17

THE QUEST

A Boer trek wagon, by William Burchell, c.1823

Calcutta, 23 February 1792

Richard Blechynden awoke at three that morning. This was not unusual. Ten years since his arrival in Calcutta, Blechynden remained one of the city’s less successful entrepreneurs, a worrier and a slave to insomnia who rarely slept as late as the dawn firing of the Fort William cannon, even in these relatively comfortable months of what passed for winter in Bengal. He followed his usual routine when roused by his nightmares or the oppression of the air, donning a loose robe and crossing to the desk where his diary lay.

By the time a bearer arrived to dress him, he had completed a particularly exhaustive account of his previous day’s endeavours and dashed off some correspondence for Europe, to go by the next Indiaman. Another servant brought his breakfast and the Calcutta Gazette. Blechynden glanced at the column of shipping news, an announcement of the first theatrical production of the season, a Greek tragedy, and news of General Abercromby’s army in Seringapatam. Then, at the foot of the page, his eye was caught by an item headlined:

THE GROSVENOR INDIAMAN

A chill fell on his heart as he read:

The lateft accounts concerning the Grofvenor Indiaman which was wrecked on the coast of Africa fome years ago in the 28th degree of Southern latitude, affure us that not the fmallest vestige of her crew or paffengers now exists and that Mrs Logie, the firft mate’s wife, who lived with one of the black Princes by whom she had feveral children, was also dead. This unfortunate Lady had the additional misfortune to furvive for a few years all her fhip-mates.

Blechynden’s first reaction, as he later recorded, was disbelief. Nine years had passed since the disaster, and while he would never be reconciled to losing Lydia, the reports and the inquiry, which he followed with ferocious intensity, had at least convinced him that her sufferings had not been prolonged. This was desperately important to him. They had been unusually close siblings, brought together in grief by losing their parents when Richard was fifteen. His sister, two years older, became the focus of his affectionate nature and an ideal for womanhood in general – ‘a delicate young female, tenderly brought up & of such exquisite sensibility that she might be said to be alive at every pore’, as he described her. Blechynden scrutinised the Gazette report again, and this time was angered and a little reassured. There was ‘no mention by how this account had come – or any reason assigned why this melancholy account was at this length of time brought before the public to wound the feelings of the friends and relatives of those unfortunate persons’. His conclusion was: ‘Improbable I may say, Impossible as to the latter part.’

For all his protestations, he was so agitated that he could not touch his breakfast. A syce was told to bring the phaeton and Blechynden set off to see his friend Edward Tiretta.

Losing their parents was not the only hardship to have befallen Richard and Lydia. A profligate grandfather had squandered the family estate in Kent, and the premature death of their father, a London merchant, would have cast them into a parish workhouse but for a kindly uncle, James Theobald, who provided for their education. Richard studied mathematics and astronomy before going to sea as a midshipman in the Godfrey, which was captured by the French in 1780 when he was twenty. His spell as a prisoner must have been quite brief because the following year he sailed as a midshipman again, this time in the Deptford East Indiaman, for Calcutta. It seems that he was to join Lydia there in order that they might set up home together, pending the marriage of one or the other.

Lydia had left a year earlier in another Indiaman with marriage very much in mind. Young women with more wit than fortune commonly went to India in search of prosperous and eligible men under a system of assisted passages offered by the Company, dubbed laconically ‘the Fishing Fleet’. As it turned out, destiny took a hand in Lydia’s plans. No sooner had she embarked on the Grosvenor, in June 1780, than the vivacious and handsome young woman passenger came to the attention of the ship’s chief mate, Alexander Logie. He courted her over the seven months of the outward passage.

At first glance, it might have seemed an unlikely match. On the one hand Lydia, with the exquisite sensibilities noted by her brother, from a family only recently fallen from gentility; on the other Logie, the former apprentice boy who for the past ten years had been whipping sailors into line from the Caribbean to the Bay of Bengal. But they were suited by need as well as by age – Logie being now twenty-eight and Lydia twenty-three. Lydia wanted a husband and Logie, having every expectation that he would take over command of the ship from Coxon, was a man of prospects. Far more improbable unions had been contracted in the volatile social mixture of Company India. While at sea, the couple came to an understanding.

On landing, Lydia proceeded to Calcutta and was provided with lodgings at the home of William Larkins, the Accountant-General of Bengal, whose wife Mary took in guests. Two other Larkins brothers were Indiamen captains, acquainted with Coxon and Logie, and the drawing room was a forum for officers of the shipping fraternity. Here Lydia stayed for more than six months while the Grosvenor was engaged on Company business, until Logie was able to free himself and travel to Calcutta for their marriage.

