by Janet Todd
For his murderous attempt, Allin was condemned to die ignominiously, a fate which he managed to pre-empt with ‘Landocum’. But his corpse had the full treatment: it was
dragged from the Gaol by the common Hangman, and Negroes, to the Pillory... where a Barbicue was erected; his Members cut off, and flung in his face, they and his Bowels burnt under the Barbicue... his Head to be cut off, and his Body to be quartered, and when dry-barbicued or dry-roasted, after the Indian manner, his Head to be stuck on a pole at Parham, and his Quarters to be put up at the most eminent places of the Colony.25
Aphra Behn may well have read this gruesome account later in a small pamphlet that Deputy Governor Byam published on the affair. If so, the details remained with her and inspired some of the grimmer passages in Oroonoko. There the heroic slave, likewise fed on Plutarch’s Lives, planned an heroic assassination of Byam followed by his own suicide. He, too, failed at both and was hacked to death.
Chapter 5
Surinam: African Slaves and Native Americans
‘sure the whole Globe of the World cannot show so delightful a Place’
On his third expedition to the New World in 1498, Columbus had arrived at the mouth of the Orinoco (or Oroonoko as it was often spelt) on the north coast of South America. He believed he had reached the river which led to the Earthly Paradise on the apex of the world, the nipple of the earth’s female breast. Since Columbus logically concluded that he would need to travel uphill to follow the river, he turned back, declaring that it was God’s will that he leave the Paradise untouched. This mixture of observation and fantasy can be traced in the work of many who actually stepped ashore in this region over the next two hundred years.1
If Aphra judged Surinam settlers as if they were Englishmen in England, she saw everything else, from St John’s Hill and ‘tigers’ to slaves and Indian gold, through the lens of literature, much as Columbus had done. If not actually carrying with her the bulky romances of La Calprenède, she was certainly transporting them in her head. At the same time, such romantic looking could co-exist with down-to-earth calculations, both financial and political. In this again Aphra was far from unique.
Harley’s plantation of St John’s Hill appeared especially Arcadian; Aphra called it the most delightful place in ‘the whole Globe of the World’. According to Oroonoko, in its groves it was ‘Eternal Spring, always the very Months of April, May, and June’; the Shades are perpetual, the Trees bearing at once all degrees of Leaves and fruit, from blooming Buds to ripe Autumn’.2 The land of alien abundance had become an idealised version of the seasonal north. Big colourful parrots screeched in the trees and the tiny hummingbird darted among the flowers. Black, saffron and wood-coloured butterflies flew about, as well as the ‘Cammel-flye’ with its wings like small leaves. The traveller George Warren wrote that, ‘having lived a while, [this butterfly] at length lights upon the ground, takes Root, and is transformed into a Plant’. He had this ‘Information of the Honourable William Byam, Lord General of Guiana, and Governour of Surinam, who, I am sure is too much a Gentleman to be the Author of a Lye’. For all her romance-reading Aphra was not so credulous.
The identification Aphra made of Surinam with Arcadia becomes even clearer in what she omitted from Oroonoko. Most settlers were forcefully struck by the mosquitoes, which could only be avoided by burning tobacco leaves, and by the heat. The colony was tropical, torrid, and always dank, and she had probably arrived towards the end of the hottest and most unhealthy season, when the climate was ‘something violent’. Athough there were some cool places, the air was on the whole unhealthy, influenced by the marshes that surrounded the higher ground. It was only cooled by clouds, rains and the north east breezes which ‘Refigerate the Aire’. These rains she could not have missed for, in the new year, they turned much of the land into muddy swamp. Warren thought the climate good for the old, but not for the young, who suffered often from fevers and agues. Many diseases awaited those who could not handle the climate or adapt to the diet, and yaws, dropsy and gout were common. Perhaps it was the memory of England that made it idyllic. In November and December, when she was in Surinam, England would have been suffering long dark nights and short days. The tropics, with almost equal days and nights, must have seemed a ‘constant summer’.
