Dan Snow's History Hit - Asylum on Saint Helena

Episode Date: October 5, 2020

Annina Van Neel showed me around Saint Helena, a small scrap of land in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This island is the most significant physical trace of the Transatlantic slave trade middle passage.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Last week in the UK the Home Secretary seemed to suggest that migrants arriving in this country, people seeking asylum, would be processed on Ascension Island, a small piece of land in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, one of the few scraps that remain from Britain's once enormous global empire. Ascension is around 1,000 miles on the coast of Africa and about 1,500 miles from the coast of Brazil. 800 miles away from Ascension is another small island, St Helena. It measures about 10 miles by five.

It is also a remnant of the British Empire. But the Home Secretary suggested that either Ascension Isle, Tristan da Cunha, or St Helena might be used to process these migrants. Well, what's very interesting is St. Lena has been used in the past to process or to house a very different kind of migrant, migrants who were not there through any choice of their own. After the British abolished the Atlantic slave trade, they used the Royal Navy to intercept certain ships crossing the Atlantic. Any enslaved African people they found were not taken back to Africa. They were dumped on St. Helena with little in the way of food, shelter or welfare. The wonderful archaeologist on St.

Helena, Anina van Neel, took me to the valley on St. Helena, a brutal desolate place now where these recently liberated Africans were forced to settle. As you'll hear some found it so difficult existing there they actually chose to head to North America to work on the plantations effectively volunteering to enslave themselves. So limited and so awful were the options available to them. This is part of the documentary I made on St. Lynn. You can head over to History Hit TV. You can use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, and you will get a month for free. And your second month is one pound, euro, or dollar. So please check out that remarkable landscape and some of the objects that Anina van Neel refers to on there. In the meantime, enjoy this podcast with a peculiar modern echo. with a peculiar modern echo.

Ania, tell me about this valley. What happened here? So Rupert's Valley is quite significant if we think about the global story of the transatlantic slave trade. St Helena is squat in the middle of the South Atlantic and therefore was the perfect ground for British naval vessels that had intercepted the illegal Portuguese slave trade ships for them to free the captured Africans that were on board. So these liberated Africans, they called Rupert's Valley their home for a period of about 30 years.

So the British didn't take them back to Africa? No. So they came to St Helena and between the period of 1840 and 1870, approximately 8,000 to 10,000 of them unfortunately passed away on St Helena. 550 managed to stay behind and integrate into the community, but the remaining 18,000 moved on to the South and Central America and some did go back to Africa, but they moved on as indentured labourers.

Now, that sounds like a lot of people dying. Was that quite a high mortality? Was that just the nature of things at the time, or was it because they lacked the food, the support, the medical services to live a quality of life down here? Yeah so basically the condition on the slave ship would have been appalling but by the time they got here a third of them would have been dead. The remaining two-thirds would be sick or some would be dying but also because of the resources and facilities that were available within Rupert's Valley they had one doctor to a thousand inhabitants and that doctor was also

responsible for the daily running of the establishment so yes they were very much under-resourced there was no running water in the valley and as you can see around us it is quite barren and hardly anything grows here. And so is there an estimate of how many of these liberated Africans how many of their human remains lie beneath our feet at the moment? Well there's a guess of approximately eight to ten thousand of them lying here in this valley. We've got two burial grounds.

We're standing on the biggest of the two, which makes this site the most significant trace of the transatlantic. That's a really good point because the nature of the slave trade, these people were deliberately anonymized. They were torn from their communities. They didn't leave a trace behind. So actually, in terms of the physical remains of the slave trade here on St Helena is... Not only does this site represent those who perished

and who managed to get a burial, a funeral of some sorts, but it also represents those of the thousand ships that sank in the South Atlantic and that can't be recovered. So yes, it definitely is the most significant site of the Middle Passage and the most important physical trace that's been left behind. What do the grave sites themselves tell us about the lives of the liberated Africans that lived here? Unfortunately, the grave sites doesn't tell us much about the individuals.

It tells us about what was imposed on them during their capture and the little time that they spent here or how they were brought to the island. So the graves were shallow, no coffins. So you can imagine the dire situation of trying to get a body into the ground as fast as possible so that diseases don't spread. And also because you don't have, most of the people you have to help you dig a grave is sick or they're dying themselves. So it really does, they were quite condensely buried as well.

So limited space, mass numbers, people dying in great numbers at a time. So it really does give us an idea of the dire situations that they came into in Rupert's Valley with a lack of resources. I think all too often the Brits can be quite pleased themselves that they were the ones who abolished the slave trade and then went to great efforts to interdict those slaving ships. But this doesn't feel like much of a liberation.

