Huguenot Ancestors

Kenn Joubert has achieved what many family historians only dream about - transforming the family history into a fictional narrative. His Huguenot Trilogy is the result: three volumes of action, adventure and romance which will appeal whether you have Huguenot ancestry or not.


1. ESCAPE TO FREEDOM

It is 1687 and the Sun King of France has grown frustrated by the challenges of the Protestant heretics and sends his dragoons into Southern France. 

Pierre Jaubert, a shy young farmer, living in the village of La Motte d'Aigues in the sun-kissed hills of Provence, is catapulted into the life of an outlaw when he impulsively attacks a vicious Dragoon Captain. The officer swears revenge as the festering scar on the cheek fails to heal. The very last thing Pierre wanted to be was a hero. He is forced to join a tidal wave of Huguenots trying to escape France. Huguenots caught fleeing are faced with imprisonment or death. 

Attend a colourful village wedding of Isabeau Richarde - a woman Pierre has secretly admired - as she marries into the Mallan family. Follow Pierre's many disastrous attempts to reach safety and the parallel escape attempts by Isabeau and her Mallan family. 

2. FOLLOW THE WIND

This exciting historic novel will bring the reader directly into the trauma faced by the French Protestants in the 1600s. The first book in the Huguenot Trilogy was Escape to Freedom. The second book, Follow the Wind, introduces new and old characters that readers have enjoyed.  It is 1687. Although a group of Huguenots refugees from Provence have skillfully escaped from France into free Switzerland, they are pursued by an avenging troop of disguised French Dragoons determined to assassinate key members of the party.

Feeling helpless, a new character, young Susanne Reyne, watched her family murdered during a safe border escape into Switzerland. Now, penniless in Geneva, she is desperate until she recognizes a neighbour from Provence, Pierre Jaubert, in Geneva streets and attempts to seek his aid. Join the group as, swept by the tidal wave of refugees, they are attacked continuously while searching through Europe - through the cantons of Switzerland, down the Rhine River and eventually ending up into the Netherlands – still searching for a future.

Here in Holland, the group is both terrified and excited, as fate throws a daring challenge - an offer of farm land and freedom in Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Never having been to sea before, the group journey on a small Dutch galleon, the China, to the bottom of the world. 

3. THE EARLY YEARS

After a shockingly dangerous voyage on the galleon China, the passengers, which included a group of young would-be brides - orphan girls from Rotterdam - arrive in Cape Town. Rejoin the young Huguenot couple, Pierre Joubert and his wife, Isabeau. Each settler, is expected to develop a farm on free land. A major task when you have to deal with lions, elephants and other wild creatures - warthogs, baboons and pythons. 

Each family must build their own house, clear the frightening land and raise crops, as they promised they would. Follow their struggles not only to survive but to tackle and defeat the many challenges they face.

The Huguenot Trilogy is available online at: 

www.trafford.com/05-2075

Recent Blog Queries

At the top of this blog is a tab which takes you to the Beginners Guide to South African Research. Click on the tab to access the guide: it may answer many of the queries which I receive via the search facility and comments form. If you are new to South African family history - and this also includes overseas ancestral links with Britain and other countries (no boundaries in internet genealogy) - read the guide for a general overview and helpful tips.

To start researching your South African ancestors go to NAAIRS at
www.national.archives.gov.za/ 

For the numerous people requesting details on the Anglo-Boer War, although there are several relevant posts on this blog (use the search facility at the top of the blog page), for more in-depth information go to
www.angloboerwar.com/ 

You are welcome to post comments on any topic using the appropriate comment form on this blog. 

Interested in the Waratah? See the new blog on this controversial topic at www.waratahrevisited.blogspot.com/

Emigrants dining on board ship: 1850s

Mariners: Caithness Ships and Family

Ships in Stormy Seas

James Ramsey Caithness emerges in these pages as an unlucky mariner: six of the ships he was associated with came to grief in dramatic style. In 1844 it was the schooner Mary in Algoa Bay, in 1848 the brig Lady Leith on Thunderbolt Reef, in 1851 the Diadem at Plettenberg Bay; in 1854 the Sea Gull in Table Bay and in April 1855 the tragic Flying Dragon, ‘consumed by fire’. 

There was one more disaster in 1856, not in South African waters but off Melbourne, when James was in command of the brigantine Prairie - further evidence that he undertook several voyages to Australia.

It was a hazardous business, going down to the sea in ships. The Cape’s deep waters and bays were particularly dangerous, the wind and weather unpredictable. James was fully aware of all the risks yet probably gave no thought to changing his occupation. He was a mariner born and bred.

A considerable family depended on him. He and his first wife, Elizabeth Watson Ridges, had five sons and a daughter. The last-born, Frederick James Ramsey, arrived in August 1850. This boy would never remember his mother who was dead and buried (in ‘Scorey’s Vault’ at St George’s Cathedral, Cape Town) by January 1851. James Ramsey Caithness is described in the burial register as Captain of the brig Diadem; in December of that year this ship was wrecked.  

Within months of Elizabeth’s death, James married again. This was a sensible option for a seafaring widower with a large family, the youngest just a year old. His second wife, Eliza Noyle, brought him a further three children – two sons and a daughter - between 1853 and 1858.

