The Chevalier de Johnstone - by Ann Swinfen

Broughty Ferry is a former fishing village on the Tay estuary, four miles down river from Dundee, on the east coast of Scotland. The fishing boats have gone now, together with the men who sailed them and who manned the whaling ships which made the perilous journeys to Arctic waters in the days when whale oil was a precious commodity. In the nineteenth century the ‘jute barons’ of Dundee began to build their handsome houses here, and ever since it has been a place for quiet homes, with nothing more disturbing than the cry of gulls and oyster-catchers, the river carrying little traffic, but providing a home for seals and dolphins. The last place you would imagine to have witnessed dragoons in pursuit of a fleeing Jacobite officer in the aftermath of a terrible battle. Yet it is the place where the Chevalier de Johnstone made his dramatic escape, thanks to the courage of some unlikely friends.

 

The harbour at Broughty still guarded by its medieval castle

James Johnstone, later known as the Chevalier de Johnstone, was born in Edinburgh on 25 July, 1719, and grew up in Scotlandand London. In 1738 he visited two uncles in Russia, evidence of an early taste for adventure which would shape the rest of his life. Almost immediately after Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his standard at Glenfinnan on 19 August 1745, Johnstone joined the Jacobite army in Perth, and soon rose to the rank of captain. Throughout the 1745 rebellion, he participated in all the major battles, culminating in the massive defeat at Culloden, on 16 April 1746, when the Jacobite forces were scattered and then pursued ruthlessly throughout the Highlands by the Duke of Cumberland’s army. Most of those who were caught were hanged, while Prince Charles Stuart turned tail and fled, abandoning his followers and escaping to France. Writing later in his memoirs, Johnstone was severely critical of the prince, claiming that he could have rallied his forces instead of deserting them.

 

Prince Charles Edward Stuart

Most of the Jacobites who survived tried to go to ground in the mountains and glens of the Highlands. Some made their escape, like the prince, via the western isles and thence to France (always a supporter of the Scots against England). James Johnstone, however, made the perilous decision to head south, into the Lowlandswhich were held by the English army and by the Protestant Lowland Scots who remained loyal to the English crown and not to the half Polish, quarter Italian, French speaking Catholic Prince Charles.

And this is where Broughty Ferry enters the story of the Chevalier de Johnstone.

Johnstone managed to reach the estate of a Mr Graham at Duntrune, a man he had been told might be willing to provide help. Graham’s two sons had fought with the Jacobites, and his family had been involved in the 1715 rebellion, but he had stayed at home during the present troubles, and so was not suspect. Inspired by a particularly vivid dream, which was to prove accurate, Johnstone was trying to make his way south to Edinburgh, where he had old friends who (he hoped) might be able to smuggle him on board a ship for France. However, to reach Edinburgh he would have to cross the two great east coast rivers – the Tay and the Forth. Graham’s estate at Duntrune was some five miles to the north of the Tay, and the whole area between Duntrune and a possible crossing place at Broughty was alive with Cumberland’s dragoons.

 

Butcher Cumberland

Graham hid Johnstone in an enclosure on his estate, full of high bushes of broom, and provided food – eggs, butter, bread, and cheese for breakfast, washed down with a bottle of wine and a bottle of beer – Johnstone’s first decent meal for weeks. Afterwards, while the fugitive slept, Mr Graham devised a plan for him to reach Broughty, as it was known then (or ‘Brochtie’ in Scots, 'Bruach Tatha' in Gaelic), where he arranged for fishermen to row him across the river. He then returned to provide Johnstone a dinner of the best piece of beef he had ever tasted. Over an excellent bottle of claret, Graham explained the plan and the two men synchronised their watches. First, at five o’clock Johnstone must follow, at a discreet distance, one of Graham’s men as he walked some miles to a windmill carrying a sack of grain for his master. This Johnstone did, waiting in hiding for his next guide, an elderly woman who led him on until they reached the hill overlooking Broughty.

‘You must wait here,’ she said, ‘while I go into Broughty to see the fishermen.’

