Читать книгу Roughing It - Ralph Goldswain - Страница 7

This is the story of the coming of the 1820 settlers. I have attempted to seek out bits and pieces of narrative in which one can hear the voices of the settlers themselves, and allow them to tell the story.

This story is contextless: it says nothing about the damage that was done by this colonisation project to the African peoples, its effect on the social and political structures of southern Africa or its impact on post-apartheid South Africa. It is simply the story of the 1820 settlers’ voyage, arrival and first three years in the Eastern Cape. The settlement of some 4 000 Britons on the frontier, and the tragic and violent conflict that took place in that region for more than a century, contributed significantly to the creation of the fault line that has been painful for South Africans for two centuries and that looks as though it will never be repaired. I haven’t addressed that issue in telling this story.

People who live through an experience do not make history: they simply live from moment to moment, not knowing what the next moment will bring. Like all of us, they just do the best they can. Historians, looking at that experience from a moment sometime in the future, are the ones who make history. I have simply attempted to capture the moments as the settlers lived them. Ordinary people don’t normally think about what their actions are going to look like 200 years later, particularly when the main theme of their lives is the daily struggle for survival. This narrative is about the day-to-day progress of people who were transplanted to an alien place where they soon found that they had, in the words of Henry Hare Dugmore, to ‘take root or die’.

I make this declaration in an attempt to dispel any notion that this book is nothing more than a history similar to those of George McCall Theal and Sir George Cory, historians who commit themselves to the Victorian heroism ideology that these settler men (and it’s the males they write about) were heroes of the British Empire, pitted against ‘murdering’, ‘thieving’ ‘savages’ over whom they subsequently triumphed and went on to establish a civilised, British culture in southern Africa. For such historians, writing when they did, exporting British culture, with its ‘superior’ language, religion, education and so on is a good thing. How many people died and were displaced and had an alien culture imposed on them in such a ‘noble’ cause is not the point for them.

This book is not a history; it is a point-of-view story. It is worth noting, too, that it focuses on just the first three years of the settlers’ experience – the voyage, arrival, settling in and the ultimate failure of the project, caused by the floods of October 1823. During these three years, the settlers’ contact with Xhosa people was minimal. There was a large tract of no-man’s-land between the two groups and all contact, in the form of employment, trading, etc., was banned by the colonial authorities on pain of imprisonment. It was only after the devastation of the frontier by three crop failures and a flood that the governor of the Cape Colony, Lord Charles Somerset, relented and relaxed the restrictions. This led to prosperity for both groups for several years as they interacted and traded with each other. The wars that came later, and which are not the subject of this book, the first a decade after the settlers’ arrival, were driven by political conflicts between the Cape government and the various Xhosa politicians. These wars were fought between soldiers and warriors. The settlers and other civilian inhabitants of the Eastern Cape were caught in between, apart from some young settlers who volunteered to fight alongside burgher commandos.

One of the characteristics of the work of historians writing in the era of Theal and Cory is the absence of a female perspective. For them, human progress was about what males did, and one can understand that because of the attitudes of their time and the way women were positioned in society. Historians now feel obliged to explore the female perspective but have to dig deep to find primary sources for that during the three years’ scope of this book. It is really hard work and it’s not surprising that I was unable to find much on that subject. Apart from the diary written by Sophia Pigot, daughter of a wealthy settler, I was able to find only two letters written by one woman. I was not able to find anything in the British Library, where I did most of my research. That is because texts written by 1820 settler women are scarce, in fact almost non-existent.

The diary of Sophia Pigot, which is cryptic and shallow in its observations, and mainly a self-portrait of a self-absorbed teenage girl, is about the only available account of that time written by a female. She presents an impressionistic view of the daily life of a settler family, albeit that of an aristocratic family that was coddled and protected by their privilege. But it does contain a few valuable observations about life on board the ship – events involving the ‘lower orders’, which Sophia couldn’t avoid or ignore because of the claustrophobic nature of the setting.

