the black pilots who went to Sierra Leone from Birchtown

In late 1791, John Clarkson arrived in Birchtown from London to tell that community -- then the largest community of free blacks in North America -- about the prospect of resettlement in Sierra Leone. The response was enormous. Life in Nova Scotia had not been kind for these former slaves who had already overcome such extraordinary barriers in their quest for freedom. Perhaps what the Sierra Leone Company was offering them would, at last, be the realization of that goal they had already risked everything to gain. To many people of Birchtown, Clarkson's offer was worth making another huge leap of faith, leaving behind again anything they had so labouriously put together for themselves over nearly a decade of back breaking work and sailing again across the sea, this time for the west coast of Africa.

The names of the heads of household are inscribed in a document entitled "List of the blacks in Birch Town who gave in their names for Sierra Leone in November, 1791."
The name of well-known religious leader David George heads the list. It's likely that the following names are in some order of precedence or association. David George was the leader of the Baptist congregation in Shelburne, and it is possible that those households listed beneath his are also members of that congregation.

James Robertson, one of the four black pilots who had been granted Lot 23 on McNutt's Island, is listed as number seventeen. Here he describes himself as being 52 years old, born in Virginia, and travelling to Sierra Leone with his wife. But although James and Betsey had traveled to Nova Scotia in 1783 with a son, James Robertson, age two and a half, described in The Book of Negroes as a "small boy," no children are going with them to Sierra Leone. It's most likely that in November 1791 young James lies in the common burying ground at Birchtown.

When asked his occupation, James the elder describes himself as both a pilot and a farmer. It's possible that he has continued to work as a pilot in Shelburne Harbour. None of the pilots was listed in the 1784 Muster Book of Free Blacks in Birchtown, a list intended to provide accurate information for the distribution of the King's Bounty at a time when widespread hardship required the material support of basic food supplies for both black and white. That the pilots were not listed in the muster roll suggests that they were not in need then. Remember that the four pilots and their families had arrived in Shelburne in May of 1783, in one of the first ships, under the wing of the influential and powerful Captain Henry Mowat.

In November 1791 James is the owner of a fifty acre lot, well improved, with a house. He will need to sell this property before he and Betsey leave Shelburne, though the price of such property will be depressed by the number of people who are in the same situation. It will be a buyer's market. James will have little room to negotiate, and likely it will be Stephen Skinner (or some other astute local businessman) who picks up the property for a very good price.

On the last of the five pages we find Richard Leach, age 38, born in Virginia, travelling with his wife and three children. Dick/Richard Leich/Leach was another of the four pilots who traveled together to Shelburne with their extended families, all under the patronage of Captain Mowat, and who were granted a share in Lot 23 on McNutt's Island.

Richard Leach here gives his occupation as farmer. He owns no land, though, so he was probably working as a tenant farmer for some large landowner such as Gideon White. A few months after the exodus White complained that eight black tenant families have left him to go to Sierra Leone.

It's an extraordinarily moving experience to look at the names of these two pilots as they prepare to seize this unexpected chance at a better life for themselves and their families, in Africa. I still don't know whether they ever lived on McNutt's Island. But I imagine they did, at least, come over to walk the bounds of Lot 23, and to look out at the sea from that great height along the island's southeastern edge, that small slice of rocky Nova Scotia ground which was, for a little while anyway, their own.

"List of the blacks in Birch Town who gave in their names for Sierra Leone in November 1791" can be viewed along with other documents at the website of Cassandra Pybus, author of Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty. The Pybus website does not give basic resource information about the document. It looks as if it is to be found at CO 217/63, f.361 ff.

For more on the black pilots and their historical context, you can go to the label "black pilots" and read through.

Black pilots' connection to Henry Mowatt

"The Black Pilots," as they are known around here, are an enduring mystery of McNutt's Island. I have written about them several times before, and you can find those posts by going to the label black pilots. They were four pilots who were granted a shared fifty acre lot here on the island in 1784. The first record of the pilots and their families can be found in The Book of Negroes, that careful listing of every black loyalist who left New York between the spring of 1783 and the fall of 1785, bound most often for sites of refuge in Nova Scotia. The pilots, along with their wives and children and other extended family members, left aboard the Ann in the last week of April 1783 -- one of the first ships to leave New York. The pilots and their families were among the first refugees to arrive at Port Roseway in the first week of May.

