by Simon Schama
A pity, then, that Anna Falconbridge’s story is so improbable. The fleet never was at Wapping, although the women could conceivably have been made senseless with drink and taken down-river to Blackwall. More seriously, why would Granville Sharp who went to such pains to make sure there was both a chaplain on board to preside over the church of freedom, and a sexton, and who kept an eagle eye on the passenger list, have countenanced for a moment the presence of sixty women of the streets, bagnios and taverns? The entire story tells us more about the chroniclers than the chronicled, as well as the contemporary taste for sensation. Weeping over the plight of the poor slaves did not preclude a frisson of horror and aversion at the thought of them sharing the beds of white women. The liaison between the Duchess of Queensberry and her black fencing master, Soubise, was the stuff of exactly this kind of scandalous excitement. For a whole troop of white women to surrender themselves to blacks so completely as to sail away with them could only be explained by their being the grossest and most vicious of their sex.
The truth was otherwise and actually more remarkable. Women such as Anne Provey, who was married to John Provey—once slave to a North Carolina attorney, later enrolled in the Black Pioneers—and mother of Ann-Louisa, were in all likelihood of very humble background. Given that many of the black poor were living in the parish of St George in the East, it is also entirely possible that some of the women may have met their black husbands in surroundings not typical of the rituals of courtship in Jane Austen’s novels. Some of them may indeed have been tavern girls, laundresses, seamstresses or something of all three—anything to keep the wolf from the door. But the concept of white women who worked is not necessarily synonymous with “working girls.” The passenger lists point to a domestic connection rather than a hasty sexual one: the mere fact that many of the white women in these mixed-race marriages had small children with them (described as “black”) presupposes something more than a spurious marriage cobbled together with gin and false promises in the rookeries of dockland.
Nothing quite like these emigrants had been seen before: 411 of them, at least half from America, slave or free, some 61 families among them, were going resolutely back to the country in which their suffering had begun. Some were black and white, with mixed-race children, such as the Holders; others black and black, such as James and Mary Had-wick and their small child; and yet others white families, such as Schenkel the baker, his wife, Ann, and their children, Richard and Rosina. There was the occasional widower, like James Yarrow, for instance, with his three small ones, Israel, John and Mary; a few white women, such as Milly Shimmings and Mary Allen, were described as “wanting to be married”; and there were many young black men, among them Thomas Truman, Mishick Wright, Edward Honeycot, Christian Friday and James Neptune. Most of these voyagers were, no doubt, facing their future with the usual mixture of relief, hope and fear.
Fear may have got the upper hand much too quickly, for the ships were barely under way when they found themselves in trouble. The naval escort Nautilus ran on to a sandbank, although with the help of high winds and tides managed to get itself off again. Those winds went from fresh to dangerous in a matter of hours as the fleet found itself in the teeth of the worst kind of gale the Channel can whip up: churning billows, huge swells and vicious, swiping gusts. The Vernon’s fore topmast came down; the ships lost sight of, and contact with, each other; and the unlucky Nautilus, labouring “very hard…the waist full of water,” limped to Torbay. The next day Captain Thompson attempted to sail to Plymouth in the wake of the Atlantic and Belisarius, but was beaten back to Torbay by the foul weather. Not until the 18th of March did the fleet manage to reunite at Plymouth. It had been almost four months since the embarkations had begun on the Thames. Men and women had died, babies had been born, blacks and whites had got off the ship and others had got on—and the Province of Freedom seemed further away than ever.
