Boer History1761 at the Cape of Good Hope: Hop's Namaqualand Expedition, Van Dessin's Library, Mason and Dixon, and First Aloes
Eleventh Year: Castle Continuity — 1761
Calendar 1761 opened in the eleventh year of Ryk Tulbagh in the first chair. He had not been quite fifty-two when, on the 27th of February 1751, he became governor; the public presentation to the burghers and the promise of fidelity from the official boards had followed on the 15th of April. Saturday, the 8th of April 1752, had been a day of thanksgiving for a hundred years of Company possession, looking back to the gardens of 1652. In 1753 his wife Elizabeth Swellengrebel had died of a severe cold after seventeen years of marriage and had left him a childless widower. March 1755 had raised him councillor extraordinary of Netherlands India, a rank higher than governor without adding to his duties. He was the second Cape governor raised to that third top seat in the Company’s commercial empire. The tenth year had closed with a thinner second chair: Sergius Swellengrebel had died on the 8th of December 1760, and on the 12th the council of policy had named independent fiscal Pieter van Reede van Oudtshoorn to fill the vacant office until the pleasure of the supreme authorities could be known. The directors confirmed him. Through calendar 1761 he sat as secunde; a new fiscal would not reach Table Bay until the following year. Jan Andries Horak still sat Swellendam. Adriaan van Schoor, appointed in September 1748 after the death of Pieter Lourens, still sat Stellenbosch and Drakenstein. Adriaan de Nys still sat Simon’s Town when the year opened. The Castle’s ordinary business—open access, fixed fees, no private trading by officers—was an eleventh year’s habit. The sumptuary laws adapted on the 25th of March 1755 still stood: no gilded coach but the governor’s, no livery but a councillor’s coachman, no large umbrella but a senior merchant’s or a board lady’s. [3] [7] [9]
As governor 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 the complaints were well grounded, he obtained speedy redress; in any case he was sure of good counsel. That quality more than any other endeared him to the people. His probity was beyond suspicion in an age when probity was hardly looked for in men holding such posts. Company salaries were small, and it was taken almost as a matter of course that officers would supplement their incomes in any way not punishable by law. Tulbagh set his face firmly against that habit. He neither traded on his own account nor would he allow any other officer of the government to do so. The fees they were permitted to receive in certain transactions were fixed, and they were restricted from taking more. He regulated his own expenses so that he lived well within his income and allowances, and used what he had to spare in relieving the wants of others. Under his administration every man was certain of getting his dues. No man was put to unnecessary delay; no bribes were received; no false accounts were rendered. Equanimity and a lack of swashbuckling dash did not mean an uneventful chair. He had never sought popularity for popularity’s sake. Gentle and tolerant he remained; strong when the governor’s authority was defied. The eleventh year tested that strength on a roadstead still paying in wartime cash, on a northern caravan that would cross the great river in force, on a private library made public, on two English astronomers and a sky-event, on church rank settled from Amsterdam, and on a death in the winter port’s chair. [3] [7] [9]
Continuity of persons was the point of the eleventh year as much as novelty of placaat. The same castle, the same boards, and many of the same officers remained. Europeans and Khoikhoi were living together on friendly terms in the old districts, but occasionally the peace was disturbed by San marauders. Land continued to be allotted to colonists without consulting Khoikhoi clans. Plenty of land still seemed left. Cattle runs in the outward districts were probably never less than five or six thousand acres, for which, when it could be recovered, a yearly rental was paid—£2 10s. until 1732 and £5 thereafter. The eastern hamlet of Swellendam remained a hamlet; the pontoon placed on the Breede in 1757, close to the junction of the Zonder End, was still the public boat on that road. Philippe Jacob Naudé of Berlin, who had arrived in the Company’s service in 1754, was still a Company servant. The Rev. Hendrik Kroonenburg still sat the Cape pulpit. The Rev. Johannes Frederik Bode sat without pay when the year opened, pending Amsterdam. The Rev. Johannes Petrus Serrurier of Hanau, kept at the Cape after March 1760 and married on the 9th of November to Margaretha Elisabeth Timmendorf, sat as the council’s intended second. The Rev. Gerhardus Croeser still sat Zwartland. The Rev. Johannes Appeldoorn still sat Stellenbosch. The Rev. Van der Spuy still sat Drakenstein. Roodezand’s church at Waveren was still under Remmerus Harders, sent inland in January 1758 by commissioner Johan Gideon Looten after Meyring’s death in May 1757. Combined consistories had already ceased in 1759; their travelling charges would not sit on the congregations in the eleventh year. [3] [4] [8]
