by Simon Schama
“We did not think, Gentlemen, any thing more was necessary than the petition we brought and delivered to you from the people we represent but as you do not seem to treat that petition with the attention we expected, you oblige us to say something more on the subject…” They had always believed what Clarkson had told them in Nova Scotia, notwithstanding more recent assertions that he had had no authority to do so, and now his letter made his own honesty in the matter unequivocally clear.
We certainly hope your Honours intend to make good those promises and we beg to know whether you do or not?…If we are not of importance enough to this Country to deserve a Governor authorized by the King, we, with due respect to your Honours think we have a right to a voice in naming the man who shall govern us…we will not be governed by your present Agents in Africa, nor can we think of submitting our grievances to them which we understand is the intention of your Honours, for it is inconsistent to suppose that justice will be shown us by the men who have injured us and we cannot help express our surprise that you should even hint at such a thing…We hope your Honours will not think we have said anything here but what is respectful and proper; we thought it our duty to tell you the truth; we want nothing but justice, which surely cannot be refused us. We have so often been deceived by white people, that we are jealous when they make promises and uneasily wait till we see what they will come to.
We shall conclude, gentlemen by observing that since we arrived here we have avoided giving you trouble as much as possible, we did not come upon a childish errand but to represent the grievances and suffering of a thousand souls.
We expected to have had some more attention paid to our complaints but the manner you have treated us has been just the same as if we were Slaves, come to tell our masters of the cruelties and severe behavior of an Overseer…24
Perkins and Anderson added, for the benefit of Isaac and Anna Maria Dubois, “When they had read this over they seemed very much out of humour.”25 This was hardly a surprise, for the directors were unused to being dressed down. They asked again for complaints to be properly and civilly set down. In return they received another letter of admonition from the blacks, pointing out that, contrary to promises made in Nova Scotia that they would be “provided with all tools wanted for cultivation and likewise the comforts and necessaries of life” would be made available from the company store at a reasonable rate, they had been fleeced and worse still, “we are certainly not protected by the laws of Great Britain.”26 With that reply “the Directors were no better pleased than the first.”
Nothing was resolved. In February 1794 Perkins and Anderson returned to Sierra Leone on the Amy, the ship that had brought them. Perhaps the directors imagined they had been sent away with a flea in their ear, chastened for their temerity. Perhaps again, they were not quite so sure, since there was some indecision about which would be the more prudent course—to pack them off back to Africa or prevent them from rejoining the colony. Back they went, though, bitterly disenchanted and more resolved on resistance. The effect of his stay in England was decisive in particular for Isaac Anderson. The man whom the directors had returned to Sierra Leone had become, thanks to them, militant.
ZACHARY MACAULAY watched seven square-rigged ships sail into Freetown harbour with some satisfaction. In spite of adversity and contention, Sierra Leone was prospering. It was a rare thing now for a settler to die of sudden disease. Cattle, timber and indigo arrived from upstream; a little fishing fleet brought back a catch every day from the open sea. Cassava, yams, melons and beans were being harvested. It was September 1794; he was governor of the colony now, and he ran it the way he thought it should always have been run: unsentimentally and economically.27 Certainly there had been discord, fomented, as he thought, by a faction of perenially disgruntled agitators, among whom Isaac Anderson was regrettably conspicuous. Better he should not have returned from that embarrassing sojourn in England where he doubtless picked up all kinds of seditious notions from the English Jacobins! Now he had made confederates—many of them, alas, Methodists, and all too prone to excitement; men such as Nathaniel Snowball, Ansel Zizer, and Nathaniel Wansey, who were much too quick to shout their pretended indignities before the credulous. Macaulay would much rather the assembly of thirty-six hundredors and tithingmen had not turned into a swarm of gadflies to irritate him in his administration with their buzzing and biting; but he still had hopes for it as a nursery of responsible government. Besides, doing away with it as a political nuisance would only fan the flames.
Macaulay put his faith in the sound and solid element among the settlers: David George and Richard Corankapone, men he could safely appoint as marshals in case of trouble. They had rallied to him in the summer when the colony had turned riotous. As so often, the matter had been escaped slaves. They materialized from forts and from ships as if Freetown were a safe haven. And inevitably it fell to him to appease the incensed captains who came in search of their property, hidden by the settlers, who appeared to believe that Lord Mansfield’s ruling applied to the colony; that the air of Sierra Leone was “too pure for slaves to breathe.” There were shouting matches, scuffles, abuse traded, hands raised, even threats with axes and knives. One such trader, a Scot, had told settlers harbouring his runaways just what he would do with them if ever they were got to the West Indies. In short order he had been set upon, and had come close to having his brains dashed out with a hammer. When Macaulay attempted to deal with those responsible the arresting marshal was in his turn attacked, and before long the whole town was in violent commotion. In the end order and authority had prevailed and the ringleaders of the riot sent to England for trial. But the muttering had gone on. It would never end. But what of it? Hardy realism was the only way for the colony to endure. Perhaps a future without African slaves might one day materialize; but for now they must needs accommodate themselves to what was; they lived among such men, tribes and captains both. Ships would sail up and downstream and some of them would have, perforce, live cargo. Those seven ships, for example, one of which appeared to be a warship, a frigate. Odd that he had had no notice of their coming. What might be their business?
