One

Sunderland Point

I stood at the edge of the bay, looking out to where cloud shadows fell onto the immeasurable sands, colouring them deep Prussian blue and red ochre. The whole saltmarsh was silent, the kind of silence that hums in the ears, and it spread over the singing blue of a frozen morning. Then a redshank materialised from a channel close by and unfurled itself skywards, casting its singular ticking call into the sky. My cover was blown and the whole marsh knew I was there.

Over the fells of Furness and further, beyond the Duddon shores, Black Combe had turned other-worldly, snow-capped, like Mount Fuji transplanted. I’d driven through the brightening of an early January morning, the lanes funnelling into a narrow single track, passing caravan sites and low-lying winter fields where flocks of goldfinches sparked out of the hedgerows. There was a sense of getting closer to the coast; the way the light shifted, paling as it fell towards a seaborne horizon.

Then a place to park by the edge of the bay and, at the road’s end, a few houses and gardens sheltered by trees. Rooks were high up in the motionless branches; feathers ruffling, wings restless. I pulled on boots and gloves, and gathered together the bits I’d need – binoculars, notebook and pen – and stuffed them into pockets before setting out to walk in extraordinary light. A pair of curlew flew up. As though choreographed, more appeared, surfacing and launching forward in sequence, out from the sea-pools and channels that threaded curving ribbons of water towards the bay, a good half-mile distant over the marsh. Arcing above me, they surged seaward, making the sky brimful with their bittersweet calls. This, of all the cadences of the natural world, fills me with the fizz of wild electricity. Oystercatchers evolved out of the distance, the flash and message of them, the sound building to a crescendo, insistent. Over the shoreline dunlin massed, flowing and peep-peeping through the breath-cold morning sky. Underneath all this, the persistent chatter of turnstones.

Constellations of birds gathered on the sea margins, waiting for the returning tide. Curlew, redshanks, greenshanks, dunlin, knot, oystercatchers and, out on the empty sands, the gulls, splashed like distant white stars. Even further, milky white galaxies of birds worked, probing the sands for food.

A bank had been constructed as a flood defence, protection for the farmland on Sunderland Point. The line of it stretched all the way down to the end of this thin strip of land, the southern marker of Morecambe Bay. Its base was bordered with scoured marsh grass that’d been raked out and deposited by the sea, the line of it meshed together with knots of blue nylon rope, sea-washed plastic, fire-blackened wood, gull feathers, bottles and mussel shells. The tides had been full and I knew that the sea would come in this far again, covering the path.

As I walked, a pair of blackbirds bobbed ahead of me along a line of wavy fence posts tilted at angles and spliced together with rusted wire. Out of the far distance a crack of sound came, like gunshot, and countless birds on the sea-edge lifted into the sky, clouds of dunlin and knot moving in front of each other, white on black, and black on white.

It was nearing mid-morning and the sun was still low-slung in the sky. Sea-pools reflected the shift from yellow sky to cerulean blue. Vapour trails formed and dissolved. After months of rain the New Year brought the gift of intense cold weather, and I was glad of it; we need our light this far north, as much of it as we can get. A tractor had been along the path, creating ruts the depth of canyons, and the weather had created its own temporary geology of freezing, melting and re-forming inside the tracks. There were whorls of opaque ice, splintered white crystals, dark, depthless frozen pools and boot-marks that had frozen and been preserved. They reminded me of the Neolithic footprints exposed by shifting tides not all that far away, just down the Lancashire coast. The footprints of adults, children, cattle and even dogs; ephemeral archaeology, dug out by weather and water. I wondered about my footprints being exposed again and found in a couple of thousand years. What would they make of me?

I came to a stile set in a wall and stepped into a small, grassy enclosure bordered by drystone walls, a farm fence and winter-black gorse. Flat on the grass was a gravestone, with a small wooden cross at its head. A robin kept an eye as I walked towards it.

