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.’
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