by Janet Todd
This was partly because the West Indian colonies were desperate for European women, and everyone in England knew it. In 1655, Cromwell’s Secretary of State, Thurloe, had responded to the pleas from men in Jamaica by dispatching to them a supply of Irish women, suitably outfitted at the state’s expense. He was sorry that he had to use force to get the women on board, but he was determined none the less: he felt it was for their ultimate good.
Other women went out voluntarily, desperate for husbands. A typical ship-load of people bound for a colony such as Barbados consisted of a ‘New-Exchange-Girl’ who was leaving her husband for her lover, two ‘Button-makers’ who doubled as ‘notorious Night-walkers and Pickpockets’, an ‘Orange-Wench’ who was also a whore, bigamist and thief, ‘two Crackt-Maiden-Servants’, one of whom was pregnant by her master’s son, and four ‘Common Prostitutes’; the rest were transportable convicts.17 Because of the female shortage, women who had failed to find a husband in England were said to have luck in the colonies, and those who had lost their reputations could pick up new ones. As the playwright, William Wycherley, wrote in his dedication to The Plain-Dealer, the plantations, like the stage and brothels, were ‘propagated by the least nice Women’.
Aphra was well aware of the opprobrium and, in the dedication to her first written play, The Young King, which she said she had begun in Surinam, she declared she feared her Muse would be thought ‘an American, whose Country rarely produces Beauties of this kind: The Muses seldom inhabit there; or if they do, they visit and away’.18 This was a common anxiety in the colonies ‘unrefined from their original Barbarisme’, where people could not achieve ‘polishings’.19 There was no prestige in having been to America.
What then could she have been doing?
It is just possible that Aphra travelled to Surinam with more socially elevated ladies than herself, even in as lowly a capacity as a maid or companion. If the evidence of her status is doubted, she may have gone as an indentured servant like one of her last characters, the widow Ranter. But, although this Falstaffian woman, in whose description the ageing Aphra Behn may have put part of herself, is admirable and attractive in breeches, there is no suggestion that she could author plays, novels, poems and translations from French and Latin. No, whatever Aphra may have been born, it appears most likely that she went to Surinam as a ‘lady’.
This does not preclude her going as a mistress. Possibly it was to hide the disgrace of being a kept woman that the author of the ‘Memoirs’ insisted on Aphra Behn’s being too young for sexual activity when she left Canterbury for Surinam. Eaffry Johnson would have been twenty-two in 1663, several years older than the majority of pert young heroines in Restoration plays. Who then could have been a candidate as keeper?
Could it have been Lord Willoughby, expected daily in his neglected colony? Years before, he had been mocked for a fat mistress whom he transported overseas:
an old Mistris and a yong Saint; one whose proportion puts us in mind of her Excellencies, and hee that meanes to board her, must put off his doublet and swim, it being of the same size with a Fish-pond; yet it is ten to one if he scape sinking, since shee is somwhat of kin to Goodwin Sands, having swallowed up many Families, many Blew-Garters, Georges, Earls, and Baronies innumerable; among them, as the latest (though of a long continuance), is the Lord Willoughby of Parham; who hath now taken a journey to the Barbados and meanes to pipe her one way since hee cannot another; In Order wherunto he hath provided her a whole Plantation of Tobacco, it being her proper Element....20
But the slippery Lord Willoughby remained absent during Behn’s stay and her reference to him in Oroonoko has a detachment that does not suggest sexual intimacy. No one else she mentions held the authority to give her the status she claims or to provide access to the best house in the colony.
