The surveyor, James Cocks, was nicknamed by his fellow councillors ‘Captain of the soldiers’. Anna Maria is even less kind in calling him ‘our illegitimate son of Mars’.

Surveyor Cocks is amiable, but inexperienced. He has been given charge of the tiny band of company soldiers, and prefers dressing up in his uniform and marching his battalion up and down to laying out lots and farms. Company plans are to augment the 18 European soldiers with 20 blacks. Cocks offers the Nova Scotian men extra provisions and free rum if they will enlist. Some do, but the white soldiers die one after the other until only four are left. They are sent home at their own request in September, leaving Freetown with only a black militia. Not many years pass before Sierra Leone will be known in England as the "white man’s grave."

The surveying is assigned to Cocks and Richard Pepys. Both delegate their work to junior officials. Anna Maria watches them quarrel over which laborers should work on their various projects. Work parties venture out to cut the great trees—African mahogany, cottonwood, ironwood, golden walnut, pearwood—and saw them into building lumber. Soon they are lured away by a different councillor promising higher wages, abandoning one work site for another. Pepys insists that the survey parties deserve a daily rum ration, a custom of long standing in the British navy. Clarkson very reluctantly agrees, but later regrets the concession because other work parties then demand the same privilege, and the men gradually acquire a taste for rum. When the workers are defeated by the huge trees entangled in masses of vines and creepers, white officials think them lazy, calling them ‘black rascals’.

This "gentleman from England" is Isaac DuBois, an American planter. Is he important? Yes. Although Anna Maria never identifies him by name, he will play a pivotal role in the months to come. Keep him in mind.

The West African coast had a reputation for pestilence and rot unequaled anywhere in the world. The rains bring such heat and humidity, such galaxies of insects, that the jungle turns into an enervating soup of frightening diseases—malaria. dysentery, spotted fever, yaws, typhus, trypanosomiasis, hookworm, cholera, plague. Water carries bilharzia and guinea worm; mosquitos carry malaria and filariasis. Any drink of water or scrap of food can move bacteria and viruses into the human body where they quickly damage organs, vision, and memory.

Clarkson soon orders the carpenters to stop making coffins, for the wood is needed more urgently to build houses.

The doctors sent out by the company are of very little use to the settlers, for they know almost nothing about treating malaria (which they called "ague"), sunstroke, scurvy, dysentery, or rheumatism. They have only chinchona bark (from which quinine would later be derived), opium, and laudanum to work with. Dr. Bell is already dead. Dr. Charles Thomas ministered to the sick during the winter passage from Nova Scotia, but the chills and fevers raging in the soggy equatorial heat are not part of his experience. Knowing how little he can do to aid the stricken, the hapless doctor wanders away almost daily to King Jemmy’s town nearby, where (according to his journal) he admires the flora, fauna, and nubile young women (who wear nothing but wraparounds called lappas and strings of beads). The spectacle of these half-naked women is a shocking contrast to the pious atmosphere ordained by the company’s sponsors. Taylor and another surgeon soon ask to return to England, as does a third man when Clarkson refuses to double his salary to compensate for the frustrating conditions.

Those who fall sick have very little effective medical attention, save for the healing skills of a young African woman who seeks refuge in the settlement. She has fled Signor Domingo’s village upriver because he intends to sell her—or so she claims. When she sees how many of the settlers are stricken with fever, she immediately brews infusions of local barks and herbs, which ease the symptoms for many of the sick. They are so delighted that they ask John Clarkson to buy her; the men pledge their labor to pay for her. The governor is very reluctant to get involved in the slave trade, but how can he refuse to redeem slaves who claim refuge in Freetown—particularly at the urging of leading settlers? In any case, this African woman is allowed to stay after promising that she will wear a blouse with her lappa.

Anna Maria smiles as she finishes this paragraph. She has disproved all the dire predictions her friends made when they learned of her plans to return to Africa. She is pleased, proud of herself, feels justified in bragging. No hot-house flower, she. No, she is made of much sturdier stuff than her English friends can possibly imagine. And much sturdier stuff than the rest of the hapless population of Freetown. She will show them the strong inner fiber to which they should aspire.

Anna Maria is aware of growing discontent among the black settlers. The various congregations gather daily for prayer meetings, at which all of their problems are debated vigorously. Some of the preachers—David George and Cato Perkins among them—attempt to act as peacemakers and reassure Clarkson of their continued loyalty. In fact, it is unfair of Clarkson to accuse those who felt betrayed of disloyalty for expressing their strong feelings about the actions taken by the company directors. He, after all, had made sweeping promises to them, and the directors have placed Clarkson in an impossible position. Much of the discussion among the settlers takes place with only one side represented. The freed blacks have little experience to prepare them for the hard realities of government and politics.

