JOINT LECTURE BRLSI & BATH LITERATURE FESTIVAL

The Caliban Shore

Steve Taylor

4 March 2004

This was the 8^th joint meeting with the Bath Literature Festival. Victor Suchar introduced the speaker as a journalist with The Times, formerly in South Africa, and author of several books connected to the British exploration of Africa.

The Caliban Shore

The Caliban Shore came about as a result of a conversation I had some years ago in which the subject of another shipwreck came up. I didn’t think much about it at the time. I had no experience of writing about the sea and – like many others, I suspect – I fell asleep during Titanic, the movie. But the theme must have stirred some long-forgotten memory from my South African childhood, for a few days later I started to think about it again.

I had then just written about a journey from Zanzibar to the Cape, in search of the whites who had stayed on in post-independence Africa. They had turned out to be a tiny, doomed band yet, it seemed to me, heroic in the way they had not only clung on to their adopted lands but integrated in a way not envisaged in – say – the India of Paul Scott. In some cases their treatment had been oppressive, as in Uganda and Tanzania, but still none could imagine leaving. In surrendering they had gone against the colonial grain, and found a home of the heart.

These two subjects – shipwreck and assimilation –may seem a bit remote. But there is a connection – and it is one that for me made the study of the loss of the Grosvenor the most rewarding subject I have tackled.

The story is set in 1782, when a handful of emaciated men stumbled into a sleepy settlement on the frontier of the Dutch colony at the Cape, near to death and with a harrowing tale of events in the unknown territory beyond. They were English seamen, castaways of a shipwreck five months earlier, and had survived a march of 400 miles, scavenging for food and evading hostile tribesmen.

Bear in mind that although the Dutch had been at the Cape since 1652, their purpose was strictly to victual their ships bound for the Indies and very little exploration had been done beyond the environs of what is now Cape Town.

In London the news caused a sensation. The ship, the Grosvenor, had been homeward bound from Bengal, carrying East India Company grandees and nabobs as wellas the crew. Miraculously, almost all of them had escaped the wreck. But in the early stages, the confused and fragmented reports reaching England from the Cape left it extremely unclear what had become of them.

Then one of the London papers – the Morning Chronicle – published a story that was to have immense resonance. It claimed that three lady passengers – Mary Hosea, Sophia James and Lydia Logie – had been carried off by a tribe known as the Caffres to what it called "the most dreadful existence that imagination can form." Another paper – the Herald, evidently the tabloid of its day – was less circumspect. The women, it proclaimed, were to be used "for the vilest brutish prostitution".

The fate of those on the Grosvenor also shocked Calcutta and Madras. These were expatriate communities where people knew one another, by name if not personally. One of those on board had been William Hosea, the senior Company official at the Nawab’s court, travelling with his wife. Another was Colonel Edward James, commander of the Madras artillery, also with his wife.

And so – after the arrival of that little band of survivors at the Cape – London and Calcutta waited for more news. And waited … and waited.

A board of inquiry was instituted by the Company – one of the reviewers of this book has compared it with the Hutton report, in that it would cast the Company’s personnel in the kindliest light, and the comparison is perhaps not inapt. In any event, very little more came out. An enduring host of myths and mysteries was born.

The wreck of the Grosvenor made a powerful cultural impact on its time as well. A narrative relating the story of the survivors published in 1791 and became a best seller. Writers like Dickens and Captain Marryat drew on it. So did the painter George Morland. The Grosvenor became the subject of a musical drama, and some truly awful verse.

Gradually though the story was forgotten, at least in Britain and India. Perhaps the place it was best remembered was South Africa, which was why that shipwreck story had revived a long-buried memory.

I did some basic reading about the Grosvenor and found myself gripped by what a wonderfully powerful story it was – and possibly even more, I was gripped by the mysteries. I set off to the archives of the East India Company at the British Library. And I went back to South Africa – to a place called the Wild Coast – to follow the trail of the castaways. That was perhaps the biggest eye-opener of all. I spent the first twenty years of my life in South Africa, and after the release of Nelson Mandela, I went back as a newspaper correspondent. I thought I knew the country well, but still I discovered in the course of writing this book another place entirely.

