Boer History1750 at the Cape of Good Hope: Centaur Wreck, Swellendam Erven, and Tulbagh’s Appointment
Swellengrebel Still Governor, Tulbagh Named — 1750
Calendar 1750 opened with Hendrik Swellengrebel still in the first chair, Ryk Tulbagh still secunde, and Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn still independent fiscal. The hierarchy fixed by the directors on the 14th of April 1739 therefore ran into an eleventh 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. In April 1749 he had written for permission to retire and spend the remainder of his life in the Netherlands—the fashion among high officers who had accumulated wealth—yet no new commission had rearranged the Castle chairs through December of that request year. The man who had asked to go home still sat the first chair when January opened. [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. Kindness, common sense, and long local experience, rather than brilliance of talent, were what the settlement credited him with. He was a widower: Helena Wilhelmina ten Damme had died in December 1746, and only toward the end of 1747 had he been able to smile again, when Orange news from the Netherlands gave the Castle a public face. Except two sons studying at Utrecht, his near relatives still lived at the Cape. The same despatch that had carried his wish to retire had also carried a request from the remaining members of the council that, if the directors consented, the secunde Tulbagh might be appointed in his stead. [3] [9]
The directors and the stadtholder consented to what was asked. On the 1st of April 1750 a despatch was received at the Cape announcing the appointment of Mr Tulbagh as governor and of Mr Sergius Swellengrebel as secunde. The retiring governor was permitted to transfer the administration whenever he chose and to proceed to Europe as admiral of a homeward-bound fleet. Calendar 1750 therefore held the legal naming of the new government while Swellengrebel still sat through the working year. Day-to-day orders, wreck relief, district surveys, pulpit arrivals, and frontier inquiries still ran under his signature. Tulbagh’s promotion was sealed paper; the first chair was not yet empty. Sergius, born in Amsterdam in 1694, had arrived in 1712, risen to adjunct fiscal, and repatriated in 1722. The April letter named him second-in-command under his nephew’s successor; it did not yet put him in the Keizersgracht house. [3] [9]
The named successor still lived as secunde in the larger house on Keizersgracht to which he had moved after 1739. He had been born at Utrecht on the 21st of May 1699, eldest son of Dirk Tulbagh and Catharina Cattepoel, and had reached the Cape in 1716 as a teenager of sixteen on twelve guilders a month, first under storekeeper Jan de la Fontaine. In 1718 he had become adjunct-secretary of the council of policy; in 1722, when Swellengrebel was secretary, he had become that man’s senior clerk. He had an innate sense of neatness and accuracy, a strong memory, and a habit of keeping his word. Unselfish, compassionate, tolerant, and incorruptible were the marks the settlement already put on him. In 1747 he had sent his widowed mother six hundred guilders each quarter, an allowance that no one in the settlement then knew of. The April despatch did not change that daily character. It only wrote, in Holland’s hand, the name the remaining councillors had already asked to see in the first chair. [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 Jan Andries Horak, who in April 1749 had succeeded Johannes Theophilus Rhenius, 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 1750 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. The year would add wrecks, survey pegs, a pulpit at Zwartland, a paper argument about more colonists, and a sealed succession—without emptying the first chair. [3] [9]
French Centaur Ashore near Cape Agulhas — 19 January 1750
At dawn on the 19th of January 1750 the French ship Centaur, homeward bound from Mauritius, ran ashore near Cape Agulhas in perfectly fine weather. Her crew of about three hundred souls and about one hundred passengers, including nine ladies and several children, got safely to land. Fine weather removed the drama of a winter gale. It did not remove the labour of a dry landing on a coast whose farms stood thin between the Agulhas strand and Table Valley. [3]
They suffered great hardships before they reached the Cape. Distance, thirst, and the thin farm chain turned a dry landing into a hard march. As soon as intelligence of the disaster was received at the castle, waggons and provisions were sent south to meet them. The settlement did not invent the rescue system for this wreck alone. It used the same inland roads and farm hospitality that already fed castaways and scorbutic crews in other seasons: the same ox-waggon economy that carried wheat to the magazines and wine to the roadstead. A French hull on a Dutch shore still drew Cape carts. [3]
The Centaur was not a Company ship. She flew a French flag and carried a passenger list large enough to fill a small village. Yet the Cape treated the people as castaways on its own doorstep. The mid-century colony had become a permanent shore station: a place that could hear of disaster on the Agulhas coast and still answer with waggons before the survivors died of thirst. January’s wreck opened the year with a foreign emergency rather than a district founding or a battle. It also showed how far the refreshment station had grown since the first wooden fort: several hundred unexpected mouths could be met on the road north because farms, magazines, and a Castle secretariat already existed to order the meeting.
