Erskine Clarke - By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey

BY THE RIVERS OF WATER

BY THE RIVERS OF WATER

A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey

ERSKINE CLARKE

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Copyright 2013 by Erskine Clarke

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TEXT DESIGN BY JEFF WILLIAMS

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Clarke, Erskine, 1941-author.

By the rivers of water : a nineteenth-century Atlantic odyssey / Erskine Clarke.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-465-03769-8 (e-book)

1. Wilson, J. Leighton (John Leighton), 18091886. 2. Wilson, Jane Bayard, 18091885. 3. MissionariesLiberiaBiography. 4. MissionariesGabonBiography. 5. MissionariesUnited StatesBiography. 6. Presbyterian Church in the U.S.MissionsLiberia. 7. Presbyterian Church in the U.S.MissionsGabon. 8. Grebo (African people)Missions. 9. Mpongwe (African people)Missions. I. Title.

BV3625.L6W554 2013

266.51092dc23

2013021385

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Judy and Will

And he shall be like

a tree planted by the

rivers of water, that

bringeth forth fruit

in his season.

PSALM 1:3, KJV

CONTENTS

1. Birds Eye View. In this view of antebellum Savannah, Hutchinson Island can be seen in the distance. The Bayard slave settlement was toward the left end of the island.

2. Hutchinson Island. This map shows the layout of the Bayard property on Hutchinson Island. Note the slave settlement, the landing, and the old rice fields with their canals and dams. Courtesy of the Georgia Historical Society.

3. Georgia Coast. A network of tidal rivers and creeks marks coastal Georgia. Both Bayard slaves going to Generals Island and Jane Bayard going to Fair Hope Plantation frequently travelled the inland waters between Savannah and Darien.

4. Sumter County. The Black River, South Carolina, served as a highway for Scotch-Irish settlers in the eighteenth century. By the 1850s, the plantations and churches of their descendants reflected the wealth created by a rapidly growing slave population.

5. Western Africa. This map, from Leighton Wilsons Western Africa, provides an overview of the coast and shows the geographic relationship of Cape Palmas to Gabon and the major places the Wilsons visited on their travels in West Africa.

6. Harper, Big Town, and Vicinity. This map shows the relationship of the Fair Hope mission to its setting at Cape Palmas. Note Bayard Island.

7. Gabon Estuary. Gabon rivers and their estuary provided easy access in the nineteenth century to Mpongwe towns and villages.

8. The American Board. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was one of many Protestant mission agencies rapidly expanding its work around the world during the nineteenth century. Note that Indian Nations were regarded as foreign missions.

By the Rivers of Water is a history set in the midst of a nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It is a story of a strange odyssey by a young white couple from the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry who left plantation homes and the elegant little city of Savannah and sailed ocean highways to West Africa. There they lived for seventeen years, first in a cottage above the pounding surf at Cape Palmas and later in a cottage by the broad waters of the Gabon estuary. Odysseus-like, they sailed along what was for them an exotic coastline and sometimes ventured up great rivers and followed ancient paths. They encountered different peoples, found cultures that evoked both admiration and horror, and visited landscapes of great beauty and waiting dangers. But unlike Odysseus, they did not undergo in their travels a journey from a great estrangement to a spiritual restoration; this was no odyssey from a war-torn city to a longed-for home. Rather, their odyssey was a journey into a wider world and into an expansion of the human spirit. And their return to home was a return that followed the call of familiar voices, places, and scenesa seductive call that emerged from deep within their memories and that echoed in their hearts. They returned because they were unable to resist the voice of a beckoning Southern homeland, unable to ignore the call of those who had loved them since their childhood, unable to abandon those who were waiting at home for them.