(A lecture presented at Moray House on May 7, 2012, by Mark Tumbridge in commemoration of the 174th anniversary of the arrival of Indians to Guyana. Tumbridge is a Ph. D. candidate in Caribbean Studies at the University of Warwick; he is also presently attached to the University of Guyana.) THEOPHILUS Richmond’s text (The First Crossing, Caribbean Press, 2010) occupies a unique position in terms of the early history of indentureship and the field of Indo-Caribbean studies.
The journal records the first voyage of the indentured labour system, charting the Hesperus’s epic and perilous journey from Liverpool to Mauritius and from there on to Calcutta. In Calcutta the ship boarded 170 indentured migrants. From there it begins the journey to the Caribbean stopping off at Ascension Island before arriving in British Guiana in May 1838.
Richmond was a young, newly qualified surgeon entering a violent, unpredictable and unfamiliar world. His father, Legh Richmond, was not only chaplain to the Duke of Kent (Queen Victoria’s father), but he also had connections with John Gladstone. Gladstone had property in British Guiana, namely Plantation Vreed-en-Hoop – he had heard how Mauritius were using Indian indentured labourers and wanted to bring Indian migrants over to the Caribbean to fill what he perceived as a labour shortage.
In her wonderful essay Capital Spectacles in British Frames (1996), which includes extracts from Mahadai Das’ work, Madhavi Kale deconstructs the justification of labour shortage and reveals British motives behind this idea. She clearly outlines how they used a whole set of “discursive resources” (Kale, 1996, 120) to create the illusion of a lack of manpower.
The British also intervened materially to affect the prospects of the former slaves who were in a position to establish themselves as competition to the planters. These two strategies, as Kale has observed, consolidated their grip on the industry in British Guiana and Trinidad, as well as making a justification for indentureship.
Even if some British reformists harboured some doubts, the argument convinced the authorities in London – meanwhile the Hesperus had already been dispatched to Calcutta when the assent came.
Richmond’s narrative is positioned among a number of other texts that can be considered as seaborne eyewitness accounts. Thinking of the texts as a group, although Richmond’s journal is the most recent in terms of publication, it was actually the first to be written.
Dr. Edward Ely was American Consul to Bombay and an opium smuggler – his narrative addresses Chinese migrants brought to Trinidad in 1853. The form of Ely’s text most closely resembles that of Captain Swinton’s – these two texts are typical of a captain or surgeon’s log in terms of how they appear on the page, that is, dated entries written in very short sentences.
Swinton’s text details the journey of his ship, the Salsette, which brought Indian indentured labourers to Trinidad in 1858. This voyage was the worst in indentured history in terms of mortality, which is one of the reasons why Swinton’s text (which is available online for free) has survived up until today.
Thirty-eight per cent of the migrants died on that journey. Captain W.H. Angel’s text, The Clipper Ship, “Sheila” is the closest to Richmond’s in terms of form – much more prose-like rather than the clipped sentences of a captain’s everyday journal. Angel’s text addresses a journey in 1877 from Calcutta to Trinidad.
When a copy of the book was handed to Brinsley Samaroo and Ken Ramchand in the 1990s they knew they had found a special text – it contains an account of a female indentured migrant who the crew refer to as the ‘Queen of Sheba’. More widely Richmond’s text fits neatly into the series of classic works of Guyanese literature recently published by the Caribbean Press.
I want to shift away from contextual information to focus on a close reading of part of Richmond’s text that will provide some tools for considering other representations in the book. Before going any further, I would like to warn my audience that this article contains scenes from the journal that some may find disturbing because of violence and abusive language. This is unfortunately the nature of the material. However, I am totally convinced that there is still much to celebrate in what follows. The person I am about to introduce to you is a Black slave or servant who was on the Hesperus. The presence of a Black person on the very first journey of indentureship, as you might imagine, is a remarkable and wonderful discovery. In terms of literary theory he might be conceived of as a subaltern subject.
It is important to briefly consider some theoretical ideas to understand why I have focused on this particular soul who inhabits Richmond’s text. The idea of the subaltern subject was brought into postcolonial theory by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak amongst others. Her seminal essay Can the Subaltern Speak? focused the field on subjects in literature who are written without a voice – those who inhabit the shadows, the periphery or margins of a literary text.
Spivak prompted us to ask of our literature who is given a voice and for whom are they speaking? Who is silenced? How are the self and others represented? The Black slave on the Hesperus is perhaps a quintessential example of such a subject. Spivak thinks of the subaltern person as the position in literature where the absolute limit of history is reached – beyond the subaltern there is no history. These people have no identity, but they raise questions about colonial and nationalist historiography. Spivak says that “the subaltern might be reinscribed as a strategy for our time” (In Other Worlds, 1998, 285). She says this is important because “the agency of change is located in the …‘subaltern’.” (1998, 271).
Without any further ado, it is time to read Page 17 of Richmond’s text, which includes the Black slave.

To be continued…

WHAT’S HAPPENING:
•    We are inviting tributes especially from Guyanese who knew Braithwaite.

•    The Ministry of Culture, Youth & Sport will host the Martin Carter Memorial Lecture on Thursday, June 28 at the Umana Yana at 17:30 hours. This Lecture was originally conceived as an annual lecture presentation in honour of the Guyanese poet, Martin Carter [1927-1997]
This year, the Ministry is pleased to have engaged the distinguished personage of Dr Rupert Roopnaraine to deliver the 2012 Martin Carter Memorial Lecture.
Dr Roopnaraine with deliver the presentation, From the ‘Terror and the Time’ (1976) to the Poetry Notebooks (2002): Encountering Martin Carter

(To respond to this author, either call him on (592) 226-0065 or send him an email: oraltradition2002@yahoo.com)