The Chronicle of Jeremiah Goldswain: 1820 Settler

By Ralph Goldswain

This is the story of the 1820 Settler, Jeremiah Goldswain, in his own words. After thirty-eight years on the eastern boundary of the Cape Colony, he sat down to write his memoirs. It is a close-up view of four decades during a period when the British Empire was expanding in southern Africa, with the borders being pushed ever farther into the hinterland by successive governors. As a result, there was constant conflict between the African tribes and the colonists. Jeremiah was directly involved in three of the nine Frontier Wars that occurred between 1779 and 1879.

It is the story of hardship and the struggle for survival of Jeremiah and his family—his wife Eliza and their ten children—on one of the most volatile borders the world has ever seen. Even in peacetime the conflict and violent clash of cultures were constantly present and many settlers were murdered, including members of Jeremiah’s family. Through all this we see a man making his way in a world he could not have imagined while growing up in rural Buckinghamshire. He lived during an important historical time for South Africa, not only observing and fighting the wars, but meeting and serving with some of the most famous names in South African history. He saw, in detail, the effects of the Cattle Killing of 1856, the Boer uprising in the Orange River Sovereignty, as well as several other famous and notorious historical events.

The text has been published once only— by the van Riebeeck Society in 1949—and since then has been used by scholars and historians as a primary source. It has not been widely read, because Jeremiah had no education, and although he had an extraordinary ability to describe experience and express his emotions, he was a stranger to the conventions of written language. Now Ralph Goldswain has transcribed the original text into an accessible account of forty years of frontier history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 30 Degrees South Publishers
• Release date: Jul 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781928211334

Book preview

Introduction

As I worked on my great-great-grandfather’s text I found myself inhabiting a weird science fiction-like world: I was existing in two dimensions at the same time. Like Jeremiah Goldswain, I once lived in the frontier country of the Eastern Cape, but a century and a half later. Like his children I grew up there, and I spent five years at the University in Grahamstown, the city my ancestor knew so well, where he took his family to live at times when the going became unbearably tough and where he and Eliza finally settled after the 1851–1852 war, and lived until the end of their lives; Jeremiah died in 1871 and Eliza in 1879.

Grahamstown is the main town of Albany, where much of the action recorded in these memoirs took place. I know it well—it’s a city now, with a cathedral, a university and several of South Africa’s top schools. Its wide streets, designed to allow a wagon with a full span of oxen to turn around in them, have been adapted to modern life, lined with pubs, shops, and restaurants. The historic buildings—the Drostdy Gate; the Old Gaol; Huntly Street School (the oldest Anglican school in South Africa), Drostdy Lodge, and many others familiar to Jeremiah two centuries ago, have been preserved, and were familiar to me, too, during my time at Rhodes University. In fact, I lived within a minute’s walk of the Drostdy Gate and attended my English tutorial sessions in Drostdy Lodge. Jeremiah would have known the Botanical Gardens, the second earliest botanical garden in South Africa, which is a famous student courting site, where we drank coffee after classes.

The city is set in rolling countryside, surrounded by farms and within easy reach of a beautiful coastline with white sand, black rocks, and huge breakers crashing on to pristine beaches and throwing up sparkling foam.

Jeremiah’s Albany may have looked like the Albany of today but it was a very different place: it was dangerous and treacherous, even in peacetime, and it yielded a life of hardship. Albany presents visitors to the region with a rural landscape unspoilt by the factories, mines and commercial centres that scar the more developed parts of South Africa. Its major features are game parks, golf courses and seaside entertainments. But two centuries ago its rocky hills were traps—places of ambush during the numerous frontier wars. The land ran with blood and even short journeys were hazardous. Travellers had cause to say a prayer of thanks when arriving home safely.

