Freedom in White and Black

Kara Walker, no world from An Unpeopled Land in Uncharted Waters, 2010. Etching with aquatint, sugar-lift,
spit-bite and dry-point. Plate: 237/8″ × 355/8″ ; sheet: 30¼″ × 40¾″
 k
FREEDOM
in White and Black
A Lost Story of the Illegal Slave Trade and
Its Global Legacy

Emma Christopher

The University of Wisconsin Press

 The University of Wisconsin Press
1930 Monroe Street, 3rd Floor
Madison, Wisconsin 53711-2059
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Christopher, Emma, 1971– author.
Title: Freedom in white and black: a lost story of the illegal slave trade
and its global legacy / Emma Christopher.
Description: Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, [2018]
| Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017044805 | ISBN 9780299316204 (cloth: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Slave trade—Africa—History. | Slave traders—
Africa—Biography. | Slaves—Africa—Biography.
Classification: LCC HT1321 .C47 2018 | DDC 306.3/620922—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044805
 k
supported by a grant unslaved

Figure Foundation
 k

For
Sergio,
with love
 Contents

List of Characters ix

Prologue 3
Introduction 7

Part 1 Journeys to the Slave Factory

1 Son of a Liverpool Slave Dealer 23
2 A Kissi Child Caught in the Slave Trade 31
3 The Banana Islands to Gallinas 38
4 Making Deals with Siaka, Selling to the DeWolfs 46
5 A Cargo of Slaves for Havana 55

Part 2 Burned to the Ground

6 A New Slave Factory at the St. Paul River 63
7 In the Barracoon 72
8 The Slave Ship Fénix and Setting the Factory Alight 80
9 Leaving, Never to Return 91

Part 3 Different Types of Liberty

10 Arriving in Freetown 97
11 The Court Case 105
12 Becoming Soldiers, Cabin Boys, and Wives 112
13 Leaving Africa 124
14 A Village of Their Own 129
15 A Murder, and an Appeal to the Prince Regent 136
16 Experiments in Civilization and Liberty 141
17 Prisoners in New South Wales 145

vii
viii Contents

18 Christianity at Hogbrook 154

19 The End of Their Punishment 159
20 A Model Village 162
21 The Appeal 179
22 Helping to Found Liberia 190
23 Van Diemen’s Land 204
24 Liberty in White and Black 208

Epilogue 221

Acknowledgments 229
Notes 233
Bibliography 277
Index 303
 List of Characters

Tom Ball: Ball’s origins and African name are unclear; he was possibly
Temne. Ball was a factory slave belonging to Bostock who gave important
testimony at Bostock and McQueen’s trial. He was subsequently drafted
into the West India Regiment and shipped to the Caribbean as a soldier,
before returning to settle in Sierra Leone.
Robert Bostock: A Briton, Bostock was the son of a Liverpool slave trader of
the same name. Bostock followed in his father’s footsteps and co-owned
slave trading factories at Gallinas and the St. Paul River in West Africa. He
was subsequently arrested in 1813, convicted of illegal slave dealing, and
transported to Australia for a term of fourteen years. He later had his con-
viction overturned and became a free settler in Tasmania.
Antonio Escoto (alias Anthony Scott): Escoto was a slave trader in Cuba
who had links with Charles Mason and the Fénix/Phoenix. He later appealed
to the British to compensate him for his losses through legal channels, but
he was also believed to be behind the murder of Captain John Roach,
committed by sailors aboard another vessel owned by Escoto.
W. A. B. (William Augustine Bernard) Johnson: A German, Johnson was a
missionary and preacher at Regent, Sierra Leone, who lived alongside
many of those who arrived from Bostock and Mason’s factory. Together
they founded what was acclaimed as a model village and built St. Charles
Church, cited as the third oldest stone church in Africa.
Charles Mason: An American slave trader, Mason co-owned the slave trading
factories at Gallinas and the St. Paul River with Bostock. Away in Charleston
or Havana at the time of Bostock and McQueen’s arrest, Mason continued
slave trading but was later captured by another British patrol and taken to
Freetown. As an American he could not be tried by the British court, but he
drowned when his ship sank on the way back across the Atlantic.

ix
x List of Characters

John McQueen: Originally from Glasgow, Scotland, McQueen had been

apprenticed to a slave factory in Africa as a child and later worked as
Bostock’s assistant at the St. Paul River. He was captured, tried, and con-
victed with Bostock and also went to Australia, where he again worked for
Bostock in Sydney.
David Noah: A Bassa man whose original name is unknown. Noah was only a
child at the time of his enslavement and the events surrounding his rescue.
He grew to adulthood in Regent, Sierra Leone, and along with Tamba
became an important member of the Church Missionary Society, later
trying to fight the slave trade in his homeland.
Jack Phoenix (originally Za): “Za” (as written by the clerk) was likely Sahr or
Saa, and so a firstborn Kissi or Kono child. He was the first captive em-
barked aboard the slave ship Fénix/Phoenix just prior to Bostock’s arrest.
Rescued during the events that followed, he became part of the crew of the
Phoenix and took the name Jack Phoenix. He was recaptured during the
revenge murder of Captain John Roach and was believed to have been sold
in Cuba.
John Reffell (originally Yarra): Yarra’s African origins are unclear, but at
the time of his liberation he was a factory slave owned by John McQueen.
He was the only man who testified at both Bostock and McQueen’s original
trial and at Bostock’s appeal. In freedom he went to live in Hogbrook/
Regent and adopted the name John Reffell, after the superintendent of
Liberated Africans, Joseph Reffell.
John Roach: A British mariner, Roach was captain of the brig Kitty with a
letter of marque to capture enemy vessels and was trading with Bostock
and McQueen. In 1813 Roach argued with Bostock and reported the latter’s
illegal slave dealing in Freetown, leading to the British naval attack on
Bostock and Mason’s St. Paul factory. Roach was later murdered, apparently
in revenge for these actions.
Lawrence Summers (and other Anglicized aliases; originally Sessay): A
Mende, Sessay/Summers was a child at the time of his rescue from Bostock’s
factory and was subsequently taken aboard HMS Thais as a “boy, third
class.” He gave an account at Bostock’s appeal, revealing his capture and
walk to the coast years before.
William Tamba (originally Tamba): A Kissi man, Tamba was involved in
the slave trade at the Banana Islands, probably as a high-ranking slave of
the Clevelands or Caulkers, and was then owned by Bostock. After his
rescue at the time of Bostock’s arrest he was one of the founders of the
celebrated village of Hogbrook/Regent in Sierra Leone, fought against the
List of Characters xi

slave trade, and helped settle the free American colony of Liberia. He
worked closely with the Church Missionary Society for many years.
Robert Thorpe: Thorpe was a British judge who fought against illegal slave
traders while occupying the bench in Freetown. Later, having being denied
the chance to return to Sierra Leone, he fought for slave traders’ rights and
assisted Robert Bostock in appealing his conviction.
Freedom in White and Black
 k
Prologue

On the banks of the St. Paul Rver, near Monrovia, Liberia.

It was at the ruins of Hotel Africa that I met a former slave. He was lean
and unshaven with eyes that clouded dully across the whites. His name was
Reuben.
“Have you come to buy it?” he asked.
“We need white man, American, to invest,” clarified another Liberian
dressed in a tattered T-shirt, who told me he was the caretaker of the wrecked
building.
There was hardly anything left to buy. The skeleton was substantial
enough to stake claim to its former grandeur, but it had been disemboweled.
The outer walls and roof had completely gone, leaving a ghoulish honeycomb
of steel girders holding up the floors. The wiring, pipes, and doors had vanished.
Furniture, carpets, fixtures, and fittings were nothing but memories, although
their imagined lavishness bloomed all the more as the old stories were retold. In
their place, trees pushed up through the foundations with tropical enthusiasm.
Nothing else had survived the crushing civil wars that tore the nation apart,
first from 1989 to 1996, and then again from 1999 to 2003. Even the beach was
being destroyed, ecological demolition from what locals described as the sea
being angry.
It is all the more poignant because Hotel Africa was originally built for a
summit of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1979 and intended as
a celebration of the continent. It was meant to symbolize that Africans would
somehow somersault happily out of poverty and into a shining future. The
centerpiece was the swimming pool, quarried in the top-heavy, lop-sided
shape of Africa and surrounded by fifty-one luxury beach villas, one for each
head of state. New roads and bridges were built, and cruise ships anchored just
offshore.1

3
4 Prologue

I asked the men to show me the famous pool, and we walked around the
ruins. It had fallen into such disrepair that the shape was hard to figure out, the
continent disfigured. Derelict in the middle was a bar where elegant bathers
could once float up for another olive in their martini, now adrift somewhere
near South Sudan. Nothing at all remained of the lavish villas.
“All finished,” declared Reuben.
Rumors say that the OAU money was misspent or misappropriated. The
entire OAU party cost the Liberian nation US $101 million, the hotel itself
US $36 million, money that even then, in far happier financial times than today,
it could scarcely afford. Now, decades on and with the hotel utterly destroyed,
the country has still not paid off the debt. It is a ghost on the political landscape
as arguments rage over where all the money went.2
The caretaker, some decades older than Reuben, remembered how it
happened. He recalled the “Congos” (that is, Americo-Liberian people) coming
to party at the OAU summit. But 1979 turned out to be the final year that this
old elite ruled, and the next year there was the first coup in the nation’s history.
Years of instability and worsening corruption followed. Then there were two
devastating civil wars. Hotel Africa survived the first part of the chaos and even
hosted peace talks in 1998, but things were going downhill rapidly. Once the
Nigerian peacekeeping soldiers left, the butchery began. By 2001 only one floor
was operating, and that, in the words of a visiting Observer journalist, was the
“centre of gravity,” where warlord Charles Taylor ran his “new trade in misery.”
The hotel’s owner, a close ally of Taylor, fled two years later, leaving looters to
ransack the building.3
The caretaker asked about my interest in this story. There was nothing to
do but dash their hopes, to confess that I am neither a potential investor nor a
hotelier, but a historian. And so the conversation made its strange turn, Reuben
looking at the packed earth, telling me that he had once been a slave.
“They caught me,” he said simply.
“I was just a boy, and I came into the hands of bad men.”
“They . . . I was a slave . . . I . . . no . . . everything is struggle for we [i.e.,
us].”
We stood in silence looking at the oil tankers moored on the horizon, un-
lovely in the afternoon haze. I did not know what to say. Words that were
heartfelt as I considered them would doubtless sound banal, trite.
It was unbearably poignant because what had taken me to Hotel Africa was
slavery and slave trading. Two hundred years ago, somewhere close to the ruins
of Hotel Africa, an American, Charles Mason, and a Briton, Robert Bostock,
together ran an illegal slave-trading business.4
Prologue 5

It was a tiny fragment of the vast transatlantic slave trade. But, unusually, it
is possible to trace a handful of the people—a few of the captives, factory slaves,
the owners and their assistant—who were there at one particular moment in
time. Some of those they held captive and enslaved can be followed from seizure
to liberation and beyond.
Nor can this slaving business be entirely divorced from the far wider Liberian
story. One of their former slaves went on to fight the slave trade, becoming part
of the reason that the nation of Liberia was founded nearby as a settlement for
the first of the Americo-Liberians, the people whose descendants would one day
party at Hotel Africa. The threads that led from Mason and Bostock’s business
to Reuben’s wartime enslavement are knotted and twisted, even sometimes
threatening to unravel in places where different paths may have been taken,
but nevertheless they are there. That the ruins of an illegal slave trading business
lie beneath a destroyed model of Africa is painfully tragic symbolism you do
not have to be a historian to interpret.
This is the story of that tiny illicit slave trading business, some of its people,
and their very different lives.
 k
Introduction

Early June 1813.

He knew that their vessels ate bodies. He knew because whenever one
skulked into view he was bidden to help feed it. Half a moon before had been
the most recent time. Then a boy, a firstborn son, had been the first sold. The
child’s hungry limbs had been pushed into the dugout that had conveyed him,
mute with terror, to where the ship’s wooden walls soared out from the water
groaning and swaying. It had swallowed the boy whole.
But something had gone wrong. The white men had brokered a deal for
hundreds of souls, but only nine-year-old Za had been handed over when a
fight had broken out, and the ship sailed away. The rest of the designated cargo
remained behind, and the pens were overflowing. Arms, legs, and torsos
crowded together.
Tom Ball knew enough of their words to understand the fury and despair.
He could read the cicatrices cut into their sweat-streaked backs. Many of them
would have expected to go, dreading that those who stepped from the conti-
nent’s edge were lost. Now, the vessel gone, he listened as they tried to push
down shoots of hope for fear that it would betray them.
If the ship returned, they were destined for the auction block’s sharp sting,
chasms of broken lives lurking beneath, then slavery that neither they, nor their
children, nor their children’s children, would elude easily. The tethers around
their limbs and necks would not leave them, not really. Tom Ball knew this
because he too was enslaved. His owner, the slave merchant, had bought him a
decade before. Just a child then, he had been told that his name was Tom Ball.
Still, sometimes he used another name, the one that wove him into the fabric of
life.1
A mere hundred paces across the rust-red earth separated his sleeping
place from the holding pens, but these footsteps somehow encompassed the

7
8 Introduction

vast ocean. He was more fortunate than those being sold onward, but it was not
much on which to build. He shared the compound with the bellows, bleats, and
stinking dung of a hundred cows, a thousand sheep, and five hundred goats.2
They were so close to the ocean that its zephyrs cut benevolently into the
burn of the late dry season. Sea air occasionally breezed in, providing fleeting
reprieve from the stink of crowded, diseased, unwashed bodies and the open
pits as toilets. It carried away mercifully the mosquitoes and the scavenger flies
hovering over wounds. Yet the ocean’s deep drubbing blows onto the sand, the
gentle spent ebb, were drowned out by the keening. Its echoes would reverberate
long after they had all escaped from this place.
He had no idea how soon that would be. Only a few days later he would be
called upon to confess the courage and dignity he had been concealing for a
decade beneath a costume of loyalty and submission. He would be asked to tell
his story, and he would speak his truths far more poetically than the white
man’s cold words would convey. A ship was a beast, he intimated—she, in the
usual feminine form for vessels, rather than it—and each one “filled her Belly
with slaves.” Slave traders might not literally feast on human beings, but Ball
knew that somehow, in their own way, they greedily consumed African souls.

Tamba rarely had any easiness in his manner. Immovable and snappish, his
powerful frame foretold the rigidness within. But his rigor, combined with a
luminous intellect, made him a natural leader with a talent for the heroic. In
the years to come the stories would be recounted far beyond Africa: of a man
caught in quicksand, already up to his gullet when Tamba’s arms wrenched
him up, free and clear. A more adept boatman than many of the pilots along
the coast, Tamba used his might to haul a canoe out of swells and whitecaps
when those aboard feared that they would drown.3
He had been ensnared when young and, like Tom Ball, had somehow
escaped the Middle Passage. A decade in the slave trade had honed his muscles
and squared his edges. His owners valued him highly, and he called himself a
servant instead of a slave. He rowed a dugout upriver to trade with headmen.
He had lived at the Plantain Islands, exchanging men for rum, women for
guns, boys for tobacco, or girls for cloth. He spoke some English and six African
languages besides: his native Kissi, plus Sherbro, Mende, Vai, Kono, and some
Gola.4
There were tiers of captivity, suffering, and pain in the slave factory,5 and
Tamba was well above Ball in the hierarchy. But all the factory slaves who
Introduction 9

guarded and fed the human trade goods lived in no-man’s-land, caught be-
tween survival and treachery. Tamba never revealed how deep ran the wounds
of this work. He gave only clues as to how being a proud Kissi man clashed
with the white man’s ways. But its repercussions would haunt him long after
their liberation.

The pens both Tom and Tamba were guarding were too flimsy to imprison. In
the vast bamboo cages, those at the sides were defenseless against the ruinous
rains and the febrile sun. Here captivity was personal. At a nearby barracoon6
an observer viewed wares tethered individually to stakes, “their foot in the
stocks, a log with a hole in the center for the foot, and a peg drove in crosswise
to confine it.” Around the whole compound were high mud walls, a further
deterrent to escape.7
The cages held captives from the patchwork of peoples that lived in the
river’s hinterland. Mende, Gbande, Kissi, Loma, and Kono, smaller numbers
of Gola, Manding, and Sherbro. Kpelle, Vai, Dei, Temne, Bassa, and Belle
people sometimes arrived. Most were strangers and could not understand the
tongues of captives from distant lands, but others had their arm linked through
that of a family member or someone from their people. A small group were
from neighboring Gbande villages subjected to a violent raid. Two Sherbro
women called each other sister. There was a set of twins, twenty-six-year-old
Kono men who had taken every step of life together.8
Long journeys had led to this hell. For Sessay, eleven, it was two years since
he had been “stolen” from his family. “[ D]riven down the Country,” he had
been passed hand to hand, dealer to trader, “before they came to the sea.”
When later he became familiar with the Bible, he would remember that the
duration of his walking had been forty days and forty nights. Those who could
not keep up were left to die like animals.9
The elders were a focus, a source of wisdom, as they had been in their
homelands. Boi, a Mende man, was forty years old; Fangha, a Kono, a similar
age. They and the younger men who were formidable warriors, like twenty-
three-year-old Canaba, who at 5 foot 10½ inches (1.79 meters) was a giant
among them, struggled surely with fury and mortification at finding themselves
in this most demeaning situation. They could do little to protect the others.10
There were no elders in the female pen. When buyers brought women
who had delivered many children, they were turned away. The four oldest
women the merchants had acquired recently were still in their twenties, the rest
10 Introduction

teenagers and girls. The indignities they suffered are beyond knowing, violations
that must have left torments, fears, and endless doubts. Safui held tight her
three-month-old daughter Bessy, born on her walk to the ocean or into the
distress of this gruesome place.
Three-fifths of all the captives were just children, eight, nine, and ten years
old. This was the age of Za, already aboard the slave vessel, and many of those
still in the pens like Eya, Famai, and Sarae.11 They had only a hazy personal
understanding of the monstrous trade that had netted them. As well as the
loneliness, hunger, and exhaustion, they had specific distresses wondering
about their parents and siblings. All ravenous, the children’s hunger devoured
whole days in raw anguish.12
Only the Muslims stretched their chains to kneel in prayer, but all came
from societies that knew evil spirits. The Mende, Sessay’s people, told of the
Njaoli who would kidnap anybody foolish enough to go onto the big water.
They warned people never to reveal fear to the Ndogbɔjusui, who looked just
like a white man. Two Loma children knew that people with fairer hair were
reincarnated water spirits and could not be trusted.13
So many died of hunger, disease, and exhaustion that each compound had
its own graveyard. But they had only lost one in recent days to the water. Za
had been pushed into a canoe and rowed out through the mangrove creeks
until he passed into the river’s mouth. They had expected him to be the first of
many, but it had not turned out that way. Za had gone without them.

Briton Robert Bostock stalked by in long trousers and a fluttering shirt, king of
the realm. He was of average height with pale blond hair, and his education
and affluence gave him an aura of authority. Bostock jointly owned the business
with his American partner, Charles Mason, but Mason was away, arranging
trade in Charleston and Havana. So Bostock ran the business alone, aided by
their assistant, John McQueen. A Scot, McQueen was younger and taller with
blue eyes. His temper lay far shallower beneath the surface than that of his
stolid boss.
Both Bostock and McQueen had years of slaving experience, both having
been habituated to the trade’s gory realities while children. Bostock’s father,
now long dead, had been a slave trader. McQueen had grown up on the African
coast, apprenticed to his slave trader uncle at the age of eleven.
Finally, after years of toil, surrounded by Africans and their violent diseases
instead of safe at home in Britain, it was all paying off. Bostock had a “very
Introduction 11

large” house within the compound. Their warehouses were vast emporia, and
Bostock boasted that he had five hundred “stacks of gold dust,” five thousand
“pieces of Gold Coin,” ten thousand “pieces of Silver Coin,” five hundred gold
bars, a thousand silver rings, a thousand amulets, and fifty thousand beads.
The value of it all was around $10–15,000.14 John McQueen was also building
his own fortune and had purchased Yarra a year earlier, a factory slave of his
own, who labored alongside Ball and Tamba.15
The problem was that their trade was illegal. Britain and America had both
introduced laws five years earlier prohibiting the transatlantic slave trade. In
Britain it had become anathema, considered a most un-British, treasonous
business. Bostock and McQueen did not yet know it, but time was quickly run-
ning out. Only a few days later when it was all over, John McQueen would look
back on his decade of trading in human beings and say, defiantly, “I liked it
very much.”16

Bostock and Mason’s compound was on the banks of what Europeans know as
the St. Paul River, a name bestowed by Portuguese sailors centuries earlier
when they happened to first see it on the feast day of St. Paul. If any of Bostock
and Mason’s business remained today, it would be in Liberia, a country that
did not yet exist in 1813. Founded by black Americans as a colony of freedom
and named for the Roman word liber, Liberia would take its first tottering foot-
steps almost eight years later on a tiny island just south of Bostock and Mason’s
factory. In 1813 an ally of theirs had his slave barracoon on that small island,
and within days of Ball loading Za aboard a slave ship hundreds of their cap-
tives would be hidden there. Its reincarnation as a place of freedom was in part
an act of redemption by Tamba, one of the African men they owned and whom
we have already briefly met.
Bostock, Mason, and McQueen could not possibly foresee this new country
of liberty, but they knew that calamity was skulking offshore. They were on the
frontlines of a battle over slavery and freedom, so close to their abolitionist
enemies that they were virtually spies behind enemy lines. Just up the coast, a
scant two days’ sail away, was the free British colony of Sierra Leone, founded
twenty-eight years earlier. It had begun as a place of freedom for Africans, a
way to exhibit what Africa could be without the slave trade. Since 1808 and the
outlawing of the slave trade, it had become the base of the British Navy’s anti-
slavery patrol and home to a growing community of “recaptured” Africans
freed from the slave ships seized for illegal trading. Ships traded food and
12 Introduction

household goods in Freetown, the capital, then crossed the invisible divide and
sold them at Bostock and Mason’s factory.
Other dangers were also afoot. Privateers—who partook in a type of piracy
supported by the state in wartime—were a constant hazard to shipping as both
the War of 1812 and the Napoleonic Wars were ongoing. The Fénix—the slave
vessel that loaded aboard the young boy named Za—had been unlucky to be
caught up in both conflicts. A French vessel had plundered it as it cruised down
the African coast. It then sailed away from Bostock and Mason’s factory with-
out its full human cargo because of a threat from a British privateer ostensibly
involved in the War of 1812.17
Despite all this, seen across the reaches of history, it was an ordinary
enough day at Bostock and Mason’s slaving factory. At the end of the dry sea-
son, light rains sometimes came in the night, but there had not yet been cre-
scendos of thunder crashing across the sky. The compound was a bedlam of
tortured captives overtaken by sickness and hunger, children screaming, dogs
barking, roosters crowing, cows lowing, women puffing as they chimed giant
pestles into waist-high mortars and pounded clothes with lye. Free African Kru
seamen used their extraordinary maritime skills to work the river, moving mer-
chandise back and forth. Goods were loaded and checked. Food stuffs had to
be prepared for the coming rains when so many of the stores would otherwise
be ruined. Out on the river canoes paddled by, one carrying two Dei traders
with five tusks of ivory they hoped to sell.18
Another canoe lapped up onto the small beach with two traders from Cape
Mount bringing a male and a female captive. Bostock or McQueen had to assess
their profit potential in the manner of the coast:

As each negro was brought before him [a slave dealer] examined the subject,
without regard to sex, from head to foot. A careful manipulation of the chief
muscles, armpits and groins was made, to assure soundness. The mouth, too,
was inspected, as if a tooth was missing it was noted as a defect liable to deduc-
tion. Eyes, voice, lungs, fingers and toes, were not forgotten.

They had to be alert for trickery, of the sick made to look healthy with
“bloating drugs,” their skins glistening with lemon juice. They had to weigh up
whether they should add two more to their swollen barracoon or turn them
away.19
Tom Ball carried foodstuffs to the pens, grains of life among the death,
walking back and forth with precious drinking water. Yarra and Ball were
guarding, ever watchful for signs that the despair had reached the cusp where
Introduction 13

men and women could take no more and would try to find a way to death’s soft
fall.
Yet, of course, it was not an ordinary day that we are regarding. If this had
been an average day at an African slave factory we would not know about these
particular ivory sellers or the final two captives arriving. The names Bostock,
Mason, and McQueen might be clear in the records—though merchants
sometimes hid their identities in the illegal period of trading—but it is very un-
likely that those same documents would reveal the stories of Tamba, Ball, and
Yarra. They would not contain these men’s own words. There would be no
names for those chained in the barracoon. The identities of the men, women,
and children who we know as only Sessay and Za are tentative at best,20 but
they are uncommon wealth in the history of the transatlantic slave trade.
To slave traders, captives were notes of credit as much as people, so names,
family ties, and ethnic identities simply did not matter. More than this, it was
an important part of the dehumanization process that captives were not known
by their names. Across the hinterland from Bostock and Mason’s barracoons,
names told of family ties and ethnic origin. They interleaved each person into
the rich tapestry of their people’s story. Along with cicatrices, they were a type
of passport that revealed personhood and consequently warded off the absurd­
ity of being an item of trade. So, as the captured headed step by chained step
across the continent and out onto the saltwater, names were stripped away.
The identities of those taken from Africa in chains are overwhelmingly lost to
history.21
This remains an open wound to the hundreds of millions of people who
today trace their ancestry to them. The loss of these identities means that so
much that was appropriated has still not been restored, though DNA analysis is
making inroads. Their extraordinarily rich heritage of beliefs, languages, cultural
norms, songs, dances, folklore, crafts, jokes, festivals, expressions, and ways of
being was splintered. Henry Louis Gates has written, “Almost all African
Americans wonder where their ancestors came from in Africa. What languages
did they speak? What was their music? Their religion? Their culture?” The
answers, as Gates puts it, are “long lost in the abyss of slavery.”22
The loss of these names and identities matters greatly—or at least should
matter—to the wider world too, to those not of African origin. These victims,
largely nameless and faceless in the voluminous records the slave trade has left
about profit and loss, changed the world. The numbers alone are horrific:
around eight million by the time of Bostock and Mason’s (comparatively tiny)
slaving operation. Twelve or thirteen million before the trade ended. It was
enough stolen labor to change everything, to make the people and places that
14 Introduction

had access to their muscle power wealthy and for that money to flow into in-
dustry, insurance, and banking.23
For Africa it was a devastating loss. Twelve or thirteen million families,
entire ethnic and family groups, whole swathes of the land, were eviscerated.
Whether this was the first major step on the way to the poverty and conflict
suffered by the continent today is still a matter of dispute. But while the answers
are complex, scholars are completing studies that prove the links. Places that
lost many of their people are still among the poorest today. They struggle more
with issues of trust and good governance.24
A significant percentage of captives, the exact amount still in debate but
around 7.5–20 percent, died or were murdered as they crossed the saltwater.
Some leapt overboard because the voyage was unendurable, and death would
carry them home. But those stolen, captured, kidnapped, traded, and tricked
were a tide. Enough lived to be whipped onto the auction block to number
four-fifths of all immigrants to the Americas up to 1807, the year the trade was
made illegal. As Edward Baptist has written, “the whole history of the United
States” can be found “behind a line of people in chains.” Pushing north into
Canada and all the way south to Brazil and into Argentina, they were the back-
bone of the economies and cultures of the Americas. Today, more people of
African origin live in Brazil than in any other country of the world except
Nigeria.25
The lack of known identities for almost all of the victims is arguably part of
the reason that white society has found it possible to look away, to sidestep even
apology. Uncomfortable truths are so much more easily shrouded when victims
lack names and faces, when millions of stories of a stolen child, kidnapped
parents, a forced march in chains, a rape, a brutal whipping, pitiless starvation,
how the skin smoked as the branding iron hit are all trussed together into one
impersonal mass of history. It is easier to pretend it is of the distant past, to dis-
avow its legacy today. It is simpler to tell of the great white liberators whose
names, images—even how they enjoyed their breakfast as schoolboys—are all
within easy reach.26 The original violation of treating people as merchandise,
their identities deemed irrelevant, is now used to rebuff their descendants’ claims
for recompense.
So it is vital, as many other historians have noted before me, to recount as
many of these stolen lives as possible. It is imperative to try and locate them not
just as the gross number of their total mass accumulated over centuries, or on the
profit and loss sheets that whittle their heartbreaks into economics—although
all of this is the crucial work on which biographies can be built—but as they
were. They were multifaceted, imperfect, irrepressible human beings.27
Introduction 15

This story can be told, and most of these names appear in the archival records,
only because in mid-1813 the end for Mason and Bostock’s slaving enterprise
was lurking just over the horizon. Within days the Royal Navy’s antislavery pa-
trol assailed them, and in desperation Bostock and/or McQueen set the barra-
coons aflame. Such palpable disregard for human life compounded rather than
hid their crimes. Both men were arrested and taken to Sierra Leone, and in the
resulting court case the detail of this story was first laid bare. In the makeshift
dock in Freetown girls’ school, with a jury made up principally of men of African
origin, Bostock and McQueen revealed their backgrounds. They pleaded for
mercy based on childhoods in the slave trade, cited previous slaving businesses
where they had worked, and named some of their equally guilty colleagues.
Desperate to save themselves, they provided the kind of information usually
hidden after the slave trade became illegal in 1808. These details provide a
portal to explore their illicit activities.
The charges against them revolved, of course, around the captives found in
the burned barracoons. Without victims there could be no case: a slave trader
found without captives walked away scot-free no matter the weight of other
evidence against him. So, to build the case of The King vs. Robert Bostock and John
McQueen, as well as to fulfill the British antislavery agenda, Africans found amid
or near the razed slave factory were also taken to Freetown. There a clerk of
the Liberated African department wrote their names. He sometimes misunder-
stood, misheard, and mangled, but this list was more information than Bostock
and McQueen had ever gathered. In fact, it revealed far more than the British
knew since these names were often identifiers that make it possible, even now
centuries later, to try to trace the African captives, to attempt to uncover some-
thing of the people they were. Through their names the barracoon’s noxious
grasp is revealed to have ranged out beyond the hinterland of the St. Paul and
far into the interior. It gives a very rare view, however incomplete, of those
caught in one slave trading business at one moment in time.28
Two Africans gave statements for the prosecution’s case. Summoning
remarkable courage, for they could not possibly know whether the two white
men might go free and enact revenge, Yarra and Tom Ball gave brief but
startling accounts. Yarra named his previous master from the time before
McQueen had purchased him. Ball, owned for much longer by Bostock, spoke
of Charles Mason, of their other slaving factory north at Gallinas where he had
previously been enslaved, and even named ships that he had helped load with
tragic human “cargo.” They are short narratives, but within the language and
16 Introduction

syntax of these two men’s testimonies are evocations of each man’s perspective,
an extraordinarily rare peep into the lives of these most marginalized workers.
Luckily for Yarra and Ball, Bostock and McQueen were found guilty and
sent into exile for fourteen years. But it was far from the end of the affair.
Charles Mason carried on slave trading and was captured by the patrols in
1816. His arrival in Freetown terrified his former bondspeople. Bostock then
managed to return to Britain from banishment, and he both pleaded his legal
case and demanded compensation for his losses. Faced with this foe, the British
sent word to Freetown asking his former slaves and captives to testify once
again. It was at this point that Tamba first gave evidence while Yarra added to
his original account. The appeal also led the British to track down Sessay, by
then known in his new life aboard a Royal Navy vessel as Lawrence Summers.
He gave the significant details of his capture and subsequent sale into Bostock
and Mason’s “slave yard,” recalling also the terrifying day that his prison had
gone up in smoke.
Having entered the voluminous paperwork of the British Empire, a hand-
ful of the rescued Africans remained within its crisp edges. Some, like Sessay/
Summers, were listed on muster rolls and in logbooks. Then, a few years later,
the Church Missionary Society (CMS) began to oversee the lives of those who
remained in Sierra Leone, and two of those liberated from Bostock and Mason
became highly literate. Tamba and David Noah, the latter of whom was a
child, his name unclear, at the time of their rescue, both joined the CMS as
“messengers of salvation in native districts.” Unusually, they corresponded
directly with the venerable society. These sources—letters and journals sent by
the two men to London—are remarkable, the most direct insight into those
saved in mid-1813 from the slave trade. Within them are glimpses of Tamba’s
traumas resulting from these events: his torment when Charles Mason appeared
in Freetown and Tamba relived the burning of the factory, his determination
to gather testimony against Bostock’s appeal, and his anxiousness to keep to-
gether those with whom he had arrived in the colony. Tamba also revealed his
battle to be treated as an equal by the CMS. Once or twice he hinted at his
despair at the relentless racism he endured.
The letters go far beyond the personal. Both Tamba and Noah ventured
heroically back to the places they had been enslaved, begging local chiefs to
stop selling their countrymen. Tamba wrote of trying to reason with Siaka a
few decades before, as King Siaka, he was involved in trading the men who
would become known as the Amistad slaves. Noah planned a mission to Bassa to
educate his people against the slave trade. Tamba even went back to the St.
Paul River, confronting the slave traders whom he had known during his days
Introduction 17

at Bostock and Mason’s. He was also seemingly instrumental in promoting that

location to the agents of the American Colonization Society for the colony of
Liberia. It is a story from which he has been whitewashed.
All of these sources, rich as they are, have blatant shortcomings. The captives
and factory slaves enter the historical lens only because of the deeds of white
men and are all but exhibits in their legal cases. An amanuensis inscribed the
scanty words of Yarra and Tom Ball. Even the letters and journals of Tamba
and Noah are part of a European-led narrative. To try to “writ[e] into the his-
torical silence,” I have read between the lines, appraised from clues told by
Europeans and North Americans. I journeyed several times into the Liberian
and Sierra Leonean upcountry regions to sit down with chiefs and elders of the
places the names on the Liberated African list are known, following up on the
suggestions provided by linguists. A few beautiful slivers of oral testimony are
used. All of this is imperfect by nature, but it is all there is to set against the (also
imperfect) written archive.29
It is a great loss to the story that the female captives, even Bostock’s and
McQueen’s African wives, are missing. It is another testament to the inequal-
ities of the times that we know almost nothing about these women. There is
no comparison across the racial cleft, yet even Bostock’s white wife is seen
only through the words of others and the birth dates of her eleven children.
McQueen’s common-law white wife, of a less privileged social class, appears in
the records most notably while being sentenced to the ducking stool for un-
ladylike conduct and being “a scold.” Tamba’s wife appears only in a note
expressing how he missed her while on one of his missionary journeys, Noah’s
wife at his sadness at her death. The women and girls rescued alongside them
are almost entirely obscure, leaving no traces that allow even an attempt at re-
construction. The women were certainly there and changing history; we just do
not see them.30
Despite these limitations, accounts of Africans caught up in the slave trade
are very rare pearls. Tom Ball, Yarra, and Tamba gave some of the only factory
slave testimonies that exist. Sessay and the unnamed Bassa child who grew up
to be David Noah provided compelling testimonies of their paths into slavery.
Sessay/Lawrence Summers; David Noah; Tom Ball, who may have also been
called Banna; Tamba/William Tamba; and Yarra/John Reffell were two cap-
tives and three factory slaves among hundreds of thousands at the Windward
Coast, but very few had the opportunity to leave their name, let alone have
their own words recorded. Their declarations stand as acts of rebellion against
those who sought to dehumanize them into merchandise. They speak their
stories for the lost.31
18 Introduction

This was not a gruesomely average slave trading tale of Middle Passage and
auction block. Far from it: beyond the slave factory the usual trajectory of the
transatlantic slave trade was, superficially at least, turned upside down. The
captives and factory slaves were declared free; it was the British slave traders
who were sent off aboard a ship in chains to labor on somebody else’s account
in a land far away.
Flipped over like this, stark truths about the era are revealed in new ways.
By 1813 the transatlantic slave trade had so twisted the racial landscape that,
regardless of their granted liberty, the Africans who escaped the Middle Passage
were grossly disadvantaged in their later lives under British control. Stripped of
the horrors of the Middle Passage and its violence, denuded of the chains and
the cane fields, the specter of race still prevailed. By the time the British and
Americans banned the transatlantic slave trade in 1807–8, the dominance they
had marshaled through profit, power, and faux science was all but unassailable.
Behind the bulwark of their self-proclaimed piety as antislavery champions
racism festered and metastasized.32
On the other side of the coin, Bostock and McQueen’s story reveals what
privileges and esteem British nationality, middle-class status, and masculinity
could bestow, whatever the gravity of a man’s transgression. In New South
Wales, the penal colony to which they were banished as sentence for their
crimes (today part of Australia), both men became successful, wealthy, and
respected astonishingly quickly. This was possible in part because of a mistake
in the legal case against them, but there was a far bigger picture too. They were
thought to be entirely different creatures—often quite literally—than hungry,
near naked, deeply traumatized West Africans.
Some of this was tangible. Bostock and McQueen were given vast tracts of
land by the colonial authorities in Australia, whereas those rescued had their
greatly smaller plots—land they had already struggled to clear and plant—
taken away. African men and women were not deemed to be deserving of
such resources. Bostock’s children in Australia got a degree of self-government
decades before those of Tamba, Noah, and the others in Sierra Leone, who
were supposed to be akin to children needing education. Britain spent enor-
mously more money on its Australian colonies than it would on Sierra Leone.
This upturning of the slave trade therefore casts an intriguing, provocative
sidelight onto the thorny question of slave trade legacies. Here, upturned, it is
possible to see the specifics beneath the general picture. A few of the Africans
can be traced from their approximate place of capture, through the barracoon
Introduction 19

and then down through the generations to their descendants today. The slave
traders’ descendants, with the exception of Mason’s, are much easier still to
find. Side by side the contrast between these families’ situations remains stark,
varying only really for Bostock’s nonwhite descendants (about whom more
later). So if, overturned, the transatlantic slave trade has left palpable inequality,
what might this imply for those who made the Middle Passage? Atypical it may
be, but this story provides a sliver of headland, a place from which to view the
journeys that contributed to today’s disparities as they sailed off along the sea
lanes that lead to the present.
 Part 1

Journeys
to the Slave Factory
 1
Son of a Liverpool
Slave Dealer

T he slave trade was the scenery of his childhood, the fresco backdrop to the
months and years as he grew. In other parts of Britain the abolitionist move-
ment was making huge inroads in popular opinion, but Robert Bostock was
raised in Liverpool, heartland of the centuries-old trade. Carrying Africans
across the sea for sale had made their city wealthy, and its tentacles reached
unashamedly onto the cobbled streets. Captains paraded through the town
proudly trailing a black “servant” brought home from their travels. Liverpool
had a Jamaica Street and the Goree Docks. Paradise Street housed the sailors’
taverns and brothels. Shops openly displayed handcuffs, leg irons, thumb-
screws, and the speculum oris: a device with which to wrench open the jaws of
any who might try to starve himself or herself to death. Liverpool Exchange
celebrated its trading successes by having opulent “Busts of Blackamores”
carved for its frieze. Their money was even called guineas, a quarter ounce of
gold in each.1
Perhaps we catch sight of Robert Bostock, a tow-haired boy, watching his
father’s ships being repaired at the old dock, amid the “gigantic docks of almost
Titanic masonry” where sugar, rum, cotton, and coffee from around the globe
were offloaded. Or perhaps we imagine him visiting his father’s office on Union
Street, bustling with seamen and only steps away from major slave traders like
Henry Blundell and the Backhouses. A square red pennant was his father’s
personal signal, hoisted when a slaving vessel was safely back from the treacher-
ous seas, leaving the family rejoicing.2
Slave trading was Robert’s family business, shoes that he would one day
step into just as other boys inherited a career as a carpenter or shopkeeper. His
father, Captain Robert Bostock, had joined the Royal Navy as a boy and after-
ward had been drawn to Liverpool and the slave trade. It was hardly an un-
usual or controversial decision; even people without seafaring skills joined in

23
24 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

the bonanza. By the mid-eighteenth century Liverpool was the center of Britain’s
slave trade, and it grabbed the imagination of “every order of people,” with
whirlwind rumors of vast fortunes made selling human beings at the markets of
Barbados, Jamaica, or Virginia. It “dazzled their ideas” like a gold rush, so that
“he who cannot send a bale, will send a bandbox.”3
Robert’s father, Captain Bostock, first commanded the tiny sloop Little Ben,
setting sail in August 1769 for Cape Mount and then selling 79 captives across
the seas at Dominica. There had been a second voyage in the Little Ben, then
another in the bigger Townside with the Little Ben in tandem. By 1773, Captain
Bostock was master of the Burrowes, yet a larger vessel. When his youngest son
was born and named for him, Captain Bostock was at the helm of the Bloom,
taking 239 captive hostages across the Atlantic for sale at St. John’s, Antigua.4
The slave trade may have lured with vast potential profit, but the risks were
legendary. Slave revolt, at worst a brutal death at the hands of a cargo of
“savages,” was the ultimate horror story luridly retold among Liverpool traders.
Larger crews, more weapons, and carefully crafted instructions from the mer-
chants were carried in hope of maintaining security. The muskets and chains
gave the whiff of protection.
The African coast was also notoriously deadly for Europeans. Written half
a century before and still in use, The Guinea Man’s Vade Mecum described the
“evil, malevolent, contagious, destructive fogs” that seemed to carry healthy
men away within a few hours. Things only got worse when they weighed anchor
for the transatlantic crossing. Imprisoned in the hold were bodies prostrate
with alarming diseases to which they had no resistance. Slaving vessels were
hothouses of malaria, yellow fever, hookworm, tapeworm, leprosy, syphilis,
yaws, opthalmia, elephantitis, trypanosomiasis, and dysentery, all generating
terror for Britons—especially middle-class Britons like Captain Bostock—who
were more familiar with smallpox, influenza, and tuberculosis. Some slave
ships employed a surgeon, but their skills were rather rudimentary even by the
standards of the day.5
There were other common difficulties too, problems his boss, slave mer-
chant Thomas Radcliffe, would have warned Captain Bostock about most
sternly on his earliest voyages. There was little trust of African dealers, with
language gaps, cultural misunderstandings, and overweening xenophobia
charging negotiations. Stories of long-winded haggling, bluffing, trickery, and
false promises were so rife that the word palaver had been adopted into English
to describe it.
So when Captain Bostock and his crew anchored at the Banana Islands off
the coast of Sierra Leone on one of his early voyages, conceivably aboard the
Son of a Liverpool Slave Dealer 25

Little Ben, he could only have been immensely reassured to meet the local chief.
His name was James Cleveland. It was an encounter that would not only pro-
foundly change Captain Bostock’s life but would have lasting repercussions for
his family, especially his then yet-to-be-born youngest son and namesake.
Captain Bostock likely anticipated some half-naked, wild African, but here was
a man so “polished in his manners” that he appeared like one of their own.
“With a White Man he is a White Man,” as one Englishman put it, and what
finer compliment could a late eighteenth-century Briton proffer? The son of an
Englishman and Ndamba, a Kissi woman, James Cleveland had been educated
in Liverpool. He knew how to “address an European with fair words,” flattering
his visitor by claiming that as the son of a white man he could not treat another
white man, another father to him, grievously. He promised Bostock a good
deal.6
In terms of how Captain Bostock saw Cleveland, it mattered that James
Cleveland spoke English fluently, ate with a knife and fork, and slept in a
European-style bed. It was not long past the days when ideas as to what consti-
tuted a person’s race encompassed far more than skin color. Lineage, education,
religion, culture, and even dress had all been signifiers as to a person’s “race” in
previous decades, and there was certainly not the attitude that anybody with
one discernible drop of African blood was “black.” This was deeply reinforced
by the fact that Cleveland’s whole family lived in a wholly different way than
the Africans they bought and sold. James’s half-sister Elizabeth, also educated in
Liverpool, moved to South Carolina and “lived her life as a member of the white
planter elite,” yet never attempted to hide in any way her African heritage.7
Cleveland was ruthless. He had expanded his territory by marrying the
sister of a neighboring rival, Charles Caulker, and then having him beheaded.
In his vast dominion he coaxed people into debt by forwarding goods that they
could not afford, then sending his personal militia, sometimes with deserters
from slave ships acting as officers, to harry the debtors. Homes, livestock, and
crops were laid waste, and anybody captured was made a slave. Those within
Cleveland’s reach gave up the age-old tradition of clearing the ground around
their homes and left bushes and trees to grow in order to provide cover if they
were forced to flee. Others simply abandoned their homes and built new ones
at the ends of creeks so narrow that only a single canoe could enter.8
Captain Bostock was so impressed by Cleveland, so relieved at the ease and
speed with which they had done business perhaps, that he continued to visit on
subsequent voyages. There is no record of it, but it is not improbable that
Captain Bostock had an African “wife” who was a member of the Cleveland
family, as other slaver captains did. Over the course of the next sixteen years,
26 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

Bostock and Cleveland certainly became allies. Having a man like Cleveland to
vouch for him was the best way that a European could do business in this part
of Africa. Even the Reverend John Newton, later one of the most assiduous
abolitionists, had an African patron while he was employed in the slave trade.
It was a relationship that endured so that even forty years later, vehemently
protesting the slave trade, Newton called his patron “my friend Harry.”9
Captain Bostock was yet more attached to James Cleveland than Newton
was to Harry Tucker, however. After a final slaving voyage aboard the Jemmy
in 1787, Captain Bostock decided to retire from the sea and become a slaving
merchant, leaving other, younger men to the dirtier, more dangerous side of
the trade. It was a regular career progression, but Captain Bostock made an
unusual decision. While the vast majority of Liverpool slaving merchants in-
structed their captains to buy from whosoever was selling, Captain Bostock
sent his ships to trade solely with his old friend James Cleveland.
This was rather extraordinary as their relationship was a friendship as
much as a business agreement, at least on Captain Bostock’s part. Mercantile
grievances he framed in terms of what he saw as their particular personal attach-
ment. It was a strange way of doing business. What exactly Cleveland felt about
all this is unclear, but young Robert Bostock and his siblings grew up very
much aware of their father’s great friend in Africa. Daughters Elizabeth,
Maria, and Margaret (young Robert’s older sisters) sat in the drawing room
meticulously embroidering ruffled shirts with James Cleveland’s name and
then sent them off to him aboard their father’s slave ships. Believing that Cleve-
land had named a son Robert after him, Captain Bostock sent a gift of a silver
coral to the baby, and young Robert Bostock grew up thinking that he had a
namesake out in Africa. The Bostock family fully expected Robert Cleveland to
live with them in England during his education.10
So Robert Bostock was a boy sure of one thing: venturing to Cleveland’s
stronghold on the Banana Islands would be his destiny. It was probably an
exciting proposition despite the risks of the “white man’s grave.” Both his older
brothers were sent out to the Banana Islands, and if they were like most other
young men of the era, they returned with tales of exquisite islands filled with
sandy beaches, palm trees, and people who wore rather less clothing than was
fashionable in England. Captain Bostock too could not forget his time with the
Clevelands and, sitting in his office in Liverpool, daydreamed of being back
on the islands; happy memories he likely passed on to his children. It must all
have seemed most exotic to the young Robert Bostock. Even the name of their
islands, banana, spoke of a fruit about which he had heard but had certainly
never eaten.11
Son of a Liverpool Slave Dealer 27

Yet as the years went on it all went fearfully wrong. This was perhaps un-
surprising, since whether Bostock’s friendship with Cleveland was truly recipro-
cated is far from certain. In Bostock’s mind their closeness meant that Cleveland
should give him special treatment, but it was not to be. In 1789, frustration build-
ing, Captain Bostock wrote to Cleveland: “I think [because of ] the Friendship
subsisting betwixt you & me that if you wou’d not give me the preference you
wou’d certainly give me my turn.” When Bostock’s ship Kite was wrecked at the
Banana Islands, misunderstandings and debts escalated. Captain Bostock be-
came increasingly enraged over money that Cleveland owed. He began to
write Cleveland very out of character and not very gentlemanly instructions, at
one point ordering him not to “involve yourself again in so much Debt.” “[N]o
Man that means well” could possibly act in such a manner without regret,
Captain Bostock wrote, a staggering change from his usual florid compliments
for his friend. When even these petitions failed, Captain Bostock began ordering
his ship captains to trade with other African merchants, in what amounted to a
seismic shift in his business tactics and ethic. But by that point he was mired in
debt, too.12
Whether from necessity or loyalty, he also continued to trade with Cleve-
land. In May 1790, during a time of crisis when Liverpool’s sailors were on
strike, Captain Bostock wrote to Cleveland complaining that he was so “much
distressed for want of Money at present” that he could “scarce keep my Credit
up.” I have “so much Property in your Hands,” he wrote, “I hope you will take
it into consideration and release me from these difficulties as soon as possible.”
The worst of it was that he believed that Cleveland had the money to repay
him but was declining to do so. Even the safe arrival of the Bostocks’ youngest
daughter Amelia failed to cheer him, and he lamented that he would rather
have received the money owed. It was all going horribly wrong. By December
1790, Captain Bostock’s account at Heywood’s Bank in Castle Street, Liver-
pool, was overdrawn by £1399 8s 3d. His business was failing, but he still hoped
it would be saved if Cleveland would repay him.13
Robert was only seven years old when these hopes were dashed. Captain
Bostock’s square red pennant was raised, but the cheer was cut short as his re-
turning ship carried terrible news. James Cleveland had passed away. It signaled
a bitter financial reverse for the Bostock family. “Riches or ruin on an enormous
scale” had always been the Liverpool merchants’ way of doing things, and
Captain Bostock seemed close to ruin. At the time of his death Cleveland owed
Bostock £1,237 3s,14 an amount that Captain Bostock, rather understating
matters, described as “a large Sum.” Bostock wrote urgently to James’s heir,
nephew William Cleveland, enquiring desperately “how you Intend to settle
28 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

his Affairs.” But William Cleveland would not or could not answer in a way
that satisfied Captain Bostock. Nevertheless, Bostock had a tombstone en-
graved for his old friend and sent it out to the Banana Islands to stand over his
grave.15
In 1792, at his Bootle home three miles to the north of Liverpool, Captain
Bostock became ill. He had been indisposed with gout for some time but now
became so sick that he abruptly stopped writing the letterbooks and ledgers he
had previously completed with meticulous care. The family tiptoed around him.
During his years first as a captain and then as a slaving merchant there had
been sustained attacks on the slave trade, but Captain Bostock’s sickness came
at a time when the abolitionists seemed to be winning. Only twenty-odd years
before, most Britons had believed that the Bible condoned slavery and that
Africans were both lesser people and especially suited to hard labor. But a suc-
cession of Enlightenment thinkers, Quakers, and evangelical Anglicans had
brought a remarkable change. Some former slave traders like John Newton
had turned against the business, and Newton’s Thoughts on the Slave Trade casti-
gated his former profession, making Britons aware of the horrors and cruelties.
Gustavus Vassa, later known as Olaudah Equiano, published his autobiography,
allowing a peep into the African side of the story. Many in Liverpool held firm
in support of the trade that had made them so wealthy, but in the rest of the
country abolitionism became a very popular cause. An unprecedented one in
six people signed a petition against the slave trade between 1787 and 1792.16
As Captain Bostock ailed, the abolitionists secured their first real parlia-
mentary victory. In April 1792, a bill ensuring the gradual abolition of the slave
trade passed the House of Commons and only failed to become law when
blocked by the House of Lords. It turned out to be only the first of a series of
shocks. In January 1793, Louis XVI went to the guillotine in Paris. Within
weeks, to the bewilderment and dismay of many, Britain declared war against
republican France. The abolitionist movement was temporarily silenced for
fear of appearing unpatriotic, but that suddenly turned into a relatively benign
problem. Now all maritime commerce would be quelled by the war.
The consequences were dire. A capital crisis gripped the country, with
regional banks faltering. Wretched confusion was wreaked in Liverpool when
one of the city’s major banks failed, owing “upwards of two millions.” Heywood’s
bank, where Captain Bostock held his account, was forced to borrow £40,000
from the Bank of England in late March and then a further £30,000 in May.
Smaller merchants in the city were the hardest hit. For Captain Bostock, sick
and desperately anxious, it was a miserable summer, particularly after the
bankruptcy of Bristol slave trader James Rogers, who had also dealt extensively
Son of a Liverpool Slave Dealer 29

with James Cleveland. There were over 1,300 bankruptcies in Britain in 1793,
more than two and a half times the usual number, but Rogers’s was one of the
most staggering.17
The toll on Captain Bostock was inestimable. A few months later he passed
away at the age of fifty. Robert Bostock, then nine years old, could only walk
behind his father’s coffin in the funeral procession as it led up the hill to St.
Anne’s Church in Richmond Street. The words “Tho mortals weep a Christian
dead” were selected for the tombstone.18
We cannot know if the young boy was aware of his father’s debts at this age.
As we catch a glimpse of the sad, small figure walking behind the coffin, perhaps
he was simply proud of the legacy he was inheriting. Tales of his father’s derring-
do would be more familiar to him than the children’s books that were just
coming into fashion. Captain Bostock had chased off a French ship in 1778
despite taking three broadsides. On his final voyage, while selling slaves at
Antigua, he had seen the king’s younger brother, accompanied by a dashing
young officer named Nelson. They were the kind of tales a young boy might
relish, as yet unaware of a more far more complex world.19

Besides their personal loss, Captain Bostock’s death delivered a devastating

financial blow for his family. The demise of the breadwinner meant an acute
drop in their living standards even after the debt-fuelled struggles of the previ-
ous years. Adding significantly to their troubles was the fact that Robert’s father
failed to leave a will, and it would be decades before his estate was finally ad-
ministered. In the meantime Robert’s mother, confined to widow’s weeds, was
forced to work, a situation considered most indecorous. Robert’s eldest brother
John, away at sea, was the only one of the children able to help the family finan-
cially, and his loss in a shipwreck not many years after Captain Bostock’s death
left the family devastated once more. Robert’s elder sisters’ suitors began shying
away—wealthy debutants were credited with beauty, good character, and ac-
complishments that the indebted were not felt to possess—and only Maria ever
married.20
Beyond the Bostock family’s personal instability, the nine years between
Captain Bostock’s death and Robert’s coming of age were a time of tumult in
Britain. In 1794, the government was so fearful of wholesale rebellion that habeas
corpus was suspended. “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,” wrote William Blake,
continuing with lines that seemed to incite revolt: “On what wings dare he
aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?” The war with France was going
30 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

badly, and in 1795 Prussia and Spain both sued for peace. The Industrial Revo-
lution, spurred by the cycles of slave trading, slave-grown crops, and their pro-
cessing, had already created population growth, increasing urbanization and
overcrowding, but when the added uncertainties of the war led to food shortages,
riots erupted in 1795–96 and 1800–1801. In 1797, major seamen’s strikes broke
out at Spithead and the Nore, triggering fears that Britain would succumb to
Jacobin-style revolution. The following year a widespread revolt against British
rule erupted in Ireland, agitation that Britain attempted to crush with carnage
and bloodshed. By 1800, Britain alone was left fighting France after Austria,
the Ottoman Empire, and Russia were defeated. Throughout the British Isles,
these were hard times.
When Robert turned eighteen it must have seemed evident what he must
do. Seafaring and trading had always been his calling, following his father
and older brothers. So, in 1802, Robert Bostock decided to sail for the Banana
Islands. His father’s money was still there—the will remained unresolved—and
with it the possibility of vindicating his family. Going to Africa was a rite of
passage for Bostock boys, and it was not difficult to find a berth. When Britain
and France signed the Treaty of Amiens, the temporary truce brought an
upsurge in maritime trade. Just that year, twelve slave ships were leaving Liver-
pool for Sierra Leone or the Windward Coast.21
There would have seemed few moral grounds to stop him joining the slave
trade. As Robert departed for Africa, it appeared as if 1792, as his father had
lain sick, had proved to be the height of the abolitionist campaign. The French
and Haitian Revolutions had halted the abolitionists’ crusade, and Liverpool
had just elected another noted slave trader as mayor. Others even seemed to be
rallying to the slave traders’ side. The French Revolutionary government had
abolished the trade, but Napoleon Bonaparte had introduced it once more.
The following year South Carolina also reopened its ports to slave ships. Even
if it should come to pass that the slave trade was outlawed, Robert Bostock
could always do as his father had once instructed and “make hay while the sun
shines.”22
 2
A Kissi Child Caught
in the Slave Trade

T he boys laughed as they scared away the birds, running with arms flapping
wildly when one dared to get too near. They made it fun, but it was a solemn
duty, a task they had to complete to ensure a good harvest, to prove they were
able to take on bigger jobs. Each evening on their way home they collected
firewood, entwining the branches into a rough bundle, then straggled gleefully
but sleepily back to the village. In the middle of the line we imagine Tamba,
average height, quick-witted, and tenacious, a well-made child who would
grow into a brawny adult.1
Nothing is known of Tamba’s childhood, but the Kissi people to whom he
belonged lived on the margins. To the north were savannah and hills, to the
south thick forest. The Kissi were rice farmers and knew that land and rainfall
were everything. The earth was the wife of the sky, and the sky shared its name
with the supreme god because it was from there that rain fell, fertilizing the
earth so that everyone could eat. Rice and rainfall marked out the seasons.
Each November as the rain stopped, families joined together, rushing to bring
in the harvest before the animals and birds stole the crop. As soon as it was
safely stowed, the celebrations and thanks to the gods and ancestors began.2
Homes were circular, made of clay from the riverbed, a conical roof of
carefully bound tuhuwe grass rising above. Tamba lived there with his mother,
his brother Saa, and sisters Sia, Kumba, and Finda. There could be other
brothers and sisters who had the same father but a different mother, and cousins
and second cousins and friends and relatives who, either by blood or marriage
or through the myriad other lines that spun out, embraced almost the whole
community. Tamba’s father would be the head of the immediate family, but
uncles, aunts, great uncles, grandparents, older cousins, and big brothers were
all respected, as of course were headmen and chiefs. Uninitiated boys like
Tamba knew their place. Within that role was life.3

31
32 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

The Kissi lived at the far reaches of the river that the Europeans called St.
Paul, but to the Kissi it was Diani or Nianda. Europeans believed that a myste-
rious mountain range called the Mountains of Kong began in Kissi territory,
but they were wrong. The hills to the north of the Kissi were the highlands of
the Futa Jallon. It was from there that terror came.4
In the time of Tamba’s grandparents and great-grandparents, the Fula had
founded a theocratic state in these highlands. They had launched jihad against
nonbelievers like the Kissi, enslaving infidels. It had begun a time of tragedy.
So many of the Kissi were sold to the coast that they were among the biggest
victims of the slave trade in the region. The sale of all those stolen then earned
the raiders more money to launch more raids. During Tamba’s childhood, the
elders would still remember brothers and sisters stolen away. They gathered
the young to tell of the great tragedies that had befallen their village. Boys like
Tamba grew up hearing warnings.5
Yet Kissi people took pride in their resilience. They were far from defeated.
Life went on much as it always had, moving forward with new ideas and dis-
coveries while honoring the wisdom of the past. Cotton cloth was woven into
the dramatic designs so treasured by everyone, and kola nuts and sometimes
salt, carried overland from the coast, were used as currencies. The elders taught
the lore and wisdom of the past to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren,
passing on knowledge of seasons and harvests. The rains fell each year, bringing
a time of sickness and hunger, and in the dry season crops were harvested and
life seemed bountiful. The gods and the ancestors were usually generous.6
Being quite a small ethnic group, the Kissi knew their immediate neighbors
since they traded with them at market. Many Kissi could speak in part the lan-
guages of the Manding, Kono, Gbande, Gola, or Loma, at least enough to buy
and sell and to hear news of lands further away. Apart from the Manding they
were all small groups with their own languages and religions so that a map of
the area by ethnic affiliation resembled an intricate patchwork.7
Other than the Manding and the Fula, the other contiguous groups—the
Loma, Gola, Kono, and Gbande—were also trying to defend their own gods
against the Muslim deity. At times these fellow nonbelievers were allies of the
Kissi. At other times they were enemies. This had long been the way of things,
but as the jihad destroyed communities and demand for slaves from the coast
grew ever stronger, the balance of life shifted. During a particularly brutal time
a “war hero” from a Gbande/Kissi conflict became the paramount chief, and
those disloyal to him had their villages burned down, their people sold into
slavery. Another warrior was notorious for his ruthlessness, and while he ruled,
A Kissi Child Caught in the Slave Trade 33

the slave trade with the Manding people flourished. Even the weekly market
became such a dangerous place that husbands went with their wives to prevent
them being captured. Things became so desperate, rumors so malicious, that
stories spread that the Kissi were reduced to the “wretchedness and barbarism”
of husbands selling unfaithful wives or parents selling their children.8
Whatever their languages, gods, and beliefs, common ideas ran through
the region’s peoples, extending out far beyond the Kissi and their nearest
neighbors. Within each group, from the oldest to the youngest, each person
was part of a pattern, their piece interlocking with all the others to make one
element. They were individuals, of course, but all together they made life itself,
something far greater than any one of them alone. Little personality, little of
the very quiddity of a person, existed without family and wider community.
People did not say that they had a brother or a child or a nephew, but that they
were a brother or a parent or an uncle/aunt, since it was this that most defined
them. The Kissi people’s neighbors, the Gbande, made boys memorize their
entire lineage by heart before they could be initiated into adulthood. The mark
of a true man was to know his place among other men.9
Lineages encompassed the ancestors and the ones not yet born. Their people
were their people and always would be, ties that transcended feeble earthly
constraints. To the Kissi the dead were not really gone but sleeping, able to
speak to the living through the wind and other natural phenomena that were
revered as manifestations of Malika, the Supreme Being. For the Mende, a large
and powerful people to the northwest of the Kissi, two or three generations of
the dead, collectively called “grandfather,” were ancestral spirits who dwelled
among the living. Poised between worlds, they could intercede between the
living and “the all-seeing, all-knowing father-protector” called Leve or Nwegɔ.
The Gbande regularly delivered food to their dead who had “gone to gather
herbs,” and they were always consulted on major decisions. Newborn Gbande
children were believed to be gifts from these ancestor spirits.10
Since belonging was vital, and identity beyond the bounds of kin group was
hard to conceive, leaving the homeland permanently was unthinkable. It was
so monstrous a fate that the Kissi would only forever banish one of their kin for
witchcraft. Each society incorporated within itself disagreements over land, un-
happy spouses, rebellious young men, or other fissures that ensued. Only in the
most extreme circumstances would somebody be forced to leave.11
Banishment was by far the worst thing that could befall anybody. It was
graver than poverty, sickness, or war. Even death was just another stage of the
human journey. But to be alone without the kin and wider clan that made life
34 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

livable was so alarming that it incited all manner of disasters including mental
breakdown. “To be at the mercy of strangers in a strange land” was the epitome
of human suffering.12
Since belonging was life, parents gave their children names that told of
their place in the world and wove them into the family and through that into
their wider clan and society. A name spoken out loud gave the listener informa-
tion since everybody in the region knew the order of names in families. When
Tamba spoke his simple two-syllable name, people across a vast area knew that
he was his mother’s second-born son and that his family were Kissi or perhaps
Kono, a related people whose names overlapped with those of the Kissi. First-,
second-, and third-born Kono and Kissi sons shared their names, although
fourth-born sons did not. Other names were given to twins, children born di-
rectly after twins, or a child born after their previous sibling had died. It was
through a name that a person became part of society. It was how they would
take their place in the warp and weft of history.13
The Sherbro people, distant relatives who had been neighbors at some
point in the past, also had these “umbilical names.” So too did the Mano,
whose land was to the south and east, near the Kpelle and Belle. A Mano
mother called her sons Saye, Nyahn, and Paye in the order of their arrival, and
her daughters Kou, Yah, and Yei, although she might also choose a different
name that had come to her in a dream, derived from an elders’ comment, or
was in honor of a godparent or ancestor. A middle name was the child’s “story
name,” telling of some event around the time of his or her birth.14
People from further away had names that spoke of the time or place in
which they had been born, or relayed a message or a parable about their life or
character. Some names told of a father’s profession or a characteristic of their
mother during her pregnancy. Most people did not have any equivalent of a
surname or lineage title, and normally clan names were things to keep secret,
not to be revealed to anybody outside of their home village. Different names
were used in different situations for it was only while safely at home that all the
facets of a person’s being could be revealed without fear of misfortune.15

Whether Tamba was initiated before he was stolen away is unclear. He did
not bear any Poro cicatrices, but that does not necessarily mean that he was
uninitiated. He might well have been old enough to live through the Poro bush
but still young enough to be called “boy” when he arrived at the coast.
A Kissi Child Caught in the Slave Trade 35

So now we must imagine him slightly older than when he had been collecting
firewood. Now the end of early boyhood has brought with it a most anticipated
occasion, when a boy became a man through initiation into the men’s society.
It was a mark of great pride, knowing that childhood was to be cast off and his
abilities and strengths would help sustain and defend his people. But even if no
boy would ever admit it, that excitement was mixed with dread. He would be
away from his mother, father, brothers, and sisters for months or even years
while undergoing initiation. Only masked spirits would pass between the world
of the initiates and the village delivering news of how the children were pro-
gressing. In the sacred bush he must learn all the skills and knowledge—laws,
social norms, lineages, songs, dances, stories of the ancestors, specialized skills,
fighting tactics—to see him through life.16
Adding to his hidden fears would be the older boys’ teasing, terrifying tales
of wild animals that would claw the boys’ backs or spears run through initiates’
bodies. Nobody could or would tell Tamba and his age mates what was really
going to happen since to know the rituals prior to initiation risked death. So
clandestine were the rites and rituals to non-initiates that they were termed
“secret societies,” even though there was nothing else secret about them. It was
certainly no secret who was a member since everybody was. There was no
other way to be a full human being. The societies stretched far back into history
uniting the past and present, the “all-pervading spirit world” with the everyday
realm of mortal men. There was a society for the men, and Tamba’s sisters
would go through parallel rituals to join a counterpart society that meant that
they were no longer girls but women.17
The wild animals and the spears had to be faced, come what may. Although
most of the stories of the initiation bush would prove to be myths, some parts of
the process would be painful since preparing children for initiation also meant
physically readying them for marriage and parenthood through circumcision.
A boy who still had his foreskin was condemned as “a weakling, an inferior
being.” For girls, a clitoridectomy was considered to be having their last bit of
maleness removed so that they were fully women and could therefore become
pregnant and give birth.18
Boys and sometimes girls had cicatrices cut into their backs: the origin of
those myths of wild animals’ claw marks. Delicate, dainty scars were desired,
and it was important to show no weakness as the knife sliced. Some groups cut
scars to signify the order in which boys entered the initiation bush, or their (ritu-
alized) escape from the wild animals or devils said to inhabit the sacred spaces.
Some told of their homes: Mano boys had scars cut “around the neck” and
36 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

down across the chest “where they branch[ed] into several double rows” swirling
around and back up to the neck. Some Mende boys had “a main line running
from the neck to the base of the spine, and from this roughly horizontal lines
passing under the shoulder blades and along the waist.” Any special skills
learned in the Poro bush might lead to extra marks, such as “circles round the
breasts,” which was a mark of great honor.19
At the end of this lengthy period of study, practice, listening, and being
tested, the initiation ceremony would be the biggest day of Tamba’s life so far.
Like all initiates he would take a new name, sometimes something told “from
the tree-tops, from the sleeping amphibian, from the prowling animal, and
from the very deeps of the earth.” Other people’s names were already decided,
such as clans who had names for the order in which the boys and girls had
entered initiation. Boys who learned a specialized skill or job adopted that as
their name. Forever after it would confer status. Among other peoples it was
very bad luck to later mention a boy’s or girl’s birth name, as it invoked the
impure person they had been before initiation, but the Kissi retained the names
that told of their birth order. Tamba remained Tamba, though perhaps he had
an initiation name with his age mates, a more personal, secret name that would
be their bond.20
Returned to the village, after the celebrations and congratulations, Tamba
and his brother initiates would be considered suitably prepared for adulthood,
and they would now be able to one day marry, own property, hold office, or
participate in important discussions. Connections made in the initiation bush
would be a haven through whatever life would later become.21
They would also form connections across their different ethnic groups for
those who suffered the fate of being separated from their people. Since the soci-
eties in various forms existed across the region, they were the stitches holding
together the patchwork of different ethnicities. Only the Muslim Manding and
the coastal Kru stood apart, and their refusal to recognize the sacred spirits of
the Poro and Sande societies was one of the reasons they were outsiders. For so
many, membership of the Poro and Sande societies would be the power clung
to when life fell apart.22

It is not possible to catch sight of Tamba as he was somehow caught up in the

waves of enslavement and made his way to the coast. He was in the historical
shadows, unseeable as the waves of violence ensnared him and carried him
away. He never left any record of these events, only that they happened while
A Kissi Child Caught in the Slave Trade 37

he was young. It was perhaps during the journey that he suffered the punish-
ments or injuries that led to the scars that he would carry for the rest of his life
on his right knee and lower back.23
We can surmise that there was mental trauma, but that has left little direct
record on the page. Since Kissi land was far from the coast, the walk must have
stretched him to the limits of endurance and then beyond into realms where
life ceded to mere existence. The stars in the cooler evening, the rare sips of
water, these were in all probability his only comforts when tethered in a coffle,
trying to synchronize each footfall with his fellow sufferers to minimize the
injuries from the chains. He was part of a swell, thousands of others captured,
sold, or pawned, all walking across Africa toward the sea. It was a procession of
pain, despair, and fury.
He survived to reach the seacoast. There, instead of being sold to a ship to
cross the Atlantic, he was kept to be a factory slave. Amid the hell and chaos that
the trade in human beings visited across the land, exactly how this happened is
unclear. Maybe it was James Cleveland, himself the son of a Kissi woman, who
recognized Tamba as a relative of his mother Ndamba. Such chance meetings
could change the fate of anybody, could save a child at the last moment from a
slave ship’s hold.24
Tamba, though a slave, was destined to stay in Africa.
 3
The Banana Islands
to Gallinas

F or most young British men the Banana Islands were an earthly paradise. The
sandy beaches enticed, and when the heat got to be too much, there was the
shade of a palm tree or a swim in the aquamarine waters of the bays. Robert
Bostock could taste tamarind, wild plum, guava, and yam and admire the birds
with plumage far more brilliant than anything he had previously seen. At night
the stars were charming.1
But Bostock discovered a major flaw in his plan to reclaim the money
owed to his late father. When Robert arrived at the Banana Islands in 1802, the
Clevelands, his family’s debtors, were not there. Even the gravestone sent out
by his father for James Cleveland was gone. Instead he found himself in the
midst of a war between the Clevelands and their enemies, the Caulkers. After
James Cleveland’s death the Caulkers had scented weakness and lost no time in
punishing past wrongs. Stephen Caulker, brother of the man whom James
Cleveland had once had beheaded, swiftly attacked. In early 1798, the Cleve-
lands fled aboard a slave ship to Sherbro, and the Caulkers took control of the
Banana Islands. Inevitably, it was not the end of the affair. European slave
traders advanced William Cleveland, James’s nephew, goods and arms to wage
war on the Caulkers, sure that conflict would increase the number of captives
brought to market. A shocked British man observed that the victims of the war
were not just men holding muskets, but women and children, captured and
sold.2
Robert Bostock was alone in Africa. But the possibility of slave trading was
open to him, particularly with the ongoing conflict, and perhaps this had been
his intention all along. He needed a patron, and Stephen Caulker was happy to
stand in that role. Caulker made a further offer: Bostock would marry one of
his daughters. It was a way to assure loyalty and an investment on both men’s

38
The Banana Islands to Gallinas 39

part. Even had he so wanted, it was an offer Bostock could hardly refuse. To do
so would cause the greatest offence.3
Marriages in England were solemn affairs of the church, one woman for a
lifetime. This was nothing of the kind. Robert surely believed that he would
later return home to find a suitable English wife, a demure girl who embroidered
and played the pianoforte like his sisters. The celebration of this marriage re-
quired drumming, rum for everybody on the islands, and the sacrifice of animals.
The earlier wedding of an Englishman to one of James Cleveland’s daughters
had been celebrated with a chorus of epithalamiums, the firing of one hundred
cannon, and the slaughter of the only bull for miles around. “Gad so! I believe I
am in love with her!” the groom had written back to England, praising his new
wife’s shape as “like the Venus of Medicis.”4
Robert Bostock married a daughter of the powerful Caulker clan. He sat
watching the drumming, made the required offerings of beads, cloth, and hand-
kerchiefs. He watched as his young bride was brought toward him under the
shade of an umbrella.5
Shortly afterward, on the island that his father had loved, he did his first
deals as a slave trader. He began to learn the tactics, the way to deal, the local
headmen, and whom to trust. The Caulkers were his in-laws, his patrons, and
his financiers. For the next few months, the Banana Islands were his home.6

Tamba lived on the Plantain Islands, tiny dots of tropical beach three miles off
the mainland and just south of the Banana Islands. The men engaged in fishing
while the women grew crops, particularly the Egusi seeds for which the islands
were renowned, but it was also a strategic post in the slave trade. A few decades
earlier John Newton had been a slave trader there, and the mighty Caulker
family had taken it as their headquarters around the 1780s, just a few years
before James Cleveland beheaded Chief Charles Caulker. Under their owner-
ship the slave trade flourished, and barracoons were constructed with metal
shackles fastened into mud walls. By the early nineteenth century it was “one of
the greatest slave markets on the coast.”7
Like John Newton before him, Tamba lived on the largest of the islands,
“low and sandy, about two miles in circumference and almost covered with
palm-trees.” The population tiny, everybody knew Tamba, and he knew them.
The Sherbro and Bullom languages spoken at the islands were related to his
own Kissi language, and Tamba quickly became fluent. And as traders came
40 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

by to purchase Egusi and sell slaves and other commodities, he learned words
of Mende and Vai and of the other languages that stretch down the coast. He
also grew accustomed to the white men who came to call in their crowded,
putrid slave ships and soon understood many of their words too.8
Tamba became a polyglot and knew that the richness of the African lan-
guages, with their many words for each permutation of domestic slave and
trade slave and so many other levels of servitude, represented clearly his position
relative to those chained in the barracoons. “Slave” could be cε in Kissi, woko in
Bullom, nduwe in Mende, wono in Sherbro, but there were many more alterna-
tives in all of these languages, words that could account for his own status. This
was the truth he clung to: he was not being sold across the ocean. There was
safety in belonging to such a powerful clan as the Caulkers. The white men
who came to buy, with their words slave, esclavo, and escravo, did not have this
richness of understanding. He learned the English word servant. It was the closest
thing he had.9
Only three miles off shore, he grew to adulthood an expert canoe man.
Climbing into a dugout and paddling it over to Shenge on the mainland, or
taking one of the bigger craft to make the longer journey northwest to the Ba-
nana Islands or southward to Sherbro, was as familiar to him as walking the
golden sands of the Plantains. He also knew that directly inland from the Ba-
nana Islands was the southernmost part of Sierra Leone, the British colony. As
the slave trade was pronounced to be illegal by the British and Americans, the
Caulkers looked to the south, away from these enemies to their business empire.
And at some point, conceivably as part of his marriage deal, the Caulkers gave
or sold Tamba to Robert Bostock.

