by Janet Todd
Late in her life Aphra memorably portrayed the vulgar and ill-managed Virginian colony of ex-convicts and bankrupts in The Widdow Ranter, where one man is characteristically reminded, ‘they say your Honour was but a broken Excise-man, who spent the King’s money to buy your wife fine Petticoats, and at last not worth a Groat, you came over a poor Servant, though now a Justice of the Peace, and of the Honourable Council’. Already an inveterate snob, Aphra found such colonial rising vulgar and anarchic. She would be even more affronted by colonial Surinam, which she probably reached a few weeks later.
The coast of South America was swampy, but no doubt sweetly welcome as the end of a tedious voyage. It was made dazzling by the crowds of flamingoes. As the ship sailed close, the travellers would smell the balmy air, the scents of aromatic trees intensified by the new rains.
Although the English had established a small settler village near the mouth of the Surinam River, this was not the usual destination and ships tended to turn into the river. There was sand at the entrance, but the huge waterway was passable far into the land if they went carefully on the deeper east side. They continued to sail up its winding length, stopping for refreshments at various plantations where the inhabitants were mightily pleased to see new arrivals. Finally, they would reach the main town of the colony called Torarica, about thirty miles upstream, comprising around a hundred houses, a government building, a chapel and a harbour suitable for up to a hundred ships. Probably the passengers decanted themselves there into smaller boats to be rowed further up the river.8
Despite the sandy soil, the banks on both sides were sometimes thickly wooded by now, with the kind of denseness and luxuriance found in hot, wet places.9 Elsewhere the ground was higher, with open fields and groves of trees full of monkeys and insects. Occasionally growth had been cleared to form settler plantations between the coast and the waterfalls, where boats were stopped. There the plantations petered out. The sandy ones farthest inland, together with those near the swampy mouth of the river which often flooded from inland streams during the rainy season, were owned by the poorer sort of settlers, who came without servants or capital; many of these were so monstrously troubled by ants and gnats that they gave up the whole attempt.
Aphra and her family would not have been heading for such impoverished terrain. Lord Willoughby had his main estate at Parham Hill on the Surinam River, but, though the new arrivals had access to the house, they did not stay there.10 Instead, if Oroonoko is here to be credited, they lodged at the plantation of St John’s Hill, one of three owned by the absentee landlord Sir Robert Harley, Willoughby’s friend and now chancellor of Barbados. His agent reported to his employer that ‘The Ladeyes that are heare live att St Johnes hill.’11 Harley had bought the plantation from Deputy Governor Byam and it contained what Aphra declared ‘the best house’ in the colony. For an agent, its position was apt, since it was close to Parham Hill and adjoined the plantation of the former rebel councillor, Robert Sanford. If Willoughby were involved in Aphra’s journey, he may well have arranged for her to stay in this house. Since little could be kept secret, it produced the immediate gossip that Willoughby had bought the plantation from Harley.12
Aphra never had a robust constitution and she would not have found it easy to adapt physically to the strange climate and food. She often fought off sickness and faintness; the narrator of Oroonoko described herself as ‘but Sickly, and very apt to fall into Fits of dangerous Illness upon any extraordinary Melancholy’. In her quest for health, she probably tested the medical properties of the various new plants and roots. The vegetarian mystic, the ‘mad hatter’ Thomas Tryon, her acquaintance in later years and a visitor to the West Indies, was much concerned with tropical remedies in Barbados; ‘bounanoes’ he pronounced ‘more venereal, and easier of concoction’ than plantains and declared that they do ‘gently loosen the Belly’. He also eulogised the ‘very brave’ potato. Regularity was what was needed, meals in early morning and then again at four rather than at noon as in England.13
The many stomach ailments afflicting Europeans in hot climates came in Tryon’s view more from alcohol than from food: ‘Now in these our Western Plantations all these tormenting Diseases are much encreased by the frequent Tippling of that pernicious Drink called Punch.’ Along with drink, the other dietary evils were the very raison d’être of the Western colonies: ‘poisonous Tobacco’ and ‘sweet Sugar’.