The green wooded valleys with their picnic spots in shady lay-bys were hiding places then, used by cattle thieves to evade pursuers trying to recover their stock. The aggrieved burghers (from the Dutch ‘burger’ meaning a citizen of a town; in the Cape Colony burgher referred to Dutch farmers but during the British administration it also denoted other settlers) gambled their lives in the thick bush, and sometimes lost. The muddy rivers, foaming and raging in the rainy season, have safe bridge crossings now, but two centuries ago they were lethal places, often impossible to cross, and where horses and oxen were frequently swept off their legs, carried away by the relentless currents, and drowned. The smooth tarred road on which a leisurely drive in an air-conditione car from Grahamstown to the coast takes forty minutes, was a rough wagon track that broke axles in dry seasons and immobilised wagons when it rained. The journey took the best part of an uncomfortable sweat-drenched day.

Two hundred years ago, where the Kowie River divides into smaller streams across a wide plain close to the mouth, then comes together again and rushes through soft sand to the sea, there were no settlements of more than a few families, but sometime in the middle of the twentieth century the Kowie’s mouth was transformed into the beach resort of Port Alfred. Two centuries earlier the nearest inland settlement of any size was the village of Bathurst, a few kilometres from Port Alfred. It is not much more than a hamlet now and it was even less than that when the Goldswain family lived there, and on Free Stone Farm nearby.

Bathurst has one of the first hotels in South Africa, The Pig and Whistle—originally The Bathurst Inn, which Jeremiah bought for his son-in-law, Samuel McArthur, in 1852, and expanded until it became the famous building it is today. My university friends and I frequently drove or hitchhiked the sixty kilometres to spend an evening at The Pig.

Jeremiah’s second son, Charles, and two of his companions, were ambushed in 1851 in what is now a game park between Bathurst and Port Alfred, and he was killed. As a student I wandered in the graveyard in Bathurst. The epitaph on my great-great-uncle’s headstone, engraved by his father, was ‘In memory of Charles Goldswain who was killed in action by kaffirs* and hottentots† near Mansfield.’ That tombstone in the dusty Bathurst churchyard is a powerful reminder of the danger and violence endured by my ancestors. Whenever I read Jeremiah’s description of his son’s death, of his feelings and those of the young man’s mother, the mental image springs up. It is an image of a very different kind from that of the weed-covered tombstone one encounters, of some forgotten person, while wandering in a quiet churchyard.

My father acquired his copies of the two volumes of the Chronicle when they were published in 1946 and 1949 respectively by the Van Riebeeck Society, and I inherited them. There has never been another edition. There are copies in history libraries, in universities and in the possession of some members of the family, and I have noticed copies advertised on the internet from time to time, but, in essence, Una Long’s transcription of Jeremiah’s journal is the only one, and it is out of print. This volume is only the second edition of the Chronicle.

Not only is the Van Riebeeck Society edition almost unavailable, but the text is almost inaccessible. How many people of our time have read it I could not guess, but the number is not great. Scholars and historians quote it in their books and papers on that period of South African history and, of course, they take the trouble to decipher it. I’m sure that because of the technical issues the text raises, although it is very exciting and well-written, very few read it for pleasure. I believe, too, that very few of Jeremiah’s several thousand living descendants know anything about him. He is in danger of becoming forgotten by his own family. And that’s where I come in.

One evening, quite recently, I sat with my younger brother and his son in Johannesburg, over a drink, and we began telling family yarns. My nephew was very interested as, although he had just finished a four-year stint at university in Grahamstown, he knew almost nothing about his frontier ancestors. My brother produced the volumes and I read an extract out loud. He suggested that I do something to revive the journal, and the following week I began thinking seriously about it.

My idea was simply to take the text and put it into a shape that would enable the modern reader to read it, in the way one reads a modern published text. I would change nothing at all of what Jeremiah had related, and try to retain his voice as far as possible: in other words, rewrite it in conventional language without changing the meaning.

Jeremiah’s manuscript is one long sentence in one long paragraph, without punctuation. The words are expressed in spelling which; the kindest way of putting it; is phonetic. Guy Butler, including an extract from the Chronicle in his When Boys were Men, says:

The spelling and syntax are all his own, so much so that they have discouraged many a reader from making his proper acquaintance. This being the case, I have taken the liberty of rectifying them a little. Inevitably, much of the Goldswain flavour is lost in the process.

