Boer History1749 at the Cape of Good Hope: Swellengrebel Retirement Request, English Church Service, Horak, and Earthquake
Swellengrebel, Tulbagh, and Van Oudtshoorn — 1749
Calendar 1749 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 tenth 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. The man who had asked, by year’s middle, for leave to go home still sat the first chair through December. [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 1749 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 seven years. The tenth 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 a metropolitan change in Company constitution, a retirement letter, a new landdrost beyond the Breede, an English Sunday in the Dutch church, a Stellenbosch pulpit vacancy, and a double earthquake shock. [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 1749, 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. When the April despatch went home, the remaining members of the council named this same secunde as the man they wished to see in the first chair if the directors consented to relieve the governor. [3] [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 until the April change of this year, and a shore line of fortifications whose Imhof battery had received cannon in July 1745. The wartime mounted country watch of fifty horsemen a month had ended with the truce news of 26 September 1748. Calendar 1749 therefore opened in peacetime after Aix-la-Chapelle, with the family-named lighter batteries—Swellengrebel, Elizabeth, Helena, Tulbagh, and Heeren Hendriks Kinderen—and the heavy Imhof work still framing Table Bay defence, and with the older permanent posts at Saldanha Bay, Klapmuts, Groen Kloof, Ziekenhuis, and Riet Vlei standing as before. Waveren had already been withdrawn. Simon’s Town, under postholder Sergeant Justinus Blas since March 1748, 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—Swellengrebel still sat through the whole calendar—than in the metropolitan elevation of the Orange stadtholder over the Company on the 25th of March, the governor’s formal request to retire in April, a new landdrost at Swellendam in the same month, an English service in the Dutch church on the 20th of April for homeward men of the allied fleet, the death of Stellenbosch’s resident clergyman in July, and a double earthquake shock at daybreak on the 27th of August. Honesty and hard work, rather than brilliance, were still what the Castle and the country credited the first chair with, and the colonists remained content under that administration even as the man who held it asked leave to spend the remainder of his life in the Netherlands. [3] [9]
Orange Stadtholder Made Chief Director of the Company — 25 March 1749
The East India Company had recently undergone a change in its constitution. During the late European 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. That restoration had already been kept as a public holiday at the Cape on the 29th of November 1747, with processions, orange cockades, illuminated houses, and balls at the governor’s residence. Calendar 1749 added the concrete Company consequence of that restoration. [3]
On the 25th of March 1749 he was created chief director and governor-general of the East India Company, and thenceforth all appointments to office were made by him upon recommendations from the Assembly of Seventeen. The March act therefore placed the Cape’s ultimate staff decisions under a restored Orange headship that the Castle officers had already celebrated as partisans of the Orange against the pure republican faction. Swellengrebel himself, Tulbagh, many other officials, and most of the governor’s friends were staunch Orangists; the same men who had declared the November holiday now sat under a prince who could appoint on the Seventeen’s advice. [3] [9]
The 1747 holiday had already shown what Orange news did to Table Valley. Public buildings and private residences had been decorated with orange banners and streamers; the church bells had tolled; guns had boomed; even anti-Orange republicans had donned orange sashes and toasted the prince. For the men in the street there had been processions and shooting contests on the levelled Wapen Pleyn. For the élite, balls had been held at the governor’s house in the Castle, in the Tuynhuys in the garden, and at the country estate Newlands, and the merriment had lasted two nights instead of the prescribed one, with guests still retiring before midnight. That civic memory was what the Castle carried into March 1749 when the prince’s Company power became a written fact. [3] [9]
The March elevation did not yet change a single Cape chair. It did, however, change the address of the April retirement letter and of the council’s accompanying request. Leave to retire, and the recommendation that Tulbagh succeed if that leave were granted, would now go not only to the Seventeen but to a hereditary Orange chief director who made the appointments. Within calendar 1749 the binding local facts remained the March act itself and the April papers that followed it; the Castle still waited on a metropolitan answer that had not arrived by December. [3]
Swellengrebel Asks Leave to Retire — April 1749
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, in March 1744 he had received the rank and title of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India. Honesty, hard work, and the continuation of the quieter tradition of Maurice Pasques de Chavonnes and Jan de la Fontaine were what the settlement still attached to his name after ten years in the first chair. [3] [9]
