Page 11 - LP1478

The London Philatelist

Natal: Use of the 1857 Embossed Stamps. Part 1.

Keith P. Klugman FRPSL

n 1492, Bartholomew Diaz reached the Cape of Good Hope from Portugal, but could not confirm
Ithat he had rounded the southern tip of Africa by ship for the first time – this achievement went
to another Portuguese explorer. On Christmas Day, 1497, Vasco de Gama, after rounding the Cape,
named the Bay of Natal based on the day of the year that he first saw it (Holden, p36).
The first English record of Natal was nearly 200 years later, when in 1683, about 80 sailors,
wrecked at Delagoa Bay, made their way south on foot to Cape Town, and their report described
the River of Natal at 30 degrees south latitude (Holden, p36). Today we know it is at precisely
29.8587 degrees south!
Three years later another English ship, the Stavenisse managed to wreck itself at the Bay of Natal.
After a year of labour, the shipwrecked sailors had put together a small boat from the wreckage,
and sailed down to Cape Town, leaving four of their compatriots behind, who did not fancy their
chances on the small boat. The Dutch government at the Cape then rescued three of these reluctant
settlers, but no successful attempt was made to colonise the area for another 140 years (Holden, p37).
In 1820 Chaka, a formidable Zulu warrior, subjugated the local tribes and four years later, Lt
Farewell with around 20 English companions, having failed to persuade the authorities in Cape
Town or London of their plans, decided to start a new colony at the Bay of Natal (Holden, p46).
To further their goal, they later renamed Port Natal, D’Urban, in honour of the newly-arrived
governor of the Cape, Sir Benjamin D’Urban. (Holden, p62)
These settlers lived in an uneasy truce with Chaka and his successor Dingaan until 1838 when
Dingaan, wary of an approach for land from Dutch voortrekker settlers, murdered Piet Retief and his
followers, and completely laid waste to the town of D’Urban, with the remaining settlers fleeing on the
ship Comet.
The earliest letter from Natal in private hands was written in happier times in 1836, by one of
those who fled in 1838, Susan Champion, wife of the American missionary at Dingaan’s kraal,
George Champion (Klugman, 2010). After the defeat of Dingane by a Boer force in 1838, the Boers
set up a Republic, Natalia, with its capital at Pietermaritzburg, 52 miles inland of Durban.
In a very short-lived military campaign in June-July 1842, from which a single letter is recorded
in private hands (Klugman, 2014), Natal was conquered by the British and became a colony
administered as part of the Cape Colony. In 1856, Natal became an independent crown colony and
issued its first postage stamps the following year.
The four stamps (3d buff, 6d green, 9d blue, one shilling buff) were adapted from locally embossed
revenue stamps, the dies for which were designed by B. Wyon of Regent Street, London, and only
defaced in the 1930s (Dickson, p25). They paid the local 3d rate of postage per ½ oz and its multiples
for heavier letters. The embossing was applied to different coloured papers from that of the light
blue laid paper of the current revenue stamps, and the postage stamps were issued on 26 May 1857
(Dickson, p32). At least the 3d appears to have been embossed in a sheet of 108 stamps, comprising
12 rows of nine stamps, presumably six rows from one side of the sheet, and then six from the
other, allowing tête-bêche pairs to exist comprising pairs across rows six and seven (Dickson, p33).
No genuine tête-bêche pairs of the higher values are recorded. The stamps were a provisional issue,
pending the arrival of Chalon head stamps designed and printed by Perkins Bacon in London
which arrived in the colony in late June, 1859, a date concordant with the end of the first period
of use of these embossed stamps. Due to a shortage of the Chalon 3d in August and September
1861, both the 3d and 6d embossed values were reintroduced just for those 2 months.
The philatelic challenge of collecting Natal is that the original dies were used to create reprints

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