by Janet Todd
In the Flemish city of Ghent, Mary Knatchbull, an acquaintance of Colepeper’s, was abbess of the English Benedictines in Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat and a good friend to the Royalists.28 Stationary and secure in her convent, Catholic and loyal to the Stuart kings who were ambiguously connected to her faith but certainly better than the Presbyterians and Independents who currently ruled her native land, Knatchbull had become a useful resource for the Cavaliers, for whom she acted as a kind of treasurer and counsellor. Possibly her covert activities were known to the Vatican, which would rather see Charles Stuart regain his kingdom than not, but felt no pressing need to provide funds.
Money laboriously raised by the King, his brother James and their courtiers from foreign princes, dukes and bishops needed to be held and distributed to the various Cavaliers and agents, complicatedly crossing and recrossing Europe on their undercover missions. Many were desperately poor. Thomas Killigrew described them as ‘a race of men who have left praying, or hoping for daily bread; and only relye upon nightly drink’; they have ‘no servants, no money, no clothes, no meat, and always afoot’.29 The little money there was had to be carefully rationed from central sources. Mary Knatchbull’s contribution can be illustrated by one itinerant nobleman who told Edward Hyde he was ‘relying upon the promise, that of the first money returned into Flanders... there shall be put into my Lady Abbess’s hands three thousand Florins for the clearing of me in Flanders’.30
If Aphra came here or to another intriguing convent, it would account for her extraordinary knowledge of Catholic institutions and ritual not easily explained by a Kentish childhood, as well as the claim before The History of the Nun, that she had once been tempted by the cloister but lacked the strength of character. Given the impecunious nature of the English convents in the Interregnum, when their usual supply of money from England had dried up, she would not have been much welcomed without a dowry.31 None the less, Aphra may once or twice have thought about the matter while she was being made much of in a convent. In the same story she describes how a girl, a ‘forward Pratler’, acute and responsive, is patronised by cultured nuns: ‘all joyn’d to compleat [her] Mind and Body’ with dancing, singing, languages, manner and wit, in all of which she excelled.32 For Aphra, the Benedictine nuns of Ghent may have helped the process of education that began with the Sidneys and Colepepers in Kent.
Aphra Behn knew little of the religious motives that might make girls want to devote their lives to God and their own sex or the piety that kept them serene under restrictions. But she was an enthralled spectator of the magnificence of Catholic ritual, ceremonial, erotic and aesthetic displays that led to ecstasy and tied her more to the theatrical arts of this world than to the mysteries of the other. As she later wrote of a fictional ceremony in Flanders:
All I could see around me, all I heard, was ravishing and heavenly; the Scene of Glory, and the dazling Altar; the noble Paintings, and the numerous Lamps; the Awfulness, the Musick, and the Order, made me conceive myself above the Stars....33
The centre of the show in the novel is a young monk who ‘bore new lustre in his Face and Eyes, Smiles on his Cheeks, and Dimples on his Lips... Ten thousand Sighs, from all sides, were sent to him, as he passed along, which, mix’d with the soft Musick, made such a murmuring as gentle Breezes moving yielding Boughs.’
Paintings, lamps, stars, and male charms—it was not exactly piety. Aphra loved the intrigue, the naughtiness, the finery, the ceremony, the sensual mystique, the scandal of what Puritanism had tried to eradicate in her home country. If she were on a spying mission, she would already have been showing her bent towards the unlawful in the terms of her own nation; she would have found Catholicism equally appealing because forbidden.
Aphra would have been struck, too, by the rivalry and envy that often fuelled the inmates of Catholic convents, some of whom were there for the convenience of their families and wanted for their dowries—she was definite that women should not be forced into convents or marriage before they knew what they were doing. None the less, she relished the gossip that excited and distracted the worldly nuns. The narrators in her stories are never nuns, although they often write of nuns and admit they have picked up details from convent gossip. They or their informers seem adept spies within the walls, images perhaps of the political activities of the Ghent convent.
