by Janet Todd
Records suggest no intended difference between the treatment of white and black workers in the western colonies, the main distinction between people being of religion rather than race. Both groups were simply seen as ‘freight’ by the shippers who brought them over, the indentured servants selling for about £10, the male slaves for £20–£30.19 Both worked similarly in gangs and both were punished savagely. There was little subtlety in the punishments, which usually included the cutting off of parts of the body: a hand, an ear, or testicles. Both groups tried to rebel from time to time. Both could live with their families if they had any and cultivate little plots of land for their subsistence. The healthiest black women were chosen by white settlers as concubines, a fate that would no doubt have overtaken Oroonoko’s bride, the beauteous Imoinda, in Oroonoko, had she not been in an heroic tale.
Although she was usually able to impose fiction on fact and conflate literature and life, Aphra may well have been struck by the predicament of a particularly sensitive slave. For, although the daily life of the Africans was no worse than that of the labouring Europeans, the fact of hopelessness separated them. The point was stressed by George Warren:
[The slaves’] wretched miseries not seldome drive them to desperate attempts for the Recovery of their Liberty, endevouring to escape, and, if like to be retaken, sometimes lay violent hands upon themselves; or if the hope of Pardon bring them again alive into their Masters power, they’l manifest their fortitude, or rather obstinacy in suffering the most exquisite tortures can be inflicted upon them, for a terrour and example to others without shrinking.
Such action would mark a hero and, whatever her tolerance of slavery, Behn was certain that heroes and people of ‘Quality’ should not be badly treated. About ordinary plebeians, black, brown or white, she was less concerned.
Despite her expeditions and observations, Aphra had much time on her hands in Surinam, and she used it in writing. Apart from the joy of creation, she must already have been considering literature as a possible source of income in the future when espionage failed. It was a strange idea since no previous woman had been known to make a career in such a way, but these were new times and something might be made of the role. Inevitably as she looked at the real world through romance, so she created a fantasy one in its style.
It was fittingly La Calprenède’s Cleopatra which attracted her as the basis for her ‘youthful sally’, as she called her first play, and some of her lines are taken directly from this beguiling source.20 To it she added incidents from older dramatists, especially from Fletcher’s Love’s Cure; or, The Martial Maid and from Calderón’s Life is a Dream from the 1630s; Charles II was known to like Spanish drama. The result was The Young King, the sort of tragicomedy that was fashionable in the early 1660s, with heroic lovers speaking blank verse, passages of courtly dialogue, and a concoction of Arcadian shepherds, symbolic pastures, magic cures and absolute disguise.
As so often with first works which begin with accessories such as a title, Aphra may have started by thinking of a patron. This must of course be a nobleman. Even in her inexperienced eye, Lord Strangford was not a suitable one for a ‘Virgin Muse’; besides, he was by now living an impoverished life.21 But his kinsman, Philip Sidney, Lord L’Isle, a man who had satisfactorily negotiated the Restoration, who may have encouraged the sort of reading from which her play derived, and may even have seen a few hesitantly composed scenes, was a possible choice. When the dedication was finally printed two decades later it was to ‘Philaster’. By then Philip had been elevated to the earldom of Leicester. He might, therefore, be Philaster, Leicester and lover of Astrea.22
The play was probably not staged until 1679 when its contemporary references indicate revision, but it retained enough of its early material to tie it firmly to Aphra’s youth. There is, for example, more criticism of aristocracy and privilege than she would allow herself later. Probably Surinam had an effect here: absolute authority in the person of Charles II in London was one thing, authority embodied in the rogue Byam in a pugnacious colony was another. Stories from Surinam may also have urged her towards depicting an amazonian woman such as her heroine, for Columbus had reported warrior women in South America.
