Читать книгу Roughing It - Ralph Goldswain - Страница 9

Herman Melville, remembering his time as a crew member on transatlantic ships in the 1830s, remarked that after the first week at sea ‘when one put one’s head through the front hatch one could believe that one was placing one’s head into a suddenly opened cesspit’.

Before the 1820 settlers began their lives of extraordinary hardship on the frontier they had to first undergo a two- to three-month endurance test on the high seas. Their voyage turned out to be excellent training for the trials that were going to characterise their first half decade in their new country. Their odyssey, a voyage in twenty-one cramped, wooden vessels tossed about on a vast, lonely and violent ocean, was not easy for them. Disease and physical danger were common, and many settlers died and were buried at sea.

The emigrants were tightly packed on board the ships, with no more than a few square feet of space per person. However, as the British class system operated as powerfully on ships as it did everywhere else in the empire, the ladies and gentlemen – the party leaders and their families, and the gentry – enjoyed privileges that shielded them from the worst effects of sea travel. The rich had been able to commandeer disproportionate amounts of space on their ships, and gentlemen like Major George Pigot brought whatever they liked with them. They loaded sheep, horses – even pigs – and furniture, including pianos, onto their ships. One even brought a prefabricated house. And some, including Pigot, brought a carriage.

But, even so, they were generally subject to the same conditions on board the ships as everyone else. All the passengers suffered the consequences of overcrowding. There were no toilet facilities and little ventilation below deck, so sanitation was an issue. Conditions varied among the vessels, but a foul atmosphere, poor food and insufficient water were common to all of them. The ships pitched and creaked, and huge waves higher than the topmast broke over them; decks were awash, hatches were battened down, people were sick. It was a dismal experience for everyone.

Half a century after the arrival of the settlers at Algoa Bay, William Howard, who had by then completed a career as a respected schoolmaster in the Cape Colony, recalled his eventful voyage aboard the Ocean in one of his many lectures: ‘… small children sobbing or screaming … whilst bored older boys and girls argued or fought.’ Frustrated by the limitations the journey imposed on their activities, youngsters were often a source of great irritation to the adults, and some male passengers were heard to complain that the women did not do enough to keep their children quiet. But one can only pity those harassed mothers as they battled to control their offspring while feeling ill themselves and struggled to prepare meals or breastfeed infants in the cramped deck space, which worked out at about three square metres per person, inclusive of baggage room.

Several passengers made notes in their diaries, or wrote or talked publicly about the voyage during the years following their journeys. They had different interests and different focuses of attention but they all mention the seasickness that kept them and those around them in discomfort for much of the voyage.

Sophia Pigot was the fifteen-year-old daughter of George Pigot, gentleman farmer, ex-army officer and the illegitimate but recognised son of the 1st Baron Pigot, MP and distinguished colonial administrator. Despite the suffering, Sophia diarised in favourable terms her first impressions of her quarters on board the Northampton. Thanks to her father’s influence, his self-assured assumption of privilege and his ability to pay for extra privileges too, she and her sister, Catherine, had their own tiny cabin. ‘Tuesday 14th Dec. Very comfortable indeed,’ she wrote.

During the journey, Sophia was preoccupied with cultivating friendships with the daughters of the other party leaders and flirting with the officers. But she also gives us glimpses of the adverse conditions on board and their effect: ‘Went on deck. Sick at night … the mess room very dirty.’

She doesn’t write at any length or with any depth about her experiences, even the things that interested her most. There are themes, however, and one of them is the seasickness that kept her confined to her cabin for much of the time. She described a frequent phenomenon – the rough seas: ‘Monday 7th Feb – dreadful thunder and lightning after tea and all night. The rain came in our cabin very much.’

Yet her diary is striking for its clear indication of her enjoyment of the voyage – mainly through her interaction with other passengers, particularly her friendships with other teenagers and the attention she received from men, which fed her blossoming womanhood. She spent her days and evenings pursuing the activities that teenage girls of her class enjoyed: writing, drawing, playing musical instruments and conversing, but hardly ever feeling completely well. Her entries, written in short phrases, and sometimes only a word, are a mixture of comments on the available pleasures and complaints about being unwell: ‘Monday 7th Feb. Not very well. Rather bilious – very fine morning’; ‘Tues 8th: not very well – headache.’ Such comments continue all through the diary: ‘Writing in my cabin all the rest of the morning, felt rather sick.’

John Ayliff, a young weaver on the La Belle Alliance, who later wrote a heavily autobiographical novel, Journal of Harry Hastings, presented in the form of a diary, has his narrator, Harry, say: ‘February 4 – Oh dreadful sea sickness! At anchor … a foul wind, ship pitching dreadfully. Oh what a calamity is the sea sickness! Two hundred and fifty persons, men, women and children all at one time unable to retain a morsel of food in their stomach, and everyone looking as pale as death. Oh, thought I, is this a settler’s life?’

Those who were not so plagued by seasickness didn’t escape from the unhealthy effects of the ocean’s worst moods, in cold conditions and in hot. Thomas Philipps, the leader of a party from Wales, sailing on the Kennersley Castle, wrote on Tuesday 11 January: ‘In the night about 12 o’clock a sea broke in thro’ the cabin windows, washed poor Edward out of his berth … The two foremost berths escaped the deluge in which we eight got shelter for the night … all our clothes got wetted and all our arrangements discomposed.’

The next day he wrote: ‘The gale continued, another child died, one had died on Monday. Both had been previously ill and both about 12 months old. The doctor gives us hope that our numbers will not be diminished in the end, as we have several ladies in a forward state.’

Philipps assures us that the doctor was keeping the women well supplied with rum as a precaution against miscarriage.

One little boy, Thomas Stubbs, was deprived of his mother throughout most of the voyage. ‘My mother had a small cabin to herself,’ he wrote. ‘She was ill nearly the whole voyage.’

The eighteen-year-old Jeremiah Goldswain recalled an alarming experience on the Zoroaster at the hands of the violent ocean: ‘I was lying in one of the two lower berths and someone, after fumigating the ship, had put the fumigating pots in the berth over the one that I was lying in and in the night a breeze sprung up and … one or more fell over and upset the contents on to me. My bedclothes and my shirt that was on me was burnt and fell all to pieces but it never touched my body.’

There were more children than adults on the ships and, apart from the boredom and constant quarrelling reported by William Howard, they created further irritation and annoyance in an environment where nerves were already jagged. John Ayliff was struck by the same racket that irritated Howard and complains, even before the voyage has begun: ‘Oh, what a night have I passed, what with the noise of seamen, of the women, of some of the party which have come aboard the worse for drink, and the crying of at least 50 children. I was annoyed beyond description that the lazy mothers do not keep them still. Oh the horrible noise, fifty children screaming all at once. How I shall bear this for two or three months I cannot tell.’

By 8 February the Kennersley Castle was pitching and rolling in tropical seas and, on top of the seasickness, her passengers were experiencing the kind of temperatures that they could never have anticipated. ‘Children dying in the heat,’ Thomas Philipps wrote. ‘Same wind and weather but getting very hot, two children died, vessel fumigated all through – measles and hooping [sic] cough very general, our maid servant Patty very ill of the former.’

The Reverend William Shaw, sailing through tropical waters aboard the Aurora, writes in his journal on 16 March: ‘The heat has been so oppressive during the last week as to affect the health of many … sickly languor, rheumatic gout … diarrhoea.’

