Boer History1745 at the Cape of Good Hope: Rhenius Landdrost, Weerman at Zwartland, Wheat Price Restored
Rhenius Full Landdrost, Six Heemraden, and the Undefined Boundary — 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. Rhenius was to preside when the court heard cases; the oldest heemraad present was to occupy the chair when it sat to arrange roads, outspans, and local regulation. That compromise had not answered at all. Through the rest of the dual year the Breede board remained an awkward stopgap: a Company officer claiming superiority as assistant landdrost, four free-burgher councillors claiming superiority over their secretary, and a split-chair ruling that honoured both titles without quieting either side. [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. Before 1743 there had been, outside of Cape Town, but one seat of magistracy in South Africa. The November heemraad experiment and the January assistantship had been the first cracks; the last day of August made the crack a district. 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 rural college of his own under Swellengrebel and the council of policy. [3]
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 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. 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]
The August settlement answered a migration already old enough to need a third district. From about 1710 to 1715 many farmers from Waveren had drifted down the valley of the Breede, while from Hottentots Holland others had made their way along the Zonderend, a tributary of the same river. By 1745 that eastern movement had become extensive enough to warrant a third magistracy. The country it had to cover was the coastal strip between the south coast and the Zwartbergen, still without a definite boundary toward the east—the same openness the August formula recorded as the Company’s power wherever it still ran. The white population of the whole settlement at this time was about four thousand burghers and fifteen hundred servants of the Company: a small European total for a magistracy whose inland edge was a phrase rather than a beacon. [4]
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 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. The board of landdrost and heemraden took time. Inspection and discussion, not a Castle order naming a village, were what 1745 actually held. Toward the east a prosperous farming community was already the population that machinery had to govern; the joined names of Hendrik and Helena still lay ahead as a district title, but the August elevation, the six-man college, and the undefined eastern formula were the binding civil facts of the year. Secunde Ryk Tulbagh remained the second civil officer under the arrangement of the 14th of April 1739. Calendar 1745 therefore closed the rank quarrel not by splitting the chair again, but by cutting Stellenbosch’s monopoly and giving the Breede country a landdrost of full rank without yet planting a named drostdy street. [3] [9]
Weerman First Pastor and the Zwartland Consistory — May–July 1745
Governor-general Gustaf Willem van Imhof’s 1743 church programme had ordered two outlying pulpits, each with a clergyman and a comforter of the sick who should also act as schoolmaster. Farmers in the Zwartland and at Roodezand had had to ride fifty to a hundred kilometres to hear Sunday sermons at Stellenbosch. Several meetings had discussed sites; the governor’s brother-in-law, the Rev. François le Sueur, had taken a prominent part, and Van Imhof had ruled that the churches must arise. 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] [9]
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. Botes remained the school-and-sick-comfort side of the 1743 pairing; Weerman supplied the missing pulpit. The wheat tract that had argued for a church within reach now had a Reformed pastor in its centre, not merely a comforter borrowed from a bay Indiaman. [3]
Close by was a hot mineral spring, of the kind found in many parts of the country and used by persons troubled with rheumatism and some other diseases. Even with a central situation, a church, a mineral bath, and no mountain barrier between the congregation 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 which can be led out for household purposes and to irrigate gardens; the summer supply comes from wells. 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. Weerman’s arrival did not erase those physical drawbacks. The church place remained known as Zwartlands Kerk until much later, when it received the name Malmesbury; in calendar 1745 it was still a wheat-belt kerkplaats with a new pastor, a school, and a site the council had taken because no vacant better ground existed. [3]
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. 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. New settlements arose when the churches in Zwartland and Roodezand began their services: not because masonry alone made a village, but because a pulpit, a school, and a consistory gave the wheat country a weekly centre that Stellenbosch’s distant sermons had never supplied. 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. The aftermath of Van Imhof’s few months at the Cape still kept Swellengrebel busy—Simon’s Bay station, a Table Bay breakwater that was already proving costly, and these outlying churches now actually in service—while Tulbagh remained secunde and the Castle still had no second rural landdrost until the last day of August. [3] [9]