The pilots not only traveled together, which in itself would show that they were already a community of mutual support. They also had in common an important connection -- Captain Henry Mowatt, of the British Navy. Henry Mowatt was commander of HMS La Sophia, in charge of the entire transport of the fleet of refugees, white and black, leaving New York City in those anxious and turbulent days. In the whole of The Book of Negroes there are no other black refugees listed as under his care: only these four black pilots and their families (and a fifth pilot, James Collin, who traveled with them and who appeared to have had no family and was not among those granted land on the island). It's likely that Captain Mowatt had relied upon the pilots' skills during the long war of rebellion, much of which occurred along the Virginia waterways the pilots knew so well. He would have stayed in contact with them in New York City. Now he undertook to safeguard their journey to Port Roseway.

In The Book of Negroes there is a column for claimant, that is, some white person who claims that this black person is actually their slave but is trying to escape under false pretenses. When there was a claimant, the British investigated, looked for documentation, listened to the stories of claimant and refugee, and decided whom to believe. For the black pilots and their families there is no "claimant" attempting to drag them back into slavery. That column is blank for every one of them. As pilots who served in the British navy their status is secure.

But next to the column for claimant is a column for Names of the persons in whose Possession they now are. Henry Mowatt is listed here, for every one of the pilots and their family members. Henry Mowatt was an important figure in the world of Loyalists, as they are called in Canadian history. As the officer in charge of transporting the fleets from New York, he was in and out of Shelburne during its early days. He brought the governor of the province up from Halifax aboard La Sophia to see the progress of the raw new town that summer, and hosted dignitaries for dinner on the ship. He was much respected by the white Loyalists, an anxious, contentious lot, who wrote to Admiral Digby begging that Mowatt not be removed from this appointment. One of the long streets in Shelburne was named in his honour. In the disorienting, fluid world of early Shelburne, the pilots' connection with Mowatt would have counted for something, and may be the reason they were granted a lot on the island, even though it was only one lot, to be shared among them.

The meaning of the category -- Names of the persons in whose Possession they now are -- is ambiguous. It could be an indenture of some sort -- a specific contract for work for a specific number of years. Indentures of black loyalists by whites were common in those early post-war years. Mowatt could have made some sort of contract with the pilots, hired them out as his indentured servants in Shelburne or Halifax, the men and boys to go on ships, and then pocketed their wages. That is a possibility.

But I'm pretty sure that the connection between Mowatt and the pilots was one of protection and support, not exploitation. And in a later post I will tell you why.


You can see the actual listing of the black pilots and their families in The Book of Negroes at NSARM's virtual exhibit, African Nova Scotians. That's so amazing.

Five shillings each for the black pilots' land on McNutt's

In the early 1930s the lightkeeper at Cape Roseway had showed Clara Dennis a bill-of-sale for McNutt's Island Lot No. 23. This lot of fifty acres was granted to four black pilots in 1785 as a reward for their service to the King during the American Revolution. But only four years later they sold the lot. In early December of 1789 each of the four (or, in James Jackson's case, his mother, who survived him) received five shillings as the price of the sale.

Five shillings each was not much. But times were hard in Shelburne and even harder in Birchtown. The Anglican priest in Shelburne at the time thought that by 1788 four-fifths of white Loyalists had left there and returned to the United States, walking away from their property in what they called Nova Scarcity. Land in and around Shelburne was worth hardly anything by then.

And 1789 was the year of famine. Boston King writes in his Memoirs:*

About this time the country was visited with a dreadful famine, which not only prevailed at Burchtown, but likewise at Chebucto, Annapolis, Digby, and other places. Many of the poor people were compelled to sell their best gowns for five pounds of flour, in order to support life. When they had parted with all their clothes, even their blankets, several of them fell down dead in the streets, thro’ hunger. Some killed and eat their dogs and cats; and poverty and distress prevailed on every side; so that to my great grief I was obliged to leave Burchtown, because I could get no employment. I traveled from place to place, to procure the necessaries of life, but in vain.

Five shillings each would not have gone far to protect London Jackson and James Robertson and Richard Leach and Jane Thompson and their families from starvation in that dreadful time, with another winter looming. But it may have done something.