Women are silent, and virtually invisible, in 1820 settler accounts, other than for some brief patronising, patriarchal references to them in their husbands’ letters, journals and reminiscences. I hope that I will not be charged with ignoring, being blissfully unaware of, or just dismissive of the undoubtedly important role played by females in the 1820 settler project. Their silence is just a phenomenon of their time. History writers 200 years from now, looking back to 2020 will find more South African female fiction writers, poets and commentators than male writers.

I do offer some glimpses of female settlers, however. There are the women of Wait’s party, who walked to Grahamstown to beg the landdrost, the district chief administrator and magistrate, to help them save their children from starvation. There is the hilarious account of three ladies who had to slaughter a sheep so that they could get meat on the table for their husbands. There are the girls who were sent out to the pastures to herd the cattle. There are the young girls who collected plants and insects, drew them and made notes on them, and there’s the young settler wife who had to contend with a huge snake curled up beside her bed, and ants ‘an inch long’.

The involvement that the British government had in this African colony, expanding it during the 1820 settler period, had little to do with anything other than its own commercial and strategic interests, and the anti-colonial backlash we are seeing in South Africa in the twenty-first century is understandable. The Dutch East India Company and its first representative in South Africa, Jan van Riebeeck, could not have foreseen the way their establishment of a refreshment station at the Cape was going to go: one never knows how any initiative is going to develop and end up. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have seen profound tensions among the people of South Africa as a result of European colonisation.

The language Cory uses about the ‘murdering’ Xhosa people encountered by colonists is quite hard to swallow. How could he not have known that the murders of settlers during raids on cattle were not sanctioned by Xhosa chiefs, who, in fact, punished the perpetrators if they were found to have murdered children, and even men? Killing unarmed men, women and children was strictly against the Xhosa code of conduct. So was stealing: the cattle thieves and murderers were renegades in their community.

Cory’s view of the 1820 settlers – that they were heroes – is misguided. Many did find themselves in situations where they had to be very brave and take great risks to overcome them – there is no doubt about that. But, in reality, they were only doing what all human beings have to do to survive in impossible predicaments. There was some genuinely heroic behaviour, however, such as the occasion during the Sixth Frontier War, when Richard Gush prevented the sacking of Salem by going out unarmed to meet the approaching warriors, sitting down with their leaders and finally persuading them to turn back. No-one was hurt. But that is not what Cory meant by calling the settlers heroes. Battling against the land and the weather is something all farmers do the world over, so it was not the 1820 settlers’ daily lives that were heroic.

There were other heroes too. William Shaw, a remarkable young man, only twenty-one when he arrived at the Cape, can never be forgotten, not so much for spreading Wesleyanism around Albany, but for the work he did to try to alleviate the suffering of the settlers in their worst time of adversity. Shaw’s organisational and interpersonal skills, particularly striking because he achieved so much while still in his early twenties, are almost unbelievable. The more one reads about him, the greater one’s admiration and, indeed, awe become.

Thomas Pringle, also a young man, was at the Cape for only half a decade, but during that time he not only set up one of the few successful settler communities, but also took on the autocratic Somerset and, together with his friend, John Fairbairn, established the first free newspaper and the principle of press freedom in South Africa, a precious gift that has lasted to this day.

I must pay tribute to Guy Butler. His great book, The 1820 Settlers: An Illustrated Commentary, is a landmark in the accounts of the settlers and was an inspiration to me. Butler was not a historian, but, like me, he was also fascinated by the 1820 settler project and the characters among that group, and their accounts of the adventure. Butler had a long preoccupation with the subject and he wrote two plays about it, Take Root or Die and Richard Gush of Salem, before embarking on his big book. He had a strong desire to share that great story of adventure and the struggle for survival, as I have.

