To Begin the World Over Again

by Matthew Lockwood

  Energized by his success at Preston and Halifax, Clarkson traveled to Shelburne and Birchtown, the two largest refugee communities, where he entrusted the recruitment of settlers to David George and Moses Wilkinson as influential religious leaders. The result was overwhelming. Whole congregations signed up en masse, eager to recreate in Africa the communities they had first established in Nova Scotia. The numbers grew to such an extent that Clarkson began to fear that there would not be space to transport and settle so many, and called off further recruitment trips to St. John, Annapolis, and Digby, the very community that had sent Thomas Peters to London in the first place. Peters, who was in constant communication with Clarkson, was not a man to be deterred, however, and visited refugee communities himself, especially fellow veterans of the Black Pioneers, managing to recruit a further 400 settlers.

  As ever, trouble and complication dogged the refugees. From the beginning the Governor of Nova Scotia had been dead set against Clarkson’s mission, sure that eagerness to join the Sierra Leone settlement would be seen as proof of his failures as an administrator. Many members of Nova Scotia’s white community were equally opposed to allowing the refugees to leave. Free they might have been, but white Canadians still viewed the refugees through the lens of slavery. They considered the former slaves only in terms of cheap labor, and were loath to let them leave without a fight. Some refused to give refugees testimonials, hoping to scupper their chances of being accepted by Clarkson, while others spread tales of the nefarious designs of the Company, of re-enslavement, and of high mortality of the transatlantic journey and of life in Africa. Accounts of the deadly failure of the 1787 settlement were published in local papers, and read aloud to refugees “in every part of the town.”24

  Few were discouraged, however, and Clarkson considered it his moral duty to risk all to aid the refugees. “These poor unfortunate men,” he explained, “have ever since Europe called herself enlightened experienced the greatest treachery, oppression, murder and everything that is base, and I cannot name an instance where a body of them collected together have ever had the promises made them performed in a conscientious way.” He was soon overwhelmed with inquiries and applications. So desperate were some to secure a better life for their families that they confronted the prospect of permanent separation from loved ones. As he recorded:

  A most affecting scene occurred this afternoon occasioned by a Black slave who came to me in order to resign his wife and family who were free. With tears streaming down his cheeks he said, that though this separation would be as death to himself, yet he had come to a resolution resigning them up for ever, convinced as he was, that such a measure would ultimately tend to render their situation more comfortably and happy. He said he was regardless of himself or the cruelties he might hereafter experience for though sunk to the most abject state of wretchedness he could at all times cheer himself that his wife and children were happy.25

  Another refugee, a man who could remember his earlier life in Africa before he had been enslaved, told Clarkson in halting English that he now worked “like a slave” and as a result could not do worse “in any part of the world.” When Clarkson warned him of the hardships and danger he was likely to face if he joined the settlement he replied, “if me die, me die, had rather die in me own country than in this cold place.”

  In January 1792, all 1,190 settlers had at last been gathered together at Halifax. On January 16 they departed Canada as a group on fifteen vessels, altered by Clarkson’s orders so that they would in no way call to mind the dreadful conditions of the Middle Passage. Boston King and the Preston refugees, who Clarkson called “better than any people in the labouring line of life in England: I would match them for strong sense, quick apprehension, clear reasoning, gratitude, affection for their wives & children, and friendship and good-will towards their neighbours,” traveled together. King and his companions had been disappointed by their years in Nova Scotia, but as they continued their seemingly endless wandering in the British Empire, they did so not as a defeated, subjugated people, but as men and women convinced of their equality, sure that if only the constraints of prejudice could be removed, their community would grow and prosper. These refugees of American slavery and American rebellion had imbibed not the language of bondage and inferiority favored by slavery’s apologists, but instead drank from the same Enlightenment well as their erstwhile masters, internalizing and coopting ideas of universal equality and natural rights. Generations of enslavement had not created a Stockholm syndrome of internalized inferiority but a vast reservoir of strength and an iron-willed commitment to struggle and fight until freedom and prosperity became a reality. Despite the failures of Canada, they continued to believe that, as British subjects, protected by British justice and the rights of British citizenship, the best opportunity to achieve their dream lay within the secure embrace of the British Empire. They were, in this way, committed imperialists engaged in a colonizing, civilizing mission.

