TWENTY-FOUR
Distant Cousins
THE BUNDLES OF LETTERS tied up in pink ribbon may have seemed worthless to cousin Dick – but they were gold dust to me, for they introduced me to my eighteenth-century family at a time when I was grieving for the family I would never have. Over the next few years, not only would I enjoy getting to know a whole host of dead relatives, but also, to my delight, many living ones. Phillipa was the first of the long-lost cousins I would meet, and I felt a special kinship with her from the off. (It was her grandfather, Dick, who had seen so little value in the old family papers.) I often stayed at Phillipa’s house during my research trips to Cumbria, and came to see it as a kind of northern home from home.
About a year after my stay at Temple Sowerby House, when I had been in pursuit of Bridget’s ‘receipt book’, Julie Evans emailed me out of the blue. Another guest claiming Atkinson ancestry had recently visited the hotel – would I mind if she put them in touch? This was how I found out about the Scandinavian branch of the family. Renira Müller, its matriarch, would have been my dad’s second cousin, which made her my closest living Atkinson relative, apart from my sister and her children. Shortly afterwards I called Renira and said I hoped we might meet; she warned me not to ‘dilly-dally’, for she would soon be ninety. A few weeks later, one freezing day in December 2011, I stood on the threshold of her apartment in the Norwegian port city of Haugesund.
The moment Renira welcomed me into her cosy home, full of books and mementoes from an evidently full life, we started a conversation that would last the best part of three days. Although her eyesight was no longer what it had once been – a source of obvious frustration – her powers of recall remained undimmed. She had never met my father, but she did have a clear memory of staying with his grandparents, her great-uncle Jock and great-aunt Connie, when she was about four, and of being harassed by their small, yappy dog – this must have been the same pet that Jock would not tolerate jumping up on the sofa. Renira’s father, Geoffrey Atkinson – one of Dick and Eliza’s grandsons – had worked in the oil business in Morocco, and she had lived there as a child until the outbreak of the Second World War. Back in Britain, she had served as a wireless telegraphist in the WRNS, listening out for enemy Morse code signals; meanwhile she had married a Norwegian resistance fighter who was stationed in London. Their children were brought up in Norway but instilled with a strong sense of their English heritage; it was one of Renira’s daughters who had lately been a guest at Temple Sowerby House.
Fast-forward five years, to April 2017, and I was still grappling with the first draft of my manuscript when an email arrived from Renira’s son, Jon Müller. Not unreasonably, he was wondering whether I’d finished writing yet: ‘My mother will be 95 years in May, and I would like to give her the book for a birthday present if it is done.’ (No pressure, then.) Jon, who is a retired optician, added that he had started looking into his own ancestry, and had recently taken a DNA test; an American woman whose father was born in Westmoreland Parish, Jamaica, had since been in touch, identifying herself as a DNA match, and wondering how they might be related. Did I have any thoughts?
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure why it hadn’t occurred to me until that moment to have my own DNA tested, for I suddenly realized – and I feel slightly ashamed to confess that it took me so long to work this out – that the process might reveal hidden branches of the family tree. It might even lead me to descendants of Betsey, Bridget, Janet, Sally, William and any other children who my male ancestors might have left behind in Jamaica. It was too tantalizing a prospect to ignore.
Even so, I had mixed feelings about sending off my DNA for analysis – because the implications of this technology for one’s privacy are quite mind-bending. (Not to mention all those stories one hears about people finding out that their parents aren’t actually their parents …) The test involves taking genetic material, provided in the form of saliva or a mouth swab, converting it into machine-readable code, then comparing it with other samples captured on a massive database. Each of the companies offering this service has a slightly different sales pitch; which one (or ones) you choose will depend on whether you wish to build a family tree, discover where in the world your ancestors lived thousands of years ago, or find out whether you carry certain genes that might affect your health. I signed up with Ancestry DNA; with a customer database into the tens of millions, it seemed best positioned for tracking down long-lost relatives. A few days later, a small cardboard box containing a clear plastic tube dropped through my letterbox; I spat into the tube, then posted it off to a laboratory in Utah.
