People · 1767–1774
No matching image yet, so this page uses a plain title card instead of a photo.
Two men of Old Town's ruling family went out to sell captives and came home years later as free men, by way of Dominica, Virginia, a locked ship in an English port and a judge's ruling. On the way they met John Wesley.
By the middle of the 1700s, Old Calabar on the Cross River was split by a bitter rivalry. On one side stood Old Town, ruled by a king the English called Grandy King George. On the other stood New Town, led by Duke Ephraim. Both towns made their money from the Atlantic slave trade, selling captives to British ships.
Among Old Town's ruling family were two men named Little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin John. Ancona was either Little Ephraim's son or his nephew; the records are not clear. They were slave traders themselves. They could read and write, they spoke several languages, English among them, and they knew how to bargain. In the trade, that made them important men.
In 1767, talks between Grandy King George and Duke Ephraim went sour, and the trade on the river stalled. New Town's traders then turned to British slave ship captains for help, and together they set an ambush for the Old Town people who were out in the trade. (That bloody day has its own story on origins, under Old Calabar 1767.)
The two Robin Johns were caught in it. The men who had come to sell people were now sold themselves.
A captain named Bivins carried them across the ocean on a ship called the Duke of York, to the Caribbean island of Dominica. There they were sold to a French doctor.
Some months later, a Liverpool captain, William Sharp, made them an offer. If they could slip away and reach his ship, he said, he would take them back to Africa. In a letter one of them wrote later, he said he was "determined to get home". So one night the two men crept away and climbed aboard.
Sharp did not sail for Africa. He sailed to Virginia, and there he sold them again.
Their new owner was John Thompson of Williamsburg, a slave trader. He often took the two men with him on his trading trips. He had a quick temper, and he beat them often.
In March 1772 Thompson died. Not long after, something remarkable happened. A slave ship called the Greyhound was in port in Virginia, and some of its sailors were from Old Town. They recognised the two men. They remembered the ambush back home, and they told the whole story to their captain, Terence O'Neil, begging him to help.
O'Neil said he would. If they could get away, he told them, he would carry them to Africa in the end. Once more the Robin Johns escaped, and once more they boarded a ship on a captain's word.
The Greyhound sailed to England. And once again the promise was broken. O'Neil moved the two men onto another ship that was going back to Virginia, where he meant to sell them a second time.
For two weeks they were kept locked up aboard that slave ship. But they were not helpless. They could write, and they knew people. They sent a letter to Thomas Jones, a well-known slave trader who had made many voyages to Old Calabar in the 1760s. Jones knew them personally and had grown close to Old Town's ruling family. In fact, right after the ambush, Grandy King George had written to Jones asking him to help bring his brother and nephew home.
Jones took up their case. He leaned on a ruling made that very year, 1772, in the case of James Somersett. Using habeas corpus, the old legal demand that anyone being held must be brought before a judge, Jones petitioned for the Robin Johns' release.
The judge ruled in their favour. The two men were free, and they could not be shipped back to America and sold.
While they were in Bristol, they met the brothers Charles and John Wesley, the founders of the Methodist movement, and they became Methodists. Historians think the meeting may have had an effect on John Wesley himself. In 1774 he published a pamphlet called Thoughts upon Slavery, attacking the whole system, and their friendship is believed to have helped shape it.
Then, after all those years and all those broken promises, the two men went home to Calabar.
What they did there is not a neat ending. Some evidence suggests that Little Ephraim went back into the slave trade. He had already told Charles Wesley that he saw little other choice if he was to pay Thomas Jones back for his help. The man who had been enslaved and then freed by an English judge may have returned to selling people, partly to settle a debt to another slave trader.
There is another memory, too. In Calabar, oral tradition says the Robin Johns were the ones who spread Christianity in the town after they came back. That is how people remember them, and it sits beside the harder record without cancelling it.
Much of what we know comes from their own letters, and in them you can still hear the voice of a man who was simply determined to get home.
