One of the most interesting narratives produced during the War for American Independence was by a woman, Louisa Susannah (Wells) Aikman. She left a detailed record of her voyage from Charleston, South Carolina to London in 1778. It was a voyage into exile because she was a Loyalist from a family of Loyalists.
[Image: Louisa Wells Aikman, from a miniature painted c. 1815.]
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Louisa was born in Charleston in 1755. Her parents, Robert Wells and Mary Rowand, married in 1750. Three years later they emigrated to Charleston. They moved there in part because members of her mother's family in Scotland had been implicated in the failed Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, on behalf of "Bonnie Prince Charlie."
Mary's family had been forced to change their name, from Ruthven to Rowand. The Ruthven name, like the tartan, had been outlawed after the rebellion.
Robert Wells soon established a successful printing and bookselling business in Charleston. He also published Charleston's second newspaper, The South Carolina and American General Gazette. It competed with the older South Carolina Gazette, owned by Peter Timothy. The two became bitter rivals.
Wells amassed considerable property, including a house at 71 Tradd Street that survives. In 1775, he claimed to have the largest stock of books of any bookseller in the North American colonies. [Image: Wells' house on Tradd and East Bay]
Ironically, Wells' newspaper was the first in South Carolina to publish the Declaration of Independence, in August 1776. Ironically, because Wells was a Loyalist who staunchly defended the British government in his editorials.
Wells had left Charleston for London the previous year, declaring that he could not live under the rebel government of South Carolina. His younger son, William Charles Wells, soon followed him, determined to pursue a medical degree at Edinburgh. William was then an apprentice to Dr. Alexander Garden, the naturalist for whom the gardenia is named. His wife Mary and daughters Priscilla and Helena went to England after William.
Robert placed the management of his business in the hands of his eldest son John, assisted by Louisa, his eldest daughter. John had apparently shared his father's political views, but as the inevitability of independence and war approached, he joined the Patriot side. It was John who published the Declaration of Independence, enthusiastically, he claimed.
John's sincerity may be doubted. He switched sides again in 1780 when the British captured Charleston, and then again when they evacuated it in 1782. He became the black sheep of the family before dying in poverty in the West Indies in 1799.
Louisa remained committed to the British cause, and like many other Loyalists, was banished from South Carolina in 1778 for refusing to sign an Oath of Allegiance to the state.
A major fire in Charleston that January had destroyed much of the family property. The Patriot government confiscated the rest. Louisa no longer felt bound by the promise she had made to stay in Charleston and preserve the family property "as long as one stone stood upon another."
In late June, Louisa, her uncle Robert Rowand, his son, and other Loyalists boarded the ship Providence, bound for Rotterdam. From there, they hoped to get passage to England. Louisa's maid Bella came with her.
Was Bella enslaved? Louisa does not say. If she was, she would have been legally free once she landed in Britain. Chief Justice Mansfield's decision in the Somerset Case (1772) had declared slavery illegal in England.
As the ship began to leave Charleston harbor, many boats were busy bringing palmetto trees into town to celebrate the second anniversary of the "ever inglorious 28th of June 1776." [Image: Charleston Harbor, c. 1773, Library of Congress]
She was referring to the Battle of Sullivan's Island, the first major defeat the colonists had inflicted on the British. As they passed Fort Moultrie at the entrance to the harbor, she noted that they could see British cannon balls "lodged in the [palmetto] logs as in a sponge."
The ship was stuck at the harbor entrance for a few days by adverse winds. On July 1, they went bumpily but safely "over the bar," guided by a "Black Pilot" named Bluff. The passengers paid him $100 in addition to the ship master's fee.
Louisa remarks on Bluff's skill and pointedly mentions that the passengers had chosen a black pilot in preference to a white man. Many of Charleston's most respected harbor pilots at the time were of African origin.
Once upon the open ocean, they celebrated their deliverance from "the dominion of Congress." As they sailed away on a brisk Southwest wind, the last bit of Charleston to disappear from sight was the black steeple of St. Michael's. Originally white, as it is today, the revolutionary government had ordered it painted black so that it would be harder for British ships to see. (It wasn't, except perhaps in the dark.)
Many hair-raising adventures lay ahead. On the 4th of July (how ironic!) their ship was captured by a British navy vessel, The Rose. Its captain, James Reid, first thought Providence was French. It had been built in France. He then decided the passengers were American rebels. Despite their protests he ordered Providence taken to New York as a prize, hoping to claim its cargo.
