Boer History1747 at the Cape of Good Hope: Swellendam Named, Locust Fast, Reygersdaal Wreck, and Orange Holiday
Swellengrebel, Tulbagh, and Van Oudtshoorn — 1747
Calendar 1747 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 an eighth full agricultural and shipping 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. Kindness, common sense, and long local experience, rather than brilliance of talent, were what the settlement credited him with. In 1727, while still council secretary, he had married Helena Wilhelmina ten Damme, also Cape-born. Tulbagh had stood as best man. Eight children of the marriage were already honoured in the shore battery named Heeren Hendriks Kinderen. [9]
That Cape household had been emptied at the top in the closing weeks of 1746. Helena had died in December, in the same month that locusts filled Table Valley, and for many months the governor was inconsolable. He had enjoyed great happiness with her. Calendar 1747 therefore opened on a widower still in the first chair, a secunde who had been inside that family circle since the wedding, and a fiscal who had held the independent office for more than five years. Only towards the end of the year was the governor able to smile and be cheerful once more, when Orange news from the Netherlands gave the Castle a public occasion to recover its face. [3] [9]
The secunde’s private year had a quieter mark. In 1747 Tulbagh came to the aid of his widowed mother by sending her six hundred guilders each quarter, an allowance that no one in the settlement then knew of and that later records alone revealed. He disliked to have his charity spoken of. The man who still sat as second-in-command had an innate sense of neatness and accuracy, a strong memory, and a habit of keeping his word; the secret quarterly remittance sat beside those ordinary virtues rather than beside any change of rank. He still lived as secunde in the larger house on Keizersgracht to which he had moved after 1739. [9]
Beyond the Castle the settlement 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 family-named lighter batteries—Swellengrebel, Elizabeth, Helena, Tulbagh, and Heeren Hendriks Kinderen—and the heavy Imhof work remained the masonry answer; the monthly inland horsemen remained the living one. The older permanent posts at Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis, and Riet Vlei stood 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 been given up at three hundred and fifty-one feet in the locust year. [3] [9]
The year’s distinctive Cape record lay less in a change of governors than in the clearance of the locust plague that had closed 1746, the formal naming of Rhenius’s district seat, the wreck of a scurvy-stricken outward Indiaman on the west-coast approaches, a hard border inquiry on the distant Swellendam frontier, the filling of the Stellenbosch pulpit, and a public Orange holiday after news of the restored stadtholderate in the Netherlands. Those six, with a governor still recovering from Helena’s death and a secunde whose charity ran quietly to Utrecht, are what calendar 1747 actually held. [3] [9]
Day of Fasting and Prayer against Locusts — 22 February 1747
In 1746 abundance of rain had given an exceedingly good wheat crop, but before the beans and peas were off the ground enormous swarms of locusts had appeared—a plague from which the colony had been free since 1695. On the 28th of December 1746 the insects had entered Table Valley in such numbers that the air seemed filled with them, and in a few days nothing edible remained, not even leaves on the trees. The late-December irruption had carried a 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]
The council 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. The governor himself proclaimed the fast. The February observance therefore answered a winter crisis that had already destroyed country gardens, stripped pasture, and doubled the price of meat after many years without cattle disease. It sat between the Christmas irruption into Table Valley and the slower biological clearance of the swarms that still hung over pasture and green crops in the opening months of 1747. [3] [9]
In the country districts the gardens had been completely destroyed, and as there was nothing left for the cattle to eat, so many oxen and sheep had died that meat, previously sold at less than a halfpenny a pound because there had been no cattle disease for many years, had 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 livestock sickness now paid twice for mutton and beef because the insects had eaten the feed. Magazine wheat from the strong 1746 cereal harvest still sat in store after tithe; garden legumes, household greens, and grazing did not. [3]
The attack lasted nearly four months once it had begun, ravaging after the long rains of 1746. Within the opening of 1747 that meant a harvest already in the barns, a capital whose trees had been stripped at Christmas, and a public fast in February while the swarms still moved. 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. Those restored staple rates framed the cash side of a year whose green surface the insects still held when the churches kept the February fast. [3] [9]
