by Simon Schama
As with every voyage in this venture, the expedition of the Myro was not trouble-free. Only thirty-nine prospective settlers were aboard rather than the hoped-for fifty, and for some reason Captain Taylor failed to buy cattle and pigs at Cape Verde, instead delivering to the settlers monies to the value of the animals—not at all what Sharp had intended. Predictably, the surgeons defected to the slavers on Bance Island as quickly as possible. Yet the surviving remnant at Granville Town was overjoyed to get the relief, if only as an affirmation that, in the midst of their hardships and adversities, they had not been forgotten and abandoned. Twelve of them signed a letter to Sharp and “the rest of our honourable and most humane friends” thanking them “for the manifold cares and gracious providences which they have been pleased to extend to us.” Although they had endured many miseries “which is clearly evident from the very crowded appearance of our burials…we have the pleasure to inform you, great Sir, that we have made good progress in clearing our land, all except our water lots which remain as yet in a state of anorky through our weakness in number of people but we hope to have some tolerable good crops this season.”20 The twelve signatories—including James Frazer, Thomas Carlisle, Jorge Dent and Thomas Cooper—ended their note with the kind of peroration, a mixture of pride and painful contrition, that might have been calculated to fortify Sharp’s perseverance:
We need not use many words. We are those who were considered as slaves, even in England itself till your aid and exertions set us free. We are those whose minds and bodies are bartered from hand to hand on the coast of Africa and in the West Indies as the ordinary commodities of trade. But it is said that we are the factors of our own slavery and sell one another at a market price. No doubt but in our uncivilized state we commit much evil, but surely the trader cannot believe that the strong on the coast of Africa are entitled to deprive the weak of every right of humanity and to devote to the most cruel slavery them and their posterity or that it belongs to him…to execute so horrid a doom.
But yet, Sir you may allow us to believe that the name of GRANVILLE SHARP our constant and generous friend, will be drawn forth by our more enlightened posterity and distinguishingly marked in future times for gratitude and praise.21
And could he, by the way, send six or eight cannon so that a proper fort could be built on St George’s Hill? (He could not.)
All was not yet lost with Granville Town; not yet. Sharp-haters (a growing number in Britain as he and his fellow crusaders became not just a nuisance but a threat) had pounced on stories of anarchy said to characterize the settlement at Sierra Leone; the comedy, as they saw it, of black men playing democratic farmers. This just shows what happens when negroes are so ill-advisedly thrust into liberty, they wrote. What would you expect? But one report from Granville Town by “Leo Africanus” (albeit based on Sharp’s own information), published in The Diary or Woodfall’s Register in November 1789, painted an altogether different picture: of “snug” cottages “formed of mangrove frames, wattled, plaistered, whitewashed and neatly covered with rushes with a piece of land adjoining, inclosed and well planted with bananas, yams, sweet potatoes, cassada [cassava] &c.”22 And what would an Anglo-African village be without a whitewashed church, freshly built, also of wattle, mud and rushes? An English bell had been sent for.
It was precisely the possibility that the little enclave (numbering, now, only around a hundred) might actually survive that, so Sharp believed, provoked its enemies, the slavers of Bance Island, to nip it in the bud. And despite the fresh batch of presents and the new “treaty,” King Jimmy was becoming a lot more restive than his predecessor about the presence of the settlers. When James Bowie and John Tilley warned Jimmy that unless the settlement were checked it might be the end of their lucrative trade, he listened. Every so often, as Sharp’s correspondents had informed him, settlers would be abducted and sold as slaves, ostensibly in reprisal for a theft or some other misdemeanour committed by one of the Granville Town men.
