William Dawes in Antigua

William Dawes (1762–1836) is one of those “‘imperial men’ who moved across … societies, their own identities … ruptured, changed and differently articulated by place”,² who are attracting increasing historical attention. He served the British empire in several of its theatres: naval engagement in the marines, New South Wales (as a marine officer, astronomer, and surveyor with the First Fleet and compiler of the fullest study of the local indigenous language around Port Jackson around the time of first British settlement), Sierra Leone (as agent of the Sierra Leone Company, governor for three terms and Commissioner), and Antigua (as agent of the Church Missionary Society, and, between 1820 and 1829, Director of its Schools in the West Indies). David Lambert and Alan Lester argue that people with what they term “imperial careers” “had opportunities to transcend their initial impressions, to insinuate themselves into personal, business, official, religious and friendship networks. They came as they saw it, to ‘know’ the local ‘native’ peoples, and to articulate more considered and comparative reflections on the colonial societies in which they had dwelt.”³ Received opinion among historians is that beyond the language notebooks and his meteorological journal from his sojourn in New South Wales Dawes’s papers have been lost, destroyed by a hurricane. Characterizations of Dawes’s work in Antigua have been largely shaped by sketchy and inaccurate accounts of his career there, usually represented simply as “work[ing] on behalf of the anti-slavery cause,”⁴ in entries on Dawes in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.⁵ In this essay I outline and analyse Dawes’s project and educational and benevolent networks in Antigua, drawing primarily on an extensive correspondence in the Church Missionary Society Archive. His letters facilitate, in particular, new understandings of his evangelical religiosity, his collaborative work towards the amelioration of slavery, and his attitudes to women, understandings that challenge the directions of some current Australian revaluations of his colonial legacy.

I outline briefly the scope of these revaluations and discuss the limits and parameters of extant archival material, Dawes’s efforts to establish himself in Antigua, and the scope of his work for the Church Missionary Society and Creole benevolent organizations. To draw out more fully his attitudes to religion, amelioration, plantation slavery and women, I analyse the complexities of his autobiographical representations in Antigua in his letters to the Church Missionary Society Committee and its Secretaries and the work diaries he prepared for the Committee during what he identifies as a “momentous crisis” produced by the shock waves from the 1823 slave rebellion in Demerara, a fierce backlash against Methodists and evangelicals in the region, which he terms “most horrid aversion to all serious religion,” and a high church Anglicanization of ameliorative reform. Dawes writes to the Committee on 20 September 1824, “during the state of suspense in which we are, the mind is unavoidably exercised with a variety of hopes & fears.”⁶ As Clare Brant points out, “Evangelical Christians had particular conventions for articulating spiritual distress: a suffering soul used letters to cry out.” Dawes’s sense of crisis and defensiveness produce a reflective, more metaphorical and retrospective interpretation of his work, more usually summarized by him in chronicle form, tables of educational progress, and presentation of financial accounts. Indeed these letters function as fragments of personal and collective spiritual autobiography.⁷

Since the mid-1990s aspects of Dawes’s career in New South Wales have whet the interest, in particular, of creative writers and historians of linguistics and cross-cultural contact, astronomy, and meteorology.⁸ Web and print editions of the language notebooks, The Notebooks of William Dawes on the Aboriginal Languages of Sydney and William Dawes’ Notebooks on the Aboriginal Language of Sydney respectively, have been released recently and are leading a revival of the Dharuk language.⁹ His relationship with an Eora girl, Patyegarang, his principal informant in the compilation of his language notebooks, has inspired Paul Carter’s poetic sound installation The Calling to Come (1996); this relationship and a crucial moment of dissent, his rebuke of Governor Arthur Phillip over a reprisal raid against Eora people are...