The play concerned a royal brother and sister, Orsames and Cleomena, the boy, because of an oracle, brought up in seclusion and ignorance of his birth, and the girl, in compensation, raised on manly pursuits and prepared for rule. Puritan fanatics were much given to belief in signs and portents, and Behn is here mocking this propensity, as she will do again many years later when it emerges in the rebellious and superstitious Duke of Monmouth. In the play, gender will out for both boy and girl, and, at the opening, the princess is feeling a sexy dreaminess which makes her retreat from the hunt, while the prince, with an onrush of masculinity, rails against his passive life of musical idleness. At this interesting juncture, Cleomena falls in love and, feeling jealousy and feminine tenderness, concludes she is a woman. She, therefore, proposes that she should step aside for her brother. Orsames’ first sortie into the outside world is not encouraging, since he confuses gods and kings and tends to want all who cross him thrown into the sea, but he is later presumed to have learnt some sense and civility. Brother and sister assume their gendered ‘natural’ roles and throw off the disguise of nurture. Cleomena declares, ‘I am a perfect Woman now, / And have my Fears, and fits of Cowardice.’23
Despite the strident assertion of gender, there are some odd depictions in the play. When the soldier, who ‘abhor[s] the feeble Reign of Women’, thinks of the super-masculine lover of Cleomena, he exclaims, ‘how soft and wanton I could grow in the Description I could make of him,’ odd vocabulary in the circumstances. The play is certain that woman is ‘no natural Amazon and that the martial attitude of the princess is to be laid to the ‘faults of Education, / That cozening Form that veils the Face of Nature, / But does not see what’s hid within’; yet Cleomena is given some perceptive remarks about the sword itself creating the martial arm. Underneath the deceiving veneer, she has ‘a Heart all soft... all Woman’, first touched by the sight of the sleeping hero, but she controls this hero in an unfeminine gaze—she even has his hair pushed back from his face to get a better look. And Love is not only feminine but triumphant, natural against the aberrance of masculine War.
Orsames’ crude notion of kingship resembles the Parliamentary caricature of Stuart ‘divine right’ doctrine, the kind of attitude the Marten brothers once had towards the Stuart kings. He wishes ‘To have Dominion o’er the lesser World’ governing ‘A sort of Men with low submissive Souls, / That barely shou’d content themselves with Life’. When his tutor argues that these humble men might ‘Refuse Obedience to the mighty few’, Orsames waves the notion aside; in that case he would destroy them. Even after he is restored, Orsames actually has little sense of kingship except as immense self-gratification, and he asks of the rival king, ‘Dost see no marks of Grandure in my Face? / Nothing that speaks the King?’ Yet, for all his palpable unsuitableness for rule, it remains axiomatic for Aphra that a nation will never be happy till it has a legitimate prince at its head.
Aphra had been too young in the civil turmoil of the 1640s to gain much impression of war and she had not yet had experience of international conflict. So she could follow romance in portraying war as a game in which a hero could fight on either side at romantic whim. A stupid populace simply moves in response to the moods and mistakes of its self-absorbed rulers.
The Young King has the kind of set pieces that would be rare in Behn’s later works, but one in particular seems to draw on her own feelings. In later life she shared the age’s love of alcohol. In the play the ignorant Orsames, describing his first taste of wine, finds it heightens the attractions of women as well as pleasure, and leads to ‘strange uneasy Joys’. He also discovers that, like wine, language increases sexual feeling; the telling of passion arouses passion. Both would be themes of Aphra Behn’s love poetry.
In the new year, while Aphra was st
ill in Surinam, Deputy Governor Byam took a trip to Barbados to visit his employer Lord Willoughby, to see to lands he held there, and no doubt confer with disgruntled Chancellor Robert Harley. Perhaps he had confirmed what he had suspected, that Aphra was indeed a secret agent. So he grew determined to rid himself of his unwelcome guests and bundle Aphra and her entourage on to the next available boat. He would make no concessions to her charm, nor play the kind of flirtatious games which she enjoyed and regarded as part of her function.
