WRECK OF GROSVENOR

Greymouth Evening Star, 24 December 1934, Page 4

WRECK OF GROSVENOR

SEARCH FOR SURVIVORS. Great interest has been aroused in Riversdale, South Africa, of the discovery in the old Kruis River Valley of the old homestead of Jacob van Reenen, who led the expedition to search for survivors of the East Indiaman, the Grosvenor, which was wrecked off the Pondoland coast ui 1782 when returning with 350 souls an an enormously rich cargo from the East, states the “Cape Times.” Van Reenen, accompanied by Jan Andries Holtzhausen, Hilgert Mulder, Lcdewyk August Prins, and others with four wagons and a contingent of armed Hottentots, left in August, l<9o, from a rendezvous near Kafirkruils River. , , , , , A previous expedition headed by Captain H. Mulder had to return owing to the persistent hostility of the natives. Van Reenen’s trip was especially prompted by the report which reached Cornelius van de Graaff, then Governor at the Cape, that three white women were being held captive, by a native chief living in the vicinity of the wreck. The intrepid Dutchman, who was away for four months, made the most exhaustive inquiries at the scene of the wreck, but could find no survivors. At the native village near the wreck he came upon three aged white women, sisters, who could not speak their own language whatever it had been, and could only say that they had been wrecked on that coast when children and had grown up among natives. They displayed great alarm at seeing people of their own colour, and, although entreated by van Reenan to accompany him back to the Cape, they would not leave their children. They had. of course, become the wives of kaffir chiefs, but were in no w r ay connected with the Grosvenor wreck, and knew of no other white women in the vicinity. Van Reenen reported the case of these women to the Governor, but history does not indicate that any steps were taken to remove them from the village.

MALAY SLAVE’S STORY. While al the wreck, van Reenen was informed by a Malay slave, who had deserted from the Cape, that a year or two previously the cook of the Grosvenor, who had been living with the natives, had died from smallpox. Of van Reenen’s party Holtzhausen fell into a game pit and was injured by the upstanding points placed at the bottom of the pit by bushmen or native hunters to trap game. He contracted blood poisoning and died on the return journey. He was buried under a tree, upon which all the members of the party cut their names. Mr M. Holtzhausen, the Riversdale postmaster, is distantly but directly related to Andries Holtzhausen, who was a noted hunter. Prins, one of the other members of the party, was mauled to death by an elephant. Van Reenen seems to have set at rest the reports that white women survivors of the wreck were in the hands of. natives. These people had been persistently referred to as “the Campbells,” but. in the ship’s register no Campbells appeared. Of the whole of the ship’s passengers and crew’ only about IS (the majority aboard were Lascars) reached the Cape. The others either perished of hunger and exposure or were murdered by natives. The first expedition, with 10 wagons and a hundred men, came upon several dead bodies. Le Valiant, the traveller, was in Is a lira ria six weeks after the wreck, and declared that, with the exception of those few who did escape, all the men of the ship, including several French officers, prisoners of war who were being taken to Europe, were killed by natives, but the women were reserved to undergo still greater hardships.