Notes from the Curious Travellers team, June 2020.

‘A wolf by the ear’

In 1820, in a letter discussing slavery and the practicalities of emancipation, the former American President Thomas Jefferson used a Classical metaphor to describe the situation:

But, as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.
Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, Monticello, 22 April 1820

Bankside smelting works, near Greenfield, engraving after Moses Griffith

The Latin phrase ‘Auribus teneo lupum’ (I hold a wolf by its ears) is used by several Classical authors and refers to making choices in a dangerous situation: whichever decision is made will bring problems in its wake. For Jefferson, that problem was the undeniable greater good of emancipation (which for him, it should be noted, included removing freed Black people from America) set against the potential of extreme political turmoil to the Union if different states adopted different measures. Historians are still divided over the paradoxes raised by Jefferson and the issue of slavery: he was a powerful advocate of emancipation, but also an enslaver—and, of course, a politician, whose opinions and decisions adapted to circumstance. (See https://www.monticello.org/slavery/paradox-of-liberty/thomas-jefferson-liberty-slavery/this-deplorable-entanglement/)

It is striking that in 1788 – thirty years before Jefferson – Thomas Pennant used exactly same phrase in relation to what he called ‘that terrible business’ and admitted that his thoughts on the subject were ‘strangely divided’.

This document sets out some examples of Pennant’s statements and actions which could give us a clearer picture of what he believed – although, as we have seen, he himself acknowledged that he was conflicted.  A Welsh-language blog on ‘Thomas Pennant, Africa, and Slavery’ written by Ffion Jones for the Curious Travellers project in 2017 explores some of these issues further: (https://curioustravellers.ac.uk/cy/thomas-pennant-affrica-a-chaethwasiaeth/)

Comments in the letters

1788: Letter to Richard Bull: https://editions.curioustravellers.ac.uk/doc/1080

“Yesterday Mrs P. & I returned frm a jaunt to Leverpool. myself with the influenza came back not the better. but by dint of spirits I clambered over the slave ships; & can say no more to that terrible business, than that ‘We have a wolf by the ears.’ I am so unwell at present that I shall refer you to my M. S. Africa for my thoughts: they are strangely divided.”

Unwell and unable to formulate a longer response to the ‘terrible business’ of slavery, the basis of Liverpool’s new prosperity Pennant admits to being ‘strangely divided’ and refers his friend Richard Bull to his ‘manuscript book’ on Africa, part of his decades-long geographical project called ‘The Outlines of the Globe’, most of which was never published; the manuscripts are held in the National Maritime Museum.  As Paul Evans noted in his doctoral thesis on Pennant, ‘Volume XI contains a good deal of information about the slave-trade, much of it having been supplied by a near neighbour, Richard Wilding of Llanrhaeadr Hall near Denbigh’. (Evans (1993) II, p.636).  Wilding had ‘resided twelve years on the coast of Guinea’ and was thus a direct witness of the practices involved; his letters are cited in Pennant’s manuscript.

Bull, one of Pennant’s closest friends, subscribed to the volume of letters published by Charles Ignatius Sancho, who was rescued from slavery as a child. Bull was also comfortable expressing clear anti-slavery sentiments to Pennant in 1795.)

“The field of Politic’s is too large for such a confused head as mine to enter upon, but I hope and trust that all will end in peace, and plenty, and that this little Kingdom, which I feel proud to be a native of, will have had the glory of confirming the rights of all distinctions of people throughout the world, and if it can be done, I hope the slave trade will e’re long be quite at an end”. https://editions.curioustravellers.ac.uk/doc/1189

Nothing else in the 500 letters of correspondence we have edited to date sheds further light on the issue, but there are many hundreds of letters still in manuscript, and we may in time find more.

Comments in published works

As with the letters, Pennant’s remarks on slavery in his published works are few and far between. There is a gruesome description in British Zoology (1768) of the corpse of an enslaved person being thrown overboard and eaten by a Great White Shark – information which Pennant had from ‘the master of a Guinea ship’, who was trying to ‘prevent the rage of suicide’ among ‘these unhappy creatures’. The ‘objective’ scientific perspective of this text does not quite manage to contain the horror of the account, but Pennant does not use the example to express any political view.

In the first volume of the Tours in Wales (1778) one of the works for which he is best known, he is much less equivocal. Writing of a period under the Saxons when British slaves were among the ‘exports’, Pennant adds:

“The first barbarous traffic was carried on by the Saxons to a great height. The description of the mart is an exact picture of the negro* commerce at present; so little have we emerged from barbarism in that instance”.

