AFRICAN CRUSOES
Natives of Mosselbaai, engraving, Cornelis de Houtman, 1646
John Bryan, being lame and unable to walk, and Joshua Glover,a fool, stayed by the wreck . . .
Report on the loss of the Grosvenor, Alexander Dalrymple
Lambasi, 7 August 1782
It was the third day and Bryan had never felt so alone. He had played up the extent of his injury to the officers while telling Hynes that he would take his chances among the natives rather than stay with a doomed company. Now he was less sure. After the tumult and shouting of the wreck, the milling figures on the shore, the soldier gazed around at a gaunt landscape. Solitude was new to him. Whether on campaign in Mysore or in the rough confinement of the Indiaman, he was used to fellowship. Hugging himself against a cool wind coming off the sea, he was shocked by the awful finality of his decision.
Earlier that day Coxon had led the ship’s company away to the south. The warriors had gone too, obviously in pursuit, but Bryan was sure that they would be back. Debris from the Grosvenor was still eddying around the inlet and snagging on the rocks. With time to himself he began a search, collecting an axe, a knife, rope . . . These he carried across the stream to a forest of milkwoods in the dunes and concealed them in the undergrowth with the last of his salt beef and flour, then dug himself a shelter in the soft sand.
Women and children came the next day and danced at the water’s edge. Discovering brightly coloured silks where they had been left by the crew, the women ululated and began to drape one another’s nakedness, gambolling and darting away with shrieks of laughter, as if to avoid the unfamiliar sensation of the fabric. Bryan watched from the trees, and when they left he felt alone again.
He returned to the inlet and found a flint. That evening, as a gale swept in off the sea, he huddled gratefully around crackling flames, and woke in the morning to find the storm had cast up fresh debris from the wreck, including pewter plates from the great cabin and a copper ewer. These he added to his little trove.
One morning he came out from his shelter to the lagoon where the Tezani and another smaller stream debouched into the sea, and followed each in turn up towards the ridge, looking for fruit among the trees that grew along the banks. The smaller stream gurgled clear and sweet among the rocks, gathering in pools surrounded by reeds. The Tezani was enfolded on either side by tiers of black sandstone that rose sheer and bristled with wild bananas and protea trees. Malachite sunbirds flitted among the branches.
On the sixth day, approaching the inlet, he saw that the warriors had returned. From a vantage point he watched the conical hairstyles bobbing among the rocks as fires were again started and fed with wreckage. When he had prepared himself, Bryan went out to meet them, proffering the axe and pointing to his mouth. He spoke in his own tongue, of his need for shelter as well as food. They replied in their own way, and he noted that some of them wore ladies’ jewellery in their hair. He continued talking – about the wreck, his poverty. They listened impassively but without any sign of antagonism.
He took up the axe and set about cleaving a spar. They resumed their search. Later, as they gathered up their iron oddments and started up the ridge, he went with them.
On the evening of 12 August, John Bryan, late of the Madras Infantry, joined another tribe. His background and almost everything else about him are a mystery but, a veteran in his thirties, he lacked neither intuitive shrewdness nor practical skills. In confiding to Hynes that he intended making ‘trinkets to amuse the natives, hoping to ingratiate himself with them’, he had a real strategy for survival, and his statement that he might as well die among the natives as starve on a march showed an insight that his fellows lacked. None of them was ever to know what became of him, and it was widely assumed that he had died. Of his life with the Pondo, and of their traditions, enough is known for this telling.
The umzi was an enclosure of thirty huts, set below the escarpment of the Mkweni River with crop patches running down almost to the water’s edge. At the highest point was the inkundla – the great house – occupied by an improbable patriarch of spare frame who appeared to be all bone and rheumy eyes. Nothing besides his age distinguished him from the other males: a hide sheath covered their genitals; otherwise they wore only long hide cloaks. But there was no mistaking the deference, even awe, shown to this ancient by the hundred or so inhabitants of his kraal. Over time Bryan perceived that he was living with a large, polygamous family headed by the inkosi, Ntlane, and including his four wives, their sons and daughters, and their spouses and offspring.
