Child Emigrants to the Cape Colony Part 1

On 11 May 1833 the ship Charles Kerr cast anchor in Table Bay after a three-month voyage from Cowes, England. It wasn’t the vessel’s first visit to the Cape of Good Hope, but on this occasion she was carrying human cargo. No, not slaves in the usual sense of the word, but twenty boys sent out by the Children’s Friend Society and destined for employment in the Colony.

Table Bay

We can imagine the excitement mingled with trepidation among the young emigrants at their first view of the beautiful Bay and its shipping, with Cape Town nestling at the foot of the majestic table-topped mountain. Most of the children had never been farther afield than London and its immediate environs. Their lives had begun in narrow streets and mostly in dingy, crowded tenements. Until a short while previously there’d been little likelihood of a change in these circumstances. Now they’d embarked on an adventure, leaving behind familiar faces and places, and crossing the ocean to a distant land.

Between 1833 and 1840, over thirty ships would follow in the wake of the Charles Kerr, bringing further groups of children, girls as well as boys, to the Cape Colony.

How and why did this come about? What destiny awaited them in the Cape and how did they cope with being uprooted and subsequently transplanted in foreign soil? Could your ancestor have been among them?

17th c London

There was actually nothing new in the idea of sending vagrant or pauper children to Britain’s colonies. As early as 1618, 100 juveniles were despatched from England to Virginia, and a second batch soon followed. The children had no say in the matter. Homeless, unprotected by parents or any charitable authorities, they were rounded up in the streets of London and herded into gaols before being shipped off to enforced exile in the American colony. There they would be bound to unknown masters whose treatment of the young apprentices was not subject to official regulation. Few of these child migrants would ever return to the country of their birth. 

This practice, whether sanctioned by government or carried out illegally, continued for two centuries. It was a means of ridding England of an unwanted surplus population, as well as providing much-needed labour in her colonies.

To be continued