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1

British Slavery and African Exploration

The Written Legacy

I

In 1816, the British government began pressuring colonial legislatures in the Caribbean to be more accountable for their African populations.¹ At this time, the colony at Berbice started keeping a “book of minutes” recording the complaints of slaves, which were then published by Parliament and distributed throughout Britain. These records are unique. For in the midst of a turbulent controversy on slavery by virtually all classes of British citizens, the voices of slaves were now to be found within official government discourse. Though the words of slaves were written down by British officials and were often in the third person, the fact that they appear at all says something about the significant shift taking place during this period between African slaves and British masters.

Among these complaints, the case of “Tommy” stands out.² On 9 February 1819, Tommy appeared before the fiscal (judge) of the colony to state his case. Tommy, a carpenter by trade, belonged to a man named Fraser of the Gladstone Hall plantation. Fraser used Tommy to repair sugar casks. On the day in question, Tommy had gone to the boiling house to fetch some nails for his day’s work, where he met another slave who was “heading up sugars.” Tommy and the other slave apparently spoke casually for a few minutes. Before he left, Tommy walked over to one of the casks and “took a lump of sugar for the purpose of sweetening three gallons of water” for his personal use. He put the sugar in his apron, along with some rusty nails. While employed repairing sugar casks, Tommy explained to the fiscal, he was in the habit of keeping old nails that he would later use to repair his hut. But as he was coming out of the boiling house, Tommy met Fraser, his “owner.”

For his part, Fraser reported that he had bumped into Tommy and immediately noticed “a big bulge” in his apron. Fraser demanded closer inspection. Tommy opened his apron revealing, in Fraser’s words, “a great quantity of sugar and nails mixed together.” Fraser accused Tommy of theft, a crime that most plantation owners considered an insidious form of resistance. Fraser then proceeded to have Tommy tied to the ground and flogged one hundred times, sixty-one more than the legal limit.

In his complaint, Tommy did not deny taking the sugar and rusty nails. If anything, he adamantly affirmed his “theft.” What he objected to was the flogging. Yet when the fiscal asked Tommy to expose his back and posterior to the court, Tommy’s body showed only a few faded marks. The fiscal questioned Tommy on this inconsistency, and he explained that “he had been favoured by the drivers, who threw the whips over him,” therefore completely missing his body with the whip. Since the case itself did not come to any conclusion because Tommy openly admitted to taking the sugar and rusty nails, and he similarly acknowledged that he had not been flogged, the logical question is: what is it doing here?

Although the legal center of Tommy’s case is the number of lashes he was supposed to have gotten, the moral center rests on the objects of the theft: sugar and rusty nails. In this way, Tommy turned the actions of the British, not of the slaves, into a crime. British guilt rested in the crime of excessive flogging, but also in the crime of withholding from slaves the products of their labor. British plantation owners could only make this kind of criminal confusion because they were “distant”—in the sense that they were indifferent to how they treated others. Tommy draws attention to this distance with a subtle vengeance by bringing his case into the rhetorical arena of human rights. He insists on the right to food (sugar to sweeten his water); to shelter (rusty nails to repair his hut); and to ownership of his own body (a restriction on flogging). He demands a say in defining his own humanity to British lawmakers. Through a simple story of sugar and rusty nails, he asks readers and listeners of this case to feel for the humanity of slaves. Tommy and the other slaves who speak through these records ask not for a cursory acknowledgment of their humanity but for a deep awareness of their experience. That they did so in a form that was recorded in the government’s official discourse indicates that the British people in the colonies, or in Britain for that matter, could no longer distance themselves from the violence of slavery as they had done for nearly three hundred years.

But how did this brutally distant attitude occur in the first place? Part of it stemmed from slavery’s geography. From the perspective of the average Briton, slavery had always been an institution situated in the faraway colonies. In fact, the most famous case in the history of the institution—that of James Somerset—was an effort to keep slavery physically distant. In 1771, nearly half a century before Tommy’s complaint, the slave James Somerset was ordered to appear before Judge Mansfield at the Court of King’s Bench in London. Somerset, who had been brought from America to Britain by his “master” Charles Stewart, ran away and was immediately returned to Stewart, who then put him on a slave ship bound for Jamaica to be sold.³ This was the case in a nutshell, and because it was unprecedented, Judge Mansfield had to decide if Somerset, as a slave of Stewart while they had both been in America, could be forced to return to one of Britain’s slaveholding colonies—in this case, Jamaica. Mansfield ruled that Stewart could not force Somerset to return to the colonies.

This case is not what it seems. Mansfield, as historians James Walvin and F. O. Shyllon explain, was intensely interested in upholding the property basis of British slavery, and he was not, by any means, proclaiming that all slaves were free in Britain.⁴ What Mansfield actually declared was this slippery justification for not deporting Somerset:

The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being now introduced by courts of justice upon mere reasoning or inferences from any principles, natural or political; it must take its rise from positive law; the origin of it can in no country or age be traced back to any other source: immemorial usage preserves the memory of positive law long after all traces of the occasion, reason, authority, and time of its introduction are lost; and, in a case so odious as the condition of slaves, must be taken strictly.⁵