Our connection to our closest relatives – parents, siblings, first cousins – is always manifest through the sheer abundance of DNA we have in common with them. With distant relatives, however, we might share too little DNA to register a match, or such a small amount that it could just as easily be a mismatch, a snippet of genetic code shared by chance with an unrelated stranger. I was staggered to find, when my results came through, that Ancestry had conjured nearly 30,000 potential cousins from its database. (I say ‘potential’, because Ancestry’s confidence in these matches ranged from ‘extremely high’ to ‘moderate’; it expressed ‘extremely high’ or ‘high’ confidence in my connection to seventeen individuals, and ‘good’ confidence for 550 more, but only ‘moderate’ confidence that I was related to the remaining 29,000.) Anyhow – now that I had enough matches (or mismatches) to fill a football stadium, my next challenge was finding out which ones were related to me through the Atkinson line. The only way of doing this, I realized, would be to triangulate my results against those of members of other branches of the family, and see who we had in common. Luckily for me, Renira Müller and David Atkinson both gamely agreed to send their saliva off for analysis.
I felt such a strong family bond with David; not only had he encouraged my research into our ancestors, he had also entrusted me with many of their letters. Still, I wasn’t too surprised when his DNA sample didn’t match mine – I had read enough to know that there is only about a two-thirds probability of detecting a relationship with a fourth cousin. (If you think of two identical decks of cards, each time they are shuffled, the number and length of sequences they have in common will be reduced. This is also true with DNA, where with each ‘shuffle’ of the generations, the number and length of common sequences is diminished.)
Renira’s test results, on the other hand, revealed that we shared 77 centimorgans of DNA across six segments. I set about compiling a list of our mutual relatives from the matches in which Ancestry had expressed ‘extremely high’, ‘high’ or ‘good’ confidence; this added up to about six hundred people for each of us. Within this data set, Renira and I had seven people in common, including one young woman whose surname was Pitter, the maiden name of our ancestor Eliza, who was born in Jamaica in 1829. The most startling revelation? All seven of these distant cousins of ours were of West African ancestry.
At this point I felt torn. I could easily have reached out to my new-found relatives right then – for Ancestry enables you to contact matches through its message board – and part of me yearned to do precisely that. But a more cautious part of me resisted the urge, from fear of treading where I was not wanted or welcome. I understood that for many descendants of enslaved Africans, their genealogical research was motivated by the desire to reunite families ruptured through slavery; so it was quite possible that the very last person they would wish to hear from was me, the direct male descendant of a white slave owner. I pondered this dilemma for several months – it really weighed on me – before finally deciding not to act on it, though still unsure that this was the right choice.
MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Jamaica is from the plane; I spy the Blue Mountains swaddled in cloud, and tiny cars beetling along the coast road. BA2263 is a boisterous flight, an airborne party, and cheering erupts when the wheels hit the tarmac. We left London that morning wrapped up against the icy grip of winter; ten hours later, we have reached Kingston in the warm glow of late afternoon. By the time I emerge from the airport terminal, having shown my passport and shed several layers of clothes, darkness has fallen. Next morning, on a verandah high up in the hills, I breakfast on saltfish and ackee, locally grown coffee, and a fruit salad known as ‘matrimony’ – a combination of orange, grapefruit and star apple, spiced with nutmeg and sweetened with condensed milk. Nearby, a lizard basks on a banana leaf, while hummingbirds flit between brightly coloured flowers.
Idyllic this scene may be, but I am here with a purpose – for I have come to visit some of my ancestors’ old haunts, not that they would recognize them today. A great fire in 1882, then an earthquake in 1907, reduced much of Kingston’s historic business and warehouse district to rubble. Later, during the politically turbulent 1970s, the rat-tat-tat-tat sound of gunfire became familiar as gang warfare engulfed parts of the city, hastening the exodus of the middle class to the suburbs. These days only fairly adventurous tourists are drawn to downtown Kingston, as the crucible of the music for which Jamaica has become world-famous. Although the city is largely safe, and Jamaicans can be some of the most easy-going people you’ll meet, its violent reputation lingers.
The streets around the Parade – a park since the 1870s – form the commercial heart of downtown. Here under shady colonnades, against a backing track of dancehall music blaring out from tinny speakers, market traders offer a wide range of wares, from goldfish to gold hotpants. Kingston Parish Church faces the Parade, on the corner with King Street, and it’s here that I hope to locate the burial place of John Atkinson, my four-times great-uncle who died in 1798. But I soon realize that my guide, Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies, which was published in 1875, is hopelessly out of date – for the old graveyard now serves as the church’s parking lot.[1] Only a few tombstones remain, embedded in the concrete surface and smeared with engine oil – and John’s monument is not among them.