  As the convoy neared the coast in March 1792, Boston King caught his first glimpse of Africa. The mountains that gave the region its Portuguese name were the first to appear, rising “gradually from the sea to a stupendous height, richly wooded and beautifully ornamented by the hand of nature, with a variety of delightful prospects.” As the mountains crept closer, crowding out the horizon, the Sierra Leone River at last came into view. Ten miles wide at its mouth before narrowing rapidly, the river was speckled with verdant islands, most of them uninhabited apart from Bance Island, 15 miles upriver, which housed a British slave factory. As he sailed upriver, the scenery speeding by, King saw flashes of color from the “variety of beautifully plumed birds” and the clusters of orange trees “overloaded with fruit,” among the greens and browns of steel-straight palms of “gigantic height.” There were other signs of life visible through the trees, glimpses of African villages that appeared and vanished as the ship moved upstream. For those who had spent their youth in Africa, “the perfumes of fragrant aromatic plants” wafting on the sultry breeze must have smelled of home, triggering long-forgotten memories in the deep recesses of their minds. Some 10 miles from the sea, huddled on a deep bay on the south bank of the river, King’s ship at last reached the few dozen huts of Granville Town, rebuilt by the settlers under the direction of Alexander Falconbridge, a former slave ship surgeon and informant of Thomas Clarkson, who had been sent to Sierra Leone the year before to re-gather and reconstruct the settlement. This bedraggled settlement of mud and thatch and wood clinging to the river was to be King’s new home.26

  It had been a rocky, storm-tossed voyage. A few days out from Halifax the fleet had run into a “dreadful storm.” For sixteen days, King recalled, the ships were buffeted by screaming winds and roaring seas, the fleet driven apart and dispersed. In the squall one of King’s fellow passengers was swept overboard to his death, leaving a wife and four children behind. For King, the raging storms outside his berth seemed to mirror the sickness that had taken hold within. His wife was now “exceeding ill,” and as the days passed and the weather at last released the convoy from its grip, he became increasingly sure she would not live to see the African shore. For weeks she held on to life by a thread as King obsessed over the dreadful prospect of having “to bury her in the sea.” So it was with double relief that King greeted the sight of land on March 6.27

  By the time King arrived, several of the ships that had been separated by the storm were already anchored 6 miles upriver from the site of Granville Town. They had arrived two weeks earlier on February 26. A few days later, they left the ships and waded through the turquoise-blue waters to stand on the soil of their ancestors. Thomas Peters, who spent his early years 1,500 miles to the south and east in what is now Nigeria, and who had now crossed the Atlantic four times in his journey into slavery and back again, was overjoyed. He had done as much as anyone to bring his people to these shores, and in a euphoric mix of elation and relief he broke into song, providing a stirring soundtrack to what was a most momentous
occasion. As Peters, George, and the other preachers led their flocks into this promised land, they lifted their voices to the heavens, singing “the day of Jubilee is come; return ye ransomed sinners home.”

  They were greeted on shore by the remnants of the “Province of Freedom,” forty or so men and women in a dejected state, some “decrepid with disease,” and “so disguised with filth and dirt” that they were hardly recognizable. There was also a contingent of local Temne people, a wary welcoming party come to meet the new arrivals. All of the refugees must have been overcome by the scene, their exodus, at least it seemed, was over. A few of their number had greater cause to greet the landing with nervous anticipation and search the crowds gathered on the sands for familiar longed-for faces. Three men at least had been born in the region, and one of these was a son of Sierra Leone itself. He had passed the time under sail across the Atlantic regaling his fellow passengers with stories of his once and future home. As luck, or destiny, or chance would have it, the fleet anchored “nearly on the spot from whence he had been carried off,” the very stretch of beach where he had been caught and sold to an American slave ship lying in the river. He had been a boy then, fifteen years ago, but he still remembered the way to his native village a couple of miles away. The trauma of his enslavement and his long years away convinced him not to risk the journey, and so he remained among the refugees constructing their camp, christened “Freetown” on one of the banks of the Sierra Leone River.28