With other travellers Aphra saw strange animals through the forms of those she already knew. Deer were like those in England, while native hares were as large as pigs. Porcupines she viewed as huge hedgehogs; the unfamilar ‘cusharee’ became a tiny lion; and the marmoset was the size of a rat, but with human hands and face. The big cats were labelled ‘tigers’, a word that included leopards, jaguars and panthers. Neither an eighteenth-century scientist listing types nor a Romantic seeing sublime vistas and energetic Nature, Aphra fitted things into her existing mental categories and perceived all in human terms.3 Like John Evelyn, who noted it in his diary, she was, for example, astounded by the torpedo or electric eel that could deaden the feeling of any living thing it touched. As usual, however, she did not wonder long without bringing in its effect on humanity. It was dangerous since, in the temporary paralysed state it induced, a person swimming in the river might drown.4 In her case the association was benign: she seems not to have been a swimmer and so had little to fear. Instead she records eating such an eel.
Inevitably, too, there was the vision of romance. In Oroonoko, the narrator goes with the hero on an expedition during which he single-handedly kills a tiger and presents it to her. It was the kind of valiant act that smattered the pages of La Calprenède. In Warren, the outcome of such a foolhardy encounter is less heroic: a man wanting very much to ‘meet with a Tyger’ does so and is killed by it.5 Huge water snakes, not especially ferocious once they had eaten and grown unwieldy, were alarming in their bulk to many visitors, but Aphra had met such mythologically sized beasts before in the pages of La Calprenède, taking on the mighty Alexander.
Most visitors saw the ‘primitive’ native American Indians either as happy innocents to be taught or cannibalistic savages to be suppressed. Warren found them cowardly and treacherous, while, according to the traveller Esquemelin, before the European invasion of the region, they were barbarous, sensual, brutish, and idle, rousing themselves only to fight each other. It was generally agreed that the climate made them lazy and that they lacked northern shame, the women’s ‘Flap for Modesty’ being thrown off once they had borne a child. Although they had an attractive initial bashfulness, they were labelled lascivious and addicted to caressing and kissing. (Yet, despite the attitude that they were ‘a people bloody and Trecherous, and not to be conversed with’, the natives were never so alien that the colonists could think of avoiding sexual contact with the women; consequently various sorts of venereal disease were rife among both natives and settlers.6)
Although Warren had some hopes the Native Americans might be christianised, Aphra again saw through romance, outside the context of European religion. She relished the childlike frankness of the natives and had no interest in converting them from it, regarding them as inhabiting a Golden Age when words were ‘simple’ and souls ‘sincere’. Her predecessor here is the sixteenth-century French essayist, Montaigne, who wrote in a tolerant essay about ‘cannibals’ on this coast: the South Americans are close to nature and without artifice, with ‘no words for treachery, lying, cheating, envy, backbiting or forgiveness’.7
Despite this romantic image of Golden Age innocence, Aphra had no problem with England’s imperial adventure. Years later in The Widdow Ranter she made her hero aware of injustice in conquest but also believe that the conqueror had the right to maintain what he had won by skill or force. The Native Americans were, indeed, innocent, and their innocence suggested their fate to her: since like children they would be controlled and disciplined and she expected the corrupt Europeans to dominate them where they could. The natives were there to be appreciated, to indicate where resources were located, and to be used.
As proprietor of Surinam, Willough
by had been instructed to trade and ‘treat with the natives...or if injurious or contumacious, to persecute them with fire and sword’.8 While Aphra was in Surinam, the natives had indeed proved troublesome and there was some fear of revolt from their combination with the slaves.9 As an agent, she would need to find out about this possibility as well as about trading. On the evidence of Oroonoko, she made an interesting attempt.
Leaving her mother and sister in St John’s Hill, Aphra went with her maid, ‘a woman of good courage’, probably the woman who remained with her for much of her life, and her brother, the kinsman, one or two others and a guide, to meet the natives. She was excited to come upon a group dancing and going about their household duties.
In most accounts, the Native Americans wear ornaments, mainly from the settlers, of glass or brass in their noses, lips and ears, and load their legs, necks and arms with beads and shells. To Aphra, bundled up in taffeta cap with black feathers, petticoats, shoes, stockings, and garters with silver lace at the edges, they appeared naked, however.10 Her brother was no less resplendent in stuff suit, with silver loops and buttons and a quantity of green ribbon. It was a cross cultural moment to savour, as each group looked with amazement at the strangeness of the other, for these particular Native Americans had never seen white people before. The English were the greater spectacle: to find layered petticoats in tropical heat was certainly stranger than a discovery of nakedness.
