by Simon Schama
Dear Sir, I am now under sail, with a fair wind and fine weather having on board 1192 souls in fifteen ships, all in good spirits, properly equipped and I hope destined to be happy.67
Well might he hope.
X
SOMETHING WAS AMISS with the commodore. Whatever it was that he had caught that chilly night in Halifax harbour, rowing around the fleet, would not loosen its grip. There were moments when he feared it might be the death of him. The peculiar mildness for mid-January with which the voyage had begun had vanished almost as soon as the last rocks of North America had disappeared over the horizon.1 Now the full force of an Atlantic winter bore down on the fleet and seemed to break against Clarkson’s slight body, engulfing it with sickness. By turns he trembled with fever, broke into dripping sweats and shuddered with cold. Violent pain throbbed within his skull as if pincers were tearing at his brain. All the while he struggled to keep command of the fleet, beset by violent gales, and of himself, likewise storm-racked. Four days out from Halifax sheets of rain crashed down on to the Lucretia, and then turned to hailstones which drummed against the deck and scoured the faces of the sailors as they struggled with the shrouds. Two days later a gusty snow squall descended on the fleet and ships he had managed to keep in sight even in the dirty weather now dissolved into the slanting veil of snow. Forcing himself to navigate, Clarkson signalled with guns, hoping they would sound through the shrieking wind that the fleet should alter course, and for a while the vessels managed to skirt the worst of it. Then, on the 20th of January, another gale blew up, one so savage that Clarkson ordered the fleet to heave to on a starboard tack and wait it out. Scanning the horizon with his telescope, he was unable to account for two of the ships. Worried sick, he reversed himself, ordering the ships to close a little.
Next day, come the light, three more ships had gone. Clarkson signalled for the speediest of the remaining vessels, the Felicity, to come within hail and then asked Samuel Wickham, her master, to haul in a quarter and search for the missing ones. Then he collapsed, feeling so ill that he had to leave the deck and go below. Wickham was given orders: at all costs to keep the fleet together and to signal the faster ships, the Sierra Leone and the Mary, that they should shorten sail. By four o’clock in the afternoon Wickham was able to tell Clarkson that all ships were now in their stations except the Somerset, which had disappeared at the height of the storm the night before and not been seen since. Swept in turn by relief and anxiety, but his head still pounding with pain, Clarkson asked his friend Charles Taylor, the physician, what he should do. Taylor’s advice was that the burdens of command in such weather would not help his recovery, or indeed the welfare of the fleet. Turning over the day-to-day command to Samuel Wickham, Clarkson wrote, “I shall not interfere in the management of the fleet until I get better.”
Thereafter, Clarkson’s journal turns into a nautical log; but what it reports, however summarily, is the kind of oceanic thrashing that only the Atlantic at its most merciless can inflict. Two days after he relinquished control of the fleet, mere gales turned into a titanic storm. A series of elemental upheavals, each one with its own measure, now seemed to run into one another to form a chain of terrifying immensity. On one of the other beleaguered ships Boston King, who had sailed enough in his life through the worst he had thought the Atlantic could do, was shocked and frightened at this towering sea, the black and green walls of water veined with spume. “Some of the men who had been engaged in a seafaring life,” he wrote, “declared that they never saw such a storm before.”2 In the teeth of the tempest King watched helplessly as one of the free blacks was taken by a vast wave and washed clean overboard, leaving a grieving wife and four children. His own wife, Violet, was sick, so seriously that he resigned himself to her dying, and hoped only that she would hang on for he had a terrible aversion to burial at sea. “In the simplicity of my heart I intreated the Lord to spare her at least till we reached the shore that I might give her a decent burial.” He did better than that. “The Lord looked upon my sincerity and restored her to perfect health.”
