“Right. And I was a coward and said I would obey, and you said you wouldn’t. So he let up on me. But you he handed over to Ushumbo and that was when your terrible suffering began.”
Basil again remained silent.
“And why did you tell Hawkshot you wouldn’t obey if you were told to whip the slaves, Basil? It was because you had to obey God, wasn’t it? What was His Name?”
He whispered, “Jesus Christ. I was a Christian then.”
“And you’re still a Christian, Basil. I know you’re probably going to tell me that you forgot Jesus Christ during those years of suffering and humiliation. But He didn’t forget you. He never forgets anyone. You were suffering for Him, from the moment Hawkshot handed you over to Ushumbo. And now Christ wants you to come back to your own country and your real life. He wants you to come back with me. You can’t say He doesn’t.”
More silence. At last he said, “But I don’t think I could manage the journey, Daniel. My health —“
“He’ll be the judge of that; and I promise you shall have all possible help from me and my friend Paul.”
At this he shook my hand, smiling rather like a loser congratulating a winner at the end of a contest.
“Well, Daniel, you’ve persuaded me, God bless you. I’m ready to come, but the king will never let me go.”
“Yes, he will,” I replied. “Just leave it to me.”
I wanted him to come at once with me and Paul, but this the guard would not allow, so we had to leave him. I need not recount the rest of that day. The next morning Paul and I, with our interpreter, again presented ourselves before the king.
After a lot of pondering, I had decided that no invented tale would carry conviction; plain truth would be best. I told the king the whole story, from my first friendship with Basil on the slave-ship and among the slaves on the shore, to the extraordinary occurrence of finding him here among the king’s “white collection”. I said that Basil’s mother in England was still alive and praying for him, and then did my best to persuade the king to imagine what he himself would do in my situation; and in conclusion, begged for his generosity and mercy.
To my astonishment the king was sympathetic. (He may have been superstitious, too.) He said that he was certainly disposed to believe our God wanted Basil to be taken home. But there was one proviso. He had bought Basil at great expense and now it was only right that we should give a fair price in exchange for him.
This fairly floored me. I said I could only agree with him, but to my regret I had no goods to offer. Yes I had, he replied: my men’s firearms. He would exchange Basil for all twelve of them, plus their powder and shot.
I reminded him that we had a long journey home, much of it through wild country, and that our very lives might depend on our firearms. Would he accept six of them?
At this he became impatient and less friendly. No, he said. We were lucky to have received such a generous offer from him. It was all twelve or nothing, take it or leave it. And he stood up as if to go.
This was Basil’s life, I thought, or as good as. Without more hesitation I told the king that I accepted his offer, and we shook hands on it. End of palaver.
Next day we were ready to go. In spite of the near mutiny of my militiamen, I had handed over our firearms. The king’s people had given Basil a pair of what they were pleased to call boots as well as a travelling cloak. Paul and I had rigged up a sort of hammock slung on poles for Basil in case of need. Food (of a sort) we had and full water-bottles. The king himself graced our departure; I had feared that he might go back on his word, but although (as I thought I could perceive), he was rather regretting the loss of his white slave, he confined himself to wishing us a safe return and said that before long his people would be coming to talk to our king about trade.
Our journey was less irksome than it might have been. The militiamen had had second thoughts, being spared from carrying the weight of their firearms, and were in good spirits to be going home. Basil, though for the most part walking in a kind of daze, did better than I had feared. He didn’t spend much time in the hammock and seemed to improve day by day. He was slow, of course, and cost us an extra day’s journey, but once the militiamen had grasped that this white man had, in effect, been rescued from King Afreera after much suffering, they bore patiently with him and even became quite solicitous.
Reporting back, Paul and I got a distinctly rough ride from Mr. Zachary. Had we really given away twelve firearms — which were not even ours to give — to a suspect, untrustworthy, slave-dealing despot, in exchange for a half-barmy man who was a plain liability and no good to us whatever? He wouldn’t have believed it of us. It was inexcusable. He had a good mind to send us both home in disgrace. When I pleaded that what was at stake was a man’s life, he disagreed. By our own account the man had been living quite comfortably and to begin with had even said that he didn’t want to come back with us. And twelve good firearms in working order! Did we think firearms grew on trees? Had we any idea how much it would cost to replace them? And this man — what were we supposed to do with him? Ship him home at our expense and dump him on the Clapham Sect as a useless encumbrance? That was about the size of it.
