Niña, Pinta, Santa María — Dart, Minerva, Dias de Favreire

Sunday Essay · History, Memory & Identity

On the ships that carried our people, the archive that kept their names, and the curriculum that chose not to teach them.

By Terrence Richard Blackman, Ph.D. · June 21, 2026

I. The Fleet I Was Given

Niña, Pinta, Santa María. I can still recite them in the order a Queen’s College master set them down for me, the way you can still find a hymn you have not sung since you were ten. Two caravels and a carrack, one ocean, one date — 1492 — and a boy at a wooden desk in Georgetown who could trace their route across a coloured map with his finger. I learned those three names the way I learned my times tables: completely, permanently, and without ever being asked whether I wanted them. Once, as a boy, I asked my teacher what had been there in 1491 — the year before the story was allowed to begin — and was made to stand on my chair for the entire period, as though curiosity about the year before were a small act of vandalism. Perhaps it was. Years afterward I came upon the books of Charles Mann, the first of them titled, of all things, 1491: a whole volume given over to the very question for which I had been made to stand. I will not pretend the vindication was unwelcome.

It was decades before it occurred to me to ask the obvious question. I could name the three ships that carried a Genoese sailor toward an island he misidentified. I could not name a single one of the ships that carried my own people across the same ocean to the coast on which I was standing. Seven generations of us in this country — the Pomeroon, Alexander Village, a line I can follow back further than most men can follow their own — and at the head of it, where the first of us stepped off onto Guianese mud, there was a blank where the vessel’s name should be. I had been given the fleet of the man who got lost. I had not been given the fleet that found me.

II. The Accounting Enterprise

For most of my life I assumed that blank was a wound — that the names were gone because slavery devours its own records, because a trade in human beings must surely have been too brutal, too furtive, too ashamed of itself to keep accounts. I had the consolation of believing the silence was a gap. It is not. It is one of the quieter horrors of the archive that the Atlantic slave trade was, above all else, an accounting enterprise.

It kept books. It kept beautiful books. Every voyage that set a captive down at Demerara or Berbice or Essequibo threw off a paper trail an auditor would admire: insurance policies that priced each body against the risk of the sea, customs manifests that tallied arrivals like bales of cotton, owners’ ledgers, captains’ logs, the cool arithmetic of embarked and disembarked with the difference — the dead — entered in the same steady hand. The trade recorded my ancestors with a thoroughness it denied them in life. They were written down precisely because they were counted as cargo. That is the obscenity at the centre of the thing: the same ledger that refused them their humanity is the reason we can, today, recover their ships.

And we can. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database holds some thirty-six thousand of these voyages, searchable by the very port where the human cargo was landed.^[1] Filter it for the three counties that became my country and the vessels surface by name — the Dart, the Minerva, and the hundreds behind them — each with a captain, a date, a number embarked and a smaller number landed. The names were never lost. They were sitting in the archive the whole time I was reciting the Niña and the Pinta and the Santa María. No one had thought to teach them to me. That is a different kind of loss altogether, and a more damning one — because it was a choice.

“Memory is not a faculty. It is a budget. Somebody chooses what gets the lesson, the hymn, the coloured map, and what gets the archive box.”

— Terrence Richard Blackman

III. Naming Is the Work

Let me name some of them, then, because naming is the work.

The first of my people to be brought here came in the holds of Dutch ships, in the long century when Essequibo and Berbice and then Demerara were plantations of the West India Company, worked for a market in Amsterdam that has largely forgotten it ever owned us. Those Dutch records are the thinnest — the further back you reach, the more the archive frays — but the ships sailed, and they are not all anonymous. Then, in 1796, the British took the three colonies, and the trade changed gear. Demerara became a frontier of sugar and cotton and credit, and the ships came faster: in 1801 alone, by the reckoning of the records, more than fourteen thousand Africans were landed on that single stretch of coast.^[2] Fourteen thousand human beings, in one year, on one river.

