by Andre Brink
© 1976, 2008 by André Brink
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Originally published in Great Britain by W. H. Allen & Company, Ltd., 1976
First published in the United States of America by William Morrow and Company 1977
Published by Penguin Books 1985
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brink, André Philippus.
An instant in the wind / André Brink. ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-1983-2
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4022-1109-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4022-1109-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Larsson, Elisabeth Maria,
b. 1727—Fiction. 2. South Africa—History—To 1836—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9369.3.B7I5 2008
823—dc22
2007040384
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
VP 10 987654321
CONTENTS
Dedication
Quotations
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
About the Author
Also by André Brink
For BREYTEN
such a long journey ahead for you and me
And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice
—Hart Crane
We live in a disoriented, deranged social structure, and we
have transcended its barriers in our own ways and have
stepped psychologically outside its madness and repressions.
It is lonely out here. We recognize each other.
And, having recognized each other, is it any wonder
that our souls cling together even while our minds equivocate,
hesitate, vacillate and tremble?
—Eldridge Cleaver
WHO WERE THEY? THE NAMES ARE KNOWN—Adam Mantoor and Elisabeth Larsson—and something of their history has been recorded. We know that in 1749, the last year of the rule of Governor Swellengrebel, Elisabeth accompanied her husband, the Swedish traveler Erik Alexis Larsson, on a journey into the interior of the Cape of Good Hope where he died some time after; that she was eventually discovered by the runaway slave, Adam; and that they reached Cape Town together towards the end of February 1751. An interesting trifle, a mere footnote adding nothing to one's knowledge of the land or the course of history.
Who were they? A few more facts may be added by tracing, with much trouble and some luck, the long list of the dead composing their genealogies.
Adam Mantoor In 1719 Willem Lowrens Rieckert, a farmer near Constantia, entered the birth of one Adam in the Slave Register of the Cape. The mother was reported to be Krissie, also known as Karis, a Hottentot woman. But as Hottentots were not generally kept as slaves in those days, additional research is required to explain that she was booked into Rieckert's service in 1714, at the age of ten or eleven, after being discovered, with a number of other children, by an expedition to the Olifants River soon after the epidemic of smallpox which had ravaged the colony the previous year. The name of her child's father was registered as Ontong, a Cape slave also in Rieckert's service, but sold soon afterwards to one Jeremia van Niekerk, farmer of Piquet Berg, for 800 rixdollars.
This Ontong appears to have been a child from a liaison, in 1698 or 1699, between a male slave, Afrika, imported from Madagascar, and a slave woman, Seli, brought from Padang at a barely nubile age. It seems likely that this Afrika was the same slave who, in 1702, was executed in front of the Castle on a count of sedition and the murder of his employer, one Grové. For his services the executioner would have received a bonus of sixteen rixdollars—four for the use of the irons, and twelve for breaking on the wheel without administration of the deathblow.
Forty years later Afrika's grandson, Adam, also fell foul of the law by disobeying the instructions of his master, the aforementioned Willem Louwrens Rieckert, and by assaulting the latter with a piece of wood. For this crime he was sentenced, after a fair trial, to flogging and branding, followed by banishment to Robben Island. In 1744 his escape was recorded without any further particulars, and for seven years no more was seen of him in the colony. Finally, in March 1751, he was flogged (three rixdollars) and strangled (six rixdollars).
Elisabeth Larsson For some reason it has always been assumed that she arrived from Sweden with her husband. But in the Cape Archives the letter, dated 17 May 1749, has now been discovered (Ref. no. C41, p. 154) in which Governor Swellengrebel gave permission for the journey into the interior. In this letter the members of the expedition are listed as Hermanus Hendrickus van Zyl, Free Burgher of Stellenbosch; Erik Alexis Larsson of Göteborg, Sweden; and “his housewife Elisabeth Maria Larsson, née Louw, of the Cape”.
The founder of this line of the family, Wilhelmus Janszoon Louw, arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1674 as a soldier of the East India Company, accompanied by his wife and two young sons. One of the children died during the passage from Texel in 1694; the other, Johannes Wilhelmszoon (b. 1668) married a Huguenot girl, Elisabeth Marie Jeanne Nourtier (b. Calais, 1676). At that time the father Wilhelmus had already obtained his discharge from the Company and started farming in the district of Stellenbosch. His son and daughter-in-law settled on the same farm, presumably because the father's state of health had become too precarious for him to cope with all the work.
From the marriage of Johannes and the French girl six children were born: Jean Louis (1696—deceased six months later), Elisabeth Marie (1697), Marcus Wilhelm Johannes (1698), Aletta Maria (1701), Anna Gertruida (1703), and Jacomina Hendrina (1704). It seems that Johannes played some part in the insurrection of the colonists against Governor Willem Adriaan van der Stel, but that he died in 1705, before the struggle had reached its climax in the deportation of the Governor. After his death his widow remarried one Hermanus Christoffel Valck and gave birth to three more children.