On the 22nd of January a tremendous bolt of lightning hit the mizzenmast of the Lucretia, not taking it down entirely, but shredding the top mainsail and forcing Captain Jonathan Coffin to reef the rest of the mizzenmast sails and heave to. Most of the blacks aboard were violently ill; one of them died on the 25th, the second burial at sea since leaving Halifax. Hardened though they were to rough swells, many of the crew were felled by this one; and others were sick from the same fever that ailed Clarkson, leaving Coffin with too few hands to put up the repaired sails once the winds allowed. The great storm had scattered the fleet beyond any hope of reassembly now—only five of the original fifteen were within sight of each other. They included some of the bigger ships, however, the Felicity, the Venus and the Eleanor, and when the winds had abated somewhat, boats were sent to collect able men from each to repair and hoist the Lucretia’s mainsail.
John Clarkson was oblivious to much of this ordeal, for he was, so Dr Charles Taylor thought, dying. Clarkson lay in his bunk trembling with fever, drifting in and out of consciousness, never coherent, often comatose. When Taylor looked in on him and saw the body convulsed with shivers beneath the blanket, he knew at least that there was some life left, although he was horrified one day to notice four blisters that had raised themselves, perhaps the sinister heralds of smallpox. But then, as the height of the sea fell back, so did Clarkson’s vital signs. For a whole day and night, he was utterly motionless. Feeling no pulse, not a whisper of breath, Taylor declared him gone.3 His body was brought to the deck and prepared for the rites of burial at sea: it was placed in a stitched canvas shroud and draped in the flag.
It must have been just before the open-ended coffin was raised by the two bearers and pointed down at the waves when someone noticed a faint movement under the canvas. Clarkson was not, after all, ready to be committed to the corruption of the deep. Still unconscious, he was carried below to his cabin at the stern of the ship and made warm.
This, it transpired, was not the best place for him to be. There had been a lull in the storm, which crews and passengers took to be a sign of its ending. They were brutally deceived, for the tumult would drive on mercilessly for more than two weeks, relaxing its grip just a little to give the seamen and passengers a moment of hope before pouncing again with even greater ferocity. On the 29th of January the next gale within the gale struck the Lucretia with sudden, horrifying swiftness. There was no thunder and lightning this time, but sharply building winds that screamed through the canvas and whipped up waves of dumbfounding height, so that the brig’s timbers groaned as it climbed and reared before dropping into the depths of the trough. Churned iron-grey water washed over the decks as the Lucretia rolled at so steep an angle that the rising wall of water entirely blotted out the sky. Something had to give, and it was the deadlights at the stern, immediately in front of which lay Clarkson’s cabin. In the deafening roar of the gale he had somehow raised himself and was stumbling about in the throes of delirium just as the ship was pooping, its bow pointing almost vertically to the sky, the stern plunging below the waterline. Windows and timbers at the deadlights splintered into flotsam and the ocean rushed in, taking Clarkson, unconscious once more, into the seething flood—but not, fortunately, out into the open ocean. Feeling the shock, the master of the Lucretia had raced below, screaming orders. If the damage was not made good and the deadlights secured right away the brig would surely sink. In Clarkson’s cabin Coffin found the lieutenant on the floor, helplessly rolling from side to side, slammed between the walls, badly bruised, cut and “covered in blood and water.”4
The Lucretia and Clarkson survived—barely—but Captain Coffin, their rescuer, would not. Once the worst of the storms had receded, in the second week of February, some accounting was made of what had endured and what had been lost. Still only five ships from the original convoy could be seen. Although her masts, astonishingly, had come through the ordeal intact, the Lu
cretia’s rigging and sails had been badly mauled and torn, and the crew was too short-handed to repair them. Only the mate and the master were well enough to fulfil their duties, the rest not just sick from the storm but also taken by whatever fever was now raging through the ship. Men were taken aboard from the Venus, the Eleanor and the Felicity to help, but they too soon fell ill. More than forty of the passengers and crew on the Venus were dangerously weak, and Wickham sent Charles Taylor to her to help with the stricken.
