1797–1798
The Barnards had their first glimpse of Paradise a few months after landing at the Cape. A year then passed before they could enter it, but the sight had been enough. Although this particular heaven lay no more than a few miles from the Castle, it opened a door to the African wilderness. It could be said to have made an adventurous traveller of Anne.
Paradise was the name of a dilapidated cottage, amid a forest some way up the side of Table Mountain, set about with blossoming orange trees, aromatic bushes, wildflowers and a stream running by. At the time that Macartney invited the Barnards to inspect it as one of three country houses within his gift, suggesting it might suit them as a weekend retreat, it was reachable only by horse or on foot. It was also far more run down than the other two houses and in need of repairs including a new thatch roof. But once Anne had inspected it and found it the ideal spot for ‘Adam and Eve to raise chickens and potatoes’, she would have no other.1 Andrew, who had seen a house by the sea ‘with a coast well calculated for bathing’, had to agree that ‘all things considered, we shall feel more snug in Paradise’.2
John Barrow’s letters lured the Barnards further inland. Since their clamber up Table Mountain, the indefatigable Barrow had wandered hundreds of miles up the eastern seaboard, reaching the most powerful Xhosa clan and inspiring him to descriptions that embody the ideal of the Noble Savage: ‘The Kaffirs I admire exceedingly,’ Barrow wrote to Anne. ‘They lead a true pastoral life, united in clans like those of the Highlands of Scotland. They live chiefly on milk and the spoils of the chase. . . Their persons are finely formed, their deportment bold and their countenance cheerful.’ As for their chief Ngqika, he was ‘one of the most prepossessing men I ever saw, black or white’.3
So distant an objective lay beyond the Barnards’ reach, but Barrow’s suggestion of a visit to Paarl – a settlement only forty miles distant albeit over rugged terrain – was attainable, and rendered exceptionally alluring:
Your route would be through Stellenbosch, Drakenstein, France-hoek, Little Drakenstein and Paarl, and I venture to say you would be highly gratified. Nowhere have I seen the sublime and the beautiful, the tame and the terrible, so well arranged as in the valley on which the places above are situated. The enclosing mountains are immensely grand . . . the sight is worth a journey of 1,000 miles . . . It would make a fine subject for the pencil.4
The opportunity for rural escape was provided by a crisis. In September news reached the Cape of the naval mutinies five months earlier that crippled Britain’s first line of resistance to an apparently imminent French invasion. The grievances of seamen at home over pay and conditions were felt at the Cape too, and on 2 October nine ships mutinied in Simon’s Bay. Anne sympathised, to the extent of telling Rear-Admiral Thomas Pringle it was only fair that the hands should receive the same concessions granted at Spithead.* But after more ships arrived in a state of mutiny three weeks later, unrest spread to the Castle gates. Soldiers were being won over by the mutineers when she wrote to Dundas:
A coach journey to Stellenbosch gave the Barnards their first view of the Cape hinterland and stimulated more adventurous travels
The sailors come ashore in numbers, partys of 12 at a time, they pillage the markets, get drunk, riot & endeavour by every means to corrupt the army . . . We are solitary enough but have no fears and the sentinels have orders to permit no sailor to pass into the Castle.5
While this confrontation was still unfolding, Barnard was ordered to Stellenbosch to deal with dissident Boers who had refused to take an oath of allegiance to the king. The official reason was that if anything could win them over it would be Andrew’s diplomatic skills. The unofficial reason was that a revolutionary spirit appeared to be abroad and with the crisis finely poised Macartney had decided that ladies should be moved from the Castle.
