by Simon Schama
By October 1792 Freetown was no longer just an idea (and a farfetched one at that). It was a place—a place quite unlike any other in the Atlantic world; it was a community of free black British African-Americans. Nine of the twelve streets ran at right-angles to the shore and were lined with neat little timber-frame houses, where the settlers and their families lived. They had survived the worst of the storms, even if they did constantly need rethatching and were vulnerable to being over run by columns of voracious ants, small packs of rats and the occasional foraging anteater. Intersecting the streets were what Clarkson called the three “beautiful avenues,” one running along the shore, where the public buildings were sited. There were two open spaces for gatherings and palavers, one of them overlooked by the tower with the great bell that rang each day at sunrise to call the settlers to work. Besides Harmony Hall, Freetown had a school where Joseph Leonard from Brindley Town taught the children. It had, at last, a proper church, packed on Sundays and full enough of worshippers every night that the sermons, hymns and cries of devotional enthusiasm kept Anna Maria Falconbridge awake. It had a retail store where blacks actually sold goods to whites from visiting ships, as well as to each other, and a lively little fishing port from which twelve boats sailed out into the bay, coming back loaded with an abundant catch.
And at long last, with the rains receding, Pepys and his thirty survey workers were running lines delineating the cultivable lots for the black settlers. Not all were yet cleared, but in the little gardens in September herbs and vegetables began to poke above the surface. “The gardens of the settlers,” Clarkson wrote on the 21st of September, “begin to look very pleasing, the Nova Scotians brought out with them a quantity of good seeds and have been able to furnish the officers with many vegetables, especially cabbages, besides satisfying their own wants.”47 The horticulture wrote the blacks’ own extraordinary history in the soil: melons, beans and corn from their American past; pumpkins, squashes and cabbages from Nova Scotia; papaya, mangoes, cassava, yams, groundnuts and rice from their new old country. Joshua Montefiore, who had come to Sierra Leone on the Calypso, one of the bedraggled survivors of a failed expedition to Bullom Island sent in competition with the company, looked at Freetown and gushed with admiration: “It is impossible to conceive the chearfulness with which they go to their daily labour [on public works] at five o’clock in the morning and continue till the afternoon, when each attends his domestic concerns and cultivates his garden. In the evening they adjourn to some meeting, of which they have many and sing Psalms with the greatest devotion until late at night. It is a pleasing sight on Sunday to see them go to church, attired in their gayest apparel with content and happiness imprinted on their countenances.”48 Even allowing for poetic licence, the place could be, then, as pretty as a picture, and Clarkson’s secretary, John Beckett, evidently a dab hand with watercolours, did one for him in early November.
It was meant as a souvenir. For in late October Clarkson had told the settlers and the company people that he would be leaving Freetown at the end of the year. Everyone was thrown into consternation by this announcement, especially the blacks, who implored him to reconsider, and even the local chiefs—Jimmy, Queen Yamacouba, Signor Domingo and the Naimbana—whom he had gathered at a big palaver in late September to settle issues over the boundaries of the colony, and who made no secret of their trust and even admiration for the nervy, slender young man who now could speak their pidgin and who had grown to appreciate the drums. He was even able to act as a local chief himself when a settler took liberties with one of Signor Domingo’s wives, provoking the outraged husband to threaten to shoot the transgressor. Loftily, Clarkson condemned the wickedness and the malefactor, while telling Signor Domingo (who liked to sport his pendant cross) that his conduct was un-Christian and that he ought instead to come to him with any complaint. “I said Signor Domingo you no like war but suppose you shoot my man you make war upon me and I could not keep my people from making war upon you and you know that would be wicked palaver.”49 This was the way Clarkson spoke now, when he had to, and he rather enjoyed it, much as he liked, to his amazement, the rhythm of the drums in Jimmy’s village—the same sounds that had once bored holes in his temples.
Faced with, and complimented by, all these glum faces, Clarkson reassured everyone that his departure would certainly not be permanent. He had been gone from England more than a year and had never thought he would have to be governor of the colony; all he intended to do by returning was to spend a few months’ leave in England to repair his health, see his brother, his friends and his patient fiancée, Susannah (after whom he had named a bay), and take the opportunity of speaking personally to the directors about the future of the colony rather than rely on intermittent dispatches. That was the way, he reassured the blacks, he could best represent their interests.