Three weeks later she boarded the Indiaman again, to sail home with her new husband. Her brother Richard was already bound for India, so in all likelihood their ships crossed in the Bay of Bengal. When the Deptford anchored at Kedgeree Roads on 31 May 1782, the Grosvenor was just about to sail from Trincomalee. Well over a year was to pass before word reached Richard of the disaster that had befallen his sister.

His friend Edward Tiretta had seen the Gazette report as well. A colourful figure, Italian by birth and formerly a fencing master in Paris, Tiretta had landed in Bengal after deserting from a Dutch ship and subsequently contrived an appointment as Surveyor of Roads. Now aged sixty-seven, he held court in a sprawling Calcutta mansion like some oriental potentate – he had just taken a new bride aged fourteen – and was both patron and father figure to Blechynden.

Tiretta tried to reassure him. Of course the report was nonsense. Had not Dalrymple stated quite categorically that the reports of Lydia’s seizure by Caffres were false? And there was that letter from the Cape military commander . . . yes, Colonel Gordon . . . had he not said that all the passengers had almost certainly died soon after being cast away? Blechynden acknowledged as much. Even so, he could not shake off ‘a great depression of spirits’. After an hour or two, unable to work or think, he returned to his apartment.

His years in Bengal had been marked by all the ups and downs to be expected in a risky business environment, including a few days in prison for debt, and he had experimented with various careers – architect, engineer and newspaper proprietor. By the standards of Calcutta he was unusually high-minded and honourable, esteemed as a man of his word by a circle of friends with whom he dined and drank chilled claret on most evenings. Although presently impecunious, he had rooms in town, a garden house and stables at the lakes where he grew roses and shot snipe, and at least three children by a variety of local bibis, for all of whom he had a patent affection. Aged thirty-one, he had just started the diary that he would keep until his death, finding the act of self-expression soothing when he was oppressed or vexed.

He turned to it again now and began scratching away furiously. The uppermost question was whether Lydia might, after all, have long survived.

Impossible! I say impossible because in the first instance it entirely militates with the evidence. And second that it is beyond the power of belief that in the hardship she must have experienced, [being] at the time of the catastrophe far gone with child and a sick husband, that she should long live with such accumulated evils – shut out entirely from the world, from all she held dear, surrounded by savages, whose language she could not comprehend, whose repast she could not even think of without loathing – without one cleansing ray of hope that she should ever revisit her native land and friends.

Reason with himself as he might, however, there was one phrase that he could not dismiss from his mind. He wrote it down – ‘one of the black Princes by whom she had several children’ – then appended an exclamation mark, and embarked on a rambling and agonised internal dialogue:

I will yield for arguments sake so far to the account as to suppose that where the mind’s passions do not go hand in hand with the body that fruition can follow – the contrary is so well known to be the case that it is useless to attempt a refutation. Nay, do not our very law Books maintain that where a woman is big with child she cannot have been forced – and what other name can they give to the horrid connexion to which they allude?

At the heart of Blechynden’s anguish was a touching ambiguity. While he knew no more about the supposedly savage Caffres than the next Englishman, he was uncommonly free of either social or racial prejudice in the circle with which he was familiar. He dined with Asians and took an interest in their society, and was painfully aware of the discrimination that his own children, who were illegitimate as well as Eurasian, were likely to encounter when he sent them to be schooled in England. He had, of course, experienced frequent ‘connexions’ himself with Bengali women, and kept company with one couple to whom he referred elliptically as Othello and Desdemona, evidently seeing nothing ‘horrid’ in that. But Lydia, delicate and tenderly brought up . . . Lydia, a concubine among naked brutes from a primitive tribe – that was another matter.

In almost ten years he had not wept for her. That night he thrashed about, tormented, until: ‘I know not what might have been the event had not a plentiful flood of tears come to my relief.’ Respite was short-lived. The nightmares resumed.

The wreck helped to rebuild ties between what had been, in effect, enemy capitals. Warren Hastings was sufficiently moved by Dutch efforts to save the castaways that he sent Governor Van Plettenburg a diamond ring that cost the Company £1,437 10s, inscribed with a quotation from Virgil: Ab hoste docere – It is right to be taught, even by an enemy. The ring was carried to the Cape, with a message expressing the hope that the recent restoration of peace in Europe meant that British ships would soon be able to receive again the hospitality for which the ‘tavern of the seas’ was renowned.*

Van Plettenburg, however, was troubled. Louis Pisani, the Italian member of the rescue expedition, was protesting publicly that Muller’s decision to turn back had been a terrible mistake and, having just received ‘a vague report of some Europeans now living among the Caffrees’, the Governor was forced to acknowledge that Pisani might be right. He replied in these terms to Hastings, vowing that if the account should be confirmed another party would be despatched ‘for the purpose of delivering all such as may be discovered’.

