Cities of Empire
Page 17
With Ireland secure and Dublin becalmed, a more obviously British Empire had emerged by the early nineteenth century, connecting the Celtic fringes of Great Britain under a unifying purpose. Resentment about England’s historic dominance over Ireland and Scotland was subtly overcome by the collective opportunity of the imperial project. The divisions between Protestant and Catholic, patriot and Whig faded away in the face of employment and prosperity. Instead, there emerged a shared imperial identity built around monarchy, the Royal Navy, military bravura and a concerted attempt to confound the common enemy of France. But after the attempted invasions of the 1790s, the focus of that struggle for colonial hegemony between Britain and France was shifting from the narrow passage of the English Channel to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. Ten thousand kilometres south of Dublin another colonial city now stood ready to resist the French and help to secure for Britain the foundations of its resurgent empire.
Nelson’s Column, illustration from G. N. Wright, An Historical Guide to Ancient and Modern Dublin, Illustrated by Engravings after Drawings by George Petrie (London, 1821).
4
Cape Town
‘The master link of connection between the western and eastern world’
Lady Anne’s voyage was a long one. After passing Madeira and the Canary Islands, and reaching the low latitudes of the Cape of Good Hope, her ship, the Guardian, was blown into the ice-packs of the southern Atlantic. Eventually, there came a change of wind and the ‘joyful news’ that land had been sighted. Alas, the sea mists and fogs were still so thick as ‘not to permit us to enjoy its appearance till we were exactly placed in the Bay opposite to Cape Town … Then, as if by one consent the Lion’s Rump whisked off the vapours with its tail; the Lion’s Head untied, and dropped, the necklace of clouds which surrounded its erect throat, and Table Mountain over which a white damask table cloth had been spread half way down showed its broad face and smiled.’ As the Guardian glided into Table Bay in July 1797, ‘guns from the garrison and from all the batteries, welcomed His Majesty’s government’.1 The Cape Colony had its first governor and its capital, Cape Town, was about to embark on its 140-year history as a British imperial city.
Anne Barnard’s journey to the southernmost edge of British Empire was not just a physical ordeal, but one equally laden with emotional complexity. She was born Lady Anne Lindsay into Scotland’s eighteenth-century Enlightenment elite, the eldest daughter of James Lindsay, 5th Earl of Balcarres. She was also a beauty and a wit. ‘Her face was pretty and replete with vivacity; her figure light and elegant; her conversation lively; and, like the rest of the family, peculiarly agreeable,’ remembered a contemporary. She formed an early attachment to the ambitious Edinburgh advocate and eager political fixer Henry Dundas and, on moving to London (like so many smart Scots in the eighteenth century after the 1707 Act of Union), she worked tirelessly to promote Dundas as he sought to rise under the patronage of Pitt the Younger. Dundas proposed marriage – yet by then Lady Anne had fallen for another Georgian politician, William Windham. He might have been described as ‘the first gentleman of his age’, but Windham refused to commit to her (in Paris, during the height of the Robespierre Terror), so she returned to Dundas ready to serve as his wife. But he, by then, had married another.2
In 1793, at the age of forty-three, Lady Anne found herself betrothed to the unknown Andrew Barnard, an impoverished son of the Bishop of Limerick. Now all her formidable society skills were dedicated to the furtherance of his unpromising political career – and she demanded Dundas pay her back for her decades of devotion. ‘You owe me some Happiness, – in Truth you do – pay me by making me the means of serving a man who has rebuilt in a considerable degree what tumbled to its foundations.’ After much haranguing, Dundas, who had risen to home secretary and then secretary of state for war, gave in to her emotional pressure by granting Barnard a sinecure as colonial secretary to the Cape of Good Hope. In 1797, the ambitious diplomatic couple accompanied a new governor, Earl Macartney, to the new colony – Anne Barnard acting as de facto governor’s wife in the absence of Lady Macartney – and carried a secret commission to report directly back to Dundas on the strategic value of the recently acquired South African outpost.3
For all the uniqueness of her mission, Lady Anne’s first response to the natural beauty of Cape Town was intensely generic. Much more than Puritan Boston, fetid Bridgetown or familiar Dublin, the British fell in love with Cape Town from the outset.* A few years after Lady Anne’s arrival, the naturalist William J. Burchell would be equally delighted to hear ‘Land ahoy!’ after four months at sea.
