by Simon Schama
Cries went up from the crowd to name the informers. Having flourished the letter (probably to the terror of those who had written it), Clarkson rapidly replaced it in his coat pocket and declared, as if he were playing some hero on the Drury Lane stage, that while there was still life in his body, he would not betray those names, nor would he ever forget their exemplary conduct. “I then called to their remembrance the many sacrifices I had made and was daily making to promote their happiness” and, as if he were on trial himself, “referred them to the whole of my Conduct toward them since I had known them.” There were issues of practical ruin here, he insisted, but also of outrage to law and right behaviour. If they were cantankerous towards the company, should they not recollect how much the company had already spent on them “although they were perfect strangers to them”? And he “endeavoured to press upon their Minds the Criminality of their conduct if, after all that had been done for them, they could, for a moment doubt the sincerity of the Sierra Leone Company’s views.” Should they permit the “Demon of Discord” to establish itself, they could expect nothing but misery.
Understandably taken aback—relieved, perhaps, that Clarkson seemed to have concluded this astonishing performance—a few of the braver settlers attempted to set things right. With the deepest of respect, they said, and whatever he might have been told, he had quite misunderstood the nature of their representation. It was just because Mr Clarkson was seen to be so daily inundated with matters trivial as well as serious that they meant nothing more than to relieve him of some of this burden. For that reason alone “they had chosen Thomas Peters their Chief Speaker or chairman as it was by his interference and interest that they were removed from Nova Scotia and 132 of them had signed a paper of this purport dated the 23rd of March which Paper Peters had intended last night to have put into the Governor’s hands.” Truly they had no other view than to “relieve the Governor of the fatigue of so many applications and expressed their sorrow that he should have taken it up so warmly, but that they hoped he would see it in a different light for that they assured him they had been most grossly misrepresented.”26
Clarkson spoke again. “The alarm and agitation being so great I found it no easy matter to persuade them they were in the wrong, however after arguing with them for a long time, they at last gave way and with the liveliest feelings of Gratitude and respect they expressed themselves extremely hurt at what had passed and promised everything I desired begging of me with all the tenderness imaginable, some of them with tears, not to expose myself any longer to the Evening air as they observed I was much fatigued with talking to them and they feared it would materially injure me.”
Thus ended the Easter rising at Freetown, which was, as Clarkson discovered when he perused the list of a 132 and found that it included some of his closest and most trusted friends, such as David George, surely no rebellion at all. Many of the names were New Brunswickers and people from Brindley Town and Digby—the same people whose trust Peters had won before going to London. But a good number were also Birchtowners. Peters, whom Clarkson now warily respected as “a man of great penetration and cunning,” he decided probably had no design “to assume the Government,” despite the warning letter that had described an imminent coup. Still, Clarkson resolved, “not only to keep an eye upon him myself but also to have his Actions watched and reported to me in Private.”
Even if Clarkson’s hair-trigger nervousness had exaggerated the crisis, there is no doubt that something serious had happened. Embedded in the proposal to “relieve” Clarkson of some of the pettier problems of the colony, however deferentially expressed, was, of course, the germ of Granville Sharp’s ideas of free black self-government, beginning with local matters—the kind of things that were appropriate for duly elected tithingmen and hundredors. By following the lead of his informers and assuming that the situation was tantamount to a usurpation of his own hard-earned authority, Clarkson had put amour-propre before political reflection. How could the assumption of some public duties by the blacks possibly be any worse than the carnival of incompetence and corruption perpetrated every day by the whites under the eyes of an increasingly alienated population of blacks?
David George and his friends did what they could to calm Clarkson down. Remember, they said, all the betrayals in Nova Scotia? Here too there is talk of our receiving land, but only talk! You did say we should not be taxed with a quit rent, yet it is said that the company means to lay the tax on us in such a way that may yet make us slaves again. We are a people deceived many, many times. No wonder, then, that we may be suspicious, whether with cause or no.
