This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2021-2022.
On the 22nd of October 2021, Professor Elizabeth Wright of the University of Georgia opened the 2021-2022 Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group Seminar Series with her talk entitled ‘On the Trail of a Shadowy Sir Lançelot: Remembering the First Atlantic Slave Voyage, from Zurara to Cervantes’.
Professor Wright launched into her talk by recounting Zurara’s chronicle, ‘Cronica da Guiné’ (ca. 1453), which detailed the journey of Lanzarote, a squire raised in Prince Henry’s household of the Aviz dynasty. Zurara records how this nobleman set sail from Lagos in the late spring of 1444 to the west coast of Africa with the sole purpose to enslave men and women. Zurara’s chronicle informs us that Lanzarote had been inspired by his predecessors, who had gained wealth and status after capturing and enslaving people encountered in a previous expedition. Here, Professor Wright introduced us to the relationship between the captor and the captured. The captor, Lanzarote, saw a vision of riches and prosperity upon capturing Africans, whilst the captured Africans tried to hide or flee this raid as revealed by Zurara’s chronicle. This unfair power dynamic would later be amplified in the coming history.
Turning her attention to the Iberian peninsula, Professor Wright next discussed how the enslaved were dehumanized upon their arrival in Portugal. Before dividing his lot, Lanzarote proudly presented his 235 captives to the Prince, who then rewarded him with knighthood. Professor Wright noted that this was the first explicitly recorded public ritual of mass enslavement of the Atlantic slave trade, which eerily anticipated what was to come in the next 400 years. This poignant and uncomfortable spectacle even made the chronicler himself reflective. Zurara was concerned for these ‘fellow children of Adam’ who in suffering wept and prayed to their gods for rescue. Here, we sense the conflict between the economic prosperity that will result from these slave transactions and the undeniable horror that this is.
Next, Professor Wright brought to our attention the misleading versions later produced from Zurara’s original chronicle of Sir Lançelot. After being archived and copied many times, the transmission of Zurara’s chronicles from the 16th through the 19th century provided a narrow version of Lanzarote’s true expedition. João de Barros’ version from the mid-16th century concentrated on Lanzarote’s knighthood and omitted the matter of black lives by excluding the suffering of the captured Africans and the near-riots of the day labourers who were agitated at the sight of the captives about to be enslaved. Professor Wright mentioned how this partial account from Barros would later echo in Don Quijote, in a parody of a squire who dreams of gaining riches through human trafficking in Africa. Thus in one private reverie, Sancho Panza conjures his path to wealth and nobility capturing people in Africa.
Nearing the end of her talk, Professor Wright pulled us back to the ongoing relevance of the topic under discussion in the present day when she referred to the defacing of the Cervantes statue in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in summer 2020, by demonstrators. Professor Wright credited the July 2020 article by editors Nicholas Jones and Chad Leahy, ‘Cervantes y la materia de las vida negras,’ who, colloquially, ‘called out’ Cervantes for contributing to the Atlantic slave trade in early modern Spain through his literature.
As a literary scholar, Professor Wright gave a new dimension to Lanzarote’s journey. She revealed its iniquitous motivations, drew attention to the need to give voice to the displaced Africans and reminded us of the way Cervantes’ Don Quijote satirized the greedy human traffickers of the early Atlantic slave trade. This was a timely talk given that October celebrates Black History Month in the UK, reminding me that more stories remain untold.
Report by Laureen Agyemang, final-year undergraduate in Economics with Spanish