At this pleasing intelligence we hastened up from the cabin, and although nothing could be seen but a small cloud, which seemed fixed on the horizon, and was at first not very easily to be distinguished, the captain, who was well acquainted with the singular appearance of the cloud which rests on the Table Mountain during a south-east gale, declared that the land which we had now before us was that of the Cape of Good Hope.4
And when the clouds dispersed, the stunning vista was revealed. Captain Robert Percival of His Majesty’s Royal Irish Regiment was completely bewitched. ‘Nothing can exceed the general effect of this scenery,’ he wrote in 1804.
After leaving Round-a-Bosch and proceeding two miles further, you find yourself on a line with the foot of Tiger or Devil Hill, which rises on your left hand; and on your right is the head of Table Bay, which with the town now opens to view. Here the stranger is greatly struck with the grand, beautiful, and variegated appearance of the prospect before him, and on each side of him.5
With its long pre-history of European colonization, stretching back through the Dutch in the seventeenth century to the Portuguese in the sixteenth century, Cape Town already had a cosmopolitan, European sensibility by the time the British took control in the 1790s. It was a place where they instantly felt comfortable. For all the strange, African ‘Hottentot’ peoples inhabiting the region, there would be no phobia of the ‘Dark Continent’ about the Cape Colony. Since the 1600s, Cape Town had grown as a staging post between the great oceans of east and west; it faced outwards to the lucrative trade winds of the world as ‘a caravanserai on the periphery of the global spice trade’.6 It was never much interested in its farmstead hinterland or the further African interior. ‘Since the time of the Dutch, it has been suggested that if England were thus to cut off the Table Mountain with its adjacent land, England would have all of South Africa that it wants,’ noted novelist Anthony Trollope in the 1870s, with uncomfortable precision.7
To modern critics of Cape Town, that same Eurocentricity remains all too redolent. In its politics (Democratic Alliance rather than African National Congress), its economic infrastructure of financial and legal services and its patterns of property ownership, the city’s white European power-base seems to stand untouched by the advent of South African black majority rule. As in the apartheid years, Cape Town and its lush environs are still marketed to the world as a landscape of paddocks and cricket-pitches, rugby and wine-tasting, sun-downers and surfing, all set against the stunning natural beauty of Table Mountain, the Twelve Apostles and Camps Bay. ‘There is nowhere like Cape Town,’ as the Cape Town Tourism literature has it. ‘Perched between the ocean and the mountain, with a national park at its heart, it’s a place to renew and reconnect. Cape Town, the “Mother-City”, is the oldest city in our country and has cultural heritage spanning more than 300 years.’ For foreign visitors, when the ‘real Africa’ is encountered it is usually through a trip to the Robben Island museum for a glimpse of Nelson Mandela’s cell, or a Cape Flats township tour (‘experience a heartwarming tour of the Cape Black’s townships … and witness the reality of township folk’).8
Understandably, this almost colonial branding of modern Cape Town has produced a political backlash. ‘Black people feel this is the old South Africa,’ in the words of Xola Skosana, a township pastor. ‘If you come to Cape Town, you’ve come to the last post of the colonial history of this
country. Both politically and economically, white people are in power.’ South African president Jacob Zuma has described Cape Town as simply a ‘racist’ place, with an ‘extremely apartheid attitude’. In part, such criticisms are the product of the city’s refusal to bow to the ANC’s political monopoly. Instead, it has stayed true to the metropolitan, melting-pot heritage of Cape Town, where black Africans have not formed a majority demographic for some 400 years. As a busy port city, Cape Town was from the 1600s a place of competing cultures and commerce, of multiple religions and ethnicities, of colonialism and anti-colonialism, and influenced as much by Malay, Indonesian and Dutch culture as by indigenous African.
