Myrmidon

“The Spirit of the Lord Jehovah is upon me; because Jehovah hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound”

— Isaiah 61:1, ASV

Lagos

Lagos in 1822 was an island town on a lagoon, ruled by its own king and full of slave-traders. The Portuguese and Spanish buyers lived in one part of it. Ajayi was there more than three months before he saw one of them. Then one evening a group of about six white men walked down the street where he was living. He did not dare to look at them properly, “being always suspicious that they had come for me: and my suspicion was not a fanciful one; for, in a few days after, I was made the eighth in number of the slaves of the Portuguese.”

By now he had stopped resisting. “Being a veteran in slavery, if I may be allowed the expression, and having no more hope of ever going to my country again, I patiently took whatever came; although it was not without a great fear and trembling that I received, for the first time, the touch of a White Man, who examined me whether I was sound or not.”

The Portuguese kept their captives in a room with one door and no windows. The men and boys were chained together by the neck, on a chain about six fathoms long, padlocked at both ends. The boys suffered most. When the men grew angry, or wanted to ease the weight of the chain to lie down at night, they pulled it tight, and the boys’ necks were bruised. “We were almost suffocated, or bruised to death.” When one or two fought in the night, all of them were punished. Eventually, when more men arrived and there was no chain to spare, the boys were separated and tied together with cord instead. “The female sex fared not much better.” They were kept like this for nearly four months.

Among the captives brought in at this time was another Yoruba boy named Joseph Bartholomew. The two would sail together, be freed together, and years later serve together as agents of the Church Missionary Society.

War on the Sea

Then a rumour went round that the English were cruising the coast. To the captives this was one more cause of dread. They had never heard of war at sea, or imagined it possible. It delayed their embarkation for some weeks. At last they were taken by canoe at night from Lagos to the beach, and in the morning put on board the ship, which sailed at once. There were 187 of them. The crew, busy with loading, gave them nothing to eat that day, and most of them were seasick.

“On the very same evening,” Crowther wrote, “we were surprised by two English men-of-war; and on the next morning found ourselves in the hands of new conquerors, whom we at first very much dreaded, they being armed with long swords.” When they were brought up from the hold, they found themselves surrounded by two large warships and several smaller vessels. The warships were His Majesty’s ships Myrmidon, under Captain H. J. Leeke, and Iphigenia, under Captain Sir Robert Mends, “who captured us on the 7th of April 1822, on the river Lagos.”

Mission tradition gives the name of the Portuguese ship as the Esperança Feliz, which means “Happy Hope.” Crowther’s letter does not name it, and no independent record of the ship has been found. The name may be right. It would be a fitting one.

The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron had been patrolling the coast since 1808, trying to enforce the laws against the slave trade. It was a small force for a long coast, and most slave ships got through. The sailors were driven partly by conviction and partly by prize money, which was paid for every captive freed. Many of them died of fever. It was, whatever its motives, one of the few things the British Empire did in West Africa in those years that was simply good, and for the 187 people in the hold of that ship it was the difference between the plantations of Brazil or Cuba and a chance of life.

Hogs and Cannon-Shot

The Portuguese owner and his sailors were tied up. The cook was left free to make breakfast. The captives, hungry and not threatened, began to help themselves to fruit from the stern, and then to wander over the ship looking for anything they could take. “Now we began to entertain a good opinion of our conquerors.”

After breakfast they were divided among the ships. Ajayi and five friends, among them Joseph Bartholomew, kept close together so as to be taken to the same vessel, and were rowed across to the Myrmidon. They could find no trace there of the captives who had been taken over before them. Then they saw parts of a pig hanging up, with white skin, which they had never seen, since in their country a pig was always roasted in the fire to remove the hair. And along the deck they saw rows of cannon-balls. They drew the obvious conclusion. The white men had killed and eaten the others, and the round shot were their heads. “But we were soon undeceived, by a close examination of the flesh with cloven foot, which resembled that of a hog; and, by a cautious approach to the shot, that they were iron.”

It is a story that Crowther clearly enjoyed telling against himself, and it says a great deal about what the captives believed. Many Africans in the era of the slave trade believed that Europeans bought people to eat them. The fear was not foolish. People taken to the coast by the white men never came back.

Within a few days the six boys were “quite at home in the man-of-war.” The sailors took them as their own boys and gave them clothes. The Portuguese owner and his son were brought on board in fetters. Ajayi, sure now that he would never again be in the man’s power, walked up to him while he was being shaved by his son and struck him on the head. He recorded it honestly, and judged it honestly: “an act, however, very wicked and unkind in its nature.”

Freetown

The slave ship was towed along for a time and then, being a slow sailer and not worth the trouble, stripped and abandoned at sea. Not all the captives who had been freed with Ajayi survived. One of the vessels carrying them was wrecked on a sandbank, though everyone aboard was saved. Another sank in a storm with all the captives and all but five of the sailors, who were found days later in a boat, reduced to skeletons. A hundred and two of the people from the slave ship were lost.

After about two and a half months cruising, the Myrmidon landed its rescued captives at Sierra Leone on 17 June 1822. Sierra Leone had been founded on the peninsula around Freetown in 1787 as a settlement for freed Black people from Britain and later from Nova Scotia and Jamaica, and since 1808 it had been a British colony and the place where the Navy landed the people it took from slave ships. They were known as “recaptives” or “liberated Africans,” and by 1822 there were thousands of them, from dozens of peoples and languages, settled in villages in the hills around the town.

That same day Ajayi and his companions were sent to one of those villages, Bathurst, and put in the care of the missionary there, Mr. Davey. They found many of their own countrymen, though none they had known before. The people assured them that they were free, “and we very soon believed them.”

But a few days later they were sent for to go to Freetown, to give evidence against their Portuguese owner in the court that dealt with captured slave ships. Someone hinted to them that they would be handed back to him. They refused to go unless they were carried, and in the end they were whipped into going. It was, Crowther wrote, “not a small joy to us to return to Bathurst again, in the evening, to our friends.” He admitted that he had been afraid, partly because of the blow he had given the man on the ship.

Liberty to the Captives

The verse at the head of this chapter was read by Jesus in the synagogue at Nazareth, at the beginning of his ministry. He unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and read that the Spirit of the Lord had anointed him “to proclaim release to the captives … to set at liberty them that are bruised” (Luke 4:18, ASV). Then he rolled up the scroll and said that the scripture had been fulfilled that day.

The captain of the Myrmidon did not know that he was setting free a future bishop. He was doing his duty. But the boy with the bruised neck whom his sailors fed and clothed would spend the rest of his life proclaiming a greater release, from a deeper bondage, to the people of his own land. Forty-two years later, according to Page, Leeke, by then an admiral, was in Canterbury Cathedral to see the boy he had freed consecrated a bishop. For Crowther, the day of his rescue was the day the psalmist describes: “Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: The snare is broken, and we are escaped” (Psalm 124:7, ASV).