The wreck sat in a longer coastal memory. In the night between the 5th and 6th of May 1740 the Company’s outward-bound Visch had run ashore above the castle in a stiff gale; on the 25th of October 1747 the outward-bound Reygersdaal had gone to pieces between Dassen and Robben islands, only twenty men getting to land after scurvy had already taken one hundred and twenty-five. Those had been Company hulls in wind or disease. The Centaur was a foreign ship in perfectly fine weather. The contrast mattered. A calm Agulhas morning could wreck a homeward Indiaman as surely as a north-west gale in Table Bay, and the Cape’s duty in either case was the same: get the living inland, feed them, and count the cost in oxen, bread, and time. [3]
Swellendam: First Private Building Sites Surveyed — 1750
The district of Swellendam had received its name on the 26th of October 1747, when the council of policy decided that the country beyond the Lower Breede should bear Governor Swellengrebel’s name joined with Helena’s Dam, and the seat of magistracy took the same title. Building sites for the use of persons not in the government service were first surveyed there in 1750. That survey is the year’s local founding act: not a new district name, but the first legal path for private erven beside the Company offices. [3] [9]
Landdrost Rhenius and the district councillors had chosen a site on the Cornlands river, with mountains close in front and irrigable soil around. Little streams from the Langebergen feed a valley that stretches from the Warm Bokkeveld toward the sea. One of those streams, for want of a more original name, was called the Cornlands river. It winds through a dell some miles in length before it joins the Breede. There the drostdy and other necessary buildings had already risen after the governor and council, on the 25th of October 1746, had given permission to use the ground selected. For a time the court had met at the residence of one of the heemraden. The government had left the choice of seat to the court itself and refused to eject Company tenants from better farm sites. Time, inspection, and discussion had produced the Cornlands dell. [3]
In the middle of the century few people could maintain themselves at that seat except by farming, so many years elapsed before the place could fairly be called more than a hamlet. The 1750 surveys opened the legal path for private erven beside the Company offices. Private plots implied shopkeepers, artisans, and families who would live by the drostdy, not only graziers who rode in for cases. The year converted an official nucleus into a place where free persons could take surveyed ground under ordinary colonial forms. Horak, in the landdrost’s chair since April 1749, inherited that hamlet at the moment it first offered street lines to men not on the Company’s pay. [3]
The new erven sat at the eastern edge of a colony that still measured its inland reach by cattle runs of five or six thousand acres, each held on annual lease at two pounds ten shillings a year. Upon the slightest fault in a run, the occupier did not hesitate to abandon it and move farther into the interior. A vast region, almost untenanted since the small-pox desolation of 1718, lay open before the colonists. Survey pegs at the Cornlands river and loan-farm drift beyond Mossel Bay belonged to the same eastward pressure. One was a street. The other was a trek. Calendar 1750 recorded both without pretending that a hamlet’s first private lots had yet made a town. [3]
Directors Ask about More Colonists — 1750
The farmers were generally in such a condition that the accumulation of wealth was impossible. Produce prices, Company dues, hired harvest labour, and the cost of European artisans kept most households close to subsistence even when seasons were fair. The Company purchased as much ordinary wine as it needed at five pounds five shillings and ten pence a legger clear, and as much wheat as it needed at ten shillings and eight pence a muid, from which the tithe was deducted, leaving nine shillings and seven pence halfpenny clear for the grower. Surplus could be sold to anyone who chose to buy, upon paying first the Company’s dues, secondly a cut to the licensed dealers in wine if the buyer were a ship’s master or purser, and thirdly a fee to the fiscal when ships’ people were purchasers. In 1750 the directors mooted the subject of increasing the number of colonists, and the council of policy called for reports. [3]
The heemraden of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein already held that there were too many European families in the country to get a good living, and that people were anxious about the future for their children’s sake. The burgher councillors went to the root of the matter. They knew of no means by which a greater number of people could obtain a living unless free exportation of produce to all countries was permitted. In the same reports the heemraden referred to a change then rapidly taking place in the old settled districts: the disappearance of grass and the springing up of small bushy plants in its stead. Pasture was not only a frontier question on the Breede. It was changing under the feet of farms that had already been worked for generations. [3]