On 19 March he wrote of a death he had witnessed on board: ‘About half past six this evening, Mrs Jones, wife of one of the settlers, departed this life. She was a young woman of 21 years of age – and when she came on board this ship at Deptford had a fine healthy appearance but

’Nipt by the wind’s unkindly blast

Parched by the sun’s directer ray

The momentary glories waste

The short liv’d beauties die away.

She has been married a few months only, was in a state of pregnancy … She had been a member of the Hinde Street Society about four years and, as far as I can judge, lived and died in the enjoyment of the comforts of religion … I saw thee die on the deck – and the reflection quite unmans me.’

The master’s log of HMS Weymouth, a ship carrying about 300 passengers, shows that the death of a child was an almost everyday event, recorded by the captain in the same dispassionate tone used for the more mundane events:

‘Sat 5 February

Am: Light winds and variable

1: In studding sails and trimmed sails

4: Moderate and fine. Set top and gallant studding sails

9: Set larboard fore studding sails. Aired bedding

Departed this life SARAH HOBBS settler’s child …

Tues 8 February

Employed washing clothes

Departed this life JOHN COCK settler’s child

Committed the body of the above infant to the deep …

Thurs 10 February

Departed this life EMMA ROGERS settler’s child

Committed body of the above infant to the deep …’

February 1820 was evidently a sad month for many with all these deaths, but twelve babies were also born on the Weymouth, four of them in February.

With so many people squeezed into such a small space, dirt-spread infection was an enemy that invaded every ship, bringing disease and even death. The captains, keenly aware of the hazards, had to make strict rules for conduct on board. Hygiene featured prominently among them. They posted these rules up and most enforced them. Ayliff records the rules on board the La Belle Alliance:

‘1.All persons are to rise at 7 a.m. excepting such as are sick and proved to be so by the medical gentlemen.

2.All screens and curtains must be rolled up by 8 a.m. and not put down the whole of the day.

3.All beds and hammocks must be brought on deck by half past 7 and to be secured to the nettings all day in fine weather.

4.All lights must be extinguished by 9 p.m. and none to be allowed after but by special permission from the Agent.

5.Provisions and water will be distributed at the times stated and all parties not attending will lose their share. Mondays and Fridays, biscuit and beef; Wednesday, tea, sugar coaco, salt and soap; Tuesdays and Saturdays, rum, pork and mustard; every afternoon at 3 o’clock, water.

6.All disputes to be settled by a reference to the Agent and the Captain of the ship.’

Vessels that did not have strict regimes would most certainly succumb to ‘ship fever’ – typhus, spread by lice, which produced a frightening mortality rate if it caught hold of a ship’s passengers. Without the prescribed cleaning rituals, the decks would become strewn with leftovers, bones, rags and other rubbish that would work its way between the boards, producing maggots and an unendurable stench. John Ayliff described one of the regular spring cleanings aboard the La Belle Alliance: ‘March 11th. Today the ship underwent a thorough cleansing – a regular turn out of all beds, bedding, etc. on deck. All hands came on deck, the hatches were closed and the ship fumigated so as to destroy rats and cockroaches, numbers of which had bred in the ship.’

The captain of the Zoroaster was a strict disciplinarian, probably more so than most of his colleagues, some of whom did not keep such a clean ship. The Zoroaster had been chartered for the voyage only as far as Simonstown and the passengers, including Jeremiah Goldswain, were then transferred to the Albury for the rest of the voyage to Algoa Bay. When Jeremiah, conditioned by the tight regime of the past three months, boarded the Albury and looked around he realised that he had been spoilt by having been on board the Zoroaster for the major part of the voyage: ‘… Great surprise and astonishment, when we got on board, to see the difference between the two ships! I was astonished. The Zoroaster was as clean as possible for a vessel to be but you could not walk upright between the Albury’s decks, and she was not the cleanest vessel I ever saw!’

Because of the size of the group, Sephton’s party were allowed to take a minister with them, paid for by the government. They chose the twenty-one-year-old William Shaw, who was to become renowned as a tireless man of God, credited with bringing Methodism to South Africa. Shaw kept a journal that is remarkable in the writer’s consistent linking of every incident, experience and thought with God. Young as he was, Shaw saw himself as a leader who, like Moses, carried the authority of the Almighty on his shoulders as he led his people along a great journey. After the burial service of a young woman at sea, he wrote: ‘I thought it my duty in finishing my address to advise the people to attend to cleanliness, etc. in order to prevent the introduction (under Divine Providence) of such diseases as might prove fatal to numbers and to which I plainly perceive we are at present much exposed.’

For much of the voyage, the passengers longed for nothing more than to be dry. During stormy weather they had to stay below deck, crowded together among sodden bedding and clothing, sometimes for days on end, with the hatches battened down. With the deck off limits, the stench would become intolerable. By the time the word came to batten down the hatches, the huge waves sweeping over the ship had already drenched the sleeping quarters. Once wet, nothing would dry until the weather improved and the settlers were able to bring their belongings out to the open air and claim some breathing space for themselves again. It was only later, with the passing of the Passenger Ship Law in 1848, that a minimum space for each passenger was stipulated.

The provision of separate facilities for men and women on public transport is a modern concept. This was introduced into law under the same passenger act of 1848, where rigid rules were laid down concerning the separation principle that we take for granted today. But in 1819, when the ships set sail, men, women and children were assigned berths by party, and not by sex or age, although married couples and their children shared berths. For single adults, separation of the sexes would have been an alien idea and the situation inevitably led to the sleeping areas being sexual boiling pots.

Ten-year-old Thomas Stubbs, on board the Northampton, was in a good position to watch the grown-ups behaving in a way that was to some bad, and to others natural. His father, John, led a subsection of Clarke’s party, so his family was entitled to a room in cabin class, where his wife, daughter, Eleanor, and baby, Richard, travelled. As there was not enough room for their three boys, John, aged twelve, William, six, and Tom, John Stubbs slept steerage with them so that he could keep an eye on them, as well as on the settlers he was responsible for.

Half a century later, after a long and distinguished life on the frontier, Thomas Stubbs, crippled with rheumatism but with his memory in sparkling form, sat down to write his reminiscences. He had been alive to everything that was going on among the adults around him, and his memoir, Reminiscences, offers valuable insight into what it was like on the Northampton: ‘One night my father heard something like a man’s voice below him, and on getting out, saw a man jump out of Bet’s berth and run up on deck. He found a pair of shoes and on looking at them saw the name of Becky, our first mate. My father showed him the shoes the next morning.’

The elderly Thomas Stubbs, still amused by it decades later, recalls the first mate’s response:

‘By Jove, Mr Stubbs, where did you find them? Someone took them out of my cabin!’

‘I have no doubt of it,’ said Tom’s father.

Becky looked down, not wanting to meet Mr Stubbs’s accusing eyes.

‘But I would advise you to keep yourself and your shoes from my quarters,’ Mr Stubbs said.

Ruined as the young woman might have been by her night-time adventure, Thomas Stubbs ended on a note of relief: ‘Poor Bet was married to our butcher Dan Wood on board a man of war before we left Algoa Bay and I believe turned out an honest woman.’

Thomas Stubbs. Illustration: Ella Jones

Little Tom witnessed many such activities throughout the voyage: ‘Some young men on going to bed were continually turning in to the wrong berths, but it invariably turned out there was a woman in them. The consequences was there were some fights and lots of rows.’