Other umzi dotted hills around the valley, of varying sizes but each with its own inkosi. It took Bryan rather longer to discover that the inhabitants were kin, linked to an ancestor named Pondo by a connection as significant to each individual as it was complex. Among the inkosi in the vicinity Ntlane had paramountcy, although how he came by it was for Bryan another mystery.
From the escarpment Bryan could see the ocean, for the umzi was no more than three miles from where the Indiaman had grounded. The perspective it commanded provided other insights: the blackened hillside explained the lights in the dark seen by Grosvenor lookouts; late in the dry season the Pondo burnt off the old grass to promote fresh growth immediately the rains began. He saw, too, that the warriors who had descended on the wreck and then pursued the castaways were not an organised cohort but men of the various family groups scattered around the valley.
For the first few days he shared a hut with two of Ntlane’s unmarried sons. It was a cave of mud and thatch, barren apart from a few clay pots and spears, dark during the day and smoke-filled at night from embers in the hearth. The floor, of compacted, polished cattle dung, was ungiving, despite the woven rush mats on which they slept, and he rose in the mornings unrested with smoke-reddened eyes.
Little appeared to be expected of him and little was done by the other men either, once the cattle had been taken from a stockade opposite Ntlane’s hut to be milked and then herded by boys into the hills. The women, on the other hand, set off early to the land with hoes of fire-hardened wood and stayed all day, breaking muddy soil softened by the onset of the rains, and planting maize and pumpkin. By evening they had returned, to rekindle fires and prepare meals that at this time of year were necessarily sparse. Once Bryan was familiar with the agricultural cycle, he realised that the natives’ reluctance to feed the castaways had been due largely to the fact that the wreck had occurred at precisely the point at which their resources were most strained. The previous harvest was all but consumed, the cattle were lean and spare.
One morning he went back to his old shelter by the lagoon and retrieved a pewter plate, which he presented to Ntlane. Bryan’s reward was to be given an imizi of his own. Once he became accustomed to the burnished dung floor, he found it was deliciously cool in the sultry summer months and yet retained the cosy warmth of a hearth fire in the short winter.
Of the younger men he remained wary. Two had women’s gold brooches pinned in their hair, another wore a charm of silver monogrammed buttons that Bryan recalled having seen on Charles Newman’s coat. So he was careful to conceal the copper ewer when he brought that back to his hut, and – working covertly at night – fashioned it into four bangles. These he gave to Ntlane’s wives, with the largest for Mamguntu, the great wife. After that he brought his tools to the umzi and worked openly.
He went hunting with the men. A spirit medium smeared them with a potion designed to attract their prey before they set off across the escarpment. The first day they saw antelope at a distance, which they chased unsuccessfully with the dogs. Bryan, no match for his fleet-footed companions, mourned the loss of his old musket. Another day passed in fruitless pursuit. Towards sunset on the third day, with only a little grain left, they crested a ridge. A barrel-like creature the like of which he had never seen before was grazing with its young on the banks of a river below.
Years later Bryan admitted to his friend Poto that had he known their peril he would not have joined the hunters who crept down into the valley, then followed a reed bed that came out within ten yards of the animals. Sprinting out, the men interposed themselves between calf and mother. As she charged, they stood their ground, taking her on their points. In a moment there was blood everywhere, the calf was squealing under the spears, and the barrel-like creature was bellowing and slashing about with her tusks. Had the hippopotamus cow been fully grown they must have found her irresistible, but as more men came, stabbing and hacking, she sank to the sand. A cry went up, a praise to the ancestors.
One hunter died of his wounds that night. Bryan, although among a number with gashes, joined the rest in gorging on the sweet flesh of the calf. Next day they cut the cow into long strips, which were draped on poles and borne home in triumph.
He picked up some of their tongue and started to venture out beyond the valley. Once, exploring the hills north of the wreck, he came to another umzi and found Joshua Glover.
