DATE: Sunday, November 16, 1997             TAG: 9711160069

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B3   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY NANCY LEWIS, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:  126 lines

SLAVE-SHIP EXHIBIT ARRIVING AT NAUTICUS NEXT YEAR OFFICIALS ARE HOPING SUCH TOPICS WILL BRING AFRICAN AMERICANS TO THE SITE MORE OFTEN.

When Peter Decker saw the child-sized iron shackles and the wax model of an African man huddled in a cramped corner of the slave ship, tears came to his eyes.

``To think that humans could treat other humans that way. It was worse than the worst jail - inhumane,''said the Norfolk attorney, remembering his two visits to the Henrietta Marie, the 16th century transport that delivered 400 Africans into bondage.

Dredged from the bottom of the Atlantic in 1983, the 400 pieces that comprise the exhibit will come to Nauticus next September for a three-month stay.

Decker proposed bringing the exhibit to Norfolk after viewing it in Miami last year.

The Henrietta Marie is the second national traveling exhibit scheduled to come to the maritime center next year. In February, a 6,000-square-foot scientific and educational exhibit on Antarctica will arrive to stay through Labor Day.

That exhibit focuses on the environment and animals of the frozen continent, said Richard Conti, interim director of Nauticus.

``We're very excited about'' the prospect of bringing more exhibits of national caliber to Nauticus, said Conti Tuesday. As for the slave ship display, he said, ``Nauticus has never had destination-type exhibits of national caliber'' during the winter off-season.

Officials hope to lure other exhibits of interest to African Americans to the financially troubled Nauticus next fall to bolster the slave ship show. Under consideration as an adjunct display is a 3-foot-by-3-foot scale model of a proposed Middle Passage monument relating the voyage from Africa to the Americas that claimed millions of lives. Some $140,000 has been raised toward the project, slated to be built on an island in Boston Harbor.

Norfolk councilman Paul Riddick traveled to Florida in July with three other people from Norfolk to see ``A Slave Ship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie,'' and returned determined to lure the exhibit here.

The hope is that appealing to a black audience will increase attendance at Nauticus.

Less than 4 percent of Nauticus visitors are black, in a city whose population is nearly 40 percent African-American, say officials.

Riddick said bringing the Henrietta Marie to Norfolk could change that statistic.

The contract price for the slave ship exhibit is $30,000, Conti said. He expects, he said, that the cost will be quickly recouped.

Riddick said he would never forget the claustrophobia he experienced once he entered the dark and dingy hold of the ship in Tallahassee in July.

``It was so vivid . . . how it used to be,'' he said. ``There was virtually no sunlight'' during the months-long voyage across the Atlantic.

The Key West-based Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society is sponsor of the exhibit, which has visited Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Charlotte, N.C., in addition to the Florida sites. In Charlotte, 79,000 people viewed the exhibit in three months.

Pewter wares, weaponry, iron bars and other items used to barter for slaves, as well as more artifacts from the wreck, also are part of the exhibit.

The Henrietta Marie, now in Fort Worth, Texas, is not without controversy.

Focus on the Middle Passage often angers black people and puts whites on the defensive, partly because the exhibit touches upon a sensitive subject - the role of Africans in the slave trade.

According to the exhibit, slavery was widespread in Africa when Europeans arrived, and prisoners of war provided the greatest number of slaves, followed by criminals and debtors.

Then, too, some northeastern cities like New York, Boston and Albany, N.Y., and others have been cool to the idea of hosting the Henrietta Marie.

But, Riddick says, ``slavery is a part of our history . . . painful, heart-rending, but part of our history.'' He likened the importance of the slave ship exhibit to the Holocaust Museum and its focus on the extermination of Jews.

Norfolk State University professor and historian Tommy Bogger, who was among the delegation that saw the Henrietta Marie exhibit in Florida, said that while there had always been an active slave trade in Africa, the trans-Atlantic version was ``something different.''

For Bogger, the reconstructed hold was also the most dramatic part of the exhibit.

``The shackles and locks are one thing, but when you see the human model, man-size, it brings to mind all that you have read and imagined about the horror of the slave trade,'' he said.

But Bogger, author of ``Free Blacks in Norfolk, Virginia 1790-1860: The Darker Side of Freedom,'' published this year, said tugging at the heartstrings through re-enactment as an approach to history made him uncomfortable on principle.

He emphasized that Norfolk did not figure prominently in the wholesale selling of Africans. When slaves arrived here, said Bogger, they would come in ``handfuls'' in ships carrying other cargo.

As to the controversial nature of the exhibit, Bogger said, anything that sparks conversation and debate is worthwhile.

The other side of slavery's coin - the harsh life of sailors on the transports - is another aspect of the exhibit. Mortality rates for crewmen were as high as or higher than those for slaves - from 13 percent to 33 percent, according to the exhibit. Dehydration and such diseases as dysentery, smallpox, malaria and yellow fever flourished.

Yet even this aspect of the exhibit comes under scrutiny from critics who say focusing on the sailors is tantamount to showing what German soldiers went through during the Jewish Holocaust.

The remains of the 120-ton Henrietta Marie are considered the most important source of artifacts from the early period of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The British-owned vessel sank off Key West in a storm after unloading 190 slaves in Jamaica during its second voyage in the summer of 1700.

At the time, more than 36,000 Africans were arriving in the Americas every year, and human bondage was a booming business.

The shipwreck was found in 1972 when treasure hunter Mel Fisher was searching for the Nuestra Senora de Atocha, a Spanish treasure galleon. Divers from the National Black Scuba Divers Association then brought up the salvage, including a cannon and two anchors, pewter tankards, bowls and a few pairs of shackles.

Then, a decade later, excavation revealed more than 90 shackles and determined that the vessel was a slave ship. The identity of the transport came through its bell, and that paved the way for research that would yield the Henrietta Marie's history. ILLUSTRATION: CAROLYN BAUMAN photos/Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Randy N'Kele, 4, of Irving, Texas, looks up at a hatch in a mock

ship hold where slaves were kept on the Henrietta Marie. ``A

Slaveship Speaks: The Wreck of the Henrietta Marie,'' an exhibit

about the slave ship, is arrive in Norfolk next September, for three

months.

Soraya Anderson, of Dallas, views the slave ship exhibit in Fort

Worth, Texas. The artifacts were dredged from the Atlantic in 1983.

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