There were 140 souls on the Grosvenor when she sailed from Calcutta and Madras. She was a ship of a type known as an East Indiaman, which is to say a merchant vessel, but at the same time one equipped for war – she resembled quite closely a frigate of Nelson’s Navy – as well as being an early passenger ship. All East India Company officials and soldiers sailed out and home by Indiamen. The Grosvenor was carrying 31 passengers in all, officers, and traders – men who had survived long enough in the murderously unhealthy climate of Bengal to make their piles and who were going home to enjoy the benefits. There were also their families – women children, and servants. And there were children travelling alone, on their way home to school.

I think we may tend to forget now just what an ordeal a sea voyage was for passengers in those days. Wooden sailing ships were sturdy enough vessels, but the whole idea of shipping civilians halfway round the world was in its infancy. And the ships themselves were appallingly cramped. The sailors lived in the forward section, the passengers aft. What passed for cabins were often no more than cubicles or parititions of canvas. You can get some idea from the statistic that the company of 140 were contained in a ship no more than 135ft long.

As well as being uncomfortable, the journey was obviously dangerous. The coast of Southern Africa was notorious among sailors for its treachery – as it is even now. Dozens of Portuguese, Dutch and English vessels had already been wrecked along that coast, and hundreds more have been since. There were other factors – the chronometer, the means by which mariners estimated their longitudinal position, was not yet in general use. English charts of the African coastline were inaccurate. On top of it all, the Grosvenor’s captain, a man named John Coxon, was out of his depth.

At dinner on the night of August 3, Coxon was heard to say that he estimated they were still 300 miles from Africa. During the course of the night, lookouts reported a number of sightings of what they thought was land. But thanks to a series of blunders – for which I think tensions between the senior officers were to blame – these warnings were ignored.

Perhaps I could read you a section of the book about what followed.

‘When the Grosvenor struck, just after 4.30am, it was not with a shudder, but with a shock of such force that William Habberley, a seaman who was on deck at the time, expected the masts to snap like sticks. In that instant sailors looked at one another, and for a frozen moment each recognised in the other a dead man.

From ladders and companionways other sailors and passengers came pouring on deck. They were greeted by an overwhelming spectacle. Claps of thunder broke above the ship and the sea swirled around darkly like a malevolent spectre.

Gradually it became clear that they had not struck some isolated rock in the middle of the ocean, for through the dark the outlines of a looming landmass could be made out. All might not be lost. The word from the hold was that the ship had not yet taken on much water, and Coxon announced that if they could get her off the rocks and keep her afloat until daylight, they might be able to run her ashore in a safer spot. With a spyglass on the land Coxon could see huts and a mass of dark figures assembling on the shore. The Grosvenor was no great distance from a grassy tranquillity. The agonising question was how it might be attained. Habberley related:

The two men stripped down and were lowered over the stern to the water with lines clenched in their teeth. From the side the entire company watched in taut silence as they battled through the surf towards the shore about 50 yards distant. Barchini was almost at the rocks when he was picked up by a wave and hurled against them with sickening force. For a moment he lay there, then was dragged back into the water and was seen no more. Joseph Barchini was the first of those on the Grosvenor to die.

Pandolpho too was hurled close to the rocks, but was then pulled back by an eddy, and in that moment seized his opportunity to swim in the last few yards and clamber on land. A cheer went up from the Grosvenor. It was by no means clear how they might use it, but they had a lifeline. A hawser was dragged to the shore, fastened to a rock.

The first signs of a breakdown in discipline occurred at about 11am. At least a dozen men broke ranks and swarmed on to the hawser, starting to haul themselves along it. Their weight caused it to sag in the middle so that breaking waves washed them off. Nine men drowned or were dashed to their deaths.

A few others swam on, among them Francisco di Lasso from Genoa, and Robert Price, the captain’s servant. Di Lasso managed to climb to safety but the boy was hurled head first against the rocks. Had di Lasso not seized him by the hair and pulled him out, he would have drowned. As it was, his head poured blood from a terrible wound and he was left senseless. Price was to carry a livid scar across his forehead for the rest of his days, but the incident created a lasting bond between man and boy, one that kept them together through all the trials of the months ahead .