On the 15th of February, in much gentler breezes, the fever caught up with Jonathan Coffin, who was forced below—the second invalided master forced to relinquish control of his ship. Clarkson, on the other hand, was now awake most of the time and able to speak to the officers and passengers, although certainly not recovered to anything like his old self. His limbs were flaccid, he still shook as if he had the palsy, and, worst of all, his poor brain seemed either tortured by nail-boring pains or else oddly muffled, as if it had grown an extra cladding of membrane closing it off from the world (it was perhaps meningitis). Most distressing and humiliating for Clarkson was the loss of his short-term memory and some of his longer memory too, both of which reduced him on occasions to anguished panic. Given a piece of information, a few minutes later he would have absolutely no recollection of it. Trying to recover his grasp of navigational skills, he discovered with rising horror that he could recall nothing of what he had learned as a midshipman and put into practice on ten successive ships. In the circumstances, he asked the masters of the other vessels to come aboard so that he could frankly explain to them his predicament, and have them assume more responsibility for the welfare of their own ships and especially that of their black passengers. “My illness has made me so nervous and occasioned such debility of mind and body that I requested the Captains on board today to speak their minds freely to me upon every occasion as to the course we should steer, for I find that I cannot remember anything as yet as to the navigation of a vessel.”5
To make matters worse, Clarkson was sunk, much of the time, in a stew of guilty melancholy. His black manservant Peter Peters, who had cared so conscientiously for him during the terrible depths of his delirium, died himself on the 18th of February and Clarkson inevitably felt culpable since Peters was “supposed to have caught the fever of [sic] me.” But he himself was well enough at last to take some air, although not capable of walking or even staggering about. So Clarkson was carried on deck upon a mattress by Samuel Wickham and another seaman while his cabin was vigorously swabbed with scalded vinegar and fumigated with tar and gunpowder balls to purge it of sickness.
But the contagion merely slunk off elsewhere. On the 22nd, three weeks after he had saved Clarkson from certain drowning, Jonathan Coffin died. Now Clarkson was tormented by an even more merciless spasm of guilt, since, after the death of Peters, Captain Coffin had made a point of personally seeing him through his rocky convalescence, sitting with him and inevitably catching the fever. “He was a worthy, good man and his loss will be greatly felt by his owners,” grieved Clarkson.6 Almost committed to the deep himself, Clarkson now had to perform the same service for Coffin. He was again carried up on deck and “as the last mark of attention to his memory I endeavoured to read as well as I could the burial service over him although I was not able to stand or hold on to the book.” The Bible fell from his hands. Coffin’s body slid into the sea.
It was Charles Taylor, now, who saw that something had to be done to preserve Clarkson from being overwhelmed, and suggested it would be good both for him and for the morale of the fleet if he were to show himself to the ships. The salt air could do no harm; rather the reverse. “I was accordingly lifted into the boat and lowered into the water with her. Upon my going alongside each ship, the black passengers had collected themselves upon deck with their muskets and fired three vollies [sic] and afterwards gave three cheers, as they had entirely given up all hopes of my recovery, which was to them of the greatest consequence.”
