‘LIBERTY BOUND’ EXHIBITION SHOWCASES THE FIRST ARCHEOLOGIST JOURNEY TO ST. HELENA

BayTV, Liverpool 3^rd April 2014 By Gaelle LeGrand

Exploring the concept of freedom through the journey of slaves on St. Helena: the new exhibition of the International Slavery Museum, ‘Liberty Bound’, lands on this tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

This remote place, located more than 1,200 miles away from the nearest coast, has been a stopover for many ships since the 17^th century.

More than 200 hundred years later, a team of archeologists decided to reach the island and explore the remains of this place where hundreds of people were made slaves.

Dr Andrew Pearson, Historian and Archeologist in Cardiff and at Bristol University, led the team over the island to pursue his researches. He said: “ We expected to find very little. St. Helena is known as the place for Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile from 1815 to 1821.

“We were the first archeologists ever to work on the island, and beyond Napoleon, there wasn’t anything that much known about the island.

“What we found in Rupert’s Valley were an enormous number of bodies of African slaves freed by the Royal Navy in the 1840’s and the 1850’s, but within very small dense areas of burials and graveyards, so it was quite of a macabre find but a very significant one.”

“Millions of African were shipped across the Atlantic between the 15^th and the 19^th century, but you can’t see it, you can’t touch it, you can only read about it. That’s quite an abstract experience.

“Here, in Rupert’s Valley, we’ve excavated 325 of African bodies, who were quite literally, straight off the slave ship.

“So you come face to face with the victims and that’s an extraordinarily powerful thing to face. Children, young mothers, young adults, all essentially killed by the slave trade.

The team also found artefacts belonging to the slaves who had been buried on their arrival in St. Helena.

Dr Pearson said: “It also personalise it. In the exhibition, we have thousands of glass beads, which were worn as earrings or necklaces, we have bracelets. We start to see people as people, who have a sense of beauty, of their own esthetics, a sense of their own identity.”

Saint Helena, which was discovered in 1502 by Joao da Nova, a Portuguese navigator, moved to the hands of the English East India Company in 1657. The island is considered as a gem on both historical and cultural levels.

Dr Pearson said: “Saint Helena is an extraordinary place, first of all by the fact that you can only reach it by boat. The thing that appealed to me is that it’s not fragmented. Because there has been so little development, it all still joins up, it’s all a whole.

St. Helena is now part of the British Overseas Territory. The British government has invested £250,000 in the construction of an airport on the island, an operation that led to the discovering of the slaves’ remains. The airport is meant to bring 30,000 tourists every year on St. Helena.

See also: Slaves and slavery