Nor were the venture’s troubles over. The two non-naval leaders of the expedition, Irwin and Equiano, were at loggerheads with each other. Equiano’s suspicions that Irwin was pocketing Treasury money intended for purchases of food, clothing and medical supplies were, as far as he was concerned, confirmed at Plymouth. Wanting to make good on supplies already exhausted during the long delays Equiano checked what had, and had not, been bought. Purchases earmarked by funds already received by Irwin seemed not to have been made. When the matter was reported to Steele and Rose at the Treasury, Irwin responded that Equiano was inciting the blacks to “make trouble.” Since Equiano also objected to both the numbers of “unauthorized” whites aboard (by which he did not mean the white wives but “passengers” such as Thomas Mewbourn, and sundry others) and the way in which they treated the blacks, Irwin may have been right that he was encouraging protest. Equally there may well have been something to protest about. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the festering dispute got worse when, not knowing how long they would be stalled in Plymouth, blacks were allowed to disembark and go into the town. The spectacle of hundreds of them walking the cobbled streets, possibly (since they had suffered from cabinfever—literally) without the kind of attention to politeness expected in Devon, so distressed many of the good townspeople that a hue and cry was raised and the offending blacks ushered back to confinement on board. In these aggravated circumstances, Equiano, who thought he was only discharging his responsibilities as the on-board representative of government as conscientiously as possible, appealed to Captain Thompson as arbiter.
Thompson blamed both of them. But for the sake of the peace of the expedition, already compromised by tempests and sickness, he told the Treasury men that one of them had to go. No doubt Irwin was no angel but Equiano, Thompson wrote, “had taken every means to actuate the minds of the Blacks to discord” and unless the “spirit of sedition” was quelled the damage done to the whole venture might be fatal. Although Sir Charles Middleton argued for him in the dispute, it was Equiano, predictably, who was discharged, and thirteen others identified as “troublemakers” were barred from resuming the voyage. Fourteen whites, including Irwin’s son and two daughters, the sexton and six white women were also removed. In addition, some of the white artisans, including a weaver, surgeon and brickmaker, decided against continuing the journey.
Back in London, furious at his shabby treatment, Equiano turned violently against the entire project. Far from inciting trouble, he was the “greatest peacemaker there ever was,” he wrote in a letter to Ottobah Cugoano that was published in the Public Advertiser on the 4th of April 1787. Not only Irwin but the chaplain, Dr Fraser, and one of the surgeons were “villains.” The whole enterprise, he said, had been, in its haste and criminal inefficiency, little more than a veiled attempt to “hurry out” blacks from where they were not wanted. “I do not know how this undertaking will end…I wish I had never been involved in it.”46 In his own diatribe published two days later, Cugoano was even more hostile, declaring that blacks had been virtually press-ganged into getting back on board at Plymouth and that any of them who cared for their lives ought to jump overboard and swim back to England rather than entrust themselves to so disastrous and brutal an enterprise.
It was entirely natural that Equiano should feel bitter. He had done precisely what the government had required of him by exercising scrupulous oversight of stores and supplies, and his reward had been humiliation and dismissal. But when he had taken the post he had eagerly endorsed the expedition to create the Province of Freedom, which was, after all, his friend Sharp’s pet project. And two years later, when he published his autobiography, he still judged the venture “humane and politick.” Whatever its failings, they ought not be laid at the door of the government since “every thing [promised] was done on their part.” It was the “mismanagement” of the way the plan was carried out that had doomed it. The committee, the Treasury men and Sir Charles Middleton, all distressed to some degree or other, agreed that Vassa should be paid £50 for his services, a sum handsome enough to suggest their shared guilty consci
ence. A year later he was being courted again for the abolitionist crusade. During the debates over the Dolben Bill, introduced to regulate the conditions under which slaves were transported, James Ramsay suggested that Members of Parliament should be greeted at the doors of the House by a black man—Equiano—who would hand each of them a damning tract against the trade.
Back in Plymouth, on the 9th of April the little fleet sailed away, dirty weather left behind with the British coast. The usual mix of fortunes attended its progress. Cooped up, husbands and wives argued and sometimes came to blows. As the ships wallowed in the swell, there was puking and drinking, and thus more puking. As usual, fevers mounted; bodies, fourteen of them, were slid overboard—far too many according to Sharp’s protégé, Abraham Elliott Griffith, aboard the Belisarius, for the surgeons were most neglectful of their duties. But at Tenerife in the Atlantic spring the ships took on cattle and fresh food and water, and the knell of mortality seemed to have abated. Patrick Fraser, the chaplain recommended by Sharp, described the expedition in a letter to the Public Advertiser as a happy ark, enjoying “the sweets of peace, lenity and almost uninterrupted harmony.” Better yet “the odious distinction of colours is no longer remembered.”47 Black and white worshipped together. Jerusalem lay just over the horizon. Praise be to God.