  King joined the camp in early March, but the sight of the new settlement and its novel setting held little interest for him. His wife had made it to their new home, but she was now so sick she had “lost her senses”; within weeks of landing she had become delirious, speaking of visions of God before she at last “expired in a rapture of love.” Violet King was among the first to perish in their new homeland, but she was far from the last. Boston King himself soon fell ill and within months the sickness was “a universal complaint.” Like their predecessors in 1787, the Nova Scotia refugees arrived just before the rains began. Temporary huts were erected where sick and sodden refugees shivered in the rain, but there had been no time to build the more permanent houses and storerooms that would protect the colonists and their provisions from the ever-present damp. The lack of fresh provisions and the exposure to the weather exacerbated illnesses brought from Nova Scotia. While still in Halifax, disease had raged among the fleet, leaving sixty-five dead before the convoy ever reached its destination. Weak and ill, the settlers were vulnerable to the unfamiliar tropical diseases that followed with the rains. Within the first few weeks, forty of the refugees had died. Settlers, King recalled, “died so fast that it was difficult to procure a burial for them.”29

  King was lucky to survive the sickness of the first rainy season and, like many who spent their first months huddled in their shacks, greeted the end of the rains with restless gratitude. They threw themselves with an almost religious fervor into herculean labors required to build their colony. King worked for the Company, helping to clear land and build a chapel, heavy but rewarding work for a believer. As Freetown began to rise around him, King began to think of his own reasons for journeying for Nova Scotia and found his mind “drawn out to pity the native inhabitants.”30

  While the settlers set about constructing their new Eden, in the local villages there was great interest in the commotion on the beach. A group from one such village decided to go and see for themselves the new settlement springing up upon the shore. With them went an elderly woman, worn with age and care. Her husband had died some years back, her son disappeared without a trace and “given up for lost.” As they approached the sea of tents that made up the settlement, and watched the newcomers at their work, the old woman became agitated. There was among the strangers a profile not so strange. At every glimpse of this young man her excitement climbed as suspicion turned into certainty. She knew this man, she told her friends, though it had been fifteen years since last she saw his face. At last she ran to him, embraced him, pressed him close. “She proved to be his own mother.”31

  It was not precisely a homecoming for the many, like Boston King, who had been born into slavery on the opposite side of the ocean. Africa was the place of their ancestors, a fabled place, a place of stories told by firelight by those who knew it from their youth, a place of history, and now of the future, but it was not a home. For men like King there had never been a home, not a true one, a place of comfort and belonging. There had been family, that much was true, but family had not been rooted in a place, a landscape richly laden with custom, with history, with meaning. Instead there had been the stolen existence of the slave, a pilfered, shifted life, moved place to place, master to master, bought and sold on a whim. In such a world there was no lodestar, no compass rose to guide one back to home; there was no home, no deep and holding roots. The American War had brought freedom with it, but the tenuous life of constant motion continued nonetheless; freedom brought still more weary wanderings in its train. But freedom also kindled hope, a restless search for independence and a home, until at last they reached this forlorn terminus on the banks of the Sierra Leone. For King and most of his companions, there was little chance they would ever find a true homeland. But that was beside the point. The long restless years that led to Sierra Leone were as much about posterity as they ever were about the present. In Africa, they hoped, even believed, they might have found a place where they could rebuild a stolen world, “our children free and happy.”32

  The Africans who watched the armada unload its threadbare cargo on their coasts had reason to welcome the immigrants with a wary eye to the future. As their raids on Granville Town had forcefully demonstrated, the local chiefs had no intention of ceding their lands to another batch of interlopers, whatever their skin color or shared ethnicity. They had long ago become accustomed to the ever-present impermanence of European merchants and their trading posts, but settlers were another matter entirely. And yet, at least some of the local rulers would have welcomed the ambitious aims of the new arrivals. Most would have embraced an expanded trade with the British. Many would have likewise welcomed an effort to undermine the slave trade. Over the years, some coastal rulers had made a tidy profit selling neighbors, rivals, and conquered captives to the slavers at Bance Island. The costs of this enrichment, however, were becoming difficult to bear.