Chapter 3
Voyage to Surinam
‘Men of Fortune seldom travell hither Sir’
Aphra may, then, have been an experienced spy at the Restoration. What could be more natural than that she should continue her activities, since the reign of Charles II did not relax surveillance?1 The next place of her operations as secret agent might well have been the exotic colony of Surinam in South America, to which she journeyed in the early 1660s.
The seventeenth century was the age of the great English adventurer-trader colonists, who travelled the globe from the Moluccas to the coasts of South America, struggling with the Dutch and Spanish for trading supremacy and the chance to plant and form agricultural communities. They had little anxiety over impinging on other cultures, but they were curious about customs, when they had leisure from surviving and plundering.
Surinam, between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers, had not been truly conquered by the Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was a target for colonial activity by many nations, especially French, Dutch and English. In the early 1630s, Thomas Howard, Earl of Berkshire, purchased a boat to send out settlers and published a prospectus in encouragement. He would, he said, dispatch honest and able men and artisans, ‘besides women’; he even intended ‘to goe with my wife & friends, to inhabit some part of that spacious & goodly countrie’.2 None of his plans came to fruition, however. Other attempts were temporarily more successful, but all settlements foundered on quarrels with natives and alien colonising powers.
The Barbados patent, which covered Barbados and the Leeward Islands, was given by James I simultaneously to two favourites. After much wrangling, it fell to the Earl of Carlisle, from whose family in 1647 the turncoat Parliamentarian/Royalist, Lord Willoughby, received a twenty-one-year lease of property rights in the Caribee islands. He aimed at founding a new colony in Surinam, and a party of Royalists was sent out in 1651 from Barbados—the fourteenth attempt at settlement.3 Plantations were begun along the Surinam River, with Willoughby, the proprietor and governor, investing over £20,000 in the enterprise. In the late 1650s Royalists were joined by failed settlers from Barbados, where Willoughby was having difficulty controlling the Parliamentarians. Amongst them came George Marten, brother of the famous Interregnum politician, the republican Henry Marten, who opposed both Cromwell and King Charles. Although the overwhelming motive of all the immigrants was financial, factional politics inevitably travelled with them. Presiding over this mixture of greed and grumbling was Willoughby’s old political associate, William Byam, now Deputy Governor.4
The settlement of Surinam had been founded to cultivate sugar and tobacco. Cotton did not do as well as in Barbados, where the soil was less rich. Tobacco grew copiously, indeed better than in Virginia, but, because of the established success of the North American colony, the Surinam settlers never grew more than was needed for their own use—a substantial amount since all were addicted to the pipe. So Surinam became primarily a sugar domain. Potentially a profitable crop, sugar was difficult to exploit; it demanded expertise, large plantations, and considerable capital expenditure on equipment. Canes took twelve months to grow to six feet, but another three months before they were harvested, and it was some years before production justified investment. One might make a great deal of money or, equally, one might go broke.
Based on large plantations rather than small holdings, Surinam soon had a settler population of around 4,000. There were about 130 plantations, 40 or 50 profitably growing only sugar and owning their own sugar mills.5 Others sometimes diversified with coffee, cotton or cacao. What the settlement lacked, it could get from the other colonies or f
rom England; boats frequently went between Virginia, Barbados and Surinam, trading in meat and sugar. Sheep and pigs in particular were sent from Virginia, since they did not flourish in Surinam where they were irritated by bats biting off their teats.6
To develop Surinam through labour, Willoughby had urged settlers to come from Britain. In the troubled, impoverished and war-torn 1640s when prices rose steeply, it was easy to persuade poor people into migration from England and, increasingly, from an even more pauperised Ireland. By the 1650s, the economy in England had begun to pick up, food prices were more stable, and the government grew anxious about the out-flow of able-bodied men. By the late 1650s, emigration was discouraged.
