Shipwreck: the plot thickens

THERE is an expression that things are not always what they seem to be. This is very much what this Chiel finds about the shipwreck and artifacts discussed here recently.

Maurice Durrheim set the scene by telling us there was a ship’s anchor at a farmhouse in the Peddie district that had been recovered from Birha by the one-time farmer. He feared it might end up as scrap metal.

Enter Errol Willows, whose farm, Kingslynn, had been taken over in the 1970s for incorporation into Ciskei.

Errol said he had taken the anchor there in the 1960s, and he too is worried it will be cut up. He believed it came from a sailing ship, the Hercules, that supposedly ran aground at the Mtana River in 1796.

Well, the plot thickens. Gill Vernon, historian, former East London Museum director, and author of a book on shipwrecks, has other news, telling me it is a Dutch ship, the Bennebroeck, wrecked there in 1713.

“Graham Bell-Cross, deputy director of the EL Museum in the 1980s, did research which indicated this would have been the site, and a salvage operation by Peter Sachs who found VOC cannons and coins with relevant dates, confirmed this. Indications are the anchor is from the Bennebroek,” Gill said.

Peter Sachs, you may remember, salvaged granite blocks from the wrecked Oranjeland off the Esplanade.

Gill continues: “At the time when the anchor was removed from the beach, there was no legislation to protect shipwreck artifacts, but today they fall under the National Heritage Resources Act, so the anchor is not open for anyone to collect it.”

She feels its right place is in a museum, but sadly museums have low budgets and to collect the anchor and move it would be out of reach. Chiel asks, then, that some magnanimous local person, or commercial interest, sponsor this worthy project. Errol agrees, before a scrap merchant gets it.

So how was the Hercules involved in all this? Gill says the story is interesting, but complicated. It seems as if a certain Benjamin Stout arrived in Swellendam to say he was a survivor from the American ship Hercules that had been wrecked at a small river near the Keiskamma.

“He was given a horse and made his way to Cape Town, and left from there. His account was published in a book, Loss of the ship Hercules, in London in 1798, which he dedicated to then US president John Adams.

“The many inconsistencies and model of his story pointed to it in fact being about the Grosvenor . Research by the Historical Society of Port Elizabeth found there was indeed a ship Hercules, registered in the US, but the captain was Benjamin Carpenter, and there was no record of it running aground on the SA coast.”

Gill says the possibility then arises that Benjamin Stout/Carpenter is the same man, and perhaps a conman, who was trying to ingratiate himself to the American president in return for favours. Americans at that time were keen to establish trade links in Africa and Stout/Carpenter believed the president would be able to help him.

Intriguing, isn’t it.

Chiel today is Robin Ross-Thompson; e- mail