All the same, Clarkson’s coming departure made the 13th of November an especially emotional event. He had decided to devote the whole day to “rejoicing” and led the entire population, men, women and children, up the slope of a hill at the back of the town. Although the land had been partly cleared to make way for the small farms, the “craggy steepness” slowed the climb. Clarkson took the opportunity to chat with the blacks as they walked, impressing on them how far they had already come—from slavery to redemption—but how much farther they still had to go if Africa was to be benignly affected by their achievement. Halfway up, the party paused for lunch at a brook that “spilled over the rocks in the most romantic manner” and filled Clarkson’s already emotionally overloaded breast with a further shot of sublimity. Finally, they reached the top and looked down, hot and exhilarated, at the trim rows of their houses, at the church, the bell tower and Harmony Hall; then out to the turquoise sea, the rivers and woods and inlets, a prospect “too beautiful for me to describe.” Then came the reward for the effort as Clarkson handed to forty settlers—eleven women and twenty-nine men—the certificates of the land grants they had drawn by lot, each about five acres—redeeming, if on a smaller scale than anticipated, at least one of the promises he had made to them in Moses Wilkinson’s chapel on that rainy day in Birchtown just over a year before. Stirred, Clarkson spoke again to the people who had come with him, still like the Israelites of old following Moses to the mount (but so much better behaved!), telling them that the happiness of their children and, for that matter, the whole country around Sierra Leone would depend on them and their conduct.
A tent was set up with tables: harmony reigned on what he now called Directors’ Hill. After dinner, Clarkson lifted his glass to the first toast: “The Sierra Leone Company and success to their virtuous exertions.” Three volleys of musket fire from the sixty men who had cleared the hill rang out, followed by three cheers. From the fort down below, right on cue, came an answering salute of cannon, booming over the river mouth and then taken up by the guns of the ships moored at the mouth of the river, the smoke curling up into the air, where their masts were festooned with the colours. And so it went on into the gathering twilight, with drinking, huzzahs and cannonades. At last there was a brief moment of grace. Bumpers were hoisted; flares lit the hillside; music sounded and toast after toast resounded in the bat-swept darkness. To the Nova Scotians! To Miss Susannah Lee! To all wives and sweethearts! And among the succession of toasts, Clarkson recorded coyly, there was particularly “one attended with rapturous cheering, firing, etc.”50
But with late November came the cool “smokes,” the sea fogs drifting in from the harbour, and with them an unpredictable alternation of chills and warmth. And so it was with the lieutenant; more confident than he had ever been that, for a while at least—perhaps six months—he could afford to leave the colony, settled and with the seeds of its prospering deep-sown. Yet come the curling smokes, he worried. His temporary replacement was to be William Dawes, a military man whose most recent post had been governing and guarding the convicts at Botany Bay. To impress on Dawes that his work in Sierra Leone could hardly be less a matter of police and puni
shment, Clarkson gave him tutorials in the long history of the blacks, their escape from American slavery and everything since. If they seemed difficult to manage, over-hasty to take offence or suspicious of whites, there was very good reason for this mistrust, since until very recently all they had ever known was deceit, cruelty and betrayal. Dawes may well have felt he needed no instruction from Clarkson about equity. He had, after all, been dismissed from Botany Bay for refusing to launch a punitive raid on aborigines. Nonetheless, Clarkson took Dawes about the colony with him, trying to make the young man unbend, to become less rigidly formal in his address and demeanour. Clarkson worried too that some members of the old council, especially the surveyor, Pepys, who made no secret of his opinion that the governor had over-indulged the settlers, had told Dawes as much, hoping he would introduce a regime of greater severity.
