Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  15. It is of course possible that the father was a stepfather and so the name would not be known. But again, given Aphra’s prominence, it is likely that such a connection would have emerged and there is no one in the records I have studied who clearly fits the role.

  16. Works, vol. 7, pp. 298 and 302.

  17. Richard Head, The English Rogue described, in the Life of Meriton Latroon, a Witty Extravagant (London, 1666).

  18. There had been at least one colonial woman, Anne Bradstreet, who had published literary work, but this evidently did not make the New World a glamorous location. Despite the fact that Bradstreet referred to the Sidneys in her Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America (1650), Aphra Behn made no mention of her in any of her published writings, accepting only Katherine Philips as her modern literary forerunner.

  19. Robert Sanford, Surinam Justice. In the Case Of several persons proscribed by certain Usurpers of Power in that Colony (London, 1662). Sanford spent his ‘whole puerility and adolescence’ in the West Indies.

  20. Lady Forster, in Henry Nevile’s Newes from the New-Exchange, Or, The Commonwealth of ladies, Drawn to the Life, in their severall Characters and Concernments (London, 1650).

  21. BL Add. MSS 47133.

  22. PRO, April 20/30, 1683.

  23. Robert Sanford, Surinam Justice, p. 9.

  24. When Joanna also arrived, she too petitioned Cromwell, admitting that William Scot had ‘lost his office through his own fault’. Cromwell must have had some regard for Thomas Scot for he granted a life pension of £20 a year to Joanna.

  25. Thomas Scot, ‘Confessions of Transactions’. See too The Speeches and Prayers of Major General Harrison, Mr. J. Carew, Mr Justice Cooke, Mr. H. Peters, Mr. T. Scott... Together with Severall Occasionall Speeches and Passages in their Imprisonment till they came to the Place of Execution (London, 1660).

  26. Perhaps had Thomas Scot apologised rather than justified himself, he might have shared the fate of the regicide, Colonel Hutchinson, whose devoted wife wrote an abject letter for him to sign, thus gaining his life but adding personal shame to political misery.

  27. Thomas Scot’s widow and William’s stepmother did manage to secure part of the property later.

  28. See Edmund Ludlow, A Voyage from The Watch Tower, ed. A. B. Worden, Camden 4th series, vol. 21 (London, Royal Historical Society, 1978).

  29. CSP, Ireland, 1660–1.

  30. CSP, Col., 1661–8, pp. 166–7.

  31. There were several of Thomas Colepeper’s Kentish relatives in Surinam, including Crisps. Behn later knew Henry Crisp well.

  Chapter 4

  1. The Dutch Lover (1673) and Works, vol. 1, no. 104.

  2. A Voyage to the Island of Love, Works, vol. 1, no. 51, ll. 86–116.

  3. See also Dryden’s The Satyrs of Aulus Persius Flaccus, the Fifth Satyr, for another description of the miseries of sea travel.

  4. See ‘The Dumb Virgin’ and ‘The Unfortunate Happy Lady’ where the hero is shipwrecked on the coast of North Africa and enslaved there for six years by ‘people less merciful, than Seas, Winds, or hungry wild Beasts in pursuit of their Prey’, Works, vol. 3, p. 80. A pretended version of this fate is used in The False Count. For a Kentish account of an Englishman enslaved by Africans at Calabar in 1668, see Watts’s True Relation. He thought the life of a slave of the Africans worse than that of a galley slave of the Moors and Turks.

  5. Perhaps Aphra’s father, if he had accompanied her, was served so.

  6. The History of the Bucaniers of America; From their First Original down to this Time (London, 1699). This work has purported accounts by Exquemelin, Basil Ringrose, and the Sieur de Montauban. See also Basil Ringrose, The dangerouys Voyage and hold attempts of Captain B. Sharp and others upon the coasts of the South Seas. From the original Journal of the Voyage, written by B. Ringrose (London, 1684). Although it was only after James Lind’s work in the mid 18th century on the effect of citrus fruit on scurvy that the connection of Vitamin C and the disease was widely known, the discovery had often been made and forgotten in the past. An authoritative recommendation of the juice of lemons is to be found in James Lancaster’s account of his voyage to the Indian Ocean in 1601, see Purchas His Pilgrimes, vol. 2, p. 393.

  7. Huntington MS HM 171919.

  8. See Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace Beyond the Line: The English in the Caribbean 1624–1690 (New York, 1972).

