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Conversation is a traffick; and if you enter into it, without some stock of knowledge, to ballance the account perpetually betwixt you,—the trade drops at once.
Laurence Sterne, Sermon 20: The Prodigal SonWith no boxes arriving in Liverpool during the expedition's first year, the ‘traffick’ of conversation with patrons was central for maintaining momentum and propping up Smeathman's personal credibility. Drury kept up the pressure, believing that his friend's writing skills would help to secure the subscribers’ ongoing commitment during lulls in business. To one enquirer after Smeathman in mid-1773, Drury went on the defensive, arguing that the African expedition was about more than ‘mere collecting’:
As a writer he has good abilities and if hereafter you should see the History of that part of Africa where he now lives, in print and published by Henry Smeathman, don't be surprised. I am fully convinced if he can get time to set about a work of that kind he will make a good figure in the literary world, especially as the accounts of Africa hitherto published are mostly compilations from other authors in which any error or misrepresentation is sure to be handed down to posterity with all its absurdities.
In order to draw out the literary prowess in which he so believed, Drury did not hesitate to pepper Smeathman with questions, asking ‘in what manner you live, how you spend your time & what reception you have met with among the Blacks, how they relish your catching Birds & Flies, whether they laugh at you for so doing, & whether you have yet made a journey into the interior parts of the country’. We have seen Smeathman's journal record of his first interactions with a range of Europeans. This chapter will attempt to answer some of Drury's fascinating questions about how Smeathman's expedition looked to ‘the Blacks’. But we must proceed cautiously as we have only Smeathman's side of the ‘conversation’. Furthermore, he was biased for two reasons. First, it was in his interest to blame delays and setbacks on local ‘black’ factors and second, it did not take him long to adopt certain disparaging views of Africans, a legacy of the dehumanizing processes central to enslavement.
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