Month: June 2013

Amistad letters at Connecticut Historical Society

Modern(ish), Museums

On March 21st, 2013, the Connecticut Historical Society acquired a collection of 91 letters written by Charlotte Cowles, a young girl from Farmington, Connecticut, to her brother Samuel between 1833 and 1846, and three letters from Samuel to Charlotte. With a final cost of $66,000 including buyer’s premium, this was a major purchase, requiring contributions from Farmington Historical Society, Farmington Bank as well as private donors. The reason these letters are worth tens of thousands of dollars is they include beautifully detailed accounts of the Mende captives who overthrew their Spanish captors on the ship La Amistad.


In 1839, 54 captives, 50 adults and four children, were kidnapped in what is today Sierra Leone and taken to Havana, Cuba, aboard the slave ship Tecora. The international slave trade had been outlawed by this point, with Great Britain, Spain and the United States all signatories to various treaties abolishing it. According to Spanish law, as soon as the captives landed in Cuba, they were free, but their captors fraudulently claimed they were Cuban-born slaves and sold them to local plantation owners. The Mende were loaded onto the schooner La Amistad headed for a sugar plantation in Puerto del Principe, Cuba.

Before they reached their destination, the captives, led by Sengbe Pieh, aka Joseph Cinqué, broke free and took control of the ship, killing some of the crew and demanding the survivors take them back home. Ship navigator Don Pedro Montez agreed, but instead steered the ship north along the east coast of the United States. As Montez had hoped, La Amistad was intercepted by a United States Revenue Cutter Service ship on the eastern point of Long Island. Hoping to claim the men under the admiralty salvage law, Lt. Thomas R. Gedney, commander of the revenue cutter, took the Mende to Connecticut where slavery was still technically legal (it was illegal in New York).

The Africans were imprisoned in New Haven, Connecticut, while their case went to court. It was a complex case with many interested parties from Gedney to the plantation owners to the captives themselves who insisted they were nobody’s property. The case was decided in the kidnapped Africans’ favor by a federal district court in 1840, and the decision was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court the next year. On March 9, 1841, the Supreme Court ruled that the Mende were free and should be allowed to go home.

This is the point where Charlotte Cowles steps into the picture. Charlotte’s father Horace Cowles was a conductor on the Farmington Underground Railroad and an active abolitionist. When the Africans were released, Cowles and other abolitionist leaders known as the Amistad Committee who had helped with the legal defense hosted the Amistad captives in their homes. While they raised money to fund their return to Sierra Leone, the Committee members taught the Africans to speak and read English and attempted to convert them to Christianity.

Charlotte’s letters to her brother begin when she is just 13 years old. As she grows up, her writings expand from fabric and friends to an increasing abolitionist social consciousness. Her brother becomes editor of The Charter Oak, a Connecticut abolitionist newspaper, and Charlotte co-founds the Farmington Ladies Anti-Slavery Society. By 1838, she is fully involved in abolitionist causes, telling her brother about the passengers on the Underground Railroad staying at their house on their way to Canada.

When the Amistad Africans were released, the Cowles family hosted one of the children, a girl named Te-meh which Charlotte spells Tenyeh. It takes the Amistad Committee a year to raise the money for the return trip and during that year Charlotte tells her brother all about her guest and the rest of the Mende. From a letter written April 8th, 1841:

Cinque is as choice of his dignity as ever, yet he is often very affable, but none of them are so easy to converse with as Kinna because he speaks English so much more fluently — He is so modest and gentle too, and every one thinks him very fine-looking. Little Fouli is all animation and yet so timid, and little Ka-le is so very bright, and Ya-bo-i is so full of good humor. — I do not know how to say enough about any of them. But Mary’s and my principal favorite, just now at least, is one whom I never heard mentioned. His name is sometimes spelled Ba-gua, but it is entirely unpronounceable, so we call it Banyeh. He is about eighteen, and the most splendid specimen of African beauty I ever saw. I have read in books of this style of beauty, but I never before believed it possible for an African to be very handsome. But if any one sees no beauty in his beaming face and sparkling eyes, all I can say is that their prejudices are control their whole souls and even their fancies. If he were painted for an Othello, the whole beau monde would be delighted. The most remarkable thing about him however is a certain dashing elegance of manner which none of the others possess at all—which is indeed the rarest accomplishment in the most polished society. […]

