And then, a document written from Bridgetown, Barbados, laid it all out:
“Whereas John Corrantee and the Caboceers of Annamabo are at present exceedingly well disposed towards the British Nation, and beg the resettlement of that place by the English, and the fort to be rebuilt And whereas a Son of John Corrantee’s Named Ansah was sold here by Captain Hamilton who he (Corrantee) is very anxious to have redeemed We hereby give it as our Opinion that the Redemption of the said Ansah will be very acceptable to John Corrantee (who is the leading man at Annamabo) . . . and will be a means to conciliate Corrantee to, and rivet him in the Interest of the British Nation in opposition to the French, who have been aiming for some Years past at the aforesaid settlement.”
OH.
OH NO.
This pile of paperwork, then, was all related to a flurry of activity by agents of the Royal African Company to fix a colossal betrayal. Eno Baise Kurentsi, commonly referred to by the British as John Corrantee, was a prominent trader and political figure at the important Gold Coast port of Anomabo. Adept at playing the French and British against each other to advance his trading interests, Kurentsi had previously sent one of his sons to visit France. In the early 1740s he agreed to allow another of his sons, William Ansah Sessarakoo, to accompany a British merchant who offered to take Sessarakoo to England to be similarly educated and feted when he was done trading on the Gold Coast. The captain of that ship, however, instead sold Sessarakoo into slavery in Barbados. In light of this treachery, Eno Baise Kurentsi’s willingness to trade with the English was understandably diminished. The Royal African Company would have to do some MAJOR damage control in a desperate attempt to fix the situation, appease Kurentsi, and keep a foothold in this critical West African region in the face of active French competition. It’s a dramatic event and it has rightfully garnered scholarly attention, including in Randy Sparks’ notable history Where the Negroes are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade. Glancing at the footnotes, though, the materials I had stumbled across had not been consulted and the clues they provided promised to shift our understanding of the events.