William Byam, Deputy Governor of Surinam under the absent Lord Willoughby, became the villain of Oroonoko. Aphra portrayed him as cowardly, treacherous and dishonourable. Yet Henry Adis, Willoughby’s otherwise appalled settler, had nothing but praise for ‘that worthy person, whom your Lordship hath lately honoured with the Title and Power of your Lieutenant General of this Continent of Guinah’.14 A French visitor also regarded Byam as a brave gentleman of courage and honour, with a most beautiful and sympathetic wife—indeed the Byams were the only civilised couple encountered in the anarchic colony.15 In the Frenchman’s account there is no mention of the Indian mistress Behn gives Byam in Oroonoko. Why did Aphra Behn so dislike this man? Partly no doubt because he disliked her and had not welcomed her to his colony. For this he had several reasons, now difficult to disentangle.
Relations had become strained between Willoughby and his new chancellor in Barbados, Robert Harley. Harley had arrived from England in Willoughby’s absence, and had swiftly antagonised the settlers—as indicated by one report: ‘He stood up more like a comedian than a judge, and said, Gentlemen, now it is in my power to carry it which way I please, and which of you will give me the lustiest bribe shall have it.’16 Some time in 1663, before Aphra arrived, Harley visited Surinam and cemented friendships with Byam and Banister, the two men most criticised in Oroonoko. He had also met Willoughby’s agent, the young Cornishman John Trefry, whom he appears to have employed to manage his property at St John’s Hill.
When Willoughby finally reached Barbados, matters came quickly to a head. Both men were hot-tempered and soon Harley was accusing Willoughby of luring him into bringing capital to the colonies with false promises. Willoughby grew furious and, in February 1664, he dismissed Harley. Harley refused to give up his seal of office. The council of the colony was convened and Harley was taken to prison. He was then banished.
Byam did not know this sorry outcome when Aphra and her party arrived in Surinam to stay at Harley’s plantation, but he probably knew of the tension between Harley and Willoughby and of some sort of tie between Aphra and Willoughby. The arrangement whereby she stayed at St John’s Hill, formerly Byam’s plantation and now Harley’s, had most likely been made before Harley fell from favour, and it had to be honoured. But, if Byam suspected Aphra as an agent of Willoughby’s, he would not, now that his friend Harley was at odds with the Proprietor, wish to keep her for long on his territory.
He was made more uneasy at her speedy alliance with Trefry, the Proprietor’s direct employee, which he saw as potentially undermining to his authority. Aphra found Trefry a gem; admiring his culture and education, she described him in Oroonoko as ‘a man of great wit and learning’. From the young man’s point of view, it was probably an unwise connection, since his partisanship with Aphra upset the Deputy Governor. Perhaps Aphra had promised Trefry some protection, in the manner of the narrator to Oroonoko. If she had done so, from a mistaken notion of her own importance, she could not deliver. Byam may well have complained to Willoughby about insubordination, and Willoughby had publicly to stand by Byam, whatever his collusion with Aphra. So, soon after she left Surinam, Willoughby sacked Trefry. The Proprietor was quite in the right according to the contrite letter the young man then wrote to Harley in Barbados. Not knowing of Harley’s final disgrace, Trefry thanked him for preventing his ‘utter deletion out of his Excellency’s favour’.17 When Aphra heard of this turn of events, it may well have soured her attitude to Willoughby, who is irritatingly missing from the Surinam of Oroonoko.
In Aphra’s story, Trefry tries to fight Byam’s law
with law, or, rather, he fights Byam’s civic law with an equivalent to the royal prerogative, Willoughby’s superior authority in his directly ruled territory of Parham. His failure to get the better of the Deputy Governor no doubt fuelled Aphra’s Royalist contempt for legal wrangling; the law seemed to her always to be serving dishonourable and violent men.
For Byam, Aphra’s poking into his activities and her alliance with Trefry were as nothing to the affront of her growing intimacy with the treacherous William Scot. Byam’s attitude is caught in a letter he wrote back to Harley in March 1664, when Aphra had left. In this he calls her ‘Astrea’, a name which denoted the goddess of Justice in the Golden Age, but, more aptly, was taken from a romance by Honoré d’Urfée, L’Astrée, where Astrea is a generous and jealous young virgin. Given his dislike of romance-reading, the reference suggests that Byam was hostile, as does the cause of his mention: a ‘sympathetical passion of the Grand Shephead Celadon’. ‘Celadon’, the equally virginal shepherd of L’Astrée, was the lover of Astrea, and there is reason, despite discrepancies in image, to identify him with the middle-aged, married William Scot.
