Boer History1748 at the Cape of Good Hope: Cloppenburg Dismissed, Boscawen Fleet, Tartar Truce, and Van Schoor
Swellengrebel, Tulbagh, and Van Oudtshoorn — 1748
Calendar 1748 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 ninth 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 remained 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 had been inconsolable. Only towards the end of 1747 had he been able to smile and be cheerful once more, when Orange news from the Netherlands gave the Castle a public occasion to recover its face. Calendar 1748 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 six years. The ninth year under the 1739 directors’ settlement was not a year of new Castle rank; it was a year in which the same three names had to carry pulpit collapse, an allied war fleet, a closed mine, and the end of the wartime mounted watch. [3] [9]
The secunde still lived in the larger house on Keizersgracht to which he had moved after 1739. He had an innate sense of neatness and accuracy, a strong memory, and a habit of keeping his word. In 1747 he had come 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; he disliked to have his charity spoken of. That secret quarterly remittance still marked the man who sat as second-in-command through 1748, rather than any change of rank. The governor’s brother-in-law, the Rev. François le Sueur, remained the pastoral link between the Castle family and Table Valley after he had been forced off the Company stipend. [9]
Beyond the Castle the settlement carried five Reformed parishes after the boundary council of 30 August 1745, a named district and drostdy at Swellendam under landdrost Johannes Theophilus Rhenius after the naming of 26 October 1747, 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 still 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 until September. 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 collapse of the Cape first pulpit under Cloppenburg, the allied refreshment of a large English war fleet bound for India, the exposure of the long Drakenstein mining fraud, the September truce news that ended the wartime mounted watch, a change of landdrost at Stellenbosch, and the departure of the Zwartland clergyman for Batavia. Those six, with a widower still in the first chair and a secunde whose charity ran quietly toward Utrecht, are what calendar 1748 actually held. [3] [9]
Cloppenburg Suspended by the Consistory — January 1748
In the staff of clergymen several changes had already been 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, had been obliged to resign his position in the Company’s service, and in August 1746 had been succeeded by the Rev. Ruwardus Cloppenburg, sent out by the directors. Three weeks later the Rev. Petrus van der Spuy had arrived from Holland to fill the long-vacant post of second clergyman at the Cape. Le Sueur was the governor’s brother-in-law; the pulpit he had left therefore sat inside the same Cape family that still occupied the first Castle chair. [3] [9]
Cloppenburg’s domestic life was such that in January 1748 he was suspended by the consistory. The January act therefore opened the clerical year of the Cape congregation by removing the first minister from active duty while the formal dismissal still lay with the council of policy, and while Van der Spuy and the highly esteemed Le Sueur remained the practical pastoral resources of Table Valley. A ministry that had lasted barely a year and a half after the August 1746 succession now stood under consistory discipline rather than under ordinary transfer or death. [3]
At Stellenbosch the Rev. Edward Arendsen, who had only filled the pulpit in September 1747 after the vacancy that had run since the death of the Rev. Willem van Gendt in October 1744, still held the oak-embowered village. The Rev. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring remained at Roodezands Kerk, where he had held the first service in September 1743 and where a consistory had been established on the 8th of October 1743. The Rev. Rutger Andries Weerman still held Zwartland, where an agreement of the 9th of May 1745 had made him first pastor and a consistory of the 8th of July that year had seated Pieter Venter and Gerrit Olivier as elders. The January suspension at the Cape was thus the first of several clerical breaks that would mark 1748. [3]
The five-parish map of 30 August 1745 still stood on paper: Cape, Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, Roodezand, and Zwartland, with yearly combined ecclesiastical councils on the third Monday of every January. The January consistory that suspended Cloppenburg therefore sat inside that combined machinery, not outside it. Dissenters still had no licensed church of their own: Lutherans had been refused a resident clergyman in 1742, and the Moravian George Schmit had already left in January 1744 after the council forbade him to baptize. Calendar 1748 did not reopen those refusals; it broke the Cape first chair from within the established church. [3]
Cloppenburg Dismissed and Sent to Europe — March 1748
In March 1748 Cloppenburg was dismissed by the council and sent back to Europe without rank or salary. The March sentence closed a ministry that had lasted barely a year and a half after the August 1746 succession to Le Sueur, and it left the Cape first chair empty under Company discipline rather than under ordinary transfer or death. The directors had sent him out; the Cape council now returned him without the honours that accompanied a regular relief. [3]
