The brutality of the slave trade.
In 1693, Captain Thomas Phillips embarked on a voyage from London to Guinea, where he purchased enslaved Africans on behalf of the Royal African Company. The subsequent journey across the Atlantic witnessed a tragic toll, with hundreds of the enslaved captives, and many of the crew, losing their lives before the ship reached the shores of Barbados.
Three centuries later, in 2010, Brecon Town Council made a startling and controversial decision—to honour Captain Phillips with a plaque without reference to his slave-trading activities.
In this engaging and original narrative, Rosemary Caldicott analyses the pages of Phillips’s journal to reveal the day-to-day brutality that defined the triangular trade, uncovering the forgotten stories of the victims in this dark chapter in history. She also reveals the compelling story of the campaign to remove the plaque, a campaign that finally bore fruit amid the world-wide ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests that reached the heart of Brecon.
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Liz Millman
In this amazing book Rosemary Caldecott shares the complex layers of the challenges faces in 2020 in Brecon, and then takes us back to around 1694 to gain some appreciation of the complexities of the trading done by sea captains with their funders, the Royal Africa Company and others, and with the local West African rulers and merchants.
Rosemary also uncovers stories about the victims, those African subjected to unimaginable abuse and terror not only by the God fearing European traders and sailors, but the treatment inflicted by their African captors.
But yet is a very readable book, a book for the times we are in, it is also extraordinarily complex, but Rosemary shares and explains the commonplace and everyday activities occurring more than 330 years ago, while remembering that we are reading this initially in 2024, and it records a story of the Black Lives Matter times.
At only £12, plus P&P this is a must read, really very timely and accessible, and although not perhaps your first choice of holiday reading, it’s worth having a copy to dip into as you start to face the grim realities of the times back then, or just to reflect and increase your understanding.