by Simon Schama
Amid so much action, there was no time nor place nor point for Midshipman Clarkson to develop a tender conscience. For much of the American Revolutionary War John had been stationed in the Caribbean, where Admiral Rodney had been ordered by the Admiralty to engage the French as much as he could so as to keep them from blockading British America or seizing British sugar islands. If he could, at the same time, perhaps snatch some of theirs or those of the Spanish, the Sea Lords would be most tremendously obliged. During those years, slavery was all around John Clarkson and he showed no signs of minding. Some of the gunners and powder men were slaves, some free. In harbour, in Barbados and St Lucia, slaves manned the cutters, piloted the ships to safe anchorage, bore hogsheads on their carts and bales on their backs; and as yet more shackled Africans were auctioned near the quay. In languid Jamaica he heard the drums for Jump-Up and John Canoe; saw the creole women parade their satin in the sun; watched young planters, some his own age or less but sallow with fevers and debauchery, tumble groggily from the taverns—and never, ever, did he give a thought to the iniquity of that world.
That was before the Zong atrocity; before his brother Thomas’s Hertfordshire epiphany by the roadside; before he had ever heard of Granville Sharp and James Ramsay. But John had barely slipped into his lieutenant’s coat when the war against the Americans and the French ended. Like thousands of other young officers, he found his ship decommissioned and he himself put on half pay. Family connections and friends were importuned to see if someone could find John a ship, but no one could; and he managed to talk himself out of an interview with Lord Howe for the command of a small cutter off the East Anglian coast. At an uncharacteristic loose end, he drifted, rather than sailed, into the infectious aura of his older brother’s non-stop zeal. He began to read, to talk, to breathe abolition, and then, with his own share of genuine emotional fervour, to act. He had, after all, practical assets to bring to Clarkson and Wilberforce’s campaign: a first-hand knowledge of the West Indies and of matters nautical. He helped Thomas ferret around the dockyards for shy witnesses and reluctant testimony; examined bills of lading with a seafarer’s eye; and wrote it all up for the committee whose meetings he punctiliously attended. Some of his old shipmates were not pleased by this conversion. One of them, John Matthews, had published an account of Sierra Leone, where he had travelled, in order to defend the slave trade. The Rowleys hurrumphed, and made noises about there always having been such things and leaving well alone. The Bishop of Bangor told John yes, well, but they have such disagreeable noses, do they not? To which the young man replied, in the slightly sanctimonious but morally impeccable manner that was to be the mark of the new John Clarkson, that he felt sure God would not make anything disagreeable.
He still wanted a commission. And briefly, in 1790, with a war scare—against Spain rather than France—one came up in the shape of Rodney’s old flagship, HMS Sandwich, now reduced to acting as a receiving station for the unfortunates press-ganged into service. It was about as squalid a post as could be imagined, and one that both Jonas Hanway and Granville Sharp had spent much energy attacking. But for the last time John Clarkson put his career above his humane conscience. Although the brothers did not entirely sever relations over this ugly work, Thomas was aghast at John’s defection and pointedly took to seeking out and caring for the wives and children of men seized by the gangs. One of them, distraught and with a babe in arms, told Thomas her husband was aboard the Sandwich. A boat took them out to the ship, where John gave his brother and the weeping woman the grievous news that the man had already sailed.19
The friction ended when the Sandwich was put out of commission altogether in May 1791, around the time that the Sierra Leone Company got its incorporation. John was once more available, and reconciled with his hectically busy brother. He was at a crossroads. There had been an auspicious engagement to Susannah Lee, the daughter of a City banker and East Anglian landowner. At twenty-seven years old, John could look forward to the inoffensive life of a philanthropically inclined, rather pious country gentleman—should he not be called back to the fleet. But those to whom he was most devoted—his brother Thomas and William Wilberforce—had entirely other ideas.
