With Colonel Fairfax and Lawrence as his guides and models, George entered into a training regimen. Horse riding and dancing were among the chief means by which a man showed himself to be worthy of the status of a Virginia planter. He had always been a good rider, but now he undertook a serious study of the art of horsemanship and developed a true “planter’s pace”—a regal, stiff-backed trot that would earn him lifelong admiration. Working under a dancing master, he also became expert at both formal dances and country jigs. He was growing into an excellent physical specimen—tall, muscular, long-limbed—and he learned to use his body to social advantage.
Outward appearance was also vital to achieving status, and George turned himself into a fastidious dresser. At age seventeen, he scribbled a note for a tailor that revealed a meticulousness and attention to detail—not to mention a self-regard—that was elemental to his nature:
Memorandum to have my Coat made by the following Directions. To be made: a Frock with a Lapel Breast, the Lapel to Contain on each side six Button Holes and to be about 5 or 6 Inches wide all the way equal and to turn as the Breast on the Coat does. To have it made very Long Waisted and in Length to come down to or below the Bent of the knee. The Waist from the armpit to the Fold to be exactly as long or Longer than from thence to the Bottom. Not to have more than one fold in the Skirt and the top to be made just to turn in, and three Button Holes. The Lapel at the top to turn as the Cape of the Coat and Bottom to Come Parrallel with the Button Holes. The Last Button hole in the Breast to be right opposite to the Button on the Hip.
There was, however, a serious impediment to his progress up the social ladder. He was, relatively speaking, painfully poor. For all his father’s ambition, he had left behind little in terms of money or tangible goods. (The farm was a ramshackle place, and the inventory following his death showed that the pride of his estate, his “plate,” amounted to a soup spoon, eighteen small spoons, seven teaspoons, a watch and a sword, together valued at a little over 21 pounds.)
Once again the Fairfax family provided a solution. Lord Fairfax wanted to sell off portions of his vast patent. In order for that to happen it first had to be divided into lots. That meant work for teams of surveyors.
With so much wild land in North America, surveying was a desirable and prestigious occupation, and one that would complement the ambitions of a planter. George’s father had left a set of surveying equipment among his effects. George trained, practiced a bit at home, then set off with a small party into the wilderness of the Fairfax lands.
It was a month of fording icy streams, shooting at turkeys, roasting bits of meat on forked sticks over a campfire, sleeping on a “Thread Bear blanket with double its Weight of Vermin such as Lice Fleas &c.,” and marching through heavy rains. For some the experience would have been misery. For him, it was a transformational adventure that simultaneously confirmed him for a life of ruggedness and bonded him with the American wilderness. At one point the group encountered thirty Indians who were themselves exhausted, having returned from a battle. George’s party offered them liquor, which cheered them so much that they set to dancing. George took notes, which mixed anthropological observation with teenaged bemusement:
They clear a Large Circle & make a great Fire in the Middle then seats themselves around it the Speaker makes a grand Speech telling them in what Manner they are to Daunce after he has finish’d the best Dauncer Jumps up as one awaked out of a Sleep & Runs & Jumps about the Ring in a most comicle Manner. He is followd by the Rest then begins there Musicians to Play. . . .
More surveying work followed. He was constantly traveling now: canoeing through seething currents, tramping up snowy mountainsides. The next year he was named the official surveyor of Culpeper County (the entirety of which fell within the Fairfax patent). His mother couldn’t complain about his being away so much, for surveying was lucrative. And along the way he engaged in a profitable sideline: scoping out choice land and using his earnings to buy it for himself. In two years’ time he purchased more than 2,000 acres.
He was not alone in seeking land. Owning acreage of the raw wilderness that stretched limitlessly westward amounted to a passion among Virginia’s planter class. In 1748 his brothers and George Fairfax, the colonel’s son, put themselves down as charter members of a new venture, the Ohio Company of Virginia, whose aim was to buy westward land, parcel it and begin to settle it. Lawrence Washington was named the company’s president.
The Ohio Company promised unparalleled adventures, but before George was able to take part in any, Lawrence fell ill. After a period of violent coughing fits, his worst fears were realized when blood showed up in his handkerchief. People associated the symptoms of tuberculosis with imminent death. Prevailing medical wisdom held that tropical air was a possible cure. George desperately wanted to help, and he offered to accompany his brother on a trip to Barbados. After more than a month of violently pitching seas, they arrived on the Caribbean island. Despite the grave purpose of the trip, he couldn’t help but feel “enraptured,” as he wrote, at the bright, blistering sun and tropical vegetation. He ate wondrous new things—an “avagado pair” and a “Pine Apple”—and went to the theater for probably the first time in his life.
Soon after, however, he himself fell ill, with smallpox. He slowly recovered—the pox left scars on his nose that would stay for the rest of his life—but Lawrence did not. He managed to survive a return voyage to Mount Vernon, and died there, at age thirty-four.