Perhaps Aphra became his mistress—Scot had after all been publicly promiscuous. But it is unlikely that she arrived so, since Scot, a wanted man, would not have been given the use of Harley’s fine plantation, where Aphra and her family by implication stayed. Also Byam’s remarks suggest a new flirtation rather than an established relationship, and he might have thought twice about using the names of the chaste Astrea and Celadon if the tie were openly sexual. Still, Aphra may not have acquitted herself so honourably as he would have wished; Byam was a pious as well as a violent man and he was disgusted by female impropriety.
Probably the relationship was mainly emotional and intellectual, and Scot may have made his mark mainly on Aphra’s views of others. Oroonoko bears witness to her admiration of old enemies of the King like Henry Marten, described as the ‘great Oliverian’, though in fact the acerbically witty Henry Marten had been a famous and outspokenly republican opponent of Cromwell’s dictatorship. As for his brother in Surinam, George Marten, he must have had some charm that appealed to Behn since she found she could imagine no treason in such a man, and, in her story of Oroonoko, she even lets him refuse to receive the quartered remains of the slave prince as if to redeem an anti-monarchical past. In contrast, Byam’s critic, the rebellious Sanford, records Marten as the henchman of the Deputy Governor and involved with him in persecution.18 Reading Oroonoko in the context of Sanford’s truculent account, it seems that Aphra gave the ferocity, instability and blasphemy of Marten, ‘who offered himself the Hangman of any at the Governours single command’, to Banister whom she dismissed as a ‘wild Irishman’.19 In fact, Marten was probably between the extremes, a shrewd operator, much valued for his tie with his influential brother during the Interregnum. Perhaps it was not primarily his politics that Aphra admired. Marten was a hedonist like his brother, a high liver who was chronically in debt for fine wines. Both Aphra and William Scot may have drunk deeply of these.
Apart from any specific reasons arising out of her mission, the general cause of hostility between Deputy Governor Byam and his visitor Aphra was that the latter never appreciated the former’s difficulties. Byam had helped establish and was now maintaining a colony in harsh circumstances for a demanding proprietor. He had to govern, keep peaceful and defend a mix of criminals, fugitives and settlers greedy for quick money and living outside the social constraints of Europe. The Jews, for example, brought in by Willoughby, planted at Savannah about thirty miles south of Paramaribo. They had been refugees from the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal who had found safety in Holland, helped the Dutch in their trade with their former compatriots, and involved themselves in sugar cultivation in Brazil. The enemy, in this heterogeneous colony, might be within of any colour, or without, materialising on the horizon under false flags. Aphra’s incomprehension gives a modern tinge to her writings, for the enormity of colonisation has now overshadowed its audacity and difficulty.
In Oroonoko, Aphra judged Surinam as if it were a portion of the Home Counties, full of free men. Yet, apart from the few who arrived as planters with capital to invest and some political refugees, the majority came as transported convicts or indentured servants—their passages paid in return for their labour. These were a ‘sort of loose vagrant people, vicious and destitute of means to live at home (being either unfit for labour, or such as could find none to employ themselves about, or had so misbehaved themselves by whoring, thieving or other debauchery, that none would set them to work) which merchants and masters of ships by their agents gathered up about the streets of London and other places, clothed and transported, to be employed upon plantations’.20 The indentured labourers also included unfortunates, since the system was much abused and many of them had in fact come as involuntarily as the convicts. There was a brisk kidnapping business by agents or ‘spirits’ hired to take labour, especially young men and boys, forcibly from Britain to servitude in the colonial plantations. That they were often harshly treated when they arrived there can be gauged from the number of laws passed to prevent the settlers from ‘Barbarous usage of some Servants’. This was important, since news of the fate of indentured labourers was putting off potential immigrants from England.
