Distant Freedom : St Helena and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1840-1872 [1 ed.] 9781781383858, 9781781382837

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Distant Freedom

Liverpool Studies in International Slavery, 10

Distant Freedom St Helena and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1840–1872

Andrew Pearson Distant Freedom

Liverpool University Press

First published 2016 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2016 Andrew Pearson The right of Andrew Pearson to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78138-283-7 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78138-385-8 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound in Poland by BooksFactory.co.uk

For Katherine Ruth Pearson

Contents Contents

List of Figures

ix

List of Tables

xi

Acknowledgements xiii Introduction 1

1. A Place of Immense Advantage

13

2. London and Jamestown

39

3. Sailortown

75

4. Life and Death in the Depots

106

6. After ‘Liberation’

201

5. ‘All, all, without avail’: Medicine and the Liberated Africans

154

7. Island Lives

242

Appendix 1: Liberated Africans Captured aboard Slave Ships: Cases Tried at Freetown, Luanda, Cape Town and St Helena, 1836–68

278

Conclusion 271

Appendix 2: Prizes Adjudicated by the Vice-Admiralty Court of St Helena

Appendix 3: Liberated African Emigration from St Helena Appendix 4: Emigrant Voyages from St Helena

282

284

288

Bibliography 291 Index 308 •

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Figures Figures

Figure 1: Map of St Helena

12

Figure 2: St Helena: view from the Peaks

15

Figure 3: Jamestown, c.1862 15 Figure 4: Lemon Bay

23

Figure 5: Rupert’s Valley

26

Figure 6: Recaptives at St Helena, 1840–72

31

Figure 7: Atlantic shipping routes, ocean currents and trade winds

74

Figure 8: Box plot of voyage durations of prize vessels sent to St Helena

80

Figure 9: Prizes adjudicated by St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court, 1840–67 87 Figure 10: Recaptives sent to British anti-slavery courts, 1836–67

88

Figure 11: Auction notice in the St Helena Gazette 91 Figure 12: The Waterwitch Monument

103

Figure 13: Lemon Valley

109

Figure 14: Sketch of Rupert’s Bay, St Helena, 1850

112

Figure 15: Sketched plan of the tents in Rupert’s Bay, 1851

114

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Distant Freedom Figure 16: Photograph of the Rupert’s Valley depot, 1861

123

Figure 17: Liberated Africans in the Rupert’s Valley depot, 1848

125

Figure 18: Age profile of recaptives in St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment, 1841–48

135

Figure 19: Copper alloy bracelet, in situ on the wrist of a child

140

Figure 20: Objects of personal adornment from the liberated African graveyards in Rupert’s Valley

140

Figure 21: Dental modifications

141

Figure 22: Preaching in Rupert’s Valley

145

Figure 23: Burials in the liberated African graveyards in Rupert’s Valley

149

Figure 24: Coffin belonging to a neonate

151

Figure 25: Evidence for pathology

159

Figure 26: Evidence of post-mortem interventions

194

Figure 27: St Paul’s church

204

Figure 28: Destinations of emigrants from St Helena

220

Figure 29: The Hussey Charity School, Jamestown

253

Figure 30: Liberated Africans on St Helena, c.1900 270

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Tables Tables

Table 1: Diseases in the Rupert’s Valley hospital, 2 June 1849

161

Table 2: Mortality aboard prizes sent to St Helena, 6 April 1847–4 June 1848

162

Table 3: Diet scales

180

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Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

This book has, quite literally, had a long journey to reach publication. It is one that would never have been possible without the generous support of a Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. The fellowship was hosted by the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol, whose staff and students provided a rich and enjoyable environment in which to work. I would particularly like to thank Alex Bentley and Mark Horton for their lively interest in the project, and Kate Robson-Brown for her academic rigour, encouragement and friendship, going back to the 2008 excavations. PhD fellows Erna Johannesdottir and Judy Watson made my visit to St Helena in 2012 particularly enjoyable. Beyond Bristol, I have benefitted from the support and advice of numerous people. Comments on working drafts were provided by Seymour Drescher, Sharla Fett, Jerry Handler, Richard Huzzey and Jason Williams. I must also acknowledge Manuel Barcia Paz’s generous refereeing of the manuscript at the time of its proposal to Liverpool University Press. Many other people have helped to broaden my understanding of the slave trade and its contexts, sharing their expertise and saving me from many errors of fact and interpretation: Rosanne Adderley, Richard Benjamin, Heidi Bauer-Clapp, Paul Benyon, Stephen Constantine, Chris Duvall, David Eltis, Mark Hunter, Helen MacQuarrie, Ken Morgan, David Richardson, Ed Simons, Annsofie Witkin, Adam Woolf and Jenny Wraight. Many of these dialogues were only made possible by grants for travel and conference attendance, from the University of California, Huntington Library, Pittsburgh World History Center, Tulane University and UMass Amhurst, all of which offered opportunities to present this research during its development. The annual meetings of the Friends of St Helena provided an expert forum for knowledge sharing and discussion, as did the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool. •

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Distant Freedom Several archives and libraries provided essential assistance, above all in the St Helena archives, where Karen Henry and Tracy Buckley were extremely helpful. I must also acknowledge the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme, since its funding enabled a return trip to St Helena in 2012, during which I was able to complete my final lines of enquiry. Other archival support was received from the staff at the UK National Archives, the British Library, the National Maritime Museum and the Bodleian Library. St Helena is a place about which much is known, but very little written down. I am therefore extremely grateful to all of those who have shared their knowledge with me, among them Colin Fox, Barbara and Basil George, Lucy Caesar, Nick, Henry and Ed Thorpe, Ian Mathieson, John Pinfold and Alexander Schulenburg. Special thanks are owed to Ben Jeffs, with whom I have shared several trips to the island, and whose knowledge of, and passion for, its heritage is unparalleled. My family are owed a particular debt. Kate Pearson spent many hours calendaring and transcribing the primary historical documents, and without her efforts this study would still be far from completion. My wife Iona has cheerfully combined practical support, particularly in respect of GIS, with a tolerance for my long absences abroad and a periodic obsession with ‘the book’. Since 2013 our son Tom has provided joy and distraction in equal measure, while Nick and Carol King deserve much gratitude for their childminding. And, through their love, support and sponsorship of my education over many years, my parents Hugh and Sue Pearson laid the foundation for this work. Lastly, I must turn to the St Helenians, whose warm welcome and friendship has made working on the island a true pleasure. I hope that they will see value in this study: it is, after all, their story.

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Introduction Introduction

In October 1840, few people on the remote Atlantic island of St Helena were giving any thought to the abolition of slavery. True, a Vice-Admiralty court had recently been established in the capital, Jamestown, and this had already pronounced judgement on a small number of slave ships, condemning them to be broken up and sold. Sailors of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron roamed the streets of the capital and spent money in its taverns, rubbing shoulders with the crews of slaving vessels who also loitered in the town, immune from prosecution but too poor to buy their passage home. To the south, out of sight and mind, the human traffic of the slave trade was also present: a few tens of Africans sequestered in the isolated beauty of Lemon Valley. Instead, all attention was focused on Napoleon, whose exile on the island from 1815 until his death in 1821 was – and still remains – St Helena’s enduring claim to fame. The former emperor’s remains had been buried in a plain tomb in the secluded Sane Valley, far removed from Europe and the scene of his military triumphs. Previous plans to retrieve his body had come to nothing, but in May 1840 they were revived by Adolphe Thiers, the new Président du Conseil under King Louis Philippe, seeking their return as a grand political coup de théâtre.1 Accordingly, on 8 October, the frigate la Belle Poule and its escort la Favorite arrived at Jamestown harbour following a stately cruise of some three months from Toulon, via Spain, Madeira, Tenerife and Brazil. Commanded by the Prince de Joinville, Louis Philippe’s third son, the mission was accompanied by a host of minor aristocracy and other dignitaries, including several of those who had been companion to Napoleon during his years of exile. 1 Gilbert Martineau, Le Retour de cendres (Paris: Tallandier, 1990). •

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Distant Freedom The St Helenians had been given several months’ forewarning of this event, which was anticipated with much excitement. Over the next week, Jamestown’s society – so often starved of novelty and for whom calls by royalty were extremely rare – was mesmerised by these prestigious guests. They watched as the visitors made a pilgrimage to Napoleon’s tomb, and then to his former house at Longwood (by then used as a barn), standing aside while the French sailors carried off the billiard table, a tapestry and a variety of other relics of exile that had survived the resident sheep and goats. Finally, at midnight of 14 October, the torch-lit operation to recover the emperor’s remains began.2 Over the following hours, Napoleon’s coffin was disinterred with great ceremony and his body, which was found to be remarkably well preserved, was transferred to a new casket. On the afternoon of the 15th, the cortege began its stately journey back to Jamestown in driving rain, the dignitaries and military escort followed by a crowd of ordinary St Helenians. The procession reached the steps of the wharf some two and a half hours later and here the emperor’s remains were formally handed to France, carefully loaded onto a launch and taken aboard la Belle Poule. Three days later, the French ships weighed anchor, and with their departure St Helena’s unlikely connection with Napoleon came to an end. Despite the brief interlude of excitement, most residents of the island would not have welcomed this turn of events. After all, it was the one thing for which their home was notable, and a few people had even made a modest profit from tourists making the pilgrimage to Longwood and Napoleon’s tomb. Many watching the ships’ departure must have viewed this episode as a further sign of St Helena’s decline. Only four years earlier, the governance of the island had passed from the East India Company to the British Crown, breaking a long-established order and removing many certainties of life. Travellers from India and the East – so long the mainstay of St Helena’s wealth – were beginning to bypass the island, preferring instead the overland route via Aden and Egypt. The garrison had been halved and in the past year hundreds of St Helenians had emigrated to Cape Colony and elsewhere in search of a better life. The economy appeared to be in decline and poverty was on the increase. The island was slipping into obscurity, with a future that seemed bleak and with little hope of reversal. How quickly this was to change, and in such an improbable manner. Few could have predicted that, within less than two months, St Helena would once again play a formative role in world affairs – one that, from an historical perspective, far outweighs its use as the prison for a deposed emperor. Nor could anyone have anticipated that slavery – which for centuries had been 2 The Exhumation of the Remains of Napoleon Bonaparte. Manuscript notes by Joseph Lockwood. British Library General Reference Collection 10095.dd.25(2). •

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Introduction the colony’s backbone – would once again preserve it from financial ruin. Yet this is exactly what transpired. Only a few weeks after the removal of Napoleon’s body, the influx of freed slaves began in earnest; for the next 30 years, St Helena’s ‘Liberated African Establishment’ assumed a key place in the island’s affairs, at times dominating them completely.3 The start of this process was not auspicious: by Christmas 1840 its limited resources were overwhelmed, corpses were being buried at sea and the newly appointed surgeon was threatening to resign. The Governor wrote to his political masters in London for advice, in the full knowledge that he could not expect a reply in anything less than six months. First Lemon Valley, and later Rupert’s Valley, would be entirely given over to the task of reception, treatment and quarantine of a multitude of freed slaves, while also becoming charnel houses for the thousands more who did not survive their transportation. The archaeological remains relating to this episode continue to offer a stark reminder of the atrocities of the slave trade, and also of the human cost of slave trade suppression policies. As this book seeks to demonstrate, from 1840, St Helena took a central place in Britain’s attempts to extinguish the transatlantic slave trade by military means. When its Lemon Valley depot opened, the Brazilian slave trade was in full flow; 27 years later, when its counterpart in Rupert’s Valley was finally broken up, the human traffic to the New World had entirely ceased. During this period the island’s Vice-Admiralty court condemned more slave ships and liberated more Africans than any other British possession, which in absolute terms amounts to 450 vessels and over 25,000 people. As a consequence, St Helena’s affairs would, once again, occupy the great British politicians of the day, while the events that took place there were reported from Europe to North America. Their outcomes, particularly in relation to the African Diaspora, continue to resonate across the Atlantic world. But, in October 1840, as la Belle Poule and la Favourite slipped over the horizon, all of this was yet to come.

*** The origins of the present book do not lie in historic archives but in the discovery of the physical remains of the slave trade. St Helena is only accessible by sea, but long-held ambitions for an airport led to pre-emptive archaeological studies being undertaken across the northern part of the island between 2006 and 2008. Much of this work addressed a landscape 3 This is the term most commonly applied to St Helena’s depots and their supporting administration in the primary documents. In this book it is either used in full, or abbreviated to ‘African Establishment’ or simply ‘Establishment’. •

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Distant Freedom whose rich cultural heritage was manifestly obvious, from its plantations and monumental East India Company defences to the Georgian architecture of Jamestown. In Rupert’s Valley, however, there was little above ground to indicate the presence of anything remarkable. It is an unattractive proposition, the ruined defences and modern industrial sheds at the bay giving way to an arid landscape of scrub and fallen rock. Yet here, between the narrow floodplain and towering cliffs, trial trenches revealed the tangled remains of corpses buried in shallow graves. Documentary research confirmed the existence of two large graveyards dating from 1840 to the early 1860s, and indicated that the burials belonged to some of the last victims of the transatlantic slave trade. That discovery gave rise to major archaeological, historical and scientific investigations that are still continuing – of which this book forms a part. Open-area excavation within the upper graveyard took place in 2008, revealing the bodies of 325 individuals in a combination of single, multiple and mass graves. These investigations have now been published as the monograph Infernal Traffic, which presents the archaeological, osteological and artefactual studies of this unique site. The monograph sets these findings within the historical context of St Helena’s African Establishment, but its primary focus is on the graveyards – and upon those freed slaves who did not survive their transportation.4 While the physical remains unearthed in Rupert’s Valley are of huge importance, an equally significant outcome of the project has been the re-emergence of the historical narrative pertaining to St Helena’s role in abolition. This is a more complete story. It encompasses the living as well as the dead, and the European as well as the African; it also stretches beyond the narrow confines of the island to embrace the African continent and the New World. And, while there are parallels to be drawn with other places around the Atlantic rim where anti-slavery courts sat and slaves were liberated, St Helena’s remote location, combined with its epidemiological, social and economic circumstances, made it unique in many respects. It is, moreover, a story that deserves telling in its own right, providing an insight into the practical outcomes of British suppression policies, long after 1807 and far from London’s political ideals. St Helena’s isolation is coupled with historical obscurity, except for its moment in the sun between 1815 and 1821. Various accounts of the island were published during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but the last detailed overview of its history is that by Philip Gosse, published in 1938.5 4 Andrew Pearson, Ben Jeffs, Annsofie Witkin and Helen MacQuarrie, Infernal traffic: The excavation of a Liberated African Graveyard in Rupert’s Valley, St. Helena (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2011). 5 Philip Gosse, St Helena 1502–1938 (Oswestry: Anthony Nelson, 1938). Other more •

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Introduction Despite St Helena’s substantial contribution to British empire-building, the island rarely features in any history of the East India Company. Its acquisition is discussed in a 1919 article, but the nearly two centuries of Company ownership do not find a place in general studies of the East India Company. The exception is Stephen Royle’s The Company’s Island, which examines the formative years of the colony (up to the early eighteenth century).6 Instead, the island’s historiography is strongly biased towards Napoleon, a situation that prevails both in terms of specific studies, and in the disproportionate attention devoted to this period within general historical accounts.7 The same myopia is manifested in physical form on the island itself: the public library contains a substantial section on Napoleon – equal to the rest of its history section – while the lobby of the only hotel, the Consulate, is festooned with portraits of the emperor and nothing else. The Museum of St Helena, fortunately, offers a far more balanced set of exhibits. St Helena is a place that was built on the backs of the enslaved, but Royle’s book is the only major published work which addresses this subject, and only within an early time frame. The island is ignored by all general narratives about slavery, though this is not unreasonable given the small numbers of enslaved, as compared to the unfree populations of the West Indies and elsewhere. On the other hand, given the importance of its role in the nineteenth-century suppression of the slave trade and the wealth of accessible primary sources, historians’ long-standing neglect of St Helena’s is less justified and harder to understand. One looks for it in vain in formative narratives such as Du Bois’s Suppression of the Slave-Trade to the United States of America and Mathieson’s Great Britain and the Slave Trade. More recent overviews of suppression, such as Temperley’s British Anti-Slavery and the relevant chapters of Thomas’s History of the Atlantic Slave Trade also fail to mention St Helena.8 The same is true for studies of the West Africa superficial studies have been published since, for example Margaret Stewart-Taylor, St Helena: Ocean Roadhouse (London: Hale, 1969) and David Smallman, Quincentenary: A Story of St Helena 1502–2002 (Penzance: Patten Press, 2003). A synoptic chronology is provided by Robin Gill and Percy Teale in St Helena 500: A Chronological History of the Island (St Helena: St Helena Heritage Society, 1999). 6 Stephen Royle, The Company’s Island: St Helena, Company Colonies and the Colonial Endeavour (London: I.B. Taurus, 2007). 7 For accounts of Napoleon’s exile see Bernard Chevallier, Michel DancoisneMartineau and Thierry Lentz, Sainte Hélène: île de mémoire (Paris: Fayard, 2005); Michel Dancoisne-Martineau and Thierry Lentz, Chroniques de Sainte-Hélène: Atlantique sud (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin, 2011). 8 William Du Bois, The Suppression of the Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638–1870 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896); William Mathieson, Great Britain and the Slave Trade, 1839–65 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929); Howard •

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Distant Freedom Squadron, the classic accounts being those of Lloyd and Ward.9 This is in marked contrast to their recognition of the role of Sierra Leone during this period, and of the activities of Vice-Admiralty courts in places such as Cuba.10 Even the abortive attempt to use the island of Fernando Po as a naval base has received greater attention.11 Of course, nothing in scholarship is completely new. All of the dedicated histories of St Helena, from John Melliss’s 1875 book onwards, discuss its role in abolition – though most of these are rather dated and none has achieved widespread circulation beyond the island. The longest account is to be found in Emily Jackson’s monograph of 1903, amounting to some 30 pages.12 In addition, there are various unpublished studies to be found, including some within the local island journal Wirebird.13 The most significant piece of research is that of Wilfred Tatham, honorary archivist at Jamestown during the 1960s, which drew together and summarised most of the primary material from the Vice-Admiralty court that was accessible on St Helena at that time. Tatham concluded his synopsis to the Government Secretary by asking whether his information would be of value in London. It undoubtedly would have been, but it was never conveyed there. Belatedly, during the research for the present book, Tatham’s work was an invaluable guide to the St Helena-based sources. Crucially, too, it made note of information contained within documents that are now too fragile to be examined.14 Temperley, British Anti-Slavery 1833–1870 (London: Longman, 1972); Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade 1440–1870 (London: Picador, 1997). 9 Christopher Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade: The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century (London: Longmans, 1949); William Ward, The Royal Navy and the Slavers: The Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969). 10 The same is true of subsequent studies, most recently Siân Rees, Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009). On Sierra Leone see Tara Helfman, ‘The court of Vice Admiralty at Sierra Leone and the abolition of the West African slave trade’, Yale Law Journal 115 (2006), pp. 1122–56. 11 Robert Brown, ‘Fernando-Po and the Anti-Sierra-Leonean Campaign 1826–1834’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 6 (1973), pp. 249–64. 12 John Melliss, St. Helena: A physical, historical, and topographical description of the island, including its geology, fauna, flora, and meteorology (London: L. Reeve, 1875); Emily Jackson, St Helena: The Historic Island, from its discovery to the present date (Melbourne: Ward Lock & Co., 1903). 13 For example Alexander Schulenburg, ‘Aspects of the Lives of the “Liberated Africans” on St Helena’, Wirebird 26 (2003), pp. 18–27; Stephane Van de Velde, The End of Slavery and the Liberated Africans’ Depot in Rupert’s Valley (unpublished document, St Helena Government Archives, c.2010). 14 Wilfred Tatham, Notes on the suppression of the slave trade. Vice-Admiralty Court, •

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Introduction Modern scholarship also touches upon the subject. Leslie Bethell’s studies of the Brazilian slave trade certainly recognise the use, and usefulness, of St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court,15 while the recently published Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its supporting database include statistics about freed slaves sent to St Helena.16 In general terms, it would be fair to say that the majority of authors currently studying nineteenth-century suppression of the slave trade, slave ethnicity and the African Diaspora show awareness of the island’s involvement. Most, however, only offer a passing reference or brief commentary amidst text that pursues other avenues of study.17 St Helena is most frequently mentioned in works whose primary focus is Sierra Leone – a place that has received a good deal of attention in both historic and modern scholarship. There is certainly nothing written about St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment that even remotely equates in length or detail to Peterson’s Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone.18 The same applies to most other bases used for the liberation of slaves, for example Cape Colony, Mauritius and Bombay: only the United States depot at Key West has received a modicum of attention, in large part because of its place in American politics immediately prior to the Civil War.19 St Helena, 1840–1872. St Helena Government Archives, File 14; Letter to Government Secretary, 22 September 1967. 15 Leslie Bethell, The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 16 David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); see also Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, http://www.slavevoyages.org. The related African Origins database incorporates the limited number of names of liberated Africans recorded on St Helena: http://africanorigins.org. 17 A succinct discussion is given by David Eltis, ‘Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations: Some Comparisons’, American Historical Review 88.2 (1983), p. 275. More recent examples include Sharla Fett, ‘Middle Passages and Forced Migrations: Liberated Africans in Nineteenth-Century US Camps and Ships’, Slavery and Abolition 31.1 (2010), pp. 75–98; Richard Anderson, Alex Borucki, Daniel Domingues da Silva, David Eltis, Paul Lachance, Philip Misevich and Olatunji Ojo, ‘Using African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Crowd-Sourcing and the Registers of Liberated Africans, 1808–1862’, History in Africa 40.1 (2013), 165–91. Two recent doctoral studies also fit into this mould: Mary Wills, Royal Navy sailors and the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, 1807–1865: Anti-slavery, empire and identity (PhD thesis, University of Hull, 2012); Maeve Ryan, The human consequences of slave trade abolition: Examining post-intervention policy and practice through the case study of the Liberated African Department and the administration of liberated Africans at Sierra Leone, 1808–1863 (PhD thesis, Trinity College Dublin, 2013). 18 John Peterson, Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone 1787–1870 (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). 19 Fett, ‘Middle Passages and Forced Migrations’. A more detailed study by Professor •

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Distant Freedom It is within three books, each pertaining to indentured African emigration, that the broadest discussion of St Helena is to be found: Johnson Asiegbu’s Slavery and the Politics of Liberation, Monica Schuler’s Alas, Alas, Kongo and Rosanne Adderley’s New Negroes from Africa.20 All three authors recognised that large numbers of liberated Africans were present on St Helena and, in discussing their transit, subsequent lives and the surrounding politics, touched to a degree on the situation on the island and the operation of its depots.21 These books – particularly that of Schuler – provide the basis upon which most subsequent scholars have drawn their information about St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment. The fact that each of these three book deals with Africa and the Caribbean first, and St Helena a distant second, results in an obvious limitation on their usefulness in respect of the latter. The source material upon which these studies are based also leads to problems of interpretation. Asiegbu drew heavily on the records of the Land and Emigration Commission, and those relating to Sierra Leone and the West Indies. Schuler, similarly, focused on Sierra Leonean and Jamaican sources. In other words, both sketched out events on St Helena with little or no reference to the principal sources that are held in the CO 247 series of the National Archives and in the St Helena Government Archives. Adderley is the exception, having accessed the London-based material, to an extent at least, though the island-based material was not used. Each of these studies criticises British policy in respect of St Helena. Schuler does so directly, presenting a picture of a place that was isolated, desolate and lethal, and which never should have been sanctioned for the reception of liberated Africans. Given her near-complete reliance on a single Fett, focused on recaptive Africans from the slave ships Echo, Wildfire, William and  Bogota, received at Charlestown and Key West between 1858 and 1860, is in preparation. 20 Johnson Asiegbu, Slavery and the politics of liberation 1787–1861: A study of liberated African emigration and British anti-slavery policy (London: Longmans, 1969); Monica Schuler, “Alas, Alas, Kongo”: A social history of indentured African immigration into Jamaica, 1841–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Rosanne Adderley, “New Negroes from Africa”: Slave trade abolition and free African settlement in the nineteenthcentury Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 21 Under the terms of the 1807 abolition act, Africans found aboard illegally operating slave ships were ‘forfeited to His Majesty … in such Manner and Form, as any Goods or Merchandize unlawfully imported’. The act stipulated that these persons were to be immediately emancipated, their liberation following as a matter of course via a two-stage process: the Vice-Admiralty court condemned the slaves to the Crown, which in turn granted them their liberty. Various descriptors have been used for these people: within this book the terms ‘liberated Africans’ and African ‘recaptives’ are used interchangeably. •

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Introduction source – an 1850 parliamentary report about Rupert’s Valley at the height of its humanitarian crisis – that conclusion is entirely unsurprising. Asiegbu and Adderley do not address the question head-on, but their narratives lead the reader towards a similar conclusion. With scenes that resembled the worst famine or refugee camps of the modern era, and with an average mortality rate of 30%, no book can or should be an apologist for the circumstances that often prevailed within St Helena’s depots. As this study will show, however, the causes were different and more complex than have previously been assumed. Much of the misunderstanding – Schuler’s in particular – stems from false conceptions about the island itself. St Helena is undeniably remote, but it has a clement, productive natural environment which, by the mid-nineteenth century, was home to a mature colonial outpost. However, because it was Napoleon’s prison and place of death (the emperor himself called it an ‘isola maladetta’ or accursed island), it has commonly been misrepresented (either accidentally or wilfully) in both academic works and popular culture.22 These negative portrayals are often taken at face value, and appear to have permeated the little scholarship that deals with St Helena’s role in suppression. William Green variously described it as ‘a remote rocky colony’ and ‘a barren and resourceless isle’, while Monica Schuler characterised the whole island as ‘barren, rocky, windy and unsuitable for the permanent settlement of large numbers of Africans’. Adderley thought it an ‘almostdesolate Atlantic island’.23 Such mistaken perceptions have the potential to mislead, because while St Helena was no paradise and certainly failed a 22 See Emmanuel-Auguste-Dieudonné Cases, Mémorial de St Hélène (London: Henry Colburn, 1823); Barry O’Meara, Napoleon in Exile or, A voice from St. Helena. The opinions and reflections of Napoleon on the most important events of his life and government in his own words (Philadelphia: J. Crissy, 1822), p. 21. For examples of negative portrayals in modern popular culture, see Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Dumas Club (London: Vintage Books, 2003) and the motion picture The Emperor’s New Clothes (2001), adapted from Simon Leys’s novel The Death of Napoleon (London: Picador, 1993). 23 William Green, British Slave Emancipation: The Sugar Colonies and the Great Experiment, 1830–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 273 note 47; William Green, ‘Plantation Society and Indentured Labour: The Jamaican Case, 1834–65’, in Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour before and after Slavery, ed. Piet Emmer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986), p. 184 note 49; Monica Schuler, ‘Liberated Central Africans in Nineteenth Century Guyana’, in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, ed. Linda Heywood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 319–52. See also Monica Schuler, ‘The Recruitment of African Indentured Labourers for European Colonies in the Nineteenth Century’, in Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour before and after Slavery, ed. Piet Emmer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1986), p. 128; Adderley, New Negroes from Africa, p. 74. •

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Distant Freedom great many liberated Africans, it was not an intrinsically deadly place. As this study will show, the disastrous mortality rates within its depots had a different set of explanations.

*** St Helena was a microcosm of Britain’s anti-slavery campaign, of its successes, failures and practicalities. By studying this episode, this book aims to shed new light on British suppression policies in action, and on the African Diaspora. Chapter 1 presents a chronological account of this littleknown story, while Chapter 2 analyses the public, political and colonial contexts that defined St Helena’s role in anti-slavery. Chapter 3 considers the Royal Navy’s relationship with St Helena, both in terms of its tactical use of the island and also the social and economic outcomes of this connection. Subsequent chapters deal in turn with the operation of the depots (Chapter 4), disease, mortality and medical treatment (Chapter 5), and the immediate and long-term fortunes of those Africans who survived to be liberated (Chapters 6 and 7).24 Within these later chapters, the narrative and analysis have a strongly St Helena-centric focus. To some extent, this stems from the nature of the island-written sources, which reflect the isolated situation in which they were composed. The modern historian, of course, can set such material within broader contexts, but in this case I have only done so to an extent. Instead, I have attempted to retain the sense of an insular place, whose inhabitants’ experience of anti-slavery was bounded by the island’s horizons. I nevertheless hope that subsequent studies will weave this information into broader narratives. In similar vein, I have chosen to stay close to the primary sources, emphasising life histories and, where possible, bringing the black experience to the foreground. This emphasis on the human element 24 In choosing the subject matter for this book, there are inevitably elements that have had to be set aside. The most obvious omission is any discussion of the Vice-Admiralty court, which was, of course, the reason why liberated Africans were brought to the island in the first place. The establishment of the court and details of its operation hold intrinsic interest, while certain cases adjudicated there had significant legal ramifications. The need to discuss the court is obviated, however, by the fact that it has already been examined in two lengthy articles by the legal historian J.P. van Niekerk. This is, to date, the one aspect of St Helena’s connection with abolition that has received detailed attention. The inclusion of the court in the present book would have involved considerable repetition of van Niekerk’s work while adding little that was new. See J.P. van Niekerk, ‘The Role of the Vice Admiralty Court at St Helena in the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade: A Preliminary Investigation’, Fundamina. A Journal of Legal History 15.1 (2009), pp. 69–111 and 15.2 (2009), pp. 1–56. •

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Introduction stems, at least in part, from the archaeology of Rupert’s Valley, where we as excavators came – quite literally – face to face with the individual victims of the slave trade. As a whole, therefore, this book presents the experiences of those – both white and black – who fell within the compass of abolition. And, in telling the story of the latter, it attempts to give a voice to a forgotten people, many of whom died in limbo in a place that was, both physically and conceptually, between freedom and slavery.

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Figure 1: St Helena.

chapter one

A Place of Immense Advantage A Place of Immense Advantage

Prelude: 1807–39 St Helena lies in the tropical South Atlantic at latitude 15°58ʹ south and longitude 5°43ʹ west. The seventeenth-century explorer Peter Mundy described its location as ‘the Farthest Distantt From any other Iland or Mayne than any other Iland elce yet Discovered’, and while a few more remote places have since been found, St Helena continues to exist in splendid isolation. It is closest to Ascension Island, 1,300 km to the north-west, while the island group of Tristan da Cunha lies 2,400 km to the south. The nearest continental landfall is southern Angola, just over 1,800 km to the east, with the Brazilian coast 3,260 km distant to the west. St Helena is not only remote but also extremely small. At 17 km long and 10 km wide, it occupies an area of only 122 km2, though the topographically complex landscape gives the impression that the island is rather larger. There is little flat ground, and the deeply incised valleys compel the traveller to take convoluted routes from one place to another.1 The island was discovered in 1502 by a Portuguese fleet returning from India, under the command of João da Nova Castella. Da Nova took the opportunity to refit his battered ships, rest his crew and replenish his stocks of food and water, before heading back into European waters. Thus, within only 15 years of the first European navigators reaching the Indian Ocean, St Helena had begun its function as a maritime staging post. This would provide the island’s raison d’être for centuries to come, as Western seafarers ventured into the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean in ever greater numbers. In 1659 the English staked their claim to the island, under the auspices of 1 On St Helena’s climate and natural environment see Philip and Myrtle Ashmole, St Helena and Ascension Island: A natural history (Oswestry: Anthony Nelson, 2000). •

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Distant Freedom the East India Company and, with the exception of a brief occupation by the Dutch in 1673, it has remained in British possession ever since. From precarious beginnings, when starvation and mutiny by both the garrison and the slave population were a constant danger, the colony gradually established itself as the eighteenth century progressed, centred on its modest but elegant port at Jamestown. Throughout this period the East India Company’s influence pervaded all aspects of life, but by the early decades of the nineteenth century the Company’s time was passing. By a clause of the India Act, St Helena was transferred to the Crown, with effect from 2 April 1834 – an event which represented a monumental shift for the island’s 4,000 inhabitants.2 Crown rule brought radical change and no little economic hardship to a place which (Napoleon’s exile aside) had existed in stasis for many decades, and it is against this backdrop that the island’s involvement with slave trade suppression would begin. During the initial decades after the passing of Britain’s 1807 Abolition Act, St Helena played only an indirect role in the suppression of the slave trade. Up to 1840, Sierra Leone was by far the most significant naval outpost for the British anti-slavery campaign on the African coast and in the Atlantic. Despite its thoroughly unpleasant reputation, Sierra Leone’s dismal capital at Freetown was usually best placed in geographical terms to receive prizes taken by the Navy, the majority of which were captured close to land in the traditional slaving grounds around the Gold and Slave Coasts, and the Bights of Bonny and Benin.3 From 1807 to 1819, a large number of cases were heard by Sierra Leone’s pioneering Vice-Admiralty court, by which process a little over 11,000 slaves were freed. After this date, most prizes fell under the jurisdiction of the various mixed commission courts (AngloSpanish, -Portuguese, -Brazilian and -Dutch). Between 1819 and 1845, the commissions in Sierra Leone adjudicated 528 cases, far more than at Havana (50), Rio (44) and Surinam (1), and no cases at all were heard in New York.4 By the time Sierra Leone’s commissioners reported to the Foreign Secretary at the end of 1839, Freetown’s mixed commission courts had registered over 2 The actual handover did not take place until February 1836, when the first Crownappointed governor arrived on the island to assume control. 3 Lloyd, Navy and the Slave Trade, Chapter 5. 4 Leslie Bethell, ‘The Mixed Commissions for the Suppression of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of African History 7 (1966), pp. 79–89; Jenny Martinez, ‘Anti-Slavery Courts and the Dawn of International Human Rights Law’, Yale Law Journal 117 (2007), pp. 1–98. The statistics for 1829–44 are given by PP 1845 (73) (212) XLIX, Slave trade – Slave vessels. Returns of cases adjudged under slave trade treaties, and number of slaves emancipated in consequence. These sources demonstrate the overwhelming importance of the role of Sierra Leone’s anti-slavery courts. •

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Figure 2:  St Helena: view from the Peaks towards Flagstaff and the Barn. Image courtesy Ed Thorpe

Figure 3:  Jamestown, c.1862. Photograph by John Isaac Lilley •

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Distant Freedom 51,000 emancipated slaves.5 In that particular year, they had adjudicated 62 cases and freed 3,283 slaves.6 Nevertheless, from an early stage it was recognised that when warships cruised south of the equator or returned from the Cape, St Helena was advantageously positioned as a place for resupply. It was also a favoured location for shore leave, as Sierra Leone’s climate (which rightly had a reputation for being fatal to European visitors) made it unpopular with naval commanders, particularly when outbreaks of disease were prevalent on the African coast. As early as 1815, therefore, the cruisers of the embryonic anti-slavery squadron began to visit St Helena, although the military base at Ascension Island was used to a far greater extent during this period. The situation vis-à-vis St Helena changed fundamentally in 1839, as a consequence of the Slave Trade (Portugal) Act.7 This legislation stemmed from the failure of drawn-out negotiations. Diplomatic initiatives had begun in 1830 but it had been a fruitless business, described by Howard de Walden, British minister in Lisbon, as ‘a very uphill game’.8 By the winter of 1837–38, Palmerston, Foreign Secretary under Melbourne, had decided that if Portugal would not agree to a satisfactory treaty then Britain would take matters into its own hands. By July 1839 the situation in Parliament, combined with prevailing public support, gave Palmerston the mandate to introduce the Slave Trade (Portugal) Bill. It passed briskly through the Commons and, despite Tory opposition in the Lords, an amended bill became law on 24 August. At a stroke the act provided authorisation for British warships to detain Portuguese vessels equipped for the slave trade, and for Vice-Admiralty courts to condemn them. However, when the bill was in preparation a potential loophole was pointed out: namely that slave traders could dispense with flag and papers altogether – an action which had been fairly rare up to that point. If nationality was not established, then a vessel could not be brought in front of either a national court or one of mixed commission. To counter this eventuality, the act therefore authorised British warships to search and capture all stateless vessels and to bring them before a British Vice-Admiralty court for adjudication. 5 PP 1847–48 (116) LXIV, Slave trade. Abstract of return of the number of slaves captured in each year since January 1810. 6 Macaulay and Doherty to Lord Palmerston, 31 December 1839, cited at http://www. pdavis.nl/SL1839.htm. 7 2 & 3 Vict c 73. 8 Leslie Bethell, ‘Britain, Portugal and the Suppression of the Brazilian Slave Trade: The Origins of Lord Palmerston’s Act of 1839’, The English Historical Review 80.317 (1965), pp. 761–84. •

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A Place of Immense Advantage The outcomes of the act were extremely significant, altering both the places and the types of court where most slavery cases would be adjudicated. Almost immediately there was a shift towards the Vice-Admiralty courts and, as will be seen, towards the use of St Helena as a trial venue and receiving depot.9 As discussed below, the process was completed by the Aberdeen Act of 1845, which applied similar measures to the Brazilian slave trade. In September 1839, the Foreign Office issued instructions to the Lords Commissioners of Admiralty, which signified that its cruisers were to detain Portuguese slave vessels, ships hoisting no flag and those without papers proving their nationality. Where necessary, new British courts of Vice-Admiralty were to be established for the adjudication of such vessels and any slaves found on board were to be landed at the nearest British settlement and placed under the care of the governor.10 Well before this date (as early as December 1836), letters patent had been dispatched to St Helena empowering the Governor to constitute a Vice-Admiralty court and to appoint its officers. However, nothing was done, and only when the Foreign Office instructions arrived in late 1839 did the Governor take any action. The process of establishing the court, 9 Throughout the nineteenth century there were two principal means by which slave ships could be tried: mixed (or joint) commission courts, and courts of Vice-Admiralty. Mixed commission courts were essentially a product of slave trade abolition, created by a series of bilateral treaties, signed between Britain and Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, the United States and several South American republics. These courts sat more or less continuously between 1819 and 1871 and existed in a number of locations: Freetown, Luanda (Angola), the Cape of Good Hope, Boa Vista (Cape Verde Islands), Rio de Janeiro, Surinam, Havana and New York. In total, courts of mixed commission were responsible for the condemnation of over 600 vessels and the liberation of nearly 80,000 slaves during the nineteenth century (see Bethell, Mixed Commissions). Vice-Admiralty courts were juryless tribunals that had existed since the seventeenth century and which were granted jurisdiction over local legal matters relating to maritime activities, also dealing with piracy and other offences committed on the high seas. Originally present in the maritime counties of England and Wales, by the nineteenth century they had come to be solely associated with the overseas dominions of the Crown. Many were of long standing: those in Jamaica and Barbados had been established in the 1660s and several others operated in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century. Others were set up somewhat later, for example those at the Cape of Good Hope (1797), Trinidad (1801), Demerara (1802) and Berbice (1811). See Michael Craton, ‘The Role of the Caribbean Vice Admiralty Courts in British Imperialism’, Caribbean Studies 11.2 (1971), pp. 5–20. St Helena was a particularly late addition, a court only becoming feasible after the island had passed from the private rule of the East India Company. By 1863, when an act regulating the Vice-Admiralty courts was passed, there were some 45 in existence, from Canada to Hong Kong and Australia. 10 Circular letter, Lord John Russell to Middlemore, 23 September 1839, CO 247/51. •

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Distant Freedom however, did not prove straightforward. The island’s Chief Justice, William Wilde, expressed the opinion that the court was illegal and refused to swear in its judge and other officers. Wilde made his objections on the basis of a fine point of law, arguing that the jurisdiction of St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court only extended to the island’s low-water mark, and therefore did not encompass matters arising on the sea. The latter, he contended, was the domain of the High Court of Admiralty – an argument that ignored the obvious precedent set by Sierra Leone’s Vice-Admiralty court between 1807 and 1819. The reality was that Wilde’s objections stemmed from the fact that somebody other than himself was to be appointed as Vice-Admiralty court judge. The matter dragged on for months, not helped by long delays while legal opinion was sought from England. Finally, advice from other members of the island’s council and directives from London overrode Wilde’s objections. The court’s judge, Charles Hodson, and the other officers were duly sworn in on 8 June 1840.11 The resolution of this issue came not a moment too soon, as two cases were already waiting to be heard.12

Early years: 1840–44 On 14 March 1840, HMS Waterwitch seized the Portuguese brig Cabacca off Ambriz. The vessel carried two slaves – a woman and her son. Finding the slaver to be unseaworthy, the Waterwitch’s crew destroyed it by fire and after a further period of cruising brought the slaves to St Helena, reaching the 11 Wilde’s objections are presented in his letter to Lord John Russell of 28 December 1840, CO 247/53 No. 79. Alternative opinions by the Queen’s Advocate and other island council members can be found as enclosures in Middlemore to Lord John Russell, 3 July 1840, CO 247/53 No. 73. The Supreme Court In and Out Letters in the Jamestown archives also shed light on the minutiae of this episode, including Wilde’s refusal to allow the use of the Public Courthouse for the early sittings of the Vice-Admiralty court (7 June 1840). Wilde continued to question the court’s legitimacy into 1841, as demonstrated by the case of the American vessel Jones, which was sent to Sierra Leone for trial after Wilde informed the commander of HMS Dolphin that St Helena’s court was illegally constituted (see Edward Littlehales to Admiralty, 16 August 1842, CO 247/58). It is notable that all of Wilde’s objections to the court ceased when, in late 1841, he replaced Hodson as its judge. 12 Five more verdicts were passed down in July. Even after this point, the court proceeded with little confidence. The officers were unprepared for the task: writing in October 1841, Hodson reported to the Governor that the task was entirely new to all those appointed to the court and that ‘there was not any competent person of whose advice in such a proceeding I could avail myself, or any books to which I could refer for guidance, and in that highly respectable, important and responsible situation, I was left to my own discretion’ (see Hodson to Seale, 28 October 1841, CO 247/55). Quite clearly, Hodson had no help from Wilde. •

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A Place of Immense Advantage island on 9 June. The newly constituted Vice-Admiralty court condemned the vessel and its human cargo to the Crown two days later. Between the months of June and November 1840, the Waterwitch and another cruiser, Brisk, brought six more prizes to St Helena for adjudication. Three of these ships had been carrying slaves; the other three were seized on the basis of the ‘equipment clause’ included within the parliamentary acts for the extinction of the Spanish and Portuguese trade. All were small vessels and the largest number of slaves taken was 16. On 30 November the Collector of Customs John Young reported to the Governor that a total of 22 recaptives had been received: initially they had been housed in Lemon Valley, down the coast from Jamestown, but by the time of his report all were apprenticed or working as labourers or domestic servants.13 Measures were put in place to deal with further prizes, including the possible use of the Andorinha (a slave ship that had been appropriated for use by the colonial establishment) as a floating hospital. Despite these minor preparations, however, there was clearly no expectation that any great number of recaptives would ever be received. The first months of St Helena’s anti-slavery role were, therefore, comparatively quiet, and the bickering about the legality of its Vice-Admiralty court must have seemed somewhat pointless. Even so, from the outset Governor Middlemore expressed concerns to the British government about St Helena’s ability to cope with any significant influx of recaptives. On 23 March 1840 – even before the arrival of the first two Africans from the Cabacca – he wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in the following terms: With reference to your Lordship’s dispatch desiring me to make such arrangements as may be necessary for the care and support of any Africans who may be landed and set free in this colony, I request permission to observe to your Lordship, the very great difficulty we should experience in providing to any considerable number of Africans in St Helena. The merchants draw all of their supplies, viz, rice paddy, grain etc. from the port and frequently have not sufficient store for the want of the population of St Helena. Consequently the prices become very serious and oppressive to the poor, as they must depend upon supplies which may be spared by vessels touching at the island.14

London’s view was complacent. On 3 July 1840 the Colonial Office formulated a reply to Middlemore which stated that: 13 Young to Seale, 30 November 1840, CSL 7 Vol. 1 No. 41. 14 Middlemore to Lord John Russell, 23 March 1840, CO 247/53 735 St Helena. •

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Distant Freedom It is, I trust highly improbable that any Africans who may be captured by her Majesty’s cruisers will be landed at St Helena: but should any considerable number of them be brought to the island for that purpose, the captain should be desired to carry them on to the Cape.15

The letter passed through several hands during July, finally reaching St Helena in September. Within only a few months, however, the assumptions conveyed in the letter were proved completely false. By late 1840, the West Africa Squadron was taking full advantage of the 1839 Act to make captures at sea, and in addition pursued aggressive tactics on the coast – most notably those of the Sierra Leone division under the command of Joseph Denman. On 4 December 1840, the Waterwitch intercepted the brigantine Julia off the African coast. Like the other prizes already sent to St Helena it was small: 124 tons, 75 feet long and 21 feet across the beam, with decks only five feet high. This vessel had nevertheless succeeded in loading a cargo of 245 slaves, well over half of them children. Conditions on board were appalling; the ratio of tonnage to slaves indicates that the Africans were packed in so tightly as to be effectively unable to move. Five died on the day of the Julia’s capture by the Waterwitch, having somehow fallen into the water, too exhausted to stay afloat until rescue. Twenty-five more died on the 12-day journey to St Helena. On its arrival at the Jamestown Roads on 16 December, the Julia was inspected by a board of the island’s medical officers. Up to this stage, these men had only encountered small groups of recaptives, all of whom were in good health. The Julia could not have been more different. The board reported to the Governor that 77 of the Africans were sick, from a combination of smallpox and dysentery, and that almost all on board had coughs and catarrh. Many were also emaciated ‘to a very frightful degree’. The board reached the obvious conclusion that more deaths were likely. The St Helenians, given no warning of the Julia’s arrival, had to decide rapidly what to do with so many people. The medical board initially recommended that Egg Island be used as a quarantine station for the very sick, while the Andorinha and the Julia would accommodate the healthy. Egg Island, however, is nothing more than a barren rock immediately off the south-west coast of St Helena. Tiny, waterless and shadeless, it had been briefly garrisoned during Napoleon’s captivity, but after 1821 the battery (surely one of the bleakest posts in the entire British Empire) was abandoned to the nesting sea birds. Fortunately, the board changed its mind, declaring that the heat, lack of water and dangerous surf rendered

15 Lord John Russell to Middlemore, 3 July 1840, CO 247/53 No. 73. •

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A Place of Immense Advantage Egg Island unsuitable, instead permitting the Africans to disembark on St Helena’s mainland.16 The medical board raised the need for overseers to look after and manage the recaptives, and for food, clothing and medical care. On an island where manpower was limited, and commodities often scarce and always expensive, these posed significant difficulties. The board also urged that another doctor be sought from a passing merchant ship. The Governor first entreated a certain George McClure, a Royal Navy surgeon travelling home to England aboard the Canton. McClure, however, clearly had no intention of sequestering himself with hundreds of sick recaptives, making ‘so many objections’ that the Governor abandoned his attempts to recruit him.17 Fortunately, the next day another surgeon was identified, this time on the Indiaman Ellen, and persuaded to stay. The original terms of his engagement were limited: he was to care for the Julia recaptives and then resume his journey. Events proved otherwise. For the next three years, prize after prize would bring in ever more Africans to the island, and the surgeon would live with his charges – sometimes in near-total isolation – in the seclusion of Lemon Valley. That man was George McHenry. McHenry was 28 at the time of his arrival on St Helena; he was already well travelled, having been born in Bengal and medically trained in London or Paris. Widowed around 1835, he had left his young son behind in Europe and returned to India. In the autumn of 1840 he was once again sailing to England, from where he intended to emigrate to Australia. McHenry represents a crucial but slightly problematic source for the early years of St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment. Part of the difficulty lies simply in the fact that he was such a prolific writer: his narrative threatens to dominate all others, but reflects his confinement to Lemon Valley, lacking awareness of wider events. Bias is another issue. In late 1844 (by which time he was living in County Antrim), McHenry wrote to the Under Secretary of the Colonial Office, notifying him that he had written two articles for publication in the Colonial Gazette. His intention, he said, was ‘simply to write a short history, and to implicate no individuals in any manner’.18 These two articles are exactly as described, and certainly bland in terms of any comment about the running of the depot. However, soon afterwards McHenry’s petition to be re-employed as surgeon on St Helena was rejected and his tone soon became rather different, with an agenda that was not only

16 Medical Board to Seale, December 16 1840, CSL 7 Vol. 1 No. 62. 17 McClure to Seale, 18 December 1840, CSL 7 Vol. 1 No. 65; Middlemore to Lord John Russell, 24 December 1840, CO 247/53 No. 78. 18 McHenry to Stephen, 7 November 1844, CO 247/62 1635 St Helena. •

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Distant Freedom anti-slavery but anti-establishment. From the third instalment, his account is far more vitriolic and politicised.19 Fortunately, it is possible to evaluate McHenry’s published articles against the primary correspondence of 1840–43 (both by and about him). This shows his basic account of events to be precise, and that his 1845–46 articles accurately reflected how he thought and acted at the time. In this there is much to admire. His letters from Lemon Valley consistently represent the interests of the Africans under his charge, and to do so this young man had to face down senior figures within St Helena’s administration – including on occasion a governor who had commanded a regiment during the Peninsular War. Even those he clashed with were in no doubt of his competence as a surgeon. On the negative side, he lacked neither confidence nor ego. The published account places him as the central, heroic, figure of the story: in part this follows Victorian literary traditions but his sarcasm, and denigration of virtually everyone around him, makes for tiresome reading. A certain level of distrust is also necessary in an author whose hubris, at one point in the narrative, allows him to equate himself with the rulers of ancient Egypt. Despite such drawbacks, however, McHenry’s is without doubt a remarkable story. It is selectively told here, but deserves fuller treatment.

*** On 18 December 1840, two days after the Julia had arrived at Jamestown, the St Helenian authorities took the first steps to deal with their new African charges. Some were permitted to disembark at Lemon Valley, while others remained on the Julia or were transferred to the Andorinha, both vessels having been towed down to Lemon Bay (Figure 4). The few inhabitants of Lemon Valley were swiftly evacuated – some against their will – their houses and the pair of barracks in the bay being commandeered for the ‘depot’ for the recaptives. McHenry arrived the same day and was dismayed by what he found: The wild toppling hills around, the seat of perpetual barrenness; the rocks and stones which everywhere strewed the ground, and obstructed the paths; the dirty, mean-looking huts that had been the dwellings of the fishermen …

The state of the Africans was more shocking: they had an ‘abject, miserable, emaciated, squalid, and filthy appearance’, and the prevalence of diarrhoea 19 McHenry’s articles were published as a series of eight ‘chapters’ in Simmonds’ Colonial Gazette and Miscellany during 1845 and 1846. The last chapter concludes with the statement ‘To be continued’, but no further articles have been located. •

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A Place of Immense Advantage

Figure 4:  Lemon Bay. View of the Lines and the barracks from Half Moon Battery. The African depot occupied the valley floor between the cliffs.

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Distant Freedom amongst them had left the ground around their dwellings covered with filth. They were also largely unclothed, apart from a few pieces of sailcloth and other material that had been scavenged.20 Over the following days there were attempts to establish some form of order. The Colonial Surgeon located a supply of condemned blankets from the civil hospital, while other supplies were procured from the Ordnance Stores. Food – albeit only cassava-based flour (farinha) and jerked beef taken from the Julia – started to be provided. In addition to McHenry, five overseers and three matrons were recruited from Jamestown. The circumstances nevertheless remained shambolic and on 24 December McHenry wrote to the Colonial Secretary to inform him of the situation. Aboard the Andorinha there was a severe shortage of water and cases of dysentery and smallpox were increasing. Smallpox was also spreading amongst the previously ‘healthy’ who had been housed on land. The boat crews were exhausted, attempts to bury the dead at sea were failing and corpses would soon be washing ashore on the beach at Lemon Bay. On Christmas Day, McHenry concluded his letter to the Collector of Customs in the following terms: I beg permission to resign my office of surgeon to what you are pleased to designate a Quarantine Establishment, but which though it has all the disagreements of one, is not entitled to the name from the careless, indifferent and ineffectual manner in which everything connected with it is done.21

Intra-island correspondence in late December 1840 and January 1841 charts the efforts to address this crisis. These letters are mainly authored by McHenry, Customs Collector Young, Colonial Surgeon Christopher Vowell and Colonial Secretary William Seale – the latter being the intermediary with the Governor. Most letters are preoccupied with quarantine, medical reports and supply, while others were written by officers of the Royal Engineers who were tasked with improving the state of the accommodation in Lemon Valley and laying a new deck for the Andorinha. By the start of February conditions were somewhat improved. Supplies were now reaching the depot, which was being equipped with clothing, fuel and better food. The state of the surviving Africans was improved and, crucially, the smallpox outbreak had run its course, though dysentery remained a great killer. McHenry nevertheless continued to detail problems at great length (‘I am sorry to trouble you so much, but …’) and still threatened resignation when things did not go his way. 20 McHenry, Simmonds’ Colonial Gazette, Chapter 3, p. 155. 21 CSL 7 Vol. 1 Nos 72 and 73. •

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A Place of Immense Advantage This comparative calm lasted barely a week into February. On the seventh, the slave ship Louiza dropped anchor in the St Helena roads. At the time of its capture it had carried 420 slaves but smallpox and dysentery were rife on board and 82 had died during the 14-day passage to the island. On 1 March another vessel arrived: the Marcianna, of less than 80 tons burthen but carrying 256 slaves, once again including smallpox victims. Next came the Minerva on 16 March, with its contingent of 316 slaves, while the Euro brought 305 Africans to the island on 3 May.22 On 1 June, there were 939 slaves present in Lemon Valley and numbers continued to rise over the next two months. By August 1841 the island had taken in a total of 1,824 recaptives and its Vice-Admiralty court had adjudicated 20 cases. With no prospect of sending the slaves elsewhere, all the St Helenian authorities could do was continue their efforts on a larger scale. Even by early 1841, however, the problems of Lemon Valley were becoming evident. Its isolation made it difficult to supply, requiring everything to be rowed around the coast from Jamestown: a situation that was compounded by sea conditions in the bay, which usually had a pronounced swell and could sometimes be extremely rough. Getting provisions ashore was always awkward and, at times, impossible; boats were smashed in the surf and personnel injured. On land, the available area for settlement was restricted and the burial grounds had to be placed near the buildings. When any significant number of people was present, the stream quickly became muddied and contaminated, while rockfall from the steep slopes of the valley – often dislodged by goats – posed a frequent hazard. These difficulties necessitated the opening of a new depot, at Rupert’s Valley. Another of the lee-side valleys offering access to the island’s interior, Rupert’s Valley had been fortified and garrisoned since the later seventeenth century, but by 1840 was virtually uninhabited (Figure 5). A survey was duly undertaken in February 1841 and it was suggested that the existing military buildings in the bay were fit for 148 Africans and an overseer. These structures, property of the Ordnance Department, were rapidly brought back into repair in order to accommodate Africans who had passed their 42-day quarantine period in Lemon Valley – the initial occupants envisaged to be the survivors from the Louiza. The first Africans were moved into Rupert’s Valley on 2 March, but in greater numbers than could be housed in the existing buildings. Eighty-six women and children were therefore placed in the hulk of the Julia, which had been towed up from Lemon Bay. On 26 April, Captain Alexander of the Royal Engineers reported than an extra building was under construction; he had engaged local workmen to do this, claiming that the recaptives 22 The arrival of these vessels is documented in CO 247/55. •

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Distant Freedom

Figure 5: Rupert’s Valley. View of the mid-valley. The lower of the two African graveyards occupies the ground beyond the industrial unit, while the upper graveyard is out of shot, above and to the left of the fuel silos. The houses are those of Hay Town, built in the 1860s.

were variously too ill, inefficient or lazy to undertake the task. Alexander stated that once the building was complete, Rupert’s Valley (including the Julia) would be able to accommodate 250 Africans. Saddle Cottage (at the junction of James Valley and Rupert’s Valley) and High Knoll Fort (the great defensive redoubt above Jamestown) could house a further 20 and 80 people respectively.23 The remainder of the recaptives were to stay in Lemon Valley. Here – even after the removal of several hundred to Rupert’s Valley and elsewhere – the numbers present had long since exceeded the capacity of the barracks and the few other buildings behind the Lines, the latter being the great wall built to defend the mouth of the valley from a seaborne attack. However, little was done to improve the facilities, except for the refurbishment of a former planter’s residence in the mid-valley to serve as a hospital. Most Africans continued to be housed in tents erected at the bay, constructed out of the timber and sails of captured slave vessels. These tents were stiflingly hot, the internal temperature often being 20°F higher than that outside, with the result that many of their occupants chose to abandon them and sleep 23 Alexander to Middlemore, 26 April 1841, CSL 8 No. 36. •

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A Place of Immense Advantage in the open air.24 Meanwhile, by the mid-point of 1841, five hulks had also been pressed into service as makeshift accommodation; the records are not precise on this point, but all but one (Julia) seem to have stayed moored in Lemon Bay.25 In the middle of 1841 the authorities attempted a form of segregation between the two main African depots, sending the adult males to Rupert’s Valley (in practice, those aged over 14) while the women and children stayed in Lemon Valley. The rationale behind the segregation – apart from a moral imperative – was the perception that the ‘weaker’ women and children would fare better in the more clement environment of Lemon Valley, while the hardier men would cope with the less hospitable conditions in Rupert’s. This system unravelled with the next major influx of recaptives, after which there was a new initiative, assigning the healthy to Rupert’s Valley and the sick to Lemon Valley. This too was fundamentally flawed, principally because it demanded the continuous shuffling of people up and down the coast as their condition improved or worsened. Communication between the two depots was also poor, with the result that Africans were dispatched from one depot without the staff at the other being aware that they were coming. On 8 August this situation descended into tragic farce. A boatload of 61 sick Africans was rowed from Rupert’s to Lemon Valley, to be swapped for convalescents. One died on the journey, and – after exposure on the rocks for several hours – all but ten were sent back to Rupert’s, despite many being ‘in a dying state’.26 Throughout 1841 sickness took a heavy toll on the recaptives, 467 (roughly a quarter of all those landed on the island) having died by August. Outbreaks of smallpox occurred almost every time there was a new intake of slaves, though in fact dysentery was the main killer, and one for which there seemed to be no remedy. The presence of contagious diseases amongst its inmates required Lemon Valley, and the European staff of the depot, to be kept isolated from the rest of the island. Meanwhile, the depots, with their growing number of occupants, became ever more burdensome. Their operation required large quantities of food, fuel, clothing, blankets and medicine, as well as myriad sundry items ranging from tin plates and watering cans to rat traps. St Helena did not possess sufficient quantities of such goods, and what could be procured locally was expensive. Letters were urgently dispatched to England and 24 See report by doctors Vowell, Solomon and McHenry, 17 Feb 1842, CO 247/57; McHenry to Seale, 11 June 1841, CSL 8 No. 126. 25 CO 247/58 No. 52 Enclosure No. 2 (25 August 1841). 26 Reported by McHenry and Mapleton (8 August), Young and Solomon (9 August), CSL 9 Nos 29–31 and 37. •

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Distant Freedom Cape Colony requesting their delivery, though the response was inevitably much-delayed. The demands imposed by the African Establishment also impacted upon the everyday life of the island. Manpower on St Helena was hardly abundant, and good manpower was a definite rarity. The diversion of numerous islanders to the support of the Africans undermined much routine activity, above all at the port. At one time, nearly all of the island’s rowing boats, which were crucial to the supply of visiting ships, were being used to service the two depots. In addition, the Collector of Customs, whose job it was to oversee the running of the port, was heavily engaged by his new obligation to manage the African depot. The lascar boatmen, an immigrant community who were the mainstay of the port’s day-to-day operation, also complained of the extra work they were now undertaking, rowing supplies on lengthy round trips from Jamestown to Lemon Valley. Several, it seems, compensated themselves for their efforts by stealing articles from captured slave ships.27

*** As described in the following chapter, the unexpectedly high use made of St Helena by the Navy provoked acrimonious debate within the British government. The Foreign and Colonial Offices, allied with the Admiralty, argued for the continued use of the island as a place of reception for slave ship prizes. Opposed to that view was the Treasury, which objected to the expense of the depot and sought its closure. During 1842–43 the latter view temporarily gained the ascendency, and from June 1842 onwards the number of recaptives arriving at the island fell significantly. St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court continued to adjudicate a good number of cases of empty vessels seized under the equipment clause, but over the next 20 months only four slave-laden prizes were tried.28 And when, in October 1843, HMS Arrow brought a slave-laden prize into Jamestown harbour it was refused permission to land and was instead directed to the Cape. At the point of capture, the prize had carried 337 Africans, stowed on top of water casks because there was no slave deck. Many were in a very sickly state: 49 died on the three-week voyage to St Helena and 21 more perished in Jamestown harbour while the Arrow’s commander sought Governor 27 Mapleton to Seale, 8 April 1841, CSL 8 No. 59; Mapleton to Seale, 7 and 15 July, CSL 8 Nos 152 and 158. 28 The court condemned 63 slaves to the Crown in September 1842, 15 in October and two separate groups numbering 139 and 349 in April 1843. There is nothing immediately obvious to suggest why these particular prizes were dispatched to St Helena: all were taken in southerly latitudes, but not unusually so. •

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A Place of Immense Advantage Trelawney’s permission to have them landed. Trelawney was unmoved, later reporting to the Secretary of State that the vessel was too small to serve for quarantine, and therefore on grounds of humanity it had been preferable to send it elsewhere. The Arrow and its prize reached Cape Town on 18 October, when only 209 of its slaves were alive to be liberated.29 Meanwhile, from early 1841, measures for the ‘disposal’ of the survivors were being pursued. As Chapter Six of this book will describe, these took two forms: short-term, on-island expedients to utilise the large number of recaptives being maintained at government expense; and permanent measures for their settlement on St Helena, coupled with emigration to Britain’s plantation colonies. These measures, combined with the pressure applied by the Treasury on the Admiralty to send prizes elsewhere, significantly reduced the numbers present in the island’s depots. The complement of recaptives, which had reached 3,000 in early 1841, had fallen to just a few hundred by May 1842.30 Two prizes received in April 1843 led to a sharp increase in the number under government charge, but this was systematically reduced to 128 by the end of the year. Thus, after the severe crises of 1841 and early 1842, the situation finally seemed to have been resolved. On 26 December 1843, the Treasury stated confidently that ‘very few, if any, captured Negroes will in future be carried to that colony’, while at the same time the depots in Rupert’s and Lemon Valley were being wound up and their staff dismissed.31 On 5 February 1844, George McHenry departed the island as a surgeon on the emigrant ship Margaret, bound for Trinidad with 60 Africans. Although he later petitioned for reinstatement as surgeon to the liberated Africans, McHenry never returned to St Helena nor had any further involvement in the medical treatment of freed slaves. After a short period in Ireland he moved to Liverpool, living close to – and presumably working at – the Royal Liverpool Infirmary. He died in obscurity at Clerkenwell in 1872, aged 59. On 10 February 1844, Governor Trelawney wrote to the Colonial Secretary Lord Stanley. With evident satisfaction he informed Stanley that St Helena’s African problem was over: ‘there are now remaining, my Lord, 29 For the Governor’s report on these events see Trelawney to Stanley, 9 October 1843, 1774 St Helena. Stanley’s approval of Trelawney’s action follows in the same folio. The letters of the Arrow’s commander, which make clear the suffering of the slaves aboard his prize, were never transmitted to Stanley. See Robinson to Trelawney, 19, 20, 21 and 23 September 1843, CSL 16, pp. 13–19. A note on the arrival of the Arrow’s prize at Cape Town, including a statement of mortality for the voyage as a whole, is found in George Frere to Lord Aberdeen, 20 December 1843, CO 247/62. 30 Trelawney to Lord Stanley, 5 December 1845, CO 247/64 Slave Trade Separate No. 8. 31 Trevelyan to Stephen, 26 December 1843, CO 247/60 1970 St Helena. •

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Distant Freedom forty-five including six in hospital who are not denizened or employed as servants: rations are not issued to them and I am informed they are earning their own livelihood’.32 Five days later, however, Trelawney wrote again, but his tone could hardly have been more different. A little before the date of his first letter (on 27 January) HMS Thunderbolt had arrived at Jamestown: accompanying it was the slaver Feliz Amizade which carried 72 Africans, some with smallpox. The commander, Lieutenant Ashton, had asked permission to land the recaptives but Trelawney refused to accept them, demanding, as for the Arrow’s prize, that they be taken elsewhere. Unfortunately for Trelawney, surveys proved that Ashton was correct in his assertion that the Feliz Amizade was unseaworthy and could not be repaired. The Vice-Admiralty court accepted the case and allowed the slaves into Rupert’s Valley, and it was in this context that Trelawney sent his furious dispatch to London on 15 February. The language with which he addressed the Secretary of State was barely diplomatic: the depot was in no fit state, the tents ‘made from old sails being no longer habitable and … worn out and decayed’; he expressed ‘surprise and regret’ that the Vice-Admiralty court had accepted the case; and he demanded that his Lordship ‘condemn the impropriety of Mr Ashton’s conduct’. A lengthy exchange of correspondence followed in London. The eventual reply to St Helena attempted to placate Trelawney, but crucially it also vindicated Ashton. Moreover, while the Admiralty reiterated its instruction to naval commanders to avoid sending prizes to the island whenever possible, it reinforced the caveat contained by orders issued in December 1841: under exceptional circumstances, captains should have the discretion to dispatch slave-laden ships to the colony. The Thunderbolt incident was, therefore, a turning point for St Helena’s African Establishment, in that the colony no longer had the right to turn prizes away when the Navy saw fit to bring them. However, this was probably not apparent at the time, because for the rest of 1844 and nearly all of 1845 there were relatively few prizes brought to the island, and the first to carry slaves did not arrive until December 1845. As a result, the Governor found it possible to purchase a hulk to accommodate the recaptives from the Feliz Amizade, rather than refitting the depot at Rupert’s Valley.33 Meanwhile, emigration was successfully employed as a means of ridding the island of these unwanted Africans, such that at the close of 1844 only nine remained under government charge. Nevertheless, this period of calm disguised a longer-term trend. As the 32 Trelawney to Stanley, 10 February 1844, CO 247/61 503 St Helena. 33 This appears to have been the condemned brig St Lorenzo, of 182 tons burthen, a prize to HMS Prometheus. See Fraser to Gladstone, 29 May 1846, CO 247/66 1050 St Helena. •

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A Place of Immense Advantage

Figure 6:  Liberated Africans and slave ship prizes at St Helena, 1840–72. Note: the upper graph omits the approximately 1,000 slaves liberated from barracoons in 1842 and brought to St Helena by HMS Waterwitch and HMS Madagascar.

traditional slave-exporting zones in West Africa came under increasing military and diplomatic pressure, the balance of the trade shifted ever more to areas south of the equator, to Congo, Angola and Mozambique. St Helena became an increasingly practical place to bring prizes, while Sierra Leone grew less and less accessible. In only a few years the ‘exceptional’ circumstances of 1844 would very quickly become the accepted norm, the West Africa Squadron making full use of a place which offered it immense advantages.34 34 Phipps Hornby to Admiralty, 18 July 1866, ADM 123/74 No. 185. •

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Distant Freedom

Apogee: 1845–52 In late 1845 the situation on St Helena was placid. Its liberated African depot stood empty, the last six occupants having been discharged with one month’s provisions the previous March. Amongst an overall population of 5,000, there were approximately 300 former slaves settled on the island, the remainder having left aboard emigration vessels. The anti-slavery campaign was, however, entering a new phase with the passing of fresh and belligerent legislation in the British Parliament. In 1841 the bilateral treaty of 1826 between Britain and Brazil that outlawed the slave trade had lapsed and attempts to replace it met with failure. Instead, Britain opted for unilateral action in the form of the Act to carry into execution a Convention between His Majesty and the Emperor of Brazil, for the Regulation and final Abolition of the African Slave Trade.35 Passed in August 1845 and better known as the Aberdeen Act, it authorised British cruisers to capture Brazilian slavers both north and south of the equator and to bring them for adjudication before Vice-Admiralty courts. In terms of defining the legal landscape, the Aberdeen Act completed the process begun by the Slave Trade (Portugal) Act. By 1845 virtually all cases – of Portuguese, Brazilian and an increasing number of unflagged vessels – were being heard by the Vice-Admiralty courts, while the mixed commission courts had become obsolete. Between 1845 and their eventual closure in 1871, the commissions at Freetown dealt with only seven cases – four Spanish, two Uruguayan and one Dutch.36 Of the places in which Vice-Admiralty courts were present, Sierra Leone and St Helena were by far the most active: those elsewhere in Africa and the Caribbean played a lesser role. The initial years of the Aberdeen Act have been judged a failure, on the grounds that it failed to force Brazil to sign an anti-slave trade treaty, while the volume of traffic actually increased during the latter half of the 1840s. Nevertheless, it enabled the Navy to capture Brazilian prizes departing from Central Africa, for which St Helena’s prize court was the logical destination: over 160 were tried there between 1845 and 1851, including two commandeered in the harbour of Rio de Janeiro during Palmerston’s final, conclusive assault on the Brazilian slave trade. Almost as soon as the act was passed there was a dramatic rise in the number of cases brought before St Helena’s court. During 1845 it adjudicated just 11 prizes (most in the latter part of the year) but in 1846 this figure rose to nearly 50; between 1847 and 1852 over 200 cases would be heard. After the 35 Wilbur Devereux Jones, ‘The Origins and Passage of Lord Aberdeen’s Act’, The Hispanic American Historical Review 42.4 (1962), pp. 502–20. 36 Bethell, Mixed Commissions, p. 93. •

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A Place of Immense Advantage hiatus of 1844–45, slaves also began to arrive in large numbers, beginning with 540 aboard the Quatro de Marco on 26 December 1845. The numbers of Africans received at St Helena fluctuated wildly: it took in just over 2,000 from December 1845 to September 1846, but none at all between November 1846 and July 1847, before having to cope with another huge influx of people during 1848–50. The amount of captured shipping present at St Helena during this period is illustrated by a locally celebrated natural disaster. The ‘Rollers’ are a regular, seasonal phenomenon associated with St Helena and Ascension Island. Between December and April, often on calm and windless days, there are extremely pronounced swells in which sequences of large waves roll into the lee side of both islands. Their cause is not entirely clear but it has been the subject of considerable fascination. Some nineteenth-century authors attributed them to differential local swells or submarine earthquakes, but a modern study has suggested that their origins are far more distant, being the product of large storms in the area south-east of Newfoundland.37 On 17 February 1846, the rollers struck St Helena with extraordinary ferocity. At the time the harbour was filled with ships, including 18 slave prizes. An eyewitness reported the destruction: … the sea broke upon the decks of the Esperanza, which broke her to atoms … the harbour was covered with masts, yards, casks and every description of wreck … The Quatro de Marco was thrown upon the West Rocks under Ladder Hill. In a few moments her companion, the Julia, followed: she no sooner came in contact with the rocks than she was dashed to pieces; indeed, so sudden was it that one moment you saw the vessel with her lower masts standing, lifted in the air, and the next she was floating in the surge in ten thousand pieces.

By the time the rollers had abated a few hours later, three people had been killed and Jamestown wharf, along with its cranes, iron water tanks, coal yard and the defensive glacis, was badly damaged. Thirteen ships were also wrecked, amongst them 11 slavers, two of which had actually been deposited on the shore by the force of the waves. Further afield, the African depot at Rupert’s Valley had sustained significant damage when water had rolled inland for some 60 m. The repairs necessary to bring Jamestown’s port back to working order were estimated at £10,000.38 37 Cleveland Abbe, ‘The “Rollers” of Ascension and St Helena’, Nature 41.1069 (24 April 1890), p. 585; D. Cartwright, J. Driver, J. Tranter and H. Charnock, ‘Swell Waves at Saint-Helena Related to Distant Storms’, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 103.438 (1977), pp. 655–83. 38 The quote is taken from an anonymous article (by ‘T.B.’) reprinted from the •

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The Cuban slave trade: 1852–67 The Brazilian slave trade did not long survive British aggression and its demise, when it came, was remarkably swift. In 1850, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies passed legislation banning the foreign slave trade – although the institution of slavery itself was not completely abolished until 1885. Official British estimates put slave imports to Brazil at 54,061 in 1849, 22,856 in 1850, 3,287 in 1851 and 800 in 1852. In 1853, it was officially announced that there had been no imports.39 The Aberdeen Act was suspended in 1852, though it was not finally repealed until 1867.40 The influx of recaptives into St Helena directly reflected this trend: 3,124 in 1850, 134 in 1851 and 66 in 1852. The future of its African Establishment once again became a subject of debate during 1853, and recommendations were made for it to be shut down. On 3 January 1854, instructions were duly given for its closure, coincident with renewed orders to the West Africa Squadron to take its captures elsewhere, namely to Sierra Leone, Luanda and Havana. Most of the staff in the depot were reassigned or pensioned off, although the Superintendent was retained in case the lull in the Brazil trade turned out to be only temporary. He also took responsibility for the small number of Africans remaining in Rupert’s Valley until employment could be found for them. The middle years of the 1850s were a quiet period for the British anti-slavery campaign in the Atlantic. The Brazilian trade proved to have been permanently extinguished, while that of Cuba remained largely dormant. In addition, the Crimean War (1853–56) led to a temporary reduction in the number of British cruisers assigned to the West Africa Squadron and the fall in slave ship captures during this period is partly a consequence of this. The activity of St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court was limited: it adjudicated on just eight cases between 1853 and 1855. Seven of these concerned vessels that were merely equipped for slaving, though the last related to a vessel with a contingent of 90 slaves that had been destroyed at sea. These were brought to the island by HMS Plumper and were received into the depot at Rupert’s Valley on 6 November 1855. All of the other British receiving stations, at Sierra Leone, Cape Town and elsewhere, also experienced a lull at this time. St  Helena Gazette: The following particulars relating to the Rollers at St Helena, which occurred on the 17th February 1846, in CO 700/STH8a1. See also Gosse, St Helena, pp. 316–17 and Melliss, St Helena, pp. 391–93. Damage by the rollers was also reported in 1850, when the condemned felucca Rozita broke from anchor in heavy seas and was lost (CSL 29 Vol. 1 No. 147, 8 April 1850). 39 Summarised by Lloyd, Navy and the Slavers, Appendix A. 40 Van Niekerk, Vice-Admiralty Court (Part 1), p. 91. •

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A Place of Immense Advantage No prizes arrived at all in 1856 and from October the Rupert’s Valley depot stood completely empty for an entire year. But, in November 1857, HMS Alecto brought in the slaver Lucia carrying 446 slaves. As had been the case after previous interludes of disuse, the African Establishment on St Helena was found to be entirely wanting. Unusually high surf prevented the slaves being landed at Rupert’s Bay: instead they had to be disembarked at Jamestown and either walked or carried around to the depot. After several years of neglect, the buildings were in a severe state of dilapidation and, when the slaves finally arrived in the valley, they found it completely unstaffed and with no supplies whatsoever. On 31 May 1858, HMS Firefly brought in a further 33 recaptives from a ‘canoe’ that it had destroyed off Congo. By that date most of the survivors from the Lucia had already been moved on to Demerara, departing in two batches in late March and early May.41 It took a while to completely empty the Rupert’s Valley depot, but by November it was reported that 50 Africans had been apprenticed on the island for a period of one year and a further 30 dispatched to Trinidad. Nine Africans remained in the depot, the intention being to employ them on St Helena as soon as they were sufficiently healthy.42 Anticipating the closure of the depot, its staff asked for advance notice of their dismissal, all the while washing clothes and blankets, sorting through the remaining equipment belonging to the Establishment, and preparing the perishable supplies for sale by auction.43 Events, however, once again defied prediction, the hiatus on St Helena of the later 1850s ending with the revival of the Cuban slave trade.44 On 21 November 1859, HMS Viper brought in a vessel captured with 519 slaves aboard, and on Christmas Eve HMS Pluto delivered another carrying 728 people. St Helena was once again overwhelmed. The nineteenth-century slave trade to Cuba had always been of a lesser volume than that to Brazil. Nevertheless, the numbers involved in its final stage were still extremely large. British sources in Havana reported that more slaving expeditions left Cuba between 1859 and 1861 than at any time since the 1820s, some 80,000 slaves being imported to the island during this 41 The correspondence relating to the Alecto’s prize is contained in CO 247/90, mainly in 1314, 1318 and 4205 St Helena. 42 Drummond Hay to Lytton, 11 November 1858, CO 247/90 13309 St Helena. 43 Swan to Pennell, 2 January 1859, CSL 41 Vol. 1. 44 On the revival of the Cuban slave trade, see Arthur Corwin, Spain and the abolition of slavery in Cuba, 1817–1886 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967); Laird Bergad, Fe Iglesias Garcia and Maria del Carmen Barcia, The Cuban Slave Market, 1790–1880 (Cambridge: University Press, 1995), especially Appendices A and B. See also Laird Bergad, The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). •

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Distant Freedom brief period. The increase in the volume of the trade also coincided with the end of the Crimean War and the subsequent ability of the Royal Navy to reinforce the West Africa Squadron: captures increased, aided considerably by the greater proportion of steam warships assigned to the patrol. These factors were reflected on St Helena by a renewed influx of captured slave vessels and their human cargo, and to a final revival of its dormant African Establishment. The volume of slave traffic was never as great as in previous decades, when both the Cuban and Brazilian slave markets were flourishing. The number of prizes brought to St Helena was also markedly smaller than it had been: 12 cases were adjudicated in 1859, seven in 1860, five in 1861 and 13 in 1862. Such statistics are misleading, however. Individual prizes tended to carry a greater number of slaves, the average numbers aboard a laden prize arriving at St Helena between 1859 and 1863 exceeding 450. The largest single cargo was aboard an unnamed vessel brought to St Helena in November 1861: a mere 243 tons, it carried 870 slaves at time of capture, of whom 25 died en route to the island. Because of this situation, very large numbers could arrive in a short period, as between the delivery of the Viper’s prize on 21 November 1859 and 4 February 1860, when over 1,600 slaves arrived at the island. In total, St Helena would take in around 7,000 recaptives between 1858 and the final closure of the depot in 1867.

