The Marxist-Leninist Weekly

Ships of free slaves from Nova Scotia arrive in Sierra Leone, January 15, 1792.

On the occasion of Black History Month, TML Weekly is posting an extract from the award-winning novel The Book of Negroes by Canadian author Lawrence Hill, published by HarperCollins in 2007. This excerpt details the voyage of the first ships of freed slaves from Shelburne, Nova Scotia to Freetown, Sierra Leone on January 15, 1792.[1]

These freed slaves, so-called Black Loyalists, had fought on the side of the British during the American Revolution. In return for their service, they were promised homesteads in Nova Scotia. Three thousand of them sailed to Nova Scotia in 1783. By 1790, many were still waiting for their land, Hill writes. In addition, the average land allocation to the black refugees was 40 acres, smaller than the lots allocated to whites. The black settlers who had gone to New Brunswick, were also allocated land many miles away from their town lots in St. John and Fredericton, "worthless in itself from its remote situation," Thomas Peters bitterly complained.[2] The freed slaves began organizing to create the conditions in which they could exercise their freedom by returning to Africa. The book tells the story of Aminata Diallo, known as Meena, who was kidnapped as a child from what is now Mali by slave traders.

Book Three

In the spring of 1790, the Methodists crammed into Daddy Moses' chapel to listen to a visitor from Annapolis Royal. He was a short, stocky fellow who looked a little older than me, and he spoke in a tone so flat that some parishioners fell asleep. But he seemed to have something urgent to say, so I slipped into the first pew to hear him better. "My name is Thomas Peters," he said. "Fourteen years ago I ran from the man who owned me in North Carolina. During the war I served the British in the Black Pioneers, and anybody who doesn't believe me can come on up here and see my regimental papers. I'm just the same as the rest of you: I came to Nova Scotia seven years ago and I'm still waiting for my land. But now I'm tired of waiting and I'm going to do something about it."

Thomas Peters said he was taking up a collection to travel to England. There, he said, he hoped to speak to members of the British Parliament about the landless Black Loyalists and the perpetuation of slavery in Nova Scotia. None of us imagined that anything would come of it, but contributed what we could. I admired Peters' determination, and gave him ten shillings. After the meeting, I helped him write the conclusion to what he called his Memorial. "The poor friendless Slaves have no more Protection by the Laws of the Colony ... than the mere Cattel or brute Beasts ... and ... the oppressive Cruelty and Brutality of their Bondage is particularly shocking, irritating and obnoxious to ... the free People of Colour who cannot conceive that it is really the Intention of the British Government to favour Injustice, or tolerate Slavery in Nova Scotia."

"Make no mistake about it," Thomas Peters said as he thanked me. "I am going to England. And while I am there, I will not for one day forget the situation of our people." Peters' boldness and ambition made me aware of how much my own will had weakened. There had been a time when I wanted nothing more than to go to England, and from there to find a way back to Africa. But now I would not travel. I stuffed moss in the spaces between logs to protect my cabin from the wind, and hauled wood from the forests to keep my stove burning through the nights. I had little left but the cabin, and worked each day to keep it clean and dry for Chekura and May. If they ever returned, I wanted the comforts of home to hold them forever. I tried to distract myself with work, but memories of Chekura and May shadowed me.

In Birchtown, we soon forgot about Thomas Peters. But the next year, he returned to our church to say that he had been to England and had met some white folks who were prepared to send us to Africa. It seemed ludicrous. He had no details to back up his story, and none of us believed him. Before he left, however, Peters promised that more information would come to us soon.

A few days later, while reading the Royal Gazette, I came across a notice from the chairman and twelve directors of the Sierra Leone Company in London, England: FREE SETTLEMENT ON THE COAST OF AFRICA.

The notice claimed that the Sierra Leone Company was willing to receive into its African colony Free Negroes who could produce testimonials of their character, "more particularly as to their honesty, sobriety and industry." It said that every "Free Black" who could produce such a written testimonial would have a grant of twenty acres of land in Sierra Leone for himself, ten for his wife and five for every child. Blacks and whites would have the same civil, military, personal and commercial rights and duties in Sierra Leone, and it would not be lawful for the Sierra Leone Company to hold any person in slavery or to traffic in the buying or selling of slaves.

