by Simon Schama
XI
Awake! and sing the song, of Moses and the Lamb
Wake! Every heart and every tongue
To praise the Saviour’s name!…
The Day of Jubilee is come
Return ye ransomed sinners home1
A THOUSAND BLACK VOICES raised in song beneath the white sailcloth flapping gently in the breeze. Jubilation pouring into the Sierra Leone morning, down to the bay where the exodus fleet lay moored; drifting out to the dark-horizoned humpback offshore islets; penetrating the compound of King Jimmy’s village half a mile off; climbing into the forested slopes, where the chorus competed with the gibbering of monkeys; an irresistible euphony, the basses vibrating, soprano notes leaping and floating like the dance of angels, a sound such as Africa had not yet heard.
The singers were in the Canvas Room, a large tent quickly improvised as assembly place and church, and although the hymn was from Lady Huntingdon’s book, they all sang it—Baptists and Methodists as well as her “New Lights”—because it sang of the marvel of their arrival. There were no hangers-back that first Sunday, the 11th of March. They had all come: Blind Daddy Moses, David George, Phyllis and the six children, the last named John after the “Honoured Sir” who had brought them safely through the tempest; Boston King, with his wife, Violet. Many among the congregation had truly returned home: Lucy Banbury, now forty-nine, born in West Africa, stolen away as an adolescent, then slave of Arthur Middleton until she ran to the British the year he signed the Declaration of Independence; John Kizell, the Sherbro chief’s son, who had fought with Patrick Ferguson’s American Volunteers at the battle of King’s Mountain in North Carolina in 1780;2 Frank Peters, twenty-nine years old, another child abductee from Sierra Leone, sold to Woodward Flowers at Monks Corner, South Carolina, and field slave there until he joined the British army in 1779, then a Birchtown woodcutter until their exodus. Two weeks later an older woman would run to Peters and fold him in an embrace: it was his lost mother.3
There were also white men and women—119 of them sent out by the Sierra Leone Company on its supply ships Amy and Harpy, doubtless singing a little more reedily than the blacks. The young Anglican minister, Nathaniel Gilbert, was the son of a rich Antigua planter, but he had Seen the Light and now preached from Psalm 127: “Except but the Lord build the house, the labour is but lost that built it.”4 To which John Clarkson, at the front of the congregation, would doubtless (had he but the strength) have cried Amen! Clarkson was a long way from being better: he was still suffering from chronic memory loss, severe headaches, fits of shortness of breath and even unpredictable swooning spells from the pure physical effort of getting himself off the ship and on to the shore. His moods swung sharply between a modicum of satisfaction and self-punishing depressive panic. There were some things he could feel rightly proud of, not least the miraculous survival of all fifteen ships of the fleet that had left Halifax seven weeks before. The last to limp into the bay had been the Morning Star, about which Clarkson had been particularly anxious, since he had fitted her specially to take pregnant women. To his happiness he discovered that there had been three births, mothers and babies all doing well. He also felt a rush of pleasure receiving the black captains of companies, “very neatly dressed,” who “expressed the general joy of themselves and…my safe arrival…at the Land of Promise…The respect and gratitude expressed in every look affected me very sensibly, their decent dress and their becoming behaviour…noticed by all who were present for the most perfect peace and harmony reigned aboard each Transport.”5 Just as satisfactory, the white ships’ captains thanked Clarkson for the “regular and orderly” conduct of the blacks towards themselves and their crews. None of the blacks, moreover, had any complaints of ill-treatment from the white sailors; Clarkson’s hopes that the crossing from Halifax to Sierra Leone would be a reversal of slave-ship passages in more than just geographical direction seemed, astonishingly, to have been fulfilled.