Behn’s only depiction of the often cruel system of indenturing is in The Widdow Ranter, where she portrayed an indentured servant, the robust widow Ranter, who manages by adroit seduction to become an independent person of considerable means:
[she was] brought from the Ship by old Coll. Ranter, she serv’d him half a year, and then he Marry’d her, and dying in a year more, left her worth Fifty thousand Pounds Sterling, besides Plate and Jewells: She’s a great Gallant, But assuming the Humour of the Country Gentry, her Extravagancy is very Pleasant, she retains something of her Primitive Quallity still, but is good-natur’d and Generous.21
Of the majority of poor British male indentured labourers, with fewer physical attractions and far less luck, Aphra has little to say. She was silent about the many who sickened and died under the harsh treatment, but she mocked the few ex-labourers and criminals who, in the new air of the colonies, forgot their past and remade themselves in the powerful images of the old world: soldier, priest, justice, and politician. Crucially they lacked that patina of gentility and verbal dexterity she believed essential to any rise and to the holding of high rank.
What Aphra refused to see at any time was that the social hierarchy to which she was already so addicted, having made some headway in it herself, had to be modified where there was a shortage of upper-class men and where those without status in England needed to be given one fast. Otherwise, no one could ensure that they would become defenders rather than subverters and rebels. As one visitor pointed out, ‘almost every considerable proprietor is a colonel, lieutenant-colonel, major, captain or lieutenant’ in the West Indies, and new arrivals, both men and women, almost invariably invented kinship with illustrious people usefully absent, or with newly dead rich planters—as Aphra may herself have done in hindsight.22 This social fluidity, in a context of violence and suffering, was the life blood of the colonies. It was, however, anathema to Behn, who saw it as sapping the little importance a woman might have from her rank. Indeed Oroonoko is at its most realistic as the lady-like narrator is made to learn, but never admit, that, in the colonial world, class and ‘quality’ might be less important than sex and force. So she insists on seeing an ill-bred rogue in Byam and a wild Irishman in Banister.
Despite all the colony’s rifts and fissures, the agent, Renatus Enys, judged it in better shape than Aphra did. He found it fruitful and on the whole in good order under Deputy Governor Byam. He even suggested that some of the unfavourable reports reaching England had been due to the jealousy of the Barbados settlers. Like Aphra, however, he did regret the absence of Lord Willoughby and he believed that the want of royal authority ‘has given encouragement to incendiaries, who have been seasonably
suppressed and proscribed the country’.23
One of the ‘incendiaries’ on whom Enys was keeping an eye and who may also have come to Aphra’s notice during her stay in Surinam was the troublesome Thomas Allin. A man of ‘good natural parts’, Allin had worked most diligently when he had first arrived in the colony to settle. But the heat and temper of the place got the better of him and he became notorious for his drunkenness. In this state he would curse and swear prodigiously. So blasphemous were some of his oaths that the superstitious Byam believed that, when recited in the court where his rumbunctious behaviour had landed him, they cracked the building’s foundations with their force.
Something of Behn’s memory of this man and his fate might have found its way into Oroonoko. At the end of the tale, the antagonism of slave to slave-owner becomes a personal obsessive hatred between the hero, Oroonoko, and Deputy Governor Byam, whom he desperately wishes but fails to kill. An analogue of this is the story told by Byam himself, of Allin’s manic attempt on the life of the real Governor, the Proprietor Lord Willoughby.24
In November 1663, when Behn was still in Surinam, Allin fought a duel intending to kill his opponent, then kill himself, but he did neither. The event created enough stir for Byam to record it. Aphra may have met the man with whom she shared a passion for romantic tales and an admiration for heroic action. Worse followed after she left. Willoughby finally arrived in Surinam and arranged to meet the troublesome Allin who, fearing the Proprietor had designs on his property, secretly came to Parham, dressed in ‘one of his Negroes’’ coats, and tried to assassinate his enemy. Despite his great plans, he managed only to wound Willoughby, although ‘I came here to dye, to kill my Lord, and then my self.’ Allin expected to be a kind of Ceasar in death, a character out of Plutarch’s Lives: ‘I have too much of a Roman in me to possess my own life, when I cannot enjoy it with freedom and honour,’ he declared heroically.