*Boston King was a former slave whose memoirs are a compellingly immediate account of his experience in Shelburne and Birchtown, and then as a participant in the 1792 exodus to Sierra Leone. First published serially in London in 1798 in The Methodist Magazine, The Memoirs of Boston King are available online. For the effect of the 1789 famine in Shelburne and Birchtown, see also James W. St. G. Walker, The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870 (Dalhousie University, 1976; reprinted by The University of Toronto Press, 1999) 52-54.

Image," A Black Wood Cutter At Shelburne, Nova Scotia, 1788," by William Booth, courtesy of Archives of Canada.

More on the black pilots: who was Jane Thompson?

When Clara Dennis visited Cape Roseway Lighthouse on McNutt's Island in the early 1930s, she copied down what the then-lightkeeper called a "bill-of-sale." Four black pilots had been granted Lot 23 on McNutt's Island as a reward for their services to the British during the American Revolution. According to the "bill-of-sale" the pilots had sold Lot 23 to the first lightkeeper in 1789. The "bill-of-sale" lists Jane Thompson, the mother of James Jackson, deceased, along with the three surviving pilots as an owner/grantor of Lot 23.

And in The Book of Negroes* there is the tiniest hint that this could be the case. Though Jane Thompson does not travel onboard The Ann with James Jackson and several other members of the Jackson extended clan, she left New York at about the same time, on the last day of July 1783, on L'Abondance, also bound for Port Roseway. The Book of Negroes describes Jane Thompson on that hot summer day as seventy years old and "worn out," travelling with a five year old grandchild. She had been born free, and lived with "Col. Tucker, Norfolk, Virginia," before leaving him six years earlier. So Jane Thompson and James Jackson came to Port Roseway from the same plantation household -- Robert Tucker's in Norfolk.

Was the pilot James Jackson dead by 1789? There is a James Jackson who is later allotted land in Free Town, Sierra Leone. But there are several other James Jacksons in The Book of Negroes; and one James Jackson is listed among the group who went out from London to Sierra Leone in 1786 to the new settlement being established there. There is no indication that the pilot James Jackson and the Sierra Leonian settler are the same man.

The detail of Jane Thompson as mother of deceased James Jackson supports the authenticity of the "bill-of-sale."

Jane Thompson appears in other local records. In the Birchtown Muster of September 1784, she is living in a household of which Robert Jackson, age 15, is head. Note, again, the Jackson connection. ( None of the black pilots is listed in the Birchtown Muster of September 1784. That muster only listed those people who were in need of aid; it's possible that in 1784 the pilots were working as pilots and so were not in need. )

In 1792 -- in the summer after the mass emigration of former slaves from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone -- Shelburne and the surrounding vicinity were devastated by a terrible fire. A list was made up: "Names of poorest and most distressed sufferers of fires, 1792." On the list is Jane Thompson, living alone, a resident of Birchtown, age ninety.**

*For references to The Book of Negroes, see The Black Loyalist Directory, ed. Graham Russell Hodges, New York, Garland Publishing Co., 1996, p.117. Or you can examine this fascinating document online. The list of those who suffered from the fire of 1792 can be found at PANS RG 1, vol.224, vol.I/3, p.99, cited at Birchtown Archaeological Survey, compiled by Laird Niven, Lockeport, NS, 1994.

**Ages given by former slaves were often approximate; it isn't significant that Jane Thompson said she was seventy years old in 1783 and ninety a decade later.

A bill-of-sale from the black pilots

Clara Dennis was an energetic and devoted young Nova Scotian who traveled about her native province in the early 1930s, camera at the ready and pen in hand. She captured and recorded images and tales that would otherwise have been long-forgotten by now. Her photographs -- the glass negatives are housed at the Nova Scotia Archives -- are a treasured resource. She wrote two books about her travels into the nooks and crannies of the province.

In the first of these, published in 1934, she tells of her visit to Cape Roseway Lighthouse on McNutt's Island.

During her visit she has a long conversation with the lightkeeper, whom she does not name. Here is Clara's account:*

"Col. McNutt's house was on the northern end of the island," said the lightkeeper. "There were land holders all over the island later. Before the light was built, negroes used to live on the east side. They piloted vessels in and out of the harbour and were known as 'Black Pilots.' Four of them sold fifty acres adjoining the lighthouse to Alexander Cockeren [sic], the first lightkeeper. I'm going to show you the bill-of-sale. The building of the light put the black pilots out of commission."