Still, the case was interpreted in the popular imagination to mean that slavery was abolished on British soil. It gained a huge following and took on a mythological status after it was settled. Long rambling opinion pieces, filled with an eighteenth-century spirit of debate, crowded out lesser news in the Morning Chronicle, London Chronicle, Gazetteer, and Gentleman’s Magazine in 1772. One man calling himself “A Friend of Mankind” wrote, “Every person in England, and every person in a civilized state, has a claim to the protection of its laws, as he is subject to them…. No degree of slavery can subsist in a free state; all mankind are created free agents, and it is only arbitrary force that perverts the gifts of God and nature.”⁶ Others proclaimed it a judgment in “universal liberty” and even the country’s fervent abolitionists, such as Granville Sharp, who was more closely connected with the case than most people, took Mansfield’s decision to mean “the exercise of the power of a Master over his Slave must be supported by the Law of the particular Countries; but no foreigner can in England claim a right over a Man: such a Claim is not known to the Laws of England.”⁷

Ten years after the Somerset case, which left the issue of slavery securely situated in the colonies, another case brought it uncomfortably close to home, the infamous case of the slave ship Zong. In 1781, the Zong sailed on a common trade route, from Liverpool to the west coast of Africa, and then with a cargo of 470 Africans bound for Jamaica. Disease and death tore through the ship, and in less than three months over sixty Africans and seven crew had died. Although this was one of the usual hazards of slave voyages, the reaction of Luke Collingwood, captain of the Zong, was shockingly unprecedented. When it became clear to Collingwood that loss through “natural causes” was inevitable, he proposed that the crew throw the remaining sick slaves overboard. He argued that this would only bring a slightly earlier death to people who would die anyway, which in turn would leave the dwindling water supplies for those who were well. It was twisted reasoning, but it seemed to be enough for the crew, who agreed to push fifty-four Africans into the sea on 29 November, forty-two the next day, and twenty-six the next. Ten of these, in an act of resistance against the mass murder, committed suicide by throwing themselves overboard in despair.⁸

As if the manner in which Collingwood treated these people was not shocking enough, the way the case was later handled in British courts indicated how callous the business of slavery and law had become. Although antislavery advocates were horrified, the case was subsumed under British insurance law, and the insurance company refused to pay slave owners anything. Apparently, death from “natural causes” was not covered. In a rebuttal, the slave owners insisted that the slaves were “goods” that had to be sacrificed in this case, and they demanded compensation. It therefore came down to a chilling distinction between slaves as property and as people. At one point in the trial, the solicitor representing the slave owners said,

What is all this vast declamation of human beings thrown overboard? The question after all is, Was it voluntary or an act of necessity? This is a case of chattels or goods. It is really so: it is the case of throwing over goods; for to this purpose, and the purpose of the insurance, they are goods and property: whether right or wrong, we have nothing to do with it. This property—the human creatures, if you will—have been thrown overboard: whether or not for the preservation of the rest, that is the real question.⁹

The Zong case was never settled. Initially, it was set for a further trial where, by coincidence, Judge Mansfield, who had presided over the Somerset case, was set to hear it. However, if there was a second trial, it was never recorded. But the event was one of the first highly publicized stories that would brand the brutalities of slavery on the British consciousness. As with the Somerset case, so it was with the Zong. Letters to the daily and weekly newspapers brought the case before the public. And just as the Somerset case had won national praise for British liberty, the Zong affair registered a profound sense of British tyranny. A letter writer in the Morning Chronicle of 18 March 1783 who attended the case wrote, “The narrative seemed to make every one present shudder.”¹⁰ It was this event, according to veteran historian James Walvin, that instigated the full unleashing of antislavery sentiment in Britain. Not only was it behind the abolitionist movement, it was a startling instance of the kind of integrated team work that would eventually bring slavery to an end. The day after the 18 March article, the Nigerian born Londoner Olaudah Equiano personally called on the white abolitionist Granville Sharp to discuss the incident.¹¹

Ironically, the Somerset case, which took place in Britain, implied that slavery would be contained in the faraway colonies, while the Zong affair, which took place faraway in the middle passage, brought slavery terrifyingly close to home in the sense that it entered the British consciousness in a personal way. The truth was that slavery, by the 1780s, was bound to ideas of proximity and distance. Before this, Europeans had been able to look with cold remove on the slave trade because of its sheer physical distance from them. The trip from a British slave port such as Liverpool, Bristol, London, or Hull to a destination along the coast of East or West Africa ran anywhere from four thousand to six thousand miles and could take months.¹² The middle passage from Africa to the West Indies was roughly the same distance, lasting anywhere from forty days at the least, to four months at the most. Sailors heading back to Britain from the West Indies would travel another five thousands miles, and depending on where they stopped with their trade goods, this journey too could last months.

But more important than physical distance was psychological distance. Slave owners, up until the late eighteenth century, seemed to have both in their favor. They frequently argued that because of the geographical remoteness of the colonies from Britain, they were absolved of any crime against Africans. The mass majority of people who were not slave owners felt even more psychologically remote. Even as people were beginning to acknowledge that physical distance made no difference in how intimately involved Britain was in the trade, they had been used to viewing slavery with the same indifference that Tommy faced in his complaint against his master. Therefore, it was psychological remove from the plight of slaves, not just geographical remoteness, that seemed an even more ironclad notion.

