Antigua reflection: Completing the trade triangle

 

Have been on a treat of a holiday with Tim recently; we went to the Caribbean and whilst there spent a week on the island of Antigua. It was a great week – sun, sand, sea, snorkelling, and relaxing, and we felt really blessed to be there. The Antiguans are very welcoming and friendly, and wherever we went there was good banter, and chat, and a really upbeat vibe.

For me, one very poignant aspect of the week was when we were on a booked excursion and had lunch at a place called Betty’s Hope memorial park. Betty’s Hope is an old sugar plantation and it turns out that the plantation leaseholders were, for the majority of the time that it was under British ownership, the Codrington family. This family have their ancestral home in and around the village of Codrington which is about 12 – 15 miles from our home town of Thornbury.

The information boards at the plantation gave a lot of insight into the day to day of the plantation, including the number of slaves who did all of the manual labour, and the conditions in which they lived and worked. The products from the plantation were sugar and rum, much of which was sold on the European market, and entered it via Bristol, which was one of the two main entry ports for products coming from the Caribbean and the Americas. As a result, a lot of the wealth of the Codrington family was made from the income generated by the sugar and rum that was produced from there.

Earlier this year I was in Ghana, and stood in the tunnel in Jamestown where abducted Africans stood in shackles ahead of being herded onto over-crowded slave ships, never to see their homeland again. With these memories so recent for me, it felt extra poignant, that just a few later I was standing on an ex-plantation that was served by slaves from Western Africa (did any of them come from Ghana via the tunnel at Jamestown), and that funded the fortunes of a family just near home. Returning home to Bristol and Codrington area was the completion of a journey into the trading triangle of so long ago – may I be a better person for the insights and reflections gained along the way.