French Abolition Memorial Begins Construction

19th century French abolitionist Senator Victor Schoelcher is indirectly in the news this week, as France's city of Nantes is undertaking the construction of a large memorial near a pedestrian footbridge named in his honor.

The memorial is not dedicated to senator Schoelcher per se, but rather to the 1848 abolition of slavery in France's colonies, the movement he played such a large role in bringing to fruition.

There will be two parts to the abolition memorial; one, an esplanade walkway along the Loire river, several miles long, aligned with 2,000 stones, each bearing the name of a French ship that had participated in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. The riverside trail will connect the forementioned Victor Schoelcher footbridge and the Anne-de-Bretagne bridge. A second, wooden pathway, described as a "meditative route", will be constructed on the slope just below the Quai de la Fosse.

This branch of the memorial has some controversy attached to it: significant work, at great cost, will have to be done to shore up the riverbank to secure the ground for the 426 foot pathway, in a section of the river prone to periodic flooding. Officials admit that it is likely that the expensive pathway will be submerged under water, and therefore closed to the public, several times a year.

The city says that a "closing protocol" is being established, where it will be someone's job every Monday morning to determined whether or not to leave open or to close the pathway to pedestrian traffic, depending on weather conditions and tidal predictions projected for that week.

The entire memorial project is expected to be completed in 2011.

[Translated from an article in the French online newspaper Press Ocean]

It's great to recognize historical events that remind us of our ability to change for the better, as from such signs we may find encouragement that such progress may continue in our own time, through our own efforts.

But: one can't help wishing that more of that money might instead be directed towards curbing slavery in modern-day France instead...

[image of the Pont Anne-de-Bretagne and my best guess for where the memorial project will be built, courtesy of Googlemaps]

Slave Patrol Surgeon's Diary Found In Scotland

In the second half of the 19th Century the ships of the British Royal Navy patrolled the world's seas in an ernest attempt to stop the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Much of their valiant labor seems lost to history, good deeds being more easily forgotten than wicked ones, it seems.

Today we tend to only remember that the trade existed, forgetting that people were also trying to stop it.

Our historical amnesia may get a needed jolt by the recent discovery of a 400-page diary. The journal belonged to doctor Richard Carr McClement, an Irish assistant surgeon who served aboard six Royal Navy ships patroling West Africa between 1857 and 1869.

In that capacity he became an eye-witness to the vicious cruelty that seems to always follow in the wake of the evil that is slavery. Researcher Dr Karly Kehoe describes what she's found in her preliminary readings of McClement's journal:

“As a surgeon working on the west African patrol, Mr McClement was called upon to assess the health of slaves whenever a slaver captured a slave. You get a sense by the way he writes that he was touched by the sheer human misery. He couldn’t really believe what he was seeing. He would have seen extreme poverty in Ireland having lived there during the famine, and would have known about discrimination, but this was all of a different order.”

The report from Scotland's Sunday Herald contains an except from McClement's journal entry for January 7, 1861, revealing the horrible scene waiting for him when he boarded the intercepted slave ship the Clara Windsor:

9am went on board the Clara Windsor. It would be utterly impossible to describe the sight which presented itself to us when we first went on board, and it would be equally difficult for any one who had not seen it, to comprehend the amount of misery, the suffering and the horrors, that were contained within the wooden walls of that little craft.

The ship is about 250-tons burden, and has her slave deck running right fore and aft, which is about three feet in height. The stench from the vessel is so great, that even at the distance of 200 yards to leeward it is almost insufferable.

When I went on board, the majority of the slaves were on the upper deck, mostly squatting in rows, each row sitting between the legs of the one behind it.

On the foetid, sloppy and sickening slave deck were to be seen the remainder, consisting of men, women, and, children, huddled together; some emaciated to skeletons; some lying sick and heedless of all around; and, some on the point of passing into another world, where it would be hard to imagine they could suffer more than they had done in this; men and women lay promiscuously, some lying on their faces, some on their backs; and, the more enfeebled sat with their heads resting on the knees.