Once I started reading the notice to people in Birchtown, others asked me to read it over and over again. I read it in Daddy Moses' Methodist chapel. I read it in the Baptist church. I read it anywhere and everywhere that folks wanted to hear about it. I read the document aloud enough times to memorize it. Still, I could not understand who would be allowed to travel to Africa, how they would get there, how they could pay for the journey, or who was behind this scheme and why they were offering it. Everybody asked me where Sierra Leone was, but I did not know.

We soon discovered that it was unsafe to discuss the scheme publicly. In Shelburne, three men beat up a Negro cooper who stepped into a coffee house with a copy of the Gazette in his hand. Some people in Birchtown worried that all the talk of moving to Africa would amount to nothing more than an excuse for white people to riot against the Negroes again.

A few days later, an Englishman named John Clarkson rode into Birchtown on his horse, wearing his full uniform as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He was a younglooking man. I was about 46 that year, and he appeared to be half my age. Young, but earnest. He had a boy's face, small nose, pursed lips. He was clean shaven but with wildly bushy sideburns. He asked to address Daddy Moses' congregation. Hundreds of people crammed into Daddy Moses' chapel and just as many crowded outside the doors, so we all moved outside. John Clarkson stood with his back to the ocean, brushing the hair out of his eyes. We gathered around him in a giant horseshoe shape, looking out at the bay.

John Clarkson had a high-pitched voice but it carried well. We stood motionless and silent so as not to miss a word.

"Reverend Moses, ladies and gentlemen, my name is John Clarkson, and I am a lieutenant with the British Navy. I am not here, however, on a military mission. I am here on a civilian purpose, which is to offer those of you who are interested and eligible passage to Sierra Leone, in Africa."

The people cheered so loudly that Lieutenant Clarkson had to wait for the roar to subside. I was stuck by his paleness, and could see a blue vein near his temple. His eyes were lively, however, and appeared to study all the people before him while waiting for them to settle down. His gaze fell on me. I imagined that his eyes were lingering on the orange scarf wrapped around my head. John Clarkson's own hair was blond and receding. Bald spots extended back from the top of his forehead. He wiped sweat from his brow and buried his eyes in his palms, like a man who was fighting sleep because he had too much work to do.

When the crowd had grown quiet once again, Clarkson said that he had been born in Wisbech, a small port some ninety miles from London. He and his relations believed that the slave trade was a stain on Christianity. He said that he had become acquainted with the fact that Negroes who had served the British in the war against the rebellious Colonies had been denied land and opportunities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. "I am here to tell you today that I have been authorized by the proper authorities in England to offer loyal Negroes passage to a new life in Africa."

Clarkson went on to issue numerous promises to those who wished to found a new British colony in Sierra Leone. "Adventurers," as he called them, would have the freedom to govern their own affairs. They would enjoy political and racial equality. They would have seeds for crops, implements to tend to them, and land to call their own. "We don't even have our own land here," someone yelled.

"I cannot alter your circumstances in Nova Scotia," Clarkson said, but the Sierra Leone Company would give free passage to the colony and land to all who went there. "Where is this place you call Sierra Leone?" Daddy Moses called out.

Clarkson asked if he should draw a map. Everybody demanded one. "You realize," he said with a grin, "that I failed all art classes in school."

Clarkson removed a quill and some paper from his carrying bag, and quickly sketched the contours of Africa. He drew it like a long oval, with the bottom left corner chopped out. North of a spot where the continent bulged to the west, he drew in a big dot and called it Sierra Leone. To the west, he said, was the Atlantic Ocean. To the northwest, something he called Wolof country. To the southeast, areas known as the Grain, Ivory, Gold and Slave coasts. When he had finished, he passed the paper through the crowd. Clarkson said, "I did fail art, but I had to learn a little about maps in the Navy."

I liked the warmth with which Clarkson spoke, and I liked that he said that many of us could teach him a lot more than he could teach us about Africa.

When the laughter died down, Clarkson grew serious again. He said that all adventurers to Sierra Leone would have to refrain from dishonest, disagreeable, unchristian, and immoral behaviour. And reading from his notes, he said, "Criminality, drunkenness, violence, theft, licentiousness, adultery, fornication, bawdiness, dancing and any other displays of uninhibited emotion will be strictly forbidden."

A few groans went up in the audience. One man standing near to me muttered, "Hell, man, we go all the way back home and can't dance about it?" A few people sniggered, but Clarkson ignored them and continued.

