A Merciless Place: The lost story of Britain's convict disaster in Africa and how it led to the settlement of Australia

by Emma Christopher

The extraordinary story - lost for two centuries - of how a failed British attempt to establish a penal colony in West Africa led to their eventual decision to abandon their African plans and move to the recently discovered colony known as New South Wales. Out of the embers of the African debacle came the modern nation of Australia.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Africa

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Emma Christoper is the author of "A Merciless Place: The Lost Story of Britain's Convict Disaster in Africa and How it Led to the Settlement of Australia," and "Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargoes, 1730-1808." She is also the co-editor, with Marcus Rediker and Cassandra Pybus, of "Many Middle Passages: Forced Migration and the Making of the Modern World."

Emma gained her PhD from the University College, London in 2002 and now holds an Australian Council Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney.

Emma is currently writing the history of a small west African slave trading factory and also involved in making a documentary about this story. She has traced slaves from the factory to Cuba and Sierra Leone and the slave traders to the USA and Australia. Because of the unique set of documents related to the case it has, remarkably, been possible to find descendants of both groups today and so to reveal some of the global legacy of one small outpost of the transatlantic slave trade. Emma is researching and filming this story in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cuba, the USA and Australia.



Emma lives in Sydney, Austratlia.

Reviews

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Dying in the right location was clearly considered to have some value to the country.’

Britain’s defeat in the American War of Independence (1775-1783) led to a search for alternative sites for the transportation of convicts. Many of us are familiar with the transportation of British convicts to Australia: the First Fleet left Britain on 13 May 1787, and arrived at Botany Bay on 18 January 1788. But what happened in between? Transportation to America effectively ceased in 1776, and consequently the British opted to send some convicts to its slave-trading ports in West Africa. In this book, Emma Christopher writes about this failed British attempt to establish a penal colony in West Africa and how it led to the establishment of a new colony in New South Wales.

Some of the convicts sent to West Africa were transported on board ships travelling to pick up their cargo of African slaves. When the convicts arrived at their new destination, some of them, together with soldiers, were forced to work in the slave-trading forts guarding humans intended as slaves. In this world, they are themselves slaves.

‘Standing on the battlements of Mori, half a world away from everything they know, the British legal system must have seemed more bizarre, and less just, than ever. Being sent into the army was odd enough but at least part of a long tradition, but sending men to guard a semi-dilapidated castle on a remote cliff face in West Africa watching slave ships sail by, was truly the most extraordinary punishment.’

It’s a story of one disaster after another: the Gold Coast was feared by Europeans as one of the deadliest places on earth. Dysentery was rampant, and typhoid and yellow fever were endemic. Many of the convicts (and soldiers) die within months of their arrival. The officers who survive often become corrupt. This is a story of flawed leadership, and government failure. But it is not an impersonal account of events - Dr Christopher tells the stories of some specific individuals involved. Those individuals include William Murray, a conman with many aliases who was transported first to Virginia and then to Africa. William Murray was murdered at Fort Mori by Captain Kenneth Mackenzie on 4 August 1782. But before he was murdered, Murray had once ruled the garrison at the fort at Cormantin. There is the story too, of Captain Joseph Wall, at Gorée, and his orders of 800 lashes.

I read this book in September 2010, not long after it was published in Australia. I heard Dr Christopher interviewed, and wanted to learn more about this episode in British penal history and how it led to the First Fleet. The combination of disaster and inhumanity means that this is not an easy read, but I found it a fascinating one.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Merciless Place is, to state the obvious, a profoundly important book which tells the history of what happened to some of Britain’s convicts after the American Revolution. The book presents in an orderly and chronological order a seemingly unbelievable tale of bizarre proportions the horror of poverty, deprivation, bizarre laws, unquenchable greed, unspeakable hardship and political lunacy that spanned the time from the end of the American Revolution to the beginning of the transportation of criminals to Australia. Consider this logic. Approximately 225 crimes carried the death penalty by the late 18C. There were hulks and prisons overflowing with criminal’s and so boatloads of criminal’s were shipped to America. When that source of criminal exportation ended the British decided to offer criminals, yes even those under the death penalty the opportunity to become convict-soldiers who could earn a pardon by setting out to West Africa to be guards/soldiers in slave forts. Thus, these convicts, now British soldiers, are now sent to Africa, many in slave ships, to guard African captives who would be sent overseas and sold as slaves. The criminals had therefore shed their shackles to become soldiers to guard slaves who would be in shackles.

Needless to say such a plan failed. The vast majority of criminal-soldiers contracted fatal diseases, the remainder faced a leadership group of British officers who were corrupt and cruel and everything fell apart. I’m being slightly simplistic but I think a death sentence in Britain was probably preferable to the extended horrors and final death sentence in West Africa.

Emma Christopher’s writing is crisp and clear, her book is very thoroughly researched, the footnotes and bibliography are thorough and extensive, and the format very effective. If you read this book you will find your head constantly shaking in disbelief. You will read about unbelievable hardship and cruelty. I dare say by the end of the book your sympathy will be with the criminals, not the politicians or the military leaders.

I urge you to read this book.

[David Carniglia · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fascinating book! And, talk about an obscure topic. Needless to say I had no idea that England shipped convicts to Africa. The dumping of convicts in Australia and in North America is a fairly well-known bit of 17th-19th century British colonial history, but Africa?

The obvious overlap with the slave trade there makes it very complex, at every level. not to mention the on-going rivalry with other European imperial powers. The officials in London who were responsible for these affairs could not have come up with a more absurd, disastrous policy.

All of which makes for great reading. The author makes it even more interesting by focusing on a couple of major players in this lucid drama--the nutty, sadistic leader of the expedition, MacKenzie, and the equally nutty and completely sociopathic gentleman-criminal, Murray. The fact that Murray (through convenient application of the appropriate pseudonym) claimed to be MacKenzie's nephew is just icing on the cake, err, plum pudding.

Though the cruelty and arbitrariness of society in the late 18th century made life precarious, the opposite was also true: due to lapses in communication and record-keeping, a clever person could get away with a lot more, and enjoy more freedom of action than most people can these days.

MacKenzie and Murray couldn't be made up-- they're that bizarre. This story would make a very depressing, but also highly-entertaining movie.

...

I'd give this five stars but for some editing issues. She's a fine writer, with a flair for clever description, not to mention serving up some nicely meandering, rewarding sentences, but I kept running into awkward misplaced phrases that fouled things up. Seems like some revision didn't get finished.

[to be continued.. ]

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting overview of how Great Britain handled its 18th century convict problem with particular focus on its disastrous African 'experiment'.