By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey

By the Rivers of Water: A Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey. By Erskine Clarke. New York: Basic Books, 2013. Pp. vii, 450; maps, notes, photographs, illustrations, bibliography, indexes. $29.99/Canada $34.50.Erskine Clarke has written a remarkable history of a pioneering American Christian mission in Africa. Yet, By the Rivers of Water is more than a missionary couple from coastal Georgia and South Carolina taking the Gospel to Africa. It is also about the transatlantic slave trade, American slavery, cultural encounters and exchanges, and colonization. The narrative, a fluid and authoritative prose, is interspersed with tragedies, perseverance, and profound contradictions.In 1834, the newly married John Leighton Wilson (mostly Leighton throughout the book) and Jane Bayard Wilson embarked for Cape Palmas, West Africa, in present-day southeastern Liberia. That same year the State Colonization Society, which had earlier severed ties with the national body, the American Colonization Society, established Maryland in in Cape Palmas. The new colony was independent of the 1822 ACS-founded Liberia. in Liberia, like the Colony of Liberia lying some 300 miles northwest, was a settlement for free black Americans and those recently emancipated from slavery. Both the black colonists and Leighton (along with his small band of white and black missionaries) shared the palm-strewn peninsula on the Atlantic coast with the Grebo, their African host.Tension was inevitable. Leighton was convinced that the colonists' goal was to ultimately subjugate the Grebo and expropriate their land. So he appeared to assume the role of protector of the natives, a la Bartolome de Las Casas in the Americas. The crisis came to the fore when the MSCS appointed its first black governor. John Brown Russwurm was an educated and well-known critic of racial discrimination in the United States. Governor Russwurm, haunted by fresh memories of domineering white power, was determined to assert his authority on the Cape, and that included the missionary station headed by the white Leighton. Thus Leighton soon found himself in a duel with the governor over jurisdiction of the Cape. Realizing that neither he nor his sponsors in America could halt the colonists' aggression against the Grebo, Leighton abandoned the Cape (after nearly a decade) and opened an outpost in Gabon. Here, they encountered the French who were also bent on colonizing Africans. Eventually however, it was failing health that forced the Wilsons to return home after almost two wandering decades on the African coast. …

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