by Simon Schama
Dealing with Michael Wallace brought Clarkson down to earth. With the horrors of the middle passage always in his mind, Clarkson had decided to err on the side of dietary generosity. Daily breakfast was to be eight ounces of cornmeal (as mush sweetened with molasses or brown sugar); dinner, either one pound of salt fish, two pounds of potatoes and one ounce of butter, or one pound of beef or pork and half a pint of pease pudding, or bacon with turnips; and supper, rice or cornmeal again. There would be tea, bread, ale, vinegar, and some wine for the poorly. This generosity meant, of course, a bonanza for the local purveyors in Halifax who, along with the ships’ chandlers, timber merchants and clothiers, suddenly began to appreciate the value after all of the great black exodus from Nova Scotia. The fifteen vessels—some of them two-hundred-ton full ships, such as the Eleanor and the Venus, and a larger number of brigs that were hardly more than coastal schooners—were necessarily drawn from local fleets around the peninsula, as were their captains and crew. Clarkson could not afford to wait much longer and therefore had to trust Wallace to make a fair bargain for the cost of charters and provisions. He suspected he was being taken advantage of, and when, as sometimes happened, that trust broke down, he and the Scotsman would have blistering rows.
At the same time that he was trying to liberate his black emigrants from imprisoning indentures or crippling debt, Clarkson had to be a scrupulous commodore of the fleet, leaving nothing and no one uninspected, from barrels of brined beef and pork to the new interior decking, often made from green planking, which he required to be thoroughly dried with charcoal fires before being certified fit for loading. There were new storms, not all of them meteorological. A few days before Christmas, with some of the black passengers already on board, Clarkson recorded an abrupt and ominous argument with Thomas Peters, probably over the stringency of the discipline he was demanding that the blacks observe on board ship. “I could not possibly make him comprehend how necessary it was for the regularity and subordination…he still persisted in his obstinacy; he vexed me extremely and I went to bed much indisposed.”60
A few days later he made a gesture of reconciliation. When Peters came to him asking for a full allowance of fresh beef for each of the blacks to celebrate their last Christmas in America, Clarkson readily and happily granted the request. He was increasingly consumed by problems of human management, unable to find a healthy balance between authority and benevolence, and every day there was a new challenge to irk him. In his rooms he was besieged by families demanding to be placed in the same ship as friends and neighbours; others requested the opposite. With winter gales still precluding an early sailing, some of the ships were nonetheless docked at the Halifax wharf. As the sleet and freezing rain steadily fell, the blacks were beginning to load chests and dogs and chickens and pots and pans and bedding, as well as the boxes of seeds they were prudently taking with them—squash and pumpkin, sage, thyme and purslane, cabbage and watermelon. In the midst of these preparations, the Halifax harbour-master-general suddenly ordered them to sail away again—the penalty, he said, for having neglected to ask his express permission to tie up. Exasperated beyond forbearance, Clarkson acidly wrote, “I am sorry to observe how little the interest of Government is attended to even by those whose conduct ought to be influenced by the highest feelings of Honour and Patriotism.” The masters of the ships—especially Samuel Wickham, a friend of Hartshorne’s and like, Clarkson, a lieutenant on half pay—he thought decent enough company, especially after a dinner a week before Christmas, when they had stood as a man, filled their bumpers and drunk “the commodore’s health.” This toast was followed by three rousing cheers, a gesture he duly appreciated, although he also wished it had not been followed by carousing that continued until one in the morning.
Nothing preyed on Clarkson’s mind so much as his determination to avoid anything in the voyage that could possibly remind any of the blacks of a slave passage. Never had the word “sympathy,” with its demand that the fortunate enter into the sentiment and even the physical sensibilities of the less fortunate, meant so much to a lieutenant of the Royal Navy. His list of printed rules, distributed to all the masters, was, in effect, a comprehensive reversal of everything that he and his brother Thomas had learned about slave ships such as the Brookes. First, the ships were to be impeccable. There were to be three daily sweeps of, and between, decks. After breakfast the bed place of each black was to be scrupulously cleaned, and the lower decks were to be swabbed three times a week in the mornings (to give time for drying) with vinegar scalded by a hot iron so that “steam may get into every crevice” for effective fumigation. Every day that the weather permitted, bedding was to be aired on deck, and two days a week were to be allowed for washing of clothes. When casks of salt beef and pork were opened, the exact amount should be declared to the black captains whom Clarkson would appoint, and if there were any measure short, it was to be entered in the log book. The chests belonging to the blacks should be secured on deck and be available for opening on a specified day every two weeks in case their owners needed any items from them. Clarkson even required ships’ masters to make a daily inspection of the sanitary arrangements aboard.61
By eighteenth-century standards this was all very extraordinary—and must have been designed by Clarkson to benefit the white crews as well as the blacks, for the mortality of the former on slaveships had become a staple of abolitionist literature. Even more remarkable were the instructions that Clarkson issued to the captains concerning the way they should behave towards the blacks. “I was fearful,” he wrote just before sailing, “that the Captains and sailors of the different vessels would not behave to their passengers with that kindness and attention they had promised (from the Black People being considered in this Province in no better light than beasts).” He insisted that the blacks be “considered as passengers who have paid the price demanded by the Owners for their accommodation” and that the captains ensure that the blacks were not subjected to “ill language and disrespect as is too often the case, but that you and your crew exercise patience towards those unfortunate people whom the King is indeavouring to render more happy by sending them to their native shore.”62
