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White women lived with tribes - Shock Horror

Shipwrecked women lived with tribes
By Rory Carroll in Johannesburg
March 24, 2004

Theirs was a fate worse than death, a tale that chilled Britain: women and girls shipwrecked on the wild coast of southern Africa in 1782 who had the misfortune to survive and be carried off by natives.

Castaways from the Grosvenor, one of the East India Company's finest vessels, included the wives and daughters of gentry left defenceless after the male passengers were slaughtered.

For the contemporary equivalent of the tabloid press it was a sensation. Newspaper accounts of ravishings by "the most barbarous and monstrous of the human species" were so shocking that British society was relieved to be subsequently assured by an official investigation that the women had in fact perished before the natives got hold of them. New evidence, however, suggests a rather different story.

Several female passengers did indeed survive and become intimate with tribesmen. But rather than being abducted and raped it appears they chose to become wives and mothers.

A new book, The Caliban Shore: The Fate of the Grosvenor Castaways, has concluded that three, possibly four, women passengers joined tribes in what is today known as Pondoland, a remote, rugged landscape on South Africa's east coast.

The author, Stephen Taylor, has scrutinised written and oral testimony, pointing to the survival of white women still remembered by the tribes.

The Grosvenor ran aground on its way from Madras to England, throwing 125 survivors on to an alien coast far from European outposts. The crew set out on a desolate trek to civilisation lasting months - but only 13 of them made it back to England.

The rest succumbed to hunger and disease.

Lydia Logie, the young, vivacious wife of the Grosvenor's chief officer, appears to have joined a Xhosa tribe, impelled perhaps by a desire to save their unborn child after her husband died.

Several years later a commander of the Cape garrison, Robert Gordon, met a Xhosa man who told him of a white woman who had lived among his tribe, and she "had a child, and she frequently embraced the child, and cried most violently".

By the time a rescue party from the Cape arrived in 1791, nine years after the Grosvenor sank, Mrs Logie was dead.

For a British public that had been fed racist notions of baboon-like savages, such assimilations with tribesmen would have been inconceivable, Taylor said.

"English society saw theirs as the fate that was worse than death and out of kindness wished them dead."

The Guardian

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/23/1079939645957.html

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John aka NitroX

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