Unearthed: journal gives eye witness account of slavery

Dr Karly Kehoe from Inverness County, Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, who works in the Highlands, is trying to piece together the life story of its author, Richard Carr McClement, and what happened to the family he left behind.

One of her few clues is a decaying photograph of a family group outside an ivy-clad house in Argyll.

Ms Kehoe, a lecturer at the Dornoch-based Centre of History in the University of the Highlands and Islands project, had previously been researching the role of woman in the development of modern Catholicism in Scotland when she was alerted to it by the Scottish Catholic Archives, based in Edinburgh.

She said: “The archivist, Andrew Nicol, showed me what looked like a large, old-fashioned ledger. It was approximately 400 pages of writing. I took it up to the reading room at about 1pm and sat and read it until I was made to leave about five hours later. I just couldn’t put it down.

“The descriptions of his surgical work are absolutely fascinating; he provides vivid descriptions of the illnesses suffered by the sailors, their wounds, the treatment, the lifestyles, the ships he served on were like large classrooms.

“But he also talks about the Royal Navy’s involvement in policing the slave trade. Parliament had passed an act to end the transatlantic slave trade in 1807 but slavery itself was only abolished by Britain in 1833, largely because a number of industries that Britain depended on at home such as cotton and sugar were hugely profitable and relied on slave labour.

“As a surgeon working on the west African patrol, Mr McClement was called upon to assess the health of slaves whenever a slaver captured a slave. You get a sense by the way he writes that he was touched by the sheer human misery. He couldn’t really believe what he was seeing. He would have seen extreme poverty in Ireland having lived there during the famine, and would have known about discrimination, but this was all of a different order.”

She said that Mr McClement was obviously a devout Catholic, often the only one on the ships on which he served. “He was an Irish Catholic, but he wanted to participate in British society. He expressed no view about Irish politics. So the journal also gives us an insight into how middle-class Irish Catholics participated in empire-building.”

She has established that Mr McClement was from Donegal, then moved to near Belfast. “He doesn’t talk about his parents but he went to private schools and on to medical school at Queens College Belfast. Then he went to London for his surgeon’s degree and when he was doing that he entered the Royal Navy.

“We know Mr McClement was an assistant surgeon in the Royal Navy from 1857 and the last entry is 1869, but I think he died three years later off the coast of China. We believe the journal ended up in Fort Augustus because his wife, who was from Dublin, remarried somebody from Argyll who converted to Catholicism.

“We know this man’s name was Campbell, but in Argyll that’s not a lot of help. She and her five children moved to Argyll, and we do have a photograph of the family outside his rather fine looking house. But one of Mr McClement’s sons entered the Benedictine Abbey at Fort Augustus where he left the journal.”

Ms Kehoe and a colleague with Library and Archives Canada are now editing the journal with a view to publication.

Professor Jim Hunter, director of the history centre, said: “Karly is one of several historians now working with the UHI.

“Her work is especially significant – not just because of its intriguing content – but because of the extent to which it involves collaboration with institutions overseas as well as elsewhere in Scotland.”

A tragic snapshot of life on a slave ship

Richard Carr McClement’s journal entry for January 7, 1861

9am went on board the Clara Windsor. It would be utterly impossible to describe the sight which presented itself to us when we first went on board, and it would be equally difficult for any one who had not seen it, to comprehend the amount of misery, the suffering and the horrors, that were contained within the wooden walls of that little craft.

The ship is about 250-tons burden, and has her slave deck running right fore and aft, which is about three feet in height. The stench from the vessel is so great, that even at the distance of 200 yards to leeward it is almost insufferable.

When I went on board, the majority of the slaves were on the upper deck, mostly squatting in rows, each row sitting between the legs of the one behind it.

On the foetid, sloppy and sickening slave deck were to be seen the remainder, consisting of men, women, and, children, huddled together; some emaciated to skeletons; some lying sick and heedless of all around; and, some on the point of passing into another world, where it would be hard to imagine they could suffer more than they had done in this; men and women lay promiscuously, some lying on their faces, some on their backs; and, the more enfeebled sat with their heads resting on the knees.

All were naked and had their skins besmeared with the filth in which they lay. On the upper deck were to be seen slaves of all ages from 30 years downwards; here also men, women and children lay or sat promiscuously and presented the same appearances as those on the slave deck. A skeleton woman – quite naked – might be seen in a dying state, with an infant sucking the already half dead breast, while adjoining might be seen another apparently dead; her shrivelled breasts showed that her milk had long since gone, yet a starving baby held the nipple in its mouth and struggled hard to obtain what man’s cruelty had robbed it of.

Here, indeed might be seen a specimen of that affection which nature implants in the bosom of woman, for her children, and, which, would show that the civilised and uncivilised possess it alike. In every case of misery, and where the woman was even senseless, or, apparently dead, or dying, her little baby was firmly clutched to her bosom as if it were the only tie that held her to life.

Read more at www.scottishcatholicarchives.org.uk/mcclement