by Simon Schama
The argument did its damage; the vote was lost. But could anything be rescued from the “retarding”? To sustain the faith of the tens of thousands of Britons who had enrolled in the crusade against the slave trade over the past four years some sort of energetic action was needed. Responding, as he always did, to the crisis of the moment, Clarkson hit on an idea of spectacular creative simplicity: rejection of West Indian sugar. Proclaimed tainted by the blood of Africans, the confection was declared moral poison. Thousands heeded the call, replacing Caribbean by East Indian sugar, or substituting honey or maple sugar. The campaign went from London bakers to Scottish vicarages and, through its domestic appeal, made wives, mothers and cooks the guardians of Christian wholesomeness.12
There was also a project that, if supported by the government, might yet compensate for the failure of Wilberforce’s motion. The presence of Thomas Peters in London, and his openness to the possibility that the free blacks of Nova Scotia might be willing to transplant themselves to Sierra Leone, suddenly made the prospects of reviving the Province of Freedom much brighter. Through the agency of the St George’s Bay Company, which had sent out the Lapwing to pick up the survivors of King Jimmy’s raid, Clarkson and his colleagues ambitiously imagined a beacon of commercial and moral energy radiating out into the African continent from Sierra Leone. In 1788 Clarkson had met the Swedish naturalist Carl Bernhard Wadstrom, who had been to West Africa, and helped publish the Swede’s attack on the slave trade. Unlike Henry Smeathman, Wadstrom seemed to be all soundness and science; and his own relatively optimistic assessment of the potential of the region, indeed, his eagerness to return to help establish a free province there, infected both Thomas and John Clarkson with a fresh burst of enthusiasm. They told Sharp they would themselves be happy to go to Sierra Leone, and were so convincing that Sharp happily passed this news on to the settlers, asking them to set aside reserved lots for the incoming distinguished gentlemen from Cambridgeshire.
The business of the parliamentary campaign and the burning of the settlers’ village had postponed this ambition. But Thomas Clarkson still clung to his cheerful vision. At the back of a reborn town, set in a busy harbour, would stretch hundreds of little farms, busily cultivated by their freeholders, growing melons and beans and rice for themselves and cotton, gum, pepper, dyewood, coffee and, of course, sugar for the market. In no time at all, Clarkson thought, free sugar would cut the world price in half and capture the global market. And since nowhere in all Africa rivalled Sierra Leone as a natural harbour, it would also be a receiving and exporting station for goods from the whole West African coast and even the caravan trade across the Sahara! Ivory and gold would come to St George’s Bay, and for the first time it would not come on the backs of slaves. In no time at all Britons would be trading with 50 million Africans. The plan to replace the old, infamous Royal African Company, which had done virtually nothing but slave, with the new Sierra Leone Company, which would strictly forbid it, was taken to the government. It was warmly received by Henry Dundas, Pitt’s Secretary for the Colonies—not least because it seemed a way to pre-empt the always opportunist French.
News from Alexander Falconbridge, the company’s agent in Sierra Leone, further heartened the supporters of the project. Up-river, he had found sixty-four survivors of the Province of Freedom—a pitiful remnant, to be sure, of the four hundred who had sailed out on the Atlantic and the Belisarius four years before. But, Falconbridge reported, whatever their distress, they had no wish to end the story there. On the contrary, they had been overjoyed to realize that they had not been forgotten, and had told Falconbridge they should very much like to return to the site of their original village.
Falconbridge, the former slave-ship surgeon, now did what he could to resurrect the Province of Freedom. At Robana he and his wife were granted a palaver—even though Anna Maria had caught the Naimbana in a “state of dishabille…in a loose white frock and trowsers.”13 During their meeting, the Naimbana changed his splendid costume three times, from purple coat to black velvet to scarlet cape, smiled constantly while chuckling at the foreign “rogues” and expressed (through Griffith, his African-American son-in-law and interpreter) his warm friendship for his brother King George. After receiving fifteen hundred “bars” and £39 he agreed to renew the lease on the land that had been granted originally to Thompson and the settlers. Falconbridge sent his Greek deputy with the cutter up-river to the island of Pa Boson, the chief who had sheltered the fugitives. Meanwhile, Anna Maria walked around Robana in a state of agitated half-excitement, half-horror, through a landscape of fetishes (rusty cutlasses and animal remains) at the foot of poles. She looked a little too closely at the sheen of bodies heavily greased with palm oil, listened to the Temne drums, admired the brilliantly striped taffeta of the queens’ robes, and gaped at the pendulousness of mature women’s breasts, a fashion she was astounded to discover was, among the local people, universally desired.