All too soon Macaulay had his answer. Through the glass he saw the frigate’s guns methodically raised, levelled and aimed—at him. The governor threw himself down on his terrace as a shot cracked past his head. Then there was a tremendous roar of sound as twelve-pound cannonballs and shot rained on the harbour from the ships. Tongues of flame and clouds of dirty smoke rose from the houses closest to the waterfront. The shouting, screaming and running began. Another look through the glass and Macaulay saw their false British colours run down, the tricolor of the banditti run up. What could he call on to defend Freetown? Dawes’s fort had never been completed. Against the French ships’ hundred cannon he had just twenty-four guns, some of them rusted in the tropical humidity, mounted on rotten carriages. There was no choice. After an hour and a half of bombardment came a pause followed by a demand from the French commander, Citizen-Captain Arnaud, that they hoist the tricolor. Zachary Macaulay had none. Instead, he ordered a white linen tablecloth to be flown as the colony’s signal of surrender.
In retrospect some of the settlers murmured that the capitulation had been too hasty. But with the odds of battle so unequal, Macaulay undoubtedly believed he was sparing Freetown a massacre. There were fifteen hundred French sailors and marines armed to the teeth, and they could do with the colony what they wanted. Miraculously, the only fatal casualty in the cannonading had been a seven-year-old child, cut in two while being held in the arms of her mother, though many other settlers had been wounded, losing arms and legs.
But for the two weeks of their occupation, short of a general slaughter, the French did the worst they could anyway—and not just to the property of the British administration, but also to the blacks whom the National Convention had grandly emancipated. Amidst the burning houses and exhaustive plunder, Citizen Arnaud made it clear he saw little distinction between Britons and ex-
slaves—they were all “Anglais.” Shops, including Mary Perth’s and Sophia Small’s, were comprehensively looted; the Freetown public library torched; the colony’s printing press dismantled and shot up; the dispensary and apothecary sacked, churches vandalized (for the Cults of Reason and the Supreme Being seemed not to have caught on in Freetown); Bibles trampled on; Adam Afzelius’s manuscript on tropical botany destroyed; more than a thousand pigs killed; wounded and mutilated dogs and cats left to bleed to death on the grass streets. Farm allotments were dug up and, when what could be eaten had been devoured, the rest of the crops burned. When they felt like amusing themselves the French sailors turned to assaulting the settlers, stripping them of their clothes and beating them.
Those who could fled into the forested mountains, where they knew the terrain, and led the frightened whites to shelter in native villages. Not all of them were prepared to be helped. The surveyor, Richard Pepys, Clarkson’s old enemy, was at least as terrified of the black settlers—who indeed had many scores to settle with him—as of the French, and took his wife and children into the rainforest where he died a week later. Others, though, discovered some sort of common cause in adversity. Macaulay remembered the night services they held together; and Mary Perth, the matriarch whose shop had been plundered by the French, led the black children who were being schooled in the governor’s house into safety in a neighbouring Temne village. Macaulay could not but be impressed by her resourcefulness and courage. When he went out to Pa Demba’s to see the children, Mary made him tea and gave him a bed for the night.28 This, the Evangelical never forgot. After it was all over he put the children in her domestic charge, and when the time came for his own leave in the spring of 1795 he took some of the children with him for schooling in Clapham and kept Mary on as their nurse, matron and housekeeper. There she treated the bonneted ladies of the Common to her jams and her salty vernacular wisdom.
But it was too much to expect that when the French departed two weeks later Macaulay would emerge from the ashes a chastened man. If anything, the contrary was true; he had become an even more resolute version of himself. In no time at all, as the settlers were struggling to rebuild their destroyed town, the governor joined battle with them. Many of them in flight had managed to salvage things from the wreckage and fire—sticks of furniture, some foodstuffs in the company store, barrels of molasses, rope, nails and timber—and had willingly shared whatever they had with the fugitive whites. Now Macaulay ordered the return of these items, which he regarded as having been pilfered from the company. The settlers, on the other hand, who had risked life and limb to save what they could so that Freetown would not be entirely bereft as it tried to recover, saw the goods as legitimately theirs. They were not about to hand them back. It did not help matters that Macaulay had appropriated the best, undamaged properties in town to house the white officials as well as the hundred-odd white prisoners the French ships had taken and dumped on the burnt-out colony.
