Of being taken by the insolent foe,
And sold to slavery; of his redemption thence,
With all his travel’s history.
But these narratives of his adventures were given by Clapperton for the sole end of entertaining his friends when they met for the mere purpose of social intercourse and convivial enjoyment; and, therefore, those friends can now give but a very indistinct account of what “by parcels they had something heard,” without any intention of detailing it again, unless in the same way and for the same purpose it had been told to themselves. Hence the early and professional life of our traveller can never be well known, except that part of it which he has embodied in the published journals of his expeditions to Africa. And not only are the incidents of his life during the time he was a sailor imperfectly known, but even of those parts of it respecting which we have obtained some vague information, we have different versions of the same story considerably at variance with one another; so that, amid their discrepancy, it is difficult to select the facts and circumstances relative to the life of our hero which are genuine and free from defect on the one side, and exaggeration on the other. No memoir of his life has yet appeared at all worthy of him. We have seen in one periodical an atrocious libel upon his memory, the emanation evidently of a mean and malignant spirit. Any newspaper notices of him which have been printed are meagre in the extreme; and the “Short Sketch” which is prefixed to the “Journal of his Second Expedition,” and purporting to be the work of his uncle, a colonel of marines, although the best account of him which has yet appeared, contains exceedingly little that is really interesting. Such being the lack of materials, we regret much that we shall not be able to produce a “Memoir” adequate to the subject; but we can assure our readers that we have used all diligence to obtain the most accurate and ample information which can now be had, and shall therefore proceed to submit it to their candid consideration.
Sect. II.—HIS PARENTAGE AND EARLY MISFORTUNES.
In one of the short notices which have been published of the traveller’s life, it is stated that the “family of Clapperton is ancient, and not without celebrity in the north of Scotland. The name,” it is added, “has been distinguished both in the church and in the field; and in proof of this we are told that a Bishop Clapperton is buried in the island called Inchcolm, in the Firth of Forth; while another individual of the same name is mentioned in the history of Sweden as having been a field-marshall in the army of that country. We cannot tell whether the prelate or the soldier is to be regarded as belonging to the family whence the African traveller was descended; but it unquestionably was highly respectable, both in point of antiquity and of its station in society. His grandfather, Robert Clapperton, was a doctor of medicine, whose professional studies were pursued by him first at the University of Edinburgh, and afterwards among the hospitals in Paris. On his return to his own country he married Miss Elizabeth Campbell, a near relation of Campbell of Glenlyon, and settled at the town of Lochmaben, in Dumfries-shire, as a medical practitioner. He is said to have been a good classical scholar, and much attached to the study of antiquity; and while he excelled in the tracing of genealogies, in the collecting of coins and songs, with the view of illustrating border history, he was highly esteemed as a skilful physician. He had two sons, the younger of whom chose the army as his profession, and is now a lieutenant-colonel of marines; but George, the elder of the two, adopted that of his father; and having previously obtained an adequate professional education, he settled as a surgeon in the town of Annan, Dumfries-shire. He was long the only medical practitioner of repute in that place; and the numerous operations and cures which he performed proved the means both of increasing his practice and extending his fame. While still young, he married a daughter of Johnstone of Thornythwaite, by whom he had fourteen children, Hugh, who afterwards became the African traveller, being the tenth. The mother of this numerous family, who is described as beautiful, amiable and accomplished, died in the thirty-ninth year of her age, leaving behind her seven sons and a daughter, Hugh being the youngest of these surviving sons, and consequently a mere infant. And to enhance the greatness of the bereavement which he had sustained in the loss of his mother, his father speedily afterwards married a second wife, whom his friends regarded as a woman of inferior station to that which he and his family occupied. At the time when this second marriage took place, most of the sons had left their father’s house, to engage elsewhere in the active pursuits of life, and the girl had been taken away by her mother’s relations; but the subject of this memoir and some of his younger brothers, were left at home to encounter the stern control of a stepmother—a species of government at best far from being desirable, but in the case of the young Clappertons, rendered peculiarly arbitrary and despotic, from the concurrence of a variety of incidental circumstances. In the first place, their stepmother, conscious that she was deemed by the friends of the family an unsuitable match for their father, must have been haunted incessantly by a feeling, not