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Embracing Protestantism

University Press of Florida

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
New College of Florida, Sarasota
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
Embracing Protestantism
Black Identities in the Atlantic World

John W. Catron 

Univer sit y Press of Florida

Gainesville / Tallahassee / Tampa / Boca Raton
Pensacola / Orlando / Miami / Jacksonville / Ft. Myers / Sarasota
Copyright 2016 by John W. Catron
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Chapter 3 originally appeared as “Early Black-Atlantic Christianity in the Middle Colonies:

Social Mobility and Race in Moravian Bethlehem” in Pennsylvania History 76, no. 3 (2009):
301–345, copyright © 2009 by The Pennsylvania State University Press. This article is used by
permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press.

This book may be available in an electronic edition.

21 20 19 18 17 16 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Catron, John W., author.
Title: Embracing Protestantism : black identities in the Atlantic world / John W. Catron.
Description: Gainesville : University Press of Florida, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015036777 | ISBN 9780813061634
Subjects: LCSH: Blacks—Atlantic Ocean Region—Religion. | Christians, Black—Atlantic Ocean
Region—History. | Protestantism—History. | African diaspora—History.
Classification: LCC BR563.N4 C385 2016 | DDC 270.7089/96—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036777

The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System
of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast
University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida,
University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University
of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

University Press of Florida

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To the two people who inspired me and kept the faith:
my mother, Patricia,
and my wife, Tracey


 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1
1. Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 15
2. The Favorite of Heaven: Antigua and the Growth of Black
Atlantic Christianity 50
3. Early Black Atlantic Christianity in the Middle Colonies 101
4. Black Evangelical Diaspora in the Greater Caribbean 150
5. Afro-Christian Diaspora in the Age of Revolution 195
Conclusion 224

Notes 231
Bibliography 269
Index 299
 Acknowledgments

No one writes a work of history by himself, and I am no exception. Without

the help and encouragement of academic advisers, the staffs of historical ar-
chives, family members, fellow graduate students, and friends, this project
would never have been started, much less completed. I am grateful to the
staff of the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, for providing
me access to its extensive holdings of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-cen-
tury Afro-Moravian culture, to which important parts of this work can be
attributed. The chief archivist in Bethlehem, Paul Peucker, was particularly
helpful, as was his knowledgeable assistant Lanie Graf. Former Moravian
archivist Vernon Nelson also provided valuable insights into early Mora-
vian history and suggested further venues for research that were particu-
larly fruitful. The staff of the archives and of Moravian College made it pos-
sible for me to spend several weeks in Bethlehem; this gave me a chance, in
my off hours, to explore the region where many of the historical characters
in this study lived and worked, adding immeasurably to my understanding
of the subject.
I am indebted as well to the staffs of the Georgia Historical Society, the
South Carolina Historical Association, the Library of Caroliniana, Mora-
vian House–London, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the
University of London, Lambeth Palace, Regents Park College–Oxford
University, the Latin American Collection at the University of Florida, and
Interlibrary Loan, all of them for allowing me access to their extensive col-
lections and services.
 Fellow panelists and the commentators at several history conferences
in which I have had the good fortune to participate have provided much-
needed criticism. My chapter 4, on evangelical networks in the Greater
Caribbean, benefited from the insights of the panelists and audience of a
conference in 2004 at the University of North Carolina–Greensboro on
“Creating Identity and Empire in the Atlantic World, 1492–1888.” Likewise,
chapter 2, on Antigua’s central role in eighteenth-century Protestant evan-
gelization, was immeasurably improved by the comments of Alexander X.
Byrd, Vincent Carretta, and Dee Andrews at the Omohundro Institute of
Early American History and Culture’s annual meeting in Salt Lake City in
2009. I would like to thank the anonymous readers from Pennsylvania His-
tory for their suggestions on more clearly defining my arguments in chapter
3, on black Christianity in the mid-Atlantic colonies. I am appreciative of
the comments made by the anonymous readers who critiqued my submis-
sion to Church History that after some revisions became chapter 5. Some of
the most insightful critiques came from the thoughtful analyses of the re-
viewers for the University Press of Florida, all of whom suggested changes
that appear in the text. Of particular help was Douglas Chambers, who en-
couraged me to take a closer look at the presence and influence of African
ethnic groups, specifically the Igbo, in early American culture.
At the University of Florida, Jon Sensbach encouraged my interest in
early American history while guiding me into several fruitful areas of study.
Jon’s work with early Afro-Moravians and his Atlantic-world perspectives
deepened my own interest in transoceanic religious movements and the
cross-cultural connections that made them possible. David Geggus and
Jeffrey Needell’s seminars on slavery and Brazilian history broadened my
understanding of early American history to include the Caribbean and
Latin America, while David Hackett and Anna Peterson deepened my ap-
preciation of the importance of religion in the historical development of
the Americas. I am thankful for my many excellent fellow graduate students
who, over hundreds of hours of discussions in the cramped graduate stu-
dent lounge and at history seminars, provided a wealth of information from
a wide range disciplines and gave me much thoughtful criticism.
My greatest debt of gratitude is to my family. My mother, Patricia Brod-
ersen, and my late father, John David Catron, inspired in me a love and
appreciation for the past and imbued a lasting curiosity about human
foibles and triumphs. My mother performed the yeomen’s duty of edit-

x • Acknowledgments
ing this work and is therefore responsible for much of what is good about
its literary style and clarity. As my lifelong friends, my sisters, Cecilia and
Carol, and my brother, David, have given continued and enthusiastic sup-
port. Finally, my wife, Tracey, and daughters, Amanda and Heidi, deserve
more thanks than I can give for enduring my long hours of study and the
extended periods I have spent away from them on research trips. This work
is for them.

Acknowledgments • xi
 Introduction

On a muggy fall day in 1792, Henry Beverhout looked out over the low
thatched huts of the newly settled West African bayside village of Free-
town with feelings suffused with both apprehension and hope. Since he
and other black men and women from around the Atlantic basin had sailed
to the freshly established colony of Sierra Leone to start new lives in free-
dom in March of that year and when Afro-Virginian minister David George
preached the first Baptist sermon in Africa under the settlement’s iconic
Cotton Tree, Beverhout suspected that life in the new British colony was
not what they had been promised. Ruthlessly exploited in America, these
expatriates arrived on Sierra Leone’s lush tropical coast determined to chart
a new course for their children and families in Africa, but as they quickly
learned, the path to true freedom was littered with obstacles that the ver-
dant landscape could not easily erase.
In the months and years that followed they came into conflict with white
Sierra Leone Company officials over low pay, high prices, and the slow pace
at which the seemingly abundant land was being apportioned to them. Just
as important, the black émigrés were dismayed by the company’s racially
discriminatory system of justice, whose juries did not, Beverhout com-
plained, “haven aney of our own Culler.” Having absorbed the British and
American legal traditions of trial by a jury of one’s peers, he demanded that
in any “trial thear should be a jurey of both white and black and all should
be equal.” Going even further, Beverhout then made an explosively demo-
cratic claim: “we have a wright to Chuse men that we think proper to act for
us in a reasnenble manner.”1
 Beverhout’s assertion that blacks be put on the same legal footing as
whites was a risky maneuver in 1792 in a colony controlled by Europeans.
It was in part a product of his relocation to a continent dominated by peo-
ple of color, but his iconoclastic ideas and demands for equality also had
their roots in his Atlantic-world upbringing. Born a free person of color
on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, he was the mixed-race son of a black
mother and a white father from one of the leading families in the Danish
West Indies.2 Beverhout’s position among whites and people of color in St.
Croix was bolstered during this period by his connection with the well-es-
tablished international Protestant evangelical religious movement. Firmly
entrenched in the planting class, whites of the Beverhout family were
early supporters of Moravian Church missionaries in their work of bring-
ing the archipelago’s African and creole slaves to Christianity beginning in
the 1730s. Besides being concerned about the fate of their souls, religiously
minded planters like the Beverhouts saw the Christianization of their slaves
as a way to make them better workers, more like Europeans culturally and
thus seemingly less foreign and, they hoped, less likely to rebel. But as often
occurs during the implementation of many attempts at social control, the
objects of the Moravians’ evangelization viewed the situation differently
and seized the opportunity for their own ends.
The introduction of Protestant missionaries brought multiple benefits
for St. Croix’s people of color, perhaps the most important being that it
gave Henry Beverhout and other black converts to Christianity access to a
worldwide evangelical network that over the long run provided an alterna-
tive to the narrative produced by whites in plantation America about the
supposed savagery and inferiority of Africans and people of African de-
scent. This counternarrative took time to overcome the static social struc-
tures of early modern Europe and the economic greed of American slave-
owning plantation masters, but it eventually paved the way to freedom.
Henry Beverhout’s global perspective and sense of personal worth were
enhanced by the unprecedented evangelical Protestant practice of giving
people of African descent positions of authority within the hierarchies of
local churches. Black church members became deacons, elders, and even
preachers, if they did not always receive official sanction from church au-
thorities. Evangelical missionary organizations encouraged international
consciousness among their black members by sponsoring the travel of
select people of color from around the Atlantic basin to receive religious
instruction in North America and Europe as well as for a limited number

2 • Embracing Protestantism
to themselves become missionaries. One of Henry Beverhout’s black cous-
ins, Wilhelm Beverhaut, traveled from the Danish Caribbean island of St.
Thomas in 1756 to attend a boarding school in the Moravian town of Bethle-
hem, Pennsylvania, to be trained as a missionary; in the process he and nu-
merous fellow Afro-Caribbeans became agents of cross-cultural exchange
and helped create what would later blossom into a fully developed black
Atlantic culture.3
Henry Beverhout, perhaps inspired by his cousin, in the early 1770s left
St. Croix for Charleston, South Carolina. Given that slavery and racial dis-
crimination held no less sway in the Lowcountry’s rice plantations than on
Caribbean sugar islands, his reasons for moving from the comforting famil-
iarity of St. Croix to the frighteningly distant mainland appear at first glance
to be unclear. Beverhout’s move begins to make sense, however, in light of
his evangelical upbringing and his later career, both of which drew him to
the Lowcountry capital to do mission work spreading the gospel among his
fellow people of color. British Methodist apostle Francis Asbury came to
Charleston several times during the early 1770s trying to form a church so-
ciety there; he and Beverhout almost certainly came in contact with each
other at that time. As events transpired, the American Revolution curtailed
further collaboration between the two missionaries. Asbury was forced un-
derground because he was the representative of a church deemed too Brit-
ish for American tastes during the war, while Henry Beverhout’s own stay
in South Carolina was shortened when in 1783 he and other white and black
loyalists were evacuated to Canada by the British army.
Undeterred and perhaps welcoming the change of scene and the loss of
Asbury’s patriarchal authority, Beverhout went on to organize an all-black
Methodist congregation in New Brunswick who nine years later migrated
en masse to Sierra Leone on the west coast of Africa. Henry Beverhout’s
religious and civic convictions, forged in the Atlantic world, gave him the
resources and determination to demand greater freedom for himself and
his people wherever they settled. Shortly after he arrived in Sierra Leone,
the colony’s white governor complained about “the Wildest extravagances”
being committed by the transplanted black Methodists at their church ser-
vices. He singled out Beverhout as a chief fomenter of the “evil that many
follow in this violent enthusiastic spirit.”4
Beverhout’s experiences and exposure to exciting new political and re-
ligious ideas then circulating around the peripheries of the North Atlantic
and the actions he took as a result made him, if not evil or extravagant, then

Introduction • 3
certainly somewhat exceptional. His life may have been atypical compared
to those of the vast majority of enslaved people of color who toiled as farm
laborers on North American and Caribbean rice, tobacco, coffee, and sugar
plantations, but his actions do represent in broad outline the strategies used
by many eighteenth-century black Christians in their attempts to forge
new and freer lives for themselves in the British Atlantic world. Educated,
mobile though not always free, and not content to live in static social en-
vironments that oppressed their brothers and sisters, Afro-Christians like
Beverhout moved multiple times throughout their lives in their search for
identity and autonomy. By moving in multiple directions from and to the
Caribbean, North America, Africa, and Europe, they became agents of
cultural exchange and in the process created a new circum-Atlantic Afro-
Christian culture. That culture had its roots in all of the above-named re-
gions but was so much the product of the violence and oppression of slav-
ery as to be disassociated with any discrete national or regional boundary.5
Initially seeing themselves as Temne, Igbo, or Mandinka or as members
of even smaller ethnolinguistic, familial, or village-based groups, the newly
enslaved had only a thin understanding their supposed identities as Afri-
cans. After living in the furnace of racial oppression as slaves in the Ameri-
cas for more than one hundred years, much of this parochial way of think-
ing was burned away as black captives reached out to each other for mutual
support, but for those who embraced Christianity in Britain’s American
empire there was an important intermediate stage.
While in the process of becoming African Americans, people of African
descent also developed Atlantic African Christian identities, eschewing at-
tachments to rigid political boundaries that whites were then forming and
instead recombining into more extranationalist groupings. Rather than be-
ing African American or Afro-British, they were transnational Afro-Meth-
odists, Afro-Baptists, and Afro-Moravians, among others, whose connec-
tions to the religions of their homelands in Africa as well as international
religious organizations in Britain and Europe gave them far more fluid iden-
tities. Late eighteenth-century Anglophone black Christians spurned the
racially exclusionary tendencies of the rising nation-states and did not ini-
tially become African Americans: they were, instead, Atlantic Africans who
used the skills they acquired while living and working along the Atlantic lit-
toral to negotiate better living conditions from a slave society that was just
entering one of its most brutally productive stages.
They were not Ira Berlin’s deracinated Atlantic creoles who attempted to

4 • Embracing Protestantism
integrate themselves at multiple levels into the white cultures of American
seaport towns. America was for most migrant Africans the land of slavery
and white supremacy that offered only limited possibilities for family sta-
bility, cultural creativity, and economic advancement. Alternatively, the At-
lantic promised access to, first, the British abolition movement that in the
1770s was beginning to gain momentum; second, German and British evan-
gelicals in the international abolition movement who gave black parishio-
ners unprecedented power in local church governance; and third, Atlantic-
world evangelical networks that connected displaced Africans in spirit and
sometimes in person with African Christianity in Kongo, Angola, and Por-
tuguese, Dutch, English, and French West Africa. Finally, blacks in North
America found inspiration and comfort in a burgeoning connection they
forged with the large Afro-Protestant churches then being formed in the
West Indies. By embracing Christianity in the eighteenth century, blacks
were not simply accommodating white culture and the social realities of a
brutal system of coerced labor; they were, rather, attempting what became
resistance within accommodation. Christianity was a way, especially after
the American Revolution, for blacks to reach out to third parties in the new
international religious and humanitarian communities being formed for
help in their continuing struggle for freedom.6
To fully appreciate early black culture we must expand our understand-
ing of African American social and religious history in the eighteenth cen-
tury beyond the plantations and plantation churches of Virginia and South
Carolina to include the entire Atlantic world. The surprising mobility of
early Afro-Protestants did much to help create a black evangelical discourse
among the various worlds they inhabited, be they in the plantation South,
the urban and rural North, the Caribbean, or elsewhere. Having been torn
away from family networks in Africa, exposed to the horrors of the Middle
Passage, and somehow surviving the physical hardships and humiliations
of American slavery, African captives and their children had to fashion
new understandings of their worlds. People of color had only attenuated
support from the familiar cultures of their homelands but refused to com-
pletely accept white social practice; they opted for a middle course. Atlantic
African Christianity was not wholly the intellectual property of Europe or
the Americas, but neither was it completely African.
Early Protestant evangelicalism was brought to blacks by usually lower-
status and less-educated whites, and its racial bigotry was at least partly
ameliorated by white believers’ desire for stability and social justice. Com-