When Andrew left Cape Town on 9 November, Anne and his cousin, Elizabeth, were with him, anticipating a little adventure upcountry, oblivious to the showdown Macartney had delayed to this point. Two hours later, as the carriage crossed Salt River and started up the pass to Stellenbosch, a cannon thundered out from the Castle. Only then did Barnard explain that it marked an ultimatum for the mutineers to surrender or be bombarded to pieces. News reached them that night. The ringleaders had been handed over, the mutiny had ended.6
Serenity returned in the lovely, fertile valley that Anne always called ‘Stillingbosch’. The first inland village founded by the Dutch was hardly a wilderness, being a single-day journey from Cape Town and much favoured by French refugee Huguenots who planted the seeds of Cape vines and libertarianism. There was still a pleasing oddity to travelling in the chaise bought by Anne from the Duke of Queensberry (which retained ‘Old Q’s’ faded coat of arms on the side) as it wound up to Stellenbosch, and they congratulated themselves on ‘how out of all calculation it seemed that we should be driving together amongst the hills of Africa’ in it.7
Unlike Barrow, whose aversion to the Boers was intractable (and arguably influential in shaping a British colonial attitude that gave rise to mutual antagonism and future strife) the Barnards were impressed by the men of the interior.8 ‘Their height is enormous, most of them six feet high and upwards, and I do not know how many feet across,’ Anne wrote. ‘I hear that five hundred miles distant they even reach seven feet.’9 More to the point, they established a rapport. The Barnards admired the Boers’ spirit, identifying it as a desire for independence from the exploitation they had known under the Dutch East India Company, rather than Jacobin subversion. Andrew went a good way to placating the dissidents at Stellenbosch.†
While he was off negotiating, Anne wandered along oak-lined lanes to the little church and the Drostdy, headquarters of the magistrate, among the Dutch vrouws and their children, slaves with fruit baskets balanced on their heads, and the whitewashed cottages. This rustic place and its surrounding district had a settler population, the so-called free burghers, of some 200 families living in farmhouses with characteristic Cape Dutch gables, dotted around a countryside producing grape and corn.
Her first experience of travel in an ox-wagon was a trundle with Elizabeth to the Hottentots Holland Mountains in hope of seeing the San, or Bushmen. In this she was disappointed, ‘they poor things having been driven up the country’.10 Although denied sight of these famously wild humans, her pencil was as invigorated as Barrow had foreseen. Just as the landscape around Cape Town was dominated by mountains, so was the interior of the Western Cape, and the majestic trajectories on every horizon mesmerised her. ‘They rise above our heads in all sorts of extraordinary shapes,’ she marvelled. The mountains, along with the natives, are a constant feature of her drawings. In Stellenbosch she produced half a dozen portraits, and idyllic watercolours of the Drostdy and an oak-lined Church Street.
A week later the Duke of Queensbury’s carriage was on a trail heading north-east, further into the interior over the Groot Drakenstein Mountains towards another village, Paarl. The surroundings, as Barrow had said, were nature’s arrangement of the sublime and the beautiful, the tame and the terrible. Having no knowledge of their whereabouts the Barnards surrendered ‘with the confidence of honest people who suppose no harm is to be done to them, tho’ in Africa and under the guidance of a black stranger’.11 They stayed with families, getting by on a blend of Andrew’s willing but execrable Dutch and Anne’s exhilaration, sharing bedrooms and tucking in with a will to anything on the table, especially when it came to a feast on the hind quarters of an antelope. They were invited to a dance where mothers breast-fed their babies openly, with ‘no false delicacys to prevent the little ones from having their repast as well as we’.12 And they joined a peasant family in their living room with ‘ducks and chickens walking about as if part of the company’.13 London society and its sensibilities were more than merely thousands of miles away. Anne felt she had entered a world where ‘we might have venerated the simplicity of the golden age’.
These were among the reflections in one of her lengthy despatches to Dundas, along with – should he be left in any doubt – her opinion as to the land’s suitability for colonisation:
Barren & ill-cultivated as it now is, it strikes both Mr B and me to have great powers in itself to become one of the finest countrys in the world. How far it will be the wisdom of England to encourage it to become so is for England’s Sovereign and his ministers to determine, or whether it will be judged most for the advantage for our possessions in India to keep it subordinate . . . is for you to determine and you only.14
The voice of an imperialist was tempered with belief that for a British colony to succeed, trust must be invested in new settlers. It seemed to her that the Boers’ endeavours had been repressed rather than encouraged.