Sailors knew it as the Windward Coast, rolling the first word off the tongue and
eliding the two halves to make “Winerd.” Sometimes they called it the Pepper
Coast after the “grains of paradise” whose purple flowers lined the inland water-
ways. Until the turn of the eighteenth century, slave ships usually sailed right
by, leaving crews to the more mundane business of working the ship all the way
from Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River to Fort Appollonia at the far west
of the Gulf of Guinea. The surf was too rough; immense waves arriving from
their transatlantic swirl meant the landing was not worth the risk.
In the early nineteenth century, however, as the illegalization of the trans-
atlantic slave trade seemed to be in the cards, the Windward Coast beckoned
with new prospects. Just beyond the pounding waves was a separate world. An
The Banana Islands to Gallinas 41

Atlantic sea bar stretched down much of the coast, and hidden behind it was a
network of placid mangrove creeks. It made trading easy. Canoes bringing
captives in ones, twos, fives, and tens could easily paddle down the mellow rivers
and creeks to sell their human wares.10
Working for the Caulkers at the Banana Islands, Robert Bostock heard
about this potential, and soon a new opportunity presented itself. He was offered
the job of second-in-command to a slave trader named Lancelot Bellerby, who
owned a factory at Gallinas on the Kerefe River. Bellerby, like Bostock, was
from Liverpool, and it must have seemed like a good fit, so Robert Bostock and
his new young wife set off on the short voyage.11
Bellerby’s business was booming. Ships owned by the DeWolfs of Rhode
Island—the most avid of North American slave traders whose head was soon to
be the second richest man in the nation—patronized his factory. It was the
DeWolf dynasty’s heyday in the slave trade: they were taking advantage of
what turned out to be a brief lull between earlier attempts to outlaw the trade
and its eventual ban. Under the terms of the U.S. Constitution, the first date by
which the trade could be outlawed was 1808, and moves were being made to
make that a reality. The DeWolfs intended to profit as much as they could in
the meantime.12
In just one seven-month period in 1804, the DeWolfs dispatched eighteen
slaving expeditions to Africa. They were making a fortune, and James DeWolf
soon began building his mansion, the Mount, just as his brother William built
his own grand home, Hey Bonnie Hall. Daughters of the family rode around in
carriages, wore fresh ribbons in their hair and silk stockings, had music and
dancing lessons, and learned to play the harp.13
The Windward Coast was far from the only area that the DeWolfs favored
for their slaving expeditions, but it was a place to which they kept sending their
captains, sure that their usual dealers would provide them with human cargoes.
In 1804, their small sloop Nancy visited Gallinas to purchase slaves. Their slaver
Hiram visited in 1805 followed by the Three Sisters. DeWolf vessels Jane and
Charlotte also called at Bellerby and Bostock’s factory that year to trade for
captives. Captain John Sabens of the Charlotte purchased some girls called
“Tully, Peggy, Purrow and Naco” that he chose as “cabin girls.” He hoped that
later slave buyers in Havana would find them equally sexually desirable and
pay up to “$350 a head” for them.14
It was not just for their wealth and the scale of the operations that the
DeWolf family and their captains were unrivaled allies for Bellerby and Bostock.
They were steady friends in uncertain times. In 1804, word reached Bellerby
and Bostock that the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade had
42 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

again been meeting in Great Britain. Having paused its earlier campaign when
war with France erupted, it was now once again pushing its cause. Slave ships
arriving from Liverpool, Bristol, and London bore the news that bills to pro-
hibit slave trading were once more being introduced to Parliament. It did not
bode well, but a quick tot of rum and a laughing exchange with those who
knew all about the exploits of the DeWolf family could only help ameliorate
any unease. Captain Jim DeWolf was a byword of defiance toward abolitionist
rulings and any who sought to check the slave trade’s wildest reaches. In his
career as a slave ship captain he had managed to sidestep two separate accusa-
tions that he had murdered slaves. He had been unruffled even by an arrest
warrant from George Washington, and he remained so well respected that he
was elected to the Rhode Island House of Representatives. Later he would
move on to the U.S. Senate.15
Such feats made for fine tales over a bottle of port or beer in the humid
evenings of Gallinas. They could laugh at the impotent thundering of the abo-
litionists who saw their hard-won laws scorned. In the 1790s and 1800s, when
Rhode Island began controlling the slave trade, the DeWolfs had flagrantly
flouted the rules. Even when caught out they had turned it into the stuff of
legend. In 1799, when the Lucy was captured illegally slaving and was about to be
sold as a forfeit, they had sent out some of their blackguards, dressed as Indians,
to kidnap the auctioneer. Then they repurchased the vessel for a pittance.16
In a legendary act of bluster, a few years earlier they had succeeded in
having their small town designated a discrete customs district. James DeWolf ’s
brother-in-law, a former slave ship captain who “personified contempt for the
abolition law,” had been installed as its collector. Their ships’ men boasted out
in Africa of how they stole out of Bristol claiming to be bound for Cuba with
rum, acquired fake papers, and then sailed for slaves.17
By 1805, the lure of all of those stories and the wealth to be had in Bristol
was overpowering. Lancelot Bellerby decided to try a new approach to the
business. Taking passage aboard one of the DeWolf slave vessels, he sailed to
Rhode Island and linked up directly with the DeWolf family.
Robert Bostock, just turned twenty-one years old, ruled his own slave trading
business for the first time. Within the crumbling walls of the compound he was
feudal lord.18

At their home near Glasgow, Scotland, John McQueen’s parents had to decide
how to give their son the best chance in life. Young John was ten or eleven
The Banana Islands to Gallinas 43

years old, pale skinned and blue eyed with hair that would be dark by adult-
hood. He was tall for his age. Apprenticeships were widely considered to be the
best choice for growing boys, a good investment for sons of the middling sort.
Increasingly, as Glasgow’s Atlantic trading links burgeoned, boys went into
maritime industries, learning trades and living under the strict rules that gener-
ally keep them out of trouble. Being apprenticed to a father or grandfather was
common if that possibility existed, but McQueen’s father could not offer such a
role. The McQueens had another option, however. John Lascelles, an uncle to
young John (whether biological or titular is unclear), owned a slave factory out
in West Africa.19
A decade before, the year Olaudah Equiano spoke in the city, thirteen
thousand Glaswegians had signed a petition against the slave trade. But there
was always considerable support among Glaswegians for its continuation, even
among those who did not have a close personal connection with it. Glasgow’s
boom times were built on slave-produced crops, mainly tobacco and rum, and
many were loath to see the profits of trade fade away. Plus, in the decade since
the petition, the abolitionist cause had been off the agenda, and other concerns
had come to the fore. Two years earlier riots had broken out over shortages of
potatoes and oatmeal.
John’s parents would have known of West Africa’s reputation as deadly to
white men, but there were few certainties along any path: smallpox carried
away nearly one in five people in their city. Did they also perhaps fear that
John would not grow up to be the most civilized of men in Africa, being so far
away from proper society? We cannot know, not least since there is little evidence
of the family’s financial standing or social aspirations. Lascelles was wealthy
and far away from Glasgow, where the population was growing apace. Perhaps,
struggling themselves, they were relieved at having one less mouth to feed.
A decision was made. Conceivably they hoped that Lascelles, apparently
without a European heir, would pass on the business to his nephew. The
McQueens decided it was their boy’s best chance in life. John, still a child,
sailed for Africa.20
John McQueen was not the only British boy growing up in West Africa’s
slave factories. Other families made the same judgment. Robert Bostock’s
older brother had been scarcely older than McQueen when he had first traveled
to James Cleveland’s demesne at the Banana Islands. Malcolm Brodie, later a
colleague, arrived in Africa “as a young boy” to work at John Frazer’s factory.
Men and women walked out of Frazer’s in chains and shuffled ashore in Florida.
Richard Drake starting slave trading on the Windward Coast in his midteens.
He became expert at turning a profit from sick captives, using “drugging,
44 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

cupping and blistering” to render the ailing saleable. American families also
made this choice for their sons. George Cook, another future colleague of
Bostock’s, claimed that he left his home when he was about ten years old to go
to the Îles de Los to work for infamous slave trader Benjamin Curtis.21
Boys like John would learn the simplest tasks first: filling in the bookkeeping
entries and arranging payments for local dealers. He also had to learn how to
spot sick slaves who had been made to look healthy to trick the inexperienced
buyer; to check for “yellow eye, swollen tongue and feverish skin.” He got to
know the other white dealers like Lancelot Bellerby, next door, and soon
Bellerby’s new associate, Robert Bostock. Bellerby and Bostock were older
than McQueen, but the resident European population in Gallinas was tiny,
and they socialized together, sharing pointers about African dealers and slave
ship captains who came to call. Ships’ captains left overseas mail with one
man for delivery to another. They shared scarce items and a consensus of
superiority.22
As the years passed, McQueen went from a boy playing on the back streets
of Glasgow to a youth who was proficient in the nuances of palavers with local
chiefs. He knew how to haggle with slave ship captains the way his contempo-
raries knew how to plane wood. The cost of each and every item in bars was as
familiar to him as produce was to a Glasgow shopkeeper. Each dry season was
a parade of dealers and deals, ships and shipments. The current of human mer-
chandise kept walking out of their factory and onto the vessels that would carry
them away. Each rainy season was a time of “insufferable lassitude and despon-
dency” when there was little to do but listen to the sound of the deluge battering
the thatch.23
In 1805 trouble came to Gallinas. The king was dead, and local chiefs in-
cluding Siaka and Faŋsona engaged in a power struggle. Lascelles lent Faŋsona
“forty slaves and ten puncheons of rum” for his fight. Then in the midst of the
protracted battle, Lancelot Bellerby returned as supercargo of a fleet of DeWolf
vessels. Bellerby was anxious to brag to his old friends about his many successes
in Rhode Island, where young belles knew him as “rich Mr Bellaby” and he
had begun courting Miss Jane Smith. But this venture, caught up in the Gallinas
conflict, was ill-starred. With many slave dealers absent as the battles raged, the
factories were all but deserted, and filling the holds proved impossible. Bellerby
was forced to sail away with far fewer slaves than planned, and James DeWolf
would pursue him for lost profits through the courts of South Carolina and
Havana.24
John McQueen had bigger problems. Faŋsona was on the losing side.
Then, with fighting at the factory gates, his uncle, master, and protector died.
The Banana Islands to Gallinas 45

Only in his midteens, John McQueen was alone in Africa and blockaded by
angry armies. He smuggled himself aboard the first available ship and sailed
away at the last moment. With little reason to return now that his uncle was
dead, he took a job at Sherbro Island.25
 4
Making Deals with Siaka,
Selling to the DeWolfs

By 1807, when a ship arrived carrying the startling news that the king and
country had illegalized his business, Robert Bostock was back in Gallinas. With
avarice trouncing pique, as fighting receded the chiefs allowed the white traders
to slink back. Now Siaka, Faŋsona, and the rest heard about the new law but
were mystified. The white men had no control over their lands. Who could tell
them what to do in their own territory? More mysteriously, white men had
always been devoted to buying captives, had caused the trade to double and
treble and quadruple with their incessant hungering for more African bodies.
By what strange logic were they now saying that it was wrong?1
Bostock left no hint about his decision to continue slave trading when others
hung up their manacles and sailed home. Perhaps he believed his father to
have been nothing like the murderous, monstrous slavers the abolitionists de-
scribed. Feasibly he was swayed by arguments that captives would still be there,
and possibly be slaughtered wholesale, if he and the other dealers did not buy
them. Slave trading could be posited as a humanitarian option if the lens was
tilted far enough in the right direction. Britain sent off its own criminals in ships
to the far side of the world, having founded the prison colony New South Wales
in 1788 specifically for this purpose. Maybe it was the right of Africans to do the
same?2
The color of the rationalizations, no matter their hue, was gold. There were
still voracious slave markets to be fed, especially in Cuba and Brazil. Greed has
never yet been overcome through parliamentary decree. DeWolf vessels still
heaved into view, their holds full to the brim. An increasing number of vessels
based in Cuba vowed to openly disobey the laws of the phlegmatic northerners.
Slave trading had always been a high-stakes business, and becoming outlaws
merely added a new frisson of adventure. There was camaraderie among
brigands.

46
Making Deals with Siaka, Selling to the DeWolfs 47

New men arrived, such as American trader Charles Mason,3 lured by the
higher profits as risks increased. Mason worked closely with William Crundell,
a white slave dealer who had sided with Siaka in the recent conflict and so was
now on the winning side. Soon Gallinas was once again an attractive destination
for slave ship captains.4
They were precariously close to the enemy nevertheless. Sierra Leone, a
tiny colony originally called the Province of Freedom, was just up the coast. It
had been founded in 1787 by a group of blacks from Britain, mostly refugees
from the American War of Independence. Others who had liberated themselves
by fleeing ended up in Nova Scotia at the end of the war, then sailed in 1792 for
Africa. In 1800 Maroons had also arrived in the colony, deported by the British
from Jamaica for revolt.5
The settlement had been a mosquito buzzing the slave trading leviathan
since Bostock was a boy. From the start the idea behind the colony had been to
defeat the slave trade. Thomas Clarkson, second only to Wilberforce in the
British abolitionist campaign, had written in 1788 that “the Establishment of a
Free Settlement on the Coast of Africa for honourable Trade would be the
most effectual means of destroying the Slave Trade.” Its principles of free Afri-
can labor and the reality of black men sitting on juries and holding their own
government had caused many a slave trader’s wry joke. But with the slave trade
made illegal, the colony became a hazard. On January 1, 1808, the Union Jack
was hauled up the flagpole in the capital, Freetown, and the settlement of
around two thousand people officially became a British colony. The British
government dispatched two Royal Navy vessels to be stationed there to catch
illegal slavers. A Vice-Admiralty Court was set up to adjudicate anybody so
captured. African captives found aboard illegal slavers would find homes in the
colony.6
There were some who tutted at the absurdity of it all. Britain was tied up in
a European war that had been virtually ceaseless since 1792. The Royal Navy
needed to deliver troops and supplies, protect borders, and collect money to
pay for it all. The nation did not have enough ships or sailors to launch an attack
on a business that was so entrenched. More than one old seadog believed that
they should concentrate on repelling the French rather than aiming their
cannons at the slave trade.7
But for men like Bostock and Mason it was galling and risible more than
threatening. The risks of actually being caught were low because Gallinas had
a feature that allowed them to dodge unwanted scrutiny. The long sea bars that
stretched along the coast separated the slavers from any bigger vessels hoping
to capture them. Merchants were already sending out smaller, livelier craft for
48 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

just this reason. These compact vessels from Havana and Matanzas in Cuba
and from São Luís do Maranhão on Brazil’s Caribbean coast could get over
the bars at high tide, gliding into the languid waters behind. There they were
safe to go about their business since the navy’s bigger vessels could not cross.8
Gone were the days when slave ships meandered down the coast purchasing
captives in small lots. Now merchants had an entire shipload readied in advance
so that captains and supercargoes could embark the captives in less than forty-
eight hours and sneak away. A few years later, the governor of Sierra Leone
would lament that “vessels coming to the Coast for Slaves are now so quick in
their movements that I generally get information of their arrival & departure
by the same conveyance.”9
So Bostock and Mason’s Gallinas factory developed a rhythmic spirit:
gentle trading down the mellow creeks in the dry season, a long, dull hiatus as
the deluge hit, and the lurches into action whenever slave ships came to call,
transforming their simple factories into choreographed commotion. It was
an auditorium of inhumanity and misery, an epic performance of greed and
violence.
But then a strike sliced through their secluded creeks that involved an
American DeWolf vessel. Although the Americans had banned the slave trade
from 1808, the earliest date allowed by the Constitution, this move had been
far less controversial than in Britain. So when James DeWolf ’s brig Baltimore
had arrived back in Rhode Island with a cargo of slaves at the end of 1807 he
had dispatched it to the Windward Coast once more. It weighed anchor in
November 1807, only weeks before the ban would start. He was pushing to its
limits the concept of a grace period in which to complete delayed voyages, in true
DeWolf style. (Another DeWolf vessel, Three Sisters, left for Africa on December
21, 1807, a mere ten days before the ban.) Having traded through earlier sanc-
tions, he evidently saw no reason not to carry on.10
It proved a miscalculation. In March 1808, the Baltimore was cruising off the
Îles de Los with seventy-two captives aboard when the crew spotted a vessel
flying the Union Jack. The British boarded and questioned them. Captain Slo-
cum failed to argue convincingly that he was not breaking regulations as there
were obviously slaves aboard. The Baltimore was carried into Sierra Leone,
where the captives were liberated.
Hearsay, rumor, and anger hove heartily down the coast. In Bristol DeWolf
raged, but it did not stop the patrols. In November one French and two Brazilian
vessels fell to the patrol’s cannons. Then came a lull. In late 1809, come the dry
season, it began again. More than a hundred African captives were rescued
from the Cuba. The Two Cousins was carried into Freetown and made a prize of
Making Deals with Siaka, Selling to the DeWolfs 49

war. The Netherlands’ schooner Africaan was forfeited for the three captives
found beneath decks.11
Alongside these captures, nevertheless, ran stories of lucky escapes, fights
won, and new methods of decoy. The navy’s patrols were a tiny dam attempting
to hold back a tidal wave. The risks of being captured were small and potential
profits ever greater. It became a sport, slavers trying to outdo each other by in-
venting new ways to beat the patrol. Among the mangrove-screened inlets of
Gallinas country, small slave trading schooners played a game of tag with British
cruisers. There were stories of a ship that blatantly relanded its captives and
compelled them to sing and dance on the beach, taunting the British, who
could only detain a vessel if slaves were aboard. British patrol captains were
rumored to occasionally be willing to take bribes to sail away when a slave ship
was due, a game known wryly as “Johnee Bull.”12
As 1808 became 1809 and then 1810, Bostock and Mason must have been
slyly thrilled. Business was booming. Captains still in the slaving business no
longer called at older, established slaving ports. More discreet places swept into
fashion, and the geography of the slave trade shifted. They and their neighbors
were clear winners, as Gallinas was the perfect place for these new times. Their
trade swelled to a size never seen when it all had been legal. The hum of promise
became a roar.13

In 1809, Robert Bostock and Charles Mason went into business together.
While most British traders had left, and those who remained fretted about the
proximity of the British Navy’s patrol boats, American merchants were less
abashed, even after the Baltimore affair. The British, with their cool climate and
pinched cheeks, had suddenly become moralistic, but America still had planta-
tions and farms that demanded slave labor. In many port cities across the South
it was an open secret that slave trading continued. Illegalization was near to
being a joke. Countless were in cahoots, and customs agents were simply bribed
to look away. Abolition appeared to be a northern-led hypocrisy, and many
wanted no part of it.
At least a thousand or so Africans were still imported into the United States
each year, sneaked in under cover of night or aboard slave ships claiming to be
“in distress.” Tens of thousands more were sold elsewhere having been trans-
ported aboard American ships, with American crews, or funded by American
money. The African Institution of London estimated that American ships carried
a quarter of those still being taken annually from Africa. President James
50 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

Madison admitted before Congress that many Americans were still trading.
The official penalty if Charles Mason was caught would be $10,000 and five to
ten years in jail (the death penalty had been discussed and outvoted but would
later be introduced), but it was such a remote possibility it hardly mattered.14
There seemed little doubt that the slave traders were winning. In London
the members of the African Institution, the organization set up by the original
Sierra Leone Company when they handed over control of the colony to the
British government, were increasingly disillusioned and despairing. In 1809
they had given grandiose celebratory speeches about the “entire cessation of
the slave trade” and discussed the agricultural crops that would flourish in
Africa’s bright new dawn. Around this time Sierra Leone’s Governor Ludlam
had left notes for his successors as if the end of the slave trade was a fait ac-
compli and they would henceforth govern over “streams of plenty” instead of
“thirsty land.” But by 1810 the abolitionists were aghast that the abolition laws
were defied wildly and openly, and they grieved that their “expectation has not
been realized.” By 1811 they raged that the “coast swarms with slave ships,”
many simply disguised as Spanish or Portuguese to cover their true origins.15
In 1810, a commissioner of the African Institution and a confirmed
abolitionist—a sentiment possibly derived from his seeing slaves during his
earlier posting in the Caribbean—became governor of the British colony at
Sierra Leone. Edward Henry Columbine, watercolor artist and hydrographical
surveyor, arrived in Freetown with authority to arbitrate captured slave ships.
He was determined that the campaign against the slave trade would enter a
new phase. Bostock and Mason were at first unconcerned, but Columbine
sprung into action and captured the slaver Esperança, finding the captives
aboard shackled “in the most cruel manner” with three sets of manacles on
their arms and legs. Soon after, the slave ship Mariana was taken. Its captain, “a
most ill-looking dog,” told Columbine defiantly that he would simply return to
the coast better armed and ready to fight.16
Columbine then made the decision that he would not even attempt the
real, if utterly impossible, task of patrolling the African coast entire. He would
instead target slave ships cruising the “coast and rivers adjacent to Sierra Leone.”
Suddenly vessels calling at Mason and Bostock’s enterprise were squarely in the
frame. Columbine sent out the Esperança, now crewed by three Europeans and
ten Sierra Leoneans, as an additional patrol vessel. It swiftly captured the Zara-
gozano, which had purchased at least some of the 129 captives aboard from
Mason and Bostock. (The captives had also rebelled, jumped overboard, and
been recaptured by Bostock’s old acquaintance William Cleveland.) It was a
warning of how the abolition movement was encroaching.17
Making Deals with Siaka, Selling to the DeWolfs 51

Columbine, a true believer in the abolitionist cause, next sent out a mes-
senger, John Kizell, to visit slave traders in the region and command them to
relinquish the trade in human flesh. Kizell was a living example of the message,
a man born close to Sherbro Island and shipped for sale in Charleston, South
Carolina. After enduring several years of bondage he had fled during the
American Revolutionary War and found his way to Sierra Leone. Now he con-
veyed an exhortation from Columbine to slave traders: “the slave trade cannot
be carried on much longer, and therefore I earnestly hope and entreat that you
will turn your views to the cultivation of your land.” This would prevent people
being trafficked and, Columbine argued, allow Africans to “rise above the
poverty which renders you so dependent on Europe.”18
Mason and Bostock must have heard about Kizell and his message from
both the Clevelands and the Caulkers. Then Kizell landed in Gallinas, where
he presented Columbine’s letter to William Crundell, Mason’s old ally, who
“curse[d] and swore and rave[d].” Bostock managed to dodge Kizell’s atten-
tions, but Mason was less fortunate. Kizell added the name “Mason” to his list
of the region’s white slave dealers. The list was sent to Britain, where Mason’s
name was printed in the report of the African Committee as one of the enemies
of their noble venture.19
None of this appears to have perturbed Charles Mason very much. Not
long after Kizell’s tour of the region and a few months after the capture of the
Zaragozano, he and Bostock upped the stakes.

Imperceptibly at first, the landscape shifted as the monster of increased de-

mand crept inland. At Gallinas and further south, previously cultivated land
returned to a “dense and lofty forest of timber-trees, entangled with vines and
brush-wood” as people fled from captors. North at Sherbro it was said that
“thousands of miles are now without an inhabitant” because so many had run
in terror.20
Disaster encroached upon village after village. Those with diverse qualities
and talents, who carried their families’ hopes, were condemned by trickery,
doomed by false accusations, sold for debts, or pawned. No man left home
without a weapon anymore. Stories of those taken spread like a contagion
with people heralding the names of the lost, those whom they would endlessly
mourn.21
It was a wife snatched from the fields, simply gone. A son who went to fight
the enemy and never returned, and whose parents suffered every day, always
52 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

wondering. The tragic day when slave raiders came to the village and so many
were gone, and the urgency with which those left that day tried to tell their
children about it. It was all of these burgeoned together into infinitude.
Most of all it was children: the “age of abolition” was really the “age of
child enslavement.” Easier to capture, less likely to rebel, able to fit into smaller
spaces aboard ship and so cheaper to transport, children were the archetypical
captives of the era. It made perfect business sense, because traders knew that
they would fetch high prices in the Americas, yet they could generally be fright-
ened into saying nothing should the antislavery patrols catch them. In increasing
numbers the young and the very young made their way to the coast.22
Wars had long been waged purely to make slaves, and the jihad was an on-
going scourge, but now warfare increased as demand for captives skyrocketed,
and the stakes of power escalated. A Gbande village in Foya was one of those
raided, with the devastating loss of many of its people. The women might be
wanted as domestic slaves, junior wives, but the men and boys and the rest of
the women were forced to march to the sea. Within a decade, as many slaves
would be shipped from Gallinas in a single year as had departed in the entire
century to 1800.23
Clan identifications began to bend amid the search for survival. Small,
weaker ethnic groups like the Banta were becoming so decimated by the on-
slaught of the Mende that later those who remained would assimilate themselves,
for there was strength in numbers. The Loma people lost so many of their kin
to slave raiders that they began changing their way of life, moving from small
hamlets into bigger settlements for protection. They made pacts to defend each
other, to be brothers in the face of the enemy.24
Some tried to adapt. The Vai, whose land Gallinas was within, became
more serious slave traders. Others sought safety in multiethnic alliances like the
Condo Federation, whose capital was at Bopolo, fifty miles inland from Cape
Mount. Founded by Loma, Dei, and Gbande, soon Kpelle, Gola, Vai, and
Manding also joined, hoping to save themselves by being part of a group strong
enough to partially control the trade. The leader at Bopolo had worked for the
British and could speak some English: a major track from Bopolo led directly to
the coast and was a main route along which captives were trafficked.25
Many of those who marched desolately through Bopolo, taking the fork in
the road leading to the coast, had already journeyed far from their homes. The
distance from the birthplaces of some of those sold at Gallinas to the coast was
around 450 kilometers or 280 miles. Others came from lands nearer to the
coast, but these expanses too were unbearable. Together they comprised a
human disaster.
Making Deals with Siaka, Selling to the DeWolfs 53

We catch an unexpectedly clear view of Robert Bostock and Charles Mason in

November 1810. They were sitting down with five powerful local chiefs, the
entourages of these men, their own servants, and the heady aspiration of build-
ing a new slave factory. The chiefs controlled the land, and their consent was
needed if Mason and Bostock were to construct their own barracoon. It was
likely Charles Mason who inscribed their names on paper so thick that the
texture was slightly uneven, using elaborate curlicue capitals as if to render the
solemnity of the occasion onto the page. “Mr Scearca,” “Dewarca Soba,”
“Fanga Suna,” “St. Medeina,” and “Mattier Rogers,” he wrote.
“Mr Scearca,” was Siaka, the man who had been William Crundell’s ally in
the Gallinas conflict. Soon he would become King Siaka, the African trader
involved in the Amistad case. In 1810 he was an up-and-coming chief and slave
dealer and within the decade owned his own town with about three hundred
houses. He was said to eat off a silver plate. Mattier Rogers was “the oldest
chief ” and so commanded respect; he was one of the vast Rogers clan who had
an English merchant ancestor. They controlled forty separate towns and vil-
lages, including the village of Dibia or Liyia, on the banks of the Moa River.
“Fanga Sunga” was Mason’s misspelling of Faŋsona, John Lascelles’s old ally in
the Gallinas conflict. His descendants up until the 1970s would treasure an
“embroidered gown said to have been given by European slave dealers.” “St.
Medeina” could have been a reference to Amara, a local chief and slaver who
would later call his capital Medina.26
With such august company to entertain, the gifts given in the palaver would
have been substantial. Another Englishman trying to rent land found himself
giving out iron bars not only to chiefs but also to entire retinues including ser-
vants, “key keepers,” “singing men,” and marabous.27
Bostock and Mason’s business must have raised the vision of mighty pro-
ceeds for the chiefs. On November 13, a deal was struck. The five chiefs agreed
to accept “fifty Bars of Tobacco, Cask Rum,” and gunpowder for the renting of
some land for the factory. Iron bars were the standard unit of currency on the
coast, the measure of just about anything a slave trader and his customers
might need. A single bar at this time bought about four pounds of pewter, three
cauldrons, one pound of coffee, or eighteen Flemish knives. A piece of “guinea
cloth” was six bars, as was a twenty-pound barrel of flour, but a firkin (about
fifty-six pounds) of butter was ten bars. The thick, rigid paper on which the
treaty was written cost around five bars for a ream, more than a gun, which was
only four bars. Each healthy slave was worth 140–50 bars.28
54 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

They undertook a solemn oath. Mason and Bostock could “cut wood,
thatch, and get water and mud and anything requisite to the Factory” and were
given “every protection in the Country.” Underneath, each of the five chiefs
signed with a cross.29
There was something more on the contract, the twinkle in their eyes and
the whisper of insolence and bravado engraved solemnly onto the paper.
Mason wrote that he and Bostock were building this slave factory at “the point
of ” Bance Island, Gallinas. While it has usually been assumed that this was
a reference to Bunce Island, in the Sierra Leone River, on closer reflection it
can only have been a jibe at the abolitionist forces. It could not have been the
old Bance Island since that was far from Gallinas and not under Siaka and
Faŋsona’s control. By November 1810 the slave trading fraternity had largely
had to abandon Bunce Island anyway because it was too close to the naval
patrols at Sierra Leone. As one man put it in that year, perhaps overoptimisti-
cally, “Bance is now of no more consequence than the dirt under my feet.” The
name was not so much a reference to the old Bunce Island but a warning from
Mason and Bostock that they hoped to found a New Bance as infamous as the
last.30
The digging and the forming of mud bricks and timber frames began. A
new barracoon was raised on Gallinas’s gentle shore.
 5
A Cargo of Slaves
for Havana

B y the end of 1810, the new factory was up and running. Slave dealers came
to call with men, women, and children to sell and slave ships began to add the
place to their itinerary. The dry season was their major trading time, and a
hubbub of activity reigned.
But Bostock and Mason were ambitious and scented ever greater profits.
Over the Christmas season of 1810, as the New Year appeared on the horizon,
they plotted expansion. By the first of January 1811 it was resolved, and they
gathered their old friends Lancelot Bellerby, now back from his adventures,
and William Crundell, to witness the new agreement. Mason and Bostock,
both “residing in the River Galinas [sic] Africa,” agreed to “Establish a Factory
at St Pauls [sic] Mount Serrada on the Coast of Africa.” Bostock “shall stay in
the Factory and sell barter ship and dispose of the property as he may think
most advantageous to the risk and benefit of both parties.” Charles Mason,
however, was not staying at their Gallinas business. The contract stated, “it is
agreed that Charles Mason shall go off with such property as may appear to be
shipped on the account of the said parties and he shall make use of the property
as may appear to arise from the same to the best of his Judgement.” Both men
laid down £1000 surety.1
The next ship to arrive at their Gallinas business, a possible vessel to carry
away Mason and his and Bostock’s property, was the brigantine Dos Amigos.
When it heaved into view its captain, William Richmond, had a story to tell
that likely made Mason and Bostock all the more determined. Richmond re-
ported that he had taken all the necessary precautions, sailing to Cuba and
putting a titular captain, Don Ramón Amadas, at the helm. His false papers
suggesting Cuban ownership were in order. Yet sailing down the coast a few
weeks earlier they had been boarded by Governor Columbine. Columbine was
certain that the Dos Amigos was “fitted out for the slave trade.” Amadas and

55
56 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

Richmond had secured the vessel’s release, but principally because they did not
have any captives aboard, rather than because their Spanish flag put them
beyond Columbine’s remit. Richmond returned boldly to slave trading.2
Richmond bought a cargo of Mende warriors, Kissi and Kono men caught
in warfare, Gbande women and children taken in raids while their menfolk
were away, Temne children who had wandered too far from home and been
kidnapped, and Vai who had been tricked or pawned or sold for crimes that
they may or may not have committed. They were 328 in number.
By this time Robert Bostock had purchased the factory slave he called Tom
Ball and had made the new Gallinas factory into Tom’s prison. Perhaps origi-
nally called Banna, and if so likely Temne—the one local language, along with
its offshoot Banta, that Tamba could not speak—Ball had been enslaved since
he was a boy. When the Dos Amigos arrived, he was set to work filling the ship’s
“belly.” It was he whose strength paddled the men, women, and children who
would make the crossing in the Dos Amigos’s hold as they left Africa for the final
time.
Then the vessel sailed away, Charles Mason waving goodbye to his old
colleagues and friends from the deck as it slipped over the bar and out to sea.
His agreement with Bostock had not specifically mentioned Cuba, or how the
island was being used to ensure a steady stream of illegal slaves into the United
States, but that was where he was headed. It was where a stream of slave traders
had moved since 1807 to hide from the British abolitionists who called them
“the pirates of the Havannah.” They sought refuge in Havana and Matanzas,
where they could trade “with more eagerness and rapacity than ever.” The
island became such an important market that African merchants began to send
their sons to study Spanish on the island, whereas they had once sent them to
England or France. A “passenger service” began, shuttling merchants between
the Windward Coast, Cuba, and Charleston, South Carolina.3
As the Dos Amigos weighed anchor in Havana harbor, the incentive behind
this move was clear before Mason’s eyes. Vast profits were conspicuous along
the Malecón with its fine business emporiums and glamorously dressed ladies
driven around in volantes by “a large negro” wearing galligaskins and a red
jacket with gold lace trim. Havana was said to have “an air of solid age . . . that
gives it a grand appearance.” Its “wealth and luxury” were so impressive that
visitors “gaze[d] at the peculiar brightness and glitter which distinguish tropical
scenes.” It was utterly different to the mud brick compound he had left behind
in Gallinas.4
Amid the narrow streets, “large solid houses” contained warehouses on the
ground floor with the merchant’s counting house above. The “moneylending
 A Cargo of Slaves for Havana 57

Havana, Cuba, in 1839. From Frédéric Mialhe, Isla de Cuba Pintoresca (Havana: Lit. de la Rl. Sociedad
Patriótica, 1839).

middlemen and speculators” had “cash in a strongbox and credit in the major
cities of the world.” Major slave merchants were among the richest of all, and
lesser players dreamed of rivaling their success. The year before Mason’s arrival,
Governor Columbine of Sierra Leone lamented—all the while sounding quite
jealous, given his own inadequate salary—that a slave bought for £18 or £20
near Sierra Leone would sell for many times that price in Havana. Columbine
had heard of an American slave dealer who made £10,000 on a single voyage.
It was rumored that George DeWolf, scion of the DeWolf family, bought his
Cuban plantation Arca de Noé [Noah’s Ark] from the profits of one illegal
slaving voyage.5
This vociferous demand for slave labor was in part because the Haitian
Revolution had fuelled an upsurge in the Cuban sugar industry, creating “a
wild millionaire orgy” as production soared. The island was utterly changed in
just a few decades. Cuba’s story became sugar, and with grim predictability
slaves followed. In the 280 or so years until 1790, around one hundred thousand
Africans had been imported. Then in just the 30 years from 1790 to 1820, at
least three times that many arrived in shackles. It was an irrevocable transfor-
mation, and the Dos Amigos’s captives were at the cusp of the tipping point.
58 Part 1:  Journeys to the Slave Factory

Their appearance in 1811, and that of six thousand or so others that year, meant
that Cuba was no longer a society where people of European origin were the
majority. Primeval feelings of insecurity, danger, and being engulfed by the
enemy fossilized and fed the very worst of human instinct.6
At the sea gate, an “olfactory catalog” of dried beef and fish greeted them
all as Mason and the crew watched the captives led away to the barracoons.
There the stench was yet more overwhelming, including sweat, putrid flesh,
and death. Many were “reduced to skin and bones.” They were “spread out on
wooden planks,” and dysentery carried some away. Yet it was violence, terror,
and “the demolition of the spirit” that made it so unspeakable. Visiting Havana’s
barracoons, one doctor would be moved to comment, “there is nothing worse
in the world than to be a slave.”7
Richmond prepared to bring them to market. Cuban planters, fancying
themselves experts on Africans in chains, had long lumped slaves together in
various regional groups. These spoke more to the place from which they had
departed Africa than any sense of their actual identity. Those who left from the
Windward Coast, like those aboard the Dos Amigos, were termed Gangá, perhaps
a contraction of “Gangara,” a term outsiders used for the Mende, rapidly be-
coming the biggest ethnic group in the region.8
Newly imported Gangá fetched fine prices. While some Cuban planters
favored Lucumí (Yoruba) bondsmen, usually captives arriving from Senegam-
bia fetched the best prices. But Gangá came only just behind. The adult men
aboard the Dos Amigos sold for as much as $400 each, the women and children
slightly less.9
Preparing their merchandise for sale in Havana, Mason and Richmond
were among friends. By 1807, Havana was already one of the two most popular
markets for American slave ships. Now fellow Americans were possible pur-
chasers for their wares as Cuba was in the process of becoming dominated by
Americans. By 1823, at least fifty plantations in Matanzas province alone were
owned by North Americans, and that decade the possibility of making the island
part of the United States would be much discussed. By 1841, visiting American
Joseph Gurney was told that 90 percent of the ships employed in Cuba’s slave
trade had been constructed in the United States and heavily funded by U.S.
capital. In the 1850s, British writer Anthony Trollope would claim: “The Havana
will soon become as much America as New Orleans.”10
Cuba was a considerable part of how and why American attempts to abolish
the slave trade were failing so badly. Slaving merchants operated proudly
among its cobbled, majestic streets, not even feigning to shun the viciousness of
their profession for the sake of appearances. It was not until 1817 that the
A Cargo of Slaves for Havana 59

Spanish government agreed, with the help of a £400,000 inducement “loan”

from Great Britain, to halt the slave trade to Cuba. That and later legislation
had little to no effect, and it would be half a century before any significant in-
roads were made into the slave trade onto the island. In the meantime, there
was very little at all to stop Americans continuing to trade slaves there.
Among those moving more of their operations to Havana in this era was
the DeWolf family, and somewhere in the wake of the Dos Amigos lies their trail.
They had long been the employers of the Dos Amigos’s captain, William Rich-
mond, and they maintained contact with him for the rest of his life. Who exactly
was behind the Dos Amigos’s voyage when it arrived in Havana in 1811 nobody
was telling, but one or more members of the DeWolf family are strong con-
tenders. The DeWolfs’ agents, Hernández and Chaviteau, received the living,
breathing shipment and arranged their sale.11
After the illegalization of the slave trade for Americans, and especially after
the capture of the Baltimore, James DeWolf made a public display of turning
his back on the slave trade. Whether it was show or reality remains to be deci-
sively proven. But others in his family were equally clear in their intention to
defy the ban. James’s nephew and sometime rival George DeWolf bought three
of James’s former slave ships to keep trading. Well into the late 1810s he sent
them to Africa for slaves. Later he retreated to his base in Cuba.12
There was more than one man who knew or suspected that the DeWolfs
were up to their old games. Charles Mason sailed away from Africa with an old
employee of theirs, and he would become a regular visitor in Rhode Island. He
sailed between Charleston, South Carolina, and Rhode Island, as well as to
Havana and Africa, arranging deals and victualing more ships for the journey
across the ocean.13

With Mason gone, Robert Bostock needed somebody to assist him. Two
months after the Dos Amigos sailed he hired John McQueen, returned from
Sherbro.
Not long after, word reached them of new penalties if they were caught
slave trading. Now, Britons risked fourteen years’ transportation or up to five
years’ hard labor if they continued trading in slaves.14
Again, Bostock’s response was to raise the stakes.
 Part 2

Burned
to the Ground
 6
A New Slave Factory
at the St. Paul River

Bostock and Mason’s new factory was on the “beautiful border” of the St.
Paul, slightly upriver from where it emerged into the sea at Cape Mesurado. It
was an area of “prolific” soil garnering “oranges, lemons, cocoanuts, pine-apples,
mangoes, plums, granadillas, sour and sweet sop, plantains, bananas, guyavas,
tamarinds, ginger, sweet potatoes, yams, cassava and corn.” Bostock and his
new assistant, John McQueen, aided by Tom Ball and perhaps Tamba, whom
they had brought with them from Gallinas, were too busy arranging the business
of the guinea trade to pay much attention to the area’s natural bounty.1
There unfortunately does not seem to be any evidence of the chief or chiefs
with whom they dealt for the right to found this business, but Chief Bagna,
whose compound was very close by, must have been involved. Whether Bostock
and McQueen married into Bagna’s clan is also not spelled out in the records
that remain, but it was a common pathway in such negotiations. Once the
chiefs had been dashed there were wells to be dug, mud to be hauled, and
wood to be carved. Pens had to be built to ensure the greatest security and
shackles attached to the floor and walls to hold individual captives securely.
Coopers, clerks, carpenters, and cooks had to be employed and sufficient Kru
sailors engaged to ensure that trade would progress smoothly.
The new factory was not far inland from the mouth of the St. Paul, close to
where a branch of the river flowed south and joined up with the Mesurado
River at the Cape. This tributary provided a quick, sheltered way to reach the
Mesurado, far easier than venturing out to the ocean. It became an important
trade route, especially since there were two prominent slave traders established
on small islands just hidden in the mouth of the Mesurado. Captives, food-
stuffs, merchandise, and news passed through the creek on dugouts.
Dazoe, the westernmost of the two islands, was the business empire of John
Sterling Mill. The son of an English father and African mother, Mill had been

63
64 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

educated in England and held similar status to the Caulkers and Clevelands.
His mixed heritage was interpreted in differing and telling ways to those who
met him: an American visitor would describe him “a yellow man,” while to an
African he purchased he was “a white man.”2
Across a causeway from Dazoe, a stroll at low tide or a quick canoe trip
when the ocean swept in, was Balli (sometimes Gomez) Island, the slaving
domain run by Philippa Hayes. The daughter of an African mother and Ameri-
can father, Philippa had married an Englishman, William Hayes. He was the
official owner of the property but in mid-1813 had returned to England, leaving
Philippa and their daughter Hannah behind. Both Mill and Hayes became
close trading partners of Bostock and his trusted friends.3
Bostock and Mason appear to have established the Cape Mesurado fac-
tory as a sub- or feeder factory, and in this they were ahead of the game. Rare
at other parts of the African coast, at Sierra Leone and along the Windward
Coast the practice of transshipping captives along the seaboard was becoming
commonplace. With the slave trade illegal and the patrols heating up, the main
imperative was to elude their attentions, and transporting slaves along the coast
helped. Slaves could be transshipped quickly and quietly to whichever place
the patrols were not present, ensuring a full shipment was available to slave
ships that landed there.4
In the following decades other traders would follow Mason and Bostock’s
lead in having smaller feeder factories to supply a main base as well as to provide
alternative places of slave purchase. Pedro Blanco, dealer of the Amistad slaves,
later owned at least four smaller slave factories that supplied his headquarters
at Gallinas. Like his forerunners Mason and Bostock, he established one of
these at the St. Paul River. Another slave trader, Theophilus Canot, boasted
that he ran a “nursery” or “junior factory” close to the St. Paul, as well as having
other sub-factories that fed his main base at New Sestros. He declared that as a
slaving entrepôt Cape Mesurado was second in importance only to Gallinas.5
It illustrated the way that the trade was changing. Bostock and McQueen
were ordering and watching, shouting and flogging as their servants and slaves
constructed their fiefdom-compounds of a different order to the slave trading
meccas of earlier times, like Elmina, Cape Coast Castle, Gorée, or Bunce.
Grand fortresses, impregnable but highly visible, had given way to smaller,
more adaptable edifices. Built with bamboo fence poles, mud, and mangrove
staves, using stonework only where it was most needed, they reflected local
building methods. The contrast to the earlier castles was so great that at Rio
Pongo, not far to the north of the Sierra Leone River, several slave factories
appeared little more than assemblies of mud huts to westerners who visited.
A New Slave Factory at the St. Paul River 65

“The lower part of it is built on the ground,” an observed noted, with “one
storey with a thatched roof over it and a parcel of mangrove sticks laid across
and a great deal of mud to make it fire proof.”6
Yet this was something of a European and American misperception since
the slave factories were showpieces, grander and more imposing than anything
else around them either then or now. American dealer George Cook, once a
boy working for Benjamin Curtis, described his Bengara factory as “130 or 140
feet in front.” It was constructed of “stones and bricks and mortar and mud . . .
a great quantity of mud,” with a storeroom underneath and a house up above.
Separate buildings included a rice house and tobacco store, as well as the powder
magazine, all gathered around “Piazzas.” “Negroe [sic] houses all built of stone
and cement standing on about two acres of land enclosed on all sides with a
Wall of 10 feet high” provided accommodation for the Africans, both free and
enslaved, that worked at the factory.7
Pedro Blanco, so powerful that he was said to have created a “theatre of a
new order of society and a novel from of government,” built his headquarters
in the same way. Blanco had an empire spread across the islands at the mouth
of the Kerefe River, a harem on one island and a grand home on another, all
constructed in this local style. These building methods are why their compounds
have left remains only accessible through archaeological excavation, although
the walls and cannons of one of Blanco’s Cape Mount sub-factories were appar-
ently visible above ground into the 1920s.8
Whatever they spent on living quarters, showrooms, wharf, and walls—and
it was considerable, reflecting their highly profitable business—their greatest
wealth was not in infrastructure but in trading goods. The wealth amassed
behind the earthen brick and mangrove walls was astonishing. Vast caches of
merchandise were held in the traders’ storerooms. George Cook claimed that
in 1814 he kept fourteen tons of rice, one hundred tons of salt, thirty-two hogs-
heads of tobacco, seven and a half tons of “prime Ivory,” five hundred different
India cloths, four tons of beads of assorted varieties, ten tons of iron, two and a
half puncheons of rum, fifty-four barrels of gunpowder and a huge assortment
of weapons and firearms, canoes, cutters and launches to load and unload
passing ships, all topped off with 250 men’s hats and 125 umbrellas.9
Robert Bostock would later say that his stores at his new Cape Mesurado
factory in the middle of 1813 held “100 pipes of Rum,” hogsheads of tobacco,
“2000 weight of Ivory,” five hundred gold bars, five hundred sacks of gold dust,
five thousand pieces of gold coin, “1000 pounds weight of Gold,” ten thousand
pieces of silver, one thousand silver rings, one thousand amulets and fifty
thousand beads. The armory comprised five hundred barrels of gunpowder,
66 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

five hundred carronades and their carriages, five hundred muskets, fifty pairs of
pistols, five thousand knives, one hundred cutlasses and five hundred bayonets.
His fabric warehouse contained “3,000 pieces of Romals” and two thousand
bafts (both types of Indian fabric), “2,000 pieces of check,” “300 pieces of Satin
Stripes,” three thousand chintzes, five thousand pieces of linen, and “5,000
pieces of Manchester goods.”
For traders looking for simpler wares, Bostock also had ten thousand
earthenware pots, five hundred brass kettles, five hundred brass pans, two
hundred iron pots and, for the more cultured purchaser, one thousand books
and thirty “sets of Musical instruments.” For construction, he offered ten
thousand loads of timber and five thousand “iron fastenings,” one hundred
glazed windows and their frames, two hundred doors, one hundred wooden
shutters, and one hundred chimneys. Should passing slave vessels need any
repairs, he also kept a small shipyard, including fifty sloops, fifty pinnaces, fifty
boats, fifty canoes, five hundred sails, fifty anchors, five thousand articles of
rigging, five thousand ropes, one hundred bowsprits, five thousand yards of
canvas, and tools for carpenters, blacksmiths, and coopers.10
Bostock built a home for himself on the banks of the St. Paul River, a house
described as “very large” by a visiting slave ship captain. Yarra, the factory
slave purchased by John McQueen not long after the establishment of the
Cape Mesurado compound, reported that it was built “in the country fashion
with a thick solid mud floor between the cellar and second story.” Around it he
had a palisade constructed for protection.
It was something like that later owned by slave trader Theophilus Canot,
who wrote:

My house, built of cane plastered with mud, consisted of two earthen-floored

rooms and a broad veranda. The thatched roof was rather leaky, while my
furniture comprised two arm-chests covered with mats, a deal table, a bamboo
settee, a tin-pan with palm oil for a lamp, and a German looking-glass mounted
in a paper frame. I augmented these comforts with the addition of a trunk, a
mattress, hammock and a pair of blankets.

But Bostock had been in Africa much longer than Canot when he built his
home. Bostock’s home was likely grander and better furnished.11

Too young to be initiated, not yet the person the years and teachings would
mold him into, Sessay had not learned to hide his hurt and pain behind a
A New Slave Factory at the St. Paul River 67

shielding guise of enigma. “Stolen from his parents,” his heartbreak was worn
like armor, as if the raw breadth of his suffering would make it stop. Unmoved,
his captors sold him onward. His young, slight neck was secured with a leather
strap so that if he slowed he quickly choked. There were twenty in his human
chain, and some of them were men, able to walk as fast as the sputtering whips
insisted.12
He was walking from far inland, from the Mendelands to the north and
east of Cape Mesurado. The Mende were powerful, advancing across whole
swathes of country as they trounced the less numerous Kono, Kissi, and Gbande.
They would boast for generations that Kono people had been sold to buy
Mende women’s headscarves. Yet for all the bravado the Mende were smart-
ing, losing their own people in wars and slave raids just like all the rest. The
antislavery patrol had only been liberating captives for a handful of years be-
fore there were so many Mende in Sierra Leone, where they were known as
Cosso, that they had their own settlement. Within a few decades the majority
of the captives aboard the Amistad would identify as Mende. In the 1810s there
were many Mende boys, girls, women, and men filling the barracoons of the
coast.
Taken from his parents so suddenly that he would always say he had been
“stolen,” unaware of what was really happening to him, Sessay was force-
marched to join all the others in the barracoons. It was a journey of tens of
thousands of footsteps, each spent trying to align with the man in front to ease
the hurt, each one hoping that the boy behind did not fall back and throttle
him. Food was sparse, water as rare as relief, moistening the mouth but never
sating. Many stumbled, and the others would try to jostle him or her forward so
that the guards would not notice. It was the only way to stop the indiscriminate
slashes of the whip across their near-naked bodies.
The first time somebody fell and, judged utterly worthless by the guards,
was left to die, it was a psychic shock. But then it became part of the rhythm of
cruelty. The country was scattered with bleached bones. A British man stopped
his trek for the night and wrote in his journal, “round this spot are lying more
than one hundred skeletons.” He and his party had already seen 107 human
bodies that day, the desiccating bones of those who had not survived to reach
the sea. He believed that the death rate for those in coffles was more than a
third. On one of the major slave routes down to Gallinas, so many died at
Cambawama that a mass grave soon existed where locals offered libations for
the unknown who died passing through. Later generations would not cultivate
the land there in deference to their loss.13
Each day of the journey to the coast was not more terrible purely because
pains accrued: weals cutting across yesterday’s welts, the chains and cuffs rasping
68 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

on already abraded necks, ankles, and wrists, and the hunger and exhaustion
rucking together to threaten collapse. Each new day was also further from
home. Adults knew the tongues of those who lived around them and could
converse with the people with whom they had traded foodstuffs at market, but
beyond that it was bewildering. The further from home they trudged the less
everything was recognized, and as the boundaries of their old lives faded on the
horizon, so did chances of escape. Hopes of making it back so that this would
all be a nightmare of the past wavered.
Sessay would afterward remember his death march as lasting forty days. By
the time he told of this memory he had grown up aboard a British naval vessel
where the Bible was read on Sundays and quoted when one of the seamen’s
bodies was pitched to the deep. He would likely have known by then that forty,
in Christianity as in Judaism and Islam, could represent an unknowably long
time. Forty days and nights, he probably understood, was the biblical duration
of great trials and tribulations. It is this perhaps that he was expressing when he
remembered his walk to the sea as lasting forty days: it had been unbearably
long, a trial so far beyond endurance that it was only survived through other-
worldly strength.14

A few days’ sail up the coast, past Lake Piso, Bostock and Mason’s Gallinas
factory, Sherbro, the Banana Islands, and the British colony at Sierra Leone,
the next big slave markets to the north were the Îles de Los and Rio Pongo.
There a larger number of renegades still sold African captives, clustered in the
Pongo’s tributaries and on Crawford, Factory, and Tamara Islands in the Îles
de Los.
It was from there that shocking news arrived at Cape Mesurado. The British
antislavery patrol had arrested two slaving merchants, Charles Hickson and
Samuel Samo. Hickson owned an operation at the Îles de Los. Samo was
owner of the slaving factory Charleston in the Rio Pongo, “a slave factor of
great note . . . a man eminent in wealth and influence.” Both men had been
taken to Freetown to stand trial for illegal slave trading.15
For Robert Bostock and all the other slave dealers watching, this was a dis-
concerting change of tactic for the Royal Navy patrol. Before they had focused
their attacks on slave ships, disregarding those ashore, so this foray onto land
was an unwelcome surprise. It was all the more unfathomable because Samo
was Dutch, not British. As in the case of the DeWolf ship Baltimore, the British
Navy had taken upon themselves to ban anybody from slave trading regardless
of their origin.
A New Slave Factory at the St. Paul River 69

In Freetown, the fact that Samo could quite clearly make a very sound case
that he was not British caused alarm. But Governor Maxwell and Chief Justice
Robert Thorpe were not willing to let the case collapse on this matter, so Max-
well launched an audacious plan. He sent an agent to the Rio Pongo on the
pretext that a British man there was in danger, and persuaded the chiefs to sign
an agreement that Europeans who lived in their realm were under British law.
That done, Samo’s trial began on April 7, 1812. The character testimonies
alone revealed a gulf between British abolitionists and the slave traders, with
his colleagues proclaiming his rectitude, as if that might save him. One de-
scribed Samo as “a very quiet man, one of the best factors in the Rio Pongo”
while another averred that “he knew nothing bad of him except his slave deal-
ing; he never was one of the active bad hands in the Rio Pongo.” It did not
help: to the British he was a “bad hand” because he was slave trading; there were
no longer any gradations of wrongdoing where this was concerned.16
Samo was proclaimed guilty. As scandalous to those watching on as the
actual conviction was the fact that it was decided by a jury on which sat a
majority of black men. The judge had to explain to them “both the law, and
the principles on which it was founded,” it was claimed, since “he was speaking
to men whom, in all probability, were first taught by the act itself that slave
trading was a crime.” Bostock and McQueen, not far south at Cape Mesurado,
can only have been dumbfounded.17
The only consolation was that a few days later Charles Hickson was ac-
quitted of all charges against him and returned swiftly to slave trading. But it
was not the end of the affair. Next, Freetown’s court tried two men who worked
for the British at Bunce Island, the former slave trading fortress by then refash-
ioned as a military depot. Again these cases contained what seemed to many
the absurd, not to mention contemptible, spectacle of Africans giving evidence
against a British man. A freed captive even gave evidence, proclaiming that the
defendant, Joseph Peters, was the man who had enslaved him. Peters was de-
clared guilty and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. His African assist­
ant, William Tufft, received a sentence of three years’ hard labor.18
Ultimately none of these sentences were enforced. Samo lingered in jail
until July as authorities dallied over what to do. Christopher Fyfe has written
that they were “unwilling to discharge unconditionally so notorious a slave-
trader,” so Maxwell again sent an agent to meet with the chiefs of the Rio
Pongo, this time asking them to petition for Samo’s release. The kings of the
Susu and Manding nations wrote to Governor Maxwell, as did his the head-
man of the Îles de Los, letters of “pathos, sincerity, and submission,” agreeing
to abandon the slave trade “and do all in their power to bring it to a total termi-
nation, upon condition that Samo be discharged.” It was a neat result for all:
70 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

British authorities could claim that Samo had been punished while averting a
crisis over his sentence. Samo was pardoned on condition that he forever turn
his back on the slave trade.
Peters too was offered a pardon if he agreed to leave Africa and never return.
It was, perhaps predictably enough, only Tufft who did not get away scot-free.
His sentence of three years’ hard labor was commuted on condition of his en-
listing in the army for life.19
The bells were tolling for the British slave traders counting their gold
coins up and down the coast, but they were deafened by desire, by the lure of
another cargo of merchandise on the horizon. When Charles Mason visited his
old friend Bostock and their new concern in 1812, all seemed normal enough.
Again it was Tom Ball who loaded the cargo aboard the slave ship of which
Mason was supercargo. “Mason . . . came in a brig to Mesurado,” Ball would
remember, “and filled her Belly with Slaves whom he took away with him.”
The captives were added to those toiling in perpetuity on Cuban or American
plantations.20

In June 1812, faraway events again colluded to change business for Mason and
Bostock when their nations went to war. The origins of the War of 1812 are
convoluted, but the transatlantic slave trade and its morality and legality were
caught up in the whole affair. The United States was fighting for free trade and
the rights of its sailors to be safe from being impressed by the British Navy. This
affected the right of Britain’s Navy to stop and search American vessels be-
lieved to be illegally trading in slaves. Before the war, President James Madison
had “quietly” permitted the Royal Navy to search American vessels believed to
be slave trading, as in the case of the Baltimore. After the war began this was
impossible. It led to something the United States did not intend: the US flag
began to be widely used to hide the illegal slave trade from Africa to Cuba.21
Bostock and McQueen may have felt themselves to be safely entrenched at
Cape Mesurado, but they must have feared a downturn in trade. French pri-
vateers had been harassing shipping for several years, getting ever more daring
as desperation set in. Now American ships would also be the enemy. Illicit slave
vessels would have to dodge not just the antislavery patrol but enemy privateers
of two powerful nations as well.22
And more cannon fire soon resounded down the coast. In March 1813,
one of the Royal Navy’s antislavery patrol ships, HMS Thais, captured the 160-
ton Rambler as it cruised offshore from Mason and Bostock’s factory at Cape
A New Slave Factory at the St. Paul River 71

Mesurado. It was a formidable fighting vessel but lost its topmasts trying to
escape and was captured and carried into Freetown as a prize. The Rambler’s
captain and his crew were adamant that they were privateering and had no
cargo, but its owners were James DeWolf and his brother Charles, and the
Rambler had made at least three previous slaving voyages. It was condemned
as an enemy privateer, but more than one observer suspected that it was still
slaving. Those who were watching would always associate the loss of this vessel
with the danger encroaching on Bostock’s domain, though whether it was
going there to buy captives is uncertain.23
Yet again peril inched toward them.
 7
In the Barracoon

A father summoned his two small sons home from their chores and told them
that they must to go the “Headman of their country” to run an errand. They
walked away jostling each other, a skip in their step, not once glancing back.
The boys’ mother had died some years earlier, and they did not pause to speak
to their friends because they could not imagine a need to say farewell, did not
know of life without them.
They were Bassa boys of the Kwa-speaking peoples like the Kru who were
spread down the Atlantic littoral. The Bassa and Kru had been among the first
to trade with Europeans who had come to call centuries earlier, selling them
melegueta pepper, or grains of paradise, and so had unwittingly named their
part of the coast on European maps.1
The brothers waited at the headman’s compound. Two weeks later, he
gathered a small group of men and told them that they must go on a trading
mission further up the coast. The brothers went with them on a three-day walk
to the lands of their trading partners. Still they suspected nothing.
Then, one day, one boy awoke to find that his brother had vanished. Every-
body he knew had gone. “I looked about me but saw none but strangers,” he
would remember later; “my country-people had all withdrawn.” An overheard
conversation revealed the truth. The headman had sold him, possibly after
being pawned by his father. While sleeping, he had passed into the realms of
merchandise.2
“I cried very much,” he would later recall, “but alas! . . . there was no pity.”
Instead he was tricked, told that he would be in the “pen” for a single moon
and would then be returning to his family. The month was long enough for him
to begin to wonder if his father had betrayed him, had been complicit in what
had happened. He thought back to the last time, searching his memory for
clues in his father’s face that he was saying farewell.

72
In the Barracoon 73

Slowly the boy realized that the promises of return were a deceit. They had
merely been a ploy to calm him long enough to try to break his spirit. Far from
releasing him, things got far worse. “Like a beast they began to treat me,
though I was free-born.” He could find “no pity, no mercy.”
Soon they again made him start walking. This time he was marched for
fourteen days. They reached the “sand beach” where a “white man” took him.
He was turned into a crowded pen. He did not yet know it, but he was now the
merchandise of John Sterling Mill.3

Sessay, the Mende boy whose journey to the coast lasted forty days, was in
another barracoon just a few short miles away. What had happened to him in
the intervening time since he had been “stolen from his parents” has been con-
certinaed into history. In the lowlights he would later tell, at the end of his
journey he had yet another shock to endure. Terrifying white men purchased
him along with six others. They were “turned into the Slave Yard where there
were many Slaves in Irons.”4
Sessay did not know the names of these two white men any more than the
tricked Bassa boy knew his owner. Sessay did not know that they were Robert
Bostock and John McQueen and he was on the banks of the St. Paul River at
Cape Mesurado.

Still at last, Sessay and the Bassa boy whose name we do not know must have
listened intently for familiar voices or words they recognized. Human nature
dictated seeking connections, shared languages, somebody who knew of their
people. For those who arrived alone in the barracoon this was key. An ally
might help interpret this utterly bewildering situation. Somebody who knew his
or her people could be a ray shining out from the sordid, despicably dehuman-
izing, shit-filled, stinking factory. A shared worldview might provide a fingertip
hold on identity and sanity, asserting who they were and uncovering common
words, gestures, and expressions through which they could transmit informa-
tion without calling attention to themselves. Friendship spoke of humanity; it
disdained the lie of being a commodity.
So many ethnicities and languages were represented among those held
with them, sharing their pain, that finding such ties was no easy task. As well as
those who arrived overland from upcountry, boats brought captives along the
74 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

big water, vastly increasing the reach of the slavers’ grasp. Their homelands
were in a huge swathe of the hinterland. Some were from so far away that the
words of others were jarring, vexing to the ear. The whispered questions, the
cries of agony, starvation, and sheer despair, the rages and threats to destroy
those who had brought them to this, came in so many languages, dialects, and
accents. A plethora of deities, spirits, and ancestors were beseeched for wisdom,
strength, and help.
Within this jumble must have festered preconceptions, old feuds, misunder-
standings, and hatreds born of wars and past wrongs. There was a young boy
named Paye, for example, the name Mano women gave to their third-born
son, and we are left to wonder if others looked at this eight-year-old and remem-
bered the pervasive rumor that the Mano were cannibals, eating dead slaves.
Paye had been badly burned on the head somewhere in his short life, perhaps
adding horrible authenticity to the fears of the other children.5
But they undoubtedly had bigger problems now. The old feuds would not
have died away, but they bent to new realities. Their captors were shape-shifting
enemies who were widely believed to be cannibals on a scale far beyond the
Mano. Such beliefs were a mixture of “fantasy and fact, fused at the ankles and
wrists in the surrealism of the transatlantic slave trade.” Europeans were also
known to be strangely adept sorcerers who could turn human bodies into an
astonishing array of commodities. They could make people float over the big
water. This was mysterious since ancestral spirits propelled canoes, but who
could say what type of spirit moved the white men’s huge vessels?6
Long-running arguments over land and resources perhaps diminished with
such immediate dangers to meet. Different peoples had specific reports, wisdom
given them by the elders and learned through their own particular experiences
in the centuries of slave trading. The Kono believed that white people lived
under the ocean, emerging in the daytime to live on islands. Among the Mende,
Sessay’s people, stories were told of Tingowei, “a beautiful siren-like woman
with a soft, white skin” who appeared in the form of a long, golden chain, and
of Njaoli who lived in deep waters and “own[ed] townsfull of treasure.” Njaoli
was beautiful but also deadly, sometimes kidnapping those who were foolish
enough to venture onto the big water. Then there was Ndogbɔjusui, “a white
man with a long white beard.” He appeared to “lonely travellers, whom he
tricked into following him. Those who encountered Ndogbɔjusui were warned
to never reveal to him what was truly on their mind.”7
To the Loma and Mano people chained in the barracoon, bad spirits and
other forms of evil lived in the water where they had entire submarine societies.
People with “reddish hair” were reincarnations of these evil spirits. To the
In the Barracoon 75

Loma, white men like Robert Bostock and John McQueen must have looked
like wickedness incarnate.8

k
Those who languished in the barracoon for some time came to know slave
trading’s recurring features. From the interior came coffles of the newly damned,
prisoners who were possible messengers. They might carry news of loved ones,
homes and villages, everything that had defined the limits of the world before
prison walls and shackles. In return for fragments from that other life might be
offered as succor just hard-won knowledge: the cruelest guards, the best ways
to get food, the fragments of an endurance that was beyond the human spirit
but was all that could be clutched.
Some were certainly freedom fighters, solid in defiance, but for most their
sentiments were surely more complex. Psychological damage was and is so in-
herently personal, and though shaped by the streams of culture, those shapes
defy easy analysis. Physical pain mingled with fear and the jagged edges of
despair. Indignation cut through shame, because to be a slave was considered
profoundly shameful, and then circled back once more so that sometimes anger
oozed with each realization of their captivity.9
Women were the minority, and they were younger. The oldest held at
Bostock and Mason’s Cape Mesurado barracoon in mid-1813 were Safui and
Safua, both around twenty-eight years old. Safui, a Kono woman, had her
baby Bessy with her in the barracoon. The sexual violence at the factory, in
addition to all the other forms of degradation they were forced to endure, re-
mains hidden. The complexion of their specific agonies they bore silently, not
least because the world of those watching and writing down was a male world,
and such issues were rarely addressed. But Bessy, at three months old, had come
into the world in the squalid barracoon or just prior. We cannot know if she
was born from love or brutality or something between.
For everyone the loss of family and friends was incalculable, but for the
children like Sessay, Za, Eya, and so many others who outnumbered adults in
Bostock’s barracoon in June 1813 by three to two, their pain was all the more
amplified by their dependence on those they had lost. Hunger and dehydration
could damage a child more swiftly than an adult, and the ever-threatening
diarrhea and dysentery easily proved fatal. For those who survived, the psycho-
logical effects never ended. Those too young to know where they had come
from or to remember the songs and dances of their village did not even have
the vestiges of their former lives to cling to, the things that acted as the major
76 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

comfort to many adults stolen away across the Atlantic. Child slaves today
often endure dysphoria: “a state of confusion, agitation, emptiness, and utter
aloneness,” not to mention isolation, distrust, self-blame, and self-harming.
Mindsets and ideologies change over time; we do not have enough evidence to
know if it was all of this, or all of this and more. Those between the ages of eight
and twelve—old enough to know what was happening but not yet possessing
the tools of endurance—were perhaps the “hardest hit” of all those who made
the transatlantic crossing. There were more than ninety children of that age in
Bostock and Mason’s barracoon on the banks of the St. Paul River in mid-1813.10
For many of their captives, adult as well as child, the physical wounds of the
long walk from their place of capture would not have yet healed as they lan-
guished in the slave pens. Ankles, pared of skin, chafed around new tethers. It is
possible that some had been drugged on the way to facilitate their dehumaniza-
tion, to numb them for the transition to faceless commodity, so that they just
felt perplexingly listless. For countless captives sickness allowed only shards of
sentience amid delirium. Very few escaped the hunger. That meant passing
through the stage of dry mouth and intensified urination, and then enduring
extreme craving for food as edema painfully swelled stomachs and joints. The
starved then entered a domain of susceptibility to all manner of diseases and
complaints until the body simply could not function and the brain shut down.
While it was in the interests of Bostock and McQueen to keep their captives
alive and healthy enough for sale, it was sometimes a close-run thing. The weight
loss of captive Africans sold at this part was very nearly a death sentence.11
Dying was not just the usual tragedy of passing. Dying away from home
was a calamity in itself, needing a special ceremony to bring home the deceased
person’s spirit to its rightful place alongside the other ancestors. So this, dying
tied up in a white man’s hellhole, what kind of death was this? How would family
and friends know? To their people they would be among the vanished, those
who had simply disappeared, fate unknown. This meant that they would never,
as the Kissi believed, become the wind, speaking words of wisdom and support
to the ones still living.12
Since most, or many, lacked family members, they began the process of
making new families, rebuilding the blocks that made life livable. For those
who were Mende, Kissi, Kono, and Gbande, there were enough of them in
Mason and Bostock’s barracoon to gang together and speak in their own
tongues.
It was a tragedy, of course, that they were so many. For the Gbande, Kissi,
and Kono, who had long been traded down through Vai country with salt, the
new realities after 1807–8 had again seen them lose out. There were more of
In the Barracoon 77

them in the barracoon because they had been newly decimated, newly destroyed.
Yet the tragedy of their numbers held captive was also their strength. They
could share information about the others with whom they were imprisoned,
remembering stories that might help them to explain their fate and sow seeds of
hope. Burdens could at least be shared so that when one despaired utterly the
others could soothe their pain, knowing that the next day it might be they who
needed succor.13
For those who were Gbande there was considerable likelihood of finding
others whom they knew well, or being chained alongside somebody whom they
had always known. The commonest name in Mason and Bostock’s pen in mid-
1813 was Bala, and although this was a name known among Manding, among
Gbande people it was especially prevalent in a few small villages, particularly
around Balahun, which can loosely be translated as “Bala place.” Besides the
Balas, there are other captives too such as Sangaree, Famai, and Paway, whose
names suggest that they could well have been from the same small area. We
can only surmise that this is who they were, but it is likely as the Manding people
had no concentration of men and boys named Bala that might account for this
group.14
The Gbande who could unite in this way were at an advantage over those
who were Manding, whose position among the others was precarious. Their
trading prowess, coupled with their participation in the jihad and conviction
that non-Islamic people could legitimately be enslaved, had led to their partial
alienation. Their refusal to acknowledge the Poro deities also left them outside
the main connection between the other disparate groups. Their isolation, con-
versely, could be a uniting factor for others. The Kissi and the Gbande, who
had often come into conflict over land, could agree about the wickedness of the
Manding in capturing so many of their people. So too could the Loma who
were held alongside them.15
So many Kissi and Kono people were held in the barracoon that each part
of the family line was represented, mirroring the broken families in the interior
severed of so many of their branches. Several of the boys were called Sahr or
Saa, the name both Kono and Kissi women gave to their firstborn son. There
were two more Tambas, or second sons, in addition to the factory slave with that
name. There was one boy named Eya (Aiah), or third son, as well as another
called Eya Gombo, a third son who had a second name dependent on his
parents’ marriage and whether a dowry had been paid for his mother. There
was a child named Fallah, the name Kissi mothers gave to their fourth-born
son. Twenty-seven-year-old Mairing was the next to the last son born in his
Kono family. Two men, both twenty-six years old and the same height, having
78 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

stood shoulder to shoulder through it all, were named Fangha, the Kono for
male-male twins.16
There were other Kono in the barracoon too, people who almost certainly
had a name that told of their place in the family but who were not commonly
known by it. Since fathers usually had several sons named Saa, Tamba, Aiah,
and so on—as many sons with those names as they had wives blessed with male
children—children were given other names too to avoid confusion. These
spoke of character traits, recalled things that happened around the time of their
birth, or honored an ancestor. So the twelve-year-old boy whose name was
later recorded as “Fingacuree” by the British—probably Fainbaquee—was a
shy, timid child, given the name for “one who is fearful.” His parents’ dismay at
losing their apprehensive child who needed reassurance and protection, and
his own sheer terror in finding himself away from his family and in captivity,
can only be imagined.17
Kissi people too had other names than their birth order names. A nine-
year-old boy later gave his name as Cosang, probably a misspelling of the Kissi
name meaning “go and spread news,” and a sixteen-year-old girl was named
Kayang, likely meaning “loser in a fight.” Yembo, aged fourteen, had the name
for a single woman, which may have reflected her mother’s status rather than
her own, and it might even have been this that had made her vulnerable to en-
slavement. Bondoa or Bendoa, a ten-year-old boy, had a name “given to a
handsome child, meaning something like ‘polygamous’”: a boy so attractive it
was thought he would have many wives. Bondoa already bore the marks of the
Poro society so this name was likely his Poro rather than a birth name. A
twenty-nine-year-old man who pronounced his name “Baloo” bore an appella-
tion that could perhaps (if this was an accurate recording) have been the Kissi
term for “waterfall.”18
Another of the bigger groups in the barracoon was made up of Sessay’s
people, the Mende. Many would later give names that told of Mende origins,
despite the mangling into English: Boye and Boy (really Boi), Quay, Gom-
boyarra, and Messay, among others. Nine-year-old Bessay or Pessay had a
name that revealed she was born to Mende parents after her mother had previ-
ously borne twins. A boy was called Torgboh, the Mende term for “tree tapper,”
which suggested that his father was one of the people who tapped sap for palm
wine. Gaywo, a nine-year-old, had a name reflecting the Mende word Nwegɔ
(god).19
For the adults, beyond ties found through their ethnic group and language,
their membership in the Poro and Sande societies provided commonality that
In the Barracoon 79

reached out to others with whom they shared their terrible circumstances. In
the barracoon these loyalties were needed more than ever, providing inner
strength when despair threatened and sparks of understanding with strangers
whose languages were impenetrable. Those high up within their home societies
were focal points in the barracoons, regularly sought out for advice and strength,
to provide wisdom and understanding, and relied upon to remain defiant and
dignified in the face of such intense provocation.20
The societies were common beams to walk on, for surely unity was needed
in this world where men no longer looked like men and the rules of behavior
had skewed so badly. The men and women of other peoples, neighbors, even
enemies, could suddenly seem similar enough in the face of such unimaginable
travesties. Brotherhood had been forged from far less. They provided under-
standing that might be clung to among so many displays of behavior that scarcely
seemed within the realms of possibility. They were ties that cut across languages,
dialects, and religious differences to forge bonds. They were laws and social
norms that could be remembered as standards of stability amid the bedlam.
Societies had left visual as well as aural traits on their members, so that
even when captives were tethered to poles, very scantily clothed, the cicatrices
cut into the body at initiation were clearly visible to those who could read them.
They were identifiers recognizable to most of the captives even if their captors
were blind to the meanings.
So the younger, as yet uninitiated boys held alongside fourteen-year-old
Balo doubtless respected the “round scar [on his] right breast” that told of a
specialized skill he learned while undergoing his Poro education. He was young
enough that it was recent, a marker of the life he had been expecting to lead, a
visual travesty on one who was now made into merchandise. Whyero, two
years older, had similar marks, advertising skills his white captors knew nothing
about. More unusually, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Sungbo was
“tattooed down [her] cheeks” and with a cruciform cicatrix on her forehead.21
So essential, so central to their understanding of the way things were and
should have been, that many carried rituals over the seas. Across the Americas,
captives continued the Poro and the Sande as best they could. Sea Island slaves
in South Carolina and Georgia knew the rituals well. Some decades later the
Amistad rebels would show their gymnastic and wrestling skills, learned in Poro
School, on the town green in New Haven, Connecticut. Another young girl,
kidnapped and taken to Cuba on the eve of her initiation into her local society,
would keep alive the songs and dances she had learned to perform for her cere-
mony. Centuries later they carried her descendants home.22
 8
The Slave Ship Fénix and
Setting the Factory Alight

As May limped on in a humid daze, Bostock and McQueen were anxious for
a slaving vessel to arrive. They needed to sell as many captives as possible before
the heavy rains fell, when food was scarcer and diseases proliferated, creating a
mass of sweating, shaking bodies. Profits were always much lower in the rainy
season when fevers stole away their merchandise and fewer vessels called.
So it was an immense relief when the brig Fénix appeared just beyond the
mouth of the St. Paul River on the twentieth, sliding over the shallows into the
river. The Fénix had made a slaving voyage the year before, taking 204 captives
to Cuba, so those aboard were familiar with the St. Paul’s headmen and pilots.1
This time it had varied its path. Leaving Havana it had paused at Matanzas
to wait out a storm and had then sailed for South Carolina. At Champney’s
Wharf in Charleston its supercargo had sold 101 hogsheads of molasses and then
shipped gunpowder, rum, and other items best calculated for the trade in
“muzzled Negroes.” This detour risked a $20,000 fine plus forfeit of the vessel if
they were caught, but there were plenty willing to collude. Charleston’s roots
were in the slave trade, and there were many who thought the abolitionist turn
was a northern folly. The Fénix’s Captain José Cábez simply claimed that they
were sailing for Teneriffe in the Canary Islands, and no further questions were
asked.2
After that, however, their luck had turned. Cruising down the African coast
to Cape Mesurado, they had been attacked by a French vessel. Captain Cábez
later told how they had been plundered, and it had been all they could do to
keep the vessel and enough merchandise to trade for slaves.
By the time they got to Bostock and Mason’s factory they were as glad to
see the friendly faces there as the two Britons were to see eager buyers. They
had to be hasty nevertheless. After the obligatory gentlemanly greetings, some

80
The Slave Ship Fénix and Setting the Factory Alight 81

drinks proffered and letters and bills passed on, they got down to business. A
local headman was willing to do business. Bostock and McQueen offered a
small boy captive as a trading token. He was not yet grown but looked healthy
and might fetch a good price.3

To those in the pens, the big vessel can only have goaded a new level of menace
ahead with its cutwater. Its first sounds surely brought panic among the chil-
dren, but the cooler men, the elders, the adult women are hard to imagine at
this moment. We cannot know the many emotions and responses that each
lurched through, still less appreciate how they created pools of panic, calm,
shock, sorrow, and distress amid the mass of people. Some of them had been
trapped at the factory for four moons: had they begun to see clefts of hope amid
the mud walls, inklings that it might not be true, that the stories of being driven
out onto the big water might be myths? Was there defiance, a resolution that
they would show no fear in order to not give their captors, their tormentors,
leverage over them? Or did the Fénix’s arrival see a wail of visceral horror rise
up on the banks of the St. Paul? It was so terrible a thing to contemplate that
the children surely gripped each other in terror, as if the touch of a familiar arm
might be all that held them to life. Mute from hunger, shock, fevers, terror, and
heartache, did any have the strength to cry?
The compound was open enough within its walls that they could see out
from the pens across the terror unfolding. Small boats came up onto the beach
next to the compound. Pale men with string for hair knotted down their backs
walked through the factory passing the barracoons. Their skin was marked
with red blotches and pitted all over. They walked in a rolling manner as if
their legs were bowed instead of straight.
The factory slaves came among them. They chose just one boy, Za. He was
dragged away, doubtless leaving those so recently chained next to him mute
with shock at his loss and the slenderness of their own escape. They could
watch until he was out of sight and then try to hear, to make sense of where
they might be taking him so that they would know what their own fate might
be. It was difficult to know if knowledge would help them or whether it was
better to go forward numbly as the best way to bear it.
They likely knew enough to expect that more would follow, disappearing
over the sand bar, out onto the most fearsome surf where the Njaoli might get
them. These would probably be their last hours on the land, perhaps as living
82 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

people. As the sun sunk over the big water they must have feared that it was all
over. Perhaps a few of the women tried to raise a solemn lament, singing out
their songs of sorrow.