*** In 1863 the Cuban slave trade suddenly and unexpectedly collapsed. Already under pressure from both the British and United States navies, the final blow to Cuba’s trade was dealt by the Lincoln administration’s grant of a mutual right of search in 1862, enabling Royal Navy vessels to intercept Americanflagged slavers. Anglo-American mixed commission courts were established at Cape Town, Sierra Leone and New York to condemn the captured vessels. Following this agreement – and despite strenuous Spanish objections – Britain placed a number of warships in Cuban waters, a move that did much to choke off the trade. Meanwhile, in both Spain and Cuba there was also a genuine change of attitude towards slavery, such that the Spanish senate passed a bill banning the trade in April 1866 which was promulgated in Cuba in September of the following year. The last verified import of slaves to Cuba was effected that year.45 With the demise of the Cuban slave trade, St Helena’s role in anti-slavery 45 Thomas (Slave Trade, pp. 783–84) states that a cargo of 900 Africans was illegally landed on Cuba in 1870, but this event does not seem to be verified and is not included on the Voyages database, whose last entries date to 1866. •

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A Place of Immense Advantage ceased abruptly. The final vessel to carry a large number of slaves was received in August 1863: the Haydee, a ship of 161 tons into which 584 individuals had been crammed. HMS Griffon brought the last six freed slaves to the island in June 1864, originally the cargo of an unseaworthy felucca that had been destroyed off the African coast. Eight more prizes were brought between then and September 1866, but all were merely equipped for the trade. The familiar process of down-scaling and decommissioning was already well-advanced by this date, alongside the process of emptying the Rupert’s Valley depot through emigration. Since 1864 the Superintendent had been retained on a permanent salary, but all other staff were employed only when there were Africans present in the depot. On 26 January 1864 it was reported that 196 Africans were left, of whom 114 had volunteered to serve as soldiers. Seventy-two others were earmarked for emigration, while the remaining ten were blind and so ‘unfit from hopelessly broken health’ that it was impossible to send them away.46 On 1 May 1867, the emigration vessel Gangees carried 11 Africans to Jamaica, leaving just 14 under the charge of the government, those who were blind, insane or aged under six months.47 Intelligence continued to reach St Helena that Royal Naval patrols were taking prizes, and local correspondence betrays an unsurprising concern that the island might once again be expected to take in a significant number of recaptives. The ancient tents in Rupert’s Valley, by now over 25 years old, ‘were for the most part utterly untenantable’ but other buildings offered sufficient accommodation for 250 Africans. Even at this late stage some construction work was sanctioned, in the form of a retaining wall to protect the depot’s buildings from seasonal flash floods.48 By the end of 1867, however, the Establishment had been completely and definitively disbanded. The buildings in Rupert’s Valley and the remaining stores were placed under the charge of the Commissariat and a certain Mr  Gillespie was retained to deal with the arrival of any unexpected prizes. The last case adjudicated by the Vice-Admiralty court was concluded on 6  July 1868, the verdict being the condemnation of an unnamed brig captured by HMS Speedwell.49 The registrar of the court continued to 46 MacBean to Pennell, 28 August 1863, CSL 46 Vol. 1 p. 223. 47 Swain to Pennell, 1 May 1867, CSL 51 Vol. 2 No. 6. 48 Elliott to the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, 15 May 1867, CO 247/106 6060 St Helena. Notes appended to this letter provide evidence of London’s uncertainty that the Cuban slave trade had finally been extinguished: ‘Approve of the steps taken by the Governor for the repair … There is unfortunately a prospect of more Africans being brought to St. Helena’. 49 VAC In-Letters, July 25 1868, p. 218. •

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Distant Freedom send quarterly reports back to London, but these only gave a formulaic statement that no cases had been heard. The duty to try slave ships finally ceased in 1872.50

50 VAC In-Letters, pp. 219–32. The last intake of recaptives to Sierra Leone was in March 1863, the cargo of a flagless, nameless schooner carrying 368 slaves, of whom 120 died before adjudication by the Vice-Admiralty court. The last equipped slaver was condemned on 26 December 1864. See Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 332. •

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chapter two

London and Jamestown London and Jamestown

Much of this book is written from a perspective that is, quite literally, insular. This is not unreasonable, given that it narrates events that centred on St Helena, over 1,000 miles from the nearest continental landfall and a far greater distance from Europe. From the colony’s earliest years its documentary record reflects a sense, and actuality, of isolation – one which prevailed into the nineteenth century and arguably persists to the present day. Nevertheless, broader perspectives cannot be ignored. Slave prizes and their human cargo did not arrive at St Helena in 1840 because of events in the South Atlantic but because of policy made in Britain. Similarly, the long-term operation of the island’s Liberated African Establishment would largely – though not entirely – be dictated by London. Anti-slavery was a mainstream issue of the period, entwined in many aspects of British domestic and foreign affairs. It was, moreover, a cause that was widely embraced both within and outside Parliament. Informed opinion had the potential to influence the course of events on St Helena, and this chapter therefore begins by considering the extent to which events on the island were known in metropolitan Britain. Its findings are in fact quite negative: information was scant, leaving parliamentarians, anti-slavery lobbyists and the general public alike badly informed. It was also the case that events on this remote island were eclipsed by matters that were genuinely of greater importance, or which were simply more interesting. As a consequence, the governance of St Helena was a departmental affair, almost entirely undertaken in private and free from external scrutiny. Decision-making rested with a small clique at the very top of the political elite, all of whom were intimately familiar with events within the island’s depots. The second part of this chapter is concerned with the nature of that governance, in particular the dynamic of the interdepartmental debate, and how policy made in London articulated with, and was influenced by, •

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Distant Freedom distant events in the South Atlantic. It reveals a tussle within metropolitan government, accentuated by a poor understanding of realities on the ground – facts which are key to understanding why St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment looked and functioned as it did. As subsequent parts of this book will show, the outcomes of this situation were far from abstract: rather, they would fundamentally impact upon the lives and deaths of those received into the island’s depots.

St Helena and the newspapers St Helena was no stranger to publicity. Between 1815 and 1821, Napoleon’s exile brought it worldwide fame, which persisted to a lesser extent after his death. The exhumation of the emperor’s remains in October 1840 briefly returned St Helena to the spotlight, and accounts appeared in numerous publications in Britain and abroad. The island was too obscure a place to warrant permanent correspondents. Instead, news about its Liberated African Establishment would be relayed by more ad hoc methods – most commonly obtained from people who had touched there on their way home to England. Thus, for example, news of the capture of the slave ship Zenobia in 1849 was brought to the attention of The Era by a whaling captain on his return to London.1 This was, however, a capricious means of newsgathering. Reports generally came from one-off correspondents, commonly lacked detail and were, on occasion, erroneous. Months could pass between the receipt of one piece of information and the next, while due to the communication lag, all material was somewhat dated by the time of publication. Some reports were positively obsolete, most notably those derived from the Admiralty prize courts, since monies paid to naval crews for captured vessels usually took several years to be awarded: one regional paper described HMS Brisk’s captures of 1841 over three years after they actually took place.2 Those reports that did reach Britain were nevertheless widely disseminated. Nineteenth-century newspapers commonly reproduced each other’s articles, and so for instance news about captured slavers at Jamestown, originating in the Standard on 21 August 1841, was repeated across the country, from the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette to the Belfast Newsletter. Some stories had complex trajectories, having first appeared in West Indian or American publications. The vast majority of articles were factual and terse. A typical example is the text that appeared in the Standard of 6 January 1862: 1 ‘A Slaver Captured’, The Era, 8 July 1849. 2 ‘The Slave Trade’, Royal Cornwall Gazette, 29 March 1844. •

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London and Jamestown Her Majesty’s ship Ranger captured, early in November last, a large barque (name and nation unknown) with about 850 negroes on board. The prize was taken to St Helena on the 18th of that month, where the slaves have been landed, and lodged under the superintendence of the proper government officers, at the station in Rupert’s Valley.3

The Ranger’s prize was one of the very largest captures brought into Rupert’s Valley. However, the story was placed in tiny newsprint on an inner page of a broadsheet paper, between notes on the death of a certain Captain Kellock and a bequest from the Marquis of Westminster to a scripture society. This was quite typical. In 1844, for example, the Lincolnshire Chronicle sandwiched the news that the Rupert’s Valley depot was to be revived between the description of a gold box presented to the King of the Ashanti and an article on seventeenth-century witch burning.4 In this way, editorial decisions consigned the human catastrophes in Rupert’s Bay to obscurity. The stories with which they sat clearly indicate their status as ephemera. A few lengthier articles were published. Dr George McHenry’s 1844–45 account in Simmond’s Colonial Gazette and Miscellany was by far the most extensive, running to over 50,000 words.5 In 1850, the Cheltenham Chronicle reproduced an excerpt from the journal of the Bishop of Cape Town in which he vividly described a slave prize and the conditions in Rupert’s Valley in the aftermath of its landing. An 1858 eyewitness account of the depot, which originated in the New York Journal of Commerce, was widely reproduced in British national and regional papers, including The Times.6 These articles stressed the human aspects of the Liberated African Establishment, but the legal case relating to the Newport attracted considerable column inches for different reasons. The Newport was a British ship whose condemnation as a slaver by St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court was reversed after appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.7 The Times and various regional papers followed the case with interest, largely because of the perceived injustice done to an honest member of the mercantile community.8 Overseas newspapers also published articles about St Helena’s involvement 3 ‘Capture of a slaver’, Standard, 6 January 1862. 4 ‘Liberated Slaves’, Lincolnshire Chronicle, 1 November 1844. 5 Parts of McHenry’s text were reproduced in other newspapers. See for example the column-length article ‘Negro Customs at St Helena’, Glasgow Herald, 2 March 1846. 6 ‘Captured Slaves at St Helena’, The Times, 10 November 1858. 7 On the details of this case and its repercussions see Van Niekerk, Vice-Admiralty Court (Part 2), pp. 27–34. 8 The Times, 15 February 1857, 10 December 1857 and 4 February 1858. For an example of the regional coverage see ‘A curious case of grievous wrong’, Morpeth Herald, 13 February 1858. •

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Distant Freedom in anti-slavery. The ready communications between South Africa and St Helena meant that events were often reported earlier in Cape Town than in London. The South African Commercial Advertiser, for example, published information about HMS Waterwitch’s capture of the Julia on 20 February 1841, which British papers only reported between March and May.9 Over the course of this study, a scattering of other articles have been found in gazettes and newspapers from other colonial possessions, most notably the West Indies, but the extent to which St Helena’s role in suppression was reported elsewhere in the Empire has not been established. In the United States, however, the subject certainly elicited interest. American newspapers on the Atlantic seaboard were well placed to receive information from the island, brought by vessels returning from the Indian Ocean or the southern whaling grounds. Reports about St Helena were published with reasonable regularity, carried by newspapers such as the Boston Traveller and the New York Times. Occasionally entire articles from the island’s own papers and gazettes were reproduced, and in doing so on one occasion the New York Times remarked that ‘the St Helena Herald is about the size of a child’s pocket handkerchief; but, considering the size of the island where it is published, it is as large as could be expected’.10 Where these articles dealt with slavery, the focus was on issues that pertained to American interests, notably the right of search and the activities of the United States Africa Squadron. With the exception of the 1858 article in the New York Journal of Commerce noted above, articles featuring St Helena concentrated on the capture of slaving vessels – above all those owned or operated by United States citizens. Examples include the Stephen Townsend in 1859 and another unnamed ship in 1862.11 There was particular coverage of the Orion, captured in late 1859 and taken to St Helena carrying over 800 slaves. Initial reports in February 1860 were followed by detailed articles from March onwards. The New York Times reproduced an unabridged account of the capture from the St Helena Herald and carried several of its own articles on the subject. Fact was accompanied by editorial, which condemned both American involvement in the slave trade and the failure of its navy to stamp it out.12 Such news stories, coming as they did on the eve of the American Civil War, had particular resonance. 9 ‘Case of a slaver captured by Her Majesty’s Brig Waterwitch’, South African Commercial Advertiser, 20 February 1841. 10 ‘A Voice from St Helena’, New York Times, 7 September 1855. 11 ‘Captured Slavers at St Helena’, New York Times, 9 November 1859; ‘The African Slave-Trade; Extent of the Traffic. Successful efforts to Suppress it’, New York Times, 17 November 1862. 12 The articles were published on 9 February, 2 March and 3 March 1860. The latter edition contained the report from the St Helena Herald. •

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London and Jamestown The largest vehicle by which the British, colonial and, to some extent, the foreign public might have learned about St Helena was the Illustrated London News (ILN). Launched in 1842, it had a weekly circulation that far outstripped all other newspapers of the time: 60,000 at the end of its first year, rising to 300,000 by 1863. Like other periodicals such as the Penny Magazine, the ILN also bridged the class divide, developing a deliberate editorial policy to disseminate and democratise information. The paper presented a mixture of news from home and abroad, accompanied by reports on myriad subjects that ranged from society events to new mechanical inventions, archaeological discoveries and natural phenomena. News was mainly addressed at a superficial level but the paper was capable of more serious discussion. Major events such as the European revolutions and the Crimean War received detailed coverage, with whole supplements devoted to them. The presentation of St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment within the ILN is typical of newspapers as a whole. The slave trade featured regularly in its news section, and at times it was an active and opinionated participant in the debate upon the subject. In March 1850, for example, the ILN led with a detailed editorial on the defeat of the parliamentary motion to abolish the West Africa Squadron; a supplement carried a verbatim account of the proceedings in the House of Commons. Most coverage of suppression was much more superficial, however. Captures of slave ships were clearly thought to be newsworthy, including some of those dispatched to St Helena. Predictably, the focus was upon the chase, sometimes accompanied by drawings recreating the point at which the slaver was brought to heel. The ILN edition of 29 December 1849, for instance, paid considerable attention to HMS Rattler’s capture of the Andorinha, while that of 6 July 1850 carried illustrated reports about the taking of the Anne D Richardson, Paquete de Santos and Lucy Anne. The state of the slaves aboard the Lucy Anne was briefly mentioned (the other vessels being empty), but only in the briefest terms; their ultimate fate was not discussed. Later, an article from 1859 showed the capture of an unnamed vessel (now known to be the Orion) by HMS Pluto. Here at least there was some discussion of the slaves, the article mentioning that they were embarked at Cabenda, landed at St Helena and were probably destined for the British Americas as apprentices.13 13 ‘Gallant capture of a slaver by HMS Rattler’, Illustrated London News, 29 December 1849, p. 440; ‘Capture of a Large Slave-Ship by the HMS Pluto’, Illustrated London News, 28 April 1860, p. 409. Both images are reproduced on the website for The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record (http://hitchcock.itc.virginia. edu/Slavery/index.php). •

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Distant Freedom Taken as a whole, the year-on-year reporting of St Helena and anti-slavery was sparse, while little was said of the depots themselves or the conditions within them. An avid follower of events there would usually have looked in vain for new information, while the casual reader could easily have skimmed past the brief reports that were offered. This is not to say that St Helena went unreported. Far from it. During 1848, the nearby sighting of a giant sea serpent by the crew of HMS Daedalus was one of the most celebrated stories of the year. The ILN’s readers, kept oblivious to the arrival of thousands of slaves at the island during that year, were handsomely compensated by many pages of print and copious illustrations, including lavish anatomical drawings of the supposed creature Scoliophis atlanticus.14

Parliament St Helena’s entry into suppression came at a liminal time, when the agenda of British abolitionists was shifting significantly, becoming more international in its outlook and focusing far more heavily on the Atlantic slave trade than it had since 1807. That connection was far from coincidental, since these changing attitudes were essential in creating the necessary sentiment for the Slave Trade (Portugal) Bill of 1839 to pass into law. Anti-slavery was a mainstream issue in British politics throughout the nineteenth century, entwined in many aspects of its domestic and foreign affairs.15 Some scholars have argued that the issue was so pervasive that late Georgian and Victorian Britain was nothing less than an ‘anti-slavery state’. Recent studies have expanded on this theme, demonstrating the myriad ways in which anti-slavery thought permeated mainstream British culture, from popular literature and newspapers to the music hall.16 Other scholars emphasise the significance of anti-slavery as a strand of foreign policy.17 Such views require a certain degree of qualification, since no era has ever been dominated by a single issue. In the decades after 1815 the domestic political agenda was dominated by economic woes, the question of parliamentary reform, middle-class agitation and the spectre of popular 14 ‘The Giant Sea Serpent’, Illustrated London News, 28 October 1848, pp. 264–65. 15 Temperley, British Anti-Slavery. 16 Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-Slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012). 17 For example: Bernard Nelson, ‘The Slave Trade as a Factor in British Foreign Policy’, The Journal of Negro History 27.2 (1942), pp. 192–209; Thomas Otte, ‘“A Course of Unceasing Remonstrance”. British Diplomacy and the Suppression of the Slave Trade in the East, 1852–1898’, in Slavery Diplomacy and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1807–1975, ed. Keith Hamilton and Patrick Salmon (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), pp. 93–124. •

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London and Jamestown revolution. Abroad, after a generation of conflict, what all foreign secretaries from Castlereagh onwards sought was stability in Europe, alongside a desire for peaceful relations with the United States. Thus, while anti-slavery was pursued by successive governments, both at home and overseas, it was a policy objective that had to be balanced with many other considerations. During the early nineteenth century, most abolitionists had considered the suppression of the slave trade to be the responsibility of government, to be pursued through a combination of foreign policy and naval force. With the ending of West Indian apprenticeship in 1838, however, the domestic ambitions of the British anti-slavery lobby were largely sated. Attention returned to matters beyond the Empire and the domestically minded Anti-Slavery Society was superseded by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) – an organisation committed to nothing less than worldwide abolition. The vastly expanded scope of anti-slavery would be highlighted in June 1840 by the meeting in London of the first World Anti-Slavery Convention, which assembled several hundred delegates from Britain, America and a number of other nations.18 This meeting, by coincidence, began a day after the condemnation of the first prize vessel in St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court. British parliamentarians of the period were well versed in matters pertaining to the slave trade. A number of MPs had direct connections to abolitionist groups while the anti-slavery lobby ensured that the subject remained in the minds of those members to whom it was of less interest. During the 1840s, the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade would itself become the subject of specific scrutiny. Criticism of the policy of naval coercion had been developing since the late 1830s, driven in large part by pacifist anti-slavery groups, most notably the BFASS. The West Africa Squadron’s principal opponent in Parliament was the radical free trade MP William Hutt, at whose instigation a House of Commons select committee was appointed in 1848 to investigate the overall question of slave trade suppression through military force. A parallel House of Lords inquiry of 1850 dealt with the same subject, though from a more pro-suppression standpoint.19 Exhaustive evidence was given to both committees and published verbatim within a 18 BFASS, Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, called by the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and held in London from Friday, June 12th, to Tuesday, June 23rd, 1840 (London: Thomas Ward and Co., 1841). David Turley identifies peaks of anti-slavery interest in Britain (based on the number of publications for each year) in 1838 and 1840, the latter coincident with the convention. See The Culture of English Anti-Slavery 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 50–51. 19 For summaries of the debate see Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, Chapter 8; Huzzey, Freedom Burning, Chapter 5. •

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Distant Freedom series of reports, accompanied by large quantities of supporting data.20 The matter was placed directly in front of MPs in 1850, when a motion to abolish the cruiser system was defeated by a comfortable if not overwhelming majority. In 1853, another Commons select committee, this time considering slave trade treaties, concluded that the cruiser system was working – an unsurprising finding given the recent collapse of the Brazilian slave trade in the face of aggressive British naval power. An 1858 motion, similar to that of 1850, was heavily defeated. Despite this focus on suppression, St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment received little attention. The island was in fact a rare feature in parliamentary business of any kind. The charge for its Civil Establishment was subject to an annual vote (not uncommonly raising questions as to why such a small colony cost such an excessive amount) while the yearly Army Estimates also included the St Helena Regiment.21 The only substantive debate pertaining to the island’s role in anti-slavery occurred in 1844 and related to the loss of life aboard the prize taken by HMS Arrow. John Bowring, MP for Bolton, tabled a question to Lord Stanley asking why the vessel had been refused permission to land at St Helena, having instead been directed to Cape Town on a voyage that ‘was literally strewed with corpses’. Lord Palmerston also pursued the same question. Stanley’s response was that, regrettable though the mortality had been, naval orders only permitted slaves to be landed at St Helena in exceptional circumstances. He explained that the Governor had not been persuaded that this case was an emergency, but instead supplied water and offered medicines, thus enabling the Arrow to set sail for Cape Town. This was a highly sanitised version of events, though one which accurately reflected the information provided to Stanley by Governor Trelawney. The letters written by the Arrow’s commander tell a very different story, but in a classic piece of censorship by a colonial administrator, these had been withheld from London.22 It would be 15 years before the second, and last, parliamentary question would be asked on the subject, this time concerning the legal case of the Newport. Here, Robert Crawford, MP for the City of London and a representative of the mercantile class, enquired of the Secretary to the 20 The principal reports of the committees were: PP 1847–48 (272) XXII, Select Committee on the Slave Trade. First Report; PP 1847–48 (366) XXII, Select Committee on the Slave Trade. Second Report; PP 1847–48 (536) XXII, Select Committee on the Slave Trade. Third Report; PP 1847–48 (623) XXII, Select Committee on Slave Trade. Fourth Report; PP 1850 (590) IX, Select Committee of the House of Lords on the African Slave Trade. 21 Hansard, 3rd ser., 1845, lxxxii, 1163 (28 July). 22 Hansard, 3rd ser., 1844, lxxv, 521–23 (11 June). •

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London and Jamestown Treasury the cost of damages payable to the owners in compensation for their losses.23 Otherwise, St Helena’s role in suppression occupied little other specific parliamentary time, though on a few occasions it featured within more general debates that touched upon anti-slavery and its ramifications. In 1847, for example, measures were proposed to regulate the fees levied by the Vice-Admiralty courts at St Helena, Sierra Leone, Cape Town and New South Wales – this being a reaction to what was seen as profiteering by the officers of the courts, to the detriment of naval captors.24 Similarly, in the following year the Chancellor of the Exchequer made a brief reference to recaptive emigrants from St Helena, Rio and Havana during a lengthy speech about the economic crisis of Britain’s West Indian colonies.25 At various points, debates on Civil Service Estimates (which included monies voted for liberated Africans) also elicited comment about whether the expense of the depots at Sierra Leone and St Helena could be avoided by shipping recaptives directly to the West Indies.26 All, however, were simply passing comments amidst broader parliamentary business. The wider debates about the slave trade also passed St Helena by. When the Slave Trade (Portugal) Bill was considered in 1839, the use of Vice-Admiralty courts as a means of trying stateless vessels was an important detail of the legislation, and one which received due attention by those formulating the bill. However, parliamentary attention rested on the bigger diplomatic picture: the potential for war with Portugal, and legislation which was deemed inconsistent with Britain’s traditional policy of peace and of respect for the rights and independence of other states.27 St Helena assumed a similarly low profile in the parliamentary enquiries of the 1840s and early 1850s into the West Africa Squadron, although at a few points witnesses to the committees did make reference to the island’s usefulness. This comes across most strongly in first report of the Commons select committee of the 1840s, where several naval officers drew attention to the tactical and humanitarian benefits of dispatching slave-laden prizes to St Helena – often as an alternative to the protracted voyage to Sierra Leone.28 However, even within this document, references to the island are quite sparse and at no stage did any member of the committee pursue the 23 Hansard 3rd ser., 1859, clii, 965 (28 February). 24 Hansard, 3rd ser., 1847, xcii, 1107–08 (20 May). See also the continuation of this debate: Hansard, 3rd ser., 1849, cii, 1100–01 (22 February). 25 Hansard, 3rd ser., 1848, xcvi, 60 (3 February). 26 For example Hansard, 3rd ser., 1861, clxiv, 1074 (18 July); Hansard, 3rd ser., 1862, clxv, 275–77 (14 February). 27 Bethell, Britain, Portugal and the Suppression of the Brazilian Slave Trade, pp. 779–81. 28 PP 1847–48 (272) XXII, questions 623–34 (Captain Henry Butterfield); questions 1724–27 (Lieutenant Henry Matson); questions 2279–330 (Lieutenant Thomas Birch). •

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Distant Freedom points raised by the officers. Within the subsequent reports, including those of the House of Lords committee, references to St Helena are almost totally confined to tabulated data, mostly in appendices. The original purpose of the Hutt enquiry had been to establish whether the preventative squadron could ever be effective in suppressing the slave trade, and at times both Commons and Lords committees did consider operational matters. Here, more than anywhere else, St Helena might have been expected to feature. The questioning, however, largely revolved around whether an inshore blockade was more effective than one enforced at a greater distance from the coast.29 The scope of the Hutt committee had, in any case, grown far beyond its original remit. The final reports show the core issues to be not only the cruiser system but the Brazilian slave trade, the economic crises of Britain’s West Indian colonies and African emigration as a possible solution, alongside a multitude of lesser matters.30 Set within that scope, St Helena was too minor a subject to receive more than passing attention. Even Sierra Leone, previously the target of intense scrutiny, was far from centre stage.31 For the same reason, St Helena is absent from the books and pamphlets written in defence of the West Africa Squadron – many of which were authored by naval officers who, while serving on the patrol, had close involvement with the island. Here again, the authors were concerned with overarching arguments in favour of suppression, rather than with the tactical or operational detail that would have necessitated the inclusion of St Helena.32

29 On the questioning of Commodore Hotham on this subject, see PP 1849 (308) XIX, Select Committee on the Slave Trade: First Report, questions 898–903. 30 For a contemporary evaluation of the evidence, and the relative importance of the various subjects considered, see Anonymous [Sir George Stephen], Analysis of the evidence given before the Select Committees upon the Slave Trade, by a Barrister (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1850). 31 Various witnesses from Sierra Leone presented evidence to the committees, including former governor George Macdonald and Chief Justice John Carr, together with missionaries and liberated Africans at the colony. George Stephen’s Analysis considered the evidence from the colony to be ‘full and gratifying’. No witnesses from St Helena were called before either committee. 32 For example: Henry Matson, Remarks on the Slave Trade and African Squadron (London: James Ridgeway, 1848); J. Leighton Wilson, The British Squadron on the Coast of Africa (London: James Ridgeway, 1849); Henry Yule, The Africa Squadron Vindicated (London: James Ridgeway, 1850); Joseph Denman, The Slave Trade, the African Squadron, and Mr. Hutt’s Committee (London: J. Mortimer, 1850). •

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London and Jamestown

The anti-slavery lobby and the public Beyond Parliament, public involvement in the anti-slavery cause had for many years influenced government policy. Recent studies have highlighted the relationship (arguably verging on dependence) that developed after 1807, between British abolitionists on the one hand and government ministers on the other.33 And, while that influence began to diminish in the 1840s – particularly as a result of the catastrophic Niger Expedition – the anti-slavery lobby remained a significant force in British politics throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Therefore – and even if parliamentarians were largely disengaged from St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment – external pressure had the potential to provide a check and balance on its governance. Of the various anti-slavery organisations of the period, the BFASS was by far the most influential. What the BFASS knew – and did not know – about St Helena is therefore of significant interest. The society’s headquarters in New Broad Street lay at the centre of an information web that stretched across the globe, drawing in intelligence from a multitude of informants, both British and foreign, who ranged from government officials to private individuals. Dozens – sometimes hundreds – of letters reached its Secretary every month. In the case of St Helena, however, the BFASS appears to have obtained only limited information and the society’s official publication, the Anti-Slavery Reporter, carried only a scattering of references to the island. There was an article specifically about the Arrow debate in the House of Commons, but otherwise St Helena usually only appeared in reports on wider matters relating to the slave trade’s suppression.34 Like other newspapers, most information about the island in the Anti-Slavery Reporter was culled from second-hand sources, though at least a few reports 33 Paul Kielstra, The Politics of Slave Trade Suppression in Britain and France, 1814–48: Diplomacy, Morality and Economics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Laurence Fenton also illustrates the linkages between policy and external influences in Palmerston and The Times: Foreign Policy, the Press and Public Opinion in Mid-Victorian Britain (London: I.B. Taurus, 2013). For abolitionist dealings with the Foreign Office see David Turley, Relations between British and American Abolitionists from British Emancipation to the American Civil War (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1969), Chapter 2. On networks of colonial lobbyists, see Zoë Laidlaw, Colonial Connections 1815–45: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 34 ‘Refusal to allow the landing of diseased slaves at St Helena’, Anti-Slavery Reporter CXIX Vol. 5 No. 13. More typical is the article in the edition for 1 May 1844 which notes the removal of 802 recaptives from St Helena to the West Indies within a summary table of emigration covering the period 1834–43 (CXV Vol. 5 No. 9). •

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Distant Freedom were obtained directly. Most notably, an article published on 16 October 1844 contained a report that the government intended to reopen the island as a depot for captured slaves, commenting that ‘It is really sickening to read the accounts which have been submitted to us of the hardships endured by the liberated Africans at St Helena …’. This phrase implies specific communication, rather than secondary information culled from official sources. The identities of the BFASS’s correspondents on St Helena are not known, but it is clear that the society was not in contact with any of the key figures involved with the island’s Liberated African Establishment. The society’s archive does not preserve communiqués from any St Helenian governor or Colonial Secretary of the period, or from any of the officers involved in the running of the depots.35 This situation was very much in contrast to that of Sierra Leone in the same period. During the 1840s and earlier 1850s, letters from Freetown arrived at New Broad Street periodically (if not exactly frequently), and correspondents included at least one governor (George MacDonald, 1842–44) and those working on the ground with the liberated Africans. Outside of the British government, it was in fact not the BFASS but the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) that was best informed about events on St Helena. Its mission to the liberated Africans (discussed further in Chapter Seven) provided it with permanent informers on the island, who between the late 1850s and early 1870s sent regular reports to the SPG’s headquarters in London about many aspects of the Liberated African Establishment. By 1872, it was arguably better informed about the fate of the recaptives than either the Colonial or Foreign Office, which had ceased to receive reports of any detail on the subject several years previously.36 The letters dispatched to the SPG focused heavily on missionary efforts amongst the liberated Africans. Where Rupert’s Valley was concerned, much attention was paid to the progress of religious education and baptism. 35 The in-letters to the BFASS are arranged under the term of office of the Secretary to whom they were sent. Within this basic division, the letters are sorted alphabetically by the surname of the correspondent. Effective research into a particular place therefore requires knowledge of the name of the persons writing. The indexes do not list any of the main individuals present at St Helena between 1840 and the late 1860s. This strongly suggests that the BFASS obtained its intelligence about the island from peripheral sources. 36 An early letter to the SPG on the subject of St Helena’s liberated Africans was sent by Bishop Grey of Cape Town in 1849, drawing attention to the use of the island as a depot for recaptives and to their suffering aboard the slave ships. The same letter also lamented the lack of any attempts to give them religious instruction on St Helena. It was reproduced in the SPG Annual Report for 1849 (pp. 157–58). There followed a gap of a decade before correspondence on this subject resumed. •

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London and Jamestown Emigration also loomed large in the discussion since the rapid onward shipment of the Africans was viewed as an impediment to the missionary agenda. Collectively, these communiqués provide a detailed picture of the goings on in Rupert’s Valley, and to some extent also the lives of those recaptives settled on, and emigrated from, St Helena. A portion of this information filtered through to the society’s wider membership: short précis are found in the SPG’s Annual Reports of 1860–63 and 1867; articles about Rupert’s Valley appeared in its magazine Mission Field in 1860 and 1862; and the memoirs of the island’s first bishop were published as a book.37 Delegates at the society’s meetings spoke on the subject, addressing very large gatherings which included many eminent figures. These speeches, in turn, found a wider audience through their reporting in British national and local newspapers. The SPG’s involvement with St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment was, however, confined to the last years of its operation. Moreover, the use of its intelligence about the island was extremely narrow. Thus, while its missionaries were present in Rupert’s Valley during its final major humanitarian crisis of 1859–63, the society’s primary interest rested not with events on the ground, but with the spiritual well-being of the liberated Africans. Above all, the concern was with the evangelising mission, whether the surviving slaves left the island in an improved state of grace. Questions about health, mortality and the morality of enforced emigration were left untouched. And, while there certainly was dialogue between the SPG and the British government on the subject of St Helena (there was for example a petition to the Treasury for funds to pay for a schoolmaster and interpreter in the depot), at no stage does the society appear to have engaged in broader lobbying about political or humanitarian issues.

*** As the preceding sections demonstrate, discussion of St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment was rare in both the public and parliamentary domains. Across the three decades during which it operated, the published material on the subject did not amount to a great deal, while the parliamentary time devoted to the subject was virtually nil. The longest debate, on HMS Arrow’s prize, must have taken no more than a few minutes before attention was turned to other matters. Recent scholarship emphasises the centrality of anti-slavery within the politics and society of early Victorian Britain. St Helena fails to fit this 37 Piers Claughton, Some account of the work in a new diocese, by its first bishop (Kidderminster: T. Mark, c.1862); SPG Papers D25c. •

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Distant Freedom model: its role in suppression neither shaped nor shook foreign policy; it was bypassed by Parliament and excited virtually no interest amongst the wider public. The explanation for this is, to an extent at least, self-evident. Anti-slavery, while woven into the British political and social fabric, was nevertheless only one strand, and within that St Helena comprised just a thread. The political backdrop in 1840 illustrates this point. When St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court was brought into being, Britain was embroiled in the Ottoman-Egyptian crisis and the Opium Wars, and there were significant tensions with both France and the United States. It was also the case that colonial affairs generally had a low profile during this period. The parliamentary business of the Colonial Office was light and Lord Stanley once remarked that when they were discussed, it was before a bored and ignorant audience.38 Meanwhile, domestic affairs – generally of far greater concern to MPs – were dominated by economic crisis and a weak administration, with free trade emerging as the major political theme for the coming decade. By these standards, St Helena’s use as an anti-slavery base was unimportant. Small, remote and a long-established British possession, its involvement did not give rise to dispute with any other nation. Moreover – and in marked contrast to Sierra Leone – the island colony had a raison d’être that was independent of slave trade suppression, while also lacking its African counterpart’s reputation for waste, corruption and mortality. St Helena did not attract the personal antipathy in metropolitan circles that did certain of Sierra Leone’s governors, and which underpinned many of the political attacks upon the colony. In just the same way, there was much else to occupy the attention of anti-slavery activists. The unfolding events on St Helena came too late to feature in the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840, but the island’s role in suppression was well established by the subsequent meeting in 1843. Over its seven days, the delegates of the second convention considered numerous subjects, which as a whole demonstrate the great breadth – and, arguably, the lack of focus – of the mid-nineteenth-century anti-slavery lobby. These included the abolition of slavery in India and the United States, slavery in Texas, Brazil, Cuba, the French colonies and the South American republics, 38 R. Pugh, ‘The Colonial Office, 1801–1925’, in The Cambridge History of the British Empire, Volume 3: The Empire Commonwealth 1870–1919, ed. E.A. Benians, James Butler and C.E. Carrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), p. 715. The lack of knowledge about the colonies amongst parliamentarians is also noted by Green (using the specific example of the plantation colony of Guiana, which one MP thought to be an island). See British Slave Emancipation, pp. 93–94. Bernard Porter argues that the British as a whole had more important concerns than empire and were largely ignorant of it until the later nineteenth century. See The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). •

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London and Jamestown and missionary work. Atlantic slave trade suppression also formed part of the agenda, as did emigration of Africans to the West Indies.39 Across all of the speeches, however, St Helena only received a passing mention in a single report about the continued Brazilian and Cuban slave trade.40 The minutes of both the private and public meetings of the BFASS show the same situation prevailing over the longer term. Moreover, those who campaigned for abolition often had wider interests that spanned free trade, pacifism, religion, temperance, working-class welfare and mercantilism.41 In short, therefore, there was much to occupy politicians, diplomats and the reform-minded Englishman of the period, and under such circumstances it would be unreasonable to expect a place as peripheral as St Helena to consume much time or attention.42 Instead, the governance of the island’s Liberated African Establishment was essentially a departmental matter, carried out behind the closed doors of Whitehall.

Metropolitan decision-making In the mid-nineteenth century, the administrative system of the British Empire was a collective process that involved a number of government departments in London.43 The Colonial Office was responsible for the administration of territories that had been annexed to the Crown, while the Foreign Office dealt with areas where British influence was exercised informally, and took the lead in diplomacy involving other nation states. These, in turn, liaised with local bureaucracies that varied in structure and 39 BFASS, Proceedings of the General Anti-Slavery Convention, called by the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and held in London from Tuesday, June 13th, to Tuesday, June 20th, 1843 (London: Thomas Ward and Co., 1843). The 1840 conference had had a similarly diverse agenda, covering mainstream topics including West Indian emancipation and the Niger Expedition, to Red Indian slavery and Egyptian slave hunts. 40 Sierra Leone had a rather higher profile, and delegates considered its suitability as a place for settlement and the reception of slave ship prizes, its mortality and expense. 41 Temperley, British Anti-Slavery, p. 72. 42 In this respect, St Helena was not unique, ignorance about colonial slavery extending to places of greater importance and with a higher political and public profile. Mauritius is one example: despite its economic significance and the severe social problems of its emancipated slaves, there was limited awareness of the island amongst British abolitionists, as demonstrated by its rare inclusion in the Anti Slavery Record (publication of the Anti-Slavery Society, the forerunner of BFASS). See Antony Barker, Slavery and Antislavery in Mauritius: The Conflict between Economic Expansion and Humanitarian Reform under British Rule (London: Macmillan, 1996). 43 John Cell, British Colonial Administration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The PolicyMaking Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). •

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Distant Freedom size, from tiny colonies such as St Helena to the huge Indian subcontinent. Other departments also had consultative functions, including the War Office, the Admiralty, the Treasury, the Board of Trade and, after 1858, the India Office.44 St Helena’s role in abolition would at times involve the first three of these departments. From 1842, the disposal of the liberated Africans in its depots also brought in the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, although this appears only to have taken an advisory role and never dictated policy. The bureaucracy of the period was extremely small, such that decisionmaking within the departments of metropolitan government rested with just a few individuals. In 1841, the Foreign Office had a staff of 40 people, four of whom belonged to the Slave Trade department, while the mid-century Colonial Office had a staff of about 30.45 Britain managed its foreign relations and governed its vast empire through these two departments. The majority of personnel performed administrative roles, being clerks or librarians. Actual power was in the hands of the Secretary of State and the departmental undersecretaries or their equivalent. Within the Foreign Office, the Secretary of State was the dominant actor in the 1840s. During this decade, two men held the position, Viscount Palmerston (1835–41 and 1846–51) and the Earl of Aberdeen (1841–46), both expert in foreign affairs. In the 1850s, only Clarendon (1853–58) occupied the office for any length of time, the others’ shorter tenures and relative inexperience placing greater emphasis on the department’s two undersecretaries. At the Colonial Office, four men held office as Secretary of State during the 1840s, three of whom (Lord John Russell, Lord Stanley and Earl Grey) had reasonably lengthy tenures; that of Gladstone lasted only a few months. By contrast, 11 men held the position in the 1850s, several for just a few months. The office of Colonial Secretary rarely attracted a great man at the height of his powers. Many knew little about colonial affairs and, with the exception of Lord John Russell and Earl Grey, the remainder were either mediocrities or, like Gladstone, able men who held office for too short a time to be effective.46 Stanley, despite his four-year tenure, was 44 Mandy Banton, Administering the Empire, 1801–1968: A Guide to the Records of the Colonial Office in the National Archives of the UK (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2008), Chapter 11. 45 Ray Jones, The nineteenth-century Foreign Office: An administrative history (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 19; Cell, British Colonial Administration, p. 25. 46 On the low political standing of colonial secretaries of the mid-nineteenth century see Pugh, ‘Colonial Office’, pp. 715–16. He considered that most prime ministers filled the office with second-rate politicians or whisked away the good ones after short terms. Moreover, as Helen Taft Manning observes, few colonial secretaries of the day had ever crossed the Atlantic, and none had ventured as far south as Cape Town or knew •

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London and Jamestown chiefly concerned with cutting a figure in Parliament and was not greatly interested in the office.47 As a result, most Colonial Secretaries relied heavily (some almost completely) on the advice of their permanent undersecretary. Only three men held this position during the lifetime of St Helena’s African Establishment: James Stephen (1836–47), Herman Merivale (1847–60) and Frederick Rogers (1860–71). A similar situation prevailed at the Treasury which, while notionally governed by the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, was effectively managed by its Assistant Secretary. For almost the entire mid-century this position was occupied by a single person, Charles Trevelyan (1840–59).48 The personalities of these few individuals, therefore, strongly influenced decision-making in their respective departments. Many were committed abolitionists. The Foreign Office as a whole had a consistent anti-slavery stance, while several Secretaries of State were outspoken abolitionists, including both Palmerston and Aberdeen.49 At the Colonial Office, James Stephen was the son of a leading abolitionist, a lifelong humanitarian and had drafted the Slavery Abolition Act (though in office he did not show any particular deference to lobbying by the BFASS). It is notable, however, that these sympathies were not shared by Stanley, who had little empathy with anti-slavery activists and whose aristocratic background made him better suited to grasp the West Indian plantocracy’s point of view.50 Charles Trevelyan’s attitude – a crucial factor in the analysis that follows – was still more ambiguous. His family home was in Clapham, in close proximity to members of the anti-slavery ‘Clapham sect’, to whom he was related though his marriage to Hannah More Macauley. However, far from sharing the Wilberforce circle’s abolitionist platform, Trevelyan’s father had inherited an estate in Grenada, and Charles and his siblings later received compensation for the emancipation of the slaves from this plantation. Trevelyan’s anything at first hand about the colonies south of the equator. See ‘Who Ran the British Empire 1830–1850?’, Journal of British Studies 5.1 (1965), pp. 88–121. 47 For a discussion of this relationship see William Morrell, British colonial policy in the age of Peel and Russell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1930), pp. 32–46. 48 Jennifer Hart, ‘Sir Charles Trevelyan at the Treasury’, English Historical Review 85 (1960), pp. 92–110. 49 Keith Hamilton, ‘Zealots and Helots: The Slave Trade Department of the Nineteenth-Century Foreign Office’, in Slavery Diplomacy and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1807–1975, ed. Keith Hamilton and Patrick Salmon (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), pp. 20–41. The long-standing ‘received conviction’ against the slave trade within the nineteenth-century Foreign Office is also noted by Roger Anstey, ‘Capitalism and Slavery – A Critique’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 21 (1968), pp. 307–20. 50 Morrell, British colonial policy, p. 35. •

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Distant Freedom lack of sympathy for the weak is also well-documented. His opinion that dependence on others was a moral disease has been widely quoted, and has come to be seen (rightly or wrongly) as the epitome of the providential theory of the Irish Famine. His administration of the British government’s relief for this crisis remains controversial to this day. Whether Trevelyan perceived groups such as the liberated Africans in the same terms as the Irish peasantry has not been established. Regardless, his reforming interests lay elsewhere, in aspects of public life such as education and the civil service. And, as a recent biographer has observed, his zeal and drive for efficiency very much bear the hallmark of secular, rather than religious, enthusiasm.51 The personal nature of politics and the centralisation of power had several important outcomes. The first was to add further inertia to a bureaucratic system whose archaic procedures already made the formulation of policy extremely slow. This was particularly apparent in the early 1840s, when Palmerston, Trevelyan and Stephen occupied key roles within the Foreign Office, Treasury and Colonial Office respectively. Each was a notoriously poor delegator and their attempts to single-handedly assimilate all incoming correspondence (and, in Palmerston’s case, also to dictate policy) were anachronisms in an era of ever-increasing official paperwork.52 When several departments had to be consulted, decision-making could become especially slow, and this was nowhere more true than in the governance of the colonies. Full responsibility for colonial expenditure had been assumed by the Treasury in 1831, such that it had to be consulted on all matters concerning money; no effective system of departmental liaison was ever worked out and grave delays in correspondence resulted.53 This, of course, merely exacerbated the unavoidable problem imposed by the great distances between the ruling centre and the peripheries of the 51 Robin Haines, Charles Trevelyan and the Great Irish Famine (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), esp. pp. 542–46. This is a revisionist work, which argues that Trevelyan’s reputation has been unfairly blackened. Cecil Woodham-Smith offers the classic characterisation of the British government as mean-spirited and deliberately parsimonious, singling out Trevelyan as the Englishman most responsible. See The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845–1849 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). Darrell Munsell also paints a dark picture of a detail-obsessed and racist man: ‘Charles Edward Trevelyan and Peelite Irish Famine policy, 1845–1846’, Societas: A Review of Social History 1.4 (1971), pp. 299–315. 52 Cell (British Colonial Administration, pp. 32–34) and Jones (Foreign Office, p. 20) discuss the procedure by which incoming despatches were dealt with in the Colonial and Foreign Offices respectively. Taft Manning (‘British Empire’, p. 117) sets out some of the reasons for the slow dialogue on interdepartmental matters. On the general ‘information crisis’ of the British government during the early and mid-nineteenth century see Laidlaw, Colonial Connections. 53 Pugh, ‘Colonial Office’, pp. 726–27. •

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London and Jamestown empire. In the case of St Helena, journey times from St Helena to Britain had improved since the eighteenth century, when a typical voyage by an East Indiaman took about three months. Nevertheless, they remained slow: in 1873 the average sailing vessel still required 65 days to reach London.54 In informational terms, therefore, the island remained extremely isolated. Governor George Middlemore summed up his position in 1838, commenting that ‘in general it takes six months before an answer can be received from England to any dispatch’.55 Analysis of the primary correspondence bears out this statement. Communication with the West Africa Squadron was equally protracted, if not more so. With cruisers spending months patrolling the southern continental coast, commanders relied on occasional port calls and ship-to-ship contact for the transmission of orders. Given such circumstances, it was not even guaranteed that instructions would reach them in the sequence in which they were written. As a consequence, dialogue was commonly little more than an exchange of abstractions, creating confusion at both ends of the chain and giving ample opportunity for events in the South Atlantic to render metropolitan policy obsolete. Secondly, in such a limited political society, personal relationships – good or bad – impacted upon government. As will be seen below, the Treasury was often at odds with other departments over St Helena, and it is notable that this mirrored the wider situation within Whitehall at that time. Relations between the Colonial Office and Treasury during the mid-century have been described as ‘deplorable’, stemming in part from the incompatible characters of Stephen and Trevelyan.56 Considerable bad feeling also arose out of the Treasury-led agenda for the reform of financial and administrative practices within the civil service. Enquiries into several government departments took place between 1848 and 1853, including the Colonial Office in 1848 and the Foreign Office in 1850; there is also a suggestion that the Admiralty and dockyards were investigated in 1848–49.57 Trevelyan’s 54 Jean Sutton, Lords of the East: The East India Company and its Ships (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1981), Chapter 8; St Helena Blue Book for 1873, CO 252/38, p. 187. Only with the advent of steamships did voyage times improve, such that by 1875 mail packets were travelling between Jamestown and Southampton in 21 days. See Melliss, St Helena, p. 36. 55 Middlemore to Lord Glenely, 26 February 1838. Contained within St Helena Original Correspondence, CO 247/68 (1847). 56 Pugh, ‘Colonial Office’, p. 726–27. A particular criticism of the Treasury by Stephen related to the lengthy delays in obtaining responses from Trevelyan. See Cell, British Colonial Administration, p. 12. 57 On the enquiries of 1849–53 see Hart, Charles Trevelyan, pp. 103–06. For detailed analysis of the Northcote/Trevelyan report see Edward Hughes, ‘Sir Charles Trevelyan and Civil Service Reform’, English Historical Review 64 (1949), pp. 53–67. On subsequent •

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Distant Freedom overarching ambition to establish the Treasury as a supervising office over the government civil service as a whole led to significant interdepartmental tensions and soured personal relationships, the long-running dispute with Foreign Office undersecretary Henry Addington being a case in point. The day-to-day dealings between the various departments in respect of St Helena therefore need to be read against this backdrop. Finally, for a historian examining cause and effect, the personal nature of government offers the opportunity to link decisions and consequences to a comparatively small group of people. The myth of the omniscient civil servant has, quite rightly, been dispelled by modern scholarship. The role of James Stephen – once asserted by Henry Taylor to have ‘virtually governed the British Empire’ – is now accepted to have been exaggerated, for example. While Stephen undoubtedly gave direction and consistency to colonial policy, such a statement overestimates his influence on the Secretary of State, and ignores the freedom extended to colonial governors and the diffusion of power to local legislatures.58 Similarly, at the Treasury, the personal views of the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the First Lord carried great weight, and revisionist historians argue that Trevelyan’s influence has been overstated.59 But, while the influence of personal government on subjects of importance may have been eroding by the mid-nineteenth century this did not necessarily apply to lesser matters. Although colonial secretaries had to submit their more important plans to the Cabinet – and, in many cases, to Parliament – other issues continued to be dealt with internally. St Helena’s African Establishment would seem to fit this latter category. As has been seen, it attracted little external scrutiny and at any one time its governance was directed by a clique that commonly numbered no more than a dozen people in London, together with St Helena’s governor and the senior officers of the West Africa Squadron.

A departmental tussle The creation of St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court was an entirely deliberate measure that arose out of the Slave Trade (Portugal) Act, but it was one whose outcomes were not foreseen. All departments of the British government appear to have been taken by surprise by the Navy’s dispatch of laden prizes to St Helena, and indeed it was not until May 1841 that a letter reforms see Maurice Wright, Treasury Control of the Civil Service 1854–1874 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969); Edward Hughes, ‘Civil Service Reform 1853–55’, Public Administration 32 (1954), pp. 17–51. 58 Taft Manning, ‘British Empire’, pp. 88–89; Hall, Colonial Office, p. 113. 59 Haines, Charles Trevelyan, p. 554. •

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London and Jamestown from Governor Middlemore made them aware of the issue.60 The receipt of this correspondence, which drew attention to the number of recaptives building up on the island, the expenses being incurred for their care and the need for their disposal, marked the starting point of interdepartmental debate in London. The Admiralty, for reasons addressed in more detail in the following chapter, was strongly in favour of the continued use of St Helena as a reception depot. The Foreign Office, responsible for the prosecution of Britain’s anti-slavery campaign, did not engage on the matter initially, only becoming involved when the existence of St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment came under threat. Over the longer term it allied itself with the Admiralty, arguing in favour of St Helena’s use, based on its tactical advantages to the Navy and the humaneness of the shorter voyages it afforded from the African coast. The Colonial Office had responsibility for the administration of St Helena and, as the conduit for communication between London and the island’s governor, facilitated the interdepartmental debate. However, it was neither responsible for suppression of the slave trade nor for funding that campaign, and as such was largely prepared to leave the argument to others. Its stance is encapsulated by comments made in an internal memorandum of 1854, which observed that: The Treasury and Foreign Office have more to do with it than we have. The Admiralty is the department which ought to remonstrate against any inconvenience to be produced at sea, and I suppose that our proper share in the business is confined to the treatment of the Africans onshore in the colonies …61

Unlike the other protagonists in the debate, the Colonial Office’s stance altered over time. From 1842 to 1845, when Stanley’s tenure as Secretary of State coincided with the governorship of Trelawney on St Helena, the department was in favour of closing the Establishment, but after Stanley’s replacement by Gladstone (1845–46) and Earl Grey (1846–52), sympathies swung in the opposite direction and would remain fixed thereafter.62 60 Middlemore to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 18 February 1841, CO247/55. 61 CO247/84, 5334 St Helena. See CO247/73, 1583 St Helena for earlier comments to the same effect (Thomas Elliot, 22 July 1849). 62 Gladstone is generally perceived to have held anti-slavery views, though this is qualified by Roland Quinault in ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, The Historical Journal 52.2 (2009), pp. 363–83. Earl Grey had strong anti-slavery leanings, having resigned as Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in 1834 because emancipation was to be gradual rather than immediate. •

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Distant Freedom The Treasury’s position was the polar opposite of that of the Admiralty and Foreign Office. As early as October 1840, it had anticipated that costs would be incurred at the new Vice-Admiralty courts for the maintenance of liberated Africans. In a circular letter to Commissioners of Customs at potential places of reception, it stressed that where financial contingencies were not in place at a colonial level, the landing of captured Africans should be prevented ‘as far as may be practicable’. And, if slaves had to be landed, the Collector of Customs was instructed to take immediate measures to remove them from government care, either through local employment or by arranging their emigration.63 On receipt of Middlemore’s letter, Trevelyan agreed to meet the expenses already incurred, but in a letter to James Stephen written in December 1841 he set out the position that the Treasury would hold, without change, through to the final closure of St Helena’s African Establishment nearly 30 years later: Two thousand Negroes have been landed at St Helena from vessels condemned in the Vice Admiralty Court under Lord Palmerston’s Act and we are now paying for them at the rate of £30,000 a year and are likely to have more than this to pay before measures can be taken to set it right. This is ruinous to the Government and very bad for the Negroes themselves; it would be difficult to find a more unsuitable place than St Helena for sending captured Negroes.64

Expense, therefore, lay at the heart of the interdepartmental debate. For a naval commander in possession of a slave-laden prize, the need was simple: to dispatch it to the closest accessible landfall. The long-term consequences of this action were neither his nor the Admiralty’s concern. Instead, the financial responsibility fell to the Treasury, which had to pay to equip the depots, maintain the recaptives and move them on from St Helena. These priorities were essentially incompatible, and created a long-running conflict within metropolitan government that would never be resolved. At times, particularly in the early 1840s, the same tensions would also be played out in Jamestown harbour between St Helena’s governor and arriving naval personnel. It would be easy, given the Treasury’s opposition to the use of St Helena, to cast it as the villain of the piece. However, such an interpretation is too simplistic. The 1840s were a period of economic recession which had seen a slump in world trade and the Peel administration, having inherited a 63 Circular letter, Treasury Chambers to Commissioners of Customs, 10 October 1840. In PP 1842 (301) XXXI, Correspondence Relative to Emigration, p. 475. 64 Trevelyan to Stephen, 14 December 1841, CO 247/56, 2323 St Helena. •

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London and Jamestown huge budget deficit, imposed strong fiscal controls, including over colonial expenditure. Moreover, Peel’s own interests centred on domestic affairs and financial reform, and he had little empathy with the views of Exeter Hall.65 During his period in office, the spending restrictions on St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment did not occur in isolation. Other slaveryrelated budgets were also cut: spending on Sierra Leone was substantially reduced in 1843, while parliamentary contributions to the costs of stipendiary magistrates in the West Indies were scaled back, and the subsidy for negro education phased out.66 The Treasury’s general lack of sympathy towards anti-slavery may also be explained by the huge costs that it was already incurring. The year-on-year cost of maintaining the West Africa Squadron would exceed half a million pounds for much of the later 1840s, while Sierra Leone’s Liberated African Department carried a basic annual cost of £14,000, a figure that ignored numerous one-off expenses.67 Much of this was rightly deemed money wasted as Freetown was a byword for financial corruption and waste. Meanwhile, by 1842 it had also become apparent that the Niger Expedition – financed by the taxpayer to the tune of £79,143 – had been a total failure.68 All such expenditure paled in comparison to the £20 million that was allocated to the West Indian planters under the terms of the Slavery Abolition Act.69 Against such a background, the Treasury’s objection to a significant new expense was understandable. But how costly was St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment? Was it truly ruinous, as Trevelyan claimed? The financial returns from its depots give a clear indication that this was not the case. The expenses incurred were initially very modest, totalling just £535 in 1840, though they escalated quickly thereafter. During the third financial quarter of 1841, to the end of September, expenditure ran to £6,720, and 65 Of the numerous studies that illustrate this point, see Eric Evans, Sir Robert Peel: Statesmanship, power and party (London: Routledge, 1991). 66 Fyfe, Sierra Leone, p. 229; Morrell, British colonial policy, p. 31. The decision to phase out the funding for West Indian education had in fact begun in 1840 under the Whig administration. 67 Fyfe gives a figure of £12,000 for 1842–43, during which period there were between 451 and 1,383 recaptives at Freetown. See Sierra Leone, 229. 68 Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: The Antislavery Expedition to the Niger 1841–1842 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). 69 On the cost of maintaining the West Africa Squadron see David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 97; Huzzey, Freedom Burning, pp. 42–44 and Fig. 5. The cost of Sierra Leone is given by Green, British Slave Emancipation, p. 269. On the politics and finance of compensation see Nicholas Draper, The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and the End of Slavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). •

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Distant Freedom an estimated £10,900 for the following three months. Trevelyan’s letter to James Stephen would have been written with this information to hand, and on that basis his annual figure of £30,000 was quite accurate – if not a little conservative. In actuality, however, expenditure on the Establishment never approached that level. The returns show that it totalled £15,018 during 1841–42 and was considerably lower in subsequent years, falling as low as £1,559 in 1846–47. Greater expenses were incurred at the end of the 1840s as recaptives were received in large numbers (£12,675 and £8,639 in 1848–49 and 1849–50, respectively), and were again high in the late 1850s and early 1860s. The outlay of £15,195 for 1862–63 represents a peak of spending. Allowing for small gaps in the data set, the total expenditure between 1840 and 1868 was £139,352.70 These figures are somewhat deceptive, since they only relate to the direct running costs of the depots and the maintenance of the liberated Africans within them. Over the years, the Treasury would have to meet numerous additional expenses, many of them considerable, the chartering and provisioning of emigrant ships being a case in point. Myriad other costs were also incurred at the local level, from ‘head money’ payable to the Collector of Customs and rewards to St Helenians for recapturing Africans who had escaped from the depots, to the subsistence costs of stranded slave ship sailors. The island’s Liberated African Establishment was, therefore, an unwelcome addition to the already sizeable bill for slave trade suppression. On the other hand, Treasury claims that its expenses were ‘ruinous’ were entirely false. Its position was, in any case, either naive or disingenuous, since recaptive slaves taken from West and Central Africa had to be sent somewhere. On several occasions, cheaper alternatives would be posited, including the idea of sending slave-laden prizes directly to the Cape or the West Indies. Both destinations offered prospects for long-term settlement of recaptives, and therefore had the potential to cut out the expense of interim transit stations.71 Neither option was particularly viable, however, because both entailed far longer voyages from the point of capture. That they were 70 The financial returns up to March 1841 are only found in CSL 9. The AO 19 series contains annual returns for the island’s expenditure as a whole for 1841–42, 1842–43 and 1843–44, including the Liberated African Establishment under the heading ‘Miscellaneous’. AO 19 also contains a near-complete run of quarterly returns for the Establishment from 1 April 1844, with expenditure usually listed under the headings ‘Provisions’, ‘Stores’, ‘Fuel and Light’, ‘Medicines’ and ‘Salaries and Allowances’. These data are complemented by less formal discussion of expenses in both the CO 247 and CSL series. The returns end in March 1868. 71 See for example ‘Extracts of a Report of Mr Rothery to the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Treasury, dated the 2nd February 1849’, CO 247/73, 1583 St Helena. On this occasion, as on others, the Colonial Office did not dismiss the possibility of sending •

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London and Jamestown suggested at all betrays either a failure to grasp practical realities, or the deliberate placing of economy above humanity. In the event, Cape Town was not used after the mid-1840s for Atlantic captures, while the Caribbean Vice-Admiralty courts were also virtually redundant. Instead, given the locations available to the British, reality dictated that the vast majority of recaptives had to go either to Sierra Leone or to St Helena.

Centre and periphery In the mid-nineteenth century, many parts of the British Empire agitated for and received ‘responsible government’, whereby the executive took advice from ministers, who in turn had the confidence of an elected legislature. Such developments passed by St Helena entirely, and after the transition to direct rule in 1834 its governance remained firmly rooted in the CrownColony model. On St Helena the Governor was the paramount political and social figure. Appointed by the Colonial Office, he exercised all of the constitutional functions of the Crown, being the effective head of state and the representative of the monarchy. Local patronage was also in his hands. To some degree, the Governor ruled by consensus, being obliged to seek advice from an executive council of two or three senior officials, but this was only a minor check to his authority. In practice, on this small and relatively impoverished island, he did not have to contend with any wealthy individuals or powerful interest groups, with the consequence that direct opposition to his rule was inadvisable and rare.72 If one takes the mid-nineteenth-century publications about St Helena at face value, the quality of island governors after the assumption of Crown rule was poor. One author described them as ‘old Major Generals, worn out Colonels, and pensioned Admirals’ who ‘knew nothing of, or were wholly indifferent to, the requirements of the place and its Inhabitants’.73 Much of this caustic assessment is incorrect, deriving from a false connection between the advent of Crown rule and the island’s economic decline. While most of the early Crown governors did indeed hold military rank, many were on the retired list and had served as civil officials for the Colonial or Foreign prizes to the West Indies out of hand, but observed that humane opportunities to do so would be rare. 72 This system had served the colony since the seventeenth century and would continue to do so until an elected Legislative Council was put in place under the terms of the 1988 St Helena Constitution. 73 Grant, Benjamin, A Few Notes on St. Helena, and descriptive guide (St Helena: B. Grant, 1883). •

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Distant Freedom Office. Each had spent considerable time in the colonies. Before taking up St Helena’s governorship, for example, Middlemore had previously served five years in the West Indies, during which time he had travelled widely and instituted reforms relating to both the military and civil populations. Thomas Gore Brown (1851–54) had been aide-de-camp to the High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands before serving with distinction in the First AngloAfghan War. Edward Hay Drummond-Hay (1856–63) spent seven years in the West India Regiment, was president of the British Virgin Isles, and between 1850 and 1855 was Governor of St Kitts. Charles Patey (1870–73) had been administrator (a position analogous to governor) first of Lagos and later of Gambia. As a group, therefore, St Helena’s governors can reasonably be argued to have been experienced and competent administrators – an assertion supported by the fact that the Colonial Office allowed nearly all of them lengthy tenures on the island. In the context of slavery, those who had served in Africa or the West Indies were already well versed in the complexities of abolition by the time they assumed the government of St Helena. Patey became embroiled with this issue in Lagos and Gambia, but most notable in this respect is Admiral Sir Charles Elliott (1863–69). His naval career spanned the East Indies and Jamaica stations and, in the early 1820s, the West Africa anti-slavery patrol. After his retirement from the Navy, Elliott took the position of Protector of Slaves in British Guiana from 1830 to 1833. As such he became the advocate for the rights of over 20,000 slaves in the face of a hostile planter society. On his recall to England, he advised the Whig government during the preparation of the Slavery Abolition Act, before again serving abroad in China where, as plenipotentiary, he played a central role in the Opium Wars. His subsequent career included the posts of chargé d’affaires in Texas (1842–46) and Governor of Bermuda and Trinidad (1854–56).74 In considering how St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment was governed, the relationship between London and Jamestown is key. In general matters of colonial rule, the long-held consensus is that Britain was central but not dominant. A governor was answerable for his actions to the British monarch, which in practice meant the Secretary of State for the Colonies, but like many other distant administrators, he was ‘the man on the spot’, operating at a great remove from his political master. The situation required a ‘policy of trust’, with a dividing line between principle, set out by London, and detail, dealt with by the Governor. The boundary between principle and detail was, of course, blurred, leading to regular tensions between metropole and periphery. Sheer distance also imposed problems, 74 Clagette Blake, Charles Elliott: A Servant of Britain Overseas (London: CleaverHume Press, 1960). •

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London and Jamestown as imperfect knowledge or changed circumstances made London’s policy inapplicable on the ground. Governors and their counterparts – particularly those with influential connections – were also not above exceeding their mandate. In respect of St Helena, this view requires modification. The island was a small and fairly unimportant outpost, and its governors were men of modest diplomatic rank – often at the end of their careers. As such, most lacked metropolitan connections and were arguably in a poor position to influence policymaking in London. Examination of the primary records for St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment generally bears out this assertion, indicating that the island’s governors were mainly content to convey information and to accept instruction. True, they offered advice to London on matters of detail, and that advice was commonly adopted. But, on the other hand, they tended to accept London’s policies and avoided unilateral decisions that would contradict them. Generally, too, there is a strong correlation between the events as reported in intra-island correspondence and the information supplied to London. In other words, the governors rarely used information flow to frame metropolitan decisionmaking, as commonly happened elsewhere. Overall, therefore, the picture is of a group of men who fairly passively followed orders and were not an influential factor in shaping policy. Even where local ‘detail’ was concerned they had little latitude, simply because of the incredibly tight hold on finances maintained by the Treasury: without money, it was certainly the case that little change could be made to the running of the reception depots. None of this is to absolve St Helena’s governors entirely of responsibility. Later chapters of this book outline local problems that were never addressed, perhaps the most significant of these being the failure of apprenticeship, and these certainly lay within the Governor’s purview. The exception is Hamelin Trelawney (1842–46). Trelawney was actively opposed to the reception of freed slaves on the island and his antipathy towards the depots is obvious in his correspondence. He also manipulated and controlled the information transmitted to London – his account of the Arrow incident being a case in point. There seems little doubt that Trelawney did much to shape the lukewarm attitude of Stanley and the Colonial Office towards the use of St Helena as a receiving station during the early 1840s. The governors who came after Trelawney adopted a far more neutral stance. Their correspondence certainly outlines the difficulties posed by the liberated Africans, but lacks Trelawney’s antipathy towards the Rupert’s Valley depot. Advice was offered to London and instruction taken, but in terms of the greater questions – above all about the very existence of the depots – they were passive. Instead, and as described below, it would be the officers of the West Africa Squadron whose interjections were far more influential. •

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The evolution of naval orders The departmental debate about St Helena after 1840 centred on the fundamental question of whether or not the colony should serve as a receiving depot for laden slave prizes. Over the years there were many attendant questions to be addressed, but all were subservient to that principal theme. The outcomes of this debate would manifest themselves, above all, in the changing orders that were issued to the West Africa Squadron over the following three decades. After the passing of the 1839 Slave Trade (Portugal) Act, the instructions issued by the Foreign Office to commanders of the anti-slavery patrol were straightforward: All vessels detained shall be brought for adjudication before the Court of Vice Admiralty established in that British colony, which may most easily be reached from the place of detention.

And, where the nationhood of a prize was unknown: in such case the commanders of Her Majesty’s Cruisers are to send such vessels … for adjudication by some court of British Vice Admiralty under the provisions of the act of Parliament … and the slaves on board such vessels are to be landed in the colony or settlement to which the vessel may be sent and are there to be placed under the care of the governor or the officer in command.75

Such instructions were ideally suited to the needs of the Navy, enabling it to pursue slave traders along the entire African coast and giving it latitude to send prizes to the most convenient destination. Because of the great distance between London and Africa, it took a considerable period before these orders actually reached the warships of the patrol, but by the first months of 1841 the Navy’s preference for St Helena had become abundantly clear. Treasury pressure led to a subtle alteration of naval instructions in December 1841, the Admiralty stipulating that prizes were not to be sent to St Helena unless it was absolutely necessary; instead, they were to be directed to Sierra Leone, the Cape or the West Indian colonies.76 75 This instruction is preserved in Palmerston to the Lords of the Admiralty, 14 September 1839, St Helena Vice-Admiralty Court Book 1839–49, pp. 3–4. It was conveyed to the colonies by a circular letter. For the copy sent to St Helena see Lord John Russell to Middlemore, 23 September 1839, CO 247/51. 76 The issue of orders to the Admiralty at this date is implied, though not explicitly stated, in the précis of events preceding the arrival of HMS Thunderbolt at the island in 1844. See CO 247/61 511 St Helena. •

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London and Jamestown These orders had an appreciable effect, albeit again one that was not immediate. Between January and May 1842, a series of slave-laden prizes were dispatched to St Helena carrying a total of 2,500 people, but from June the number of recaptives received on the island fell dramatically. Although no prizes were turned away from St Helena during this period, there were nevertheless significant tensions in Jamestown harbour. Prize commanders were forced to justify their arrival to Governor Trelawney, explaining why theirs represented an ‘emergency’ case that could not have gone elsewhere. On one occasion, for example, Frederick Sturdee, Ship’s Master of the Waterwitch, wrote to the Governor in the following terms: I have the honour to acquaint you of the arrival in this port of a brigantine captured by Her Majesty’s brig Waterwitch on 3rd April last having on board 390 slaves, the remainder of which are in a dreadful, sickly, emaciated state, owing to the stinking water on board and the vessel being so small. The slaves have been constantly wet from the strong winds on the passage across from the coast of Africa, having had 41 deaths already. I therefore hope that it will please your Excellency to cause the remainder to be landed as soon as possible, for it will greatly relieve the sufferings of the poor creatures and prevent greater mortality. Myself and the prize crew, ten in number, are also suffering from the effects of the water, which is so bad we can scarcely put our noses to it.77

During 1843, the Treasury achieved a complete reversal of policy, naval orders being changed such that the advice to avoid St Helena became an absolute imperative. This was achieved with the support of the Colonial Office in concert with Governor Trelawney – a rare instance of St Helena exercising influence on the decision-making process. These instructions were much to the distaste of the patrol’s commanders. In later evidence to Parliament, Henry Matson, commander of HMS Waterwitch, stated that the order was ‘very prejudicial’ and its application ‘almost an impossibility’.78 It was nevertheless under these circumstances that, in October 1843, the prize to HMS Arrow was turned away from St Helena, with the consequent loss of life already mentioned. This situation prevailed only briefly, due to the outcomes of a parliamentary committee which, since 1842, had quite independently been formulating new instructions for the West Africa Squadron. The committee came from an extremely strong anti-slavery standpoint: appointed by Lord Aberdeen, it was chaired by the veteran abolitionist Stephen Lushington and among its members were men such as James Bandinel and Joseph Denman, the latter 77 Sturdee to Trelawney, 25 April 1843, CO247/59. 78 PP 1847–48 (272) XXII, question 1727. •

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Distant Freedom on half pay pending the outcome of a court case arising from his destruction of the slave barracoons at Gallinas. The committee’s instructions, intended to give clearer guidelines to the officers of the anti-slavery patrol, were published in mid-1844. They included a clause that directly contradicted the orders of the previous year: prize vessels seized under the 1807 and 1839 Acts, it stated, were to be taken to the ‘nearest and most convenient’ Vice-Admiralty court for adjudication.79 Events in the South Atlantic also played a part in reversing the situation. When news of the mortality aboard HMS Arrow’s prize reached London from Cape Town, the Foreign Office, which previously had been passive on the subject of St Helena, began to exert its authority.80 In addition to the parliamentary questions that were tabled on this subject, Foreign Secretary Lord Aberdeen also made private representations to Trevelyan, adverting to the misery and loss of life that would occur if the Navy had no discretion to send prizes to the island in cases of emergency.81 The Foreign Office was the pre-eminent office of state within metropolitan government, and as such easily overcame Treasury objections. Thus, when Governor Trelawney wrote to the Colonial Office, complaining in the strongest terms about HMS Thunderbolt’s delivery of a laden prize into Jamestown, he received short shrift. In a letter dated July 1844 he was informed that the actions of the Thunderbolt’s commander had been endorsed, and of new naval orders which stated that: Although her Majesty’s government continue to consider it most desirable that the commanders of Her Majesty’s ships should abstain as far as possible from carrying captured vessels or captured slaves to St Helena, cases of real emergency may occur in which the unconditional refusal to permit the temporary reception and landing of Africans at that island might give rise to very great hardship and much loss of life.82

The passing the Aberdeen Act in 1845 led to a further strengthening of this directive. In an echo of the original Foreign Office instructions of 1839, and consistent with the Lushington committee instructions, Downing Street now informed colonial administrators that: 79 Instructions for the guidance of Her Majesty’s naval officers employed in the suppression of the Slave Trade, Section 3, paragraph 7. The guidelines were laid before the House of Lords by Aberdeen on 25 July 1844, receiving universal endorsement: Hansard, 3rd ser., HL Deb lxxvi, 1372–86. 80 Frere and Surtees to Aberdeen, 20 December 1843, CO 247/62. Copy forwarded to the Foreign Office 13 April 1844. 81 Letter dated 27 May 1844; paraphrased in CO 247/61. 82 Stanley to Trelawney, 2 July 1844, CO 247/61. •

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London and Jamestown Their Lordships [of the Admiralty] have been directed to instruct the commanders of Her Majesty’s cruisers to carry any vessel so captured before the Court of Vice-Admiralty which may most easily be reached from the place of capture, or to the colony where the vessel may most safely lie during the adjudication.83

With this instruction, the situation vis-à-vis St Helena had come full circle. Where less than two years previously Jamestown had been a prohibited destination for naval prizes, now its use was sanctioned under all circumstances. Yet, less than nine months later, the situation changed yet again. The Treasury maintained its ‘strong objection’ to the landing of captured Africans at the island but, recognising that the situation could not be completely reversed, sought a return to the middle ground that had existed from 1841 to 1843, whereby St Helena would only be used in circumstances of emergency. Perhaps surprisingly, the Admiralty agreed to this request, issuing revised orders to that effect in March 1846.84 There was inevitable confusion in the South Atlantic. The commanders of the West Africa Squadron were presented with ever-shifting, contradictory orders emanating from London. These variously permitted them to utilise St Helena, instructed them to avoid it entirely or allowed them discretion in cases of emergency – the latter of course based on their own subjective judgement. Faced with the humanitarian crisis engendered by a laden slave ship, several commanders simply ignored their orders. One such was Lieutenant Thomas Birch, commander of HMS Waterwitch between 1845 and 1847. In evidence to the Commons select committee he described how Africans aboard one prize were in such a dreadful state that, in contravention of the prevailing instructions, he dispatched them to Jamestown. He was reprimanded for this course of action and when a similar situation arose he was forced to send his prize on a 19-day voyage to Sierra Leone when St Helena could have been reached in four. Asked if great mortality had attended this decision, Birch confirmed that it had.85 On St Helena, expectations veered from one extreme to the other. At the start of 1844, Trelawney had closed both depots and disbanded their staff, only to be caught out a few months later by London’s volte-face on the subject. Similarly, the Admiralty’s revised orders of March 1846 led Acting Governor George Fraser to anticipate the closure of Rupert’s Valley and discharge over half of the Establishment’s staff, leaving only a surgeon, a clerk, a dispenser of medicines, a superintendent 83 Circular letter, Downing Street, 20 August 1845, CO 247/64. See also in the same folio, Aberdeen to Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, 5 August 1845. 84 Trevelyan to Stephen, 21 March 1846, CO247/67, 361 St Helena; Admiralty to Trevelyan, 24 March 1846, CO 247/67. 85 PP 1847–48 (272) XXII, questions 2314–26. •

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Distant Freedom and an overseer. However, only a year later, Fraser’s successor Patrick Ross appears to have been left with the impression that all captured slave vessels were to be brought to St Helena.86 Finally, in October 1847, with prizes being taken in ever-greater numbers below the equator, events in the South Atlantic took matters completely out of London’s control. Citing the great mortality aboard a particular prize sent to Freetown, alongside the general vulnerability of prize crews during the lengthy transit to Sierra Leone, Commodore Hotham of the West Africa Squadron issued instructions to his commanders that: When a full slaver is captured to the southward of the line [the equator] the commanding officer will duly consider whether the probability of a speedy passage is in favour of Sierra Leone or Saint Helena and he will send the detained vessel to which ever port can be most speedily reached.87

Hotham is a widely criticised figure, a man who by his own admission was ill informed about his command and who was at odds with his subordinates over the tactics of blockade.88 Nevertheless, his decision to direct prizes to St Helena was highly significant, being greatly to the benefit of both the West Africa Squadron and the slaves it intercepted. When news of Hotham’s orders reached London, familiar positions were adopted: the Admiralty and Foreign Office endorsed the new instruction, while the Treasury not only opposed the measure but complained that it had not been consulted. The Colonial Office, though agreeing that the Treasury had indeed ‘been passed by rather irregularly’, aligned itself with the Foreign Office, Earl Grey commenting that: … wherever treaties allow, no mere consideration of expense or inconvenience should lead us to commit the inhumanity, both to the crew and the slaves, of requiring them to beat up for several weeks to Sierra Leone, when they could in a much shorter time reach the healthy Island of St Helena, making their passage through a daily improving climate.89 86 Fraser to Gladstone, 29 June 1846, CO 247/66 29 1193 St Helena. Ross’s misconception is pointed out in a letter on behalf of Earl Grey: CO 247/68 1179 St Helena, 9 July 1847. 87 Circular memorandum from Hotham to commanding officers of the West African Squadron, 4 October 1847, CO 247/68 512 St Helena. 88 The period of Hotham’s command is discussed by Lloyd (The Navy and the Slave Trade, pp. 119–22) and Rees (Sweet Water and Bitter, pp. 261–65). 89 The communication between the Foreign and Colonial Offices is found in CO 247/71, 36 St Helena. The internal discussion within the Colonial Office is preserved in •

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London and Jamestown The Colonial Office nevertheless attempted to mediate, proposing a conference between the main protagonists on the basis that the matter was unlikely to be resolved by written discussion. However, this meeting was postponed pending the findings of the Hutt committee which, as seen above, reached no conclusion on the subject of St Helena. As a consequence, Hotham’s orders remained in place, though, as Thomas Elliot would later observe, the matter remained a ‘controverted point’ between the various departments to the end of the decade.90 At the Colonial Office, Grey maintained his position on the subject, commenting in 1849 that the justification for sending slaves to St Helena instead of Sierra Leone was ‘so strong that these instructions ought not to be revoked’, though adding that he would not object to slavers being sent directly to the West Indies for condemnation in the rare instances when this might be practical.91 On St Helena, the outcome of the new orders was dramatic. After the nadir of 1844, when just 72 slaves had been liberated on the island, during 1848, 1849 and 1850 its Vice-Admiralty freed a total of 8,710 recaptives. On the ground, this new influx would overwhelm the meagre resources of the Rupert’s Valley depot. The falling off of slave ship captures following the collapse of the Brazilian trade enabled the Treasury to lobby once again for the closure of the Rupert’s Valley depot in 1854 – this time successfully. The Colonial Office stood aside, observing that neither the Foreign Office nor the Admiralty had seen fit to contest the matter of an apparently redundant depot. Colonial Secretary George Grey nevertheless expressed concern about the potential loss of life aboard captured slavers, suggesting to the Treasury that naval officers be given latitude to send prizes to St Helena in cases of emergency. The reply, returned to the Colonial Office the very same day, tersely informed Grey that the St Helena depot was already broken up and orders issued for all vessels with slaves to be conveyed either to Sierra Leone, Luanda or Havana.92 The cycle repeated itself for the last time three years later, in late 1857, when HMS Alecto brought 454 slaves to the island, triggering the reopening of the Rupert’s Valley depot. The Treasury was quick to oppose this revival, at one point trying to correct the Governor’s ‘erroneous impression’ that St Helena was once more to become a receiving station for liberated Africans. the same folio, a memorandum by Thomas Elliott entitled ‘Taking Prizes to St Helena instead of Sierra Leone’ being annotated by both Merivale and Earl Grey. 90 CO 247/73, 1583 St Helena (22 July 1849). 91 Earl Grey, comment appended to a memorandum by Thomas Elliott, 22 July 1849, CO 247/73. 92 The correspondence on this matter is contained in CO 247/84, 5334 St Helena. •

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Distant Freedom Again the Foreign Office intervened, overruling the Treasury and reinstating the permission to take prizes there. This proved to be the last word on the matter. The instruction prevailed until the mid-1860s, and only with the demise of the Cuban slave trade did the Treasury achieve the closure of a depot which, by 1867, had become entirely obsolete.