A few days later, nearing the British stronghold of New York, they were pursued by a French fleet under the Comte d'Estaing. They managed to reach safety in the harbor.
At first it seemed they were in danger of being treated as rebels in New York, but influential Loyalist friends intervened to ensure they weren't. While waiting for a judgment on the disposal of the ship's cargo, Louisa spent several weeks in Flushing with old friends, Colonel Archibald Hamilton and his "Lady," granddaughter of Cadwallader Colden, long-time Lt. Governor of New York.
A Vice Admiralty court ruled in favor of the Providence. Louisa and the other passengers recovered their property and were allowed to leave. In mid-October they embarked on the Mary and Charlotte, bound for England, accompanied by a convoy of naval and mercantile ships. After having survived storms and avoided French and American privateers, they became lost in dense fog for eight days off the south English coast, unsure of their location.
When the fog cleared they found themselves off the rocky coast of Cornwall. That night another ferocious storm struck. Five of the six ships in their group were lost.
Louisa's ship survived, and they anchored near Dover on November 27. Contrary winds prevented their landing, but she and other passengers were able to disembark a few miles down the coast at Deal. Observing the stone walls of Deal Castle, she remarked that the British should build forts of palmetto logs!
She described her emotions when finally stepping onto "British soil": "I could have kissed the gravel on the salt beach! It was my home: the country which I had so long and so earnestly wished to see. The Isle of Liberty and Peace."
It seems a rather ironic statement from a woman born in South Carolina of Scottish parents as she arrived on the South coast of England! Especially as her mother's family had supported the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 against the Hanoverian monarchs.
From Deal Louisa and her uncle took a coach across the Chalk Downs (hills) and passed through Canterbury, Rochester and Greenwich to London. Along the way, she remarked how remarkably green the countryside was compared to America in late November.
She ended her journey at the home of her parents at 47 Salisbury Court, just off Fleet Street. The street was then known colloquially as the printers' street because it was home to so many printing establishments. It was a natural place for Robert Wells to settle, and he had built a successful printing business there.
Louisa fell ill of a fever shortly after she arrived. Her parents sent her to Bath Spa to recover. The journey must have been unpleasant because she claimed that she would rather have made a voyage to the West Indies.
Ironically, that is where she soon went. In 1782 she married Alexander Aikman, Printer to the House of Assembly and King's Printer, in Jamaica, and a member of the Assembly.
The couple had known each other in Charleston. For four years they had worked together in her father's business. On her way to Jamaica to marry Aikman, Louisa's ship was seized by a French naval vessel. She was interned in France for several months before being allowed to resume her journey.
The couple had 10 children, only four of whom survived to adulthood. Such appalling child mortality was typical of malarial Jamaica and also of Louisa's native South Carolina. It was in part a consequence of an economy based on enslaved African labor.
Around 1820 Louisa moved to Cowes on the Isle of Wight, perhaps for health reasons or to be with her daughter Susannah. Louisa died in Cowes in 1831, aged 76.
A few months after her arrival in London in November 1778, Louisa wrote the work from which most of this information comes, The Journal of a Voyage from Charlestown, S.C., to London (1779). The journal is an important primary source for social life during the Revolutionary Era generally.
Due to the loss of his Charleston property, ill-advised lending, and a paltry pension from the British government, Robert Wells fell into debt in the 1780s, leaving the family in comparative poverty. He suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1791 and died three years later. Mary Wells survived him, dying at Camberwell in 1805.
Louisa's brother William became senior physician at St. Thomas' Hospital in London. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of London, the most prestigious scientific society in Britain. His written works include one in which he articulated the theory of natural selection, more than 40 years before Charles Darwin. William Charles Wells died of a heart condition in 1817.
Louisa's sister Helena married and authored two novels. She died in 1824. We know little of her other sister, Priscilla, except that she never married. She died in 1843, outliving her siblings.
Louisa played an important role in the preservation of popular musical scores. Along with a large load of books, Robert Wells had brought hundreds of song sheets from the British Isles to Charleston in 1753. Many of them have survived because Louisa created a personal songbook of about 110 sheets of the music.
In 1992, the Music Division of the Library of Congress purchased the book. Individual sheets are available for viewing at the Library online. https://www.loc.gov/notated-music/?all=true&q=Louisa+Susannah+Wells&sp=1
Further Reading:
Louisa's journal was published in 1906 by the New York Historical Society. A copy can be accessed online at the Internet Archive:
Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2011, 2014.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
The Papers of Henry Laurens. 16 vols., (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972-2003. See Volumes dealing with the 1770s.
Very tough life
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