MICHAEL MORRIS: From Grosvenor castaways to Gaza, false certainties come at high cost - Business Day
Michael Morris
Recent holiday reading took me back to some of the most enthralling episodes of my 1970s childhood, hiking the Wild Coast with my late father and elder brother. In particular, traversing the rock shelves north of Lambasi Bay, contemplating the calamity of the Grosvenor running aground there about two centuries earlier.
I remember gazing at those unrevealing reefs and struggling to picture the disaster of August 1782. But the utter remoteness of the location, and a sense of the sheer implausibility of rescue, made a lasting impression.
Stephen Taylor’s enormously rewarding account, The Caliban Shore, The Fate of the Grosvenor Castaways, brought it all back. More than that, revisiting the chronicle of the doomed Indiaman stimulated some unexpected thinking about our own times and crises, particularly in the reflected light of Taylor’s skilful illumination of the complexities and subtleties of the setting (African as well as colonial — the Grosvenor was returning “home” from Madras (now Chennai), the prevailing sensibilities, the economic (and class or social) dynamics, and — so easy to overlook — the levelling fundamentals of what it is to be human.
Perhaps all disasters strip away every shred of refinement or accomplishment that is non-essential to basic survival to reveal all humans as equivalently vulnerable and — perhaps at our worst — equivalently self-interested.
There’s plenty to think about in Taylor’s examination of these things, not least for example the fate — the new, wholly different lives as tribal figures in Africa (some of them by choice) — of some of the men, women and children survivors, not a few of whom had been abandoned by the rest.
Taylor succeeds in deftly closing the distance of time to give the reader a real sense of the castaways’ terror at being marooned in indescribably unfamiliar, hopelessly unalterable circumstances. And, simultaneously, the scope for seeing it all in a very different light.
Seaman William Habberley, a notably dispassionate chronicler of the Grosvenor disaster, described how as the survivors began to make their haphazard way southwards along the coast from Lambasi Bay the stragglers “were plundered of everything about them, the natives making no difference between age and sex, pillaging all and threatening to kill those who opposed them”.
Here, surely, was evidence that with survival came the horror of contending with not just a hostile shore, but an inscrutably savage one. Yet Taylor reminds us there were people on the Cornish coast of the 1700s who were little different.
“In 1753, one witness to ‘the monstrous barbarity practised by these savages’, wrote: ‘I have seen many a poor man, half dead, cast ashore and crawling out of the reach of the waves, fallen upon and in a manner stripp’d naked by those villains.’”
We are usefully alerted to the risks of being tempted to take sides on the false grounds of unexamined “foreignness”. As always, it’s not about “them” and “us” — it is, actually, only ever “us”.
To my archaeologist brother and childhood hiking mate David, I am indebted for sharing the text of novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2009 Ted talk on The Danger of a Single Story, in which she observes how power is central to the sole narrative, “the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person”.
As in the late 1700s, in every era since and virtually every society, such false certainties have come at high human cost. Africans and Afrikaners come to mind, as do Palestinians, Jews, Chinese, Persians and Americans. The list is far longer.
• Morris is head of media at the SA Institute of Race Relations.