INTRODUCTION

In the decades following the American War of Independence, the United States was a significant presence at the Cape Colony. This chapter traces the writings of two US visitors to the Cape: Benjamin Stout and Robert Semple (1766–1816). Stout, a patriot and ship's captain, was shipwrecked in the Eastern Cape, and undertook an overland journey to Cape Town from June to November 1796. Very little is known about him other than that he was an American sea-captain plying his trade in the Indian Ocean. He was transporting rice from Bengal to Britain under charter to the English East India Company, when his ship Hercules ran aground on 16 June 1796 between the Begha and Keiskamma rivers on the Eastern Cape coast. Washed up with most of the crew intact, the survivors walked the 500-mile journey to Cape Town, helped along the way by sympathetic native inhabitants and Dutch settlers. When Stout returned to England in November 1796, he wrote an enthusiastic 112-page account of his journey, which was published in 1798, together with a 58-page Dedication to American president John Adams (1735–1826), exhorting Adams to colonise the Eastern Cape for America. There is no evidence that Adams read Stout's Narrative, but the general reading public enjoyed his tale, with edited versions appearing in many different compilations and one further full-length edition in 1820.