Sierra Leone and Other Sites in The War of Representation Over Slavery

Sierra Leone and Other Sites in the War of Representation over Slavery
Author(s): David Lambert

Source: History Workshop Journal, No. 64 (Autumn, 2007), pp. 103-132
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25472937
Accessed: 05-12-2017 22:30 UTC
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Sierra Leone and Other Sites in the
War of Representation over Slavery
by David Lambert
INTRODUCTION
The controversies over the Atlantic slave-trade and slavery itself can be
usefully understood as what Catherine Hall has termed a 'war of
representation'. At stake was 'the question as to the truth about the
system of slavery' and, from 1823, in particular, both supporters and
opponents of slavery were 'interested in mobilising public opinion, that
increasingly powerful phenomenon'.1 This 'war' took place over a
variegated terrain: the 'truth' about the nature of the enslaved African
and Afro-Caribbean subject was clearly of great importance, but so was that
of the enslaving white Creole subject.2 In this paper, however, the focus is not
on the subjects of the slavery controversy, but its sites and spaces. Hall notes
that the war of representation 'took place on many sites: in the press, in
pamphlets, in fiction, in poetry, in paintings and engravings, in public
meetings'.3 Yet beyond these textual, visual and performative sites were a
series of worldly spaces over which the truth about slavery was fought.
As Hall has demonstrated, the main worldly focus was the Caribbean itself,
but other spaces - the East Indies, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast and West
Africa more broadly - featured too, and hence the war of representation
over slavery was fought across multiple theatres, some lying far beyond the
Caribbean.
Politically and ideologically motivated comparisons between different
worldly sites were common currency in the war of representation. For
instance, abolitionists sought to establish and emphasize the cultural and
moral difference of Caribbean slavedom from metropolitan British society,
whilst their opponents asserted the essential unity of the British Atlantic
world, the loyalty of the West Indies, and the duty of care that Britain owed
to its colonies. This differentiation between a ' "slave-world" aberration'
and a metropolitan '"free-world" norm' - asserted by humanitarians,
contested by defenders of slavery - was one of the key spatial features in the
war of representation.4 More fine-grained distinctions were also made. For
example, supporters of slavery contrasted supposedly ordered and
productive West Indian colonies with Haiti, which was made to serve as a
portent for what might happen after emancipation. On the other side of the
Atlantic, the West African colony of Sierra Leone was represented by
humanitarians as a kind of anti-Caribbean space - a free African labour
History Workshop Journal Issue 64 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbm048

? The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
104 History Workshop Journal
experiment and an anti-slavery colony - and, thus, it attracted the ire of

their opponents.
The cartography of the war of representation deserves more systematic
attention than it has hitherto received. This involves examining how
arguments about slavery were articulated through the representation of
worldly spaces in and beyond the Caribbean. It also means studying the
spatial strategies employed in this war - such as the comparisons and
contrasts made between different sites - as well as the tactics that were used,
including the forms of representation through which these places were
depicted. These tactics were deployed in Hall's textual sites of the press,
pamphlet and the individual page. Their importance is underlined by Ian
Baucom's astute observation that the 'way in which that struggle [over the
slave-trade] was waged suggests that it was not only a struggle between
competing theories of right (the slaves' right to human dignity and the
slavers' right to trade), but one between competing theories of knowledge".5
Baucom's remark suggests that central to the war of representation were not
only ontological questions as to the 'truth about the system of slavery', but
also epistemological questions about how that 'truth' could be established.6
For example, what forms of knowledge about slavery were trustworthy and
how did authors seek to establish this through particular practices of
writing? How were the textual, tabular and visual spaces of the page used to
make credible claims about, and, ultimately, to try to effect policy towards,
the worldly spaces of West Africa (and the West Indies)? How, in short, was
the war of representation fought out simultaneously on the sites of the page
and the world? To help understand the former, this paper addresses what
Gerard Genette terms 'intertextuality' and 'paratextuality'.7 Genette uses
'intertextuality' in a fairly conventional, if narrow sense, to refer to a
relation of co-presence between two or more texts, often the literal presence
of one within another in the form of quotation. By 'paratextuality', Genette
refers to the liminal devices and conventions that mediate a text to its reader.
These form part of the 'performative infrastructure' of texts, serving as the
'mediums for addressing and thereby bringing into existence the audiences
and publics for written materials'.8 Genette identifies two forms of
paratextuality: 'peritexts' are found within a text, whilst 'epitexts' are
found beyond. As will be seen, claims were substantiated through the use of
peritexts such as footnotes, tables and maps. It is through textual practices -
tables, footnotes, maps, selective quotation - that broader discourses about
worldly spaces were articulated.9
The specific focus of this paper is a series of exchanges over the West
African colony of Sierra Leone that took place in the mid to late 1820s
between former plantation-overseer and geographer of Africa, James
MacQueen, and Kenneth Macaulay, cousin of the prominent abolitionist,
Zachary Macaulay.10 The MacQueen/Macaulay exchanges took place
primarily in 1826 and 1827, although MacQueen had made reference to
Sierra Leone earlier.11 In a series of'letters' to Robert Hay, Under-Secretary
Sierra Leone in the War of Representation over Slavery 105
of State for the Colonies, published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine,

MacQueen launched a wide-ranging attack on Sierra Leone.12 Macaulay
responded with The Colony of Sierra Leone Vindicated from the
Misrepresentations of Mr. MacQueen of Glasgow (1827), to which
MacQueen's A fourth letter to R. W. Hay (1827) was a rejoinder.13 As will
be seen, these exchanges took on particular significance in the context of a
contemporary Royal Commission that was examining Britain's West
African settlements.
The paper begins by locating the MacQueen/Macaulay exchanges in
relation to Sierra Leone's long-standing place in the war of representation.
It then introduces the two protagonists and examines how they claimed their
authority to represent the colony. A dispute over MacQueen's use of a
particular source illustrates the tactics they employed. Next, the paper
considers the two key themes that characterized their exchanges over Sierra
Leone. The first concerned the healthiness, or otherwise, of the colony and
was connected to broader debates about tropical disease and West Africa's
emerging status as a 'white man's grave'. The second area of contention was
the suitability of Sierra Leone's location in the effort to suppress the foreign
Atlantic slave-trade and as a site for commercial intercourse with the
African interior. Against Sierra Leone, MacQueen championed the cause of
an alternative site in West Africa.
SIERRA LEONE AND THE WAR OF REPRESENTATION

From its inception Sierra Leone was imagined as a counter-point to the
Caribbean colonies. In 1783 Henry Smeathman, a naturalist who had
travelled in West Africa and the West Indies, and whose sponsors included
Joseph Banks, proposed the establishment of free-labour plantation
production there to undermine the colonial slave system.14 His ideas,
including the positive account he gave of the local environment, attracted
the interest of British philanthropists. Granville Sharp, who since the mid
1760s had been concerned with the fate of the 'black poor' in London
and with slavery, was particularly interested and soon published his own
Utopian plan for a 'Province of Freedom'.15 In 1787 the first effort to
establish a settlement failed. In 1790 a second attempt was made under the
auspices of the newly-formed St George's Bay Company, which received
its charter as the 'Sierra Leone Company' a year later and drew many of
its investors from the humanitarian Clapham Sect. The Company was
soon struggling financially, however, and it was clear that the colony
would not succeed solely as a commercial venture. Efforts were made to
involve the government and in 1808 Sierra Leone became a Crown
Colony.16 Nevertheless the humanitarians continued to maintain consider
able influence through the newly-established African Institution.17
The abolition of the British slave-trade created new opportunities for the
settlement at Sierra Leone and it was made the centre of the government's
effort to suppress the wider trade.18 In 1817 and 1818, Britain made treaties
with Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, by which each declared the trade
illegal. Courts of Mixed Commission were set up in Freetown, Sierra Leone,
in 1819 (and similar courts in suitable Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch ports)
to adjudicate on intercepted slave-ships. Captured slave-crews were handed
over to their governments. The slaves remained on board in the harbour
until adjudicated, at which point they were landed, registered and passed on
to the Captured Negro Department (renamed the Liberated African
Department in 1822). Some would be selected as apprentices; the rest
were settled locally.
Freed blacks liberated from slave-vessels soon came to dominate the
colony's population. This reinforced Sierra Leone's status as a testing
ground for humanitarian ideas and 'whatever happened there, for better or
worse, could be a reflection of the Africans' "potential"' and, by extension,
indicative of what might happen after the emancipation of Britain's colonial
slaves.19 Indeed, from the start, Sierra Leone featured in this wider war of
representation over slavery. The Sierra Leone Company had attracted
opposition from the Committee of the Company of Merchants Trading to
Africa, or African Committee, which managed the administration of the
British slaving forts (mainly on the Gold Coast), and also from the West
India lobby.20 Although such opposition was initially aimed at the
Company's requests for a monopoly of trade with Sierra Leone and a
Crown grant of land, the colony soon took on a wider significance and
became a symbol of abolitionism:
It was this symbolic role which made the struggle to survive of a few
hundred poor black people in a tiny corner of West Africa a matter of
international significance. Events at Sierra Leone were followed by the
abolitionists and their opponents not only in Britain, but also on the
other side of the Atlantic, where groups of American blacks considered
emigrating to join the settlement. Opponents made use of the failure of
the Province of Freedom not only in the discussion surrounding the
incorporation of the St. George's Bay Company but also in the larger
debate on the slave trade.21
From the beginning, then, Sierra Leone had been conceived - by

