by Simon Schama
Two weeks later came the deluge. And these were not the rains of Shooter’s Hill. They were not even the kind of heavy downpour against which Jonas Hanway’s green silk device had offered protection. They were, rather, an attack. In June the storms threatened in the early hours as innocent, chubby bunches of vapour, but as the day went on and they sponged the saturated estuarine air, the towers of cloud rose and darkened, so that the light turned a deep bottle-green and it seemed like midnight at noon. When at last the storm broke, the bolts of lightning that flared over the high forests were so intense that the forks imprinted themselves on the eyeball, even with lids shut fast against their violence. The thunder that went with them was a two-note musket crack followed by a cannon boom, a rending of the firmament. Water fell on the Sierra Leone peninsula as if it were made of stone, hammering the earth, making frothing lagoons and gulches of tawny mud. When the torrent thinned into mere heavy rain, the relief was greeted by the jubilant song of thousands of river frogs and the rasping percussion of millions of cicadas. Every so often there would be another phantom bolt, as if the storm were irritated by its own recession.
As the season deepened in mid-year, it got worse. The sky disappeared into a muffling grey void, the drowning pausing only with the sudden arrival of tornadoes for which the capes were notorious—sucking gales that lifted and tore apart anything that had the bad luck to be in their path. Then the temperature would suddenly drop so that those exposed to the brutality of the elements shivered as they were drenched in the tempest. Thus it was that the sounds of Romarong came to Captain Thompson’s emerald hill.
By July, when the storms were at their most ferocious, the Union Jack on that green eminence drooped in soggy desolation. To the beleaguered, demoralized settlers it seemed madness to be planted on such an exposed outcrop. Some of them gingerly descended, camping instead at its base, where nature seemed to give a little more shelter—even if the mosquitoes, the snakes, mambas and kraits, especially the little pale green synyak-amusong, the spitting cobra, whose venom would instantly blind you, and the bugabug white and red ants, which seemed to survive both flood and fire, were also looking to share a home.7 Against this onslaught, elemental, zoological and epidemic (for fevers were taking their toll, too), what did the London blacks and the remaining six whites have? The navy surplus canvas supplied for their tenting proved useless against the ripping winds. With the soil flooded there was no hope of planting the seeds brought out from England, and any rice seedlings set in wet fields were directly washed away by the contemptuous storms. All that could be done with the 161 shovels, 386 axes and 150 hoes was to try to prevent them from rusting. Self-sufficiency was out of the question. Survival depended on the stores that had been brought on the ships, and those were rapidly mouldering; in their desperation the settlers consumed them anyway. When these provisions were gone, the settlers began to trade their tools and, before long, their clothes in exchange for food from the only dependable source—the slavers on Bance Island and on the Bullom shore.
Before the Province of Freedom ever had a chance to establish itself, its people began to disappear. In mid-July Joseph Irwin died. By the third week of that month, 24 whites and 30 blacks were dead and half the remainder gravely ill. By the 16th of September, when Thompson boarded the Nautilus for the voyage home, having ostensibly seen the settlement through its teething pains, 122 of those who had landed in May had perished. Among them were Benjamin Whitecuffe’s white widow, Sarah, and the wives of both John Cambridge and Abraham Elliott Griffith, Sharp’s protégé. Many of the whites—all of the baker Schenkel’s family save one daughter, the nurseryman, the sexton, the flax dresser, the carpenter, the tailor, the surveyor and a surgeon named Currie, whom Equiano had called a “villain”—died early in the tempestuous equatorial winter. Most were victims of fevers of one kind or another, malaria being probably the most common, despite the cinchona bark, the raw material of quinine, which had been brought on the ships and could be infused in wine.
