Captain Benjamin Moodie (1789 - 2 April 1856) was the 10th

Laird Laird () is the owner of a large, long-established Scottish estate. In the traditional Scottish order of precedence, a laird ranked below a baron and above a gentleman. This rank was held only by those lairds holding official recognition in ...

of Melsetter who led a party of 200 Scottish immigrants to the

Cape Colony The Cape Colony ( nl, Kaapkolonie), also known as the Cape of Good Hope, was a British Empire, British colony in present-day South Africa named after the Cape of Good Hope, which existed from 1795 to 1802, and again from 1806 to 1910, when i ...

in 1817, three years before the arrival of the

1820 Settlers The 1820 Settlers were several groups of British colonists from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, settled by the government of the United Kingdom and the Cape Colony authorities in the Eastern Cape of South Africa in 1820. Origins After th ...

. Moodie served in the Ross and Caithness Militia and returned from the

Napoleonic wars The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major global conflicts pitting the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I, against a fluctuating array of European states formed into various coalitions. It produced a period of Fren ...

in 1815 as a

half-pay Half-pay (h.p.) was a term used in the British Army and Royal Navy of the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries to refer to the pay or allowance an officer received when in retirement or not in actual service. Past usage United Kingdom In the Eng ...

officer, and was forced to sell the heavily indebted family estate in the

Orkney Islands Orkney (; sco, Orkney; on, Orkneyjar; nrn, Orknøjar), also known as the Orkney Islands, is an archipelago in the Northern Isles of Scotland, situated off the north coast of the island of Great Britain. Orkney is 10 miles (16 km) north ...

. In 1817 he led a party of indentured Scottish artisans to settle in the Cape Colony. The first party arrived in

Cape Town Cape Town ( af, Kaapstad; , xh, iKapa) is one of South Africa's three capital cities, serving as the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It is the legislative capital of the country, the oldest city in the country, and the second largest ...

on 14 June 1817 on the ship ''Brilliant'', followed by a further 50 on the ''Garland'' on 23 August 1817, and a third party on the ''Clyde'' on 24 September 1817. Among the party was

David Hume David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment philo ...

, who became an explorer and big-game hunter, and his brother Donald Moodie. A second brother,

John Moodie John Moodie, Jr. (1859 in Hamilton, Canada West – 8 August, 1944) was a Canadian textile manufacturer, executive, and hobbyist. In 1903, Moodie was founder of the Hamilton Automobile Club (now CAA South Central Ontario), the first organization ...

, joined him in South Africa in 1819. Benjamin Moodie settled on the farm Groot Vaders Bosch near

Swellendam Swellendam is the fifth oldest town in South Africa (after Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Simon's Town, and Paarl), a town with 17,537 inhabitants situated in the Western Cape province. The town has over 50 provincial heritage sites, most of them b ...

and later at White Sands, now known as

Witsand Witsand is a small coastal town situated at the mouth of the Breede River in the Western Cape, South Africa. It is a good fishing area and is widely considered to be the whale nursery of the South African coastline. Witsand has seen some of the lar ...

, at the mouth of the

Breede River The Breede River ( af, Breederivier), also known as Breë River, is a river in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. Travelling inland north from the city of Cape Town, the river runs in a west to east direction. The surrounding western mou ...

. After his wife Margaret died in 1838, he returned to Britain where he married Susan Barnett, returning to the Cape in 1841 with 21 orphan children. In 1892, Benjamin Moodie's grandson Thomas Moodie led a party of mostly Afrikaner farmers to settle in

Rhodesia Rhodesia (, ), officially from 1970 the Republic of Rhodesia, was an unrecognised state in Southern Africa from 1965 to 1979, equivalent in territory to modern Zimbabwe. Rhodesia was the ''de facto'' successor state to the British colony of S ...

, where they established the town of

Melsetter Chimanimani is a town in Zimbabwe. Location Chimanimani is a village located in Manicaland Province, in south-eastern Zimbabwe, close to the border with Mozambique. The village lies about , by road, south of Mutare, the location of the provin ...

, named after the Moodie ancestral home in the Orkney Islands.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Moodie, Benjamin Scottish emigrants to South Africa 1789 births 1856 deaths