The footnote takes the reader to a moving scene from the Life of St Wulfstan, where beautiful ‘young people of both sexes’ are roped like animals and sold into slavery.

The present frequently casts a shadow on the past in Pennant’s writing: to be an antiquarian is not necessarily to be cocooned from contemporary concerns. In Of London (1790) the complex and often brutal relationship between the conquering Romans and the less ‘civilised’, but native, Britons is given a grim modern parallel. Speaking of London during the reign of Tiberius, Pennant remarks:

‘The exports from hence were cattle, hides and corn; and let me add, that slaves were a considerable object. Our internal parts were on a level with the African slave coasts; and wars among the petty monarchs were promoted for the sake of a traffic now so strongly controverted’.

If ancient British Londoners were once treated as Africans are today, the sub-text could read here, should we not recognize some kind of kinship with them? Many years later, the novelist Joseph Conrad would also summon up those early Roman traders in human souls, at the very beginning of his Heart of Darkness.

Greenfield Valley: Cotton-mills and Copperworks

The interpretation panels in today’s Greenfield valley, and the open-air museum at its foot, have long been explicit about the inequalities of power and the atrocities of a ‘triangular trade’ which linked the production of copper trinkets to the ‘purchase’ of enslaved Africans, who would be exchanged in the Americas for raw cotton bales, which might end up being milled in the new buildings powered by the stream from St Winifred’s Well. In his History of the Parishes of Whiteford and Holywell, Pennant explains that by the 1780s ‘the great copper-companies, those behemoths of commerce’, energized by Thomas Williams (‘that useful and active character’) had ‘with unparalleled speed, covered the lower part of the stream […] with buildings stupendous in expence, extent, and ingenuity of contrivance’.[1] Williams (‘Twm Chwarae Teg’, 1737-1802) is remembered today for his highly profitable exploitation of the copper mines in Anglesey, and his market-driven, vigorously anti-abolitionist stance.

Thomas Pennant’s own account of these brass and copper objects is oddly disturbing. Describing the ‘goods for Africa, America and most other markets’ he lists:

brass Neptunes, or large pans in which the Negroes make salt; pans for getting the gold out of their rivers, and for various other purposes; kettles, brass and copper rods; bright and black manillas – the first are rings for the ornaments to the arms and legs; the last for the current money of the country. The last are not unlike the golden bracelets of the antient Britons, the ends turned up and flatted.  (History of the Parishes, p. 211)

Pennant here evokes a vision of a thriving society of Africans busily engaged in profitable activities (salt-making, panning for gold) and delighting in the ‘ornaments’ sent across the sea from the Greenfields mills. The antiquarian twist, likening the manillas to the torques of the ‘antient Britons’, once again connects ‘primitive’ contemporary African society to a British golden age, but this time the vision is more idealized. Nowhere in his detailed and inquisitive accounts of copper and cotton manufacture does he mention the question of how and by whom the raw materials are produced, or acknowledge the harsh facts of the triangular trade. But then, neither did younger and more politically engaged visitors, such as Arthur Aiken, the nephew of Anna Le Barbauld, who visited Greenfields in 1796.

[1] Pennant, History of the Parishes, 204.

Engraving after Moses Griffith, Holywell, Upper and Lower Cotton Mills

Friends on both sides

As Ffion Jones has shown, Pennant was proud of his distant kinship with Richard Pennant, Lord Penrhyn, whose energetic expansion of the slate industry in Caernarfonshire, and improvement of his own estates, and of the living conditions of his workers, was funded by money from slavery. He writes with enthusiasm of visits to Penrhyn, but, again, in common with virtually every other visitor at the period, does not make an explicit connection between the distant sources of wealth and its effects on the Welsh landscape and economy. Yet he was also a friend and correspondent of the committed abolitionist Joseph Plymley (1759-1838), who seems very likely to have been a source of information about the north coast of Africa, as Pennant gathered material for his ‘Outlines of the Globe’. The surviving letters between Pennant and Plymley are currently being edited and will be published in Curious Travellers Digital Editions in the near future (a north Wales tour written by Joseph’s sister, Katherine Plymley in 1792 can be read at: https://editions.curioustravellers.ac.uk/doc/0008.

