The Caliban Shore: The Fate of the Grosvenor Castaways
by Stephen Taylor
(Faber & Faber)
South Africa’s south-eastern Cape coast is notorious as a graveyard for ships. The swift, warm Agulhas current encounters low pressure systems sweeping in from frigid Antarctica, with meteorological consequences comparable with, as Stephen Taylor puts it, “pouring icy water into a vat of hot oil”.
These treacherous seas are still a challenge, even for huge modern ships equipped with sophisticated navigation and communications aids. One can only marvel that people were once foolhardy enough to venture forth in small, frail wooden vessels powered only by sail, navigating as much by luck and guesswork as by their rudimentary technology, before a reliable method of calculating longitude was invented. Unless several ships sailed together in convoy, they had no means of communication whatever.
If a ship was stranded on an alien shore, those lucky enough not to have drowned during the wreck itself may have ended up wishing they had not made it to shore, where they often had a very slim chance of surviving. Those who did manage to reach their own kind again tended to be young and fit enough to start with to be able to endure the inevitable starvation, thirst, scurvy, exposure, let alone the dangers posed by wild beasts or attacks by hostile indigenes.
The wreck of the Grosvenor in 1782 caused a sensation in the British press at the time, prompting the creation of dramatic paintings and books. Charles Dickens was inspired to write a tear-stained account about one very young boy’s death. Taylor fleshes out the castaway narrative with other historical detail that adds much to the fascination of his story.
First, though, he takes a brief look at the wreck of another East Indiaman, the Dodington, at Algoa Bay, 27 years earlier. These castaways endured seven months on uninhabited Bird Island nearly 10km offshore while they built a makeshift boat to sail to Madagascar and safety. This wreck was the result of miscalculating their position and turning northwards too soon. In 1780, just two years before the Grosvenor tragedy, a handbook published for the guidance of East India Company mariners used the fate of the Dodington as a stern warning. So why did the Grosvenor meet the same doom?
For many reasons. The ship was delayed in departing from the Bay of Bengal until it was dangerously late in the season. Its companion ship never arrived, itself wrecked. Human negligence played its own role, as did the fatal decision to walk south to the Cape instead of north to Delagoa Bay along a more hospitable shoreline, a tactic which had saved previous castaways.
After a somewhat slow start, in which Taylor explores the backgrounds of the crew and passengers, his narrative sweeps one away like a rip tide.
Taylor visited the site of the wreck on the remote Pondoland coast several times and tramped along some of the coastline, so his evocation of the landscape rings true. He manages to keep track, without confusing the reader, of the various parties and individuals after the main group of castaways split up, aided by a detailed map. It is a harrowing tale of people pushed to the limits of endurance and despair, yet told with restraint. Many intriguing questions remain about the ultimate fate of some of the castaways, especially the women and children.
What makes The Caliban Shore stand out from previous accounts is that, instead of condemning the indigenous tribes for the indifferent, even hostile, way they treated the castaways, as most other writers have, Taylor explores the story from their side as well, giving plausible reasons for their reluctance to assist the wretched umlungus washed up on their stretch of coast.
In the final chapters, drawing on material recorded by early missionaries and settlers, as well as judicious speculation, Taylor pieces together tantalising stories about the probable fates of the handful of survivors who did not make it as far as the most easterly outpost of Dutch habitation, Ferreira’s farm near Algoa Bay. They may have been absorbed into certain tribes along the coast. The oral traditions of these tribes confirm that some of their ancestors were umlungu women found as children beside the sea. Some of these are closely related to Nelson Mandela’s lineage.
Taylor mentions the many salvage attempts to recover the Grosvenor‘s rumoured treasure (still believed by many to have included the Peacock Throne of the Moghuls) and their attendant scams. One of these fooled no less a personage than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of that arch-detective, Sherlock Holmes.
Two minor quibbles: in the text, footnotes are marked by such faint asterisks that one notices the notes only on reaching the foot of the page, and endnotes are not marked by numbers in the text at all.