The only son of the family, Marcus Wilhelm Johannes mentioned above, returned to the service of the Company where he was soon promoted from clerk to bookkeeper and eventually to keeper of stores, or dispensier. In 1721 he married Catharina Teresa Oldenburg (b. 1703), daughter of a distinguished Company inspector who visited the Cape from Batavia in that year.
Two sons born from the marriage—in 1722 and 1724 respectively—both died soon after birth, leaving Elisabeth Maria (b. 1727) as the only surviving child. It may be of interest, however, that between 1740 and 1748 Marcus fathered at least five more children from three different female slaves in his service; at his death in 1750 all five were listed as assets in his estate.
Elisabeth Maria probably met the Swedish traveler Larsson very soon after his arrival at the Ca
pe in February 1748. A year later they were married on the eve of their departure on that fateful voyage into the hinterland. One reason why the journey drew very little attention at the time must have been the fact that Larsson consistently represented it to the authorities as a simple hunting expedition (his license was for shooting elephants, rhinoceros, hippopotamus and “exotic beasts”) rather than as a journey of exploration. Not only did the Company at that stage—unlike a couple of decades later, during the visits of Larsson's illustrious compatriots Thunberg and Sparrman—frown on explorations by foreigners, but it seems reasonable to assume that Larsson himself would have tried to prevent others from forestalling him in the execution of his main project. This was the collection and cataloguing of plants, birds and animals unknown in Europe; and, above all, extensive geographical observation aimed at the definitive mapping of the interior.
After her return to the Cape Elisabeth Maria Larsson, née Louw, remarried (the Marriage Register mentions only her maiden name, which explains some of the confusion obscuring her historical identity for so long). Her new husband was an elderly neighbor, Stephanus Cornelius Jacobs (b. 1689), and the ceremony took place in May 1751. In August of the same year she gave birth to a son. Soon afterwards her husband died. She never married again.
Classified under the name of Elisabeth Jacobs there exists, in the Cape Archives, a handwritten Memoir of eighty-five octavo pages, in which, ostensibly for the benefit of her son, Elisabeth gives a brief survey of her life. With great objectivity and reticence, remarkable in her circumstances but intensely frustrating for the modern historian, she includes an outline of her Cape journey: “Left the Cape in April 1749, with two tent wagons, crossed Hottentot's Holland Mountains, proceeded to the Warm Baths”—and more in the same vein, describing the customary coastal route as far as Mossel Bay, and over the Outeniqua Range; and from there quite far north, with a wide semicircle through the Camdeboo to the hinterland of the Winterberg and the Suurveld in the Eastern Cape. The account suggests that the newly married woman found it interesting in the beginning, but that excitement soon gave way to boredom and finally to “unbearable revulsion.”
Her husband devoted nearly all his time and interest to his feverish scientific activities, pressing flowers, shooting and stuffing birds, preparing animal skins, collecting reptiles, and meticulously mapping their progress.
There appears to have been trouble with Van Zyl, who had joined the expedition as a guide but very soon got hopelessly lost. Things came to a sudden head when, after a violent quarrel, he ran into the bush and blew out his own brains with a pistol. Soon afterwards a band of Bushmen stole twenty of their oxen, forcing them to abandon one wagon. Later, all their Hottentots deserted the expedition, taking with them all but two of the remaining oxen. And then Erik Alexis Larsson quite simply walked off into the wilderness and disappeared. At that stage they were encamped in a bushy region somewhere along the tributaries of the Great Fish River. And there Elisabeth was discovered by the runaway slave.
The Memoir contains very little on the first part of the return journey to the sea, but, fortunately, reveals rather more about the rest of their trek, which one can, with a certain amount of conjecture, reconstruct through the north-eastern section of the Tsitikama forest and across the mountains to the Lang Kloof and the Little Karoo, over the Swart Berg or “Black Mountains”, through the Karoo and so back to the Cape.
But even this information is scant, almost insignificant. And it is only the final sentence which strikes one with sudden, subtle meaning after so many dreary facts, when Elisabeth writes:
This no one can take away from us, not even ourselves.
Quite by accident, in the course of a completely different research project, a vital new discovery has now been made in Livingstone House, the headquarters of the London Missionary Society: the badly deteriorated but still decipherable journals of Larsson himself. How on earth these three folio volumes in sturdy leather binding ever landed in the hands of the LMS is impossible to tell. The only explanation, in itself far-fetched, seems to be that wandering Hottentots may eventually have found them in the desolate farmhouse where, many years before, Elisabeth had made the final entry, and delivered them to the missionaries of nearby Bethelsdorp.