Van der Spuy then remained for some time sole clergyman of the Cape congregation, but was greatly assisted by Le Sueur, who was very highly esteemed, though in accordance with the law he could not draw a salary from the Company while he was owner of more than two morgen of land. The Rondebosch freehold that had forced Le Sueur’s resignation in 1746 therefore still barred him from a Company stipend even while his unpaid help kept the Table Valley pulpit workable after Cloppenburg’s removal. The two-morgen rule that had emptied the first chair in 1746 now kept its former occupant off the pay list while he filled the gap the council had made in March. [3]
Calendar 1748 thus fixed a Cape clerical pattern of one salaried Company minister, a suspended-and-banished predecessor, and a popular former incumbent serving without pay because land ownership exceeded the two-morgen rule. No new first clergyman arrived from the Netherlands within the year to restore the dual Cape establishment of 1746. The Castle family that had lost Helena in December 1746 now also watched the pulpit of Table Valley lean on the governor’s brother-in-law, unpaid, while Van der Spuy carried the Company stipend alone. [3] [9]
Admiral Boscawen’s Fleet in Table Bay — April 1748
Among the English ships that called at the Cape in these middle Swellengrebel years was a far larger force than ordinary Indiamen. In April 1748 Admiral Boscawen put into Table Bay with twenty-six men-of-war and transports, when on his way to India with a force intended to restore English power after the capture of Madras by the French. The April visit was not a casual refreshment: it was an allied war fleet using the Cape roadstead as a drill ground and a provision base on the India passage. [3]
Great Britain and the Netherlands were then in alliance, and all possible assistance was therefore given to the English fleet. The troops were landed, and formed a camp just above the Company’s garden, where they were drilled for some weeks, as many of them were recruits. Table Valley thus briefly held a foreign camp on the slope above the garden while hulls and transports crowded the bay under allied colours. The Imhof line and the family-named lighter batteries looked down on an English recruit camp rather than on an enemy, because the war despatches of September 1744 had placed France and England at war and the Netherlands on the same side as Britain. [3] [9]
The April visit belonged to the same wartime shipping world that had brought Commodore George Anson’s Centurion homeward through the Cape in March and April 1744 after her Pacific cruise, and that still required the Imhof line and the country mounted contingent until truce news arrived later in 1748. Within the calendar year the binding naval fact was Boscawen’s large allied refreshment and recruit drill above the garden on the India passage after Madras. Anson had been one famous hull; Boscawen brought twenty-six. [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. English hulls were already the largest foreign class in the bay; Boscawen’s twenty-six men-of-war and transports in a single April made that English weight visible as a fleet rather than as scattered Indiamen. The average number touching at South African ports across the wider span was 73 yearly. Calendar 1748 sat inside that busy allied decade, and April was its sharpest naval week. [3]
Muller’s Drakenstein Mine Exposed and Banished — 1748
Since November 1740 excitement had run on Frans Diederik Muller’s report of a rich silver mine at Groot Drakenstein close to Simonsberg. The governor had immediately left to inspect the locality and had been persuaded that ore was to be had in enormous quantities, only requiring capital. Early in 1743 the Assembly of Seventeen 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 of everything valuable obtained and delivery of the surplus at specified Company prices. [3]
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. De Wet took the chair and most of the shares, and spent the greater part of his capital on salaries for the miners and up-to-date equipment. Muller was appointed chief engineer. For more than five years the clever rogue managed to keep up the hopes of his employers without producing anything valuable. The ore which was found he first pronounced to be silver, then he termed it copper, and finally he asserted it to be gold. [3] [9]
At this stage some of the ore was sent to Holland to be tested by competent persons, when it was found to contain only “a very inexpensive metal which was mixed in small quantities with other materials in casting bells to improve their sound.” The work then ceased. Muller was brought before the council, who declared him an impostor, confiscated his property, and banished him to Batavia. De Wet not only lost a great deal of money but also his reputation as a clever businessman, and the governor was not pleased. The pits and underground passages, which had cost the association a great deal of money, remained objects of curiosity to strangers. [3] [9]
Counting more than five years from the early-1743 charter, the Dutch assay, the stoppage of work, and Muller’s banishment fall with the middle and later Swellengrebel years that include calendar 1748. The long false boom that had still been running through 1746 and 1747 therefore ended in exposure rather than in metal, and the Drakenstein diggings closed as a failed private association under Company charter. What Simonsberg had promised as silver, copper, and gold left only bell-metal and empty passages on the Groot Drakenstein slope. [3] [9]
Tartar Brings Truce News; Burgher Watch Ends — 26 September 1748
During the time that it was feared the colony might be attacked by an enemy, the burghers of the country districts had been 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 obligation had run since the war despatches of September 1744 announcing that France and England were at war and that the Netherlands might soon be involved, and since the Company had resolved to construct a line of fortifications along the shore of Table Bay. The outlying farm districts felt the rotation as a monthly drain of horsemen toward Table Valley. [3] [9]