After holding the office of governor ten years, and having been in continuous service since 1713, in April 1749 he wrote to the directors for permission to retire. He assigned as his reason that he wished to spend the remainder of his life in the Netherlands. That wish was then the prevailing custom with most of the Company’s servants who attained high rank and who had accumulated wealth. The April letter was therefore not a confession of failure. It was a Cape-born governor, still trusted at home and still contenting the colonists, asking to follow the fashion of rich seniors who took their fortunes back to Europe. [3] [9]
With him such a desire could only be compliance with fashion. Except two of his sons who were studying at Utrecht, all his near relatives were living at the Cape. He was a widower, his wife having died in December 1746, and as an old man he was going to a country which was not his fatherland in any other sense than that his mother was a Dutch woman. His father was by birth a Russian. The house at the corner of Berg and Wale Streets, the country estate, the eight children honoured in a battery name, and the brother-in-law still preaching without Company pay were the Cape world he proposed to leave for a university town beside two sons. [3] [9]
The same despatch that announced the governor’s wish to retire contained a request from the remaining members of the council that if the directors consented to relieve him, the secunde Ryk Tulbagh might be appointed in his stead. That request named the man who had been best man in 1727, senior clerk under Swellengrebel, and second-in-command since 1739—a quiet reader with a strong memory, already bound to the family by marriage to the governor’s sister Elizabeth. Within calendar 1749 the binding local fact was the April request and the council’s recommendation of Tulbagh, not yet any change of chairs. Swellengrebel still governed; Tulbagh still sat as secunde; Van Oudtshoorn still held the independent fiscalate. The Castle waited on Amsterdam and on the prince. [3] [9]
After the Orange climax of late 1747 the governor had already stayed on through a full peacetime year. April 1749 was the moment he chose to put the fashion into a letter. Nothing in the Cape record of that month suggests disgrace, recall, or a broken administration. The colonists were content; the directors had already honoured him; the council asked for his closest colleague as successor. The first chair simply began, in writing, the long leave-taking that Cape custom expected of a wealthy senior who wished to grow old near sons at Utrecht rather than among the relatives who still filled Table Valley. [3] [9]
Jan Andries Horak Landdrost of Swellendam — April 1749
In April 1749 Jan Andries Horak succeeded Johannes Theophilus Rhenius as landdrost of Swellendam. Rhenius had been appointed assistant landdrost and secretary beyond the Lower Breede in January 1744, after four heemraden had been named on the 12th of November 1743 to form a court for residents east of that river. On the 31st of August 1745 the country beyond the Lower Breede had been separated from Stellenbosch and Rhenius raised to full landdrost, with six heemraden and a district whose outer limit was only “where the power of the Honourable Company ends.” District and drostdy had taken the joined family name Swellendam on the 26th of October 1747. Horak’s April succession therefore opened the second landdrostate of the young district. [3] [9]
There was still no surveyed free-burgher grid at the seat. Rhenius and the district councillors had chosen a charming locality where the Cornlands River winds through a dell some miles in length before uniting with the Breede, mountains close in front and rich irrigable soil around. Permission to use that ground and to put up needed buildings had been given on the 25th of October 1746. Through 1749 the magistracy still sat in a landscape of Company buildings, heemraden farms, and the long single-street potential of the Cornlands dell rather than a village of private erven. Few people could maintain themselves except by farming, and the place remained more hamlet than town. The landdrost’s court continued to meet under the powers that had framed Rhenius’s board: justice, local order, and the slow growth of a named frontier capital. [3]
Horak inherited a district whose eastern graziers had already tested the paper limits. Some 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 river. Coastal occupation by Europeans still stood only a few miles east of Mossel Bay. The circumstances under which the graziers lived remained so favourable to expansion that they could not long be kept within assigned limits, and cattle runs of five or six thousand acres, rented from the Company at £5 a year after the increase of 1732, continued to pull men east of the named drostdy. April 1749 did not redraw those limits; it put a new civil name over the same unfinished map. [3] [4]
The April change was the year’s only named shift of a country magistracy. Stellenbosch already sat under landdrost Adriaan van Schoor after the death of Pieter Lourens in September 1748. Swellendam now passed from the bookkeeper who had grown with the district to Horak, whose court would keep the Cornlands hamlet as the eastern civil address of the colony through the remainder of Swellengrebel’s government. Within this calendar the administrative fact was simply the end of Rhenius’s tenure and the opening of Horak’s: a second landdrost in a district still younger than five years, still without a surveyed burgher street, still facing San stock theft on a distant border and graziers who treated paper rivers as suggestions. [3]
English Church Service in the Dutch Church — 20 April 1749
In April 1748 Admiral Boscawen had put into Table Bay with twenty-six men-of-war and transports bound for India, when on his way with a force intended to restore English power after the French capture of Madras. Great Britain and the Netherlands were then in alliance, and all possible assistance had been given. The troops had landed and formed a camp just above the Company’s garden, where they were drilled for some weeks, as many of them were recruits. In the following year some ships of that fleet put into Table Bay when returning home. [3]
