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On the Trail of a Shadowy Sir Lançelot: Remembering the First Atlantic Slave Voyage, from Zurara to Cervantes, 22 October 2021 – Seminar write up

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. 

The King’s Fountain (Portuguese: Chafariz d’El-Rey). Anonymous, c.1570. Public domain image.

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. 

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