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, with the governor still holding the rank of councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India conferred in March 1744. [3]
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 that year, and a shore line of fortifications whose Imhof battery and the batteries toward Salt River still framed Table Bay defence after the wartime mounted country watch had ended with the truce news of 26 September 1748. [3]
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, the governor’s formal request to retire, a new landdrost at Swellendam, an English service in the Dutch church for homeward men of the allied fleet, the death of Stellenbosch’s resident clergyman, and a double earthquake shock at the end of August. [3]
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. [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. [3]
Intelligence of the resumption of the stadtholderate 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: the prince’s new power to appoint on the Seventeen’s advice, which would shortly shape the consent given to Swellengrebel’s retirement and to Tulbagh’s succession. [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. [3]
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. [3]
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. [3]
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. The directors and the stadtholder consented; a despatch of appointment for Tulbagh as governor and for Sergius Swellengrebel as secunde reached the Cape only on the 1st of April 1750, and the formal transfer of administration waited until the 27th of February 1751. Within calendar 1749, therefore, the binding local fact was the April request and the council’s recommendation of Tulbagh, not yet the change of chairs. [3]
Jan Andries Horak Landdrost of Swellendam — April 1749
In April 1749 Jan Andries Horak succeeded Johannes Theophilus Rhenius as landdrost of Swellendam. Rhenius had held the eastern magistracy since the directors’ creation of a full landdrost beyond the Lower Breede in August 1745 and since the naming of district and drostdy on the 26th of October 1747. Horak’s April succession therefore opened the second landdrostate of the young district while the Cornlands River seat was still more hamlet than village. [3]
Building sites for the use of persons not in the government service were first surveyed at the Swellendam seat only in 1750. 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 surveyed free burgher grid. 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 would still be the landdrost to whom Ensign August Frederik Beutler wrote in 1752 when a half-famished French sailor from the brig Nécessaire was sent westward from the Gaurits with a request that he be forwarded to the Cape. The April 1749 appointment thus fixed the civil name that would later receive that exploratory correspondence, while within this year the administrative fact was simply the end of Rhenius’s tenure and the opening of Horak’s. [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, and the troops had formed a camp above the Company garden while Great Britain and the Netherlands stood in alliance. 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. [3]
Later English uses of the same building—the burial of William Wake, recently governor of Bombay, on the 9th of February 1751, and another officer’s funeral on the 5th of February 1752—lay ahead. Within calendar 1749 the recorded fact was the living Sunday service under English rites, granted by a Dutch Reformed consistory and Company government still treating British seamen as friends after Aix-la-Chapelle peace. [3]
Death of Rev. Edward Arendsen at Stellenbosch — July 1749
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. [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 Petrus van der Spuy with unpaid help from the highly esteemed François le Sueur. [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, and it would remain vacant until August 1750, when the Rev. Christiaan Benjamin Voltelen arrived from the Netherlands. Calendar 1749 thus paired a fresh Stellenbosch vacancy with an ongoing Zwartland empty chair inside the five-parish map of 1745. [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. [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 entered the settlement’s written memory as a natural scare without ruined walls or fallen chimneys—an event of minutes rather than of reconstruction. [3]
Coming in the same year as Swellengrebel’s retirement letter, Horak’s installation, the English church service, and Arendsen’s death, the earthquake fixed a physical punctuation on a political and clerical year without altering the administrative map. 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]
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 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. [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. 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, stayed unfinished. Homeward English men-of-war in 1749 therefore used the same Table Bay roadstead that Boscawen’s outward fleet had filled the year before. [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 until Voltelen’s 1750 arrival. The five-parish paper map of 1745 thus ran through 1749 with two rural pulpits dependent on temporary arrangements. [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, while Constantia wine, ivory, skins, ostrich plumes, and dried fruit also left the colony. [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—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. [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 and again for 1750 left 1749 without a fresh dated conviction, while 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]
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, and a quiet agricultural year under ordinary staple prices after the locust plague had passed. [3]