We Are the Rebels Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of Senegal
in 1853. As the Scottish teenager Alexander Dick tells us, there was no pier or
landing place, and one of the primary industries of the natives —who were of mixed
African and Portuguese descent—was carrying passengers from boats to the shore.
    The Sir William Molesworth arrived in considerable surf. Dick describes the scene
of moral pandemonium that ensued, with the ladies utterly horrified to find that
they could only reach the shore in the arms of a Cape Verdean man as naked as the
Apostle Belvidere and as black as Beelzebub . Some flatly refused, and returned to
the ship. A few daring souls resigned themselves half unwillingly to the adventure,
arriving on the beach tousled and tumbled and blushing like peonies .
    It was an extraordinary scene. Familiar standards were blurred, behaviours adapted,
boundaries crossed. The women who were carried to shore were only ‘half unwilling’.
No longer upstanding, but tousled and tumbled and set down arse-about. Wondering,
probably, how a precious English rose should act when her knight in shining armour
is not a handsome prince but a buck-naked black man.
    Not all the women jumped ship when the opportunity presented. But some did grab at
the chance to throw off the trappings of convention and surrender to something new.
And it would have been only one of the disorienting experiences for the south-bound
travellers. For many of them, the ship voyage abruptly shattered old assumptions.
    Shipboard, immigrants were neither on land nor of the sea; neither leaving nor arriving.
They were neither here nor there. Fanny Davis even observed a Catholic prayer service,
below deck, conducted by a young woman . What had possessed this girl to go against
the strict traditions of her faith?
    Alpheus Boynton, a young Canadian, described the scene on the promenade deck of his
ship at night, when it assumed the appearance of a dance hall with fiddlers, tambourines,
dancers. Folks stood in a ring, clapping and cheering. Had it not been for a sober
and quite respectable company , wrote Boynton, one might have imagined himself in
an Ann Street gathering: in short, we had a regular break down . (Ann Street was the
red-light district of Boston, where the city’s blacks and whites would notoriously
intermingle.)
    John Hopkins, travelling aboard the Schomberg , enjoyed a silly affair when the lads
in his cabin put on a show: the star was a ‘beautiful young lady’ with a beard .
    Fanny Davis described one of her ship’s full dress balls where women went to pains
to outdo each other’s outfits. Some of the girls , she wrote, dress in the Highland
costume as men. It looks first rate . And out on deck she was finding things even
more peculiar. An awning had been rigged up on the deck for the ladies, but many
did not use it. The sun begins to turn the colour of our skins , wrote Fanny, we shall
all be black soon . The Marco Polo Chronicle reported the same phenomenon: fair faces
brown rapidly .
    For sixteen-year-old Sarah Ann Raws, sailing on the Bloomer in 1854, reaching the
tropics was a revelation. Although she and her brother could scarcely sleep in our
beds for the heat , Sarah Ann delighted in lying on top of her mattress with only
a thin sheet as cover, sweat rolling off our faces . And no stockings.
    What a sign of the topsy-turvy times.

SOUTHERN STARS
    During their first miserable, stomach-churning weeks at sea when everything solid
melted into air, people still had the stars. Reading the map of the night sky (which
everyone did, before electricity and TV) kept passengers in touch with a familiar
reality. There was Ursa Major. There was Pegasus. There was Leo. Constellations that
you knew, and could use to chart a known route towards an unknown destiny. Those
stars seemed a last link uniting us , wrote Mrs Charles Meredith.
    Then, as ships sailed south through the layers of latitude towards the equator, even
that certainty was stripped away. I do