It seems likely, knowing that the company wanted someone to go to Nova Scotia to second Peters’s efforts, that John volunteered rather than was pushed by Thomas. But he must have known how pleased his brother would be at this initiative; how the goodness of the one commission would erase the infamy of the other. From the company’s and the committee’s point of view they could not have had anyone better. John Clarkson was still young, just twenty-seven—but then the prime minister, Pitt, had first attained his high office at three years younger than that! And if there was to be some sort of sailing from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone, who better to manage it than the lieutenant, seeing that he represented a marriage of naval experience and godly zeal?
Perhaps most compelling was the indisputable fact that William Wilberforce loved John Clarkson at least as much as did his own brother. John’s impishness was a refreshing change from Thomas’s uninterrupted solemnity and goodness. It was possible to be sly with John. Wilberforce, five years older, addressed him in letters and sometimes in speech as “dear Admiral” and gave the impression that there was winking and even horseplay between the two of them. Surrounded though they were by all this gravity, they were still boys. But the boys would do the work of men, and tough saints at that. That the “Mission,” as it was already called, would be the making of the young lieutenant Wilberforce had no doubt. He personally saw to it that members of the government, such as Dundas and Evan Nepean, the under-secretary responsible for Canadian matters, would provide the necessary letters of instruction, authority and introduction that would ease John’s way in Halifax. To Nepean, Wilberforce wrote that he had the utmost faith in John Clarkson, a “young Man of very great merit & a thousand good qualities both professional & personal amongst which, believe me, discretion is one…added to all this he is a person for whom I feel a very sincere Regard.”20 On the 5th of August John Clarkson requested and was granted a twelve-month leave from the navy.
His brother Thomas, of course, was not about to slow down. He was touring again, promoting what was now called the Anti-Saccharine Campaign and chasing up the Sierra Leone subscriptions. He walked for pleasure only at night. He wrote letters while he ate. When his Shropshire host, the Reverend Plymley, was a little later for dinner than arranged, Clarkson voiced his regret at the precious minutes wasted and got Katherine Plymley, the man’s sister, to furnish him with pens, ink and desk forthwith. After he was obliged, Clarkson then suggested she might like to seal the letters as he polished them off, to avoid squandering further time. Always mindful of the good of the cause, Thomas instructed John to keep a journal of his mission, for he thought that such a document, properly edited and published (by him), could be of inestimable value to the anti-slavery crusade. Obedient as always, John promised to do this.21 Then he went to see his fiancée, Susannah, to get her blessing for, or at least consent to, the postponement of their marriage. It was not, after all, as if he would be gone for years. His work was to see whether there were any takers in Nova Scotia for the Sierra Leone colony; and, if so, to get them there. That was all. The company in its wisdom would then appoint a governor or a superintendent. Within a year at the outside he would be home; satisfied, he trusted, with a high vocation properly fulfilled.
John boarded the Ark at Gravesend, twenty miles down-river from London. Then, suddenly, his older brother seems to have had an attack of apprehensiveness about the venture. “In the Rivers of Africa, take care of the Allegators [sic] and on the land, of the snakes,”22 he wrote in a parting letter; but his fretfulness went deeper than this cautionary advice. He could not quite let go of John; he needed a more complete farewell. And the winds—adverse and blustery—were with him, if not with the Ark. Progress into the Atlantic was out of the question. Thomas, who seldom interrupted his carefully planned itinerary for anyt
hing so sentimental, now adjusted it to take in visits to Plymouth and Exeter and rode frantically southwest trying to discover just where the Ark had put in, finally catching up with John at Weymouth. There was a last serious encounter, a last embrace, and—for these were, after all, the Clarksons—doubtless a quiet, anxious prayer.
WAS IT halfway across the Atlantic, with an autumnal fog so dense that the Ark almost collided with a brig right under its lee, that John Clarkson first experienced an untimely sinking feeling? He kept recalling Wilberforce’s strange advice before he had embarked. Do not be too close to Peters, Wilberforce had written him in early August, lest you share in any blame he might incur; cultivate the governors; be careful not to oversell the scheme.23 It was not counsel designed to reinforce his equanimity, which now and again would suddenly darken like the colour of the waves when the sun was crossed by cloud.