Niceties over, Bostock agreed to 150 bars of trade goods per captive. John
McQueen supervised the factory slaves as they aided the ship’s crew and super-
cargo, Manuel Ruiz, unloading the Fénix of its payment. “Nineteen hogs-
heads rum and four bales handkerchiefs,” tobacco, “checks,” “blue Bafts,”
and “beeds” came ashore. The following morning, the captives would be
loaded.4
But another vessel appeared slithering gingerly over the shallows and into
the river. It was the brig Kitty. At its helm was John Roach, an old Liverpool
slave trader who Bostock and McQueen knew well. Roach had first captained
the slaver Cecilia in 1799, buying captives in the Congo River and delivering
them to Kingston, Jamaica. He had worked for John Bolton, a major Liverpool
slave dealer, and had captained his vessels Christopher and John carrying captives
from Africa to Guiana, where Bolton was involved in cotton production. On
another voyage aboard the John he had sold his human cargo at the slave mar-
kets of Havana, the destination for the vast majority of those sold by Bostock
and McQueen.5
Almost exactly five years earlier, however, in late May 1808, Roach had
dropped anchor back in Liverpool aboard the slaver May and had professed
himself a changed man, about to embark on a new career. Slave trading was
in the past. Abolition a reality, he gained a letter of marque and become a
privateer.
By 1813 he claimed to be a patriot capturing enemy ships. This allowed him
to also infer his abolitionist credentials—a slave trader shown the error of his
ways—by capturing slave ships. Yet his first venture into this had been curious
at best. The Amelia had traded at Cabinda and sailed with 275 slaves aboard
before an African American crewman had encouraged the captives to revolt.
The mutineers kept some of the crew alive to help and likely tried to sail back
from where they had come. Instead they sailed around the coast of Africa for
four months until, dying from hunger and thirst, they landed at Cape Mount to
beg for water. But those who ventured ashore to ask for help were ambushed
and again held captive. Roach, somewhere nearby, heard that a pirate vessel
was offshore. He retook the Amelia from the vastly weakened rebels and carried
The Slave Ship Fénix and Setting the Factory Alight 83

it, along with the remaining 88 men, women, and children, into Sierra Leone.
It was not so much an act of abolitionism, as Roach claimed, but the recapturing
of men and women who had already freed themselves.6
That had been Roach and the Kitty’s only venture into capturing slave ships
until a few weeks before when they had assisted HMS Thais to capture the San
José Triunfo as it was loading its human cargo at Elmina. What else Roach was
doing other than privateering remains unclear, but he had a lucrative trade.
There may have been nothing particularly illegal about this as Africa had far
more to offer than captives, and he was both delivering goods to Freetown and
exporting produce from there. But Roach and the Kitty were also trading fre-
quently with all the slave traders up and down the coast. Roach clearly knew
Bostock was slave trading even if the Kitty was not directly involved in buying
and selling slaves.7
A few weeks earlier Roach had come to call on his old friends Bostock and
McQueen and they had shaken hands on a deal. Roach had delivered some
goods, and now he returned for payment. But there was a misunderstanding,
and Bostock got into an argument about the amount of the debt. To Bostock it
was nothing out of the ordinary, simply a businessman’s quarrel that would
soon be sorted out with a handshake. But Bostock badly misjudged the extent
of Roach’s loyalty to slave traders; misread the lengths that he would go to in
protecting the illegal trade. As Roach had shown in the capture of the San José
Triunfo, he was eager to capture slave ships if there was nothing to be gained
financially by dealing illicitly with the merchants.
Furious at Bostock and McQueen, Roach made a wild threat. He bellowed
across the compound that he would attack the Fénix and carry it to Sierra
Leone. He argued defiantly that he could prove that it was an American vessel
and therefore a legitimate prize of the War of 1812. It was flying Spanish colors,
but in 1813, and aboard a slaving vessel, that hardly ruled out American owner-
ship. American ships routinely faked Spanish-Cuban ownership to disguise
their illegal activities, and the Fénix had, after all, sailed from Charleston.
Bostock could not believe it. Perhaps, like his father’s long ago trust of
James Cleveland, he put too much reliance on friendship. He did not believe
that Roach would really attack the Fénix, apparently thinking it all an act of
bluster to sting him for more money. But Roach was irate, and he ordered his
men to ready their weapons. The Kitty’s crewmen sponged into the cannons’
breeches, added the powder, wadded them in, and then rammed in the balls.
Aboard the Fénix, Captain José Cábez was flabbergasted. Assured by
Bostock that Roach was an old ally, he could not have foreseen the ambush.
84 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

His men, already plundered by the French, were in a defiant mood. Cábez gave
“orders to put the Fénix in a position to fight.” His men too began to ready their
weapons.8
The Kitty was slightly smaller than the Fénix, 116 tons to the slave vessel’s
124, but more heavily armed. The Fénix, hoping simply to outrun the naval
patrols, mounted only four guns. Both men thought their chances were fair.
Then, judging himself within firing range, Roach ordered his men to take aim.
As he yelled “Fire!” the clap of cannonballs roared across the water.
From ashore Bostock and McQueen heard the boom ring out. It was un-
believable. An ally was betraying them. Utterly incensed, Bostock watched
from his ringside seat. Then one of the Kitty’s cannons hit its target.9

Za was held in a wooden dungeon, alone for what was very likely the first time
in his life. It must have been almost too much to bear: the utter darkness, the
rough walls, the endless rocking that turned his empty stomach. He can only
have wondered at how nine short years of life had led to this, never conceiving
that anything worse could happen since he had been taken from his parents,
and yet more terrible things piled on top, and more kept being added, pushing
him down.
When a huge boom rang out and the brig pitched wildly, he surely feared
that death had found him.

A small party of the Kitty’s victorious men rowed over to the Fénix to formally
take their prize. Aboard, they found that one of the rewards was a nine-year-
old captive boy imprisoned in the hold. They took him back to the Kitty. Then
they began ferrying the Fénix’s beaten sailors to shore, intent on leaving them
prisoners in Bostock’s compound.
Robert Bostock had other ideas and had already armed some of his factory
slaves. As the sailors stepped ashore, Bostock and McQueen seized Roach
while their factory slaves held the Kitty’s seamen. John McQueen threatened
Roach “that they would be the death of him” if he did not let the Fénix go. The
Fénix’s seamen took one of the Kitty’s boats and returned to their vessel. Later
that night, taking advantage of scant security in Bostock and Mason’s compound
for Europeans, John Roach managed to bribe some of the Krumen to return
him and his men to the Kitty.10
The Slave Ship Fénix and Setting the Factory Alight 85

Back aboard his ship, Roach sat down and wrote a letter to John Sterling
Mill, the slave dealer in the Mesurado River. Annotating his letter “Brig Kitty,
Sunday morning 5 o’clock,” he addressed it “My Dear Mills.” Roach told Mill
that he was determined to prove that “I am not so great a villain as he is,” but
that he was incensed by Bostock’s “obstinacy.” He was willing to negotiate with
Bostock over the capture of the Fénix and asked John Sterling Mill to mediate.
If Bostock offered enough money then he would “pledge my word of honor
that I will not hurt the hair of any man’s head for what has taken place.” He
would wait twenty-four hours for Bostock’s offer, but after that he threatened
to take John McQueen to Freetown and have him arrested for debt. John
Roach’s motives—pecuniary rather than principled, grimy rather than
grand—were laid out in elaborate curlicue.11
As an afterthought, Roach asked Mill to pass on a message to Philippa
Hayes next door. Roach asked Hayes to let him have some ivory and other
items she had promised him. Then he mentioned that he had lost his glasses
case and asked Hayes to search for it in her closet, a place he had clearly been
spending more time than might be thought appropriate for somebody claiming
that his privateering activities in West Africa were virtuous. Roach also asked
Hayes to “send the children off in a boat.” What he meant by this—what chil-
dren Hayes had that were going aboard the Kitty—is very unclear and is, obvi-
ously, suspicious, although they could possibly have been Kru children or even
free passengers.
Upon receiving the letter, Mill simply sent it over to Bostock’s place with
the short message attached:

Dear Sir
This Letter you read I rec’d this morning and I have sent it for your perusal
according to Captn. Roach’s wish, hope you are well
And remain
Your Humble Servant
J. S. Mill.

Bostock was far too livid to negotiate with a man who he believed had blatantly
hoodwinked him. He remained indignant. The twenty-four-hour deadline
passed.12
Roach ordered the Kitty’s seamen to set sail. As Bostock watched them sail
away, he must have hoped it would be the end of the affair. It was not. Aboard
the Kitty, Roach’s crew turned mutinous; it is unclear whether over the attack
on the Fénix, the children that Philippa Hayes was sending them, or even perhaps
86 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

just a drunken brawl. Roach, already fuming, was beyond a calm response.
On June 8, not long after he had ordered the brig steered back around Cape
Mesurado, he saw a British naval ship nearby and hailed it to ask for help with
his insubordinate crew.13
It was HMS Thais, leader of the antislavery squadron and vanquisher of the
DeWolf vessel Rambler. Just three days earlier the substantial prize money from
that capture had been paid to the Thais’s men, and they were jubilant. At the
helm was Captain Edward Scobell, a man whose family appeared in Burke’s
Peerage and for whom the antislavery station was a test of faith. “In great wa-
ters,” it would be effused on his tombstone, “he saw the wonders of the Lord.”
Zachary Macaulay, one of the most prominent abolitionists, was his prize agent
in London. His mission was both “the annoyance of the enemy” and catching
illegal slavers; he was at Cape Mesurado searching for a vessel named Governor
Wentworth, rumored to be illegally slaving. Scobell already knew John Roach as
the two had worked together to capture the slaver San José Triunfo just the pre-
vious month.14
Scobell sent a party to investigate what was happening aboard the Kitty.
Four mutinous sailors were clamped into irons and launched over the side into
the Thais’s boat. But the Thais gained more than the rebel seamen. By the end
of this encounter Edward Scobell knew that an “extensive traffick in slaves”
was being carried on nearby “by one or two Englishmen, and some Mulatto
traders.”15
Scobell was alarmed enough to sail straight to Freetown and lodge the Kitty’s
rebellious sailors in jail. Then he begged a meeting with Governor Charles
Maxwell to report what he had heard. Normally the Royal Navy’s small anti-
slave trade squadron did not attack slave factories ashore. The arrests of Samuel
Samo and Charles Hickson had been anomalies, though not unsuccessful ones
with Samo’s conviction. But for them to ignore this information would be an
admission of feebleness, even cowardice. Maxwell fired off letters to the Colonial
Office and the Admiralty reporting the disturbing news.16
Soon the Kitty also arrived in Freetown to “complain officially and claim
redress.” Bostock and McQueen had stolen his goods, Roach alleged formally,
and McQueen had made threats on his life. A couple of Krumen from Bostock’s
were with him to corroborate his story. Za was there too and was officially de-
clared to be free, his name recorded as “Za alias Jack Phoenix.” The Kitty’s
sailors had renamed the child. He had become a Jack Tar, originally found
aboard the slaver Fénix.17
Governor Maxwell and Captain Scobell came to a decision. They could
not ignore this, could not be seen to ignore a flagrant contravention of the law
The Slave Ship Fénix and Setting the Factory Alight 87

by two British men so close to their territory. Scobell would go to investigate

and would arrest the two men if he found anything suspicious. Scobell’s crew
were in a poor state, with many afflicted by fevers, catarrh, rheumatism, “flux,”
gonorrhea, tuberculosis, and boils. The ship was “very leaky,” the running
rigging “in a bad state, spliced and tail’d and not haveing any Reeve anew
[sic].” But they readied the Thais once again.18
Within days they weighed anchor, running again out of Freetown’s spectacu-
lar harbor and hauling south to find out what was going on at Cape Mesurado.
Sailing with them was the colonial schooner Princess Charlotte, a relatively small
vessel that was struggling to fight the “much superior” slave vessels that came
to call at the coast. By some reports there was also the sloop Juan, another Cuban
slave ship that the Thais had captured a week earlier north of Sherbro Island.19
The next day, June 25, they were rounding Cape Mount, some of the men
busy scrubbing clothes. They did not go unnoticed in the vigilant environment
of one of the major slaving regions of Africa. The Caulker family heard the
news. They immediately sent men in canoes to charge ahead and warn Bostock,
still allied to them through his senior wife, who belonged to their family.20

The lapping of paddles cutting through the water alerted them first, then
shouts. In the tranquil early morning light, before the heat set the country
ablaze with reds and golds, canoes appeared. As they pulled up onto the beach,
Bostock heard their shouted news, the alarmed tone that brooked no debate.
The naval patrol was on its way.
Bostock and McQueen agreed that they would try to hide their captives.
They might brazen it out if all the captives were hidden, like slave ship captains
who were caught but could not be prosecuted because of insufficient evidence.
It was how William Richmond had secured the release of the Dos Amigos and
how countless other illicit slaver captains talked their way out of trouble.
They began barking orders. The factory slaves were instructed to get as
many captives as possible into canoes and take them to John Sterling Mill, still
an ally whatever the business with John Roach. They worked quickly, losing
the chains and tethers that held so many, selecting the first group to go off, then
whipping them into canoes. Yarra and Tom Ball rowed off in convoy, rapidly
steering around the weft of the island, nipping through the small creek that
separated the Mesurado and St. Paul’s Rivers. Jostling the captives over the
side, they beseeched Mill’s help. The captives were put into his barracoons,
hidden in plain sight. Tom and Yarra returned and repeated the exercise. For
88 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

the rest of the day they went back and forth. By evening, news reached Bostock
and Mason’s compound that the enemy was offshore.
The naval vessel anchored for the night out beyond the sea bar while Scobell
ordered the “jolly boat and the cutter jawl [sic]” prepared. That night brought
“light airs with rain.” The next morning they began before daybreak. The
mate wrote in his log, “5:30 armed the cutter yawl and a jolly boat to be readied
for action.”21
At the factory Bostock and McQueen also rose long before dawn, planning
and plotting to do just enough to escape arrest. Using twilight as cover they
urgently hid more of their captives, making it look as if they were trading in
some other commodity. It would be a preposterous claim, but the onus was on
the naval men to prove their case, and that could only be done if Bostock and
McQueen were actually found with captives.
Again Yarra and Ball worked the canoes, removing more captives to Mill’s
and perhaps Hayes’s places. It was a precarious task. Speed was of the essence,
but taking too many risked revolt and mass escape. Bostock’s wives threw their
most treasured possessions into a trunk. It was still half an hour until sunrise
when four small boats appeared at the mouth of the St. Paul, crossing the “dark
sand intermix’d with shell” where the shallows of only fifty-one feet had previ-
ously protected them. Not far into the river Lieutenant Watkins, in charge of the
boats, “gained intelligence that many Slaves were then ready for embarkation.”22
It was frantic; the captives were not yet all gone. Yarra and Tom worked
the canoes, loading another group of captives aboard just as the Thais’s boats
approached. At the last minute, Bostock gave the trunk with his possessions to
Yarra, bidding him to take it. The two factory slaves desperately pushed off
from the shore and paddled away. One of the boats gave chase. Tom and
Yarra reached the shore, and many of the captives darted off, fearing for their
lives as gunshots ricocheted around. Those who dallied, stunned by shock,
hunger, and months tied at the ankles and wrists, felt the whip’s snap across
their naked limbs as they were impelled to find the momentum to run.

All was chaos, and a new type of terror. Knocked out of their fastened shackles,
the captives wore only the tethers that allowed them to go who knew where.
They were driven to the waterfront and crowded into canoes. Terror surely
reigned, but there was mystery too because they headed away from the big
water, in the direction some of them had been carried from their homes, up-
river to where a branch of the St. Paul hugged the island. Through the creek
The Slave Ship Fénix and Setting the Factory Alight 89

they were paddled, furiously, the few miles until it emerged into the Mesurado
River, where they were disembarked and once again chained. New men and
new dangers were all around.
More were pushed from the pen that had been their jail and loaded into a
canoe on the small sandy beach. At some point it must have become clear that
a boat of white men was chasing them. Amid the white men’s shouts of fury
they careened up onto the bank. Rolling over the sides, they splashed into the
water and made for shore. Suddenly some found themselves alone in the bush,
unguarded. Astonished and terrified as shots rang out, courage coupled with
desperate fear propelled them forward, their feet cutting into the soft mud.
They ran and ran and ran until, exhausted, they could run no more.23

The Thais’s men watched the last canoe get away, its people fleeing, before
turning back and approaching the factory. There were about forty men in their
party, advancing with “English colours” held high.
Desperate now, Bostock called on Tamba and told him to unshackle the
rest of those in the barracoon and march them to Chief Bagna’s compound.
Tamba got seventy-nine or eighty captives together. It was a desperate move
risking mutiny and even being murdered in vengeance, but it was all they had
left. Time was running out.
Robert Bostock and John McQueen were determined to fight. They had
large supplies of arms, and if necessary they could go into their storeroom where
five hundred carronades and their carriages, five hundred muskets and fifty
pairs of pistols were stockpiled. Perched behind the wall of one of their stronger
buildings, they opened fire on the marines as they stepped onto shore. Pro-
tected by the building and with the element of surprise, Bostock and McQueen
saw one naval man go down, then another. Realizing that they were under
“heavy fire” the marines fought back. Volleys shot across the compound.
Offshore, Scobell and the rest of his crew were surprised and alarmed as
they heard “several Guns and Musquets fired.” They had apparently perceived
no danger. Samuel Samo and Charles Hickson had been arrested with little
trouble, certainly not open resistance. The Thais “Shift’d the Schooner and
Sloop Close in Shore” in case they were needed. But Scobell need not have
worried; the Royal Navy’s men were far from beaten. They were quickly over
the threshold of the factory.
Bostock and McQueen made a last desperate move. Though they would
deny it always, and the naval men admitted that they did not know definitively
90 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

what happened, several of those there that day reported that Bostock and/or
McQueen ordered the barracoon put to flame. They only had to touch the
thatch before flames shot up its sides. With smoke billowing they fled, choking,
running in a manner they would previously have considered far from dignified.
Only a few moments later they heard a mighty explosion as the fire ignited
their vast store of rum. The barrels of gunpowder in the storeroom also ex-
ploded, creating fireworks visible for miles around. It was a blasting spectacle in
the morning air.24

Sessay was one of the last, still there after the canoes had carried many away
and others had been linked into a coffle and marched out. He had seen “four
small boats with white men in them” approach. Others were still there too. The
navy’s men would find the last few in the razed buildings, some “running from
it.” For some reason—a rather strange implication that was later crossed
through in the records—“it [was] supposed” that those who did not flee “were
drinking in the Cellar.”25
 9
Leaving,
Never to Return

R obert Bostock and John McQueen woke the following morning to a burned-
out world. They were hiding at Chief Bagna’s compound, uncertain what on
earth to do next. Word reached them that the Thais’s crew was intent upon
rounding up all the African captives they could find.
That first morning the gig shuttled backward and forward from the Thais to
the Princess Charlotte and back to the shore, everybody surveying the scene of
devastation. The next day, Monday, June 28, the first thirty-two Africans be-
lieved to be Bostock and McQueen’s captives were rowed out and embarked
onto the Princess Charlotte. The following day another sixteen were carried
aboard the Thais. The day after that twenty-six more were embarked. At some
point in these days Tom Ball, Bostock’s slave since childhood, was taken aboard
the Thais. Then Tamba and Yarra joined them.
The following day, the naval men visited Bagna’s compound, and the chief
handed over some of the captives who had shuffled over in Tamba’s hastily
constructed coffle. Sixty-seven men, women, and children were rowed out to
HMS Thais. Chief Bagna seems to have been intent on a palaver, arguing that
Bostock and McQueen must give themselves up. They evidently hoped that
Bagna could protect them, perhaps making offers of the deal he might have if
he continued to hide them. It seems likely that at least John McQueen, who
would later try to bribe others, offered money, and Robert Bostock had a whole
trunk of his most valuable possessions with him he could proffer. But Bagna
decided that he could not afford to enrage the British Navy, as his own business
depended on them not looking too closely at the ships with which he was
trading.
Hearing that he was hiding many of Bostock’s captives, the men of the
Thais next called on John Sterling Mill. By the account of the captive Bassa boy
held there, this time the navy’s men were prepared for trouble and sent five

91
92 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

boats, one more than on the original mission. Realizing that he too might be
swept up in the trouble, Mill sent his headmen with groups of captives off to the
mainland where they would be away from the eyes of the British.
Unguarded for a moment, the Bassa boy seized his chance. He and another
boy slid away and once hidden by the dense bush sped frenziedly away. It was
not long before they heard the sounds of pursuit. They were children, and
those stalking them were grown men familiar with the terrain. Strong arms
grabbed him and towed him pitilessly back to captivity.
Back at Dazoe, Mill was negotiating for his business, his livelihood. From
what we know of other such occasions the navy’s men likely made threats
gloved in the words of friendship: Mill’s and Hayes’s businesses would be left
alone if they surrendered those they were hiding for Bostock and McQueen. If
not, the navy would come after them long into the future. Into 1814 the patrol
was still attacking factories believed to be hiding captives for Samuel Samo. On
the other hand, if Mill and Hayes were to hand over those they were hiding for
Bostock and McQueen and make written promises that they would trade in
human beings no more, the Royal Navy would look away.1
John Sterling Mill handed over captives equal to the number he was hiding
for Bostock and McQueen. It did not matter who was who, whether those
handed over were truly Bostock’s or whether they were swapped for captives of
roughly equal value. The Bassa boy, who had never been a slave of Bostock
and McQueen, transformed in only a few weeks from “free-born” to an inter-
changeable item of merchandise, was rowed out the Princess Charlotte.2
On July 1 there was little more to be done. With even Mill and Hayes pres-
suring them to hand themselves over to end the assault, Bostock and McQueen
knew the game was up. Presumably they said goodbye to wives and children
hiding with them at the compound, though no evidence of this exists. It seems
likely that Bagna would have offered safety to Bostock’s Caulker wife and her
children, since he would not have wanted to make such powerful enemies over
such a small matter. Bostock and McQueen’s wives from Bagna’s family and
those who were the kin of other Cape Mesurado chiefs also seem to have re-
turned home taking their children with them. Although some of the children
taken to Freetown aboard the Thais and Princess Charlotte were listed by the British
as having a “yellowish complexion” or even a “yellowish tinge”—terminology
that raises the specter, at least from the perspective of American racial termi-
nology, that these were Bostock and McQueen’s sons and daughters—this is
relatively unlikely, at least in some cases. One of these children said to have a
“yellowish complexion,” for example, named Doray, also bore Poro cicatrices,
which seems unlikely for a child of Bostock’s.
Leaving, Never to Return 93

Bagna handed over Robert Bostock and John McQueen, claiming that
they had “been taken in the Woods by the Natives” rather than admitting that
he had been hiding them. They were summarily placed into handcuffs and
rowed out to the Thais. Housed above decks, some of their former captives held
below, they could only hope that the whole affair would be sorted out in Free-
town. The Thais’s men broached a cask of pork and beef, a reward for a difficult
job done well.
That same day John Sterling Mill and Philippa Hayes agreed to sign a
deposition:

We the undersigned . . . voluntary make oath and confess that . . . we have dealt
in and carried on a traffic for slaves buying in this country and bartering to be
shipped by sea and conveyed in Irons to a state of Slavery various Negroes
Natives of Africa the last purchased of whom our Slaves we did during the
month of May last sell to the concern of Charles Mason and Robert Bostock the
former we believe being an American now there and receiving the return of
the cargoes into that Country and the latter being an Englishman living in this
Neighbourhood and managing their extensive slave concern at the Factory of
St. Pauls from whence and personally from the said Robert Bostock we have
within the last month received payment for the said Slaves in Tobacco Rum etc.3

Beneath was information revealing the nature of the leverage the British
had applied to gain this “Recantation and Abjuration.” Mill was made to
admit that his father had been an Englishman. Hayes confessed: “my property
derives from an Englishman my Husband W Hayes being of that Country and
now in it.” In other words, they had been warned that their businesses were liable
to attack since they could conceivably be considered to be British property and
therefore under British legal jurisdiction. The only thing Mill and Hayes had
been able to do to keep their business was to confess. “Made sensible of the in-
humanity and unlawfulness of bartering the liberty and persons of our Fellow
Creatures,” they wrote treacherously, “we will never henceforward be condu-
cive in anyway to the enslaving of African Negroes.”4
The Thais and the Princess Charlotte remained out at sea for a few more days.
Their seamen were not finished. Thirteen more of their captives arrived aboard
the next day. A boat going to fetch them overturned at the mouth of the St.
Paul River, and a naval man drowned. The following day another forty-three
Africans were embarked.5

k
94 Part 2:  Burned to the Ground

Armed men came for the captives hiding in John Sterling Mill’s barracoon or
at Chief Bagna’s compound. They were rounded up and ordered to march to
the shore. Small craft, much inferior to their own people’s canoes, lay in wait.
And so, after everything, after the wars and kidnaps and raids and pawning,
beyond owners and dealers and gunfire and barracoons, this was leaving. Sit-
ting in the bottom of the dugouts, their legs circling the person in front, arms
crowding, they made the terrorizing journey out over the sandbar. They were
forced to climb up onto the giant vessel, the white men angry when anybody
hesitated or stumbled. It floated on top of the big water as if between the worlds
of the spirits and the living. They knew that the ones who went out onto the big
water did not return.
The motherless, tricked Bassa boy would remember that he had been “so
afraid when I got into the vessel. I cried very much, especially when I think
about my father, brother and sister.” Adding to their fear were the strange cere-
monies. One day the drowned sailor was wrapped into some sort of cloth and
with incomprehensible words, thrown overboard. Four days later one of the
white men was hauled up on ropes, his back exposed. A giant whip lashed into
his flesh, backward and forward, slashing the air hither and thither to the count
of thirty-six. While he was enslaved, Olaudah Equiano had watched a sailor
flogged and wrote, “this made me fear these people the more, and I expected to
be treated in the same manner.”6
The British naval men who took them on this journey, herding them along
and using gestures to instruct, were certain that they were rescuing them, that
their actions were on the side of God, morality, and mercy. Whether the Bassa
boy, Sessay and the others, even the adults, appreciated this is far from certain. It
may well have seemed like yet another scene in the ongoing spectacle of violence.

Eventually, 233 men, women, and children, believed to be former captives

from Bostock and Mason’s slave factory, were aboard the Thais and the Princess
Charlotte. It was perhaps half of those whom they had already sold to the Fénix at
the time of the Kitty’s attack.7
They weighed anchor on July 4. Charles Mason, away in America, would
not hear of his factory’s destruction for some time and was busy celebrating
his nation’s freedom from British tyranny. But for Robert Bostock and John
McQueen it was all over. They left behind the ruins of the slave factory they
had constructed only eighteen months before.8
 Part 3

Different Types
of Liberty
 10
Arriving
in Freetown

Sailing away from the burned-out ruins of their business, Robert Bostock and
John McQueen were in an awkward predicament. Shut in the space that had
been used to confine the mutinous sailors from the Kitty just a few weeks before,
they were allowed to stroll around the decks for exercise. When they did so they
were among the Thais’s marines and sailors upon whom they had fired a few
days earlier. Propriety demanded that they make small talk with men whose
colleagues they had killed and injured, and it was this, the records suggest, that
concerned them. McQueen in particular sought out William Chambers, one of
the men who had been in the Thais’s boats, and expressed his remorse for his
wounded friends.1
That they were partisan enemies meeting across the deck—illegal slave
traders and the frontline of the antislavery patrol—does not seem to have fully
sunk in. It may have been that this gulf was simply too vast for them to grasp.
The fact that anybody might truly, deep down, believe that slave trading was
morally wrong may have seemed too improbable or too dangerous an idea to
contemplate. Such philosophies belonged to another world, and they were only
a few days out from being potentates of their own slaving domain. They could
not yet appreciate the full rush of the abolitionist movement, the way that it
had sunk deep into British minds.
The cases of Samuel Samo and Charles Hickson likely reinforced this idea.
Hickson had been acquitted, and even Samo, found guilty, had afterward been
pardoned. If the charges against them were the same as those against Samo and
Hickson, they might reasonably expect to walk away. But Samo and Hickson
had not resisted arrest and had certainly not killed the king’s men. There was
also a whiff of the craven in their actions. If it could be proven that Bostock
and McQueen had set fire to their business, it would suggest ungentlemanly
conduct. The tenets of middle-class, white, male Georgian behavior meant

97
98 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

head-held-high acceptance of fate, back ramrod straight in order to assume the

required stature of preeminence.
They were acting out a charade of British civility that stood apart from the
Africans they had been buying and selling. Even in these earliest days of their
post–slave trading lives there was another agenda, appeals to a shared heritage
as sons of Albion, and above and beyond that as worthy gentleman rather than
ragamuffin sailors. They were white men of the proper sort and demanded a
certain sort of treatment no matter the allegations against them. They both
approached Captain Edward Scobell during the short voyage, “begging his
intercession.” They did not deny their guilt but spoke openly about their busi-
ness, even noting for Scobell the exact number of captives they had held at the
moment of attack. Both admitted that it was far more than those now aboard
the Thais and Princess Charlotte.2
John McQueen apparently also believed that they might bribe their way to
freedom. One day he was on deck when quartermaster Thomas Lovekine ap-
proached, asking how he thought they would fare. McQueen is alleged to have
blustered: “if money would get them off they were sure of their liberty.” It was
a very ill-advised thing to say, a swaggering boast that utterly misjudged the
reverence of many abolitionist devotees. Yet in other times and places he might
just have been right.3

At best it can only have been utterly mystifying. Tethers may have still chaffed
at wrists as the Thais’s men did not usually remove shackles until the captives
had been formally declared free, days later. For men, women, and children
captured in wars and raids, the arrival of the naval men was most likely just
another of part of their long journeys into captivity. Whether they had any idea
that their lives were diverging from the vast majority of those who left Africa in
chains is not clear, but the evidence would imply that many did not. There are
numerous reports that those “recaptured” had no idea what had happened,
and some threw themselves overboard after their rescue, still preferring the re-
bellion of the deep. The days of the voyage were much less than an Atlantic
crossing, but so few had ever returned that no such comparison was possible. It
may even have seemed that these new events presented a worse fate than their
original one, since slave dealers were known to deliberately mislead their cap-
tives to fear grisly deaths if they fell into the hands of the naval patrol.4
Their conditions on this voyage are not recorded. Probably they were given
water to wash and food (salted pork? cheese?), but their situation can only have
 Arriving in Freetown 99

Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 1850. From Thomas Poole Eyre, Life, Scenery and Customs in Sierra Leone and the Gambia,
vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley, 1850).

been grim. The seasickness and cramped conditions were terrible enough;
what the voyage might mean in its entirety was horrifying. They were diseased
and hungry, crowded aboard wooden vessels: the embodiment of all their fears.
For the Kru, going to sea was a way to communicate with the ancestral spirits,
but the others could only hope that their cries were still heard.5
Tamba, Tom Ball, and Yarra must have understood some of the words,
but it was all so improbable. Who could be trusted? In these earliest days of their
journey they could not know if it was safer to keep faith with Robert Bostock
and John McQueen as they were still their masters. Ball and Tamba knew little
else.
After two days the ship no longer moved across. Those above decks saw
that they were pulling through the heads of a giant harbor, buildings soon rising
on the banks. The uniformed men came again, shouting strange words and
goading them up and over the sides into more small boats. They huddled to-
gether as they set foot ashore. One man who watched recaptives arriving wrote
that they often thought they were in the slave markets of the Americas.6
Within a few years a set of steps, forever after known (curiously) as the
Portuguese steps, was cut and hefted into place and a “King’s Yard” erected,
complete with pontificating dedication to British justice. But those arriving
100 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

aboard HMS Thais and Princess Charlotte were early recaptives, and none of that
yet existed. They walked ashore up a muddy bank with planks set down to gain
traction. They were rounded up into what was described as a “cattle-pen” near
the levee.7
Back on solid ground, they were pulled from their huddle one by one. They
were measured. The strange men asked for their names. An African clerk wrote
them as best he could. Some of the children were too shocked, too fearful, to
speak. They were all allotted a number, a simple count of arriving Liberated
Africans; in later times numbers would be inscribed onto a “small metal ticket”
and tied around the neck.8
Tamba was the first to step forward. It was seemingly the first step toward
the new role he would carve out for himself as their leader. The English guessed
his age as thirty-three, around ten years older than his real age, and noted that
he had several scars on his body from his life of enslavement in the slave trade.
The others watched the strange dance as a stick was laid against him. Fears of
being eaten likely menaced the children’s minds as they watched. Tamba was
recorded as being 5 feet 4½ inches tall and was given the number 4338. His
well-known name gave the clerk no problem. Next a man whose name was
recorded as “Kangaree” stepped forward. He was judged to be twenty-five
years old and stood only 4 feet 8 inches tall. They noted that he was tattooed
down his right arm. He was now number 4339.
The other men were jostled forward, one by one. Yarra, the property of
John McQueen, became number 4405, the Poro cicatrices down his back
noted. They guessed that he was twenty-nine years old, and he stood 5 feet 6½
inches tall. The name Tom Ball does not appear on this list; instead he gave an
African name. It was perhaps a simple act of dignity. Calculating backward
from what appears to have later happened to Ball, he possibly gave the name
Banna, which would imply that he was perhaps Temne. If that was the case,
then he had tattoos on his left wrist and a scar below his shoulder blade. A life-
time of enslavement had left him 5 feet 3¼ inches tall.
Though they could not know it, these checks and notes spoke of many
things. There was the British desire to tally and a need for numbers to be sent
back to London as matters of accounting. The numbers also would serve to il-
lustrate how the campaign against the illegal slave trade was progressing. They
intimated that Africans’ complex naming systems were not understood and so
thought best reduced to numbers. More portentously, they marked the re-
captives’ unwitting entry into the British Imperial world. They would not be
enslaved, but their labor was nevertheless requisite.
Arriving in Freetown 101

A whole world of Poro membership, specialized skills, pride, and belonging

was noted into the ledgers, though the clerks—certainly the European clerks—
had little idea what they were noting. Their scarification was a type of passport
(albeit the information was more nuanced), and it is our tragedy that so much
that the ledgers contain is now ambiguous.
Boi—written Boy by the British—around forty years of age, had his proud
marks of identity and status boxed into the cool, slightly puzzled description
“very much purrahfied.” They were turned around so that their scarification
born on different parts could be noted: Canyarra had “purrah each side”;
Sangolee wore his Poro marks on his back; Wojoe’s were “on breast”; Fandee’s
on his cheeks. For the two Kono twins named Fangha, their scars were the
things by which they could be separated. The second Fangha had “purrah”
marks noted to be “curious.”
Some found that their facial scarification was sketched into the white men’s
big book. A twenty-nine-year-old man whose name sounded to the clerk like
the English word Gray had his cicatrices drawn into the ledger. The cross on his
forehead bore circles on the end of each branch. Coseree, whose age was esti-
mated to be twenty-one, had a single two-stroke cross, while another man named
Fangha, older than the twins, bore a star.
After the adult men came the teenagers: Tambo and Bondoa, each with an
extra finger, and Kong, who had the scars of smallpox, lines of newly acquired
Poro cicatrices, and marks of medicinal healing.
Then it was the turn of the children. Sessay hung back, waiting for more
to go ahead of him. When most of the other boys his age had already gone
forward he was pulled to the front. He was just over 4 feet 5 inches tall, and it
was noted that he had a “bump” on his left knee and a long face. He was now
number 4516. A boy who did chores aboard the ship did not have his name
written down, only the strange word Prince that the white man shouted when he
wanted him. He was eight years old, and they looked closely at his face, writing
that he had “a yellowish tinge” to his “complexion.”
The women and girls were last. The first was Kayang, around sixteen years
old and probably Kissi. One fourteen-year-old was recorded by the name
Charlotte, after the Princess Charlotte. Perhaps she simply was too traumatized to
speak, but the specter of the Charlotte seamen’s lusting for her “round face” is
also raised. The last of Bostock and Mason’s captives to be counted was Dee,
an eight-year-old girl with a round face who became number 4570.9
British authorities claimed that they had all been saved from being sold to a
passing slave ship, but this was not entirely true. Tamba, Tom, and Yarra had
102 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

been factory slaves, unlikely to be sold away. At least the one Bassa boy, and
likely others, had belonged not to Bostock and Mason but to John Sterling Mill.
And another man was astonished and angry that these white men were not
acknowledging what they obviously knew. When his turn came to give his
name he said, “Joshua Krooman.” While Kru sailors regularly took wondrous
names like Bottle of Beer, Frying Pan, Mashed Potato and Bubble and
Squeak—there had even been letters written to London demanding that this
levity in Kru naming be stopped—they seldom used Kruman as a surname.
Joshua must have added it to say that he was most definitely not a captive, not
in the same category as the others. His cicatrices told of his freedom. He bore
the “black mark down forehead nose and inside eye” that Kru seamen adopted
to prevent them being stolen away as slaves.10
Two of the children were also Kru. A seven-year-old girl gave her name as
Bassa Kroo. It could be that the child simply gave the name of her region and
her people as she knew them, proclaiming herself to be Kru from Grand Bassa.
Another child, a nine-year-old boy named Saree, did not give “Kroo” as part
of his name that day in the King’s Yard but soon afterward declared himself to
be Kru.11
Joshua Krooman was testimony to the fact that the campaign against the
slave trade had become a money grab. There is little doubt that the naval men
knew that Joshua was not a captive awaiting sale. They had worked alongside
Krumen and recognized what their facial scarification meant. But they had
captured him and brought him to Freetown nonetheless, conspiring to get the
head money that he would accrue.

Stepping ashore in Freetown, Bostock and McQueen passed into the hands of
George Clarke, the colony’s jailer, one of the last of the original settlers who
had founded the Province of Freedom twenty-six years earlier. Freetown had
no jail. Two houses were being used, and Bostock and McQueen were lodged
in one of those. They wore no shackles.12

The captives languished in the cattle pen. Large cauldrons of rice were cooked
to keep them fed, but it was too little too late. “Emaciated, squalid, sickly look-
ing and ill fed,” the newly Liberated Africans were often “nothing more than
living skeletons.” An observer of another group of recaptives wrote:
Arriving in Freetown 103

The expression of the countenance indicated suffering, moral and physical, of

the most profound and agonizing nature. . . . The belly is, as it were, tacked to
the back, whilst the hip bones protrude, and give rise to foul sloughing and
phagedenic ulcers. . . . The squalor and extreme wretchedness of the figure is
heightened, in many cases, by the party-coloured evacuations with which the
body is besmeared. The legs refuse to perform their functions, and with difficulty
support the emaciated, tottering and debilitated body.13

It was hellish. Recaptives died in their first days in Freetown as diseases and
hunger overtook them. Of Bostock and Mason’s slaves, one of those lost in the
early days was probably fourteen-year-old Bessy, for whom no later fate was
recorded.
Yet, in that darkness there were shafts of light. They were not alone. The
pen stood only yards from the center of Freetown, and many recaptives from
the earliest days of the patrols lived on the fringes of the settlement. So visitors
came to see them, recaptives descending en masse to search for family members
and countrymen. The question would seethe through the town whenever new
people arrived: “who is of my country?” For those brought in before, it was a
way to try and reach the homes and families from which they had been stolen,
to hear news of loved ones and remember their lives before. The starving, sick,
and exhausted arrivals were the only communication route most had. It was
also a way to offer support and hope for those arriving after them, to rebuild
kinship and community according to their own understanding that food and
shelter, like pain and suffering, were shared.14
For those in the pen who were found by a countryman or countrywoman,
the relief can only have been overwhelming. An observer of such a reunion
wrote, “The poor creatures being faint . . . and unconscious of what had be-
fallen them, did not know whether they should laugh or cry when they beheld
the countenances of those whom they had supposed long dead.” The scene was
“too affecting” to be described, and “no one could refrain from shedding tears.”15
Kinsmen and kinswomen were safety, sanctuaries after journeys through
the perdition of strange lands. Countrymen were a pathway to a future that
was, at last, imaginable. They could be interlocutors explaining to the newly
arrived the dimensions of their scarcely comprehensible fate, teaching them
how to negotiate the place in which they now found themselves. Through these
visitors they began to learn something of this strange place and catch sight of
the future.
A recaptive Kissi man who had been in the colony long enough to take the
name Mulberry arrived to meet the newcomers. Kayang, the sixteen-year-old
104 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

who had stepped forward first of all the females, was one of his kinswomen. He
held out the possibility of a life she recognized; he was tangible proof that her life
would go forward from this hell. Other Kissi came to meet Tamba, a fourteen-
year-old second son. Safua and her baby, Bessy, were also lucky. They met
some of their country people who offered them a roof and food, a safe space to
recuperate.
A Sherbro woman named Terro also heard that some of her people were in
the cattle pen and hastened there. No records reach us, but there must have
been scenes of unbounded joy and delight as Manay and Marray, who called
each other sister, embraced her, relieved beyond words at this rescuer’s arrival.
Terro offered to share her home and her scanty food with them for they were
all sisters.
Countrymen are also reported to have come to welcome two of the children.
Seven-year old Bono went to live with a Loma family. Perhaps they hoped that
somebody was taking care of their own children, from whom they had been
stolen away, and through Bono saw hope that caring and sharing might extend
to those they had lost. A seven-year-old who whose name had been written
“Mano”—whether a rendering of her name or her attempt to give her people’s
identity—was also claimed.
At Freetown’s arrival yard an entire continent of gods were praised in the
elation of reunion and among the “suffering, moral and physical,” were scenes
of pure, life-affirming joy. Kayang, Safua and Bessy, Tamba, Manay and
Marray knew that they had only to wait for their release from British authorities
and they could leave their captivity. They were among the most fortunate of all
the new arrivals.16
 11
The Court Case

After a couple of days, white men arrived in the pen and asked questions
about Robert Bostock and John McQueen. Tamba, Ball, and Yarra under-
stood some of the words. Still, the wider implication, the intimations shrouded
within those rounded British vowels, can only have been bewildering. Bostock
and McQueen, and Charles Mason before he sailed away, had controlled their
days and their nights, where they went, what they ate, and where they rested
their heads. The men had tried to own their minds. Yarra was slightly older
and was not captured until he was at least old enough to have Poro scars down
his back, but Bostock had owned Tom for so long that he had grown up inured
to his former owner’s fantasies of omnipotence.
Tamba, Ball, and Yarra cannot have fully known it, but the request for
their witness would have been strange almost anywhere around the Atlantic
Ocean in the early nineteenth century. In many places it would have been
anathema. Yet a couple of years earlier it had been decided that “the Negroes
themselves should appear as parties . . . before the Court, in order to implead
their right to freedom.” Africans had testified at the court cases of Joseph Peters
and William Tufft in June 1812. Even so, there had not been many Africans
called. A potential roadblock was the issue of whether their testimony could
stand if they did not pledge an oath, and it was a remarkably broadminded de-
cision for the times that had allowed that they could swear to tell the truth in
the manner of their own countries or however they so chose. Those who had
bravely gone before them and those would come soon after used not only the
Old and New Testaments and the Koran but had also recited prayers in their
own languages, sworn on their mother’s lives, invoked direct hits from God,
kissed the earth, and performed other solemn rituals: “he rubbed his two fore-
fingers on his forehead and applied the dust to his tongue.”1

105
106 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

It is not clear why Tamba did not give evidence. Possibly he was too con-
flicted about his own role, or not yet able to psychically distance himself from
his former owners. Perhaps this was also an acknowledgment that the British
knew another truth, one that they could not afford to spell out in the legal record
for fear of blurring their fantasy of a clear line between sinful trader and sup-
plicant African awaiting their divinely inspired assistance. Likely they knew
that Tamba was not simply a captive awaiting sale but also a man said by other
African slave traders to have been “in the slave trade.”
Tom Ball and Yarra agreed to give accounts of what Bostock and McQueen
had been doing: of the captives and the ships, the minutiae of their own hor-
rific jobs guarding and feeding and loading aboard slave vessels. Whether
they believed they had any choice or not we cannot know, but nonetheless it
showed remarkable bravery. Ball and Yarra had no way of knowing whether
Bostock and McQueen still claimed ownership over them and might wreak
revenge for having testified. Ball also could not have known whether Charles
Mason, his old master from the Gallinas factory, would come back for him. For
some, the risks of testifying were just too much. Another slave trading trial fell
apart because the main witness refused to appear, not wanting to incur any-
body’s wrath.2
On July 9, Yarra gave his evidence before Judge Robert Purdie and Purdie’s
assistant. There is no record of whether Purdie wore formal court dress as
required by the Lord Chamberlain, and so presented himself sweating in the
intense humidity in a dark-colored frock coat and breeches with white silk
stockings and a wig.
Yarra was asked about his owner. He replied that he had previously be-
longed to another white slave trader and after that man’s death John McQueen
had bought him. That had been twelve moons before, Yarra related, and since
then he had been held at Mason and Bostock’s factory. Next they turned to
questions of his work. By the time his answer was noted down his original words
were transformed into English: “I have been taking care of the slaves, putting
them in Irons and looking after them. I put many slaves into boats and in Irons
and sent them on board Vessels that have taken them away.” He was asked to
clarify that this had been under the direction of Bostock and McQueen, and he
concurred. Yarra was then questioned about the people in the barracoon, but
instead of speaking of those who had arrived in Freetown he talked of others
who had not. Of those who had been held captive at the factory “about half a
moon ago, when the Man of War came,” he claimed that only around half had
been brought to Sierra Leone. Yarra was given the metal-nibbed quill to make
The Court Case 107

a mark under what they had written, and he made two lines, carefully crossing
them. It was done.3
Next Tom Ball sat before the elderly white man. He was asked to make his
own promise that he would tell the truth and did so in the manner of his own
country, remembering back to the times he had seen men do this before he had
been stolen away. His years of enslavement to Robert Bostock were far longer
than Yarra’s, and there was so much to tell.
“I hath been a slave of Robert Bostock since I was a little boy,” Ball stated,
“living with him first at Gallinas then came with him to St. Paul’s Mesurado on
the setting of that factory.” He was the only one of the factory slaves to speak of
Mason: “A year and a half ago Mason a white man with whom Bostock lived at
Gallinas came in a Brig to Mesurado and filled her belly with slaves whom he
took away with him.”
Asked about the last time a slaving vessel called at their factory, the one
prior to the Fénix, Ball replied: “about four months ago was the last time a
Vessel took slaves from Bostock, she was a schooner and she carried away a
great many.” Questioned about John McQueen, Ball recalled how McQueen
had lived with Bostock for two years, and “has helped Bostock to buy and send
off Slaves and when Bostock was absent about a year ago McQueen had charge
of the factory.” They asked him about his own work: “I kept them when kept at
the factory in Irons,” he replied. He too was handed the quill and signed with a
cross.4
Three days later, a week after having set sail from Cape Mesurado, their
case was decided. Sierra Leone’s courthouse was one of only six stone buildings
in the town, used as a church on Sundays and every other day as the girls’
school. Classes halted for the occasion, and Judge Robert Purdie got down to
the business at hand. Having invoked “the name of Christ and having God
alone before his eyes,” Purdie decreed that the freedom of the 233 men, women
and children who had been brought from Charles Mason and Robert Bostock’s
barracoon was legal under British law. One half of them were said to be the
property of Robert Bostock, forfeited because he was a British citizen caught
slave trading illegally. The other half of the captives were deemed the property
of Charles Mason, who as an American lost this property as prize of the War of
1812. With that they were legally free.5
The news was conveyed to them back in the cattle pen in best king’s En­glish,
a language they did not understand. The Britons making the grand declaration
believed that they were performing an act of God and that the Africans’ futures
were now all rosy. It sometimes became such a sanctimonious performance of
108 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

pomposity that one observer derided it as “mummery.” It was nevertheless an

escape by the slimmest of margins from enslavement in perpetuity.6

k
On July 11 Bostock and McQueen had decided to plead guilty, apparently
convinced that if they admitted their crime and begged for forgiveness they
would walk free. Edward Scobell wrote, “no denial . . . was attempted.” They
admitted slave trading but mentioned the length of time they had been involved
in the business, hoping that having entered the trade before it was outlawed
would ameliorate their guilt.7
The following day word reached them that their former captives had
been declared free. It was a financial setback as significant as the loss of their
inanimate goods and buildings the week before. Yet there must also have been
a glimmer of satisfaction in the news, since the manner of their loss dealt a
blow to those who had destroyed them. For the crews of HMS Thais and the
Princess Charlotte, the decision to decree half of their former captives to have
been the property of Charles Mason instead of Robert Bostock had been a dis-
appointment. By 1813, “head money” of £60 for each man, £30 per woman,
and £10 for every child was paid for those who rescued captives from slave
ships, divided among all of those involved down to the lowliest cabin boy. The
naval men had been expecting that this sum would be paid out for all of those
saved from Bostock and Mason’s barracoon. Collectively, the worth of the
233 Africans brought from the St. Paul River would have amounted to £8,410.
But Purdie’s decision meant that head money would not be paid for the half
considered to have been Mason’s property. They were instead prizes of war,
and prize money usually came from the sale of the ship, cargo, armaments, and
whatever else had been captured. But here at the sharp end of the abolitionist
canon there was no question of half of those rescued being sold to line the
naval men’s pockets. Instead of the £8,410 they had been expecting, Maxwell,
Macaulay, Edward Scobell, and the men of the Thais and Princess Charlotte shared
£5,790.8

Ten days later, Bostock and McQueen were led to court. They hustled past
wattled huts along Westmoreland Street, named for the Maroons’ Jamaican
home. The Nova Scotians had named the side streets they passed for Generals
in the American War (Rawdon and Howe) or members of the Royal Family
The Court Case 109

(Gloucester, Charlotte, and George). The girls’ school was again halted for this
occasion.9
The case before theirs was the theft of a blue jacket and £9 in £1 notes, for
which the defendant was found guilty and sentenced to five years’ hard labor. It
was a sideshow: it was Bostock and McQueen’s trial that had drawn the crowd,
their prosecution a hotly debated topic and quasi entertainment in this tiny
colony where everybody lived and died by the fight against the slave trade.
They were tried under the 1811 Slave Trade Felony Act, also known as
Mr. Brougham’s Act, first used the year before in Samuel Samo’s case. Just like
Samo’s trial, Bostock and McQueen’s promised to be a spectacle, a theater of
sin, sanctity, and possible redemption all under one roof. Samo’s trial had in-
volved tales of shackles, chains, captives branded on the right thigh. When he
was found guilty, all in court had heard Judge Robert Thorpe assail Samo,
“human beings made and created in God’s image you have stolen,” and then
sentence him to a “penalty of law that is not death, but it is worse, for it reduces
the convict to the most infamous degradation of life” where he would do hard
labor with “a fetter or a log appended to some limb.”10
Issuing a reprieve, Thorpe had invoked Samo to persuade his fellow dealers
to abandon their trade so that “it be shattered to atoms in a storm of benevolent
charity to mankind—it will be an immolation acceptable to the deity.” Later,
reading the King’s Mercy to the prisoner, Thorpe had been so impassioned
that one Englishman attending “wept almost the entire time.”11
But there was bad news for Bostock and McQueen. It was Judge Thorpe
who had convinced Governor Maxwell to recommend a pardon for Samo, and
Thorpe had since returned to England. Presiding over Bostock and McQueen’s
trial, just as he had freed their former captives a week earlier, was Judge Robert
Purdie, the colony’s former surgeon, who lacked any legal training as well as
Thorpe’s histrionic streak. Just three weeks previously he had written to Gover-
nor Maxwell acknowledging that he was “very little acquainted . . . with the
laws of England.”12
This was not uncommon in faraway colonies where few people had legal
training. A few years earlier, a storekeeper had been the colony’s judge. It was
actually more unusual that until a short time earlier Robert Thorpe, a trained
barrister, presided over the Sierra Leone courtroom. That had happened only
because Thorpe was sent to Sierra Leone as penance after being banished
from Upper Canada for “violence and indiscretion.” Nevertheless, in Free-
town he had become “a devoted abolitionist,” vigorously prosecuted cases
against slave traders. In 1812, he had boasted to Governor Maxwell that be-
tween them they were stopping the slave trade, having “closely bound up the
110 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

Portuguese . . . crippled the Americans, and put flight to the Spaniards.”
Thorpe believed that “immortal fame” rested in these deeds and that he and
Maxwell were “at the vanguard of social and legal change.” But, needing a
break so that he could improve his health, he had sailed for England a few
months before Bostock and McQueen arrived in Freetown. Purdie had taken
over, supposedly temporarily.13
The same jury who had judged the guilt of the jacket thief remained on,
and however much Bostock and McQueen had prepared themselves for this
moment, it must still have been a shock. Kenneth Macaulay, a Briton who was
superintendent of captive Negroes, was in the jury. James Carr, an accountant
for the African Company who had left the colony at one point to go slave trading,
was also there. These were the only feint glimmers of hope for them.14
Also sitting among the jury, waiting to pass judgment, were Nova Sco-
tians Joseph Jewett and Pompey Young. Representatives of the Maroon com-
munity were even more numerous. John Ellis was the Maroon preacher of the
Huntingtonian Church, and William Libert was a clerk and carpenter. Barney
Baily, John Morgan, and William Thorpe were all Maroons, and James Williams
was the son of a Maroon.15
Bostock and McQueen had traded alongside African men and sometimes
women, lived with African women, and had mixed-race children, but having
their fate in the hands of this multiracial jury, in which black men were a very
distinct majority, can only have seemed a perversion, a parody of all that they
believed themselves to be. Racial designations might not have been quite as
hardened as they would later become, but by the turn of the century an august
Englishman would be scandalized and incensed to discover that in Freetown a
white man could be sued by a local man, “with the damages assessed by a
coloured jury.” Others alleged that they have been unfairly treated simply
because the jury was black.16
Bostock and McQueen learned that two of their former slaves had given
evidence against them. It was most likely a shocking development on two
fronts. A year earlier, Samo had been convicted more or less entirely on the
testimony of Africans, and Joseph Peters’s sentence came at the word of his
former captive. Just the idea of Africans having this sway over white men had
been inflaming to many. Equally confronting, however, was to learn which of
their former slaves had testified. Yarra was a recent arrival at the factory, but
like so many American plantation masters who thought that their domestic
slaves were loyal and reasonably content, Bostock and McQueen surely believed
Tom Ball to be the most reliable of their bondsmen.17
The Court Case 111

Yet they had to sit and listen to Ball’s statement that related how he had
been enslaved as a “small boy” and had grown up as the personal property of
Robert Bostock. He had told of their Gallinas factory and Charles Mason and
the Fénix and other earlier slave ships. Both he and Yarra had revealed details
of their factory and the captives they had bought and sold. It was one of the
rare times that former African slaves ever testified before a court in the English-
speaking world about the circumstances of their captivity.18
Bostock and McQueen also heard the confessions of John Sterling Mill and
Philippa Hayes that they too were slave trading and had bought and sold from
Bostock and McQueen. Whether they smiled sardonically upon hearing their
solemn promises to quit the slave trade, or were angered, or were even coolly
aware that they would have done the same, we cannot know. There seems little
doubt that they knew that the pledges were hollow.19
After the testimonies of a few crewmen aboard the Thais, Purdie, with little
idea of how to proceed, followed his learned predecessor. Thorpe had found
Samuel Samo guilty, so Purdie did the same, “with confidence.” He proclaimed
the two men guilty and quickly passed sentence. Both were banished to Australia,
Britain’s prison colony founded back in 1788, for fourteen years.20
It caused them great distress, certainly. But they cannot have given up hope
at this point. Samuel Samo had been convicted but then quickly pardoned.
Now he was happily back slave trading in the Rio Pongo, despite his pledge to
help it be “shattered to atoms in a storm of benevolent charity.” Bostock and
McQueen likely clung to the faith that a similar fate would meet them.21

Not long after that trial, Judge Purdie adjudicated another case. It was the final
strand of the events that had seen the demise of Mason and Bostock’s St. Paul
enterprise. John Roach and the men of the Kitty claimed the slave ship Fénix as
their rightful prize. Purdie declared the capture legal since one captive, Za, had
been found aboard. Legally captured slave ships were usually sold in order for
captors to receive their share of the prize money. Instead John Roach decided
to keep the Fénix, or as he called it, the Phoenix.22
He also kept aboard Za, now called Jack Phoenix. Freedom for the young
recaptive boy was to be the servant/apprentice of Captain John Roach.23
 12
Becoming Soldiers, Cabin Boys,
and Wives

At best, it was baffling. Even once they knew that they were not now captives,
it was mysterious. Before enslavement they had been in the safety of their fam-
ily and kin group, where human life stood tall. Then had come the hell of the
coffles and the barracoons. What happened next was a blank slate.
The British believed that they had given them a priceless gift, and that
escaping the barracoon can only have been an immense relief. Those enslaved
in the Americas would doubtless have agreed overwhelmingly that to be sud-
denly deemed free was an inestimable windfall. But these men and women
lacked clear insight into these alternatives: the endless toil of generations in the
cane fields versus liberty. They had not come from nations that had recently
adopted freedom as an all-encompassing aim, shouting huzzah for Liberty or
Death, guillotining aristocratic necks in the name of liberté or proclaiming that
the air of their country so pure that all must be free. They had not been longing
for this thing the white men called freedom, at least not in the sense of individuality
of action and autonomous decision making. The culture shock must have been
monumental. Within a week they went from white men’s merchandise chained
in a stinking barracoon to experiments in enlightenment theory.
Many of them wanted more than anything to go home, which as one
observer noted, was their idea of “genuine liberty.” Children wanted parents,
and husbands longed for wives. They had been snatched from a jigsaw puzzle
of extended family and community that stretched back to the ancestors and
reached out to the ones not yet born, where each person had established roles
that anchored the earth to the sky and morning to night. No one piece, one
person, told the whole story of that intricate puzzle, and only whole would it
reveal the image entire. Liberty as the British perceived it was indecipherable.
Worst, isolation and desolation were close kin. Humanity was found through
society; life was in and through others.1

112
Becoming Soldiers, Cabin Boys, and Wives 113

But going home was hardly ever a possibility, since the distances they were
away from their homelands meant impossibly long journeys. Even if a route
were known, they would be at immense risk of being re-enslaved. Some had
been away for years and had received no news of their people. The circumstances
of Tom Ball’s and Tamba’s appropriation from their families years earlier are
unclear: perhaps they had no homes to which they might return. Some of the
smaller children from the barracoon had no idea where their homes even were
and could hardly travel there alone. They had little choice but to try and re-
create some semblance of normality in this new place.
The British had little idea what rescued men, women, and children would
do. Abolitionists had not anticipated this constant, and very much increasing,
flow of recaptives because they had optimistically believed that the slave trade
would be quickly wound up after 1808. Beyond that, they wavered about be-
coming too involved in the lives of the rescued Africans, since to them the slave
trade was a matter of sin and abrogation of divine law, it was not a humanitarian
matter per se.
When the slave trade had first been illegalized by the British five years
earlier and Royal Navy ships sent out to catch those breaking the ban, almost
all of the attention was on the actual business of slave trading and on prosecuting
those found breaking the new laws. One solitary clause in Britain’s law illegal-
izing the slave trade mentioned the captive humans they might find aboard the
illicit slave ships. It would have been quite remarkable to them that it would
ever be called “an early and bold judicial experiment in humanitarian interven-
tion.” There was no admission made among the abolitionists that captives,
having been freed, were really their concern.2
Most Britons, including the abolitionists, imagined that Liberated Africans
would be put to work in some way that contributed to imperial progress. They
could be kept in various degrees of nonfreedom as long as they were not held in
outright slavery. Apprenticeship for a term up to fourteen years or enlistment
into His Majesty’s army and navy were thought the most appropriate types of
liberty. These were the sorts of thing that many young British boys had to
choose between.
Yet the abolitionists did not believe that Africans could be expected to fully
understand these options. So, a proviso that each was to be treated “as if he had
voluntarily so enlisted or entered,” revealed the abolitionists intentions to treat
them along the lines of British boys and yet displayed that some would not ac-
tually have made a deliberate decision at all. Officers “appropriated” Liberated
Africans for military service because they were not thought capable of making
an informed choice. This is one of the reasons that Marcus Wood has argued
114 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

acerbically that “emancipation [was] a mean-spirited and highly efficient plan

for the continued exploitation of the African body as both commodity and re-
source.” Tellingly enough, throughout decades of the campaign against the
slave trade, the British termed the freed Captured Negroes, with the terms recaptive
and Liberated African only used later.3
In March 1808, when two American slave ships had first arrived in Sierra
Leone, having been captured by the naval patrol, nobody knew what to do
with those aboard, nor had any money to pay for their upkeep. Believing that
these would be rare cases rather than the start of a torrent, Governor Ludlam
enlisted forty of the “ablest men” into the military, and the rest he “sold” as
apprentices to Freetown’s citizens for $20 each, the proceeds being paid to the
naval men for their rescue. Ludlam claimed that he imposed the fee to secure a
better sort of master for these “apprentices.” But the captives were still wearing
iron shackles, and most buyers thought they were purchasing chattel slaves
whom they would own in perpetuity.4
Though Ludlam and the other abolitionists always hotly denied any wrong-
doing, this was cutting things a bit too close. Zachary Macaulay admitted that
the $20 should not have gone to the men of the naval patrol since “it tells ill,
because it looks something like a sale.” Thomas Perronet Thompson, who
became governor in July 1808 a few months after this sale, had been horrified.
He had declared all apprenticeships signed before he had arrived to be void,
believing, as he wrote to his fiancée, that the scheme “introduced actual slavery.”
William Wilberforce and his fellow antislavery “saints” had “at last become
slave traders with a vengeance” because of their support for apprenticeships,
raged Thompson.5
Thompson had hoped to turn the Liberated Africans into a “free and hardy
peasantry,” but with no budget to do so he had been forced to go on apprenticing
many of the newly arrived recaptives to Maroons and Nova Scotians. Adver-
tisements in the African Herald reveal something other than the hearty farmers
for which he hoped. In November 1809, Moses Grief had advertised a $60
reward for the return of his three “New Negro Fellows” who had gone off with
abolitionist literature in their pockets. The following week’s paper had advertised
for the return of Cupid (tellingly, the fugitive called himself Osman, not Cupid),
who had been rescued from a slave ship a few months earlier. He had run off,
“in consequence of the light whipping given to his wench.”6
There had been no more open sales of Liberated Africans after 1808, but in
place of outright sale came negligence. When Edward Columbine replaced
Thompson as governor, there had been allegations that Liberated Africans were
given insufficient food and had been forced to go around the town “begging &
Becoming Soldiers, Cabin Boys, and Wives 115

stealing for subsistence.” Columbine, despite being an abolitionist and member

of the African Institution, had remained unapologetic, apparently declaring on
one occasion, “Tis enough that we give them liberty.” They could “earn their
bread by labour,” he believed.7
Charles Maxwell had taken over from Columbine by the time Bostock and
Mason’s captives arrived, but there was little change with Maxwell “bidden to
continue Columbine’s regime of economy.” A visitor in 1811 had watched
HMS Thais bring in some other recaptives and wrote, “if the settlers wish to
have any of them, to employ them in their houses, or on their farms, they make
application to the Governor specifying the number they want.” Maxwell then
wrote out an indenture, the greater aim of which was “to inure them to the
habits of industry, and teach them the arts of the civilized life.” Yet by July
1813, even apprenticeships were not widely used.8
The only man among the Thais’s arrivals who knew what to do was Joshua,
the Kru man who had been trying to make his status obvious. Near the harbor,
not far from where they had landed, was Kroo Bay. Since the very earliest days
of the colony Kru men had established their own place with “loosely wattled
sheds,” a village where the skilled seafarers could live while they were working
in the colony. Three years later Kroo Bay would become the first parcel of land
within the Sierra Leone colony alienated for a specific ethnic group. At least six
hundred to seven hundred of Joshua’s kinsmen were there and could offer him
a place to sleep and a plate of food while he found work.9
So Joshua hastily headed for Kroo Bay, slaking off the embarrassment of
having been erroneously brought in as a recaptive. He could look for seafaring
work and earn as much as three or four dollars per month. But Kroo Bay was
famously a “bachelor village”—even a reward of £5 5s to any Kru man who
brought his wife and children to the colony had failed—so there was no place
for the Kru children Bassa and Saree.10
The others had little idea what to do. They were given a blanket and a
piece of cloth long enough to wrap around their body. Each child got a smaller
bit of fabric and shared the blanket with another boy or girl. And that was
virtually all the help they got.11
They were hungry, traumatized, and away from everybody who could offer
support. Worse, perhaps the most immediate threat for those not ailing from
disease was the man officially in charge of them, twenty-one-year-old Kenneth
Macaulay. Stories flew back to London that he was “in the constant habit of
debauching numbers of the captured negro girls.” He was said to treat the girls
and young women as his personal harem and later kept “a seraglio of half a
dozen women” with whom he lived “in the most libidinous and profligate
116 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

manner.” Nobody ever asked his alleged victims for their stories: they were
young girls recently wearing chains, unable to understand him, and he was a
white man in a position of almost unmitigated power.12
The boys and men might have escaped his more lascivious attentions, but
Macaulay was said to “shamefully coerce and chastise” them. He paid little
attention to their well-being or fate, and in this laxity was room for people to
re-enslave them or otherwise exploit their need for help. Only one of them,
eleven-year-old Paway, was indentured. The rest had no idea what to do.13
This white man’s gift called freedom may well have seemed to possess some
very strange features.