Conclusions     

Thomas Pennant’s attitude to the issue of slavery cannot easily be summed-up, since it was, as he suggests, ‘strangely divided’. His abhorrence of the nature and conditions of the trade in human beings is very clear, but he does not take an abolitionist stance, and can see how wealth acquired through slavery has brought material and economic benefits to Britain. He has friends on both sides. His antiquarian imagination allows him to equate Ancient Britons and modern Africans in ways which are both sympathetic and troubling. Though he writes nowhere at great length about slavery, he does not ignore it: an interest in the cultures, the geography, landscapes and natural history of other countries brought him into contact with people who had first-hand experience of the north coast of Africa. Slavery was not, therefore, a merely theoretical concern, but unavoidably connected to his work as a naturalist and traveller, and part of the wider story of how British intellectuals at this period constructed their views of the world.

This sample of citations from his work can be taken as representative, but it is not comprehensive: more work on this subject should help to build a clearer picture over time. We will endeavour to add to this survey, and we welcome any further insights and observations from readers of Pennant’s work.

Mary-Ann Constantine for Curious Travellers research team, June 2020.

Further reading:

Chris Evans, Slave Wales: The Welsh and Atlantic Slavery, 1660–1850 (University of Wales Press, 2021)

Brian Taylor, Human Cargo: A slave trade link with Greenfield Valley (The Friends of the Greenfield Valley Association, 2007)

https://gov.wales/slave-trade-and-british-empire-audit-commemoration-wales

A letter written during lock-down by the Chairman of the Thomas Pennant Society,

Norman Closs Parry

[Cymraeg yma]

Like most sensible citizens, I have felt very apprehensive, if not scared, during this lockdown period of the Coronavirus pandemic. As I heard some elderly ladies discussing on television (both had lived through the worst of the Second World War) how then, night after night, you knew what to expect, where it was coming from, and what to do. But with this one does not know where it is, or where or who is next! It currently appears as if the transmission of the virus is down (though not out, as the scientists tell us it could spike anywhere, anytime) and the politicans are playing catch-up until a vaccine is found.

Wordsworth as a young man in 1798, by William Shuter.
(wikimedia commons)

For me, this has meant total shutdown. I have just received my second letter from Cardiff suggesting strongly that I stay indoors until August 16th.  But to every cloud there is a silver lining, and the lock in/shut down has given me time to catch up with my reading. This period of being shut in has also coincided with my 80th birthday: all my family and friends pushed the rules to their limit, and have ensured that now, in my eighty-first year to heaven, I am drowning in reading material. Paul Brighton, my “friend of fifty years well nigh” presented me with Jonathan Bate’s new classic Radical Wordsworth: The poet who changed the world (2020), an excellent piece of research into the life and times of the great poet William Wordsworth. All of us remember him, of course, from school-days – ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud/ that floats on high o’er vales and hills.’  Back when I did my environmental science course at Bangor, I hung my argument on his poetry:

“One instance from a vernal wood
Will teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good
Then all the sages can…”
(‘The Tables Turned’)

And even now, when I see a rainbow, I recite his words;

“My heart leaps up when I behold
a rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man,
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.”

Reading and thinking about this book has helped me a great deal during the troubled times and the very long hours of solitude, and I have been particularly delighted to follow up the references to Wordsworth’s highly significant visit to Wales – memorialized in his great autobiographical poem ‘The Prelude’.  A  great walker and an admirer of nature from infancy (his passion for walking may have affected his Cambridge degree, which was a disappointing lower 2nd), while at college he befriended a Welshman, Robert Jones  from Plas-yn-Llan, Denbigh. Jones accompanied him on his Alpine tour, also wonderfully described in ‘The Prelude’; and then, quite depressed, he came and spent the summer of 1791 with Jones (and his five good-looking sisters!!) at Plas-y-Llan, Llangynhafal, Denbigh.

Whilst at the Plas, he and Robert made excursions into the Welsh Countryside, and it is not beyond imagination that Wordworth picked up a copy of the Tours in Wales or Journey to Snowdon by Thomas Pennant in Plas-yn-Llan.

Snowdon from Caernarfonshire by Paul Sandby – a print in Pennant’s  Extra-Illustrated Tours of Wales.

Over the last decade I have added tremendously to my knowledge and understanding of Pennant and his time and contacts through the involvement of Cymdeithas Thomas Pennant with ‘The Curious Travellers’ project based at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies and Glasgow, and through other new scholarship by young academic researchers. These projects have often focused on connections between people, and on social and literary ‘networking’. This seems to me a very simple but effective example: let us imagine Wordsworth in Dyffryn Clwyd (Clwyd Vale), feeling a little sorry for himself. The ‘elan’ of The Great House’ with the laughter if these pretty sisters will have helped, I have no doubt, but he must also have found imaginative and intellectual challenge in The Tours. On enquiry with the Joneses he found that he knew somebody who knew Thomas Pennant (my guess would be the Rev John Lloyd of Caerwys, since young Robert Jones was destined for holy orders). I’m sure that two things were activated. Firstly, Wordsworth and Jones decided on the ‘Snowdonian Adventure’, an secondly that they would walk as far as Downing by arrangement for a consultation with Pennant who had written so splendidly about his climb up Snowdon. (See Radical Wordsworth, p. 83.) Wordsworth would have read how:

