She was baptised “Marie Alzire”, but always known as Alzire, an unusual name in the West Indies. Family lore, as well as first-hand accounts of the Bells’ life in New Zealand, have long specified that Alzire 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). Mixed-race children were common in West Indian colonial societies of the time, 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. In his will of June 1783, Alzire’s father Pierre Servant repeatedly refers to Alzire as “free”, which means that she was either born free, or had been formally manumitted by that time. For people of colour during the slavery era, freedom – once granted – had to be constantly asserted. This explains Servant’s repeated declarations of Alzire’s free status. He took further steps that would have helped underline her freedom: baptising her, assigning slaves to her care, and bequeathing her an annuity payable from his plantation.
However, Servant was evidently still concerned about Alzire’s future. In his will, he indicates that he wanted her to stay “under the care and supervision” of his good friend Duplanty in Martinique. He asserts that she is to stay away from Bellevue and “not brought back… under any pretext”. This is interesting, as Servant’s sister (and Alzire’s aunt), Anne Tregent, was still living at Bellevue with her husband James at that time. Why wouldn’t Alzire be welcomed into their household? Servant had obvious affection for her, calling her “my little girl”. Was it due to her race and parentage?
My little natural daughter Alzire… should not be brought back to my home under any pretext.
Pierre Servant
We know that Alzire’s parents weren’t married, as Servant refers to her as his “natural daughter”. Illegitimate children were very common, so this is unlikely to have been a cause of social stigma in itself. However, there could have been some discrimination within the family due to Alzire’s mother (certainly, this is reflected in the legacies Servant left to his white family compared to Alzire). We haven’t been able to uncover anything more about her, besides her race. We can only speculate as to her origins: analysis of shipping records of the time indicates that 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. It’s not known whether Alzire’s mother was a free Black woman, or enslaved by Servant, or even whether she was alive by the time of Servant’s death.
If the family story that Alzire was born on the Bellevue plantation in Carriacou is true, she would most likely have been born between 1777 (after her father settled on that island) and June 1783 (when he named her in his will). The family has always believed her to have been born in 1776, but a later date is more consistent with her own reproductive history: she had three children between 1817 and 1820, which would be unusual for a woman in her 40s. We don’t know when Alzire was separated from her mother, or whether she ever lived in Martinique. Her father’s words were “I also want her to remain always in Saint Pierre, Martinique Island until her age of majority”, which makes it unclear whether Alzire was already there when he wrote his will, or he intended for her to be sent there after his death. It’s possible Alzire remained on the Carriacou plantation against her father’s wishes (a 1787 list of slaves on Bellevue includes an adult woman called Alzire – we don’t know if this is our Alzire, wrongly categorised, or someone linked to her in some way). Servant’s friend Duplanty had died shortly before Servant himself, which could have complicated arrangements.
I also want her not to be brought back to my home under any pretext.
Pierre Servant
Bellevue was seemingly bought in 1787 by Dr John Bell, who had formed a partnership agreement with Tregent before the latter sailed for England. 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. We don’t know where Alzire grew up, but it seems she returned to Bellevue eventually – she gave birth to Bell’s daughter, Mary Ann, at the very end of the 18th century, when she was probably still a teenager. We suspect Bell was much older.
Alzire herself became a slave owner in 1800, when Dr Bell died and bequeathed the Mount Sinai plantation and “twenty able negroes” to her and Mary Ann. Bell had bought Mount Sinai, part of the original Bellevue estate, back from Servant’s brother-in-law in 1790. Slave ownership was often attained 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. 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.
I leave to my mulatto girl Alzire and her child Marian eighteen quarries of land… with twenty able Negroes attached to it.
John Bell
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, although we have always been told that he managed Bellevue. WGB and Alzire married and had a daughter, Margaret, in Carriacou before moving to Scotland with both girls in the 1810s. They had a further four children, settling on a farm in New Abbey, Kirkcudbrightshire. Black and mixed-race people were not uncommon in Georgian Britain, but most were men, and Alzire 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. Alzire 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 baptism records 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.
Alzire 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, Alzire and Mary Ann jointly owned 13 adults and 2 children. All of them had been born into slavery, and further births (such as mixed-race Mary, born to Ritta in 1819) and deaths (including Betsey, who died aged 2½) are documented in the years leading up to abolition. In 1823, Alzire, WGB, and Mary Ann divided the legal ownership of Mount Sinai and its slaves into two distinct halves (rather than as tenants-in-common), and appointing John Dallas, a local planter who was infamous for his cruelty, as trustee.
In July 1839, as we all know, Alzire and WGB (both nearing 60) and their five children sailed 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 Alzire’s life, it’s clear she had a remarkable existence. Enslaved, enslaver, immigrant, coloniser: her roles and station changed enormously over the course of her life. She also emigrated across the world twice, taking her family with her. 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 Alzire, 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 presented here, despite the efforts of 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, Alzire is described only as the “good-wife” 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.
An earlier version of this article appeared in the newsletter ‘A Bell Family Affair’, produced by Alan Bell, New Zealand, February 2021. I am grateful to Bill Holland from the Dumfries & Galloway Family History Society for providing detail and context on Alzire and William Gordon Bell’s life in New Abbey.