  9. There are no full and extant English maps of Surinam published in the early 1660s but there is a manuscript one in two versions. One was probably copied by a Dutch person, given his script and use of Muller for Millard and Davenpoort for Davenport; possibly it was made from an English map in Holland after the ceding of the colony (or before to help with the conquest). The second is an unsigned MS in Brown Library drawn in ink and colours with additions in ink in a seventeenth-century hand. There is also an engraving after 1667 as A New Draught of Surranam upon the coast of Guianna. All three maps represent Surinam under the English but they have different names on the plantations and are not necessarily copies of each other. The first of these maps came into the possession of William Blathwayt, who may have obtained it when he was a clerk in the embassy of Charles II in The Hague from 1668 to 1672. As a clerk he needed to know something of Surinam since he was relaying information about the treatment of the English settlers. See Gertrude Ann Jacobsen, William Blathwayt: A late seventeenth-century English administrator (New Haven, 1932).

  10. In Oroonoko Behn calls this Parham House, the name also used for the government house in the capital.

  11. BL Add. MS 70010.

  12. Yearworth recounts to Harley a rumour ‘that your Honour have sould that plantation too my Lord Willoughby’. BL Add MS70010.

  13. Thomas Tryon, Friendly Advice.

  14. Adis, A Letter Sent from Syrranam. The letter is followed by a reply from Lord Willoughby, dated Barbados 23 January 1664. The title of lieutenant-general was a military one, and the confirmation of Byam suggests either that the post might have gone to another or that Willoughby had only recently been confirmed by the King in the power to create such titles.

  15. Antoine Biet, Voyage de la France equinoxiale en l’isle de Cayenne (1654).

  16. CSP, Col., 1664.

  17. BL Portland MSS. It is not known precisely what his offence was.

  18. Sanford, Surinam Justice, p. 3.

  19. Behn may have been prepared for her liking by having read an engaging little book of letters entitled Coll. Henry Marten’s Familiar Letters to his Lady of Delight published in 1662 when Marten was in the Tower. When later in her play, The Roundheads, Behn mocked the Parliamentarians from just before the Restoration, she mentioned but did not portray Henry Marten, although he had been the butt of satirists for his politics and his womanising.

  20. Sir Josiah Child, A New Discourse of Trade (London, 1694). The government insisted that the indentures should be made ‘freely without delusion, persuasion or any other Sinisterly means’ and demanded that servants be bound before one or more JPs, a record being kept at the Court of Quarter Sessions. The indentured person granted to his or her master for a number of years, usually seven, total service; in return the master agreed to pay the passage and provide food, clothing and lodging during the period of the indenture. At the end many servants found themselves in a dreadful state without land or resources. In a generous case, he or she might receive, as one man did, a breeding sow, 35 acres of land at 2d per acre per annum and corn sufficient to sow two acres of land. Before they were freed, however, many indentured servants died, for their lives were of less value to their masters than those of their slaves. In all the colonies of the Spanish, Dutch, English and French, indentured servants were beaten to death: one employer was said to have killed over a hundred. See the case history of the pirate Esquemelin in The History of the Bucaniers of America, Ringrose, 1699.

  21. Works, vol. 7, p. 299.

  22. CSP, Col., 1667, p. 528. In Thomas Southerne’s dramatisation of Oroonoko, two yo
ung women who have gone to Surinam to find husbands, having become ‘shopworn’ in London, pretend to be related in this way. Aphra may have had something of a marital aim herself.

  23. Enys’s report is summarised in CSP, Col., 1661–8, p. 577.

  24. I am not suggesting that Behn bases all of her Oroonoko on Allin but his being white is no impediment to her taking some details from the story. In ‘An exact narrative of the state of Guyana’, Ashmolean MS, Byam recounts some ‘insolencies of our Negroes’, with a few rebelliously escaping to the woods, which may also have some bearing on Behn’s tale.

  25. An Exact Relation of The Most Execrable Attempts of John Allin, Committed on the Person of His Excellency Francis Lord Willoughby of Parham, Captain General of the Continent of Guiana, and of all the Caribby-Islands and our Lord Proprietor (London, 1665).

  Chapter 5

  1. Sir Walter Ralegh landed in the mouth of the Orinoco in 1616. See his Discoverie of the large, rich and beautiful Empyre of Guiana, with a Relation of the great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spanyards call El Dorado)...Performed in the yeare 1595 (London, 1596) and Sir Walter Ralegh’s apology for his last voyage to Guiana.

  2. Works, vol. 2, p. 95. cf. Warren’s Impartial History, ‘There is a constant Spring and Fall, some leaves Dropping, and others succeeding in their Places: But the Trees are never quite divested of their Summer Livery; Some, have always Blossoms, and several degrees of Fruit at once.’

  3. For a discussion of colonial vision see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992).

  4. Over a hundred years later the eel was still the prize exhibit of the region, as can be seen from Alexander von Humboldt’s famous accounts of South America.

  5. Warren, p. 13. Among other animals, armadillos were a craze with European collectors and no antiquary could be without a stuffed one. They tended to be seen as miniature rhinoceros and be depicted in allegories of America.