I was one of Guy Butler’s students and my feelings about him went beyond respect and admiration. He was warm and responsive, and a brilliant teacher, especially when it came to Shakespeare, and I can never hear the name ‘Yeats’, whose poetry he loved, without thinking of him. I could never forget the way he had of whipping off his glasses and smiling at his audience – and it was always an audience – when delivering the punchline of one of his points. And he had a great smile. I was also aware that, unaccountably, Butler liked me. That may have had something to do with his interest in my ancestor Jeremiah Goldswain, but in many ways he was my guardian angel while I was at Rhodes University.

While performing in Take Root or Die, I and my fellow members of the cast had a unique insight into Butler’s playwriting method. The play was a kind of work in progress. We took it on tour before its run in the newly built theatre in Grahamstown. We could see the playwright standing anxiously in the wings during the first performance, gauging the audience’s response. When he heard the first laughter, a huge smile spread across his face. As the tour progressed, he would sense any boredom in the audience and listen for coughing. Taking note of those parts, he would either rewrite or delete them in the evening and hand out the revised script to the cast the next morning, to be learnt for the evening performance. And so this process went on until he had his final draft. The important thing for Butler was to bring this great story to life, which he did in that play.

As I worked on this book, I was reminded that I would often see him through the glass doors of the Cory Library, his head bowed over some book or document. And sometimes, while writing my account, when I became excited about some new find, I have discovered that Guy Butler had got there before me. Moreover, when I have looked over a document, making the decision about what I should include from it in my own story, I have found that he had chosen the same passage. I have tried, therefore, to use different extracts to avoid the impression that I have simply duplicated his material. I have often been unable to avoid that, though, because he cherry-picked the best bits of the documents he used – as all writers do, and as I have also done.

My story is told differently, though, and that distinguishes it from Guy Butler’s. Butler uses his extracts as discrete illustrations of his perceptions. His book is something one can dip into and out of, referring to the many illustrations as one does so. And his book covers a much longer period. It is also divided into topics with headings and subheadings. This book is a different kind of reading experience. It is a continuous narrative, a straight-through read, without subject headings – something like a radio documentary, with a narrator who includes a variety of voices in a seamless narrative. And I have different emphases. For example, I provide a more detailed description of the voyage, I give accounts of party leaders and I have included some significant voices that Butler didn’t recover.

In researching this story, I found some gems among the writings of several individuals but I have had to rely to a large extent on just a few of them, and their observations dominate the narrative. They were mainly educated people; one of them, Thomas Pringle, was a professional writer. Finding texts that express raw experience without the restraint and self-conscious prose that characterise the writing of those who were educated in the early nineteenth century was difficult. Writers like Pringle, Shaw, Dugmore and Thomas Philipps had a sophisticated reader in mind as they wrote. They used the rhetorical style of their time, the writing conventions that to them were a necessity, choosing elaborate vocabulary and constructions, thus making much of their prose appear old-fashioned.

Thomas Pringle was a master of description and his account of the first night on the journey from Algoa Bay to his party’s destination is a joy. Reading it is like watching a colour film, with sound. Thomas Philipps, who became a formidable presence on the frontier, kept a diary and wrote many letters, in which his slightly detached view (he wrote not so much about himself as about those around him) has proved valuable in the making of this narrative.

I have relied heavily on the talk that the sixty-year-old Dugmore delivered in Grahamstown in 1870 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the settlers. It is a beautiful, carefully crafted reminiscence, well thought-out as to what he should include in a talk lasting about two or three hours. It is without doubt one of the most important, interesting and informative of the 1820 settler accounts.

For an account of a settler’s immediate experience, there is Sophia Pigot’s diary, mentioned earlier, an almost daily record of how she felt about things. The daughter of a rich settler who had brought with him all the comforts of home, she provides observations that were not general: her diary was intended only for herself, which gives it an intimacy that makes it a good source for this story. The diary suddenly stops, however, soon after the family’s arrival at their location. What a pity that is, as Sophia was just beginning to write about the transformation of the family’s fortunes and the hardship of having to suspend some of her pleasures and pitch in with the work required for the family’s survival. So there is nothing about the wretched conditions the Pigots found themselves having to endure during the adversity of 1822 and 1823.