Criminals and disreputable people would not be allowed to join the trip. Single women would not be permitted to journey alone, unless a man could vouchsafe for the integrity of their character and promise to ensure their welfare.

Clarkson asked for an assistant to take minutes of the meeting. Several people shouted my name.

I stepped forward, so he asked me also, "Would you point me to Mr. Meena?" "I am Aminata Diallo."

"My name is Meena, for short," I said. "You wanted a note taker, and I can help." "You can?" John Clarkson lowered his hand.

His face lifted into a smile the likes of which I hadn't seen in years. It was an I am so indescribably happy to meet you sort of smile. It was an I think the two of us could be friends sort of smile. To my great surprise, I felt the same way. I liked the man from the instant I met him.

I was given writing materials and a stool to sit on, and I took notes as the meeting continued.

Clarkson asked for the names of the leaders of the community, so that he could quickly obtain and relay information in the coming weeks. He was given the names of three ministers. He asked if anyone was opposed to the idea. One Birchtown resident named Stephen Blucke argued that Negroes should make the most of what they had in Nova Scotia. Why risk losing everything on a dangerous journey to an unknown land? Rather than taking offence, Clarkson merely urged Blucke and any others who felt they were doing well to stay put in Nova Scotia. I liked the way Clarkson was confident enough to let folks speak their minds.

Clarkson took pains to answer every question. Word by word, he gained my respect. No, he said, the ships would not be slave vessels.

He raised his finger to emphasize a point. "Slavers of many nations still trade in men on the coast of Africa. Some of them do their vile work in Sierra Leone. But there will be no question of slavery in the colony we create."

The Sierra Leone Company was directed by men whose life's passion was to abolish slavery, he said. The ship or ships would be outfitted with modern conveniences and stocked with proper food so that every man, woman and child could cross the ocean in decent conditions.

Clarkson said he hoped that the adventurers would be on their way within two months, and said that it would take about nine weeks to sail from Halifax to Sierra Leone.

The Sierra Leone Company, he continued, would spare no expense in removing us from Nova Scotia, out of the twin sentiments of duty and patriotism. Duty, because black people had a right to live free of slavery and oppression, and what better way to set them on the right footing than to send them back to Africa, where they could civilize the natives with literacy and Christianity. Patriotism, because we, the black colonists of Sierra Leone, would help Great Britain establish trading interests on the coast of Africa. No longer would the empire have to depend on slavery for enrichment. The land was so fertile, Clarkson said, that figs, oranges, coffee and cane would leap from our farmlands. We would meet our own needs easily and help the British Empire bring to market all the rich resources of Africa.

There was the small matter of those who had gone before us, Clarkson said. Some black people from London had settled five years earlier in Sierra Leone, but their colony had failed to prosper. However, we would have use of their old townsite, on which we could expand and make improvements.

I found myself believing that Clarkson's promises were real, but felt that I could not go with him. If I travelled back to Africa, I would never see my daughter or husband again. And so, as Clarkson held forth, I found my attention wandering a little and I missed one or two of the questions and answers that I was supposed to be writing down. The dream of my lifetime was finally within reach, and yet it didn't seem right to take it.

After the meeting, the lieutenant hoisted Daddy Moses onto his cart and the two men came to my cabin for a visit. We ate apples, buttered bread and cheese that Theo McArdle had given me for the occasion, and we drank my own hot libation of mint, ginger and honey.

"My stars," Clarkson said, "this sure clears out the nasal passages, doesn't it?" He peered at the stove rigged up for cooking and heating, looked over the utensils hanging on the wall and bent over to examine the books on my shelves.

"Don't you just love that term ‘Lilliputians'?" he said. "Where on earth did Swift come up with the word?"

"How would you like to be my assistant?" Clarkson asked me. "I need someone to take notes, communicate with the Negroes and help me organize the adventure."

"I am free and have no debts," I said. "But I am waiting for my husband and daughter and could not leave without them."

Clarkson asked what I meant. He listened carefully and tapped his fingers together while I told him about Chekura and May.

"I don't know what to say about your daughter," he said. "Given that the Witherspoons are wealthy, they could have taken her to any number of cities or countries. But let's talk about your husband. You say that his ship was called the Joseph?"

"Then I should be able to dig up some naval records. When I'm back in Halifax, I'll see what I can do."