I replied that for years the man had suffered appalling torment and misery as the result of his courageous refusal to act against Christian principles; alone, he had stood up for the right, in a slave-ship, a devil’s realm of terror and cruelty. I asked Mr. Zachary what he would have done in my position. “Nothing,” he answered. “I would have let well alone, and you should have done so.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, “but I’m afraid I can’t believe you. You would have acted as I did. Apart from anything else, I had a moral obligation to purge my own cowardice; my cowardly submission to Captain Hawkshot.”
Mr. Zachary paused. “Did you honestly and truly believe that you were doing what was right in getting this man released and bringing him back here with you?”
“Yes, sir, I did. And I still believe that.”
“Well, if that’s really what you thought, we’ll say no more. But next time I send you on a diplomatic visit, don’t do anything like that again, do you see?”
Basil remained with us for a month or two, gradually regaining the ability to live naturally, to make friends in an English-speaking society and – as he put it — “to do a day’s work like anybody else.” Yet Paul and I were compelled to realise that he was by no means free from the effects of the cruelty he had suffered for so long. When he had told me that he was well off in King Afreera’s “white collection”, he had said nothing of his epileptic fits and his terrible nightmares. Dr. Winterbottom gave him every attention, monitoring the beneficial effects of regular treatment with laudanum and morphine, but gave his opinion that the case resembled that of Lady Macbeth, “More needs she the divine than the physician.” Rev. Nathaniel Gilbert spent much time with him and did all he could to “cleanse the stuffed bosom”. He told me, however, that he thought that Basil would be to some extent mentally scarred for the rest of his life. He needed a regular occupation and sympathetic companionship. The latter he certainly received from Paul and myself and at Mr. Zachary’s suggestion I wrote to Mr. Thornton, explaining what had happened and asking whether it would be possible to keep an eye on Basil as well as finding him some suitable employment. I might have known that Mr. Thornton would be supportive. He arranged for Basil’s case to be put into the hands of the Quakers. Mr. Gratby’s eldest son, George, took ship from England for the express purpose of accompanying Basil on the homeward voyage. Having met George Gratby and talked with him, I felt that Basil couldn’t be in better hands, and the two of them departed in excellent spirits.
Mr. Zachary remained as Governor for three more years. Although he continued to be not only active, but approachable and courteous in his dealings, particularly with the Nova Scotian Settlers, they were years of dissension, with the society hovering on the brink of revolution; a revolution involving loss of control by the Company and the
assumption of rule by the Settlers. The two prime factors of dispute were Land and Trade.
The same vexation remained unredressed, which had been at the heart of the Nova Scotian grievance ever since their arrival four years before. They had been promised twenty acres of land per man and they had never got them. The plain truth was that they were simply not there.
The Clapham Sect — and particularly Mr. Wilberforce, Mr. Sharp and the Clarkson brothers — had had a vision of Sierra Leone as a prosperous country, its economy based on agriculture. With a society consisting largely of freed slaves, it was to become an agricultural Eden providing produce for Europe and happy lives for its inhabitants. This was really an unduly starry-eyed concept; at bottom it was not realistic. There was not enough fertile soil and not enough informed knowledge of tropical agriculture. The Nova Scotian Settlers, a group conscious of themselves as a strong, united body, hanging together within the larger society of Sierra Leone, found that in effect they had been deceived. They had been promised land that wasn’t there. But they were “stuck” with Sierra Leone. They couldn’t go anywhere else and somehow or other they had to make a living. They possessed two assets – their religious unity and their numerical majority over any other group in the country. When Mr. Zachary tried to introduce Quit Rents they simply failed to pay them and he had to drop it.
