The sergeant, p.9
The Sergeant, page 9
But even though he was well treated in Europe, Said yearned for Africa: “More than once have I turned my longing eyes to the southward, in the direction of beloved Kouka, and sighed for that rest which I could not find.” By the summer of 1859, he had worked for Trubetzkoy for six years, after initially promising only five. His homesickness was rising as he and Trubetzkoy arrived in England that July, for their fourth visit in as many years. After three weeks in London, they went to the Isle of Wight for the annual three-day Royal Yacht Regatta, sponsored by Queen Victoria. The city of Ryde, a quaint seaport of around 9,000 people, swelled by several thousand during the regatta, and that year the crowds were bolstered by the arrival of Grand Duke Constantine, Tsar Alexander’s brother, who led a squadron of Russian boats to participate. “The streets of Ryde have been overrun with Russian sailors, who seem somewhat puzzled with the cleanliness and respectability of our town,” one news article read. “Looking at the men, without prejudice, we conclude that they are a very inferior race.”
For Trubetzkoy, the regatta was probably a welcome breather from London, where he had been swept up in a flurry of balls that began near midnight and did not end until morning. In Ryde, the pace was much slower. At Binstead Cottage, a rustic villa with ivy-covered walls and a thatched roof, he attended a garden party amid flowerbeds, shrubbery and evergreens. Then it was off to St. Clare Castle, where he was treated to a visit with self-styled psychic Glorianna Eagle, who claimed she could read people’s minds through “electrobiology.” Researchers had debunked her claims six years before, when she was a teenager working in her father’s magic show, but she was so charming she still drew audiences. “We understand she was very successful with her experiments upon [Trubetzkoy],” the local newspaper reported.
A local music hall, meanwhile, featured London’s Coloured Opera Troupe, a group of white musicians who darkened their skin with burnt cork and performed in the supposed dialect of American slaves. Blackface minstrel shows had started in the United States in the 1830s, but English tastes weren’t as suited to the over-the-top caricatures that Americans liked, so groups like the Coloured Opera Troupe promised their audiences “refined Negro music,” which they accentuated by dressing in white-powdered wigs and baroque outfits, with knee breeches and buckled shoes. There was nothing particularly “Negro” about the songs, which drew heavily from Irish and Scottish folk music. (“In Maryland, I had a farm, and happy there did dwell, until I saw a yellow girl, her name was Flora Bell.”) Between the songs, there were slapstick routines and jokes which, as one critic noted, could have easily been done without the blackface, except that “the laughter-loving populace would hardly relish them so well with a clean skin.” Another wrote that “with white faces the whole affair would be intolerable. It is the ebony that gives the due and needful colour to the monstrosities, the breaches of decorum, the exaggerations of feeling, and the ‘silly, sooth’ character of the whole implied drama.” Social historian Michael Pickering says much of the troupe’s humor relied on the image of “the ‘nigger’ dandy, with his constantly unrealized pretension to grandeur and good living.”
Considering Trubetzkoy’s status as a foreign dignitary, it is likely local civic leaders insisted that he see the troupe perform, if only to show how their small town could attract first-class entertainers, and it would have been natural to bring his valet. Coming at a time when Said was already feeling homesick, the show would have likely bolstered his feeling that no matter how much he felt accepted in European society, many people still viewed him an outsider. As the audience laughed at the garishly dressed “colored” performers, what did that say about how they viewed him, with his gold-embroidered Turkish robes, continental accent, and effete tastes? Did they see him merely as “an African ‘dandy’ ” with pretensions to grandeur?
Unaware of Said’s homesickness, Trubetzkoy was already planning the next phase of their journey. Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna was now visiting Queen Victoria at her palace on the Isle of Wight, and once the regatta was over, she planned to cross back to the English mainland and travel to the seaside resort of Torquay, where she had rented three villas for her family and friends. Trubetzkoy planned to join her, and fully expected Said to come along. But Said finally had enough. “I must go home to my people,” he said.