It seems most plausible, then, that Aphra Behn went to Surinam as she would go to Antwerp and had probably been to Ghent, as a spy or agent. Many years later, Samuel Morland wrote a paper entitled ‘A Brief Discourse Concerning the nature and Reason for Intelligence’ in which he argued that the people were naturally vicious, looking always to their own advantage, and that any ruler should always mistrust them.21 This was true of Restoration England and was also true of its outpost, Surinam, which was in need of controlling through secret agents. As the double-dealing Colonel Bampfield later remarked to the English government, ‘you may come to the bottome of ill designes both at home and abroad, by throwing in fit persons amongst them, not suspected...’.22 In Oroonoko, the narrator spies on the hero at the behest of the community; in real life the author might have had a wider remit. In contemporary accounts, Surinam was portrayed as riddled with spies and it was ‘the grand complaint in that Colony that...no society or scarce family [was] found empty of an Informer or Trapanner: one incitement to many hot spirits to speak worse than they thought.’23
The writer of these words was a Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Sanford, a councillor and magistrate in Surinam. In theory, the colony had a fairly democratic form of government created through annual elections but, in 1661, Deputy Governor Byam announced he would retain supreme power. The following year Sanford wrote a petition blaming Byam for clinging to office through military force: ‘The generality, thus robbed of their privileges, begin to mutter, and others better spirited openly deny his power; one of whom is kept prisoner in irons, and others are tried by a kind of military powers, where they are fined and banished.’ Any who opposed his actions were seized when ‘asleep in their beds’. Sanford ended his petition by complaining of how ‘insecure their future life must be under an irritated authority’ and begging ‘those lawless rulers to be commanded home’. When petition led to opposition, Byam easily quelled it and he imprisoned, fined and banished Sanford. In the pamphlet war that ensued, Sanford was forced to prove his innocence ‘against their no-proofs of our guilt’, the very ‘Grandeur of their oppression’ giving them impunity.
Faced with conflicting accounts—since Byam also took the precaution of sending his version of events to London—someone in the government or with interest in the colonies might have wanted to send spies to filter out the truth.
The presence in Surinam of William, the son of the old secret service chief, Thomas Scot, could only mean trouble. He had already been suspected of playing a double game in Booth’s uprising just before the Restoration and he was known to have ties with the Dutch, who coveted all England’s precarious territories. Deputy Governor Byam had had Scot under surveillance for some time and had noticed how he consorted with the old Commonwealth faction in the colony. This inevitably made Byam jumpy, for dissidents were dangerous men.
Scot was now a middle-aged married man. He had used his father’s position to gain an important place in the Post Office, which, given the link between espionage and the postal service, brought him very close to the work of intelligence—Aphra had probably come across the name if not the person before the Restoration. He may even have been known to Colepeper, whose distant relative he was. During Thurloe’s tenure at the secret service office in the mid-1650s, Scot had gone to France, presumably as an agent of some sort, since he was given official passes. There he probably met Colonel Bampfield, by then another agent of Thurloe’s and a former one of his father’s. He took his wife Joanna and their child but, finding the child a burden, he dispatched it back to England, whence his wife also returned a month later. This domestic detail enforces William’s reputation as a ne’er-do-well who had inherited his father’s reputed susceptibility to women but not his professional abilities. In December 1656, Thomas Scot had the embarrassment of having to ask help from his successor, Thurloe, as a result of ‘my improvident son in France and his only child here which his wife hath been pleased to send home to me’.24
With his father’s resumption of power over the secret service after Cromwell’s death, William returned to the Post Office. But his recklessness with money continued and, when the Restoration came in sight in March 1660, two warrants were issued,
the first for his arrest and the second for the requisition of £1000 from the Post Office.
As for Thomas, who had had ‘little apprehension of his Majesty’s probable accession to the Government’, it must have been a miserable moment when it dawned on him that the son of the king whose death warrant he had signed was about to become supreme ruler of his country, worse when he learnt that his name had been omitted from the general pardon and Act of Oblivion that followed the Restoration. Belatedly, he disguised himself and escaped to Brussels. There he was recognised by English agents. Credulous to the end, he was persuaded to give himself up, apparently believing that he might save his life. In July he was in the Tower and his trial followed in October. Even at this juncture he hoped that ‘his Majesty will not... Revenge as to blood.’ During his trial Thomas Scot presented himself as a useful hack who could still be of some limited service to the new regime: ‘some drudgery they might looke for from my knowne diligence & faithfulnesse.’25 He gave much information on espionage, but declined to name all his sources, though he did mention Bampfield in Holland. Thomas Scot was executed on 17 October 1660, an exemplary lesson for his son William, who would try not to be as credulous and sincere.26
Thomas Scot’s execution made hiding in England unwise for his son. Certainly William could not have gone near his family and he can have expected nothing from his father’s property which was forfeited.27 He had a brother, another Thomas, in Ireland who might have been useful, but this Thomas had, in the nick of time, moved over to the Royalist cause and could count himself among those who had forwarded ‘the restitution of his Majesty’.28 As a result, he was given a free pardon in January 1661.29 He was not likely to have welcomed his less politically agile brother to his home.