Back on the ship, panic again took hold. As Habberley put it:

Amid the terror and despair, individuals were able to recall afterwards glimpses of surreal events on shore. The half-dozen or so seamen who had gained safety were pulling dead and injured shipmates from the water. And the dark figures who had come down from the ridge during the morning were now gathered there in great numbers. They were paying the sailors scant attention and had started a series of bonfires into which they were feeding the foremast and other flotsam from the ship.

It was not long after midday, there were still about 120 people on board, and the Grosvenor was in her death throes. Impaled on the reef by her stern, her head down and almost filled with water, she was sliding over on to her beam ends when, with a series of thunderous cracks, the great oak timbers of her hull started to break up. In a final clap, she came apart in the middle. There was now no more talk among the sailors of how the women and children might be saved. In a chilling summary of this new crisis, one man recalled: "All hands began now to do the best they could for themselves."

EXACTLY how the miracle occurred is hard to say, for the sources are confused and conflicting. Nevertheless, a miracle it was, in which tide, wind and fortune all coincided to bring deliverance.

The gale had blown itself out by mid-afternoon and the force of the sea dissipated. At around the same time the wind, which had been blowing off the land, turned about. The stern section – seething with bedraggled men, women and children, the grandees rubbing shoulders with tars for the first time, the ladies and their ayahs – lifted clear of the rocks, and in that moment floated again. It started to drift towards the shore. Seeing this, and noting that the hawser was still attached to the stern, the men on land started to haul on it. Slowly at first but then steadily it came on, and as it did those stranded on that battered little wooden island saw the approach of their salvation. With growing excitement the men pulling on the hawser realised that they could manouevre the hulk into a sheltered inlet among the rocks. As it came in men splashed into the shallows and hands reached up to help down the women and children while those who were able clambered down themselves and felt the first shocking sensation of solid ground underfoot.

That there is no record of the emotions registered in that moment of deliverance is hardly surprising. An entire day had passed since the first impact and if there was one prevailing sense it was sheer and utter exhaustion. But the sensation simply of being on land must have added to another sense, that of disorientation. They had been at sea for almost two months, and through the waves of fatigue came sensations of dizziness and weakness in the knees. Many would have lain or sat down among the rocks to steady themselves.

The casualties were mainly those who had struck out from the ship in trying to save themselves, and included fourteen members of the crew. Two men who went into the lazaretto and drank themselves into oblivion were never seen again. But of the crew of 105 to set out, 91 had landed alive – severely injured in some cases, sick also, but nevertheless alive. The women and children were without injury, the families intact.

Exhaustion, and perhaps euphoria as well then. Something else too – a sense of dreamlike strangeness. For in the gathering gloom of that first evening in Africa, among the fires burning at the edge of the Indian Ocean, they found themselves in the midst of the dark figures who had gathered on the rock shelf, and whom they now saw were half-naked tribesmen. The two groups surveyed one another with mutual incomprehension: on the one hand the dishevelled castaways; on the other, black warriors with high conical hairstyles and daubed with red mud.

The castaways had been washed ashore in a place known today as Pondoland. It is still a rural backwater of South Africa, undeveloped and rugged terrain which starts a hundred miles or so south of Durban. The shoreline itself is called the Wild Coast, and with good reason. It is a place of almost elemental grandeur – of great spaces and silences. Everything seems to be on a large scale – the gorges that run down to the coast from the high country of the interior like great rents in the earth’s crust, the forests – very lovely and wonderfully diverse in species – but then seemingly impenetrable once you get close to them. And the rivers – just innumerable rivers, from streams and rivulets to immense torrents which, after the rains, become the biggest obstacle of all.

It is the sort of place where today, hikers and outdoor enthusiasts cast themselves away for pleasure. I walked a down that coast myself – not the entire 400 miles of it, but a good chunk. And of course, with a stout pair of shoes, a sleeping back and supplies of food, it is an experience to treasure.

At that time, to outsiders, it was a mystery world – overwhelming and intimidating. There were just two European settlements in Southern Africa – the Dutch at the Cape and the Portuguese at Delagoa Bay – that is Maputo in Mozambique today. Between lay more than 1,000 miles. Of the terrain and their whereabouts, the Grosvenor castaways were ignorant.

They were also, of course, ignorant of the inhabitants. The English view at the time of Africa was of a place of monstrous beasts and savage people. What contact there was with the Continent confined to West African, and the only reason for that was the slave trade. Otherwise, the English avoided Africa. Yonder dwelt Caliban.