In the 1850s my ancestor Jeremiah Goldswain, a man with no formal education, wrote his recollections. Most are about his life after the period covered by this book: Goldswain was more interested in the later entrepreneurial exploits that made him a wealthy man, his experience in the wars, and the life he lived as a sheep farmer near Grahamstown. The quality of his writing, with its humour and straightforward commentary, has contributed a great deal to the texture of this story.

It is difficult to know whom Goldswain intended his memoirs to be read by and the manuscript lay in the family for several years, emerging when one of his granddaughters donated it to the Cape National Archives. Una Long, a Rhodes University academic, found it and transcribed it, and it was published by the Van Riebeeck Society in two volumes, in 1946 and 1949. Many of Goldswain’s descendants bought a copy but it was read mainly by historians, who found it one of the most important documents to come out of the Eastern Cape. There is a problem with it, however: it is difficult to read. Goldswain’s spelling is sometimes so far from conventional that it is time-consuming to try to decipher the text as one is trying to read, skimming one’s eye along the line. His writing also lacks any form of punctuation – in fact, the hundred thousand or so words form one continuous ‘sentence’, which makes reading it a formidable chore.

I recently transcribed Goldswain’s memoirs word for word, correcting the spelling, punctuating the text, and dividing it into chapters with headings. In the process, I discovered that, grammatically, it was near perfect, although written in the author’s rural Buckinghamshire dialect. What came across was what a wonderful writer he was – a natural storyteller, with variation in the speed with which he dealt with incidents, slowing down for emotional impact, for example, and selecting the most interesting items from his memories. His characterisation and, above all, his humour are a delight. There are no rhetorical flourishes and none of the writing conventions that characterise the educated writers of the time. It is possible that he intended his memoirs for his children and he often addresses the reader directly, using terms like ‘dear reader’. Historians rightly see it as an important account of a significant period in frontier history, but now it is an easy read as well.

The only pieces of female writing that I found apart from Sophia Pigot’s diary are two letters written by Anna Francis to her sister and a friend in Essex, complaining about her life on the frontier. Her writing is heartfelt and, in many ways, her experience can be seen as representative of the lives and feelings of the settler women in general. Francis is so miserable that her accounts are almost funny. That is not to put her down but merely a comment about the way she writes: it’s a lively, over-the-top description of the situation she finds herself in and how she feels about it. She has a beautifully authentic voice that reveals a feisty personality, although there is nothing funny about the experience itself.

I visited Albany recently and saw it through new eyes. Halfway through my work on this book, I sought out some of the places where the story is set. I had limited success, as much of the land has been taken over by holiday resorts and gated game parks, and the rest is mainly private farmland surrounded by fences and ditches. There are very few visible signs of the 4 000 settlers and what they created there.

Grahamstown is full of 1820 settler evidence, however, and there are a few sightseeing attractions around Bathurst. And although Salem is no longer a thriving village, the churches that Hezekiah Sephton’s party built there and their churchyards are lovingly cared for by a local preservation group. There are a few other churches in the open countryside, like the beautiful one built by the Nottingham party at Clumber, surreal in the way that it stands out of the wilderness like a giant wedding cake.

In spite of the limitations, I was thrilled by finds like the faint traces of wagon roads, particularly the main road that crossed the Bushman’s River at Jager’s Drift. I saw now-protected yellowwoods growing – the trees the settlers used to make furniture, and I was made aware of the distances they had to walk if they wanted to go to Grahamstown or Bathurst through terrain that would be difficult for the modern hiker. The highlight for me, though, was to be able to stand on the very spot where my ancestor was deposited and see the original burnt-out Dutch farmhouse that he had seen, realising for the first time what he had got himself into.

I have tried to use narratives that will transport modern readers back in time, right into the Albany of the early 1820s with the challenging climate, the fear and apprehension, the suffering, but also the excitement, the pleasures, the humour and the hope. As I read the words of those long-dead settlers I was taken there and I hope that readers of this book will be too.

Ralph Goldswain

2016