Boer History1746 at the Cape of Good Hope: Swellendam Drostdy Site, Mole Suspended, Locusts, and Cloppenburg
Swellengrebel, Tulbagh, and Van Oudtshoorn — 1746
Calendar 1746 opened with Hendrik Swellengrebel still governor, Ryk Tulbagh still secunde, and Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn still independent fiscal after relieving Daniel van den Henghel on the 18th of September 1741. The hierarchy fixed by the directors on the 14th of April 1739 therefore continued through a seventh full agricultural year under the same three senior civil names. In March 1744 the Assembly of Seventeen had already marked their approbation by giving the governor the rank and title of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India. He had been in continuous Company service since 1713. No new commission rearranged the Castle chairs in this calendar. [3]
The man in the first chair was a Cape-born governor. He had been born on the 29th of September 1700, son of Johannes Swellengrebel, who had arrived in 1691, held Company offices, and settled as a free burgher in 1716. His mother, Johanna, was a daughter of the explorer-soldier Hieronymus Cruse; she died when Hendrik was thirteen, and his stepmother Christina Stants, widow of Jan van Meerland, was likewise a Cape colonial. The governor’s grandfather of the same name had lived as a Dutch merchant in Moscow and died there in 1649, but the grandson who now sat in the Castle had grown up inside Table Valley. Kindness, common sense, and long local experience, rather than brilliance of talent, were what the settlement credited him with. [9]
In 1727, while still council secretary, he had married Helena Wilhelmina ten Damme, also Cape-born. Tulbagh had stood as best man, and the couple had lived in the spacious Swellengrebel house in Berg Street before the governor moved into the Castle, remaining a regular visitor after his father’s death in 1744. Eight children of the marriage were already honoured in the shore battery named Heeren Hendriks Kinderen. Calendar 1746 therefore still presented a Cape household at the head of a Cape administration: a locally raised governor, a locally raised wife, a secunde who had been inside that family circle since the wedding, and a fiscal who had held the independent chair for five years. [9]
Beyond the Castle the settlement now carried five Reformed parishes after the boundary council of 30 August 1745, a full landdrost beyond the Lower Breede in Johannes Theophilus Rhenius, and a shore line of fortifications whose Imhof battery had received cannon in July 1745. Country burghers still rotated fifty mounted men to the Cape while European war news kept the Netherlands under threat. The governor had been instructed, after the 1744 despatches on war between England and France, to strengthen the Cape’s defence; the family-named lighter batteries—Swellengrebel, Elizabeth, Helena, Tulbagh, and Heeren Hendriks Kinderen—and the heavy Imhof work were the masonry answer, and the monthly inland horsemen were still the living one. The older permanent posts at Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis, and Riet Vlei remained as before; Waveren had already been withdrawn. Simon’s Town, under postholder Sergeant Justinus Blas, still served the winter fleets because the Table Bay mole had not yet been given up. [3] [9]
The year’s distinctive Cape record lay less in a change of governors than in four practical fields: the choice of a permanent seat for Rhenius’s new district court, the halt of the Table Bay mole experiment, a locust plague after a strong wheat harvest, and a double shift in the Cape clergy after François le Sueur—the governor’s brother-in-law—left Company service. Those four, with the December death of Helena in the same weeks that locusts filled Table Valley, are what calendar 1746 actually held. [3] [9]
Good Wheat Harvest, then Locusts on the Late Crops — 1746
During the thirteen years 1738–1750 the Cape saw several bad seasons and one exceptionally good one, so that exports fluctuated sharply. The year 1738 had been drought, and in 1739 only 340 muids of wheat and 85 of rye could be sent abroad. Rust had almost destroyed the next crops, so that in 1740 no grain went out and famine at home was feared until a placaat capped wheat at 11s. 1d. a muid; the following harvest then filled the magazines and sent 17,000 muids abroad. Calendar 1746 belonged to the good side of that ledger for grain: abundance of rain fell, and the wheat crop harvested was an exceedingly good one. [3]
Before the beans and peas were off the ground, however, enormous swarms of locusts made their appearance—a plague from which the colony had been free since 1695. The year therefore paired a strong staple wheat return with the sudden loss of gardens and later legumes once the insects arrived in force. Rain had done what the farmer needed for cereal; the insects then took the green surface that still stood after the wheat was in. The contrast with 1740 was exact: that year had feared famine and capped the wheat price; this year filled the barns first and then watched the locusts take everything that was still green. Magazine wheat and garden legumes no longer rose and fell together. [3]