Early abolitionists emphasized exactly this point. One of the first, the American Quaker John Woolman, whose essay Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes appeared in 1746, traveled around America as an itinerant minister speaking against slaveholding. Along with those of the American abolitionist and fellow Quaker Anthony Benezet, Woolman’s writings were transported to Britain, serving as the initial inspiration behind Britain’s antislavery movement: British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson gives Woolman credit for his own conversion to the antislavery cause. Very soon into Woolman’s travels around America, he discovered he was up against one grand objection. His parishes argued that because metropolitan centers were at a safe distance from plantations, they were not responsible for what took place there. So Woolman found himself writing things like, “Great distance makes nothing in our favour. To willingly join with unrighteousness to the injury of men who live some thousands of miles off is the same in substance as joining with it to the injury of our neighbours.”¹³ Woolman used this concept of intimate distance to challenge the psychological remoteness of most Europeans and Americans. The term he used repeatedly to evoke guilt in his readers was “self-interest.” “Can it be possible,” he wrote, “for an honest man to think that with a view to self-interest we may continue slavery to the offspring of these unhappy sufferers … and not have a share of this guilt” (my emphasis).¹⁴ Psychological proximity, Woolman argued, would clarify just what slavery did:

And did we attend to these scenes in Africa in like manner as if they were transacted in our presence, and sympathize with the Negroes in all their afflictions and miseries as we do with our children or friends, we should be more careful to do nothing in any degree helping forward a trade productive of so many and so great calamities.¹⁵

Following Woolman, British abolitionists considered it standard practice to challenge the idea of self-interest and to combat the belief that ordinary Britons were simply detached parties in a slave system beyond their control. In 1791, the radical abolitionist William Fox wrote specifically about bridging distance based on racial and geographic boundaries: “Can our pride suggest,” he asked, “that the rights of men are limited to any nation, or to any colour? Or, were any one to treat a fellow creature in this country as we do the unhappy Africans in the West-Indies; struck with horror, we should be zealous to deliver the oppressed, and punish the oppressor. Are then the offices of humanity and functions of justice to be circumscribed by geographical boundaries?”¹⁶ Others bridged that distance in more rhetorically simple ways. The slave trader turned evangelist John Newton actually became a “a Captive and a Slave myself” among the “Natives of Africa.”¹⁷ Similarly, Thomas Clarkson, in an effort to bring the subject of slavery closer to the British mind, wrote part of his Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species in the first person, but from the perspective of the African witnessing a scene of horror equal to that of the Zong. “To place this in the clearest, and most conspicuous point of view,” Clarkson writes, “I shall suppose myself on a particular part of the continent of Africa, and relate a scene…. At first, I will turn my eyes to the cloud of dust that is before me. It seems to advance rapidly, and, accompanied with dismal shrieks and yellings, to make the very air, that is above it, tremble as it rolls along. What can possibly be the cause?”¹⁸

Clarkson was by far the most active abolitionist of the Romantic period and the most inclined to make slavery a personal issue. He traveled over thirty-five thousand miles between 1788 and 1795 alone, establishing local antislavery organizations all over the country and collecting facts and artifacts about the British slave trade that would help convince anyone, from paupers to Members of Parliament, of the inhumanity of slavery.¹⁹ Not only did Clarkson submit facts and figures, numbers and dimensions, and stories of ill treatment, he brought in actual iron instruments used on slave ships: handcuffs, leg shackles, thumb-screws, speculums for force-feeding slaves who would rather die.

One of the most shocking artifacts of Clarkson’s travels is a drawing that shows how Liverpool and Bristol slavers regularly crammed hundreds of African bodies into the bowels of their slave ships (Figure 1). The drawing, in fact, has remained a sort of icon of the visual horror of the slave trade ever since. The peculiar way in which the bodies are imagined in the genre of an architectural drawing and cross section says something about the hideous underside of British seafaring. What is most surprising about the drawing, however, is the amount of detail the bodies have. Little leg irons and arm bands cup the limbs of the African males, while the females lie with their breasts exposed. The distance with which these middle passage slave bodies were normally kept from the British people must have made them startling to viewers at this time. This British ship—the Brookes—was originally filled with slaves in Africa and emptied of them in the West Indies, far from Britain’s clean shores, and it is the close proximity of this conventionally foreign and distant picture that gives it the intensity of a central image of the antislavery movement.²⁰

By driving the Liverpool slaver onto the steps of London’s parliamentary buildings, Clarkson and the abolitionists brought slavery home, bridged the distance between London and West Africa, between Liverpool and Barbados. Psychologically, they were saying, as Tommy would say some years later in his Berbice complaint, that it was no longer possible for people in Britain to look with myopic indifference on the human suffering and violence of slavery. “As then the inhumanity of this trade must be universally admitted and lamented,” the notice on the slave ship poster reads, “people would do well to consider, that it does not often fall to the lot of individuals, to have an opportunity of performing so important a moral and religious duty, as that of endeavouring to put an end to the practice, which may, without exaggeration, be stiled one of the greatest evils at this day existing upon the earth.”²¹

II

There is very little argument by historians or literary scholars over the claim made by Clarkson and his coworkers in 1788 that slavery was the greatest evil existing upon the earth at that time. But slavery, they were all aware, was an inherited problem. Servitude, bondage, and forms of dependence and forced labor have been aspects of many cultures and time periods. Ancient civilizations in Asia, Africa, Europe, and pre-Colombian America record slavery in its various forms. It has been endorsed by the world’s major religious institutions—Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity.²² And long before the transatlantic trade, slavery was practiced in the Mediterranean. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, slave auctions were held all along the coast of North Africa as well as in some of the most fashionable European cities, such as Venice, Seville, Lisbon, and Antwerp.²³ From the fourteenth right through to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, India received slaves from Africa, with the trade running from Madagascar and the Red Sea by way of Arab traders. Slaves were also integral to the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.²⁴ Even in Africa itself, slavery was widespread until the nineteenth century.²⁵

Figure 1. Detail, Thomas Clarkson, 1789. Courtesy of Wilberforce House, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries, UK/Bridgeman Art Library, London.

