Ralph Goldswain is the great-great-grandson of Jeremiah Goldswain – who emigrated from Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire, to the Cape as one of the 1820 Settlers – and Eliza Debenham of Frome in Somerset.
Ralph Goldswain is the great-great-grandson of Jeremiah Goldswain – who emigrated from Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire, to the Cape as one of the 1820 Settlers – and Eliza Debenham of Frome in Somerset.
He has produced a new edition of The Chronicle of Jeremiah Goldswain: 1820 Settler, which is to be published by 30 degrees South in July 2014. Ralph travelled from his home in London to Albany during March, to visit the places Jeremiah wrote about and to take pictures for the book. He talks about his ancestor and share his experiences of the visit to settler country.
Jeremiah Goldswain sat down to write his memoirs sometime during the 1850s and finished them on 23 December 1858. He wrote in straight lines, on sheets of thin blue paper, probably working from notes that he kept throughout his life.
Apart from its idiosyncratic spelling and lack of punctuation and paragraphing, it is a wonderful, though difficult, read.
The Chronicle, kept in the Cape Archives, was transcribed by the scholar, Una Long, and published by the van Riebeeck Society in two volumes in 1946 and 1949. It tells the colourful story of a settler from Great Marlow, Buckinghamshire, in a way that brings the settler experience to life.
The Chronicle is generally regarded as the finest of all the settler reminiscences, with vivid characterisation and detailed, visual descriptions of events. I decided to produce a new edition and transcribed the manuscript, transposing it word for word but using the conventions of modern English written language. That made the text fully accessible for the first time.
When I had finished I had an irresistible urge to visit Albany, find the places where Jeremiah lived his life, and take photographs for the book, which is to be published in July. I thought it would be a good idea to fly out from London, meet my brother in Johannesburg, proceed to Port Elizabeth together, pick up a car, find the key places our great-great-grandfather mentioned and take the pictures.
Not only would I have original photographs for the book but we would have our own adventure in settler country.
We scheduled three days for that. It all seemed so easy.
Easy?
In spite of the great people we met, the excellent meals we enjoyed, and the excitement of being in settler country, it was a frustrating experience.
The dangers of the fast-flowing rivers and the dense bush of 19th century Albany, where lives were regularly lost, have given way to the pleasures of the ‘Sunshine Coast’, with game parks, golf courses and beaches.
Those features have overwritten the country the settlers of 1820 knew, making it difficult to find.
It’s beautiful country with its rivers and forests. Much of it is like parkland and it’s no wonder that Albany has become such a popular holiday area.
Finding the exact spot where the wagons, creaking their way across rivers and through hilly country, left the track from Algoa Bay (where the settlers landed) to the Kowie Mouth, and dropped the settlers of Wait’s party off at the source of the Ghio stream near the Bushmans River, proved quite easy. But we could only see the actual spot through binoculars.
Wait’s farm, Belton, has been divided up, and the spot where the settlers pitched their tents at the place they called Raven Hill, is now in the Kariega Game Reserve, surrounded by an electric fence and roamed by the Big Five.
Running out of time, we could not get there, but the friendly manager of the Reserve subsequently took pictures of the spot and sent them to me.
Jeremiah’s Freestone Farm, near Bathurst, is now the township of Nolukhanyo. Farming cattle there, Jeremiah also quarried limestone and had the contract to supply lime to the Albany government.
We were thrilled when we found his lime kiln, intact, on the farm of Les Pretorius, who welcomed us with overwhelming hospitality. He showed us a track that had been engraved on the land by wagon wheels all those years ago: it was the main road that ran from the Kowie mouth to Grahamstown and passes right by his house.
We found the Pig and Whistle with no difficulty at all, of course, and stopped for a drink.
Jeremiah bought it for his son-in-law, Samuel McArthur, in 1852 and virtually rebuilt it: the structure that stands there today is the result of Jeremiah’s renovation.
Everything else was challenging, however. We had fences everywhere, thorny bushes, inaccurate maps – you name it.
We located Burnt Kraal, once owned by Piet Retief, the farm Jeremiah bought in 1847 and where he farmed sheep until his business was wiped out in the war of 1850-3. The farmhouse is in the middle of the Grahamstown Military Base. We could not get there because of the weather – again frustrating – but we managed to arrange for pictures to be taken of the house, which now does service as a military conference and hospitality venue.
We tried to visit the Clay Pits where so much conflict took place between settlers and Xhosas, for whom the pits had been a source of their important cosmetic clay for generations.
When the settlers there tried to prevent them from visiting the pits, which were now regarded as their possessions, the result was violence, with many deaths on both sides.
It was the place where Jeremiah got his first job, after the Landdrost released the rebellious labourers of Wait’s party from their contract.
We could not get there as it was raining and the clay road was more than perilous, with the car sliding as though on steep ice.
One of the most moving accounts of a death of a young man that one can find among settler writings is Jeremiah’s account of his son, Charles’s death at the hands of Xhosas and rebel Khoi on 8 September 1851 at the age of 24.
A group of eight went out from Bathurst to recover stolen cattle and were ambushed at Dry Flat near Mansfield, a few kilometres from Bathurst.
Five of them escaped, leaving Charles and two others to fight the attackers.
When Charles’s body was recovered they found that his hands had been torn to shreds: he had tried to bat away the assegais as they ripped through his hands.
His tombstone in the Anglican churchyard in Bathurst tells the story. We found that and stood silently, quite overwhelmed at being so close to that tragic event.
We also found the plot in the Old Methodist Cemetery in Grahamstown where Jeremiah, his wife Eliza, and one of their sons, William, are buried. Miraculously, their tombstones, surrounded by the debris left by grave robbers, are among the very few that are intact.
Our mission was far more difficult to accomplish than we had imagined it would be. Three days were not enough to have a proper meeting with Jeremiah, but we found the immersion in settler country rewarding and the friends we made very much worth the effort.