Smeathman and Sharp - as a space of freedom in explicit contrast with
the West Indies. Even though Sharp's dream for a Utopian 'Province of
Freedom' had ended by 1791, when the Sierra Leone Company took over
and inaugurated something more akin to 'enlightened despotism',22 the
place remained indelibly associated with the humanitarians. For pro-slavery
writers the experiment with free African labour had to be shown to have
failed, particularly after the resurgence of the British anti-slavery campaign
in the early 1820s and its increasing emphasis on emancipation. Defenders of
slavery insisted that African and Afro-Caribbean people had to be coerced
to work - for the time being at least - and that any move towards
emancipation must be extremely gradual. By this point, it was difficult for
supporters of slavery to hide the brutality of the system, not least due to the
role played by missionaries in the Caribbean as conduits of information, and
a form of misdirection - away from the colonies and towards Sierra Leone -
became an important pro-slavery strategy, in parallel with the delaying
actions of those who urged the gradual amelioration of slavery. Another
reason why Sierra Leone attracted the attention of pro-slavery publicists was
that leading humanitarians were materially involved in the colony as
merchants and agents, even after company rule was ended. With not
inconsiderable Parliamentary grants made to Sierra Leone, especially during
the governorship of Charles MacCarthy (1815-24), any evidence of financial
problems and abuse was seized upon by 'those anxious to prove the Colony
a job, kept on to gratify the "Saints'".23 Hence the West India lobby used
Sierra Leone to argue that the humanitarians were not as moral as they liked
to claim, but rather were self-interested hypocrites. Sierra Leone, then,
afforded the opponents of the humanitarians an opportunity to attack them
directly and not just to refute their criticisms of the West Indies. In short, 'an
attack on the Sierra Leone experiment was a defence of the West Indian
planters'.24
It is wrong, however, to view Sierra Leone merely as the location of
displaced debates about Caribbean slavery. In the 1810s, for instance, the
issue of Sierra Leone was debated by two broad alliances that represented a
range of interests:
The cause of [the] African Institution was combined with the strategic
claims of Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast, opposition to West
Indian slavery, and administration of the West African posts by a royal
government. The pro-slavery people, on the other hand, preferred
company administration and a strategic emphasis on Cape Coast; and
they launched a bitter public attack on the Sierra Leone experiment.25
Sierra Leone stood at the centre of a complex series of relationships and

rivalries that extended beyond the immediate issue of Caribbean slavery -
or, perhaps, it would be as accurate to say that this demonstrates how the
problem of slavery became intertwined with other fields. Rivalry between
the African Institution and the African Committee was a major theme but,
beyond such institutional conflicts between interest groups, there were also
differing models of administration and rule - company versus government -
as well as competing geostrategies at play. For example, should Britain's
involvement in West Africa focus on the continental interior or remain
limited to coastal settlements and, if so, where on the coast? Such strategies
were devised and debated in a context of changing geographical knowledge.
Philip Curtin terms the period from the 1790s to 1830s the 'classic age of
West African exploration1.26 Beginning with the foundation of the African
Association in 1788 and its major success in the form of Mungo Park's first
journey, and ending with the Landers expedition of 1830, which finally
established for Europeans that the River Niger terminated in the Atlantic
Ocean, this period saw an outpouring of geographic and ethnographic
accounts that had a special place in forming the British image of Africa.
Such writing was of considerable importance for the development of policies
and geo-strategies in West Africa, but it was never merely 'information':
Little of the writing about Africa was... politically neutral - nor could it
be in an era when first the slave trade and then West Indian slavery were
debated in Parliament. Both the humanitarians and their opponents
needed data to support their efforts in Britain.27
Hence it was not only displaced debates about Caribbean slavery that were
conducted through Sierra Leone. The colony and broader West African
region were focal points for discussions about imperial policy and
geostrategy, and the production of geographical knowledge.
In this context, the MacQueen/Macaulay exchanges of 1826-27 were the
latest round in the on-going war of representation over Sierra Leone.28
What made them particularly important, however, was that this was a key
moment in the development of Britain's broader policy towards West
Africa.29 In the mid to late 1820s the government was seeking to manage a
series of different roles and challenges in the region, in the context of
pressure at home for financial retrenchment. There was its commitment to
the on-going campaign against the Atlantic slave-trade, changing relations
with African states (especially the Asante) and, from 1821, overseeing the
transition from company rule after the Company of Merchants had been
abolished and all the West Africa possessions placed under the rule of the
governor-general at Sierra Leone (then Charles MacCarthy). Driven by the
twin pressures of economy through administrative centralization and
humanitarianism, Britain had become more involved in West Africa since
the abolition of the slave-trade. This policy ran into trouble, however.
Despite the aim of financial retrenchment, costs rose. More importantly, the
efforts at suppressing the slave-trade did not seem to be succeeding and the
Admiralty complained that Sierra Leone was poorly located for the task of
patrolling the coast.30 In addition, the defeat and death of MacCarthy at
Bonsaso by the Asante was 'the biggest blow to the 1821 policy and the
hopes that had ridden on it'. His death left the humanitarian cause in
'disarray' and there were calls for the withdrawal of Britain's formal
presence from West Africa.31 A wide-ranging policy review was ordered by
the government, which included the appointment of two Royal
Commissioners to examine Sierra Leone and the other West African
settlements. The Commissioners, James Rowan and Henry Wellington,
arrived in West Africa in 1825 and reported to Parliament in 1827 on such
issues as expenditure, trade and agriculture, as well as making observations
on climate and the operations of the Liberated African Department.32

MacQueen's attacks coincided with this heightened official scrutiny and
were an intervention in the public debate over Sierra Leone that this had
engendered. With opinion turning against Sierra Leone, it was imperative
for Macaulay to respond to MacQueen's charges and to restate the
importance of the humanitarian colony.
MACQUEEN VERSUS MACAULAY

James MacQueen, a former plantation-overseer in Grenada, was one of the
most outspoken opponents of the humanitarians in the 1820s and early
1830s, and became the 'principal spokesman for the anti-Sierra Leoneans'.33
Through his editorship of the Glasgow Courier, frequent articles in
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and non-serial publications such as The
West India Colonies (1824) and The Colonial Controversy (1825), he
maintained an unremitting assault on the anti-slavery campaign. Like
other defenders of West Indian slavery at this time, he claimed to be against
it in principle but opposed to immediate emancipation or to sudden reforms
that might cause enslaved unrest. He clashed in print with many leading
humanitarian figures - the 'anti-colonists' as he dubbed them - including
James Stephen, Thomas Fowell Buxton and Zachary Macaulay.34 His
writing sometimes bordered on the libellous, and Thomas Pringle, Secretary
of the Anti-Slavery Society and the publisher of The History of Mary Prince
(1831), would later describe him as the 'Glasgow King of Billingsgate'
because of his use of innuendo.35
Alongside his role in opposing abolitionism, MacQueen had also
acquired a reputation as a geographical expert on Africa. Since the early
1810s MacQueen had published works that synthesized surveys, maps and
statistical information.36 A particular interest was the geography of West
Africa, although MacQueen never visited the continent. He was, rather, an
'armchair' or 'critical' geographer who operated in a 'speculative' mode,
using 'the latest information communicated from the field to synthesize,
cross-check and produce further speculations and hypotheses about little
known regions'.37 Working within the textual tradition that dominated the
production of geographical knowledge until the early nineteenth century, his
Commercial and Geographic View (1821) was a synthesis of contemporary
travel accounts, as well as the writings of Arabic and Classical geographers.38
He used this approach to argue that the River Niger terminated in the
Atlantic Ocean at the Bights of Benin and Biafra. Although correct in this
claim, the fact that his approach did not involve demonstration by actual
travel meant that it was not accepted by men such as John Barrow, Second
Secretary to the Admiralty, and 'principal organizer of "official"
geographical exploration in early nineteenth-century Britain'.39
It was precisely such synthetic methods that MacQueen used to condemn
Sierra Leone, drawing on Parliamentary returns, the annual reports of the
African Institution and first-hand accounts of the colony. He appealed to a

scientific geographical outlook and employed geographical discourse and
devices - mathematical location, territorial extent, the map, the survey - to
attack Sierra Leone. For example, he wrote:
In order to secure the introduction of light and liberty, industry and

civilization, into the dark and the demoralized continent of Africa, where
that continent is peopled by Negro tribes, it was judged necessary to plant
a British colony, or settlement, on the Western coast. SIERRA LEONE,
situated on the extreme point of the southwest coast of that continent,
and in N. Lat. 8? 22', and W. Long. 12? 17', was pitched upon as the most
eligible spot for that purpose.40
Determining the location of a place - its longitude and latitude - was a

common feature of geographical descriptions in contemporary gazetteers
and grammars. It related to one of the major divisions within the science of
geography: 'mathematical', as distinct from 'physical' and 'political'.41
Rhetorically, this was part of an effort to establish the scientific principles
of his description. MacQueen went on to describe the territorial size of
Sierra Leone: 'the extent of the settlement is TWENTY-SIX British miles
by TWENTY!' With its capitalization and exclamatory punctuation,
this fact was intended to speak for itself, as became clear when MacQueen
contrasted this small territorial size with 'what this settlement and our
labours on the African Coast... have cost this country', which he calculated
at over ?16 million. Despite such expenditure on Sierra Leone, Britain had
'not obtained one object... not succeeded in any one undertaking... done
no good whatever', had achieved, according to MacQueen, 'NOTHING!'42
As these examples suggest, geographical forms of discourse and method
abounded in MacQueen's descriptions of Sierra Leone. Indeed, much of his
argument was based on an appeal to geographical common-sense: if only the
public and government looked clearly at Sierra Leone, its cost, its lack of
value and, above all, its location, then they would accept his criticisms and
see through the lies and falsehoods of the African Institution. This appeal to
geographical common-sense was performed elsewhere in MacQueen's
writing through the evocation of maps: 'Unfold the map of Africa - look
at it, and say if this is not the fact';43 'we have only to take up a map',44 and
so on. As will be shown later, this disinterested cartographic eye was
not only used figuratively; maps were also used to propose an alternative
focus for British activity in West Africa. But, of course, maps must be
understood not 'primarily as inert records of morphological landscapes
or passive reflections of the world of objects', but rather as 'refracted
images contributing to dialogue in a socially constructed world'. In other
words, both specific maps, and 'cartographic discourse' more broadly,
have power.45
As elsewhere in his pro-slavery writings, MacQueen presented himself as