During this last decade, Freetown developed as an entrepôt for goods from Europe. This became for the Settlers a firm economic foundation for Trade. Within a year of their arrival, they had gained approval and respect by growing produce in their own gardens. Some successfully farmed hogs. Their fishing boats went out regularly; some of the fish was consumed locally, but a good deal was traded to neighbouring societies up and down the coast. Another commodity in which they dealt was rum, which they sold in Gambia and the Bunce Islands, A number of them ventured up the inland rivers to the indigenous, tribal people, trading European commodities in exchange for agricultural produce from those more fertile lands (such as Mr. Watt’s) in the interior.
The gradual demise of Mr. Granville Sharp’s dream of an agricultural Province of Freedom was really due to the Nova Scotians’ developing something more workable and profitable, namely, Trade. True, in many of their trading activities they were no more than middlemen; but they were shrewd; they made profits nonetheless and in so doing superseded Mr. Sharp’s original concept.
In his dealings with the middlemen for the Settlers during these last three years, Mr. Zachary was troubled by that very system of local representation that he had described to me during our first journey out. In their meetings with him, the locally elected “tithingmen” continually beset and criticised him, and behind their troublesome carping lay always the black shadow, the unspoken threat of insurgency; a threat expressed in plain words by my adolescent Virginian friends. “We don’t need your Mr. Zachary, you know,” said Shooter to me one afternoon. “We could run the place ourselves better than that chartered company or whatever it calls itself in London.”
And this was what became clearer and clearer during the first decade of the new century, after the days of Mr, Zachary’s Governorship. The chartered company in London gradually went bust. From the outset, its policy had never really had a future. The Settlers paid it lip-service and more-or-less ran the economy themselves. Finally, in 1808, the Company wound itself up and begged the Crown to take over, which it did. Sierra Leone became a Crown Colony.
During the last years of the old century, Mr. Zachary became more and more disillusioned with his appointment. He was not furthering the cause of Abolition as he had once hoped. He wrote almost every day to his Selina, and naturally his impatience for marriage, like my own, occupied his thoughts more and more strongly.
It was one day in March of 1799 when he invited Paul and myself to dinner and spoke to us confidentially and frankly.
“You’ve supported me loyally,” he said, “and you deserve to be told what I have in mind. The plain truth is that we’re wasting our time here. Granville Sharp’s idea of an agricultural Colony of Freedom hasn’t worked and the economic prosperity of the country is in the hands of the Nova Scotians. I honestly don’t think there’s much more we can contribute. You came out here, didn’t you, Daniel, with the idea of helping to destroy the Slave Trade, by making a financial profit for the Clapham Sect, to help them in the cause of Abolition by creating a society of freed slaves? Well, in effect it is a society of freed slaves, but they’re not ours; they’re black people from the southern States of America. The prosperity is due to them, and that’s to their credit. But meanwhile, the Clapham Sect – the Company – are losing money hand over fist. So what it comes to is that I’m clearing out and going home. Apart from anything else” (and here he smiled, passed the port and gestured to us to refill our glasses) “it isn’t fair to keep Selina and Fahdah waiting any longer. Selina’s impatient and so am I. When we came back here, Daniel, after our extended leave, I made up my mind to carry on as Governor for as long as I reckoned I was still useful. Well, I don’t think I’m doing any more for the cause of Abolition by staying here. What do you two think? Do you feel the same?”
We said we did.
“Right,” said he. “We’ll resign forthwith.”
On 4th April 1799 Mr. Zachary, (who was only thirty), handed over the Governorship to Mr. John Gray and we sailed for home. Our ship’s destination was Southampton, and upon our arrival we separated — Mr. Zachary to join Miss Mills, while Paul and I set off for Clepton. It was an awkward journey of more than 60 miles and took us three days, stopping overnight at Salisbury and Warminster. We reached Clepton late in the afternoon. Paul surprised me by going straight to Mr. Hodges’s cottage, while I went to Mrs. Beddoes’s kitchen. Here, as I had hoped, I found Fahdah, who wept for joy as she took me in her arms. I thought she had never looked more beautiful, and I kissed her again and again until Mrs. Beddoes sat me down to a large bowl of stew from the stockpot. I was still dealing with this when Lady Penelope’s bell rang. Fahdah, of course, carried her joyful news upstairs, and Lady Penelope told her to bring me up to the drawing room.