That sequence mattered for both Company magazines and free-burgher households. Wheat filled the ships and Batavia stores after tithe; beans and peas, and household gardens, fed local tables and livestock more immediately. The Indian authorities had restored the magazine wheat price to 10s. 8d. a muid in June 1745, leaving 9s. 7½d. clear after tithe, and ordinary wine still moved at £5 5s. 10d. a legger clear. A year that opened with rain and a heavy grain crop thus closed under a pest that stripped the green surface of the settlement after the main cereal had already been secured at those restored rates. [3]
The attack on the late crops was not a single day’s flight. It lasted nearly four months once it had begun, ravaging after the long rains. Within calendar 1746 that meant a harvest already in the barns, then a green-crop and pasture collapse that ran from the inland gardens into the closing weeks of the year. The later appointment of a colony-wide fast belongs to the next calendar; the binding agricultural fact here is that the plague started on the beans, peas, and gardens of 1746 after half a century without locusts. [3] [9]
Average exports to India across the wider thirteen-year stretch ran at 7,539 muids of wheat, 116 of rye, 289 of peas, and 271 of beans, with 384 leggers of ordinary wine a year to Batavia besides ship supply, and all the Constantia that could be got. Ivory, skins of wild animals, ostrich plumes, and dried fruit also left the colony. Calendar 1746 could still load wheat after tithe; it could not keep the pea and bean line, or the garden and pasture that the locusts took, inside that average. [3]
Locusts Enter Table Valley — 28 December 1746
On the 28th of December 1746 the swarms found their way in such vast numbers into Table Valley that the air seemed filled with them, and in a few days there was nothing edible left, not even leaves on the trees. The late-December irruption carried the country plague into the administrative and shipping heart of the colony itself. What had begun on inland beans and peas now sat on the Company’s garden, the burgher erven under the mountain, and the trees that shaded the town. [3]
In the country districts the gardens were completely destroyed, and as there was nothing left for the cattle to eat, so many oxen and sheep died that meat, which, owing to there having been no disease among cattle for many years, had previously been sold at less than a halfpenny a pound, at once doubled in price. The locust year therefore struck pasture and butcher’s meat as well as green crops. A settlement that had lived through years without cattle disease now paid twice for mutton and beef because the insects had eaten the feed. [3]
Table Valley’s December filling also explained why the harbour mole could not be fed. Vegetation destroyed, convict labour already nearly gone, and burgher quotas unpaid were the three reasons work stopped at three hundred and fifty-one feet; the insects that stripped the trees above the Castle were the same swarm that took the forage and garden stuff on which a labour camp had to live. The plague was at once an agricultural, a pastoral, and a public-works event. [3]
Within 1746 the binding facts were the strong wheat crop, the return of locusts after half a century, the December filling of Table Valley, and the sudden doubling of meat prices. A later fast-day and the almost-disappearance of the insects belong to the next calendar. The year closed with the air of the capital still full of wings and with Helena’s death in the same month—two blows, public and private, on the same Castle household. [3] [9]
Table Bay Mole Reaches 351 Feet and Work Is Suspended — 1746
The mole or breakwater experiment in Table Bay had been commenced on the 4th of February 1743 after governor-general Gustaf Willem van Imhof’s visit, under a special tax on Europeans in South Africa and with convict labour sent from Batavia. 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. The Simon’s Bay station had been kept as cheap as possible precisely because the directors meant the mole, if it succeeded, to make the winter port unnecessary. [3]
General direction lay with the retired burgher councillor Johannes Carolus de Wet and the naval head Jacobus Moller, who gave the work a base of one hundred feet sloping to twenty-four feet at the top. Swellengrebel had had to ride repeatedly to Simon’s Bay to supervise the magazine, hospital, and postholder’s quarters there, and the breakwater in Table Bay took a great deal of his attention and time as well. Much money and labour went into the undertaking; even Batavia’s convicts were part of the gang. Calendar 1746 was the year that labour and money both ran out. [3] [9]
By the close of 1746 the mole was three hundred and fifty-one feet in length from the shore; but the work was then suspended, owing to the destruction of vegetation by the plague of locusts. In the mean time the convicts sent from Java had nearly all died from change of climate and excessive fatigue, and the burghers declared that they could not pay their quota any longer. Three failures arrived together: forage and garden stuff gone, the imported gang dead, and the country assessment unpaid. [3]