The sentiments which surface in each congregation doubtless reflect the eloquence and persuasive power of their leader in articulating their grievances. Thomas Peters, the Methodist preacher, is a commanding figure, older than most, and hardened in the crucible of the War for Independence, when he was one of only three black sergeants in the British regiment of Guides and Pioneers. He is very aware of the disorder in Freetown, and is clearly furious with the waste, the lack of progress, and the bickering and fumbling of the white administration while the rains pour down and people are dying daily.

Although Peters was his strong right hand in preparing the voyage from Halifax, John Clarkson is now mistrustful of his influence over the Methodists, suspecting that they are in a mood to rebel and put Peters in charge of the settlement. Clarkson knows that support from England would end if that happened, and in April he calls a public assembly to make that clear to the settlers. He and Peters are at loggerheads thereafter.

Peters’ death on June 26 rocks Clarkson, for he remembers Peters’ willing and able assistance in Halifax in the hasty preparations for the voyage to Africa. Peters’ wife writes, not to Clarkson, but to Alexander Falconbridge, asking for supplies that are needed for an appropriate funeral—"a Gallon of Wine, One Gallon of porter, & ½ Gallon of Rum, 2 lbs. Candles, 5 Yards of White Linen." Clarkson orders the storekeeper to meet all her needs, and when a deputation comes requesting pine boards for a coffin, he breaks his no-coffin rule. He arranges a pension of £20 a year for Mrs. Peters and her six or seven children. He also grants permission to those wishing to attend the funeral to leave work. His journal note is cryptic: "Thos. Peters funeral went off without disturbance," attended by "a great many." How much more eloquent that description might have been had one of the black preachers recorded the final rites of the most prominent of Freetown’s founding fathers. They would remember him as heroic in stature, having braved the wild Atlantic to take their pleas to England, and standing steadfast both in Nova Scotia and Freetown in demanding that the white officials keep the promises made to them by English officials.

The "worthy discreet man" is John Wakerell, whose health soon breaks down, forcing him to return to England. The Botanist is Adam Afzelius, a Swede, the first to do systematic botanical work in West Africa.

Anna Maria labels the third Englishman only "Gentleman," but surely he catches her eye. This is not a pure fiction, as later events will prove.

So, how should we picture Isaac DuBois, who is to take charge of the colony’s defenses? Let’s make him tall, built like an athlete, and with a resolute air that appeals to Anna Maria. Whenever she sees him, Anna Maria might feel a little frisson of excitement, struck by his manliness. Surely she would have asked someone about him—most likely John Clarkson, whom she regularly encounters on the waterfront.

"The DuBois were loyalists?"

"Very definitely. His father died before the war, but Mr. Dubois served as a lieutenant in the New York volunteers and fought on our side. Their Carolina plantation was seized by the Americans and Isaac and his mother and siblings exiled to England when the war ended."

"Apparently Dubois has never been compensated for his lost property in America. He asked the Commissioners for Loyalist Claims for assistance in claiming property confiscated during the war and was sent back to North Carolina to seek compensation under the terms of the Peace Treaty. Instead of honoring his claim, the good men of Wilmington tossed him in jail for ten months and then banished him from the state for life as a traitor."

"How dreadful."

"What can he do here to help you?"

"A cotton plantation—before we even have roofs over our heads?"

"Yes, our other needs are more pressing."

Anna Maria shook her head in dismay. "He seems very capable."

Unfortunately, the soil is poor on the peninsula, for the heavy annual rains erode away topsoil and leach nutrients faster than they are replaced. Settlers who had labored on prosperous southern plantations in the colonies soon share with their African neighbors a bewildered sense that dark forces somehow hold the land in thrall, for nothing really thrives around them except the jungle that binds the soil in place and forms a huge but permeable umbrella to break the force of the winds and rains. Cut the great trees, kill their roots, and soon nothing remains but a sticky red clay composed of iron, manganese, and other insoluables that barely support decent grass.

The settlers catch fish and an occasional deer or wild pig to eat, but little in the way of African fruit and vegetables will be available until the new harvest matures toward the end of the rainy season. Barely three weeks after their arrival, shortages force Clarkson to cut rations by half. Everyone is dismayed. They watch the horizon hopefully for another supply ship to ease the deprivation.