A confrontation ensued. Macaulay threatened to withhold schooling, medical care and the vote to anyone who refused to return salvaged property or to take a formal oath of allegiance. Since many of the precious land grant certificates issued by Clarkson had been destroyed in the conflagration Macaulay issued new ones, but with conditions inserted that violated the original agreements. Most glaring was the obligation of settlers to pay a quit rent of a shilling an acre on their lots, the tax for which Clarkson had expressly assured the Nova Scotians they would never be liable. Henry Thornton, who insisted on a quit rent, had written to Clarkson that despite the contradiction he hoped the matter would not be seen by the settlers “as a grievance.” But how could that be possible when it was set at fifty times the rate for white Nova Scotians and, for that matter, the ex-convicts of Australia? The assembly of hundredors and tithingmen warned the people not to take up any land grants bearing those illegitimate obligations, and for the most part they were heeded. Black arrows were daubed on the houses of noncompliers—three-quarters of the colony. Deprived of education, the settlers responded by opening their own private schools. The most alienated among them, led by Nathaniel Snowball (who had been a young boy when he had fled with his mother from a plantation in Queen Anne County, Virginia) and Luke Jordan (who had been one of Clarkson’s captains on the crossing), now decided to leave the colony altogether and found their own settlement on Pirate’s Bay, land they had leased from the Temne chief Jemmy George about halfway between Freetown and Cape Sierra Leone. It was at this juncture, in November 1794, that Jordan, Isaac Anderson and “Daddy” Moses Wilkinson—until now no radical—wrote to John Clarkson that “we wance did call it Freetown but since your absence—we have Reason to call it a Town of Slavery.”29
Macaulay and Dawes were their Pharaohs, John Clarkson their “Mosis and Joshua,” and the people he had led across the ocean to what they all hoped would be a Promised Land still looked to him, wrote to him as their true redeemer, hoping against hope that he would one day come back to them. “We Raly look to you with ever Longing Eyes—Our Only Friend,” Jordan and the others had written. “The day you leaved it we was very much Oppress by Government,” wrote James Liaster in March 1796. “We Believe that it was the handy work of Almighty God—that you should be our leader…kind Sir and honoured Sir be not Angry with us but Oh that God would once more Give you a Desire to come & visit us here.” “We could say many things,” wrote Snowball and Jordan in the summer of 1796 before their move to Pirate’s Bay, “but after all it will amount to no more than this that we love you and remember your Labours of love & compassion towards us with Gratitude & pray that Heaven may always smile on you & yours.”30
Clarkson must have felt a pang when he read these imploring letters, not least because he knew there was nothing he could do about their plight and no chance of being allowed to go back to Sierra Leone. There were occasions, though, when the history came to him. In 1796 Boston King called on him at Purfleet in Essex, where Clarkson was managing a limeworks. King had taken his calling as preacher and teacher, begun in Preston, Nova Scotia, to the northern shore of the Sierra Leone River at a place called Clarkson’s Plantation, where he set up a chapel and school for twenty pupils. Conscious that he himself needed better training as a missionary, he went back to England with Dawes, who placed him at Kingswood School near Bristol. It was there that King set down his whole extraordinary story for the Methodists. At some point in his stay he managed to stop hating white people: “I had suffered greatly from the cruelty and injustice of the Whites which induced me to look upon them in general as our enemies: And even after the Lord had manifested his forgiving mercy to me, I still felt an uneasy distrust and shyness towards them, but on that day the Lord removed all my prejudices, for which I bless his holy Name.”31 He might have spoken too soon. Discovering that, though forbidden to do so, King had gone to see John Clarkson, the company reneged on its promise to provide free passage from Africa and back again when he returned to be a missionary-teacher there. He was now to be charged fifteen guineas for the privilege. But he had gone through a lot worse than this since his escape from bondage. King reported this latest act of meanness to Clarkson, writing, with an almost audible sigh, “but Sir I regardeth it not because I know I shall be able to pay them and I do ashoure it will only serve to Attach my love more to you because I knew it was only out of Spite.”32
King’s touching loyalty may have consoled Clarkson somewhat for what he had heard of David George, whom he had brought to England to be introduced to prominent Baptists there. He duly did the rounds, meeting John Newton the slaver-turned-preacher who composed “Amazing Grace”; and related for publication his own eventful biography, from the lashings of the overseer to up-river life with George Galphin and the Indians, his smallpox-scarred ordeal at the siege of Savannah, the Shelburne days of frostbite and visions, and finally the oceanic exodus to Africa. Clarkson, he said, “was a very kind man to me and everybody…very free and good natured” and had been delighted when George had named his
last-born son after him. But in the six months of his stay in England George became the directors’ pet Christian, and he returned their generosity by betraying his old friend. Clarkson noticed the change of temperature in their communications, so it was not altogether a surprise when one of his correspondents in Sierra Leone confirmed that David George had become a company man. “Mr George has spoke very much against you,” the letter said. Hurt by the desertion, Clarkson wrote on the back of the letter: “David George’s Ingratitude.”33 Although he was still getting letters pleading with him to come back, he hardly had the stomach for it any more.
SO IT WAS not Clarkson who returned to Sierra Leone in 1796, but Macaulay. In all essentials he had not changed, but the colony had, and Macaulay noticed. It was more self-sufficient, self-confident and (he bitterly regretted this) politically headstrong. Materially, it was unquestionably doing better. The old, improvised dwellings of mud and thatch had gone. The four-hundred-odd houses were solidly timber-framed and divided on the inside into small rooms, though still without chimneys. Cooking was done in the little yards beside the houses, where chickens scratched and strutted, sharing the space with a hog or two. Mango trees leafed out between the houses to give fruit and shade.