Black Market: 1796 Anne Reynolds
Captain Robertson set sail from Hell bound for everlasting damnation. Sapless bones make music; distant drums echo, decomposition freed slaves inchmeal from the manacled embrace; living cargo breathing down below. Currency’s demise as cold water floods the straining nostril’s flare of hope. Twice five score years the whispers swelled to howls of outrage, shame and grief. Ebony flesh decays to white ivory as, accusing, sightless skulls confront the persistence of the impartial tides; Rapparee Cove, the makeshift grave for sixty heathen souls that night. Silver and gold in shifting sands survived October’s dusky chill, the ‘London’ dashed against the rocks spewing out its treasures as the greed died in the captain’s eyes.
Sixty slaves died, fettered to the ship’s timbers, aboard the ‘London’ in the charge of Captain Robertson on 9 October 1796. They were part of the prize money won from the French in the Caribbean Campaign. The black slaves were not given a Christian burial in consecrated ground but were buried in the sands like a guilty secret.
31
