Saturday the 31st of August

The Wild Coast.

They took up their brands and walked on... 

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 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.