Black History Month 2025 at UCL History

To celebrate Black History Month at UCL History, Professor Matthew J. Smith (Director of CSLBS, The Centre for the study of the Legacies of British Slavery) shares an essay on the story and research underpinning New World Royalists, a new digital humanities project that uses an array of digital resources to produce a deep and unique history of Port Royal parish, Jamaica, from the perspective of enslaved people who lived there. The project eschews familiar tales of piracy by remapping a town which looms large in the popular imaginary, to instead tell stories of urbanity, mobility, enslavement, labour, and freedom from new perspectives.

                                  The Story of Our Digital Story of Jamaican Slavery

                                                          Matthew J. Smith

Image: Sketch of Port Royal from the hills by Holly French 

British-Jamaican anti-slavery advocate Richard Hill wrote eloquently of his visit to Port Royal, Jamaica in 1855. In his opening lines of A Week in Port Royal he called the old town, “a place for the memory.” He elaborated that “in the history of places reckoned among the great and famous of the Earth, she stands remembered as a terrible example.” Hill had in mind the levelling earthquake of 1692 which in his own age was considered as the first of several blights on one of the most recognizable names of the Caribbean. But Hill the naturalist who was at pains to take close observation of every bird call and bright hibiscus he passed (“the place was a perfect zoological garden”) as well as the history, knew that the Port Royal he was seeing in 1855 was not just the wide seaside harbour town but the vast stretch of interlocking mountains behind. Much of that vista was the parish of Port Royal, settled first by the Spanish then firmly established by the English. 

The history of the parish is misunderstood. Popular imagination has projected it as a place of piracy and sunken treasure, a tale told in nineteenth century novellas and retold in modern-day video games. For most of its life until emancipation it was defined by slavery and that larger part of the reality of the generations who lived there is often subsumed by recitals of vice and divine retribution. 

It is that more profound chapter of Port Royal’s life that drew us at the CSLBS to develop a project on the enslaved population of Port Royal using the registers of the “Returns of Slaves” filed every three years from 1817 to 1832. As we started to work on the Port Royal registers and looked closely at the incredible findings of our Research Associate Matt Stallard, we became more aware of the complexity of Black life in the parish. In that work we digitized, transcribed, and linked the registers into a massive database that elevated their functionality from being spreadsheets of data to six separate censuses of the last generation of Africans brought to Jamaica. We published a scholarly article on that pilot project but wanted to do more with the material. It seemed appropriate that we develop a digital history project that uses the instruments of modern storytelling to vividly present the experiences of Port Royal’s enslaved population. 

Our working question seemed straightforward: how can we make a digital narrative that represents these lives beyond a presentation of large-scale quantitative data? Lives are not lived in rows and columns and so we had to find a way to make of that evidence something more. 

That was three years ago. We immediately set about searching through our findings for stories that we could develop, flashes of lives that we could follow just a little bit further down the archival path. In that time our project evolved considerably and was shaped and fashioned by a large team of collaborators each of whose intellectual and creative fingerprints are on the final output. 

One key element came quite early in the process. It was the title. People from Port Royal take great pride in calling themselves Royalists much the same way people from London refer to themselves as Londoners. There is no esteeming of European monarchism in the term. Quite the opposite. Royalists see themselves as courageous survivors of Port Royal’s misfortunes and slavery’s brutality. They have claimed not just the name of their area but a knowing sense that they are ascribing to their ancestors and themselves a title that was seen as unimaginable for Africans in the Caribbean. Jamaican writer Marguerite Curtin put it well: “The history of Port Royal deserves to be put in its true context, and in all fairness to the citizens of Port Royal (Port Royalists as they prefer to be called).” It was this spirit that inspired us to name our project New World Royalists. 