  6. ‘The Description of Guyana’, BL Sloane MS 1956, 3662.

  7. Aphra Behn probably read Montaigne between visiting Surinam and publishing Oroonoko in 1688 since her likely acquaintance, Charles Cotton, was translating the essays in the 1680s.

  8. June 16, 1663, CSP, Col., 1661–8, p. 425.

  9. During the 1660s there were slave raids on the Surinam settlers but other colonies such as Jamaica and Barbados fared worse. Some of the uprisings passed unnoticed in London, but others made the news in the years between Behn’s return and her publishing of Oroonoko in the late 1680s. In 1675 there were reports of a ‘Conspiracy of the Negroes’ who had intended to establish an Ashanti-style monarchy under an ‘Ancient Gold Coast Negro’. But the plan was discovered through a female domestic slave who overheard a would-be rebel trying to recruit. One hundred and ten were arrested and six burnt alive, CSP, Col., 3 Oct. 1675, p. 294.

  10. Feathers loomed large in early portraits of Native Americans, a Portuguese painting of the epiphany in about 1505 providing a headdress of Brazilian feathers for one of the Magi. By then, some examples of featherwork had reached Europe and several artists such as Dürer included the radial crown of feathers in their drawings. There was a misconception that Native Americans also wore skirts of feathers—Behn obviously did not see one and did not record it.

  11. Agent Enys’s report made a similar point: ‘The greatest infelicity of this colony is that his Majesty is not rightly informed of the goodness thereof.’

  12. In about the 1640s Albert Eckhout, a professional artist, went with Johan Maurits to Brazil to draw figures, animals and plants. His picture of an African king, possibly of the Congo (he seems not to have visited Africa), is the kind of exotic but Europeanised vision Behn has of Oroonoko. The picture features a curtain, column, balustrade, and European crown.

  13. Warren, p. 19. Harley’s agent Yearworth describes the arrival of a slave ship captained by Sir John Wood, which Aphra may have witnessed. It had 130 blacks on board, having lost 54 on the voyage (BL Add MS 70010). Before her visit to America Behn may have seen a few black Africans probably as footmen and pages to the rich and aristocratic, but she had certainly never seen them in a group as she would have done in Surinam.

  14. Hilary Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715 (Knoxville, Tennessee, 1989), p. 117.

  15. See the Dutch manuscript map in The Hague Rijkarchief of the ‘Goud-Kust’.

  16. Anthony à Wood, Life and Times, vol. 11, p. 425.

  17. Montaigne, ‘On the Cannibals’, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (Harmond-sworth, 1993).

  18. ‘The Essay on Translated Prose’, Works, vol. 4, p. 76.

  19. Richard Blome, A Description Of the Island of Jamaica; With the other Isles and Territories in America, to which the English are Related (London, 1678), p. 37.

  20. For example, when the hero awakens to see the heroine, La Calprenède’s character says, ‘Great Goddess... pardon to a stranger the errour he may have committed against your Divinity; had I known this sacred place, I would not have prophan’d it by my presence’, while Aphra’s exclaims, ‘Great Goddess, pardon an unlucky Stranger, / The errours he commits ’gainst your Divinity, / Who, had he known the Grove had Sacred been, / He wou’d not have prophan’d it by his presence.’

  21. Isabella, Strangford’s wife, was dead and he had little hold left on the Sidneys.

  22. Behn may have taken the name from a famous tragicomedy of Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster: Or, Love Lies a Bleeding (1609). Katherine Philips used the name in her works for the Welsh Royalist, John Jeffreys of Abercynrig.

  23. The cross-gendered education of Fletcher’s characters was more adhesive. The girl found it hard to ‘suffer like a woman’ and the boy belligerently to assault whoever gets in his path.

  24. Portland Collection, University of Nottingham Department of Manuscripts, Pw2 Hy221.

  25. Alternatively, the reference might just have been to Ferdinando’s brother, Henry, of whom their father noted that his ‘unguided temper’ had carried him to Barbados. See Raymond Gorges, The Story of a Family through Eleven Centuries, being a History of the family of Gorges (Boston, 1944).

  26. So bad was the situation in Barbados that in September 1663 a Corporation of Barbados Adventurers was looking for new land to settle. It had turned its attention to Surinam.

  27. By the time Harley received the information of the departure of both Astrea and Gorges, he himself was en route for England, having been banished by Willoughby.

  28. After the departure of the tenants and Harley’s return to England, Byam checked that everything was in ‘good order’ at St John’s Hill. He ordered silk grass to be planted, put ‘5 negros’ to work there and proposed a new manager, a William Gwilt, to look after things. See letters of Byam to Harley’s attorney, 24 July 1664 and to Harley in November 1665, as well as Gwilt to his father on 24 July 1664. BL Add MS 70010.