It was felt as a great relief by the burghers when on the 26th of September 1748 the British man-of-war Tartar brought intelligence that a truce had been arranged between the belligerents, and a little later the conclusion of peace at Aix-la-Chapelle permitted them to be relieved of military duty. Great joy prevailed particularly in the outlying farm districts. The September despatch therefore ended four years of monthly mounted rotation from the country districts into Table Valley guard. War clouds that had hung since 1744 passed as a naval signal, not as a Cape battle. [3] [9]
A temporary outpost at St. Helena Bay, which had been established to give notice of any ships that might touch there, was broken up at the same time. The older military outposts—Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis, and Riet Vlei—remained as before. The Waveren outpost, maintained since 1700, had already been withdrawn in October 1743, when the building with sixty morgen about it had been sold by auction to Pieter de Vos for £266 13s. 4d. Peace took the wartime watch and the St Helena lookout; it did not take the older cattle and grain posts. [3]
The fortifications that had framed the wartime watch still stood: the castle; the Chavonnes battery on the shore, begun in February 1715, completed in April 1726, and officially so named in November 1744; Fort Knokke, foundation stone 24 October 1743, completed in October 1744; the Imhof battery, foundation stone 23 November 1744, cannon mounted from July 1745; four lighter works between the castle and Salt River named Swellengrebel, Elizabeth, Helena, and Tulbagh; and Heeren Hendriks Kinderen, with ten guns, between the castle and the Chavonnes work. Peace at Aix-la-Chapelle relieved men, not masonry. [3] [9]
Adriaan van Schoor Landdrost of Stellenbosch — September 1748
In September 1748 Adriaan van Schoor was appointed landdrost of Stellenbosch. He succeeded Pieter Lourens, who had held the magistracy from May 1729 to September 1748—a tenure of more than nineteen years over the oak-embowered village, the Drakenstein farms, and the still-expanding cattle country that had only recently lost the Lower Breede to Rhenius’s separate court. The village had been quickly rebuilt after the fire of 1710, and travellers described its beauty among the oaks. [3]
The board of landdrost and heemraden at Stellenbosch still acted as a court of justice and performed the duties later undertaken by municipal and divisional councils. A farmer kept a pontoon on the Berg river and the road over the Roodezand pass, taking yearly from every family beyond the Berg either a muid of wheat or eleven shillings. In December 1742 Pieter Wion had been allowed a village butcher’s shop on condition of good mutton every Wednesday and Saturday at two pence a pound, or six pence for four pounds, and beef four times a year at the same rates, on pain of a £5 fine to the deacons for the poor. The leased public mills at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein still brought the district £126 13s. 4d. a year each, and the board guarded that exclusive grinding privilege even when a burgher such as Michiel Otto of Hottentots-Holland asked to use a small water mill of his own. Van Schoor inherited that local administrative machine rather than a quiet rural sinecure. [3]
Calendar 1748 therefore changed the Stellenbosch chair in the same autumn that truce news ended the mounted watch. Rhenius continued at the newly named Swellendam seat beyond the Lower Breede, so the colony’s two rural magistracies now stood under Rhenius and Van Schoor while Lourens’s long service closed. Swellendam itself, named on the 26th of October 1747 by joining Hendrik’s Swellen and Helena’s Dam, still waited for private building sites; those first surveys belonged to a later calendar. The Cornlands river vale already held a drostdy; it did not yet hold a town of burgher erven. [3] [9]
On the Drakenstein side of Van Schoor’s new district the Huguenot farm map also shifted by death. Pierre Joubert of de la Motte d’Aigues in Provence, who had arrived in the Berg China in 1688 with his wife Isabeau Richard, had died on the 31st of June 1732; his widow died in 1748. The farms owned at the time of her death were Bellingham, granted in 1695, Lamorin, La Roche, La Motte, La Provence, and De Plaisante, the last at Waveren. Those names still marked the Berg River and Tulbagh-basin country that now answered to Van Schoor at Stellenbosch rather than to a separate French court. [8]
Weerman Leaves Zwartland for Batavia — December 1748
In December 1748 the Rev. Rutger Andries Weerman, of Zwartlands Kerk, at his own desire was transferred to Batavia. Weerman had held the Zwartland pulpit since the 9th of May 1745, when an agreement with the chaplain of a passing ship made him first pastor of the fifth Reformed parish. On the 8th of July of that year a consistory had seated Pieter Venter and Gerrit Olivier as elders and Jan Loubser and Floris Smit as deacons. The widow of Pieter van der Westhuizen had given the site on the 16th of June 1744, exchanging her farm and receiving a sum equal to one hundred and seventy-four pounds sterling for the buildings, after which the sick-comforter Wietse Botes had opened a school at once. [3]
