Sunday, 29th October 1837

After his dismal performance at last week's proclamation of the new monarch I gave young Strangways his due comeuppance. I told him that I wished to have a copy of my own of the letters that I received from London regarding our new Queen and gave him the task of handcopying them for me. He produced them for me, but only after many an attempt and much annoyance. The knottiness and obscurity of the language and my insistence that copies of letters of such historical interest should be completely without error or correction meant that he needed to start again in his task several times. I cannot but feel that if he did not finish them when he did he might have actually uttered a curse word! Such was the limit to which he was pushed!

To be honest I could not give a tinker's curse about the letters, but just wanted to give the lad a slap on the wrist after his poor showing on Friday last. Ill natured of me, I suppose, but you take your amusement where you can.

Word has come to me of a ship arrival that will, I predict, cause some ructions within the Colony.

The Solway (Cpt R. Pearson) arrived at Kingscote on October 16th having sailed from Hamburg in June with a full complement of some 70 Germans.

Now let me say at the outset that I am not one prone to prejudice and the unthinking condemnation of other nations. Reason, a dedicated study of the facts and a modern, enlightened attitude towards the peccadilloes of Societies other than our own are my watchwords in this matter.

And so it seems to me entirely without prejudice and utterly reasonable to say that even such a low type of Englishman as Fisher has within him a natural British quality that places him above even the best that other nations can offer.

Never prejudice, but reason, a study of the facts and personal experience, have led me to understand that the French as a race are entirely treacherous, supercilious, unhygienic, snail eating regicides.

And now we have Germans. As I said, I am not one to set my cap against other nations and races, but even so, I have some concerns about these new Teutonic arrivals.

At the moment we have them offshore on the island, but if we allow them to come to the mainland and live among us as Colonists then what trouble may it cause? With their sausages and their Martin Luther and their leather breeches and their jaw breaker of a language I can only but hope that they make some attempt at fitting in to our British society here in the Colony.

They have come to an English Colony and I cannot help but feel that the least they can do is to learn to speak English, dress as the English dress and show an acceptance of the value and beliefs that make England the very acme of the nations of the world.  

If they choose not to blend in with our British society, but insist on continuing with their own forms of dress, of food, of language, of religion and of custom then I fear that our local English colonists will not accept them, but view them as willfully adherent to ways that are clearly inferior to our own. 

And I trust they have no hopes of setting up a Germanic enclave here in the Colony. We cannot have two different types of colonist: one British and devoted to the British way of life and the other devoted to the Prussian view.

But the secret fear that will haunt all our British colonists is that the Germans will try and  convert us to their German ways. I suspect that these seventy colonists are but the first in a flotilla of German laden boats and once they are here in sufficient numbers will we all finish by drinking heavy red wines and carving cuckoo clocks? Will we all be required to be punctual and humourless?

For the nonce, whilst they are detained at Kingscote, all is well. But who knows what the future might bring?