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Voices from a “Valley of Dry Bones”: Life Narratives of the Slave Trade from St. Helena

In 2008, a team of archaeologists working on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena unearthed a unique and disturbing find. In Rupert’s Valley, unmarked amid the landscape of semidesert scrub, and modern industrial buildings, lay the graves of thousands of “recaptive” or “liberated Africans.” The historical context of these graves is found in Britain’s nineteenthcentury abolition campaign, when warships of the Royal Navy were tasked with intercepting slave ships and bringing them for trial. The human “cargo” of these vessels was offloaded at reception depots; Rupert’s Valley was one such place, receiving some 25,000 slaves during its period of operation between 1840 and the mid-1860s. However, the appalling circumstances of the slave ships, combined with the rudimentary circumstances of the depot, resulted in the deaths of thousands of Africans. They were buried in institutional graveyards in the upper parts of Rupert’s Valley, where until recently they disappeared from history. The Rupert’s Valley graveyards are unique. Cemeteries containing the graves of slaves are known in the New World, but these contain a mixture of people of African birth alongside secondand later-generation slaves. Only in the St. Helena graveyards do we have an unadulterated snapshot of the Middle Passage, composed of people straight out of Africa and immediately off the slave ship (Pearson et al.). The archaeological, artifactual, and osteological evidence from Rupert’s Valley provides a strong starting point for the emergence of this forgotten episode. However, such data are to some extent mute and have to be combined with other information if their potential is to be fully exploited. As with all historical archaeology, physical finds from the site may be coupled with documentary evidence. In the case of Rupert’s Valley, this documentary resource is extraordinarily rich. Many thousands of pages of correspondence