They came in vessels with the bland, almost domestic names the English merchants favoured. The Dart, out of Liverpool, set down its captives at Demerara in 1801 and came back to do it again the next year. The Minerva, out of London, landed three hundred and fifty-nine souls at Demerara in 1800 and sailed on toward Berbice. Behind those two stand hundreds more, each one a Sunday’s worth of reading, each one a name a Guyanese child could be made to know as easily as she knows the Santa María.

And then there is a second fleet, which we must be careful not to fold into the first, because the difference is the whole of someone’s life. After Britain outlawed the trade in 1807, the Royal Navy began stopping slave ships at sea and carrying their captives to Sierra Leone, to St. Helena, to Rio de Janeiro — and from 1841, British Guiana brought these “Liberated Africans” to its plantations as labour. They arrived on named ships too, and on documented days. The first of them reached Berbice on the eleventh of May, 1841 — about one hundred and fifty souls, carried up from Rio de Janeiro — aboard a vessel the colonial clerk entered in his register as the Dias de Favreire.^[4] The Venezuela followed that September, also from Rio. The Lady Rowena came into Georgetown on the first of November with two hundred and ninety-nine aboard; the Zulmeina reached Demerara the following March. These were not slavers in the old sense; the people they carried had been seized from bondage rather than into it. To say their names in the same breath as the Dart‘s, without marking the difference, is to lose precisely the distinction that mattered most to the men and women who lived it. Precision, here, is not pedantry. It is respect.

IV. A Budget, Not a Faculty

Why, then, do I carry the three and not the three thousand?

Not because the three were better kept. We have seen that they were not; the slavers were documented with a care that shames the curriculum. I carry the Niña and the Pinta and the Santa María because, somewhere along a century of curricular choices, it was settled that those three names were a story worth pressing into a child — and that the others were merely data, to be left in the ledgers where the accountants had filed them. Memory is not a faculty. It is a budget. Somebody chooses what gets the lesson, the hymn, the coloured map, and what gets the archive box.

I have spent a good part of my working life on a related thesis, which I have called, only half in jest, Beyond a Googol: the claim that Black mathematical excellence is not absent from history but systematically undocumented — that the men and women existed and the record of them was never made. The ships are that thesis turned inside out, and they are the more troubling for it. Here the record was made. Made meticulously, made in triplicate, made by the very people who profited. The erasure did not happen at the moment of writing. It happened at the moment of teaching — later, cooler, more deliberate, performed not by slavers but by educators, by ministries, by the quiet editorial hand that decides what a nation’s children will be given to keep. Absence is one way to disappear a people. Abundance, left untaught, is another. We have been disappeared both ways.

“The erasure did not happen at the moment of writing. It happened at the moment of teaching — later, cooler, more deliberate, performed not by slavers but by educators, by ministries, by the quiet editorial hand that decides what a nation’s children will be given to keep.”

— Terrence Richard Blackman

V. The Excuse Is Gone

And here is what has changed, and why I can no longer treat the blank as fate.

The archive is open now. The ledgers the accountants kept have been gathered, in our own lifetime, into a single searchable record that anyone with a telephone can interrogate from a verandah in Kitty or a kitchen in Brooklyn. You may filter it by the place the cargo was landed and read back the vessels that came to your county. Alongside it sits a second database, African Origins, which holds the personal particulars of some ninety-five thousand people taken off captured slave ships — their African names, their ages, where they were embarked — and which will, if you ask it, pronounce those names aloud, so that you may hear a sound your great-great-grandmother might have answered to.^[3]

I do not pretend this is easy listening. I say only that the excuse is gone. For most of the history I am describing, the sentence we cannot know was simply true; the records were scattered across three empires and a dozen languages, and no one life was long enough to assemble them. That sentence is no longer true. We can know. Whether we choose to is now a question about us, not about the archive.

But I would be cheating you to stop on that clean note, as though the archive were a vending machine and recovery a matter of pressing the right key. Look again at that first Liberated African ship, the one the Berbice clerk logged in the spring of 1841. He set it down as the Dias de Favreire — and no vessel was ever truly christened that. It is an English hand mangling a Portuguese name, a clerk transcribing by ear a tongue he did not speak, and the error has sat in the record, uncorrected, for nearly two centuries. The name survived. It simply survived wrong. That, I have come to think, is the truer condition of our memory — not a clean blank waiting to be filled but a smudged line waiting to be read properly — and it means the work ahead of us is not merely retrieval. It is repair.

