Mixed Media Vanishing Point

More than two centuries ago, a group of West Africans chose death over enslavement in the waters of coastal Georgia. Why do so few traces of their story remain there today?

- By Ramenda Cyrus, Illustrations by Kim Demarco

DUNBAR CREEK IS A narrow, unassuming strip of water that winds through the north side of Georgia’s St. Simons Island. People drive over it daily via a narrow causeway, some on their way to the lavish Sea Island Resort. In the daytime, the water is so murky that the depth is impossible to gauge. At night, the water is indistinguishable from the land. In that darkness, some residents claim, they have heard chains rattling— the last remnant of a people who flew.

In 1803, 75 West Africans, many of them Igbo people from what is now Nigeria, were sold for $100 each to John Couper and Thomas Spalding. They were packed like cargo onto the slave ship the Morovia (or the York; accounts vary). Their fate was excruciatingly obvious, and the only answer was a rebellion. The Igbo overpowered the ship’s captain and killed some of his crew, and the ship ran aground in Dunbar Creek.

The Igbo made a conscious decision. They knew that a life of agony and horror awaited them, so they decided to walk into the water. In most oral retellings of what happened, they sang, “By the water spirits we came and by the water spirits we will be taken home,” as they walked into the creek, still chained to each other. “You cannot be an enemy of the land you are a part of.” It’s unknown how many people drowned and how many were recaptured; the bodies of 10 to 12 Igbos and three white captors were reportedly recovered from Dunbar Creek, according to contemporaneous documents held by the Coastal Georgia Historical Society.