A permanent impermanence As was once observed about St Helena within the Colonial Office, ‘The truth is that the repression of the Slave Trade is one of the subjects in which inevitable inconvenience arises from the number of coordinate departments concerned’.93 There is little arguing with this appraisal. Over nearly 30 years the gulf between the principal parties of government was never bridged, and the subject was only laid to rest when the suppression of the slave trade in the Atlantic had ceased to be relevant. Successive political interventions created a scenario that was continually in flux and, as so often happens in situations where a distant government vacillates or seeks to impose inapplicable policy, the ‘men on the spot’ came to the fore. In this case it was not St Helena’s governors but the officers of the West Africa Squadron whose decisive interventions shaped the whole political dynamic. The net result was to make St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment a permanent impermanence: nearly always operational, but perennially on the brink of closure. Its entire documentary record, from 1840 through to its final breaking up, is characterised by a fundamental uncertainty about its future. The role of the Treasury is particularly important here. As a relatively junior, non-Cabinet department, its overall ambition to shut the Rupert’s Valley depot was thwarted by the Foreign Office, and it was only able to take the lead on policy when that more powerful office stood aside. However, its refusal to accept defeat was the key factor in generating irresolute and oscillating policy. On a day-to-day basis, the Treasury’s influence was also profound. Colonial expenditure fell firmly within its remit and, conversely, was of little interest to the Foreign Office. In keeping with Charles Trevelyan’s financial management as a whole, there was intensive scrutiny of expenses on St Helena, an example of which can be seen in a letter of 1845, where Governor Trelawney wrote to apologise for an accounting error that had resulted in an overpayment of 13 shillings to the island’s Emigration Agent.94 Through fiscal control, therefore, the Treasury was able to circumscribe the operation of St Helena’s depots, determining their physical form, 93 Undated memorandum from 1854, Thomas Elliot, CO 247/84 5334 St Helena. 94 Trelawney to Stanley, 5 November 1845, CO 247/64. •

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London and Jamestown staffing levels and all matters of supply and provisioning. Although the Establishment remained open, it did so under very constrained circumstances. The most obvious examples of cost-cutting can be found in the vetoing of schemes for new buildings, which ensured that the liberated Africans were received into depots that were simply too small for their numbers, and housed in structures that were never fit for purpose and which became increasingly dilapidated as the years went by. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, there are also numerous instances where lesser economies were imposed: staffing was kept to a minimum; the stockpiling of medicines was prohibited; and the food issued to the recaptives included little or no fresh produce. The suppression of the slave trade was undoubtedly expensive and a burden to an overstretched Exchequer, but the reality is that these day-to-day economies on St Helena saved little money. On the other hand, the decision to impose them had direct and significant impacts upon the life chances of the liberated Africans, and it is within this context that subsequent chapters will consider the experiences of those received into St Helena’s depots.

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Figure 7: Atlantic shipping routes, ocean currents and trade winds.

chapter three

Sailortown Sailortown

In August 1866, on board his flagship Bristol, Geoffrey Phipps Hornby, Commodore of the West Africa Squadron, composed a lengthy communiqué to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty. Entitled Comparative advantages of St Helena and Ascension as places for a principal naval depot on the West Coast of Africa Station, it extolled the virtues of the former of these two islands as a military base and hospital, and made the case for its future use.1 With hindsight, it was a wasted effort. The Cuban slave trade was all but extinct and only two more slave ships would ever be adjudicated at St Helena, the last in 1868. Within four years, the West Africa Squadron – its work accomplished – would be subsumed into the Cape Station and proposals for St Helena to assume a wider strategic role were quietly dropped. Phipps Hornby’s letter nevertheless holds considerable interest, as it revisited arguments that had been made time and again over the past quarter century. The Admiralty had long maintained that St Helena was an indispensable asset, and persisted in this opinion even in the dying years of the Atlantic slave trade and in the era of the steam warship.2 1 Phipps Hornby to Admiralty, 6 August 1866, ADM 123/74 No. 196. 2 The West Africa Squadron is discussed by several twentieth-century authors. Christopher Lloyd’s The Navy and the Slave Trade (1949) remains the classic account, while W.E.F. Ward’s The Royal Navy and the Slavers (1969) is a useful companion. These fit within a broader research on British sea power described by Christopher Bartlett, Great Britain and Sea Power 1815–1853 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963). More recent studies add little that is new, for example Bernard Edwards, Royal Navy versus the slave traders: Enforcing abolition at sea 1808–1898 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Maritime, 2007); Rees, Sweet water and bitter. For valuable work on the United States’ Africa Squadron and Anglo-American political relations in the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic, see Donald Canney, Africa Squadron: The U.S. Navy and the slave trade, 1842–1861 (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006); Mark Hunter, Policing the seas: Anglo-American relations •

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Anti-slavery in the South Atlantic St Helena’s involvement in the suppression of the slave trade ultimately hinged not on political considerations, but on its relationship with the natural circulation of winds and currents (Figure 7). The Atlantic comprises two systems, the first of which, to the north of the equator, operates in a clockwise direction. South of the equator, sailing is dictated by the Benguela Current, which flows northwards up the coast of Africa, where it joins the South Equatorial Current (heading towards the Caribbean) and the Brazil Current (which flows south around the coast of Brazil and Argentina). These currents combine with the prevailing south-east trade winds and westerlies to create a system in which the natural sailing routes follow an anti-clockwise direction. Further to the south are the Roaring Forties – strong westerly winds that circulate around the globe at latitudes of approximately 40 to 50 degrees south.3 This system provided the framework for navigation in the South Atlantic throughout the Age of Sail. The Portuguese explorers at the turn of the sixteenth century, such as Vasco da Gama and Pedro Álvares Cabral, pioneered routes into the Indian Ocean that utilised the Brazil Current; on their return voyages the trade winds drove them directly north-west across the South Atlantic to the Cape Verde Islands and the Azores. This became the standard route to India and the East for the Portuguese and other Europeans throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The same factors facilitated the ‘triangular’ slave trade of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, in which vessels followed an itinerary from Europe to Africa, Africa to the New World, and from there back to Europe. and the equatorial Atlantic, 1819–1865 (St. John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime Economic History Association, 2008). An edited volume by Robert Burroughs and Richard Huzzey has recently been published: British Suppression of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Policies, Practices and Representations of Naval Coercion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). For studies of some of the cultural aspects of the anti-slavery patrol see Robert Burroughs, ‘Eyes on the Prize: Journeys in Slave Ships Taken as Prizes by the Royal Navy’, Slavery and Abolition 31 (2010), pp. 99–115 and Mary Wills, Royal Navy sailors and the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. A wealth of primary material relating to the mid-Victorian Navy, including the West Africa Squadron, is offered by the websites http://www.pdavis.nl/Background.htm#WAS and http://www.pbenyon. plus.com/Naval.html. 3 For example Robert Laurie, The African Pilot (London: R. Laurie and J. Whittle, 1799) and modern texts on the same subject: UK Hydrographic Office, Africa pilot. Volume II, Comprising the west coast of Africa from Bakasi Peninsula to Cape Agulhas; islands in the Bight of Biafra; Ascension Island; Saint Helena Island; Tristan da Cunha Group and Gough Island (Taunton: UK Hydrographic Office, 2004). •

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Sailortown Following  abolition, only the Middle Passage remained, with voyages reduced to two-way journeys between Africa and the remaining markets of Cuba and Brazil. After 1808, the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery patrol relied heavily upon Sierra Leone, both as a base for resupply and as a place to deliver prizes for adjudication. Through to 1840 the colony received 67,910 liberated Africans, despite being manifestly unsuited to the role in many respects.4 In operational terms it was very poorly positioned, being far-separated from the patrol’s main cruising grounds. The Gulf of Guinea – the principal focus of the patrol through to the late 1830s – lay 1,200 to 1,800 km distant. Furthermore, all northward voyages from the equator (as far as Cape Palmas, on the southwestern tip of the continent at latitude four degrees north) were opposed by the prevailing ocean currents. As a consequence, warships and prizes heading to Freetown faced a lengthy voyage, and one whose duration was rendered uncertain by the capricious sailing conditions on the African coast. Winds here are light and variable, particularly around the equator where the doldrums are noted for calm periods when the winds disappear altogether, trapping sailing ships for days or weeks. More severe weather, in the form of squalls, thunderstorms and hurricanes, are also common.5 The reliance on Sierra Leone, therefore, greatly reduced the patrol’s efficiency, requiring cruisers to spend considerable periods away from the blockade. The long voyages of slave-laden prizes were also a matter of great concern. An 1827 commission found that prizes were seized at an average distance of 790 miles (1,250 km) from Sierra Leone, and that the average interval between capture and adjudication was 62 days (which admittedly included two to three weeks at anchor in Freetown). Two instances were cited in 4 See the Voyages database: http://slavevoyages.org/tast/database/search.faces?year From=1807&yearTo=1866&fate=110.111.120.121. Meyer-Heiselberg concluded that the overall number of recaptives released at Freetown was 94,329. See Notes from Liberated African Department in the Archives at Fourah Bay College Freetown, Sierra Leone (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1967), II, 55–61; Eltis and Richardson estimate the same figure to be 94,787 (Atlas, Map 189). 5 Modern technical publications continue to offer a clear picture of the practicalities of sailing in the region. Voyages of any distance between different parts of the West African coast by modern yachts take more circuitous – but in reality far quicker and less arduous – routes in the open ocean. A northward journey from the Cape to the Gulf of Guinea, for example, follows the south-east trade winds and will often take in St Helena and Ascension Island. Similarly, sailing southward to Cape Town from locations such as Congo and Angola would be an extremely slow affair, as it involves opposing the Benguela Current; instead, it is more practical to sail north-west into the open ocean, before circling south and east as if making the voyage from St Helena or England. See National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Sailing Directions, Southwest Coast of Africa (Springfield, VA: NGIA, 2012). •

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Distant Freedom which vessels took more than 200 days to arrive. Similarly, an 1830 select committee concluded that it took an average of over five weeks for a prize to reach Freetown, occasioning the death of between one-sixth and half of the slaves aboard and causing great suffering for those who survived.6 Thomas Fowell Buxton condemned the lengthy journey from Guinea to Freetown in his 1839 treatise The Slave Trade and its Remedy, drawing attention to examples such as the Segundia Rosalia, whose voyage to Freetown took 11 weeks and led to the deaths of 110 slaves out of a total contingent of 480.7 Modern analysis bear out these statistics, showing that the average transit to Sierra Leone was equivalent to the far longer Middle Passage, and had a comparable shipboard death rate: from 1821 to 1839, prize voyages from the Bight of Biafra to Freetown averaged 34 days and occasioned mortality of 17.9%.8 The passing of the 1839 Slave Trade (Portugal) Act exacerbated this situation. This legislation and the subsequent 1845 Aberdeen Act had the effect over time of extinguishing the traditional slave-trading entrepôts around the Bights, leading to a concentration of ports of embarkation in more southerly regions. Key points of blockade such as the Congo Delta lay 3,500 km or more from Freetown, separated by many weeks of arduous sailing. The log of the USS Constitution provides just one illustration of the difficulties of coastal sailing in this region, recording that in 1854 the warship took 13 days to travel the 60 nautical miles between Mayumba and Luanda: during this time, it anchored 31 times to prevent the current carrying it back over its own wake.9 As access to Sierra Leone became ever more difficult, so the mid-Atlantic landfalls offered by St Helena and Ascension Island became increasingly attractive. Their position in relation to prevailing winds and currents allowed both places to be reached quickly and reliably from any point on the West or Central African coast, such that warships could sail to either island and return to the coastal blockade within a matter of a few weeks. Officers drew attention to this fact in their evidence to the House of Commons enquiry 6 Peterson, Province of Freedom, pp. 182–83; PP 1830 (661) X, Report from the Select Committee on the Settlements of Sierra Leone and Fernando Po. The conclusions reached about mortality are summarised in Resolution 5 of this report. 7 Thomas Fowell Buxton, The Slave Trade and its Remedy (London: John Murray, 1839), pp. 175–84. In later evidence given to Parliament, Joseph Denman noted that Buxton had focused on particularly extreme examples, which to some extent undermined his overall conclusions. See PP 1847–48 (272) XXII, para. 331. 8 David Northrup, ‘African Mortality in the Suppression of the Slave Trade: The Case of the Bight of Biafra’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9.1 (1978), pp. 47–64; Eltis and Richardson, Atlas, Maps 123 and pp. 124, 180–81. 9 Canney, Africa Squadron, p. 169. •

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Sailortown into the West Africa Squadron, which is borne out by the log books of the warships themselves. In the modern day, the fast passage from the south-west African coast is demonstrated by the annual Governor’s Cup yacht race from Cape Town to St Helena: competitors usually take between eight and 14 days to complete the voyage, with the current record standing at 7 days and 20 hours.10 These advantages prevailed into the period when the sailing vessels of the anti-slavery patrol had been supplanted by hybrid warships combining steam propulsion with a traditional sailing rig.11 The introduction of steampowered vessels to the West Africa Squadron significantly changed its operations on the coast, negating the problems posed by capricious winds and adverse currents and allowing warships to enter estuaries, deltas and rivers in pursuit of their quarry. In terms of oceanic sailing, the change was less dramatic: with engines that were comparatively inefficient and with limited coal stores, the greater part of most voyages was still undertaken under sail. This is demonstrated by Phipps Hornby’s 1866 communiqué to the Admiralty, which included a quantification of average voyage lengths between the four headquarter points of the squadron on the African coast and St Helena and Ascension Island. Combining steam and sail, a voyage from Jellah Coffee (near Accra) to St Helena took 18 days, the return leg taking ten and a half. Return voyages between St Helena and Lagos, Luanda and Congo took 29, 18 and 22 days respectively.12 The journey times of ships taken as prizes by the West Africa Squadron were also significantly reduced by the use of St Helena. As seen in the preceding chapter, the Admiralty, Foreign Office and Colonial Office all drew attention to the humanitarian benefits of this shorter voyage, which also underpinned Commodore Hotham’s instructions of 1847 that directed prizes to Jamestown instead of Sierra Leone. Analysis of the island’s Vice-Admiralty court records bears out these assertions. This finds that slave-laden vessels took an average of 17 days to reach St Helena (including the day of capture and arrival), with minimum and maximum voyage lengths from the African coast of eight and 41 days respectively, the latter 10 On the history and results of the Governor’s Cup, see the St Helena Yacht Club’s website: http://sthelenayachtclub.weebly.com/gcyr-history.html. 11 On the development of the steam-powered Navy see Andrew Lambert, Battleships in transition: The creation of the steam battlefleet 1815–1860 (London: Conway Maritime Press, 1984). Specifications of individual ships are given by David Lyon and Rif Winfield in The sail and steam Navy list: All the ships of the Royal Navy, 1815–1889 (London: Chatham, 2004). 12 The same voyages to and from Ascension Island were broadly similar, though because of its northerly position it was seldom possible to reach Congo under sail, and never Luanda. See Phipps Hornby to Admiralty, 6 August 1866, ADM 123/74 No. 196. •

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Figure 8: Voyage durations of prize vessels between the point of capture and their arrival at St Helena. The heavy line on the box plot denotes the average voyage duration. The top and bottom lines represent the 25th and 75th percentiles. Dots represent statistical outliers.

figure being quite exceptional.13 Other prizes taken in the open ocean reached the island still faster. The contrast with the protracted voyages to Sierra Leone – even from the Guinea coast, let alone further south – needs no elaboration (Figure 8). From the Admiralty’s standpoint, St Helena had other advantages beyond its accessibility. Because of its natural resources and its traditional role as an ocean way station, food and fresh water were available in the quantities necessary to provision its warships.14 This became a matter of increasing importance after the mid-century as the small sailing vessels of the anti-slavery patrol gave way to larger, more densely manned steamships. Until this stage it had been possible, up to a point, to reprovision at sea by use of dedicated supply ships or to take on food and water at African coastal settlements. However, these options were rather less viable for bigger ships which, despite the flexibility offered by their steam engines, were more tied 13 Unladen prizes took considerably longer to reach the island. With no humanitarian considerations, these vessels could sail in convoy with their captors for days or weeks before parting company. The data reflect this lack of urgency, the voyages of empty prizes sent to St Helena averaging 25 days. Few reached St Helena in less than two weeks, while Levin Lank took 105 days to make its way to Jamestown. 14 See for example Admiralty to James Stephen, 21 October 1847, CO 247/69 2024 St Helena, which cited the ‘unfailing supply of water at St Helena and the abundance of wholesome vegetables that are raised there’, arguing that this rendered it a far more efficient place for refreshing the Africa Squadron than Ascension Island. •

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Sailortown to land bases than their sailing forebears had ever been. Phipps Hornby observed that his flagship Bristol, with its crew of 450 men, was in fact far too large for the station: amongst other drawbacks, its visits to the coast, he said, ‘created famine’.15 From the later 1840s, the Navy also drew on St Helena’s stocks of coal for its steam-powered vessels. A coal yard was present on Jamestown wharf by this date, the coal itself imported from England and sold for both naval and civilian use.16 Dedicated military coal was delivered to St Helena from about 1844, some of which was stored in prize hulks in Jamestown harbour. By 1847, 4,000 tons was being held on the wharf in a position safe from the surf – a lesson learned from the destruction of the coal yard by the Rollers in the previous year. Storage was problematic, both in terms of available space and because the coal had a tendency to spontaneously ignite in the heat of the sun. A long-term solution to all of these difficulties appears to have been mooted between 1845 and 1847, when the Admiralty proposed that a naval depot and coaling station be set up in Rupert’s Valley, with ships mooring against a pier built out into the bay. The idea foundered, partly on the issue of its expense, but partly also because of confusion in London as to whether St Helena would play any future role as a receiving depot for liberated Africans. The subject disappears from the correspondence in 1847 without any sign of a resolution.17 For all of St Helena’s other benefits, therefore, the island was never a naval base in a formal sense: visiting warships had to deal with an ad hoc system of supply that was never dedicated to its service, competing with commercial traffic for finite provisions.18 The island was, additionally, an ideal place for shore leave. Anti-slavery commissions commonly lasted three or four years and entailed a mission 15 Phipps Hornby to Admiralty, 15 November 1866, ADM 123/74. 16 On St Helena as a coaling station see Trevor Hearl, St Helena Britannica: Studies in South Atlantic island history, ed. Alexander Schulenburg (London: Society of Friends of St Helena, 2013), Chapter 29. 17 Commodore Jones to Trelawney, 27 June 1844 and 17 April 1845; CSL 22 Vol. 1, Nos 28 and 29; Ross to Earl Grey, 24 April 1847, CO 247/68, 1179 St Helena; Pennell to Officers of Ordinance, 18 November 1847, CSL 26 Vol. 1, No. 109. 18 The same factors led to the United States applying to use the island as a depot for its own Africa Squadron, its petition citing the ‘many facilities the island affords for shipping’, including its good anchorage and landing, extensive port facilities, permanent water supply and its hospital. See Consulate of the United States, St Helena, to Drummond Hay, 14 October 1857, CO 247/88 306 St Helena. As Canney points out, the United States Africa Squadron was severely hampered by having its supply depot at Cape Verde, 2,500 miles from the northernmost centres of the slave trade in the Bight of Biafra. Its effectiveness greatly increased in 1859, when the base was relocated to St Paul de Luanda, Angola. See Africa Squadron, p. 43. •

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Distant Freedom that, on a day-to-day basis, was arduous and unremitting. Even uneventful cruises were debilitating. Alexander Bryson noted that prize officers were particularly ‘worn out by excessive labour, broken rest, and exposure both by night and day upon the deck of a small vessel, probably crowded with slaves in a loathsome state of misery and disease’.19 And, as with all warships of the age, the sloops and brigs of the squadron were extremely crowded. A venue where crews could relax and recuperate was therefore essential, from the standpoint of both health and shipboard discipline.20 Commanders of the patrol had few good options on the African coast, its west and central parts all being deemed extremely unhealthy.21 Commanders sought to minimise their contact with the coast, using native Africans (mainly Kru) for shore operations as far as possible, since they were perceived to have a natural immunity to fever.22 Naval regulations also only allowed shore leave to officers and African crew, but these orders were constantly flouted, with predictably fatal consequences. Sierra Leone was undoubtedly a bad option. Malaria and yellow fever decimated visiting naval crews, and Freetown itself was detested.23 Scathing comments from squadron officers abound, describing a crude, sprawling and squalid settlement that was surrounded on all sides by swamp. One officer commented that ‘I never knew, nor heard mention of, so villainous, miserable or sickly abode’, while another called it ‘a pestiferous charnel house ... a detestable spot with no 19 Alexander Bryson, Report on the climate and principal diseases of the African station; compiled from documents in the office of the director-general of the Medical department, and from other sources (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1847), p. 9. 20 The United States Africa Squadron also utilised St Helena for shore leave. In 1861 it was officially designated by the Secretary of the Navy as the place for rest and recuperation. When Commodore Lavellette brought his ship Germantown there in 1851 his crew had not been ashore for nine months. See Canney, Africa Squadron, pp. 144 and 219. 21 Naval surgeon Alexander Bryson concluded that the entire coast was unhealthy. See his Report on the climate and principal diseases of the African station. 22 Robert Burroughs, ‘“The true sailors of Western Africa”: Kru seafaring identity in British travellers’ accounts of the 1830s and 1840s’, Journal of Maritime Research 11 (2009), pp. 51–67. 23 On the numerous discussions of mortality at Freetown see Peterson, Province of Freedom, pp. 146–48, which may be read alongside contemporary accounts such as Anna Maria Falconbridge, Two Voyages to Sierra Leone, during the years 1791–2–3 (London, 1794); F. Harrison Rankin, The White Man’s Grave; a visit to Sierra Leone, in 1834 (London: Richard Bentley, 1836). Lieutenant Birch of the West Africa Squadron was asked by the Hutt committee whether avoiding Sierra Leone would be beneficial for his crew. He replied that it would most decidedly be so, as all the men he ever lost, except one, died at Sierra Leone or from the effects of ‘Sierra Leone fever’: PP 1847–48 (272) XXII, question 2330. •

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Sailortown one good-quality to recommend it’.24 All of these factors led to the abortive attempt between 1827 and 1830 to relocate British anti-slavery operations to Fernando Po (modern Bioko), an experiment ended by disastrous mortality among the garrison and naval crews, occasioned by the malaria and yellow fever that are endemic to the island.25 Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the Atlantic, the danger of violence was as great as that of disease. All ports carried that risk, as landsmen preyed on sailors, whether to deprive them of money or possessions, or to ‘shanghai’ or kidnap them for service on another ship.26 In the period of abolition, South America was a particularly unwelcoming place for the Royal Navy. Lieutenant John Bailey, for example, described how in 1853 three of HMS Cormorant’s crew were thrown out of a window in Rio and killed. He wrote to his brother that ‘we are, therefore, close prisoners, and never think of going anywhere’.27 Any large continental port, such as Rio or Cape Town, also offered an opportunity for seamen to abscond. St Helena, on the other hand, had none of these risks. It was a fundamentally healthy place, free from malaria and yellow fever. Jamestown was, moreover, a well-appointed settlement that was well liked by naval officers. Lt Frederick Forbes of HMS Bonetta, for example, commented on Jamestown’s superior society, noting in turn that Freetown had ‘few ladies’. A visit to St Helena, he said, was ‘much longed for’ and each vessel of the patrol attempted to go there at least annually.28 It was also an ideal option for the lower decks’ shore leave, where the common sailor could be given his liberty without risk of him contracting tropical diseases or being lost through murder or desertion. Alternative South Atlantic landfalls were, for a variety of reasons, less viable. The tiny island of Tristan da Cunha could immediately be discounted. Rugged, barren and remote even by the standards of St Helena, it possessed good supplies of water but nothing else. Ascension Island was a more realistic prospect whose small naval depot usually held food and coal, but 24 Frederick Chamier, The Life of a Sailor. By a Captain in the Navy (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1833), p. 132; the second quote is drawn from Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, p. 15. 25 Robert Brown, ‘Fernando-Po and the Anti-Sierra-Leonean Campaign’, pp. 249–64. The evidence that led to the decision to establish a British base at Fernando Po is presented in PP 1830 (661) X. For a contemporary medical account of this episode see Bryson, Report on the climate and principal diseases of the African station, pp. 68–79. 26 As discussed by Stan Hugill, Sailortown (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967). 27 ‘An Adventure on the Coast of Brazil’, The Times, 23 October 1853. 28 Frederick Forbes, Six Months’ Service in the African Blockade: From April to October, 1848, in command of H.M.S. Bonetta (London: Richard Bentley, 1849), p. 126. •

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Distant Freedom supplies of fresh water were extremely limited.29 This raw volcanic island experienced droughts in 1839, 1844 and 1857.30 Its use as an anti-slavery depot was posited but, in the Colonial Office’s assessment, it was ‘too wild a place for the seat of a Court of Justice, or for the reception, without great expense and difficulty, of any large number of people waiting for removal’.31 Ascension nevertheless provided an important supply depot and hospital for the West Africa Squadron throughout the period of suppression – a fact not recognised by the existing literature on the subject. In the early decades after abolition, various warships suffering from outbreaks of disease sought out Ascension Island: HMS Owen Glendower and Bann in 1823, Eden and Sybille in 1829, Black Joke in 1830 and Bonetta in 1838.32 The extraordinary ‘Bonetta Cemetery’ at Comfortless Cove is mute testament to these episodes. Here, a motley collection of grave markers stands in a small depression surrounded by a landscape of jagged rock and volcanic ash. Amongst the dead are crewmembers not only of the Bonetta, but also the Viper, Flying Fish, Archer and the USS Constellation.33 Cape Colony, by contrast, had much to recommend it – not least its extremely healthy climate. Simonstown was a fully fledged naval establishment, by far the best-equipped base in the South Atlantic, its facilities including a harbour and a sizeable hospital. Cape Town was a populous and sophisticated settlement, where food, water and other supplies were available in abundance. The expanding colony also had a need for labour, giving potential for the long-term settlement of freed slaves. Cape Colony’s single, insurmountable, drawback lay in its inaccessibility. On the West African coast, northerly winds and currents pushed ships further away from the Cape, while the anti-clockwise South Atlantic system imposed a 29 Contemporary accounts of the settlement at Ascension Island include: Peter Leonard, The Western coast of Africa. Journal of an officer under Captain Owen. Records of a voyage in the ship Dryad in 1830, 1831, and 1832 (Philadelphia: E.C. Mielke, 1833), pp. 216–25; H. Brandreth, ‘Notes on the Island of Ascension’, Professional Papers of the Royal Engineers 6 (1840), pp. 116–30; Henry Huntley, Peregrine Scramble; or Thirty Years Adventures of a Blue Jacket (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1849), pp. 136–39. 30 During the drought of 1844, the West Africa Squadron stores vessel Tortoise had to be towed from St Helena to Ascension in order to deliver water, as reported in Commander Scott to Governor of St Helena, 30 August 1844, CSL 19 Vol. 1. 31 ‘Taking Prizes to St Helena instead of Sierra Leone’, CO 247/71, 36 St Helena. 32 The Sybille had in fact taken its fever-ridden crew to St Helena but when a suitable place for quarantine could not be agreed it had proceeded to Ascension Island. 33 For Ascension Island’s connections to the anti-slavery patrol. See John Packer, The Ascension handbook. A concise guide to Ascension Island, South Atlantic (Georgetown: Cable and Wireless, 1968); Kevin Schafer, Ascension Island: Atlantic outpost (Freshwater: Coach House Publications, 2004); Anonymous, Bonetta and Trident Cemeteries (unpublished document, Ascension Island Archive, Georgetown, 2001). •

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Sailortown lengthy voyage on vessels that left the coast for the open ocean. In short, it simply took too long for warships patrolling in the Atlantic to reach the Cape, while for the same reason it was impractical to dispatch laden prizes there because of the mortality that resulted from protracted voyages. An additional consideration was the stormy conditions at the Cape, which rendered it an uncertain and dangerous landfall – particularly during the winter months. As a consequence, Cape Colony played only a peripheral role in the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, though it featured to a greater extent in the abolition campaign in the Indian Ocean.

Facts and figures Between 1840 and 1867, the Navy brought 439 cases for adjudication at St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court. Of these, 87 pertained to ships laden with slaves, the remainder having been seized for being equipped for the trade. Not every prize was taken to the island: 258 were dispatched to Jamestown, while 143 were wrecked, run ashore or deliberately destroyed by the Navy at the point of capture; the fate of a further 38 vessels is not specified in the surviving records. When a prize was tried in absentia it was common for a symbolic piece to be condemned and sold, as in the example of the chronometer and piece of the figurehead of a schooner burnt off the coast in 1849.34 Allowing for minor vagaries within the data set, the slave-laden prizes carried 27,000 slaves between them at the point of capture (see Appendices 1 and 2). Some 1,700 perished before they reached St Helena, while over 800 died between landing and adjudication (usually a period of two to three weeks); 24,221 slaves survived to be liberated by St Helena’s court. Approximately 900 recaptives need to be added to this total – these being slaves liberated from coastal barracoons in 1842 and brought to St Helena aboard HMS Waterwitch and HMS Madagascar. Since no slave ships were involved, the delivery of these people to the island and their subsequent liberation do not feature in the Vice-Admiralty court records. One-third of the laden prizes carried less than 100 slaves – often just a few tens – but a significant number carried several hundred people. The largest captures, made in 1850, 1859 and 1861, carried 862, 874 and 870 slaves respectively. Of the laden vessels for which a tonnage is stated, the data show that the slaves were packed in at an average of 2.7 people per ton. This is higher than the slave per ton ratio on British-built ships of the 1780s, which was typically around 1.75 slaves per ton, but in line with examples such as the Brookes (2.3 ton) and lower than notorious cases such as Zong  (4  ton). 34 FO 84/776, p. 143. •

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Distant Freedom Considered another way, the Passengers Act (1835), which regulated the shipment of emigrants on merchant vessels and which was applied to liberated Africans dispatched onwards from St Helena, stipulated three people for every five tons; the human cargo aboard the captured slavers was packed at over four times this density. The slavers were taken as prizes by 86 different warships. Some were prolifically successful, above all HMS Waterwitch, which sent 40 prizes carrying 3,188 slaves to St Helena between 1840 and 1853 – adding to a lesser number adjudicated at Sierra Leone (mainly between 1835 and 1840). In the five-year period 1845–50, HMS Cygnet dispatched 22 prizes carrying 2,567 slaves to St Helena, including two of the largest captures: 549 aboard Lidador and 785 on Harriet. HMS Styx sent 25 empty prizes (all under the Equipment Clause) between February 1847 and March 1848. Other warships, on the other hand, dispatched only a few prizes to the island, or in some cases just one. Despite the fact that steam vessels played a role in the last years of the slave trade, all of the prizes adjudicated on St Helena appear to have been sail-driven. They were a variety of barques, brigs, brigantines, schooners and feluccas, ranging from fine vessels to ones that were barely seaworthy. The smallest were nothing more than open boats or canoes, being engaged in the coastal movement of slaves rather than their transatlantic shipment: the Cabacca – the first case brought before St Helena’s court – had a displacement of just 15 tons and carried only two slaves. Most vessels of this size were destroyed at the point of capture. Nearly 80% of prizes had a tonnage of less than 200, and 93% under 300 tons. The largest laden prize was 453 tons, and the biggest seized on the basis of being equipped for the trade was 692 tons. The capture location of 376 prizes is stated in the court records or can be surmised from other sources (Figure 9). A proportion was taken to the north of the equator, most clustered in the Gulf of Guinea with a few others to the west and north.35 All of these captures took place between 1840 and 1851 and none carried slaves. The majority of seizures – and all those which were laden – were made to the south of the equator, mostly at or near the coast. A lesser number of prizes were taken in the open ocean: these mainly represent the outcome of successful chases, though a few unfortunate slavers simply happened on cruisers in transit between the coast and St Helena or Ascension. No explanation is given for why one slaver chose to sail (and was captured) within 60 km of St Helena. Two vessels intercepted in very southerly latitudes are known to have had voyages originating in East Africa: 35 The capture made 100 km from Freetown relates to a vessel that was burnt at the coast and whose case was heard at St Helena over four months later when its captor finally reached port. •

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Figure 9: Prizes adjudicated by St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court, 1840–72.

the Conciecao de Maria, taken 500 km to the south of St Helena carrying 457 slaves, was bound to Rio from Mozambique, having been 61 days at sea. A final cluster of 24 slavers was taken off South America. Most were captured around Rio de Janeiro (several from within its harbour) and on an adjacent stretch of 1,100 km of coastline; a single prize was taken close to Bahia. Only one of these vessels carried slaves, who were landed at Rio. These seizures occurred during Palmerston’s final assault on the Brazilian slave trade, between 1848 and 1851. The balance of use between St Helena and other British settlements can also be observed from the data. Throughout the 1830s, Sierra Leone played the dominant role in anti-slavery, taking in nearly 18,000 recaptives in the years 1836–39 alone. The passing of the Slave Trade (Portugal) Act marked a watershed. Between 1840 and 1843, the number of slaves received at Freetown dropped dramatically, as the Navy made full use of its new mid-Atlantic •

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Figure 10: Recaptive slaves sent to British anti-slavery courts, 1836–67. The graph depicts the number of slaves alive at point of interception by the Royal Navy. For the sources of the data see Appendix 1.

depot at St Helena. There was a noticeable revival at Sierra Leone in the middle years of the decade, when naval instructions denied access to the island, but thereafter the two places operated in tandem, receiving broadly similar numbers of recaptives, with ebbs and flows that reflected the wider circumstances of the slave trade and its suppression. The overall number of Africans landed from 1840 was nearly identical: 24,777 at Sierra Leone and 25,233 at St Helena.36 Far less use was made of the other Africa-based courts at Luanda and Cape Colony, and neither received any slaves after 1847. The various courts in Brazil, Cuba and the Caribbean were also all but defunct by the early 1840s, though that at Kingston, Jamaica was sporadically active up until 1857. That Sierra Leone continued as a base for anti-slavery after 1840 owed little to suitability or practicality, and much to political and legal considerations. Opposition to St Helena’s depots within metropolitan government was an important factor, and the fact that every laden prize taken north of the equator was sent to Freetown – when most could have reached St Helena more quickly – is an indication of the artificial division imposed by naval instructions. The presence of mixed commission courts at Freetown was also influential, since prizes of Spanish and various other nationalities had to be tried at such venues, as opposed to Vice-Admiralty courts. Even south of the equator, therefore, certain vessels could not be sent to St Helena, but instead had to make the long journey northwards to Sierra Leone.37 This operational divide is very much apparent, above all in the 1840s, before 36 See Appendix 1. 37 Captain Henry Butterfield explained to the Hutt committee how he sent all •

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Sailortown the traditional slaving entrepôts around the Bights became extinct and the whole trade focused below the equator. Cruisers in southerly waters had a close involvement with St Helena, sending most prizes there whenever their instructions permitted it, and using it as their base for resupply. Those assigned to the northerly division, however, retained their connection to Sierra Leone. Frederick Forbes’s account of his time in command of HMS Bonetta, for example, shows a familiarity with Guinea and the Bights, but little of the coast further south. Although he castigated Sierra Leone and praised St Helena, he never once went to Jamestown, resupplying instead at Freetown, Ascension and at places at or near the African coast.38 The five vessels captured by Forbes in 1848 were all dispatched to Sierra Leone, while only a single prize taken by the Bonetta was ever adjudicated in St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court – this being a ship seized on the Brazilian coast in 1851 after the cruiser’s transfer to the South American station.

An economy of abolition From St Helena’s inception as a British colony in the seventeenth century, its intrinsic value was as a place of refreshment and rendezvous for homewardbound ships from India. The island’s economy – and indeed its whole raison d’être – was entirely based on the needs of these visitors. Its ‘plantations’ were geared to large-scale market gardening, bearing no resemblance to the sugar and coffee-producing estates of the West Indies. Goods sold to visiting vessels mainly comprised staple foods such as bread, biscuit, vegetables and livestock, as well as vital anti-scorbutics such as limes and vinegar. Wine, beer and, above all, fresh water, were absolute essentials for ships which were often running low on provisions. Timber, copper, water casks and other ship stores were also available. As steam ships became more common, coal was sold in increasing quantities, though this (as with many other items) was not found on St Helena and had to be imported to the island. However – and although it was not wholly apparent in the 1830s or 1840s – the island was fast becoming a place out of time. The traditional Atlantic passage to and from India was expensive, unpleasant and took upwards of four months, and an ‘overland route’ via the Mediterranean, Egypt and the Red Sea had been gaining popularity with travellers since the 1820s – this being quicker, cheaper and more tolerable. In 1838, the British acquired an area of the Yemeni coast around Aden, further facilitating this express route to India. New technologies were also coming, which would lead to Vice-Admiralty cases to St Helena, but that cases for mixed commission courts had to go to Sierra Leone. PP 1847–48 (272) XXII, questions 632–33. 38 Forbes, Six Months’ Service. •

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Distant Freedom the replacement of sail by steam, and the advent of refrigerated shipping. Because of all of these factors, St Helena, whose prosperity relied so heavily on maritime traffic, was increasingly bypassed. It would nevertheless be a mistake to conclude that the island was dying on its feet in 1840. While the overland route certainly reduced St Helena’s captive market of wealthy travellers, merchant vessels (both sail and steam) continued to ply the Atlantic seaways throughout the middle decades of the century. St Helena usually saw 600 or 700 ships annually and the tonnage in the early 1870s was actually greater than 30 years previously.39 Throughout the lifetime of the Liberated African Establishment, therefore, economic circumstances on St Helena were far from desperate. But, all this said, the positive impact of the slave trade’s suppression on the island was of major proportions. Warships had long been transient visitors to St Helena, calling at the island for supplies in just the same way as their merchant counterparts. These were only fleeting contacts, but the formation of the West Africa Squadron in the early nineteenth century, combined with the establishment of the Jamestown Vice-Admiralty court in 1840, created a new relationship between the Navy and St Helena. The first of these actions placed a permanent naval force in the Equatorial and South Atlantic, which by mid-century had become a sizeable presence. The second ensured regular contact between that force and St Helena. After 1840, therefore, the ships of the squadron – particularly those assigned to the southern division of the patrol – began to call at Jamestown on a frequent basis. Cruisers were a common feature of the Jamestown Roads for most of the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s, combining repair, reprovisioning and shore leave in their visits. As the previous chapter has shown, the Navy – or, more accurately, its slave-laden prizes – were not always guaranteed a favourable reception from the St Helenian government. In most respects, however, the warships, their crews and their prizes were extremely welcome. The West Africa Squadron generated significant income for the island, at a time when the traditional sources underpinning its economy were in decline, and also brought social vibrancy to an often isolated society. There is a distinction to be drawn, therefore, between the official reception of a slave-laden prize and the more positive attitude of the St Helenians towards the Navy. Anti-slavery benefitted St Helena’s economy in a number of ways. The first arose from the fact that the West Africa Squadron required very considerable quantities of supplies. And, while a part of that demand was met through government stores, or through items specifically shipped from 39 St Helena Blue Book, 1873, CO 252/38, pp. 198–99. Gill and Teale, in St Helena 500, cite rather higher numbers per year, although the trend is essentially similar. •

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Figure 11:  Auction notice in the St Helena Gazette, 11 June 1859.

Britain for the Navy’s use, the remainder had to be procured from private merchants. Prices on the island were steep and the Admiralty, while a firm advocate of the island as a base, nevertheless acknowledged the high prices at which it was forced to procure goods at Jamestown. The prize ships represented another major source of income. By law all vessels condemned for their involvement in the slave trade had to be destroyed, in order to avoid their repurchase by slave traders, much to the chagrin of certain St Helenians, who lamented the destruction of such fine vessels whose market value was much greater than the sum of their parts after having been broken up (Figure 11).40 Nevertheless, the trial and condemnation of prizes at St Helena generated wealth for many, and in fact created a whole new ship-breaking industry in Jamestown. The judge and other officials of the Vice-Admiralty court earned fees for their involvement in each case, while bills of fees and disbursements compiled by the Marshall of the court show that the condemnation of the vessel set in train a whole series of profitable activities. This can be illustrated by the documents relating to just one of these vessels, an unnamed ship taken by HMS Prometheus in 1846 and tried the following year. Local carpenter Charles O’Neil was paid 40 Anonymous, A Bird of Passage (London: Houlston and Wright, 1865), p. 73. •

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Distant Freedom for cutting up the vessel; Shaik Serang and his lascar working party charged for dismantling the hulk and landing the stores, for which a launch and crane had to be hired; a Mr Scott earned money as ship-keeper during its time at anchor; a Mr Ramage rated its chronometer; George Gibb advertised the auction of the ship in the St Helena Gazette; and Henry Harris kept the accounts of the sale. In total, for this modest vessel of 195 tons, the fees and disbursements amounted to £70 1s 6d. When one considers that over 250 ships were destroyed and sold in this way, the scale of the new enterprise becomes clear. It appears that a good many people came to rely upon it: the damage wreaked by the Rollers of 1846, which included the destruction of 11 slave ships in Jamestown harbour, was subsequently reported to have thrown many out of employment and deprived them of the means of supporting their families.41 Finally, there were the naval sailors themselves, who spent very considerable sums during their visits to the island. St Helena was a notoriously expensive place to visit. To some extent this was inevitable: the island was thousands of miles from Britain and the costs of transport, import taxes and port duties had to be passed on. However, prices were also kept high by a cartel of merchants who cashed in on their trade monopoly and visitors to the island frequently complained of their hosts’ habitual profiteering. James Prior, for example, returning from India aboard the frigate Nisus in 1819, wrote that: … good living is out of the question. The man who should peradventure desire the luxury of a fresh meal, must first reflect on the extravagance he is about to commit … He dare not taste a mutton chop [sold for] under a guinea … In fact it is a miserable place; the necessities of life are scarcely to be procured, and then only at an exorbitant rate.42

Naval sailors’ ability to squander money in a short time is well documented. According to the memoirs of George Watson, a sailor of the 1820s, 48 hours’ shore leave was time enough for a sailor to spend six month’s pay: he related how he sold all his possessions and most of his clothes in order to buy drink and women.43 Jamestown, like all port settlements, was well equipped to deprive West Africa Squadron crews of their savings. As the St Helena 41 ‘Rollers at St Helena’, CO 700/STHa1. 42 James Prior, Voyage along the Eastern Coast of Africa, to Mozambique, Johanna, and Quiloa; to St Helena; to Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco in Brazil, in the Nisus Frigate (London: R. Phillips and Co., 1819), pp. 84–85. 43 George Watson, A narrative of the adventures of a Greenwich pensioner written by himself (Newcastle, 1827), pp. 92 and 149. Quoted from Roy and Lesley Adkins, Jack Tar (London: Abacus, 2009), who discuss naval shore leave on pp. 354–70. •

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Sailortown Advocate once recorded, ‘the tars as usual kept the place alive, and sent their money flying from hand to hand as if they earned it but to fool away’.44 It is difficult to put an accurate figure on the value of anti-slavery to St Helena, but there is no doubt that it was substantial. The benefits were also quickly felt, as shown by a report by Governor Trelawney that noted a marked improvement of the island’s revenues during 1841 and 1842. This he attributed ‘to the great impetus which has been given to trade by the supplies required for the African establishment; as also an increase of shipping; particularly of the Navy’.45 That this situation continued is made clear by a letter from Governor Ross in 1847, who wrote of the need for a bigger wharf at Jamestown to cope with shipping and mercantile concerns that had ‘increased beyond all expectation’.46 Sources such as the St Helena Advocate also reiterate the fact that this income was being generated at a crucial juncture, when other sources of money were in decline. A correspondent wrote in 1851: … trade languished, property fell in value, and money became so scarce that the Island was reduced to a very low state of adversity; suddenly resources equally as great as unexpected arose, and ameliorated to some extent this miserable state. The Company’s monopoly of the India Shipping Trade being abolished, a great increase in the number of vessels calling for supplies ensued. Then came the Coast Squadron – the commission for the trial of Slavers, and the Liberated African Establishment – causing probably the influx of upwards of £40,000 per annum.47

Although the figure quoted by the correspondent was an estimate (and probably an unreliable one), it demonstrates the perceived value of anti-slavery to St Helena. The general conclusion is certainly supported by official sources of the period, including a report by the Governor in the following year which estimated colonial revenue from the duties paid on condemned vessels to be £1,000 pounds a year.48 The scaling down and temporary closure of the Establishment after 1852 brought considerable hardship, and editorials in the island’s newspapers expressed the contradictory feelings of the St Helenians on the subject. Of the slave trade, one said that all were glad its end is near, since many were familiar with the unspeakable miseries of the ships landed at Rupert’s Valley. On the other hand, it lamented the great economic benefits that 44 St Helena Advocate, 29 May 1851. 45 Trelawney to Stanley, 23 February 1843, CO 247/59, 263 St Helena. 46 Ross to Secretary of State, 18 November 1847, CSL 26 Vol. 2, No. 109. 47 St Helena Advocate, 29 May 1851. 48 Gore Brown to Earl Grey, 4 March 1852, CO 247/79. •

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Distant Freedom had existed in the ‘palmy days’ of the trade. Sailors had brought money and ship-breaking had generated employment, while the sale of the prizes and their cargoes had made basic staples such as rice, farinha and firewood available at prices affordable to the poor.49 The anticipated demise of the slave trade had not yet, in fact, occurred, and its revival brought one more period of relative prosperity to the island. The final withdrawal of the West Africa Squadron in the late 1860s, however, ushered in a long period of genuine hardship – one which arguably still continues today.

“Jack’s ashore” During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, naval sailors were a commonplace on the streets of Jamestown. In 1840, the West Africa Squadron was a relatively modest force made up of 12 sloops and brigs, but in 1846 it was very considerably increased to 25 vessels including five steamships. After the expansion of the mid-1840s, the squadron was manned by 1,500 to 2,000 sailors, rising to a peak of 2,164 in 1859.50 For all of these men, ports of call were limited and opportunities to spend their wages were rare. And, because Cape Colony was rendered off limits by the ocean currents, St Helena was the only place on the West Africa station that could be considered to have a sophisticated port town. Sailors visited Jamestown either en masse with their parent warship, or as prize crews aboard captured slavers. Warships generally called only for as long as it took to reprovision, but prize crews usually stayed for a minimum of two or three weeks, because of their obligation to give evidence to the Vice-Admiralty court. Thereafter, the duration of their visit was determined by how long it took before a suitable opportunity to return to their parent ship presented itself. Naval personnel at a loose end represented a useful source of manpower for St Helena’s colonial government. Their expertise was regularly drawn upon for tasks such as vessel surveys, while some few became directly involved in the running of the Liberated African Establishment – the most striking example being the prize crew of the slave ship Julia, who staffed the embryonic Lemon Valley depot in early 1841. Here, amongst other work, James Wilcox and his compatriots were tasked with rowing the bodies of deceased slaves out to sea for burial. In such ways individual crewmembers 49 St Helena Advocate, 29 January 1852. Among others effects, it was noted that there had been a large decline in the consumption of wines and spirits since the Africa Squadron no longer landed its crews on the island. See R.M. Pritchard, Collector of Customs, to Pennell, 31 September 1855, CSL 37 Vol. 2. 50 Lloyd, The Navy and the Slave Trade, Appendix C. •

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Sailortown were drawn further into the process and human aftermath of abolition. Most, however, simply availed themselves of the opportunity for extended shore leave. And, because many of them visited regularly and repeatedly, the sailors of the West Africa Squadron got to know St Helena, and forged social bonds with St Helenians, in a way that more transient visitors did not. It was a relationship of mutual benefit, as all passing traffic relieved the inhabitants’ sense of isolation. Earlier in the century, this phenomenon had been described by James Wathen, passenger on the Company ship Hope sailing from China and Madras, who wrote how ‘the arrival of the homeward-bound East Indiamen spreads joy and gladness over all the island. Everybody quits the country, and repairs to James Town; balls, plays, and entertainments succeed each other’. Wathen also related the anecdote of a St Helenian lady who, in conversation with the captain of an Indiaman, asked if London was not very dull when the East India fleet left England.51 The sailors of the West Africa Squadron came to provide a very similar social distraction and their visits were celebrated. The St Helena Advocate of 25 September 1851, for example, described the ‘Great Penelope Picnic’, reporting that: The past has been a rather busy week, with the arrival of Penelope, flag ship, and the picnics and parties consequent thereon both above bridge and below. Jack’s ashore – and we hope he intends to be so for some time longer, as his own warm genial spirit seems to pervade and animate the Island from one end to the other – instilling into it new life, and breaking its usual cold monotony.

Jamestown itself was a sailortown, one of many such way stations spread across the globe. As Stan Hugill observes in his evocative work on port cities, a ‘sailortown was a world in, but not of the landsman. It was a world of sordid pleasure, unlimited vice, and lashings of booze, but a dangerous place too’.52 Contemporary depictions of Jamestown rather tend to contradict this view, portraying an idealised view of the settlement. That in G.W. Melliss’s Views of St Helena (1857), for example, shows a few well-dressed gentlemen conversing in an otherwise empty Main Street, flanked by neat Georgian buildings.53 The reality, of course, was rather different. Jamestown in fact conformed to the model of a sailortown, its elegant architecture belying a 51 James Wathen, Journal of a Voyage, in 1811 and 1812, to Madras and China; Returning by the Cape of Good Hope and St Helena; in the H.C.S. The Hope, Capt. James Pendergrass (London: J. Nicholls and Son, 1814), Chapter 14. 52 Hugill, Sailortown, xviii. 53 George Melliss, Views of St Helena: Illustrative of its scenery and historical associations (London, 1857). •

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Distant Freedom vibrant, seedy and occasionally violent port, in which the lives of inhabitants and visiting mariners were closely intertwined. Main Street contained hotels in which the better-appointed traveller could stay, but here and in the surrounding back alleys these were juxtaposed with a far greater number of cheap lodging houses and taverns. Some were nothing more than private houses with a tap room, styling themselves with names such as the ‘Ship Tavern’ or ‘Britannia Tavern’ – monikers designed to draw in the patriotic sailor. Laws regulating their opening hours were ignored, prompting complaints that drinking, gambling and other vices were partaken of at all times of the day and night, even on the Sabbath.54 Prostitutes abounded, a subject of much concern to the local authorities, in part on grounds of morality but equally because of the destructive prevalence of syphilis among the town’s inhabitants. Many travellers’ accounts make no mention of St Helena’s seedier side and published guides to the island scrupulously overlooked it. Nevertheless, a few informal accounts do acknowledge this aspect of the town, one such being the journal of Daniel Whitfield, sailor aboard the American whaling bark Dr Franklin. His entry for 6 March 1857 read as follows: Spent the day as usual, Rambling about town, in and out wherever we took A Fancy to go, Making all the fun we could in many ways too tedious for Me to mention until Night came on. Witnessed Several fights between drunken sailors and Drunken Whores, and Then Repaired to the Ball Room where the Evening passed off with Music Dancing Singing and drinking until I got tired out. So went home and turned in for the Night.55

Jamestown was, according to Whitfield, the most promiscuous place on earth but one suspects that he had never been exposed to any of the great port cities – from London and Marseilles to Singapore and Shanghai – where vice exceeded anything St Helena could possibly offer. Newspaper articles, such as the one quoted above in relation to Penelope’s visit, describe a rather civilised scene. To some extent this is accurate, particularly in relation to the officers of the squadron. Some engaged in social gatherings aboard their ships or in town, while others took the opportunity for tourism in the island’s interior.56 The men of the lower decks, however, were usually more interested in Jamestown’s less refined attractions – namely its grog shops and its women. Naval sailors’ behaviour in port was rightly 54 For example Janisch to Acting Colonial Secretary, 19 April 1853, CSL 34. 55 New Bedford Whaling Museum, KWM 1033, pp. 333–34. 56 For example Commander Henry Need of HMS Linnet, whose painting of Longwood is held in the National Maritime Museum (NMM, ART/10). •

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Sailortown notorious. As Samuel Leech wrote in a memoir of his Navy service, liberty to go on shore was ‘almost invariably abused for purposes of riot, drunkenness and debauchery’. Once on shore, he said, Jack was like an uncaged bird, as gay and quite as thoughtless. He summed up the experience by saying that, ‘bad as things are at sea, they are worse in port’.57 As it had for time immemorial, the Navy accepted such debauches as a necessary evil. A little disruption on shore was a price worth paying for discipline on a long, claustrophobic cruise – albeit at the cost of strained relations with local residents. Civil disturbance was undoubtedly a regular aspect of shore leave on St Helena. In 1846, it was reported that sailors were bringing muskets, pistols and cutlasses ashore, which had to be confiscated, and that the magistrates had tried seamen from HMS Styx and Waterwitch who had entered boarding houses and put their inhabitants in ‘bodily fear’. During the following year, the Police Magistrate recorded a ‘violent altercation’ between soldiers of the St Helena regiment and sailors from HMS Actaeon; in 1851, the disorderly behaviour of the crew of HMS Penelope was singled out for complaint; while in 1853, HMS Harlequin’s sailors were thrown in gaol for assaulting the local police.58 Even some of those placed in Jamestown’s civil hospital misbehaved, as attested by a letter of 1851 which reports a group of sailors absconding from the wards at night to visit houses of ill repute.59 The presence of slave ship sailors, effectively marooned on St Helena after the destruction of their ships, was doubtless another inflammatory element on the streets of Jamestown. A letter published in the St Helena Guardian for 1861 encapsulates the worst aspects of naval shore leave in Jamestown. It also illustrates the problem caused by the larger steam-powered vessels which equipped the squadron in its later years. As the correspondent observes, Jamestown was overwhelmed by very large numbers of sailors: The scene of debauchery and vice witnessed in Market Street during the last few days, whilst the crew of the Arrogant have been at liberty is beyond description. Morning and evening, night and day, there has been such an amount of drunkenness and din, swearing, fighting, and abominable indecency on the part of the sailors and the disreputable women who infest our city … 57 Samuel Leech, Thirty Years from Home, or A Voice from the Main Deck (Boston: Charles Tappan, 1844), pp. 109–12. 58 Police Office to Pennell, 1 October 1847, CSL 26 Vol. 1. The lawlessness of the Penelope’s crew is described in two letters from the Police Office dated 26 August and 20 September 1851 (CSL 32, Nos 78 and 95). That relating to Harlequin is found in CSL 34, 3 May 1853. 59 Vowell to Pennell, 24 July 1851, CSL 32 Vol. 1. •

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Distant Freedom … a large number of seamen cannot find sleeping places in this already overcrowded town; the consequence is that many of them lay about the streets in some cases in a state of nudity and perfectly insensible from the effects of drink – others wander through the city all night, roaring after one another, fighting, swearing, and hammering at everybody’s doors in the hope of gaining shelter … even the Sabbath day proved no exception.

The writer concludes: So long as the Executive will permit any and everybody to obtain a licence upon payment of the required sum to keep these dens of filth and infamy, commonly known as Taverns or Wine Shops where, in some of them, women of the vilest character are permitted to assemble with impunity, and so long as the Commanders of Her Majesty’s ships will, without the slightest regard for the Inhabitants, send on shore two or three hundred seamen at once … we may expect a repetition of the disgraceful proceedings already alluded to.60

Viewed in retrospect, these events take on, perhaps, a slightly comedic aspect, but at the time they were a matter of serious concern. They were perceived as jeopardising the lives and properties of the inhabitants of Jamestown, and the ability of the police to cope with so many violent outbreaks was doubtful. There was also a genuine fear of fire breaking out, as sailors, soldiers and others cavorted around, throwing fireworks in a town where many of the buildings away from Main Street were built from timber.61 Regular beats were assigned to the police in an attempt to clamp down not only on the sailors’ drunken behaviour, but also the theft of goods from the wharf and from private gardens. This is not to say that all trips ashore resulted in riot: the St Helena Advocate of 29 May 1851 reported, for instance, that the crew of HMS Hecla ‘though a little noisy at times kept themselves free from trouble’.62 Nor, it should be noted, was the Navy the sole culprit. Merchant sailors behaved just as badly, as did the local garrison. Moreover, naval commanders – while not condoning the activities of their crews – also pointed on occasion to provocation by the local authorities.63 60 St Helena Guardian, 5 December 1861. 61 Concerns about fires were expressed in relation to the Arrogant incident (7 December 1861; CSL 43 Vol. 1). In 1846, a case of arson was investigated, in which the house of a Mr Solomon was set alight by local soldiers throwing fireworks (30 November 1846; CSL 25 Vol. 1). 62 St Helena Advocate, 29 May 1851. 63 This problem is raised in Lieutenant Mansell (HMS Actaeon) to Pennell, 1 October 1847, CSL 26 Vol. 1. •

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Sailortown Most crewmembers got away with their misdemeanours, which were usually overlooked unless violent. Inevitably, though, some found themselves on the wrong side of the law. The arrest of members of the Harlequin’s crew has already been noted and there were a good many other sailors who found themselves in a similar situation. Their commanding officer had to intercede to secure their release, in order for them to rejoin the ship before it departed.64 Prison sentences could, on occasion, be lengthy. In June 1843, five sailors from HMS Grecian petitioned Justice Wilde from Jamestown gaol, where they had spent the last 50 days, after arrest at ‘an unguarded moment and excited from a state of intoxication’. This situation had proved ‘most injurious’ to their health and they promised that their future conduct would be most sober and discreet. They were finally released on 20 July, Wilde ruling that their detention had been illegal in the first place.65 During shore leave there were many sexual encounters between sailors and the women of Jamestown. The island’s register of births predictably contains a good many entries where the father is given as ‘a sailor’ who remains anonymous; it is reasonable to assume that a number of these were from the West Africa Squadron. However, not all such relationships would have been so short-lived. The isolated society of St Helena offered little to young women of any social class, while options of a good marriage for those of its ‘elite’ were narrow. Visiting sailors, therefore, offered St Helenian women an avenue of escape, a fact observed many years before by the explorer and pirate William Dampier. In 1691, he wrote how females born on the island ‘very earnestly desired to be released from that Prison, having no other way to compass this but by marrying Seamen or Passengers that touch here’.66 And, although the colony was much changed by the turn of the nineteenth century, the desire of women to leave it had not. There were, for example, many marriages between St Helenian women and the men of the Napoleonic garrison of 1815–21. No systematic attempt has been made to identify marriages between squadron crew and local women. Nevertheless, there must surely be a number recorded in the island’s marriage registers (which begin in 1852), although identification of these will depend on the husband’s occupation as a naval sailor having been noted. Common law marriages, of course, leave no documentary trace. One marriage is known, between Frederick Sturdee, Ship’s Master of the Waterwitch, and Anna 64 The imprisonment of some of the Penelope’s crew in 1851 is referred to in Janisch to Pennell, 29 September 1851, CSL 32 Vol. 2, No. 101. 65 Jones et al. to Chief Justice Wilde, 27 June 1843, CSL 15 Vol. 1, No. 126; Seale to Firmin 29 June 1843 (CS 6 Vol. 3, No. 205). 66 Diana and Michael Preston, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier (London: Corgi, 2005), pp. 298–99. •

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Distant Freedom Frances Hodson, the youngest daughter of the colonel of the St Helena Regiment.67 Overall – and despite the tension between unruly sailors and the residents of Jamestown – the prevailing sense is of a comfortable relationship between the islanders and the Navy. Parallels can be drawn with other large groups of incomers, most obviously the garrison during Napoleon’s captivity and the Boer prisoners of war held there between 1900 and 1902. In both instances, a military population quickly became integrated into island society; in the case of the Boers, there remains a strong affiliation between South Africa and St Helena, as well as some Boer ancestry within the island population.68

The withdrawal of the squadron The West Africa Squadron was finally withdrawn in the late 1860s, its absence leaving St Helena a poorer and less vibrant place. Writing a few years later, island resident John Melliss described the empty streets of Jamestown: After some years the squadron was reduced, the Liberated African Establishment abolished, and, in 1874, excepting an occasional visit from a British gunboat, which appears more by accident than by any other means to get to St. Helena, the place, once so gay with naval men and ships, now knows them no more. But the negroes, which could have been best spared, still remain.69

Melliss’s comments exemplify the contradictory relationship of the St Helenians with abolition – welcoming the Navy yet antipathetic to the human cargo it delivered. His book, and others after, express a bitterness that the island had contributed to the ending of slavery but ultimately had not profited. The scaling back and eventual cessation of military activity in the South Atlantic was a major blow to St Helena, undermining the economies that had developed around the Navy, the Liberated African Establishment and prize auctions. It may only be coincidental that the estate of auctioneer William Rolfe (responsible for the sale of captured vessels) was sold off after bankruptcy in 1873, but it is certainly symbolic.70 On its own, the loss of the Navy-based income was serious, but the fact that it coincided with the opening of the Suez 67 A note of the marriage is present in Waterwitch’s log book: ADM 51/3746. 68 Barbara George, Boer Prisoners on St Helena 1900–1902 (unpublished document, St Helena Government Archives, 1999). 69 Melliss, St Helena, p. 32. 70 St Helena Herald, 10 April 1873. •

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Sailortown Canal (in 1869) made it an unmitigated disaster. As intended, freight could now reach Europe via the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, avoiding the Cape and the long ocean voyage. It took a few years for the Suez effect to be fully felt, but within a decade the canal had stripped the South Atlantic of most Europe-bound traffic. Troop ships returning from India soon bypassed the Atlantic altogether, while other passenger traffic also declined. In 1880, only 564 vessels called at St Helena; in 1890, that figure was 211; and in 1910 it was a mere 51. Steamers to and from the Cape ceased to call at the island after 1889, further emphasising its isolation. St Helena’s raison d’être had been critically undermined, and as East India Company pensioners either died or left the island, and the garrison was scaled down, other sources of income also diminished. An 1871 memo from the inhabitants to the Secretary of State made much of their destitution, citing a dearth of employment, lack of prospects and the consequent emigration of the working classes (among them a good many liberated Africans). The whole place, they contended, was ‘declining towards … uniform pauperism’.71 This was not hyperbole, and by the time that Philip Gosse penned his history of St Helena in 1938 he could genuinely write of an island that had lost all commercial and strategic significance, was suffering severe economic hardship, and had little purpose and few prospects.72 The end of the slave trade’s suppression, therefore, has long been seen as signalling the end of the island’s last golden age. There was, in addition, an unexpected twist. Valuable as slave ship prizes had been to St Helena’s economy, their long-term legacy was disastrous. Local tradition holds that termites or white ants were introduced to the island within the timbers of a prize vessel around 1840, and there is no reason to doubt this assertion. Certainly they were absent before this date. The impact of these insects was catastrophic. In short order they began to devour the fabric of Jamestown, from structural timbers to the books in its library (where they apparently favoured the theological section).73 By 1875, the church was in ruins, and many public and private buildings were also in a state of severe dilapidation. The Governor informed the Secretary of State that the cost of repairs over the preceding quarter century had run to at least £100,000. He likened the devastation to that of a great fire or earthquake, noting that had such natural disasters occurred, the British government would have offered far greater aid to the colony.74 71 Memorial of the Inhabitants of St Helena to the Earl of Kimberly, St Helena Guardian, 9 March 1871. 72 Gosse, St Helena, Chapters 13 and 14. 73 Melliss, St Helena, pp. 172–75. 74 Elliott to Earl Granville, 11 November 1869, CO 247/110, 13749 St Helena. •

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Distant Freedom By the later nineteenth century, termites had spread across the island. The Governor’s residence at Plantation House was rendered uninhabitable by 1928, and the church of St Paul was condemned as unsafe in 1939.75 St Helena is now characterised by an almost complete absence of timber buildings and generally only hardwood features survive for any time within the termite areas. Some of the island’s more recent structures have had to be constructed from prefabricated iron as opposed to traditional stone and timber: the Market, built in 1865, is one prominent example. Termite damage has also extended to the island’s historic records and while most key texts have remained untouched, it is ironic that one of the most damaged document groups is that of the Vice-Admiralty court. Termites remain a scourge to this day, with legislation still in place for their control.76

The anti-slavery cruise of HMS Waterwitch There is no single or ‘typical’ voyage which encapsulates the experiences of the West Africa Squadron, whose operations in the Atlantic spanned almost seven decades and were undertaken by numerous warships and many thousands of men. Nevertheless, an examination at the level of an individual vessel does have the potential to bring into greater focus many of the themes which have been touched upon in this chapter, and in so doing to demonstrate the part that was played by St Helena. The selected cruise is that of HMS Waterwitch between 1839 and 1843. The choice is partly practical, in that a full set of log and muster books survives in the UK National Archives for this particular commission. The time frame is also ideal because it allows for analysis of the period immediately before and after the passing of the 1839 Slave Trade (Portugal) Act, and St Helena’s entry into the British suppression campaign. In other ways, too, the choice is apposite. The Waterwitch was an icon of the West Africa Squadron; converted from a racing yacht of some celebrity, it was fast and prolifically successful, taking more prizes than any of its counterparts – and more indeed than the entire United States Africa Squadron over the whole period of its existence. Finally, the Waterwitch had a particular affinity to St Helena, which was expressed by its crew in the memorial column erected in Jamestown (Figure 12).77 75 Gill and Teale, St Helena 500, pp. 338 and 344. 76 An Ordinance to provide for the control and spread of infestation by termites or White Ants (Ordinance 5 of 1957). 77 A more detailed analysis of the cruise is given by Andrew Pearson, ‘Waterwitch: A warship, its voyage and its crew in the era of anti-slavery’, Atlantic Studies 13.1 (2016), pp. 99–124. •

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Sailortown

Figure 12:  The Waterwitch Monument, Castle Gardens, Jamestown.

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Distant Freedom The Waterwitch began its commission on 2 March 1839, leaving Portsmouth on 30 April. It was the vessel’s second assignment to the West Africa Squadron, following on from a successful commission between 1835 and 1838. The first months of the patrol were spent north of the equator, around the Gulf of Guinea. Five prizes were taken, each dispatched to Freetown for adjudication. It is unclear at which stage the vessel’s commander, Henry Matson, became aware of the provisions of the Slave Trade (Portugal) Act and the new operating framework it created. It was not until 13 January 1840 that he sailed south of the equator, heading first to Ascension Island to take on provisions. From that point onwards, the Waterwitch’s cruising pattern became markedly different, showing very clearly the implications of the new legislation and the additional powers that it provided to the anti-slavery patrol. For the remainder of his commission, Matson stayed entirely in southerly waters, taking prizes in increasing numbers from late 1840 and dispatching virtually all of them to St Helena. The year 1840 was occupied by long periods of tedium on the coast, mostly in a confined area around Kabenda. Of five captures, four were adjudicated at St Helena and one (for reasons that are unclear) at the Vice-Admiralty court at British Guiana. Not until early December was a vessel with any significant number of slaves taken, but the dispatch of that prize, the Julia, triggered St Helena’s full role in the suppression campaign. It also began the close connection between the Waterwitch’s crew and the island: the Vice-Admiralty court records preserve the verbatim testimony of Second Mate James Wilcox, given before he and his crew were seconded to the new African depot at Lemon Valley. While the depot’s doctor George McHenry was critical of most of those around him, he singled out Wilcox for praise. The new pattern of patrol continued in 1841 and 1842, during which time the Waterwitch took 21 prizes. Four of the seven prizes captured in 1841 went to St Helena, the others going to the British and Brazilian Court of Mixed Commission at Sierra Leone. Each of the 14 captures in 1842 were tried at Jamestown, bringing with them over 800 Africans. Meanwhile, in June of 1842 the Waterwitch conveyed some 465 slaves liberated from coastal barracoons – part of a delivery of nearly 1,000 people to Jamestown. Two more prizes followed in early 1843 (one carrying 390 slaves) before the warship finally left station and headed for European waters, reaching Portsmouth in June after nearly 50 months at sea. Over that period, it had touched at St Helena on eight occasions, with prize crews bringing in captured slavers at numerous junctures. Jamestown’s Vice-Admiralty court had adjudicated 24 of its prizes, which between them had carried some 2,150 Africans to the island. Only nine prizes had gone to other courts. At the end of the cruise, the Waterwitch’s crew could look forward to the award of considerable prize money, though the process was so slow that the •

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Sailortown money for even the earliest captures in 1839 did not become available until 1844. A significant proportion of the crew did not survive to collect their reward: of the Waterwitch’s notional complement of 60 men, 13 had died during the course of the cruise: some at Sierra Leone, others at Ascension, three at St Helena and the remainder at sea. The ship’s muster book also shows that several people were invalided out of the service – amongst them James Wilcox. On the other hand, Ship’s Master Frederick Sturdee not only returned in good health but with a St Helenian wife. It proved to be a long-lasting union and their son, Frederick Charles Doveton Sturdee (b. 1859), became Admiral of the Fleet in 1921 having seen action at both the Falklands and Jutland. The Waterwitch itself was nearly ruined – not only by the wearing conditions of the South Atlantic but also the lack of dock facilities: it made the lengthy journey to Simonstown only twice, in 1841 and 1843. The Master Shipwright at Portsmouth wrote of it being ‘in a worse state than I ever saw any vessel … how she swam is to me inexplicable’.78 After repair, the Waterwitch was commissioned for two further anti-slavery cruises, in 1848 and 1851. In total, it sent 3,188 Africans to St Helena from 40 prizes, the last in 1853. Some of the survivors took their new identity from the vessel, the surname Waterwitch persisting on the island until the early twentieth century. The warship itself was finally sold out of the service at Sheerness in 1860. It was subsequently broken up and nothing of it now remains. However, the elegant neo-classical column that was erected by the ship’s company in Jamestown’s Castle Gardens still stands. The inscription that it bears sums up much that this chapter has sought to convey about the Navy and St Helena: This column was erected by the commander, officers, and crew of Her Majesty’s brig Waterwitch to the memory of their shipmates who died while serving on the coast of Africa A.D. 1839 – 1843. The greater number died while absent in captured slave vessels. Their remains were either left in different parts of Africa or given to the sea, their graves alike undistinguished. This island is selected for the record because three lie buried here and because the deceased as well as their surviving comrades ever met the warmest welcome from its inhabitants.