VII
WOULD IT HAVE MADE any difference if they had known the Temne name, Romarong—the place of the wailers, the place where men and women wept in the storms? All that Captain Thomas Boulden Thompson knew, as he spied the site from the deck of the anchored Nautilus on the 10th of May 1787, was that it had been called “Frenchman’s Bay” and he had it in mind to rename it St George’s Bay. The wooded hill rising gently from its southern shore had been called who knows what by the natives? Well, now it would be St George’s Hill. For the captain, patriotic overstatement conceded nothing to topographical imagination. St George and England, along with some 380 free black Britons, had arrived at the mouth of the Sierra Leone River.
It had been noticed. The next day, wasting no time, the local Koya Temne chief, King Tom, appeared, big and affable, a glory in blue silk and ruffled shirt, the flap of his hat thick with gold lace. His wives, standing at a proper distance, were still bigger and even more affable in brilliant taffeta and turbans wound high. Punctiliously naval, Thompson made sure the Nautilus greeted them with a thirteen-gun salute. On deck there was an exchange of pleasantries and a preliminary offering of presents from the naval captain to the king (more hats—they always went down well). Thompson announced his intention to buy from the king a territory of some four hundred square miles, stretching from the harbour and the hill south, east and inland perhaps twenty miles; the land that would be the Province of Freedom. King Tom raised no objections. But then, why should he? He was no ingénu when it came to dealing with Europeans. A pidgin English, much coloured with pidgin Portuguese, had been a lingua franca on the coast for at least a century since the slavers had first leased Bance Island. It was understood by the Temne and their neighbours the Bullom as the language of the “rogues”; and they were prepared, if not actually eager, to compete with them in roguery.1 They also were at pains to make sure that the Europeans properly appreciated the order of things on the coast and up the river. Although Messrs Anderson, the holders of the slaving concession, and their agents Mr James Bowie and Mr John Tilley formally paid their tribute rent to the Bullom chief on the north shore, they knew they were there on the sufferance of King Tom on the south shore, just as King Tom accepted that his own authority was ultimately subject to the greater chief, the Naimbana, further inland at Robana. And even the Naimbana was regent rather than the “king” that the Europeans styled him. Whether the Europeans wished to slave or, as this captain seemed to be saying, settle free black men was all the same to King Tom; just so long as they understood that what they were “buying” was not ownership of land (for no one truly owned it) but permission to stay.
Which is, of course, exactly what did not get understood, especially not on the 15th of May when Captain Thompson went through the customary ritual of an act of imperial possession: the planting of a flag. Beaching their skiffs on the curving stretch of creamy sand, a party of blacks and whites walked beneath the grove of palms fringing the shore, hacked a way through the razor-sharp grass, the ten-foot-high tangle of thorny scrub, and the grove of cotton-silk and camwood trees, and made their way up the slope that Sir George Young, a fellow naval captain, had assured Thompson would be best suited for the foundation of the Province of Freedom. It would be cooler there, he had said, more salubrious than the mangrove-strangled swampy lowland to the north. Running down its sides were brooks rushing with sweet, pure water. Once the party had arrived on the brow, Captain Thompson ordered a small tree to be felled and its trunk trimmed and set deep in the red earth in a clearing. Then the Union Jack was run up. Let Granville Town arise!2
From the crest of the “eminence,” the prospect may not have been quite the terrestrial paradise Granville Sharp described to his brother James (“the hills are not steeper than Shooter’s Hill [in Kent]…the woods and groves are beautiful beyond description”).3 But on that day in May the view may still have looked auspicious. Below the flag party, down a gentle gradient, stretched the broad mouth of the Sierra Leone river, a harbour so naturally inviting that it had attracted ships since 1462, when the Portuguese mariner Pedro da Cintra, imagining he saw the shape of a leonine head in the mountainous peninsula, called it Serra Lyoa. And since this was the only natural harbour in all of West Africa without a barrier of high surf, there was not a day when the bay did not see brigs, sloops and schooners at