CalibanShore-38.html

First American Edition 2004

First published as a Norton paperback 2005

Originally published in England under the title
The Caliban Shore: The Fate of the Grosvenor Castaways

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write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Taylor, Stephen, 1948–

Caliban’s shore : the wreck of the Grosvenor and the strange fate of
her survivors / Stephen Taylor.—1st American ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-393-05085-8 (hardcover)

1. Grosvenor (Ship) 2. Shipwrecks—South Africa—Cape of Good
Hope—History —18th century. 3. Cape of Good Hope
(South Africa)—History—To 1795. I. Title.

DT1813.T395 2004

968.7’032—dc22 2004011806

ISBN 0-393-32707-8 pbk.

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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* As Chief Justice, Sir Robert outraged the diarist and lawyer William Hickey with his ruling in the Calcutta bazaar land case of 1793, in which he had a substantial financial interest. See Hickey (under Spencer (ed.) in ‘Published sources’), vol. 4, pp. 135–9.

* Outward-bound East Indiamen exploited the prevailing trades across the Atlantic, sometimes touching the east coast of South America before tacking south-east for the Cape of Good Hope.

* A corruption of the title Nawab.

* In 1810, there were no more than an estimated 250 white women in Bengal, among 2,000 to 3,000 men.

* Two of the children had already been sent to live with Mary’s mother in England. Only the third, Frances, sailed with them on the Grosvenor.

* The report itself has been lost. What survives is a letter from Hosea to Chambers insisting that it was for information only and ‘not to be quoted’.

* The fifteen so named included not only Rumbold, but Sir Edward Hughes, the admiral commanding the Royal Navy squadron on the Coromandel coast.

* In armaments and dimensions, the Grosvenor was not unlike the frigate, HMS Surprise. This twenty-four-gun sixth-rate, French-made but captured by the Royal Navy in 1796 and in service until 1802, was salvaged from history by Patrick O’Brian in his maritime novels and relaunched as Jack Aubrey’s best-loved ship.

* Latitude – position north or south of the Equator – was readily calculable from a noon sun sight. Longitude – position east or west of a home port – was far more difficult to establish and for centuries was generally calculated by ‘dead reckoning’, various crude means of estimating a ship’s speed. Innumerable vessels were lost through navigational error before John Harrison’s chronometers, which kept accurate time differentials between ship and port, enabled captains to determine their whereabouts accurately.

* Just two days before the Grosvenor sailed from England, London was convulsed by the Gordon Riots, seven days of all-out anarchy – the storming of prisons, attacks on the Bank of England – that only ended when soldiers opened fire on the mob, killing 285 people. Afterwards thirty of the ringleaders were hanged at Tyburn.

* The British in India were renowned for their appetites. Mrs Fay, no mean trencher woman herself, gives as a typical menu for dinner in Calcutta: ‘A soup, a roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a fore quarter of lamb, rice pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, fine bread, excellent madeira.’

* After the East Indiaman Dodington sank off Algoa Bay in 1755, the survivors used her timbers to build a small vessel, which they called the Happy Deliverance and sailed to Delagoa Bay.

* Dalrymple produced a widely accepted chart in 1769, locating Terra Australis Incognita in the South Pacific, a vast land mass south of the Indies and west of the Americas, and then denounced Cook for failing to substantiate this contention by venturing further south after his epic circumnavigation of New Zealand. Cook held that there was no such land mass and obtained his revenge by demonstrating as much on his next voyage.

* Cook was remarkably perceptive about the impact of Europeans on indigenous peoples, writing: ‘We debauch their Morals already too prone to vice and we interduce among them wants and perhaps diseases which they never before knew and which serves only to disturb that happy tranquillity they and their fore Fathers had injoy’d. If any one denies the truth of this assertion let him tell me what the Natives of the whole extent of America have gained by the commerce they have had with Europeans.’

* Johnson had a black servant, Francis Barber, a freed Jamaican slave whom he treated as a nephew, encouraging his education and providing for him in his will. Barber later became a teacher and married an Englishwoman.

* Anthropologists have offered another, more prosaic, explanation for the Pondo origin – that they were an offshoot from the Swazis and came down to the coast through the country now inhabited by the Zulus.