Once the ships had left the shores of southern England, there was little chance of obtaining fresh food and water until they reached the Canary Islands and, later, the Cape Verde Islands, where the vessels loaded up with supplies that had to last until they reached the islands off Brazil, where they could refresh themselves and replenish their stocks again.

But even before the ships sailed, when the food was still fresh, the settlers were given inadequate and inferior rations. Jeremiah Goldswain described his first night on board the Zoroaster at Deptford, on the Thames, as ‘a bad beginning’. The ship’s kindly but correct steward told them on that first icy December night that they wouldn’t receive their bedding until morning because he hadn’t been given the authority to issue it, and that he couldn’t give them any supper either because, again, he had to wait until morning for the order to give them food.

It wasn’t until ten o’clock the next morning that they heard the ‘joyful news – come and get your rations’. They were given a wooden tub containing their rations for the day and told to form themselves into messes of six: ‘We had three quarters of a pound of busket [probably local dialect for bread] for each man, some oat meal, a little meat, and a very little bit of butter, and when we had got it we did not know what to do with it or how we were to cook it.’

Goldswain described eating it as ‘jawbreaking work’. There was also pea soup for dinner, which the cooks made on the deck in large copper pots every day for the rest of the voyage. Jeremiah pointed out that the rations weren’t enough for the young men, who had very keen appetites.

Nine-year-old Henry Dugmore, a passenger on the Sir George Osborn, was struck by his first encounter with the rations. In his lecture to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the settlers, he said: ‘I remember … the hard salt junk and harder biscuit of 1820 and how salty the puddings were that the cooks boiled in sea water.’

The gentlemen, for some of whom deprivation was an unknown phenomenon, brought their own supplies or bribed the officers who controlled the rations, so they were generally able to enjoy the culinary standards they were accustomed to. The entry in Thomas Philipps’s journal on 29 January reads: ‘We ate a hearty breakfast of coffee and chocolate, toasted cheese and a rasher of ham, the females are the greatest devourers of the latter delicacies … Anything agrees with us that has a sharp taste, mustard, pepper and pickles are grand requisites.’

That was early in the voyage, however, and there is no doubt that food was a major challenge on the ships. Its preparation was difficult: on most vessels the cooking facilities were insufficient for the number of passengers and they could not be used at all in bad weather. One warm meal a day was the most the passengers could hope for. Incidents involving water and food and its preparation were the greatest flashpoints in the relationships between individual settlers and between the social classes. Jeremiah Goldswain observed such a confrontation between the gentlemen and the lower-class settlers on the Zoroaster: ‘The passengers were allowed three quarts of water per day for everything. One morning, when they were called up to get their boiled water they hurried joyfully, as usual, and filled their teapots.’ But then, Jeremiah wrote, ‘if you had been present and heard the cries from fore and aft of the ship by the poor women in particular’… ‘Who had put vinegar into the coppers? If they knew who had done it they would join all hands and give him a good flogging.’

The vinegar in the water flushed the gentlemen out of their saloon. Out they came – Messrs Wait, Thornhill, Barker, all the Dyasons, Bennet and Hougham Hudson. By this time the cooks, John Badger and William Bear, had dumped the polluted water overboard and begun making the pea soup that they were going to dish out to the settlers at dinnertime. The gentlemen ordered the cooks to throw the pea soup out and boil more water for the ladies’ morning tea.

Bear and Badger stood back from their work. “Well, Sirs,” Badger said. “We don’t know what to do, for if we did do so we should disappoint all the other people of their dinners as it is now so late.”

The gentlemen told them in no uncertain terms that they would have it done. There could be no argument about it.

While this conversation was going on more men had come up to the deck. Some of them were pretty vocal in defying the gentlemen. They told the cook that as they had had their breakfast spoilt they were determined that they should not lose their dinners as well. The pea soup would stay.

The two sides were squaring up to each other now and the cooks were doing nothing. The gentlemen were outraged. They sent for the captain.

The captain was a no-nonsense man: he was not going to allow any disruption on his ship. He immediately set about identifying the most vocal of the settlers and labelled them ringleaders of the “mutiny.” He ordered them aft on to the quarter deck. He read them the Mutiny Act and informed them of the consequences of their actions in terms of the Act. He ordered a boat to be lowered and designated a crew to man her. He ordered six of the “ringleaders” to step into the boat. He pointed to another settler ship some distance away and said that he had instructed its captain to put them ashore on an island. He then gave the word for the boat to be lowered.

One of the wives, Sarah Allen, came forward. At great risk to the baby she was holding she dropped on to the deck at her master, George Dyason’s, feet. She begged him to intervene. She said that she didn’t know what she would do if her husband were put ashore on an island. What would become of her and her child?

Dyason didn’t look at her. Stoney faced, he said: “I can do nothing in this as the captain is determined to punish them.”

She then turned to the captain but he wouldn’t be moved.

So off the boat went and the settlers watched until it disappeared from view.

That particular incident had a happy ending, however. Soon after, one night when there was a full moon, a sailor called from the crow’s nest indicating that there was a small boat approaching. The word went round and the settlers left their beds and crowded against the rail to see. For some reason – and Goldswain does not explain why – the six mutineers were coming back. They approached amid loud cheering. Mrs Allen was particularly joyful when she was able to make out the figure of her husband. She hugged baby John and told him that his father was coming home.

Everyone remained silent as the mutineers related what had happened to them. They had been received aboard the other ship as honoured guests and its settlers had shared their rations with them. When they heard about their guests’ ‘crime’, they expressed their surprise and, to a man and woman, declared that they sympathised with their plight. The mutineers spent four happy days with them. Sam Allen had participated in the holiday atmosphere that prevailed but maintained a slight distance. As he’d said repeatedly: ‘I only wish that I had my wife with me and then I should be happy too.’

As well as the hazards of rough seas, disease and food poisoning, there were the further dangers of shipwreck and fire. Perhaps the settlers’ worst fear was that at any moment disaster could strike in one of those forms. It was up to the captain and crew to prevent shipwreck to the best of their ability, but as regards fire, every passenger bore the responsibility for preventing it. On a wooden ship lighted candles and open cooking fires posed a constant hazard. The ships’ list of instructions included a time for lights to be put out and the captains dealt harshly with anyone found breaking that rule.

But even so, there were people who placed everyone around them in jeopardy by breaking even the most sensible of rules. Tom Stubbs spotted one of the women sewing at night-time: ‘When one night the word to douse the glim was given … [she placed] the candle on deck and cover[ed] it with her clothes, standing over it until all was quiet then [began] her sewing again.’

There were countless incidents of fires breaking out on board. They were usually dealt with by a crew member trained to act swiftly and decisively, but there was one settler ship where the crew was unable to do anything.

The Abeona caught fire and sank near the equator on 25 November 1820. A late departure, she had sailed from Greenock, carrying the Glaswegian party led by William Russell. Only forty-nine of the 160 crew and settlers survived. Mr Duff, the first mate, had gone into the storeroom to look for something and, disregarding the safety rules, had removed a candle from its lantern to help him search more effectively. The most feared consequence occurred.

Just after noon, the alarm was given that the ship was on fire: smoke and flames were coming from its stores and provisions. The sailors were quick to pass buckets of water to the first mate and the mariners who were down there, but their efforts were in vain.

In the meantime, the passengers had been driven up from below by the dense smoke and rapidly spreading fire. In ten or fifteen minutes from the first alarm the case was hopeless, and the ship was ablaze from the mainmast on the lower deck. The passengers crowded onto the upper deck and, judging by the excessive heat, they were expecting the fire to penetrate it at any moment. The flames rushed up from the hold, spread to the main rigging and flew up the masthead like lightning.