Infuriated though he was by this treatment, in the interests of the settlement’s survival Sharp was forced to modify his original uncompromising principles. He still clung to his stubborn belief that in time his colony of free Africans, built on the foundation of Frankpledge, would be the germ of a great and general emancipation as it grew to maturity. But for now, with the Province of Freedom under immediate and dire threat of obliteration, he was persuaded into pragmatism. Within the Province slavery would never be tolerated, but beyond its bounds, it was only prudent, he wrote to the settlers, to avoid provoking the traders or the native chiefs with whom they did business. They would be well advised to “be courteous and kind to all strangers that come to the settlement even though you know them to be slave dealers or slave holders provided they do not offend your laws during their stay.”
Easier said than done. But in 1789 Sharp must have felt that, if only his Province could somehow hang on, the success that the campaign against the trade was enjoying in Britain itself would sooner or later enlist the powerful to its protection. In a stroke of brutal irony, it was precisely that power, in the imposing shape of His Majesty’s Ship Pomona, that brought about the ruin of Granville Town.
No one could have foreseen it. The enactment of Sir William Dolben’s bill regulating the physical conditions of the trade meant that, for the first time in modern history, state power was being used to intervene in the traffic of “live cargo.” And the Pomona, with Captain Henry Savage commanding, had been ordered to sail to the African coast, distribute copies of the Dolben regulations amongst the slave factories and the agents of the Liverpool and Bristol concerns, and see that its provisions were complied with. After anchoring in St George’s Bay in late November 1789 Savage did his duty, but was instantly beset by complaints from representatives of the free settlers and the slavers, both of whom looked to the captain to uphold their grievances. Abraham Ashmore, the current governor of Granville Town, complained bitterly about his settlers being abducted and sold. James Bowie and John Tilley, on behalf of Messrs Anderson, counter-groused that the settlers were thieves and lawless rogues who had threatened their own establishment. And although Savage had come armed with the paper of parliamentary righteousness, he was, after all, a naval officer and an English gentleman and therefore credited what the white traders, not the blacks, told him.
On one issue, however, Ashmore and Bowie made common cause. King Jimmy had become a menace, violating the agreements he had made with both parties, attacking the settlement, and taking and selling slaves that were not his to sell. He needed to be brought to book and reminded of his solemn undertakings, and the captain of the Pomona should see to it. Savage obliged. On the 20th of November a gun was fired and a flag of truce hoisted to signal that the king might safely come aboard for a parley. No Jimmy appeared. That same afternoon a party of men, including armed marines, four settlers and Bowie himself, was sent to find him. Savage watched from the deck as the boats were beached and Lieutenant Wood and his companions disappeared into the trees. Quiet. Then the crack of musket fire, a sudden plume of flame behind the shoreline and smoke rising over the palms. Someone, probably a young midshipman, had got jumpy as boys do, thought he had heard something, fired into a village, Jimmy’s village, and set a thatched roof on fire. It was the dry season, and it took only minutes for the entire compound to be reduced to charred sticks.
This was just the start of what was to turn into a very bad day for the brand-new British Empire of freedom. From the deck of the Pomona sailors and marines were seen running back in hasty confusion to the shore. Alarmed, Savage sent a second boat to pick them up. As some of the men were swinging their legs over the gunwales, a volley of fire broke from the line of trees fringing the beach. A marine sergeant, the lieutenant of the relief boat and a black settler were all killed, their blood staining the white sand. Now that the skirmish had gone colonial Savage trained the guns of his ship on the shore, “clearing” the bush. Over the next few days he repeated the exercise. In response, Ji
mmy’s men shot at anyone attempting to land for water. Only the well-disposed Naimbana could arbitrate, and one of the settlers was sent to Robana to call for his intervention. When he came back with the message, as he stepped out of his boat he too was felled by a shot.
