Lost on the Map: A memoir of colonial illusions

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BRIEF INTRODUCTIONS,

TALL TALES

A family treasure trove

WHEN I WAS eight years old, my fearsome Auntie Alix informed me solemnly that I was distantly related to faraway royalty. An illustrious seafaring ancestor, Captain Samuel Wallis, she announced, had been the first European to discover the island of Tahiti. Then, following a charged pause to allow this news to sink in, she added that shortly after his discovery – most unfortunately for Captain Wallis – he had been eaten by the queen of that idyllic isle. Alix was sombre as she delivered these strange tidings and I realised she had judged me old enough to be inducted into this vital family lore. She explained that if a member of the Tahitian royal clan had selected someone for the honour of consumption, well … according to local custom, this gastronomic privilege made all the victim’s descendants, for ever after, honorary members of the Tahitian royal lineage.

‘And that, Bryan,’ beamed Alix, ‘includes you!’

For over 250 years my family went forth and colonised. Yet, until recently, I had little idea of this imperial epic of adventurers, rogues, swashbucklers and subversives, as most of it had been either forgotten or kept secret. My ancestors, I have now learned, abandoned the mother country to crisscross the globe, helping to paint the map red. Some made good; others went bust. What united them was that they all felt entitled, however humble, to settle in distant lands as though it was their divine right.

They also created self-glorifying myths. My mother, Barbara, occasionally retold that venerable Tahitian saga, though altogether more amusingly, and later I found references to it in letters from relatives I’d never met. It wasn’t true, of course. Even so, like other tales passed down the generations, this had been an article of faith: our invisible family legacy, illuminating how we were supposed to see ourselves. Yet when I finally did discover the truth about our ‘royal’ Tahitian heritage, the actual story, faithfully recorded in Captain Wallis’ own log of his voyage on HMS Dolphin, proved to be altogether far more bizarre, if less socially exalted; almost, in fact, unbelievable.

Painting the map red

As an only child, my family tree appeared sadly stunted, ending abruptly with my only living grandparent: beyond Granny Trixie in Johannesburg, it was blank. Now that I have explored our ancestral map, it is filled with a ghostly legion of relatives.

Britain eventually staked a claim to control one quarter of the globe. That much I knew. But the more that I filled in the blanks on our family tree, exhuming our role in this astounding imperial enterprise, the more I began to wonder: what did they believe and what were they thinking – all those Rostrons, Macleods and the Wallis dynasty – when they scattered so confidently across the face of the earth? Naturally, they carried in their heads, as we all do, a subjective mental map. And on that global chart, it seems, absolutely nowhere was out of bounds for us to either claim or occupy, irrespective of who already lived there and had to be dispossessed.

Our zigzagging family saga is a tantalising mix of adventure and misadventure: personal, familial, and occasionally apocryphal. Yet what also propelled that astonishing expansion of empire were at times parallel beliefs in outlandish myths. Captain Wallis’ instructions from the British Admiralty were to discover the fabled ‘unknown southern land’, reputed to contain fabulous riches – and where higher beings were so advanced that they could communicate telepathically. As this was merely a figment of European desires, Wallis bumped into Tahiti instead. Similarly, in Africa, feverish legends about the Empire of Monomotapa swelled to such ludicrous proportions that they inspired European expeditions to locate its imaginary treasures of gold and precious stones.

So, this is not a sober history. I am more intrigued as to how we finally got to South Africa, with many a detour, and to understand what three generations of us, myself included, imagined that we were doing here. Myths, I have found, can often prove as powerful as facts in revealing what our forebearers truly thought they were doing in helping to paint the map red. Testing those myths might also shape how we, the orphaned grandchildren of empire, now think of that lingering legacy.