In the census returns of 1754 the number of colonists of both sexes and all ages had been given as 5,510, and the number of slaves owned by them as 6,279. In those of 1756 the number of colonists is given as 5,128, and of their slaves as 5,787. No later count sat on the Castle table in 1761. In ordinary years the number of deaths stood to baptisms roughly as 100 to 261, and there was a constant accession to the colonial population by servants of the Company taking their discharge. The figures, though they cannot be depended upon as absolutely accurate, still give the idea of the heavy loss of life by the smallpox. Table Valley had buried 963 Europeans and 1,109 blacks between the 1st of May and the 31st of October 1755. With the Khoikhoi the disease had created great havoc, spreading farther inland than in 1713—felt in Great Namaqualand at least to the twenty-sixth parallel, and in the east to the Great Fish. Before midsummer it had entirely died out. The eleventh year therefore still lived inside that shadow: fewer free households, fewer bondsmen, and a colony that had exported grain from reserves while the capital’s labour force stayed thin. Company books had already closed the quarterly 600 guilders sent since 1747 to Tulbagh’s widowed mother Catharina Cattepoel; she had died in 1757. A childless widower sat the first chair without that Dutch household claim. A confirmed secunde who was still independent fiscal sat the second. [3] [9]
Outward, the land regime did not change. Cattle runs of five or six thousand acres still seemed to leave land enough. Yearly rental, when it could be recovered, remained £5 after the fifteen-year quit-rent settlement of 1732. Khoikhoi who still held together in compact bodies retained their own government, with chiefs practically appointed by the Dutch authorities. The greater number had lost old tribal distinctions and lived as dependents of farmers, or wandered and took service as they felt disposed. The courts were open for their protection. Dirk Marx’s report, received in 1756, that he had met Xhosa as far west as the Great Fish, remained the frontier note. Calendar 1761 added no second Beutler-scale trek and no second Roggeveld commando. It added a paying bay in which English courtesy was restored, a public library of nearly four thousand volumes, two astronomers on a global transit, a burgher captain’s caravan beyond the Orange, a new export drug, a fairer Constantia contract, church rank settled from the Seventeen, and a resident’s title at False Bay. [3] [4] [7]
Wartime Market and English Courtesy Restored — 1761
From the arrival of the French men-of-war and transports in December 1758 and January 1759 the farmers had been in a prosperous condition. The war in India between the English and the French had not yet ended. French men-of-war still called to refresh and take in supplies until 1761; after that date ships of both nations came for cattle, meal and wine. Officers of French packets from Mauritius and of English packets from St Helena bid against each other. The empty roadstead of the glut years had become a double auction. What the Castle could not do by placaat in 1756 and 1757—move the surplus—seventeen hulls and the packets that followed them still did in cash. Calendar 1761 sat at the hinge of that wartime boom: the last year in which French demand stood almost alone, and the first in which both flags crowded the roadsteads while the council still had to fill Company holds. [3] [9]
On more than one occasion in this wartime stretch the government was unable to procure as much provision as was needed for the Company’s own ships, as the burghers were desirous of selling at high prices to strangers. That tension was the inverse of the insolvency years. The same farms that could not move wine in 1756 could not keep it from foreign pursers in 1761. The Castle still needed its own fleets fed. Burghers still preferred the higher foreign price. There was a remedy later; it was not this year’s placaat. In the eleventh year the Castle watched strangers bid and still had to fill Company holds. [3]
The government, as well as individuals, profited by the strangers. The revenue was increased, a quantity of surplus wheat in the magazines was disposed of, and some shipments of Bourbon coffee were purchased at the low price of twenty-five shillings per hundred pounds for transmission to Europe. Colonial and private interest aligned for once: the revenue rose when strangers bought, magazines could move surplus wheat, and farmers who had faced insolvency held the scarce goods. In 1756 an export duty of £1 per legger had been laid upon all wine and brandy sold to strangers in bulk, in addition to the dues previously levied. The duty was farmed out by auction, and in the first year was sold for no more than £38 6s. 8d. Four years later—calendar 1760—it rose to £400. That farm still paid in 1761, because the bay was buying. For wine farmers the swing remained sharp. In the mid-1750s India had cut Cape wine intake—exportation to Batavia, which for the five years 1751–5 had averaged 558 leggers, had fallen to 262 on an average during the next ten—and insolvencies had become alarmingly frequent; the fiscal’s fee on foreign wine sales had even been swapped for a grain fee to ease the pressure. By 1761 the roadstead arithmetic had reversed: strangers paid cash, magazines emptied, and the risk was no longer glut but the Company’s inability to secure its own stores when burghers held out for packet prices. [3] [9]