A week later, on the 27th of November 1789, the Naimbana’s deputies came to order Jimmy to desist, and for the moment he did so, albeit grudgingly and biding his time. Savage agreed to sail away with the Pomona, but only after a general palaver had been arranged, which was supposed to settle grievances peacefully. However, once the warship had set sail on the 3rd of December, King Jimmy was free to impose his notion of what a just settlement should be, and issued an ultimatum to the settlers to leave Granville Town within three days. Then he burned the village down to the ground.23
Although now homeless, the people of Granville Town were not entirely helpless. A small group of them accepted shelter at Robana with the Naimbana, but a larger group of about seventy, kept together by Abraham Ashmore, went up-river to Bob’s Island in the territory of another local chief, Pa Boson—much to the displeasure of the Bance Island agents, who still thought them close enough to be a nuisance. They were no longer in the Province of Freedom. But nor had they been reduced to slaves. Sharp did not hear of the destruction of Granville Town until four months later, in April 1790. His immediate reaction, beyond anguish, was to try to send yet another relief ship, this time a modest forty-ton sloop, the Lapwing—but under whose auspices? Even with the government top-up, the Myro had been expensive, and there was a limit to his and even the Sharp family purse. But there was another possibility: that the newly founded St George’s Bay Company might finance the voyage of the Lapwing.
This commercial enterprise had come into existence as a result of Sharp’s second thoughts about the self-sufficiency of his experiment. The relentless rain of misfortune that had fallen on the settlement had obliged him to recognize that although one day his vision of British freedom might be realized on African soil, that day had not yet come. Perhaps when the trade had been abolished, as he hoped, through legislation the attempt could be renewed. But in the meantime the frail colony desperately needed resources other than the yams, rice and bananas it might grow in a merciful season. In a letter to Sharp sent in September 1788, James Reid had written, “Dear Friend…there is one thing that would be very helpful to us; if we had an agent or two out here with us, to carry on some sort of business in regard to trade; so that we could rely a little sometimes on them for a small assistance, until our crops were fit to dispose of and then pay them. It would be of infinite service to all the poor settlers as provisions are scarce to be got—not one mouthful sometimes.”24 Now Granville Sharp had nothing against trade at all. Was not his brother James an ironmonger? Were not so many of his good colleagues and friends, staunch for the cause, whether bankers or brewers? And wise men such as Adam Smith had projected an African trade in which the products of free labour would find a market far beyond that of the traffic in men.
Provided, then, that it never lost sight of the lodestar of liberty, there could be no harm in establishing a commercial company that might well be in a position to help the settlers with advances against their crops, and that would allow them to trade up-river and inland with the natives. Indeed, replacing the slave-tainted Royal African Company with a St George’s Bay Company would be to purify the spirit of commerce. A charter from Parliament would not only encourage investors by limiting personal liability, it would also give the company the protecting power, legal and if need be military, to stave off the inevitable assaults from the slave interest.
The idea was no sooner floated than it took off. The good rallied with their subscriptions: Thomas Clarkson; William Wilberforce; the Evangelical MP brothers Thornton, Samuel and the banker, Henry, the brewer Samuel Whitbread. But, to Sharp’s dismay, what was not forthcoming in the summer of 1790 was support from the government. Repeated letters to William Pitt went bafflingly, and then woundingly, unanswered. All the time, the hounds of the West India and Africa lobbies were baying loudly, protesting that the abolitionists sought a monopoly and were about to destroy the profit and power of the Empire. Worse still, the government, formerly thought to be sympathetic to abolition, now seemed at best tepid and at worst sceptical. The Attorney-General actually voiced his outright opposition to the project.