Another day I drive out to Spanish Town, the seat of colonial government until 1872. It ought to be a tourist mecca, given the fine collection of Georgian buildings clustered around its centre, but visitors are a rare species – I think I may have spotted a pair of backpackers roaming in the distance, but I couldn’t swear to it. I stand on the broad, wooden verandah of the former House of Assembly, the present-day headquarters of St Catherine Parish Council, looking down on the main square, and try to picture the air thick with the cigar smoke of the slave-owning plantocracy. This requires a certain leap of imagination, since the verandah is now a dumping ground for old filing cabinets and other bureaucratic detritus.
The exquisite marble statue of Admiral Rodney, who in 1782 prevented Jamaica from being invaded by the French, still dominates the north side of the square under its octagonal cupola. The Island Secretary’s Office, once the lucrative domain of the Atkinson family, remains an administrative building, although it hardly seems busy; its faded green hurricane shutters are tightly closed despite the stormy season ending two months ago. The King’s House, occupying the west side of the square, was gutted by fire in 1925; only its brick façade is left. Likewise the old court house on the south side, which burnt down in 1986.
It is hardly surprising that the prevailing attitude of Jamaicans towards their built heritage is one of fatalistic neglect, especially given how little money can be spared for conservation works. It’s not as though the British cared greatly about these structures in the first place, since they saw Jamaica as a colony to be exploited in the short term, not settled for the long term; for that reason they tended to build meanly, prioritizing utility over beauty. So it seems certain that Spanish Town, and countless great houses and sugar factories dotted around the island, will continue to decay – many of them discreetly, hidden beneath vegetation, others in plain view. And why, you might wonder, should modern Jamaicans give a damn about these relics of a time when their ancestors were transported there in chains, deprived of their human dignity and subjected to conditions of almost unthinkable cruelty? Why would any of this be worthy of preservation?
UNFAMILIAR AS I AM with the byways of rural Jamaica, and unversed in the local patois, I would be hard pressed to track down the remains of my ancestors’ sugar estates without a guide; so I’m lucky that Peter Espeut has agreed to accompany me on a short road trip into the island’s interior. Peter is well known for his weekly column in The Gleaner newspaper, has a distinct Father Christmas-meets-Fidel Castro look about him, and is recognized wherever he goes. He is also a clergyman, environmentalist and sociologist, as well as the author of a historical gazetteer of the island’s estates – in short, I couldn’t wish for a more ideal travel companion.
We set out from Kingston, breaking our drive to the west end of the island at Marshall’s Pen, near Mandeville. This coffee and cattle estate in Manchester Parish once belonged to the Earls of Balcarres, and was managed by the Atkinsons until the falling-out of the 1830s. The great house, built for the overseer in about 1817, lies at the end of a bumpy track edged with dry-stone walls – were it not for the lushness of the vegetation, one might almost be in the Cotswolds. Its current owner, Ann Sutton, shows us round; the property was purchased by her late husband’s family in 1939, and its wood-panelled rooms, chintz furnishings and mildewed pictures evoke an English country house of that period.
Ann manages the Marshall’s Pen estate as a private nature reserve – the glossy brown cattle that graze its rolling pastures are part of a breed conservation programme – and also, as one of Jamaica’s leading ornithologists, conducts birding expeditions all over the island. Her expertise in this field offers me an opportunity that is too good to resist. On the screen of my laptop, I show her photos of the colourful stuffed birds that used to be in the gallery at Temple Sowerby House, and are now in my sitting room in London. I assume they were my great-great-grandfather Dick’s handiwork, dating from his time on the island, but it turns out that I am wrong. Ann tells me that these species are unknown in Jamaica, and probably native to Central and South America – regions which, so far as I am aware, none of my ancestors ever visited.
The following day Peter and I are in Hanover Parish, hunting for traces of Saxham estate, the property of Richard ‘Rum’ Atkinson’s partner, Hutchison Mure. Peter has worked out its rough location from James Robertson’s 1804 map of Jamaica, where a dot marked ‘H. Mure’s’ can be found at the end of a road – although this road doesn’t seem to match one that exists today. We turn off the coastal highway at Green Island and head into the hills; after several false leads, we reach the bottom of a steep track.
A farmer, Albert Miller, soon appears and offers to show us some ruins which, he says, are at the top. Ordinarily I might resist letting a machete-wielding stranger into my car, but he seems friendly enough, and we invite him to climb in. We follow the track for a mile or so, rising all the way; scrubby vegetation eventually gives way to open grass, and I park under a shady tree. We scramble under a barbed-wire fence, then tramp through undergrowth to a place near the crest of the hill. Albert points towards the ground with his blade; ankle-height stones trace the outline of an old building. Peter and I have been expecting to find Saxham’s sugar works – but this lofty spot, with its panoramic view of hills and sea, seems more likely to have been the site of a great house. One of Bridget Atkinson’s sons, Dick, died at Saxham in 1793, and Peter speculates that he may have been interred on the property, given the distance from the nearest church – but we see no signs of a burial place.
