John Jea (born 1773) is one of the most remarkable of Portsmouth’s little-known literary figures, a black preacher from Africa who briefly made the city his home. Between 1815 and 1817 Jea lived and preached in Hawke St, moving into the street only three years after the child Charles Dickens moved from there to Wish St.
The sketch of Jea’s life that follows is drawn from chapter 3 of Ryan Hanley’s Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770–1830, Jea was born in the town of Old Calabar (now part of Nigeria) and, alongside his whole family, was enslaved at two years of age and sent to New York. Within fifteen years he had emancipated himself and had become a Methodist preacher. Widely travelled, he visited and preached across the British Isles, United States, West Indies, and East Indies. He settled in Portsea in 1815 and wrote his autobiography, The Life, History and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher and A Collection of Hymns (both Portsea: James Williams, 1816) while living there. Although unable to write Jea used an amanuensis (probably from the local Methodist community) to produce his writings, and claimed to hold absolute editorial control over their contents.
In the very earliest years of the nineteenth century Jea lived and worked in Lancashire, long a heartland of nonconformism, and gained a strong reputation as an anti-slavery preacher within and well beyond the black population of the city, which at the time numbered something like 500 individuals. When he moved to Portsmouth he found a much more traditional and Anglican religious establishment as well as a port city dominated by sailors and their various onshore activities, but continued to build his reputation. In between Liverpool and Portsmouth, Jea’s experiences were remarkable. Returning to the States, he then set out to the East Indies, before being returned to Boston. Travelling down the east coast, Jea was imprisoned and almost re-enslaved, leading him to travel to Ireland where he stayed for eighteen months, entered into religious disputes with Catholics and Calvinists, and married a local woman called Mary (Jea’s third wife). From Cork they set sail for Portsmouth, planning to form part of a Methodist mission to Nova Scotia, but Mary was forced to stay in Portsmouth through illness while John set off only to be captured near Torbay by a French privateer. Imprisoned in north-west France, he was then marched to Cambria. Eighteen months later he was returned to the Americans and asked to fight against the British. Refusing to do so he was imprisoned near Brest for the remainder of the Napoleonic Wars, returning to Portsmouth in 1815, ten years after leaving Liverpool.
These life experiences helped form Jea’s particular gifts, and in particular his ability to preach to sailors and soldiers, and it was this that made Portsea an attractive, but challenging place to settle. According to Hanley:
‘By 1825, preachers in Portsmouth needed to attend to congregations more than triple the size of those in the region’s second-largest circuit of Salisbury. For Jea, this means preaching to constantly shifting congregations of between 70 and 100 soldiers, dockers, publicans, prostitutes, landladies and servers in tumble-down back rooms within earshot of the bars and brothels on the west-end of Queen Street, the heart of Portsmouth’s sailor town […] His sermons needed to be loud, engaging and emotionally evocative to hold the attention of his congregation in such an environment’.
Jea shrewdly used patriotic and nationalist sentiments in promoting an anti-slavery message that was strongly anti-American and anti-French, while his own experiences leant his words authenticity amongst military congregants. As in Liverpool (and many port cities in the nineteenth century) there was a relatively large black population in the city, and again many of them formed part of his congregation. Formally aligned with Wesleyan Methodism, Jea’s preaching was in fact often closer to the tenets and approaches of the Primitive Methodism that had emerged during this period. Jea remained in Portsmouth until October 1817, before moving to Jersey. Little is known of his life beyond this point.
On 16th October 2019, the History Department at the University of Portsmouth organised an event in which Ryan Hanley gave a popular and well-attended public lecture entitled ‘Black Preachers in Georgian Portsmouth’.
If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions in relation to the map please contact Dr Mark Frost, English Literature Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk