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.
A lithograph by R Middleton of Algoa Bay, Port Elizabeth, December 1823. Source: National Library of South Africa: Cape Town Campus
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