Zachary Macaulay sailed from Portsmouth on 23 February 1796 and reached Sierra Leone on 18 March. James Watt, the First in Council when Macaulay had been acting Governor, had died and William Dawes, who was anxious to get home, left on 25 April. Macaulay was therefore appointed Acting Governor again. The Council Minutes did not record him officially as Governor until it became clear that Dawes was not to return. Macaulay certainly did not covet the post, to judge by his rather desperate comment to Selina: ‘Dawes’ return which I dare not hope, would no doubt make every difficulty (over staffing) to vanish’.

Although he returned to a colony which had made a remarkable physical recovery from the devastation of the French invasion in 1794, the human tensions had increased rather than diminished. The powers of the Hundredors and Tythingmen continued to be a contentious issue with the Governor and the policy of quit-rents was no less of a tinder box. There was a continual threat from French ships in the area. Relationships with local rulers were as delicate and volatile as ever. As if that was not enough, an additional major headache would plague the Governor throughout most of this second period in the colony. Two English missionaries, one Baptist and the other Methodist, were to lead continual protests from the settlers over what they saw as an attack on their religious freedom when the Governor insisted that marriages could only be legally conducted by those appointed by the Company.

Missionaries and Methodists

The Methodist Missionary Society had been founded in 1791. Six families from the Society accompanied Macaulay on the Calypso. Two of them were ordained and travelling on board was the colony's new Chaplain, Rev. John Clarke of the Church of Scotland. During the time at sea a dispute arose over the Sunday worship. Another Scot, Mr Wilson, who was to be an under-storekeeper, complained about the use of psalms that were not in the Scottish metre. Macaulay, whose letters to Selina were to indicate his sympathy for Watt's psalms, described Wilson to Thornton as having a limited church experience with a ‘particular cast of seceders in Scotland who are most singularly bigoted to every petty circumstance, not merely in their creed but in their mode of worship’.