Ahead of them, not far from the Zwartkops River mouth, was the welcoming farmhouse of Christian Ferreira. But 14-year-old Robbie Price couldn’t make it. His legs were swollen with scurvy, for he had eaten shellfish from the rocks and hardly anything else during 92 days of walking along the African coast. His legs collapsed under him, and the seamen, Francisco and Barney, half carried him to the house.
Robbie was too ill to move for quite a long while. So his two friends left him at the farm while they hurried on in order to send a message to Governor Van Plettenberg asking for a relief expedition. 123 people had actually managed to reach the shore as the Grosvenor was sinking. Who knew what had happened to all the others?
Gradually, Robbie told the kind Ferreira family what he could remember. He had been the cabin boy aboard the grand East India Company ship Grosvenor. She had loaded up with merchandise and taken on 18 wealthy passengers in Ceylon and was heading home to England. Off the shore of Pondoland, she had been wrecked. Robbie Price shuddered as he remembered that terrifying night.
A sailor friend of his, Tom Lewis, was one of those up aloft shortening sail because of the freshening wind. There were lights on the horizon which Robbie guessed could be fires on a distant shore. The second mate ordered a change of course to take them away from shore, but the captain, John Coxon, came up on deck and told them all firmly that they were wrong. The nearest land was some 500 kilometres away. He put the Grosvenor back on a course heading towards the west.
In the first light before dawn, Tom was aloft again. As he clung to the wildly pitching lines near the masthead, he saw a dark line on the horizon which could only be land. He reported this, but the officer on watch told him he was seeing things. It must be a bank of cloud. He refused even to cross the deck and see for himself. By 4.30 a.m. Robbie had joined Tom and several others on deck. From the bows of the ship they could see the land clearly.
‘I daren’t say anything more,’ Tommy muttered. ‘I’ll get flogged if I tell an officer he’s wrong.’
‘Well, I’ll risk it,’ said Robbie, and with his heart thumping he ran below to wake the captain.
It was too late. Captain Coxon took one look and ordered the ship to change course at once. As she did, her bows struck the rocks with a crash that shuddered through the ship. Passengers hurried on deck, officers shouted. Robbie remembered how they had tried to float the Grosvenor off the rocks, but water poured in through the hole in her bows and at once she started to sink.
Sunrise showed Robbie that they were only about 500 metres off shore, but the sea between them and the land was cruel. A boat was lowered only to be swept away and battered to pieces on the rocks. Eventually five seamen offered to swim ashore with a light guide rope. Four of them made it, though one drowned in the crashing waves. A stronger, heavier rope was attached to the line, hauled to shore and made fast. During the morning, Robbie and a few others used this rope to help them reach the beach. He was glad he had learned to swim strongly when he was a boy. Some weaker swimmers were lost in the heavy sea.
From the sandy beach, Robbie watched the Grosvenor starting to break up that afternoon. The stern broke loose and was driven ashore. Robbie waded into the surf and helped some of the passengers scramble to safety. As others floated in on pieces of wreckage, the officers made a count. Of the 138 people on board, only 15 were lost. At the time, Robbie had felt encouraged.
Then the walking started. To begin with, they had all decided to stay together. It seemed safer. The local tribesmen seemed greedy for any metal objects but otherwise were not very friendly. All the crew had as weapons were their pocket knives and a couple of cutlasses. The muskets were useless for they had no powder. But they were slowed down by little children who went so slowly and men who were sick. It was clear that the fitter and stronger men had to move on as fast as they could, to send help back to the weaker ones.
‘Two weeks of walking,’ the captain had assured them. ‘That will bring you to the nearest farms.’ He had seemed very certain. Robbie never saw him again after they split up into separate groups – and that was some three months ago.
For a while, they had traded their belongings and clothes in exchange for food. But the Pondo tribesmen had started to rob them during the night. Once, in a village, when they had nothing left to offer in exchange, Robbie had watched the food they so longed for being given to the dogs.
Again, he blessed the day he had learned to swim, for when they came to each river mouth, it was the swimmers who could get across while the rest had to go inland to find a crossing. Robbie stayed with two seamen, Francisco di Lasso and Barney Leary. His friend Tom had died of hunger weeks before. Once, Francisco had spotted a porpoise in the shallow water near a river mouth and had managed to grab it by the tail. The three of them hauled it ashore and feasted on its tough, salty flesh – uncooked, for they had no means of making a fire.
Robbie and his companions were lucky. They were among the nine who reached civilization. Rescue parties did rescue seven seamen and two Indian maidservants. Otherwise all they found were a few sun-bleached skeletons dressed in rags.
The sad fate of those who survived the wreck of the Grosvenor on 4 August 1782, on what is now called the Wild Coast, was unconnected with any thoughts of sunken treasure. The ship was certainly carrying a full cargo which included money and diamonds. But the legend of fortunes hidden beneath the waves probably came from a newspaper article in February 1880. A certain Sidney Turner had found about 50 gold coins washed up on the beach at Lambasi Bay, which the Natal Mercantile Advertiser took as proof that ‘there must have been large quantities of bullion on board’.
The word ‘bullion’ conjured up dreams of wealth and so the great search began! Fortune hunters arrived with a steam crane, a dredger vessel, tunnelling equipment, and some even began building a 400-metre breakwater around the wreck. The crashing seas defeated all attempts and washed away all traces of the breakwater. Eight iron cannons, coins and pieces of broken porcelain are the only treasures so far recovered from the Grosvenor.
Yet the legend lives on. The fabled Peacock Throne of the great Moguls of India, shaped as two golden peacocks, made of solid gold with their spreading tail-feathers encrusted with diamonds and rubies and other precious stones, was stolen (they say) from a temple in Delhi. Locked in brass-bound oak chests, the throne was smuggled on board the Grosvenor and stowed away in the hold. Naturally there was no mention of it on the list of cargo. Such a priceless treasure would be worth millions and more – if it was ever on board. The great mystery remains unresolved to this day.
The Wild Coast
The coast of the Eastern Cape is rightly named! From Port Edward in the north to the Kei River in the south there stretches 250 kilometres of coastline as wild as any in Africa. There is no comfortable coast road, for the land is carved into jagged valleys by the rivers running seawards from the Drakensberg. The Grosvenor was wrecked at the northern end of this coast, one of many ships which have perished on its cruel rocks. One of the holiday resorts is Coffee Beans which is said to be named after a wrecked shipload of coffee beans which took root on the shore.