By the Rivers of Water

by Erskine Clarke

  36. JLW to JBW, 10 June 1842, CTS; JLW to JBW, 18 July 1842, CTS; JLW to JBW, 15 January 1843, CTS; WWD, 28 December 1842, WHS. Cf. Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley, CA, 2009), 54, 108–111.

  37. Quotations: JLW to JBW, 18 July 1842, CTS; Wilson, Western Africa, 262. For use of knives and forks by Mpongwe away from the estuary, see WWD, 23 February 1842, WHS. For a “knife and fork doctrine” on a Baptist mission in the Congo and the ways in which it promoted European domesticity and hygiene in the twentieth century, see Nancy Rose Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC, 1999), 118–123.

  38. JLW to JBW, 7 August 1842, CTS. For slave production of food, see Rich, A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat, 27–35. Cf. Preston, Gaboon Stories, 69–70.

  39. Quotation: JLW to JBW, 7 August 1842, CTS. For details of the international slave trade, see “Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database” at www.slavevoyages.org, especially the “Voyages Database” section of the site, which provides a database of 34,941 slave voyages. For a summary drawing from the “Voyages Database,” see Eltis, “The U.S. Transatlantic Slave Trade.” For a contemporary summary account of the British navy’s efforts to suppress the international slave trade, see “The Slave Trade: From the Parliamentary Papers, Commissioners at Sierra Leone, to Viscount Palmerston, Sierra Leone, December 31, 1840,” in The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter: Under the Sanction of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (London), 5 October 1842, 162. Rich, A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat, 6–8, provides a succinct summary of slave trading in the Gabon estuary. For slave ships built in New England and Baltimore, see Griswold, “Journal,” 26 June 1842, ABCFM. Cf. JLW to JBW, 25 February 1843, CTS; “United States Slave-Trade,” The British and Foreign AntiSlavery Reporter: Under the Sanction of the British and Foreign AntiSlavery Society (London), 20 April 1842, 62.

  40. For King Glass’s slave trading and trading at Glass’s Town, see WWD, 10 February 1843, WHS; WWD, 3 June 1843, WHS. See also Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses (New York, 2005), Chapters 5 and 6, for an accessible account of the role of distilled spirits in the slave trade. The chapters are entitled “High Spirits, High Seas” and “The Drinks That Built America.”

  41. Quotation: WWD, 10 February 1843, WHS. See Griswold, “Journal,” 26 June 1842, ABCFM. For JLW’s attack on Southerners who were seeking to reopen the international slave trade to the United States, see Wilson, “The Foreign Slave-Trade: Can It Be Revived Without Violating the Most Sacred Principles of Honor, Humanity, and Religion?” Southern Presbyterian Review 12 (1859): 491–512. Cf. WWD, 10 February 1843, WHS.

  42. For JLW’s evaluation of the character of Mpongwe slavery, see Wilson, Western Africa, 271–272.

  43. Quotation: WWD, 30 December 1842, WHS.

  44. Quotation: Robert Hamill Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa (New York, 1904), 263. For plants and poisons available, see André Raponda-Walker and Roger Sillans, Les Plantes Utiles du Gabon (Paris, 1961), passim; and Muse D’Ethnographie Genève, Le Gabon de Fernand Grébert, passim. For the knowledge of and use of poisonous plants by the indigenous people of Gabon, see Raponda-Walker and Sillans, Rites et Croyances des Peuples du Gabon (Libreville, Gabon, 2005 [1962]), 43–55. For eating as a dangerous act that makes a person vulnerable to malevolent spirits, see WWD, 23 February 1843, WHS; Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, 422–425; Rich, A Workman Is Worthy of His Meat, 31.

  45. Quotation: Wilson, Western Africa, 271. Cf. Wilson, “Mr. Wilson’s Description of the Country Near the Mouth of the Gaboon,” Missionary Herald, June 1843, 233. Cf. James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT, 1990), 3–4, 31–36. For slave use of poisons in the Lowcountry, see Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), 614–618. For “weapons of the weak,” see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, 1985).

