by a combined ecclesiastical council consisting of the clergyman and an elder of each of the five congregations, presided over by a political commissioner. The sitting fell one day before Rhenius’s elevation to full landdrost rank and closed the church side of the same late-August week that reorganised civil jurisdiction beyond the Breede. [3]
Thereafter such councils met yearly, on the third Monday of every January, to arrange matters of common interest. The August settlement thus created not only a one-time parish map but a standing inter-congregational board under political chairmanship—an ecclesiastical counterpart to the landdrost-and-heemraden machinery that governed roads, mills, and local justice in the country districts. [3]
While the number of parishes connected with the state religion was thus increased and delimited, dissenters remained prohibited from establishing churches of a different form of worship. Lutherans still lacked a resident clergyman after the refused petition of 1742, and the Moravian enterprise under George Schmit had ended with his free passage home in January 1744. The five-parish Reformed system of 30 August therefore expanded confessional geography without opening the colony to rival public pulpits. [3]
Indian Authorities Restore the Wheat Magazine Price — June 1745
In 1744 the Indian authorities had reduced the price of wheat delivered at the Company’s magazines at the Cape to 9s. 4d. the muid. Substantial burghers had assembled at Stellenbosch with the landdrost and heemraden, arguing that harvest labour hired from townspeople at from 1s. 8d. to 2s. a day, and European masons or carpenters at from 2s. 6d. to 4s. a day besides food, made that magazine price unsustainable after Company dues. [3]
The country board had requested the governor and council of policy to petition India to raise the price again to 10s. 8d. In June 1745 the governor-general and council of India agreed to what was asked of them. The June answer restored the higher magazine figure that the Stellenbosch conference had sought and closed the price dispute opened by the previous year’s Batavia-side cut. [3]
The restoration mattered beyond a single tariff line. Wheat was the staple that filled Company magazines for ships and Batavia, and the cash return after tithe set whether grain farmers could hire seasonal slave labour and still clear a living. By granting the Cape petition in June, the Indian authorities re-aligned metropolitan buying policy with the cost structure the landdrost and heemraden had put on record after the 1744 reduction. [3]
Produce Market Terms after the June Restoration — 1745
After the June decision the farmers stood in a defined market position. The Company purchased from them as much ordinary wine as it needed at £5 5s. 10d. a legger clear, and as much wheat as it needed at 10s. 8d. a muid, from which the tithe was deducted, leaving 9s. 7½d. clear for the grower. Those two Company purchase prices framed the staple cash side of Cape agriculture under Swellengrebel once India had reversed the wheat cut. [3]
They could sell surplus produce of any kind to any one who chose to buy, upon paying first the Company’s dues of 10s. 8d. upon every ten muids of wheat and 12s. 6d. upon every legger of wine; secondly £1 0s. 10d. a legger to the licensed dealers in wine if this article were sold to the master or purser of a ship; and thirdly a fee to the fiscal when ships’ people were purchasers of produce. Free sale therefore remained open, but only through a layered schedule of dues and middleman charges that kept Company and licensed interests on every foreign or shipboard transaction. [3]
Complaints of the quality of the wine continued from the Indian authorities. The directors sent out skilled persons from Europe to instruct farmers in proper manufacture, and the Cape authorities tested every legger purchased, but the complaints continued as before. Calendar 1745 thus fixed clearer staple prices without resolving the long Indian dissatisfaction with Cape wine quality. [3]
Gamtoos Graziers Ordered West of the Great Brak — January 1745
By the mid-1740s the country along the coast was occupied by Europeans a few miles farther eastward than Mossel Bay. Some graziers had taken possession of land on the banks of the Gamtoos, well beyond the older settled belt and beyond the temporary eastern marks the government preferred to hold. [3]
In January 1745 the landdrost of Stellenbosch, acting under orders from the governor, required them to return to the westward of the Great Brak river. The January order used the still-unified Stellenbosch magistracy—months before the August separation of the Lower Breede—to pull pastoral occupation back from the Gamtoos to a river line west of the newer Mossel Bay neighbourhood. [3]
