Roughing It. Ralph Goldswain
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.
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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