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 had stopped the breakwater at three hundred and fifty-one feet by the close of 1746. 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 February fast therefore answered not only empty gardens and doubled meat but a public works halt that had already handed winter shipping back to Simon’s Bay. [3]
Locusts Almost Disappear — End of April 1747
By the end of April 1747 the locusts had almost disappeared. Towards the end of April they vanished at last, leaving hardly anything edible in the gardens and fields. The clearance closed a pest sequence that had begun on the late legumes of 1746, filled Table Valley at Christmas, drawn a February day of fasting and prayer, and then faded as autumn advanced. Four months of wings had taken the green surface; the cereal barns of the previous harvest were what remained. [3] [9]
Average exports to India during the wider thirteen-year stretch 1738–1750 stood at 7,539 muids of wheat, 116 muids of rye, 289 muids of peas, and 271 muids of beans, with ordinary wine averaging 384 leggers a year to Batavia exclusive of ship supply. All the Constantia wine that could be obtained was exported, and ten times the quantity would have found a ready sale. Ivory, skins of wild animals, ostrich plumes, and dried fruit were also among the colony’s exports. Calendar 1747 could still load wheat after tithe from the previous year’s barns; it could not at once restore the pea and bean line, or the garden and pasture that the locusts had taken, inside that average. [3]
The remaining years of that same thirteen-year ledger were free from excessive drought and insect plagues, but the binding agricultural fact inside calendar 1747 was recovery after plague rather than a new bumper figure of its own: the February fast, the April disappearance of the swarms, and the return of ordinary pastoral and garden conditions after meat prices had doubled and leaves had been stripped from the trees in Table Valley. Rain had done what the farmer needed for cereal in 1746; the insects had then taken everything still green; April at last gave the ground back. [3]
That clearance mattered for both Company magazines and free-burgher households. Wheat filled the ships and Batavia stores after tithe; beans, peas, and household gardens fed local tables and livestock more immediately. 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. A year that opened under locusts and closed with ordinary pasture restored therefore still sold its wine and its remaining wheat at those rates, while the legumes the averages listed had been the first green things the swarms had taken. [3]
Within 1747 the agricultural year was therefore a winter of fasting and an autumn of empty gardens giving way to a winter pasture that could again carry stock. The public fast of February, the April vanishing of the insects, and the doubled meat price that had answered dead oxen and sheep were the three figures the locust chapter left on the Castle books. No new placaat capped wheat as in the famine year 1740; the restored magazine price of June 1745 still stood. What had to be waited for was grass. [3]
Rev. Edward Arendsen at Stellenbosch — September 1747
In the staff of clergymen several changes had been caused by death or removal. At the Cape, the Rev. Ruwardus Cloppenburg still held the first pulpit after succeeding François le Sueur in August 1746, and the Rev. Petrus van der Spuy remained second clergyman after his arrival three weeks later. Le Sueur, the governor’s brother-in-law, had purchased a farm at Rondebosch on the estate of his wife’s father, Johannes Swellengrebel, and had been obliged to resign Company service because the law would not let a salaried clergyman own more than two morgen of land. He remained highly esteemed and still assisted the Cape congregation without salary. Calendar 1747 therefore kept two Company pulpits in Table Valley and one former first minister on a Rondebosch farm. [3] [9]
In October 1744 the Rev. Willem van Gendt had died, from which date the church at Stellenbosch was without a resident clergyman until September 1747, when the post was filled by the Rev. Edward Arendsen, who was sent out by the directors. Nearly three years of vacancy therefore ended in the spring of 1747 with a Company-appointed pastor for the oak-embowered village and its surrounding farms. The Stellenbosch succession that had run from Hercules van Loon through Hendrik Bek, Salomon van Echten, and Van Gendt now had a new name on the resident chair. [3]
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 fifth parish whose consistory and first pastor had been settled in 1745–1746. Drakenstein continued under the Rev. Salomon van Echten. The five-parish map fixed on 30 August 1745 therefore had, by September of this year, a resident minister in each chair: two at the Cape, Arendsen newly at Stellenbosch, Van Echten at Drakenstein, Meyring at Roodezand, and Weerman at Zwartland. [3]
Arendsen’s arrival did not rearrange the Castle or the country courts. It closed a pastoral gap that had run through the same years in which Rhenius had become full landdrost beyond the Lower Breede, the Cornlands drostdy had been permitted, and locusts had stripped the gardens. Stellenbosch farmers who had carted grain and wine to magazine and licensed dealer through a vacancy of almost three years now had a resident clergyman again, sent from the Netherlands by the same directors who had earlier sent Cloppenburg and Van der Spuy to the Cape. [3]
