Le Précepteur du Prince-Royal Victor-Henry by William Wilson

Reviewed by: Le Précepteur du Prince-Royal Victor-Henryby William Wilson LeGrace Benson Le Précepteur du Prince-Royal Victor-Henry. By William Wilson. Translated byMarie-Thérèse Chenet and Lucienne Zennie. Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 2020. 72pages. ISBN: 9993503614, 9789993503613. 650 gourdes. Close to the two-hundredth anniversary of the death of Henry Christophe and the fall of the Kingdom of Haiti, Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien (MUPANAH) archivist Marie-Thérèse Chenet was excited to discover a report by one William Wilson, tutor to Henry Christophe's son, Victor-Henry. It told of Wilson's sojourn in the Kingdom of Haiti from 1818 to the terrible events of October 1820 and his subsequent return to England. He moved to Canada in 1833, serving as a physician and as translator to legislative bodies. It was there that he wrote the report, using notes he had kept from that time combined with others that may be from a trip after the devastations of the earthquake of 1842 or may be from reports he received from other visitors to Haiti. Wilson's descriptions are from the point of view of a person favorable to abolition who regarded gens de couleur, ordinary workers, tradespeople, and laborers as morally and politically equal to bankers or kings. Wilson's opinions and reflections were unusually open-minded for an upper-class, educated, and well-traveled Englishman of that era. His expansive perspectives perhaps also reflect his medical and scientific training as well as his embrace of at least six languages. He probably acquired Kreyòl as well, given that he reports chatting with people in town. Until 1940, the document, probably written in the 1850s, remained in the possession of Wilson's granddaughter, Mercier Muller. Recognizing its value to Haitian history, she donated it to President Sténio Vincent in 1941. President Vincent conveyed it to MUPANAH for safekeeping in the official archives. There it languished in its protective jacket for nearly [End Page 167]eighty years. Chenet, who had been appointed archivist and assistant to the head of the Service of Conservation Dukernst Biamby, encountered it in a process of reviewing and documenting all holdings. The report is one of several significant historical documents to emerge from the archives in the period of 2019–2020. It begins to provide data and revelations about the Kingdom that are connected to the many British teachers, agronomists, botanists, doctors, and artists sent to Haiti at the request of King Henry by abolitionists Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. Clarkson's and Wilberforce's letters in the British Library give full indication that neither Alexandre Pétion nor his successor as president of the Republic of Haiti, Jean-Pierre Boyer, were at all interested in a similar exchange. On learning of what had become the Republic of Haiti under Boyer, Wilson would lament the "dissolute and disordered manners, ignorant of propriety and the rules of hygiene" (50). For Wilson this was a shocking contrast with the medical clinics the king had provided throughout the kingdom, each with a medical doctor, perhaps an intern from the Royal College of Medicine in Cap Haïtien, and a midwife who was a Haitian woman from that particular locality. The report begins with many pages devoted to the historical background of Haiti from the time of Columbus, including the unfortunate fate of the Taino people. This would have been instructive to the English-speaking Canadians who were his intended readers. For a twenty-first-century reader, it shows how that history was viewed and reported by a nineteenth-century abolitionist who was nevertheless a citizen of the most extensive colonial empire in history. What is most revealing are his descriptions of accepting the mission to the Kingdom, of being met upon arrival at the Cap Henry port by an unexpectedly high official, Baron Dupuy, followed the next day by an audience with the king himself. Wilson's notes on Henry and the brief moments of being in his presence from time to time yield a portrait that seems more specifically detailed and more dispassionate than others, even that written by the relatively

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