I agreed to work for Clarkson for three shillings a day, plus room and board. Clarkson said that he would be needing me night and day until the departure for Africa. He would get a room for me at the Water's Edge Inn in Shelburne, and after a few days of work we would sail to Halifax to finish the job.

"Could I have another spot of that tea?" he said. "It is the most marvellous drink." Perhaps one day, I thought, I would tell him about drinking mint tea with my father in Bayo. But for now, I wanted to know more about the men who directed the Sierra Leone Company.

He said the Company included some of the leading abolitionists in London, his brother Thomas Clarkson among them. They wanted to create a profitable colony in Africa, where liberated blacks could live productively and in dignity, and from where Great Britain could build a profitable trade with the rest of the world—trade, he said, that did not rely on the evils of slavery.

JOHN CLARKSON APPLIED HIMSELF EVERY WAKING HOUR to the details of registration. "Necessary civilities," he called it when we paid a courtesy trip to the Shelburne mayor, knowing that he opposed the adventure. The mayor predicted that the Negroes would die en route, or be consumed by tropical diseases, or cannibalize the naive Europeans who took them to Guinea.

John Clarkson heard every imaginable objection in the five days that we registered Birchtown residents for the trip, and I heard every term under the sun for people from my homeland. People called us Ethiopians, darkies, and those of the "sable race." They called our land Sierra Leone, Serra Lyoa, Negritia, Negroland, Guinea, and the dark continent. They called us ingrates for wanting to leave Nova Scotia. Knowing that slaves, indentured workers and debtors would not be allowed to sail with Clarkson, some people accused Negroes of having debts or of being indentured to them. My job was to ensure that every Birchtown resident who wanted to leave showed up to register at the Water's Edge Inn, and to find evidence to disprove false allegations.

Although we had to rush through our work, Clarkson always took a few moments to ask if I needed anything—food, drink, ink or quills. When I was tired, he told me that he felt the same way. And when we had a few minutes alone to eat at the end of our long hours of work, Clarkson entertained me by mimicking some of the people we had met that day. The man could pick up any person's accent. But ultimately he was completely serious about his assignment, and I liked the fact he respected my efforts to help him. The nights, however, were difficult for Clarkson. I don't know how he had survived naval battles with his mind intact. The slightest insult or provocation set his anger simmering for the rest of the day and night, and either prevented him from sleeping or plunged him into nightmares. The walls at the Water's Edge Inn were as thin as parchment and each night his screams awoke me. "No," he would shout out, "I said, let her go right now." After the first eruption, I understood that these were merely nocturnal anxieties. I had had my share of nightmares too, so I did not judge him.

Over tea in the morning, he would tap the table, ask me to remind him to write a letter to his fiancée that night, and fuss over the Negroes who were being prevented from leaving for Africa. When a tavern owner claimed that one Negro still owed him five pounds for unpaid beer and fish, Clarkson paid the debt himself and warned the adventurer not to set foot in any more taverns for the rest of his stay in Nova Scotia. Clarkson wore his worries on his face, and sometimes dissolved into tears while we were discussing unfinished work. But neither Clarkson's tears in the day nor his outbursts at night prevented him from carrying out his long hours of work. I admired him for persevering in the face of his own struggles, and I made a private vow to support him to the best of my abilities.

When we finished the registration process in Shelburne, Clarkson advised the six hundred adventurers who had been accepted for the journey to Africa that he would send ships to bring them to Halifax. After reminding Daddy Moses and Theo McArdle to keep their eyes open for Chekura or May, I set sail with Clarkson.

I had a cabin of my own on the two-day trip to Halifax, and felt an odd sense of relief to be leaving the place I had inhabited for eight years. I had time to think during the long nights alone, and it struck me that good white men weren't likely to stay sane for very long in this world. Any white man who wanted to help Negroes "raise themselves up," as Clarkson liked to say, would be an unpopular man indeed among his peers. I hoped that Clarkson would retain his faculties long enough to get us safely to Africa. His tantrums and outbursts worried me. He was just too concerned about Negroes. It didn't seem natural.

HALIFAX WAS A FLEDGLING TOWN when I arrived in November 1791. It was not as attractive or meticulously laid-out as Shelburne. It lacked the array of storehouses and public buildings that the black people of Birchtown had built in Shelburne, but it was a gentler place to be, and far less menacing for Negroes.

