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existence almost depending on what they could lay up in summer … I think I never saw wretchedness and poverty so strongly perceptible in the garb and the countenance of the human species as in these miserable outcasts.”
    Thomas Peters was fifty-three, an old man by the day’s standards. He escaped slavery in North Carolina during the Revolution, joined the British forces, rose to sergeant in a black regiment and sailed as a freeman with the first wave of Loyalist refugees to Nova Scotia. Peters was uneducated, but possessed charisma and enough righteous indignation to speak for all the blacks who escaped from their rebel masters and came to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia expecting Britain to keep its promises. Between 1784 and 1790 Peters petitioned the crown three times for land on behalf of the blacks who settled in New Brunswick. When that got nowhere he organized a fourth petition on behalf of black families in the two provinces and made his way to London, where he planned to present it to the authorities in person.
    He landed in London at an ideal moment: liberal guilt over the slave trade was sweeping England; a group of British abolitionists had pooled their resources and obtained a grant of land to establish a free colony of blacks in Sierra Leone. Then Peters arrived with his disturbing accounts of the suffering and disappointment endured by the Loyalist blacks in Nova Scotia. The British Home Office decreed that agents be appointed to provide the dissatisfiedblack Loyalists with three options: stay in Canada and receive a comfortable settlement for their hardships; join the black army corps in the West Indies or accept free passage to Sierra Leone.
    Back in Nova Scotia, Peters and John Clarkson, the main recruiter for the Sierra Leone Company, met self-interested politicians, businessmen who concocted false debts to try to hold on to their cheap labour pool, and free blacks convinced that Sierra Leone was more delusion than opportunity. Ultimately the present was too awful, the future too alluring. By the new year, 600 blacks from Shelburne and Birchtown, 200 from Preston, near Halifax, 180 from the Annapolis Royal–Digby area and 200 from New Brunswick gathered in Halifax. At the insistence of Clarkson, the shipowners gave each captain written instructions to treat the blacks with the respect due all paying customers. One January day in 1792 he was rowed out to each of the fifteen vessels anchored in Halifax harbour to hand the black families assembled on deck signed certificates entitling them to Sierra Leone land. Five days later a favourable wind rose, and the convoy left behind the country that never showed them a moment’s decency.
    The voyage lasted nearly two months; sixty-five died in the crossing. Clarkson, who lay helpless for a month with a raging fever, almost joined them, then rebounded enough to make landfall. In wilting heat the boats continued up the broad estuary of the Sierra Leone River. They saw the low coastline, the crescendo of hills rising to, in Clarkson’s words, “lofty mountains crowned with perpetual verdure.” Finally, home. Yet there they met more frustrationover land grants. Fearful of reliving the Birchtown experience, they took up arms. But the riot was quelled and the Nova Scotian influence waned in the new colony. Until, that is, 1992, when gunfire again rang through the streets of Freetown, and Valentine Strasser, a Creole descended from the Nova Scotians, became Sierra Leone’s president.
    Out of curiosity one day I called on Elizabeth Cromwell, who lived in Birchtown, and asked what had happened to the blacks who stayed behind. She told me the last of the elders had died a decade earlier. But since then a few descendants of the settlers had trickled back. Four black families in Birchtown could trace their roots to the great drama. They are the backbone of the local historical society, which pushed the province for the highway sign. They are the ones who cajoled the