The ancient document was produced. It ran:

Know all men by these presents that we, London Jackson, Richard Leah, James Robertson and Jane Thompson mother of James Jackson, deceased, -- black pilots now of Shelburne in the province of Nova Scotia, for and in consideration of the sum of five shillings current money of the province aforesaid to us severally in hand paid at the ensealing and delivery of these presents by Alexander Hood Cocken of Shelburne aforesaid, Mariner, the receipt whereof we do hereby severally acknowledge and so be therewith fully contented, satisfied, and paid, and thereof and of every part thereof do hereby acquit and discharge the said Alexander Hood Cocken, his Executors, Administrators, and Assigns have granted, bargained, sold and these presents do fully and clearly and absolutely grant, bargain, tell and release under said Alexander Hood Cocken, all and whole a certain tract, field, parcel and lot of land situate lying and being on the east side of McNutt's Island adjoining the lot on which the lighthouse is erected being Lot 23, containing fifty acres to have and hold the above ascribed lot unto Alexander Hood Cocken, his Executors, Administrators and Assigns forever.

We the above named Grantors for ourselves, our Executors, Administrators do covenant and agree to and with the above named Alexander Hood Cocken, his Executors, Administrators and Assigns to warrant and defend the sale of the above described lot against all persons whatsoever. In witness whereof we have hereunto set our hands and seals the fourth day of December in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine.

Dennis concludes: "The X's made by the dusky London and the other three, together with their thumb-imprinted seals, made the bargain irrevocable."

It all seems quite official and legal and final. But there are one or two details that make me wonder. The first lightkeeper was Alexander Cocken, who was the father of Alexander Hood Cocken. Alexander Hood Cocken the son became lightkeeper after his father's death, and served until his own death in the 1860s. But in 1789 Alexander Hood Cocken was either not yet born or a tiny child. It seems a curious inconsistency to name the son as party to the contract, rather than the father -- a tiny anachronism, like a little red flag.

It makes me wonder whether the bill-of-sale Clara Dennis saw that day was written down later on, as a record of something that had actually taken place without benefit of documentation. Or maybe the original deed was lost, and later reconstructed from a memory of how, once upon a time, the pilots sold Lot 23 to the lightkeeper.

Then, think of Clara here, in the lightkeeper's house, asking whether she could copy the bill-of-sale, and pulling out her notebook and pen to do that. As far as I know, the document that the lightkeeper showed her that day no longer exists. If it did exist we might be able to find clues in its physical appearance -- the paper it was written on, the kind of ink, the handwriting.

As it is, the bill-of-sale that you are reading on your computer screen is a bit ghostly: at best it's a copy of a copy of a copy. But for all its unknowns, it does tell us something about James Robertson and Richard Leach and London Jackson and James Jackson, the four black pilots who arrived in Port Roseway with their families in 1783 and who later received Lot 23 in recognition of their service to the British during the Revolution. Through this bill-of-sale the pilots whisper: "We were here."

*Clara Dennis, Down in Nova Scotia: my own, my native land (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1934) 342-343. The Nova Scotia Archives has a wonderful virtual exhibit on Clara Dennis, here.

You can read earlier posts about the black pilots by clicking on the label black pilots at the right hand side of the blog.

Schooner Amistad in Shelburne Harbour

Amistad arrived at the town dock in Shelburne today. She's a powerful symbol of courage and resistance to injustice.

Amistad is a replica of the ship which was carrying enslaved Africans out of Havana in 1839. The Africans rose up and took over the ship.
If you don't know the story, Steven Spielburg's movie Amistad is a great way to learn about it. They are showing it in town this afternoon. And there are several other excellent events surrounding the Amistad's arrival. In case you are near Shelburne, you can find out about the week's activities here.
Amistad will be travelling to Cuba later this month, then replicating her historic voyage from Havana to Long Island. There's lots of information about the trip at Amistad's web site.

Today in Shelburne the townspeople marched out to greet her. These are the Third New Jersey Volunteers. That's our solicitor, second shako from the left.

It's always a bit head-spinning for us Yanks, since we think of New Jersey as being on the American side in the Revolution. But in Nova Scotia when we refer to the Third New Jersey Volunteers we mean a regiment of British Loyalists, or as they would have been referred to in the newly independent American colonies, traitors. Head-spinning. But we are on the Nova Scotian side of things now.