78 James Sharp, Memoirs of the Life and Services of Rear-Admiral Sir William Symonds (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858), p. 440. •

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chapter four

Life and Death in the Depots Life and Death in the Depots

It has been observed that, at the heart of Atlantic slavery, the relationship between captive and captor was in many regards a war, and the slave ship was a critical site where that war was waged.1 In such terms, the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena might be seen as a liminal place in which the relationship between European and former slaves began to be redefined. Nevertheless, it was still a place where Briton ruled over African, and white over black. The ‘Establishment’ was not confined to a single place, but was in fact spread across several locations on the island. Its main foci were the reception depots in Lemon Valley and Rupert’s Valley, but they were managed from Jamestown, while other places also played a lesser role. The depots themselves are best understood via the familiar modern terminology of a refugee camp, but at the time such a concept was novel. Circumstances involving the treatment of large numbers of sick were certainly known (for example, those associated with warfare or urban epidemics), but in many ways the African depots at Sierra Leone, St Helena and other sites around the Atlantic rim were pathfinders for what has become a commonplace in the modern world. The means of dealing with problems of hygiene, of mass disease and malnutrition, and of the logistical support of large dependent populations were all pioneered in these remote nineteenth-century settings.2 This chapter considers St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment in these contexts, and relates the lives and deaths of those within it. 1 Alexander Byrd, ‘If We Must Die: Shipboard Insurrections in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade (review)’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 39.1 (2008), pp. 131–32. 2 On this subject more generally see Caroline Shaw, ‘The British, Persecuted Foreigners and the Emergence of the Refugee Category in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Immigrants and Minorities 30 (2012), pp. 239–62. •

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The depots and their staff Liberated Africans were received in two locations, both on the leeward coast of St Helena. The first of these, Lemon Valley, 3 km to the south-west of Jamestown, was one of the very first areas to be explored by the Portuguese after their discovery of the island in 1502.3 Its fertility was remarked upon from an early date, a Dutch commander once describing a landscape filled with orange, lemon and pomegranate trees.4 The valley’s pristine environment did not, of course, long survive the ravages of man or of introduced fauna and flora. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were just a few lemon trees left, ‘withered by neglect’, the rest having been consumed by goats or cut down by sailors to save themselves the trouble of picking the individual fruit. Even so, its landscape remained an attractive (if much-altered) prospect, the valley floor occupied by meadows through which a small stream meandered to the sea, descending via a series of gentle waterfalls.5 Because of its clement environment and sheltered anchorage, Lemon Valley was one of the earliest settled and defended sites on St Helena. A military presence was maintained there by the English from the 1660s, and a ‘fort’ (probably little more than a watch-house) was washed away by a ‘tidal wave’ that engulfed the bay in 1667. Late seventeenth-century East India Company land deeds indicate that civilian settlement was also becoming established in the landward parts of the valley by this period, and during the following century a series of small farms grew up along the valley floor, on land that was either deliberately cleared of native vegetation or stripped bare by goats. Massive defensive ‘lines’ were in place at the coast by 1770, totally blocking access from the sea, which were augmented by flanking batteries high on the cliffs above, built either in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. A large garrison was maintained there during Napoleon’s exile, but thereafter the defences were virtually unmanned. At the coast, Lemon Valley opens to a sheltered bay, roughly 150 m across and with a shallow-shelving pebble beach. On either side are towering volcanic cliffs that rise to heights of 500 m and which hem in the entire valley as far as its head, 2 km distant. Habitable land is confined to the level ground of the valley floor, which rapidly narrows as it snakes inland. Though within the coastal zone (classed as semi-desert), the valley is one of the most pleasant places on the island: in the daytime, on- and offshore 3 Ben Jeffs and Andrew Pearson, Lemon Valley Conservation Management Plan (unpublished report for St Helena Government, 2011). 4 Reproduced without citation of the source by the St Helena Almanac for 1913. 5 The contemporary landscape is described by McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Simmond’s Colonial Magazine, Chapter 3. •

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Distant Freedom breezes temper the heat and humidity, while the nights are comfortably cool. Rainfall is infrequent, but the stream provides a reliable supply of water throughout the year. Only its small size and separation from Jamestown prevented Lemon Valley becoming an important place of settlement. When the first liberated Africans arrived at St Helena in 1840, several factors recommended the use of Lemon Valley as a depot. It had a good climate and reliable supply of water, its beach offered the prospect of supply from the sea, it was virtually uninhabited and buildings already existed which could be converted into a hospital and accommodation.6 In any case, since the early eighteenth century the valley had been the default location for the quarantine of sick arrivals to the island, the first recorded instance of its use as a ‘lazarette’ coming in 1717, for Madagascan slaves suffering from smallpox. British naval personnel were sent there during the Napoleonic Wars, some of them buried in a small graveyard a few hundred metres from the bay that later came to be used for the liberated Africans. In 1830, Governor Dallas had proposed building a permanent quarantine station at Lemon Valley, suggesting it as a preferable alternative to Ascension Island.7 The African depot was primarily situated at the coast, in the area immediately behind the defensive lines. Here were two small barrack blocks and a number of other ancillary buildings. Nearby, on the upper flank of the eastern edge of the valley, were a few tiny fishermen’s huts of crude drystone construction and roofed with ‘gunny bags’ or sacking, plus a cottage owned by a poor widow named Mrs Renton. The whole area measured little more than 100 m by 200 m, not all of which was useable because it was bisected by the stream corridor. In December 1840, all of these buildings were taken over as accommodation, and by the middle of the next year every available patch of open ground near the bay was occupied by tents, such that ‘the visitor might now have imagined it an encampment of Arabs in the desert’.8 The second component of the depot lay 500 m inland, centred on Chamberlain’s Cottage, a modest farmhouse that had been abandoned a couple of years previously. Positioned within a flat area of ground of about one and a half acres, the house was not large but was nevertheless a substantially built single-storey structure with handsomely tall windows. A main 6 Young to Middlemore, 11 June 1840, CSL 6 Vol. 2, No. 96. 7 On the quarantine of Madagascan slaves see Gill and Teale, St Helena 500, p. 182. Governor Dallas’s proposal is found in Letters to England, 29 March 1830; 20 May 1830. The last incidence of quarantine at Lemon Valley occurred in the early twentieth century. 8 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 7, p. 23. •

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Figure 13:  Lemon Valley. View north, taking in the area occupied by the liberated African depot between 1840 and 1843. The ruins in the foreground are those of Chamberlain’s Cottage; the hospital occupied the surrounding terrace, while the graveyard lay in the now-overgrown area below. The white roof of the former barracks – the focus of the main depot – is visible next to the sea.

block of two rooms and a central corridor was augmented by two smaller ranges that formed a courtyard. The house was converted into a hospital, and also served as depot surgeon George McHenry’s accommodation (replacing the ‘miserable hovel’ in which he had previously been living). A separate latrine and wash house were added to the main building complex, while more tents were erected to provide extra accommodation for patients. It was here, also, that McHenry established a small garden, planting banana, loquat, fig and peach trees, vines, a variety of fruit and vegetables, and even flowers such as Indian lilacs and moon plants. It was, of course, mainly the work of the liberated Africans. Immediately below the house – and in stark juxtaposition with the garden – was the depot’s graveyard. An extension of the existing cemetery for quarantined sailors, it housed the bodies of several hundred recaptives by the time of the depot’s closure in 1843. The influx of recaptives into St Helena from late 1840 quickly revealed the drawbacks of the Lemon Valley depot. It was too narrow and confined to accommodate more than a few hundred people, was difficult to supply because of the distance from Jamestown and the violence of the surf, while •

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Distant Freedom its stream rapidly became polluted. An alternative was sought, and the decision quickly came to rest on Rupert’s Valley. The respective benefits of the two places would be revisited from time to time, but the revival of Lemon Valley was never seen as viable, and from 1844 Rupert’s Valley served as the sole depot on the island.9 Named after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the valley lies immediately north-west of Jamestown, the two separated by the towering ridge of Munden’s Hill. As another lee shore landing place, Rupert’s Valley had been garrisoned since the English first exercised their formal claim to St Helena. Great masonry lines were built at the coast early in the 1700s and a garrison was maintained there into the nineteenth century. At the coast is a broad, shallow-shelving bay that provides an excellent sheltered anchorage. The valley extends 2 km inland from the ocean, becoming ever more constricted as it rises up to meet Deadwood Plain, terminating in steep, vegetation-choked terrain. Although spacious by comparison to Lemon Valley, habitable land is not abundant. The valley floor is commonly less than 100 m wide, giving way to steep hillsides rising to heights of over 400 m. It is bisected by a small stream, which in the 1840s meandered down the entire length of the valley, exiting via a culvert in the fortifications at the bay. The stream bed is usually dry and only runs freely after heavy rain: following particularly severe storms, the valley has historically been prone to destructive flash floods. Rupert’s Valley has always been a less favourable prospect for settlement than nearby James Valley. The climate is essentially the same in both places, but the absence of water in Rupert’s Valley has resulted in a landscape of sparse scrub. It is an open, unattractive place where the lack of trees exposes the visitor to the direct heat of the sun, and where there is little shelter from either the persistent wind or the periodic squally rain showers that sweep through from the island’s interior. The environment of Rupert’s Valley discouraged settlement throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there being many better places to live, and attempts to create a town there in the 1850s and ’60s would also meet with failure. Thus, despite its proximity to James Valley and its populous and elegant colonial town, Rupert’s Valley is a stark contrast and feels a world apart. The mid-nineteenth-century narratives which address the African depot in Rupert’s Valley are almost universally unfavourable, emphasising its unattractive, arid and wind-blown character. Piers Claughton, Bishop of St Helena, described it as ‘a desolate valley running down to the sea between 9 For two such appraisals see Young to Pennell, 29 December 1845; forwarded to Colonial Office in 1849 (CO 247/72). Griffiths to Governor Clarke, 9 September 1850, CSL 30 Vol. 2, No. 98. •

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Life and Death in the Depots bare and bleak hills approached only by a winding path cut in the rock’.10 Similar opinions were transmitted in official reports. Charles Rawlins, for example, who lived there during his tenure as surgeon to the Africans, called it a ‘bleak and dreary spot’ and drew attention to its chill winds and damp environment.11 However, care needs to be taken not to overstate the negative. Other contemporaries considered Rupert’s Valley to be perfectly habitable: the St Helenian author Benjamin Grant – admittedly an apologist for the island as a whole – went as far as to describe Rupert’s Valley as a ‘pleasant and healthy place to live in’, though even he conceded that from a distance the first impression was that of a ‘dreary wilderness’.12 Some people did settle there in the 1860s, and a small community still occupies the mid-valley. A survey of the valley was undertaken in February 1841, which concluded that the existing accommodation at the bay was fit for 148 Africans and an overseer. Unlike Lemon Valley, the space afforded by Rupert’s Valley enabled the entire depot to be sited immediately behind the defensive lines. The most prominent features of the depot were the 11 large wooden tents, put up in 1841, arranged in two rows immediately behind the Lines and each capable of holding about 30 people. Overseers’ quarters occupied the buildings adjacent to the Lines, formerly used as the garrison barracks or as storerooms and magazines. The medical buildings were clustered immediately to the rear of the tents, the main element of which was a narrow, single-storey wooden hospital, measuring approximately 6 m by 60 m. It was divided into three wards with windows occupying the whole of the long sides. Adjacent was a twelfth tent, identical to the others but reserved for convalescing patients. Nearby were a small dispensary and an even smaller ‘dead house’, which served as a mortuary and venue for post-mortems. In later years, another narrow rectangular building was present, this time constructed of stone, standing at a slight remove on the west side of the road leading from the bay. Labelled on a drawing of 1885 simply as ‘No. 1 Building’, the historical records indicate that it was an accommodation block.13 Across the stream from No. 1 Building was a small garden belonging to the depot and devoted to cultivating fruit and 10 Letter of the Bishop of St Helena, 29 December 1859, SPG Papers D8, pp. 691–94. 11 PP 1850 (643) XL, Correspondence relative to Emigration of Labourers from Sierra Leone and St Helena to the West Indies, p. 91. 12 Grant, A Few Notes, p. 9. 13 Local tradition falsely identifies No. 1 Building as a hospital, and stories are also related of slave chains having been found there during renovation work. This seems highly improbable: the report presumably stems from popular notions about the island’s older associations with slavery. •

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Figure 14: Rupert’s Bay, St Helena, 1850. Source: CO 700/St.Helena8a/1. Image courtesy UK National Archives

vegetables. A rectangular enclosure framed by a low stone wall and fringed by trees, it is included on the edge of a drawing of the depot dating to 1858. As a whole, the depot had the capacity for 396 healthy individuals and 140 sick.14 Despite the longevity of the depot in Rupert’s Valley, the facilities created in the early 1840s were never greatly improved or augmented, despite their increasing age and manifest inadequacy. Recommendations for new buildings were periodically forwarded to London, beginning with a proposal (rejected) in 1845 for an enclosed complex comparable to the Queen’s Yard at Freetown.15 A report by the Colonial Engineer in 1851 described the situation thus: The tents are a very temporary construction. When first erected the rough framing of them was covered with old canvas. This covering soon perished and then boards were substituted … These boards are not more than three quarters of an inch in thickness and in consequence are continually cracking from the effects of tropical heat and moisture. 14 Gore Brown to Earl Grey, 5 August 1851, CO 247/77, 8597 St Helena. 15 Young to Pennell, 29 December 1845, CO 247/72; Acting Governor Fraser to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 14 May 1846, CO 247/66. •

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Life and Death in the Depots The report also noted that repairs over the past four years had cost £1,268 and that more money would be required in the future to keep them going. It concluded by stating that, regardless of what was done, ‘twenty four months is a fair estimate of the time they may continue [to be] serviceable’.16 Plans for a new barracks were therefore forwarded to the Colonial Office, comprising an elegant two-storey building with a veranda, wash houses and water closets, sufficient to house 600 people.17 In transmitting this request to Earl Grey (along with an estimate for its cost of £5,818), Governor Gore Brown anticipated its rejection and suggested a cheaper alternative: I am doubtful if you will approve of so great an outlay as the one here proposed, and I venture to suggest, that ready-made iron buildings might be sent out from England at less cost, and would probably answer the purpose quite as well, and be more valuable when they cease to be required for their present use.18

Such pessimism was well founded, as his predecessor had already been informed that: Whilst the extent and the duration of the resort of prize-vessels with Africans to St Helena shall continue so doubtful as at present, the Lords of the Treasury are not prepared to sanction any outlay in constructing permanent barracks, but I should hope that with zeal and intelligence, means might be found of making the labour of the Africans themselves add to the comfort and cleanliness of their houses, at no considerable cost.19

The plans were indeed turned down, though in this instance not unreasonably, as the slave trade to Brazil had collapsed and St Helena had all but ceased to receive new arrivals. However, a near-identical proposal was again rejected in 1857, after a new influx of recaptives into the depot brought about its revival.20 An accompanying survey reported that the tents were infested with termites, while elsewhere roofs leaked and the boilers used for cooking filled the kitchen with smoke.21 By 1861, the tents were described as ‘badly constructed, badly ventilated and long since condemned as unfit for human habitation’.22 The following year, the point was made again: they were ‘in so 16 Melliss to Pennell, 28 July 1851, CO 247/77. 17 Report and estimate, Civil Engineer’s Office, 11 August 1851, CO 247/77. 18 Gore Brown to Earl Grey, 5 August 1851, CO 247/77, 8597 St Helena. 19 Earl Grey to Ross, 17 January 1850; reproduced in PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 121. 20 Plan, elevation and section drawings of this building are found in CO 247/88. 21 Civil Engineers Office, St Helena, 3 November 1857. 22 Melliss to Pennell, 28 June 1861, CO 247/94. •

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Figure 15:  Sketch plan of Rupert’s Bay, 1851. Source: CO 247/77. Image courtesy UK National Archives

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Life and Death in the Depots decayed a state as to be incapable of repair and likely to become uninhabitable if subjected to a continuance of wet and windy weather’.23 Even then they were not replaced, the only significant addition being No. 1 Building. This was one of six new masonry structures that were sanctioned in 1862, intended to house 480 people. Dogged by delays and cost overruns, only one building was finished, in 1865, by which time the Cuban slave trade had all but ended and the depot was virtually empty.24 The contrast between the structures of the African Establishment and the new gaol that was built in upper Rupert’s Valley in 1854 is marked. Designed by the reforming architect Joshua Jebb (whose other works included such notable prisons as Pentonville and Freemantle), the gaol was shipped out to St Helena in prefabricated form. It was an archetype of modern prison architecture in miniature, intended to promote both hygiene and moral improvement. Its cost – running to several thousand pounds – was met locally by a levy on visiting ships.

*** At the outset, it proved almost impossible to find staff to work in the smallpox-ridden station in Lemon Valley. Even the inducement of a £1 daily wage – an extraordinary amount for a labourer – attracted only the dregs of St Helenian society.25 George McHenry corroborated the official comments about this problem, giving a damning portrait of overseers and matrons who were drunkards, wastrels or simply too old to be of any use. According to McHenry, those hired in the months that followed were little better: Mrs Weller was a hypochondriac; John Connolly was a violent and abusive drunk; Robert Seale, the young nephew of the Colonial Secretary, was physically (and perhaps also mentally) disabled, such that he was ‘incapable of rendering the least service’. William Huntley allegedly only signed up at Lemon Valley in the hope that his overbearing wife (whom McHenry compared to Douglas William Jerrold’s creation, the garrulous Mrs Caudle) would accompany him and then contract a fatal disease. She obliged in both respects, her death arousing in McHenry sufficient suspicion for him to perform an autopsy on her body.26 23 Drummond Hay to the Duke of Newcastle, 25 June 1862, CO 247/95, 7606 St Helena Immigration. 24 Memorandum, Colonial Engineer’s Office, 27 June 1864, CSL 27 Vol. 2, p. 172. 25 As set out in Middlemore to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 6 February 1841, CO 247/55, No. 88. 26 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 5, p. 433. •

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Distant Freedom Few of these people had any skills that recommended them as carers for the Africans, having formerly been employed in such professions as soldier, sailor, boatman, glazier and sawyer. Faced with the horrific realities of the depot, several overseers left almost immediately. Another, William Smith, his health already ruined by alcohol, lasted four days aboard the Andorinha before dying. McHenry reserved his worst criticism for the nine ex-slavers from the prize vessel Dous d’Abril, appointed as overseers during March and April 1841. Customs Collector Young had devised this venture, stressing that their employment ‘could be done more economically than by engaging additional others from the island’.27 In his published account, McHenry railed against the appointment of these ‘blood-selling Portuguese’ and expressed the same sentiments in his private letters to the Governor: Miguel Villanova was ‘an exceedingly lazy man’; Joachim de Souza stirred up the Africans against overseer Richard Mallett (one of his few useful members of staff); the worst was an unnamed slaver placed aboard the Andorinha, who had sex with one African ‘girl’ and attempted to rape another.28 This said – and to prove that not all slave ship sailors conformed to their vicious stereotype – two others were deemed useful and industrious. The experiment of employing the Portuguese was brought to an abrupt end at the close of April. By the middle of 1841, the worst of the overseers were laid off and a formal staff structure was put in place. As it had from the outset, overall responsibility for the Establishment rested with the Collector of Customs, while daily management of the depots fell to a superintendent, supported by a group of overseers, storekeepers and cooks. The surgeon – in reality the most influential figure within the depot – was assisted by a dispenser of medicines, hospital dressers and, on occasion, by matrons.29 In the mid-nineteenth century, the matron fulfilled an administrative rather than a medical role. The term was applied to women in charge of children’s homes and workhouses, or those who looked after the domestic affairs of such establishments. The matron of a workhouse was very often the wife of the master, and in this context it is interesting to note that one of those on the 1846 staff list, Margaret Knipe, shares the St Helenian surname of the depot’s clerk and one of the overseers. In an era when the role of women in nursing was brought to the fore of British public consciousness, these matrons are virtually the only women known to have been involved in the 27 Young to Seale, 16 March 1841, CSL 7 Vol. 2, No. 158. 28 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 5, p. 437; Chapter 7, p. 22; McHenry to Young, 21 April 1841, CSL 8, No. 30. 29 The staff list is given in a return of the Establishment dated 1 July 1841 (CSL 9). It comprised 22 men and one woman; seven were at Lemon Valley, 11 at Rupert’s Valley, two at nearby Saddle Cottage and three at Customs House. •

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Life and Death in the Depots care of St Helena’s liberated Africans. They were not a permanent feature of the Establishment, however, and staff lists commonly only record men. Occasionally there are also references to female cooks and attendants, but otherwise it is a story that was written, and portrayed as being dominated, by men. The organisational structure established in 1841 remained in place through to the final closure of the Rupert’s Valley depot in the 1860s. The only alteration of substance concerned its chief officer, the Collector of Customs being relieved of his responsibility for the depot in August 1850, to be replaced by a Superintendent of Liberated Africans. From 1856, after a number of quiet years, this post was abolished, the Senior Commissariat Officer taking charge of the Establishment alongside his other duties. Much like the Collector of Customs before him, this would become a severe burden during the depot’s revival between 1859 and 1862. Most of those employed in the depots were native St Helenians, the exceptions being the more senior figures. The doctors tended to have been born elsewhere, while the first two Superintendents had British naval backgrounds. Unlike at Sierra Leone and other places where recaptives were received, such as Havana, Africans do not appear to have been employed. A good many of the staff served the Establishment for long periods. Collector Young headed it for the whole of the 1840s, while an 1856 staff list includes a number of overseers who had first been employed in the early or mid-1840s.30 James Greenland, hired in 1845, rose to be Chief Overseer in 1863. After the removal of the initial cohort of overseers, the quality of personnel greatly improved. Corruption does not appear to have been a problem, though overseer Robert Gunnell was dismissed in 1843 on suspicion of stealing provisions.31 His larceny ran parallel to other pilfering from the Establishment in its early years, most notably by a group of lascars from the Marine Department, who were convicted of stealing articles from prize vessels: after a sentence of six months’ hard labour these were deported back to Bombay.32 The size of the Establishment continually fluctuated, the staff being employed for only a few days or weeks, as circumstances demanded.33 It was never great, and at its maximum it appears to have stood at about 25 people. A snapshot of the Establishment is given by a staff list of September 1848. At that time the Rupert’s Valley depot was being run by the Colonial Surgeon, who had been drafted in as an emergency measure in late July, 30 Trevelyan to Merivale, 16 February 1856, CO 247/87, 1606 St Helena. 31 Young to Seale, 14 September 1843, CSL 16, p. 33. 32 Mapleton to Seale, 15 July 1841, CSL 8, p. 158. 33 PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 84. •

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Distant Freedom following the arrival of 850 slaves aboard two separate prizes. Also present were a storekeeper and his assistant, 11 overseers (some acting in a secondary capacity as watchmen imposing the quarantine of the valley) and a hospital dresser. At that time a parallel depot in miniature existed offshore on a temporary hospital ship, staffed by a surgeon, dispenser, dresser, four overseers and a cook. With the departure of the emigrant vessel Euphrates imminent, plans to reduce the Establishment were being formulated, such that 11 people would be left to care for the 310 Africans who remained.34 The tendency was for the depot to be undermanned. St Helena’s governors, always under pressure from London, commonly discharged staff at the first quiet moment, only to find the remaining personnel overwhelmed when the next laden prize sailed into James Bay. In 1846, a year during which 900 recaptives had been present at one point, the entire depot was staffed by just 16 people. In June, when there was a temporary lull, it was proposed to reduce this number to six.35 The ratio of staff to recaptives was commonly lower than the initial recommendation, made in June 1840, of one overseer to 20 men, and one matron to every 25 women.36 In 1842, the population of Lemon Valley comprised George McHenry, ‘half a dozen labouring men’ and about 1,000 Africans. This represents an extreme case, but ratios above 1:30 were not uncommon. The wages of the Establishment staff were, for the most part, modest. McHenry, as surgeon and superintendent of the Lemon Valley depot, was paid at the handsome rate of 30 shillings per day, which equated to an annual wage of £547 (a figure which placed him behind only the island’s Governor, Colonial Secretary and Chief Justice in terms of salary). After the break up of the Lemon Valley depot in 1843, however, rates of pay were brought in line with island norms. The doctors were paid the more realistic daily sum of 10 shillings (comparable to a naval surgeon), while overseers earned between 3 and 5 shillings – usually the lower amount. This wage equated to that for semi-skilled manual jobs, such as the plumber’s assistant in the Engineer’s Department and the matron in the Civil Hospital.37 Personnel such as cooks, matrons and messengers earned still less: 2 shillings per day on the staff list of June 1846. 34 ‘List of Persons employed in the Liberated African Establishment under John Young Esquire, Collector of H.M. Customs from the 1st July 1848 to the 25th September 1848’, Colonial Engineer’s Estimates 1840–1852. 35 ‘Nominal return of the Establishment, detailing the emigrants sent to British Guyana aboard the vessels Nerasimo and Standard, and those remaining on government charge’, 3 June 1846, CO 247/66. 36 Young to Middlemore, 11 June 1840, CSL 6 Vol. 2, No. 96. 37 For an example of island pay rates see St Helena Blue Book, 1843, pp. 71–119. •

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Life and Death in the Depots The one exception to this situation was Customs Collector John Young, for whom anti-slavery brought very significant wealth by island standards. His period in charge of the Establishment saw nearly 17,000 recaptives enter St Helena’s depots, for which he was paid 5 shillings ‘head money’ each, alongside a similar rate for arranging their emigration. When the Treasury replaced his per capita fees with a fixed annual salary of £500 in 1848, it triggered a dispute that would drag on for the next decade. Young would demand a total of £3,374 in unpaid fees – a huge sum for a private individual on St Helena that was one and a half times the annual salary of its Governor. In the event, Young was unsuccessful, but his case draws attention to the less obvious costs the Treasury was forced to sustain in relation to St Helena.38 Living in close proximity to their charges, disease was an occupational hazard. In an 1849 report, Dr Vowell described the general prevalence of dysentery amongst the Establishment staff, noting seven recent victims. John Young appended a comment, describing how the reception of a prize, with its filth-covered occupants, posed a particular danger to the staff.39 Given the prevalent sickness, it is perhaps surprising that only two staff actually died: the alcoholic overseer William Smith and decrepit matron Mrs Huntley, both during the first months of the Lemon Valley depot. Nevertheless, the health of some was permanently affected. Overseer Richard Mallett became seriously ill after working with the Lemon Valley Africans and begged funds from the Governor to leave for England. Dispenser McDaniel partially lost the sight of one eye because of ophthalmia. A coxswain in the Marine Department was left unable to work after an accident while delivering supplies by boat to Lemon Bay. In 1856, after ten years in the depot, Charles Rawlins wrote of his impaired health, ‘occasioned by the nature of his services at Rupert’s Valley under a tropical sun among so many hundreds of infected Africans’. He died in July of that year aged 56, his widow petitioning the Secretary of State for a pension that recognised his ‘arduous and troublesome duties connected with the Liberated African Establishment’.40

38 Young’s grievances were set out in a private pamphlet dated 1858: A brief sketch of the treatment received by Mr Young late Collector of Customs, St Helena, at the hands of Her Majesty’s Government, in the form of observations and remarks upon official documents from the Treasury and Colonial Office. Bodleian Library, MSS Eng Misc b441. 39 PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 84. 40 M.J. Rawlins to Lord John Russell, September 1855, CO 247/85. •

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The character of occupation The arrival of a ship that was merely equipped for the slave trade had little impact on Rupert’s Valley. Anchored in James Bay, it would remain there to await trial, dismemberment and auction. The reception of a laden prize, on the other hand, was a defining event for St Helena’s African depots, and one that commonly engendered a humanitarian crisis. Eyewitness accounts from St Helena echo the language of abolitionist texts of the eighteenth century, and contemporary narratives of nineteenthcentury suppression. To an extent also, they fit within a broader literary tradition which extended to contemporary emigrant and convict ships.41 The accounts universally speak of the filth, stench, dense packing and the appalling state of the slaves.42 A description was given by Colonial Engineer John Melliss, who was closely involved with the Rupert’s Valley depot during the 1850s and ’60s: A visit to a fully-freighted slaveship arriving at St. Helena is not easily to be forgotten; a scene so intensified in all that is horrible that it almost defies description. The vessel, scarcely a hundred tons burthen at most, contains perhaps little short of a thousand souls, which have been closely packed, for many weeks together, in the hottest and most polluted of atmospheres. I went on board one of these ships as she cast anchor off Rupert’s Valley in 1861, and the whole deck, as I picked my way from end to end, in order to avoid treading upon them, was thickly strewn with the dead, dying, and starved bodies of what seemed to me to be a species of ape which I had never seen before.43

The experience of the slave ship left an indelible memory for those who witnessed it. Melliss wrote over ten years after the last laden prize had been received on St Helena, while George McHenry published a vivid account of what he experienced two decades after he had left the Lemon Valley depot: A crowd of slaves … may be perceived, squatting, reclining, extended or standing, in all directions … Some exhibit huge scabs, the result of blows, over different parts of the body; or thick crusts, formed from the 41 For example: Emma Christopher, ‘“The Slave Trade is Merciful Compared to This”. Slave Traders, Convict Transportation, and the Abolitionists’, Many Middle Passages: Forced migration and the making of the modern world, ed. Emma Christopher, Cassandra Pybus and Marcus Rediker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 109–28. 42 A discussion of these narratives is given by Wills, Royal Navy and suppression, Chapter 5. 43 Melliss, St Helena, p. 30. •

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Life and Death in the Depots drying of the humours of the craw-craw, a loathsome cutaneous eruption. A few, still able to crawl, may be marked with the incipient pustules of the smallpox; while others are conspicuous from the size of the scorbutic tumours with which they are affected, or hideous and repulsive from the extent of the gangrenous sores eating into their flesh. Among the throng are to be found a few unable to move, from the rack of rheumatism, the stab of pleurisy, or the tortures of a broken bone; or in the last stage of emaciation, oozing out their lives with the constant flux of dysentery; or perhaps just dead.44

Disembarkation was a complex, labour-intensive operation. There was no quay or jetty at either Lemon or Rupert’s Valley, and therefore the recaptives had to be rowed ashore. Pulling boats were at a premium, and it was observed that at times the everyday work in Jamestown harbour came to a standstill as resources were diverted to Rupert’s Bay. The time and effort required to move some of the larger cargoes ashore – on occasion over 800 people – is self-evident. One commentator wrote how the Africans ‘were moved into the boats like bales of goods, apparently without will of their own’, while Melliss’s narrative recorded: miserable, helpless objects being picked up from the deck and handed over the ship’s side, one by one, living, dying, and dead alike … Many died as they passed from the ship to the boat, and, indeed, the work of unloading had to be proceeded with so quickly that there was no time to separate the dead from the living.

In the chaos mistakes were sometimes made: Bishop Claughton described how the overseers could not always tell the living from the dead, relating the story of an African who was wrongly loaded for burial when in fact he was still alive. Although the majority of bodies were immediately removed from the slave ship, some corpses, rendered inaccessible by items such as water casks, could not be retrieved for some days, and continued to rot in the high temperatures below deck. No description, wrote Claughton, could exceed the reality of what he had seen.45 44 George McHenry, Visits to Slave Ships, published as a pamphlet by the BFASS in 1863. The full text is reproduced in Pearson et al., Infernal Traffic, Appendix 1. Other published accounts include that of Edwin Chatfield, St Helena and the Cape of Good Hope or, Incidents in the missionary life of the Rev. James McGregor Bertram of St. Helena (New York: E.H. Fletcher, 1852), pp. 174–76. Henry Matson provided one of many eyewitness descriptions of slave ships by naval personnel, describing the human cargo of one slaver as ‘the most horrible and disgusting heap that could be conceived’: PP 1847–48 (272) XXII, question 1470. 45 Letter of the Bishop of St Helena, 29 December 1859, SPG Papers D8, pp. 691–94. •

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Distant Freedom Once on land, the dead were immediately dispatched for burial and a sorting process begun for the survivors. After an initial parade and examination, the ideal was for the sick to be sent to the hospital building and the remainder to the tents. However, as the Collector of Customs pointed out, this was simply not practical when the depot already housed, or was receiving, a large number of recaptives, ‘the wards being all required, and seldom sufficient for the sick’.46 The examination also served a second purpose, of quantification, determining the number, age and sex of those who had survived the voyage – information required by the Vice-Admiralty Court and necessary for the distribution of ‘head money’ to the naval captors.

*** Contemporary images of the Rupert’s Valley depot almost universally depict it as empty. They show a place devoid of people; the interest of the artist, it seems, was in the structures rather than their occupants. The only known image of the liberated Africans is a photograph of the survivors of a prize to HMS Wrangler, taken in 1861, where they are assembled on the cobbled surface behind the Lines, perhaps at roll call (Figure 16). These pictures of order and quietness chime with written accounts of the depot at certain stages of its existence. On taking up the office of Governor in 1851, Thomas Gore Brown conducted an inspection of Rupert’s Valley, reporting to the Secretary of State that ‘the utmost cleanliness and regularity prevailed throughout’.47 Since Gore Brown was new to the post, and had no reason to put a gloss on his account, this can reasonably be assumed to be a genuine portrayal. Indeed, this situation appears to have prevailed for much of the 1850s, when receptions into the depot were generally low. A similarly positive appraisal was given by Governor Elliott in 1863.48 A visitor writing in The Times in 1858 also described a calm scene, in which some 300 Africans were living in clean accommodation and the hospital stood all but empty.49 Other commentators also described contented scenes of ‘tableau[x] vivant[s]’ in which children played or where the adults competed in rowing races.50 As the depot superintendent informed The Times’ correspondent, however, the arrival of a laden prize had the potential to transform this situation: the 46 PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 75. 47 Gore Brown to Earl Grey, 5 August 1851, CO 247/77, 8597 St Helena. 48 Elliott to the Duke of Newcastle, 25 July 1863, CO 247/97, 8337 St Helena. 49 ‘Captured slaves at St Helena’, The Times, 10 November 1858. 50 John Lefroy, Autobiography of General Sir John Henry Lefroy. Edited by Lady Lefroy and printed for private circulation (1895); the account is given in a letter to his sister Isabella, dated October 1841. See Anonymous, Bird of Passage, pp. 72–73. •

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Figure 16:  ‘View of Rupert’s Valley showing the slave barracoons and a batch of slaves captured by HMS Wrangler in 1861’. Photograph by John Isaac Lilley

state of affairs he observed was unrecognisable from that at the beginning of the year, when there was widespread sickness among the newly arrived slaves, of whom 87 died within the first two weeks. The reception of small, healthy cohorts was usually managed in good order, particularly when the depot was empty or only lightly occupied. Large or sickly prizes were a different matter. As noted above, the Rupert’s Valley depot had capacity for just over 500 people, but it was not uncommon for single ships to carry more than this number, the biggest holding 874. At certain times, prizes also arrived in clusters, as in late 1859 when two vessels brought nearly 1,500 slaves in the space of a month. The records consequently show that the depots were often badly overcrowded. Lemon Valley was overwhelmed as early as March 1841 and by October there were over 1,700 recaptives under government charge.51 In later years, despite the vigorous efforts to empty Rupert’s Valley by means of emigration, the depot was periodically filled far beyond its capacity. This was particularly the case during the second half of the 1840s: 931 were present in January 1846 and 892 in May 1848; March and April 1850 saw 1,270 recaptives in the valley. 51 ‘Estimate of the probable expense that will be incurred … for the maintenance of 1272 Liberated Africans remaining on charge at the termination of the quarter ended 30th September, and also for 444 received on 4th October’, Customs House, 22 October 1841, CO 247/55. •

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Distant Freedom The authorities placed great emphasis on the maintenance of order and a healthy environment. ‘Cleanliness’, wrote Dr Charles Rawlins, ‘is ever inculcated’.52 However, under pressure from such great numbers of recaptives – many of whom were badly ill – and with the minimally staffed, rudimentary facilities at their disposal, the St Helenians simply failed to cope. McHenry provides a stark account of Lemon Valley in 1841, while documents collated and printed for Parliament in 1850 encapsulate the disastrous situation in Rupert’s Valley at the end of the 1840s.53 Here, in the overcrowded confines of the depot, the infectious mingled with the healthy. Supplies of medicine, food and clean water broke down. The Africans died in droves; rats fed on the living and the dead alike while higher in the valley corpses were thrown into shallow holes amidst graveyards that were alleged to ooze with ‘effluvia’. If sheer numbers posed a huge problem, so too did the wild ebb and flow of recaptives passing through the depot. While the depots were regularly filled far beyond their capacity, at other times they housed only a handful of Africans, or stood completely empty. In March 1847, for example, only six people remained in Rupert’s Valley, all of whom were too sick to embark for the West Indies. During the 1850s and 1860s it became more common for the station to be empty, sometimes for several months or, at one stage in 1863–65, for a year and a half. With hindsight, the observable pattern correlates with broader historical events, most notably the rise and fall of the Brazilian and Cuban slave trades, and with the political interventions that variously permitted or denied Royal Navy access to St Helena. However, such a perspective was not possible at the time, leaving the St Helenian authorities with no idea when the next consignment of slaves might appear on the horizon. In busy periods, significant fluctuations occurred at a weekly or even daily rate. The population of Rupert’s Valley was continuously in flux, as can be illustrated by the period between April and June 1848 (Figure 17). On 31 March, there were 214 recaptives present, a number that was augmented throughout May and June by new arrivals captured by HMS Cygnet, Contest, Siren, Bittern and Ferret. On a single day, 15 May, the Contest and Siren brought 713 recaptives to the island. These increases were offset on 8 May and 14 June by the departure of the Zephyr and Rhyn, respectively destined for Berbice and Jamaica. In addition, there was a rotation of people to and from the depot, 32 being taken away to be apprenticed on the island and three being returned from service. Finally, there were three births, but these were far outweighed by deaths: 382 over a period of 91 days. On 30 June, after all 52 Rawlins to Young, 7 August 1849, in PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 104. 53 PP 1850 (643) XL. •

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Figure 17:  Liberated Africans in the Rupert’s Valley depot, 31 March to 30 June 1848.

of these comings and goings and a large number of burials, there were 533 recaptives present in Rupert’s Valley.54 54 To give another example: on 1 July 1846 there were 44 recaptives in the depot; on 24 July a further 548 were received. On 19 August and 17 September, emigrant vessels took away 197 and 157 to the Caribbean, before another 539 slaves arrived two days later. Over this period, five people were apprenticed out of the depot and there were 108 deaths, such that 696 remained on 19 September. •

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Logistics and supply The logistics required to support the Liberated African Establishment were complex and far-reaching. St Helena had an inexhaustible supply of fresh water but its other resources were finite. Moreover, staples such as grain and rice were not grown locally and had to be imported, while all manufactured goods were also brought in from overseas. Given these limitations, the quantities required were daunting. At their peak in late 1841, a quarterly estimate for the depots included 98,000 lb of fresh meat, 92,000 lb of rice, 69,000 lb of biscuit, 300 tons of water, over 1,500 articles of clothing, together with a multitude of sundry items. The projected cost of these items ran to £8,763.55 At quieter times, the requirements were obviously more modest, but nearly always appreciable. Emigrant vessels also had to be equipped, creating a parallel demand to that of the depots. Again, the amounts needed were substantial. Even a vessel of modest size, such as the Salsette, which carried 200 emigrants to Jamaica in 1843, took delivery of 400 blankets and two sets of clothes for every person aboard, in addition to food and water for its six-week voyage.56 During the formative period of the Establishment, the necessary supplies were obtained from a variety of sources – in short, anywhere from which they could be quickly procured. January 1841 therefore found the colony drawing upon the Ordinance and Commissariat stores, private merchants and from captured prizes. After matters normalised, most goods were procured from private contractors, as was common in other aspects of government supply. Only when these standard avenues of supply failed (as, for example, during the Xhosa War of 1846–47, which interrupted deliveries from South Africa) were goods drawn from colonial or naval stores, or requisitioned from passing merchant vessels.57 Local sources were exploited as far as possible. St Helena-raised livestock and fresh vegetables were bought, while slave ship cargoes provided rice, farinha and other foodstuffs, but the greater part of the demand still had to be met from imports. Food came either from or via the Cape, while the scattered references to clothing indicate that most (if not all) was of English manufacture.58 Medicine also came from Britain. 55 ‘Estimate …’, Customs House, 22 October 1841, CO 247/55. At that time, there were 1,700 recaptives in the depots. 56 ‘Return of Liberated Africans embarked per Bark “Salsette”, 28 December 1843’; reported in Trelawney to Secretary of State, 10 February 1844, CO 247/61. 57 Treasury 1440 St Helena, 14 October 1846, CO 247/67. 58 Fragments of either clothing or blankets were found on a number of skeletons from the 2008 excavation. •

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Life and Death in the Depots Advertisements seeking tenders for contracts to supply the Liberated African Establishment were a regular feature in St Helena’s newspapers and gazettes.59 Although the government sought to obtain goods at reasonable prices, there is no doubt that the small clique of merchants who operated on St Helena did very well out of the bargain. The extent of profiteering is not clear, but it is apparent that one of the leading companies, Solomon and Moss, exploited its monopoly over the equipping of emigrant ships.60 Tenders were awarded on the basis of samples or ‘sealed patterns’, which subsequently acted as a benchmark for the quality of the articles concerned, but despite these attempts to ensure good quality, some items do seem to have been substandard. In 1851, for example, Superintendent Griffiths noted that recently issued clothing and blankets were inferior, but that new tenders had provided better samples, while blankets of superior quality were to be procured from England.61 One of his successors had to rebut the accusation that emigrant Africans were clothed with second-hand articles, probably ‘part of the clothing of some deceased seaman’, and that the trousers were made from condemned bread bags from the Commissariat stores.62 In his response he insisted that all items were new, claiming the additional defence that the Africans quickly destroyed their clothes, no matter how expensive the price or substantial the texture. With a six-month lag between the ordering of goods and their arrival from England, the maintenance of adequate stores presented a major challenge. Essentially, a system had to be put in place to sustain a community which at times numbered well over 1,000 people, but at other times fell to almost none – and all this on a remote island where prizes and emigrant vessels came and went on a completely unpredictable schedule. As was observed by an officer of St Helena’s Commissariat: The difficulty … in making requisitions on the mother country, is to arrive at correct data upon which to form an estimate; the service is so 59 In 1852, the Governor stated that he made it an ‘unavoidable rule’ to advertise everything that could be offered to public competition. See Gore Brown to Earl Grey, 24 February 1852, CO 247/79, 3313 St Helena. 60 A schedule dated 14 March 1842 gives a comprehensive list of items and their prices to be provided by John Scott to the Establishment, covering food, clothing, ironmongery, cooking and cleaning equipment, lanterns and candles, basic gardening tools, fabrics, fuel, medicines and stationery. These were considered to have been procured at rates unprecedentedly low for the colony. See CO 247/57. For a later example of an itemised tender list for food, medicines, fuel, clothing and general stores, see the St Helena Herald of 29 November 1855. The matter of Solomon and Moss is found in Murdoch to Elliot, 5 May 1864, CO 247/101, 4192 St Helena. 61 Superintendent’s Office, 11 January 1851, CO 247/76. 62 Willan to Pennell, 18 August 1862, CO 247/95. •

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Distant Freedom uncertain and fluctuating in nature that much must be left to chance, the influx of large numbers of Africans might exhaust the supplies, and expose government to the exaction of the merchants, at no time disposed to be very moderate in their demands, and who would no doubt profit by the occasion …63

The problem was most acute with regard to perishable foodstuffs and medicines, which the Treasury was reluctant to stockpile because of the risk of their going to waste. An overabundance of food was to some extent permissible because it could be put to military use, sold on the open market or returned to Britain.64 Therefore, although the quality of the Africans’ provisions was questioned at times (and, as Chapter Five will show, they were certainly nutritionally deficient), there are no records indicating actual shortages. Medical supplies, on the other hand, had no possibility of resale, and were regularly stocked in insufficient quantities.

Routine and discipline Organisation and discipline were paramount objectives for those in charge of the depots and a rigid daily regime was imposed in both Lemon and Rupert’s Valley. By this means George McHenry congratulated himself on ‘substituting order and quietness for irregularity and clamour’, the tone for each day being set by a roll call: I ordered the overseers and matrons to go round the dwellings of the Africans, and rouse them every morning at six o’clock, and after conducting them in distinct parties to the stream that flows through the valley, to perform their ablutions, to march them all down to the Battery. There they assembled, and arranged themselves in to two long files, composed of males and females; and there the muster was regularly taken, the persons and clothes inspected, the sick separated and conducted to their allotted quarters, and all the eventualities of the last four-and-twenty hours ascertained.65

In Rupert’s Valley, detailed instructions were drawn up for the Superintendent that prescribed the Africans’ daily lives: 63 F.B. Archer to Pennell, 5 August 1851, CO 247/77, 8591 St Helena. 64 8597 St Helena 5 August 1851, Gore Brown to Earl Grey, CO 247/77. 65 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 4, p. 257. The roll call at Rupert’s Valley was observed by The Times’ correspondent in 1858. •

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Life and Death in the Depots The Negroes are to be divided into squads, each overseer to have a particular charge of their clothing, bedding etc, and the Overseer or Matron in charge of each squad is to be held responsible that each Negro is present at muster and that they do not stray away from the Station. The greatest vigilance and attention is to be paid that cleanliness is observed by bathing: clothing to be washed on Tuesdays and changed every Sunday morning. Negro women to be employed in washing and some of the men to be taught cooking. The morning meal to be at 8am and the afternoon meal at 4pm and you will be always be present with the whole of the overseers during the distribution of the food. A selection to be made of intelligent Negroes as assistant overseers of squads and assistant cooks. The whole of the negroes who are healthy are to be employed in cleaning and filling stores and such other light labour as may be required between the breakfast and dinner hour daily.66

Significant emphasis was also placed on the need to keep the liberated Africans fully occupied, this being considered an important preventative of disease.67 Their general engagement with the depot included unpaid work as cooks, orderlies and boatmen, no doubt alongside many other basic labouring jobs including the burial of the dead. Other activities were also encouraged, from fishing to singing and dancing.68 Although the discipline of the depot might be viewed as onerous, the preservation of order was at least attempted through peaceful methods. An instruction was in place that prohibited striking or using force against the Africans and any who disobeyed it were to be brought in front of a magistrate and prosecuted for assault. If the exception proves the rule, then the occasional enquiries into the use of violence would seem to demonstrate that it was obeyed at most times.69 Only twice, in 1861 and 1863, were serious disturbances documented. In the first instance, Rupert’s Valley was reasonably full, holding some 250 recaptives from a prize landed late in the previous year. The situation had been gradually deteriorating, the Africans being described as ‘mutinous and rebellious’; on 17 March, the depot superintendent wrote that they had been 66 ‘Instructions to the Superintendent Liberated African Establishment dated 26 December 1845 to 6 July 1848’, CO 247/72, 9 June 1849. 67 For example: Griffiths to Pennell, 11 January 1851, CO 247/76, 2768/51. 68 Griffiths to Lieutenant Colonel Clarke, Acting Governor, 9 September 1850, CO 247/74. 69 This situation contrasts with that aboard the captured slave vessels as they made their journey to St Helena. Prize crews resorted to considerable violence on occasion, both as a means of self-defence and as a way of keeping order amongst their volatile charges. See Robert Burroughs, ‘Eyes on the Prize’, pp. 102–04. •

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Distant Freedom insubordinate for the entire week, each day leaving the station en masse and going into Jamestown.70 The response appears to have been to lock at least some of them into the barracks at night. On the 24th, the Bishop of St Helena was pelted with stones during a visit to the depot, and on the following day a full-scale riot occurred – events narrated by Assistant Superintendent George Burchill.71 In an apparently planned move, the Africans set on Overseer Greenland with sticks, stones, knives and iron bars, beating him unconscious. Burchill and the other staff succeeded in fleeing the station, leaving the Africans in possession. A contingent of police was dispatched from Jamestown to restore order, and at their appearance most of the ringleaders of the revolt escaped into St Helena’s interior. The few rioters who were captured were placed in stocks to await an unspecified punishment. Burchill interpreted the uprising as an attempt by the Africans to permanently take over the depot, but this seems rather implausible.72 Perhaps more realistically, the attacks stemmed from the recaptives’ resentment of their confinement in the valley and night-time imprisonment. In the immediate aftermath, the depot staffing was increased, and clarification given that self-defence would not be treated as assault. Problems were again reported in September 1863 when the Africans, ‘armed with knives, sticks, iron bolts and other missiles, made a great riot and disturbance, and violently assaulted an overseer named Thomas, who was with much difficulty rescued out of their hands’. The origin of the riot had apparently been the recent appointment as instructor and interpreter of Thomas, to whom the Africans took a great dislike. According to the superintendent’s report, the most prominent actors in this riot were young men who had been selected for enlistment in the 5th West Indian Regiment.73 A detachment of troops was posted in the valley and by the end of the year the depot was again emptied by emigration, thus bringing an end to the problem. But, although the episode was not particularly serious (being dismissed by the Governor as a riot of schoolboys), it was sufficient to discourage plans to replace St Helena’s European garrison with a force of African troops.74 More problematic was the absconsion of Africans from the depots. This caused much inconvenience and, at times when infectious diseases were present amongst the recaptives, was a matter of great concern. Escapes from the Lemon Valley depot started almost immediately. Despite the imposition 70 Commissariat to Janisch, 17 March 1861, CSL 42 Vol. 2, p. 80. 71 Letter of H.J. Bodily, 28 Sept 1863; SPG Papers E13, pp. 431–34. 72 Burchill to Willan, 26 March 1861, CO 247/85. 73 Burchill to Elliott, 22 September 1863, CO 247/98. 74 St Helena Guardian, 10 December 1863. •

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Life and Death in the Depots of quarantine – enforced by a cordon of armed men – the Africans slipped away at night and began to roam the St Helenian interior. One woman was shot in the arm while making her escape. The search for the recaptives usually fell to the overseers of the depot, though they were sometimes aided by other volunteers. Early on, a few St Helenians even made a small living from tracking down loose Africans and returning them to Lemon Valley, as shown by a bill for £2 presented to the Colonial Secretary by Henry Legg and several others for the expenses of ‘securing eleven negroes’.75 Some islanders complained – apparently with good justification – that these wandering bands of Africans were stealing food and other property. McHenry (perhaps expressing racialised assumptions about Africans as natural thieves) described their expert pillaging of fields and farmyards, from which they took vegetables, eggs and poultry – though he was at pains to state that these depredations were the work of just a few. In 1841, wilder reports also circulated of some escapees resorting to highway robbery, but McHenry dismissed the notion as laughable.76 While the opportunity for theft may have prompted some of the recaptives to escape, the motive of many was far more profound. Having arrived at St Helena in the closed hold of a slave ship (and quite possibly lacking the concept of an ocean), many recaptives believed themselves still to be on the African mainland and left the depot in a doomed attempt to find their way home. McHenry commented on this occurrence as, some years later, did Charles Rawlins, the latter describing a case in 1847 where four Africans struck out inland with the intention of reaching Luanda. Rawlins noted that after their true situation had been explained to them, and ‘an example made of the runaways’, the Africans appeared content to stay within the bounds of the Rupert’s Valley depot.77 In reporting this incident, Rawlins expressed the hope that no more would leave the station, but escapes continued on a regular basis. Most breakouts elicited little comment, simply being recorded on the tabulated returns of the depot’s population. A few more remarkable episodes did receive greater attention, either due to their scale or because of a tragic outcome. One example can be found in the correspondence for July 1849, when 43 recently disembarked Africans absconded from Rupert’s Valley. After a week’s search, five were still missing and one of those recovered had been found in a ‘dying state’. The death of escapees was not infrequent, 75 Young to Seale, 31 March 1841, CSL 8, p. 5. The advertisement offering a reward for the capture of an African is reproduced by Jackson, St Helena, p. 263. 76 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 5, p. 437. 77 Rawlins to Young, 30 December 1847, CSL 26 Vol. 2, p. 142. •

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Distant Freedom though the cause – whether illness, accident or suicide – never seems to have been established. In 1848, for instance, the case of four runaways was transmitted to the Governor: three had been fetched back by the overseers in fairly short order, but the body of the fourth was found many days later on an isolated stretch of the island’s northern coast.78 The matter of preventing escapes occupied Collector of Customs John Young for some years – unsurprising given that he was first in line for blame if liberated Africans carried disease to the wider population. In 1845 he made a recommendation to the Governor for new ‘enclosed habitations’ to be built in Rupert’s Valley, modelled on those at Sierra Leone. It was a suggestion he made again in 1849, but nothing was ever done.79 A less ambitious plan, formulated in 1850, was to move all the recaptives to a hulk moored in Rupert’s Bay, but this was likewise never realised. Instead, as in Lemon Valley, it fell to the overseers to watch their charges, occasionally supplemented by the local militia when quarantine was being imposed on the valley. Such measures were totally ineffective, Young reporting to the Governor that the Africans were ‘almost daily in the habit of absconding’.80 And, while the post-1850 correspondence makes only occasional reference to the subject, there is little reason to suppose that the problem ever went away. As a whole, this evidence contradicts, or at least modifies, the portrayals of the recaptives as cheerful and content found in both the official correspondence and published narratives about the Establishment.

The Africans Though commonly portrayed by the British-written historical accounts as a single entity, the liberated African community assembled at St Helena was in fact ethnically and linguistically diverse. Multiple strands of evidence combine to indicate that the recaptives in St Helena’s depots were predominantly from Central and Southeast Africa. This was certainly the conclusion reached at the time by those working in the depots. In the early 1840s, McHenry and Young concurred in the opinion that virtually all of the recaptives had come from the Congo, Angola and Benguela regions, with a lesser number from Mozambique. The exception were 40 ‘natives of the interior’ who had made a journey of three to four months, including over desert, before reaching the African coast. McHenry named their tribe as the ‘Kavoomboo’ and observed some commonality of vocabulary, though he also

78 Young to Pennell, 1 May 1848, CSL 27 Vol. 1, p. 56. 79 Young to Pennell, 23 July 1849, CSL 28 Vol. 2, p. 134. 80 Young to Pennell, 19 April 1850, CSL 30 Vol. 2, p. 165. •

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Life and Death in the Depots noted their inability to communicate with the other liberated Africans.81 Places named Kavumbu exist today in the south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (near Kananga, close to the Angolan border) and in northern Zambia, near to Solwezi. These two Kavumbus are separated by nearly 800 km, and whether either one equates to Kavoomboo is not known. Nevertheless, both are far inland – over 1,200 km in each case – which would certainly fit McHenry’s perception of an interior rather than a coastal people.82 An essentially similar situation, of depots populated by Central and Southeast Africans, was described at later points in the Establishment’s operation, though no other commentators ever took as much interest in the subject as McHenry had done. At the very end, in 1864, a predominance of people from Mozambique and Madagascar was noted – though at this point receptions into Rupert’s Valley were so low that a single cargo was sufficiently great to skew the depot’s composition.83 These assertions about origins are very much in accord with the data from the Vice-Admiralty court, which show that all slave-laden prizes directed to St Helena came from south of the equator, with most captures clustered around the Central African coast. There is a particularly good fit with McHenry’s and Young’s statements, since captures for the period 1840–43 all came from a 900 km tract of coastline from the Congo delta southward, together with a single capture in the open ocean of a vessel from Southeast Africa. In general terms, the St Helenian data also accord with the current view of slave origins and export areas during the mid-nineteenth century. However, it should be remembered that the prevailing naval instructions stipulated that all captures made north of the equator should go to Sierra Leone, as should any vessels which could be tried at mixed commission courts, including those flying Spanish colours. The recaptives at St Helena were, therefore, not representative of the slave trade as a whole, since West Africans and at least a portion of the Spanish-driven exports were absent. Further study may refine our understanding of precisely where they came from. There are a small number of names (approximately 100) that have the potential to be analysed, though this is vastly fewer than the tens of thousands which were recorded at Sierra Leone and will only ever provide a partial snapshot.84 Meanwhile, ongoing research involves the analysis of 81 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 2. 82 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 1, p. 174; Young, Extract from Collector’s report dated July 1841, CO247/58. 83 Letter of the Bishop of St Helena, 28 January 1864, SPG Papers D25c, pp. 251–54. 84 On the analysis of names at Freetown, see Anderson et al., ‘Using African Names to Identify the Origins of Captives in the Transatlantic Slave Trade’. •

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Distant Freedom stable and radiogenic isotopes from the skeletal assemblage excavated from Rupert’s Valley. The results of this research may help assign the skeletal remains from St Helena to groups based on region of origin, and will undoubtedly provide a comparative reference database for the future use of New World archaeologists. The population of St Helena’s depots was not only diverse but also far from the norm of either a native African or New World plantation community. Demographic data for the transatlantic slave trade show that there were fluctuations in age and gender ratios over time, as well as regional variations, but the general overall trend shows that the ratio of females fell markedly from relatively high levels in the seventeenth century, and that the proportion of children under 15 rose in the nineteenth century, with the greatest increase among girls. As a whole, therefore, these analyses indicate that adult males and children were very strongly represented in the nineteenth-century Atlantic slave trade.85 Numerical returns from St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment bear out these broader historical trends. In common with other record-keeping from the depots, the data on this subject are most complete during the 1840s, in this case between the years 1841 and 1848 (Figure 18). These show continual fluctuation of the demographics within the depots, which could change significantly due to the arrival of a new prize or the departure of an emigration ship. Nevertheless, what comes across very strongly is the impression of a young and, to some extent, male-dominated population. Over this eight-year period, men and boys accounted for 57%, so in this respect there was not too great an imbalance, but the youth of the population is striking. Children (usually classified as those under 14) accounted for nearly half of all of those present in the depot. On occasion, this proportion was even higher, most notably in the first quarter of 1842, when out of a total population of 1,229 people, 68% were children (618 boys and 158 girls). Occasional prizes brought in cargos that were dominated by child slaves: HMS Heroine brought one such cargo in 1848, while HMS Plumper brought another in 1854, described as ‘all boys’. In the latter case, 85 David Geggus, ‘Sex Ratio, Age and Ethnicity in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Data from French Shipping and Plantation Records’, Journal of African History 30.1 (1989), pp. 23–44; David Eltis and Stanley Engerman, ‘Fluctuations in the Age and Sex Ratios of Slaves in the Transatlantic Slave Traffic, 1663–1864’, Economic History Review 46 (1993), pp. 308–23; David Eltis and Stanley Engerman, ‘Was the Slave Trade dominated by men?’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23.2 (1992), p. 241; Paul Lovejoy, ‘The Children of Slavery – the transatlantic phase’, Slavery and Abolition 27 (2006), pp. 197–217. Figures for slaves shipped to Cuba between 1811 and 1867 show a ratio of 229 males per 100 females, and a total of 39% children younger than 15. Similar ratios have been observed in cargoes shipped to Brazil during the same time period, but with a slightly higher percentage of children (42%). See Geggus, ‘Sex Ratio, Age and Ethnicity’, p. 24. •

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Figure 18: Age profile of recaptives in St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment, 1841–48 Note: the returns for the quarters ending 30 September 1841, 31 December 1841 and 31 March 1842 placed the division between adult and child at 16 years. All later returns placed this division at 14.

the depot was empty at the time of the slaves’ disembarkation, and for six months thereafter Rupert’s Valley was entirely populated by children.86 Of course, at times the opposite is also found, with populations aged over 14 dominating in 1847 and 1848, while in 1863 a strongly adult male profile was created by the arrival of a prize carrying 371 young men. Although only a small sample (equivalent to the cargo of a modest-sized slave ship), the skeletal assemblage excavated at Rupert’s Valley offers a more detailed insight into the demographic structure of the depots’ population. It is admittedly only a snapshot, but the greater resolution of age categories makes for interesting reading. The basic age profile of the 325 skeletons is consistent with the historical data, both for the nineteenth-century slave trade as a whole and also for St Helena. Sub-adults (classified by osteology as individuals aged under 18) were very well represented, accounting for 54% of the whole assemblage. Within this group, newborn and stillborn babies were almost completely absent (1%) and there were no individuals under a year old. Young children (1–6 years) accounted for 6% of the total assemblage, older children (7–12 years) 32% and adolescents (13–18 years) 15%. Of the adults, 19% of the total assemblage was classified as young adults (19–25 years), 20% as prime adults (26–35 years) and 5% as mature adults 86 Governor Vigors to William Molesworth, 6 November 1855, CO 247/84, 681 St Helena. •

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Distant Freedom (36–45 years). No individual was aged over 46 years. Children’s gender can rarely be determined through osteological analysis, and so the division between boys and girls is not known. Amongst the adults whose gender could be identified, there was a very high proportion of males (84%).87 All the evidence, therefore, points to a community that was dominated by youth. This make-up deviated significantly from that of a normal African society, and from established plantation communities. The nineteenthcentury creole population of Jamaica, for example, did have a strong bias towards the under 15s, but had a normal, tapering age structure above that, which included a reasonable proportion of older people. The modal age range for enslaved African groups in Jamaica during that period (admittedly beginning to be skewed by the post-1807 ban on imports) was between 25 and 45.88 The outcomes of this situation are not directly specified by the contemporary accounts, but from the British perspective they can be reasonably well surmised. Such a youthful community must have been highly dependent, and more malleable and controllable than an older group. It is notable that the only disturbances in Rupert’s Valley occurred when an unusually high proportion of adult males was present. In terms of potential emigrants, the dominance of males was also welcome, but here the bias towards the very young posed a significant difficulty, since – in just the same way as infant plantation slaves – they had no prospect of being immediately useful. On the African side, it is far more difficult to speculate. One thing is certain, however: for all incomers to St Helena’s depots, the experience must have been bewildering, but for the youngest children it must have been utterly incomprehensible. The processes of enslavement and of the slave ship meant that a large number of these children were orphans, and there is a little historical evidence for their adoption by recaptive women – presumably pointing to a far more widespread practice.89 The subject might also be considered in broader anthropological terms, though this would have to be done on a theoretical basis because the historical sources lack sufficient detail. No attempt is made at such analysis here – but the social dynamics of an artificially formed community, dominated by the young and subject to only superficial external control, are potentially fascinating.

87 The demographic analysis of the Rupert’s Valley assemblage is set out in Pearson et al., Infernal Traffic, section 4.3.2. 88 Barry Higman, Slave population and economy in Jamaica, 1807–34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), Chapter 5. 89 For one instance of adoption see Hartley to J.D. Willan (Acting Commissary General and Emigration Agent), March 25, 1863, CO247/97. •

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Language and communication The liberated Africans in St Helena’s depots, gathered from diverse communities and geographical areas, spoke numerous languages. In 1857, Sigismond Koelle identified over 200 languages or dialects amongst the recaptives of Sierra Leone, ranging in origin from Senegal in the north-west to Mozambique in the south-east.90 The variety of languages present in St Helena’s depots was probably more limited, since all prizes sent there were taken south of the equator and, as a consequence, largely carried people speaking Bantu languages. In 1841, Collector Young stated that there were four distinctly separate languages being spoken in the depots, belonging to Congo, Angola, Benguela and Mozambique, and each bearing no relation to the next.91 McHenry identified the same four languages, but contradicted Young on the matter of their mutual unintelligibility. He found some resemblances between the central African ‘dialects’ (particularly numbers), though none between these and the language of Mozambique. Both were, of course, highly flawed analyses, but contained a basic truth about the dominance of central and south-eastern languages, together with an absence of those from the more northerly regions of West Africa. The most detailed examination of the Africans’ languages appeared in a two-page newspaper article in the St Helena Gazette in May 1850, entitled ‘Illustrations of the Congo Language’.92 The author only gave his initials – J.L. – though plausibly he could have been Joseph Lockwood, whose general account of the island was published in the following year. Whatever his identify, it is evident that this person had spent a considerable amount of time in Rupert’s Valley and achieved a decent level of dialogue with some of the recaptives. J.L. admitted only being an amateur linguist, but considered that there were three principal languages amongst the recaptives in the depot at that time: Congolese, Angolan and Benguelan – all of which were intimately connected. According to J.L., the Benguelan language was the most prevalent, while Cabenda and Ambriz ‘jargons’ were also spoken, these being dialects of the Congo. While again a vast oversimplification, J.L.’s work was nevertheless a worthy attempt and holds intrinsic interest, prefiguring not only the publications of Koelle but also those of other pioneering African linguists such as Wilhelm Bleek. As on the slave ship, the different groups of Africans within St Helena’s 90 Sigismund Koelle, Polyglotta Africana, or a comparative vocabulary of nearly three hundred words and phrases, in more than one hundred distinct African languages (London: Church Missionary House, 1854); Peterson, Province of Freedom, p. 237. 91 Young, Extract from Collector’s report dated July 1841, CO247/58. 92 St Helena Gazette, Volume 5 No. 258, 18 May 1850. •

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Distant Freedom depots had only a limited ability to establish a dialogue among themselves. Meanwhile, effective communication between the recaptives and the European staff posed a significant problem. A few of the depot staff evidently learned enough of the various languages spoken among the Africans to achieve some level of dialogue: after three months in Lemon Valley, for example, George McHenry claimed that he was able to converse with recaptives from Benguela, though the new arrivals aboard the Minerva (mainly from the Congo) spoke a language that was unintelligible to him. In general, however, the Europeans had little ability to converse with the recaptives and even educated men who worked in the depot for a number of years in the 1840s and ’50s – for example, doctors Vowell and Rawlins – had little grasp of any of the African languages. The overseers presumably learned enough phrases to issue basic instructions to their charges, though none appear to have gained any great proficiency.93 When given adequate time, the Africans proved rather more adept at learning English, at least to a rudimentary standard. Some became reasonably proficient, as evidenced by the two-way translations undertaken in the depot by ‘J.L.’. However, those present in the depots for just a short time lacked the opportunity to learn and were essentially confined to relations within their own language group. For the most part, communication was achieved through the medium of African translators. These were apparently difficult to come by, and at no stage was the British government prepared to sanction the wages of an interpreter – despite various requests at a local level that it should do so. The presence of anybody with a good command of both English and African languages therefore appears to have been a matter of luck. It was sufficiently rare to draw comment, as for example in 1842, when Governor Trelawney remarked on the good fortune of there being an African interpreter aboard the emigration vessel Mary Hartley, a man he used to inform the recaptives of the benefits of their proceeding on to Guiana.94 This circumstance is somewhat curious, given that liberated Africans were settling on St Helena from 1841 and numbered about 500 by 1850. They should have provided a broad pool of interpreters, but the colonial authorities were apparently unable to draw upon their expertise. Its inability to give them waged employment may have been a factor, but there is also the implication of a separation between the settled receptive community and the newly arrived in Rupert’s Valley. This contrasts with the situation at Freetown, where 93 The Navy’s solution to this problem is seen in the log book of the anti-slavery cruiser HMS Black Joke, which contains a phrase book of basic words and commands. See Wills, Royal Navy and suppression, p. 159. 94 Trelawney to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 16 June 1842, CO 247/57, 1774 St Helena. •

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Life and Death in the Depots established recaptives regularly visited the Queen’s Yard, and there was never a shortage of interpreters to work with the recently liberated. Where interpreters were unavailable, complex dialogue between European and African was impossible. Basic communication in the depots probably mirrored the situation aboard slave ships, where some of the enslaved were said to quickly learn the rudiments of English, as well as speaking to their captors by ‘sign and gesture’.95 However, this was the most superficial dialogue: at one time Governor Gore Brown observed that no communication at all was attempted with the recaptives ‘beyond what is necessary for the most material objects’.96 This language barrier created a fundamental division between the white masters of the depot and their black charges, while also rendering the Africans’ whole experience of St Helena totally bewildering, since their current situation and future prospects could only be explained to them in the most basic terms. At a practical level, the inability of the two groups to communicate severely hampered the running of the Establishment, impacting from the point of reception to the recaptives’ final emigration from the island. Many of the problems relating to discipline, including the most serious uprisings, must partly stem from this situation. The limitations imposed by language were most commonly raised in relation to medical treatment, emigration and religious conversion. These subjects are discussed in later parts of this book, and amply demonstrate both the dearth of interpreters and the hindrances stemming from their absence.

Material culture and cultural expression Although the materiel of the Establishment was predominantly European and utilitarian, there was also considerable retention, and expression of, African culture within the depots. Previous research has suggested that most slaves were naked during the Middle Passage and without personal possessions, due to the physical stripping process at the point of embarkation.97 Evidence from St Helena modifies this view, indicating that some personal possessions were retained after captives were boarded on slave ships. While noting the naked state of most arrivals in Lemon Valley, George McHenry described 95 Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), pp. 276–78. The same occurred aboard prize vessels, naval personnel describing how recaptives relayed their wishes by ‘noise, and signs’. See John Hayes to George Elliott, 6 May 1831, ADM 1/1. 96 Gore Brown to the Duke of Newcastle, 22 February 1854, CO247/83, 3502 St Helena. 97 As discussed by Jerome Handler, ‘The Middle Passage and the Material Culture of Captive Africans’, Slavery and Abolition 30.1 (2009), pp. 1–26. •

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Figure 19:  Copper alloy bracelet, in situ on the wrist of a child (Small Find 54).

Figure 20: Objects of personal adornment from the liberated African graveyards in Rupert’s Valley. Top left – glass bead necklace (Small Find 39); top right – glass bead and cowry shell necklace (Small Find 07); bottom left – ‘galet rouge’ glass bead necklace (Small Find 17).

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Figure 21: Dental modifications present on skeletons from the Rupert’s Valley excavation.

some people who came off the ships ‘ornamented with strings of beads, and coins and pieces of metal, their necks and arms decked with necklaces and bracelets, and with large glittering copper rings around their legs for anklets’.98 The basic truth of this statement is borne out by archaeological finds from the Rupert’s Valley graveyards. Here, a number of artefacts were found which are highly likely to have been brought from Africa, namely a copper alloy bracelet worn by a girl aged ten to 12, a glass bead and cowry shell necklace worn by a mature adult female, a glass bead and horn necklace belonging to two to three-year-old child and a glass bead necklace buried with a mature adult male.99 Such objects accompanied other facets of African cultural expression. If they stripped their captives of possessions, the slavers could not erase the 98 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 3, p. 156. 99 Small Finds SF 54, SF 07, SF 22/23 and SF 17/18. For a discussion of the likely provenance of these objects see Helen MacQuarrie and Andrew Pearson, ‘Prize possessions: Transported Material Culture of the Post-Abolition Enslaved – New Evidence from St Helena’, Slavery and Abolition (2015): http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01 44039X.2015.1077636. This study derives from Helen MacQuarrie, Prize Possessions: Personal adornment from a Liberated African cemetery, St Helena (MPhil dissertation, University of Bristol, 2010). •

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Distant Freedom many body alterations they exhibited, including scarification or cicatrisation, tattooing and dental modification. Other less permanent cultural manifestations, for example customs of dress and hair arrangement, were resurrected by the recaptives after their arrival at the depots. All of these traits are remarked upon in the historical accounts of the depots, Henry Lefroy for example describing ‘teeth cut to sharp points like a shark or an ogre’s’.100 Most are intangible in the archaeological record, but the dental modifications are strongly evidenced in the Rupert’s Valley burials: 115 individuals (over a third of all the excavated skeletons) exhibit some form of alteration achieved by either chipping or filing of the teeth, ranging from simple to quite complex designs.101 Traditional activities were also continued. The Africans were said to be ‘fond of amusements’, and found various ways to fill their time at the depots. Singing and dancing were common, while McHenry described the playing of various games, including one with a ball, and a Mancala-style strategy game. Smoking was also extremely popular amongst both adults and children, with much bartering undertaken in order to obtain tobacco. McHenry noted the smoking of a narcotic root with which he was unfamiliar, but which the Africans called diamba. This was in fact cannabis and the description of it being inhaled, and smoked ‘out of an immense bamboo, with a rattan or reed pipe fixed to it as a mouthpiece’, leaves little doubt as to its identity. The Africans in Lemon Valley obtained the cannabis through barter with St Helena’s lascar boatmen – providing an interesting insight into what might be termed ‘unofficial’ interactions between the recaptives and other members of the island’s society.102 The Africans’ industriousness drew particular attention. Numerous items were made, from aesthetic objects such as metal and glass-bead jewellery, to musical instruments, snuff boxes and utilitarian items ranging from fishing hooks, nets, mats and baskets to straw hats. Much of the scrap iron and copper for these products was scavenged from slave ship timbers delivered to the depot as firewood, but some of the raw material may have been deliberately distributed: it was proposed, for example, that parcels of iron be given to encourage the recaptives in metalwork.103 It is possible that several 100 Lefroy, Autobiography, p. 54. 101 Pearson et al, Infernal Traffic, pp. 63–72. 102 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 2, p. 437. The practice of cannabis smoking amongst native African populations, and its diffusion in the Atlantic world via enslaved and recaptive groups, has been observed by Chris Duvall in ‘Cannabis: An African Biogeography, 1500–1940’, 2012 Conference, Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis. 103 PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 79. •

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Life and Death in the Depots artefacts found during the 2008 excavation represent the end products of this manufacture, notably two iron hoops worn as bracelets, and at least some of the bead jewellery.104 The ‘African’ material culture of the depots – whether brought aboard the slaver or made after landing – was accompanied by social and cultural activities. Once its initial crisis receded, McHenry portrayed the Lemon Valley depot as a place of colour and vibrancy, whose inhabitants engaged not only in games but also in dances and processions – although he admitted that their significance was lost upon him. However, not all interactions were so harmonious. Personal arguments arose frequently, but wider disputes – often dividing on tribal lines – also occurred. McHenry described fights between groups of men that resulted in serious injuries, though no actual fatalities. A couple of other references from the early 1840s note the recaptives’ tendency to coalesce into tribal groups, and the sometimes fractious relationships between these cliques (for example, aboard the emigrant vessel Chieftain), but later records are silent on the subject. Nevertheless, their existence shows the trap set by the majority of sources, which give a false impression of a single, homogenous recaptive ‘community’ within the depots. In the historical record, Lemon Valley comes across as a rather freer environment than Rupert’s Valley. To some extent this may simply be due to the fact that McHenry’s colourful narrative about the former contrasts with the drier official accounts about the latter. However, it was certainly the case that the recaptives in Lemon Valley lived in the depot for a considerable time, some up to a year or more, and this situation might well have allowed for the development of a fledgling society there. By contrast, the turnover in Rupert’s Valley was far swifter, particularly in later years, and more likely to have precluded the formation of any stable community. Its character at most times would have been much closer to that of a refugee camp with a transient population.

Missionary initiatives One of the few aspects of depot life that involved more than superficial interaction between white and black was the evangelising mission to Rupert’s Valley. Here, in contrast to Sierra Leone, where the Church Missionary Society were involved with the recaptives over many decades, efforts to convert St Helena’s liberated Africans were made only in a brief period at the end of the Establishment’s lifetime. After a visit to the island in 1849, Bishop Grey of Cape Town condemned the lack of instruction given to the occupants of Rupert’s Valley, the request for a stipend for a religious teacher 104 Pearson et al., Infernal Traffic, p. 103. •

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Distant Freedom having recently been turned down.105 In a later response to this criticism, Governor Gore Brown was caustic, drawing attention to the practical difficulty of such instruction: I am at a loss to know, how his Lordship arrived at this conclusion, or how he proposes to supply the want when it is remembered that the Africans often come from different places, and do not understand each other’s language, that their stay here seldom exceeds a few weeks, and that no one is able to communicate with them except by signs and a few words often misunderstood. I think it will be admitted that HM government can scarcely be blamed for declining so hopeless a task.106

Nothing appears to have been done, and during the quiet years of the mid-1850s there were too few recaptives for the issue to receive further attention. It took until 1859, prompted by the establishment of St Helena as an independent diocese, that matters were taken in hand. Under the auspices of the new bishop, Piers Claughton, a mission to Rupert’s Valley was set up with the express ambition of teaching the rudiments of Christianity to the recaptives. Initial progress was reported to be good, and after a few months Claughton baptised 537 before their emigration to the West Indies, though he admitted that their grasp of the Gospel was tenuous, describing his converts as ‘almost Christians’.107 Claughton therefore wrote to his counterparts in Trinidad and Jamaica, requesting that the programme of religious instruction be continued after the recaptives’ arrival, in order to prevent his progress being lost.108 Claughton described his method of teaching in a letter to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Having abandoned attempts to purchase a slave ship hulk as a floating church, preaching took place within the depot itself: In one single spot only there are some trees and a small garden, and it is here, under the shade of some green bamboos, that we assemble our scholars, ourselves and the interpreter in the centre, and they seated around us. Our plan is to speak to them in short sentences waiting for each to be interpreted, and then to put questions to them on what we have said. And each time we meet we recapitulate our lesson of the previous 105 Bishop Grey to Earl Grey, 30 March 1849, CO 247/72. 106 Gore Brown to Earl Grey, 5 August 1851, CO 247/77, 8597 St Helena. 107 Letter of the Bishop of St Helena, 29 December 1859, SPG Papers D8, pp. 691–94. 108 Fifteenth annual report of the Church Society, St Helena, 1859–60 (Jamestown: James Elliott, 1860), pp. 11–12. •

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Figure 22: Preaching in Rupert’s Valley. Source: SPG Annual Report for 1867. Image courtesy of the Bodleian Library, Oxford and the United Society

day, one great difficulty in teaching them being their want of memory. It is very striking to watch their countenances, some eager and attentive, a few listless and indifferent (but these generally the weak and sickly in body) then the rapid changes that pass over them, the quick gesture, the word of assent or wonder!109

Optimistic reports continued during the next few years. Reverend Edward Bennett, responsible for the mission, considered the Africans to be eager converts, writing that ‘It is a truly pleasing sight to see these poor benighted souls gather round us when we go down to the Station and many of them seem keen to drink in more eagerly the Words of exhortation which we speak unto them’.110 The youth of the pupils was deemed to make them particularly receptive to the new learning. Claughton continued to authorise baptisms, thus sending liberated Africans to the West Indies ‘either entirely converted and made Christian or at least brought some steps on the way’.111 109 Letter of the Bishop of St Helena, 29 December 1859, SPG Papers D8, pp. 691–94. Claughton included a sketch of the scene, which was later reproduced in the SPG’s annual report for 1867. 110 Letter of E. Bennett, 28 February 1860, SPG Papers E5, pp. 193–95. 111 Letter of the Bishop of St Helena, 27 June 1860, SPG Papers D25c, note 41. •

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Distant Freedom Mass baptisms, sometimes of several hundred people at a time, were carried out through to 1862. One such ceremony was described in a contemporary pamphlet, which although published anonymously was clearly written by an eyewitness to events. The story is told as if narrated to a group of children by their ‘Aunt Ina’. Before the arrival of the bishop, the narrator stated, the St Helenians had looked after the physical well-being of the Africans but had neglected to care for their spirit. The need to bring these people into God’s Temple was manifest and baptism was presented as redeeming the Africans not only from the slavery that had enthralled their bodies, but also from spiritual slavery, their souls being lifted from savagery. Much emphasis was placed on the eager simplicity of the converts, their unfeigned humility and the pure joy of their reception to the Christian faith.112 All this, of course, was the situation as seen from the European perspective. How the Africans perceived the missionary agenda is far less clear, as is the extent to which they genuinely engaged with it. Cracks certainly began to appear in this rosy narrative as early as 1861. During the unsettled period in the depot, the bishop was attacked by stone-throwing recaptives, who had come to associate baptism with compulsory emigration. Moreover, as ‘Aunt Ina’ had noted, the baptism of those who had been taught indirectly through a translator posed a theological difficulty, though ‘wise heads’ – that is to say, Bishop Claughton – had decided that it was permissible. Thomas Welby, successor to Claughton in May 1862, brought a new and critical attitude to the Rupert’s Valley mission. He found the mode of mass, open-air teaching to be most unsatisfactory. In his opinion, few of the Africans derived any benefit from it and they left St Helena ‘almost in the state of heathen ignorance in which they left the coast of Africa’.113 He also rejected the policy of large-scale baptism, on the basis that the ‘half-bewildered condition’ of the recaptives was inappropriate preparation for reception into the Church.114 The matter of translation was a continuing difficulty from late 1860, after the original interpreter left St Helena to take up African missionary work. The problem appeared to be resolved in 1863 by the employment of Jacob Faithful, a former recaptive who was engaged in the depot as a cook. Unfortunately, Faithful did not live up to his name and favourable reports gave way to notice of his dismissal. Far from translating, he had simply been telling the teachers exactly what they wished to hear, giving a false impression of the Africans’ knowledge, when in fact they understood nothing. A replacement was found but was fired shortly after for drunkenness. By that time, in any case, the mission in Rupert’s Valley was winding down, 112 Anonymous, The Baptism of Slaves at St Helena (London: Bell and Dalby, 1862). 113 Letter of the Bishop of St Helena, 27 February 1863, SPG Papers D25c, pp. 247–50. 114 Letter of the Bishop of St Helena, 28 January 1864, SPG Papers D25c, pp. 251–54. •

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Life and Death in the Depots the depot being empty apart from the sick and permanently disabled, who were few. Missionary attention increasingly shifted to the residual liberated African community on St Helena, as is discussed in Chapter Seven.