In 2022 we had a name and a focus. In April of that year I began Jamaican field research for the project. Because the parish boundaries of the island changed in 1867, it was first necessary to physically trace the older outline of the parish. After checking in with Geographic Information System (GIS) specialists in Kingston, I overlayed eighteenth and nineteenth century maps on the modern map of Jamaica and outlined the older boundaries. With copies of this map in hand I drove the entire area which took me from walking the famous port then plunging into the deep mountain range of the Port Royal and St. Andrew mountains that overlook it. From Bull Bay I went all the way up to Bito and beyond and then went down to Papine and Tavern to get a full sense of the wide reach of the parish, taking photographs of turns and scenes I encountered and adding notes to our working map. This visceral sense of geography matched the hard work our team in England had been doing on the fine details of the thousands of unfree workers in Port Royal.

It was a remarkable mix of experiences of slavery –from unfree urban labour in the town to sugar and coffee and mountain slavery.  The CSLBS team and our excellent research assistants and volunteers ploughed through parish records, the registers, newspapers, travellers accounts, leading monographs on the area (such as Kathleen Monteith’s Plantation Coffee in Jamaica), nineteenth century books on coffee cultivation, even adventure and romance novels set in Port Royal, to get a collective sense of the character of the parish and its people over time. We received great support from Jonathan Greenland of the National Museum of Jamaica and his team which was deep in their own research for the development of a museum in Port Royal. We avoided looking in the usual places so we could access the lesser-known details of the Black lives in the parish. Matt Stallard’s meticulous work on the registers gave us depth and a trail from which we could find individual stories. One that came early from this work was of two sisters, Amy and Sue, who were attached to Windsor Lodge plantation and tried to escape their enslavement. Mention of Amy’s capture in Port Royal opened a lane for further investigation. 

Image: Working Board of CSLBS Team meeting for New World Royalists

Meanwhile, at the National Library of Jamaica, I researched the various surveys, maps, and manuscript collections on areas in Port Royal and St. Andrew which incorporated much of the parish after the new boundaries were effectuated in 1867. It was among these records that I came upon an important document that cracked another door for us. It was an 1848 survey commissioned for a coffee estate called Bloxburgh. This “jobbers survey” was crucial because it included a detailed map of the plantation identifying abodes and land usage and more importantly, a list of names. Since the Jamaica Returns of Registers of enslaved ends in 1832, it presents a challenge for researchers to successfully track and connect names in the years after full freedom in 1838 into the 1840s. This gap was significantly closed for some of the residents of Bloxburgh with this find. We took the names on that list and began to immediately track them through the registers and civil and parish records to build family and social connections. One of the standout features of New World Royalists is a remarkable multigenerational family tree that begins in Africa in the eighteenth century and goes all the way up to the twentieth century. We were so moved by this material that we contracted calligrapher Fiona Mitchell to draw the family tree with an elegant script seldom found in family trees of enslaved persons and their descendants. 

In Jamaica I trekked high up the mountains in search of Bloxburgh which finally came into view near the summit. Over the next three years we came to know not just the place and history of Bloxburgh but of its incredible community of farmers thanks to the help of community member and activist, Rosemarie Chung. 

Image: Early mapping idea for Bloxburgh section.

After gathering the initial research, it was time to design New World Royalists. We determined that we had to tell more than one story to better reflect the complexities of the lives of the people we found. Our three stories had emerged quite clearly to us in research and fieldwork. The first would be of the two sisters, Amy and Sue. The third and largest would be the story of Bloxburgh as a living place; not just specific individuals but the full story of a once thriving coffee plantation that had survived slavery and colonialism and was now a small, disconnected and ageing farming community that does not appear on most maps of Jamaica. It was a tale of the profits and disavowals of slavery. Our second, bridging story is of the geography of the mountain where a different environment of slavery existed. We aim to take visitors to New World Royalists through the same terrain that the individuals we met in the records had to navigate. It was a peculiar experience of mountain slavery; an experience held tightly by the land in which incredible views of the majestic beauty of Jamaica were juxtaposed against the routine of everyday violence. The heart of New World Royalists is Bloxburgh and our details give indication of how people survived against the odds and made a heritage of belonging claimed by the descendants of eighteenth-century Africans who came there in chains. 