  The entire region, stretching from Sierra Leone north to Senegambia, and south to the Gulf of Guinea, had been ravaged by the slave trade. One local ruler openly encouraged the Sierra Leone Colony, “in order,” as he said, “that there might be a stop put to the horrid depredations that are often committed in this country by all countries that come here to trade.” The vile trade left few untouched, and even this powerful man had seen three of his relatives captured from his own territory and sold to the West Indies. “I know not how to get them back,” he told the colonists. Reports from the north told much the same story of kidnapping, raids, and wars, all for “the sole purpose of procuring slaves.” Conditions inland were hardly better; the interior was plagued by incessant wars instigated by the unquenchable need for slaves. These accounts were confirmed by another local informant, the mixed-race “mistress of a large town in the Mandingo country.” Her English name was “Mrs. B. Heard” and she had spent time in England in her youth. For her, the slave trade was a source of “constant terror,” never knowing “when she lay down at night, whether she might be assassinated before the morning.” By drying up the demand for slaves, the American War had been a blessing. In those years, Heard explained, “there had been no wars in the interior country,” for “the wars do not happen when there is no demand for slaves.” But the respite had been only temporary and with peace in Paris came the return of slaving wars in Africa.33

  To ensure their continued supply of slaves, Europeans openly encouraged warfare between African states. One informant who visited Freetown from the headwaters of the Sierra Leone River reported that Europeans often encouraged quarrels and
fomented wars, even arming both sides with arms and ammunition. The man himself was in the midst of a five-year war prompted by a British slaver. The slaving wars could become a vicious, inescapable cycle, as the informant outlined. He was forced to “waylay and sell strangers” in order to buy the arms and ammunition his people required to protect themselves from enslavement by their neighbors. He acknowledged that the trade in slaves was “a bad thing,” but he could not abandon his part in it without leaving his community vulnerable. War begat slavery, and slavery begat war ad infinitum.34

  Further south, the Company’s agents found further evidence of this post-war renewal, scores of villages “depopulated,” their former residents enslaved or fled. A mixed-race slaver, educated in Liverpool, had laid waste to the entire region with his raids. His method was to lend goods to local chiefs and village headmen, and when they could not pay, arm 200 men or more, led by white deserters from European ships, and seize slaves as compensation. This was common practice among European slavers as well, who used unpaid debts as leverage to press coastal peoples into raiding their neighbors for human stock to meet their leaders’ debts. In one such case, a local chief approached the colony for relief. His daughter had been seized by his creditor, and sold to a slave ship anchored off Freetown. The governor attempted to intervene and redeem the girl, but the captain of the vessel refused unless another slave could be found to take her place. In another example of the cycle of enslavement, the father thus went “off in quest of a slave,” to capture some other poor soul as a substitute for his child. There was considerable opposition to slavery within African society, but after centuries of involvement in the trade, the slavers had become enmeshed in the economy and politics of the region. Together with local rulers who were themselves “deeply engaged in the slave trade,” some slavers formed confederacies that ensured their raids would go unchecked. The effects were grim. The African interior was beset by near constant warfare, which destabilized and depopulated whole regions, disrupting societies and economies, and preventing capital accumulation. On the coasts, some African polities accumulated wealth and power from their role in the slave trade, but they too remained in a precarious position, increasingly reliant on European trade to survive. Africans everywhere bemoaned the terrible impact of the slave trade, but few could see a way out of the vicious cycle.35