This consideration Clarkson asked to be unstintingly reciprocated. Assuming the mien and manner of a parson, the commodore required the blacks to exhibit
…a modest and decent behaviour towards the officers of the ship considering the old proverb that “soft words turneth away wrath”; this we recommend to prevent broils, not to make free with the seamen lest they in turn should make free with you and by improper behaviour bring on disturbance, to live in friendly terms with each other, to mutually bear and forbear, considering that very little inconveniences or hardships which you may experience on the passage will be of short duration we farther recommend a particular attention to Divine worship in the best way you are capable of, constantly remembering with humble gratitude the goodness and power of God and that if you conduct yourself in such a manner as to have His approbation you must be happy.63
If this founding fleet of the Sierra Leone Company was in no danger of being confused with a slaving expedition, neither would it quite resemble any other kind of sailing—naval or mercantile. What John Clarkson had designed was an inter-racial, floating Christian republic: bound for freedom, glory and the merited blessings of God. The journey was not just about an escape from bondage, as all the others had been; it would be an experimental voyage of social transformation. Because no distinctions would be tolerated between blacks and whites, Clarkson wrote, “they [the blacks] are to become Men.” What was more, he wished them, in their own land, to throw off all the old habits of servility, not just as slaves but even as servants. “I have…told the men that I shall form a very unfavourable opinion of those who may show an inclination to be servants when they have an opportunity of becoming their own masters and valuable members of society if they please and that…the character of the Black people for ever after will depend on the manner they conduct thems
elves and that the fate of millions of their complexion will partly be affected by it.”64 And now it was time for the blacks to begin to exercise their own authority. Clarkson appointed forty black captains, including Peters, Steele, another Pioneer originally from St Croix, Henry Beverhout, David George and Boston King, who were to be distributed among the ships. They were to have supervisory and even judicial powers on board. In cases of drunkenness or fights, the senior black captain would appoint a panel of five to hear the offence and sentence the culprit. Only in cases of theft, violence or improper conduct to women should the offence be reported to Clarkson himself.
So if Granville Sharp’s vision of a self-governing black democracy had already been sacrificed to the demands of a commercial colony, at least Clarkson went to great lengths to give the blacks, on a voyage that was bound to be fraught with all sorts of anxieties, the sense that they held their destiny in their own hands. And in some ways Clarkson’s passion for the African-Americans went well beyond anything Sharp could possibly have felt. The blacks in London had been, for Sharp, a cause, and his exposure to them had been limited to those whose cases he had championed, to the “Black Poor” whose fate had given him much heartache, and to articulate advocates such as Equiano and Cugoano. John Clarkson, on the other hand, who had spent years in the slaving Caribbean without ever being moved to anger or dismay by what he saw every day in Jamaica or Barbados, had had a truly Pauline conversion. Every day for almost three months he had been surrounded by the free blacks. Old men, young women and small children had crowded about him, had opened his doors and his suddenly enlarged sympathies to their agonies; and he had counselled them in their distress, understood the depths of their bitterness and desolation, and become enraged at the whites whom he held responsible for it all. He cared for each and every one personally; was saddened that Sarah, the wife of another Pioneer, Charles Wilkinson, had died of a miscarriage en route from Shelburne, and beside himself with fury that Thomas Miles had died aboard one of the ships in harbour, asphyxiated by fumes from the charcoal fires used to dry the green planking, an accident he was sure could have been prevented had his instructions on ventilation been properly followed. Clarkson made up his mind to sail, not in one of the larger ships, but in the brig he had designated for the fleet hospital, and which would have the largest share of the elderly and sick. He hoped that this would “convince the blacks of my ardent and disinterested zeal.”65 They had been through so many shabby betrayals. He would stand by them. He would be their British freedom or die in their defence.
On New Year’s Eve there was an unexpected change in the skies. The wintry gales, which had postponed the sailings and almost overturned one of the lighter schooners in the harbour, disappeared and were replaced by “the most pleasant mild weather such as the oldest inhabitant never witnessed before.” Clarkson drew the obvious lesson, that “it really appears as if Providence favours the plan.” The next morning, New Year’s Day 1792, there was another happy surprise. “A little before eight this morning thirty of the Black People going to Sierra Leone came to my door, each of them with a gun, to salute me and wish me happy returns of the day.”66 Delighted, but keeping his demeanour of correctness and propriety, Clarkson asked if they would be so good as to go to the wharf, where his personal pennant would be hoisted on the Lucretia and could be greeted with an appropriate salute. His mood skipped now, high and low. Aboard one of the ships twins had been born, mother and children doing very well; but then immediately afterwards Clarkson learned that a man on the Somerset had somehow suffocated below deck—he felt sure it was through just the kind of negligence he had been at pains to warn the captains against. It was as well, he thought, that, together with those he most trusted, like David George, he would sail on the brig he had designated the hospital ship.