They tell me there is nothing this place is not equal to, particularly if we can suppose the intercourse between the inner part of the country and Cape Town to be rendered more easy. It is certainly a healthy spot. We have lost but one officer here.15
All this went off to Dundas with half a dozen ostrich eggs, plus cooking instructions, and an admission that although her opinions might be flawed, she felt bound to express them – not to him as a minister, she added hastily, but as a friend.
The future of the Cape was, in fact, already being intensely debated. French victories in Europe had left Britain isolated. Worse, the mutinies had exposed vulnerability in the navy, the nation’s sole source of strength. Anne’s friend Jane Parker wrote to her from Tunbridge Wells full of fear about ‘the total Overturn & Destruction of Everything by those Scourges of Europe’. The war was going so badly that an invasion of England was not only feasible, it seemed probable; and while the likely consequences were anyone’s guess, a peace would almost certainly spell a surrender of the Cape.
In the meantime theirs was a blessed place. The Barnards moved to Paradise in April. A road had been built, repairs to the cottage completed and Andrew suggested that they make it not just a weekend retreat, but a home. Such it became. He would ride into town every morning, returning in the evening to their haven in the shade of the mountain. The house was too small for servants, so Anne rose at six, went for a ride herself, cooked breakfast, then set about feeding the chickens. A little menagerie of wildlife required attention too.
Late in the Cape summer, with just a hint of cool coming off the mountain, Andrew sat out on the veranda writing ‘a letter from Paradise’ to Margaret. It was novel, he agreed, that it should be coming from him, but Anne had gone off ‘to play with a young buck and now she is dancing it about like a young child. Did you ever hear of such a sister, so fond of bucks?’16
Anne picked up the thread. She had, she told Margaret, collected other pets beside the buck, including a seal: ‘His method of walking has too much of the waddle in it to be graceful,’ she wrote, ‘but when laughed at, he plunges into the water and is in his kingdom.’ There was also a penguin – which spent ‘half the day in the pond with the sea-calf and half of it in the drawing room with me’ – and a pair of secretary birds:
majestic creatures with long legs, black velvet breeches and large wings who strut about with an air much resembling that of some of our fine Gentlemen.17
Dark came quickly, as the sun was lost behind Table Mountain two hours earlier than on the Table Bay side. Mosquitoes (muskatos, Anne called them) would start their vexatious whine, and gangs of baboons came down to plunder the fruit trees. Andrew blasted away with his rifle until he scored a hit, then was mortified at his victim’s shrieks of agony. One evening, with a fire in the grate, he said: ‘How happy are the days we spend here, love . . . How much better is our own company to each other than company who speak without conversing, and are noisy without enjoyment.’18
This natural Elysium is captured in a painting which still hangs at the Castle, showing a naked woman stepping gingerly into a stream. It is entitled Lady Anne Barnard’s Pool and it reflects local legend that the first lady of the Cape enjoyed bathing in the nude. Much about this mysterious work is unknown, including the artist, but an old inventory turned up in a recent search at the Castle describes it as a ‘small oil of Lady Anne Barnard bathing at a pool at Platteklip Gorge on Table Mountain’. On the back is inscribed, ‘My own bathing place’. The artist and the voluptuous bather may have been one and the same, the location a stream known as Capel Sluyt that gurgled down to Paradise from the mountain.19 Anne’s dreams of an Eden, for ‘Adam and Eve . . . to raise chickens and potatoes’, sometimes prompted her to slip out of her shift and into the water.20
A verse inspired by the painting by the South African poet Anthony Delius imagines the governor’s hostess caught between her official duties at the Castle and the call of the wilderness:
. . . until I flee
The twinkling clavichord and wine to show
My nakedness in hostage to a tree.21
Like all perfect moments, it could not last. Macartney’s deteriorating health often confined him to his quarters and he had written to Dundas, requesting that he be relieved.22 Finding a successor would take months of wrangling, and months more for him to make his way to the Cape, but Barnard was not going to find another superior so congenial. Already he was at odds with an overweening military establishment.