Such cosmopolitanism, however, was of little concern to Europe’s great powers at the end of the eighteenth century. In London, Paris and Amsterdam, the value of Cape Town lay purely and simply in its strategic significance. In the aftermath of American Independence and with growing interest in the potential riches from East India Company factories in Bengal, Britain’s colonial interests shifted decisively from the Americas towards India. Cape Town proved to be the axis of the Empire’s ‘Swing to the East’, a city which would be fought over and traded between multiple European empires – not for the riches of its African interior, but for its command of the open oceans. It was an Anglo-Dutch colonial city, the footprint of which has yet fully to recede, which signified the shift from the First British Empire of America to the Second British Empire of India. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its more explicit purpose was to secure India for the British and ensure the demise of French colonial competition.
KAAPSTAD
A ‘Swing to the East’ had certainly inspired the first European settlers of the Cape. Founded in 1602, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC) was the Dutch equivalent to England’s East India Company, tasked with an equally aggressive approach to foreign markets. The Dutch States General granted it exclusive monopoly rights to engage in commerce with Asia, consolidating all of Holland’s trade with the East Indies under it. In return, fleets of more than one hundred ships delivered staggering financial returns to the Company’s six founding cities on the import of nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon, as well as Chinese porcelain, tea, coffee and cotton textiles. In many ways, the VOC enjoyed even greater licence than the East India Company, as it could make treaties, acquire land, build forts and generally provide the infrastructure of future colonization. Steadily, the spice islands of the East Indies – modern-day Indonesia – fell under Dutch control and Britain’s East India Company was limited to the Indian subcontinent.10
But getting from Amsterdam to the Javanese capital of Batavia (now Jakarta), around the Cape of Good Hope, was never a smooth sail. The confluence of the warm Agulhas current of the Indian Ocean and the cold Benguela waters of the South Atlantic made for a treacherous passage. Rear Admiral Fitzroy, captain of Charles Darwin’s ship the Beagle, describes the meteorological challenge well:
Several causes combine to make the Cape of Good Hope a stormy promontory. High, steep, and salient, every wind must be more or less affected by it, as a mechanical obstacle, and by the relative temperatures surrounding, as well as immediately above, its ranges of mountainous land … In the north are African deserts – towards the south, Antarctic ice, beyond a wide range of open sea, in which strong currents, like the Gulf Stream, run from thirty to eighty or more miles a day (off Cape Lagulhas). And this in that zone where incessant alternation occurs between the two greater air-currents: all which causes contribute to make that famous promontory truly ‘El Cabo Tormentoso’ or the ‘Cape of Storms’, as described by the early voyagers, and not in exaggerated terms.11
When the storms caught the ships, it was dangerous sailing indeed. ‘Rapidly the swell increases, and like the water in a boiling cauldron, tosses the vessels to and fro, the brutal battering of the waves placing a heavy strain on the anchor ropes as they slacken and tighten suddenly with each wave,’ was how one captain described a Cape north-wester. In the dangerous months of May to September, ship after ship could fall victim to the waves and the weather, even when anchored in Table Bay or False Bay. William Burchell spent days buffeted around the South Atlantic as his ship tried to drop anchor.