The Huguenot valleys that had planted vines after 1688 now sold into a wartime bay. Drakenstein, the Paarl, Fransche Hoek, and Val du Charron—later Wellington—had been agricultural settlements whose fruit and grain had become plentiful while cattle remained scarce. Under the second van der Stel the settlement had been extended beyond the first mountain range to place colonists for cattle farming and stock grazing. The Tulbagh kloof remained the gateway to that inland basin. Piketberg, from which a hunter had ridden north the year before, sat in that same outward cattle country. Wine from those old French names, and cattle from the outward runs of five or six thousand acres, were what French and English pursers still paid for. The eleventh year did not invent those farms. It paid them. [4] [7]
After Clive’s action against the Dutch armament sent from Batavia to Chinsurah on the Ganges in 1759, the friendly feeling between Great Britain and the United Provinces had been disturbed. England and the Netherlands were at peace, yet Colonel Clive at Fort William had feared that if Dutch forces grew, the nabob Meer Jaffier—raised by English aid—might ally with them against English interests. He had resisted the Dutch fleet on the Hooghly, captured the ships, destroyed the army, and forbidden the factory to fortify or raise troops. Orders had issued from the directors that nothing which could be refused under existing treaties should be supplied to English ships touching at the Cape. The matter was adjusted without a rupture. In 1761 instructions arrived that English visitors were again to be treated in a liberal manner. Swedish colours, first seen in Table Bay in 1759, remained a new flag among the foreigners who obtained whatever they chose to pay for, except when the council thought it necessary to prohibit the sale of articles the Company needed. Liberal treatment did not mean a soft governor. The 1761 instructions restored English access after the Chinsurah scare; they did not erase Tulbagh’s standing rule that the Dutch flag and salute etiquette bound every visitor who wanted Cape beef and wine. In leaner years he had refused supplies to French ships that withheld the customary nine-gun salute until both had fired; only then came watermelons, courtesy and wine. The eleventh year’s roadstead was therefore a paying one with English courtesy restored and the honour of the flag still sitting on every salute. [3] [9]
Van Dessin's Library and Mason and Dixon — 1761
In 1761 Joachim Nicholas van Dessin (also Joachim Nicolaas), for nearly a quarter of a century secretary of the orphan chamber, bequeathed to the colony his library of three thousand eight hundred printed books, many manuscripts, mathematical and astronomical instruments, and several oil paintings. He named the Cape consistory guardians of the gift, and left one thousand rixdollars—then equal to about £208 6s. 8d.—as capital whose interest should preserve and enlarge the collection. One thousand rixdollars as endowment was a deliberate act of permanence: not a one-time gift of shelves, but interest meant to buy and bind books after the donor was gone. [3] [9]
The books were placed in a building near the church; the sexton was to act as librarian. That the sexton doubled as librarian tells the scale of the settlement—still small enough that a church servant kept the keys—yet large enough that nearly four thousand volumes and instruments could be imagined as a public trust. The institution was little used at first, and in time some of the most interesting volumes disappeared without record. What remained became known as the Dessinian collection, later kept in the gallery of the South African Public Library—still including works of permanent value. Tulbagh authorised the building that housed the gift. A cultural seed was planted even if Capetonians of the day seldom filled the room. That the library failed to attract crowds, and that the precious books were rarely read, was not charged to the governor but to the tough background of most settlers. The seed sat. [3] [9]
Visitors already ranked van Dessin among the settlement’s few men of letters. The Abbé Nicolas Louis de la Caille had counted three intelligent men in Cape Town: the governor, council secretary Du Grand Prez, and Nicolaas van Dessin of the orphan chamber—whose books later launched the town’s cultural life. The 1761 bequest turned that private reputation into a public trust. It sat in the same category of Tulbagh’s cultural work as the later raising of the Groote Kerk tower and the placing of a clock inside—another seed, even when the clock at first refused to tell the hour. Science and letters used the station that year as surely as packets used the roadstead. [9]
