Travellers' accounts

Hendrik Swellengrebel was born at the Cape on 26 November 1734, the fifth child of Hendrik Swellengrebel Snr, at the time the Secretary of the Council of Policy, but from 1739 Governor of the Cape of Good Hope, and of Helena Wilhelmina ten Damme. After bidding farewell to his parents on 25 March 1746, Hendrik Jr travelled as an eleven-year-old boy to the Netherlands with the return fleet. Already then, his father intended to return to the Netherlands eventually. He had four sons and three daughters – what future did the Cape offer those children? So, he sent his sons to the Netherlands to further their studies. After their arrival there, they were taken care of by Rev. J. Schermer and his wife in Utrecht. Hendrik attended the Latin school and afterwards read law at Utrecht University. Not yet 21 years old, he completed his studies in 1755 and after that established himself as an attorney and also became a canon in the chapter at the Cathedral. In 1775 Hendrik Swellengrebel embarked on the VOC ship Alkemade, to pay a visit to the land of his birth, at that time no ordinary undertaking. The reasons for this visit were never explicitly revealed by him so far as is known. Certainly a desire to see his country of birth again played a role in this. Yet, it is not impossible that he also played with the idea of establishing himself at the Cape. His interest in the possibilities – including financial ones – offered by farming there, evident in his travel accounts and in his exchange of letters in the years thereafter, point in that direction. At the Cape, in 1776-1777, Hendrik made three journeys through the interior of the Cape of Good Hope, once even as far as the land of the Xhosa. His journals of these three journeys and the accompanying drawings commissioned by him were not published in his day and remained lying in the family archives in the Netherlands for over one-and-a-half centuries. In 1932 Dr E.C. Godée Molsbergen published ‘Journal of an overland journey that the undersigned Pieter Cloete made with Mr Hendrik Swellengrebel Esq. in the year 1776’, which he had found in the archive of the eighteenth Governor of the Cape, Joachim van Plettenberg, but which constituted only a brief summary of one of those journeys. The drawings themselves only became known even later, thanks to a publication in 1951 by A. Hallema, Die Kaap in 1776-1777. Akwarelle van Johannes Schumacher uit die Swellengrebel-Argief te Breda (The Cape in 1775-1777. Water Colours of Johannes Schumacher from the Swellengrebel Archive in Breda).