The 268 survivors were then further thinned as deserters decamped to where shelter, food and wages were offered—the slave depots. Patrick Fraser, the man of God personally selected by Sharp, was among those to make this pact with the devil. But then he must have felt that God was not on his side. No one could be found to build his promised chapel amidst the torrents, so he had had no choice but to hold services beneath a spreading tree, probably a banyan. Increasingly sick and tubercular, he finally accepted the offer of more solid lodging on Bance Island, preaching to the white slavers and artisans and to bemused slaves who understood nothing of his prayers and sermons. Periodically he would go down-river to see to his abandoned flock, but would come back to the island, coughing and choking on blood. The surgeons of Granville Town followed him, leaving the stricken settlers without medical help when they most needed it. But whites were not the only ones to go over to the enemy, just as Jonas Hanway and, eventually, Equiano had feared. Blacks, too, took paying jobs up-river on Bance Island with Bowie, some of them turning from slaves to slavers. One of those who chose to take slaves on the Bullom shore was Harry de Mane, whom Granville Sharp had rescued just the previous year from a ship carrying him in chains to the West Indies.
ON HEARING THE NEWS of this betrayal, Granville Sharp felt as though he had taken a sword-thrust. His life’s work had been made fools’ play. “I could not have conceived that men who were well aware of the wickedness of slave-dealing and had themselves been sufferers…under the galling yoke of bondage…should have been so basely depraved,” he wrote to the settlers at Granville Town in September 1788, “as to yield themselves instruments to promote and extend the same detestable oppression over their brethren.”8 It was an unspeakable betrayal, and “Mr Henry Demane (whom I am informed is now a great man on the Bulam shore)” the greatest of all the traitors, he thundered. None of those who had defiled the purity of the cause would ever be forgiven by its promoters, nor could they ever expect to be reconciled and readmitted to the Province of Freedom (sadly, a vain threat since none of the defectors ever showed the least sign of wanting to). “Warn them, from me,” the distressed and aggrieved Sharp wrote again in 1789,
…of the horrors and remorse which must one day seize those authors and abettors of oppression who do not save themselves by a timely repentance. Remind Mr Henry Demane of his own feelings under the horrors of slavery when he turned his face to the mast of the ship into which he was trepanned by his wicked master and formed a resolution, as he afterwards confessed, to jump overboard that very night rather than submit to a temporary slavery for life but he is now in danger of eternal slavery! Remind him also of the joy he felt when he saw two men, sent with a writ of Habeas Corpus so exactly in time (most providentially) to rescue him, that a single minute later (as the anchor was up and the ship under weigh from her last station, the Downs) must have rendered his recovery impossible! Tell him I have ample reason to be convinced that his escape was by a real interposition of God’s Providence…tell him…that the species of slave-dealing and slaveholding are inimical to the whole species of man by subverting charity, equity and every social and virtuous principle on which the peace and happiness of mankind depend, that they may fairly be deemed unnatural crimes and ought to be ranked with the horrible unnatural depravity of man devouring man.9
As far as Granville Sharp was concerned, then, free blacks turned slavers were no better than cannibals. And his rage and chagrin were stoked by the frustration of being so far away from his wards and therefore unable to harangue them back to virtue as indeed he would have attempted, even with that base ingrate Harry de Mane. If anything, his vexation was aggravated by the reflection that the two years since the Province of Freedom had been founded had been a time of unparalleled promise for the campaign against the Accursed Thing. On the 22nd of May 1787 the formation of a Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was announced, with the Quaker crusaders Joseph Woods, Samuel Hoare and the Phillipses at its core, along with Clarkson and Wilberforc
e. Its president—the human emblem of its zeal, its will to prevail—could, of course, be none other than Granville Sharp. A campaign of mass petitioning against the trade was mobilized, and Thomas Clarkson travelled around the country to drum up enthusiasm and collect signatures. A seal for the committee showing a kneeling negro and bearing the inscription “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” was fired in Etruria in the Potteries by an ardent convert to the campaign, Josiah Wedgwood, and manufactured in thousands as a jasper medallion. Ladies wore it about their necks or on their dresses as a pin.10 The essays of Ramsay, Clarkson, John Newton and Alexander Falconbridge, the penitent slave-ship surgeon, were all reprinted in editions of up to fifteen thousand.