We prepared detailed notes for the design and worked out the shape and look we wanted for the site. Sean Cham, a Birkbeck doctoral student in Art History worked with us on the early stages and made a visual model from these notes. This was modified later through a detailed storyboard drawn by Holly French, Research Assistant at CSLBS and doctoral student in Caribbean History at UCL. Holly’s sketches included directional instructions in cursive that inspired us to use her handwriting for the title and textual motifs of the site. 

With this detailed blueprint, our graphics for each scene, and hundreds of pages of notes and documents we approached Zoë Gumbs, a gifted web developer based in Manchester, UK. Zoë immediately got the meaning of what we were doing and helped us think through the technical possibilities. Zoë also put us in touch with the brilliant web design team Bearded Fellows. This talented group of animators and design specialists worked closely with us over the next two years on each aspect of the project. It was a remarkably creative collaboration. We shared a Google drive of our archival evidence with Samson Owolabi, Hollie Charnock, Matthew Stanners and the rest of the team at Bearded Fellows and they read through all of it to get a full sense of a history that was first unknown to them but which they came to appreciate well. And in return they taught us at CSLBS a great deal on the rubrics, skills and opportunities of digital storytelling.

Image: CSLBS team members with the Bearded Fellows team at their office in Manchester.

As we worked through the flow and pacing of New World Royalists, we decided there had to be space for users to see exactly how we were able to construct these stories from the fragmentary records. The site features two interactive sections at which our bundle of clues is presented for users to review and do their own research. The functionality of these sections is due to the extraordinary innovation of Zoë Gumbs. Zoë’s bespoke design enables the CSLBS team to modify and expand those sections even after the site goes live. Since New World Royalists is above all a powerful statement on how we can use the loose leaves and sterile volumes of the archives to give sharper glimpses of unfree Black labourers in the British Caribbean, this is a remarkable feature. 

Along our journey we presented works-in-progress drafts of our design for feedback to various audiences. We are grateful for all of the audiences we met and who offered impressions and thoughts, from students in my MA seminar at UCL, to those who interacted with us at presentations at Yale, Brown, and Oxford universities, University of Toronto, UWI-Mona, and University of Virginia. We also give thanks to Alex Gil, a leading Caribbean digital humanist at Yale who offered critical peer review of the project in its near final state. 

We owe a special debt of gratitude to our funders at the Next Economy Trust who believed in the project when it was nothing more than an idea mentioned in a meeting and UCL’s Grand Challenges for much needed funding once we got underway. 

As we have proudly arrived at this moment of sharing New World Royalists with you, I remain ever grateful to my intrepid band of seekers of past truths at the CSLBS. We worked as one at all levels of production on this project which will stand as a reflection of the quality of our combined energies. 

Image: Matt Smith premieres New World Royalists in Bloxburgh, Jamaica.

This spring we wrapped the project and got ready to go live with the site. In May I travelled to Jamaica and made my way back up the mountain and crossed narrow and collapsing roads to Bloxburgh. The farmers honoured me with an invitation to present our work to them at their monthly meeting. In a classroom of Bloxburgh Primary where the meeting begins with devotionals and ends with members singing the farmer’s anthem, We Plough The Fields, I came face to face with the great weight of what we had accomplished. For every hour we spent over three years reading documents and every idea discussed, dismissed and then partially resurrected, we were transmitting despatches of a history that ultimately belongs to the Royalists who listened keenly to every word I said and studied every frame of our work. Their approval of what we have done is the greatest blessing New World Royalists could receive. One farmer remarked that we were sharing “hidden histories of a hidden place.” Another said in a quiet voice, “I didn’t know we were so valued.” 

The Royalists are valued as are all the other carriers of histories in the Caribbean who silently pay tribute to their ancestral past every single day when they put their hands in the same earth and make space for their own freedom in the present. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This article has been republished from: Matthew J. Smith, “Royal Society; The Story of Our Digital Story of Jamaican Slavery,” in TRACES, A QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER, Spring/Summer 2025.