The Pondo tribesmen who descended on the wreck showed no great inclination to succour the castaways, but nor were they hostile. Their interest was in metal – in a geological area notably deficient in iron, the wreck was a treasure trove to the Pondo. At the same time, they were not likely to immediately take in and feed well over 100 people at the end of what was for them the post-harvest season.

It was a situation ripe for a classic case of misunderstanding and blunder.

I don’t if anyone is familiar with a wonderful book Captives by Linda Colley. We are somewhat used to seeing the British imperial march around the globe as a succession of advances. In fact, as Linda Colley’s book shows, the early empire was marked more by setback doubt and hesitation than anything else. In the case of the Grosvenor, we have perhaps a unique set of circumstances. I know of no previous situation in which individuals from so wide a spectrum of British society had found themselves in so remote a spot – and so removed from the old certainties.

On the one hand the grandees – as well as the captain there were half a dozen or so important figures, such as William Hosea, who had been Resident at the court of the Nawab of Bengal and Colonel Edward James who had commanded the Madras Artillery. On the other hand the ordinary seamen – men like Habberley, who left the only surviving first-hand account by a survivor, whose obvious concern was their own survival.

The grandees took fright at the mere appearance of half-naked tribesmen. Hosea, highly strung and with a record that showed he had little sympathy with dark-skinned people, was close to panic. Not only were they fearful of the Pondo, they were afraid of being deserted by their own kind – for if one thing was plain it was that they were now utterly dependent on the younger and fitter seamen for their own survival.

The best course would have been to send a small, mobile party of the fittest seamen for help, while the majority stayed at the site and bartered with the Pondo for food. Instead, Captain Coxon announced two days after the wreck that they would strike down the coast together for the Cape. His estimate was that they would reach the outlying Dutch settlements within two weeks. We might recall that the last time he made such an estimate it was to the effect that the ship was still 300 miles from land.

The upshot was that a company that included seven women – one in an advanced stage of pregnancy – five children and a number of grievously injured men, was set on a forced march down a tumultuous shoreline slashed by rivers and precipitous valleys, inhabited by wild animals and other tribes of the supposedly savage people whom they had sought to avoid.

Things went immediately and disastrously wrong. The Pondo first tried to stop them leaving, then started to harass them. At the same time they ran immediately into that unforgiving terrain. In a week they covered about fifteen miles.

What followed was a succession of partings and betrayals. I do not wish to go into detail, but in effect it amounted to a collapse of the social order. Early on the majority of seamen, under the Second Mate, abandoned the captain and passengers.

It got worse. The captain and the remaining men then left the grandees. Hosea was left with his wife and child. The other women were also abandoned. So were most of the children who had been travelling alone and had been entrusted to the captain’s care.

There was some heroism – one of the children, a lad named Thomas Law was taken under the wing of the steward Henry Lilburne – who swore to lead the boy to safety or die; Lillburne and some of the men took it in turn to carry Tom Law on their shoulders.

There was also a great deal of endurance and perseverance in the months that followed as bands of men made their way towards the Cape. A few acquired some basic skills as hunter-gatherers. Some others threw themselves on the mercy of African people and survived that way. A great many more simply gave up and died.

Finally, four months after the wreck, we are back where I started – with a handful of the youngest and hardiest seamen finally stumbling in to an outlying Dutch settlement at the Cape. Of the 125 castaways, just 13 finally got back home.

Small wonder, then, that the story became encrusted with mysteries. What had happened, to those left behind? What had happened to the hopelessly incompetent Captain? Two men had stayed by the wreck – what had happened to them? Above all, what had happened to the children, and the women?

These questions resurfaced from time to time, as reports filtered down to the Cape about whites living among the natives beyond the frontier. A first expedition sent out by the Cape authorities failed to reach the wreck site, but so persistent were the reports of further survivors that ten years later a second party was sent out.

I’ll read another short section of the book about what followed. The party was composed mainly of farmers but one of their number, Jacob van Reenen, was able to write and acted as a scribe.

They rode, following the line of the coast but holding to a course between 30 and 40 miles inland, avoiding the magnificent but awkward Outeniqua mountains and Tsitsikama forest, instead making fast progress on the bleached plains of the Karoo scrubland as they swung along in the saddle for up to 10 hours a day.