The British soldiers who regarded the inhabitants with contempt were little better disposed to those who treated them as friends. At dinners given by the Barnards, officers’ behaviour towards the other guests verged on the boorish unless the governor was present, and since the arrival of General Francis Dundas as commander-in-chief matters had got worse. The general thought Barnard a parvenu and made clear to Anne ‘that he conceived I had married a man beneath myself’.23 General Dundas’s attitude was no doubt coloured by the fact that he was a nephew of Henry Dundas, the Secretary of State for War, and as mystified as everyone else that she had rejected his uncle in favour of a nobody.
It may not have been coincidental that around this time the Barnards went through an upheaval of their own. Just what it was Anne did not explain, though she was candid enough to place it on record as ‘the only moment in my married life during which my happy heart knew a pain, something accidental having occurred to pain it’.24 That was all; but she may have learnt of an infidelity. As we have seen, she asked few questions of Andrew and her use of the term ‘accidental’ has a sense of unexpected as well as unwanted disclosure. Five years of marriage, her childlessness and their age difference may already have introduced a maternal aspect to the relationship. She was not far from the matronly age of fifty and, perhaps only half in jest, Andrew had started to address her as ‘Dearest Nanny’.
Whatever caused her pain, she did not permit it to last. Of her ‘sweet, amiable man’, it may be recalled, she wrote: ‘His peculiarities were almost invisible to the eye of an attentive wife. Yet he had some!’ Having accepted Andrew’s foibles, she set the subject aside and turned back to the sunlight of a time ‘so dear to my heart . . . a Character so near to perfection’, while thanking God ‘for having allowed me a portion of Existence innocently happy, so soothing to me on reflection’.25 There is a characteristic that had come to define her as a woman of mature years and many sorrows, and to which we will return: Anne Barnard shared with Jane Austen what a biographer of the author called an unwillingness to lead a disappointed life.26
A second journey provided the opportunity for reconciliation. In anticipation of his early departure, Macartney gave Barnard leave to take Anne on a real journey: a trek. A full month away would give them time to follow in the wagon tracks of John Barrow, who had thrilled her with a gift from his travels, the bulb of a strelitzia, ‘a curious plant which will be a very acceptable thing in England’, and had sent her accounts of ‘more kinds of beasts than ever entered Noah’s Ark, scampering around the plains of Africa . . . ten thousand Springboks . . . Elephants, Buffalos, the Gnoo, a most extraordinary animal, Zebras, Quachas’.27 The season was not ideal, for the Barnards would be travelling at the start of the Cape winter, which brought downpours that could make routes impassable. However, time being short and with no other opportunity in prospect, they departed the Castle in a wagon on 5 May.
Anne’s venture to the interior in 1798 was no pioneering epic. Wandering Dutch pastoralists known as trekboers had been drifting eastwards for decades, living at the pace of the ox on the sunny uplands with a fierce determination to escape the interference of administrators. Wagon travel was nevertheless an adventure. As the historian Noel Mostert has pointed out, partly because of the mountains which encircle the Cape Peninsula and isolated it from the interior, and partly because the trekkers left nothing behind them, barely any network of posts or communication existed by which authority could pursue and control. Once the traveller passed beyond the handful of houses at Swellendam, almost 200 miles to the east, no European settlement was to be found until Graaff-Reinet, which lay more than 400 miles off and had been founded only ten years earlier in a late and hopelessly misdirected effort by the Dutch to impose law on the trekboers.28 In short, while the Barnards were not exploring virgin terrain, they were entering unmapped space, and doing so for the pleasure and novelty of it. Anne was the first British woman to make such an African journey and friends at home were naturally anxious. ‘I only tremble for your activity going beyond your strength,’ wrote Jane Parker. ‘Remember how many as well as Mr B are interested in your life.’29
They were not alone. Elizabeth Barnard again joined them, along with an army officer cousin of Anne’s named John Dalrymple, and a Khoikhoi driver and guide, Gaspar. Communication would be helped by having on hand Andrew’s servant Pauwel, a Flemish-speaker whose tongue was close to the language already evolving into Afrikaans. The wagon was drawn by eight horses on the first stage as they left Cape Town by the road for Stellenbosch, but within a few miles the trail turned south-east and by the second day they had begun a steep ascent to the Hottentots Holland Mountains, across passes that could be negotiated only by a team of twelve oxen.