During the voyage, my mind has been constantly occupied with the importance of my mission. I see it in a different point of view to what I did when first I offered my services, for then I was influenced by the feelings of the moment in consequence of the affecting story I had heard Peters relate and the difficulty the Directors seemed to have finding a suitable person to conduct it; but when I got to sea and had time for reflection, the case was altered. I had then leisure to perceive the magnitude of the undertaking and although I felt an equal desire to assist these unfortunate people yet I almost shrank from the responsibility I had imposed upon myself, but having embarked in it I had no alternative but to go on.24
Was he to be, then, Jonah rather than Moses? Constant self-interrogation was a habit of the Evangelical cast of mind. But hitherto he had not been much beset by the kind of doubt that came flooding in along with an equally stern summons to duty. Suppose Peters, for all his obvious integrity and passion, was not right, and that the blacks were better off staying where they were? For Sierra Leone, to be sure, would have its own share of risks and perils. Why, then he would be most culpable of misleading them. True, he came armed with a document, in the form of a handbill published by the company in August 1791, that could be posted or be read to the blacks, and which promised precisely what they did not presently have: a guaranteed plot of land to cultivate (twenty acres per man, ten for his wife and five for each child), and a system of justice that would include black juries. The handbill also contained the first explicit anti-discrimination document in Western history, a strict instruction from the government that “the civil, military and commercial rights and duties of blacks and whites shall be the same and secured in the same manner.”25 And above all, as Sharp had insisted, there was to be no slavery tolerated in Granville Town, nor were any of the agents of the company, much less settlers, to engage in the traffic themselves. So it would be a new place for them, and surely an improvement over their experience in Nova Scotia. All the same, Clarkson thought, he owed it to them (and perhaps to himself), as Wilberforce had counselled, not to advertise this future with excessive enthusiasm so that only the most determined would go. He would simply state the policy of the company and His Majesty’s government and then leave it to the good people “to make their own choice, for I considered them as men having the same feelings as myself and therefore I did not dare to sport with their destiny.”
On the 7th of October the Ark dropped anchor in the broad harbour of Halifax. Standing on deck, Clarkson was charmed by the jumble of yellow and white houses climbing the hill. But he was already nervily impatient to set about his task. Lodgings were rented in the merchants’ coffee-house by the harbour, where he was called on by Lawrence Hartshorne, the Quaker merchant who was the company’s agent in the Halifax area and who struck Clarkson right away with the frankness and modesty of his character, qualities he would find in short supply among other white Nova Scotians. A group of Swedenborgians put in an appearance; they were especially well disposed to Clarkson’s mission, since their Church professed the belief that in Africans were to be found the true uncorrupted spirit of Christianity. Thomas Peters, Clarkson learned, had preceded him and already left Halifax for Annapolis. That Peters had received a warm and cooperative welcome from Governor Parr he presumed unlikely.
That same afternoon John Clarkson presented himself and his instructions to Parr, who, even before Peters’s arrival, knew about both men through the letter sent by Dundas on the 6th of August. What Clarkson did not know was that there had been a further communication from Evan Nepean, which, in a gesture of mysterious underhandedness, had already undercut his authority. The gist of Nepean’s note was to counsel Parr not to hasten Clarkson’s enterprise unduly. If, indeed, it could be somewhat retarded, that might be politic. Just why Nepean (and perhaps Dundas) should have wanted to express second thoughts so directly against the spirit and letter of their own official instructions is unclear, unless they concurred with Parr’s own view that to promote the Sierra Leone expedition was to invite trouble from the white loyalists, perhaps even hasten a mass defection back to the United States. And Parr and Thomas Carleton, of course, were bound to take exception to the implication of Peters’s complaints, since it reflected badly on their own stewardship.
