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She sits at a small table in a cramped upper room overlooking the London waterfront. Her nose wrinkles
in distaste at the quarreling voices in the kitchen below her and the rank smell of boiled cabbage, but if she opens the garret
window, the breeze wafts in an equally loathsome perfume of tidal mud, caulking tar, and decaying garbage. Alexander Falconbridge
is obviously not a wealthy man, for he does not indulge his young wife with lodging at a better class hostelry in a more residential
part of London.1
Anna Maria Falconbridge is writing the first entry in a journal of letters addressed to an unnamed friend in Bristol, her
home town.
LETTER I
LONDON, Jan. 5, 1791.
My dear Friend,
The time draws nigh when I must bid adieu to my native land, perhaps for ever! The thoughts of it damps my spirits more
than you can imagine, but I am resolved to summon all the fortitude I can, being conscious of meriting the reproach of my
friends and relations for having hastily married as I did, contrary to their wishes, and am determined rather than be an incumbrance
on them, to accompany my husband even to the wilds of Africa, whither he is now bound, and meet such fate as awaits
me, in preference to any possible comfort I could receive from them.
As Anna Maria writes her first paragraph, her lips curl in a sly grin. What she has written is true, but important information
is withheld—information that she has no intention of sharing with the reader, for she is writing a travel book, not
a memoir. Every author must capture the reader’s attention, and a little exaggeration is an acceptable part of poetic
license. Let the reader wonder what a young Englishwoman of good family is doing amid the noise and smells at dockside, waiting
to board a slave ship bound for Africa.
No reader will question that she comes from a good family. She uses the vocabulary of an educated individual. She has been
schooled far beyond the rudiments necessary to read her Bible and prayer book. Barely educated people do not write "the time
draws nigh when I must bid adieu to my native land." The aristocrats, gentry, and rich merchants in the late 18th century
were all literate, as were most well-to-do shopkeepers. 2 Anna Maria’s family
belongs in this prosperous strata of society. Her journal is articulate and grammatically acceptable. (She does love commas,
dashes, colons, and semicolons in preference to periods in run-on sentences. She makes single sentences into paragraphs, but
writers in 1791 didn’t have a style manual to follow). Some of her spelling is quaint—cloaths for clothes;
flower for flour; least for lest—but spelling rules have altered over the last two centuries. Her concepts
are mature; the reader has no trouble understanding Anna Maria’s prose.
But in this very first paragraph Anna Maria explodes a bomb to grab her readers’ attention. She has married hastily,
contrary to her family’s wishes. Nice girls in those days didn’t marry against their family’s wishes.
Or did they?
She has grown up during the reign of King George III. She has been schooled in reading and writing, in playing soothing
music on the harpsichord, in drawing pretty sketches with pen or water colors, in making charming conversation. In short,
in the development of good taste. 3 She has been taught that "keeping a journal is
the most important means by which refinement might be cultivated."4 Her parents
were probably among the first to take a subscription at Bristol’s public library when it opened in 1773. Two of the
finest circulating libraries in England are in Bristol, boasting 200 members and 5,000 titles.5
Her prosperous papa and stepmama doubtless pursued an active public life, attending concerts, plays, galleries, and museums.
Bristol has handsome open squares, assembly rooms and theaters, and a Vauxhall Garden as fine as London’s, where plays
and concerts are given and people stroll and chat through the long summer evenings. As Anna Maria progressed through her teens,
she would have become part of these outings. She was introduced to suitable young men. The time came when, properly vetted,
a lad was allowed to escort her to a play or gallery or the pleasure garden, with a sister or an aunt discreetly in the distance.
Anna Maria was thankful that young women were no longer obliged to accept without question husbands chosen by their fathers.
They could express their preferences in whom they would marry. Even her parents’ generation generally agreed that some
mutual affection should exist before a marriage was contracted, "if only as a precaution against immediate adultery." 6 What mattered to Anna Maria’s father was that she marry in the correct social class, her husband
display the requisite gentility.