All were naked and had their skins besmeared with the filth in which they lay. On the upper deck were to be seen slaves of all ages from 30 years downwards; here also men, women and children lay or sat promiscuously and presented the same appearances as those on the slave deck. A skeleton woman – quite naked – might be seen in a dying state, with an infant sucking the already half dead breast, while adjoining might be seen another apparently dead; her shrivelled breasts showed that her milk had long since gone, yet a starving baby held the nipple in its mouth and struggled hard to obtain what man’s cruelty had robbed it of.

Here, indeed might be seen a specimen of that affection which nature implants in the bosom of woman, for her children, and, which, would show that the civilised and uncivilised possess it alike. In every case of misery, and where the woman was even senseless, or, apparently dead, or dying, her little baby was firmly clutched to her bosom as if it were the only tie that held her to life.

Graveyard Of 10,000 Slaves Found On Island Of St-Helena

St-Helena, the South Atlantic island known to the world as the answer to trivia questions about Napoleon's final exile, finds itself thrust into the news spotlight this week, as a mass graveyard of former slaves has been uncovered there during preparations for the construction of a commercial airport for the remote British territory.

Halfway between the decaying slave forts of West Africa and the overgrown plantations of the New World, on the tiny island of St Helena, archaeologists have uncovered one of the largest slave graveyards anywhere in the world.
The bones of some 10,000 young Africans lie buried in the rocky valleys of this isolated British territory in the South Atlantic, victims of the ruthless trade that Britain dominated in the 18th century but fought to suppress after the abolition of slavery.
A team of British archaeologists uncovered the first graves last year after preparation had begun to build an access road to the site of the planned new airport on St Helena.
The bodies, many of them children, were discovered where they had been buried after being brought to St Helena between 1840 and 1874 by Royal Navy patrols hunting the slavers. The captured ships were forced into the island where the traders were arrested and their victims liberated. By then, however, many were already dead in the fetid holds where they had been packed together for the long journey.
Many of the survivors also died soon after they were brought to Rupert’s Valley, near the capital Jamestown. It was used as a treatment and holding depot by the navy’s West Africa Squadron. Smallpox, dysentery and other diseases claimed many of those who had endured hunger, thirst and the terrible conditions below decks.
The discovery of so many bones is of enormous importance in researching the history of slavery. Few graves have been found of captives who died before they were sold in Cuba, Brazil, the United States and other parts of the New World.
...
Some 325 skeletons have been excavated. They are now being examined by a research team in Jamestown to determine their age, sex, life history and cause of death. So far, the vast majority have been males, with a significant proportion of children or young adults, some less than a year old.
...
Many of the young captives appear to have had a hard-working life before being shipped out of Africa. Between 1840 and 1850, 15,000 Africans were landed on St Helena, of whom nearly 5,000 died. The liberation centre did not finally close until 1874.

There's an interesting (although indirect) connection between St-Helena's most famous resident, and slavery. Here's the story, as chronicled in the fascinating 1824 book The History of the Island Of St-Helena, from the discovery by the Portugese to the year 1823.

On October 15th 1814, the HMS Northumberland deposited the captive Napoleon Bonaparte on the island of St-Helena, much to the surprise of its government officials, who weren't informed of their important new guest until a few days before, the news being carried by a faster ship sailing ahead of the naval escort.

Fast forward to April 14, 1816 and the arrival of Sir Hudson Lowe as the island's new Lieutenant-Governor. On his agenda: the emancipation of the island's slaves, an objective he approached cautiously, to allow him the ability to "... judge of the fittest mode to carry his purpose into execution." [pg 394]

At a meeting convened on the 13th of August 1818, Governor Lowe proposes that children born of slave parents, after a fixed period, become free. This outline was agreed to in a meeting lasting only ten minutes. Four days later, the committee in charge of fine-tuning the details of the agreement laid out the rest of the plan: “By this law, all children born of a slave woman, from and after Christmas Day 1818, are free, but to be considered as apprentices to the proprietors of the mothers, if males, until the age of eighteen years, and if females, until sixteen; and that masters and mistresses are to enforce the attendance of free-born children at church and at the Sunday schools." [pg 396]

St-Helena’s movement for the abolition of slavery coincided with Napoleon’s presence on the island. (He died, poisoned or otherwise, in 1821.) It’s tempting to wonder what the architect of the Napoleonic Code, which returned the practice of slavery to the French colonies, thought about it all.