The estrangement did not last long. Soon the natives were fingering her hair and Aphra was making a present of her garters, while retaining her shoes and stockings. Perhaps she was relieved to experience some slackness in her apparel at last. In exchange, she may at this juncture have received the full set of coloured head feathers which she took back to England as a novelty. Hospitality followed as she and her party ate venison and buffalo on top of broad leaves. It was a meal in Paradise, prelapsarian but too peppered.
In return, Aphra and her brother played flutes and the kinsman showed his scientific tricks—if a Colepeper relative, he here revealed a family resemblance with the Colonel, who was especially entranced by scientific experiments. The kinsman set fire to paper with a glass, thus turning himself into a powerful magician in the natives’ eyes. It all helped to suggest the dominance of the Europeans, as Aphra noted. But, when she met the young native medicine man, her understanding of how he worked, through tricks and cunning, became relevant to her own society of priests and quack doctors. It was perhaps no bad thing to cure patients more by ‘fancy’ than through medicines; the mystical vegetarian Thomas Tryon held the same view and accepted cures through the control of the mind.
Along with her perception of the country, its animals and people, Aphra also saw gold in a literary glow. The age was obsessed with gold and, in his ‘Adversaria’, Colepeper speculated endlessly about its creation from other metals. Much earlier, Columbus had assumed that El Dorado, the mythical Indian prince who was powdered in gold after his bath, lived in South America, while Sir Walter Ralegh in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had gone on futile quests for part mythical, part commercial gold in the very region Aphra was herself visiting. Only gold, natural it was thought to sunny lands, could originally have brought anyone to this steaming region.
Aphra, too, thought of gold as a kind of mystical money. Like Ralegh, she had bizarrely mingled the Golden Age myths with the stories of Indian gold; so, when she met some ‘Indians of strange Aspects’, who ‘brought along with ’em Bags of Gold Dust, which, as well as they cou’d give us to understand, came streaming in little small Chanels down the high Mountains, when the Rains fell’, she transmuted their words into her myths. Indeed, in Oroonoko, even the effort to hold the ‘Gold’ drew on legends. In romance, guards are always placed on the golden river: something must stand between the adventurer and the realisation of the vision. In Oroonoko ‘the Country was mad to be going on this Golden Adventure,’ she wrote, but Lord Willoughby, having been sent a sample of the dust, relayed instructions that seekers should be restrained and that ‘a Guard shou’d be set at the Mouth of the River of Amazons, (a River so call’d, almost as broad as the River of Thames) and prohibited all People from going up that River, it conducting to those Mountains of Gold.’ Whatever Aphra had experienced in South America in the way of gold dust, she surely did not ‘see’ the Amazon.
The sceptical King Charles was probably less imposed on by legend. When, on her return, Aphra told him of the golden hope, she was aggrieved to find that, though his desire for new sources of wealth was mightily keen, he did not immediately try to develop Surinam gold. Spain had grown rich on American gold but, so far, the English had had nothing like such treasure from their outposts and the King was probably sick of legends of El Dorado. They had been around too long: he knew how Ralegh had repeatedly been fooled by them and had irritated his grandfather, James I. Soon events overtook him:
we going off for England before the Project was further prosecuted, and the Governour [Willoughby] being drown’d in a Hurricane, either the Design dy’d, or, the Dutch have the Advantage of it; And ’tis to be bemoan’d what his Majesty lost by loosing that part of America.11
The future was, however, with the King, though unbeknownst to any of the players, since he had by then exchanged Surinam for the colony of New York.
As she approached the Native Americans in Arcadia’s light, so Aphra saw the African slaves through La Calprenède and a play which meant much to her as a young woman, Othello.12 With her head full of the noble and passionate black hero of Shakespeare and the noble but barbarous Oroondates of La Calprenède’s Cassandra, she may well have expected to see an African prince, a prince of Ethiop, such as Oroonoko in Surinam, where Warren anticipated only the ‘naturally treacherous and bloody.’13 Certainly her African Oroonoko would have much in common with Oroondates who, as prince of the Scythians, was simply a racial other for the Greeks.