Within 1747 the binding clerical fact was therefore the September restoration of a resident Stellenbosch minister after the long gap that had run since Van Gendt’s death, while Cloppenburg and Van der Spuy still divided the Cape congregation, Meyring remained at Roodezand, and Weerman still held Zwartland. No other pulpit changed hands in this calendar. [3]
Reygersdaal Wrecked between Dassen and Robben Islands — 25 October 1747
On the 25th of October 1747 the Company’s outward-bound ship Reygersdaal ran ashore on the coast between Dassen Island and Robben Island, and went to pieces at once. Only twenty men got to land. The October wreck therefore belonged to the same west-coast shipping world that winter refreshment at Simon’s Bay after 1742 and the abandoned Table Bay mole had been meant to ease—an outward hull already emptied by disease, unable to work a short coasting entry, breaking up between the two islands. [3]
She was four months and a half from Holland, and had lost one hundred and twenty-five men from scurvy. Eighty-three of the remaining crew were too ill with the same disease to keep their feet, and the few who were able to work could not manage the ship. They were trying to get into Saldanha Bay when the final disaster took place. The survivor count of twenty was what remained of a complement already reduced by a hundred and twenty-five dead and eighty-three still too weak to stand. Saldanha, the older cattle-and-seal bay on that coast, was the harbour they could not reach. [3]
Several wrecks had already marked the South African coast in the Swellengrebel years. In the night between the 5th and 6th of May 1740 the Company’s outward-bound ship Visch, when attempting to come to anchor in Table Bay in a stiff gale, had run ashore above the Castle and become a complete wreck; her sick men between decks were drowned, the others, with one exception, reaching shore by hawser. The Reygersdaal disaster was of a different kind: not a gale in the roadstead but scurvy on an outward passage, a failed attempt at Saldanha, and an instant breakup between the islands. Calendar 1747 recorded it as the hard single-ship loss of the year. [3]
In the thirteen years 1738–1750 there put into Table Bay 640 ships belonging to 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 that same stretch, so that the average touching at South African ports ran at seventy-three yearly. Calendar 1747 sat inside that wartime stream: the mole that might have kept winter fleets in Table Bay already abandoned, Simon’s Town’s expensive land-carriage still at work, and one outward Indiaman lost on the Dassen–Robben coast before she could take Saldanha or the roadstead. [3]
The wreck fell one day before the council named Swellendam. An outward hull broken up between the islands, and a district seat named on the Cornlands the next morning, were the two October facts that tied west-coast shipping to the eastern cattle magistracy in the same week. Within 1747 the binding nautical fact was the Reygersdaal: four and a half months out, a hundred and twenty-five dead of scurvy, eighty-three unable to stand, twenty men on the beach, and Saldanha unreached. [3]
District and Drostdy Named Swellendam — 26 October 1747
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 had at first been 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 at once 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 1747 had to give that open district a name as well as a seat. [4]
On the 25th of October 1746 the council had permitted use of the ground selected on the Cornlands river, a Langeberg feeder winding through a dell some miles in length before it joined the Breede, and a drostdy and other necessary buildings had speedily arisen there. Mr. Rhenius and the district councillors had chosen a charming locality: mountains close in front, rich soil capable of being irrigated around, and little streams of clear fresh water issuing from the Langebergen at various places, feeders of the river that drains the valley from the Warm Bokkeveld to the sea. Some excellent sites had already been occupied as farms, but it was not deemed advisable to eject government tenants; the board had taken time, and only after much inspection and discussion had the Cornlands ground been agreed upon. [3]
The place received a name in 1747: on the 26th of October of that year 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. The naming thus fell one day after the Reygersdaal wreck and a full year after the October permission to occupy and build on the Cornlands site. Towards the east it was the prosperous farming community that was born, fittingly named by joining Hendrik’s Swellen and Helena’s Dam—the Cape-born governor and the Cape-born wife who had died in the locust December, written together on the new eastern magistracy. [3] [9]
At mid-century few people could maintain themselves there except by farming, and many years elapsed before the scattered houses and gardens along the vale could fairly be called more than a hamlet. Within 1747 the binding civil fact was the October decision that fixed the district and drostdy name Swellendam on the Cornlands seat already rising under Rhenius. A court that had sat at a heemraad’s house, then on permitted but unnamed ground, now sat under a name that joined the governor’s house to the Overberg cattle country. [3]
