by Simon Schama
In some other respects, however, the additional instructions drafted by the company in November 1791, and that would be waiting for John Clarkson when he arrived in Sierra Leone, were a drastic and shocking departure from the assumptions he had taken with him to Nova Scotia. The most serious alteration, and the one that would make for much future trouble, was the matter of taxation. In response to anxious enquiries, Clarkson had specifically reassured the blacks that there would be no quit rent, but the company had, in fact, decided to impose one—and at the onerous rate of a shilling a year for the first year, rising to a level of 4 percent after three years. In a letter waiting at Sierra Leone, Henry Thornton explained to Clarkson that the company preferred this means of recovering “all our huge expenses” to a customs duty on produce and added, “I trust the Blacks will not consider it a grievance.” They would.
Nor would Freetown be governed by them, except in the matter of local policing. And this too would come as an unwelcome surprise and be a source of deep grievance. A white man, meeting up with a group of blacks on the road to Shelburne, asked them where they were going and was told they were bound for Sierra Leone where they would all be “majesties.”47 And most of them certainly thought that blacks as well as whites would be “magistrates” of their own community. But the company had ruled this out and replaced Granville Sharp’s assembly of free men with a superintendent and a body of white councillors, more akin to the governance of British Madras or Bombay than the experimental polity originally designed for Sierra Leone. The councillors would be, for the most part, the professionals deemed to be needed as stewards of the foundation: a surveyor, an engineer of works, a physician, a gardener, a chaplain and so on, all, so the company thought, carefully screened for their integrity, their enthusiasm for the settlement and their scrupulousness in abiding by the directive to be strictly colour-blind when it came to matters of administration and justice. The first superintendent was to be a decommissioned army officer called Henry Hew Dalrymple, who had testified to the Privy Council on the horrors he had seen at the slave factories in Goree. It had affected him so powerfully that, on inheriting a plantation in Grenada, Dalrymple had freed his slaves and locked the place up.48
But somebody was unhappy about this last preferment; Alexander Falconbridge, the company’s agent, who had returned to Britain from Sierra Leone in late September 1791, a few weeks after Clarkson had sailed. He and his wife, Anna Maria, had survived a nightmare journey home on the tiny thirty-four-ton Lapwing: almost sunk by tornadoes en route to the Cape Verde Islands, their livestock washed overboard; most of the nine crew and passengers violently sick and feverish; their fresh water leaked from casks riddled with marine worm-holes. Anna Maria survived on a daily teacup of flour made into a pap with salt and rainwater.49 After a period of recuperation they sailed through the islands, only for the ship to run aground. It would have certainly been driven on to the rocks of São Tomé had not Anna Maria been walking the deck on a moonlit night, seen the imminent disaster and roused the crew in the nick of time. Fearing that the schooner might break up, the passengers got themselves into a small boat (Anna bringing “a few shiftings of clothes and our bedding”), only to find there was nowhere on the rocks that could offer any kind of safe landing. “Despondency was pictured in every face! What shall we do, or what is best to be done was the universal cry. Conscious of a woman’s insignificance in such matters I was silent till then, when finding a general vacancy of opinion among the men, I ventured to say ‘Let us return to the Lapwing and put our trust in Him who is all sufficient and whose dispensations are always just.’ “Whether or not providence came to her aid, Anna’s instinct turned out to be sound. The ship eventually got afloat—although only to run straight into another “tremendous storm” between Cape Verde and the Azores, which lasted five days, “augmenting the miseries…almost unbearable and past representation.”
Once their man was safely home, the company seemed to have added insult to Falconbridge’s injuries, since, although the remnant of settlers had hoped he would be made their governor, he was passed over for Dalrymple. Even after a number of arguments with Dalrymple, serious enough for the directors to dispense with the new governor’s services, Falconbridge was not named in his place but appointed instead as “commercial agent”—although with a trebled salary of £250 per annum, and responsibility for managing the company’s investment in Sierra Leone.
