Boer History1751 at the Cape of Good Hope: Tulbagh Governor, De la Caille, and the Fiftieth Penny
Tulbagh Assumes Office — 27 February 1751
Calendar 1751 opened with the sealed succession of the year before still waiting on a ship. The directors and the stadtholder had already named Ryk Tulbagh governor and Sergius Swellengrebel secunde in the despatch received on the 1st of April 1750. The retiring governor had been permitted to transfer the administration whenever he chose and to proceed to Europe as admiral of a homeward-bound fleet. It was nearly a year before the final arrangements were made. Through January and most of February Hendrik Swellengrebel still sat the first chair. On the 27th of February 1751 the administration was handed over. Tulbagh was not quite fifty-two years of age. [3] [9]
He was the eldest son of Dirk Tulbagh and Catharina Cattepoel, born in the city of Utrecht on the 21st of May 1699. The family was plain, honest, and respectable; several near relatives, and among them in later years his father, laid down their lives on the battlefield in the cause of the Netherlands. His parents removed from Utrecht to Bergen-op-Zoom while he was still an infant. There he remained at school until he was sixteen, when his friends considered him sufficiently well educated to make his way in the world. Other capital than his own good qualities and the knowledge gained at school he had none. In 1716 he entered the Company’s service under an agreement for five years, embarked in the ship Terhorst, and landed at the Cape not yet seventeen, on twelve guilders a month. His first work was under storekeeper Jan de la Fontaine. [3] [9]
Colonel De Chavonnes observed that the youth spent leisure hours in useful books, was a fair accountant, and wrote a clearer hand than many old clerks. In 1718 he was placed as assistant clerk in the office of the secretary of the council of policy on twenty-five guilders. In 1722, when Swellengrebel was secretary, Tulbagh became that man’s senior clerk. In 1725, when Adriaan van Kervel became fiscal, Tulbagh took the vacant secretaryship. He remained in it without a vote until the 16th of September 1728, when he became a member of the council of policy and received a seat in the high court of justice. On the 14th of April 1739, by order of the Assembly of Seventeen, he became secunde and senior merchant, and president of the high court—an office then always held by the secunde. He had taken to wife a Cape-born young lady, Elizabeth Swellengrebel, sister of the man who would sit the first chair until February of this year. The wedding was in 1736; the couple had lived first in a modest house in Strand Street, then, after the secunde’s appointment, in a larger house of two storeys and eight rooms with a little garden on Keizersgracht. [3] [9]
Continuity of persons was the point of the succession as much as novelty of title. The same castle, the same boards, and many of the same officers remained; the chair changed. Independent fiscal Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn still held his office. Landdrost Jan Andries Horak still sat Swellendam, having succeeded Johannes Theophilus Rhenius in April 1749. Adriaan van Schoor still sat Stellenbosch and Drakenstein, named after Pieter Lourens’s death in September 1748. Five Reformed parishes still stood after the boundary council of 30 August 1745. The wartime mounted country watch had ended with the truce news of 26 September 1748. Calendar 1751 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. The year would add a hand-over, an English burial under the church floor, a French astronomer’s instruments, a postholder at Simon’s Town, and a property tax headed by the governor’s own name. [3]
Tradition already had a word for the man now in the first chair: a wise, just, and benevolent ruler; a kind, homely, fatherly officer whose fame would rest less on founding or on grandeur than on everyday conduct. Dark-brown eyes, almost black, meeting a glance full and straight; features regular rather than handsome; honesty and firmness without a challenging sparkle. Unselfish, compassionate, tolerant, and incorruptible were the marks the settlement put on him. He had an innate sense of neatness and accuracy, a strong memory, and a habit of keeping his word. In 1747 he had sent his widowed mother six hundred guilders each quarter—nearly half a governor’s later salary—without a soul in the settlement knowing of the allowance. The February hand-over did not invent that character. It only put it in the first chair. [3] [7] [9]
Stellenbosch Heemraden Answer the Directors — 11 January 1751
Before the chair changed, the old boards still answered Holland’s paper. In 1750 the directors had mooted the subject of increasing the number of colonists, and the council of policy had called for reports. The reply of the board of heemraden of Stellenbosch and Drakenstein is dated the 11th of January 1751. In it the heemraden expressed their opinion that there were already 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. The first dated Cape paper of Tulbagh’s calendar year was therefore not a commission or a salute. It was a district board telling the Seventeen that mouths already outran markets. [3]