Actually, people in Shelburne dress like this a lot. If you are going to live in Shelburne you might as well go ahead and invest in some eighteenth century clothes. You will need them.

There is an organic connection between Amistad and Nova Scotia, and particularly with Birchtown, here in Shelburne Harbour. In 1792 a large group of former American slaves, who had won their freedom and a Nova Scotia refuge by actively supporting the British cause in the Revolution, left Nova Scotia and sailed to Sierra Leone, which was then also the site of a British slave-trading outpost. There they established Freetown and a new community of freedom in the midst of an active slave trade. Over half of those new settlers to Sierre Leone came from Birchtown.

Nearly fifty years later, the Africans aboard the Amistad were enslaved near Sierra Leone and taken to Cuba to be sold.

If you imagine a skein of connection between the American colonies (later the new United States), Nova Scotia, England, Sierra Leone and the slave embarkation points along Africa's west coast, and Cuba and the West Indies where slaves were needed for the sugar plantations, then back to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland for cheap salt fish to feed the slaves, you have the bare outlines of a vast global economy based on slavery. Both the Nova Scotian settlers of Sierra Leone and the enslaved Africans who took control of Amistad were courageous people whose personal actions furthered the end of a system so deeply entrenched that many thought it would be impossible to eradicate.

A wonderful book on the end of slavery is Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005). Hochschild is a great story teller, worthy of his huge subject.

Reading locally

Eating locally has reached its tipping point. It's been building for a decade now, coming in from the fringe. Books -- The Hundred Mile Diet; Animal, Vegetable Miracle; Omnivore's Dilemma-- and movements -- Slow Food, Kitchen Gardens International -- have raised general awareness that our expectation that we will eat, as a matter of course, things out of season or out of our planting zone, or processed food products with eternal shelf lives, has had its day. On Friday Michelle Obama began a vegetable garden on the south lawn of the White House. Here in Nova Scotia, farmers markets are gaining ground each year. The era of uniformity and industrialization in food, about fifty years in the making, is sputtering to an end. Let's hope.

Reading is another way we can benefit from a more local orientation. Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes was recently chosen as the winner in the 2009 Canada Reads competition. It's the compelling story of a woman captured as a girl in her native Africa and sold as a slave in the American colonies. She eventually escapes to freedom with the British during the American Revolution and is a part of the tumultuous founding of Shelburne and Birchtown. She leaves Nova Scotia with John Clarkson's fleet and returns to Africa, to Sierra Leone. It is a remarkable story, so remarkable that fiction must be the best way to tell its astonishing truth. Yet every bit of it is historically grounded.

The Book of Negroes -- partially set just across Shelburne Harbour from us -- helped me understand better this place Greg and I have chosen to call home. What other books could be out there, I wondered, that could help me understand our new culture? I began a sort of random search, and now I have a new blog category: reading locally. There are wonderful writers -- mostly out of print -- who tell of life within one hundred kilometres of McNutt's Island. I don't know whether many people read these writers nowadays. But I will do my best to find them and read them and then write a little something about them now and then, so that if you wanted to know more about this local culture by way of reading, you could.

Within one hundred kilometres of McNutt's Island -- and probably within one hundred kilometres of every place on earth -- there is, I imagine, a rich garden of local reading, filled with tastes and textures and experiences and perceptions that you just can't get anywhere else.

Birchtown, winter 1784

If you were a former slave living in Birchtown on Shelburne Harbour, you likely would have spent the first few Nova Scotia winters in a pit house like this replica. Birchtown -- the first town of free blacks in North America -- was a stony forest, its soil impossible to clear by hand and unfit for cultivation, and a long walk to the new Town of Shelburne where work might be found. The former slaves had moved heaven and earth to obtain their freedom, first by escaping from slavery throughout the American colonies and then through service to the British during the American Revolution. Now they lived in holes they dug in the ground, with planks laid over the top, plugged with moss and lichen and spruce boughs.

An excellent historical account of Birchtown can be found in Simon Schama's Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (HarperCollins, 2006). There's also a wonderful novel by Lawrence Hill called The Book of Negroes (HarperCollins, 2007). At the Birchtown Museum you can see a compelling exhibit, as well as this replica, and you can visit the old burying ground, a peaceful place from which to gaze out at the harbour and the sea beyond, and contemplate the long journey to freedom.