The scenes that followed were recorded by eyewitnesses. The Philanthropic Gazette of 24 January 1821 published a letter written by a surviving crew member: ‘The panic and confusion were such that the longboat proved too heavy to be launched by the few who were sufficiently collected to attend to the orders given, and on the falling of the main arm yard she was stove. Seeing now all was over, and the people were throwing themselves overboard, and into the boats, I also jumped over, and happily was picked up by the gig. Our anxiety was now to save as many lives as our three small boats could possibly swim with, and I rejoice to say that forty-nine were miraculously preserved.

‘A few minutes after I quitted the wreck the main and mizzen masts fell. The flame, rapidly advancing forward, drove numbers of the poor wretches on the bowsprit, where it was our hard lot to behold them frantic, without being able to render them the least assistance. You will judge how the boats were crammed, when husbands, who had wives and children still clinging to the wreck, exclaimed against more being received!’

A widow with four children picked up her youngest daughter, about two years of age, and jumped overboard with her. She left two of her children on deck but her eldest daughter, who was about ten, leapt from a different part of the vessel. There was only one boat within reach of them and the question arose among the sailors as to who was to be saved. They made the decision to save the mother and infant, and the other child drowned before they could get to her.

These passengers would have made good frontier settlers: mothers and fathers, regardless of their own lives, gathered their young children and threw them into the boats so they could be rescued. One family, the Barries, who had left Glasgow with their ten children, with great hope for a future in a land of opportunity, were confronted with the dilemma of who should survive. The father and mother, with the help of their two elder sons, flung the other children into the arms of the sailors on one of the boats just in time, before they were themselves devoured by the flames. One of the saved children was just fifteen months old.

A young couple, the MacFarlanes, who had been married only a few days before embarking, jumped overboard. The wife could not swim, so MacFarlane took her on to his back and tried to swim out to one of the boats. When his strength failed him, they clasped each other and drowned together.

The author of the letter published in The Philanthropic Gazette also reported an incident regarding a family where only the father could swim: ‘A Mrs. McLaren, with her husband and four children, upon the flames advancing, retreated into the fore channels, when recollecting that her husband was a good swimmer, she implored him to save his own life, and leave her and their children to the fate that awaited them, as he could not avert it – and her wishes were attended to.’

By contrast, Duff, whose carelessness had been the cause of the fire in the first place, was urged by his fellow officers to save himself. But he refused to get into a boat. Perhaps with his experience as a mariner in mind, he said: ‘No, I pity the people in the boats, for with us all will soon be over, but they will be eating each other soon.’

It had been possible to launch no more than three small lifeboats, so the forty-nine who had managed to make it into those dubious havens were squashed together with no food and only a dozen gallons of water. They managed to rescue three live pigs from the water and took them on board, presumably with the intention of slaughtering them and eating them raw. The compass they had was so badly damaged that it was virtually useless. They had neither oars nor sails. There were a few spare hammocks that had been stored in the boats and they made sails with those, but they all knew that any chance of finding land was hopeless. It was desperate – almost enough to extinguish what small human spirit remained after what they had just experienced. Most of them were bereft of family members as well.

But as they huddled together on that first night a miracle occurred. Just before daybreak they were almost run down by a Portuguese merchantman, the Condessa Da Ponte. The crew hauled them aboard to safety and they were taken to Lisbon.

From there, they returned to Glasgow. All thoughts of emigrating to the Cape of Good Hope had evaporated for most of them. Yet six determined survivors of the disaster arrived in Simon’s Bay in August 1821 aboard the HMS Sappho. They were granted land in the Western Cape, where they thrived, but played no part in the history of Albany.

Packed tightly into their ships, ready to sail from ports around Britain, the settlers had a foretaste of the dangers of sea travel even before they had departed British shores. Dugmore recounts an incident as a nine-year-old on the Sir George Osborn. In the jubilee lecture that he delivered in Grahamstown, Dugmore told his audience: ‘A few days before our expected time of starting one of those January gales for which the coast of England is so fearfully noted burst upon us as we lay moored in the Thames. Whole tiers of vessels were driven from their moorings, and drifted in the darkness down the river. Lads sleep soundly, and so the first effects of the storm did not disturb me; but I remember being awakened by a crashing noise soon after daybreak and looking up through the hatchway just in time to see the rigging of our ship torn away like cobwebs by the yards of another that had come foul of us. This first and involuntary stage of our voyage ended in our running aground just opposite Greenwich Hospital and having all the women and children landed lest the ship should heel over and capsize with the ebb tide.’

Even by 1820 the river authorities had not established mastery over the Thames, and there are several more accounts of collisions on the river while the boats were departing. Jeremiah Goldswain reported that after three weeks of being frozen up in the Thames at Deptford, at last they got underway: ‘As soon as it was possible they cut us out and we dropped down to Blackwall. We had no sooner dropped the anchor when a merchant vessel coming down with a strong tide and a stiff breeze ran right across the stern of the Zoroaster and took away the captain’s gig but did not do any damage to the vessel more than to the gig, which was soon recovered without much damage.’

Several settler ships gathered at the ports of Torbay and Portsmouth, where food, water and ballast were loaded. The settlers were not safe there either: at Portsmouth the force of the wind broke the Ocean from her moorings and, bobbing about like a cork, the boat was propelled by the fierce gale towards where the Northampton was moored. To the consternation of the passengers on the Ocean’s deck, they could only watch helplessly as the dark shape of the Northampton loomed closer.

Trying to cope with their seasickness and all the difficulties of being below in a wooden ship on turbulent water, little did the Northampton’s settlers imagine what was about to happen. There was a mighty crash as the Ocean careered into the moored vessel. Thomas Stubbs, aboard the Northampton, and awakened by the impact, remembered the incident: ‘The masts creaked, the timbers groaned, and the wind whistled through the rigging. In the midst of this another ship, called the Ocean, also laden with ‘tiger hunters,’ as the sailors termed the settlers, crossed our stern and took away all our cabin windows. The settlers were about on the deck in their shirts, trying to recover their property – the women groaning, children crying, and sailors swearing, while the sea continued to break over the ship, and threaten her destruction, until daylight.’

Strangely enough, the damage to the vessels was not as extensive as one might have expected, and both ships were seaworthy again within a few days and ready to sail to the southern tip of the dark continent with their traumatised passengers.

Danger came from everywhere – even from the crew, who didn’t always maintain the discipline necessary for a safe voyage. Thomas Stubbs tells us that during an ancient ceremony, the crossing of the equator, the sailors of the Northampton, turned on their unpopular second mate and dragged him off to be shaved and then plunged into the ship’s boat, which had been filled with water. Outnumbered, he bribed them with a gallon of rum. They took the rum, but punished him nonetheless. Incensed, the second mate locked himself in his cabin and didn’t reappear for several days. ‘The upshot,’ Stubbs explained, ‘was the whole of the crew got drunk, the man at the wheel fell asleep, and the next morning no-one knew where the ship was.’

It’s likely that all the ships experienced the problem of drunken sailors. Thomas Philipps anticipated trouble aboard the Kennersley Castle as the ship arrived at the equator: ‘Monday 21st Feb. I hope the business will pass quietly, but I am no friend to coarse jokes, they generally end in riot and confusion. However, there is to be a limited period fixed for the amusement.’