In the same report the heemraden incidentally 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. The pastoral floor under the wheat and wine wards was shifting even as Holland asked whether more families could be planted. Stellenbosch itself was by this time quite embowered among its oaks. It had been quickly rebuilt after the fire of 1710, and travellers described its beauty in glowing terms. The board of landdrost and heemraden acted as a court of justice and also performed the duties later associated with municipal and divisional councils: a pontoon on the Berg river and the Roodezand pass kept by a farmer who took yearly from every family beyond the Berg either a muid of wheat or eleven shillings; mill leases at Stellenbosch and Drakenstein worth £126 13s. 4d. a year each, with household hand-mills tolerated only if the lessee was paid as if the corn had gone to the district mill. [3]
That January answer sat inside the staple cage the directors themselves had built. 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 the old districts watched grass give way to small bush. The heemraden were not refusing children out of spite. They were reading the same ledgers the Castle read: accumulation of wealth among ordinary farmers was generally impossible; more households without freer export would only multiply anxiety. Calendar 1751 therefore opened with a paper no of a particular kind—the no of a settled wheat-and-wine country that could feed fleets and still feared more mouths. [3]
The eastern magistracy named for the retiring governor remained a mere hamlet. Horak still held Swellendam. The country along the coast was occupied a few miles farther eastward than Mossel Bay; some graziers had taken land on the Gamtoos and had been required, in January 1745, to return west of the Great Brak. Circumstances so favourable to expansion could not long keep men within assigned limits, but January 1751 did not found a new district. It recorded, from the oak village, that the old districts already felt full. The hand-over of February would change the first chair. It would not, in this year, open the export the burgher councillors had named as the only remedy. [3] [4]
William Wake Buried in the Dutch Church — 9 February 1751
On the 9th of February 1751, still under Swellengrebel’s last weeks, another English service was held in the Dutch church in Table Valley. The building had already heard the rites of the church of England on the 20th of April 1749, when a commodore’s chaplain had preached for homeward men of Boscawen’s fleet. This time the occasion was a death. Mr. William Wake, recently governor of Bombay, died here while on his passage home. His widow and the captain of the ship in which he was returning requested that his body might be buried in the church with the state due to his rank. The request was complied with. [3]
Dutch officers took part in the funeral procession. The flag on the castle was lowered. The bell was tolled. Minute guns were fired from the batteries. The surgeon of the Boscawen read the English burial service, and the body was deposited in a vault below the floor of the church. Alliance memory still had a liturgy at the Cape: the same Dutch nave that had opened to an English chaplain in 1749 now opened to an English burial in 1751, with Castle honours that a Bombay governor’s widow could recognise. Peacetime after Aix-la-Chapelle did not close the church door to a foreign rank. It dressed the door with a lowered flag and a minute-gun count. [3]
The burial sat eighteen days before the hand-over. Swellengrebel still signed the Castle’s courtesy; Tulbagh still sat secunde. The English dead of the India run were not a new Cape problem. They were a reminder that Table Bay remained a Christian roadstead for more than one flag, even when the first chair was about to change from one Cape brother-in-law to the other. The Dutch Reformed nave remained the only established floor. Lutheran petitions would wait. In February 1751 the exception granted was not a second congregation. It was a vault, an English surgeon’s book, and the honours of the batteries. [3] [4]
Swellengrebel Sails for Europe — March 1751
On the day after the hand-over the late governor embarked. On the 2nd of March he sailed for Europe with a fleet of five ships, permitted to go as admiral of a homeward-bound squadron. By the beginning of 1751, after many months of waiting for a fitting return-fleet to be commanded by a retired Governor of the Cape who also carried the title of councillor extraordinary of the Indies, Hendrik Swellengrebel left the country of his birth, which he had served with unabating diligence for thirty eventful years. He had been born at the Cape on the 29th of September 1700, son of Johannes Swellengrebel, who had arrived in 1691 and become a free burgher in 1716. Kindness, common sense, and long local experience, rather than brilliance of talent, were what the settlement credited him with. [3] [9]
He took up residence at Utrecht, to be near his sons who were studying there. A few years later he found new happiness in a second marriage, leading Helena van Ruyven to the altar of the old Dom Church. He died in that city in 1763. Except those two sons, all his near relatives had still lived at the Cape when he asked leave to retire. He was a widower of December 1746, going as an old man to a country that was not his fatherland in any other sense than that his mother was a Dutch woman. His father had been by birth a Russian. Fashion among high officers who had accumulated wealth pulled him north; the March fleet made the fashion a wake. [3] [9]