A large number of Englishmen being on shore, the commodore requested one Sunday that his chaplain might be permitted to preach in the church. Leave was granted without demur, and on the 20th of April 1749 divine service according to the rites of the church of England was held in the Dutch church in Table Valley. The April service therefore marked an allied courtesy inside a decade when English hulls were already the largest foreign class calling at the Cape, and inside a peacetime year after the Tartar had brought truce news the previous September. [3]
The building that opened its pulpit that Sunday was the same Dutch Reformed church whose towers had streamed orange banners in November 1747, and whose consistory had, in January and March 1748, first suspended and then seen dismissed the Rev. Ruwardus Cloppenburg. The Cape first chair of the pulpit now rested on the Rev. Petrus van der Spuy, greatly assisted by Le Sueur, who remained highly esteemed though he could not draw a Company salary while he owned more than two morgen of land. It was that consistory and that Company government, still treating British seamen as friends after Aix-la-Chapelle, that granted the English chaplain the church without argument. [3]
No wreck, no funeral, and no second English Sunday entered the Cape journal of this calendar. The recorded fact was the living Sunday service under English rites, granted as a wartime ally’s courtesy after the fleet’s India work and used by homeward men filling the same Table Bay roadstead that Boscawen’s outward ships had crowded the year before. The Dutch church, the Castle flag, and the batteries named for Swellengrebel’s household all stood around that one April hour of common worship, then returned to Reformed Sundays and Company bells. [3]
Death of Rev. Edward Arendsen at Stellenbosch — July 1749
In the staff of clergymen several changes had already been caused by death or removal before this year opened. The Rev. Le Sueur, having purchased a farm at Rondebosch on the estate of his wife’s father, Johannes Swellengrebel, had been obliged to resign the Company’s service, and in August 1746 had been succeeded by Cloppenburg; three weeks later Van der Spuy had arrived from Holland to fill the long-vacant second Cape chair. Cloppenburg’s domestic life had then been such that in January 1748 he was suspended by the consistory and in March dismissed and sent back to Europe without rank or salary. Van der Spuy remained sole clergyman of the Cape congregation, greatly assisted by Le Sueur without Company pay. [3]
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, sent out by the directors. Arendsen’s oak-embowered ministry therefore lasted less than two full years when death closed it in July 1749. The Stellenbosch congregation, only recently restored to a resident pulpit after a three-year vacancy, was again without a man of its own. [3]
The Rev. Salomon van Echten, of Drakenstein, was then required to act as consulent of Stellenbosch until the directors could make another appointment. Van Echten had held Drakenstein since his removal there after the death of the Rev. Johan Wilhelm Hartzogenrath in June 1736, and he had already acted as consulent for Stellenbosch in earlier vacancy years. July 1749 therefore returned the oak village to a shared-pulpit arrangement while the Cape first chair still rested on Van der Spuy with unpaid help from the highly esteemed Le Sueur. Two country congregations now depended on one Drakenstein stipend. [3]
At Roodezands Kerk the Rev. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring remained. At Zwartland the congregation was still without a clergyman after the Rev. Rutger Andries Weerman’s transfer to Batavia in December 1748, at his own desire. Calendar 1749 thus paired a fresh Stellenbosch vacancy with an ongoing Zwartland empty chair inside the five-parish map of 1745. Meyring held the Waveren pulpit; Van Echten covered Drakenstein and Stellenbosch as consulent; Van der Spuy and Le Sueur covered Table Valley; Zwartland waited on the directors. The paper map of five Reformed parishes ran through the year with two rural pulpits dependent on temporary arrangements. [3]
Double Earthquake Shock — 27 August 1749
That the Cape is subject to occasional shocks of earthquake was experienced in the early morning of the 5th of September 1739, and again at daybreak on the 27th of August 1749. In the first instance there had been a single shock; in the second there were two in quick succession. The August morning therefore entered the settlement’s written memory not as a new kind of disaster but as a second, sharper visit of a known Cape fact: the ground could move, and it could move twice before the sun was well up. [3]
On both occasions there was a rolling noise, as of passing thunder. Beyond causing alarm, no damage was done. The August double shock therefore fixed itself as a natural scare without ruined walls, fallen chimneys, or a day of fasting and prayer of the kind the council had appointed against locusts on the 22nd of February 1747. It was an event of minutes rather than of reconstruction. Table Valley, the Castle, the Dutch church that had hosted English rites in April, and the inland pulpits all stood after the rolling noise as before. [3]
The earlier shock had fallen in the first months of Swellengrebel’s government, in the same year as the Barbier rising and the San commando work of 1739. The later pair fell in his tenth year, after the April retirement letter, Horak’s installation, the English Sunday, and Arendsen’s death. Coming in that sequence, the earthquake fixed a physical punctuation on a political and clerical year without altering the administrative map. No placaat followed it. No battery was rebuilt. No parish boundary moved. [3]