  46. WWD, 20 November 1843, WHS. WW saw the woman being pulled into the brush on 13 November 1843.

  47. Quotation: WWD, 20 November 1843, WHS. See also Benjamin Griswold to Rev. Greene, [?] 1844, ABCFM. WW saw the woman being burned on 20 November 1843, a week after having buried the first woman.

  Chapter Sixteen: Rainforest Lessons

  1. Benjamin Griswold to RA, 26 December 1843; WW to the Prudential Committee, 28 December 1843, ABCFM.

  2. WWD, 10 December 1842, WHS; Mary Griswold to RA, 26 November 1847, ABCFM; JLW to RA, 13 December 1847, ABCFM; Jane Preston, Gaboon Stories (New York, 1872), 80–82.

  3. WW to the Prudential Committee, 28 December 1843, ABCFM.

  4. Quotations: JLW to Charles Hodge, 1 December 1844, CTS; J. Leighton Wilson, Western Africa: Its History, Condition, and Prospects (New York, 1856), 239–240. For JLW’s work on the Bantu language family, see J. Leighton Wilson, “Comparative Vocabularies of Some of the Principal Negro Dialects of Africa,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 1, no. 4 (1849): 337–381. Cf. JLW to Rev. Lewis Grout, South African Mission, 13 January 1851, ABCFM.

  5. WWD, 1842–1860, WHS, passim.

  6. Quotation: Robert Hamill Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa (New York, 1904), 258. For WW’s relationship with JLW and JBW, see, for example, WWD, 11 July 1843, WHS. For WW’s continuing grief, see, for example, WWD, 2 February 1843, WHS; WWD, 2 May 1843, WHS.

  7. For the decline of the Shékiani and their role in the slave trade around the estuary, see WWD, 2 September 1848, WHS; WWD, 20 September 1848, WHS; WWD, 14 October 1848, WHS; Wilson, Western Africa, 300; K. David Patterson, “The Vanishing Mpongwe: European Contact and Demographic Change in the Gabon River,” Journal of African History 16, no. 2 (1975): 217–238. For King George’s account of the decline of the Shékiani, see Rollin Porter to RA, 1 October 1851, ABCFM.

  8. For earlier visits to George’s Town, see WWD, 20–23 March 1843, WHS; WWD, 28–29 July 1843, WHS.

  9. WWD, 20 March 1843, WHS. Cf. Rollin Porter to RA, 1 October 1851, ABCFM.

  10. For George’s character, see WWD, 26 October 1843, WHS; WWD, 14 March 1844, WHS; WWD, 1 February 1847, WHS; “West Africa,” Missionary Herald, June 1848, 195–196; Wilson, Western Africa, 254–256. For George’s account of the history of the Mpongwe, see Rollin Porter to RA, 1 October 1851, ABCFM. Cf., for traditions about the origins of the Ndiwa and the Mpongwe, Abbé André Raponda-Walker, Notes d’histoire du Gabon (Brazzaville, 1960), 58.

  11. For the two Mpongwe sent to France, see T. Edward Bowdich, Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee, 3rd ed. (London, 1966 [1819]), 425.

  12. Quotation: WWD, 23 October 1843, WHS; WWD, 5 December 1843, WHS. For the slave trade route through King George’s Town, see the map in Christopher J. Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa: Southern Gabon, ca. 1850–1940 (Rochester, NY, 2002), 28. For a detailed description of the slave trade in Gabon, see ibid., 27–35. For the role of New England rum in debauching the people, see, for example, “West Africa: Report of the Mission for 1849,” Missionary Herald, July 1850, 226; Wilson, Western Africa, 124. For an evaluation of these charges by the missionaries and similar charges by other Europeans and Americans, see Patterson, “The Vanishing Mpongwe,” 230; Henry Hale Bucher, Jr., “The Mpongwe of the Gabon Estuary: A History to 1860” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1977), 151–152; George E. Brooks, Yankee Traders, Old Coaster and African Middlemen: A History of American Legitimate Trade with West Africa in the Nineteenth Century (Boston, 1970), 19–23, 273–275.