Learning of the scale of John Clarkson’s planned emigration, and notwithstanding his regard for Thomas, Falconbridge thought the plan imprudent, or, as Anna Maria put it (possibly in retrospect), “a premature, hair-brained [sic] and ill-digested scheme.”50 Nevertheless, whatever reservations the Falconbridges may have had were swept aside by their delivery to the directors of one piece of evidence that promised great things for the future of Freetown. He was the “Black Prince.” John Frederic, the twenty-nine-year-old son of the Naimbana of Robana, had been sent, probably under the influence of the king’s son-in-law, Abraham Elliott Griffith, to be educated in England. (Hedging his bets like the pragmatic ruler he was, the Naimbana had sent another son to France.) The king’s England-bound son was carrying a letter from his father to Granville Sharp, promising to protect the settlers and declaring that he remained “partial to the people of Great Britain, for which cause I have put up with a great deal of insults from them, more than I should have from any other country.” He hoped that Sharp would take care of his son “and let him have his own way in nothing but what you think right yourself.”51
The “Black Prince,” who had shared all the privations of the voyage of the Lapwing, was described by the not unprejudiced Anna Maria as having “a person rather below the ordinary, inclining to grossness, his skin nearly jet black, eyes keenly intelligent, nose flat, teeth unconnected and filed sharp after the custom of the country, his legs a little bandied and his deportment manly and confident.”52 But if, through his education and cultivation, he could be made into a friend and ally of Freetown, then, given that his succession to the old Naimbana could not be far off, the settlement would be secure against any repetition of the King Jimmy disaster.
Invited to stay at Henry Thornton’s house in Kent, and supplied with a Reverend Gambier as tutor, the prince was baptized with Thornton and Sharp standing as godfathers. Before long Sharp was able to write to the Naimbana that his son showed a “natural good disposition, modesty…great diligence and application to learning.” Indeed John Frederic, so his tutors reported, could hardly bear to stop reading and “would express regret if he had been let into any company where the time had passed away without improvement.” Taken by Thomas Clarkson to see the Plymouth dockyards, the young African could not understand what he was doing there when he might be in London, deep in his reading. Yet if the “Black Prince” seemed an almost unbelievable paragon of studiousness, he never forgot that he was indeed black and an African. “He was quick in all his feelings and his temper was occasionally warm,” it was said, especially when he suspected he was being drawn out on the subject of Sierra Leone only so that white men and women could parade their superiority. In fact the prince was a dab hand at irony, retorting to those who wanted to make invidious comparisons that a country so “unfavourably circumstanced” as Sierra Leone was not supposed to have been capable of any attainments that could possibly make it worthy of a British conversation. When someone passed a remark offensive or condescending about Africans “he broke out into violent and vindictive language, and when reminded of the Christian duty of forgiving enemies responded that ‘if a man should rob me of my money I can forgive him; if a man should shoot at me or try to stab me I can forgive him; if a man should sell me and all my family to a slave ship so that we should pass all the rest of our days in slavery in the West Indies I can forgive him but’, rising from his seat with much emotion, “if a man takes away the character of the people of my country I can never forgive him.’”53
Evidently, Sierra Leone was going to be the pet project not just of
those who had declared themselves its benefactors.
DAY BY DAY, the lieutenant was turning into a messiah, a reluctant saviour racked by nagging doubts about his own worth and about the fate of his mission. Yet for the sake of his people too (and by now, in December, they were his people), John Clarkson kept his terrors and his trepidations to himself, not even confiding in the good Lawrence Hartshorne. Every day, since he had made it known that his rooms in Shelburne were open to the incoming blacks for the answering of questions and the hearing of grievances, he had been swamped by crowds of them. They stood two and three deep at the back, with others trailing from the open door, while one of their number recited whatever ills worried them or threatened to detain them: debts into which they had been fraudulently ensnared, terms of indenture falsified, kidnappings, verbal and physical intimidation. To his great amazement he even had white soldiers, British and Hessians, at the door, themselves desperate to leave, soliciting him “with tears in their eyes” for a passage to Sierra Leone; something he could not give, although he felt for them, too.54
Although Clarkson supposed there could be nothing left to shock him, some of the stories he heard still stirred him to bitter fury. One afternoon a slight woman called Lydia Jackson had come to see him, and the tale she told was appalling.55 She and her husband had lived near Manchester, which he had left to find work. Finding her in “great distress,” a local loyalist, Henry Hedley, had invited her to work in his house in return for board and lodging. Lydia moved in, but after eight days Hedley demanded rent for her accommodation. Knowing she was destitute, he offered her the alternative of a seven-year indenture. After she refused, Hedley offered her instead a one-year indenture and drew up the papers on which she put her mark—but not, as she thought, for a single year but for a term of thirty-nine years! Still ignorant of this misfortune, Lydia was told next day that she would serve out her year with a Dr John Bolman of Lunenburg and was put on a schooner bound for that port. Bolman, a Hessian surgeon who had served with the army, let her know right away that he had paid £20 for her, that she was his for thirty-nine years and that she had better resign herself to her fate. His methods of bringing about this resignation consisted of regular doses of physical assault. Lydia told Clarkson that she had been beaten with fire tongs, had had rope tied about her face that cut into the flesh, and that in the eighth month of her pregnancy Bolman had knocked her to the floor and stamped on her belly.