Introduction • 5
mitment to racial and social equality dissolved after the American Revolu-
tion as southern whites, including evangelicals, took advantage of new op-
portunities to exploit land and labor;7 black Christians in North America
realized that the only chance they had to gain power and an independent
identity lay with their ability to reach out to other Afro-Christians within
the Atlantic world. Masters, as fierce defenders of the paternalist ethos that
projected their authority and protected their economic interests, wanted
slavery to remain a strictly personal relationship between themselves and
their slaves; by using the “white man’s religion” blacks attempted to bring
that relationship into the public sphere. Early black evangelicals used the
connections they forged with international religious organizations to
broadcast to ever-widening audiences the truth of their own humanity and
the basic immorality and inhumanity of holding people, especially other
Christians, in bondage.8 This book details their initial attempts to foster an
international black Christian community and the Atlantic African identity
that gave it coherence.
Defining the emerging Atlantic African culture these early black evan-
gelicals created is important but difficult, given the diversity of those people
of color who lived in such a large geographic space; nevertheless, identify-
ing three of its general characteristics is useful here. First, Atlantic African
culture in British America was heavily influenced by African spirituality
that emphasized practical solutions to temporal problems rather than the
vague promises offered by white preachers of heavenly rewards after a life
of slavery’s degradation. These people did not suffer in silence; they actively
reached out to sources of power outside their nominally circumscribed
worlds in search of freedom. Second, and quite practically, Atlantic African
culture was delineated by the mobility of its adherents who had the ability
to walk, ride, or sail in their quest for freedom. And third, black Atlantic
Protestants distinguished themselves by their willingness at certain mo-
ments to use violent means to achieve freedom.
It is an understatement to say that black culture in the eighteenth century
was extraordinarily varied; a major theme of this study is the incredible di-
versity among Africans and people of African descent who were enslaved
and discriminated against in the Americas. Many of the men and women
who came to the Americas from West and West Central Africa understood
multiple, often closely related languages and shared common religious and
other cultural values.9 The same can be said, of course, of the languages and
cultures of Europeans, Native Americans, and other peoples in close geo-

6 • Embracing Protestantism
graphic proximity. Having recognized the relative homogeneity of some Af-
rican societies, we must also appreciate how diverse and complex those so-
cieties, which inhabited an entire continent, were and continue to be. Africa
is, after all, a very big place. Environmental zones as widely varied as the arid
Sahara at one extreme, the Sahel and savannah in the middle, and regions
dominated by tropical rainforest at the other extreme affected the develop-
ment of African cultures in important and far-reaching ways. Africa’s tradi-
tional religions, while in many ways quite similar to one another, also served
to particularize rather than unify people from the same region; the people
were overwhelmingly localist in orientation even if they spoke the same or
closely related languages and shared certain facets of culture. Imported reli-
gions like Christianity and Islam were incorporated into the worldviews of
only a minority of Africans, though when they took root they caused even
more fissures in an already multilayered and complex social fabric.
In America, ethnic and religious cleavages among the enslaved remained
and were compounded by the widely varying social, political, economic,
physical, and cultural environments they encountered there. Over time,
slavery and the vagaries of plantation demographics tended to homogenize
ethnic and sub-ethnic differences among the African-born and their de-
scendants as the enslaved sought security in the unity of the oppressed.10
Nevertheless, the sheer size of the British American littoral—stretching
as it did at various times from Trinidad in the tropical West Indies to the
flooded rice fields of subtropical Georgia in the American South to urban
Philadelphia and New York City in the Mid-Atlantic colonies of New Jer-
sey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and finally to the ice and rock of Nova
Scotia in the far north—militated against the creation of a common culture
for America’s people of color. Cultural differences among people of African
descent caused by geographic separation makes it necessary to study dis-
crete black communities in multiple and well-spaced locales all along the
Atlantic littoral. That is why this study examines Afro-Christianity in the
port towns of Atlantic Africa, the British Caribbean, Lowcountry Georgia
and the Carolinas, and the Middle Colonies to their north; because they are
so widely separated from each other, these locations would seem not to be
closely associated culturally or historically.
Remarkably, despite their ethnic diversity and spatial separation, some
enslaved and free people of color in these port towns and the surrounding
hinterlands managed to establish a series of interregional religious commu-
nities that served over the course of several decades to effectively cover up,

Introduction • 7
if not obliterate, Old World cleavages and create a wholly new Atlantic Afri-
can identity. Afro-Christians in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world
remained a diverse group of people, but they were nevertheless able to form
fragile yet enduring networks that fostered the necessary unity to push for
greater autonomy and ultimately for freedom.
In this study I have built on the work of J. Lorand Matory, James Sidbury,
James Sweet, Vincent Brown, Daniel Brown, Linda Heywood, and John
Thornton while coming to some alternative conclusions. To fully engage
any historical subject, scholars must re-create the material lives of those af-
fected by larger economic, political, and cultural forces. In each section of
this project I have followed, as far as the sources permitted, the lives of in-
dividual Afro-Christians, charting their physical and spiritual experiences
within the Atlantic system.
In chapter 1 I have employed travel accounts of white merchants, sailors,
and missionaries, the extant diaries, journals, and scholarly works of black
missionaries, secondary historical works, and literature from more recent
anthropological investigations to chart the development of Christianity in
Africa. It has become broadly recognized that many Bakongo of West Cen-
tral Africa embraced a modified form of Christianity as early as the fifteenth
century and remained faithful to it well into the nineteenth century. Chris-
tianity likewise was introduced into West Africa in the fifteenth century,
but its adoption there was more sporadic and usually limited to the coastal
enclaves of European slave traders. Even in West Africa, though, the osten-
sibly Africanized Christian church was larger than has been recognized.
Historians Ras Michael Brown, Jason R. Young, John Thornton, and others
argue the degree to which Catholicism and Protestantism were reshaped
by believers in the Kongolese hinterland and West African littoral.11 Many
scholars now agree that many Africans were either Christians or sufficiently
exposed to Christianity before they made the Atlantic crossing that the reli-
gion offered by white evangelicals in the Americas was not wholly unfamil-
iar. The process cannot really be called creolization, however, because the
Christianity they practiced had been modified to such an extent that it was
a truly African religion.
Catholic and Protestant Africans, when they came to British America as
slaves, were for political and economic reasons not welcomed into churches
or even recognized as fellow believers by white masters or missionaries.
Nevertheless, they played a pivotal role in building the black church in the
New World, especially in the Caribbean island colony of Antigua. In chap-

8 • Embracing Protestantism
ter 2 I examine why Antigua, a relatively small British possession in the Lee-
ward Islands, became a vital center of Afro-Protestantism that eclipsed the
far larger and more populated colony of Jamaica and predated by several
years the evangelization of blacks in South Carolina, Maryland, and Vir-
ginia. Using the records, journals, letters, and diaries of resident Moravian
and Methodist missionaries led to discovering why Antigua was particu-
larly fertile ground for Christian evangelization. Generations of social sci-
entists have puzzled over why captive Africans in Antigua and the rest of the
Americas ultimately embraced Christianity, which was, after all, the faith of
their oppressors. Many scholars note that evangelical Protestant church ser-
vices and traditional African religious celebrations shared the same sense of
heightened emotionalism, spirit possession, and physicality, thus allowing
people of African descent in the Caribbean and North America to feel fa-
miliar and comfortable with the putatively new religion.
There are examples, though, of large numbers of black American Chris-
tians who did not engage in emotionally charged church services, calling
into question the trend by some historians toward an African essentialism.
Africans and their descendants who lived in British America chose as their
vehicles of spiritual resistance foreign-born Methodist, Baptist, and Mora-
vian churches, even though in the eighteenth century these were small
and comparatively insignificant religious sects. All three denominations
officially frowned upon raucous song and dance or any sort of emotional
display in church, contradicting claims by many scholars that blacks chose
evangelicalism because it allowed them to freely express their African cul-
tures. Instead, displaced Africans chose these churches precisely because
they were marginalized, existing on the peripheries of the plantation power
structure. Early Moravian, Methodist, and Baptist preachers were outsiders
whom the ruling Anglican planter class held in contempt and who in turn
criticized what they characterized as the licentious lifestyles of the slave
drivers; they gained black adherents because as foreign missionaries they
gave slaves access to powerful decision makers in Britain and Europe who
were beyond the clawing grasp of the planter political complex. Achieving
spiritual fulfillment was a vital motivation, but as we will see, a by-product
of black evangelization for many Afro-Antiguans was their growing connec-
tion to and communication with the world outside the island’s confines,
a connection that proved crucial to their empowerment. Studying black
Protestantism in Antigua is important because Antigua’s blacks were the
first people of color in British America to be successfully evangelized—or

Introduction • 9
rather, to successfully evangelize themselves—in large numbers. As such,
Antigua became a model that influenced the growth of black Protestantism
in the rest of the British West Indies as well as in North America.
News about the success of Afro-Protestantism in Antigua was broadcast
throughout the Anglophone world by white missionaries but also by black
evangelists who moved within the greater Caribbean with surprising ease
and regularity. In chapter 2 I examine a secondary diaspora of Afro-Chris-
tians from Antigua. Fanning out from the island colony beginning in the
late 1770s, black evangelicals founded churches throughout the West Indies,
transmitting the gospel message to people of African descent in that region
and as far away as North America, Europe, and West Africa. White mission-
aries claimed that teaching slaves about Christianity would help stabilize
a potentially dangerous workforce, and in some ways they were right. But
black-led spirituality in the plantation cultures of the British Caribbean and
the American South also could be a subversive element. Though unable to
challenge white supremacy directly, the connections they made through-
out the Atlantic world created an international awareness of the conditions
people of color in the West Indies had to endure, thus helping to spark the
early abolition movement in Britain and the American North.
The black evangelical networks that bound together the greater Carib-
bean did in fact radiate north to encompass the Mid-Atlantic colonies of
New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Chapter 3 focuses on why blacks
from around the Atlantic rim were attracted to the ethnically German Mora-
vian Church enclave of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Though a small place,
Bethlehem became an important link in a network of black evangelicals
who traveled circuits in the Middle Colonies in the 1740s and 1750s preach-
ing an Atlantic African gospel message; they eventually reached out to black
Christians in the West Indies and ultimately connected with subaltern com-
munities throughout the Atlantic basin. Rare firsthand accounts written by
the settlement’s Afro-Moravians as well as other church documents give un-
precedented evidence of multifaceted cultural connections and exchanges
among Africa, the West Indies, Europe, and North America. Of particular
interest is correspondence I have uncovered between black Christians in the
West Indies and Native Americans in Pennsylvania, records from the 1740s
of the first church-sponsored black missionaries in North America, and evi-
dence of continued loyalty to ethnic affiliation by Africans in the Mid-At-
lantic colonies. Studying this sort of social interpenetration adds complex-
ity to our understanding of black life in the North in the early and middle

10 • Embracing Protestantism
eighteenth century. It reveals how blacks in the North, thought to be largely
cut off from their African cultures, were actually placed squarely within an
emergent Afro-Protestant Atlantic world community.
How black Protestants in Lowcountry South Carolina, Georgia, and
coastal North Carolina established and benefited from the development
of cultural links to Africa, the West Indies, and the wider Atlantic world
is the subject of chapter 4. There, I go beyond the stale “continuity versus
creativity” debate that pits those who believe traditional African cultures
survived in the Americas and those who argue that a creole society was
fashioned that blended many different African traditions. A growing body
of evidence supports both views: that multiple African cultures survived
the Middle Passage to influence discrete regions of the Americas and that
over time people of African descent, like European Americans, borrowed
heavily from different African groups, Native American culture, and Euro-
American traditions to create something new.
Blacks who embraced evangelical Protestantism in late eighteenth-century
British America were not unconverted Africans who cynically joined Chris-
tian churches as a way to cope with slavery, as Albert Raboteau, John Boles,
and John Blassingame have contended. Nor were they the deracinated Atlan-
tic creoles about whom Ira Berlin speaks so eloquently who actively “forgot”
their African backgrounds in attempting to integrate themselves into the
dominant European cultures of American port towns. While acknowledging
that both continuity and creativity were vital forces in black life, those Afri-
cans and their descendants who converted to Protestantism in British Amer-
ica chose a middle path that shunned national identities. Instead, they as-
sumed a transnational African-Atlantic identity that allowed them to remain
fiercely loyal to their ethnic and sub-ethnic African identities and gave them
access to sources of power that helped them attain their freedom.
Black life in eighteenth-century Lowcountry South Carolina poses a
paradox: during this era the most thoroughly Africanized section of Anglo
North America had by far the largest number of black Christians. In chapter
4 we will look into the Africanness of the Lowcountry, which was in part
the legacy of Christianity in Kongo, while also seeing that people of African
descent enslaved in the Americas took on multiple identities throughout
their lives as a means of gaining freedom. If by becoming Christians they ad-
vanced some very basic needs, then they went to church on Sundays, even
if on the other six days they made ritual offerings to the simbi water spirits
they had carried with them from Africa. Black life in the Lowcountry was,

Introduction • 11
therefore, polycultural with many different African traditions contributing
in discrete ways. The region was Atlantic African in nature, and its people
of color maintained a practical agenda that utilized the white religious out-
reach of the Great Awakening for their own temporal purposes.
Contributing to the area’s religious complexity was a cadre of white and
black Methodist and Baptist missionaries who had served in the Carib-
bean and later found themselves reassigned to churches in the American
South in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, black evangelicals
from North America could be found in the West Indies preaching to the
newly converted at plantation churches on the sugar islands. The connec-
tions between the Caribbean and mainland North America developed by
these itinerant preachers influenced in multivalent ways the debate among
evangelicals over the issue of slavery. While many black and white Method-
ists and Baptists in the Lowcountry suffered persecution for their antislav-
ery views, they continued preaching to biracial congregations and pressing
for abolition well after 1800 because of their continuing connections to the
transatlantic evangelical movement.
Well-known white transatlantic evangelists like George Whitefield and
Thomas Coke were important catalysts in fostering the evangelical move-
ment among the South’s people of African descent. However, it was the
black preachers and laypeople who remained behind after the white preach-
ers left such places as Wilmington, North Carolina, and Savannah, Geor-
gia, who did the real work of building the region’s early Afro-evangelical
churches. By placing their churches on the Atlantic littoral, black American
preachers like Andrew Bryan in Savannah and Brother Amos Williams in
the Bahamas were uniquely positioned to nurture and benefit from the
transatlantic exchange of ideas and information that aided the growth of a
nascent black Protestant movement.
Sylvia Frey, Alexander Byrd, and others have ably demonstrated that the
American Revolution helped shape and transform black American culture
in general and the black church in particular. The subject of chapter 5 is how
black evangelicals George Liele, Boston King, and John Marrant, among
others, took advantage of the cultural space afforded by the revolution to
develop transatlantic networks and build independent transnational black
churches. All three men, along with thousands of other people of color,
abandoned their homes in the new United States after 1783 for what they
hoped would be sanctuaries of freedom scattered along the Atlantic rim. In
Jamaica, the Bahamas, Nova Scotia, London, and especially Sierra Leone,