In rewriting the text I found that I agreed with this comment. I tried my best not to alter the wording, the grammar or the syntax, but in a few places I had to make an adjustment or the passage would have been incomprehensible, even with punctuation and conventional spelling. Una Long, in the introduction to her Van Riebeeck Society two-volume edition of the Chronicle, explains how she has provided some help to the reader: To clarify words in which the spelling is exceptionally odd, the right spelling is shown in square brackets.

Jeremiah was not an educated man. Although it is clear from the manuscript that he wrote fast, in a steady, even hand, he wrote language exactly as he heard it. The result is that he wrote as he, and the people around him, spoke. If an actor were to study and rehearse a passage, using the intonation of 19th-century rural Buckinghamshire, and perform it, we would hear the voice of Jeremiah Goldswain.

Although the Chronicle is a wonderful read, because of it’s inaccessibility it is not known for this. As a primary history source it’s a treasure trove, but it’s also invaluable in linguistical studies. Several scholars have used it to gain insights, not only into the dialect and pronunciation of 18th-century rural Buckinghamshire, but also the development of English pronunciation of 19th-century Albany. In so doing they have had to use the manuscript itself, as even the minor changes made by Una Long would interfere with their results.

As it is, the modern general reader would have such difficulty in working out what is being related that he or she would not get very far. Stopping at every second or third word to try and work out what it is, and often having to re-read passages several times for the same purpose, would cause potential readers to give up after a few lines.

It seems that Jeremiah may have kept some kind of diary. The memoirs as we have them are not generally diary entries, and while the occasional passage seems to be a journal record, there is no actual diary in existence. In spite of being unschooled in writing Jeremiah sometimes wrote letters, mainly on behalf of himself, but also on behalf of others. Those letters and, possibly some diary notes, seem to be all the writing he did until he sat down to write his memoirs.

As my work on the text progressed I was increasingly surprised and delighted. I had had little idea what a good writer he was. As the text became transparent I found that his sense of humour came through in several episodes, as well as his real talent for capturing the emotions surrounding tragedy, with dialogue, silences and the careful selection of material that best conveyed his emotions. He had a strong feel for the dramatic and was able to turn every encounter between people, whether it was a fight, a court case, or even just a conversation, into a dramatic or humorous moment. Above all, though, he had a natural talent for storytelling. He pandered to his audience, withheld things for a later dramatic impact, and sometimes had a punchline or payoff. It’s apparent, too, that he was writing with an audience in mind as he sometimes addressed the reader directly, but it’s not clear who he thought his readers would be.

Taking into account all these elements, I was able to transform the text for the modern reader. The simple device of using speech marks for dialogue and putting each new piece of dialogue on a separate line casts characters and situations in relief. One laughs at his account of his wedding day, and at the episode in which he helped to bring in the desperate robber, John Cameron.

Possibly his finest moment as a writer was a Pinteresque account of his reception of the news that his son has been murdered, and then breaking it to his wife. The moment is presented in short sentences, silences, and emotion conveyed less in what is said than in what is unspoken.

In telling the story of the disappearance of his first son, William, feared killed, he tells half the story, changes the scene to the search for him, and then, after the fear and panic and a frantic search, produces William alive and well. Only then do we get the rest of the story; how he escaped what seemed certain death. The result is suspense and page-turning tension. The episode in which he and Field Cornet Bradshaw capture Cameron is a brilliant comic drama with an amusing epilogue.

The memoirs are stuffed with people, although few are actually characterised. Jeremiah’s wife, Eliza, is not, nor are other members of his family.

Jeremiah had a long association with the elderly Bradshaw, field cornet of Bathurst. The two had many adventures together and we get to know the field cornet’s courage, wisdom and skill in dealing with the difficult situations that confronted frontier people. He was also amusingly grumpy and comically fierce. In Bradshaw we have a character who could have been written by Dickens, who was very close to being a contemporary of Jeremiah.