After all, can you begin to realize that these interesting creatures are but a very small specimen of the victims which the merciless slave- trade is every week—now, this very moment — seizing and destroying! The idea of Cinque and Kinna and Banyeh toiling on a plantation seems incredible. I feel that I never had the least conception before of the horrors of that accursed business, or of the mass of misery that exists in this world; and now, how inadequate!

I could quote the whole letter because every line is an eye-opening record of the Amistad refugees and of abolitionist society. The whole collection is a unique glimpse into the life of a young girl in 1830s Connecticut who grapples with the most quotidian things to issues so huge that 20 years later they would tear the country apart. Even the smallest details — like how hard it is for Charlotte to get to Hartford, which is just 10 miles away from Farmington, to purchase the red and burgundy striped fabric she wants — are fascinating.

The letters are now on display at the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford. The exhibition opened on June 19th in celebration of Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating of the end of slavery in Texas on June 19th, 1865, and features the original letters and transcripts. Scans of the letters and slightly annoyingly formatted transcripts (every other word is underscored as a search keyword) have also been uploaded to Connecticut History Online. Search for “Charlotte Cowles” to see them all.

Napoleon’s death mask sells for $260,000

Modern(ish)

One of only two plaster death masks of Napoleon Bonaparte remaining in private hands sold on Wednesday at Bonhams’ Book, Map and Manuscript sale in London for £169,250 ($260,000). The death mask was made by surgeon Francis Burton of Britain’s Sixty-Sixth Regiment of Foot on May 7th, 1821, two days after Napoleon’s death on St. Helena. Madame Bertrand, the former emperor’s attendant in exile and wife of General Bertrand, Napoleon’s Grand Marshal, insisted the death mask be taken even though plaster was hard to come by on the remote Atlantic island. By the time enough plaster was scared up on a neighboring island, Napoleon’s body had begun to decompose so even though she initially refused to let an Englishman make a mould of Napoleon’s face, Madame succumbed to the inevitable: it was either the Englishman or nobody.

Burton’s mould was done in at least two sections — face from eyebrows to chin, back of the head (possibly in two parts) — and at some point in the process Napoleon’s Corsican doctor Francesco Antommarchi, who had earlier insisted a death mask could not be made due the dearth of materials, joined the work in process. The next day, Burton made a positive cast from the moulds, but the face cast stuck to the original mould which could then only be removed by destroying it, so all that was left of Napoleon’s death mask was the mould of the back of his head and the positive cast.

While the face cast was drying, Burton left Longwood House, Napoleon’s residence, and Mme Bernard took advantage of the opportunity to take the cast so copies can be made in Europe, leaving dirty English hands out of it. Burton was promised a copy, but never received one. He had to settle for keeping the moulds of the back of the head which he reportedly destroyed in rage after his attempts to secure the promised copy failed.

Antommarchi and Bertrand remained on St. Helena until the end of the month. A source of plaster was fortuitously discovered on the island giving them the opportunity to work on a complete death mask. Since they’d pissed off Burton, they didn’t have access to the ears, neck, upper forehead, etc., so they enlisted the aid of artist and miniaturist Joseph William Rubidge who was the only professional artist on the island and whose drawing of the dead emperor would later become a popular print in its own right. Rubidge recreated the missing parts and combined them with the positive face cast to create the one authentic death mask.

Before the group’s departure, two casts made from the prototype were given to the Reverend Richard Boys, Senior Chaplain of St. Helena, who despite his Englishness was popular with the French contingent. He remained on the island for eight years after Napoleon’s death. Upon his return, he carried the death masks and several other mementos of the emperor. He gave one mask to his daughter Mrs. Sankey (ie, the Sankey cast, now at the Maison Française d’Oxford) and the other to his son, the Venerable Archdeacon Markby Boys (ie, the Boys cast). The latter has remained in the Boys family until now. The seller, Andrew Boys, is the great-great-great-great-great nephew of Rev. Richard Boys.

