Raymond Seitz
FREEDOM IN FREETOWN
Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution
By Simon Schama (BBC Books 448pp £20)

On 9 January 1792, John Clarkson, a 27-year-old lieutenant on leave of absence from the Royal Navy, set sail from Halifax, Nova Scotia, as 'commodore' of what is surely the most peculiar fleet ever to have crossed the Atlantic. The flotilla was made up of fifteen small ships - altogether not more than 2,000 tonnes - and carried 1,196 people. The crews were mainly white. The passengers were black, all former slaves from Britain's lost American colonies.

The fleet was bound for Sierra Leone. One of the voyagers was a blind woman aged 104 who as a child had been sold into slavery in Sierra Leone and was now on the final leg of her tragic round trip. Despite seven storm-tossed weeks and multiple near-calamities, all fifteen ships miraculously made it.

As Simon Schama relates in this powerful tale, Clarkson had been dispatched to Nova Scotia the previous autumn to round up black volunteers for the floundering settlement in West Africa. He was an unlikely choice. He had never betrayed any abolitionist fervour during his tours of duty in the Caribbean, where slavery in the British sugar plantations was about as horrible as it could get, and he had never displayed a trace of missionary zeal. But John's brother, Thomas, was one of a group of London-based philanthropists who had dedicated their endeavours to the abolition of legal slave status within Britain, the abolition of the slave trade itself, and eventually, in 1834, the abolition of slavery in the Empire altogether.

Foremost among this Quaker-inspired coterie was Granville Sharp, who in 1772 in Westminster Hall, before the Lord Chief Justice, managed to overturn an older ruling that a slave brought into Britain by his owner remained in bondage, a slave being deemed property, plain and simple. Sharp argued that this 'Accursed Thing' of slavery contravened the most fundamental liberties of English Common Law. He drew on an even older and confidently ethnocentric legal opinion from 1569 concerning an imported Russian serf, which stated that 'England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe'. A slave entering Britain was ipso facto free.

As Sharp, Clarkson and others continued to press the issue - the most powerful parliamentary voice belonged to William Wilberforce, and both Pitt and Fox, rarely in the same bed, were sympathetic - another matter cut across Britain's incipient abolitionist movement: the American Revolution. And here both sides in the ensuing war displayed levels of hypocrisy and cynicism that would take away the pure breath of even the most jaded politician. American patriots fought for all the uplifting principles of freedom and liberty except where they concerned the one-tenth of the American population who were black slaves. British governors, especially in the Southern colonies, promised freedom to any rebel-owned slaves who crossed into the British lines and joined the fight, but made no promises at all to Loyalist-owned slaves (one British general even considered infecting escaped slaves with smallpox and sending them back to rebel plantations, an early example of biological warfare).

Tens of thousands, at great risk, answered the British call. Although blacks fought on both sides of the conflict, many of the British-liberated slaves were organised into coherent units - the Black Pioneers and Guides or the Black Brigade - and many others, especially women and children, filled supporting camp roles. In return, these blacks, though frequently ill-treated, received 'certificates of service', which documented their contributions and their free status. But, in truth, Albion's call to freedom was motivated less by humanitarian concern and more by an effort to destabilise the economy of the recalcitrant rebels.

Following the defeat at Yorktown and the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the British began the task of evacuating the imperilled white Loyalists (often with their slaves) and even more imperilled free blacks. Some 15,000 to 20,000 ex-slaves shipped out from New York and Charleston. Most were dumped in Nova Scotia, where they were promised free land, which rarely materialised. Others ended up indigent on the streets of London. Still others were tricked by unscrupulous merchants and sold back into slavery in Barbados or Jamaica.

Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson et al, now joined by the influential Comptroller of the Navy, Sir Charles Middleton, and the evangelical preacher, James Ramsay, put their efforts into the Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor, and from this came the inspiration for a settlement in Sierra Leone. Sharp, ever the utopian, foresaw a democratic and prosperous community whose example would spread throughout the African continent. The irony, not to mention the jeopardy, of establishing a tiny free black community in a sweltering, tropical territory whose prime economic activity was the slave trade seems not to have occurred to the founders. Four hundred square miles of land were 'bought' with beads, cloth and tobacco from the quixotic Temne chief King Tom, and in May 1787, 383 London blacks were deposited in Freetown (first called 'Granville Town'). Their situation almost immediately started to deteriorate.

Enter John Clarkson, with time on his hands and adventure in his heart. He arrived in Nova Scotia on a simple recruitment drive, but as he travelled from village to village, and heard the stories of destitute and abandoned blacks, he became a kind of eighteenth-century Schindler. By the time his fleet departed Halifax, his passengers were calling him a white Moses. Arriving in Sierra Leone, he then dedicated himself to making the settlement a success. But compassion wasn't enough. The conditions were wretched and support from London meagre. Clarkson was eventually dismissed in favour of more commercial and colonial interests.

This tawdry tale will form the basis for one of Schama's forthcoming BBC documentaries, and he here puts together the pieces of a mostly forgotten transatlantic story. His prose is assertive and sinewy, and the sentences pound along like a brig in full sail. He is also a colourful writer ('Halifax was a sleeping princess waiting for the kiss of empire'), and never relaxes the dramatic grip of his story. Some readers, however, will doubtless detect the style of a documentary narrator - the stentorian voice-over, the little quippy asides, the occasional tone of barely concealed indignation - and will be put off by an impression of sound-track history. Still, the research is authoritative, and Simon Schama has given this hitherto obscure collection of historical footnotes the central place it deserves.