Johnstone hid himself behind the trees and undergrowth in a furrow on the edge of a ploughed field beside the road down into Broughty, more or less where our nineteenth century house stands today. On the other side of the road, on Fort Hill, stood the fort (or what remained of it) built two hundred years earlier by Henry VIII’s forces during the ‘Rough Wooing’, a campaign which was intended to bring about a marriage between the children Mary Queen of Scots and the future King Edward VI. (It failed.)

 

18th century dragoon

As Johnstone waited in considerable fear, a large troop of dragoons rode up the hill from Broughty, passing within feet of his hiding place, having searched every fisherman’s cottage, boat shed, and tavern in the village. They were closely followed by the old woman, in a state of panic. As it was drawing toward dusk, the dragoons rode away, having failed to find any of the Jacobites for whom they had been searching. The old woman, however, warned that the fishermen now refused to row Johnstone over the river, having been intimidated by the threats of the dragoons. She urged him to return to Duntrune.

This the Chevalier de Johnstone refused to do, and left his hiding place to hurry down the hill to the village where he had expected to be taken across the river on the next stage in his escape. He had no difficulty in finding the fishermen’s inn on the shore, and no difficulty in finding the fishermen. But the men continued to be terrified and flatly refused to take him across the river. Johnstone argued that, since the dragoons had just searched the whole village and found nothing, now was the safest time to make the journey. Still they refused.

 

The Ship Inn on the river front may stand on the same spot

The innwife, Mistress Burn, had two exceptionally beautiful daughters, Mally and Jenny. They taunted the men with their cowardice, but to no effect.

‘O Jenny,’ said the elder girl, ‘they are despicable cowards and poltroons. I would not for the world that this unfortunate gentleman were taken in our house. I pity his situation. Will you take an oar? I’ll take the other, and we will row him over ourselves, to the eternal shame of these pitiful and heartless cowards.’

[So the Chevalier de Johnstone reports her. She is very well spoken for a Broughty innwife’s daughter!]

 

The wide Tay at Broughty

At ten o’clock, Johnstone and the two girls ran the boat down the pebble beach to the river and got aboard. The Tay was then about two miles wide at this point, and it carries more water than any other river in Britain. To row across it, in the dark, in time of war, was no small undertaking, but the two girls took turn about on one oar, while the Chevalier de Johnstone took the other, and thus the fugitive officer was rowed safely across to Fife, reaching it around midnight. Once on shore the girls set him on the road to St Andrews. They refused any payment, but Johnstone managed to slip ten or twelve shillings into Mally’s pocket, before kissing them both soundly and continuing on his flight to Edinburgh. He was never to see them again, but he never forgot them.

After more adventures, the Chevalier de Johnstone reached Edinburgh and travelled thence to Rotterdam and Paris, disguised as a servant to Lady Jane Douglas, as foretold in his dream. He would continue to lead an exciting life for many years in Europe and Canada, eventually recorded in The Memoirs of the Chevalier de Johnstone.

As for Broughty and the two girls, Mally and Jenny Burn? No doubt Broughty slipped quietly back into its life as a fishing village, and presumably the girls held their tongues, for there is no record of reprisals by Cumberland’s forces. Today a simple plaque stands as a memorial to their act of defiance and courage, in the face of the fishermen’s cowardice.

The plaque in Broughty commemorating the escape

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

The day the Endeavour sailed close to home by Debra Daley

It’s the morning of the second day of November and I’ve sat down at the kitchen table to finish writing this post. Every so often, as always, my gaze strays to the big view framed in the window. The shellfish season is passing and the garden is throwing out new spring shoots and blossoms. The pōhutukawa in the gully below is already coming into crimson bloom. Tui are feasting on the flax flowers and I can hear blackbirds and thrushes too and a rasping call as a pair of rainbow lorikeets pass by, Australian invaders that have turned up looking ridiculously overwrought, among our more restrained native birds, in their green and scarlet and blue feathers.

Flax blooming in my garden, 2 November 2016

In the distance Mauao, an extinct volcano, rises up on the southern tip of the entrance to Tauranga Harbour, where I live on the Ōtūmoetai peninsula in the Bay of Plenty – a wide scoop of sandy beaches that stretches for 250 kilometres on the northeastern coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Over Mauao’s shoulder lies the purple-grey outline of Mayor Island, once a source of valuable obsidian, which the local tangata whenua (people of the land) obtained for use as cutting and scraping tools in centuries past.

View of Mauao from Ōtūmoetai, 2 November 2016. 

Ōtūmoetai means ‘the tide standing still as if asleep’.

View of Mt Maunganui (Mauao) from Ōtūmoetai. Undated sketch by S.L. Clarke, possibly 1880s. Tauranga Library.

On the morning of 2 November, two hundred and forty seven years ago, HMS Endeavour, the Royal Navy research vessel commanded by Lieutenant James Cook on his first voyage of discovery to Australia and New Zealand, was passing Maketu just south of Tauranga. (Later, one of my ancestors, Elizabeth Kelly, would run the one-room school at Maketu and her brother Richard would leave the family farm in 1916 to fight in the First World War. He was killed in France.) As the Endeavour approached the sweeping bay known as Te Moana-a-Toi (the sea of Toi), the master's mate, Richard Pickersgill, drew Cook’s attention to the large pallisaded settlements on the hilltops and the hundreds of canoes drawn up on the beaches. It was the most densely populated stretch of coast that the Endeavour had yet encountered in New Zealand – and it occurred to Cook to name the great curving coastline the Bay of Plenty.

Model of a Māori pā (fortified village) on a headland. Auckland War Memorial Museum. WikiMedia Commons.

By the late afternoon of 2 November, the Endeavour had reached Mayor Island with Mauao in sight. Twenty-six-year-old Joseph Banks, botanist and patron of natural sciences, was among the 90 men and boys on board. Banks, who had supplied £10,000 of his own money to equip the expedition, was accompanied by Linnaeus’s protegé, the Swedish botanist Dr Daniel Solander, a former watchmaker turned naturalist named Herman Spöring and the botanical draughtsman Sydney Parkinson. Samuel Johnson might have been aboard as well, remarkably enough, had Banks succeeded in persuading him to join the Endeavour’s expedition, but Dr Johnson had declared himself no enthusiast for ‘savage life’ and held fast to his spot in the snug at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Street. 

Sydney Parkinson. Engraving of pōhutukawa blossom (Metrosideros Excelsa) 1788, after a 1769 drawing.

I am beguiled by the thought of those Georgian urbanites lingering in proximity to my distant home in the South Pacific. How extraordinary that Banks, of whom I have read so much, was ever here. I can imagine him stooping his six-feet-five-inch frame in his ‘hutch’ – as he referred to his accommodation – to try on, for effect, the cloak he had obtained a week or two earlier from a Māori chief – he later commissioned a portrait of himself wearing it. Banks was impressed by the textile uses of harakeke (New Zealand flax). ‘Of the leaves of these plants,’ he wrote, ‘with very little preparation all [Māori] common wearing apparel are made, and all strings, lines and cordage for every purpose, and of a strength so much superior to hemp as scarce bear a comparison with it. The Finest cloaths are made with the extracted fibres, snow white and shining almost as silk and likewise surprisingly strong.’

Benjamin West. Joseph Banks, 1773. Usher Art Gallery, Lincoln. Sir Joseph Banks in a Māori cloak with Pacific trophies. 

Thomas Pringle. A woman weaving a flax cloak, photographed probably in the Rotorua district, 1905.

Cook was always on the lookout for a useful anchorage as a base for finding supplies of fresh food and water, but he was denied the opportunity to discoverthe excellent harbour at Tauranga and the large pā that overlooked its calm inner waters. While the Endeavour was sheltering at Mayor Island on the evening of 2 November, two large canoes packed with warriors sailed out to challenge the alien entity in their waters. The Endeavour’s men had experienced a number of similar encounters as they had made their way along the east coast of the North Island, mapmaking and gathering botanical specimens. Only that morning at Maketu, warriors had harassed the ship. The local people were in no mood to be welcoming. During the mid-18th century, most of the Bay of Plenty was engaged in tribal skirmishes between war parties or plunderers demanding satisfaction for various offences. The approach of warm weather in November traditionally marked the start of the fighting season and strangers, let alone an apparition of pale ‘goblins’, were regarded with suspicion. In a repeat of the repulse at Maketu, the Tauranga warriors performed a haka in their canoes, hurled stones and spears and chased the Endeavour away.

A sketch by Herman Spöring of the Endeavourchased off the Bay of Plenty coast, 2 November 1769. The Māori crew performed a haka and pelted the ship with stones.

It’s no great effort, I think, for enthusiasts of the 18th century to come into contact with its manifestations in other parts of the world, but here in New Zealand material evidence of that age is much more fugitive. You have to find it in covert human-made contours of the land or in terribly fragile remnants of organic materials or in the threads of memorised genealogies passed down through the generations. I am always looking for traces of that pre-European history though. I want to know what it was like to live here then.

A few months ago, a roadworks crew arrived one morning near my house and embarked on excavations to widen the street. Not long afterwards, the work came to a halt, and un-roadworks types turned up with cameras and clipboards. Archaeologists! The digging had exposed the remains of at least twenty five pre-European food storage structures - a find that confirmed existing evidence that a large Māori population had been living at Ōtūmoetai during the late 18th century. There were three pā on the peninsula at that time, the largest being its namesake. From the size and number of the storage pits, archaeologists estimated that the gardens belonging to this settlement could have fed as many as two thousand people. I was already greatly interested in Ōtūmoetai pā. Its footprint is preserved in a local historic reserve, which I sometimes pass through when I walk down to the waterfront.

Ōtūmoetai pā. Image by Philip Perry.

The body of the pā was situated on an escarpment with panoramic views of the harbour and of Mauao, before dropping some twenty metres in a series of steep, terraced embankments to a sandy foreshore that offered a safe refuge for canoes. Its location could hardly be more beneficial. A frost-free climate eased the cultivation of crops and there was an abundance of fish and seafood. When I first began digging terraces on our steep garden, I kept unearthing scatterings of seashells and learned that there are many middens in this area, produced when those long-ago inhabitants scooped out the contents of shellfish to dry in the sun. I often thought of those gardeners past, workingloamy soil that offered every advantage to the staple root crop of kūmara as well as yams, taro and gourds.

Gottfried Lindauer. Digging with the Kō, 1907. Auckland Art Gallery. The kō was a long-handled digging tool.

The Cornish printer and missionary William Colenso, who arrived in New Zealand in 1834, remarked of Māori cultivation practices, ‘… all worked alike: the chief, the lady and the slave; and all were under a rigid law of minute ceremonial restrictions, or tapu, which were invariably observed…. It was a pretty sight to see a chief and his followers at work in preparing the ground … They worked together, naked, save a small mat or fragment of one about their loins, in a regular line or band, each armed with a long handled narrow wooden spade (ko), and like ourselves in performing spade labour, worked backwards, keeping rank and time in all their movements, often enlivening their labour with a suitable chant, or song, in the chorus of which all joined.’

A Māori communal garden in the Auckland region before the arrival of Europeans. The two large plots contain kūmara (sweet potatoes) and uwhi (yams), with taro in the lower right and hue (bottle gourds) in the small plots in front. Image: Nancy Tichborne in Helen Leach, 1,000 years of gardening in New Zealand. Reed, 1984 

Ever since the kūmara storage pits were unearthed near my house, I have been ferreting around in the New Zealand Room at the Tauranga Library trying to discover more about everyday life in the Ōtūmoetai pā – and I have found a surprising amount. Too much to add here, but I will use my December post to describe as well as I can what I have learned of my neighbourhood in the late 18th century.