12 May 2014
A little bit history
In two weeks time as
various teams struggle through the Transkei with rapidly depleting energy it
would be good to reflect on the fact that it will be exactly 172 years (latter
part of May 1842) that Dick King galloped through those parts on his epic ten day ride
from Port Natal (Durban) to Grahamstown to raise the alarm that the British
forces had been besieged by the
Voortrekkers under Pretorius and running out of horses to eat.
If you chance to
pass through Butterworth (on account of intentional or accidental navigation)
look out for the memorial on its main street.
The fight had its
origin in the decision, during January 1842, by governor Sir George Napier to
send a force of some 260 soldiers under Thomas Charlton Smith to sort out the
Voortrekkers who were getting uppity in the Republic of Natalia. According to
Joseph Brown, the expedition bugler and chronicler, the wagon train, which
stretched over 2 miles (3,2 km) included a howitzer, a pair of light field pieces,
and a few dozen women and children - one
of whom, Mrs Gilgen, gave birth to a daughter on the journey.
Anyway, and this is
where it affects us: Brown claims they
crossed 122 streams and rivers, some of them 600 meters wide. Personally I
think Mr Brown had a tendency to exaggeration - much like myself.
Another navigation
tip for you okes: It appears that they preferred to travel inland only going
down to the coast at Port Edward where they cows and whale skeletons and “ gambolled in the sea and ate a cornucopia
of shellfish” .
To cut a long story
short, after arriving in Port Natal they only succeeded in irritating the
Voortrekkers hence the need for Dick King’s dash.
Wait, there’s more.
290 years before
Dick King (1552) two Portuguese galleons, the St Jerome and the St Juan ran into a major
storm off the Wild
Coast St Jerome went down
without any survivors near the present day Richards Bay
This was some 100
years before Jan van Riebeck landed at the Cape
so the nearest European trading post was Inhambane, 500 km north of Maputo . Which is where
the captain, the nobleman Manual de Sousa de Sepulveda, decide to walk with his
equally well-bred wife, Dona Leonora, two small children and, and course, the
survivors.
Only 22 of the
original 500 made it to Inhambane, the rest having either decided to stay
behind along the way to be assimilated
into the gene pool or got themselves killed by disease, wild animals etc.
The lovely long
haired Dona Leonora had a nasty end whose details I will leave out in case it
traumatises our foreign teams - as it did the captain who apparently had a
mental breakdown and wandered off into the bush to die. As for you South Africans I won’t tell you
either, because you will just shrug it off and say, as is typical, “she was lucky because she could have been xxx
or even yyy or worse still zzz“
With the benefit of
detailed maps, roads, transition boxes filled with food, hi-tech clothing and
29ers it can only be a walk in the park for us.
(with
acknowledgements to Tim Couzins “South African Battles” and Roger Webster “At
the Fireside”).
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