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