It is easy to imagine their joy. Bryan and Glover seem to have come by their salvation in a similar fashion, the latter having salvaged from the wreck a chisel with which he performed useful tasks and carved wooden figures that he gave to children. Yet there is nothing in the admittedly fragmentary accounts of their lives to suggest that they formed any particular bond. The sailor had been regarded by his fellows as a lunatic and was shunned by them as a Jonah. It is likely that some of his more superstitious shipmates blamed him for the wreck, which would help to explain his disappearance with the Pondo soon afterwards. In any event, he too found a place among them. Tribal society was tolerant of eccentricity and although less is known of Glover’s subsequent life than Bryan’s, he was also remembered.* We may assume that if he and Bryan did not become intimate acquaintances, they continued occasionally to meet.
As the days grew hotter, and fields ripened with pumpkin and sorghum, the tempo of life quickened. During the spring fertility rituals, Bryan noticed the high breasts and long limbs of a girl named Sipho. Later he went to sit by her. One night he followed her and was surprised when his fumbling advances were not repulsed. She began his instruction in ukumetsha. Though much gratified, he found her self-control disconcerting, for she would not permit penetration, and as he had previously been acquainted only with garrison women, it took him some time to comprehend that, although adept at this form of external intercourse, Sipho remained a virgin.
Late that first year – it must have been December – the older women wove long grass into baskets tight enough to hold liquid, and harvested maize and sorghum. Grain was ground to the accompaniment of songs, and when all was ready, Ntlane gathered his people and they set off up the valley. In two days of walking Bryan’s shoes finally fell to pieces and he was limping on raw feet when they reached a labyrinth of huts and pens sprawling across a low grassy knoll. Many of the sixty-odd clans of the royal house were already at Qawukeni, the Great House of the paramount, and by the time the moon reached its fullest phase, all of Pondo’s people were at hand for inxwala, the first fruits ceremony, being celebrated by his descendant, Ngqungqushe.
Women deposited their crops, then withdrew to a nearby hilltop to observe. Oxen were slaughtered. Beer was passed round in calabashes, and pipes were filled with a plant that grew wild on the hills. Young men grew boastful while their elders engaged in rumbling debate punctuated by choruses of consensus, and the sweet scent of cannabis wafted on the air and mingled with the smell of roasting flesh.
A circle of male diviners prepared pots of a medicine composed of the fresh grains, herbs and a secret ingredient. First to taste the potion was Ngqungqushe. The warriors followed suit, for now each clan sent forward its young men to make an army for the paramount. Chunks of fatty beef circulated on wooden trays. After the feast, diviners came among the men, scarifying them under the right eye in order that their aim should be true. With the rite complete and the warriors made strong, they awaited only the orders of Ngqungqushe.*
Which of their traditional foes – the Pondomise, the Bomvana or the Tembu – suffered the Pondo onslaught in that summer early in 1783 is lost in legend. Bryan saw them go. He had achieved his initial objective among his adopted people; but it was as more than a maker of trinkets that he would be remembered. The harvest of iron from the Grosvenor was soon depleted by war and hunting. Some time after that first inxwala ceremony, Bryan went back to the wreck.
All in pieces, the Indiaman lay in the inlet, the stern section of her hull no more than thirty yards offshore. It was only severe storms that brought up further treasure now, but by feeling his way around the rocks at the start, then diving below the surface as he gained in confidence, Bryan found the stern at a depth of about fifteen feet. He never did discover the chest of gold mohurs that disgorged its contents on the rocks a few decades later. Of far more value to him, however, were the oblong pigs of ballast that had spilled from the Indiaman’s hull and were churning around on the seabed like iron bricks.
With a rudimentary forge and bellows of oxhide, he began to produce assegai heads, then utensils. The next growing season his rough hoes transformed the women’s labours, and his renown spread beyond the valley. He was called Umbethi, meaning the Beater, and men brought cattle to barter for his wares. Soon he had his own herd. Then, with the blessing of Ntlane, he moved up the valley. Beside a thicket of wild banana trees he established his own umzi, a large hut with a fine, smooth dung floor laid by Sipho and the women, and a circular cattle stockade made by the men.
Not long after that Sipho’s father accepted lobola of ten cattle for her. She was bathed in the contents of a cow’s gall bladder, so that her family should be blessed with cattle, and after a feast on the rest of the animal – to which Umbethi was not admitted – she was delivered by a delegation to the umzi of her new husband.