Trubetzkoy was dumbfounded. “You are no longer an African, but a citizen of Europe,” he said. “If you go back, you will not be able to reconcile yourself to the manners and customs of your countrymen.” Trubetzkoy promised that if Said worked as his valet for twenty more years, he would get such a large pension he could retire in his early forties and live comfortably for the rest of his life. When Said refused, Trubetzkoy made him promise that after spending a year in Africa, he would return to Russia to visit. With that, Trubetzkoy presented Said with back pay equivalent to between $13,500 and $40,000 (Said’s accounts vary) and bid his farewell.
“I wish you good luck,” Trubetzkoy said. “You have served me honestly and faithfully, and if ever misfortune happens to you, remember I shall always be, as I always have been, interested in you.”
“I am exceedingly thankful for all you have bestowed on me and done in my behalf,” Said replied. “I will pray for you as long as I live.” By the time they said their goodbyes, both men were crying. “I felt truly sorry to leave this most excellent prince…,” Said later wrote. “It was many days before I overcame my regret. Often I could hardly eat for grief.”
8 Land of the Puritans
As Nicholas Said left the Isle of Wight, for the first time in his life he was totally alone: five thousand miles from home, with no friend or relative to offer guidance, no employer to set his path, and no concrete plan for how to proceed, except a vague notion about going to London to look for a ship that could take him to Africa. He quickly found that London was much different than it appeared during his visits with Trubetzkoy. The doors that were open to him as the valet of a Russian prince were closed to mere commoners, and he soon found that beyond the airy realm of mansions, palaces, ballrooms, and theaters he had formerly visited stood a congested metropolis, with grimy tenements, smoke-belching factories, gut-wrenching poverty, and “the dirtiest and darkest streets that were ever seen in the world,” as Charles Dickens put it.
Unaccustomed to worrying about finances, Said soon burned through much of the money Prince Trubetzkoy had given him, whether it was lost, squandered, gambled, stolen, or swindled away, making him so depressed he could scarcely eat. And the six years he spent with the moody liquor-swilling prince apparently taught him that when he got depressed, the best solution was to drown his sorrows in drink. There’s no evidence he was an alcoholic, but over the next several decades he would exhibit a habit of binge drinking to relieve stress, and unfortunately he never learned how to hold his liquor, which led to two of the most bizarre incidents of his life.
On August 20, 1853, little more than a week after he left Trubetzkoy, Said became boisterously loud while getting drunk at the Marlborough Head pub in the tony Mayfair section of London. The pub’s owner, John Good, tried to quiet him down, explaining that his wife was very ill upstairs and shouldn’t be disturbed, but Said responded, “I don’t give a damn. I’ll make as much noise as I choose,” thumbing his nose in disdain.
When another customer, Henry Cooper, tried to intervene, Said knocked him to the ground. “I can lick five Englishmen!” he boasted. As the two men scuffled, Said bit a chunk out of Cooper’s left ear, bit his neck deeply enough to draw a flow of blood, and was about to bite his right ear when Cooper pushed him away. In response, Said slammed him so hard against a door that he broke the paneling and then threw him onto a mahogany table, which split in two. When Good tried to step in, Said bit him several times in the arm before being subdued.
In his trial two days later, Said insisted he had no memory of the event. “Then I will make you [remember it],” said the judge. “When a man acts the part of a cannibal, I will be as severe as I can.” The judge fined him £10—the equivalent of more than $1,200 today—and said if Said could not pay it, he would face four months of hard labor in prison. Said refused to pay, but after two months in jail, he begged for help from Prince Trubetzkoy, who was about to leave England for France. On October 15, Said was released from jail after a courier from Trubetzkoy not only paid the fine, but added £2 so Said could travel to Paris and resume his duties as valet.
