Monday, November 18, 2013

Tuesday the 18th of November

Exclusive Books, Rosebank

He passed the village where the bullock had been slaughtered and went on and walked throughout the night.

Thursday, November 14, 2013

Thursday the 14th of November

He could smell the smoky mushroom smell of the bowl and the sharp clean tang of the soured milk. 

Friday, November 8, 2013

Thursday, November 7, 2013

Wednesday, November 6, 2013

Wednesday the 6th of November

He ate the shellfish he had brought. They had no taste, no smell. 

Monday, November 4, 2013

Saturday, November 2, 2013

Thursday 31st of October, 1782 - Fish River Mouth

Fish River Sun Country Club, 2013.

The men were painted with red clay and armed with lances and shields. They examined the castaways and talked and debated among themselves and then the stoning began. The castaways knelt and bled and begged for mercy and the men came in among them. They took Mr Williams and dragged him to the river and threw him into it. Mr Taylor and the boy escaped unnoticed to the edge of the dune forest. They watched as Mr Williams struggled to his feet chest deep in the stream. He tried to swim for the far side. The men stoned him as he swam and a rock struck him on the head and then another and he sank and the men shouted to see it.

The Walk


It started at Lambasi in northern Pondoland and it ended not far from what we now know as Port Elizabeth. It is a hike that every South African should have the privilege of taking. For the survivors of the Grosvenor, as they clambered onto the rocks in 1792, they might as well have crash landed on Mars. 

Walk takes the reader, step by step, day by day, on the castaway's horrific journey. While indisputably fiction, it steers a good deal closer to the historical truth than most nonfiction found on the shelves.

Walk is tale of suffering rivaling Aspley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World. It is the true story of a boy's survival in the face of impossible odds. It is a haunting parable on the meeting of Europe and Africa.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Saturday the 28th of September

Kobonqaba River

They saw a group of elephants, grey beasts which rolled and frolicked and pirouetted massively in the mud and dipped their trunks into the water and sucked it in and threw it out into the sky like blowing whales.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Tuesday the 17th of September

Already the sand was building up against his form and the boy, his apprentice these four years, carefully drank the water in the shells he had brought and then he went a little way apart from the company and sat on the sand and watched the big swells roll in and rise up steep and curve their clean lips forward and crash down upon themselves in great heaves of white water.


The castaways were somewhere between the Shixini and Qora rivers.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Sunday the 15th of September

At dawn they rose and built up the fire and prepared to walk but Mr Shaw was not able to stand. He lay on the sand and his skin was draped upon his bones like the rags that covered his nakedness. 

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Thursday the 12th of September

The dawn came... 

The dawn came and with it a slanting rain and mist and they proceeded and they halted at low tide for shellfish. They stopped often to wait for Mr Shaw. 

Friday, September 6, 2013

Friday the 6th of September - Dwesa

Dwesa Wildlife Reserve

The castaways stood in awe and the monster stepped forward and flapped its grey ears and lifted up its head. It curled its trunk to the sky and emitted a shrieking blast of sound that sent them scuttling back along the beach like crabs before an advancing wave.

Monday, September 2, 2013

Monday the 2nd of September

...a strange procession in the roar of the surf, pilgrims, perhaps, who had journeyed to the land of the dead and returned much reduced, each man holding aloft his smoking standard.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Sunday the 1st of September

They awoke shivering in mist and drizzle and moved the fire to a more sheltered spot and built it up and chose their brands and then they proceeded down the coast.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

At half past twelve she parted into two halves...



George Carter, a jobbing writer and painter, met Irishman John Hynes on a passage to India and learnt the story of the wreck and the walk which followed it. He proceeded to disseminate it in print and oils. Samuel Johnson urged his friend Mrs Thrale to read Carter’s account. Charles Dickens wrote about the castaways in an essay, ‘The Long Voyage’, calling the tale, ‘the most beautiful I know associated with ship wreck’.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Tuesday the 27th of August - Umtata River

There were those among them who had begun to perceive that they were engaged in a race and that their competitor in that race was starvation. John Brown and Hynes and Fitzgerald and Fruil and Simpson and Warmington were among them and they made bundles of their clothes and possessions. They went a little upriver and entered the water and swam with one hand holding their essentials above their heads.

Thursday the 22nd of August

Captain Coxon and Mr Shaw differed as to the strategy to be followed and the group split. The boy and eighteen souls, all male, all strong, stayed with Mr Shaw and his flint. 

Wednesday the 21st of August


They halted on a little beach at sunset and as they came down onto it they saw in the sand the prints left by the paws of wild beasts. 

Monday the 19th of August - Umgazana River

Umgazana

Reduced and tattered as they were and kneeling about the roaring blaze and tearing at the flesh with their canines, they took on an aspect of profound savagery. Their hosts sat among them with their intricately braided hair and they grilled lengths of intestine in the coals and sliced off sections with their spears. 

Friday the 16th of August

They came to a large village where the people came out to watch their passing but offered no opposition. The castaways knelt and made gestures of eating and drinking and a man stepped forward and gestured for them to follow. They obeyed him and he led them away from the village for some miles and then he quickened his pace and was lost to sight. 

Thursday the 15th of August

Colonel d’Espinette, a Frenchman, was overcome by exhaustion and left behind.

Wednesday the 14th of August

They moved inland in search of a ford and came to a subsidiary river too deep to cross. At the confluence they left behind two Italian seamen named Bianco and Paro. 

Tuesday the 13th of August - Port St. Johns

They had eaten nothing that day but a little wild sorrel and celery.

Monday the 12th of August

The people did not look at them. They brought out a red clay bowl and they filled it with milk from a gourd and then they set the bowl before their dogs.

Sunday the 11th of August - Between Ntafufu River and Port St. Johns

The remaining souls went forward as a group but soon enough a consensus emerged among the strong that it was of little use to tarry and perish with little children and women and others who could not be helped. 

Saturday the 10th of August

The castaways had not gone far when people started to follow them and form lines on either side and then, as in a nightmare that circles back to the same horror, the stones came again. 

Friday the 9th of August

They went forward in the same order as before and they were forced from the shore by cliffs. They found a path that led westward and followed it and saw people on a hillside before them. They went down into a little valley and as they laboured up the other side the people gathered on the hilltop and stoned them. 

Thursday the 8th of August

Not an hour later they came over the brow of a hill in that populous landscape and saw a man coming up towards them. Mr Shaw went forward and hailed him. The man stood and examined the castaways with careful astute eyes. His hair was black and long and straight and his skin was the colour of weathered oak. He wore a loincloth of antelope hide and he carried his few possessions in a bag formed from the skin of a small ape.

Goedendag, he said.

Wednesday the 7th of August

They numbered one hundred and twenty-six souls and as they started on their journey each able-bodied castaway carried five pounds of flour and six pounds of beef or pork. They had, on the advice of Captain Coxon, discarded their hats and created turbans and shawls of silk and muslin and they looked strange, even to themselves, like a colourful tribe of feckless Bedouin, bereft and gone astray on a green shore. 

Tuesday the 6th of August

In the afternoon the captain consulted with the officers and the passengers and they decided that given the disposition of the people and the scarceness of provisions obtained, the party would set forward towards the Cape next morning. They lived in hope of coming to the first Dutch settlements within sixteen days.

Sunday the 4th of August

They worked the Grosvenor round and some hands were in the act of hoisting the mizzen-staysail when the boy heard an extended tectonic rending. Standing there with his bare feet upon the planks, he felt the resonance of the collision in his bones and knew that it signalled a prodigious shift in the nature of things.