The settlers had turned to African slaves when demand outstripped supply of indentured labourers in the 1650s, since sugar needed much cheap labour.14 As neither white nor black managed to raise enough children in the unhealthy conditions of Surinam, a new supply of labourers was always wanted. Given the constant need, slavery proved a burgeoning trade for slave-merchants. In 1662 a charter was granted to a company headed by James, Duke of York, to supply 3,000 slaves per annum to the West Indies; soon the main source of labour in all the Caribbean colonies was slaves. Willoughby himself became a great slave-trader.
Slaves came from where they were available and where commercial contacts between European merchants and African slave traders existed. Some groups were more desirable than others. The Calabaries from the Niger delta, for instance, were not much in demand since they were regarded as poor workers and weaker people. The most desirable for both the Dutch and English came from the Slave Coast and Gold Coast, called Cormantin in some accounts after the much disputed English castle on the coast of modern Ghana, not far from Cape Coast; it was from this place that Behn’s slave hero, Oroonoko, originated.15 Although most slaves were obtained through African traders, European slave captains did sometimes capture their own cargo, as in her story and in an episode recorded by Anthony à Wood from 1678, when a ‘Tall Indian King... was betrayed on Board of an English Interloper, and Barbarously abused’. (This man, Escelin, a chief from ‘Guinny’—the word ‘Indian’ referred to any strange dark person—was redeemed from slavery by an English merchant and exhibited in Oxford for 3d a viewing.)16
Aphra had the prejudices and opinions of her nation and race, but she was also open to new customs and types, and she had no sense of absolute superiority of any group. She had grown up accepting that every race enslaved every other if it could and that no society existed entirely without this. Slavery as a trade by the English was not yet on a huge scale and, although she would have read of Nubian slaves, she would not have associated slavery exclusively with Africans. Indeed her romantic fictional reading would have acquainted her far more with Eastern slavery,
especially of the Turks. Thus, although she had many blindspots and prejudices, the absolute distinction of race, so salient a feature of later imperialism, was not one of them. Nor was it likely to be when race was still considered not an absolute biological distinction but a behavioural and cultural one: one might become black by being too much in the sun.
Aphra was not alarmed by slavery as such. Some years later, Thomas Tryon discussed it in a book he wrote to give advice to West Indian planters. He made a rare anti-slavery case through an exemplary slave, provided with European rhetorical skill. Behn never shared Tryon’s sentiments, and, although she warmed to his picture of an educated cultured slave who should never have been enslaved, she also thought some people, white or black, quite suited to slavery. People who could suffer slavery themselves and had a precarious hold on a tropical outpost far from any European centre of power could not assume the racial superiority of a nineteenth-century European in an established empire. Nor could they afford to be squeamish about slavery. In Surinam, Negro slaves were necessary because the natives were too numerous to be enslaved, she wrote.
In her attitude to culture and race, Behn was again close to the position of Montaigne, who wrote, ‘every man calls barbarous anything he is not accustomed to; it is indeed the case that we have no other criterion of truth and right-reason than the example and form of the opinions and customs of our own country’.17 When she came to write Oroonoko about an heroic black slave, Aphra made him distinct from everybody else in parts of her story, as a hero of romance should be, but perfect in the cultural terms of Europe—indeed he seems to have been given the learning of the Cornishman, Trefry, with whom Aphra always associated him in her mind, as well as the staunchness perceived in George Marten. Oroonoko differs from all other black slaves in his extreme blackness, his Roman nose, his straight hair, his European education, and the courtliness worthy of London society. He reads Roman history and appreciates mathematics and technological instruments. Behn knew what she was doing: Europeanising the exotic to make it perfection in her necessarily blinkered eye. She assumed that all found their standards of beauty in their own race, but did not therefore make value judgements about other people’s beauty and their ideas of it: ‘what we think a Deformity they may think a Perfection; as the Negroes of Guinney think us as ugly, as we think them.’18
