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January
24, 1997
Mel
Fisher Maritime Heritage Society
FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Burnside’s
Spirits of the
Passage
Details
Transatlantic Slave Trade, Courage, and Survival
In
1700, the English merchant slave ship Henrietta
Marie broke apart and sank in the waters off the
Florida Keys. Now, nearly three hundred years later, the
story of the vessel—believed to be the world’s
largest source of artifacts from the horrific maritime
slave trade—is finally being told. Simon &
Schuster is releasing Spirits of the Passage, the first general-interest history of the
slave trade’s early years, on February 12.
The
release will be celebrated with a book signing and
reception from 7 to 9 p.m. on February 12 at the Mel
Fisher Maritime Heritage Society Museum (200 Greene
Street); the public is invited to attend.
The
richly illustrated volume was written by Madeleine
Burnside, chief curator of the ground-breaking national
touring exhibition “A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of
the Henrietta
Marie.” Edited by Essence
magazine’s Rosemarie Robotham, the book features a
thought-provoking introduction by Cornel West, author of
the best-selling Race
Matters and one of the nation’s foremost
philosophers on the subject of race.
Following
the Henrietta
Marie’s first slaving voyage from London to West
Africa to the plantation islands of the Caribbean, Spirits
of the Passage examines the social, economic, and
cultural context that allowed the brutal trade to grow
and thrive as the largest business of its time. Vividly
transforming historical data into distinctive text,
author Burnside offers tales of courage and survival, of
people and places, of torment and triumph. The result is
a compelling account of events whose impact continues to
resonate today.
Driven
by a desire to understand how the three cultures
involved could have accepted and condoned a trade in
human lives, Burnside explores the motivations of
European slavers, Africans who sold their war captives
and political prisoners into bondage, and the “labor
junkies” of the Americas who saw slavery as a far more
viable solution to the workforce problem than indentured
servitude.
Each
aspect of the trade is illustrated by personal profiles
that breathe life into the subject and give Spirits
of the Passage a powerful immediacy. Among the
subjects Burnside touches on are the widespread nature
of slavery in seventeenth-century Africa and Europe,
African warriors’ belief that shipping off their
captives was more humane than killing them, and the
European societal context that allowed slave ships’
captains to view themselves as good and just men.
As
an example, Burnside tells the story of John Newton, a
slave trader who later condemned the practice and wrote
the moving hymn Amazing Grace.
“Newton
wrote that, during all the time he was a slave trader,
no one ever said to him that slavery was a bad thing and
he shouldn’t do it,” she relates. “Nothing he ever
read, nothing he ever saw, nothing he ever heard said to
him that slavery was inhumane—that the Africans he was
transporting were his fellow men.”
Burnside
holds a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the
University of California at Santa Cruz. The recipient of
both an NEA Fellowship and a Harkness Fellowship in
creative writing, she completed her post-doctoral
studies at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New
York and went on to become the executive director of
Long Island’s Islip Art Museum.
Since
1991 the executive director of the Mel Fisher Maritime
Heritage Society in Key West, Florida, she did much of
her research into the transatlantic slave trade during
the Society’s creation of “A Slave Ship
Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta
Marie.” The first major museum exhibition in this
country devoted to the trade, it was prepared and
mounted with the assistance of a panel of nationally
recognized authorities on African-American history.
The
exhibition has received praise from The
New York Times, OMNI,
National
Geographic, and most of the major newspapers in the
United States. Its four-year national tour is sponsored
by the General Motors Corporation; GM’s William C.
Brooks characterizes it “a story which must be
told.”
The
exhibition’s stops to date include the Museum of
African-American History in Detroit, Chicago’s DuSable
Museum, the Watts Labor Community Action Committee
Center in Los Angeles, and Spirit Square Center for the
Arts in Charlotte, NC. It will appear at the Historical
Association of Southern Florida in Miami from February
13 though May 4 before moving on to the Florida State
Museum in Tallahassee, the Fort Worth Museum of Science
and Industry, and the Pink Palace Museum in Memphis,
Tennessee.
Even
after completing years of work in preparing the
exhibition and the book, Burnside relates, she was
unable to answer the driving question of what motivated
the individuals involved in the transatlantic slave
trade.
“I
would think for a minute that I had a little flash of
what drove someone, of what he was thinking,” she
says, “but ultimately, it remains incomprehensible. I
understand better now that I don’t—that I
can’t—understand.”
In
fact, it is the complexity of the issues involved in the
17th-century slave trade—a time that formed the
current time, through a practice whose wounds still
fester—that she feels that is the primary message of Spirits
of the Passage.
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