Roughing It. Ralph Goldswain
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.’
The ceremony lasted only two hours but afterwards ‘the sailors went below, dressed, then drank rum and danced till night. There were no blows, but much confusion.’ The next day, Philipps wrote: ‘The night has passed over without accident, although some of us expected otherwise, indeed at one time, there was not a sailor sober enough to relieve the man at the wheel and one of the settlers was placed there.’
Apart from the moods and tempers of the ocean, the hazards of infected food, the dangers of dirt and disease, the irresponsibility and negligence of the crew, and the incidents of settlers falling overboard and having to be recovered with great difficulty, there were the additional dangers lurking everywhere posed by the seafaring community.
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, before the advent of steam-driven ships, every vessel sailing on legitimate business, unless it was a man-of-war, was in danger of being attacked by pirates. To take advantage of the favourable prevailing winds, the settler fleet had to make for Brazil, then turn and head for the southern tip of Africa, calling in at islands off the African and Brazilian coasts to refresh their supplies. It was on those islands, where the sea was calmer and the weather more congenial, that pirates made their camps and villages, from where they operated.
The organisers of the settler project had tried to minimise the danger of piracy by arranging for the ships to sail in pairs. In some cases, the plan worked well but most of the ships became separated from their partners early on. On the whole, the settler ships were not accosted by pirate vessels. There were some reported incidents, however, but more in the nature of scares and conjecture than of actual pirate attacks.
A dramatic incident took place one night when the HMS Weymouth encountered a licensed slave ship. Its captain began firing on her. There was an exchange of fire, ending with crew members of the slaver boarding the Weymouth. With cannon balls flying past them and loud booming coming from their own ship’s guns, the settlers must have thought that their end was imminent. Then to see a rough-looking bunch of seamen coming aboard, there could have been no greater nightmare. But the slaver’s captain soon realised that he had mistaken the Weymouth for a Spanish merchantman. To make up for the error, the next morning he entertained some of the settlers on board his ship. One of them, William Cock, wrote in his journal about the slave ship: ‘She was quite prepared for battle and carried several small guns, with a long brass gun on a swivel, and a rascally-looking crew fit for anything – no doubt a pirate as well as a slaver.’
The Aurora had what might have been a genuine close encounter with pirates. On 25 March, William Shaw wrote that he saw ‘a small vessel at a distance bearing down upon us with all her sails set. So small a vessel such a distance from any land surprised us – and we thought she was in distress and wanted help. We lay to until she came nearer. She hoisted Portuguese colours, hailed us, and, after having asked two or three frivolous questions and given no answer to some proposed by our Captain, she tacked about and went away. Several circumstances appear to countenance the opinion