As morning dawned over their first day after the strange ceremony, the meaning
of which was still opaque, men in uniform appeared at the pen. The adult
males and teenage boys were told to line up. Limb touching limb, they likely
stood dignified and unflinching as they had learned in the Poro bush. They had
come so far, they would not break at this. They knew that to reveal any emotion
was to give their tormentors a tool with which to unstitch them. The sick perhaps
harnessed their might, standing as tall and straight as they could manage because
this might be an audition for life. A show of health and vitality might prove
their worth, might be the difference between life and death.
The white men looked, examined, and discussed. They made notes. Then
they pointed at Konbah, probably a Kono; Fallee, perhaps a Kissi man; Miah,
a Mende man whose serried row of cicatrices had been drawn in the arrival
book; and Bala, one of the Gbande men. They motioned to the tallest of them
all, Canaba, and one of the shortest, Kangaree. “The most muscular”—those
who had managed to fight off the worst of the diseases and starvation—were
separated from the rest. They had come together, now some of them stood
apart.14
For Kerricure it was seemingly all too grave. Nineteen years old, she saw
her countryman picked and knew that her last consolation, the last thread that
led back to the other life before, would be lost. Distraught, too overwhelmed to
shroud her pain behind an impassive veil, she apparently clung to the man who
embodied all that had been stolen from her. Perhaps the other women looked
on, unsure if Kerricure was plucky or crazy. Yet somehow it worked. Alone of
the women, Kerricure stood with the chosen men.
There were more white men wearing different uniforms. More were singled
out, a cut deeper than the last. Soon forty-two more stood apart. Mamaroo, a
Becoming Soldiers, Cabin Boys, and Wives 117

proud Muslim man of sixteen, Nacoi, Gumboo, Blaman, Woorie, Panday, and
Fouray with scarification on his cheeks and forehead. Tom Ball, listed under
his African name, was one of those taken. The youngest were only nine years
old, surely too young to be soldiers and perhaps wanted as servants or porters.
Whole groups of those from the muster roll chose to go or not go, as if they had
stood with their countrymen and fellow language speakers when they had ar-
rived and now together selected their fate.
The British declared that anybody who resisted could stay behind, but how
to chose when so little was known? Tom Ball might have understood that they
were being chosen for military service. He, or African clerks who were earlier
recaptives, may have been able to explain. But it is far from certain. It is entirely
possible that many of them had no idea what was happening, much less that
they had a sliver of choice. The only experience they had with white men was
enslavement, and many believed that they had been purchased by the white
men in Sierra Leone, in the form of the head money given to their rescuers. It
was a view shared by many of the people living around the colony who thought
that the Liberated Africans belonged to the white men who governed. For what
other purpose would the white men have brought them to the colony? Decades
earlier, aboard the slave ship leaving Africa, Olaudah Equiano had been told
by his countrymen that they “were to be carried to these white people’s country
to work for them.” It probably seemed to some that this was simply coming
true.15
There was even some justification behind these apparent misconceptions,
since the law provided that recaptives were “for the sole use of His Majesty,
his heirs or successors.” It was a provision intended to prevent their being re-
enslaved, but it nonetheless spoke of a bigger picture in which their labor was
not entirely their own. Since November 1811, when a “Black Company” had
been added to the Royal African Corps (RAC), the collector of customs in
Freetown had been required to turn over any newly rescued men fit enough
for military service. Edward Scobell carried instructions to look among those
he liberated from slave ships for “a supply of recruits to complete the Black
Regiments.”16
In Westminster, where they were agonizing about war on several fronts—
there were fears that Britain itself might be invaded—and suffering an acute
shortage of recruits, this forced recruitment of released captives made perfect
sense. Britain itself had already been driven to try both ballots and a system
whereby each parish had to provide a certain number of men for the army. It
did not seem too much of a stretch to enlist Liberated African men to fill the
ranks of faraway corps. The British also thought that military service was a way
118 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

that Liberated Africans could repay them for their freedom. Having convinced
themselves that they were now moral giants for their stance against the slave
trade, many Britons thought that those liberated from slave ships should, at
bare minimum, be appreciative.17
For the captives, it was a glimpse of the largely unquestioned notions of
superiority held by the British. It was far from the worst racism that they and
their descendants would face, but it showed that equality was not even imagined.
Most of the abolitionists saw Africans as unlucky children in need of teaching
and improving. Civilization was the mantra of the age, and it was hoped that
Africans might be shown the way forward, and so be manifestly improved, if
only the British taught them how to be the proper sort of human being. How
exactly this would happen given that their white comrades-in-arms in the RAC
were men “of the worst description,” profligate drunks who were too dangerous
to be “set at large,” was obscure even to those watching on. Clearly proximity
to even the lowest of Britons was thought to be a step-up for Africans.18
Yet, even for those recaptives who did know something of their choice, who
loathed everything to do with white men, and who had perhaps begun to discern
and abhor the patronizing zeal of this new set, there were likely positive reasons
to enlist. Men who had endured capture, chains, and whipping, who had been
powerless to protect their families, probably found the idea of carrying weapons
tempting. Some of them had been warriors in their homelands. In military
service might be dignity and honor, a future way to defend themselves and
their people.
By the end of the day, the first twenty-two men were enlisted into the RAC,
and the second forty-two were destined for the recruiting depot of the West
India Regiment (WIR). For British men the RAC was a convict corps, a punish-
ment for those who had committed some crime or deserted from another regi-
ment. The white man’s punishment was the black man’s liberation. In 1813, it
was one of the better options available for men of African origin no longer in
their homelands.19

They marched out of the cattle pen under a “strong escort” of sickly looking
men in red and green, carrying muskets. Robert Thorpe spoke of government
men “driving a terrified Being to the fort, who knew not what was said to him,
nor what was to become of him.” They were led to one of the few stone buildings
where wooden benches were lined up. Only a handful of days before a clerk
Becoming Soldiers, Cabin Boys, and Wives 119

had attempted to write down their names. Now they were told a new name,
unlike any they had known.20
Twenty-two appeared as soldiers in the RAC’s muster. Their African
names, or rather the approximations of them that had been written down by
the British clerk, were no more. Kangaree, Fallee, Baloo, Nacoi, and all the
others had, by unknown alchemies, become David Neptune, Isaac Newton,
John Nero, and Tom Parrott. Rather than letting his imagination roam free,
the clerk obviously decided not to mess up his alphabetization and so gave all
twenty-two men surnames beginning with the letters N, O, or P. Who was who
no longer mattered.21
They were handed a strange array of items. Some coins—later they would
discover that it was barely half the amount given to white recruits—and a variety
of “gifts.” Some got “Barley Corn Beads assorted” and a tambourine; others
got amber or coral, panpipes, tobacco, and a snuffbox with an image of a black
man in uniform on the top. They were the type of gewgaws that dealers had
tried to trade for slaves for hundreds of years. Some received iron bars. They
were also given a red jacket, grey pantaloons, and a hat. The jacket had “trifling
lace cord” that the new masters had requested especially for them, believing
that it would make them feel important.22
They were herded back to the harbor and loaded aboard small boats once
more. At last freed from their shackles, they saw for the first time the swaying,
stirring splendor of Sierra Leone’s harbor, the picture postcard emerald idyll
sliced through with cobalt waters below a lucent sky. For twenty miles they
traveled upriver, a scene acclaimed for its “exquisite and peculiar beauty” with
“nodding palms uplift[ing] their heads above umbrageous groves,” “the whole
canopied by a sapphire sky.”23
At a small island they were gestured to disembark. A chilling sight met
them: a “formidable” building, “about one hundred feet in length, and thirty in
breadth . . . under which are commodious large cellars and store rooms.” Laid
out in front was an apron of forbidding cannons, beckoning seaward, though
the embrasures from which they had formerly peeped out lay in ruins. They
were at Bunce Island, once the main slave trade factory in Sierra Leone where
fifty thousand Africans had been forced into exile, bound as beasts of burden.
Freedom had been a headlong leap into a far more conventional slave trading
fort than that from which they had been rescued.24
In its heyday in the mid-eighteenth century Bunce Island had boasted fine
lodgings for Europeans, a conference hall, a Tradesmen’s Gallery where up to
ninety visiting merchants could display their wares, a rice house, a meat house,
120 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

and a bakery. There had even been a two-hole golf course complete with African
caddies wearing tartan loincloths imported from Glasgow. Now there were just
some British men trying to run a recruitment depot among the decaying build-
ings. The same buildings that had formerly held slaves were thought particularly
suitable for the new recruits because escape was all but impossible.25
Even the directors of the African Institution in London admitted that the
plan was far from perfect. At Bunce Island, they admitted, new recruits suffered
“great hardships.” Two former employees had, after all, already stood trial for
slave trading. Punishments and chastisements were brutal, and though the
same could be said for white recruits’ training, when mixed with bigotry and
thrown into a slave trading context, the results were grim.26
Tom Ball, his feet never before shod—so recently padding the rust earth
from the pens to the cookhouse—forced his toes into military boots. He tried
on the green jacket with red cuffs, three lines of metal down the front, over blue
pantaloons. He had grown up with Robert Bostock and knew the correct way
to cover the body with these items. Perhaps he helped the others with the shiny
buttons, fiddling with the lace trim to meet their superior officers’ demands,
and try to drag them back from the precipice of trouble. But there was an ele-
ment of the absurd. It was so unlike their usual dress.27
There was rudimentary training with muskets. Prime and Load! was shouted,
and they had to learn to load cartridges, pull back the hammer to half-cock,
and load powder. The ramrod had to be used to ram the powder to the breech
of the barrel. There was a right way to stand, an exact sequence of maneuvers
that had to be followed in order not to be yelled at or beaten. It all had to happen
so quickly before the shout of Fire! was heard.
A few weeks later, Tom Ball and some of the others enlisted in the WIR
embarked aboard ship. Ball had been saved from an ocean voyage when Bostock
had purchased him as a small boy. Now he was going after all. He was a soldier
in His Majesty’s Army.28
For those in the RAC it was less of a journey to their new homes. They
recrossed the harbor and went to the side of Fort Thornton, where they were
allowed to build huts. They took over garrison duties for the town, surely a vast
upturn in their situation no matter the harshness of the discipline.29

Meanwhile, those still waiting back in the cattle pen made their first forays
into the colony. Freetown was unlike anything they had seen before. Its broad
thoroughfares were set out in a grid pattern in a way that promoted regularity
Becoming Soldiers, Cabin Boys, and Wives 121

and distance, rather than the sense of community derived from having homes
clustered. The buildings not made from stone were rectangular frame and
shingle topped with thatch, all so different from the round mud brick and man-
grove wood buildings of their homelands. Each had a small garden laid out
with, “orange plantations, paw paw, apples, pepper, ginger.” The Nova Scotian
and Maroons’ clothing was nothing they had ever seen Africans wear. Free-
town’s women wore long skirts and sleeves to their wrists, head ties with a hat
atop that. Many of the men wore “very respectable” trousers and shirts. Even
in its earliest days Freetown aspired to Englishness and a sort of European
gentility.30
Many of them saw the town as they were marched across the city eastward
to where Governor Maxwell had a plantation, Belle Vue. By some reports an
overseer or “director of some public work” came for those not enlisted into the
army or navy the morning after they were declared free. “The sanction of the
poor ignorant captured negro the moment he landed a freeman” was cause for
many complaints about their treatment. They were “marched off in small lots,
under the care of some white man commonly a soldier on fatigue duty.” Several
decades later, a visitor would note that “Africans recently liberated” did all the
work that in other countries was performed by “beasts of burden.” Governor
Maxwell’s estate grew “yams, Indian corn and other produce” as well as coffee,
which had first been noticed growing in the colony in the 1790s by Nova Scotian
Andrew Moore, who had grown up on a slave plantation in Georgia. It had
since been widely planted and was seen as a potential export crop for Sierra
Leone.31
Some of the recaptives rescued from Mason and Bostock’s business worked
among the coffee plants, watching for pests. Belle Vue, twenty-eight years later,
was “much cooler and more pleasant in every way” than Freetown, “birds of
every colour are for ever flitting past.” By then it had “the side of a hill . . . cleared
and planted with coffee [that] rises like a wall.”32
Ironically enough, it was the work that many of their brothers and sisters
transported to Cuba were doing on the other side of the ocean. There, coffee
was the secondary crop to sugar throughout the era, employing at least as many
bondsmen in the 1810s. Liberated Africans in Sierra Leone were not kept in
“prison-like quarters” and watched constantly, but they similarly received no
pay since they were already considered to be in debt to the British for their
rescue, food, and the blanket.33
The women were not taken to do this work. Ideas about what female Liber-
ated Africans might do were based on ideas of femininity prevalent in Britain.
They were to be kept away from all but the lightest agricultural labor. This was
122 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

both a blessing and a curse, protecting them from the type of backbreaking
labor that was carrying away many of their sisters in the Caribbean, but nar-
rowing the ways that they might feed and clothe themselves and care for the
small children from their kin groups who were with them in the pen. For those
trying to ward off Macaulay’s attentions, they also needed to find a way to
protect themselves.
The only options open to them were domestic service or finding a male
settler to live with in something approximating marriage. The latter was by far
the more attractive option for those who had been initiated into womanhood,
since living with a man in some sort of mutual arrangement was what they
expected from life. Learning the delights of ironing a settler’s breeches with a
large stone was not, and left them little more than “domestic slaves” who lacked
rights over their own children. If respectable citizens came to ask for their
service, however, they could hardly refuse. Macaulay let them be used as cheap
labor. Fifteen-year-old Coree was sent to live with the Reverend Charles
Wenzel—by this time “deaf, lame and sometimes blind from opthalmia caught
from recaptives”—and his Nova Scotian wife as a domestic servant.34
Kayang had gone with her countryman now known as Mulberry, and
Kerricure was with her countryman who had joined the RAC, but some of the
others had no choice but to hastily marry men in the colony. Under a later gov-
ernor, newly arrived recaptive women had only three months to find themselves
a husband before being summarily cut from the government’s food allowance.
They were shipped around for display in various villages where there might be
willing men. They had to agree to marry any man who came looking, wrote
one observer, painting a picture of them being “carried off to joy by liege lords,
who assume their unasked consent.” But in mid-1813 there was not even a
three-month leeway. They had to find a man, find some other way to feed
themselves, or starve.35
Twenty-seven-year-old Blango went to live with John Davidson. Sixteen-
year-old Banga found a man named Harry Zuanill willing to take her as his
wife. How these deals were struck, their longevity, much less the women’s
thoughts about their fate, is lost to history.
For the girls not yet initiated there were fewer choices still. One of those
who came to know many of them well would later say that no one suffered as
much in the slave trade as girls aged ten to twelve. There were not many girls
rescued from Bostock and Mason in this category, but two who were, Yatta
and Faylay, stayed behind in the pen, presumably taking safety with adults
from their people who were there with them. Eleven-year-old “Jenny” went to
live with Governor Maxwell, either at Belle Vue or at his stone house at the top
Becoming Soldiers, Cabin Boys, and Wives 123

of the wharf steps. The governor also took younger girls: nine-year-old Pessay
and eight-year-olds Zo and Dee, while Reverend Wenzel took care of a nine-
year-old girl named Fo, perhaps a countrywoman of Coree, and Lieutenant
Dodds took Sewa, whose noted name was that of a river that flowed through
the colony’s hinterland.36
 13
Leaving Africa

Robert Bostock and John McQueen were expecting a reprieve, some grand
chastisement like that handed down to Samuel Samo, at which they could hang
their heads and look suitably abashed. They could have been planning to go
back to slave trading as Samo had done as soon as backs were turned, though
with the destruction of their barracoons rebuilding would be harder.
Days blended together as they waited. Then, confounding hopes, they were
told that they were to be re-embarked aboard HMS Thais. They were allowed
the privilege of saying their last goodbyes, visiting people in Freetown to bid
them farewell.1
Back aboard ship they were in new territory, their punishment going further
than Samuel Samo’s. They were being sent to England for their sentences to be
actuated. The Thais was the first ship bound for home, and its crew was priming
the vessel ready to return and rest from their tropical fevers. It was much
needed, with more added to the sick list each day and some thrown to a watery
grave.

Back in the pen where the rest of the recaptives were languishing, the British
imperial project came to see which of the boys might be put to work. Some of
the Thais’s men arrived, perhaps faintly recognizable. Following a long tradi-
tion of taking African boys as sailors, they were looking for likely lads for the
crew. Rules and regulations made African seamen less common aboard Royal
Naval vessels than merchantmen, but all sailors were used to their employ-
ment. No vessel in the antislavery squadron sailed without Africans. “Peter
Romney, Black Boy” had died from a fall aboard HMS Thais near Cape
Mesurado in May 1813. A Kru man named Ben Freeman had also recently

124
Leaving Africa 125

been employed on the Thais, and its sailors had carved into an elephant tusk
powder horn the endorsement: “Ben Freeman born at Krew Cetra Honest
Man has sailed in HMS Thais from Sierra Leone to Ambriz to the Satisfaction
of the officers.”2
Manee, aged around eleven, with “twenty scars above his right elbow,” got
the signal. Sarwae, the Kru boy, was an obvious choice. Then two boys named
Gurra, both about ten. Famoi and Nacoi, about nine years old. Jongo, Wossay,
Coomah, and Gombo, perhaps a year younger. The Thais’s Lieutenant Watkins,
who had led the party in the boats to attack Bostock and Mason’s factory, took
the small boy whom he had made his servant during the voyage, the eight-year-
old boy he called Prince. The last picked was Sessay, the Mende boy stolen
from his parents two years earlier and forced to walk for more than an entire
moon to the sea. As at the original muster he had tried to hold back, had not
been one of the more brazen boys pushing forward. His reticence had not
brought invisibility. He was earmarked to go.
The enemies of Sierra Leone decried the summary enlistment of boys
aboard naval ships as “slavery under another name,” not least as they were
apparently unpaid and given scantier rations. But others disagreed, believing
naval service to be an excellent way for them to contribute to imperial progress.
Edward Scobell wrote that the twelve boys taken aboard the Thais “might be
useful on board HM ships.” With “excellent materials afforded in the African
nature” they would save English sailors from death in tropical climates. After-
ward, Scobell believed, they would go home and tell their fellow Liberated
Africans about the wonderfully munificent British.3
They were loaded back aboard the vessel that had brought them from
their captivity. Again they lined up before a man standing making shapes in a
book but this time they were told a new name. Now they were New Ben of
Liverpool—soon shortened to Ben Liverpool—Black Andrew, Boy Jack, New
Tom, Ben Williams, William Coff, George, William (Bill) Williams, Jack Bew,
Sam Freeman, and Samuel Davis. Strangely, not even Prince, Lieutenant
Watkins’s servant, got to keep this name. The only boy who managed to register
his own non-Anglo-Saxon name on the hallowed paper of a naval muster was
the Kru boy Sarwae or Sarwae Tetee—a suffix meaning “son of ”—who was
listed as “Sarititee.”4
Back at the pen other naval men sized up the boys who remained. Eleven
more of them were selected. Paway and Boi, almost old enough for Poro initia-
tion. Six eight-year-old boys, their names originally rendered as Wona, Ghema,
Corree, Coona, Yorrow, and the two Mano boys named Paye. Mende boys
Boi and Sessay. Fangha, a Kono child who had become separated from his
126 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

twin brother and had sustained a large scar down his temple. His large eyes,
swollen with fear, had already been written down as one of his distinguishing
features.
Together this group of eleven more also retraced their steps to the harbor.
They had been ashore a mere handful of days, and now they were marched
aboard another of the huge water beasts. On its side was written, though it is
unlikely any of them could read it, HMS Albacore.
On the Albacore’s muster they were listed separately from the white crew-
men as “black boys from the colony of Sierra Leone,” but there were no longer
eleven of them. What happened to the others—whether they were judged un-
suitable and returned to the cattle pen, were assigned elsewhere, or if they
passed away from hunger, diseases, and mistreatment—was not recorded.
Those who stayed became Tom Handyman and John Cardigan (both thought
to be eleven years old, these were possibly Paye and Boi, who had earlier been
recorded as being older than the others); Roderick Random, John Junk, Jerry
Pounce, James Marlin, Timothy Chipps, and William Warwick.

HMS Thais set sail on August 4, 1813, exactly one month after they had departed
Cape Mesurado. As Bostock and McQueen sailed out of Freetown’s “exquisitely
beautiful” harbor they must have suspected what would turn out to be the
truth. Neither of them would ever again set foot in Sierra Leone.5
They were listed among the Thais’s supernumeraries aboard, given two-
thirds of the sailors’ allowance of food and grog. Scobell later said that he and
his men treated them “with every possible indulgence.” Needless to say, Bostock
and McQueen did not agree. They complained bitterly of their “heavy irons.”
In their minds anything that made them felons was wrongheaded, reasoning
that was bolstered when the Thais headed southward to visit Accra before
sailing for England, and they passed Elmina and Cape Coast Castle. Bostock
and McQueen can only have marveled at the change in morality seeing these
monuments that lay bare the centuries when European powers traded in slaves
with hardly a blush. Sailing from there on September 3 they saw several slav-
ing vessels including the Bom Caminho, which would deliver 503 captives from
Benin to the slave markets of Bahia, Brazil, and at Sao Tome the Whydah, an
unapologetic Portuguese slaver. Their situation must have seemed all the more
unjust.6

k
Leaving Africa 127

None of those taken aboard the Thais or the Albacore as cabin boys and servants
ever had a chance to record what they made of these first days aboard ship.
Many of them came from communities where waterways were crucial to trade
and survival, where they had learned to handle canoes in a way far more skillful
than their new crewmates from the time they were tiny children. But, other
than Sarwae Tetee, they had no tradition of going out onto the big water and
leaving sight of the land. Sarwae, the young Kru boy of around nine years old,
was the only one who would have grown up hearing about this work from his
father, grandfather, and uncles. He was the only one who had likely known
that seafaring work was his destiny even before these strange events.7
We must hope for them that they found the Albacore and Thais’s crew to be
as amenable as, half a century earlier, Olaudah Equiano had found the men
with whom he shared his first berth. They “used me very kindly,” Equiano
wrote, “quite contrary to what I had seen of any white people before.” It was
this that made Equiano wonder whether “they were not all of the same disposi-
tion.” Even then, the seamen tormented Olaudah, teasing them that they were
about to kill him and eat him.8
The white men from the slave factory were aboard the vessel too, but they
rarely saw them between the hauling, carrying, helping, cleaning. The boy
known as Prince continued as servant to Lieutenant Watkins, but for the others
there was the more wide-ranging role of being a “3rd class boy” in the British
Navy. Hardtack riddled with worms, salted meat from an animal they cannot
have identified, deafening noise, and terrible grime became their lives.
They arrived in the land of the white man in November. A handful of those
liberated from Mason and Bostock’s barracoon, including William Williams
and Sam Freeman, were still aboard and found themselves part of the Royal
Navy’s vast operations, at the mercy of distant legislators to know where they
would be sent next, whether they would stay aboard the Thais or whether, like
many in their situation, they were simply to be paid off in this strange land.
Then HMS Albacore also arrived from Sierra Leone, bringing with it a few more
of those liberated with them. They too were assigned berths on other vessels as
necessitated by the Royal Navy. Both William Warwick, aged ten, and Timothy
Chipps who was even younger, were sent from the Albacore to HMS Prince, a
veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar then reduced to a receiving ship, on Christmas
Eve of 1813.9
These children found themselves in a world they cannot possibly have
understood. Within the dockyard at Portsmouth were “immense store-houses,
handsome residences for the principal officers, a spacious mansion for the
Commissioner, an Academy of naval instruction, a neat chapel, mast-houses,
128 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

&c.” There were two steam engines, vast piles of timber ready for use, a three-
story rope house for making cables, a gilt statue of Richard III wearing a toga,
and most fearful of all the Anchor Forge, where the conflagration of flames,
smoke, and incessant din of smashing hammers created “Cyclopean scenes.”10
Another boy found himself alone in the United Kingdom. For James
Marlin, not yet ten years old, freedom was to be left alone on the docks in
Portsmouth on December 21, 1813. What happened then to the poor, lost boy
is not known. Among other, far more horrific problems, he must have been
freezing. It was not until 1815 that a captain in the navy raised the alarm about
the “extremely distressed state” of African sailors being dismissed from ships in
Britain, and an agreement was reached to feed them until they could be re-
turned to Africa. Likely, in this time of national emergency, Marlin was again
swept up into the navy’s grasp or taken perhaps into the merchant marine.11

Scobell was unsure what to do with Bostock and McQueen. He had been told
that Governor Maxwell had sent on the paperwork from their trial, but it had
not yet arrived. Along with two of their former captives, they were sent aboard
HMS Prince at Spithead to be held prisoner.12
As 1813 turned to 1814, Robert Bostock and John McQueen were rowed
into Portsmouth and handed over directly to the town jail, a newly opened
building on Penny Street where modern ideas of incarceration were in use. No
more of the “promiscuous throng” that had existed at the old jail, now prisoners
could be “properly classed.” Bostock and McQueen would not have to associate
with the lower sort.13

Sessay stayed aboard HMS Thais. Captain Scobell was soon gone, replaced
by Captain Henry Weir, but Sessay found a home for himself, growing up be-
tween decks. He was still there when they set sail a few months later “with se-
cret orders”: they were heading to Hellevoetsluis in the Netherlands to collect
£450,000 in French coins and then sail for Bordeaux to take them to Welling-
ton’s forces.14
 14
A Village
of Their Own

In the hills outside of Freetown beyond Leicester village a small footpath led
higher up the slopes away from the town. Two hours’ walk down that track laid
a tiny place, more of a notion than a reality. Four years earlier Governor Thomas
Perronet Thompson had laid the first stone and named it Kingston-in-Africa,
but his high hopes for the place had not been realized. It was mostly abandoned
and generally known as Hogbrook after the creek in its center that was a com-
mon drinking spot for pigs.1
Only a matter of weeks after their arrival in Sierra Leone, Kenneth Ma-
caulay dispatched most of the Thais recaptives left behind by the army and
navy recruiters to this remote place. It was so deserted that later they—noted in
the records as “people brought by a slave ship from Mesurado,” which was
almost true—would be credited with having “formed” the village in July 1813.2
It seems possible that some of them were happy enough to be sent into the
hills because Freetown offered few opportunities to feed themselves if they had
failed to find a countryman or woman offering assistance. Most of the inhabitants
of the tiny colony—the handful of original settlers who still remained, the Nova
Scotians, and the Maroons—were struggling despite having been there for a
decade or two. A few were very successful, but most had “nothing but the labour
of their own hands” and were far from secure enough to build up any capital or
begin enterprises that might employ a large workforce. A new customs house
had been completed the previous year, but only the former factory slaves knew
this type of business.3
There was nowhere in Freetown where it was easy to build homes and
begin farming. Many of the recaptives came from rice-cultivating people and
were highly skilled cultivators, but there were few places around town that they
might attempt this, even in the new settlements being laid out around the edges
of the original settlement. Some of the Thais recaptives taken as soldiers in the

129
130 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

RAC would soon live in these newly created places, but for others this was not
an option. They could not simply claim land and were not given any either.4
They may also have felt unwelcome in town. The numbers of Liberated
Africans was overwhelming the Nova Scotians and Maroons, who were resentful
and scared of this growing influx. Two years earlier, a census of Freetown had
listed 1,917 settlers—roughly split between the Nova Scotian and the Maroon
communities—plus 22 white men, women, and children. Those numbers had
risen in the two years since, but the number of babies born into these commu-
nities was nothing like the numbers of recaptives arriving. Dee, the last of those
arriving from Mason and Bostock’s aboard HMS Thais, was the 4,570th Liber-
ated African to arrive in Freetown. Not all of them were in the city and many
had died, but they still far outnumbered the other populations of the city added
together.5
It was not simply a matter of numbers. There were many in the Nova
Scotian and Maroon communities who were resentful of each other, never
mind the growing influx of hungry, sick recaptives whose cultures were utterly
different from their own. The newcomers posed a huge risk that they would
unmoor the advances that both communities felt they were making. They were
clinging by their fingertips to the tenets of “civility” as the British parochially
judged these things. Each act that united everybody of African origin too
closely was a step backward for the Maroons and the Nova Scotians. The Nova
Scotians, at least according to Governor Ludlow, had been horrified when the
Maroons had arrived in Freetown, because their “savage warlike appearance
struck them with dismay.” It would take generations for those feelings to com-
pletely heal, and just prior to the arrival of HMS Thais from Cape Mesurado
Governor Maxwell had lamented “the invidious distinctions of Maroon and
Settler.”6
The newly arrived recaptives were much more threatening still. In each
new batch were so many examples for any bigots (and there were plenty of
them) who wanted to illustrate that Africans were uncivilized. The newly ar-
rived recaptives were near naked whereas the British saw dress as central to
polite society; they were considered mostly to be nonbelievers whereas Chris-
tianity was the pivot of civilization; they ate with their fingers whereas the British
viewed this as one short step from anthropophagy. What had they done to con-
tribute toward enlightenment and human progress, such as these things were
judged in Europe? In January 1813, Pride and Prejudice was published in Europe,
and in December Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony in A premiered. It was these
things that the British, and indeed the majority of Europeans and white Ameri-
cans, saw as progress. For the Nova Scotians and Maroons, urgently clinging to
A Village of Their Own 131

modes of respectability brought with them from the New World, their status as
vaguely “civilized” was far too precarious to withstand being associated too
closely with these hungry, semi-clad illiterates. In the recaptives they saw writ
large everything that they were accused of by the white world. Getting too close
meant losing their status, and that was terrifying.
There were other reasons too that the original settlers felt aggrieved by the
influx of recaptives. The new arrivals were starving, and because they were not
provided for by the government, they begged for assistance and even grabbed
what food they could. The Maroons and Nova Scotians, struggling themselves,
accused the recaptives of “despoiling their land of its crops, cutting down their
cinnamon and coffee-trees for firewood.” They believed that the recaptives
watched where they planted crops and then dug up the seeds at night and ate
them. Some Maroons even left the colony, believing themselves at risk from the
newcomers.7
These divisions would continue for decades. In the 1830s, British visitor
Frederick Harrison Rankin observed, “the haughty black Settlers sneer at the
new importation of savage Captives.” The settlers derisorily calling them
“Willyfoss [Wilberforce’s] niggers,” and there were reports of “guns . . . fired all
night,” thefts, the burning of property, destroying planted crops, and the savage
beating of a Liberated African who married a settler. One old lady settler, ap-
parently agitated that the Liberated Africans had their own hospital, said, “it is
only my wonder dat we settlers do not rise up in one body and kill and slay.”8
Nor was the British government willing to help the newly arriving recaptives
to any great extent. It was not simply a matter of economy, though that was
certainly an anxious issue given the wartime privations back home. In 1813 the
Liberated Africans cost Britain £4039, an amount that was printed with dismay
in newspapers. More than that, the type of evangelical uplifting that had pro-
voked the abolitionist campaign did not include the British government assisting
the recaptives in any material way. The abolitionists assumed that they would
teach recaptives the glories of the Protestant work ethic and then the newly
liberated would be fine. The abolitionists felt that Africa’s biggest problem was
that the slave trade had buoyed idleness. Able to sell enemies, passers-by, and
other miscreants, the abolitionists supposed that Africans simply sat back luxu-
riating in their ill-gotten gains. “Indolence” was “a disease which it is the busi-
ness of civilization to cure,” they believed. They hoped to “excite . . . a spirit of
industry among them,” which would also have the happy advantage of
“improv[ing] their morals.” Handing out food and clothes, beyond a bare
minimum to make them decent, would send out the wrong message entirely. It
was in some ways an even more pitiless type of freedom than emancipation
132 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

without the forty acres or the mule—albeit many of them were not owed life-
times’ worth of back pay—since the recaptives did not know the land and the
language or have any family with them.9
In line with this philosophy, and clear now that the influx of recaptives was
not about to end, the British had adopted a scheme to have the recaptives per-
form agricultural labor in the hills around the city. It fit with British hopes that
they would soon be able to support themselves and the long-standing concern
that not enough Maroons or Nova Scotians had turned to productive agricul-
ture. It also meant that they would be further away from the Nova Scotians and
Maroons who resented them. Leicester, around three miles from Freetown,
had already become a “neat village,” with ground cleared for planting crops.
Now Governor Maxwell offered seeds and simple tools to settlers prepared to
go to “the west of Leicester Mountain.” Placing the liberated into small, free
villages was an idea that would be followed extensively in Jamaica when slavery
came to an end.10
The only report by any of the newly liberated comes from the Bassa child
who would take the name David Noah. Later he would recall, “after we had
staid [sic] one month in Freetown, we were sent to Regent—then called Hog-
brook.” But they were not inanimate parcels to be sent around, and there was
likely more decision making than that. It is not hard to imagine Boi, Dogua,
and Fangha, the elders among them; Tamba, clearly making himself into a
leader; the Kono twins named Fangha and others sitting together to discuss
their options, summoning common words and ideas to make plans. A group of
fourteen men, listed one after another on the arrivals list, all chose to move to
the mountains, indicating that they were kinsmen who spoke the same language
and had stood together in the cattle pen. Yarra was the first among another
group of nine men who all chose to go to the hills, suggesting that perhaps he
had a group of his country people following him, looking to him for advice and
help because he could speak some of the white men’s language and was one of
their people.11
They needed to find a way to survive, and quickly. Their needs were urgent.
Beyond the piece of cloth, the blanket that Macaulay gave to each of them, and
the food they ate in the pen, only the most seriously sick or disabled recaptives
were given any assistance. They were desperately traumatized, suffering from
myriad illnesses and injuries from their horrific experiences. They understood
very little about this new colony in which they found themselves. Three-fifths of
them were children, who were at particular risk of being re-enslaved if they re-
mained in Freetown, where the kidnapping of children remained a lucrative
business for decades. Yet British authorities expected them to immediately start
A Village of Their Own 133

fending for themselves. We cannot be too surprised if they looked to the villages
being settled in the hills, hoping for space to make the necessities of life for
themselves, the time and distance to regroup and find the space to negotiate
some middle path. For all the remoteness, for all that there was very little in the
way of infrastructure, it was the land beyond the town that offered this poten-
tial. There they could live away from the white men, who came to appropriate
them for all kinds of tasks they little understood, but close enough to Freetown
to not be troubled by slave raids.12
One hundred and eleven of those who arrived from Mason and Bostock’s
barracoon at the St. Paul River took seeds, hoes, shovels, and rakes and set out
from the town to their new home. There were thirty-eight men and fifteen boys
aged between eleven and sixteen. Forty-six boys aged ten and younger were
also with them, presumably simply following men and women whose languages
and ways of life they could understand. They could help with the simpler tasks
but would also need care and teaching.
Only six adult women were with them, as well as six girls aged fourteen and
younger. There had been fewer of them to begin with, and now some had gone
to be wives to settlers. Again the women are less visible in the records, and it
is harder to imagine the choices they believed they had. Yet one of the girls,
seven-year-old Zenee or Zeenee, gives us some insight. Zenee was marked out
in the census of the colony that would soon be taken as being specifically under
Yarra’s protection. It is only a glimpse of what was obviously a much bigger
story, but it seems that Yarra had found one of his country people, a small girl,
and had kept her with him. Those who had arrived aboard the Thais and Prin-
cess Charlotte were bound together now by experience, but their old loyalties to
kin and country remained strong.13

There were enough of them to begin again, though few records exist of these
earliest days when they must have been a group of traumatized, hungry, sick
people dropped onto a hillside above the town. They were met at the site of the
village by Macaulay and a man named as Captain William, but then left to
their own devices. The first necessity was to put up some kinds of rudimentary
shelters to protect themselves because the rains were beginning, which would
bring sickness as the rains did each year. They were “surrounded by nothing
but bushes.” Fortunately wood and leaves for thatch were plentiful, as was mud
to fill the walls. They also had to begin the heavy work of clearing the ground
for planting. In the shorter term there was hunting to supplement the leaves,
134 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

fruits, and herbs that the women gathered. Their British rulers believed the
land to “abound with lions, leopards, hyaenas, musk-cats, weasels, porcupines,
wild hogs, squirrels, antelopes and various species of monkey,” and for those
that were real rather than imagined, they offered potential for bush meat.14
It was unbearably tough. They were a group of people who had little in
the way of common language and worldviews, some of them were traditional
enemies of others, and they arrived with nothing but diseases and suffering.
David Noah would later remember that they had been there for more than a
year before they had any help: “we lived in a wretched way,” he wrote, “with-
out hope in the world.” He described the village as “a desert . . . surrounded by
bushes. “It had been so bad, he reported, that they had wanted to leave but had
been “forced” to stay. Whether they had literally been impelled or had few
other options he did not make clear.15
They were joined at Hogbrook by a group of mainly Igbo captives, brought
in on an illegal slave vessel. Forty of them had initially been sent into the army
at Bunce Island but had been “discharged as intractable” and moved to Hog-
brook. British authorities did not know, much less care, that these people were
utterly different to those who arrived aboard the Thais. Igbo land was almost
two thousand miles from that of the Mende and the others, a similar distance as
London to Fes or St. Petersburg. The Igbo were from places far beyond those
that knew of the Poro and Bundu societies.16
There were reports that the people argued, that the Igbo stole from the
others, killing dogs and pigs. Although observers would later declare that “the
greater number were not, indeed, sunk into a state of degradation as low as that
of the Ebos,” all of them were considered by British authorities to be savages,
incapable of “proper” behavior. When put to work with an African who spoke
some English operating as their overseer, he “exercised what appeared to him
unavoidable severity.” We cannot know, but it was quite possibly Tamba who,
as well as speaking some English, had been raised to oversee other workers in a
slave factory and guard captives awaiting sale and would likely have ideas of
labor control different from the devout man who would later write of this
event.17
And yet things did get better. The men from Bostock and Mason’s were
mostly Mende, Kono, Kissi, and Gbande, and standing side by the side as they
constructed homes and made shelters, they began the process of learning each
other’s ways. They needed to develop common names for tools and household
items. They heard each other’s stories and traditions. They began to look after
pigs and chickens.18
A Village of Their Own 135

Others arrived in the colony who were far easier to understand than the
Igbo. The NS das Dolores, which had purchased its captives at Gallinas, possibly
even at Bostock and Mason’s other factory, was brought in not long after their
arrival. The next year the Volador, Golondrina, and NS de Belle, all of which had
loaded their captives at Cape Mount, weighed anchor in the harbor. Which of
these captives were sent to live in Hogbrook is not entirely clear, but they would
certainly have heard of this village where other Windward Coast peoples were
living. It was likely one of these vessels that delivered the man who would be-
come William Davis, soon Tamba’s closest colleague.19
Together they began to build a village. While in some communities one
language predominated, in mixed villages like Hogbrook, settlers “speedily
learn[ed] a broken kind of English as a common medium of intercourse.” It
was from such interactions that eventually, much later, they would all become
Krio, making a culture and language by assimilating what they had carried
with them and melding it onto that brought over the seas by the Nova Scotians
and the Maroons.20
As agricultural tasks were gender specific among the ethnic groups from
which they had come, the women must have struggled to cook and wash for so
many men even before the land was cleared for them to plant and later harvest.
But bending at the brook to wash their clothes against the stones was at last a
glimpse of normality. After the unspeakable horrors of the coffle, the barracoon,
the voyage to Freetown, and the cattle pen, here was something routine. Just as
their brothers and sisters did on plantations across the Americas, they began
learning words of other languages, and as the months spread ahead they de-
veloped common terms for things that spanned different language groups.
They combed the hair and washed the clothes of all the children who were not
theirs but for whom they now had some kind of responsibility. They began to
plant seeds.
 15
A Murder, and an Appeal
to the Prince Regent

As Robert Bostock and John McQueen began what turned into a lengthy
wait in jail, they wrote home to their families in Liverpool and Glasgow telling
of their terrible news. A dark cloud of infamy hung over them. Fourteen years
transportation to the end of the world, far from their families, friends, and busi-
nesses, seemed to them absurdly harsh. Their crime, only a few years previously,
had been no crime at all.
As the weeks became months they began to learn how greatly the nation
they had left behind a decade before had changed. A sense that slave trading
was immoral as well as illegal, that that it was so un-British as to be verging on
traitorous, had taken firm hold. Abolitionism was such a force that it was
changing the social landscape of Britain. It was now extolled as the height of
mercy toward lesser people, a dazzling example of British virtue. Things might
not have been going well in other spheres—war in Europe seemed interminable,
the popular king was quite mad—but lo, it was majestic to be British.
Bostock and McQueen had missed a sea change. At a meeting in March
1808 to celebrate the first anniversary of their parliamentary victory, the
“Friends to the Abolition of the Slave Trade” had begun with toasts to the king
and queen, progressed smoothly through salutes to the British Army and those
“hearts of oak,” the Royal Navy, and then moved on to the speeches. Rising to
address the crowd of five hundred, the Duke of Gloucester had not restricted
himself to thanking their supporters but also fulsomely praised his own dedica-
tion to the cause. He was a better man, he intimated, and his nation an altogether
greater one, because of its ending of the slave trade.1
By 1811, when Charles Mason had been sailing off aboard the Dos Amigos
to Cuba, to stand against the slave trade had become as integral a part of the
collective British persona as tea drinking. In August of that year, the Times of
London had published an article claiming that British subjects were no longer

136
A Murder, and an Appeal to the Prince Regent 137

engaged in the slave trade, “or at least, comparatively, in a very trifling degree.”
Just the dastardly Spaniards and Portuguese were continuing, the Times
claimed. The following year, when it was admitted that some British men were
still involved in the trade, Lord Brougham stated that they were “derogatory to
the interests and honour” of the nation. That same year, when Bostock and
McQueen were supplying the Zaragozano and numerous other ships with
human cargoes, a writer named W. Davis in Bath linked the abolition of the
slave trade to efforts to “civilize the Indian tribes,” educate poor children and
introduce the bible across the tropics, bracketing them all as “Divine Provi-
dence,” examples of British benevolence, and things for which future genera-
tions would owe a debt to his own.2
By the time Bostock and McQueen were firmly established at the St. Paul
River, back in their homeland it was believed that Britain’s antislavery stance
was well on its way to saving the whole continent of Africa, perhaps the entire
world. The news that penalties for anybody caught slave trading illegally had
been extended was published from Chester to Cheltenham with the heading,
“we sincerely congratulate our countrymen and the world at large on this
signal example of Justice.” That year, the British Parliament heard that the
continuation of the slave trade by other nations was the “great hinge on which
the future welfare of Africa turns.” Meanwhile, the actions of the British and
Americans in outlawing the slave trade were reported by one “expert” to have
“tranquilised the Natives in some degree, and given them a turn for agriculture,”
while another opined that it had “rendered the Natives more industrious, and
less disposed to seek occasions for disputes.”3
In the space of a few short years, while Bostock and McQueen had been
busy at their slave factories, opposition to the transatlantic slave trade had be-
come a glowing mark of self-acclaim for Britons. Abolitionism was being trans-
formed hastily into a way in which they would, in their own self-regarding
rhetoric at least, somehow “save” the world’s second largest continent. It was
this, Bostock and McQueen learned, that they were pitted against, just as much
as the laws and statutes.4

By the end of 1813, the news filtered back from Cape Mesurado to Havana.
Slaving merchant Antonio Escoto learned that John Roach and the Kitty had
captured his vessel Fénix. Escoto was outraged and knew exactly to whom he
should turn. William Gould Page, a Briton based in Havana, had permission
from the Spanish consul to take to Lord Castlereagh appeals from slave traders
138 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

whose ships had been captured. The capture and sale of the Fénix, Page
claimed, involved, “Grievances Nullities Inequities Injustices Injuries and Errors
in the Proceedings.”5
In the meantime, Escoto apparently made other, far less legal, plans to
punish Roach and the rest of the Kitty’s crew. Six months after the destruction
of Mason and Bostock’s St. Paul business, Roach and his crew—including the
rescued child Jack Phoenix/Za—spotted another slave vessel off Gallinas. In
hopes of more prize money they planned an attack. But before they could fire
the first shot there was a covert approach. Five men from the slaver rowed over
to the Kitty, shouting that they wanted to join Roach’s ship. They were told that
the Kitty had a full crew but Roach was presumptuous. He allowed them
aboard, believing that he would soon need extra men to sail the slaver to Free-
town as his prize.6
For a few hours all seemed normal. But that evening, as Roach and his first
and second mates sat down to dinner in the cabin, the five men made their
move. Captain Roach, cutting into his food, only had time to yell “No!” as he
jumped up to fight before he was stabbed “through the heart.” The first mate,
also stabbed, managed to run from the cabin trailing blood and was chased to
the fore-rigging, where he threw himself overboard. The second mate, cut with
a handspike, jumped from the port window. Flailing in the sea he found the
Kitty’s Kru sailors already in the water, one dying from a shark attack.7
The first mate dragged himself back on deck, finding Roach breathing his
last. By the time the second mate got back aboard, the attackers had control
of the whole brig, and the crew were defeated. The ship was lost. An African
woman cook named Venus Murray saw Captain Roach’s body thrown over-
board and his belongings plundered. The Kitty’s ivory, gold, cloth, “bottles of
Lavender,” bedding, dollars and doubloons, “six pigs . . . one Bull, one Sheep . . .
six Goats, thirty ducks, three coops Fowls . . . a number of Parrots . . . a Crown
bird,” and a “walking stick which changed into a spy glass” were all looted.8
The following morning the victors put the Kitty’s surviving white sailors into
a small boat with some bread and water. The Africans aboard were not released;
with value as saleable merchandize, they became part of the prize. “Nineteen
Kroomen [Kru men] coming to Sierra Leone,” Venus Murray the cook, the
infant son of a trader from Cape Coast Castle who was a passenger, and Jack
Phoenix were all held aboard the ship.9
Venus Murray somehow escaped to tell her tale, but Za/Jack Phoenix was
not heard from again. The British believed that Za and the others were taken
to Havana and sold into slavery. The ship after which he had been named, the
Fénix or Phoenix, was also sold at Havana. For Za, the respite from slavery had
A Murder, and an Appeal to the Prince Regent 139

been only a few brief months. The child who first had been a token of trade,
had been liberated, and had then become a sailor was condemned to the auction
block.10
By the time that the legal protest instigated by Escoto and penned by Page
reached London, John Roach was no longer alive to answer for his actions. It
was left to his widow, Constance, to testify that he had been in a “very consider-
able Line of Business” and had owned a lot of property in Africa at the time of
his death.11

In Portsmouth jail, as 1813 turned into 1814, Bostock and McQueen still
waited and hoped for the king’s mercy to be granted. The months ticked mo-
notonously by with the aggravation of knowing that the costs of their incarcera-
tion were growing. News arrived of the events of the War of 1812, the conflict
that had somehow damned them. They were in prison when the British burned
Buffalo, New York, and were still there the following August when British troops
occupied Washington, DC. Rumors in February that Napoleon was dead were
later proven to be a hoax, and more news from the wars on the continent flooded
in. They were there for so long that they became friendly with their jailer,
even getting him to help shape their pleas for clemency. Bostock’s mother and
McQueen’s father wrote in their children’s favor, begging that they be given
mercy.12
Eventually Bostock and McQueen decided to go right to the top. They
wrote to the prince regent, who had taken over from his increasingly mad father
George III under the Regency Act of 1811. They wrote of their “broken consti-
tutions” after their years in Africa and how they were “sinking under the heavy
sentence which has been passed upon them.” They had, they lamented, been,
“Dragged from Africa as Felons” but obviously having quickly deduced how
things had altered in their absence, argued that the example set them by Britain,
“this most humane, great and united Kingdom,” had already been “most bene-
ficial.” They lurched between toadying mea culpa and a sense of furious entitle-
ment to forgiveness as if somewhere in the bonds of the two might be their
salvation.
Unclear if they were being insulted racially or in a class-based manner, they
insinuated both. The way that they had been shipped to Britain aboard the
Thais had been “disgraceful,” they wrote, since they had been made to wear
“heavy irons.” Without irony, they claimed that this was surely “insulting to
the munificence of Britain,” a country whose “Philanthropy and Protection so
140 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

powerfully comforts the humble African.” “Confined with the Dregs of Society
with Felons of the worst description,” in Portsmouth jail, they signed off with a
hyperbolic flourish: “death will be a welcome visitor.”13

Their hopes for a pardon remained high as other convict transports set sail for
Australia, and they were not ordered aboard. Two sailed in January, another
in March, and then a forth during August. Still they remained in jail. Then
their luck ran out. They were sent to the Retribution hulk and in October 1814
loaded onto the transport Indefatigable. Convicts were regularly sung aboard
convict ships, sent away with chains clanking to the ditties and ballads of defi-
ance. It was the only way that many, usually poor people who had committed
paltry thefts of food and clothing, could endure being sent away from their
family and friends. But there was no such recourse to impudence for men like
Bostock and McQueen. They can only have been mortified.14
Their new shipmates were 198 other convicts, the youngest three only
thirteen years old and another two aged fourteen. They were mostly petty
thieves (among their collective loot: “custard cups,” a cruet set, a bed head-
board, a pair of sugar tongs, some pantaloons, and a teapot). There were also
three men caught in possession of forged bank notes, two highwaymen, eight
soldiers court-martialed for desertion, and a man who had received stolen goods
in the form of three asses belonging to Lord Ellenborough.15
As they stepped aboard it was Bostock’s and McQueen’s social class, rather
than the nature of their crime, which set them apart. Bostock considered him-
self a gentleman, and McQueen was certainly aspiring to middling status. Their
crime might, to modern eyes, have been far more serious than that of the three
teenage boys aboard who had together stolen one solitary handkerchief, but
that was certainly not the way that they viewed such things. The British class
system being what it was, Bostock, and probably McQueen, considered them-
selves gentlemen wrongly done by, whereas the three handkerchief thieves were
riffraff, nuisances to the honest men of the kingdom like themselves.16
They waited and hoped, growing ever more indignant, desperate for a last
minute reprieve. It was not to be. They sailed in convoy with the Sydney Packet,
heading out across the Atlantic to catch fair winds rather than sailing down
past their old home. They were, as it turned out, the only slave traders who
would make the long journey to Australia in captivity.17
 16
Experiments in Civilization
and Liberty

I n Hogbrook, homes were strengthened with extra wood nailed across, more
thatch heaped atop to better protect those inside. Better places to hunt meat
were found and new sources of fruit located. Clouds grouped and darkened
over the hills and the rains fell, water cascading down the laterite spindle path-
ways that ran through their mountain valley. More recaptives arrived in the
colony and were sent to join them, skeletons shocked through with the worst of
human experience. Those who had arrived earlier had so little, and their
homes were “in a rather miserable condition,” but they opened their doors to
the newcomers. Then, as the rusty trails between their homes dried into parched
earth, the first crops they had planted began to reap returns.1
Just as they were digging in, changes were coming from outside to ease
their lot. When they had been in the colony for a year Governor Maxwell re-
signed and left for a quieter post in Dominica. After some uncertainty, Charles
MacCarthy was installed permanently as his replacement. A Catholic of Jacobin
heritage, son of a Frenchman and an Irishwoman (MacCarthy was his mother’s
name), MacCarthy was a very different man to those who had gone before.2
He was shocked by the state of the Liberated Africans. Determined to do
better, he instituted a plan that once recaptives had been declared free they
would be provided with basic household items and, for the men, tools to grow
foodstuffs. They would also be given daily provisions of rice, beef, and vegetables
until they could afford their own. For those who arrived after 1814 things would
not be as desperate materially as they had been for the men and women aboard
the Thais and Princess Charlotte. Yet MacCarthy’s distress at the state of most of
the Liberated Africans puts into perspective the scale of the achievements of
those in Hogbrook, those led by the men from Bostock and Mason’s business.
Somehow, with little more than togetherness and sweat, and with virtually no
help, most of them were surviving, recouping, and rebuilding.3

141
142 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

MacCarthy’s leadership provided opportunity to build on this start. Fields

were planted with rice and cassava. The road to Hogbrook from Leicester was
said by visitors to be a marvel to behold, with vast cultivations lining the sides of
the still-rugged path. In this new world, the people of the Thais and Princess
Charlotte were holding their own.4
Yet their lives would not be entirely their own, at least not within the world-
view of the British Empire. Praises began to be lavished on Hogbrook, but they
reveal as much about the hopes and expectations of the British as the lives and
achievements of the Liberated Africans. In 1815 it was said that “the conduct of
the settlers is said to differ very little from the generality of English Villagers,”
an accolade that was considered to be the highest praise. The recaptives exhib-
ited “every shade of improvement,” it was claimed.5
“Improvement” meant much more than simply planting crops and pro-
viding for themselves. As much as Tamba, Yarra, the twins named Fangha,
and all the rest doubtless felt they were struggling to survive, they were actually
test cases. Sierra Leone had always been the petri dish of free labor, but after
the first recaptives landed in 1808 expectations were heightened. Liberated
Africans were human experiments in the battle between slavery and free labor,
between Africans as beasts of burden or as brothers. If they could prove them-
selves industrious without slavery, on what grounds would Caribbean planters
argue that enslavement should continue ad infinitum?
“Improvement” also meant becoming more refined, more civilized, all
together more British. Achieving this was a central pillar of the abolitionist
campaign since it would crush many of the pro-slavery arguments and simul-
taneously fit in with their brand of Evangelicalism. But, only a decade past the
final shockwaves of the Haitian Revolution, this was a tall order. Images of
white women and children being murdered by rampaging gangs of blood-
thirsty African assassins remained far more in the public conscience than any
notions of Africans in suits and ties reading the Bible.6
To the African Institution, Africans were as capable as anybody else of
achieving progress and enlightenment, given the right guidance and succor
from the more advanced peoples of the earth, by which of course they meant
those of European origin. Africans were redeemable given the right influences
and training; they might currently be lesser, but they were not inherently so,
merely less fortunate in their upbringings, teachings, and surroundings. This
idea was entirely at odds with that of most planters in the Caribbean, for whom
Africans’ debasement was inherent and insurmountable. To the pro-slavery
faction, anybody of African origin could never ascend to the high standards of
intellect, culture, and morality displayed by those of European heritage.
Experiments in Civilization and Liberty 143

Meeting back in 1807, just as they were winning the campaign against the
slave trade, the Committee of the African Institution in London had spent a
long time arguing about the posited negative qualities of black men and women.
They concluded that some of these were simply figments of planters’ imagina-
tions. Those that they thought had some basis in fact, such as Africans’ “indo-
lence,” were “by no means an incurable defect.” They just needed to be shown
the right way.7
A few months after the London meeting, Governor Ludlam noted that the
abolition of the slave trade would not “prevent the Africans from still remaining
a savage and uncivilized people.” Nevertheless, he hoped that without the slave
trade, they would now “exert themselves, in the way of regular industry.” If
British authorities could “introduce the blessings of a civilized society among a
society sunk in ignorance and barbarism,” then the recaptives might become
“civilized.” In 1810, the directors of the African Institution had written: “Africans
are as susceptible of intellectual and moral culture as the natives of any other
quarter of the globe.” It was a view far ahead of its time, if also a long way from
acknowledging alternative notions of intellect or morality.8
One of the central ways in which such improvement was to be activated
was through teaching Africans, presumed wildly slothful, the protestant work
ethic. For those not enlisted into the army or navy, it was felt that an appropriate
sort of regular labor was agricultural production. This was in part because the
colony needed not only to feed its people but also to prove itself financially
viable in order to counter pro-slavery arguments that the affluent Caribbean
islands would fall into devastation without an enslaved workforce. Agricultural
exports that could contribute to the imperial juggernaut would help immensely.
Schools in Sierra Leone had long taught not only reading and writing but
also agricultural skills. Long periods of the African Institution’s meetings were
taken up in the earliest years, before they truly acknowledged the scale of the il-
legal slave trade, with discussions of crops and how best to plant them in African
soils. All manner of produce was suggested. In 1809, the African Institution had
even established a system of rewards of fifty guineas each for the first people
importing crops such as cotton, coffee, indigo, and rice from Sierra Leone into
Britain. The plan was abandoned after the only winners were the firm of Ander-
son of Philpot Lane, the slave traders from Bunce Island.9
So the rice and cassava being cultivated up at Hogbrook, those fields laid
out by Bostock and Mason’s former captives as a means of survival, became
something much more. Tamba, Yarra, the Kono twins named Fangha, and all
the others thought that they were feeding themselves and making new connec-
tions. To the British abolitionists they were also disproving centuries of ingrained
144 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

misinformation and bigotry. Hogbrook was taking the first steps being a model
village. At the head were Tamba and others from Bostock and Mason’s.
With the Liberated Africans clearing and cultivating the land, the other
pillar of the civilization plan began. The word of the Lord had to be sown.
Governor MacCarthy put education throughout the tiny colony in the hands
of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), which had been founded in 1799 by
William Wilberforce and other prominent abolitionists. They were ideally
suited to taking over Sierra Leone’s education, not only to save the government
a great deal of money, but also because education was believed to comprise not
just letters and numbers but also morality, civility, and the Bible. The CMS
received its first land grant on the side of Leicester Mountain and began a
school.10
Hogbrook got a schoolteacher, Thomas Hirst, who, in the absence of any
other Europeans around, also acted as superintendent of the Liberated Afri-
cans. There was a hospital, which had ten sick boys in 1815. Hirst called meet-
ings to talk of God. The young Bassa boy who had escaped from John Sterling
Mill’s barracoon was one of those to whom Hirst tried to teach the Lord’s
Prayer. A chapel and a schoolroom were planned. Even Sierra Leone’s enemies
would soon agree that “one very excellent settlement has been made at the
Hogbrook.”11
More missionaries flooded into the colony, and all manner of improvements
were witnessed among this most experimental flock. They began to form the
Krio language as a way to communicate and to learn this new religion. As
Christopher Fyfe wrote, “Amid the Babel of tongues English became not only a
lingua franca but a Pentecostal interpreter.”12
As early at 1814 Liberated Africans were even perceived to “express grati-
tude for their mercies” and “lament the misery and degradation of their African
brethren.” This was a major development as far as their rulers were concerned,
since British visitors only three years earlier had claimed that “many of these
men are insensible of the services that have been done to them.” They were not
sufficiently aware of their “obligation” to those who “snatched them from the
horrid grasp of their tyrants.” Now the Africans were at last considered to be
showing more of the required appreciation.13
 17
Prisoners
in New South Wales

It is such an intriguing image to draw: two men who had sold tens of thou-
sands of Africans now themselves below decks, ironware around their ankles.
Whether Bostock and McQueen sensed the reparative, Old Testament–style
appropriateness in their punishment we cannot know, but many of their con-
temporaries saw the links. Analogies were drawn relatively often between
Britain’s mode of criminal punishment and the slave trade. In earlier times,
British slave traders had fought the abolitionist movement by citing convict
transportation as a parallel, arguing that if Britain deemed it acceptable to send
its criminals across the seas then it should be legal for Africans to send captives,
some of whom were surely convicted of crimes, over the Atlantic. A few years
after Bostock and McQueen’s banishment the abolitionists would turn that
contention on its head, hoping that the “celestial ray” of benevolence that had
fought the slave trade would now be cast on convict transports.1
In truth, the analogies were more in the perception than the detail. Bostock
and McQueen’s voyage was very much longer than the transatlantic Middle
Passage, yet only two of the two hundred convicts aboard the Indefatigable died.
This was nothing approaching the 10–20 percent mortality rates on slave ships.
The convicts survived because conditions were far better with less confinement,
more air, better food, and medical care. A slave vessel the size of the Indefatigable,
even allowing for the troops that slavers did not carry, would have packed aboard
somewhere in excess of a thousand Africans during the years of the illegal slaving
trade, five times the number of convicts aboard the Indefatigable. In fact, if convict
transportation seeped too close to slavery, it caused an outcry. Not long before
the Indefatigable sailed, another transport used slave shackles on some of the
convicts aboard, provoking uproar.2
Ultimately, the difference between convict transportation and the trans-
atlantic slave trade cannot be found in statistics. The real gulf was in the realms

145
146 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

of human perception and sentiment. For captive Africans their voyage was into
an unfathomable, gaping unknown. Whether they survived or not, and what
they would be if they did survive, was terrifyingly unclear. By contrast, in the
1810s the British and Irish knew quite a lot about the penal colony at New
South Wales. They sang ditties about it. Transportation was almost always a
permanent departure from family and friends, which was utterly traumatic, but
there were many who hid their distress in a show of defiance toward the society
that was throwing them out. It sometimes became a ghoulish festival of counter-
culture, “a party of pleasure,” since it was their only chance to mock a society
that was sending them away for what were mostly very petty crimes.3
So while slaves looked at sailors and wondered if they were cannibals about
to eat them alive, convict men (more than a few of whom had been seafarers)
tried to befriend them. Many convict women began flirting madly. The con-
victs’ actions were born of desperation certainly: these were survival tactics of
the powerless. Nevertheless, they molded the rules of engagement in a way that
most African captives simply could not.4
If Bostock and McQueen wanted to compare firsthand their fate with that
of those they had sold into bondage—and likely no such thing, other than as a
rhetorical device, would ever have crossed their minds—they had a chance
when the Indefatigable made an unscheduled five-week stop at Rio de Janeiro,
home to around twelve thousand slaves of African origin. Arriving in Rio’s re-
splendent harbor, they sailed past Ilha das Cobras with its slave prison and then
passed the customhouse with newly arrived slave ships reeking and creaking
alongside. An American visitor a few years later wrote that the water of Rio’s
harbor was “covered with the bodies of blacks” who, he believed, had thrown
themselves overboard from arriving slave ships. When the tide went out, their
drifting bodies washed up “on the strand.”5
On Rio’s docks, the two former slave traders could see enslaved stevedores
milling around loading and unloading cargo. Slave canoemen rowed sick con-
victs to shore. Enslaved porters delivered food and water casks to the ship. Ashore
they may have seen the slave warehouses at Valongo, public pillories for whip-
ping slaves set alongside the imposing cathedrals in elegant squares, and African
slaves doing every kind of labor conceivable. In this city, wrote one visitor, slaves
“take the place of horses.” There were so many enslaved Africans on the streets
of Rio that arriving foreigners sometimes thought themselves in Africa.6
Leaving Rio, the Indefatigable recrossed the Atlantic, sailing around the
Cape of Good Hope and across the Roaring Forties where the wind sent the
vessel flying. Finally they reached the Pacific Ocean and then steered northward.
Almost five months after leaving England, they sailed through the heads into
 Prisoners in New South Wales 147

Sydney from the North Shore, ca. 1817. Joseph Lycett, courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New
South Wales.

Sydney’s harbor, famously considered by the earliest colonizers from Britain to

be “the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe, and at the same time
the most secure, being safe from all the winds that blow.”7
We know nothing of Bostock’s and McQueen’s first impressions of the
town perched besides the grandeur of the coves and inlets, but for many con-
victs it was relief. Appearing at long last in the distance, Sydney looked “a place
so very like my own native home,” wrote one convict upon arrival. Further re-
assurance paddled up as higgledy-piggledy craft swarmed alongside, settlers
coming aboard armed with welcomes, fruit, and invitations. Aboriginal elders
in their nowies arrived to greet them too, and if others aboard were unsure of
what to make of such an act, it was not the first time Bostock and McQueen
had come face to face with a culture not their own.8
The Indefatigable’s passengers finally set foot ashore at Sydney Cove in late
April 1815. They were at what is today Circular Quay, where the coastline
warps between the Sydney Opera House and the southern end of the Harbour
Bridge. It was almost two years after the slave ship Fénix had arrived at their
factory in Africa, bringing the wrath of the Royal Navy in its wake.
148 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

The Sydney Gazette wrote that the Indefatigable’s prisoners looked healthy and
“of particularly clean appearance.” There was perhaps something of an echo
of a slave ship’s arrival in the Gazette’s comment, the prisoners’ potential for
labor being the real, if tacit, point of interest. But such echoes were extremely
faint. While in the seventeenth century there had been some overlap in the
status of African slaves and British and Irish convicts in the Caribbean, this had
waned long before with the rise of racial stratification. Before the American
Revolution there had been a racial divide that separated black slaves from
white convicts, and in New South Wales there was not even a sale of convicts’
labor as there had been in the American colonies.9
The Indefatigable’s convicts were allotted as private servants to existing settlers
or sent to labor on the colony’s public works. Many went to the outlying settle-
ments at Windsor, Parramatta, and Liverpool, but Bostock and McQueen re-
mained in town. They were about to discover that things would not turn out
nearly so badly as they must have feared.10

When Bostock and McQueen arrived in 1815, Sydney was still figuring itself
out. It had been founded as a convict colony, a city of damned outcasts, and
was in fact Sierra Leone’s twin, the two colonies having been started at the
same time. But it was also Sierra Leone’s inverse: a nonfree white colony (the
Indigenous people were not considered) in contrast to the free black community
in Africa. In 1787, as ships had bobbed in the harbor being victualed for both
settlements, it had seemed very clear to black men aboard the First Fleet destined
for the South Seas that Sierra Leone was the better option.11
There had been hard times, but by 1815 Sydney was more than a vast
prison camp. It was moving far ahead of its supposedly more advantaged African
coeval. While Sierra Leone was struggling, Sydney was on the cusp of being an
extraordinary success story.
The fillip was deliberate policy, coming not from London but instigated
by Governor Lachlan Macquarie. Launching a grand scheme of stately build-
ings and decorous parkways, the fifty-four-year-old set about reinvigorating
the colony. He dreamed of making Sydney into an imposing city of shipping
and commerce, modeled on the opulent grandeur he had witnessed during an
earlier posting at Bengal.
Macquarie modeled this dream using convicts and former convicts. In the
process he created many prospects and lucky breaks for criminals whom Britain
had condemned to suffer. Macquarie, himself a self-made man, determined to
Prisoners in New South Wales 149

allow New South Welshmen to make their own fortunes as best they could. He
became famously generous with pardons.12
The opportunities Macquarie offered to convicts were so controversial that
in 1819 Britain sent out Commissioner John Thomas Bigge to investigate what
on earth was going on. A former chief justice of Trinidad, Bigge was horrified
by what he found: lax rule and little of the intensive agriculture he had seen
slaves performing in the Caribbean. Before Bigge’s arrival, however, New South
Wales was the ideal environment for convicted men to start again.13
Macquarie’s vision of building the city on seaborne trade meant that Bostock
and McQueen’s expertise was immediately marketable. Everything in the
small colony revolved around business. It can only have been a welcome sign to
Bostock, who had grown up around the vast docks and trading offices of Liver-
pool. The Commissariat, the agent for government supplies, remained the
largest trader in the colony, but the private sector was growing rapidly. There
was huge demand for imported goods, even luxury items that would have been
rare treats in Britain. Rumor had it that in Sydney the most ignorant man
could earn “a few thousand” simply by “merchandising.” The deputy commis-
sary flounced around town sporting a feather in his hat.14
If one could overlook the illicit character of the “goods” they had previ-
ously bought and sold, Bostock and McQueen were just the type of men that
Sydney needed. Fortunately for the two former slave traders, overlooking pre-
vious transgressions was something at which Sydney excelled. In fact, many of
the colony’s elite had arrived in chains. The wealthiest man in Sydney was
Simeon Lord, a thief turned shipbuilder, sealer, auctioneer, and entrepreneur.
Samuel Terry, known as “the Rothschild of Botany Bay,” was a former stocking
thief. James Underwood, once sentenced at Maidstone, had become a very
wealthy boatbuilder, sealing merchant, the owner of St George Coffee Lounge
and a Regency-style house.15
Fresh off the Indefatigable, Bostock and McQueen should have been given
out as servants to a free colonist or employed on Macquarie’s growing list of
public works. Perhaps they were in the short term, but no records survive of
their immediate fate. In fact, their exact status, and even how far their bondage
extended, was an intriguingly blurred issue. Even the idea that convicts were
attainted had waned, and neither those who arranged their transport nor their
employer had any property rights over them. Into the 1820s, newspapers in the
colony debated the issue of transportation: was bonded labor part of the deal,
or was the sentence simply banishment? This was largely a notional argument
for those distributed as servant laborers to colonists, but there were checks and
balances and recourse to complaint for anybody treated excessively badly. The
150 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

argument that New South Wales was a slave society seems, at least from a point
of view looking out to sea from Cape Mesurado over the Atlantic to Cuba, to
be stretching a point.16

Far away in the Atlantic, while his former captives, his business partner, and
their assistant had all been forced to make new lives for themselves, Charles
Mason was busy working in the slave trade. He had lost one of his factories but
had other ventures ongoing, including the Gallinas operation and his business
in Cuba.
On November 13, 1815, Charles Mason—or Masson/Massón as he was
sometimes called in Cuba—again took to the seas. He had purchased a former
privateer called Commodore Perry and refitted it as a slaving vessel called Rosa.
Following the usual path, they sailed to Cuba and installed a Spanish-Cuban
captain, Bartolomeo Mestre, and papers suggesting a Cuban origin. They
carried rum, tobacco, and gunpowder to trade for slaves in Gallinas.17
After a halt in Matanzas to wait out a storm, they made a quick crossing of
the Atlantic. On January 4, 1816, Charles Mason was back at his old factory.
Soon he had 277 slaves aboard the Rosa, and they were ready to set off on the
adrenalin-fueled sprint back to Cuba. It was all or nothing, great wealth if they
escaped the patrols or utter disaster if they were captured.
Six hours later, Mason and the crew realized to their dismay that an English
schooner, the Mary, had spotted them. It was an unbearable moment, described
colorfully by a slave trader the following decade: “I cannot describe the fretful
anxiety which vexes the mind under such circumstances. Slaves below; a blazing
sun above; the boiling sea beneath; a withering air around; decks piled with
materials of death; escape unlikely; a phantom in chase behind; uncertainty
everywhere; and, within your skull, a feverish mind, harassed by doubt and re-
sponsibility, yet almost craving for any act of desperation that will remove the
spell. It is a living night-mare [sic], from which the soul pants to be free.” The
Rosa’s crew raised Portuguese colors in a desperate attempt to stop the Mary
attacking, but the effect was only temporary. The Mary’s crew launched a
barrage of fire, killing four of the Rosa’s men.18
The Rosa was sizeable for an illegal slave vessel and was mounting twenty
guns. It was not beaten, but it struck its ensign as if in surrender. The Mary dis-
patched a boarding party. As soon as it was within range the Rosa’s crew fired
at the boats.
Exasperated and furious, the Mary’s crew stood off. But the next morning
they again sighted the Rosa and now also HMS Bann, which they signaled for
Prisoners in New South Wales 151

help. The Rosa repeated the trick, fooling the Bann’s crew into thinking all was
calm enough for them to send a lieutenant to investigate. The Rosa’s guns again
opened fire as the boat approached. HMS Bann and the Mary lost patience and
unloaded their weapons onto the Rosa. A lucky strike sent a twelve-pound shot
right through the Rosa’s mainmast.19
The world of illegal slave trading around Gallinas and Mesurado was a
small one. The slave traders all knew each other. Often their pursuers were on
first-name terms with them too. Given the scale of devastation and repercus-
sions that their actions have wreaked, it is easy to imagine a huge web of men,
but actually in any narrow time period the number of people slave trading
between, say, Havana, the Windward Coast, and the United States was small.
Unpicking their networks turns up the same names again and again. The British
naval patrol was only too aware of whom HMS Bann had finally caught. The
Twelfth Report of the Directors of the African Institution wrote that a slave ship named
Rose [sic] had been captured, and aboard was an old slave trader from Mesurado.
The Americans, relying on an account from Sierra Leone given to Viscount
Castlereagh, reported that the Rosa was “fitted out and manned with Ameri-
cans” and that one of the captured had been once “partner of Boostock [sic] at
Mesurado.”20
By the time it arrived in Freetown nine days later, the captured Rosa had
only 262 slaves aboard, another sixteen having died. The survivors were taken
to the Liberated African yard, where they were added to the growing numbers
of recaptives in the colony.
The Rosa’s crew, excepting the injured boatswain, took accommodation in
Freetown. Mason wandered around the town where some of his former cap-
tives were living, alongside a few of his former slaves that he knew much better,
like Tamba. Then reports swirled that the Rosa’s men were planning a daring
escape, stealing their vessel back and making off across the ocean. It must have
been terrifying for Tamba and the others in Hogbrook, for surely they feared
that he was planning on taking them if he fled illegally with his vessel.
Taking no chances, authorities put the Rosa’s men in jail. They remained
there on February 3 when the vessel was condemned for illegal slave trading.
The ship was purchased by the government and pressed into service to relieve
the ailing Princess Charlotte, the vessel that had helped raid Bostock and Mason’s
factory in 1813.
Two and half years after his former partner Robert Bostock was incarcerated
there, Charles Mason found himself in Freetown’s jail. But his situation was not
nearly as dire as Bostock’s had been. Since at least 1810, Mason had claimed to
be an American, and most people around the region believed him to be a citi-
zen of the United States. This was an era in which the divide between these
152 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

nationalities was still in some dispute, and the British held that anybody born in
Great Britain was incontrovertibly British, regardless of what citizenship they
claimed. But in this case most of those involved seemed to be in little doubt that
Mason was American. After the War of 1812, Britain no longer pursued Ameri-
cans for slave trading.21
So although the capture and seizure of the Rosa and its captives was an-
other financial blow, Mason’s freedom was not in jeopardy in the way that
Bostock’s and McQueen’s had been. Rather than being hauled up before Free-
town’s court, Charles Mason was only tangentially involved in the case over
the Rosa. Authorities were unsure how to divide up the prize money between
the crews of the Mary and the Bann, so Charles Mason and Bartolomeo Mestre
appeared in court to state which vessel they considered their captors.22
There were other captured slave ships alongside the Rosa in Freetown
harbor: the Guadeloupe, the Rayo, the Eugenie, and the Augustina, all along with
their crews. Freetown’s authorities could not endlessly hold so many disaffected
sailors, so the local authorities released one small vessel, the Bella Maria of
Cadiz, to carry some of them back to Havana. Charles Mason was free to go,
once more sliding back to the world of illicit slave trading. He embarked on the
Bella Maria along with twenty-one other Americans and Spaniards/Cubans,
including six others from the Rosa’s crew as well as men from the Guadeloupe,
Rayo, Eugenie, and Augustina.23
They set out in April. It should have been a straightforward trip westward
to home, but six weeks out and with the shoals of the Bahamas and Turks and
Caicos nearly in sight, the weather started to look ominous. The clouds dark-
ened and waves deepened as the storm closed in. Suddenly concerns about
returning to Havana without slaves and without money must have seemed
trivial. Returning to Havana at all was the best they could hope for. Then, at
the worst possible moment, the pilot made a fatal mistake. Two of the sails
were furled, “completely capsizing the ship.”
The ship started to break up, the sea bulging over the decks. Five men
abandoned ship. The former captains of the Eugenie and Rayo, the third pilot of
the Augustina, and two American sailors reached a small boat and cast off. For
Mason and the rest there can only have been dread, the seas swallowing the
vessel before they could reach the safety of the small boats.
The five men who had managed to get away did not have to wait long for
salvation. The Bella Maria was sinking around thirty leagues from Abaco in the
Bahamas, and the survivors were drifting in a busy shipping channel. The Fame
from Providence, Rhode Island, bound to Havana, spotted them. It was all the
rescued men could do to tell their story. The Fame made the wreck as quickly as
Prisoners in New South Wales 153

possible, but these efforts were in vain. The weather was too rough, and darkness
approached. The rest of the men were lost.
Among the roll call of the dead was Charles Mason. Not quite three years
after the loss of his slaving enterprise on the banks of the St Paul’s River,
Charles Mason was gone.24
 18
Christianity
at Hogbrook

Jolted awake, Tamba realized that in a trancelike state he had climbed from
his bed and was on his knees. Clinging to the bedframe like a shield, his cheeks
were streaming with tears that he had no memory of crying. He had endured a
nightmare of “a man coming into his cottage and making in the middle of it a
large fire.” The malevolent man had then dragged two people into the home,
then “he bound . . . [them] in chains and put them into the fire.” The prisoners
had not burned quickly, forcing Tamba to watch while they were “howling
with anguish,” the fire so hot that the nails fell from their fingers and toes. Next
the murderer came for Tamba and tried “to thrust him also into the fire.” For-
tunately another man intervened at the last moment, arguing, “Let him alone;
he belongs to me.” It had launched Tamba from his bed, seeking sanctuary.1
The dream had been so intense, so lacerating to Tamba’s psyche, that even
realizing that the events were not real—or at least not happening then—and
that he was safe at home in Hogbrook did not soothe him. His wooden home
was better made than some, but still the cool mountain air of the night puffed
through the planks as he stayed on his knees, bereft. As morning dawned he
was still disturbed by what he had seen in the dark corners of his mind.
Nobody can see into another man’s dreams, much less across centuries and
cultures, but today, should Tamba have experienced such night terrors, he
would surely be evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder. It is impossible not
to raise the question of whether Tamba was reliving the horrors of his past, the
events of his liberation in 1813 when Bostock and Mason’s Cape Mesurado
barracoon had burned down with people still inside.
It seems highly likely that Tamba met with Charles Mason in late 1816, or
at least heard of his old master’s appearance in town, and that this in some way
proved to be the catalyst for his night terrors. By the time Mason was in Free-
town promenading around the streets, Tamba had married and was Hogbrook’s

154
Christianity at Hogbrook 155

butcher. Tamba and his wife, like many others in Hogbrook, walked frequently,
even daily, down to Freetown, setting up open-air markets around the capital
to sell their produce. Freetown was a tiny place where news of fresh arrivals
spread quickly, and those caught aboard illegal slave ships were spicy gossip. It
seems impossible that they would not have heard that Charles Mason was in
town, and while many who had been held captive in his barracoons would not
have known his name, Tamba certainly did. A new fear could well have taken
hold since Mason’s presence raised the specter of re-enslavement, that Tamba
would be compelled to return to his earlier life, especially after the rumors
that Mason was going to steal his ship away from under the nose of British
authorities.2
None of these causes were really explored at the time: psychology as a sepa-
rate field of study was still decades away. The devout European who recorded
the event, William Augustine Bernard Johnson, saw the dream as a typical
vision of hellfire, a representation of what Satan had in mind for nonbelievers.
Yet even Johnson intimated that there were links between this most distressing
nightmare and Tamba’s former life, that his visualization of hellfire was all the
more striking because of what he had seen and done. Tamba was “like the jailer
of old,” Johnson wrote, while another narrator changed this to “like the Philip-
pian jailer.” Clearly they saw links between the biblical jailer at Philippi who
despaired when his prisoners escaped during an earthquake and Tamba, who
had lost half of the prisoners he was charged with keeping when HMS Thais
attacked.3
The morning after the nightmare it was Johnson from whom Tamba
sought counsel and comfort. Johnson, a former London sugar refiner born in
Germany, and his wife had arrived in Sierra Leone the previous year, with
Johnson taking over from Thomas Hirst as Hogbrook’s schoolteacher. Where
Hirst had struggled with illness and a flock utterly uninterested in his teachings,
Johnson’s style and passion were having more of an effect. Though still in his
twenties, he was becoming their guide, the conductor of a Liberated African
ensemble. The Reverend Johnson, as he was soon ordained, was their leader.4
When Johnson took the post at Hogbrook, it was considered among the
most challenging and deadly of all in the CMS’s realm. All of West Africa was
believed to be “pre-eminently reigned over by the Evil One,” but within that,
Hogbrook was a place where “mingle wickedness, woe, and want,” its people
“the degraded race of Ham.” Despite these warnings, when Johnson arrived he
was aghast. “Natives of twenty two different nations” were living crowded into
the hillside huts, he wrote, and “some of them [were] so hungry they were ‘skele-
tons.’” More died each day. To Johnson’s mind it was not just “the brutalizing
156 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

cruelties of the slave trade” that had created this situation. These were “poor
heathens” with “naturally depraved hearts.” The recaptives at Hogbrook were
“the off-scourings of Africa,” Johnson grieved, “some of the wildest cannibals
in Africa.” Tamba, Yarra, and all their former shipmates aboard the Thais
were not considered as degraded as the Igbo, who had arrived soon after them,
but this was hardly promising. Things were so bad that Johnson’s nerve wavered.
“I think I shall be of no use among so wild a race as that at Hogbrook,” he
wrote home to the CMS.5
Johnson soon rallied. By as early as July 1816, he led Sunday services that
lasted all day, attendance obligatory for all of those living in the mountain valley.
An impassioned public speaker, he thrilled them with dramatic renderings of
Noah’s Ark, prodigal sons, David versus Goliath, and the children of Israel
finding the Promised Land after four hundred years of slavery. He exhorted
them to accept the word of God, or they would burn in hell forever more.
With his wife’s help, Johnson also set about feeding the hoards of hungry
people, distributing food given by Governor MacCarthy. He arranged for the
local doctor to inoculate them against smallpox. A school for boys took shape,
using Bell’s method, by which the smartest boys were taught first and then they
led groups of less gifted boys.6
For some these might have been purely matters of faith, but it is also easy to
see how many who were not believers, those who held onto their native reli-
gions, came to see Johnson as their savior. He commanded life and death, and
winning his favor and approval could mean substantial gains. Visiting their
farms, he determined whether they were showing the requisite industry to be
worthy of the food and clothing distributed by Governor MacCarthy. Fascinat-
ingly, he was believed to have supernatural powers, striking a backslider lame
through the sheer power of his invective. This was likely more of a reflection of
many of his congregation’s native belief systems, where the mystical was an
unquestioned part of life, than he was prepared to admit. Small wonder that
with magical powers, distributing food and clothing that showed his wealth and
prestige, and his compound filled with dependents, he was the biggest of big
men in their traditional worldviews. That this fitted neatly into a Christian
narrative they were now being taught was a happy concurrence.7
Soon Hogbrook’s people, along with some volunteer soldiers from the RAC
(possibly some of their old friends from Bostock and Mason’s), lined up to start
digging the foundations of what would become the colony’s first stone church.
It was on the rise just at the top of the main pathway through the cottages, the
boys’ and girls’ schools sitting beside it.8
 Christianity at Hogbrook 157

Church and Missionary House in Regent, Sierra Leone, 1850. From Thomas Poole Eyre, Life, Scenery and Customs
in Sierra Leone and the Gambia, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1850).