Owner of the mask, Andrew Boys, explains how it came down through his family and into his hands: “At a family funeral I was rather surprised and taken aback, to hear that I had been left this mask. After a while I realized its significance but I was not sure what to do with it beyond ensuring its safety. To date it has been confined to an attic but I most definitely did not want this to happen for another generation. I came to the conclusion that the best thing to do was to offer it for sale in the hope that, as a result, it was something more people would then be able to see and enjoy”.

A donation to a museum might have been a more secure way of seeing that dream come true. There’s no news on who the buyer is.

Anyway, on May 27th, 1821, Bertrand and the rest of the French contingent left the island, the prototype cast stashed in Antommarchi’s bag. That prototype would be used to make plaster and bronze copies which would be sold all over Europe. It would become so recognizable an image that surrealist artist René Magritte painted a blue sky and clouds over no fewer than five plaster copies of Napoleon’s face mask to represent L’Avenir des Statues (The Future of Statues). Here’s one of them at the Tate.

Powhatan’s capital will be preserved for posterity

Modern(ish)

The archaeological site of Werowocomoco, Chief Powhatan’s capital city when the Jamestown colony was founded in 1607, is no longer in danger of development and destruction thanks to a new agreement between the property owners and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. The conservation easement will protect the site from development and keep it open to future archaeological exploration.

Examining records and maps left by explorer Captain John Smith, among other primary sources, in 2003 historians identified the 57 acre site overlooking the York River in Tidewater, Virginia, as the likely center of Powhatan’s vast chiefdom. Subsequent archaeological excavations confirmed the identification, but they’ve barely scraped the surface. Only 2% of the site has been explored thus far. Landowners Robert and Lynn Ripley have generously allowed archaeologists to excavate the site for the past decade, and now that the easement agreement has been made, their generosity will extend in perpetuity giving researchers all the time they need to dig wider and deeper.

Werowocomoco means “place of chiefs” or “place of power” in the Powhatan language and it was no overstatement. Chief Powhatan — real name Wahunsunacawh — created a confederation of tribes whose territory, called Tsenacommacah meaning “densely-populated land,” stretched from the Eastern Shore of Virginia west to a fall line near I-95. All the tribes had their own chiefs who all paid tribute to Wahunsunacawh. Werowocomoco was the seat of religious and temporal power of the Powhatan paramountcy.

Powhatan’s chiefdom covered 30 political divisions and a population of 15,000 to 20,000 people while Jamestown settlers struggled to survive. Excavations have yielded the outline of the largest longhouse ever found in Virginia and a system of ditches that may have separated sacred and secular areas.

Randolph Turner, a retired state archaeologist whose hunt for Werewocomoco dates to the 1970s, said Powhatan’s empire was “one of the most complex political entities in all of eastern North America.” The leader “had the power of life and death” and expanded his empire through warfare or the threat of warfare.

“He’s one of the most interesting political and military figures that I’ve ever read about,” Turner said. “And we’re just getting hints in the historical records of all he accomplished in his lifetime.”

Werowocomoco is an invaluable resource on the life of Powhatan, his chiefdom and culture, all the more so because much of what is commonly known about the great man has been filtered through the perspective of the Jamestown colonists. Notice the title of the article about the easement: “Virginia site of Pocahontas rescue will be preserved.” That’s a reference to the almost certainly apocryphal story that Chief Powhatan’s daughter Pocahontas threw herself bodily over John Smith to save him from being executed by her father in 1607.

Members of the area’s Pamunkey tribe have been involved in the excavations from the beginning, getting their hands dirty in the dig, working with archaeologists to ensure the site is treated with respect and burial grounds are not disturbed. The preservation and continuing exploration of Werowocomoco will reveal their history without the constant and irritating forced connection to Jamestown and the various associated legends.