The major portion of the journal is in Larsson's own handwriting— extensive, clinically accurate notes on their progress, observations, discoveries, conclusions and expectations. There is, for example, a detailed catalogue of everything taken with them on the two wagons with which they left the Cape. The first wagon was loaded with six large chests (on which the couple's mattress was unrolled at night) and two smaller ones containing:
clothes
white candy sugar
coffee
tea
10 lb. chocolate
a jack, nails, iron rods, and assorted bits of iron
pins, needles, cotton
stuff for bartering: glass beads, copper tinderboxes, knives, rolled tobacco, Indian scarves, combs
500 lb. gunpowder in small barrels, wrapped in wet sheepskins to preserve the contents watertight
1 ton lead and tin, with a complete set of casting molds
16 blunderbusses, 12 double-barreled pistols, 2 sabers, 1 dagger
10 reams paper for pressing plants
scientific instruments, including a compass, a hygrometer, a dipping needle, a yard-long barometer in a box, with additional mercury in an earthenware bottle
The second wagon contained two large empty boxes intended for scientific collections of specimens, insects, etcetera, as well as the following:
2 tents
1 table and 4 chairs
1 iron grill
1 large frying pan, 2 kettles, 4 saucepans, 2 coffee cans, 2 teapots, 2 washing tubs, 3 washbasins
4 halfaums of brandy, two for storing specimens, the rest for bribing and encouraging the Hottentots and winning friends in the country
a collection of porcelain plates, dishes, cups and saucers
The trek was accompanied by thirty-two oxen, four horses, eight dogs, fifteen chickens and six Hottentots.
Every day the distance covered was calculated and the weather noted. One is struck by the numerous references to wind—“Windy today”— “Windy again”—“Very windy”—“Elisabeth complains about wind”— “Gusts of wind”—and once a longer reference, the nearest Erik Alexis Larsson ever approached to poetry in his journal: “The whole interior is like a sea of wind on which we toss and drift unsteadily”.
There is a daily catalogue of new discoveries. Every buck or beast of prey shot was measured and dissected and described in detail. With just as much precision, events of importance were recorded:
“Attacked by wounded lion and saved just in time by Hottentot Booi, who was bitten in the arms before the animal could be killed. Interested to note that Booi's flesh under the skin was exactly the same color and texture as that of a white man.”
It also transpires that Larsson perfected a highly ingenious method for shooting birds without damaging them, so that they could be stuffed for his collection. This method, “rediscovered” years later by the explorer Vaillant, consisted of pouring a small quantity of gunpowder into the gun (the exact amount to be determined by the size of the bird and the distance from it) and securing it with a plug of candle wax, afterwards filling the barrel with water. In this way the bird was merely stunned by the impact, and its wet feathers prevented escape.
There are very few references to personal circumstances. Occasionally there is a brief note: “Quarreled with Elisabeth”—“Elisabeth, sadly, has no faculty for scientific understanding”—“Elisabeth very demanding last night, again this morning; not conducive to concentration”.
His final entry (dated 3.1.50) is followed by some empty pages before the journal is resumed, without any dates, in Elisabeth's handwriting. Her inscriptions are, on the whole, longer than his; her tone much more personal than in the Memoir of so many years later. There is an unfortunate
lack of explicit detail, and some of the experiences which, judging from the urgency of the tone, were most significant to her, remain distressingly cryptic. But there are occasional remarks in which one suddenly glimpses an existence beyond history:
Such a long journey ahead for you and me. Oh God, oh God.
Who are they? The Memoir and the Journals are presently being prepared for publication in annotated editions, the latter subject to final permission from the LMS. Then history will claim them for itself. But history as such is irrelevant. What is important is that phrase, This no one can take away from us… Or those other words, Such a long journey…
It is to this end that the crust of history must be scraped off. Not simply to retell it but to utterly expose it and to set it in motion again. To travel through that long landscape and back, back to the high mountain above the town of a thousand houses exposed to the sea and the wind. Back through that wild and empty land—who are you? who am I?—without knowing what to expect, when all the instruments have been destroyed by the wind and all the journals abandoned to the wind, when nothing else remains but to continue. It is not a question of imagination, but of faith.
HE FINDS HER HUDDLED ON THE DRIVER’S SEAT of the wagon among the wild fig-trees, late in the afternoon, with the birds already settling in the branches for the night. She is surrounded by the remains of her trek, the relics representing in this wilderness the achievements of her civilization: unloaded rifles (fired off last night and this morning) and bags of lead and powder, dried flowers between sheets of stained white paper, stuffed birds and delicately boned skeletons, drawings of animals and trees and camping sites beside hills or rivers, small reptiles preserved in alcohol, the long tube of the barometer still upturned in its bowl of mercury, kettle and cooking pots at the fire, hand-embroidered sheets spread over bushes and a dried aloe stump, clothing still crumpled and damp from last night's storm, a grill marked with new rust, crockery; and the map on one of the boxes behind her, its outlines suggested by early Portuguese and defined by a century of shipping, a narrow patch from left to center inscribed and covered with the contours of hills and rivers, mountains, plains, longitudes and latitudes, heights above sea level, climatic zones, prevailing winds—surrounded by white emptiness containing only a few tentative lines and dots, open and exposed, terra incognita, great and wide.