A personal odyssey

In one of the cheap exercise books, where I recorded my initial researches, there’s a pencilled note that I was present in the majestic British Library Reading Room the very Saturday that it finally closed its doors at the British Museum. On that day, beneath the sky-blue dome and surrounded by 25 miles of stacked shelving, there were only four months left before I returned to South Africa, the land of my birth, after a 28-year absence. I was reading the original accounts of early explorers who long ago set forth from the southern tip of Africa into territory hitherto unknown to Europeans. Late on that final day, waiting for another hefty eighteenth century volume to be delivered, it finally occurred to me to look up Captain Samuel Wallis. That was the first of a great many surprises, delightful and shocking, unearthed during this quest, compelling me to reassess almost everything; in particular, why do we cling to cherished family stories and historical assumptions, often despite all the evidence or common sense?

As our family map filled out, illuminating a receding hinterland of identifiable names and startling landmarks, it was as though the long dead had begun to whisper to me over the centuries: an ancestral chorus of forgotten witnesses. There were no dukes on safari in Africa or Viceroys of India. Most of my predecessors were ordinary folk, many of them tradesmen. With no qualifications or the need for passports, they set off with high hopes, and nowhere in the entire world, it seems, was out of bounds.

This freedom of movement is reflected in my own life. Starting out under the straightjacket of apartheid, I subsequently lived in England, France, Italy and the United States, experiencing the reverberation of over 2,000 years of different empires.

After delving into our family’s past, and the empire which allowed them to flourish, some common threads emerge: one is the prevalence of secrets. Another is an obsession with colour. Over a century ago a distant cousin of mine, a notorious adventurer, wrote a popular book about race, sounding a panicked alarm that the white race was about to be swamped by the yellow and brown races. However, my relative reserved his most histrionic vituperation for Africa, under the heading, ‘The Black Problem’. Insidiously, the furies of ethnic insecurity are bubbling up again in the former imperial powers of Europe and in the United States. It’s as though some of the racial terrors that I’ve been excavating are hissing in our ear again, ready to reawaken the sullen beast of white supremacist rage: a reminder that the past still haunts us.

Debates about colonialism rage on, as do its aftereffects.

In February 2018, the British Treasury tweeted: ‘Did you know? In 1833, Britain used 20 million pounds, 40% of its national budget, to buy freedom for all slaves in the Empire. The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off till 2015.’

This tweet didn’t mention that the cash (approx. 17 billion pounds today) only went to compensate slave owners for the loss of their human chattels. Nevertheless, the Treasury crowed, ‘Which means that living British citizens helped pay to end the slave trade.’ Not everyone was thrilled to learn this, myself included. Eighteen years of working on UK newspapers, and paying taxes, meant that I too had helped to settle that massive debt. Taken aback by the public response, the tweet was rapidly deleted. Nevertheless, that Treasury ‘Friday Fact’, having hopelessly mangled the facts, had briefly exposed the self-justifying amnesia that afflicts current apologists for colonialism.

If we owe any debt to the past, it is to face it squarely. The recompense paid to Cape Colony slave owners, for example, trickles down to the present, part of the rich patrimony of their white descendants. For their estimated 38,742 slaves, the 1833 legislation stipulated that they had to continue as unpaid ‘apprentices’ for a further several years.

Above all, what has been laid bare by my search for lost family and empire are the invisible influences which have helped shape me: the sum of where I have come from and who I am. For good or ill, this should be faced. The account has largely been assessed, but the bill not yet paid. It’s time for an honest reckoning. And where better to examine all this than from South Africa, long the mad laboratory of racial prejudice?

Today, my wife and I live at the back of Table Mountain, overlooking a bay that may have been visited by the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope. The exact location of the bay named by Bartolomeu Dias, the representative of yet another vanished empire, is hard to pin down on a sketchy early sixteenth century map. It probably identifies this bay upon which I gaze as I write. Then again, it may not.

Like much of my chronicle, the ‘facts’ remain stubbornly provisional, even ambiguous. Nevertheless, Porto Fragoso, a description bestowed by Dias, suggests that this is the perfect perch from which to mull over the finds of my long search: Porto Fragoso, or Rocky Port.