The expense was found to be beyond the means of the Company, and the completion of the mole was abandoned. As far as could be judged, it 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 had formed which strengthened the work. Engineering hope therefore survived the halt; the treasury and the labour roster did not. Simon’s Bay, which the mole had been meant to render unnecessary, remained the winter alternative. [3]
The abandoned mole, after storms and later quarrying, left its name on Mouille Point, still to be seen like a reef running out from under the later lighthouse. Within calendar 1746 the decisive fact was suspension at three hundred and fifty-one feet under locust damage, labour collapse, and unpaid burgher quotas. The wall visible at low tide is what that halt left of Swellengrebel’s attempt to comply with the directors’ harbour experiment. [3] [9]
Council Permits the Cornlands River Drostdy Ground — 25 October 1746
Since the 31st of August 1745 the country beyond the Lower Breede had been a separate district under full landdrost Johannes Theophilus Rhenius and six heemraden, with boundaries defined only as “where the power of the Honourable Company ends.” Half the heemraden retired every year after sending a list of six names to the council of policy. 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 August elevation had created a district; it had not yet planted a drostdy street. [3]
That third magistracy answered a migration already old. From about 1710 to 1715 many farmers from Waveren had drifted down the Breede, while from Hottentots Holland others had made their way along the Zonderend. By 1745 the movement had warranted a district comprising the coastal strip between the south coast and the Zwartbergen, still without a definite eastern boundary. The white population of the whole settlement was about four thousand burghers and fifteen hundred Company servants. Calendar 1746 had to give that open district a place to sit. [4]
The government wisely left the choice of a seat to the court itself. Some excellent sites were already occupied as farms, but it was not deemed advisable to eject government tenants. The board of landdrost and heemraden prudently took time, and only after much inspection and discussion was a site agreed upon. Application was then made to the governor and council, by whom on the 25th of October 1746 permission was given to use the ground selected and to put up such buildings as might be needed. Inspection and a council minute, not a Castle order naming a village, were the year’s civil method. [3]
Mr. Rhenius and the district councillors chose a charming locality. From the Langebergen issue at various places little streams of clear fresh water, feeders of a river which drains a valley stretching from the Warm Bokkeveld to the sea. One of these streams which, for want of a more original name, was called the Cornlands river, winds through a dell some miles in length before it unites its waters with those of the Breede. Here, with the mountains close in front and rich soil capable of being irrigated around, a drostdy and other necessary buildings speedily arose. Water, irrigable ground, and a mountain wall in front were the reasons the board stopped there. [3]
In the middle of the eighteenth century few people could maintain themselves except by farming, and hence many years elapsed before the place could fairly be called more than a hamlet. It received a name only in the following calendar, when the joined names of Hendrik and Helena would be written on the district; building sites for persons not in the government service were first surveyed still later. Within 1746 the binding civil fact was the October permission to occupy and build on the Cornlands site. A prosperous farming community toward the east already existed; a named drostdy street did not. [3] [9]
Le Sueur Resigns; Cloppenburg Succeeds at the Cape — August 1746
In the staff of clergymen several changes were caused by death or removal. The Rev. François le Sueur, having purchased a farm at Rondebosch on the estate of his wife’s father, Johannes Swellengrebel, was obliged to resign his position in the Company’s service. Ownership of more than two morgen of land barred a clergyman from drawing Company salary under the standing rule. The governor’s brother-in-law therefore left the paid Cape pulpit because he had become a landed man on the family estate, not because the congregation had lost confidence in him. [3] [9]
Le Sueur had first conducted service at the Cape on the 16th of October 1729 as second or assistant clergyman sent out by the directors, and after Lambertus Slicher’s death in June 1730 he had even acted provisionally at Drakenstein and Stellenbosch before returning to the Cape. The index of Cape Town ministers records him from October 1729, with an interval, through to August 1746. Seventeen years of Company pulpits ended when the Rondebosch farm made the two-morgen rule bite. [3]
In August 1746 he was succeeded by the Rev. Ruwardus Cloppenburg, who was sent out by the directors. Cloppenburg’s arrival therefore restored a paid first Cape pulpit after Le Sueur’s land purchase forced him out of Company clerical service, even though Le Sueur remained highly esteemed and later continued to assist without salary. The directors, not a local consistory election, filled the chair. [3]