Here lies

Poor SAMBOO

A faithfull NEGRO

Who

(Attending his Master from the West Indies)

DIED on his Arrival at SUNDERLAND.

Full sixty Years the angry Winter’s Wave 
Has thundering dash’d this bleak & barren Shore 
Since SAMBO’s Head laid in this lonely GRAVE 
Lies still & ne’er will hear their turmoil more

The grave has a life of its own; it seems to change with the seasons and the weather. I’d been here before with my husband and son, and on that autumn day there’d been: a collection of bright painted beach stones surrounding the cross, many with messages of love to the slave boy; a key ring with a small black and white dog attached to it; a painting of a fairy; a miniature bear and the carved wooden figure of an African antelope.

Going back there on that January morning, Christmas ephemera had been left: a pair of tiny angel figurines and a rusted metal coil that had been a miniature Christmas tree. There was a prayer book made of painted plaster with the message ‘In loving memory’, a plastic hedgehog and a child’s plastic bangle dangling from the cross; its hollow gems refracted the winter light onto the pebbles at the base.

But there had been an unwelcome addition.

A slate panel had been hung from the horizontal bar so that most of the cross was now hidden from view, and the slate had become the first – no, the only – thing you’d see as you entered the little enclosure. In neat lettering someone had written the words of the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, and added at the bottom, ‘I come to this peaceful and beautiful place to give thanks and enjoy this charming and delightful special burial ground.’ Myself, I liked the plastic hedgehog better; it had more eloquence, even for the simple nonsense of it.

* * *

Reverend James Watson, a retired schoolteacher, installed the grave some sixty years after the boy’s death. In 1796 he decided to mark the boy’s death for posterity, and set about raising the necessary money for the grave and composed the eulogy inscribed on the stone. The story of the slave boy changes depending on where you read it. An article published in the 1822 edition of the Lonsdale Magazine, a ‘provincial repository’, containing ‘literary, scientific, and philosophical essays, original poetry, entertaining tales and anecdotes, miscellaneous intelligence etc,’ suggests the boy died from his inability to speak English. Somehow though, I doubt it.

After she had discharged her cargo, he was placed at the inn ... with the intention of remaining there on board wages till the vessel was ready to sail; but supposing himself to be deserted by the master, without being able, probably from his ignorance of the language, to ascertain the cause, he fell into a complete state of stupefaction, even to such a degree that he secreted himself in the loft on the brewhouses and stretching himself out at full length on the bare boards refused all sustenance. He continued in this state only a few days, when death terminated the sufferings of poor Samboo. As soon as Samboo’s exit was known to the sailors who happened to be there, they excavated him in a grave in a lonely dell in a rabbit warren behind the village, within twenty yards of the sea shore, whither they conveyed his remains without either coffin or bier, being covered only with the clothes in which he died.

Elsewhere it’s suggested that the boy was the only survivor of a shipwreck off Sunderland Point, or died from a broken heart after his master left him. Some reports suggest that he might’ve died from a European disease to which he had no immunity. This seems more like it, makes more sense, putting two and two together. But anyway, I wanted to dig deeper.

* * *

Sunderland’s history is bonded tightly to Lancaster’s. The village was developed as an ‘outport’ for Lancaster early in the 18th century by the Quaker industrialist Robert Lawson. Lancaster’s economy boomed as a direct result of the slave trade, and the city’s renowned Georgian architecture was built on the back of it. Lancaster became the fourth largest city in the UK involved in the slave trade, following only London, Liverpool and Bristol.

I’d been to visit Lancaster’s Maritime Museum on the Georgian quayside, housed in the former Custom House, and I’d seen a troubling image. A pattern in black and white caught my eye from across one of the rooms. It reminded me of an African textile border print. But, walking closer, it dematerialised as pattern and became instead a kind of instruction manual, a graphic illustration showing the method of packing slaves onto ships. Four hundred and fifty people would have been crammed onto the four decks of a Lancaster slave ship. At the bulkhead end they were arranged at odd angles so that no space was wasted.