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. Five pulpits, five elders, and a Castle commissioner in the chair: the map of Reformed parish geography was drawn by the same government that, twenty-four hours later, would cut Stellenbosch’s civil monopoly. Weerman’s new congregation sat in that council as an equal with the older Cape, Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, and Roodezand churches, two and a half months after the ship’s chaplain had signed his agreement and seven weeks after Venter, Olivier, Loubser, and Smit had taken their benches. [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. The third-Monday rule placed church business on the calendar as regularly as heemraad rotation and wheat-tithe accounting. It also kept a political commissioner in the chair: the state religion’s parish lines were not left to clergymen alone, any more than district roads were left to farmers alone. [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. There were many Lutherans at the Cape, anxious for a resident clergyman, but they could not obtain permission. In 1742 a strong petition of theirs had been refused. No objection was raised to Lutheran chaplains of Danish ships holding service in a private house, but that was the utmost liberty granted. The directors refused to permit any other church than the Dutch Reformed to be established in the colony. The five-parish Reformed system of 30 August therefore expanded confessional geography without opening the colony to rival public pulpits. [3]
Another instance of the same treatment had already closed. The Moravian George Schmit, permitted in 1737 to settle at Baviaans Kloof among the Khoikhoi, had baptized five and thereby collided with the Reformed monopoly of baptism. Three clergymen, one of them Le Sueur, had advised “the required caution” and a provisional ban on further baptism while he continued to instruct. He had taken a free passage home in January 1744. The August 1745 parish map therefore described a Reformed monopoly that had already refused Lutherans a church and had already seen the Moravian kloof emptied: five state pulpits with surveyed boundaries, and no second public confession on the ground. [3] [9]
Late August thus did double work. On the 30th the five congregations drew parish lines under a political commissioner; on the 31st the Breede country received a full landdrost and six heemraden. Church geography and civil geography moved in the same week, both under Castle chairmanship, both leaving an eastern edge more formula than fence. Zwartland’s new consistory sat inside the ecclesiastical settlement; Rhenius’s new rank sat inside the civil one. Calendar 1745 is the year those two maps were written down together. [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. Thereupon some of the most substantial burghers in the country assembled at Stellenbosch to confer with the landdrost and heemraden, and to endeavour through their solicitation to obtain a higher price. The conference was not a riot and not a petition from the Castle outward: it was a country board taking the grain farmers’ arithmetic to the governor and council, asking India to reverse a Batavia-side cut. Zwartland, already the colony’s best wheat tract and now a parish in formation, had a direct interest in whether magazine wheat would pay after dues. [3]
They represented that the ordinary work of the agriculturist was performed by his slaves, but at harvest time he required more labourers. These he obtained by hiring slaves from the 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 occasionally an inferior workman could be hired at £2 a month. After paying wages at that rate, and deducting the Company’s dues, he could not sell wheat at 9s. 4d. the muid. The landdrost and heemraden were of the same opinion, and they requested the governor and council of policy to petition the Indian authorities to raise the price again to 10s. 8d. Harvest labour, artisan rates, and tithe—not a shortage of land—were what made the reduced magazine figure unsustainable. [3]
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. 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. Calendar 1745 therefore carried both the Zwartland pulpit into the wheat country and the magazine price that country had said it needed. [3]
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. They could sell surplus produce of any kind to anyone 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. Wheat had a restored magazine figure and a stated tithe remainder; wine had a stated Company purchase price, a stated shipboard middleman charge, and the same quality quarrel that instructors and testers had not closed. The June restoration was a grain victory recorded through Stellenbosch landdrost and heemraden, not a general loosening of the produce market. [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. That occupation was the living edge of the same Breede–Zonderend drift that would, in August, receive a landdrost of its own. Loan-farm pastoralism, not a surveyed grant, had carried stock to a river the Castle still treated as too far. [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. Civil command still ran through Stellenbosch even for country already sliding toward the new Breede district’s future sphere. The recall was a gubernatorial boundary, not a bargain with the graziers: return west of the Great Brak, and do it under the landdrost who still legally held the wanderers. [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. In the early periods of the outward move, burghers had obtained an informal sanction to occupy new lands and pastures under a somewhat indefinite understanding that they were held during the pleasure of the Company. That informal tenure, the same openness later written as “where the power of the Honourable Company ends,” made a January river line hard to hold. Stock needed grass; grass failed; occupiers did not hesitate to seek other and better places. The January recall therefore recorded a clear gubernatorial boundary for 1745 without ending the deeper pressure of loan-farm pastoralism toward the east. [3] [4]