one of the few prepared to question the received wisdom that, he alleged,
was falsely promulgated by the humanitarian 'anti-colonists'. He was not
one of the 'weak theorists and interested individuals' whose voices
were usually heeded and he challenged the misleading picture presented by
the African Institution in its annual reports.46 By contesting the
representations produced by the 'Sierra Leone sophists', MacQueen
sought to challenge the credibility of the anti-slavery campaign more
broadly and their representation of this and other places - particularly the
Caribbean.47
If MacQueen's critique turned on bringing a geographer's objective eye to
Sierra Leone, then Kenneth Macaulay's response was to discredit
MacQueen's status and contrast his 'armchair' speculations with his own
first-hand experience. The Macaulay family, of course, were closely
associated with Sierra Leone and the broader abolitionist campaign.
Zachary Macaulay had served as the colony's governor from 1794 to
1799, as well as being the Secretary of the Sierra Leone Company and
Honorary Secretary of the African Institution. His nephew, Kenneth, was a
leading businessman in the colony and member of the Council, who had
acted as governor. In its defence Kenneth Macaulay described MacQueen as
'one of the oldest and bitterest enemies of Sierra Leone' and 'an able and
acute controversialist'.48 He characterized his opponent's general approach
as follows:
To establish these charges, he puts forward hardy assertions, often

without an attempt at proof; quotes pretended extracts from public
documents; and, in a few instances, refers to the statements of
individuals.49
To substantiate claims about MacQueen's lack of credibility, Macaulay

questioned his social status and objectivity, and criticized the synthetic
method he employed. He drew a contrast between MacQueen, a man who
had established himself financially by working as a plantation-overseer and
whose livelihood continued to rely on commercial links with the West
Indies, and those associated with Sierra Leone:
Who are, in fact, the persons who he thus accuses of an infamous

conspiracy to mislead and deceive his Majesty's Government and the
people of this country? They include, of course, the Directors both of the
Sierra Leone Company and of the African Institution. They further
include many distinguished persons in the different walks of public life,
ministers of the Gospel, officers of his Majesty's military, naval, and civil
service, and also of foreign powers - men of rank and character, and of
unimpeachable integrity; the value of whose testimony it would be an
insult on the understanding of the people of England, on the feelings of
the living, and the memory of the dead, to compare with the assertions,
however bold, of a man like Mr. MacQueen.50
Steven Shapin has shown how social status and presumed moral worth
played a vital role in considerations about whose testimony was and was not
to be believed. In relation to the activities of the Royal Society in the
seventeenth century, it was, broadly speaking, a gentleman who could be
trusted.51 Macaulay's argument was similar and he was explicit about
comparing the 'value' of the testimony of 'distinguished persons' with the
'assertions... of a man like Mr. MacQueen'. It was not only MacQueen's
lack of 'distinction', however, that made his arguments unreliable, but also
the financial benefits he gained from articulating them. Macaulay described
MacQueen as a 'well paid mercenary... who it is computed, must have
received at least ?15,000 from votes of the West Indian Legislatures, and
from public subscriptions in the Colonies for his services since 1823'.52 The
implication was that financial self-interest was 'the secret spring of all his
violence and exaggeration' and hence MacQueen was not a credible or
objective interrogator. Macaulay was certainly right that MacQueen
had received money from the West Indies and he acknowledged as much.
In his reply, MacQueen sought to turn this accusation round by accusing
Kenneth and Zachary Macaulay of profiting from trading monopolies at
Sierra Leone.53
Macaulay's point was broader than just that it was financially
advantageous for MacQueen to attack Sierra Leone and those associated
with it. His painting of MacQueen as a 'well paid mercenary' and one of the
many 'persons interested in upholding the Slave Trade, or Slavery' who
'have considered that colony as an object of hostility, and have
endeavoured, by maligning and misrepresenting the system carried on
there, and the effects of that system, to divert the attention of the people of
England from the abuses of their own' laid bare the broader parameters of
the debates about Sierra Leone. Macaulay sought to reveal not only the
channels of influence and incentive that explained why MacQueen wrote
what he did, but also the ideological terrain on which the war of
representation over Sierra Leone was fought. In other words, if one
wanted to understand what motivated MacQueen, and hence how credible
he was as a witness, one had to understand that his claims stemmed
ultimately from Caribbean slavedom.
Macaulay's second line of attack on MacQueen's credibility turned on the
synthetic method he employed. Macaulay, who had long lived in Sierra
Leone, drew attention to the fact that MacQueen had never actually been to
the colony. For example, in dismissing the claims that MacQueen made
about the lack of educational progress, Macaulay wrote:
this is the mere assertion of Mr. MacQueen - a man who has never been
at Sierra Leone - unsupported by one iota of proof, or even an attempt
at it. We have seen how he garbles and perverts the testimony of others to
suit his purposes. What credit, then, can be due to a mere assertion of his
own? Men of character, respectability, and rank, have frequently visited
the colony and inspected the schools; and the testimony borne by some of
them is to the following effect.54
Macaulay did not stop here, however. MacQueen 'garbles and perverts the
testimony of others to suit his purposes', he asserted. Describing
MacQueen's use of Parliamentary Papers, he wrote, '[s]ome of these
words are curiously brought together from various parts of different
returns'.55 Criticisms of the intertextual character of'armchair' writing were
not unusual in the context of contemporary debates about geographical
knowledge.56 They were also common in the war of representation over
slavery, although usually it was West Indians and their supporters who
complained about the uninformed speculations and allegations made by
'armchair' philanthropists.57 MacQueen himself acknowledged that his
argument was put together 'a little curiously', but insisted that selective
quotation and combination was necessary to bring such a wide range of
sources 'into the narrow limits of a letter in a monthly Magazine', that is
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.58 This was the same approach that
MacQueen employed in his more explicitly geographical work on the River
Niger, and had attracted criticism from those, like John Barrow, who were
more committed to demonstration by first-hand experience.59 Its use here
was even more problematic, however, because the debate about Sierra
Leone was so obviously ideological and his synthesis could not help but have
an (un)intended rhetorical effect.
FIXING THE MEANING OF MAJOR LAING

The contest between MacQueen and Macaulay about credibility was
encapsulated in their exchanges over the use and misuse of sources.
To support his claims about Sierra Leone, MacQueen drew on the testimony
of those who had visited it, such as Major Alexander Laing, who had
been sent by the Sierra Leone government to Timbo in 1822 and was the
author of Travels in the Timanee, Kooranko, and Soolima countries,
in Western Africa (1825).60 MacQueen used him to attack the moral
character of the Sierra Leone colony through examples of misbehaviour by
missionaries:
Let us turn from the side of imposition to the representations of truth;

and first, as to its morality, and religion, and good example. 'Considering
the special purpose for which Sierra Leone was originally formed', says
that intelligent traveller, Major Laing, (pages 397 and 398,) who knew the
place well: 'the length of time since its formation, and the influence which
it has acquired amongst the nations of Western Africa, it is a remarkable
fact, that not a SINGLE MISSIONARY is to be found BEYOND the

precincts of the colony; and that even WITHIN the Peninsula itself, on
which Freetown is built, are several native villages, in a PECULIARLY
DEPLORABLE STATE of barbarism, which had never had the
advantage of EVEN BEHOLDING a Missionary. It has happened to
myself to have seen one Missionary DRUNK in the streets, to have
known a second living with a Negress, one of his OWN parishioners, and
a third tried for the MURDER of a little boy who he had FLOGGED
TO DEATH.'61
MacQueen's aim in this quotation from Laing - adding emphasis for effect -
was to paint Sierra Leone as a place where immorality was common, even
amongst those charged with spreading true religion. This was part of a
broader accusation about Sierra Leone's failure and the hypocrisy of those
who championed the colony.
Macaulay attacked this passage in a number of ways. Most directly, he
responded to the specific charges of misbehaviour by the individual
missionaries.62 More interesting, however, was how Macaulay challenged
MacQueen's use of Laing. Firstly, he poured doubt on the credibility of
Laing himself, pointing out that '[h]e was brought up in the West Indies, and
may therefore not unreasonably be supposed to have had prejudices against
the colony'.63 That those associated with the West Indies could not be relied
upon to contribute fairly to debates about slavery was a common refrain in
humanitarian attacks. For example, MacQueen's claims that he could
accurately represent Caribbean slavery because he had 'been in most of the
Windward Islands (long in one)' had been challenged by an abolitionist -
possibly Zachary Macaulay - on the basis that a person's prolonged
residence in the Caribbean served to 'relax the tone of his humanity, and to
disturb the natural and healthy exercise of his moral perceptions'.64
Secondly, Kenneth Macaulay suggested that Laing's criticisms of Sierra
Leone might be attributable to the fact that after he had returned from West
Africa he 'became acquainted with Mr. Macqueen' in Glasgow.65 The
accusation was that, just as the influence of the West India interest was
apparent in MacQueen's attacks, so this influence had spread - through
MacQueen - and shaped Laing's testimony. Macaulay's third objection
related to MacQueen's method:
Mr. Macqueen, however, has given as continuous extracts what are not
so. He has, in some cases, joined sentences which occur in distant pages of
the work; and he has, in other instances, given half sentences, leaving out
the context, and inserting adjuncts of his own, in order to fix a meaning
on the passages which they do not bear in the original.66
Macaulay went on to provide a close reading of Laing's text and

