Navigating a New Mid-Nineteenth Century Middle Passage: ‘Liberated Africans,’ Immigration, Illness, and Decentering ‘Western’ Notions of Disease

Marcus Filippello, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In the early hours of 3 March 1848, a British ship named the Amity Hall steered into the harbor of Kingston, Jamaica. The ship’s passengers consisted of West and Central Africans who had entered contracts to work on plantations shortly after being freed from illicit slaving vessels by the British Navy’s West Africa Squadron. The Amity Hall was one in a makeshift fleet of naval ships and commercial vessels designated to transport emigrants to British and French colonies in the years following the emancipation of enslaved peoples in 1838 and 1848, respectively. From 1840 to the early 1860s, these ships delivered nearly 52,000 Africans and many thousands more south and east Asians to the Americas to work as ostensibly free laborers. Like many of the ships involved in the transport of emigrants across the Atlantic, the Amity Hall failed to deliver its full complement of passengers. Of the 277 Africans who boarded it from Sierra Leone the month prior to its arrival in Kingston, 44 died, mostly from varying diseases and illnesses. This paper examines the Amity Hall’s ship records alongside colonial dispatches and correspondence to foreground how disease ecologies and the mid-nineteenth century ships outfitted to traverse a new type of middle passage shaped a mid-nineteenth century Atlantic world. While Africans feature only tangentially in colonial documentation, a critical reading of data also yields new insights about how their perceptions of illness and environmental space informed and challenged perceptions of imperial notions of modernity as they navigated varying layers of freedom and colonial subjugation.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 51. Disease Ecologies, Notions of Modernity, and Conceptions of Illness