Bradshaw and Jeremiah made a strong bond and they saved each other’s lives on more than one occasion. We see Bradshaw exhausted, almost unable to go on, and we are aware of a real affection for him on Jeremiah’s part, as he looks after him and makes sure he’s comfortable, giving the old soldier his own last drops of brandy when he’s almost dead from fatigue. It’s frustrating that, although Jeremiah and Bradshaw liked each other and trusted each other with their lives, sadly, Bradshaw eventually turned on Jeremiah, quite viciously, and we never find out why that was.

Sir Harry Smith is an entertaining figure, a great eccentric who comes across as a colourful character. The two men knew each other personally and met several times so Jeremiah was able to observe him at close quarters. On one occasion, after he became governor of the Cape Colony, when Jeremiah told him that war was about to break out, Sir Harry disagreed and said that if Jeremiah was proved right he would forfeit his head. War broke out a few days later and Jeremiah reflected that he was now the owner of Sir Harry’s head, the governor having made the oath personally to Jeremiah.

The characters often speak with Jeremiah’s voice, with even military officers, magistrates and other educated people using the single verb with the plural noun and other grammatical irregularities at times, but Jeremiah was a good mimic, it seems, and he sometimes imitated those educated men’s way of speaking. He certainly captured Sir Harry’s voice, and we get a few good snapshots of the man.

Putting the text into paragraphs and chapters was quite difficult. I found Una Long’s chapter divisions logical and sensible and I have made the same divisions, although the text could have been carved up differently. I have also divided each chapter into sections, trying to differentiate episodes. One of the problems, both with paragraphing and other divisions, is that episodes run into each other and one finds episodes days, months, and even years apart, coming in one stream, all in the same sentence, without punctuation. All of this needed careful thought about its arrangement. My main aim was to try and present a structure with the kind of logic a modern writer would use.

There is always an issue that needs addressing when one is dealing with autobiographical material—that is the suspicion that’s needed when assessing it. The problem is that the accounts are based on memories rather than the research that’s required for biographic studies. Memory is unreliable, especially memories of events that occurred long before. The memories we write about could be stories that we have told and re-told to ourselves and others many times. Along the way they tend to become more dramatic and exaggerated as we edit and re-edit them. As actual experience is haphazard and formless, we have to put our experience into structures that give our lives meaning and direction. We then often begin to believe the stories that we have created about ourselves, and believe them to be accurate. It is then easy to give an ‘honest’ account that presents us in a way that may not be entirely correct.

Jeremiah’s word-for-word conversations which happened decades before he wrote them down, for example, cannot be accurate accounts. More complex, though, is the way that he presented himself as a man with considerable leadership qualities, as a good, god-fearing man, as a winner, as a highly respected man and so on. We cannot be sure how much exaggeration there is in these accounts of himself. Others may not have seen him in quite the same way. He probably had all those attributes, but to a lesser degree than he wished to remember.

When he successfully petitioned the governor for farms for himself and his sons after the 1850–1853 war, he found the surveyor general a difficult man to work with and it seemed he was not going to get the farms. He then offered the official money. He was accused of trying to bribe the man but denied it. He quoted the letter that he wrote with the offer and gave an explanation which attempted to justify his cash offer. The truth is that it almost certainly was a bribe attempt.

Sometimes the line between a false memory and a lie is very thin. An extreme case of something that clearly did not happen is the catalyst that gave Jeremiah his commitment to religion. He was out in the bush alone, commuting to his job a long way from home. He and his family were on the brink of starvation; his creditors had failed to pay their debts to him. He dismounted from his horse to let it drink and while the horse was resting he decided to pray to the Lord to feed his ‘preshus soul’. He knelt down and immediately saw, in the shade, leaning against the trunk of a tree, something wrapped in a sheet of foolscap paper. He opened the parcel and inside it was a fresh white bread sandwich, buttered and filled with tongue.