12 • Embracing Protestantism
they attempted to institute the republican ideals about which white revo-
lutionaries spoke so eloquently but failed to extend to people of color. En-
countering hostile forces wherever they went, these black expatriates built
evangelical networks with their brothers and sisters from around the At-
lantic, energized by their belief in freedom, evangelical community values,
and remembered African culture. The transnational Atlantic African cul-
ture they produced helped foster North America’s black church in the early
nineteenth century and opened the way for African American missions to
Africa beginning in the antebellum era.
The object of chapter 5, and more generally the entire project, is to high-
light the role of Afro-Atlantic peoples in the eighteenth century’s interna-
tional revival movement. The deployment of black missionaries, some of
whom who received formal training and others who went into the field of
their own accord, forced white members of the international Protestant
movement who previously preferred to focus on otherworldly issues to
engage the problems of this world, namely slavery, to a greater extent than
they wished. By doing so, black Atlantic missionaries became one of the
principal means by which evangelical Protestantism helped to bring about
the moral and ethical transformation of the West.
Many West and West Central Africans viewed the region beyond the At-
lantic horizon as a metaphysical space they associated with death and the af-
terlife. It was for many West and Central Africans a pleasant place where the
dead reunited with their ancestors in happy communion.12 In the context
of the transatlantic slave trade, the western ocean’s association with death
became less benign; most Africans could easily see that the men, women,
and children who sailed over the far horizon on European ships were still
alive and never came back for even a spiritual reunion. The linking of the
Atlantic with heaven, honored ancestors, and a new beginning but also with
separation and suffering was a source of internal conflict for many people of
color in both Africa and the Americas. Most second- and third-generation
African Americans, given the option, chose to stay in America rather than
return to Africa but nevertheless maintained a connection with the land
and people across the Great Water. Headstones in many eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century cemeteries dedicated to blacks in America face east to-
ward the ocean and Africa. On a trip several years ago to the site of the for-
mer Silver Bluff plantation on the banks of the Savannah River just south of
Augusta, Georgia, I visited an abandoned and decaying graveyard for slaves.
The graveyard was the final resting place for members of Silver Bluff Baptist

Introduction • 13
Church, said to be the first independent black Protestant congregation in
North America, whose founding predates the American Revolution.13
As part of my visit to the Lowcountry, I attended a Sunday-morning ser-
vice at Silver Bluff Baptist Church, which still exists but has been moved
several miles down the road from the old Silver Bluff plantation site. The
church’s large chapel was only partly filled that morning, the pastor ex-
plained, because much of the congregation had “gone visiting” to a sister
church in Augusta, a ritual he said they followed on a regular basis. This
practice of visiting fellow Christians at great and not so great distances,
while not unique to black Protestantism, is surely a legacy of their Afri-
can Atlantic roots. The legacy of the black Atlantic can be seen also in the
placement of the old church’s grave markers, now overgrown with grass and
shaded by moss-covered oaks and longleaf pines—the markers all face east
toward Africa. Scattered around the few remaining small monuments are
shards of broken porcelain, another remnant of an Atlantic African ritual
conducted at funerals that allowed the spirits of the dead the freedom to fly
back to Africa to rejoin deceased family members.14
Most of the people buried at the Silver Bluff slave cemetery died in the
mid-nineteenth century, yet the old traditions of looking east across the
Great Water remained intact. Forced to leave their homelands and families
on board monstrous barges of death, many people of color in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries never really left those slave ships. Not wanting to
become fully integrated into New World white culture as creoles and sepa-
rated from the Old World cultures of memory, they were left somewhere
in the middle. No longer Africans but not yet Americans either, people like
Henry Beverhout who lived in widely separated locations along the oceanic
littoral had been transformed by slavery and Christianity into citizens of the
Atlantic world. People of African descent have often looked east to Africa
for a sense of identity and hope, but black evangelicals in the eighteenth
century also looked east hoping to connect with people and organizations
that promised potential aid. In port towns such as Charleston, English Har-
bor, Nassau, and Freetown these Atlantic Africans foraged for the help and
resources they needed to create new identities out of multiple inputs from
Africa, Europe, and Native America, all in an attempt to achieve freedom.

14 • Embracing Protestantism
 1
Christianity in Atlantic
Africa before 1800

Globalizing processes that transformed villagers in Little Popo on the Gulf

of Guinea in what is now Togo or along the shores of the Malebo Pool in
the modern Republic of the Congo and elsewhere into Atlantic Africans
began long before the first so-called Africans came to the Americas. By the
late fifteenth century the people who lived in parts of the African continent
adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean began feeling the influences of an expanding
Christian European culture. Their reactions to it varied greatly, from accept-
ing Christianity in its wholly European form to synthesizing it with their
own indigenous faiths to making it just one more cult among many tradi-
tional ones that helped them survive and prosper in a dangerous world to
rejecting it completely.
This complex process is documented in the work of eighteenth-century
German Moravian missionary C.G.A. Oldendorp, who wrote meticulously
of what captive Africans in the Caribbean told him about what he believed
was the practice of Christian ritual in Africa. In the religious services by
which the West Central African Sokko people celebrated the seventh
month of the year, “one can see,” according to Oldendorp, “traces of their
contact with Christian missionaries. Throughout that month, practices
such as a daylong fast and a suspension of all work activities until sunset
are observed. On those occasions, a priest addresses the assembled people
by reading to them from a book, exhorting them to believe in God as the
source of all that is good and warning them to obey his word.” Moreover,
Oldendorp’s African source told him that the “priest also kneels and prays
with the people who touch the earth three times with their foreheads dur-
ing prayer and cross themselves three times after the conclusion of the ser-
vice.” The Moravian missionary-turned-ethnographer was convinced that
this was a clear example of how the Sokko had incorporated into their reli-
gious practices the Western Christian belief in the tripartite nature of God.
A perhaps less biased observer would note, however, that while strains of
Christian traditions are present, much of what Oldendorp relates about
contemporaneous Sokko spirituality had firm roots in many traditional Af-
rican religions as well.1
Another, more fraught example of Christian influence in Africa was re-
lated in the 1760s by recently arrived Moravian missionaries August Span-
genberg and Friedrich Martin on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas. They
“experienced great joy” when they met Marotta, whom they described as
“an old Guinea woman from the Papaa nation” who said that in her African
homeland she regularly prayed in the morning before she ate and at night
before she went to sleep. On both occasions, Spangenberg notes, “she falls
on her knees” and “lowers her face to the earth” before giving thanks to the
deity. When asked, however, she said she had never “yet heard the gospel
of Jesus Christ,” but she did have some vague notions about the trinity. She
probably learned about it while living in or near Great Popo along the Slave
Coast from African Christians or the occasional Portuguese priest who vis-
ited the area from time to time. This Papaw (also spelled Papa and Popo)
woman proclaimed that there was only one God, the Father, to whom she
referred as Pao, and that he had a son named Masu, who was the “only
door . . . through which it is possible to come to the Father.” Marotta was,
though, unfamiliar with the idea that Jesus, or Masu, had become a man
and sacrificed himself to redeem all mankind. Before joining the Moravians,
Marotta routinely sacrificed a goat or a lamb to placate her god and thereby
ensure her own well-being. She was not a Christian in Africa, but the influ-
ence of Islamic and Christian ideas is clearly evident; if she was not an Afri-
can Christian while living in Great Popo, Marotta was certainly an Atlantic
African. Spangenberg and Martin were happy enough to use whatever entre
they could to spread their brand of the faith.2
As the spiritual practices of the Sokko and of the Papaw illustrate, mul-
tiple influences helped to shape Atlantic-African spirituality in the early
modern era. They are especially important here because they illustrate well
the presence and hybrid character of Christianity in Africa as well as in the

16 • Embracing Protestantism
Caribbean during the eighteenth century. Christianity’s influence among
Atlantic Africans, however deep or shallow, began as early as the fifteenth
century and endured as a largely indigenous movement over the follow-
ing three hundred years. Discovering how they came to be Christians,
how many black Christians there were in Africa during this period, how
contact with African culture changed Christianity, and whether Africans
brought their version of Christianity with them to the Americas when
they went there as forced migrants are the objects of this chapter. Chris-
tianity’s history in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa extends to the fourth
century CE and over the millennia has inspired the conversion of millions
of adherents. Intriguing new evidence supports the idea that many Afri-
cans in the diaspora were not only well acquainted with Christianity in
Portuguese Kongo, Angola, and elsewhere but also knew about the black
Christians of Ethiopia and Egypt and therefore thought of Christianity
as an indigenous faith initially independent of and not wholly dominated
by white slave owners, making them more likely to embrace it once in
America.
In assessing the origins of African American Christianity it is important
to keep in mind a number of ideas. First, the development of black Chris-
tianity was an Atlantic-world phenomenon. There were black Christians
in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean long before people of
color were converted in large numbers in North America. Afro-Christians,
moreover, moved around the Atlantic basin with startling regularity.3 Most
went unwillingly to work, struggle, and die on New World plantations;
others began their lives as slaves but used their wits and sometimes their
religion to gain freedom and new homes; some, already free, traveled the
Atlantic in search of opportunity.
There were far more Christians in Africa before 1800 than previously rec-
ognized by most scholars of the Americas. At a peak in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries up to two million African Catholics lived in Kongo
and Angola. Though less successfully, white and black Christian missionar-
ies from the Caribbean, Europe, and Britain brought their versions of true
faith to the people of West Africa’s Atlantic littoral. Operating out of trading
factories or castles run by slave traders, Caribbean, European, and Eurafri-
can missionaries brought an unknown number into Christian churches
from along the region’s Atlantic coast over the course of three centuries.
Theirs was a remarkable feat considering the scant resources afforded them,
the small number of evangelists involved, and the inescapably obvious con-

Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 • 17

nection in the minds of many Africans between Western Christianity and
the transatlantic slave trade.4
Those who attempted to spread Christianity in Africa faced real and du-
rable obstacles, and the task would have been nearly impossible without the
assistance of Africans and mixed-race Atlantic Africans. Both groups took
the lead in propagating the faith in the absence of sufficient numbers of Eu-
ropean missionaries, most of whom died soon after they arrived in tropical
Africa from diseases from which they had few natural immunities. African
Christians, moreover, did not merely translate European Christianity word
for word to their catechists but developed a series of regional hybrids that
existed alongside indigenous faiths and served the particular spiritual needs
of diverse sets of Africans in varying locales. They created, in the process, a
uniquely African Christianity that was then carried in the hearts and minds
of at least some enslaved Africans to the Americas, where it flourished, sim-
mered below the surface, or died as circumstances dictated. Though not the
only source for Christianity among blacks in North America and elsewhere,
Africa, because of Christianity’s long presence there and the large numbers
of Africans converted, must be included as one of the regions that influ-
enced its development and growth.
Religious members of the Sokko and countless other groups from all
over Atlantic Africa constructed a complex religious superstructure that in-
cluded traditional African spirituality, Christianity, and Islam, as they strove
to deal with the brutalities of the transatlantic slave trade. When they found
themselves thrust into the slave markets of Bahia in Brazil, Savanna-la-Mar
in Jamaica, or Stono River in South Carolina, some were already Christians.
For a variety of reasons, they did not identify their beliefs as Christianity,
but under the right circumstances some of them found it beneficial to em-
brace a faith whose rituals had a certain pleasing familiarity.

The Role of Atlantic Africans

Some of those most responsible for fostering this unique form of African
Christianity before 1800 were the mixed-race offspring of European men
who came to Africa to profit from the slave trade and the African women
they found there. Most children of these unions who grew up in Africa were
maligned by white European observers as merely nominal or semi-Chris-
tians whom they damned for never completely separating themselves from
their African social and religious heritages. It should be noted that many

18 • Embracing Protestantism
early modern Europeans’ understanding of Christianity’s finer points was
rudimentary at best, yet they still thought of themselves as Christians, the
implication being that for most Europeans the Christian label was a badge
of ethnic identity that they were initially quite hesitant to transfer to non-
Westerners. So, no matter how versed these mixed-race Eurafricans became
in biblical scripture, since they were not white they were never wholly ac-
cepted by white Europeans as true Christians. At the same time, because
they embraced a foreign cosmology, many Afro-Christians were unable to
fully integrate themselves into the African societies in which they lived, of-
ten leading them to occupy a painfully lonely and insecure middle ground.5
As previously noted, the mulatto Eurafricans who inhabited Atlantic Af-
rican coastal communities in significant numbers by the eighteenth century
were the products of European and African unions. Out of necessity be-
cause many, if not most, of them lived on the margins of two cultures, some
took advantage of their knowledge of both to fashion a new hybridized cul-
ture. Atlantic Africans, as these mulattoes are better described, were fluent
in many of the trade languages of the Atlantic basin and were to some de-
gree cosmopolitans who could function in various cultural settings.6 Many
Atlantic Africans worked in the European trade forts that began to dot the
West and Central African shoreline beginning in the sixteenth century. The
Gold Coast, along what is now modern Ghana’s Atlantic shore, had the larg-
est concentration of European slave trading posts of any stretch of the Af-
rican coast, with some sixty forts, or “factories” as they were called, there
during the height of the transatlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century.
Generally small, with usually fewer than ten white traders and Eurafrican
and African employees, these West African outposts were administered by
three larger and more impressively built “castles” controlled by European
trading companies.
Elmina Castle, constructed by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century,
was conquered by the Dutch in the seventeenth as part of their attempt to
take control of Portugal’s Atlantic empire; thereafter it became the center
of the Dutch West Indies Company’s slaving and other commercial opera-
tions in Africa. Several miles east of Elmina was Britain’s so-called grand
emporium at Cape Coast, built as a wood structure by Swedish traders in
1653, captured by the Danes ten years later, and finally taken by the English,
who rebuilt it in stone in 1664. Some seventy miles farther down Ghana’s
shoreline was Denmark’s Christiansborg Castle, where Danish merchants,
who followed a string of European occupants there that included the Por-

Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 • 19

tuguese, Dutch, and the Swedes, traded rum and tobacco for tropical com-
modities such as beeswax and ivory as well as for human beings.7
European merchants and investors, most notably England’s Royal Afri-
can Company in the seventeenth century, made several attempts to estab-
lish plantations on or near the African coast to avoid the high costs associ-
ated with transporting captives to the Americas and New World crops back
to Europe. They quickly discovered that Africa’s disease environment, the
ease with which slaves could rebel or escape, and the threat of annihilation
by hostile African neighbors made such commercial operations infeasible.
Incredibly, it was far more practical to buy captive Africans and transport
them thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean, as dangerous and ex-
pensive as that was, than to risk losing all by maintaining large-scale farm-
ing operations in Africa. The task of obtaining, managing, and then selling
captive Africans was made immeasurably easier by the presence of Atlantic
African workers. Using their facility with languages, knowledge of African
culture, and intimate familiarity with the trade policies of Europe and Af-
rica, the Eurafricans who worked at Elmina, Cape Coast, Christiansborg,
and the smaller emporia learned how to survive and occasionally prosper,
though their well-being depended upon the suffering of other Africans they
played a part in enslaving.8
Despite the crucial role they played in facilitating trade between Eu-
ropean merchants and African princes, Eurafricans were almost univer-
sally condemned by European observers and not a few African kings who
believed they spent most of their time and energy “whoring, drinking,
gambling, swearing, fighting, and shouting.” They undoubtedly engaged in
their fair share of debauchery, but many also sent their children to school
at the trading forts, went to Christian churches, and earned what livings
they could in the commerce of the Atlantic market.9 Complicating matters
was the presence, beginning in 1601, of the so-called New Christians, or
Jews newly but only superficially converted to Christianity, in Portugal’s
African colonies. Forced to abandon their ancestral religion by Catholic
government authorities, the New Christians, or conversos, as they were
also known, took advantage of the lack of European clerical and secular
authority in most of West Africa to return to the faith of their mothers and
fathers. The admixture of Judaism with Roman Catholicism at Portuguese
slave-trade forts made African Christianity even more hybridized and may
have contributed to its condemnation by some white observers as not be-
ing Christian at all.10

20 • Embracing Protestantism
 How difficult it is to define what constituted a real Christian in the Af-
rican context is illustrated by the case of Eurafrican Edward Barter. Con-
temporary Afro-Dutch ship captain Willem Bosman described the Afro-
English Barter as a figure caught in the interstices of two cultures who
prospered nonetheless by serving Western business interests at the British
trading post of Cape Coast Castle on West Africa’s Gold Coast in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Barter spent the early 1690s in
England, where the Royal African Company paid for his education and in
1693 returned him to his native Cape Coast as its agent.11 He was valued by
his employers because he was half English but even more so because as the
son of a local African woman who was a member of an established clan he
had access local trade networks. He was invaluable as an agent for the Euro-
pean trading company also because as a longtime resident he came to know
far more about the region’s political, economic, and social affairs than did
most of the short-tenured British governors stationed at Cape Coast. By the
end of the seventeenth century he had used his position to essentially be-
come the ruler of Cape Coast, amassing so much wealth as a middleman
between the English on the coast and African merchants from the interior
that he was able to build what Bosman described as a small but well-posi-
tioned castle that he protected with several large cannon.
At the same time, Barter attained near-warlord status because he could
raise, according to Bosman, “a large number of Armed men, some whereof
are his own Slaves, and the rest are Free-Men, that adhere to him.” The
source of Barter’s wealth and power was his control of access to the British:
“whoever designs to trade with the English must stand well with him before
they can succeed.” Though he got rich living on the margins of two very dif-
ferent cultures, Barter appears to have remained loyal to the English, will-
ingly aiding their interests when they were challenged by other European
and African interlopers.12
Having one foot in the European world and the other in the African, the
aptly named Barter appeared to blend many aspects of those cultures in his
daily life. Bosman accused him of “pretending to be a Christian,” clearly fail-
ing, according to Bosman’s estimates, to uphold European Christian stan-
dards of morality. Interestingly, some scholars contend that Bosman himself
was a Eurafrican, the son of a Dutch father and an African mother, and that
his opinions about Barter may have been colored by commercial rivalry,
personal enmity, or nationalist antagonism. Obviously well educated, Bos-
man may have been trying to associate himself more closely with the Dutch

Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 • 21

side of his parentage through his attack of Barter, whom he might have
wanted to discredit with his European trading partners. His critique of Bar-
ter, however, betrays his own insecurity and the ambivalence of many other
Eurafricans during this era who were unsure where they fit in, culturally and
socially. Bosman condemned Barter as a backslider who gained commercial
advantages through his dexterity at manipulating his liminal position at the
expense of loyalty to an imagined cultural superiority. Barter, Bosman caus-
tically observed, had “above eight wives” and married a white woman while
living in England as a young man, making him an unfit trading partner.13
Polygyny, as Willem Bosman certainly would have known, was an ac-
cepted practice in most of West Africa, with the only limit on the number of
wives a man could possess being his ability to maintain them.14 African wives
themselves could be important sources of wealth. Most women of such mar-
riages were put to work in some capacity, usually weaving cloth that could
be sold domestically or exported to the Mediterranean or southwestern
Asia, so the more wives an African or mixed-race man had and could use-
fully employ, the greater his potential for profit.15 As a man of importance,
Barter no doubt felt he had the right and perhaps even duty to take as many
wives as he could afford to profitably maintain. If by doing so he found him-
self at odds with European concepts of Christian behavior, he may have be-
lieved that he was practicing a form of African Christianity that synthesized
aspects of the two cultures but was at its heart Christianity nonetheless. Bar-
ter could well have responded to critics like Bosman, moreover, by pointing
out that many of the European Christians resident at Cape Coast, includ-
ing, as the prudish Bosman readily admitted, “most of their chief Officers or
Governours,” also kept mistresses and “quasi-wives”; indeed some even kept
multiple wives from local families and were encouraged to do so by resident
tribal headmen who wanted to cement alliances with European officials and
merchants by having them marry their daughters.16
Little appears to have changed on this score over the succeeding century.
Anna Maria Falconbridge, wife of abolitionist and Sierra Leone colony or-
ganizer Alexander Falconbridge, observed during her stay at the settlement
in 1793 that many of Sierra Leone’s black women “appeared to be of superior
rank, at least I concluded so from the preferable way in which they were
clad, nor was I wrong in my conjecture, for upon enquiring who they were,
was informed one was the woman or mistress of Mr.——, another of Mr.
B——, and so on: I then understood that every [white] gentleman on the
[British-controlled Bance] island had his lady.”17

22 • Embracing Protestantism
 Social pressures and the press of business caused some Atlantic Africans,
like Barter, to walk a tightrope between European and African religious be-
liefs. Bosman writes of another Anglo-African merchant who proclaimed
himself a Christian when in the presence of Europeans but did not allow his
faith to become common knowledge among the local African community.
He feared that if his African customers and neighbors knew of his Christian
affiliation they would shun him, leaving him friendless and without a way to
support his family. Even though this man, in Bosman’s words, “ridiculed his
own Country Gods,” he still made public profession of his belief in them,
ignoring men like Bosman who decried his weak faith.18 Many observers of
European descent like Bosman complained that Africans living around the
coastal trading forts who called themselves Christians were really “a sort of
half Christians.” They apparently did not think that reciting the Pater Nos-
ter and Ave Maria, confessing to a priest, and attending church on Sundays
was enough to make true Christians.19
French observers in Senegambia during the 1790s agreed with this judg-
ment of many African Christians. While touring the kingdom of Galam on
the middle reaches of the Senegal River, French traders Saugnier, whose
first name was not revealed, and Pierre-Raymond de Brisson complained
that the favorite wife of the king of Galam merely “pretends to be a Chris-
tian.” At one time she had been the mistress of a French factor on the Sen-
egal who over the course of his years in that country had converted her. She
held onto her faith as best she could under trying circumstances, wearing
a cross and observing holy days, but her show of religious fealty and con-
viction was apparently not enough for the culturally insular Frenchmen.20
In a region dominated by indigenous religions and under increasing attack
from Islamic jihadists, solitary Christians like Galam’s queen did the best
they could without the support of foreign or indigenous clergy. Saugnier
and Brisson noted that some of the local Wolof people were Christians as
well, but again the traders doubted the people’s sincerity. The Frenchmen
considered religion “a matter of indifference to” the Wolof, who were inter-
ested only in trade.21
Here again, Europeans were applying a double standard, accusing Chris-
tian Wolofs of an apparent lack of religious zeal while forgetting the indif-
ference that many titular French Catholics displayed toward church atten-
dance and other practices. French cultural influence was felt in some of
Senegambia by the late seventeenth century, notably in the port city of St.
Louis, where a large proportion of the indigenous male population worked

Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 • 23

as boatmen and in other capacities servicing the slave trade. Some were cer-
tainly Christians, though the people of St. Louis and other places along the
Atlantic rim practiced many different and competing religions, Catholicism
being just one of them. Wolof boatmen and longshoremen largely adopted
the French way of life but had the freedom to choose Islam, Christianity, or
any number of indigenous faiths.22
Many scholars agree with Bosman, Saugnier, and Brisson that a deeper
knowledge and psychic attachment to Christian dogma was necessary be-
fore a person could be called a true Christian. If so, however, many whites
who thought of themselves as Christians in the eighteenth century prob-
ably would not qualify by that definition, either. White settlers in the
trans-Appalachian West living on the fringes of the French, Spanish, and
Anglophone worlds in the colonial era were many times accused by visit-
ing priests and ministers of being little better than “white Indians,” not
only because they lived with and dressed like Native Americans but also
because they had forgotten Christian practices and rituals and did not meet
regularly to worship in organized congregations. Distant settlements and a
paucity of ordained clergy led to the diminution of organized religion on
the American frontier, but it would be wrong to say that those frontiersmen
and women were living completely outside the Christian tradition; they
readily returned to the church when it became feasible to do so.23 Many
African Christians also went for long periods without ordained priests and
ministers but persevered nonetheless, although how they celebrated that
faith evolved and moved away from European norms. Differences in geog-
raphy notwithstanding, therefore, it is unfair to hold people of color to one
standard of faithfulness and whites to another.24
The mixed-race women of Holland’s West African trading factory at El-
mina came in for even more scorn from Bosman than did the men for cling-
ing to certain indigenous beliefs while adhering to Christianity. The dis-
tance between the sacred and the profane narrowed considerably, however,
when it came to treating the sick. Bosman deplored the practice by women
of mixed race he saw as merely putative Christians making “rich Offer-
ings” to African priests and medicine men when illness struck; the women
seemed to have greater confidence in such healers than did pure-blood Afri-
cans. The Afro-Dutchman noted with even more disgust that local Europe-
ans had “grown very fond of wearing some Trifles about their Bodies which
are consecrated or conjured by the [African] Priest.”25
Bosman should not have been too surprised that whites indulged in the

24 • Embracing Protestantism
use of what he considered African magic. The use of occult or magical de-
vices enjoyed widespread popularity in the Christian West throughout the
early modern period and continued its hold on educated and polite society
well into the seventeenth century, while a lively interest in non-Christian su-
pernatural devices still enjoys popularity in the early twenty-first century.26
“Wise men” and “wise women” throughout Europe and European America,
as they did in Africa, kept away disease, foretold the future, explained the
past, and tried to save the very young from untimely death primarily with
herbal medicines but also by resorting to all manner of magical amulets, po-
tions, and even verses of biblical scripture written on small scraps of paper.
Seeking protection in a violent world that struck down many in a seemingly
random manner, men and women in the early modern era made few dis-
tinctions between Christianity and magic, astrology, and divination.27 Even
evangelicals as early as the seventeenth century immersed themselves in
the occult through the practices of divine healing and the use of glossolalia.
English Baptists and Quakers performed exorcisms and miraculous cures
and tried to raise the dead at church services in the 1650s and 1680s; one
hundred years later Oxford-educated Methodist founder John Wesley con-
tinued to believe in a seemingly non-Christian “world of wonders.”28

Evangelizing Christianity in Africa

A large number of Eurafricans had been Christians since birth, but just
as many and probably more rejected the religion of their white fathers.
Thomas Thompson, the first missionary employed by the Church of Eng-
land’s Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) to
do mission work in Africa in the early 1750s, expressed dismay at the seem-
ing lack of interest in Christianity shown by Cape Coast’s mulatto popula-
tion. He assumed that since part of their heritage was European, they would
naturally have a heightened interest in the Anglican gospel. Thompson was
quickly disabused of this assumption. The SPG missionary preached regu-
larly at the home of Cudjo, the local caboceer, or indigenous leader, but only
to small audiences of mulattoes and black Africans. His listeners were polite
and attentive but generally uninterested in what he had to say, no doubt at-
tending his Sunday services at the urging of caboceer Cudjo, who, Thomp-
son said, “seemed to be well satisfied in the Christian religion” as long as
it promoted continued trade between himself and the British and did not
unduly upset local indigenous religious leaders.29

Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 • 25

 Though the roadblocks to Christian infiltration of Africa were consider-
able, other factors helped to propagate the faith, however hybridized. Inter-
marriage between European men and African women was quite common
on the African coast during the early years of contact and served as one
of the principal ways by which Christianity became integrated with local
cultures.30 Religious authorities at the Danish Christiansborg Castle sanc-
tioned their employees’ having interracial children and taking African wives
or concubines as long as white husbands made good on three conditions:
the white man could obtain and keep only one wife at any one time; he
had to “promise to see his heathen wife” converted to Christianity, some-
thing that most attempted though with mixed results; and upon the hus-
band’s return to Europe he was required to take his African wife, though not
their children, with him if she wanted to go, thus guaranteeing continued
good relations with local kin groups upon whom the Danish merchants de-
pended for trade.31
The Eurafrican offspring of these unions were encouraged to stay in Af-
rica as employees of the trading companies since they were usually multilin-
gual and so made excellent intermediaries and translators as well as guards
and soldiers whose loyalties usually lay with their Danish employers.32 The
mulatto children of Christiansborg were, according to Danish employee
Paul Erdmann Isert in 1788, “always christened and instructed in Christian-
ity.” The idea was to take care of their physical and spiritual welfare because
it was inevitable that their fathers would either leave for Europe in several
years or die even sooner of one of many tropical diseases.33 Absent a Eu-
ropean Christian father, most Eurafrican children absorbed a very African-
ized Christianity that in many cases did not differ greatly from indigenous
African beliefs.
The status and life possibilities of Eurafricans many times depended on
the social positions of their mothers but could also be affected by the type
of social structures in place in the communities where they lived. In strati-
fied and patrilineal societies such as those of the Wolof, Serer, and Man-
dinka, Luso-Africans in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries were
marginalized because their fathers were not part of long-established African
families; they were forbidden to marry free persons, join craft associations,
or cultivate the land. Cut off from the cultural mainstream and barred from
making a living in traditional ways, these sons and daughters of European
men and African women were forced into professions associated with the
Atlantic-world market, taking up jobs such as sailors, soldiers, guards, in-