On the 27th of April 1761 Messrs Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, two astronomers who had left England intending to observe at Bencoolen the transit of Venus on the 6th of June, arrived at the Cape. Delayed on the passage, they resolved to observe the transit here. Governor Tulbagh gave them all the assistance he could. Their original plan had been Sumatra, not Table Valley. Delay on the English passage forced a Cape solution; Tulbagh’s assistance turned a contingency into a successful observation. For five months—from late April to early October—the two astronomers and their clock and telescopes were part of the castle world’s traffic, alongside packeteers and provision buyers. [3]
The 6th of June was showery, but at the moment of transit no clouds covered the sun’s disc. Their instruments were two reflecting telescopes of two feet focal length magnifying one hundred and twenty times, a quadrant of a foot radius, and an astronomical clock. They remained at the Cape until the 3rd of October. Science as well as commerce used the station that year: a global sky-event pinned to Table Valley under a governor already known for sending botanical and zoological specimens to Netherlands museums and for hosting distinguished observers at the Tavern of the Seas. It might have been coincidence that so many foreigners called during Tulbagh’s administration; it might have been safer and faster shipping. It was no less true that the name of the Cape as a well-managed tavern had acquired international lustre, and that two English astronomers on a delayed Sumatra voyage found instruments, a clear disc at the critical minute, and a governor who made the observation possible. [3] [9]
Hop's Expedition Organised; the Caravan Leaves the Bakoven — 1761
In 1760 the burgher Jacobus Coetsee had hunted elephants beyond the Orange with twelve Khoikhoi companions—believed the first white crossing of that stream. White cattle runs already reached the mouth of the Elephant river; since Simon van der Stel’s copper journey of 1685 the supply base had moved inland nearly two hundred miles. After his return Coetsee told Hendrik Hop, one of the captains of the burgher militia, who occupied the farm Slot van de Paarl, that he had heard of black people called Damrocquas living ten days’ journey beyond the farthest point he had reached, said to have long hair and wear clothes of linen cloth. The great river itself was not new in rumour. Namaqua visitors in the seventeenth century had already given the castle its first authentic word of a wide deep stream to the north—the Gariep—and of Briqua peoples beyond, while denying fabulous towns of Monomotapa near their own country. Coetsee’s hunt and Damrocqua tale turned old geography into a 1761 government caravan. [3]
In June 1761 Captain Hop reported this to the government and offered to lead an exploring party in that direction. The offer was accepted, and the captain then called for burghers to volunteer. Such an undertaking was no longer so formidable as in the days of Simon van der Stel, for white men were now in permanent occupation of cattle runs as far north as the mouth of the Elephant river. Hop held exactly the sort of inland rank that could raise volunteers and wagons without stripping the garrison. The government’s acceptance of his offer made the 1761 northern march an official exploring party, not a private ivory hunt like Coetsee’s the year before. Tulbagh, who organised several expeditions far into the hinterland and followed their marches through unknown regions with keen anticipation, backed the venture. Good rulers attract good officers. Tulbagh did. Captain Hendrik Hop of the burgher militia was only one of them. [3] [9]
Specialists joined the train. The services were secured of the botanist Jan Andries Auge, master gardener of the colony and a brilliant botanist, who was to collect information on plants and trees—a subject in which Tulbagh was deeply interested and about which he knew a great deal; the surgeon Carel Christoffel Rykvoet (also Rijkvoet), a mineralogist of repute; and the surveyor Carel Frederik Brink, whose duty it was to determine positions, to make a map, and to keep a journal. The caravan was not a hunting party with a flag. It was a burgher column with a gardener, a mineralogist, and a surveyor on the Company’s scientific errand, under a militia captain whose farm sat at the Paarl. [3] [9]
It was arranged that the members of the expedition should assemble at a place called the Bakoven, near the mouth of the Elephant river, and from that point commence the journey. On the 16th of August 1761 all was ready, and the caravan left the Bakoven for the north. Beside Hop, Auge, Rykvoet and Brink rode thirteen colonists: Jacobus and Joris Coetsee, Abraham Russouw, Hendrik Kruger, Andries Greef, Jan van Niekerk, Tieleman Roos, Pieter Marais, Casper and Jan Badenhorst, Josua Joubert, Coenraad Scheepers, and Ocker Heyns. They had fifteen waggons and sixty-eight mixed Khoikhoi servants. Colonists volunteered largely hoping for cattle in barter. Fifteen wagons and sixty-eight servants made a train that would have been unthinkable from the fort in the 1660s. [3]