George Washington had lost a second father figure. But overcome as he was with grief, his propulsive ambition compelled him to begin planning the next phase of his life even while tending to his brother in his last days. Lawrence had served as adjutant general in the Virginia militia: the highest military post in the colony and also a social office. He himself may have been the one to propose, from his deathbed, that George apply to take over the job.
George needed little persuading, and he does not seem to have been bothered that he had absolutely no military experience. He was soon logging miles on horseback, paying visits to influential men, lobbying for their support. He ended up being named adjutant of the Northern Neck district. It was mostly a ceremonial title, but he craved titles and recognition. Like his brother before him, like the Romans he had studied, he was now a military man.
While he was riding high on his success, he figured he would follow in Lawrence’s footsteps in another way as well. He asked William Fauntleroy, a militia officer, member of Virginia’s House of Burgesses and one of the colony’s wealthiest and most aristocratic planters, if he could call on his sixteen-year-old daughter, Betsy. George was now twenty years old; simultaneously marrying and moving himself up another rank in society seemed a grand idea.
Mr. Fauntleroy—who traced his aristocratic lineage back to the time of William the Conquerer and who was wealthy enough to order a carriage in London made to his specifications and sporting his family’s coat of arms—gave the young man a dose of reality when he rejected him as not being good enough for his daughter. George Washington may have been full of ambition, but, as all Virginia’s better class knew, he was still a backwoods boy with a crazy mother.
Dukandarra was no more.
Turning away from the sight of his father’s tortured corpse on the most fateful day of his life, Broteer Furro had to face the larger disaster that had befallen his people. The slave-hunting army had destroyed his village. Then, immediately after killing Broteer’s father, the leader, a man named Baukurre, ordered his soldiers to move on. Their destination lay hundreds of miles away.
Broteer found himself attached to the advance party, which was to scout ahead of the main army. His captors must have noted that he was strong and smart, for he was given the job of assisting the party’s leader, and was even tasked with carrying the man’s gun. While still in the savanna—undulating grasslands and scrubby desert-like regions, punctuated by the occasional fat-trunked baobab tree—the scouts came upon a small settlement of herders. Broteer wat
ched how efficiently they operated: sweeping in, corralling the inhabitants, cowing them into submission, then butchering the thirty or so cattle they found and processing them into food.
Later, Broteer’s job changed. The army brought with it a millstone, which weighed upward of 25 pounds. The boy was made to carry it, along with other cooking supplies, as they hiked mile after mile in the heat and dust. Sixty-odd years later, he was still burdened with the pain caused by damage to his developing body.
On they went. The army denuded villages, capturing men, women and children and taking everything that could be eaten or sold.
Then the nature of the march changed. There came a long, grueling stretch, perhaps hundreds of miles of merciless plodding. They had presumably miscalculated the distance, or else assumed there would be more villages to plunder on the last stretch of the journey. The soldiers as well as their captured slaves were ground down. At last, weakened and thinned in numbers, the army staggered into their destination: the town of Anomabo, and the coast.
Immediately on entering Anomabo they found themselves under sudden, sustained attack. Rather than let the inland warriors bring their prisoners into the town and trade them, the locals had an army of their own ready to strike. What Broteer evidently became caught up in was the West African practice of panyarring—“man-stealing.” It meant taking something or someone by force as repayment of a debt. The people of Anomabo, which was part of an alliance of Fante tribes along the coast, apparently believed that the interior tribe that had come to sell slaves had done them wrong in the past.
The depleted army that had taken Broteer from his home collapsed under the attack. The slaves, now in the hands of new captors, were marched down from the main coastal road. For Broteer, who had been raised on the sparsely populated savanna, the hike through town must have been a wonder, even amid the confusion. Anomabo was a center of the slaving industry on the coast, with a polyglot population from a jumble of tribes—Mossi, Grunshi, Mamprusi, Asante—as well as white men of different nations, dressed in all manner of garb, haggling or being haggled over under the relentless sun. It was a wild place, like port towns all around the Atlantic Rim, alive with whoring, drinking and gambling, but it had its own order. A religious shrine set in a sacred grove in the neighboring town of Mankessim, the spiritual center of the coast, provided a social foundation. Besides priests, farmers, fishermen and traders, Anomabo had specialized workers who serviced the slave industry: canoemen, haulers, interpreters, cooks, middlemen and brokers. And the town had its own slaves.
At the bottom of the hill lay the ramshackle cluster of the fishing village, stinking of rotting fish, huddled around the shallow scallop of the bay, with dugout canoes fanned out along the beach. Here too was the most surreal and alien of sights for a boy from the interior: the sea.
On the beach and jutting from the shallow water were the clusters of rock from which the place got its name: Anomabo meant “bird rocks.” It had been a tiny fishing village until the 1500s. As Europeans began their age of exploration, Portuguese traders showed up looking for gold. The town and others like it along the water rose not on the slave trade, but as a trading post for gold that was mined in the interior, thus earning the name the Gold Coast. In time, the Dutch broke down the Portuguese monopoly; then Swedish, Danish, French and English ships muscled in. The Europeans built their forts along the coast, for which they paid rent to the regional kingdom. At Anomabo the leaders became especially sophisticated at managing the trade. They let the English build a fort, but refused to allow them a monopoly. Instead they encouraged ships of different nations to anchor and do business in the harbor—“boat trade,” it was called—so that the town’s leaders could play the Europeans off against one another.