Sergius Swellengrebel remained as secunde under the new arrangement. Born in Amsterdam in 1694, arrived in 1712, risen to adjunct fiscal, repatriated in 1722, he had been named second-in-command in the April 1750 letter. The name Swellengrebel thus stayed in the highest civil list even as Hendrik left the roadstead. District Swellendam kept the family title on the eastern magistracy founded in the 1740s. The retiring man’s portrait, if a last respectful glance is allowed, is not that of a brilliant ruler nor of great intellect, but of an honest, hard-working executive who continued the tradition of Maurice Pasques de Chavonnes and Jan de la Fontaine and deserved the esteem in which his people held him. [3] [9]
The March departure closed a Cape-born governorship that had run from the 14th of April 1739. It did not empty the family from the Castle. It moved the first chair one seat along a marriage connection that had already bound Tulbagh to Elizabeth and Hendrik to the same house at the corner of Berg and Wale Streets. The five-ship admiral’s wake was the visible end. The invisible end was quieter: a Cape son choosing Utrecht fashion over the oak village and the eastern hamlet that already carried his joined name. [3] [9]
Adriaan de Nys Postholder at Simon’s Town — March 1751
In March 1751 Adriaan de Nys was appointed postholder at Simon’s Town in succession to Sergeant Justinus Blas, who had held the winter station since March 1748. The winter roadstead opened in the 1740s now had a named officer at the start of Tulbagh’s government, a small administrative fact that matched the growing use of False Bay when Table Bay gales made the northern anchorage unsafe. Simon’s Bay had begun to be used in 1742. Before the close of 1750 seventy-seven ships, all belonging to the Company, had put into that harbour. [3]
The building erected in Swellengrebel’s time—four hundred and fifty feet in length, and previously serving for all purposes—still stood as the station’s long shed. Later years would add a hospital, storehouses, a stone pier, a slaughter-house, a bakery, workshops, and a dwelling for the officer in charge. March 1751 did not build those works. It named the man who would keep the winter door while they remained unbuilt. Table Bay remained the principal roadstead; Simon’s Town remained the second latch for the months when the north-west blew under the Lion’s Rump. The mole project in Table Bay had already been given up. A postholder at the False Bay shore was cheaper than a breakwater that had failed. [3] [9]
The appointment was of a piece with the year’s tone: not a new port, not a new district, but a named officer for a facility already in use. Blas had been a sergeant-postholder under the old governor. De Nys took the same winter duty under the new. Foreign wrecks of the year before—the French Centaur at Agulhas in fine weather, the Danish Elephant at the Gouritz for thirst—had shown how much the Cape already owed to shore stations and ox-waggon roads. Simon’s Town was the Company’s own winter answer to the same coast. In March the answer received a new name on the civil list. [3]
Public Presentation and Fidelity — 15 April 1751
The ceremony of public presentation to the burghers, and of receiving the promise of fidelity from the various official boards, did not take place until the 15th of April. Legal succession in February and public oath-taking in April were separated by several weeks of ordinary business under the new governor. The induction was feasted by all sections of the population with more enthusiasm than many later Castle holidays would command. General rejoicing had already marked the February hand-over. April made it visible: burghers, boards, and a governor who did not hold himself aloof. [3] [9]
As governor, the high qualities he possessed were prominently shown. He was accessible without the least difficulty to all who wished to see him. The humblest individual could pour grievances into the ears of the father of the country and be sure of a patient hearing. If complaints were well grounded, he obtained speedy redress; in any case he received good counsel. It was this quality that more than any other endeared him to the people. They knew that he studied their interests, that although he was their governor he was still their adviser and friend. No man, however good and wise, could ever gain the affections of a people like the South African colonists if he held himself aloof from them. He never sought popularity for popularity’s sake. He did not trim his sails to every favourite wind. Accessibility was not the same as compliance. [3] [9]
His probity was beyond suspicion, and that in an age when probity was hardly looked for in men holding positions such as his. Salaries of officers in the Company’s service were small, and it was taken almost as a matter of course that all who could would supplement their incomes in any way not punishable by law. Some practices were perhaps harmless; others had a tendency to lead on to real pilfering, and to make men look upon commercial immorality as after all not a very serious crime. He who became wealthy through dishonest, even fraudulent, transactions was too often admired as a sharp, clever business man. Governor Tulbagh set his face firmly against everything of this nature. He neither traded on his own account, nor would he allow any other officer of the government to do so. The fees which they were permitted to receive in certain transactions were fixed, and they were restricted from taking more. As for himself, he regulated his expenses so that he lived well within his income and allowances, and used what he had to spare in relieving the wants of others. [3]
