On British soil he was free. The Case of Fugitive Slave Charles Mitchell

John Adams is an author, historian, and he owns and operates a walking tour company “Discover The Past” that offers walking tours of Victoria.

Location: Bastion Square marks the original site of Fort Victoria.  It is located in the heart of downtown Victoria.  The east entrance is located at View and Government Streets with a ceremonial entry arch. In the square are historical buildings as well as restaurants, pubs, and cafes with outdoor patios.  In the summer, it hosts an artisan’s market. To the west, the square looks out onto the Inner Harbour

Interview format:  John is standing to the right of a post that bears an information sheet about “Boomerang Court and Chancery Lane”.   Throughout the video John looks around and/or points at the poster.

On-screen text: On British soil he was a free man: The Case of Fugitive Slave Charles Mitchell

John: I don’t think anyone has quite figured it out yet but Charlie Mitchell had stowed away with the connivance of a couple of black people from Victoria who worked on the boat. He didn’t creep on, on his own,  he came with their help but he was hiding in a lifeboat.

Then somebody saw him and and reported him to the captain. The captain locked him up in the brig. The Captain’s plan was to take Charlie back to his owner, Major Tilton in Olympia Washington and collect a reward.

However the people on board who had smuggled Charlie on board went straight to the magistrate here in Victoria, and said “Guess what?  There’s a fugitive slave being held on one of the ships.” So the sheriff, Brooke Naylor, went straight down to the boat.

Here is the jail that stood right here and this is where Brooke Naylor’s office would have been.  He went straight down to the Captain and demanded that the boy be released.

The captain said “No. He’s on my ship and I’m taking him back to his owner.”

Now Brooke Naylor was a rather large man and convinced the captain that maybe there was a different way of doing this; and so Charlie Mitchell was brought shore.

It couldn’t happen today, but the court case took place almost immediately.  I don’t know whether the court case took place here, because the police courts were also located here or whether it took place in one of the old colonial buildings where the present Parliament buildings are.  Nonetheless justice was swift and the Chief Justice ruled immediately “What’s the argument? The boy is here.  He’s on British soil so it doesn’t matter how he got here; he’s now a free man”.

Charlie Mitchell stayed and went to school. Nobody’s exactly sure what happened to him after that, he was just a young boy.  We believe he did stay but what happened to him in the long term nobody knows.

But it is possibly in this building where the court case took place; it was the Supreme Court Justice who heard the case. The Supreme Court was meeting at the time in another old building known as the bird cages so it’s unknown if the case actually took place here.