The directors’ 1750 question thus met a local answer that mixed demography, trade law, and the face of the veld. More mouths without freer markets looked, to the district boards, like sharper want—not denser prosperity. The Cape could absorb castaways from Agulhas. It did not, in the heemraden’s view, need a fresh immigrant wave locked inside the Company’s staple cage. Complaints of wine quality continued despite testing every legger purchased and despite skilled instructors sent from Europe. The staple floor was set in Batavia and the Seventeen’s chambers, not in the Stellenbosch oak shade. [3]
The village of Stellenbosch stood embowered among its oaks, rebuilt after the fire of 1710. Travellers described its beauty in glowing terms. The board of landdrost and heemraden still acted as a local court and as what later ages would call municipal and divisional work. 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 the burgher Pieter Wion had been allowed a butcher’s shop on condition that every Wednesday and Saturday he offer wholesome fresh mutton at twopence a pound, or sixpence for four pounds, and beef four times a year at the same rates, under a five-pound fine to the deacons for the poor. Hand mills and small water mills were tolerated only if the owner satisfied the lessee of the public mill: the district was taking one hundred and twenty-six pounds thirteen shillings and four pence a year for each of the Stellenbosch and Drakenstein mill leases. Michiel Otto of Hottentots-Holland might grind for his own household on his farm mill, but he paid the Stellenbosch miller the same fees, and the permission was not to form a precedent. [3]
That municipal web is the ground on which the 1750 colonist question stood. A village that fixed mutton prices for the poor, farmed mill monopolies, and charged a muid of wheat for a mountain pass did not look, to its own board, like a country short of hands. It looked like a country short of markets. Free export to all countries was the burgher councillors’ only proposed remedy. Without it, more European families meant more anxiety for children already watching grass give way to bush. The Castle could survey erven at Swellendam. It could not, from Table Valley, invent a larger world price for Cape wheat.
San Border Rumours on the Swellendam Frontier — 1750
Europeans and Khoikhoi were living together on friendly terms in much of the settled country, but the peace was sometimes disturbed by San marauders. In 1747, and again in 1750, 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 government caused strict inquiry to be made, with the object of bringing the offenders to justice. It was impossible to obtain evidence sufficient to secure conviction. The year therefore left a hard record of accusation without a courtroom finish: frontier violence reported, investigated, and unproved in the forms the high court required. [3]
Along the coast the European occupation still stood only a few miles farther east than Mossel Bay in the mid-century settlement pattern. Some graziers had taken possession of 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 to the westward of the Great Brak river. The circumstances under which the graziers lived favoured expansion. They could not long be kept within assigned limits. Cattle runs of five or six thousand acres, annual leases, and the slight fault that justified a move farther inland all pulled the same way as the unproved shots on the Swellendam border. [3] [4]
Farther east, beyond any landdrost’s ordinary ride, the Xhosa world was also in motion. Palo, head of the nation from 1702, had placed his own location in the Izeli country while the Cape’s white graziers moved toward him from the west. His great son Gcaleka, founder of the Amagcaleka, had crossed the Kei some time before 1750 and settled in the Komgha country. His right-hand brother Rarabe was already the enterprising, brave figure whose popularity would later split following from the great house. Calendar 1750 did not yet bring those houses to a colonial battlefield. It did place a Xhosa westward step and a Boer eastward step in the same generation, with Swellendam’s new erven and the Gamtoos recall as the Cape’s visible marks of the meeting that was still years from a named frontier war. [4]
So 1750’s San rumours sat beside a wider frontier truth. Stock recovery, unproved massacre stories, pressure beyond Mossel Bay, and Gcaleka’s seat west of the Kei all belonged to the same two-sided movement that Swellendam’s new erven only partly institutionalised. The council could survey a street at the Cornlands river. It could not easily police every shot fired on a distant cattle trail, nor could it see, from Table Valley, the Komgha settlements that already lay east of any placaat line the Castle still pretended to hold at the Great Brak.
