Black Harbour: Slavery and the Forgotten Histories of Black People in Newfoundland and Labrador by Xaiver Michael Campbell and Heather Barrett was a slight book of 183 pages telling a brief story of slavery and black settlement in Newfoundland and Labrador. While black history in Canada’s easternmost province is without a doubt a forgotten history, I found the authors’ account to be overwrought with repetition. It only requires one explanation in an early chapter to inform the readers of the origins of black settlement, and why the black experience was erased from history, yet the authors’ repetitiveness made the read seem more as a ruse to pad out an already thin book.
I found the earliest histories of black slaves sold in Newfoundland and their role during the years of exploration and in the fishing trade to be the most captivating. The authors forced the reader to look at the current traditions in Newfoundland and question how they got that way. Many of these traditions occur in the kitchen: how did molasses become such a staple of Newfoundland cuisine? When I was in Newfoundland this past summer, I was served a snowball, a chocolate ball coated in coconut. How do you think molasses and coconut became such a standard part of Newfoundland cooking when neither sugarcane nor coconut palms grow on the east coast? These culinary ingredients found their way to Newfoundland via the black sailors or slaves who came to the east coast via the Caribbean.
Campbell and Barrett also documented all the boats that were built in Newfoundland that were used to transport slaves. They provided charts detailing the names of each vessel, when it was in operation and the number of slaves it transported, as well as the number who perished during transit. The authors also found records that documented some slaves’ names. In order to ensure that these souls weren’t left to lie in obscurity, they listed their names–all of them–several times. I get why they did this, but it seemed gratuitously repetitious to read the same string of names over and over again.
One unfortunate fault in the writing is that both authors employed an overabundance of incomplete sentences. Suddenly a period appeared at the end of these fragments. On countless occasions I would have to reread these passages since the rhythm was destroyed, as I anticipated subjects or verbs after a long subordinate clause. The authors’ sentence fragments made no sense on their own and did not enhance the points they were making.
Black Harbour was a noble start to document the history of slavery and black settlement in Newfoundland and Labrador. It was far too short and repetitive to be a major academic work, and I anticipate more work will be written as archives are explored and more sites are discovered.