26 • Embracing Protestantism
terpreters, and traders. Living apart from mainstream African society, many
Eurafricans reacted by trying to cultivate new identities. Instead of em-
bracing their African backgrounds, they were driven to the other extreme,
wearing European-style clothes, prominently displaying crucifixes and ro-
saries to enhance their Catholic identity, speaking Crioulo (derived from
Portuguese and several western African languages), and loudly proclaiming
that they were Portuguese, whites, and Christians. Even though Europeans
rejected them even more than did Africans, these creoles became the bed-
rock community upon which much of African Christianity was built in later
years and which then spread across the Atlantic in multiple directions.34
Perhaps the most interesting ministers to evangelize the Christian faith
in Atlantic Africa in the eighteenth century were Christian and Rebecca
Protten, a pair of black missionaries whose identities could not have been
more prototypically Atlantic African. The Prottens proselytized their black
brethren and sisters not only in Africa but in Europe and the Americas as
well. Christian was born in 1715 on the Gold Coast in what is today the
country of Ghana to a Danish father and an African mother before being
taken at age ten to Denmark. There he excelled as a student and eventually
gained entrance to the University of Copenhagen. While a student, Chris-
tian became interested in a small Protestant sect in Germany, the Renewed
Unity of the Brethren, known popularly as the Moravians; they aroused
his interest probably because they were just then beginning an aggressive
campaign to proselytize people of color in the Americas. He left school and
spent the next two years living with the Moravians at their commune in the
central German town of Herrnhut before he was sent as a missionary to his
home on the Gold Coast and later to the island of St. Thomas in the Danish
West Indies. Neither of Christian’s missions was a success, and in 1745 he
found himself back in Herrnhut, where he met Rebecca. She was of mixed-
race parentage, too, and began life as a slave on the Caribbean island of An-
tigua before being “sold to a family of high-standing” on the faraway island
of St. Thomas.35
Rebecca Protten’s early life was marked by religious activism and, as a
result, conflict with the clerical and civic leaders of St. Thomas. Having
learned to read and write Dutch in her owner’s home, where she was a do-
mestic slave, Rebecca soon came to associate herself with the Moravian
mission on the island that had been instituted there in 1732.36 Rebecca be-
came an active church member and began preaching the gospel to enslaved
African field hands. She was manumitted and in 1738 married fellow mis-

Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 • 27

sionary and white Moravian Matthäus Freundlich. As elsewhere, interracial
marriage was taboo in St. Thomas; after spending four months in jail on
trumped-up charges, the newlyweds were released and promptly boarded
a ship headed to Germany and Herrnhut. During the trip to Europe Mat-
thäus sickened and died.
In 1746 Rebecca married Christian Protten.37 It subsequently took twenty
years of living in Herrnhut, but the Prottens were once again selected as
missionaries when the Moravians made a renewed effort to proselytize peo-
ple of color abroad, this time in Africa.38 After making the trip south to their
new mission station in Danish-controlled Christiansborg Castle on the
coast of Ghana,39 the couple opened a school for the fort’s mulatto children
in 1765. Christian’s death of an undisclosed illness four years later derailed
this effort, though, leaving Rebecca with little support from local Danish
officials or from Moravian authorities back in Germany. Offered a chance
to return to St. Thomas, Rebecca decided to remain on the Gold Coast and
spent the rest of her life evangelizing a Christian gospel that was colored, no
doubt, by her experiences in slavery and the Atlantic world. Rebecca and
Christian led remarkable lives, made even more so because they reversed
the trajectory of most people of color during the eighteenth century from
one in which blacks left Africa to toil away their lives on American planta-
tions to one in which they began in America and then headed east, first to
Europe and then to Africa. If they did not spark a revival, they can be seen
as inspirational and pioneering Atlantic African figures whose missionary
work contributed to the growing awareness among humanitarian groups in
Europe and elsewhere of the basic humanity of people of color.40

Political Influences
The Prottens, as Atlantic Africans, lived and worked in a world dominated
by the Protestant northern European countries of Holland, Denmark,
Great Britain, and Germany. Most Africans, if they were Christians in the
fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, were not Protestants, how-
ever, but Catholics. The roots of Christianity in Sierra Leone, for example,
though usually associated with the British Protestant settlement of Lon-
don’s “black poor” and the black loyalist refugees of the American Revolu-
tion beginning in 1787, are really to be found among sojourning Portuguese
and Afro-Portuguese merchants and priests who traveled along the region’s
rainforest-shrouded rivers and savannah-fringed footpaths beginning in the

28 • Embracing Protestantism
sixteenth century. Though Portugal’s commercial and spiritual influence
in the region was in eclipse by the mid-1700s,41 when the area’s inhabitants
were most likely to be enslaved and exported to the Americas, the Portu-
guese did leave behind a sizable population of Luso-Africans who doggedly
held onto their Catholic identities and took those identities with them to
the New World.42
Officials in the Portuguese church attempted to bring Christianity to the
Sierra Leone region as early as the 1530s when they created a Catholic see in
the Cape Verde Islands 350 miles off what are today the countries of Senegal
and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania.43 This move seems to have paid off
handsomely; by the mid-seventeenth century Christianity apparently made
serious inroads into the creole population of the Cape Verdes. On a trip
to Portugal that included a stop in the Cape Verde archipelago, a reform-
minded Luso-Brazilian priest named Vieira was impressed by the mixed-
race clerics he met there, exclaiming that there “are here clergy and canons
as black as jet, but so well-bred, so authoritative, so learned, such great mu-
sicians, so discreet and so accomplished that they may well be envied by
those in our own cathedrals at home.”44 Building on such a solid platform,
the bishop of the Cape Verde Islands made a number of excursions dur-
ing the mid-sixteenth century to the mainland, where he attempted to bring
spiritual comfort and, more likely, spiritual discipline to the Portuguese
traders and sailors living there. The odd visitation was no substitute for es-
tablishing full-time resident priests, something that did not happen until a
vicar was appointed in the 1590s at Cacheu in the northwest corner of what
is now Guinea-Bissau. A major problem that plagued church officials trying
to maintain adequate staff in the Sierra Leone region as well as the rest of
tropical Africa was the horrific mortality rates endured by white mission-
aries, who regularly fell victim to the disease environment that proved so
unhealthy for Europeans. Another obstacle was the language barrier that
made trying to convey abstract religious concepts to non-Europeans nearly
impossible.45
In the last decade of the sixteenth century, Portuguese church officials
attempted to solve these problems by appointing a priest of African origin
to western Africa who could both communicate effectively with locals and
survive local epidemiological conditions. Presumably born somewhere
along the Guinea coast, though perhaps a native of the Cape Verdes, a ma-
jor stop in the transatlantic slave trade, and educated and ordained in Portu-
gal, this Atlantic African appeared to be the ideal candidate for such work.

Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 • 29

The project, though, hit a snag when unspecified friction between this black
creole clergyman and the bishop of Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands led
to his early dismissal, perhaps over the extent of African religious elements
the priest was willing to integrate into Catholic dogma or perhaps because
of his criticism of the treatment of the island’s slaves.46
Portugal’s Catholic authorities did not send any more missionaries to
the Sierra Leone region in the sixteenth century, but a considerable num-
ber of Africans in the region converted to Christianity nonetheless. Instru-
mental to their evangelization were local headmen who sent their sons and
even a few of their daughters to Europe to be educated in Western math
and science; these young people learned about Christianity in the course
of their studies. Some of the European-educated Africans who returned to
their homelands may have subsequently played roles in helping to convert
the hundreds of refugees who fled an invasion of Sierra Leone by the Mane
people in the 1560s and were then evacuated to the Cape Verde Islands and
Cacheu. The latter group of former Sierra Leoneans were said to be ruled
by a Christian chief who was reputed to be able to “read and write as he was
brought up on Santiago Island” in the Cape Verde archipelago. According
to a Portuguese observer in the 1590s, “all the other blacks in this settlement
are Christians,” and the ruler “has all the babies who are born there bap-
tized. Every night in this settlement, Christian doctrine is taught publicly,
and is attended by children of the more advanced blacks of the country, al-
though they are not Christians.”47 In this case it appears that Christianity
thrived and grew, as is the case with many new religions, in an atmosphere
of political and cultural chaos where the victims of social breakdown ap-
plied to it for salvation from worldly misery.48
A new initiative was instituted in 1604 by the Jesuits, who sent three
Catholic missionaries to Sierra Leone through the end of 1617. They man-
aged to build and maintain a half-dozen churches in that short period de-
spite a lack of support from home, perhaps as a result of the beginning of
the Thirty Years War in 1618 that consumed the energies of Catholics and
Protestants in many European countries. What success the Jesuits en-
joyed depended in large measure on the efforts of Portuguese and Afro-
Portuguese laymen and laywomen. After the Jesuits pulled out in 1617 and
throughout the rest of the seventeenth century, rivalry between Spain and
Portugal led those two countries, though officially united between 1580 and
1640, to send competing religious orders to the region. Spanish Capuchin
monks came to Sierra Leone in the 1640s but faced many obstacles put up

30 • Embracing Protestantism
by Portuguese agents who viewed them as interlopers on their papally sanc-
tioned religious territory. In response, Lisbon sent Franciscan monks to the
Cape Verde Islands and elsewhere in the region; one of them, a young man
named Andre de Faro, ventured from the archipelago as far as Sierra Le-
one in 1663. By the 1650s, however, Portuguese influence in the area was in
decline, battered by economic competition from the Dutch, English, and
French, with the British eventually gaining the upper hand along the Sierra
Leone coast. Anglophone traders displayed little interest in Christian evan-
gelizing in the region before 1787, but several British travelers did neverthe-
less note Christianity’s continued presence.49
Naval officer John Atkins, for example, found himself sailing with a Brit-
ish squadron along the West African coast in the 1720s to escort several slave
ships that needed protection in those waters against roving flotillas of Atlan-
tic-world pirates. During one of his sojourns, Atkins went ashore on the coast
of Sierra Leone and met a Seignior Joseph, whom he described as a “Chris-
tian Negro of this Place.”50 An African, Joseph originally settled at the mouth
of the Sierra Leone River in 1715 and, to Atkins’s astonishment, was a Catho-
lic priest and the first priest of any color to visit or live in the region since the
1680s. Reputedly the grandson of the ruler of Cape Mount in what is today
the country of Liberia, Joseph traveled the North Atlantic in his youth, even
living in North America a short time before crossing over to Britain. It is un-
clear what prompted young Joseph’s travels. He may have been enslaved as a
consequence of war or kidnapped, taken to America, and subsequently freed
when he showed evidence of royal birth or education. Another possibility is
that he was sent to America by his family specifically to get a Western educa-
tion and was never a slave. Though not common, it appears that this African
version of what Americans and Europeans in the nineteenth century called
“the grand tour” did occur. This story was confirmed years later by SPG mis-
sionary Thomas Thompson, who on his way back to England after several
frustrating years on the African coast met Seignior Joseph.
The priest told Thompson of his sojourn to New York, where he went to
school and was baptized a Christian.51 His tour continued when he crossed
the Atlantic eastward to England, where he might have received instruction
in Chaucer, Latin, and ancient Greek philosophy but also a heavy dose of
Protestant Christianity. The latter part of his English education apparently
did not stay with him, though, because when he next traveled to Portugal
he quickly converted to Catholicism and trained to be a priest. Upon his
ordination, Joseph sailed for Sierra Leone and home.52

Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 • 31

 Originally settling on the coast, Joseph subsequently moved his family,
along with clan members and hangers-on, nine miles up the Sierra Leone
River to a remote though more secure location. He explained to Atkins
that difficulties with local slave traders had necessitated the move as well as
proximity to European slave-trading factories at English-controlled Bance
Island and French-administered Gambia Island, both in the Sierra Leone
River estuary.53 Fearful of exposing his family to the slave trade though still
wanting to remain connected to the Atlantic world, this black Christian
patriarch no doubt felt it was best to have as little contact as possible with
Europeans, if not Christians. It is fascinating to speculate, though impos-
sible to estimate for sure, how many other African Christian leaders felt and
acted like Seignior Joseph did, removing their people from the shadow of
European corruption and observation and thereby being lost to history.
As a priest, Joseph did his best to evangelize and save souls, and to that
end he built a small Christian shrine in his settlement in the Sierra Leone
hinterland, erected a cross, tutored his family in Portuguese so they could
read what Atkins derisively called the “Romish Prayer-Books” he brought
with him from Europe, and even gave his children European Christian
names. He had over the years asked Portuguese officials to send missionar-
ies to help him propagate the faith, but none had ventured even the short
distance inland from the coast to where Joseph lived. Atkins surmised that
the “Poverty of their Country” would “probably keep them a long time from
that Benefit.” Missionaries, Joseph found out, usually only went to places in
Africa that engaged in trade with Europeans and could therefore provide
the monetary resources to help maintain a priest and mission. Even when
the money was found to support one or two priests, most European clergy-
men found the isolation of living in the interior of Africa away from Euro-
pean contact overwhelming. Besides isolation, white missionaries were also
terrified and repelled by, in Atkins’s words, the “Danger of Wild Beasts . . .
(especially Wolfes)” and all the “Rats, Snakes, Toads, Musquitoes, Centi-
pedes, Scorpions, Lizards, and innumerable Swarms of Ants” that were an
inevitable part of life in tropical Africa.54
While in North America, England, and Portugal, Joseph apparently ac-
quired a taste for Atlantic-world luxury goods as well as a fascination for a
great deal of European culture. Much to Atkins’s surprise, his Afro-Catholic
host entertained him “with a clean Table-cloth, Knives and Forks, and a va-
riety of Wines and strong Beer.” Atkins also noticed with some pleasure how
Joseph’s wife and daughters behaved with “Quaker-like Obeysance,” leav-

32 • Embracing Protestantism
ing the dining area “decently and without Hurry or Laugh.” Atkins might
have attributed this good behavior to the civilizing influence of Christian-
ity, as he appeared to believe Joseph was a true Christian. To be counted a
real Christian, conformity to European discourses about gender and class
seem to have been at least as important as having an intimate and nuanced
knowledge of scripture.55
The African Catholic priest Joseph lived an apparently long and well-
traveled life, there being evidence that as an older man, after 1750, he moved
with his followers from his inland settlement on the Sierra Leone River
north and west to the coast of Bissau. In Bissau a local leader named José
Lopez, who historian P.E.H. Hair believes was in fact Seignior Joseph, con-
tacted the Portuguese in the 1750s asking for missionaries and a trade alli-
ance. Joseph’s mantle in Bissau was taken up later in the century by a man
named Seignior Domingo, a local African leader who reputedly could read
Portuguese and claimed to be a Catholic. The black American Protestants
who later settled in Sierra Leone came into contact with Seignior Domingo
in the 1790s, keeping West African Christianity alive and tracing yet another
connection through Domingo and Joseph between black Christians on
both sides of the Atlantic.
As late as the 1790s, a Portuguese traveler in Sierra Leone asserted that
“the number of Christians dispersed through the distant hinterlands is
infinite.” To back up this claim, he described an incident in which a white
priest, when encamped at a river crossing in the Sierra Leone interior, was
inundated by faithful Africans demanding that he dispense the sacraments
and baptize their children.56 While reports of such examples of spontane-
ous popular Christianity in West Africa may be a case of wishful thinking
by a hopeful Lusitanian, there is a grain of truth to the idea that Christianity
survived in the African hinterland without European priests to guide it or,
unfortunately, write about it.
The African form of Christianity had been a presence in coastal West Af-
rica for more than 250 years by the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. It remained a minority religion in the region, but to have survived
at all it had to have been incorporated into the social fabric of individual
clans and lineage groups. If village leaders like Seignior Joseph and Seignior
Domingo accepted Christianity, then it became an essential part of that
group’s identity, so that to be part of the group meant being Christian. With
this type of quasi-institutional support, Christianity’s continuation, however
modified or muted by isolation from Europeans, was certainly a possibility.

Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 • 33

 Some Westerners managed to go short distances into the interior to es-
tablish trading outposts, but travel through the rugged West African hinter-
land could be dangerous and difficult for outsiders. Besides the wild beasts
that on occasion ate unwary travelers and the local humans who generally
looked upon foreigners with the deepest suspicion, travel into the interior
was made difficult also because few of the region’s rivers were navigable by
oceangoing vessels.57 One of the first Europeans to penetrate the West Afri-
can interior to any great extent was a Scotsman named Mungo Park, whose
first expedition into the area did not take place until the mid-1790s. Some-
what to his chagrin Park found that by the late eighteenth century, their
scarcity notwithstanding, Europeans were a known and feared quantity in
much of western Africa’s heartland. On one occasion when Park accepted
the hospitality of a Fulbe herdsman to share a meal with his family in what
is now the country of Guinea, he was astonished to find that no sooner had
the shepherd mentioned that Park was a “Nazarani,” a Nazarene or Chris-
tian, than his host’s children began to cry, “and their mother crept slowly to-
wards the door, out of which she sprang like a greyhound, and was instantly
followed by her children.”58 Because of its long association with the slave
trade, anyone labeled a Christian was apparently an object of fear for many
people in this stretch of western Africa, an association that must certainly
have hindered Christianity’s popularity.
Christian missionary activity in the rest of West Africa east of Sierra Le-
one began in the seventeenth century and was, as in Sierra Leone, initially
the product of religious zeal, economic interest, and military strategy on the
part of Europeans and Africans alike.59 The desire of Africa’s rulers for trade
with Europe and the spread of Christianity were sometimes closely linked,
but economic opportunism should not obscure the spiritual integrity of
those involved on either side. African kings often allowed white missionar-
ies access to their territories only if they were accompanied by merchants.60
Questions arise about the sincerity of African rulers’ conversion to Christi-
anity, given that they were usually accompanied by pleas for European con-
sumer goods and weaponry.61
Bumi Jeleen, ruler of the late fifteenth-century Senegalese kingdom of
Jolof (also spelled Wolof), asked King João II of Portugal to send him trade
goods. João responded by suggesting that trade between the two nations
might be facilitated if the Jolof prince joined the Christian church. Jeleen
initially declined but was later forced to reconsider the offer when a palace
coup led to his removal from the throne and subsequent need for foreign

34 • Embracing Protestantism
allies. Living in exile in Portugal, Jeleen eventually converted to Christian-
ity, but he also never stopped asking for arms to regain his lost kingdom.
King João, for his part, knew that in order to spread the faith he had to es-
tablish trade relations with the Wolof, and trade with the Wolof would, he
hoped, open up commercial relations with the legendary and presumably
rich commercial center of Timbuktu farther inland; that in turn would pro-
vide the resources and people to spread Christianity into an African interior
then dominated by Islam. João and Jeleen must have recognized that dis-
associating religious faith from commerce and politics would be unattain-
able.62
The relationship between trade and political power on the one hand and
religious faith on the other has long been fraught with charges of oppor-
tunism. But as the Jolof king’s example demonstrates, there was no clear
line between religion and politics in early modern Europe or Africa. There
is evidence that Jeleen’s conversion to Catholicism was sincere. Jeleen and
João would have known that supernatural allies were essential to success
in politics or on the field of battle. Adopting a non-African religion could
be dangerous for a ruler, yet the power of Western technology must have
inspired many Africans to believe that metaphysical forces were behind
the power of European guns. Cold calculation by African monarchs surely
played an important role in such matters; still, religious conviction cannot
be discounted.63
João II’s successors continued to send merchants and priests to the area
in the following decades and beyond. By the seventeenth century, though,
Portuguese traders and missionaries were increasingly marginalized by
larger and more powerful European states that could sell goods to Afri-
can buyers at far better prices. Portugal did not give up on the region and
was able to re-enter the West African market at least once during the late
seventeenth century as a consequence of the War of the League of Augs-
burg (1689–97), which pitted forces led by the English against those of the
French under Louis XIV. Taking advantage of the Franco-British imbroglio,
the government in Lisbon sent merchants and Franciscan monks to Ilha de
Bissau, in what is now the country of Guinea-Bissau, baptized its ruler, and
reestablished commercial relations.
By 1694, with official Bissau embracing or at least not resisting Francis-
can evangelism, the monks there claimed to have brought some 700 Afri-
cans into the church in Bissau, 1,200 in Geba, another 700 at Cacheu, and
600 more at Bolor. Unfortunately for Portugal, its religious and commercial

Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 • 35

monopoly of Bissau ended as abruptly as it began when England under Wil-
liam III patched up its dispute with Louis in 1697, allowing French and Eng-
lish merchants to reappear. As Portugal attempted to keep these interlopers
from coming back, its efforts only angered Bissau’s rulers, who had grown
accustomed to the cheaper and better-quality goods offered by French and
British traders. Christianity lived on in Bissau in the eighteenth century,
but without the support of European priests or the encouragement of local
rulers, it was up to Africans like Seignior Joseph and Seignior Domingo to
propagate the faith over the next century.64
The retreat of Portuguese power had a deleterious effect on the main-
tenance of Afro-Catholicism throughout West Africa. By the 1770s, Luso-
African traders were unable to compete with the English for the purchase
of slaves and ivory. Creoles were also becoming, in the estimation of one
Portuguese official, almost indistinguishable in their lifestyles from local
Africans. Mulatto Luso-Africans already had partially integrated into local
West African culture, a process that continued unabated since European
priests had not ventured into the area for some twenty years. Despite the
lack of outside support, Luso-African Christianity persisted. When white
priests finally trekked up the Nuñez River valley in the 1780s, local African
Catholics seized the opportunity to make confessions, take communion,
and have their children baptized.65 By then, however, a new effort to bring
Christianity to West Africa was in the offing; again, it depended on black
people—this time Protestants from the Americas—to make it work.

Competition from Islam

Another potential roadblock to Christian evangelization in West Africa
during the Atlantic slave-trade era was more worrying to European mis-
sionaries than indigenous religious leaders and African Christian hybrids.
Islam’s presence was well established when Christian missionaries came
to western Africa;66 as we will see, Muslim influence turned out to pose as
many opportunities as it did dangers for the region’s Christians. European
traders and explorers knew that Islam existed as a minority faith in west-
ern Africa, as in their travels they came into direct contact with numerous
Islamic merchants and a few Muslim warlords.67 Many religions were ob-
served in western Africa by the eighteenth century, including Islam, which
had been influential in the region since the ninth century. Examples abound
of captive Africans in the Americas who continued to practice Islam,68 and

36 • Embracing Protestantism
though they never dominated the slave quarters of the West Indies or North
America like they sometimes did in Brazil, black Muslim slaves, some of
them distinguished by their ability to read and write, attracted wide notice
by slave owners.69
Islam’s expansion in West Africa was accelerated by the sporadic Mus-
lim holy wars, or jihads, that engulfed the western African hinterland for
much of the eighteenth century. As early as 1727, Fulbe Muslims attacked
their pagan neighbors, selling some, in this case the Susu, into the Atlantic
slave market.70 Ethnic groups, such as they were, could also be split along re-
ligious lines, pitting one faction whose adherents believed in an indigenous
African religion against an Islamic faction. Such was the case for the Fulbe
living in the highland region of what is now Guinea. They divided them-
selves into the Fulbe-Timba, who maintained their indigenous faith, and
the Islamic Fulbe-Labe, making war on each other even though they shared
the same culture and spoke the same language.71
Neighboring Futa Jalon’s Muslim armies won and lost numerous battles
during the course of the eighteenth century, inevitably causing some of
their number to be sold into slavery in the Americas.72 A decisive victory
in 1789 consolidated Fulbe Muslim hegemony over Futa so that it was not
successfully invaded again until European colonization occurred late in
the nineteenth century.73 One of the main reasons Muslim leaders resorted
to armed aggression against their neighbors was that those same neighbors
raided Muslim towns, capturing free Muslims, and selling them into slav-
ery.74 Interestingly, western Africa’s Muslims were not opposed to slavery
as an institution: there is no prohibition against slavery in the Qur’an.75
Without any religious sanction, the Futa became a major slave-trading
people as the century wore on, selling captives of its raids and wars to the
French at Conakry and the British at James Fort at the mouth of the Gam-
bia River.76
While Muslim slave traders felt no to need justify their trade in slaves,
British slave traders, whose apologists used the threat of Islamic expansion
as a rationale for the trade’s continuance, conversely did feel the need to jus-
tify their activities. John Matthews, a lieutenant stationed aboard a British
Royal Navy frigate that toured the coast of West Africa in the 1780s, main-
tained that abolishing the slave trade would be detrimental to British inter-
ests because that would mean bringing to an end the education of numerous
Africans who were sent to Europe for that purpose. Gaining some Western
learning and, Matthews hoped, a dose of Protestant Christianity, these sons

Christianity in Atlantic Africa before 1800 • 37

Discovering Diverse Content Through
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 Occidentales de Castilla a su partida."

Another meritorious action is added:

"A su instancia perdonó la Magestad de aquel Rey (James I.) a

sesenta sacerdotes que estavan presos condenados por causa
de la religion, y a otros mucho Catolicos, passandolos todos
consigo a Flandes."

The title of Count Gondomar was conferred upon him by Philip III. in
1617, but the date of his death is still a desideratum. Many
anecdotes concerning him are to be seen scattered in Howel's
Treatise of Ambassadors.
W. M. R. E.

DOOR-HEAD INSCRIPTIONS.
(Vol. vi., p. 543.)

B. B. Woodward (urged, probably, by R. Rawlinson's question in Vol.

vi., p. 412.) sends you the following inscription,

"Sit mihi nec glis servus, nec hospes hirudo,"

copied from over the entrance to an old hostel in the town of

Wymondham, Norfolk. He says he quotes from memory.

Vol. vii., p. 23., you give an English translation of the inscription:

"From servant lazy as dormouse,

Or leeching guest, God keep my house;"

but suggest that "hirudo" should be "hirundo," and produce some

apt classical quotations supposing it may be so, requesting Mr.
Woodward to look again at the original inscription.
In a recent Number (Vol. vii., p. 190.) Mr. Woodward appears to have
done this, and sends you the inscriptions correctly (as I beg to
vouch, having often read and copied it, and living within four miles
of the spot), thus:

"Nec mihi glis servus, nec hospes hirudo."

Permit me to add to this corroboration, that I should venture a

different translation of the word "hospes" from your correspondent's,
and render the notice thus:

"Good attendance and cheap charges:"

taking "hospes" not as guest but host, and the literal words, "My
servant is not a dormouse, nor (I) the host a leech."

Ainsworth gives authority for "hospes" meaning host as well as

guest, and quotes Ovid's Metamorphoses in support of it.
John P. Boileau.
Ketteringham Park, Wymondham, Norfolk.

With due respect to your correspondent A. B. R., the word "hospes"

most probably means host, not guest.

"Sit mihi nec servus glis, nec hospes hirudo."

In Blomfield's Norfolk (but I cannot now lay my finger on the

passage) the line is given as an inscription on the lintel of a door of
an ancient hostelry, carved in oak. If so, the line may be rendered—

"No maid like dormouse on me wait,

Nor leech-like host be here my fate."

But, on the supposition that guest is the proper meaning, "hirudo"

might be taken in the sense of a greedy guest, although this would
not be complimentary to the older hospitality. And even in the sense
of gossiping, "hirudo" would not be so inappropriate an imitation of
the "recitator acerbus" at the conclusion of the Ars Poetica:

"Nec missura cutem nisi plena cruoris hirudo."

E. L. B.
Ruthin.

PHOTOGRAPHIC NOTES AND QUERIES.

Photographic Gun-Cotton.—The "doctors differ" not a little in their
prescriptions for preparing the best gun-cotton for photographic use.
How shall the photographer decide between them?

Dr. Diamond ("N. & Q.," Vol. vi., p. 277.) says (I quote briefly), "Pour
upon 100 grains of cotton an ounce and a half of nitric acid,
previously mixed with one ounce of strong sulphuric acid. Knead it
with glass rods during five minutes," &c.

Mr. Hunt, quoting, (apparently with approbation) from Mr. Archer,

says (p. 260., 3rd edit.), "Take one ounce by measure of nitric acid,
mixed with one ounce by measure of ordinary sulphuric acid, and
add to them eighty grains of cotton; well stir," &c., "for not more
than FIFTEEN SECONDS," &c. "It will be seen that the cotton is not
exposed to the action of the mixed acids in this last mode longer
than is necessary to saturate the cotton; should the action be
continued further, the solubility of the cotton is entirely lost."

Not only is the order of manipulation different (a point probably not

material), but the time between "five minutes" and "fifteen seconds"
must exercise a most important influence on the result. Who is
right?
Cokely.
Sealing-wax for Baths.—I notice in your answers to correspondents
(No. 176., p. 274.), that you inform H. Henderson that glass may be
cemented for baths with sealing-wax. May I recommend to H.
Henderson the use of gutta percha, instead of glass, for that purpose?
Sheet gutta percha is now very cheap, and the baths are most easily
made. I have had one of my own making in constant use since last
July, having never emptied it but twice, to filter the nitrate of silver
solution. It is not liable to breakage. The joinings are much less
liable to leakage. And when it is necessary to heat slightly the silver
solution (as it has been during the late cold weather), I have
adopted the following simple plan: Heat moderately a stout piece of
plate glass; plunge it into the bath; repeat the operation according
to the size of bath. It is very useful to make a gutta percha cap to
cover over the bath when not in use; it protects it from dust and
evaporation, and saves the continual loss of materials arising from
pouring the solution backwards and forwards. For home-work I have
reduced the whole operation to a very simple system. My bath,
hypo-soda, developing fluid (of which, as it keeps so long, I make
ten ounces at a time), are always ready in a small closet in my
study. These I arrange on my study-table: a gutta percha tray, a
brass levelling-stand upon it, a jug of soft water, and half-a-dozen
small plates to place my pictures on, after treating them with the
hypo-solution (for, to save time, I do not finish washing them until I
have done all the pictures I require). All these things I can prepare
and arrange in less than ten minutes, and can as easily return them
to their places afterwards.

