Charles Canham

Minna was possibly Mary Wilmot, the 7yr old survivor of the wreck of the East Indiaman, the Grosvenor in 1782. In 1907 William Bazley describes how, “after the women and children were abandoned by Capt. Cox and his officers, one little girl, who he calls Minna, was carried across the Mzimvubu River by a Lascar man. … Bazley calls her maMolo [so] she was probably raised by the amaMolo.” [Crampton, p299.]

Said to have married a soldier who had deserted from the Cape. Crampton speculates that it might have been one of the four Englishmen deserters who associated with the rebel boers: John Madder, Thomas Bentley; Harry Obry; Coves Bork associated with Willem & Nicholas Lochenburg (the old boer who guided the first missionaries to Bessie’s son, Mdepa in 1827) [Crampton, p299.]

Minna – or Minnie – as Bazley sometimes calls her, is said to have had children with this man, before he died. He says that she then married an escaped slave (or one of the Lascars who survived the Grosvenor) – ‘Domosi’. Crampton suggests the name could be a corruption of ‘Damin’ – a runaway Bengalese slave, who spoke Dutch and acted as Ngqika’s mother’s interpreter, and who is known to have lived alongside the boers.

A missionary, van der Kemp, at Ngqiuka’s Great place, taught Damin – who he called a ‘Mahometan Hindoo’ to read and write. Another of van der Kemp’s pupils was the Khoi woman Sarah, who later married Nicholas Lochenberg, and a ‘Heathen’ woman called Mary… As Minna, like Sarah, eventually settled at the Butterworth mission station, it seems like to Compton, that Minna – the child survivor of the Grosvenor, Mary, the convert, and Mary Wilmot – the 7 year old Grosvenor survivor were the same person. [Crampton p300]

Minna and Damin had several children. One, a son – May Jong (Eastern name?) is said to have lived for many years at the Ibisi in East Griqualand and died there, an old man. Bazley says at least two of her daughters married white men – one becoming Mrs ‘Toughy’ and the other Mrs ‘Piarse’ – with a daughter, Catherine, who marries John Dunn.

A third daughter, Lydia, married Poswa an Mfengu of the ‘Maskati or Langalati’ tribe, and had several children – the youngest of whom was Elizabeth – who Bazley mistakenly says married Carson – actually Charles Canham; a white trader of dodgy repute. “One official described him as ‘a rascal.’ He’d lived on the Wild Coast since at least 1856, in which year he’d written a letter on behalf of the Thembu chief to the colonial governor regarding the murder of Rev Thomas of Beecham Wood mission, a crime in which some of Bessie’s descendants were involved. The missionary had apparently been caught up inadvertently in a squabble between the ‘Morley people’ – Canham’s close friend, Mathew Ben Shaw, son of Rev William Shaw, co-founder of Morley mission, and the ama Mpondo. the feud included an attack on the latter by several armed and mounted men led by Shaw…

When Sir Walter Stanford, a colonial official, met the Canhams in the 1880s, they were living in the vicinity of today’s village of Lusikisiki – a little inland from the Lambasi Bay where Bessie was shipwrecked”. Elizabeth, says Stanford, was ‘a light-coloured woman of civilised ways and habits’ and assumes she is descended from Bessie: ‘one of the three old women seen by Jacob van Reenen at Umgazi on his expedition in search of survivors of the Grosvenor. Elizabeth’s death notice in the Cape archives proves, however, that she was really Mina’s granddaughter, according to Crampton. [Crampton, p301-2]

Crampton, Hazel. ‘The Sunburnt Queen’. Johannesburg: Jacana. 2004. Print. Contact Sharon Doubell