* Unlike the Pondo, the Khoikhoi were not a Bantu people, having been established at the Cape thousands of years earlier along with the hunter-gatherer San, or Bushmen. Both Khoikhoi and San were displaced and eventually eradicated by a combination of European and, to a lesser extent, Bantu expansion.

* In 1552 a Portuguese galleon, the São Joao, went down about fifty miles further north. Of 500 or so survivors, most reached Delagoa.

* It has been suggested that this was a disastrous miscalculation inviting attack, as a Dutch frontier war against the Xhosa had ended only a year before. However, the tribes in this region had no previous experience of the Dutch.

* One scholar of the period might almost have had the Grosvenor seamen in mind when she wrote: ‘By means of the sea and ships, these puny people could and did go everywhere. Ships cannot operate on dry land, however; so after landfall things for the British were always different, and usually far more difficult. This was emphatically the case as far as the East India Company was concerned.’ Colley, p. 246.

* Accounts of such mistreatment at the hands of Africans evoked outrage when they reached England; but it is worth recalling that shipwrecked seamen could often expect no better in their native land. The Cornish coast was notorious for the activity of wreckers who looted shipping. In 1753, one witness to ‘the monstrous barbarity practised by these savages’, wrote: ‘I have seen many a poor man, half dead, cast ashore and crawling out of the reach of the waves, fallen upon and in a manner stripp’d naked by those villains.’ When the Indiaman Halsewell was wrecked in Dorset three years after the Grosvenor, a clergyman, Morgan Jones, related hearing the news at breakfast with a friend: ‘The disposition of the country to plunder is well known; we therefore immediately mounted our horses, to afford what protection we could to the unfortunate.’

* Early identification by the English of African carnivores is extremely eccentric. Usually, ‘tigers’ referred to leopards and ‘wolves’ meant hyenas; but Hynes’s mention of ‘twenty wolves at a time lying in the grass’ would indicate the gregarious wild dog rather than the solitary hyena.

* A sailor of the time described the fare in Timor: ‘Buffalo, sheep, hogs, fowls, maize, rice, limes, oranges, mangoes, plantains, watermelons, tobacco . . . the natives showed us the greatest possible inclination to supply us with whatever they had.’

* This was on 24 August. Shaw’s party reached it three days later, after returning from their inland detour.

* Such symptoms reflect the tensions over cattle raiding – by both settlers and Xhosa – which, more than land hunger or any other factor, had triggered the start of the Cape frontier conflicts.

* There is a slight but distinct possibility that the painting was commissioned by the child’s father, Thomas Law, who was still living in Bengal after Carter’s arrival. It was in any event sold in Calcutta, although its present whereabouts are unknown. Thomas Law left India and in 1793 went to the United States and married George Washington’s granddaughter, Betsey Custis. He made it known that he had had three sons by a previous marriage, but that all had died.

* Three weeks after the Grosvenor sailed from Madras, Macartney – apparently uneasy about what Newman had found – wrote to Hastings claiming that he had resisted the bribes of the Nawab’s durbar, which had ‘found me incorruptible’. Another subject of Newman’s inquiries, the former Governor Sir Thomas Rumbold, who ‘shook the pagoda tree’ more vigorously than anyone since Clive, was brought to trial before the British Parliament later that year, but was acquitted. In 1784 he was elected MP for Weymouth and, his fortune intact, lived in the manner expected of a nabob until his death in 1791.

* Twenty years later, Sampson came upon the evidence that vindicated him – confirmation that a Grosvenor passenger, William Hosea, had had a substantial parcel of diamonds. It was too late to help Bock, who had died soon after his release, and by then the diamonds had mysteriously disappeared. In recent years a campaign has begun to clear Bock’s name and his descendants have claimed that they are due compensation for loss of the treasure.

* On 2 July 1783 Margaret wrote to her brother of Fanny Chambers: ‘A young, handsome wife with unsteady principles and immodest vanity has lost her reputation entirely – I hope she has not lost her honour, tho’ the candid must allow appearances are greatly against her.’

* While the Pondo knew Bryan as the blacksmith, Glover was always described as the carpenter.