In general, the colonies had difficulty attracting bona fide immigrants and there was suspicion that advertisements and favourable reports were simply ‘decoys’ to tempt the unwary. Colonists had, after all, to ‘abandon the Land of [their] Nativity, and those comfortable outward Imployments and Accommodations which most of you had there, and to adventure [them] selves to the Hazards of a long Voyage at Sea, to come to this Remote part of the World’.7 Others blamed the colonists: a Mr Hodges of Barbados said that ‘It is grown a proverb with English merchants that, if a man goes over never so honest to the Plantations, yet the very air does change him in a short time. But it is not the air; it is the universal corruption of Justice’.8
To lure settlers, Willoughby issued a prospectus in 1655: ‘Certain overtures made by the Lord Willoughby of Parham unto all such as shall incline to plant in the Colony of Surinam’.9 But he himself was no advertisement: by 1663 he had not been near Surinam for nearly a decade. Colonists frequently seemed eager to reap the rewards of overseas proprietorship and grew energetic in persuading settlers to emigrate, while trying every possible means to avoid living in their violent and unhealthy possessions themselves. Indeed Lord Willoughby was so disastrous as a proprietor that he threw the whole system of proprietorship into disrepute; consequently he was the last of the individual colonial ‘owners’.
The appalled response to Surinam society of one new arrival, after being persuaded to emigrate by Willoughby’s propaganda, is caught in a letter of 10 December 1663. The Baptist pamphleteer, Henry Adis, had been deeply shocked by the brutish nature of the Surinam settlers, who displayed both debauchery and atheism and were, in his opinion, even worse than ‘the very Heathens themselves, to the shame and stink of Christianity’. Collectively the Europeans were a ‘rude rabble’, given to drunkenness, blasphemous oaths and ‘lascivious Abominations’.10
The ‘Memoirs’ declares that, through kinship with Lord Willoughby, Aphra’s father went to Surinam as the designated ‘lieutenant-general of six and thirty islands, besides the continent of Surinam’ but died en route. The information was lifted straight from the short story that has given Behn posthumous fame, Oroonoko. This is a tragic tale of a princely black hero who is kidnapped from Africa, enslaved and taken to distant Surinam where, after trying to rebel, he is tricked into a gruesome death by the dishonourable white governor of the colony. The tale is told by a narrator, said to be the author, the writer Aphra Behn, who claims to have been his friend and companion and, to some extent, his keeper. The material was spiced in the ‘Memoirs’ with an allegedly false rumour that Behn had had an amorous affair with her black hero. This was of the exotic interracial sort that Othello and contemporary romantic fiction made glamorous, although, in lampoons, consorting with a black man rather signalled whorishness—no doubt this too enlivened the picture.11 The ‘Memoirs’ was aimed at a sophisticated readership.
Something certainly happened to Bartholomew Johnson in the years after the Restoration: the Hearth Tax Returns for 1662 for his parish of St Margaret’s appear to have been eaten by rodents, but in 1664 he should have featured in the extant Returns of Canterbury if he were still there, but he did not. The most likely explanation is that he died. Did he die at home in Canterbury or exotically at sea wrapped in a military uniform far beyond the aspirations of an average barber? The answer to this depends on the answer to the more basic questions: did Aphra go to Surinam at all?12 Is it likely that she was the daughter of such an important man as the ‘Memoirs’ claimed?
To take the middle question: the main witness for Aphra’s stay in Surinam is the story, Oroonoko, helped by a few supporting documents in manuscript collections and state archives. This story depicts the colony in some depth. It quotes odd words from the native Carib language of the sort an inquisitive visitor might have picked up during a stay and refers to the native habits of counting and healing that accord with detailed memories of others who indubitably visited the region, such as the traveller George Warren.13 What Behn wrote may of course have taken details directly from Warren or from the Deputy Governor of Surinam, William Byam, whose observations were circulating in London in the 1660s. But why should she bother? When she set a story in Spain, she made little effort to provide local colour beyond reference to Spanish honour and the Prado; when she put it in the South of France the characters might as well be picnicking in Tunbridge Wells. Verisimilitude was not much prized by her audience.
The subsidiary Europeans in Oroonoko were all present in Surinam in the early 1660s, from Byam, made into the villain of the tale, with his sidekick, the crude and cruel James Banister, to the cultured young Cornishman, John Trefry, and the shrewd ex-Parliamentarian George Marten, now a colonel in the local militia. Indeed the fact that Behn’s opinions of these men did not follow her later Royalist principles—she liked Marten, called a ‘rational gentleman, and of loyalty and resolution’ despite his Parliamentarian past, and disliked the Royalists, Byam and Banister—suggests personal experience.14 Yes, she probably went to Surinam.