It can’t be stressed how abnormal that fight was for Said. Over the next twenty years, acquaintances would uniformly describe him as “modest,” “gentlemanly,” “graceful,” “elegant,” and even “shy,” with no hint of any rage seething beneath the surface. He did have occasional problems with alcohol during that period, but they were far more benign, such as drinking himself into a drowsy stupor or missing a speaking engagement because of a hangover, but not acting like a madman and biting into human flesh. There was only one other known incident that involved such behavior, and it happened just four days after he was released from jail.
Instead of using Trubetzkoy’s money to rejoin him in Paris, Said went on another bender in London. On October 19, he was already drunk by 2:00 P.M. when he went to a pub on Pall Mall boulevard and devoured two steaks, some pork chops, and two bottles of stout. The bill came to 5 shillings (about $35 today), but Said dashed out without paying. As a policeman chased after him, he hopped onto the back of a carriage and rode it down Pall Mall until it stopped in front of the Reform Club, an exclusive hangout for liberal politicians. By the time the policeman caught up, the carriage driver and some of the club members were trying to get him off the carriage, but he managed to hold them at bay. “He appeared mad with drink,” a bystander later said. It took four constables to handcuff him and haul him to jail, but not before he bit one in the hand.
After a speedy trial, the judge said he could pay a 40-shilling fine (roughly $280) or spend two weeks in jail. It’s not clear what punishment Said chose, but by the time he was released, he’d had enough of England. He took a room at a boarding house on the waterfront, planning to stay just long enough to secure passage to Tripoli, where he would join a caravan that would take him back to Borno. Shortly afterward, however, a messenger appeared at the boarding house, bearing a letter from Count Isaac Jacob Rochussen, Landdrost of Paramaribo, inviting him to discuss a business proposition. Said had never heard of the count before and had no idea what a “Landdrost of Paramaribo” was, but he probably knew the Rochussen name. Jan Jacob Rochussen, who had become prime minister of the Netherlands the previous year, was making headlines over his plans to abolish slavery in his country’s colonies. Intrigued, Said traveled to the count’s hotel.
Isaac Jacob Rochussen was a genteel-looking young man, with a balding pate and long, sandy sideburns, not unlike the prime minister, who was a cousin of his father. Despite a slight lisp and an addiction to chain-smoking, Rochussen was a smooth and entertaining talker whose family had risen to prominence due to his ancestors’ skills at piracy and slavery. His great-great-great-grandfather Isaac amassed great wealth in the 1600s by attacking Spanish galleons laden with gold from the New World, and Isaac’s heirs used that money to build a firm that specialized in shipping slaves to Dutch colonies in the Caribbean. After that firm dissolved in 1790, more recent generations of Rochussens tried to make amends for their connection to the slave trade, especially Prime Minister Rochussen, who had rammed through parliament a plan to free African and Indonesian slaves on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) as of January 1, 1860, with plans to gradually abolish slavery through the rest of the Dutch colonies in Asia, the Caribbean, and Surinam, on the northern coast of South America.
The count told Said that thanks to his kinsman, he was a landdrost, or magistrate, in Surinam’s capital, Paramaribo, where he was such an outspoken abolitionist that he came to the attention of the British Anti-Slavery Society, which invited him to London in May 1859 to address its meetings. Shortly after arriving in England, he traveled to the countryside to help a widow named Caroline Davies complete a lengthy history of the Netherlands. She had already published three volumes and was now preparing a fourth, with the help of her niece, who had mastered the Dutch language to assist her. After a whirlwind courtship, Rochussen and the niece were to be wedded in December, followed by a year-long honeymoon in the Americas.
And that is why Rochussen contacted Said. Any respectable nobleman embarking on such a journey required a valet to attend to his needs, but Rochussen had somehow neglected to bring any servants from Surinam, so he offered Said the job. Rochussen declined to tell Said who had recommended him, but he certainly knew of his recent brawls, which had been widely covered by the London newspapers, under headlines like “A Cannibal” and “A Dangerous Black and His History.” The articles covered Said’s fights in salacious detail but also noted his skill with languages, his travels throughout Africa, the Middle East, and Europe, and his years of service to a Russian prince, who was so pleased with his work that he wanted to rehire him.
