The View from “White Man’s Bay”: The Captain John Matthews Papers on Sierra Leone at the Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University

Abstract In 2017, the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University, acquired the papers of a British enslaver who operated in the region of greater Sierra Leone during the late-eighteenth century. This article offers an introduction to these papers for potential researchers. Focusing on two journals that cover Matthews’s time in the region between 1785 and 1787, it suggests three topics for which the collection might be of value to scholars of early-modern West Africa. These three topics are the local workings of the transatlantic slave trade in greater Sierra Leone; the production of European knowledge about Africa and Africans; and the history of the region immediately preceding the settlement of Freetown. In addition, this article includes four images of Sierra Leone. Black and white versions of these images were printed in 1791, but the watercolors are reproduced here for the first time.

In 2017, the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University, acquired a collection of papers related to John Matthews that was previously unknown to historians. 1 Matthews was a British naval officer and enslaver in the late-eighteenth century with close ties to the region of greater Sierra Leone, which he defined as extending from roughly the Rio Nuñez in the present-day nation of Guinée-Conakry, to Cape St. Ann in the south of the present-day nation of Sierra Leone. 2 Kelly Bolding, a project archivist at Princeton, and Don Skemer, a manuscripts curator, have already summarized the broad contents of the "Captain John Matthews Papers" for potential researchers. 3 The following archives report will focus on two of the four logbooks included in the collection. These books cover Matthews's employment as co-agent for a London-based slaving firm, named Samuel Hartley and Company, between 1 The author would like to thank the following people: John Smolenski, Lorelle Semley, Robin Law, John Thornton, Deirdre Coleman, Emma Sarconi, Jeremy Till, Kathryn Reed-Smith, the staff of the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library at Princeton University, the staff and faculty of the UC Davis History Department and UC Davis Graduate Studies, the editors and staff at Cambridge University Press, the anonymous reviewers who read this piece, and the editors and staff at History in Africa.
2 The term "Sierra Leone" was used inconsistently by European writers throughout the early-modern era. See Paul Edward Hedley Hair, "The Spelling and Connotation of the Toponym 'Sierra Leone' since 1461," Sierra Leone Studies 18 (1966) April of 1785 and May of 1787. 4 Matthews's operations were based out of a factory that was situated in "White Man's Bay," an inlet on the northern coast of the Sierra Leone Peninsula. 5 Matthews represented this coast himself in a series of watercolor images that he produced at the time of his residency (see Figure 1). More specifically, this report will suggest three topics for which these journals might be of value to scholars of early-modern West Africa. These topics are the local workings of the transatlantic slave trade in greater Sierra Leone; the production of European knowledge about Africa and Africans; and the history of the region in the years preceding the settlement of Freetown.
First, Matthews's logbooks are valuable because they provide insight into the local workings of the transatlantic slave trade in a coastal region that was defined by neither the presence of a centralized African state or an official European firm. Scholars of the slave trade in precolonial West Africa have long recognized, in the words of the historian Toby Green, that "There was not one Atlantic slave trade, but [instead] many trades wreaking many different effects…." 6 In comparison to some other areas of the West African coast where European enslavers operated-like present-day Senegal, The Gambia, Ghana, Benín, and Congo-Angola-there were no large European forts and few chartered companies operating in the region of Sierra Leone. There were also no large African states or kingdoms in direct contact with European traders, even though the inland state of Fuuta Jalon did exercise a great influence over the coastal slave trade. 7 Also, unlike in southeastern 4 Princeton University Libraries, Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton, USA, Manuscripts Division, Special Collections, Captain John Matthews Papers, C1575, "Journal One: 28 April 1785 -15 May 1787" and "Journal Two: 1 April 1786 -31 March 1787." John Matthews and William Harrison are described as the co-agents of Samuel Hartley and Company of London in several drafts of a contract with local traders from the Bay of Sherbro. These drafts can be found at the back of Journal One. 5 For a contemporary map that shows the location of "White Man's Bay," see National Archives, Kew, UK, MPG 1/1132/1, Anonymous, Plan of Sierra Leone and the Parts Adjacent (London: James Phillips, 1794). Although the inlet is not labeled, it lies between "Pirate's Bay" and "Jimmy's Town." Matthews's factory was "nearly adjoining" the town at the bottom of the inlet, called Ya Ma Cooba's town. See Matthews, A Voyage, 2nd Edn. (1791), v. It is not clear when the name "White Man's Bay" was first applied to this inlet; however, it appears to have been used regularly by at least the mid-eighteenth century.  "landlord-stranger" relationship, in which he paid ground rent and customs duties for protected residency and permission to conduct trade by "boating" up and down the shore. 9 In the process, he drew upon shared traditions of Afro-European commerce that went back to the fifteenth century, and that were rooted in cultures of ancestry, marriage, language, migration, and credit. 10 He married a local woman as a "country wife" and had a son with her; he relied upon skilled and gendered Temne labor to run his business; and he engaged in long-tested customs of Afro-European commerce that were meant to secure trust and credit. 11 He also interacted with a diversity of sovereign local communities and a constellation of European and mixed-race residents who functioned as local leaders. He depicted the home of one of these leaders, the Anglo-African trader James Cleveland, in one of his drawings (see Figure 2).
