See for yourself – in a new series by David Bristow
In this new series, DAVID BRISTOW tells the stories behind must-see places in South Africa that have sparked his curiosity and imagination, starting with the Wild Coast
Our current adventure finds us in the region of Lusikisiki, where it’s best to have a 4x4 if you want to access some of the finest rustic holidayland in the world, otherwise known as the Wild Coast.
The road to Lambazi Bay, Luphatana and Waterfall Bluff quickly deteriorates from tar, with the ubiquitous Transkei speed bumps, to a looping gravel road, then a track, and the track to a path, sometimes a rockery, in other parts a rutted grass field; clay when dry and soup when it rains.
Peter and Chere Retallick, who run the Drifters Greenfire Lodge at Lambazi, often welcome teary and weak-kneed guests, much like the survivors who struggled ashore here more than 200 years ago from the wreck of an East Indiaman. I first stumbled upon the story of the Grosvenor at Rhodes University when our English class read the poem by Mike Kirkwood, ‘Henry Fynn and the Blacksmith of the Grosvenor’.
I got to explore the area in 1987 while researching a book on the South African coastline. In a red Citi Golf, I dodged a tropical cyclone that turned out to be worse than Domoina in 1984, and even Leon-Eline in 2000. When I reached Lambazi, aka Port Grosvenor, some cottage owners asked how I’d got there. I pointed to my little red hire-car.
At Lambazi I was intrigued to find what was left of the Grosvenor, not so much the wreck but various attempts to salvage it. Over time, myth had turned rumours to fact about the great treasures that were lost when the ship went down. Top of the list was the legendary Peacock Throne which, the wisdom went, had gone missing from India around that time.
Throughout the last century there was a kind of a Grosvenor treasure rush. Salvage companies were floated, big monies were raised, a circus parade of fortune seekers descended on the place. Someone tried to build a drydock cofferdam around the wreck site, but the wild Indian Ocean was having none of that. Another hauled a steam crane down from the Reef by ox wagon to lift it up. And others built floating barges to work the site (see above: wild Indian Ocean).
One bright man with stars in his eyes began digging a tunnel from the shore, hoping to burrow underneath the wreck. Just what he planned to do with an entire ocean when it poured into his shaft is anyone’s guess. Fortunes were lost.
On a sunny day I went sauntering along that coastline, past the flat, rocky shelves at Luphatana, around the great headland of Waterfall Bluff to the natural sculpture known as Cathedral Rock. On a grassy headland I stumbled across a pile of metal ingots, clearly not of recent provenance. I am convinced they were part of the stash that survivor John Bryan ‘… had hefted, hurled and heaved/ pig-iron of the ship’s ballast/ up the beach with a realist’s hands/ On that cliff-top your forge flame faced… ‘
(from ‘Henry Fynn and the Blacksmith of the Grosvenor’).
John Bryan was a soldier who had badly injured his leg while battling his way ashore, and it was he who set himself up as the blacksmith, married at least one local woman and fathered several children.
The Grosvenor is probably the most famous shipwreck in South African history, having crashed into the African mainland one dark and stormy night in August 1782. Already well into the storm season, she’d set sail from Calcutta later than was safe.
In good weather Lambazi is as delightful a place as you’ll find along the Wild Coast, a small beach with a stream entering the sea, surrounded by grassy banks and rocky platforms beyond that. Holiday shacks dot the shore, but 237 years ago there would have been just the humble huts of Mpondo herders.
Around midnight on 3 August, Captain John Coxon calculated they were about 300 kilometres shy of the mainland, en route from India to England, then went to bed. First mate Mr Logie had come down with a fever and had also taken to his bed, which left second mate Mr Shaw as officer of the watch.
In the wee hours, with a squall blowing from the south-west, seaman William Hubberly reported to the watch, Mr Beale, that he’d seen lights off to starboard. Beale dismissed them as ‘lights in the air’ and didn’t even bother to look. He should have, because those lights were veld fires and the ship was minutes away from ripping its timber guts out on a reef just a stone’s throw from the beach.
After a day of tragedy and pandemonium, by dusk 125 of the original 150 crew and passengers had found their sorry ways to the shore, witnessed by curious locals.
Four days later, the survivors set off towards the Cape in small, ragged groups. Captain Coxon reckoned the walk would take them 10 days, maybe 17 if things went badly. They did, very. After just four days of walking, Coxon abandoned the women and children to fend for themselves. They returned to the site of the wreck and were later absorbed into the local Xhosa society.
Since that time, every woman shipwrecked on the Wild Coast who took up with the local people – and there were many over more than two centuries – was assigned to the Grosvenor. Most famous was Bessie, a girl who’d been shipwrecked about 40 years previously. She became known as the ‘sunburnt queen’ and legend has it she’s the stem mother of abeLungu, the white Xhosas.
No sooner had the survivors started walking than they were attacked by locals, demanding ntsimbi (metal). Their possessions were stripped and some even killed. They had not thought to repay the locals for the food provided to them and when they walked off without offering compensation it was too much for their Mpondo hosts. Word raced ahead, warning of the ungrateful mzungus, so, as they approached kraals hoping to get food, they were stoned and chased off.
Anyone who knows the dramatic Pondoland will have an idea of the struggle they faced. Some of Coxon’s party drowned when a hippo capsized their raft. One woman strangled herself with her silk scarf rather than proceed. And they were still only a short way into their trek.
More than three months later, just six ravaged, sand-blinded, starved men – and the cabin boy, Price – stumbled onto a settler farm in Algoa Bay. About a dozen more were located later by expeditions sent out from the colony to search for survivors.
There was one last twist to the story, and an even larger tragedy. A farmer found a sizeable horde of diamonds on his land close to the Kei ferry. There was a rush to the spot and, when no more diamonds were found, farmer John Boch was accused of ‘salting’ the ground and imprisoned for fraud. However, those who have researched the story in great depth hold that the diamonds had belonged to either Captain Coxon or another of the Grosvenor’s wealthy passengers, William Hosea.
About 18 months after the wreck, a group of Xhosa men travelling past Algoa Bay were asked if any of the survivors were still alive. Yes, they replied, but their own people were now dying in great numbers. It seems that at least one survivor brought ashore a deadly fever (possibly what had laid low first mate Logie on the fated night). Within a decade, the region had been decimated by ‘the pox’.
Sitting atop Waterfall Bluff, watching the Mlambomkhulu (‘big river’) dive over the cliffs into the pounding waves below, I wondered: did any of the shipwreck survivors ever sit down in a place like this and think how lovely it was?