TRIBECA — A dark time in maritime history is being brought to light aboard a historic boat floating in the Hudson.
The exhibit "Spirits of the Passage: Stories of the Transatlantic Slave Trade," now on display inside a steamship from the 1930s, chronicles the brutal journey millions of men and women from Africa were forced to take — and the lucrative, global business stretching 400 years that grew from their enslavement.
The pop-up exhibit inside the Lilac, which is docked at TriBeCa's Pier 25, is a smaller, traveling display from the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West, Florida — a museum endowed by a famed explorer who, in his search for sunken treasures, also found submerged wrecks of slave ships. Within those wrecks were discovered thousands of artifacts, like shackles that bound hundreds of people in unbearably cramped quarters.
On view inside the Lilac are large panel displays that detail the business and history of the slave trade, along with profiles of individual slaves and abolitionists.
There are also historic pictures, maps, renderings and photos of artifacts salvaged from slave ships including the Henrietta Marie, a boat that sunk off the coast of Key West in 1700 that once carried hundreds of captured men and women from Africa to the West Indies.
One display details how slave traders used "luxury" items from Europe like iron bars, guns and liquor to buy African people. They would then sell the men and women in the Americas at a huge markup, and use that money to buy sought-after American goods like sugar and tobacco, which would be sold back in Europe, for another premium price. "What is the price of life?" it says on one part of a display, next to photo of 12 small iron bars recovered from a slave ship.
Each display also profiles the life of a slave or abolitionist, including the story of Olaudah Equiano, a man who was kidnapped from his family in West Africa and sold into slavery in 1755, at the age of 11. Eventually Equiano bought his freedom from Robert King, a Quaker and naval merchant, and he went on to become an active anti-slavery lecturer. His autobiography is widely credited with helping to end England's slave trade, which was abolished in 1807, ten years after Equiano's death.
Mary Habstritt, the director and president of the Lilac museum, said this was the first time the traveling Spirits of the Passage exhibit had been displayed within a ship.
"The Lilac is dedicated to maritime history, and when I learned about the exhibit, I thought this was the right place for it," Habstritt said. "This is part of maritime history."
The Lilac, docked at Pier 25, on N. Moore and West Streets, is open 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Thursdays and 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.