Death, burial and the graveyards Death was an integral part of the recaptive experience of the depots, and at times occurred in large numbers and on a daily basis. The disposal of such large numbers of dead – about 8,000 people in total between 1840 and the mid 1860s – was a major enterprise, but about which very little was ever written. The official correspondence is heavily weighted towards matters that required political decisions or expenditure, or where enquiries into the performance of the Establishment were deemed necessary. Burial cost nothing, being carried out by the depot staff (presumably with the aid of recaptive labour) and by and large was not problematic. As a consequence, it was rarely deemed worthy of discussion, and never in detail. Instead, it is archaeological evidence which informs us about the process of burial at the depots.115 After their initial failed attempts to dispose of corpses at sea, the St Helenians buried the recaptives in graveyards at both Lemon and Rupert’s Valley. At the time of its closure in late 1843, that in Lemon Valley contained a comparatively small number of burials – just a few hundred – in an area of the valley floor immediately below Chamberlain’s Cottage. The approximate location has been established, but the area is heavily overgrown and no actual graves have been identified. In Rupert’s Valley there were two main burial areas, one 300 m from Rupert’s Bay and the other much further up the valley, 800 m from the coast: it was in the latter graveyard that archaeological excavation took place in 2008. The cartographic, historical and archaeological evidence combines to suggest (though it does not conclusively prove) that the upper graveyard was the original area assigned for burials, and that at some point in the mid- or later 1840s it was closed in favour of a new site nearer to the bay – which had to be extended during the crises at the end of the decade. By the early 1860s, this graveyard had itself ceased to be used and an ad hoc approach to burial was being practised. By that time, most of the ground in the mid- and upper valley that was not in the floodplain or too rocky to dig was occupied by bodies. Parties of men were sent out to prospect for patches of suitable ground, both in Rupert’s Valley and around its margins, mostly without success. The last recorded interments were in January 1860, when the Civil Engineer’s Office wrote to the Colonial Secretary to inform him that ‘two pits to bury dead Africans in have been excavated in Rupert’s Valley about 200m above the old well’. 115 Pearson et al., Infernal Traffic. •

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Distant Freedom This was significantly beyond the limits of the old upper graveyard, over a kilometre from the coast. Management of the graveyards was attempted, as evidenced by the layout of the excavated part, where graves were tightly arranged but never intercutting. As with much else about the Establishment, order within the graveyards was probably maintained at times of relative quiescence, but disintegrated during crises. This comes across most strongly in the documents of the late 1840s, when those working in the depot painted an appalling picture of conditions in the graveyards. Because of the steep slope of the hillsides, terraces had to be constructed, forming a series of irregular platforms retained by crude stone banks. In dry periods, the area would have been bare and dusty, as vegetation was sparse and slow to regenerate; after heavy rain, it became impassably muddy. Rocks fell from the slopes above, rats scavenged the graves and ‘effluvia’, stinking of decay, was alleged to be leaching out of the soil from the decomposing bodies. At such times, the cemeteries must have been a chaotic landscape of collapsing terraces, open graves and spoil heaps. In such a place it is no wonder that so many of the bodies would show signs of a rapid burial.116 The liberated Africans would have had fixed ideas about the proper treatment of the dead, but except in rare circumstances – and just as on the slave ship – they were deprived of the agency to carry it out.117 Instead burial equated to nothing more than the institutional disposal of corpses, undertaken by the depot authorities. This is not necessarily to imply criticism. In a hot climate the bodies represented a serious health threat, and many would have been in an advanced state of decay at the time of burial – above all those retrieved from the slave ship holds: fly pupae (i.e. maggots) were found in ten of the graves, either close to the skeletons or actually within the body cavities, providing direct evidence for this. The layout of bodies found within the excavated graves bears all the hallmarks of rapid interment in a crisis situation. The grave cuts were shallow, the deepest being a metre deep, and some just shallow scrapes covered with a few centimetres of soil. Large rocks remained in many, these having simply been too difficult to remove. In holes that were roughly the dimensions of a standard burial (i.e. six feet by two), fewer than half 116 This evidence was presented in PP 1850 (643) XL. Here again, comparison with St Helena’s more general circumstances is apposite. In 1809, the Christian cemetery in Jamestown was condemned for looking like a common for dogs, while nearly 50 years later the town’s four burial grounds remained a matter of public concern, all being very full and dilapidated. See Gill and Teale, St Helena 500, p. 256; Commissioners of Crown Property to Acting Colonial Secretary, 28 March 1853, CSL 34. 117 Rediker, Slave Ship, pp. 275–76. •

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Figure 23:  Burials in the Rupert’s Valley graveyard.

contained just one body. Of the rest, most contained two or three bodies but a few held between four and seven. Coffins were not normally provided, and although winding sheets are mentioned by the documentary sources, the archaeological evidence indicates that most bodies were put directly into the ground with no shroud or covering. Only a small minority of graves exhibited an orthodox, prone arrangement of the body. More commonly, •

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Distant Freedom corpses appear to have been deposited with a view to maximising the space within each grave – resulting in a variety of ‘arrangements’ in which bodies lay on their front, back or sides. There is nevertheless a little evidence that points to African engagement in the process of burial. Where adults are concerned it is extremely ambiguous, and relates to a few items that began as utilitarian objects but which may have assumed a different significance. Most notable are three iron ship fixings, found buried in close association with the body and appearing to have been deliberately deposited. Each object was quite large and could not have been left in the grave accidentally; rather, their deposit required a conscious decision to carry them almost a kilometre from the bay up to the graveyards. They had no practical function in the grave-digging process and so it can be reasonably inferred that they were placed in the graves as objects of perceived significance – although their meaning cannot be known. Expression of culture is far more apparent in the four burials of stillborn and newborn babies found during the excavation. In marked contrast to virtually all the burials around them, these are distinguished by the apparent care with which the bodies were interred. Each baby was buried in a tiny wooden coffin, one ornamented with a pair of stamped tin coffin plates. Inside the coffin, the complexity of the burial varied, but one in particular was quite elaborate. Here, the baby had been laid carefully with its head resting on a pillow, wearing a cap with a fine net trim and a satin ribbon, and covered by a quilt of red-dyed woollen cloth. Coins covered the baby’s eyes and a single child’s shoe (the left) was placed by its head. At the base of the coffin was a mattress made up of over 9,000 coloured glass beads (Figure 24). As a whole, the cost of the burial was not great, but it would still have been beyond the reach of many in St Helenian society – and certainly beyond that of the liberated Africans. With the exception of the bead mattress, all of the items present in the coffin would have been quite in place in the burial of a well-to-do middleclass English burial of the period. The clothing was designed for wear by a living child and is not in any way unusual, but the presence of the single shoe is much more curious. In north-west Europe the use of a left-footed shoe to ward off bad luck has a long history in local folklore, and thus it may fit with the other Western artefacts within the coffin. However, this tradition is also apparent in nineteenth-century African-American burial practices: six of the 140 burials at the First African Baptist Church cemetery in Philadelphia had a single shoe placed on the coffin lid. There is no such ambiguity about the mattress: although made from European trade beads (as was the other bead jewellery being worn by the recaptives), it clearly belonged to an •

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Figure 24: Coffin belonging to a neonate (Skeleton 381). Cascade diagram, from coffin lid (top) to coffin base (bottom). •

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Distant Freedom African-influenced tradition, and its presence in the coffin provides clear evidence for hybridity of burial rites.118 The death of any child in St Helena’s depots would have been a particular loss because of the extraordinary rarity of live births. During his time in Lemon Valley, McHenry recorded only 18 births; five babies died almost immediately but the remainder survived. Over the same period, he estimated there had been another ten premature labours, in each instance the child being born dead. For the 1840s as a whole (the period over which comprehensive records have survived), the data show that there were only 31 births. From 1850 through to the closure of the Establishment, the records are less complete, but not a single birth is listed in the quarterly returns charting the ‘cause of increase and diminution’ of Africans at the Rupert’s Valley depot.119 Therefore, and although the recaptive population of St Helena was young, the depots were usually completely devoid of babies. The records from St Helena treat the deaths of the liberated Africans in much the same terms as they do their lives, as a numerical and logistical problem, yet the impact of death on the recaptive communities of Lemon and Rupert’s Valley must have been profound and all-pervading.120 The archaeological evidence from the graveyards provides a stark insight into death and burial, but to a great extent it is evidence that is mute. An historical account from the contemporary United States depot at Key West, however, does much to bridge this gap. While undoubtedly a reflection of sentimentalist tropes of motherhood in nineteenth-century Anglo-American writing, it nevertheless offers evidence for African agency in infant burials, and describes the sense of loss that accompanied death amongst the recaptives. Although set in Florida, this narrative would surely apply to any of the liberated African depots across the Atlantic world: Among the Wildfire’s cargo there is a young mother, with a babe about six weeks old. She soon became an object of interest among visitors, and in a very short time both mother and child were suitably and comfortably clad. The babe soon sickened and died – and as we saw the mother bending and weeping, and kissing its inanimate form – wailing in plaintive song, and responded to by numerous mourners around the corpse – we felt that 118 The analyses of the artefacts from this burial, and their interpretation, are presented in Pearson et al, Infernal Traffic, Chapter 5, and are the work of Helen MacQuarrie, Penelope Walton Rogers, Isabella von Holstein, Josie Sheppard and Quita Mould. 119 ‘Census of Liberated Africans received on St Helena, 9 June 1840 to 1 December 1849’, St Helena Blue Book for 1850. 120 For an examination of death in slave society see Vince Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). •

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Life and Death in the Depots love was beyond all conditions of pride or place, and that many might rejoice and be flattered in their self-love, if they would be missed as much as the dead babe was by its mother. It was laid in a handsome coffin, and a procession of 17 went with it to its last abode. Low chantings and loud wails of grief would break forth, and when at last the spot was reached, they became as silent as the narrow house which would contain all the heart prized so much. The little coffin was placed in the grave, each threw in its handful of earth, and amid the deepest sorrow they returned in silence back.121

121 Key of the Gulf, 19 May 1860. •

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chapter five

‘All, all, without avail’ Medicine and the Liberated Africans Medicine and the Liberated Africans

A sickly slave ship was a horror beyond imagination, and the liberated Africans who survived long enough to reach St Helena suffered from the same range of disease that afflicted the millions of other victims of the transatlantic crossing. The medical treatment of these people is central to the history of the island’s Liberated African Establishment: for most recaptives, it was a core part of their experience at the depots; for the colonial authorities, it was a major preoccupation, always at the fore of the correspondence and at times dominating all other subjects. As shown in Chapter Two, arguments in favour of the island’s use as a reception depot rested on grounds of humanity. However, if the purpose of the St Helena experiment was the saving of enslaved Africans from death in the plantations, then it was an apparent failure. In virtually every period when its depots were busy, mortality was extremely high, and the letters of the medical officers convey a strong element of despair: everything had been tried, but all without avail.1 Modern analyses of St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment tend towards portraying the island as a death trap, a place so unsuited to receive freed slaves that its use should never have been contemplated. The reality was far different: it was a healthy place whose environment was much better suited to the rescue of recaptives than most alternatives available to the British. The failure of medical treatment, while undeniable, had different and more complex causes.

1 The quote is from Dr Charles Rawlins, surgeon in Rupert’s Valley 1847–55; PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 93. •

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The disease environment and public health of St Helena Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medico-environmental theories, founded on the link between place and disease, generally held that humans were not suited to being ‘exotics’ in a foreign environment. It was also universally agreed that that the torrid zone, encompassing Africa and the East and West Indies, was deleterious to European constitutions in both physical and moral terms. Tropical regions were synonymous not only with disease as it would be understood in the modern sense, but also with lethargy, effeminacy and decay.2 St Helena is far distant from Europe and lies firmly within the tropical zone. According to received wisdom, therefore, its environment should have been malevolent to settlers and visitors alike. However, from the moment European mariners first set foot on the island it had proved to be precisely the opposite, and for centuries afterwards sailors of many nations successfully recuperated there following arduous voyages in the Indian Ocean. St Helena’s rich natural resources and pleasant climate contributed to its healthiness, but the key factor was the absence of malaria and yellow fever. Although neither the nature of these diseases nor their vectors of transmission were understood at the time, contemporary observers recognised the crucial absence of ‘fevers’ on St Helena, while the island’s isolation also insulated it from other epidemic diseases such as smallpox and measles. The contrast with the West African stations – whose fatal, feverridden character had been demonstrated in front of numerous parliamentary committees – could not have been greater. The unexpectedly benign character of St Helena was the subject of a good deal of comment, for example by Robert Martin in his Statistics of the Colonies of the British Empire.3 The same opinions are found in official correspondence: when forwarding the Blue Book for 1851, for example, Governor Gore Brown informed the Secretary of State for the Colonies that ‘the climate though situated within the tropics … is one of the finest in the world’.4 Contemporary 2 There is a considerable modern literature on tropical medicine and climate. See for example Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment, and British Imperialism in India, 1600–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Karen Kupperman, ‘Fear of hot climates in the Anglo-American colonial experience’, William and Mary Quarterly 41.2 (1984), pp. 213–40. 3 Robert Martin, Statistics of the Colonies of the British Empire in the West Indies, South America, North America, Asia, Austral-Asia, Africa and Europe (London: W.H. Allen, second edition, 1843), p. 521. 4 Gore Brown to Earl Grey, 4 March 1852, CO 247/79, 3316 St Helena. •

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Distant Freedom statistics bore out these observations. The mortality rate among St Helenian civilians was comparable to that in England,5 while annual deaths among the island garrison also matched those for troops stationed in Britain and was significantly lower than in the West and East Indies. The Army Medical Department report of 1840 that presented these latter figures marvelled at this: ‘it could scarcely have been anticipated that under the tropics a situation could be found where the mortality among both the black and the white population did not … exceed that of its native countries … There is no doubt, however, that this is the case in St Helena’.6 Unfortunately, while its underlying environmental conditions were favourable, public health on St Helena left much to be desired. At the assumption of Crown rule, the incoming principal medical officer for the island (no less a man than James Barry) found circumstances in a parlous state. The civil hospital in Jamestown was ‘confused and disgusting’, with sailors, soldiers, prostitutes and animals crowded together in the same wards. In the town itself, an outbreak of dysentery was in progress and many of the women there were afflicted by venereal disease.7 Barry’s brief tenure on St Helena was characteristically turbulent, but by the time he was expelled from the island in 1838 some aspects of the medical establishment (most notably in relation to the supply of medicines) had been improved. A new hospital was finally built to a good standard in 1850, replete with running water, proper toilets, a wash house, heating and a dedicated mortuary. It took a while to get things right, however: blood from the morgue ran into the street for several years until the drainage arrangements were sorted out. Nevertheless, the medical establishment continued to be overwhelmed at times of crisis, not least because its staffing was extremely low throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century: in 1840 it numbered just 12 people, the ratio of qualified doctors to the civilian population being in excess of 1:2,000.8 The basic mortality statistics thus disguise serious public health issues on 5 The Blue Books for St Helena show the island’s death rate to have been 2.1% in 1841, 1.4% in 1851 and 3.3% in 1861. 6 Alexander Tulloch, Statistical Report on the Sickness, Mortality, and Invaliding among the Troops in Western Africa, St. Helena, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Mauritius (London: Clowes and Sons, 1840), p. 4a. The comparative data generated by this and other statistical reports by Major Alexander Tulloch are discussed by Philip Curtin, ‘Epidemiology and the Slave Trade’, Political Science Quarterly 83 (1968), pp. 190–216. 7 Rachel Holmes, The Secret Life of James Barry (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), Chapter 8. 8 By comparison, the ratio of doctors for the settler population of the Cape (excluding the majority blacks) was always better: it ranged between 1:490 (in 1805) and 1:1,226 (in 1865); Harriet Deacon, ‘Introduction: The Cape Doctor in the Nineteenth Century’, in The Cape Doctor in the Nineteenth Century: A social history, ed. Harriet Deacon, Howard Phillips and Elizabeth van Heyningen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), p. 30. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans St Helena, particularly among the poorer elements of its society. Of course, bad health and a low standard of medical treatment afforded to the lower class of a British society was nothing unusual for the period. One has only to read Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (1842) to realise that a St Helenian pauper was probably better off than many of his counterparts in England – particularly those in the rapidly growing industrial cities. Nevertheless, this situation provides an important context for the present study. Throughout the mid-nineteenth century, the liberated African incomers to St Helena were afforded medical care that preoccupied the few doctors on the island and exhausted its meagre supplies of medicines. By contrast, St Helena’s poor were neglected. Take the situation in 1856, when the admission of paupers to the hospital was halted until the parish settled its debts.9 In the same year, George Rowlatt was sent to gaol over his unpaid bill of 13 shillings owed to the hospital.10 Or consider Jacob Peter, who in 1858 wrote a desperate letter to the parish overseer begging for medical aid for his wife, bed-ridden for two months and probably dying: as a day labourer he barely earned a living wage, though he offered what little money he had.11 The voices of ordinary St Helenians rarely invade the historical record and their opinions about the liberated Africans are not articulated: however, given the preferential treatment of the recaptives, it would not be surprising if they were strongly resented.

Disease and mortality In 1849 Dr Charles Rawlins, surgeon in the Rupert’s Valley depot, described the situation facing him in the following terms: The diseases which I found to prevail amongst the Africans during the time of having their medical charge (now 18 months) have been, first, dysentery or macula (as it is termed by the Portuguese), ophthalmia in various forms, bad mouths, chest affections, fevers, ulcers, anarsarca, or general infiltration of serum into the whole of the cellular tissue of the body; diseases of the heart, and genito urinary organs; variolous diseases; African itch, or craw-craw, acute and chronic rheumatism, epilepsy, apoplexy, and various accidents.12

Rawlins’s diagnosis chimes with those of his contemporaries, for example naval surgeon Alexander Bryson, whose 1847 Report on the climate and principal 9 Galbraith and Miller to Pennell, 5 February 1856, CSL 38 Vol. 1. 10 Alexander to Pennell, 6 February 1856, CSL 38 Vol. 1. 11 Peter to Solomon, 21 December 1858, CSL 41 Vol. 1. 12 PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 92. •

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Distant Freedom diseases of the African station systematically discussed the illnesses prevalent among transported slaves, citing the main diseases as dysentery, diarrhoea, ‘fever’, smallpox and ophthalmia.13 Modern analyses broadly agree with these accounts, identifying smallpox, a wide variety of fevers (including yellow fever and malaria), gastrointestinal diseases such as dysentery and diarrhoea, respiratory diseases and ailments arising from malnutrition (including but not exclusively confined to scurvy).14 The lethal effects of dehydration – largely overlooked at the time – are also now recognised.15 Physical trauma, of broken bones, fractures and crushing injuries, arising both from accidents and deliberate violence, were also common. The situation on St Helena broadly conformed to this analysis. Reports from the depots show that dysentery was by far the most prevalent disease, accounting for almost half of hospital admissions and nearly three-quarters of all deaths. Those suffering from ophthalmia also filled the wards. Contagious diseases, including smallpox, measles and influenza, were also periodically present, although as described below, smallpox outbreaks were most common during the period 1840–43 and less frequent thereafter. Equally significant were the contagious diseases that were rarely, or never, 13 Bryson, Report on the climate and principal diseases of the African station, pp. 255–56. Ophthalmia was a nonspecific description used at the time to designate infectious and inflammatory conditions of the eye: these infections were highly contagious and quite often resulted in permanent blindness. Ophthalmia was widely reported on slave ships: on certain occasions, as on the French vessel La Rodeur in 1819, it spread throughout the whole vessel, causing the slaves and the entire crew to go blind. 14 There are numerous discussions of disease and causes of mortality aboard slave ships, among others: Johannes Postma, ‘Mortality in the Dutch slave trade 1675–1795’, in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the economic history of the Atlantic slave trade, ed. Henry Gemery and Jan Hogendorn (New York: Academic, 1975), pp. 239–60; Herbert Klein, The Middle Passage: Comparative studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade (Princeton: University Press, 1978); David Northrup, ‘African Mortality in the Suppression of the Slave Trade: The case of the Bight of Biafra’; Herbert Klein and Stanley Engerman, ‘Slave Mortality on British Ships, 1791–1797’, in Liverpool, the African Slave Trade and Abolition, ed. Roger Anstey and P. Hair (Liverpool: Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1976), pp. 113–25; Joseph Miller, ‘Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade: Statistical evidence on causality’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11.3 (1981), pp. 385–423; David Eltis, ‘Mortality and Voyage Length in the Middle Passage: New Evidence from the Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Economic History 44.2 (1984), pp. 301–8; Richard Steckel and Richard Jensen, ‘New evidence on the causes of slave and crew mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade’, Journal of Economic History 46 (1986), pp. 55–77. A convenient summary of present research is given by Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 130–42. 15 Kenneth Kiple and Brian Higgins, ‘Mortality caused by dehydration during the Middle Passage’, Social Science History 13.4 (1989), pp. 421–37. •

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Figure 25: Pathological evidence. Top left – Skeleton 389: porosity on the palatine process, associated with scurvy; top right – Skeleton 234: healing rib fractures; bottom – Skeleton 211: possible tibial trauma or shackle fracture.

brought into St Helena’s depots. Above all, the symptoms of malaria and yellow fever were never reported by St Helena’s doctors. Venereal disease, while commonly transmitted to women on slave ships, was also rare.16 The skeletal evidence from Rupert’s Valley bears out the documentary sources, at least to a point (Figure 25). In the main it is not particularly informative about the cause of death – unsurprising given that much pathology leaves no osteological trace, including for the main killers aboard a slave ship such as dysentery and smallpox. Indeed, cause of death only seems clear in the case of two older children: musket balls recovered beneath their chest cavities strongly suggest that these individuals had been shot. On the other hand, evidence of trauma in the form of bone fractures is 16 Official inquiries prompted by the high death rate at St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment reiterated this conclusion. See for example Colonial Office to Palmerston, 27 November 1849, with enclosure from Thomas Murdoch and Frederick Rogers to Earl Grey, 25 August, 1849, FO 84/780. •

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Distant Freedom certainly apparent, just over half being found in adult males – precisely the group on whom violence was most likely to be visited. Some of the rib fractures and sharp-force trauma certainly resemble injuries resulting from direct blows. The fracture of the hand of one skeleton also has the look of a defensive injury. Another point of significant interest is the prevalence of scurvy. This was periodically noted by the depots’ doctors, but the extent of its presence was rarely quantified. The osteological evidence suggests that it was extremely common, porous lesions indicating its presence in 20% of all individuals.17 A typical portrait of the circumstances in Rupert’s Valley is given by a tabulated return for June 1849, which for the most part must relate to the 176 survivors landed from the prize vessel Horizonte four weeks earlier (Table 1). At that time, 83 out of a total of 268 people in the depot were hospital patients; 22 people had died that week.18 On this return, as on others, scurvy was not specifically listed among the other diseases – most likely because, of itself, it was not a cause for hospital admission. However, its symptoms were probably manifested in the cases of ‘bad mouth’ recorded in the returns. An essentially similar situation prevailed through to the closure of the depot. A return from January 1863, for example, listed 105 in the hospital, of whom 82 had been admitted out of a combination of diarrhoea and dysentery, with a further 11 suffering from ophthalmia and the remainder from fever or physical trauma.19 The death rate in St Helena’s depots was appalling. A census found that 4,760 of 15,076 liberated Africans received on St Helena between 1840 and the end of 1849 did not survive: average mortality for the decade therefore stood at 31.6%. It was at its very worst at the outset, in chaotic depots ravaged by smallpox and dysentery: during the 18 months following the arrival of the Julia in December 1840, the death rate averaged 36%. Mortality was a little lower at the end of the decade, but at 30% was still catastrophic.20 Figures for the 1850s and 1860s are not so conveniently summarised, but 17 Pearson et al., Infernal Traffic, pp. 93–95 and Table 4.34. 18 ‘Weekly Return of Africans treated at Rupert’s with the Diseases with which they are afflicted … 11 June 1849’, CO 247/72. In addition to the 20 deaths listed in the table, an appended note indicates those of two infants. The death of the patient admitted for rheumatism must surely be misleading: presumably the patient died from a different cause. 19 ‘Weekly return of liberated Africans treated at Rupert’s with the diseases with which they are affected … 31 January 1863’, CO 247/97. 20 ‘Census of Liberated Africans received on St Helena, 9 June 1840 to 1 December 1849’, St Helena Blue Book for 1850. The mortality rate for 1840–42 is given in an enclosure in Trelawney to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1 June 1842, CO247/57, 1271 St Helena. The census is reproduced in Pearson et al., Infernal Traffic, Table 2.1. •

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Table 1: Diseases in the Rupert’s Valley hospital, 2 June 1849 Remaining Admitted Total 26 May (sick) Dysentery

75

Pneumonia

5

Ophthalmia

Febris

Accidents Oedema

Bad Mouth

Rheumatism Total

57

9 4

6

1

1

161

3

14

57

36

10

5

5

1

4

1

76

Discharged Deceased Total 2 June

5

4

6

5

1

164

61

1

0

14

2 2

1

1

20

48 21

0 3

4

4

3

0

83

can nevertheless be extrapolated from the data. Just over 10,000 slaves were landed at the island from 1 January 1850 to August 1863; of these nearly 3,000 died, giving an average mortality for this latter period of 28.8%. The similarity with the 1840s comes as no surprise, since neither the condition of the arriving Africans nor the facilities and medical treatment afforded them had changed to any great extent. In the context of such broad figures, it is important not to generalise. Mortality varied from month to month: ranging between 21% and 35% during 1848–49, for example. Not every slave ship and its human cargo were the same, nor was the medical prognosis necessarily similar. This can be illustrated by a return of the nine prizes brought to the island between April 1847 and June 1848, which shows that while the average mortality among those landed was 20.7%, the survival rate across different vessels was very variable (Table 2).21 For these shipments there seems little correlation between mortality rates and either the ratio of slaves per ton or voyage duration, though wider studies have suggested that both factors may have been influential. Mortality itself was not a linear process. In the normal course of events, a large number of deaths would occur at the point of landing and shortly after, before gradually tailing off in the weeks that followed. The Establish 21 PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 66. Where assigned, the Voyages ID for these vessels are: Felicidade 4657; Louiza 4739; Nereide 3708; Temerario 3713; Princeza Donna Izabel 3714; Josephine 3717. •

161

•

48

•

162

•

6

250

275

495

unknown

6

218

222

491

327

41

567

50

315

No. slaves (landed)

0

15

53

43

90

12

155

25

40

4 months*

27

34

12

14

37

20

21

5

No. died after Voyage time landing, as at to St Helena 13 June 1848 (days)

* Slaves brought to St Helena aboard HMS Hound

Pagaseira

Josephine

Princeza Donna Izabel

Temerario

Nereide

650

Unknown (captor: Hound)

Louiza

60

317

No. slaves (captured)

Rey Bango

Felicidade

Prize

unknown

81

149

128

101

11

162

10

50

Tonnage

-

3.09

1.85

3.87

3.23

4.36

4.01

6.00

6.34

Slaves/Ton

0.0

18.8

38.5

9.5

unknown

39.6

36.6

58.3

13.2

Total mortality (%)

Table 2:  Mortality aboard prizes sent to St Helena, 6 April 1847–4 June 1848

0.0

6.9

23.9

8.7

27.5

29.3

27.3

50.0

12.7

Mortality after landing (%)

Distant Freedom

Medicine and the Liberated Africans ment’s officers stated on several occasions that more recaptives died in the first month than in any subsequent period.22 This can be illustrated by the case of the prize Esperança which, when captured in 1850, carried 679 slaves: 552 survived the 11-day voyage to St Helena, all of them extremely emaciated and described as being in a ‘revolting state’. On arrival at Rupert’s Bay, eight more corpses were taken off the ship and 57 people needed immediate removal to hospital, where seven died that first night. In the period that followed, medical treatment was unavailing: 85 died in the first month after landing, and a further ten the next month. Thus, of the original cohort embarked on the ship at the African coast, one-third had perished.23 Physical evidence for this pattern can be seen in the archaeological findings from Rupert’s Valley. Grave cuts containing multiple bodies were found in clusters, and these are thought to derive from the burial of numerous corpses in the immediate aftermath of a slave ship’s arrival; graves containing just one or two individuals more probably derive from the ‘tailing off’ stage of mortality in the days and weeks that followed.24 Although this pattern was the norm, there were exceptions. A prize taken in the same year as the Esperança (an unnamed brigantine captured by HMS Cyclops) offers one example. She carried 609 slaves when captured, all but three of whom survived to reach St Helena 15 days later. The Africans landed from this vessel were noted as being in a healthy, robust state – drawing favourable comparisons with those from the Esperança. Deaths in the first month numbered 23, but increased to 39 in the month following, mainly from dysentery and pneumonia.25 Total mortality up to the end of the second month was 10% of the original cargo. The mortality pattern of the Cyclops’s prize was sufficiently rare to be remarked upon by the depot’s officers. Such exceptions to the rule must have arisen mainly because of disease contracted not on the slave vessel, but in the depot itself. These deaths, as discussed in the conclusion to this chapter, were the most avoidable. .

The doctors The medical treatment of the liberated Africans on St Helena rested, at any given time, in the hands of just a few doctors. Up to 1855, there was a good deal of continuity in personnel: medical treatment was essentially directed by various combinations of George McHenry (1840–43), C.M. Vowell 22 See for example the comments of Dr Rawlins in PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 104. 23 Griffiths to Clarke, 5 April 1851, CO 247/76, 5793/51. 24 Pearson et al., Infernal Traffic, p. 148 and Figure 6.4. 25 Griffiths to Pennell, 11 January 1851, CO 247/76, 2768/51; Griffiths to Clarke, 5 April 1851, CO 247/76, 5793/51. •

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Distant Freedom (1840–53), Charles Rawlins (1847–55) and Henry Solomon (1840–47). After this point, there was a faster turnover of staff, such that at times it becomes difficult to determine which medical officer was in charge. The lives and background of these doctors are only known in any detail in two instances: George McHenry, in charge of Lemon Valley between 1840 and 1843, and Charles Rawlins, surgeon to the Africans in Rupert’s Valley from 1847 to 1855. A third doctor, Henry Hartley, left a good deal of correspondence relating to his tenure in Rupert’s Valley between 1859 and 1863, though little is known of his career before or after this episode. While other doctors became involved with the Africans, either in Rupert’s Valley or on emigrant ships, few left a record of their work. Most appear British- or Empire-born; their surnames certainly suggest this. The exception is Henry Solomon, Health Officer and surgeon to the Africans in the mid-1840s, who was St Helenian. The colonial medical man was, like many servants of Britain’s empire, an itinerant. Though taught in Europe, their subsequent lives followed trajectories across the globe. George McHenry and Charles Rawlins certainly fit this mould. McHenry was Indian-born, trained in either England or France, and in 1833–34 was an assistant at the General Dispensary, Aldersgate Street, London. Rawlins was another incomer to St Helena. Born in 1799 in an unspecified place in ‘tropical climates’, he had been a student at Kings College London and a medical pupil at Middlesex Hospital, attaining a diploma from the Royal College of Surgeons and a series of favourable testimonials from his teachers, including such eminent figures as Benjamin Collins Brodie. Rawlins’s biography also illustrates the eclectic career of the ‘colonial surgeon’. Having touched briefly at St Helena in 1842 he then served as surgeon on board the emigrant vessel Chieftain. On his return to St Helena, Rawlins became Emigration Agent for Jamaica and Trinidad before finally, in 1847, taking on the position of surgeon to the liberated Africans – a role he kept until his death in 1855. During his time on St Helena he maintained a private practice as well as acting in other capacities beyond the medical sphere: he ran a small farm, gave lectures on agriculture and, in 1853, was dressed down by the Governor for moonlighting as an attorney in the Supreme Court.26 It appears that most of the doctors working in St Helena’s African depots were trained according to the clinical, scientific approach that prevailed in the majority of British universities and teaching hospitals by the 1820s and ’30s. Rawlins presumably received his medical education during the 1820s, and McHenry during the mid-1830s. Henry Hartley probably attended Kings College London in the 1850s. That said, at least one of the St Helenian 26 Rawlins to Edwards, 24 October 1853, CSL 34. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans doctors, Colonial Surgeon Vowell, had been trained by the alternative (and equally acceptable) route of apprenticeship, having been an assistant surgeon in the army for nine years prior to his appointment on St Helena.27 Qualifications, of course, were no guarantee of competence. Depending on the place of study, examinations could be rigorous or so simplistic as to be entirely farcical. The letters MD, therefore, did not distinguish between the good, indifferent and outright bad practitioner.28 Moreover, medical practice on St Helena was unregulated – and would remain so until 1910. Although this was far from anomalous,29 it permitted a situation in which the quality and competence of medical professionals on the island lacked any form of peer-review or audit.30 The high death rate among St Helena’s liberated Africans naturally raises the suspicion of medical incompetence or neglect of duty on the part of the surgeons. This possibility is further highlighted by the periodic accusations of malpractice that were levelled against the Establishment’s doctors, usually at times of high mortality, or when disease had spread from the depots into the island’s wider population. The question, however, is extremely difficult to evaluate. Every accusation made against a doctor was rebutted by counterclaims, making it hard to determine what was fact, and what simply self-protection. Moreover, in the island’s claustrophobic society, 27 To a great extent, this situation mirrors that in South Africa – the colony with which St Helena had the greatest affinity. Here, the overwhelming majority of doctors were European migrants, mostly of British origin, who had passed through English, Scottish or Irish medical schools, although the colony’s former association with the Dutch also resulted in a number of practitioners having trained in Holland or Germany. By 1840, none of the doctors registered to practise in the Cape had trained via apprenticeship. See Howard Phillips, ‘Home Taught for Abroad: The Training of the Cape Doctor, 1807–1910.’, in The Cape Doctor in the Nineteenth Century: A social history, ed. Harriet Deacon, Howard Phillips and Elizabeth van Heyningen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 105–31. 28 A. Youngson, The Scientific Revolution in Victorian Medicine (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979), Chapter 1. 29 The 1858 Medical Act represented the first move towards the uniform regulation of doctors in England. Regulation of the practice of medicine and allied professions in South Africa only began in the 1890s, while India had no medical registration act until the first decade of the twentieth century. Trinidad and Jamaica, by contrast, passed ordinances requiring medical licensing in 1814 and 1833 respectively. See Richard Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves: A medical and demographic history of slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 50–51. 30 An ordinance was in fact drafted on St Helena in 1846 entitled Regulations relating to medical practitioners and apothecaries in this colony but was never passed into law. The draft nevertheless provoked a stir among St Helena’s doctors, who either refused or were unable to produce documentation proving their qualifications. •

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Distant Freedom debate about medical matters often descended into personal antagonism. Rawlins is particularly problematic in this respect: he was an obnoxious man who aggravated virtually everybody and it would not be surprising if those around him sought to contrive his dismissal. In such circumstances, even the incumbent governors admitted that they could not ascertain the truth: Patrick Ross made just that point after an enquiry into Rawlins’s conduct in 1850. The documentary sources are also unhelpful, giving little insight into the practices of individual doctors. The lack of a medical day book (i.e. a record comparable to those compiled by military doctors of the period) is a particular hindrance: no such journal was ever kept for St Helena’s depots, the surgeons there being simply too busy.31 The best that can be said is that no allegation of incompetence against the surgeons was ever upheld. This may, of course, have been simply the outcome of a bureaucracy with a tendency to self-protection, insulating itself from criticism by London. Certainly the fatal confusion between scabies and smallpox in 1841 (discussed below) reflects very badly on the Military Surgeon, but no action was taken against him. Of all the Establishment’s surgeons, only Henry Hartley was dismissed – and this for a spectacular social faux pas committed away from the depot (involving a great deal of alcohol, a senior officer of the St Helena Regiment and a full chamber pot). Even Hartley was regarded with a degree of sympathy, the Governor suggesting that his behaviour owed much to his stressful isolation in Rupert’s Valley. His peers thought him competent, while his letters are those of a diligent, likeable and well-educated man who took his duties extremely seriously.32

Treating disease The treatment of disease in St Helena’s depots fell into three basic categories: medicine, dietetics and nursing care. To these may be added a fourth measure: quarantine, aimed at preventing the spread of contagious disease. In addition, the longer-term treatment of the Africans included efforts to address the ‘moral’ aspects of disease, which today would partially equate to occupational therapy. Early Victorian medicine, though moving towards a more scientific basis, remained firmly rooted in neo-Hippocratic principles. The aetiology 31 On the rejection of the idea of keeping a day book, see Gore Brown to Earl Grey, 5 August 1851, CO 247/77, 8597 St Helena. 32 On Hartley’s dismissal see MacBean to Colonial Secretary, 26 November 1862, CSL 44 Vol. 1; Elliot to Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, 14 January 1864, CO 247/100, 1754 St Helena. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans of disease was poorly understood, while classifications and methods of diagnosis were far from accurate by modern standards. ‘Fever’, for example, was a category that covered numerous diseases, amongst them yellow fever, malaria and typhoid – grouped not only for the purpose of classification but also because practitioners could not always distinguish between them.33 Despite St Helena’s distant setting and the extraordinary circumstances of its depots, the medical treatment afforded to the recaptives mainly conformed to the standard practices of the period. Most of the diseases present in the depots were neither peculiar to Africa nor to the slave trade, being commonly found in both European and other colonial settings. St Helena’s doctors were at pains to point out this orthodoxy in their routine reports and in response to official inquiries. For this reason, many of the treatments administered to the liberated Africans were never specifically outlined: it was simply not thought necessary to detail unremarkable approaches that were being taught in the London hospitals and which could be found in standard medical texts. The same is true of surgical interventions, of which there must have been many: very little is said, beyond the fact that the Africans were reluctant to submit to them. Detailed discussion was largely confined to diseases that occasioned great mortality – above all dysentery. These, not coincidentally, were also the diseases where the doctors departed from their training and attempted treatments that deviated from the norm.34 The pharmaceutical toolkit employed was also quite standard.35 Surviving inventories of medicines from the depots detail the extensive lists of drugs that were available: a list from 1842, for example, includes over 100 items, encompassing wound treatments (e.g. silver nitrate), pain relief (e.g. tincture of opium and henbane extracts) and a variety of purgatives, laxatives and vermicides (e.g. extract of colycinth bark and powdered ipecacuanha bark).36 Also present were items considered at the time to 33 Philip Curtin, ‘Epidemiology and the Slave Trade’, pp. 207–9. 34 This is not atypical. Alexander Bryson’s contemporary text on the diseases of the West Africa station is quite similar: it devoted an entire chapter to the treatment of ‘fever’, the main scourge of naval crews, but spared only a paragraph for dysentery on the grounds that treatment was nearly the same in all parts of the world. Other diseases were similarly ignored, with only some of the more unusual ailments, notably craw-craw and guinea worm receiving brief attention. In the case of craw-craw, the approach advocated by Bryson and that applied on St Helena was precisely the same, namely the application of sulphur ointment. See for example Hartley to Willan, 25 March 1863, CO 247/97, 5287/63. 35 I am extremely grateful to Karen Howell, curator of The Old Operating Theatre, Museum and Herb Garret, Southwark, for her help in analysing these inventories. 36 The most detailed list is found in CSL 14: ‘Return of medicines remaining in store 31st December 1842’. Another inventory of drugs can be found in a list appended •

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Distant Freedom be efficacious, but which are now recognised to be highly dangerous if not actually lethal; the mercury-based compounds, used for venereal disease, or as rubs and dressings, are a prominent example. All the drugs listed would have featured in the pharmacopoeia of the period. The same inventories include stocks of leeches and cupping cases, indicating that phlebotomy was being undertaken. Again, this was quite in keeping with current European practice, as the benefits of bloodletting only began to be widely questioned in the second half of the nineteenth century.37 Surgical equipment comprised knives, syringes, needles and lancets, along with ‘a small case of amputation instruments’. Items such as bandages, lint, splints, hernia trusses and crutches were also present for the treatment and management of physical injuries.

Dysentery Dysentery (in the nineteenth century also termed ‘flux’ or ‘the bloody flux’) refers to a number of disorders marked by inflammation of the intestine, especially the colon, characterised by frequent and fluid diarrhoea, abdominal pain, often with blood and mucus in the faeces. It is most often caused by Shigella (bacillary dysentery; endemic in Europe but epidemic in Africa) and Entamoeba histolytica (amoebic dysentery; endemic in parts of Africa), though it is not known which type afflicted St Helena’s slave trade victims. Both before and after abolition, dysentery was the greatest killer aboard the slave ship, often spreading unchecked in the cramped and insanitary conditions below deck. It was also the largest cause of mortality on the plantations, accounting for as many deaths as all other diseases combined.38 to Trelawney to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 30 May 1842, CO 247/57, 1720 St Helena. The medical supplies required for the 140 Africans embarked on the emigrant ship Mary Hartley in 1841 are set out in CO 247/55. 37 The practice of bloodletting was specifically referred to by Dr Vowell in his report of 1849; PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 82. On the continued popularity of bloodletting into the 1850s see Philip Curtin, Disease and Empire: The Health of European Troops in the Conquest of Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 24–26. Curtin notes, however, that there was a shift away from heavy bleeding by West Africa-based doctors by the 1830s. Naval surgeon Alexander Bryson observed that bloodletting had declined among surgeons in the West Africa Squadron since the 1820s and specifically argued that it should not be applied to slave ship victims because of its fatal consequences. See Report on the Climate and Principal Diseases of the African Station, pp. 235 and 257. 38 R. Hoeppli, Parasitic Diseases in Africa and the Western Hemisphere: Early Documentation and Transmission by the Slave Trade (Basel: Verlag für Recht und Gesellschaft, 1969), pp. 63–64; Klein, Middle Passage, pp. 201 and 234; Eltis, ‘Free and Coerced Migrations’, p. 276; Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, pp. 116 and 209–10. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans The medical officers on St Helena frequently referred to the scourge of dysentery among their patients. George McHenry reported on its widespread devastation in the Lemon Valley depot, where at one time he stated that not more than one person in 12 recovered from a severe attack and even those survivors were at risk of fatal relapses.39 In later years, dysentery remained the principal sickness and cause of death in Rupert’s Valley.40 It was also prevalent among the depot staff: in 1849, for example, the doctor, dispensers, overseers and storekeeper all contracted it within a short space of time.41 Modern treatments for dysentery place emphasis on rehydration, while in more severe cases anti-microbial drugs are employed.42 The nineteenthcentury method was entirely different, focusing on purgative, emetic and astringent medicines. This was an approach of long standing: the treatments administered by eighteenth-century slave ship surgeons, and advocated by contemporary West Indian doctor-authors, for example, were based on the same principles.43 St Helena’s doctors followed this accepted practice, relying on a combination of items such as castor oil, ipecacuanha and acacia, all of which were aimed at accelerating defecation or inducing vomiting. Hindsight shows that they possessed no means by which to combat the bacterial or amoebic cause of dysentery, and their intervention must have done far more harm than good, dehydrating patients at the very time they most needed additional fluid. Such treatments were, inevitably, a failure. In desperation the doctors cast around for new solutions, seeking external advice from those with close experience of the disease, including on one occasion the Head Surgeon of Portuguese Angola. The latter advocated the standard cures of castor oil for dysentery and, for diarrhoea, the administration of ipecacuanha or calomel (mercury chloride, which again has a purgative and cathartic effect). As a last resort for both diseases he suggested using an enema of gunpowder with brandy: such a cure, he admitted, ‘may appear absurd but experience has proved it to be most 39 McHenry and Vowell to Seale, 17 February 1842, CSL 10 Vol. 2. 40 The correspondence in the CO 247 series for the 1840s provides overwhelming evidence for the prevalence of dysentery. See also the reports of doctors Vowell and Rawlins in PP 1850 (643) XL and, for its continued presence in Rupert’s Valley in later years, the reports of Dr Hartley and the Superintendent: CO 247/97 (for 1863). 41 Dr Vowell’s Report, PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 84. 42 Myron Levine, ‘Bacillary Dysentery: Mechanisms and Treatment’, Medical Clinics of North America 66 (1982), pp. 623–38. 43 Kiple and Higgins, ‘Mortality caused by dehydration’, p. 327; Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, p. 210. For examples of eighteenth-century treatises concerning the treatment of dysentery see David Collins, Practical Rules for the Medical Treatment of Slaves (London: J. Barfield, 1811), pp. 247–58; Benjamin Mosely, Observations on the Dysentery of the West– Indies with a new and successful Manner of treating it (London: T. Becket, 1781). •

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Distant Freedom efficacious and for this reason is admitted at the Hospitals in Loando’.44 Rawlins is known to have experimented with each of these approaches, but predictably neither he nor any other surgeon in the depots ever managed to arrest the mortality occasioned by dysentery. Rawlins concluded one discussion of the matter with the following comment: ‘Time and further experience, I trust, with the aid of the Almighty, will eventually enable us to arrive at a more successful mode of treatment’.45 His appeal to a higher power highlights the futility of all medical interventions against this disease in St Helena’s depots.

Smallpox Among the many diseases brought to St Helena by the liberated Africans, it was those of infectious character that caused the greatest consternation to the island’s authorities. Other sickness – while more lethal to the recaptives themselves – had less potential to spread to the depots’ staff or to wreak havoc among the general population. Such diseases included chickenpox, measles and influenza, but crucially neither slaves nor naval crews ever brought yellow fever to the island. Nevertheless, all three of these diseases represented a significant threat to the island since the native population had little immunity to them. In 1807, a measles epidemic caused a great many deaths, and another outbreak in 1843 would kill a lesser number. At the end of the century, an influenza outbreak resulted in the deaths of a significant number of local people – including some long-term liberated African settlers.46 Of all infectious diseases, however, it was smallpox (the variola virus) that was the most prevalent among the liberated Africans. It was also the one with the most fearsome character. Highly virulent, smallpox is characterised by vomiting, pain in the loins, fever and eruptions that spread over the body. The severe form of the disease, Variola major, has an overall mortality rate of 30–35%, leaves many survivors disfigured by severe scarring, commonly on the face, and has other complications including blindness. A milder form 44 Letter from Dr Manuel Marie Rodrigues Bastos, Head Surgeon of the Province of Angola and Member of the Naval Board of Health in Portugal. Enclosure B in Ross to Earl Grey, 12 June 1849, CO 247/72. 45 Dr Rawlins’s Report, PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 93. 46 Hudson Janisch recorded that during the 1807 measles epidemic at least 160 people died during March and April alone, out of a population of approximately 1,600. See Extracts from the St Helena Records and Chronicles of the Cape Commanders (Jamestown: Benjamin Grant, 1908). This figure is substantiated by Alexander Beatson, Tracts Relative to the Island of St. Helena; Written During a Residence of Five Years (London: Nicol and Booth, 1816), Appendix 2. On the later influenza outbreak see Gill and Teale, St Helena 500, p. 317. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans of smallpox, Variola minor, also exists, which kills about 1% of its victims.47 There remains no treatment. The closely packed, filthy slave ship was the ideal place for smallpox to thrive, transmitted via bodily fluids and contaminated objects such as bedding and clothing.48 The disease reached St Helena in late 1840 aboard the Julia and in the 36 months that followed there were nine separate outbreaks in the Lemon Valley depot. At the height of the epidemic, in February and early March 1841, McHenry recorded 340 people suffering from smallpox: based on its prevalence aboard prizes brought from Central Africa, he thought its origin to be in Benguela, though modern research is unable to substantiate this theory.49 After the revival of the Establishment in 1844, smallpox continued to occur among the liberated Africans brought to, and held at, the Rupert’s Valley depot. Outbreaks became markedly less frequent as the decade progressed and the disease was only occasionally reported during later years.50 Perhaps surprisingly, smallpox killed relatively few liberated Africans on St Helena, even during the severe outbreaks of the early 1840s. Exact figures are not given, but McHenry wrote that it only occasioned ‘trifling mortality’ among his charges in Lemon Valley, emphasising instead the lethal effects of dysentery. This might suggest that much of the disease was of the milder form, Variola minor. Its indirect and longer-term impacts were nevertheless deemed significant: McHenry observed that those who survived smallpox were commonly ‘so reduced by it that they easily contracted other diseases, and died in consequence of them, or pined away for months, wretched and melancholy specimens’.51 Nineteenth-century doctors correctly realised that they had no way to cure infectious disease. Their response therefore focused not on medicinal measures but on containment. In England, specialist fever hospitals began to be built from the late eighteenth century onwards, while the isolation 47 On the pathology and epidemiology of smallpox see Donald Hopkins, Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Abbas Behbehani, ‘The smallpox story: Life and death of an old disease’, Microbiological Review 47.4 (1983), pp. 455–509. 48 On smallpox in slave-keeping societies see Sheridan, Doctors and slaves, Chapter 9. 49 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 1, p. 177. Dauril Alden and Joseph Miller identify a smallpox epidemic in Mozambique during the mid-1830s, but report nothing for West or Central Africa during the 1830s or 1840s. See ‘Out of Africa: The Slave Trade and the Transmission of Smallpox to Brazil, 1560–1831’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18.2 (1987), pp. 195–224. 50 It is recorded in 1854, for example, among a group of liberated Africans who had originally been thought fit for emigration. Kenyon to Young, 8 September 1854, CSL 36. 51 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 1, p. 177; Chapter 5, p. 432. •

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Distant Freedom of individual wards was emphasised in the ‘pavilion principle’ of hospital design that was developed during the mid-nineteenth century: wards were deliberately separated and access between them restricted, thus preventing the spread of infection from one to the next.52 On a metropolitan scale, quarantine was attempted – albeit unsuccessfully – as a response to the cholera pandemic in England during the 1830s. On St Helena, the containment of smallpox and other contagious diseases operated on two comparable levels: the prevention of its spread among the Africans, and the imposition of quarantine to keep it from the wider island community. As the following narrative will show, this second level of containment was achieved to a far greater extent than the first. In 1840–41, McHenry adopted a three-way division of patients at the Lemon Valley depot: those who were actively suffering from the disease and were contagious; those who had survived smallpox and were immune; and those who were healthy but, due to the incubation period, might still carry the disease. Each group was assigned to a separate hulk moored in Lemon Bay, patients moved from one vessel to another as their condition changed. Where possible, only those whose smallpox was in remission (i.e. those who could no longer be carriers) were allowed onto land. Later, in mid-1841, a new system was instituted whereby the healthy were sent to Rupert’s Valley and the sick quarantined in the Lemon Valley depot. Both systems, while sound in principle, failed in practice. From a medical standpoint, the main problem was that, with the exception of those who had actually survived smallpox, it was impossible to distinguish those who were healthy from those in whom the disease was latent. In any case, in the chaotic, overcrowded and understaffed depots, the system simply broke down: infected persons were transferred from ship to shore, and from Lemon Valley to Rupert’s Valley, with the inevitable consequence of cross-infection. Time and again, smallpox was eradicated from the depots only to re-emerge among previously healthy cohorts. The containment measures adopted in Rupert’s Valley during later years are not specified. However, given that there was usually a hospital hulk in Rupert’s Bay, it is probable that most smallpox victims were kept there. The effectiveness of this method is not known, but the lack of comment on the subject suggests a reasonable level of success. Although smallpox could not be treated, medical science offered an effective means of prevention. The first method was inoculation or variolation, by which small amounts of the virus were administered, reproducing the disease in a less severe form and conferring immunity. The superior method 52 Jeanne Kisacky, ‘Restructuring isolation: Hospital architecture, medicine and disease prevention’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79.1 (2005), pp. 1–49. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans of vaccination, pioneered by Edward Jenner in 1796, was in widespread use by the early nineteenth century. Ideally, this was achieved by the use of lymph (material containing the vaccinia virus collected from inoculated calves) but the ‘arm-to-arm’ method of transmission could be used when lymph was unavailable, though it was markedly less effective.53 Europeans involved in the suppression of the slave trade were usually vaccinated, and were therefore at relatively little risk from smallpox. Naval personnel, for example, had been protected against the disease since the Napoleonic Wars.54 During the era of the legitimate trade, inoculation or vaccination of slaves prior to embarkation had become common practice, while variolation had been practised in African societies long before its adoption by Europeans.55 In the illegal trade of the nineteenth century, however, vaccination appears to have ceased to be standard practice, as evidenced by the smallpox-laden ships arriving at the New World ports of Cuba and Brazil. Vaccination was practised on St Helena, but it was not compulsory in 1840 and a significant part of the population (mostly the poor) remained vulnerable to smallpox. The arrival of the liberated Africans prompted a major programme of vaccination that had encompassed some 1,200 people by February 1842.56 By 1848, there had been an almost universal adoption of vaccination (a process completed by an ordinance of 1854 which made it compulsory), and by 1863 the disease was unknown on St Helena outside of the depots. The islanders’ fear of smallpox was proportional to this situation. In the early 1840s, its presence among the Africans caused great consternation but by the later part of the decade, with most St Helenians now immune, it became far less of a concern. Attempts were also made inoculate or vaccinate the liberated Africans. It appears that the outmoded method of variolation was employed initially, because Dr McHenry had to be indemnified against a breach of the 53 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in NineteenthCentury India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), Chapter 3; Katherine Foxhall, ‘The Colonial Travels and Travails of Smallpox Vaccine, c. 1820–1840’, in Migration, Health and Ethnicity in the Modern World, ed. Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 83–103. 54 Laurence Brockliss, John Cardwell and Michael Moss, Nelson’s Surgeon: William Beatty, Naval Medicine, and the Battle of Trafalgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 93 and 164. 55 Alden and Miller, ‘Out of Africa’, p. 210; Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves, pp. 252–56; Eugenia Herbert, ‘Smallpox Inoculation in Africa’, Journal of African History 16 (1975), pp. 539–59. 56 Proceedings of a medical board, 7 February 1842; transmitted in Young to Seale, 9 February 1842, CSL 10 Vol. 2. •

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Distant Freedom United Kingdom’s 1840 Vaccination Act, which prohibited this technique. In subsequent years, vaccination became the norm. When supplies permitted, significant numbers of recaptives were vaccinated: for example, 142 people in the six weeks up to 11 January 1851.57 However, a consistent, comprehensive programme of vaccination was never achieved, being stymied by the availability of lymph. Its perishable nature made it difficult to maintain stockpiles and new supplies all had to be imported – usually from Britain but sometimes from the Cape. The vaccine crusts or sealed tubes of lymph were many months old by the time they reached St Helena; they travelled badly and were often found to be inert.58 Regular complaints that the lymph had spoiled are present in the correspondence, as for example in 1855, 1859 and 1863. In the latter year, Dr Hartley gave a telling summary of the situation to the Acting Commissary General, stating that ‘all the medical men [of the island] will tell you how difficult it is to maintain a constant supply, in fact it has never been done’.59 As a consequence, the depots rarely had an adequate quantity of effective lymph, and even when a reasonable stock existed it could be exhausted by the arrival of a single prize. The arm-to-arm method of vaccination was used as a fallback, but was generally found to be unsatisfactory. It was therefore common for recaptives to remain unprotected from smallpox while in the depots, and for a significant number to be loaded onto emigrant ships without having first been vaccinated.

Quarantine The separation of the African depots from the rest of St Helena represented a second level of disease containment. Quarantine in Jamestown harbour had been an obsession long before the liberated Africans’ arrival because, like any isolated community, the island’s population was vulnerable to epidemic disease. The possibility of introduction was countered by a regime of inspection and, where necessary, the quarantine of arriving vessels. Slave prizes and warships of the naval patrol nevertheless represented a new and very serious health threat. The St Helenians were well aware of outbreaks on other Atlantic islands associated with the West Africa Squadron, whose contact with the lethal diseases of the African coast gave rise to great concern. HMS Bann had carried epidemic fever to the Ascension Island 57 For the 1851 figure see Griffiths to Pennell, 11 January 1851, CO 247/76, 2768/51. An example of the tabulated return of numbers vaccinated can be found in ‘Weekly state of Liberated Africans under charge’, 26 June 1858, CO 247/90, 7501 St Helena. 58 This mirrors the situation in India, where much vaccine was imported from England until the 1890s. See Arnold, Colonising the Body, pp. 139–40. 59 Hartley to Swan, 25 March 1863, CO 247/97 (emphasis added). •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans garrison in 1823, while the disaster on Fernando Po in 1829–30 was recent history. In 1845, HMS Eclair would trigger another epidemic on Madeira.60 The depots at Lemon Valley and Rupert’s Valley were both deliberately chosen for their isolation, and in 1840 procedures were quickly put in place to prevent the spread of contagion from the recaptives to the St Helenian population. After landing, the liberated Africans were quarantined for a period of six weeks, by which time it was judged that any epidemic among them would have run its course. Less stringent measures were applied to naval prize crews. On arrival at St Helena, all personnel were examined by a medical board; if there was any risk that they had been in contact with a transmissible disease a brief period of quarantine was imposed – usually lasting two weeks. Even this incarceration was a cause of considerable complaint, not least from the very first prize crews in 1840 and 1841: after many days navigating the stinking vessel Julia to St Helena, James Wilcox of the Waterwitch found himself spending a fortnight among the Africans in the appalling conditions of Lemon Valley. He was then dispatched to the bleak rock that was Egg Island (‘what a disgusting place you have consigned me’) and subsequently to nearby Old Woman’s Valley. Here he broiled by day, froze by night and was forced to burn his clothes before being admitted into Jamestown.61 Later prize crews served their whole quarantine in the main depots. This system of quarantine remained in place over the lifetime of the Establishment, though it only operated when contagious diseases were present. At other times, movement in and out of the depots was less restricted. The system was flawed in a number of important respects however. First, its fundamental principle was unsound. Contagious diseases have short incubation periods (that of smallpox is 12 days) but can take many months to run through any given population. Segregation of the healthy and sick at the depots commonly broke down, and Africans near the end of their quarantine period could just as easily contract smallpox as those who had recently arrived. Only those who had survived the disease could truly be considered as safe. Secondly, quarantine was neither rigorously nor comprehensively maintained. As noted in Chapter Four, the Africans regularly absconded from the depots, even when armed guards were posted to prevent them from doing so. Recent arrivals, potentially carrying disease, roamed the island and came into contact with its inhabitants. The Europeans were equally guilty of flaunting the quarantine process. A degree of contact between Jamestown and the depots was inevitable because of the need to deliver supplies but, 60 These incidences are narrated by Bryson, Report on the climate and principal diseases of the African station, pp. 36–38 and 179–94. 61 Wilcox to Seale, 28 December 1840, CSL 7 Vol. 1, No. 77. •

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Distant Freedom despite instructions to the contrary, people came and went far more than was necessary. Dr McHenry – himself sequestered for the best part of six months with his African charges – complained of numerous breaches of quarantine by others during 1841. The Colonial Surgeon, for instance, attended the sick at Lemon Valley on a regular basis but, far from imposing any quarantine upon himself, would return home the same day. Similarly, the military engineers garrisoning Banks Battery commuted there from Jamestown via a coastal path that cut straight through the smallpox-infested depot at Rupert’s Valley.62 Matters were little better in Jamestown harbour, where slave prizes would anchor initially. The port staff – already overworked by the demands of the existing merchant traffic – struggled to cope with the additional slave ships and naval cruisers. The situation was made worse by the abolition of the post of Health Officer in 1845, which was combined with that of the (medically unqualified) harbour master as a cost-cutting measure.63 As a consequence, inspection and quarantine procedures were improperly enforced and poor decisions made, allowing a dangerous level of contact between Jamestown and potentially contagious ships. The incident of the slave ship Corisco, brought into Jamestown harbour in August 1841, was one early instance of failed quarantine. After a misdiagnosis on the part of the Military Surgeon, confusing smallpox for scabies, the Africans were allowed to disembark and local boatmen started working on the ship. This led to an outbreak of smallpox among the town’s inhabitants, during which several died and others were permanently blinded. Some sufferers found themselves quarantined alongside the liberated Africans aboard the hospital ship in Lemon Bay. The Corisco itself was left in James Bay, where her occupants remained unattended for two weeks, ‘a floating lazaretto abandoned to the destruction of a ruthless malady’.64 Further violations of quarantine provoked petitions to the Governor in 1843, in this case because of an outbreak of measles that allegedly originated in the Lemon Valley depot (but in fact probably did not).65 Lessons do not appear 62 McHenry to Seale, 2 September 1843; Letter No. 13 appended to Memorial of George McHenry, CO 247/59, 907 St Helena. 63 Trelawney to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 4 September 1843, CO 247/59, 1628 St Helena. 64 The mistaken diagnoses are reported in Vowell to Seale, 29 July and 15 August 1841, CSL 9. The outcomes are described by McHenry, whose published and private correspondence was equally damning of the Military Surgeon. See McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 8, 136; see also McHenry’s memorial to the Secretary of State (note 62 above). 65 Mason and Kennedy to Seale, 7 August 1843, CSL 15 Vol. 2, p. 310; McHenry to Seale, 9 August 1843, CSL 15 Vol. 2, p. 336. Other correspondence on this subject is •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans to have been learned, as the islanders continued to complain about the authorities’ failure to apply port procedures throughout the middle of the century.66 Considering these circumstances, it is remarkable that, during the three decades of its African Establishment, St Helena suffered no serious or widespread outbreak of epidemic disease. Given the level of incompetence in managing quarantine, this owed a good deal to the success of vaccination against smallpox. It also owed much to luck.

Diet Alongside those killed by disease and violence, numerous victims of the slave ships died from a simple lack of food. The severely malnourished state of recaptives was a consistent theme in narratives of suppression: commentators on St Helena wrote of human skeletons, of a ‘wasted appearance’ and of ‘arms and legs worn down to about the size of a walking stick’. Naval officers made many similar observations. In 1819, Lt Digby Marsh, for example, recorded the weights of two slaves from a Portuguese schooner as 64 lb and 81 lb, and that of a 14-year-old boy as 45 lb; others were too sick to even be weighed.67 Modern studies emphasise the role of inadequate provisions in Middle Passage mortality, particularly near the end of lengthy voyages.68 In addition to its inherent destructiveness, malnutrition also rendered the survivors of the slave ship more susceptible to pathogenic invasion. Another outcome was the development of scurvy, prevalent in the slave trade as a whole and commonly noted among the liberated Africans at St Helena’s depots. Its physical symptoms include tiredness, lethargy and pain in the limbs, while bleeding into the joints (particularly the major joints of the leg) causes swelling and severe discomfort. As the illness progresses, the gums also swell, ultimately leading to the loss of teeth. While it does not kill directly, scurvy degrades the immune system, leaving the victim exposed to other lethal diseases.69 As Kiple and Kiple point out, a background of malnutrition among communities in Africa was exacerbated by the appended to the Memorial of George McHenry, CO 247/59, 907 St Helena (Letter Nos. 6, 7 and 8). 66 See for example the islanders’ representation to Governor Ross; Ross to Earl Grey, 17 February 1847, CO 247/68, 829 St Helena. 67 Wills, Royal Navy and the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, pp. 154–55. 68 Raymond Cohen and Richard Jensen, ‘The Determinants of Slave Mortality rates in the Middle Passage’, Explorations in Economic History 19 (1982), pp. 269–82. 69 G. Maat, ‘Scurvy in adults and youngsters: The Dutch experience. A review of the history and pathology of a disregarded disease’, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 14 (2004), pp. 77–81. •

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Distant Freedom disastrous nutritional circumstances of the Middle Passage.70 The onset of scurvy must also have begun in Africa, since body stores of vitamin C last about three months and most prizes brought to St Helena had only been at sea for a few weeks.71 The situation found in St Helena’s depots therefore closely accords with the analysis of Joseph Miller, who emphasises the contribution of adverse African conditions to deaths occurring early on in Middle Passage voyages and also draws attention to the prevalence of scurvy in the South Atlantic slave trade.72 The recovery of the slaves from their malnourished and sometimes scorbutic condition was a crucial element of their treatment on St Helena. Indeed, given the limitations of contemporary medicine and surgical techniques, it was arguably the key way by which the Africans might be saved. Alexander Bryson made just that point in his discussion of diseases among slaves taken on prizes by the Royal Navy, stating that ‘proper diet both as a means of prevention and cure, is of much more importance than medicine’.73 By the Victorian Age, the means of combatting scurvy, through the provision of fresh vegetables and anti-scorbutics such as limes, were long established.74 St Helena’s economy relied on selling such goods to passing vessels: fresh fruit and vegetables abounded in its market garden ‘plantations’. By contrast, the methods by which malnutrition could be addressed were understood to a far lesser extent: study of this problem only came to the fore in the mid-twentieth century, continuing to the present day, when malnutrition has come to dominate world health agendas. Even so, the 1840s was not a time of complete ignorance. The starvation of millions in Ireland brought the subject of their diet to governmental and public attention, and such immediate concerns ran parallel to the longer-standing question of the nutrition of the poor – an issue connected with philanthropic and social-reforming agendas.75 The initial feeding of the liberated Africans on St Helena – in keeping 70 Kenneth Kiple and Virginia Kiple, ‘Deficiency diseases in the Caribbean’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 11.2 (1980), pp. 199–200. 71 Robert Hodges, James Hood, John Canham, Howerde Sauberlich and Eugene Baker, ‘Clinical manifestations of ascorbic acid deficiency in man’, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 24 (1971), pp. 432–43. 72 Miller, ‘Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade’. 73 Bryson, Report on the Climate and Principal Diseases of the African Station, p. 257. 74 David Harvie, Limeys: The conquest of scurvy (Stroud: Sutton, 2002). 75 Amongst others, this was a subject investigated by the flamboyant culinarian Alexis Soyer, on the basis of his experience in both Ireland and the Crimea. His diet scales for the poor were first published in 1847 and focused on cheap but balanced diets where animal products were not greatly used and waste was kept to a minimum. See Ruth Cowan, Relish: The Extraordinary Life of Alexis Soyer, Victorian Celebrity Chef (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006). •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans with so many other aspects of their care – was chaotic. The arrival of the Julia in December 1840 occasioned a search for food – any food – that might be given to the new arrivals, the initial recourse being the stores on the prize vessel itself, comprising farinha (cassava-based flour), jerked beef and beans. Its distribution and preparation was haphazard, being served to the Africans cooked or raw, without any attempt to regulate the quantities or frequency at which it was given. The recaptives were accused of rejecting much of it, and would be again, with large quantities of soup and rice going to waste.76 The lethal consequences of this indigestible diet quickly came to the fore, McHenry observing how the salt pork ‘operates like castor oil, and brings on purging and dysentery’.77 The poor diet also impacted over the slightly longer term, as by April of 1841 both McHenry and his counterpart in Rupert’s Valley reported outbreaks of scurvy among their charges. Each doctor asked that the salted foods be partly substituted for fresh provisions at least three times a week, while McHenry also resorted to dispatching the Africans higher up into Lemon Valley to collect watercress. In response to this crisis, some minor improvements were made, including the addition of limited quantities of fresh meat and vegetables. And, once the depots’ operation was regularised, the issue of diet was given more consideration. While food continued to be drawn from prize vessels and government stores, it also began to be procured under contract from local merchants; cooks were appointed to the depots and meals were issued at prescribed intervals. Rigid diet scales were also devised. That in use in early 1842 consisted of biscuits, rice, salted and fresh meat, though the latter was subsequently removed on grounds of expense.78 Over the years a series of other diet scales were experimented with, though all were essentially variations on the same theme, being based on a combination of rice, farinha, biscuit, bread and salted meat or fish, together with small allowances of items including coffee, sugar and chillies (Table 3). Fresh meat and vegetables were just an occasional part of the weekly diet, and at certain periods the diet scale only allowed for these to be given to the sick and convalescent (for example, in 1849). The healthy were often fed entirely on salted provisions or, at best, enjoyed fresh produce as a minor element of their diet. By modern standards, particularly as applied to disaster situations, the diet of the liberated Africans’ would be considered highly inappropriate, 76 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 4, p. 256. 77 McHenry to Young, 24 April 1841, CSL 8, No. 34; Solomon to Young, 28 April 1841, CSL 8, No. 35. 78 Responses to a questionnaire by Dr McHenry, contained in ‘Extract of report from Mr Rothery dated 3rd May 1842’, CO 247/58. •

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Table 3: Diet scales Table drawn up on 8 June 1849; reproduced in PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 90. Articles of diet

Scale of Dr McHenry, up to 31 March 1844

Scale of Dr Solomon, up to July 1847

Ration: children under 14 years receive half ration

Ration: children under 14 years receive Half ration

Rice

1½ lb, Mo, Th, Fri

½ lb daily

Biscuit

1½ lb Wed, Sun

½ lb daily

Salted beef

¼ lb Wed, Sat

Farinha

Salt Fish

Salted pork Potatoes

1½ lb Tu, Sa

½ lb daily when rice is not issued

1½ lb Mo, Th, Sun

–

½ lb daily

¼ lb Wed, Sat

½ lb every day except Sun

–

–

Pumpkins

½ lb Sun

–

Coffee

4 lb for the whole number, 215 slaves

1/32 lb daily

Sugar

Fresh meat

1/8 lb every day

–

Vegetables

–

Chillies

–

Bread

1/16 lb daily

½ lb sick daily, and Th and Sun for the whole –

–

–

–

comprising the wrong food types and nutritionally deficient. Recovery of the severely malnourished requires some 4,000 kcal daily for several months, but the diet administered to the recaptives fell significantly short of this. The character of the rehabilitation diet is also crucial, proteins, vitamins and minerals all being essential, while in the early stages of re-feeding it can be fatal to provide food that is too rich in protein.79 As modern guidance stresses, ‘the state of starvation of the patient did not occur acutely overnight 79 The benchmark study of malnutrition and refeeding is still considered to be the Minnesota Starvation Experiment of 1943. See Leah Kalm and Richard Semba, ‘They Starved So That Others Be Better Fed: Remembering Ancel Keys and the Minnesota Experiment’, The Journal of Nutrition 135.6 (2005), pp. 1347–52. •

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Table 3:  continued Scale of Dr Rawlins, from 1 January 1847

Ration: children under 14 years receive half ration No. 1

No. 2

–

–

–

½ lb daily

½ lb daily – – – – –

1/16 lb daily

1/32 lb daily

No. 3

½ lb daily

½ lb daily

½ lb daily

–

–

–

– – –

1/16 lb daily

1/32 lb daily

Ration: children under 10 years receive Half ration

½ lb daily

½ lb daily

–

Scale in operation at the present date

½ lb daily – –

– –

½ lb daily, sick excepted – –

–

1/16 lb daily

1/32 lb daily

– –

–

½ lb daily for the 3/8 lb daily for the ½ lb daily for the ½ lb for the sick whole whole sick, and Th, Sun for the whole ½ lb daily

½ lb daily

½ lb daily

–

–

–

–

1/16 lb per week

–

½ lb when biscuit ½ lb when biscuit – is not issued is not issued

and, therefore, should not, indeed, must not, be corrected acutely in the first few hours or days of treatment’.80 Where amoebic dysentery is concerned, a diet is prescribed that contains ample sources of vitamins, especially vitamin B complex.81 In all these respects, the diet on St Helena was deficient. It was vitamin-poor, while the daily ration of half a pound of salted meat or 80 J. Alexander Palesty and Stanley Dudrick, ‘The Goldilocks Paradigm of Starvation and Refeeding’, Nutrition in Clinical Practice 21.2 (2006), pp. 147–54 (the quote is from p. 153); R. Weinsier and C. Krumdieck, ‘Death resulting from overzealous total parenteral nutrition: The refeeding syndrome revisited’, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 34 (1981), pp. 393–99. 81 George Hunter, William Frye and J. Clyde Schwarzwelder, A manual of tropical •

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Distant Freedom fish would have provided about twice as much protein as advised by modern recommendations.82 The purging effects observed by McHenry in Lemon Valley are classic symptoms of an inappropriate diet administered to the severely malnourished, while the lack of vitamins was manifested in the continued development of scurvy many weeks after the recaptives had been admitted to St Helena’s depots. The diet administered to the liberated Africans must, therefore, have contributed to numerous deaths in the depot, manifested as diarrhoea and dysentery, particularly in the immediate aftermath of the landing of a slave ship. The doctors and administrative officers on St Helena nevertheless believed that the diet was broadly satisfactory. There was a significant lack of consensus, however, on whether farinha was a suitable staple food, and even the efficacy of fresh vegetables was disputed. During the 1840s, doctors McHenry, Vowell and Rawlins all considered vegetables to be absolutely essential, but Dr Solomon (Rawlins’s predecessor in Rupert’s Valley) and Collector Young disagreed. Solomon in fact discontinued the use of vegetables because he thought it increased fatal diseases among the Africans, while Young also believed them injurious to those previously unaccustomed to them. This divergence of opinion illustrates not only the prevailing ignorance of dietetics and nutrition among those working in the depots, but also their inability to determine the root causes of the diseases present. The quality of the food was also a subject of much concern and, at times, serious argument. Although the Establishment’s officers were adamant that the provisions were always good, there are sufficient references to suggest that, on occasion, its quality left something to be desired.83 As the preceding discussion makes clear, the Africans’ diet was a troubled and contentious subject throughout the Establishment’s lifetime. Its composition was never entirely settled as those working in the depots failed to hit upon a formula that met with universal acceptance. The attitude of the recaptives was described by Dr Rawlins in the following way: The subject of diet has ever been a most difficult one; every new batch of Africans having some peculiar notion, or fancy for certain articles; some will cry out constantly for farinha, refuse rice, attributing it to the production of dysentery; others, again, will not eat farinha, but ask for medicine, 4th ed. (London: Saunders, 1966), p. 302. This subject is discussed by Kiple and Higgins, ‘Mortality caused by dehydration’, p. 427. 82 Kiple and Kiple, ‘Deficiency diseases’, p. 202. 83 See for example Superintendent Archer’s assessment of the meat imported from the Cape in 1851, which he described as hard, losing greatly in weight during cooking and deficient in nutritional qualities. See Archer to Pennell, 5 August 1851, CO 247/77, 8597/51 St Helena. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans beans, fish and meat, with chillies; often what they pronounce the best one day will be thrown away the next in disgust.84

Although often presented as such, the recaptives’ attitude was not simple obstruction. The diet of the slave ship – to a large extent replicated in St Helena’s depots – was radically different to what they had been used to in Africa. In certain regions, animal protein often formed only a marginal part of the diet, bovine milk was rarely consumed and, because of cultural beliefs, fruit consumption was frequently frowned upon, as was the use of most vegetables, except the yam, taro, cassava, and maize.85 The differing (and to the British, apparently capricious) responses of each ‘new batch’ of recaptives probably owed much to their exact region of origin, previous nutritional environment and also perhaps their social status. Away from the depot, the related issues of quality and cost were a source of very significant tension. The addition of fresh meat and vegetables to the diet necessarily entailed greater expense, but this had to be sanctioned by the Treasury. Here lay the crux of the problem, because the Treasury naturally preferred to feed the liberated Africans on cheaper foodstuffs – a major source of which was, of course, the slave ships themselves. Many of these prizes are recorded by court documents as carrying ‘extraordinary quantities’ of items such as farinha, jerked beef, beans, Indian corn and rice, and the cost of procuring these goods for the use of the Africans was virtually nothing. As a consequence, the Establishment’s officers committed much effort to the task of persuading the Colonial Office and Treasury that fresh produce was not only beneficial to health, but also cost-neutral if not in fact cheaper. An example is found in 1851, when depot Superintendent Rowlatt attempted to balance expenditure and benefit: Once a week at least I would issue a ration of fresh meat and vegetables to all the healthy Negroes. The expense as compared with salt meats would be more, but if it should be found that sickness was lessened, by such a practice, there might be a saving in the end even under the head of fresh meat alone, by checking the number of admissions to the hospital, so that economy would really be the result, not to insist upon the more important matter of humanity.86

In making such cases, the officers strayed from their assigned medical or administrative roles, engaging in dialogue with St Helena’s governor and senior figures in the London government on matters of policy, economy and 84 Dr Rawlins’s Report, PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 96. 85 Kiple and Kiple, ‘Deficiency diseases’, pp. 198–99. 86 Rowlatt to Pennell, 26 July 1851, CO 247/77. •

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Distant Freedom ethics. To an extent, they also subverted the depot’s regulations, keeping patients in the hospital in order for them to receive the better diet only allowed to convalescents. Their sponsorship of a superior diet is one of the most prominent examples of the way the Establishment staff became advocates for the liberated Africans, promoting their interests at both a local and metropolitan level. The Treasury, however, was largely unmoved. The periodic requests for fresh food transmitted from St Helena were usually only sanctioned on a temporary basis, while at no stage did fresh food constitute more than a minor part of the liberated Africans’ diet. As late as 1863, having inspected the depot and finding all other aspects satisfactory, Governor Charles Elliott recommended to the Secretary of State that while the food ration was sufficient, the vegetable portion should be doubled in quantity.87 To the end, therefore, considerations of economy prevailed over the nutritional needs of the recaptives.