I moved into a room at The King's Inn, among a set of ramshackle wooden buildings along a busy street by the water. I had only a few minutes of free time every day, and liked to start my mornings in solitude by eating breakfast in my room while I read the newspapers. Henry Millstone, who ran the tavern in the hotel, brought me the Royal Gazette and a bowl of fish chowder at seven o'clock every morning. He always liked to pause and chat.

"Lieutenant Clarkson tells me that you are the most literate Negro he has ever met," Mr. Millstone said. "Is that true?"

I was discovering something intriguing about white people. It seemed that they wanted either to sing my praises or to run me out of town. But sometimes it was difficult for me to make the transition from one sort of person to the other.

"There are some literate Negroes, Mr. Millstone, and over time there will be many more in Nova Scotia, where they are not prevented from reading."

"I wouldn't mind learning with them," he said with a laugh. "So are you going with the others to Guinea?"

A few days after I arrived in Halifax, three Negroes pounded on the door of my room at ten in the evening. They had just spent fifteen days walking through the woods from Saint John. An agent in that town had refused to register them for the departure, or to allow them to embark on a ship bound for Halifax, so they had no choice but to set out overland for the city, hoping to arrive before the ships departed. Clarkson agreed to admit the men.

Within a week, another hundred cold and hungry Negroes drifted by foot into Halifax. I saw men without coats, women with nothing but ragged blankets around their shoulders, and children without any clothes at all. By mid-December, boats from Shelburne and Annapolis Royal had transported more people to town, bringing the total of Negro adventurers to more than one thousand.

Clarkson lodged people in warehouses by the water, brought blankets so they wouldn't freeze at night and hired dozens of women to boil up cauldrons of food every evening. He worked all day and through half the nights, buying clothes for the naked and arranging medical care for the sick between his long hours at the docks. While I spread the word about what the Nova Scotians were allowed to take to Sierra Leone—no more than one dog for every six families, fowls but not pigs, a trunk of clothing but no tables or chairs— Clarkson oversaw the provisioning of ships. He spoke daily of the health of the travelling Negroes, and in each ship ordered pitch boiled, decks scrubbed with vinegar, and all sleeping quarters refitted to allow for a minimum height of five feet. He even posted a Bill of Fare to reassure travellers that they would be properly fed. At breakfast and supper, we would eat Indian meal with molasses or brown sugar. At dinner, we would have salt fish days, pork days or beef days, and eat turnips, peas or potatoes.

Clarkson arranged to have nearly two hundred turkeys slaughtered, dressed and cooked for a feast on Christmas Day, and for each man or woman to have one cup of beer or wine. During the course of the meal, he took me along as he walked from warehouse to warehouse to address the adventurers. He prayed with each group and repeated his "Rules and Regulations for the Free Black People Embarking for Sierra Leone." He usually dealt respectfully with individuals, but had a tendency to speak to groups as if they were children. I flinched when he instructed the assembled travellers to pay attention to divine worship, to use soft words to prevent broils and not to make friendly with the seamen. However, none of the Negroes objected to his lectures. They venerated the man who was leading them to Africa.

Bedford Basin near Halifax. This detail of a painting by Robert Petley, c. 1835, is of a black family on the Hammond Plains Road. Some of the most significant eighteenth-century Black Loyalist settlements were Birchtown, Annapolis Royal, Digby, Halifax, Sydney and the Saint John River area.

The Governor and his wife invited Clarkson and me to dine with them for Christmas. As we entered their palatial home, Clarkson whispered to me that Government House had been built at a cost of twenty thousand pounds, and that the same amount would have employed one thousand Negro labourers for a year. Clarkson and I joined sixteen other guests in the dining room. Mrs. Wentworth was a loud, cigar-smoking woman, and we were barely into the meal when she turned the conversation to the migration. "I'll say, Lieutenant, it's quite the voyage you are cooking up."

"Do you honestly believe they'll have a better go of things in the tropics?" she asked. I was tired of letting them debate as if I wasn't there, so I added a comment of my own: "We have waited eight years for land, and most of us still don't have it."

"Every Nova Scotian can tell stories of delays in getting their land," she said. "It's not just blacks who are clamouring for acreage."

"It's about more than land," I said. "It's about freedom. Negroes want to make our own lives. But we are wilting here."

"You take our provisions and our handouts when it suits you," she said. "That doesn't sound like wilting to me—"

Governor Wentworth cut in. "Speaking of freedom, may I propose a toast to His Majesty the King?"