On the 7th of January Clarkson packed his clothes and was rowed with his chest of personal possessions to the Lucretia, where for the first time he dined aboard. The next night he slept on the ship. Everything was moving, at last, towards the waterborne exodus. There was a church service at St Paul’s, and prayers were offered by Bishop Inglis and others for the safety of the voyage. Clarkson had hoped to hear a sermon preached on the exemplary behaviour of the blacks, “a pattern for others to imitate having had not less than twelve hundred people in the town for upwards of five weeks in the depth of winter and not so much as the least disorder from any one of them.” But somehow that sermon did not get preached.
On the 9th the Lucretia hauled off from the wharf and joined the rest of the fleet in Halifax harbour, a spectacle to make the heart leap and one that deserves remembering in the annals of African-American history: the Betsey, the Beaver, the Mary, the Felicity, the Lucretia, the Catherine, the Parr, the Somerset, the Eleanor, the Morning Star, the Prince William Henry, the Two Brothers, the Venus, the Prince Fleury and the renamed Sierra Leone. It was a convoy of almost 2,000 tons, carrying 1,196 people, 383 of them young children. Behind them, the little towns and villages in which the emigrants had struggled to make a free life in British America were mere shells: Preston virtually emptied, Brindley Town reduced to a lingering vestige, and Birchtown suddenly a hopeless place with just a fifth of its population left in the care of Stephen Blucke. But Blucke’s best days were past too. His grand manor house never got finished; his wife, Margaret, left him and went back to New York. He became increasingly unpopular, and his patron, Skinner, was unable to shield him from rumours and accusations that he had misappropriated funds. Three years after the sailing of the fleet, Blucke’s torn body was found in the woods, mauled and partly devoured, it was said, by wild animals.
At the last minute, when the endless paperwork that so irritated Clarkson was finally concluded, there was yet another delay. The skies over Halifax were fair, but the winds were unhelpfully adverse. On the 10th of January, feeling exhausted and somewhat unwell, Clarkson attended ceremonies arranged by the acting governor, Bulkeley, and Attorney-General Strange, who made speeches praising his conduct, so that on parting Clarkson actually felt a twinge of affection for Halifax—or at least for the section of its society that had been hospitable and courageously sympathetic. Later that evening his old sparring partner Michael Wallace, who after many disputes had arrived at a healthy respect for the stamina and determination of the nervous lieutenant, helped him go through a muster of the full passenger list. Clarkson then had himself rowed through the entire fleet, stopping at each of the ships to read the regulations of conduct that both blacks and whites were to follow and to make a little speech of exhortation, congratulation and blessing. But the climax of the little ceremony was his reading of the roll of passengers and the presentation to each family of the certificate he had had specially printed in town, dated the 31st of December 1791 and indicating the plot of land “free of expence” they were to be given “upon arrival in Africa.” It was the document each of them must have yearned for ever since the moment they had taken their lives in their hands and fled their American slavemasters.
This John Clarkson did fifteen times, from the Beaver to the Felicity, until well into the night, when the temperature in Halifax harbour abruptly dropped from “excessive heat to a keen frosty air.” Just as suddenly the sweat beneath his boat coat changed to a shiver, and John Clarkson began to feel really “inconvenienced” by a sense of creeping malady. He went to bed at midnight, burning with fever.
And still the damned “baffling” wind, stronger now, blew against them. Desperate to be off, Clarkson filled the hours fretting over the number of blankets aboard and the rapidly depleting provisions; he wrote further farewells, but uttered them in person to his closest friends, such as Hartshorne. And it was surely during this last week that Clarkson took his pen and made graceful drawings in the journal of the pennants of his fleet, and then, most beautifully, filled a double page with the fleet itself, each schooner, brig and ship precisely drawn, sailing east-southeast across the vellum, their jibs, spinnakers and mainsails billowing with cheerful breezes on
ward to their destiny.
On the 14th of January there was some hope that the wind direction was changing. His indisposition masked by growing excitement, Clarkson shrugged it off with a vengeance, went on a night sleigh ride with Hartshorne and some lady friends and returned to Halifax for a late supper and an attempt at sleep. The next morning, at long last, “a light air sprang up” and Clarkson, aboard the Lucretia, signalled the fleet to weigh anchor at eleven o” clock. The Felicity, with Wickham commanding, would lead the fleet out and he would bring up the rear.
At noon the lieutenant-turned-commodore was piped aboard again, and as the Lucretia got under weigh made sure to salute the admiral of the Halifax fleet and the town by lowering his mainsail topgallant in respect. On the quay there was a surprising crowd, much waving of hats and handkerchiefs and even cheering—though doubtless some were happy to see Clarkson go. He went below, settled himself in the commodore’s cabin at a modest desk, reached for the goose quill and wrote on this auspicious day, the 15th of January 1792, to Henry Thornton: