Murderers, Miscreants and Mutineers

This work is the long-awaited sequel to the historianNigel Penn's award-winning book Rogues, Rebels andRunaways, in which he entertained and informedreaders with stories of the lives of some remarkablecharacters from early Cape history.In this new volume Penn, a consummate raconteurand storyteller, brings to life an assortment ofextraordinary personalities from the eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries. There is Maria Mouton,the first white woman at the Cape to be executed, forher adulterous affair with a slave and the murder of herhusband. Then, too, there is Johannes Seidenfaden,an LMS missionary whose 'enormities' so shockedDr John Philip, the LMS superintendent, that hebranded him 'a wolf in sheep's clothing'. (Seidenfaden,a married man, had not only attempted to seducehis Khoikhoi housekeeper on five occasions but alsoturned his mission station of Suurbraak, just outsideSwellendam, into his own personal fiefdom andimpoverished all the Khoikhoi inhabitants.)Other chapters tell stories of desertion by ill-treatedsoldiers in Cape Town, who intended to escape toMozambique but got no further than the HottentotsHolland Mountains, where they were apprehendedbefore being hanged; the escapades of the Swiss Meuron Regiment at the Cape; and the 'ear atrocity'in the Onder Bokkeveld near Ceres.These remarkable stories, told with élan, eruditionand humour, throw light on our extraordinary pastand reveal much about social relations and humanexperience in the early Cape colony.

Dettagli