Second, Matthews's logbooks are valuable because they offer an opportunity to examine the production of European knowledge about Africa and Africans. Scholars have found a number of logbooks by European enslavers who operated off the coast of greater Sierra Leone, and they have sometimes been able to see how white enslavers constructed public knowledge of West Africa in the early-modern period over a series of revised texts. 12 Nonetheless, 9 This practice of "boating" in greater Sierra Leone is described in the following contemporary source: Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa  it is rare to uncover logbooks by an enslaver who produced so much other contemporary written material about the area in which he operated. 13 Matthews was part of a generation of enslavers who produced proslavery work on Africa and Africans during the British government's investigation into the economics and morality of the transatlantic slave trade. After returning from Sierra Leone in 1788, he worked as a delegate for the antiabolitionist lobby. 14 He testified against the abolitionists before the Privy Council and the House of Commons; he protested abolition in private letters to the chair of the investigation; and, finally, he published a proslavery travel book about Sierra Leone, entitled A Voyage to the River Sierra-Leone. 15 Historians can now compare Matthews's logbooks with his testimonies and his travel account in order to better see how Europeans produced public knowledge of a region like Sierra Leone across different textual genres and for a distinct political agenda. 16  aspects of life in West Africa enslavers chose to silence and which aspects they chose to emphasize for their own political purposes. To mention just one example here, Matthews represented Sierra Leone in both his testimony and his travelogue as a picturesque landscape of natural abundance and scientific curiosity. This representation can be seen in the instructive nature of the images that he produced (see Figure 3). By doing so, he downplayed the real threat that the climate posed for any potential migrants. It is only in Matthews's unpublished logs that we learn just how sick the free and enslaved Figure 3. Original watercolor image of "A View of the South side of Sierra-leone River from… Leopards Island," Captain John Matthews Papers, Manuscripts Division, Special Collections, Firestone Memorial Library, Princeton University Libraries, C1575, Box 2, Folder 2. The third of these four watercolor images depicts the Sierra Leone Peninsula from across the river. The late-eighteenth century was a period of growing European interest in Sierra Leone, due largely to the mission of British abolitionists to establish a colony there based upon free labor. In both his testimony and his travelogue, Matthews positioned himself as an expert on the region. The dark clouds at the top of this picture almost certainly depict the Harmattan, a seasonal wind in West Africa that Matthews described as a thick smoke. The deforested slope of the mountain in the foreground was meant to show tracts of land that had been previously cultivated or newly cleared for agriculture. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.
following volume: Board of Trade, Report of the Lords of the Committee of Council Appointed to the Consideration of All Matters Relating to Trade and Foreign Plantations (London: British Government Printing Office, 1789). For manuscript versions of the House of Commons testimonies, see National Archives, Kew, UK, ZHC 1/82. people at his factory became. Matthews himself almost died after he became "full ill" for two weeks in the summer of 1786. 17 Finally, Matthews's logbooks are valuable because they may comprise the most intimate look at life on the north coast of the Sierra Leone Peninsula immediately preceding the founding of the Sierra Leone colony. Britain established its first permanent settler colony in West Africa in 1787, when abolitionists resettled approximately 400 impoverished black residents of London on the eastern side of what is today Kroo Bay, Freetown. 18 This first cohort was followed up another five years later by a second settlement in the same location, this one comprised of roughly 1,000 black settlers from the British colony of Nova Scotia. 19 Matthews's factory was situated only two miles to the west of this spot, and his journals cover the two years leading up to the first cohort's arrival. This means that he was closer to Freetown, both temporally and geographically, than the other contemporary writers whom we know about, including Nicholas Owen,John Newton,and Henry Smeathman. 20  . Although Britain had an earlier colony in Africa at Senegambia, this was short lived and not a settler society. The British Senegambia colony lasted from 1765-83 and produced few settlers. 19 For an introduction to the experiences of these settlers, see James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone 1783-1870(London: Longman, 1976. 20 Owen kept a journal in greater Sierra Leone from about 1754-9, while he was based in the Bay of Sherbro. Newton kept a journal of his voyages to Sierra Leone from about 1750-4 and had previously resided for a year on the Plantain Islands. Smeathman resided on the Banana Islands from about 1771-5. For his history, see Deirdre Coleman, Henry Smeathman, the Flycatcher: Natural History, Slavery, and Empire in the Late Eighteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018). The Banana Islands are located off the southwestern tip of the Sierra Leone Peninsula, and the Plantain Islands are located at the mouth of the Sherbro River. the second edition of A Voyage. 21 The original watercolor of that drawing is included here (see Figure 4). To date, this drawing remains the only historical image that we have of the initial settlement. It portrays the black settlers erecting the colony's first wood frame houses in an area of cleared land at the base of what is today Tower Hill. In the final entry of his journal, Matthews writes that he returned to his factory from the Bay of Sherbro at 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 15 May, and found the settlers' transport ships laying at anchor. This drawing was probably not created by Matthews himself, although it was first published in the second edition of his travelogue. Unlike that black and white print, this color version represents a few of the black settlers. They can be seen walking amongst the buildings and on the road that leads to the shore. Courtesy of Princeton University Library.
To end with a specific example about the Sierra Leone colony, the Captain John Matthews Papers can help us better understand the upheaval that the first black settlers experienced. On the eve of colonization, black abolitionists in London, such as Ottobah Cugoano, recognized the danger that migration to Sierra Leone posed for these potential settlers. Cugoano questioned in his pamphlet, titled Thoughts and Sentiments, whether a "free colony" could really survive "nearly on the spot" where enslavers operated. 22 His words proved to be prescient, as the first settlement was burned to the ground by the local Temne leader, King Jimmy, just a couple of years later, in December of 1789. Matthews's logbooks allow us to see the instability that prevailed in the years before these settlers arrived. For example, they show villagers abandoning their homes in the Bay of Sherbro during wartime; captives and pawns fleeing Matthews and his patrons at "White Man's Bay" for fear of being transported; and locals plotting to murder Matthews just as one of his predecessors, a European slave trader named John Tittle, was killed by locals in the 1770s. 23 In these ways and more, the Captain John Matthews Papers at Princeton University can serve as a valuable resource for scholars working on the history of early-modern Sierra Leone and West Africa.