The modern traveller ascends to Hottentots Kloof by car over Sir Lowry’s Pass at a rate that leaves scarce opportunity to pause and digest the epic scale of the Cape Peninsula – ‘Africa’s appendix’ one writer has called it – as False Bay is left in a great sweep below.‡ The Barnards’ movement by wagon was agonisingly slow, each turn of a wheel a little progress. Grinding their way up to the kloof under Gaspar’s lash, the oxen seemed to Anne ‘sensible creatures, for much did they appear to dislike the business they were going on’.
As we ascended it grew worse and worse & sometimes the path was so perpendicular and the jutting rocks over which the wagon was to be pulled so large we were astonished how it could be accomplished at all . . . At length we reached the summit and the new Canaan opened on my view. ‘The World was all before me where to choose my place of rest, and Providence my guide.’30
The quotation, from Milton’s Paradise Lost, was apt. The region to which they had come is known as the Overberg, and it is arguably the loveliest part of a Western Cape landscape renowned for craggy grandeur and bountiful harvests. Anne had been right: ‘Here is scarcity but here will be plenty.’ The rich tableland of the Overberg has since been transformed into an African food basket, a source of grains and fruit, bound by mountains in the west and north, the Breede River in the east and the Indian Ocean in the south.
Here the travelling became easier on a trail following the south-eastern seaboard while the mountains, always the mountains, shadowed them to the north. Anne had no names by which to identify the Riviersonderend and Langeberg ranges, and there were no more passes quite so hair-raising as Hottentots Kloof, yet her eye was drawn to the horizon continually and she sketched away busily, even from the back of a lumbering wagon. Cattle were seen grazing on treeless plains of fynbos, the indigenous shrubland. Again she was reminded of Barrow’s contrasting of the tame and the terrible, the beautiful and the sublime.
Towards evening a stop might be made at the farmhouse of a Boer family, the Brands say, or the Cloetes or the Morkels. Here ethnic distinctions became blurred, for slaves lived in close proximity to their owners. In contrast to the Cape, racial mixing and intermarriage was quite acceptable to the frontier folk. Anne referred to the ‘blue friends’ she met along the way, meaning people of mixed blood, usually women with Boer husbands. At the Jouberts’ one night, near what is now Grabouw, their hosts welcomed a neighbouring farmer and his mixed-race wife of ‘a most pleasing countenance and fine teeth’, and although they were unable to converse, when Anne asked her what the farm produced, ‘she begun crowing like a cock, quacking like a duck, wabbling like a turkey, [going] thro’ the articles of her trade by sound or gesture’.31 The evening ended in hilarity with Anne declaring the woman so much better company than most of those they met that she invited her – rather to Andrew’s concern – to visit them at the Castle.
The farms scattered along the easterly trail were hospitable, but with rough beds and discomforts came the odd night in the open and the occasional danger. Rivers became a more regular obstacle than mountains and while the travellers often had reason to praise Gaspar’s skills, during one fording the wagon pitched over, trapping the occupants until they managed to crawl out, bruised but unbroken. After that they would get out at points of awkward traversal and walk.
Of real peril, however, they saw nothing. One evening Anne declined Andrew’s offer of a walk – ‘I am bad company when drawing’ – and went off alone to sketch ‘while the setting Sun fell behind the Stupendous Mountains’, and though eventually her thoughts turned to the carnivorous animal that might leap out and devour her, or the renegade native possibly in search of plunder, she was no more at risk than at Paradise.32
As the wagon trundled on towards Swellendam, the frontier beckoned. Anne longed ‘to see a little of the real natives’. The Xhosa described by Barrow were always going to be beyond range, but she did get some insight into tribal life at Genadendal, a mission where three Moravians ministered to the local Khoikhoi. Curious as ever, she could not restrain herself from entering their mud huts, marvelling at the sparse rigour of the contents – a few skins, some firewood to boil water, calabashes, wooden spoons, an iron pot. Addressing a common belief that ‘the Hottentot’ epitomised primitive barbarism, she noted: ‘On the contrary [he] is so cleanly that he is washing himself all day long . . . As to horns, I believe they have not more than other Country Gentlemen.’33
Observing the Khoikhoi women interacting with their men brought her to the heart of the matter. Ultimately, she cast aside fashionable notions about the Noble Savage, just as she shunned views of racial inferiority, and came down on the side of a universal humanity:
Real & true love, such as he who made the sexes meant them to feel for each other, when it takes place in good hearts, whether clothed in a dark skin or a fair, whether in man or woman, will always be ready to sacrifice every thing for its object.34
It took eight days to cover about 180 miles to Swellendam. The sole disappointment was that they had not encountered more wildlife. Bontebok and springbok were abundant, along with zebra and ostrich – an animal ‘wildly, madly and beautifully angry’ – but of carnivores such as leopards and hyenas nothing was to be seen.