Ashley Atkins, a Pamunkey member and College of William & Mary doctoral candidate put its neatly: “I want people to understand there was a real civilization, a complex cultural community that existed prior to European colonization. Europeans didn’t bring civilization. They brought a lot of other things, some good, some bad.”

1500-year-old Chinese tomb murals salvaged

Ancient, Looting

In the summer of 2008, experts from the Shanxi Provincial Institute of Archaeology and Shanxi Museum found a tomb in the ancient Fanwangsi Cemetery of Shuozhou City, a town in Shanxi province 200 miles southwest of Beijing, China. Built 1,500 years ago in the Northern Qi Dynasty, the tomb had been repeatedly looted and the only grave goods left were fragments from lower quality pottery figurines and glazed vessels. Besides those pieces, some wooden structural elements and a few iron nails that were probably once part of a canopy over the coffin were the only contents of the tomb remaining. Even the fan-shaped architrave over the doorway had been pried off.

Archaeologists were just in time, however, to save the true crowning glory of this tomb: richly colored murals painted on plastered walls and ceilings. Looters had already marked them for removal. There were blue lines drawn dividing the murals into discrete sections to guide the cutting tools and gauze fabric stuck to the murals in order to keep them from falling apart during the theft. Between June and August, the archaeological team excavated the tomb. In order to keep the paintings safe, to repair environmental and human damage and to ensure their rare ancient color remained brilliant, archaeologists decided to remove the murals. By the end of the summer, 860 square feet of murals were being restored at the Center for the Preservation of Cultural Relics of the Shanxi Museum.

The murals begin on the walls of the passage tunnel leading into the main burial chamber. There are red ochre clouds on the vaulted ceiling and armed guards and cavalry troops on both sides of the tunnel. There’s a single door guard on the west wall leaning against his sword and a pair of honor guards inside the door frame. They too lean on their swords as they face each other. Approaching from a distance are three units of cavalry troops. The same types of figures are on the east wall, the only difference being the orientation of the cavalry.

Passing from the tunnel through the doorway into the tomb chamber, the murals cover the floor to the ceiling in three sections. The domed ceiling is painted with a sky map. A dark grey background symbolizes celestial infinity and the silver river winding through the grey is the Milky Way. White dots on both sides of the Milky Way are stars. On the east side of the heavens is a solar orb with a crow in the middle. Across from it on the west side of the ceiling is the moon with the Lunar Hare and toad inside.

Beneath the sky map are the Four Supernatural Beings — the Green Dragon, White Tiger, Scarlet Bird and Black Tortoise — each guarding one of the cardinal directions. Beneath the Supernatural Beings the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac frolic counter-clockwise in a band around the dome.

Human figures come back into prominence on the walls of the burial chamber. On the north wall a man and a woman sit underneath a canopy at a banquet. These are probably images of the occupants of the tomb. On one side of the canopy female attendants stand, on the other male and female musicians entertain. The women attendants and the hostess wear their hair in the distinctive flying bird style.

The banquet is guarded by more cavalrymen and honor guards on the east wall. Of particular note is a tall light red horse in the center of the image. A line of honor guards stand in front of the horse and attendants carry equipment while in the distance two lines of cavalry approach. It’s a proud display, a procession moving from south to north.

On the west wall is a procession going in the other direction, north to south. In the center of this panel is an ox cart with an arched canopy and awnings. The ox is being driven by two non-Chinese men, so identified by their curly beards. Female attendants with flying bird chignons follow the cart, and yet another honor guard of five men on horses holding pennants are painted above the ox.

The last wall, the south wall, has the doorway in the middle. Around the entrance are two symmetrical sets of musicians. They stand side by side facing each other as they hold long horns so they cross each other at the top.

Such an elaborate set of murals suggest this was the tomb of a high-ranking official. Researchers believe he may have been the local militia leader under the Northern Qi Dynasty, a turbulent period of less than 30 years (550 to 577 A.D.) in which military leaders would have been very highly valued indeed. There are few records covering the history of Shuozhou City during the Northern Qi, and very few archaeological remains have been excavated. This was the first proper scientific excavation of a Northern Qi tomb in Shuozhou and is thus an invaluable source of information about an obscure period.

