Pierre-Antoine Delalande (1787-1823), a naturalist of French extraction, formed the rearguard of a cohort of explorers such a Sparrman, Thunberg and Burchell to the southern tip of Africa in the latter half of the 18th century and early 19th century.
When passing through Algoa Bay – Port Elizabeth would only be established in 1820 – Delalande would encounter Frederick Korsten, an entrepreneur with fingers in a multitude of pies: exporting salted beef to Mauritius, milling flour, whaling and sealing amongst a host of activities based at Cradock Place.
Another visitor was contemporaneously staying at Cradock Place with Frederick Korsten: Samuel Eusebius Hudson, the diarist. Would they coexist peacefully, or would they be analogous to oil and water?
Main picture: Pierre Antoine Delalande
Anglo-Franco animosity
Relations between the British and the French had reached a nadir during the Napoleonic Wars. The consequence was not a European War but rather a world-wide war with the chess pieces being the maritime fleets and colonial islands and land. This animosity would be enacted in a brief but intense stand-off in Algoa Bay just prior to dusk – 4pm to be precise – on Friday 20th September 1799 when a French vessel, the Preneuse, engaged two British vessels, the HMS Rattlesnake and HMS Camel off North End beach in Algoa Bay. After a night long exchange of gun fire, the Preneuse scuttled off in the early morning of the 21st.
Not only would this skirmish in Algoa Bay be the only engagement between the English and the French naval vessels in Southern Africa, but that the antipathy between the English and the French twenty years later would have largely dissipated. However remnants of distrust as will later become evident.
With the defeat of Napoleon and the restoration of the French monarchy, relations between England and France were improving. In 1818 Delalande commenced his expedition to South Africa with his nephew Jules Verreaux, who was around 12 years old at the time, to collect exotic specimens. This is indicative of the warm relations between these historic foes.
Expeditions prior to Algoa Bay
Prior to his extensive expedition to Algoa Bay and the eastern Cape, Delalande had already undertaken three expeditions. He had commenced the study of natural history at an early age but simultaneously he studied painting under an artist. His first expedition was at the age of 21 when he accompanied Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire of the Paris Museum on a scientific mission to Portugal. Five years later in 1813 he was sent on a trip to Provance to collect fish and molluscs. It would be another three years before Delalande undertook his third expedition, this time travelling to Brazil accompanied by the French Ambassador.
Expedition to the Cape
After this level of practical experience, the Paris Museum must have felt confident in Delalande’s ability to undertake an extensive expedition by himself to the various parts of the Cape Colony. Accompanying him as his assistant would be his 12 year old nephew, Pierre Jules Verreaux. The first trip was eastwards along the coast for an undefined distance until they were compelling to retrace their steps when they encountered drought conditions and advancing Xhosa warriors. Making the trip worthwhile, even if they did not achieve their primary objective, was their discovery of a 24 metre long stranded whale on the return trip. It would take 2 months to dissect it but the skeleton would be the first complete whale skeleton acquired by the Paris Museum.
For the second journey, which commenced on the 5th July 1819, Delalande would travel north from Cape Town as far as the Olifants River. It was in the marshlands along the Berg River that he killed a hippopotamus thus providing him with a skeleton for the Paris Museum.
Third and longest expedition in the Cape
This expedition commencing on the 2nd November 1819 would take eight months. Fortunately the first leg of the journey was by sea from Cape Town to Algoa Bay. While in Cape Town, the Colonial Secretary, Colonel Bird, placed a British vessel at Delalande’s disposal. This mode of transport would reduce the travel time from Cape Town to Algoa Bay by weeks as the colony lacked even vestiges of road from Swellendam eastwards to Algoa Bay. In his otherwise comprehensive diary Hudson fails to provide any indication whether Delalande had informed Korsten in advance of his plan to collect plants and animals in the Eastern Cape or whether he had even notified Korsten in advance of his arrival in Cape Town.
Encounter between Korsten and Delalande
On Sunday 12th December 1819, Delalande and his nephew sailed into Algoa Bay. The first human habitation that they would have noticed as they entered the bay at Cape Recife, were several basic houses of wattle and daub marked on the map as the settlement of Algoa Bay. This nomenclature was indicative of the fact that this collection of huts was not even accorded a formal town’s name. Delalande’s sojourn would not encompass the period when the 1820 Settlers landed at Algoa Bay and its subsequent renaming by Sir Rufane Donkin as Port Elizabeth. In his book entitled Old Times and Odd Places, Chase describes the collection of houses in Port Elizabeth of this period as mud huts. In that case my statement that they were wattle and daub might be too posh a description.
Further along the beach, they would have noticed some large vats used to produce whale oil, but which were still under construction. From the 16th century through the 19th century, whale oil was used principally as lamp fuel and for producing soap. Whaling was the latest venture to which Frederick Korsten would apply himself having recently suffered some adversity in his salted beef and flour milling operations at Cradock Place.
After landing at Algoa Bay Delalande and his nephew encountered Korsten en route to inspect the construction of his whale oil factory nearby. Delalande informed Korsten what the purpose of his visit to this remote part of the Colony was. He explained that he had been despatched by the Museum National d’Historie Naturelle situated in Paris, to collect specimens which had been “depleted” during the Napoleonic Wars. Korsten immediately offered the visitor from France “the hospitality of his house at Cradock Place to use as a base camp for his expedition in the area.” The author notes that “he may not have fully realised what that would entail. This cryptic comment would be exposed shortly.