San Border Violence Rumours and Government Inquiry — 1747
Europeans and Khoikhoi were living together on friendly terms in much of the settled country, but occasionally the peace was disturbed by San marauders. In 1747 rumours reached the Cape that certain farmers on the distant border of Swellendam had not scrupled to shoot down women and children as well as men when they were endeavouring to recover cattle and punish the murderers of their servants. The new district name was barely on the council minutes before it also labelled a hard allegation of excessive frontier violence. [3]
The government caused strict inquiry to be made, with the object of bringing the offenders to justice; but it was impossible to obtain evidence sufficient to secure conviction. Calendar 1747 therefore recorded both the new district name on the Lower Breede and a hard allegation of excessive frontier violence under that same geographical label, answered by official inquiry without a secured conviction. The Castle could name a drostdy; it could not, on the evidence then obtained, name the men who had fired. [3]
The country along the coast was now occupied by Europeans a few miles farther eastward than Mossel Bay. Some graziers had earlier taken possession of land on the banks of the Gamtoos, but in January 1745 the landdrost of Stellenbosch, acting under orders from the governor, had required them to return to the westward of the Great Brak river. The circumstances under which the graziers lived remained so favourable to expansion that they could not long be kept within the assigned limits, even while the Castle tried to police the manner of San conflict on the distant Swellendam border. Placaats forbidding further eastern movement could still be posted; they could not easily be enforced once a loan-place occupier had walked his flocks past the last landdrost. [3] [4]
Cattle recovery and the punishment of servants’ murderers were the stated reasons the rumours gave for the shootings. On a frontier where San bands still disturbed isolated runs, and where Khoikhoi and Europeans otherwise lived on friendly terms in the settled wards, the distinction the Castle wanted to keep was between recovering stock and killing women and children. The inquiry of 1747 was the government’s attempt to keep that distinction after the district had a name. It did not produce a conviction. The eastern cattle map therefore combined a named drostdy, an undefined Company boundary, a Great Brak limit already under pressure, and an unproven charge of indiscriminate firing. [3]
Within 1747 the binding frontier fact was therefore not a new eastern river line but a named magistracy whose distant border already generated rumours the fiscal’s office could not turn into sentences. Rhenius’s court on the Cornlands now carried both the governor’s joined names and the first Swellendam-border inquiry on the Castle books. [3]
Orange Stadtholder Holiday — 29 November 1747
The East India Company had recently undergone a change in its constitution. During the late war the office of stadtholder had been again created in the Netherlands, after its abrogation for a number of years, and Willem Carel Hendrik Friso, prince of Orange, had been raised to the dignity, which was declared hereditary, with the additional title of captain and admiral general of the republic. In 1747 the French invaded the Dutch Republic, and William IV was made hereditary stadtholder. A letter reached the Cape announcing a re-organisation of the Company’s constitution around the restored stadtholdership of the House of Orange. [3] [9]
At the Cape the officers of government were enthusiastic partisans of the Orange, as against the pure republican faction, and intelligence of the resumption of the stadtholderate was received with great rejoicing. Not only the governor himself but also secunde Ryk Tulbagh, many other officials, and most of his friends were staunch Orangists, and that day the whole Castle was in a festive mood. Only towards the end of 1747 had the governor been able to smile and be cheerful once more after Helena’s death; the Orange letter gave that recovery a public form. [3] [9]
The governor promptly declared the 29th of November 1747 a public holiday, and the gayest celebrations took place that the Caabse Vlek had enjoyed. There were processions through the streets, ringing of bells, and firing of salutes, every person being decorated with orange cockades, while above the towers of the church and the castle orange banners were streaming. Public buildings and private residences were decorated with orange banners and streamers; the church bells tolled; guns boomed. Even anti-Orange republicans donned orange sashes and toasted the prince with orange gin. [3] [9]
For the men in the street there were processions and shooting contests on the smooth grounds of the Wapen Pleyn, the square the governor had earlier had levelled by burghers each sending one slave a day. For the élite, balls were held at the governor’s house in the Castle, in the Tuynhuys in the garden, and at the country estate Newlands. In the evening the houses were illuminated. The merriment lasted two days instead of the prescribed one. For two nights in succession there were balls at the governor’s residence; but in those days guests retired before midnight. [3] [9]
