NEW HAVEN (06/21/2007) -- The Freedom Schooner Amistad, a re-creation of the vessel on which 53 captive Africans attempted to win their freedom in 1837 and whose struggle for freedom inspired the religious abolition movement, sailed from her home port of New Haven to begin a voyage that will bring her to Sierra Leone, the home of the original Africans, and back across the Atlantic's Middle Passage. Blessed by the presence and good wishes of local, state, and federal public officials; the prayers of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim clergy; and hundreds of well-wishers, Captain Eliza Garfield and her crew sailed into a beautiful afternoon to begin their eighteen month journey.
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Minister Lammy, Attorney General Blumenthal, and Treasurer Nappier sing "Lift Every Voice and Sing" before the Sengbe statue |
The day began with an interfaith service hosted by the United Church on the Green, UCC, featuring the words of the Rev. M. Linda Jaramillo, the UCC's Executive Minister for Justice and Witness Ministries. A crowd of local young people, Amistad well-wishers, and visitors in the state for the United Church of Christ's General Synod stood before the great statue of Sengbe Pieh at City Hall to hear several notables reflect upon the significance of the original Amistad struggle and the promise of the current vessel's Freedom Tour. Among those celebrating were:
The Rev. John Thomas, General Minister and President of the United Church of Christ, brought particularly appropriate words to the gathering, seeing in the Amistad incident of 1837 the best and worst of American Christians, and looking forward to a day when the sadness of slavery and its ills shall be no more.
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| John Thomas at the Amistad |
Celebrants marched from a site nearby to the Amistad's berth at Long Wharf Pier for the vessel's blessing ceremony. At a special service for UCC visitors, held to allow those beginning work on Synod matters that afternoon, Rev. Thomas blessed the vessel, her work of education, and her crew with prayer. Connecticut Conference Minister Davida Foy Crabtree introduced crew member Donald George, a Sierra Leone national whom the UCC had sponsored to enter the United States so he could participate in the voyage. Mr. George performed a traditional Sierra Leone libation ceremony to bless the schooner.
Children's choruses, a letter from US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, the presentation of a replica of the 1807 British Act of Parliament which ended the slave trade in the British Empire, blessings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish clergy, and a further libation from Magdaline Mamie Jigba of Sierra Leone ended when the Amistad slipped the lines that held her to the pier, and she made her way toward the harbor mouth, escorted by US Coast Guard vessels and New Haven's Quinnipiac schooner.
The Amistad's Atlantic Freedom Tour will visit the ports of Nova Scotia, Liverpool, London, Lisbon, Dakar, Freetown, Barbados, and others, before returning to New Haven up the US Atlantic coast. She will be in England during the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the end of the legal slave trade in the British Empire and the United States, and in Freetown will be near the home of the original Amistad voyagers.
The voyage from Africa to the Caribbean will recall their experiences on a slave ship before reaching Cuba. There the 53 were to be carried on the coasting schooner La Amistad to a Cuban plantation. Seizing the vessel, the former captives attempted to sail her east to Africa, but were intercepted by a US Revenue Service vessel and held in New Haven as mutineers. A lengthy court battle, argued before the US Supreme Court by former President John Quincy Adams, eventually proved that they had been illegally enslaved and transported to the Americas. The Amistad Committee, which had been formed chiefly of the local New England Congregationalists, went on to become the nucleus of the American Missionary Association, the nation's first religious anti-slavery organization.