Not far from Captain Thompson’s hill was an abandoned Temne village of seventeen huts, which was declared suitable for the rebirth of the settlement. When the cutter arrived, bearing the bedraggled company of blacks with the seven white wives whom Anna Maria decided must have been prostitutes, she thought it one of the most depressing spectacles she had ever seen. But the misery was dispelled, at least for a moment, as Falconbridge distributed clothing brought in the Lapwing, and made a buck-up speech worthy of a small town alderman or a beleaguered brigadier, promising, should they show themselves willing, that they should have tools and weapons to protect themselves and all would be well. Finally, with a flourish “he named the place GRANVILLE TOWN after their friend and benefactor GRANVILLE Sharp Esq., at whose instance they were provided with the relief now afforded them.”14 Huzzah. God bless.
So there was, after all, a saved remnant. Together with the Black Pioneers, whom Peters would bring over from Nova Scotia, they might yet make something of Granville Town. The only person unhappy about all this was Granville himself. He had been assured, not least by Clarkson, that the new Sierra Leone Company would be a dagger to the heart of the slave trade, but he could not quite believe it. His dream of a society built on black Frankpledge had perished, destroyed as much by white pusillanimity and cupidity as by the torches of King Jimmy. For this new place would be, he protested, barely bringing himself to write the word, a colony. He had not thought he would ever be in the business of establishing commercial colonies. The Province of Freedom had belonged to those who lived in it (never mind that it had actually belonged to the Temne and the Sherbro). Now it was to be the property of the Sierra Leone Company, and the settlers merely there by the company’s grace. Certainly, when things had become difficult, he had been ready to transfer administration from himself to the St George’s Bay Company, but only on condition that the essential political character of the Province of Freedom—self-rule, watch and ward, the freehold of the lots—remained sacrosanct. In the proposals for incorporation of the new company all this seemed to have been done away with, replaced by the distant government of a board of directors and, even worse, by their appointed (white, he assumed) councillors in Sierra Leone itself. What was left—just black juries and constables? Gone was the currency in units of public common labour; gone his experiment in direct black democracy in the assembled Common Council; gone the justice and “liberty” that had been the heart of his enterprise.
What was Sharp to do? He could not bring himself to write off the whole enterprise, as Equiano and Cugoano had done. He knew that the handful of survivors in Africa still placed their trust in him, and that he owed them whatever measure of benevolent vigilance he could still exercise. His name still meant something, surely. So, with deep misgivings, Granville Sharp accepted the new company and even a place among its directors. But he made sure to write to well-disposed Members of Parliament requesting the provision of certain safeguards for the settlers. He worried that, in a more purely commercial system, the settlers would be forced to sell produce cheaply to t
he company, which would then sell it dear at home. Should those prices not be satisfactory to them, the settlers ought to be able to ship it themselves at nominal cost. It should be understood that they held their land freely, not as lease-bound tenants, and that it should be automatically inherited by their children. Any land not used for cultivation ought to be set aside for commons, where settlers might graze cattle, hunt or fish. And, most important, there should be a single, race-blind system of justice.
Some of Sharp’s provisions became articles of incorporation. But even as an exercise in capitalist colonialism the company still faced strident opposition from the slave and sugar lobby, especially in Liverpool. But Thomas Clarkson was optimistic. Many MPs, he thought, were nursing a guilty conscience over their vote against abolition of the slave trade and would vote for the company, or at least abstain from opposition, to feel a little more Christian. He was right: the proposal passed easily through both Houses of Parliament. The company came into being in July 1791 with Henry Thornton, a young Evangelical banker (and William Wilberforce’s cousin), as its first chairman. Mobilizing the capital of the faithful, especially Quakers and Evangelicals, produced an initial fund of £42,000. Now as a director of the company, Thomas Clarkson took his new passion on the road, boasting of the millions of Africans who would shortly be trading with Britain. A one-man chamber of commerce, he developed the habit of keeping in his pockets samples of peppercorns and coffee beans, which he would invite guests to sample, having first roasted the latter in a shovel over an open fire.15
A new page was about to be turned in the epic history of the African-Americans who had opted for British freedom. But everyone concerned with the rebirth of the Sierra Leone venture recognized that its success depended on a transfusion of fresh blood from Nova Scotia. It became a commonplace, when lamenting the fate of the first settlement, to remark that perhaps it had not been made from the most promising human material; that those “poor blacks” had been, after all, dependent on charity for some years and were unaccustomed to the challenges of hard work. But the Nova Scotians, from what Peters had said, were the cream of the black loyalists and would need no homilies about perseverance in adversity. Just how many of them would emigrate, however, was uncertain. Henry Dundas, on behalf of the government, assumed no more than perhaps thirty families, which would nonetheless be a good start and perhaps all that the infant settlement could, for the moment, absorb. In conversations with Clarkson, Peters himself estimated no more than a hundred-odd souls. But however many might make the move, it would be done with the blessing and protection of His Majesty’s government. On the 6th of August Dundas wrote to Governors Parr and Thomas Carleton in Canada, enclosing copies of Peters’s petition and implying that they would have to address its grievances. An inquiry should be launched to see if land had been withheld, for, if Peters were right, his people would “have certainly strong grounds for complaint.” Redress should be made, but for any blacks not wishing to stay the government was committed to providing free passage to Sierra Leone and resettlement on land there, or, should the alternative be more attractive, military service in free black regiments in the West Indies.16 That two of Britain’s colonial governors were being required by the Westminster government to pay serious attention to the complaints and concerns of an illiterate sergeant of the Black Pioneers, someone they had brushed aside as an inconsequential gadfly, was a breathtakingly improbable turn of events.