To entice him, Rochussen outlined all the sights he would see in the New World: the Bahamas, where Black freemen were pressing for greater rights; Haiti, the only nation in history founded by self-liberated slaves; Canada, a haven for escaped slaves; and the United States, at the brink of civil war over slavery. “I will take good care of you and show you many new things to tell your people about when you return to Africa,” he promised. “We will not be absent more than twelve months, and after that I will bring you straight back to England.”
In fact, there was even a chance that Rochussen might take Said back to Africa. He had recently applied for a transfer from Surinam to Dutch Guinea, a loose collection of Dutch settlements in what is now the coastal region of Ghana. Dutch Guinea was 1,500 miles from Borno, but that was much closer than Tripoli and without the treacherous Sahara in between. Rochussen offered a salary of £3, 11s. per month, as well as all travel, food, and clothing expenses, but to Said the thought of seeing the New World was more important than the compensation: “I had read much about these countries, and my fondness for travel asserted its supremacy.”
In mid-December 1859, Rochussen and Said boarded a train to Wells, a rural town about 120 miles west of London. Their ride through the wintry countryside gave Rochussen plenty of time to tell Said about his fiancée, Katharine Anne Drake, whose family was as illustrious in its corner of England as Rochussen’s was in the Netherlands. As with the Rochussens, the Drakes’ wealth began with pirated gold, with Katharine’s ancestor Sir Bernard Drake plundering Spanish galleons at the same time as Isaac Rochussen, but with no involvement in the slave trade.
At thirty-seven, Katharine was a decade older than what Rochussen claimed to be. (He was thirty, but said he was twenty-seven.) At a time when most Englishwomen wed before turning twenty-five, Katharine was surely viewed as an over-the-hill spinster, but she was, as one writer put it, “a delicate, refined woman, cultivated in the languages, drawing, and music,” with a shyly beguiling smile and a gracious personality. Besides her work on the history of the Netherlands, her chief claim to fame was her sketch of a “Lunatics Ball”: a party for inmates of the Somerset Lunatic Asylum. The drawing, which has been reprinted in academic publications to this day, drew praise for its depiction of the patients, who all seem lost in their own worlds. “There is no attempt to throw a tone of fictitious enjoyment around the scene. A sort of quiet confusion prevails throughout,” one reviewer wrote.
The couple married on December 15, 1859, in Saint Cuthberts Church, a soaring six-hundred-year-old structure with a wooden ceiling carved with angels and rosettes. Katharine’s brother Rev. Charles Drake and cousins Revs. Francis and Charles Mackworth Drake presided over the ceremony. Rochussen was likely dressed in a manner befitting a Dutch count, and Said, no longer dressed like a Turk, stood by his side in a valet’s uniform of buff and blue, with gold buttons bearing the Rochussen family’s coat of arms. For Wells, a town of cheese makers, cobblers, and corn farmers, this visit by a foreign nobleman was one of the major social events of the year. Aunt Caroline was so pleased she gave Rochussen a dowry of £1,000 ($137,500 today), more than enough to pay for a year-long honeymoon.
If Said were the suspicious type, several things about Rochussen might have sparked his curiosity. How could a magistrate spend so much time away from his job: seven months in England even before starting a year-long honeymoon? Why would a nobleman spend so much time abroad without a single servant, until the necessities of his wedding demanded one? And why would a dashing young aristocrat marry a commoner so much older than him? (This was, after all, the Victorian Era.) But Said had always been a trusting soul, and his fondness for travel had “asserted its supremacy.” Once the festivities were over, the newlyweds and Said took a train to Liverpool, where they boarded the packet ship Bohemia, bound for the Americas.