The reappearance in Cape Town, after a series of journeys through Caffraria, of François Le Vaillant, the French traveller, ornithologist and artist, gave rise to new speculation. Le Vaillant related that he had heard of a shipwreck and of women survivors being ‘cruelly reserved’ by the Caffres. Among the tribes living along the Great Fish River he saw metal trinkets that he suspected had come from the castaways. He wrote in his celebrated volumes of Travels:

The idea of these miserable people haunted me everywhere; and I could not help reflecting on the melancholy situation of the poor women, condemned to drag out their existence amidst the torment and horror of despair.

Le Vaillant’s sympathies were passed on to Colonel Robert Gordon, commander of the Cape garrison, a Dutchman of Scots descent. Gordon, too, had explored beyond the colony’s boundaries, mapping the region visited by Le Vaillant, and although unable to break away from his duties at the bastioned Castle down at the edge of Table Bay, he identified with the plight of those he called the stranders and resolved to do what he could.

Other echoes were meanwhile being heard along the colony’s frontier. From farmers in eastern districts, the Cape authorities started receiving accounts of whites living among natives up the coast. One particular report, which landed on Van Plettenburg’s desk in March 1784, described a visit to a farmer named Stephanus Scheepers in the distant mountain region of the Winterhoek, two days’ journey north of Algoa Bay, by a delegation of ‘Kaffers and Gonakwas’, who ‘bore witness that the English people were still alive’. Twice the Governor issued orders to the field commander of the Camdebo district, David van der Merwe, to organise a new rescue expedition. Twice the missions were abandoned, because of disputes among the farmers and a shortage of resources.

Then, late in 1785, the process was given new momentum when Lord Macartney visited the Cape. On his way home from Madras, Macartney may have been among those whose regret at the Grosvenor tragedy had been tempered by the disappearance of Charles Newman’s evidence of corruption in his presidency. He certainly retained a keen interest in the East Indiaman and her human cargo and, as the most senior British envoy since the restoration of peace, raised the subject with Gordon. Macartney reported in his diary on 18 October:

Lt Col Gordon a very well informed & Ingenious man . . . Told me the Grosvenor was lost only 8 or 10 days South distance from De Lagoa – & that if the people had gone a little within the Country they would have got safe . . . Believes most of the people perished – perhaps one lady not dead.

Gordon’s instincts were soon tested. A month after Macartney’s visit, he was ordered to take a detachment up the coast to investigate suspicions that the crew of a British vessel, the Pigot, had made an unauthorised landing about 300 miles up the coast at Cape St Francis. He set out in November and was away almost five months. He pushed his orders to the limit and beyond, venturing at least 150 miles beyond his supposed destination, through the region where William Habberley had resided with the Xhosa, and nearly to the Great Fish River, where Taylor and Williams had met their deaths. Here Gordon interrogated local tribesmen, and was deeply moved by one story in particular. He related it later to another prominent visitor to the Cape.

On a wet day in 1788, His Majesty’s armed vessel Bounty dropped anchor in Table Bay. The Bounty’s commander, a protégé of Cook’s named William Bligh, was under orders to proceed to the Pacific and take on breadfruit for the West Indies slave plantations. While his ship provisioned for the next stage of his voyage, he called at the Castle, where he met Gordon. His story so gripped Bligh that he recorded it in detail:

He said that in his travels to the Caffre country, he had met with a native who described to him that there was a white woman among his countrymen, who had a child, and that she frequently embraced the child, and cried most violently. This was all he could understand; and, being then on his return home, with his health much impaired by fatigue, the only thing he could do was to make a friend of the native, by presents and promise of reward, on condition that he would take a letter to this woman, and bring him back an answer.

Accordingly, he wrote letters in English, French and Dutch, desiring that some sign or mark might be returned, either by writing with a burnt stick or by any means that she should be able to devise, to satisfy him that she was there; and that on receiving such token from her, every effort should be made to ensure her safety and escape. But the Caffre, although apparently delighted with the commission which he had undertaken, never returned, nor has the colonel ever heard anything more of him.*

A mother and child. The description pointed to Lydia Logie and her baby, unborn at the time of the wreck. It might equally have applied to Mary Hosea, last seen with her two-year-old daughter Frances. But then the sources reporting to Gordon sometimes told different stories. At some stage he met another Xhosa who told him that there was not one woman, but two. Gordon related this to another visitor, a young Frenchman named Perneau.

Six years after the wreck, in other words, there was a substantial body of confused but nevertheless broadly consistent evidence that cried out for further investigation, an expedition that would go all the way to the site and resolve the mystery one way or another; but the new Governor, Cornelis Van de Graaff, was preoccupied by renewed frontier tensions with the Xhosa.