But while he mingled with the captains, both black and white, Clarkson was also attacked by moments of deep unhappiness that two of the ships’ masters—his personal saviour, Jonathan Coffin of the Lucretia, and Captain May of the Betsey—had died, along with his servant Peter Peters. As soon as he heard that the number of shipboard mortalities had been as many as sixty-five (mostly, as might be expected, from among the old, the sick and the very young), Clarkson was shaken by paroxysms of guilt. After chatting a while, he suddenly collapsed so completely that “I was obliged to be carried to bed where I was in violent hysterics for nearly two hours.”6
This was not the kind of behaviour expected from the man who was now, apparently, the “superintendent” of Sierra Leone and the as yet unbuilt Freetown. This unsought appointment had only added to Clarkson’s shock and distress. As the Lucretia had anchored in the bay on the morning of the 7th of March, Clarkson had ordered a special pennant to be run up (oddly, the Dutch flag reversed) as a prearranged signal to Henry Hew Dalrymple, whom, in the absence of recent news, he assumed had already been installed as governor. Not long afterwards, a pinnace was seen approaching Clarkson’s ship, but instead of carrying Dalrymple, it appeared to be full of overdressed white gentlemen perspiring in their hats. Only one of them, Alexander Falconbridge, the commercial agent, was known to Clarkson; the others were introduced as Dr Bell, the surgeon sent by the company, whom Clarkson immediately suspected of being a devotee of the bottle; and Richard Pepys and James Cocks, respectively surveyor and engineer. Together with the Reverend Gilbert and a Mr Wakerell (accountant, yet to arrive), these gentlemen were, apparently, constituted as the “council” appointed by the company directors to govern Freetown along with Clarkson himself, who, he was now informed, was to be superintendent in place of the dismissed Dalrymple.
This was neither what he had expected nor what he wanted. Even had he not been feeling so unwell, Clarkson had assumed his work would have ended once the free blacks were safely ashore and the plots of land to which they were entitled had been surveyed and distributed. This, he supposed, would take only a few weeks, after which he would go back, marry his handsomely propertied fiancée, continue to assist his brother in the good cause and, on the strength of his achievement in Nova Scotia, renew his applications for a naval command. Now, as he read through the stack of letters handed to him, John Clarkson felt himself trapped by what his brother Thomas, William Wilberforce, Joseph Hardcastle and Henry Thornton were telling him was his duty, his unavoidable destiny. “The Eyes of England are upon you and this Infant Colony,” Thomas wrote fulsomely: “No Establishment has made such a Noise as this in the Papers or [been] so generally admired…To your lot it falls to be Governor of the Noblest Institution ever set on foot.”7 Personally, of course, Thomas could wish for nothing better than to set eyes on his dear brother once more, but such personal wishes, he knew, must be set aside for the greater good. John, Thomas hoped, would consider staying for at least a year, adding unconvincingly at the end of the letter, “You are the best judge of your own Happiness: and therefore whether you stay or not, you will please me.” The insistence grew louder with each message. Joseph Hardcastle, for instance, married Quaker prophetics to Enlightenment utopianism in a style perfectly calculated to make it impossible for Clarkson to resist: “You have brought from afar & planted in Africa a precious Seed which is perhaps destined to become a great tree, under whose shade many are to rejoice but your superintendence, your constant influence, like the Sun and the rain must cherish and fertilize it. You are filling the singularly interesting station of presiding over society in its rudimental State, you are to draw forth its latent energies and cherish the embrio Virtues of untutored man.”8
Suffocating in the praise, and sure that, for the sake of his health, “I ought not to hesitate in doing justice to myself and connexions by returning to a northern climate,” John nonetheless knew he was caught. He would stay for the sake of the blacks, not for the sake of the directors to whom, despite his shaky memory, he suddenly felt superior in practical
wisdom. They seemed obsessed with their vision of pan-continental free African commerce blossoming out from Sierra Leone. Perhaps that was why they had sent so much sugar-boiling equipment. But John Clarkson was no longer much interested in that grand plan, if ever he had been. He was much closer now to Granville Sharp’s vision of a free and virtuous black society, something new and thrilling in the world. He would do his utmost to make it happen.