The ceremony lasted only two hours but afterwards ‘the sailors went below, dressed, then drank rum and danced till night. There were no blows, but much confusion.’ The next day, Philipps wrote: ‘The night has passed over without accident, although some of us expected otherwise, indeed at one time, there was not a sailor sober enough to relieve the man at the wheel and one of the settlers was placed there.’

Apart from the moods and tempers of the ocean, the hazards of infected food, the dangers of dirt and disease, the irresponsibility and negligence of the crew, and the incidents of settlers falling overboard and having to be recovered with great difficulty, there were the additional dangers lurking everywhere posed by the seafaring community.

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before the advent of steam-driven ships, every vessel sailing on legitimate business, unless it was a man-of-war, was in danger of being attacked by pirates. To take advantage of the favourable prevailing winds, the settler fleet had to make for Brazil, then turn and head for the southern tip of Africa, calling in at islands off the African and Brazilian coasts to refresh their supplies. It was on those islands, where the sea was calmer and the weather more congenial, that pirates made their camps and villages, from where they operated.

The organisers of the settler project had tried to minimise the danger of piracy by arranging for the ships to sail in pairs. In some cases, the plan worked well but most of the ships became separated from their partners early on. On the whole, the settler ships were not accosted by pirate vessels. There were some reported incidents, however, but more in the nature of scares and conjecture than of actual pirate attacks.

A dramatic incident took place one night when the HMS Weymouth encountered a licensed slave ship. Its captain began firing on her. There was an exchange of fire, ending with crew members of the slaver boarding the Weymouth. With cannon balls flying past them and loud booming coming from their own ship’s guns, the settlers must have thought that their end was imminent. Then to see a rough-looking bunch of seamen coming aboard, there could have been no greater nightmare. But the slaver’s captain soon realised that he had mistaken the Weymouth for a Spanish merchantman. To make up for the error, the next morning he entertained some of the settlers on board his ship. One of them, William Cock, wrote in his journal about the slave ship: ‘She was quite prepared for battle and carried several small guns, with a long brass gun on a swivel, and a rascally-looking crew fit for anything – no doubt a pirate as well as a slaver.’

The Aurora had what might have been a genuine close encounter with pirates. On 25 March, William Shaw wrote that he saw ‘a small vessel at a distance bearing down upon us with all her sails set. So small a vessel such a distance from any land surprised us – and we thought she was in distress and wanted help. We lay to until she came nearer. She hoisted Portuguese colours, hailed us, and, after having asked two or three frivolous questions and given no answer to some proposed by our Captain, she tacked about and went away. Several circumstances appear to countenance the opinion of our people, viz. that she is a Pirate Ship.’

Of all the things that could conceivably go wrong on an ocean voyage, one would not immediately expect one of them to be the captain getting lost at sea. But there is an occasion when that reportedly happened. The Kennersley Castle approached what its captain thought was the island of Santiago, one of the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands, but as the ship came closer something didn’t look right – the harbour didn’t seem familiar. Puzzled, the captain examined his charts and declared that there was something wrong. It soon emerged that he didn’t know where they were and had no idea what island it was that they had arrived at.

A British ship, not one of the settler vessels, was moored nearby. Its boat approached, carrying the ship’s mate, who came aboard the Kennersley Castle. Thomas Philipps commented: ‘It is rather a delicate question to ask him what island it is and the Lieutenant takes him into the cabin.’ The sailors were laughing: their captain may not have had any idea of where they were, but the crew told the passengers that it was the island of Boa Vista, a day’s voyage from Santiago.

So it turned out that they were off schedule. They had lost time unnecessarily and would not get to Santiago until the next day.

The island of Santiago eventually came into sight and the Kennersley Castle tried to approach the harbour. As Philipps noted: ‘As the wind blows out of the bay we [were] obliged to tack and pass again near the eastern battery: when pretty close we are astonished with a cannon shot whizzing through the rigging. An officer with two epaulettes and a tawdry uniform comes alongside in a boat manned with Blacks. As soon as he is on board the Lieutenant takes him by the shoulder and pointing to the British flag, says: “How dare the port fire at that?”

“I assure you that it shall not occur again,” the officer says. “By your tacking the soldiers thought you were going away again. We have been so annoyed by pirates and insurgent privateers that orders were given to fire at all vessels that hovered about.”’

The officer was repentant. Philipps continued: ‘We find the officer is a harbour master and lieutenant in the navy, and is come to pilot us in, and soon brings us to anchor. When finished he takes some oranges out of his pocket … What a prize it is considered!!’

Aside from the incident of the cannonball, the Kennersley Castle’s visit to Santiago was a pleasant respite for the passengers. Philipps concluded his account of the episode: ‘Our cabin is hung round with oranges, sweet and sour lemons, limes, pineapples, bananas, plantains, eggs, gourds, pumpkins and coconuts. What a treat you must suppose all this must be to people who had been a month at sea.’

The Ocean also had an unfortunate experience on reaching the Cape Verde Islands. As if the collision with the Northampton weren’t adventure enough for her passengers, there was more to come. During one of his talks about the early days of the settler experience, William Howard told his audience of an even more terrifying incident than the one in Portsmouth harbour.

After several weeks without seeing land, the ship arrived at the island cluster. On the afternoon of 10 February they entered the harbour of Porto Praia, on the island of Santiago, and the ship dropped anchor.

The sea was calm, tranquil and blue. The settlers crowded the deck to enjoy the weather, made perfect by a cool breeze. The children played, the adults chatted and there was laughter all around: it was an atmosphere of well-being. As the passengers looked on while brightly coloured tropical fruit, green vegetables and fresh water were brought on board, it seemed as though all the fears, discomforts and hunger of the voyage so far had been an illusion. They went to bed that night, snuggling down in dry bedding, something they had not done since leaving home.

Then, at about one o’clock in the morning their sleep was shattered by a deafening bang and a large cannonball ripped between the masts of the ship. The settlers were immediately awakened. The passengers below joined those who had been sleeping out in the cool of the decks, and watched the flickering lights on the fort where there was a battery of guns.

As they debated what was happening, some hysterical, all afraid, ‘the sound of a large discharge from the fort rolled fearfully on our ears,’ William Howard wrote. ‘The noise on board as the ball struck our ship was so tremendous that I considered the masts were certainly carried away (not supposing that it had entered the ship so near to me and my family as it really had). In about a quarter of an hour afterwards, however, a third discharge was heard from the same quarter and the ball, I am confident, came in the same direction with the one previously alluded to, but it fell into the sea at a short distance from us for, as my cabin window was open, I distinctly heard it go down into the sea, making a noise resembling hot iron put into water.’

In the morning Howard asked the ship’s carpenter and its second mate for an assessment of the damage done: ‘The noise which I had supposed was made by the carrying away of masts, was the effect of a ball, weighing nine pounds, entering the side of the ship into the storeroom, about three feet only below the floor of the little cabin in which I then was, with part of my family.’

Howard went ashore. As he was rowed towards the fort, he was concerned that he was going to have difficulty in communicating with the Portuguese officers who had been responsible for the attack. To his surprise, though, he found that the officer in command of the fort was an Irishman.

With a laugh, the Irish commandant made some kind of an apology. It wasn’t his fault, he assured Howard – his men had acted in good faith. He explained that the cause of the trouble was a schooner that had entered the bay before the Ocean. When challenged, it had refused to hoist its national colours or give any information. Three weeks before, a similar vessel carrying eighteen guns had discharged a cannonballs into the town, put out to sea to recharge and returned to repeat the attack. The governor had therefore ordered the military to be on their guard, and if they saw the schooner, to make a show of force. That night the sentinels had seen a well-manned ship approaching and had directed one of the guns to fire a warning shot. They had misdirected the shot, and it had hit the Ocean. It was a simple error, the Irishman explained to Howard. The other vessel was a smuggler ship: it had got the message and disappeared, so it had ended well, he concluded.