All of these developments were undoubtedly very positive for many. They
had more food and clothes, some semblance of governance, and an arbitrator
to whom they could look to rule between their many misunderstandings and
conflicts. The children were in school and could look to a brighter future than
when they were kidnapped, stolen, traded, and walked vast distances across
Africa in coffles.
Yet this also marked a point when the achievements of the Thais’s captives
were subsumed into a European-led narrative. Some of Johnson’s claims about
the state of Hogbrook upon his arrival were not just the first impressions of a
European man in Africa for the first time, but a more conscious account of
Christianity setting out to find a path through the dense jungle of heathenism.
Johnson finding the village initially destitute made the transformation he was
determined to bring about all the more spectacular. So the immensely hard
work the men and women had already put into clearing the land and planting
crops, all the rice and cassava fields laid out, was disregarded. In Johnson’s nar-
rative they were living in “a complete wilderness,” surviving only by plunder,
grabbing chickens and then eating them raw. The fact that they had built
homes and welcomed large numbers of new arrivals into them translated to a
158 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

condemnation of the lack of “female purity” because “in some huts ten of them
were crowded together, and in others even fifteen or twenty.”9
Similarly at the time of Tamba’s distressing nightmare of burning to death,
Johnson claimed that Tamba and his wife were “weeping for hunger.” Yet
other sources suggest that by this point Tamba was “entirely independent” of
government resources, no small achievement in an era when most Liberated
Africans remained completely reliant on the government for food. He had a
small farm, owned a bullock and a goat, and as well as being Hogbrook’s
butcher he burned charcoal for the blacksmith. At the time of his formal con-
version he was already successful enough to tithe half a crown weekly to the
church. Many were certainly hungry, but Tamba does not seem to have been
one of them.10
Tamba’s official conversion, in Johnson’s narrative, was at the time of his
nightmare of hellfire. But that was something of a gloss on a more complex
story. In 1816, before the nightmares, when Johnson became ill with fever, he
had written that he could “lay down his head without a care,” knowing that
“the faithful Tamba” was taking care of things. Whatever the exact sequence of
events, Tamba was certainly “one of the first fruits of that mountain valley.”
Tamba began taking classes in English reading and writing in the mornings
before the rest of his work and in the evenings attended the first of the classes
led by Johnson.11
With Johnson at the helm, Hogbrook was converted “to a smiling village,”
its formally “savage” people now “tame and civil.” It now had 1,100 people,
and huts built on both sides of the creek led down to the brook where hogs still
drank.12
Johnson’s successes were reported in British and American newspapers as
early as 1816. “Here the triumphant influence of Christianity,” they trumpeted,
“in rapidly civilizing and blessing rude and ignorant men, is remarkably dis-
played.” Hogbrook was no longer considered a respectable enough name for
such a village. Governor MacCarthy renamed it Regent in honor of the Prince
Regent, the man of whom Bostock and McQueen had begged pardons.13
 19
The End
of Their Punishment

For almost ten months Bostock and McQueen had been walking Sydney’s
George Street and strolling across the Domain where Mrs. Macquarie loved to
ride, lately Bostock promenading with his new belle on his arm. It probably
seemed not so bad after all, that the conditions of their banishment were cer-
tainly endurable. Then, not long after they had marked their first antipodean
Christmas and seen in the New Year, wonderful news arrived. The ship Fanny
sailed into harbor carrying a dispatch that set the colony alight. The Sydney
Gazette hastily printed a “Gazette Extraordinary” to broadcast the news. Na-
poleon Bonaparte, “the Faithless Disturber of Europe and Destroyer of the
Human Race,” had surrendered. And there was something more important for
Bostock and McQueen snuggled amid the curled papers carried in the Fanny’s
chests. Alongside news of Wellington’s victory were their pardons. They had
been written in June 1815 but had taken seven months to reach them.1
That night, by happy coincidence, a ball for the queen’s birthday was al-
ready planned, so the town’s worthy danced across a floor “painted with em-
blems of martial glory . . . the figure of Fame, in the center of the floor, sounding
her trumpet, and holding in her right hand a scroll, whereupon were inscribed
‘waterloo, wellington and victory.’” Whether Bostock, perhaps even
McQueen, was there is not clear, but they both were almost certainly present
on Saturday when Sydney honored the Duke of Wellington with a Grand Salute
from the Battery of Dawes Point, followed by a feu de joie from the 46th Regiment
in Hyde Park. As Union Jacks waved in a patriotic flurry, Bostock and McQueen
had their own news to celebrate.2
Three days after the celebrations, a mere five days after the Fanny’s arrival,
Robert Bostock married fifteen-year-old Rachael Rafferty at St. Phillip’s
Church. The daughter of an Irish convict woman and a ship captain who had
sailed away long before, Rachael had been born free in New South Wales and

159
160 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

was a renowned beauty. It seems likely that Bostock had been awaiting free-
dom to marry her, eager to not harm her status as a freeborn woman through
marriage to a convict. It was no small matter to attract a wife in a colony where
there were more than three men for every woman, rarer still to win the hand of
a free girl. Whatever Bostock had been working at during his months of convict
servitude he was clearly making waves. His African wives were forgotten.3
The following week Bostock patriotically joined the committee collecting
donations for “relief of the sufferers at the . . . glorious battle of Waterloo.”
Bostock’s donation was £5 5s, the same amount given by Simeon Lord, Sam-
uel Terry, and even colonial grandees like William Balmain and D’Arcy
Wentworth.4
Later that month their pardons were officially transmitted. Robert Bostock
was listed as being from Liverpool, thirty years old, 5 feet 4 inches tall, with a
“Fair ruddy” complexion, hazel eyes, and “Flaxen” hair. John McQueen was
recorded as being a native of Glasgow, twenty-four years old, 5 feet 6¾ inches
tall, with pale skin, brown hair, and blue eyes. It was two and a half years since
their arrest in Africa. Now they were “restored to all the rights and Privileges of
a free Subject.”5
Three days before this official documentation was delivered, Robert Bostock
placed an advertisement in the Sydney Gazette. He had for sale “ladies and chil-
dren’s straw bonnets, and dress caps, slops of all kinds, blankets, damask table
cloaths [sic], queen stuffs, dimity, chintz, black bombazeen [sic] &c. Cognac
Brandy and Hollands’ Gin.” Robert Bostock, respectable colonial merchant,
had set up shop.6
It was a good moment to start a business, as the recession of the previous few
years was receding. Bostock’s soon became a well-known emporium at 14 Hunter
Street, at the corner of Bligh Street, where Sydney’s first church had once stood.
John McQueen worked as his assistant, just as he had in the old days at Cape
Mesurado. Now their merchandise spanned everything from furniture to food-
stuffs; beer, wine, and liquor; apparel of all kinds including hats, umbrellas, and
parasols; all manner of ironmongery; a vast assortment of cloth; tobacco and
snuff; stationery, trunks, and even grand pianos and bird cages. Soon Bostock
owned homes on both Hunter and Blight Street.7
At the end of 1816, Bostock received a first grant of land from Governor
Macquarie. He and Rachael also became parents. Into the next year Bostock
bought and sold, placing regular advertisements in the Sydney Gazette. Bostock
was almost certainly receiving letters and news from England via the ships
that pulled into harbor, and likely he already knew that not long after he and
McQueen had sailed aboard the Indefatigable, Robert Thorpe, formerly Sierra
The End of Their Punishment 161

Leone’s judge, had published a book in the form of an open letter to William
Wilberforce. Barred from returning to Sierra Leone after a public spat with the
abolitionists, Thorpe had turned vehemently against them. Thorpe’s book
argued that Bostock’s and McQueen’s convictions were illegal.8
Then by late 1817 more exciting news still arrived for Bostock, possibly
sailing into Sydney in the letters aboard the convict ship Larkins. It was not only
that three slave dealers arrested in 1814 had won their cases to have the convic-
tions overturned; one of them had been awarded £20,000 compensation from
former governor Maxwell for his losses. Another was claiming £50,000. Robert
Bostock decided that he would make his own case. At worst he could have his
conviction expunged. At best he might gain a vast sum in recompense for his
losses and sufferings while a convict.9
Astonishingly, Bostock had already earned enough for the usually prohibi-
tively expensive passage back to Britain. Very few convicts ever afforded to re-
turn, but Bostock embarked aboard the Harriet, paying for his wife and baby
daughter to accompany him. Like adventurers, they carried antipodean curios
for show-and-tells they would perform in England.10
The Harriet set sail a few days before Christmas in 1817. Before they could
even get into the southern ocean they discovered some convicts had stowed
away on board. They sailed into harbor at Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land, to
offload the stowaways. They were there only a few hours, but long enough for
Bostock to see a bit of a town that would play a big part in his future. Evidently
it took his fancy.11
 20
A Model Village

By 1817, things were getting better for those in Sierra Leone. The population
of the tiny colony was now nine to ten thousand people, more than double that
of only three years earlier, and positive signs could be seen everywhere. The jail
was finally finished, “a three story stone building” to replace the houses for-
merly used. The town hall had been built, and the first stones of St. George’s
Church in Freetown were laid to the reading of Psalm 100. The wharf had been
reconstructed with new steps leading down. Arriving in 1817, the new chief
justice wrote home that he was “well content ” with the state of the colony. A man
calling himself “a Lover of Truth” boasted in the Royal Gazette, “in 1814 we had
six Stone Houses . . . we have now nearly sixty.”1
Amid all of this development, Regent, as Hogbrook had been renamed,
was indisputably the colony’s jewel. Once considered a place of “heathen bar-
barity and darkness,” it was now known far and wide as “a most romantic
spot.” Rivers cascaded down the mountains into the brook, a meadow for cattle
was fenced beyond the homes. In Britain it was reported that they were “making
very great progress” in growing crops. Reverend Garnon, making his first visit
in February 1818, wrote of Regent: “The first view which you have of it, in
going from Leicester Mountain, is as you emerge from a thick wood and are
descending into a valley. There, on a small eminence, stand the Church, the
Parsonage House, and the Schools. In all directions are seen the houses of the
Liberated Negroes. The whole is surrounded with ‘cloud-capt mountains,’
covered with an almost impenetrable forest.”2
Garnon attended one of Johnson’s preaching marathons—three rounds of
divine service and two prayer meetings—and declared himself “well satisfied
with the conduct of these dear Negroes.” There was a considerable population
crowded into Regent’s church, the village now containing 790 Liberated African
adults and 565 children, along with four Europeans. Some of those who were

162
A Model Village 163

rescued from Bostock and Mason’s barracoon had built homes on the main
street, now called Christian Street.3
By December 1818 the local Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser printed a
celebratory article about Regent. “The young men settled there,” it enthused,
“have furnished an example which will long be admired, and not easily sur-
passed.” Among the Liberated Africans’ achievements were “two excellent
stone bridges,” roads built remarkably “solid and level,” and the construction
of a hospital. Clearly, said the journalist, people just rescued from the holds of
slave ships had only achieved these things with the help of “the hand of
Heaven.”4
At the center of these developments, working as Johnson’s right-hand men,
were Tamba and another Liberated African named William Davis. At this
time only around twelve people in Regent took communion, but Tamba and
Davis were among them. Their influence was quite extraordinary, and the idea
that two African men, rescued from the transatlantic slave trade, had become
such devout servants of Jesus was proclaimed reverently as some sort of miracle.
At a general CMS meeting as early as 1817, following the speakers it was
Tamba who led everyone in prayer, leaving reports to gush: “Not yet of two
years old in knowledge, and yet how heavenly wise!”5
This was extremely beneficial to the abolitionist agenda, but Tamba was
undoubtedly very useful to Johnson in other ways as well. He was an interlocutor
between the Liberated Africans and the church, and Reverend Johnson regu-
larly used him to intervene in cases of misunderstanding or backsliding. In
1817, Tamba was sent to talk to a man who professed the Christian faith but
then feared he must leave the church when told that his marriage was not recog-
nized. Johnson told him to speak to Igbo women about the Lord, showing his
lack of understanding since Igbo was not among the many languages Tamba
spoke.6
Many of the Regent recaptives apparently looked to Tamba in the role of
interlocutor and, wrote Johnson, “seem to be very fond” of him. This might
just have been Johnson’s interpretation, wishful thinking, but it likely also re-
flected the rare insight Tamba had into the white world. Tamba had grown up
around the Caulkers and Clevelands, who themselves had learned to belong to
both the African and European worlds. Unlike the overwhelming majority of
the Liberated Africans, Tamba knew long before he arrived in Regent how to
speak, dress, eat, and generally live in a way familiar enough to Europeans to
be considered “civilized.”
Having this kind of cultural intermediary was invaluable to many of
those trying to survive in a society so very alien. There was plenty of scope for
164 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

misunderstandings even when the intention was good. In nearby Gloucester

village, some Liberated Africans feared that Reverend Düring was helping
them while they were sick so that they would be worth more when sold. Even
at Regent a small girl howled with horror when first taken into the church,
thinking it a slave market. That many Liberated Africans struggled to trust
white men was hardly surprising; their fears were more than understandable
given the traumas bestowed upon them by their experiences.7
Having a go-between not only helped recaptives understand more of the
missionaries’ motives; it was particularly important because the kind of Christi-
anity being proselytized by Johnson was one considered visible. Christianity
and civilization went hand in hand so that faith was almost one and the same as
adopting outward English culture. Dressing in European-style clothing, culti-
vating fields, building a “better” home, and eating with knives and forks was a
requirement. Respectability could be found through the ownership of sofas and
cupboards with crockery.8
Sierra Leone’s British rulers were unquestioning about this. Although word
was sent out to Sierra Leone to “not mistake civilization for conversion,” the
adoption of British modes of behavior, in addition to devout faith, was required.
Few Britons questioned whether their own way of life was at the very pinnacle
of civilization and progress. A visitor from Britain wrote, “I find myself perfectly
satisfied to find a solid foundation of British pre-eminence” in Sierra Leone.
The only things that disturbed him were the Africans’ failings in manners and
“social tact.” Vigorous interventionism was unchallenged. Having experienced
a world in which one was bought and sold as a human commodity, having to
learn to eat with a knife and fork was doubtless a much better option.9
But it was alarming nonetheless. The CMS allowed Britons who made a
donation of £5 to name a Liberated African child as if he or she were an exotic
pet. Some of those who did so were wealthy individuals like Miss Harriet New-
biggin who gave £10 to name a child Henry Palmer; whole congregations also
clubbed together to name a recaptive child for pastors and other revered elders.
Donors requested that the CMS publish reports of “the behaviour and charac-
ter” of each these namesakes. With Tamba taking a leading role in Regent’s
affairs, it seems very likely that some of the children rescued from Mason and
Bostock’s were among those receiving a British name from a sponsor in this
way. It is not possible to prove, however, since original African names were not
recorded alongside their new Anglo ones. Their motivations might not have
been the same, but the CMS was carelessly stripping people of their identities,
and by extension their original ethnicities, just as planters in the Americas
did.10
A Model Village 165

At around this time Tamba added the Christian name William to his own,
presumably after the Reverend Johnson’s first name (though Johnson was more
commonly referred to as Augustine). In those lessons with Johnson, he learned
to sign himself William Tamba. William Davis perhaps took his surname from
Reverend Davis, a Methodist minister who had been one of the first two men
to welcome Reverend Johnson to Freetown. Many who, at least outwardly,
adopted the Christian faith of their new leaders took wholly Anglicized names,
albeit retaining their African names too. Tamba’s old colleague Yarra became
John Reffell after the superintendent of the Liberated Africans, Joseph Reffell,
a close friend of both Governor MacCarthy and Reverend Johnson. Other
Liberated Africans took names like Waterfall, Sea Breeze, Rose Bush, and
Rose Bud. Whether they adopted these themselves, even perhaps taking the
equivalent term for one of their original names in some cases—Waterfall was
the meaning of the Kissi name Balloo, for example, the name of one of Bostock
and Mason’s former captives—or were given them by some British clerk, is
unclear.11
Johnson’s fervor included substantial pressure to relinquish their former
ethnic identities—something rarely pushed in parts of the colony with less
zealous missionary leadership—in favor of now being simply brothers and
sisters in Christ. When Johnson proposed that they found a Benevolent Society
in Regent, one unnamed recaptive stood up in church and declared, “Dat be
very good ting, Broders! we be no more of plenty country: we belong to one
country now—Jesus! Suppose one be sick, all be sick: suppose one be well, all
be well!” It was a fine sentiment in many ways, and a move toward their later
inclusion as Krio peoples, but it nevertheless demanded an impracticable sever-
ing of all that they had known, and it was far beyond what was expected of
most Liberated Africans who lived in their ethnic groups for generations to
come. To abandon these identities in the middle of their ongoing recovery
from serious mental and physical damage can only have caused further insta-
bility. It was not just their time as captives and slaves that had been a travesty,
they were now taught, but rather their entire previous lives. Those who had
opened their homes to them, shared food and succor despite having so little
themselves, those with whom they had shared understanding based on experi-
ences that stretched back before their captures and enslavements, were supposed
to be no more important than those previously considered enemies. It was a lot
to take in and most never would.12
More troubling still was the implication that the recaptives had to distance
themselves from their families from whom they had been taken, everything in
fact that they had known before. The type of muscular Christianity preached
166 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

by Johnson and followed by Tamba allowed no scope for inclusion of traditional

African religious beliefs, which were derided as merely “deplorable supersti-
tions.” Unable to perceive the rich wealth of ancestral guides, myriad tutelary
spirits, and supreme deities, much less the expansive diversity between the
many different African religions found in the colony, all nonmonotheist places
of worship were simply denounced as “chapels in honour of the evil spirit.”
Syncretism was judged akin to devil worship. The white man would settle for
nothing less than control over their entire minds, demanding that they abandon
not just their deities but also the ancestral spirits that had stayed with them in
this strange new land. Even their drums were considered most unacceptable.
Johnson would later crow proudly to London that there were no more drums
left in Regent. Most startlingly of all, Johnson considered amulets as disfiguring
as slave chains, as if all of their former lives with their families had been as
destructive as their periods of enslavement.13
This relentless preaching to abandon so much of their former worldview,
belief system and entire way of being was desperately disturbing to some. Al-
ready stolen from their families and deeply wounded by the events that had led
to Regent, many now came to the horrible realization that if they adopted the
religious beliefs of Johnson, Tamba, and the CMS, they were in effect damning
to hell their families and friends back in their homelands. One young woman
admitted to Johnson that in prayer her mind wandered back to her own coun-
try. Life was always a two-way pull, because when she thought of her lost home
and family she feared that, not knowing Jesus, they were doomed to hell’s fires.
Another woman revealed how she always cried when she thought of her father
because, “poor man, he no sabby [know] anything about Jesus Christ.” Even
Tamba was troubled by this implication, writing, “I remember my country
people, which are far from the word of God.”14
As if none of these things were difficult enough, the recaptives were also
supposed to show gratitude to their British rulers. Governor MacCarthy, who by
this time lived with Philippa Hayes’s daughter Hannah as his common-law wife,
believed that the recaptives were in debt to Britain, and the least they could do
was show abject thankfulness. They “owed to Great Britain,” MacCarthy
wrote, “under the blessing of God, every thing that could dignify man: they
were emancipated from Slavery; and, above all other benefits, they were edu-
cated in the principles of Christianity.” Recaptives were required to be devout
enough to disown all their previous religious beliefs, forsake their ethnic iden-
tity in favor of a newly created one, take a different name, adopt new ways of
life, speak a new language, and then be grateful to those who demanded these
things from them.15
A Model Village 167

Some of the Liberated Africans accepted this, becoming loyal members of

the church. They included some of those who arrived aboard the Thais, who as
early arrivals and associates of Tamba had heard the teachings more than
most. One child admitted that he played and laughed when Hirst first taught
them about God, but after Johnson’s arrival he had a severe case of smallpox,
commonly fatal, and remembered again the teachings about eternal life. He
decided to follow the Christian faith and remained a member of the church.
Yarra too, now John Reffell, was a member of the church, though nothing
much is known about his decision to follow this path.16
The tricked, traded Bassa boy once purchased by John Sterling Mill and
handed over as one of those he had been hiding for Robert Bostock, also became
a member of Regent’s congregation. David Noah, as he now called himself,
just a boy when they had arrived aboard the Thais, had taken a longer path to
the church than Tamba. He admitted that he had caused Hirst problems when
the schoolteacher had tried to teach him the Lord’s Prayer. Even after John-
son’s arrival he had played up, with Johnson later admitting, “He was a very
dull lad when I came hither.” When he went to stay briefly in Freetown with
Joseph Reffell, superintendent of the Liberated Africans, Reffell had grown
mad with Noah’s waywardness and had sent him away. He returned to Regent
and went to stay with Reverend Johnson, who put him in charge of the rice
store. Staying at Johnson’s home, he had no choice but to attend divine service.17
By 1817, things had begun to change. In Johnson’s words: “it pleased God
to open his eyes about the beginning of 1817.” Noah believed that in 1817 “Jesus
first began to work on my heart,” and he would later write that he had been
called from darkness into light. Having made the decision to follow the Chris-
tian teachings, Noah showed himself to be a brilliant and dedicated scholar.
“He then began with all his might, to learn to read,” Johnson wrote. Soon he
had “outstripped all the others.” Noah became an usher in the church, and he
and Johnson became extremely close. “I do not know what I would do without
him,” Johnson recorded. For Noah, his rescue from “temporal slavery” by the
“government” and his deliverance from “the slavery of the Devil” by the CMS
were one and the same.18
Even for the less devout than Tamba and Noah, there were reasons for
the recaptives to follow the path that the CMS advocated. Church attendance
brought a degree of acceptance, food and clothing when times were tight, edu-
cation for them and their children, and a role in a tight-knit supportive com-
munity to partially replace that which they had lost. Ideas of God’s love may
well have been soothing and a warm embrace after times of such biting uncer-
tainty. As the years moved forward, the incentives to join the church would
168 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

become more pressing still to many of their children and grandchildren whose
ties to their ancestral homelands thawed into their identity as Sierra Leonean
Krios. Embracing European, Christian modes of life would bring opportunity,
and they hoped for the material ease of the Europeans in the colony. The ideas
of liberty and the aim of property ownership became compelling to those so
nearly traded as merchandise.19
Others, however, not withstanding Tamba’s, Davis’s, and Noah’s exhor-
tations or the material gains on offer, were less certain. Some mixed their tra-
ditional ways into this newly learned faith. These could be simple misunder-
standings, perfectly understandable attempts to interpret what Johnson and the
others were telling them as seen through their own grasp of the world. One
child, for example, believed that his financial contributions to the church would
allow him to buy his non-Christian family a path to heaven. His people’s lack of
Christian faith had been troubling him, and he was “glad too [i.e., so] much”
to hear that his donations to the church might somehow facilitate his being re-
united with them. When a white man told him, “perhaps, through the coppers
which we give” in church, he might see some of his countrymen again on Judg-
ment Day, he seized the idea literally. A couple of decades later, liberated slaves
in Jamaica similarly misconstrued missionaries when tickets proving church
membership were believed to be fetishes, rewards for payments and “passports
to heaven.” It seems likely that Reverend Johnson’s posited power to physically
strike down doubters was an amalgamation of what the congregation heard
preached from the pulpit filtered through their own understandings of the
world.20
Often, too, this mixing of the old and new was more conscious and deliber-
ate, a means to survive. Many Liberated Africans adopted two ways of being,
one that they performed in public to satisfy the missionaries and government
officials, and another wholly more African persona that they could be in private.
Perhaps this was why Yarra was also still known as Yarra, despite taking the
name John Reffell. The two names lived on, side by side. Culturally and spiri-
tually, the newly preached ways would never totally supplant the old. “The
customs of their country” were often practiced when no Europeans were
around to see.21
Johnson and Tamba were aware that many of their congregation professed
to follow their faith and yet also kept some of the ways of their homelands.
Rather than seeing any richness in this, or even benevolently hoping that the
new ways would eventually come out on top, they saw hypocrisy and duplicity.
They preached against those who “have been baptized and now call them-
selves Christian: they think because they come to church, and say Lord! Lord!
A Model Village 169

they are going to heaven, while they have no heart-religion.” These people
who “only put Jesus Christ in their mouths” were still going to hell, they scolded
their listeners.22
This duality was not always intentional. Some Liberated Africans were
genuinely struggling between Christianity and their native beliefs, unsure
which way their heart truly lay. They were drawn to the idea of eternal salvation
and terrified by Johnson’s preaching about hell’s flames, yet they longed for the
families and places from which they had been so cruelly stolen. “Suppose me
pray, my heart run to My Country,” one woman confessed to Johnson. This
troubled her greatly, since in recalling her homeland she was also thinking
about things “me no want to remember.” She confessed that she did not know
what to do, ending her sad tale by admitting, “Me think me sometimes have
two hearts.”23
For all those who followed Johnson’s and Tamba’s lead, whether as “heart-
religion” or “mouth-religion,” many others refused resolutely to follow the
British Christian path at all. Some of these were Bassa people who had “built
houses in the woods” outside of Regent. This was particularly troubling to Wil-
liam Davis and David Noah, who were themselves Bassa. When they tried to
convince the Bassa to convert, one old man declared, “I think I and the Devil
should do very well together. Me tall fellow, I could help the Devil cut wood to
make fire good.” Davis in particular was very dispirited by this. This Bassa
group claimed that they lived outside of Regent because of sickness in the town,
but Johnson’s comment that they wanted to live not just outside of the Christian
teachings, keeping their own gris-gris, but also wished to live “without society,”
suggests that it was British culture and control that they were rejecting as much
as their faith. They were one of several groups that refused to conform.24

Johnson’s dreams of a New Jerusalem in Africa extended far beyond the con-
fines of Regent. In 1818 he made Tamba and Davis an extraordinary offer. He
asked them to accompany him and British schoolteacher John Brereton Cates
on a “circuit of the colony.” The two men can only have been honored, if also a
little apprehensive. With his ability to speak many of the “uncultivated” lan-
guages in the region, Tamba was an essential part of the undertaking and was
delighted with this new role.25
The four men and their team traveled by canoe, fording streams where
they were “obliged to pull off shoes and stockings, and walk through the mud.”
Near Tombo, the people all gathered around Tamba, “some on stools, and
170 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

some on country chairs; forming a motely [sic] group” as he read the Bible.
They saw sharks in the rivers, and in the vivified account that was told back in
England they slept among leopards, elephants, and heathens who decided to
murder them. Despite it all, “Tamba consecrated one native dialect after an-
other by declaring in them, for the first time, the wonderful works of God.”26
As soon as they returned, “a Second Journey was in contemplation,” this
one wholly more ambitious. It would take them far beyond the relative safety of
Sierra Leone, to Sherbro Island and then down through the lands of the Vai
and Dei peoples where Tamba had spent years working for Mason and Bostock,
and to the Bassa country, which was Davis’s home. A meeting was held before
they left Regent discussing the true objectives of this peculiar mission. Cates
was armed with an initiative to either found a new colony, or perhaps extend
the existing one as far south as the St. John River. On February 1, 1819, Cates,
Tamba, and William Davis again left Regent, venturing out of the lands of the
abolitionists and into the domain of the slave traders.27
It was their first trip so far beyond the tiny colony, and it wasn’t long before
Cates went into deep shock. Barely beyond the boundary of British governance,
the people’s “drumming and dancing” infuriated him. He was soon uttering
the non-too-Christian opinion that he was glad they would not convert since
they were so heathen to be beyond help. Poro initiations incensed him, since he
believed them simply to be the devil’s work. What Tamba and Davis made of it
is less certain; probably they were trying to interpret Cates’s message to the
people they met, a burden that would have fallen more heavily on Tamba
during the first part of trip since he could speak Mende and Sherbro. There
were certainly many reminders of his former life as they sailed close to the Plan-
tain Islands and saw the village where he had once lived.28
Word of their exploits went ahead of them. As they walked through the
country not far north of Gallinas, they encountered a man coming to greet
them. He reported that he was one of Chief Siaka’s sons, and that all in Siaka’s
camp had heard that “a White Man was walking through the country, who
spoke against selling Slaves.” Rather taken aback, Cates told him why he
thought all types of slavery were indeed wrong. The man “seemed aston-
ished,” Cates wrote, “and said he thought that Black Men never would consent
to life as I would have them: they must have plenty of Wives and plenty of
Slaves.”29
Undeterred, on February 15, 1819, Tamba, Cates, and Davis reached
Gendema, Siaka’s bastion, which they found “strongly defended: there are
many cannon of different sizes, some mounted and others not; with a quantity
of arms and spears.” They thought that the town comprised about 150 houses
A Model Village 171

and had around 600 inhabitants, “but, in time of war, they amount to 1000.” It
was an altogether strange place for the British abolitionist and the two former
slaves. They met a man who had once lived in London and two European
sailors left behind from a slaving vessel. Cates was more disturbed by the sight
of “a fine healthy-looking boy, about four years of age, the child of some White
Man who is either dead or gone away, and who left him to be brought up in all
the wretchedness and superstition of an African. He was quite naked, and
running about with other children.” Cates believed that if the “Sons of lust and
debauchery considered the misery which they frequently entail on their unfor-
tunate offspring, they would restrain their licentiousness.”30
Siaka was sick with yaws, but that evening the visitors went boldly to his
home. Cates read the third chapter of Acts, focusing on the parts that exhorted
Siaka to “repent, then, and turn to God” and turn “from your wicked ways.”
Siaka was unmoved. Later Tamba read the third chapter of St. John to some of
the King’s people who came to see them.31
Departing the next day, they went to visit Charles Gomez at Mano, another
of the most powerful slave traders on the coast. Then, heading southward, they
ventured from Cape Mount down to the banks of the St. Paul River. So Tamba,
the former slave who had worked in the slave trade, arranged to hold a meeting
on the banks where Bostock and Mason’s enterprise had once stood, where he
had once guarded captives, bought and sold those he now held as brothers. A
message was sent to John Sterling Mill, once an acquaintance of Tamba and
owner of their colleague David Noah, asking permission.32
Unfortunately an account of this extraordinary event comes only through
the diary of Cates, who seems to have been largely oblivious to Tamba’s con-
nection to the place. They preached to thirty or forty people from Matthew
chapter 25: “For I was hungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye
gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye
clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.”33
Then crossing the St. Paul River two miles upstream to a small place
named Sheppo, they began walking the six miles to the Mesurado River. For
Tamba it must have been bittersweet and perhaps terrifying, for he came
equipped with only righteousness and Bible versus where he knew all too well
the arms Mill owned. Cates wrote little about their stay at Dazoe Island, not
even referring to Mill by name until they were on their way back to Freetown
at the end of their trip, so we are left to imagine the scene as Tamba and Davis
tried to convince the slave trader of his sins. They also visited “Mrs. Phillipa”—
Philippa Hayes—in whose compound they held morning worship and
preached Psalm 96. At night they dined with her. Cates wrote only that Tamba
172 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

met “many an old acquaintance,” whom he believed looked with wonder into
the eyes of a man who was now “new-born, even to their apprehension.”34
Heading even further south, they next stopped at the St. John River and
began walking inland. Davis preached from the second verse of Isaiah: “And it
shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall
be established on the top of the mountain.” They were looking for a headman
called John White but went instead to King John’s town, where houses were
circular with conical roofs, “better built than any we have seen lately,” and
there was plentiful grass to support the “numerous cattle.” Cates was received
“very cordially” by the Bassa King John, who wore long robes made of country
cloth, “a blue scarlet cloth cap, ornamented with a van dyke and tassels,” and
who could only walk with the aid of a “staff.” Cates offered to read “the book”
to his people if King John would gather them together, to which the King
“cheerfully assented.” At this meeting one Bassa man was said to be so aston-
ished at Cates’s appearance, and the news that he had arrived from Sierra
Leone, that he instead “stated it to be his opinion, that I came down from
heaven, which he thought, of course, to be a shorter journey.”35
Davis’s appearance was more startling still. There had never before been
an instance of a person sold into slavery returning to visit, Davis believed, so
that it was as if he had returned from the lands of the dead. For those who had
sold him into slavery, his reappearance was even more stunning. They tried to
hide from him, Davis reported, because they were so ashamed, although “the
mistress of his late master . . . ran towards him and fell on his neck and wept.”
Davis learned that his mother too was still alive, and though she was too far
into the interior to be visited, he sent her a gift.36
After all of these challenging encounters, Tamba, Davis, and Cates were
provided with a house for the night and given a meal of beef. Cates could not
bear the palm oil, but Davis and Tamba were delighted by the dinner. They
tried to hold a prayer meeting afterward but were rather disturbed by the Bassa
“howling and dancing in an extravagant manner” with “drums and horns.”37
The next morning King John, by now attired in a crown of “an enormous
amount of leopard’s teeth tied together,” asked them to preach. Cates read
from Matthew 18 while Davis translated. Afterward the King offered a bull to
Cates, which he tried to refuse: it being Sunday he did not want the men to
carry out the work of killing it. We can only imagine whether Davis was madly
trying to negotiate a way through this cultural impasse since to refuse a gift was
very bad form, but in the end Cates was prevailed upon to take the bull. King
John was evidently perplexed, asking at this point if Cates’s “great knowledge”
had been acquired through a particular diet.38
A Model Village 173

Afterward Cates stood before a great meeting reading from the nineteenth
Psalm and then the second chapter of Genesis, all of which Davis was tasked
with not just translating but also explaining. When he criticized the people for
killing many for the crime of one man, “the whole congregation, which had
hitherto been silent, set up two or three loud shouts, as if they had been elec-
trified.” There were more prayers, more Bible readings, but also more of the
drumming and dancing that so tormented Cates. Eventually the king asked if
Davis could be sent to live among them to teach, and an agreement was made
that some of the king’s land would be available to the colony. The three Re-
gentonians believed they had seen the urgent necessity of sending Davis to
teach them when, on their final morning, they saw the masked spirit, undoubt-
edly a society mask, “turn into all sorts of postures . . . uttering a noise like that
occasioned by blowing water through a pipe.”

A garment of dried grass or rushes covers him, and reaches to the ground. His
arms and feet are concealed. A white country cloth covers his shoulders. Round
his head, and tied under his chin, are two or three cotton handkerchiefs. The
face is frightful. The mouth and nose are black. Two large teeth project far
beyond the lips. A row of coarse shells is bound round, above the eyes. On the
head is a red cap, which reaches four or five feet in height, and is surmounted
by a plume of feathers.

It was alarming enough that they were happy to be returning to the safety and
piety of their mountain home.39
A reward for this hard labor awaited them upon their return. Back in
Regent, both Tamba and Davis were appointed “messengers of salvation in
native districts.” It was a remarkable achievement, a sign of how Liberated
Africans might, in the 1810s and 1820s at least, push through the cracks of the
British protestant facade that generally had so little scope for Africans. They
were treated as children certainly, but there was room for them to grow up and
attain the status of adults if they showed the requisite “civilization” and Chris-
tian devotion. Later, David Noah would become only the third man to be for-
mally accepted into the CMS.

The timing of Cates, Tamba, and Davis’s trip is slightly mysterious. They left
Regent, armed with aspirations to expand the Sierra Leone colony or begin
another, just before two American missionaries arrived in Sierra Leone hoping
174 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

to found a new settlement of their own. It is possible that the American plan
had reached Regent by letter in advance of the Americans’ arrival, spurring
the plans of Cates, Tamba, and Davis, but this is not certain. Perhaps Johnson
had his own hopes of pushing the British government to expand their sphere of
influence, and this would later conflate into the American plan.
Reverend Samuel Mills and Ebenezer Burgess arrived in Sierra Leone as
agents of the American Colonization Society, which hoped to found an Ameri-
can free settlement. President James Monroe, after whom Monrovia would
later be named, was a supporter of the scheme. But in spite of this high-profile
support, the whole plan was riven to the heart with a welter of contradiction
and anomaly. A handful of white American supporters hoped to create a
promised land for African American ex-slaves. They hoped that the colony
would be a buffer against the slave trade and a new hope for Africa, just as
British abolitionists had imagined at the time of Sierra Leone’s first steps. Allied
to this, a handful of the white Americans supported the idea of colonization in
the hope of redeeming their nation for its role in the slave trade. Elias B.
Caldwell, a clerk of the Supreme Court, believed that the settlement of a free
American colony in Africa would be “a national atonement for the wrongs and
injuries which Africa has suffered.”40
But for other white Americans, some liberal and enlightened people among
them, it was more a matter of exporting a population they did not want. If the
nation’s slaves were to be freed, then they wanted them to go away, preferably
far. Thomas Jefferson favored an end to slavery, but he also wanted “expatria-
tion,” writing, “Let an ocean divide the white man from the man of color.”41
Leaving all of these schisms behind, Burgess and Mills had arrived in Sierra
Leone in March while Cates, Davis, and Tamba were visiting Siaka. The
Americans were impressed with Freetown’s schools, where they heard boys
read and watched them spell and saw “about 100 neatly dressed little girls,
many of whom could read and sew.” At the “very decent appearance” and
“prosperous condition” of the town Burgess wrote, “It causes my heart to pant
for the day that America shall have a foot hold on the continent.”42
Some in Sierra Leone were less impressed with the Americans’ plan,
however. Two citizens wrote anonymously to the editor of the Royal Gazette,
worrying that America would “behold” such a colony “in that light, Great
Britain does now, New South Wales.” In other words, they were concerned
that the home country would not consider the settlers to be truly free. Above
and beyond those philosophical concerns were also worries that a huge in-
crease in the population of freemen near Sierra Leone would affect the colony’s
prosperity.43
A Model Village 175

Not dissuaded from their mission, and sure that concerns about potential
settlers’ freedoms were unfounded, Burgess and Mills headed up to Regent for
Sunday service a week after their arrival. There they found “children once des-
tined to foreign slavery; now fed, clothed, governed and carefully taught in the
Christian religion.” The sight of them in church was “a spectacle of grateful
admiration.” It was sufficient impetus for Mills and Burgess to leave the follow-
ing morning, intent on founding a similar place for African American freed
people. Mills died on their way home, but Burgess returned safely “and reported
favourably on their Mission.”44
Not long after this visit, two British schoolteachers, Mr. and Mrs. Jesty, also
arrived in the village. In a letter to her sister written a few days later, Mrs. Jesty
proclaimed herself so amazed by “our dear black brethren” that she hoped “all
Africa may become as Regent’s Town.” Her husband was similarly impressed
by the sight of people “once led captive to the will of Satan” who were now
dressed decently and singing hymns. He was so delighted with the village that
he was overcome with “wonder, love and praise.”45
In Britain, however, doubts were mounting about Johnson’s methods. The
main criticism leveled was that he was placing too much trust in Liberated Afri-
cans. The CMS wrote to him expressing concern that “the peculiar character
of your people” left them susceptible to the will of Satan. “Their judgements
are imperfectly formed,” the CMS wrote, “while their constitutions render
them remarkably susceptible of having their feelings strongly wrought upon.”
Nor was their exuberance godly enough to English eyes. Rather than having a
stiff upper lip they showed “violent excitement to the feelings.” Johnson was
ordered to be endlessly watchful and to exert an “inflexible firmness” on “his”
“peculiar” people.46
Soon these doubts came to greatly affect Tamba and the handful of other
Liberated Africans assimilated into the CMS. The arrival of the Jestys in the
colony allowed roles to be shifted around to give Johnson and his wife an oppor-
tunity to return to Europe for a break. Johnson’s departure was a time of worry
in Regent, and many walked down to Freetown with him. When his ship sailed
they were said to proclaim, “Massa, suppose no water live here . . . we go with
you all the way, till no feet more!”47
Whatever their fears as they watched their leader and protector sail away,
they could hardly have imagined what happened next. Tamba, Noah, or Davis
wrote explaining to Johnson what had happened:

That time Mr Cates sick, and Mr Morgan sick; and poor Mr Cates die. Then
Mr Collier get sick, and Mr Morgan get sick again; and one friend said, “God
176 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

soon leave this place” and I said, “I trust in the Lord Jesus Christ: He Knows his
people: and, He never left then, neither forsake them”—and next Sunday Mr
Collier die about eleven o’clock—Then Mr Morgan sick—Mrs Morgan sick—
Mr Bull sick. Oh! that time all Missionaries sick! We went to Freetown,
Monday, and bury Mr Collier; and we come home again and keep Service in
the Church. Oh, that time trouble too much in my heart. Nobody to teach me,
and I was so sorry for my poor Country-people. Mr Cates died—Mr Collier
died—Mr Morgan sick—Oh, what must I do for my Country-men! but I trust
in the Lord Jesus Christ: He know what to do; and I went to pray, and I say, “O
Lord, take not all the Teachers away from us!”48

Mrs. Jesty had not survived long either: “delivered of a still-born child,” it
was written, “she departed in a triumph of faith.” Cates’s death was blamed on
the trip to Grand Bassa, with Tamba and Davis admitting, “the journey . . . too
much for him, the land so long to walk and the sun so hot.”49
All the sickness and death left Tamba, Davis, and Noah in positions of
great trust. But it was a marginal role, balancing between those in Regent who
wanted to live according to their own more African ideas of life, and those in
the CMS who believed that Africans were not to be trusted. Tamba heard
rumors that he, Davis, and the others were to be thrown out of the CMS for
behaving badly, and that Johnson would not return because of their disrespect.50
The truth was quite different, though the ambiguous feelings of the CMS
were real enough. All three men wrote letters to Johnson and, eager to show
how far Africans had been “civilized” and become pious Christians, they were
printed in American newspapers under the heading: “from Christian Negroes.”
Left alone in Regent and unaware of the reach his letters were having, Tamba
tried desperately to keep the Benevolent Society and other Christian organiza-
tions alive, clinging to these life rafts that seem to have allowed him to make
some peace with his former life.51

While Johnson was away, some of the former Bostock and Mason captives who
had been drafted into the West India Regiments returned to Sierra Leone.
While those mustered into the Royal Africa Corps had been living nearby,
many of them in Soldier Town on the outskirts of Freetown, some of the forty-
two drafted into the West India Regiment had been far away. Among them
was Mamaroo, only sixteen when he arrived aboard the Thais. It was probably
at this time that Tom Ball also returned.
A Model Village 177

They and their fellow conscripts had been in the Caribbean, seeing at close
quarters the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Some of them
were in Barbados in 1816 when they were ordered to help suppress the island’s
biggest ever slave revolt. After the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, some
slaves apparently came to believe that “the island belonged to them and not to
the white man whom they proposed to destroy.” Bussa, an African-born man
among a slave population that was over 90 percent Caribbean-born, led the
revolt.52
What the Liberated Africans made of facing rebel slaves in battle is not
easy to know. There were reports that the rebels thought that “the King’s
troops would join them.” Upon seeing the black soldiers of the West India Regi-
ment approaching, the rebels were said to be “confused,” perhaps believing
that they were Haitians come to help. The troops of the West India Regiment
were attacked by slaves “armed with Firelocks, Bills, Pikes, Hatchets, &c” who
gave “three cheers,” believing that the black soldiers would not fight back.
Their commander ordered them to load their muskets, however, and in the
firefight forty rebel slaves were killed and another seventy taken prisoner. The
rebels then made a stand at a nearby plantation house, where many more
were “killed and wounded jumping from the windows & rushing from the
doors,” then being chased across the cane fields by the soldiers. The whole
rebellion was quashed in three days but only after indiscriminate murder and
the wanton burning of slave huts with immense loss of live among the en-
slaved. It was claimed that up to one thousand died in the fighting or were later
executed.53
Now that their services were no longer required, the Liberated African sol-
diers were returned to Sierra Leone. Their arrival off the coast of Sierra Leone
caused raucous celebrations. Hearing that their ship had docked, those in
Regent were ecstatic, urgently looking for “parents, brothers and friends”
among those who years earlier had been sent into the forces. “Glowing hope”
was found on the faces of most at Regent.54
Tom Ball apparently went to Waterloo, a former Temne village once
known as Jack Ryan’s Town. He and the other soldiers were given land and
farming tools, along with 5d a day allowance, a sum that allowed them to live
reasonably well. Some of the returning soldiers married Bullom women, and
others married women from the recaptives. It might have been around this
time that Ball married a woman named Sophia (or Safi) and built a home on
Robbin Street, Waterloo.55

k
178 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

In February 1820, Tamba was inordinately relieved to hear that Johnson was
back. Regent again turned into a festival of celebrating and worship. David
Noah recorded the scene as Regent’s faithful heard that Johnson’s ship had
arrived: “[H]e come! he live in Town! And the people began to make noise.
Some could not get through the door, but jumped out the window—they so full
of joy. Some went to Freetown the whole night; and some people sing the
whole night through!” They soon learned that Johnson carried with him news
that pertained to Tamba, Yarra, and their shipmates: Robert Bostock was back
from exile and demanding compensation for wrongful arrest. Authorities in
Sierra Leone, including Johnson, were tasked with finding anybody who had
been rescued from Bostock’s factory to testify once again to the events of 1813.
Far from escaping into a new world of Christianity and British-style civiliza-
tion, Tamba and his fellow former Thais and Princess Charlotte arrivals learned
that they would have to revisit their old lives as factory slaves and captives.56
 21
The Appeal

I t must have been the most happy and unexpected of family reunions. Convicts
banished to New South Wales hardly ever returned to Britain, let alone only
three years after they had left dripping with chains and shame. Yet here was
Robert home and free, with a new young wife and baby daughter he had named
for his mother and oldest sister, and the prospect of apology and compensation.
They were welcomed back into the family that now comprised Elizabeth, the
matriarch, brother Charles, and sisters Elizabeth, Maria, and Margaret. While
they were in England the family was expanding, with both Charles and Maria
having children, and two sons born to Robert and Rachael. Maria and her
husband lived in Kent, but the others were still in Bootle, to the north of Liver-
pool, and at some point around then the road where they lived became known
as Bostock Street.1
The Britain Robert returned to had changed. When he had been convicted
in Freetown and then sailed for New South Wales, Britain had been at war
with both Napoleon and the United States and desperately stretched on both
fronts. Now those conflicts were memories, even the victories tainted by the
famines and extreme unemployment that followed. While Bostock was in Britain
preparing his case, anger gathered into demonstrations in favor of parliamentary
reform, culminating in the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester when the cavalry
charged protestors. In early 1820, a few months before he took the case back to
court, news of a plot to murder the prime minister rocked the nation, and the
subsequent hanging, drawing, and quartering of the conspirators was a public
spectacle.
The abolitionist seascape had also changed completely since Bostock’s
original conviction in 1813. Hopes that the slave trade would quickly come to
an end once it became illegal had been confounded. The abolitionists now

179
180 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

knew that they were engaged in a long fight. Rulings of dubious legal standing
had been overturned and new laws and regulations passed.
Most of all, the end of the wars had affected the abolitionists’ campaign. In
1813, the British had believed that the Portuguese and Spanish would go along
with Royal Naval attacks on their slave ships because they needed their help to
force Napoleon out of the Iberian Peninsula. With the end of the war those
ideas quickly died. Similarly, while the United States had not protested the
capture of its slavers by the British before the War of 1812, afterward they were
adamant that this was unacceptable, vehemently criticizing any incursions on
their trade.
The case of the French slaver Louis in 1816 had been a turning point in anti-
slavery tactics. The Princess Charlotte, the same vessel that had accompanied
HMS Thais to Mason and Bostock’s premises three years earlier, had captured
the Louis offshore from Cape Mesurado and carried it into Sierra Leone for
adjudication, where it was condemned. But the French had appealed the cap-
ture to the High Court of the Admiralty, and Sir William Scott ruled that British
ships did not have a right of search over foreign ships in peacetime. The navy
therefore could no longer board vessels suspected of slave trading if they be-
longed to another nation.
British policy had to change. The Treaty of Vienna had condemned slave
trading, and Britain increasingly sought to make treaties with the nations who
persisted. The government paid £400,000 to the Spanish government as com-
pensation for lost shipping (or bribery) on agreement that the slave trade would
be abolished. The Portuguese had received £300,000 to make the trade illegal
north of the equator. To regulate things further, Freetown now had a Court of
Mixed Commission with a judge earning one and a half times the salary of the
governor.2
More than any of this, it was the pique of Judge Robert Thorpe, a personal
crusade of ill will and frustration that had revealed the flaws in the antislavery
laws, which brought Bostock back to court. Thorpe, the man who had stood
so firm against slave traders while sitting on the bench in Freetown, was now
Bostock’s loudest supporter. Removed from his post in absentia and never
allowed to return to the colony, Thorpe had become an avid advocate for slave
traders.3
Thorpe was busy accusing the abolitionists of all manner of wrongdoing
even where he had previously been involved. He did have some grounds for
grievance. While in Freetown he had written continually to London asking that
the laws against the slave trade be clarified. After Lord Liverpool had written
back in 1812 ensuring him that his scope was wide, he had been left alone to
The Appeal 181

piece together what he could. He had argued that slave ships were legal prizes
based on his reading of British law and treaty laws, and more generally on com-
mon ideas about humanity. It was only in October 1815, after Thorpe had been
sacked and was beginning to vent his anger against the abolitionists, that a judge
in the High Court of the Admiralty wrote to the British foreign secretary advising
him that the rule of law instituted by Thorpe in Sierra Leone was invalid.4
If Thorpe had been content to claim mistreatment at the hands of the British
government based on the lack of instruction, he would have made a sympathetic
case. But he was an angry man bent on revenge, and in his rage he moved full
circle to support the slave traders. It was a position that was not entirely logical.
Thorpe had published the polemic Letter to William Wilberforce about the
conviction of merchants like Bostock and McQueen. It was as abstruse, as over-
stated, as those original vague laws that had brought him down. His reading of
the antislave trade law was as confused as the government’s had been. He
quoted the Slave Trade Felony Act: “if any British subject, or any person resid-
ing in the united kingdom, or any island, colony, dominion, fort, settlement,
factory belonging thereto” was caught slave trading, they were breaking the
law. He used this to declare that Bostock and McQueen (or Bostwick and
M’Quin as he called them) were wrongly charged because Cape Mesurado was
not British territory. Yet surely the quoted law intended that the suspect had to
be either British or in British territory for the law to be invoked, not necessarily
both. Certainly the attorney general’s opinion was that the Royal Navy could
arrest slave traders who are either Britons or in British territory.5
Thorpe’s reading of this was not even backed up by the cases of other slave
traders whom he had already supported. James Dunbar, George Cook, and
Malcolm Brodie, arrested at Rio Pongo in 1814, had taken their suits to court,
supported by Thorpe. James Dunbar, demanding £50,000 from Governor
Maxwell for his losses, did so on the grounds that not only was Rio Pongo not
British territory but that he was an American citizen (or alternatively, covering
all bases, that he was Spanish and that his real name was Santiago Dunbar).
George Cook also stated unequivocally that he was not British, having been
born in South Carolina. His testimony in July 1817 had begun, “the Plaintiff in
this Case is a subject of the United States of America,” before launching into
a plea about having been reduced from comfort to “absolute beggary” by
Maxwell’s actions. Maxwell had overstepped his bounds, there being no “Law
so absurd as to affect to bind the subjects of foreign Nations” if they were not in
British territory.6
Dunbar had died sometime around then, but Cook had won compensa-
tion. The attorney general stated that although Maxwell thought Cook was an
182 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

Englishman, he was ultimately wrong to prosecute him, as Britons could not

punish Americans for acts in neutral territory. Cook was awarded £20,000. If
Charles Mason had still been alive, he would have been in line for a significant
payout.7
It was left to Bostock alone to make his case, however, which was far less
clear, as had been the claim of the third of the Rio Pongo slave traders, Malcolm
Brodie. Brodie, like Bostock, was British. The fact that he had been pardoned
alongside his American colleagues was less an aspect of the government admit-
ting wrongdoing than what was thought to be practical mercy. By the time his
appeal was heard in London, Brodie had been grossly disfigured, “A Species of
Cancer having attacked his face, eaten away his entire mouth, and part of his
right Cheek.” He was so sick by the time he appeared in court “as to appear a
being not of the Human Race . . . foetid and noxious.” Brodie’s plea was to be
respited from transportation not because of his innocence but because he was
“a dying man.” He was believed to be far too sick to survive the voyage to
Australia, and mercy was shown.8
The case of Samuel Samo, the Dutchman whose case had been in many
ways the forerunner of Bostock and McQueen, had also shown forcefully that
these cases depended upon the nationality of the alleged slave trader as well as
the claims to the territory in which they did business. Before a packed court-
room, Samo had claimed to be a Dutchman born in Amsterdam and flourished
his passport for travel from Suriname to New York. He spoke fluent Dutch.
Faced with this evidence, authorities had performed some extraordinary twist-
ing to make sure of his guilt. There had been the extra-legal claim that the Rio
Pongo was British territory and the improbable declaration that Samo’s sur-
name was actually “very common among the Jews born in the neighbourhood
of Duke’s Place [in London].”9
It was far from clear, therefore, whether Bostock had a case for wrongful
arrest if solely based on the grounds, as Thorpe claimed, that Cape Mesurado
was not British territory. Initially, the British government’s legal advisers were
unimpressed with Bostock’s case. “Bostock being a British Subject,” they
opined, “though his crime was committed in the territory of an African prince
[he] is as fully amenable to the operation of that Law as if the crime had been
committed in Westminster.” They backed up their case by referring to the re-
capture of the Bounty mutineers, the first of whom had been arrested and taken
aboard HMS Pandora at the decidedly un-British location of Tahiti. (In fact, this
too was stretching the point, as the original crime of mutiny had been committed
aboard the Bounty, a Royal Navy ship and therefore British territory.)10
The Appeal 183

But, rattled by the successful suits brought by Cook and Dunbar as well as
the expensive claims from a whole host of slave ship owners, they could not
afford to act hastily. They decided to contest Bostock’s case and made a sur-
prising decision. They sent word to Sierra Leone to find anybody who had
been enslaved, bought, or sold by Bostock and McQueen and to again have
them testify.
As the request headed out to Freetown, officials set about tracking down
other people involved. Robert’s brother Charles testified that they were both
British citizens. Francis Hopkins, whose relation to the case is unclear, claimed
to have letters from Bostock in which he confessed his guilt. Even George
Clarke, the jail keeper in Freetown, was sent for.11
Men from the Thais’s crew in 1813 were tracked down. Lieutenant Watkins,
in charge of the boats that had gone into the St. Paul River, had died in the inter-
vening years, but others from the crew were found. William Winsley, who had
been whipped as they made their way to Cape Mesurado, William Chambers,
and William Matthews were all among the marines who had been in the boats.
Winsley told of the “heavy fire of small arms” they had faced and recounted
how Bostock and McQueen injured two of his crewmates. Chambers stated
that John McQueen had been remorseful over the wounded marines, but when
he had asked the Scotsman about the burning of the factory, McQueen had
allegedly admitted, “our people set fire to it before yours came.” Matthews was
perhaps the strongest witness of the three, since he was the man who had been
injured when Bostock and McQueen opened fire, but unlike his fellow victim
he had lived to tell the tale.12
One of the most damning testimonies was from the quartermaster aboard
the Thais, Thomas Lovekine. Although he was not one of the landing party, he
remembered incriminatory details. He claimed that the men admitted firing on
the marines and that McQueen had claimed that bribery would ensure their
freedom.13
It was another of the Thais’s crewmembers who gave by far the most re-
markable evidence, however. Sessay, once a boy taken aboard the vessel by
Edward Scobell, was now a grown man. He had led a remarkable life in the
Royal Navy. Since he appears to have remained aboard or rejoined HMS
Thais, he seems to have visited the Caribbean, glimpsing a version of the life of
endless toiling as a slave that he had so narrowly escaped. He must have been
involved in the dramatic capture of enemy vessels. He had perhaps visited
Penang, Madras, and Bengal and seen China. Had he been at St. Helena when
Bonaparte was held there? The Mende boy taken from the slave factory of
184 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

Bostock, Mason, and McQueen had grown into a man who had seen the world.
He was no longer Sessay, nor even whatever British name he had been given
when first entered into the muster roll in 1813. Now his name was Lawrence
Summers.14
Faced with remembering the horrific details of his earlier life, he made a
detailed statement. He had been “stolen from his parents,” he told the clerk,
and “driven down the country.” He cast his mind back to how it had shocked
him to see the four boats arriving at the slave factory with white men on the day
that the Thais attacked, and how he had been there when Bostock and McQueen
had started firing. “The factory was set on fire before the White Men came to it.”
“Bostock and McQuin [sic] ran away,” he recalled. This last, stating clearly that
the premises were destroyed deliberately and inferring some rather cowardly
fleeing, was a significant statement. Of those testifying it was only Sessay, al-
ready at the factory rather than arriving on the boats, who had seen what had
happened.

At first he had struggled with the chalk stick in his hand, struggling to form it
into English words. Tamba had been visiting William Johnson in the early
mornings for a few years, going to the vicarage before he started butchering
meat and burning wood for charcoal. Then in the evenings, after a full day’s
work and sometimes the ten-mile round trip walk to Freetown, he would join a
class. He and the others would sit and roll the words around their mouths and
then try and scratch them onto the slate. They read the Bible, struggling over
so many words that were not phonetic.
Then, a few months earlier, when Reverend Johnson returned to Regent
from England, he had presented Tamba with an extraordinary gift. Paper-
making, other than that laboriously handcrafted from old rags, was in its in-
fancy, but Johnson had procured some of this newly available material for
Tamba. Quills were still the commonest type of writing implement in use, and
they were easy enough to come by. Johnson encouraged Tamba to start keeping
a journal. It would be yet another proof of an African man’s ability to progress.
Tamba had taken up the challenge diligently and had begun recording his
wandering and preaching. He traveled the area speaking to some of those who
had come from the Thais and Princess Charlotte. Presumably he had also been
talking to those in Regent, but in his journals he wrote only of those who had
left the settlement to live elsewhere.
The Appeal 185

Likely he was attempting to get others to testify, especially since in Free-

town authorities were not trying very hard to track down those who had once
been owned by Bostock. No public announcement appeared, nor was anything
published in the newspaper requesting their assistance. Seven years had passed,
and some had died, victims of anguish and loss, disease and dismay. Others,
like Sessay and some of those drafted into the armed forces, were no longer in
the colony. Authorities simply did not know where to look for those still around,
a puzzle that spoke of administrative muddle as well as the fact they were at
liberty to go wherever they pleased. And again there was the troubling part of it
all, that some of them had not been Bostock and McQueen’s captives at all.
David Noah, now a devout servant alongside Tamba, could hardly testify with-
out muddying the waters since he had been counted among the 233 rescued
from them but had actually belonged to John Sterling Mill.
Despite these setbacks, Tamba was seemingly trying to get others to give
evidence. He wrote in his diary, “I went to see my country people first” and
then traveled to “Calley place,” probably referring to the man whose name the
British had written as “Cauley,” who was now in his late thirties. At Nebyo’s
Place—likely the man listed by the British in 1813 as Nibea—he met five men
and four women who had moved away from Regent, again speaking as if at
least some of them had arrived with him from Mason and Bostock’s.
Those who heard the summons Tamba was issuing had more reasons for
fearing it than for answering. It can only have been mysterious and rather terri-
fying. Why were they wanted? What strange notions had these inexplicable
white men come up with now that might single them out? Rumors swirled that
if they raised their hands and admitted that they had been rescued from Bostock
and Mason’s compound, they would have to go to London to give evidence. It
was petrifying to contemplate. It would mean traveling across the water where
so many had departed and not returned. They would face their former owners
in a foreign land, judged by laws they little understood. Surely the risk was per-
petual bondage once more. It was safer to say nothing.15
On the eve of his testimony about the events at Bostock and Mason’s factory,
Tamba wrote nothing about it. It seems that it was on his mind, however. A
few weeks before he had preached from Exodus 20: “I am the Lord thy God,
which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”
Then as he rode home to Regent from Leicester village the evening before he
gave his testimony, an uncharacteristic doubt filled his mind. When he reached
home he sat down and wrote: “While I was going my mind told me, mind your-
self every Day; you told the people to pray to God, and to leave of [sic] their
186 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

country fashion, and perhaps you are not in the right way.” He consoled him-
self with how sweet Jesus’s name was to him when he first heard it and prayed
hard, yet wrote that his “heart is the house of hell.”16
While for his shipmates there were plenty of reasons not to give evidence
against Bostock, for William Tamba it was an opportunity. Perhaps it was an
act of repentance for his own part in the sufferings of those who were now
friends and neighbors, and a way to damn Robert Bostock, whose actions had
left him so deeply distressed. It was also a way to show his devotion to his Chris-
tian beliefs, allied as they were to the abolitionist movement. Tamba had spoken
to Johnson of his former life, relating how he had been “the jailor” at Bostock
and Mason’s factory. He had been around the region begging his former ac-
quaintances to give up their slave trading ways and was making peace with his
own actions through the Bible. Since William Johnson was one of those collect-
ing evidence, there was little doubt that Tamba would make a statement.17
Tamba testified that Robert Bostock had owned him since he was young, a
pitiable story similar to the one Tom Ball had once told. While Bostock and
McQueen would occasionally buy ivory or wood if a trader offered it, Tamba
was unequivocal that their chief business was in human flesh. He recounted
once more the arrival of the Fénix, the appearance of the Caulkers’ canoes to
warn Bostock, and how he, Tamba, was subsequently ordered to take the cap-
tives and go and hide. He claimed that he did not know what caused the fire at
the factory, but he did offer that the houses of the Kru sailors were too far away
for the conflagration to have begun there. Tamba also revealed that those who
were brought to Freetown were only a fraction of the original number held at
the factory. He told of how that had happened: he had been told to guard them
at a nearby chief ’s compound, but more than half had escaped.
Tamba and Johnson also prevailed upon Yarra, now John Reffell, to give
an account. He testified before Johnson that he had worked for Bostock and
McQueen at Mesurado, stating, “Slave trading was their principal business
and the means by which they supported themselves.” At the time of the raid,
Yarra recalled, Bostock had just bought the cargoes of two Spanish ships and
was waiting to send the slaves from his barracoon as payment. But after Cap-
tain Roach arrived with the Kitty, followed later by HMS Thais, he and Tamba
were sent away with slaves. Yarra told how he was hiding in the bush when
fighting had broken out. He could not give any evidence as to whether Bostock
and McQueen set fire to the factory deliberately to hide their crime or whether
it was an accident. He also made another claim to back up Tamba’s. Only
about half of the slaves owned by Bostock and McQueen were recaptured and
liberated in Freetown. The rest had mysteriously disappeared.
The Appeal 187

Tamba’s and Yarra’s statements revealed the influence of their years in

Regent and of the British. Although Yarra ( John Reffell) still endorsed his state-
ment with the cross of the illiterate, William Tamba was now highly articulate
and literate, all those years of study with Johnson obviously having paid off.
Similarly, whereas Tom Ball had in 1813 been “sworn after the manner of his
Country,” Yarra and Tamba were now “duly sworn on the Holy Evangelists.”
(Summers, testifying before a different justice of the peace, does not appear to
have been asked to swear or sign, although it might be that this was simply not
noted.)18

None of this raised any doubt that Bostock and McQueen had been illegally
slave trading when they were arrested. In fact, Bostock himself never denied it.
Nor was there much debate about the principal matters of the case: Bostock
was a British man, as even his own brother avowed, and Cape Mesurado was
not British territory. The case did not, as Robert Thorpe had intimated, fall
apart solely on those grounds.
Yet Bostock and McQueen had been wrongly convicted, and the British
government knew it. The problem at the heart of their case was jurisdiction.
The court in Sierra Leone only had jurisdiction over recaptured slave ships and
crimes committed within its boundaries. Bostock and McQueen were captured
not aboard a slave ship but on land at Cape Mesurado, beyond Sierra Leone’s
borders. As it had been put in the case of the French slaver Louis captured there
in 1816, Cape Mesurado was “as much removed from the local jurisdiction of
Great Britain [as] the middle of the Atlantic or the Baltic.” It was an exaggera-
tion but a valid point.19
Bostock and McQueen’s wrongful conviction hinged not on the matter of
their nationality, like that of Cook and Dunbar, nor even on whether their
crimes were committed in British territory. What actually led to their convic-
tion being overturned was an oversight on the part of the British government.
Before their arrest in 1813 the British Government had failed to send out a new
commission to Sierra Leone to allow them to try those captured for slave trading
if they were beyond British boundaries and on land rather than at sea. Without
such a commission, Bostock and McQueen should have been shipped back to
England for trial.
Bostock had not been convicted in error so much as tried in the wrong loca-
tion. This would actually have been an even stronger case had Charles Mason
still been alive to press the issue, as the court in Sierra Leone had no jurisdiction
188 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

whatsoever to make prizes of war. As William Wilberforce had earlier said

when he stood in Parliament to discuss the cases of Dunbar, Brodie, and Cook,
it was “a mere point of law not upon the merit of their case, that they got off.”
Another honorable member put it another way: “the defect was only in those
persons not being tried by a proper commission; but . . . there was nothing else,
either in the law or in the evidence, which was in their favour.” They were
“criminals” who had escaped “from merited punishment.”20
So despite having gone to the extraordinary lengths of finding and inter-
viewing William Tamba, John Reffell, Lawrence Summers, and any number
of former crewmen from HMS Thais and various other relevant parties, and
having taken the trouble of revisiting the words of Tom Ball and Yarra from
years earlier, the British government had little choice but to overturn Bostock’s
conviction. Much more than the free pardon that arrived in New South Wales,
this made Bostock a free man with no past convictions on his record. His slave
trading past was expunged.21
With this in place, Bostock claimed £50,000 damages, the same sum
claimed by James Dunbar. Supposedly this sum included compensation for
four years imprisonment (an exaggeration, since he had actually been a convict
for about two and a half years and for a large part of even that had been all but
free) and the value of every inanimate item held at his slave factory when the
Thais had arrived plus the buildings. He even included the cost of the three
handkerchiefs he had owned at the time.
Bostock could hardly launch this suit against Governor Maxwell, as Dunbar
and Cook had done, as Maxwell was already financially embarrassed after
Cook’s victory. Robert Purdie, the judge who sentenced McQueen and him
back in Freetown, had died some years earlier. Bostock and Thorpe therefore
launched the suit against Edward Scobell, former captain of HMS Thais. It
must have been rather a shock to him since he had long before ceased to be
leader of the antislavery squadron. After delivering Bostock and McQueen to
England, Scobell had resigned his command, saying that he was “giving up the
Thais for the renovation of my health.” Like half of his crew, he had been un-
able to fully recover from the “lassitude and enervation” (probably recurrent
bouts of malaria) that their time in Africa caused. He would pass away five
years later at the age of forty-one.22
Already smarting from having to pay countless claims by wronged slave
ship captains and having bailed out Governor Maxwell after Cook’s £20,000
win, the government agreed to settle out of court. Since the settlement was
hidden behind closed doors, there is no record of what Bostock received, and
no amount is entered into treasury ledgers as having been paid to him at this
The Appeal 189

time. Since he was not a foreigner like previous slave traders who had won
compensation, his case was unchartered territory.23
Quite possibly, Bostock had already given the government a way to get rid
of him with minimal financial damage. Around this time he applied to the sec-
retary of state for a free settler certificate for Van Diemen’s Land, the place he
had seen from the decks of the Harriet for a few hours two and a half years
earlier. It was about as far away as it was possible to go, a place Britain continued
to send its dirty secrets. Why argue the finer points of the law if Bostock was
happy with a free settler certificate and perhaps what might have been a quite
small amount in cash?
 22
Helping to Found
Liberia

F or all his devotion to Christianity, the first words that Tamba had written in
his journal when he received it from Reverend Johnson revealed that he was
still very much a Kissi man. His understanding of kinship networks remained
West African, filtered through the lens of somebody who had been through the
nightmares of the slave trade. His first entry had been about his shipmates,
those who arrived with him aboard the Thais. He wrote of them as his “country-
men.” They had arrived together, he wrote, and so must remain united to-
gether. Tamba may have brothers in Christ, fellow brethren in his church and
faith, but he never conceived of giving up his other comrades.
But these connections troubled him. Just like those who worried that their
families back home were condemned to hell because they had never heard
Christian teachings, Tamba was desperately worried when his “countrymen”
from Bostock and Mason’s refused to convert to Christianity. He felt ties to
them that he wanted to maintain, yet part of the teachings of the church were,
as William Davis said, to “be a separate people,” apart from non-Christians.
Davis was “afraid that some did still keep company, improperly, with people of
worldly minds.”1
When Tamba had ventured to the tiny settlements of those who had left
Regent, intent perhaps on having them testify against Bostock, the bigger aim
was to speak about the state of their souls and their Christian beliefs. This at
least was how he wrote about these encounters in the journals, which would
later go to the CMS. At “Calley place,” he asked Calley and his people if their
hearts were good. They claimed that they were since they “Do No bad to any
body.” But Tamba harangued them, “God said every one of us is bad because
God said thieves are fornicators, murderers, and adulterys, and liers, and such
ascursed and mark the Lord’s day.” They would all go to hell, Tamba told

190
Helping to Found Liberia 191

them. The fact that he had told them of Jesus’s words, but they had not accepted
Him into their hearts, “Shall be a witness against you in the Day of Judge-
ment.” At Nebyo’s Place he informed the people there that if they died that
very night they would spend the rest of eternity in hell. They scoffed at his
words. He had to leave without reaching any resolution and wrote that his
“heart is full of sorrow for my country men.”2
Mamaroo, returned from the West India Regiment, was also refusing to
live in Regent and so warranted a visit from Tamba. Mamaroo’s experiences
over the six years since they had been rescued from Mason and Bostock’s had
been profoundly different from those whom he had left behind in Freetown’s
recaptive pen when he enlisted. While they had been in Regent, beginning
farming and listening to entire Sundays of Christian teachings, he had been in
the Caribbean and had likely witnessed the retribution after Bussa’s rebellion.
Who could wonder if he now chose to live away from white control?
It is also likely that it was his own Islamic beliefs that Mamaroo wished to
hold onto. Like Indigenous belief systems, Islam was little accepted in Regent,
and Tamba was combative when faced with Muslims and the Koran. Seeking
to have autonomy, Mamaroo had formed a small hamlet outside Regent with
five other men and three women, at least some of who had also come from
Bostock and Mason’s place.
“The Lord send me to clean myself from blood,” Tamba announced, a
mixing of the idea of Jesus’s blood washing away sins with what was perhaps an
intimation of his own guilt about events back at the slave factory. He then
barked that hellfire was going to be their destination if they did not repent of
their sins. One of the men tried to argue, claiming, “we no do bad,” but Tamba
chastised them, maintaining that they were going straight to hell for thrashing
rice on a Sunday. They can only have been astonished by Tamba’s rhetoric,
this man whom they had once known as one of their enslavers in an entirely
different world.
The words Tamba used in this exchange reveal that he too was still more
an African than a British man with dark skin, as Johnson and the CMS aspired.
Having called them countrymen, Tamba launched into a speech that spoke to
the idea of “shipmates,” common between the enslaved throughout the Ameri-
cas. “The Lord brought us from a long country,” he implored them. “Many of us
come together.” It was an ordeal that, at least in Tamba’s telling, bound them
together no matter their origins or their different experiences since that day.3

k
 192 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

St. Charles Church Regent, 2017. Courtesy of Lansana “Barmmy Boy” Mansaray.

