Theirs was a fate worse than death, a tale which chilled colonial Britain: women and girls shipwrecked on the wild coast of southern Africa in 1782 who had the misfortune to survive and be carried off by the natives. Castaways from the Grosvenor, one of the East India Company’s finest vessels, included the wives and daughters of gentry left defenceless after the male passengers were reportedly slaughtered.
For the contemporary equivalent of the tabloid press it was a sensation. “By these Hottentots, they were dragged up into the interior parts of the country, for the purposes of the vilest brutish prostitution,” said the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser.
Newspaper accounts of ravishings by “the most barbarous and monstrous of the human species” were so shocking that British society was relieved to be subsequently assured by an official investigation that the women had in fact perished before the natives got hold of them.
New evidence, however, suggests a rather different story.
Several female passengers did indeed survive and become intimate with tribesmen. But rather than being abducted and raped it appears they chose to become wives and mothers.
A new book, The Caliban Shore: The Fate of the Grosvenor Castaways, has concluded that three, possibly four, women passengers joined tribes in what is today known as Pondoland, a remote, rugged landscape on South Africa’s east coast.
The author, Stephen Taylor, has scrutinised written and oral testimony, including previously overlooked material, pointing to the survival of white females who are still remembered by the tribes.
“The notion of white women with black men was so horrifying to contemporary sensibilities that polite society tried to wish it out of existence,” Taylor said in a telephone interview yesterday. “But that’s what the evidence points to.”
The Grosvenor ran aground on her way from Madras to England, throwing 125 survivors onto an alien coast far from European outposts. The crew set out on a desolate trek lasting months — but only 13 made it back to England, the rest succumbing to hunger and disease.
When the last male passengers died the women and children were dependant on assimilating with natives who eked a livelihood from hard, unyielding soil.
Lydia Logie, the young, vivacious wife of the Grosvenor‘s chief officer, appears to have joined a Xhosa tribe after her husband died, impelled perhaps by a desire to save their unborn child.
Several years later a commander of the Cape garrison, Robert Gordon, met a Xhosa man who told him a white woman had lived among his tribe, and that she “had a child, and she frequently embraced the child, and cried most violently”.
Piecing together other fragments, Taylor concluded that Logie had been adopted by a sub-group know as the ama-Tshomane whose matriarch, by coincidence, was an Englishwoman named Gquma who had been shipwrecked as a child in Pondoland about 40 years earlier. By the time a rescue party from the Cape arrived in 1791, nine years after the Grosvenor sank, Logie was dead, her spirit and strength probably worn down from the grind of tanning hides, planting crops and collecting firewood.
The rescuers were disappointed not to find any survivors, but Taylor believes they blundered by missing Mary Wilmot and Eleanor Dennis, young girls who escaped the Grosvenor and grew up in Pondoland.
Evidence for this comes from a former Royal Navy lieutenant Francis Farewell, who stumbled across the wreck in 1823 and was told of two white women who had lived there for some time but had fled a Zulu invasion. They disappeared into the bush and starved to death, he was told.
Archives in the University of Natal suggest that Frances Hosea, who had been two years old when the Grosvenor sank, may also have survived and become the elderly, Zulu-speaking white woman encountered by a British trader in the 1860s.
For a British public fed racist notions of baboon-like savages, such assimilations would have been inconceivable, Taylor said. Rumours and fragmented reports of white women rearing children in Pondoland kraals only deepened the dread. Relatives feared the official version of all the females swiftly perishing was too “optimistic”.
“English society saw theirs as the fate that was worse than death and out of kindness wished them dead,” said Taylor. — Guardian Unlimited Â