Anna Maria does not tell the reader that her mother, Grace Roberts Horwood, died when Anna Maria was four years old. And
her father, Charles Horwood, who presumably would be greatly concerned with her choice of a husband, is also dead, having
succumbed to apoplexy in 1787. 7 Anna Maria probably went to live with one of her
older married sisters after his death, not caring to stay with her stepmother, and in the following year, at the age of nineteen,
she married Alexander Falconbridge.
Where did Anna Maria meet her suitor? Bristol was the most important seaport in England after London. Ships loaded with
food supplies and trade goods in both London and Bristol to begin the long triangular voyage that would take them to the coast
of West Africa, where they exchanged trade goods for a cargo of slaves to transport to the Caribbean and America, filling
their holds there with kegs of rum or bales of tobacco to satisfy the markets in England. Anna Maria and her family were certainly
aware of the slave trade. Indeed, her brother, Charles Horwood, captains a slave ship. 8
In 1788 Alexander Falconbridge was practicing medicine at the village of Lodway, not far from the Horwood family home in
Bristol. 9 His tales of four voyages to Africa on slave ships may have been what
first caught Anna Maria’s attention. Her imagination was captivated by what seemed like high adventure. It didn’t
matter that he was some years older than she, nor that he was a mere surgeon with only a year of medical training at the Bristol
Infirmary. A surgeon in those days was much lower on the totem pole than he is today. Surgeons ranked below doctors, but above
barbers in the hierarchy of the time. Nor did it matter that Anna Maria’s older sisters Anne and Christian Jane and
perhaps her brother as well thought him an unsuitable match for the daughter of a prosperous watchmaker and goldsmith in All
Saints Lane. In their minds, Alexander Falconbridge turned Anna Maria’s pretty head with his tales of adventure in exotic
tropical harbors and planted a seed of excitement among her girlish aspirations.
She loves travel books and is well aware how popular they are in England. Books about travel and geography account for
almost half of all the borrowings from the Bristol library between 1773 and 1784. 10
Anna Maria feels considerable trepidation about the adventure ahead of her, but think what a unique travel book could be written
by a woman voyaging to West Africa in 1791. It would be the first of its kind..
In the Preface to Anna Maria’s book (published in 1794 and 1802 11), doubtless
written after the text, she admits her intentions:
The Authoress will not imitate a threadbare prevailing custom, viz. assure the Public [that] the following letters were
written without any design or intention of sending them into the world. 12 On
the contrary, she candidly confesses having some idea of the kind when writing them, tho' her mind was not fully made up on
the business 'till towards the beginning of April,—nay, for some time before then (from a consciousness of the inability
of her pen) she had actually relinquished all thoughts of publishing them, which determination she certainly would have adhered
to, if her will had not been overruled by the importunities of her friends.
When she returns from Sierra Leone after the first voyage and reads some of her jottings to her friends, they exclaim,
"Oh, my dear Anna Maria, this is fascinating. You must publish it!" And so she polished her prose and hunted up a printer.
* * *
Anna Maria’s first entry continues:
Mr. Falconbridge is employed by the St. George's Bay Company 13 to carry
out some relief for a number of unfortunate people (blacks and whites) whom Government sent to the river Sierra Leone14 a few years since, and who in consequence of some dispute with the natives are scattered through the
country, and are just now, as I have been told, in the most deplorable condition. He [Mr. Falconbridge] is likewise to make
some arrangements for collecting those poor creatures again and forming a settlement which the company have in contemplation
to establish, not only to serve them, but to be generally useful to the natives.
Mr. Falconbridge, his brother Mr. W. Falconbridge and myself are to embark on board the Duke of Bucleugh 15, Captain McLean, a ship belonging to Messrs. John and Alexander Anderson of Philpot Lane. These gentlemen,
I understand, have a considerable factory16 at a place called Bance17 Island, some distance up the river Sierra Leone, to which island the ship is bound.
The company have either sent, or are to send out a small cutter 18 called
the Lapwing to meet Mr. ------ [Falconbridge]19 on the coast. She carries
the stores for relieving the people, &c.
