ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Abrabah: Enslaved Garden Girls as Captive Scientists in a Silent Archive

• In Event: Other Voices in Early Modern Science

English Abstract

Despite the ubiquity of their presence, children have largely been invisible in the historiography of the British slave trade. Children are generally unworthy of substantive notice unless the profit potential lodged in their pre-adolescent bodies comes into question. Yet, one population of child victims in Britain’s slave trafficking industry occupies a unique presence, not only in the history of the slave trade but also in the history of science in the Atlantic world.
This talk explores the role of enslaved African garden girls who were owned by Britain’s Company of Merchants Trading to Africa. They lived out their enslavement at Cape Coast Castle in present-day Ghana. From approximately the age of five to fourteen, they served the slave trading corporation as “garden girls.” Five-year-old Effeway, eight-year-old Aquishbah, eight-year-old Ambah, and nine-year-old Crofsuah are among the hundreds of little girls named in the Company’s archives as “garden girls.” Throughout the eighteenth century, enslaved African garden girls participated in the Company’s two most important medical and scientific initiatives—growing physic gardens with local, indigenous medical remedies based on the precolonial West African pharmacopoeia; and, contributing to agricultural and horticultural experimentation which the Company required in order to profit from the ‘big science’ and ‘big business’ of the era—botany. The gardens at Cape Coast Castle represent an unacknowledged sphere of scientific activity in the 18th-century Atlantic world, and the garden girls who tended them have likewise been invisible and unknown. This talk situates the girls as captive scientists, and wrestles with archival silences to bring them from names in a ledger into fuller presence as contributors to Atlantic science.

Author

• Carolyn Roberts, Yale University