Port Elizabeth (Algoa Bay) in the 1850s was still in its early days though becoming an important town. An indication of the increase in its population – and consequently the amount of mail received – had been the establishment of a proper Post Office in a building for that purpose, with an official postmaster in charge. This structure deserves our attention, for ‘when the Post Office was moved across the Market Square, the [original] building became the abode of Mr Caithness and his sons.’* 

The [first] Post Office was a two-storeyed house which stood in a plot enclosed by a low fence at the foot of Castle Hill ... It was built in the early settler style with whitewashed walls and red-tiled roof flanked by two squat chimneys, whilst at the rear of the building were the usual out-houses and stables ... the rooms downstairs served as the Post Office. On the right hand side of the house was the old tumbled-down jail.

In the intriguing picture below, the main buildings of interest are identified by number:

1850 View of Castle Hill taken from the Market Square. No 2 in this pic is the first Post Office in Port Elizabeth, later the house of Mr Caithness. It is recognizable in the picture below dated 1864. Key: 1. Jail; 2. Post Office; 3. Richards and Impey; 4. Mrs Philips; 5. Mr Heugh; 6. Caesar Andrews; 7. Jailer Sterley's cottages; 8. Rev. F McClelland; 9. Mr Ashkettle; 10. The public well with people drawing up water.

1864 View of the Town Hall (with pillared portico and hatted gentlemen standing at foot of steps), the Obelisk at right; to right of Town Hall is the Market Bell and, beyond that, the 2-storeyed house of Mr Caithness, formerly the Post Office. It has three windows looking out over the Square. Note the absence of houses on the hill behind. The shape of the Caithness house with some minor alterations such as addition of a lean-to verandah (slanting roof with poles holding it up) remains much the same as the building was during its time as a Post Office.

* Port Elizabeth in Bygone Days, J J Redgrave (Wynberg: Rustica Press 1947)

Acknowledgement:
Tom Sheldon for details of Elizabeth Caithness's burial, also on the shipwrecks of Diadem and Prairie.

  

Mariners: Caithness and the Flying Dragon 3

W and J Pile Shipbuilders of Monkwearmouth:
The Flying Dragon was built at this yard

The reports of Flying Dragon’s disastrous fire at the end of July 1854 were still fresh in public memory when she was again in the news. 

Incredibly, within a matter of months the vessel was involved in a second fire. The headline, ‘Loss of the Flying Dragon’, would have given readers a sense of déjà vu as they perused their papers over breakfast.

An account in the Graham’s Town Journal was repeated in the Hobart Town Daily Courier on 16 July 1855 after the usual colonial time lag: 

Loss of the Flying Dragon: This vessel, which put into Simon’s Bay some months ago [July 1854], having a fire smouldering on board, was entirely consumed by the same destructive element on Tuesday last, when a youth, the son of the master, Captain Caithness, unfortunately lost his life. She had been surveyed and was expected to put to sea on Tuesday next. The unfortunate youth who perished on the occasion had previously encountered another narrow escape. He was on board the Sea Gull when she ran ashore in Table Bay, and by a miracle escaped being knocked overboard when another vessel came in collision with her on that occasion.

The Liverpool Daily Post of 12 June 1855 offers a precise date: ‘Cape of Good Hope, April 19, The Flying Dragon, Caithness, in ballast*, was burnt to the water’s edge in Simon’s Bay yesterday. Crew, except captain’s son, saved.’

It seems the second fire took place on the night of 18 April 1855. The use of the same phrase as in reports of the first fire – ‘burnt to the water’s edge’ - adds to a measure of confusion arising from the vessel’s two similar but separate tragedies. Initially it was stated that the Flying Dragon had been scuttled after the damage sustained in the events of July 1854. How then could she have been about to put to sea again in April 1855?

Subsequent to the first fire, an enterprising Cape businessman by the name of Suffert had purchased the Flying Dragon’s hull and instituted extensive repairs on the vessel. The considerable sum outlaid for this work would be covered as Suffert confidently expected to make handsome profits employing the Flying Dragon in taking settlers to Australia, with James Caithness as Master.

The second fire put an end to the plan and cost the life of Caithness’s son. Although the latter is not named in contemporary accounts, this was in all likelihood Alfred Douglas Caithness, at twelve old enough to be learning the ropes crewing aboard his father’s ship. The boy had been involved in the Sea Gull wreck the previous July but had emerged unscathed. Now James endured the loss of a child in awful circumstances as well as the bitter disappointment of losing another ship. It’s not impossible that this double blow hastened James’s own early death, at the age of forty-five, five years later.** 

Suffert apparently continued his interests in ocean transport: in 1858 he sent the Colonial Office a tender for conveying emigrants to Melbourne.***

The Flying Dragon press reports dispel any doubts that it was James Caithness who was captain of the Sea Gull in July 1854 and there is a hint that James’s acquaintance with Suffert may well have been linked to the Sea Gull’s carrying passengers to Australia, though the gale prevented that particular voyage. 

Reference to the death of Captain Caithness’s son in the second Flying Dragon fire, the presence of the same boy in the Sea Gull incident, together with the absence of a burial record for Alfred Caithness are all strong pieces of evidence underpinning this chapter of the Caithness story.

Scrimshaw Flying Dragon

*      i.e.  with no cargo loaded

**    it is a guess that the boy was Alfred, but it's significant that no records of Alfred’s burial have been found;
       James jnr (christened James Edward) was the eldest son, then aged 16, but he did not die young.
***  Messrs H and E Suffert of Cape Town; the Suffert brothers were in partnership