For a settlement that had watched locusts strip the trees in December 1746, had fasted in February 1747, and had seen the Reygersdaal go to pieces between Dassen and Robben islands in October of that year, an earthquake that did no damage was a scare that left the harvest and the roadstead untouched. Meat prices had doubled in the locust months and then eased; grain and wine had returned to ordinary export. The double shock of August 1749 did not reopen those accounts. It simply reminded Table Valley, at daybreak, that the Cape’s ground was not as still as its peacetime government. [3]
Shipping, Simon’s Bay, and the Open Pulpits — 1749
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 Company ships through the winter seasons of this decade. The average number touching at South African ports was thus 73 yearly across the wider span. English hulls remained the largest foreign class, which is why a returning Boscawen commodore could fill the Dutch church with his people on one April Sunday. [3]
The Simon’s Town establishment on the southern shore—magazine, hospital, and quarters begun after Governor-General Van Imhof’s site choice in February 1743—remained under a small post with the title of postholder. Swellengrebel had had to ride repeatedly to that bay to supervise the building after the commissioner’s visit. Sergeant Justinus Blas, appointed postholder in March 1748, still framed that winter harbour while the abandoned Table Bay mole, carried to 351 feet by the close of 1746 with money, labour, and even convicts sent from Batavia, stayed unfinished because the costs had proved too high. Homeward English men-of-war in 1749 therefore used the same Table Bay roadstead that Boscawen’s outward fleet had filled the year before, not the winter creek under Blas. [3] [9]
No new wreck stained this calendar on the South African coast. The Visch of May 1740 and the Reygersdaal of October 1747 remained the recent Company disasters in local memory; the French Centaur and the Danish Elephant still lay ahead of the next harvest. Homeward English hulls refreshed, took in meat and wine at the restored staple prices, and sailed. The peacetime roadstead after the Tartar truce was busy without being tragic. [3]
Clerical staffing at the year’s close left Van der Spuy sole paid Cape minister with Le Sueur’s assistance, Van Echten covering Drakenstein and Stellenbosch as consulent after Arendsen’s death, Meyring at Roodezand, and Zwartland empty after Weerman’s December departure. The five-parish paper map of 1745 thus ran through 1749 with two rural pulpits dependent on temporary arrangements, while the Dutch church in Table Valley had, for one April Sunday, also held an English congregation under an allied chaplain. Shipping and pulpits therefore told the same peacetime story: more English faces on shore than in any earlier decade of the Swellengrebel government, and fewer settled ministers than the five-parish map required. [3]
Settlement, Staples, and the Quiet Agricultural Year — 1749
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 exports of the colony. Calendar 1749 sat inside that ordinary run: no famine placaat, no rust year, no locust fast. [3]
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 after the Indian authorities had briefly cut wheat to 9s. 4d.—still framed the staple cash side of settled agriculture. 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. Placaats forbidding further eastern move and prescribing boundaries continued to be issued; once beyond Swellendam the graziers felt they could treat such orders with contempt, knowing the penalties could no longer be enforced. [3] [4]
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 1749 without a fresh dated conviction. The government had caused strict inquiry to be made, with the object of bringing offenders to justice when farmers were said to have shot down women and children as well as men while recovering cattle and punishing the murderers of their servants; evidence sufficient to secure conviction had not been obtained. Coastal occupation still stood only a few miles east of Mossel Bay, and the Great Brak limit of January 1745 still formally checked Gamtoos advances. [3]
Among the older French farms the year closed an estate. Jacob de Villiers, stated in his will in 1719 to be of Burgundy and aged fifty-eight, had married Margaretha Gardiol of Provence, born 1674, and had died on the 17th of May 1735. Inventory in her estate was filed in June 1749. The three de Villiers brothers—Abraham, Jacob, and Pierre—had been sent out from near La Rochelle on account of their knowledge of the vine; Abraham had been among the first deacons of the French congregation, a heemraad, and captain of the burgher cavalry at Drakenstein. June’s filing therefore marked, on paper, the passing of a Provence widow from one of the vine households that still supplied ordinary wine at the Company’s legger price and Constantia casks whenever they could be got. [8]
Calendar 1749 therefore combined the Orange prince’s 25 March elevation over the Company, Swellengrebel’s April retirement request and the council’s recommendation of Tulbagh, Horak’s succession to Rhenius at Swellendam, the 20 April English service in the Dutch church for homeward Boscawen ships, Arendsen’s July death and Van Echten’s consulent duty at Stellenbosch, the double earthquake shock of 27 August, a June inventory in a Gardiol–de Villiers estate, and a quiet agricultural year under ordinary staple prices after the locust plague had passed. The governor still sat. The secunde still waited on a metropolitan answer. The ground had moved twice at daybreak and then been still. [3] [8] [9]