Later, Clarkson marked this moment as a turning point. Certainly the weather improved: the temperature climbed, the winds were merely fresh and the water turned from dull grey to the deep cobalt of the South Atlantic. The Somerset, one of the lost ships, now came in sight, and in the last week of February Clarkson felt well enough to summon all the captains aboard the Lucretia for dinner. He could still overdo things. Trying to read Sunday prayers and deliver a shipboard sermon, he was suddenly overtaken by a massive sense of exhaustion which felled him for some days. On the 28th he had recovered sufficiently for a tour of inspection of the vessels, hoisted aboard on his chair. On the Eleanor he dined with Captain Redman, who told him that one of the black passengers was particularly anxious to see him. She was an ancient blind woman of one hundred and four, who had been abducted by slavers as a child in Sierra Leone and had implored Clarkson (who had made it a special point in Nova Scotia to satisfy himself that the passengers were fit for an arduous Atlantic crossing) to take her with him so that she might “lay her bones in her native country.” He had consented, and here she was on deck, overcome with joy, pumping his hand and congratulating him on his recovery.7
They were not far now. Whales sounded, fish flew, and in the bright calm the seas were gentle enough for the blacks to make visits in pinnaces to each others’ ships. There were embraces, tears, cries. And for some, with Africa not far off, there were mingled memories of childhood happiness and terror. On the 4th of March, a few days out from Sierra Leone, another ship called the Mary sailed past; but this was the Mary of Bristol, bound for Annamabo to pick up its usual “live cargo.” Clarkson thought this the right moment to summon all his strength to speak to the blacks on the Lucretia, expressing his pleasure at how well, through all the storms, they had conducted themselves since leaving America. The next day he repeated the avuncular performance on all the other ships in sight. “All seemed in high spirits and promised obedience and attention to all orders given upon their landing. I was much pleased with the happy and contented countenances of all of them; their expressions of respect and gratitude upon this occasion were most gratifying and affected me much—most ardently do I hope the change they are about to make will ultimately turn out to the advantage of them and posterity.”8
Two days later he ordered the Eleanor, the fastest ship, to sail ahead and begin to make fathom soundings, signalling with her guns when she sounded eight deep. For all his enervation, Clarkson was beside himself with anticipation: “I could not be prevailed upon to quit the deck.” At two in the morning on the 7th of March he heard the Eleanor’s guns, and before long the Lucretia’s own sounding hit seven fathoms. The waters were growing shallower and the coast could not be far off. Finally, Clarkson took to his bed but found it almost impossible to sleep, such was his intermingled agitation and anticipation. At seven he abandoned the attempt and rose under cloudy skies and dawn mists. Restlessly striding the deck, opening and shutting his glass, he was the first to catch sight of Cape Sierra Leone about five leagues off to the southeast. Hardly had he seen it than guns sounded from two other ships, followed by cheering from the whole squadron and volleys of fire that rang into the bay ahead.
But then, in the midst of all this jubilation, being John Clarkson, and having gone through everything he had gone through, he had a sudden strange feeling in the pit of his stomach. “It is not in my power to describe my sensations at this moment, for I knew not what the next hours might produce—the fatigue of being up the greatest part of the night added to great anxiety of mind quite exhausted me and filled me with gloomy ideas.”9 Suddenly the talk at John Parr’s table on the second night of his stay in Halifax, and his own peremptory dismissal of the rumours of hostile natives, came back to him with brutal clarity. What if that Falmouth captain had been right? What if there had been another attack? Suppose—since he had still heard not a word from the directors since leaving England—they had received none of his letters either, and no proper provision had been made for the reception of the blacks? Suppose they s
till imagined a mere ship or two, with perhaps one hundred or fewer? “Particularly when I reflected upon the small quantity of provisions on board the Transport (not having more than sufficient with the most rigid economy for a month) with no probability of recruiting them should it be necessary, our ignorance of the coast and its inhabitants and my total inability to any exertion should it be required, I could not help giving way to those desponding reflections which, had I been in health, would probably have never occurred.”
At noon they passed Leopard’s Island and could plainly see now the forested peaks of the peninsula rising, it seemed, right out of the water. “The high mountain…appeared like a cloud to us,” wrote David George.10 Then, to Clarkson’s “inexpressible joy,” one of the leading ships of the fleet made the signal that indicated there were ships at anchor up-river. Clarkson took out his glass and saw a small squadron that, from the size of one of the vessels, he immediately took to be the supply fleet sent by the Sierra Leone Company. When its flag could be made out, he saw on its green face a lion and clasped hands, black and white—the device of the company. Relief flooded him. “The succours from England had arrived.” At last, he thought, the journey was truly over, and Clarkson indulged himself in a “hope of speedy termination to my anxieties and fatigue.”