But his brother and the rest of the directors had made that work incomparably harder with their “constitution” and their “council,” which he could summon and over which he could preside with a casting vote, but never overrule, no matter how foolish its decisions! Ensnared in what he thought an unworkable system, Clarkson would later snap at his own brother for saddling him with “your ridiculous form of government.” Not having been with him in Nova Scotia, not to mention on the perilous crossing, the councillors could not be expected to understand how important it was for the welfare and effectiveness of the settlement, and for the trust of the blacks, that they should look to him, above all, as a proper governor. The blacks needed to know that, whatever troubles they might have with the many whites, their chief would be a fair, impartial and sympathetic judge and protector. And trouble, Clarkson felt sure, there would certainly be. For he was horrified to see on arrival in Sierra Leone that, despite his requests to the company, nothing whatsoever had been done for even the temporary accommodation of the thousand-plus settlers, despite the fact that the transport ships had arrived two weeks earlier. The councillors had stayed on board their ships, devouring supplies, emptying the rum, feeling faint, bickering with each other and with the captains. Not a tree had been disturbed at the forest’s edge, not a patch of grass scythed. It seemed to have been considered beneath the dignity of the whites to begin making clearings or erecting tents and the huts that were urgently needed for shelter before the harmattan got under way in April. Such things would, of course, be black men’s work. With no time to lose, Clarkson mobilized his black captains, and within a few days of arrival, eighty acres had been cleared and a start made on huts, built quickly, after the local fashion, of poles, mud and grass thatch.
The white councillors and their many employees and hangers on—marines and sailors, storemen and artisans, and the councillors’ ladies—were another story entirely. After a week of incredulity and disgust, Clarkson wrote that, as a group, they demonstrated “nothing but extravagance, idleness, quarrelling, waste, irregularity in accounts, insubordination and everything that is contrary to what is good and right.” This was not merely a matter of administrative incompetence. With the exception of Falconbridge and the Reverend Gilbert, they behaved as if they were masters of some commercial or military colony, not people who were supposed to be helping the blacks as friends and protectors and setting them an example of a society founded on “good and virtuous principles.” For Clarkson, the profoundly moving experience in Nova Scotia and on the crossing had been a supreme moral and spiritual course of instruction, almost akin to the experience of one of the Early Christian Fathers or apostles. He could not expect gentlemen sent from England to emulate that, but he did expect them to be guided by him, and the discovery of his impotence in that respect so “completely at variance with the advice I had given the Directors in my letters” galled him intensely. What he wanted were Plato’s Guardians. What he had were vain, imperious, disputatious, dissolute popinjays and nonentities, many of whom spent the day drunk.
The worst of the lot was the surgeon, Dr Bell, appointed for his reputed expertise in tropical diseases. When Clarkson saw him on the man’s return from seeing the slavers at Bance Island, probably to stock up on liquor, Dr Bell was invariably too inebriated to have the slightest idea who he was, a failure of deference to which the superintendent did not take kindly.9 Dining aboard the Harpy, one evening he endured “the delirious ravings of Dr Bell” who, at half past nine, was taken to bed with a fever brought on, so Clarkson thought, by the bottle. Half an hour later he was discovered dead by a servant—the victim, so the other councillors generously decided, of an epileptic fit. Clarkson was not exactly distraught. “I determined, had he not died to send him [back] to England.” Rather than welcome an act of providential relief, Clarkson was aghast to learn that the councillors planned a full military funeral complete with struck colours flying from the ships and thirteen-gun salutes. “I replied that had I not heard it from their own mouths I could not have believed it possible that any set of men situated as they were as the representatives of the Directors of the Sierra Leone Company, to form a colony on virtuous principles could have made so extraordinary [a] request, for the person to whose memory these honours were designed had been almost constantly drunk from the time he left England to the day of his death.”10 Clarkson would have liked to forbid this lavish funeral on the grounds that it would shock the blacks, who would not understand the honour shown to such a person. But he was outvoted by the council—who told him, moreover, that they expected his presence. Feeling weak, Clarkson was carried up the hill at the back of the settlement, where he saw the flags at half mast and heard the funerary guns. Later that afternoon he was told that, during the firing, a gunner named Thomas Thomas had had his arm accidentally blown off, and had subsequently died from the wound. “This completely overcame me and on arrival aboard the Amy [where he slept] I was seized with the most violent fainting fits and hysterics which closed the mortifications of the day.”11
