The exhibition “The Dark Chapter “kicked off on June 27th
2013 at the National Maritime Museum (Het
Scheepvaartmuseum) in Amsterdam and will
be on view until August 31st 2014. The museum announced on Monday, Feb 3, 2014 that
the display has attracted over 100 000 visitors. This exhibit is worthy of note
for being the subject of one of the greatest yet least known shipping tragedies
in Dutch history.
In the Netherlands slavery was brought to an end on 1 July
1863 and last year various events were held across the country to mark the 150th
anniversary of Dutch abolition. For most of the 17th and 19th
centuries the Dutch played an active role in the transatlantic slave trade. The Dutch West India Company (WIC) was established as a
monopoly over the African slave trade to the Americas and the Caribbean. It is estimated that about half a million slaves were transported from the West Coast of
Africa by the WIC.
The slaves worked on plantations
growing sugar and coffee for example, and these products were shipped back to
Amsterdam to be refined in factories. Income from the goods produced from the
trade in slaves and the fruits of their labour were the driving force behind the
Netherland’s golden age- a period of economic prosperity and the best living standards
in Europe....
Chained and bound, nearly 700 men, women and children stripped
not only of their clothing but their personal dignity, were fastened in a
coffle and pushed through the Elmina Castle’s ‘ door of no return.’ There,
docked at the harbor was the Leusden,
waiting to carry them through the middle passage to Surinam were they were to
be sold as slaves. Unknowingly, this was to be the Leusden’s tenth and last transatlantic voyage.
So, the Dutch West India Company (WIC) slave ship set sail from
Ghana on November 19, 1737. However, on
January 1, 1738 it was caught in a violent storm near the Maroni River off the Surinam
coast. When the captain realized the ship was sinking he instructed the crew to
lock the captives below deck in the ship’s hull for fear that they might
stampede the lifeboats.
Thirty-seven crew members and sixteen slaves managed to escape
in the lifeboats and reach Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam where 14 of the
captives were sold. There were two little boys who were carted away as presents
for a business partner in the Netherlands. However the company associate in
question had died by the time the boys got there.
In total the six hundred and eighty
captives shackled below and abandoned, perished at sea. The sinking of the Leusden has been described as the largest
death toll of its kind in transatlantic slave trade maritime history.
This dark secret in Dutch history is revealed in an exhibition
that has come on the back of a PhD thesis based on five years of research by
the historian Dr Leo Balai. He states “Not much research has been done on slave
ships which were indispensible for the transport of African captives to the
territories in the Americas. This is remarkable because the treatment of
captives on the slave ships may give us a clearer picture of how this forced
transport of people was organized.” “The story of the Leusden was never told in
Holland,”
“If you look for a list of shipping disasters in Dutch
history, you won’t find it,” said Remmelt Daalder, a senior curator at the
Maritime Museum. “It was not seen as important. It was a large loss in terms of
money, but no one seemed to mind that it was a large loss in human lives. No
one was punished, and in fact, some of the crew members got a reward because
they were able to save a box of gold from the ship.”
According to Dr Balai, “It was the largest
murder case in the history of the slave trade, but no one ever talked about
it.”
The exhibition encourages visitor participation with a
rendition that provides insights into what the captives must have endured on
board the Leusden. For example, in
the museum visitors walk though a doorway marked 'De Zwarte Bladzijde' (The Dark
Chapter) listening to a recording of what the captives must have been talking
about. Hanging from the ceiling are paper tags which have the names, ages and
dates of capture.
However despite historical memory efforts such as these some
have argued that the majority of white Dutch society remains decidedly silent about
slavery issues, the role played by the country in the trade and its effects on
their present descendants.
Calling for an
attitude change to the legacy of Dutch slavery, Dr Guno Jones, Senior
Researcher at the Free University of Amsterdam challenges the dominant Dutch
historic narrative. “The story of these victims is not often mentioned because
history used to be written by the powerful. That’s silenced history, but
silence can be disrupted.”
Kathleen Ferrier, former Dutch politician and daughter of the
first president of Suriname has stressed the importance of discussing slavery “If
you do not know the shared past, you cannot work together for the future. The
past always comes back to the fore, so it is important to put it into words.” (Andreas
Havinga, Ecumenical News International, September 19, 2012 )
The slave trade helped build a world economy and is often described
as the first globalization system. It can be argued that we cannot be selective
about shared histories by dividing them into mutually exclusive categories for
the purpose of glorifying certain aspects while other parts remain less
visible.