MacQueen's use of it. He explained that MacQueen had in fact combined
and reordered two separate passages from Laing's Travels, and that running
them together in this way turned Laing's description of the three
missionaries into a charge against the colony as a whole.67 Over the
next pages (21-31), Macaulay provided examples of 'the manner in
which Mr. Macqueen has made his quotations... by subtractions, additions,
and remote conjunctions'.68 He did so by dividing pages into two, with
MacQueen's direct and indirect quotations on one side and the original
sources on the other. Here is an example:
Mr Macqueen goes on: 'As Major Laing advanced into the Timmanee country, which almost
borders upon the gardens of Freetown, 'he could not avoid expressing the greatest surprise on
observing that it had gained so little by its vicinity to Sierra Leone. At Yeba, situated in the
western part of the Timmanee country, where we stopped a night, the people appeared to be
hardly a remove from the brute creation, and even called forth the pity of the companions
(Negroes) of my journey.' This is given as one continuous quotation from Major Laing's
travels, and is marked as such. Now, what is the real case? It is taken from two different parts of
the book, and dovetailed together, as I will shew below.
Macqueen, p. 883. Laing, p. 103

'He could not avoid expressing the 'Their agricultural instruments are certain
greatest surprise, on observing it simplest, as well as rudest, that I have e
had gained so little by its vicinity to beheld, and I could not avoid expressin
Sierra Leone. greatest surprise on observing, during my fir
visit to this country, that it had gained so
little by its vicinity to Sierra Leone.' 'The
hoe, &c.' [and so on, to shew that hoes, flails,
rakes, shovels &c. would be acceptable and
beneficial.]
Fig. 1. Kenneth Macaulay, The Colony of Sierra Leone Vindicated from the Misrepresentations of
Mr. Macqueen of Glasgow, London, 1827, p. 21. By permission of the British Library.
The exchanges over Laing are instructive because they reveal details of
MacQueen's approach, including his appeal to eye-witness accounts to
challenge 'weak theorists and interested individuals' and his synthetic use of
sources, as well as how Macaulay sought to contest this by identifying
the Caribbean and the interests associated with it as the ideological source
of anti-Sierra Leonean sentiment. Most importantly, the use of quoted
material and the tabular comparison of different sources (what Genette
would term intertextuality and peritextuality respectively) point out
how specific textual practices were used to articulate general arguments.
These practices linked the space of the page to worldly spaces beyond
and, thus, the war of representation was fought out in both sites
simultaneously.
More generally, the exchanges between Macaulay and MacQueen over
authority and credibility reveal different geographical imaginaries at work.
In stressing that MacQueen had 'never been at Sierra Leone' and instead
relied on the 'curious' method of synthesizing sources, and in insisting that
MacQueen was merely a 'well paid mercenary', Macaulay sought to expose
transatlantic networks of pro-slavery influence and advocacy that would

stop at nothing to misdirect public and governmental attention away from
Caribbean slavery. Macaulay's aim was to encourage readers to view
MacQueen's attacks as those of a financially self-interested outsider and,
hence, to locate the ultimate origins of his attacks beyond Sierra Leone, in
the Caribbean. In contrast, MacQueen urged his audience to look directly at
Sierra Leone and appealed to geographical common-sense about the place:
one only had to 'unfold the map' and open one's 'eyes to the truth' to see
why the colony was such an expensive failure. In their exchanges, it was not
just the success or failure of Sierra Leone that was at stake, but the
credibility of those who spoke against or in support of slavery.
PLACING THE DEAD IN WEST AFRICA

The war of representation over Sierra Leone revolved around a number of
substantive issues - financial cost, commercial value, and allegations about
corruption and misrule - but the two most recurrent themes were the
healthiness or otherwise of the colony and its particular location on the
African coast.69 For MacQueen, both were connected to what he portrayed
as the geographical failures of Sierra Leone:
Let us open our eyes to the truth... We have failed to do any good in
Africa because we have planted, and are still attempting to plant, our
settlements amidst the most sickly of all the sickly swamps of that, to
Europeans, that sickly continent. - We have failed in Africa, because, in a
country where they are no roads, we have kept away from those quarters
which afford the best and the only substitute for roads, namely,
NAVIGABLE RIVERS. In short, in a geographical, in a commercial,
in an agricultural, and in a political point of view, we have hitherto
planted our settlements in the least commanding, and in the worst chosen
spots in all the extended coasts of Africa.70
For MacQueen, then, Sierra Leone was an unhealthy and poorly-located

colony that was amongst the 'the worst chosen spots' in Africa. These two
themes were also significant beyond the confines of the MacQueen/
Macaulay exchanges. For example, the former was linked to the emergence
of a wider discourse of West Africa as a 'white man's grave', whereas the
latter had direct policy consequences in the aborted colonization of
Fernando Po. In this section, the theme of disease and health will be
considered. That of location will be addressed in the next.
From at least the late eighteenth century 'Europeans recognized that
tropical Africa was not a healthy place', and in the first year of
settlement of Sierra Leone, forty-six percent of the white settlers died.
Despite this, 'the general public had not yet formed an image of West
Africa as the "white man's grave"' and in the 1820s this was still a
contested issue.71 The field of 'medical topography', which sought to

establish links between health and particular environments, was still
developing and would not become a regular feature of reports on West
Africa until the late 1820s.72 Most writing about West Africa from the
1790s onwards had political overtones - including medical writing - but
this did not mean that the facts about European mortality were not
mainly true.73 For Europeans, the disease threat in West Africa cam?
from malaria, yellow fever and gastrointestinal infection. The causes wefe
little understood and often attributed to dangerous 'miasmas'. Most
treatments caused far more harm than good. Hence, although the
MacQueen/Macaulay exchanges were part of the contest over establishing
the 'white man's grave' discourse, this is not to deny the reality of high
death-rates, but rather to emphasize the importance of the meanings that
were attached to mortality. Indeed, both protagonists had particular ways
of framing and, literally, placing death.
As has been noted, one of MacQueen's persistent assertions was that the
'Sierra Leone sophists' deliberately sought to obscure the true nature of
what was happening in the colony by hiding facts and promulgating false
truths. The annual reports of the African Institution were singled out for
particular blame, but one of MacQueen's other claims was that such
falsehoods were not subject to challenge from government officials or
members of the armed forces based there because of the high levels of
mortality. As he put it:
They [the African Institution] may say what they please, because they
know it is useless to appeal to the grave - the environs of the fatal
'PLUMB TREE,' to refute them. Death has bound up for ever the
mouths which could have refuted their statements.74
The very unhealthiness of Sierra Leone prevented the truth from being
spoken. MacQueen's response was to 'appeal to the grave' and make the
dead speak in order to substantiate his claims. He wrote:
To show the ravages of disease on that fatal and worthless coast,

I adduce the names of officers who died there between October 1824
and March 1826. The army list will show whether I am correct or
incorrect.75
MacQueen directed the reader's attention to an extensive footnote contain

ing the names of twenty-nine officers, alleged to have died at Sierra Leone,
along with their rank, age at death and 'Time in Africa'. Most had died
within a year of their posting and amongst them was 'General Turner', the
former governor-general of Sierra Leone, whose death had caused shock in
Britain.
Age Time in Africa

James Chisholm, Major, R.A.C. 32 10 years
Thomas Burton, Lt. 28 4 months
P. J. De Baruellir, Capt. 30 7 do.
Patt. Cannody, Ensign 19 6 do.
Robert Smith, do. 18 6 do.
Charles Lizares, Lt. 22 8 do.
-Uniacke, Ensign 20 5 do.
Jonas Oxley, Lt. 40 7 do.
Colin Oxley, Volunteer, son, 17 5 do.
H. Wm. Graham, Lt 34 7 do.
George Foss, Lt. 19 9 do.
John Stapleton, Lt. 20 7 do.
Philip Splain, Lt. 24 8 do.
William Ross, Capt., 27 12 do.
Duncan Robertson, Lt. 20 13 do.
Charles Gordon, Ensign, 20 4 do.
Charles Turner, Major-General, 53 13J/2 do.
-Turner, Lt. 17 ?
Donald Turner, Volunteer, 15 ?
Thomas Inglis, Deputy Inspector, 42 7 do.
Henry Paterson, Hosp. Staff, 24 5 do.
-Williamson, do. do. 22 6 do.
J. W. Grant, h. p. Act. B. Major, 27 5 do.
Lt. W. O. Aitchison, R. Marines, 28 13 do.
J. W. Whily, D. Com. Gen. 26 4 do.
J. Munro Kennedy, Com. Clerk, 19 9 do.
-Jabbott, ditto, 25 3 do.
-Cartwright, Lt. K. A. C. 25 2 do.
George Huntley, Ens. R. A. C. 17 4 do.
Fig. 2. James MacQueen, 'Civilization of Africa: Sierra Leone', Blackwood''s Edinburgh

Magazine 21, March 1827, p. 324. By permission of the British Library.
MacQueen's message was clear: 'Look at this appalling list, and let th
boldest champion of pestilence and death say what advantage either this
nation or Africa reap from this horrid waste of human life!'76
In the preface to his Reply, Macaulay referred directly to the 'appalling list'
Mr. MacQueen, with his usual hardihood, publishes in a note at page

324, a list of twenty-nine officers, who, he would wish the world to
believe, died at Sierra Leone, between October 1824 and March 1826
He appears to have ample means of access to any information he may
wish to possess; for not only does he obtain the names of the persons
dying on the coast, but he gives even their respective ages and length o
residence. He could not, of course, be ignorant where they actually died
and any insinuation therefore, on his part, that they died at Sierra Leone,
could only be intended to mislead the people of England.77
To demonstrate how MacQueen intended to 'mislead the people of