Under his administration every man was certain of getting his dues. The petty, shameless pilfering system, often previously in vogue, under which farmers were compelled to bribe the Company’s officers before they would receive produce, and then bribe them again before proper accounts could be had, was not tolerated. The governor took care that no man was put to unnecessary delay, and that no bribes were received or false accounts rendered, so that the farmers were not exposed to injustice or vexatious treatment. In 1751 those rules were still promises measured in ordinary Castle business rather than in crisis. The first year of the new government did not open with a new district or a frontier war. It opened with a hearing-room door that stayed open after the April oaths. [3]
Abbé De la Caille Arrives — 19 April 1751
On the 19th of April 1751 the Abbé Nicolas Louis de la Caille, member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, arrived in South Africa. He had already attained celebrity in France by his astronomical researches and his writings when he resolved to visit the Cape of Good Hope with the object of making a sidereal chart of the southern skies and of measuring an arc of the meridian. He brought a letter of recommendation from the Prince of Orange to the authorities at the Cape. From Governor Tulbagh, who took a warm interest in the work, he received all the assistance that it was possible to give. The public presentation of the 15th of April was four days old. The Castle’s first scientific guest of the new government arrived while the fidelity oaths were still fresh. [3]
He remained in the colony until the 8th of March 1758. During his stay he performed an almost incredible amount of astronomical work, and all that he did was surprisingly well done. When measuring his base line on a plain east of Saldanha Bay he had the aid of an engineer officer named Muller, belonging to the Cape garrison, but for the remainder of his work in the field his only assistants were untrained and uneducated men. The 1751 arrival thus opened one of the Cape’s most durable scientific seasons: a French abbé, a garrison engineer for one baseline, and farm labour for the rest of a triangulation that would run from Table Valley toward Piketberg. [3]
The arc which he measured by triangulation extended from a point within a few yards of the later corner of Strand and Adderley streets in Cape Town to Klipfontein in Piketberg—about 1° 13′ 17.5″ by his computation. He found the degree of latitude to be 364,728.5 English feet. A later verification at the Cape, with an able staff and improved instruments between 1840 and 1848, found the French astronomer’s observatory latitude wrong by only about two seconds of arc, and the true length of a degree of latitude northward from it 364,439 English feet. The difference between the two calculations amounts to less than twenty miles for the whole circumference of the earth. The position of the stars in De la Caille’s chart was found to be equally accurate. [3]
Orange recommendation and Castle hospitality mattered as much as the instruments. The stadtholder who had been created chief director of the Company on the 25th of March 1749 now sent, through a letter, a French academician to a Dutch refreshment station. Tulbagh’s warm interest was of a piece with the open door of the April presentation: the humblest burgher and the Paris astronomer both found a governor who would hear a request and order help. Calendar 1751 therefore holds both a vault under the Dutch church floor for an English Bombay governor and a baseline party east of Saldanha for a French abbé. The roadstead’s mid-century work was not only meat, wine, and water. It was also a southern sky. [3] [9]
Fiftieth Penny Extended to Company Possessions — 20 December 1751
During the war in Europe which was brought to a close by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, the United Netherlands had been put to enormous expense. Public finances were in such a condition that it became necessary to resort to 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: every one was obliged to pay a rate nearly equal to five pence in the pound upon the value of his property. Calendar 1750 had closed with that Netherlandic ordinance. Calendar 1751 had to collect it at the Cape. [3]
On the 20th of December 1751 the governor-general, Jacob Mossel, and the council of India decreed that the tax should be paid by all Europeans in the Company’s possessions. The first names upon the list of those who paid in South Africa are those of Ryk Tulbagh and his wife Elizabeth Swellengrebel. Then come the members of the council of policy: the independent fiscal Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn, his wife Sophia Boesses, and eight children; Lieutenant-Colonel Izaak Meinertzhagen; Captain Rudolph Sigfried Allemann, his wife Alberta Meyboom, and eight children; the issuer of stores Nicholas Heyning, his wife Gertruyd Vermey, and six children; the master of the warehouses Christoffel Brand, and his wife Sarah van Brakel, also for the children of Burgert Brand and his wife Anna van der Byl; the chief salesman Cornelis Eelders, his wife Johanna Catharina van der Poel, and three children; the secretary Joseph de Grandpreez, and his wife Adriana Slotsboo. [3]