  13. WWD, 5 December 1843, WHS; WWD, 14 March 1844, WHS.

  14. For WW’s discussion of these matters and for the use of the name Mpongwe, see WW to the British antislavery leader Thomas Fowell Buxton, contained in WW to RA, 29 December 1843, ABCFM. For the Bantu political tradition of lineages being divided into houses, villages, and districts, see Jan
Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison, WI, 1990), 74–83. For the development of clans and clan heads around the Gabon Estuary, see ibid., 232–234. For the role of missionaries in creating a distinct identity that transcended local villages, cf. J. D. Y. Peel, Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (Bloomington, IN, 2000), 283–288; and Dmitri van den Dersselaar, “Creating ‘Union Ibo’: Missionaries and the Igbo Language,” Africa 67, no. 2 (1997): 275.

  15. Quotation: “Report of the Gaboon Mission to Prudential Committee,” 28 December 1843, ABCFM. For the terminology of “Big Men”—the technical term in anthropology for leaders such as Glass and George—and its history among Bantu-speaking people, see Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests, 73–74, 274–275.

  16. Quotations: WWD, 5–6 June 1849, WHS. Note WW’s efforts to “reduce” the language to “order” and cf. Van den Dersselaar, “Creating ‘Union Ibo.’”

  17. Quotation: WWD, 21 March 1843, WHS. Cf. WWD, 3 May 1843, WHS. The dollar amount was what the slave traders told William Walker and is not the equivalent of what it would be today.

  18. Quotations: WWD, 12 February 1843, WHS; WWD, 6 March 1843, WHS. For the drums, see “Types de Tambours,” in Raponda-Walker and Sillans, Rites et Croyances des Peuples du Gabon, 72–74; and cf. Musée D’Ethnographie Genève, Le Gabon de Fernand Grébert, 1913–1932 (Geneva, 2003), 47, 217, 270.

  19. Quotation: WWD, 5 March 1843, WHS. See also WWD, 21 March 1843, WHS.

  20. Quotations: Benjamin Griswold, “Mr. Griswold’s Visit to Corisco Island,” Missionary Herald, December 1843, 449; JLW to RA, 28 March 1851, ABCFM. See also JLW to JBW, 23 June 1843, CTS.

  21. Wilson, Western Africa, 270–272; Patterson, “The Vanishing Mpongwe,” 227; Henry H. Bucher, Jr., “The Village of Glass and Western Intrusion: An Mpongwe Response to the American and French Presence in the Gabon Estuary, 1842–1845,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 3 (1973): 363–400.

  22. WWD, 8 June 1849, WHS.

  23. Quotations: WW to Brother Alfred, 7 February 1849, ABCFM. For examples of runaway wives, see WWD, 4 April 1843, WHS; WWD, 14 April 1843, WHS; WWD, 24 December 1847, WHS. Cf. Patterson, “The Vanishing Mpongwe,” 229–233.

  24. For missionary experience of the rainforest, see Wilson, Western Africa, 364–365, 374–378; WWD, 10 November 1847, WHS; William Walker, “Western Africa,” Missionary Herald, 31 December 1847. For white images of jungles and the contrasting reality of rainforests, see Vansina, Paths in the Rainforests, 39–46. On the complex place of the leopard in Mpongwe life, see Wilson, Western Africa, 365–366; Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, 200–203; Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest, 74, 78, 276–277; Raponda-Walker and Sillans, Rites et Croyances des Peuples du Gabon, 178–182; Jeremy Rich, “‘Leopard Men,’ Slaves, and Social Conflict in Libreville (Gabon), c. 1860–1879,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 34, no. 3 (2001): 619–639. For a comprehensive overview of the role of leopard men and their relationship to the secret Mwiri societies in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Gabon, see Gray, Colonial Rule and Crisis in Equatorial Africa, 196–203.

