Who am I?

In the tempest I am playing a spirit. The spirits work under the orders of the Prospero who has taken control over the island after ousting Sycorax, a very powerful witch that was banished to the island for practicing very powerful sorcery. When Sycorax came to the island she tried to take control of the spirits, which lead to the imprisonment of the leader of the spirits Ariel. Ariel was imprisoned for twelve years, where he was freed which lead to him serving Prospero along with all the other spirits.

In the modern context of the play, we are a group of African and European slaves, who were moved to Sierra Leone by the British to settle in the new Freetown colony. My character is based of Thomas Peters a black loyalist who fled to North Carolina with the British during the American revolutionary war, and later became one of the leaders of Freetown.

Thomas Peters
Thomas Peters was born in Nigeria, and was an ethnic Yoruba of the Egba people clan.Thomas Peters was captured at the age of twenty by slave traders and sold as a slave to Colonial America on a French ship, the Henri Quatre. Upon arrival in North America, Peters was sold to a French owner. Peters tried to escape three times before being sold to an Englishman or Scotsman in one of the Southern Colonies. Peters escaped from his owner's flour mill near Wilmington at the start of the American Revolutionary War and joined the Black Pioneers, a Black Loyalist group made up of runaway African American slaves. The British had previously promised freedom in exchange for helping the war effort against the colonies that formed the new United States. During this time Thomas was married to Sally Peters, a slave from South Carolina and he had a son called John (born in 1781) and a daughter Clairy (born in 1771). There is a possibility that Sally and Peters were once slaves together in South Carolina and that they reunited during the war.

Peters became disheartened when he saw promises of land by the British government had not been carried through and he decided to travel to England to demand the land promised to him and others. Peters gathered the signatures and marks of African American settlers in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before getting funds to travel to London (with the risk of being re-enslaved) and convince the Government to settle the blacks in Nova Scotia elsewhere. In 1791, Peters went to London, where he helped convince the Royal government to allow them to settle a new colony in Sierra Leone that was to be Freetown, Sierra Leone. It was decided in London that Peters and others would assist in recruiting blacks to settle in Sierra Leone.

After convincing about 1,100 of the 3,500 American blacks to return to Africa, in 1792 they arrived at St. George Bay Harbor. Thomas Peters soon became at odds with the newly established Governor John Clarkson and he called himself the "Speaker General" of the Annapolis Royal Nova Scotia settlers. Eventually the overwhelming majority of Nova Scotia’s chose John Clarkson as their true leader and Peters became disheartened. Peters died of malaria in Freetown, in 1792. Peters died leaving a wife and seven children.