After a voyage of seven days, Byam arrived back in Surinam in February or early March 1664. He found, he wrote to Harley, a ship ‘full freighted’ and ready to depart for London, with room for a few more passengers. So on it he dispatched ‘the faire shouperdess and Devouring Gorge...but with what reluctancy and regritt you may well Conjecture.’24
Gorges, a man Byam liked no better than Astrea and whom he assumed Harley would not like, was probably Captain Ferdinando Gorges, relative of the famous colonist Ferdinando Gorges of Maine in North America. He had been bred in Barbados among Puritans and was later suspected of harbouring ‘fanatic’ sympathies.25 He might have gone to Surinam from the chronically mismanaged Barbados—which had in addition been plagued by caterpillars in 1663—in the hope of finding an alternative or additional place to plant.26 At the end of March he was one of the Council in Barbados involved in the proceedings with Willoughby against Harley, and so he had presumably been hostile to Harley for some time. Neither Harley nor Byam would have reason to like Gorges much, while both might be inclined to call him by the inevitable nickname of ‘Devouring Gorge’, especially suitable since Ferdinando had grown very rich. If he was Aphra’s co-passenger he was presumably returning to Barbados, at which a ship travelling from South America to England would naturally call.27
Aphra had to comply with Byam’s demand, although she may not have wished to leave Surinam so abruptly, and her heart must have sunk as she saw the salted tortoises loaded on to the ship, a staple at sea despite the unpleasant taste.28 She had not yet forgotten the rigours of the previous journey. She packed up various curiosities which she had acquired, including some remarkable dead butterflies and her set of Indian feathers; she also carried her various manuscripts and notes.
In the final encounter with Aphra, Byam remained on the ascendant, officiously seeing her from the colony he was pleased to have again to himself. But a quarter of a century later, with the publication of Oroonoko, in which the harsh, superstitious governor became the self-indulgent and dishonourable villain, the ‘faire shouperdess’ very much had the last word.
Chapter 6
Marriage and the Great Plague
‘a merchant of Dutch extraction’
The voyage from Surinam to London was long. At the end of it Aphra may have achieved something important if not much valued, for, between her arrival back in London and her leaving it again in 1666, she had become Mrs Behn. Who was her husband? She gave few hints.
In his ‘Adversaria’, Thomas Colepeper records a marriage between Aphra’s sister Frances and a man whose name is obscurely written but might be Wrils or Write or even Wrede and who was a captain. In the same paragraph, he notes the marriage between Aphra and ‘Mr Beene’. The ‘Memoirs’ adds the information that Mr Behn was a Londoner, a ‘merchant of Dutch extraction’. The word ‘Dutch’ implies that he might be of Dutch or German lineage, since it covered many nationalities from German to Flemish. ‘Behn’ is a north German rather than a Dutch name.
A hint of Mr Behn’s immediate provenance occurs in the dedication to The Young King—if this was completed just after the return from Surinam. There Aphra refers to her Muse if not to herself as ‘an American’. Possibly Mr Behn was an ‘American’, that is, a frequent trader with the New World colonies.1 So, a certain Johan Behn comes into prominence. He was one of the forty-odd crew serving on an Atlantic vessel called the King David in May 1655 when the ship was seized by the English settlers in Barbados. The Captain, who owned the ship, was a Captain Wrede—close enough to Colepeper’s illegible word for Frances Johnson’s husband. Johan Behn was a merchant sailing with him. The two men might have been together again sailing home to London from Surinam. If so, they may have coincided with Aphra and Frances Johnson and, especially before the cold began to dominate their lives as they pushed north, have wiled away time together. It is of course all speculation.