Just before this event he had passed an officer, riding along, whistling. They did not speak. If the story is true, it could be that the officer had stopped, sat under the tree and left his sandwich there. Or the explanation could be that it was simply imagination; or a false memory. Or a lie. The last is not likely as there are no other examples of such fantastic events.

With Jeremiah these questions of reliability are complex. He doesn’t tell us anything unfavourable regarding the characters of any of his family. He tells us that he paid out a great deal of money purchasing the Bathurst Inn for his son-in-law, Samuel McArthur. This shows his generosity, which no-one doubts, the information is in the recorded history of the inn and, indeed, he was known for his generosity. What he doesn’t tell us is that McArthur was what today we would call an alcoholic. Moreover, Jeremiah’s daughter, Jane, told her father that she was finding it impossible to live with McArthur; he was always drunk and the business was going downhill. Jeremiah wrote about this in his journal and then crossed it out. That suggests that he did not want to besmirch the character of any member of his family, although the passage is there for all who read the manuscript to see. Quite soon after taking possession of it the inn failed and McArthur was declared bankrupt.

According to his memoirs Jeremiah was always at the centre of any action he was involved in; he led and others followed, even if those others were professional military officers. We have no idea of whether this was entirely true. Moreover, if there were mysteries, he was the one who solved them. All that could be a matter of what he chose to select from a lifetime of experience. We can all select only the moments when we are the hero, when writing about ourselves. It is hard to write about one’s own failures, particularly in Victorian times when heroism was such a highly valued aspect of life; something every man was expected to aspire to. It is clear, though, that Jeremiah Goldswain was not in any sense a failure, including in the Victorian heroic ideal.

Having briefly considered the problem involved in interpreting memoirs, it’s important to say that there is evidence that Jeremiah was a god-fearing man and a strong presence on the frontier. As Grahamstown evolved into a major South African city Jeremiah was at some point honoured with a street being named after him. And he is generally thought of by historians of the period as a fairly significant figure in that small corner of the country. He may not be a famous historical figure (although his Chronicle is famous) but he certainly was a well known figure around Albany for several decades.

For my own part, having worked on his text, I am filled with admiration for him and I have great affection for him. I also have a clear image of him. It is a fact that he was physically striking; tall and strong, with red hair and a pale skin with freckles. He was very healthy, a dedicated family man, religious, but not ‘preachy’. As a frontiersman he was reliable, effective and knowledgeable about the land and the people; an important attribute when your life depended on the way you dealt with people whose culture was so strange to the English and who constantly threatened the lives of you and your family.

What are the memoirs about?

They are about Jeremiah’s life as a frontiersman and the experiences that most interested him. But let us start with the things that he was less interested in writing about.

Although he was devoted to his family, he wasn’t interested in writing about that. Moreover, he was not interested in depicting family members. His home was his base: he had a large family and new members were born at regular intervals but he did not write about that, except for one episode where one of the babies died. He was away from home a great deal and always had a story to tell about an adventure, but his memoirs show that he took for granted his stable and secure family life.

Although family members are seldom portrayed, we gather from his adventures that the eldest son, William, was a man very much like his father; steady, reliable, and always ready to serve, especially if there was the prospect of an adventure. Jeremiah reported several of William’s adventures in which he came very close to death. In one incident William joined the British troops as a wagon owner carrying supplies as they travelled across the Orange River, led by Sir Harry Smith, to quell the boers at Boomplaats. Jeremiah reported: "William said that when the boers was firing at our troops that the balls fell thick and fast around him, knocking the dust up into his face as he stood by his wagon, and that he expected every moment to be hit by them, but he returned home without a scratch."

William’s near death experiences seem quite exaggerated: the image of him calmly standing out in the open while bullets are whizzing past and falling around him is not really tenable. I don’t know anyone who would do that, but who can say?

