to the New World, took anywhere from two weeks to two months, and it’s hardto imagine how he survived. He was chained to another man and made to lie hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder on a shelf in the dark, airless, sweltering hold, the next shelf only inches above him. As the ship pitched and rolled under sail, the rough planks ground away his sweat-soaked skin and flesh, leaving open running sores.
The hold was a noxious pit of putrid stench—urine, vomit, excrement and the sour stink of vinegar used by the slavers in a halfhearted effort to quell the foul odours. Men around him groaned and cried out in the dark in their different languages. Many died, consumed by despair. Each day he was hauled on deck with others, chained to the rail, fed, and forced to dance while sailors tossed buckets of icy seawater on him to wash him down. Some slaves broke free and hurled themselves into the freezing ocean.
Of the many who died, most succumbed to the “bloody flux,” chronic dysentery that squeezed the liquid from their bowels in violent, painful spasms and killed them where they lay on the benches drenched in their own reeking waste. On average, the corpses thrown overboard numbered fifteen per cent of the human cargo.
He refused to die. He fought off the virulentdiseases that stalked the ship and the terrible despair that tempted him every minute of every day to give up.
After two months of the horror, a skeleton wrapped tightly in shiny black skin, covered in scabs and sores, his eyes sunken into his head, he was off-loaded, probably in the Barbados, given a salve to rub on his ravaged skin, fattened up for a few weeks and, when he looked presentable, taken to auction on the mainland. Where? In the slave market in Charles’ Town, South Carolina, in Boston, in New York? Whatever his point of entry into the colonies that “belonged” to Britain, he was bought from the Royal African Company by Pierpoint, a British soldier, and named Richard.
When I started this project I thought that a slave was just a person owned by another person, like a wagon, an axe or a horse. A slave was someone with no freedom. But what they took from him was more than that. They stole his home, his family, his roots and, maybe worst of all, his name. His religion was called heretical. His language was “mumbo-jumbo”. His stories and songs were scorned.
There were some things they couldn’t take away, though—his willpower and his intelligence, his courage and his dignity.
If the land of Pierpoint’s birth was one of slavery, the American colonies in 1760 were, in many ways, worse. There were thousands and thousands of captured Africans labouring on plantations or serving in households. Although they did not remain in bondage for life, there were white slaves, too: indentured servants sold to a master for a period of years; convicts transported to the New World and sold as labourers until they had “paid off” the cost of their passage; sailors “pressed” into duty (captured, hauled aboard ship and not released until the vessel was far out to sea). Owning a human being was an idea that was widely accepted. The man who penned the Declaration of Independence was a plantation owner whose African farmhands were his property, and when he wrote that all men were created equal he meant white males only. The man who wrote “Give me liberty, or give me death” owned more than sixty slaves.
In that land of wagons, horses, dirt roads, huge plantations and primitive isolated farms, frontier towns and a few cities that were just tiny dots in a vast landscape of unbroken forest, the sixteen-year-old boy from Bondu must always have felt isolated and alone. He was the personal servant of a British officer who probably looked down on most of his owntroops, never mind his black slave. Richard Pierpoint had to learn a new language and strange customs. But he did it. He did all that, and more.
And he dropped out of sight for twenty years.
Richard
The hold was a noxious pit of putrid stench—urine, vomit, excrement and the sour stink of vinegar used by the slavers in a halfhearted effort to quell the foul odours. Men around him groaned and cried out in the dark in their different languages. Many died, consumed by despair. Each day he was hauled on deck with others, chained to the rail, fed, and forced to dance while sailors tossed buckets of icy seawater on him to wash him down. Some slaves broke free and hurled themselves into the freezing ocean.
Of the many who died, most succumbed to the “bloody flux,” chronic dysentery that squeezed the liquid from their bowels in violent, painful spasms and killed them where they lay on the benches drenched in their own reeking waste. On average, the corpses thrown overboard numbered fifteen per cent of the human cargo.
He refused to die. He fought off the virulentdiseases that stalked the ship and the terrible despair that tempted him every minute of every day to give up.
After two months of the horror, a skeleton wrapped tightly in shiny black skin, covered in scabs and sores, his eyes sunken into his head, he was off-loaded, probably in the Barbados, given a salve to rub on his ravaged skin, fattened up for a few weeks and, when he looked presentable, taken to auction on the mainland. Where? In the slave market in Charles’ Town, South Carolina, in Boston, in New York? Whatever his point of entry into the colonies that “belonged” to Britain, he was bought from the Royal African Company by Pierpoint, a British soldier, and named Richard.
When I started this project I thought that a slave was just a person owned by another person, like a wagon, an axe or a horse. A slave was someone with no freedom. But what they took from him was more than that. They stole his home, his family, his roots and, maybe worst of all, his name. His religion was called heretical. His language was “mumbo-jumbo”. His stories and songs were scorned.
There were some things they couldn’t take away, though—his willpower and his intelligence, his courage and his dignity.
If the land of Pierpoint’s birth was one of slavery, the American colonies in 1760 were, in many ways, worse. There were thousands and thousands of captured Africans labouring on plantations or serving in households. Although they did not remain in bondage for life, there were white slaves, too: indentured servants sold to a master for a period of years; convicts transported to the New World and sold as labourers until they had “paid off” the cost of their passage; sailors “pressed” into duty (captured, hauled aboard ship and not released until the vessel was far out to sea). Owning a human being was an idea that was widely accepted. The man who penned the Declaration of Independence was a plantation owner whose African farmhands were his property, and when he wrote that all men were created equal he meant white males only. The man who wrote “Give me liberty, or give me death” owned more than sixty slaves.
In that land of wagons, horses, dirt roads, huge plantations and primitive isolated farms, frontier towns and a few cities that were just tiny dots in a vast landscape of unbroken forest, the sixteen-year-old boy from Bondu must always have felt isolated and alone. He was the personal servant of a British officer who probably looked down on most of his owntroops, never mind his black slave. Richard Pierpoint had to learn a new language and strange customs. But he did it. He did all that, and more.
And he dropped out of sight for twenty years.
Richard
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