Celebrations and Shipwrecks in Rhode Island

I read a couple of thought-provoking articles about Revolutionary Rhode Island this week.

Prof. Ben Railton of Fitchburg State University wrote his column in the Saturday Evening Post on Independence Day in Bristol. The town had its first recorded celebration of the day in 1785, giving rise to this article’s title, “Considering History: The Contradictions Behind America’s Oldest July Fourth Celebration.”

Railton writes of contradictory histories:

The first of those two histories is Bristol’s central role in the slave trade, which emerged at precisely the same time the community was beginning to present those Fourth of July celebrations. In Unrighteous Traffick, a series of 15 compelling articles for the Providence Journal in 2006, journalist Paul Davis offered a comprehensive history of Rhode Island’s central role in the slave trade across the entire 18th century. As Davis puts it, “Rhode Island ruled the slave trade. For more than 75 years, merchants and investors bankrolled 1,000 voyages to Africa. Their ships carried some 100,000 men, women, and children into New World slavery.”

Bristol was far from alone, but it emerged as the center of the trade at a particularly fraught moment, in the post-Revolutionary period when Rhode Island had officially outlawed slave trading. As Davis notes, “almost half of all of Rhode Island’s slave voyages occurred after trading was outlawed [in 1787]. By the end of the 18th century, Bristol surpassed Newport as the busiest slave port in Rhode Island.” . . .

Exemplifying that trend is the story of the multi-generational DeWolf family that came to be synonymous with Bristol and even Rhode Island itself. As Davis writes, “the DeWolfs financed 88 slaving voyages from 1784 to 1807 — roughly a quarter of all Rhode Island slave trips during that period.” They used their profits to construct the city’s emerging infrastructure, as with their 1797 founding of the Bank of Bristol with $50,000 in capital.

In addition, the Boston Globe Magazine published Brian Amaral’s article about a dispute rising from the waters off Newport. As Boston 1775 noted in 2016, scholars have reached consensus that the same ship that Capt. James Cook sailed around the world as H.M.S. Endeavour was—under the name H.M.S. Lord Sandwich—scuttled off Rhode Island in 1778.

That news came from the Rhode Island Marine Archeology Project, directed by Dr. D. K. Abbass. In 2018 Boston 1775 reported an upcoming lecture by her about the challenges of identifying any particular underwater wreck as the Endeavour/Lord Sandwich.

This past February, the Australian National Maritime Museum did just that. It declared there was enough information to pinpoint the former Endeavour, the ship that established Britain’s claim to Australia. But then Abbass complained that announcement was premature, that the only definitive statement should come from her organization.

Amaral’s Globe Magazine article is headlined “Is a famous shipwreck in Newport Harbor? An international fight over the answer has turned personal.” It’s part recap and update on the historical investigation, part profile of Abbass. Clearly she has a strong personality. She has to, she might well say, to have built a career in her field.

Is Abbass sitting on a pronouncement about the crucial wreck site to guard her stake? Did the Australian museum break protocol with her for the sake of national politics? Can’t both of those things be true?