If that was so, Pepys might have pointed to what he thought was Clarkson’s most recent capitulation to the importunings of the blacks. With supplies dwindling, it had been decided that the two-shilling wage paid for a day’s work would now only purchase half the rations the settlers had previously been getting. Consternation, fury and petitions greeted this arbitrary decision. Luke Jordan, one of the captains, wrote, “Consider your eccellent promise is to mak all man hapy sir we wont to know wither we is to pay as much for the half rassion as for the full.” The next day another petition signed by twenty-eight heads of households, including Boston King, the preacher Cato Perkins, and the fiery Isaac Anderson, made the case that
…we labours very hard with very small wages—which is very loo for the Expence of tools runs hard as we are Oblidge to have a good many therefore we are Come to a Rasalition to lay it before you in hopes yr honour will take in Consideration towards us we don’t wish to offend, we Could wish as we only works for three shillings pr day to have our provisions free or else have our wages raisd and pay for it by free grace we wish to have our full provision as work men ought to have and our wages to be half in hard Cash and the other part in the Coloney mony by which there will be no grumbling.51
To all the other Freetown firsts, then, needs to be added the first free black labour negotiation—and one, moreover, that was successful. Clarkson conceded the case and, perhaps to Pepys’s annoyance and Dawes’s bemusement, restored the original ration.
Yet it was precisely Clarkson’s willingness to listen, his openness to change his mind and his good faith and transparent affection towards them that won the blacks’ respect as no other white Briton, with the exception of Granville Sharp, ever did. And although Clarkson was at pains to smooth Dawes’s way by deliberately making him the bearer of whatever good news there was to bring, while taking on himself the role of admonisher, and although the settlers heard him out when he praised Dawes to the sky, many of them remained nervous, reconciled to Clarkson’s going only if they could feel certain he would return.
On the 16th of December he spoke to them once more from a pulpit, as he had done the first time when he had seen them gathered in Birchtown. His text, of course, was from the Book of Exodus: and he spoke, feelingly, as patriarch, prophet, father and friend, even though he was still only just twenty-eight years old. In this colony I do not, he said, consider myself “as Governors in general do…but as the servant of God, the guardian of your morals and your instructor in religious and temporal duties.” He was their Moses, their Aaron, their Joshua, their David. Then he spoke to them from his organ of truth, his heart: “I have professed an affection for many of you. I now declare…that I would willingly lay down my life to promote your general happiness; because if I could make you happy and get you once well settled, I should not despair but that your humble, industrious, temperate, peaceable and forgiving conduct would have such an influence on the un-enlightened Pagans of this continent that they would be anxious to embrace Christianity.”
Then Clarkson turned, as was his wont, admonisher, lecturing the settlers that they were not to confuse liberty, their right, with licence; he spoke of his disappointment at their contentiousness over wages, and at their increasing indulgence in strong liquor, which he deeply deplored. He was sorry that not everyone had yet received their land, and might not before Christmas as he had hoped, but he had the strictest promises that those still without would shortly come into their possession. Without him, as with him, they must endeavour for right behaviour since “the happiness of every Black man throughout the world” turned on the outcome of the great venture at Sierra Leone. Then, causing a sudden, sinking feeling in the congregation that had packed the church and spilled outside under an awning, Clarkson said frankly that, as they knew, he never liked to make promises unless he could guarantee they would be kept. “I therefore cannot promise you to come back, but I will go so far as to say that I think the chances are ten to one that I shall; for I do not know any employment in this world that would be more pleasing to myself and I hope to my Creator than my best attempt to establish this Colony.”52
When the time came for valedictions John did what he could, what his heart bade him. Perhaps remembering those who had sat with him on the Lucretia as he had sweated and shivered and rambled and raved until the shaking took him to the outer verge of life, he now sat with those on the same dark brink and held their damp hands. Augustus Nordenskjold, the seeker after minerals, whose journey up-country Clarkson knew, with a terrible certainty, would be the end of him, had sent word that he was in distress and sought help. It had been given, and Nordenskjold had come back ragged, skeletal, convulsed with sickness, altogether “more like a spectre than a man.” He did not see out the year.