The black pilots

The black pilots came to Port Roseway in spring of 1783, among the first African Americans to make passage to Nova Scotia. Their individual stories are recorded in The Book of Negroes, that detailed list of all the former slaves who threw their lot with the British in the American Revolution, escaping slavery, now sailing away to this uncertain freedom.

James Robertson was forty nine years old then, a thin man who had escaped from Captain Paul Layon in Portsmouth Virginia. With him were his wife Betsey, forty six years old, and their son James, two and a half, a small boy. Betsey had escaped slavery with her husband.

James Jackson was fifty, thin, escaped from Robert Tucker of Norfolk Virginia. Jackson served the British cause with Lord Dunmore. After Jackson are listed Judith Jackson, most likely his wife, twenty four years old, and Harry Jackson, eight -- a good little boy, the record adds.

London Jackson was thirty two, a stout fellow-- stout meant strong and healthy -- who had escaped from William Ballad of Hampton Virginia. Three more members of the Jackson family come next, though their relationships are not clear. Sebro and her infant child Zolpher travelled to Port Roseway on another ship, but are listed here. Nelly, thirty three and stout, is probably London's wife, since she escaped from slavery in Hampton Virginia at the same time he did.

Dick Leich was twenty eight, escaped from Manney Goddin of Nansemond Virginia. Ruth Leich was twenty and her sister Grace was seventeen. They had both escaped from Colonel Conel of Hampton Virginia. Ruth and Grace could be Dick's sisters, or maybe they are his sister and his wife.

These four men are described as pilots in The Book of Negroes. They all came from the same area along the mouth of the James River as it flows into Chesapeake Bay. Their knowledge of the local waters was irreplaceable. They risked everything to put that knowledge to work for the British, who had promised them freedom if they did.

It's likely that these families and households, all from the same place, had ties of kinship or relationship strong enough to make them want to stay together and take care of each other. Maybe their relationships had begun in the intertwined life of James River plantations. As pilots along the James and into Chesapeake Bay, the men would have been crucially-positioned conductors of a powerful slave grapevine, in on everything. They may have been instrumental in facilitating escapes, not only of their own families, but also of friends and neighbours.

Or maybe they found each other later, in New York City, refugees seeking the comfort of those who shared the common experience of a James River plantation culture. However they knew each other, by the time they stepped on board the Ship Ann, bound for Port Roseway, they had formed a protective extended family. They were looking out for each other.

The raw Nova Scotia town of Shelburne would need pilots to navigate vessels safely through its long harbour. Those pilots would need to live where the harbour opened into the Atlantic, where a goods-laden schooner could anchor and wait until a pilot rowed out to board and guide the ship into Shelburne. And when you look at the Old Grant Map of McNutt's Island, that's exactly where the pilots are located.

They were not given four lots on the island, the fifty acres apiece that was promised to all who had risked their lives in service to the British. Instead their four households shared one fifty acre lot.

But did they really live here, on McNutt's Island? I think they did, at least for a while, though I haven't discovered any positive documentation. But it makes sense. Life on the island would have been hard, but it was hard for African Americans in Shelburne and Birchtown and in some ways harder there. And the pilots were likely paid for their services, so they would have income. In their own small community they could have cleared forest, built shelter, established a life. It's dark winter as I write this, and difficult to imagine a small group of former slaves enduring the cold winds and stony ground of the island's isolated eastern side, with very few other people living anywhere on the island. But maybe they felt safe in this extended family they had created for themselves, out in the forest.

In 1792 most black settlers in the Shelburne area sailed away to a new life in Sierra Leone. Nova Scotia had been brutal, and many had not survived. At least one of the pilots, James Robertson, took up a lot in Freetown, the new settlement. And maybe little James Robertson lived to grow up in Sierra Leone, an astonishing journey from slavery to freedom, from the James River to Nova Scotia and on to the shining promise of Africa, full circle.

Maybe he lived a long time, and maybe when he was an old man he sat sometimes in the warm African sun and remembered his childhood on that Nova Scotia island. If he did, maybe his memories held at least some moments of joy or wonder: a father's laugh or mother's smile, a special stone picked up along the shore, a taste of wild raspberries, the glimpse of a seal poking her head out of the waves.

There's a bit of ground on the eastern side of McNutt's that holds a memory of this journey to freedom. You can stand on a high cliff there and look out across the Atlantic, south and east toward Sierra Leone, and try to imagine it.