Aphra would have been considering her options. There was the possibility of a professional literary life, although there was no precedent for it, or there was the chance of future espionage. Or, more commonly, there was marriage since she was now at the usual age for it, the mid-twenties. Having passed as a lady, she would probably have wished to have a gentleman, but for this a woman needed a portion of about £1000, which Aphra clearly did not have. The life of a mistress was open to her, but it was precarious and, although the King elevated some women, not many achieved wealth and security. Unlike in Venice, where pretty, witty girls were provided with silks, pearls and high-heeled red shoes and fruitfully managed by their mothers, England had little of the tradition of clever respected courtesans. For a portionless young woman there rested only a union within the middling ranks.
After weeks of easy male companionship and debilitating travel, the wonderful idea of earning her own living by writing or spying might have palled. Both needed health and ebullience. So Aphra may well have accepted and been urged to accept the proposal of the merchant sailor, Johan Behn. With little respect for matrimony, she yet saw its necessity once. Perhaps it was some advantage that her elder sister may have been given a similar option with Captain Wrede.
No wedding of a Behn is recorded in London, but records are incomplete and it might have taken place elsewhere in Britain or on the Continent. Nor is the texture of the marriage known. Aphra Behn would write about miserable arranged and forced unions from her first staged play, The Forc’d Marriage, to one of her last, The Luckey Chance, providing in each case an escape. Usually this occurred through an earlier oral promise to marry which could be considered binding, especially if consummation had followed. It sounds like the personal fantasy of an unwilling wife.
Equally salient in Aphra’s work will be the horrid coupling of an old man with a fresh young woman. In her final years when she returned to her earlier days for material, she combined the two themes very thoroughly:
... how fatal are forc’d Marriages!
How many Ruines one such Match pulls on—
Had I but kept my Sacred Vows to Gayman How happy had I been—how prosperous he!
Whilst now I languish in a loath’d Embrace,
Pine out my Life with Age—Consumptions Coughs.2
In the same play, one of the young women who has made a marriage for money pleads, ‘remember I was poor and helpless, / And much reduc’d, and much impos’d upon.’
And yet, except for this first staged play, set in a mythical land of absolute kings who can cause anything, none of the marriages is ‘forced’, although Aphra notably downplays the collusion of the woman in the matches. Within her class in particular, a marriage might have been pressured; it is unlikely to have been precisely ‘forced’.
Johan Behn had probably been a slaver since at least 1655. Aphra enjoyed adventurers and he may, like her admired Othello, have had some sea stories to tell which amused her at first. He may even have told her tales of his West African cargo, the slaves he had transported across the Atlantic. Whatever his initial attractions, however, they seem quickly to have worn off. One of the most villainous of the white men in Oroonoko is the slave captain who deceives Oroonoko on to his ship before carrying him to Surinam. Perhaps Aphra had learnt of some such action from her husband.
Johan Behn’s King David is an elusive vessel. Probably a slaver, it might have been freighted with sugar for the Atlantic crossing from Surinam. Slave ships were no different from other wooden ships, and, with a few modifications, a predominantly cargo ship could house slaves between its decks, while a slaver could pack
away sugar.3 To make identification more problematic, ships could be rented and then fly the flag of the renting group; they might even assume a different name. The real slipperiness of vessels came, however, from politics: ships frequently changed their flags to hide their business and ownership. This might be due to state piracy or war—a Dutch King David was captured by the English and rechristened The Good Intent—but, most often, it responded to commercial needs. The English authorities were constantly suspicious that more tobacco and sugar were exported than ever reached England. The new Navigation Act ordered that Dutch-built ships were to be barred from trading directly with English colonies and, to keep tabs on trade, all ships and masters were to be listed. Naturally this situation bred subterfuge, for there was obvious reason for the Dutch ships to hide their provenance.4
Because of this elusiveness and the multiplication and subtraction of ships’ names, it is a hard job indeed to follow either Mr Behn or his King David for long. So his identification is problematic as seafarer and husband. In the period when Aphra sailed home to England, there were possibly up to seven vessels called the King David—or there may be only two or three. There is of course no way to direct Mr Behn’s King David to and from Surinam in the early months of 1664.5