At this point they diverted from the eastern trail, starting south across rollicking hills that run beside the Breede River towards the Indian Ocean. Their host here was Jacob van Reenen, who offered Andrew some hunting. Anne was more interested in information. Eight years earlier van Reenen had joined a mission to answer a great mystery: what had become of the Grosvenor castaways? For a woman who had sailed on an Indiaman and was now visiting the shores where the Grosvenor had been lost, this was an enthralling subject.
In 1782 six emaciated English seamen appeared on the Cape frontier, survivors of a homeward-bound Indiaman wrecked far up the coast. At home the news created a sensation, for the 141 souls on the Grosvenor had included some of the elite of Bengal society and their families, all of whom had escaped the wreck only to be attacked as they came ashore. As the London papers reported it, the men had been killed by ‘savages’ while three women had been carried off to ‘the vilest brutish prostitution’. A rescue party sent out by the Dutch found a few seamen, but no trace of the women and six children. Ten years passed before more searchers set off up the coast. Jacob van Reenen was among them.
Van Reenen spoke English and over dinner at his farmhouse he related how the trek had proceeded almost 600 miles up the eastern seaboard, to a region where ‘the natives were fierce and poor and no civilized person before had ever dared to visit’. What they discovered was shocking. The castaways had lacked leadership and broken up into smaller parties. All appeared to have died, leaving only skeletons and traces of clothing. The sole castaway to be found was an elderly white woman who had become the wife of a chief by whom she had sons. As van Reenen related, he suggested she join them in returning to the Cape, but although she ‘seemed intoxicated with pleasure’ at the idea, she said she could not leave before the harvest.35 Anne was gripped. ‘I wish she would make her words good while I am here,’ she wrote to Margaret. ‘I should be very glad to give old Caffraria an apartment in the Castle.’ §
The next day they went down to the Breede mouth, a broad sandy lagoon where one of the great rivers that carve up the Indian Ocean coast debouches into the sea, and while the men fished, Anne wrote and sketched, marvelling again at this Africa, so dangerous, so forbidding as it seemed to the world, yet so tranquil and grand.
Another paradox to emerge from the self-declared gourmand’s pen is how, amid the discomforts of the trail, the travellers enjoyed better fare than was to be had at the Cape – or London for that matter: Anne savoured ‘dried buck . . . very good indeed’, possibly the first mention in English of the South African titbit known as biltong, along with pickled fish, wild honey and mutton chops. One dinner of broiled fowls with plenty of potatoes and good butter she declared ‘a repast fit for an emperor’. Even that was surpassed by a supper at the van Reenens, ‘the best I ever eat [sic] in my life’, of roast veal, stewed bontebok, partridges and curry. Here at the Breede mouth a cloth was laid out for a picnic of grilled fish washed down by madeira.
After warm farewells, the Barnards’ wagon turned inland again on 17 May, back towards Swellendam. Anne hoped they might proceed to Graaff-Reinet, from where the trek could have extended further, ‘to parts of Africa where nature becomes wilder and there is less affinity to what has been seen before’. Her imagination had been fired: ‘Nations are to be found in the Interior by those who have courage to look for them, whose names we only know on the Map and some who are not even there.’36 In truth, covering such a distance was never feasible in the month available. She insisted, however, that if they could not go east a route should be navigated across the colony to Saldanha Bay on the west coast. Feathers of the flamingo might be had there, and she wanted some for Margaret.