In December 1788, for the first time, a print was published showing a view from above of the opened hold of a slave ship; it was modelled on a Liverpool slaver, the Brookes. Now a public that had read much about the traffic in “live cargo” could actually see it. Originally engraved for the Plymouth Committee for Abolition in a run of fifteen hundred, the print was modified a little by the London Committee, which added longitudinal sections and ran off an edition of eight thousand. The blacks were shown head to toe and side by side with no arm room, stacked like so many logs. At the bow, where the curve of the ship allowed a little more space, it was crammed with yet more bodies. However much had been read on the subject, it was this image that brought the campaign out from its secure base among Quakers and Evangelicals to a much larger public. Framed copies were seen as far apart as Scotland, the cities of the industrial north, especially Manchester where the cause was strong, and the southwest of England. Samuel Hoare’s daughter remembered her family’s obligation to display “horrible engravings of the interior of a slave ship…pinned against the walls of our dining room.”11
Sharp was in the thick of all this, far more than just an honorary patriarch of the good fight. Through his correspondence with Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and Samuel Hopkins of Rhode Island he put together what was becoming a genuinely transatlantic campaign. News of the abolition of the trade in six American states was publicized in Britain, whilst news of the petitioning movement, the passage through both Houses of Parliament of Sir William Dolben’s bill regulating the physical conditions of transportation, and Pitt’s momentous creation on the 11th of February 1788 of a Privy Council committee to examine the state of the trade was circulated in the United States. While all this was happening, Sharp was very much aware that the ratification of the Constitution was being debated in Philadelphia, but also that, for the sake of an expedient unity, the delegates to the convention had agreed to defer for some years the consideration of proposals to outlaw the slave trade. There was no question of slavery itself being abolished throughout the entire United States. This was the same convention, after all, that decreed a slave to be, for the purposes of apportioning representation, three-fifths of a human. Thus the same economical gesture that affirmed the partial humanity (only) of blacks, ensured, through demographic finagling, that the Southern states would be protected from any federal attempts to undermine their “peculiar institution.”12
Granville Sharp too, so he thought, was a Founding Father, busy at precisely the same moment as his friends Franklin, Jay and Adams with the foundation of a free society. Unlike the American republic, his would be one that would not only encode in the law its abhorrence of racial distinctions, but in its practices have blacks set the standard for active citizenship. Sharp believed in this idea strongly enough to spend time urging on his distinguished American correspondents the particular virtues of what he had always felt was the purest form of liberal democracy: Israelito-Saxon Frankpledge. Watch and ward, public labour as a unit of currency, universal suffrage, voting by households, tithings and hundredors—all this, he felt sure, was right for, say, the backlands of the Appalachians.13
The stake that Sharp had in the success of his experiment only made his anxiety over its fate more acute, and he lamented the dearth of information concerning what he called, rather unhappily, “my poor little, ill-thriven, swarthy daughter, the unfortunate colony of Sierra Leone.”14 For a very long time—especially considering that Sierra Leone was but a month’s sail—there was no news, and then intermittently there was, but mostly bad news. Abraham Elliott Griffith, the manservant and protégé whose education he had provided for, had written to him at the end of July in the throes of the rains and had not spared him at all.
Honoured Sir,
I am sorry, and very sorry indeed, to inform you, dear Sir, that this country does not agree with us at all and without a very sudden change, I do not think there will be one of us left at the end of twelve month. Neither can the people be brought to any rule or regulation, they are so very obstinate in their tempers. It was really a very great pity ever we came to this country after the death of Mr Smeathman; for we are settled upon the very worst part. There is not a thing put into the ground, will grow more than a foot out of it…quite a plague seems to reign here among us. I have been dangerously ill myself but it pleased the Almighty to restore me to health again and the first opportunity I have I shall embark for the West Indies.15
This, too, was deeply shocking; that Griffith would rather hazard his liberty and his life in the Caribbean than try to endure in Granville Town. In the event, Griffith did not take ship but, asked by the Naimbana to open a school at Robana, became a personal secretary, interpreter, emissary and, when he married Princess Clara, son-in-law to the old king. His story in Africa was not yet ended.