But transatlantic slavery was a very different creature. One of the most startling aspects of the early years of the slave trade is how rapidly it expanded from a minor commerce to a full-blown economic enterprise. If one wanted to attach an actual date to the beginnings of the trade it would be 1518, when Charles V of Spain granted the first licenses to Europeans to take African people from their homes and bring them to the Spanish American colonies to be used as slave labor.²⁶ Within just ten years, by the 1520s, the slave trade was a developed operation managed by the Portuguese, who controlled the basis for slave supply on the west coast of Africa. One hundred years later, during the 1640s, the trade ballooned again when sugar plantations spread from Brazil to the Caribbean. Sugar cultivation could only be profitable if outfitted by cheap labor in the form of slaves. And so during the middle 1640s, the Portuguese who had controlled the transatlantic trade for a hundred years, and the Spanish who continued to be involved, were joined by the Dutch, French, Danish, and British. The gruesome baton of massive slave exports passed from the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and eventually to the British, who dominated the trade after 1660.

Britain’s very first dealings in the slave trade were amply recorded by Richard Hakluyt in 1582. Hakluyt chronicled the voyage of “Master John Haukins,” who “having made divers voyages to the Iles of the Canaries,” realized what other European nations had already made disturbingly possible: “that Negros were very good merchandise in Hispaniola, and that store of Negros might easily bee had upon the coast of Guinea.” According to Hakluyt, Hawkins immediately “resolved with himselfe to make triall thereof, and communicated that devise with his worshipfull friends of London.”²⁷ Britain’s role in the trade continued to expand, as it seized various portions of the Caribbean and exported slaves to its North American colonies, dealing principally in sugar.

In the 1780s, the transatlantic trade reached its peak, with the British leading the way and, ironically enough, it was at this exact moment that the British also began to dominate abolition efforts. One of the landmark events in the abolition movement took place in 1789, when William Wilberforce moved for twelve antislave trade resolutions in the House of Commons. Wilberforce objected to the slave trade on the grounds of British national guilt. This very idea, in fact, formed the moral center of his parliamentary speech: “The motion he meant to offer, was perfectly reconcileable to political expediency, and at the same time to national humanity. It was by no means a party question, nor would it, he hoped, be so considered; … He came not forward to accuse the West India Planter; he came not forward to accuse the Liverpool Merchants; he came forward to accuse no one; he came forward to confess himself guilty, for the purpose of shewing to the House, that if guilt any where existed, which ought to be remedied, they were all of them participators in it.”²⁸ The magnitude with which the British exported slaves was now matched, in the popular imagination, only by the guilt each person bore because of it.

Indeed, even though transatlantic slavery was an inherited problem for Romantic audiences, it carried some peculiarly shameful aspects compared to other forms of slavery. Transatlantic slavery was different for several reasons. First of all, its sheer dimension is staggering. By the early nineteenth century, the African slave trade represented the largest migration of people in human history to that point.²⁹ Millions of people were torn from their homeland and deposited on foreign shores. Just how many millions is a matter of historical debate. The number seems to range from between ten and fifty million. Toni Morrison dedicates her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved to “Sixty Million and more.”³⁰ Most recent research suggests that around twelve million Africans entered the Atlantic slave trade between 1500 and 1867 with ships of the British Empire alone carrying nearly three and a half million of those slaves from Africa between 1662 and 1807.³¹ It is also estimated that 10 to 15 percent of those transported from Africa to the Caribbean and the Americas died on slave ships during the middle passage, which is one of the most horrible and resonating memories of slavery.

Besides its unparalleled magnitude, the other particularly shameful aspect of the trade, one that abolitionists and poets were well aware of, is that plantation slavery turned people into chattels, and this led to the interpretation in Western culture of slavery as the polar opposite of freedom. Transatlantic slavery gave European culture its definition of freedom because in a very real sense, enslaved blacks created freedom for whites in Europe and America. Slavery within Africa, by contrast, did not carry this connotation. While slaves there still suffered in profound ways—for instance, they lost their status and social identity—a slave was not turned into property.³² Similarly, slavery in the Muslim world included intricate laws and customs regarding how people once enslaved could still make themselves full members of Muslim society.³³

By the early nineteenth century the dismantling of the slave trade and the emancipation of slaves was inevitable, but Britons expressed extreme insecurity about its consequences. This feeling is registered most strikingly by George Canning, the leader of the House of Commons, on 16 March 1824, in what is now a famous speech in the history of British slavery. “The question is not,” he said, “a question of right, of humanity, of morality merely. It is a question that contemplates a change, great and difficult beyond example; one almost beyond the power of man to accomplish;—a change in the condition and circumstances of an entire class of our fellow creatures;—the recasting, as it were, of a whole generation of mankind.”³⁴