Cloppenburg’s later domestic life would lead the consistory to suspend him and the council to dismiss him and send him back to Europe without rank or salary. Those proceedings fall outside calendar 1746; within the year the Cape congregation simply received a new Company-paid first minister in August after Le Sueur’s resignation. The year’s clerical fact is succession, not scandal. [3]
Petrus van der Spuy Arrives as Second Cape Clergyman — 1746
Three weeks after Cloppenburg’s succession the Rev. Petrus van der Spuy arrived from Holland to fill the post of second clergyman at the Cape, which had long been vacant. The Cape Town succession places him from September 1746. The double appointment of late winter and early spring 1746 therefore gave the Table Valley congregation both a new first minister and a restored assistant chair in quick succession, after years in which the second Cape pulpit had stood empty. [3]
After Cloppenburg’s later dismissal, Van der Spuy would remain for some time sole clergyman of the Cape congregation, greatly assisted by Le Sueur, who was very highly esteemed though he could not draw Company salary while he owned more than two morgen. That later sole tenure underlines how important the 1746 dual staffing was while it lasted: Cape Town briefly held two active Reformed ministers again after years of thin cover, with the unpaid brother-in-law still available in the town. [3]
Outside the Cape, the Rev. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring remained at Roodezands Kerk, where he had sat since September 1743. The Rev. Rutger Andries Weerman still held Zwartland, the pulpit he had taken as chaplain of a passing ship in May 1745. Stellenbosch continued without a resident clergyman from the death of the Rev. Willem van Gendt in October 1744. The August–September arrivals of 1746 therefore strengthened only the Cape pair of pulpits, not the full five-parish map. [3]
The combined ecclesiastical council established in 1743 still bound those five congregations into one clerical conversation, but it could not put a resident minister into Stellenbosch from Cape Town’s new pair. Van der Spuy’s arrival filled a long-vacant second chair in Table Valley; it did not travel inland. Calendar 1746 therefore closed with Cape Town doubly staffed, Roodezand and Zwartland each holding their 1743–1745 pastors, and Stellenbosch still waiting on the directors. [3]
Muller’s Drakenstein Diggings Still under De Wet’s Charter — 1746
Since November 1740 excitement had run on Frans Diederik Muller’s report of a rich silver mine at Groot Drakenstein close to Simonsberg. Governor Swellengrebel had inspected the ground, and early in 1743 the Assembly of Seventeen had granted a charter to Olof de Wet and associates for exclusive search and extraction within the area bounded by the Paarl, French Hoek, and Hottentots-Holland mountains, upon payment of fifteen per cent to the Company and delivery of the surplus at specified prices. The council, keen on a windfall, had given the prospectors that concession. [3] [9]
De Wet, as chief director, 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. He spent the greater part of his capital on salaries and up-to-date equipment. For more than five years the clever rogue managed to keep up the hopes of his employers without producing anything valuable, first pronouncing the ore silver, then copper, and finally gold. Calendar 1746 sat inside that long false boom, not at its exposure. [3] [9]
Only later would some of the ore go to Holland to be tested, and be found to contain only “a very inexpensive metal which was mixed in small quantities with other materials in casting bells to improve their sound.” Muller would then be declared an impostor, his property confiscated, and himself banished to Batavia; De Wet would lose both money and reputation, and the governor would not be pleased. Those reckonings lie outside this year. The pits and underground passages were still being driven at association cost in 1746. [3] [9]
Calendar 1746 therefore fell inside that long false boom: pits and underground passages were still being driven at association cost, Muller still held the master-miner’s place, and no competent Dutch assay had yet exposed the bell metal. The year’s mining fact was continuation, not climax—another Company-approved speculation running in the same months as a locust plague, a halted mole, and a drostdy ground without a village name. [3]
Death of Governor Swellengrebel’s Wife — December 1746
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 he had received in March 1744 the rank and title of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India. Honesty, hard work, and the esteem of the people, rather than brilliance, were the character the settlement attached to him. [3] [9]