England', Macaulay provided his own list of names with rank (Fig. 3)
along with their 'Place of Death' (the station where the death occurred).
Macaulay's list showed that only nine of the officers had actually died in
Sierra Leone, whilst twelve had perished on the Gold Coast and two at the
Gambia. A further individual had died at either the Gambia or the Isles de
Los; one of MacQueen's names was a mistake (There was no such person',
Macaulay wrote);78 and, finally, two names were listed as dying 'Not at
Sierra Leone'. A footnote to Macaulay's list comments that 'Some of the
names [in MacQueen's list] are wrong spelt, and some of the ranks
erroneous, as also the length of residence. These mistakes, however, do not
affect the main question at issue'.79
Name Place of Death

James Chisholm, Major. Gold Coast
Thomas Burton, Lieutenant - - - Gambia
P. J. de Baruellir. Gold Coast
Patt. Cannody, Ensign. Ditto
Robert Smith. Not at Sierra Leone
Charles Lizars, Lieutenant- Gold Coast
-Uniacke, Ensign. Ditto
James Oxley, Lieutenant. Ditto
Colin Oxley, Volunteer. Ditto
H. W. Graham, Lieutenant - - - Gambia
Geo. Foss, Lieutenant. Sierra Leone
John Stapleton, Lieutenant- Ditto
Ph. Splain, Lieutenant. Isles de Los, or Gambia
William Ross, Captain. Sierra Leone
Duncan Robertson, Lieut.. Ditto
Charles Gordon, Ensign. Gold Coast
Charles Turner, Maj.-General Sierra Leone
Donald Turner, Lieutenant- Ditto
-Turner, volunteer
Thomas Inglis, D. Inspector - - - Sierra Leone
Hugh Paterson, Hosp. Staff - - -
-Williamson.- Ditto
J. W. Grant, B. M.. Gold Coast
Lt. W. O. Aitcheson, R. M. --- Ditto
J. W. Whiley, D. Com. Clerk Ditto
-Jabbot-ditto. Not at Sierra Leone
Cartwright, Lieutenant. Gold Coast
George Huntley, Ensign. Sierra Leone
Fig. 3. Kenneth Macaulay, The Colony of Sierra Leone Vindicated from the
Mr, Macqueen of Glasgow, London, 1827, pp. iv-v. By permission of the
The list and counter-list are instructive. They are e

detailed assertion of fact and counter-fact was importan
representation, in addition to more obviously rhetorical
sion. Hence, MacQueen's frequent allegorical referen
"PLUMB TREE"' - Sierra Leone's burial ground - w
through tabular data (Fig. 2). Also evident was the forensic manner in which
Macaulay sought to refute MacQueen's claims, not only by highlighting
minor errors to pour doubts on his general argument, but by responding
with tabular data of his own. Moreover, this example of a detailed textual
exchange was connected to broader debates about healthiness and
credibility. Thus, MacQueen insisted that the 'appalling list' confirmed the
'ravages of disease on that fatal and worthless coast', whilst for Macaulay its
publication actually afforded 'another proof... of the faith which may be
reposed in the justice of Mr. Macqueen's accusations against Sierra Leone,
and in the truth of his pretended facts'.80
Macaulay's alternative geography of death was used to exonerate the
colony, as was clear from one of the categories he used: 'Not at Sierra
Leone' (Fig. 3). This negative locational category, of which he wrote: 'all I
certainly know is, that they did not die at Sierra Leone'*1 underlines the
importance for both protagonists of putting the dead in the right place. The
lists articulated competing geographies of mortality; where these officers
died mattered a great deal. Hence, as well as refuting MacQueen's claim,
Macaulay used his list 'to compare the rate of mortality at Sierra Leone with
that on other parts of the coast'.82 His argument was that of 'this list of
twenty-nine deaths'...
... twenty did not take place at Sierra Leone; and that, although Sierra
Leone as the head-quarters, and had always more officers resident than at
the other stations, yet the number of deaths there (including General
Turner and the others who died in consequence of fatigue and exposure in
expeditions beyond the colony) was not one-third of the whole; whilst on
the Gold Coast, in the same latitude with Fernando Po, and not very
distant from it, nearly one half of the whole mortality occurred.83
Macaulay's sample formed the basis for a claim about 'comparative

mortality' based on his 'firm conviction' that Sierra Leone was healthier
than the Gambia or Gold Coast (and, by implication, the nearby island of
Fernando Po), and at least as healthy as the Caribbean colonies.84
Macaulay's argument about the 'comparative mortality' of Sierra Leone
and other sites in the war of representation makes it clear that the detailed
exchanges over MacQueen's 'appalling list' - in which each man made use of
peritextual devices (tables and footnotes) - were connected to broader
debates about tropical health, medical topography and the human cost of
empire. Indeed, despite Macaulay's attempt to contest the 'appalling list'
and the broader pro-Sierra Leonean effort to challenge the view that the
colony was an unhealthy place, there was an emerging consensus on this
point. In May 1827, the Royal Commissioners, Wellington and Rowan,
reported to Parliament. They had been instructed to investigate the causes of
the sometimes unhealthy climate. Based on the returns of local medical
officers, the Commissioners identified the presence of stagnant water,
mixed with decayed vegetable matter, as 'producing effluvia which cannot

be otherwise than prejudicial'. Moreover, MacQueen's specific observations
were echoed in a general point made by the Commissioners that '[t]he
proportion of deaths amongst officers, may also be considered as a tolerably
fair criterion of the effects of climate'.85
Curtin credits the systematic gathering of empirical data on health and
the environment by the 1827 Royal Commission as laying the way for the
increasing popularity of broad studies of West African medical topogra
phy.86 Certainly, the report was unequivocally pessimistic about the
healthiness of Sierra Leone and indicated that little could be done to
militate against the high levels of mortality there. Unsurprisingly,
MacQueen, who had done much to promulgate the argument that Sierra
Leone was a 'white man's grave', was quick to pick up and use the
Commissioners' report to support his claims.87 This was one of the
most successful lines of attack used against the colony and, by association,
the broader humanitarian project. For MacQueen and its other opponents,
Sierra Leone was a foolhardy experiment that cost far too much in terms
of British - and African - lives. For some, this called into question
Britain's very involvement in West Africa and its efforts to suppress the
Atlantic slave-trade. For MacQueen, however, it was not so much the
British colonial presence that was the problem, but its particular
geographical focus.
FERNANDO PO AND AN ALTERNATIVE GEOSTRATEGY