Days later the colony still trembled, either in anger or in trepidation, from the effect of the palaver under the cotton-silk tree. Clarkson learned that someone had died of the shock of it. “A Young Woman seeing me land and walk at unusual pace up the Hill and hearing the Great Bell ring, immediately afterwards was so frightened, knowing her husband had signed the paper for Peters’s appointment that she was taken with strong convulsions and soon after expired.”27
Although he thought he had mastered the worst of the situation, Clarkson was told there were still ugly things happening; men suspected of being the informers were intimidated, others interrogated. Henry Beverhout, one of the Methodist captains, came to see him to insist that his flock had nothing to do with the agitation. Three days after the palaver Clarkson called another general assembly, this time in the Canvas Room, with all the free blacks lined up in their shipboard companies and under their black captains. The settlers were asked to sign a document stating that while they were in Freetown they would live obedient to its laws, which “as far as circumstances will permit” would be “made comformable with the laws of England.”28 There was a general sound of assent.
A tornado was gusting up. The silvery floss from the cotton-silk trees was blowing now, high in the sky, coming in from as far away as the northern Bullom shore. Then it descended, covering everything with its delicate, drooping filaments. Out in the bay, sailors on the Harpy could still be seen picking strands out of the sheets and shrouds.29
FOR ALL THE SEVERITY of his demeanour, in the days and weeks after Easter Sunday 1792 Clarkson behaved carefully towards the blacks. But the key to re-establishing his authority with those among whom it had been shaken, he knew, was asserting himself over the whites—councillors, soldiers and sailors—whose conduct towards the blacks was the source of much of the anger. Whenever he had an opportunity to demonstrate his even-handedness, Clarkson seized it with theatrical eagerness. Grass and thatch for the repair of huts damaged by the storms was desperately needed, but as the line of forest and scrub was gradually being pushed back, the distance the blacks had to walk with bundles of grass on their backs made the task much harder. So Clarkson ordered a cutter from the Lapwing to go upstream, gather the grass and sail it back down to the colony. With the storms becoming more frequent, there was, he thought, no time to lose, so the order was given for a Sunday, a day when all kinds of work was being done around the settlement. But the Lapwing’s sailors, hating the idea that they were to have their rest interrupted to make life easier for the blacks, decided they would instead observe the Lord’s Day, even though none of the seamen had hitherto been conspicuous for their piety.
Clarkson’s decision to make an example of these recalcitrants was also based on the seamen’s habit of referring to the settlers as “Black Rascals” and using “other insulting and degrading expressions highly injurious to the harmony of the Colony and extremely offensive to the Nova Scotians.”30 At issue, too, was the superintendent’s authority over the squadron of ships. The master of the Harpy, Captain Wilson, whose behaviour was increasingly cantankerous, was prepared to countermand almost anything Clarkson said. A show of power was called for. Accordingly, Captain Robinson of the Lapwing was ordered to be present at the trial of four men said to be “ringleaders,” each of whom was sentenced to three dozen lashes. This was the world of the slave plantation turned upside down. The wh
ite governor had ordered white sailors to be publicly flogged before all the assembled blacks for refusing to do something that could ease their toil and for habitually subjecting the blacks to abuse! Moreover, the man who would administer the flogging was himself a black, Simon Proof, who had sometimes performed this service in the British army. But Proof was not especially eager to be the instrument of the superintendent’s exercise in salutory racial justice, and had to be talked into it. Clarkson told him that no matter how distasteful he might find it, the welfare of the colony depended on the public punishment.31
Under lowering clouds, the entire colony and the crews of the ships were summoned by the great bell on the hill and Clarkson made another speech.