In accompanying Korsten to Cradock Place, they passed the remnants of the abandoned earth redoubt called Star Fort last used when the Xhosa and Khoikhoi crossed the Zwartkops River and attacked the settlement at Uitenhage and then swept through Papenkuilsfontein, then owned by Thomas Ignatius Ferreira, driving sheep and cattle towards Bethelsdorp.
An infusion of enthusiasm
Samuel Eusebius Hudson, also a guest of Korsten at Cradock Place [formerly Papenkuilsfontein, who was also very keen on natural history, had already been collecting insects at Algoa Bay prior to Delalande’s arrival, in order to send them to his friends in Cape Town. As both Hudson and Delalande shared a passion for natural history, Hudson, the pupil naturalist, was rapidly being infected by the French naturalist’s enthusiasm for the topic as well as his taxidermical skills. The extent of this zeal and passion is exposed in his diaries as he pours out the minutiae of the insects that he collected.
Hudson notes that “Delalande who was accompanied by his young nephew, had with him an impressive quantity of scientific equipment and packing cases in which to store his treasures.” What he also required from Korsten was space for dissecting and preparing his specimens. In his diary, Hudson made his feelings of Delalande’s activities known as they were an intrusion.
Misplaced enthusiasm or an odious conundrum
The author, Edward Hudson, noted that “Worse was to come. Delalande was now dissecting the stomach of sea eagle he had collected in order to establish his diet. This turned out to comprise a snake “a foot and a half long…. no way injured in its construction but dead” along with the decomposed remains of a puff adder and a lizard. The inevitable consequence of this activity in the heat of summer was that “a most intolerable stench comes from the dissecting room of Monsieur Lalande and will require all the spices of Arabia to make the place sweet again.” Also problematic was the amount space utilised by Delalande. Combined with the duration of the stay, meant that Delalande was always underfoot.
Expedition to the Great Fish River
Korsten’s generosity was again on display when Delalande announced his desire to mount an expedition to the Great Fish River. Korsten lent Delalande a new wagon and hired him two Hottentots with a span of bullocks for RxD 75 per month. In his diary Hudson could not suppress his glee at Samuel’s departure recording in his diary that “Therefore I expect they will be off in a few days, not to the regret of great part of the family, who begin to be heartily tired of the noise and stink of running in and out of the dissecting room.“
Displeasure recorded
Hudson’s diary was the unwitting recipient of multiple secrets. For instance Edward records that “Meanwhile, the manners and dress of Delalande’s teenage nephew, Jules-Pierre Verreaux (1807-1873) were falling short of the standard expected in the Korsten household and struck Hudson as unworthy of the naturalist whose eminence he now recognised. Ultimately Julius is banished from the table due to “his improper conduct.”
Early in January 1820, Delalande had finally departed for Plettenberg Bay. This expedition would take almost two months. The author noted that “one of its chief objectives was to obtain the skeleton of a two-horned rhinoceros. Hunting rhinoceros was prohibited under penalty of a fine of RxD 1,000 but Delalande had been exempted from this law by the Governor, Lord Charles Somerset. Finding and killing a two-horned specimen had not been easy” but he had finally succeeded. However in the process, he had been thrown from his horse. In his ever-present diary, Samuel meticulously recorded these details but failed to record one pertinent detail viz that to obtain the rhinoceros skeleton, that Delalande had incurred a serious head injury and a broken collarbone. On his return, Korsten would once again offer Delalande his hospitality except that on this occasion, having learnt from prior experience, he offered him a dissecting room at the Cooperage which was far from the house.
Anglo-French intrigue
Once again, Anglo-French relations in the Indian Ocean area were in a fraught state. The receipt of a letter demanding Delalande’s immediate presence in Madagascar raised suspicions in Hudson’s mind that Delalande could be acting as a double agent. Heightening these suspicions was the fact that Delalande took the first available vessel to Cape Town. The French Naturalist’s abrupt return to Cradock Place suppressed the Diarist’s qualms as it became apparent that Delalande was playing a game of cat-and-mouse with the French authorities. To them he was paying lip-service to their instructions, but he shrugged them off in the meantime.
With suspicions cast adrift, the Frenchman and the Diarist resumed their teacher-pupil relationship unencumbered with intrigue. In anticipation of a vessel arriving shortly, Delalande was re-energised. First he explored the nearby “woods” during the second week of March in 1820 and then six days later he headed towards the Van Stadens and Gamtoos Rivers and on to “Cassakamma”.
When the time came to depart from the Cape on the 12th May 1820, there was the customary exchange of gifts with Delalande giving Hudson a case of stuffed birds. This bore testimony to the friendship which had developed between Hudson and Delalande.
What is unexplained nor covered in Hudson’s diary, the fact that the settlers had started arriving in the Bay. The first party to disembark was that from The Chapman on the 10th April 1820.
Successful mission
Delalande and his nephew Verreaux had travelled and collected specimens in South Africa for three years. On their return in 1821, they took back an astounding 131,405 specimens, mostly plant material. Their collection included 288 mammals, 2205 birds, 322 reptiles, 265 fish, 3875 shellfish, and various human skulls and skeletons from a Cape Town cemetery and from the 22 April 1819 Battle of Grahams-town between the British forces under Colonel Willshire and the Xhosa under Nxele.
Sources
1. Edward Hudson, “A French naturalist in the Eastern Cape” in Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa, Vol. 73, No. 2, December 2019
2. S2A3 Biographical Database of Southern African Science-Pierre–Antoine Delalande
3. Wikipedia
4. Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa vol. 73, no 2 (December 2019): 179-190
The main repository of Hudson’s diaries is the Western Cape Archives and Record Service