The path north of the peninsula was no longer trackless rumour. As early as 1660–61 parties under Cruythof and van Meerhof had followed past Riebeek’s Kasteel to the Elephant river; the country to that stream was well known before Hop’s heavier train rolled out. They passed by the copper mountains of Little Namaqualand that had been first visited by Europeans in 1685, and keeping almost due north, made for the great river. Permanent cattle runs to that mouth had put a supply base two hundred miles inland, so that a militia captain could call volunteers instead of stripping the castle garrison. [3]
Orange Crossing, Giraffes, and the Northern Limit — 1761
On the 29th of September they crossed the great river at a ford where the stream was nearly eleven hundred feet in width. The Little Namaqua were found in an impoverished condition. They had been robbed by San groups of the greater part of their cattle, and it seemed as if they must eventually be utterly destroyed. The Great Namaqua had migrated to the north about twenty years before. Along the Karas corridor the country offered spectacle and scarcity together: new game for European eyes, empty watercourses, and Namaqua communities already pushed by stock loss and earlier migration. The 1761 march was as much a census of hardship north of the Orange as it was a search for Damrocqua cloth and hair. [3]
The names given by Captain Hop to places north of the great river have long since been replaced by others, but there is no difficulty in following the route. They passed the hot spring later called Nisbett’s Bath, and kept along the western base of the Karas mountains, between the eighteenth and nineteenth meridians from Greenwich. The caravan was pushing into what later maps would call Great Namaqualand’s north, notebooks filling with heat, plants and mineral notes. This is not a year-page for every camp. It is enough that the expedition penetrated the country north of the Orange and gathered notebooks full of information, under a governor who followed hinterland marches with keen anticipation. [3] [9]
Soon after the crossing they found giraffes and killed several—animals the party had never seen before. Tulbagh, who had already enriched the chief museums of the Netherlands with many specimens illustrating the botany and zoology of the colony, sent the skin of one of these giraffes to the museum of the University of Leiden. It was the first taken to Europe from South Africa. It was not his first such gift to Leiden and kindred institutions. The governor who authorised a building for van Dessin’s books also sent a northern hide to a Dutch university: the same scientific appetite, one from a Cape shelf and one from a river the castle had only rumoured a century earlier. [3] [9]
The expedition reached about latitude 26° 18′ S., and two of the burghers penetrated the country some miles further. But the heat had now become almost insupportable; there was such a scarcity of food for the cattle that they were dying off rapidly; and though numerous beds of rivers were found, there was no water in any of them except at distant points where the natives had made deep pits in the sand. Captain Hop called a council, and there was but one opinion expressed, that it was impossible to go further. Heat, empty river beds and dying oxen ended the northward push more firmly than any hostile army. The December council was not a quarrel among officers but a single shared judgment: further progress was impossible. On the 7th of December 1761 the caravan turned to the south. [3]
At the great river some time was spent in refreshing the worn-out cattle, which afforded an opportunity to examine the country around. In the mountains bordering on the river copper was discovered, but the conclusion which Captain Hop and his assistants came to was that it would not pay to extract it. They observed first that there was no wood in the neighbourhood which could be used as fuel, consequently the ore must needs be taken away in its crude state. Next, there were obstructions in the river which would prevent the use of boats to transport the ore to the sea, so that it would be necessary to remove it in waggons. And lastly, the country was not only very difficult to traverse, but it was so parched by the summer heat as not to afford a supply of food for draught cattle. The mouth of the river was too distant to be examined. Copper in the bordering mountains was therefore a mineralogist’s note, not a Company’s mine. Rykvoet’s errand had an answer: the metal was there, and it would not pay. [3]