Posing the vital question

On first returning to South Africa after an absence of nearly three decades, there came an inescapable moment with nearly all our foreign visitors. They would lean forward, narrow their eyes, and you knew that they had at last judged the moment suitable to pose a question which had been preying on their minds ever since landing in Cape Town. As though they feared that you were perhaps temporarily emotionally unstable or had contracted some appalling disease, they would lower their voice and, with funereal delicacy, ask ‘But … are you optimistic?’

Of course, they weren’t concerned about the roasting summer droughts or violent winters we can get here on the southern tip of Africa. As none had experienced the emissions from the local fish factory, nor were they worried about the effects on our health of that oily reek which occasionally perfumes the valley so pungently. Oh no. Those tactful probes about our mental state were really a coded question, implying that now there was a democratic (black) government in South Africa, were we quite sure that we had done the right thing in leaving London?

There is a peculiarly European ambivalence to Africa. This combines a sense that Africa must somehow be ‘saved’ along with an atavistic terror of what they might actually find here. Charles Dickens astutely caught this contradictory attitude in Bleak House (1853) with the meddlesome Mrs Jellyby; a plump, pretty woman whose eyes seem to gaze a long way off as though ‘they could see nothing nearer than Africa!’ A martyr of ‘telescopic philanthropy’, she works remorselessly on her latest cause, ‘the Borrioboola-Gha venture’, to the neglect of her own large brood of underfed children.

‘You find me, my dears,’ Mrs Jellyby informs visitors, ‘as usual, very busy; but that you will excuse. The African project at present employs my whole time.’ Though as a result, ‘I am happy to say it is advancing. We hope by this time next year to have from a hundred and fifty to two hundred healthy families cultivating coffee and educating the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger.’

Mrs Jellyby sits ‘in quite a nest of waste paper’ and elaborates on ‘the brotherhood of humanity’, though later she fails to notice when her demoralised husband goes bankrupt and tries to throw himself out of the window. Despite her unstinting labour, towards the end of Bleak House we discover that ‘She has been disappointed in Borrioboola-Gha, which turned out a failure in consequence of the king of Borrioboola-Gha wanting to sell everybody – who survived the climate – for rum …’.

After all that: am I optimistic?

The most truthful reply might be that of the diligent Mrs Jellyby when visited at her dishevelled central London home in the busy district of Holborn; where in fact I’d worked for a while on a national newspaper. Asked about the climate of Borrioboola-Gha, the single-minded philanthropist declares it to be the finest in the world. Met with some incredulity, the self-important busybody has a surprisingly sensible reply.

‘Certainly. With precaution,’ retorts Mrs Jellyby. ‘You may go into Holborn, without precaution, and be run over. You may go into Holborn, with precaution, and never be run over. Just so with Africa.’

My imperial inheritance

Peering back through a narrow familial telescope, the picture shrinks drastically and reflects back a peculiarly white world. For this is also the tale of two grandfathers. Both migrated to South Africa shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. My maternal grandfather, Lewis Rose Macleod, sailed from Australia, where the skinny young man had been an enterprising journalist and author of flippant verse and droll amateur plays. He docked in Durban, but quickly made his way to the gold frenzy of Johannesburg. Though he had left school in Sydney at 13, Lewis Rose soon developed into a benignly rotund and thoroughly establishment fellow, and by the 1920s he was editor of the Rand Daily Mail, at that time the voice of the plutocratic ‘Randlords’.

On the other hand, my paternal grandfather, William Rostron, was a working-class printer from Lancashire. Tough, irascible and a boxing aficionado, according to my father he also squandered most of their meagre housekeeping money at the racetrack. In 1903 William had landed in South Africa as a penniless emigrant, and his orphaned, tubercular wife, Annie Maguire, recalled being lowered onto the dock in a wicker basket. A dedicated trade unionist, by the 1920s William was printing the small weekly newspaper for the recently founded Communist Party of South Africa. He also printed pamphlets for the violent 1922 Rand Insurrection, during which a prominent slogan was ‘Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a White South Africa!’