The circumstances under which the graziers lived were, however, so favourable to expansion of the colony that they could not long be kept within the assigned limits. The January recall therefore recorded a clear gubernatorial boundary for 1745 without ending the deeper pressure of loan-farm pastoralism toward the east. It also showed how civil commands still ran through Stellenbosch even for country already sliding toward the new Breede district’s future sphere. [3]
Predator Premiums Require Exhibition of the Carcass — 1745
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 a higher earlier figure to £2 1s. 8d., for a leopard to £1 5s. 0d., and for a hyena to 8s. 4d., half paid by the Company and half by the burgher council or by landdrost and heemraden according to district. [3]
In 1745 a regulation was made that in order to obtain the premium the dead animal must be exhibited at the castle or at the office of the landdrost. Previous to that date the premium had been paid on exhibition of the skin, but at this time it was suspected that some unprincipled persons were bartering furs from the Khoikhoi of the interior. The new rule therefore shifted proof from a portable hide to a carcass presented at a Company or district office. [3]
The exhibition requirement tightened fiscal control over predator bounties at the same moment the settlement was multiplying rural offices— Zwartland’s new parish machinery, Rhenius’s rising Breede court, and the older Stellenbosch board still policing the Great Brak line. A skin bought inland could no longer pass as easily for a local kill when the whole animal had to be shown where clerks and landdrosts could see it. [3]
Cannon Mounted on the Imhof Battery — July 1745
After the September 1744 war despatches announcing that France and England were at war and that the Netherlands might soon be involved, the Company had ordered a line of fortifications along the shore of Table Bay and a stronger Cape garrison. Fort Knokke had been completed in October 1744, the older Mauritius work officially named the Chavonnes battery in November 1744, and the Imhof battery’s foundation stone laid on the 23rd of November 1744. [3]
The Imhof work was intended to cover the face of the castle and rose from the margin of the sea, where winter storms dashed against its walls. Cannon were mounted on it in July 1745. The July arming turned the November foundation into a gun-bearing battery within eight months and gave the castle’s seaward face a finished heavy point in the new shore line. [3]
Around it the lighter batteries of the same programme—Swellengrebel, Elizabeth, Helena, and Tulbagh between the castle and Salt River mouth, and Heeren Hendriks Kinderen with ten guns between the castle and Chavonnes—filled the open beach intervals. Calendar 1745 therefore completed the Imhof heavy end of a named fortification string begun under the previous year’s war news, while European conflict still threatened to draw the Netherlands in. [3]
Country Burghers Furnish Mounted Contingents at the Cape — 1745
During the time that it was feared the colony might be attacked by an enemy, the burghers of the country districts were required to furnish a contingent of fifty mounted men to assist in keeping guard at the Cape. Every month they were relieved by fifty others, so as to make the task less heavy for individuals. The rotation spread wartime guard duty across the inland free-burgher population rather than holding a single country troop at the Castle indefinitely. [3]
That burden ran through the years of fear after the 1744 despatches and was felt as a great relief only when, on the 26th of September 1748, the British man-of-war Tartar brought intelligence of a truce and the later peace of Aix-la-Chapelle permitted the men to be relieved of military duty. Calendar 1745 therefore sat inside the active contingent period: Imhof guns newly mounted, shore batteries rising, and monthly reliefs of fifty horsemen still owed by the country districts. [3]
A temporary outpost at St. Helena Bay, established to give notice of any ships that might touch there, remained part of the same wartime watch system until it was broken up with the peace. The older permanent posts—Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis, and Riet Vlei—continued as before, while Waveren had already been withdrawn and sold in October 1743. The mounted contingent of 1745 thus reinforced a mixed landscape of standing outposts and emergency Cape guard drafts under Swellengrebel. [3]