He was a widower after December 1746, when his wife Helena Wilhelmina ten Damme died. He had enjoyed great happiness with her, and for many months he was inconsolable. Two of his sons were studying at Utrecht; otherwise nearly all his near relatives lived at the Cape. The December bereavement therefore struck the governor’s household in the same closing weeks that locusts filled Table Valley and the mole works stood idle. [3] [9]
The marriage of 1727 had tied the Castle to a Cape family: Tulbagh as best man, Elizabeth Swellengrebel as bridesmaid, Le Sueur as brother-in-law in the pulpit, and eight children later written on a battery. Helena’s death in the locust December took the locally born wife out of that circle while the governor, the secunde, and the fiscal all remained in their chairs. The personal record of the year is not a change of government. It is a household emptied at the top of an administration that otherwise stayed put. [9]
His later request of April 1749 to retire and spend the remainder of his life in the Netherlands, and the transfer of administration to Tulbagh only on the 27th of February 1751, lie outside this year. Within 1746 the personal record is simply that Helena died in December while he still held the first chair, Tulbagh the second, and Van Oudtshoorn the fiscal’s office, and that the Castle household took months to recover its cheer. [3] [9]
Cattle Runs, Tithes, and Settlement Pressure — 1746
Through these middle Swellengrebel years the colonists were constantly taking possession of new tracts of country and laying them out in cattle runs never less than five or six thousand acres in extent, for each of which they paid the Company a yearly rental of £5 after the increase of 1732. Upon the slightest fault being discovered in a cattle run, the occupier did not hesitate to abandon it and move farther into the interior. Once beyond the Breede district, permission, boundaries, and rent were increasingly ignored. The extent of the country seemed illimitable, and the farmers helped themselves. Placaats forbidding further eastern movement could still be posted from the Castle; they could not easily be enforced once a loan-place occupier had walked his flocks past the last landdrost. Rhenius’s new board, sitting first at a heemraad’s house and only from late October on permitted Cornlands ground, was the government’s attempt to put a court where the cattle already were. [3] [4]
A vast region, almost untenanted since its desolation by smallpox in 1713, still lay open before the colonists. Van Imhof’s 1743 offer to convert sixty morgen about a homestead into freehold on payment of from roughly ten to forty-two pounds according to value had drawn very few takers, so the ordinary pastoral pattern of large annual loan places continued to set the inland map while Rhenius’s court sought a fixed drostdy on the Cornlands. The governor-general had wanted to attach farmers to the soil and stop random desertion of farms; the Cape-born governor had to live with the fact that almost no one took the freehold bait. Europeans and Khoikhoi were living together on friendly terms in these middle years, while San marauders still disturbed the distant border from time to time. The cattle-run map of 1746 therefore mixed a legal £5 loan place, an unenforced eastern formula, a new landdrost without a named village, and an interior that still looked empty after the 1713 smallpox. [3] [9]
Company purchase of ordinary wine at £5 5s. 10d. a legger clear and of wheat at 10s. 8d. a muid before tithe—restored in June 1745—still framed the staple cash side of settled agriculture. Surplus produce could be sold to any buyer after the Company’s dues of 10s. 8d. upon every ten muids of wheat and 12s. 6d. upon every legger of wine, plus the licensed dealer’s fee and a fiscal’s fee when ships’ people bought. Complaints of wine quality continued despite skilled instructors from Europe and testing of every legger purchased. Calendar 1746 therefore combined a strong wheat return at the restored magazine price with locust destruction of the very legumes the Company also listed among its Indian averages. [3]
In the thirteen years 1738–1750 there put into Table Bay 640 ships of the Dutch East India Company, 198 English, 23 French, and 20 Danish. Simon’s Bay, first used as a port of call in 1742, received seventy-seven Company ships before the close of 1750. The average touching at South African ports was thus seventy-three yearly. Calendar 1746 sat inside that wartime stream: the mole that might have kept winter fleets in Table Bay had just been abandoned at 351 feet, so Simon’s Town’s expensive land-carriage still had work to do. [3]
Among the older French-refugee names still on the Cape register, David Senecal of Dieppe in Normandy, agriculturist who had arrived in the Zuid Beveland in 1688 and married Marie Madeleine du Puis of Paris, died on the 16th of July 1746. The refugee generation that had filled Drakenstein and Stellenbosch benches was passing in the same year that Rhenius’s board at last received permission to build a drostdy on the Cornlands. Calendar 1746 therefore combined a strong wheat return, locust destruction of gardens and late legumes, a halted harbour mole, a permitted but still unnamed drostdy site, two new Cape ministers, a governor newly widowed at year’s end, and one more of the 1688 names struck from the living roll. [3] [8]