Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution, by Simon Schama, Viking Canada, 2006.

By Charles Saunders

The Daily News

The basic story of the long, tortuous journey that took black freedom-seekers from slavery during the American Revolutionary War to refuge behind British battle-lines to settlements in Nova Scotia and SierraLeone is well known in this part of theworld. But the circumstances and context of those events have been obscured bythe passage of more than two centuries of history.

In Rough Crossings, Columbia University art-history professor Simon Schama plays the role of time-traveller, conveying the reader back to the days of the Revolution, and the debate over the morality of slavery, and the dogged determination of slaves who soughtfreedom, and the steadfast persistence of whites who fought for the freedom ofblacks, and the obduracy of those who supported slavery.

The lives of two British men – antislavery activist Granville Sharp and naval officer John Clarkson, who supervised the establishment of the Sierra Leone colony – provide the framework from which Schama constructs a dramaticnarrative that includes dozens of significant players.

From our modern perspective, we sometimes consider the late 18 th and early 19 th centuries a simpler time, when social issues were a matter of black or white, with no nuances between the extremes. Schama demonstrates that the distant past was at least as complicatedas the present, if not more so.

He points out, for example, that that Lord Dunmore, whose proclamation the promised freedom to American slaves who made it to British lines, was himself a slave owner. Slaves of American loyalists who escaped to the British were promptly returned to their owners.The return of absconded human “property” was one of the most contentious issuesduring peace negotiations at the end of the Revolutionary War. One of thethousands of escapees who ended up in Nova Scotiaonce belonged to George Washington.

Rough Crossings is packed to the brim with details such as these. Sometimes, Schama is meticulous to the point of overkill, describing such minutiae as the instruments played by Granville Sharp’s family musical ensemble.

In other passages, though, Schama’s prose waxes poetic, as in this appreciation of why a group of blacks who had already suffered many privations sang as they were about to depart for Nova Scotia:

“Sing! What was there to sing about?

“Everything. Rebirth. British freedom. God’s loving kindness; His all-encompassing mercy; the honest goodness of the king; the word of Sir Guy Carleton; the promise of food for a year; a piece of land for the rest of their lives. Born again. Born again, dear Lord.The wide sea-water lay before them … There had been so many boats, so manypassages in the night, so many experiences over the water on which they wereabout to be conveyed to a new life.”

Those high hopes were dashed on the rocky shores of Nova Scotia. Schama chronicles the broken promises that caused a large number of Black Loyalists to be amenable to John Clarkson’s invitation to establish a colony offree blacks in Sierra Leone,West Africa. There, they found even more hardship andbroken promises. Yet the blacks in both Nova Scotiaand Sierra Leonesurvived, and created communities that continue to this day.

Schama is unsparing in his dissection of heroes and villains, blacks and whites, slaves and slave-owners, and Britons, Americans and Africans, which makes Rough Crossings a rough read at times.

But it’s also a necessary read for anyone seeking an understanding of a formative time for communities in North America, West Africa and Britain.