2 - Slave Traders and French Invaders

Summary

Arrival in the Colony

The prospect of a voyage to the West African coast (Figure 3) with its dangers and potential threat to health would hardly daunt a young man who had survived five years in the Caribbean. In a letter to Thomas Babington on New Year's Day 1793 Macaulay indicated that the journey from England to Sierra Leone had been swift and trouble-free. Perhaps to gratify Babington he focussed particularly on his relationship with Rev. Nathaniel Gilbert, Chaplain to the colony, the travelling companion whom his brother-in-law hoped would strengthen his reawakened religious enthusiasm:

We arrived here on the 25th after a period of four weeks which passed very pleasantly in the society of Mr. Gilbert. I know not indeed that any period of my life ought to affect me as more particularly attended by a blessing from God, than that which I have spent in his company. My obligations to him are of a kind not easy to particularise. He is a man of real piety, of a meek and gentle spirit, and whose thoughts are as much raised above the things of the world, as his passionate attachment to an only child, and his fervent love to his brethren of men, will admit to.

Although such a passage might seem somewhat excessively pietistic, its language was common coin within the evangelical circle in which Zachary was now immersed. His time at Rothley had made this so, but subsequent letters from Sierra Leone indicate that he was a most enthusiastic advocate of evangelical Christianity in a way that his father would have found hard to understand. However his feelings about it were never unmixed. His retiring spirit did not sit easily alongside displays of evangelical ‘enthusiasm’ for worship in his new home in Africa.