Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Maps
- Preface
- Author's Note
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Part I Scotland: Border Farm to Literary Edinburgh (1789–1820)
- Part II The Cape Frontier: Pioneer, Settler Leader (1820–1821)
- 5 Settler Leader: Arrival
- 6 At Glen Lynden
- 7 Beyond Glen Lynden
- Part III Cape Town and Genadendal: The Stand Against Power (1822–1825)
- Part IV The Frontier, Karroo: Rural Retreat and the ‘Great Cause’ (1825–1826)
- Part V London Literary Life and The Anti-Slavery Campaign (1826–1833)
- Part VI Scotland and Highgate A Poet Returns to his Roots and Last Works (1830–1834)
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - At Glen Lynden
from Part II - The Cape Frontier: Pioneer, Settler Leader (1820–1821)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Maps
- Preface
- Author's Note
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Part I Scotland: Border Farm to Literary Edinburgh (1789–1820)
- Part II The Cape Frontier: Pioneer, Settler Leader (1820–1821)
- 5 Settler Leader: Arrival
- 6 At Glen Lynden
- 7 Beyond Glen Lynden
- Part III Cape Town and Genadendal: The Stand Against Power (1822–1825)
- Part IV The Frontier, Karroo: Rural Retreat and the ‘Great Cause’ (1825–1826)
- Part V London Literary Life and The Anti-Slavery Campaign (1826–1833)
- Part VI Scotland and Highgate A Poet Returns to his Roots and Last Works (1830–1834)
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
They spent the night where Field Cornet Opperman left them and next morning ‘leaving a sufficient guard to protect our little camp, we proceeded on foot, well armed, to inspect our new domain’. They found it ‘sprinkled over…with beautiful clumps and groves of mimosa trees, interspersed with open grassy pastures, while the river, a gurgling mountain-brook, meandered placidly through the fertile meadows’. Almost a scene from ‘The Autumnal Excursion’ but for the troops of quaggas, the hartebeest, duiker, rietbok and wild hog, all named and described in his African Sketches (1834), based on the lost journal he kept all those years.
At last they chose a spot three miles up river from that camp for their first settlement. They called it Glen Lynden, a name of Pringle's invention rather than from the map of Scotland. It was later given to their whole location and now denotes only the glebe of their church and its Dutch Reformed neighbour. It became the farm of Pringle's father Robert, now called Lower Clifton, and he and Beatrice, Thomas's stepmother, are buried there.
Captain Harding, that ‘very intelligent and agreeable man’, as Pringle described him in a letter to Scott, arrived with the government surveyor H.J.H. Azerond, to define their boundaries and formally hand over the location to Thomas. Then came a rude shock. Harding and his party left next morning (1 July 1820) ‘after strongly advising me to take careful precautions to avoid being surprised by our wild neighbours, the Bushmen and Caffers’.
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- Information
- Thomas PringleSouth African pioneer, poet and abolitionist, pp. 79 - 92Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012