No information of a positive kind was obtained concerning the black people to the north, then called Damrocquas. But the wild stories that had previously been current of their having long hair and wearing linen clothing were found to be incorrect, for the Great Namaqua knew of no people answering that description except Europeans. Information was obtained concerning the Betshuana, then called Briquas or Birinas, living east of the Kalahari. And it was ascertained that the smallpox of 1755 had spread into Great Namaqualand and caused the loss of many lives. Pieter Marais, one of the burghers who accompanied the expedition, understood the Khoikhoi language, and was a man given to inquiry. He and Tieleman Roos drew up a report upon the natives, showing that the different clans which were met were members of one tribe. They had witnessed the method of worshipping the new moon by singing, dancing, and invocations; and they had learned that the Great Namaqua had some faint conception of a supreme being, whom they called Chuyn, but what the nature of this being was supposed to be they had not ascertained. They had seen the natives smelting copper and working it into ornaments by means of a stone hammer and anvil. The Great river was called by the Namaqua Chari or Eyn. The last word was the same as that given to Commander van der Stel by the Little Namaqua in 1685. The first word Chari is the same as Gariep of later maps. The hard northward year was 1761: organisation, departure, crossing, giraffe, limit, copper judgment, and the December turn. The wagons would not roll into the castle yard until the following year; none of the members died or suffered serious illness on the march. Notebooks came home full. The Damrocqua linen-and-long-hair tale did not. [3] [9]
Aloes, Constantia Wine, and Church Rank — 1761
During the twenty-one years of Tulbagh’s government the average quantity of farm produce exported to India was 11,791 muids of wheat, 202 muids of rye, 68 muids of barley, 202 muids of peas, 174 muids of beans, and 346 leggers of common wine. Butter had first been exported to India in 1754; during the next eighteen years the quantity sent abroad annually averaged 22,322 pounds, usually purchased at the Company’s stores at sixpence to eightpence a pound. To Europe were sent yearly rather over 100 leggers of common wine and as much Constantia wine as could be obtained, which was usually not more than 14 or 15 leggers. From 1736 to 1761 the price paid by the Company for red Constantia wine was £20 16s. 8d. and for white Constantia wine £10 8s. 4d. the legger, the proprietors of the farms into which the original estate was divided being obliged under an old contract to sell at that price. They could easily get double those sums from foreigners, and were loud in complaining. In 1761 that complaint had a sharper edge: the bay was paying foreigners’ prices while the Company still took Constantia at the old contract, and the wine-export farm itself had already jumped to four hundred pounds. [3]
In 1761 an agreement was made with Jacobus van der Spuy, then owner of High Constantia, that he should deliver to the Company two-thirds of all the red wine made by him at £31 5s., and two-thirds of all the white wine at £15 12s. 6d. the legger, he to be at liberty to sell the remaining third to whom he chose at the best price which he could obtain. A similar agreement was subsequently made with Lambert Myburgh, owner of Great Constantia. The agreement was made in rixdollars, at that time current at two and a half gulden of Holland, or four shillings and twopence English money each. The change was modest reform under monopoly, not free trade. It still marked 1761 as a year when the most famous Cape vineyards won a written share of the foreign premium while the wartime provision boom made every legger count—and while bankrupt wine farms of the mid-1750s still remembered how close ruin had come before the French fleets. [3] [9]
In 1761 the first aloes were exported from South Africa. A quantity of two hundred and eighteen pounds in weight was produced by the old burgher councillor Petrus Johannes de Wit, who lived at the Cape, but who had a farm in the country, and had caused the drug to be prepared there. The council of policy decided to send it to Europe, where it was pronounced to be of good quality. The directors issued instructions to purchase it at the stores at a price not exceeding two shillings and threepence halfpenny a pound. From that date it remained an article of export to Europe, but the quantity in demand being inconsiderable, it was not of much advantage to the colony. A new line sat on the produce list beside wine, grain and ivory: a country drug from a Cape councillor’s farm, judged good in Europe, priced at the stores, and never a second Constantia. [3]
In March 1760 the Rev. Johannes Petrus Serrurier of Hanau had arrived from Europe. On the 9th of November 1760 he married Margaretha Elisabeth Timmendorf. The council of policy decided to keep him at the Cape, and to send Mr. Bode to Waveren. But Bode declined to remove, on the ground that having been inducted as clergyman of the Cape he could not be required to fill a position of less dignity, without being found guilty of misconduct. Some members of the council were also of this view, but the majority suspended him from duty and stopped his pay until the opinion of the directors could be made known. The quarrel was about rank and induction, not doctrine. Bode’s stand split the council; some members agreed with him, but the majority stopped pay until Amsterdam spoke. [3] [8]