The journey was not all bad weather and misery, however. As the fleet sailed away from the violent North Atlantic Ocean and the rough equatorial seas, and voyaged further south towards the Cape of Good Hope, the conditions became generally better, sometimes even to the point of allowing the voyage to be pleasurable. For example, on 5 March William Shaw made the following entry in his diary: ‘The fineness of the day, calmness of the sea, the advantage of the awning spread over our heads which screened us from the burning rays of the sun, the harmony of the voices in singing the praises of God, the comforting promises of God’s word, and the still more consoling influences of His Spirit, all combined to produce an effect upon the congregation which can be better conceived than described.’

At those times, the settlers were able to regenerate both body and soul. They promenaded on the decks, mingled with people from all areas of the ship, and the children ran about, climbed, and helped the sailors fetch and carry, clean and repair, and paint and swab the decks. The fearless young Tom Stubbs was one of the children who relished those times, in all weather: ‘I and my brother John were always among the sailors,’ he remembered.

The voyage held a mixture of joy and unforgettable terror for the youngest passengers. One of South Africa’s best-known settlers was William Guybon Atherstone – doctor, naturalist and geologist. (Later he would identify a crystal found near Hopetown as a diamond, which led to the establishment of South Africa’s diamond industry.) Guybon Atherstone was a five-year-old when he travelled on the Ocean. He captured those moments in his unpublished memoirs: ‘All was new and strange to us – the porpoises so huge and ugly were wonderful and played “leapfrog” round our ship – flying fish came splashing and fluttering on to the decks with such loud bangs like guns firing, giving us children lots of fun trying to catch their slippery bodies to throw them back into the sea. Then suddenly we saw some huge fish with horrid mouths which came quite close to the side of the ship. The sailors told us they were called sharks and that they were very bad things and would eat anyone who fell overboard. One of the sailors called some of the mothers and told them to keep us away from the rails for fear any of us might fall overboard when the horrid sharks would catch and eat us before anyone could do anything to help us. That frightened even our parents who kept us well away from the rails as long as those horrid sharks continued to swim beside the ship. We were frightened too and kept close to our mother until the soldiers told us those ugly monsters had gone.’

With the better weather further south, there was more opportunity for communal activities and religious services, which were well attended. The passengers were able to dry out their waterlogged belongings and some of those who were particularly susceptible to seasickness had some respite from that terrible condition.

Sometimes, even when a gale was buffeting the ship, the settlers managed to derive some pleasure from their association with each other. Thomas Philipps wrote: ‘Monday 31 January: This evening we had our clarinet as usual, about 7 the moon rose majestically whilst we were walking on the deck, we could not resist the opportunity for a dance and in spite of the unsteadiness of the vessel we managed to dance 6 couples for a couple of hours, between 9 and 10 o’clock we went below.’

In fair weather and in foul, human intercourse took its familiar turns. There were quarrels and fights but there was far more comradeship than bad blood. The passengers were ordinary people thrust together in temporary confinement and they did what people have always done in those cases. Something that evolved on all the ships were self-help groups that cared for the sick and protected themselves against theft and threats to their persons. Single young women were always in danger from crew members and other passengers, and they were offered protection by such groups. Some passenger behaviour was not only a nuisance, but downright dangerous and this prompted a firm reaction. For example, the gentlemen on the Northampton formed a committee to deal with the almost daily outrages perpetrated by Mahoney and his Irish party, namely drinking and fighting.

Jeremiah Goldswain was one of the fortunate beneficiaries of this corporate attitude. While the Zoroaster was still on the Thames at Blackwall, he unthinkingly put on a damp shirt and this led to pneumonia. He slipped in and out of consciousness, and was unaware of anything until they arrived at the Canary Islands. After that, he became so ill that he had made it onto the deck only once until they were three weeks away from Simon’s Bay. At one point the ship’s doctor told Goldswain’s party leader, William Wait, and his wife that they should be prepared to part with Jeremiah, as the doctor thought that nothing would save him. All through that time his berth mates cared for him, feeding him, changing his clothes and carrying him around. When they were anchored for two or three days at Madeira, ‘some of the men went ashore and brought me a little soft bread,’ wrote Goldswain.

When the Zoroaster’s passengers were transferred to the Albury at Simonstown for the voyage to Algoa Bay, the ship was overcrowded. Goldswain described the cramped conditions: ‘Most of us had to sleep on the hard boards. For my part I did not know what to do for where my bones had pushed through my skin while I had been ill had not by this time healed up. I was sitting in front of the berth of Mr Thomas Hartley, whose family had two or three berths. His eldest daughter, seeing me sitting there, asked me where I was going to sleep that night. I informed her that I must take the deck for it as there was no other place. She said that it was not a fit place for one who was so ill … “Here is a spare ship bed and a blanket, and you can have them if you will.” I told her that I should be much obliged to her for them.’

Such acts of kindness and humanity compensated to some extent for the hardships. Jeremiah went on to have a lifelong association with the Hartleys and they were close neighbours during the time the Goldswain family spent in Bathurst. The Hartleys built the Bathurst Inn – later to become the famous Pig and Whistle – and Jeremiah bought it from them in 1853. He enjoyed a friendship with the oldest Hartley son, William, which lasted throughout their lives.

The settler project occurred in a century when girls were deemed ready for marriage from their early teens. The colourful Sir Harry Smith, who was appointed governor of the Cape in 1847, was most famous for two things: his horseback ride from Cape Town to Grahamstown, which took just six days, and his beautiful young Spanish wife.

At the age of thirty-five, he had served under General Arthur Wellesley at the Siege of Badajoz in Spain. The day after the Anglo-Portuguese army forced the surrender of the French garrison, a well-born Spanish lady, who had lost everything in the destruction that had taken place, came to the British camp seeking protection. She was accompanied by her fourteen-year-old daughter, Juana Maria de Los Dolores de Leon. Less than a week later, Juana Maria became Mrs Harry Smith.

When Jeremiah Goldswain married Eliza Debenham, aged nineteen, in 1821, she was already quite old for marriage, it seems. Her sister, Anne, had been married the previous month: she was just thirteen.

At the time of the settler project, older men seemed to have thought nothing of wooing teenage girls, even in the full glare of their parents’ gaze. Society at the time regarded it as normal and the fifteen-year-old Sophia Pigot was no exception, receiving (and enjoying) a great deal of attention from the captain of the Northampton, even though he had a wife and children at home in England. Sophia’s diary reveals a two-way flirtation, which she even boasted about. It is sprinkled with entries like these: ‘Captain Charlton very full of mischief, taking our things below … laughed very much’; ‘Working after tea – in Captain Charlton’s seat’; ‘Captain Charlton teasing me about my poetry.’

Sexual encounters were common, as we have seen, and the opportunities plentiful, given the sleeping arrangements. Several couples met during the voyage and subsequently shared their destinies on the frontier. And when not cowering beneath the dreadful waves, throwing up, fighting hunger, feeling ill or mourning dead children, the settlers made the most of the fact that they were surrounded by other people. On the calm, warm days and evenings there were many kinds of shared pleasures – in addition to the open-air prayer meetings and sermons.