The picture stirred in me one of my most powerful memories from primary school. Studying the slave trade, we’d been shown a similar image and my young eyes had taken in all that crushed humanity. Between 1736 and 1807 Lancaster’s ships carried around 29,000 slaves from West Africa to the West Indies.

The boy ‘Sambo’ would have been a servant, a cabin boy or a personal assistant. To have a black slave was considered a luxury, a sign of status, and whilst slaves did not come into England en masse, at the time of Sambo’s arrival and death at Sunderland, around 40 country houses in the Lancaster area were known to have had black servants.

The city developed a different kind of slave ship, smaller than most others were at the time. Designed with a shallow draught, they could venture inland, navigating up rivers on the Windward Coast (modern Liberia and Ivory Coast), the River Gambia, and explore African estuaries where slavery was becoming a more specialist pursuit. They carried beads, bracelets, mirrors, hawk bells, clothing, hats and brass pans. They also carried iron ore, which was then a scarce resource in Africa. Ore had been dug out of the Furness hills for centuries, and the bay area is also rich in limestone, used as flux in the smelting process. The remains of lime kilns across the area are testament to the extent of the industry. Iron was smelted into chunks here and exported along with all the other ephemera of slave-buying currencies.

The earliest recorded ship sailing from Sunderland to Jamaica was in 1687. Named, somewhat inappropriately, The Lambe, she set sail during the reign of King James II of England, VII of Scotland. Though this seems to be extraordinarily early, it shows the scope and aspiration of tradesmen from a small city in the north-west of England. I’d read about young men being plied with wine in the local inns, and once unable to stand upright they were carried off and put onto ships at Sunderland Point. I wonder which must have been worst – the mighty hangover, the rolling ship or the realisation that there was no going back? They must have thought they were sailing to the edge of the world.

In the Maritime Museum there’s a poem from the time, a kind of gruesome justification for the slave trade.

I own I am saddened by the purchase of slaves

And fear those who buy them and sell them as knaves.

What I hear of their hardship, their torture and groans

Is almost enough to draw pity from stones.

I pity them greatly but I must be mum,

For how could we do without sugar and rum?

The Quakers were heavily involved in the Lancaster slave trade. It seems that they were able to turn a blind eye to the ‘torture and groans’. It’s unclear how they squared this with their belief that Christ was available to everyone, there for the taking; just the small matter of the colour of skin that meant you were in, or out.

* * *

I wanted to see Sunderland Point in a different light. Six months later, with the tide far out on an early summer day, I cycled the tidal causeway road that links the village to the rest of the world. The first section of the road dives below the level of the marsh, so that my view of the river margin was seen through a pink bloom of sea thrift. Occasional cars ploughed the road, all but their roofs hidden from view.

High up, a splash of skylarks filled the sky, though with the light so intense it was impossible to pick them out. Their songs trickled down over the marsh. The ground was furrowed by water channels and streambeds, and water left by the tide oozed and prickled, wicking its way underneath the surface. In a deep muddy hollow a slither trail of evidence; something had been here, moving towards a stream and a hidden route to the river. I thought, otters.

Arriving in Sunderland village it was as if a warp in time as well as space had been crossed. Take away the streetlights and TV aerials and you could imagine yourself back in the 18th century. There was a small, walled orchard with grass so high it would part like the sea as you waded through it. Windows looked out onto the river. A small boat zipped out to sea and a line of geese came flying an oscillating line down-river, their call a wave pulse of sound. If I lived here, I’d never get anything done with all this to look at – the birds, the boats and the ships. I’d have to keep checking in, see what was happening.

