In August 2022, Afra and I travelled to Ghent (Belgium) for a few days. We went to view the original logbook of the slave ship Het Hof van Zeeland, which is kept at Ghent University Library.
A number of years earlier, we had already visited the Zeeuws Archief in Middelburg. At the time, we had an extensive conversation with Peter Sijnke, then archivist at the Zeeuws Archief, about various aspects of Zeeland's history of slavery. He was the one who pointed us towards the ship's log of the very first slave voyage of the ship Het Hof van Zeeland.
Het Hof van Zeeland was part of the Middelburgsche Commercie Compagnie (MCC). This company engaged in the trade of human beings during the second half of the 18th century. Between 1732 and 1734, they made their first trans-Atlantic slave voyage with Het Hof van Zeeland, the triangular route between the Netherlands, Angola and Curaçao.
The visit to the University Library in Ghent was impressive. It was deeply moving to see this remarkable archival piece, the log in which the very first slave voyage of this frigate is recorded, 'in real life'. What was especially confronting was reading the paragraph describing, among other things, the jump overboard of the five enslaved women. The description of the death of one of them became the basis for the dance film Armazoen (part of the larger art project).