But what Canning does not admit here is that change was endemic to the period. The American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 were seen to inaugurate a period of upheaval in which people all over the world could set themselves free from tyranny. The revolutions in Spanish America began around 1810. Simón Bolívar, the liberator of Venezuela, Colombia, and Peru, set up the Congress of Venezuela and the Congress of Colombia in 1819, but he dreamed of a united South America, free from Spanish rule. Closer to home, the Greek war of independence had been sparked as early as 1821 against the Turks of Moldavia and Wallachia. The revolutionary flavor of world politics inevitably spread to the system of slavery—most notably the Haitian revolution of 1791, which lasted many years. On a smaller scale, British slave colonies had continual problems with day-to-day resistance and with major uprisings, such as those of 1816 in Barbados, of 1823 in Demerara, and of 1831–32 in Jamaica. The Jamaica rebellion, in particular, was just what was needed to prompt Parliament to pass the emancipation bill. Samuel Sharpe, a feisty figure who has achieved heroic status, was the leader of the rebellion where 200 slaves were killed and at least 340 more put to death in torturous trials that followed the uprising. Sharpe himself was one of the last to die, on 23 March 1832, a week before Parliament appointed a committee “for the purpose of effecting the Extinction of Slavery.” Sharpe reportedly said, just before his execution, “I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery.”³⁵

III

But just as Britain was planning a change in the status of slaves, the British were figuring out ways they could exploit Africans in Africa itself. In some bizarre way, they were drawn to Africans or Africa for the entire nineteenth century, whether through slavery or African exploration. At the beginning of the century, as the abolition movement swung into full momentum, Britain was not only the major European sea power, it was the leader (though not far ahead of France) in exploration. At the time, the major contours of Europe, Asia, and North and South America had already been charted, so it was the interiors that presented the most challenging sites for exploration. But those explorers who went in their country’s name, and in the name of discovery, also knew that the lands they described would soon become zoned for commercial activity, and beyond that, for colonial exploitation.

Following the three celebrated journeys of Captain James Cook, executed between 1768 and 1779, Britain initiated thousands more voyages, in an effort to chart the entire globe. In the South Seas, not only Cook wrote up his travels, but his shipmates Georg Forster and John Hawkesworth came out with their own versions. These were followed by other South Seas travelogues, such as George Keate’s 1788 Account of the Pelew Islands. In North America, travelers meticulously recorded flora and fauna, as well as Native American Indian customs, as found in William Bartram’s 1791 Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, The Cherokee Country … together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians. The more hearty explorers braved the snows and ice of Canada in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, as recorded in Samuel Hearne’s 1795 Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean. No place was out of reach. The Middle East, India, China and Japan were scoured under the traveling eyes of men and women alike: James Morier’s 1812 Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, and James Wathen’s 1814 Journal of a Voyage, in 1811 to 1812, to Madras and China. Even the places that had been occupied by Britons for hundreds of years were worthy of travel accounts. There were travels to Scotland, Ireland, and all the countries in Europe. Caribbean histories and travels also abounded, from William Beckford’s early Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790) to the celebrated gothic writer Matthew Gregory Lewis, with his Journal of a West India Proprietor, published in 1834, after his death from yellow fever.³⁶

As this worldwide exploration and description went on in reasonably systematic fashion, Africa was pursued with more attention than the rest of the world put together. Africans did not put up a united front against white explorers the way the Chinese and Japanese did, so this made exploration a more viable option for the British and the French. As the Industrial Revolution gathered steam, Africa was also attractive because it offered an expansive market for European trade goods, and the British were determined to corner that market before the French.³⁷ So the British set up an official association devoted to learning more about the continent and how it could be used to Britain’s advantage in the face of the worldwide changes of slavery and French imperialism. The Association for Promoting the Discovery of the Interior Parts of Africa—or the African Association, as it was called—came into being in 1788 owing to the inspiration of Sir Joseph Banks.³⁸

A round, heavy figure, with darkly defined eyebrows, a dimpled chin, and sturdy hands, Banks was at the imperial center of Britain for at least fifty years. Although Banks does not survive in the popular consciousness the way other figures have—like Cook, or Wordsworth, or Napoleon—he was more influential at the time than any of them, and some of his activities continue to be influential, even in the twenty-first century. He sailed with Cook, in his circumnavigation of the globe, led the first scientific voyage to Iceland, and in 1778 became president of the Royal Society. A friend of King George III, he also became director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, making them the world’s most impressive repository of international specimens. He was responsible for importing Merino sheep to Australia whose wool to this day is found in sweaters. He planted colonies all over the world and shipped British convicts to Australia. He masterminded the Tahitian breadfruit expedition which ended, of course, with the infamous mutiny on the Bounty. He aided Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the eminent German scientist (also called the father of anthropology) in the development of one of the first scientific efforts to categorize the races of man, which led to our modern racist categories.³⁹