As well as claims about its unhealthiness, the other main line of attack on
Sierra Leone was its location - particularly as this related to the operations
of the anti-slave-trade squadron, but also in terms of its place within
broader West African geostrategies - and the colony's opponents were keen
to suggest other centres for Britain's West African activities. That those
opposed to the humanitarian experiment would propose any sort of
alternative in the region may seem surprising. However, the more efficient
suppression of the foreign slave-trade was certainly something that the West
India lobby would favour. It also suited their effort to discredit Sierra Leone
and the experiment with free African labour by any means and, thus,
perhaps stave off the abolition of Caribbean slavery. Others, including
MacQueen, sought greater British commercial involvement in West Africa
and held that this would only be made possible by a colonial presence
further south. As will be seen, Macaulay believed that such alternative
proposals were disingenuous and that the real aim was to cause the whole
humanitarian project in Africa to fail.
As noted earlier, the comparing and contrasting of different worldly sites
was a persistent aspect of the war of representation. One place that
Sierra Leone was consistently compared with in the 1820s was the island
of Fernando Po, the largest in the Gulf of Guinea. Unlike other
Guinea islands, such Principe and Sao Tome, it had not undergone
plantation development. It was not colonized by the Portuguese because it
was too large, had an indigenous population - the Bubi - and was not well
located for navigation by sail. In 1778, Spain took 'possession' of Fernando
Po and planned to develop the island as a slaving station, but the Spanish
were driven off by the combined effects of resistance from the indigenous
population and the difficulties caused by the physical environment. In 1783,
a British squadron arrived with the intention of opening trade with the Bubi,
but had no more success.88
Despite the difficulties that Europeans had faced in colonizing Fernando
Po, its situation, about twenty miles from the African mainland at the
nearest point, meant that some saw it as particularly well-placed to be a
British regional base. MacQueen wrote:
But leaving, as Great Britain ought long ago to have left, Sierra
Leone... let us turn our eyes for a moment to the Bights of Benin and
Biaffra (sic). There the navigable mouths of the mighty and the
NAVIGABLE NIGER enter the sea through a rich, a populous,
a cultivated, and comparatively civilized country - THE NIGER!
that stream which lays open Northern Central Africa to its deepest
recesses. Opposite to the mouths of this river, and about thirty-six
miles from the largest of these, stands the island of FERNANDO
PO, fertile and healthy, excellent anchorage, easily fortified, and
isolated, so long as Great Britain commands the ocean, from the attack
of every foe. There, is the proper, the commanding, spot for a British
settlement! Nature has planted it there for that end... From that point,
commerce, industry, civilization, knowledge, and true religion, would
rapidly diverge and diffuse themselves over Africa, and by its
influence and by its power, the Slave Trade would be cut up and
destroyed, and ultimately slavery itself disappear from the adjacent
continent of Africa.89
The notion of islands as 'natural colonies' and their association with Utopian
projects have been persistent themes in the modern European encounter
with the wider world.90 John Gillis argues that '[b]y the end of the eighteenth
century virtually every Atlantic island had been found, explored, and
exploited to the fullest extent possible. At this point, the insular imagination
moved on to the Pacific, where a whole new mythical geography was in the
process of formation'.91 Fernando Po, of course, was one of the exceptions,
and MacQueen projected on to it fantasies of possession and paradise.
Hence, Fernando Po's location was as ideal as Sierra Leone's was useless.
One had 'only to look at a map of Africa, to perceive, from its geographical
position, that Sierra Leone is most improperly and most imprudently singled
out', whilst Fernando Po had been 'planted' in 'the proper, the command
ing, spot' by 'Nature'.92
For MacQueen, Fernando Po was everything that Sierra Leone was not.
Indeed, 'the opponents of Sierra Leone began to make claims for Fernando
Po that sounded exactly like the humanitarians' descriptions of the former
place'.93 Contemporary medical opinion held that islands were healthier
than continental sites and Fernando Po's mountainous elevation was
deemed to make it even clearer of dangerous 'miasmas'. Its location near the
important slaving ports of Old Calabar and Bonny made it an ideal base
for the anti-slave-trade squadron and the Courts of Mixed Commission, and
the island could be used to command the Gulf of Guinea.94 Finally, it was
well positioned for commercial intercourse. As noted earlier, MacQueen had
long asserted that the River Niger entered the Atlantic Ocean at the Bights
of Benin and Biafra. Fernando Po's proximity to the termination of the
Niger, therefore, made it an ideal location for the British commercial
penetration of the African interior. Although this geographical fact would
not be proved by direct European observation until after the Landers
expedition of 1830, MacQueen had been striving since at least 1820
to establish it and now worked it in to his proposals for a new British
West African geostrategy.95 His warning was that, with its present focus on
Sierra Leone, Britain was poorly placed - literally - to take advantage of
commercial opportunities in Africa (provided by the emerging palm-oil
trade, for example). As he put it: 'Look at our neighbours and our rivals the
French. They have planted themselves upon a river, the Senegal, which is
navigable into the interior nearly 900 miles'.96 Therefore, unless it colonized
Fernando Po, Britain would find itself marginalized in West Africa by
imperial rivals. If the island was colonized, however, it would fit perfectly
within a wider imperial geostrategy based on riverine trade, insular outposts
and the dominance of the Royal Navy.
Supporting MacQueen's claims about Sierra Leone was a map (Fig. 4),
which accompanied a June 1826 article in Blackwood's Edinburgh
Magazine?1 The article was a review of the recently published journal of
Dixon Denham, Hugh Clapperton and Walter Oudney, who had undertaken
an expedition to explore the Niger in 1821.98 This article brought together
MacQueen's interest in the geography of Africa, including the commercial
opportunities offered by 'most populous, fertile, and civilized (if we may use
the term) portions of Central Africa', and his opposition to Sierra Leone.99
The map itself showed the route that MacQueen believed the River Niger
took, including its Atlantic termination, along with an alternative - and,
from MacQueen's point of view, entirely erroneous - course that was
supported by John Barrow. As well as presenting MacQueen's geographical
theory about the Niger, the map made a visual case for relocating the focus of
Britain's West African activities to Fernando Po. The region of Africa
immediately north of the Niger delta, which would be opened up to British
commerce, was labelled 'Rich soil and level country' (in contrast to
MacQueen's characterization elsewhere of Sierra Leone as a 'den of
pestilence and death').100 The settlement at Sierra Leone was not even
; ~~- Hot A at A* &|M*t*r- J(Bj^
Fig. 4. Map based on map of 'Africa north of the equator showing the course & direction of the
principal rivers and mountains particularly of the Niger and its tributary streams from the best
authorities', accompanying James MacQueen, 'Geography of Central Africa: Denham and
Clapperton's journal', Blackwood1s Edinburgh Magazine 19, June 1826, facing p. 687.
labelled and the map merely showed 'Sierra Leone Riv'. This map was the
visual counterpart to MacQueen's writing in general. It was presented as an
objective, scientific representation of the world, based on the synthesis of the
'best authorities', which appealed to geographical common-sense in order to
marshal an argument against Sierra Leone and in favour of Fernando Po.
Such assertions about the value of this alternative to Sierra Leone did not
go unchallenged. Indeed, Macaulay's Reply to MacQueen turned, in essence,
on two key themes: firstly, as has been seen, questioning his credibility and
authority; and, secondly, of no less importance, launching a counter-attack
on Fernando Po. Macaulay's strategy was that often used by those seeking
to maintain the status quo - to pour doubt on the alternative. Hence,
Fernando Po was a place of 'unknown forests and unexplored mountains',
comparable with 'the deserts of the Sahaara (sic), or the forests of
Benguela'.101 The theme of uncertainty recurred in Macaulay's attacks on
the island. In the light of the failed Spanish effort at colonization in 1778,
there was uncertainty about whether the island was actually healthier than
Sierra Leone; concern that the focus of the slave-trade would just move
away from the Gulf of Guinea and establish itself elsewhere; uncertainty
about whether Fernando Po was more fertile than Sierra Leone; and finally
uncertainty as to whether the indigenous Bubi would allow a British colonial
presence.102
The other theme in Macaulay's counter-attack was Fernando Po's status
as an island. On the one hand, he questioned whether it was insular enough
to be healthier than a continental area such as Sierra Leone:
Islands are said to be more healthy than the continent; but, if even true,
Fernando Po has little of that advantage. It is situated at the bottom of
the bight of Biafra, within a few miles of the continent, and near the
mouth of several large rivers, daily pouring into the waters around it all
the putrid vegetable matter which they bring down from the interior.103
On the other hand, he suggested that it was too insular, that it was an
isolated station and therefore an unsuitable place from which to spread
Christianity and 'civilization':
If the object is, that industry, knowledge, civilization, and true religion,
are to spread from our settlements to the neighbouring tribes, and thence
over the whole of this vast continent, Sierra Leone, or any point on the
main land, must be preferable to an island. In the latter, all these
invaluable blessings will be shut up... your example will be a sealed
book.104
Although the geographical logic Macaulay employed seems contradictory,

the association of islands simultaneously with both isolation and
connectedness is common in Western writing.105 Macaulay also drew on
and challenged long-standing Utopian ideas around islands to criticize
Fernando Po. He argued that the process of establishing civilization would
have to start from scratch such that a slave 'landed at Fernando Po, cannot,
for some years, meet with any body of Negroes more civilized than himself.
The work of amelioration must there be commenced anew, with men in the
lowest state of debasement and ignorance'.106 Indeed, he went on to
speculate that failure might actually be 'the object of the enemies of Sierra
Leone, and of the African race'.107
The MacQueen/Macaulay exchanges over the respective advantages of
Sierra Leone and Fernando Po reflected and informed wider debates.
Complaints about the difficulties that the anti-slave-trade squadron faced,
by being based at Sierra Leone, had been circulating since the mid 1810s.
The 1827 Royal Commissioners' report also addressed this issue, mentioning
that the 'misery' of the re-captive slaves was 'prolonged by the distance
which, under existing arrangements, they are to be conveyed before they
reach the place of adjudication'.108 Exemplifying this with reference to the
number of deaths occurring on slave-ships being brought to Sierra Leone for
adjudication, the report noted that the majority of slaving vessels

intercepted by the Royal Navy were stopped south of Sierra Leone at 'an
average of 790 miles' away. In consequence, the Commissioners proposed
that 'a leeward station should be selected for establishment of the Courts of
Mixed Commission'.109 Although they did not name Fernando Po and did
not suggest the total abandonment of Sierra Leone, this echoed MacQueen's
arguments.
The preference for Fernando Po was also translated into policy. In 1827,
the Admiralty was given the order to establish a settlement on the island, in
preparation for moving the Courts of Mixed Commission and re-basing the
anti-slave-trade squadron.110 The project soon ran into difficulties, however.
Britain was unable to purchase the island from Spain and the status of its
settlement on the island remained ambiguous. The naval captain in charge
of the expedition, William Fitzwilliam Owen, began to adopt unorthodox, if
not illegal, means to suppress the slave-trade in the Gulf of Guinea and a
campaign was started to remove him. Its ultimate target was the Fernando
Po project itself: 'It hoped to discredit him, thereby causing support for the
removal scheme to fall away; it was led by the British commissioners in
Freetown and openly supported by the financial community of that
place'.111 A Parliamentary Select Committee of 1830 did keep public
interest alive for the relocation of the Courts of Mixed Commission, but
opinion was starting to turn against Fernando Po. When even the
Admiralty's interest ended in 1832, orders were sent to dismantle the base.
As an alternative to Sierra Leone in the 1820s and early 1830s, Fernando
Po was a significant, if short-lived, site in the war of representation over
West Indian slavery. The failure and abandonment of the Fernando Po
experiment was attributable, in part, to the lobbying efforts of pro-Sierra
Leone interests, of which Macaulay's Reply to MacQueen was an early
example.112 What is striking is how criticisms that had previously been
applied to Sierra Leone - about its unhealthiness and spiralling cost, for
example - were later applied to Fernando Po. The island's failure did not
mean that Sierra Leone was fully rehabilitated, however, and the 1830s saw
an intention to scale back Britain's presence in West Africa. Nevertheless,
this 'hesitancy in the face of a dangerous "climate" lasted only about a
decade'. It ended decisively with Thomas Fowell Buxton's Niger Expedition
almost a decade later, which revived the vestigial British presence on
Fernando Po.113 In a remarkable turnaround, Buxton's chief geographical
advisor was none other than James MacQueen, who was still convinced that
the island was the most appropriate base for Britain's West African
activities.114
CONCLUSIONS
The MacQueen/Macaulay exchanges were one skirmish in the wider war
over representation of slavery, in which Sierra Leone, though far beyond the
Caribbean, was an important site of battle. They were also part of a longer
conflict that stretched back to the foundation of Sharp's 'Province of
Freedom'. Yet, although centred on the issue of slavery, the exchanges
encompassed broader fields of debate, including British policy in
West Africa and the geostrategies it should employ, and a changing context
of geographical knowledge - itself a contested field with different theories
about how knowledge should be produced. In considering the MacQueen/
Macaulay exchanges, two particular themes stand out: the healthiness of
Sierra Leone, and the adequacy of its location. In both terms, Sierra Leone
was found wanting, something that led to the short-lived experiment
at Fernando Po. There were also broader consequences. In relation to
debates about health, disease and mortality, those who first spoke in
favour of Fernando Po and against Sierra Leone could do so because the
discourse of West Africa as a 'white man's grave' had yet to be definitively
established. In the 1820s, it was still plausible to claim that even if Sierra
Leone was an unhealthy place - a claim that its supporters vigorously
contested - then Fernando Po, an island with greater elevation, was not.
Yet, once a British presence had been established there and mortality
levels were also high, this helped to entrench the reputation of the region
as a whole as a 'white man's grave'. If this is an example of the expansion
of a particular idea to encompass a larger territorial area, then another sort
of spatial dynamic was at work in relation to the comparison of Fernando
Po and Sierra Leone. Positive claims that had been made by the
humanitarians for Sierra Leone were made by their opponents for
Fernando Po, and negative assertions were shifted from one to the other
in a similar fashion. Although the war of representation was a multi-theatre
conflict, this might suggest that the discursive repertoire employed by the
protagonists was narrow. For example, the same set of problems - about
tropical disease, corruption and white mortality - could be seized by each
side and applied to different spaces, be it the Caribbean, Sierra Leone or
Fernando Po.
This paper has been concerned with matters at two different scales.
On the one hand, it has focused on the space of the page, dwelling on the
details of the exchanges between MacQueen and Macaulay. In part, that is
because they did. In his final 'letter' to Hay, MacQueen wrote that T am
really ashamed to take up your time in unravelling such miserable quibbles
and objections as these'.115 Yet, this was precisely how both men sought to
establish the credibility of their arguments (and I hope readers will forgive
me for doing something similar). In examining these important sites in the
slavery controversy, it is not only rhetorical figures that have been the focus,
but also the forms of presentation, illustration and referencing used. On the
other hand, the paper has addressed the worldly sites of the war of
representation, primarily Sierra Leone, but also spaces with which it was
more or less explicitly compared: the West Indies and Fernando Po, in
particular. Connecting the spaces of the page to the worldly spaces beyond
involved different strategies and tactics. Making comparisons and drawing