Jeremiah said little about his wife, Eliza. She appears as a shadowy figure but, as such, she is seen in flashes; riding horses, walking for miles, being prepared with her gun to protect her family during wartime and peacetime, experiencing anguish when her husband and sons are out chasing after thieves or murderers, tending the sick and injured. All this while either pregnant or nursing—Eliza bore eleven children between 1822 and 1843. There is one moment when she comes into focus—when she receives the news of Charles’s death. Jeremiah was reluctant to tell her that their son had been murdered: he lied to her, told her that Charles had been injured. She dragged the truth very slowly from him. Jeremiah found himself unable to report her reaction. Instead he invites the reader to imagine what a mother’s feelings must be on hearing about the death of her son. There is also a picture of her after the death of her week-old baby, of her depression. These two incidents also tell us something about their relationship. Jeremiah displayed a special tenderness in reporting those events.

It’s a pity that his family life is hardly reported. We see the younger sons in snapshots; carrying messages, helping with the ox wagons, riding about on the farm, and I thrill when I see my own great-grandfather, James, as a young teenager, helping to hunt down stock thieves, watched over and coached in the skills needed by his father. There is nothing about the daughters, apart from one nearly dying of a fever, and one being very pleased at her father’s safe return after an absence. We are given one glimpse of a simple family event, where they are all taking breakfast in the dining room of their house in Bathurst when a neighbour brings the news that William is feared dead.

Pauline Goldswain, who researched the family for her book, The Settler Named Jeremiah Goldswain, tells us:

The Goldswain family from many accounts were handsome, good-looking, pretty, full of humour like their father, Jeremiah, popular, and … fairly prosperous. Many were the musical evenings wherein each member and guests contributed his or her talent such as singing, violin, flute, community singing and tuneful whistling.

She also tells us that Jeremiah’s wife, Eliza, came from a musical family. Eliza’s mother had been brought up in an educated, prosperous family, but married ‘beneath’ herself. She raised her daughters as young ladies, with music lessons. Jeremiah’s children had the benefit of that background. As I grew up I was aware that I was part of a musical family. My father, great-grandson of Jeremiah and Eliza, loved to sing, and his younger brother was exceedingly musical. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of Goldswain family parties in which singing was the central feature.

Jeremiah was not interested in writing about urban life but we gain some insights of the villages or towns from his accounts of events in which a town is somehow a part of the incident. We see him walking in the streets of Grahamstown, calling on people in their offices on matters of business, and grappling with the problems of keeping large flocks of sheep, with their stench and flies, in town. But most of the time we see hills, raging rivers, unbearable heat, freezing cold, woods, bushes, and rocks; we hear the bleating of goats, the creaking of ox wagons and the crack of whips, and we smell gunpowder and axle grease.

The thing that most interested Jeremiah was outdoor life and adventure, both in wartime and peacetime. He needed no second invitation to participate in a piece of wartime action, jumping whenever he was needed to carry supplies for the troops in his ox wagons, to fight with the troops and to participate in routine burgher patrols. Also, any hint of stock theft or attacks on friends, family or neighbours found him springing into action.

On one occasion, on his farm Burnt Kraal, he decided to take the day off. He asked his wife to lay out an early dinner and he went upstairs to shave—and just then a crisis occurred. He called for his horse to be saddled. He and his sons and some servants rode out and there was a gunfight with some thieves. In the middle of that he observed that he had half a long beard and there was shaving cream on his face. What had started as a day off, with the prospect of a leisurely lunch, became a day of violence followed by a very late night.

Of all the things that happened to Jeremiah, of all the things he heard and observed, the things he selected as most interesting, most notable and most memorable, were the events where life was endangered, where there was a fight for survival; and the more physical the better. The memoirs are therefore mainly about frontier action. The combination of that and the detailed description of the issues and the action, together with Jeremiah’s being in the places where history was happening, is what makes the Chronicle such an important historical document, widely consulted by historians researching that period. We see the British troops; the conquerors of the Empire; in their red tunics, out of place in the African bush. We hear bugles and the boom of cannons and we have detailed insight into the difficulties they had in such an alien place against alien people—and we see the misjudgements and incompetence of their officers. We get a close look at the means of transport, the economy, the social structures and the workings on the ground of the law and justice. We observe almost half a century of development on the frontier, including fashion in dress and the improvement in standards of living. The Chronicle is a valuable source for historians specialising in several different areas of life.

