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w This PDF of The Museum On Site's book, A Thousand Ships: A Ritual of Remembrance Marking the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, is shared according to the conditions of a Creative Commons Attribution-noncommercial- noDerivs 3.0 unported License; no part of the document can be removed and distributed separate from the PDF without permission. To purchase a copy of the paperback book, please visit www.themuseumonline.com/book An event created by The Museum On Site and Barnaby Evans Book edited and written by Andrew Losowsky & Lyra Monteiro, designed by Jason Tranchida COnTenTS FOReWORD BY PROFeSSOR JAMeS T. CAMPBeLL ................................. i inTRODuCTiOn ..................................................................................... 1 A Thousand Ships was dedicated to the memory of Rhett S. Jones (1940-2008), one of the first professors of Africana Studies at Brown university, co-founder of the Rites and Reason Theater, and a distinguished scholar The LibatiOn ............................................................................. 3 of the history of slavery in the Americas, who passed away shortly before this event. The PROCeSSiOn ................................................................... 11 The ACTORS .............................................................................. 23 iSBn-10: ......................................................................... 77 0615579329 The TRiAngLe iSBn-13: The LuMinARiA ..................................................................... 91 978-0-615-57932-0 ReFLeCTiOnS On A ThOuSAnD ShiPS ................................................ 99 Copyright 2012 The Museum On Site ePiLOgue BY BARnABY evAnS ........................................................ 103 First Revised edition MeThODOLOgY OF A ThOuSAnD ShiPS BY LYRA MOnTeiRO ....... 111 The contents of this book are copyright their respective creators. CReDiTS .............................................................................................. 123 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-nonCommercial-noDerivs 3.0 unported License. A free PDF of this book can be downloaded at www.themuseumonline.com FurtheR ReADing ............................................................................ 127 For more information, or to obtain copies of the book, please contact [email protected] SPOnSORS .......................................................................................... 129 by James T. Campbell Professor of united States history, Stanford university We are inured to statistics. They pervade our world, tidy measures of incalculable suffering: six million Jews murdered in the holocaust; a quarter million dead in the indian Ocean tsunamis of 2004; 5.4 million slaughtered in the continuing carnage “Shuttles in the rocking loom of history, in the great Lakes region of Africa. The figures wash over us, confirming the wisdom of novelist erich Maria Remarque, whose experience on the Western Front the dark ships move, the dark ships move, during the First World War taught him something about wholesale dying: “The their bright ironical names death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” like jests of kindness on a murderer’s mouth...” Yet when confronting the transatlantic slave trade, statistics are often all that we have. The names of those who traversed the Atlantic in slave ships are mostly lost to us. First-person accounts by individuals who made the passage and lived to write Robert hayden, Middle Passage (1962) about it are vanishingly few — the most recent scholarly investigation turned up just fifteen. But statistics we have, and in abundance.h ere are a few to ponder: in the 375 years after Columbus’s first voyage to the new World, more than 12.5 million Africans were loaded onto slave ships bound for the Americas. About 10.7 million of them survived the passage. About 1.8 million, roughly 15% of the total, did not. Though precise figures are elusive, it is likely that similar or even greater numbers died before leaving Africa, perishing in the coffles marching to the sea or in coastal forts and barracoons, or in their first six months in the Americas, during what contemporaries called the “seasoning” process. Putting these figures 8 A Thousand Ships Foreword i together, at least half of the Africans enslaved in the era of the transatlantic trade As such names suggest, slave ships flew the flags of many different nations. died within a year or two. Most of the rest would follow soon enough: average life About nine million Africans — three-fourths of the total — were transported expectancy on a new World sugar plantation was less than seven years. on Portuguese or British ships, but virtually every european nation participated in the trade, including France, Spain, the netherlands, Denmark and Sweden. About 5.5 million of those trafficked from Africa, or just under 45% of the Though they entered the trade belatedly, Americans also played their part. total, were bound for Brazil. Similar numbers were shipped to the islands of the According to the slave trade database—which is estimated to record only 80% of Caribbean — to Cuba, Jamaica, Barbados, Saint-Domingue, Martiniquez and a score all voyages—1,660 slaving voyages were launched from what is today the united of other sugar-producing colonies. The balance were carried to mainland colonies States. nearly 60% of those ships — at least 946 voyages — originated in a single in north and South America, including to what is today the united States, the colony and state: Rhode island. destination of just under half a million Africans, or about four percent of the total transatlantic traffic. Some people may be surprised to hear slavery invoked in the context of Rhode island. For most Americans, slavery conjures southern images - cotton fields and Precisely how many ships crossed the Atlantic during the era of the slave trade is pillared plantation homes. But the “Peculiar institution” flourished throughout impossible to say. Slavevoyages.org, a consolidated slave trade database, includes the Americas, including all thirteen mainland colonies and, for a time, all thirteen information about 34,948 distinct voyages, a figure that probably represents original states. About one in ten of the residents of Paul Revere’s Boston were something over eighty percent of the total. The first recorded voyage occurred in enslaved. in new York City, the figure was closer to one in four. Following the 1514; the last in 1866, nearly sixty years after the passage of slave trade abolition bills Revolution, all northern states moved to abolish slavery, but most did so gradually by the legislatures of great Britain and the united States. The peak of the traffic came and grudgingly. new York, Pennsylvania and new Jersey all took nearly a quarter in the eighteenth century, which saw more than seven million Africans transported century to enact gradual abolition laws, and decades longer to abolish the to the new World, but the trade continued well into the nineteenth century. About institution outright. new Jersey, in fact, never did: the last few enslaved men and three million Africans were carried to the Americas, mostly to Brazil and Cuba, after women in the state obtained their freedom only in 1865, following the adoption 1807, when great Britain and the united States declared the trade illegal. of the 13th Amendment to the u.S. Constitution. Slave ships’ names also lend themselves to statistical analysis. 981 ships sailed even as they abolished slavery within their own borders, most northern states under some variant of Mary or María. 1,130 ships’ names included Joseph (or Josef, remained economically dependent on the institution. northern firms supplied João, or José). 467 bore the name of Jesus. The roster also included 190 elizabeths, slave owners with shipping facilities, banking services, even insurance policies to 138 Sallys, 78 Providences (or Providencias), 210 Friendships (including Amistads, shield them against the death of their enslaved property. Textile mills wove slave- Amizades, Amites, vriendschaps, and venskabs), 535 hopes (including esperanças, produced cotton into cloth, some of which returned to plantations in the form esperancas, espoirs, hoops, and habs), and one Charity. of “negro cloth,” the cheap, coarse fabric used to clothe the enslaved. Factories ii A Thousand Ships Foreword iii produced the brogans that enslaved workers wore on their feet, the hoes with Over the last few years, the myth of northern innocence has begun to unravel. which they chopped cotton, the blankets beneath which they slept. “Peculiar” it The emergence of a vocal slavery reparations movement (including the filing in may have been, but slavery was more than a southern institution. 2002 of a series of well-publicized, though ultimately unsuccessful, class-action lawsuits seeking monetary damages from prominent northern corporations); nowhere was the north’s economic dependence on slavery more obvious and the unearthing of a forgotten African burial ground in Manhattan, just a stone’s long-lasting than in Rhode island. Rhode island ships dominated the north throw from Wall Street; the discovery, during construction of a new Liberty Bell American portion of the transatlantic slave trade, bearing 100,000 Africans into interpretive center in Philadelphia, of the buried foundations of the nation’s new World slavery, most to the plantation colonies of the Caribbean. Rhode first executive

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