Banks developed a grand network of correspondence with scientists and explorers all over the world. Although he shipped men and specimens to the furthest corners of the globe, the most intimate centers of Banks’s collection of distant lands were his houses, first at New Burlington Street, then at 32 Soho Square. As if finding the world in a grain of sand, scientists, dignitaries, politicians and explorers discovered here a microcosm of the nature and culture of foreign places. Here Banks assembled a massive library, open to scholars of all kinds, and, more impressively, tens of thousands of specimens, including many of the 30,000 he had collected on the Endeavour when he had sailed with Cook. The walls crawled with insects and sprouted plants. One visitor wrote “it would be absurd to attempt a particular description of what I saw there … his house is a perfect museum; every room contains an inestimable treasure.” In one room, Banks had “warlike instruments, mechanical instruments and utensils of every kind, made use of by the Indians of the South Seas”; in another were “an almost numberless collection of animals, quadrupeds, birds, fish, amphibia, reptiles, insects … preserved in spirits.” And Banks had his collection available in reproducible form: “the choicest collection of drawings … 987 plants drawn and coloured by Parkinson; and 1300 or 1400 more drawn with each of them a flower, a leaf, and a portion of the stalk, coloured by the same hand; besides a number of other drawings of animals, birds, fish, etc. and what is more extraordinary still, all the new genera and species contained in this vast collection are accurately described.”⁴⁰ In short, scientists and travelers first saw distant lands through Banks’s classified information. When they traveled to those lands, when they wrote about them, their perspectives were already shaped by what they had seen at Soho Square. In this way, Banks oversaw almost all voyages of discovery Britain undertook during the Romantic period, but Africa was one of his special favorites.

The African Association was composed of members representing a wide variety of Britain’s interests—from scientific to commercial. Interestingly enough, the membership also included the country’s two most prominent abolitionists, William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. They hoped, as historian John Gascoigne has demonstrated, that “the Association would be a means of combating the slave-trade.”⁴¹ But underlying the association’s goals, and those of the abolitionists, was the deeply entrenched belief that British occupation would enlighten Africa. In the process, Britain would enlighten itself about the lands beyond its reach. The original purpose of the association stated, “Certain however it is, that, while we continue ignorant of so large a portion of the globe, that ignorance must be considered as a degree of reproach upon the present age.”⁴²

The desire to explore and enlighten very soon turned to a lust of conquest. In 1792, Banks said that colonizing Africa “did not in my opinion coincide with the purpose of the association,” but just seven years later, in 1799, he recommended “secur[ing] to the British Throne, either by conquest or by Treaty, the whole of the coast of Africa from Auguin to Sierra Leone.”⁴³ He argued that such a colony would make Africans more “happy than they now are under the Tyranny of their arbitrary Princes,” and that Britons would support this colonization effort, especially because Africans would then be converted to the “Christian Religion” and the nation could then end slavery “upon the principles of natural justice & Commercial benefit.”⁴⁴

This link between African exploration and the demise of British slavery has been carefully critiqued by present-day historians. Most agree, in fact, that abolitionists acted, to a greater or lesser degree, in tandem with the British desire to colonize the world. This particular line of thinking was initiated by Eric Williams, an Oxford historian who went on to become prime minister of postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago, in his 1944 Capitalism and Slavery.⁴⁵ With originality and striking persuasion, Williams argued that the British slave trade, with all the money and industry it generated, created the conditions for the Industrial Revolution, and this, in turn, funded the large-scale scientific explorations of the nineteenth century. Abolition of the slave trade and emancipation of slaves in the Caribbean, Williams said, was thus a result of economics, not humanitarianism, and it certainly did not have anything to do with transcendental ideals. For historians ever since, Williams’s analysis has been the foundation for rethinking the relationship between antislavery opinion and industrial capitalism, humanitarianism and economics. More recently, David Brion Davis has argued that abolitionists were unwittingly acting out of self-interest in pushing for the end of slavery. Since most of them belonged to the rising middle class, it was in their best interest to support abolition, which promised, in turn, to boost capitalism. Davis writes, “British antislavery helped to ensure stability while accommodating society to political and economic change; it merged Utilitarianism with an ethic of benevolence, reinforcing faith that a progressive policy of laissez faire would reveal men’s natural identity of interests.”⁴⁶ In short, exploration and subsequent colonization was the flip side of slavery.

In the realm of literature, exploration had different consequences. It brought Africans—or stories about them—home to Britain, but in different ways from the stories circulating about slaves. The first to do this with any success was a protégé of Joseph Banks, the Scottish explorer Mungo Park. In July of 1794, Park, an unemployed ship’s surgeon, found himself in London’s Thatched House Tavern in a meeting with Banks. Though the two were opposites in many ways—Banks was rotund, privileged, and, by this time, homebound, whereas Park was angular, solidly working-class, and moving around the world—they had in common a curiosity about Africa. So Banks drafted a resolution stating, “That Mr Mungo Park having offered his Services to the Association as Geographical Missionary to the interior countries of Africa; and appearing to the Committee to be well qualified for the Undertaking, his offer be accepted.”⁴⁷ Even as he signed the commission, Park knew that almost every other European who had been sent to navigate the Niger River had died in the process. John Ledyard had gone west from Cairo and Daniel Houghton east from Gambia; neither one returned alive.

Still, Banks vetted, prepared, and sent Mungo Park by way of Gambia, and, as if to double his chances for successful African exploration, Banks also sent a young German named Friedrich Hornemann by way of Tripoli the same year. Both men went in the name of the African Association, and, while Hornemann died along the way, Mungo Park (whether by ingenuity or, more likely, sheer luck) returned in 1797, having accomplished most of his mission. Banks had sent him to explore the Niger Valley with the aim of “rendering the geography of Africa more familiar to my countrymen, and in opening to their ambition and industry new sources of wealth, and new channels of commerce.”⁴⁸ So naturally, upon Park’s return, Banks and the African Association immediately set about shaping his experiences into a publication designed to open the unknown continent to the eyes of European readers. Banks recruited Bryan Edwards, who had already written the influential History, Civil and Commercial of the British West Indies as ghostwriter. Edwards made sure Park’s narrative was “interesting and entertaining,” and then he had Banks “cast [his] eye” over each chapter for final approval.⁴⁹ The narrative certainly has dramatic elements, with the requisite amount of humor, sex, danger, and violence. At one point, Park himself is taken captive and is asked to give “ocular demonstration” of his private parts to a group of Moorish women.⁵⁰ At another point he is robbed, stripped naked, and left for dead.⁵¹

