While 2020 marks the second centenary anniversary of the arrival of the 1820 settlers, with much having changed since then, some things remain the same.
When the 1820 settlers arrived in Algoa Bay, there were just a handful of visible incumbents and the only buildings were Fort Frederick and a cluster of cottages below the bluff on which it stood.
The first wave of settlers came on the Chapman on April 10 after four months at sea, with a stop-off in Table Bay.
It was the first of a series of historic landings through to June of 1820, which saw 60 parties comprising of a total of 4,000 settlers arrive in different ships.
Thomas Pringle, from the county of Kent in England, who arrived in Port Elizabeth on the Brilliant on May 15, describes the scene in his Narrative of a Residence in South Africa.
“It was animated and interesting.
“Around us in the west corner of the bay were anchored 10 to 12 large vessels which had recently arrived with immigrants of whom a great proportion were still on board.
“Directly in front, on a rising ground a few hundred yards from the beach, stood the little fortified barracks or blockhouse called Fort Fredrick, occupied by a division of the 72nd Regiment, with the tents and marquees of the officers pitched on the heights around it.
“At the foot of those heights, nearer the beach, stood three thatched cottages and one or two wooden houses, which formed the offices of the civil functionaries appointed to transact the business of immigration and to provide the settlers with provisions and other stores and with ox wagons for their conveyance up country.”
While they waited, the settlers camped on the beach that existed at that time in front of the Campanile — subsequently built to commemorate their arrival, and unveiled in 1923.
Then they loaded up all their belongings and set out for the small farms that had been assigned to them in the Bathurst area.
Bay historian Jenny Bennie said on Wednesday the veld they moved through had likely not changed much.
“We whizz through it today in our cars, on tar roads, and they trundled along in their wagons, but though it has been transformed in patches by agriculture, development and erosion, much of it is probably just like it was then.”
The arrival of the settlers was presaged by the Napoleonic Wars and the great unemployment at the time in England, she said.
“They were encouraged by the British government of the time to leave their homes and to settle on their allotted land … on the eastern frontier,” she said.
BY GUY ROGERS – HeraldLIVE