It took four years of work to restore the murals. They are now divided into 31 sections on aviation aluminum panels so they can be dismantled and transported for exhibition.

The tombstone of Britain’s first Roman legionary

Ancient, Museums

The tombstone of Lucius Valerius Geminus, veteran of the Legio II Augusta, one of the elite legions that first invaded Britain in 43 A.D. under the Emperor Claudius, the legion which defeated Boudica and built Hadrian’s wall, is going on public display at the Oxfordshire Museum in Woodstock for the first time since its discovery in 2003.

The tombstone was found in the foundations of the town wall near the west gate of Alchester, a Roman town two miles south of the modern Oxfordshire town of Bicester. The stone had been broken into 20 pieces and reused for rubble in the foundations of the stone wall which we know from coin evidence was built after 260 A.D. and before the abandonment of the town in the 5th century. The town was preceded by a Roman military base the construction of which, thanks to dendrochronological analysis of two wooden gateposts found at the front gate preserved by waterlogged ground, we can date incredibly precisely to between October of 44 A.D. and March of 45 A.D.

What makes this tombstone such a significant find is the biographical detail in the inscription describing a soldier who most likely participated in the initial conquest of Britain and then settled in the province after his retirement. It’s the only personal biography we have of anyone living in Oxfordshire before the Middle Ages, and the first for an individual veteran in the entire province of Britannia.

Here is the text of the inscription:

Dis. Manibus/ L(ucius) Val(erius) L(uci filius) Pol(lia tribu) Gemi/nus For(o) Germ(anorum)/ vet(eranus) Leg(ionis) [I]I Aug(ustae)/ an(norum) L. h(ic) s(itus) e(st)/ he(res) c(uravit)/ e(x) t(estamento)

“To the souls of the departed: Lucius Valerius Geminus, the son of Lucius, of the Pollia voting tribe, from Forum Germanorum, veteran of the Second Augustan Legion, aged 50(?), lies here. His heir had this set up in accordance with his will.”

Forum Germanorum was a one-horse town in north-west Italy at the base of the Alps in what is today the Piemonte region. It was once part of the province of Gallia Cisalpina (Gaul on this side of the Alps) but had been granted Latin Rights in 89 B.C. under a law promoted by (and maybe even written by) Gnaeus Pompeius Strabo, father of the triumvir Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. Lucius Valerius’s epitaph was inscribed 70 or so years later and his membership in the Pollia voting tribe still ranked a mention.

Since we know that he had to have died before the garrison left Alchester around 60 A.D., his approximate age at death (50), the general age of army recruits (17-25) and the standard term of service for a legionary (25-30 years), we can deduce he joined the legions during the reign of Tiberius (14-37 A.D.). The base of the Second Augustan Legion at that time was Strasbourg from which he may have participated in Caligula’s quasi campaign (he just executed a bunch of his own people and moved around, really) in Germany from 39-40 A.D. Less than two years later, the future emperor Vespasian became commander of Legio II Augusta and it was he who brought it from Strasbourg to Britain in 43 A.D.

It’s unlikely that Lucius Valerius died away from home and was buried on the spot. As noted in the inscription, the gravestone was inscribed and installed according to the explicit instructions in his will. Obviously he felt no need to be interred back home in Forum Germanorum — he’d probably been gone decades by then — because it wasn’t at all unheard of for soldiers on expedition to be returned home for burial even over great distances but he chose to rest eternally in British soil.

No accompanying burial was found during the 2003 excavation of the Alchester walls. This makes sense because he would have been buried outside of the city, probably along a road. What seems most likely to have happened is a couple of hundred years after his death and burial, Lucius’ gravestone was broken up and moved by cart to the construction site of the new town walls. It was probably a deliberate breakage and transport rather than someone collecting random broken stones because so much of it was found in the rubble foundation.

After its discovery, the tombstone was studied and painstakingly piece back together by experts at the Oxfordshire Museum. Starting July 20th, the gravestone of Lucius Valerius Geminus, first known legionary of Britannia, will be on display in the museum’s History in the Making Exhibition.