After fruit and cheese were served, a butler showed up to offer guests a tour of Government House. Clarkson and I followed some of the others up and down endless flights of stairs and in and out of rooms full of portraits, but only the map room caught my attention. The butler said there were maps from every conceivable place in the world. When the tour left the room, Clarkson and I stayed behind. I thumbed through a thick wad of maps while Clarkson complained that the dinner had wasted his time.

Clarkson said he still had to finish outfitting the ships and look into finding another ship's surgeon. He had asked Wentworth if he could take one of the royal surgeons from Halifax on the mission to Sierra Leone, but the governor had refused. Clarkson nearly choked with anger as he described the situation. One surgeon for a flotilla of fifteen ships was grossly inadequate, he said. What if the ships got separated on the voyage? What good was a surgeon on one ship if somebody was dying on another?

"Plainly," Clarkson said, "he doesn't want me to succeed in my business. He would prefer that the free blacks stay right here to prove that they are content in Nova Scotia and that their complaints of ill treatment are groundless."

Clarkson was breathing heavily and starting to wave his hands wildly. I sat with him for a minute and managed to calm him down by urging him to take steady, regular breaths, and breathing along with him. When he settled down to join the other guests for a drink, I had the maps to myself.

Somebody had taken the trouble to organize them into categories: British North America, Nova Scotia, the Thirteen Colonies, England, Jamaica and Barbados, and Guinea.

From the portfolio marked GUINEA, I removed the first map and spread it out on a table with two burning candles. It showed the typical paintings of half-dressed African men and naked African women, usually with baboons and elephants nearby. Reaching again into the Guinea portfolio, I pulled out a piece of paper with flowery handwriting: "Copied from On Poetry: A Rhapsody, by Jonathan Swift, 1733." And then I found the lines:

So geographers, in Afric-maps,
With savage-pictures fill their gaps;
And o'er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns.

Elephants for want of towns. I found it comforting to know that nearly sixty years earlier, before I was even born, Swift had expressed the very thing I was feeling now. These weren't maps of Africa. In the ornate cartouches of elephants and of women with huge breasts that rose in unlikely salute, every stroke of paint told me that the map-makers had little to say about my land.

I pulled out the next map, and the next, and the next, but they were old maps with no details that I hadn't already discovered. They listed the Grain Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast, and they showed some of the major ports, such as Bonny and Elmina. I always remembered that last one, because it sounded like my name. Finally, I pulled out the most recent map that I had ever seen of Africa. It was dated 1789, and printed in London. I saw slave ports again, such as Wydah and Elmina. But much farther to the northwest, I saw another slave port: Bance Island. I remembered that William King, the slave trader in South Carolina, had told me that I had been shipped from Bance Island. I could not tell if Bance Island belonged to a particular country, but the words "Sierra Leone" appeared slightly to the southeast. I studied the map more closely. Although there were still the obligatory naked African women with children on their backs, and monkeys and elephants—especially in the so-called "Zarra or Desert of Barbary"—I also found the names of a few inland towns. This map had the coastal ports—most of them, it seemed— but also a few villages. From my childhood, I remembered my father promising to take me one day to the town of Segu. He had said it was about four days by foot from our village. And now I saw the name appearing a few inches north of Bance Island. I was puzzling over what four inches meant in real distance, when John Clarkson came back for me.

I sat facing him, imagining that he had come to speak about all the work remaining. "You asked me to look into your husband's ship," Clarkson said. "The Joseph, which sailed from New York when you were being evacuated."

"That's right." I put my hands together, formed my fingers into steeple. Sitting my chin in the crook of my thumbs, I pressed my nose with my index fingers.

"I checked with the British naval authorities," he said, then coughed. "They have an office down the street. Manifests, records, ships logs—they keep all that."

"The Joseph went down," he said again. "It was blown off course in high winds. It was blown so far off course that it almost made it to Bermuda. But then, in a huge storm, it sank. Everybody on board was lost. The captain, the crew, the Loyalists white and black. I'm so sorry. But you did ask me to find out."

John Clarkson reached out to put his hand on my shoulder, but I recoiled from him and ran from Government House. I didn't want to be seen or touched. I wanted only to be alone with the news. Chekura. My husband. After such a long journey. Gone, on the very vessel that I should have taken.

