(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.) WITHOUT any further ado, it is time to read Page 17 of Richmond’s text, which includes the Black slave.
There are great numbers of flying fish hereabouts, constantly pursued by an enemy called the Skipping Jack, and their different attempts to catch and escape are very amusing to see. It is impossible to describe the extraordinary beauty of the nights in this latitude, for no pen could do them justice; there is a constant succession of Meteors, falling stars & vivid sheet light’ning beside the brilliancy of a new constellation named the Southern Cross composed of four large stars; added to these there is the most beautiful phosphoric light from the water that you can conceive, we literally sail in floods of fire: Montgomery might have sat on our bowsprit when he wrote thus:
Gleamed the Sea
Whose waves were spangled with phosphoric fire,
As tho’ the lightnings there had spent their shafts,
And left the fragments glittering  on the field.
Pelican Island

Friday, 28th
“Fun is fun but opening your oysters with my razor is not fun at all” is a saying that I thought of this morning when I saw our nigger cabin boy very quietly scraping an old dirty teapot with my penknife, and in which I assisted by sending him and his pot head over heels along the deck; knives are too precious at sea to use them thus. A beautiful Nautilus sailed by us, of a pink colour and…

It is important to read how this man is introduced into the text. While emerging from a burst of light, he never fully makes it out of the shadows. As he is possibly the most ephemeral and peripheral of subjects in Richmond’s work, it is imperative that his place in the text is reassessed with a view to rearticulating his position.
This clipped, violent outburst is disturbing not only in its content, but also in the jarring way that it is sequenced or positioned in the text; the shift away from Richmond’s romantic description of the sea is too abrupt and the effect of this is to make the violence appear all the more sudden and shocking.
He appears at the beginning of a new entry directly after one of the aesthetical apexes of Richmond’s text where he was most imaginatively engaged in the wonders of the journey, not to mention appearing psychologically at ease.
“Flying fish…Meteors, falling stars and vivid sheet light’ning” alongside “the brilliancy of a new constellation” are a testament to this.  When he says “we literally sail in floods of fire” (my italics) he does not mean it; he is speaking figuratively. Then, a quotation from a James Montgomery poem that seems to tap into all this beauty is followed by Richmond knocking an African slave along the deck.
A jarring in the text is produced by Richmond quickly leaving the imaginative dimension and reengaging the reader with the stark and violent material world. The presence of the Black slave shakes the very foundations of Richmond’s text.
Richmond’s reaction speaks of the shattering of his patience and tolerance, but it also reveals the value a ship’s surgeon would invest in a knife – from Richmond’s point of view, the knife might save a life. That Richmond reacts so violently towards him, both at the level of text and physically, is perhaps symbolic of the crisis in Richmond’s future.
The trope of death which inhabits the text more or less from the start becomes an uncanny reminder of Richmond’s own death from yellow fever just months after arriving in British Guiana. There is no recording of what Richmond actually said to the Black slave, but it could be that there are traces of it left in the quotation above.
These six brief lines are all that Richmond allows us to see – the Black slave is absent from the rest of the text. The brevity of the presence of the slave in the narrative seems to fit with Spivak’s argument that the subaltern is at the edge of history, and suggests that he occupies a position that is very radical at this early stage of indentureship.
Who was this black man experiencing the first crossing? At present, all of the information available on him is within those six lines; any knowledge of his background will be speculative at this point.
How did he get to Liverpool? Had he arrived there directly from Africa, or had he come via the Caribbean? The former is feasible, but as the Hesperus had set sail from Liverpool, it is possible that he was a slave with experience of the Middle Passage.
However, if he came to Liverpool via the Middle Passage, this would mean he was at least 30 years old when he boarded the Hesperus – bearing in mind that Richmond calls him “boy”. It is possible he was as young as 13 or 14, but Richmond may have been using “boy” to emasculate and insult an older man. The idea that he is 30 years old is based on an estimate that assumes he was enslaved by the British no later than 1807, when the trafficking of African slaves was abolished.
On the other hand, it may be that he was the descendant of a slave and had made the journey onwards from the Caribbean to Liverpool. Alternatively, of course, he may have been a Black British subject; there were, according to Peter Fryer’s Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, “10,000 or so living in Britain at the beginning of the nineteenth century” (Fryer, 1984, p. 235).
Speculation aside, the presence of this black man upon the first journey is certainly important in terms of creolisation. This is another aspect of his radicalism; he changed history. He allows the first contact between African and East Indian people that were involved in slavery and indentureship to be placed at an earlier point in history than has hitherto been suggested.
Between 5th and 16th May 1838, the Hesperus and the Whitby arrived in Guyana dropping off their human cargoes at Berbice and Demerara; it is at or shortly after this point that the first encounter between the communities would have occurred in the Caribbean.
However, the presence of the slave aboard the Hesperus allows the start of the creolisation process for East Indian (and conceivably Chinese) indentured labourers to be estimated at possibly the end of November 1837 when the Hesperus reached the pilot station on the Hugli, or slightly later around the 8th December when it reached the docks and depots of Calcutta itself.
The black slave would have encountered the gaze of the original soon-to-be East Indian indentured labourers of the Caribbean fully five months before they arrived in British Guiana. It is unlikely that he would have stayed in India when the ship set sail for the Caribbean (the rest of the crew stayed with the Hesperus until it returned to Liverpool), which places him amongst the migrants on that epic journey.
The encounter between the Black slave and the East Indian indentured labourers in India is the first possible instance of creolisation literally speaking (meaning in terms of physical contact). The East Indians’ journey is at least symbolically comparable to that of the Africans and would figure later in their encounter as a shared experience.
The journey is recorded in the archive in a number of forms. As part of the research for my PhD, late in 2010 a visit was made to the National Archives of Britain at Kew, south west London. After two hours of painstakingly turning over very fragile documents, the muster listing for the Hesperus was found.
This document would have been written in Liverpool before the ship set sail and accompanied the vessel until it returned to the UK. The muster listing records the names, dates and places of birth of the members of the crew. The document was scanned using high resolution technology at the National Archives – this allowed the document to be read in detail, close up and over time. It lists the twenty members of the crew, including Richmond and the 22-year-old seaman, Dobson, who died in the cholera outbreak.
However, all analysis on the places of birth points to the other crew members being born in England and Ireland. The Black slave seems not to have been listed in the records – unless he had an anglicised name and was indeed a Black British subject born in England or Ireland.
Making any final conclusions about the slave on the Hesperus seems contrary to ideology of the project of this article. His story needs opening out and elaborating on rather than closing down – further research needs to be done on Richmond’s journal and on the Black slave of the Hesperus. It would be a mistake to read his silence as a sign of stoicism. He is a subaltern for our time.

WHAT’S HAPPENING:
•    A month of activities is planned by the National Library to honour ER Braithwaite on his birth centenary. We are inviting tributes to the man and comments on his work..

•    The Ministry of Culture, Youth & Sport will be hosting the Martin Carter Memorial Lecture on Thursday at the Umana Yana beginning at 17:30 hours. This year, Dr Rupert Roopnaraine will 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)