100% not. That's only a portion of the story. We have a way of telling history that makes us look good. We are much more complex than that. And this story shows exactly how complex that was. I mean, the 18,000 that were moved on as indentured labor, can you really say that choice was given to them? Or were they forced to leave yet again? So those 18,000 liberated Africans were pressed into service here, and many of them were transported to the new world to basically work on plantations in is that slavery in all but name yeah actually at the

UN building where they have the arc of return and that's the whole remember slavery project Saint Helena's actually marked on that map as a slave export site. Yes, so that reaffirms what you're saying, that slavery would have taken many forms and indentured labor would have just been a nicer way of saying it. How did you and your team discover these human remains? So originally there was nothing to discover really,

because there are maps, engineering maps that date back to the 1800s that show that these burial grounds, these cemeteries were here. Discovery or remembering that they were here happened approximately 40 years ago when the island's power station, the first power station was built directly on the upper burial ground. Thousands of bodies were exhumed, most of which were stored in empty oil drums, but 10 years later they actually had a respectful reburial,

which was organised by community members, not the government. 30 years on, the archaeological excavation happened where 325 bodies were exhumed to make way for the airport road. So it was more of a disturbance than a discovery. We've always known that they were here. I mean were you surprised at the time by the you know the scale the concentration of these remains? So I wasn't actually here in 2008 when the archaeological excavation took place. My surprise was more regarding the disconnect between the community and this very sacred site. And that's where I found a personal connection

to seeing that this memorialisation actually takes place. Talk to me about what we might have seen in this valley from the 1840s onwards. Did they have physical shelter? So lower down at the beach level, so at the bay, they would have been landed in the bay and brought to the hub of the establishment, which was 11 tents, which were made from the remains of the captured slave ships and with sails from the ships. And these 11 tents could house up to or had to house up to a thousand inhabitants at a time. That was at the highest peak of the illegal slave trade. They also had a slave hospital,

so where all these people would have been treated. And they had a garden, they had a garden where they could produce and feed themselves. The garden walls are actually still visible further down in the valley, as well as the slave hospital, which is currently being used as a fisheries building. This does not feel like a valley that can support a good quality of life for thousands of people.

No that wasn't the point of this valley. The point of this valley was isolation for them to be separated from the rest of the island community and I guess they were re-cultured so made more British and more acceptable. They also were forced into working, building the roads that we see. They built the first prison on the island. They built the roads. They built the run that now currently runs through the middle of the valley. So the concrete run. So a lot of labor came from those 26,000 that actually passed through St. Helena.

So you mentioned descendant communities. The liberated Africans who did then join the St Helena community over that cliff and into Jamestown, is there DNA still there? Are the descendants of those people living here still? Yeah definitely. There are a handful that actually can trace back their African descendancy from oral history within the family. For the rest though, about two years ago we commissioned a study, a DNA, a living DNA study to try and find out not just how many African descendants are left, but you know what the makeup is of St. Helena, which would be lovely for anyone to see. And you know history is something that everyone needs to be proud of, not just our African

heritage or history. So definitely there are descendants left here on the island, but more importantly globally and especially in the Americas, we have a larger descendant population that need to know about this site. How have you made sure that there is some form of recognition here? I've done what I can with the resources that are in my reach. One of the ways that I've tried to, it's not much, but we used cobblestones from the beach and painted them white to actually demarcate the boundary of the upper burial ground, which is the most threatened. As you can see, it has been previously disturbed several times, and it's just a reminder

to people that this is actually a sacred space. Why does this site matter? This site matters to me as an African, it matters to St Helena, it matters to Britain, and it matters to the rest of the world because it is the most significant physical trace of the transatlantic slave trade middle passage. What is the best way to remember these people? The best way is to lean on the descendant community. And if there is no descendant community, you act as if you are the descendant community. And if there is no descendant community you act as if you are the descendant community. And that is something that's very difficult to do now on St Helena

in economically hard times where everything else, especially economic development, takes precedence over cultural heritage. So we are working, especially collaborating with arts and local artisans on how we can incorporate these beautiful aspects of this site including the knowledge and the history the rich history that lies with it into the culture of St. Helena but also sharing that story with the rest of the world because this is a story that's everyone's story one story. wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five-star rating and a review. It really helps, basically boosts up the chart, which is good. And then more people listen, which is nice.

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