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