Voltelen Takes Zwartland — August 1750
In the staff of clergymen the year closed a vacancy that had stood since December 1748. The Rev. Rutger Andries Weerman, of Zwartlands kerk, had at his own desire been transferred to Batavia. The congregation remained without a clergyman until August 1750, when the Rev. Christiaan Benjamin Voltelen arrived from the Netherlands and took over the duty. Zwartland thus received the only new resident pulpit of the calendar. The combined ecclesiastical council established in 1743 still bound the five congregations into one colonial church order. [3]
At the Cape the Rev. Petrus van der Spuy remained sole Company clergyman of the Table Valley congregation after Ruwardus Cloppenburg had been suspended in January 1748 and dismissed in March of that year without rank or salary. He was greatly assisted by the Rev. François le Sueur, the governor’s brother-in-law, 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—having purchased a farm at Rondebosch on the estate of his wife’s father, Johannes Swellengrebel. The Castle family and the Cape pulpit therefore still met in one household even after Le Sueur had been forced off the stipend. [3] [9]
Stellenbosch still had no resident clergyman. The Rev. Edward Arendsen, sent out by the directors in September 1747, had died in July 1749. The Rev. Salomon van Echten of Drakenstein was required to act as consulent of Stellenbosch until the directors could make another appointment. The index of the printed succession would later show that the next resident name, Johannes Appeldoorn, did not arrive in this calendar. Roodezands kerk remained under the Rev. Arnoldus Maurits Meyring, who had held the post since September 1743. Five parishes, one new arrival, two pulpits carried by neighbours: that was the church map Voltelen entered in August. [3]
August’s pulpit at Zwartland and August’s Danish wreck at the Gouritz belonged to the same shore year: a Netherlands clergyman stepping into a long-empty country church, and a waterless foreign crew stepping onto a river mouth east of Mossel Bay. The Company could still staff a parish from the Fatherland when it chose. It could not staff every frontier trail. Voltelen’s arrival is the year’s quiet ecclesiastical date, easily lost beside Agulhas and the Gouritz, but it closed the Zwartland vacancy that Weerman’s transfer had opened eighteen months before.
Danish Elephant Run Ashore at the Gouritz — 8 August 1750
On the 8th of August 1750 a Danish ship named the Elephant, homeward bound from Tranquebar, was purposely run ashore close to the mouth of the Gouritz river. Some days later she went to pieces. She had made a long and disastrous passage. Provisions ran short, and when land was sighted there was not a drop of fresh water on board. The crew therefore ran her ashore as the only means of saving their lives. They, to the number of sixty-five men, got safely to land, and after a time reached the Cape. [3]
Unlike the Centaur, the Elephant was a deliberate sacrifice of hull to thirst. The Gouritz mouth was not a harbour of choice. It was the first beach that could stop a waterless ship. The men who walked inland from that river joined the same colonial network that had already absorbed the French passengers in January: farms, waggons, and a Castle that treated foreign flags as well as Company hulls as last-refuge business. January’s French wreck and August’s Danish stranding book-ended a coast year in which the settlement did not choose the wrecks. It absorbed their people into magazines, farms, and roads built for fleets that still measured success by greens, water, and men who could stand.
The Gouritz was already a colonial river in more than a wreck. Louis Fourie, a French-refugee agriculturist of the Wagonmakers Valley, had received a grant in 1699 and named it Slange Rivier; he had lived there until his death, which must have been about 1750, when an inventory in his estate was filed. In terms of his will the place was to devolve upon his son Louis, who waived his right, and it was purchased at auction by Gabriel Rossouw. He had also owned Zeekoedrift on the Gouritz river. The Danish crew’s landing therefore took place on a coast already named in a refugee inventory of the same year: one family’s drift, another nation’s thirst. [8]
Fourie had married first Susanna Cordier, daughter of the refugee Louis Cordier, who died about 1715, and then Anna Jourdan, daughter of Pierre Jourdan. At his death he left five children or representatives by the first wife and eight by the second. The inventory year and the Elephant year are the same calendar. A Huguenot farm changing hands by auction, a Danish hull going to pieces at the river mouth, and Swellendam’s first private lots being pegged farther west along the Langebergen all belong to one mid-century fact: the colony had become old enough for estates to close and still young enough for foreign crews to walk inland from an unnamed beach. [8]
Simon’s Bay Traffic Tallied to the Close of 1750
Simon’s Bay began to be used in 1742, after the directors resolved in 1741 that their fleets should refresh there from the 15th of May to the 15th of August—the season of north-west gales in Table Bay. The roadstead offered secure shelter, though land access was difficult and fresh provisions expensive until boats in fine weather could ply from the head of Kalk Bay and shorten the cartage. Sergeant Justinus Blas still held the post. Before the close of 1750, seventy-seven ships, all belonging to the Company, had put into that harbour. [3] [9]