The Continent would be the obvious place of escape, but his father’s experiences in Brussels must have deterred the son. The far off colonies in America, full of criminals and fugitives, seemed good and distant places to hide, as many other dissidents who had failed to make satisfactory transitions had found. Major-General Whalley, a regicide, had, for example, fled to New England. Scot had the added incentive that another brother had settled in Surinam as one of Willoughby’s planters. But, although it would take some time before the demand for the Post Office’s £1000 arrived, he cannot have expected to be free from English agents who would watch him even there. Perhaps Scot did not entirely want to be. Possibly he had already approached Whitehall with some sort of complicated deal and needed someone to speak to and relay his message. Aphra might have been asked to make contact with William Scot in Surinam, as well as discovering the attitudes of his fellow dissidents.
If Aphra went as an agent, who would have sent her? Perhaps Hyde, now Earl of Clarendon, whose son Laurence was involved with Willoughby in the proprietorship of Surinam. Most likely it was in part Willoughby—or an agent of Willoughby’s—who needed to know something independent of his Deputy Governor. Willoughby was a devious man; trusting no one and trusted by few, he may have been anxious about his own control over his colony now run by the autocratic Byam, a man who had, in the Sanford affair, shown signs of incompetence. At about the time of Aphra’s visit, Willoughby had come from England to attend to his West Indian colonies and it is likely that he would dispatch agents to those he could not immediately visit, like Surinam. He himself concentrated on Barbados. Perhaps, too, the King himself heard of disputes and dangers in his territories and was interested. According to the ‘Memoirs’, when she returned, Aphra had an audience with Charles II to give him ‘An Account of his Affairs there’, not the usual consequence of a young woman’s trip abroad.
It was never the policy in Whitehall to listen to only one agent or let anyone spy without being spied upon. At about the same time as Aphra went to Surinam, so did a Renatus Enys. He too was in touch with the authorities back in London. Since there are many records of spies wittingly or unwittingly travelling together, Aphra might actually have journeyed out with Enys from England. His ship arrived in Surinam on 27 August 1663.30 It had taken nine weeks.
A person with such a purpose as Aphra’s could not travel alone and she seems to have set off with her full family of mother, sister, younger brother and maids. They were useful in giving her respectability and covering her activities. The dead father could be lamented on arrival and a kinsman, mentioned in Oroonoko, perhaps a distant member of her family or, more likely, of the Colepepers, could be greeted as pretext for the outlandish journey.31
Chapter 4
Colonial Politics: Willoughby and Byam
‘a sympathetical passion of the Grand Shephead Celadon’
Aphra has left no description of her epic voyage in a wooden ship across the Atlantic to Surinam, but she does refer to the pains of sea travel. In an early play a character describes being becalmed during ‘a long voyage to Sea, where after a while even the calms are distasteful, and the storm’s dangerous: one seldom sees a new object, ’tis a deal of Sea, Sea’. Into a late translation she inserted a graphic description of a sea-storm, in which the sky grew black, ‘The Billows all into Dis-order hurl’d, / As if they meant to bury all the World.’1 The ship’s passengers run to their cabins and distractedly try to repent to persuade Heaven to save them. Then the storm subsides, as do the fear and repentance, while each ‘with still doubting Eyes looks round about’.2 On more ordinary days she knew what it was to feel the ship dismantling about her as she lay confined in the small cabin on a damp mattress and to have her stomach ‘wamble’—roll with nausea and sickness—from both the slurping sea and the mouldy meat.3
Aphra would have been on a smallish vessel, which would most likely have joined a convoy, since ships tended to congregate together to avoid privateers. The seas were violent places and it was always possible for a vessel to be captured by pirates and its passengers sold as slaves to the Turks—as she imagines in many of her later works.4 There was also the fear of the Spanish who enslaved Europeans for their colonies in Peru and of the French who forced Protestants into their galleys. Then there was the conflicted interest of English authorities and colonists. The English authorities desired to control trade and shipping between its colonies and Europe; they were eager to prevent what the colonists especially wanted, direct communication between themselves and the Continent. Convoys prevented English ships from straying, or being lured, into strange ports.