at all likely to soothe and sweeten her temper, or fitted to dispose her to regard the children of the former marriage with any considerable degree of complacency; by a feeling not likely to lead her to watch over such of them as were subject to her management with any very vigilant attention, to make her extremely solicitous about their comfort or improvement, or to visit them with a treatment any way marked by kind and tender affection. In the second place, she soon had children of her own, and these, by degrees, increased, till they amounted to the number of seven; and it will readily be allowed, that her own offspring were naturally fitted more strongly to engage her affections and to engross her solicitude, than those children with whom she had only an adventitious relationship. And in the third place, it would appear that Dr. Clapperton himself, the father of the African traveller, was not by any means so attentive to the interests of his immense family as he ought to have been; for his brother, the colonel, says of him, “He might have made a fortune, but unfortunately he was, like his father, careless of money;” and we believe the fact cannot be denied; nor, moreover, can it be disguised that the condition into which he fell in his latter days was owing, partly at least, to a culpable neglect of his professional duties.[3] When, therefore, it is considered that as his father advanced in years, his circumstances in life so much declined, as at last to reduce him into a state of abject indigence,—while at the same time his family was constantly increasing in number, and that it was the melancholy lot of our traveller to lose his mother in his infancy, and so scarcely ever to have had the happiness to experience the soothing and heart-impressive influence of maternal tenderness and maternal care, but, on the contrary, to be placed at that tender age under the care and control of a stepmother,—it will be abundantly obvious that his life commenced under the most unpropitious auspices that can well be imagined.
Sect. III.—HIS BIRTH, EDUCATION, AND YOUTHFUL ADVENTURES.
He was born in the year 1788, and was, as we have seen, soon after placed under the charge of a stepmother, by whom it is said he was not only neglected, but treated with harshness and cruelty; and hence throughout his life stepmothers were regarded by him with a feeling of unconquerable horror.[4] The accounts which he occasionally gave his companions of the sufferings of his youth, arising from the causes which have been specified, were appalling. In reference to them, an enemy, who, however, seems to have been in possession of accurate information on the subject, says, that while a schoolboy, “the climate of Lapland and that of Timbuctoo alternated several times in the course of a day—a species of seasoning, or rather case-hardening, that must go far to render him invulnerable on the sultry banks of the Joliba.” And one of the most intimate of his friends thus speaks of them in a letter now before us: “How can the hardships and privations of his early life be touched upon without hurting the feelings of relatives? These had much better be buried in oblivion, although they tended to form the man hardy and self-denying.” When he was a boy, he was nearly drowned in the Annan; and on that occasion he used to say, that he felt as if a calm and pleasing sleep was stealing over his senses, and thought that gay and beautifully painted streamers were attached to his legs and arms, and that thereby he was buoyed out into the sea; but he always declared that he experienced no pain until efforts were making to restore him to a state of animation. At this time he was an expert swimmer, having been previously taught that useful art by his brothers; but he had exhausted his strength by continuing too long in the water. When the alarm of his danger was given by some one to his father, he hastened to the spot, plunged in, and found his son in a sitting posture in very deep water.
Among the injuries of his early life, that of a neglected education was none of the least. He was taught the ordinary acquirements of reading, writing, and arithmetic, which are generally imparted to the lowest classes of the Scottish youth; but he was never initiated into a knowledge of the classic authors of Greece and Rome. Under Mr. Bryce Downie, however, a celebrated teacher of geometry in the town of Annan, he acquired a practical knowledge of mathematics, including navigation and trigonometry, and afterwards, by means of his own application, he acquired many other branches of useful and ornamental knowledge, and excelled especially in drawing.[5]
He very early discovered a strong propensity for this latter accomplishment, so that, with the aid of a few instructions from his father, who excelled in the knowledge of geography, he could sketch a map of Europe, while still a child in frocks, with chalk on the floor. His love of foreign travel and romantic adventure, were likewise very soon manifested in the delight which he took in listening to his father, while he pointed out the likely situation of the “North West passage” to him and his brothers on the globe; in the enthusiasm which he displayed, when told by his father that he might be the destined discoverer of that long sought for route from Europe to Eastern Asia; and also in the avidity with which he devoured books of voyages and travels of all descriptions whenever they fell in his way.