credits
AFRICAN - RECENT HISTORY
Black Sailors
Olaudah Equinano
Papa Mandela London Project at Deptford Community Radio's 1999 Cultural Awareness Day at the Lewisham Irish Community Centre, Catford, London SE6.
Community contacts: Harry Powell, Lewisham Way Youth and Community Centre, 138 Lewisham Way, New Cross SE14.
Roy Pinder, Chair, Pan African Caribbean Community Organisation, 66 Charlton Church Lane, Charlton, London SE7.
Black sailors
The beautiful buildings of the Royal Naval College were built as the Royal Hospital for Seamen, founded in 1694 by William and Mary. Until its closure in 1869, it housed over 2000 sailors from the Royal Navy who, because of old age or infirmity could no longer earn their living at sea.
Illustrations of the Greenwich Pensioners from last the last century show that many of them were black.
Similarly, black men were among the sailors treated at the Dreadnought Seamen’s Hospital (closed 1986), and black boys attended the Royal Hospital School, a training school for sailors, housed in the Queen’s House and the other buildings that now comprise the National Maritime Museum. In a document of 1831 a cruel case is described.
A mixed race boy in the school severely injured himself while doing the compulsory gymnastic exercises. For that cause he was dismissed from the establishment. Having no friends or home he was sent to the Workhouse.
Olaudah Equinano
Born in 1745 in Nigeria, Equinano was sold into slavery when he was eleven years old for 172 cowry shells. Having been sold many times and having spent much time at sea, he bought his freedom in the 1760’s. He then campaigned vigorously against slavery. He published his autobiography in 1789. He knew the Greenwich district extremely well. He stayed with the Guerin sisters at no. 111 Maze Hill in Greenwich and visited Deptford at least twice.