Environment, facilities, staffing and logistics In addition to medical interventions, the life chances of the liberated Africans hinged on a series of practical matters: the environment in which they were housed, the facilities in which they lived and in which treatment was administered, levels of staffing and supporting logistics. Prevailing medical theories of the period emphasised the link between disease and place, while the importance of good facilities and a clean environment for the prevention of sickness – particularly ‘diseases of filth’ such as cholera, dysentery, typhus and scarlet fever – was widely recognised by the 1840s. In respect of the latter, two different paradigms existed to explain their transmission: miasmatic and contagious. However, regardless of the paradigm adopted, the solution was identical. Dirt caused disease and cleanliness prevented it: therefore, it was necessary to create healthful environments. Hygiene was also to some extent a moral cause – a rationale for better living and a critique of industrialism.88 In mid-nineteenthcentury Britain, these medical and social agendas combined to propagate the Public Health Acts of 1848 and 1872 and the Sanitation Act of 1866, though it would be many years before decent standards of hygiene were widely achieved in either the urban context or the narrower environment of the hospital. Of the two reception depots on St Helena, that at Lemon Valley was recognised to have the more clement environment, being warm, sheltered 87 Elliott to the Duke of Newcastle, 25 July 1863, CO 247/97, 8337 St Helena. 88 John Pickstone, ‘Medicine, Society and the State’, in The Cambridge History of Medicine, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 260–97. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans and with a natural (albeit limited) supply of fresh water. The medical facilities were rudimentary, however – above all at the outset of their use. McHenry wrote how: All the requisites of a regular hospital were either forgotten or considered unnecessary; no beds, bedding, pillows, no utensils of necessity or articles of comfort, were provided; the sick had merely one blanket each allowed them, rolled up in which they had to lie and sleep on the bare boards.89

Even when Chamberlain’s Cottage was converted for use as a hospital, it could only have housed a few dozen patients. Because of its small size, Lemon Valley rarely resembled a healthful environment. The depot was cramped, dirty and defied any attempts at segregation of the sick from the healthy. In his first days there McHenry described the appalling scene of hundreds of Africans lying in the open air, amidst their own filth, being given whatever food there was to hand and drinking from a polluted water supply. And while limited changes were made from early 1841, the facilities always came under stress at times of large intakes of recaptives. Inclement weather was also problematic: during a period of heavy rain in 1843, for example, McHenry again described ‘a shocking state of filth’, with flood water encroaching into the hospital tents.90 The climate in Rupert’s Valley was less ideal: objective commentators on the depot there (as distinct from those writing for dramatic effect) generally thought that the place was ‘tolerable’, but noted the cold, raw wind in winter and the oppressive heat of the summer.91 Time spent in the chill open air was considered injurious. Dr Vowell, for example, attributed the cough that developed among a cohort of Africans landed in 1850 to their five-hour exposure to the wind.92 On the other hand, the medical facilities in Rupert’s Valley were rather more extensive, comprising a hospital capable of housing 140 patients (each occupying 20 square feet), and an adjacent tent for convalescents which could accommodate a further 33 people.93 Under certain circumstances, the greater space and larger facilities in Rupert’s Valley did permit for a clean and orderly environment. When 89 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 8, p. 140. 90 ‘Extract from Dr McHenry’s Letter, dated 22nd May 1843’, CSL 14, p. 398. 91 See for example the evaluation of Lemon Valley and Rupert’s Valley in Rowlatt to Pennell, 1 July 1851, CO 247/76, 8601/51 St Helena. 92 Dr Vowell’s Report, PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 84. 93 Letter from Civil Engineer’s Office, St Helena, to Colonial Secretary, 28 July 1851, CO 247/77. •

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Distant Freedom relatively small numbers of Africans (up to a few hundred) were present, a satisfactory division could be put in place: the infectious were confined to hulks in the bay, other sick were placed in the hospital buildings and the healthy were quartered in the other tents. Cleanliness and decent sanitation could be maintained, and inspections at various times found the depot in an acceptable state: there are, for example, favourable official reports dating to 1851 and 1863, while published accounts such as those in The Times (1858) and the anonymous Bird of Passage (1865) describe a similarly good scene. Under pressure, however, the situation changed dramatically. As previously discussed, the number of recaptives commonly exceeded the depot’s capacity, and of these a significant proportion required medical treatment, quarantine or commonly both. The reception of a new prize created particular pressure. As Dr Rawlins described in 1849, ‘no slaver has ever arrived, that at least one third of the Africans have not been sent to hospital as soon as landed’.94 In extreme instances – as for the Alecto’s prize of 1857 – the sick far outnumbered the healthy, only 12 out of the 450 people aboard being pronounced free of disease. To deal with the overspill, liberated Africans were sometimes transferred to Jamestown’s civil hospital, but in doing so occupied its entire bed space. When all such measures failed, order broke down in Rupert’s Valley, and with it sanitation and all attempts at segregating the sick from the healthy. As described in Chapter Four, the number of staff assigned to the Liberated African Establishment was always small. Treatment was normally directed by a single surgeon, supported by a variety of assistants, including a dispenser of medicines. The ratio of doctors to patients must have had a severe impact on the level of individual care. McHenry described how in Lemon Valley he had in an average of 70 patients a day to attend. On the basis of a 14-hour day, this would have allowed him a notional average of 12 minutes per patient – ignoring the fact that they were distributed in various parts of the valley and on several hulks offshore. At certain points, the number of people requiring McHenry’s attention rose to over 100 and under such circumstances he can only have given many a passing glance.95 During later years the situation remained similar, though at times of particular crisis in the late 1840s and early 1850s a few additional medical staff were drafted in. In early 1850, for example, the Governor allowed a second surgeon to be employed in Rupert’s Valley whenever the number of sick exceeded 100, 94 Dr Rawlins’s Report, PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 104. 95 Memorial of George McHenry, CO 247/59, 907 St Helena; Letter No. 15, ‘Return showing the number of liberated Africans in the establishment at various periods during the last 12 months [1 October 1842–16 September 1843]’. During this period, the total present in the depot ranged from 193 to 422 and the number of sick between 34 and 107. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans to be assigned to the hospital hulk anchored in the bay.96 Such measures were demonstrably inadequate given the number of recaptives then present in the depot: 1,700 in March 1850, of whom 516 were sick. Obtaining sufficient medical supplies was also problematic. Shortage of medicines was a perennial problem on St Helena, drugs usually having to be ordered from Britain: six months could elapse before they arrived, though a rather shorter timescale was possible if shipped from the Cape. Stocks in the government stores were often inadequate and could run dangerously short at times of crisis. An 1844 report on the civil hospital found it lacked many drugs, while others in the store had perished, lost their efficacy, or were unidentifiable because they had lost their labels. Medical instruments were also scarce and had to be sent away for repair because there was no cutler on St Helena.97 The African Establishment suffered from the same difficulties, but on a greater scale. An estimate made for the first six months of 1849 indicated that nearly 600 lb (271 kg) of drugs would be needed – far more than the island consumed in the normal course of events, and well above what could be procured locally.98 The issue of supply was partially solved by advance ordering from private contractors, although there were times when no merchant tendered for advertised contracts, or where negotiations descended into antipathy. (On one occasion, relations became so bad that a merchant was alleged to have said that ‘he would rather see all the Africans die than supply them with medicines’.)99 However, while a certain level of pre-emptive ordering and stockpiling was possible, the maintenance of large stores was blocked by the Treasury, which was unprepared to sanction the purchase of drugs that might go to waste if left unused. For all of these reasons, therefore, when a large slave-laden prize reached St Helena, it often found a depot devoid of medical supplies.

Insanity The slave ship brought not only those suffering from disease, but many who were psychologically traumatised, and the treatment of these people at St Helena also deserves discussion. The care of St Helena’s mentally 96 Ross to Earl Grey, 26 March 1850, CO 247/74, 4840 St Helena Emigration. In 1850, Dr Mullins, Assistant Surgeon of the St Helena Regiment, was assigned to the hospital hulk in Rupert’s Bay; in 1852, two private practitioners were drafted in to assist with the initial examination of new arrivals. 97 Vowell to Seale, 16 May 1844, CSL 18, p. 393. See also the same situation eight years later: Vowell to Colonial Secretary, 27 July 1852, CSL 33. 98 Rawlins to Young, 1 December 1848, CO 247/72. 99 Archer to Pennell, 13 December 1850, CSL 31 Vol. 1; letter to Pennell (signature illegible), 28 January 1851, CSL 31 Vol. 1. •

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Distant Freedom ill was generally unsatisfactory. They were sometimes placed in the civil hospital, but this was unsuited to long-term inmates, and in any case the beds were needed for other patients. Usually, those perceived to be mad were marginalised. Insane paupers were incarcerated in an asylum in Sandy Bay, a distant community on the opposite side of the island from Jamestown. Conditions were appalling, despite legislation passed in 1848 to improve the lot of the island’s lunatics.100 A report by the Colonial Surgeon in 1855 described a state of ‘squalid wretchedness’, living conditions worse than convicts, harsh treatment and no attempts at rehabilitation.101 When a woman named Susanna Barclay died there the following year, the coroner’s verdict was ‘natural death, accelerated from the want of all the necessary requisites of existence, proper nourishment and cleanliness of person, and from living in a foul atmosphere’. The coroner went on to place the blame on St Helena’s society as a whole, asking how, in the heart of a civilised community, such inhumanity was allowed to be exercised towards helpless individuals.102 This scandal provoked improvements to both living conditions and diet. It was to this asylum that the insane among the liberated Africans were sent. During the first years after 1840 there is no mention of the subject, and indeed the documentary evidence for the whole period of the African Establishment only addresses a handful of cases. Given the tens of thousands of slaves received into St Helena – which surely must have included a significant number with mental illness – this begs the question of what happened to the remainder. The suspicion has to be that the majority were shipped away as emigrants. The first mention of the subject is found in 1847, regarding the 23-year-old woman ‘Insane Jane’, who had arrived on the island two years earlier and was presently in the civil hospital. It was not thought suitable to put her in the ‘usual building’ with the male lunatics, prompting the suggestion that she be moved to the paupers’ asylum at Sandy Bay.103 In October 1849, she was apparently still occupying an empty ward in the civil hospital but was disturbing the other patients. Jane was subsequently taken back to Rupert’s Valley, but a month later it was reported that she was disruptive and had also caused damage at the hospital. Removal to an asylum, and physical restraint, was recommended.104 By September 1850, Jane was incarcerated 100 St Helena Ordinance No. 1 of 1848: ‘For the better ease and maintenance of lunatics on the Island of St Helena’. 101 Alexander to Pennell, 11 October 1855, CSL 37 Vol. 2. 102 HM Coroner (signature illegible) to Pennell, 25 August 1856, CSL 35. 103 Vowell to Pennell, 1 April 1847, CSL 25 Vol. 2, No. 107. 104 Vowell to Pennell, 30 October 1849, CSL 28 Vol. 2. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans in Sandy Bay at the not inconsiderable expense of £2 per month.105 In 1852, she was one of six inmates, along with a male African who was notable for his lassitude and a voracious appetite that was ‘approaching to bulimia’.106 Jane survived the nightmare conditions of the institution, in which she spent periods kept under restraint.107 By 1862, she was housed in the new asylum at Jamestown, where she was reported to be bodily well but suffering from periodic bouts of ‘despondency’.108 The only other case discussed in any detail is that of Jacob Africa, present in the asylum in September 1856, at which time he was in his mid-twenties. Eleven months later, Jacob was considered fit for discharge without being a danger to the public. He was apparently capable of working, since the recommendation was made that a ‘considerate employer’ be found for him – ideally, one whose house was similar in temperature to the asylum, and thus conducive to his mental well-being. In December 1857, the regimental surgeon reported with satisfaction that Jacob had been discharged for some time, and ‘continued to conduct himself as a rational and responsible being’.109 Jacob survived for many years after his release, though the details of his life are not known. He died in the island’s poor house in 1892 aged 60, from acute bronchitis and asthma.110 Finally, in August 1867, after over 20 years on St Helena, Jane was embarked aboard HMS Bristol for Sierra Leone, along with 13 other liberated Africans deemed incapable of looking after themselves: the group comprised two insane, nine blind and two infants. The involuntary emigration of Jane and her companions represented the final emptying of the Rupert’s Valley depot.

European doctors, African patients Medical treatment represented one of the most common points of contact between European and African at St Helena’s depots. It was, however, an almost entirely imposed process, in keeping with the wider framework of authority and control that was exercised by the British over their recaptive charges. That tone was set at the very beginning, during the inspection 105 Young to Pennell, 30 September 1850, CSL 30 Vol. 2, No. 20. 106 Vowell to Edwards, 6 May 1852, CSL 33. 107 Alexander to Pennell, 4 November 1854, CSL 36, p. 119. 108 Fowler to Colonial Secretary, 25 October 1862, CSL 44 Vol. 1. 109 Mullins to Pennell, 28 December 1857, CSL 40, p. 2. 110 Police Office (signature illegible) to Pennell, 1 September 1856, CSL 38 Vol. 2, p. 172; Mullins to Pennell, 13 August 1857, CSL 39, p. 137; St Helena Register of Deaths, 1887–1936, No. 4411. •

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Distant Freedom process at disembarkation, which Charles Rawlins outlined in the following terms: The mode of selecting the sick after landing, is to parade them all, and examine each one separately, in a state of nudity; should the skin about the oscofygis [sic] and glutei be found much wrinkled, or the sphincter ani at all relaxed, the individual is immediately sent to hospital as dysenteric … then also all ulcers, wounds or other diseases are ferreted out, much to the annoyance of the Africans, as they cannot divest their minds of their former master’s cruelties.111

Compare this narrative with that for an 1859 slave auction in Savannah, Georgia: The negroes were examined with as little consideration as if they had been brutes indeed; the buyers pulling their mouths open to see their teeth, pinching their limbs to find how muscular they were, walking them up and down to detect any signs of lameness, making them stoop and bend in different ways that they might be certain there was no concealed rupture or wound …112

Thus, while the intentions of St Helena’s doctors may have been different, the scene at Rupert’s Bay almost exactly mirrored the practices to be found in contemporary slave-keeping societies. Even the inspection of teeth finds a parallel, since examination of the dentition was the principal means by which the ages of younger recaptives was established.113 Moreover, the Africans at St Helena were likely to experience this inspection as a re-enactment of the terrifying and demeaning stripping process they had endured on the coast, prior to embarkation on the slave ship. Quite probably it seemed a continuation of the dehumanising treatment to which they already had been subjected over the preceding weeks or months. Over the longer term, matters do not seem to have improved greatly. At an individual level, there was apparently little relationship between doctor and patient, a situation engendered in large part by the transitory nature of the depot, in which few stayed for any length of time, and by the fraught circumstances that prevailed while they were there. The separation between white and black was heightened still further by the language 111 Dr Rawlins’s Report, PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 91. 112 ‘What became of the slaves on a Georgia plantation? Great auction sale of slaves, at Savannah, Georgia, March 2d & 3d, 1859. A sequel to Mrs. Kemble’s Journal’, Library of Congress, Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection, Digital ID: lcrbmrp t2305; http://hdl. loc.gov/loc.rbc/lcrbmrp.t2305. 113 Alexander to Pennell, 17 December 1860, CSL 42 Vol. 1, p. 92. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans barrier, which was perceived as a particular hindrance to successful diagnosis and treatment. Contemporary practice was based not only on the doctor’s observation of signs of disease, but on dialogue with the patient to elucidate symptoms. However, as Dr Rawlins explained: … our total ignorance of their language, and means of ascertaining minutely the different symptoms they may have; hence our only criterion is experience and dumb show. Interpreters are not in the least to be relied upon, as they will inevitably ask a question quite opposite to your desire, and will rarely tell the truth … The patients will often refuse answering at all, but sit perfectly mute and motionless: should they answer it is with falsehood. Constant watching and observation alone can give us the slightest idea of the state of their disease.114

Earlier parts of this chapter have shown that the medical interventions on behalf of the liberated Africans were largely ineffective. In seeking to explain this failure, and the resultant mortality, the doctors and others working in the Establishment placed considerable onus on the Africans themselves. At a fundamental level, they contended that Western medicine was – quite literally – inapplicable. After nearly a decade watching his charges die in Rupert’s Valley, Collector Young concluded that European remedies would always prove injurious to the Africans: instead, he advocated that ‘every endeavour should be made to acquire information respecting, and have recourse, to those remedies which have been found effectual in curing the diseases peculiar to the Africans in their native country’.115 A scattering of references indicate that they did indeed seek external advice, approaching such diverse groups as naval surgeons, Europeans living in Africa and even captured slave traders. The letter from the Head Surgeon of Portuguese Angola, noted above in respect of dysentery, documents one of the responses to these enquiries. The liberated Africans were, moreover, also accused of contributing to the failure of treatment, by hindering or subverting the authorities’ attempts to cure them. Doctors McHenry and Rawlins both commented on their tendency to conceal disease, to disregard all instructions, and the difficulty in getting them to take any internal remedies. The recaptives were criticised for numerous other misdemeanours, including discarding or ruining their clothes and blankets, sleeping in the open air or bathing at night, refusing to use chamber pots, rejecting food or selling their rations in exchange for wine and breaking quarantine. Such criticism finds its context in a wider 114 Dr Rawlins’s Report, PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 93. 115 Comments by John Young, 12 June 1849, appended to Reports of Drs Rawlins and Vowell, PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 97. •

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Distant Freedom patronising narrative, in which the Africans are presented as little more than children for whom discipline was anathema and education and religious conversion wasted. The Establishment’s doctors nevertheless recognised that much of this resistance, passive or otherwise, arose from the trauma of enslavement and the Africans’ total distrust of Europeans.116 Rawlins’s observation about the recaptives’ inability to distinguish between the slavers and their British liberators has been quoted above, while in Henry Hartley’s analysis the experience of the slave ship also had a bearing: ‘Coming as they do from a state of ill treatment and misery, they dread the infliction of any pain, consequently the application of any remedies, indeed the mere examination of the parts is a matter of great difficulty and requires much patience’. Taken in a wider context, the liberated Africans’ rejection of European medicine was far from uncommon. A similar situation had long prevailed in the plantations of the New World, where slaves avoided whatever level of ‘science-based’ care their masters chose to provide, while retaining African healing practices.117 At a practical level, they were wise to do so, since much of the medical treatment on offer was of very low quality, and had little chance of success even by the standards of the day. The slaves’ resistance to Western medicine also had a social dimension, being one element of their contest with their white masters. Given the manifest failure of European medicine, the liberated Africans’ rejection of it needs little explanation. The same rejection occurred at Sierra Leone for the same reasons. William Hamilton, manager of Regent village, described how the recaptives ‘manifested the greatest reluctance to be taken into the hospital under the charge of the African Department’, preferring instead to be treated by their own countrymen.118 On St Helena, the 116 Parallels for this situation can be found elsewhere: Alexander Bryson, discussing the treatment of slaves aboard prize vessels, concluded that European medicine could not be successfully practised. His observation was in part practical, relating to the cramped and insanitary environment of the slaver, but he also noted that many traumatised Africans simply refused to accept treatment. See Report on the Climate and Principal Diseases of the African Station, p. 256. 117 For discussion of plantation medicine and health see Todd Savitt, Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Sheridan, Doctors and Slaves; Sharla Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Niklas Jensen, For the Health of the Enslaved: Slaves, Medicine and Power in the Danish West Indies, 1803–1848 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 118 William Hamilton, ‘Sierra Leone and the Liberated Africans’, The Colonial Magazine and Commercial-Maritime Journal 8 (1842), p. 41; quoted by Peterson, Province of Freedom, p. 258. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans dismembering of their shipmates in the name of medical science can have done nothing to help this situation. Autopsies were a central element of the new European medicine of the earlier nineteenth century, offering a means by which signs and symptoms could be linked to the lesions of disease. Some surgeons in the major hospitals carried out hundreds, and occasionally thousands, of autopsies. And, at a time when English medical schools were faced with a severe shortage of cadavers, it was medical practitioners working in isolated contexts or with marginalised communities who had the greatest opportunity to further their careers by undertaking autopsies in large numbers. Helen McDonald’s study of the culture of dissection in Britain and Australia finds a medical profession that was as eager for the bodies of Aboriginal people as it was for those of the labouring poor, while Katherine Foxhall shows how naval surgeons had unparalleled access to cadavers.119 Colonial surgeons working with liberated Africans were afforded a similar opportunity.120 The historical documents from St Helena mention post-mortems only very rarely: the sole detailed account is given by Rawlins, who described the findings of his autopsies on two dysentery victims.121 Archaeological evidence from Rupert’s Valley, however, suggests that the practice was quite common. Of the 325 bodies exhumed during the 2008 excavation, three bore signs of craniotomies (where the skullcap is removed to enable an examination of the underlying membranes and the brain). Several other skeletons were found without skulls, despite the grave being undisturbed, leading to the assumption that the head was removed and either buried separately or retained for study.122 The well-preserved but disarticulated long bones and skulls, buried in two pits within the excavation area, could also have been generated by autopsies. Rawlins, in fact, may have been too enthusiastic a pathologist: in 1851, Superintendent Griffiths stated that ‘I have been compelled to request the surgeon not to examine more bodies post-mortem than he deems absolutely requisite, in order as much as possible to quiet their [the Africans] fears and 119 Helen MacDonald, Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011); Katherine Foxhall, Health, Medicine and the Sea: Australian Voyages, c. 1815–1860 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). On the exploitation of marginal groups see also Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001). 120 On the broader history of medical experimentation on African Americans, including unauthorized autopsies and dissections, see Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Doubleday, 2006). 121 Dr Rawlins’s Report, PP 1850 (643) XL, pp. 92–93. 122 Pearson et al., Infernal Traffic, pp. 96–98, 150 and Fig. 4.54. •

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Figure 26: Evidence of post-mortem intervention. Top left – Skeleton 341: calvarium with craniotomy; top right – Pit 2111: d ­ isarticulated remains likely to be derived from autopsy; bottom – Skeleton 502, buried with the head missing.

prejudices on the subject’.123 The situation was made worse by the fact that the ‘dead room’ in which autopsies were performed stood in the centre of the Rupert’s Valley depot – literally a few footsteps from the hospital. It is impossible to generalise about the liberated Africans’ concepts of death, or about any perceived relationship between the physical body and the nonphysical person in the afterlife. Nevertheless, it is self-evident that the destruction of the body, and sometimes its burial in more than one grave, must have been abhorrent or terrifying to any whose beliefs linked the corporeal with the spiritual. 123 Griffiths to Pennell, 11 January 1851, CO 247/76, 2761/51. The dead room is shown on an 1885 plan of the depot (WO 78/2344). •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans

African healing The records from St Helena discuss medicine within the very narrow terms defined by Western science. The Africans’ role in the process of healing is generally presented in the negative, through lack of cooperation, wilful or otherwise. By contrast, virtually nothing is said of the ways in which the recaptives attempted to treat themselves. In part, this stems from a lack of understanding of the nature of African healing. Far from simply practising ‘medicine’, they instead embraced a relational view of health that was intimately tied to religion and community. To most European observers in the depots, much activity associated with healing would not have been perceived as such – including perhaps a good deal of the ritual activity that is described in Chapter Four. Activities such as the smoking of cannabis, while viewed as a recreational habit, in African minds also had a medicinal aspect. To an extent, the European-written accounts also have to be read against the grain, as certain elements of ‘resistance’ were clearly related to attempts at self-healing. A few who spent time with the Africans in the depots developed considerable respect for their capabilities as healers. Foremost of these was George McHenry: The knowledge possessed by the negroes respecting the art of healing is more considerable than Europeans would be inclined to give them credit for. Certain it is, they understand the treatment of their own diseases quite as well as any graduate of a college who has not possessed the advantage of much experience in their particular cases … They are not ignorant of the advantages of venesection and topical bleedings, the latter of which are in daily use among them … Inoculation with variolous matter is practiced by some in order to induce a mild species of small-pox. Purgative, emetic, astringent, diaphoretic and epispastic medicines are employed – and in some instances very judiciously.

McHenry also noted the quality of amputations that had been performed by native doctors in Africa, and observed how the women of the depot were skilled in inducing miscarriages without risk to the mother. He detailed the Africans’ expertise in herbology, including successful treatments for headaches (applying slices of Sempervirens leaves, or alternatively mud paste), toothache (Asclepias or milkweed leaves) and skin complaints (castor oil tree leaves). Bowel complaints were remedied by a decoction of the astringent rock rose, while a drink made from the boiled down roots of a local tree was used to induce vomiting. He was more sceptical of the cures for dysentery, which most commonly comprised applying water-soaked cloths to the abdomen, but could also involve a suppository made from vinegar, gunpowder and a •

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Distant Freedom plant he named as Santa Maria or Ether.124 The combination of gunpowder with a herbal suppository has been noted elsewhere in this chapter, as a suggested cure by a doctor from Portuguese Angola: that the recaptives also adopted this method is a possible hint of hybrid practices, with remedies crossing between ‘African’ and ‘European’ medicine. As a whole, McHenry’s evidence makes it clear that the liberated Africans at Lemon Valley took an active and extensive role in the process of healing. It also indicates that, as depot surgeon, he was content to allow them to do so. During the period of its operation, the Lemon Valley depot housed a fairly settled community, particularly up to late 1841 and the departure of the first emigrant ships. Such circumstances enabled a recaptive society to develop, within which African healers might come to the fore. The situation in Rupert’s Valley is less clear: the constant turnover of its occupants – received and emigrated in short order – perhaps precluded a comparable situation developing. The fact that the wide variety of plants growing in Lemon Valley was not matched in the arid environment of Rupert’s Valley may also be salient.

Conclusion Within days of taking up his position, George McHenry began to write extensively about the sickness present in the Lemon Valley depot, and in so doing began a dialogue between the Establishment’s doctors and the colonial authorities that would persist for nearly 30 years. Throughout the entire period of its operation, the circumstances of St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment were the subject of scrutiny, and the issues of disease and mortality were always at the forefront. Periodic crises provoked enquiries at both a local and, more rarely, a metropolitan level, continuing well into the 1860s. The most extensive review occurred during the final years of the 1840s, prompted by the great mortality among the liberated Africans in Rupert’s Valley. The initial enquiry was undertaken in July 1848 at the instigation of St Helena’s governor, Patrick Ross. His purpose, he stated, was ‘to ascertain, if possible whether this has been occasioned or increased by any neglect or mismanagement on the part of the department of Customs, the medical officers, or others employed in the charge of these people’. Ross’s conclusion, as reported to Earl Grey, was at best complacent: 124 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 2, pp. 440–41; Chapter 8, pp. 149–50. On the Africans’ recourse to cold water or damp conditions as a treatment for dysentery see also a letter by doctors Vowell, Solomon and McHenry, 17 February 1842, CO 247/57. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans I have repeatedly visited Rupert’s Valley … and inspected minutely into their state, their clothing and their food, and I find it impossible to attribute their death to any neglect or remissness whatever. It may be, that from the liberality of government, by whom no expense for their accommodation and comfort is spared, their supply of meat etc, may be beyond what their constitutions … are able to bear.

This conclusion clearly did not satisfy the Colonial Office, which set in train a further enquiry the following year. The numerous documents generated by these investigations, collated and printed for Parliament in 1850, provide a bleak portrait of circumstances in the Rupert’s Valley depot.125 Ross’s report is extremely curious. Did he genuinely believe that nothing more could be done, or was it a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation, a classic example of information censorship from the peripheries of empire? The documentary record certainly contradicts his findings and it is hard to reconcile the Governor’s description of liberality and comfort with a camp that was frequently woefully overcrowded and filthy, where the sick often outnumbered the healthy, where the graveyards overflowed and where rats feasted on the living and dead alike. In his report, Ross presented comparative data from other places receiving liberated Africans. The information to hand was very thin, having been culled from the limited gazette sources that were available locally to the Collector of Customs. The statement compared deaths on St Helena between April 1847 and June 1848 (19%) to those at Sierra Leone in 1835 (26%) and Cape Town during an unspecified period (39%).126 On that basis, Ross reached the conclusion that ‘however extensive and lamentable the deaths in this island have been, the proportion is considerably less than at the others’. It was a dubious argument, not only because of the paucity of data but also because the mortality cited at St Helena during 1847–48 was significantly lower than the death rate for the decade as a whole.127 Nevertheless, Ross was essentially correct in asserting that liberated Africans on St Helena fared better than elsewhere. Published data relating to mortality at other depots remains scant, but certainly this is true in respect of Sierra Leone. There Thomas Cole, Chief Superintendent of the Liberated African Department 125 PP 1850 (643) XL. 126 ‘Comparative statement showing the total number of liberated Africans who have died prior to their disposal from the African depots at the under mentioned colonies during the period set forth respectively’, 29 August 1848, CO 247/70. 127 Enclosures submitted with Ross’s report to the Secretary of State amply demonstrated this fact: an abstract of mortality for the period from 9 June 1840 to 23 November 1846 showed it to have been 32.5% (8,818 received; 2,867 deaths); PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 65. •

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Distant Freedom for over 20 years, wrote in 1840 that about one-third of all arrivals at the colony died within a few weeks.128 Statistics on the death rate were not systematically compiled, but those which exist demonstrate that recaptives’ life chances on the Sierra Leone Peninsula were slim. Hospital returns indicate that, between 1838 and 1850, average mortality was 50% (7,147 deaths out of 14,342 admissions). Mortality during individual years was quite variable: in 1829, 57% (271/478) of all admissions died, while in 1841 this figure was approximately one-third (roughly 500/1,500).129 Thus, if the situation was bad on St Helena, that at Freetown was worse. A somewhat different perspective is offered by the United States depot at Key West during its brief operation in 1858–60. Here, mortality ran at the significantly better rate of 18.9% though, as Sharla Fett observes, when shipboard deaths on the return voyage to Liberia are considered, less than half of those taken from the slave ships actually survived to reach Africa again.130 The doctors and other officials in St Helena’s depots had a tendency, not unreasonably, to blame the slave traders for the deaths of their charges. In Collector Young’s opinion: a certain proportion of the Africans … will die after their arrival from their previous ill-treatment; whether in the barracoons in Africa, or on board the slaver they suffer most, is difficult to say, but that both combined sufficiently accounts for the frightful loss of life must be manifest to any one who has seen the Africans when first landed here; for in every gang a large number of living skeletons are only debarked from the prize vessel to find a grave sooner or later on shore.131

This is not the whole story however. St Helena was an intrinsically healthy place with a deserved reputation for its restorative qualities, free of the diseases of tropical Africa and where inhabitants and visitors alike traditionally flourished. Why, therefore, did it fail the liberated Africans so badly? In large part, the answer lies in the medical science of the period. Most contagious diseases were not successfully treated until the twentieth century and there is still no cure for smallpox. Infection rates, partially reduced by antiseptic and aseptic surgery in the later nineteenth century, did not radically improve until the development of antibiotic drugs in the 1940s. Antibiotics also provide the only effective means of treating the main killer in St Helena’s depot – dysentery – while the lack of knowledge about the importance of hydration was also critical. Therefore, despite the numerous 128 Peterson, Province of Freedom, pp. 256–58. 129 Ryan, Slave trade abolition, Chapter 6. 130 Fett, Middle Passages and Forced Migrations, Tables 1 and 2. 131 Observations of John Young, PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 102. •

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Medicine and the Liberated Africans remedies that were propounded by European teachers, and the extensive pharmacopeia that underpinned them, in reality there was little that could be done to cure the acute conditions found among the recaptives. The efficacy of many of the drugs available to St Helena’s doctors was limited, while some were positively harmful. For many patients, tincture of opium was the best treatment medical science had to offer, providing pain relief but nothing more. A second explanation may lie in the voyage stage at which slave ship prizes reached St Helena. As shown in Chapter Three, most slavers were taken near the African coast, from which the sailing time to St Helena was generally about two to three weeks. Research into Middle Passage mortality indicates that the death rate of the enslaved rose in the weeks immediately prior to embarkation, continued to rise after departure, peaking between days 29 and 42 of the voyage, before gradually declining. This peak was coincident with the greatest mortality from fever (day 25 of the voyage) and gastrointestinal disease (day 31).132 At the point of disembarkation, therefore, St Helena’s depots not only inherited the conditions of the slave ship but, by unfortunate coincidence, commonly did so at the voyage stage when untreatable disease was rifest and mortality at its highest. Under these circumstances, treatment was inevitably futile. As Charles Rawlins stated, ‘Every plan that has suggested itself to me, or recommended by others, has had a fair and just trial, all alas, but to end in one result, death’.133 This pessimism was widely echoed in other contexts. Alexander Falconbridge had written that as a slave ship surgeon he had never once recovered a patient with severe dysentery, while naval surgeon Alexander Bryson could offer no effective remedy for either fever or dysentery. Away from the slave trade, contemporary surgeons experienced the same failure, as for example in the Crimea: one doctor in the Scutari hospitals concluded that ‘I might sum up my account by saying that everything was tried and nothing succeeded. At least I can say that I never cured a case, and I never saw a case cured’.134 The key determinant in the Africans’ survival at St Helena was their health at the point of arrival. There was hope for those received in a good state, but 132 Miller, ‘Mortality in the Atlantic Slave Trade’; Eltis, ‘Mortality and Voyage Length’; Steckel and Jensen, ‘New evidence on the causes of slave and crew mortality’. 133 Dr Rawlins’s Report, PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 93. 134 A total of 2,368 patients with cholera were admitted to one of the Scutari hospitals, of whom 1,423 (60%) died. See R. Bakewell, ‘Notes on the diseases most commonly treated at the Scutari hospitals’, Medical Times and Gazette (1855), pp. 441–42. On the medical history of the Crimean War see John Shepherd, The Crimean doctors: A history of the British medical services in the Crimean War, Vol. 2 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press: 1991). •

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Distant Freedom far less for those who were already sick.135 In such an analysis it is difficult to find fault with St Helena’s doctors. They were not incompetent, nor lazy, uncaring or corrupt. Rather, detailed reading of their correspondence reveals a group of dedicated, conscientious men who genuinely did their best for their charges, often at risk to their own health.136 Culpability for the mortality at St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment lay instead at an institutional level, stemming almost entirely from economies imposed by London. The Lemon Valley depot was always hindered by its lack of space, but Rupert’s Valley was big enough to create a place where infectious disease could be controlled by quarantine and where cleanliness and decent sanitation would have minimised the spread of dysentery. Loss of life, if it could not be prevented, could certainly have been reduced. The provision of a decent and appropriate diet was also quite achievable for only a modest additional outlay. The doctors and officers of the Establishment, recognising the shortfalls of their situation, petitioned for improvements but were largely unsuccessful. The barrier was money – money that the Treasury, and Charles Trevelyan personally, was not prepared to sanction. Instead, poor facilities, low staffing, an indifferent diet and inadequate logistics prevailed. Therefore, while St Helena’s depots undoubtedly inherited the disease and mortality of the slave ships, they also perpetuated it. None of this was unique to St Helena, nor were the liberated Africans in some way singled out for poor treatment, since the labouring class of the island were provided with only a modicum of medical care, and both groups achieved parity in the hideous circumstances of the Sandy Bay asylum. It would nevertheless be wrong to accept Governor Ross’s complacency. More could have been done and there is blame to be apportioned. At least some of the deaths in St Helena’s depots could have been averted, and this was a lost opportunity for which the British government – and above all the Treasury – must take the greatest responsibility.

135 This observation was made by the depots’ officers on numerous occasions. See for example: George Fraser (Colonel and Governor) to Gladstone, 14 May 1846, CO 247/66, 1049 St Helena; comments of Superintendent Edward Griffiths in Rawlins to Rowlatt, 24 March 1850, CO 247/79. 136 This situation contrasts with that at Sierra Leone, at least at certain times. Dr Andrew Foulis, who reported on the Kissy Hospital in 1830, concluded that ‘abuses and extreme carelessness’ were at least as much to blame for mortality as any other factor, finding that the ‘patients in hospital suffered severely’ from the collusion of the ‘surgery man’ and hospital manager in a scheme for their own personal financial gain. Cited by Ryan, Slave trade abolition, Chapter 6. •

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chapter six

After ‘Liberation’ After ‘Liberation’

Over 17,000 men, women and children survived the slave ship and its aftermath, to be freed by Jamestown’s Vice-Admiralty court. Liberation, however, did not equate to freedom. As elsewhere, St Helena’s recaptives remained firmly under the control of the colonial authorities. Denied their own agency, the Africans’ lives in the weeks and months after the court’s adjudication were rigidly ordered, and decisions made in London and on St Helena would fundamentally shape their long-term futures. From the British perspective, the ‘disposal’ of so many displaced persons from remote St Helena posed significant difficulties. These difficulties were not new, having arisen for several decades in other places where recaptive populations were generated by anti-slavery courts. Many of the outcomes on St Helena – for example, of forced labour and involuntary onward transportation – also had parallels elsewhere. In other respects, as this chapter will demonstrate, the transition to freedom for St Helena’s liberated Africans took a unique course.

Colonial labourers As soon as the quarantine of the Lemon and Rupert’s Valley depots was lifted in February 1841, the liberated Africans brought aboard the Julia were pronounced fit for ‘public deployment’. This was nothing more than a euphemism for hard labour on behalf of the colonial government, which felt perfectly entitled to extract a return on the monies it had laid out for the Africans’ upkeep over the preceding weeks. Such use of recently freed slaves for public works had a lengthy precedent at Sierra Leone, where it was common practice for adult males to serve in this capacity for a period of weeks or even a few months prior to their final disposal as settlers, soldiers •

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Distant Freedom or emigrants. These people were generally those who were retained longest in Freetown’s Queen’s Yard. On St Helena, the initial deployment applied to all able-bodied men and the older boys, placed under the supervision of the Engineer’s Department. The greatest number were set to laying macadam on Side Path, one of the principal roads leading out of James Valley; the longer-term intention was for them to build an extension of that road to the Briars and thence towards Longwood.1 The experiment began badly. Side Path, winding upwards against the cliff edge, is totally devoid of shade and the Africans – just six weeks off the slave ship – were worked in the heat of the day. The conditions were so punishing that after just a matter of days one boy died from sunstroke: only after this event were the remainder issued with hats.2 The diet with which they were provided was also entirely inadequate: not until April did the supervising officer point out that the standard ration of rice and salted meat or fish could not support the expected level of work; a greater food allowance was requested, ‘in such quantities as may enable them to endure hard labor with efficiency’.3 A second cohort of Africans was assigned to the island’s quarry, which was situated on the sea cliffs above Sandy Bay on the south-east side of St Helena. These workers remained barracked in Rupert’s Valley, with the result that their stonebreaking task was bracketed by a daily nine-mile walk in both directions across mountainous terrain. Once again, this labour was entirely unpaid, although a weekly allowance of tobacco was given ‘as an incentive to the deserving’.4 A final group worked to create the depot at Rupert’s Valley, being engaged in building the tents, hospital and other ancillary structures, alongside other basic labouring tasks. A lesser number of these (deemed the most intelligent, trustworthy and industrious) were co-opted into the staff of the Establishment. In 1841, several were recruited as overseers or orderlies in the Lemon Valley hospital,5 while others were assigned to the 1 Royal Engineers Office to Seale, 17 February 1841, CSL 10 Vol. 2, No. 73. 2 CSL 7 Vol. 2, 4 March 1841 and CSL 8, 30 and 31 March 1841. By way of a counterpoint to the treatment of the liberated Africans, see the recommendation by the Royal Engineer’s Office for the award of a pension to a St Helenian, made ill by hard labour on the roads in the tropical heat (CSL 28 Vol. 1, 9 March 1849). 3 Letter from Royal Engineers Office, 22 April 1841, CSL 8, No. 37; revised diet roll, 27 April 1841, CSL 8, No. 50. The original diet comprised 20 oz of rice and 3 oz of salted meat or fish; the revised diet represented a significant increase: 24 oz of rice or biscuit (presumably hardtack) and 8 oz of meat or fish, with 8 oz of pumpkins twice weekly. 4 See McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 7, p. 25. On the tobacco allowance in lieu of payment see Alexander to Seale, 17 Feb 1842, CSL 10 Vol. 1, No. 74. 5 McHenry to Young, 8 April 1842, CSL 11, No. 53. •

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After ‘Liberation’ Marine Department as boatmen, replacing the lascar crews who had been diverted from their usual harbour duties by the new demands associated with supplying the depots and unloading slave ships.6 The use of recaptive labour to maintain, repair and (more occasionally) to staff the Liberated African Establishment is consistently seen throughout its lifetime. Their employment on public works was also to continue through to the 1860s. Road mending was a common assignment, reflecting the never-ending task faced by the colony, whose extensive network of byways and military tracks suffered not only from normal wear and tear but was commonly damaged by flood and rockfall.7 In 1850, for example, heavy rain wrecked the path into Rupert’s Valley: in this instance the Colonial Engineer advocated that the hard labour of repair be undertaken by the Africans, not least because the road was largely for their benefit.8 As need arose they were also set to other tasks, including on occasion the maintenance of Jamestown’s wharf and drainage system.9 Some of their works can still be seen, most tangibly at the ‘country church’ of St Paul (now the cathedral church of the St Helena diocese), for whose construction African labourers carried the stone in 1851 (Figure 27). Such employment was considered by their colonial overseers to be of benefit to them – an extension of the ‘occupational therapies’ that were advocated for those confined to the depots. Under benign conditions this might have been partially true, employment elsewhere on the island providing a welcome escape from the monotony of depot life. Certainly this was how the Superintendent presented the situation of the African church builders, reporting to the Governor that ‘the excursion into the country seems to invigorate the men so employed and they invariably return pleased and cheerful’.10 Be that as it may, it is beyond doubt that the labour of the liberated Africans was of significant economic value to St Helena’s colonial establishment, whose budget for public works was always under scrutiny from the British government (along with the rest of its finances). Raw materials cost virtually nothing; it was labour that was expensive. The cost of employing native islanders was appreciable, while even prisoners who had been sentenced to 6 Mapleton to Seale, 6 May, CSL 8, No. 59. 7 Roads were consistently the largest component of St Helena’s Public Works expenditure. In 1842, for example, road repairs cost £654 out of a total of £1,537. See ‘Return of all Public Works, Civil Works, Canals, Bridges, Buildings &c’, St Helena Blue Book for 1842, pp. 52–53. 8 Melliss to Pennell, 17 January 1850, CSL 30 Vol. 1, No. 1. 9 See for example Melliss to Pennell, 14 December 1857, CSL 40. 10 Edward Griffiths to Colonel Clarke, 5 April 1851, CO 247/76. •

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Figure 27:  St Paul’s church. Image courtesy Paul Tyson Photography

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After ‘Liberation’ hard labour were charged out by the sheriff at a rate of 7 shillings per day.11 The liberated Africans, on the other hand, could be – and were – made to work for nothing. The benefits of this situation are well illustrated by one of the last public works undertaken by the liberated Africans, namely the creation of a water channel through Rupert’s Valley in 1862. It was a major enterprise which entailed the excavation of a channel over a kilometre long, three metres wide and one metre deep. But, as the Colonial Engineer reported: During this work the Africans were overlooked by the overseer employed by the African establishment in general charge of them, and the whole directed by the colonial engineer. No expense has therefore been incurred for superintendence and the work being of so rude and simple a nature, none for the employ of skilled labour. The only cost has been the tools, which it will appear from the accompanying return in the first instance did not exceed £6.12

The channel still exists – a major feature that bisects lower Rupert’s Valley. It is a tangible product of the liberated African labour that was exacted during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Many of the recaptives’ other works cannot be so easily recognised, but their contribution to the surviving buildings and infrastructure of St Helena should not be underestimated.

The failure of apprenticeship While employment on public works was expedient, it still left the liberated Africans under the colonial government’s jurisdiction and maintained at its expense. In order to resolve this situation, two basic strategies were pursued: limited settlement on the island and large-scale emigration to colonies elsewhere in the British Atlantic. The initial recourse of the St Helenian authorities was on-island settlement via the mechanism of apprenticeship, beginning in late 1841.13 For St Helena this broke new ground. The freeing of the island’s enslaved population during the 1820s and early 1830s had been achieved under East India Company rule, and thus without reference to the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. The period of ‘apprenticeship’ for emancipated slaves prescribed by 11 Sheriff to Doveton, 18 December 1844, CSL 20, p. 51. 12 Melliss to Pennell, 23 May 1862, CO 247/95, 6323 St Helena. 13 This policy conformed to the official regulations that had been established in 1808 by the Privy Council, regarding the mode of receiving and employing liberated Africans brought into Sierra Leone. See Asiegbu, Slavery and the politics of liberation, p. 27. •

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Distant Freedom the act had not been mirrored on St Helena and therefore, in contrast to most other former British slave-keeping colonies, the complexities of this issue were not familiar to its inhabitants. There were, moreover, no existing laws or regulations that could be adapted for the case of the liberated Africans.14 Initially, apprenticeship was pursued on a very small scale. By the end of 1841, 19 liberated Africans had been removed from the Lemon Valley depot and taken on as servants; there was heavy bias towards boys and girls, the majority being aged between 12 and 14. They were placed with native St Helenians, among them the Collector of Customs himself, who took on a 13-year-old girl.15 This focus on children, whose use as servants was – in the immediate term at least – rather limited, perhaps reflects a humanitarian policy to address the question of the large number of orphans then present in the depots. Over the same period, the St Helenian authorities prepared measures for the regulation of apprenticeship on a greater scale. This found formal expression in the Ordinance for the protection and care of such liberated Africans as shall become servants or apprentices in the island of St Helena, which passed into law in mid-1842.16 The ordinance closely adhered to the principles of master and servant legislation set out by two Orders in Council of 1838 (collectively known as the Stephen Code, after their architect James Stephen), intended to guard against the rise of ‘a disguised form of slavery’ in post-emancipation societies. Similar legislation had been imposed on the ‘new’ dependencies of British Guiana, Trinidad and St Lucia by the Colonial Office which, in the late 1830s and early 1840s, also closely scrutinised new labour laws emanating from Britain’s other plantation colonies.17 St Helena’s ordinance – retrospectively vetted and approved by the Colonial Office – was a 24-clause document that by 1842 would have been familiar across the British Caribbean. The conditions of service were rigidly 14 On the system of apprenticeship introduced by the 1833 Emancipation Act, see William Burn, Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937); William Green, British Slave Emancipation, Chapter 4; Douglas Hall, ‘The Apprenticeship Period in Jamaica, 1834–1838’, Caribbean Quarterly 3 (December 1953), pp. 142–66. 15 ‘Return of the Liberated Africans removed as servants during the quarter, showing the persons by whom they are employed’, 31 December 1841, CSL 10 Vol. 1, No. 47 Enclosure No. 1. 16 St Helena Ordinance No. 3 of 1842; 27 July 1842. 17 Mandy Banton, ‘“The ‘Taint of Slavery”: The Colonial Office and the Regulation of Free Labour’, in Slavery Diplomacy and Empire: Britain and the Suppression of the Slave Trade, 1807–1975, ed. Keith Hamilton and Patrick Salmon (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2009), pp. 145–46. •

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After ‘Liberation’ defined, stating the exact nature of employment (e.g. field labourer, house servant, boatman), hours of work, remuneration and allowances. Verbal contracts were limited to four weeks and written contracts to a maximum of a year, while children aged ten to 16 could be apprenticed by their parents or guardians for up to five years in order to learn a trade; those over 16 could do so independently on the same terms. The Collector of Customs was to act in the capacity of a stipendiary magistrate, witnessing all contracts and having summary jurisdiction over any dispute. He was granted power to fine or imprison apprentices who neglected to perform their stipulated work, and to do the same for masters who ill-used their servant or apprentice. A draft of the ordinance was circulated on St Helena in June 1842, and evoked the same concerns from potential employers that had been expressed in other colonies. The greatest misgivings related to the term of service: various individuals argued that 12 months was far too short a period for the Africans to become conversant in English or to learn their work, and that a term of three to five years would be more beneficial for employer and servant alike. The allocation of power to the Collector of Customs – a man entirely untrained in law – was also criticised.18 The ordinance passed into local law in July 1842, and should in theory have provided a framework for the successful integration of the liberated Africans into St Helenian society. Unfortunately, practicality once again overcame good intentions. The ordinance remained on St Helena’s statute book for many years, but was in fact never implemented. Instead, it foundered immediately on its third clause, which stated that ‘no written contract of service or apprenticeship would be valid unless voluntarily entered into, and with a clear understanding by all parties as to its meaning and effect’. It was argued by the St Helenian authorities that, because the liberated Africans were incapable of grasping the implications of the contract, it was inappropriate to apply the ordinance to them.19 This opinion was not unreasonable, particularly in relation to freed slaves who had only been on the island for a matter of weeks. However, rather than assume a greater paternalist role towards the Africans, or to prohibit apprenticeship entirely, St Helena’s government simply chose to step aside. In the resultant vacuum, unregulated apprenticeship flourished. This led to a situation that was highly unsatisfactory from numerous standpoints, in which there were no incentives for reputable employers to take on servants, and no safeguards for the liberated Africans. And, where the initial 18 See for example the representations made to the Governor of 13 June 1842 and 16 July 1842; CSL 12, Nos 16 and 54. 19 This situation was set out some years later in a letter by Governor Vigors to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, 6 February 1856, CO 247/87, 3071 St Helena. •

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Distant Freedom a­pprenticeship scheme had concentrated on placing children into service, employers now focused on those who had the most immediate usefulness – namely the adult males. Women were generally considered ‘too indolent to work and too ignorant to be taught’, while children were mainly overlooked, to be left in the depots. The means of obtaining an ‘apprentice’ or servant was simple. From his situation as depot surgeon in Lemon Valley, George McHenry was ideally placed to observe the process in operation, describing it thus: When an inhabitant of the island wished to obtain the services of a Liberated African, he made an application to the Collector of Customs, and a paper signed either by the Collector, or his first clerk, or the clerk of the department of the African Establishment at the Custom-house, was delivered to him, containing words to the following effect:– “Please deliver to Mr. _______ a Liberated African (man, woman, boy or girl, whichever it might be that was required), reporting particulars.” This was handed to the applicant, who, on the delivery of the order to the officer in charge of the Station, proceeded to select an individual, and having procured his or her consent, without further trouble took the person away from the Establishment.20

In this free for all, St Helenians of all classes took advantage of this new source of labour, which McHenry characterised as a ‘mania of Negrokeeping’. Governor Trelawney took on a number as personal staff for his estate at Plantation, where they looked after his sheep and cattle, cut wood, fetched water and undertook a variety of other labouring and domestic activities. He also lent others out to members of the island’s elite: Judge William Wilde, for example, borrowed four men on a daily basis to work on his personal property, returning them to Lemon Valley at night. No consideration was given to the social or economic status of those applying for servants, with the result that Africans could be acquired equally easily by those from the lowest social tier, from ‘native’ farmers to mulatto fishermen. At least one boy found himself taken on by the washerwomen of Jamestown – who were well known for supplementing their income through prostitution. There is, additionally, the tantalising (but undocumented) possibility that certain liberated Africans found themselves apprenticed to St Helena’s recently emancipated slaves. If this did indeed occur – and it is perfectly plausible given the types of islander obtaining 20 The narrative on the taking of servants from Lemon Valley is given by McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 7. •

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After ‘Liberation’ servants from the depot – then the transition from slave to exploitative master on St Helena had taken little over a decade. In no other circumstance could any of these people have afforded servants.21 Because of the failure of regulated apprenticeship, most of the liberated Africans found themselves employed in the lowest economic occupations, such as agricultural labourers, shepherds and domestic servants. Some appear to have been neither clothed nor fed properly – unsurprising given that their ‘masters’ also lived in marginal circumstances. Only a few were able to improve their situation by learning a trade, as had originally been envisaged. Moreover, without contracts to define the relationship between master and servant, there appears to have been little permanence of employment. By the end of 1843 – the point at which the authorities first attempted to break up the Liberated African Establishment – nearly 300 people had either been apprenticed or taken into service. However, as McHenry explained, this figure was deceptive: Though 286 be the number of Africans assumed to have been apprenticed, yet it would be more correct to increase it to double or treble this amount; for their masters, when tired of them, returned them to the Establishment, and took others; and these again were exchanged for a third lot, and so on indefinitely.22

This was an example set by the Governor, as Stephen Pritchard, senior clerk and storehouse keeper of the Lemon Valley depot, related: one of the Governor’s boys absconded from him to Rupert’s on Friday. I sent him back. His Excellency would not keep a negro who had once quitted his service – and who can compel him (or any one) to do so? Acting by this guide, I have taken advantage of a fit of the sulks of my little negro girl, who said she wished to go to Lemon Valley, to obtain the Collector’s permission for her to do so.23

Africans were returned to the depots on these and other pretexts, from 21 The labour of liberated African servants had considerable financial value. The wages of a St Helenian labourer ranged from 2s to 2s 6d per day, but (where they were paid at all) the Africans tended to earn between 3d and 1s per week, as well as their living expenses. Therefore, just as the colonial government profited from the exploitation of the labour of the liberated Africans, so too on a micro-scale did the ordinary St Helenians. 22 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 7, p. 29. The numerical return of the Establishment for 1 October 1842 shows 26 Africans returned from service during the preceding quarter, CO 247/57. 23 Pritchard to McHenry, 16 August 1842; quoted in McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 7, p. 30. •

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Distant Freedom perceived laziness to sickness.24 One was imprisoned after an assault on his master. Conversely, out of dissatisfaction with either their situation or wages, the recaptive servants were equally prone to abandoning their new masters. Despite a government prohibition on their returning, they came back voluntarily to the depots, or hid out in the caves in upper Lemon Valley. Though the 1842 ordinance had included provisions for the punishment of abusive masters, it was these Africans who were, on occasion, imprisoned for absconding. Many years later (in 1903), Emily Jackson described the apprenticeship process in very different and far more positive terms. She wrote how ‘the merchants and farmers in St Helena, when requiring servants, went to the depots and made their choice, engaging to clothe and feed those chosen. A number of these slaves became so fond of their masters and mistresses that they elected to remain on the island’.25 Jackson’s account is, at best, selective, and is largely at odds with the primary sources of the early 1840s and with McHenry’s (admittedly partial) account. Her text perhaps holds greater interest because of its idealised portrayal of St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment – part of a narrative tradition that grew up in the later nineteenth century and prevailed long into the twentieth. In all probability a number of successful master-servant relationships did develop, but these go unmarked in the contemporary correspondence and by McHenry’s account, which instead focus on instances of failure and abuse. However, even in the best circumstances, the lack of a written, regulated contract would have made the relationship an uncertain affair, undefined in its scope and liable to termination by either party at any time.26 ‘Apprenticeship’ or, perhaps more accurately, servant-taking ultimately proved to be a short-term phenomenon on St Helena, mainly confined to the period between mid-1842 and the end of 1843.27 After that point, the historical records are largely silent on the subject, but the few references 24 The return of Africans in poor health from service is seen on several occasions in the earlier 1840s. This happened twice in close succession in December 1844 and January 1845, and both individuals (an adult man and a boy) subsequently died in the hospital. These examples are related in CSL 20. 25 Jackson, St Helena, p. 260. 26 Apprenticeship at Sierra Leone, a much longer-term phenomenon in that colony, had mixed outcomes – though it was undoubtedly not the outright failure that was seen on St Helena. Apprentices were indentured for periods of between three and nine years. Some learned a trade, but others were treated as ‘virtual domestic slaves’ and subjected to bad treatment; others absconded or were sold back into slavery. See Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, pp. 105–7, 114 and 182. 27 A return shows a revival of the practice in 1847–48, 72 recaptives having been removed from the depot as servants. See PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 66. •

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After ‘Liberation’ that exist indicate that – apprenticeship having been deemed unworkable – the liberated Africans denizened on the island were left to find their own employment as free agents in the labour market. In that respect (if not in others), they were treated by the island authorities as a normal part of the general populace, without any special measures or provisions. When the possibility of newly arrived Africans being allocated to private masters was raised again, in 1857, it was dismissed on the grounds that all would soon be shipped onwards as emigrants.28 This latter solution, as the next part of this chapter demonstrates, proved a far more effective method for the ‘disposal’ of St Helena’s liberated Africans.

St Helena and the ‘mighty experiment’ The transportation of liberated Africans as migrant labourers formed just one small part of a global phenomenon. The nineteenth century witnessed population movement on a scale that was entirely unprecedented. Over 2 million people migrated between 1830 and 1920, and labour movement within the British Empire represented a significant part of that figure.29 As was observed in 1858 by Thomas Elliott, formerly chairman of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, ‘since the world began there can scarcely have been such an experience of the conveyance of people by sea’.30 Despite the political prominence of immigration to the British West Indies, the number of people involved was comparatively small. Between 1841 and 1867, indentured emigrants to Britain’s West Indian colonies totalled 160,000 – a figure which, when set against the great migration of Europeans to North America over the same period, shrinks almost to insignificance.31 Moreover, recaptives made up only a minor proportion of these Caribbean immigrants. Over the 27 years of officially sponsored African emigration (1841–67), labourers were also being drawn into the West Indies from many other parts of the world, from Britain and Canada to the Indian Ocean. An estimated 36,120 liberated Africans were conveyed to the Caribbean – a figure comparable to the number procured from Madeira. East Indian 28 Letter from Downing Street to Governor Vigors, 16 April 1856, CO 247/87, 3071 St Helena. 29 David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 30 Quoted by Cell, British Colonial Administration. For a general study of colonialism, migration and indentured labour see Seymour Drescher, The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 31 G. Roberts, ‘Immigration of Africans into the British Caribbean’, Population Studies 7.3 (1954), pp. 235–62. •

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Distant Freedom immigration over the same period amounted to 86,537 and continued on a significant scale into the twentieth century.32 As a consequence, recaptives comprised a minority of immigrants received by most colonies, including British Guiana (14%), Trinidad (10%) and Jamaica (37%); this situation only differed in some of the smaller colonies, most notably St Lucia, St Vincent and Tobago, but here the numbers of people involved were very small.33 Thus, both in terms of its duration and in numbers, liberated African immigration to the West Indies was less important than its East Indian counterpart. Despite this, the scheme to transport them was far from unimportant, and its impacts were arguably disproportionate to the number of people moved. As William Green has commented: Immigration saved the sugar economy in Trinidad and British Guiana … The immigration question added a new dimension to the anti-slave trade activities of the Royal Navy; it revived the old controversy over the merits of Sierra Leone colony; and it affected Britain’s self-appointed mission to ‘civilize’ Africa. Immigration intruded upon Britain’s relations with foreign nations, including such diverse countries as China and the United States34

It is also the case that, between 1840 and 1845, when Indian immigration was prohibited, liberated Africans represented the only sizeable source of labour accessible to the British Caribbean colonies.35 The availability of this manpower came at a crucial juncture, coincident with the ending of apprenticeship and the flight of labour from the plantations. St Helena’s role in the process was appreciable. In absolute numbers, more liberated African emigrants passed through St Helena than through Sierra Leone (16,287 as 32 Roberts, ‘Immigration of Africans’, Tables 1 and 2. See also K.O. Lawrence, Immigration into the West Indies in the Nineteenth Century. Chapters in Caribbean History 3 (Kingston, Jamaica: Caribbean University Press, 1971). 33 Immigrants from Sierra Leone and St Helena accounted for nearly half of the labourers shipped to St Lucia (1,297 of 2,833; 45%) and St Vincent (1,035 of 2,149; 48%) during the period 1841–67, and all of those sent to Tobago (517). These percentages have been calculated from a contemporary audit undertaken by the Government Emigration Board. These statistics are demonstrably incomplete, as illustrated by the shortfall of nearly 2,000 immigrants from St Helena. See CO 318/243 for immigrant statistics from 1843–62, in which statistics for 1863 were appended by hand to the original printed return. 34 Green, British Slave Emancipation, p. 261. 35 This prohibition arose from abolitionist protests against John Gladstone’s importation of Indian labour to his Demerara estates, which they considered ‘tantamount to a revival of the slave trade’. By 1838, they had succeeded in virtually cutting off Indian recruitment for the Caribbean. See Drescher, The Mighty Experiment, p. 156. •

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After ‘Liberation’ opposed to 15,634) while after 1855, 80% of all liberated African emigrants came from the Rupert’s Valley depot. Emigration was the core mechanism which prevented St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment (and the island as a whole) becoming entirely overwhelmed. At that level, it was a necessary expedient. However, its application was extremely complex from a logistical standpoint, and undermined by fundamental contradictions. The result was a difficult and morally flawed process. St Helena entered suppression at a liminal stage of British emigration policy. The Slavery Abolition Act – with its own, broader failures of apprenticeship – had created a shortfall of plantation labour in the British West Indies, prompting a variety of unsuccessful initiatives to address the problem. Jamaica had experimented with European immigrants, but mortality had been excessive and the destitute situation of the survivors encouraged many to move onwards to the United States.36 There was also a parallel failure of the major sugar-producing colonies to recruit labour from the Western hemisphere, both from elsewhere in the Caribbean, and from the United States and Canada. Efforts to procure liberated Africans freed by the mixed commission courts of Rio de Janeiro and Cuba also yielded just a small number of immigrants.37 From 1835, the West Indian colonies made official requests to be allowed to draw labour from Africa, including Sierra Leone, but these were rejected by Colonial Secretary Lord Glenelg as well as by James Stephen and others in Downing Street, on the grounds that such schemes had all the appearances of the slave trade.38 However, during the final years of the decade, attitudes in government began to shift. Stephen remained implacably opposed to African emigration, but the stance of others within and around the Colonial Office became more pragmatic. Herman Merivale articulated this new position in a series of lectures at Oxford between 1839 and 1841, while the incoming Colonial Secretary, Lord John Russell, soon became an advocate of African emigration. In large part, this shift was precipitated by the crisis of West Indian labour, which worsened markedly in 1838 because of the premature ending of the apprentice system for ex-slaves and their consequent ‘flight’ from the 36 Mary Thomas, Jamaica and voluntary laborers from Africa, 1840–1865 (Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1974). 37 Green, British Slave Emancipation, pp. 262–63. On the problems and responses of individual colonies, see Thomas, Jamaica and voluntary labourers; Donald Wood, Trinidad in Transition: The Years after Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968); Alan Adamson, Sugar without Slaves: The political economy of British Guiana, 1838–1904 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). 38 Green, British Slave Emancipation, p. 265. See also Green, ‘Plantation Society’, pp. 167–70. •

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Distant Freedom plantations to which they had previously been bound. At the same time, the rising cost of West Indian sugar (reaching prices not seen since the Napoleonic Wars) threatened economic hardship in the British home market. A humanitarian argument for African emigration also emerged, prompted by the failure of abolitionist schemes to civilise West Africa. These were to be realised through European-led agriculture and missionary settlement, in which model farm communities cultivating sugar and cotton would demonstrate the superiority of free labour, such that African rulers would abandon both slavery and slave trading. These schemes were to rely heavily on the labour of liberated Africans but the disastrous Niger Expedition of 1840–41 effectively put an end to such ambitions, a fact admitted by even its most ardent supporters. From this point, the notion that Africans could only be civilised or converted by removing them from Africa – including by emigration to the West Indies – became increasingly acceptable, even in abolitionist circles. At the same time, state-sponsored emigration was becoming a fixture of official thinking. In 1840 the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission was established to supervise the migration of British subjects, while the Passengers Act of the same year regulated the conditions under which those emigrants could be shipped.39 The question of the African labour trade, therefore, arose at a time when mechanisms for large-scale emigration were being put in place across the Empire, and when economic imperatives began to overshadow the perceived risks of the enterprise.40 In March 1841, the Colonial Office sanctioned labour emigration from Sierra Leone, Lord John Russell stating that as a consequence ‘a new epoch has arrived for the African race’. In Freetown, competitive campaigning for liberated African emigrants began as soon as the Colonial Office’s sanction became known – principally by agents acting for British Guiana, Jamaica and Trinidad. Vessels left for each of these colonies in April 1841, and by April 1842, 24 ships had carried 1,343 emigrants from Sierra Leone. However, this initial success did not last. News of disappointments and unfulfilled promises filtered back from the first groups of emigrants, with the consequence that the supply of voluntary migrants dwindled to almost nothing. By May 1842, Governor M’Donald of Sierra Leone reported that the harbour was ‘crowded with emigrant ships’ that were forced to sail away empty.41 By this time, the supply of emigrants from Sierra Leone was being complemented by shipments from St Helena. The dialogue relating to emigration from St Helena had been initiated by Governor Middlemore in 39 Fred Hitchins, The Colonial Land and Emigration Commission (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931). 40 Green, British Slave Emancipation, p. 270. 41 Asiegbu, Slavery and the politics of liberation, pp. 44–45. •

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After ‘Liberation’ February 1841, by which point it was already obvious that the island’s role as a reception depot was going to be more significant than London had anticipated. Middlemore informed Russell that the 470 liberated Africans present were already more than could be employed as apprentices, and requested instructions as to their future disposal.42 The reply, formulated in May but not received on St Helena until the summer, authorised emigration but was vague as to the destinations to which the recaptives might be sent: With regard to the difficulty which you apprehend may be experienced in providing in the island to the Africans who are there now, you will understand that you are authorised to avail yourself of any opportunity which may offer for sending them to the Cape of Good Hope, or to any other British colony from which offers may be made to you to pay the expense of their passage thither; assuming always that due precautions are taken for the health and comfort of the people, and that they shall consent to their removal from St Helena.43

Lord Stanley, Russell’s successor at the Colonial Office, initially adopted the same non-committal stance with regard to the destination of St Helena’s emigrants. In a letter to James Stephen he argued that the only practical course in the immediate term was to dispatch them to either the Cape or Mauritius, while at the same time investigating whether the governors of Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana would be prepared to meet the cost of transporting labourers to their respective colonies.44 Stanley was in no doubt that the demand existed: by that point he had already been petitioned by several private individuals from Mauritius, Trinidad and Jamaica, each seeking to procure labourers from St Helena.45 Stanley responded that there was no law to prevent such enterprises and that (contingent on emigration being voluntary and with suitable precautions taken for the health of the passengers) the government would not impede the undertaking.46 Detailed orders in respect of emigration were not finally dispatched to St 42 Middlemore to Lord John Russell, 18 February 1841, CO 247/55, 757 St Helena. 43 Lord John Russell to Middlemore, 8 May 1841, CO 247/55, No. 128. 44 James Stephen to Charles Trevelyan, 5 January 1842, CO 247/56. 45 Correspondence exists from two Jamaican plantation owners, Thomas Philpotts and Charles Bayley, who held eight estates between them (Philpotts’s amounting to 7,000 acres), requesting permission to ship 140 male and 80 female liberated Africans, with the intention of engaging them on a three-year contract. It is unclear whether anything came of this initiative, as the vessel that Philpotts and Bayly proposed to use (the Sarah Bayly) never took emigrants from St Helena. Exports to Jamaica nevertheless began in mid-1842: three vessels carrying a total of 425 people. See Philpotts to Stanley, 4 December 1841, CO 247/56, 2258 St Helena; reply made on 11 December 1841. 46 This awareness of the situation on St Helena perhaps qualifies the discussion in •

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Distant Freedom Helena until the first quarter of 1842. Recognising that ‘the removal of their persons … is daily becoming more desirable’, Stanley directed Middlemore to appoint an officer to take charge of liberated African emigration and transmitted instructions about how the process should be regulated. In so doing, much emphasis was laid upon the voluntary nature of emigration, on the health and well-being of the passengers, and on the benign labour contracts to which they should be subject in the receiving colonies – all issues that will be discussed in later parts of this chapter. In the meantime, events had to some extent taken their own course on St Helena, an independent dialogue having developed between the island and several other colonies. This had made it clear that the liberated Africans, while unwanted on the island, were a much-prized commodity elsewhere. In parallel strands of communication, the governors of Cape Colony and British Guiana both made the case for their respective colonies being the ideal destination for emigrants.47 The rapid expansion of Cape Colony meant that immigrant labour for agriculture was much in demand, such that in March 1841 a memorial signed by over 1,000 residents of the Cape had been transmitted to the Colonial Secretary, petitioning him to allow the sale of Crown Wastes in order to raise funds to pay for the importation of new labourers.48 The glut of recaptives at St Helena represented a sizeable and accessible source of such manpower. Writing of their prospects to his counterpart at Jamestown, Governor George Napier expressed his firm conviction that ‘the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope holds out to their description of people, advantages which are not possessed by any other of Her Majesty’s colonial possessions’. The climate was neither too hot nor too cold, and labour (as domestic servants, agricultural labourers, shepherds) was ‘such as no European need complain of ’. Napier also stressed the benefits of working in a non-plantation environment, and pointed out the good experiences of the 1,200 recaptives already apprenticed out within the colony.49 Similar propaganda was received from British Guiana. This had been the destination of the first emigrant vessel to leave St Helena, the Mary Hartley Chapter Two relating to public awareness of events on the island: interested parties clearly had avenues of information that are not tangible to the modern historian. 47 On the import of labour sent to British Guiana see Alan Adamson, ‘The Reconstruction of Plantation Labor after Emancipation: The Case of British Guiana’, in Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, ed. Stanley Engerman and Eugene Genovese (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 457–73. 48 Napier to Russell, 15 March 1841. Reproduced in PP 1842 (301) XXXI, p. 487. 49 Napier to Trelawney, 22 December 1841, CSL 10 Vol. 2, No. 80. For a general account of the importation of recaptive labourers into the Cape, see Christopher Saunders, ‘Liberated Africans in Cape Colony in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 18.2 (1985), pp. 223–39. •

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After ‘Liberation’ having sailed on 22 December 1841 with 111 African men and 29 women on board.50 The Mary Hartley was, in fact, simply a cargo vessel transporting rice from Calcutta that happened to have spare capacity; sensing a business opportunity, her captain, James Webb, offered to carry emigrants.51 He was not disappointed. Having delivered this first consignment, the Mary Hartley was immediately rechartered for St Helena. Webb himself was fêted by the Guianan authorities and returned to the island with letters extolling the virtues of the colony. That from the Immigration Agent for Berbice contained glowing praise for Webb’s treatment of the liberated Africans during the voyage, and continued: You have seen these people on several of the plantations where they have been located, and they have told you how happy and contented they are, that they are earning plenty of money, that they have been in good health since their arrival, and that the climate agrees with them; that they feel no desire to return to their own country, but wish you to bring plenty more of their countrymen.52

Webb also carried a letter from Governor Henry Light to his counterpart on St Helena, entreating him to embark as many emigrants to British Guiana as possible for employment as agricultural (i.e. plantation) labourers. In favour of that course of action, Light made much capital out of the existence of stipendiary magistrates in his colony, by whose actions ‘the welfare of the labourer is perhaps better secured in British Guiana than in any other part of the West Indies’. He also stressed that all costs for passage money and maintenance would be met by his colony.53 A third letter, from the Sheriff of Berbice, echoed these sentiments: ‘In no portion of HM’s Dominions would they find greater advantages than in this Section of British Guiana – Liberal Proprietors, and good management; and excellent Cottages, Medical attendance, Churches and Schools free of any expense, with wages from 8 to 10 Dollars per month’.54 All these communications, both from Cape Colony and British Guiana, disguised significant problems – if indeed they did not constitute active 50 For the documentation relating to this shipment see PP 1842 (301) XXXI, Correspondence relative to emigration between the Colonial Office and authorities in Colonies, or the Commissioners of Emigration, pp. 477–81. 51 McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 8, pp. 141–42. 52 G. Lowenfield to Webb, 1 March 1842, CO 247/58. 53 Henry Light to Trelawney, 12 December 1842, CSL 11, No. 91. 54 Office of the Sheriff of Berbice to Governor of St Helena, 3 March 1842, CSL 11, No. 14. •

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Distant Freedom deception of St Helena’s governor. At the time of writing, Governor Light was in conflict with his planter elite, whose unilateral publication of ‘New Rules and Regulations’ significantly curtailed the freedom of labour. These regulations also had the unintended effect of bringing voluntary emigration from Sierra Leone to a virtual halt – thus placing still greater importance on the alternative source of labour from St Helena.55 At the Cape, Napier had also conveniently glossed over internal problems: he had, in fact, refused to endorse his colonists’ memorial, not least because the promised conditions of service for new labourers were exaggerated. In transmitting it, he informed Russell that: It would be unjust to entice the British labourer to this colony without acquainting him of the true position in which he would be placed on becoming a servant to a colonial farmer; for if the labourer comes out here, allured by the high colouring given to the wages he is going to get, and the comforts he is to enjoy, by those whose interest alone governs them, he will be most sadly mistaken … with no church, no comfortable cottage and garden, no doctor if sick, and a master speaking a language of which he understands nothing, he will certainly get dissatisfied, and probably take to drinking as his only comfort.