* Ngqungqushe is said in some of the Pondo traditions to have ordered the attacks on the Grosvenor castaways, but neither Bryan nor Glover was ever harmed. He appears to have been a chief of no great ability and died a few years later in tribal warfare. He is remembered, however, for having fathered the great Pondo chief Faku.

* Bryan’s later life recalls that of an earlier castaway, an old Portuguese who was found by Dutch seamen along this coast in 1689 but refused to leave. They reported: ‘He had been circumcised, and had a wife, children, cattle and land, he spoke only the African language, having forgotten everything, his God included.’

* This Faku is not to be confused with the great Pondo paramount of the same name, the successor to Ngqungqushe, and a leader whose shrewd diplomacy and generalship brought his people through the turmoil of Shaka’s era relatively unscathed.

* Hastings returned to England three years later, where the malevolent Philip Francis finally obtained his revenge, successfully manipulating the political forces in Parliament so that Hastings was impeached and brought to trial. Proceedings dragged on for seven years before he was acquitted.

* Bligh remained fascinated by the story. Eighteen months later, on his way back to Europe after the mutiny that made his name notorious, he stopped again and, on asking the latest news of the Grosvenor, was told of a recent account received by a farmer ‘from some Kaffirs that at a kraal or village in their country there were white women’.

* In this vividly melodramatic piece, the three white women are clearly portrayed. Lydia is shown clutching at a masterful figure in an officer’s tricorn hat directing the rescue, evidently her husband Alexander Logie. Among other identifiable figures, Mary Hosea is shown swooning in William’s arms with Frances, while Sophia James’s arms are raised imploringly to heaven.

* i.e. Ngqungqushe.

* One other account that speaks of two women survivors needs to be treated with caution. In 1796 an American ship, the Hercules, was run ashore near the Great Fish River by her captain Benjamin Stout. In his published narrative, he wrote of having questioned the natives who pointed out the Grosvenor wreck site and related how a chief ‘insisted on taking two of the white ladies to his kraal . . . the captain and his people resisted and were destroyed.’ Stout reported that although one of the women had died, the other still lived and had several children. But as the Hercules was lost well over 200 miles south of the Grosvenor, the whole story sounds apocryphal.

* Marryat’s story concerns Sir Charles Wilmot, nearing the end of his life in the Berkshire countryside and deeply troubled by rumours that his castaway daughter, ‘Elizabeth Wilmot’, who has travelled on the Grosvenor with a Colonel and Mrs James, remains alive among the natives. His nephew, as a service to the old man, sets out on a mission to Africa, where he establishes that Elizabeth had in fact perished with the rest. He makes all haste back to Berkshire to tell Sir Charles ‘that he has no grandchildren living the life of a heathen’, upon which assurance the grateful old man, joining his hands above the bed-clothes, exclaims: ‘Gracious Lord, I thank thee that this weight has been removed from my mind,’ before expiring.

* The combination of the letters ‘g’ and ‘q’ indicates the characteristic fricative click of Xhosa, so Gquma is rendered Cl’ooma. According to some versions of the story she was not alone when found, being accompanied by two or three men said to be her brothers and a dark woman, an Indian maid. The men married and had numerous descendants but played no significant part in the future of the tribe.

* Another mixed-race people linked with shipwreck castaways made their home in the vicinity of the Umgazi and were known as the amaMholo; they were darker-skinned and appear to have been descended from lascars and other Asian people, including slaves escaped from the Cape, such as Trout.

* The most intriguing and sophisticated tactic used by the various fraudsters attracted to the Grosvenor involved a letter on cream paper, supposedly written by Captain Coxon to the directors of the Company stating: ‘The list of bars should read 720 gold bars – not 270 as in my official list. The balance 1400 silver bar[s] and nine boxes of precious stones and the specie is correct.’ The letter was placed in Sir Joseph Banks’s copy of Dalrymple’s report, now in the British Library, and was shown to me by a librarian. Of all the strands of evidence proving the letter to be a fraud, the clearest is at the head: ‘Capetown 29 August 1782’ – in other words, just twenty-five days after the wreck and around the time that Coxon was last seen at the Umtata river.