The next year was a bad one in the valley. It started with an accusation of sorcery against a wife of Msingali, one of Ntlane’s sons. Umbethi heard about the case, how the child of another woman in the umzi had died and she had claimed that Msingali’s wife was a thakathi – a witch. Ntlane was consulted and rather than have her killed out of hand, he ordered Msingali to send her back to her family; but he was attached to that wife, and instead left the two others and took her a few miles away, where they built a hut. A few months later Msingali visited Umbethi, relating that new accusations against his wife had been made from another umzi – that she was responsible for cattle sickness. A few days later news came that men had arrived in the night, set fire to Msingali’s hut and beaten him and his wife to death.
When the dry season came again, and the grass turned the colour of biscuit, fires were started in the hills in anticipation of rain. No rain came. At dawn each day Ntlane would limp down to the cattle stockade and gaze silently on his precious creatures. Each day they had to be herded further from the umzi, yet they were producing little milk and were as spindly as the idama tree. Word came that fighting had broken out over grazing in another valley. Soon afterwards, other inkosi came from across the hills to petition Ntlane for rain.
All the Pondo rainmakers had their own methods. An early researcher took down the following account almost a century ago:
The chief sends a black beast without spot. It is killed and the hide is prepared. A human being is killed and in his skull is put the fat of the beast. The rainmaker goes to live in a hut by himself. He covers himself with the hide and smears the hide with the fat from the human skull. Then a snake comes by night and licks the fat off the hide. It should not be seen by any one except the rainmaker. After that it rains.
The valley came to life with almost the first drops. Green shoots burst above the charred stalks. Great was the acclaim for Ntlane; but the old inkosi was saddened by loss, and by his sacrifice. Soon afterwards he died, and was buried within his umzi. His eldest son, Geza, became inkosi but did not succeed Ntlane as head of the clan because a conclave of the other headmen ordained that another of their number was the rightful mediator with the ancestral spirits.
As Bryan’s metamorphosis to Umbethi continued, his skin darkened and his hair grew thick and matted under the sun, the soles of his bare feet were hardened like leather and if he never attained the agility and endurance of his fellows he could still join them in the hunt.
Mostly the days were divided between his cattle and his forge. Sipho tended the fields of maize and sorghum. In the evening he bathed in the river. Sometimes he would return to the umzi and drink beer with Poto and the other sons of Ntlane, but more often he was content by his own fire with a pipe of the sweet-smelling herb. The heavens had an aspect of startling clarity at night, and he would lie back on the grass, gazing at the beam-like brightness of Venus, tracing patterns among the stars and mesmerised by the Milky Way.
Castaways have usually attempted to keep track of time, as a link to their former lives and perhaps as a subconscious assurance that they will return to it. Barney Leary kept a notched stick in the march down the coast, until losing it on the thirty-ninth day. Defoe has Robinson Crusoe record the date of his shipwreck on a cross, then score it daily to maintain an annual calendar. At some point, though, Umbethi forgot time, and when the second anniversary of the wreck came, he was in all probability oblivious to it.
Rather than the calendar, he became aware of cycles – of the moon’s phases, of the season of grass-burning, of the planting time and of the wet season when black clouds blew in thunderously from the sea. There followed long, sultry days in the valley when he plucked sweet red matungulu plums and wallowed in the Mkweni’s thick brown waters: at this time the hills were hung with soft mossy foliage, the cows grew fat and the baskets were full of beer and grain. Then once again the grass turned to the colour of sand and a cool breeze coming off the river rustled the dry wild-banana fronds.
Their firstborn was a girl, called Mambethi, or daughter of Umbethi. If there had been any doubt beforehand, there was no question after that of going back. As the years passed, he may have sighted a passing sail on the horizon, must have learnt that Delagoa Bay to the north could be reached with no great hardship. He never tried to go back. Instead, for some years he had the satisfaction of emerging in the morning from his hut, its entrance facing to the east, to feel the dew under his feet and the sun on his face, and to savour a glow of proprietorial pride as he surveyed his herd.*
He had every reason to be grateful to his new people. The manner of his acceptance recalls other early visitors’ accounts of the Nguni-speaking tribes – of people tolerant, patient, indulgent and gregarious, ‘loving one another with a most remarkable strength of affection’, as one put it – rather than the brigands associated with the Grosvenor survivors. Whether he assimilated in the fullest sense is another matter.