I wondered how the ship had gone down. Perhaps it had been struck by lightning, or had flipped in the churning sea. Had my husband died quickly, or had he had time to think of me as the water swallowed up his body? I consoled myself by imagining that he had probably been helping somebody else. Holding a child, perhaps. So very many Africans had been lost at sea, and many more again had been lost on the way to and from the slave ships. And now ... this.

Many times I could have died, yet I was here still, now on the precipice of yet another journey across the water. The first one had been involuntary. This one was my choice. Chekura was dead. Mamadu was dead. May had been gone for five years. If she was still alive, she probably didn't remember me, and most certainly wasn't coming back. I missed all three of my loved ones so terribly that my body, it seemed, was half missing.

I spent a morning in my room in the King's Inn, emptying my grief into a pillow. Then I returned to help John Clarkson. I would take what was left of my body and spirit and join the exodus to Africa. There was nothing left for me in Nova Scotia. I imagined May showing up at Shelburne and asking for me, and this gave me trouble breathing. I tried to calm myself by holding a book, stroking its cover and opening to a random passage, which I read over and over until I was able to speak the words. No matter what the book or the passage, the matter of reading it out loud brought me to a simple truth that I had denied for years in Birchtown: I would never see May again, and it was time to move on. WE FORMED QUIET, ORDERLY LINES on the docks in the Halifax harbour. Huddled in the wind and the rain, waiting our turn to be rowed to the ships, we spoke in whispers. One out of every three men and women had, like me, been born in Africa. Including children, there were 1,200 of us. It took five days for the storm to subside. I boarded the Lucretia with John Clarkson, the ship surgeon and all the pregnant women and ailing adventurers. On January 15, 1792, our fifteen ships lifted anchor and set sail for Sierra Leone.

John Clarkson's illustration of the 15 ships carrying 1,200 freed slaves from Halifax to Freetown.

Book Four

IN MY OWN SHIP, THE LUCRETIA, seven out of the 150 passengers died during the ocean crossing. John Clarkson himself nearly succumbed, choking on his own vomit during a storm, but was rescued. He remained bedridden for most of our journey, though he rallied as our ship sailed into St. George's Bay on March 9, 1792. I scoured the green mountains. From my childhood, I remembered the profile of the lion's back and head. Sierra Leone— Lion Mountain—rose up so sharply on the peninsula that I wanted to reach out and touch it.

I knew now that I had come, some thirty-six years earlier, from a slave ship that had left Bance Island. I had found the island on a map, and Clarkson had told me that it was in Sierra Leone. But until the coast with the lion-shaped mountain came into sight, I had doubted that I would truly return to the place of my departure. It had seemed too much to hope for.

The Nova Scotians hugged one another on the deck of the Lucretia and shouted praise to Jesus and to John Clarkson.

"I'm afraid I'm like most of you," Clarkson said, fixing his eyes on the coast. "I've never been to Africa before."

I stared at him, and noticed others doing the same. It had never occurred to me that the man who had led our exodus from Nova Scotia had never seen my homeland. To break the silence, one of Clarkson's officers tipped a barrel and poured rum into glasses for the men and the women. I wanted no drink, felt no need for laughter, and preferred to stand alone at the ship's railing. I pressed my hands to the wooden bar, felt the humid breeze on my face, and wondered what would become of me now. I had expected to be overjoyed, but instead felt deflated. Waves crashed up against the shores of Africa, yet my true homeland was still far from sight. If I ever did make it home, I knew the one question that people would ask: Where are your husband and children? I would have to confess that in the land of the toubabu, I had managed to save only myself.

The crossing had taken nearly two months, but our waiting was not over yet. While the fifteen ships in our flotilla from Halifax dropped their anchors and baked for three days in the African sun, Clarkson was rowed back and forth between our ships and a handful of others already in the harbour. I could see that they too flew the flag of the Sierra Leone Company—two clasped hands, one black and the other white.

I felt relieved, seeing that they were friendly ships, but Thomas Peters ranted about them to me and to any other passengers who would listen. Peters was fond of reminding us that he had been the one to make the migration possible, by travelling to London two years earlier to complain that the Black Loyalists were still without land in Nova Scotia. But now Peters had something new to say: "What are all those ships from London doing here? This was supposed to be our colony. Our new life. And all decisions in our hands. But what are we doing? Waiting while Lieutenant Clarkson discusses our fate with other white men."