contrasts between different sites were the strategies most often employed,
but the paper has touched on others. The entire effort by the West India
lobby to attack Sierra Leone was, to a large extent, an attempt at
misdirection, designed to discredit the humanitarians and delay the move
towards emancipation by pouring doubt on the possibility and value of free
African labour. Macaulay's effort to lay this intent bare by drawing
attention to MacQueen's connections to the Caribbean colonies (as a 'well
paid mercenary') could also be seen as a form of misdirection, away from
Sierra Leone, as well as an effort to map out the ideological sites from which
attacks on the West African colony emanated. It was also one of the many
tactics used in the war of representation. Others included the deployment of
geographical devices, such as maps, as well as appeals to common-sense and
first-hand knowledge. Tracing the various strategies and tactics employed in
the war of representation, and how the sites of the page were connected to
different worldly sites beyond, is a vital step in mapping the cartography of
the slavery controversy.
David Lambert is Reader in Historical Geography at Royal Holloway,

University of London and formerly a Research Fellow of Emmanuel
College, Cambridge. His research interests are in Caribbean slavery,
imperial networks, and postcolonial approaches to White identities. He is
the author of White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of
Abolition (Cambridge, 2005) and the co-editor, with Alan Lester, of Colonial
Lives across the British Empire (Cambridge, 2006). He is currently working
on a book that examines the relationship between the controversy over
Atlantic slavery and the production, circulation and reception of geogra
phical knowledge about West Africa in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries.
NOTES AND REFERENCES
1 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination,
1830-1867, Oxford, 2002, p. 106.
2 See David Lambert, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity During the Age of
Abolition, Cambridge, 2005, esp. chap. 1.
3 Hall, Civilising Subjects, p. 108.
4 David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, Oxford, 1984, p. 81; Lambert, White
Creole Culture.
5 Ian Baucom, Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of
History, London, 2005, p. 16. Emphasis added.
6 Hall, Civilising Subjects, p. 106.
7 Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, transl. Jane E. Lewin,
Cambridge, 1997. For another use of Genette's ideas of paratextuality in relation to the war
of representation over slavery, see David Lambert, 'The Counter-Revolutionary Atlantic:
White West Indian Petitions and Proslavery Networks', Social and Cultural Geography 6: 3,
2005, pp. 405-20.
8 Clive Barnett, 'Textualities of African Representation: Rethinking the Cultural Politics

of Heinemann's African Writers Series', Paper presented at the Royal Geographical Society
Institute of British Geographers conference, London, 2003.
9 Miles Ogborn, 'Writing Travels: Power, Knowledge and Ritual on the English East
India Company's Early Voyages', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27, 2002,
pp. 155-71; Miles Ogborn,'Geographies Pen: Writing, Geography and the Arts of Commerce,
1660-1760', Journal of Historical Geography 30, 2004, pp. 294-315.
10 Attacks on Sierra Leone also appeared in John Bull, the Morning Journal and the West
India Reporter, which were further circulated in The Times. The Royal Gazette and Sierra Leone
Advertiser led the counter-charge, as did Thomas Fowell Buxton in Parliament. See Martin
Lynn, 'Britain's West African Policy and the Island of Fernando Po, 1821-43', Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History 18: 2, 1990, pp. 191-207.
11 See James MacQueen, The Colonial Controversy, Containing a Refutation of the
Calumnies of the Anticolonists; the State of Hayti, Sierra Leone, India, China, &C. The
Production of Sugar, &C. And the State of the Free and Slave Labourers in Those Countries;
Fully Considered... With a Supplementary Letter to Mr. Macaulay, Glasgow, 1825. This book
itself brought together a number of 'letters' to the Prime Minister, the Earl of Liverpool, that
had been published in the Glasgow Courier from 1824.
12 James MacQueen, 'Civilization of Africa: Sierra Leone: Liberated Africans: To
R. W. Hay Esq.', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 20, December 1826, pp. 872-92; James
MacQueen, 'Civilization of Africa: Sierra Leone [Second Letter to R. W. Hay]', Blackwood's
Edinburgh Magazine 21, March 1827, pp. 315-29; James MacQueen, 'Civilization of Africa:
Sierra Leone [Third Letter to R. W. Hay]', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 21, May 1827,
pp. 596-624.
13 Kenneth Macaulay, The Colony of Sierra Leone Vindicated from the Misrepresentations
of Mr. Macqueen of Glasgow, London, 1827; James MacQueen, A Fourth Letter to
R.W. Hay, Esq. &C &C. In Reply to Mr. Kenneth Macaulay's 'Sierra Leone Vindicated',
Glasgow, 1827.
14 Starr Douglas, 'Natural History, Improvement and Colonisation: Henry Smeathman
and Sierra Leone in the late eighteenth century', Unpublished PhD thesis, University of
London, 2004; Deirdre Coleman, 'Henry Smeathman, the Fly-Catching Abolitionist', in
Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and Its Colonies, 1760-1838, ed. Brycchan Carey,
Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih, Basingstoke, 2004, pp. 108-22.
15 Granville Sharp, A Short Sketch of Temporary Regulations (until Better Shall Be
Proposed) for the Intended Settlement on the Grain Coast of Africa, near Sierra Leona, 3rd edn,
London, 1788.
16 On history of Sierra Leone, see Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, 1962; John Peterson, Province of Freedom: a History of Sierra Leone,
1787-1870, London, 1969; Stephen Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London's
Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement, 1786-1791, Liverpool, 1994; Nemata
Amelia Blyden, West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: the African Diaspora in Reverse,
Rochester, NY, 2000.
17 Wayne Ackerman, The African Institution (1807-1827) and the Antislavery Movement in
Great Britain, Lewiston, 2005.
18 Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone; Christopher Lloyd, The Navy of the Slave Trade: the
Suppression of the Trade in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1949, pp. 15-16.
19 Ackerman, The African Institution, p. 222.
20 Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists, pp. 241-249; Philip D. Curtin, The
Image of Africa: British Ideas and Actions, 1780-1850, London, 1965, p. 8.
21 Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists, p. 241.
22 Peterson, Province of Freedom, p. 37.
23 Fyfe, History of Sierra Leone, p. 164.
24 Curtin, Image of Africa, p. 161.
25 Curtin, Image of Africa, pp. 161-2.
28 A previous series of exchanges had taken place in the mid 1810s, initiated by an attack
from Sierra Leone's former Chief Justice, Robert Thorpe. See Robert Thorpe, A Letter to
William Wilberforce, Containing Remarks on the Reports of the Sierra Leone Company, and
African Institution: With Hints Respecting the Means by Which an (sic) Universal Abolition of the
Slave Trade Might Be Carried into Effect, 3rd Edition, with a Preface, London, 1815. For a
discussion of Thorpe's attacks and the controversy it provoked, see Ackerman, African
Institution, pp. 117-122, 154-155.
29 Lynn, 'Britain's West African Policy'.
30 Robert T. Brown, 'Fernando Po and the Anti-Sierra Leonean Campaign: 1826-34',
International Journal of African Historical Studies 6: 2, 1973, pp. 249-64; Lloyd, Navy of the
Slave Trade.
31 Lynn, 'Britain's West African Policy', p. 194.
32 'Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the state of the colony of Sierra Leone',
PP, Part 1, 7 May 1827; Part 2 (Gambia, Gold Coast), 29 June 1827.
33 Brown, 'Fernando Po', p. 251.
34 James MacQueen, The West India Colonies: the Calumnies and Misrepresentations
Circulated against Them by the Edinburgh Review, Mr. Clarkson, Mr. Crupper, Etc. Etc.,
London, 1824; MacQueen, Colonial Controversy.
35 Thomas Pringle to William Blackwood, 8 Nov. 1833, MS 30969, Blackwood Papers,
National Library of Scotland. MacQueen's pro-slavery activities are discussed in detail in
David Lambert, 'The "Glasgow King of Billingsgate": James MacQueen and an Atlantic
proslavery network', Slavery and Abolition, forthcoming.
36 For example, James MacQueen, Population, Soil, and Climate of the Russian Empire;
Description of Moscow; Strength and Losses of the French Armies in Russia and Spain During
1812; to Which Is Added, a Short History of the Memorable Campaign in Russia, Etc., Glasgow,
1813.
37 Clive Barnett, 'Impure and Worldly Geography: the Africanist Discourse of the
Royal Geographical Society', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23: 2, 1998,
pp. 239-51, ref. on p. 244.
38 James MacQueen, A Geographical and Commercial View of Northern Central Africa:
Containing a Particular Account of the Course and Termination of the Great River Niger in the
Atlantic Ocean, Edinburgh, 1821.
39 Charles Withers, 'Mapping the Niger, 1798-1832: Trust, Testimony and "Ocular
Demonstration" in the Late Enlightenment', Imago Mundi 56: 2, 2004, pp. 170-93, ref. on
p. 178. The Caribbean basis of MacQueen's claims are discussed in David Lambert, ' "Taken
captive by the mystery of the Great River": James MacQueen, slavery and the Niger problem',
Paper presented in the 'Exploring and being Explored: Africa in the Nineteenth Century'
conference, National Maritime Museum, 30-31 March 2007.
40 MacQueen, 'First Letter to Hay', p. 872.
41 For example, see James Bell, A System of Geography, Popular and Scientific, or a
Physical, Political, and Statistical Account of the World and Its Various Divisions, Glasgow,
1832. See also Robert J. Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography: the Political Languages of British
Geography, 1650-1850, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2000, pp. 207-16.
42 MacQueen, 'First Letter to Hay', pp. 874, 882.
44 MacQueen, Fourth Letter to Hay, p. 48.
45 J. B. Harley, 'Maps, Knowledge, and Power', in The Iconography of Landscape,
ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 277-312, ref on pp. 278, 300.
48 MacQueen claimed that the real author of the Reply was none other than Zachary
himself. See James MacQueen, 'British Africa - Sierra Leone. Report of the Parliamentary
Commissioners', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 23, January 1828, pp. 63-89, ref on p. 64.
49 Macaulay, Sierra Leone Vindicated, pp. 1-2.
51 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth, Chicago, 1994.
52 Macaulay, Sierra Leone Vindicated, footnote on p. 11. Emphasis in original.
54 Macaulay, Sierra Leone Vindicated, p. 32.
56 Felix Driver, 'Distance and Disturbance: Travel, Exploration and Knowledge in the
Nineteenth Century', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14, 2004, pp. 73-92; Withers,
'Mapping the Niger'.
57 Lambert, White Creole Culture.
58 MacQueen, Fourth Letter to Hay, pp. 6, 37.