Like other free blacks, Lydia Jackson, although illiterate, believed she had recourse to the courts and found a lawyer in Lunenburg prepared to present her case. Once in court, however, she was intimidated into silence on the witness stand by the terrible Bolman; case dismissed. Back at his house he told her that he had done with such an ingrate, sent her to labour on his farm with instructions to his servants to beat her as they saw fit, and periodically threatened to sell her to a West Indian planter as a slave. Lydia endured three more years of this hell before escaping, running and walking through the forest all the way to Halifax, where she took her tale of woe to Chief Justice Blowers and Attorney-General Strange. When they did nothing, she came to John Clarkson’s door. Moved, he took her case to a friendly lawyer, who warned that if she sued Bolman for back wages and fraud, the case would take so long that the Sierra Leone fleet would have gone without her. Gently, understanding Lydia Jackson’s burning sense of unaddressed grievance, Clarkson advised her nonetheless not to proceed with legal action, which he doubted she could win. He will not dare to take you now that he knows you are under my protection, was the comfort of his counsel. Leave him to his gall; make a new, free life in Africa.
Increasingly, Clarkson tried to find ways to skirt the law or to soften its rigour, especially when it concerned terms of indenture. Especially distressing to him was the thought that the Sierra Leone sailing might end up dividing families, some members of whom could leave and others not, and on occasions he would personally intervene to try to persuade employers to let their servants go. Caesar Smith’s young daughter had three years left on her indentures to a Mr and Mrs Hughes, after which, Clarkson gloomily reckoned, with her parents gone away “this child will be sold for a slave.” Unable to persuade Hughes, Clarkson tried a sentimental approach to the wife:
I saw Mrs Hughes and solicited her in the most affecting way to induce her to give up the child; I called upon her as a mother and described the distressed state of Smith’s whole family at the thought of leaving the girl behind and brought to her recollection the circumstances which occasioned the child to be indented for five years which happened in consequence of Smith’s family having lost all they had in the world by their house being burnt down…that the poor Mother was constantly in tears about the child and I therefore hoped she would feel the case as if it were her own and do as she would be done by.
Mrs Hughes was unmoved, Clarkson sorrowfully recording that he “could not make the least impression.”56
Sometimes, between distress and despair, it was all too much. On the 12th of December, near collapse, Clarkson recorded: “Came home today at four o’clock extremely ill from anxiety and fatigue—It is impossible to describe my situation every day. There are not less than eight hundred souls of every description here under my particular care, who come to me for all their trifling wants in spite of the regulations I have made to prevent it and perplex me more giving answers to each than any other part of the business.” But whenever he was close to prostration, some fresh instance of the blacks’ wish to go being shamelessly frustrated by local magistrates, masters or officials would recharge Clarkson’s engine of outrage and he would go into action for them once more. Three days earlier a group of men from New Brunswick had shuffled through the door to see him—Richard Corankapone, William Taylor, Sampson Heywood and Nathaniel Ladd. Before they would allow the four to leave, officers at St John, as elsewhere in both provinces, had demanded to see original General Birch Certificates or other passports dating from the American war testifying to their loyal service. Often, the blacks had kept these yellowing pieces of paper safe; but, considering everything that had befallen them, there were some who could not produce them on demand. As Clarkson pointed out, for the black New Brunswickers to have had (as was conceded) their land assignments registered at St John they must some time earlier have produced those documents; but because they could not do so now, at the last minute they were prevented from boarding the ship taking the other New Brunswickers to Halifax for the grand “rendezvous.”
