For most of my enlightened life I have been haunted by a question for which I have never been able to find an answer but which recurs in my head every year during the celebration of the just ended Holetown Festival.
It has to do with what happened to the ten Africans who landed at Holetown in 1627 along with the first group of 80 English settlers.
Yes, you can go into the archives and trace the subsequent successes or failures of most, if not all,of the 80 Englishmen. People who delve into these aspects of our history could even probably pinpointa cemetery somewhere on the island and even the gravesite of one or more of those first 80.
But no, there is no one who can or who probably ever tried to trace the subsequent fate of a single one of those first ten Africans. For, despite the fact that they were slaves, the records of their owners more than likely would have contained some mentionor reference in the details of their “property”.
This missing link of information has haunted me almost as seriously as the missing link pertaining to the African side of my family. For whereas I can easily trace part of my ancestry to Scotland and, if I wanted, could use one of the international agencies in that field to find me some Gilkes blood in Aberdeen or Glasgow, there is no means by which I can connectto any roots of my no-name African family tree on the other side of the Atlantic.
Yet, for years with every staging of the Holetown Festival, I have hoped and prayed the planners would dedicate some element of the events to the memoryof those first ten Africans who landed at “The Hole”.
There is a Holetown Monument there which “commemorates the tercentenary of the first landingof Englishmen from the Olive Blossom near thisspot about the month of July 1605 . . . .” But nothing for 1625 or 1627 that I am aware of.
So via Internet search engines like Google and Ask, I have been persistently googling and asking for any possible information uncovered about the ten.Yes, I get endless answers but all contain basically the same information, namely that in 1625, captain John Powell landed in Barbados with his crew and claimed the uninhabited island for England. Two years later, his brother Captain Henry Powell landed with a party of 80 settlers and ten African slaves. I can read more about what the 80 went on to achieve but not a single word more about the ten.
Then out of the blue last week when I typeda question on Ask about those ten Africans, I gotan answer that shocked the living daylights out of me. It indicated in no uncertain terms that they never existed. That’s right. There were no Africanson that boat with Powell and his 80 Englishmen.
If you doubt me, the information is there for the whole world to see on a website that appearsto be totally and 100 per cent Barbadian andwhich, in its history of Barbados segment,carries the following revelation:
“1627: The first British settlement arrived, brought by Captain Henry Powell. It consisted of 80 English settlers and 10 kidnapped Irish and English workers.”
Now I know and now you know that our historyhas been incorrect all along.
Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm.Email algilkes@gmail.com.