59 Withers, 'Mapping the Niger'.
60 Alexander Gordon Laing, Travels in the Timanee, Kooranko, and Soolima Countries, in
Western Africa, London, 1825; Curtin, Image of Africa, p. 170.
64 Glasgow Courier, 1 Aug., 30 Oct. 1823, microfilm box 33, Special Collections, Mitchell
Library, Glasgow.
67 Specifically, all but the final sentence of the Laing quotation came from pp. 397-8 of
Laing, Travels in the Timanee, Kooranko, and Soolima, whereas the final sentence came
from p. 393.
71 Philip D. Curtin, Disease and Empire: the Health of European Troops in the Conquest of
Africa, Cambridge, 1998, p. 3; Curtin, Image of Africa, p. 89. The origins of the term lay with
one of the Portuguese Commissioner to the Courts of Mixed Commission, who described Sierra
Leone as 'sepulcro dos Europeos' in 1822. Curtin, Image of Africa, pp. 179, note 4.
72 Curtin, Image of Africa, pp. 344, 352.
75 MacQueen, '[Second Letter to Hay]', pp. 323-4.
76 MacQueen, '[Second Letter to Hay]', pp. 323-4.
77 Macaulay, Sierra Leone Vindicated, pp. iii-iv.
78 Macaulay, Sierra Leone Vindicated, p. iv.
80 MacQueen, 'First Letter to Hay', p. 887; Macaulay, Sierra Leone Vindicated, p. iv.
81 Macaulay, Sierra Leone Vindicated, p. iv. Emphasis in original.
83 Macaulay, Sierra Leone Vindicated, p. v.
85 'Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the state the colony of Sierra Leone', PP,
Part 1, 7 May 1827, pp. 104, 108.
86 Curtin, Image of Africa, pp. 344, 352.
87 MacQueen, 'Report of the Parliamentary Commissioners', p. 77. The report is
discussed in detail from p. 72.
88 Ibrahim K. Sundiata, From Slaving to Neoslavery: the Bight of Biafra and Fernando Po
in the Era of Abolition, 1827-1930, Madison, 1996.
89 MacQueen, 'First Letter to Hay', pp. 891-2.
90 Islands in History and Representation, ed. Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, London,
2003, p. 1.
91 John R. Gillis, 'Taking History Offshore: Atlantic Islands in European Minds,
1400-1800', in Islands, ed. Edmond and Smith, pp. 19-31, ref on p. 20.
92 MacQueen, 'Third Letter to Hay', p. 608.
94 David Eltis, 'The Export of Slaves from Africa, 1821-1843', Journal of Economic
History 37, 1977, pp. 409-33.
95 James MacQueen, pamphlet addressed To His Majesty's Ministers', 13 June 1820,
CO 267/52, TNA.
97 James MacQueen, 'Geography of Central Africa: Denham and Clapperton's Journal',
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 19, June 1826, pp. 687-709.
98 For details, see Withers, 'Mapping the Niger', pp. 179-180.
99 MacQueen, 'Geography of Central Africa', p. 707.
100 MacQueen, 'Geography of Central Africa', p. 709.
101 Macaulay, Sierra Leone Vindicated, pp. 2, 120.

105 Islands, ed. Edmond and Smith, pp. 4-5.
PP, Part 1, 7 May 1827, p. 22. See David Northrup, 'African Mortality in the Suppression of
the Slave Trade: the Case of the Bight of Biafra', Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9: 1, 1978,
pp. 47-64.
PP, Part 1, 7 May 1827, pp. 22-23, 46.
110 Lynn, 'Britain's West African Policy'; Brown, 'Fernando Po'.
112 Lynn, 'Britain's West African Policy'; Brown, 'Fernando Po'.
113 Curtin, Disease and Empire, p. 18; Howard Temperley, White Dreams, Black Africa: the
Antislavery Expedition to the River Niger, 1841-1842, Yale University Press, London, 1991.
114 This is discussed in Lambert, 'The "Glasgow King of Billingsgate'".

Sierra Leone and Other Sites in The War of Representation Over Slavery

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Sierra Leone and Other Sites in the War of Representation over Slavery

Author(s): David Lambert

History Workshop Journal Issue 64 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbm048

experiment and an anti-slavery colony - and, thus, it attracted the ire of

of State for the Colonies, published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine,

SIERRA LEONE AND THE WAR OF REPRESENTATION

From the beginning, then, Sierra Leone had been conceived - by

Sierra Leone stood at the centre of a complex series of relationships and

on climate and the operations of the Liberated African Department.32

MACQUEEN VERSUS MACAULAY

African Institution and first-hand accounts of the colony. He appealed to a

In order to secure the introduction of light and liberty, industry and

Determining the location of a place - its longitude and latitude - was a

As elsewhere in his pro-slavery writings, MacQueen presented himself as

To establish these charges, he puts forward hardy assertions, often

To substantiate claims about MacQueen's lack of credibility, Macaulay

Who are, in fact, the persons who he thus accuses of an infamous

FIXING THE MEANING OF MAJOR LAING

Let us turn from the side of imposition to the representations of truth;

fact, that not a SINGLE MISSIONARY is to be found BEYOND the

Macaulay went on to provide a close reading of Laing's text and

Macqueen, p. 883. Laing, p. 103

transatlantic networks of pro-slavery influence and advocacy that would

PLACING THE DEAD IN WEST AFRICA

For MacQueen, then, Sierra Leone was an unhealthy and poorly-located

contested issue.71 The field of 'medical topography', which sought to

To show the ravages of disease on that fatal and worthless coast,

MacQueen directed the reader's attention to an extensive footnote contain

Age Time in Africa

Fig. 2. James MacQueen, 'Civilization of Africa: Sierra Leone', Blackwood''s Edinburgh

Mr. MacQueen, with his usual hardihood, publishes in a note at page

To demonstrate how MacQueen intended to 'mislead the people of

Name Place of Death

The list and counter-list are instructive. They are e

Macaulay's sample formed the basis for a claim about 'comparative

mixed with decayed vegetable matter, as 'producing effluvia which cannot

FERNANDO PO AND AN ALTERNATIVE GEOSTRATEGY

; ~~- Hot A at A* &|M*t*r- J(Bj^

Although the geographical logic Macaulay employed seems contradictory,

adjudication, the report noted that the majority of slaving vessels

involved different strategies and tactics. Making comparisons and drawing

David Lambert is Reader in Historical Geography at Royal Holloway,

NOTES AND REFERENCES

8 Clive Barnett, 'Textualities of African Representation: Rethinking the Cultural Politics

58 MacQueen, Fourth Letter to Hay, pp. 6, 37.

103 Macaulay, Sierra Leone Vindicated, pp. 116-7.

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