Undaunted, Sharp and his friends resolved to outfit and dispatch the Lapwing even before a charter of incorporation had been enacted. The sloop, commissioned for what was to become the Sierra Leone Company, sailed at the end of 1790 loaded with hardware: yet more hoes, forks and shovels, blacksmiths’ tools, quantities of nails and, for some reason, a quantity of children’s knives (Sharp’s enemies said this was to oblige his ironmonger brother). Alexander Falconbridge, the Bristol ex-slaver surgeon who had become well known as the author of the most widely read and graphic account of the physical cruelties of the trade, had been appointed to oversee the resurrection of the Province of Freedom and negotiate a more lasting settlement with King Jimmy. But he had literally missed the boat, and together with his wife, Anna Maria, and his brother, William, had to be sent on in the Duke of Buccleuch.25
During these months, Granville Sharp was plagued with harrowing anxieties. Did the avowedly commercial character of the St George’s Bay Company mean sacrificing his Frankpledge utopia? Would its directors in London and the agents they might appoint for Africa now rule the blacks to whom he had solemnly promised self-rule? Was the great work of building freedom to be surrendered to the lesser work of making money? Then there was another foreboding that gnawed at him. What of the people with whom he had tried to make his place of liberty? How many of the trusty ones had survived? How many, like the unspeakable Harry de Mane, had betrayed him? How could a new world be made from just seventy or eighty souls? He had no appetite to trawl the streets of Wapping and Stepney again for recruits. Perhaps he was not looking in the right place? The Reverend Samuel Hopkins, evidently a good man, had written that in Rhode Island and other places such as Massachusetts where the trade and even the institution had been outlawed there were free blacks who had heard of his enterprise in Sierra Leone and wished to emigrate there—to go from an uncertain American future to British freedom. How he wished he could oblige them!
And Granville Sharp was still wishing and fretting when the good Lord provided. There was a black man, he was told, who had come to London from Nova Scotia and had heard of his project. This man had apparently been a sergeant in the British army during the late American war, serving in the Guides and Pioneers. Before that he had been a slave—a millwright who, along with multitudes like him, had escaped his master in North Carolina and joined the forces of the king, understanding that his loyalty would be repaid with freedom and enough land to make a decent living. Sharp had heard such stories before, of course, from those among the London poor who had been with the British. But they had been a sorry few and there was nothing hangdog about this sturdy sergeant, greying at the temples—this quiet, angry, illiterate but eloquent Thomas Peters.
Peters had travelled on his own account from Nova Scotia, commissioned by fellow blacks who said they had been grievously wronged, carrying a “Memorial” that he had himself drafted. Addressed to the Secretary of State William Grenville, it asserted that the wishes of the king had been set aside; that land promised had not been delivered. With no friends, Peters had sought out those who could commend him: the captain, George Martin, who had sworn him sergeant in the Black Pioneers; and Sir Henry Clinton, who remembered him, had introduced him to Wilberforce and even, through a letter, to Grenville. This Peters spoke of things dear to Granville Sharp’s heart: of the English air too pure for slaves to breathe; of the British constitution that could never tolerate the ignominy and indecency of servitude; of Common Law, the equity of which had never been surpassed in the history of the world. He was a man, by God, this Peters, and he was also, if ever there was such a thing, a true Briton. If there were more like him in
Nova Scotia, then the Province of Freedom would, Lord willing, find its citizenry. He would make sure Thomas Peters had a hearing. London would listen to his story.
VIII
THE TWO MIDDLE-AGED MEN sat together in a room in Old Jewry. Sharp was even more gaunt as he had aged, the eyes still keen above the sunken cheeks; Thomas Peters, also in his fifties, was by turns expansive and taciturn. As Sharp listened, he began to grasp something repellent. The burden of Peters’s accusations—the hurt the Pioneers and their families had suffered in Nova Scotia—began to oppress him. It was not just that they had been denied the land they had been promised and so robbed of their little self-sufficiency. It was much worse than that. Into the country that ought to have been the birthplace of a new, free British-American empire, as spotless of corruption as a fall of fresh snow, the old stain had obscenely seeped. There was, it seemed, slavery in Nova Scotia. Loathsome though it was, Sharp understood that white loyalist planters and merchants coming to their northern refuge would not permit their “servants” to be uncoupled from their bondage. But as for the black men who had faithfully followed the king’s flag: that they and their families should have been reduced to servitude again, even if it were not called by that name, Sharp found inconceivably abhorrent.