  25. Quotations: WWD, 23 and 26 October 1843, WHS; WWD, 11 March 1844, WHS. Walker still used “tiger” for “leopard” in 1844. He later used the correct name “leopard.” I have quietly used “leopard” where he used “tiger.”

  26. Quotations: WWD, 1 February 1847, WHS; Albert Bushnell to RA, 22 June 1854, ABCFM. Cf. Psalm 73:3–14, Job 21:1–26; and Georgia Writers Project, Savannah Unit, Works Projects Administration, [Mary Granger], Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Savannah, 1940), 142, 147, 183.

  27. Quotations: William Walker, “Letters from Mr. Walker,” Missionary Herald, December 1847, 195–196. For the steady decline of George’s Town in the 1840s and 1850s, see, for example, WWD, 5 December 1843, WHS; WWD, 14 March 1844, WHS; WWD, 9 November 1847, WHS; Walker, “Letters from Mr. Walker,” Missionary Herald, December 1847, 195–196. Patterson estimated that the population of George’s Town and its villages declined from approximately 550–650 in 1843 to 170 by 1863. See Patterson, “The Vanishing Mpongwe,” 217–238.

  28. For descriptions of traveling narrow trails at night, see, for example, WWD, 23 February 1843, WHS; WWD, 20 March 1843, WHS; WWD, 22 March 1843, WHS; WWD, 30 March 1844, WHS; Walker, “Mr. Walker’s Visits to the Interior,” Missionary Herald, April 1849, 120–123. For the character and use of the ojo for travel at night, see Rollin Porter to RA, 1 October 1851, ABCFM.

  29. For descriptions of sailing on the estuary at night, see, for example, JLW to JBW, 7 August 1842, CTS; WWD, 21 February 1843, WHS; WWD, 23 February 1843, WHS; WWD, 22 March 1843, WHS; Rollin Porter to RA, 1 October 1851, ABCFM. Cf. WW to S. L. Pomeroy, 17 September 1854, ABCFM.

  30. WWD, 3–14 July 1844, WHS; Hampden C. DuBose, Memoirs of Rev. John Leighton Wilson, D.D., Missionary to Africa and Secretary of Foreign Missions (Richmond, VA, 1895), 94.

  31. Quotation: Benjamin Griswold to RA, 17 July 1842, ABCFM.

  32. JLW to RA, 25 July 1842, ABCFM; “West Africa,” Missionary Herald, July 1845; WWD, 6–14 July 1844, WHS. Cf. Albert Bushnell to RA, 16 February 1850, ABCFM, and WWD, 30 January 1848, WHS.

  Chapter Seventeen: The French: “The Most Dishonest and Shameless People”

  1. For French interest in Gabon, see Henry H. Bucher, Jr., “The Village of Glass and Western Intrusion: An Mpongwe Response to the American and French Presence in the Gabon Estuary, 1842–1845,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 6, no. 3 (1973): 363–400; Hubert Deschamps, Quinze Ans de Gabon: Les débuts de l’établissement français, 1839–1853 (Paris, 1965), esp. 289. For the outlawing of French vessels carrying slaves, see Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade (New York, 1997), 622–628.

  2. K. David Patterson, The Northern Gabon Coast to 1875 (Oxford, 1975), 90–91.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Quotation: ibid., 91. See also Deschamps, Quinze Ans, 292; Bucher, “The Village of Glass,” 389.

  5. Deschamps, Quinze Ans, 295.

  6. Bucher, “The Village of Glass,” 379–384.

  7. WWD, 26 April 1843, WHS; WW to the Prudential Committee, 28 December 1843, ABCFM; RA to the Gaboon Mission, 19 November 1843, ABCFM.