Earlier in the same November, on the 5th, Jan Serrurier of Hanau, son of Louis Serrurier and Ester de Vis of Hanau, married Catharina Krygsman at the Cape. He became a burgher councillor of Cape Town and was the owner of Alphen at Wynberg. The refugee-descended burgher roll thus recorded a November wedding in the same month that orange cockades filled the streets. The November holiday closed the political year of 1747 with an open display of Orange loyalty at the Cape, a governor able to be cheerful again, and a Castle that had spent two nights under orange banners after a winter of locust fasting. [3] [8] [9]
Muller’s Diggings and the Wartime Burgher Watch — 1747
Since November 1740 excitement had run on Frans Diederik Muller’s report of a rich silver mine at Groot Drakenstein close to Simonsberg. 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 of everything valuable obtained. De Wet, as chief director, engaged a large number of men to whom the government had granted passes, and prospecting and excavation continued with Muller as master miner. The governor and council, keen on a windfall for the Honourable Company, had granted the concession; De Wet spent the greater part of his capital on salaries and equipment. [3] [9]
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 1747 still fell inside that long false boom. Muller as alchemist-in-reverse still named whatever came out of the pits; De Wet still carried the chair and most of the shares; the Company’s fifteen per cent still waited on a metal that had not yet been shown. The pits and underground passages, which had already cost the association a great deal of money, remained objects of local curiosity rather than of bullion. [3] [9]
At the same time the European war that had brought despatches in September 1744 announcing France and England at war, and the likelihood of Netherlands involvement, still required country burghers to furnish a contingent of fifty mounted men monthly to assist in keeping guard at the Cape. The governor had been instructed to strengthen the Cape’s defence; the family-named batteries and the heavy Imhof work were the masonry answer, and the inland horsemen were still the living one. Outlying farm districts felt the burden. Within 1747 the diggings and the mounted watch therefore both continued as unfinished obligations from earlier years: one a hoped-for mine that had not yet paid, the other a wartime roster that had not yet been stood down. [3] [9]
The older permanent posts at Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis, and Riet Vlei still framed the settled approaches, while Simon’s Town under Sergeant Justinus Blas took the winter fleets the abandoned mole could not shelter. Calendar 1747 therefore kept a wartime shore and a false silver pit running together under a governor who was only late in the year cheerful again, and under a secunde whose private remittances to his mother never reached the same public notice as orange cockades or Muller’s latest name for the ore. [3] [9]
Settlement Pressure, Staples, and the Named Frontier — 1747
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—£2 10s. until that year and five pounds thereafter, when the rent could be recovered at all. 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. [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 now sat under the fixed name Swellendam. 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. New settlements had already arisen when the churches in Zwartland and Roodezand began their services; towards the east it was now the named farming community of Swellendam. [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. In the thirteen years 1738–1750 Table Bay took 640 Company ships, 198 English, 23 French, and 20 Danish; Simon’s Bay, used from 1742, took seventy-seven Company ships in that stretch. Calendar 1747 sat inside that stream with the mole already abandoned and one outward Indiaman lost between Dassen and Robben islands. [3]
Among the older French-refugee names still on the Cape register, Jan Serrurier of Hanau married Catharina Krygsman on the 5th of November 1747 and stood thereafter as a burgher councillor and as owner of Alphen at Wynberg. The refugee generation that had filled Drakenstein and Stellenbosch benches was giving way to Cape-born and Cape-married sons in the same year that Rhenius’s board received a district name on the Cornlands. Calendar 1747 therefore combined the February locust fast and April clearance, Arendsen’s September arrival at Stellenbosch, the Reygersdaal wreck and the Swellendam naming in late October, a border inquiry without conviction, the November Orange holiday, and the continued pressure of loan cattle runs beyond the newly named eastern magistracy. [3] [8]
No new commission rearranged the Castle chairs. Swellengrebel still governed, Tulbagh still sat as secunde, Van Oudtshoorn still held the independent fiscal’s office. What the year changed was the map’s eastern label, the Stellenbosch pulpit, the locust account, the west-coast wreck book, and the public colour of the streets on the 29th of November. Orange banners on church and Castle, a drostdy named for Hendrik and Helena, and gardens that at last stood empty of locusts rather than of leaves: those were the Cape facts of 1747. [3] [9]