Clarkson had hired a group of African men to row him about St. George's Bay. We all stood on deck, admiring the rowers' muscles and their sleek, smooth paddling, until Peters had a chance to put his questions to Clarkson.

Peters raised his palm. "No disrespect intended. Just tell us. Do those men row slaves in these waters?"

Clarkson coughed, and took a moment to compose his answer. While he was thinking, we slowly gathered around him.

"Thomas," I said to Peters, "why don't we all stand back a little and give the man room to breathe?"

"Thank you, Meena," Clarkson said. "I have already told you that there are slavery operations in Sierra Leone."

"But Mr. Clarkson," I said. Many heads turned to watch, because everybody knew that Clarkson and I got along well. "How," I continued, "could you put us anywhere near a hive of slave trading?"

"It's not as if we had twenty choices," Clarkson said. "This is where we have operations. This is where we have negotiated with the locals. And this, at least, is removed from the activities of the slavers."

I heard a few people cursing. I was happy that we had sailed close enough to Bance Island for me to see the shore and be sure that this was the land from which I had been taken. But I wished right now that we could drift another two hundred miles along the coast, in any direction.

Clarkson seemed to guess my thoughts. "At any place where Europeans have established themselves on the Guinea coast, you will find slave-trading factories. Nowhere is safer than this. Our mission is special, and our colony will be different. We will thrive with farming, industry and trade, and find our own ways to serve the British Empire."

"We didn't leave our homes in Nova Scotia to serve the British," Peters said. "We came to Africa to be free."

"That you shall be," Clarkson said. "I have given you my word. Is this perfectly clear? None of you shall be taken as slaves."

Peters fell silent. He had echoed my very concerns, but I reasoned that Bance Island was far enough away. If I could go where I pleased, I would never even have to see it. "When shall we disembark?" I asked.

We spent the rest of that day and all the next morning looking out at the lush green land in the distance, and were at the ship's railing when we saw a new vessel drawing near. Clarkson stared through his looking glass and groaned.

He handed me the looking glass, which I lengthened and adjusted. Peering through it, I spotted naked homelanders on deck. And then the stench engulfed the Lucretia. The stink grew as the ship drew closer. Some of the Nova Scotians went below to their rooms, but I was transfixed. I didn't want to see it, but could not turn my eyes away.

Clarkson headed for his cabin and returned to the deck dressed in his uniform as a naval lieutenant. The approaching ship had also prepared for the meeting: all captives had been sent below decks. The true nature of the ship could not be disguised, however, because the stink made us choke and gag. I knew exactly how the captives were chained in the belly of the ship, and I could imagine the running sores on their legs and the moans leaking from their lips. A white man was rowed from his ship to ours and allowed to climb aboard.

Clarkson exchanged handshakes, pleasantries and goods with the man. The lieutenant gave him three barrels of dried meats, and the slaver gave Clarkson barrels of fresh water and oranges. They shook hands as if they were friends. Later, when the man was being rowed back to his ship, Clarkson saw me staring at him.

"I received water and oranges from them—things that you and your fellow adventurers badly need," Clarkson said. "Do you think I took those supplies for my own consumption?"

"Mr. Peters, this vessel is not a warship. Do you see any cannons or soldiers with muskets? Everything about me opposes the trade in slaves, but we have to pick our battles. We have come to establish a free colony—not to start a war with the slavetraders."

I had not even set foot back on land and I already could see that nothing would be simple. I admired Peters for objecting to the slave trade. But for the time being, I felt that Clarkson was right. I had learned that there were times when fighting was impossible, when the best thing to do was to wait and to learn. First we had to get off our ships, build shelters and find food. That night, while I watched from the Lucretia, dark clouds rolled in over the mountain. The skies grew black and starless. Lightning sawed through the clouds, illuminating the ships in the harbour and sending waves of thunder crashing across the bay. From the caves in the mountain, the thunder shot back at us, echoing over and over like cannons in the night. Many of the people on the ship were terrified, but I had not forgotten the storms, even after all these years, and I knew that they would pass.

1. Fifteen ships were needed to carry nearly 1200 people to Sierra Leone, at a cost of £15,500 to the British government.

(This book was published in the United States as "Someone Knows My Name." Excerpts from the book can be found on Google Books by clicking here. Illustrations are from the illustrated edition of The Book of Negroes and the internet.)

Meena's Story

Book Three

Book Four