What then of her father, the alleged lieutenant-general? Would not someone have mentioned such an elevated background before Behn published Oroonoko during her last years of life? Wouldn’t she herself?
Among vaguely maritime English functionaries, there is only a purser called Johnson and a storekeeper at Portsmouth. There are some Johnsons on both sides of the law in the West Indies, some being slavers, some pirates, and one becoming a lieutenant-governor of Nevil in the eighteenth century. But there is no Johnson intended for high office in Surinam in any of the records, nor any among Willoughby’s known relatives.15
The biographical sketch which Charles Gildon wrote to preface her posthumous play, The Younger Brother, asserts that Aphra Behn went with her family merely to settle in Surinam. Yet there are no suitable Johnsons among the recorded settlers either. It is, too, an unlikely move for a man neither destitute nor equipped with money to trade or buy land. As a character enquires at the beginning of one of Behn’s last plays, The Widdow Ranter, which calls on her Surinam memories, ‘what Chance... drove thee to this part of the New World?’ Another observes, ‘Men of Fortune seldom travell hither Sir to see fashions.’16
Yet, if they do not endorse Aphra’s father, Gildon’s remarks may give some validity to the daughter’s journey. The Younger Brother was dedicated by Gildon to Colonel Christopher Codrington. This young man, unborn when Behn allegedly visited Surinam, had a Caribbean past and his father, captain-general of the Leeward Islands, had sold property to George Marten in Barbados in the 1640s and 1650s, before the latter’s financial collapse and removal to Surinam. In Oroonoko, Behn claimed she knew George Marten; his colourful family saga of dour Puritan father of two rakish sons, one flamboyant (Henry) and the other more secretive (George), forms part of the plot of her Younger Brother, a use suggesting some intimate talk between Aphra and George, whom, outside Surinam she could not have met. Also, a connection between Behn and Codrington seems possible, perhaps close enough to speculate that Gildon might have heard of Behn’s Surinam past from the Colonel, who was probably known to them both. (Codrington could, of course, have refuted the claim to such a past if he had heard nothing of it.) Without such a connection, it seems strange that Gildon, a free-thinking man, should dedicate the amoral work of a woman often rebuked a
s an atheist to such a distinguished man; although a wit and patron of other playwrights, Codrington was also pious, and he left his Barbadian estates for the founding of a college to train medical missionaries who were to live obedient celibate lives.
Oroonoko and the ‘Memoirs’ have Aphra’s father dying at sea, a claim which The Younger Brother sketch fails to make. As it happens, this was the fate of the real ruler and proprietor of Surinam, the Lord Willoughby, who was lost in a storm just after the time when Aphra must have travelled there. To make a good story, a transference would be easy. This is the more likely when one considers Oroonoko again. For what does it say about this important father? Nothing, except that he dies. His death seems to have had little impact on his daughter, who would be very noisy in her grief for patriarchal men in the future. It is also curious how little of her father’s supposed importance rubs off on to his widow, as would be customary. Neither Oroonoko nor the ‘Memoirs’ nor any of the supporting records assign any particular status to Aphra’s mother. It is Aphra alone who is prominent in Surinam.
A further transference may have been from Deputy Governor Byam to Aphra’s father. Mr Johnson is said to have been given the position of lieutenant-general. This was, in fact, awarded to Byam through Willoughby at this time. Again it sounds as though Behn is organising matters fictionally, on this occasion to justify the attitude she provides for herself as fictional character in Oroonoko: of consuming hatred of Deputy Governor Byam. She could have been jealous of a man who had apparently taken her father’s place.
As a voyager, then, Mr Johnson may well have been a fantasy or a displacement. And, if Aphra did indeed reach Surinam, it was more likely than not under her own sail. She was always adept at making necessary images of herself and, if one had the misfortune to go to the New World, one had to surround the event with as much respectability as possible.