anchor, and canoes busily shuttling between ships and shore, loading supplies, chests and slaves. True, much of the coast, especially north of the river mouth, was sunk low in muddy mangrove swamp, interlaced with creeks where basking sharks shared the shallows with crocodiles. Twice a year, in spring and autumn, the sea carried the coffee-coloured ooze over the low plain, making the estuary good for nothing except the extraction of salt. Once the sun had hardened the mud into a solid crust, the people of the northern shore would walk out on to the cracked desolation and cut slabs of it to carry away. The tangy brown muck would then be dissolved again in big terracotta pots and finally boiled down in brass pans, leaving the salt behind. It was, many travellers observed, a particularly fine salt.4
But free men could not live on salt alone. And as far as they could see, there was damned little else to sustain life on the north shore, although a few saturated fields swayed with meagre yellow stalks of rice. The promised land had to be behind them as they stood on Captain Thompson’s eminence, in the hills of the peninsula that stretched south all the way to the cape facing the Banana Islands, where Henry Smeathman had attended to his ants, looked at the mantled mountains and pronounced them fair. The high, conical peaks were, to be sure, forbidding (if very beautiful in the picturesque way of things); but in the foothills there were camwood, ebony and copal gum trees, indigo (said to be the best in the world), cotton and perhaps coffee. There, on upland pasture, flocks and herds could graze.
In due course the Naimbana came downstream, saw the tents of Granville Town perched on their hill and went on board the Nautilus. But, as with the dealings with King Tom, each of the two parties understood the negotiation quite differently. Thompson believed himself to be buying land outright and unencumbered, as a permanent possession. For the Naimbana, on the other hand, this was a direct and personal agreement with the captain, and any acceptance of the right of these black men and women to live in and around his bay was conditional on their acknowledgement of his concession along with the implied right to withdraw it as he saw fit. There could be no freehold for the Province of Freedom. In the world of the Temne (as in that of other tribes of the region, the Mende, the Bullom, the Sherbro and the Fula) the permanent alienation of land was strictly inconceivable. Land was held, not owned, and it was invariably held from someone else.
The Naimbana, tall, thin and stately,
with his grizzled beard, white satin waistcoat and embroidered coat, seemed gracious enough and was politely responsive to the overtures.5 Bowie and the other slavers had warned him that these free blacks and the white officers were in Sierra Leone to make big trouble for him and his chiefs. For all the presents, the newcomers would ruin the business that had made them all prosper and, worse, would try to make his people worship the Christian god and then push him off his ceremonial stool, take his kingdom and force him back into the uplands. But looking at Captain Thompson, taking his measure, the Naimbana shrugged off such prophecies as self-serving. Perhaps Mr Bowie and the Andersons might have something to fear, but not he. And yet, as Thompson noticed, the Naimbana did not actually say “yes,” not in Temne, Bullom or Mende; still less did he sign anything set before him on the deck of the Nautilus.
But if the Naimbana was not ready, King Tom was. On the 11th of June he and two other local chiefs, the Bullom queen Yamacouba and another Temne, Pa Bongee, set their marks alongside Tom’s on the parchment prepared by Thompson. The captain declared this a “treaty,” and 8 muskets, 3 dozen “hangers and scabbards,” 24 laced hats, 4 cotton towels, 34 pounds of tobacco, 117 “bunches of beads,” 10 yards of scarlet cloth, 25 iron bars and 120 gallons of rum, altogether amounting to £59 and a few shillings, were duly handed over to the chiefs. In return, it seemed that they had promised to cede to “the free community…their Heirs and Successors forever” the four hundred square miles of the Province of Freedom, stretching inland and upstream from Granville Town, albeit imprecisely, to Gambia Island in one direction and perhaps as far as the Sherbro River to the south. More improbably, the chiefs of the province had sworn “true allegiance to His Gracious Majesty King George the Third” and had promised, rather like a Lord Lieutenant of the counties or an imperial governor, “to protect the said free settlers his subjects to the utmost of my power against the insurrections and attacks of all Nations and people whatsoever.”6