With regard to Mr. Mabley's process, described in "N. & Q.," No. 176.,
p. 267., as I am but a beginner myself, and have much to learn, I
should be sorry to condemn it; but I should fear that his pictures
would not exhibit sufficient contrast in the tints. Nor do I see the
advantage the pictures would possess, if they did, over positives
taken by our process. We amateurs in the country labour at present
under great disadvantages, some of which I think the Photographic
Society will remove. I am myself quite unable to form an idea what
the collodion pictures done by first-rate photographers are like. All
the positives done by amateurs in this part of the world, and
developed by pyrogallic acid, which I have seen, present a dirty
brown hue, by no means pleasing or artistic; and I have seen but
very few, either developed by pyrogallic acid or protosulphate of
iron, free from blemishes. I think if we were to act upon the
suggestion made in "N. & Q." some time back, and send the editor a
specimen of our performances, it would be a slight return for his
endeavours in our behalf; and he would, I doubt not, honestly tell us
whether our pictures were tolerable or not. I, for one, shall be very
happy to do so.
J. L. Sisson.
Edingthorpe Rectory.

Developing Chamber.—I think Mr. Sisson will find some difficulty in

applying his very excellent idea of a sheet India rubber lighting
medium to his portable laboratory, as the vapour of the ether will act
upon it and render it sticky and useless after one or two usings.
Allow me to suggest what I am in the habit of using, viz. a double
layer of yellow glazed calico, stuck together with a little common
drying oil, and allowed to dry for a few days: this causes a perfect
exclusion of the actinic rays, and is very durable.
F. Maxwell Lyte.
Falkland, Torquay.

The Black Tints on Photographic Positives.—A correspondent having

inquired how these were obtained, and another replying that it was
caused by starch, I beg to offer a process to your readers as to how
they may obtain those carbonic tints; though I must premise that
the process requires some skill, and is not always successful, though
always sure to make them black: but on occasions of failure the
lights sink, and the brilliancy of the picture is lost. That it is not
starch in the French process, unless that vehicle contains some
preparation, I am tolerably certain; the chloride of barium will often
produce black images, though very uncertain; and the black process
as given by Le Gray is uncertain also. For myself, I generally prefer
the colour given by ammoniac salt; it is artistical and sufficient for
any purpose. The present process, which I use myself when I
require a black colour, with its imperfections, I offer to the
photographic readers of "N. & Q.," and here it is.

Take a two-ounce vial, and have some powdered litharge of lead, by

some called gold or scale litharge; pound it fine in a Wedgewood
mortar, and put in the vial about one scruple; pour on it about half
an ounce of Beaufoy's acetic acid, but do not replace the cork or
stopper, as the gas evolved is very active, and will burst the vial,
placing the operator's eyes in jeopardy; agitate and allow it to stand
some hours to settle, or leave it till next day, when it will be better
for the purpose: then decant the clear part and throw the fæces
away, return the solution into the bottle, and fill up with distilled
water. The positive paper being now prepared with the ammonio-
nitrate of silver, and placed as usual in the sun, the artist must
remove it when a tolerably distinct image is visible, but not
altogether up: this is one of the niceties of the process; if it is too
much done the blacks will be too black, and if not enough they will
be feeble and want richness; it is when a visible image of the whole
is developed: at this point put the positive into cold water; this will
remove a great deal of the silver that has not been acted upon by
the light: let it soak three or four minutes; take it out and blot off
the water, laying a clean piece of paper below. Now pour a small
quantity of the solution of lead on one end, and with a glass rod
pass it carefully over every part; blot it off, and giving the paper a
little time to dry partially, pass over a solution of newly made gallic
acid; the shadows will rapidly become perfectly blank, and the
picture will come up. But another nicety in the process is the point at
which it must be plunged into hyposulphite of soda solution; if
plunged in too soon the black will be mingled with the sepia tints,
and if too late the whole tint will be too black. I offer it, however,
because I know its capabilities of improvement, and the intensity of
the black is sometimes beautiful: it is better suited for architectural
subjects, where there is but little sky, as it will lay a faint tint over it;
but if a sky is attempted, it must be kept under by a brush with a
little hyposulphite of soda solution, touching it carefully. The time it
will take in becoming black will not exceed one minute; but as the
eyesight is the guide, the moment the tints have changed from red
to black is the proper time to arrest its further progress: the
combination thus obtained will not change, nor, I believe, become
faint by time; but I repeat it may be much improved, and if any
abler hand, or one with better means at his disposal, will take the
trouble to examine its capabilities, I shall be very thankful for his
notes on the subject.

N.B. The solution of lead must contain acid; and if by keeping it does
not change litmus-paper, acid must be added till it does.
Weld Taylor.
7. Conduit Street West.
 Replies to Minor Queries.
Contested Elections (Vol. vii., p.208.).—There is a very fair history of
the boroughs of Great Britain, by Edwards, in 3 Vols. 8vo., printed by
Debrett in 1792.
J. B.

X. Y. Z. is informed that a compilation on the subject to which his

Query relates was published a few years since in Leeds by Henry
Stooks Smith. Speaking from recollection, it appears to be a work of
some research; but I cannot say how far it is to be relied on. It may,
perhaps, be one of the unfortunate works which have already fallen
under his censure.
J. B.
Prestwich.

Suicide at Marseilles (Vol. vii., p. 180.).—In Montaigne's Essays I

find,—

"In former times there was kept, in our city of Marseilles, a

poison prepared out of hemlock, at the public charge, for those
who had a mind to hasten their end, having first, before the Six
Hundred, which were their Senate, given an account of the
reasons and motives of their design; and it was not otherwise
lawful than by leave from the magistrate, and upon just
occasion, to do violence to themselves. The same law was also
in use in other places."—Book ii. chap. iii., at end.

This, however, is not the original authority required by your

correspondent.

In the earlier part of the same chapter, "Plutarch, On the Virtuous

Deeds of Women," is referred to as the authority for the statement
which Montaigne makes of

"The Milesian virgins, that by an insane compact hanged

themselves, one after another, until the magistrate took order in
it, enacting, that the bodies of such as should be found so
hanged should be drawn by the same halter, stark naked,
through the city."
J. P.
Birmingham.

Acts, xv. 23. (Vol. vii., p. 204.).—From the notes to Tischendorf's

Greek Testament, it appears that καὶ ὁι is omitted by Griesbach ed.
II. anno 1806, as well as by Lachman, on the authority of the four
most ancient Greek MSS. distinguished as A, B, C, and D, confirmed
by the versio Armenica, and so quoted by Athanasius, Irenæus,
Pacian, and Vigilius. The MS. A is referred by Tischendorf to the
latter half of the fifth century, and is the Alexandrian MS. in the
British Museum. B is the Vatican codex of about the middle of the
fourth century. C the codex Ephraemi Syri rescriptus at Paris, and is
of the first half of the fifth century; and D is Beza's MS. at
Cambridge, of about the middle of the sixth century. Mr. Sansom may
find a very interesting letter upon this subject from Dr. Tregelles to
Dr. Charles Wordsworth, the present Bishop of St. Andrew's, which
was published very recently in the Scottish Ecclesiastical Journal, and
in which that learned critic defends the omission of the καὶ ὁι. I
regret that I cannot furnish him with the number of that Journal, but
it was not more than three or four back.

I hope that Mr. Sansom will inform your readers of the ultimate result
of his inquiries on this interesting subject.
P. H.

Serpent's Tongue (Vol. vi., p. 340.).—The Lingua Serpentina of old

MSS., and the fossil now commonly termed a Shark's-tooth. In
former days, few pilgrims returned from the East without bringing at
least one of those curious stones. Being principally found in Malta, it
was said they were the tongues of the vipers, which once infested
that island, and which St. Paul had turned into stone. Considered to
be antidotes, and possessed of talismanic qualities, they were set in
cups, dishes, knife-handles, and other requisites for the table.
W. Pinkerton.
Ham.

Croxton or Crostin of Lancashire (Vol. vii., p. 108.).—A full account of

the parish of Croston (not Crostin), which was formerly very
extensive, but is now divided into the six parishes of Croston,
Chorley, Hesketh, Hoole, Rumford, and Tarleton, may be found in
Baines's Lancashire, vol. iii. pp. 395. to 440. There does not appear
to have been a family of Croston of any note, though the name is
common in the county. In Burke's Heraldic Dictionary, I find three
families named Croxton; the principal one being of Croxton in
Cheshire, since temp. Hen. III. Their arms are—Sable, a lion
rampant arg. debruised by a bend componée or and gu.
Broctuna.
Bury, Lancashire.

Robert Dodsley (Vol. vii., p. 237.).—In the Biographia Dramatica it is

stated that "this author was born near Mansfield, in
Nottinghamshire, as it is supposed;" and this supposition was, not
improbably, founded on the following lines, which occur in one of his
poems, as Mansfield is situated in the forest of Sherwood:

"O native Sherwood! happy were thy Bard,

Might these, his rural notes, to future time,
Boast of tall groves, that nodding o'er thy plain,
Rose to their tuneful melody."
Tyro.
Dublin.

Lord Goring (Vol. ii., pp. 22. 65.; Vol. vii., p. 143.).—In the order-
books of the council of state, I find that William Killegrew was, on
the 1st Oct., 1642, appointed lieutenant-colonel of the regiment of
Colonel Goringh, vice Thomas Hollis, deceased; and that, on the
26th March, 1647, he was named colonel of the same regiment, vice
Colonel Goringh, resigned. That the last-mentioned colonel is George
Goringh we learn from the war-budget (Staat van Oorlog) of 1644,
where the salaries of

Colonel George Goringh iijc£

William Killegre, Lieutenant-Colonel lxxx£

are charged on the province of Holland. It nowhere appears from

official reports that Lord Goring held a higher military rank than that
of colonel in the Netherlands army. That he left England previous to
1645 is proved not only by the above, but also by his presence, as
colonel in the service of Spain, at the siege of Breda in 1637. If he
afterwards served in the Spanish army as lieutenant-general, what
could have induced him at a later period to accept the rank of
colonel in the army of the States?
—t.

In the Irish Compendium, or Rudiments of Honour, vol. iii. pp. 64,

65., 2nd ed.: London, 1727, we read that Lord Richard Boyle, born in
1566, married as second wife "Catharine, only daughter to Sir Jeffry
Fenton; by her had five sons and seven daughters, of which the
Lady Lettice was married to George Lord Goring."—V. D. N. From the
Navorscher.

Chaplains to Noblemen (Vol. vii., p. 163.).—There is, in the Faculty

Office in Doctors' Commons, an entry kept of the appointments of
chaplains when brought to be registered. Under what authority the
entry is made does not seem very clear. The register does not
extend beyond the year 1730, though there may be amongst the
records of the office in St. Paul's some earlier notices of similar
appointments.
G.
The Duke of Wellington Maréchal de France (Vol. vii., p. 283.).—The
Duke of Wellington is indebted to the writer in the Revue Britannique
for his dukedom and bâton of France, and not to Garter King-at-
Arms. No such titles were attributed to his Grace or proclaimed by
Garter, as a reference to the official accounts in the London Gazette
will show. The Order of St. Esprit was the only French honour
ascribed to him; that Order he received and frequently wore, the
insignia of which were displayed, with his numerous other foreign
honours, at the lying-in-state. Such being the case, Garter will not
perhaps be expected to produce the diploma for either the title of
Duc de Brunoy or the rank of Maréchal de France.
C. G. Y.

Lord North (Vol. vii., p. 207.).—Mr. Forster has, it seems, blundered

a piece of old scandal into an insinuation at once absurd and
treasonable. The scandal was not of Lord Guilford and the Princess
Dowager, but of Frederick Prince of Wales and Lady Guilford. On this
I will say no more than that the supposed resemblance between
King George III. and Lord North is very inaccurately described by
Mr. Forster in almost every point except the fair complexion. The
king's figure was not clumsy—quite the reverse, nor his face homely,
nor his lips thick, nor his eyebrows bushy, nor his eyes protruding
like Lord North's; but there was certainly something of a general
look which might be called resemblance, and there was above all
(which is not alluded to) the curious coincidence of the failure of
sight in the latter years of both. Lord North was the only son of Lord
Guilford's first marriage: I know not whether the children of the
second bed inherited defective sight; if they did, it would remove
one of the strongest grounds of the old suspicion.
C.

Mediæval Parchment (Vol. vii., p. 155.).—The method of preparing

parchment for illumination will be found in the Birch and Sloane
MSS., under "Painting and Drawing," &c., where are a number of
curious MS. instructions on the subject, written chiefly in the
sixteenth century, in English, French, and Italian.
Sir Frederic Madden, in the Introduction to Illuminated Ornaments,
fol. 1833, and Mr. Ottley, in Archæologia, vol. xxiv. art. 1., have both
written very minutely on the subject of illuminating, but their
observations are too long for quotation.
E. G. B.

I remember reading in an old French work the process used in

illuminating parchments, and remember that the gilding was laid
upon garlic juice; it might very possibly be diluted with proof spirits
of wine; at all events, no parchments can bear water at whatever
time they may have been prepared: the process of making them
wear out with water would turn them into leather. The work I allude
to was brought out, I recollect, under the auspices of the French
Academy.
W. T.

"I hear a lion," &c. (Vol. vii., p. 205.).—These lines (corrupted by

your correspondent Sagitta into five) are two couplets in Bramstone's
lively poem of the Art of Politics. They are a versification of a shrewd
question put by Colonel Titus in the debate on the celebrated bill for
excluding James Duke of York.
C.

The Art of Politics, by the Rev. Mr. Bramston, contains the following
lines, which will, I apprehend, give your correspondent the required
information:

"With art and modesty your part maintain;

And talk like Col'nel Titus, not like Lane.
The trading knight with rants his speech begins,
Sun, moon, and stars, and dragons, saints, and kings:
But Titus said, with his uncommon sense,
When the exclusion-bill was in suspense,
I hear a lion in the lobby roar;
Say, Mr. Speaker, shall we shut the door
And keep him there, or shall we let him in
To try if we can turn him out again?"

Mr. Bramston's poem is in the first volume of Dodsley's Collection.

Perhaps some of your correspondents may be able to refer to a

cotemporary account of Colonel Titus's speech on the Exclusion Bill.
C. H. Cooper.
Cambridge.

Fercett (Vol. vi., p. 292.).—The term Fercett is probably intended as

the designation of some collection in MS. of family evidences and
pedigrees. It was usual among our ancestors thus to inscribe such
collections either with the name of the collector, or that of the
particular family to whom the book related. Thus the curious MS. in
the library of the City of London, called Dunthorne, and containing
ancient municipal records, is so called from its collector, whose name
was Dunthorne. Instances of such titles are to be found in the
collections of Gervase Holles in the Lansdowne MSS., where one of
such books is referred to as Trusbutt.
E. G. B.