The congregation was left without a resident clergyman when Weerman sailed. December 1748 therefore opened a vacancy on the wheat lands north of the Cape flats, while Arendsen still held Stellenbosch, Meyring remained at Roodezand, and Van der Spuy carried the Cape alone with Le Sueur’s unpaid help. The site itself remained a hard one for a Dutch village: uneven ground, no permanent stream that could be led out for household use and gardens, summer water from wells, and a general belief that the brackish soil, though capable of producing the finest wheat, was unfit for trees. The pulpit that Weerman left was a wheat-land pulpit, not a garden-village one. [3]
Within a single calendar year the Cape first chair had lost Cloppenburg by suspension and dismissal, and the Zwartland chair had lost Weerman by voluntary transfer east. The five-parish map of 1745 still stood on paper; two of its pulpits were in crisis or empty by the close of 1748. Combined ecclesiastical councils could still meet on the third Monday of January; they could not put a salaried first minister back into Table Valley, or keep Weerman on the Zwartland wheat. [3]
Shipping, Simon’s Bay, and the Allied Shore — 1748
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 after the directors’ 1741 order that fleets should refresh there from the 15th of May to the 15th of August, received seventy-seven Company ships before the close of 1750. The average number touching at South African ports was thus 73 yearly across the wider span. English hulls were the largest foreign class; Boscawen’s April fleet made that class a camp as well as a count. [3]
The Simon’s Town establishment on the southern shore of the bay—magazine, hospital, and quarters begun after Governor-General Van Imhof’s site choice in February 1743, with building started the following month—remained under a small post with the title of postholder. Sergeant Justinus Blas still commanded the few soldiers stationed there, while fishermen and people dependent on the shipping formed a small village named from the bay. The establishment was conducted as cheaply as possible, because the directors had meant the Table Bay mole to make the winter harbour unnecessary. The mole, carried to 351 feet by the close of 1746 and then suspended after locusts destroyed vegetation, convicts from Java had nearly all died, and burghers declared they could not pay their quota any longer, stayed abandoned. Winter reliance on Simon’s Bay therefore continued through 1748. [3] [9]
Boscawen’s April fleet and the Tartar’s September truce news therefore sat inside a busy allied decade at the Cape, when English hulls were the largest foreign class in Table Bay and when Dutch policy still treated British men-of-war as friends to be refreshed. The same alliance that drilled recruits above the garden in April was the alliance that let a British frigate close the wartime watch in September. Calendar 1748 did not need a Cape battle to feel the European war; it needed a camp and a truce packet. [3]
Settlement, Staples, and the Quiet Agricultural Year — 1748
After the locust clearance of April 1747, the remaining years of the long Swellengrebel period were free from excessive drought and insect plagues. Average exports to India during the wider period 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 1748 could load those staples after the locust year without a new famine figure of its own. [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, leaving 9s. 7½d. clear after tithe—still framed the staple cash side of settled agriculture. Surplus produce could be sold to any buyer upon paying the Company’s dues of 10s. 8d. upon every ten muids of wheat and 12s. 6d. upon every legger of wine, plus £1 0s. 10d. a legger to the licensed wine dealer if the buyer were a ship’s master or purser, and a fee to the fiscal when ships’ people were purchasers. Complaints of the quality of the wine still came from the Indian authorities, even after skilled instructors from Europe and testing of every legger purchased at the Cape. [3]
Through these middle 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, having paid £2 10s. before that date. Upon the slightest fault being discovered in a cattle run, the occupier did not hesitate to abandon it and move farther inland. Van Imhof had tried in 1743 to fix sixty morgen about each homestead as freehold, at from £10 8s. 4d. to £41 13s. 4d., leaving the remainder on the £5 rental; very few farmers availed themselves of it. Remote districts already ignored permission, boundaries, and rent; once beyond Swellendam, placaats forbidding a further eastern move were hard to enforce. [3] [4] [9]
Europeans and Khoikhoi were living together on friendly terms in much of the settled country, but occasionally the peace was disturbed by San marauders. The hard Swellendam-border rumours and unsuccessful inquiries recorded for 1747 left 1748 without a fresh dated conviction. Coastal occupation still stood only a few miles east of Mossel Bay. Some graziers had taken land on the banks of the Gamtoos, but in January 1745 the landdrost of Stellenbosch, acting under the governor’s orders, had required them to return west of the Great Brak. The circumstances of grazier life remained so favourable to expansion that those assigned limits could not long be kept. [3] [4]
Calendar 1748 therefore combined Cloppenburg’s January suspension and March dismissal, Boscawen’s April fleet and garden camp, the collapse of Muller’s Drakenstein fraud, the Tartar’s 26 September truce news and the end of the fifty-man watch, Van Schoor’s September succession to Lourens at Stellenbosch, Weerman’s December transfer from Zwartland to Batavia, the death of Pierre Joubert’s widow on the Drakenstein and Waveren farms, and a quiet agricultural year under ordinary staple prices after the locust plague had passed. The same three Castle names that had opened the year still closed it. [3] [8] [9]