This week, it's 100 years since the SS Mendi sank with 646 dead, of whom 607 were black soldiers of the SA Native Labour Corps.
For the past three weeks, the Cape Times has featured the sinking of the Mendi. I welcome this focusing our attention on this because the SS Mendi volunteers, survivors as well as those who died, have neither been paid due attention by the writers of maritime disasters of South Africa, nor, when I was teacher of history in high school, by the writers of history textbooks.
There are unpleasant stories that surround the sinking of the ship. One such story concerns the behaviour of the captain and officers of the Darro, the cargo ship that rammed into the Mendi in the English Channel. Even though the Darro had place for 1177 passengers and crew, and was sailing empty except for its crew, no attempt was made to rescue survivors of the SS Mendi.
Another unpleasantness concerns the fact that members of the SA Native Labour Corps who survived the sinking of the Mendi, and so also thousands of other volunteers for the Labour Corps, were denied the World War I campaign medals that all soldiers received afterwards.
The sinking of the Mendi, as is the case with many other maritime disasters, is also a story of bravery, the bravery of the volunteers, and that of Reverend Isaac Wauchope Dyobha, who urged the men to remain calm and to face the death they had known, when volunteering, might await them.
According to the Cape Times, the sinking of SS Mendi is South Africa's worst maritime disaster and surpasses the sinking of HMS Birkenhead in 1845, when 450 persons died. Two other sources, as well as the Birkenhead Brewery, put the date of the wrecking of the Birkenhead as 1852 and one of these sources puts the number who lost their lives at 420. But whether 450 or 420 is not the point; one life lost is already too high a cost.
Be that as it may, this comparison with HMS Birkenhead reminds me of another comparison with that vessel. This concerns the wrecking of the transport ship the Abercrombie Robinson in 1842. According to my source, the Birkenhead has been held up as an example of the heroism of its crew and the rigid adherence to discipline in the face of extreme danger. But the same can be said of the Abercrombie Robinson disaster - it bears testimony to the heroism and the discipline of its men.
On both the Abercrombie Robinson (1842) and the Birkenhead (1852) the order was given not to immediately abandon ship after the ships had run aground.
The idea in both instances was to stabilise the ship and to run a line between ship and shore as an evacuation route.
In the case of the Abercrombie Robinson, this strategy was successful; a line was erected between ship and shore while all aboard waited their turn patiently.
By 1pm, all 600 people on board the Abercrombie Robinson had landed safely ashore, with not one life being lost.
Ten years later, the HMS Birkenhead crew thought along the same lines - no immediate abandonment of ship. But, while the ship was being stabilised and a line erected between ship and shore, the ship sank and there was great loss of life.
One could wonder why the almost miraculous feat accomplished by the personnel on board the Abercrombie has not become the legend the Birkenhead has.
It was probably because the successful evacuation of the Abercrombie was overshadowed by the dreadful grounding of the Waterloo on the same day, its breaking up and loss of some 190 lives in full view of people on the shore and by those on board the Abercrombie, by noon that day.
While a shipwreck usually occurs through an act of God, there is a tale that concerns the wreck of the La Rozette that was planned and engineered by a mutinous band in 1786. The prime movers were the brothers Antonio and Stefano Tailjasco, together with the ship’s carpenter, Francois Ras. All three felt aggrieved at the treatment they had received at the hands of the ship’s officers and carried a deep resentment within them.
They recruited the ship’s cookand another sailor to join their mutinous band, after they had issued death threats to these two. Armed with three hatchets and a hammer from the carpenter's toolbox, four of the mutineers became murderers - the fifth was at the helm of the ship.
They killed the officers and remaining crew in brutal fashion, with the exception of the second mate, Boij, who killed the last remaining crew member, the cabin boy. With this deed, Boij became a fellow mutineer. However, this status was soon lost when he himself was struck with an axe and thrown overboard.
The mutineers then engineered the sinking of the ship by having the carpenter break a hole in its bottom.
He assured his companions the ship would sink without trace. He had not finished breaking the hole when he thought the others were about to leave without him and left off completing the breaking up of the ship. To their dismay the La Rozette did not sink, but lay ashore on the rocks for all to see. The circumstances under which the ship was wrecked were investigated.
Ultimately, the mutineers were found guilty and four of them were subjected to a most cruel death, the details of which I find too gruesome to recount here. The cook was spared their fate but had to watch the execution of his comrades and was then hanged.
The majority of the hapless souls on board the Cospatrick, which caught fire in 1874, drowned or perished because of the blaze. In the end, second officer Henry MacDonald and 29 others found themselves in a little open boat without water or food.
One by one the men died, and it was at a certain juncture that the story of the survivors of the Cospatrick overlaps with that of the Andes survivors – members of a soccer team who ate parts of the bodies of their dead fellow countrymen after their plane crashed in an inhospitable mountainous region.
The last survivors of the Cospatrick ate the liver and drank the blood of those who had died. Drinking the blood of the dead became daily practice for the five survivors. They were eventually rescued by the British Sceptre, but in the end there were only three survivors, among them MacDonald.
Then there is the story of a potential shipwreck survivor whose greed was his undoing. The De Visch ran aground on some rocks in 1740. Thepeople on board were saved by an ingenious method – a large empty cauldron was fed, by rope, to the vessel, and survivors were hauled to land via the cauldron. But when it came the turn of the butler, the butler's mate and a little boy, things went wrong. The cauldron capsized when one of its iron rings broke off.
The butler's mate and the little boy were rescued, but the butler sank and drowned. He had stuffed his pockets with gold coins, which dramatically increased his weight. Thus he perished because of greed.
It is fitting that the SS Mendi is being remembered and that the bravery of the soldiers on board is remembered. The tales of those who remember the Mendi are moving, especially those whose ancestors died on the Mendi. So, also, I hope, we remember those other brave people who survived or died during a maritime disaster.
Finally, I see a front page photograph (Cape Times, February 21) of a smiling Junaid Arendse with his mother, Monique. Junaid, says the caption, has two weeks to live since the cancer he has been diagnosed with and which was in remission has returned. I cannot know whether Junaid is brave or not.
He is so young – only seven years old. He might not know the import of what is happening. Monique certainly does – her sadness in the photograph tells us. And one must be brave to cherish your loved one while the world around you is falling apart. As Monique is.