Apart from the flirting among the settlers and between women passengers and crew members, and the less discreet bed hopping, there was a generally jovial relationship between passengers and crew. The worldly, well-travelled sailors enjoyed spinning tall yarns to the inexperienced and naive settlers, and they told their passengers stories about sea monsters, giant octopuses and other mythological wonders of the deep, not to mention weird accounts of the cultures on the islands they had visited.

When the Zoroaster was moored at Simonstown, its passengers were fascinated by the mountains that rose from the bay and they looked out for the sheep that they had been told grazed on the mountain slopes. The sailors, Jeremiah Goldswain wrote, had told them that they had seen sheep climbing the hills, ‘with their tails made fast to a little truck with two wheels. They stated that the hills that the sheep had to graze on were so steep that all their fat ran into their tails.’

When they reached Simonstown, he was disappointed that the sheep were nowhere to be seen, ‘but in the course of that day we saw one of those tails, weighing about five pounds’.

When the sea was calm, there were not only religious gatherings on the decks, but also parties, where rum flowed. And on every ship there was the customary ‘crossing the line’ ceremony where members of the crew dressed up as Neptune and his wife and their court members, and ‘boarded’ the ship to the accompaniment of music. This was an initiation rite of the sea, in which all the men who were crossing the equator for the first time were condemned by Neptune to be shaved, thrown into a lifeboat filled with water and made to drink rum whether they wanted to or not.

Most of those who wrote or gave talks about the voyage later mentioned that ceremony, which always occurred in extreme heat, of course. Little Tom Stubbs, on board the Northampton, recaptured his childish excitement at the event in old age. Being the son of a party leader, he had been in the privileged position of being able to watch the whole spectacle from start to finish from a seat on the poop, shaded by an awning. His father, John, was part of the pageant, as the organiser had asked him to provide the music by playing his fiddle: ‘That morning the “tiger hunters”, as the sailors called us, were battened down, with the exception of heads of parties who, with the cabin passengers, were accommodated with seats on the poop, having an awning over them … At about ten o’clock a gun was fired, and it was reported below that Neptune was on board. The old sea god and his wife soon made their appearance, she riding on a gun carriage, covered with a Union Jack, drawn by some fellows in masks, and with the violin playing in front. Old Neptune then gave orders to bring up the first novice and introduce him to His Majesty and Mrs Nep. A regular chaw-bacon [simple country person] was brought up from below, blindfolded, and brought to the small boat filled with water, and seated on the gunale, a guard holding each arm. In the meantime one of the men had mixed the suds – tar and fat, and with this decoction the unwilling countryman’s face was smeared. He was then asked where he came from, and on opening his mouth to speak, the tar brush was inserted in the aperture. After three duckings in the water he was taken to see old Neptune and his spouse, whose healths he had to drink.’

Tom was not spared humiliation either. He was dragged off his chair to be initiated: ‘I was too young to shave, so was only dipped in the boat, but had my tot of grog and was kissed by Mrs Neptune. She had a precious hard beard.’

The ceremony aboard the La Belle Alliance was similar but, according to Ayliff, very intimidating, even for an adult. He described the emotions around him as he too was put through the initiation: ‘All of the royal party looked most frightful, and a lot of the young girls and children, and some of the young chaps, looked somewhat alarmed, and went off between decks to get out of the way.’

As John Ayliff describes it, the shaving implement looked crude and unhygienic – ‘a piece of iron hoop for the razor’ – and after that he was dumped in the lifeboat where as he was plunged in and out of the water bucket after bucket of water was thrown at him. ‘My eyes smarted so dreadfully with the salt water being dashed on them that it was some time before I could get right again.’

He concluded the day’s entry: ‘So passed this day, by a grand ball in the evening in which all the settlers seemed to enjoy themselves. I am certainly glad that I have passed the line, and the razor of Neptune’s barber.’

It would be unnatural if there had not been some serious conflict among a group of British people in such close confinement. The vinegar incident on the Zoroaster, insignificant as the cause of the conflict was, resulted in dangerous consequences for the ‘mutineers’ – expulsion from the ship and the prospect of being marooned on a remote island.

And there were more significant conflicts – some recorded but probably very many more unrecorded. Without doubt, the most notorious occurred aboard the Northampton, observed by Sophia Pigot and Tom Stubbs.

Although she was thrilled by Captain Charlton’s attention and the new friends she had made among the other teenage girls, Sophia was unsettled by the conflict all around her throughout the voyage, in both the domestic and the wider spheres. On 17 February she wrote: ‘Mr and Mrs Clark quarrelled very much – he beat her etc.’ And again: ‘Wed 1st March: Disturbances with Mr Clark.’

Mrs Clark must have sought comfort from the teenager because Sophia wrote: ‘She told me a great deal about it.’

However, the disharmonious chords on board the Northampton came mainly from the Irish settlers and their leader. These settlers, led by the colourful, eccentric architect Thomas Mahoney, were extremely violent and aggressive towards him, each other, the other passengers, the captain and the crew. They kept the Northampton in a state of constant turmoil with their drunken brawls and quarrels. Although Sophia was wrapped up in her own little preoccupations, their disruptive effect on life on board the vessel forced itself on her attention. ‘January 11,’ she wrote, ‘Two men handcuffed for striking the captain.’

‘January 20, a meeting of the gentlemen below, sad disturbance with these Irish people.’

‘Friday 3 February. Great disturbances with the Irish people, sharpening both sides of their knives. Rather frightened. They were threatening to put a sentinel at Mr Mahoney’s cabin door.’

The climax came when Mahoney refused to draw his party’s water ration. When the captain ordered him to perform the task, Mahoney became insolent and abusive. The captain tried to arrest him and a fight took place: some of Mahoney’s men rushed to his aid, the captain called for help and his officers became involved. Mahoney’s supporters resisted for some time but were finally subdued. The Irishmen were put in irons and locked up in the punishment cells.

When they were released, the disruptive behaviour started again. Party leaders Pigot, Stubbs and Dalgairn formed a committee of public safety to try to find a way through.

The first fortnight of March 1820 was a rather unsettled time, as Sophia noted: ‘Monday 6 – Holding consultations about Mr Mahoney … Mr Brown and a number of people ill after drinking at Mr Mahoney’s cabin the other night.’

It wasn’t only Mahoney and his Irish settlers, however. Some of the other leaders on the Northampton seemed to squabble a lot: ‘Saturday 11th – Disturbance on deck between Mr Clark and Mr Elley – fighting. Sunday 12th: Had prayers in our own cabin. A fuss in the cuddy the while. Poor Mr Elley was sent into his own cabin – very sorry for him.’

By the time they arrived at Algoa Bay, ‘Mr Mahoney and Mr Clark speak to no-one but the people forward.’

While party leaders Clark, Brown and Mahoney misbehaved badly, largely due to their nightly drinking, Pigot, Dalgairn and Stubbs behaved as gentlemen were expected to. They maintained a reserve as the other leaders got drunk and fought among themselves and with their settlers.