How was he ever to get better? Only, as he wrote in the journal, by a “return to a northern climate without loss of time.” And, whatever his brother and the directors thought, he was not honour-bound to stay in Africa beyond a short time. Yet to leave now, given the calibre of the men the company had sent, was to condemn Freetown to ruin before it had ever begun. He could not abandon the blacks in their hour of need; not now. With a flourish of the slightly self-aggrandizing desperation in which he was beginning to wrap himself, John Clarkson wrote, “I was compelled to sink all private considerations and agree to remain here, and although I may be disgraced by blending my services with those of others over whom I have no proper control, I have made my mind up to take the consequences and accept the Government under its present objectionable form and to remain with the poor Nova Scotians till the Colony is established or lost.”12
On the 18th of March 1792 Clarkson crossed a line beyond which there was no going back. He ordered his commodore’s pennant struck and the transport fleet discharged. The ships that had borne the blacks to Africa—the Felicity, Morning Star, Sierra Leone, Betsey, Eleanor, Catherine and the rest—were free to return to Halifax. There they would disabuse the white loyalists, still nursing a deep sense of grievance over the mass emigration of “their” blacks, of stories circulating in the port city that Clarkson’s fleet had met with utter destruction—that barely twelve people had survived from the twelve hundred who had left, and even they in such pitiable condition that they lamented ever leaving Nova Scotia.
THERE WOULD COME A DAY in Sierra Leone, not far off, when things had come to such a pass that John Clarkson felt he should ask the distressed and the disgruntled whether they did, in fact, wish to return to North America. And the question would be greeted with laughter.13 But in the first weeks and months there was plenty to cry about. Another forty of the free blacks died, including Violet King, who had gone through so much with her husband since leaving Colonel Young’s plantation in Wilmington, North Carolina: the terror of recapture in Charleston and New York; in wintry Birchtown physically thrown to the ground by the force of Moses Wilkinson’s preaching and then raised up again so purely that her husband, Boston, the oath-hater, felt himself by comparison a terrible wicked sinner who must take himself off at night to the deep snowdrifts of the forest to ask forgiveness. They had come through the Atlantic tempest and her sickness only for Violet to catch the “putrid fever” at the end of March. “For several days she lost her senses and was as helpless as an infant,” but then suddenly recovered her tongue, sure sh
e would meet her Maker very soon. “On Sunday while several of our friends were with her, she lay still; but as soon as they began singing the hymn “Lo! He comes with clouds descending, Once for favoured sinners slain” she joined in with us till we came to the last verse when she began to rejoice aloud and expired in a rapture of love.” Two months later, at the height of the rains, Boston caught the same fever but managed to survive. Many others did not. “People died so fast,” he wrote, “that it was difficult to procure burial for them.”14
Medical care and drugs—mostly cinchona bark to be used against malaria—were in desperately short supply. Dr Bell (for whatever good he might have been) was no more, and his replacement, Dr Thomas Winterbottom—much admired by Clarkson, and the author of the first serious account of African diseases—did not arrive until July. The timber intended for a hospital did not arrive until later in the year, by which time the worst of the fevers had abated. Rotting food, discarded from the stores, lay strewn around, attracting vermin and adding to the health hazards. Settlers, both black and white, were subsisting principally on “worm-eaten bread” and salt meats and fish, distributed at half allowance. Local villagers brought cassava and groundnuts, but the Nova Scotians had no idea what to do with them. When fresh fruit came—limes, papaya, pineapples, melon and bananas—it was a godsend.
It was the white population, with little or no immunity, that perished fastest and in the greatest numbers. Anna Maria Falconbridge lay gravely ill for three weeks, “stone-blind” for four days and “expecting every moment to be my last,” and was forced to suffer her head being shaved, turning her into what she described as “a ghastly figure.” She wrote of five, six or seven deaths a day at the height of the epidemic being commonplace, the victims buried “with as little ceremony as dogs or cats.” The habitual greeting of a morning, she recorded, became “How many died last night?”15 By the time the mortality rate ebbed in late July and August, barely 30 of the original 119 whites remained.