Farther to the southward on this African coast was the land of the black folk, and toward the Cape of Good Hope lay the country of the Kafirs, against whom the Boer settlers waged a war of extermination. All white men looked alike to these savage warriors, and it ill befell the ship that was cast away among them. There are scenes in the wreck of the Grosvenor, East Indiaman, lost on the Kafir coast in 1782, that are distinguished for haunting pathos and somber tragedy. It was a large ship’s company, with a total number of one hundred and thirty-five men, women, and children, and no more than a dozen survivors succeeded in reaching the Dutch settlements after four months of terrible suffering.
All the rest were killed or died or were missing, and among those who vanished in the jungle were the captain and his party, with which were most of the women and children. There was no trace of these English women until a Colonel Gordon explored the country of the Kafir tribes in 1788, and there met a native who said that a white woman dwelt among his black people. “She had a child,” related the informant, “which she frequently embraced, and wept bitterly.”
Bad health compelled Colonel Gordon to return homeward, but he promised to reward the native if he would carry a letter to the white woman, and he accordingly wrote in French, Dutch, and English, desiring that some sign, such as a burnt stick or any other token, might be sent back to him, and he would make every exertion to rescue her. The Kafir undertook the mission with eagerness, but nothing more was ever heard of him. An account of the wreck of the Grosvenor written before 1812 stated:
“It is said by officers who have resided at the Cape that a general belief prevailed of the existence of some of the unfortunate females who survived the wreck. It was surmised that they might have it in their power to return and leave the Kaffirs but, apprehending that their place in society was lost and that they should be degraded in the eyes of their equals after spending so great a portion of their lives with savages who had compelled them to a temporary union, they resolved not to forsake the fruits of that union and therefore abode with the chiefs who had protected them.”
In 1796 the American ship Hercules, Captain Benjamin Stout, was wrecked on this same coast where the Grosvenor had been lost. These castaways were more fortunate, for the Kafirs and the Boers happened to be at peace, and they made their way to the outlying farms of the white pioneers in the Hottentot country. Captain Stout wrote the story of his adventures, and a stirring yarn it is, but the reference of particular interest just here is as follows:
This being, as I conceived, at no great distance from the spot where the Grosvenor was lost in 1782, I inquired whether any of the natives remembered such a catastrophe. Most of them answered in the affirmative and, ascending one of the sand hills, pointed to the place where the Grosvenor had suffered. I then desired to know whether they had received any certain accounts respecting the fate of Captain Coxon who was proceeding on his way to the Cape with a large party of people, including several men and women passengers that were saved from the wreck.
They answered that Captain Coxon and the men were slain. One of the chiefs having insisted on taking two of the white ladies to his kraal, the captain and his officers resisted and not being armed were immediately destroyed. The natives at the same time gave me to understand that at the period when the Grosvenor was wrecked their nation was at war with the colonists, and as Captain Coxon and his crew were whites they could not tell but they would assist the colonists.
The fate of the unfortunate English ladies gave me so much uneasiness that I most earnestly requested the natives to tell me all they knew of the situation, whether they were alive or dead, and if living what part of the country they inhabited. They replied with much apparent concern that one of the ladies had died a short time after her arrival at the kraal, but they understood that the other was living and had several children by the chief. “Where she is now, we know not,” said they.
There was evidence of an earlier mystery of this mournful kind when the Doddington was wrecked on a rock in the Indian Ocean in 1755. Her crew built a boat in which they coasted along Natal, and while ashore in search of food and water, “the English sailors were extremely surprised to find among these savages, who were quite black, with woolly hair, a youth apparently twelve or fourteen years of age, perfectly white, with European features, fine, light hair, and altogether different from the natives of this country, although he spoke only their language. The people of the Doddington remarked that he was treated as a servant, that the savages sent him on their errands and sometimes did not allow him to eat with them, but that he waited until the end of the repast before making his own.”