There was a sign fixed to a gate: ‘Local History Book for Sale. No obligation to buy. Come in and have a look’. I walked through the gate and into a walled garden where swallows dipped and dived on a pathway of air, chittering and swooping in and out of nests underneath a covered porch. The garden borders were filled with canna lilies, delphiniums, lupins. Inside the house a radio was playing, but no one answered my knock. I began to feel like an intruder. A robin landed a foot away from me on the garden wall, inspected me with his head cocked to one side before flitting away on a burr of quick wings. I watched the swallows for a few moments more then walked to the front door. On the way, a woman in an upstairs window caught my eye and waved.

She came to the front door and apologised for not hearing my knock. ‘I’m in the middle of painting the bathroom,’ she said, and I told her I was sorry to interrupt the flow. She fetched a copy of the book and we fell into conversation.

She told me that her husband was a fisherman, but that the fish don’t come like they used to, and you couldn’t make a living any more. Before I left she said, ‘Come back again if you want to know any more.’

I thanked her and said, ‘I’m off to the grave now.’

‘So you know the way?’ she asked.

‘Yes, I’ve been before.’

‘It’s always changing,’ she said. ‘People bring things all year round.’

‘I know. Last time I was here there were Christmas decorations, a miniature tree, that kind of thing.’

As I walked to the gate she said something else, and her words hung in the air after we said our goodbyes.

‘That’s if he is buried there.’

I left the bike, out of habit locking it to a fence, and walked across the isthmus of land to the grave site along a lane that was thick with June’s offerings; elder flowers, wild rose, rabbits disappearing under hedges and a badger sett, recently swept clean, the way they do.

The grave had changed again. The too-big sign was still draped over the front, but someone had attached coloured ribbons to it. Maybe one day someone will turn the slate over, start a petition: ‘Let’s stop calling him Sambo. How’s about “Sam”?’

The Christmas tree had gone. There were new pebbles, newly painted too, one with the words, ‘In memory of Sambo, God Bless from the Marsh History Society.’ A boat constructed from tin, some origami, a plastic car and another pebble: ‘Have a happy day Sambo, Kylie X’. The plastic hedgehog had gone. It’d been replaced by a frog.

For me there’s a sense of tension around the memorial. There’s a temptation to regard even the idea of the grave and its story as relics from the past, as anachronisms. But almost daily emails arrive asking me to sign petitions against slavery. There’s even an ad on the TV – ‘Help put an end to modern slavery’ – and regular stuff in the papers too. It’s almost 280 years since the boy was abandoned at Sunderland, but dig just a little and you find that there are likely to be more people bonded into slavery now than ever were during the Atlantic slave trade. Processing this, squaring it with the small grave in the field, is difficult.

* * *

I walked back along the lane to the village, and stopped outside ‘Upsteps Cottage’, the place the slave boy had run to. He’d fled, so the story goes, up the flight of external stone steps and into the brewhouse storeroom, and it’s here that he was left alone to die. But there’s a mystery, a question. Some contemporary reports indicate that the boy’s body was carried to a field behind the brewhouse and interred there in unconsecrated ground, rather than at the site of the grave. And why would you carry a body any further than you needed to?

By 1796, when the Reverend Watson decided to mark the lonely grave beside the sea, all was not well in either Sunderland or Lancaster. Ships were being built on a larger scale, and there were ongoing problems with the River Lune silting up. To facilitate easier access to the city Glasson Dock had been constructed just upriver. But it all came too late. With its larger and more accessible port, Liverpool was fast becoming the centre for trade and Sunderland had become known as ‘Cape Famine’.

I remembered the words of the woman I’d bought the book from. ‘That’s if he is buried there,’ she’d said, and I wondered if the boy really had been buried in the lonely field beside the sea. Or was the grave a creation, a kind of Turner Centre of the day designed to bring about regeneration? In the late 1700s the benefits of taking the sea air and sea-bathing were being promoted as aids to health. People had begun to visit Sunderland for recreation, and I wondered if this had got our Reverend thinking. A short walk across the fields may have been just what people needed, a focal point, or a reason to walk. After all, it’s why I went.