The reality, however, was that all propaganda sent to St Helena was unnecessary. The correspondence makes it clear that the sole wish of its governor (by January 1842, Hamelin Trelawney) was to see the liberated Africans gone from his island: their destination was an entirely secondary concern. The proactive response at the Cape and in British Guiana simply ensured that the first shipments were directed to these colonies. Accordingly, by the end of May 1842, British Guiana had received 1,108 emigrants and Cape Colony 1,322. During the early months of 1842, policy in London finally crystallised in respect of destinations. The Colonial Office adopted recommendations put forward by the Treasury, in which Mauritius was rejected on the grounds that it already had a glut of workers, and that indentured labour was depressing wages, threatening to make a ‘nation of paupers’ out of the ex-slaves.56 In 55 ‘New Rules and Regulations for the Employment of Labourers on Plantations … from and after 1st January 1842’. Discussed by Asiegbu, Slavery and the politics of liberation, pp. 45–47. 56 On indentured labour in Mauritius see M. North-Coombes, ‘From Slavery to Indenture: Forced Labour in the Political Economy of Mauritius, 1834–1867’, in Indentured Labour in the British Empire 1840–1920, ed. Kay Saunders (London: Crook Helm, 1984), pp. 78–125; Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). •

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After ‘Liberation’ any case, if necessary Mauritius had access to ample sources of labour from the East African and Indian markets. Instead, all African emigrants were to be directed to Jamaica, Trinidad and Guiana – in other words, to the major plantation colonies that had both a drastic labour shortage and the financial mechanisms to pay for the transportation of emigrants. The latter was the core consideration for the Treasury, which wished to be relieved of any costs of the Africans’ removal from St Helena.57 Thus, from the middle of 1842 virtually all of St Helena’s liberated Africans were sent westwards to the British Caribbean. The funds provided to the Cape government for African emigration were cut off and, with the exception of a brief and small-scale revival in 1846–47 (privately financed by the Municipality of Cape Town), it received no further liberated Africans from St Helena. The departures in late 1841 and early 1842 prefigured over two decades of African emigration from St Helena.58 In total, up to 1867, just over 17,000 recaptives were transported onwards from the island. This represents 70% of all those who were liberated by its Vice-Admiralty court – and virtually all who survived in the depots thereafter. The amount of people moved annually was highly variable, closely reflecting the numbers received onto the island at any given time – itself derived from the ebb and flow of the slave trade and the Navy’s success in making captures. Peaks in emigration occurred in 1842–43, 1846–51 and 1860–63, with troughs in the mid-1840s and mid- to later 1850s. No emigrants left at all in 1852, 1854 and 1855, and just five and 65 in 1853 and 1856 respectively.59 Through to the late 1840s (and other than the consignments to Cape Colony in 1842 and 1846–47) all emigrants were sent to the West Indies. British Guiana, Jamaica and Trinidad took practically all of these labourers (3,028, 2,775 and 2,466 respectively) with a single cohort directed to Grenada at the very end of the decade. The period from December 1849 until mid-1851 (the latter being the point at which the depot effectively became dormant) saw something of a diversification in terms of destinations, five vessels carrying emigrants to Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia and St Kitts.60 When 57 Trevelyan to Stephen, 12 January 1842, CO 247/58, 87 St Helena. The Treasury also proposed to charge the receiving colonies for the expense of maintenance while on the island, but no such levy was ever imposed. 58 For a breakdown of emigrant voyages from St Helena, see Appendices 3 and 4. 59 This hiatus coincides with the opening of Chinese emigration in 1852. From this date, there was a clear preference amongst the West Indian colonies for Indian and Chinese labourers, and conversely little interest in the importation of large numbers of liberated Africans. See Roberts, ‘Immigration of Africans’, p. 239. 60 The immigration to certain smaller islands in the Caribbean (Grenada, St Vincent, St Lucia, Dominica, St Kitts and Tobago) was permitted by the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission in 1848. Other islands remained debarred from importing •

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Figure 28:  The destinations of liberated African emigrants from St Helena.

emigration resumed on a significant scale in 1860, British Guiana and Jamaica once again took the lion’s share of labourers from St Helena, the latter beginning imports again in 1861 after a nearly nine-year gap. Trinidad took just one shipload during this later period: 476 people in 1860. Small cohorts were carried to some of the lesser islands, including one group to Tobago. Thus, by 1865, emigrants from St Helena’s depots were present in practically every colony in the British West Indies. Receptions into Rupert’s Valley, and the consequent emigration, dwindled to virtually nothing after 1863. No liberated Africans left St Helena in 1864, 42 in 1865 and none again in 1866. The departure of the Gangees on 1 May 1867, carrying 11 Africans to West Africa, represented St Helena’s last act in Britain’s ‘mighty experiment’ of labour migration.

labour, and the primacy of Jamaica, Trinidad and British Guiana was emphasised. See Roberts, ‘Immigration of Africans’, pp. 250–51. •

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The practicalities of emigration Liberated African emigration from St Helena was a complex process, and the shipping arrangements went through several incarnations.61 Vessels chartered by the receiving colonies in 1841–42 were replaced by the ‘threeship’ scheme of 1842, in which British Guiana, Jamaica and Trinidad were each assigned a single vessel, chartered by the British government and with a British naval supervisor. From 1845, emigration was undertaken by private ships subject to the provisions of the Passengers Act and under superficial government control; during 1848–49, it was restricted to private ships that were specifically licenced. In 1849, the trade was contracted to a single enterprise: Messrs Hyde, Hodge & Co., who operated five ships to the Caribbean during the next half decade. After the virtual cessation of emigration during the mid-1850s, the same company was again contracted, but operated in parallel with other private contractors. Finally, during the 1860s, when the supply of liberated Africans became increasingly sporadic, measures were put in place as and when needed, including the transportation of recaptives aboard vessels carrying Indian labourers.62 Like other aspects of the Liberated African Establishment, emigration was facilitated by just a few people. From the outset, the logistical arrangements were managed by the Collector of Customs who between 1842 and 1844 acted in concert with two local agents acting on behalf of the receiving colonies. Both agents, coincidentally or not, came from the clique already working with the liberated Africans: doctors George McHenry (for British Guiana) and Charles Rawlins (Jamaica and Trinidad). After the abortive closure of the Establishment in early 1844, the position of agent was abolished and responsibility for all aspects of emigration passed to the person in charge of the Liberated African Establishment: from 1844–50 the Collector of Customs, and thereafter the Superintendent.63 61 Asiegbu, Slavery and the politics of liberation, Chapters 4, 5 and 7. 62 Several hundred liberated Africans were moved on in this way, amounting to about 5% of all emigrants from St Helena. See Northrup, Indentured Labor, p. 86. 63 These men illustrate the multiple and changing roles taken by individuals in relation to liberated Africans, and to emigration as a whole. McHenry served variously as depot surgeon and emigration agent, before departing St Helena aboard the African transport Margaret in February 1844. Rawlins was surgeon aboard the emigration vessel Chieftain in 1842, before becoming emigration agent and doctor in Rupert’s Valley. William Rowlatt was the superintending naval officer aboard a variety of emigrant transports during the 1840s before being appointed Superintendent to St Helena’s liberated Africans in 1851. On the abolition of that post in 1854, he was transferred to the Emigration Agency of Belfast, becoming responsible for the removal of Irish migrants to America. •

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Distant Freedom The allocation of this role to officers already involved with the Establishment was problematic. The most basic drawback arose from the fact that they were already overworked, in marked contrast to Sierra Leone, whose bloated Liberated African Department was notorious for its overstaffing.64 The Collector’s ordinary duties were onerous, involving all aspects of Jamestown harbour’s day-to-day operations, from the provisioning and unloading of visiting ships to the gathering of customs revenues. Similarly, the doctors – though well situated within the depots to recruit emigrants – were (or should have been) fully occupied with the care of their patients. The conflict of interest engendered by their dual roles, between the health of the convalescing Africans and the imperative to fill emigrant ships, is discussed below. St Helena’s emigration officers faced a complex task. Every departing vessel had to comply with the requirements of the Passengers Act, meeting standards for space, hygiene, food, clothing and medical supplies. Ship manifests illustrate how extensive these demands were: the Janet, a ship carrying a mid-sized cargo of 232 passengers, had to be provided with over 1,500 individual items of clothing, more than 500 blankets and provisions for her month-long voyage to Trinidad.65 Such commodities were far from abundant on St Helena, and the needs of the emigrant vessels competed with both those of the Rupert’s Valley depot and the island’s general populace. Finding a qualified surgeon for each ship was, on occasion, impossible. The highly fluctuating numbers in the depot, usually including a large proportion of sick, commonly made it difficult to make up full cargoes. Vessels were often forced to delay their departure for several weeks in order to secure a full complement, while a good many left short of passengers – some badly so. At certain junctures, ships arrived at Jamestown only to find that there were no emigrants at all to transport, and sailed away empty.66 At other times, most notably during the late 1840s, the converse also occurred – namely a surfeit of liberated Africans in the depot but a dearth of emigrant vessels.67 64 For a damning contemporary assessment of Sierra Leone’s Liberated African Department see the findings of R.R. Madden’s 1841 investigation of the colony: ‘Report of the Commissioner of Inquiry on the West Coast of Africa’, reproduced as Appendix No. 15 of PP 1842 (551) XI, Select Committee on the West Coast of Africa. 65 ‘Return of Liberated Africans embarked per British Barque “Janet”, 18 June 1849’, CO 247/72. 66 Delayed departures created the dilemma of whether to keep on board those liberated Africans already embarked, or to return them to Rupert’s Valley. Those who remained aboard spent a good deal longer on board than the voyage duration subsequently reported to Parliament. 67 As seen, for example, in Thomas Dick, Agent for Hyde, Hodge and Co., to Pennell, 8 July 1850, CSL 30 Vol. 1. •

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After ‘Liberation’ While the emigration trade was plied by private contractors, competition for St Helena’s liberated Africans was fierce and its emigration officer arbitrated between competing claims. The standard practice was to adopt a first-come-first-served approach, but disputes still arose that required a disproportionate amount of time to resolve.68 Matters were simplified by the exclusive contract awarded to Hyde, Hodge & Co., but in the later 1850s the emigration officer was once again compelled to evaluate rival claims.69 If finding adequate numbers of passengers was difficult enough, compiling groups of emigrants with a suitable demographic profile was still harder. The receiving colonies usually had a preference for a high proportion of young males: in 1841, for example, the Governor of Cape Colony stressed to his counterpart on St Helena that ‘boys were the most prized’. The same was generally true of the West Indian plantation islands, though the need for young women was also stressed: the Jamaica Immigration Act of 1840, for example, required that one-third of the cargo of every emigrant ship be female. These preferences, however, were at odds with practical circumstances on St Helena. Although the long-term population within the depots was on average young and predominantly male, there were significant short-term variations. Unusual cargoes – such as the vessel captured by HMS Pluto in 1855 which carried mostly children and the aged – could skew the proportions of liberated Africans present on the island considerably. Initial attempts were made to satisfy the receiving colonies’ requirements, but left a disproportionately high number of children and women on St Helena. This effectively stored up problems for later shipments, as seen in May 1843, when of the 320 people left in Rupert’s Valley 126 were males and 194 females. This could only be rebalanced by the embarkation of 61 females and 38 males aboard the Rose – a cargo that was far from ideal at its destination in Trinidad. The Colonial Office, mindful of this problem, placed the imperative to empty the depots above the needs of the receiving colonies. Thus, when St Helena’s governor shipped an entirely young male cargo to Cape Town aboard the Hamilton Ross in 1842, he was strongly reprimanded 68 In 1849, for example, the master of the Glasgow tendered unsuccessfully for emigrants, but left empty. When the Glasgow returned to the island he argued (again to no avail) that his previous tender gave him precedence over more recent arrivals. See Hamlin to Pennell, 29 December 1849, CSL 28 Vol. 2. 69 See, for example, the case of the 90 slaves brought to the island aboard HMS Plumper on 5 November 1855, when Superintendent J.G. Swan found himself at the centre of a bidding war, receiving offers from three rival ships (CO 247/85 and CO 247/87). Other concerns also had to be addressed when it came to evaluating tenders: in 1861, for example, Superintendent Willan rejected a tender for the conveyance of Africans aboard the Elizabeth on the basis that her captain was an intemperate drunkard (29 March 1861, CSL 42 Vol. 2). •

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Distant Freedom by London: his failure to dispatch women and children alongside male labourers was condemned as ‘a great mistake’ that needed to be rectified in future shipments.70 From 1843, cargoes were assembled as dictated by the needs of St Helena, although balanced cargoes were shipped where possible. During the late 1850s and 1860s, little heed was paid to proportions of age and sex. Concern focused solely on the imperative to empty Rupert’s Valley of every liberated African who was fit enough to travel.

The question of free will The British government, though kept appraised of these practical matters, mainly left them to be resolved at the local, St Helenian, level. However, it took a particularly close interest in two issues: the voluntary nature of emigration and the health of the passengers and the resultant voyage mortality. The principle of voluntary emigration took centre stage in communications with both Sierra Leone and St Helena during the first years of the 1840s. It is encapsulated by a memorandum by Lord John Russell that was originally written for John Jeremie during the latter’s brief and fatal tenure as Governor of Sierra Leone, and subsequently forwarded to Governor Middlemore by way of guidance for how emigration was to be regulated on St Helena. Emancipation, Russell stated, had been a ‘wonderful and successful experiment’; applying the same tenets of liberty, he declared himself ‘actively opposed to any plan for taking the liberated Africans to the West Indies against their will’.71 The same sentiments are found in the Colonial Office’s directly issued instructions to St Helena. In May 1841, for example, Russell informed the Governor that emigration was permissible only if the Africans ‘shall consent to their removal from St Helena’.72 However, as Russell had acknowledged in his memorandum to Jeremie, the principle of voluntary emigration was set against the reality that the liberated Africans could not stay indefinitely in Freetown’s Queen’s Yard. Therefore, after three months they would either have to show that they were capable of supporting themselves, signify their willingness to emigrate or leave the colony.73 The liberated Africans’ choices at Freetown were therefore 70 Stanley to Trelawney, 10 June 1842, CO 247/57. 71 Russell to Jeremie, 20 March 1841. The copy was dispatched to Middlemore by Stanley in December 1841. The latter is found in Secretary of State Despatches for 1841, pp. 279–89. 72 Lord John Russell to Middlemore, 8 May 1841, CO 247/55, No. 128. 73 For discussion of the volition (or otherwise) involved in the enlistment and emigration of liberated Africans from Freetown see Daniel Stephen, A history of •

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After ‘Liberation’ closely circumscribed, but on St Helena these options dwindled to almost nothing. After the absorption of a few hundred Africans into the island’s labouring population there was no employment to be had, while there was virtually no way for them to quit the colony by their own means. The choice was therefore emigration or destitution. The ambiguity of the situation – and the fact that Lord Stanley was content to leave St Helena’s governor to negotiate it – is illustrated by a communication to William Burge, the London-based agent for Jamaica: His Lordship disclaims, on the behalf of Her Majesty’s Government, any right to compel the negroes at St Helena to quit that island, and the Governor will be distinctly instructed that no such coercion must be employed. On the other hand, as those people are unable at St Helena to find any employment profitable to themselves or the public at large, and by remaining there must continue a burden on funds … the legitimate influence of the local government will be employed in every reasonable manner to induce them to avail themselves of the opportunity [of emigration] to be offered …74

Documents generated at the island made a point of echoing the language of free will. The return of Africans aboard the Mary Hartley, for example, stated that all embarked voluntarily,75 while the captains of the Treasurer and Fairy Queen both requested the Governor to supply them only with ‘consenting emigrants’. At the far end of the process, the Sheriff and Chief Magistrate of the County of Berbice also certified the safe arrival and relocation of Africans carried by the Elizabeth to Plantation Mara, once again of their own free will.76 Such language was little more than a facade. Governor Trelawney was untroubled by the contradiction of his instructions, content to facilitate compulsory emigration on the grounds that ‘the law authorising their removal … would be only an extension of that parental care of the British Nation by which they have been brought from slavery to freedom and only that fatherly control that any parent would be justified in using towards his own children’.77 Actual children required a different solution.78 Many were too young to Liberated Africans in the colony of Sierra Leone during the first half of the nineteenth century (MA thesis, University of Durham, 1963), Chapter Two. The Colonial Office’s instructions for their disposal is discussed on pp. 36–37. 74 Hope to Burge, 27 January 1842, PP 1842 (301) XXXI, pp. 482–83. 75 PP 1842 (301) XXXI, p. 480. 76 Certificate by Charles Whinfield, 1 February 1843, CSL 15 Vol. 1, p. 196. 77 Trelawney to Stanley, 3 March 1842, CO 247/57, 1026 St Helena. 78 On the prevalence of children aboard slave ships see: Audra Diptee, ‘African •

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Distant Freedom be of any use as apprentices on St Helena, while their youth also made them unattractive as labourers in other colonies. They were also (not unreasonably) deemed incapable of making informed choices about their future – though this conveniently obviated the difficulties engendered by the notion of free choice. In the case of orphans, St Helena’s governor acted as their lawful guardian, exercising choice on their behalf. In this he was simply instructed to ‘send them to whatever colony he may think most advisable, there to be apprenticed under the superintendence of the Governor of such colony and conforming to the rules and regulations applicable to emancipated Negroes’.79 For the most part, children were dispatched as part of the general cargo of emigrant vessels, though a few ships appear to have carried a large number of the very young: in 1848, the Vanguard took 150 children and 95 adults, and the Rhyn 200 children and 134 adults: both went to Jamaica; the Hamilla Mitchell, which took away the cargo from the prize captured by HMS Plumper in 1855, nearly exclusively children, went instead to British Guiana. In the face of all of these complexities, the matter of emigration from St Helena quickly came to a head. The first visit of Trinidadian recruiters to Lemon Valley in May 1842 (then mainly populated by women and children) met with unqualified rejection, many of the inhabitants fleeing the depot.80 By November 1842, George McHenry (in his capacity as emigration agent) reported to the Governor that the Africans were refusing to emigrate, despite threats to stop their provisions (a sanction that was ultimately not carried out for fear that they would simply resort to robbery).81 Similarly, in May of the next year, Rawlins could only persuade five people to emigrate voluntarily; during the following month he was accused of horsewhipping one African who had refused to board the Fairy Queen for Trinidad – the very same vessel whose captain’s formal correspondence stressed the requirement for consenting emigrants.82 By the start of 1844, the pretence of free choice had all but evaporated. The embarkation of emigrants aboard the Margaret in January and February of that year admirably illustrates this fact – as well as many of the general complexities of loading any emigrant vessel at St Helena. The Margaret was intended as the means of emptying the depots at Lemon and Rupert’s Children in the British Slave Trade during the Late Eighteenth Century’, Slavery and Abolition 27.2 (2006), pp. 183–96; Paul Lovejoy, ‘The Children of Slavery’. 79 ‘Extract of report from Mister Rothery, dated 1st December 1843’, CO 247/60. 80 Undated letter from Rawlins to Lean, PP 1843 (621) XXIX, Colonial Land and Emigration Commission. General Report, 1843, p. 51–53. 81 McHenry to Seale, 19 November 1842, CSL 13. 82 Rawlins to Seale, 14 May 1843, CSL 14; Young to Seale, 2 June 1843, CSL 15 Vol. 1. For the rebuttal of the charge of assault see Rawlins to Seale, 10 June 1843, CSL 15 Vol. 1. •

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After ‘Liberation’ Valley, thus allowing the closure of the Establishment as a whole. However, the majority of African men refused to embark, offering instead ‘frivolous excuses’ for staying at St Helena, while 40 women would not leave without their husbands.83 The authorities responded with coercion. The Governor cut off rations on 18 January, at the same time embarking 24 children ‘without consultation’. Another youth, who had absconded from his master, was induced to go on board after spending a night in the gaol.84 Forty-two people were embarked through these methods by 23 January – far short of the Margaret’s capacity and leaving many still living in the depots. The vessel remained in Jamestown harbour, her captain demanding reimbursement from the government for the costs of feeding his passengers. Much of the subsequent correspondence came to focus on a single woman in the Civil Hospital who appears (for reasons that are unclear) to have been the key to filling the vessel, since many others refused to leave without her. She, however, declined to emigrate. A dispute then erupted between the officers of the colony. The woman, who had an unhealed blister on her shoulder (i.e. a potentially infectious and therefore fatal wound), was visited by the captain of the Margaret and by doctors McHenry and Rawlins – once again acting in their capacity as emigration agents rather than as medical men. In response, Colonial Surgeon Vowell complained of the ‘importunity of harassing sick persons’ in his care, intimating that such attempts at coercion were no isolated event. On 5 February, the Margaret finally sailed from St Helena carrying just 60 people. The whole episode had been entirely unsatisfactory. Thirty-nine Africans remained behind on the island, reported to be living without rations, wandering about the island by day and returning to Rupert’s Valley at night. The farce had been compounded by the arrival of HMS Thunderbolt’s prize on 27 January carrying 72 new slaves – an event that sparked political intervention from London and ultimately made St Helena’s role in suppression permanent. The edict relating to voluntary emigration remained in force through to the last departures of the 1860s. It appears, for example, in instructions provided to St Helena’s Emigration Officer in 1855. However, after the revival of the Establishment in the mid-1840s, it was meaningless. The island could not – and would not – accommodate newly arrived liberated Africans on a permanent basis. Instead, compulsory emigration was the expected 83 On the reluctance of African women to emigrate see Schuler, Alas, Alas, Kongo, pp. 17–18. 84 These events are narrated in CSL 17. McHenry relates the gaoling of the apprenticed boy in ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 7, p. 33. •

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Distant Freedom norm, whatever lip service was paid to the exercise of free will. Resistance to that emigration is seen at certain (albeit rare) junctures, most notably in the riots and the antipathy to baptism within the Rupert’s Valley depot in the early 1860s. In every case, the authorities won out.85 Intrinsically linked to the issue of free will was the question of how much the liberated Africans understood about the emigration that was proposed to them. The initial groups taken from Sierra Leone in 1840–41 comprised established settlers from the colony, induced to emigrate by a recruitment campaign that emphasised the opportunities to be realised in the West Indies. They were predominantly respectable, able-bodied, middle-aged and literate, with skills as farmers or artisans. Their decision to leave Freetown was genuinely voluntary, and they did so in possession of reasonable information about the conditions under which they would work and the lives they could expect.86 On their arrival, they made a favourable impression: Trinidad’s Lieutenant Governor Henry MacLeod was most impressed by those aboard the Elizabeth & Jane, remarking on the readiness with which they set to work, and marvelling at the standard of their literacy.87 From 1842, however, the pool of voluntary migrants at Sierra Leone dried up and the colonial government adopted a policy of sourcing labourers from the newly arrived liberated Africans in the Queen’s Yard. On St Helena, the emigration agent was issued with a series of standing orders, one of which specified that he should ‘afford the Africans who may wish to emigrate all the information and assistance of which they may stand in need’.88 Implementation of this instruction was virtually impossible. It was stymied by the language barrier and the newly arrived liberated Africans’ limited understanding of their geographical situation: even the basics of emigration were difficult to convey, let alone the nuances. Thus (and in addition to making a mockery of the notion of free choice) the outcome of this situation was the export of people who had little notion of what their emigration entailed for them. The contrast between the first shipments of voluntary labourers from Freetown and those that followed – from both Sierra Leone and St Helena 85 Physical coercion appears to have been unusual, though in 1863 three seamen serving on the vessel Bonanza entered a complaint against its Master and Surgeon for cruelty to an African during the voyage to Demerara in September of the previous year. The African had apparently been put on board wearing leg irons and handcuffs and had subsequently committed suicide. The evidence of the witnesses was deemed contradictory, and the case was dismissed. 86 Asiegbu, Slavery and the politics of liberation, pp. 44–45. 87 Schuler, Alas, Alas, Kongo, p. 18; Roberts, ‘Immigration of Africans’, p. 241. 88 Stanley to Middlemore, 27 December 1841, Secretary of State Despatches for 1841, pp. 273–77. •

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After ‘Liberation’ – was remarked upon by the authorities in the receiving colonies. The voyage of the Chieftain, which departed St Helena for Trinidad in May 1842, represented the watershed between these two types of emigrants. She was the fourth vessel to arrive at Port-of-Spain carrying liberated African labourers, but the first from St Helena, and the first to bring those who had only recently been rescued from slave ships. In Port-of-Spain, the difference of this new type of passenger was immediately obvious. Where MacLeod had been impressed by earlier arrivals, he expressed concern about the ‘extreme uncivilisation’ of those aboard the Chieftain. The perceived inability of such emigrants to function unaided in Trinidadian society prompted its council to prepare An Ordinance … for the protection of and the promoting of the Industry of recently liberated Africans introduced into the Colony, a measure modelled on similar legislation enacted in 1835 for liberated Africans from Cuba.89 Aboard the Chieftain, the ship’s surgeon (Charles Rawlins, prior to his employment on St Helena) gave the Africans’ perspective. He drew the same distinction as Trinidad’s governor, remarking that the passengers ‘were not such men as emigrate from Sierra Leone, who have enjoyed the benefit of mixing with civilised beings’. Rawlins also made the passengers’ lack of comprehension of their situation abundantly clear: Some imagine that all care taken of them by a white man arises from purely interested motives, the Vishi Congos entertaining the idea that the white man merely buys him for the purpose of transporting and eating him in his own country: this created a great sensation among our people as we made the land of Trinidad – men, women and children all crying and screaming, wailing that they would be eaten on shore: one of the women became quite ill through this fear, for being young and fat, she made certain that her turn to be eaten would be a very early one.90

Rawlins’s account makes it quite evident that the Chieftain’s passengers had not entered into any voluntary agreement, and that assertions to the 89 As discussed by Adderley, New Negroes from Africa, pp. 78–79 and notes 50–52. The ordinance was ultimately disallowed by the Colonial Office, but even before the Chieftain’s arrival the Secretary of State had approved the principle of indenturing newly arrived liberated Africans for a period of one year, on the grounds that their untutored state made it ‘for their own benefit’. Problems associated with ‘uncivilised’ emigrants manifested themselves amongst St Helena’s liberated African migrants after landing in the receiving colonies. Some of those taken to Jamaica aboard the Treasurer in 1842 subsequently deserted their plantations and resorted to petty banditry, while others rioted on the Bathurst estate (Schuler, Alas, Alas, Kongo, p. 48). 90 PP 1843 (621) XXIX, Colonial Land and Emigration Commission. General Report, 1843, Appendix 12. •

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Distant Freedom contrary were simply false. Far from being optimistic, aspiring emigrants, the Africans shared the same terrors and misconceptions as those carried to their destinations aboard slave ships. Only three years earlier, the uprising aboard the Amistad had been partly motivated by the fear of cannibalism.91 How representative was the Chieftain of other emigrant cargoes from St Helena? Probably very much so. Accounts of subsequent voyages indicate that the same chaotic, fearful situation prevailed aboard other vessels: the ‘mutinous’ and ‘threatening’ conduct of those embarked on the Salsette in 1843, for example, caused the crew to place some of the Africans in irons and put them on a diet of bread and water.92 It is plausible that the very earliest shipments, comprising people who had lived in the depots for many months and with whom meaningful communication had been possible, carried at least some passengers with a reasonable grasp of their circumstances. It is also during this period that genuine efforts were made to recruit via persuasion. However, as early as mid-1842, the Chieftain had shipped emigrants with little understanding of their situation and – as the incident of the Margaret shows – attempts at voluntary recruitment had effectively ended by 1844. In later years, most liberated Africans dispatched from St Helena did so after only a brief period in the Rupert’s Valley depot, speaking no English and understanding little of their situation. In all respects, therefore, these people mirrored the contemporary emigrants from Freetown: ‘bewildered, newlyarrived recaptives who had no knowledge of Sierra Leone and no stake in its affairs’.93

Emigration and health The second issue in which London took an interest was the state of the passengers’ health. Politically, this was a matter of great sensitivity, subject to both domestic and international scrutiny. David Northrup has shown that shipboard deaths amongst indentured African emigrants (from all points of origin) occurred at a rate of 31 per 1,000 per month. Such mortality was approximately half that of the contemporary illegal slave trade, comparable to that of indentured Chinese on Cuba, but markedly higher than for other groups, notably British emigrants to North America and convicts to 91 Fear of cannibalism had a long pedigree in the era of legitimate slaving and continued into the illegal trade of the nineteenth century. See Alan Rice, ‘“Who’s Eating Whom”: The Discourse of Cannibalism in the Literature of the Black Atlantic from Equiano’s “Travels” to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”’, Research in African Literatures 29.4 (1998), pp. 106–21. 92 Jackson, Island of St Helena, p. 266. 93 Green, British Slave Emancipation, p. 272. •

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After ‘Liberation’ Australia.94 No systematic records of emigrant mortality were ever kept on St Helena, and even cursory statistics are unavailable for the early 1840s. More complete records were generated during the later 1840s onwards, but for no period are they comprehensive. The initial cargoes of emigrants from St Helena do not appear to have experienced any problem with shipboard health. All 140 of those embarked on the Mary Hartley survived and were reported to have arrived in excellent health. Likewise, the subsequent emigrants to British Guiana and those sent to the Cape seem to have fared well. The subsequent omission of the subject within the historical record is a reasonable indication that mortality during this early period was low – or at least considered unremarkable. It nevertheless appears that the Fairy Queen was quarantined for over three months after its arrival at Trinidad in 1843. During the voyage it had lost 11 out of a cargo of 206 people.95 Given the prevalence of smallpox in the Lemon Valley depot, it would be surprising if other vessels were not subject to similar measures. Two analyses of voyage mortality have been undertaken for the last years of the 1840s, both expressing their results as a percentage of those who survived the voyage. Asiegbu’s study of 15 vessels departing from St Helena during 1848 and 1849 makes for bleak reading: those supervised by government officers experienced mortality of 1% to 6%, but unsupervised vessels fared much worse: 6% to 16%.96 The overall average of 6.5% chimes with the analysis of David Eltis who, considering the period 1847–49, calculated the average mortality aboard 34 ships as 7.4%. Eltis observed that this percentage was closer to the slave trade than to other free migrant rates.97 It is notable, however, that these shipments occurred on the eve of the award of the contract to Messrs Hyde, Hodge & Co. – a development that removed many of the irregularities associated with private vessels and which ushered in a marked improvement in mortality.98 The late 1840s was also the time of the worst conditions within the Rupert’s Valley depot. A rather more positive, long-term picture can be drawn from the work of Adderley. This shows that of the 15 emigrant vessels that left St Helena for Trinidad between 1842 and 1860, three arrived with all passengers still living, while others lost a maximum of 13 and usually rather fewer: the total deaths amongst the 2,569 passengers numbered 72, or 2.8%.99 94 Northrup, Indentured Labor, Figure 4.3 and Table A.5. 95 As detailed in ‘Petition of Mr Kennedy, 22 March 1844’, CO 295/145, 553 Trinidad. 96 Asiegbu, Slavery and the politics of liberation, pp. 132–33. 97 David Eltis, ‘Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations’, p. 275. 98 Northrup, Indentured Labor, p. 100. 99 Adderley, New Negroes from Africa, Appendix 2. The exceptional losses on the •

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Distant Freedom Many voyages seem to have passed off against a backdrop of reasonable health and little or no mortality. Nevertheless, shipboard health was a constant preoccupation at St Helena, the receiving colonies and in London. Sickly voyages were subject to detailed investigation and generated significant volumes of correspondence. Episodic problems with shipments from St Helena began to be flagged up after the revival of St Helena’s African Establishment in the mid-1840s. In 1846, Governor Light of British Guiana raised the case of the Margaret, which had lost 14 of its cargo of 351. The last years of the decade saw a series of fatal voyages where mortality was far above the norm: the Reliance lost 20 out of 230 passengers on her voyage to Demerara; the Euphrates lost 46 of 309 and the Rhyn 54 out of 334, both en route to Jamaica.100 Incidences of mortality aboard two vessels drew particular attention: Atlantic in 1850 and Maida in 1862. These do much to reveal the tensions surrounding emigration at a local level and the problems that arose when the desire to empty the depots conflicted with the emigrants’ state of health.101 On St Helena, the consequences of hasty embarkation were well understood at an early stage.102 The Emigration Commissioners had been informed that those placed aboard the Margaret in 1846 had done so ‘in a sickly state’ and a subsequent enquiry found that 58 had been taken on board directly from the depot hospital.103 This knowledge was cemented by high Atlantic, mainly but not exclusively amongst Africans embarked at Sierra Leone, are excluded from these figures. 100 During the last years of emigration from St Helena, a small number of liberated Africans were placed aboard vessels carrying Indian migrants. Several of these had poor shipboard conditions and experienced high mortality amongst the Indians, for example, the Themis (1860), Clarendon (1861) and Scoresby (1862). The notorious vessel Salsette, which lost 120 of its cargo of 324 people, called at St Helena in June 1858, though it did not embark any Africans there. See Ron Ramdin, The other Middle Passage: Journal of a voyage from Calcutta to Trinidad, 1858 (London: Hansib, 1994). 101 On the acrimony that erupted between the Collector of Customs and the depot surgeon over the Atlantic, see Young to Pennell, 3 May 1850, CO 247/74, 6656 St Helena. 102 Modern analyses bear out the point that shipboard mortality was affected, above all, by the condition of the passengers at the point of origin. Northrup (Indentured Labor, p. 95) highlights three separate factors: the general physical debility of the migrants before recruitment; their care between recruitment and boarding; and the likelihood of epidemic disease being introduced from the local environment. Arnold Meagher makes a similar point regarding Chinese emigration, though also drawing attention to the connection between mortality and ill-equipped ships, overcrowding, lack of government oversight, and lack of food and medical care. See The Introduction of Chinese Laborers to Latin America: the ‘Coolie Trade’, 1847–1874 (PhD thesis, University of California, 1975). 103 Commissioners to Colonial Office, 21 November 1846, CO 386/52; Ross to Earl Grey, 28 April 1847, CO 247/68, 1395 St Helena. •

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After ‘Liberation’ death rates on vessels dispatched between 1848 and 1850, mortality on some of which was attributed to dysentery: four of these carried emigrants who had arrived on prizes between eight and 31 days previously.104 Lieutenant Griffiths, Superintendent in 1850, made the point that the Africans were essentially a tough, resilient people, but nevertheless had to be given adequate time to recover from their ordeal aboard the slave ship. The first six to eight weeks after landing, he said, was a crucial time, but having survived this period their prospects were good. Griffiths went on to warn of the risks of placing them on board emigrant ships without an adequate period of convalescence.105 His advice does not seem to have been heeded: after heavy losses aboard the Tuskar in late 1850, it was commented that there was no doubt ‘that the mortality was caused by the shipment of persons, who had not sufficiently recovered from the hardships of the Slavers’.106 In response to the Margaret incident, St Helena’s governor had put in place a measure that required the medical officers of the Establishment to sign a certificate that guaranteed the good health of emigrants prior to embarkation. In 1850, parallel instructions were issued to the Superintendent (also the emigration agent) that made clear the ‘importance of firmly refusing to ship Emigrants before they are really fit for the voyage’.107 The latter edict was, however, never wholly implemented. Indeed, a specific outcome of the appointment of Hyde, Hodge and Co. was the shortening of the interval between landing and transhipment, and the practice of rapidly dispatching recaptives to West Indies seems to have persisted through to the ending of emigration from St Helena. This can be illustrated by reference to certain vessels, of which the Broughton Hall is a good example. It was a large vessel, capable of carrying over 600 passengers, but on arrival at St Helena in December 1859 found only 250 people fit to embark. However, intelligence reached the island of the imminent reception of a prize to HMS Pluto. It was not a healthy cargo: of the 874 slaves living at the time of capture, 146 had died on the passage to St Helena and 19 more immediately after landing. Despite this fact, expedience prevailed: the Governor informed the Colonial Secretary that ‘immediately on the adjudication of the prize … “Broughton Hall” will be despatched with as many emigrants as be in a fit state for the voyage to Demerara’. She duly 104 Colonial Office to Palmerston, 27 November 1849, with enclosure from Thomas C. Murdoch and Frederick Rogers to Earl Grey, 25 August 1849, FO 84/780. Cited by Eltis, ‘Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations’, note 68. 105 Letter dated 24 July 1850, CO 247/74. 106 Young to Pennell, 18 December 1850, CO 247/74. 107 Colonial Office to Ross, 24 July 1850, CO 247/74, 5405 St Helena. •

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Distant Freedom departed on 7 January, carrying 340 from the Pluto’s prize: these people can only have been in Rupert’s Valley for 13 days.108 The Maida sailed from St Helena on 16 August 1862, carrying 258 emigrants to Jamaica: these people represented the residue of two captures brought to the island two months earlier. The requisite forms, signed by the depot’s surgeon Henry Hartley and the Maida’s surgeon Robinson Bonstead, testified to the emigrants’ fitness to embark. The Maida’s arrival in Jamaica, after a 37-day voyage, found an entirely different situation. There had been seven deaths during the passage and over 60 had to be admitted to Kingston’s Public Hospital. A return of the sick compiled by Bonstead recorded widespread sickness, most prevalent being dysentery, pneumonia, ophthalmia and rheumatism. Over 30 people of this group showed symptoms of scurvy and a similar number were diagnosed with venereal disease. One man had a foot ‘in such as a state of disease as to require amputation’. The risk of smallpox was also raised as a concern, only 56 of the passengers having been vaccinated against the disease prior to their embarkation.109 An enquiry – and recriminations – inevitably followed. Bonstead blamed Hartley, citing a ‘want of care’ in the latter’s selection of emigrants. Hartley responded that the Maida’s surgeon, having had ample opportunity to inspect the emigrants himself, was simply seeking to escape sanction from the Jamaican authorities for the sickly state of his patients on their arrival at Kingstown. He concluded his rebuttal by noting that in the previous year Bonstead had been dismissed from the Bombay Army after a court martial. Regardless of Hartley’s protestations and the real possibility of Bonstead’s incompetence, it is evident that the Maida’s was not a healthy cargo. And, given the comparatively short duration of the voyage, much of the sickness must surely have been latent in the Rupert’s Valley depot. Hartley’s comments are also telling in a wider context. He stated that many of the cases on Bonstead’s sick list were ‘of a very slight nature’, which suggests that the emigration of those without acute illness was quite acceptable. The shipment of those whose sight had been damaged by ophthalmia was certainly commonplace: Hartley commented that ‘If I kept back from emigration all those with one eye quite, or partially occluded, I should have a great many able bodied men and women now remaining on the station’. 108 Drummond Hay to the Duke of Newcastle, 28 December 1859, CO 247/92. Similarly, in July 1860 it was reported that a cohort of liberated Africans were in such good health that they were shipped ‘at once’ to Demerara. See Letter of the Bishop of St Helena, 28 July 1860, SPG Papers D25c, pp. 53–56. 109 The voyage had also gone badly in other respects. One sailor was prosecuted for the rape of an African girl (case dismissed for lack of evidence) while another was convicted for the assault of a male emigrant. •

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After ‘Liberation’ Finally, the Maida incident provides a rare instance where the experience of a named recaptive from St Helena is related. This was Sallamoo, a girl aged less than one year. She, along with her mother and brother Veendoo, had all been admitted to the hospital on arrival at St Helena. The mother had died from dysentery but the two siblings survived, though ophthalmia destroyed the sight in one of Sallamoo’s eyes and damaged the other. Both children were ‘adopted’ by another African woman in the hospital, Caimbee, and Sallamoo also seems to have become something of a favourite with Hartley, who described giving her great attention, giving her money and having her brother take her out for walks. Hartley also deliberately kept Sallamoo in the hospital so that she could be provided with a better diet (of soft bread, milk, sago and fresh meat) that was not available to those he discharged. When Caimbee and Veendoo opted (or were co-opted) for emigration aboard the Maida, Hartley decided that, as a kindness, the little girl should also accompany them. The outcome of her voyage, unfortunately, appears not to have been a happy one; Bonstead diagnosed Sallamoo (‘a perfect little skeleton when embarked’) with hydrocephalus (‘water on the brain’) and his account implies that she may also have been separated from her adoptive mother and brother. Her prospects appeared bleak: Bonstead described her as an ‘incurable orphan … a burden on the Island all its life, its ultimate recovery to ordinary health impossible’. Sallamoo’s ultimate fate is unknown.110

A successor to the slave trade? The indentured labour trade of the nineteenth century has provoked considerable controversy over whether it constituted a disguised successor to the slave trade. Several modern analyses draw attention to the resemblances, of which Hugh Tinker’s study of Indian labour is perhaps the most influential.111 But while certain elements of the trade are more or less universally considered as a continuation of slave trading – most notably the French ‘repurchase’ scheme – the prevailing opinion is that contracted labour was a distinct phenomenon.112 110 The Jamaican authority’s enquiry into the sickness aboard the Maida can be found in CO 137/368. The response from St Helena see Hartley to J.D. Willan (Acting Commissary General and Emigration Agent) is in March 25, 1863, CO 247/97; his account was supported by the dispenser of the liberated African depot, H. McDaniel (16 March 1863; same folio). 111 Hugh Tinker, A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas, 1830–1920 (London: Oxford University Press, 1974). 112 See Northrup, Indentured Labor, p. 27. For interpretations of the French repurchase scheme as slavery, see Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 146; David Eltis, Economic •

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Distant Freedom The preceding narrative gives an opportunity to consider how these evaluations apply to emigration from St Helena. Both Asiegbu and Schuler have contended that the transportation of liberated Africans to the West Indies was – just like the French scheme – an effective continuation of the slave trade.113 This position is an overstatement: efforts at persuasion were made, conditions of passage were markedly better and the term of indenture was finite – commonly only a year. David Northrup’s view is more accurate: it was not slave trading, but it was ethically ambivalent and far removed from the ideals expressed in London during the late 1830s and early 1840s. Study of the St Helenian records shows that the emigration of Africans from the island was not founded on any notion of the profits to be made from people trafficking, nor were the needs of the West Indian colonies ever a material consideration. Instead, it was driven by simple expediency, created by the island’s isolation and the tendency of its depots to become overcrowded, insanitary and ultimately fatal. It was, in essence, the mechanism which prevented St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment (and the island as a whole) from becoming entirely overwhelmed. The principle of free choice undoubtedly fell victim to this imperative. Most of those leaving St Helena did not do so of their own volition, nor did they understand what the process entailed or what they might expect after their transportation. The liberated Africans were pushed from St Helena: few could have had the positive motivation and aspirations for the future that characterised other contemporary emigrant groups. The St Helenians themselves appear to have viewed the disposal of the liberated Africans with ambivalence. In the comparatively large and diverse society of Freetown, religious and missionary groups provided critical comment on emigration, and to some extent acted as a check and balance to the colonial government. In the earlier 1840s, for example, concern was voiced about the involuntary nature of emigration.114 The recruitment of children was cast by one critic as a ‘seduction’, while in December 1845 the Sierra Leone Watchman newspaper, discussing the departure of nearly 6,000 newly arrived slaves to the West Indies during the preceding year, rightly questioned the degree of free will and choice under which they departed.115 Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 246. 113 Asiegbu (Slavery and the Politics of Abolition, p. 119) argues, unconvincingly, that British naval policy after 1841 became more interested in capturing foreign slavers on the high seas and making ‘voluntary emigrants’ of their cargoes than in preventing the slave dealers from embarking the slaves from the coast. 114 Asiegbu, Slavery and the Politics of Abolition, p. 83. 115 Sierra Leone Watchman, December 1845. See also Adderley, New Negroes from Africa, pp. 78 and 82–83. •

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After ‘Liberation’ In St Helena’s confined society, such groups simply did not exist. There was no missionary presence, no politically powerful individual other than the Governor and no interest group that might have voiced an opposition to the circumstances of emigration. Instead, as the island rid itself of its unwanted Africans, dissent was almost completely absent; the inhabitants’ silence may, indeed, reasonably be interpreted as acceptance or even approval.116

Dispersal in the colonies Recaptives from St Helena were dispatched across the Atlantic world, from the Cape to the Caribbean. This book does not address their lives after arrival at these places: this represents a study in its own right, and entails a discussion not only of those recaptives moved from St Helena, but also those from Sierra Leone and all other places from which the British procured its new African labourers. In the main, it is also not a topic that can be satisfactorily addressed with the documentary sources that are available in the United Kingdom or on St Helena. The detail appears to lie in the archives of the receiving colonies – and thus on materials that have not been accessed during the present study. A cursory examination suggests that, on arrival in the West Indian colonies, each shipment was broken up, the emigrants being dispersed to numerous separate locations. The authorities were at pains to point out, however, that family groups were kept together and assigned to the same places.117 This mode of dispersal is evidenced for the first cohort of St Helenian emigrants, sent to British Guiana aboard the Mary Hartley: they were divided into lots of 14 and assigned to ten sugar estates, all but one of which was in the county of Berbice.118 By that point, British Guiana had been taking in liberated African emigrants from Sierra Leone and Rio de Janeiro for seven months and therefore the new arrivals from St Helena entered several plantations which already had a small population of Africanborn labourers.119 On the opposite Atlantic seaboard at Cape Colony, the 116 The incident involving one Indian emigrant vessel, the Hanover, bears a striking echo of the local reaction to the liberated Africans. On their arrival at St Helena in December 1857, the sickly condition of its passengers evoked much sympathy, but as they became a burden on resources, popular sentiment quickly turned sour and there were demands that the ship sail onwards as soon as possible. See Letter to Colonial Secretary, 11 December 1857; petition to Governor Ross, 16 December 1857, CSL 40. 117 See for example Willan to Pennell, 23 January 1863, CO 247/97, No. 202. 118 Shammaine Joseph, ‘The Liberated Africans of Berbice, 1841–1865’, History This Week – No.  26/2010, Staebroek News (http://www.stabroeknews.com/2010/features/08/12/ the-liberated-africans-of-berbice-1841-%E2%80%93-1865). 119 That this pattern of distribution continued into 1843 is implied by the certificate •

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Distant Freedom emigrants from St Helena were also dispersed, mainly in Cape Town and its neighbouring villages, but to some extent into more distant districts such as Malmesbury and Stellenbosch. Here the emphasis was on the allotment of individuals or very small groups, usually into domestic service or as farm labourers.120 Years later, the same situation can be observed in relation to the survivors of the ill-fated Maida after its arrival at Jamaica in 1860. Here the records show dispersal of the emigrants across virtually the whole island, from the parishes of Westmoreland and St James in the west, to St Thomas in the east and all points in between. Some of the groups were quite sizeable, most notably the 50 people assigned to William Hosack, a prominent landowner in St George parish; several other groups numbering 20 and 30 were also allotted, but others comprised between just five and ten people.121 The widespread dispersal of African immigrants from St Helena into their receiving societies – often in small numbers – must have precluded most forming distinct, long-lasting communities. If recaptive African identity was maintained amidst the wider society of Europeans, creoles and other immigrants, it was more likely to have been as part of broader groupings – that is, of those with common Central African origins and the recent shared experience of the slave ship. The exact point of transit – whether from St Helena, Sierra Leone or elsewhere – was perhaps less material. That said, the bonds formed amongst shipmates of the slave ship are known to have been extremely strong, and a few pockets of St Helenian migrants could have had retained coherence in the New World. Monica Schuler claimed to have identified one such group in Seafield, Berbice, where even in 1985 the villagers retained knowledge of St Helena.122

*** Alongside the large-scale emigration to the West Indies, it is also possible to identify a variety of other avenues by which St Helena’s liberated Africans for the assignation of 15 St Helenian emigrants from the Elizabeth to the Mara plantation, situated on the east bank of the Berbice River. On the dispersal of early Sierra Leonean emigrants to numerous plantations, see PP 1842 (301) XXXI, pp. 368–72. Correspondence from St Vincent relating to the arrival of liberated Africans from St Helena in 1850 indicates a similar mode of dispersal. See CO 260/72. 120 Saunders, ‘Liberated Africans in Cape Colony’, pp. 232–34. 121 CO137/368. Schuler’s examination of immigrant vessels to Jamaica finds that five ships from St Helena, carrying 1,045 people, landed at the St Thomas-in-the-East ports of Morant Bay and Port Morant. She suggests that this explains the present strength of Central African culture in the parish (Alas, Alas, Kongo, pp. 68–69). 122 Schuler, ‘Liberated Central Africans’. •

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After ‘Liberation’ were dispersed. A few hundred men were recruited into the British military – a common practice for many years at Sierra Leone but confined to the early 1860s on St Helena, where military enlistment had been precluded by the 1842 edict that all recaptives were to be assigned as labourers to the West Indies.123 The relaxation of that rule in 1862 led to enquiries by the War Office about the possibility of obtaining recruits at St Helena and a suitable opportunity presented itself in August 1863, in the form of the cargo aboard the Haydee. This had on board 371 male slaves of ‘a most unusual description of large and robust adults’. Recruitment began only days after their arrival – pre-empting the formal judgement of the Vice-Admiralty court. The exercise stimulated discussion about the manner of their recruitment, notably the extent to which their enlistment should be voluntary. Detailed consideration of the Mutiny Act followed, focusing on the distinction between the Africans’ enlistment through ‘selection’, as opposed to their own free will. That debate was ended by the Colonial Office: transmitting a copy of the correspondence to the War Office, the Duke of Newcastle stated that ‘there can be no doubt that the liberated Africans must enlist voluntarily or not at all’.124 It is unclear whether, on St Helena, there was a genuine understanding among the recruits or if – as was once noted at Sierra Leone – the enlisted men ‘could not possibly have had any idea of the nature of the engagement into which they were entering’.125 Regardless, the Haydee’s cargo provided 200 ‘splendid able-bodied negroes’ for the Fifth West Indian Regiment.126 (These men were the main participants in the riots in Rupert’s Valley while awaiting embarkation.) Late in the same year, another 132 men enlisted with the West India Regiment.127 These two groups represented the only men directly recruited into the British Army. However, a number of those taken to Cape Colony in 1846 were formed into a Liberated African Corps, fighting under European officers in the War of the Axe on the eastern Cape frontier. Given uniforms and guns, they were chiefly employed in escort 123 The Abolition Act stated that officers designated by the Crown would have the authority to enlist liberated Africans in the armed forces, and the recruiting of freed slaves had been common practice since 1808. The majority of enlistments were for the West India regiments, with a lesser number entering the Royal Navy. On army recruitment see: A.B. Ellis, The History of the First West India Regiment (London: Chapman and Hall, 1885); S. Ukpabi, ‘West Indian Troops and the Defence of British West Africa in the Nineteenth Century’, African Studies Review 17.1 (1974), pp. 133–50. 124 Elliott to the Duke of Newcastle, 29 August 1863, CO 247/97, 9397 St Helena. Newcastle’s response is appended as a hand-written note on this letter (original emphasis). 125 Ellis, History of the First West India Regiment, p. 16. 126 MacBean to Pennell, 28 August 1863, CSL 46 Vol. 1, p. 223. 127 J.W. Murdoch to Frederick Rogers, 28 January 1864, CO 247/101, 809 St Helena. •

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Distant Freedom duty for much of that year. On their return to Cape Town in January 1847, unsuccessful efforts were made to persuade them to volunteer for the Cape Corps on a permanent basis; instead they joined the colony’s free labouring population.128 The extent of naval recruitment from St Helena is not known, but was certainly limited. Recaptives from Sierra Leone commonly feature on the muster books of the West Africa Squadron, alongside other Africans – most notably Kru – but recruitment from St Helena was again precluded by the Colonial Office’s 1842 directive. Before that date a few may have enlisted: one at least, ‘Jim Mischief ’ (whose formal name was James Wilcox, after the ship’s mate) is found serving on HMS Waterwitch in 1842–43.129 A detailed search of other muster books of this period would probably reveal other St Helenian recruits. Finally, a few scattered references attest to a small number of liberated Africans leaving St Helena through a variety of other means. Some were taken on as servants by army personnel, or by civilians on passing ships, following their new masters to a diverse range of locations.130 One African boy, for instance, having been taken on by an officer of the 46th Regiment, found himself in the north of England. The officer, writing from Smedley Old Hall, Manchester, reported to the Colonial Office that, having suffered from the severity of the English winter, the boy wished to return to St Helena rather than accompany him to his new posting in Canada; the reply from London stated that no funds were available to defray the costs of a return voyage.131 Others are known to have signed on as sailors aboard merchant vessels – an extremely rare instance of recaptives having left the island through their own agency. One group enlisted aboard a Russian ship bound for London and, having abandoned that vessel, were later found in a destitute sailors’ asylum at an unspecified location.132 Our knowledge of such people is largely a matter of luck. The stories related above are preserved only because subsequent events caused the Africans’ circumstances to be transmitted to the Colonial Office. Doubtless the lives of others were never recorded, or have simply been lost from the 128 Saunders, ‘Liberated Africans in Cape Colony’, p. 236. 129 HMS Waterwitch Muster Book, 1839–43, ADM 38/9325. 130 In 1848, for example, it was noted that a few ‘left the island as sailors or servants to passengers’. See Return showing the number of liberated Africans removed from the establishment and settled in the island from 9th June 1840 to 30 June 1848; Custom House, St Helena, 30 August 1848, CO 247/70. 131 Lt Wemyss to Lord Stanley, 23 March 1845, CO 247/65, 358 St Helena. Reply from Colonial Office, April 1845. 132 Letter from Lt Pierce RN, 21 February 1854; Trevelyan to Merivale, 18 February 1854, CO 247/84, 1640 St Helena. •

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After ‘Liberation’ documentary record. Nevertheless, these chance references serve as an indication of the diverse life histories of the survivors of the Rupert’s Valley depot, for whom St Helena served only as a temporary place of transit, and as a prelude to myriad global trajectories.

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chapter seven

Island Lives Island Lives

Most liberated Africans experienced St Helena only as a temporary transit camp, but a small number – roughly 3% of those who survived their time in the depots – became permanent residents of the island. This chapter tells their story. The African settlers mainly belonged to the first intake, that is to say those received into Lemon and Rupert’s Valley during 1840–43. A census of the Establishment taken at the end of the decade recorded that 391 were denizened on the island by January 1844, a further 34 up to March 1846 and 118 more by December 1849.1 A few others are known to have settled at the very start of the 1850s, amongst them recaptives taken by HMS Cyclops in 1850, some of whom – as detailed at the end of this chapter – were still living half a century later. Virtually no new arrivals stayed on St Helena after 1851, the exceptions being those who were disabled, or otherwise too sick or old to make an onward journey: these people were kept apart from the residual African community, confined to the Rupert’s Valley depot or incarcerated in the island’s asylum.2 The liberated African community grew throughout the middle of the century. In 1854, there were reported to be nearly 200 families present, and by the early 1870s the number of Africans ‘of pure blood’ was around 1 ‘Liberated Africans. Abstract showing the Total Number brought to St Helena, and the manner of their disposal’. Duplicate of a despatch from Governor Sir Patrick Ross to Earl Grey, 6 June 1850, pasted into the copy of the St Helena Blue Book for 1850, which is held in the St Helena Government Archives. 2 The island census for 1911 recorded that African settlement on St Helena took place between 1841 and 1851. This broadly matches a comment made in 1854 by St Helena’s governor to the effect that all those settled on the island had done so prior to the contracting of Hyde, Hodge & Co. as emigration agents. See Gore Brown to the Duke of Newcastle, 22 February 1854, CO 247/83, 3502 St Helena. •

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Island Lives 750. This figure represents the high point since, in 1872, over a third of this number emigrated to Africa. The community dwindled thereafter, as the first-generation recaptives died and their descendants merged into the general island populace.

Dispersal and settlement During the early 1840s, the liberated Africans retained a close connection with Lemon Valley. In the period before emigration was developed as a means of emptying the depots, many lived there permanently while others gravitated back to family or comrades after failed periods of employment or apprenticeship. This connection was, however, largely severed by the breaking up of both depots at the end of 1843, triggering a more general diaspora among those Africans who remained in the colony. By the start of the 1850s, the liberated Africans had dispersed widely across the island. A good many lived in Jamestown – which as the only conurbation offered the most opportunities for employment – but others took up residence in the ‘country’ parts of the island, and at the village of Sandy Bay on the south-east coast. The manner of the recaptives’ settlement is not entirely clear – in particular, the extent to which they coalesced into their own discrete communities. In the diaspora world there are numerous examples of the formation of liberated African enclaves, physically and culturally set apart from the surrounding, established society. Some of these settlements were created by deliberate British intervention: the villages of Sierra Leone are perhaps the most obvious example;3 another can be seen in the Bahamian Governor’s creation of Adelaide village for 150 Africans taken from slave ships in 1831. Other enclaves arose out of the independent agency of the liberated Africans themselves. There was, for example, a tendency among those who had been settled in Jamaica to abandon their plantations and to coalesce elsewhere. A similar clustering has been observed in Trinidad and in neighbourhoods of the Bahamian capital Nassau.4 The same phenomenon occurred in British Guiana, where in some instances the liberated Africans formed their own 3 Peterson, Province of Freedom, pp. 161–64. 4 Liberated African migrants not only had the potential to separate themselves from the established population and other immigrant groups, but might also subdivide on the basis of ethnic lines. Thus, in Freetown and its hinterland, former recaptives lived in settlements or districts defined by national identity. Ethnic clustering has also been observed in Jamaica (Schuler, Alas, Alas, Kongo, pp. 9 and 67–83) and Trinidad (Adderley, New Negroes from Africa, Chapter 3, in particular pp. 113–15). Whether similar ethnic cohesion existed in St Helena’s liberated African community is entirely unknowable; given its small size, it is perhaps less likely. •

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Distant Freedom settlements, either buying property on the open market or petitioning the government for land grants.5 Elsewhere, and very notably, the last recorded group of slaves to reach the United States, brought aboard the Clotilda in 1860, eventually bought land and founded their own town in the county of Mobile, Alabama.6 The impetuses behind this phenomenon were both positive and negative. In part, group identity among liberated Africans arose from the shared experience of their recent, violent translocation from Africa aboard the slave ship. Considerable ‘immigrant unity’, forged in the depots of Sierra Leone or St Helena is also postulated. That solidarity was negatively reinforced by tensions with the existing (in the Caribbean, the creole) population, which appears to have been common. On St Helena, there was no deliberate policy of settlement by the colonial authorities. After departure from the depot, the liberated Africans were free to go where they wished, and if they stayed together it was by choice rather than government design. Some certainly left individually as apprentices or employees, but others presumably departed in groups. There is evidence to suggest that Longwood became a focus for liberated African settlement. In 1862, there were 130 ‘Africans’ living there, alongside 140 Europeans and 310 Cape Malays. For reasons which are not clear, however, that number fell steadily over the next two years, such that in 1864 the Africans had dwindled to just 70.7 This is, perhaps, indicative of a population whose places of residence were impermanent, or still in flux. Longwood is, in any case, a name given to both an extensive parish in the central part of the island, and the village where Napoleon’s former house is located. Whether the Africans actually lived together in the village, or were in fact dispersed across the parish, is not known. A permanent settlement of liberated Africans also grew up in Rupert’s Valley – distinct from the temporary occupants in the adjacent depot. The formation of a small village here began in the early 1860s, stemming from a broader government scheme to develop Rupert’s Valley as an entirely new town, thus relieving the pressure on Jamestown, which by the mid-century was becoming increasingly crowded and insanitary.8 This scheme had first 5 Schuler, ‘Liberated Central Africans in Nineteenth-Century Guyana’; Joseph, ‘Liberated Africans of Berbice’. 6 Sylviane Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 7 Reports of H.J. Bodily to the SPG, 2 January 1862, 19 January 1863, 12 January 1864 and 31 December 1864; SPG Papers E9a, pp. 923–24; E13, pp. 423, 425; E15, p. 425. 8 St Helena’s population peaked at this time, reaching 6,444 in 1861. See Gill and Teale, St Helena 500. •

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Island Lives been suggested in the early 1850s and a few lots of land were sold, but the project failed to progress because of the ‘strong prejudice existing in the minds of the people against settling there’.9 In other words, it was felt to be an unattractive prospect for settlement – an opinion no doubt reinforced by the presence of the liberated African depot at the bay. As the decade progressed, however, Jamestown’s problems became ever more acute and the scheme was revived by Governor Edward Drummond Hay (1856–63), from whom the settlement took its name – Hay Town. Drummond Hay’s project was made more viable by the fact that the valley had recently been provided with a permanent piped supply of fresh water – a system both for the benefit of, and built by, the liberated Africans. There was nevertheless an adjustment of expectations: the new settlement was to be for the labouring classes only, with no thought that ‘persons of a superior class’ would take up residence.10 The anticipated town was ambitious: it was to take up most of lower Rupert’s Valley, beginning immediately behind the liberated African depot and extending a kilometre inland. Its extent, and the density of occupation, can be seen on a map of 1861 which shows all available ground divided up into notional land parcels.11 Concern was expressed that some of the building lots being put up for sale were actually within the African graveyards – at least one of which must still have been in use. In response, it was blithely stated that ‘probably these will be the last lots taken for building purposes, and the local government will no doubt not overlook the sanitary considerations connected with the use of old burial grounds for the erection of dwellings’.12 The reality proved less impressive. Relocation to Rupert’s Valley remained an unappealing prospect, not least because the scheme coincided with the last period of large-scale slave ship captures. The depot commonly held hundreds of recaptives at that time, and on occasions its unruly occupants fought running battles with the overseers. In any case, the island’s economy was beginning to decline and rather than looking to resettle internally, many in the labouring classes were seeking to emigrate. In the event, just a few structures were built and plans to build a church in the valley, immediately behind the African hospital, also came to nothing.13 In fact, the only 9 ‘Return of building lots granted in Rupert’s Valley St Helena’, Colonial Engineer’s Office, 23 May 1862, CO 247/95, 6323 St Helena. 10 Murdoch to Elliot, 25 January 1862, CO 247/96, 930 St Helena. 11 Pearson et al., Infernal Traffic, Figure 2.10. 12 Murdoch to Elliot, 25 January 1862, CO 247/96, 930 St Helena; War Office to Drummond Hay, 26 February 1862, CO 247/96, 2110 St Helena. 13 Claughton to Pennell, 3 March 1860, CO 247/93, 4294 St Helena. This ambition was only realised in 1996, when the residents of the valley erected a small concrete chapel at their own expense. •

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Distant Freedom people interested in purchasing land there appear to have been those with an association to the depot. A return of building lots from 1862 shows that 13 had been granted to a mixture of Europeans and liberated Africans. Among the Europeans were depot overseer George Burchill, living with his family in ‘a good substantial house’, while Jacob Faithful, Eve Waterwitch and two other Africans were all occupying small houses or huts.14 A report in the following year noted no change to this situation, with the exception of a liberated African called Bob, who had erected a shed to sleep in. Described as a troublesome and disreputable character, his shed was demolished and Bob sent out of the valley.15 The community in Rupert’s Valley did not progress significantly from this modest start. Nevertheless, it does seem to have served as an important focus of settlement for St Helena’s liberated Africans. The 1881 census lists 90 people living there, a figure that included 14 who had arrived on the island as recaptives, along with second-generation family members.16 That settlement was of some longevity, the island deaths register attesting ‘African’ residents there into the early years of the twentieth century. This indicates that these people were recognisable as recaptives many years after most others had merged into the wider population; quite plausibly Rupert’s Valley was an enclave of those who never integrated into St Helenian society. The buildings themselves still remain. The elegant Hay Town House with its plaque dated 1862 stands rather incongruously near a group of industrial sheds, while further up the valley is a row of single-storey stone-built cottages (see Figure 5). These are now home to the modern population of Rupert’s Valley.17 There is also strong evidence that, during the 1850s at least, Rupert’s Valley served as the graveyard for the residual liberated African community. The failure of the majority to convert to Christianity resulted in their exclusion from the Christian cemeteries of Jamestown and instead they gravitated to Rupert’s Valley as a burial place. This circumstance is noted by several sources during the earlier 1850s: one by a Christian commentator is related in more detail below. Another source that attests to this situation is a résumé of the Jamestown Court Sessions for 1851. Here comment was passed 14 ‘Return of building lots granted in Rupert’s Valley St Helena’, Colonial Engineer’s Office, 23 May 1862, CO 247/95, 6323 St Helena. 15 Willan to Pennell, 8 June 1863, CSL 45, No. 236. 16 Of the 90 residents of Rupert’s Valley, 14 were born in Africa, 73 on St Helena, and two in Britain. 17 These buildings are included in the St Helena Heritage Environment Record (HER) as Nos 10146 (Hay Town House) and 10149–55 (Hay Town Cottages). For the HER see http://www.nationaltrust.org.sh/shnt-conservation-programmes/builtheritage/historic-environment-register-her/. •

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Island Lives on the interment of ‘Sambo’, a murdered African boy, once again in Rupert’s Valley. The document expressed ‘unmitigated disgust’ at the manner of his burial: despite the presence of several of his country people waiting to take possession of the body, it was covered with a gunny bag, flung into a boat and carried to Rupert’s Valley with neither ceremony nor decency. It was, the author concluded, an affair that disgraced a civilised community.18 There are sufficient references indicating that burial of the settled liberated African population in Rupert’s Valley was standard practice. For example, Charles Chipper (‘a negro’), convicted for attempted rape at the same session as Sambo’s murderers, subsequently died in prison and was transported back to Rupert’s Valley for burial. The correspondence dealing with his body’s removal to the ‘African Burial Ground at Rupert’s Station’ suggests that the occurrence was nothing unusual.19 With consecrated ground denied to them, Rupert’s Valley was the logical place to use as a graveyard. And, even if institutional in character, interment in the same place as the family or ship-kin who had not survived their time in the depot may well have been considered apposite. It is therefore plausible that somewhere amidst the burial grounds are the graves of a small number (perhaps up to 100) of St Helena’s settled recaptive community. This provides a minor caution against the assumption that all bodies in the valley were brought directly from the slave ship or the depot.

Education and religion The education of those liberated Africans who settled on St Helena contrasts with the hurried attempts at conversion undertaken in the Rupert’s Valley depot. It had slow beginnings, as no efforts were made in this respect during the chaotic early years of the 1840s, characterised by sickness, quarantine and the failed scheme for apprenticeship and employment.20 Initiatives finally began in 1845, at which time there were 300 liberated Africans permanently settled in the colony. This instruction – which combined religious teaching with more general education – was left in the hands of the island’s 18 St Helena Advocate, Supplement to Issue No. 1, 1851. 19 An inquest determined that Chipper died because of his confinement in a damp cell. See Sheriff to Pennell, 28 July 1851, CSL 32 Vol. 1, No. 59; Inquest verdict, 31 July 1851, CSL 32 Vol. 1, No. 80. 20 Overall, there was far less emphasis upon liberated Africans’ education on St Helena than in Sierra Leone, where schooling took a central place, partly out of a desire to Christianise and civilise but also because it was seen as an investment in the colony’s future. The matter was of sufficient importance to provoke a serious dispute in 1827–28 between Governor Campbell and Dixon Denham, Chief Superintendent of the Liberated African Department. See Peterson, Province of Freedom, pp. 156–58. •

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Distant Freedom Benevolent Society, supported by a modest annual payment of £10 granted by Parliament.21 This funded a Sunday School, located in a disused room in High Knoll Fort. A little curiously, given his general antipathy towards the liberated Africans, the school was strongly sponsored by Governor Trelawney and was frequently visited by him. There seems to have been a personal connection, a member of his family being ‘deeply interested in the moral welfare of all’. Trelawney certainly assured the Colonial Office that its money was being well spent, commenting in January 1846 on the ‘great advantages already derived from it’.22 But, despite such positive propaganda, attempts to expand the scheme were vetoed by London. In January 1846, Trelawney appointed the Reverend Frey, a German protestant missionary returning from several years in Malabar, his task being to ‘civilise and instruct’ the liberated Africans. However, neither the Colonial Office nor the Treasury would sanction Frey’s salary of £180 and his tenure lasted a mere six months.23 The High Knoll Sunday School was closed at some point before 1853, on the grounds that its pupils had themselves become parents with families and could no longer attend. In its place, an evening school was opened in Jamestown, coupled with an infant school for African children. Reverend Kempthorne, a representative of the Benevolent Society who was heavily involved with the liberated Africans, stressed the importance of these schools. They met, he argued, a ‘deficiency which is becoming ever more serious in a population so rapidly growing, and unchristian and uncivilised’. Kempthorne also claimed that the schools – which remained the sole measure for African education until the 1860s – achieved a ‘marked improvement’ among its pupils; of the 92 adults attending the evening classes, some were even training to be teachers of their ‘more ignorant countrymen’.24 Kempthorne’s claims are at odds with other comments made about the liberated Africans at that time, including those of Governor Gore Brown, transmitted to the Colonial Office in 1854, in which he criticised their unintelligible English and failure to comprehend Christianity.25 Such a poor standard of education was, of course, prevalent among all other elements 21 Trevelyan to Stephen, 6 October 1845, CO 247/65, 1354 St Helena. 22 Trelawney to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 8 January 1846, CO 247/66, 259 St Helena. 23 Trelawney to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 8 January 1846; Colonial Office to Trelawney, 12 March 1846, CO 247/66, 259 St Helena. Frey nevertheless remained on St Helena until his death in 1870. 24 Kempthorne to Edwardes (Acting Colonial Secretary), 25 January 1854, CSL 34. 25 Gore Brown to the Duke of Newcastle, 22 February 1854, CO 247/83, 3502 St Helena. •

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Island Lives of St Helena’s native labouring population. This included the former slaves of the island who had been emancipated in the early 1830s: in 1845, the Church Society reported that virtually none of these were receiving any form of learning, noting also their destitution.26 The parlous state of education in the colony as a whole was epitomised by the dilapidated state of the Jamestown school house, which in 1846 doubled as the store for the gaol gallows.27 The specific failure of the religious education of the liberated Africans, as perceived by the wider St Helenian population, is seen in a letter to the St Helena Herald for 1854. Addressed to ‘the Emancipated Negroes at St Helena’ by an anonymous author styling himself simply as ‘Christian’, it once again affirms the use of Rupert’s Valley as a burial ground, reading as follows: My good people, I felt great pain this morning in witnessing quite a respectable funeral passing my house, and not seeing a clergyman of any denomination accompanying it, and further, that no funeral rites were performed at the grave. This is no doubt caused by the deceased (the beloved wife of one of you poor negroes) not having professed nor being baptised in the Christian faith. As this is the case, let me entreat you my good people, to attend the night schools, and also some place of worship, and try to learn something of Christianity, so that you, your wives, husbands and children may embrace the means whereby you will be entitled to the rites of Christian burial, and not be interred at Rupert’s. You that have some light by attending school and church, will feel great gratification in seeing the remains of your husbands, wives and children committed to the earth like Christians, and not like dogs.28

Liberated African education finally took a higher priority in the early 1860s. This came about as a consequence of the creation of an independent diocese of St Helena in 1859, combined with the direct involvement of the SPG. This represented the first involvement of any external organisation: the Church Missionary Society – so active in Sierra Leone – had no involvement with St Helena.29 26 The Church Society of St Helena: Appeal, 15 September 1845, CSL 22 Vol. 2. 27 Luxmore to Pennell, 7 October 1846, CSL 25 Vol. 1, No. 4. 28 St Helena Herald, 9 February 1854. The newspaper’s editor commented on the probable futility of this plea, writing that ‘We give insertion to the following address to the Negroes of this Island, though we fear that few will read it, as none of them purchase this paper. The better place for the address would have been on the walls up and down the town’. 29 On the CMS see Maeve Ryan, ‘“A Most Promising Field for Future Usefulness”: The Church Missionary Society and the Liberated Africans of Sierra Leone’, in A Global •

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Distant Freedom The SPG placed the annual sum of £200 at the disposal of the bishop for three years, for the pastoral care and instruction of the ‘coloured portion’ of the population.30 The Rector of Jamestown emphasised the difficulties being experienced at that time: I find it a hard task to bring the African population of the town, which is considerable, to the habit of public worship. Their indolence and unsteadiness of purpose, their general small progress in English, their superstitious cast of mind, the natural weakness of intellect in some, and the crazed condition of others through cruel treatment on board the slave ships are immense impediments to their edification in Christianity. I think there can be little hope of their being anything like exemplary Christians, if they be not kept under daily instruction for several years after their baptism.31

Nevertheless, in 1861 Bishop Piers Claughton reported optimistically to the SPG that the Africans were ‘becoming much more amenable to advice and ministerial authority than before’, and that certain cohabiting couples had been baptised, confirmed and were to be married.32 In numerical terms at least, considerable progress was made. By the mid-1860s, the Sunday service held for the liberated Africans had regular congregations in excess of 100 and at one time numbered 264, approximately a third of all of the former recaptives then living on the island. Baptisms and confirmations were performed in small numbers – with much more rigour applied to the candidates’ readiness than had formerly been the case in Rupert’s Valley.33 In other respects, the mission was less successful. In 1867 Thomas Goodwin, Master of the Benevolent School and catechist to the liberated African mission, reported to the SPG that although attendance at church was increasing, and had been accompanied by a gradual improvement in the habits of the Africans, he remained ‘disheartened by the vice, idleness and ignorance of a large number of them’. He also remarked on the fact that only two couples living in an unmarried state had been induced to marry.34 History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth Century, ed. William Mulligan and Maurice Bric (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 37–58. 30 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Work in the Colonies: Some Account of the Missionary Operations of the Church of England in Connexion with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (London: Griffith and Farren, 1865), p. 152. 31 SPG, Work in the Colonies, pp. 152–54. 32 Letter of the Bishop of St Helena, 30 March 1861, SPG Papers D25c, pp. 101. 33 See the 20th and 21st annual reports of the St Helena Church Society (for 1864–65 and 1865–66), published in Jamestown by Benjamin Grant in 1866 and 1867 respectively. 34 Report of Thomas Goodwin, 31 December 1866, SPG Papers E21, pp. 453–55; Report of T. Goodwin, 31 December 1867, SPG Papers, E21, pp. 469–70. These reports •

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Island Lives From 1864, there was a brief dovetailing of the mission work in Rupert’s Valley and the instruction of the settled liberated African community. At this time the few residents of the otherwise empty depot – comprising children, aged and disabled – were brought to the Jamestown school for education. In this context there is an interesting mention of the provision of ‘books for the blind’ which, given the date, were probably Haüy books. These comprised the raised imprints of Latin letters embossed on heavy paper, allowing readers to trace their fingers over the text, comprehending slowly but in a traditional fashion. Haüy books were laboriously constructed and expensive: acquiring them for the liberated Africans of St Helena would have entailed no little difficulty and cost.35 From the mid-1860s, responsibility for the spiritual and practical education of the liberated Africans and their descendants passed from the SPG to a new organisation – the Charity of Rebecca Hussey for the Redemption of Slaves. The charity had a somewhat curious provenance. Rebecca Hussey (1668–1714) was the eldest daughter of a wealthy Lincolnshire family and on the death of her father she and her sisters inherited the magnificent Elizabethan mansion of Doddington Hall. During her lifetime Rebecca was renowned for her philanthropy, and in her will she bequeathed very substantial sums for charitable purposes, including £1,000 ‘for the redemption of slaves if it may be effected or else to the easement of their slavery’. Much of this money must have lain unused for nearly 150 years, because in 1861 the Attorney General discovered a large fund in the Court of Chancery that belonged to the Hussey charities; a subsequent court order stipulated that new schemes be established for its distribution. Exactly how the connection with St Helena’s liberated Africans came about is unknown, but presumably it owed much to the contemporary work of the SPG. The court’s release of the funds also coincided with the last major intake of recaptives on the island.36 The St Helenian branch of the Hussey Charity was founded with a donation of £11,000 – a figure that clearly dwarfed the grants made formerly dovetail with the island’s marriage registers for the period: between 1861 and 1872, only three marriages of liberated Africans can be identified (although other such unions may not be apparent because of the Africans’ adoption of European or island surnames). 35 Braille – a more effective reading method and whose texts were markedly cheaper – was adopted by the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris in 1854, but did not achieve widespread international use until the 1870s. See Gabriel Farrell, The Story of Blindness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956). 36 I am grateful to the current trustees of the charity for sharing their research about Rebecca Hussey and the charity’s foundation. Rebecca Hussey’s will is held at the UK National Archives, while the rediscovery of the funds was reported in the Northampton Mercury, 3 August 1861. •

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Distant Freedom by the Treasury for African education on the island. A portion of the money was used to purchase a school in Jamestown, with the remainder providing a six-monthly dividend that supported all its expenses thereafter. The finances were overseen by a board of trustees in London, based in fashionable Great St George Street, while a local board on St Helena was chaired by the colonial secretary and also included the Bishop of St Helena – indicating the cross-connection between the Hussey Charity and the initiatives of the Anglican Church and the SPG. The Town School was purchased and furnished in October 1865; the hire of a ‘country’ house followed shortly after, to serve as a second school at which six of the most promising boys and girls were to be trained in agriculture and as domestic servants respectively. A master and mistress were appointed for each school. The Town School, on the fringe of Jamestown, was a modest single-storey rubble-masonry structure that still stands today (Figure 29). The Country School, originally situated rather remotely at Friar’s Lodge in the north-western fringe of the island, had relocated to Longwood by 1868. It finally settled nearby at Hutts Gate – a central crossroads of the island – in 1872, where it still operated in the 1930s. In 1872, the charity also took over the running of the Parish School of St Matthew.37 The charity’s early documents are preserved in the island archives and provide an insight into its activities between its foundation in 1865 and the early 1870s.38 Attendance was initially quite modest, the register for 10 January 1867 recording 31 and 26 pupils at the day and night schools respectively. Most of those in the (day) Town School were ten years or younger, the oldest attendee being 14 years old. The night school (at Longwood or Hutts Gate) provided education for those already of working age: all were in their teens, apart from one man aged 30. Later registers indicate increasing attendance: that for July 1872, for example, records 80 pupils in the Town School and 30 at Hutts Gate. The curriculum combined a dual agenda, in which religious improvement ran alongside more general education in literacy and numeracy, and after the school had been open for six months its progress was assessed by the island’s bishop. Where religious teaching was concerned, he found that 37 The Town School is described by Grant (A Few Notes, p. 52), and its location is shown on a map of Jamestown dated 5 December 1900 (CO 1047/829). The building is included on the St Helena HER as No. 10869. Friar’s Lodge is now a ruin (No. 10961). The Hussey Charity’s assumption of control over the Parish School is noted by Gill and Teale, St Helena 500, p. 303. 38 ‘Scheme for the Charity of Rebecca Hussey established for the Redemption of Slaves for St Helena, together with minutes of the proceedings of the local trustees’, St Helena Government Archives. •

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Figure 29:  The former Hussey Charity School, Jamestown. Image courtesy Paul Tyson Photography

while all could recite the creed, they were ‘very ignorant’ about its meaning. Writing skills were considered ‘tolerable’, the students being able to write in large letters; multiplication and counting were assessed as good, some of the older students being ‘quick at it’. The schools also placed considerable emphasis on crafts such as carpentry for the boys and needlework for the girls. Here the pupils appeared to excel; their work was examined at various junctures and was always considered very satisfactory.39 In this respect, the Hussey Charity schools may be viewed as addressing the gap created by the failure of apprenticeship over two decades earlier, giving opportunities to the St Helenian-born ‘Africans’ that had never been available to their parents. The records also give occasional glimpses into some of the less formal aspects of schooling. In July 1867, for example, the master of the Town School reported to the trustees how a magic lantern show had been put on for all pupils and their parents – an event that afforded much pleasure to all who attended. The same report, however, described the dilapidated state of the school building itself, the upper floors being in a very dangerous state due to damage to the timbers by white ant. Detailed records of the charity’s work do not survive after 1872, but the 1881 census records the continued operation of the three schools, which 39 See, for example, the report on the school inspection of 15 October 1872. •

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Distant Freedom between them had 250 scholars (out of a total of 1,183 being educated on the island as a whole). Benjamin Grant offered comment on its efforts in 1883: The Hussey Schools educate the colored children, principally African and of African origin. Besides receiving a good common education the lads are also instructed in Carpentry and Tailoring by efficient tradesmen, and have proved themselves to be worthy of the trouble taken with them, and the girls in Needlework.40

The Hussey Charity continued to fund education on the island well into the twentieth century. In 1911, it operated four schools and had 242 pupils.41 As the years passed its remit became increasingly general. In 1939, the London trustees noted that the scheme’s income was supposed to be used only for the education of Africans, but ‘that the proportion of “Africans” in St Helena was now so small as to make this regulation impractical’. They suggested a change in the regulations to allow funds to be paid into a general pool for education on St Helena.42 The charity still exists, now known as the Charity of Rebecca Hussey for Africans. It works mainly in Africa, supporting Christian organisations. Its objects were and are the redemption of slaves in Africa and African slaves elsewhere, and the promotion of education and welfare of persons of African descent, including inhabitants of the island of St Helena.43

Interaction, assimilation and separateness The island-based records, above all the demographic registers, of births, baptisms, marriages and deaths, provide a view into the integration – or otherwise – of the liberated Africans into St Helenian society. It is a selective insight, as the first three types of register include only those who had embraced Christianity. The deaths records are less discriminatory, but identification of entries pertaining to recaptives still relies on either the deceased having an obviously African name, or the registrar noting their origin. The number of liberated Africans found in all the registers is only a small proportion of the more than 700 living on the island around 1870. 40 Grant, A Few Notes, pp. 23–25. 41 Census of the Island of St Helena in 1911 (Jamestown: Benjamin Grant, 1911), Table No. 10. 42 Trustees of the Hussey Charity, 5 August 1939. This correspondence is preserved as a series of loose typescript letters in the volume for the scheme in the Jamestown Archives. Later correspondence relating to the scheme can be found in the UK National Archives under ED 49/13180 (1939–41) and CO 1024/56 (1953–4). 43 UK Charity No. 207 102. •

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Island Lives One aspect of the recaptives’ transition from occupants of the depot to island residents is found in their taking of new names.44 A significant number of surnames were drawn from the ships of the West Africa Squadron, for example, Firefly, Contest, Brisk, Pluto and Waterwitch. Others adopted common island surnames, which in some instances belonged to the people by whom they were employed; these include March, Thomas, Harris, Anthony and Richards – all of which are well represented on St Helena in the modern day.45 A few took European names with a historical resonance. Arthur Wellington (later nicknamed ‘Duke Wellington’) and James Blucher were baptised together in December 1851. In taking the name of the Prussian victor of Waterloo, however, Blucher was unaware of the irony of a more local connection: a racehorse of the same name had been sold ‘under the trees’ in Jamestown in 1829, part of an auction that included the sale or hire of 14 slaves.46 A few African surnames appear to have been retained, at least for a few years, though none are found in the registers after 1870. Biblical names are rarely seen, though classical names (such as Leo, Caesar and Constantine), which were common among the former slaves of the island, appear to have been adopted somewhat more frequently.47 Baptisms of liberated Africans began in later 1845 – a date that doubtless relates to the first educational initiatives of the Benevolent Society. Thomas Brisk, John March and James George were baptised in September, followed by others in later 1845 and 1846 either individually or in small groups.48 These initial baptisms pertained to adults, and conversion of African-born converts continued into the 1860s. While the first converts appear to have been quite long-term residents, fairly recently arrived slaves increasingly came to be baptised. By the late 1840s, the baptism of children born on St Helena to liberated African parents began to be attested – indicative of a developing and self-sustaining Christian community. It also appears to have achieved a certain degree of autonomy. Each baptism record includes details of the sponsor (for children) or witness (for adults). The first baptisms were 44 Informally taken names, adopted outside the auspices of the Church, are not recorded. Examples of such names at Sierra Leone are given by Asiegbu, Slavery and the politics of abolition, pp. 25–26. 45 See for example the group baptism of Robert May, George Joseph and Susannah Thomas on 23 September 1849 in St Helena Register of Baptisms 1849–62, Nos 70–78. 46 Schulenburg, For Sale under the Trees. 47 Eve Waterwitch is an exception; she may be one of two children who Jackson (St Helena, p. 260) notes were christened as Adam and Eve. 48 St Helena Register of Baptisms 1844–49, Nos 94–96 and 100–05. A fourth man was baptised with Brisk, March and George; his first name was William but his surname is illegible (No. 93). •

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Distant Freedom witnessed by Europeans, amongst whom Reverend Kempthorne is particularly prominent. That European involvement continued, but from 1849 the registers show Africans standing as sponsors or witnesses. Some sponsors were the parents,49 but others had no discernible family connection. Thus, for example, John March and Thomas Alley (the latter baptised in 1846) sponsored an infant named John in 1849, and later acted in the same capacity for other children. Similarly, Robert May (baptised in September 1849) was sponsor for a girl named Sarah in March 1850, while Arthur Wellington sponsored an infant named Charles in 1857.50 Some of the earliest converts appear to have been particularly zealous – both as colonial subjects and as Christians. In 1848, John March, James George and Benjamin Vemba addressed the Governor in the following terms: We, the liberated Africans residing at St Helena, do beg to return our most hearty and sincere thanks for the care that has been taken of us since our arrival in the British Dominions, and we have become the subjects of our beloved Queen, Victoria … We likewise return our most hearty thanks and praises to God for his merciful guidance in bringing us into the hands of Christian people from whom we have learnt to love and serve God … We cannot return the thanks we wish, but if we were called upon to defend the rights and possessions of Great Britain, we will, one and all, endeavour to defend it with our last breath.51

Given both the language of the letter and the quality of its script, its content and composition must surely owe much to a European. The sentiments were presumably genuine, however, as the letter made no requests and its African signatories had no obvious agenda. It nevertheless provided useful propaganda for the Governor, the address being reproduced for Parliament in 1850, in a report that otherwise dealt with the high mortality rates in the Rupert’s Valley depot.52 Two years later the Governor was again contacted, this time by four men who requested government aid to return to Africa. Their object, they said, was to ‘diffuse the light of civilization into the dark minds of our unenlightened countrymen’.53 The Governor and the Commodore of the 49 For example, ‘Corah’ (no surname was given) stood as sponsor for her daughter Sarah. See St Helena Register of Baptisms 1844–49, No. 57 of 1849. 50 St Helena Register of Births 1849–62, No. 58 of 1849, No. 14 of 1850, No. 1152 (1857). 51 Address to Governor Patrick Ross, 18 August 1848, CO 247/70, 2314 St Helena. Also quoted in Jackson, St Helena, pp. 263–64. 52 PP 1850 (643) XL, p. 67. 53 Jacob Fryar, William Lewis, Peter and Handy to Pennell, 20 December 1850, •

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Island Lives West Africa Squadron were pessimistic about their prospects, considering that the most likely outcome would be their capture by slave dealers. The request was transmitted to the Colonial Office, but whether this missionary enterprise ever came about is not known.54 Despite the conversion to Christianity of at least a portion of the liberated Africans, alongside the superficial adoption of other English characteristics, they felt a strong and enduring sense of isolation within St Helenian society. To some extent this was inevitable. In a community that was mainly of European, Indian Ocean or Chinese descent, the recaptives were nearly the only Africans. Their cultural background was entirely different, while skin colour, scarification and dental modification would have made many of them highly visually distinctive. They were further singled out by their residual use of African languages and a poor grasp of English. St Helena was, additionally, a place where origins were long-remembered: half a century after their arrival as indentured labourers, the official records still discussed the Chinese as a separate, inferior element of island society.55 Decisions taken by those in authority also served to keep the liberated Africans apart from the established population and hindered their integration. Such policies arose out of a perception of the Africans’ non-Western ‘otherness’, an expression of which can be found in a letter of 1862 written by the Bishop of St Helena: he considered that their ‘peculiar habits made it necessary to deal with them separately from the other portion of the Inhabitants’ and on this basis thought it advisable that they should have a chapel to themselves and independent religious instruction. According to the bishop, this had elicited very encouraging results in his previous diocese of Cape Town.56 Presumably this perception of otherness pervaded not only official policy but also everyday interactions between the liberated Africans and ordinary St Helenians. CSL 31 Vol. 1. A man named Handy had been on St Helena since at least 1843, when he was gaoled for two months for assault (24 August 1843, CSL 15 Vol. 2, No. 418). Coincidentally, the same man (‘an Angolan’) is described by McHenry as having accused his wife of adultery and demanding that she swear an oath of her innocence on a pebble. Assuming that the 1843 and 1850 records relate to the same person, this is an interesting example of a conversion from African cultural beliefs to Christian practice (McHenry, ‘An Account of the Liberated African Establishment on St Helena’, Chapter 2, p. 440). 54 Lieutenant Colonel Clarke to Earl Grey, 15 January 1851, CO 247/76, 2109 St Helena. 55 The first cohort of Chinese immigrants arrived on St Helena in 1810. See Barbara George, The Chinese Connection: The History of Chinese indentured labourers on St. Helena, 1810–1836 and beyond (Bristol: Printsetters, 2002). 56 Eighteenth annual report of the Church Society, St Helena, 1862–63 (Jamestown: Benjamin Grant, 1863), p. 10. •

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Distant Freedom In 1854, by which time many of the settlers had been living on the island for over a decade, Governor Gore Brown described them in the following terms: They are generally employed as labourers in all parts of it, and have increased to about 200 families … By far the largest portion remain in profound ignorance, submitting themselves to the direction of an African who assumes to be their head man, and exacts presents on marriage or exchange of wives, and the settlement of disputes. This man, though only a labourer, has considerable influence over his countrymen, who believe him to be a sorcerer, and he does not always use it for good purposes.57

As this passage suggests, elements of the liberated African community retained many of their social practices. Their continued belief in witchcraft was a theme that cropped up with some regularity – an aspect of the Africans’ lives that was singled out for particular attack by members of the white, Christian community of the island. Such comments are in keeping with concerns expressed about liberated Africans in more general contexts, their potential to reintroduce obeah to post-Emancipation Caribbean society being one argument advanced against their importation as indentured labourers.58 The persistence of ‘witchcraft’ was a source of frustration and concern to those tasked with turning St Helena’s liberated Africans into civilised colonial subjects, as Thomas Goodwin related in 1869: I have often regretted the evil influence which some few of the Africans here possess over their more ignorant countrymen. There are certain of them, both male and female, who are much feared, in consequence of having acquired the reputation of being able without detection to poison 57 Gore Brown to the Duke of Newcastle, 22 February 1854, CO 247/83, 3502 St Helena. Such ‘headmen’ were common in the villages of Sierra Leone and played an important role in their political organisation and administration. Even groups of labourers during their first three months in the colony developed their own leadership. See Michael Banton, West African City: A Study of Tribal Life in Freetown (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), pp. 11–17, 25–32, 142–61; Peterson, Province of Freedom, p. 201–05. 58 This was a view expressed by James Stephen, missionaries and anti-slavery groups in the late 1830s and early 1840s. See Green, British Slave Emancipation, p. 267. For a recent study of obeah, see Kenneth Bilby and Jerome Handler, Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760–2011 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2013). This emphasises the positive role of obeah among enslaved societies and, conversely, the negative and antisocial dimensions attributed to it by white commentators. •

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Island Lives those whom they dislike. They are supposed to cause bad legs, incurable sores, etc, and sometimes even death. I do not believe this, but attribute their ideas to ignorance and superstition; still, however, the dread of these ‘Ghangerers’ as they are called exists, and their influence is considerable.