The directors decided that his contention was just, and they issued instructions—which were received at the Cape in April 1761—that Mr. Serrurier should be inducted as third clergyman of the Cape, that Mr. Bode should resume duty as second clergyman and be paid his arrear salary, and that upon the first death or removal of either Mr. Kroonenburg, Mr. Bode, or Mr. Serrurier, no successor should be appointed. They were all in active service through the rest of Tulbagh’s government. In the same year the directors ordered that the Rev. Remmerus Harders, sent to Waveren in 1758 after Meyring’s death by commissioner Johan Gideon Looten, should remain there permanently. Church politics in 1761 thus closed a rank dispute, fixed a three-clergyman Cape bench for the rest of Tulbagh’s life, and locked the country pastorate at Waveren. Combined consistories, useful or not, still did not meet at the congregations’ travelling cost. The Cape pulpit sat three deep; Roodezand sat Harders for good. [3]
De Nys Dies; Kirsten Resident at Simon's Town — May 1761
During the period that Governor Tulbagh was at the head of the colony, the town in Table Valley was considerably enlarged, and strangers began to know it by its present name of Cape Town, though by the colonists it was still termed the Cape. Several new streets were laid out. The parade ground was again levelled, and an oak hedge was planted round it. The artificial fountains from which the inhabitants got water were renewed. The town house—the same that is still in use—was built by the burgher council. The hospital was falling to ruins, and it had been resolved by the directors to build a new one, but the work was not yet commenced, though the materials were being collected. The fortifications were repaired, and a new battery was constructed near the mouth of Salt River. Calendar 1761 did not invent that civic programme. It sat inside it: a capital still thinning from the 1755 graves, still selling dear to two empires, and still building. [3] [9]
At Simon’s Town expensive works were carried out. The hospital—a square building of 130 feet frontage—was commenced in 1760 and would be completed in a later year. Substantial storehouses, a stone pier, a slaughter house, a bakery, workshops for smiths and carpenters, and a dwelling house for the officer in charge of the station followed in the same enlargement. The building erected in the time of Governor Swellengrebel—which was 450 feet in length and had previously served for all purposes—was now used solely as quarters for the garrison and workmen. Not only in town, but also in the country districts, the impact of Tulbagh’s energy was felt. Simonstown was enlarged: warehouses, a stone pier, a large hospital. False Bay was no longer only an emergency winter door. The hospital foundation of 1760, the resident title of 1761, and the stores that followed made Simon’s Town a second built face of Company power—paid for while foreign and Company ships still crowded the refreshment economy of Table Bay. [3] [9]
In March 1751 Adriaan de Nys had been appointed postholder in succession to Justinus Blas. Mr. De Nys died in May 1761, when Jan Frederik Kirsten was appointed officer in charge at Simon’s Town, with the title of resident—a step up in name that matched the post’s growing weight beside Table Bay. Blas had sat from March 1743 to March 1751 as postholder; De Nys had sat the next ten years under the same title; Kirsten’s new style marked the winter port as more than a post. The long building of Swellengrebel’s time remained as barracks. The square hospital still rose. A resident sat where a postholder had died. [3]
The village of Stellenbosch was also considerably enlarged and improved in appearance during this period, though the drostdy fire that would test it sat outside this calendar. Swellendam remained a mere hamlet. To facilitate access to it from the Cape, the pontoon of 1757 on the Breede, close to the junction of the Zonder End, still carried the public road. Horak still sat that drostdy. Van Schoor still sat Stellenbosch. The eleventh year did not reshuffle the inland benches. It reshuffled False Bay’s title, and it sent a militia captain’s wagons north. [3] [9]
North and south the year stretched the colony’s reach: a caravan beyond the Orange with giraffe skins and copper judgment; a library of nearly four thousand volumes by the church; English astronomers on the transit from April to October; aloes in the Europe-bound holds; Constantia written into a fairer contract; three Cape pulpits ordered from Amsterdam; and a resident’s chair at the winter port. Under Tulbagh, 1761 was not a year of conquest but of probe, gift, sky-work, small commercial firsts and institutional repair—while farmers still sold dear to the fleets of two empires at a neutral tavern of the seas. The eleventh year closed with cash in the bay, Bode paid and restored, Serrurier inducted as third, Kirsten styled resident, and Hop’s wagons already turned south of latitude 26° 18′. The gardens of 1652 were a hundred and nine years behind. The great river, named Chari or Eyn in the notebooks coming home, was no longer only a Namaqua rumour. [3] [4] [7] [8] [9]