Such intimate encounters riveted a public that had been saturated with stories of Africans as slaves. In Park’s estimation, Africans were sometimes fierce, sometimes friendly, most of the time clever, but never subservient. At one of his particularly vulnerable moments, Park is told by the villagers of Bambarra that he must wait alone the entire night, without food or shelter, and an African woman “returning from the labours in the fields” comes upon him. The woman, says Park, “stopped to observe me, and perceiving that I was weary and dejected, inquired into my situation, which I briefly explained to her; whereupon, with looks of great compassion, she took up my saddle and bridle, and told me to follow her.”⁵² She and her daughters feed Park, and then sing to him:

The winds roared, and the rains fell.—The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree.—He has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn. Let us pity the white man; no mother has he, &c. &c.⁵³

Park’s narrative is filled with modest moments of compassion, and words like “unexpected kindness,” “hospitality,” and “benefactress” are scattered throughout the pages of his narrative describing his encounters with Africans. His book thus made readers, who were trained to think of African-European encounter in terms of slaves and masters, imagine Africans in new ways.

For this, and other reasons, the narrative was an instant literary classic, necessitating two more editions after an initial sellout and German, French, and American editions by 1800.⁵⁴ Park’s observations on Africans were also used by scientists, other explorers, and poets. They were the subject of a play called “Mungo’s Address,” a song by the duchess of Devonshire called “A Negro Song from Park’s Travels” and a poem by Felicia Hemans. James Montgomery quoted Park in his popular abolitionist poem of 1809, The West Indies, and Mary Russell Mitford celebrated the narrative itself in “Lines, Suggested by the Uncertain Fate of Mungo Park”: “Oh! When secure in Albion’s happy land, / He trac’d his dangers with recording hand.”⁵⁵ After Park, poets portrayed Africa as a place through which the hidden depths of the self could be imagined.

But the imaginative use of Park differed from the political use of him. On 25 May 1799 Banks told the African Association that Park had “opened a Gate into the Interior of Africa into which it is easy for every nation to enter and to extend its Commerce and Discovery from the West to the Eastern side of that immense Continent.” If Britain did not “possess” itself of the “Treasures” of Africa discovered by Park, “some Rival Nation” soon would. Chief among those treasures was gold, which Park had seen traded as dust. “Science,” Banks stated, “should teach these ignorant savages that Gold which is Dust at the mouth of a river must be … in the form of Pebbles when near the place from whence it was originally washed.” He also thought Britain should send troops up the Niger to secure the gold reserves: five hundred, supported by artillery, would overcome “the whole Forces which Africa could bring against them.”⁵⁶ In the end, Britain sent out a more modest expedition. Park led it; he was supported by a troop of soldiers and together they shot their way along until, weakened by disease and ambushed by the Africans, they most likely drowned in the Niger.

Given this fact, it is not surprising that today, among historians and literary critics, Mungo Park and his exploration of Africa are viewed in the same light as African slavery, as a shameful legacy. Mary Louise Pratt, for instance, features Mungo Park as one of the key agents of empire, written about through the myth of “anti-conquest.” According to Pratt, “Park’s book owes much of its power to [its] combination of humanism, egalitarianism, and critical relativism anchored securely in a sense of European authenticity, power, and legitimacy.”⁵⁷ Ashton Nichols, in an article dedicated to Mungo Park, also sees Park’s journey as intimately tied to the language of domination. He writes: “At a time when British, like European, self-definition had been destabilized in so many ways—political revolutions, social and economic restructuring, class anxiety—Park’s Romanticized Africa, and the subsequent romanticization of Park’s own life by Europeans, contributes in important ways to the creation of the discourse of the colonizing culture that would soon ‘dominate’ the globe.”⁵⁸

IV

Both African exploration and the antislavery movement coincided with the rise of print culture. While people consumed slave products—tobacco, rum, steel, cotton, indigo, mahogany, coffee, and the addictive white substance, sugar—the vast majority knew about Africans and slaves only through written accounts. From the 1780s onward, the British presses issued millions of pages in the form of parliamentary debates and newspaper columns, sermons and speeches, poems and novels and stage performances, medical tracts and anatomical inquiries, African travelogues and West Indian histories. Legislative debates were often printed in the papers—Gentleman’s Magazine, for instance, regularly printed the debates, such as the Fifth Session in 1788, which included an open discussion of the revenue produced from the slave trade. It was talked about publicly in the streets—John Bidlake’s “The Slave Trade: A Sermon” preached at Storehouse Chapel in December 1788, or Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lecture on the Slave Trade given in Bristol in June 1795. Antislavery discussion and propaganda took many forms—James Montgomery’s long poem The West Indies (1809), Monk Lewis’s play The Castle Spectre (1798), Maria Edgeworth’s novel Grateful Negro (1804), William Cowper’s ballad “The Negro’s Complaint” (1788), paintings such as Fuseli’s The Negro Revenged (1806–7) and Turner’s Slave Ship (1840), religious tracts such as John Newton’s Thoughts on the African Slave Trade (1788), narratives such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), travelogues like Mungo Park’s, and medical treatises like Letters and Essays on [diseases] of the West Indies (1787). The debate also impinged upon works of natural history and science like Charles White’s Account of the Regular Gradations in Man (1799) and James Cowles Prichard’s Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813), as well as histories such as Bryan Edwards’s History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793) and Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (1808). Each of these genres is more complex than any neat categorization could suggest; they overlap and intertwine to make slavery and African exploration two of the most ubiquitous topics of the era.