A guide was found at Swellendam to navigate a route to Saldanha and the wagon started west towards the Atlantic, still with the mountains haunting the northern horizon. Soon they were back amid immense gnarled ridges of stone. The trek’s longest leg took them across the Langeberg range and another rocky, dangerous pass at Cogmans Kloof where the women alighted and walked while the men pulled on ropes to hold the wagon upright and prevent it toppling down into the Kingna River. More passes took the wagon through what is now the Boland and the towns of Worcester and Tulbagh. With the horses able to cover forty miles a day, the wagon reached Saldanha Bay in a week.
On 28 May Anne stood at the lookout point called Uitkyk, around 600 feet up on a peninsula above the Atlantic, drawing a panorama of the bay below where, in 1620, two captains of the East India Company landed and claimed possession in the name of King James. No further action was taken before the Dutch settled in Table Bay thirty-two years later, but Saldanha’s excellence as a natural harbour was recognised by this first British female visitor who thought, ‘It appeared to my Ignoramus eye as a place where ships may ride most securely sheltered.’ Such, indeed, was attested by its subsequent use.
The journey was nearing its end. Anne had recorded it in a diary – one, like her journal of the voyage, in the form of an extended letter to Margaret, complete with knowing asides and entre nous references. The ‘Tour into the Interior of Africa’, as she styled it, reflected a bashful desire that her creative side might receive some recognition. She was too self-effacing to seek publication. Instead, an elaborate hand-produced volume was compiled, incorporating ‘sketches and figures taken on the spot’, in what amounts to a travel narrative.
It was consistent with Anne’s social position and her time that the work should have been designed solely for family. She shrank from exposing her talents as a writer and artist because of the modesty expected of a lady. But self-effacement also played a part in concealing these gifts. In the end Anne Barnard, like Anne Lindsay, simply lacked the assertiveness that would have claimed attention. Admittedly, the ‘Tour into the Interior of Africa’ is too wordy even by the standards of the day to count among her best writings. The illustrations, however, foreshadow the aquatints of Samuel Daniell, an artist who visited Africa a year later and produced beguiling yet romanticised versions of similar subjects. A better comparison may be made with another woman traveller, writer and illustrator who journalised her adventures in India a generation later. Fanny Parkes has been described as ‘an enthusiast and an eccentric with a love of India that is imprinted on almost every page’.37 Apart from their other similarities, Fanny’s exhilarated cry, ‘Oh the pleasure of vagabondising in India!’ has a clear echo of Anne in Africa.
Three more days brought the party from Saldanha to Blaauberg, where the Barnards looked once more across Table Bay to Cape Town and its unmistakable mountain skyline. If not exactly home, it was still so for the time being, and all the more appealing for offering comforts absent over the past month and some 700 miles in the back of a wagon.38
* Anne wrote two despatches to Dundas devoted to the Cape mutinies. They would have had no influence on events and so are omitted here. Typically, however, she singled out for praise one captain, Andrew Todd of the Trusty, ‘a man who has risen from a very low class of life by undisputed merit in his profession’, and who, alone among the commanding officers ‘remained on board his ship, watching [for] the moment when lassitude should render it possible to make a few of his men listen to reason’. (Robinson, 1973, p. 67).
† Ultimatums were issued to a dozen Boer dissidents to swear allegiance to the Crown. Eight complied. The other four resisted Barnard’s imprecations, and then surrendered to face deportation to Batavia. After their wives wrote to Anne and were allowed to visit them, they submitted and were freed.
‡ The opening of Sir Lowry’s Pass from Cape Town to the Overberg in 1830 reshaped travel even by wagon.
§ The account given by van Reenen to Anne does not match his narrative of the expedition, which states that three white women had been found who, on sighting their would-be rescuers, set up a cry: ‘Our fathers are come!’ However, they declined to leave their new tribes and their children, and appear to have been survivors of an earlier wreck, probably Portuguese. The fate of the Grosvenor castaways is the subject of The Caliban Shore by the present author. It concludes that one of the women castaways and two children were taken in and assimilated with local tribes. At least two seamen are also known to have made new lives among the natives.