The next day Parr gave a dinner for Clarkson, with the notables of Halifax in attendance. They included Michael Wallace, naturally, and Bishop Inglis, who had formerly been vicar of Trinity Church in New York and who was, at best, lukewarm in his sympathy to the blacks (his pews, after all, were closed to them except in the gallery). Also at the table was a Mr Hammond, a British diplomat to the United States, who had come to Halifax in the Falmouth packet. Suspiciously encouraged by the governor, Hammond said that on the boat he’d heard reports of the annihilation of the Sierra Leone settlement by local natives. His gloomy account led Parr to make sceptical noises about the wisdom of any mass departure of Nova Scotian blacks for so perilous a destination. Clarkson, of course, knew all about King Jimmy’s attack of 1790, and supposed this latest report to be of a second, purported raid on the village re-established by Falconbridge. But, already alert to what might be a self-interested campaign of dissuasion, Clarkson dismissed the veracity of this latest “intelligence.” But Parr wouldn’t let it go, insisting he had heard many similar reports of the unhappy fate of the Sierra Leone settlers. Then, at Parr’s table, against the backdrop of goblets and silver, the tall, nervous young man in his lieutenant’s blue, with his face and bright eyes, discovered his own authority. Neither the directors nor His Majesty’s government, he said smartly (and a little officiously), could possibly have countenanced his mission, nor authorized him to make the offer of transport to Sierra Leone, had they had any reason to believe such reports. There must have been some unfortunate misunderstanding on the part of these informants. At this point, so Clarkson wrote in his journal, “the conversation dropped by the Governor pushing about the bottle…I could plainly see that the Governor would rather I should not succeed in my business…probably from an idea that if the people were averse to leaving the province it would be a good argument to prove that they were content.”
All the same, the news unsettled Clarkson after he had begun to spread word of the company’s offer of resettlement in Halifax and neighbouring villages, such as Preston, and deepened his self-inflicted anxieties. Perhaps it would be prudent that “arms and ammunition…be sent out with a proper Armourer” to Sierra Leone? But then he could not prevent the romantic imagination from taking hold. Visions of “his” blacks set upon by hostile tribes on arrival in Africa preyed on him; worse, perhaps his masters in London had kept something from him and knew he was being sent on a wild goose chase. Why, then, of what account was he? And how would he ever forgive himself for leading the blacks into yet more suffering?
‘I will tell you now,” John wrote to an imaginary reader—himself, perhaps, or his brother—as he collapsed into the stream-of-consciousness broken syntax that betrayed his inner agitation,
…what will certainly happen, should I meet with any determined resistance [in Africa] while the people are under my
protection; I shall keep uppermost in my thoughts that I have several innocent men under me, many of whom were comfortably settled in peace and quietness and would have been well content, had it not been for the inclemency of the weather for some part of the year—that these people placed a confidence in me, to perform the promises made by the Company and assured by me that there was no immediate danger from the kings of the country, but that I thought it necessary that all good citizens should be on their guard—that these poor unfortunate men have, ever since Europe called herself Enlightened, experienced the greatest treachery, oppression, murder and everything base, that I cannot name an instance where a body of them collected together have ever had the promises made them performed in a conscientious way; and therefore, after considering what I have said in its fullest intent and particularly after recollecting that these people were in peace and quietness before they put their confidence in me, I shall be at a loss (supposing we meet with resistance) to convince them of the Integrity and real feeling of my heart towards them, and I do declare that you will never see me more if any thing of the kind should happen, for I will sacrifice my life in the defence of the meanest of them on board, sooner than they should entertain a doubt of the sincerity of my intentions…26
What exactly was John Clarkson threatening, should he, at journey’s end across the ocean, discover he had been wilfully misled and, worse, had unknowingly misled the blacks? Armed resistance? Suicide? And what had suddenly brought on this passionate, even violent, private outburst?
First, he had been keeping company in Halifax with men who were all too ready to confirm the reports of the systematic mistreatment of the free blacks. The two principal legal officers of Nova Scotia, Chief Justice Sampson Blowers and Attorney-General Thomas Strange, regularly heard cases that grieved and outraged them and that had, in fact, made them the advance guard of a small faction in Halifax that favoured the complete outlawing of slavery in the province. Then Lawrence Hartshorne had introduced him to the Quaker loyalists, who, in common with Friends in Britain and America, had always been of a similar mind.