And the further I go, the worse the news for the easy version. Go looking for that first ship and the record itself forks. Writing in Stabroek News’s History This Week, Shammane Joseph gives you the Dias de Favreire, reaching Berbice from Rio on the eleventh of May, 1841;^[4] in the same column, years later, Cecilia McAlmont — following the historian Oswald Kendall — gives you a plainer vessel, the Superior, arriving a fortnight later and setting its people down along the Essequibo coast.^[5] Two first ships, two first days, and not even the same stretch of coast — and neither writer is careless. Each is doing precisely the work I am asking of all of us, and still they do not agree. The record does not merely need dusting; in places it needs adjudicating, one contradiction at a time, by people willing to sit with the ledgers until one account yields. That is not retrieval. It is not even repair. It is judgment — and judgment is the most expensive form of remembering there is.

VI. Sovereignty and Remembrance

Which brings me, as these essays tend to, to the present — and to money.

Guyana is, suddenly and against every expectation of my boyhood, a wealthy country. The oil has made us so. We are building roads and bridges and power stations; we are arguing, rightly, about funds and formulas and what a sovereign endowment owes to the generations not yet born. In all of that argument, I have not once heard it proposed that some sliver of this new wealth be spent on memory. We have decided that sovereignty buys infrastructure. We have not yet decided that it buys remembrance.

It can — and this is the rare moment when we could afford to. Oil has given us, perhaps for the first time in our history, the means to finance not merely development but recovery: not only the country we are building, but the past we have declined to teach. A nation that can stand up a Natural Resource Fund can stand up a national register of the ships — a public, permanent, authoritative naming of every vessel that brought a captive or a Liberated African to these shores, drawn from the databases and the colonial papers and set in stone where the landings happened, at the mouths of the rivers we still call Essequibo and Berbice and Demerara. A nation that can fund a school can fund a lesson in which a Guyanese child learns the Dart and the Lady Rowena in the same week she learns the Santa María — and learns, too, the difference between them. This is not expensive. Measured against a single mile of highway it is nothing. What it requires is not money but the decision that the dead are worth the line item. The constraint was never the cost. The constraint was the choosing — and we are, for the first time, a people with the means to choose.

VII. The Blank at the Top of the Line

I began with a boy who could name three ships. Let me end with the man he became, who has spent years tracing a line seven generations deep — through Alexander Village, up the Pomeroon, back along a coast my family has worked and buried its dead in since before there was a Guyana to call it — and who has found, at the very top of that line, the old blank still waiting where a ship’s name should be.

I mean to fill it. The record is open; the work is only patience. And I have chosen where to begin. Before the next of these essays, I mean to settle that mangled name in the Berbice register — the Dias de Favreire that never was — and tell you what the first ship of the Liberated Africans was truly called. Call it a rehearsal for the harder name at the top of my own line. And when I find that one — the vessel, the captain, the date, the number embarked and the smaller number that stepped off alive — I will write it down where my grandchildren can find it, beside the three names a schoolmaster gave me half a century ago and could not be bothered to balance. I was taught three ships. I intend that they be taught three hundred. That is the whole of the argument, and it is not, in the end, about ships at all. It is about who decides what a people is allowed to remember — and the discovery, late but not too late, that the decision is now ours to make.

References

1. Slave Voyages. “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.” slavevoyages.org. Emory University et al.
2. Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Voyages to Demerara, 1801. slavevoyages.org.
3. Slave Voyages. “African Origins Database.” slavevoyages.org.
4. Joseph, S. (2010). “The Liberated Africans of Berbice, 1841–1865.” Stabroek News, History This Week, 12 August 2010.
5. McAlmont, C. (following Kendall, O.). “The Liberated Africans of British Guiana.” Cited in Stabroek News, History This Week.
6. Mann, C. C. (2005). 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Knopf.

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