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. The average number touching at South African ports was thus about seventy-three yearly when those flags were counted together. Simon’s Bay’s seventy-seven Company entries by the close of 1750 are a winter-door count inside that larger tally: not a rival port so much as a second latch for the months when Table Bay under the Lion’s Rump was unsafe. [3]
That winter roadstead mattered because Table Bay remained dangerous when the north-west blew. The mole project had already been given up at three hundred and fifty-one feet in the locust year. Simon’s Bay gave Company hulls a second door. By 1750 the experiment of 1742 had become a measurable traffic count, not only a chart note. Foreign wrecks on the Agulhas and Gouritz coasts and Company wintering in False Bay together defined the Cape’s maritime year: one shore that rescued French and Danish strangers, another that logged seventy-seven of its own ships in eight winter seasons. [3] [9]
English hulls still used Table Bay in peacetime memory: the Centurion, Commodore George Anson, in March and April 1744; Admiral Boscawen in April 1748 with twenty-six men-of-war and transports, troops camped above the Company’s garden; and on the 20th of April 1749 an English chaplain’s service in the Dutch church in Table Valley for homeward men of that fleet. Calendar 1750 added no such English Sunday. It added a French dawn at Agulhas, a Danish thirst at the Gouritz, and a completed Company count at Simon’s Bay. The alliance that had landed Boscawen’s recruits still framed the roadstead; the year’s own flags on the beach were French and Danish. [3]
Fiftieth Penny, Staples, and the Quiet Agricultural Frame — 1750
During the European war closed by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the United Netherlands had been put to enormous expense. Public finances required special taxation. On the 29th of December 1750 the States General imposed a tax called the fiftieth penny upon the inhabitants of the United Provinces—each person to pay a rate nearly equal to five pence in the pound upon the value of his property. The ordinance is the Cape year’s last dated European stroke: a war-debt instrument made in the Netherlands. Table Bay still answered to European balance sheets even when the Castle’s own ledgers had not yet been told to collect the penny from Cape households. [3]
Through the longer stretch 1738–1750 the colony had known several bad seasons and one exceptionally good one, so exports fluctuated. Drought in 1738 had left only 340 muids of wheat and 85 of rye to send abroad in 1739; rust had then destroyed the next crops until famine was feared and a placaat capped wheat at eleven shillings and a penny a muid; the 1740 harvest, after that famine, had been the best ever known, with 17,000 muids exported once the magazines were full. Locusts in December 1746 and through the first months of 1747 had doubled the price of meat. The remaining years were free from excessive drought and insect plagues. Average exports to India in that printed period were 7,539 muids of wheat, 116 muids of rye, 289 muids of peas, and 271 muids of beans. Of ordinary wine, every year on an average 384 leggers went to Batavia, exclusive of that supplied to the ships. 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. [3]
By 1750 the mid-century Cape was a refreshment and staple station under a governor already marked for retirement and a secunde already named to succeed him. Company wine and wheat purchases still set the floor of farm income. Farmers sold surplus only after dues, licensed dealers’ cuts, and fiscal fees when ships’ people bought. Cattle runs still pulled men inland on annual leases, while old districts watched grass give way to small bush. The colony could feed fleets and bury foreign wreckage. It could not easily multiply free households without freer export. That is the answer the 1750 colonist question met, and it is the agricultural frame in which Swellendam’s first private lots were pegged. [3]
In the old French wards the same calendar closed lives as well as hulls. Fourie’s inventory at Slange Rivier and Zeekoedrift has already been named. At Stellenbosch the widow of Antoine Faure—born at Orange in 1683, arrived in 1714 in the Company’s service, voorlezer and schoolmaster at Stellenbosch from 1719, married in 1714 to Rachel de Villiers, daughter of the refugee Abraham de Villiers, and dead by the joint will of 1736—applied in 1750 for a piece of ground at Stellenbosch. A schoolmaster’s widow asking for village ground, a refugee farmer’s estate going to auction, and the directors asking whether more colonists could live, all spoke the same language: the settlement was old enough to inherit, and still closed enough that its boards feared more mouths without more markets. [8]
So 1750 closed without a battle or a new district name. It left wreck survivors on the roads from Agulhas and the Gouritz, survey pegs at Swellendam, a paper argument about more colonists without free export, unproven blood on the San frontier and a Xhosa seat at Komgha already west of the Kei, seventy-seven Company entries logged at Simon’s Bay, Voltelen in the Zwartland pulpit, a sealed appointment for Tulbagh while Swellengrebel still governed, Fourie’s inventory and Faure’s widow’s ground, and a States General tax that had been written in the Netherlands on the year’s last working days. The first chair was still occupied. The name of the next man was already on the despatch of the 1st of April. [3] [4] [8] [9]