  8. For charges of missionary meddling in political affairs, see, for example, JBR to Oliver Holmes, 27 December 1837, MSCS; JLW to JBW, 25 February 1843, CTS. The charge was echoed by some twentieth-century historians. Jane Jacks Martin, for example, in writing about JLW’s charges of imperialism by the Maryland Colonization Society and its settlers, remarked that “Wilson’s conduct in later years [in Gabon] indicated his penchant of meddling in political affairs.” See Jane Jackson Martin, “The Dual Legacy: Government Authority and Mission Influence Among the Glebo of Eastern Liberia, 1834–1910” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1968), 155.

  9. For efforts to stir public opinion in the United States and Britain against French moves in Gabon, see, for example, “West Africa,” Missionary Herald, November 1844, 381. For the efforts of missionaries to protect “aboriginal rights” in the face of aggressive white settlers in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, see Alan Lester, “Humanitarians and White Settlers in the Nineteenth Century,” in Mission and Empire, ed. Norman Etherington (Oxford, 2005), 64–85. For the role of the Southern Presbyterian Church, and especially the African American missionary William Shepherd, in exposing the atrocities in the Congo under Belgium colonization, see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (New York, 1999).

  10. For Buxton and the Aborigines’ Protection Society and for the ridicule they faced, see Lester, “Humanitarians and White Settlers.”

  11. Quotation is found in a copy of WW’s letter to Buxton in WW to the Prudential Committee, 28 December 1843, ABCFM.

  12. Quotations: WWD, 14 March 1844, WHS. See also WWD, 3 July 1843, WHS.

  13. WWD, 1 November 1843, WHS.

/>   14. Quotation: WWD, 30 March 1844, WHS. For the story of Glass’s signing and what followed immediately, see J. Leighton Wilson, “Letter of Mr. Wilson,” Missionary Herald, 25 November 1843, 112; William Walker, “Letter from Mr. Walker,” Missionary Herald, July 1844, 248; J. Leighton Wilson, “Letter from Mr. Wilson,” Missionary Herald, November 1844, 381; JLW to Charles Hodge, 1 December 1844, CTS. For a summary of the French version of what happened, see Deschamps, Quinze Ans, 300–302. For a sharp critique of the French account, see Patterson, The Northern Gabon Coast to 1875, 96–100; and Bucher, “The Village of Glass,” 391–393. Both Patterson and Bucher make extensive use of WW’s diary.

  15. WWD, 19–23 January 1844, WHS.

  16. Quotation: Bucher, “The Village of Glass,” 388.

  17. Missionary Register (London), 1 January 1846, 7.

  18. WWD, 26 August 1844, WHS.

  19. Quotation: WWD, 6 January 1845, WHS. See also WWD, 31 December 1844 to 30 March 1845, WHS.

  20. JLW to RA, 30 January 1845, ABCFM.

  21. Quotation: WWD, 22 June 1845, WHS. See also WWD, 30 March 1845 to 22 June 1845, WHS.

  22. WWD, 4 July 1845 to 24 November 1845, WHS.

  23. WWD, 2 December 1845, WHS.

  24. Quotation: Bucher, “The Village of Glass,”395. See also J. Leighton Wilson, “Letter from Mr. Wilson, July 25, 1845,” Missionary Herald, January 1846, 25–31. The most detailed treatments of the French move against Glass’s Town are Bucher, “The Village of Glass,” 363–400; Henry Hale Bucher, Jr. “The Mpongwe of the Gabon Estuary: A History to 1860” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1977), 259–296; Patterson, The Northern Gabon Coast to 1875, 90–107. French perceptions are provided by Deschamps, Quinze Ans, 305–308.

  25. Quotation: J. Leighton Wilson, “Letter from Mr. Wilson, July 25, 1845,” Missionary Herald, January 1846, 27. See also ibid., 31.

  26. Quotation: ibid., 29–30.