Peters was to return to Nova Scotia himself to spread the word among the black communities. In addition, agents on the spot, specially appointed by the company, were to interview and gather together any who wished to emigrate, whether to Africa or the Caribbean. But given what Peters had told them about the conduct of the white loyalists towards the blacks, not to mention their dependence on them as a source of cheap labour, Clarkson and Sharp worried whether their sergeant would be capable of ensuring that the wishes of government and the company were faithfully executed. Someone else, someone white, needed to go to Nova Scotia: someone of tenacious determination, irreproachable integrity and inexhaustible energy; someone capable, not just of canvassing the blacks, but of chartering a ship and organizing the voyage and seeing it safely to Sierra Leone, after which a “superintendent” appointed by the company would take over.
Heads were scratched, wondering who such a paragon might be. Thomas himself was far too busy to be spared. But then, with a sudden unexpected alternation of joy and sobriety, he thought of his brother.
HE HAD ALWAYS BEEN the “other” Clarkson—second born, perfectly affable, sweet-tempered Johnny, easy in his disposition, not a great engine of thought and deed like Thomas and not, perhaps, destined for great things, but always willing to do his duty and do it without cavil. The two brothers were affectionate, perhaps because (aside from the same prominent Clarkson nose) they were so dissimilar, and if profession were decided by physique and temperament, they ought to have changed places. Thomas, the clergyman, was big-boned and square-jawed, with a great forehead, as burly as a carthorse and hopeless at small talk. John, the naval officer, was slender, tall, naturally sociable, with somewhat delicate features and the quick animation and tender sentiment that, beside the adamant Thomas, made him seem almost puppyish. The younger brother was as much in awe of the elder as the rest of well-disposed Britain, which is to say, abjectly.
Yet young John Clarkson had certainly not been sheltered from the world’s pounding. He had been two years old when his father, the Wisbech schoolmaster, died, leaving the widow, Anne, not only bereft, but a martyr to crippling rheumatism. Each year she would take the three children (for there was a sister, also called Anne) to stay with their cousins, the Gibbses of Horkesley Park in Essex. There, amidst the usual re-landscaped pastoral of the times (ornamental sheep, tall sash windows on the west front), the young Clarksons encountered blue coats and gold braid, for the Gibbses were married into the naval clan of the Rowleys, and it was with Captain Joshua Rowley that the twelve-year-old John Clarkson had his entry into the Royal Navy. So while Thomas was parsing Latin poetry and steeping himself in Erasmus at St Paul’s School, John slung his hammock aboard HMS Monarch, a seventy-four-gun man-of-war as a cadet. There he spliced rope, diligently got to grips with his sextants and quadrants, climbed aloft to keep watch above the rolling ship, and learned that it was his duty to stand by the guns during an action, pistol cocked, quite ready to shoot anyone attempting to flee the deck.17
In five and a half years as cadet, midshipman and acting lieutenant John Clarkson served on nine ships, from a third-rater man-of-war such as the Monarch to a swift, predatory frigate named the Proserpine, ending up on the trim little raiding sloop Bloodhound. His apprenticeship in the navy coincided almost exactly with the American conflict, so by the time he was commissioned lieutenant, in March 1783, he had experienced just about everything the wartime navy could throw at him. When barely more than a child he had watched as sailors had plunged headlong from the top mainmast, one to his death on the guns; had become inured to the grim ceremony of daily floggings (cracks, grunts, opened flesh sluiced with brine); had felt the sickening impotence of a great ship run aground in a violent gale, the stern wheeling madly about as the crew frantically dumped everything overboard except the guns; had cheered himself hoarse as the king was rowed through the fleet at the Spithead Review; had registered in his bones the juddering smash and splinter of a direct broadside, so violent that it felt as if the walls of the vessel would fall away; had watched helplessly as mainsails shredded by fire collapsed, shrouding the deck like a suddenly disarticulated fallen seabird; had skidded in the miry blood of the gundeck despite the sand strewn to prevent it; had seen an officer’s arm taken clean off by a cannon ball in battle and he not so much as utter a cry; had agonized at the excruciating deliberateness of manoeuvre either getting into, or out of, lines of fire; and, worst thing of all, had stared, paralysed, at the brute carnage of an unequal boarding, his own shipmates whooping as they hacked and cleaved and shot their w
ay through the pitifully determined crew of a small French sloop, the Sphinx, a massacre he could never afterwards quite put out of his mind.18