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. [3]
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. [3]
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 left Company service. [3]
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. 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. [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. 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. [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. [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. [3]
The council later appointed the 22nd of February 1747 to be observed as a day of fasting and prayer that God would be pleased to remove the plague, and by the end of April 1747 the insects had almost disappeared. Those remedies and the final clearance belong to the next calendar year; 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. [3]
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. 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. [3]
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. [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. The abandoned mole, after storms and later quarrying, left its name on Mouille Point; within calendar 1746 the decisive fact was suspension at three hundred and fifty-one feet under locust damage, labour collapse, and unpaid burgher quotas. [3]
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.” 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. [3]
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. [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. [3]
At the present day the village, with its scattered houses and gardens on each side of a single winding street, extends quite three miles along the vale, but in the middle of the eighteenth century few people could maintain themselves except by farming, and hence many years elapsed before it could fairly be called more than a hamlet. It received a name only in 1747, when on the 26th of October the council of policy decided that the district should be called Swellendam, and in conformity with the usage of the time the seat of magistracy took the same name. Building sites for persons not in the government service were first surveyed in 1750. Within 1746 the binding civil fact was the October permission to occupy and build on the Cornlands site. [3]
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. [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. [3]
Cloppenburg’s later domestic life would lead the consistory to suspend him in January 1748 and the council to dismiss him and send him back to Europe without rank or salary in March 1748. 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. [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 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. [3]
After Cloppenburg’s dismissal in 1748, 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. [3]
Outside the Cape, the Rev. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring remained at Roodezands Kerk, the Rev. Rutger Andries Weerman still held Zwartland until his later transfer wish of December 1748, and Stellenbosch continued without a resident clergyman from the death of the Rev. Willem van Gendt in October 1744 until September 1747. The August–September arrivals of 1746 therefore strengthened only the Cape pair of pulpits, not the full five-parish map. [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. [3]
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. 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. [3]
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 “very inexpensive metal” that would end the scheme and send him banished to Batavia. The year’s mining fact was continuation, not climax. [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. [3]
He was a widower after December 1746, when his wife died. 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]
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 the governor’s wife died in December while he still held the first chair, Tulbagh the second, and Van Oudtshoorn the fiscal’s office. [3]
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. [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. [3] [4]
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. 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, and a governor newly widowed at year’s end. [3]