The first challenge to the governor’s popularity came in that same year, when the States General of the near-bankrupt Dutch Republic decided to impose the special property tax, and the governor-general of the Indies interpreted it as payable by all Europeans living in Company territories. Without hesitation Ryk Tulbagh and his wife Elizabeth paid up first, and inspired by their example all Company officials followed suit. That took the sting out of an abhorrent measure. Burghers queued at the Castle with their coins, still calling Rijk “Father Tulbagh”. The man who would not trade on his own account, and who had sent quiet money to a widowed mother, now put his own name at the top of a war-debt list. Accessibility in April and the first signature in December were the same character in two seasons. [3] [9]
The Cape thus paid a European war debt through a property rate that began at the top of the civil list. The ordinance of late 1750 became a Castle ledger entry in late 1751. Succession and taxation arrived in the same twelve months: a new governor and an old Netherlandic bill. Heemraden in January had said the country already held too many families for a good living. In December the same country was asked for five pence in the pound on property. The two papers do not contradict so much as they stack: a closed export and an open tax, both written from Europe, both answered at the Cape by boards and by a governor who paid first. [3]
Church, Midwife, and the First Year’s Frame — 1751
Beyond the Castle the settlement still carried five Reformed parishes. The Rev. Christiaan Benjamin Voltelen, arrived from the Netherlands in August 1750, held Zwartland. The Rev. Mr. Meyring remained at Roodezands kerk. Drakenstein’s Mr. Van Echten still acted as consulent of Stellenbosch after the death of the Rev. Edward Arendsen in July 1749. At the Cape, Mr. Van der Spuy remained clergyman of the town congregation, greatly assisted by Mr. Le Sueur, who was highly esteemed though, in accordance with the law, he could not draw a salary from the Company while he owned more than two morgen of land. Clergymen sent out from Holland were paid entirely by the government, that is, by the Company. They became civil servants: responsible in a limited measure to the Classis of Amsterdam, but really controlled by the dictates of the commander of the Cape for the time being. A Political Commissioner appointed by the governor attended consistory meetings to see that nothing was done prejudicial to the government or public. The doctrine and discipline remained that of the Dutch Reformed Church in Holland, still the established form of worship. [3] [4]
In the old French wards the same calendar closed lives as well as chairs. Maria Buisset, born at Sedan on the French frontier in 1678, married in January 1700 at the Domkerk in Amsterdam to Jean Prieur du Plessis of Poitiers, surgeon, and after his death to Dirk Snith of Nieuwburg, surgeon, who died about 1725, herself died subsequently about 1751. She had practised in Cape Town as a qualified midwife. Anna’s baptism in 1704 had named Christoffel Buisset and Maria Buisset as sponsors. A Huguenot midwife’s death in the first year of Father Tulbagh is not a Castle event. It is the other census of 1751: the refugee generation that had arrived with wagonmakers and vinedressers was now old enough to die in the town where the new governor’s open door was being praised. [8]
Europeans and Khoikhoi were living together on friendly terms, but occasionally the peace was disturbed by San marauders. In 1747, and again in 1750, rumours had 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 recovering cattle. The government had caused strict inquiry to be made; evidence sufficient to secure conviction could not be obtained. Calendar 1751 inherited that unproven blood without adding a new named raid in the printed year. Land continued to be allotted to colonists without consulting Khoikhoi clans. Plenty of land still seemed left. The eastern hamlet remained a hamlet. The first year of a popular government was strong enough, in the old districts, to keep the law from becoming a dead letter against European criminals in such cases as reached the courts; the remote border remained another country. [3]
So 1751 closed without a battle or a new district name. It left a Cape-born governor’s five-ship wake on the 2nd of March, a secunde of the same surname in the second chair, and a Utrecht-born clerk of 1716 in the first. It left a heemraden no of the 11th of January to more colonists without free export, an English vault under the Dutch church floor on the 9th of February, public oaths on the 15th of April, a French astronomer’s instruments from the 19th of April, a postholder named De Nys at Simon’s Town in March, a midwife’s death in the French wards, and a fiftieth-penny list headed by Ryk Tulbagh and Elizabeth Swellengrebel on the 20th of December. The tone of the new government—open access, fixed fees, no private trading by officers, the governor’s own name first on an unpopular tax—was still a first year’s promise. The settlement called him father. The year gave that title its first twelve months of ordinary Castle business. [3] [4] [7] [8] [9]