The magnetism of the ‘mother country’, however, remained formidable – even for those colonial subjects who had never been there. Lewis Rose didn’t travel to Europe until he was 41, when he wished to volunteer (unsuccessfully) to serve ‘his country’ in the First World War. Later, in the 1930s when editing South Africa’s leading newspaper, he was apparently astonished when my mother told him that she planned to visit Victoria Falls.

‘But my dear,’ he chided, ‘when one goes on vacation one goes to Paris.’

Europe and its rituals remain a significant focus for many white people. Even here where we live, half an hour from Cape Town, many imperial influences persist into the twenty-first century. In this amphitheatre of mountains enfolding our alluring bay, we are left with the echo, and even some ruins, of three great European empires. The Dutch, the first European settlers at the Cape, christened this valley Hout Bay after its magnificent forests. Leading to our home high above the rock-fringed bay is Pondicherry Avenue, named for the French regiment dispatched from India to support their Dutch allies as a European war threatened. On either side of the bay, cannons still stand guard, aiming at fishing boats as they chug into the Atlantic. Residues of the British Empire lurk round every corner. From Victoria Road, we turn left toward the sea along Empire Avenue, passing Manchester, Liverpool, Oxford and Brighton, till we arrive at Princess Street opposite the beach and its constantly shifting dunes.

View of Hout Bay with cannons

Both my father, Frank, and maternal grandfather chose to identify themselves explicitly as ‘Empire men’. As late as 1948, the year I was born, my father flew over the entire continent of Africa on a marathon four-day flight in a BOAC flying boat, from Johannesburg to Southampton – and at no point soaring over the entire continent were they not above territory either governed or indirectly controlled by the British. Looking back, it even seems to me that as I grew up, I was largely educated, in fact, to be a dutiful and upright district officer in an empire which no longer existed.

Dreams of elsewhere

As sometimes only a stuffed shirt colonial can be, my splendidly pompous Uncle René was comically snobbish. Somehow Uncle René got himself made the honorary consul for Monaco in Cape Town. He utterly adored the tubby Prince Rainier and his glamorous consort, the former Hollywood star Princess Grace. Uncle René’s voice would lower reverently whenever he referred to their Royal Highnesses, even though they reigned over a seedy Riviera statelet mostly renowned for the casino in Monte Carlo. Quite late in life, Uncle René had married my mother’s older sister Betty, and they rented a cottage on a battery chicken farm in the suburb of Tokai outside Cape Town.

By day Uncle René was an undistinguished office manager. But by night he was transformed in his imagination into a debonair Edwardian bon vivant who dressed formally for dinner, even though at the table there was usually only himself and his wife.

When I was 16, with my mother and I as the sole guests, Uncle René appeared for dinner with a bulky chain of office round his neck that proclaimed him as president of his local wine tasting society. At dawn the following morning, peering out of a window at the back of their modest cottage, I was astonished to observe him in his garden raising the flag of Monaco. To mark the birthday of Prince Rainier, Uncle René wore a dinner jacket and white gloves, and when the flag finally reached the top of the pole he saluted stiffly – witnessed only by Auntie Betty and the battery chickens.

Today, many years after Uncle René paid his anonymous homage to little Rainier III, I live on the opposite side of the mountain chain that bisects the Cape Peninsula. And while South Africa has changed so dramatically, not all attitudes have kept pace.

Europe still exerts an almost magnetic pull, even for families who have lived in southern Africa for many generations. As a result, that startling doubt which first surfaced over half a century ago – on witnessing Uncle René’s comic tribute to a European princeling six thousand miles away – now comes back to haunt me with unsettling insistence: what on earth do we white people think we are doing here in Africa?