Old Satchells (Vol. vi., p. 160.; Vol. vii., p.209.).—Your correspondent

J. O. seems not to be aware that another and a fourth edition of Old
Satchells' True History ("with copious additions, notes, and
emendations," under the editorial superintendence of William
Turnbull, Esq., F.S.A.) is in course of preparation 'neath the fostering
care of Mr. John Gray Bell, the pro amore publisher of so many
historical and antiquarian tracts of interest. Mr. Bell has already given
to the world a Pedigree of the Ancient Family of Scott of Stokoe,
edited, with notes, by William Robson Scott, Ph. D., of St. Leonard's,
Exeter, from the original work compiled by his grandfather, Dr.
William Scott, of Stamfordham, Northumberland, then (1783)
representative of the family. The latter gentleman left behind him a
large and valuable collection of MSS. relative to the family, which, as
I learn from the prospectus, will be called into requisition in the
forthcoming reprint of the Old Souldier of Satchell. Possibly the
publishers of the second and third editions may have been assisted
in their labours by the learned doctor in question, whose already
quoted Pedigree of the Scotts of Stokoe was issued only a few years
prior to the appearance of the Hawick edition of 1786, not 1784, as
accidentally misprinted in J. O.'s interesting communication.
T. Hughes.
Chester.

Curtseys and Bows (Vol. vii., p. 156).—In the interlude of The Trial of
Treasure, by Purfoote, 1567 (page 14. of reprint), Inclination says to
Gredy-gutte:

"Ise teach you to speake, I hold you a pounde!

Curchy, lob, curchy downe to the grounde.

Gre. Che can make curchy well enowe.

Inc. Lower, old knave, or yle make ye to bowe!"

For rationale of bows and curtseys, see "N. & Q.," Vol. v., p. 157.,
though I fancy the bob curtseys are the ones referred to.
Thos. Lawrence.
Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

The Rev. Joshua Marsden (Vol. vii., p. 181.).—This gentleman was

born at Warrington in the year 1777. In the year 1800 he offered
himself, and was accepted by the Wesleyan Methodist Conference,
as a missionary to British North America, where he laboured for
several years. He removed thence to Bermuda. In 1814 he returned
to England with a constitution greatly impaired, but continued to
occupy regular stations under the direction of the Conference until
1836, when, worn out by affliction, he became a supernumerary,
and resided in London, where he occasionally preached as his health
permitted. He died August 11, 1837, aged sixty.
John I. Dredge.
A memoir and portrait of the Rev. Joshua Marsden will be found in
the Imperial Magazine, July, 1830. He was at that period a preacher
among the Wesleyan Methodists, having been for many years
previously a missionary in connexion with that people. He was an
amiable, ingenious, and worthy man, and although not a powerful, a
pleasing poet. Among other things, he published Amusements of a
Mission, Forest Musings, and The Evangelical Minstrel.
J. H.

Sidney as a Christian Name (Vol. vii., p. 39.).—Your correspondent R.

D. B., of Baltimore, is informed that the name of Sidney is extremely
common in North Wales as a Christian name of either sex, but more
particularly of the female.

There seems to be no tradition connected with its use. In this part of

the principality, the name has generally been assumed more from its
euphonistic character than from any family connexion.
E. L. B.
Ruthin.

The Whetstone (Vol. vii., p. 208.).—In your No. 174. of "N. & Q.," E.
G. R. alludes to the Game of the Whetstone. The following
quotation, as bearing on that subject, may not be uninteresting to
your readers:

"In the fourth year of this king's (Edward VI.) reign, in the
month of September, one Grig, a poulterer of Surrey (taken
among the people for a prophet, in curing of divers diseases by
words and prayers, and saying he would take no money), was,
by command of the Earl of Warwick, and others of the Council,
set on a scaffold in the town of Croidon, in Surrey, with a paper
on his breast, wherein was written his deceitful and hypocritical
dealings: and after that, on the eighth of September, set on a
pillory in Southwark, being then Our Lady Fair there kept; and
the Mayor of London, with his brethren the aldermen, riding
 through the fair, the said Grig asked them and all the citizens
forgiveness.

"'Of the like counterfeit physicians,' saith Stow, 'I have noted, in
the summary of my Chronicles (anno 1382), to be set on
horseback, his face to the horse-tail, the same tail in his hand
as a bridle, a collar of jordans about his neck, a whetstone on
his breast; and so led through the city of London, with ringing
of basons, and banished.'

"Whereunto I had added (with the forementioned author) as

followeth:—Such deceivers, no doubt, are many who, being
never trained up in reading or practice of physicke and
chirurgery, do boast to doe great cures, especially upon women;
as to make them straight that before were crooked, corbed, or
cramped in any part of their bodies, &c. But the contrary is true;
for some have received gold, when they have better deserved
the whetstone."—Goodall's Royal College of Physicians: London,
1684, p. 306.
J. S. S.
Bath.

Surname of Allen (Vol. vii., p. 205.).—Perhaps A. S. A. may find the

following words in Celtic of use to him in his researches as to the
origin of the name of Allan:—Adlann, pronounced allānn, means a
spearman or lancer; aluin, a white hind or fawn (Query, Do any of
the name bear a hind as a crest?); allin, a rocky islet; alain, fair,
bright, fair-haired, &c.
Fras. Crossley.

Belatucadrus (Vol. vii., p. 205.).—Papers concerning the god

Belatucadrus are to be found in the Archæologia, vol. i. p. 310., vol.
iii. p. 101., vol. x. p. 118. I take these references from Mr. Akerman's
useful Archæological Index.
C. W. G.
Pot-guns (Vol. vi., p. 612.; Vol. vii., p. 190.).—In the parish of
Halvergate, a train of seventeen pot-guns is kept at the blacksmith's
shop. Mr. Woodward is correct in stating that they are "short
cylinders set perpendicularly in a frame, flat-candlestickwise;" but
each pot-gun at Halvergate is set in a separate block of wood, and
not several in a frame together. By touching the touchholes of each
pot-gun successively with a bar of red-hot iron, and with the aid of
two double-barrel guns, a royal salute is fired at every wedding or
festive occasion in Halvergate.
E. G. R.

Graves Family (Vol. vii., p. 130.).—Your correspondent James Graves

will find a tolerable pedigree of the Graves family, commencing in
the time of Edward IV., in the first volume of Dr. Nash's
Worcestershire; and, in the notes thereto, many interesting
particulars of various learned members of the family. Independent of
the three portraits mentioned by your correspondent, of which I
possess fine proof impressions, I have also one in mezzotinto of
Morgan Graves, Esq., of Mickleton, county of Gloucester, and Lord of
the Manor of Poden, in the co. of Worcester.
J. B. Whitborne.

Portrait Painters (Vol. vii., p. 180.).—The name of the Derby artist

was Wright, not White. I have seen several portraits by him of great
excellence. The time of his death I do not recollect, but I think the
greater part of his works were executed in the latter part of the last
century. Have not some of them been exhibited in Pall Mall? I have
not the means at hand of ascertaining the fact, but I think he
painted the "Blacksmith's Forge," which was so admirably
mezzotinted by Earlom.
E. H.

Plum Pudding (Vol. vi., p. 604.).—Southey, in his Omniana, vol. i. p.

7., quotes the following receipt for English plum puddling, as given
by the Chevalier d'Arvieux, who in 1658 made a voyage in an English
forty-gun ship:
 "Leur pudding était détestable. C'est un composé de biscuit pilé,
ou de farine, de lard, de raisins de Corinthe, de sel, et de
poivre, dont on fait une pâte, qu'on enveloppe dans une
serviette, et que l'on fait cuire dans le pot avec du bouillon de la
viande; on la tire de la serviette, et on la met dans un plat, et
on rappe dessus du vieux fromage, qui lui donne une odeur
insupportable. Sans ce fromage la chose en elle-même n'est pas
absolument mauvaise."

Cheese is now eaten with apple puddings and pies; but is there any
nook in England where they still grate it over plum pudding? I have
heard the joke of forgetting the pudding-cloth, told against Lord
Macartney during his embassy in China. Your correspondent will find
plum porridge and plum puddings mentioned together at page 122.
vol. ii. of Knight's Old England.
Thos. Lawrence.
Ashby-de-la-Zouch.

Muffs worn by Gentlemen (Vol. vi., passim.).—The Tatler, No. 155.,

describing a meeting with his neighbour the upholsterer, says:

"I saw he was reduced to extreme poverty by certain shabby

superfluities in his dress; for notwithstanding that it was a very
sultry day for the time of year, he wore a loose great coat and a
muff, with a long campaign wig out of curl," &c.
Erica.

The Burial Service by heart (Vol. vii., p. 13.).—In the Life of the Rev.
Griffith Jones, the celebrated founder of the Welsh circulating charity
schools, is this note:

"Living amongst dissenters who disliked forms of prayer, he

committed to memory the whole of the baptismal and burial
services; and, as his delivery was very energetic, his friends
frequently heard dissenters admire his addresses, which they
 praised as being extempore effusions unshackled by the Prayer
Book!"
E. D.

Burrow (Vol. vii., p. 205.).—Balliolensis says that in North

Gloucestershire "the side of a thick coppice is spoken of as a very
burrow place for cattle." He understands this to mean "sheltered,
secure from wind;" and he asks to what etymology this sense can be
attributed. I suspect the Anglo-Saxon bearo, a grove or copse, is the
word here preserved. As a wood forms a fence against the wind, and
is habitually so used and regarded by the agricultural population, the
association of ideas is suitable enough in this interpretation. Bearo,
first signifying the grove itself, might easily come to mark the shelter
which the grove afforded. But there is also a compound of this word
preserved in the ancient charters, in which the fitness of a place as a
pasture for swine is the prominent notion. Kemble, Cod. Dipl., No.
288.: "Hæc sunt pascua porcorum, quæ nostrâ linguâ Saxonicâ
denbera nominamus." In the same sense the compound with the
word weald (= a great forest) is found: weald-bero. The wood was
considered by our forefathers as propitious to their swine, not only
for its shelter, but also for the masts it supplied; and this may have
further helped to associate bearo with the comforts of cattle.
Orielensis.

"Coming home to men's business" (Vol. vii., p.235.).—It is hardly

requisite to state to the readers of "N. & Q.," that many editions of
Bacon's memorable, beautiful, and didactic Essays appeared in the
distinguished author's lifetime, obviously having experienced (proved
by prefatory epistles of different dates) the repeated revision and
emendations of the writer. The Essays were clearly favourites with
him, as well as with the then reading public. They were first
published in 1597, preceded by a letter addressed "To M. Anthony
Bacon, his deare Brother." The ninth edition was issued the year
before his death, which took place April 9, 1626. In that edition is
added a dedication "To the Right Honorable my very good Lo. the
Duke of Buckingham, his Grace Lo. High Admirall of England;"
signed, "Fr. St. Alban:" previous signatures being "Fran. Bacon"
(1597); "Fr. Bacon" (1612); "Fra. Bacon" (no date). In this
dedication to the Duke of Buckingham first appeared the passage
inquired about: "I doe now (he tells the Duke) publish my Essayes;
which, of all my other workes, haue beene most current: for that, as
it seems, they come home to Men's Businesse and Bosomes."—How
accurate, yet modest, an appreciation of his labours!
A Hermit at Hampstead.

My copy of Lord Bacon's Essays is a 12mo.: London, 1668. And in

the epistle dedicatory, the author himself tells the Duke of
Buckingham as follows:

"I do now publish my Essays; which, of all my other works, have

been most current: for that, as it seems, they come home to
men's business and bosomes."

This will carry J. P. eleven years further back, at all events.

Rt.

Heuristic (Vol. vii., p. 237.), as an English scholar would write it, or

Hevristisch, as it would be written by a German, is a word not to be
found in the sixth edition of Kant's Critik (Leipzig, 1818), nor in his
Prolegomena (Riga, 1783).[3] Your correspondent's copy appears to
have been tampered with. The title Kritik should be spelt with the
initial C, and reinen should not have a capital letter: the Germans
being very careful to prefix capitals to all substantives, but never to
adjectives. The above-mentioned edition of the Critik was sent to me
from Hamburg soon after its publication. It was printed by Fröbels at
Rudolstadt in 1818; and is unblemished by a single erratum, so far
as I have been able to detect one. Allow me to suggest to H. B. C. to
collate the pages in his edition with the sixth of 1818; the seventh of
1828; and, if possible, with one published in Kant's lifetime prior to
1804; and he will probably find, that the very favourite word of Kant,
empirisch, has been altered in a few instances to hevristich. Mr.
Haywood is evidently inaccurate in writing evristic, which is wrong in
Greek as well as in German and English.

Instead of giving the pages of his copy, your correspondent will

more oblige by stating the divisions under which this exceptional
word occurs, in the running title at the top of each page of his copy;
together with two or three lines of the context, which I can compare
with my own copy. I have not here the facility of resort to a British
Museum, or to German booksellers. Should your correspondent find
any difficulty in effecting collation of his edition with others, I shall
be willing to part with my copy for a short time for his use; or, if he
will oblige me with his copy, I will collate it with mine, and return it
within the week with the various readings of the cited passages.
T. J. Buckton.
Lichfield.

Footnote 3:(return)

The former is the synthetic, the latter the analytic exposition of

his system of mental philosophy.

"Cob" and "Conners" (Vol. vii., p. 234.).—These words are Celtic. Cob
means a mouth, a harbour, an entrance. Conners appears to be a
compound word, from cuan, a bay or harbour, and mar or mara, the
sea; pronounced "Cuan wara," then shortened into Conner. Conna-
mara, in the west of Ireland, properly spelled Cuan na mara, means
"bays of the sea."
Fras. Crossley.

Lady High Sheriff (Vol. vii., p. 236.).—Your correspondent W. M. is

informed that in Duncumb's Herefordshire there is no mention made
of the fact, that a lady executed the office of high sheriff of the
county. The high sheriffs for the years 1768—1771 inclusive were
Richard Gorges, William Nourse, Price Clutton, and Charles Hoskyns,
Bart. The lady alluded to would be the widow of one of these.
H. C. K.
 —— Rectory, Hereford.

Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery,

exercised the office of hereditary sheriff of Westmoreland, and, at
the assizes at Appleby, sat with the judges on the bench (temp. Car.
I.) Vide Blackstone's Comment., and Pocock's Memorials of the
Tufton Family, p. 78. (1800.)

I may add that ladies have also been included in the commission of
the peace. The Lady Bartlet was made a justice of the peace by
Queen Mary in Gloucestershire (Harl. MSS); Margaret, Countess of
Richmond, mother of Henry VII., was made a justice of peace; and a
lady in Sussex, of the name of Rowse, did usually sit on the bench at
the assizes and sessions amongst other justices cincta gladio (op.
cit.).
W. S.
Northiam.

Death of Nelson (Vol. vii., p. 52.).—The "beautiful picture which

hangs in a bad light in the hall of Greenwich Hospital" was not
painted by West, but by Arthur William Devis, a very talented artist,
but somewhat careless in financial matters. He was a pupil of
Zoffeny, was in India for some years, where he practised portrait-
painting with considerable success. The well-known print of the
"Marquis Cornwallis receiving the Sons of Tippoo Saib as Hostages,"
was from a picture painted by him. The "Death of Nelson" at
Greenwich was a commission from the house of Boydell, Cheapside;
and a large print was afterwards published by them from it. Devis
met the vessel on its return to England, and on its way homeward
painted, very carefully, the portraits of the persons represented in
his picture, and also a very exact view of the cockpit in which the
hero died. The picture has great merit, and deserves to be better
placed.
T. W. T.
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