It is about an hour’s drive to our next destination, Montego Bay, via the coast road, passing through what used to be rich sugar terrain; only the conical towers of a few windmills remain to bear witness to that era. Leaving the parish of Hanover and entering St James, we cross a police checkpoint – in a drive to reduce the number of murders and other gang-related crimes around Montego Bay, a state of emergency is currently in place. The Bogue estate, which once upon a time belonged to Richard ‘Rum’ Atkinson, is these days a suburb of Jamaica’s second city. During the 1960s, a land reclamation scheme merged some of the bay’s mangrove islands, formerly uncultivated areas of the Bogue, into a cruise terminal and duty-free shopping area; a gleaming white ship is currently in port. We turn off the dual carriageway that cuts through what used to be cane fields into Bogue Heights, a neighbourhood of upscale villas shielded behind electric gates. Apart from a few breadfruit and ackee trees, which often hint at the past site of a slave village, there are no obvious signs of the sugar plantation that once occupied this land.
Much of the following morning is spent fixing a puncture, and it is almost midday by the time we reach Whithorn village, which lies within the boundary of what used to be the Dean’s Valley Dry Works estate. We pause outside the small stone Methodist church to admire the view before dropping down to the flood plain below. Despite our best efforts at map reading, we still end up going round in circles, and I start to despair of ever locating the remains of this particular property. Then we turn on to a stony track, drive round a corner, and there, ahead of us, we see a crumbling pillar of cut limestone emerging from a backdrop of rampant vegetation, overshadowed by a towering African tulip tree with bright red flowers. Unmistakably the ruins of an old sugar works.
We pull over. A man emerges from a nearby house, curious to know our business, and we in turn ask him questions. His name is Rawle Davis; he tells us that his family has lived here for more than thirty years, and offers to show us round. We tread carefully through dense foliage growing out of uneven heaps of rubble. It seems there are three ruined buildings – presumably a boiling house, curing house and distillery – although it’s hard to discern them as separate units. In a few places, thick stone walls more than twice our height rear up out of the bush; elsewhere an enormous cylindrical cast-iron boiler languishes in the undergrowth.
I feel almost overwhelmed to find myself in this place where hundreds of enslaved Africans were once forced to manufacture sugar; and appalled to think that these people had been the lawful property of my family. I can’t help but wonder, did my ancestors ever pause to reflect how posterity might judge them?
BEFORE I FLY HOME, the Jamaican Historical Society has invited me to give a lecture about my project. Writing a family memoir is not an undertaking to be entered into lightly; so far it has taken me eight years, but this will be the first time I have spoken about it in public. On a rainy evening, about twenty-five people turn up to hear my talk at a school in the Kingston suburb of Papine; they are a sympathetic crowd, and it feels surprisingly liberating to tell them what I’ve been up to all this time.
Afterwards, refreshments are served – spicy beef patties and slices of watermelon. A woman approaches me, smiling genially; she introduces herself as Suzanne Francis-Brown, before delivering the quite startling news that she has two ancestors called Richard Atkinson, a great-grandfather and a great-great-grandfather, on different sides of her maternal line. Suzanne goes on to tell me that her mother’s family, the Atkinsons, were a tall, light-skinned clan from Catadupa in St James Parish, about twelve miles from both the Bogue and Dean’s Valley estates. Her late uncle, a keen family historian, had always said that three Atkinson brothers came to Jamaica from the north of England in the late eighteenth century …
Clearly, the resonances between Suzanne’s family story and mine are too great to be discounted. We meet the following day at the museum she curates on the University of the West Indies campus at Mona, and spend a couple of highly enjoyable hours indulging in wild speculation about whether we might be related – and if so, how. But there’s only one way to find out for sure. Suzanne has already had her DNA tested through 23andMe, not a company I’ve used, and I volunteer to do the same. It’s a long shot, of course – for even if we are distant cousins, the odds are stacked against her DNA matching mine.
Back in London, I post my saliva sample to the laboratory. Three weeks later the results come through; they connect me to more than one thousand ‘DNA Relatives’. I scan the list of names, but Suzanne’s isn’t among them. I email to say how disappointed I am, and she comes right back with a message that is typically Jamaican in its warmth. ‘Hush,’ she writes, ‘we’ll be honorary cousins.’