This is all the information I can give you at present respecting my intended voyage, but as it is an unusual enterprize
[sic] for an English woman to visit the coast of Africa, and as I have ever flattered myself with possessing your friendship,
you will no doubt like to hear from me; and I therefore intend giving you a full and circumstantial account of every thing
that does not escape my notice 'till I return to this bless'd land, if it pleases Him who determines all things, that shall
be the case again.
I have this instant learnt that we set off to-morrow for Gravesend, where the ship is laying ready to sail. Should we put
into any port in the channel, I may probably write you if I am able, but must now bid you adieu.
Endnotes
1. Anna Maria sat somewhere in London to write this letter, but she does not tell us where, nor will
she ever tell us enough about herself in her text that we can know her. There are other sources, however, from which to add
whole chapters to her narrative. Let’s use them all, and, where there are only tantalizing blanks, paint feasible images
that will clarify our sense of who she is.
2. By 1750 sixty percent of Englishmen were literate, forty percent of
women. See J. H. Plumb, The First Four Georges (Boston, Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1956), p. 167.
3. Ibid., p. 59, 180.
4. Ibid., p. 108.
5. Ibid.
6. Christopher Hibbert,
The English: A Social History 1066-1945 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1987).
7. Christopher Fyfe,
Anna Maria Falconbridge (Liverpool University Press, 2000) p. 1.
8. Mr. Horwood, Anna Maria’s brother, is mentioned in a letter from Isaac DuBois to John Clarkson, first governor
of Freetown, on 1 May 1793. See Fyfe, Anna Maria Falconbridge, p. 188.
9. Ibid. p. 2, 193-194.
10. Plumb, p. 181, based on Paul Kaufman, Borrowings from
the Bristol Library, 1773-1784: A Unique Record of Reading Vogues (Charlottesville: Bibliographical Society of the University
of Virginia, 1960).
11. In 1967 Frank Cass &
Co. of London printed a facsimile edition of the 1802 publication. In 1999 Leicester University Press, London and New York,
included Falconbridge’s narrative in Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies, edited by Deirdre Coleman. In 2000 Liverpool
University Press published a volume, edited by Christopher Fyfe, containing Anna Maria Falconbridge’s Narrative of
Two Voyages to the River Sierra Leone, the Journal of Isaac DuBois, and Alexander Falconbridge’s An Account of
the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa.
12. In
choosing a letter form for her travel book, Anna Maria may have been copying Lieutenant John Matthews. In his A Voyage
to the River Sierra Leone (facsimile of the 1788 edition, London: Frank Cass & Co., 1966), he also wrote in letter
form, and Anna Maria has certainly read his book.
13.
St. George’s Bay Company was the name of the trading company Granville Sharp set up in
1790 to aid the first blacks to return to Africa. Sharp’s city friends who contributed to its establishment petitioned
for incorporation by Act of Parliament as the Sierra Leone Company. (The comma placed after "St. George’s Bay Company"
in this sentence and dozens more to follow have been deleted. Other punctuation is adjusted to improve readability.)
14. Sierra Leone in the 18th century included only the peninsula on which
Freetown was established in 1792. The country now called Sierra Leone, which includes the peninsula and a much larger area
of hinterland, was not created until 1896, when Great Britain established a protectorate over the interior.
15. Anna Maria does not italicize the names
of ships, but they are italicized here for clarity. She always follows ship names with the name of their captain, a convention
of the time.
16. A slave
factory, where slaves sold by up-country tribes are held until a European ship can load them for transport to the West Indies
or the southern states in America.
17. Anna Maria’s spelling for Bunce Island. It was also
spelled Bence and Bense.
18. A single-masted, fore-and-aft-rigged
sailing vessel with a running bowsprit, a mainsail, and two or more headsails which are usually set flying.
19. Anna
Maria rarely spells out the names of the men she mentions. They are spelled out here to assist the reader in following her
story.
Return to Introduction for Anna Maria's diary.
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