They lived off the land, and well too, using long-barrelled roers to provide daily feasts of eland, buffalo and hippopotamus. Bontebok and wildebeest darted across the plains, and birds dazzled from acacia thorn trees. And they shot elephants for ivory. One of their number, a grizzled wanderer named Tjaart van der Walt, was impaled and trampled to death by the largest of these creatures. Another man fell into a staked pit set by the Xhosa to trap animals and died of infected wounds. Amid these fragments of adventure in a grand space, their trek anticipated a greater saga to come. They might have been on a quest, but they were pioneering territory that Boer dissidents would follow a generation later when they rejected English rule and rode away beyond the Cape in the exodus known as the Great Trek. Crossing the Amatola mountains into the Xhosa country, the land-hungry eyes of the farmers noted what Van Reenen, described as "beautiful countryside interspersed with little perennial streams, all of which are suitable for irrigation."

The Xhosa were welcoming. Chief Ndlambe of the Rarabe wished the searchers a safe journey and provided guides. On October 14, they crossed the broad, lovely Qora River into the land of the Tembu, distributing gifts and receiving in return interpreters and guides. Two months after setting out, they reached the Umtakatyi, the point at which the first expedition had turned back. They were nearing the site of the wreck.

Two days later, at a Bomvana kraal, they received electrifying news. Nearby, they were told, stood ...

Early on November 4, the riders came down from a ridge to a settlement of about a hundred thatch huts set above the Umgazana River. Smoke from a dozen fires was rising through the trees as the inhabitants came out. Their features and complexions were not of pure Africans, but of ‘whites and also from yellow slaves and Bengalese’.

There also, in the clearing, were three white women.

"They were deeply moved to see people of their race," Van Reenen wrote. And, it was said, a cry of rejoicing went up from this strange tribe at the sight of white men on horseback: "Our fathers are come ..."

WERE the Grosvenor women there ? Probably not. The three white women were said to have been quite old, and that would not fit with what we know of Mary Hosea, Sophia James and Lydia Logie. But there is still compelling evidence – both from the records of later travellers and from the oral traditions of the coastal people – that some of the Grosvenor castaways had attached themselves to this mixed race tribe, and that others made new lives for themselves among the Pondo.

The Grosvenor is still very much in the Pondo consciousness – as a legend about an uqwembe, in other words a wooden meat tray, that came ashore hundreds of years ago bringing white people, some of whom had stayed with the Pondo. In the course of my three visits to the Wild Coast for this book I encountered many people whose features showed a startlingly rich ethnic fusion, of Asian as well as European and African. I spoke to King Mpondombini, the Pondo paramount, who confirmed the oral traditions and tried to help trace descendants of the Grosvenor castaways.

In the end, that was not possible. There have been simply too many layers of humanity washed up on the Wild Coast to be able to connect anyone living now to one particular shipwreck more than 200 years ago. But in a story long on self-interest and desertion, it was satisfying to find this vindication of the human spirit, to discover that long before the colonial era a handful of Britons had come as close to being Africans as white men and women could.

In a sense, this process of assimilation is the untold story of that South African coastline. Portuguese and Dutch ships had been wrecked before and some of those on board had survived and stayed. So too had another English ship. And this brings me back to that mixed-race tribe found by the Dutch rescuers.

One other legend of the coastal people concerns a white child who was found castaway ashore from a ship. She is said to have called herself Bess, but she was named Gquma by the Bomvana people who took her in – a name mean Roar of the Sea. At first her prospects were despaired of, for it was said "Who will marry a frog – a thing that came from the sea". But she was taken as a wife, and by no less than a chief. And she herself became a tribal matriarch of great popularity and influence. Gquma, or Bess as she had been, was in fact head of the mixed race tribe found by the Dutch. Her response to their offer to take her back to the Cape, and to others of her own kind, is fascinating.

At first, they reported, she seemed "Very Willing and wished very much to live among Christians." After a few days of reflection, however, she decided to stay with her children and grandchildren. Van Reenen wrote that she was very moved when they parted. In the end, she evidently felt that having become part of Africa, there could be no going back. For the Grosvenor castaways, too, there was no going back.

Steve Taylor