Then in the late 1600s the gold trade fell off at the same time that Europeans were expanding their colonies and looking for slaves to work them. In the early 1700s the Akan kingdoms in the interior began their series of wars, resulting in masses of displaced people who could be turned into slaves. The Fante coastal trading towns retooled to meet the new need. But slavery was a dangerous business, so they merged into a coalition, united by the opportunity and by their common ethnic identity.
As he was being marched down to Anomabo’s waterfront, Broteer was seeing the slave trade at nearly its height. He was part of a humming, seething industry, employing thousands, processing millions.
Since the leaders of the town had not given the English a monopoly on slaving, the English had let their fort fall into decay. But it still dominated the waterfront, and was probably the largest structure Broteer had ever seen, with man-made walls as high as cliffs. Derelict though it was, it was good enough to house slaves.
Slaves were packed together in small cave-like cells, with a small hole in the roof through which captors poured food and water. Inside it was dank and terrifyingly dark. Once a day the slaves were marched outside to be aired. On such occasions Broteer may have been able to see, in the harbor, a newly-arrived ship. She had sailed more than 4,300 nautical miles from her home port of Newport, Rhode Island.
Her captain, James Collingwood, after having been rowed ashore and making his way past the fort, had a ten-minute walk from the fishing village to the upper town, where the important people lived. He was probably drunk: European slavers usually were. It was a way to deal with the constant fear and anxiety, for they knew it was only a matter of time before yellow fever, malaria, tuberculosis or dysentery struck, and there was the perpetual danger of negotiations turning violent. They wanted to make their deal and get out.
When the town had shifted its trade from gold to the more dangerous business of dealing in slaves, its traditional rulers had been pushed aside by a new breed of strongmen. The leader of the town now, the man to whom ships’ captains headed, was Eno Baisie Kurentsi, known to European traders as John Currantee. He was about fifty years old, and was feared by locals and Europeans alike. In time he would become exalted enough that his son would be a presence in London, where he would meet King George II and be dubbed the “Royal African.” Collingwood likely found him in his bathtub, the perch from which he preferred to handle affairs, sipping rum and smoking a pipe so long its head sat on the ground. Bargaining took place in a hybrid language that contained elements of Portuguese—“black Portuguese,” traders called it.
Kurentsi wasn’t alone in representing Anomabo. Selling slaves was a complicated business, which involved priests from the local shrine, town elders, and prominent traders. The leaders of Anomabo sometimes wanted payment in guns and gunpowder, but their demands and desires changed frequently, and since they were the ones in charge, the Europeans were constantly at pains to please them. A leader like Kurentsi might suddenly insist on tallow, or brandy, or copper rods, in exchange for slaves. A European slave ship thus left its home port with its hold stocked like a warehouse, with cases of Turkish rugs, Dutch cotton sheets, chintz, brass kettles, fish hooks, bells, locks, pots, pans, boxes of scales and weights, quart tankards, slope-pointed knives, as well as hundreds of gallons of liquor and chests of cutlasses and firearms. The captain had to hope that the leaders of the port city wanted at least some of the items in his floating department store. A trader named John Atkins expressed exasperation that at none of the Gold Coast ports where he put in were the “many considerable Articles of my Invoyce ever asked for,” and he ended his voyage with a net loss. James Collingwood had better luck. He ended his negotiations by purchasing 87 slaves.
Broteer remained in the pen with the other slaves until Collingwood arranged for provisioning. Eventually, he was hustled down to the beach and into a dugout canoe. Then came a flash of fright on experiencing for the first time in his life the imponderable force of the pitching waves. As the canoe reached the side of the ship, if he heard its name pronounced by one of the crew the incongruity of its meaning would have been lost on him; it would have sounded as forbidding as any cluster of incomprehensible syllables could: the Charming Susanna. Up the side the slaves w
ent, then down onto the hard planks of the deck, the nostril-sting of pine tar cutting through the salty tang of the air.
Then came some new confusion: shouts and laughter. Something was going on—whatever was happening to Broteer, he was being treated differently from the other slaves that were herded onboard. Later he was able to piece it together. The young man who was suddenly at his side—the ship’s steward; Robinson Mumford was his name—had struck a deal with Captain Collingwood. He liked the look of this boy, and bought him for his own use. He didn’t pay cash but instead handed over the trade goods he had brought on board: four gallons of rum and a piece of calico fabric. Then a thought struck him. An old term for personal cargo was still in use in the eighteenth century; Shakespeare had employed it in Julius Caesar, in a nautically themed passage as weighted with despair as the boy must have now felt:
There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune . . .
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
Venture: that’s what Robinson Mumford had given up for the boy. On the spot he decided that that was what he would call him.
Revolution Song Page 5