Nor did Alexander Falconbridge. Although he too was very ill, he finally “crawled from his sick bed,” as his wife put it, to try to give at least some impression of activity as a commercial agent. He had been in the last stages of planning a trading mission when Clarkson had to give him the news of his dismissal. Clarkson was struck by the relatively impassive way Falconbridge took the blow. But this was a mask, and Anna Maria was not deceived. Long given to drinking his way out of depression and impotence, Falconbridge now took to the bottle with a vengeance. “By way of meliorating his harrowed feelings,” Anna Maria wrote, “he kept himself constantly intoxicated; a poor forlorn remedy you will say; however it answered his wish, which I am convinced was to operate as poison and thereby finish his existence.” John Clarkson agreed that Falconbridge initially drank more to muffle the pain of his humiliation, but then in such excess as to be unmistakably suicidal. “He has been killing himself by slow degrees for the last three months and for some days past his Bones have been through his skin in several parts of his Body.”53 When the issue of which ship he might sail home on was raised, Falconbridge retorted, half fatalistic, half in defiance, that he would never return to England. He imagined he might still live outside the colony in a vacant house. But on the 19th of December, to no one’s surprise, he had a fit and died. Anna Maria did not pretend to grieve. She had borne the brunt of his self-pity, his rum-soaked ravings and his many physically violent outbursts. And she had begun a romance with the young Isaac DuBois, who must have been a source of consolation as well as protection. “I will not be guilty of such meanness as to tell a falsehood on this occasion by saying I regret his death, no! I really do not, his life had become burthensome to himself and all around him and his conduct to me for more than two years past was so unkind (not to give a harsher term) as long since to wean every spark of affection or regard I ever had for him.”54 Wasting no time (for no one knew their allotted ration of happiness in Sierra Leone), Anna Maria asked Clarkson for a licence to marry DuBois. Clarkson gave them his furniture and his blessing but—ever the uncle—asked them to wait a month before marrying.
There were many more emotional farewells. At Robana, the old Naimbana presented Clarkson with a bullock, the fattest anyone had ever seen in Africa, and to keep him safe, a talismanic charm on which was written a passage from the Koran. He wanted Clarkson to see his son John Frederic, over whose portrait, g
iven the chief by Falconbridge earlier that year, the Naimbana expended many sighs and tears. Faced with Clarkson’s departure, even some of the white officers said things he could not have expected. Richard Pepys, with whom he had been at constant loggerheads, claimed he would never “forget or Cease to love him.”55
He waited for Christmas, the first the blacks had spent in their own Freetown. Whatever they had endured and would still endure, this was a time for celebration. On the Eve, they gave themselves over to music, sweet and sad, deep and wild, the sounds of America, of Nova Scotia, of Africa. A crocodile of Joseph Leonard’s schoolchildren carolled to the houses. Then a file of fifes and drums snaked and skirled around the streets, right to the officers’ houses, to wish them the season’s greetings and a measure of their own rejoicing.
Clarkson—never entirely the master of his sentiment—was unashamed to expose the fullness of his heart. Before boarding the Felicity he had gone around the settlers’ houses pumping hands, receiving embraces, trying to calm their anxieties. But his composure had collapsed when he received a procession of Freetown women who brought him, for the voyage, offerings from their little farms: yams, papaya, onions, six dozen chickens and six hundred eggs, often just a few from each woman. Clarkson doubtless thought back to Preston, a year and an age ago, where British Freedom and the struggling farmers had also promised (and delivered) him chickens and eggs for the sea voyage from Halifax. There was something sacerdotal about the moment, and intense feeling welled up and inevitably broke through the thin wall of Clarkson’s self-control. “When many of the poor Widows expressed the gratification they had felt in being allowed to add their little mite to my sea stock by giving me an Egg each, I could not refrain from tears.”56
None of Clarkson’s big moments, of course, were ever complete without mishap. After the Felicity had weighed anchor in the afternoon of the 29th of December and had sailed through the harbour, as salutes from both the shore batteries and the ships rang out, he saw a sailor blown overboard from the Amy after looking carelessly down a loaded gun. But when Clarkson gazed back at the quayside he saw the entire colony gathered, waving handkerchiefs and hats and shouting farewells, and this sight he would take with him across the ocean along with all those eggs.