Proving Einstein Right: The Daring Expeditions that Changed How We Look at the Universe by S. James Gates & Cathie Pelletier

Author:S. James Gates & Cathie Pelletier
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2019-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

HENRY WOODD NEVINSON

On the question of slave traffic in Príncipe and São Tomé, the media got involved. In 1904 and 1905, an investigative journalist named Henry Woodd Nevinson went to Angola on behalf of Harper’s Monthly Magazine. Unlike William Cadbury, he wanted to see firsthand what was happening, both in the interior of Angola, where many of the “volunteer laborers” originated, and on the cocoa plantations themselves. In his middle age, Nevinson had become a British war correspondent. He covered several wars, including World War I, during which he was wounded at Gallipoli, in the same battle that took the life of physicist Henry Moseley. As a journalist, he “brought warfare to British breakfast tables.”4

For his investigation, Nevinson journeyed 450 miles into the dense forests of central Angola, to the origin of the trading route. He then followed the trail to the sea, the same path along which men, women, and children were forced to walk. He would witness floggings, dismemberments, rape, and murder. The trail was already so littered with human skeletons that Nevinson felt outrage. Hanging from the trees were wooden neck and leg shackles, removed from the bodies for the next trader to find and put to use. “It would take an army of sextons to bury all those poor bones that consecrate that path,” he wrote.

Henry Nevinson was then forty-nine years old and gravely ill. Believing he had been poisoned by Portuguese dealers to stop his investigation, he swallowed the antidote he carried and made arrangements for his journal to be sent to England should he die. And yet he walked twenty miles a day in the unforgiving heat. The fury he felt as a firsthand witness to this inhumanity drove him onward. The beaten and starving souls who survived were “freed” by the Portuguese officials waiting for them at the end of the march. They were free, that is, to work for five years on São Tomé or Príncipe. These were the places from which no one ever returned. In their language, São Tomé had become synonymous with the word okalunga, which means “hell.” Still suffering from fever, Nevinson followed one group of captives down to the water’s edge and boarded the ship waiting to transport them to the cocoa plantations on both islands, a voyage that would take eight days. On this particular ship were 273 captives, not counting 50 babies. What Nevinson saw after he reached the plantations was just as deplorable. “As horrible as anything recorded in human history,” he wrote. His columns were printed in Harper’s over the next several months, causing a public outcry. In 1906, Nevinson’s book titled A Modern Slavery was published. 5

William Cadbury had begun an investigation of his own by enlisting a fellow Quaker and former bank employee named Joseph Burtt to investigate. What were the conditions really like on the plantations that were providing him with “brown gold?” To learn the language, Burtt first lived for several months in Portugal. He left England for Africa

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.