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DISCOVERING NOBLE SAVAGES

The ballad of Captain Wallis

THE REASON I DIDN’T pay much attention when Auntie Alix told me we were related to Tahitian royalty was that she possessed something far more fascinating to a comic-reading lad. Her claim that our ancestor Samuel Wallis had been eaten by a queen had a certain creepy novelty, but obviously it happened an unimaginably long time ago; ages before photography, for instance. And Alix had a pair of fading photographs that I was always itching to see again. So, after what seemed like a diplomatic interval for an eight-year-old, I would pipe up, ‘Auntie, may I see your Chinese photos, please?’

Alix had been brought up in China, and was a small girl when in 1900 the Boxer Rebellion erupted. Her father, Charles Lenox Simpson, was an official in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service. During the final decades of the sclerotic Qing Dynasty, acquisitive foreign powers were aggressively asserting their commercial muscle, and the nationalistic ‘Boxers’ attempted to drive them out violently.

There were two sepia snapshots in Alix’s photo album that captured the drama of the insurgence. One was captioned ‘Before’ and the other ‘After’. The first showed a Chinese man in a long robe kneeling down with his neck close to the ground; over him loomed another Chinese man with a huge sword raised above his head. In the second photo the kneeling man lay on the ground with his severed head a few paces away. This was inordinately interesting, especially as the executioner was encircled by onlookers who appeared curious, yet unmoved by the spectacle.

Only decades later did it occur to me, in the British Library, to investigate that other strange tale, first divulged to me by Alix: about our kinship with Tahitian royalty. The Dictionary of National Biography clarified that Captain Wallis, who had been born in Cornwall, enjoyed a long and distinguished career, dying peacefully at his home in London in 1795, aged 67. Captain Wallis had indeed ‘discovered’ Tahiti in 1767; but he had not been eaten, not even by a queen. In fact, Wallis continued on his voyage, departing Tahiti undevoured, and successfully circumnavigated the globe.

Captain Samuel Wallis

A couple of years previously, Captain John Byron, grandfather of the poet, and known as ‘Foul-Weather Jack’, had been dispatched by the Admiralty in HMS Dolphin with instructions ‘to make Discoveries of Countries hitherto unknown’, and had claimed the Falkland Islands for Britain. Byron returned with a ‘positive opinion’ that the (imagined) Great Southern Land must exist somewhere in the South Pacific. So, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Egmont, appointed Samuel Wallis as captain of HMS Dolphin. His mission was to search for this supposedly fabulous, unknown continent. Initially, Lord Egmont also wished Wallis to secure the Falkland Islands. But the cabinet split over this, fearing that such an act could provoke war with Spain and undermine their main objective. Egmont resigned, and Captain Wallis’ new instructions made his objective clear: to explore the Pacific and locate ‘Land or Islands of great extent, hitherto unvisited by any European power …’.

HMS Dolphin, commanded by my forebearer Captain Wallis, set sail in August 1766 and on its return nearly two years later, the ship’s barber published a lengthy dirge, The Dolphin’s Journal Epitomised In A Poetical Essay, which eulogised his captain, still very much alive, in heroic fashion:

‘WALLIS I sing, the hero brave,

Who to his country, like a slave

Undaunted plow’d the southern wave,

In search of land unfound.’

Alix had been entirely mistaken, as had my mother and other relatives. The family myth had gathered currency by fanciful repetition. After all, Auntie Alix wasn’t actually my auntie either. She was my mother’s great-aunt, consequently to me a cousin (at some remove). But ‘Cousin Alix’ sounded far too precocious. Instead, I was encouraged to adopt her as my ‘auntie’, although to a small boy, Alix appeared chillingly austere. According to my mother, when the topic of sex once arose, Alix pursed her lips and lapsed into French to distance herself from that distasteful subject.

‘Ma chérie,’ she admonished Barbara severely with strangulated, well-bred vowels, ‘je n’aime pas absolument cette chose-là!’

This may reveal the clue to our fiction of Captain Wallis being gobbled by the Queen of Tahiti. Were the facts simply consumed by imperial prudery? For it seems very likely that what Alix had confused for ‘being eaten’ was – squeamishly, Freudianly – sex.