Jeremiah was very interested in the legal process and the operation of justice. The colonial authorities kept a firm grip on matters and the courts operated every bit as rigorously on the turbulent frontier as they did in peaceful England of the time. Crimes were investigated, civil disputes resolved, and criminals were brought to justice and punished. Jeremiah loved everything about law and justice and he reported, in detail, several events in which he was involved in the capture of criminals.

He also saw himself as something of a legal man. He reported a case where he was being sued, and won the case in court. In another episode, his son-in-law, Samuel McArthur, the landlord of the Bathurst Inn, was charged with the crime of having supplied a constable with brandy while he was on duty. Jeremiah, watching the trial, decided that McArthur was about to be convicted so he stepped in and took over his defence. He conducted a very clever campaign and not only was McArthur acquitted, but the main witness for the prosecution was charged with perjury.

Related to his interest in matters legal were Jeremiah’s detective-like qualities. He wrote at length about the several murders that occured around him, in which he seemed so often to have an interest. We get forensic reports of these, with Jeremiah reconstructing the crime by a close examination of the ‘crime scene’. He became an expert in following the tracks of thieves and often was able to retrieve stolen stock.

During the years Jeremiah was writing about he was a healthy, fit, physically strong, and active man. He was well-known in Albany, not only to the settlers, but also to the military officers and even to Cape Colony governors. He was physically striking: tall; like his father, who was six foot six. His pale skin and flaming red hair made him vulnerable to the hot African sun and in 1848 he sustained sunstroke. This brings us to another of the subjects that fascinated Jeremiah enough to make it prominent in his memoirs: he provided detailed descriptions of his illnesses and accidents.

Through his life Jeremiah had about the average amount of injury and illness experienced by others, but he dwelled on all incidences, including the illness on board ship that made him oblivious to the voyage to the Cape. He was gored by a cow, thrown by a horse and sustained other more or less severe injuries. He also endured several illnesses, although, happily, he lived to be a septuagenarian. He described all his injuries and illnesses in the kind of detail I have shown above. He also related some of the illnesses and injuries of his wife, his children and several others, in the same detail. Based on his descriptions of the medical treatment he received, one has a good picture of a limited treatment that fitted every condition—brandy and bleeding. In his case it usually worked!

Jeremiah was interested in all aspects of money. He mentioned the price of everything, from the first page to the very last sentence. There is no doubt that he was a very intelligent, able, wise and effective man who could have become wealthy in whatever he chose to do, if he had not been handicapped by being forever on the raw edge of the British Empire, with its succession of wars. He was a true entrepreneur.

Starting with working as a sawyer (a person who saws timber for a living), his trade as a youth in England, he did various jobs, and when he ran out of money he did things like buying and selling, at which he was very good. He built up a lucrative business as a contract transporter with a fleet of wagons. As his sons became adults they joined him in business. He became a trader: he would buy the whole cargo of a ship and sell it. Popular as he was, it was in this field that he made enemies. The problem was that none of the other traders understood competition. Jeremiah did, and his undercutting of his competitors got him into trouble.

All through his memoirs he tells us the price of everything and how much he has made and how much he has lost. The final sentence of his journal is: In conclusion jest state my Losses from the first of Jeny 1851 up to Decr 1858 are not less then £5,500.

It is not an exaggeration to say that he was, at one stage, very rich. How much he had left over after such a loss, or how much he subsequently made in other enterprises, is not recorded. Experts could work out what £5,500 in 1858 would be worth today, but without doing the figures it would be fair to say it was a great deal of money. And can we imagine a businessman or farmer going to some place on business and, just by the way, buying a hotel there for someone else with money out of his back pocket? That was the Bathurst Inn, for £1,100, a great deal of money.

