Maiden Voyages and Infant Colonies - Two Women's Travel Narratives of the 1790s (Hardcover)

In the 1780s in Britain, two very different places -- Sierra Leone and Botany Bay -- were mooted as possible sites for a penal colony. In the end, Botany Bay won the day and Sierra Leone became instead an experimental self-governing colony for ex-Slaves, the distant flagship of a vigorous popular movement at home against the slave trade. This fully annotated edition of Anna Maria Falconbridge's Two Voyages to Sierra Leone (1794) and Mary Ann Parker's A Voyage Round the World (1795) brings together in one volume the first published accounts by women of these new sites of British colonization. Laying the texts alongside one another brings into illuminating conjunction Britain's concurrent, late eighteenth-century systems of transportation and resettlement, convictism and slavery. Their republication in modern format will also help to focus current debates about the constitution of national, racial and sexual identities and the relationship between imperial and authorial power.

Two Voyages to Sierra Leone is a lively and controversial text. Written as a series of letters to an intimate female friend, it is principally concerned to expose the bungling, hypocrisy and greed of an African imperial venture run by some of Britain's leading abolitionists. It is an important text for exploring some of the complexities surrounding women's intervention in the pro and anti-slavery debates of the age. Recently married to a slave-trade surgeon turned passionate abolitionist, Falconbridge charts the demise of her marriage amidst flirtations with the local slave traders and eventual defection from abolitionism. Her pro-slavery position is striking for its alliance with strong anti-colonial andpro-woman views.

Mary Ann Parker's account of the first few years of settlement at Port Jackson covers social visiting and picnicking, the unique flora and fauna and observations on many of the colony's leading players. There are some forthright comments on the horrors of transportation and a 'manners and customs' portrait of local aborigines under the rubric 'Observations on the Slave Trade'.