‘Sierra Leone’ and ‘Freetown’ were used synonymously in the early years when the colony consisted of little more than the fledgling town, covering just one third of a square mile bordered by a few settler farms. The area of land negotiated in 1787 with the local tribal chief was vague but was thought to be around ten miles by twenty but this was reduced by mutual agreement in 1792 to around two miles and a quarter by not more than five or six miles.1 By 1819, however, the colony had expanded to cover the whole peninsula to the south of Freetown, some 270 square miles.
I have usually referred to the three women and their husbands by their first names, as the narrative’s principal characters; for more peripheral individuals such as Governors, Company officials and fellow missionaries, I have used either their full name or their surname.
Until women were recruited in significant numbers for service overseas, the term ‘missionary’ was taken to apply to men only, even though the Church Missionary Society recruited its first women missionaries as early as 1820. In keeping with this practice, therefore, I have only referred to men as missionaries and have used the term ‘missionary women’ or ‘missionary wives’ for the women who served on the West African mission during this period.
When quoting from the correspondence in the main text and transcribing the selected letters in Appendices 3 and 4, I have retained the original erratic use of capital letters, abbreviations and punctuation. The clarity of the handwriting and the current condition of some letters, however, has made it difficult to accurately decipher the text. Nor has it always been clear whether the writer was using a capital letter, or a colon or semi-colon; the use of the colon and also the comma seem particularly illogical to the contemporary reader. Nevertheless, I have reproduced the text as closely as possible to what is decipherable on the page.
Where a word could not be deciphered in a letter, I have indicated this as [missing word]. Where I have omitted phrases or sentences from letters, I have used a series of dots as in [….]. I have sometimes summarised sections of the letters, again using square brackets and italics.
On a few occasions the correspondent has added a phrase or sentence to her (or his) text, as an afterthought or clarification, and I have enclosed these words in round brackets. Where a word has been abbreviated in such a way as to limit understanding I have inserted the missing letters between square brackets at its first appearance, e.g. ‘tho’ts [thoughts]’, ‘Rev’d [Reverend’], but not thereafter.
Spelling was not standardised in the early nineteenth century, with the spelling of names being particularly eccentric. African names were spelt in English in numerous ways. I have tried to be consistent.
I have retained the practice of anglicising the first names of the German missionaries, as found in their correspondence and in the CMS records.
As explained in the section ‘Enriching the discourse’ of the Introduction, in the interest of historical authenticity I have decided at times to retain terms that we would now consider offensive.
Anna Maria Falconbridge, Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies: Two Women’s Travel Narratives of the 1790s, ed. Deirdre Coleman (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999), 111.