In one of the short notices which have been published of the
traveller’s life, it is stated that the “family of Clapperton is
ancient, and not without celebrity in the north of Scotland. The name,”
it is added, “has been distinguished both in the church and in the
field; and in proof of this we are told that a Bishop Clapperton is
buried in the island called Inchcolm, in the Firth of Forth; while
another individual of the same name is mentioned in the history of
Sweden as having been a field-marshall in the army of that country. We
cannot tell whether the prelate or the soldier is to be regarded as
belonging to the family whence the African traveller was descended; but
it unquestionably was highly respectable, both in point of antiquity
and of its station in society. His grandfather, Robert Clapperton,
was a doctor of medicine, whose professional studies were pursued by
him first at the University of Edinburgh, and afterwards among the
hospitals in Paris. On his return to his own country he married Miss
Elizabeth Campbell, a near relation of Campbell of Glenlyon, and
settled at the town of Lochmaben, in Dumfries-shire, as a medical
practitioner. He is said to have been a good classical scholar, and
much attached to the study of antiquity; and while he excelled in the
tracing of genealogies, in the collecting of coins and songs, with
the view of illustrating border history, he was highly esteemed as a
skilful physician. He had two sons, the younger of whom chose the army
as his profession, and is now a lieutenant-colonel of marines; but
George, the elder of the two, adopted that of his father; and having
previously obtained an adequate professional education, he settled
as a surgeon in the town of Annan, Dumfries-shire. He was long the
only medical practitioner of repute in that place; and the numerous
operations and cures which he performed proved the means both of
increasing his practice and extending his fame. While still young,
he married a daughter of Johnstone of Thornythwaite, by whom he had
fourteen children, Hugh, who afterwards became the African traveller,
being the tenth. The mother of this numerous family, who is described
as beautiful, amiable and accomplished, died in the thirty-ninth year
of her age, leaving behind her seven sons and a daughter, Hugh being
the youngest of these surviving sons, and consequently a mere infant.
And to enhance the greatness of the bereavement which he had sustained
in the loss of his mother, his father speedily afterwards married a
second wife, whom his friends regarded as a woman of inferior station
to that which he and his family occupied. At the time when this second
marriage took place, most of the sons had left their father’s house, to
engage elsewhere in the active pursuits of life, and the girl had been
taken away by her mother’s relations; but the subject of this memoir
and some of his younger brothers, were left at home to encounter the
stern control of a stepmother—a species of government at best far from
being desirable, but in the case of the young Clappertons, rendered
peculiarly arbitrary and despotic, from the concurrence of a variety
of incidental circumstances. In the first place, their stepmother,
conscious that she was deemed by the friends of the family an
unsuitable match for their father, must have been haunted incessantly
by a feeling, not at all likely to soothe and sweeten her temper, or
fitted to dispose her to regard the children of the former marriage
with any considerable degree of complacency; by a feeling not likely to
lead her to watch over such of them as were subject to her management
with any very vigilant attention, to make her extremely solicitous
about their comfort or improvement, or to visit them with a treatment
any way marked by kind and tender affection. In the second place, she
soon had children of her own, and these, by degrees, increased, till
they amounted to the number of seven; and it will readily be allowed,
that her own offspring were naturally fitted more strongly to engage
her affections and to engross her solicitude, than those children
with whom she had only an adventitious relationship. And in the third
place, it would appear that Dr. Clapperton himself, the father of the
African traveller, was not by any means so attentive to the interests
of his immense family as he ought to have been; for his brother, the
colonel, says of him, “He might have made a fortune, but unfortunately
he was, like his father, careless of money;” and we believe the fact
cannot be denied; nor, moreover, can it be disguised that the condition
into which he fell in his latter days was owing, partly at least, to a
culpable neglect of his professional duties.[3] When, therefore, it is
considered that as his father advanced in years, his circumstances in
life so much declined, as at last to reduce him into a state of abject
indigence,—while at the same time his family was constantly increasing
in number, and that it was the melancholy lot of our traveller to
lose his mother in his infancy, and so scarcely ever to have had the
happiness to experience the soothing and heart-impressive influence
of maternal tenderness and maternal care, but, on the contrary,
to be placed at that tender age under the care and control of a
stepmother,—it will be abundantly obvious that his life commenced under
the most unpropitious auspices that can well be imagined.