Among them he was a phenomenon; but a society in which a man’s lineage – his relationship with the ancestors – was so essential to his standing, had some difficulty revealing itself completely to outsiders. For Bryan’s part, a pragmatic, rational spirit may have stood in the way of participation in tribal life at its deepest level. Perhaps Glover was a readier vessel for accepting an existence ordained by magic and witchcraft. England was not so distant itself from a belief in witches and their familiars, and the sailor was touched by the fantastic. He never took a wife but gained some renown as a praise-singer and was invariably seen at inxwala where he would extol the virtues of the paramount, to much approbation.
As for Bryan, there was another tenet of tribal culture to which he was resistant. While he had the land and cattle of an inkosi, he did not proceed like others to procure more wives. For one of his wealth and standing, six was not uncommon; but Sipho was to remain his only mate. She was pregnant with their second child when the invaders came.
The circumstances are unclear. For some years the clans living up the coast, beyond the Umzimkulu River, had been engaged in a process of conquest and subordination that would culminate twenty years later in an illegitimate outcast named Shaka emerging at the head of a centralised kingdom. Already the northern clans of the Zulu were being organised into the disciplined age-group regiments, the amabutho, that would sweep down on the Pondo and other smaller clans. At the same time, the Pondo had a history of conflict with their neighbours and the raiders may have come from the same Bomvana group that killed the paramount Ngqungqushe at around this time.
Whoever the raiders were, they came for Umbethi’s cattle, and his wife. When the sun went down Sipho had been carried off. He seems to have gone after her, for he made no attempt to rebuild his umzi but left the valley and set off with their daughter Mambethi on a wanderers’ trail. He never did find his mate. What eventually became of her is not known, but she survived long enough to bear their second child, a son Faku, who in due course returned to the valley.* Some thirty years later, Faku told the final chapter of his father’s story to Henry Fynn, an English adventurer who spent most of his life among the Zulu and Pondo, took a number of native wives and evidently recognised a kindred spirit in the castaway soldier. Fynn wrote in his diary:
He was in despair on account of the loss of his wife. He resided for a time among the amaXolo tribe, near the Umzimkulu, with his daughter, and built a canoe for exploring the river. He, however, failed to proceed far up because of the beds of rocks that extend across it. Leaving his daughter, he went off in an inland direction, from whence, soon afterwards, news was received by the amaXolo of his death. His daughter was killed in 1823 in the general slaughter of the surrounding peaceful nations by Shaka. Faku is still living, he has a large family and possesses a few cattle.
An earlier, more famous castaway, Alexander Selkirk, marooned on the tiny Pacific island of Juan Fernandez with the company only of cats and goats, endured more than four years of solitude before being rescued in 1709. He returned to England and fame, attracting the notice of Daniel Defoe, who used his story as the basis of his seminal novel. An old sea captain thought Selkirk’s case ‘may instruct us how much a plain and temperate way of living conduces to the health of the body and the vigour of the mind, both of which we are apt to destroy by excess and plenty, especially of strong liquor’. Selkirk, indeed, lived to regret being rescued, and was given to staring at the sea and lamenting, ‘Oh my beloved island! I wish I had never left thee.’
Umbethi died in about 1795, so he had some thirteen years to contemplate the vindication of his decision. A man of desperate fortune – nothing else explains his recruitment to the most wretched corps in the Company’s service – he had sought only survival yet had found much more. In crossing the line between his two worlds like few Englishmen, he had wrought a life of freedom and endeavour, and had he returned to London the scribes would doubtless have fallen on him as another Selkirk to weave a thrilling tale from his experiences.
In fact, Bryan and Glover were forgotten, their lives left unchronicled. Journalists, authors and even composers had in the meantime been exercised by a far more outlandish idea than male castaways. Not long after Bryan’s death, the Drury Lane Theatre in London staged a musical drama by the composer Charles Dibdin entitled Hannah Hewit, the Female Crusoe. It was the first of a variety of popular entertainments about English ladies lost among tribesmen who dressed in skins and hunted wild animals with spears and clubs.