I now shortly addressed the Nova Scotians upon the necessity to protect their families and told them unless we could ensure a proper subordination in every department of the Colony it would be impossible for us to succeed. I declared that it was far from my desire to make any distinction between Black and White, on the contrary I wished them to consider each other as Brethren requiring mutual kindness from each other in their present arduous situation and no part of their Conduct would be more gratifying to me than to see them endeavour to lighten each other’s hardships by a conciliatory and Christian-like conduct.32
The first of the guilty seamen, hands tied, was brought forward and leaned against the whipping post. Clarkson declared that he “punished only with a view to reformation,” then told Proof to proceed. The sailor had a bullet clenched between his teeth the better to stand the pain, and worked his jaws on the metal as the stripes were laid on him. Through the first thirteen lashes the prisoner grimaced silently, but at the fourteenth, when his flesh opened, the bullet dropped from his mouth and released a scream. Clarkson ordered Proof to stop, then approached the sailor and asked him if he felt sorry for the offence and if he was willing to amend his conduct. When he grunted yes, he was untied and taken to the guardhouse. Not surprisingly, after a few lashes the second prisoner made his own gesture of contrition, likewise the third. “I dismissed the people,” Clarkson wrote, “being satisfied a sufficient impression had been made.”33
Gestures alone were not enough. A few days after the flogging Clarkson sent Nathaniel Gilbert back to London on the fastest of his ships, the Felicity, with letters for Thornton and the directors. To the Board of Directors, he detailed some of the worst abuses inflicted on the colony, especially the corruption at the storehouse, where, he told the directors, the company was being robbed every day by unscrupulous whites while honest blacks suffered. Until and unless they gave him proper power to over-ride the council, this state of unholy chaos would continue and he could not possibly be expected to be responsible for such a state of affairs. He ended, therefore, with an ultimatum: “Give me authority and if it does not come too late I will pledge myself to remedy the whole. If you do not my resolution is fixed. I must return home.”34 The private letters he sent were still more passionate and angry. He accused his brother Thomas of concocting the kind of government precisely calculated to make the settlers as miserable as possible; and to Thornton he thundered, “I call God to witness, who knows the secrets of the heart that I should rejoice to lay down my life to accomplish the great wishes of the Sierra Leone Company,” but if they would not grant him what was needed, they had better consider a replacement.35
To get some sea breezes inside his clammy lungs Clarkson sailed a short distance with the Felicity out to the Banana Islands. When he got back, on the 26th of April, a thunderbolt hit in the shape of a grievance against Thomas Peters brought by a settler who claimed that Peters had purloined the property of a recently deceased man. Conscious of Peters’s following, Clarkson did not leap at the opportunity to discredit his rival. Until hearing the grievance in person, he was inclined to dismiss is as a personal grudge. But it soon became apparent that not to act on what seemed to be indisputable evidence risked alienating at least as many blacks as would be offended by proceeding against Peters. On the 29th the worst storm yet struck Freetown, lightning bolts coming so close together that they flashed continuously for ten minutes, “appearing like Cataracts of fire, rushing down from the sky.”36 Clarkson made up his mind. Peters would have to be tried.
On the 1st of May Peters admitted having taken the goods, but insisted that the man had incurred a debt to him in Nova Scotia that had never been repaid, and that he had therefore merely been claiming property to which he was rightfully entitled. A black jury, however, disagreed, ruling that he had no right to the goods and ordering their return to the widow. No other form of punishment was handed down: Clarkson evidently felt the humiliation had been enough to do permanent damage to Peters’s leadership. A sign of that was a letter from Peters himself, informing Clarkson that he had given up the property but asking him to appeal the jury’s verdict. “Of course,” Clarkson wrote, “I did not choose to interfere further in the Business.”37
Despite Peters’s fall from grace, Clarkson still felt insecure and took to summoning assemblies of the settlers for speeches that turned into rambling confessionals punctuated by veiled threats. On the 3rd of May he told them that he was “nearly worn out, that I came to this Colony to expect difficulties and [when] they could not be avoided I met them Cheerfully,” but he had been grieved by the neglect of public works, with settlers “sneaking away before the hour of labour was over.” Petulantly, half schoolmaster and half affronted Old Testament prophet, he declared that, were it not for his love of Africa, he would instantly retire to his friends in England, who were anxious to see him again, and that “unless I saw a great difference in their behaviour I should certainly leave them; that I did not wish to leave them in anger but on the contrary would shake hands with them all, wishing them from my heart as much happiness as they wished themselves. If they thought they could do better without me than with me…it was much better and more honourable for them to say so at once than suffer me to sacrifice my life in their Service without doing them any good.”38 This shamelessly self-pitying appeal, with its vision of imminent farewells, had precisely the effect Clarkson wanted: “An instantaneous expression of gratitude burst from the whole.”