No doubt at intervals Aphra witnessed the various rituals each ship followed, the ‘baptising’ of new travellers perhaps or the dousing of crew and passengers as they entered the tropics, the drinking to celebrate certain moments passed. Few long sea voyages could have occurred without a death, in which case the dead man would be thrown overboard and given a volley or two in respect.5
A typical few days from a seaman called Basil Ringrose suggests what Aphra endured. He described the food in some detail, how they made ‘plumb Pudding of Salt-water and wine-Lees’, how water, which quickly grew brackish and foul, had to be rationed once they were out to sea and beyond the rainy or drizzly climate. Towards the end of their voyage their food would be ‘very scanty with us’. The live animals would have been slaughtered and eaten and the salted meat grown stinking. On the return route, there might have been oranges and lemons, but not on the voyage out (the use of fruit to prevent scurvy would not be common on sea voyages until the late eighteenth century). Ringrose also described the great winds and storms, the riggings giving way and the frantic and lengthy mendings, as well as the dull days hazy with rain. Huge tempestuous seas threatened the ship at one moment, while at another it was becalmed in fog and mist. A gale would make the crew take in the foresail and loosen the mizen which would be blown to pieces, while the sea splashed round them all a foam. His ship usually made about 32 or 35 leagues in a day, sometimes 42 in good weather, sometimes as low as 18 in the dark.6
The solvent passengers on the small ships had to travel light since there was not much room for baggage. When the useless young Tom Verney had been dispatched by his family to Virginia a
couple of decades before to cultivate ‘much tobacco’, he had taken three servants, a featherbed, blankets and a pair of sheets. Aphra, her mother, sister and their maid would have had to carry along those necessary items to live in the tropics and to keep up appearances as ladies. No doubt they had brought pomanders and smelling salts. The lavatorial arrangements were crude for all, but, for menstruating women wearing multiple layers of clothing, they must have been particularly unsatisfactory. On such a long journey Aphra is likely to have had some ailment and she may thus have been wearing her hair unusually short; long hair was regarded as sapping to a woman’s strength.
After many weeks of cold and damp, the travellers would spy the first land bird and know they would soon be seeing a coast. They would all begin ‘to look out sharp on all sides for land, expecting to see it every minute’. Then at last there would be proof, that hazy line that could have been cloud, except that it was there in the morning as well as the evening: ‘I cannot easily express the infinite joy we were possessed withal, this day to see our own country-men again.’
It is likely that these countrymen were first spied by Aphra in Virginia. This was an established settlement, and the wealth from tobacco allowed the planters and their wives flamboyantly to display new status unthinkable back in England. A person with a sense of the ridiculous would enjoy the sight of ex-criminals on the bench and of their ex-servant wives sporting expensive beaver hats. As in all the southern American colonies, the authorities had trouble with blasphemers, drunks and ‘open scandalous livers’, and the Governor had much ado to follow the orders of the English authorities, that he suppress vice and debauchery: it was, he had been told, especially important to keep up standards in ‘plantations if far from their owne Country’, for, without pleasing God and gaining his assistance, ‘they are in dayly hazard of perishing.’7 Laws were passed to keep the colonists in church or chapel on a Sunday—the fine for non-compliance being 50 pounds of tobacco.
