In 1820, about five thousand British settlers — a wildly diverse mix of farmers, soldiers, artisans, and gentlemen — landed at Algoa Bay on the east coast of the Cape Colony and were sent to occupy the borderland cleared by the Xhosa wars. Three years of near-catastrophe followed — blight, locusts, floods, Xhosa raids, and a hostile governor. Those who survived became some of the toughest and most capable people in South African history.
The wars on the eastern frontier had left the Zuurveld an empty wilderness — too dangerous for the Xhosa to live in, too exposed for the Boers to stay. It was rich land going to waste at the edge of a colony that needed people. In England at the same time, peace had ended Napoleon's wars and left the country in economic chaos. Soldiers and sailors were being paid off by the thousand. The price of bread was high, trade was bad, and the poor were miserable. The Government had too many people and no place to put them. Someone had the idea of putting them together.
A Most Improbable Crowd
In December 1819 the first transports sailed from England. Others followed through the spring of 1820. Parliament had voted fifty thousand pounds for the scheme. Nearly a hundred thousand people had applied to go. About five thousand were chosen. They were as mixed a crowd as you could imagine. Sharp Scottish farmers and burly Somerset yeomen. Loutish field labourers whose ancestors had worked the same land since the Saxons. Fine ladies and gentlemen tired of gaming and thirsting for the simple life. Weather-beaten Thames watermen and sailors. Old soldiers who had fought in every corner of Europe. Pale artisans and mill-hands from the industrial cities. Anglicans and Presbyterians, Methodists and Dissenters. On one ship, the Brilliant, two men managed to split the entire emigrant party into hostile camps before they'd even seen Africa. One was a tall, grave Wesleyan coachmaker. The other was a little dogmatic Anabaptist surgeon. These two fell into heated theological dispute and dragged everyone in. "Heated by incessant controversy for three months," wrote Thomas Pringle, a Scottish poet and journalist who became the settlers' most famous voice, "many of them who had been wont formerly to associate on friendly terms ceased to regard each other with sentiments of Christian forbearance." Both men were still arguing furiously when they reached the Cape. Both died within days of arrival — first the Wesleyan, then the Anabaptist who wept at his enemy's grave. They were buried side by side somewhere under the streets of modern Port Elizabeth.
About five thousand settlers landed at Algoa Bay in 1820, their wagons and ploughs and fashionable carriages piled on the beach while Highland soldiers carried them through the surf. They would face three years of near-catastrophe before finally finding their footing.
Sir Rufane Donkin and the Town Named for Love
The man who oversaw the settlers' arrival was Sir Rufane Donkin, one of the most sympathetic figures in the whole colonial period. He was a brilliant soldier who had fought in every corner of the British Empire. His latest service had been in India, where by a brilliant flanking movement he cut off the enemy's retreat in the Mahratta War. But his triumph was shadowed. His young wife, whom he had married only three years before, died at Meerut while he was still serving in India. Broken in mind and body, he was invalided to the Cape, where he served as acting governor while Lord Charles Somerset was away. He threw himself into the work of settling the emigrants with the energy of a man trying to forget his grief. He went down to Algoa Bay himself to supervise the landing, arranged wagons and Boer drivers, organized the march into the interior. He laid the foundation stone of the first house of the new town on the beach and named it Port Elizabeth — after his dead wife, Elizabeth Markham, eldest daughter of the Dean of York. He also built an obelisk to her memory on a nearby hill. Sir Rufane lived a long life afterwards, was honored for his service in war and scholarship, but he never forgot Elizabeth. When he died and was buried in Old St. Pancras Churchyard in London, the urn that held her heart was buried with him. The real memorial of this sad love story is the great city of Port Elizabeth.
Three Bad Years — and Then They Held On
The settlers jogged into the interior in ox-wagons behind Boer drivers who wore antelope-skin trousers and went barefoot and cracked enormous whips to keep the sixteen-ox teams moving. The country was wilder than anything they'd imagined — rock and thorn-bush and sudden mountains and river drifts where the wagons had to be hauled across by hand. Thomas Pringle's party of Scots settled in the upper Baviaans River valley, calling their new home Glen Lynden. They built reed-thatched huts, held two church services on their first Sunday (reading from a volume of sermons sent by a relative in Perth), and an antelope came and listened, "gazing at us in innocent amazement." Then came three years of near-disaster. Their wheat was blighted three years running. Locusts ate their orchards and vineyards. Xhosa raided their cattle. Floods washed away half their houses. Jackals and hyenas killed their young stock. Lions took their horses. Elephants — "too big to wrestle with," said one old lady — trampled their gardens. Baboons stole their pumpkins. And then Lord Charles Somerset, the colony's governor, bullied and neglected them — a cross-grained man who undid most of Donkin's wise arrangements and made the settlers' lives even harder. But they held on. An association formed in Cape Town raised ten thousand pounds in relief. Pringle used his pen to draw British public attention to their situation. Loans and title-deeds were issued. Somerset himself visited and acknowledged his mistakes. By 1823 or so, the worst was over. The settlers who had survived became something remarkable. The hardships had weeded out the weaklings, as Pringle wrote. Those who remained became quick and self-reliant frontiersmen, skilled with an axe as with a rifle, rising buoyant above every misfortune. They built the Eastern Province of South Africa — its farms, its towns, its particular blend of English toughness and African pragmatism. Many of their descendants live there still.
Pringle described looking down from a ridge into Glen Lynden for the first time — a beautiful green valley surrounded by snowy mountains, with herds of wild animals grazing peacefully, where they were going to build something from nothing.
