Page 17 - KBHA Bulletin 16

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of infantry, being 700 men in total, excluding their families and a corps of Militia.

Annual Company expenditure was £80 – £90,000 but as returns were only £3 – £4,000
the Island was clearly a loss-making enterprise. Under the Crown the Island now had to

pay its way. The new Governor, Middlemore, arrived with instructions to slash expenses
ruthlessly and he did so by dispersing the garrison, pensioning off some and re-hiring

others, and dismissing most of the Company’s civil servants. Formerly well-off
individuals were reduced overnight to near-poverty and, in fact, the circumstances of

almost everyone on the Island suddenly bordered on penury as neither the Company nor

the British Government made any provision for the former servants. This condition was
noted by Darwin who spent a week there in July 1836:

On viewing the Island from an eminence, the first remark which occurs is on the infinite
number of roads & likewise of forts. The public expenses, if one forgets its character as a
prison, seems out of all proportion to the extent or value of the Island. So little level or
useful land is there, that it seems surprising how so many people, (about 5,000) can
subsist. The lower orders, or the emancipated slaves, are, I believe, extremely poor; they
complain of want of work; a fact which is also shewn by the cheap labour. From the
reduction in number of public servants owing to the island being given up by the East
Indian Company & consequent emigration of many of the richer people, the poverty
probably will increase. The chief food of the working class is rice with a little salt meat;
as these articles must be purchased, the low wages tell heavily; the fine times, as my old
guide called them, when “Bony” was here can never again return. Now that the people
are blessed with freedom, a right which I believe they fully value, it seems probable that
their numbers will quickly increase; if so, what is to become of the little state of St
Helena?

Charles Darwin’s Diary, 1934: 411.

This prospect of enduring poverty was the “push” factor that in 1838 caused whole
families as well as about 110 others, mainly young men, to emigrate to the Cape. (Gosse,

1990: 309.) Members of Saul Solomon’s family and his extended family, which included

the Gideons’, Isaacs’s, and Moss’s, emigrated to the Cape at this time, although he
remained on the Island and died there in 1853. At the Cape his nephews, Saul and Henry,

entered the printing, book-binding and stationery business. In 1857 they became printers
of the Cape Argus and in 1863 they became its proprietors, and through it exercised