Family lore, as well as first-hand accounts of the Bells’ life in New Zealand, have long specified that Alziere was a woman of colour. She is described in earlier documents from the West Indies as ‘mulatto’, which confirms that she was mixed-race, and that her mother was Black (not Carib). We also know that her parents weren’t married, as Alziere is also referred to as Servant’s ‘natural daughter’. It’s possible that Alziere’s mother was a free Black woman, but it’s more likely she was enslaved. Before 1760, most slaves trafficked to Grenada were from the Bight of Benin and West Central Africa, whereas those arriving in the 1760s and 1770s were predominantly from the Bight of Biafra and the Gold Coast. Alziere’s illegitimacy would not have been a problem in Carriacou, as illegitimate children were very common in the West Indian colonial societies at the time. Mixed-race children were also common, and they were frequently (but not always) acknowledged by their white fathers. A baby’s status as enslaved or free was dependent on its mother’s. This means that if her mother was enslaved, so too was Alziere, and she would have had to have been formally manumitted. Alziere’s use of the surname Servant, and her father’s bequest of an annuity payable to her from his plantation, indicate that if she were born into slavery, he had freed her before his death in 1784. If the family story that Alziere was born on the Bellevue plantation in Carriacou is true, she would have been born between 1777 (after Pierre Servant arrived on that island) and 1783 (when he named her in his will). A later date is more consistent with her own reproductive history. She had three children between 1817 and 1820, which is unlikely for a woman in her 40’s (as she would have been if born in 1777). A list of slaves at Bellevue in 1787 includes an adult woman named Alzier. This Alzier is puzzling, as she was too old to be our Alziere (who would have been free by then). The name was rare in the West Indies, so it’s possible that this Alzier was our Alziere’s mother or linked to her in some way. Our Alziere probably grew up on Bellevue, which was bought by Dr Bell in 1787. Dr Bell was a Scottish surgeon, originally from very small beginnings, who became wealthy by accumulating slaves and plantations. He seems to have based himself at one of his other estates, where he had three children - Peggy, John, and Dorothy (Dolly) - with an enslaved woman, Margaret. He manumitted all four of them in 1789. Alziere gave birth to Dr Bell’s daughter Mary Ann at the very end of the 18th century, when she was probably still a teenager. We suspect Dr Bell was much older. Alziere herself became a slave owner in 1800, when Dr Bell died and bequeathed the Mt Sinai plantation and ‘20 able Negroes’ to her and Mary Ann. He had bought Mt Sinai, part of the original Bellevue, back from Servant’s brother-in-law in the 1790’s. Dr Bell also left the smaller Whim plantation on the northern tip of Carriacou to his three other children. The bulk of his estate, including hundreds of slaves and several properties, one of which was Bellevue – went to his Scottish nieces and nephews. Interestingly, he had made another will only months before, which he revoked ‘on mature deliberation’, perhaps in response to the birth of Mary Ann. Slave ownership was often attained in through inheritance. Recent research indicates that while the largest slaveholders were predominantly wealthy white men, owners of West Indian slaves frequently included women, people of colour, and the middle classes. We don’t know for sure whether William Gordon Bell (WGB) was related to Dr Bell, or when and how the latter arrived on Carriacou. We do know that he and Alziere eventually got married and had their daughter Margaret there. They moved to Scotland with both girls in the 1810’s, where they had a further four children, and settled on a farm in New Abbey, Kirkcudbrightshire. Black and mixed-race people were not uncommon in Georgian Britain, but most were men, and Alziere would have been distinctive in rural Scotland. There is no suggestion that this caused problems for the family, who appear to have fully integrated. WGB was a well-liked and respected member of the community. Alziere did not attend the local Presbyterian church with the rest of the family, but this indicates only that she was Roman Catholic. Her name is recorded on her children’s birth certificates in various forms, including with the surname ‘Stewart’, which is curious – this might have been due to mispronunciation, or even a convention linked to the local Stewart laird. Alziere and WGB continued to profit from the labour of enslaved people after they left Carriacou. By 1817, when the British started keeping slave registers to document their colonial assets, Alziere and Mary Ann jointly owned 13 adults and 2 children. All of them had been born into slavery, and further births (such as Mary, born to Ritta in 1819, mixed-race) and deaths (including Betsey, aged 2½, cause of death: debility) are documented in the years leading up to abolition. In 1823, Alziere and WGB sold their share of Mt Sinai and its slaves to John Dallas, a local planter who was infamous for his cruelty. In July 1839, as we all know, Alziere and WGB (both nearing 60) and their five children departed from Liverpool. They were bound for Australia, but eventually arrived in New Zealand in March 1840, only a few weeks after the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed. Now that we have discovered more of the facts of Alziere’s life, it’s clear she had a remarkable existence: probably born into slavery, becoming a slaveholder herself, then emigrating across the world – twice. There cannot have been many women, particularly Black or mixed-race women, who had crossed both the Atlantic and Indian Oceans before 1840. She may well have been the first woman of Black African descent to reach New Zealand. It’s intriguing, though, that stories about Alziere, her mother, and her origins have not been passed down. There is an established cultural practice on Carriacou called ‘Nation Dance’ or ‘Big Drum’, in which the African origins and identities of enslaved people are celebrated and remembered. The loss of this link seems to be a casualty of assimilation into white colonial society. Instead, we are reliant on property records and other official documents for much of the knowledge as presented here, despite the efforts of both Jean Williams and Christina Bell to capture what they could in The Bell Family Affair. In an account of the early colonial years in New Zealand, in which WGB’s personality and appearance are covered at length, Alziere is described only as the ‘goodwife’ who had raised a fine hardy family. While this is commendable, we still have no information about her thoughts and interests, what she was like as a person, or even what she looked like. Tamsin Dewé. Jo Broad. February 2021.