Rape of British women was newspaper fantasy

[dArKeR]

Theirs was a fate worse than death, a tale which chilled colonial Britain: women and girls shipwrecked on the wild coast of southern Africa in 1782 who had the misfortune to survive and be carried off by the natives. Castaways from the Grosvenor, one of the East India Company's finest vessels, included the wives and daughters of gentry left defenceless after the male passengers were reportedly slaughtered.

For the contemporary equivalent of the tabloid press it was a sensation. "By these Hottentots, they were dragged up into the interior parts of the country, for the purposes of the vilest brutish prostitution," said the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser.

Newspaper accounts of ravishings by "the most barbarous and monstrous of the human species" were so shocking that British society was relieved to be subsequently assured by an official investigation that the women had in fact perished before the natives got hold of them.

New evidence, however, suggests a rather different story.

Several female passengers did indeed survive and become intimate with tribesmen. But rather than being abducted and raped it appears they chose to become wives and mothers.

http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=33016

[bedtimeforbonzo]

1. whew

I'm glad that's finally settled ;)