“Have you finished, Daniel, with Sierra Leone?” asked Mr. Hardwick. “You haven’t got to go back, have you?” I told them about Mr. Zachary’s resignation and forthcoming marriage, whereupon Mr. Hardwick said he was relieved on my account and added that he supposed my own marriage was not going to be delayed. Lady Penelope enquired whether we had left all well in Sierra Leone and when I told her that I feared there was likely to be another attack by the natives before long, said that she was glad that Mr. Zachary, Paul and myself were safely out of it. Then she excused Fahdah from duty for the rest of the day, leaving us free to enjoy the fine evening. Going into the stable yard, we met Paul and Marian Hodges, who seemed almost as happy as ourselves.
Paul told me that three years before, when we were about to set out with Mr. Zachary for Sierra Leone, he and Marian had become engaged. At that time her parents had thought her too young to marry and had told him to wait until he returned to England. Marian had that very evening received their consent.
Fahdah, being in Marian’s confidence, had known of her engagement but Paul himself had preferred to say nothing while he and I were in Sierra Leone. I thought his reticence perfectly understandable, and not in the least out of keeping with our friendship.
As Fahdah and I were sitting in the meadow by the pool, she said, “Do you remember, Daniel, how I told you that when you came back our true happiness would begin?”
We were married three weeks later. Mr. Hodges drove us to Bristol, and here we stayed for two weeks in a welcoming district of black people, where we made several good friends. One evening two of these asked us about our plans for the future. I told them of our commitment to the cause of Abolition, and said that we meant to rejoin Mr. Zachary Macaulay and Mr. Wilberforce in London. They replied that we were lucky to work in such distinguished company, and wished us every success.
Before Fahdah and I left Clepton,
Paul told me that he hoped I wouldn’t be disappointed if he returned to service with Lady Penelope. I gathered that Marian didn’t feel altogether happy at the prospect of life in London. In the event, they have remained at Clepton, and for good reason. Some time ago Mr, Graydon, with Lady Penelope’s recommendation, was successful in gaining the post of butler at the country residence of Lord Nailsden in Wiltshire. Upon his departure, Paul became Lady Penelope’s butler while Marian, aged seventeen, also joined the household. They have a boy and a girl, and are entirely content.
Although in a way sorry to be leaving Lady Penelope, to whom she owed so much, Fahdah was excited at the prospect of going to London. As soon as we arrived, we went to see Mr. Wilberforce, and found awaiting us a letter from Mr. Zachary in Suffolk. He and Selina, he told us, were married and had taken a lease upon a house in the village of Marylebone. He gave us the address and hoped that we would join them whenever it might suit us.
We went there the same evening. Mrs. Selina Macaulay made us welcome, and I told Mr. Zachary that I wished for nothing better than to resume work for Abolition under his direction.
Fahdah and I found Selina charming. I guessed her to be in her early thirties, about the same age as Mr. Zachary. She seemed by nature full of gaiety and high spirits, and (as it seemed to us) perfectly complemented Mr. Zachary’s rather more serious character. That impression has turned out to be altogether correct, and I have never seen a happier marriage.
Mr. Zachary told us that he had already been in touch with George Gratby, to enquire after Basil Townley. He had learned that things were going on as well as could have been hoped. George, having first found out that Basil’s mother was still alive had then, to her indescribable joy and elation, brought him home. She had long given him up for lost. Before leaving them together, he had gained from the vicar and the local doctor assurances that they would keep a watchful eye on Basil and give him all the help he might need. Apparently the vicar, when told of Basil’s refusal to give in to Captain Hawkshot, had been deeply moved and said that he had never heard of a finer example of Christian courage. Basil was all but a martyr. He had written to the bishop, who had replied that now that Mr. Townley was safely home, he deserved the fullest support that the church could provide. While George could still not help feeling some anxiety about poor Basil’s intermittent mental troubles, he thought that at least his future was in the best possible hands.
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