There were only so many times, however, when Clarkson could turn on these nakedly emotional appeals to loyalty and self-sacrifice. Besieged with complaints at all hours of the day and night, he took to sleeping sometimes aboard the Amy. But even there he would lie awake and the sounds of Sierra Leone would assail him from every direction: the drumming and singing from King Jimmy’s town; the wailing hallelujahs from the night services that the Methodists and Baptists were holding; the roaring of drunken soldiers from their tents; the unstoppable, immense thrumming of the insects, millions of jointed legs rubbing, and then, deep within the serpentine chambers of his afflicted head, yet other throbbing sounds drilling away and not leaving him in peace. What would become of his memory, already so tattered and torn? He kept the worst of it from those over whom he must summon a semblance of authority. He must not seem perplexed.
He waited impatiently for an answer from the directors to his demands, but although ships came and went in the steely waters of Kru Bay, answer came there none. But at least some of those ships supplied him with new faces; men whom he thought, right away, might be sympathetic to his mission. Fresh blood was needed, since his old Nova Scotia comrade, the surgeon Charles Taylor, was himself sick, moody and (he blushed to acknowledge it) sometimes showed signs of indulgence in liquor, which was when he made no secret of his ardent wish to go back to England. Alexander Falconbridge, whom Clarkson thought one of the best of the bad bunch of councillors, at heart a good and even sensible soul (though with no sign of any aptitude in the way of commerce), was now also deep in his cups, often sick and vomiting, pitifully incoherent, subject to violent fits of evil temper, which were sometimes directed against his blameless wife. For some reason—perhaps because his little book on the slave trade had opened so many hitherto closed or indifferent minds—Clarkson felt for him, but at
the same time knew (and wrote to tell the directors, who after all must be concerned with the investment) that Falconbridge was utterly unfit to be the “commercial agent” of the colony.
So Clarkson was cordial towards the new arrivals, among them an affable young American loyalist, Isaac DuBois from Wilmington, North Carolina (the country Peters had fled), who, although once a wealthy cotton planter, was deeply sympathetic to the blacks. Doubtless influenced by Carl Wadstrom, there were two Swedes: Adam Afzelius, a naturalist and student of Linnaeus, and Augustus Nordenskjold, a mineralogist, eager (over-eager, Clarkson thought) to explore inland for the veins of gold he had heard of and that lay in the territories of the old Naimbana’s chief queen. But he could scarcely go there yet. The rains were relentless, and temperatures, especially at night, began to dive, adding cold to the misery of the continuous drenchings. The surveying and laying out of town and country lots went at snail’s pace, engendering more fears among the settlers that, as in Nova Scotia, without their own plots, they were doomed to labouring for others.
Supplies were so limited that everyone was on short allowance. When a packet ship, the Trusty, arrived with desperately needed supplies, Clarkson discovered that they had been so carelessly packed into cheap barrels without iron bands that the casks had often split en route, exposing food, textiles and tools to ruin and rot. Barrels of spoiled pickled tripe lay about, adding to the appalling smells coming from the refuse area around the storehouse and inviting colonies of enormous rats to roam the grass-lined streets of Freetown. Drunkenness was becoming a serious problem, habitual among the sailors and councillors who, when they needed restocking, would send upstream to the slave factories on Bance and Gambier islands for it. But, to his dismay, Clarkson also noticed that liquor was starting to make inroads among “his” blacks. To his amazement the Methodist preacher Henry Beverhout had actually complained that Clarkson withheld grog from the blacks working on the experimental garden attached to his house. To Clarkson this could only mean that Beverhout had somehow fallen under the influence of Peters, who had evidently recovered from his temporary disgrace and was seen attending the night services of both Methodists and Baptists. Clarkson believed that Peters still wanted to be elected “Speaker-General” for the blacks and thought of him increasingly as a kind of black Cromwell, inciting them to voice their grievances and always parading his own authority as the person responsible for their coming out of Nova Scotia. On the 31st of May he got a letter from Peters, effectively acting in this capacity, requesting that Clarkson meet with the blacks “according to your promise; if not please give me the liberty to speak a few words to them today for I do not mean to live in such confusion.”39