His true vocation, however, was farming, which he loved above all the occupations he tried. He knew how to go about being a successful farmer but with all the wars and the stock theft he did not, finally, succeed. However, his successive farms were in such vulnerable places that his attempts to build them up brought many dangerous adventures which were, I have to conclude, his main interest in writing.

Even without an education he was a successful businessman and farmer; or would have been if his progress had not been continually interrupted by the wars. If he had been educated he could without doubt have been a lawyer and, indeed, his talent and interest in matters of law were recognised with the nickname, ‘Sawyer turned lawyer’. Clearly he also had the qualities one needs to be a journalist, with his inquisitiveness and his investigatory interest, his fearlessness and, of course, his writing interest and ability.

A most charming element of the journal is Jeremiah’s detailed observations about things such as locusts on their destructive journeys, the habits of the honey bird and the gathering of honey. Throughout, he reports on interesting or amusing little sideshows. One of my favourites is when we are confronted with a significant historical event: Sir Benjamin D’Urban reads a declaration, taking over the land extending east from the source of the Kei River in the Stormberg to the sea. A royal salute of twenty-one guns is fired. All the British soldiers and wagoners and the Xhosa chiefs present are standing to attention. And this is what takes Jeremiah’s fancy: There ware three fieldpieces and about 10 yeards in frunt of the first that was fieard off stud a large Grayhown and as soon as it was fierd off the Dog fell and befor he could recover itself the same cannon was fierd again down went the dog with one yelp and a grone every time and by the time the 21 guns was fiered off the Dog was almost dead.

The text ends a few days before Christmas, 1858. It’s difficult to imagine that after such an active life Jeremiah just sat about in Grahamstown doing nothing for the next twelve years. Unfortunately we have no reliable record of what he did from 1859 onwards. There are some reports of him, however. The South African poet and academic, Guy Butler, tells this story, in his When Boys Were Men:

In 1870, during the celebrations which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the landing of the settlers, H. H. Dugmore delivered a remarkable address titled Reminiscences of an Albany Settler. In the course of this lecture he referred to the varying stamina and beauty of the horses used by volunteers during the first Fetcani commando in 1828; when a not particularly handsome mare, Old Bess, had been issued to Goldswain. Unknown to the lecturer, Goldswain, now almost 70 years old, was present in the audience: There were many handsome, high bred horses on the commando taken from the Grahamstown stables, Duggan said, "and many a youth spogh’d [showed off] dashingly enough upon them at starting. But long after their curvettings had been exchanged for drooping ears and footsore pace … Old Bess waddled on as she had done at starting, and active Jerry Goldswain … At this Jerry started up in the audience and exclaimed, Here he is still."

When the applause had subsided Dugmore continued: There’s life in the old boy yet, I see!

And that’s the last we hear of Jeremiah Goldswain. The original manuscript found its way into the possession of one of Jeremiah’s granddaughters, Mrs Zenobia Austen, who left it to the Government Archives in 1944. It is now housed in the National Archives in Cape Town. I have been able to acquire a copy from there.

There has only ever been one substantial transcription; Una Long’s. It has become a South African classic but, sadly, it has been out of print for decades.

In some places Jeremiah related events outside his immediate experience. In such cases he copied reports from other sources, namely the Narrative of the Irruption of the Kafir Hordes, 1834–35 by Robert Godlonton, and the Grahamstown Journal. He has not always copied accurately. Moreover, Ms Long found that in order to make this very long text more reasonable in length she summarised much of it. My experience was much the same and so, with the permission of the Van Riebeeck Society, I have leaned on her text quite heavily; in some places I have condensed further her excellent summaries. I have also transcribed parts of the manuscript which Ms Long summarised, for example the graphic description of Charles’s murder, which Jeremiah described in a letter to the Grahamstown Journal