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February
20, 1998
The
Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society
FOR
RELEASE ON OR PRIOR TO: Thursday, February 26, 1998
Henrietta Marie
Presentation Begins Society’s Lecture Series
In
recognition of Black History Month, the Mel Fisher
Maritime Heritage Society is opening its new monthly
lecture series with a presentation on the English
merchant-slave ship Henrietta
Marie. Angus Konstam, curator of the Mel Fisher
Maritime Museum, will provide an overview of the life,
times and excavation of the ship; and director of
archaeology Corey Malcom will present his latest
research in a paper entitled “Trade Goods on the Henrietta
Marie and the Price of Men in 1700.” The lectures
will take place in the museum’s theater at 7:00 PM
Thursday, February 26th. Admission is free. The museum
is located at the corner of Greene and Whitehead streets
in Key West’s Old Town.
The
Henrietta Marie,
shipwrecked in 1700, was discovered in the waters
thirty-four miles west of Key West by Fisher and his
crew in the early 1970’s. It has since been the
subject of intensive archaeological investigations which
have revealed previously unknown insights into the early
transcontinental trade in African men, women and
children. An exhibition of materials recovered from the
wreck is currently on a national tour.
“The
slave trade is not a subject that everyone wants to
discuss,” says Malcom, “but the Henrietta
Marie, and ships like her, are the roots for black
culture in the Americas. By exposing them for what they
were, we can put some of today’s problems in better
perspective.”
Founded
in 1982, the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society is an
independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to
exhibition, education, archaeology, preservation, and
research into New World maritime activity. Its Key West
museum holds the richest single collection of
17th-century maritime and shipwreck antiquities in the
Western Hemisphere.
(PHOTO
CAPTION)
Corey
Malcom, director of archaeology for the Mel Fisher
Maritime Heritage Society, recovers a set of shackles
from the wrecksite of the slave ship Henrietta
Marie. Malcom and museum curator Angus Konstam will
present two lectures about the Henrietta Marie on Thursday, February 26th, at the Mel Fisher
Maritime Museum.
(PHOTO BY DYLAN KIBLER, (C) MFMHS)
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