Was there any hope at all to be salvaged from the wreckage of Sharp’s utopia? Frankpledge, all too obviously, was not functioning in the floods of West Africa; nor had church, courthouse, school or prison been built. But, desperate for encouragement, Sharp doubtless noticed that the letter he received from the Philadelphia black loyalist Richard Weaver, who had been one of the corporals of the London black poor, referred to “the body of the people” calling “a meeting to choose their officers whereby they choosed me to be their chief in command.” Other letters referred to a “senit” (senate).16 Some sort of elections, then, had taken place, and the people of Granville Town had a black “governor.” Detecting at least the germ of the free polity he had hoped to inaugurate, Sharp continued for some time to refer in his letters to Sierra Leone to the settlers’ “Common Council,” as if they had established a deliberative assembly with the capacity to make laws as provided for in his “Short Sketch of Government.” However, another letter written six months later, in September 1788, by one James Reid, announced that he was now “Governor,” a change that Sharp might have taken as evidence of active politics had not Reid and Weaver engaged in mutual recrimination over the theft of some sixty muskets from the settlement store.17 Reid, who had been elected while Weaver was seriously incapacitated for three months, complained that he had been unjustly accused:
Mr Weaver and Mr Johnson…told them [the assembled people] that I made away with them myself and got them under arms and they rised against me and seized my house and took it from me and all what little I had in the world and sold it to pay for those things that was lost…After they broke me they thought to have God’s blessing as they said. The first thing [misfortune] was a young lad found shot in the woods but never found who was the person who did it. The second was that they got into a little trouble with King Tom and he catched two of them and sold them on board a Frenchman bound for the West Indies. The third was, five of them went up to Bance Island and broke open a factory belonging to one Captain Boys [Bowie] and stole a number of things but they were detected and Captain Boys sold the whole five of them.18
This succession of disasters seemed to bear out only too well the returned Captain Thompson’s report that there was nothing good to be expected from the settlers since they were, for the most part, a drunken, vicious, scoundrelly lot, who either lived in anarchy or had sold out to the slavers. But of course Thompson would hardly take kindly to the conspicuous and, as he saw it, unseemly lack of deference on the part of th
e blacks. Sharp, the incurable optimist, was not going to give up on Granville Town. He noted from Reid’s correspondence that huts had at last been built to protect the settlers from the worst weather, and that although the English seeds had failed, they had had better luck with native crops. And since the mortality rate seemed also to have ebbed somewhat (even though the colony was down to fewer than half the original emigrants), Sharp put the early disasters down to moral turpitude—especially demon rum, which he felt had weakened their resistance to “distempers”—rather than to the contagion-friendly nature of the local climate. Doses of wine infused with cinchona bark had kept death away from the sailors who had stayed up-river aboard the Nautilus in 1787, and, advised perhaps by his doctor brother William, he saw no reason why it should not act with similar benevolence for those on land.
Far from abandoning Granville Town, Sharp resolved, almost certainly with the help of his charitably minded brothers, to come to its rescue. In the summer of 1788 he spent £900 outfitting a two-mast brig, the Myro, intended to bring relief supplies and fifty new settlers, black and white, amongst them two replacement surgeons, as well as fresh livestock, including draft oxen, which were to be bought by Captain Taylor en route at the Cape Verde Islands. With the Myro Sharp sent letters for the settlers, yet another version of his advice and instruction on their good government, “six stout watch coats for the night watch,” a box of leather caps “with capes to secure the necks of the wearer from the cold and the wet” and a batch of presents to the value of £89, to renew the agreement for Granville Town with King Tom’s successor, King Jimmy.19 To his surprise and pleasure, Pitt’s government, now a friend to the anti-slave trade cause, chipped in with another £200, and the Myro sailed for Sierra Leone in September. A day after it had weighed anchor at Blackwall Sharp sent a cutter to catch it with twelve hogshead of porter, courtesy of his new friend and supporter the brewer Samuel Whitbread—a healthier alternative, he thought, to rum.