A vast mist enveloped the whole circuit of the mountain. The prospect down was horrible. It gave an idea of numbers of abysses, concealed by a thick smoke, furiously circulating around us. Very often a gust of wind formed an opening in the clouds, which gave a fine and distinct visto [sic] of lake and valley. Sometimes they opened only in one place; at others, in many at once, exhibiting a most strange and perplexing sight of water, fields, rocks, or chasms, in fifty different places.

 Journey to Snowdon (1781)

Thomas Pennant too could be literary! I remember experiencing such phenomenon myself when we as youngsters we used to go ‘i weld yr haul yn codi…’ (to see the sunrise) from this same summit, usually at the time of Harvest Moon. But circumstances turned an experience shared by many into a defining moment in the life of William Wordsworth when, presumably after their consultation at Downing, he and Jones undertook the climb.

‘Snowdon from Llanberis Lake’ by Thomas Rowlandson (1797)
[wikimedia commons]

Without question, Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem The Prelude is one of the great books in the English language. Unlike the great Wordsworthian sonnets ( ‘London 1802’, ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ or, with Coleridge, the poems of the Lyrical Ballads’) it is in free verse, made up of fourteen ‘books’ – all in pure poetry observing and reflecting on his ‘seven ages’. It encapsulates much of his life philosophy, and understanding his way of looking at the ‘inside’ of things requires time and thought. What is most important to me, along with the idea that he sought Thomas Pennant’s advice regarding his night climb of Snowdon, is that this climb forms the concluding part of the Prelude; that the work where he brings all facets of his philosophy of life, learning and Nature together comes about because of what happened when he, Robert Jones and John Jones, a local guide (probably from Beddgelert) undertook the adventurous experience:

When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,
And with a step or two seemed brighter still;
Nor was time given to ask or learn the cause,
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash, and lo! as I looked up,
The Moon hung naked in a firmament
Of azure without cloud, and at my feet
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.
A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved
All over this still ocean; and beyond,
Far, far beyond, the solid vapours streched,
In headlands,tongues, and promontory shapes,
Into the main Atlantic, that appeared
To dwindle, and give up his majesty,
Usurped upon far as the sight could reach.

(The Prelude 1850, Book XIV)

For an introduction to the beauty of ‘The Prelude’, no one has written better than Earl Grey of Falloden, but I’m grateful that Jonathan Bate’s brilliant biography, Radical Wordsworth made the ‘Welsh connection’ for me. I urge you, for personal satisfaction – seek a quiet room, and read at leisure what can happen, when two great minds, Pennant and Wordsworth, experience and capture a similar natural phenomenon in prose and poetry!

Prophets of Nature, we to them will speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blest by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above the frame of things
(Which, ‘mid all revolutions in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.

The Prelude, Book XIV: Conclusion

Norman Closs-Parry (July, 2020)

Post-script: a memory of meeting Pennant

In a letter written many years later, Wordsworth recalled his visit to Downing (either 1791 or a later visit in the early 1790s). He offers a lively portrait of Pennant:

“Five and thirty years ago I passed a few days in one of its most retired vallies at the house of a Mr Thomas some time since dead. His ordinary residence was upon an estate of his in Flintshire close to Mr Pennant’s of Downing with whom, I mean the Zoologist, then a handsome figure of a man in the freshness of green old age I passed several agreeable hours in his library; he was upwards of seventy, tall and erect and seemed to have fair pretensions for 15 years of healthful and useful life, but soon after he fell into a sudden languishment, caused mainly I believe by the death of a favorite Daughter, and died…”

Letter to George Huntly Gordon, 14 May 1829, cited in Donald E. Hayden, Wordsworth’s travels in Wales and Ireland, (Tulsa, Oklahoma : University of Tulsa, 1985). See also D Myrddin Lloyd, Wordsworth and Wales, National Library of Wales Journal, VI, (1950) 338-350.

Further reading:

Michael Freeman has compiled a list of many accounts of ascents of Snowdon, including Pennant’s descriptions of two ascents (1752 and the early 1770s), and Wordsworth’s climb with Jones.