Thomas Stubbs gave a more comprehensive account than Sophia of one of the incidents involving Mahoney: ‘One morning, just after the deck had been swabbed, the cook called out for the settlers to come fore for their allowance of burgoo [a kind of porridge]. An Irishman … was leaving the caboose with his wooden bowl of burgoo, when the ship gave a pitch and threw the Irishman on his back, and the burgoo on the deck. Seeing what happened, the second mate, a little proud upstart fellow, who wore extravagantly large frills on his shirt front, came up to our Irishman with intention of kicking him. A stout-made settler seeing this, seized the man by the frill of his shirt and shook him as a terrier would a rat. The mate ran aft to the Captain calling out “mutiny.” The Captain immediately called a muster of sailors armed with cutlasses, and placed them across the quarter-deck. All the Irish rushed to the forcastle, some armed with pieces of wood, and some with pieces of iron hoop … The uproar continued for some time longer but eventually, after much trouble, it was arranged that the settler who shook the mate should give himself up.’

Drunkenness, class conflict and boredom may have generated disruption and division but religion, always the great divider, was present and on form as one of humanity’s most divisive forces on some of the ships.

The Brilliant carried the overspill of the huge Sephton party, the majority of whom occupied the whole of the Aurora. Also on board the Brilliant were the smaller Erith and Pringle parties.

Sephton’s party had undergone a leadership change before the ships had set sail. It had originated as a group of dissenters and Wesleyans, led by Richard Wynne, a zealous member of the Great Queen Street Wesleyan Methodist Chapel. He collected more than a hundred families together and they formed themselves into the United Wesleyan Methodist Society, with a committee responsible for the organisation of the party. Having more than a hundred souls, they were entitled, under the terms of the settler project, to take a clergyman with them and, as mentioned, the committee selected Reverend William Shaw, who would bring Wesleyanism to the frontier’s inhabitants, both Europeans and locals.

Wynne’s wife died in October 1819, and Wynne withdrew from the project. He was replaced by Thomas Colling, a builder from Wapping. Colling also stepped down, however, in November. The group then chose Hezekiah Sephton as the new party leader, and although he was deposed within a few months of arriving at their final settlement, a large tract of land between the Bushman’s and Kariega rivers, the party retained his name and, under the democratic approach of the committee that succeeded him, it became one of the most well organised and successful of the settler communities.

Richard Gush – who would later become a frontier legend in the Sixth Frontier War when he single-handedly and peacefully halted what would have been the sacking of Salem, and which would have incurred many deaths – was in charge of Sephton’s settlers on board the Brilliant. Also on board were two religious fanatics, who created unparalleled disharmony during the voyage – not without amusement for onlookers. Their dispute was a farce that ended with jaw-dropping irony. If ever there was a ship alone on a wide ocean that was a microcosm of society at large, it was the Brilliant.

The religious episode would have been lost to us if Edinburgh writer Thomas Pringle, who was to become an important figure in South African history, hadn’t been on the Brilliant. He wrote about the disagreement in his Narrative of a Residence in South Africa.

One of the actors at the centre of the drama was Charles Bray, a thirty-nine-year-old coachmaker. Pringle tells us that he was ‘tall and grave’. The other, Charles Caldecott, was also thirty-nine. Pringle describes him as ‘a little dogmatic Anabaptist surgeon’. Pringle comments that Gush’s settlers, having little else to occupy their attention, engaged keenly in polemical discussions, and under the respective leadership of Bray and Caldecott, very soon split into two discordant factions: high Calvinists and Arminians.

On the other Sephton ship, it was all peace and harmony on the religious front. The Aurora’s settlers had the benefit of the presence of the Wesleyan preacher, William Shaw, whose diary reports how he maintained a firm hand on their spiritual nourishment. There were daily communal prayers, with everyone gathered on the deck, numerous sermons and generous portions of individual pastoral care as everyone united around him. The unchristian spectacle on the Brilliant could never have come about if William Shaw had been there.

The dispute, over a subject unimportant to most people today, was the stuff of comic opera. The doctrinal differences within the protestant faith community can, over the space of several miles, where individual families occupy their own domains, be accommodated by all but not, apparently, in the confined space of a ship on a three-month voyage. It all depended on the individuals involved, though – a tall, grave Calvinist coachmaker and a little, dogmatic Anabaptist surgeon, in this case.

One fine morning on the upper deck the settlers were promenading, enjoying the blue sky and warm sun after the cold, grey weeks behind them. They were chatting to friends in their party and new friends they had made in the other parties. Two of them, the coachmaker and the surgeon, who had enjoyed the prayers and hymn singing they had shared with the other settlers, raised their hats to each other and walked side by side on the deck.

They were in agreement that, because of the Fall, human beings inherited a corrupt and depraved nature, but the follower of Arminius used the words ‘free will’, which put the Calvinist on his guard. He knew better than the little surgeon beside him what is in God’s mind. He reminded the surgeon that humans do not have free will. The surgeon turned on him and passionately insisted, ‘We do indeed, Sir.’ The tall coachmaker tut-tutted, all calm complacency, which infuriated the little surgeon, who touched his hat and took his leave: ‘Good day, Sir,’ he snapped, and departed.

The surgeon’s negative feelings about the Calvinist stayed with him as he tried to sleep in the equatorial heat and he tossed and turned with indignation. The next day he sought out Bray and told him what had been on his mind. ‘And what is more, Sir,’ he says, ‘I would wager my life that our Lord died for all mankind, not just the elected few.’

Caldecott had uttered a heresy and Bray could not let that pass. God had called on him to defend the Calvinist doctrine and defend it he would. By this time, other party members had gathered around them and they took up the theme as well. A fight broke out among two young men, women shouted at each other and the rest pitched in.

And so, within a few days the party became bitterly divided and the prayer meetings and hymn singing were performed apart, on two different parts of the deck. Some of the settlers continued the discourse when they met, with raised voices, arguing at a more basic and personal level, while their respective champion theologians fumed over such things as God’s sovereignty, divine election, grace and perseverance – all matters of dispute between the two protestant doctrines. It kept the emotional level of the community at boiling point.

Thomas Pringle takes up the story: ‘Heated by incessant controversy for three months many of them, who had been wont formerly to associate on friendly terms, ceased to regard each other with sentiments of Christian forbearance; and the two rival leaders, after many obstinate disputations, which became more intricate and intemperate every time they were renewed, had at length parted in flaming wrath, and for several weeks past had paced the quarter deck together without speaking or exchanging salutations.’

The tale took an ironic turn. As the Brilliant lay anchored in Algoa Bay, its settlers waiting for tents to become available on the beach, Charles Bray was seized with a fatal distemper and the Lord took him without even giving him an opportunity to set foot on that land that he had so ardently hoped to reach. Pringle wrote: ‘His body was brought ashore and interred in the soldiers’ desolate burial ground near the beach; his former antagonist assisting with tearful eyes at the funeral.’

A few days later, Caldecott was seized with the same fatal virus and died in a tent on the beach. Pringle saw him shortly before he died, and the surgeon confided some last thoughts to him: ‘There was something else pressing on his mind that he wished to unburden,’ Pringle tells us. But they were interrupted and Pringle never saw him again. ‘Both however, I have every reason to believe, died forgiving each other their trespasses, as they hoped to be forgiven.’

The passengers of the Brilliant believed that these, the only two deaths among them, had occurred in such a way that it must have been a sign. The two divided religious groups then forgave each other and, reunited, they worked for God as one under the fatherly eye of the young William Shaw, and established the only settler-founded village that still exists in some form. They called it Salem, which means ‘place of peace’. They built a church together, which stands today as one of the finest in the region, and where buildings of worship sprang up like mushrooms.

A final touch brings this story to a perfect end. Two of the children of the warring theologists – Caldecott’s son, Alphonso, and Bray’s daughter, Fanny – were married to each other five years after the landing at Algoa Bay.