This setback, however, did not deter them. “These people were determined to quit a Country at the peril of their lives, whose inhabitants treated them with so much barbarity.” They had walked the long route around the Bay of Fundy—some 340 miles—in the depths of winter, “their passage, for a few days, lying through such parts as I am convinced were never before visited by man.” There was a fifth companion, but he had become lame just forty miles away from Halifax and had persuaded them to go ahead lest they miss their ship, although he was “expected every hour.” Stirred by their epic perserverance, Clarkson confessed to his journal that he wished he could have given the four men some sort of immediate reward, but since he had so many in his care suffering acutely, he had to beware of any gestures that could be misconstrued as favouritism. “Prudence [must] get the better of my feelings till I have a proper opportunity of indulging them.”57
Still the blacks continued to arrive in Halifax from every part of the two maritime provinces: another eighty from Annapolis; and over five hundred from Shelburne and Birchtown, including fifty who had been born in Africa, such as John Kizell, the nephew of a Sherbro chief, who had been kidnapped when he was just twelve and was finally going home. And, like Kizell, the vast majority of the emigrants were going as families: husbands, wives, sometimes three or four children. And, from the pregnant mothers arriving in Halifax, Taylor expected at least seven or eight more to be born on the Atlantic crossing. Put together a collection of families, simple, honest, industrious and Christian, with an almos
t complete repertoire of artisanal skills—smiths, sawyers, fishermen, farmers, tanners, bakers, weavers—and you surely had the makings of an ideally constituted small market town. This new Freetown would correspond exactly to the late eighteenth-century romantic view of an ideal community: neither the hell of a factory, nor the appendage to some aristocratic estate. Stripped of both the vicious criminal and the useless landowner, this would be black Merrie England in the tropics.
For the moment, however, Clarkson had a serious problem of finding temporary accommodation, made urgent when he saw twenty-two vessels arrive in Halifax harbour with people from Shelburne. Given his tortuous negotiations with the ubiquitous entrepreneur Michael Wallace, who was handling the fleet contract, it was unclear just when the fifteen ships now needed for transportation would be ready to sail, even though time was of the essence if they were to reach Sierra Leone before the onset of the devastating rains. On the day that the Shelburnians arrived, Clarkson and Hartshorne raced around the harbour area searching for a warehouse that they could use for temporary shelter. Discovering that the Sugar House Barracks might do, they had it swept clean, installed stoves, and laths on which to place bedding, and somehow managed to get it ready by the same evening. It came not a moment too soon. Many of the blacks lacked adequate clothing for the winter cold, and Clarkson appealed to the acting governor, Bulkeley, for an immediate distribution of shifts, petticoats, shirts and jackets “for more than half the people from Shelburne are entirely naked.”58 Conditions soon became so crowded in the Sugar House that Clarkson, with good reason, became worried about the spread of contagion—especially smallpox—and moved two hundred out to another warehouse. At moments when he succumbed to an overwhelming sense of the sheer impossibility of the whole venture, Clarkson would take himself down to the warehouses at time of worship and sneak in by a back door, the sole white face among a sea of swaying, singing blacks, surrendering to the pure transport of the moment. The Methodists had the best sermons, and Blind Moses Wilkinson would soar on wings of exclaimed prayer: “During this man’s discourse I felt frequently distressed for him, his feelings were so exquisite and he worked himself up to such a pitch that I was fearful something would happen to him.” But David George’s Baptists, gathered at the top of the Sugar House, had the best voices: “I never remember to have heard the Psalms sung so charmingly before in my life; the generality of the blacks who attended seemed to feel more at singing than they did at prayers—I left sooner than I wished fearing that David George, if he had seen me might have been confused but I have too good an opinion of him to think that the presence of anyone would in the least deter him from offering up his praises to the Creator.”59