Helen Pierce (University of Aberdeen)

Within the first volume of Thomas Pennant’s extra-illustrated Tour in Wales are two drawings by the English artist Francis Place. Place was a member of the York Virtuosi, a collection of largely independently-wealthy gentlemen, active in York and the north of England during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with a shared enthusiasm for travel, antiquarianism, natural philosophy, and the visual arts.

Place is known to have visited Wales twice. In 1678, he and William Lodge, a fellow artist and member of the Virtuosi, journeyed around South Wales, reportedly covering an impressive 700 miles on foot over a period of seven weeks. Pen-and-ink sketches of this tour, which was combined with leisurely episodes of fishing, are preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the National Museum of Wales. Yet it was not all art and angling: Place and Lodge were, quite literally, ‘strangers’ as they travelled from Yorkshire as far west as Pembroke Castle, and were reportedly arrested at Chester on suspicion of being Jesuit spies, with friends having to vouch for their innocence before they were released. 

Despite this experience, Place found himself back in Chester, reluctantly or otherwise, in 1699. He was returning to his home in York from a further sketching tour, this time having travelled in Ireland between Drogheda and Waterford. From Holyhead to Chester, he continued to draw vistas and landmarks including St Winefrid’s Well, just outside Flint. He also reproduced his sketch of this pilgrimage site as a detailed etching which was then published in London by Pierce Tempest, a fellow native of Yorkshire. This image was an enduring, and apparently commercially-successful one, since it was republished several times during the 1750s by two further London printsellers, John Bowles and Robert Sayer.

Thomas Pennant acquired one of Sayer’s prints of St Winefrid’s Well (with its original imprint, mentioning both Place and Tempest, firmly erased and replaced with Sayer’s details) which was pasted into his extra-illustrated copy of A Tour in Wales, now held in the National Library of Wales.

Also included in the first volume of Pennant’s guide to Wales are two original drawings by Francis Place, executed in pen and ink with light washes of watercolour. One depicts the west side of Hawarden Castle with a distant view of Chester, the other, of Flint Castle, has been annotated by the artist to indicate specific landmarks: ‘West Chester’ ‘The West Side of Flint Castle in 1699’ and ‘& Bestone [Beeston] Castle’.

Beneath the drawing of Flint Castle is a faint inscription in pencil, written by Thomas Pennant himself: ‘Drawn by F. Place and presented by D Perrot See Walpole’s Engravers’. Horace Walpole was an acquaintance and occasional correspondent of Pennant’s, and his Catalogue of Engravers Who Have Been Born or Resided in England, first published in 1764, would have been an essential reference book as the illustrations for A Tour in Wales were assembled. ‘D Perrot’ appears to be a misnomer for Francis Parrott, Place’s grandson, who had inherited the artist’s personal collection of artworks. Following Place’s death in 1728, the contents of what were termed in his will as ‘the pictures in my house, pictures prints drawings & other things belonging to my painting room’ had been kept and passed down through the family, with the collection remaining largely intact until it was auctioned the 1930s. Thomas Pennant’s note in A Tour in Wales, however, confirms that certain items had left the collection much earlier, as gifts or donations. Francis Parrott’s ‘presentation’ of his grandfather’s drawings of Hawarden Castle and Flint Castle to Thomas Pennant also echoes the earlier activities of Francis Place, who donated a number of items, including his own drawing of Tynemouth Castle, to the extensive cabinet of curiosities established by his fellow York Virtuoso, Ralph Thoresby.

We know that Francis Place tended to draw his landscape subjects, quite literally, on the spot, using small-scale, portable sketchbooks, and although some of these drawings were subsequently revised into prints, such as that of St Winefrid’s Well, many seem to have been made simply for pleasure. Place represents a particularly early example of the artist as tourist around Britain, exploring and visually recording parts of the country which were slowly becoming accessible to outsiders. Having returned to Yorkshire from Ireland via Wales, Place’s next sketching tour took him to Scotland in 1701, where surviving drawings indicate that he visited Dunbar, Stirling, Glasgow and Dumbarton, taking a particular interest, as he had in North Wales, in castles and fortifications. The recording of a further, now untraced drawing of ‘Highlands Scotland’ in the collection of Place’s drawings which were handed down through his family, suggests that his artistic activities as a curious traveller were, for the early eighteenth century, remarkably novel and ambitious in their scope.

Further reading

Richard Tyler, Francis Place, 1647-1728, York: H Morley & Sons, 1971.

Emily O’Reilly, Wales 1678: Reconstructing the earliest on-the-spot sketches of Wales 

Susan Owens, The Art of Drawing: British Masters and Methods Since 1600, London: V&A Publishing, 2013, Chapter 2.