The moment we had passed beyond the shelter of the Lion Mountain, a furious wind suddenly and unexpectedly assailed the vessel; pouring out of the clouds, as it seemed, its boisterous fury upon us … The vessel was rapidly driving out to sea again: in the utmost hurry the sailors flew up the rigging, and took in all sail possible … the fore top-sail being split, we were compelled to wear the ship, and retreat to the shelter of the Lion Mountain to bend another sail.12
It was the Portuguese mariner Bartolomeu Dias who first rounded the Cape in the 1480s and named it Cabo de Boa Esperanza, the Cape of Good Hope, since a successful passage opened up the route to India. Another Portuguese explorer, António de Saldanha, is the first recorded European to set foot on the Cape, in 1503. In 1620 two British officers, Andrew Shillinge and Humphrey Fitzherbert, of East India Company fleets bound for Surat and Bantam, took ‘quiet and peaceful possession’ of Table Bay and ‘of the whole continent near adjoining’, in the name of ‘the High and Mighty Prince James, by the Grace of God King of Great Britain’.13 Their plans were to establish a plantation along the lines of Virginia, but the resources were never forthcoming. So in 1652 the Dutch agent Jan van Riebeeck took Table Bay as part of a deliberate move to exclude the English and, as the VOC bureaucrats put it, gain control of a refuelling station ‘to provide that the passing and re-passing East India ships, to and from Batavia, respectively, may, without accident, touch at the said Cape or Bay, and also upon arriving there, may find the means of procuring herbs, flesh, water, and other needful refreshments, and by this means restore the health of their sick’.14 Without such a stopping-off point at the Cape, the VOC would have been unable to operate on such a large scale. The sixty-odd Dutch ships that annually passed back and forth through the port during the eighteenth century deposited their sick and made some money by off-loading either European delicacies such as Dutch cheese and beer (on the outward-bound route) or spices and oriental artefacts (homeward-bound) in order to buy fresh meat, wine and vegetables. When the VOC rear admiral Johan Stavorinus, who was fastidious about the health of his sailors, passed through in 1774, he ‘sent forty or fifty men on shore every day, in order, that by taking exercise among the hills, and by the effects of the land-air, the scorbutic tendency, which had already begun to manifest itself among them, might be combated’.15
‘The Dutch never considered the Cape in a commercial view, but merely as a place of refreshment necessary for the carrying on their Commerce to India,’ as one Royal Navy memo from the 1790s accurately put it. ‘Considered as an entrepot between Europe and Asia, it has every advantage that can be wished, either in point of Situation, Climate, Soil, and Productions.’16 So much so that other ships – British, French and American – started dropping in, all of whom were charged higher rates for their victuals by the VOC in order to subsidize the refuelling of Dutch East Indiamen.
One disadvantage of the incipient colony from the Dutch perspective was the attitude of the indigenous Khoekhoe (an ethnic grouping of the broader Khoe-San people, but usually described at the time as either ‘Hottentots’ or ‘Bushmen’), who refused repeated attempts to corral them into labouring for the Europeans. For centuries, the Khoekhoe tribesmen had grazed sheep and then cattle around the lush pastures of the Cape in a nomadic, subsistence way of life. The Portuguese, in the 1480s, had bartered with yellow- and brown-skinned herders at Saldanha Bay, Table Bay and Mossel Bay and recorded their language as characterized by clicks. Moving with the seasons, they shepherded fat-tailed sheep and long-horned cattle in huge numbers, often with six head of cattle per person. The Khoekhoe drank the milk and skinned the carcasses, but fed themselves from hunting boar, fishing and collecting honey. To begin with, relations with the incoming Dutch were politely commercial, the VOC exchanging bras
s, iron and dress ornaments for beef and mutton. However, when the Dutch began to impinge on traditional grazing areas – by farming, initially, in the Rondebosch region – and claim novel rights of private ownership over common land, tensions escalated. By the 1670s, the Dutch settlers were using all the advantages of European technology to drive the Khoekhoe off their lands and, in a colonial experiment which would continue until the 1990s, deport the most troublesome suspects to Robben Island. Between 1662 and 1713, company records reveal that the VOC expropriated 14,636 cattle and 32,808 sheep, while Dutch colonists, spreading out as free burghers to farm wheat and tend vineyards on their own land (in contrast to the absentee landlord plantations of Barbados and Ulster), took the best pastures and expanded their control of territory up to 80 kilometres north and 65 kilometres east of Cape Town. Such systematic theft of livestock and land destroyed the Khoekhoe community: without large tracts of land, the Khoekhoe livestock economy faltered, the chieftain structure imploded, and the language faded. Then, in 1713, a homeward-bound Dutch ship docked and spread smallpox across the Cape colony, wiping out multiple indigenous tribes. The disease returned in 1735 and 1767, cutting the Khoekhoe population down from an estimated 200,000 in the mid-seventeenth century to approximately 20,000 by the opening of the nineteenth century.17