Goodwin followed these comments with an account of an African named Friday who suffered from a bad leg. Friday attributed his affliction to another African, who many years previously had cursed him ‘to walk like a pig’. Compelled to go about upon his hands and knees, Friday was adamant that this was a fulfilment of the prediction. Goodwin was scornful, stating that the disease was ‘very common to his race’. He concluded his account with a comment that this was one of many instances of their ‘superstitious credulity’, which he had little hope of overcoming easily or quickly.59 Its continuance was remarked upon a few years later by John Melliss: They are very superstitious, and still retain some belief in witchcraft. My servant told me on one occasion that a man’s protracted illness was caused by an enemy poisoning his tools while he was absent at his meals, and that his recovery was hopeless until his enemy permitted it; he further informed me that some few persons could reveal the image of the enemy in a bowl of water without mentioning the name, but that such was an expensive art.60

Scattered references indicate the expression of the liberated African community’s cultural identity in other, more positive ways. On Christmas Day 1866, for example, it was noted that ‘one of the African native dances was being performed in the town’. No further explanation is offered nor has any other mention of similar events been found, but the comment hints at the public display of more acceptable elements of the recaptives’ former culture. Entertaining as such displays may have been, the fact remained that – despite the diverse origins of its population – the social tone of the island was set by its white master class. This aspired to a Christian, colonial English society and deviation from this model was frowned upon. 59 Report of T. Goodwin, 30 June 1869, SPG Papers E24. 60 Melliss, St Helena, p. 80. There is, incidentally, anecdotal evidence for the persistence of non-Christian beliefs on the modern-day island. Informal interviews with St Helenians occasionally elicit mention of voodoo, and more commonly of the ‘Gilly’. This usually has negative connotations; a person possessed of malevolent power can be a Gilly, while somebody suffering inexplicable misfortune and pain may attribute such suffering to the Gilly. There is also an association between the Gilly and persons able to cast the ‘evil eye’. While not named as obeah, such accounts bear a strong resemblance and it is quite possible that these beliefs derive from the liberated African community. •

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Distant Freedom By the later 1860s, it appears that the boundaries between liberated African and St Helenian were at last beginning to blur. Reporting to the Secretary of State on the island census, Governor Elliott observed that: Of Europeans we are but a handful, of undoubted African parentage on both sides your Grace will perceive in the Census that we are more plentifully supplied. We have besides a considerable mixture of Chinese, Hindu and other races mixed with European, partly European, and African and partly African blood in various proportions.61

Elliott then proceeded to offer his opinion on the outcomes of racial mixing. According to his observations, the mixture of Chinese and African was not disadvantageous, but the combination of Hindu and African was not to be recommended. From this it can be surmised that intermarriage (or, more commonly, cohabitation) was occurring between the liberated Africans and other elements of St Helena’s lower classes, to some extent at least. In the conclusion of his letter, Elliott drew attention to the problem of the census form, which discriminated only between ‘white’ and ‘dark people’, observing that those of mixed blood aspired towards fair skin colour and had a tendency to place themselves under the description of ‘white’. On St Helena, therefore, as in many colonial societies, dark skin carried negative social connotations. This does much to explain the ‘disappearance’ of the liberated Africans from later generations and, as will be discussed in the conclusion to this book, the lack of an obvious successor community. While they remained socially distinct, in economic terms the liberated Africans were firmly embedded in St Helena’s lower class. By the 1860s and 1870s, they made up a significant proportion of the labouring population and as such shared the same hardships as the island’s natives. In the declining economic circumstances, employment was far from guaranteed and wage levels were depressed. Where the living conditions of the African community were described, it was invariably poor. Commenting on the influenza outbreak of 1867, for example, Thomas Goodwin wrote that they suffered acutely from the cold of St Helena’s winter, which was generally the most sickly part of the year for them. He also described how they lived in ‘wretched hovels’ which provided inadequate shelter from the wind and rain.62 Often left in poor health by their period of enslavement, the Africans made regular applications for medical aid (for which they could not pay), 61 Charles Elliott to the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, 11 September 1868, CO 247/108, 11099 St Helena. 62 Report of T. Goodwin, 30 June 1867, SPG Papers E21, pp. 461–63. •

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Island Lives thus provoking arguments about whose duty it was to attend them. Should they be considered native islanders (and thus an expense for the parish) or did they belong with the fresh arrivals in the Rupert’s Valley depot (to be treated at government cost)? 63 In 1865, they created a measure of self-help in the form of the African Benefit Society. Run along the lines of other friendly societies on the island, it was a contributory fund that gave relief to its members when sick, in addition to an increased allowance for funeral expenses.64 As such it was comparable to some of the African benefit societies that existed in Sierra Leone, though its function was purely economic; it did not equate to the ‘companies’ or ‘secret’ societies, which had more political and religious dimensions.

‘The Secret of Mount Eternity’ Finally, any discussion of St Helena’s liberated African community needs to make reference to ‘The Secret of Mount Eternity’, a curious article which appeared in the obscure and short-lived satirical newspaper the St Helena Monthly Critic and Flashlight, serialised in 1891–92.65 It is an awkward source to evaluate. It was written anonymously, and the author disguised himself further by claiming to have been the surgeon on an emigrant voyage of which there is no record, and to have served with the 150th Regiment – an army unit that never existed. The exact date to which it refers was also withheld, though it must relate to a period in which the depot was relatively quiet, most probably during the later 1850s or mid-1860s. Lastly, there is the subject matter. The account was written in considerable retrospect and involved a great deal of artistic licence. Its central theme was the local legend of ‘Mount Eternity’ and for the most part it comprises a rather banal account of the author’s hunt for buried treasure in St Helena’s interior. However, in telling his tale he also related his experiences with the liberated Africans in Rupert’s Valley, and describes a situation so radically different to the grim official accounts of the depot that on first reading it seems too fantastic to be believed. All that said, there seems no reason to believe that the text is a 63 The problem appears to have endured since Dr Vowell raised it in 1848 and again in 1852; on the latter occasion, he placed himself firmly on the Africans’ side, refusing to turn them away from the Civil Hospital. See: CSL 28 Vol. 1 (for 1848); Vowell to Pennell, 29 September 1852, CSL 33; Dick to Pennell, 30 October 1852, CSL 33. 64 These included the Benevolent Society, Widows’ Fund, Mechanics Society, Social Society and the Poor Society. The latter, by far the largest, had 920 members in 1867. In that year – the first in which the African Society is listed – it had 90 members. See St Helena Blue Book, 1869, CO 252/34, p. 131. 65 Anonymous, ‘The Secret of Mount Eternity’, St Helena Monthly Critic and Flashlight 1 and 2 (1 December 1891 and 5 January 1892). •

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Distant Freedom complete fabrication. Assuming that there is a central element of truth, the article provides a fascinating insight into life in Rupert’s Valley, and of the interaction between new arrivals and the established African community. The author recounted how, having taken on a black servant named Jake, he was invited to a grand ball given by the ‘African Community of St  Helena’. The event was held in one of the barrack rooms of the depot and was presided over by the Master of Ceremonies (Uncle Jerry, ‘an active darkey of sixty’). Established recaptive inhabitants (including Ebernezer Green, ‘the Island dandy’) mixed with new arrivals and with St Helena’s emancipated African population, most notably in the form of ‘Aunt Chloe’, an old woman with a reputation for her powers of obeah. This latter is a tantalising reference, hinting at some relationship between the recaptives and the few African-born slaves brought to the island before 1792 and freed in the 1820s and ’30s. Unfortunately, nothing more is said on the matter. Everyone was dressed for the occasion. Jake had procured ‘a black suit for tropical wear’, while ‘every other variety of African type was to be seen in the Ball Room, from the full blown dandy in swallow tail and white tie to the new arrival, hardly able to move in his first clothes’. Refreshments had been provided by the Ball Committee, consisting of cakes, sweets, port and wine negus (port, mixed with hot water, spiced and sugared). The event was vibrant. It resembled a country dance in which ‘thirty couples stood in two long rows up the room, at the top of which was the orchestra, a flute, a banjo, two fiddles and a concertina, the players seated on chairs on a long table’. Matters were directed by Uncle Jerry, and ‘the golden rule appeared to be “when in doubt swing your partner”’. The author contrasted this jollity with modern European fashion, ‘when square dances are now performed in such a manner as to make a funeral procession a scene of riotous joy in comparison’. Assuming that there is some level of truth in this account, there are various points that can be drawn out, the first and most obvious being the simple observation that not everything in Rupert’s Valley was misery. When circumstances permitted, its inhabitants were capable not only of surviving but of creating considerable entertainment for themselves. The distinction within what the author called the ‘African Colony’, between long-term residents and those newly arrived, and the social stratification within the community is also apparent. Some newcomers, of allegedly high rank in Africa, are presented as unable to accept either their new circumstances or the social levelling that had occurred as a consequence of their enslavement. Separating a fight between Ebenezer Green and a former ‘prince’ (now rechristened Pompey Waterwitch), Uncle Jerry made this situation clear: he is quoted as saying, ‘You not African genelmen, you ornery black niggahs, and if you behaves as sich out you goes. You Pompey, not know nuffin yet, you’s excuse’. •

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Island Lives Communication was not entirely straightforward. Many of the new arrivals spoke only their native language and a little English, relying on long-term residents who spoke their native dialect to act as intermediaries. For the rest, the lingua franca was English: the first-generation recaptives spoke it sufficiently for practical purposes, while those born on the island were described as fluent. Thus, no matter how crudely the British perceived their speech, the settled recaptives had successfully adopted a form of English as their bridge language. Finally, the author describes the Africans’ aping of European social practices. Jake had acquired not only European clothing but ‘a complete set of new manners … bowing and scraping with a dignified air to all comers’. His act appears to be satire, rather than a failed or accidentally comedic adoption of European manners. This contrasts with the standard colonial discourse, in which savages or natives are mocked for their imitation of Western civility. Here, instead, it appears to be the Africans who are mocking their British neighbours.

Return to Africa As St Helena’s economic fortunes began to decline, official attempts were made to reduce the island’s population through emigration. The first such initiative occurred in the mid-1850s – as a direct result of St Helena’s diminished income from suppression at that time. The relationship between St Helena and Cape Colony once again came to the fore with the development of a scheme through which unemployed workers were shipped from St Helena to Cape Town.66 As a part of this initiative, and separate from the policy of West Indian emigration that was applied to new intakes into the Rupert’s Valley depot, efforts were also made to persuade the permanently settled liberated Africans to leave. In this case, emigration was a truly voluntary affair – and the Africans showed no interest in departing from their new home. Free passage to British Guiana aboard the Hamilla Mitchell was offered in 1856, alongside a cargo of recently liberated recaptives. There was initial interest, but the settled Africans rejected the opportunity, apparently because they suspected that they would be forced to serve the same period of apprenticeship as the newly freed slaves with whom they would travel. In fact, they would have been free agents on arrival, but all attempts to persuade them of this were in vain.67 66 For details of the scheme see Rawson, Colonial Secretary, Cape of Good Hope, to Pennell, 29 July 1856, CSL 35, No. 46. 67 Colonel Vigors, Acting Governor, to Secretary of State for the Colonies, 13 July •

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Distant Freedom Despite this determination to stay, the hardships experienced by St Helena’s labouring class became increasingly severe in the 1860s and the liberated Africans were by no means immune. In 1862, an audience was held between a number of former recaptives and the Bishop of St Helena. Some stated a desire to return to their homeland (which they said was Luanda) but others, who were living among the ordinary St Helenians and had wives and families, expressed a wish to stay. All emphasised the dearness of the island, stressing the expense of all things, from food to burial fees. They begged the bishop to forward their petition to Prince Albert – unaware, because of the island’s isolation, that the Queen’s consort had died nearly three months previously.68 By 1870, economic decline had turned to economic crash, and the resultant hardship compelled a great many islanders to leave in search of better conditions. Between 1871 and 1873, over 1,000 native St Helenians departed: 638 to the Cape and 441 to Natal.69 In addition to this exodus there was a sizeable emigration of Africans, 261 of whom accepted the offer of a free passage to Lagos or Sierra Leone – a figure representing approximately one-third of all Africans ‘of pure blood’ then residing on the island. According to Thomas Goodwin, ‘They are all very sorry to leave the Island, but feel compelled to do so on account of its increasing poverty and want of employment’.70 Those who departed appear to have been among the more enterprising of the African community: they included some 40 of the Hussey Schools’ best pupils, their absence impacting on the overall standard of the Christmas Examination.71 Though he regretted their departure, Goodwin expressed the hope that these Christianised Africans would have a positive influence upon the natives with whom they came into contact. Other St Helenians were content to see them go. A correspondent to the St Helena Guardian wrote that although they worked hard, honestly and made little demand on the public purse, the labour glut on the island meant they would not be missed. The correspondent’s opinion was shaped by the racially based opinion that, despite the civilising benefits of education, the pure-blooded Africans (including their children) had no capacity to rise above their current station. As such, they could not benefit the island: ‘If fifty negroes choose to go

1856, CO 247/87, 8803 St Helena. Swan to Colonial Secretary, 26 July 1856, CSL 38 Vol. 1, No. 145. 68 St Helena Guardian, 6 March 1862, contained in SPG Papers D25c, p. 157. 69 Census of the Island of St Helena in 1881 (St Helena: Edward Watson, 1881). 70 Report of T. Goodwin, 30 September 1872, SPG Papers E27a, pp. 1587–90. 71 St Helena Guardian, 24 December 1872. •

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Island Lives to work in the Copper mines in Namaqualand, let them go, – they were mere labourers here, they will be the same there’.72 The emigrants left aboard HMS Himalaya on 11 October 1872. The small number of letters they sent back from Lagos are the last primary record of St Helena’s liberated Africans. They are, moreover, the only pieces of writing in which the recaptives’ voices are ever heard, free from any colonial filter. The two correspondents were undoubtedly atypical of the majority of former recaptives, as both were literate and had been closely associated with the activities of the SPG – hence their communication with Thomas Goodwin. Charles Williams had acted as Secretary to the African Benefit Society, while Bayanni Waterwitch (‘a youth of about seventeen’) had been privately educated by Goodwin and had been a member of the choir of St James’s church.73 Bayanni wrote of their safe arrival in Lagos and of the welcome reception they had received from the Governor there. He went on to recount how: On Sunday the Governor came round to all of us, and told us to go to the Court House every morning so that we might be enabled to get employment. Many of the children are able to work and a good many of the women are employed. I myself was employed on the said day by a Minister receiving £1 10 0, but on the following Monday I was sent for by the Harbour Master and he employed me as a Clerk in his office for the Government at the salary of £3 per month. Should I suit him, in three months my proper pay will be £4 per month. I shall now give you an account of a few of our men who are employed by the Government. Charles Williams is a groom receiving £2 per month, Henry Francis, James Bran, Benjamin James, Thomas Gough and William Olliver are all employed by the Government. Olliver is the Governor’s Cockswain, Elizabeth Williams is gone as a pupil teacher, Margaret Olliver is teaching children to sew, her best respects to you and Mrs Goodwin and the children. There are more girls out at service in different places, but I have not time to mention them. The best part of the boys are gone out as shop-keepers, with some to trades. There are plenty of schools here and every school has a harmonium; also there [are a] good many Churches of English and Yoruba languages.

Charles Williams wrote that: We like Lagos very well at present, but food such as we eat is very dear, but plenty country food, but we don’t like it. I have just got work as the Governor’s groom at £2 per month. Elizabeth is getting £1 per month 72 St Helena Guardian, 23 May 1872. 73 Report of T. Goodwin, 31 December 1872, SPG Papers E27a, pp. 1591–95. •

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Distant Freedom teaching in a school. She sends her kind respects to Mrs Goodwin and gives her many thanks for learning her all that she did, and by her help and God’s made her prosper. We wish her and the children are quite well.

Williams concluded by saying that he would let Goodwin know more by his next mail. If any such letters were written they have not been found, and at this point the Lagos emigrants pass out of history. Whether the descendants of the Waterwitch family or any other of the St Helena emigrants still live in modern Nigeria is not known.

The last recaptives The departure of the emigrants aboard the Himalaya left approximately 500 liberated Africans on St Helena. John Melliss offered a portrait of the remaining community in 1875: They are a strong race of men, capable of doing any amount of hard work upon a scanty supply of food, and are very tractable and well-behaved until their jealousy is excited or passion roused, when, in a sort of momentary phrensy [sic], they will commit crime even to murder. They are a very quiet, tractable, inoffensive people, amongst whom crime is small, murder unknown, and burglary so little thought of that doors and windows of houses are not secured by bolts and bars, or even locks and keys; their greatest vice is drunkenness, and their thieving does not go beyond mere pilfering of the poultry yard, the orchard, or the pantry … As domestic servants, when carefully and kindly treated, they are excellent, becoming closely attached to their employers, and exceedingly jealous of whatever belongs to them, but still they are as indolent as most inhabitants of warm countries.74 74 Melliss, St Helena, pp. 79–81. One murder case involving two liberated Africans in 1867 drew widespread public attention. Charles Miller was sentenced to death for the killing of Edward Friday, whom he had discovered in bed with his wife. A memorial signed by over 100 St Helenian residents pleaded for clemency, with the result that Miller’s sentence was commuted to two and a half years’ hard labour. Among the arguments presented for clemency were Miller’s character (‘a simple uneducated half-civilised negro’) and the possibility that enforcing the death sentence might ‘weaken amongst the African population those milder feelings and habits with which civilisation and Christianity are replacing their old savage ways and barbarous familiarity with death by violence’. See Memorial to Charles Elliott, 11 January 1867, CSL 51 Vol. 1, pp. 167–71. In 1872, an African boatman named George May (also known as Panza) was stabbed to death in a ‘disreputable house’ at the Briars by an American seaman (St Helena Guardian, 2 May 1872). •

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Island Lives Melliss emphasised the continued social distinction between the Africans and the island’s ‘native’ (or ‘Yam Stalk’) population, the latter including the emancipated slaves of the 1820s and 1830s: The ‘Yam stalks’ must not be confounded with the Africans or negroes, as the greatest insult they can hurl at one another is the epithet of ‘nigger’; they respect and look up to the Europeans and white population, but consider themselves as occupying a much higher step on the ladder of social position than the Africans, who certainly had the disadvantage of arriving at the Island just eight years after the ‘natives’ became freemen. With the ‘natives’ they do not blend, but live apart in little colonies or settlements; not half a dozen instances of intermarriage have occurred during thirty years, and the ‘natives’ still consider themselves superior.75

Official records ceased to discuss the liberated Africans as a specific entity after 1872. They had simply become part of is eclectic lower class. The only official sources that continue to refer to them are the registers for births, baptisms, marriages and deaths: these, in fact, provide practically the sole information about the later lives of the liberated Africans. Many are invisible in these registers; those who had taken a common Christian name and a British or island surname simply cannot be distinguished from other St Helenians.76 The records show the continued perception of the ‘otherness’ of certain liberated Africans, often many years after their arrival at the island. Each register contains a column for observations about the individual concerned, or for ‘qualities, trade or profession’. For decades after their liberation – in fact, into the twentieth century – the defining characteristic of some was simply given by the registrar as ‘African’. This contrasts with the adjacent entries for ‘native’ St Helenians, who in the same space were described by their occupation. In most instances, the African in question was a former recaptive (as indicated by their considerable age), but in a few cases the distinction extended to second-generation members of family. In the deaths register for 1900, for example, James Morrison is described as ‘African’: aged only 29, he could not have arrived aboard a slave prize. It is perhaps significant that the Morrison family lived in Rupert’s Valley; this group may have retained its distinctive character far longer than others, remaining 75 Melliss, St Helena, p. 80. 76 There was apparently little persistence of unusual names into later generations. This contrasts with Sierra Leone, where names such as Black Jones and John Bread – quite typical of those taken by recaptives – remained common at least into the 1960s. See Asiegbu, Slavery and the Politics of Liberation, p. 26. •

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Distant Freedom apart from the mainstream of St Helenian society in both geographical and cultural terms. In the main, however, the second-generation Africans cannot be seen in the records, and virtually nothing is known about their lives beyond generalities that would extend to the whole of St Helena’s labouring class. This situation also prevails in the decennial censuses for the island. The preamble to the 1881 census observed that, while former counts had distinguished the children of liberated Africans born in St Helena, this was now almost impossible ‘owing to the mixture with the other portion of the coloured population’. Instead, it simply distinguished those whose birth place was the ‘West Coast of Africa’, recording 77 such people. Twenty-nine lived in Jamestown and its environs; 14 lived in Rupert’s Valley and nine at the head of the valley at the Briars; six were at Longwood and 19 more were spread across various parts of the island.77 The island’s deaths registers chart the demise of these first-generation recaptives. Inevitably, such records make melancholy reading, describing deaths from sickness and debility, and it is important to recognise that the circumstances they describe were common to many poor St Helenian ‘natives’. More positively, they demonstrate how many of the liberated Africans lived into old age. Nevertheless, the records emphasise the fact that, after liberation, the freed slaves never rose from the bottom strata of society. The occupations listed were all of a menial nature, and many died in poverty. It is also notable that the witnesses who signed the registers (presumably next of kin) often did so with just a mark because of illiteracy. All of this is indicative of the failure of apprenticeship and education. There is no evidence whatsoever for any of the social mobility or wealth creation that is witnessed in the liberated African community of Sierra Leone. Thus, in 1888, the records include the deaths of Thomas Hector (aged 65, a pauper, heart disease), James Waterwitch (80, pauper, senile decay) and Robert Waterwitch (66, pauper, albuminuria). Most subsequent years contain similar entries: 1892 saw the deaths of Samuel Henry, Jacob Africa and Henry George, the latter two residents of the poorhouse. In 1894, the infant daughter of John and Martha Fuller (‘Africans’) was killed by whooping cough; their residence was stated as ‘Gunny Bag Cottage’ – in other words, a hovel roofed with sacking. Not all died of natural causes: in 1890, Thomas and Eliza Peters, both first-generation recaptives who had survived the slave ship and its aftermath, were killed along with five others by a rockfall on Ladder Hill. The number of deaths tails off markedly after 1900, in which year Thomas Thomson (a 55-year-old labourer from 77 1881 Census, Table No. 3. For comment on the enumeration of liberated Africans in the 1871 census see the editorials in the St Helena Guardian of 20 April and 6 July 1871. •

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Island Lives Jamestown) and John Samuel (89, from the Briars) died of influenza, part of an outbreak that killed many islanders and Boer prisoners of war; 1903 saw three deaths, including that of 90 year-old Sarah Waterwitch, widow of James, in Rupert’s Valley. Sarah was the last member of the Waterwitch family still living on St Helena. In the same year, Emily Jackson published a commentary on the Liberated African Establishment in her book St Helena: The Historic Island. Amidst a rather rambling narrative about slave ship prizes and the proceedings of the Vice-Admiralty court, she included a photograph of five first-generation Africans.78 This picture, of aged men and women who had been resident on St Helena for over half a century, is the last image of St Helena’s recaptives.

78 Jackson, St Helena, p. 262–63. She notes that some or all had arrived on captures made by HMS Cyclops, which brought eight prizes to St Helena in a short period during 1849 and 1850. Two prizes carried slaves, arriving at the island in February and December 1850. •

269

•

Distant Freedom

Figure 30:  Liberated Africans on St Helena, c.1900. From Jackson, St Helena, p. 264. Image courtesy of National Museums Liverpool The text accompanying this photograph reads as follows: The Cyclops is spoken of by one of the old men still living, and there are five I was able to photograph who came in her – two men and three old women, who are now in the poorhouse. The men, although over seventy, are still able to earn a little, but the women are helpless, and almost blind, being all of good age. The taller man is named Duke Wellington, the other Blinker. Wellington says they were brought here in the Cyclops.

•

270

•

Conclusion Conclusion

On 6 July 1868, an unnamed and empty vessel, prize to HMS Speedwell, was tried in St Helena’s Vice-Admiralty court and condemned for its engagement in slave trading.1 By this date the tailing off of the trade had long been obvious to the St Helenians. It had been 18 months since the court had last sat, and the preceding interval had been nearly two years. This vessel, however, would be the last, and with the court’s judgement the island’s involvement in suppression came to an end. Lemon Valley had long since ceased to be used by the Liberated African Establishment. The buildings commandeered for the depot were returned to their owners in 1844, several of whom pursued the colonial government for compensation for damage sustained during their enforced absence. The valley continued to be sparsely occupied through to the mid-twentieth century, but has been totally abandoned for many years. All the while its ecological transformation has continued, dense thickets of wild mango and prickly pear having taken over most of the valley floor, supplanting the meadow and creating a landscape that is much more closed-in and claustrophobic than was the case 150 years ago. The remnants of the depot still survive amidst this landscape; damaged by time and smothered by vegetation, but legible nonetheless. The ship hulks anchored off shore and the multitude of tents – all key elements of the depot – are, of course, long gone. At the bay, one of the barracks remains roofed and habitable, while the ruins of the second, and of a cottage and the fishermen’s hovels, are identifiable. Chamberlain’s Cottage is now a roofless shell, but the walls of the house, the gardens and the irrigation system that supplied them directly conform to the written accounts of the 1840s. One can still stand in the main house and look through its windows 1 Vice-Admiralty Court In-Letters 1841–72, p. 218. •

271

•

Distant Freedom to the distant ocean, past the seven great Indian fig trees which once framed George McHenry’s view. In Rupert’s Valley, the depot buildings were kept in place for a number of years, in case the slave trade should once again resume. This never happened, but the hospital was briefly revived in 1872, when sick sailors from the Swedish merchant ship Norrkoping were admitted there.2 The last official letters to mention the Liberated African Establishment date to 1885: they record the transfer of the buildings behind the Lines at Rupert’s Bay to the War Office and the sale of the remaining stores.3 By this date, the gaol in Rupert’s Valley, built at such great cost in the 1850s, had burnt down, never to be repaired. With its abandonment, and the parallel break-up of the depot, Rupert’s Valley was quickly left to its isolation, inhabited by its small community of former depot staff and recaptives. Meanwhile, if the stories are to be believed, local children played at ‘funerals’ in the graveyards and dug up teeth from the burials in the hope of selling them to the chemist for the manufacture of dentures.4 Military occupation of the Rupert’s Valley Lines continued into the early twentieth century, while in 1900–02 a desalination plant was built at the bay, designed to supply fresh water to Boer prisoners of war who were held at a camp on Deadwood Plain.5 In 1899, Rupert’s Bay was also chosen as the landing point for the Atlantic cable, and No. 1 Building was adapted to serve as the cable house. However, despite this activity, the valley’s small population gradually dwindled, such that in 1938 it was reported that the only person living there was the island’s leper, the place having become a lazarette in a literal sense.6 A visitor in the 1960s described how ‘virtually nobody lived there, and half the handful of cottages were empty … up the valley were the ruins of three or four buildings which had been part of the slave village, and, I was told, unmarked in all this desolation, were burial grounds’.7 This situation has changed considerably over the last half-century, mostly due to the industrialisation of the valley, but also because of the re-establishment of a small community. In the modern day, Rupert’s Valley is characterised by a mix of occupied historic buildings and modern industrial structures dispersed amongst the natural scrub vegetation. Little of the 2 St Helena Guardian, 11 January 1872. 3 Governor Janisch to Earl of Derby, 5 March 1884, WO 32/7211. 4 Ian Bruce, ‘Thomas R. Bruce – The Life of a Saint (1862–1956)’, Wirebird: The Journal of the Friends of St Helena 37 (2008), p. 4. 5 George, Boer Prisoners; Jackson, St Helena. 6 Gosse, St Helena, p. 364. 7 Ian Baker, St Helena: One Man’s Island (Windsor: Wilton, 2004), p. 90. •

272

•

Conclusion African depot now survives above ground, the area it occupied having been taken over by a bulk fuel complex and a fisheries plant. Ground levels here have been raised, such that the cobbled surface behind the Lines, on which the tents once stood, is now buried at a depth of half a metre. This has at least ensured its preservation, and it is possible that archaeological traces of the depot also survive. Above ground, No. 1 Building is substantially complete and still in use by the Fisheries Department; its external appearance is virtually unchanged but its interior has been gutted in its conversion to offices. Across the road, the walled enclosure of the garden also survives, but both structures lack any ‘sense of place’ within the surrounding industrial environment. Further up the valley, the graveyards are now indistinguishable from the adjacent landscape of scrub and tumbled rock. Several areas of the graveyards have been badly disturbed by post-war construction, most notably for the power station and the adjacent fuel complex during the 1980s. Here, a significant number of skeletons were exhumed en masse, in contravention of the island’s Burial Grounds Ordinance, and their treatment provoked considerable local public anger. The government later publically apologised for its actions. A committee of enquiry recommended that the remains be reinterred in Rupert’s Valley, and that the opening of the power station be accompanied by a multi-faith ceremony of blessing.8 In the event, the remains were buried in unconsecrated ground immediately outside the island’s Anglican cemetery of St Paul. The greater part of the graveyards remains intact, and the 2008 excavation (itself an intrusion) demonstrated the archaeological richness that lies below this superficially unremarkable landscape. Through to the early twentieth century, memories of St Helena’s engagement with suppression appear to have persisted, and certainly the episode has been considered worthy of note in books about the colony. At some stage, however – perhaps with the deaths of the last recaptives – accurate memory was replaced by hearsay. Local and visiting historians continued to show an awareness, but for the majority of St Helenians, Rupert’s Valley came only to have a general association with ‘slave graves’. Much of this was probably a consequence of the lack of a successor population to the liberated Africans. Certainly none is obvious on the modern island, and neither during the 2008 excavation nor since have any individuals or groups come forward claiming direct ancestry. No African 8 Report of the Proceedings of the Commission of Enquiry into objections raised to the erection of a new power station at Rupert’s Valley on part or parts of disused burial grounds. Issued by proclamation on St Helena, 29 January 1985. See also ‘Commission of Enquiry set up under the Burial Grounds Ordinance’, St Helena News Review 15.2 (8 March 1985), p. 355. •

273

•

Distant Freedom heritage is apparent, this appearing to have been lost by the early or mid-twentieth century. Though their society is mixed-race dominated, there is a strong element of colour-consciousness amongst St Helenians, who lean towards an ideal of lighter (but not white) skin colour. The traveller Oswell Blakeson observed this rejection of blackness in 1957, noting how ‘they have their colour bars. They call one another a dirty black …’, and that ‘a negro has only to be shown in the cinema to start off hysterical laughter’.9 Under such circumstances, it would be quite expected that the descendants of liberated Africans chose to emphasise alternative lineages. During the researching of this book, the identity of liberated African descendants on St Helena has been a constant source of curiosity, but it is an issue that is largely unresolved. Tracing lineage forward through genealogical records is far more difficult than searching backwards, and on St Helena the task is made more complex by the limited number of surnames and the tendency for children to be born outside marriage, with the father unnamed or falsely specified. A few probable descendants have nevertheless been identified but, given the sensitivities surrounding slave ancestry, it is not appropriate to name them here. Rather unsatisfactorily, it is necessary to offer a rather bland conclusion: that there is a Central and perhaps Southeast African component to the St Helenian genetic make-up – a contribution of the recaptives to a group of people whose community strength leads them to identify themselves above all as a ‘Saint’.

*** Large-scale global and regional studies provide a necessary framework within which to understand the slave trade and its abolition, but local case studies are an essential means of appreciating its detail. The long-overlooked outpost at St Helena is one such example. At its most basic, this book provides a narrative of a poorly understood episode, revealing a place that was bound up in the process of anti-slavery – even if this was little recognised at the time or subsequently. It also reveals a more nuanced picture of how slave trade suppression was pursued, with a complex reliance on multiple bases across the Atlantic, as opposed to simply Sierra Leone. The gulf between metropole and periphery is heavily apparent. In Britain, the broad ‘anti-slavery state’ treated abolition as a diplomatic, political and moral matter. However, the example of St Helena shows how the public as well as politicians focused on the larger issues while remaining oblivious to much of the finer detail. It also reiterates a cautionary tale: governance from London was only ever partially realised in distant colonial contexts, 9 Blakeson, St Helena, p. 173. •

274

•

Conclusion and what those in authority intended and what actually happened were two rather different things. Metropolitan policies, therefore, are only part of the story and cannot be taken in isolation. For those on the ground, far from the ideals of London, the perception of abolition was also quite distinct. The locally based authorities, in this case St Helena’s colonial government, were far less concerned with the moral aspects of abolition, being instead – and quite necessarily – obsessed with the practicalities of their situation. Ordinary local people saw it in yet other ways, and in very diverse terms. As this study shows, anti-slavery meant many things to the St Helenians, ranging from the negative – for example, the danger of epidemic disease and competition for local resources – to something far more positive. What comes across most strongly are the economic opportunities that anti-slavery presented at colonial and individual levels. This may be taken as a broader indication of the ways in which, in local contexts, abolition had outcomes that were more subtle and wide-ranging than simply the ending of the slave trade. Finally, St Helena offers a window into the human experiences of abolition and diaspora. It does so in terms of the islanders and Europeans who managed and staffed the reception depots, but crucially – and despite the Eurocentric nature of the sources – it also elucidates the African experience. In this instance, the blending of documentary and archaeological evidence has been particularly important in building up composite microhistories of recaptive lives and deaths. As such, this story complements existing close narratives of suppression, while also adding to the more general corpus of studies of Africans within the slave trade. As a whole, this examination of St Helena’s Liberated African Establishment shows, very clearly, that slave trade suppression was a vexed and flawed process. Whether the island contributed to the end of slavery, of course, depends entirely on whether one believes that military suppression had any impact, or if in fact it was economic factors that independently brought its downfall. Any judgement on the actual operation of the Establishment, verging as it must on moral judgement, is fraught with subjectivity. For many years, commentators judged it to have been a resounding success. Emily Jackson, for example, wrote of the barbarity of the slavers but passed no comment on the death rate at the island’s depots or the morality of the emigration process. Oswell Blakeson went further, considering this part of St Helena’s history to be ‘highly meritorious’ and one which redounded to the credit of the British government. Consciously or not, his verdict echoed that of William Lecky on anti-slavery as a whole: Lecky placed it among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages in the history of nations.10 10 Blakeson, St Helena, p. 83; William Lecky, History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (London: Longmans and Green, 1869), Vol. 1, p. 161. •

275

•

Distant Freedom More recent historical analyses have been more realistic and far more critical. That of Monica Schuler has been noted at various points within this book, while David Eltis has also questioned the rationale behind, and the effectiveness of, St Helena’s use as an anti-slavery base.11 It is undeniable that the recaptives died in large numbers at all stages of their journey: en route from the African coast, at the island’s depots and, in lesser numbers, aboard emigration vessels. The data assembled for the present study show that the average composite mortality must have approached 40% and, as Eltis points out, the recaptives had as much chance (or better) of reaching the New World aboard a slave ship. Any such analysis requires qualification, since it does not consider the mortality of slaves post-disembarkation, either in the immediate term or in the harsh environment of Brazilian and Cuban plantation slavery. The research for this book also suggests that, at the point of interception by the Royal Navy, recaptive life chances were better for those directed to St Helena than to Sierra Leone. This significantly modifies the view that the British government’s use of St Helena was a fundamental mistake. Rather, given the decision to pursue anti-slavery by military means, St Helena was a well-placed – and arguably indispensable – asset for naval operations in the South Atlantic. The problems in its depots did not stem from the malign character of the place, or even necessarily from its isolation. Instead, and as so often in humanitarian interventions, the failings were political, logistical and, to some extent at least, avoidable. Numerically and mortality-based arguments about slave trade suppression have a long pedigree, reaching back into the early nineteenth century. However, in these historical debates, questions of humanity and the price of freedom also loom large. Considering the short life expectancy of slaves in Brazil, Lord Denman once argued in a letter to Henry Brougham that a premature death was less to be deplored than a life of colonial slavery.12 In respect of St Helena, this would be too comfortable an equation, since it would ignore the avoidable deaths that occurred at its poorly equipped and aging depots. Besides, this is a European view: the voices of those from the slave ships and the recaptive depots rarely enter the historical narrative. Of those liberated Africans who were landed on St Helena, the last – by then, long free and of advanced years – lived well into the twentieth century. Arthur Wellington died aged 82 in Jamestown’s poorhouse in 1909, and the 1911 census recorded nine liberated Africans still living at that time.13 The last to pass away was Charlotte Harper, an ‘African’, who died of senility 11 Eltis, ‘Free and Coerced Transatlantic Migrations’, p. 275. 12 Anonymous, Analysis, p. 12. 13 1911 Census, p. 3. Of the 3,477 inhabitants, all professed a Christian religion; 129 lived in Rupert’s Valley and the Briars but, unfortunately, the census combined the •

276

•

Conclusion and heart failure on 26 August 1929, aged 100.14 Charlotte was surely the last recaptive living on St Helena: certainly there is no subsequent entry in the deaths register that identifies an African. Her life, which began in Africa during the early nineteenth century, finished in the remote South Atlantic on the eve of the Wall Street Crash. It is perhaps telling that, nearly 80 years after her arrival at St Helena, Charlotte was still remembered as a former recaptive. In life she was a link to the island’s increasingly distant role in abolition. Her death represented the end of an era.

population of these two separate settlements, so the number living in Rupert’s Valley cannot be determined. 14 St Helena Register of Deaths 1887–1936, No. 6447. •

277

•

appendix one Liberated Africans Captured aboard Slave Ships: Cases Tried at Freetown, Luanda, Cape Town and St Helena, 1836–68 Liberated Africans Captured aboard Slave Ships

Year

1836 1837

1838

Sierra Leone Slaves embarked

Slaves landed

5591

4849

6042

3608

3240

791

767

1839

2646

1841

360

1843 1845

1840 1842

1844 1846 1847

0

0 0

2534

0

0

0 0

716

0

694

0

0

1267

0

3570

3306

5591

5063

1814

1722

765

485

0

0

0

0

0

1963 556

1780

1852

0

1854

Slaves embarked

1383

451

1850

1853

Slaves embarked

772

4799

1851

Cape of Good Hope

353

1848 1849

5439

Luanda

446

1879

844

545

195

572

•

278

0

0

•

4

0

0

0

7

0

1614

0

1222

317

0

0

1353

0

4521

0

0

0 0

0

0

Liberated Africans Captured aboard Slave Ships

St Helena Vice-Admiralty Court and Foreign Office records Slaves embarked 0

0

0

0

269

Slaves landed** 0

244

503

0

0

0

0

239

0

2746

2843

503

535

2357

2292

72

540

Slaves embarked 0

0

0

550

572

0

0

2754

91

0

0

3073

2569

Slaves liberated

Voyages database*

Slaves landed 0

0

0

0 0

2410

2661

2454

72

247

222

475

0

487 0

1640

1570

1452

2212

2110

2775

2560

2424

2748

2378

3787

3552

3191

3346

69

67

64

0

0

0

0

0

0

1027

3299 97

0

0

932

3167

95

887

650

3095

95

0

0

•

279

3299

3085

0

0

0

•

567

3122

0

Distant Freedom Year

1855

1856

Sierra Leone Slaves embarked 0

Slaves landed 0

0

Luanda

Cape of Good Hope

Slaves embarked

Slaves embarked

0

0

0

0

0

1857

794

725

0

0

1859

469

460

0

0

1861

1390

1256

0

0

1863

500

368

1865

0

0

1858 1860 1862

1864 1866 1867

1868 Total (1840–68)

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0 0

0

0 0

0 0

0 0 0 0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

26976 ***

0

0

24777

2383

0

3597

* The voyages data are included for comparison, although the data culled from the Vice-Admiralty Court and Foreign Office records are slightly more complete, and deemed more accurate. Some of the apparent year-on-year discrepancies arise because of the precise date assigned to a given case. The voyages database query is: http://slavevoyages.org/ ** The number of deaths during transit are unknown for the two prizes that were adjudicated on St Helena in 1855 and 1857. They are assumed to be zero in both cases. *** 17,887 slaves were landed at Freetown in the years 1836 to 1839, bringing the total received there between 1836 and 1868 to 44,863.

•

280

•

Liberated Africans Captured aboard Slave Ships St Helena Vice-Admiralty Court and Foreign Office records Slaves embarked 90

0

Slaves landed** 90

Slaves liberated 90

0

0

Voyages database*

Slaves embarked 0

0

Slaves landed 0

0

454

454

454

603

454

1393

1174

1118

1393

1174

33

1138

32

1067

32

0

1024

866

0

807

1361

1334

1326

2226

2082

1057

1036

1024

1057

1036

0

0

0

0

0

1650 6

0

0

0

27000

1627

6

1614 4

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

25233

1568

0

0

0

24221

•

281

26254

•

1527 0

0

0

0

23915

appendix two Prizes Adjudicated by the Vice-Admiralty Court of St Helena Prizes Adjudicated by the Vice-Admiralty Court of St Helena

Year

Carrying Slaves

Equipped

1840

6

4

1841

13

1843

3

1842

1844 1845

1846 1847

269

14

3073

7

550

10

17

1

3

1

22

3

43

3

Slaves captured

Slaves liberated 239

2746

2569

2292

91

72

572

503 475

33

1640

1452

1027

887

1848

11

49

2775

2424

1850

9

56

3787

3191

1852

1

2

1854

0

1849 1851

1853 1855

1856 1857

7 1

3

0

0

0

90

0

454

454

14

1393

1118

0

33

2

•

64

90

5

2

95

0

0

1

3095

69

0

4

0

1860

97

1

1

1

3299

9

0

1858 1859

31

282

1138

•

0

32

1024

Prizes Adjudicated by the Vice-Admiralty Court of St Helena Year

Carrying Slaves

Equipped

1861

2

3

Slaves captured

Slaves liberated

1361

1326

1057

1024

0

0

1862

5

14

1650

1864

1

0

6

1866

0

1

1868

0

1863 1865 1867

1869 1870 1871

1872

2

0

0

1

0

1

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

87

0

0

0

0

336

•

283

27000

•

1614 4 0

0

0

0 0

0

0

24221

appendix three Liberated African Emigration from St Helena Liberated African Emigration from St Helena

Year 1840

British Guiana

Trinidad

Jamaica

Cape Colony

0

0

0

0

1842

978

435

425

1332

1844

0

0

0

1841

1843 1845

140 63

818

1848

913

1850

322

1852

0

1849 1851

1853

1854 1855

0

0

0

468

40

0

859

0

10

236

0

1330

823

0

0

0

94

0

0

5

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

261

0

1056

0

0

0

0

0

1858

281

30

1860

631

476

1861

0

0

100

65

1859*

201

60

1856 1857

0

305

0

1846 1847

0

0

0

0

40

0

0

47

0

•

284

•

38

0

0

0 0

0

0

0

Liberated African Emigration from St Helena

Grenada 0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

St Lucia

St Vincent

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Tobago

0

0

0

St Kitts 0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

520

286

0

138

0

0

0

0

0

91 370 0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

215

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

214

•

0

285

0

•

0

Distant Freedom Year

British Guiana

1862

426

0

0

0

0

0

5359

1863

630

1865

42

1867

0

1864 1866

Trinidad

Jamaica

Cape Colony

485

0

0

0

0

0

11

0

4033

3983

1410

0

309

0

0

* Four emigrants left St Helena for an unknown destination in 1859.

•

286

•

0

0

0

Liberated African Emigration from St Helena Grenada 0

120 0

0

0

St Lucia

St Vincent

180

0

0

225

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

Tobago

0

0

0

St Kitts 0 0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

0

796

700

500

225

138

•

287

•

appendix four Emigrant Voyages from St Helena Emigrant Voyages from St Helena

Departure date

Vessel Name

22/12/1841

Mary Hartley

140

British Guiana

24/2/1842

Helen

400

Cape of Good Hope

13/4/1842

Hamilton Ross

313

27/5/1842

Chieftain

245

Egyptian

259

2/2/1842

22/3/1842

6/5/1842

30/5/1842 1/6/1842

13/6/1842

15/6/1842

24/6/1842

No. embarked Destination

Hamilton Ross

251

Lady Rowena

Helen

Kingston

402

British Guiana

368

Cape of Good Hope

135

West Indian

191

Mary Hartley

317

Treasurer

99

5/7/1842

Harvest Home

190

2/6/1843

Fairy Queen

206

29/12/1843

Salsette

201

15/1/1846

Mandarin

40

Navasimo

320

27/2/1843 7/1843

5/2/1844

16/1/1846

14/5/1846

28/5/1846

Gallovidia

63

Rose

Margaret Nelson

288

•

Trinidad Jamaica

Demerara

Jamaica

Berbice

Jamaica

Trinidad

British Guiana

Trinidad

Trinidad

60

Trinidad

147

•

Cape of Good Hope

99

88

Standard

Cape of Good Hope

Jamaica Jamaica

Jamaica

Demerara

Demerara

Emigrant Voyages from St Helena Departure date

Vessel Name

19/8/1846

Margaret

351

Berbice

13/10/1846

Indus

340

Jamaica

Velox

38

17/9/1846

2/11/1846 4/1/1847

Velox

40

Arundel

5/3/1847

Bellaris

18/5/1847

Cornwall

26/4/1847

No. embarked Destination

100 10

Emma

136

334

Jamaica

Zephyr

203

12/8/1848

Emma Eugenia

390

26/9/1848

20/11/1848 12/2/1849

27/2/1849

Euphrates

309

Tuscan

154

Reliance

21/3/1849

King William

7/4/1849

Sevenside

7/4/1849

Reliance

21/3/1849

7/4/1849

19/6/1849

27/8/1849 4/9/1849

10/12/1849 3/1/1850

10/2/1850

22/3/1850

22/4/1850

31/7/1850

25/10/1850

4/11/1850 23/2/1851

230

Tropic

Jamaica

Demerara

Jamaica

Trinidad

140

Janet

254

179

234 173

Ceres

Demerara

319

Elizabeth Moore

Sevenside

Berbice

Jamaica

171

Euphrates

Demerara

210 319

Bathurst

Trinidad

Jamaica

90

Rhyn

British Guiana

216

3/5/1848

14/6/1848

Cape of Good Hope

Trinidad

Sea Park

Vanguard

Trinidad

100

11/2/1848 19/3/1848

Cape of Good Hope

91

Jamaica

Trinidad Jamaica

Trinidad Trinidad Trinidad Trinidad Grenada

Euphrates

286

Glentanner

408

Tuskar

316

Trinidad

520

St Lucia

Perseverance

138

Atlantic

332

Fame

322

Glentanner

370

Tuskar

•

289

•

St Vincent St Kitts

Trinidad

Trinidad

Demerara Grenada

Distant Freedom Departure date

Vessel Name

4/8/1851

Glentanner

22/1/1853

12/7/1856

No. embarked Destination 94

Harkaway

5

Hamilla Mitchell

65

Jamaica

Trinidad

British Guiana

29/3/1858

Dominic Daly

150

11/11/1858

Edith Moore

30

7/1/1860

Broughton Hall

590

Ceres

232

Trinidad

30

Demerara

4/5/1858

2/1/1859

9/2/1860

13/2/1860

Hopewell

Hanover

Tyburnia

27/2/1860

Brookline

22/3/1860

Colgrain

22/3/1860 23/4/1860

131

Demerara

4

Unknown

78

Trinidad

166

Calliope

11

Themis

47

9/6/1860

Tartar

188

1/1861

Ulysses

63

17/12/1860 3/4/1861

Akbar

241

Collingwood

40

22/7/1861

Maida

261

28/1/1862

Midlothian

225

16/8/1862

Maida

10/12/1862

Clarendon

227

16/1/1863

Christine

159

3/2/1863

Bonanza

27/1/1862

26/6/1862 16/9/1862 1/1/1863

27/1/1863 16/4/1863

Daniella

Demerara

Trinidad

Demerara

Jamaica

St Vincent/Grenada St Vincent/Grenada St Lucia

Demerara Jamaica

St Lucia

David Malcolm

266

Demerara

Bonanza

160

258

Reward

?

Tobago

Jamaica

Demerara Jamaica

British Guiana Demerara

Wentworth

309

Midlothian

196

British Guiana

232

Demerara

43

Barbara Campbell

21/1/1865

Athleta

1/5/1867

Trinidad

117

22/5/1863

30/12/1863

Demerara

120

Clarendon

42

Gangees

11

•

290

•

Jamaica

British Guiana

Grenada

Demerara Jamaica

Bibliography Bibliography

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Distant Freedom Pérez-Reverte, Arturo, The Dumas Club, trans. Sonia Soto (London: Vintage Books, 2003). Peterson, John, Province of Freedom: A History of Sierra Leone 1787–1870 (London: Faber and Faber, 1969). Phillips, Howard, ‘Home Taught for Abroad: The Training of the Cape Doctor, 1807–1910’, in The Cape Doctor in the Nineteenth Century: A social History, ed. Harriet Deacon, Howard Phillips and Elizabeth van Heyningen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 105–31. Pickstone, John, ‘Medicine, Society and the State’, in The Cambridge History of Medicine, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 260–97. Porter, Bernard, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Postma, Johannes, ‘Mortality in the Dutch Slave Trade 1675–1795’, in The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. Henry Gemery and Jan Hogendorn (New York: Academic, 1975), pp. 239–60. Preston, Diana and Preston, Michael, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: The Life of William Dampier (London: Corgi, 2005). Prior, James, Voyage along the Eastern Coast of Africa, to Mozambique, Johanna, and Quiloa; to St Helena; to Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco in Brazil, in the Nisus Frigate (London: R. Phillips and Co., 1819). Pugh, R., ‘The Colonial Office, 1801–1925’, in The Cambridge History of the British Empire, Volume 3: The Empire-Commonwealth 1870–1919, ed. E.A. Benians, James Butler and C.E. Carrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), pp. 711–68. Quinault, Roland, ‘Gladstone and Slavery’, The Historical Journal 52.2 (2009), pp. 363–83. Ramdin, Ron, The other Middle Passage: Journal of a voyage from Calcutta to Trinidad, 1858 (London: Hansib, 1994). Rankin, F. Harrison, The White Man’s Grave; a visit to Sierra Leone, in 1834 (London: Richard Bentley, 1836). Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007). Rees, Siân, Sweet Water and Bitter: The Ships that Stopped the Slave Trade (London: Chatto and Windus, 2009). Rice, Alan, ‘“Who’s Eating Whom”: The Discourse of Cannibalism in the Literature of the Black Atlantic from Equiano’s “Travels” to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”’, Research in African Literatures 29.4 (1998), pp. 106–21. Richardson, Ruth, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001). Roberts, G., ‘Immigration of Africans into the British Caribbean’, Population Studies 7.3 (1954), pp. 235–62. Royle, Stephen, The Company’s Island: St Helena, Company Colonies and the Colonial Endeavour (London: I.B. Taurus, 2007). •

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Index Index

Aberdeen Act 17, 32, 34, 68, 78 Aberdeen, George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl 54–55, 67–68 Addington, Henry 58 Aden 89 Admiralty 17, 28–30, 54, 57, 59–60, 66, 69–71, 75, 79, 81, 91 Africa, Jacob (Liberated African) 189, 268 African Benefit Society (St Helena) 261 Ambriz 18, 137 American Civil War 7, 42 Angola 13, 17n9, 31, 77n5, 132–33, 137, 169, 191, 196 archaeological excavations in Rupert’s Valley 3–4, 141–42, 147–49, 152, 163, 193–94, 273 Ascension Island 13, 16, 33, 75, 77–80, 83–84, 86, 89, 104–5, 108, 174 Atlantic Ocean 76–77, 84–85 auction of slave ships 91–92 autopsies 115, 193–94 Azores 76 Bahia 87 Bandinel, James 67 barracoons 31, 68, 85, 104 Barry, James 156

Benguela 132, 137–38, 171 Berbice 17n9, 124, 217, 225, 237–38 see also British Guiana Bights of Benin and Biafra 14, 78, 81n18, 89 Bioko see Fernando Po Birch, Thomas 69, 82n23 Bleek, Wilhelm 137 Board of Trade 54 Boers 100, 269, 272 Bonetta Cemetery (Ascension Island) 84 Bowring, John 46 Brazil 1, 3, 7, 17, 32, 34–36, 46, 48, 52–53, 71, 76–77, 87–89, 113, 124, 134n85, 173, 276 see also Rio de Janeiro British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society 45, 49–50, 53, 55 British Guiana 52n38, 64, 104, 138, 206, 212, 214–21, 226, 231–32, 237, 243, 263 see also Berbice, Demerara Bryson, Alexander 82, 157–58, 167n34, 168n37, 178, 192n116, 199 Butterfield, Henry 88n37 Caimbee (Liberated African) 235 cannabis 142

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Index Cape Colony 2, 7, 16, 17n9, 20, 28–29, 34, 36, 42, 46–47, 62–63, 66, 68, 79, 83–85, 88, 94, 101, 105, 126, 187, 197, 215–19, 223, 231, 237–40, 257, 263–64 Cape Town see Cape Colony Cape Verde 17n9, 76, 81n18 children 20, 25, 27, 116, 122, 134–36, 140–41, 150–53, 159, 202, 206–9, 223–27, 234n109, 235, 240, 247–49, 251–56, 264–65 Church Missionary Society 143, 249 Claughton, Piers 110, 121, 144–46, 250 coal 33, 79, 81, 83, 89 Collector of Customs 28, 60, 62, 116–17, 122, 197, 206–9, 221–22 Colonial Land and Emigration Commission 8, 54, 211, 214, 219n60 Colonial Office 19, 21, 28, 52–57, 59, 64–65, 67–71, 79, 113, 183, 197, 206, 213–15, 218, 223–24, 239–40, 248, 257 Congo 31, 35, 77n5, 78–79, 132–33, 137–38, 229 Crawford, Robert 46 Crimean War 34, 36, 43, 199 Cuba 6, 34–36, 52–53, 72, 75, 77, 88, 115, 124, 134n85, 173, 213, 229–30, 276 see also Havana Dampier, William 99 Demerara 17n9, 35, 212n35, 228n85, 232–33, 234n108 see also British Guiana Denman, Joseph 20, 67–68, 78n7 Drummond-Hay, Edward 64, 245 Dysentery 20, 24–25, 27, 119, 121, 156–61, 163, 167–71, 179, 181–82, 184, 191, 193, 195, 198–200, 233–35 East India Company 2, 4–5, 14, 17n9, 95, 101, 107, 205 •

Egg Island 20–21, 175 Elliott, Charles 64, 122, 184, 260 Elliott, Thomas 71, 211 Emigration agents 164, 221–22, 225–28, 233 Emigration vessels Atlantic 232 Bonanza 228n85 Broughton Hall 233 Chieftain 143, 164, 221n63, 229–30 Elizabeth 225 Elizabeth & Jane 228 Euphrates 118, 232 Fairy Queen 225–26, 231 Gangees 37, 220 Hamilla Mitchell 226, 263 Hamilton Ross 223 Himalaya 265–66 Janet 222 Maida 232, 234–35, 238 Margaret 29, 221n63, 226–27, 230, 232–33 Mary Hartley 138, 216–17, 225, 231, 237 Reliance 232 Rhyn 124, 226, 232 Rose 223 Salsette 126, 230, 232n100 Treasurer 225, 229n89 Tuskar 233 Vanguard 226 Zephyr 124 equipment clause 19, 28, 86 Faithful, Jacob (Liberated African) 146, 246 farinha 24, 94, 126, 179–80, 182–83 Fernando Po (Bioko) 6, 83, 175 First African Baptist Church cemetery (Philadelphia) 150 Forbes, Frederick 83, 89 Foreign Office 17, 28, 50, 53–60, 63–64, 66, 68, 70–72, 79 Fowell Buxton, Thomas 78 Fraser, George 69 Freemantle Prison 115

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Distant Freedom interpreters 51, 130, 138–39, 144, 146, 191 Irish Famine 56, 178

Freetown 14, 17, 32, 50, 61, 70, 77–78, 82–83, 86–89, 104, 112, 138, 198, 202, 214, 224, 228, 230, 236, 243 see also Sierra Leone

Jamaica 17n9, 37, 88, 124, 126, 136, 144, 164, 212–15, 219–21, 223, 225–26, 232, 234, 238, 243 Jamestown 1–2, 4, 14, 33, 35, 57n54, 68, 81, 83, 92–106, 121, 130, 148n116, 156, 174–76, 189, 203, 208, 222, 243–53, 255, 268–69, 276 Jebb, Joshua 115 Jeremie, John 224

Gladstone, William Ewert 54, 59 Goodwin, Thomas 250, 258–60, 264–66 Gore Brown, Thomas 64, 113, 122, 139, 144, 155, 248, 258 Governor’s Cup yacht race 79 Grant, Charles, 1st Baron Glenelg 213 graveyards (Lemon Valley and Rupert’s Valley) 4, 26, 108–9, 124, 140–41, 147–52, 163, 193, 197, 245–47, 272–73 Grenada 55, 219 Grey, George 71 Grey, Henry, 3rd Earl Grey 54, 59, 70–71, 113, 196 Grey, Robert, bishop of Cape Town 50n36, 143 Griffiths, Edward 127, 193, 233 Gulf of Guinea 77–78, 80, 86, 89, 104

Kabenda 104 Kavoomboo (Kavumbu) 132–33 Kempthorne, Richard 248, 256 Key West (Florida), United States depot 7, 152–53, 198 Koelle, Sigismond 137 Kru 82, 240

Harper, Charlotte (Liberated African) 276–77 Hartley, Henry 164, 166, 174, 192, 234–35 Havana 14, 17n9, 34–35, 47, 71, 117 Hay Town (Rupert’s Valley) 26, 244–46 High Knoll Fort 26, 248 Hodson, Anna 100 Hodson, Charles 18 Hotham, Charles 70–71, 79 Hutt Committee 45–46, 48, 71, 88n37 Hutt, William 45 Hyde, Hodge and Company 221, 223, 231, 233, 242n2 Indian labour migration 212, 219, 221, 232n100, 235, 237n116 ‘Insane Jane’ (Liberated African) 188–89 •

Lagos 64, 79, 264–66 Lascars 28, 92, 117, 142, 203 Lemon Valley 1, 3, 19, 21–29, 94, 104, 107–11, 115–21, 123–24, 128, 130–32, 138–39, 142–43, 147, 152, 164, 169, 171–72, 175–76, 179, 182, 184–86, 196, 200–2, 206, 208–10, 226, 231, 242–43, 271 Liberated Africans absconding 130–32, 175 adoption of European names 255–256 apprenticeship 19, 205–10 births 124, 152 conversion to Christianity 143–47, 255–56 daily regime 128–29 death and burial 4, 25, 121–22, 142, 147–53, 163, 194, 246–47, 249, 273 demographics 134 dental modifications 141–42 diet 177–84 disorder and rioting 129–30 education 50, 247–54

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Index emigration from St Helena 29–30, 37, 211–41, 263–66 employed for colonial labour 201–5 ethnic origins 132–33 expenditure on 61–62 initial arrivals at St Helena 19–22 insanity 188–89 languages 132–33, 137–38, 263 legal definition 8 malnutrition 158, 177–80 material culture 139–43 military recruitment 239–40 mortality rates 9, 160–63, 197–98, 276 numbers in the depots 25, 32–33, 35, 118, 123–25 Light, Henry 217–18, 232 Longwood 2, 244, 252, 268 Luanda 17n9, 34, 71, 78–79, 88, 131, 264 Lushington Committee 67–68 Madagascar 133 Malaria 82–83, 155, 158–59, 167 matrons 24, 115–16, 118–19 Matson, Henry 67, 104, 121n44 Mauritius 7, 53n42, 215, 218–19 Mayumba 78 McHenry, George 21–22, 24, 29, 41, 104, 109, 115–16, 118, 120, 124, 128, 131–33, 137–39, 142–43, 152, 163–64, 169, 171–73, 176, 179–80, 182, 185–86, 191, 195–96, 208–10, 221, 226–27, 272 MacLeod, Henry 228–29 measles 155, 158, 170, 176 Melliss, John 6, 100, 120–21, 259, 266–67 Merivale, Herman 55, 213 Middlemore, George 19, 57, 59, 64, 214–16, 224 Mixed Commission courts 14–17, 32, 36, 88, 104, 133, 213 More Macauley, Hannah 55 Mozambique 31, 87, 132–33, 137, 171n49 •

Napier, George 216, 218 Napoleon 1–3, 5, 9, 20, 40, 99–100, 107, 244 Newport, legal case 41, 46 Niger Expedition 49, 61, 214 obeah 258–59, 262 Old Woman’s Valley 175 ophthalmia 119, 157–58, 160–61, 234–35 Opium Wars 52, 64 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount 16, 32, 46, 54–56, 87 Parliamentary Select Committees 45–48, 69, 78 Passengers Act 86, 214, 221–22 Patey, Charles 64 Peel, Robert 60–61 Pentonville Prison 115 Phipps Hornby, Geoffrey 75, 79, 81 Plantation House (St Helena) 102, 208 pneumonia 161, 163, 234 Portugal 16–17, 19, 32, 47, 76 Public Health Acts 184 quarantine 20, 24–25, 108–9, 131–32, 171–72, 174–77 Queen’s Yard (Freetown) 112, 139, 202, 224, 228 Rawlins, Charles 111, 119, 124, 131, 138, 157, 164, 166, 170, 182, 186, 190–93, 199, 221, 226–27, 229 Rebecca Hussey Charity 251–54 right of search 36, 42 Rio de Janeiro 14, 17n9, 32, 47, 83, 87, 213, 237 Rogers, Frederick 55 ‘Rollers’ 33, 81, 92 Ross, Patrick 70, 93, 166, 196–97 Royal Navy vessels Actaeon 97 Alecto 35, 71, 186 Archer 84 Arrogant 97 Arrow 28–30, 46, 49, 51, 65, 67–68

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Distant Freedom Bann 84, 174 Bittern 124 Black Joke 84, 138n93 Bonetta 83–84 Brisk 19, 255 Bristol 75, 81 Contest 124, 255 Cormorant 83 Cyclops 163, 270 Cygnet 86, 124 Éclair 174 Eden 84 Ferret 124 Firefly 35, 255 Flying Fish 84 Grecian 99 Griffon 37 Harlequin 97–98 Hecla 98 Madagascar 31, 85, 133 Owen Glendower 84 Penelope 95–97 Plumper 34, 226 Pluto 35, 43, 223, 233–34, 255 Prometheus 30n33, 91 Ranger 41 Rattler 43 Siren 124 Speedwell 37, 271 Styx 86, 97 Sybille 84 Thunderbolt 30, 68, 227 Viper 35–36, 84 Waterwitch 18–20, 31, 42, 67, 69, 85–86, 97, 99, 102–5, 175, 240, 255 Wrangler 122–23 Rupert’s Valley 3–4, 9, 25–27, 29–30, 33–35, 37, 41, 50–51, 65, 69–72, 81, 93, 106, 110–25, 128–38, 140–49, 152, 157, 159–61, 163–64, 166, 169, 171–72, 175–76, 179, 185–86, 188–91, 193–94, 196–97, 200–3, 205, 209, 213, 223–224, 226–28, 230–31, 234, 239, 242, 244–47, 249–51, 256, 261–63, 267–69, 272–73 •

Russell, John, 1st Earl Russell 54, 213–16, 218, 224 Sallamoo (Liberated African) 235 Sandy Bay 188–89, 202, 243 Sanitation Act 184 scurvy 158–60, 177–79, 182, 234 Secretary of State for the Colonies 19, 29–30, 54, 58, 64, 119, 213, 216, 233 Sierra Leone 6–8, 14–16, 18, 20, 31–32, 34, 36, 38n50, 47–48, 50, 52, 53n40, 61, 63, 66, 69–71, 77–80, 82–84, 86–89, 104–6, 112, 117, 132–33, 137, 143, 189, 192, 197–98, 200n136, 201, 210n26, 212–14, 218, 222, 224, 228–30, 236–40, 243–44, 247n20, 249, 258n57, 261, 264, 268, 274, 276 see also Freetown Simonstown (South Africa) 84, 105 Slave Trade (Portugal) Act 16–17, 32, 44, 47, 58, 66, 78, 87, 102, 104 Slave vessels Andorinha 19–20, 22, 24, 43, 116 Anne D Richardson 43 Brookes 85 Cabacca 18–19, 86 Conciecao de Maria 87 Corisco 176 Dous d’Abril 116 Esperanza 33, 163 Euro 25 Feliz Amizade 30 Harriet 86 Haydee 37, 239 Horizonte 160 Julia 20, 22, 24–27, 33, 42, 94, 104, 160, 171, 175, 179 Levin Lank 80n13 Lidador 86 Louiza 25 Lucia 35 Lucy Anne 43 Marcianna 25 Minerva 25, 138

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Index Orion 42–43 Paquete de Santos 43 Quatro de Marco 33 Rozita 34n38 Segundia Rosalia 78 St Lorenzo 30n33 Stephen Townsend 42 Wildfire 152 Zong 85 Slavery Abolition Act 55, 61, 64, 205, 213 Smallpox 20, 24–25, 27, 30, 108, 121, 155, 158–60, 166, 170–77, 198, 231, 234 Society for the Propagation of the Gospel 50–51, 144–45, 249–52, 265 Solomon, Henry 164, 182 Spain 17n9, 19, 36, 133 St Helena annual shipping figures 89–90 climate and natural environment 9, 13, 155–56 discovery and early history 2, 13–14, 107 economic and strategic role 13–14, 80–81, 89–90, 92, 100–101 governors 63–65 historians’ characterisations of 8–9 historiography 4–5 journey times from the African coast 79–80 journey times to Britain 57 structure of government 63 subject in Parliamentary business 46–47 venue for naval shore leave 81, 92–100 St Kitts 64, 219 St Lucia 206, 212, 219 St Paul’s church (St Helena) 102, 203–4, 273 St Vincent 212, 219, 238n119 Stanley, Edward George, 14th Earl of Derby 29–30, 46, 52, 54–55, 59, 65, 215–16, 225 •

steamships 36, 57n54, 75, 79–81, 86, 89–90, 94, 97, 101 Stephen, James 55–60, 62, 206, 213, 215 Sturdee, Frederick (Master, HMS Waterwitch) 67, 99–100, 105 Sturdee, Frederick Charles Doveton (b. 1858) 105 Suez Canal 100–101 syphilis 96, 159 Tobago 212, 219n60, 220 Treasury 28–29, 47, 51, 54–62, 65–73, 113, 119, 128, 183–84, 187, 200, 218–19, 248, 252 Trelawney, Hamelin 29–30, 46, 59, 65, 67–69, 72, 93, 138, 208, 218, 225, 248 Trevelyan, Charles 55–59, 61–62, 68, 72, 200 Trinidad 29, 35, 64, 144, 164, 206, 212, 214–15, 219–23, 226, 228–29, 231, 243 Tristan da Cunha 13, 83 United States Africa Squadron 42, 75n2, 81n18, 82n20, 102 USS Constitution 78 vaccination 172–74, 177, 234 Veendoo (Liberated African) 235 Vice-Admiralty court, St Helena 1, 3, 6–7, 10n24, 17–19, 25, 28, 30, 34, 37, 41, 45, 47, 52, 58, 71, 79, 85–91, 94, 102, 104, 122, 133, 219, 239, 269, 271 Vice-Admiralty courts 6, 14, 16–17, 32, 38n50, 47, 60, 63, 68–69, 88, 104 Villiers, George, 4th Earl of Clarendon 54 Vowell, Christopher 24, 119, 138, 165, 168n37, 182, 185, 227, 261n63 Waterwitch, Bayanni (Liberated African) 265

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Distant Freedom Waterwitch family (Liberated Africans) 246, 255, 262, 265–66, 268–69 Waterwitch Monument (Jamestown) 102–3, 105 Wellington, Arthur (Liberated African), 255–56, 270, 276 West Africa Squadron 1, 5–6, 20, 31, 34, 36, 43, 45–48, 57–58, 61, 65–72, 75, 79, 84, 88, 90–105, 174, 240, 255, 257 see also Royal Navy Vessels West Indian Regiment 64, 130, 239–40 White Ant (termite) 101–102, 253

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Wilcox, James 94, 104–105, 175, 240 Wilde, William 18, 99, 208 Williams, Charles (Liberated African) 265–66 World Anti–Slavery Conventions 45, 52–53 Xhosa War 126 Yellow fever 82–83, 155, 158–59, 167, 170 Young, John 19, 24, 116–17, 119, 132–33, 137, 182, 191, 198 see also Collector of Customs

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