Gordon was a decent and sensitive man. While convinced by now that there were survivors, he saw no purpose, as he told Bligh, in raising the hopes of those whose loss was still raw until the facts were established one way or another. At around the same time, he received a letter from James Theobald in London, introducing himself as the uncle of Lydia Logie, and with an enclosure addressed to her. Theobald explained that he had heard Lydia might still be alive and asked Gordon to have the message taken up the coast by a bearer. Having written just such a letter himself and heard no more, Gordon did what he thought was for the best: he returned the letter ‘with the positive assurance of all the Grosvenor Stranders being dead’. It was received with relief by Theobald, who passed it on to his nephew, Richard Blechynden.

Blechynden kept Gordon’s letter. He used it as a kind of talisman against his visions of Lydia. More difficult to explain are his reasons for hanging in his rooms a dramatic picture of the sinking Indiaman, in all probability the aquatint by Robert Pollard, after an original oil by Robert Smirke, which was published two years after the wreck and became the best-known image of the Grosvenor.* But if it is difficult to comprehend why he kept at hand this harrowing reminder of the disaster, there can be no doubt that Blechynden’s distress was genuine. In the months after publication of the Gazette report, there are frequent references to Lydia in the diaries:

9 December, 1792: This day always makes me melancholy. It is the anniversary of the birthday of my unfortunate & ever lamented Sister Mrs Logie!

16 December, 1792: Passed a very disagreeable night. Had shocking dreams about Mrs Logie. Awoke much troubled in my mind.

Years went by, but Blechynden’s peace of mind remained fragile. Soon after he heard about Gordon’s suicide in 1795, precipitated by the British occupation of the Cape – ‘I am very sorry for this . . . I am much indebted to him for the endeavours he took to trace out my poor dear sister Mrs Logie,’ he wrote – an uncannily coincidental meeting with Perneau, the Frenchman who had spoken to Gordon before his death, brought all these events together and shook Blechynden deeply:

10 November, 1796: Perneau called on me to visit. I hate visits. [His] attention was attracted by the print of the loss of the Grosvenor and he pretended with all the levity of a Frenchman that there were two ladies in existence among the Caffres in 1788 – that Colonel Gordon told him this. How this man can fib when I myself have a letter from Colonel Gordon to my uncle in which he opines him they are all dead! It however served to sink my spirits.

While Richard continued to assert with an air of defiant certainty that Lydia had died soon after the wreck, in his heart he feared that the persistence of the stories from the Cape marked them as true. Nightmares plagued him for years, and every year, on 9 December, he would start his diary with the same melancholy reflection. The last entry in 1810, a few years before his death, is typical and reads: ‘My poor lost Sister’s Birthday!’

When finally the expedition was launched, it came not at the instigation of a reluctant Governor but on the initiative of a handful of conscience-stricken colonists. On 24 August 1790 a commando of thirteen burghers mustered at the Kaffir Kuils River, a picturesque spot about 170 miles due east of Cape Town. It included no fewer than five members of the first rescue attempt, including Stephanus Scheepers, the Winterhoek farmer who had been troubled since being visited by the Xhosa delegation six years earlier. Also there was Heligert Muller, who had had plenty of opportunity to reflect on his mistakes as commander of the first expedition. This time, however, the party was commanded by Jan Holthausen, and it would succeed in reaching its destination, more than 620 miles away.

They rode, following the line of the coast but holding to a course between thirty and forty 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 ten hours a day. Lessons had been learned, and when, after four weeks, they crossed the Great Fish River, the column consisted of just ten wagons.

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 (Holthausen recorded the first sighting by a European of the distinctive crowned crane). And they shot elephants for ivory – twenty in all. One of their number, a grizzled wanderer named Tjaart van der Walt, was impaled and trampled to death by the largest of these creatures; and Holthausen’s son, a youth name Jan, fell into a staked pit set by the Xhosa to trap animals and died of infected wounds. Amid these fragments of tragedy, drama and adventure in a grand space, their trek anticipated a greater saga to come. Holthausen might have been on a quest, but he was 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 their scribe, Jacob van Reenen, described as ‘beautiful countryside interspersed with little perennial streams, all of which are suitable for irrigation, and which possesses everything necessary for good and fine farms, broken grassland excellent for cattle . . . a great deal of game’.

The Xhosa were welcoming. Chief Ndlambe of the Rarabe, warring with the neighbouring Gqunukhwebe, wished the searchers a safe journey and provided guides so that they might avoid his foe. On 14 October Holthausen 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, Holthausen received electrifying news. Nearby stood ‘a kraal of Christian bastaards descended from people from a ship wrecked there’.

Early on 4 November 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 . . .’