Your editorial (4 November) notes that the British “have long found it fairly easy to sweep the history of slavery under the carpet”. Here in Plymouth we have the distinction of having been in the forefront of the slave trade, in the person of Admiral Sir John Hawkins. We even have a square named after him. And there is a lot of sweeping under the carpet.
Mayflower 400 is commemorating the Mayflower voyage of 1620 without reference to the context and aftermath of that colonising venture. You are right to say that “The history of race relations in the US is the great, divisive faultline running through American history” – and it is firmly rooted in the Virginia colony and the arrival of the Mayflower. The myth that Britons want to remember is of a brave search for freedom. But what needs to be remembered is that this was an invasion, seeking profit, and part of that process was the construction of a racial categorisation.
The early English colonists of Virginia and New England adopted slavery as a labour practice. The wealth of New England was built on another triangular trade: supplying the Caribbean slave plantations and distilling rum to exchange for slaves in west Africa. But Plymouth, in the form of the Mayflower 400 commemoration, does not seem to want to face up to the painful truth of the slave trade.
Angela Sherlock
Plymouth
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