Slavers

300 ships sailed from Bristol as part of the slave trade in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, hundreds more from Liverpool.

They plied the slaver’s “Golden Triangle” route (England to Africa to the Americas to England).

Sailing first from Bristol Harbour to Africa’s west coast, the ships were laden with English copper bracelets and brass pots, knives, pistols, Venetian and Bohemian glass beads in rainbow colours, woven richly dyed cloth sourced in India, there to be traded for human beings.

Then, packed with African slaves jammed mercilessly into the holds of the ships, shackled, chained to wooden benches with no room to move and scarcely room to breath, the ships would set sail for the 6 week long journey to the Carolinas or the Caribbean.

There the surviving slaves would be sold or traded for cotton, rice, sugar or rum, bounty brought back to Bristol in the return leg of the Triangle. By many accounts, 3 million people were trafficked from Africa to the Americas.

I’ve been to the other end of this route, visited the slave market in Charleston, now preserved as an historic site, where tens of thousands of human beings were merrily sold at carnival auctions advertised in newspapers and flyers distributed as far afield as Texas. Assuming, of course, they made it past Sullivan’s Island, where they were held and “processed” before being brought into Charleston.

I’ve seen the handbills printed up by Slave Brokers, men who prowled the plantations looking for older slaves past their prime, or little children 4 and 5 years old deemed surplus. These Brokers would buy them to sell them on to to plantations in other parts of the state, or out of state.

I’ve seen the slave records in Savannah, where inbound slave ships were first unloaded on Tybee Island, for “health reasons.” The slaves who hadn’t survived the passage were “dealt with” and buried.

I suspect the ones who were sick, or weak, were also ”dealt with.”

I’ve walked through dirt-floored slave cabins in South Carolina and Georgia.

These are chilling experiences as you come face to face with the inhuman history forming the invisible foundations for so much of the wealth of Europe and North America.

Much of the old wealth of Bristol comes from this “business”: fortunes rooted in building and outfitting the slave ships, making or importing the trade goods, partnering with London financiers to provide the capital for these slaving joint ventures, owning the plantations in the Caribbean, processing or packaging and distributing the raw sugar and cotton and the rice and rum that were brought back.

The mansions on Clifton Hill, many of Bristol’s magnificent public buildings, some churches, some of Bristol’s early schools, even the alms houses for the poor, were no doubt built at least in part from these fortunes, who’s owners generously distributed a portion of their wealth to create monuments to their memory.

It’s a history every white European has to grapple with and one that Bristol, to its credit, is attempting to confront in its museums and historic homes.

More importantly, Bristol’s new mayor, Marvin Rees, is the city’s first mixed-race mayor: with a white mother and a black father. Is Rees a symbol or an anomaly?

Only the passage of even more time in this ancient city will tell.