Because of changes in print culture and the literary marketplace, many of these writers regarded themselves as having global importance and world-historical influence.⁵⁹ As literary historians Jon P. Klancher and William G. Rowland Jr. have shown, a profound shift took place in the early nineteenth-century writer’s sense of audience. What made the Romantic period special in this sense, writes Klancher, was that “perhaps for the last time, it was still possible to conceive the writer’s relation to an audience in terms of … a personal exchange of power’ between writer and reader.” Romantic audiences lived in a “moment of transition,” where people’s sense of themselves as individual readers was constantly combined with their sense of being part of a larger audience.⁶⁰ Klancher says that writers of the British Romantic period shifted between the sense of a personal audience and of a massive audience that they had never met. This could give them either a sense of power or a feeling of despair. Rowland, extending Klancher’s idea, argues that Romantic writers’ activity “forced them to confront a general feeling of their epoch, sometimes called alienation and sometimes called modern selfhood.”⁶¹ “The romantic elevation of the self,” writes Rowland, “had its darker counterpart in bourgeois despair, the widespread feeling that individuals can do nothing to change a monolithic social order, composed as it is of a ‘mass’ of people and the attendant uncontrollable, inexplicable forces.”⁶² Yet even with this dark alienation closing in on them, Romantic writers clung to the belief that their work had had the force of change. Nowhere is this more strenuously or more eloquently articulated than in Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads:

In spite of the difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things gone silently out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time. (W Prose, 1:141)

The present-day American poet Michael Ryan observes that “by imagining the audience to be permanent and universal instead of immediate and particular, [Wordsworth] awards the poet a larger, lasting, more important role in ‘the vast empire of human society,’—far beyond Britain in 1800.”⁶³

What we also have to remember about the writers of this period and their relationship to social and political issues is that for them writing was activism. Their sense of world-historical influence may seem silly in the coolly ironic twenty-first century, but at the time it seemed just the opposite, and it is exactly what fueled both Romantic writing and abolitionist writing. Who else, but someone who thought he or she could make a difference, would publish the large-scale claims found in John Wilson’s “On Reading Mr. Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade”:

Before him lay a quarter of the world,

A mighty land, wash’d by unnumber’d floods,

Born in her bosom,—floods that to the sea

Roll ocean-like, or in the central wilds

Fade like the dim day melting into night

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

That he by Heaven is chosen to restore

Mercy on earth, a mighty conqueror

Over the sins and miseries of man.

The work is done! The Niger’s sullen waves

Have heard the tidings,—and the Orient Sun

Beholds them rolling on to meet his light

In joyful beauty.⁶⁴

Yet despite this grand enthusiasm for global change through poetry, what became increasingly clear was that influential writing had to take up important issues at the same time it had to depart from stale forms and stereotypical images. By the early nineteenth century, so many discourses were saturated with the topic of slavery that writers were hard-pressed to come up with different ways to write about it. In 1809, James Montgomery commented that there was simply no “subject so various and excursive, yet so familiar and exhausted, as the African Slave Trade,—a subject which had become antiquated, by frequent, minute, and disgusting exposure, which afforded no opportunity to awaken, suspend, and delight curiosity, by a subtle and surprising development of plot; and concerning which public feeling had been wearied into insensibility, by the agony of interest which the question excited, during three and twenty years of almost incessant discussion.”⁶⁵ Coleridge had said exactly the same thing a year earlier, in 1808. In his review of Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, Coleridge explains how slavery’s tenacious hold on the nation ensured that other political events never eclipsed it in power and intensity. He writes: “The nation, throughout city, town, and village, was only not unanimous: and though the almost weekly explosion of new events, all of them more or less directly affecting the interests of Great Britain, drew away their attention, or deadened their zeal, for a time, as to this great subject, yet it was only necessary to proclaim the same facts anew—and the same zeal was rekindled, the same sense of duty felt and expressed by all classes” (SWF, 1:236).⁶⁶

Given the pervasiveness of the slave issue in the Romantic era, I hope to show in the following chapters how Romantic writing—creative works that concerned themselves with the imagination—took up this issue in more oblique and thus more terrifying ways, as in Coleridge’s 1798 poems “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” with its grimly repetitive “Alone, alone, all, all alone” and its unbearable burden of guilt. Writers like Coleridge took great care to subtly, not brazenly, embroider their poetry with topics that had been treated with ideological righteousness or soggy sentimentalism in most of the literature of the day. Keats felt the same way, as he said in 1818: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us—and if we do not agree, seems to put its hand in its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle or amaze it with itself but with its subject.”⁶⁷ Shelley, too, remarked that when poets explicitly try for a moral aim, “the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to avert to this purpose.”⁶⁸ Thus, while Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and other writers whose works we continue to read, did write about the African and slave presence, they avoided, in Keats’s words, putting a “palpable design” on their readers. Since the topic had been made so explicit for so long, such writers considered it most powerful when least obvious, most familiar when most unfamiliar, and truly intimate when seemingly distant.