In Regent, where St. Charles Church was ever expanding and the pressure to
attend was intense, others who had arrived aboard the Thais were among the
most faithful. A couple of months before Tamba’s and Yarra’s testimony about
Bostock’s past actions, a number of the Liberated Africans had spoken in
church of the events that had led to their captures, winding their enslavement
stories into a Christian narrative of darkness and light, of bondage and freedom.
David Noah was one of those who testified, speaking of his capture, of his fears
when he was seized and then his terror aboard the naval vessel. He concluded
that he was glad to have heard the word of God and hoped that his countrymen
in this homeland might also hear the news.4
Others from the Liberated African community followed in piety. No names
were given when this was reported back to Britain: they had become merely
Christian Africans in the CMS’s rhetoric. But their statements indicate that
nearly all of them were in Regent, then called Hogbrook, before Johnson’s
arrival, revealing that more of the Thais arrivals, their Igbo neighbors, and
other of the earliest settlers were among them.
One woman told how her mother died when she was young, and then a
dreadful sickness had afflicted her people. Fearing this disease, her father took
Helping to Found Liberia 193

her away, but they were caught on the road. Her father begged and pleaded for
her to be released, crying as her captors refused. She had been walked for days,
sold hand to hand, all the time getting sicker and weaker until she was just skin
and bone. As the woman related these events, she broke down and could speak
no more.5
The tales they told made clear that the type of Christianity promoted in
Regent was intended to replace not just their former religious and spiritual
beliefs but also their cultures and ways of life. Woven into their stories were
hints to the listening missionaries that they now disapproved of all manner of
“native” behaviors, including drumming and gris-gris, which were thought akin
to devil worship. Everything before their arrival in Regent was to be condemned
in toto, the family life that many of them yearned for and missed terribly had to
be denounced as forcefully as their time in coffles and barracoons. One woman
outdid the others, telling an overblown tale of native savagery that she obviously
believed the church leaders wanted to hear. She was captured along with all of
her brothers and sisters, who were murdered and put into a pot, boiled and
eaten, she related.6
Undoubtedly they were revealing trauma and hellish experiences. Yet
there was something else too, discord between longings for their families and
the lives the missionaries were promoting. “When I was a little boy, no done
suck, fight come to my country,” one young man revealed, continuing, “Mammy
run away; and, when she run, she throw me away and a man come and pick
me up, and I no see my Mammy again, bye and bye they sell me for a bundle
of tobacco.” The man was intimating that his mother, whom he could surely
hardly remember if he was as young as he claimed, was what the missionaries
would consider a bad woman because she was not a Christian. Since it was these
events that had caused him to be saved and have found the light, his mother
seems to have been cast into the darkness as his condemner, at least in this nar-
rative told before the church. Jesus had now replaced their heathen parents.
“Some white man take me and sell me,” revealed one man, declaring, “I know
not my father and mother, but God is my father and mother.”7
Another man’s story revealed that he had come to know that one of the
commonest forms of rebellion, of liberation at their own hands, was believed a
sin. He told of those who had jumped from the slave ship he was aboard, a
common enough practice since many supposed that if they did so they would
go home in death. Watching “plenty people jump into the water . . . I want to
do the same,” he revealed. Now, however, the man was clearly uneasy about
these people’s choice. “Suppose I been die that time,” he grieved, “I go down
to everlasting condemnation.”8
194 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

Another man’s story reflected the long-held problem that it was his cap-
ture and enslavement that had led him to God. He confessed before Regent’s
congregation that in some sense he must feel glad about everything that had
happened to him, since it was this that led to his being in Sierra Leone and
therefore that had ultimately allowed him to be saved in Christ.
Many who made the Middle Passage shared these mixed sentiments. Phillis
Wheatley had made one of the most eloquent statements some fifty years earlier:

’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.9

The irony is that these viewpoints came close to arguments made by apolo-
gists for slavery. Before the slave trade had been illegalized, those advocating its
continuance had promoted the idea that Africans were better off being enslaved
to a Christian master than left alone without the Bible’s teachings in Africa.
Africans were barbarous and savage, the pro-slavers had posited, arguing that
the trade advanced the cause of civilization by leading them to a place where
they might learn the advantages of Christian society.10
It was an argument that still mattered after the British legal battles over the
slave trade were won and the fight shifted to the institution of slavery itself. A
man who sailed on the British antislavery squadron in the 1820s hated Sierra
Leone and its liberated people passionately, finding them “wretched, naked
and disgusting.” Africans were clearly better off in the Caribbean as slaves than
left on their home continent, he wrote, since in the Americas they could learn
through Christianity to be men and not brutes.11
It was not solely the slave trade and slavery that Tamba, Wheatley, and so
many tens of thousands of others on both sides of the Atlantic were fighting.
The racism so inherent to, and reinforced by, the slave trade and slavery had
created a world in which Africans’ intelligence, aptitudes, and even ability to feel
complex sentiments was in question among those not of African origin. Their
ability to reason was generally thought greatly inferior to that of a white man.
In showing that Africans could be Christians, learned, and well-mannered,
Wheatley helped redefine the meaning of “civilization” to potentially include
those with dark skin. The fact that a woman born in Africa—her gender, race,
and place of birth confounding the doubters—could produce beautiful poetry
challenged existing racial designations. In a world in which Africans’ entire place
as humans was called into question by philosophers, thinkers, and governments,
Wheatley was “auditioning for the humanity of the entire African people.”12
Helping to Found Liberia 195

So too were Tamba, Davis, and David Noah. In those private lessons each
morning and classes every night, learning to swirl the T when he wrote what
was now his surname, neatly copying out catechisms and the psalms, Tamba
was doing far more than learning to keep a journal and write letters to the
CMS. He, Davis, and Noah, along with so many others who played smaller
roles, were fighting for their right to be seen as fully fledged people in the Atlantic
world, to throw off their image as uncivilized, naked cannibals and prove that
they could equal anybody else given the right circumstances.
Yet it was a steep mountain to climb, with even some missionaries who
supposedly assisted the Liberated Africans believing them to be desperately
inferior. One noted, “the extreme ignorance, and the ridiculously absurd preju-
dices of the African, are beyond all conception.” Another, John Morgan, wrote,
“I had in England read, heard and thought much on the African character, or
rather given into some prejudices against the mental endowments of the negroes,
and lean[ed] rather still to the side of uncharitableness.” It was only working
with Tamba and other Liberated Africans that caused Morgan to change his
mind.13
What the abolitionists, and their allies Tamba, Davis, and Noah, thought
that they were working toward was the improvement of the entire African race,
which they believed could only be attained through Christianity, education,
learning to cultivate the land, and other acts that comprised “civilization.” For
the abolitionists, Africans were not yet on the same level as those of European
origin, but there was nothing innate stopping them from leaping forward with
the right assistance and training. It was an idea that would continue for the
next decade or two before being smothered by fogs of bigotry. In the 1820s,
Hannah Kilham, a missionary and educator based in Sierra Leone, thought
that Liberated African children would soon do as well in school as their British
equivalents. Governor Sir Neil Campbell, although holding Liberated Africans
in “deep disgust,” nonetheless thought that they “possess the same faculties and
propensities as white people.” The ultimate outcome of these ideas was that
Africans might become darker-skinned Englishmen and women if provided
with the right conditions. Every Liberated African was either a sunbeam for
Jesus or well on the way to being one.14
The stakes extended far beyond Tamba and the other Thais and Princess
Charlotte freedmen. They would matter even more in the years that followed.
The abolitionists, having won the war to have the slave trade illegalized, were
now focusing on outlawing slavery in Britain’s Caribbean possessions. Sierra
Leone was a proving ground. So it was trumpeted widely when some of the
Liberated Africans of Regent were considered so “civilized” that they were
called for jury service in Freetown. By the mid-1820s, no fewer than one in
196 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

three people living in Regent could read and write, a huge achievement by any
standard. Most of the children were in school, learning not just to read and
write but dressmaking in the case of the girls and woodwork for the boys.15
British authorities were so keen to show that Sierra Leone was progressing
along very British lines that at times the colony was in danger of being a parody.
In 1819, Freetown Fair began with “an elegant dejune a la fourchette” for the
colony’s “gentry” and included a pony race and a ten-guineas cup. By 1820, the
local Royal Gazette had progressed to a “Fashionable Memoranda” column that
reported the doings of the elite. In one week there was a choice of “a petite fete
champetrè” at the chief justice’s “elegant chauniere,” a dinner party on a visiting
naval ship, a trip on the governor’s barge, a “grand dinner party at the Pavilion,”
a small dinner at the Masonic lodge, and two smaller dinner parties at Govern-
ment House. The newspaper also thought that its readership might appreciate
tidbits such as poems by Lord Byron and a story about a man who, scandalously
forgetting propriety, touched the queen’s daughter on the arm. Liberated Afri-
cans were all taught to give rousing renditions of “God Save the King.”16
They could not overstep the mark, however. They were supposed to be
becoming black Englishmen, but few seemed to have really thought through
that they might then consider themselves equal, much less that they would use
the religion they were being taught to make that case. When Tamba dared to
preach against “swearing, and cursing, and Drunkenness,” warning that “every
one who Dose these things shall go to hell,” a white man in his congregation,
Dr. Bell, “looked at me very sharp,” he wrote. Afterwards the two men had
“words.” Being reprimanded for their conduct by an African was evidently not
what many had in mind when they had taken jobs in Sierra Leone, and the
next time Tamba visited Leicester to preach he found that “Doctor Bell was in
his Room, he wished not to hear me talk.” The visit after that, Bell took his
horse and rode off down to Freetown in order to escape hearing Tamba’s mes-
sage. Recaptives were supposed to learn to be pious British Africans but always
remember to defer to actual Britons regardless of their piety.17

Tamba’s role was more difficult than most. If he failed to understand some of
the dislocation inherent in the Christian teachings—their unattractive implica-
tion that enslavement and subsequent liberation was the only pathway for most
Africans to being saved—it was perhaps because he still witnessed slave trading.
This was highly unusual. He was even more exceptional in that he met those
with whom he once was involved in slave trading several times after being
Helping to Found Liberia 197

liberated. He was a former slave, grabbed from his family before adulthood,
who sat down to dinner with those still slave-trading like Philippa Hayes, John
Sterling Mill, and the Caulker family. To Tamba, the very real alternative of
the Christian faith was the bloody world of slave trading. Small wonder that he
was such a devout servant of Jesus.
Tamba spent weeks traveling around the region speaking about his new
beliefs, exhorting people to respect the Sabbath day and not use amulets. His
most serious altercations came when people heard him speak but questioned
his words. One man argued that the Bible was to white men what gris-gris
were to black men, concluding that although he was glad to hear Tamba’s
words he would carry on with the “women, and greegrees.” Then he defiantly
claimed: “nor will I leave off selling slaves, for whom will work for me when I
get old?” Another man, a Manding, challenged Tamba, saying that “God’s
book,” the Koran, came from the East, not the West, and that Tamba’s Bible
was “devil’s book.” Angered by Tamba’s assertion that Mohammed was a thief
and that polygamy was sinful, the man cursed Tamba in a language he did not
understand.18
His frequent short journeys to preach the word came to a temporary halt in
late 1820 when Tamba embarked on a longer mission. A few months after testi-
fying about Robert Bostock’s former activities, Tamba was asked to join a
major proselytizing mission with Johnson and six African youths from the
seminary. They appeared to be “the white missionary and his seven negro
sons!” one writer commented, though Tamba was Johnson’s contemporary.19
There was a short journey from Freetown, during which they were so
scandalized by the canoemen’s language that they felt the need to stop for a
cleansing prayer. Then, having already escaped being eaten by sharks, they
were in danger when Johnson sank to his knees while attempting to wade across
a creek. Tamba pulled him out.
Soon they reached the Banana Islands, where they met George Caulker,
himself a convert to Christianity who had begun translating the Bible and some
hymns into Sherbro. By this time Caulker had ceded the Banana Islands to
Britain and was in the process of handing over power to them. When Johnson
began introducing his party, Caulker immediately recognized Tamba, recalling
that he had known him “when in the slave-trade on the plantains.” Johnson
told them that Tamba was now a Christian, and an arrangement was made
that he would travel again around the whole area visiting each village to teach
the word of God in Sherbro. William Tamba had become a sort of African
John Newton, a sinner who had engaged in the slave trade but was now among
the most devout.
198 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

The group then traveled on to Tamba’s old home at the Plantain Islands.
Johnson reported that the place had “much the appearance of a European resi-
dence.” He noted that Tamba, “who had lived there,” knew most of the people.
Leaving the island, Tamba again showed his boating skills and his local knowl-
edge, saving them all when they were in danger of being wrecked, and their
pilot did not know what to do. Tamba’s “calm unruffled spirit, his firm hand,
and his steady eye” were what saved them.20
Almost as soon as he returned from this trip, Tamba left again, making
good on his promise to return to the Banana and Plantain Islands to teach the
word of God. If testifying against his old slave owner was courageous, the new
venture was equally brave since he would be away from Johnson and his pro-
tectors. He risked re-enslavement daily, going straight to “his old acquaint­
ances,” who were utterly astonished to hear him “reason of righteousness,
temperance and judgment.”21
Tamba eventually returned to Regent at five in the morning on Christmas
Eve, a Sunday, in time for the earliest of morning worship.

In February 1820 a vessel called Elizabeth, better known as the Mayflower of Liberia,
weighed anchor in New York. Less than a month before the Missouri Compro-
mise, the eighty-eight settlers aboard were leaving to form a free black republic.
The high hopes transmitted back to America by Mills and Burgess less than
two years before had resulted in a scheme to form a colony on Sherbro Island.
The intending colonists were full of optimism, determined to found their own
land and live on their own terms.
They arrived in Sierra Leone and waited to move to Sherbro. While there
they met with John Kizell, the man who had once exhorted Charles Mason to
stop slave trading. Kizell moved with the settlers to Sherbro, where they founded
a new settlement, but it was not long before things started to go wrong. One of
the leaders, Reverend Samuel Bacon, died from fever, and soon their settle-
ment was all but deserted, even the church bell stolen in a miasma of tropical
quarreling.22
A few months later Ephraim Bacon and Joseph Andrus, two more white
Americans, arrived in Sierra Leone ready to join the new colony. Instead they
learned the bad news about Sherbro, and Ephraim learned that his brother,
Samuel, had passed away. Speaking with survivors, they decided not to restart
the Sherbro plan but rather to find a new site for their colony and begin again.
Reverend William Johnson met them and provided advice.23
Helping to Found Liberia 199

Before they departed Freetown to find a spot, Johnson invited Bacon and
Andrus to visit Regent. They gratefully accepted his hospitality and rode up
into the hills to visit this renowned wonder. Andrus performed Holy Commu-
nion for no less than four hundred of Regent’s people. They had heard that
Grand Bassa was perhaps the best place for their settlement, but after “an inter-
view with Tamba and Davis on the subject,” they were slightly less certain; Cape
Mesurado and other nearby locations apparently added to the mix. Johnson
offered them some practical help: two translators to go along with them on
their journey to find land for their new settlement. The translators would be
Davis and Tamba. Tamba and Davis’s inclusion on the mission “excited a
lively interest among the people” at Regent, “who offered up many prayers for
the success of the undertaking.” The plan that Johnson had tried to put into
motion two years earlier, when Cates had gone south to claim land at the St.
Paul or St. John River, was reinvoked.24
Arrangements were made for Charlotte Bacon to stay with Johnson and his
wife in Regent while her husband was away, and on March 19 the four men
were ready to depart. Immediately they hit upon a problem, discovering that
they could not sail because half of their sailors were drunk on shore. Captain
Martin too was making “unnecessary delays” and causing trouble, alleged
Bacon, who added rather cynically, “but I expected to find trouble in Africa.”25
On March 25, as they “made land,” Tamba was unsettled. “I remembered
what I should speak to the people,” he wrote, “and what I should Do for my-
self; and that made me feel afraid and made me more sick, and I could not
sleep, but was full of fear, and trouble.” What exactly he had to do “for him-
self ” is unclear; the implication is that he was being encouraged to make some
repentance for his former actions while a slave of Bostock and Mason. He took
heart in the biblical message that Jesus had come not for the righteous but for
sinners, and begged: “O Lord have mercy upon us” and “forgive all our sins
and teach us to know more and more.”
It was March 27 when they reached Cape Mount, and Tamba was “much
cast down” and was so troubled that he could not pray. “When I prayed,” he
would write in his journal, “I could only say Lord Do what thou wilt with me; I
am a great sinner: take away this stony heart and give me a new heart.”26
Andrus and Bacon had been forewarned that King Peter, ruler of this
whole stretch of coast, was “powerful and warlike” and “more deeply engaged
in the slave trade than any of his neighbours.” They did not attempt to meet
with him but sailed on. They passed the St. Paul River and soon arrived at the
mouth of the Mesurado River. Reverend Bacon wrote in his journal: “we came
to anchor the next day, before two small islands, owned by John Mills [sic].”27
200 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

Bacon described Mill as a “yellow man” and denounced his establishment as

“mere slave markets.” They went on shore to meet “a dependent of King
Peter,” only to be turned away, even their present of trinkets rejected.28
Behind the rather scant recordings of Ephraim Bacon there are faint traces
of two men with a mission. Within the United States the colonization plan was
divisive, and later Liberia would come to have many problems, but from
Tamba and Davis’s perspective it was clear that they should help the Ameri-
cans in what looked like a very worthy project. In 1819, the United States had
passed a law allowing its navy to take anybody captured aboard illegal slave
ships and return them to Africa, and there was hope among the British that this
meant that the burden of suppressing the trade would be shared. Bacon and
Andrus described their proposed colony as a place that would protect those
brought in by American naval ships, much as Sierra Leone was a colony of the
“recaptured.” The prospect of an American colony equivalent to Sierra Leone
seemed very real. Even before leaving Sierra Leone, Andrus and Bacon had
two hundred recaptives who would join them if judged to be legally free. A new
colony at the Mesurado or St. Paul River would be an act of redemption for
Tamba and a huge victory. The place that anguished him would be reimagined
as the beacon of freedom.29
Bacon’s journal says little about Tamba and Davis on this journey, and in a
sketch of the occasion they are standing to the side. Yet despite the fact that
Mill was evidently fluent in English, Tamba played a bigger role than Bacon’s
journal suggests. William Tamba’s recording of the affair was much more per-
sonal than Bacon’s, since of course he knew Mill well and had visited him only
the year before. He already knew that Mill had not kept to the “Recantation
and Abjuration of the Slave trade” that he had made before the British at the
time of Bostock’s arrest. So instead of an outside observer commenting on a
stranger, Tamba recorded a meeting between old acquaintances turned adver-
saries. “John Mills and Barky were there,” he wrote, giving no further expla-
nation of their roles; “I told them that we had come to get some land for the
Missionaries to sit Down on.” Barky, recorded by Bacon as “Baha, a black and
native African,” was Philippa Hayes’s successor at Balli Island.30
In Bacon’s journal, they were turned away and then simply left without
another word. Tamba, however, gave a different version of events. Mill tried to
dodge the Americans’ demand, stating that the matter was not in his hands. He
claimed to be unable to make a decision without consulting King Peter, who
was too sick to be asked. Tamba stood his ground, demanding that Mill answer
for himself rather than hiding behind a smokescreen of subjection. “The King
has given you liberty to say to us about that what you like, I know that,”
Helping to Found Liberia 201

harangued Tamba, intimating that perhaps he had even been negotiating

behind the scenes. “And again,” he added, “will you wait for the King when a
ship comes for Slaves? Will you wait for him before you sell them?” A French
slave schooner soon sailed into view, making his point, but it was a Pyrrhic
victory.31
They had no choice but to sail on. But the area around Cape Mesurado
had impressed the Americans. “The natural growth is luxuriant and abundant,”
enthused Bacon; “many of the trees attain to a large size, and present every indi-
cation of a strong and fertile soil.”32
Soon they reached the St. John River, Bassa country, where they met with
the local headmen. The old King John, who had made a deal with Cates, had
died, and the new King Ben was unwilling to cede land even when the prior
agreement was flourished. Instead he called a palaver. There a Kruman called
Brown argued that the Americans were “emissaries from some slave ship”
come to harm them, an accusation that Tamba could not let slide by. He inter-
rupted Brown, cutting into his fiery speech to deny the charges. Eventually,
after retiring to discuss under the “shade of a large silk cotton tree,” the Bassa
returned and offered a deal. King Ben agreed to their plan if the Americans
made a written agreement not to interfere with the slave trade, and to in no
way assist the antislavery patrols. Tamba wrote nothing of this condition,
which surely must have appalled him, noting instead the price agreed for the
land, “Two Cask of Rum, Two of Tobacco, one Box of Pips [ pipes], 20 pieces
of cloth, and many more things I forgot.”33
Although dismayed by the condition imposed by the Bassa chief, Reverend
Bacon nevertheless believed that he had secured land for an American colony,
especially since King Ben sent his son back to Regent with Davis. The land was
said to be thirty or forty miles square, “healthy and fertile—lying high—and
producing rice of excellent quality, and all kinds of tropical grains and fruits
and very good coffee, cotton and tobacco.” The river itself, they enthused,
“furnishes the best fish and oysters.” It was a slice of paradise that would cost
the Americans only “an annual supply” of items worth around $300.34
Back in Regent, the arrival of the Bassa king’s son caused great rejoicing.
David Noah learned that his father and siblings were alive and well, and others
too heard news from home. But “the questionable contract with the Bassa
tribe” was far from settled, no matter what the men liked to pretend, and was
said to have “haunted those pious minds like malignant ghosts” that even
prayer would not appease. Exactly what happened next is mired in myth and
distortion, not least because Reverend Andrus died not long after his trip, and
Ephraim and Charlotte Bacon were both very sick. Even the Bassa king’s son
202 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

soon passed away. Ultimately, the American colony would not be founded at
Grand Bassa.35
According to one account, some Krumen were stuck aboard an American
vessel that could not land because of a storm, and found themselves in America.
They returned to Africa on a vessel captained by twenty-five-year-old Robert
Stockton and also carrying Dr. Ayres, new agent of the Colonization Society.
The Krumen apparently recognized Cape Mesurado as they pulled near and
recommended the place. Stockton, Ayres, and some of the Krumen then went
to salute King Peter, a meeting at which Stockton was harangued: “He be master
of gunboat. He take ship with goods we sell. I be steward. He make masters wear
iron. He break our trade.” Stockton defiantly agreed that this was true; he was
“an annoyer of the slave trade” by profession, and in the ensuing fight he pulled
his gun.36
By some embellished accounts, Stockton held his gun to King Peter’s head,
and a “shaft of golden sunlight appearing” at that moment, the Americans took
it to mean that God esteemed their plan. By more sober reckoning it was John
Sterling Mill who sent a young boy as a messenger, telling Stockton and Ayres
to return. A small bull was offered to them as apology. The palaver began
again, and finally, on Christmas Eve 1821, it was agreed that a strip of the coast
120 miles long, stretching 40 miles wide, and to include the islands owned by
John Sterling Mill and Barky (formerly Philippa Hayes) could be had for six
muskets, powder, a barrel of rum, clothes, four umbrellas, three walking sticks,
four hats, ten iron pots, soap, and some shoes.37
Relieved at last to have a place to found their colony, prospective settlers in
America began to prepare for their new lands. Unfortunately for them, by the
time they arrived King Peter had changed his mind. The only place they could
disembark was on the small island owned by John Sterling Mill. He had “sold”
his tiny island, plus his house upon it, to the American agents for “the consid-
eration” of a barrel each of rum, bread, beef, and port, a tierce of tobacco, and
a piece of cloth. They renamed the island Providence. The Reverend Lott
Cary, one of the earliest settlers who had been born a slave in Virginia and
purchased his own freedom, wrote of Cape Mesurado, “It is a delightful spot . . .
here I expect to spend my days.” “Our work is almost like building the walls of
Jerusalem.”38
Was there some destiny perhaps, some attempt at deliverance, in Tamba
being part of a plan that refashioned the slave barracoons he knew so well into
an island of freedom? Tamba’s and Davis’s roles in these events are under-
played, yet the accounts read as if somebody had been pushing firmly for Cape
Mesurado, perhaps even for Mill’s island specifically, as the perfect place for
Helping to Found Liberia 203

the American colony. The Americans had been told that Grand Bassa was the
most likely spot before they met Tamba, but after this meeting Bacon wrote,
“The neighbourhood of Cape Mesurado” had “been indicated as a part of the
coast favourable to our purpose.” Tamba and Davis might have been largely
airbrushed from the common accounts of Liberia’s founding, left a role as little
more than boatmen and translators, but it seems that they were much more
than that. They had an objective in view and determined that the place that
Tamba had once hidden Bostock and Mason’s captives, the place that others of
the kin that they had formed in Regent, like David Noah, had once been held
chained and “treated like brutes,” would be the frontline of a new nation of
African liberty.
 23
Van Diemen’s Land

F ollowing his trip back to Britain, at the end of February 1821 Robert Bostock
arrived in Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land. It was three years and two months
since he had departed Sydney as an emancipated convict. Now he carried a
certificate from the secretary of state for the colonies declaring that he was a
free settler. Rather than a convict who had been freed, a common enough status
in Britain’s Australian colonies, it was as if he had never been a convict at all.
Bostock never revealed much about his decision to again sail for the colonies
rather than remain in Britain, but clearly the ease with which he had made
considerable wealth in Sydney appealed to him. Since the end of the Napoleonic
Wars Britain had suffered a severe economic downturn, so there was little
beyond family to keep him in England. But returning to Sydney, where John
McQueen was still faithfully running their businesses, was not appealing.
People there knew only too well that he had been a convict. To make a new
start he needed to go somewhere that his past was not known.
Not long before he left Britain, Charles Jeffreys’s book Van Diemen’s Land
was printed, recommending the island in the glossiest of terms. According to
Jeffreys, Van Diemen’s Land was “El Dorado . . . pregnant with every essential
article of human necessity.” In postwar Britain it “arouse[d] a mania.” The
more extreme of Jeffreys’s claims were not actually true; the book had been
plagiarized from a stolen manuscript. (“Lieutenant Jeffreys . . . sometimes deals
in the marvellous,” claimed the writer whose manuscript he had bootlegged, in
what must be considered a model of restraint.) But it mattered little to intending
emigrants who believed they would make money in the colony “by hook or by
crook.” Jeffreys’s book created “ship-load after ship-load hurrying to their
distant and eagerly adopted homes.”1
The climate may also have played a role in Bostock’s decision. Contempo-
rary writers always mentioned Van Diemen Land’s weather when writing

204
Van Diemen’s Land 205

about the island, praising its very English coolness. Charles Darwin, visiting
Hobart in 1836, wrote in his diary of the temperature making the land fertile
and abundant. Others trumpeted that Van Diemen’s Land climate was “the
most salubrious and congenial of any in the known world,” “more congenial”
to a European’s “constitution” than the sunshine of Sydney.2
This mattered for reasons far beyond a personal preference for showers
and mist. Climate was considered to have a direct link to race by way of the
darkening effects of the sun. Notions of inherent superiority and inferiority
were tied up with climate. James Ross, who arrived as a free settler in Van
Diemen’s Land in 1822, wrote that he chose it because he believed that in
Sydney’s climate a man “must content himself with having his future progeny . . .
as dark and swarthy as a Spaniard, or a Tawny Moor.” It was, said Ross, “to
resign the complexion if not the constitution of an Englishman.” Whether this
was a consideration for Bostock, who now had three children with Rachael, we
cannot know, but it might well have mattered more to a man who had once
been the father of a mixed-race family than it did to men like Ross, for whom
such concerns were more notional.3

When the Bostock family arrived, Hobart was so rough and ready it was known
as “the Camp.” Another settler who docked just after Bostock wrote that the
settlement was “in a very embryo state.” Its population of about two to three
thousand people lived in wattle-and-daub huts, and the “old market place” was
little more than an “impassable mud hole” that the tide washed over. The jail
was so flimsy that just before Bostock’s arrival some thieves rather inventively
broke into the jail to steal from the jail keeper. “Open concubinage” was said to
be rife, and rumor told of wives sold for fifty ewes or £5 plus a bottle of rum.
Even the lieutenant governor, William Sorell, was a “base and treacherous
seducer” living openly with another man’s wife.4
For all that, it was a very good time to arrive in Van Diemen’s Land. A
weekly market was just beginning, new roads were being built, and a mail service
was starting. The worst of the bushranger terror seemed to be behind them.
Looking back some twenty years later, one writer claimed that Van Diemen’s
Land’s “virtual nativity dates with 1820,” as before that time it was “little better
than an extensive penitentiary.” That year marked the date when Hobart
“sprung up with a celerity worthy of Aladdin and his redoubtable lamp.”5
Bostock had carried an assortment of merchandise with him from England,
and soon he placed an advertisement in the Hobart Town Gazette for brandy and
206 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

gin, cloth and clothes of various kinds, plus “a few dinner services of elegant
china.”6
Then he set off for Sydney to sort out his affairs with John McQueen. His
old business partner had been running their business under the name “Bostock
and McQueen,” but now bought him out completely, one sign among many
that McQueen too was doing well. He had just applied for an auctioneer’s
license and acted as agent for prominent men whose businesses took them out
of town. This soon proved to be exceptionally lucrative when one client left
him an incredible bequest: the schooner Endeavour. McQueen had it refitted
and began trading with Van Diemen’s Land and Robert Bostock. McQueen
also now had a common-law wife, Catherine Ryan, and two children.7
On his return to Hobart, Bostock applied for a land grant. Normally these
were made in June, but it was July 2, 1821, when Bostock put his case before
Lieutenant Governor Sorell. Sorell was handing out grants of land on a scale
never before witnessed: 47,180 acres were allocated to settlers just in 1821, obvi-
ously with no regard whatsoever for the diverse populations whose ancestors
had lived there for at least forty thousand years. The amount of land given
depended upon the amount of money a settler had, or rather what he claimed
to have, a figure generally inflated, so Bostock listed his assets. He professed to
have £1800 “Merchandize & Cash on Hand,” the houses in Hunter Street and
Bligh Street in Sydney worth £1200 and £300, respectively, and another
£1800 from the proceeds of the business with McQueen. (This more than any-
thing suggests that his payout from the British government had not been more
than the cost of his family’s voyages and the goods that accompanied them.)8
Sorell allotted Bostock a prize plot of land by the waterfront—today the site
of the twelve-story Hotel Grand Chancellor, formerly the Sheraton—where he
built a new store. He sold all manner of items: a Brussels carpet with a chintz
pattern, a mahogany footstool, and a silk sash. There was a demand for these
things because, just as in Freetown, the population was socially aspirational
and trying to re-create Anglo-Saxon culture. There was only a tiny middle class,
but these few tried to outdo each other. Settlers held dinners with new ingredi-
ents adapted to mimic the old: kangaroo pies, roast kangaroo, and kangaroo
soup. Soon Hobart had regular regattas, cricket matches, and horse races.
The Bostocks were at the forefront of dignified colonial society, and Reverend
Robert Knopwood made polite social calls where they drank tea and discussed
the weather.9
Bostock remained utterly silent about his past. Rachael, having traveled
back to England with him for the court case, must surely have been aware of
his conviction, but his children were never told of their father’s earlier career.
Van Diemen’s Land 207

Despite the overwhelmingly abolitionist sentiment in Britain, it was not just his
slave trading past that he was hiding. He was extraordinarily anxious to disso-
ciate himself from the “convict stain.” Free settlers held themselves aloof from
convicts and emancipists, religiously laying claim to their moral superiority.
Van Diemen’s Land was said to be “a caste-based society, with an untouchable
majority barred from almost all contact” with the free. As a free settler who had
once been a convict, Bostock needed all the distance from the convict and ex-
convict world he could get.10
Socially this was critical. It was not just a matter of his and Rachael’s hopes
of entertaining the better sort at dinner. His children’s chances depended on
his ability to protect them from the convict stain that he had avoided by the
merest of margins. There were stories of children thrown out of schools when it
was discovered that their long-dead mother had once been a convict. Bostock
understandably wanted nothing of the kind for his growing family.11
 24
Liberty
in White and Black

Tamba did not return to Regent with the two American missionaries and
Davis. As they sailed past the Banana Islands he disembarked, following the
earlier request from George Caulker to spend time at the islands. As he went
about preaching the word he diligently recorded in his journal his successes
and the problems he ran into. Returning to one village two years after his first
visit, he found that they had miscalculated the days of the week and so had
been resting on Saturdays instead of Sundays. One man demanded to know
what he should do with his other wives if he was now to just have one. Another
said that he would rather Tamba had brought clothes from the white men
instead of more orders. Despite all this, the whole visit was so successful that
George Caulker wrote a letter to the CMS asking if they could “spare him
[Tamba] again before the rains, before the people are lulled again to sleep?”1
Tamba hoped to be a missionary among the Sherbro, but it was not to be.
Instead he was sent to St. Mary’s, today Banjul, at the mouth of the Gambia
River. The CMS’s first preacher sent there had died, and the second departed,
so Tamba was sent to fill in, showing the high standing he had attained. A small
settlement of 1,845 people, St. Mary’s had a small courthouse, a barracks, and a
hospital and was home to a Wesleyan mission as well as the CMS mission. The
Wesleyans’ Reverend John Morgan should have been an ally for Tamba, but it
was not that simple. Morgan wanted to escape back to England, believing that
“the brutal wretchedness of the natives” meant that they were “inferior to the
human species, and incapable of benefitting from his labours.” It must have
been unimaginably difficult for Tamba, with his friends eight hundred miles
away in Regent and his only likely ally believing him not just unequal but less
than human. Nevertheless, Tamba went about his work, holding services twice
a day and working as the settlement’s schoolteacher. He even had some success,

208
Liberty in White and Black 209

it being reported that “the people under his care do certainly improve” and
that the schools were now in “good order.”2
Tamba sailed back to Regent in 1822, critically ill with pleurisy (possibly a
complication of pneumonia). He survived and returned to his usual rounds of
preaching and prayer meetings, actually in better health than many as ophthal-
mia then yellow fever swept the colony. When Reverend Düring had to leave
due to illness, Tamba was placed in charge of Gloucester Village, and soon
after William Davis took control at Bathurst. That Christmas Day, Tamba
walked with his entire congregation over the hill to Regent, making what John-
son called “the largest congregation I ever saw in Africa.”3
By this time David Noah had become the schoolteacher at Regent. John-
son wrote of him:

David Noah is employed from daybreak till ten o’clock at night, a continuance
of exertion which no European could endure in this climate. He conducts
entirely the day and evening schools; besides this he issues rations for about
1,200 people, keeps the provision-lists and returns, and school-lists, measures
out all the lots, and sees that the houses and fences are regularly built; prays
with the sick, receives the stores every Thursday in Freetown, enters marriages,
baptisms &c. and does the duty of a parish clerk; in short, he is every thing at
Regent’s Town.

Noah did all of this “with great pleasure,” enthused Johnson, “and never thinks
that he can do too much.” Perhaps most astonishingly of all, Johnson wrote to
the CMS: “I would not exchange him for a European school master.”4
Noah attended Bible classes morning and night with his wife, and in the
second of a new set of classes in late November 1822 he spoke so well that his
message was conveyed back to England. Reading from Ephesians II, he took
especial note of verse eight: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that
not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” He spoke to the group about how he
found in this passage “a view of the slave trade, how God had brought good
from evil.”5
So close was their bond, so deep the admiration, that in late 1822, when
William Johnson again asked permission from the CMS to travel to Britain
since his wife was sick, consent was sought for David Noah to accompany him.
Noah had been “begging hard,” Johnson wrote, noting that he would travel as
his servant and so incur little expense. In early 1823 the CMS replied granting
Johnson authorization to take a break, but they wrote, “Respecting David
210 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

Noah, the Committee came to a different decision. We have seen so much evil
arise, with hardly an instance to put into the opposite scale, from Africans
coming to this country.” Fearing the “temptations and snares to which he
would be exposed, and the spiritual injury he might receive,” it was decided to
“decline to authorize his coming with you.” They had written to him to “soften
the disappointment.”6
Noah stayed behind, and along with Davis and Tamba he was left in charge
of the CMS’s entire endeavor in Sierra Leone. It was testament to their abilities
and was truly an amazing achievement: only a decade from enslavement, having
recently learned to read and write English, they temporarily took over the vener-
able body’s activities in the region. In March 1824, Noah traveled to Kissy and
on the anniversary of the CMS mission there courageously told his story, re-
counting how he had been a child sold into slavery while on a trading mission.
The wrongs done to him he attributed to the lack of faith beyond the colony.
Before the Kissy crowd, he explained: “As there was no Christian Religion
there; there was no pity so I became a slave.” “My African brethren I beseech
you to be thankfull,” he preached, adding, “you know what we were once.”7
The problem they would face without a man as open to African brother-
hood as Johnson was already very clear. Just before Johnson left, Tamba had
caused a scandal by preaching, “both white and blacks, dying in their sins,
would be cast to hell.” When he spoke these words, the one white man in the
congregation, named only as Mr. S, “was enraged, and has ever since hated
Tamba,” wrote Johnson. As earlier with Dr. Bell, any intimation that every-
body would be equal before the eyes of God on Judgment Day was obviously
pushing things too far for some. Tamba was unrepentant and, supported or at
least not chastised by Johnson over the matter, boldly refused to apologize for
his words.8
After Johnson sailed away, the CMS also discounted Tamba, Noah, and
Davis, overlooking their leadership, which they considered to be naturally in-
ferior. African leaders were akin to no leader, and Regent’s people were now
“like sheep without a shepherd.” Tamba came as close as he would to chiding
them for this attitude, as well as censoring those like Mr. S, on Christmas Day
1823, not long after Johnson’s departure. Writing from Gloucester, Tamba
wrote rather pointedly, “I am put a poor Black Man, but God is no respecter of
persons.” He was equal, he asserted, in the eyes of the Lord, whatever they
chose to believe. It was a brave and bold comment, couched in terms that made
it difficult to rebuke.9
Not long after Johnson’s departure, news arrived that Governor MacCarthy
had been killed in conflict with the Ashanti. It was a terrible blow to the whole
Liberty in White and Black 211

colony. In March 1824, all seemed to be well, with Tamba reporting, “morning
and evening prayers is kept regular,” though Noah wrote of a smallpox out-
break that had carried away twenty of their pupils. By April, Tamba reported
to the CMS: “its gone very ill with us.” He took solace in the words of St.
Matthew’s Gospel, “blessed are ye when men shall revile you, & persecute
you” and prayed, “the Lord knows what he intends to do with poor Africans.”10
Then in the first week of September disastrous news arrived. Reverend
Norman, who was standing in for Johnson at Regent, revealed it first to his
closest confidantes. Johnson had passed away not long after his ship sailed,
some of his last words apparently reserved for Noah, whom he wished to be
told to “go on steadily in his duty.” Noah was devastated, but Norman simply
told him and all the others that they had to bear “the trial with Christian meek-
ness and patience.” That evening Norman broadcast the news to Regent’s entire
congregation. “I spoke to them,” he wrote, “and begged them not to make any
noise, as I knew it was an African custom to cry aloud when they had lost a
friend. I told them that the Christian manner of bearing a trial was with patience
and silent submission. Nevertheless, the CMS would report, “A general cry of
weeping (as only Africans can make) enveloped the town.” Even in mourning
they were simply too African.11
Noah wrote to the CMS that it had “pleased the Lord to try us on every
side, in taking away our Spiritual Father.” Tamba would record these losses
with the simple remark, “it go dark sometimes with us.” By December things
had settled down. When Reverend Düring returned he was very pleased with
Tamba’s progress. “William Tamba has conduced the whole to my entire satis-
faction,” Düring wrote, “and the people seem to like him very much, for, as
yet, I have not heard a single individual complain of him; but, on the con-
trary, all speak of him with respect.” But with the congregations dwindling and
revenues declining, the CMS was less than happy. The Liberated African
preachers were rebuked for not inspiring their people to donate enough money
to the missionary cause, considered the “spiritual barometer of any Christian
community.”12
By the standard of his times, Tamba was wildly successful. Yet he struggled
with his racial origins, no matter his valiant defenses against bigotry. His letters
and journals give a privileged view into his life and opinions and reveal that
despite his triumphs he was inevitably affected by the culture of white degrada-
tion toward people of African origin that prevailed all around the Atlantic
world.
Despite Tamba living where Africans were the overwhelming majority, his
skin color seems have been a source of some shame to him, or at least very
212 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

ambiguous esteem. Spending his youth as a slave in the transatlantic slave

trade can hardly have left him unaware of the implication of his skin color to
Europeans, even before confrontations with men like Mr. S. Then in Regent
he was taught that he was also the color of sin. “I am but a poor Black man,” he
wrote in 1824, referring to spiritual rather than material poverty. More than
three years later he wrote, “Though the world may call me black; yet the Lord
is able to make me white by the blood of his Son Jesus Christ.”13

Johnson and MacCarthy’s deaths heralded the beginning of cutbacks and

reductions. After 1824, the CMS no longer administered Regent, Gloucester,
and the other villages, and expenditures were severely cut.
In some ways the years that had gone before had been a golden age in
terms of support the liberated would get from Britain. The colony was failing
economically, and Britain increasingly looked to cut costs. Farming was fruitful
enough at Regent: in 1820 Liberated Africans there sold “near 7,000” bushels
of rice to the government to feed those less productive. But the majority of farms
were nowhere near that fruitful, and as a whole the recaptive community did
not support itself, unlike the liberated populations in Cuba and Brazil. Nor had
Sierra Leone found a staple crop for export. The amount that the colony cost
Britain was repeatedly raised in Parliament and would matter much more by
the following decade when there were calls to abandon it all together.14
Regent never really got back its status as a model village after Johnson’s
departure. Norman, his successor, stayed only a year, and his replacement died
after only a short time at his post. In 1826, Noah wrote, “as fast as the Lord is
sending us his faithful servants among us, so fast he remove them from us by
death.” Noah admitted, “sometimes I incline to think the Lord intends to leave
us entirely to punish us our sins on account of our wickedness.” The Liberated
African faithful had to fill in, with the CMS dispatching them to the various
villages, whether they wanted to go or not. First, David Noah was appointed
native teacher at Kissy. He admitted to the CMS that leaving Regent was “a
trial” for him, and later Tamba declined to follow an order from the CMS to
also move to Kissy and take control. This led to Tamba being suspended for
“contumacy.” He was forced to beg for forgiveness for the “inward Sickness”
that had caused him to disobey this “order.” He would not make the same
mistake again and seems to have gone about his work quietly from them on,
aware that his days of negotiating with Johnson were over. From the mid-
1820s, Tamba lived in Regent but moved throughout the Krio villages, working
Liberty in White and Black 213

for periods in Gloucester and Wellington and regularly visiting Kissy, Kent,
Hastings, and Waterloo. Noah also traveled around to teach and preach, writing
in 1826, “there are not people enough belonging to the Society to fill every
station.”15
To some extent Tamba internalized the idea that his own leadership was
inferior to that of white Europeans, or at least he was prepared to intimate this
to the CMS. He longed for more white people to be sent out to Sierra Leone
and must have desperately missed the heyday of Johnson’s leadership. Writing
to the CMS in 1827, he prayed that “the Lord send more faithfull people to
come & preach the Gospel of Christ among poor black people.” Without them,
his congregation “fell back into the world, by the sin whoremongers & adul-
terers.” Noah too wrote to the CMS begging that they “pray for the poor sons
of Ham,” referring to the idea that Africans were the descendants of the biblical
Noah’s son, punished by the curse of Canaan for an evil deed.16
Tamba remained a devout servant through periods of debilitating sickness.
In March 1828 he described his routine: “On Monday evening we keep prayer
meeting. Tuesday I visit the school only Boys, no Girls school, afternoon I visit
the Sick. On Wednesday I visit the hamlets between Hastings & Allans Town,
evening I speak to the people when about seventy attend. On Thursday I visit
the hamlets of the Town between Hastings and Waterloo; Friday I visit the
school evening I speak to the people.” David Noah had similar duties, traveling
throughout the hills and to Kissy.17
Then in 1829, David Noah made a decision to “leave the missionary work
of this colony for the purpose of returning to my Native Country to settle.” He
wrote of his “benighted Countrymen, whom I can see no longer without a hope
in the world.” The CMS granted him six weeks’ leave to travel to Bassa and
report back on the feasibility of his plans.18
He sailed in February for the new colony at Liberia that now lay between
Sierra Leone and Bassa country, attending a church service and visiting Gover-
nor Randall. Then he sailed on to Bassa. Setting foot ashore, he wrote that he
was “surrounded by many of my Countrymen.” “I appeared to them just as
one who arose from the dead,” he wrote, noting that some were too afraid to
approach him, thinking him some kind of ghost. With great sadness he learned
that a slave vessel had only recently carried away a great number of captives.
King Tom sent for Noah, and a fatted goat was killed to celebrate the return
of his lost Bassa son. Some of Noah’s family arrived and cried “in their country
fashion” with joyfulness. Noah told them not to cry, speaking of how the Lord
had blessed him since he had been stolen away. “I cannot fully express with pen,”
he wrote, “the joy and gladness which possessed us while we were together.”
214 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

Noah began preaching to his countrymen, reporting that they were aston-
ished to hear the Bible in the Bassa language. Noah chastised them for wearing
fetishes, to which they answered that it was their custom and that his own ways
were merely “whitemen’s fashions.” Although he was welcomed by many local
chiefs and believed that they would support his returning to live in Bassa country,
he found it tough, reporting that many thought his instruction to rest on the
Sabbath was mere “foolishness.” Nor could he persuade them to stop sacrificing
chickens to their “greegrees,” and he lamented one Sunday, “we were obliged
to have Divine Service by ourselves.” Attending a funeral, he hated the drum-
ming and dancing and wrote, “Nothing but heathenism is carried on among
them.” It was all so dispiriting that soon Noah was ready to return to “my
Christian friends.”
He did not speak of any fear that he might be re-enslaved, but throughout
his visit he was extremely disheartened to see the arrival of slaving vessels. “Oh
when shall this horrible traffick of human blood be done away?” he implored
in his journal. Then on his way back to Regent he took passage aboard the
schooner Susan, which found itself surrounded by slave ships when they reached
Cape Mount. The slavers launched musket fire and cannon at them, and only
by luck did he escape unharmed. Taking refuge on shore, Noah saw “no less
than about 3 or 4 hundred slaves.” He returned to Regent dejected, sad that his
homeland was still so badly afflicted by the slave trade, and arrived to the devas-
tating news that his wife had passed away in his absence.19

Far away in Van Diemen’s Land, in 1826 Bostock received another grant of
land. It was to the north of Hobart on the South Esk River. It was frontier land
but a very beautiful spot. Within a few years he had another adjoining 1,800
acres granted to him. He began to build a grand home as well as a barn, granary,
yards, and stables and soon owned 63 cattle, 2,500 sheep, and 8 horses. He was
allotted a whole coterie of convict servants—mostly petty thieves—to work for
him both in the fields and in the house. His family had three pianos including a
grand, and they played backgammon and shot possums.20
He was part of Australia’s burgeoning wool industry. Once merino sheep
were found to flourish in Australia, the colonists had a product that was in huge
demand on the world market and that could be transported relatively cheaply
for long distances. The number of sheep owned by settlers skyrocketed from
sixteen thousand in 1816 to sixteen million by 1850, an expansion driven by the
fact that “land was not only abundant but essentially priced at zero.” Wool
Liberty in White and Black 215

proved astonishingly profitable, becoming the main force behind Australia’s

economy—soon providing some of the highest standards of living in the
world—until it was outshone by the gold rushes of the 1850s. Funded also by
“enormous subsidies” from the British government, life was very good for those
among Australia’s pastoral businessmen.21
Bostock’s daughters were part of the exclusive set who attended boarding
school at Ellenthorpe Hall, hand-picked by the redoubtable headmistress
Hannah Maria Clarke as being suitable objects for her lessons in refinement.
Board and tuition was £40 a year and included lessons in French, decorative
needlework, and dance. Instruction on the harp cost extra. One frequent visitor
to Bostock’s (he was enamored of one of Bostock’s daughters) wrote, “the view
from . . . the residence of Mr. Bostock is very beautiful. The river winding
through the valley, its course marked by long times of the Tea Tree, and old
Ben Lom[o]nd a lofty mountain in the distance.”22
Africa must have seemed far away; John McQueen was his only real tie to
the past, and even he was 650 miles away in Sydney. Even for McQueen, the
past was being left far behind as he was making extraordinary business advances.
He opened a store near the King’s Wharf, branched into the seal trade, and
bought shares in the Bank of New South Wales. He increasingly left the day-to-
day running of his business to others, as befitted a gentleman.23
Then suddenly John McQueen was dead, still only in his late thirties,
passing away at his home in Princes Street. He was buried on March 21, 1829,
at St. Phillips Church, “the ugliest church in Christendom,” where Robert and
Rachael had married. McQueen’s obituary in the Sydney Gazette called him an
“enterprising and upright Merchant of this Colony.”24

When Tamba had written of being a “poor black man” he was not generally
referring to his economic situation—Tamba was far from poor when compared
to the many recaptives who struggled to feed themselves—but the type of
wealth rapidly being accumulated by his former owners in Australia was far
beyond his reach. He tried to be accepting of his lot, writing in 1826, “the world
may count me poor, I need no more.”25
By 1829, a handful of Maroons and Nova Scotians had well-paid positions in
the government, but even they were usually mixed-race men born to European
fathers. A few sons of Maroons and Nova Scotian fathers did gain government
work, but they were paid significantly less than their mixed-race colleagues.
Such opportunities simply did not exist for Liberated Africans. They were not
216 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

only damned by their blackness but also regarded as “corporate objects rather
than individuals,” like other former slaves unable to shake off their former status
as merchandise.26
The land grants seen in the Australian colonies were unknown in Sierra
Leone. Even the land that Tamba, Yarra, and all the others cleared and culti-
vated when they first reached Regent would be mostly lost. When Sir Neil
Campbell took over as Sierra Leone’s governor in 1826, he announced the
seizure of all informally held land. A British visitor in 1834 saw that land grants
given to recaptives were “limited to about half a rod” around the “square shed”
in which they lived, a situation he compared unfavorably to Liberia, where re-
captives had land grants of fifty acres.27 But even the Liberian example was tiny
compared to most land grants in Australia.28
In Van Diemen’s Land, Bostock had eight thousand acres allotted to him
by the government, and he had earlier been given the land on Bligh Street in
Sydney where his shop stood. John McQueen was only just starting to build his
holdings when he passed away but had already been granted four hundred
acres in 1821. In Sierra Leone, recaptives had tiny plots to grow a few vegetables
for their own sustenance, similar to the strips cultivated by the enslaved in the
Americas. In Australia land was “the most important resource during much of
the nineteenth century, and access to it was the principal route to acquiring
private wealth.” Land meant wealth and status, and Bostock and McQueen
still had far more than those who had been rescued from them.29
Sierra Leone’s economic strife—its failure to find a staple crop that would
make it valuable to Britain—was an ongoing problem. By 1830, there were
moves before the British Parliament to withdraw from the colony altogether.
Even Thomas Fowell Buxton, leader of the abolitionists, admitted, “the experi-
ment of Sierra Leone has failed.” An 1832 Dictionary of Commerce condemned
Sierra Leone as “the most pestiferous of all pestiferous places.”30
By Sierra Leonean standards, nonetheless, Tamba was doing very well. By
the late 1820s, Tamba’s son, also named William, enlisted at Sierra Leone’s
Fourah Bay College, the first Western-style university in West Africa. Mark
Joseph Tamba, who assisted in church duties, may have been another son.31
As Tamba went around the villages of Sierra Leone, he was not simply
preaching from the Bible but was engaged in melding the people into commu-
nities that cut across language and ethnic ties. They were beginning to be Krio.
Tamba himself came to write of those who were not Kissi nor his shipmates from
the Thais and Princess Charlotte as countrymen. Mende, Kono, and others might
be included in this term as the years went by, forming the kind of regional affili-
ation that enslaved Africans often made on the plantations of the Americas.32
 Liberty in White and Black 217

The Regent house of the Reffells, the descendants of Yarra, alias John Reffell, who was enslaved by John
McQueen in 1813. Possibly on the same land their ancestor first built his home. Note St. Charles Church in the
background. Courtesy of Lansana “Barmmy Boy” Mansaray.

Tamba’s own shipmates, those who arrived with him, remained part of his
life. It is unlikely that Sessay, now called Lawrence Summers, ever returned to
Sierra Leone, and nor is it clear whether men like Mamaroo and Nibea ever
returned to live in Regent.33
Tom Ball’s whereabouts also remain ambiguous. He and his family ap-
pear to have lived for some time at Waterloo, where former soldiers from the
West India Regiment were sent, but he had close ties with his former ship-
mates at Regent. One of his grandchildren apparently married one of Yarra’s.
Perhaps at some point he did move to Regent, though this is far from certain.
The colonial chaplain, Thomas Eyre Poole, visited Regent in the 1840s and
stayed with a man named “Old Thomas,” one of the earliest settlers, whose
house was filled with English furniture and who dressed in English clothes. It
is fanciful to think this could be Tom Ball, but in the absence of evidence other
than his grandchildren’s activities, we can perhaps imagine an echo of Tom
Ball in the gray-haired, bright-eyed and sprightly “Old Thomas,” respected
elder in Regent.34
218 Part 3:  Different Types of Liberty

David Noah and John Reffell were also there, living out their lives. Both
were members of the church, and Reffell owned one of the oldest homes in
Regent, where “in final touch of fairyland, the stream . . . actually flowed under
the house.”35

With McQueen’s death, Bostock’s ties to Africa were gone. But we cannot
quite leave him yet, because his engagement in another affair is worth briefly
recounting. The slave trade’s coagulation of a racial divide based almost entirely
on skin color had a long and painful range. It easily reached Tasmania, feeding
into British xenophobia toward the Indigenous peoples. In the late 1820s and
into the 1830s, we see Bostock one final time, at home on the South Esk River,
then a frontier in the Black War between settlers and Indigenous inhabitants of
the region.
Not long after the Bostocks’ move to the South Esk, the real push of the Black
War began. The traditional inhabitants of the land were fighting for survival as
their access to food evaporated. The settlers were intent on proclaiming the land
theirs. They aimed at nothing less than the complete removal of Indigenous
people from the island.
This was hardly unrelated to the “global colour line.” In 1826, the Hobart
Town Gazette wrote of the Aboriginals as the lowest form of humanity, noting
that they wished that these “Oceanean Negroes” were related to Africans, as
then they might be able to be tamed into docility and suitable for hard labor.
Observers at the time wrote of Indigenous peoples of Van Diemen’s Land as “a
fragment of a world strangely riven from the coast of Africa.”36
So Robert Bostock, now in his late thirties, was required to stand on what
became known as the Black Line. “A truly immense and desperate operation,”
it involved “a mass mobilisation of all able-bodied men to defend the colony—
a levee en masse.” They would stand together to form a chain across the island
and walk toward the sea, capturing all the native people who were still living.
The “chain of posts” showing the lines to be marched passed straight through
Bostock’s land. The plan was an utter failure, but nevertheless here at the end
of the world we find a baffling but related image, a final glimpse of the man who
had once been a fair-haired boy hearing his father’s stories of slave trading in
Africa. Now the former slave trader and his sons stood with rifles in an attempt
to rid his new land of dark-skinned people.37
By this time Robert Bostock seems to have been a model citizen, as some of
his descendants today are keen to point out. His life was an exemplar of what
Liberty in White and Black 219

middle-class men with entrepreneurial talents and vast amounts of luck could
achieve. But if viewed from a perspective that stretches far beyond Australia’s
shores, it is also clear that he was the recipient of heady doses of white privilege,
one of the many legacies his former trade bestowed upon the world.
He passed away in 1847, a year of great bushfires and a jubilee to celebrate
the end of convict transportation, at his grand house on the South Esk River.
His obituaries lauded him a pioneer settler and gentleman whose “kindness of
heart” had won many friends. It was a story he had willed into being.38

Tamba passed away just over seven years earlier than Bostock after a long illness.
His former congregation were just singing the last bars of evensong when a
messenger ran through the door with a message that Tamba was gone. He had
died, “free from fear,” his friends said, having “fought a good fight.” In truth,
he had done so much more than that.39
 k
Epilogue

I lay no claim to having “discovered” the story of Robert Bostock, slave trader
turned proud Australian pioneer. Professor Cassandra Pybus first told me the
rather astonishing news that a mansion built by a convict transported for slave
trading still existed in Tasmania. Later the house would appear in the coffee
table book Country Houses of Tasmania, and one snowy day fellow historians
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart and Kirsten McKenzie would kindly indulge my
curiosity and drive with me to see it. It sits majestic on high ground with an iron
lacework Victorian veranda on three sides from which to take in the vast grounds
and charming view of Ben Lomond.1
The Bostock family sold the house immediately after Robert’s death. He
left his estate to all of his Australian children who outlived him rather than
keeping it in the hands of his eldest son, meaning that the grand home had to
be sold for all to get their share. And so when I met Thelma Birrell, née Bostock,
a great-great-granddaughter of Robert Bostock and a genealogist extraordi-
naire, she was eager that I know that she does not come from money. Her father
grew up in an orphanage, and everything that she and her husband Matt have
has been hard won. Thelma tells of being in awe when the then-owners allowed
her to visit the old house. Its grandeur is far from the life of struggle she knew as
a child, growing up a Bostock in the mid-twentieth century. A narrative of the
Bostocks as dashing pioneers and settlers is one of which she is extremely
proud.
Thelma very generously let me use her private archive, where I gained rare
insight into the world of the early Bostocks in Australia, such as the school-
books of Bostock’s sons and old family photographs. It is churlish therefore, I
admit, for me to suggest that an alternative point of view comes into being if the
lives of those rescued from Bostock are also taken into account. In some ways, I
believe, the old house can be seen as a distillation of the gross inequality at the

221
222 Epilogue

heart of this story. It is not just that Bostock grew wealthy enough to build such
a home despite his conviction and transportation. Among its many bedrooms,
music room, stables, and all the rest is a glimpse of the security, education, and
privilege that his sons and to a slightly lesser extent his daughters had, enabling
them to grab hold of the myriad opportunities available to them.
Not long after Bostock died, Tasmania became a self-governing colony.
With land in Tasmania becoming increasingly scarce by comparison to what
had gone before, most of Bostock’s children became settlers in the newly opened
mainland areas, today in the west of Victoria, and became local worthies.
George Bostock was on the board of trustees of Christ Church in Warrnambool,
Thomas exhibited vegetables at the Warrnambool show, Augustus sat on the
Warrnambool Hospital Board, and youngest brother James manned the Fish
Protection Society. They all donned their whites and turned out for the town
cricket team. They would leave behind large Victorian families; the name
Bostock is today relatively common throughout Australia.2
Without taking anything away from all of that hard work and entrepre-
neurial spirit, it is problematic not to acknowledge another story that lurks be-
neath. Bostock and his children and (white) grandchildren in Australia were
able to use hard work and entrepreneurial spirit to build, sure that their banks
were safe, that their government was to some extent representative, and know-
ing that, provided they did not fall foul of the law, they would be treated as up-
standing men and women. The antislavery impetus that had entrapped Bostock
did not fight against racism but rather increased it, mutating into the dreams of
imperial expansion and economic domination that benefited his descendants.
As scientific racism cut swathes through the later century, they were benefi-
ciaries of its bogus findings. They may have struggled: undoubtedly conditions
for many were very hard. But they were nevertheless always regarded as men
and women capable of progress, while in Sierra Leone Bostock’s former slaves
were considered unable to experience complex emotions. Hoping to find out
more, Surgeon Clarke of the Liberated African Hospital (who actually had
comparatively progressive ideas about Africans’ capabilities) collected forty-
three skulls from Liberated Africans. This happened within the lifetime of
many of Bostock’s freed captives.3
A few decades later, when Fourah Bay College (Tamba’s son’s alma mater)
affiliated with Durham University in the United Kingdom, the London Times
was provoked to enquire whether Durham was thinking next of an alliance
with London Zoo. By the end of the century segregation came to Freetown. Afri-
cans might visit the white community at Hill Station in the day to do cleaning,
gardening, and childcare, but by nightfall they and their deadly diseases were
Epilogue 223

banned. Even those earlier claims of possible civility somewhere down the
decades, if they displayed the requisite signs of progress, were betrayed. By
painful contrast, three of Robert’s children would live to see the federation of
the Australian colonies into one independent country within the British Em-
pire. The new nation declared itself—proudly, stridently—to be a white man’s
country.4
In fact race, and the privileges accorded to those deemed white, very much
mattered in Australia too. While Britons had got behind antislavery en masse,
they “largely shunned” its later incarnation, the Aborigines’ Protection Society,
leaving white men in Australia considerable leeway to act as they saw fit. When
Thelma’s grandfather Robert was born at Eumeralla West in 1850, his father,
George Bostock, and his fellow settlers were in the midst of the Eumeralla Wars
against the Gunditjmara people. The settlers had to be armed even if they were
going only to their own milking shed. George Bostock’s part is unknown, but
his brother-in-law John Cox was part of a group who “opened fire upon the
tolerably large body of blacks,” with Cox recalling, “I distinctly remember
knocking over three blacks, two men and a boy.”5
And so it went on. As Robert Bostock’s sons opened up the territory to the
west of Melbourne, so a few of his grandsons headed north in the great pastoral
boom. In what is today the Northern Territory, grandson George Bostock had
children Peter and Fanny with a Jingili woman named in the records only as
“unknown F/B [full-blood] Aborigine,” and according to the family he had
more children by other Indigenous women. The nature of these relationships is
highly contentious. There is no evidence that Bostock was involved, but near to
his property three white men started a “slavery racket,” kidnapping young
Aboriginal women and girls and selling them to white men for £10 each. Wakaya
men, whose women had been taken, then murdered these slavers. In retaliation,
Bostock’s partner and a gang of other settlers set off to seek revenge. One mem-
ber of the avenging party bragged afterward that “a Wagai [ Wakaya] warrior
bit the dust” for every bone in the dead men’s bodies. Other men did not buy
women but simply kidnapped them, with one writer noting, “Sex with black
women was part of the bushman’s identity.” As elder Riley Young Winpilin
succinctly noted, “White man did big cruel.”6
In 1907, in a time of drought, George Bostock got tired of the “colourless”
life, “absolutely devoid of human interest,” as some anthropologists who met
him wrote, and sailed back to Victoria. But there was a real problem for the chil-
dren he left behind. In 1911, the Commonwealth passed a bill for the Northern
Territory entitled the Aboriginals Ordinance Act. This allowed the authorities
to “remove” mixed-race children from their “full-blood” Aboriginal mothers
224 Epilogue

because under the prevailing mores of the era the children’s “superior” white
genes would somehow be damaged by such mothering. Separation was con-
sidered imperative. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, Aborig-
inal communities posted lookouts to watch for men coming for their children,
sending them into the bush when strangers approached, and even blackening
the paler-skinned ones with boot polish.7
In the 1920s, Dr. Cecil Cook—the “enlightened” chief protector of Ab­
o­rig­ines in the Northern Territory—announced that the solution to mixed-
race people was to “breed them out.” As eugenicist ideas grew, mixed-race
people were considered to be a risk to the country’s development because
“hybridized people are a badly put together people,” a “pathetic, sinister third
race,” or “the sad futureless figure[s] of this lonely land.” By 1931 Cook de-
creed that “all illegitimate half-castes . . . under sixteen years” would be forcibly
institutionalized.8
Those taken away became “semi-enslaved and disenfranchised domestic
and rural workers.” Children were sometimes given new names and even
birthdates, meaning that there was little chance they could ever be reunited
with their family or even trace their ethnic origin. Between one-tenth and one-
third of Australian Indigenous children, principally those of mixed racial heri-
tage, were forcibly removed from their families from 1909 into the 1970s. They
are known as “the stolen generations.”9
George Bostock’s son Peter, born to the unnamed Indigenous woman,
went on to have a daughter named Bessie, who was around ninety years old
when I had the privilege of meeting her in Elliott, in Australia’s Northern Ter-
ritory. She was with her daughter Mona, whom Bessie battled to get back after
Mona was taken away at the age of four to be an “inmate” at St. Mary’s Hostel
in Darwin, some 450 miles away. This was far from Bessie’s only life achieve-
ment. Bessie fought for sixteen years to get an “Aboriginal community living
area of 25 square kilometres [10 square miles]” from some of the land grabbed
from her Jingili ancestors by George Bostock and his mate Harry Bathern to
make Beetaloo Station. Bessie declared proudly to me, “I am a Bostock.” She
was also one of the last of the native Jingili speakers and named her land Jingaloo,
going there for corroborees, where they spoke the old language, performed their
old rites, and sang their own songs.10

While George Bostock was in the Northern Territory, his cousin Augustus
John Bostock had moved to the Tweed River, today on the border between
Epilogue 225

New South Wales and Queensland, and had children with at least one Bund-
jalung woman. In the family memory this relationship was far more freely
entered into than many between Indigenous women and white men, but never-
theless their children and grandchildren were mixed-race in a world that de-
cried being any such thing. They would grow up on missions where they were
supposed to be learning “civilization” and the protestant work ethic, a painful
echo of Britain’s earlier attempts at “improving” and proselytizing to Africans.
Among Augustus John Bostock’s descendants are the Indigenous campaign-
ers Lester, George, and the late Gerry Bostock and renowned artist Euphemia
Bostock. Lester has been Aboriginal elder of the year four times and awarded
an Order of Australia medal; Gerry was among the most prominent Aboriginal
rights activists of his era; George Bostock has fought for recognition of Indige-
nous men who have fought in Australia’s armed services. In Australia, the
name Bostock is perhaps best associated with these Indigenous men and
women who have fought so hard against the ravages of racism.
Shauna Bostock-Smith, George’s youngest daughter, is today writing her
own account of her astonishing family history. Like Bessie Bathern, she too is
very proud of being a Bostock and believes that it is wonderful to have in a way
“reclaimed” their name as a symbol of racial justice. Yet speaking about Indige-
nous history in Australia, she says, “If you think it’s over . . . it’s not over yet. . . .
I wonder if we will ever put it behind us totally.” “The recovery is only starting
now,” she argues, because Australia’s Indigenous people are only just starting
to gain the things that “everybody else takes for granted.”11
None of this is to cast blame on those alive today, to suggest that those—
like Thelma Birrell, and Annette Hurdis, John McQueen’s descendant, who
also kindly spoke to me—whose bloodlines descend from Robert Bostock and
John McQueen are in some way culpable for the deeds of the past. But while
guilt is not transmissible down the generations, power, wealth, opportunity, edu-
cation, social standing, and so much more certainly are, and not to acknowledge
that seems to be acting out the pretense that the actions of Bostock and the thou-
sands of other slave traders have left no mark on our world, or at least none that
stretches to Australia. This is simply not the case.

There are no families in Sierra Leone with the surnames Tamba, Reffell, and
Ball with spare rooms full of genealogical data that trace their origins back to
other nations, or at least none of which I am aware. When I asked about families
named Tamba, I was firmly told that this name is a “native” name and does
 226 Epilogue

Nafisatu Deen, descendant of the Ball family, outside on the land in eastern Freetown where her forebears
lived, 2013. Screen grab from filmed footage in author’s own collection.

not exist in the Krio community, in which many older members still cling
firmly to their British identities. At some point in the past, they suggest, a family
named Tamba would have taken a more Anglo name. As more and more
“native” people were included in the colony of Sierra Leone when the protec-
torate was declared in 1896, the Krio were ever more determined to mark their
difference, and names like Tamba were abandoned.
I had more luck with the Ball family, however. Having spent months tracing
them, I had discovered that while the surname Ball is unknown today in Krio
Freetown, into the 1950s Tom’s descendants had lived on Lucas and Clark
Streets in the east of Freetown. Then Mrs. Cassandra Garber of the Krio De-
scendants’ Yunion kindly invited me to her home to speak to a group of Krio
elders, and a man named Solomon Abiodun Parker remembered something
nobody else had. A well-known Krio family called Sanusi had once had the
surname Ball. The Krio community is small, and a phone number was traced
within minutes. The Sanusis invited me to their home. They were a two-minute
walk away from Lucas Street, around the corner where its east end runs into
Savage Square, still there but with a new surname. Mrs. Raila Sanusi-Ball (as
she afterward asked me to call her) became teary speaking of how her grand-
mother always cried when she related how her own great-grandfather, Tom
Ball (a first name I had not revealed to her), had been a slave.
Epilogue 227

Mrs. Sanusi-Ball went on to tell me of their ties to another family whose

ancestor, as it turns out, was seemingly Yarra (a name they had not known),
once a factory slave owned by John McQueen. I had known that Yarra took
the name John Reffell, but this is one of the most common names in the Krio
community and finding the correct descendants was tricky. Raila Sanusi-Ball
told me, reaching back into the family’s oral genealogy she learned from her
grandmother, that one of Tom Ball’s grandchildren had married one of John
Reffell’s. This then, most likely, was the John Reffell once named Yarra. It is a
connection the two families still hold dear.
Raila also told me that Tom Ball’s grandson Matthew was one of the many
Krio in Sierra Leone who traded with Abeokuta, in what is today Nigeria. In
the late 1830s, some Krio bought a condemned slave ship at auction in Freetown
and sailed to Badagry, in the Gulf of Guinea, determined to spread Liberated
African civilization along the coast. They founded Abeokuta and another town
called Olowogbowo as refuges from the raids and wars that made captives of so
many. By 1840 Abeokuta had a population of almost forty thousand. The de-
scendants of those rescued from Mason and Bostock’s factory fought the trans-
atlantic slave trade just as had their forebears.12
Things have not been easy for the Sanusi-Balls and their compatriots. It
was 1961 when Sierra Leone gained its independence, a sixty-year delay after
Australia that spoke of perceived racial difference. Democracy lasted only a
handful of years before a dictatorship took hold. In 1991 one of the most brutal
civil wars the world has seen swept in from Liberia. In 1997, St. Charles Church
in Regent, once the pride of William Tamba and David Noah, was used as a
sanctuary when the village was attacked. Some of those hiding within its walls,
singing hymns, could easily have been—more than likely were—the descend­
ants of those who arrived aboard HMS Thais and the Princess Charlotte. When
the war was over a decade later, the country had no hospitals, no electricity, no
schools functioning, the biggest percentage of amputees in the world, and a
huge number of former child soldiers and child “bush wives” who were victims
of gang rape, forced drug addictions, and severe mental trauma.
Many feared that Sierra Leone would never recover, questioning how for-
mer child soldiers would grow into peaceful, able adults. Yet the country picked
itself up and carried on. The benchmark of recovery from civil war is the decade
mark: make it there, and a country’s hopes are good. Sierra Leone made it,
peaceful and booming, with elections deemed free and fair. Two short years
beyond that came the Ebola crisis and its resulting severe economic downturn.
Raila Sanusi-Ball, whose face lit up when she told me that the Reffells of
Regent were family—“our grandfathers were cousins”—explained simply,
228 Epilogue

“Everything is struggle for we.” They were the same words Rueben had used
on the banks of the St. Paul River. When we look for the reasons for the struggles
faced by Reuben and Raila Sanusi-Ball today, the transatlantic slave trade may
seem just a whisper behind much more acute sociopolitical challenges. The
sources of Raila’s and her country’s problems might not lead us directly back to
the transatlantic slave trade, but if we stand at the ruins of Hotel Africa and
look out, I believe we can see one of its major tributaries gushing down the
river.
 Acknowledgments

A few colleagues have been involved in this book in unanticipated ways. As

mentioned in the text, Cassandra Pybus told me about Robert Bostock’s house
in Tasmania years ago, inadvertently setting off this project. Kirsten McKenzie
and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart later drove by the house with me, while Clare
Smith was a central part of the fantastic Tasmanian weekend that followed. I
am grateful to all of them for being better friends than I deserve.
Suzanne Schwarz’s part in this story did not make the final cut but is none-
theless a treasured memory. Almost a decade ago, before they became part of a
British Library Endangered Archive project, she and I were both working on
the Liberated African Letterbooks in the Sierra Leone archives. I had been
looking for the arrivals from Bostock’s factory for some time when she came
across them and cheered, calling me over. It is only because of that finding that
any detail about the captives rescued that day could be deduced. Beyond that,
my searches through the interior of Sierra Leone looking for information about
the names was aided first of all by Joe Alie and his suggested connections in
Freetown, and then by the inestimable Lansana “Barmmy Boy” Mansaray. I
would never have found so much, gone so far, nor had nearly so much fun
without Barmmy, and our ever-wonderful driver, Abu Bakr Bah. Barmmy also
saved me much embarrassment by gently pointing out that one of the names
on the Liberated African list, if pronounced in a certain way, is today a very
colorful word in Sierra Leone and nothing I should perhaps be blithely saying
in front of all sorts of chiefs and elders. Suzanne Schwarz also put me in touch
with her former student Denise Jones, who I was lucky enough to meet with
in Liverpool and who shared with me her own research into the Liverpool
Bostocks.
I am grateful to Deirdre Coleman twice over: once for arranging with Starr
Douglas to send me an image from the Cleveland papers, and then again for

229
230 Acknowledgments

having some of David Noah’s letters sent when my university library could not
get them. Beyond that, she has been a faithful supporter of this project and has
welcomed another Australian writing about Sierra Leone. Marilyn Lake has
also provided great encouragement, and Marcus Rediker’s and Joseph Miller’s
words of support have been both very helpful and immensely encouraging. I
am truly grateful. Randy Sparks and an anonymous reviewer for University of
Wisconsin Press provided feedback that much improved the final work. Penny
Russell, Robert Aldrich, and Andrew Fitzmaurice were all astonishingly tolerant
of my frequent absences while they variously occupied the chair of history at
the University of Sydney. Dennis Lloyd at the University of Wisconsin Press has
been supportive of the whole project since first reading the manuscript. Elise
Collie and Sarah Hill both helped immensely with proofreading and providing
feedback. Many thanks to them both.
I’m very thankful I had Oilda Hevia and Jorge Felipe González as research
assistants in Havana. Jorge in particular was the most knowledgeable person
anybody might wish for, and helped re-create the complex events around both
the murder enacted in revenge for the loss of Bostock and Mason’s factory and
the subsequent events aboard the Bella Maria. Manuel Barcia, María del Carmen
Barcia, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, and Marial Iglesias Utset also helped in many
ways with connections and information about the Cuban part of the research.
It was Manuel whom I originally emailed to ask about Liberian legacies in Sierra
Leone because of this story, leading to one wonderful day that he and I drove
out of Havana on what became the first of many trips to the Gangá-Longobá
casa in Perico, Matanzas. That meeting did not prove useful to this project but
set me off on the entirely unexpected journey of making the documentary They
Are We. While that distracted me so much that this book has taken around five
years longer than it would otherwise have done, it is nonetheless something for
which I am exceptionally grateful. I cannot even begin to unpick how differ-
ent my life might be had Manuel and I not visited Perico that day and been
welcomed by the late, great Magdalena “Piyuya” Mora Herrera.
A few people whose ancestors were part of this story have also been very
helpful and gracious. Thelma Birrell, née Bostock, her husband Matt, and her
cousin Les Watters very kindly welcomed me and let me discuss with them the
legacy of their forebear Robert Bostock. Thelma has done a remarkable job
collecting documents and records about the Bostock family in Australia, and I
am very appreciative for her input and willingness to let me use her private
archive. Annette Hurdis, a descendant of John McQueen, generously agreed
to be interviewed about her family history.
Acknowledgments 231

I was lucky enough to meet Shauna Bostock-Smith, along with her husband
Allan Smith and daughter Brenna, through researching this story and am now
lucky enough to call them friends. She is writing her own story of the Bostocks,
focusing on the Indigenous Australians, and I very much look forward to reading
it. I encourage readers to do the same.
In Sierra Leone, Raila Sanusi-Ball poignantly told stories of her ancestor
Tom Ball and put me in touch with Joseph Reffell, apparent descendant of
John Yarra, whose family house still sits near St. Charles Church in Regent.
Paramount Chief Reverend Doris Lenga-Koroma, née Caulker, tried valiantly
to help me discover who Bostock’s Caulker wife had been.
None of this could have happened without the generous funding provided
by the Australian Research Council through the University of Sydney. A five-
year fellowship allowed the research for this project to be completed. I also
benefited immensely from a short-term fellowship at the Gilder Lehrman Center
at Yale University.
As usual, my greatest thanks are for my family. My parents were as end-
lessly supportive and encouraging as ever. I cannot thank them enough for
always believing in me and listening. This book, however, is dedicated not to
them this time but to my husband, Sergio Leyva Seiglie, who helped in an
incalculable number of ways. I am much happier finishing this book, having
him in my life, than I was at its start, many years ago, when I did not. So this is
for him, with love and gratitude.
 Notes

Abbreviations

ANC Archivo Nacional de la República de Cuba

BHPS Bristol [Rhode Island] Historic and Preservation Society
CMS Church Missionary Society
LRO Liverpool Record Office
NASL National Archives, Sierra Leone
NSWSRA New South Wales State Records’ Authority
RAC Royal African Corps
TNA UK The National Archives, United Kingdom
WIR West India Regiment

Prologue

1. Rodney D. Sieh, “Feuding over Liberia’s Debts: Ghosts of OAU ’79 in 2011
Political Play,” www.focusonliberia.wordpress.com/2010/07/05.
2. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, This Child Will Be Great: Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa’s
First Woman President (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Helene Cooper, The House at
Sugar Beach: In Search of a Lost African Childhood (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008),
145; obituary, President W. Tolbert, Times (London), 14 April 1980, 17.
3. Peter Beaumont, “How a Tyrant’s Logs of War Bring Terror to West Africa,”
The Observer (London), 27 May 2001.
4. Visiting a few years later, George Robertson implied that Bostock and Mason’s
factory had been at Providence Island, but this must be wrong. The original agreement
Bostock and Mason signed was to construct a factory at “St Pauls Monserada”; the
Thais’s captains’ and masters’ logbooks report that his factories were on the banks of the
St. Paul River, as do Bostock’s own letters, the Fénix records, and the court documents.
G. A Robertson, Notes on Africa: Particularly Those Parts Which Are Situated between Cape Verd
and the River Congo (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1819), 34; letter to Robert

233
234 Notes to Pages 7–10

Bostick, “Africa. Gallinas. Slavery. Sierra Leone. Letter, 1813,” www.worthpoint.com

/worthopedia/africa-gallinas-slavery-sierra-leone-letter (as at April 2010); Special
Court of Oyer and Terminer, and Gaol Delivery Held at Freetown on the 22nd Day of
July 1813, Robert Bostock vs. Edward Scobell, TS 11/826/2732, The National Archives,
UK (hereafter TNA UK); “Appeal No. 983, Captured Ship: Phoenix,” HCA
42/488/983, TNA UK; “King vs. Robert Bostock and John MacQueen,” ADM 1/1647,
TNA UK; captains’ logs, HMS Thais, ADM 51/291451/2914, TNA UK; masters’ logs,
HMS Thais, ADM 52/3462, TNA UK.