Europeans and Khoikhoi were living together on friendly terms in these years, but occasionally the peace was disturbed by San marauders. The January order was not a war measure against those raids; it was a limit on European graziers, issued through Stellenbosch, while the Castle still preferred an eastern mark short of the Gamtoos. Friendly Khoikhoi neighbourhood and San disturbance both belonged to the same coastal belt the landdrost was told to police. The Great Brak line tried to keep that belt from running ahead of offices the Company had actually staffed. [3]
August’s undefined district formula and January’s Great Brak order sat in one calendar without agreeing. The early-year command named a river; the late-year magistracy named no river at all, only the Honourable Company’s power. Graziers ordered west in January inhabited, by August, a district whose eastern edge was wherever that power still reached. Calendar 1745 therefore held both a recall and an opening: Stellenbosch pulling men back from the Gamtoos, and a new Breede landdrost whose writ was defined by presence rather than by a beacon on the Brak. [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 of these 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. The split payment already tied predator control to the same local colleges that governed roads and mills: Castle money for half, district money for half, according to where the beast had been killed. [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. 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]
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 claimant now had to bring the carcass to a place the Company actually staffed. That was harder from a loan farm beyond Mossel Bay than from a Cape-district hunt, which was part of the point: the premium was for a kill the office could inspect, not for a hide that might have changed hands in the interior. Half Company, half district, and the whole animal on the floor, were the 1745 terms. [3]
The same regulatory series distinguished beasts of prey from animals the council wished to keep. The elephant had nearly disappeared from the settled districts, owing to the demand that always existed for ivory. In 1742 an order had prohibited the destruction of zebras under a penalty of £10 for each offence; members of the council of policy had thought the animal’s presence on the hillsides an attractive feature, and had offered a premium of £20 each for three young ones to be delivered at the castle with a view to taming. Calendar 1745 did not repeal that zebra protection. It added a proof rule on the predator side: lions, leopards, and hyenas still carried cash bounties, but only when the dead beast itself, not a traded skin, was shown at Castle or drostdy. [3]
Harmless game preserved, predators paid for, and proof moved from fur to carcass: the year’s wildlife placaat belonged with the same instinct that restored the wheat price on recorded costs and that would not pay a bounty on a hide of uncertain origin. Swellengrebel’s government in 1745 was thickening inspection—magazine wheat, parish boundaries, a second landdrost, and now the animal on which the premium was claimed. [3]
Imhof Battery Guns and Country Burgher Contingents — 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. The governor had been informed by the directors of that outbreak and of the bad chance of Dutch involvement, and instructed to strengthen the Cape’s defence. Fort Knokke, whose foundation stone had been laid on the 24th of October 1743, had been completed in October 1744 on the eastern shore toward Salt River and Papendorp. The older Mauritius work had been officially named the Chavonnes battery in November 1744. The Imhof battery’s foundation stone had been laid on the 23rd of November 1744. Calendar 1745 inherited that shore string and had to arm the heavy seaward work. [3] [4] [9]
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. It was the one battery of the new line built solidly enough to remain when the lighter works had gone. 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. 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, July’s guns marked the shift from paper war readiness and a cornerstone to metal on the waterline. [3]
Around it the lighter batteries of the same programme filled the open beach intervals. 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.” The result was a significant expansion of the fortifications by new batteries along the shore, family names written on the lighter works and the governor-general’s name on the heavy seaward battery that July now armed. [3] [9]
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. Outlying farm districts felt that monthly draft as a real burden: fifty horsemen at a time, relieved by fifty others, while Imhof guns were new on the seaward wall and the lighter family batteries covered the beach. Calendar 1745 sat inside the active contingent period, not at its end. [3] [9]
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. 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, while the Imhof battery, eight months from its foundation stone, at last carried cannon. The year that gave the Breede a full landdrost, Zwartland a pastor and consistory, five parishes their boundaries, wheat its restored magazine price, and predator bounties a carcass test, also put metal on the castle’s seaward face and kept fifty country horsemen rotating through Table Valley. [3] [9]