  Chapter 6

  1. There are other claimants but none so far very compelling. Beane is a common London name, see, for example, Richard and Ephater Beane in registers of St Katherine’s by the Tower. The Calendar of Treasury Books, 1660–1667 lists two possible Beanes but no Behns. The first is a Humfrey Beane, merchant and farmer of excise in various southern counties, especially Essex; he was also involved in collecting excise from alcohol in London. This Beane survived the plague and does not die or disappear when Mr Behn drops from Aphra’s life. He goes on being a farmer of excise for the southern and eastern counties, petitioning and being petitioned against and he is still flourishing in the 1670s, when he seems to have become an alderman. (Incidentally his subcommissioner of excise in Kent and East Anglia was in 1671 a Charles Johnson.) The second Beane is a slightly more likely but less visible candidate, Isaack Beane, described as a merchant, who on 9 November 1660 was petitioning with a Benjamin Hassall for release of goods seized by Edward Watkins, the head searcher in London. Presumably he had had incoming goods seized, wrongfully he believes, which makes him involved wi
th shipping. After this mention he disappears from Treasury papers. The Port Books throw up some candidates but I have found none with an overwhelming case.

  2. The Luckey Chance, Works, vol. 7, p. 227. The old man (senex) was also a stock figure in comedy, including commedia dell’arte.

  3. Johannes Nenne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1660–1815 (Cambridge, 1990), p. 145.

  4. In addition, the English government wanted to prevent the importation of arms for a possible ‘fanatic’ or republican rebellion in England helped by the republican Dutch; again it was in the interests of those ships carrying such arms to be as secretive as possible and to keep in their holds as many colours as they could in the hope that one would please the ships they met or the ports at which they had to call.

  5. See CSP, Col., August 14, 1655, entries 219, 219, i-vi. I am grateful to Keith Davey for disentangling the various King Davids.

  6. CSP, Dom., pp. 253 and 276.

  7. This Norwegian ship was allowed by King Charles to participate in certain trading activities around the shores of England—it was carrying deal both before and after the date on which Aphra probably travelled from Surinam to England—though it was never considered more than a foreign ship; indeed it was open to the kind of theft that British inhabitants saw as their right in regard to ‘foreign bottoms’. See Art. 30 of Dutch complaints in A Catalogue of the Damages for which the English Demand Reparation from the United-Netherlands. As Also A List of the Damages, Action, and Pretenses for which Those of the United-Netherlands demand Reparation and Satisfaction from the English (1664), which listed the grievances of the East India Company against the Dutch and the grievances of the Dutch East India and West India Companies against the English: ‘Lawrence Kettles, Merchant of Amsterdam, saith, That in May 1659 his Ship named the King David, (Oche Alberts... Master) laden with Salt at St Uvall, and bound for Dronton in Norway, was taken and carried to Dunkirk, by Captain Louis de Hay.’ There it is said in reply ‘that the Captain was neither an English Subject, nor had any English Commission, and therefore the English cannot be responsible for his action’. This Scandinavian ship sailing a northern route was licensed by Charles II to trade as a Norwegian ship in July 1661 despite being Dutch-built (CSP, Dom., 1661/2, pp. 34 and 47). In 1665 Thomas Middleton wrote to Pepys of the goods on board the prize ship the King David and had leave from the commissioners of prizes to land them if a warrant could be procured. In 1666 there is a report of the Lords Lauderdale, Arlington, Ashby and Berkeley about a dispute between a merchant, John Hammond, and the Earl of Morton, that the King David of Druntheim, Norway, was freighted in August 1664 by Hammond to go to Norway and return laden with deal, but had in fact been driven by harsh weather into the Orkneys. In April 1665, the lading was condemned in the Admiralty, as war had been declared with the Dutch in February 1665. Since the goods had been loaded before the declaration of war between England and the Dutch Republic, however, the authorities advised release of the cargo on payment of reasonable charges. They would give no opinion of the ship itself, however, since it was principally Scandinavian. Despite this clear statement, in July Hammond was complaining that the Earl of Morton had none the less disposed of some of the goods from the ship and suffered others to perish. It seems fairly unlikely that a ship would go to the West Indies to trade illegally after it had been permitted to trade legally as a Norwegian ship in 1661. The reason that a biographer would try to take it to Surinam is the mention of Oche Alberts or Oge Albert, Dutch master and owner of one-sixteenth of the ship. In the letters purportedly from Antwerp, Behn writes of an ‘Albert’. Throughout this study I have referred to the United Provinces as ‘Holland’, although Holland was in fact only one of the Dutch provinces.