Introduction

1. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK; Liberated

African Letterbooks, National Archives of Sierra Leone (hereafter NASL).
2. Evidence of Tom Ball in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732,
TNA UK.
3. Maria Louisa Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley; or, The Church in Regent’s
Town, West Africa (London: Seeley, Jackson and Halliday, 1856), 189; Robert Benton
Seeley, A Memoir of the Reverend W. A. B. Johnson (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers,
1853), 245.
4. William Tamba journal in William Tamba, Original Papers—Missionaries,
Church Missionary Society archive (hereafter William Tamba papers, CMS).
5. The term factory historically meant a place where “factors”—merchants—
worked and was widely used for slave trading enterprises. It does not imply any actual
production was carried on there.
6. Slave barracks, from the Spanish barracón and the Portuguese barracão.
7. Norman Robert Bennett and George E. Brooks, eds., New England Merchants in
Africa: A History through Documents, 1802–1965 (Boston: Boston University Press, 1965),
86–87.
8. Interviews with the author, recorded interviews in author’s collection, Voinjama,
Balahun, and Foya, Liberia, 2010 and 2013; Liberated African Letterbooks NASL;
“Register of Disposal of Captured Negroes,” CO 267/38, TNA UK.
9. Evidence of Lawrence Summers, in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS
11/826/2732, TNA UK.
10. Liberated African Letterbooks, NASL; “Register of Disposal of Captured
Negroes,” CO 267/38; David Eltis, “Welfare Trends among the Yoruba in the Early
Nineteenth Century: The Anthropometric Evidence,” Journal of Economic History 50, no. 3
(September 1990): 521–40; Gareth Austin, Joerg Baten, and Bas Van Leeuwen, “The
Biological Standard of Living in Early Nineteenth-Century West Africa: New Anthro-
pometric Evidence for Northern Ghana and Burkina Faso,” Economic History Review (26
September 2011): 1–23.
11. Eya was very likely Aiah, the third-born son of Kissi and Kono women. Sarae
was really Sarwae, a Kru child. Famai’s name is more difficult to pin down definitively.
Notes to Pages 10–14 235

I have decided to use the names as rendered by the British in order to facilitate discus-
sion of who these people were, with the exception of the men named “Boy” by the
British—really Boi—since this is pejorative and can be reasonably clearly attributed as
Mende.
12. This paragraph is based on the oral evidence of their hometowns and villages.
Interviews in author’s collection.
13. Kenneth Little, The Mende of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Routledge, 1951), 221–23; Sylvia
Ardyn Boone, Radiance from the Waters: Ideas of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 129–32; George Schwab, Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland
(Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, 1947), 306–7. Evidence regarding Bostock and
McQueen’s physical appearance is in Pardon, 4/4472, pp. 9–11, New South Wales State
Records’ Authority (hereafter NSWSRA).
14. The higher figure, in today’s prices, would be approximately a quarter of a
million dollars in real terms, or more than six million dollars in income value.
15. Evidence of Tarra/Yarra (see below) in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer,
TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK; Slave Trade Cases, Admiralty Miscellanea, ADM 7/606,
TNA UK; Evidence of Brodie in George Cook vs. George William Maxwell, TS
11/823/2712, TNA UK. The main evidence given in 1813 is by a man whose name is
written as Tarra, but since nobody gave the name Tarra when they arrived into Freetown
and the stories overlap, I have assumed that they were one person and not two.
16. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press), 351; “Evidence of Thomas Lovekine,” in Special Court of Oyer and
Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
17. Helmut Tuerk, Reflections on the Contemporary Law of the Sea (Leiden: Martinus
Nijhoff, 2012), 74; Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK;
“King vs. Robert Bostock and John MacQueen,” in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer,
and Gaol Delivery Held at Freetown 22 July 1813, enclosed in George Collier to John
Wilson Cook, Letters of Captains, ADM 1/1674, TNA UK; Liberated African Letter-
books, NASL.
18. Entry for 25 June 1813, captains’ logs, HMS Thais, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK.
19. Brantz Mayer, Captain Canot; or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver (New York:
Appleton, 1854), 94.
20. Sessay is a common name throughout the region and popular among the
Mende. Za, spelled Saa or Sahr, is the name given to firstborn sons in Kono and Kissi.
21. Journal of Rev. S. Mills in The Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser, 19 August
1820.
22. Henry Louis Gates, Faces of America: How Twelve Extraordinary People Discovered
Their Pasts (New York: New York University Press, 2010), 7.
23. This is an ongoing debate. The major works remain Eric Williams, Capitalism
and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Seymour Drescher,
Econocide: British Slavery in the Era of Abolition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1977), and more recently books such as Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told:
236 Notes to Pages 14–18

Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), and Sven
Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).
24. Nathan Nunn, “The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades,” Quarterly
Journal of Economics 123, no. 1 (February 2008): 139–76; Nathan Nunn and Leonard
Wantchekon, “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa,” National Bureau
of Economic Research Working Paper Series, no. 14783, March 2009.
25. Gad J. Heuman and James Walvin, “General Introduction,” in Heuman and
Walvin, eds., The Slavery Reader, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2003), 8; Herbert S. Klein,
The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 138–39; Baptist,
The Half Has Never Been Told, xxiii; Barbara L. Solow, “Capitalism and Slavery in the
Exceedingly Long Run,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17, no. 4 (Spring 1987): 711–37.
26. William Hague tells us what Wilberforce ate for breakfast in William Wilberforce:
The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (San Diego: Harcourt, 2008), 7.
27. Randy J. Sparks, Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives across the Atlantic
World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1, 3–4.
28. Philip R. Misevich, “The Origins of Slaves Leaving the Upper Guinea Coast,”
in David Eltis and David Richardson, eds., Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Trans-
atlantic Slave Trade Database (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 157.
29. Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), xiii–xv; and more generally on historical
silences Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston:
Beacon Press, 2015), 26–27.
30. General Notices, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 7 December 1833,
2; Sydney Quarter Sessions, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 1 February 1834,
2; Law Intelligence, Sydney Quarter Sessions, The Sydney Herald, 3 February 1834, 1;
Tamba journal, March–June 1821, William Tamba papers, CMS; David Noah to
Church Missionary Society, “Journal of a Trip to Bassa Country,” in David Noah,
Original Papers—Missionaries, David Noah, Church Missionary Society archive (here-
after David Noah Papers, CMS).
31. There was a boy named William Tamba who was sent to school in Clapham,
England, in the early years of the nineteenth century. This seems a strange coincidence
but likely not more than that: the boy in England was listed as the son of “Pa Tamba,
trader at Bullom,” a different history altogether to the William Tamba from Bostock’s.
Tamba is an extremely common name in the region, as every second-born Kono and
Kissi boy’s name as, of course, was William in the nineteenth century Anglo-sphere.
William Tamba, rescued from Bostock and Mason, was apparently taught to write by
Augustine Johnson, and it is very unlikely that Johnson would not have mentioned it if
he had known that Tamba visited England at some point. The possibility that Tamba
was feigning a slave past among the Liberated Africans remains, of course, but I have
found no evidence to suggest that. See Bruce L. Mouser, “African Academy—Clapham,
1799–1806,” History of Education 33, no. 1 ( January 2004): 87–103.
32. For a broader understanding of antislavery and racism, see Richard Huzzey,
Notes to Pages 23–25 237

Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2012), 6, 185.

Chapter 1.  Son of a Liver pool Slave Dealer

1. Quoted in Ray Costello, Black Salt: Seafarers of African Descent on British Ships (Liver-
pool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 11; Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress
and Accomplishments of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade (London: John W. Parker, 1839),
375–77; Richard Brooke, Liverpool as It Was during the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century:
1775–1800 (Liverpool: J. Mawdsley and Son, 1853), 37; Jon Stobart, “Culture versus
Commerce: Societies and Spaces for Elites in Eighteenth-Century Liverpool,” Journal of
Historical Geography 28, no. 4 (October 2002): 471–85.
2. Kenneth Morgan, “Liverpool’s Dominance in the British Slave Trade, 1740–
1807,” in David Richardson, Anthony Tibbles, and Suzanne Schwarz, eds., Liverpool and
Transatlantic Slavery (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 14–20; Gore’s Liverpool
Directory 1790.
3. Gomer Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque (1897; repr.,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 598.
4. Denise M. Jones, “The Business Organisation of the Liverpool Slave Trade in
the Eighteenth Century: A Case Study of Robert Bostock” (master’s thesis, University of
Liverpool, 2006), 11–12; Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, www.slavevoyages
.org, voyage numbers #91581, #92478, #80587; Williams, Liverpool Privateers, 234–35;
“Sales of 307 Slaves Import’d in the Ship Bloom,” 1:123, Robert Bostock Letterbooks,
387 MD 54–55, Liverpool Record Office (hereafter LRO).
5. Bickerton Papers, 942 BIC 1, LRO; Richard B. Sheridan, “The Guinea Surgeons
on the Middle Passage: The Provision of Medical Services in the British Slave Trade,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies 14, no. 4 (1981): 601–25; W. N. Boog Watson,
“The Guinea Trade and Some of Its Surgeons,” Journal of the Royal College of Surgeons 14
(1969): 203–14; Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730–1807
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 33–34, 39.
6. Thomas Winterbottom, An Account of the Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra
Leone (London: John Hatchard, 1803), 137; Anna-Maria Falconbridge, Two Voyages to
Sierra Leone during the Years 1791–2–3 (London: printed for the author, 1794), letter 8;
George E. Brooks, Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious
Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003),
299; Linda Day, “Afro-British Integration on the Sherbro Coast, 1665–1795,” Africana
Research Bulletin 12, no. 3 (1982): 82–107, 92; A. P. Kup, Sierra Leone: A Concise History
(Devon: David and Charles, 1975), 103; Imodale Caulker-Burnett, The Caulkers of Sierra
Leone (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2010), 56; Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea
Coast, 1545–1800 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 220; G. R. Collier, Sir
Charles MacCarthy, et al., West African Sketches (London: L. B. Seeley and Son, 1829),
137–38.
238 Notes to Pages 25–28

7. Elizabeth Cleveland’s story is told in Sparks, Africans in the Old South, chapter 1,
quote on 12. On racial designations see Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories
of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2000); Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the 18th
Century (London: Routledge, 2003); Colin Kidd, “Ethnicity in the British Atlantic World,
1688–1830,” in Kathleen Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity
in Britain and Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Dror
Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth- Century England
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
8. G. E. Brooks, Eurafricans, 299; C. B. Wadström, An Essay on Colonization (London:
printed for the author, 1795), 2:15. James’s half-brother John Cleveland apparently had
a somewhat more humane reputation: Sparks, Africans in the Old South, 22.
9. For example, Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America
(Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1930–35), 4:497–99; Richard Drake, Revelations
of a Slave Smuggler (New York: R. M. DeWitt, 1860), 200; William Smith, A New Voyage to
Guinea (London: John Nourse, 1745), 213, 251; Nicholas Owen, Journal of a Slave-Dealer
(London: G. Routledge, 1930), 85; Nathaniel Uring, A History of the Voyages and Travels of
Captain Nathaniel Uring (1726; repr., London: C. Cassell, 1928), 97; John Newton, Journal
of a Slave Trader, 1750–1754, edited by Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell (London:
Epworth Press, 1962), 15, 23–24, 37, 68, 76–79, 88.
10. D. M. Jones, “Case Study of Robert Bostock,” 58–59; Robert Bostock to James
Cleveland, 10 August 1789, vol. 2, 23; 13 November 1789, vol. 2, 52; 20 January 1790,
vol. 2, 68; and 9 June 1790, vol. 2, 94; all in 387 MD 54–55, LRO. There is little evidence
that Cleveland did name a son Robert, but he may have been the son that Adam Afzelius
mentioned in 1795 as being “a boy of 6 years” who owned three slaves; Adam Afzelius,
Sierra Leone Journal, 1795–6 (Uppsala: Almqvist und Wiksell, 1967), 8.
11. Robert Bostock to James Cleveland, 6 May 1790, vol. 2, 90, 387 MD 54–55, LRO.
12. D. M. Jones, “Case Study of Robert Bostock,” 58–59; Kenneth Morgan,
“James Rogers and the Bristol Slave Trade,” Historical Research 76, no. 192 (May 2003):
189–216; Robert Bostock to James Cleveland, 10 August 1789, vol. 2, 23, 387 MD 54–55,
LRO; Voyages, slavevoyages.org, #82173.
13. David Pope, “The Wealth and Social Aspirations of Liverpool’s Slave Mer-
chants of the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” in Richardson, Tibbles, and
Schwarz, Liverpool and Transatlantic Slavery, 168–80, 208; Brooke, Liverpool as It Was, 253;
Robert Bostock to James Fryer, 25 July 1790, vol. 2, 109, 387 MD 54–55, LRO; D. M.
Jones, “Case Study of Robert Bostock,” 38.
14. The equivalent of approximately £129,000 or US $207,000 today, although
many times even this in the “prestige” value of the sum.
15. Afzelius, Sierra Leone Journal, 9; Morgan, “James Rogers,” 199; S. G. Checkland,
“Economic Attitudes in Liverpool,” Economic History Review 5, no. 1 (1952): 59; Robert
Bostock to William Cleveland, 16 August 1791, vol. 2, 138, 387 MD 54–55, LRO.
16. Much has been written on this subject. I have drawn especially on Kenneth
Notes to Pages 29–31 239

Morgan’s account in Slavery and the British Empire: From Africa to America (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007). See also Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British
Mobilization in a Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987).
17. Francis E. Hyde, Bradbury B. Parkinson, and Sheila Marriner, “The Port of
Liverpool and the Crisis of 1793,” Economica 18 (November 1951): 363–78; Kenneth
Morgan, “James Rogers,” 189–216; Paul Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth
Century: An Outline of the Beginnings of the Modern Factory System in England (London: Rutledge,
2006), 254.
18. Thelma Birrell, Mariners, Merchants—Then Pioneers (self-published), 8.
19. Vere Langford Oliver, The History of the Island of Antigua (Antigua: Mitchell and
Hughes, 1894), vol. 1, letter 10.
20. Averil Mackenzie-Grieve, The Last Years of the English Slave Trade, 1750–1807
(London: Frank Cass, 1941, 1968), 69; Voyages, slavevoyages.org, #82274; David R.
Green and Alastair Owens, “Gentlewomanly Capitalism? Spinsters, Widows, and
Wealth Holding in England and Wales, c. 1800–1860,” Economic History Review 56, no. 3
(August 2003): 510–63; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and
Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2002), 283–84;
Birrell, Mariners, Merchants, 13, 16.
21. Birrell, Merchants, Mariners, 7, 13, 17; Bostock Letterbooks, vol. 2, 165, and vol. 2,
168, 387 MD 54–55, LRO. I am unsure who the “Mr Bostock” at the Rio Nunez was, if
any relative. See Bruce Mouser, “The Nunez Affair,” Académie Royale des Sciences to
D’Outre Mer (1973–74): 697–98, at http://www.tubmaninstitute.ca/sites/default/files
/file/Nunez_Affair.pdf (accessed October 2017). At the helm of one of the vessels leaving
Liverpool was Captain John Roach, the man who would eventually cause Bostock’s
downfall, but I have not found any evidence that it was Roach’s ship that Bostock sailed
aboard. See Muster of the John, Registry of Shipping and Seamen, Agreements and
Crew lists, Series 1, BT 98/62, TNA UK.
22. D. M. Jones, “Case Study of Robert Bostock,” 39.

Chapter 2.  A Kissi Child Caught in the Slave Trade

1. George W. Harley, “Notes on the Poro in Liberia,” Papers of the Peabody Museum
19 (Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum, 1941); Caroline Bledsoe, “Political Uses of
Sande Ideology,” American Ethnologist 11, no. 3 (August 1984): 455–72; Richard M. Fulton,
“The Political Structures and Functions of the Poro in Kpelle Society,” American Anthro-
pology 74, no. 5 (1972): 1218–33.
2. Sahr John Yambasu, Between Africa and the West: A Story of Discovery (Bloomington,
IN: Trafford, 2013), 18; Elwood D. Dunn, Amos J. Beyan, and Carl Patrick Burrowes,
Historical Dictionary of Liberia (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 1995), 270–72. There is
much controversy about the extent to which rice cultivation techniques, like those of the
Kissi, were transferred to the Americas by bondsmen and women. Useful starting points
in this discussion can be found in Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice
240 Notes to Pages 31–34

Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), and for a
different viewpoint, David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson, “Agency and
Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation
in the Americas,” American Historical Review 112, no. 5 (December 2007): 1329–58.
3. Harley, “Notes on the Poro”; Bledsoe, “Political Uses of Sande,” 457; Fulton,
“Poro in Kpelle Society.”
4. Alexander Gordon Laing, Travels in the Timannee, Kooranko, and Soolima Countries in
Western Africa (London: John Murray, 1825), 327–28.
5. Rodney, Upper Guinea Coast, 255.
6. Dunn, Beyan, and Burrowes, Historical Dictionary, 270–72.
7. Kenneth C. Wylie, “Fountainheads of the Niger: Researching a Multiethnic
Regional History,” in John P. Henderson and Harry A. Reed, eds., Studies in the African
Diaspora: A Memorial to James R. Hooker (Dover, MA: Majority Press, 1989); P. E. H. Hair,
“An Account of the Liberian Hinterland c. 1780,” Sierra Leone Studies 16 (1962): 218–26.
8. Djibril Tamsir Niane, “The War of the Mulattos (1860–1880): A Case of Resist­
ance to the Slave Trade on the Rio Pongo,” Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire 3, no. 3
(Summer 2001): 117; Sylviane Diouf, “Devils or Sorcerers, Muslims or Studs: Manding
in the Americas,” in Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman, eds., Trans-Atlantic Dimen-
sions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora (London: Continuum, 2003), 139–57, 141; Sylvester
Corker and Samuel Massaquoi, Lofa Count in Historical Perspective (n.p. [1972?]), 1–2, 3, 6,
10; Nester H. Duncan, Family Life in Lofa County, Liberia (n.p. [1970?]), 1:8–9; Laing, Travels,
280–81.
9. James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing and the Intellectual History of the
Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 33; Charles Piot,
“Of Slaves and the Gift: Kabre Sale of Kin during the Era of the Slave Trade,” Journal of
African History 37, no. 1 (1996): 31–49; Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, Slaves to
Racism: An Unbroken Chain from America to Liberia (New York: Algora, 2008), 77; Benjamin
G. Dennis, The Gbandes: A People of the Liberian Hinterland (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1972),
135, 143.
10. Michael F. Kallon, Idols with Tears (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2005), 19,
26; E. Dora Earthy, “The Impact of Mohammedanism on Paganism in the Liberian
Hinterland,” Numen 2, no. 3 (1955): 206–16; Boone, Radiance, 8–9; Kenneth Little, The
Mende of Sierra Leone: West African People in Transition (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 1967),
217–26; Kenneth Little, “The Function of Medicine in Mende Society,” Man 48, no. 142
(1948): 127–30; Corker and Massaquoi, Lofa County, 30–33; Dennis, Gbande, 6, 88.
11. Harley, “Notes on the Poro,” 8.
12. Michael D. Jackson, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relatedness, Religiosity, and the
Real (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 10; Michael D. Jackson, Life within
Limits: Well-Being in a World of Want (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 160.
13. Kumba Kemusu Solleh, The Damby Tradition of the Kono People of Sierra Leone, West
Africa (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2011), 96–97.
14. F. W. Butt-Thompson, West African Secret Societies (London: H. F. Witherby,
1929), 148–49; Daniel Flinkinger Wilberforce, Sherbro and the Sherbros; or, A Native African’s
Notes to Pages 34–38 241

Account of History Country and People (1886; repr., Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2010), 16–
17; Schwab, Tribes, 212–13.
15. Elizabeth Tonkin, “Jealousy Names, Civilised Names: Anthroponomy of the
Jlao Kru of Liberia,” Man 15, no. 4 (December 1980): 653–64; Gordon Innes, “A Note
on Mende and Kono Personal Names,” Sierra Leone Language Review 5 (1966): 34–38;
Kumba Kemusu Solleh, Kono Gold or Koine Gold: Onomastics, the Human Naming Tradition
(Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2009); E. Ralph Langley, “The Kono People of Sierra
Leone: Their Clans and Names,” Africa 5, no. 1 (1932): 61–67; Julie F. Nemer, “Phono-
logical Stereotypes and Names in Temne,” Language in Society 16 (1987): 341–52, 341.
16. Harley, “Notes on the Poro,” 7, 13; Ruth B. Phillips, “Masking in Sande Mende
Initiation Rituals,” Africa 48, no. 3 (1978): 265–77.
17. Harley, “Notes on the Poro,” 7, 13; Corker and Massaquoi, Lofa County, 15;
Winterbottom, Account, 136; M. C. Jedrej, “Structural Aspects of a West African Secret
Society,” Ethnologische Zeitschrift 1 (1982): 133–42; Bledsoe, “Political Uses of Sande Ideol-
ogy,” 455–72.
18. Mark Hanna Watkins, “West African Bush School,” American Journal of Sociology
48, no. 6 (May 1943): 666–75; Little, “Function of Medicine,” 129–30; Bledsoe, “Political
Uses of Sande Ideology,” 457; Phillips, “Masking in Sande”; Boone, Radiance, 52; Butt-
Thompson, West African Secret Societies, 126.
19. Harley, “Notes on the Poro,” 10, 14–15; F. W. H. Migeod, “Some Observations
on the Physical Characteristics of the Mende Nation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Society 49 (1919): 270; F. W. H. Migeod, A View of Sierra Leone (London: Kegan Paul, 1926),
236–38; Schwab, Tribes, 23, 118; Little, Mende, 119–20; Dennis, Slaves to Racism, 93.
20. Butt-Thompson, West African Secret Societies, 148–49; Boone, Radiance, 63; Phillips,
“Masking in Mende,” 267; Innes, “Mende and Kono,” 37; V. R. Dorjahn, “Initiation of
Temne Poro Officials,” Man 61 (February 1961): 36–40; Watkins, “West African Bush
School,” 666–75; Winterbottom, Account, 135; Wilberforce, Sherbro, 16–17; Michael A.
Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial
and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 97; Butt-
Thompson, West African Secret Societies, 148–49.
21. Bledsoe, “Political Uses,” 457; Fulton, “Poro in Kpelle Society.”
22. Boone, Radiance, 15, notes that Bassa women at one point joined the Sande society
en masse, and Harley, “Notes on the Poro,” states that among the Kru the Poro “exists
in a somewhat modified form,” 6, 17.
23. Liberated African Letterbooks, NASL.
24. Ibid.

Chapter 3.  The Banana Islands to Gallinas

1. No record exists of Bostock in the Banana Islands. This account is adapted from
F. Harrison Rankin, White Man’s Grave: A Visit to Sierra Leone in 1834 (London: Richard
Bentley, 1836), ch. 15, and James Boyle, A Practical Medico-Historical Account of the Western
Coast of Africa (London: S. Highley, 1831), 64–69.
242 Notes to Pages 38–42

2. Caulker-Burnett, Caulkers, 58–61; Deirdre Coleman, ed., Maiden Voyages and Infant
Colonies: Two Women’s Travel Narratives of the 1790s (London: Leicester University Press,
1999), 101; Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 81;
Third Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting on the 25th
of March, 1809 (London: J. Hatchard, 1814), 44.
3. Evidence of Yarra/John Reffell, in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS
11/826/2732, TNA UK; Mayer, Captain Canot, 110.
4. Mayer, Captain Canot, 115–18; Deirdre Coleman, Romantic Colonization and British
Anti-Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 33.
5. Mayer, Captain Canot, 112–14.
6. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
7. Henry Caswell, Martyr of the Rio Pongas (London: Rivingtons, 1857), 114.
8. John Newton, The Select Works of the Rev. John Newton (Edinburgh: Peter Brown
and Thomas Nelson, 1831), 13.
9. G. Tucker Childs, A Grammar of Kisi: A South Atlantic Language (Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, 1995), 333; John J. Grace, “Slavery and Emancipation among the Mende in
Sierra Leone, 1896–1928,” in Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, eds., Slavery in Africa:
Historical and Anthropological Perspectives (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977),
418–19; Gustavus Reinhold Nyländer, Grammar and Vocabulary of the Bullom (London:
Church Missionary Society, 1814), 10.
10. The same geographical factors led to slave traffic increasing in this era further
north in Rio Nunez and Rio Pongo. See Kenneth G. Kelly and Elhadj Ibrahima Fall,
“Employing Archaeology to (Dis)entangle the Nineteenth-Century Illegal Slave Trade
on the Rio Pongo, Guinea,” Atlantic Studies 12, no. 3 (2015): 317–35.
11. Testimonies of John McQueen and Robert Bostock in Special Court of Oyer
and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
12. Thomas Norman DeWolf, Inheriting the Trade (Boston: Beacon Press, 2008), 45;
Matthew E. Mason, “Slavery Overshadowed: Congress Debates Prohibiting Atlantic
Slave Trade to the United States, 1806–1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 21, no. 1 (Spring
2000): 59–81.
13. Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted,
Prolonged and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005), 111; “Bills for the
Misses D’Wolf,” vol. 1, 1821, D’Wolf Papers, Baker Library, Harvard University.
14. Box 2, folders 3, 4, 18, 41, D’Wolf Papers, Bristol, Rhode Island, Historic and
Preservation Society (hereafter BHPS); Bruce L. Mouser, “Trade, Coasters and Conflict
in the Rio Pongo from 1790 to 1808,” Journal of African History 14 (1973): 45–63; Voyages,
slavevoyages.org, #36849, #36840.
15. Box 9, folder 19, D’Wolf Papers, BHPS; George Howe, Mount Hope: A New
England Chronicle (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 101; Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle:
Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1981), 145.
16. Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York:
Notes to Pages 42–46 243

Simon and Schuster, 1997), 545, unnumbered note; Calbraith Bourn Perry, Charles
D’Wolf of Guadaloupe, His Ancestors and Descendants (New York: T. A. Wright, 1902), 27–29;
Farrow, Lang, and Frank, Complicity, 111.
17. Howe, Mount Hope, 107; Mark A. DeWolfe Howe, Bristol, Rhode Island: A Town
Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1930), 13.
18. Testimony of Robert Bostock in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TNA
TS 11/826, TNA UK.
19. Individual Petition: Elizabeth Bostock and John MacQueen, HO 17/1 f. 1,
TNA UK.
20. Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 168.
21. Testimony of Malcolm Brodie and George Cook in George Cook vs. Charles
William Maxwell, TS 11/823/2712, TNA UK; Jane Landers, Atlantic Creoles in the Age of
Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 129; Daniel L. Schafer,
“Family Ties That Bind: Anglo-African Slave Traders in Africa and Florida, John Fraser
and His Descendants,” Slavery and Abolition 20, no. 3 (1999): 1–21; Drake, Revelations of a
Slave Smuggler, 18, 46–48; Mouser, “Trade, Coasters, and Conflict.”
22. Drake, Revelations of a Slave Smuggler, 18, 46–48; Mayer, Captain Canot, 95.
23. Canot, Revelations, 70.
24. Louisa Smith to Lydia S. Fales, 13 July 1806, Fales Family Papers, John Hay
Library, Brown University, Providence, RI; Voyages, slavevoyages.org, #36883; adver-
tisements, Charleston City Gazette, 10 and 17 July 1807; “Ship News,” Charleston City Gazette,
19 February 1807 and 15 July 1807; Svend Einar Holsoe, “The Cassava-Leaf People:
An Ethnohistorical Study of the Vai People with a Particular Emphasis on the Tewo
Chiefdom” (PhD diss., Boston University, 1967), 120; Sixth Report of the Directors African
Institution, Read at the General Meeting on 25th March 1812 (London: J. Hatchard, 1812), 148–
49; Collier et al., West African Sketches, 152–55; Loren Schweninger, ed., The Southern Debate
over Slavery, vol. 2 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 84–87; Howe, Mount Hope,
124–25.
25. Legajo 44, Num. 3, Consulado 3572, Archivo Nacional de la República Cuba
(hereafter ANC); Index to New England Naturalization Petitions, 1791–1906, M1299,
39, National Archives and Records Administration.

Chapter 4.  Making Deals with Siaka, Selling to the DeWolfs

1. J. F. Ade Ajayi and B. O. ÓOlÓoruntimÓehin, “West Africa in the Anti-Slave Trade

Era,” in John E. Flint, ed., The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. 5, C. 1790—c. 1870 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 200–201.
2. See Emma Christopher, “‘The Slave Trade Is Merciful Compared to [ This]’:
Slave Traders, Convict Transportation, and the Abolitionists,” in Emma Christopher,
Cassandra Pybus, and Marcus Rediker, eds., Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and
the Making of the Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
244 Notes to Pages 47–50

3. Mason was possibly working for, or allied with, the DeWolfs, though this is not
entirely clear in the extant records.
4. Collier et al., West African Sketches, 109–12; James Sidbury, Becoming African in
America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press,
2007), 171–72; Kevin G. Lowther, African American Odyssey of John Kizell (Charleston: Uni-
versity of South Carolina Press, 2013).
5. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone; Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and
the American Revolution (London: BBC Books, 2005); Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Free-
dom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston: Beacon
Press, 2006); Stephen J. Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and
the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786–1791 (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 1994); Alexander X. Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-
Century British Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010);
Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York:
Knopf Doubleday, 2012).
6. Granville Sharp, “A Letter on the Formation of a New Settlement at Sierra
Leone,” 13 October 1788, from Papers of Thomas Clarkson, Huntington Library, San
Marino, CA; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 97.
7. Jeremy D. Popkin, “Race, Slavery, and the French and Haitian Revolutions,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 1 (Fall 2003): 113–22.
8. A Portuguese slaver was reported to have sailed from Bostock and Mason’s
factory just before the arrival of the Kitty. On Portuguese ships at this part of the coast
see Daniel B. Dominguez da Silva, “The Atlantic Slave Trade to Maranhão, 1680–
1846: Volume, Roots and Organization,” Slavery and Abolition 29, no. 4 (2008): 477–501.
9. Svend E. Holsoe, “Slavery and Economic Responses among the Vai,” in Miers
and Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, 293–94; Tara Helfman, “The Court of Vice-Admiralty at
Sierra Leone and the Abolition of the West African Slave Trade,” Yale Law Journal 115,
no. 5 (March 2006): 1124–56; Maxwell to Bathurst, 12 June 1813, Letters from Secretaries
of State, ADM 1/4226, TNA UK.
10. Beverly Malin, “The Illegal Slave Trade, as Practiced by the De Wolf Family of
Bristol, Rhode Island, 1790–1825” (master’s thesis, Brown University, December 1975),
23; Voyages, slavevoyages.org, #36928, #36889.
11. Voyages, slavevoyages.org, #36927, #7539, #7541, #7521, #7542, #7543; Thomas
Perronet Thompson Papers, 1809, DTH/1/11, University of Hull, UK.
12. Sir George Collier to Admiralty, 13 January 1820, Letters from Captains, ADM
1/1674, TNA UK; “Captain George Howland’s Voyage to West Africa, 1816–1817,” in
Bennett and Brooks, New England Merchants, 90–91.
13. Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, “The Initial ‘Crisis of Adaption’: The
Impact of British Abolition on the Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa, 1808–1820,” in
Robin Law, ed., From Slave Trade to “Legitimate” Commerce: The Commercial Transition in
Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 32–33.
14. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of
Notes to Pages 50–52 245

America, 1638–1870 (New York: Longmans, Green, 1896), 102, 112–15; Charles Clarke of
the Little Watt, 27 January 1808, DeWolf Papers, Box 3, Folder 19a, BHPS; Hugh
Thomas, Cuba: A History (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 85–87.
15. Third Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 14; Thomas Perronet Thompson
Papers, DTH 1/39, University of Hull; Fourth Report of the Directors of the African Institution,
Read at the Annual General Meeting on the 28th of March, 1810 (London: J. Hatchard, 1814),
2–3; Fifth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting on the
27th of March, 1811 (London: J. Hatchard, 1811), 2.
16. “Edward Henry Columbine (1763–1811),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography;
Fourth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 8–9; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 105;
Voyage to Africa in the ship Crocodile, 20 December 1809–2 March 1811, E. H. Columbine
Papers, University of Chicago.
17. Anon., Extracts from the Report of the Commissioners Appointed for Investigating the State
of the Settlements and Governments on the Coast of Africa (London: printed for the House of
Commons, 1812), 101; Voyages, slavevoyages.org, #7551; Juan Luciano Franco, Comercio
Clandestino de Esclavos (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1985), 144–46, 154;
[First] Report of the Committee of the African Institution, vol. 6, 107–9. For evidence that this
ship was trading with Bostock, see the letter to Robert Bostock, “Africa. Gallinas. Slavery.
Sierra Leone. Letter, 1813,” http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/africa-galli
nas-slavery-sierra-leone-letter (accessed April 2010).
18. Collier et al., West African Sketches, 109–12; Sidbury, Becoming African in America,
171–72; Lowther, African American Odyssey, 179.
19. Diary entry for 13 August 1810, EH Columbine Papers; Collier et al., West African
Sketches, 112–17; Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK;
Donnan, Documents Illustrative, 2:658.
20. Thomas Fowell Buxton, African Slave Trade and Its Remedy (London: John Murray,
1811), 229; Second Report of the Committee of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General
Meeting on the 25th of March, 1808 (London: J. Hatchard, 1812), 22.
21. Djibril Tasmir Niane, “Africa’s Understanding of the Slave Trade: Oral Ac-
counts,” Diogenes 45, no. 75 (1997): 84–85.
22. Benjamin N. Lawrance, Amistad’s Orphans: An Atlantic Story of Children, Slavery, and
Smuggling (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), especially 7, 46.
23. Based on interviews in Gbande country and surrounding areas that a great
many names on the Liberated African Letterbook list for those rescued from Bostock
suggest a village or a close network of villages. Liberated African Letterbooks, NASL;
Voyages, slavevoyages.org; Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 134.
24. David Dalby, “Banta and Mabanta,” Sierra Leone Language Review 2 (1963): 23–25;
Schwab, Tribes, 29.
25. Holsoe, “Slavery and Economic Responses among the Vai,” in Miers and
Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa, 293–95; Migeod, Sierra Leone, 145–46; Svend E. Holsoe, “The
Condo Federation in Western Liberia,” Liberian Historical Review 3 (August 1966): 1–28;
246 Notes to Pages 53–55

Robert Selig Leopold, “Prescriptive Alliance and Ritual Collaboration in Loma Society”
(PhD diss., Indiana University, 1991), 19–21.
26. Sixth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 149–50; Adam Jones, From Slaves
to Palm Kernels: A History of the Galinhas Country, 1730–1890 (Wiesbaden: A. Schröder, 1983),
56–61, 65; “Captain George Howland’s Voyage, 1816–1817,” in Bennett and Brooks,
New England Merchants, 88; “Captain George Howland’s Voyage to West Africa, 1822–
1823,” in Bennett and Brooks, New England Merchants, 109; Collier, West African Sketches,
152–53. Mattier was possibly the “Boakei Kpana Matia” who sold an engraved ivory
trumpet to a sea captain in 1826. It is now in the Peabody Museum at Harvard: see
Adam Jones, “White Roots: Written and Oral Testimony of the ‘First’ Mr Rogers,”
History in Africa 10 (1983): 151–62; Fredrick Lamp, “Ancient Wood Figures from Sierra
Leone: Implications for Historical Reconstruction,” African Arts 23, no. 2 (April 1990): 50.
27. Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place: The Fate of Britain’s Convicts after the American
Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 315.
28. “Robert Bostock Documents Concerning the Slave Trade,” James Marshall
and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
Yale University (hereafter Robert Bostock Documents, Beinecke Library); A. Jones,
Slaves to Palm Kernels, 28–31. The deed states that it would be at “the point of ” Bance
Island, Gallinas, and for obvious reasons this has led some to assume that the factory
was at the well-known Bance Island, the notorious slave trading fortress of a slightly
earlier era in the Sierra Leone River. Yet November of 1813 was rather too late to be
slave trading there, and the local “chiefs” who signed the document—who logically
must have had control over the land on which it was to be established—ruled in Gallinas.
Tom Ball also named the place as Gallinas, and even the agreement itself states that the
location was Gallinas River. While “Gallinas River” was an ambiguous term in 1810, at
least to non-African visitors, since it was used for both the Kerefe and the Moa Rivers,
both of these were far away from the Sierra Leone River where Bunce Island is located.
See A. Jones, Slaves to Palm Kernels, 2.
29. The writing closely resembles that taught in American schools in this era and is
very different to that of Robert Bostock. See George Fisher, The Instructor, or American
Young Man’s Best Companion Containing Spelling, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetick (Worcester:
Isaiah Thomas, 1786); Tamara Plakins Thornton, Handwriting in America: A Cultural History
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 12, 20–21.
30. J. J. Crooks, A History of the Colony of Sierra Leone, Western Africa (1903; repr., London:
Frank Cass, 1972), 87, quoted in Lowther, Odyssey, 179.

Chapter 5.  A Cargo of Slaves for Havana

1. Copy of an Agreement between Bostock and Mason, in Special Court of Oyer

and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK. Conceivably, the man left behind was
Crawford, who would sell slaves from Gallinas to the NS Das Delores in 1813 and who
was said to have been delighted, hugging the sailors, after the murder of John Roach.
Notes to Pages 56–59 247

2. Junta de Fomento, Leg. 86, Exp. 3506, ANC; Edward H Columbine, Voyage to
Africa in the ship Crocodile, 20 December 1809–2 March 1811, Columbine Papers; Vice
Admiralty Proceedings, Sierra Leone, HCA 49/97 f. 12, TNA UK; Vice Admiralty
Court Returns, Sierra Leone, HCA 49/101, TNA UK; Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and
Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Long-
mans, 1940), 61.
3. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK; MacCarthy
to Bathurst, 15 September 1815, CO 267/40, TNA UK; American State Papers, Foreign
Relations, 5:105; Bruce L. Mouser, American Colony on the Rio Pongo: The War of 1812, the Slave
Trade, and the Proposed Settlement of African Americans, 1810–1830 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World
Press, 2013), 64.
4. Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main (London: Chapman and
Hall, 1860), 149; Robert Francis Jameson, Letters from the Havana: During the Year 1820
(London: John Miller, 1821), 58–60.
5. Jameson, Letters from the Havana, 58–60; Manuel Moreno Fraginals, The Sugarmill:
The Socioeconomic Complex of Sugar in Cuba, 1760–1860 (New York: Monthly Review Press,
1976, 2008), 73; Manuel Barcia, The Great Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom
in Matanzas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), 33; diary entry for 21
August 1810, Columbine Papers; Warwickhistory.com, General George D’Wolf (accessed
29 May 2014).
6. David R. Murray, Odious Commerce: Britain, Spain and the Abolition of the Cuban Slave
Trade (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 17–19; Manuel Barcia, “Sugar,
Slavery and Bourgeoisie: The Emergence of the Cuban Sugar Industry,” in Ulbe
Bosma, Juan Giusti-Cordero, and G. Roger Knight, eds., Sugarlandia Revisited: Sugar and
Colonialism in Asia and the Americas, 1800–1940 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 153;
Matt D. Childs, 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 9, 37, 49; Louis A. Pérez, Cuba: Between
Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), ix; Laird W. Bergad, Fe
Iglesias García, and María del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880 (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 26; Robin Moore, Nationalizing Blackness:
Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1997), 16.
7. Jameson, Letters from the Havana, 60.
8. G. Aguirre Beltran, “The Rivers of Guinea,” Journal of Negro History 31, no. 3
(1946): 290–316, 305. There are numerous other possible explanations for this name, but
I am yet to be convinced that any of them are more compelling.
9. Pérez, Cuba, 105; Bergad, García, and Barcia, Cuban Slave Market, 73–75.
10. Leonard Marques, “Slave Trading in a New World: The Strategies of North
American Slave Traders in the Age of Abolition,” Journal of the Early Republic 32, no. 2
(Summer 2012); Thomas, Cuba, 161; Trollope, West Indies, 136.
11. Marques, “Slave Trading”; Wilfred H. Munro, The History of Bristol, R.I. (Provi-
dence: J. A. and R. A. Reid, 1880), 323; Lemuel C Richmond, Bristol, to Spalding,
248 Notes to Pages 59–65

Cuba, 16 December 1822, Edward Spalding Papers, Otto G. Richter Library, the Uni-
versity of Miami. The other serious contender is Antonio Escoto of Havana. See Tribunal
de Comercio, Legajo 161, Exp. 17, ANC.
12. Howe, Mount Hope, 129–30, 202–5. Howe claims that the Rambler was one of the
three ships, but at its capture in 1813 it was still listed as belonging to James DeWolf. See
Prize Papers, Rambler, HCA 32/1308, TNA UK.
13. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826, TNA UK.
14. A Correspondent, “Slave-Trade Felony Act,” Times (London), 20 June 1811.

Chapter 6.  A New Slave Factor y at the St. Paul River

1. Mayer, Captain Canot, 420–21; Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS

11/826/2732, TNA UK.
2. Ephraim Bacon, Abstract of a Journal Kept by E. Bacon, Assistant Agent of the United
States, to Africa (Philadelphia: Clark and Raser, 1822), 13–14; Jehudi Ashmun, A Memoir of
the Exertions and Sufferings of the American Colonists Connected with the Occupation of Cape Mont-
serado: Embracing the Particular History of the Colony of Liberia from December 1821 to 1823 (Wash-
ington, DC: Way and Gideon, 1826), 7, unnumbered note; Evidence of John Sterling
Mill in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK; Samuel
Abraham Walker, The Church of England Mission in Sierra Leone (London: Seeley, Burnside
and Seeley, 1847), 235.
3. Svend E. Holsoe, “A Study of Relations between Settlers and Indigenous Peoples
in Western Liberia, 1821–1847,” African Historical Studies 4, no. 2 (1971): 331–62; Sixth
Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 110; Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS
11/826/2732, TNA UK; Tim Hetherington, Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold (New
York: Umbrage Editions, 2009), 10.
4. Allen M. Howard, “Nineteenth-Century Coastal Slave Trading and the British
Abolition Campaign in Sierra Leone,” Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 1 (April 2006): 23–49;
Bruce J. Mouser, “Îles de Los as Bulking Center in the Slave Trade, 1750–1800,” Revue
Français d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 83, no. 313 (1996): 77–91; Philip Misevich, “On the Frontier
of ‘Freedom’: Abolition and the Transformation of Atlantic Commerce in Southern
Sierra Leone, 1790s to 1860” (PhD diss., Emory University, 2009), 56, 179–80; Ernest
Obadele-Starks, Freebooters and Smugglers: The Foreign Slave Trade in the United States after
1808 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), 6–8; Ted Maris-Wolf, “‘Of
Blood and Treasure’: Recaptive Africans and the Politics of Slave Trade Suppression,”
Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 1 (March 2014): 54.
5. “Colony of Liberia,” Times (London), 23 November 1840, 3; Mayer, Captain
Canot, 333, 357.
6. Captain Denman’s Trial, Gallinas, ADM 7/605, TNA UK; Slave Factories at
Gallinas, 1840, TS 18/58, TNA UK; Liberation of Slaves by HMS Alert at Gallinas, TS
18/60, TNA UK.
Notes to Pages 65–70 249

7. Testimony of William Salter Saunders in George Cook vs. George William

Maxwell, TS 11/823/2712, TNA UK; Kelly and Fall, “Employing Archaeology”; Infor-
mation re the Claims of George Cook, Foreign Office Correspondence, Spain, FO
72/182 f. 81, TNA UK; Bruce L. Mouser, “Women Slavers of Guinea Conakry,” in
Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, eds., Women and Slavers in Africa (Portsmouth,
NH: Heinemann, 1997), 326.
8. Captain Denman’s Trial, Gallinas, ADM 7/605, TNA UK; Slave Factories at
Gallinas, 1840, TS 18/58, TNA UK; Liberation of Slaves by HMS Alert at Gallinas, TS
18/60, TNA UK; Kelly and Fall, “Employing Archaeology”; Sidney De La Rue, Land of
the Pepper Bird: Liberia (New York: Putnam, 1930), 210–11.
9. Information re the Claims of George Cook, Foreign Office Correspondence,
Spain, FO 72/182 f. 81, TNA UK.
10. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
11. Testimony of José Cabez in Appeal No. 15: Ntra. Sra. De los Dolores, HCA
42/488/982, TNA UK; Testimony of Yarra/John Reffell in Special Court of Oyer and
Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK; Mayer, Captain Canot, 76–77.
12. Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior of Africa (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black,
1858), 159–60, 278.
13. Samuel Abraham Walker, Missions in Western Africa among the Soosoos, Bulloms &c.
(Dublin: William Curry, 1845), 43; A. Jones, Slaves to Palm Kernels, 46; interviews at
Blama, Sierra Leone, March 2010.
14. Testimony of Lawrence Summers in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS
11/826/2732, TNA UK.
15. Interrogation of Jesse Porter of the Penel, Thomas Perronet Thompson Papers,
DTH/1/42; Edinburgh Review, or the Critical Journal 21 (February–July 1813): 76. The spelling
is variously given as Penel, Pennel, or occasionally Penelope.
16. Anon., The Trials of the Slave Traders: Samuel Samo, Joseph Peters and William Tufft
(London: Sherwood, Neeley and Jones, 1813), 22.
17. “The Trials of the Slave Traders . . . ,” Edinburgh Review, or the Critical Journal 21
(February–July 1813): 72–93.
18. Anon., Trials of the Slave Traders; George Cook vs. George William Maxwell, TS
11/823/2712, TNA UK; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 120–22; “Notice: Charles Hickson,
deceased,” Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser, 11 July 1818; Emily Haslam, “Redemp-
tion, Colonialism and International Criminal Law: The Nineteenth Century Slave-
Trading Trials of Samuel Samo and Peters,” in Diane Kirkby, ed., Past Law, Present
Histories (Canberra: ANU Press, 2012), 7–22.
19. “Trials of the Slave Traders . . . ,” 80; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 120; Anon.,
Trials of the Slave Traders; Haslam, “Redemption, Colonialism,” 13–14.
20. Testimony of Tom Ball in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS
11/826/2732, TNA UK.
21. Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making
250 Notes to Pages 70–75

of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 169–70; Eliga
H. Gould, “The Wars of 1812,” Journal of the Early American Republic 34, no. 1 (Spring
2014): 109–14.
22. Greg H. Williams, The French Assault on American Shipping, 1793–1813: A History and
Comprehensive Record of Merchant Marine Losses ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009).
23. Scobell to Crocker, 18 March 1813, and Scobell to Croker, 24 April 1813, ADM
1/2536, TNA UK; Navy Board Head Money, 1813, ADM 43/64, TNA UK; captains’
logs, HMS Thais, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK; Munro, History of Bristol, 311; Eighth Report of
the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting on the 23rd of March,
1813 (London: J. Hatchard, 1814), 15–16; Voyages, slavevoyages.org, #36848, #36880,
#36915; Papers of the Rambler, HCA 32/1308, TNA UK; Robert Bostock Documents,
Beinecke Library.

Chapter 7.  In the Bar racoon

1. William E. Allen, “Liberia and the Atlantic World: Convergence and Effects,”
History in Africa 37, no. 1 (2010): 7–49.
2. David Noah’s Speech at the Anniversary of the [illegible] at Kissey, 1824, David
Noah Papers, CMS; Seeley, Memoir, 198–99.
3. David Noah’s Speech; Seeley, Memoir, 198–99; S. A. Walker, Church of England
Mission, 234–35.
4. Testimony of Lawrence Summers in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS
11/826/2732, TNA UK.
5. Schwab, Tribes, 93, 253; Liberated African Letterbooks, NASL.
6. William D. Piersen, “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, Depression, and
Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide among New Slaves,” Journal of Negro History 62, no. 2
(April 1977): 147–59; John Thornton, “Witches, Cannibals and Slave Traders in the
Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 60, no. 2 (April 2003): 273–94; James H.
Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 162; Costello, Black Salt, 13;
W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997), 57. See Rosalind Shaw’s remarkable book Memories of
the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002), especially 3, 55, 62–64, 93, 231, for how such ideas played out
among the Temne, and Gomez, and Exchanging Our Country Marks, 146–48, on how similar
ideas may have influenced West Central Africans.
7. Robert T. Parsons, Religion in an African Society (Leiden: Brill, 1964), 161; Little,
Mende, 221–23; Boone, Radiance, 129–32; Henry John Drewal, “Mami Wata: Arts for
Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas,” African Arts 41, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 60–83;
Alex van Stipriaan, “Watramama/Mami Wata: Three Centuries of Creolization of a
Water Spirit in West Africa, Suriname and Europe,” Matatu 27/28 (2003): 323–37.
8. Schwab, Tribes, 306–7.
Notes to Pages 75–80 251

9. David W. Blight, “If You Don’t Tell It Like It Was, It Can Never Be As It Ought
to Be,” in James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, eds., Slavery and Public History: The
Tough Stuff of American Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 27.
10. See Paul E. Lovejoy, “Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on Africa: A Review
of the Literature,” Journal of African History 30, no. 3 (1989): 365–94; Judith Hyde and
Kevin Bales, “Physical and Mental Health Aspects of Rehabilitating Children Freed
from Slavery,” Free the Slaves, Washington, DC, final draft submitted to the U.S.
Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, 12 May 2006; Sweet, Re­
creating Africa, 69; Liberated African Letterbooks, NASL.
11. Niane, “Africa’s Understanding,” 45, 75–90; A. Jones, Slaves to Palm Kernels,
51; Sharman Apt Russell, Hunger: An Unnatural History (New York: Perseus, 2005), 99–100,
114.
12. Earthy, “Impact”; Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage
from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 58–60,
140–41.
13. Holsoe, “Slavery,” 291; Kup, Sierra Leone, 95; Dennis, Gbandes, 14.
14. Benjamin Samuel Ngovo, “The Bandi of North Western Liberia: A Study of
Continuity and Change in Bandi Society to 1964” (PhD diss., Western Michigan Uni-
versity, 2011), 57–59, 87; interviews in Voinjama, Kolahun, and Foya, Liberia, 2010.
15. Diouf, “Devils or Sorcerers,” 146; Rodney, Upper Guinea Coast, 110–12; Benjamin
Anderson, Journey to Musardu (New York: S. W. Green, 1870), 109.
16. Liberated African Letterbooks, NASL; Duncan, Family Life, 1:20; Kallon, Idols
with Tears, 109; Parsons, Religion, 46; Langley, “Kono,” 61–67.
17. Interview Kenema, Sierra Leone, 2010.
18. Interviews in Kolahun, Liberia, 2009; Kailahun, 2010 and 2012; Guékédou,
Guinea, February 2010.
19. Innes, “Mende and Kono,” 36.
20. William P. Murphy, “The Sublime Dance of Mende Politics: An African Aes-
thetic of Charismatic Power,” American Ethnologist 25, no. 4 (November 1998): 563–82.
21. Boone, Radiance, 97, 176–77, 181.
22. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, 99–100; Margaret Washington Creel, A
Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (New York: New York
University Press, 1989); Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery
and Freedom (New York: Penguin, 2013), 134; Butt-Thompson, West African Secret Societies,
138; They Are We (documentary), directed and produced by Emma Christopher (New
York: Icarus Films, 2014).

Chapter 8.  The Slave Ship Fénix and

Setting the Factor y Alight

1. Junta de Fomento, Leg. 86, Exp. 3506, ANC; Appeal No. 15: Ntra. Sra. De los
Dolores, HCA 42/488/982, TNA UK.
252 Notes to Pages 80–86

2. Junta de Fomento, Leg. 86, Exp. 3506, ANC; Du Bois, Suppression, 104; Sixth
Report of the Directors of the African Institution; Lowther, Odyssey, 171.
3. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
4. Bill of Lading of the Phoenix, HCA 42/488/983, TNA UK; letter from Bostock to
William Young of Charleston, www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/slavery-africa-south-
carolina-shipping-bill (accessed 14 March 2017).
5. Voyages, slavevoyages.org, #80768, #80838, #82039, #82040.
6. “Case of the Amelia,” Sixth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 36, 40–41;
Voyages, slavevoyages.org, #7659; Anon., “Hints for Improving the Colony of Sierra
Leone,” The Philanthropist, or Repository for Hints and Suggestions Calculated to Promote the Com-
fort and Happiness of Man (London: Longman, 1812), 2:41–56; Lowther, Odyssey, 198 and
268, note 64.
7. Case of the San José Triunfo: Jeremiah Vernice, Jeremiah Vernice of the Island of Saint
Thomas, Merchant, Claimant of the Cargo, as the property of Juan Bailey, of the island of Puerto Rico . . .
(London, 1812); Voyages, slavevoyages.org, #7577; Robert Thorpe, A Letter to William
Wilberforce, ESQ, MP, Vice President of the African Institution . . . (London: Law and Gilbert,
1815), 57–59.
8. Appeal No. 15: Ntra. Sra. De los Dolores, HCA 42/488/982, TNA UK.
9. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732 TNA UK; King vs.
Robert Bostock and John MacQueen, 1813, Letters from Captains, ADM 1/1674, TNA
UK; Liberated African Letterbooks, NASL.
10. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
11. Robert Bostock Documents, Beinecke Library.
12. Ibid.
13. Entry for 8 June 1813, captains’ logs, HMS Thais, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK.
The two ships might actually have already spoken two days earlier.
14. Entries for 4 May and 5 June 1813, captains’ logs, HMS Thais, ADM 51/2914,
TNA UK; Sancreed Church Tombstone; Information re the claims of George Cook,
Foreign Office Correspondence, Spain, FO 72/182 f. 79, TNA UK; Order of the Admi-
ralty, W. Dennett, Joseph Yorke and Walpole to Edward Scobell, 5 October 1811,
George Cook vs. George William Maxwell, TS 11/832/2712, TNA UK; John Burke, A
Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland (London:
Henry Coulburn, 1847), 2:1197–98.
15. “Boys of the Third Class” and “Supernumeraries for Wages,” Admiralty Ships’
Muster: Thais, ADM 37/3341, TNA UK; Maxwell to Bathurst, 12 June 1813, CO
267/36, TNA UK; Maxwell to Bathurst, 12 June 1813, Letters from Secretaries of State,
ADM 1/4226, TNA UK.
16. Maxwell to Bathurst, 12 March 1813, CO 267/36, TNA UK; Maxwell to
Bathurst, 16 March 1813, and enclosed in letter from JW Croker to Admiralty, 30 August
1813, Letters from Secretaries of State, ADM 1/4226, TNA UK.
17. Testimony of Edward Scobell in George Cook vs. George William Maxwell,
TS 11/832/2712, TNA UK; Liberated African Letterbooks, NASL.
Notes to Pages 87–98 253

18. Scobell to Croker, 18 March 1813, ADM 1/2536, TNA UK.

19. Paul Jolly to Colonial Office, 25 April 1813, CO 267/37, TNA UK; Appeal no.
680, Captured Ship Juan, HCA 42/455/680, TNA UK.
20. Entry for 25 June 1813, captains’ logs, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK; Special Court
of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732.
21. Entry for Friday 25 June 1813, captains’ logs, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK; entry
for same date, masters’ logs, ADM 52/4362, TNA UK.
22. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
23. Seeley, Memoirs, 198–99.
24. Entry for 26 June 1812, captains’ logs, HMS Thais, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK;
Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
25. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.

Chapter 9.  Leaving, Never to Return

1. Bruce L. Mouser, “Trade and Politics in the Nunez and Pongo Rivers, 1790–
1865” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1971), 105–6.
2. David Noah’s Speech; S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 235.
3. Evidence of Lawrence Summers, Yarra/John Reffell, Mill and Hayes in Special
Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK; entry for 1 July 1813, captains’
logs, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK.
4. Evidence of Mill and Hayes, Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS
11/826/2732, TNA UK.
5. Entry for 2 July 1813, captains’ logs, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK.
6. Seeley, Memoirs, 198–99; Nicholas Parry received thirty-six lashes of the cat-o’-
nine-tails for saying that he would be “bugger’d before he would go in the boat” to fetch
slaves, entry for 2 July 1813, captains’ logs, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK; Olaudah Equiano,
The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (London: printed for the
author, 1794), 48–49.
7. Entry for 2 July 1813, captains’ logs, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK.
8. Entry for 4 July 1813, captains’ logs, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK.

Chapter 10.  Ar riving in Freetown

1. William Brown died from his injuries on 27 June 1813, captains’ logs, ADM
51/2914, TNA UK.
2. Testimony of Edward Scobell, Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS
11/826/2732, TNA UK.
3. Mayer, Captain Canot, 357.
4. Thomas Coke, An Interesting Narrative of a Mission Sent to Sierra Leone, in Africa, by the
Methodists, in 1811 (London: printed for the author, 1812), 39; Mary Church, Sierra Leone;
or, The Liberated Africans, in a Series of Letters from a Young Lady to Her Sister in 1833 and 34
254 Notes to Pages 99–105

(London: Longman, 1835), 29; Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the
East, Twenty-First Year: 1820–1821 (London: L. B. Seeley, 1821), 240.
5. Bolster, Black Jacks, 49–50.
6. George S. Brooks Jr., “A View of Sierra Leone ca. 1815,” Sierra Leone Studies 4,
nos. 13–14 (1960): 24–31, 30.
7. African Herald, 25 November 1809.
8. Misevich, “Origins of Slaves,” 157; John Peterson, Province of Freedom: A History of
Sierra Leone, 1787–1870 (London: Faber, 1969), 187.
9. Liberated African Letterbooks, NASL.
10. Ibid.; Leonard, Records of a Voyage, 57–58; interviews with Joseph Tugbah-
Manneh and Chief Tuleh Davis, 1 March 2011, Kroo Town, Sierra Leone. A witness in
the 1812 case of Joseph Peters had also, however, given his name as Tom Krooman, see
Anon., Trials of the Slave Traders, 42.
11. Another Liberated African girl, Emily Augusta Gason, some years younger
than this one, also gave her ethnicity as “Bassa Kroo.” See Silke Strickrodt, “African
Girls’ Samplers from Mission Schools in Sierra Leone (1820s to 1840s),” History in Africa
37 (2010): 189–245, 206; interview with Kru Chief Tuleh Davis, who clarified: “It is from
these people that all these people came from who went on the slave expeditions, who are
manning the slave ships, from that seaside.”
12. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 98, 110; evidence of George Clarke, Special Court of
Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
13. Akintola Wyse, The Krio: An Interpretive History (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1989), 4; Hannah Kilham, Memoir of the Late Hannah Kilham, Chiefly Compiled from Her
Journal (London: Darton and Harvey, 1837), 328; F. A. J. Utting, The Story of Sierra Leone
(London: Longmans and Green, 1931), 117; S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission,
xxxiv.
14. H. J. Ricketts, Narrative of the Ashantee War: With a View of the Present State of the
Colony of Sierra Leone (London: W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 1833), 218; Proceedings of the
Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, Twenty-Second Year: 1821–1822 (London: L. B.
Seeley, 1822), 63–64.
15. Sixteenth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting
on the 10th of May, 1822 (London: J. Hatchard, 1822), 346.
16. Evidence of R. Clarke, Assistant Surgeon at Sierra Leone, quoted in S. A.
Walker, Church of England Mission, xxxiv; “Register of Disposal of Captured Negroes,”
CO 267/38, TNA UK.

Chapter 11.  The Court Case

1. Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting
on the 12th of April, 1815 (London: J. Hatchard, 1815), 55; Anon., Trials of the Slave Traders,
42–48; Emily Haslam, “Silences in International Criminal Legal Histories and the
Construction of the Victim Subject of International Criminal Law,” in Christine
Notes to Pages 106–110 255

Schwöbel, ed., Critical Approaches to International Criminal Law: An Introduction (London:

Routledge, 2014), 181–95.
2. Haslam, “Silences,” 13.
3. Testimony of Tarra/Yarra, Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS
11/826/2732, TNA UK.
4. Testimony of Tom Ball, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
5. Vice Admiralty Proceedings, Sierra Leone, HCA 49/97, f. 9, 85, TNA UK; A
Lover of Truth to The Editor, Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser, 30 May 1818, 1–2;
Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 134; Sheldon H. Harris, “An American’s Impressions of
Sierra Leone,” Journal of Negro History 47, no. 1 ( January 1962): 35–41; Robert Purdie,
Decretal [sic] of Sentence, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
6. G. S. Brooks, “View of Sierra Leone,” 30.
7. Testimony of Robert Bostock, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK; “King vs. Robert
Bostock and John MacQueen,” 1813, in Letters from Captains, ADM 1/1674, TNA UK.
8. 31 December 1809–2 March 1811, part 2 of 3, p. 162, Columbine Papers; Vice
Admiralty Proceedings, Sierra Leone, HCA 49/97 f. 9, f. 85, TNA UK; An Account of All
Sums of Money Paid or Claimed under the Acts Passed for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, or under
Any Orders in Council, as Bounties for Slaves or Natives of Africa, Condemned in Any Court of Vice
Admiralty Navy Office, 28th June 1817 (London: printed for the House of Commons, 1817).
9. Fyfe, Sierra Leone, 99.
10. Bruce L. Mouser, “The Trial of Samuel Samo and the Trading Syndicates of
the Rio Pongo, 1797 to 1812,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 46, no. 3
(2013): 423–41; Haslam, “Redemption, Colonialism,” 15–16.
11. Anon., Trials of the Slave Traders, 20, 33–35, 39.
12. Mouser, American Colony, 70–71; Purdie to Maxwell, 1 July 1813, CO 267/36,
TNA UK.
13. Tara Helfman, “The Court of the Vice-Admiralty at Sierra Leone and the
Abolition of the West African Slave Trade,” Yale Law Journal 115, no. 5 (March 2006):
1133; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 115; Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution,
Read at the Annual General Meeting on the 12th of April, 1815 (London: J. Hatchard, 1815), 109–
10, 154–55; Maxwell to Bathurst, 16 March 1813, CO 267/36, TNA UK; Dr. Thorpe’s
Case, 1815–1827, CO 267/88, TNA UK.
14. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK; Iain Whyte,
Zachary Macaulay, 1768–1838: The Steadfast Scot in the British Anti-Slavery Movement (Liver-
pool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 209–10; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 68, 74, 92, 115.
15. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 140, 144, 177, 205, 319; James W. St. G. Walker, The
Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (New
York: Africana, 1976), 273; Mavis C. Campbell, Back to Africa: George Ross & the Maroons
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1993), 31; Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A
History (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997), 77; Suzanne Schwarz, “Re-
constructing the Life Histories of Liberated Africans: Sierra Leone in the Early Nine-
teenth Century,” History in Africa 39 ( January 2012): 175–207.
256 Notes to Pages 110–115

16. Augustus Ferryman Mockler-Ferryman, British West Africa: Its Rise and Progress
(London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1900), 30–31.
17. Haslam, “Redemption, Colonialism,” 13–14; Haslam, “Silences”; P. E. H.
Hair, “Africanisms: The Freetown Contribution,” Modern African Studies Review 5, no. 4
(1967): 531–32.
18. Evidence of Tom Ball in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732,
TNA UK; Haslam, “Silences.”
19. Testimony of John Sterling Mill and Philippa Hayes in Special Court of Oyer
and Terminer, TNA TS 11/832, TNA UK.
20. Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 98–99.
21. Mouser, American Colony, 82–83.
22. By some accounts there were two children already aboard the Fénix at the time
of its capture. However, the crew recalled only one slave, and Za alone was entered
onto the Liberated African list at Freetown.
23. “Register of Disposal of Captured Negroes,” CO 267/38, TNA UK.

Chapter 12.  Becoming Soldiers, Cabin Boys, and Wives

1. Leonard, Records of a Voyage, 143.

2. Maeve Ryan, “‘A Most Promising Field for Future Usefulness’: The Church
Missionary Society and the Liberated Africans of Sierra Leone,” in William Mulligan
and Maurice Bric, eds., A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 37–39, 42–43; Helfman, “Court of Vice-Admiralty,”
1122.
3. Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 144–45; Journals of the House of
Commons, 69:860; Joseph Marryatt, Thoughts on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and the Civili-
zation of Africa (London: JM Richardson and J. Ridgway, 1816); Marcus Wood, The
Horrible Gift of Western Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Representation of Emancipation (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2010), 14; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 114–15.
4. African Herald, 25 November 1809, 2 December 1809; Special Report of the Directors
of the African Institution, 49–54; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 106, 143.
5. Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 54; Michael J. Turner, “The
Limits of Abolition: Government, Saints and the ‘Africa Question,’ c. 1780–1820,” English
Historical Review 112, no. 446 (1997): 319–57; Peterson, Province of Freedom, 51–54.
6. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 107; African Herald, 18 November 1809.
7. Samuel Swan’s “Journal of a Voyage along the West African Coast, 1815–16,” in
Bennett and Brooks, New England Merchants, 72–73.
8. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 116; Coke, Interesting Narrative, 35–36, 40; Utting, Story
of Sierra Leone, 119.
9. “Register of Disposal of Captured Negroes,” CO 267/38, TNA UK; Michael
Banton, West African City: A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1970), 16; T. R. Griffiths, “On the Races Inhabiting Sierra Leone,” Journal of the
Notes to Pages 115–119 257

Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 16 (1887): 300–310; Coke, Interesting Narra-
tive, 44–45; Harris, “American’s Impressions,” 35–41.
10. A. B. C. Sibthorpe, A History of Sierra Leone (London: Cass, 1970), 23; F. Harrison
Rankin, “A Visit to Sierra Leone, in 1834,” Carey’s Library of Choice Literature, no. 41, part
2 (2 July 1836): 276–349 (Philadelphia: L. E. Carey & A. Hart; Leonard, Records of a
Voyage, 55–56.
11. Ricketts, Narrative of the Ashantee War, 196.
12. “Register of Disposal of Captured Negroes,” CO 267/38, TNA UK; Fyfe, History
of Sierra Leone, 118, 146.
13. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 115; Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution,
112–13; “Register of Disposal of Captured Negroes,” CO 267/38, TNA UK.
14. Rankin, White Man’s Grave, 2:107.
15. A. B. Ellis, History of the First West India Regiment (London: Chapman and Hall,
1885), 16–19. See also Rankin, White Man’s Grave, 2:112; [First] Report of the Committee of the
African Institution, Read to the Annual General Meeting on the 15th of July, 1807 (London: J.
Hatchard, 1811), 43; Coke, Interesting Narrative, 42; Equiano, Interesting Life, 48–49.
16. Quoted in Ryan, “‘Most Promising Field,’” 39; Arthur T. Porter, Creoledom: A
Study in Freetown Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 37; J. J. Crooks, History of
Sierra Leone, Western Africa (London: Browne and Nolan, 1903; repr., London: Frank
Cass, 1972), 87; Peterson, Province of Freedom, 58; Order of the Admiralty, W. Dennett,
Joseph Yorke and Walpole to Edward Scobell, 5 October 1811.
17. Kevin Linch, Britain and Wellington’s Army: Recruitment, Society and Tradition, 1807–
15 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 31–33; Coke, Interesting Narrative, 41.
18. African Repository and Colonial Journal 7 (1831–32): 364.
19. Linch, Britain and Wellington’s Army, 145.
20. Rankin, White Man’s Grave, 2:107; Robert Thorpe, A Reply “Point by Point” to the
Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution (London: F. C. and J. Rivington, 1815),
84; A. B. Ellis, History.
21. Liberated African Letterbooks, NASL; Register of Disposal of Captured
Negroes, CO 267/38, TNA UK; Recruiting Accompt of a Detachment of the Royal
Africa Regiment of Infantry, WO 12/10344 and WO 12/10345, TNA UK.
22. S. C. Ukpabi, “West Indian Troops and the Defence of British West Africa in
the Nineteenth Century,” African Studies Review 17, no. 1 (1974): 133–50; Brian Dyde, The
Empty Sleeve: The Story of the West India Regiments of the British Army (St. Johns, Antigua:
Hansib, 1997), 32; R. J. Wingfield to Col. Torrens, 18 November 1811, reprinted in
Miscellaneous Accounts and Papers, vol. 10, 7 January–30 July 1812 (n.p.: preserved in the
Bodleian Library, 1812), 113; Wingfield to War Office, Journals of the House of Commons,
69:856, 860.
23. Captain J. F. Napier Hewett, European Settlements on the West Coast of Africa, with
Remarks on the Slave-Trade and the Supply of Cotton (1862; repr., New York: Negro Universities
Press, 1969), 87–89.
24. Coleman, Maiden Voyages, 57–58; Butt-Thompson, Sierra Leone, 146.
258 Notes to Pages 120–125

25. David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British
Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–2, 190–
91; Coleman, Romantic Colonization, 50; Dyde, Empty Sleeve, 31.
26. Ninth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting
on the 12th of April, 1815 (London: J. Hatchard, 1815), 54; Anon., Trials of the Slave Traders.
27. Rene Chartrand, British Forces in the West Indies, 1793–1815 (London: Osprey,
1996), 33.
28. Dyde, Empty Sleeve, 30–31.
29. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 119.
30. Christopher Fyfe, “The Foundation of Freetown,” in Christopher Fyfe and
Eldred D. Jones, eds., Freetown: A Symposium (Freetown: Sierra Leone University Press,
1968), 1–8; A Lover of Truth, “Letter to the Editor,” Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser,
30 May 1818, 1–2; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 134; Harris, “American’s Impressions,”
35–41; Francis B. Spilsbury, Account of a Voyage to the Western Coast of Africa (London: Richard
Phillips, 1807), 29; Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 21.
31. Thorpe, Reply “Point by Point,” 84; G. S. Brooks, “View of Sierra Leone,” 25–31;
Leonard, Records of a Voyage, 47; “Register of Disposal of Captured Negroes,” CO
267/38; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 62.
32. Mrs. E. H. Melville, A Residence at Sierra Leone (1849; repr., London: Frank Cass,
1968), 39; C. H. Fyfe, “A View of Freetown, Sierra Leone,” Journal of Sierra Leone Studies 1
(2016): 26–27.
33. Theresa A. Singleton, “Slavery and Spatial Dialectics on Cuban Coffee Planta-
tions,” World Archaeology 33, no. 1 (2001): 98–114.
34. Fourth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting
on the 28th of March, 1810 (London: J. Hatchard, 1814), 65–68; “Register of Disposal of
Captured Negroes,” CO 267/38, TNA UK; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 130–31.
35. Sibthorpe, History of Sierra Leone, 38; Crooks, History of Sierra Leone, 131–32;
Leonard, Records of a Voyage, 87; Rankin, White Man’s Grave, 2:107–8, 125.
36. Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, Twenty-Fourth Year:
1823–1824 (London: L. B. Seeley, 1824), 1823–24, 226.

Chapter 13.  Leaving Africa

1. Evidence of George Clarke, Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS

11/826/2732.
2. Entry for 15 May 1813, captains’ logs, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK; quoted in
Costello, Black Salt, 41–42.
3. Scobell to JW Croker, 21 November 1813, ADM 1/2537, TNA UK; Marryatt,
Thoughts on the Abolition, 11; Ships’ Musters (Series 2), Ship Thais, 1 January 1812–30 June
1813, ADM 37/4430, TNA UK; Leonard, Records of a Voyage, 253–54; Lawrance, Amistad’s
Orphans, 168–69.
Notes to Pages 125–130 259

4. Ships’ Musters (Series 2), Ship Thais, 1 January 1812–30 June 1813, ADM
37/4430, TNA UK; “Register of Disposal of Captured Negroes,” CO 267/38, TNA
UK; interview with Kroo Chief Tuleh Davis.
5. Voyage to Africa in the ship Crocodile, 20 December 1809–2 March 1811, EH
Columbine Papers.
6. Admiralty Ships’ Muster: Thais, ADM 37/3341 TNA UK; Mr. William Villacott
and Mr. George Bartholomew, TS 11/832/2712, TNA UK; “The Slave Trade,” Times
(London), 30 November 1813, 3; captains’ logs, ADM 51/2914, TNA UK; Liverpool
Mercury, 17 December 1813; Marryatt, Thoughts on the Abolition; Voyages, slavevoyages.org,
#7367.
7. Bolster, Black Jacks, 47.
8. Equiano, Interesting Life, 56.
9. Ships’ Musters (Series 2), Ship Albacore, 1 August 1812–28 February 1814, ADM
37/4462, TNA UK; Ships’ Musters (Series 2), Ship Thais, 1 January 1812–30 June 1813,
ADM 37/4430, TNA UK; Ships’ Musters (Series 2), Ship Thais, 1 July 1813–31 August
1814, ADM 37/4431, TNA UK; Costello, Black Salt, 35.
10. Edward Wedlake Brayley and John Britton, The Beauties of England and Wales,
vol. 4 (London: Vernor, Hood, Longman, 1805), 320–22. Among the navy’s imperfect
mustering system and the profligate trading of names, where they went next is unclear.
11. Ships’ Musters (Series 2), Ship Albacore, 1 August 1812–28 February 1814, ADM
37/4462, TNA UK; Tenth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual
General Meeting on the 27th of March, 1816 (London: J. Hatchard, 1816), 37.
12. Edward Scobell to Bathurst, 3 December 1813, CO 267/37, TNA UK.
13. Times (London), 30 November 1813; Henry Slight and Julian Slight, Chronicles of
Portsmouth (London: Lupton Relfe, 1828), 44.
14. Herbert H. Kaplan, Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the Creation of a Dynasty (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2006), 89.

Chapter 14.  A Village of Their Own

1. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 107.

2. Eleventh Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting
on the 26th of March, 1817 (London: J. Hatchard, 1817), 139; Collier et al., West African
Sketches, 187; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 119; Anon., “Sierra Leone” The Friend: A Religious
and Literary Journal, 3:301 (Philadelphia: John Richardson, 1830); African Herald, 15 April
1809, 1; Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 112.
3. Ninth Report of the Directors of the African Institution,, 53–54; Sibthorpe, History of Sierra
Leone, 26–27; Third Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General
Meeting on the 25th of March, 1809 (London: J. Hatchard, 1814), 38–39; Marryatt, Thoughts
on the Abolition, 48–49.
4. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 134.
260 Notes to Pages 130–137

5. Ibid., 114.
6. Spilsbury, Account of a Voyage, 30; Maxwell to Bathurst, 15 June 1813, CO 267/36,
TNA UK.
7. Sibthorpe, History of Sierra Leone, 25–26.
8. Rankin, White Man’s Grave, 2:105; Leo Spitzer, The Creoles of Sierra Leone: Responses
to Colonialism, 1870–1945 (Ile-Ife: University of Nigeria Press, 1972), 11; Seeley, Memoir,
122; Melville, Residence, 240–42.
9. Times (London), 24 August 1814; [First] Report of the Committee of the African Institution,
24; Eighth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting on the
23rd of March, 1813 (London: J. Hatchard, 1814), 16–17; Ryan, “‘Most Promising Field,’”
43–44.
10. Ninth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 57–59; Catherine Hall, Civilising
Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002), 120–27.
11. David Noah’s Speech; S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 235.
12. Ryan, “‘Most Promising Field,’” 39–42; Ninth Report of the Directors of the African
Institution, 53–54; Leonard, Records of a Voyage, 81–82.
13. “Register of Disposal of Captured Negroes,” CO 267/38, TNA UK; Lawrance,
Amistad’s Orphans, 191.
14. David Noah’s Speech; S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 235; Coke, Inter-
esting Narrative, 2–3.
15. David Noah’s Speech; S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 235.
16. S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 17.
17. Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, Twentieth Year: 1819–
1820 (London: L. B. Seeley, 1820), 89–90; S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 17.
18. S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 17.
19. It is possible that the Dolores, or Dores, was the “Portuguese” vessel that sailed off
from Mason and Bostock’s at the St. Paul River during the chaos with Roach and the
Kitty. Since the Dolores reported that it did not get to the Windward Coast until July,
however, and appears to have purchased its captives from Crawford and a Mr. Cross at
Gallinas, this seems to have not been the case. The possibility remains that it sailed off to
go to Mason and Bostock’s Gallinas factory, of which Crawford may then have been in
charge. See the “Appeal No. 15: Ntra. Sra. De los Dolores,” HCA 42/488/982, TNA UK.
20. Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, Eighteenth Year: 1817–
1818 (London: L. B. Seeley, 1818), 167.

Chapter 15.  A Murder, and an Appeal to the Prince Regent

1. Anon., “Abolition of the Slave Trade,” Times (London), 26 March 1808.

2. Mercatoe, “Slave Trade Felony Act,” Times (London), 17 August 1811; Fifth
Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting on the 27th of
Notes to Pages 137–142 261

March, 1811 (London: J. Hatchard, 1811), 4–8; “To the Editor,” Bath Chronicle and Weekly
Gazette, 20 February 1812, 4.
3. “Slave Trade,” Chester Chronicle, 14 July 1811, 4; “Slave Trade,” Cheltenham Chronicle,
6 June 1811, 4; Anon., Extracts from the Report of the Commissioners Appointed for Investigating the
State of the Settlements and Governments on the Coast of Africa (London: Printed for the House of
Commons, 1812).
4. Colley, Britons, 351; Srividhya Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of
British National Identity, 1759–1815 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 94; Jasanoff, Liberty’s
Exiles, 139–40.
5. “The Memorial of William Henry Gould Page,” FO 72/182 f. 72–4, TNA UK.
6. Maxwell to Bathurst, 1 May 1814, CO 267/38, TNA UK; Twelfth Report of the
Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting on the 9th of April, 1818
(London: J. Hatchard, 1818), 162; Voyages, slavevoyages.org, #14675.
7. Testimony of Michael Williamson and John Gustave, CO 267/38, TNA UK.
8. Testimony of Richard Blundell, Michael Williamson, and Venus Murray, CO
267/38, TNA UK.
9. Ibid.
10. Testimony of Venus Murray, CO 267/38, TNA UK; Twelfth Report of the Directors
of the African Institute, 162; Junta de Fomento, Leg. 86, Exp. 3506, ANC; Voyages, slavevoy
ages.org, #81655, #81654.
11. “Appeal No. 15: Ntra. Sra. De los Dolores,” TNA HCA 42/488/982, TNA
UK.
12. Individual Petition: Elizabeth Bostock and John MacQueen [sic], HO 17/1 f. 1,
TNA UK.
13. Petition of Bostock and McQueen to the Prince Regent, TS 11/826/2732,
TNA UK.
14. Historical Records of Australia, series 1, vol. 8, 602–3.
15. Journals of the House of Commons, vol. 70, 1036. See oldbaileyonline.org, including
the cases at t18140420–45, t18140420–72, t18140420–42, t18140525–33, t18130714–8,
t18140525–14, t18130714–1, t18140525–68, t18140706–106, t18140420–124.
16. Oldbaileyonline.org, t18140706–106.
17. Marika Sherwood, “The Trade in Enslaved Africans and Slavery after 1807,”
in Fernne Brennan and John Packer, eds., Colonialism, Slavery, Reparations and Trade:
Remedying the Past (Oxford: Routledge, 2012), 24.

Chapter 16.  Experiments in Civilization and Liberty

1. “Mr Bickersteth’s Report,” in S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 4–5.

2. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 123–24.
3. Ryan, “‘Most Promising Field,’” 45.
4. Tenth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 73.
262 Notes to Pages 142–147

5. Missionary Register for 1816, Containing the Principal Transaction of the Various Institutions
for the Promulgation of the Gospel, vol. 4 (London: L. B. Seeley, 1816), 238.
6. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York:
Knopf, 2014), 4, 47.
7. [First] Report of the Committee of the African Institution, 22, 30.
8. Marryatt, Thoughts on the Abolition, 18, 46; [First] Report of the Committee of the African
Institution, 11; Fourth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 24.
9. Second Report of the Committee of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting
on the 25th of March, 1808 (London: J. Hatchard, 1812), iv, 11; Third Report of the Directors of
the African Institution, 10.
10. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 127.
11. Ryan, “‘Most Promising Field,’” 45; Bronwen Everill, Abolition and Empire in
Sierra Leone and Liberia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 22–23; Tenth Report of the
Directors of the African Institution, 76–77; “Mr. Bickersteth’s Report,” in S. A. Walker, Church
of England Mission, 5, 235; Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East,
Seventeenth Year: 1816–1817 (London: L. B. Seeley, 1817), 171; Thorpe, Reply “Point by
Point,” 83.
12. Fyfe, Sierra Leone, 127.
13. Anon., “A Brief Sketch of the State of Sierra Leone, in 1814, from the National
Intelligencer,” in John Edwards Caldwell, ed., The Christian Herald (New York: John E.
Caldwell, 1816), 2:341–43; Coke, Interesting Narrative, 41.

Chapter 17.  Prisoners in New South Wales

1. Christopher, “‘Slave Trade Is Merciful’”; Thomas Reid, Two Voyages to New

South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown,
1822), ix.
2. Historical Records of Australia, series 1, vol. 8, 553; Herbert S. Klein and Stanley L.
Engerman, “Long-Term Trends in African Mortality in the Transatlantic Slave
Trade,” Slavery and Abolition 18, no. 1 (1997): 36–48; M. H. Ellis, Lachlan Macquarie: His
Life, Adventures and Times (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2010), 395.
3. Ellis, Lachlan Macquarie, 395.
4. Emma Christopher, “‘Ten Thousand Times Worse than the Convicts’: Rebel-
lious Sailors, Convict Transportation and the Struggle for Freedom,” Journal of Austra-
lian Colonial History 5 (2004): 30–46.
5. “Sydney: Ship News,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 29 April 1815,
2; Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1987), 61; Gerald Horne, The Deepest South: The United States, Brazil and the African
Slave Trade (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 13.
6. Horne, Deepest South, 25; Karasch, Slave Life, 55–58.
7. John White quoted in Tim Flannery, ed., The Birth of Sydney (Melbourne: Text,
1999), 48–49.
Notes to Pages 147–151 263

8. Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Sydney: Allen and Unwin,
2009), 162, 177; Grace Karskens, The Rocks: Everyday Life in Early Sydney (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1998), 16; Carol Liston, “Colonial Society,” in James
Broadbent and Joy Hughes, eds., The Age of Macquarie (Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 1992), 30–31.
9. “Sydney: Ship News,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 29 April 1815,
2; Christopher, Merciless Place.
10. Information regarding allotment of convicts, reel 6004, 4/3494, p. 66,
NSWSRA.
11. Cassandra Pybus, Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia’s First Black Settlers
(Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006), 68–69.
12. Karskens, Colony, 193.
13. M. H. Ellis, Lachlan Macquarie, 221–41, 465–66, 468–76, 488–96, 500–503;
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Closing Hell’s Gates: The Death of a Convict Station (Sydney: Allen
and Unwin, 2008), 149–50.
14. Jane Elliott, “Was There a Convict Dandy? Convict Consumer Interests in
Sydney, 1788–1815,” Australian Historical Studies 26, no. 104 (1995): 373–92; entry for 13
July 1815, Joseph Arnold Journal, Mitchell Library, Sydney.
15. “Lord, Simeon (1771–1840),” “Underwood, James (1771–1844),” “Kable, Henry
(1763–1846),” and “Terry, Samuel (1776–1838),” all in Australian Dictionary of Biography;
E. C. Richmond, “Simeon Lord: A Merchant Prince of Botany Bay,” Journal and Pro-
ceedings of the Royal Australian Historical Society 30, no. 3 (1944): 157–95; D. R. Hainsworth,
The Sydney Traders: Simeon Lord and His Contemporaries, 1788–1821 (Melbourne: Cassell,
1972), 39–40; James Broadbent, “Macquarie’s Domain,” in Broadbent and Hughes, Age
of Macquarie, 6; Karskens, Colony, 170.
16. Bruce Kercher, “Perish or Prosper: The Law and Convict Transportation in
the British Empire,” Law and History Review 21, no. 3 (2003): 527–84; Michael Dunn,
“Early Australia: Wage Labour or Slave Society,” in E. L. Wheelwright and Ken Buckley,
eds., Essays in the Political Economy of Australian Capitalism, vol. 1 (Sydney: Australia and
New Zealand Book Company, 1975), 33–38; J. B. Hirst, Convict Society and Its Enemies
(Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), 24–26, 81–82; David Neal, “Free Society,
Penal Colony, Slave Society, Prison,” Historical Studies 22, no. 89 (October 1987): 497–
518; John Hirst, “Or None of the Above: A Reply,” Historical Studies 22, no. 89 (October
1987): 519–24.
17. Letter from William Fisher of HMS Bann, Letters from Captains, ADM 1/1813,
TNA UK; Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the West Indies, vol. 4
(London: G. & W. B. Whittaker et al., 1819), 493; American State Papers, Foreign Relations,
vol. 5, 104–5.
18. Mayer, Captain Canot, 207.
19. Letter from William Fisher of HMS Bann, Letters from Captains, ADM 1/1813,
TNA UK; captains’ logs, HMS Bann, ADM 51/2180, TNA UK; Case of the Rosa, Vice
Admiralty Court Returns, Sierra Leone, HCA 49/101, TNA UK; Case of the Rosa;
264 Notes to Pages 151–158

Apresamiento de la Rosa, 1816, Tribunal de Comercio, Legajo 30, Dossier 199, ANC;
Twelfth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 161; Franco, Comercio Clandestino, 168.
20. Twelfth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 164; American State Papers,
Foreign Relations, 5:106.
21. American State Papers, Foreign Relations, 5:106; James H. Kettner, “Subjects or
Citizens? A Note on British Views Respecting the Legal Effects of American Indepen-
dence,” Virginia Law Review 62, no. 5 (1976): 945–76; James H. Kettner, “The Develop-
ment of American Citizenship in the Revolutionary Era: The Idea of Volitional
Allegiance,” American Journal of Legal History 18, no. 208 (1974): 208–42; Alan Taylor, The
Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, Irish Rebels and Indian Allies (New York: Vintage Books,
2011), 4, 102–5.
22. Case of the Rosa, Vice Admiralty Court Returns, Sierra Leone, HCA 49/101,
TNA UK.
23. I am grateful to Jorge Felipe González for helping me put together the events
surrounding the Bella Maria.
24. “Ship News,” Providence Patriot, 25 May 1816, 3.

Chapter 18.  Christianity at Hogbrook

1. Seeley, Memoir, 55–56; Arthur T. Pierson, Seven Years in Sierra Leone: The Story of the
Work of William A.B. Johnson, Missionary of the Church Missionary Society, from 1816 to 1823 in
Regent’s Town, Sierra Leone (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1897), 63–64; Stephen H.
Tyng, A Memoir of the Rev. W. A. B. Johnson, Missionary of the Church Missionary Society, in
Regent’s Town, Sierra Leone (New York: R. Carter, 1853; repr., Memphis: General Books,
2010), 26.
2. Kup, Sierra Leone, 153; William Singleton, “An Account of a Visit to the Gambia
and Sierra Leone,” in Anon., Report of the Committee Managing a Fund Raised by Some Friends
for the Purpose of Promoting African Institution (London: Harvey, Darton, 1822), 54–55;
Leonard, Records of a Voyage, 49–50.
3. Seeley, Memoir, 55–56; Pierson, Seven Years, 64.
4. Sibthorpe, History of Sierra Leone, 29; Tyng, Memoir, 3; Eleventh Report of the Directors
of the African Institution, 139.
5. Tyng, Memoir, 207–8; Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley, 37; Seeley, Memoir,
26, 32–34, 36; Pierson, Seven Years, 15–16, 37, 39, 41; Peterson, Province of Freedom, 107.
6. Seeley, Memoir, 32–33, 56; Padriac X. Scanlan, “The Colonial Rebirth of British
Abolition: The Liberated African Villages of Sierra Leone, 1815–1824,” American Historical
Review 121, no. 4 (2016): 1085–113.
7. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 129; D. M. Jones, “Business Organisation.”
8. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 129.
9. Scanlan, “Colonial Rebirth”; Anon., “Sierra Leone,” 301; S. A. Walker, Church
of England Mission, 16–17.
10. Seeley, Memoir, 17–18, 68, 86, 333; Kup, Sierra Leone, 153; S. A. Walker, Church of
Notes to Pages 158–162 265

England Mission, 71–72; Proceedings of the CMS, 1817–1818, 246; Pierson, Seven Years, 108;
Tyng, Memoir, 33, 44; see also Tamba journal March–June 1821, William Tamba papers,
CMS.
11. Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley, 57, 69; Proceedings of the CMS, 1817–1818,
247.
12. Sibthorpe, History of Sierra Leone, 33–34; Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley,
36–37.
13. “Regent’s Town, 1816,” Boston Recorder, 1 May 1819.

Chapter 19.  The End of Their Punishment

1. Government and General Orders, Sydney Gazette, 20 January 1816, 1; Individual

Petition: Elizabeth Bostock and John MacQueen [sic] HO 17/1 f. 1, TNA UK; Historical
Records of Australia, series 1, vol. 8, 602–3; Sydney Gazette, 20 January 1816.
2. “Sydney,” Sydney Gazette, 20 January 1816, 2.
3. Bigge Reports, A2130, Mitchell Library, Sydney; Birrell, Mariners, Merchants, 36;
Alan Atkinson, “The Moral Basis of Marriage,” Push from the Bush 2 (1998): 104–15.
Transportation was often considered akin to divorce even for those who had left their
legal spouses in Britain or Ireland, never mind for spouses left in Africa.
4. “Names of Persons in New South Wales Who Have Subscribed to the Relief of
the Sufferers at the Memorial and Glorious Battle of Waterloo,” Sydney Gazette and NSW
Advertiser, 3 February 1816, 1.
5. Pardon, reel 772, 4/4472, pp. 9–11, NSWSRA.
6. Sales by Auction, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 24 February 1816, 2.
7. Hainsworth, Sydney Traders, 101–5; “Announcements,” Sydney Gazette and NSW
Advertiser, 8 November 1817, 2; Piper Papers, vol. 1, p. 279, A254, Mitchell Library;
Colonial Secretary’s Office, 2648, reel Z1787, Archives Office of Tasmania.
8. Re land grant, Fiche 3266, 4/438, p. 9 NSWRA; Bigge Report A2130, Mitchell
Library; Maxwell to Bathurst, 25 October 1814, CO 267/39, TNA UK; Thorpe to
Bathurst, 26 October 1814, CO 257/39, TNA UK; Index for CO 267/40, TNA UK;
Fyfe, Sierra Leone, 121; Thorpe, Letter to William Wilberforce, xvii (original emphasis);
Advertisements, This Day Is Published . . ., Times (London), 14 July 1815, 2.
9. “Parliamentary Intelligence,” Times (London), 15 April 1815, 2; Fyfe, History of
Sierra Leone, 123.
10. Hassall Correspondence, Mitchell Library, Sydney, A1677–74, vol. 4, 107–8.
11. Hobart Town, Hobart Town Gazette and Southern Reporter, January 3 1818, 2.

Chapter 20.  A Model Village

1. Eleventh Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 34–35, 136; Fyfe, History of
Sierra Leone, 133–34; A Lover of Truth to the Editor, Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser,
30 May 1818, 1–2.
266 Notes to Pages 162–170

2. Special Report of the Directors of the African Institute, 112; “Memoir of the Late Rev.
William Garnon,” http://anglicanhistory.org/africa/sl/garnon1819.html.
3. “Memoir of the Late Rev. William Garnon”; “Register of Disposal of Captured
Negroes,” CO 267/38, TNA UK; Kenneth Macaulay, The Colony of Sierra Leone Vindicated
from the Misrepresentations of Mr. McQueen of Glasgow (London: Hatchard and Son, 1827),
124; Seeley, Memoir, 72–73, 88.
4. “Freetown: Public Works and General Improvements,” Royal Gazette and Sierra
Leone Advertiser, 19 December 1818; Seeley, Memoir, 126.
5. Sixteenth Report of the African Institution, 353; Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley,
66–67.
6. Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley, 83, 104–5.
7. Kup, Sierra Leone, 151; Peterson, Province of Freedom, 195; Pierson, Seven Years, 160–
61; Seeley, Memoir, 268–69.
8. W. Singleton, “Account of a Visit,” 58.
9. Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East, Nineteenth Year: 1818–
1819 (London: L. B. Seeley, 1819), 223; Eleventh Report of the Directors of the African Institution,
33–34.
10. Proceedings of the CMS, 1816–1817, 214, 269, 272; Proceedings of the CMS, 1818–1819,
79; Peterson, Province of Freedom, 70; Seeley, Memoir, 348; Special Report of the Directors of the
African Institute, 150.
11. Tamba actually did what the British had imagined when the first recaptives
appeared in 1808. Fourth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 62; Tyng, Memoir, 31;
Seeley, Memoir, 36; Utting, Story of Sierra Leone, 117.
12. Proceedings of the CMS, 1819–1820, 86.
13. Anon., “Sierra Leone,” 301; Proceedings of the CMS, 1819–1820, 91.
14. Seeley, Memoir, 87, 202; Tamba journal, 1820, William Tamba papers, CMS.
15. Fyfe, Sierra Leone, 147; Proceedings of the CMS, 1818–1819, 61.
16. Seeley, Memoir, 198–99; interview with Joseph Reffell, Regent, Sierra Leone,
May 2012.
17. S. A. Walker, Church Missionary Society, 39.
18. Ibid.; David Noah’s Speech, 250.
19. Everill, Abolition and Empire, 9; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–
1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 10.
20. Seeley, Memoir, 199; C. Hall, Civilizing Subjects, 155.
21. Hair, “Africanisms”; W. Singleton, “Account of a Visit,” 54.
22. Seeley, Memoir, 200.
23. Proceedings of the CMS, 1818–1819, 246.
24. Ibid., 246, 253.
25. Missionary Register for 1824, Containing the Principal Transaction of the Various Institu-
tions for the Promulgation of the Gospel, vol. 12 (London: L. B. Seeley, 1824), 135; Evangelical
Magazine and Missionary Chronicle, vol. 26 (1818), 198; Proceedings of the CMS, 1818–1819, 239.
26. Proceedings of the CMS, 1818–1819, 241; Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley,
109–12.
Notes to Pages 170–177 267

27. Proceedings of the CMS, 1818–1819, 76; Letter from Reverend Johnson, Religious
Intelligencer 6, no. 28 (8 December 1821), 43.
28. Proceedings of the CMS, 1819–1820, 265–67.
29. Ibid., 275.
30. Ibid., 276–77.
31. Ibid., 277–78.
32. Ibid., 280, 285–86.
33. Ibid., 286.
34. Ibid., 297–99; Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley, 131.
35. Proceedings of the CMS, 1819–1820, 291–92.
36. “An Abstract of the Journal of Rev. J. B. Cates,” in Bacon, Abstract of a Journal,
67–73; Pierson, Seven Years, 152–53; Anon., “American Colonization Society: Purchase of
Land for a Colony at St. John’s River,” Quarterly Christian Spectator 3, no. 7 (1821): 649–53;
Missionary Register for 1819, Containing the Principal Transaction of the Various Institutions for the
Promulgation of the Gospel, vol. 7 (London: L. B. Seeley, 1819), 491–92; Charlesworth, Africa’s
Mountain Valley, 205.
37. Proceedings of the CMS, 1819–1820, 292.
38. Ibid., 292–93.
39. Journey of Mr. Cates, in Religious Intelligencer, vol. 6, for the year ending May
1822 (8 December 1821), 438–40; Church Missionary Paper 18 (Midsummer 1820).
40. Quoted in Lowther, Odyssey, 207.
41. Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making
of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 13–14, 75; James T.
Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa (New York: Penguin, 2007), 41.
42. Quoted in Macaulay, Sierra Leone Vindicated, 122.
43. Two Africans, “To the Editor of the Royal Gazette,” Royal Gazette and General
Advertiser, 25 April 1818.
44. Africanus, “To the Editor of the Times,” Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser,
29 May 1820; Proceedings of the CMS, 1818–1819, 72.
45. Seeley, Memoir, 41–45.
46. Ibid., 176–77.
47. Proceedings of the CMS, 1819–1820, 71, 96.
48. Ibid., 97; Pierson, Seven Years in Sierra Leone, 219–20.
49. The Washington Theological Repertory, vol. 1, 294; Seeley, Memoir, 172.
50. Seeley, Memoir, 182–83.
51. Religious Reporter, 30 September 1820; Seeley, Memoir, 181.
52. Quoted in Hilary McD. Beckles, “The Slave-Drivers’ War: Bussa and the 1816
Barbados Slave Rebellion,” Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 39 (December
1985): 85–110.
53. Beckles, “Slave-Drivers’ War”; Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to
Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 263; Cleve McD.
Scott, “Bussa’s Rebellion, 1816,” in Junius P. Rodriguez, ed., Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance
and Rebellion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 1:90–91; Hilary McD. Beckles,
268 Notes to Pages 177–185

“Emancipation by Law or War? Wilberforce and the 1816 Barbados Slave Rebellion,”
in David Richardson, ed., Abolition and Its Aftermath: The Historical Context, 1790–1916
(Abingdon, UK: Frank Cass, 1985), 81–82; Fyfe, Sierra Leone, 136.
54. “Mr. T. Morgan to the Secretary,” in Seeley, Memoir, 225.
55. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 136; birth certificates of the early colony, NASL.
56. Proceedings of the CMS, 1819–1820, 98.

Chapter 21.  The Appeal

1. Birrell, Mariners, Merchants, 13–17.

2. Helfman, “Court of Vice-Admiralty,” 1148–49; Marryatt, Thoughts on the Aboli-
tion, 40–41; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 136–37.
3. Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 87–92, 95–97.
4. Helfman, “Court of Vice-Admiralty.”
5. Thorpe, Letter to William Wilberforce, 18–20; George Cook vs. George William
Maxwell, TS 11/823/2712, TNA UK.
6. Maxwell to Bathurst, 29 March 1815, CO 267/40, TNA UK; George Cook vs.
George William Maxwell, TS 11/823/2712, TNA UK; Dr. Thorpe’s Case, CO 267/88,
TNA UK; George Francis Dow, Slave Ships and Slaving (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), 227.
7. George Cook vs. George William Maxwell, TS 11/823/2712, TNA UK; Afri-
canus, “To the Editor of the Royal Gazette,” Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser, 20
June 1818; Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 123.
8. What actually happened to Brodie is unclear; by some reports he returned to
slave trading. George Cook vs. George William Maxwell, TS 11/823/2712, TNA UK;
MacCarthy to Colonial Office, 5 May and 8 May 1819, CO 267/49, TNA UK.
9. Purdie to Maxwell, 13 July 1813, CO 267/36, TNA UK; Fyfe, History of Sierra
Leone 120.
10. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
11. George Clarke to Henry Goulburn, CO 267/55, TNA UK; A. Grant to Henry
Goulburn, 26 December 1820, CO 267/51, TNA UK.
12. Proof of Winsley, Chambers, and Matthews in Special Court of Oyer and
Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
13. Proof of Thomas Lovekine in Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS
11/826/2732, TNA UK.
14. John Marshall, Royal Navy Biography; or, Memoirs of the Services . . . (London:
Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1824), vol. 2, part 1, 496; Asiatic Journal
and Monthly Miscellany 2 (1816): 327, 637. I attempted to search through the muster rolls at
ADM 37, TNA UK, but a definite answer to his various name changes and ships between
1813 and 1820 seems improbable.
15. In the event only the jail keeper went to London, although Lawrence Summers
might have already been there. George Clarke to Henry Goulburn, CO 267/55, TNA
UK.
Notes to Pages 186–196 269

16. Tamba journal, April 2, 21, 22, William Tamba papers, CMS.
17. Seeley, Memoir, 55–56.
18. TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK.
19. John Dodson, A Report of the Case of the Louis, Forest, Master: Appealed from the Vice
Admiralty Court at Sierra Leone (London: John Butterworth, 1817), 7.
20. The Navy List, 1814, 130; TS 11/826/2732; “Parliamentary Intelligence,” Times
(London), 15 April 1815, 2; Special Report of the Directors of the African Institution, 97.
21. Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS 11/826/2732, TNA UK; Fyfe, History
of Sierra Leone, 123.
22. Dr. Thorpe’s Case, CO 267/88, TNA UK; Scobell to Irby, December 1813 and
March 1814, copied in Marshall, Royal Navy Biography, vol. 2, part 1, 496–97; Marshall,
Royal Navy Biography, Supplement, part 2, 351; see also the inscription of his tombstone at
Sancreed, Lake’s Parochial History, 1868, http://west-penwith.org.uk/sancreed2.htm.
23. Checks in the Treasury Papers of TNA UK failed to turn up any information
on this question.

Chapter 22.  Helping to Found Liberia

1. Proceedings of the CMS, 1818–1819, 151.

2. Tamba journal, beginning 13 February 1820, William Tamba papers, CMS;
Liberated African Letterbooks, NASL.
3. Ibid.
4. Seeley, Memoir, 199.
5. Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley, 168–69.
6. Seeley, Memoir, 254–55.
7. Ibid., 196–97.
8. Ibid., 195.
9. Quoted in Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black
Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (New York: Basic Civitas, 2003), 70.
10. Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade, 31; Dale Herbert Porter, “Defense of the
British Slave Trade, 1784–1807” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 1987), 85–86.
11. Frederick Chamier, The Life of a Sailor by a Captain in the Navy (New York: J & J.
Harper, 1833), 1:111, 31.
12. Mary McAleer Balkun, “Phillis Wheatley’s Construction of Otherness and the
Rhetoric of Performed Ideology,” African American Review 36, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 121–35;
Gates, The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, 27.
13. “Wesleyan Missionary Society,” in Missionary Register for 1819, 5; Seeley, Memoir,
219.
14. Kilham, Memoir, 227; Peterson, Province of Freedom, 201.
15. Sibthorpe, History of Sierra Leone, 32–33; Joe A. D. Alie, A New History of Sierra
Leone (Oxford: Macmillan, 1990), 69; Peterson, Province of Freedom, 54–56, 108; “Register
of Disposal of Captured Negroes,” CO 267/38, TNA UK.
270 Notes to Pages 196–204

16. Anon., “Fair of Free Town,” Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser, 3 and 11
April 1819; “An Enigma,” Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser, 8 January 1819; “Fashion-
able Memoranda,” Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser, 26 February 1820; Sixteenth Report
of the Directors of the African Institution, 335.
17. Tamba journal, November–December 1820, William Tamba papers, CMS.
18. Ibid.
19. Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley, 188.
20. Seeley, Memoir, 241–44; Tamba journal, November–December 1820, William
Tamba papers, CMS; Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley, 161.
21. Seeley, Memoir, 149, 159.
22. Lowther, Odyssey, 217–25.
23. Seeley, Memoir, 249; Bacon, Abstract of a Journal, 6–7.
24. Bacon, Abstract of a Journal, 7, 10; Proceedings of the CMS, 1821–1822, 80.
25. Bacon, Abstract of a Journal, 9.
26. Tamba journal, March–June 1821, William Tamba papers, CMS.
27. Mill wrote his name without the “s” in his earlier letter to Bostock, though
Europeans generally wrote Mills.
28. Bacon, Abstract of a Journal, 9–14.
29. Proceedings of the CMS, 1820–1821, 60; Mouser, American Colony, 95–96; W. Single-
ton, “Account of a Visit,” 61–62.
30. Robert Bostock Documents, Beinecke Library; Tamba journal, March–June
1821, William Tamba papers, CMS; Special Court of Oyer and Terminer, TS
11/826/2732; Bacon, Abstract of a Journal, 9; Charles Johnson, Bitter Canaan: The Story of the
Negro Republic (Boston: Boston University African Studies Center, 1988), 37.
31. Tamba journal, March–June 1821, William Tamba papers, CMS.
32. Bacon, Abstract of a Journal, 9.
33. Letter from Reverend Johnson, Religious Intelligencer, vol. 6, no. 28 (8 December
1821), 437; Bacon, Abstract of a Journal, 15; Tamba Journal, March–June 1821, William
Tamba papers, CMS.
34. Letter from Reverend Johnson, Religious Intelligencer, 437–40.
35. “United States Colonization Society,” Christian Observer 22 (1821): 60–62;
C. Johnson, Bitter Canaan, 40; Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the
East, Twenty-Second Year: 1822–1823 (London: L. B. Seeley, 1823), 59.
36. C. Johnson, Bitter Canaan, 44.
37. J. T. Campbell, Middle Passages, 53; C. Johnson, Bitter Canaan, 41–44.
38. Holsoe, “Study of Relations”; James B. Taylor, Biography of Elder Lott Cary: Late
Missionary to Africa (Baltimore: Armstrong and Berry, 1837), 36.

Chapter 23.  Van Diemen’s Land

1. Lieutenant Charles Jeffreys, RN, Van Diemen’s Land: Geographical and Descriptive
Delineations of the Island of Van Diemen’s Land (London: JM Richardson, 1820), 159; David
Notes to Pages 205–206 271

Burn, A Picture of Van Diemen’s Land (Hobart, TAS: Cat and Fiddle Press, 1973), 5; “Jeffreys,
Charles (1782–1826),” Australian Dictionary of Biography; George William Evans, Geographical,
Historical and Topographical Description of Van Diemen’s Land (London: John Souter, 1822),
63, unnumbered note; James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Collingwood, VIC: Black, 2010),
155.
2. Edward Curr, An Account of the Colony of Van Diemen’s Land (London: George
Cowie, 1824), 3; Jeffreys, Van Diemen’s Land, 8; Michael Roe, “Darwin in Hobart,” Island
28 (1986): 16–18; Godwin’s Emigrants Guide, 1; Evans, Geographical, Historical and Topographical
Description, 26; W. C. Wentworth, A Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony
of New South Wales, and Its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen’s Land (1819; repr., Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), 182.
3. James Ross, The Settler in Van Diemen’s Land (1836; repr., Melbourne: Marsh
Walsh, 1975), 45.
4. Ross, Settler, 3, 15, 4, 1; Leonie C. Mickleborough, William Sorell in Van Diemen’s
Land (Hobart, TAS: Blubber Head Press, 2004), 27; Sharon Morgan, Land Settlement in
Early Tasmania: Creating an Antipodean England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003), 49; James Fenton, A History of Tasmania: From Its Discovery in 1642 to the Present Time
(Hobart, TAS: J. Walch and Sons, 1884; repr., New York: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 50; Margaret Dillon, “Convict Labour and Colonial Society in the Campbell
Town Police District: 1820–1839” (PhD diss., University of Tasmania, April 2008), 11;
Kirsty Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 60–73; Mickleborough, William Sorell,
5–9, 11, 100–101, 104; Alison Alexander, Governors’ Ladies: The Wives and Mistresses of Van
Diemen’s Land Governors (Sandy Bay, TAS: Tasmanian Historical Research Association,
1987), 70–76, 78.
5. Morgan, Land Settlement, 13; Mickleborough, William Sorell, 23–24, 43, 45–46;
Burn, Picture of Van Diemen’s Land, 14.
6. Classified advertising, Hobart Town Gazette, 14 April 1821, 2.
7. On John McQueen’s activities in the colony: Application for a Joint Auctioneer’s
Licence, 15 January 1821, reel 6051, 4/1748, 95–97, NSWSRA; Granted an Auctioneer’s
Licence, 8 March 1821, reel 6070, 4/1265, 56–57, NSWSRA; Tendering Rebuilt En-
deavour, 11 August 1821, reel 6051 4/1749, 410–12, NSWSRA; Reply to tendering pro-
posal, 21 July 1821, reel 6008, 4/3504, 159, NSWSRA; Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the
Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1820–50 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004),
83–84; New Partner at MacQueen and Atkinson, 8 July 1822, reel 6055; 4/1761, 10,
NSWSRA; “Sydney,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 27 December 1822, 2;
“Ship News,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 16 June 1821; Classified Adver-
tising, Sydney Gazette, 2 January 1819, 4; “Hobart Town: Ship News,” Hobart Town Gazette
and Southern Reporter, 23 January 1819, 1; Classified Advertising, Sydney Gazette, 15 July
1824, 1; Hobart Town Gazette, 25 December 1825; Sydney Gazette, 18 September 1823; Sydney
Gazette, 15 July 1824; Hobart Town Gazette, 25 December 1825.
8. Colonial Secretary’s Office, 2648, reel Z1787, AO of Tasmania. His supporter
272 Notes to Pages 206–213

Robert Thorpe also implied in his own court case in Britain that Bostock’s claim was
unsuccessful. See Dr. Thorpe’s Case, CO 267/88, TNA UK.
9. Ross, Settler, 4; Joan Goodrick, Life in Old Van Diemen’s Land (Adelaide: Rigby,
1977), 130; Hobart Town Gazette and VDL Advertiser, 12 October 1822; Morgan, Land Settlement,
45–46; Mary Nicolls, ed., The Diary of the Reverend Robert Knopwood, 1803–1838 (Launceston,
TAS: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1977), 383, 391.
10. Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 158–60.
11. Goodrick, Old Van Diemen’s Land, 167; Babette Smith, Australia’s Birthstain: The
Startling Legacy of the Convict Era (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2007).

Chapter 24.  Liberty in White and Black

1. Z. Lewis, American Missionary Register, vol. 2 (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1822),
236–38.
2. Bacon, Abstract of a Journal, 39; William Fox, Brief History of the Wesleyan Missions on
the Western Coast of Africa (London: published for the author, 1851), 265–66; S. A. Walker,
Church of England Mission, 11–13, 183–84; Tyng, Memoir, 173.
3. Seeley, Memoir, 343; Butt-Thompson, Sierra Leone, 238–39; Proceedings of the CMS,
1823–1824, 229.
4. S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 157; Charlesworth, Africa’s Mountain Valley,
156.
5. S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 169.
6. Seeley, Memoir, 338, 356.
7. Noah to CMS, “Speech of 1824; Seeley, Memoir, 363; S. A. Walker, Church of
England Mission, 175–76.
8. Seeley, Memoir, 289.
9. Tamba to CMS, 10 February 1824, William Tamba papers, CMS; Proceedings of
the CMS, 1823–1824, 96.
10. Tamba to CMS, 28 March 1824 and 9 April 1824, William Tamba papers,
CMS; Noah to CMS, 24 March 1824, David Noah Papers, CMS.
11. Thomas Sylvester Johnson, The Story of a Mission: The Sierra Leone Church (London:
S.P.C.K., 1953), 36, S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 222–23.
12. Noah to CMS, 17 November 1824; Tamba to CMS, 30 December 1824, William
Tamba papers, CMS; S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 211, 234; Proceedings of the
CMS, 1823–1824, 96.
13. Tamba to CMS, 10 February 1824 and 13 March 1827 (date crossed through),
William Tamba papers, CMS.
14. Anon., “At a Meeting of the Agricultural Society . . .,” Sierra Leone Advertiser and
Royal Gazette, 7 October 1820; Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus
Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 96–98.
15. Noah to CMS, 6 May 1826, David Noah Papers, CMS; Noah to CMS, “Report
at Kissey for Michaelmas 1825,” Noah Papers, CMS; S. A. Walker, Church of England
Notes to Pages 213–216 273

Mission, 268; Tamba to CMS, May 1825, William Tamba papers, CMS; Tamba report
Wellington/Kent of 27 September 1826, William Tamba papers, CMS; Noah to CMS,
“Report at Regent, 1827,” David Noah Papers, CMS.
16. Noah to CMS, 6 May 1826; Tamba to CMS, 19 December 1827, William
Tamba papers, CMS.
17. Tamba to CMS, 27 March 1828, William Tamba papers, CMS.
18. Noah to CMS, report of Gloucester and Regent, 1829; Noah to CMS, “Journal
of a Visit to Bassa.”
19. Noah to CMS, “Journal of a Visit to Bassa.”
20. Birrell, Mariners, Merchants, 70–76; Thelma Birrell to author, personal commu-
nication, 2010; Colonial Secretary’s Index, 4/3504, reel 6008, p. 45, NSWSRA; Lucille
V. Andel, Clerk of the House: The Reminiscences of Hugh Munro Hall, 1818–1882 (self pub-
lished, 1984), 74, 81–83.
21. Ian W. McLean, Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 54, 58.
22. Bennett and Warner, Country Houses, 92–97; Andel, Clerk of the House, 74.
23. Advertising, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 2 September 1826, 4;
classified advertising, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 4 April 1828, 4; Historical
Records of Australia, series 1, vol. 14, 156–57, 560; Mathew Hindson Account Book, p. 65,
1827–30, A151, Mitchell Library; Paula Byrne, “Freedom in a Bonded Society: The
Administrative Mind and the ‘Lower Classes’ in Colonial New South Wales,” Journal of
Australian Studies 53 (1997): 51–58.
24. Probate packets, John McQueen, date of death 19 March 1829, series 1–383,
NSWSRA; Karskens, Colony, 168–69. McQueen’s death certificate gives his age as forty,
but as all other ages for him—from his days in Africa through his period as a convict—
coincide, it would seem that it is this one that was wrong, adding one or two years onto
his actual age. Family Notices, Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 21 March
1829, 3.
25. Tamba to CMS, n.d., received by them Midsummer 1826, William Tamba
papers, CMS.
26. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 174–75; Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 209.
27. Half a rod is roughly 8.25 feet; each acre is 160 square rods.
28. Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, 162; Rankin, White Man’s Grave, 2:115–18.
29. Thelma Birrell, personal communication, 2010. See F. M. L. Thompson,
English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963),
28; Re Approval of grant of tenement in Hunter Street to Mr. Bostock, 4 March 1819,
reel 6006, 4/3500, 7, NSWSRA; Memorial for a Grant of 400 acres and indulgences,
1 October 1821, Fiche 3209, 4/1863, 28, NSWSRA; Reply to memorial for land, 13
November 1821, reel 6008, 4/3504A, 7, NSWSRA; McLean, Why Australia Prospered, 70.
30. Drescher, Mighty Experiment, 98–99.
31. Sibthorpe, History of Sierra Leone, 152; S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission,
221, 300.
274 Notes to Pages 216–223

32. J. Sweet, Recreating Africa; Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves:
Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400–1900 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann,
2003); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the
Links (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
33. The name Summers is not known among Krio surnames today, suggesting that
he did not return, or at least that he changed his name or did not have any sons.
34. See Seeley, Memoir, 200; Thomas Eyre Poole, Life, Scenery and Customs in Sierra
Leone and Gambia (London: Richard Bentley, 1850), 1:56–58.
35. Based on the fact that he swears on the Holy Bible while giving his testimony
in 1821 (where many others did not), and on the Reffell family’s own family history.
Robert Wellesley Cole, Kossoh Town Boy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960),
129–30.
36. “The Black Natives,” Hobart Town Gazette, 11 November 1826, 2; Burn, Picture of
Van Diemen’s Land, 24.
37. Nicholas Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (Brisbane:
University of Queensland Press, 2014), 125; James Bonwick, Last of the Tasmanians, or, The
Black War of Van Diemen’s Land (London: Sampson Low, Son and Marston, 1870), 143.
38. Goodrick, Life in Old Van Diemen’s Land, 208, 184; Van Diemen’s Land, Geelong
Advertiser and Squatters’ Advocate, 6 July 1847, 1; “Family Notices,” Launceston Examiner
(Tasmania), 16 June 1847, 6; “Family Notices,” Courier (Hobart, TAS), 16 June 1847, 2.
39. S. A. Walker, Church of England Mission, 427–48.

Epilogue

1. Alice Bennett and Georgia Warner, Country Houses of Tasmania: Behind the Closed
Doors of Our Finest Private Colonial Estates (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009), 198–207;
Sherwood, “Trade in Enslaved Africans,” 24.
2. Bain Attwood, Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History (Melbourne:
Miegunyah Press, 2009), 15–17; Richard Osborne, The History of Warrnambool (Prahan,
VIC: Chronicle, 1887), 14–16, 41, 77, 131, 135, 189, 202–3, 213, 238.
3. Robert Clarke, Sierra Leone: A Description of the Manners and Customs of Liberated Africans
(London: J. Ridgeway, 1843), 47–48.
4. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Nairobi: East African Educa-
tional, 1972), 141; Stephen Frenkel and John Western, “Pretext or Prophylaxis? Racial
Segregation and Malarial Mosquitos in a British Tropical Colony: Sierra Leone,” Annals
of the Association of American Geographers 78, no. 2 (1988): 211–28. Bostock’s children Eliza,
Augustus, and James—his eighth-, ninth-, and eleventh-born Australian children—all
lived into the twentieth century. See Birrell, Mariners, Merchants, 38.
5. Huzzey, Freedom Burning, 17; Rolf Boldrewood, Old Melbourne Memories (New
York: Macmillan, 1896), 51, 65–69.
6. Tony Roberts, Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900 (St. Lucia: Uni-
versity of Queensland Press, 2005), 184; 211; Deborah Bird Rose, Hidden Histories: Black
Notes to Pages 224–227 275

Stories from Victoria River Downs, Humbert River and Wave Hill Stations (Canberra: Aboriginal
Studies Press, 1991), 180, 260.
7. Roberts, Frontier Justice, 88; F. J. Gillen, Gillen’s Diary: The Camp Jottings of F. J.
Gillen (Adelaide: Libraries Board of South Australia, 1968), 3:485–87, 492; Alf Chambers,
Battlers of the Barkly: The Family Saga of Eva Downs (Rockhampton: Central Queensland
University Press, 1998), 55; Tony Austin, I Can Picture the Old Home So Clearly: The Common-
wealth and “Half-Caste” Youth in the Northern Territory, 1911–1939 (Canberra: Aboriginal
Studies Press, 1993), 3–4; Tony Austin, Never Trust a Government Man: Northern Territory
Aboriginal Policy, 1911–1939 (Darwin: Northern Territory University Press, 1997), 19–20,
44–45; Anna Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmented Indigenous Families, 1800–2000 (Fremantle,
WA: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000), 288.
8. Austin, Never Trust, 17, 195–97; Haebich, Broken Circles, 195.
9. Haebich, Broken Circles, 155, 192–93, 343; Richard Broome, Aboriginal Australians:
Black Responses to White Dominance (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 120.
10. Beetaloo Station Pty. Ltd. v. Minister for Lands, Planning and Environment,
Bruce Godilla, and Pompey Raymond Administrative Law, http://www.supreme
court.nt.gov.au/archive/doc/sentencing_remarks/0/98/0/NS000520.htm.
11. Interview with Shauna Bostock-Smith, 2012.
12. Interviews with Raila Sanusi-Ball and Nafisatu Deen, Eastern Freetown,
March 2009 and 2011; Christopher Fyfe, “Four Sierra Leone Recaptives,” Journal of
African History 11, no. 1 (1961): 75–85, 82; Jean H. Kopytoff, Preface to Modern Nigeria: Sierra
Leonians in Yoruba (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 51; Wyse, Krio, 20–21;
T. J. Barron, “James Stephen, the ‘Black Race,’ and British Colonial Administration,
1813–1847,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 5 (1977): 131–50, 137; J. T.
Campbell, Middle Passages, 81.
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Archival Documents

United States of America

baker library, bloomberg center, harvard business school

D’Wolf Papers.

beinecke rare book and manuscript library, yale university

Robert Bostock Documents Concerning the Slave Trade, James Marshall and Marie-
Louise Osborn Collection.

bristol historic and preservation society, rhode island

D’Wolf Papers.

huntington library, pasadena, california

Papers of Thomas Clarkson.

john hay library, brown university

Fales Family Papers.

national archives and records administration

Index to New England Naturalization Petitions, 1791–1906.

otto g. richter library, the university of miami

Edward Spalding Papers.

richard j. daly library, the university of chicago at illinois

E. H. Columbine Papers.

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Bickerton Papers, 942 BIC 1.

the national archives, london, admiralty

ADM 1/1674: Letters from Captains, Surnames C, 1820.
ADM 1/1813: Letters from Captains, Surnames F, 1816.
ADM 1/2535: Letters from Captains, Surnames S, 1813.
ADM 1/2536: Letters from Captains, Surnames S, 1813.
ADM 1/2537: Letters from Captains, Surnames S, 1813.
ADM 1/2538: Letters from Captains, Surnames S, 1814.
ADM 1/2539: Letters from Captains, Surnames S, 1814.
ADM 1/2540: Letters from Captains, Surnames S, 1814.
ADM 1/4226: Letters from Secretaries of State, July–September 1813.
ADM 7/605: Captain Denman’s Trial, Slave Factories, Gallinas, 1840–1848.
ADM 7/606: Slave Trade Cases, Admiralty Miscellanea, 1850.
ADM 37/4430: Ships’ Musters (Series 2), Ship Thais, 1 January 1812–30 June 1813.
ADM 37/4431: Ships’ Musters (Series 2), Ship Thais, 1 July 1813–31 August 1814.
ADM 37/4462: Ships’ Musters (Series 2), Ship Albacore, 1 August 1812–28 February
1814.
ADM 43/64: Navy Board: Head Money and Papers, Vouchers, 1813.
ADM 51/2180: Captains’ Logs, Bann, 1812–1820.
ADM 51/2914: Captains’ Logs, Thais, 1812–1816.
ADM 52/3462: Masters’ Logs, Thais, 1813.

the national archives, london, board of trade

BT 98/62: Registry of Shipping and Seamen, Agreements and Crew lists, Series 1,
Muster Rolls.

the national archives, london, colonial office

CO 267/36: Sierra Leone Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, 5 January–23
March 1813.
CO 267/37: Sierra Leone Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, 24 March–27
December 1813.
CO 267/38: Sierra Leone Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, 1814.
CO 267/39: Sierra Leone Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, 1814.
CO 267/40: Sierra Leone Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, 1815.
CO 267/41: Sierra Leone Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, 1815.
CO 267/49: Sierra Leone Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, 1819.
CO 267/51: Sierra Leone Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, 1820.
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CO 267/55: Sierra Leone Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, 1821.

CO 267/88: Sierra Leone Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, Dr. Thorpe’s
Case, 1815–1827.

the national archives, london, foreign office

FO 72/182: Foreign Office, General Correspondence, Spain, 1 April 1815–31 April 1815.

the national archives, london, high court of the admiralty

HCA 32/1308: Prize Court, Papers, War of 1812, nos. 1644–1651.
HCA 42/455/680: Appeals for Prizes, Papers, Napoleonic Wars, 1815, Captured Ship:
Juan.
HCA 42/488/982: Appeals for Prizes, Papers, Napoleonic Wars, 1816, Captured Ship:
Nuestra Senora De los Dolores.
HCA 42/488/983: Appeals for Prizes, Papers, Napoleonic Wars, Captured Ship: Phoenix.
HCA 49/97: Vice Admiralty Proceedings, Sierra Leone, 1808–1817.
HCA 49/101: Vice Admiralty Proceedings, Various, 1793–1831.

the national archives, london, home office

HO 17/1/1: Home Office, Criminal Petitions (Series 1), 1813.

the national archives, london, treasury secretary

TS 11/823/2712: Papers, George Cook vs. Charles William Maxwell and others,
Chancery and King’s Bench, 1816–1820.
TS 11/826/2732: Papers, Robert Bostock vs. Edward Scobell, King’s Bench, 1820.
TS 18/58: General Series Papers, Criminal Cases, Slave Factories at Gallinas, 1840.
TS 18/60: General Series Papers, Criminal Cases, Liberation of Slaves by HMS Alert
at Gallinas, 1855.

the national archives, london, war office

WO 12/10344: African Corps, General Musters, 1813.
WO 12/10345: African Corps, General Musters, 1814.

university of birmingham
William Tamba, 1820–1829, Original Papers—Missionaries: Church Missionary Society
papers. Available on microfilm, Church Missionary Society (Wiltshire: Adam
Matthews Publications), section IV, part 5, reel 94, CA 1 O203.
David Noah, 1824–1829, Original Papers—Missionaries: Church Missionary Society
papers. Available on microfilm, Church Missionary Society Papers, Microfilm
(Wiltshire: Adam Matthews Publications), section IV, part 5, reel 89, CA1 O165.

university of hull
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Australia

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Colonial Secretary’s Office, 2648, reel Z1787.

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John Thomas Bigge: Appendix to Bigge’s report of 1822, returns of Births, Deaths and
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Hassall family—Papers, 1793–2000.
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Captain John Piper Papers and Correspondence, 1790–1845.

new south wales state records’ authority

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Re land grant, fiche 3266, 4/438, p. 9.
Application for a Joint Auctioneer’s Licence, 15 January 1821, reel 6051, 4/1748,
pp. 95–97.
Granted an Auctioneer’s Licence, 8 March 1821, reel 6070, 4/1265, pp. 56–57.
Tendering Rebuilt Endeavour, 11 August 1821, reel 6051 4/1749, pp. 410–12.
Reply to tendering proposal, 21 July 1821, reel 6008, 4/3504, p. 159.
New Partner at MacQueen and Atkinson, 8 July 1822, reel 6055; 4/1761, p. 10.
Colonial Secretary’s Index, 4/3504, reel 6008, p. 45.
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Memorial for a Grant of 400 acres and indulgences, 1 October 1821, fiche 3209, 4/1863,
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Sierra Leone

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Cuba

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Legajo 44, Number 3, Consulado 3572.

Newspapers

United States of America

African Repository and Colonial Journal (Washington), vol. 7, 1831–1832
American Missionary Register (New York), vol. 2, 1822
Boston Recorder, 1819
City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Charleston), 1807
Religious Intelligencer (New Haven, CT), vol. 6, 28 December 1821
Religious Reporter (Middlebury, VT), September 1820
Washington Theological Repertory, vol. 1, 1819

United Kingdom
Asiatic Journal and Monthly Miscellany (London), vol. 2, 1816
Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 1812
Cheltenham Chronicle, 1811
Chester Chronicle, 1811
Christian Observer (London) vol. 22, 1822
Church Missionary Paper: For the Use of Weekly and Monthly Contributors to the Church Edinburgh
Review, or the Critical Journal, vol. 21, February-July 1813
Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle (London), vol. 26, 1818
Gore’s Liverpool Directory, 1790
Liverpool Mercury, 1813
Missionary Society (London), vol. 18, Midsummer 1820
Observer (London), 2001
Times (London), 1808–1815, 1840, 1980

Sierra Leone
African Herald (Freetown, Sierra Leone), 1809
Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone Advertiser, 1817–27
Sierra Leone Gazette, 1808

Australia
Courier (Hobart), 1847
Geelong Advertiser and Squatters’ Advocate, 1847
Hobart Town Gazette and Southern Reporter, 1818–1825
Launceston Examiner, 1847
Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 1815–1929
Sydney Herald, 1834
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. Ninth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting
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. Tenth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting
on the 27th of March, 1816. London: J. Hatchard, 1816.
. Third Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General Meeting
on the 25th of March, 1809. London: J. Hatchard, 1814.
. Twelfth Report of the Directors of the African Institution, Read at the Annual General
Meeting on the 9th of April, 1818. London: J. Hatchard, 1818.
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Anderson, Benjamin. Journey to Musardu. New York: S. W. Green, 1870.
Anon. An Account of All Sums of Money Paid or Claimed under the Acts Passed for the Abolition of the
Slave Trade, or under Any Orders in Council, as Bounties for Slaves or Natives of Africa, Condemned
in Any Court of Vice Admiralty Navy Office, 28th June 1817. London: printed for the House
of Commons, 1817.
. “American Colonization Society: Purchase of Land for a Colony at St. John’s
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. “A Brief Sketch of the State of Sierra Leone, in 1814, from the National Intel-
ligencer.” In The Christian Herald, edited by John Edwards Caldwell, 2:341–43. New
York: John E. Caldwell, 1816.
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 Index

Abeokuta, 227 Baily, Barney, 110

abolitionist campaign (UK), 11, 23, 26, 28, 30, Balahun, 77
43, 46–51, 56, 69, 82, 86, 97–98, 109, 113– Ball, Sophia (Safi), 177
15, 118, 131, 142–45, 161, 163, 174, 179–81, Ball, Tom, ix, 7–8, 11–13, 15–17, 56, 63, 70, 87–
186, 195, 207, 216 88, 91, 99–100, 105–7, 110–11, 113, 117,
abolition of the transatlantic slave trade (UK), 120, 176–77, 186–88, 217, 226–27; testifies
23, 28, 30, 41–42, 50–51, 82, 136–37, 143, against Bostock and McQueen, 15–16,
145, 177, 195 106–7
abolition of the transatlantic slave trade (US), Balli Island, 200
41–42, 49–50, 58–59 Balmain, William, 160
Aborigines’ Protection Society, 223 Baltimore, 48–49, 59, 68, 70
Africaan, 49 Banana Islands, 24, 26–28, 30, 38–41, 43, 68,
African Institution, 49–50, 115, 120, 142–43, 151 197, 208
Amadas, Ramón, 55 Bance Island. See Bunce Island
Amara, 53 Banta, 52, 56
Amelia, 27, 82 Baptist, Edward, 14
American Colonization Society, 17, 174 Barbados, 24, 177
American War of Independence, 47, 51 Barky (Baha), 200, 202
Amistad, 16, 53, 64, 67, 79 Bassa, x, 9, 16–17, 72–73, 91–92, 94, 102, 132,
Andrus, Joseph, 198–201 144, 167, 169–70, 172, 176, 199, 201–3,
Antigua, 24, 29 213–14
Augustina, 152 Bathern, Bessie (née Bostock), 225
Austria, 30 Bathern, Harry, 224
Ayres, Dr. Eli, 202 Bathern, Mona, 224
Battle of Waterloo, 159–60
Backhouse family, 23 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 130
Bacon, Charlotte, 199, 201 Bell, Dr. Andrew, 196, 210
Bacon, Ephraim, 198–201, 203 Bella Maria, 152, 230
Bacon, Samuel, 198 Belle, 9, 34
Bagna (Chief Bagna), 63, 89, 91–94 Bellerby, Lancelot (Bellaby), 41–42, 44, 55
Bahamas, 152 Bengal, 148, 183

303
304 Index

Bigge, John Thomas, 149 Bostock-Smith, Shauna, 225

Birrell, Thelma (née Bostock), 221, 225 bounty mutineers, 182
Black War Tasmania, 218 Brazil, 14, 46, 48, 126, 212. See also Rio de Janeiro;
Blake, William, 29 São Luís do Maranhão
Blanco, Pedro, 64–65 Bristol, Rhode Island, 42, 48
Bloom, 24 Bristol, United Kingdom, 28, 42
Blundell, Henry, 23 Brodie, Malcolm, 43, 181–82, 188, 268
Bolton, John, 82 Brougham, Lord Henry, 109, 137
Bom Caminho, 126 Bullom, 39–40, 177
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 30, 139, 159, 179–80 Bunce Island, 40, 54, 69, 119–20, 134, 143
Bootle, 28, 179 Bundu. See Sande society (Bundu society)
Bopolo, 52 Burgess, Ebenezer, 174–75, 198
Bostock, Amelia, 27 Burrowes, 24
Bostock, Augustus, 222 Bussa’s rebellion, 177, 191
Bostock, Augustus John, 224–25 Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 216
Bostock, Captain Robert (father of Robert), 10, Byron, Lord George Gordon, 196
23–29, 83
Bostock, Charles, 179, 183 Cábez, José, 80, 83–84
Bostock, Elizabeth (mother of Robert), 29, 139, Cabinda, 82
179 Caldwell, Elias B., 174
Bostock, Elizabeth (sister of Robert), 26, 179 Cambawama, 67
Bostock, Euphemia, 225 Campbell, Sir Neil, 195, 216
Bostock, Fanny, 223 Canaba, 9, 116
Bostock, George (descendant of Augustus John Canada, 14, 109. See also Nova Scotia
Bostock), 225 Canot, Theophilus (Conneau), 64, 66
Bostock, George (son of Robert), 222–24 Cape Coast Castle, 64, 126, 138
Bostock, Gerry, 225 Cape Mesurado, 63–70, 73, 75, 80, 86–87, 92,
Bostock, James, 222 107, 124, 126, 130, 137, 150, 154, 160, 180–
Bostock, John, 29 83, 187, 199, 201–3
Bostock, Lester, 225 Cape Mount, 12, 24, 52, 65, 82, 87, 135, 171,
Bostock, Margaret, 26, 179 199, 214
Bostock, Maria, 29, 179 Carr, James, 110
Bostock, Peter, 223–24 Cary, Lott, 202
Bostock, Rachael (née Rafferty), 17, 159–60, Cates, John Brereton, 169–75
179, 205–7, 215 Cauley, 185
Bostock, Robert, 4, 10, 15, 23, 26, 29–30, 38– Caulker (first name unknown, wife of Robert
44, 46, 49, 53, 56, 59, 65, 68, 73, 75, 84, Bostock), 39, 41, 87, 92
89, 91, 93–94, 97, 99, 105, 107–8, 111, 120, Caulker, Charles, 25, 39
124, 128, 136, 151, 159–61, 167, 178, 186, Caulker, George, 197, 208
197, 204, 206, 218, 221, 223, 225, 229–30; Caulker, Stephen, 38
at Banana Islands, 38–39; childhood, 23– Cecilia, 82
30; as free settler in Tasmania, 189, 204– Chambers, William, 97, 183
7, 214–15, 218–19; Gallinas slave factory, Charleston (slave factory), 68
49, 53–56, 59, 68, 106–7, 111, 135, 150; St. Charleston, South Carolina, 10, 51, 56, 59, 80,
Paul slave factory, 11, 63–66, 80–90, 94; 83
as Sydney trader, 160–61; transportation Charlotte, 41
to Australia, 140, 145–48 Chipps, Timothy, 126–27
Index 305

Christianity, 68, 130, 154–58, 163–70, 173, 175– Elizabeth, 198

76, 178, 186, 190–97, 210–11, 214 Elliott, 224
Christopher, 32 Ellis, John, 110
Church Missionary Society, 16, 144, 155–56, Elmina, 64, 83, 126
163–64, 166–67, 173, 175–76, 190–92, 195, Equiano, Olaudah (Gustavus Vassa), 28, 43,
208–13 94, 117, 127
cicatrices, 7, 13, 34–35, 79, 92, 100–102, 105, Escoto, Antonio (Anthony Scott), ix, 137–39, 248
116–17, 125 Esperança, 50
Clarke, George, 102, 183 Eugenie, 152
Clarkson, Thomas, 47
Cleveland, Elizabeth, 25 Fame, 110, 152, 159
Cleveland, James, x, 25–27, 29, 37–39, 43, 83 Fanny, 159
Cleveland, Robert, 26 Faŋsona, 44, 46, 53–54
Cleveland, William, 27–28, 38, 50 Fénix (Phoenix), 12, 80–86, 94, 107, 111, 137–38,
Columbine, Edward Henry, 50–51, 55–57, 147, 186
114–15 Fort Appollonia, 40
Commodore Perry, 150 Fort Thornton, 120
Condo Federation, 52 Fourah Bay College, 216, 222
Connecticut, 79. See also New Haven Foya, 52
“convict stain,” 207 Frazer, John, 43
convict transportation, ix, 59, 69, 136, 140, 145– Freetown, 12, 15–16, 47–48, 50, 68–69, 71, 83,
48, 179, 219, 222 85–87, 92–93, 97, 99, 102–4, 106, 109–10,
Cook, Dr. Cecil, 224 114, 117, 120–21, 124, 126, 129–30, 132–33,
Cook, George, 44, 65, 181–83, 188 135, 138, 151–52, 154–55, 162, 165, 167,
Court of Mixed Commission, Freetown, 180 171, 174–76, 178–80, 183–86, 188, 191,
Crundell, William, 47, 51, 53, 55 195–97, 199, 206, 209, 222, 226–27, 229
Cuba, 42, 46, 48, 55–59, 70, 79–80, 121, 136, Fula, 32
150, 212. See also Havana; Matanzas Futa Jallon, 32; jihad in, 32, 52, 77
Cuba, 48 Fyfe, Christopher, 69, 144
Curtis, Benjamin, 44, 65
Gallinas, 15, 38, 41–42, 44, 46–49, 51–56, 63–
Darwin, Charles, 205 64, 67–68, 106–7, 111, 135, 138, 150–51,
Davis, William, 135, 163, 165, 168–76, 190, 195, 170
199–203, 208–10 Gangá, 58, 230
Dazoe Island, 171 Garber, Cassandra, 226
Deen, Nafisatu, 226 Garnon, William, 162
DeWolf, Charles, 71 Gates, Henry Louis, 13
DeWolf, George, 57, 59 Gbande, 9, 32–33, 52, 56, 67, 76–77, 116, 134
DeWolf, James, 41–42, 44, 46, 48, 59, 71, 248 Gendema, 170
DeWolf, William, 41 George III of the United Kingdom, 139
Diani. See St. Paul River George IV of the United Kingdom (formerly
Dominica, 24, 141 the Prince Regent), 139, 158
Dos Amigos, 55–59, 87, 136 Glasgow, 42–44, 120, 136, 160
Drake, Richard (Philip), 43 Gola, 8–9, 32, 52
Dunbar, James (Santiago), 181, 187–88 Golondrina, 135
Durham University, 222 Gomez, Charles, 171
Düring, Henry, 164, 209, 211 Gorée, 64
306 Index

Governor Wentworth, 86 Jeffreys, Charles, 204

Grief, Moses, 114 Jemmy, 26
Guadeloupe, 152 Jenkinson, Robert, Lord Liverpool, 180
Guiana, 82 Jesty, Mr. and Mrs., 175–76
Gulf of Guinea, 40, 227 Jewett, Joseph, 110
Jingaloo, 224
Haitian Revolution, 30, 57, 142 John, 82
Harriet, 161, 164, 189 Johnson, William Augustine Bernard, ix, 155–
Hastings, 213 58, 162–69, 174–76, 178, 184, 186–87,
Havana, 10, 41, 44, 48, 55–59, 80, 82, 137–38, 190–92, 197–99, 209–13, 236
151–52, 230 Juan, 87
Hayes, Hannah, 64, 166
Hayes, Philippa, 64, 85, 93, 111, 166, 171, 197, Kayang, 78, 101, 103–4, 122
200, 202 Kerefe River, 41, 65
Hayes, William, 64 Kerricure, 116, 122
Hernández and Chaviteau, 59 Kilham, Hannah, 195
Heywood’s Bank, 27–28 King Ben of the Bassa, 201
Hickson, Charles, 68–69, 86, 89, 97 King John of the Bassa, 172, 201
Hill Station, 222 King John’s Town, 172
Hiram, 41 King Peter, 199–200, 202
Hirst, Thomas, 144, 155 King’s Yard, 99, 102. See also slave yard
HMS Albacore, 126–27 King Tom, 213
HMS Bann, 150–51 Kissi, 8–9, 25, 31–34, 36–37, 39–40, 56, 67, 76–
HMS Pandora, 182 78, 101, 103–4, 116, 134, 165, 190, 216
HMS Prince, 127–28 Kissy, 210, 212–13
HMS Thais, 70, 83, 86, 91, 100, 108, 115, 124– Kite, 27
26, 128, 130, 155, 180, 183, 186, 188, 227 Kitty, 82–86, 94, 97, 111, 137–38, 186
Hobart, 161, 204–6, 214, 218 Kizell, John, 51, 198
Hogbrook, 129, 132, 141–44, 151, 154–58, 162, Knopwood, Robert, 206
192; founding of, x–xi, 129–30, 132–35. See Kono, 8–9, 32, 34, 56, 67, 74–78, 101, 116, 125,
also Regent 132, 134, 143, 216
Hotel Africa, 3–5, 228 Kpelle, 9, 34, 52
House of Commons (UK), 28 Kroo Bay, 115
House of Lords (UK), 28 Krooman, Joshua, 102, 115
Hurdis, Annette, 225, 230 Kru, 12, 36, 63, 72, 84–86, 99, 102, 115, 124–25,
127, 138, 186, 201–2
Igbo, 134–35, 156, 163, 192
Îles de Los, 44, 48, 68–69 Larkins, 161
Indefatigable, 140, 145–49, 160 Lascelles, John, 43–44, 53
Ireland, 30 Leicester, 129, 132, 142, 144, 162, 185, 196
Islam, 32, 36, 68, 117, 191 liberated Africans, 100, 102, 113–14, 117–18, 121,
125, 130–31, 141–42, 144, 158, 163–65,
Jack Ryan’s Town, 177 167–69, 173, 175, 177, 192, 195–96, 212,
Jamaica, 23–24, 47, 82, 132, 168 215, 222; arrival in Freetown, 98–102; on
Jane, 41 Belle Vue plantation, 121–22; liberation,
Jefferson, Thomas, 174 112–16; recruited into Royal Navy, 124–28,
Index 307

183–84; recruited into army, 116–20; as Matanzas, 48, 56, 58, 80, 150, 230
shipmates/countrymen, 191–92 Matthews, William, 183
Liberia, 3, 5, 11, 17, 190, 198, 200, 203, 213, 216, Maxwell, Charles, 69, 86, 108–10, 115, 121–22,
227. See also Bopolo; Cape Mesurado; 128, 130, 132, 141, 161, 181, 188
Dazoe Island; Foya; King John’s Town; Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish, 221
Monrovia; Windward Coast May, 82
Libert, William, 110 Mayflower of Liberia, 198
Little Ben, 24–25 McKenzie, Kirsten, 221
Liverpool, 23–28, 30, 41–42, 82, 125, 136, 148– McQueen, John, ix–x, 10–13, 15–18, 42–45, 59,
49, 160, 179–80, 229 63–64, 66, 69–70, 73, 75–76, 80–94, 97–
Liverpool sailors’ strike, 27 100, 102, 105–11, 124, 126, 128, 136–37,
Loma, 9–10, 32, 52, 74–75, 77, 104 139–40, 145–49, 152, 158–61, 181–88, 204,
London, 16, 42, 49–50, 86, 99–100, 102, 115, 206, 215–18, 225, 227
120, 134, 136, 139, 143, 148, 155, 157, 166, Mende, 8–10, 33, 36, 40, 52, 56, 58, 67, 73–74,
171, 180, 182, 185, 222 76, 78, 116, 125, 134, 170, 183, 216
Lord, Simeon, 149, 160 Mestre, Bartolomeo, 150, 152
Louis, 13, 28, 180, 187 Mill, John Sterling, 63, 73, 85, 87, 91–94, 102,
Louis XVI of France, 28 111, 144, 167, 171, 185, 197, 199–200, 202,
Lovekine, Thomas, 98, 183 270
Lucy, 42 Mills, Samuel, 174–75, 198
Ludlam, Thomas, 50, 114, 143 Monroe, James, 174
Monrovia, 3, 174
Macaulay, Kenneth, 110, 115–16, 122, 129, 132–33 Morgan, John, 110, 175–76, 195, 208
Macaulay, Zachary, 86, 114 Murray, Venus, 138
MacCarthy, Charles, 141–42, 144, 156, 158,
165–66, 210, 212 Nancy, 41
Macquarie, Lachlan, 148–49, 160 Ndamba, 25, 37
Macquarie, Mrs. Elizabeth, 159 Nelson, Horatio, 29
Madison, James, 50, 70 Newbiggin, Harriet, 164
Mamaroo, 116, 176, 191, 217 New Haven, 79
Manding, 9, 32–33, 36, 52, 69, 77, 197 New Orleans, 58
Mano, 34–35, 74, 125 New Sestros, 64
Mariana, 50 New South Wales, 18, 46, 145–50, 159, 174, 179,
Marlin, James, 126, 128 188, 215, 225. See also Parramatta; Sydney
Maroons, 47, 108, 110, 114, 121, 129–32, 135, 215 Newton, John, 26, 28, 39, 197
Mary, 150–52 Nianda. See St. Paul River
Mason, Charles (Masson, Massón), ix, 4–5, 10– Nigeria, 14, 227. See also Abeokuta
13, 15–17, 19, 47–51, 53–59, 63–64, 68, 70, Noah, David (Bassa name unknown), x, 16–18,
75–77, 80, 84, 88, 93–94, 101–3, 105–8, 72–73, 91–92, 94, 102, 132, 134, 144, 167–
111, 115, 121–22, 125, 127, 130, 133–36, 138, 69, 171, 173, 175–76, 178, 185, 192, 195,
141, 143–44, 150–55, 163–65, 170–71, 176, 201, 203, 209–14, 218, 227, 230; becomes
180, 182, 184–87, 191, 198–99, 203, 227, schoolteacher at Regent, 209–10; child-
230, 233, 236, 244, 260; captured aboard hood in Regent, 144; conversion to Chris-
the Rosa, 150–52; drowns, 152–53; Gallinas tianity, 167–68; missionary journey to
slave factory, 49–51, 53–54; leaves Africa Bassa, 213–14; sold into slavery, 72–73
for Cuba, 55–59 Nore mutiny, 30
308 Index

Norman, James, 211–12 Retribution, 140

Northern Territory, 223–24. See also Elliott Reuben, 3–5, 228
Nova Scotia, 47 Rhode Island, 41–42, 44, 48, 59, 152
NS das Dolores, 135 Richmond, William, 55–56, 58–59, 87
NS de Belle, 135 Rio de Janeiro, 146
Rio Pongo, 64, 68–69, 111, 181–82
Organization of African Unity, 3–4 Roach, Constance, 139
Ottoman Empire, 30 Roach, John, x, 82–87, 111, 137–39, 186, 239,
246, 260
Page, William Gould, 137 Rogers, James, 28–29
Parker, Solomon Abiodun, 226 Rogers, Mattier, 53, 246
Parramatta, 148 Rosa, 150–52
Pepper Coast. See Windward Coast Ross, James, 205
Peterloo Massacre, 179 Royal African Corps, 117–20, 122, 130, 156
Peters, Joseph, 69–70, 105, 110 Royal Navy (UK), 11, 15–16, 23, 47–49, 68, 70,
Phoenix. See Fénix (Phoenix) 86, 89–92, 113, 121, 127–29, 136, 143, 147,
Phoenix, Jack (Za). See Za ( Jack Phoenix) 180–83
Plantain Islands, 8, 39–40, 170, 197–98 Ruiz, Manuel, 82
Poole, Thomas Eyre, 217 Russia, 30
Poro society, 34, 36, 77–79, 92, 100–101, 105, Ryan, Catherine, 17, 206
116, 125, 134, 170
Portsmouth, 127–28, 139–40 Safui, 10, 75
Pride and Prejudice, 130 Samo, Samuel, 68–70, 86, 89, 92, 97, 109–11,
Princess Charlotte, 87, 91–94, 98, 100–101, 108, 124, 182
133, 141–42, 151, 178, 180, 184, 195, 216, Sande society (Bundu society), 36, 78–79, 134
227 San José Triunfo, 83, 86
Prince William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester, Sanusi-Ball, Raila, 226–28, 231
136 São Luís do Maranhão, 48
privateering, 12, 70–71, 82–83, 85, 150 Scobell, Edward, 86–89, 98, 108, 117, 125–26,
Prussia, 30 128, 183, 188
Purdie, Robert, 106–11, 188 Scotland, 42. See also Glasgow
Scott, Anthony. See Escoto, Antonio (Anthony
Radcliffe, Thomas, 24 Scott)
Rambler, 70–71, 86 Scott, Sir William, 180
Randall, Richard, 213 Sessay (Lawrence Summers), x, 9–10, 13, 16–17,
Rankin, Frederick Harrison, 131 66–68, 73–75, 78, 90, 94, 101, 125, 128,
Rayo, 152 183–85, 217; enslavement, 9, 66–68. See
Reffell, John (Yarra), x, 17, 165, 167–68, 186– also Summers, Lawrence (Sessay)
88, 217–18, 227. See also Yarra ( John Sherbro, 8–9, 34, 38–40, 59, 68, 87, 104, 170,
Reffel) 197, 208
Reffell, Joseph, 165, 167, 231 Sherbro Island, 45, 51, 87, 170, 198
Regent, 132, 136, 139, 157–58, 184–85, 187, 190– Siaka (Chief Siaka/King Siaka), 16, 44, 46–47,
96, 198–99, 201, 203, 208–12, 214, 216–18, 53–54, 170–71, 174
227, 231; education in, 114, 156–57, 162, Sierra Leone, 11, 15–16, 18, 24, 30, 40, 47–48,
167, 195–96, 208–9; model village, 144, 50–51, 54, 57, 64, 67–68, 83, 99, 106–7,
162–77, 212. See also Hogbrook 109, 114–15, 117, 119, 121, 125–27, 129, 138,
Index 309

142–44, 148, 151, 155, 157, 161–64, 170, second missionary journey, 197–98; tes-
172–74, 176–78, 180–81, 183, 187, 194–96, tifies at Bostock’s appeal, 183–84; third
198, 200, 210, 212–13, 216–17, 222, 225–27, missionary journey, founding Liberia,
229–31. See also Banana Islands; Bunce Is- 199–203
land; Cambawama; Fort Thornton; Free- Tamba, William (Tamba). See Tamba (William
town; Gallinas; Gendema; Hastings; Hill Tamba)
Station; Hogbrook; Jack Ryan’s Town; Tasmania, 218, 221–22, 229. See also Van Die-
Kerefe River; Kissy; Kroo Bay; Leicester; men’s Land
Plantain Islands; Regent; Sherbro Island; Taylor, Charles, 4
Tombo; Waterloo Temne, 9, 56, 100, 177
slave yard, 16, 73. See also King’s Yard Terry, Samuel, 149, 160
Slocum, Captain, 48 Thompson, Thomas Perronet, 114, 129
Smith, Jane, 44 Thorpe, Robert, xi, 69, 109–11, 118, 160–61,
Soba, Dewarca, 53 180–82, 187–88, 272
Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Thorpe, William, 110
Trade, 41 Three Sisters, 41, 48
Sorell, William, 205–6 Tombo, 169
South Carolina, 25, 30, 44, 51, 56, 59, 79–80, Townside, 24
181. See also Charleston, South Carolina Treaty of Vienna, 180
South Esk River, 214, 218–19 Trollope, Anthony, 58
Spain, 30 Tucker, Harry, 26
Spithead mutiny, 30 Tufft, William, 69–70, 105
St. Charles Church, 192, 217, 227, 231 Turks and Caicos, 152
Stewart, Robert, Lord Castlereagh, 137, 151 Two Cousins, 48
St. John River, 170, 172, 199, 201
St. Mary’s (Banjul), 208, 224 Underwood, James, 149
St. Medeina, 53
St. Paul River, 11, 16, 63–64, 66, 73, 76, 80, 93, Vai, 8–9, 40, 52, 56, 76, 170
108, 133, 137, 171, 183, 199–200, 228 Van Diemen’s Land, 161, 189, 204–7, 214, 216,
St. Phillip’s Church, 159 218. See also Tasmania
Stockton, Robert, 202 Vassa, Gustavus. See Equiano, Olaudah (Gusta-
Summers, Lawrence (Sessay), x, 16–17, 184, 188, vus Vassa)
217. See also Sessay (Lawrence Summers) Vice-Admiralty Court, Freetown, 47
Susan, 214 Virginia, 24, 202
Sydney, 140, 147–49, 159–61, 204–6, 215–16, Volador, 135
230–31
Sydney Packet, 140 War of 1812, 12, 70, 83, 107, 139, 152, 180
Warrnambool, 222
Tamba (William Tamba), x–xi, 8–9, 11, 13, 16– Warwick, William, 126–27
18, 31–32, 34–37, 39–40, 56, 63, 78, 89, 91, Washington, George, 42, 139
99–101, 104–6, 113, 132, 134–35, 142–44, Waterloo, 159–60, 177, 213, 217
151, 154–56, 158, 163–76, 178, 184–88, Watkins, Lieutenant, 88, 125, 127, 183
190–92, 194–203, 208–13, 215–17, 219, Weir, Henry, 128
222, 225–27; conversion to Christianity, Wellesley, Arthur, Duke of Wellington, 128,
154–55, 158; first missionary journey, 169– 159, 213
73; lives at Plantain Islands, 8, 39–40; Wentworth, D’Arcy, 160
310 Index

Wenzel, Charles, 122–23 Yarra ( John Reffel), x, 11–13, 15–17, 66, 87–
West African naming practices, 34, 36, 77–78 88, 91, 99–101, 105–7, 110–11, 132–33,
West India Regiment, 118, 120, 176–77, 191, 217 142–43, 156, 165, 167–68, 178, 186–88,
Wheatley, Phillis, 194 192, 216–17, 227, 231; moves to Regent,
Whydah, 126 132–33; testifies against Bostock and
Wilberforce, William, 47, 114, 131, 144, 161, 181, McQueen, 106–7; testifies at Bostock’s
188 appeal, 186–87
Williams, James, 110 Young, Pompey, 110
Windward Coast, 17, 30, 40–41, 43, 48, 56, 58,
64, 135, 151 Za ( Jack Phoenix), x, 7, 10–13, 75, 81, 84, 86,
Winpilin, Riley Young, 223 111, 138
Winsley, William, 183 Zaragozano, 50–51, 137
Wood, Marcus, 113 Zenee, 133